![]() More appropriately, the cave houses only divinities having nothing to fear from the surrounding wilderness. It can be no coincidence that the Phaiakians deposit Odysseus outside the cave and not inside it. Similarly, the cave of the Naiads is not presented as a potentially fitting human domicile, however appealing it may have been to the weary traveler. Though both caves contain signs of industry well known in the human realm, namely weaving and the making of cheese, these enterprises merely constitute traps or lures for unsuspecting mortal prey. Yet both caves would ultimately have hidden Odysseus entirely from the world of the living, sending him instead along the dark and treacherous path to the House of Hades. It is a cave that the brute Cyclopes, existing in a Neolithic Golden Age, inhabit, and a cave that Calypso calls home. The cave had been previously demonstrated an unsuitable habitat for progressive humanity. Returning to the illusory idyll of the Ithakan harbor scene, each of its features, cave, spring, harbor, and olive tree, is inextricably bound to the utopian “blueprint” revealed elsewhere in the course of Odysseus’ wanderings. The belief that the inscription of Nature is fundamental to both the physical and moral constitution of the polis would remain prevalent in Greece through the Archaic and Classical periods until the eclipse of Athens and Sparta, the power- poleis, by Macedonia and the replacement of the poleis by the megalopolis. To this extent, the Homeric ideal, which is also the ideal of the nascent polis, entails the manipulation and transformation of the landscape by skilled human hands, by tekhnē. Lovely though it may be, the natural environment is governed by its own, unpredictable laws. Nowhere in Homer is there an unmotivated landscape, natural scenery for its own sake. This seductive landscape is not what it may at first appear it is no fleeting idyll. Athena steeps all the harbor’s splendor in a thick mist, so that Odysseus will not lapse, in a moment of jubilant weakness, into ill-timed complacency. The entrances to this cave are two, for immortal and mortal separately. ![]() ![]() The cave, itself a marvel, contains bowls and jars of stone in which bees store their honey, looms upon which the nymphs weave precious cloths dyed purple as the sea, and springs whose water flows without ceasing. At the head of the harbor, Homer tells us, is a long-leaved olive tree and a cave, lovely and shaded, sacred to the Naiad nymphs ( Odyssey 13.96–112). There the spectacular harbor of Phorkys, enclosed by two lofty promontories sheltering it from perilous winds and waves, affords all vessels a ready approach. It is at dawn, the time of new beginnings, that the Phaiakian ship, with Odysseus onboard, draws near to the island of Ithaka. ![]()
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