Odyssey 5.133 · Book 5, lines 133–136
I loved him — and offered him deathlessness
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ἔνθʼ ἄλλοι μὲν πάντες ἀπέφθιθεν ἐσθλοὶ ἑταῖροι, τὸν δʼ ἄρα δεῦρʼ ἄνεμός τε φέρων καὶ κῦμα πέλασσε. τὸν μὲν ἐγὼ φίλεόν τε καὶ ἔτρεφον, ἠδὲ ἔφασκον θήσειν ἀθάνατον καὶ ἀγήραον ἤματα πάντα.
There all his other brave comrades perished, his noble men, but him the wind carrying, and the wave, drove here. And him I loved and tended, and kept vowing to make him immortal and ageless all his days.
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The setting
Calypso finishes her account of the rescue. Odysseus's companions all drowned; only he washed ashore on Ogygia. She took him in, loved him, and promised to make him immortal and ageless forever.
A note on this passage
The rescue completed. His crew drowned; wind and wave carried Odysseus, the one left, to her island. And there Calypso did what a goddess can offer a mortal: she loved him, cared for him, and promised the one gift that would undo his mortality — never to age, never to die.
This is the offer at the center of Book 5, and the poem's quiet astonishment is that Odysseus refuses it. To be made immortal and ageless is to be lifted out of the human lot entirely — the very thing that separates gods from ‘the dying ones.’ Calypso holds it out, and the man would rather have his mortal wife, his rocky island, and his death. The whole argument for home is measured against exactly this temptation.
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