Poseidon

Poseidon is the antagonist who never has to show his face. He is the sea itself, and the sea is everywhere a man trying to get home would have to cross. The eighty-eight black bulls burning on the beach at Pylos are for him. The fleet that sails for Egypt is at his mercy. He is feasting with the Ethiopians at the rim of the world when Odysseus slips out of Calypso’s island, and the moment he turns back and spots that raft on the open water, he wrecks it for sport. The grudge is personal. Odysseus blinded his son Polyphemus and then, in a moment of unforgivable pride, shouted his real name across the water. Polyphemus prayed. Poseidon listened. From that day the sea was a closed door. Every storm, every drowning, every detour into a worse island, every year on Calypso’s shore, traces back to a Cyclops with one ruined eye calling on his father. [SPOILER: He turns the Phaeacian ship to stone in their own harbor as punishment for ferrying Odysseus home. And Tiresias’s prophecy says the grudge does not end at the homecoming. Odysseus must carry an oar so far inland that a stranger mistakes it for a winnowing fan, plant it in the earth, and make his peace. Only then is the sea forgiven him.]