Reading Troy — chapter 55 of 74 · Odyssey, Book 5

Odyssey, Book 5 — Calypso Releases Odysseus; the Raft (Day 7 of the poem's main action, tenth year after Troy's fall; Olympus, Ogygia, the open sea, the Phaeacian coast)

A second council on Olympus opens the book. Athena complains to Jove that Ulysses still languishes — and that the suitors are now planning to kill Telemachus on his return. Jove reminds her she arranged the Telemachy herself; he sends Hermes to Ogygia with the decree. Hermes binds on his golden sandals, takes the wand with which he draws sleep over men's eyes, and skims the wave-tops like a cormorant.

Ogygia is the most beautiful island Butler's Ulysses ever sees: a wide cave grown over with vines and irises, four crystal springs running in different directions, owls and falcons and chattering sea-crows in the trees. Calypso is at her loom singing. She recognises Hermes at once, feeds him ambrosia and nectar, and listens. Hermes states the decree: Jove orders that Ulysses be sent home; he is the last survivor of the fleet that sacked Troy, and he is not to die here. Calypso bursts out — you gods ought to be ashamed of yourselves, always jealous when one of us takes a mortal lover. She lists Diana shooting Orion, Jove killing Iasion with a thunderbolt. She has no ship, no men, but she will obey: she will instruct him.

She finds Ulysses on the beach where he sits every day, eyes filled with tears, gazing at the empty sea. She tells him he is free to go. He distrusts her at once: swear by Earth and Heaven and the river Styx that you have no further mischief planned. She swears the great oath. They eat together, he the mortal food, she the food of the gods; she tries one last time — stay with me and be immortal — and he refuses with the speech that defines him: Penelope is a mortal woman and cannot compare with you, but I long for the day of my return.

Five days of carpentry. She gives him a bronze axe and an adze. He fells twenty trees of alder and poplar and pine, squares them, bores them, bolts them with rivets, lays a deck, raises a mast and yard, weaves a sail of linen Calypso supplies, fits a steering-oar, and palisades the gunwales with wickerwork against the sea. On the fifth day she bathes him, dresses him in fragrant clothes, fills the skins with wine and water and a sack with provisions, and sends a fair wind aft.

Seventeen days he sails, sleepless, the Pleiades and late-setting Boötes and the Bear (which never bathes in Ocean) always on his left. On the eighteenth day the mountains of Scheria rise like a shield on the horizon. Poseidon, returning from his Ethiopian holiday, sees him — and is furious. He gathers the clouds, grips the trident, summons all the winds at once, drives night down across the sea. The mast snaps. Ulysses is washed overboard, dragged under by Calypso's heavy clothes, surfaces, clings to the broken hull. Ino-Leucothea (once mortal, now a sea-goddess) rises in the shape of a sea-mew, gives him her immortal veil — wind this about your chest, leave the raft, swim, and when you reach land throw the veil back into the sea without looking. He distrusts her too: he will keep the raft as long as a plank holds.

Poseidon sends one more wave that scatters the timbers like chaff. Ulysses straps on the veil and swims. Two days and two nights in the swell. On the third he sights land — and almost dies on the rocks, hands torn like the suckers of a polyp pulled from its bed, before he prays to the unnamed river-god of a small estuary, who calms his current and lets him crawl ashore. He returns the veil to the sea. He climbs into a thicket where two olives, a wild and a cultivated, have grown into one shelter; he scoops himself a bed of dead leaves as a man on a lonely farm covers a brand of fire under the ashes and sleeps. Athena pours sleep over his eyelids.

Analysis

Chapter 0055 — Analysis

The hero first seen, weeping

We have been hearing about Ulysses for four books. He has been described by Athena, by Nestor, by Menelaus, by Helen, by Proteus, by the suitors. He is the most discussed absence in the poem. Book 5 is his entrance — and Homer enters him not in glory but in tears. The first image we get of the hero of the Odyssey is a middle-aged man sitting on a beach weeping at an empty sea, his sweet life ebbing away in homesickness. Butler's plain prose is well suited to this anti-climax; a more elevated translator (Pope, Chapman, even Lattimore) cannot avoid heroising what Homer keeps small. The whole poem will be a recovery from this opening picture: the man on the beach must become the man in the bed of olive at Ithaca, the bow-stringer, the husband.

The second council and the structural restart

Book 5 begins with a second divine council that almost word-for-word repeats book 1. Athena petitions Jove, Jove agrees, the action begins. Ancient editors already noted the doubling; modern analysis explains it as the seam where the Telemachy (books 1–4) was stitched onto the Wanderings (5–12). Whether or not the poem was assembled from pre-existing pieces, the effect is real: book 5 is a fresh start. The Telemachy has shown us the world Ulysses must return to and given Telemachus his apprenticeship; now the poem turns to the man himself. The repeated council marks the hinge.

Calypso, the goddess who could not keep him

Calypso is the Odyssey's first great refusal scene. She offers immortality. Ulysses refuses. The choice mirrors and inverts Achilles's choice in Iliad 9 (long life at home or short life with kleos at Troy): Ulysses chooses nostos over even immortality. The reasoning is one line: Penelope is a mortal woman and cannot compare with you, but I long for the day of my return. The verb is himeiromai, the same verb the Iliad uses for grief. The Odyssey defines its hero by what he gives up, and what he gives up is the most extravagant gift any mortal in Greek myth is offered. Tennyson's "Ulysses" reads this scene wrong on purpose — his Ulysses would have stayed; Homer's would not.

The name Kalypso means "she who hides" or "she who conceals." Ogygia is the place of disappearance: seven years lost, no news. Once Ulysses leaves it the world begins to register him again — gods see him, gods speak about him, Phaeacians hear his name. The book is a re-emergence into narrative.

Poseidon's wrath, the second great wrath

The Iliad is the wrath of Achilles. The Odyssey is two wraths braided: Poseidon's wrath at Ulysses for the blinding of Polyphemus (which we will not see narrated until book 9), and Athena's championship that holds it in check. Book 5 stages the first head-on collision. Poseidon is returning from Ethiopia — a structural gift, as the storm could not happen at all if he had been at his post — and he sees the raft and is furious that the other gods have plotted his absence. The storm itself is a virtuoso passage: every wind released at once, the night dropping like a black cloth across the sea, the simile of the raft tossed like Autumn winds whirl thistle down. Butler renders the chaos competently in flat prose; the King James cadence of Way or the high music of Pope catches more of the cosmic anger. Note what Poseidon does not do: he does not kill Ulysses. He cannot — Jove has decreed otherwise. He punishes within the limits of fate.

The female helpers as a system

Three goddesses help Ulysses survive this book. Calypso gives him the wood and the wind. Ino-Leucothea gives him the immortal veil that keeps him afloat in the storm. Athena, invisibly, restrains all winds but the North, calms the sea, and pours sleep over his eyelids in the olive thicket. The Odyssey works through a network of female aid — divine and mortal both — that runs from Athena down through Calypso, Ino, Nausicaa, Arete, Circe, Penelope, and Eurycleia. Read against the Iliad's nearly all-male battlefield, the difference is the poem's quiet thesis: war is the work of men, return is the work of women.

Butler's prose against the storm

Butler's prose is at its weakest in the storm. Greek hexameter and Pope's couplets can carry the sea's noise; flat prose flattens it. But Butler is at his best in the carpentry: the bronze axe, the twenty trees, the wickerwork palisade. The Odyssey loves competent hands at work. Butler's plain register — he made a deck of stout planks, he set up the mast and yard, he fitted a steering-oar — gets the satisfaction of craft exactly right. This is the same poem that will later linger over Ulysses building the bed of olive at Ithaca.

What to watch for

• The bed of leaves in the olive thicket — first appearance of olive as Ulysses's sign-tree (the bed of olive at book 23 will be the recognition token).
• Ino-Leucothea's veil — the only divine object he is given on the wanderings, returned to the sea unused once he reaches land.
• The seventeen-day star-steered crossing — Ulysses navigates by Pleiades, Boötes, the Bear; the Odyssey makes him a competent helmsman, not just a wanderer.
• Kalypso as the verb of concealment — when Ulysses is hidden in book 6 by the dust of Nausicaa's wagon-tracks, when he is veiled by Athena's mist at Scheria, the same root is reaching for him.
• The polyp simile — torn from its rock — a domestic-disgusting image Homer uses to keep the heroism small.

Echoes across the cycle

Chapter 0055 — Echoes Across the Cycle

Backward echoes

The hero we have heard about for four books finally appears, and his first speech is a refusal of immortality framed as a choice between two women. The structural echo is Achilles in Iliad 9 receiving the embassy: Achilles is offered the gifts of Agamemnon and the chance to go home long-lived; Ulysses is offered the gifts of a goddess and immortality. Achilles refuses gifts and chooses kleos at Troy. Ulysses refuses immortality and chooses Penelope. The two greatest refusals in Homer mirror each other across the cycle; the Iliad chooses death-for-glory, the Odyssey chooses mortality-for-home. Ino-Leucothea's intervention (the daughter of Cadmus, suicide in the sea, now a marine goddess) extends the Iliad's network of low-divinity helpers — like Scamander, like the river-gods — but turned now to rescue instead of destruction. Calypso's bitter catalogue of mortal lovers killed by jealous gods (Orion, Iasion) reaches outside the cycle into older Aegean myth and gives the Odyssey one of its few moments of articulate goddess-grievance against the male Olympian order. Poseidon's grudge is the Odyssey's only sustained backward-link to a not-yet-narrated episode: the blinding of Polyphemus in book 9, the act that turned the sea against Ulysses. The poem keeps its causal centre deferred for four more books.

Forward echoes

• The bed of leaves in the olive thicket is the first appearance of Ulysses's sign-tree. The bed of olive at book 23 — carved from a living tree, immovable, the secret of his marriage — is prefigured here, where he first sleeps under twin olives after surviving the storm.
• The refusal of Calypso is the structural rhyme for every later female encounter on the wanderings: Circe in book 10 (offered, accepted on terms, then refused for home), the Sirens in book 12 (refused without contact), Nausicaa in book 6 (a marriage hinted, declined gently), Arete in book 7 (the queen who confirms his hospitality). Each repeats and varies the choice made here.
• Poseidon's storm sets up the framing of the poem's whole peril: the sea is Ulysses's enemy from now to the end of book 13. After Phaeacia drops him at Ithaca, the sea releases him and Athena takes over.
• Ino-Leucothea's veil has a long life in later literature: it is the model for every magical garment that protects in water — the kredemnon survives into Apollonius's Argonautica, into the Virgilian Cymothoe and the marine helpers of Aeneid 5.
• The Olympian council that restarts the action is taken up by Virgil at the opening of every Aeneid quarter: Aeneid 1 (Juno's wrath), Aeneid 7 (Allecto unleashed), Aeneid 10 (the council of the gods). Virgil read the Odyssey's twin councils as the structural model for how a long poem keeps its divine machinery in motion.
• Ulysses's choice of nostos over immortality becomes the philosophical centre of every later return-poem: Tennyson's "Ulysses" inverts it; Cavafy's "Ithaka" sublimates it; Joyce's Ulysses is one long re-enactment of the choice made on Ogygia.
• The seventeen-day star-steered crossing is one of the earliest detailed descriptions of celestial navigation in Western literature — the model for every later seafaring poem from Apollonius to Coleridge.

Cast in this chapter

Chapter 0055 — Cast In This Chapter

On stage

• Odysseus — "Ulysses"; first seen on the beach weeping, refuses Calypso's immortality, builds the raft, survives the storm, sleeps in the olive thicket
• Calypso — releases him under Jove's decree, offers immortality once more, gives the axe and adze and provisions
• Zeus — "Jove"; presides over the second council, sends Hermes with the order
• Athena — "Minerva"; petitions Jove; later, invisibly, restrains the winds and pours sleep over Ulysses's eyes
• Hermes — flies to Ogygia with the decree; eats nectar with Calypso
• Poseidon — "Neptune"; spots Ulysses returning from Ethiopia, raises the storm

Mentioned / off-stage

• Penelope — named in Ulysses's refusal: she is mortal, but he longs for her
• Telemachus — Athena reminds Jove of the suitors' ambush plot against him

Non-cast named figures: Ino-Leucothea, the once-mortal daughter of Cadmus now a sea-goddess, who gives Ulysses her immortal veil (the kredemnon) in the storm; the unnamed river-god whose estuary takes him in; Orion and Iasion, named by Calypso as past mortal lovers of goddesses killed by jealous Olympians; the Pleiades, Boötes, and the Bear, the constellations by which he steers.

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.