What happens
In Book 22 Odysseus kills a hundred and eight men in his own hall, having barred the doors. Terms are offered and refused. Full restitution is offered by Eurymachus and refused. Two men are spared — the bard Phemius and the herald Medon — on the ground that they acted under compulsion. A third, the seer Leiodes, is killed while supplicating.
Then twelve enslaved women who had slept with the suitors are made to carry out the bodies and wash the hall, and are hanged. Odysseus orders a clean death by sword; Telemachus refuses it, saying they poured shame on his mother and himself, and hangs them in a row from a ship's cable. The poem compares them to thrushes or doves caught in a net, and says their feet twitched a little, but not for long.
Melanthius the goatherd is mutilated and killed. The hall is purified with fire and sulphur.
The case the poem builds
The Odyssey does not present this as an atrocity, and it does not present it as easy. It spends twenty-one books constructing a justification.
The suitors violate xenia under Zeus's protection, consuming a household while enjoying its shelter. They are warned repeatedly — by Telemachus in assembly, by the seer Halitherses, by omens, by Theoclymenus's vision of the hall running with blood, and privately by Odysseus himself, who tells Amphinomus to go home. They plot to murder Telemachus. They throw objects at a beggar three separate times.
The word the poem uses is tisis, retribution: payment exacted for an offence. Within the poem's terms this is not vengeance but the restoration of an order the suitors broke.
Where the case does not hold
Three things resist the justification, and the poem includes all three.
Amphinomus. He is decent, he is warned, he is troubled, and he is killed anyway — because, the poem says, Athena had bound him to his death. The massacre is just and indiscriminate at once.
Leiodes. Killed in the act of supplication, which the poem elsewhere treats as inviolable.
The women. Enslaved people executed for sexual relations they were in no position to refuse. The poem gives them a simile that no reader forgets — birds hoping for a roost and finding a snare — which is not the language of a text that thinks nothing is happening.
The refusal to exult
Immediately after the killing, Eurycleia begins to raise the ululation of triumph over the dead, and Odysseus stops her: it is not hosiē, not sanctioned, to glory over slain men.
He says this standing in a hall full of bodies, minutes before ordering an execution. The poem places the two side by side without comment, and the juxtaposition is not accidental.
Restoration is not achieved by the violence
This is the poem's most serious statement and the one adaptations most often cut.
Book 24 shows the consequence: the families of the dead assemble, Eupeithes calls for vengeance, and about half the island arms. Ithaca is one scene from civil war. Killing a hundred and eight aristocrats has not solved a political problem; it has created a larger one.
Athena stops the fighting and imposes oaths. The peace of Ithaca is imposed from outside, by force, in the last hundred lines. The poem ends there because there is nothing further to say: violence recovered the household and could not settle the community.
Later interpretation
The hanging of the maids has become a focus of modern reception — Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad (2005) narrates the poem from their side, and Emily Wilson's 2018 translation was widely noted for declining the moralising nouns earlier English versions had used for them. That attention is a response to something in the text, not an imposition on it: the poem chose to describe them dying.