Book V. Aurora has barely announced the return of day to gods and men, when Jupiter assembles his council on Mount Olympus.  There Minerva rehearses Ulysses’ grievances, demanding that he be at last allowed to return home and his son saved from the suitors’ ambush.  In reply Jupiter sends Mercury to bid Calypso provide her unwilling guest with the means to leave her shores.  Donning his golden sandals, the messenger-god flits to the Island of Ogygia, enters Calypso’s wonderful cave, and delivers his message.  Although reluctant to let Ulysses depart, Calypso—­not daring oppose the will of Jupiter—­goes in quest of her guest.  Finding him gazing tearfully in the direction of home, she promises to supply him with the means to build a raft which, thanks to the gods, will enable him to reach Ithaca.

After a copious repast and a night’s rest, Ulysses fells twenty trees and constructs a raft, in which, after it has been provisioned by Calypso, he sets sail.  For seventeen days the stars serve as his guides, and he is nearing the island of Phaeacia, when Neptune becomes aware that his hated foe is about to escape.  One stroke of the sea-god’s mighty trident then stirs up a tempest which dashes the raft to pieces, and Ulysses is in imminent danger of perishing, when the sea-nymph Leucothea gives him her life-preserving scarf, bidding him cast it back into the waves when it has borne him safely to land!  Buoyed up by this scarf, Ulysses finally reaches the shore, where, after obeying the nymph’s injunctions, he buries himself in dead leaves and sinks into an exhausted sleep.

  Close to the cliff with both his hands he clung,
  And stuck adherent, and suspended hung;
  Till the huge surge roll’d off; then backward sweep
  The refluent tides, and plunge him in the deep. 
  And when the polypus, from forth his cave
  Torn with full force, reluctant beats the wave,
  His ragged claws are stuck with stones and sands;
  So the rough rock had shagg’d Ulysses’ hands. 
  And now had perish’d, whelm’d beneath the main,
  The unhappy man; e’en fate had been in vain;
  But all-subduing Pallas lent her power,
  And prudence saved him in the needful hour.

Book VI. While Ulysses is thus sleeping, Minerva, in a dream admonishes Nausicaa, daughter of the Phaeacian king, to wash her garments in readiness for her wedding.  On awakening, the princess, after bespeaking a chariot with mules to draw the clothes to the washing place, departs with her maids for the shore.

The clothes washed and hung out to dry, the princess and her attendants play ball, until their loud shrieks awaken Ulysses.  Veiling his nakedness behind leafy branches, he timidly approaches the maidens, and addresses them from afar.  Convinced he is, as he represents, a shipwrecked man in need of aid, the princess provides him with garments, and directs him to follow her chariot to the confines of the city.  There he is to wait until she has reached home before presenting himself before her parents, as she does not wish his presence with her to cause gossip in town.