The slaughter of the suitors

Odysseus throws off his rags, leaps onto the threshold, and announces himself. The doors are locked. Telemachus and Eumaeus and Philoetius bring weapons from the storeroom. Antinous goes first — Odysseus shoots him through the throat as he lifts a wine cup, and the cup falls and the wine pools red across the floor. Eurymachus tries to negotiate, blames everything on Antinous, offers compensation in cattle and bronze; Odysseus refuses and kills him. The other suitors scatter, find no weapons, and try to fight with the furniture.

Melanthius the disloyal goatherd tries to bring weapons in from a hidden store but is caught by Eumaeus and Philoetius and tied up in the rafters. Athena appears for a moment as a swallow on a beam, watching. The fight goes one way: Odysseus and his three companions, armored, against unarmed men. When it is done, the great hall is stacked with bodies. The disloyal maids — twelve of them, the ones who have been sleeping with the suitors — are made to clean the blood from the floor and then are hanged in the courtyard. Melanthius is mutilated and killed.

The hall is fumigated with sulphur. The violence is told without flinching, but also without celebration. The poem has spent five chapters making the suitors specific people — Antinous's particular cruelty, Eurymachus's smoothness, Amphinomus's near-conscience — so that you cannot read this chapter as a simple satisfaction. They are men, and they die badly, and the moral logic of xenia says they had to die. The poem holds both at once: the necessity of the slaughter and the cost of it.