Odyssey 5.129 · Book 5, lines 129–132
So now you begrudge me — but I saved him
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ὥς δʼ αὖ νῦν μοι ἄγασθε, θεοί, βροτὸν ἄνδρα παρεῖναι. τὸν μὲν ἐγὼν ἐσάωσα περὶ τρόπιος βεβαῶτα οἶον, ἐπεί οἱ νῆα θοὴν ἀργῆτι κεραυνῷ Ζεὺς ἔλσας ἐκέασσε μέσῳ ἐνὶ οἴνοπι πόντῳ.
So now again you begrudge me, O gods, that a mortal man should be at my side. I saved him as he straddled the keel alone, when Zeus had struck his swift ship with a blazing thunderbolt and shattered it in the middle of the wine-dark sea.
Word by word
The setting
Calypso turns from the old examples to her own case: the gods resent that she keeps a mortal man. She recalls finding Odysseus, sole survivor of the wreck Zeus made of his ship, clinging to the keel.
A note on this passage
Now the point of the two examples lands. The gods begrudge her the one mortal she has, exactly as they begrudged Dawn and Demeter. Then she turns to the man himself: she found Odysseus clinging alone to his broken keel, the sole survivor of Zeus's thunderbolt, and she saved him.
The single word ‘alone’ carries the weight. Every other man is gone; the sea took the whole crew and left one, astride a plank. Calypso is not only pleading her right to love — she is reminding heaven that she is the reason Odysseus is alive at all. The rescue is her claim, and it makes the order to give him up feel, from where she stands, like ingratitude.
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