Summary
Athena, in a dream, prompts Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous, to take the household washing to the river — putting marriage in her mind as the reason.
The girls wash, eat, and play at ball. A shout wakes Odysseus, naked, salt-encrusted and terrifying. He breaks a branch to cover himself and comes out.
He supplicates Nausicaa without touching her knees — judging that to grasp them would offend — and with a speech that compares her to Artemis, and then to a young palm shoot he once saw at Delos, before asking only for clothing and directions.
She has him washed and dressed, feeds him, and gives directions to the city. She tells him not to walk in with her, because of what people would say, and instructs him to go to the palace and supplicate her mother Arete rather than her father.
Narrative function
Begins Odysseus's re-entry into human society, and does it through the most exposed possible position: naked, nameless, dependent on a stranger's judgement.
Greek concepts in this book
- hiketēs
- Suppliant. A protected status under Zeus. Odysseus's decision to supplicate with words rather than by grasping her knees is a calculation about how to invoke it.
- aidōs
- Shame, respect, the sense of what is fitting. Nausicaa's instruction not to be seen walking with him is aidōs operating as social constraint on a woman of standing.
Connections to other books
Book 7 · Book 8
Nausicaa's advice to appeal to Arete rather than Alcinous determines the whole of Book 7.
Book 5
The contrast with Calypso is deliberate: an immortal who offered everything and a girl who offers clothes and directions, of whom only the second gets him home.
Source notes
The palm-shoot simile (6.162-167) refers to Delos, the sanctuary island of Apollo, and is one of the poem's rare references to a specific cult site. Nausicaa's marriage prospects are raised repeatedly and never resolved; the poem does not pair them, and the Cycle's traditions on the subject are later.
Reading it responsibly
The speech is a piece of rhetorical engineering and the poem expects the reader to notice. He is naked, filthy and frightening; the situation is one in which a wrong word means the girls flee and he dies of exposure. He solves it by flattery so exact that it does not read as flattery. This is mētis operating in a domestic register, and it is the same faculty that empties the Cyclops's cave.