Who was Calypso in the Odyssey?

The goddess of Ogygia

Homer puts her island at the navel of the sea, as the Greek says, far from every city of men (Odyssey 1.50). Her father is Atlas, the Titan who holds the pillars that keep earth and sky apart (1.52–54). When Hermes lands there in book 5, he finds a cave with a fire of cedar and sandalwood, a vine heavy with grapes over the entrance, four springs and meadows of violets. Inside, Calypso sings as she weaves with a golden shuttle. Even the god stops to stare (5.55–75).

Her name is usually explained from the Greek kalyptein, to hide or to cover. She is the one who hides him away, and the poem hides him too: Odysseus is talked about for four books and steps on stage only in book 5, on her beach.

Seven years and an offer

He reached Ogygia alone, clinging to a keel, after Zeus struck his last ship with lightning (5.130–134). He stayed “seven years straight on end,” he later tells the Phaeacians, and wet the clothes she gave him with tears the whole time (7.259–260). Homer is plain that he stayed against his will. By day he sat on the rocks and stared at the sea (5.151–158).

Calypso wanted him as her husband, and she offered what no mortal woman could: to make him immortal and ageless all his days (5.135–136). She even asks whether a mortal wife can match a goddess. His answer is a model of tact.

I am quite aware that my wife Penelope is nothing like so tall or so beautiful as yourself. She is only a woman, whereas you are an immortal. Nevertheless, I want to get home, and can think of nothing else.

Why he said no

Homer never makes the choice easy. Calypso is beautiful, devoted and immortal; Ithaca is a rocky island where trouble waits. Odysseus does not pretend Penelope is lovelier. He grants the opposite, and chooses her anyway, with old age and death thrown in. Six books later the ghost of Achilles says he would rather be a poor man’s hired hand alive than king of the dead (who Odysseus met in the underworld). Read together, the two scenes point the same way: a mortal life with a home and a name is worth more than an endless one without them.

The gods’ order and the raft

The release begins on Olympus. Athena pleads for Odysseus, and Zeus sends Hermes to tell Calypso the gods have decided (1.81–87; 5.28–42). She answers bitterly that the gods are jealous whenever a goddess takes a mortal husband: they killed Orion, whom Dawn loved, and Iasion, whom Demeter loved (5.118–129). Still, she obeys. She swears by the water of the Styx that she means him no harm, gives him a bronze axe, an adze, augers and sailcloth, and in four days he builds a raft. On the fifth she sends him off with wine, water, food and a warm, fair wind (5.178–268).

Those seven years are the biggest block of his ten years away. On the eighteenth day at sea Poseidon wrecks the raft, and Odysseus swims ashore to meet Nausicaa. Calypso never appears in the poem again. Hesiod, in the closing lines of the Theogony, gives the goddess and Odysseus two sons, Nausithous and Nausinous (Theogony 1017–1018).