Athena's speech here, which will fuel the eventual release of Odysseus and his long ride home, continues at this point to describe the situation in which (at the story's beginning) he is imprisoned. She described how he is suffering torments "on a wave-washed island rising at the centre of the seas," where he is held captive by "a daughter of Atlas, wicked Titan." This daughter, Calypso, is herself an immortal, and contemporary of the oldest gods. The Titans were those deific forces which proceeded Zeus and the other Olympic Gods. Cronos, king of the Titans, had been the father of Zeus and over thrown by them. In this overthrow, the old titans were replaced by the new Gods -- but the child of the titan Atlas would still have a great deal of power like Zeus himself. Atlas was the titan "whose shoulders lift on high the colossal pillars thrusting earth and sky apart" and who with his strength supports...
Hence Calypso, as his child, can be see as a sort of elemental force. She holds Odysseus as easily as Athena controls the minds of the suitors, and yet she is not as strong as Zeus. In her forced yielding to Zeus (who is essentially her cousin), there is some foreshadowing of the way in which Odysseus with Athena's help is overcoming the anger of the gods... For Zeus and the young gods were once to the titans what humans are now to the gods, and their eventually seizure of control has certain odd parallels to the slip from the Iliad to the Odyssey in terms of deific intervention. This extract ends with Athena saying that as he is "straining for no more than a glimpse of hearth-smoke drifting up from his own land, Odysseus longs to die..." This is used to return the extract to a focus on the humanity of the story, and Odysseus' desire to return home which is being thwarted by the gods.
