Summary
At an assembly Alcinous arranges entertainment for the unnamed guest. The blind bard Demodocus sings of a quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles. Odysseus covers his head and weeps; only Alcinous notices.
Games follow. A young Phaeacian, Euryalus, taunts the stranger as a merchant rather than an athlete. Odysseus throws the discus far beyond the rest and delivers an angry speech about the difference between looks and speech.
Demodocus sings a second song, the comic tale of Ares and Aphrodite caught in Hephaestus's net.
Odysseus asks for a third: the wooden horse. Demodocus sings it, and Odysseus weeps again. The poem compares him to a woman clinging to her husband's body on a battlefield as she is beaten and led away into slavery. Alcinous stops the song and asks his guest, at last, who he is.
Narrative function
Forces the revelation of identity by making the hero the audience of his own legend, and supplies the poem's own account of what poetry does.
Greek concepts in this book
- aoidos
- Bard, singer. Demodocus is a professional with a fixed social place, honoured and dependent; the poem's self-portrait, insofar as it has one.
- kleos
- Fame as something heard. Book 8 shows kleos arriving at its subject, and it is unbearable.
Connections to other books
Book 4
The wooden horse is told here to Odysseus and in Book 4 to his son; the poem never narrates it directly.
Book 9
Alcinous's question at the end of Book 8 is answered by the opening of Book 9 — 'I am Odysseus.'
Book 1
Phemius on Ithaca and Demodocus here are a matched pair: two bards, one singing under duress, one honoured.
Source notes
The quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles sung at 8.72-82 is not an episode we possess; it is either lost tradition or invented for the moment. The Ares and Aphrodite song (8.266-366) has been suspected as an interpolation since antiquity, largely on grounds of tone.
Reading it responsibly
The widow simile at 8.523-531 is the most morally serious thing in the poem. The sacker of cities weeps at the song of his own greatest triumph, and the poem finds its image for his grief in the person his triumph destroyed. The comparison is not decoration. It is the poem taking the measure of its own hero's fame from the far side.