Book 5 · Book Guide
Now the poem turns at last to Odysseus himself. At a second council of the gods, Athena again pleads his case, and Zeus sends the messenger Hermes to order the nymph Calypso to set Odysseus free. She has kept him on her island for years and even offered to make him immortal, but Odysseus only wants to go home, and cries on the shore every day. Reluctantly, she helps him build a raft and sends him off with supplies and a fair wind.
For seventeen days Odysseus sails safely. Then Poseidon, returning home, spots him and smashes the raft with a furious storm. With help from the kind sea-goddess Ino, who lends him a magic veil, and from Athena, Odysseus barely survives. After two days struggling in the water, he drags himself ashore on the coast of the Phaeacians, crawls into a thicket, and falls into an exhausted sleep.
Nymphs are minor goddesses of particular places — a spring, a grove, a mountain, an island. They’re immortal, beautiful, and far below the Olympians in power: when Zeus sends an order, Calypso can rage, but she obeys. She’s a daughter of the Titan Atlas, living alone on the island of Ogygia at the far edge of the world — so remote that gods themselves rarely visit. Her name echoes the Greek word for ‘hide,’ and that’s exactly what she’s done with Odysseus for seven years.
Calypso’s offer is real: stay, and be immortal and ageless with a goddess, on an island so lovely even Hermes stops to stare. Odysseus’s answer is the heart of the whole poem. He admits, tactfully, that Penelope can’t compare with a goddess — and chooses her anyway: the aging wife, the rocky island, the mortal life with an end. The Odyssey is, among other things, an argument about what a human life is worth, and this is where the argument is won. Ten years of war and shipwreck couldn’t make him settle for paradise.
Odysseus blinded the Cyclops Polyphemus — who is Poseidon’s son — and then couldn’t resist shouting his real name as he sailed away, which let the monster curse him by name. (He’ll tell that whole story himself in Book 9.) Poseidon can’t kill him; fate has decreed the homecoming, and even gods work inside fate. What the sea god can do is make the road long, lonely, and bitter — and for ten years he has. That’s the machinery of the poem: a god’s grudge stretching the journey, other gods waiting for the grudge-holder to look away.
When the Olympians need something delivered — here, an eviction notice to a nymph at the end of the world — Hermes goes. He’s the messenger god, patron of travelers, luck, and tricksters, with golden sandals that carry him over sea and land like a seabird skimming the waves. Gods travel in Homer the way the story needs: instantly, gorgeously, and usually unseen. Only the audience gets to watch.
At a council on Olympus, Athena again speaks for Odysseus, stuck and grieving on Calypso’s island while the suitors plot to kill his son. Zeus agrees the time has come. He tells Athena to look after Telemachus, and sends Hermes to order Calypso to release Odysseus, who is fated to reach home by way of the Phaeacians.
Hermes flies down over the sea to the nymph’s island, a beautiful place of woods, springs, and meadows. He finds Calypso at her loom, singing, but Odysseus is not with her; he is down on the shore as always, crying and staring out at the empty sea.
Calypso feeds Hermes and asks why he has come. He tells her plainly: Zeus commands that she send Odysseus home, for it is not his fate to die here. Calypso is bitter, complaining that the gods envy goddesses who take mortal lovers, but she knows she cannot refuse Zeus and agrees to let him go.
Calypso finds Odysseus crying on the shore and tells him he may go: he must build a raft, and she will stock it and send a fair wind. Suspicious that this is some trick, Odysseus refuses to set out unless she swears a solemn oath that she means him no harm. Smiling, she swears by the river Styx, the gods’ greatest oath.
Over a last meal, Calypso asks if he truly wants to leave her for a mortal wife, and offers to make him deathless and ageless if he stays. Odysseus answers gently: he knows she is more beautiful than Penelope, but still he longs every day for home, and he will endure whatever the sea brings. That night they sleep side by side for the last time.
At dawn Calypso gives Odysseus tools and shows him the tall, seasoned trees. He cuts twenty timbers, planes and fits them, sets a mast, steering oar, and sail, and fences the raft against the waves. In four days the work is done. On the fifth, bathed and provisioned, he sails away with a gentle wind.
Odysseus steers by the stars, keeping the Bear on his left as Calypso told him, never sleeping. For seventeen days he sails, and on the eighteenth he sees the shadowy mountains of the Phaeacians’ land rising like a shield on the misty sea.
Poseidon, on his way home, spots Odysseus and burns with rage that the gods have helped him in his absence. He gathers the clouds, stirs up every wind, and drives a huge wave that flings Odysseus from the raft and snaps the mast. Weighed down by Calypso’s clothes, Odysseus barely surfaces, then fights back to the battered raft and clings on.
The sea-goddess Ino, once a mortal woman, pities him. She perches on the raft and tells him to strip off his heavy clothes, wrap her immortal veil across his chest, and swim for shore. Odysseus, fearing a trap, decides to stay with the raft as long as it holds.
Poseidon sends another great wave that smashes the raft to pieces. Odysseus straddles a single plank, then strips off his clothes, ties on Ino’s veil, and throws himself into the sea to swim. Satisfied he has suffered enough for now, Poseidon drives off home, but Athena ties down the other winds and leaves only the North Wind to push Odysseus toward land.
After two more days adrift, facing death again and again, Odysseus at last sees land. But as he nears it he hears the sea booming on sheer rocks, with no harbor and no beach, only cliffs and reefs. He fears that the surf will dash him against the stones or carry him back out to sea.
A wave hurls him at the rocks; he grabs hold and clings as the skin is torn from his hands, then is dragged back out. Swimming along the coast with Athena’s help, he finds the calm mouth of a river and prays to its god, who stills the current and lets him struggle ashore. Spent and swollen with seawater, he can barely breathe.
Odysseus lets Ino’s veil drift back to the sea, then crawls up from the river and kisses the ground. Afraid of dying of cold by the water or of wild animals in the woods, he creeps under two thick olive bushes, heaps up a deep bed of fallen leaves, and buries himself in it. Athena pours sleep over his eyes to ease his exhaustion.
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