The text of Od. IV 665 raises a number of difficulties for its interpretation. To resolve them, some editors of the Odyssey have adopted Hartman’s conjecture εἰ instead of the ἐκ, a reading transmitted by the codices. After an analysis of the passage on both syntactic and semantic level, the author of this paper defends the textus receptus of the manuscript tradition and the interpretation of ἐκ as a preverb in ʽtmesisʼ (or in any case as an adverb) with the verb οἴχεται.