112 pages • 3 hours read
Homer, Transl. Emily WilsonThe Odyssey
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Books 21-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 21 Summary: “An Archery Contest”
The contest of the axes is held in Book 21, with none of the suitors able to string and shoot Odysseus’s bow. He asks to take a turn and shoots the arrow through all 12 axes, then gives his herdsmen and Telemachus the signal.
Prompted by Athena, Penelope prepares for the contest with the axes. She fetches Odysseus’s bow and quiver from the storeroom, weeping as she holds her husbands famed bow, a guest-friend gift from Iphitus, in her hands. Returning to the hall, she explains to the suitors that whoever can string Odysseus’s bow and send an arrow through 12 axes will win her hand in marriage. She instructs Eumaeus to set up the axes. He complies, weeping with Philoetius as he does so. Antinous scolds them for crying, saying their tears are upsetting Penelope. He acknowledges that “it will be difficult” to “match Odysseus” (463).
Telemachus calls the suitors forward, adding that he too will attempt to string the bow to prove that he deserves to carry his father’s legacy. If he can, he will “no longer mind” if his mother remarries (464). His first three attempts are unsuccessful, and Odysseus indicates that he should not try a fourth time. Telemachus laments his weakness and invites the suitors forward.
Leodes tries and fails, and a succession of suitors do likewise. Philoetius and Eumaeus leave the hall, followed by Odysseus. He asks them how they would feel if a god immediately guided Odysseus home. Both pray that it will happen and affirm their readiness to fight with him. Odysseus reveals himself and promises that if he defeats the suitors, he will reward them with wives, homes, and wealth, making them Telemachus’s brothers. He shows them his scar, and after inspecting it, the men embrace Odysseus and weep.
Odysseus says that when he gives them the signal, Eumaeus should bring his bow and arrow, and Philoetius should lock the outer gates. They return to the hall, where Eurymachus, having failed to string the bow, laments the blow to the suitors’ reputation if they cannot match Odysseus in strength. Antinous suggests that they quit for the day, since it is Apollo’s feast day.
Agreeing with their plan, Odysseus expresses his desire to try the bow as a test of his strength. Afraid the beggar will succeed where the suitors failed, Antinous rails against him for his impudence. Penelope insists on giving the beggar a turn since he is Telemachus’s guest. Euryamchus reaffirms his concern about their honor, but Penelope tells him they lost it when they wanted “the riches of a king” (471). If the beggar succeeds, she will gift him new clothes, a sword, and a dagger.
Telemachus tells Penelope that only he has the right to decide who can hold his father’s bow, since he holds the power in the household. He tells Penelope to return to her rooms, and she complies. Odysseus lifts the bow, and the suitors threaten him with violence. Afraid, he starts to set the bow down. Telemachus forcefully instructs him to continue, telling him to mind who he obeys. Amused, the suitors forget their anger. Eumaeus brings Odysseus the bow, then instructs Eurycleia to lock the hall doors and stay in the women’s quarters with the other women, no matter what they hear. Philoetius slips out to lock the outer gates.
Odysseus strings the bow and sends an arrow through the 12 axes, horrifying the suitors. He gives Telemachus the sign, and he straps on his sword and picks up his spear.
Book 22 Summary: “Bloodshed”
In Book 22 Odysseus slaughters the suitors with Athena, Telemachus, and the herdsmen’s help. The palace is purified, and 12 enslaved women deemed disloyal are hung.
Odysseus tears off his rags, offers Apollo a prayer, and shoots Antinous in the neck. His death prompts outrage among the suitors, who search for weapons in vain, telling Odysseus that he will pay with his life. He reveals his true identity, terrifying the suitors. Eurymachus blames Antinous and admits that Odysseus is right to be outraged. Now that Antinous is dead, Eurymachus begs for mercy, promising the suitors will pay a fine and replenish Odysseus’s treasure. Odysseus counters that they will all pay with their lives; nothing will dissuade him.
Eurymachus urges the suitors to use tables as shields and rush Odysseus, then flies forward with his sword drawn. Odysseus shoots him down while Telemachus kills Amphinomus. He runs out to gather more arms and armor while Odysseus uses his arrows then his spear to kill more suitors. Melanthius offers to fetch the suitors’ arms and armor from the storeroom, which Eumaeus sees. Realizing that Melanthius is helping the suitors, Odysseus sends the herdsmen to trap him in the storeroom then bind and torture him.
Odysseus, Telemachus, Eumaeus, and Philoetius reconvene in the hall and are joined by Athena, who is disguised as Mentor. Odysseus recognizes her and offers her a prayer. Agelaus threatens Mentor-Athena, enraging her. She exhorts Odysseus to use “proper force” and to be as courageous as he was at Troy. She assists but does not “grant a decisive victory” (484) because she is testing Odysseus and Telemachus’s courage. When Athena flies up to the rafters, the suitors believe that Mentor has left, but she continues to foil all of their shots. The rout continues.
Leodes, a priest, supplicates Odysseus, saying that he warned the suitors but they refused to listen. Odysseus denies him mercy, saying he prayed for Odysseus not to return, then cuts off his head. Phemius, the poet, weighs his options and decides to supplicate Odysseus. He tells Odysseus that he will regret killing Phemius because his gift of song comes from the gods, and he was forced to sing for the suitors because they outnumbered him. Telemachus quickly confirms this and urges Odysseus to spare Phemius as well as Medon, another slave who supplicates. Odysseus complies, sending them to the courtyard, where they station themselves by an altar dedicated to Zeus.
When all the suitors are dead, Odysseus summons Eurycleia, who gloats at the sight of the corpses. Odysseus orders her to stop because “[i]t is not pious” (490). He asks her who among the enslaved women have been loyal and disloyal and to bring the disloyal ones to him. He instructs Telemachus and the herdsmen to make the women carry out the corpses and clean the hall, then kill them. Telemachus decides to hang them, “to make their death an agony” (492). He and the herdsmen also kill Melanthius, cutting off his nose, ears, and genitals, and feeding them to the dogs, then cutting off his hands and feet. Odysseus purifies the palace and tells Eurycleia to call Penelope and the enslaved women who remained loyal.
Book 23 Summary: “The Olive Tree Bed”
Book 23 focuses on the reunion of Penelope and Odysseus. Telemachus and the herdsmen contrive to prevent news of the suitors’ murders from leaving the palace grounds.
Eurycleia tells Penelope that the beggar was Odysseus in disguise and that he has killed the suitors. Penelope is both overjoyed and dubious, since she cannot see how one man could kill more than 100. After Eurycleia tells her that she felt Odysseus’s scar, Penelope goes to him but keeps her distance. Telemachus rebukes her for being hardhearted. She tells him that if this is indeed Odysseus, she and he will have their own “secret signs known only to us two” (498). Odysseus smiles and agrees.
He tells Telemachus to plan a defense against the suitors’ families, who will surely seek revenge. He and the herdsmen should clean up, change, and instruct Phemius to play music, giving the impression that a wedding feast is taking place. They must keep the news of the suitors’ deaths from spreading for as long as possible. Hearing the music, townspeople say that Penelope “must have lacked the strength” to wait and “keep her husband’s house safe till he came” (499).
After Eurycleia bathes Odysseus and Athena beautifies him, he returns to Penelope. He accuses her of being hardhearted and asks Eurycleia to make a bed for him. Penelope concurs, instructing her to put the bed that Odysseus built outside. He is outraged; he built one of the bedposts from a living olive tree; the bed could only be moved by cutting down the tree. Penelope runs to him, weeping, embracing, and kissing him. She explains that she had to test him to ensure he was not an imposter trying to lure her from her loyalty, as Helen had been.
Athena holds back Dawn to give the couple more time together. Odysseus warns Penelope of Tiresias’s troubling prophecy, and she insists on hearing it in full, even if it brings her pain. Since she “will find out eventually, she prefers “to know now” (503). After she hears the full prophecy, she is hopeful that “an end to all our troubles” will eventually come (504). They go to bed, then tell each other stories about how they spent their 20 years apart.
When Athena is satisfied that they have rested enough, she summons Dawn. Odysseus tells Penelope that he must replenish his treasure and see his father. News will spread that he killed the suitors. He instructs, though Penelope is “smart enough / to need no orders,” to stay within the palace and not speak to anyone (506).
Book 24 Summary: “Restless Spirits”
Hermes leads the suitors into the underworld; in Ithaca, Odysseus seeks his father. Anticipating violence from the suitors’ families, Laertes, Odysseus, and Telemachus prepare to defend themselves, until Athena’s intervention affirms Odysseus’s rule.
Hermes leads the suitors to the underworld, where they encounter the ghosts of Achilles, Patroclus, Ajax, and Agamemnon. Achilles says it would have been better for Agamemnon to have died on the battlefield at Troy, since the Greeks would have built him a tomb and given him honor. Agamemnon agrees, recounting the honors Achilles received upon his death at Troy: 17 days of mourning, lamentations sung by all nine Muses, a funeral pyre, sacrifices of sheep and cattle, an urn crafted by Hephaestus to house his ashes, and a huge memorial visible from the sea. The gods themselves contributed the prizes for his funeral games. Achilles’s fame is immortal, while Agamemnon survived Troy only to have his wife’s lover murder him upon his return home.
The warriors are surprised to see so many young men in the underworld at once and assume either the gods or a foreign invasion struck them down. Agamemnon asks Amphimedon, whose father was a guest-friend, what happened, and he explains about their courtship and Odysseus’s revenge. Agamemnon notes how fortunate Odysseus is to have a loyal wife whose “fame will live / forever” (513).
In Ithaca, Odysseus sends Telemachus and the herdsmen to Laertes’s house then looks for his father. Finding him in an orchard, Odysseus tells him that he was a guest-friend of Odysseus and asks if he knows what happened to him. Laertes replies that he has died far from home, without funeral rites, then asks who Odysseus is. He claims to be a king’s son who parted from Odysseus with good omens, prompting Laertes to pour “two handfuls of the ashy dust / over his gray old head” and weep (517). Pitying him, Odysseus reveals himself, embracing and kissing his father. Laertes asks for a sign, and Odysseus shows his scar and recalls walking through the orchard as a child while Laertes identified the trees. Laertes believes him and faints.
Laertes’s first thought when he revives is that the suitors’ families will seek revenge. He returns with Odysseus to his house, where slaves wash him and Athena beautifies and strengthens him. Laertes’s slaves recognize Odysseus with joy, and all enjoy a meal together.
Rumor spreads the news of the suitors’ murders. Their families bury them then assemble in the square. Antinous’s father, Eupeithes, speaks first, pointing out Odysseus’s offenses against Ithacan families: He caused their sons’ deaths at Troy, at sea on the journey home, and in the palace. If they do not “take revenge on him,” they “will be shamed forever” (521). They must hunt him down before he attempts to escape.
Medon and Phemius point out that a god helped Odysseus, promoting Halitherses, a prophet, to blame the suitors’ families for their sons’ deaths. He warned them, but they did not control or censure the suitors’ behavior. Many decide to drop the matter, but a large group arms and follows Eupeithes. Meanwhile, Athena consults with Zeus, and he tells her to “do as you wish” (523) but suggests she encourage the matter to be forgotten and ensure peace and prosperity.
When Odysseus and his allies see the suitors’ families approaching, they arm themselves. Athena goes to Odysseus’s side disguised as Mentor. Odysseus warns his son not to shame his family on the battlefield. Telemachus ensures him that will not happen, and Laertes delights to see his son and grandson competing over who is braver. Telling Laertes that he is her favorite, Athena instructs him to throw his spear. It strikes and kills Eupeithes. Odysseus and Telemachus charge the front line and would have overseen another rout, but Athena stops them. She orders the two parties to “go your separate ways” (525). The suitors’ families drop their weapons and prepare to return to town, but Odysseus attacks again. Zeus sends a thunderbolt, and Athena orders him to stop. He obeys, and both sides “swear solemn oaths of peace” (525).
Books 21-24 Analysis
The poem’s closing books pose several interpretive challenges for modern readers, including Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors and the abrupt conclusion of strife between his family and theirs.
The first suitor who Odysseus kills is Antinous, the leader of the group. The rest of the suitors assume that Odysseus killed him by accident. Only after he reveals his true identity do they realize what is coming. Eurymachus hopes to save their lives by emphasizing that the suitor who goaded the rest on is dead. He hopes that Odysseus will find Antinous’s death sufficient compensation and embrace material compensation from the rest to replenish what they have taken from him. Such a scenario is plausible in the world of the poem because in the absence of public laws, police forces, and prisons, offended citizens seek compensation on their own terms. Both Odysseus and Athena, however, have already decided that all the suitors will die, regardless of how eagerly or reluctantly they participated in the courtship of Penelope.
The poem does not question Odysseus and Athena’s decision in any explicit way, but it does create opportunities for the audience to pity the suitors and to see them as vulnerable, some more than others. Antinous is struck just as he is about to sip his wine, having “no thought of death” (476). Agelaus begs just one of the suitors to escape so that he can bring help. Leodes assumes the pose of supplication, but Odysseus slices his head off as his mouth is “still framing words” (487). Odysseus is merciless, and Athena not only supports this but encourages it. She goaded the suitors to deepen his hatred for them. When the slaughter begins, she continues to test Odysseus’s resolve, stopping short of intervening until he shows that he intends to kill every last one.
One way of understanding this scenario is to see it as expressing human feelings of powerlessness, whether for gods who interfere consciously, forces of human nature that operate indiscriminately, or even reckless choices to which humans feel an irresistible pull. Odysseus’s response to Eurycleia’s gloating can be read as support for this reading: Gloating suggests that he dictated the events and engineered the outcomes. This would elevate him to arbiter of justice and revenge, a role that belongs to Zeus. Fate and the gods are in control, and humans must find a way to reconcile themselves to that.
The only men whom Odysseus spares are the bard Phemius and the enslaved Medon, on the grounds that their service was coerced because they were outnumbered. Medon demonstrated his loyalty at the beginning of the book, when he revealed the suitors’ plot against Telemachus to Penelope. Odysseus does not extend this same excuse to the 12 enslaved women who are hanged in Book 22, yet he seems aware that they too were coerced. When he initiates the slaughter in Book 22, he accuses the suitors of having “fleeced my houses and raped / my slave girls, and you flirted with my wife” (477, emphasis mine). The poem expresses awareness of this disconnect through the simile used to describe the women at the moment of their deaths: “As doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly / home to their nests, but someone sets a trap— / they crash into a net, a bitter bedtime” (492). Comparing the women to entrapped birds emphasizes their lack of choices.
Penelope and Odysseus’s reunion emphasizes their suitability for each other. When Penelope asks Eurycleia to bring Odysseus’s bed outside for him, he experiences a momentary lack of control because he believes that Penelope had ordered his bed taken apart. Since he built it from a living tree, it could not otherwise be moved. It seems to him in that moment that the wife he fought so hard to return to has betrayed him, but it was a test. Penelope’s scheme almost undoes him, showing her to be his ideal match. Odysseus recognizes this when he gives her instructions though he knows she is “smart enough / to need no orders” (506).
Since antiquity, scholars have debated whether the poem originally ended with Penelope and Odysseus’s reunion. In the 6th century, Athenian leaders instituted readings of the Homeric poems at the Panathenaea, a religious festival held every four years. Scholars have debated the extent to which Athens may have altered the poem’s end to highlight issues of importance to the city. Fueling this theory is Athena’s intervention to bring peace suddenly and decisively, which resembles the ending of Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy Oresteia.
One element of the final book that is not entirely consistent with classical Athens, however, is the assembly that takes place among the suitors’ families. Throughout the poem, men gather to discuss and debate issues that affect them collectively, but the point does not seem to be to arrive at collective action. Elders debate and consider, as in the council Telemachus calls at the beginning of the poem. Kings give instructions, as Alcinous does. Similarly, at the council that Eupeithes (Antinous’s father) calls in Book 24, he shares collective grievances against Odysseus, but the purpose is to be heard and potentially gather support rather than to vote or arrive at consensus or collective action.
Eupeithes’s grievances against Odysseus are portrayed as legitimate and shared. Twenty years ago, he left for Troy with their young male relatives but returned alone, then he killed their sons in the palace. From his perspective, many men died at Odysseus’s hands. At issue is not so much whether his grievances are legitimate but that the gods stand by Odysseus. When Medon and Phemius point out that Odysseus had a god’s support at the slaughter, many of the suitors’ families back down. They recognize him as the god-approved king of Ithaca; to fight him would thus be pointless. Eupeithes and those who join him prefer to fight, even if it means death, than to appear weak and cowardly, which brings neither honor nor immortality in the Homeric world. Eupeithes, the leader of the opposition, is the only named member of the suitors’ families, thus his sacrifice of his life has its compensation by Homeric standards. He is immortalized through the poem.
