Book XX

Notes

1 line 2 — The bed itself is an indictment: an undressed oxhide, and fleeces "of the sheep the Achaeans kept slaughtering" — bedding that arrives tagged with its provenance: the king lies down on the by-products of his own devoured estate. The mantle on top is Eurynome's small mercy. ↩

2 line 6 — The disloyal women go out to the suitors "setting each other laughing" — past the master lying in the porch. The night audit he refused from Eurycleia (19.500ff) happens anyway, involuntarily: they file past his bed toward their own sentence. ↩

3 line 14 — The bitch simile — his heart snarls over the household like a mother-dog over "soft-boned pups" facing a stranger. The tenderest guardian-image in the poem given to a rage for slaughter; what the heart wants to protect and what it wants to do are the same growl. This is the poem's only look inside Odysseus at war with his own organ of feeling. ↩

4 line 18 — "Bear up, my heart. A more dog-vile thing you bore" — κύντερον, "more dog-like," snapping back at the dog-simile two lines up: the heart snarls like a bitch and is told it once endured something doggier. The self-address — struck chest, quoted speech to his own heart — became the archetype of self-command (Plato quotes it twice); the argument is a veteran's: we survived the cave by craft, we outlast this by craft. ↩

5 line 25 — The paunch simile: he tosses like a blood-sausage being turned over a blaze, "longing to have it roasted quickly." The comparison is deliberately gross and deliberately chosen: it was the beggars' prize at 18.44–45 — paunch "packed full of fat and blood" — and now the man who won that contest is one, stuffed with heat and urgency, almost done. Homeric similes rarely joke; this one does, at its hero's expense. ↩

6 line 33 — Athena's opening is a goddess's tease — "Here is your house; here is your wife" — as if the twenty-year problem were solved and the man merely forgetful. What she omits (the hundred and eight men between him and both) is exactly what he answers with. ↩

7 line 41 — The second worry is the remarkable one: "even if I kill them... where do I run from what follows?" — the blood-feud. Odysseus is the only person in the poem planning past the climax: the suitors' kin, the vendetta arithmetic of a small island. Book 24 will prove the worry exactly right; Athena's answer here, as there, is essentially I am the exit. ↩

8 line 45 — "Hard man!" — σχέτλιε, the same address she opened with at 13.293: her fond exasperation at a mortal who audits even a goddess's guarantees. The rebuke that follows ("a person will trust a weaker friend — a mortal one") is the closest the poem comes to Athena stating what she is to him. ↩

9 line 49 — "If fifty companies of mortal men stood round the two of us... even so you would drive away their cattle and sheep." The promise is scaled in raids — not survival but profit: you would leave with the livestock. Athena knows her man; the reassurance is denominated in his own currency. ↩

10 line 56 — The stagger of the sleepers: as sleep takes him, she wakes. All night the house has held one waking griever at a time, husband and wife trading the watch without knowing it — the poem's image for the marriage itself these twenty years. ↩

11 line 61 — The prayer to Artemis expands the wish of 18.202–205 into the poem's darkest devotion: the arrow now, or the whirlwind — annihilation without burial, snatched off "down the ways of gloom" to the mouths of Ocean. She prays for the fate of the storm-taken, the worst end the Greek imagination offered a woman, in preference to "gladdening the mind of a lesser man." ↩

12 line 66 — The daughters of Pandareus — second tale from that house in a single night (the nightingale, 19.518ff, was their sister). Orphaned, fostered by four goddesses — Aphrodite's food, Hera's beauty and sense, Artemis' height, Athena's handwork — and, on the very day of their betrothal negotiations, carried off by the snatching-winds to serve the Furies. The myth is a machine for her meaning: divine care lavished for years, then annulled in an hour between promise and wedding — her own biography, read as a warning against hoping. ↩

13 line 77 — "The snatching-winds carried the girls away and gave them over to the hateful Furies": ἅρπυιαι — the harpies as functionaries of a transaction between storms and vengeance-spirits. The bureaucratic horror of it (girls "given over to serve") is the point: some fates are not deaths but permanent disappearances into service — which is also a description of slavery, the poem's other abyss. ↩

14 line 80 — "That with Odysseus before my eyes I may pass even under the hateful earth": the prayer's kernel — she will accept Hades if she can go down still seeing him (ὀσσομένη — with him before her mind's eye). Not reunion; just unreplaced. The alternative — a lesser man gladdened — is what this very day's contest offers, and this prayer is her true position on it. ↩

15 line 88 — The dream that torments her is a good one: Odysseus beside her "as he was when he went with the army" — young, and she "thought it no dream, but the waking truth at last" (ὕπαρ — the word of 19.547). The cruelty is in the waking; the accuracy is in the timing: a man like him is in the house tonight. Her dreams are now running ahead of her information. ↩

16 line 93 — He hears her weeping and half-dreams awake: "it seemed to him... that she knew him already, and stood beside his head." His fantasy and her dream reach for each other across the house — she dreamed him beside her; he imagines her beside him, recognizing. Two rooms apart, the marriage is dreaming symmetrically; only the plot holds the doors shut. ↩

17 line 100 — The double-omen prayer: a φήμη (spoken omen) from someone waking indoors, and a τέρας of Zeus outside. He specifies the evidentiary standard — two independent channels — like the strategist he is; Zeus fills the order in reverse: thunder from a clear sky, then the mill-woman. ↩

18 line 108 — The mills, "the marrow of men" (μυελὸν ἀνδρῶν) — barley and wheat as civilization's bone-fill, ground by twelve women. Twelve: the number of the disloyal maids (22.424). The poem's arithmetic of the household keeps its books in dozens. ↩

19 line 116 — The mill-woman's kledon — the frailest of the twelve grinders, the last one at the stone, is granted the poem's decisive curse: "may they sup now their last!" Her authority is her exhaustion ("who have loosed my knees") — the suitors' feast priced in one worker's body. Zeus thunders for her; the great revenge is countersigned at the bottom of the labor hierarchy. ↩

20 line 120 — "Rejoiced at the omen of her word" — the kledon-formula of 18.117 again. Twice now the suitors' doom has been ratified by chance speech: their own blessing then, a slave's curse now. He "told himself the guilty would pay" — τίσασθαι: the ledger-verb; the day's business is now booked. ↩

21 line 129 — Telemachus' morning question needles his mother in absentia — she honors the worse man, slights the better "on impulse" (ἐμπλήγδην). It is camouflage (he must not seem to prize the beggar) laid over real grievance, and it is unjust; Eurycleia's correction (135ff) is precise: the guest got everything he would accept. The performance of casualness now runs even inside the family. ↩

22 line 135 — "Do not blame the blameless woman" — Eurycleia's report is an innkeeper's docket: wine as long as he liked, bread declined and offered, bed refused, mantle laid over him anyway. The house's kindness is documented against the boy's slander; the nurse audits even her masters. ↩

23 line 148 — Eurycleia gets her full formal genealogy — "daughter of Ops, Peisenor's son" — as she issues the day's work orders. The poem dignifies the head-of-staff with a patronymic at the exact moment the house is scrubbed for its own liberation: sweep, sprinkle, crimson coverings, sponges, rinsed bowls — the massacre's venue is being cleaned for it. ↩

24 line 156 — "It is festival for everyone today" — the feast of Apollo, the archer-god, casually flagged by a housekeeper. The deadline sworn twice by the beggar (14.161–162 = 19.306–307: "between this month's waning and the rising of the next") lands today, the dark of the moon, Apollo's day: the bow's own god presides over the bow's return to work. ↩

25 line 173 — Melanthius abuses the beggar again (17.217ff, the kick; now the fists-threat) — strikes entered in the record a day apart; his sentence (22.474ff) will be read against this docket. Odysseus answers with the fixed line of silence — the head-shake, the deep-brooded evils (= 17.465 = 17.491). ↩

26 line 184 — The fixed line of endured insult — head shaken, silence kept, "brooding evils deep in his heart" — now in its third appearance (17.465 after the footstool, 17.491 the son's copy, here after Melanthius' taunt). The formula has become the beggar's standard receipt: abuse deposited, nothing said, interest accruing. ↩

27 line 185 — "A third came in — Philoetius, a leader of men" (ὄρχαμος ἀνδρῶν, Eumaeus' own title): the cowherd, the poem's last major loyalist, introduced at dawn on the last day. The trio is now assembled — swineherd, goatherd, cowherd: loyal, traitor, loyal — the estate's whole moral range walking in with its animals. ↩

28 line 194 — Philoetius reads the beggar in one look: "in build he is like a lord, a king" — then supplies the theology that explains the rags: the gods sink wanderers in misery "when they spin hard sorrow even for kings." He sees through the disguise to the type and reasons correctly about the god-spun exception; no one in the poem gets closer on sight alone. ↩

29 line 199 — His greeting repeats Amphinomus' toast word for word (18.122–123): "Your health, father stranger!..." — the loyal cowherd and the doomed half-decent suitor share one blessing-formula. The poem files them together deliberately: the two men in the hall who wished the beggar well — one will be armed by him, the other killed by his son. ↩

30 line 201 — "Father Zeus — no other god is deadlier than you: you have no pity on men, though you begot them yourself." The boldest theological complaint in Homer — spoken not by a hero in a storm but by a herdsman upset about cattle. Philoetius arraigns Zeus for fathering men into misery, then goes straight on weeping about his master's rags: doctrine and devotion in one breath, the working man's metaphysics. ↩

31 line 204 — "I broke sweat when I saw him" (ἴδιον) — grief as a physical event: the cowherd sweats at the sight of a beggar because the beggar makes him see Odysseus in rags somewhere. His body recognizes what his mind dare not: the sweat is for the man in front of him. ↩

32 line 211 — The herd report: broad-browed cattle come on "like standing wheat" — increase past counting, all of it requisitioned by "strangers" who "do not tremble at the gods' watching eye" (ὄπις — divine surveillance). Philoetius' complaint doubles as the estate's account-book: the wealth is intact, the extraction is total, the auditor is standing in front of him disguised. ↩

33 line 219 — The loyalist's dilemma, stated exactly: flee with the herds to a foreign king (betray the son), or stay and serve the thieves (suffer). He has chosen the "colder" option — staying — held by one hypothesis: "what if he came from somewhere...!" Eumaeus' loyalty is love of persons; Philoetius' is loyalty under stated analysis, which the poem may rate even higher: he has done the math and stayed anyway. ↩

34 line 230 — The oath to Philoetius = the oath to Eumaeus (14.158–160): Zeus, the table of friendship, the hearth of blameless Odysseus. The formula's third swearing (19.303–304 to Penelope between them), and this time the payoff is explicit: "with your own eyes, if you wish it, you shall see the killing of the suitors." Each loyalist is issued the same bond; redemption falls due before the day is out. ↩

35 line 237 — "Then you would learn my strength — and how my hands follow it." Philoetius answers the oath with an enlistment; Eumaeus co-signs with a prayer. The muster is complete: the hall now holds four fighters, and only one of them knows it. ↩

36 line 242 — The eagle-with-dove on the left — the same sign that blessed Telemachus' departure (15.525ff) now blocks his murder: omens keep intervening between the suitors and the boy. Amphinomus reads it instantly and correctly — his third and last decent act, once again the minimum: not "stop," only "not today; let us think of the feast." The feast he defers to is the one the mill-woman cursed. ↩

37 line 245 — "This plan of ours will not run smooth" — συνθεύσεται, a racing word: the plot won't run with us. Amphinomus' idiom is a gambler's, and accurate: every start the suitors make now is scratched by heaven. ↩

38 line 253 — The service of the last feast: Eumaeus passes cups, Philoetius the bread, Melanthius pours the wine. The staffing chart is the battle-plan in embryo — two loyalists and the traitor handling the suitors' food and drink; within hours the same three hands will hold the doors, the arms-store, and nothing. ↩

39 line 257 — "His craft at work" (κέρδεα νωμῶν) — Telemachus seats his father inside the hall by the stone threshold, with a battered stool, a little table, an equal portion, and a golden cup: degradation staged to the eye, parity delivered in fact. The arrangement is tactical (the threshold is where the bow will be shot from) and filial in the poem's peculiar key — the son can honor his father only in the grammar of hospitality to a beggar. ↩

40 line 264 — "This is no public house: it is Odysseus' house — and he won it for me." The plainest property-law sentence in the poem, spoken over the property's owner drinking from the golden cup. Every word doubles: the house is indeed not public, is indeed Odysseus', and the he won it (ἐκτήσατο) quietly asserts the acquisition ethic — this estate was earned, and its earner is present. ↩

41 line 268 — Lips bitten, bold speech marveled at = 18.410–411 verbatim: the second time in two days the hall has had to swallow Telemachus whole. The formula's return marks the trend: each performance of authority is stronger, and the silences after them longer. ↩

42 line 273 — Antinous' reply concedes everything in a sneer: "Zeus would not have it; otherwise we would have silenced him long since." The confession is casual and complete — only heaven's veto has kept Telemachus alive — and it is spoken as a complaint. The suitors now blame Zeus for their own unfinished murder; the theology is truer than they know. ↩

43 line 276 — The town's festival procession — hecatomb through the streets, the people gathering in Apollo's shady grove — runs in parallel montage with the hall's last feast: outside, Ithaca worships the archer; inside, the archer's day is being kept another way. The cut back and forth is the poem's quiet liturgical joke. ↩

44 line 284 — Athena's goad, verbatim from 18.346–348: the outrage must not slacken, "so that pain might sink still deeper." The goddess re-administers the dose on schedule — the second day running — topping up the rage this very day will spend. Divine cruelty as fuel logistics. ↩

45 line 287 — Ctesippus, "a man versed in lawlessness" — ἀθεμίστια εἰδώς, the Cyclopes' adjective (9.106): the poem introduces its newest suitor with the vocabulary of monsters. Rich, from Same, and defined before he acts: what follows is not a lapse but a credential. ↩

46 line 296 — The "guest-gift" speech is the suitors' cruelty at its most refined: a parody of xenia protocol — the stranger has had his portion, propriety demands I add a ξείνιον — with the gift an ox-hoof from the scrap basket. Where Antinous threw in rage and Eurymachus in drunken pique, Ctesippus throws as satire: the institution itself mocked. It is the escalation that matters: the abuse has become theater. ↩

47 line 301 — The dodge and the smile: "a smile most sardonic" — σαρδάνιον, the first occurrence in literature of the word that became "sardonic." A smile in the heart, behind the face, at the moment a bone aimed at his head hits the wall: the whole disguise in one adverb. The etymology was debated even in antiquity (the Sardinian herb that twists the mouth of the dying?); the poem's usage needs no botany — it is the smile of a man filing a debt. ↩

48 line 307 — "Instead of a wedding your father would be busy here with a funeral": Telemachus' threat runs on the same rails as the beggar's curse on Antinous (17.476, death "before any wedding") — marriage and burial as the two feasts a suitor might get. For Ctesippus the account settles at 22.285ff, when Philoetius' spear takes him — with a taunt about ox-hooves attached. ↩

49 line 317 — Lines 316–319 repeat, nearly word for word, what the disguised Odysseus said at 16.106–111: better to die than watch guests manhandled and slave-women hauled through the beautiful house. Telemachus was in the hut when his father said it; now he speaks it as his own in open hall. The father's ethic, overheard once, has become the son's public platform — the poem's way of showing an inheritance delivered. ↩

50 line 322 — Agelaus opens with Amphinomus' exact lines (18.414–417: no offense at a just word; hands off the stranger and the slaves) — the reasonable-suitor script now circulating as a formula. The decency of the doomed is interchangeable; the poem keeps showing that moderation without withdrawal is just politeness on the way to the same spear (Agelaus falls at 22.293). ↩

51 line 334 — Agelaus' proposal is the suitors' case in its best dress: the waiting was honorable while hope lasted; hope is gone; sit by your mother and settle the marriage — you keep the estate, she keeps another's house. It is reasonable, humane in tone, and rests entirely on one premise ("now it is plain that he is past returning") that is false by the width of the room. ↩

52 line 341 — Telemachus' oath — "by Zeus, and by the sufferings of my father" — swears by the very thing the room denies exists. His position is exact and unimpeachable: the marriage is urged, dowered, and un-forced; "I am ashamed to drive her out against her will." He has said it before (2.130ff); saying it now, with his father listening and the contest hours away, it becomes the last word on the subject the suitors will ever hear. ↩

53 line 345 — The Athena-maddened laughter — the most frightening lines in the poem. She "knocked their wits askew," and they laugh "with jaws no longer their own" (γναθμοῖσι ἀλλοτρίοισιν); the meat runs blood; their eyes fill with tears while the laughter continues; "the heart in them wanted to wail." Possession as comedy breaking down into grief — the body's future (bleeding, wept-over) surfacing through its present (feasting, laughing). The suitors experience their own deaths as a mood they cannot account for; 18.100's idiom ("died laughing") has begun to come literally true. ↩

54 line 351 — Theoclymenus' vision — the apocalypse of the noonday hall: night shrouding heads, faces, knees; wailing "caught like fire"; blood on walls and crossbeams; porch and courtyard packed with ghosts "hurrying down to Erebus"; the sun perished from the sky; the mist running over everything. Seven lines of second sight, every clause redeemed in Book 22 (the shrouded heads, the spattered walls, the following dusk). This is the seer's third and greatest utterance — after the omen (15.531ff) and the hearth-oath (17.155ff) — and the poem's only sustained prophetic vision: not a bird read but the thing itself seen — a sun perished at noon, which no dark of the moon can explain. ↩

55 line 358 — "They all laughed at him sweetly" (ἡδὺ γέλασσαν) — the same "sweet" laughter that has run through their scenes since Book 2, now directed at a man describing their corpses. The possession-laughter of 345–349 has subsided into ordinary mockery: they have been shown the ending and find it funny. No damnation in the poem is more complete than this amusement. ↩

56 line 364 — Theoclymenus' exit speech is the dignity of the functioning senses: "I have eyes, and ears, and both my feet, and a mind in no way meanly made" — inventory of a working prophet, walking out on his own equipment. He needs no escort because he can see — the precise faculty the room has just proven it lacks. His final sentence, evil "no man of you will escape or dodge," closes the seer's own tally of refused warnings: omen, thunder, vision, and the man who read them all. ↩

57 line 371 — He goes to Piraeus — the same harbor-friend who took him in at 15.539ff. The seer's arc closes where it began: received by the one reliably hospitable man in the town. He exits the poem here, the only guest who saw everything and left before it happened — Ithaca's Cassandra, believed by no one and unbloodied. ↩

58 line 376 — The anonymous suitor's résumé of the beggar — "no skill for work and no strength either: a dead weight on the good earth" (ἄχθος ἀρούρης, Achilles' own phrase of self-reproach, Il. 18.104) — grades the man who out-plowed and out-mowed their kind in his challenge-speech (18.366ff) and will string the great bow of the house within the day. The mockery inventory is exactly inverted; every clause is about to be refuted with a corpse. ↩

59 line 382 — "Send them to the Sicilians — there they would fetch you a worthy price" (ἄξιον... ἄλφοι): the slave-sale idiom of Eumaeus' childhood (15.388, 429 — "he paid a worthy price") aimed now at Odysseus and Theoclymenus. Selling guests west into slavery is the suitors' final proposal on the subject of hospitality; the word "price" is the last item in their xenia file. ↩

60 line 385 — "He watched his father in silence — waiting, always, for the moment": Telemachus' whole interior compressed to a gaze. The line is built of the plan's key words (16.274ff: endure, watch, wait for the sign); the discipline ordered in the hut is now visible as posture at the feast. Around him the hall laughs; the son is a cocked trigger politely passing bread. ↩

61 line 387 — Penelope's chair, set "across from them" — she has positioned herself to hear every word in the hall: the taunts, her son's oath, the seer's vision. The queen sits through the last feast as its audience, in plain view and listening; whatever she knows or half-knows when she rises to fetch the bow, the poem has put her within earshot of everything. ↩

62 line 392 — The closing sentence sets the two feasts side by side: the dinner they cooked "laughing" — sweet, hearty, lavish — and the supper "a goddess and a strong man were soon now to set before them," than which "none could ever be more graceless" (ἀχαρίστερον: without χάρις, grace, thanks, pleasure — the un-feast). The last clause is the poem's whole verdict on the revenge, delivered as table-manners: they had begun it; the shameful devising was theirs. Book 21 opens with the bow. ↩