Ogygia (/oʊˈdʒɪdʒiə/;Ancient Greek:Ὠγυγίη,romanized: Ōgygíē[ɔːɡyɡíɛː], orὨγυγίαŌgygíā[ɔːɡyɡíaː]) is an island mentioned inHomer'sOdyssey, Book V, as the home of thenymphCalypso, the daughter of theTitanAtlas. In Homer'sOdyssey, Calypso detainedOdysseus on Ogygia for seven years and kept him from returning to his home ofIthaca, wanting to marry him.
Athena complained about Calypso's actions toZeus, who sent the messengerHermes to Ogygia to order Calypso to release Odysseus. Hermes is Odysseus's great grandfather on his mother's side, throughAutolycos. Calypso finally, though reluctantly, instructed Odysseus to build a small raft, gave him food and wine, and let him depart the island.
TheOdyssey describes Ogygia as follows:
...and he (Hermes) found her within. A great fire was burning in the hearth, and from afar over the isle there was a fragrance of cleft cedar and juniper as they burned. But she within was singing with a sweet voice as she went to and fro before theloom, weaving with a golden shuttle. Round about the cave grew a luxuriant wood,alder andpoplar and sweet-smellingcypress, wherein birds long of wing were wont to nest, owls and falcons and sea-crows with chattering tongues, who ply their business on the sea. And right there about the hollow cave ran trailing a garden vine, in pride of its prime, richly laden with clusters. And fountains four in a row were flowing with bright water hard by one another, turned one this way, one that. And round about soft meadows of violets andparsley were blooming...[1]
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A long-standing tradition begun byEuhemerus in the late 4th century BC and supported byCallimachus,[2] endorsed by modernMaltese tradition, identifies Ogygia with the island ofGozo, the second-largest island in theMaltese archipelago.
Aeschylus calls the Nile Ogygian, andEustathius the Byzantine grammarian said that Ogygia was the earliest name for Egypt, while other suggested locations for Ogygia include theIonian Sea.
Maps of historians and geographers likeJean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville,Philipp Clüver,Petrus Bertius andAaron Arrowsmith refer to Ogygia as an island northwest ofCorfu,Ionian Islands, Greece, which adds fuel to modernGreek tradition that Ogygia is, indeed, the same island as the island ofOthonoi.[3]
Victor Bérard identifiedPerejil as the location of the mythical island of Ogygia.[4]
Approximately seven centuries afterHomer, the Alexandrian geographerStrabo criticizedPolybius on thegeography of the Odyssey. Strabo proposed that Scheria and Ogygia were located in the middle of theAtlantic Ocean.
At another instance he Polybius suppresses statements. For Homer says also, 'Now after the ship had left the river-stream of Oceanus',[5] and, 'In the island of Ogygia, where is the navel of the sea',[6] where the daughter of Atlas lives; and again, regarding the Phaiakians, 'Far apart we live in the wash of the waves, the farthermost of men, and no other mortals are conversant with us.'[7] All these clearly suggest that he composed them to take place in the Atlantic Ocean."[8]
Plutarch also gives an account of the location of Ogygia:
First I will tell you the author of the piece, if there is no objection, who begins after Homer’s fashion with, an isle Ogygian lies far out at sea, distant five days’ sail from Britain, going westwards, and three others equally distant from it, and from each other, are more opposite to the summer visits of the sun; in one of which the barbarians fable that Cronus is imprisoned by Zeus, whilst his son lies by his side, as though keeping guard over those islands and the sea, which they call ‘the Sea of Cronus. The great continent by which the great sea is surrounded on all sides, they say, lies less distant from the others, but about five thousand stadia from Ogygia, for one sailing in a rowing-galley; for the sea is difficult of passage and muddy through the great number of currents, and these currents issue out of the great land, and shoals are formed by them, and the sea becomes clogged and full of earth, by which it has the appearance of being solid.[9]
The passage of Plutarch has created some controversy. W. Hamilton indicated the similarities of Plutarch's account on "the great continent" andPlato's location ofAtlantis inTimaeus 24E – 25A.[10]Kepler[11] in hisKepleri Astronomi Opera Omnia estimated that “the great continent” wasAmerica and attempted to locate Ogygia and the surrounding islands.Ruaidhrí Ó Flaithbheartaigh usedOgygia as a synonym forIreland in the title of his Irish history,Ogygia: Seu Rerum Hibernicarum Chronologia ("Ogygia: Or a Chronological Account of Irish Events"), 1685.Wilhelm von Christ was convinced that the continent was America and states that in the 1st-century sailors traveling throughIceland,Greenland, and theBaffin Region (Qikiqtaaluk) reached theNorth American coast.
Ogygia is associated with theOgygian deluge and with the mythological figureOgyges, in the sense that the wordOgygian means "primeval", "primal", and "at earliest dawn",[12] which would suggest that Homer's Ogygia was a primeval island. However, Ogyges as a primeval, aboriginal ruler was usually sited inBoeotia,[13] where he foundedThebes there, naming it Ogygia at the time.[14]In another account of Ogyges, he brought his people to the area first known asActe. That land was subsequently called Ogygia in his honor but ultimately known asAttica.
Ogygia is used byRoderick O'Flaherty as an allegory for Ireland in his book published in 1685 as Ogygia: seu Rerum Hibernicarum Chronologia & etc., in 1793 translated into English by Rev. James Hely, as "Ogygia, or a Chronological account of Irish Events (collected from Very Ancient Documents faithfully compared with each other & supported by the Genealogical & Chronological Aid of the Sacred and Profane Writings of the Globe”.
Ogygia Island inAntarctica is named after the mythical island.
