Why does Odysseus reject Calypso’s offer to stay with her forever? (Catherine Project 8)

 Catherine Project, Spring 2024, Homer -- Response 8,  Od. 5-8

When Calypso tells Odysseus he may go home now if he wishes, she repeats her offer (apparently offered many times before) that Odysseus could instead stay with her, be lord of the household, and be immortal (Od. 5.208-210; cf. 5.135-6, 7.255-7, 23.333-8); Calypso thinks that Odysseus wants to see his wife, even though Calypso is more beautiful. Odysseus readily admits that Calypso, as an immortal goddess, is more beautiful, but even so he wants to see his home and his day of homecoming. 

Putting aside what Calypso gets out of the deal (epic’s male perspective assumes Calypso would of course want Odysseus), I personally have always found it hard to understand Odysseus’ response and choice here. Immortality with a beautiful, loving goddess on an island paradise (5.63-76) would seem pretty close to the ideal human condition, even by the Od.’s standards. What Calypso offers sounds a lot like what is promised to Menelaus for his special afterlife in the Elysian Fields: immortality in a gentle land at the edge of the earth, perhaps with Helen (4.563-8). So why does Odysseus insist on going home? (similarly: why not take Alcinous’ offer [7.313-5] of land and property, marry Nausicaa, and stay among the Phaeacians, in a land that’s a lot like Ithaca but a little better?)
 
Some possible explanations that are sometimes put forward: 
  • Odysseus won’t get what’s promised. Hermes claims that it’s not Odysseus’ fate to perish on Calypso’s island (5.113), and Calypso herself provides the parallels of Orion and Iasion, mortals whom the gods killed for loving goddesses (5.118-128). Perhaps if Odysseus stays, he will simply die rather than become immortal. Seems unlikely to me, especially given that there are two other apotheoses in Od. 5: the more obvious case of Ino = Leukothea (5.333-5), and the subtler but closer parallel of Tithonus. Here in 5 Tithonus still shares Dawn’s bed (5.1), and presumably has achieved a good immortality with youth in addition to deathlessness. 
  • Fame (kleos). According to both Telemachus (1.234-242) and Odysseus (5.306-311), Odysseus lost great fame by disappearing at sea rather than dying at Troy. Possibly Odysseus wants to recover this fame, though he doesn’t bring that up specifically as a motivation to return home (rather than not die at sea). He is interested in his own fame: he asks Demodecus for a song about himself (8.492f), and slightly beyond our reading he sees his fame as crucial when he reveals his identity (9.19-20). 
  • Adventure. “I cannot rest from travel: I will drink / Life to the lees” (Tennyson Ulysses 6-7). Possibly Odysseus find the idea of life in Calypso’s isolated island (5.101-2) boring, though I don’t see many indications in the Od. that Odysseus values travel and adventure for its own sake. 
I think it’s more likely that Odysseus is serious about wanting to return to his house. Elsewhere in our reading characters praise a) going home to see property, serving people, house (7.225, Odysseus), b) going home to see fatherland, house, and own people (6.315, Nausicaa), and c) passing down to one’s children one’s property and social rights (6.149-50, Odysseus). 

I think this last one is significant: we’ve already seen how invested the Odyssey is in the passing down of land and property from one generation to the next (a fundamentally aristocratic ideal). The links over generations to a particular country, house, and property cannot be recreated by Odysseus creating a new life with Calypso or Nausicca. Odysseus has already received from his father his property and social standing in Ithaca; if he stays with Calypso (or even creates a new home with Nausicaa), he will be abandoning his obligation to pass that same standing down to his son Telemachus.

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