Odyssey 9.94 · Book 9, lines 94–97
The fruit that erases home
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τῶν δʼ ὅς τις λωτοῖο φάγοι μελιηδέα καρπόν, οὐκέτʼ ἀπαγγεῖλαι πάλιν ἤθελεν οὐδὲ νέεσθαι, ἀλλʼ αὐτοῦ βούλοντο μετʼ ἀνδράσι Λωτοφάγοισι λωτὸν ἐρεπτόμενοι μενέμεν νόστου τε λαθέσθαι.
And whoever of them ate the lotus's honey-sweet fruit no longer wished to report back again nor to return, but there they wanted, among the Lotus-eating men, feeding on the lotus, to remain and to forget their homecoming.
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The lotus is not poison but something stranger. These lines describe what it does to whoever tastes it.
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One taste and the man is altered. He no longer wants to carry word back or to sail; he wants only to stay and graze the lotus. The verb for their eating, ἐρέπτομαι, is what animals do to grass — the men browse like cattle.
What the lotus takes is νόστος, the homecoming that is this poem's whole subject. To forget νόστος is, in the Odyssey, to drop out of the story altogether. The horror is contentment: no one is harmed, and no one wishes to leave.
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