5.92-144

The exchange that follows is the first in a series of delicate character studies, far richer than might be required to move the plot along. Hermes begins somewhat nervously—we can almost see him shifting in his seat. Calypso has asked him “god-to-god” (97), and he will tell her the unerring truth, since she has urged him to do so. He has not come willingly, for who would want to travel so far over the vast deep ocean? There are no cities nearby, no humans available to offer sacrifices! Clearly anxious about the nymph’s response to his news, he finally delivers the message: she must send Odysseus home. Hermes’ discomfort at bearing the bad news might prompt us to ask why he, an immortal god, would be afraid of a minor nymph. He is only following orders, after all. But Homer’s light touch urges us to view the exchange through the lens of human relationships, complicated, often driven by undercurrents that go unspoken. The tone here is of a brother treading ever so lightly with a touchy sister. By establishing this context for the conversations that follow, the poet creates a charming atmosphere for these important negotiations. At the same time, he allows himself to work the boundary between human and divine while exploring his main theme, the crucial interaction of divine will and human choice.

Calypso is angry. The male gods are cruel, jealous of goddesses who take mortal lovers while they themselves do so with impunity. She cites the examples of Eos and Demeter, both of whom took mortal lovers who were then killed by the gods, but—perhaps calculating how far to push things—does not mention the number-one offender among the males, Zeus. She tells the story of how she saved Odysseus as he clung to the keel of his ship, the rest of which Zeus had destroyed along with his shipmates. Then come two startling verses:

"τὸν μὲν ἐγὼ φίλεόν τε καὶ ἔτρεφον, ἠδὲ ἔφασκον
θήσειν ἀθάνατον καὶ ἀγήραον ἤματα πάντα."

“I loved him and nursed him and told him
I would make him immortal and ageless forever.”

Odyssey 5.135–36

This is not the picture of an all-powerful being snatching a boy toy for her amusement. She loved Odysseus and nursed him and wanted him beside her forever. Now the poet’s phrasing in verses 1–2 echoes in our ears. Calypso is not Eos, cruelly entombing her lover in endless decay because of her careless request to Zeus. She wanted Odysseus—still wants him—because she loves him. Her tenderness contrasts with the rapacious arrogance of male gods. We are witnessing powerful emotions.

As soon as Calypso speaks, we begin to move beyond the familiar paradigm of the seductive, detaining woman who would keep the hero from completing his mission. Her name, transparently allegorical (“I will cover up,” from the verb καλύπτω), points toward such a figure, but as he often does, the poet plays against our expectations. The character of Circe, another detaining woman whom, as we will learn, Odysseus has already encountered earlier in his return journey, has its origins in myth and folktale, a version of the powerful witch who might beguile the unsuspecting hero or even an Indo-European mistress of animals. Calypso has no such analogue and seems to be Homer’s invention, a strikingly original figure whose portrayal is at the heart of a delicately nuanced episode. What we learn from Odysseus’s encounter with her will resonate throughout the rest of the poem.

The intimacy we sense in Calypso’s relationship with Odysseus comes not just from Homer’s use of the verb φίλεόν (135). She becomes emotionally accessible to Odysseus—and so to us—because she wants something important to her that she cannot have. That frustrated desire makes her vulnerable, emotionally needy, feelings with which we humans can readily identify. Homeric deities are usually remote figures precisely because, being omnipotent, they are rarely denied something important to them. They may be temporarily annoyed by events on Earth or Olympus, but finally nothing can disturb their blissful existence for long. Only one other prominent scene in Homeric poetry parallels the exceptional dynamic at work in the Calypso episode, when Zeus looks down on the battlefield in Iliad 16 and realizes his mortal son Sarpedon is about to die at the hands of Patroclus:

τοὺς δὲ ἰδὼν ἐλέησε Κρόνου πάϊς ἀγκυλομήτεω,
Ἥρην δὲ προσέειπε κασιγνήτην ἄλοχόν τε:
"ὤ μοι ἐγών, ὅ τέ μοι Σαρπηδόνα φίλτατον ἀνδρῶν
μοῖρ᾽ ὑπὸ Πατρόκλοιο Μενοιτιάδαο δαμῆναι.
διχθὰ δέ μοι κραδίη μέμονε φρεσὶν ὁρμαίνοντι,
ἤ μιν ζωὸν ἐόντα μάχης ἄπο δακρυοέσσης
θείω ἀναρπάξας Λυκίης ἐν πίονι δήμῳ,
ἦ ἤδη ὑπὸ χερσὶ Μενοιτιάδαο δαμάσσω."

Seeing them, the son of devious Kronos
felt pity, and spoke to Hera, his wife and sister:
“Ah me, Sarpedon, the dearest to me of all men,
is fated to die at hands of Patroclus, son of Menoitios.
My heart is divided in two ways as I ponder,
whether I should snatch him alive from the sorrowful battle
and set him down in the fertile land of Lycia,
or kill him at the hands of the son of Menoitios.”

Iliad 16.431–38

We might suppose that Homer is about to settle a vexed question: Can Zeus change fate (μοῖρα)? Typically for Homeric poetry, the apparently clear outlines of this metaphysical question are blurred in the event. Hera tells Zeus to go ahead and save his son, but none of the other gods will approve of him. Exerting his unconquerable will in this case will breed resentment among the other Olympians. Instead of the supreme deity of the universe, Zeus here appears as the father of a fractious family, trying to keep the peace.

Zeus decides to let Sarpedon die, a decision that prompts him to shed tears of blood on the battlefield. After Patroclus kills Sarpedon, Zeus arranges for the twin deities, Sleep and Death, to carry his corpse home to Lycia. There he will be accorded a hero’s burial, marked by some of Homer’s most sublime verses, a haunting prelude to the funeral of Hector that ends the poem:

καὶ τότ᾽ Ἀπόλλωνα προσέφη νεφεληγερέτα Ζεύς:
"εἰ δ᾽ ἄγε νῦν φίλε Φοῖβε, κελαινεφὲς αἷμα κάθηρον
ἐλθὼν ἐκ βελέων Σαρπηδόνα, καί μιν ἔπειτα
πολλὸν ἀπὸ πρὸ φέρων λοῦσον ποταμοῖο ῥοῇσι
χρῖσόν τ᾽ ἀμβροσίῃ, περὶ δ᾽ ἄμβροτα εἵματα ἕσσον:
πέμπε δέ μιν πομποῖσιν ἅμα κραιπνοῖσι φέρεσθαι
ὕπνῳ καὶ θανάτῳ διδυμάοσιν, οἵ ῥά μιν ὦκα
θήσουσ᾽ ἐν Λυκίης εὐρείης πίονι δήμῳ,
ἔνθά ἑ ταρχύσουσι κασίγνητοί τε ἔται τε
τύμβῳ τε στήλῃ τε: τὸ γὰρ γέρας ἐστὶ θανόντων."

And then Zeus the Cloudgatherer spoke to Apollo:
“Go now, dear Phoibos, and rescue Sarpedon
from the battle and cleanse away the dark blood,
then bear him further off and bathe him in the streams of the river;
anoint him with ambrosia, wrapping him in in immortal garments.
Then send him to be carried by two swift messengers,
the twin brothers Sleep and Death, who will
set him down in the rich countryside of broad Lycia,
where his brothers and countrymen will give him proper burial,
with a funeral mound and marker; for this is gift of honor for the dead.”

Iliad 16.667–75

As we witness Zeus struggling over his decision, he moves closer to us because he faces, as humans so often do, a painful, and apparently unavoidable, loss. That his decision casts him in the role of a loving father tangled in the crosscurrents of familial conflict, as opposed to the male boss of the universe, and makes him emotionally available to us as he is nowhere else in the poem.

Homer creates the same dynamic in his portrait of Calypso. She wants Odysseus and cannot have him, and that loss colors all of her interactions with him. She accedes to Zeus’s orders, as she must, but grudgingly:

"ἀλλ᾽ ἐπεὶ οὔ πως ἔστι Διὸς νόον αἰγιόχοιο
οὔτε παρεξελθεῖν ἄλλον θεὸν οὔθ᾽ ἁλιῶσαι,
ἐρρέτω, εἴ μιν κεῖνος ἐποτρύνει καὶ ἀνώγει,
πόντον ἐπ᾽ ἀτρύγετον· πέμψω δέ μιν οὔ πῃ ἐγώ γε·
οὐ γάρ μοι πάρα νῆες ἐπήρετμοι καὶ ἑταῖροι,
οἵ κέν μιν πέμποιεν ἐπ᾽ εὐρέα νῶτα θαλάσσης.
αὐτάρ οἱ πρόφρων ὑποθήσομαι, οὐδ᾽ ἐπικεύσω,
ὥς κε μάλ᾽ ἀσκηθὴς ἣν πατρίδα γαῖαν ἵκηται."

“But since there is no way for another god
to get around or render useless the purpose of cloud-gathering Zeus,
let him be gone, if he himself asks for and urges it,
upon the barren sea. I will not send him anywhere!
For there are no oared ships and sailors here with me,
who would carry him on the broad back of the sea.
I will, however, freely counsel him, nor will I hold anything back,
so that he might arrive safely at his own native land.”

Odyssey 5.137–44

The language here brims with anger but also a certain forlorn resignation. What I have translated as “let him be gone” (ἐρρέτω, 139) carries a darker tone, something like, “to Hell with him!” Achilles uses the same verb in angrily refusing to accept any apology from Agamemnon when the embassy of his fellow warriors comes to beg him to return to the battle (Il. 9.377). The nymph’s injured feelings make her petulant, unable to yield gracefully. She offers some self-justification—she has no ships and sailors here—but then bows to the inevitable: she will give him advice and at least not hinder him.

The modulation of the emotional register in this exchange is so masterful that we don’t notice that the transaction of Zeus’s command—tell the nymph to release him—has occupied our imagination far longer than would be necessary to advance the plot. But Homer will use all of this rich material in the exchanges between Odysseus and Calypso that follow. For the moment, we wonder whether this anger and hurt will spill over onto Odysseus and how he will find his way around them if it does.

Further Reading

Clay, J. 1983. The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey, 213–239. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Peradotto, J. 1990. The Man in the Middle: Name and Narration in Homer’s Odyssey, 102–106. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Segal, C. 1992. “Divine Justice in the Odyssey: Poseidon, Cyclops, and Helios.” American Journal of Philology 113: 489–518.

Thalmann, W. 1992. The Odyssey: An Epic of Return, 47–50. New York: Twayne Publishers.

Tracy, S. 1990. The Story of the Odyssey, 30–33. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Van Nortwick, T. 1992. Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: The Second Self and the Hero’s Journey in Ancient Epic, 58–59. New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 2008. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey, 16–17; 53–57. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.