Nausicaa

Nausicaa is the daughter of King Alcinous of the Phaeacians and his wife Arete, and Alcinous's father Nausithous was a son of Poseidon (Odyssey 7.56-63), and she enters the Odyssey at the moment Odysseus needs her most. He lies asleep on the shore of Scheria after twenty days at sea. Homer says Athena goes to the Phaeacian palace to contrive his return, and she finds Nausicaa sleeping in a richly wrought chamber, a maiden like the immortal goddesses in form (Odyssey 6.1-20).

Athena takes the shape of a friend, the daughter of Dymas, and scolds Nausicaa for leaving her fine clothes unwashed. Her marriage is near, the dream says, and she has suitors among the noblest Phaeacians. Athena urges her to ask her father for a mule wagon and go to the washing tanks at daybreak (Odyssey 6.21-40). The plan is a wedding-preparation errand, and it puts Nausicaa on the shore at the right time.

In the morning Nausicaa asks her father for the wagon. She gives the laundry as her reason and does not name marriage, because Homer says she was ashamed to speak of it, but Alcinous understands and agrees (Odyssey 6.49-70). Her mother packs food, wine and olive oil in a gold flask. Nausicaa takes the whip and reins herself, and her handmaids come with her (Odyssey 6.71-84).

At the river the girls wash the clothes, spread them on the shore to dry, bathe and eat. Then they play at ball, with Nausicaa leading the song. Homer compares her to Artemis moving among her nymphs on the mountain, taller than all of them and easy to know (Odyssey 6.85-109). When the ball is thrown into a deep eddy, the cry wakes Odysseus. Homer says Athena arranged the toss so that he would wake and see the girl who would lead him to the city (Odyssey 6.110-126).

Odysseus comes out from the bushes holding a leafy branch before him, and the handmaids scatter in fear. Nausicaa alone stands her ground, because Athena puts courage in her heart (Odyssey 6.127-141). Odysseus chooses to keep his distance and speak gently rather than clasp her knees. He asks whether she is a goddess or a mortal, and compares her to Artemis (Odyssey 6.142-161). She answers that he seems neither evil nor witless and that Zeus gives men their lot, and she promises clothes and food. She tells her maids that strangers and beggars come from Zeus, and orders them to feed him and let him bathe (Odyssey 6.186-210).

The next lines give the only sign of feeling for him in Book 6. After his bath, Athena makes him taller and more handsome, and Nausicaa tells her maids that he seemed uncouth before but now looks like the gods. She wishes that a man like him might be called her husband and be pleased to stay (Odyssey 6.211-250). She says this to her maids, not to him, and she then acts with care for her name, not with hope.

Her directions are practical. She tells Odysseus to follow behind the wagon while they cross the fields, then wait in Athena's grove outside the city. She fears that townspeople will say she has brought home a foreign husband, and she says she would blame another girl for doing what she is doing (Odyssey 6.251-288). He should ask the way to Alcinous's house and go past the king to clasp her mother's knees, because if Arete favors him he will see his home again (Odyssey 6.289-315).

Homer brings her back once more. At the end of the Phaeacian feast Odysseus is bathed and dressed, and Nausicaa stands by the door-post of the hall, marvelling at him. She says, "Farewell, stranger, and hereafter even in thy own native land mayest thou remember me, for to me first thou owest the price of thy life" (Odyssey 8.457-468). Odysseus answers that he will pray to her as to a god all his days, because she gave him life. That is her last appearance in the poem.

The Odyssey never says what happens to Nausicaa after Book 8. Alcinous had already said, in Odysseus's hearing, that he wished such a man would take his daughter to wife and stay, with a house and possessions, but that no Phaeacian would keep him against his will (Odyssey 7.311-316). Odysseus does not take up the offer, and Nausicaa is not part of the farewell talk that follows.

In Book 7 Alcinous also says his daughter was wrong not to bring the stranger to the house herself. Odysseus replies that she did tell him to follow with her maidens, and that he refused for fear and shame (Odyssey 7.299-307). That is not what she says in Book 6, where she tells him to walk behind and wait in the grove. Homer lets the reader see that Odysseus is shielding her from blame.

Apollodorus's Epitome sums up the encounter in one sentence. Nausicaa is washing clothes, Ulysses begs for her protection, and she brings him to Alcinous, who entertains him, gives gifts and sends him home with an escort (Epitome 7.25). The same passage adds that Poseidon, angry with the Phaeacians, turned the ship to stone and covered the city with a mountain.

Some later writers gave her a husband. Eustathius, the twelfth-century commentator on Homer, reports that Aristotle in his Constitution of the Ithacans and Hellanicus said Telemachus married Nausicaa, daughter of Alcinous, and that Perseptolis was their son. The same commentator also reports a Hesiodic line naming Nestor's daughter Polycaste as the mother, and that rival version is discussed on the page for Telemachus. Neither Aristotle's nor Hellanicus's own text survives here, so the claim rests on Eustathius alone.

Her best-known modern afterlife is a theory about the poem's author. In The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), Samuel Butler argued that the Odyssey was written by a young woman from Trapani in Sicily, who introduced herself into the work as Nausicaa. Classical scholars did not accept the theory, but Butler's book keeps the princess at the center of the question of who composed the poem.

The Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki took the name for the heroine of his Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. He has said the name comes from the Phaeacian princess of the Odyssey. He was drawn to her through Bernard Evslin's retelling in Gods, Demigods and Demons. That heroine is a new character, not a version of Homer's, but the name is Homer's.