5.192-227

We are told that Odysseus sits in the chair occupied by Hermes when he delivered Zeus’s command to the nymph, an exchange focused on the boundaries between human and divine, male and female. Calypso speaks for us in asking the obvious questions: Why would the hero want to leave her island and the blissful existence she offers him, immortal life in paradise beside a beautiful nymph, to embark on a journey destined to bring pain and loss? Surely Penelope, a mortal woman, cannot compete in beauty with her? Because the poet has already let us see into Calypso’s heart, we hear the plaintive tone that runs under her words. This is not an inquiry driven by disinterested curiosity. The nymph is in pain, deprived of love and genuinely baffled. Why can she not have the man she wants?

Odysseus is famous for his eloquence and never has it been more important than at this moment. His earlier outburst does not bode well for his self-restraint here. In the event, he delivers a masterful speech, evidence of the great skill and tact we have heard so much about in Books 1–4. There can be no explaining his choice to this powerful being without offending her, so he does not explain. He admits that his behavior makes no sense from her point of view and passes quickly to his stubborn desire, ending with a defiant assertion of his will to survive. Homer gives Calypso no reply and the exchange ends with their retiring to bed to make love. Given what has preceded, we cannot see this final union as forced in any way. Indeed, the poet’s beautifully modulated scene leads us to the conclusion that of all their nights together, this one is the least forced, the most tender. Odysseus has revealed his preference as gently as he can, and we are left to imagine Calypso’s feelings from her actions.

Homer’s portrait of the relationship between Odysseus and Calypso is powerfully moving in the moment, the delicate interplay of emotions creating an intimacy that draws us in. At the same time, Odysseus’s choice reverberates throughout the rest of the poem. To grasp its full significance, we need to see it against the backdrop of the story Menelaus tells to Telemachus in Book 4, about when he was marooned by the gods in Egypt (4.351–592). Blown off course on his way home from Troy, Menelaus and his men are trapped by adverse winds on Pharos, an island off Egypt. Their supplies have run out after twenty days and things are looking grim, when Eidothea, a friendly nymph and daughter of Proteus, The Old Man of the Sea, approaches Menelaus as he wanders alone. She urges him to lie in ambush and restrain her father when he returns from herding his seals. Proteus knows all the secrets of the sea and can tell Menelaus how to get home, but he is also a shapeshifter and will only reveal what he knows if Menelaus is able to wrestle him to a draw, keeping him from escaping by assuming different forms. The nymph helps the Greeks to orchestrate an elaborate plot, requiring them to disguise themselves as seals and then jump the old man. The plan succeeds after Proteus tires of changing shape. Under questioning from Menelaus, he reveals the fates of Ajax, Agamemnon, and Odysseus after they left Troy: the first two have died, the third is marooned on Calypso’s island.

This sad news is offset by what Menelaus hears from the old man about his own fate:

"σοι δ᾽ οὐ θέσφατόν ἐστι, διοτρεφὲς ὦ Μενέλαε,
Ἄργει ἐν ἱπποβότῳ θανέειν καὶ πότμον ἐπισπεῖν,
ἀλλά σ᾽ ἐς Ἠλύσιον πεδίον καὶ πείρατα γαίης
ἀθάνατοι πέμψουσιν, ὅθι ξανθὸς Ῥαδάμανθυς,
τῇ περ ῥηίστη βιοτὴ πέλει ἀνθρώποισιν:
οὐ νιφετός, οὔτ᾽ ἂρ χειμὼν πολὺς οὔτε ποτ᾽ ὄμβρος,
ἀλλ᾽ αἰεὶ Ζεφύροιο λιγὺ πνείοντος ἀήτας
Ὠκεανὸς ἀνίησιν ἀναψύχειν ἀνθρώπους:
οὕνεκ᾽ ἔχεις Ἑλένην καί σφιν γαμβρὸς Διός ἐσσι."

“It is not fated for you Menelaus, nourished by the gods,
to die and meet your end in horse-pasturing Argos,
but to the Elysian fields and the ends of the Earth
the gods will send you, where sandy-haired Rhadamanthus
lives, and where life is most easy for mortals:
no snow, no harsh winter nor any rain is there,
but always the clear breath of the blowing wind
comes from the Ocean, to refresh mortals.
This is because Helen is yours and you are son-in-law to Zeus.”

Odyssey 4.561–69

There is much in Menelaus’s story that looks forward to the Calypso episode. Both heroes are kept from returning home by divine powers; each has a crucial encounter with a friendly nymph (in Odysseus’s case, two different nymphs, as we will see); in each case, the hero’s bond with his spouse proves to be decisive for his future happiness. This last parallel is also where the two heroes part ways. Because he “has” Helen (569), the daughter of Zeus, Menelaus will not die, but live on forever in a blissful place that sounds a lot like Ogygia; Odysseus, because he chooses Penelope over Calypso, will live a finite life and suffer great hardships. Menelaus, in other words, will have what Odysseus declines.

These two episodes exemplify a compositional practice that we have seen on a smaller scale in the first two lines of Book 5. Homer’s method of composition is analogical, using repeated elements in his traditional style to build his characters by accretion. (See Introduction: The Uses of Anonymity) We see Achilles in Books 19–22 of the Iliad, for example, through the lens of Diomedes in Books 5 and 6. Both warriors rampage through the Trojan ranks until they meet gods. Diomedes has been told by Athena not to attack any deity except Aphrodite, and so when Apollo reveals himself, Diomedes backs off. Achilles, faced with the anger of the river god Scamander in Book 21, keeps right on killing, eventually provoking a response nearly fatal to him (Il. 5.124–32; 431–36; 21.214–382). When Diomedes, having dispatched many opponents, meets the Trojan Glaucus on the battlefield, the two discover that their fathers were friends and decide to cease fighting, exchanging gifts instead. The corresponding episode for Achilles is his pitiless killing of Hector in Book 22 (Il. 6.119–236; 22.247–360). The penumbra of Diomedes’s measured heroism lies behind Achilles’s excesses, helping us see what makes Achilles so unique and so dangerous: he always goes too far, ignoring the limits that civilizing norms place on human behavior. By crossing over the boundaries that define human experience, he prompts us to think about why they are where they are and consequently, what it means to be human.

Likewise, Menelaus’s easy existence, both in Sparta and later in the Elysian Fields, throws into relief the life that Odysseus chooses when he leaves Calypso. Though the blissful existence of the gods is often held out in the Iliad and Odyssey as the ultimate goal for mortals, the poems paint a more complicated picture. For Achilles, who would seem to be the hero best equipped to achieve a divine existence—something his divine mother thinks is his due—striving for godlike omnipotence is disastrous, leaving him alone and miserable. In the Odyssey, the places that approximate the easy life of the gods exude in prospect a changeless stasis that the poem portrays as potentially dangerous for a hero. Though Odysseus faces all kinds of threats on his way home, physical and psychic, the common denominator is passing into nothingness, dying alone where he will be forgotten, a dismal end that Telemachus foresees for his father (1.159–62). In this sense, the seemingly delightful existence that Calypso offers Odysseus is parallel to the threat of being eaten by Polyphemus or drowning at sea. To be the man he is supposed to be, Odysseus must constantly be on guard against the forces of annihilation by acting out into the world to assert his existence. The choice he makes in rejecting the nymph’s offer is an existential one, affirming that for him, to be alive is to create himself through action, continually asserting himself in the face of the void. The high point of Odysseus’s encounters with other societies is very often when he passes from being an anonymous stranger to the hero Odysseus: having been nobody, he becomes the hero Odysseus again. The pattern recurs several times in the poem, culminating in the recognition scene in Ithaka in Book 23 (181–230).

The question that hovers uneasily is this: If returning to his customary roles as king, husband, father, and son in Ithaka is the final affirmation of Odysseus’s identity, which has been at issue all through the poem, then why does the life that awaits him at home resemble, in its static and hierarchical structure, the unchanging places that he has worked to escape in order to assert his existence? The tension that arises from this paradox informs the entire story of Odysseus’s return and makes us wonder whether the hero we have come to know will be able to rest at home. Has Homer created a hero who cannot be contained by the poem?

Further Reading

Anderson, W.S. 1958. “Calypso and Elysium.” Classical Journal 54: 2–11.

Nagler. M. 1974. Spontaneity and Tradition: The Oral Art of Homer, 64–111. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Van Nortwick, T.1992. Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: The Second Self and the Hero’s Journey in Ancient Epic, 39–88. New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 2008. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey, 7–12; 74–78. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.