Odyssey 5.118 · Book 5, lines 118–120
You cruel, jealous gods
Read the full text in our reader
Calypso — σχέτλιοί ἐστε, θεοί, ζηλήμονες ἔξοχον ἄλλων, οἵ τε θεαῖς ἀγάασθε παρʼ ἀνδράσιν εὐνάζεσθαι ἀμφαδίην, ἤν τίς τε φίλον ποιήσετʼ ἀκοίτην.
Cruel you are, gods, jealous beyond all others, you who begrudge goddesses lying openly beside mortal men, if any goddess makes a man her dear husband.
Word by word
The setting
Calypso's protest bursts out. She accuses the male gods of a double standard: they cannot bear a goddess to take a mortal lover, though they do the same freely themselves.
A note on this passage
Calypso opens not with a plea but an accusation. The gods are cruel and jealous past all others, she says, because they will not let a goddess take a mortal to her bed in the open and call him husband.
The undercurrent is the double standard she is naming. Male gods pursue mortal women constantly and unpunished; a goddess who loves a mortal man is made to give him up. She will go on to cite examples, but the charge is here already: the resentment is not against fate in the abstract but against a jealousy she reads as specifically the gods' — and specifically aimed at her. Her word for what she wanted, akoítēs, ‘husband’, insists she meant it as a marriage, not a whim.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Odyssey 5.118 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
From the Great Library
You are reading a page of the Odyssey — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Odyssey 5.118 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/5.118/