REVENGE OF ODYSSEUS?

[00:00:00]Meanwhile, back on Ithaca, home has become an occupied territory. 108 suitors are camped in the palace.

[00:00:08]They're eating all the food, drinking the cellars dry, devouring the estate of a man that they're just completely, you know, confident is dead. And Penelope has been holding off this siege all alone. She announced that she would choose a new husband soon, just as soon as she finished weaving a burial shroud for old Laertes, her father-in-law, which was very proper of her and very dignified, so no one really objected. And she wove the shroud by day, and then she would secretly unweave it by night. And she bought three full years with that trick until one of her own maids ratted her out. And then old Telemachus, Odysseus and Penelope's son, just got back from searching abroad for any news of his father and had to slip past an ambush just to make it home. You see, the suitors have moved on from freeloading to planning the murder of the heir and basically take over this entire island for their for themselves. And that is the state of things when a strange beggar no one recognizes walks into the palace courtyard. It's been 20 years since Odysseus actually left the island of Ithaca and set sail. The whole war, a curse, a goddess's island, and Odysseus finally sets foot on Ithaca again. So, real quick, remember how the poem has 24 books? The entire second half of it takes place on Ithaca, and it's not really an adventure story, to be honest.

[00:01:35]It's an undercover operation with like surveillance and a disguise and a loyalty test. It's a man casing his own house so he can take it back from the inside. Essentially, if the first half of the Odyssey is the mythos, it's like the mythology around everything, the second half is like a revenge thriller Hollywood movie. It's like the tensest stretch of storytelling that survives from the ancient world. And this is basically how it goes. Athena disguises Odysseus as an old beggar with like shriveled skin and rags and like a walking stick. And his first stop is a hut in the hills, the home of his swineherd and slave, this guy Eumaeus.

[00:02:17]Now, Eumaeus is a man who owns nothing.

[00:02:20]He takes in this filthy, uh, you know, homeless stranger and feeds him his best pig and gives him his own cloak against the cold without the slightest clue even who this man is. Meanwhile, up at the palace, the richest young men in the kingdom are violating every single law of hospitality ever. The poorest man in the story is actually the best.

[00:02:45]Think about that. Like the poorest beggar, this guy takes in Odysseus and holds this sacred xenia principle to the highest degree. This this this honor, this hospitality. Then, at the palace gate, on a dung heap, lies a dog. This is Odysseus's dog, Argos. Odysseus trained him as a little puppy 20 years ago, and now he's this old, lumpy, tick-ridden throwaway. And he's the first living soul on Ithaca to recognize his master. Argos is too weak to stand up, so he lifts his head and he wags his little tail.

[00:03:22]I mean, just what a beautiful like visual. I love dogs.

[00:03:25]>> That's so cute.

[00:03:26]>> Isn't that the best? Like Odysseus comes back 20 years later and his dog is like, "That's my boy right there. I know that guy."

[00:03:32]But Odysseus, who obviously can't break his cover cuz he, you know, he might just get killed immediately, he wipes away a single tear and walks past him into the house.

[00:03:42]Now, the poem says that Argos dies right there on the spot. Having seen Odysseus again in the 20th year, Argos can finally pass away in peace.

[00:03:53]>> [sighs and gasps] >> She's going to make me cry, dog. Isn't that beautiful?

[00:03:57]>> Also brutal.

[00:03:58]>> I mean it is brutal, but it is beautiful. Now inside, the beggar works the halls of his own palace. Odysseus in this disguise starts kind of going around and basically begging for scraps from men eating his own food at his table drinking his wine. And he's quietly mapping like which servants are loyal and which ones are, you know, fine with Odysseus dying. And basically he's looking for the ringleader of all these potential suitors that are trying to marry Penelope and kill his son and take his entire estate. And he finds him, this guy Antinous. And basically caps off the evening by hurling a footstool at him. Later that night, the old nurse Eurycleia, the woman who nursed Odysseus as a little baby, is told to wash the stranger's feet. And her hands find a scar above his his knee, a boar tusk wound from a boyhood hunt. And she knows instantly who this is, and she turns towards Penelope to cry out. But Odysseus's hand closes around her throat and he tells the woman that if she makes a sound or tells anyone when the killing starts, he's not going to spare her.

[00:05:03]Yeah, that detail doesn't really survive the adaptations either cuz it shows Odysseus kind of as like a brutal aggressive guy. But he says, "Hey, don't say a word."

[00:05:11]But then, there's Penelope.

[00:05:14]The queen sits down for a long fireside interview with this beggar, and he claims that he actually hosted Odysseus decades ago and swears that the great man is alive and that he's on his way home right now. And Penelope weeps.

[00:05:30]And then that same night, this famously patient woman who has stalled a hundred and eight men for years suddenly announces that the waiting is over.

[00:05:40]Tomorrow, there will be a contest, and whoever can string the bow of Odysseus, a bow that is so stiff and so strong and so difficult to pull back, that no other man has ever been able to bend it.

[00:05:52]And if they can do it and shoot an arrow through the socket of 12 axes, we'll take her, the Queen Penelope.

[00:05:59]Now, one way to read this is that she finally gave up, and that, you know, with this news, she's had her heart broken so many times that she just kind of gives in. Another way to read it is that she just looked into the beggar's eyes and saw who she was really talking to. And basically handed her husband a loaded weapon in front of all of his enemies and was like, "Hey, baby, you know what to do."

[00:06:24]The poem never tells you which way to interpret it. Scholars have fought about this for literally 2,000 years, but Homer keeps the queen's secret, and it's kind of just up for you to decide. So, as the next day comes around and the contest plays out in the great hall, and the mysterious beggar with his shriveled skin and his rags walks over and kind of ambles his way to the bow. And then the poem says, "The way a singer stretches a new string onto his lyre, easily, without strain, he strings it." And sends the arrow through all 12 axes without even rising from his stool. And then the beggar stands up and announces who he really is. And what follows next is a massacre.

[00:07:08]Truly, that's the only way to put it.

[00:07:09]Odysseus, with his son Telemachus, and his uh basically poor slave friend that took him in, Eumaeus, and then one other cow shepherd killed every single one of the suitors. All 108, plus the household men who served them. It's like the most badass comeback story ever. Odysseus, alongside his boy, who hasn't he hasn't seen since he was a baby, alongside his friend who's poor and has nothing that took him in when he didn't even know who he was. Eumaeus probably was stoked. He was like, "I That that the whole time? Like, what a That's like, okay, as a dude, you're like, all right, I'm going to win my girl back with the help of my son and my homie that always rides for me and is just like a good dude in general. And then also like a shepherd cuz like we need another, you know, we need like we need to round out our our fourth. And then they kill all the traitors. And when it's over, the poem shows us its hero standing in the middle of it like just spattered head to foot and compares him to a lion that has just fed.

[00:08:11]And now And let me just say it, this is the part that gets a little uncomfortable. 12 of the palace's enslaved women, the ones judged disloyal, the ones who slept with the suitors, they're brought out. And uh Yeah, they're forced to remove the corpses. Some of them, the bodies of like their own lovers because, you know, these suitors were just in the palace for years this point and they slept with some of them, you know, the servants, the slaves. And then they scrub the blood from the tables and then finally Odysseus orders them to be killed with swords.

[00:08:46]It's a little brutal, but like it's a different time, all right? Imagine you got back from a 20-year journey, all right? You'd be a little bit like, You let these people in my house?

[00:08:54]I'm not going to defend killing defenseless women, but anyway, Telemachus decides that is too easy.

[00:09:01]It's too clean. No honorable death, he says, for these. So, he hangs them instead.

[00:09:08]It's kind of brutal, but that's what he does. It's in the story. I mean, it didn't really happen. It's in a epic poem by Homer. All 12 of them from a single ship's cable strung across the courtyard. The poem describes them in one of the most terrible images in all of ancient literature. This is how it they describe them. I'll read it verbatim. Like doves caught in a snare on their way home to the nest, their heads in a row, and their feet twitched for a little while.

[00:09:35]You don't love that, right? When you're reading the story of Odysseus, you're like, "Dude, I'm Odysseus. Like, I'm sailing around. I'm I'm pushing these these side pieces off of me, these sirens. Bang, get out of here." I'm I'm this woman's trying to sleep with me, turning me into a god. I say, "No, I got to get back to my baby girl."

[00:09:52]And then you get back there and then you're like, "Also, I'm going to kill these maids." You're like, "Ah."

[00:09:57]And then Odysseus has the survivors strike up music and dancing. He wants it loud, so anyone passing the palace will assume that the queen finally chose a husband and that this is like a big wedding feast and nobody comes asking about the missing men.

[00:10:11]So, the happy ending of like, "Oh yeah, Odysseus comes back and takes his girl back and everyone goes home."

[00:10:19]It's a bloodbath and a cover-up with music. And that is Odysseus's homecoming. But, the poem still isn't done because one person in that palace has not yet decided to believe her eyes.

[00:10:32]The last monster that Odysseus has to face is his own wife.

[00:10:37]So, Eurycleia runs upstairs. This is like the nurse that brought Odysseus up when he was just a boy and recognized him from the scar on his knee. And she's stoked. She's very giddy. She's she's excited to tell the queen. She's like, "Hey, great news, your husband's home and the suitors are all dead." And Penelope's response is complete disbelief.

[00:10:58]She comes downstairs, sits across the fire from the man himself, cleaned up a little bit, you know, restored-looking every inch like the king that he is, and she just stares at him. Now, remember when I said that Odysseus and his son basically fight to, you know, kill all the traitors, all the other suitors. Well, the reason his son recognizes him is because Odysseus literally, with the help of Athena, Athena basically reverts him back from being a beggar into being Odysseus himself, to being the king, to being the man that he always is, and he looks at his son and and literally pulls like a he pulls a Star Wars on him. He goes, "I am your father."

[00:11:34]And his son doesn't believe him. He's like, "No, you must be a god." And he says, "I'm not a god. I'm your daddy."

[00:11:39]And then the two of them basically conspire to kill all the other men that are in the palace. And that's how he convinces his son. But Penelope is still not convinced. So, she runs a test to see if it is truly Odysseus that is sitting before her.

[00:11:53]She basically says to one of her servants, "Hey, move my bed out of the chamber. Move it out of the bedroom."

[00:11:59]And Odysseus gets mad. He says, "That's not possible. I built that bed. That bed is rooted into a live olive tree.

[00:12:06]Literally, the bedpost is a real tree.

[00:12:09]You can't move the bed unless you cut the bed off of the tree. Who cut my bed off the tree?" And in that moment, Penelope realizes this is the real Odysseus because no one has been in the bed. The perfect symbolism. The bed is symbolic of their union, of their marriage, of this immovable object that only Odysseus and Penelope would truly know.

[00:12:29]And right there, with husband and wife finally reunited with their son, with their most loyalist, kindest friend, this is where a lot of ancient readers would be like, "All right, the poem's over, right?" Like the scholars who curated Homer's text at the Library of Alexandria marked that very line as the Odyssey's true endpoint. Everything after it they regarded with a lot of suspicion saying it might have been a later performer's addition kind of stitched into the classic. But what follows from that point, which for a lot of people is the actual end, is really weird.