Odysseus presents himself as someone who has endured exceptional trials and tribulations and has managed, alone, to survive the perils and dangers of his journey back from Troy. After listening to the swineherd Eumaeus tell the story of how he was captured and trafficked as a child, entering a lifelong position as a lowly slave, Odysseus comments that Eumaeus’ sufferings can hardly match his own: “Your life is good. / But as for me, I am still lost.” Odysseus suggests that his own inability to reach his homeland, even after twenty years’ absence, is the ultimate form of suffering, which trumps all other pain. But it is notable that Odysseus travels in elite fashion, without ever touching the oars himself. That lowly hard labor is performed for him by others, men who are uncompensated for their labor, and who all, eventually, die before reaching their homes.
The Choice of Odysseus
At the start of the poem, we see Odysseus making a momentous and defining choice: to return to Penelope, his mortal wife, rather than stay forever with the goddess Calypso. This goddess is divinely beautiful, and her island is marked by luxuriant, dense complexity; it is a place of secrets and tangled mixtures.
The scent of citrus and of brittle pine
suffused the island. Inside, she was singing
and weaving with a shuttle made of gold.
Her voice was beautiful. Around the cave
a luscious forest flourished: alder, poplar,
and scented cypress. It was full of wings.
Birds nested there but hunted out at sea:
the owls, the hawks, the gulls with gaping beaks.
A ripe and luscious vine, hung thick with grapes,
was stretched to coil around her cave. Four springs
spurted with sparkling water as they laced
with crisscross currents intertwined together.
The meadow softly bloomed with celery
and violets. (5.60–73)
The god Hermes, visiting Calypso’s home, is understandably “full of wonder.” But Odysseus, in this magical, mysterious place where he shares the bed of a majestic goddess, is miserable.
His eyes were always
tearful; he wept sweet life away, in longing
to go back home, since she no longer pleased him.
He had no choice. He spent his nights with her
inside her hollow cave, not wanting her
though she still wanted him. By day he sat
out on the rocky beach, in tears and grief,
staring in heartbreak at the fruitless sea. (5.151–58)
The text implies that for some (carefully unspecified) amount of time, Odysseus willingly enjoyed the company of the goddess. Calypso rescued him when he crawled, ragged and half drowned, onto the shore of her island, and he spends a good seven years—the majority of time spent returning from the war—sharing her bed. She has given him shelter from the storm and has provided him with a home that seems in certain very obvious ways superior to his original home on Ithaca. As she herself reminds him with touching defensiveness, the goddess is much more attractive than Penelope. Moreover, Calypso’s island is lush and fertile, in contrast to barren Ithaca—and, what ought to be a clinching argument in the case, she has the power to make Odysseus immortal and free from aging forever. She offers him everything, except a way back to his original, human home. Outraged at his rejection of her love, she asks him,
“Do you really want
to go back to that home you love so much?
Well then, good-bye! But if you understood
how glutted you will be with suffering
before you reach your home, you would stay here
with me and be immortal—though you might
still wish to see that wife you always pine for.
And anyway, I know my body is
better than hers is. I am taller too.
Mortals can never rival the immortals
in beauty.” (5.204–14)
The depiction of Calypso, a powerful but emotionally open female character, frustrated in her desire for the human she has rescued, is one of the most memorable sequences in the poem. She perhaps does herself a disservice in emphasizing only her superior good looks. She also has a superior mind, and she is particularly well matched with Odysseus, who shares her fondness for secrets. Like Circe and Athena, Calypso appreciates and understands Odysseus’ capacity for deceit and scheming, because she has similar qualities herself—albeit at a divine, more than mortal level. She praises him for mistrusting her, saying, “You scalawag! What you have said / shows that you understand how these things work.” Penelope, for obvious reasons, shows far less appreciation for Odysseus the liar, Odysseus the trickster, Odysseus the “scalawag.” Her looks are ordinary compared with those of the goddess; her love for Odysseus is more careful, more suspicious, and her understanding of him is less complete; and in choosing Penelope, Odysseus is also choosing to become old and, eventually, to die. In reply to the goddess, Odysseus acknowledges the truth of everything she says. But then he adds simply, “But even so, I want to go back home, / and every day I hope that day will come.”
Why exactly does Odysseus make this surprising choice? The poem never gives us an explicit answer—an omission that makes the hero’s yearning for home all the more resonant and moving. Calypso, an obviously prejudiced observer, suggests that Odysseus’ choice to go home is masochistic: a deliberate embrace of suffering, and a perverse preference for something worse over something better. The tactful hero does not correct her.
Presumably, Odysseus is inspired by a deep loyalty to his wife, son, father, and the place of his birth, and moved by a deep and constant love for those he left behind. But we must avoid projecting the anachronistic ideas of chivalric romantic love onto Odysseus, who is not a medieval knight performing valiant deeds for the sake of a beautiful lady. To explain the meaning of Odysseus’ choice in Homeric terms, it is useful to look back to The Iliad. In that poem, the central character, Achilles, makes the momentous choice to stay and fight at Troy, to gain honor among his fellow Greek warriors, rather than return home to his young son and dying father, where he might have lived a long life in obscurity. The choice of Odysseus is parallel to the choice of Achilles, in that it is a decision to be mortal in order to gain a particular kind of masculine honor. If Odysseus had stayed with Calypso, he would have been alive forever, and never grown old; but he would have been forever subservient to a being more powerful than himself. He would have lost forever the possibility of being king of Ithaca, owner of the richest and most dominant household on his island—an estate wealthy in pigs, sheep, goats, fruit, grain, wine, and slaves, with an old father, a young son, and a desirable, much-courted, and valuable wife all devoted to him, and all increasing his value in the eyes of his neighbors.