Summary
Hermes leads the suitors' souls to the meadow of asphodel, where Achilles and Agamemnon are talking. The suitor Amphimedon tells their story; Agamemnon contrasts Penelope's fidelity with Clytemnestra's and declares that Penelope's fame will never die.
Odysseus goes to the farm where Laertes lives in squalor, working his orchard. He tests his father with yet another false story, watches him break down and pour dust on his head, and only then reveals himself — by the scar, and by naming the trees Laertes gave him when he was a boy: thirteen pear, ten apple, forty fig, and the rows of vines.
Rumour brings the suitors' families to the assembly. Eupeithes, father of Antinous, calls for vengeance. Halitherses and Medon warn them that the killing was done with the gods' assent; about half withdraw, the rest arm.
At the farm, Laertes, rejuvenated by Athena, kills Eupeithes with a spear-cast. As the fighting starts, Athena calls a halt; Zeus throws a thunderbolt at her feet; she imposes oaths of peace on both sides, in the likeness of Mentor. The poem ends there.
Narrative function
Closes the family across three generations and contains, by divine intervention, the feud the killing created.
Greek concepts in this book
- kleos
- Fame. Agamemnon's speech awards it to Penelope explicitly, and the poem's last word on reputation is about a woman's.
- horkos
- Oath. The poem does not end in reconciliation but in a sworn settlement imposed from outside.
Connections to other books
Book 1 · Book 3 · Book 11
The Agamemnon paradigm, introduced in Book 1 and repeated throughout, is finally resolved in his own mouth.
Book 11
Anticleia's report in Book 11 that Laertes has withdrawn to the country is answered by this reunion.
Book 22
The feud is the direct consequence of Book 22 and the poem does not pretend otherwise.
Source notes
The authenticity of Book 24 has been questioned since antiquity, in connection with the Alexandrian note at 23.296. Arguments against it cite the second underworld scene's inconsistency with Book 11 and some unusual language; arguments for it cite the structural necessity of resolving the feud and the reunion with Laertes that Book 11 sets up. There is no consensus, and this platform does not manufacture one.
Reading it responsibly
The ending is the part of the poem adaptations most often discard, and it is the part that makes the poem political rather than merely domestic. Killing a hundred and eight aristocrats does not restore order; it starts a war. Homer's Odysseus does not solve this. Athena does, by force, in the last hundred lines. The peace of Ithaca is imposed, not earned — and reading the poem as though it ended with the marriage bed removes the one thing it says about what violence costs a community.