Odysseus and Calypso: the seven years of Canto V

Told in one sentence, the story sounds simple: a man took twenty years to get home from the war, spent part of that time with other women, and his wife held everything together alone. That reading is not wrong. It sees correctly what it sees in the summary of the Odyssey. What it is missing is what Canto V, where Homer finally shows what happened between Odysseus and the nymph Calypso, says about those specific seven years, and it says it in a way more precise and more uncomfortable than the accusation alone.

What the reader already knows, and what Canto V adds

Of the twenty years Odysseus spends away from Ithaca, ten are the war at Troy. Of the ten that remain, seven are on Calypso's island. That is the period the complaint about "other women" is really about, and it is exactly the period Canto V describes with an uncomfortable precision, one that favors neither the easy accusation nor the easy defense.

Odysseus only appears in the poem in this canto, nearly a fifth of the way through the book, in the seventh and final year of his captivity. Before that, the first four cantos are about his son, Telemachus, trying to become a man in a house overrun by suitors. Only here does the camera, so to speak, turn back to the hero.

Seven years sitting on the beach, looking at the sea

The picture Homer paints of the captivity takes only a few lines, and they leave no room for doubt about the nature of it. Odysseus spends his days sitting on the rocks of the beach, looking at the open sea, weeping. And at night, the poem says:

"But at night he slept beside her in the hollow cave, unwilling, beside her who was willing." (Odyssey, V, 154-155; Portuguese source consulted: Christian Werner, Cosac Naify, 2014)

It is not an ambiguous line. The poem states plainly who wants this and who does not. Calypso, for her part, is not painted as a villain: she goes so far as to complain to the gods that they tolerate male gods taking mortal lovers, yet punish goddesses who do the same. The poem records the complaint and moves on, without deciding who is right. What is clear, on both sides, is that this is not a romance between equals.

The offer of immortality, and the refusal

Calypso offers Odysseus the one thing no mortal ever receives for free: never aging, never dying, staying on that island forever, at her side. And she argues, correctly, that she is more beautiful than the wife waiting for him.

Odysseus does not deny it. He admits that Penelope is indeed inferior to Calypso in beauty and stature, and that one is mortal while the other is an ageless goddess. But he answers that he wants, all the same, to go home and see the day of his return. He grants the whole premise, and refuses the conclusion. He does not choose Penelope because she is better. He chooses mortal life because it is his own, on a small, rocky island where he will, one day, die.

That does not make him a saint. That is not the reading the poem proposes, nor the one this article defends. It makes him something more interesting than a saint: a man who was offered everything, the end of fear and of time, and who chose to go home.

Naked on the beach, without a name: what was left of him

Free of the island, Odysseus builds a raft with his own hands, and Poseidon destroys it in a storm. He reaches the shore of the Phaeacians with no boat, no clothes, no companions, and sleeps under olive trees, covered in leaves, like an animal. It is the poem's lowest point: none of the four pieces that made him someone are left, no land, no possessions, no witness, not even the ability to say his own name to someone who would recognize it.

It is from this point, not before it, that the rebuilding told in The Odyssey, by Homer: summary and analysis begins. And it is worth noting what that changes about how to read the seven years with Calypso: they are not the middle of Odysseus's story, they are the end of one phase and the start of the most complete unmaking the poem has in store for him.

Why this scene matters for anyone reading the Odyssey today

The accusation that opens this article is not wrong about the facts it lists. What it leaves out is what the text itself records about the will of the person who was actually there: an unwilling man, weeping every day, who refuses immortality to return to a wife who will grow old. Who decides, in the end, whether that choice is enough, is not this article, nor today's reader alone: it is Penelope, in Canto XXIII, the only person in the house with the authority to judge the whole twenty years, and she puts Odysseus through a test no other character in the poem passes.

It is this same scene, read verse by verse with the translation in hand, that the Nous video lesson on the Odyssey develops, together with the rest of Odysseus's journey, from the shipwreck to the reunion.

Continue: The Odyssey, by Homer: summary and analysis · Penelope and the test of the bed, in the Odyssey · Starting over after losing everything, in the Odyssey · Why is Macbeth "the Scottish play"?
Source class: Odisseia, de Homero