Summary
Odysseus lies awake in the porch, watching the maids go out laughing to the suitors, and his heart growls within him like a bitch standing over her puppies. He rebukes it and endures. Athena comes and tells him to sleep.
Penelope, waking, prays to Artemis for death rather than a second marriage. Odysseus hears her and asks Zeus for a sign; Zeus thunders from a clear sky, and a woman grinding grain — the last still working, the weakest of them — prays that this may be the suitors' final meal.
The cowherd Philoetius arrives and declares his loyalty. Melanthius insults the beggar again. An omen of an eagle with a dove turns the suitors from a renewed plot against Telemachus.
At dinner Ctesippus throws an ox-hoof at the beggar as a mock guest-gift; Telemachus rebukes him publicly. Athena sets uncontrollable laughter on the suitors. The seer Theoclymenus sees the hall filled with darkness, the walls and rafters running with blood, and the porch crowded with ghosts going down to Erebus. The suitors laugh at him and he walks out.
Narrative function
Holds the poem still for one night and loads it with omens, so that Book 22 arrives as something long announced.
Greek concepts in this book
- thymos
- The seat of anger and impulse. Odysseus addressing his own thymos and telling it to endure is one of the earliest depictions in European literature of a person divided against himself.
- kledōn
- An omen taken from overheard speech. The grinding woman's prayer is one, and the poem makes the weakest person present the source of the sign.
Connections to other books
Book 22
Theoclymenus's vision describes Book 22 in advance, and is laughed at.
Book 21
The night ends with the morning of the contest.
Source notes
The address to his own heart at 20.18-21 was quoted in antiquity as a model of self-command; Plato cites the lines in the Republic in the course of arguing that the soul has parts that can disagree.
Reading it responsibly
The poem's technique here is to make the coming violence inevitable in every register at once — divine sign, human prophecy, the prayer of a slave, and the hero's own barely-restrained rage. By the time the killing begins, the poem has arranged for it to feel less like a decision than like weather.