Calypso
Who is Calypso in Greek mythology?
Why was Calypso exiled to Ogygia?
How did Odysseus’s captivity with Calypso end?
Calypso, in Greek mythology, a nymph of the mythical island of Ogygia. In Homer’s Odyssey she entertained the Greek hero Odysseus for seven years, but she could not overcome his longing for home even by promising him immortality. According to Hesiod’s Theogony, she bore Odysseus twin sons, Nausithous and Nausinous.
Charlize Theron plays Calypso in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Tom Holland as Telemachus, and Zendaya as Athena.
Calypso was a daughter of the Titan Atlas (or Oceanus or Nereus). She was exiled to Ogygia for taking her father’s side in the Titanomachia, a struggle for supremacy in which the Titans were defeated by the Olympians, led by Zeus. She sheltered the shipwrecked and solitary Odysseus, who landed in Ogygia during his wanderings between Troy and Ithaca after the Trojan War. Some of the men on Odysseus’s ship had previously been snatched up by the sea monster Scylla, and his remaining companions perished in a storm that Zeus sent as punishment for plundering the Cattle of the Sun.
Calypso fell in love with Odysseus and refused to let him leave. His captivity was finally brought to an end when the goddess Athena pleaded with Zeus to intervene, and Hermes was consequently deputed to secure Odysseus’s release. When Hermes traveled to Ogygia to relay Zeus’s command, an enraged Calypso railed against the injustice of the impunity afforded to male gods in their affairs with mortals while female deities were denied similar grace. She offered Odysseus the choice of staying on the island as her immortal husband, which he rejected. Resigned to the loss of her lover, Calypso facilitated Odysseus’s departure by giving him tools to build a raft and granting him a favorable wind.
