Thanks to Athena’s magic, Odysseus initially does not recognize Ithaca; it seems like yet another unfamiliar and probably dangerous place. Once the divine mist disperses, Odysseus knows that he is on Ithaca, but we can also see that his initial suspicions were in many ways correct: Ithaca is indeed a dangerous and unfamiliar place, and there are real questions about how and when Odysseus might be able to transform it again into the home that he left behind.
A key part of his strategy for doing so is to test the loyalty and behavior of various members of his household. He appears in disguise to the key players, each in turn, and tests their responses to his own persona as a homeless migrant. Those who pass the test are to be incorporated into Odysseus’ plan and restored into the household; those who fail are killed. Thanks to the long process by which Odysseus gradually infiltrates his way into the community of Ithaca, he is able to assess who will help him, and whom he must destroy in order to reassert his own power over his home.
But it is unclear when Odysseus finally achieves his ends and reaches his home, if indeed this moment ever comes. Odysseus is reunited with Penelope, but the poem continues. We see the ghosts of the suitors travel down to the underworld and meet the spirits of Achilles and Agamemnon, which might have been a kind of ending; but the poem continues. We see Odysseus reunite with his old father, Laertes; but the poem continues. Fighting breaks out on Ithaca between Odysseus and his supporters, and the friends and family members of the dead suitors. The battle grows intense, and Odysseus is wild with martial rage; only thanks to the intervention of Athena does it stop. And there the poem ends.
Scholars since antiquity have been puzzled by the ending of The Odyssey. Two Homeric scholars of the Library of Alexandria in the third and second centuries BCE, Aristarchus of Samothrace and Aristophanes of Byzantium (not the comic playwright), argued that the poem really ended at the moment when Odysseus and Penelope go to bed together; on this model, the real ending is in Book 23, when the narrator tells us,
Finally, at last,
with joy the husband and the wife arrived
back in the rites of their old marriage bed. (23.293–95)
We do not know what grounds were given by these ancient scholars for treating the end of Book 23 and the whole of 24 as extraneous. Eustathius, a twelfth-century critic, tried to defend Book 24 on literary and semantic grounds, arguing that the recognition scene between Odysseus and his father is an essential element in the story.
Modern scholars have also argued about the “correct” or “original” place for the poem to end. Linguistic arguments have been made against Book 24, but these are highly debatable; Homer’s language, as we have seen, is always a mixture of words and phrases from many different dialects and periods. The episode involving the ghosts of the dead suitors is unusual—but the situation is also unusual. The encounter between Laertes and Odysseus seems cruel to some readers, since Odysseus has no need to “test” his father, now that the suitors are already dead; yet it is arguably not out of character for Odysseus, a person “addicted to deceit,” to keep spinning his lies even when they seem to serve no particular purpose.
Perhaps there are two related reasons that many readers have felt unsatisfied with the ending of The Odyssey. First, it feels less than definitive as a place to stop the story. More events will clearly happen after this conflict between the Ithacans and Odysseus, which is stopped only thanks to the convenient intervention of the goddess. Moreover, a curtailed battle does not feel like the proper culmination of a story of homecoming—unless Odysseus feels most at home when he is killing his fellow countrymen.
Both of these “problems” are perhaps precisely the point. The poem refuses to offer us a definitive moment at which home and peace are achieved, once and for all. Odysseus never sets aside his desire to fight and kill his fellow men, or his yearning to wander and be absent. According to the prophecy given by the dead spirit of the prophet Tiresias in Book 11, Odysseus will not remain and settle in Ithaca. He has at least one more journey to complete, to a land that is, from the perspective of the Greek islands, the strangest of alclass="underline" where nobody knows the sea, where people eat food without salt, and nobody has even seen a boat. He will know he has arrived when he meets “someone who calls the object on my back / a winnowing fan” (a tool used in preindustrial agriculture to separate wheat from chaff). Only in this utterly alien location, Tiresias suggests, can Odysseus finally put to rest the anger of Poseidon, the Lord of the Sea.
But even if he were ever to return from this obviously mythical location, one might wonder whether Odysseus would be able to settle down in peace and comfort in Ithaca—the land that would still be populated by the families of those Odysseus has killed. In antiquity, there were a number of legends about what happened to the protagonist after the poem ends—alternatives that may reflect ancient recognition of how little the last book wraps things up. One story tells that this criminally aggressive hero was sent into exile for killing the suitors. Other ancient stories express discomfort with Odysseus’ habit of committing adultery. We are told that he had a son by Circe, named Telegonus, who sailed in search of him and eventually killed him with a poisoned spear. Several stories provide alternative futures for Penelope: either she was killed by Odysseus himself for sleeping with Antinous the suitor; or, creepily, she married Odysseus’ son Telegonus; or she was spirited to Arcadia and seduced by the god Hermes, and became the mother of the god Pan. All of these stories seem to suggest dissatisfaction with the state of Odysseus and Penelope’s marriage, which is defined in the poem primarily by absence, pain, economic dependence, and mutual mistrust.
The Odyssey is in some ways like a fairy tale. “Bad” people are killed, and the “good” hero triumphs. But the poem is surprisingly clear-sighted about both the problematic tendencies of its own hero and its own dominant fantasy. Everybody likes the idea of a radical reversal of fortune, a surprising and long-delayed final victory, a settled, forever home. This is a text that allows us to explore our desire for power and for permanence, in the world of imagination, while also showing us the darker side of these deep human dreams, hopes, and fears.
Reception
In antiquity, Homer was traditionally said to have been a blind man from the Greek island of Chios. This popular idea is expressed in a poem from the sixth century BCE called the “Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo,” which tells how Apollo and his twin sister, Artemis, were born. Their mother, Leto, was pregnant with the twins by Zeus, and had to find a place to give birth: a hard task, since Zeus’ jealous wife, Hera, had made all lands on earth reject her. Finally Leto reached Delos, which was supposedly a floating island, unattached to the sea floor. Since this was a space unattached to the earth, the island welcomed the laboring goddess. Delos was rewarded with a special sanctuary to the god Apollo, who felt deep attachment to the island as the place of his birth. The poem ends by instructing the girls who worship Apollo on Delos to remember the poet who composed the present song: