Calypso

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Calypso is the nymph of Homer’s Odyssey who keeps Odysseus on her island of Ogygia for seven years, loves him, and offers to make him immortal — an offer he turns down in order to sail home to a mortal wife and an ordinary death. Her name comes from the Greek verb kalyptō, to cover or conceal, and the poem plays on it: she is the one who hides the hero away, off every map, out of the reach of the gods who are looking for him.

In the Odyssey she lives alone in a cave wreathed in vines and woodland, and the text introduces her only after Odysseus has already spent years in her keeping. The arrangement is presented as something close to captivity softened by affection: she shares his bed, but he weeps on the shore each day looking toward the sea. When Zeus at last sends Hermes to order the hero’s release, Calypso protests bitterly that the gods begrudge a goddess the mortal lover a god would be allowed — then yields, and helps him build the raft on which he leaves. Hesiod’s Theogony names a Calypso among the daughters of Ocean, and ancient readers were unsure whether this was the same figure; the poems do not settle it, and the genealogies of the nymphs were never fully consistent.

What she offers is the part later readers found hardest to pass over. Deathlessness and perpetual youth, freely given, refused for the sake of return: the scene became one of the standard texts on what a human life is for, cited wherever Greek and later writers argued whether mortality is a loss to be escaped or the very thing that gives a life its shape. The Neoplatonists, who read the Odyssey as a coded account of the soul’s exile in the material world and its journey back to its source, found rich material in its nymphs and caves; Porphyry’s allegorical essay on a related Homeric passage is the surviving monument of that method, and the same impulse later treated Odysseus’s whole voyage as the soul’s homecoming. Such readings are interpretation laid over the poem, not anything Homer states — the epic itself frames the episode as a story about a man who wanted to go home.

Calypso has accordingly had two lives. In one she is a minor figure of the Odyssey, a delay on the road to Ithaca. In the other she is a fixed image in the European imagination — the enchantress on the hidden island, the offer of escape from time — recurring in poetry, opera, and painting long after the genealogies that produced her had been forgotten. The island has never been located. That, in the poem, is the point of her name.

→ In the library: Porphyry — On the Cave of the Nymphs (Taylor, 1823)

→ Related: Rhadamanthus · Danae · Leda · Orestes