5.43-91

ὣς ἔφατ᾽, οὐδ᾽ ἀπίθησε διάκτορος ἀργεϊφόντης.
αὐτίκ᾽ ἔπειθ᾽ ὑπὸ ποσσὶν ἐδήσατο καλὰ πέδιλα,
ἀμβρόσια χρύσεια, τά μιν φέρον ἠμὲν ἐφ᾽ ὑγρὴν>
ἠδ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν ἅμα πνοιῇς ἀνέμοιο.
εἵλετο δὲ ῥάβδον, τῇ τ᾽ ἀνδρῶν ὄμματα θέλγει,
ὧν ἐθέλει, τοὺς δ᾽ αὖτε καὶ ὑπνώοντας ἐγείρει.
τὴν μετὰ χερσὶν ἔχων πέτετο κρατὺς ἀργεϊφόντης.

[Zeus] spoke and the messenger, slayer of Argos, did not disobey.
Right away he tied under his feet the beautiful sandals,
ambrosial and golden, that carried him over the water
and across the boundless earth like a puff of wind.
He took up the wand, with which he enchants the eyes
of mortals, whomever he wishes, and then wakes them from sleep.
Taking this in this hand, the strong slayer of Argos flew off.

Odyssey 5.43–49

Ornamental epithets slow the pace of the story, lingering on the gleaming, divine footwear and the magical powers of the wand. Homer uses his leisurely traditional style here to mark an important transition. After the urgent discussion on Olympus, these verses shift our attention to a more timeless world of beautiful objects that symbolize the unchanging power of the gods.

Virgil, always a brilliant student of Homer, puts these verses to powerful use:

Dīxerat. Ille patris magnī pārēre parābat
imperiō; et prīmum pedibus tālāria nectit
aurea, quae sublīmem ālīs sīve aequora suprā
seu terram rapidō pariter cum flāmine portant.
Tum virgam capit: hāc animās ille ēvocat Orcō
pallentēs, aliās sub Tartara trīstia mittit,
dat somnōs adimitque, et lūmina morte resignat.

So he spoke. That god prepared to obey the command
of his mighty father; first he bound to his feet the golden
sandals that carry him aloft on their wings, swiftly
over the sea or the land with the blowing wind.
Then he took up his wand, by which the god calls back
pallid souls from the dead and sends others down to misty Tartarus;
he calls them from sleep and opens their eyes in death.

Aeneid 4.238–44

The Odyssey’s poet wants us to pause over his verses, slowing the pace of the plot and preparing us for a different world. Virgil, as he so often does when conjuring Homer’s poems, has a darker vision. Aeneas, recently emerged from a winter spent with Dido, marvels at the buildings surging up in Carthage under the queen’s leadership. Jupiter, meanwhile, goaded by the ranting of Dido’s jilted suitor, senses that Aeneas’s mission to bring the Trojans to Italy may be in jeopardy. He sends Mercury (the Roman Hermes) down to deliver his command: Aeneas must leave at once for Italy. No more dawdling with the queen. The allusions to Homer equate Dido, a selfless leader whom Juno and Venus have manipulated into falling in love with Aeneas, with Calypso, a divine nymph intent on keeping a mortal lover for herself. Dido, arguably the noblest of all the heroes in the Aeneid, is reduced to a pawn in the cruel game the goddesses play with her and Aeneas. She will die soon—committing suicide with Aeneas’s sword—while Calypso lives on after Odysseus leaves, momentarily disappointed but immortal. The dynamic that Virgil’s allusion highlights, between divine immortality and human existence, bounded by time and circumstance, will be at the heart of Odysseus’s encounter with Calypso.

His equipment secured, Hermes launches from Pieria, a peak near Olympus. As he flies over the sea, the poet compares him to a tern, dipping its wings into the sea, skimming over the water looking for fish. The arresting image of the god floating over the waves, perhaps dragging a sandal through the brine, can obscure the fact that Homeric gods regularly beam themselves in and out of the human world, without suiting up and laboriously making their way (e.g., Od. 1.96–104). That we are invited to contemplate Hermes in flight, with his special gear, suggests that the poet wants to impress upon us how far the god must go to reach Calypso’s island (τηλόθ᾽ ἐοῦσαν, 55). Like many of the places Odysseus passes through on his way home, Ogygia is a wholly mythical island. The important thing we are to keep in mind is not only that the nymph’s home is far away from where other humans live but that even gods must make a long trip to get there.

Hermes finds Calypso in her cave, singing and spinning wool. Cedar wood burns in the hearth, releasing a sweet fragrance that wafts out over a fecund and exotic landscape, woods teeming with alder, poplar, and fragrant cypress through which birds flit, meadows thick with violets and parsley. At the cave’s mouth are four springs, all in a row, and around the opening grapes vines cluster, heavy with fruit. There is order here, but not human order. The burbling springs and darting birds, the woods and flowers, all seem to respond to the nymph’s magical, beguiling voice. Calypso’s power over nature is expressed through the senses: fragrance, physical beauty, and music. Her music contrasts tellingly with songs of bards like Phemius in Book 1 (325–27), whose subject is usually the famous deeds of men. While their art is always in the service of human memory, preserving the self-asserting, heroic acts that found and secure civilization, the power of Calypso’s singing is aimed at exerting an extra-human control over nature, creating a seductive venue in which men forget their mortality and its imperatives. This is the music of the Sirens, who draw men to their doom with alluring songs. Odysseus, we will later learn, has escaped their power on his way to Ogygia, only to fall under its spell again (12.39–54; 165–200; 447–50).

Everything here signals both beauty and, in the masculine imagination of this poem, seductive danger. Weaving and singing like Calypso’s are both associated with feminine wiles in the Odyssey. As the fragrance of the burning wood wafts around her, the nymph sits on a shining chair and will offer her guest a cup of ambrosia. In early Greek poetry, the combination of fragrance, ambrosia, and shining cloth is always associated with trickery. This is a decidedly feminine milieu, as the Greeks understood gender: an enclosed, womblike cave set in a space articulated by natural growth. The boundaries of nature and culture, a crucial polarity in the Greeks’ characterization of human experience and gender in particular, are blurred here: the springs are “all in a row” (70), but they gush forth amorphous water; the grape vines around the cave’s entrance soften the stone and mask its contours. Human civilization is a masculine project in Greek myth, the product of the imposition, by human intelligence, of limits to channel the power of nature and create meaning. The feminine world that Calypso inhabits threatens the hard edges of those boundaries, obscuring their control and the meaning they generate.

Having touched down, Hermes marvels at the exotic venue. Such are its wonders that even gods are amazed, the poet tells us. When he enters the cave, Calypso recognizes him immediately, because immortals always know each other, even if they live far apart. Calypso has questions for him, but first she must offer him the appropriate hospitality. All this attention to how gods behave and what they do in each other’s presence invites us to think about the parameters of their existence as opposed to the limits of human life, about how the nymph’s exotic existence fits with that of the Olympian gods and, by implication, with the experience of mortals. By insisting on the remoteness of Calypso’s island from both humans and gods, the poet establishes Ogygia as a way station in more than one way: geographically but also existentially; it is a place where the boundaries of human and divine are blurred, prompting us to focus on the most enduring question raised by all early Greek literature: what does it mean to be human?

Further Reading

Austin, N. 1975. Archery at the Dark of the Moon, 138–152. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pantelia, M. 1993. “Spinning and Weaving: Ideas of Domestic Order in Homer.” American Journal of Philology 114: 493–500.

Van Nortwick, T. 1980. “Apollonos Apate Associative Imagery in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes.” Classical World 74: 1–5.

———.1992. Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: The Second Self and the Hero’s Journey in Ancient Epic, 96–107. New York: Oxford University Press.

———.2008. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey, 14–15. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Vernant, J.-P. (1982) 1996. “The Refusal of Odysseus.” In Reading the Odyssey, edited by S. Schein, 185–189.  Reprinted. Princeton: Princeton University Press.