Calypso's Island — Ogygia (Calypso's Island) (Ὠγυγίη), landfall 13 of 15 on the voyage of odysseus

The navel of the sea

Ogygia lies at the remote navel of the sea — so far west that this map, following Victor Bérard, sets it hard by the Pillars of Heracles, a last island guarding the gate to the outer Ocean. Alder, poplar and cypress stand over the cave; four springs run in a row; vines heavy with grapes climb the rock. Even Hermes, arriving on the god's errand, stops to stare.

Here the sea-nymph Calypso found the castaway on his tenth night in the water, and kept him. Her name says everything: Kalypso, from kalyptein — 'I will hide.'

A custom island: No real island sits mid-strait at Gibraltar; this map draws one anyway — a deliberate Bérardian invention. He reasoned that Homer's 'navel of the sea,' seven days' sail beyond everything, guarding the way to the river Ocean, could only mean the Pillars: the ancient edge of the world. Ogygia is placed just inside the gate, where the Mediterranean ends.

The offer no mortal is offered

Calypso does not merely keep Odysseus; she loves him, and offers what no mortal is offered twice: stay, and be immortal. Ageless, deathless, with a goddess, on the most beautiful island in the world.

And he refuses — knowing Penelope is mortal and ageing, knowing exactly what he is turning down, he says so to Calypso's face with the tact of a man who must not offend a goddess: my wife falls short of you in every way; and even so, I long for home. It is the Odyssey's central choice: a human life, with death in it, over paradise.

“She is mortal, and you are deathless and unageing. Yet even so I wish and long, all my days, to come home and see the day of my return.” — Odyssey V, 218–220

Seven years

The nights are hers: he sleeps beside her in the hollow cave, unwilling lover next to willing nymph, as Homer puts it with terrible precision. The days are his own — and every day is the same.

Seven years pass this way. Of the twenty years of Odysseus' absence, more than a third is spent here, hidden, in comfort, in despair. The Odyssey's poet chose to begin the whole poem at this lowest point — everything else, Troy and the Cyclops and the dead, is told later, in flashback, by the survivor.

The man on the shore

Where Hermes finds him — where he is always found — is the shore: sitting on the rocks, eyes never dry, staring at the empty horizon toward Ithaca. His life, Homer says, was dripping away in weeping for his homecoming, since the nymph no longer pleased him.

On Olympus, Athena has finally forced the issue while Poseidon is away among the Ethiopians. Zeus sends Hermes skimming the waves like a cormorant with the order: release him. Calypso rages — you gods begrudge every goddess her mortal — and then yields completely, because there is no appeal against Zeus.

“But Odysseus, yearning to see even the smoke leaping up from his own land, longs to die.” — Odyssey I, 57–59

The raft

Calypso, once resigned, helps with her own hands: she brings him a great bronze axe, leads him to the tallest dry trees, and in four days Odysseus builds a raft — twenty timbers, decked and railed, a proper piece of shipwright's work that Homer describes bolt by bolt. She provisions it with wine, water, grain and meat, bathes him, dresses him in scented clothes, and sends a warm fair wind behind him.

Seventeen days he steers east by the stars she named — the Pleiades, Boötes, the Bear that never bathes in Ocean, kept always on his left hand. On the eighteenth day the mountains of Scheria rise like a shield on the horizon. And Poseidon, riding home from the Ethiopians, sees him.