The Conflict Between Poseidon and Odysseus
At a Glance
- Central figures: Odysseus, cunning king of Ithaca, and Poseidon, god of the sea - whose son Polyphemus the Cyclops was blinded by Odysseus after the fall of Troy.
- Setting: The wine-dark sea between Troy and Ithaca, including the island of the Cyclopes, the island of Ogygia, and the land of the Phaeacians; drawn from Homer’s Odyssey.
- The turn: Odysseus blinds Polyphemus and then, from the safety of his ship, shouts his true name back at the screaming giant - gifting Poseidon a name to curse.
- The outcome: Poseidon hounds Odysseus across ten years of sea travel, drowning his ships, stranding him on Ogygia for seven years, and ultimately punishing the Phaeacians for ferrying him home.
- The legacy: Odysseus reached Ithaca, but returned alone - every man who had sailed from Troy at his side was dead, and the Phaeacians’ ship was turned to stone in the harbor as the price of their hospitality.
Polyphemus did not ask his father’s help quietly. He stood at the mouth of his cave with blood on his hands and a stake driven through his eye, and he hurled his prayer out over the water like a stone: let Odysseus never reach home, or if the Fates have already spun that thread, let him arrive late, alone, on a foreign ship, and find nothing but sorrow waiting. Then he lifted a boulder and threw it toward the sound of the oars. It landed just ahead of the prow, and the wave it raised pushed the ship back toward shore. Odysseus had already done the damage. He had given the Cyclops wine, he had put out the eye, he had slipped his men past under the bellies of the rams. He had done all of this. And then, when the ships were nearly clear, he could not keep his name in his mouth.
Poseidon heard every word of it.
The Name Shouted from the Ship
The Trojans had not called Odysseus clever for nothing. When Polyphemus first sealed the cave with its boulder and began eating the crew - two men at a time, cracked against the floor like crabs - Odysseus already knew that killing the Cyclops outright would doom them. No one alive could move the stone. So he sharpened a stake of olive wood, hid it in the dung, got Polyphemus drunk on unmixed wine, and when the giant lay back snoring drove the stake into the single eye. Polyphemus screamed. His neighbors, other Cyclopes, came to the cave mouth and called out to know who had hurt him.
Nobody, he screamed back. Nobody is hurting me.
They went home.
Odysseus lashed his men under the sheep and got them out at dawn, the flock streaming past the blinded Polyphemus who sat at the entrance feeling each animal’s back. When they reached the ships, Odysseus pushed off and called back an insult across the water - he could not stop himself - and when Polyphemus hurled the boulder and the wave pushed the ship back, his men begged him to stay silent. He did not. He called his name, his father’s name, the name of Ithaca. He wanted the Cyclops to know who had done it. Polyphemus lifted his arms and prayed to Poseidon in exact, devastating terms: if Odysseus must reach home, let it be late, alone, wretched, on a foreign ship, to find grief in his house. Then the giant threw another boulder, and the surge drove the ships to shore.
Odysseus had his glory. Poseidon had his name.
Storms, Winds, and the Slow Destruction of a Fleet
What followed was ten years of the god using the sea as a weapon. Not always directly. The island of the Lotus-Eaters cost Odysseus men who had to be dragged back to the ships. Aeolus, keeper of the winds, sealed all the adverse winds in a bag and gave it to Odysseus with strict instructions - and the crew, convinced the bag held gold, opened it two days from Ithaca, releasing everything at once. The storm drove them back to Aeolus, who refused to help a second time, seeing in Odysseus a man the gods had marked. The Laestrygonians, a race of cannibalistic giants, sank all but one of the twelve ships and speared men in the water. Scylla took six men off the oars - one for each of her heads - as the ship passed through the strait, and Charybdis churned the water below into a pit that could swallow a hull whole.
These were not all Poseidon’s work. But they were all sea, and Poseidon owned the sea, and what the sea gave and what it swallowed was finally in his hands.
The crew’s worst act of disobedience came on the island of Helios, where despite Odysseus’s warnings they slaughtered and ate the cattle of the sun god. Helios demanded satisfaction from Zeus, and Zeus split the ship with a lightning bolt. Everyone drowned. Only Odysseus survived, clinging to the keel, riding the wreckage back through Charybdis, holding onto a fig tree above the whirlpool until the timbers came back up and he could drop onto them and paddle free.
He arrived on Ogygia alone.
Seven Years on Ogygia
The nymph Calypso found him on the beach and kept him. Not cruelly - she loved him, she offered him immortality, she fed him and slept beside him - but she would not let him go, and the island was too remote to escape. Seven years. Odysseus sat on the rocks each day and looked out at the sea that Poseidon owned and wept for Ithaca. He could see the sea from everywhere on that island. There was no direction he could look that wasn’t the sea.
It was Athena, grey-eyed and persistent, who finally moved Zeus to act. She made her case in the assembly of the gods while Poseidon was away among the Ethiopians, accepting their sacrifices, and Zeus sent Hermes to Ogygia with the order: release him. Calypso argued that the gods were hypocrites, that they took mortal lovers themselves and never suffered for it, that she had saved this man from the sea. Then she did as she was told. She helped Odysseus build a raft, gave him provisions and a following wind, and watched him sail.
Poseidon spotted the raft on his way home from Ethiopia.
The Raft, the Storm, and Leucothea’s Veil
He rose up from the horizon in a chariot drawn by bronze-hooved horses, and what he felt looking at that small raft moving across the water toward Ithaca was not finished business - it was a refusal to let it end this way, cleanly, after Zeus had arranged it without him. He gathered the clouds from every quarter. He stirred all four winds against each other. He raised the sea into walls. The raft broke apart. Odysseus was thrown into the water and nearly drowned before he got back to a plank. A wave ripped off the clothing Calypso had given him. He held on.
Leucothea, a sea nymph who had once been mortal, rose from the water and gave him a veil. She told him to strip off his clothes, tie the veil around his chest, and swim. He did not trust her at first - he was a man who had been deceived by too many divine gifts - but when the raft broke up completely, he had no choice. He swam for two days and two nights in the open sea, and the veil held him up, and on the third day he reached the island of Scheria, where the Phaeacians lived, and crawled ashore under an olive tree and slept.
The Phaeacians and the Stone Ship
The Phaeacians were sailors without equal - their ships moved by thought, knew every harbor, could cross the sea in a night. King Alcinous heard Odysseus’s story over several evenings and sent him home on the finest ship in the harbor, loaded with gifts, the crew rowing him to Ithaca while he slept in the stern. He woke on his own shore for the first time in twenty years.
Poseidon watched the ship turn back toward Scheria and moved against it in sight of the harbor. He struck it with his palm and turned it to stone, sailors and all. Alcinous looked at the rock jutting from the water where the ship had been and recognized the punishment at once - his father had warned him that Poseidon resented their safe passages. He canceled the sacrifice he had been planning and offered it to Poseidon instead.
On Ithaca, Odysseus was alone on a beach he did not recognize, surrounded by gifts he could not yet count, alive after ten years at sea. He had come home. The men he had led from Troy were gone - to the Cyclops, to the Laestrygonians, to Charybdis, to the lightning bolt Zeus had thrown at Helios’s request. The suitors were still in his hall, eating his food, pressuring Penelope, treating his house as their own. The sea was behind him, and that war was over. Another was about to begin.