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The True Story Of The Odyssey (and why it matters) - Alex Petkas - #1125
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Why Odysseus Walked Away From a Goddess
At 42:20 · chapter starts 37:21
Book 5 opens on Odysseus weeping on the shore of Calypso's impossibly beautiful island, staring out to sea and longing for home. Calypso is a divine nymph — a lesser goddess — who has offered him immortality and eternal, undying youth. She even makes her case directly: she's more beautiful than Penelope, the island is more pleasant than rocky Ithaca, and he would live forever. Odysseus agrees she's right on every count — and rejects the offer anyway. Alex Petkas delivers the episode's first major philosophical insight here: Odysseus's identity is constituted by his Homeric epithets — polytropos (many-turned, crafty), polymetis (many-minded), polytlas (much-enduring). None of those qualities could exist in paradise. Staying would be a kind of death of the self. Hermes arrives, Calypso is forced by Zeus to release him, and she equips him with tools to build his own raft — every detail reinforcing the Athena-versus-Poseidon polarity of craft-and-civilisation against wild-nature-and-force. Odysseus sails for 20 days, Poseidon smashes his raft, and he washes ashore naked on the island of the Phaeacians — a death and rebirth, under an olive bush (Athena's tree), where he's woken by a bouncing ball.
Odysseus spent approximately 8 years as a captive-lover of the divine nymph Calypso, who promised him immortality and eternal youth if he stayed.
Calypso offered Odysseus immortality and eternal youth, yet he chose the suffering of the return home over godhood — because staying would erase his identity.
