Blogging The Odyssey: Part 3 (The One Where Everyone is Naked for Some Reason or Another)
To catch up on parts 1 and 2, click here!
Good news: Odysseus is alive!
Bad news: an island nymph is holding him hostage.
Good news: Zeus is negotiating for his release!
Bad news: Calypso is like, “I kidnapped this human fair and square and I’m keeping him.” So there’s where we are.
BOOK 5: Odysseus—Nymph and Shipwreck
I once had to do a group project on Ayn Rand, and let me tell you, coercing four people (each with their own distinct personalities and font preferences) into contributing to the PowerPoint was no picnic. In fact, it was like pulling teeth, if each of the teeth were screaming. That’s a horrifying image, isn’t it? So I can imagine Athena’s frustration with the Odysseus Situation, and now, with that choice anecdote in mind, hopefully you can too. The gods re-group on Mount Olympus, and the conversation is pretty much this:
ATHENA: So I thought we were taking care of this.
ZEUS: We are.
ATHENA: Calypso has made Odysseus her sex slave. I don’t know what “taking care of this” means to you, but to the actual rest of the world, this isn’t it.
ZEUS: Look, I’ve got Poseidon throwing hissy fits left and right, I’ve got Hades going rogue, I’ve got Hera breathing down my neck, and to make matters worse I haven’t had sex with anything in about four hours. This has been hard on all of us.
ATHENA: Especially Odysseus, who hasn’t seen his family in twenty years.
ZEUS: Athena, please. Nobody wants to hear your logic and common sense. Now let me sit here and think about what I, the most powerful god of all the gods, can possibly do to make this situation better.
He decides the best he can do is to send Hermes, the messenger god, to tell Calypso, “Put that thing back where it came from or so help me.”
Pixar
Predictably, Calypso is not in favor of this. She says oh, sure, the gods are allowed to mingle with mortals, but when a goddess does it suddenly it’s “gross” and “steadily chipping away at Odysseus’s will to live.” She actually has some decent points in that the male gods are never held to the same double standard as goddesses, but we can’t very well keep Odysseus here against his will for equality. He’s already been away from home for twenty years; if he has to wait around for the decline of the patriarchy, he’ll be there forever.
In the end, she throws up her hands and says, “Fine, I’ll let him go. He’ll probably die at sea, anyway.”
But Odysseus, whose main character trait is that he’s wily, manages to outsmart the sea. It’s a rough journey, what with Poseidon chucking tsunamis at him at every turn. But in the end Odysseus manages to wash ashore in some undisclosed location and fall asleep naked on a beach after twenty years of trials and tribulation, and honestly isn’t that the dream?
BOOK 6: The Princess and the Stranger
A beautiful lady discovers Odysseus, who is still naked. The lady is naked, too. Her hand-maidens, who have gathered around to look, are also naked. We’re given to understand that this is just another Tuesday for Odysseus. The timing is just right for an abrupt bacchanalian orgy, but this doesn’t happen, and we’re all poorer for it.
You might be wondering why everyone has to be naked, and you’d be right to! Last night, the princess dreamed that Athena told her to go wash her clothes by the river. She’s going to be a bride some day, after all, and brides can’t have dirty clothes. Or something like that. I don’t know, the logic was lost on me, I’ve been wearing the same hoodie for three years straight and I’m not very well going to stop. Whatever. Everyone’s naked by the river now and that’s all we need to know.
We’re told repeatedly that the princess is beautiful and also a virgin. For some reason, it’s very important that we know this.
Odysseus, smooth talker that he is, wavers between either
- Just asking for help, or
- Throwing himself bodily at the princess and sobbing
He opts for the first one. The princess agrees to help but tells him to wash up first, because he looks like actual human garbage. Athena decides to use her godly powers to make him really hot. The princess and her hand-maidens are like “HOLY SH*#, IS THAT A MAN OR THE HUMAN EMBODIMENT OF SEX?” and now, presumably, they are going to help him find his way home even harder.
The princess tells Odysseus she’ll take him to her father’s kingdom, but not right away. She and her entourage will go first, and then, the next morning, Odysseus can follow. She gives this big long speech about virtue, but the TL;DR of it all is that she can’t just go strolling back into Phaeacia with a sexy vagrant in tow. She is the princess, after all. She has an image to maintain, and people will talk. They’ll think she’s just sleeping around with all the naked swamp men she finds in rivers.
So Odysseus hunkers down (sexily, of course) in a cave on the outskirts of town to await his fate. Possibly the Phaeacians will be nice to him. If past experience is any indication, however, they will simply throw up a middle finger in his general direction and then set fire to everything he loves. Only time will tell.
Meanwhile, Poseidon is still pissed, which just sounds like a catastrophe for everyone involved.
Discussion questions:
- Is Calypso a sort of protofeminist figure, or is kidnapping mortals a bad thing to do any way you slice it?
- Can somebody do one of those celebrity face morphs of Oscar Isaac and Theo James? Because I think that’s probably what Odysseus looks like.
- I wouldn’t mind being stuck on an island with Oscar Isaac. That isn’t a question, although I guess I could make it one. Who would you like to be stuck on an island with, and if it’s not Oscar Isaac kindly get out of my face.
Check out the rest of our Blogging the Classics series right here!
