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Odysseus, Calypso, and the Philosophy of Immortality

Odysseus on Calypso's Island, pining for Ithaca
Calypso offered eternity. Odysseus chose Ithaca.

Suppose an attractive goddess offered you eternal youth and immortality. Would you accept? Most of us wouldn’t have waited for the end of my last sentence. Homer, however, tells the story of a man who turned her down.

Calypso is one of the most elusive characters in Greek mythology. Like ‘apocalypse’ and ‘eucalyptus’, her name derives from the Greek kalyptō, ‘to conceal’ or ‘to hide’. She lives on the remote island of Ogygia, hidden from both gods and men. She is beautiful and deeply in love with Odysseus. More than that, she offers him the greatest prize of all: eternal life with eternal youth.

Yet every day Odysseus sits alone upon the shore, gazing out to sea and weeping. He longs not for paradise, but for Ithaca.

The Odyssey is full of monsters and marvels. The Cyclops tests Odysseus’ ingenuity. Circe his self-control. The Sirens his judgement. Yet Homer saves his greatest temptation until the monsters are gone. Calypso cannot be defeated. She can only be refused. Her island may be the most philosophical place in all literature. It asks neither how we survive nor how we succeed, but what makes a human worth living—or even, what makes a human life human.

At first sight, Odysseus’ decision seems irrational. Calypso is more beautiful than Penelope, her island more idyllic than rocky Ithaca. She offers not merely pleasure, or happiness, but eternity. Why exchange eternity for a finite, imperfect, and uncertain human life?

Nor is Calypso a villain. Homer invites us to sympathise with her. When Hermes arrives bearing Zeus’ command that she release Odysseus, she bitterly complains that the male gods freely take mortal lovers while condemning goddesses for doing the same. Before letting him go, she desperately pleads with Odysseus. Penelope can never rival her beauty or save him from ageing and death.

The obvious answer is that Odysseus misses his wife and son. But Homer suggests something deeper. To embrace Calypso would be to abandon not merely his home, but himself. When we fall in love, we fall in love with someone who would change us, but not change us beyond all recognition. Calypso does not ask Odysseus to become a better Odysseus. She asks him to become someone, or something, else.

For thousands of years writers and philosophers and sorcerers have returned to the same question.

Some five centuries before Homer, another hero came to the opposite conclusion. After the death of his friend Enkidu, whom he mourned ‘like a woman mourning’, Gilgamesh set out in search of eternal life. At the end of his long journey and descent into the underworld, he discovered the plant of immortality—only for a serpent to steal it while he bathed. He returned home empty-handed, having learnt that the proper task of human beings is not to escape death, but to make the most of life.

Greek mythology itself offers an even darker warning. Eos, the goddess of the dawn, fell in love with the Trojan prince Tithonus and, fearing his loss, begged Zeus to grant him immortality. As the centuries pass, the once alluring youth shrivels into a babbling old man, too frail to live yet unable to die. In some versions of the myth, he shrinks into a cicada, condemned forever to thirst and chirp.

Jonathan Swift issues a similar warning in Gulliver’s Travels. The Struldbrugs, though born immortal, continue to age indefinitely. As they lose their memories and outlive everyone they have ever loved, they sink into loneliness, despondency, and envy of mortals.

In his essay The Makropulos Case (1973), the philosopher Bernard Williams sought to explain why immortality might ultimately become undesirable. The ambitions and desires that give our lives meaning, he argued, cannot sustain one and the same person forever. Once they are exhausted, we could escape the resulting tedium only by becoming different people, with different ambitions and desires. But then who exactly would be living forever?

Immortality threatens not only meaning but identity. Tolkien reached a similar conclusion, this time by asking the opposite question. In The Silmarillion, his mythology of Middle-earth, death is ‘the Gift of Men’. It is not men who envy the immortal elves. It is the elves who envy men, because only mortal lives possess the shape, urgency, and completion that immortality denies. Far from a punishment, mortality becomes one of humanity’s greatest blessings.

Today, our oldest ambition has become a technological one. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs spend vast fortunes on longevity research. Some hope to slow ageing indefinitely. Others dream of uploading consciousness into machines. Cryonics companies promise to preserve bodies until such a time as science might revive them. The quest of Gilgamesh is now drawing venture capital.

Before asking whether any of this will succeed, we should ask, with Homer, whether it should.

Odysseus’ refusal is one of the most astonishing decisions in all literature. Offered eternal youth and immortality, he prefers an ageing wife, a rocky, run-down island, and a fragile, mortal life. Rightly or wrongly, it is not life that Odysseus wants, but his life—not an immortal life, but a meaningful one. Instead of trying to live forever, it is today that we should seek to live.

That, anyway, is what Homer seems to be saying. 

What about me? Would I accept Calypso’s offer?

I think I’d compromise and ask for three hundred years. That way, I’d have the best of everything.

There are two things that man can do that God cannot: make wine, and end his own life.

Deus non sibi potest mortem consciscere si velit, quod homini dedit optimum in tantis vitae poenis. —Pliny

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What Homer’s Odyssey Teaches Us About Nostos

Odysseus sitting on Calypso's island and pining for Ithaca
Calypso offered him eternal youth and immortality. He chose home.

What’s Homer got to do with the sitcom Friends?

Over the past ten or fifteen years, journalists have contacted me time and again with questions about nostalgia. More often than not, they want to know the same thing: Why do we keep rewatching Friends? Why do we return to the same books, films, songs, and places, even when we know them by heart?

The obvious answer is that familiar things comfort us in uncertain times. That is true. But I have come to think there is a deeper answer—one that, almost three thousand years ago, Homer already understood.

If Homer’s Iliad is the epic of kleos (glory), his Odyssey is the epic of nostos (homecoming). As a psychiatrist and the author of a book on the emotions, I have been writing about nostalgia for many years. But only recently did I begin to see the Odyssey through that same lens.

The word nostalgia was coined in 1688 by the Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer. A portmanteau of nostos and another Greek word, algos (‘pain’ or ‘ache’), it originally referred to the homesickness of Swiss mercenaries fighting in flat and foreign lands. Military physicians blamed the condition, among others, on ear and brain damage from the constant clanging of cowbells. Today, of course, we no longer think of nostalgia as a mental illness but as a natural, common, and often beneficial emotion.

Although the word is relatively recent, the feeling is ancient. No writer understood it more profoundly than Homer.

When we first meet Odysseus, he is not blinding the Cyclops or resisting the Sirens. He is sitting alone on the shore of Calypso’s island, gazing out to sea and weeping. Calypso has offered him everything that human beings are supposed to desire. She is beautiful and deeply in love with him. More significantly, she promises him eternal life with eternal youth. Despite all this, he daily returns to the same lonely place by the water and pines for Ithaca.

At first sight, his yearning seems irrational. Ithaca is a small, rocky island. His wife Penelope has grown older. His palace has been overrun by arrogant suitors. Why exchange paradise for hardship, mortality, and uncertainty?

Because what Odysseus longs for is not a better life, but his own life.

This is what makes the scene so moving. Odysseus does not simply long for a place in his past. He longs for the life that belongs to him: his wife, his son, his kingdom, his mortality—in short, his identity. Ithaca is not merely a destination but the place in which he can return to being himself.

Later in the story, the Phaeacian bard Demodocus sings of the Trojan War. Odysseus, who is in disguise, covers his face and weeps. Homer compares his grief to that of a woman throwing herself upon the body of her fallen husband, before she is dragged away into slavery. Only then does Odysseus reveal his identity and begin to tell the tale of his wanderings. As he reclaims his story, his voice blends with that of Homer. Memory becomes narrative, and narrative begins to heal memory.

Virgil echoed the famous scene at the beginning of the Aeneid, the foundational epic of Rome. Arriving in Carthage, Aeneas sees murals depicting the fall of Troy. He too breaks down into tears, before telling his story. Mourning the loss of his Trojan kin, he cries out, Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt: ‘These are the tears of things, and mortal things touch the mind.’

Neither was nostalgia limited to Mycenaean princes. In 586 BCE, Babylonian forces destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple, forcing many Jews into exile in Babylon. In the Bible, these Babylonian captives lament the loss of their homeland, in verses later put to music by Boney M: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, Yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.’ 

Different peoples, different ages, different homes—but always the same tears. Nostalgia may be a seventeenth-century coinage, but the feeling is as old as humanity itself.

Today, psychologists understand nostalgia not as a mental disorder or disturbance but as an emotional resource. Nostalgia strengthens our sense of self and identity by anchoring our present in a larger narrative and reconnecting us with the people and places that have shaped us. In fact, nostalgia can be thought of as the counterpart of anticipation, and seems to serve the same purpose. The hauntings of times gone by, and the imaginings of times to come, strengthen us in lesser times.

This is one reason so many of us return to Friends. Those of us who are old enough often say that we miss a world before mobile phones and social media, when friends met spontaneously, conversations stretched late into the evening, and no one thought of ghosting you. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Cold War was over, and many of us were riding high on the Wind of Change. There is a lot of truth in that. But I suspect we are also longing for something more personal. We are remembering a time in our lives when connection seemed fuller, the future seemed more open, and we ourselves were younger. Friends becomes a doorway not only onto that lost world, but also onto the person who inhabited it.

We think of nostalgia as longing for the past. Homer suggests something deeper. We long not simply for what has been, but for the life that feels most truly our own.

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What Homer’s Odyssey Teaches Us About Great Literature

Odysseus looks out towards Ithaca.
The longest journey is the one home to ourselves.

Why do some books remain alive for thousands of years while others, equally entertaining in their day, quietly disappear? The books that survive are those in which each generation discovers a different book. Even within a single lifetime, we never read the same book twice. Great books are mirrors. Every time we return to them, we see something different—not because the book has changed, but because we have grown. 

Homer’s Odyssey is perhaps the greatest example. No one simply receives Homer. Every translator, filmmaker, and reader enters into a conversation with him. Emily Wilson’s celebrated translation, the first complete English translation by a woman, has drawn renewed attention to aspects of the epic that many earlier translators scarcely noticed, particularly the experiences and voices of women. Wilson has argued that previous translators sometimes allowed their own assumptions to colour the text—for example, referring to enslaved palace women as ‘whores’ and ‘sluts’ where the Greek uses neutral terms or simple feminine pronouns. Christopher Nolan, meanwhile, has made a screen adaptation that many reviewers have read through the lens of contemporary concerns such as trauma, displacement, and identity. Every generation inherits the same three-thousand-year-old poem, yet somehow discovers a different Odyssey.

Part of the explanation lies in the hero himself. At first sight, Odysseus seems an unlikely everyman. He is a king, a war hero, the favourite of Athena, the architect of the Trojan Horse, and cleverer than almost everyone else. Yet Homer never reduces him to any one quality. Wilson famously translates his opening epithet, polytropos, as ‘complicated’: ‘Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost…’ Elsewhere Homer describes him as ‘much-enduring’ (polytlas) and ‘great-hearted’ (megalētōr). From the very beginning, Odysseus emerges not as a one-dimensional hero but as a many-sided human being, shaped as much by suffering as by triumph. In the twentieth century, Lord Raglan identified twenty-two recurring features of the mythical hero—miraculous birth, an attempt on the infant’s life, a royal destiny, and so on. Figures such as Theseus, Oedipus, and Moses satisfy twenty or more. Odysseus satisfies only eight. He stands halfway between mythical hero and ordinary man. Brave yet frightened, wise yet often foolish, loyal yet tempted, he struggles, learns, and changes. We do not admire Odysseus because he is perfect. We recognise ourselves in him because he isn’t.

Great books are psychologically spacious. Into them, we project not only ourselves, but our deepest concerns—and the concerns of our age. Looking into the Odyssey, Freud found a map of the unconscious. Simone Weil discovered a moral philosopher of attention. James Joyce found the voice of modern consciousness. Given my background as a psychiatrist and philosopher, I tend to read the Odyssey as a psychological and moral tale. On the surface, it is a geographical tale about a man trying to get home. But underneath, it is a psychological tale about finding our way home to ourselves and becoming the people we were meant to be. Every island offers Odysseus a different way of abandoning his journey—and abandoning himself. Each asks him the same question in a different form. The Lotus-Eaters ask, ‘Will you forget who you are?’ Circe asks, ‘Will you surrender your humanity to animality and pleasure?’ Calypso asks, ‘Will you give up your mortal life?’ The Cyclops Polyphemus asks, ‘Will you let your pride destroy you?’ The Cattle of Helios ask, ‘Can you resist immediate gratification?’ You, reading the same poem, may yet discover an entirely different Odyssey. That is not a weakness of the work. It is what enables it to endure.

Not all of us get to sail around the Mediterranean navigating Sirens and sea monsters. But all of us are on a journey home to ourselves. Like Odysseus, we too must grow and change before we can truly arrive. His wanderings are not simple delay but essential schooling. Every trial teaches him something—or, more importantly, strips something away. He must learn patience and perseverance, love and remembrance, humility and restraint… Only by losing and recovering himself does he become fit to return to Ithaca. Ithaca, or home, is not simply a place, but a life that feels genuinely our own.

The Odyssey does more than invite interpretation. It embraces it, making it part of the story itself. Many people imagine that the epic unfolds in straightforward chronological order, from Troy to Ithaca. In fact, most of the adventures for which it is famous—the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Calypso—are narrated retrospectively, as Odysseus recounts them to the Phaeacians. But before he begins speaking, Homer has him weep. Hearing the bard Demodocus sing of Troy, Odysseus breaks down. Only then does he recover his own story. As he weaves his years of wandering into a coherent narrative, his voice blends with that of Homer. In telling his story, he transforms himself. His next journey will take him home.

For nearly three thousand years, we have become the Phaeacians, listening to a weary traveller trying to make sense of his life, as we try to make sense of our own. All along, we thought we were interpreting the Odyssey. All along, the Odyssey was interpreting us.

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Why does being ghosted hurt so much? Homer and the Mahabharata point to a timeless answer, hidden in the faithfulness of two dogs.

Odysseus meets Argos upon his return to Ithaca
Argos is the first to recognise Odysseus upon his return to Ithaca—and then dies.

The reunion of Odysseus and Argos occupies barely forty lines, yet it is one of the most moving episodes in Homer’s Odyssey.

After twenty years away, Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar. Outside the palace lies his old hunting dog, Argos, blind, flea-ridden, and abandoned on a dung heap. Recognising his master, the dog lifts his head, gives a final wag of his tail—and dies.

Christopher Nolan greatly expanded Argos’ role in his film adaptation, showing the dog ageing under the neglect and abuse of the suitors. Many cinema-goers, myself included, found the brief reunion between dog and master to be the film’s most moving scene. Nolan has said that Argos was one of the elements that drew him to the project, even describing the epic as the ‘ultimate dog movie’.

Why does this scene move us so deeply? There are many reasons. But one of the deepest is that Argos fulfils one of our most fundamental human longings: the longing to be recognised. Long before we seek fame or deeds, we seek to be known. Friends delight in being understood without explanation. Lovers hope to be recognised beneath the depredations of time. One of the quietest forms of suffering is not to be hated, but to be overlooked—to become as if invisible.

That is why being ghosted can be so painful. It is not merely rejection, but the withdrawal of recognition: the feeling that someone who once knew you now behaves as though you no longer existed. Argos does the opposite.

After twenty years of disguises and transformations, he alone recognises the man who once gave his name as ‘Nobody’. The old dog sees beyond age and suffering—and Athena’s best work—to the man he has always known. Odysseus weeps for the dog, but he weeps also for himself. For twenty years, he has been all things to all men. Then, for one fleeting moment, someone recognises the one man beneath all the disguises. 

Homer was not alone in seeing something profound in a dog’s fidelity. The Mahabharata, along with the Ramayana, is one of India’s two great epics. At the end of the Mahabharata, after the great war has been fought and every earthly hope has been shattered, the five Pandava brothers journey to Mount Meru, followed only by a stray dog. One by one, they fall on the ascent, leaving only the eldest, King Yudhisthira, to arrive at the gates of heaven. The god Indra invites Yudhisthira into heaven, but refuses to admit the dog. Yudhisthira turns away, explaining that he cannot bring himself to abandon his faithful companion. At this, the dog reveals himself as none other than Dharma (cosmic order, duty, right way of living), and Yudhisthira is reunited with his brothers in Heaven. Like Argos, the dog embodies something much greater than himself. By remaining faithful to faithfulness, Yudhisthira proves himself worthy of Heaven and saves his clan.

The two stories mirror one another. In Homer, it is the dog who remains faithful to a man. In the Mahabharata, it is just as much the man. Yet both honour the same virtue. Homer and the authors of the Mahabharata independently arrived at the same intuition, namely, that the fidelity of a dog is not merely an animal instinct. It is a revelation.

The irony, certainly in Homer, is that Argos remembers better than we do—better even than Penelope. Anyone who has ever ghosted, or been ghosted, may find themselves asking: are we better than dogs?

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If this essay has left you wondering why certain stories continue to speak across centuries, you may enjoy The Meaning of Myth—an exploration of how myths become enduring sources of meaning, shaping not only our imagination but the civilisations we inherit.

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I don’t usually accept media invitations, but this one was irresistible.

I was invited to discuss the Odyssey with Emily Wilson, whose translation has introduced Homer to a new generation of readers.

We even ventured into Indian epic, comparing Argos with the stray dog of the Mahabharata.

And, of course, the conversation ended on food, wine, and giggles.

Click on the button to listen in.

Why the Odyssey Endures

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

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