Summary
Odysseus strips off his rags, leaps onto the threshold, and shoots Antinous through the throat as he lifts a cup. The suitors, believing it an accident, threaten him; he names himself and refuses all terms.
Eurymachus offers full restitution and more; Odysseus rejects it and kills him. Telemachus kills Amphinomus. Telemachus fetches armour but leaves the storeroom open; Melanthius uses it to arm the suitors, is caught on a second trip, and is strung up alive in the storeroom.
Athena appears as Mentor, taunts Odysseus, and watches from the rafters as a swallow before finally raising the aegis, at which the suitors panic. The killing is compared to hawks among small birds and to cattle stung by gadflies.
The seer Leiodes is killed while supplicating. The bard Phemius and the herald Medon are spared as compelled men. Eurycleia is fetched and starts to cry out in triumph; Odysseus stops her, saying it is not holy to exult over the dead. Twelve maids who slept with the suitors are made to carry out the bodies and clean the hall, and are then hanged in a row by Telemachus, who refuses them the clean death by sword his father ordered; the poem compares them to thrushes or doves caught in a net, their feet twitching a little. Melanthius is mutilated and killed. The hall is purified with fire and sulphur.
Narrative function
Resolves the political crisis by force and creates the blood-feud that Book 24 must then contain.
Greek concepts in this book
- tisis
- Retribution, payment exacted. The poem's word for what is happening, and its justification: the suitors' hybris against xenia is paid for.
- hosiē
- What is sanctioned or permitted. Odysseus forbids Eurycleia to exult, saying it is not hosiē to glory over slain men — in a hall he has just filled with bodies.
Connections to other books
Book 1 · Book 2 · Book 17 · Book 18 · Book 20
Every warning, omen and abuse the poem has accumulated since Book 1 is discharged here.
Go to Book 1Go to Book 2Go to Book 17Go to Book 18Go to Book 20
Book 24
The dead suitors give their own account in the second underworld scene, and their families take up arms.
Source notes
The hanging of the maids occupies 22.462-473. It is among the most discussed passages in Homer, and it is not presented by the narrator as a crime; the women are described as having slept with the suitors, and Telemachus's stated reason is that they poured shame on his mother and himself. Emily Wilson's 2018 translation was widely noted for rendering them as 'girls' rather than with the moralising nouns earlier English translators had used.
Reading it responsibly
Two things must be held together. The poem regards the killing of the suitors as just, and builds a careful case for it. The poem also shows Odysseus forbidding triumph over the dead in one breath and ordering the execution of enslaved women in the next, and it gives those women a simile — birds in a net, hoping for a bed and finding a noose — that no reader forgets. Whatever the poem intends, it does not let the reader off.