1.44–79

The motives behind Poseidon’s animus are clear: while on his way home, Odysseus has blinded the sea god’s son, Polyphemus the Cyclops.  The episode describing this incident, one the best-known parts of the poem, will not appear until Book 9, when Odysseus recalls his past adventures for the Phaeacians.  But we will soon discover that while Poseidon cannot kill Odysseus, since Zeus and Athena have arranged for the hero to return home alive (1.75), he can stir up major trouble, as Odysseus will learn when he sails away from Calypso’s island in Book 5 (282–97).

Athena’s reasons for loving Odysseus are not tied to a specific event. She pities him for the pain he has endured on the way home, but then many Greek warriors have suffered. He offers fine sacrifices, again hardly unique among the Greeks. We finally learn the reason for Athena’s powerful affection when the two meet on the shore of Ithaka in Book 13. The goddess, with characteristic wiliness, disguises herself as a young shepherd. She questions the hero, who responds with reciprocal deception, telling the first of his “false tales,” a whopper about his exile from Crete as punishment for murdering a man and subsequent adventures at sea, ending with his being abandoned while asleep by sailors. Athena is delighted with his lies:

κερδαλέος κ᾽ εἴη καὶ ἐπίκλοπος ὅς σε παρέλθοι
ἐν πάντεσσι δόλοισι, καὶ εἰ θεὸς ἀντιάσειε.
σχέτλιε, ποικιλομῆτα, δόλων ἆτ᾽, οὐκ ἄρ᾽ ἔμελλες,
οὐδ᾽ ἐν σῇ περ ἐὼν γαίῃ, λήξειν ἀπατάων
μύθων τε κλοπίων, οἵ τοι πεδόθεν φίλοι εἰσίν.
ἀλλ᾽ ἄγε, μηκέτι ταῦτα λεγώμεθα, εἰδότες ἄμφω
κέρδε᾽, ἐπεὶ σὺ μέν ἐσσι βροτῶν ὄχ᾽ ἄριστος ἁπάντων
βουλῇ καὶ μύθοισιν, ἐγὼ δ᾽ ἐν πᾶσι θεοῖσι
μήτι τε κλέομαι καὶ κέρδεσιν:

Cunning and stealthy would be the one who got around you,
amid all your tricks, even if a god were to meet you!
Unflinching and devious, never weary of deception, you are
not about to let go of your lies and thievish tales, 
even in your own country; they are in your very nature.
But come, let’s talk no more of this, for we both know
sharp dealing, since you are the best of all mortals
in counsel and stories, and I am renowned among all the gods
for my wit and sharpness.

Odyssey 13.291–99

It is not surprising that Athena loves Odysseus, since he is just like her, and the gods love no one more than themselves.

These small portraits continue the perspective on the gods we see in Zeus’s first speech. We are not witnessing the august deliberations of the guarantors of the cosmic order. Rather, the poet is at pains to bring these figures closer to our own human experience, showing them negotiating emotions generated by the kind of interactions between family members that we can easily imagine.  We understand Poseidon’s anger at seeing his child hurt. In the absence of any family connection, we might wonder what kind of intense bond could animate Athena’s solicitude and affection for Odysseus. We might also hear in the goddess’s description of the hero’s captivity a whiff of resentment at Calypso’s power over her favorite—she has enchanted him θέλγει (57), whispering sweet nothings in his ear! (As we’ll discover in the poet’s brilliantly subtle portrait of the relationship between Odysseus and Calypso in Book 5 (148–227), the power dynamics between the two are considerably more complex). Zeus, meanwhile, sounds much like a father trying to keep the peace among his fractious relatives, assuring Athena of his goodwill toward her and her favorite, but seeing Poseidon’s side of the dispute, too.

The brief genealogies for Calypso and Polyphemus also expand our view of these otherwise opaque figures. Calypso, a divine nymph with her own remote island, has a father, Atlas, whose job it is to hold up the sky. The mother of Poseidon’s son is a sea nymph—probably invented for this occasion by the poet—herself the child of one Phorkys, a minor deity with some connection to Ithaka (13.96, 345).  These details will have no further bearing on the plot of the story. Rather, they help to bring these figures, whose terrifying power over mortals might make them emotionally inaccessible to us, closer to our own experience. The role of the gods in Homeric poetry is a challenging topic, especially if we try to identify a consistent set of attributes. But one way to keep our bearings when thinking about the relationship between human and divine characters in the stories is to observe that in all Greek works of art, non-human forces serve as a foil to the lives of mortals, always turning our attention back toward human experience, toward the ultimate question, what does it mean to be a creature who knows s/he must die?

Further Reading

Van Nortwick, T. 2008. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey, 12–19; 66–68. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.