The Lotus-Eaters

Blown off course, Odysseus sends three men ashore to find out who lives there. The Lotus-Eaters do them no harm at all. They offer them the lotus, which is the whole of the danger: anyone who eats it loses all desire to return home, and wants only to stay and eat more.

Homer is precise about the mechanism. The men do not forget who they are, and they are not imprisoned. They simply stop wanting to leave, which is worse, because there is nothing to fight and nobody to blame.

Odysseus goes and gets them by force, dragging them back weeping and tying them under the rowing benches, and orders the rest of the crew aboard immediately before anyone else can taste it. It is the only episode in the poem he ends by running away from something entirely peaceful.

The episode is short and disproportionately memorable, because it identifies a category of danger the rest of the Odyssey does not: not a monster, not a god's anger, just comfort offered at the exact moment a tired man is most inclined to accept it.

Botanists have spent centuries guessing at the plant. Herodotus, describing a real North African people who ate a sweet fruit, is usually taken as the origin; jujube and date have both been proposed. It hardly matters. Homer needed a food that removes ambition rather than reason, and no real plant has ever quite fitted the requirement.