Odysseus arrived on Scheria in the condition of a man who had nothing left.
He had lost his ships and his men in the Scylla and Charybdis passage. He had lost the raft that Calypso gave him to the storm that Poseidon sent when he saw him on the open sea. He had spent two days and two nights in the water, clinging to the broken keel, before the current brought him within reach of the Phaeacian coast. When he finally reached the shore, he pulled himself out of the surf and collapsed under a pile of leaves in an olive grove, too exhausted to move, and slept.
He woke to the sound of young women laughing.
Nausicaa, the daughter of the Phaeacian king Alkinoos, had come with her attendants to wash the household linen in the streams near the sea, and when their game with the ball woke Odysseus from the leaves, the attendants ran from the naked and sea-encrusted stranger while Nausicaa stood her ground. She gave him clothing and directions to her father’s palace, and she gave him the advice that would determine how the Phaeacians received him: do not approach my father first in the hall, but my mother, who sits by the hearth weaving her purple thread. If you win her goodwill, you will have reason to hope for a homecoming.
The instruction is the Odyssey’s most direct statement about how the Phaeacian society worked: not through the king’s military power or the council’s formal authority, but through the queen’s judgement of the stranger’s worth. Arete, whose name means excellence or virtue in the Greek that makes it also a quality and not just a name, was the figure whose approval determined whether the guest received the xenia that the Phaeacians were obligated to offer and famous for providing.
Who the Phaeacians Were
The Phaeacians in Homer’s account are not simply a convenient plot device for returning Odysseus to Ithaca. They are a conception of a civilization, and the details that Homer accumulates around them constitute a vision of what a society organized entirely around peace, beauty, and divine service might look like.
They were descended from Poseidon and the nymph Periboia, the daughter of the Giant Eurymedon, which gave them a divine lineage that placed them closer to the gods than ordinary mortals while remaining on the mortal side of the boundary. They had originally lived in Hyperia, a land near the Cyclopes, but the violence of the Cyclopes had been intolerable to a people constitutionally averse to violence, and King Nausithoos, the son of Poseidon and Periboia, had led them to Scheria, the island far from any other land, at the edge of the navigable world, where they had built their city and established the civilization that Odysseus encountered.
The distance of Scheria from the rest of the world is one of the Odyssey’s most insistent geographical points, and it is a thematic point as much as a geographical one: the Phaeacians lived far from the competitive, violent, politically turbulent world of the Greek heroic age specifically because their civilization was incompatible with that world. The world that produced Achilles and Agamemnon and the ten-year siege of Troy was not the world where a people devoted to song, dance, athletics, beautiful garments, hot baths, and the service of travelers could maintain their character. Scheria was the edge of the known world because the Phaeacians required that distance to be what they were.
Their society was governed by Alkinoos, who ruled as the presiding figure among twelve other noble rulers, each of whom was also called a king, in a council arrangement that the Odyssey treats as the appropriate governance structure for a people who had no military ambitions and therefore no need for the single supreme military commander that the heroic world’s kings represented. Alkinoos himself was a figure of considerable dignity and warmth rather than of military or political authority, and his most extended speech in the Odyssey is the speech in which he offers to keep Odysseus on Scheria permanently, as the husband of Nausicaa, the provision of a house and property that would have been the offer of a father to a son rather than the offer of a king to a stranger.
The Ships That Needed No Oars
The Phaeacian ships are the most extraordinary material feature of Phaeacian civilization, and Homer’s description of them is the description of technology that exceeds anything that the heroic world’s own maritime tradition possessed or aspired to.
The ships moved without oars. They did not require a helmsman to steer them. They traveled without the human effort of rowing or the environmental assistance of wind filling a sail. They knew the minds of their passengers, understood where the passenger wished to go, and delivered them there with a speed that no other vessel in the ancient world could match. They moved through fog and darkness without difficulty, and they were incapable of being wrecked or lost.
The nature of this transportation technology in the Odyssey’s terms is divine: the ships were the gift of Poseidon, who was the Phaeacians’ divine ancestor and patron, and the quality of automatic, thought-responsive navigation was the quality that made the Phaeacian ships the instruments of a divine function. The Phaeacians’ role in the cosmos was to be the escorts of the dead and the conveyors of the blessed: the tradition that is not fully developed in the Odyssey but that later commentators have identified as the mythological substructure beneath the Phaeacians’ function in the poem suggests that their original purpose was to carry the souls of the heroic dead to whatever afterlife awaited them, and that Odysseus’s conveyance to Ithaca was a version of this function applied to a living man.
The ships also carried a cost that Alkinoos understood before he deployed them for Odysseus. Poseidon, who had been persecuting Odysseus throughout the Odyssey in revenge for the blinding of his son the Cyclops Polyphemus, was offended by the Phaeacians’ service to the man he hated, and he petitioned Zeus for the right to punish them. Zeus conceded that Poseidon could do what he wished, and Poseidon struck the returning Phaeacian ship with his hand as it entered the harbor, turning it to stone and, in some versions of the tradition, burying the city behind it under a mountain. The transformation of the ship to stone was the mythological completion of the cost that the Phaeacians’ divine service entailed: they served the gods’ purposes in conveying travelers home, and the gods, or at least one god, punished them for it.
Alkinoos had known this would happen. Before Odysseus left, Alkinoos mentioned the prophecy that an angry Poseidon would one day punish the Phaeacians for their generous escorts, hiding the city behind a mountain. He sent Odysseus away anyway. The hospitality obligation was stronger than the self-protective calculation.
Xenia and Its Stakes
The xenia tradition, the sacred obligation of hospitality that governed the relationship between host and guest in the Greek world, is developed in the Odyssey’s Scheria episode with more explicit theological grounding than anywhere else in the poem.
When Odysseus emerges from the olive grove and approaches Nausicaa, he frames his appeal in the terms of xenia: he invokes Zeus Xenios, Zeus as the patron of the guest-friendship relationship, before he makes any request. The invocation is not decorative: it is the establishment of the theological framework within which the encounter will be judged. If Nausicaa and her father respond generously to the stranger, they are honoring Zeus Xenios. If they refuse, they are insulting the god whose domain this encounter belongs to.
The quality of Phaeacian hospitality that Homer emphasizes is the hospitality that does not require the guest to identify themselves before receiving it. The Phaeacian custom, which Alkinoos explicitly states, was to provide the stranger with food, bath, clothing, and gifts before asking their name and their story. The identification of the guest comes after the hospitality has been provided, not as a condition of its provision. This reversal of the practical order in which hospitality might be rationally organized, verify the identity before committing the resources, is the expression of the Phaeacian theology of the guest: the stranger’s claim on the host’s generosity was established by the fact of the need, not by the identity of the needy.
It is only after the feast, after the games, after the gifts have been given and the ship prepared, that Alkinoos asks who Odysseus is and where he wants to go. And Odysseus’s answer occupies Books IX through XII of the Odyssey, the four books that contain the most celebrated narrative material in the poem: the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis. The Phaeacian hospitality is the occasion for the poem’s most extended narrative, and the poem’s most extended narrative is the story that Odysseus tells to the people who are about to take him home. The xenia of Scheria is the structural foundation on which the Odyssey’s central narrative sequence rests.
Arete and the Hall
The role of Queen Arete in the Scheria episode is the detail that the modern retellings of the Odyssey most consistently underemphasize, and its underemphasis does a disservice to Homer’s construction of the Phaeacian society.
Nausicaa’s instruction to Odysseus was to approach the queen first, not the king. Athena’s instruction when she appeared to Odysseus in disguise as he walked to the palace was the same: find Arete, and address your supplication to her rather than to Alkinoos. The repetition of the instruction is Homer’s signal that the instruction is important: in the Phaeacian court, the queen’s judgment was the determining judgment on matters of hospitality.
Arete was described in terms that the Odyssey reserved for its most significant female figures: she was honored by her husband as no woman on earth was honored by her husband, and the people of Scheria reverenced her and greeted her as a goddess when she walked through the city. Her authority derived from her lineage, she was the granddaughter of Poseidon on both her father’s and her mother’s side, which made her the most divinely descended of all the Phaeacians, and from the quality of her judgement, which the people had learned to trust over the course of her queenship.
The moment when Arete recognized the clothing that Odysseus was wearing as the clothing that she herself had made, and that she had given to Nausicaa, and that Nausicaa had given to the stranger, was the moment when the Phaeacian court’s hospitality passed its most important test: Arete could have interpreted the situation as evidence that Odysseus had stolen the clothing or harmed her daughter, but instead she asked him directly where he had gotten it. The directness of the question and the honesty of the answer established the trust that allowed the hospitality to proceed. The queen’s perceptiveness, the ability to read a situation and ask the right question rather than making the wrong assumption, was the quality that the Phaeacian court depended on and that Homer chose to dramatize in this scene.
Scheria’s Location and the Question It Raises
The question of Scheria’s geographical identity has occupied commentators since antiquity. The answer that ancient lore most consistently gave was Corfu, the Ionian island that the ancient Greeks called Kerkyra. Homer’s geography of the western Mediterranean places it in approximately the right position for an island at the edge of the navigable world from the perspective of the Aegean Greek.
The identification of Scheria with Corfu appears in ancient sources including Thucydides. He notes the island’s earlier associations with the Phaeacian narrative in his account of the founding of Korkyra as a Corinthian colony. The landscape features of Corfu that match the descriptions of Scheria provided by Homer, such as the two harbors, the rocky promontory, and the fresh water springs near the shore, are features that the ancient identification used as supporting evidence. They remain features of the northern coast of the island today.
But the more interesting question than whether Homer had a island in mind is the question of what Scheria’s geographical character in the poem meant. The repeated insistence that Scheria was far from all other lands, at the edge of the world, beyond the range of any other seafaring people, was not geographical realism. It was the establishment of the narrative condition that the Phaeacian episode required: a civilization that existed outside the competitive, violent world of the heroic age, unreachable by the conflicts that defined that age, maintaining its character precisely because it had no contact with the forces that would destroy that character.
Scheria was wherever the world of the Iliad could not reach, and Homer’s Corfu identification, if that is what it was, worked because Corfu was sufficiently distant from the Aegean world’s center of gravity to function as the edge of the known world in the seventh-century BCE imagination.
What the Phaeacians Understood
The Phaeacians’ function in the Odyssey is not to be admired as a utopia but to provide the service that returns Odysseus to the world he belongs in: they are the threshold between the mythological world of the Odyssey’s wanderings and the human world of Ithaca to which the poem is returning. They are the last supernatural encounter before the realistic domestic space of the poem’s final books, and the character of their civilization, its beauty, its generosity, its divine ships, its queen who judged the stranger’s worth before the king had spoken, is the character of the threshold: a world better than the heroic world in every dimension that the Phaeacians value, and a world that cannot survive contact with the heroic world’s most powerful patron deity.
Poseidon destroyed the returning ship and threatened the city behind its mountain. The Phaeacians had known this would happen and had sent the ship anyway, because Alkinoos understood that the obligation to the guest was stronger than the obligation to self-preservation. The theology of xenia that the Phaeacians embodied was the theology that placed the divine command to honor the stranger above every other consideration including the survival of the community that honored it.
The ship turned to stone in the harbor is the monument that the Odyssey leaves behind in Scheria: not the beautiful city, not the magic ships, not the feasts and the songs and the games and the hot baths, but the petrified vessel, the evidence that the Phaeacians had honored the guest and paid the price for it.
It is a more honest monument than a utopia would provide.
At Olympus Estate, Mythic Essays moves through the deeper currents of the Greek tradition. Scheria was wherever the world of the Iliad could not reach, and the Phaeacians were the people who had removed themselves from that world in order to be what they needed to be. They served the stranger at the cost of the city. The ship turned to stone in the harbor is still there, in the poem, waiting. Odysseus reached Ithaca. The Phaeacians paid for it.
