Summary
Telemachus returns to town; Penelope questions him and Theoclymenus prophesies that Odysseus is already in Ithaca.
Eumaeus leads the disguised Odysseus to the town. On the road Melanthius the goatherd insults him and kicks him in the hip; Odysseus considers killing him and endures it.
At the gate lies Argos, the dog Odysseus reared before sailing for Troy, now old and neglected on a heap of dung. He knows his master, drops his ears, wags his tail, and lacks the strength to come; Odysseus wipes away a tear, and the dog dies.
Inside, Odysseus begs from the suitors table by table. Antinous refuses and throws a footstool at him, striking his shoulder. Odysseus does not react. Penelope, hearing of it, curses Antinous and asks that the stranger be brought to her; Odysseus asks to wait until evening.
Narrative function
Puts the king inside his own house as its lowest occupant, and begins the systematic accumulation of grievance that justifies Book 22.
Greek concepts in this book
- ptōchos
- Beggar — a status distinct from xenos, guest. The suitors' failure is that they treat a beggar as beneath the protection they owe a stranger.
- tlēmosynē
- Endurance, the capacity to bear. Book 17 is a sustained demonstration of it; Odysseus is repeatedly said to hold his anger down.
Connections to other books
Book 18 · Book 20 · Book 22
The pattern of an object thrown at the beggar recurs three times — a footstool here, another in 18, an ox-hoof in 20 — establishing a record of abuse before the killing.
Book 22
Melanthius's insult here is repaid with the poem's most brutal single punishment.
Source notes
The Argos scene (17.290-327) is twenty-odd lines long and has no consequence for the plot. It is among the most frequently cited passages in Greek literature and among the shortest.
Reading it responsibly
The dog knows him and cannot say so; the wife will not know him and can; the son has been told. The poem arranges recognition along a scale of capacity and evidence, and puts at the bottom of it the one creature with no interest, no doubt and no power. That the scene changes nothing is the reason it works.