Calypso releases Odysseus; the wreck on Scheria

The narrative finally reaches Odysseus. He has been on Calypso's island for seven years, sleeping with the goddess at night and weeping by the shore by day. A second council of the gods sends Hermes to compel her to release him. She receives the order with the most pointed speech in the poem about the double standard the male gods apply to female ones — they sleep with mortal women whenever they like, but the moment a goddess takes a mortal man, all of Olympus gathers to take him back.

She gives in. She offers Odysseus immortality if he will stay; he refuses. He builds a raft over four days, with the tools she provides, and sets sail. For seventeen days the wind is fair and the stars guide him by night. On the eighteenth, Poseidon, returning from his feast among the Ethiopians, sees him from a distance and is enraged. The sea-god raises a storm that destroys the raft and very nearly Odysseus with it. He is saved by a sea-nymph named Ino, who gives him her veil as a life-preserver, and by Athena, who calms the worst of the wind.

After two days and two nights in the open water he reaches the shore of Scheria, the magical island of the Phaeacians. He drags himself up onto land, kisses the earth, and falls asleep under a pile of leaves at the base of an olive bush — naked, half-drowned, far from home, but no longer at sea. After four chapters of being talked about by gods and grieved over by his son, the famous man finally enters the poem in his own right: not yet as a hero, but as a survivor, asleep on a beach.