Summary Book V

Book 5
Bk. 5 opens on the seventh day of the poem with a second council of the gods on Olympus, whence Hermes, messenger of the gods, is dispatched to Ogygia to order Calypso to release Odysseus. Calypso, reluctantly agreeing, seeks out Odysseus, who sits weeping on the beach. She instructs him to build a raft. This he completes in the next four days; the day following, he departs for Phaeacia. On the eighteenth day of his voyage (the twenty-ninth day of the poem), he spies Phaeacia, but Poseidon, returning from Ethiopia, in anger sends a storm against him and wrecks his craft. Then he swims for two days and nights upon a divine veil received from the sea-nymph Ino until he reaches the coast. Odysseus escapes the sharp crags with a prayer to the gods and falls asleep beneath the brush on the shore.