Preliminaries: Some images to help you visualize the final events in the palace in Ithaca

1. What the "great hall" looks like in Mycenean palace: this is the sort of room where the suitors are killed:

2. How a great lady (such as Penelope) is depicted in Mycenean art (a wall fresco from Tiryns):

3. The composite bow: what it looked like, and a coin image showing the difficulty of stringing such a bow:

4. One model for how the axes might have been arranged that Odysseus shoots through:

1. Why do people think the "original" Odyssey may end at 23.296 (=Fagles line 338):

¶ what is so unsatisfactory about the ending?

¶ think esp. about Amphimedon's report to Agamemnon in the underworld; the treatment of Laertes by Odysseus; the ways the ending does or does not hang together with what precedes

2. Justice, gods, and revenge

a. Athena

• both an Olympian goddess who exists independently: separately and externally from Odysseus and Telemachus and Penelope
• and at the same time a kind of projection of each individual's internal thought processes (never makes Od. & family do or think anything alien to what seems their "independent" emotional or intellectual predisposition)

e.g. Mentor/Athena in book 1: Od. is "among savage men": not true: but certainly what Telemachus is disposed to think

or even Odyssey 15, dream: does Athena tells T.something he doesn't know, or is this T.'s anxiety that h ewill be ambushed on his way home?

b. Does justice come from the gods?

• Justice of Zeus: p. 311 (Cretan tale #2): but this is just a STORY
• Once again: the initial theological statement: pp. 78-9
• So does Odysseus do these things or does Athena contrive that he do all this? Who's in control? (no simple answer!)

Revenge on the suitors: a just act?

• p. 440: the charges
• p. 441: note Eurymachus' argument, and how he tries to escapethe blame: Antinous made us do it (cf. Zeus' complaint thatmen always say a god made us do it)
• The "blood wedding": #1 Antinous: p. 439-440: where else have we seen "bread and meats soaked in a swirl of bloody filth"?(e.g. p. 263: "we sprawled by the mixing-bowl and loadedtables, throughout the palace, the whole floor awash withblood"; but also, interestingly, the Cyclops!). #2 Eurymachus. But #3 perhaps a surprise: Amphinomus: why?
• The last to die: p. 449: what scene does this reflect? (Iliad: Lycaon!)
• What's the tone of all this? Who is saved? Note esp. 450,lines 382ff: the comedy (!)
• p. 452 top: Odysseus represents himself as the instrument of divine justice. Does this hold? Are we as readers convinced?
• Several themes converge, but in a complex way, with lots of cross-currents and backwaters: cosmic order, establishment of civilization throughout the (known) Greek world, recognition of Zeus Xenios and the sense of final divine justice in this newly ordered world

4. Recognition, acknowledgement, identity

• In romantic terms, this is a dream come true: see the nurse's version: p. 457
• But in real terms, more like a nightmare: blood everywhere, twelve maidens a-dangling, the mutilated corpse of the goatherd; yes, a returned husband, a lion, but one who, for all his valor, is dressed in rags, "splattered with bloody filth", cruel in his revenge (like a god?). What has Penelope awoken to??
• Read through pp. 457-459: Then Od. turns away from her, dresses (what happens with P. in the meantime?) and then the test:p. 461 top. Finally, the appeal to the paradigm of Helen, p. 462 (NOT, notice, of Clytemnestra!) Why Helen, of all people??

Fred Ahl and Hanna Roisman (Odyssey Re-formed) make a useful distinction between recognition and acknowledgement. Recognition seems to come slowly, in stages, and acknowledgement deferred.

The million dollar question: why is Penelope so slow to acknowledge her recognition of Odysseus?

• -plot verisimilitude: possible intimidation from thecircumstances: is she on trial? does Od. trust her loyalty orwill she be summarily executed like her handmaidens?
• -psychological verisimilitude
• -thematic resonances: disguise, recognition, acknowledgement, identity
• -Penelope is periphron: very thoughtful, very careful: she will test thoroughly before she acknowledges
• -difficulty of knowing others, knowing oneself: the world, and the mind, is full of deceits, stories that appear to be the truth but are false; stories that appear to be false but say something true; disguised people (and gods!) who are not what they seem to be; it's hard to size up what's around you, whether these people are gods in disguise, or people in disguise, or people saying one thing (cf. Antinous) but thinking another in their heart
• -moreover connection with others is difficult: we are all travelers, wayfarers, changing all the time: how can we know anyone else well enough to connect with that person? -the romantic ideal is one of immediate recognition, bliss, living happily ever after; but in the complex world of the Odyssey, the hero comes home only for a while, for he must leave again to travel, and will never return; and since the world is full of deceit, both deceit of others and self-deceit, one must have two physical tokens --in addition to one's own senses-- before one can take that step, that enormous step, of acknowledging an intimate connection with the wayfarer, with the man of deceit, the man who has andwill go away.
• -the Odyssey is often described as Od's voyage of self discovery, as though the epic were a movement towards the delineation of his self identity: but I have a hard timeseeing it in quite that way: it seems to me more a meditation on the problems of the discovery of the inner nature of oneself and other people: an exploration of the difficulties,which are pressing to all of us, of figuring out who we are,who are the people around us -- or are they gods? -- and how perilous it is to connect with others, since it's so hard to know who they really are, and indeed hard to know who we really are? Is Odysseus in the end an Iliadic hero, who shows his true self in battle and gore? Or is he something else? It's hard to say in the end exactly who Odysseus is, I think, and no less hard for Od. to say that, and for P. to recognize and acknowledge it.