Chapter summary
Odysseus strips off his beggar's rags, steps up onto the great threshold with the bow and the full quiver, and pours the arrows at his feet. He tells the suitors that the contest of the bow is finished and that now he will aim at another target, one no man has hit, if Apollo grants him glory. He aims the arrow at Antinous, who was raising a two-handled golden cup to drink and was not thinking of death, and shoots it through his throat. Antinous falls, the cup drops from his hand, he kicks the table, and the food spills across the floor. The suitors leap up in uproar and search the walls for a shield or a spear, but there is none within reach. They shout to the guest that he shoots badly, that he has killed the best young man in Ithaca, and that the vultures will eat him, because they suppose he shot by accident and do not see that ruin is already reaching them.
Odysseus looks them in the face and accuses them: they did not expect him to return from Troy, so they ravaged the house, forced themselves on the maidservants, and courted his wife while he was still alive, without fearing the gods or the reckoning of men. Only Eurymachus answers. He admits that, if the man is truly Odysseus of Ithaca, what he says is just, for there were many outrages in the house and in the fields. But the one guilty of it all already lies dead: Antinous, who needed the marriage less than he needed to rule Ithaca and to kill Telemachus in an ambush, plans that Zeus did not fulfill. Eurymachus asks Odysseus to spare the people and proposes that each man pay, in bronze and gold, the value of twenty oxen for everything eaten and drunk in the house, until his heart is appeased. Odysseus refuses: even if they gave back all his father's wealth and added other goods, he would not stop his hands from the slaughter before the suitors paid for all their outrage. They have the choice to fight or to flee, but he does not believe any will escape. Their knees and hearts give way.
Eurymachus urges the others: draw swords, use the tables as shields against the arrows, charge together to push the man from the threshold, and raise the alarm through the city. As he rushes at him with sword in hand, he is struck by an arrow in the chest, beside the liver, and dies convulsing. Amphinomus charges at Odysseus to drive him from the door, but Telemachus wounds him first, from behind, and leaves the spear in the body for fear that an Achaean will strike him while he pulls it out. He runs to his father, promises to bring shields, spears, and helmets for the two of them and arms for the swineherd and the cowherd, and goes to the room where the arms are stored. He returns with four shields, eight spears, and four bronze helmets. Eumaeus and the cowherd Philoetius arm themselves and take their place beside Odysseus. While he has arrows, Odysseus hits one suitor at a time; when they run out, he leans the bow against the doorpost, takes a shield, a helmet, and two spears. There is a side door in the wall, the hall's only access to a corridor, and he orders Eumaeus to guard it.
The suitor Agelaus proposes that someone go up through that door and call the people. The goatherd Melanthius replies that it is too close to the courtyard and that one strong man would be enough to hold them all back, and he goes up to Odysseus's room to fetch arms. He brings twelve shields, twelve spears, and twelve helmets and hands them to the suitors. On seeing the enemy armed and brandishing long spears, Odysseus feels his knees and heart fail, and concludes that one of the women of the house or Melanthius is arming them. Telemachus takes the blame: he was the one who left the door of the room pulled to but not barred, and the suitors had a better lookout than he did. He orders Eumaeus to shut it and see who is doing this. When Melanthius returns for a second load, Eumaeus spots him and asks Odysseus whether he should kill him or bring him in. Odysseus orders him and the cowherd to tie him up in the room, hands and feet behind his back, and to hoist him to the rafters by a braided rope fastened to a tall column, so that he will suffer alive for a long time. Eumaeus mocks him: he will have a whole night in a soft bed.
Athena arrives in the appearance and voice of Mentor. Odysseus rejoices and asks her to remember their old companion, supposing that it is Athena. The suitors threaten her: Agelaus warns Mentor that when they kill father and son, he too will die, his goods will go to Odysseus's, and his family will not live in Ithaca. Athena grows furious and reproaches Odysseus: has he lost the strength he had when he fought nine years for Helen and took Priam's city, and now he complains in front of the suitors? But she does not yet give full victory: she wants to test the strength of Odysseus and his son. She climbs to a roof beam, looking like a swallow. Agelaus gathers the six best suitors who remain to throw first, and Athena makes their spears vain. Odysseus proposes that his own men throw too, and he, Telemachus, Eumaeus, and Philoetius kill four. The suitors fall back, the four retake the spears of the dead, and on the second volley Athena deflects most of them. One suitor grazes Telemachus's wrist and another Eumaeus's shoulder. Odysseus kills Eurydamas, Telemachus kills Amphimedon, and Eumaeus kills Polybus; Philoetius wounds Ctesippus in the chest and mocks him: that is the guest gift he gave to Odysseus the beggar. Odysseus wounds Agelaus at close range, and Telemachus wounds Leocritus.
Then Athena raises the aegis that destroys mortals high from the roof, and the suitors' spirits are terrified. They flee through the hall like cows stung by a gadfly, and the four strike them down like vultures falling on birds, until the floor seethes with blood. Leodes, their seer, clasps Odysseus's knees and pleads: he says he never spoke or did anything wrong against the women of the house, and that he tried to restrain the others, who did not listen to him. Odysseus answers that, since he was their seer, he surely prayed many times that the end of his homecoming would be far away, and he kills him with the sword Agelaus had dropped. The aoidos Phemius, who sang for the suitors under compulsion, lets his lyre fall to the ground and, uncertain whether to take refuge at Zeus's altar or to beg Odysseus, chooses to clasp his knees. He says it will be painful for Odysseus afterward to kill a bard, who taught himself and whom a god planted songs of every kind in his mind, and that he was forced to sing. Telemachus asks his father to spare him, and also the herald Medon, who looked after him as a child, if Philoetius or Eumaeus have not already killed him. Medon, hiding beneath a throne and covered with a freshly flayed ox hide, comes out and clasps Telemachus's knees. Odysseus smiles and reassures him: it was Telemachus who saved him, so that he may know and tell others that a kindness is better than a wrong. He orders the two to sit outside in the courtyard while he sees to what needs doing in the house.
Odysseus walks the hall looking for any survivor hidden there and sees everyone fallen in blood and dust, like fish drawn from the sea in a net and tossed onto the beach, dried by the sun. He orders Telemachus to call Eurycleia. The nurse finds him among the dead, smeared with blood like a lion that has just devoured an ox. On seeing the corpses she is about to cry out in joy, but Odysseus restrains her: it is not right to exult over dead men, whom the fate of the gods and their cruel deeds have overcome, for they honored no man. He asks her to say which women dishonor him and which are innocent. Eurycleia answers that there are fifty maidservants, trained to work wool and endure servitude, and that twelve have trampled on shamelessness, showing no respect either for her or for Penelope. Telemachus was young, and his mother did not let him give orders to them. The nurse wants to go up and wake her mistress, whom a god has put to sleep, and Odysseus orders her not to wake her and to call the women.
Odysseus orders Telemachus, the cowherd, and Eumaeus to have the women carry out the dead and then clean the chairs and tables with water and sponges. When the house is finished, they must lead the maidservants out into the courtyard, between the round building and the wall, and strike them with swords until their lives leave them and they forget Aphrodite, whom they had secretly enjoyed with the suitors. The women come weeping, carry the dead to the porch of the courtyard, forced by Odysseus, and clean. The three men scrape the floor, lead the maidservants to the indicated place, and corral them with no way out. Telemachus says he will not take their lives by a clean death, because they poured insults on his head and his mother's, and slept with the suitors. He fastens a ship's rope to a great pillar, stretches it high so that none touches the ground, and they hang them in a row, with nooses around their necks, like thrushes or doves in a net; their feet thrash for a short while. They take Melanthius through the courtyard, cut off his nose and ears, tear out his private parts for the dogs to eat raw, and cut off his hands and feet. They wash their hands and feet and return to Odysseus, and the work is done.
Odysseus asks Eurycleia for sulfur and fire to purify the hall, the house, and the courtyard, and he orders her to call Penelope and the maids. She agrees and offers to bring him a cloak and tunic, because he is covered in rags across his broad shoulders and that would not be seemly; he replies that he wants fire first. She brings it, with the sulfur, and he purifies the house. Eurycleia goes to call the women, who come out of the hall with torches in their hands, surround Odysseus, greet him, kiss his head and shoulders, and take his hands. He feels a sweet desire to weep and moan, and he recognizes them all.
Analysis
The song gives the reason for each of Odysseus's decisions and makes each one different from the others. For the suitors there is no possible compensation, because what they owe is the outrage. Leodes dies for the craft that puts him on their side; Phemius and Medon live because someone pleads for them and there is a reason the text accepts; the twelve maidservants and Melanthius receive a punishment whose measure the poem records without comment.
The gods always enter from the side. Athena deflects spears, holds back full victory to test father and son, and finally raises the aegis, and Odysseus explains the slaughter to Eurycleia as the work of the gods' fate and of the suitors' own deeds. The poem sets the two reasons side by side, the divine and the one of the reckoning of deeds, without saying which weighs more.
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