At the end of Rhapsody 21, Odysseus has already passed, in rapid succession, two of three successive tests that needed to be endured by the true king of Ithaca. That is, he has already performed a stringing of his mighty bow and has already won an ultimate contest in archery by executing a perfect shot with the very first arrow that he shoots from the bow. But now, at the beginning of Rhapsody 22, the third test awaits Odysseus. He must now kill the suitors, and the successive killings that follow will ultimately eliminate all the would-be husbands of Penelope. In the end, Odysseus will be the only Achaean left standing. And he has by now been revealed as the only true husband, the only true king. So, he has become the best of the Achaeans in the Homeric Odyssey. But a question remains. Now that all the suitors have been killed, what will happen to the other characters in the Odyssey who had turned against the king in the course of his lengthy absence? Here is where things get really ugly. The extreme cruelty of the retribution that awaits these characters, as we see it narrated here in Odyssey 22, presents the modern reader with moral problems that cannot be evaded.

Odysseus kiling Penelope’s suitors. Attic red-figure skyphos, ca. 440 BCE. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

At O.22.437–473, the disloyal handmaidens of the household are executed by hanging. There is considerable emphasis on the terror and suffering of these wretched women as they get strung up in a row, twisting and turning in their agony, O.22.471–473. Those who participate in the execution are Telemachus, the cowherd Philoitios, and the swineherd Eumaios; Odysseus too is present. Then at O.22.474–479 follows the punishment of the goatherd Melanthios: his nose and his ears are chopped off, then his genitalia are ‘pulled out’, to be fed to the dogs, and then, finally, his hands and his feet are also chopped off. After these torments, it appears that he is left still alive. Participating in this horrific retribution are the cowherd Philoitios and the swineherd Eumaios. It is not clear in this case whether Telemachus is also participating, though it is clear enough from O.22.479 that Odysseus is no longer present. In any case, as I already noted in the anchor comment at O.18.085–087 with specific reference to the extreme cruelty involved in the punishment of the goatherd, an explanation is needed for understanding how the supposedly righteous adherents of Odysseus could inflict horrors that were parallel to the horrors inflicted by the mysteriously infernal Ekhetos, as recounted in ghastly detail at O.18.085–087. In the anchor comment, I already indicated that at least one part of the explanation may involve the words of Antinoos at O.21.300–301 concerning a comparable mutilation inflicted on the Centaur Eurytion. But we are still left with the moral problem of the extreme cruelty at work here. Addressing this problem, I now turn to another part of my explanation, which involves what I described in the comment at I.23.001–064 as a dynamic tension between dysfunctionality in the heroic world of myth and functionality in the post-heroic world of ritual. I find it significant, in this regard, that the main agents of extreme cruelty in the narrative about the punishment inflicted on Melanthios are herdsmen, just as Melanthios himself is a herdsman. This pastoral context is relevant, I think, to the cruelty described in the narrative of O.22.474–479, which takes place in the festive setting of a festival that is sacred to Apollo. This festival, after all, is a pastoral celebration, centering on the sacrifice of a hundred cattle. For further pastoral details, I refer again to the anchor comment at O.20.276–280 on the festival of Apollo. But this festival as narrated here in Rhapsody 22 is not yet a ritually correct event: a correction can come about only in the post-heroic age, when the pollutions of the heroic age that happen in myth, including all the horrific cruelty, are purified year after year, into eternity, by way of festive re-enactment in ritual. The pastoral festivities of a festival of Apollo in the post-heroic world of ritual can now transcend the horrors that still pollute the heroic world of myth. But the first steps in purifying the pollution are already being taken in the myth, since Odysseus insists on the fumigation of his household in the aftermath of all the carnage. In my overall explanation, I have been emphasizing the festivities that mark the occasion of any festival, and this emphasis is relevant to a most telling insight shown by Plato when he looks into one of the most horrific of all narratives in Greek mythology. I am thinking here of the myth about Marsyas, a satyr who was an ultimate master in the art of playing the double-reed known as the aulos. According to this myth, Marsyas was skinned alive by the god Apollo, that ultimate master in the art of playing the lyre known as the kitharā. In Plato’s Symposium 215a-b, we can see how the extreme violence of Apollo in the world of myth, where he strips the skin from the body of Marsyas, is counterbalanced by the festive merriment of discovering what is under the skin of Marsyas in the world of ritual. In the passage that I have just cited from the Symposium, the speaker is Alcibiades, and he is comparing the external ugliness of Socrates to that of Marsyas—but here the focus is on the Marsyas of ritual, not of myth. As we now learn, there used to be a festive custom of making hollow figurines of Marsyas that contained in the inside the smaller figurines of gods. I infer that the defining god that was hidden in the inside of Marsyas was Apollo himself, so that, when you peeled off the Marsyas on the outside of the figurine, you found the god Apollo on the inside. Thus, the grim violence of the myth is purified here in the festive merriment of a ritual celebrating Apollo. There could be many parallels I could draw from other festive customs as we find them world-wide—perhaps my favorite is what I could fancifully call the “John Barleycorn Syndrome”—but I content myself here with presenting my formulation in its most basic form. Of course, the shock of the violence in myth remains, and I cannot exorcise it in my own mind, but at least it is expurgated by the merriment in ritual. A similar explanation could be attempted in the case of those wretched women who were caught in that snare, O.22.471–473, since they are compared to kikhlai ‘thrushes’ and peleiai ‘pigeons’ at O.22.468. These birds get comparably snared—but the difference is, they are caught in order to be cooked and eaten as delicacies.

Still life showing eggs, thrushes, napkin: from the House of Julia Felix, Pompeii. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

analysis of the differentiation of blame in the Odyssey (vs. in the Iliad) and the muting of the mēnis theme in it, here especially regarding the suitors, their relatives, and Odysseus and his family