Peace in Ithaca

Hermes leads the souls of the dead suitors down to Hades, where they meet the ghosts of Achilles and Agamemnon. Agamemnon, who began the poem's parallel back in Book 3, hears the story of Penelope's twenty-year fidelity and contrasts it bitterly with his own wife's betrayal. The poem closes its parallel here: Penelope is the answer to Clytemnestra; Odysseus is the answer to Agamemnon; the homecoming has come out right. Up in Ithaca, Odysseus walks out to the country farm where his old father Laertes has retreated in grief and let his life run down.

Laertes is in the orchard, planting a tree, dressed in rough farm clothes, looking like a slave. Odysseus does not reveal himself at once — he tests the old man, the way he has tested everyone. Eventually he says enough — he names the trees Laertes once gave him as a child, the thirteen pear trees, the ten apple trees, the forty figs — and Laertes faints from joy in his arms. It is the last and gentlest of the recognitions. Then trouble. The families of the slain suitors gather, armed, to take revenge.

They march on Laertes's farm. Odysseus and Telemachus and the old man arm themselves; Laertes himself, in armor, fights for the first time in years. The battle begins. Athena calls a halt. She speaks in the voice of Mentor and orders both sides to stop. Zeus throws a thunderbolt at her feet to underline the order. Both sides put down their weapons. The poem ends — not at the moment of the slaughter, not at the recognition, but at the moment of civic peace, with the king back on his throne and the families of the dead suitors no longer his enemies.