5.365-407

Faced with annihilation once again, he must let go of his resistance to trusting Ino. He accepts the bargain she offers, shedding Calypso’s clothing, the last vestiges of her control over him, and wraps himself in Ino’s veil. With this new leverage, he once again begins the long climb back from powerless anonymity to heroic glory.

Satisfied that he has inflicted as much suffering as possible on Odysseus, Poseidon rolls away over the waves. The hero does not have to wait long for help:

αὐτὰρ Ἀθηναίη κούρη Διὸς ἄλλ᾽ ἐνόησεν.
ἦ τοι τῶν ἄλλων ἀνέμων κατέδησε κελεύθους,
παύσασθαι δ᾽ ἐκέλευσε καὶ εὐνηθῆναι ἅπαντας:
ὦρσε δ᾽ ἐπὶ κραιπνὸν Βορέην, πρὸ δὲ κύματ᾽ ἔαξεν,
ἧος ὃ Φαιήκεσσι φιληρέτμοισι μιγείη
διογενὴς Ὀδυσεὺς θάνατον καὶ κῆρας ἀλύξας

But Athena, daughter of Zeus, had other plans.
She restrained the flow of all the other winds
and told them to settle down and go to sleep.
Then she roused the swift north wind and broke down the waves,
until Zeus-born Odysseus might mingle with
the oar-loving Phaeacians, escaping death and destruction.

Odyssey 5.382–87 

A symmetrical divine response to Odysseus continues, Poseidon attacking, Athena defending. The inverted gender implications of the imagery in the two interventions repay closer inspection. Poseidon, male god of the sea, brings chaos and disorder, smashing the boat and undercutting the masculine project of channeling natural forces to create human civilization. His subversive acts reflect his annoyance at being left out of the deliberations on Olympus. Athena, the warrior goddess born from Zeus’s head without benefit of a mother, gets the masculine project back on track by restraining the winds and cutting a path through the waves to afford a straight course toward the human civilization of the Phaeacians. At the same time, she “puts the winds to sleep,” like an indulgent mother, a role she will play for Odysseus more than once in the poem. Though feminine forces have often been the source of obstacles in Odysseus’s journey homeward, at this moment we seem to have reached a turning point: Calypso’s lingering hold on the hero slips away with the clothes he sheds, and both Ino and Athena play a supportive maternal role, buoying him up as he reemerges from the primal sea to be reborn on shore.

Homer’s vision here is, as often, thrown into relief when compared to Virgil’s later reworking of the same material in the Aeneid, in the storm that Juno sends to keep the Trojans from reaching Carthage. Poseidon’s anger stems from a specific act by Odysseus, the blinding of his son, Polyphemus, while Athena loves the hero because he embodies traits that remind her of herself (cf. 13.287–310). The consequences of these divine attitudes are grave for Odysseus and those he meets, but not cosmic in their reach. Aeneas, by contrast, carries the burden of Juno’s anger not because of who he is or anything he chose willingly to do, but because he is dutifully headed for Carthage, a favorite city of Juno’s which, centuries in the future, his descendants will destroy. Juno’s anger will cause her to harry the Trojans across the Mediterranean, as Poseidon’s resentment periodically punishes Odysseus and his crew. But the reach of the Roman goddess’s rage is much wider and deeper, sweeping up whole civilizations in its wake.

Juno’s anger has its roots in the judgment of Paris, an event that precedes the Trojan War:

Arma virumque canō, Trōiae quī prīmus ab ōrīs
Ītaliam fātō profugus Lāvīniaque vēnit
lītora, multum ille et terrīs iactātus et altō
vī superum, saevae memorem Iūnōnis ob īram,
…………………………………………………..
necdum etiam causae īrārum saevīque dolōrēs
exciderant animō; manet altā mente repostum
iūdicium Paridis sprētaeque iniūria fōrmae…

I sing of arms and a man, who first from the shores
of Troy came to Italy and Lavinia’s shores,
a fugitive by fate, much tossed on land and sea
by the force of savage Juno’s unforgetting anger.
…………………………………………………..
not yet had the cause of her anger and savage grief
left her soul; there lingered deep in her mind
the judgment of Paris and the insult to spurned beauty…

Virgil, Aeneid 1.1–4, 25–27

In Virgil’s vision, Juno’s malignant rage stands behind all the subsequent suffering in the poem, the fall of Troy, the destruction of Dido, the subjugation of the native Italian people whom the Trojans will defeat. Its baleful effects stretch across the entire poem, fueled by jealousy and spite, producing immense suffering. Poseidon’s anger, which surfaces in the first divine assembly of Book 1, has a much more limited scope. He is understandably angry about his son Polyphemus being blinded and makes some short-lived meteorological mischief for Odysseus but acquiesces in Zeus’s verdict soon enough.

In the Odyssey, both Poseidon’s and Athena’s responses send mixed signals in terms of the traditional gender categories we have seen in the poem. The Sea God undermines the masculine order with his vengeful storm, while Athena steps in to restore masculine order. Virgil’s deities conform more strictly to expected behavior. The sources of disorder are invariably feminine, of order, masculine. The first scenes of the Aeneid reflect this pattern clearly: Juno’s rage drives her to seek out Aeolus, the minor deity in charge of the winds; she bribes him to send a storm to wreck the Trojan fleet by offering him a nymph to “marry”; he is outranked in the divine hierarchy and complies; Neptune, Aeolus’s male superior, then calms the winds and rolls away across the waves in his chariot, these last verses clearly modeled on Poseidon’s exit in Odyssey 5 (Aen. 1.51–156; Od. 5.380–81).

A gendered division of human experience informs Virgil’s vision of the world in his poem, surfacing insistently throughout. The Odyssey reflects the same distinctions, but the boundaries are more fluid, allowing the poet to focus our attention on them to explore the varieties of human experience more fully. That Athena is a female deity and yet champions the male hero, sometimes acting as the agent of masculine order against feminine disorder, sometimes as a maternal protectress, expands the paradigms of gendered behavior in ways that provoke further reflection on their meaning. Odysseus himself embodies both masculine and feminine traits, as the Greeks saw them, boldly challenging sea monsters (e.g., 12.225–33) but also resorting to deception to outmaneuver more powerful adversaries. Much of the darkness in the Aeneid comes from the iron grip of higher powers who enforce the boundaries of human action to preserve their cosmic order. As we watch Aeneas and the Trojans respond to these forces, we learn about how human life can be destroyed but also ennobled by their struggles. The world of the Odyssey, by contrast, is a wide-open space for us to contemplate how our received ideas about human experience might be enriched by our loosening our grip on them.

Further Reading

Dimock, G. 1989. The Unity of the Odyssey, 70–73. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press.

Van Nortwick, T. 1992. Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: The Second Self and the Hero’s Journey in Ancient Epic, 89–94. New York: Oxford University Press.