It is curious to see how Hermes plays with polytheism, hinting ever so slyly the contradiction in the Greek Pantheon. "Why dost thou a God ask me a God why I come?" It is indeed an absurd question, for a God ought to know in advance. In numerous places we can trace a subtle Homeric humor which crops out in dealing with his many deities, indicating a start toward their dissolution. Then with a strong assertion of the supremacy of one God, Zeus, Hermes utters the unwilling word: Ulysses must depart from this island.
The answer of Calypso is significant, she charges the Gods with jealousy; "Ye grudge the Goddesses openly to mate with men," which proposition she nails by several examples. But the Gods reserve to themselves the privilege of license with mortal women. A complaint still heard, not in the Olympian but in our Lower World; men are not held to the same code of morals that women are! But Calypso yields up her lover whom she "thought to make immortal and ageless." What else can she do? It is true that she saved him once and has preserved him till the present; she is, however, but a stage which must now be transcended. Appetite may preserve man, still he is to rise above appetite.
3. Now Ulysses is brought before us. The first fact about him is, his intense longing to return home; he is found "sitting on the shore, and his eyes were never dry of tears" as he looked out on the sea toward his country; "for the nymph was no longer pleasing to him," whatever may have been the case once. Surely the hero is in bonds which he cannot break, though he would; a penitential strand we may well find in his sorrow; thus he is ready for release.
Calypso, therefore, announces to him the divine plan: he must make a raft and commit himself to the waters. She has to obey, for is she not really conquered by Ulysses? Certainly the divine order requires her to send the man away from her island. Yet the return is by no means made easy, but is to be won by hardest effort; he must grapple with the waves, with angry Neptune after leaving Calypso. No wonder that Ulysses shuddered at the proposition; truly he has the choice between the devil and the deep sea, and he manfully chooses the latter. First, however, the Goddess has to take the great oath "by Earth, by Heaven above and Styx below," the sum total of the physical universe, from whose presence the perjurer cannot escape, though a God, that she is not practicing any hidden guile against her much-desired guest. Always the doubter, the skeptic Ulysses will show himself, even toward a divinity. He must test the Gods also, as well as man. Very beautiful and humane is the answer of the Goddess: "Such things I plan and deliberate for thee as I would devise for myself, were I in so great straits. For I too have a righteous mind, and the heart within my breast is not of iron, but compassionate."
Has a change come over the Goddess through this visit from Olympus? Hardly could she have felt this before, else she would have sent away Ulysses of her own accord. Her adjustment to the divine decree seems now to be internal, and not simply a yielding to an external power. Still the separation costs her deep pangs, and she wonders how Ulysses, a mortal, can give her up, who is immortal, with all her beauty and the pleasures of her paradise.
The answer of Ulysses reveals the man in his present stale of mind. He recognizes Calypso as beautiful, deathless, ever young; still he must have something more than sensuous life and beauty; though it last forever, it can never satisfy. Not to be compared with the Goddess in grace and stature, is his wife Penelope, still he longs for his home; "yea, though some God wreck me on the wine-dark deep, I shall endure." But there is no doubt the other side is also present in Ulysses; he has within himself a strong sensuous nature with which is the battle, and the poem does not disguise the matter, for he is again ready to enjoy all the pleasures of Calypso's bower, after this paroxysm of home-sickness.
Such is the deep struggle of the man; such is also the divine obstacle, which has to be removed by an Olympian interference before he can return. We see that Ulysses in spite of all blandishments of the Goddess and momentary weakness of himself, was ready for its removal; in his heart he has overcome Calypso, and wishes to get back to his institutional life in Family and State. Such a man must return, the Gods must be on his side, else they are not Gods. According to the Greek conception, Calypso is a subordinate deity who must be put down by the Olympians; appetite is not a devil, but a lower good, which must be adjusted to the higher. Note, then, that the external stream, or the world-movement represented by the Gods, now unites with the internal stream, the spirit of the individual, and brings forth the great event. As stated often before, these two streams run through all Homeric poetry.
Ulysses now makes his raft; the hero is also a ship-builder, being the self-sufficient man, equal to any emergency, in whom lie all possibilities. The boat, still quite primitive, is constructed before our eyes; It is the weapon for conquering Neptune, and prophesies navigation. Calypso aids him in every way, she even supplies him with tools, the axe, the adze, the augur, which imply a more advanced state of civilization than has hitherto appeared in the Dark Island. Whence did she obtain them? No special answer is given; hence we are thrown back upon a general answer. Calypso is the original wild state of nature; but her transformation has begun, she helps Ulysses in her new character. These tools are themselves formed from nature into means for subduing nature; the instrument of bronze in the hands of the wood-cutter is the master of the tree. At present Calypso is also such an instrument; she, the wild product of nature, is herself transformed into a means for helping Ulysses conquer the mighty physical element before him; an implement she has become in the hand of the Gods for restoring the heroic endurer, and hence she can emblematically hand him these material implements, for they are one with her present spirit. Indeed we may carry the analogy one step further, turning it inwardly: Calypso, though once the inciter to sensuous desire, now helps the man put it away and flee from it; ethically she is converted into an instrument against her former self. In like manner nature is turned against nature by the thinking artificer.
Also food and drink and raiment the Island Goddess furnishes for the voyage; with rare skill she tells him how to direct his course by the stars; she is mistress over the winds, it seems, for she sends the right one to blow. Wonderful indeed is the change; all those forces of nature, formerly so hostile, have been transformed into helpers, Calypso herself being also transformed. Thus we catch the outlines of the Fairy Tale or marvelous story, which tells, in a supernatural way, of man's mastery of the physical world, once so destructive, now so obedient.
Cloth for his sails she brought him, but we must recollect that she was a weaver at the start of the story. At last Ulysses pushes his raft down into the fair salt sea; Ogygia, the place of nature's luxuriance and delight, is left behind; he must quit the natural state, however paradisaical, and pass to the social order, to Ithaca, though the latter be poor and rocky. Still we may well recall the fact that the island and Calypso once saved Ulysses, when wrecked elsewhere, on account of the slaughter done to the Oxen of the Sun; this wild spot furnished him natural shelter, food, gratification; nay, it gave him love.