Calypso

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Her name is the thing she does. Calypso comes from the Greek verb kalyptō, to cover, to wrap, to hide from sight, and the Odyssey never lets the reader forget it: she is the one who takes the hero and folds him out of the world, off every chart, beyond the reach even of the gods who are searching for him. For seven years Odysseus is, in the most literal sense, concealed — not dead, not home, not anywhere the story can find him until the poem chooses to go looking. When it does, in the fifth book, it discovers a man it had presumed lost, wintering on the edge of a green island at the navel of the sea.

Odysseus and Calypso (1616), Jan Brueghel the Elder, depicting the hero on the nymph’s wooded island — Jan Brueghel the Elder, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The island and the cave

Ogygia is the most beautiful prison in the poem. When Hermes arrives on Zeus’s errand, even he — a god, and not given to wonder — stops at the mouth of the cave to look. A great cultivated vine sprawls over the hollow rock, heavy and ripe; four springs run side by side, their bright water threading off in four directions; the meadows are soft with violet and wild parsley; alder and black poplar and sweet-scented cypress stand around, and seabirds — owls, hawks, long-tongued cormorants whose business is the water — roost in the branches. Smoke of split cedar and citron-wood rises from the hearth. Calypso is at her loom inside, singing, the shuttle of gold passing back and forth. It is a place arranged for permanence, for a life that does not need to change because nothing in it will age.

Odysseus on the Island of Calypso (1830), Ditlev Blunck, showing the wooded coast of Ogygia — Ditlev Blunck, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

And in the middle of it sits a man crying. The poem’s first image of Odysseus is not the cunning tactician of later memory but a figure broken down by longing: he spends his days on the headland, on the stones, looking out over the barren salt water with his eyes full of tears, his sweet life draining away in homesickness, no longer taking any pleasure in the nymph. The nights he passes with her in the hollow of the cave, unwilling beside the willing — the text is exact about the asymmetry. The arrangement is captivity softened by affection, and the affection is real on her side, which is precisely what makes it captivity rather than rescue. She has saved him; she has loved him; she will not let him go.

The offer

What she offers is the thing the rest of the poem spends its energy refusing. Calypso proposes to make Odysseus athanatos kai agērōs — deathless and ageless, exempt from the one law that governs everything mortal — and to keep him so forever, in this garden, at her side. The gift is immortality of the kind the gods keep for themselves and bestow on almost no mortal. It is not a trick. It is the most generous gift a goddess can extend to a man, the very thing that, granted to a few favored mortals, lifts them out of the human order entirely. Set against it is an old wife on a rocky island, gray coming into her hair, and a death waiting at the far end like everyone else’s.

Odysseus and Calypso (1882), Arnold Böcklin, with the hero turned toward the sea and away from the nymph — Arnold Böcklin, Kunstmuseum Basel, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Odysseus’s answer is one of the foundational texts in the long argument over what a human life is for. He grants everything: Penelope is the lesser woman, mortal where Calypso is divine, plainer in form and stature, and he knows it. And still he wants to go home. He will take the sea and the shipwrecks and the gray wife and the ordinary end, because the alternative — agelessness in a place where the days do not turn — is not, for him, a life he recognizes as his own. The scene became one of the standard citations wherever later writers argued whether mortality is a wound to be escaped or the boundary that gives a life its shape. The same choice runs through the deathlessness-and-youth promised to other mortals — the cup of perpetual youth that makes Hebe the reward of a deified hero, the unaging sleep that holds Endymion forever young on his mountain — but Odysseus is the one who is offered it outright and says no. The refusal is the whole point. Without a death to return to, the homecoming would mean nothing.

Hermes, and Calypso’s protest

The release is not Calypso’s idea. Zeus, prompted by Athena, sends Hermes down across the wine-dark water with the order: the man is fated to reach home, and she must let him build his raft and go. Calypso receives the command with a flash of real bitterness, and her complaint is one of the sharpest things any divine character says in Homer. The male gods, she protests, begrudge a goddess the mortal lover they take for themselves without consequence. She names the precedents. When Dawn took Orion the hunter, Artemis came with her painless arrows and shot him down. When Demeter, following her own heart, lay with Iasion in a thrice-plowed field, Zeus learned of it and killed the man with a thunderbolt. Now, she says, the gods grudge her the mortal she pulled living from the sea and kept and fed and loved and meant to make immortal. It is a goddess’s accusation of the order that rules even goddesses, and the poem lets it stand unanswered.

Hermes Ordering Calypso to Release Odysseus (c. 1670), Gerard de Lairesse — Gerard de Lairesse, Cleveland Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Then she yields — there is no defying Zeus — and the yielding is gracious. She does not sulk. She shows Odysseus the trees to fell, lends him the bronze tools, brings cloth for the sail and provisions for the voyage, sends a fair wind behind him. The woman who would have kept him forever helps him leave. It is among the quieter demonstrations in the epic of what it costs to do the right thing against one’s own desire.

Hesiod’s Calypso, and the question of who she is

The Odyssey makes Calypso the daughter of Atlas — the Titan who holds the pillars of heaven and knows the depths of every sea — which sets her at the edge of the world, fittingly, where her island lies. But Hesiod’s Theogony, cataloguing the daughters of Ocean, lists a Calypso among the Oceanids, the countless water-nymphs born of Oceanus and Tethys. The same poem, in its closing genealogies, names a Calypso who bore Odysseus two sons, Nausithous and Nausinous — though other traditions hand those, or sons like them, to Circe instead, and the lines were never made to agree. Whether Atlas’s daughter and Ocean’s daughter are one nymph or two the poems do not decide; the genealogies of the nymphs were copious and inconsistent from the start, a crowd of names attached loosely to springs and groves and coves, and Calypso slips among them. The uncertainty is old, and it suits her. A figure whose whole function is concealment is allowed to be hard to place.

The two afterlives

Calypso has had two lives in the centuries since, and they sit oddly together.

In the first she is a minor obstacle on a long road — a seven-year delay between the fall of Troy and the rocky shore of Ithaca, an episode of the wanderings, the enchantress on the hidden island whom Odysseus must refuse and outlast. This is the Calypso of the European imagination at large, the offer of escape from time recurring in poem and painting and opera long after anyone remembered whose daughter she was.

In the second she is a station of the soul. The Neoplatonists read the Odyssey not as a sailor’s tale but as a coded account of the soul’s exile in the material world and its long labor to return to its source — and in that reading the whole voyage becomes an ascent, each island a condition of embodied life to be passed through and left. Porphyry, pupil of Plotinus, is the surviving monument of the method: his treatise On the Cave of the Nymphs takes a different Homeric passage — the cave of the Naiads on Ithaca, with its two gates for souls descending into birth and ascending out of it — and unfolds it as an image of the cosmos through which the soul travels. He credits the reading to Numenius the Pythagorean before him, who saw in Odysseus the figure of a man crossing the stormy sea of generation, of sensible life, until he reaches at last a country where storm and sea are unknown, a people, in the old English rendering, “who ne’er knew salt, or heard the billows roar.” On that hermeneutic Ogygia is not a place on any map but a phase of the descended soul — the body, or sensual oblivion, the soft green covering that hides the homeward self from itself — and the deathlessness Calypso offers is the false immortality of staying down in matter, exactly the thing the soul that means to return must turn away from. The allegorists who came after Porphyry, Proclus and the school that ran through Iamblichus, kept the Odyssey as a working text of the soul’s homecoming, and the Renaissance Platonists inherited it intact.

This is a reading by particular philosophers, centuries after the verses were composed, and applied to the voyage as a whole rather than drawn from anything the Calypso episode states. The epic itself frames the seven years on Ogygia far more plainly. It is the story of a man who was offered everything and wanted, instead, to go home.

The text and its students

The Calypso episode is the opening movement of the Odyssey’s account of the hero’s own wanderings, set out in the fifth book of the poem — the cave, Hermes’ embassy, the protest, the offer, the raft. The Greek of the central scene, with the goddess’s catalog of jealous Olympians and the verb of concealment buried in her name, is read closely in the annotated commentary on Odyssey 5.92–144 maintained by Dickinson College, which sets the protest about Eos and Demeter against the wider grammar of divine resentment in Homer. The older critical tradition runs through the Italian and German commentaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the standard companions to the poem; the figure herself, her parentage, and the variant genealogies are gathered in the reference literature on the nymph Calypso.

The allegorical afterlife has its own scholarship, distinct from the reading of the poem as narrative. Porphyry’s treatise — addressed to a different cave, the Naiads’ on Ithaca, but the surviving charter of the whole method — is studied as the chief witness to how the late Platonists turned Homer into a manual of the soul; the work and its debt to Numenius and Cronius are surveyed in the scholarship on On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Odyssey. Thomas Taylor’s 1823 English version, with its appended essay unfolding the wanderings of Ulysses as the soul’s passage over the sea of generation, remains the most accessible window onto that reading and is held in full in the Library.

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 · Odysseus · Hermes · Zeus · Porphyry · Neoplatonism · Plotinus · Proclus · Iamblichus · Immortality · Soul · Apotheosis · Hebe · Endymion