Calypso

The island at the navel of the sea

Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey opens with Odysseus kept from home, and the poet names the nymph who keeps him in its first lines. Calypso holds him back in her hollow caves, wanting him as her husband. A nymph in Greek myth is a lesser goddess of a single place. For Calypso that place is an island.

The goddess Athena puts his case to Zeus, whose might among the gods is supreme. The island is wooded and surrounded by water, she says, and it lies where the navel of the sea is. The goddess who lives there is the daughter of Atlas, who knows the depths of every sea and himself holds the tall pillars that keep earth and heaven apart. Odysseus gives the island its name much later in the poem, when he tells his story to the queen of the Phaeacians. It is Ogygia, far off in the sea, and the fair-tressed daughter of Atlas who lives on it is guileful Calypso, a dread goddess.

The cave, the fire and the loom

Hermes, the messenger of the gods, reaches the island and comes ashore out of the violet sea. He finds a great cave with a fire burning on the hearth, and the scent of cleft cedar and juniper carried right across the island as they burn. Calypso is inside, singing in a sweet voice as she goes to and fro before her loom, weaving with a golden shuttle.

A wood of alder, poplar and sweet-smelling cypress grows round the mouth, with long-winged birds nesting in it, owls and falcons and sea-crows that make their living on the water. A garden vine trails over the hollow cave, heavy with clusters. Four springs run in a row close by one another, each turned a different way, and soft meadows of violets and parsley bloom around them. Homer says an immortal who happened to come might stand and marvel at the place, and Hermes does.

The resolve Zeus sends to the island

The gods sit in council and Athena complains that Odysseus is still in the halls of the nymph, with no ship and no companions to carry him over the sea. Zeus answers by sending Hermes to Calypso with what he calls their fixed resolve. Odysseus is to return.

The terms are strict. He goes with the guidance of neither gods nor mortal men, on a raft bound stoutly together, suffering as he sails, and on the 20th day he is to reach deep-soiled Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians, who are near of kin to the gods. They will honour him as though he were a god and send him home in one of their own ships, with more bronze and gold and clothing than he would ever have carried away from Troy.

The offer Odysseus refused

Odysseus later gives the length of his stay as seven years, with the eighth the year in which Calypso let him go. In that time she offered to make him immortal and ageless for all his days. By his own account she could never persuade the heart in his breast, and he refused her.

When she does send him on, she equips him herself. She provisions the raft with plenty of bread and sweet wine, gives him clothing, and puts a warm following wind behind him. He sails 17 days over the sea, and on the 18th the shadowy mountains of the Phaeacians’ land come into view.

Two fathers, and two sons

The ancient poets do not agree on whose daughter Calypso is. Homer makes her the child of Atlas. Hesiod, an early Greek poet, puts a charming Calypso in his catalogue of water goddesses instead, among Chryseis, Asia, Eudora, Tyche, Amphirho, Ocyrrhoe and Styx, the chief of them all, and he names Oceanus and Tethys as the parents of the eldest of those daughters.

Hesiod also closes that poem with the goddesses who bore children to mortal men, and Calypso is among them. She was joined to Odysseus in love and bore him two sons, Nausithous and Nausinous. Homer never mentions either name, and the seven years on Ogygia produce no children in the Odyssey.

Where Ogygia was supposed to be

Homer never puts Ogygia anywhere a reader could follow, and the question was already open in antiquity. Strabo, who wrote a geography of the known world, took it up against Polybius, who had turned the poem’s sailing distances into calculations of days. Strabo quoted the poem’s own line for the island’s position, at the centre of the sea, with the daughter of Atlas living there, and read those passages as pointing to the Atlantic Ocean, well outside the Greek seas.

The one position Homer does fix is the raft’s landfall: Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians. Thucydides, the Athenian historian of the war between Athens and Sparta, records that Corcyra, the island now called Corfu, traced its old renown at sea to the Phaeacians, whom it claimed as the island’s earlier inhabitants. Northwest of Corfu lies Othonoi, the westernmost point of Greece, and the identification is held there locally. A sea cave at Aspri Ammos, on the west of the island, is called Calypso’s cave, and 16th-century naval maps described Othonoi as Calypso’s island.