The Er of Odysseus, Phaeacian Socrates to Christ

Book 12 ends with Odysseus telling Alcinous that he will not reiterate his story on Calypso's island as they have heard it and book 13 of the odyssey starts with Alcinous loading a boat for Odysseus anticipated return home.
The Phaeacian crew steer the ship while Odysseus sleeps all night long and even after the ship lands back at Ithaca Odysseus home shores. They gently carry Odysseus ashore and leave him and his gifts sleeping on the shore. As the Phaeacian crew reaches Scheria Poseidon who finds Odysseus on the shores of Ithaca gets mad that this crew helped him reach home and appeals to Zeus to be allowed to punish them. As prophesized in book 8 Zeus allows the punishment and the ship is turned to stone and sinks in the harbour, this causes the Phaeacians to take on a xenophobic policy concerning helping wayward travelers.
Odysseus wakes up on the shores of Ithaca in a country so different he does not recognise it.

This part of book 13 portrays the transition in the shipping practices of the Phaeacian. Their friendly voyages and interaction with peoples like the Greeks ends with the destruction of their ships and them turning to stone or statues. The days of Phaeacian interaction with other nations are now at the bottom of the sea that acts like a museum to the heyday of the Phaeacian naval empire. To Odysseus it almost seems like a dream to suddenly wake up from his journeys back on the shores of Ithaca. It is a beginning of a new era in Greece and the results of the growth of the Greek empires and naval travels have affected mainland Greece. It is as if the Greeks suddenly wake up and beginning to look at themselves, the effects of post Trojan growth and the effects of Greeks of this era concerning other Greeks.
The politics and effects arise as the Phaeacian wane. The sleeping to waking represents the sleepy heydays the Greeks experience while Phaeacian is strong and does not find most of its ships at the bottom of the sea. Part of this shift may be due to their interaction with the Greeks. The Phaeacians allied with the Greeks and soon their ships became upgraded and one with the Greeks, in fact they became Greeks and thus were no longer an independent people to rule and sail around interacting with people on their own.

Note Er of Plato’s myth of Er is the son of Alcinious and represents the transition to the new type of Greek that becomes the fertile ground that becomes the beginning of Socratic Greeks as the Socratic philosopher appears to be a second Er and Christ a third growing from the Greeks of the second. (See Plato’s mythologizing of the myth of Er by Chrysovalantis (Val) Petridis, inkwaterpress, USA, 2009)