Summary
A second divine assembly. Athena raises Odysseus again; Zeus sends Hermes to Ogygia to order Calypso to release him.
Calypso protests that the gods resent goddesses who take mortal lovers, and complies. She finds Odysseus on the shore, weeping, looking at the sea, as he does every day. She offers him immortality if he stays; he answers that he knows Penelope is lesser in form and stature than a goddess, and that he wants his homecoming regardless.
He builds a raft in four days with tools she provides, and sails on the fifth. For seventeen days he sails; on the eighteenth Poseidon, returning from the Ethiopians, sees him and raises a storm.
The raft breaks up. The sea-goddess Ino-Leucothea gives him her veil to keep him afloat. After two days in the water he reaches the coast of Scheria, is nearly killed on the rocks, finds a river mouth, crawls ashore, and sleeps under a pile of leaves beneath two olive bushes.
Narrative function
Introduces the protagonist at his lowest point and establishes the terms of the poem's central choice: mortality with home against immortality without it.
Greek concepts in this book
- nostos
- Homecoming. Book 5 defines it by making it cost something: Odysseus refuses deathlessness to have it.
- polytlas
- 'Much-enduring.' Odysseus's other standing epithet, and the one Book 5 earns.
- athanatos
- Deathless. What Calypso offers and what is refused — the poem's clearest statement that being human is a condition worth keeping.
Connections to other books
Book 1
Fulfils the divine decision taken in Book 1; the repeated council is a structural marker of the poem's second movement.
Book 9
Poseidon's hostility, active here, is explained retrospectively in Book 9 by the blinding of Polyphemus.
Book 23
The choice of a mortal wife over an immortal one is answered at the end by the bed rooted in the ground.
Source notes
Calypso's complaint about the gods' double standard (5.118-129) is one of the poem's few explicit criticisms of divine behaviour placed in a divine mouth. Her name is built on the root of kalyptō, 'to conceal', which most readers hear as significant.
Reading it responsibly
The situation is one of captivity. The poem says Calypso detained him and that he wept on the shore continually; it also says they slept together, in a formula that gives him no stated reluctance. Modern adaptations tend to resolve this tension in one direction or the other. The text does not resolve it, and a reading that erases either half is not reporting the poem.