perkamentus:mythology meme - five of six nymphs/muses: calypso The tale begins when all those who ha
perkamentus:mythology meme - five of six nymphs/muses: calypso The tale begins when all those who had escaped the pit of destruction were safe in their own lands, spared by the wars and seas. Only Odysseus was held elsewhere, pining for home and wife; the Nymphe Calypso, a goddess of strange power and beauty, had kept him captive within her arching caverns, yearning for him to be her husband. And when there came with revolving seasons the year that the gods had set for his journey home to Ithaka, not even then was he past his troubles, not even then was he with his own people. For though all the gods beside had compassion on him, Poseidon’s anger was unabated against the hero until he returned to his own land. The other gods were gathered together in the palace of Olympian Zeus. Athene, goddess of gleaming eyes made answer: “It is for Odysseus my heart is wrung–so subtle a man and so ill-starred; he has long been far from everything that he loves, desolate in a wave-washed island, a wooded island, the navel of all the seas. A goddess has made her dwelling there whose father is Atlas the magician; he knows the depths of all the seas, and he, no other, guards the tall pillars that keep the sky and the earth apart. His daughter it is who keeps poor Odysseus pining there, and who seeks continually with her soft and coaxing words to beguile him into forgetting Ithaka; but he–he would be well content to see even the smoke rising up from his own land, and he longs to die. O son of Kronos, father of us and sovereign ruler, if indeed the blessed gods now wish that shrewd Odysseus should come to his own land again, then let us instruct the radiant Hermes, the Messenger, to go to the island of Ogygia and without delay to tell the Nymphe of the braided tresses our firm decree that staunch Odysseus is to depart and journey home.” -- source link