I am rereading the Odyssey after many years, and Book 5 has fascinated me much more than I expected. While reading it, I started wondering whether the repeated imagery of clothing, veiling, covering, immersion, and re-emergence might play a larger role in the structure of the book than I had previously noticed.
I came to this through the old debate about Calypso herself. There is the interpretation associated especially with Hermann Güntert’s Kalypso, which connects Calypso with death and the otherworld, partly through her name and partly through comparative material. Meuli strongly resisted the attempt to reconstruct an ancient death-goddess behind the Homeric figure. Kranz’s description of her as a Verbergerin, a “concealer,” seems more cautious and in some ways more useful: whatever her prehistory may have been, Calypso is the figure who keeps Odysseus hidden from the human world. Christopher Metcalf has more recently revisited the underworld interpretation and argued for much greater restraint in what can be inferred from the comparative evidence.
What first caught my attention was Calypso’s clothing.
After Hermes’ embassy, once she has agreed to let Odysseus go, Calypso dresses herself at Odyssey 5.228ff. in an argypheon pharos, usually understood as an argent, silver-white, or shining robe. She puts a golden girdle around her waist and a kalyptra, a veil, over her head.
My first thought was that this might mark a change of costume. If Calypso had previously been dressed in black or dark clothing, then the appearance of a luminous robe at the moment when she releases Odysseus could suggest a shift away from death or concealment and toward re-emergence.
That idea turned out to have no textual basis. Homer does not tell us what Calypso was wearing before. There is no black garment in the poem, so the supposed chromatic transition cannot carry any weight.
The parallel with Circe makes the problem even clearer. At Odyssey 10.543–545, Circe wears essentially the same combination of shining robe, golden girdle, and veil, and she does so when she is preparing Odysseus for his journey to Hades. This makes it difficult to assign a simple “return to life” meaning to Calypso’s costume. The formula may instead belong to a situation in which a divine woman is about to send the hero onward.
Once I gave up the idea of the black garment, I began noticing something broader in Book 5.
Calypso’s name is normally connected with kalyptein, “to cover,” “conceal,” or “hide.” Whatever one thinks of the stronger underworld interpretation, her narrative function is certainly to keep Odysseus out of sight and outside the human world.
There is also the old proposal associated with Alfred Heubeck that Kalypsō might be related to a reconstructed Kalypsaneira, roughly “she who conceals men.” I know that this reconstruction is hypothetical and disputed, though the possible meaning fits Calypso’s role in the poem remarkably well.
Then, at the moment when she prepares to release Odysseus, Calypso herself puts on a kalyptra, literally a covering or veil.
She also bathes Odysseus and gives him clothes for the journey. Those clothes later become a problem during the shipwreck:
“heimata gar rh’ ebaryne, ta hoi pore dia Kalypso”
“for the clothes which divine Calypso had given him weighed him down”
(Odyssey 5.321)
The clothes given by Calypso are now physically dragging Odysseus beneath the water.
Ino-Leucothea then appears and tells him to take them off. She gives him her kredemnon, her veil or headdress, which will keep him from perishing in the sea.
This sequence struck me as especially suggestive. Calypso clothes Odysseus. Those clothes become dangerous. He has to strip them off. He then receives a different kind of covering from another goddess, and that covering helps him survive.
The vocabulary of covering continues through the episode.
At 5.435, a great wave covers Odysseus:
“ton de mega kym’ ekalypsen”
Then, at the very end of the book, once he has reached land, the same verbal family appears again:
“hōs Odysseus phylloisi kalypsato”
“So Odysseus covered himself with leaves”
(Odyssey 5.491)
A few lines later, Athena puts him to sleep:
“phila blephar’ amphikalypsas”
“covering/enfolding his dear eyelids”
(Odyssey 5.493)
What interests me most here is the question of agency.
At the beginning of the episode, Odysseus is in a state that can be described in terms of Calypso’s own name: he is hidden, kept away from human society and prevented from completing his nostos. During the storm, coverings continue to act upon him. The clothes weigh him down and the sea repeatedly covers him.
At the end of Book 5, the grammar changes. Kalypsato is middle: Odysseus covers himself.
His hiding under the leaves is temporary and self-protective. He is concealing himself in order to survive until he can enter the human world again.
The fire simile at the end of the book also seems important in this context. Odysseus hidden beneath the leaves is compared to someone preserving a spark under ash so that the “seed of fire” does not perish. Something living remains hidden under a covering, waiting to emerge again.
There is another detail that I found striking. The goddess who gives Odysseus the saving veil is Leucothea, the “White Goddess.” Shortly after giving him the kredemnon, she disappears into the sea, and Homer says:
“melan de he kyma kalypsen”
“and the black wave covered her”
(5.353)
I would be reluctant to build too much on the color contrast by itself. Still, within a book so concerned with covering and survival, the conjunction of Leucothea’s name, the black wave, and the verb kalypsen seems worth noticing.
This made me wonder whether Book 5 develops several different forms of concealment over the course of Odysseus’ departure from Ogygia. At first he is concealed by Calypso. During the shipwreck, covering becomes physically dangerous. He strips away Calypso’s clothes and accepts Leucothea’s veil. After reaching land he is naked and exposed, then chooses his own concealment beneath the leaves. Sleep covers him at the very end of the book, just before his re-entry into human society in Book 6.
This seems relevant to the older interpretation of Calypso as a figure connected in some way with death.
I do not think the pattern can establish Güntert’s historical claim about Calypso’s origin. Metcalf’s methodological warning seems important here, since literary patterning inside the Odyssey does not by itself tell us what sort of divinity Calypso may have been before Homer.
What I find more plausible is that Book 5 can make use of imagery associated with disappearance, death, and return to life even if Calypso’s historical origin remains uncertain. Her name, the clothes she gives Odysseus, the repeated acts of covering, the threat of drowning, and the final emergence onto Scheria all seem capable of participating in the same poetic field.
I later found that some of this has already been discussed in important scholarship.
Ann L. T. Bergren’s “Allegorizing Winged Words: Simile and Symbolization in Odyssey V” (Classical World 74.2, 1980, pp. 109–123; later reworked as “Similes and Symbol in Odyssey V” in Weaving Truth) seems especially relevant to the symbolic structure of the book and to the repeated imagery of covering.
Elizabeth Block, “Clothing Makes the Man: A Pattern in the Odyssey” (Transactions of the American Philological Association 115, 1985, pp. 1–11), treats clothing as an important part of Odyssean identity.
Dianna Rhyan Kardulias, “Odysseus in Ino’s Veil: Feminine Headdress and the Hero in Odyssey 5” (TAPA 131, 2001, pp. 23–51), deals directly with Odysseus’ use of Ino’s feminine headdress and its significance for the episode.
David West, “Shipwrecked Spouses: Leukothea’s Veil and Marital Reunion in the Odyssey” (2020), offers another reading of the veil, connecting it with the larger theme of marital reunion.
Christopher Metcalf, “Calypso and the Underworld: The Limits of Comparison” (2020, pp. 417–431), is especially useful for the history of the underworld interpretation and for its methodological difficulties.
I am also very interested in the Circe parallel. At Odyssey 10.543–545, she wears essentially the same robe, girdle, and veil as Calypso when she prepares Odysseus to travel to the dead. I wonder whether the shared costume belongs to a liminal role: both goddesses have detained Odysseus, and both eventually become responsible for sending him across a boundary. Calypso sends him away from Ogygia and back toward the mortal world; Circe sends him toward Hades.
I would be very interested to hear what people who work on Homer make of all this.
How far can the pattern involving kalyptein, clothing, veiling, stripping, and concealment reasonably be taken?
Is there scholarship beyond Bergren that treats these moments in Book 5 as parts of a single system?
Has anyone discussed the parallel clothing of Calypso and Circe specifically in terms of their role when dispatching Odysseus?
And does the shift from Odysseus being covered by external forces to kalypsato, “he covered himself,” at the end of the book seem significant to others?
I would also be grateful for any work on death-and-rebirth imagery in Book 5 that avoids making a strong claim about Calypso’s historical origin as an underworld goddess.
These ideas came out of rereading the poem rather than from a thesis I am trying to defend, so corrections and objections would be very welcome. The original idea about a nonexistent black dress turned out to be wrong, though checking it was what made me pay much closer attention to the way Book 5 handles covering and concealment.
