(Day 38 of the poem's main action, the late afternoon and evening of the festival of Apollo; the great hall, courtyard, and inner enclosure of the palace at Ithaca)

Ulysses lifts the great bow and leaps from the stool to the stone threshold of the megaron, pours out the arrows from the quiver around his feet, no longer the bowed beggar but the king visible. Now I shall try another mark — one Apollo himself may grant me. He sets an arrow on the string, sights, and shoots Antinous through the throat just as he is raising the gold double-cup to his lips. The cup falls; the arrow's point comes out the back of the neck; a great dark gout of blood gushes from his nostrils; his foot kicks the table over and the meat and bread tumble into the dust mixed with the blood. The suitors leap up shouting — what is this? you fool of a stranger, you have killed the best youth in Ithaca; you will be torn by vultures — running to the walls for weapons and finding none, the racks empty since the night before.

Ulysses stands forward. Dogs — you had thought I would not come back. You ate up my house; you courted my wife while I lived; you feared neither the gods in heaven nor the wrath of men on earth. The day of your death has come. The colour drains out of every face. Eurymachus the chief of the smooth-tongued steps forward. If you are Ulysses come home, all you say is true; the wrongs have been many. But it was Antinous who led us — Antinous wanted the kingdom and the killing of Telemachus, not the marriage; and now he lies dead. Spare us; we will pay every one twenty oxen, give you back bronze and gold in full, until your heart is content. Ulysses: Eurymachus, all the inheritance of all your fathers would not buy me off your blood; fight or fly, but the way out of this hall today is by death. Eurymachus turns to the room: gentlemen, the man will not stay his hand; we must charge him. Draw what swords you have; lift the tables for shields; rush the threshold. He draws his bronze blade and runs with a cry. Ulysses shoots him in the chest by the nipple, the arrow lodges in the liver; the sword falls; Eurymachus doubles over a table and drops to the floor, his forehead beating the ground in the death-throe.

Amphinomus, the decent one, draws and rushes the threshold. Telemachus catches him from behind between the shoulder-blades with a spear-thrust; the point comes out through the chest; Amphinomus falls heavily, striking his forehead on the ground. Telemachus, leaving the spear in the body to keep its weight away from him, runs to his father at the threshold and says: I will fetch shields and spears and helmets from the store-room. Ulysses: go — quickly, while I have arrows. Telemachus runs up to the store-room and brings down four shields, eight spears, four bronze crested helmets, and arms himself, Eumaeus, and Philoetius. Ulysses keeps shooting from the threshold, dropping a man with every arrow, until the arrows are gone — then sets the bow against the door-post, slings a four-hide ox-shield across his shoulders, puts on the helmet with the horse-hair crest, takes two long bronze-pointed spears. The four men stand in line at the threshold.

Telemachus, in haste, has left the door of the store-room open. Agelaus son of Damastor proposes: someone go up to the side-door of the courtyard, call in to the town for help, and let us know whether any of these other doors will yield us arms. Melanthius the goatherd, who knows the house, slips up through the side-door of the women's quarters to the high store-room, and through the door Telemachus left ajar. He brings down twelve shields, twelve spears, twelve helmets and gives them out to the suitors; they begin to arm. Ulysses watching from below sees the arms appearing in the suitors's hands and his heart sinks for a moment: there is treachery in the house — someone is bringing weapons. Telemachus: father, I left the store-room door open; the fault is mine; let us send to find who is doing it. Eumaeus goes up to the store-room and finds Melanthius coming back for a second load. Eumaeus and Philoetius set on him, drag him to the floor, bind his hands and feet behind his back with the painful binding, throw a rope round him under the armpits and hoist him up by it to a high beam of the store-room, leaving him hanging there alive against the rafter. Eumaeus: Melanthius, you will lie soft tonight in the best bed for goatherds; you will not miss the morning when you have to drive the goats in for the suitors' dinner — it is a different kind of dawn waiting for you. They lock the store-room behind them and come back down armed.

Athena now appears at Ulysses's side in the form of Mentor, his old comrade. Ulysses recognises her at once but plays out the formal greeting. Agelaus shouts: Mentor, do not let this man win you to his side with words; if you fight with him you will die with him, and we will burn down your house and take your wife and children and exile them. Athena, in Mentor's voice, turns on Ulysses with a sharp public reproach (for the sake of the suitors's encouragement): Ulysses, where is the strength I knew at Troy? where is the man who fought nine years in the front line for Helen? Why so faint here, in your own house? The reproach is a test. Ulysses sets his teeth. Athena, not yet willing to do the work for them, flies up to the roof-beam in the form of a swallow and perches there to watch.

The five strongest of the surviving suitors — Agelaus, Eurynomus, Amphimedon, Demoptolemus, Peisander, Polybus — gather under Agelaus's lead. Throw spears together, in one volley, against the four — but throw at Ulysses first; the rest will follow. They throw. Athena makes every spear go wide: one strikes the door-post, one the lintel, one the wall. Ulysses calls the answering volley: now. Four spears go: Ulysses kills Demoptolemus, Telemachus kills Euryades, Eumaeus kills Elatus, Philoetius kills Peisander. They run forward, pull the spears out of the bodies, and retreat to the threshold. A second suitor-volley follows: Amphimedon's spear grazes Telemachus's wrist; Ctesippus's spear scrapes a long shallow cut along Eumaeus's shoulder above the shield-rim. Both wounds are slight, as Athena turned the points aside. The answering volley: Ulysses kills Eurydamas, Telemachus kills Amphimedon, Eumaeus kills Polybus the son of Polyctor, Philoetius kills Ctesippus with the great breast-wound and stands over the body. There, son of Polytherses, you ribald jester — that is for the ox-foot you threw at my master last night; you would not give a bigger gift, so I have given you this one back.

Ulysses now closes with Agelaus and runs him through. Telemachus runs Leiocritus son of Evenor through the belly with the spear-point coming clean out the back; the man falls flat. Athena now lifts her aegis from the high roof-beam — the destroying aegis of the gods that breaks the courage of mortal men. The hearts go out of every remaining suitor. They flee through the megaron as a herd of cattle when the brown gadfly comes upon them in spring at the cattle-stations, scattering. Ulysses and his three men go through them — as eagle-beaked, crook-taloned vultures from the mountains stoop on a flock of small birds and the little ones are driven down out of the cloud cover into the plain and the killers strike them from above and the small birds have no defence and no escape. The four kill them in the hall, by the doors, in the corners. The floor seethed with the running blood.

Leiodes the diviner, the decent one among them, runs to Ulysses and clasps his knees. Have mercy on me, Ulysses son of Laertes; I was your priest, I sat among them as sacrificer, I never lifted my hand against a woman of your house, I held the others back. Ulysses: and yet you sat with them; you prayed often enough that I should not come home, that you might have my wife. There is no mercy for that. Die. He takes up Agelaus's fallen sword and strikes Leiodes on the back of the neck; the head rolls in the dust while the man was still speaking.

Phemius the bard, who has been forced through the years to sing for the suitors, stands by the side-door clutching his lyre and trying to decide whether to bolt for the altar of Jove in the outer court or to throw himself at the king's knees. He lays the lyre down between a mixing-bowl and a silver-studded chair and runs to Ulysses, clasps his knees. Spare me, Ulysses; you would be sorry afterwards to have killed a bard who sings for gods and men. I came here under force; Telemachus himself will tell you I did not want to sing for them; the suitors were too many for me, they brought me in. Telemachus is by Ulysses already. Father, do not kill him — he is a man without fault; spare him; and Medon the herald too, who was always kind to me when I was a child. The herald Medon, hidden under a freshly flayed ox-hide beneath a chair, throws off the hide and runs to Telemachus's knees. Ulysses smiles: Telemachus's word is the word; both go to the outer courtyard, and sit by Jove's altar. The two go out into the courtyard and sit at the altar trembling.

Ulysses walks once through the hall to be sure no live man is hidden. The dead are like fish that fishermen have netted out of the grey sea, dragged up onto the beach, lying gasping in the sun for water and the heat of the sun makes an end of them, piled in heaps — the suitors lie piled across the hall.

He sends Telemachus to fetch the nurse Eurycleia. She comes — sees Ulysses standing in the middle of the dead bodies covered in blood like a lion that has been devouring an ox, breast and cheeks gore-stained, his eyes terrible; she starts up to cry out in triumph. Ulysses: rejoice in your heart, old nurse, but not aloud — it is not holy to triumph over dead men; the gods's doom and their own evil deeds have brought these men down. Now name to me, of the women of this house, which were loyal and which were not. Eurycleia: of the fifty women in the household, twelve have gone the wrong way — they slept with the suitors, they insulted me and the queen; the others held to their work. Ulysses: call them out — call out the twelve.

The twelve are called from the women's quarters into the hall. They come weeping and wailing. Ulysses sets them to the work of carrying out the bodies of the suitors — prop them upright against each other in the gateway — and then to sponging down the chairs and the tables, and shovelling the blood and dust off the floor; Telemachus and the men shovel the blood-soaked earth out the door. The hall is washed clean. Then Telemachus speaks for himself: I will not let these women die a clean death by the sword — they who insulted my mother and slept with the suitors. He takes a great ship's hawser, makes one end fast to a high column-post of the colonnade, throws the other end up over a roof-beam high enough that no foot will touch the ground, and ties twelve nooses along its length. The twelve women stand under the nooses. Their heads are put through one after another. And they kicked a little, in the cable as a thrush or a dove kicks when it finds itself caught in a net set among the bushes near its nest, looking for shelter and finding death — they kicked a little, but only for a short while.

Last, Melanthius is brought down from the rafter of the store-room into the inner court. His nose and ears are cut off with the cruel bronze; his vitals are pulled out and given raw to the dogs; his hands and feet are cut off in the men's rage and thrown after them. Then the hands of the four killers are washed.

Ulysses asks Eurycleia for sulphur and fire to purify the hall — for there is much pollution here. She brings sulphur in a bowl. She begs to dress him in clean clothes first; it is not right to stand among the women still in these rags. He: first the fire and the cleansing. He burns the sulphur and the smoke fills the hall and the cloisters and the courtyard, the cleansing of pollution. Then Eurycleia goes up to the women's quarters and brings down the faithful women — the maids and the servants who had held to the house through twenty years — and they come down with the torches lit in their hands and pour around Ulysses weeping and embracing him and kissing his head and his hands and his shoulders. He knows each one by name, weeps, accepts them. The household is his again.

Analysis

Chapter 0072 — Analysis

The book the poem has been pointing at

Book 22 is the book the poem has been pointing at since book 1. The slaughter of the suitors — the Mnesterophonia in its Greek technical name, the killing of the wooers — is the resolution of the kleos problem the Iliad set and the nostos problem the Odyssey has been working through. It is also the book that has caused the most moral discomfort to the poem's modern readers. The killing of the suitors makes sense to ancient xenia-logic and to Bronze-Age aristocratic-revenge logic; the hanging of the twelve maids does not, or does not in the same way; the mutilation of Melanthius does not at all. The poem has built the moral case carefully across nine books, but it ends on three different registers of violence that the reader is asked to hold together.

The first arrow

The first kill is one of the most efficient pieces of plot-work in Greek literature. Antinous, drinking the gold cup, is shot through the throat as he lifts it. The cup falls; the meat scatters; the blood mixes with the food on the floor. The image is the inverse of every banquet-scene the Odyssey has shown. Eating-becomes-being-eaten, the body of the suitor becomes the meal he was enjoying. The first arrow is also the first divine sanction: now I shall try another mark — one Apollo may grant me. The festival of Apollo is the day; the bow of Eurytus is in the hand of the archer; the first kill is announced as the archer-god's gift. The Odyssey gives the killing the religious frame it needs.

Eurymachus's negotiation

The poem allows Eurymachus a moment of negotiation. He blames Antinous (who is already dead and cannot answer), offers payment, asks for mercy. Ulysses refuses with the absolute fight or fly. The exchange establishes the moral logic of the killing: this is not negotiable; xenia-breach is not paid off with cattle; the door of repair is closed. The negotiation-and-refusal motif is the foundational template of every later "no mercy for the wicked" scene in Western literature. Aeneid 12's killing of Turnus (where Turnus also offers negotiation and is refused, by Aeneas seeing the baldric of Pallas) is the direct Latin rewriting.

The choreography of the four

The poem is at its most technically excellent in the choreography of the four men at the threshold. Telemachus runs for arms; Ulysses keeps the suitors back with the bow; the door is held; the volleys are coordinated; the named kills are distributed (Ulysses-Demoptolemus, Telemachus-Euryades, Eumaeus-Elatus, Philoetius-Peisander; the pattern repeats). The four are presented as a small disciplined unit against a hundred amateurs. The Odyssey is interested in organisation as the form of victory — the four trained men beat the hundred undisciplined ones because the four work as a unit. The lesson is Bronze-Age military but also classical-Greek polis: the well-ordered few defeat the disorganised many.

Athena as Mentor and as swallow

Athena's two appearances in this book — first as Mentor with the sharp reproach to Ulysses, then as a swallow on the high beam — are the poem's clearest single statement about divine restraint. The goddess could end the fight in one gesture; she does not. She wants the killers to do the killing themselves, that the kleos may be theirs. The aegis is held back until the suitors are already broken; only at the end does she lift the aegis to scatter the panicked remnant. The figure of the goddess as swallow on the rafter is one of the strangest in the poem — the supreme deity has become a small bird and is watching her favourite fight. The image will be picked up in later Greek and Roman art (the Athena Promachos tradition; the swallow-on-rafter motif in early Christian iconography of the watching angel).

Leiodes and Phemius and Medon

The poem distinguishes three categories of bystanders within the suitor-faction. Leiodes the diviner — who has been the decent suitor through several books, who prayed and failed, who tried to hold the others back — is killed without mercy, because he sat with them. Phemius the bard — who was forced to sing for them under threat — is spared because force is the morally relevant fact; his lyre is given the careful detail of being set down between mixing-bowl and chair before he runs to Ulysses's knees. Medon the herald — who has been quietly loyal across many books (he tipped off Penelope about the murder-council in book 16) — is spared at Telemachus's intercession. The three figures form the poem's moral architecture of complicity, coercion, and quiet loyalty. The lesson is precise: you cannot remain a decent member of a vicious faction; Leiodes's refusal-to-leave is what makes him as guilty as Antinous. Phemius and Medon were not members; they were captives or servants; they are spared.

The hanging of the twelve maids

The hanging of the twelve maids is the passage in the Odyssey most discussed in modern criticism. The execution is performed by Telemachus, not by Ulysses. The method — the ship's hawser tied as a horizontal rope-with-twelve-nooses suspended high enough that the women's feet cannot touch — is a deliberately unclean form of death (as opposed to the clean sword-death of the suitors). Telemachus says explicitly I will not let these women die a clean death; the choice of execution is gendered, class-marked, and moralised. The simile of the thrushes-and-doves caught in a fowler's net adds the further note that the women are small birds compared to the suitors's larger battle-deaths; the natural-history image is the poem's most disturbing comparison. Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad (2005) is the most sustained modern response to this passage. The question whether the poem endorses the executions or merely narrates them has no settled answer; the poem gives the executions to Telemachus, not to Ulysses, perhaps holding the hero at one remove from the most morally compromised act.

Melanthius's mutilation

The mutilation of Melanthius is the only act of cruelty in the book the poem does not narrate as the natural conclusion of xenia-breach. The cutting off of nose and ears, the pulling-out of vitals for the dogs, the cutting of hands and feet in the men's rage — these are not the actions of justice; they are vengeance in the rage-register that the Odyssey has been carefully holding back across nine books. The brief sentence in their fury admits as much: Eumaeus and Philoetius, who have been disciplined and loyal across many books, are at last allowed one moment of rage at the man who insulted them and their master. The poem grants them this. The reader is asked to take it. Modern readings are divided.

Eurycleia silenced

The detail of Ulysses silencing Eurycleia from crying out in triumph — rejoice in your heart, but not aloud; it is not holy to triumph over dead men — is the poem's most surprising single moral statement. The hero who has just killed a hundred and eight men silences his old nurse from cheering. The line the gods's doom and their own evil deeds brought these men down is the Odyssey's clearest single statement that the killing was fated, not celebrated. The line will be quoted by Aeschylus's chorus (Agamemnon passim), by Sophocles (Ajax on celebration over the fallen), by every later moral handbook on the discipline of victory. The Iliad's heroes triumph over their kills (Achilles dragging Hector); the Odyssey's hero refuses the triumph and silences it in his own house.

The purification

The book ends with sulphur burned through the hall and the courtyard. The detail is religiously precise: the hall has been polluted by blood and must be ritually cleansed before the household can resume. The faithful maids come down with torches and weep around the master. The pollution-and-purification is the form the closing of the book takes. The Odyssey is the only Western text that closes its great violence with a ritual cleansing; Greek tragedy will inherit this (Orestes's purification after the matricide); the miasma / katharsis topos passes into Christian liturgical traditions.

Butler's prose at the slaughter

Butler is at his best in the technical detail and at his weakest in the great similes. The arming of the four, the choreography of the volleys, the named kills, the choice of weapons, the door-bolting, the trap-door, the cleaning of the floor — all of this Butler renders with the calm of a war correspondent. The vulture-simile of the killing, the fish-on-beach simile of the dead, the thrush-and-dove simile of the hanged maids — Butler renders these without elevation, and the result is sometimes more affecting than Pope's high music. The mutilation of Melanthius Butler renders flatly: they cut off his nose and ears with the cruel bronze. The flat prose is the right register for this scene.

What to watch for

• Antinous shot at the cup — the first arrow as religious-aesthetic gesture.
• Eurymachus's negotiation and refusal — the moral foundation of the slaughter's absolute logic.
• The choreography of the four against the hundred — discipline as the form of victory.
• Athena as Mentor and as swallow — divine restraint; the gods want the killers to do the killing.
• Leiodes, Phemius, Medon — the poem's three categories of bystander (complicit, coerced, loyal).
• The hanging of the twelve maids by Telemachus on the ship's hawser — the most morally contested passage in the poem.
• The mutilation of Melanthius — the in their fury admitted into the moral structure.
• Eurycleia silenced — rejoice in your heart, but not aloud.
• The sulphur-cleansing — the ritual closure of pollution.

Echoes across the cycle

Chapter 0072 — Echoes Across the Cycle

Backward echoes

The slaughter is the structural answer to the Iliad's combat. The Iliad ends with the death of Hector and the funeral games; the Odyssey's slaughter is the warrior at last in his own house, fighting not other warriors on a plain but men who have broken the law of his household. The vulture-simile of the killers reaches back to the Iliad's repeated bird-of-prey similes for warriors in battle (Iliad 16's eagle, Iliad 17's vultures), but transposed from battlefield to hall. The fish-on-beach simile of the dead reaches back to Iliad 21's river-of-corpses (Achilles in the Scamander) but compressed.

The bow itself reaches back to the xenia-betrayed history of Iphitus and Heracles (set up in book 21): the same weapon that was given in a xenia-encounter and then dishonoured by Heracles's xenia-betrayal is now used to punish men who have themselves dishonoured xenia in the giver's own house. The full closing of the bow's biographical loop is complete.

Antinous shot through the throat at the cup reaches back to Agamemnon's death at the feast (Odyssey 11 and earlier tellings) and to the long-standing tradition of the host killing the bad guest at the table. The motif is also the inversion of Aegisthus's killing of Agamemnon at the welcome-feast — here the rightful king kills the bad guests at his own welcome-feast, the nostos turned right side up.

The Leiodes figure reaches back to Amphinomus of book 18: both are the decent men in the bad faction; both are warned by what they themselves know; both die in the slaughter; both are mourned by the poem in their brief individual scenes.

Forward echoes

• The Mnesterophonia is the foundational act of Western literature's category of the rightful king returning to clean his house. The pattern survives intact: Aeneid 10–12 (Aeneas's killing of Mezentius and Turnus); medieval romance's many restored-king-slays-usurpers episodes; Shakespeare's Hamlet (the killing in the hall, the cleaning of the court); every Western political fantasy of restoration.
• The killing of Antinous at the cup is the precise model for Virgil's killing of Turnus at the close of Aeneid 12: the negotiation, the offer, the refusal, the killing in cold blood. Virgil also rewrites the bath-Aegisthus motif (Cassandra's vision in Agamemnon) through Odyssey 22.
• Eurymachus's negotiation as a model of unsuccessful supplication is the foundational scene-type of the failed-prayer-for-life tradition in classical tragedy. Hector's plea to Achilles in Iliad 22 (also rejected); Priam's successful plea in Iliad 24 (accepted because of grief); Turnus's plea in Aeneid 12 (rejected because of Pallas's baldric). The Iliadic-Odyssean-Virgilian trilogy is the foundation of every later supplication-scene in Western literature.
• The hanging of the twelve maids is the passage of the poem most contested in modern scholarship and the most extensively rewritten in modern literature. Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad (2005) gives the twelve maids their own voice as the suppressed chorus of the poem; Louise Glück's Meadowlands (1996) reads the slaughter from the wives's side; Emily Wilson's translation (2017) renders the scene with deliberate awareness of its violence ("their feet kicked, but not for long"); a generation of feminist-classical criticism (Helene Foley, Lillian Doherty, Nancy Felson-Rubin) has read the maids's hanging as the poem's most morally compromised single passage. The Odyssey's careful preparation of the maids's complicity (Melantho in books 18 and 19, Eurycleia's report in book 22) is the poem's defence; modern readers do not all accept it.
• The mutilation of Melanthius is the only passage of the poem the commentary tradition has been uncomfortable with since antiquity. The Hellenistic scholarchs (Aristarchus, Zenodotus) were already suggesting some lines might be later additions; modern commentators (G. S. Kirk, A. Heubeck) read it as the poem's deliberate moment of admitted-but-unjustifiable fury.
• Athena as swallow on the rafter is taken up by early Christian iconography of the watching angel (the dove on the beam) and by countless later "divine observer" tropes.
• Eurycleia silenced from triumph — rejoice in your heart, but not aloud; it is not holy to triumph over dead men — is one of the foundational texts of the Western tradition's ethics of victory. Cited by Plato (Republic on the proper attitude after victory), by the Stoics (Marcus Aurelius on triumph as vanity), by Augustine, by Augustine's medieval inheritors, by every later moral handbook on the de mortuis nil nisi bonum and the parcere subjectis et debellare superbos (Aeneid 6.853, spare the conquered and beat down the proud).
• The sulphur cleansing is the foundational passage on miasma (pollution by bloodshed) and katharsis (purification) in Greek religious-literary tradition. Aeschylus's Eumenides (Orestes purified by Apollo at Delphi after the matricide); Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus (Oedipus's purification at the grove); every later tragic-purification scene; the Christian liturgical traditions of incense and asperges as cleansing of polluted space all draw on the Odyssean prototype.
• The killing of the suitors ends the Trojan cycle in its broadest sense. The Iliad opened with the wrath of Achilles for one woman; the Posthomerica closed Troy; the Aeneid founded Rome out of Troy's ashes; the Odyssey closes the war's nostos by killing the men who threatened the war-hero's home. The four-poem cycle ends here.

Cast in this chapter

Chapter 0072 — Cast In This Chapter

On stage

• Odysseus — "Ulysses"; throws off the rags, shoots Antinous through the throat, refuses Eurymachus's negotiation, holds the threshold with bow and then with spear and shield, kills Leiodes himself, smiles at Telemachus's mercy for Phemius and Medon, silences Eurycleia from triumph, calls for the sulphur to cleanse the hall
• Telemachus — kills Amphinomus with the spear from behind, fetches the arms from the store-room (leaves the door open), grazes Amphimedon's spear, intercedes for Phemius and for Medon, hangs the twelve maids on the ship's hawser, kills Leiocritus through the belly
• Athena — "Minerva"; appears as Mentor with the public reproach to Ulysses, then flies up to a roof-beam in the form of a swallow to watch, deflects the suitors's spears, lifts the aegis at the end to break their courage
• Eumaeus — armed by Telemachus, kills Elatus and Polybus, captures and hoists Melanthius into the rafter, performs the mutilation, weeps with the faithful maids
• Eurycleia — fetched by Telemachus from the women's quarters, finds Ulysses standing among the corpses like a blood-stained lion, silenced from her cry of triumph, identifies the twelve disloyal maids, brings sulphur for the cleansing
• Antinous — the first killed, shot through the throat as he raises the cup

Mentioned / off-stage

• Zeus — "Jove"; Phemius and Medon sit at his altar in the outer court at the end
• Apollo — invoked by Ulysses as the patron of the first shot; the festival is his

Non-cast named figures: Eurymachus son of Polybus (the second killed, the negotiator); Amphinomus son of Nisus (killed from behind by Telemachus; the decent suitor whom Ulysses had warned in book 18); Philoetius the cowherd (kills Peisander and Ctesippus, gives the great taunt about the ox-foot); Agelaus son of Damastor (the leader of the surviving suitors, killed by Ulysses); Demoptolemus, Euryades, Elatus, Peisander, Eurynomus, Amphimedon, Polybus son of Polyctor, Eurydamas, Ctesippus son of Polytherses of Same, Leiocritus son of Evenor (the named dead suitors); Leiodes the diviner (begs at the knees, is killed); Phemius son of Terpes the bard (spared at Telemachus's word); Medon the herald (spared, hidden under the ox-hide); Melanthius son of Dolius (brings arms to the suitors, captured, hoisted to the rafter, later mutilated); Mentor (Athena's chosen form); the twelve unfaithful maids (hanged on the ship's hawser); the faithful women of the household (come down weeping to embrace Ulysses at the cleansing).

---

This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.