Odysseus and Calypso in the caves of Ogygia. Painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568 - 1625)

Ogygia (Greek: Ὠγυγίη or Ὠγυγία), is an island mentioned in Homer's Odyssey book V as the home of the nymph Calypso, the daughter of the Titan Atlas, also known as Atlantis (Ατλαντίς^[1]) in ancient Greek. In Homer's Odyssey Calypso detained Odysseus on Ogygia for seven years and kept him from returning to his home of Ithaca. Athena complained about Calypso's actions to Zeus, who sent the messenger Hermes to Ogygia to order Calypso to release Odysseus. Calypso finally allowed Odysseus to build a small raft and depart the island.

The Odyssey describes Ogygia as follows:

...and he (Hermes) found her within. A great fire was burning in the hearth, and from afar over the isle there was a fragrance of cleft cedar and juniper as they burned. But she within was singing with a sweet voice as she went to and fro before the loom, weaving with a golden shuttle. Round about the cave grew a luxuriant wood, alder and poplar and sweet-smelling cypress, wherein birds long of wing were wont to nest, owls and falcons and sea-crows with chattering tongues, who ply their business on the sea. And right there about the hollow cave ran trailing a garden vine, in pride of its prime, richly laden with clusters. And fountains four in a row were flowing with bright water hard by one another, turned one this way, one that. And round about soft meadows of violets and parsley were blooming... ^[2]

[edit] Locating Ogygia

Modern scholars are reluctant to place Ogygia or indeed any of the locations Homer describes in any existing geography and the literary tale is acknowledged as a work of fictional, mythical intent.

Many ancient and modern interpreters believe that Ogygia was located in the Ionian Sea. Later interpretations sometimes identify either Ogygia or Phaeacia with sunken Atlantis. A long-standing tradition begun by Euhemerus in the late fourth century BCE and supported by Callimachus^[3] endorsed by modern Maltese tradition, identifies Ogygia with the island of Gozo, the second largest island in the Maltese archipelago.

Some scholars, having examined the work and the geography of Homer, have suggested that Ogygia and Scheria were located in the Atlantic Ocean. Among them were Strabo and Plutarch.

[edit] Geographical account by Strabo

Approximately seven centuries after Homer, the Alexandrian geographer Strabo criticized Polybius on the geography of the Odyssey. Strabo proposed that Schería and Ogygia were located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, stating " At another instance he [Polybius] suppresses statements. For Homer says also 'Now after the ship had left the river-stream of Oceanus'^[4] and 'In the island of Ogygia, where is the navel of the sea,'^[5] where the daughter of Atlas lives; and again, regarding the Phaiakians, 'Far apart we live in the wash of the waves, the farthermost of men, and no other mortals are conversant with us'.^[6] All these clearly suggest that he composed them to take place in the Atlantic Ocean."^[7]

[edit] Geographical account by Plutarch

Plutarch also gives an account of the location of Ogygia:

First I will tell you the author of the piece, if there is no objection, who begins after Homer’s fashion with, an isle Ogygian lies far out at sea, distant five days’ sail from Britain, going westwards, and three others equally distant from it, and from each other, are more opposite to the summer visits of the sun; in one of which the barbarians fable that Cronus is imprisoned by Zeus, whilst his son lies by his side, as though keeping guard over those islands and the sea, which they call ‘the Sea of Cronus. The great continent by which the great sea is surrounded on all sides, they say, lies less distant from the others, but about five thousand stadia from Ogygia, for one sailing in a rowing-galley; for the sea is difficult of passage and muddy through the great number of currents, and these currents issue out of the great land, and shoals are formed by them, and the sea becomes clogged and full of earth, by which it has the appearance of being solid.^[8]

The passage of Plutarch has created a lot of controversy. W. Hamilton indicated the similarities of Plutarch's account on "the great continent" and Plato's location of Atlantis in Timaeus 24E - 25A.^[9] Kepler ^[10] in his Kepleri Astronomi Opera Omnia estimated that “the great continent” was America and attempted to locate Ogygia and the surrounding islands. Roderic O'Flaherty used Ogygia as a synonym for Ireland in the title of his Irish history, Ogygia: Seu Rerum Hibernicarum Chronologia ("Ogygia; or, A Chronological Account of Irish Events"), 1685. Wilhelm von Christ was convinced that the continent was America and states that in the first century sailors travelling through Iceland, Greenland, and the Baffin Region reached the North American coast. G. Mair^[11] in 1909 suggested that the knowledge of America came from Carthaginian sailors who had reached the Gulf of Mexico. Henriette Mertz, an American archaeologist, proposed in her book The Wine Dark Sea: Homer's Heroic Epic of the North Atlantic (1964) that Ogygia was one of the Azores.

[edit] Primeval Ogygia

Ogygia is associated with the Ogygian deluge and with the mythological figure Ogyges, in the sense that the word Ogygian means "primeval," "primal," and "at earliest dawn," ^[12] which would suggest that Homer's Ogygia was a primeval island. However, Ogyges as a primeval, aboriginal ruler was usually sited in Boeotia, ^[13] where he founded Thebes there, naming it Ogygia at the time. ^[14] In another account of Ogyges he brought his people to the area first known as Acte. That land was subsequently called Ogygia in his honor but ultimately known as Attica.

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• Plutarch - Concerning the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon