The Odyssey's Last Chapter
To ensure the Hero's Quest remains preserved for all time.
A while ago, I posted The Odyssey and the Desire for Home, which discussed the core of The Odyssey. This new post focuses on the ending.1
Odysseus wants some form of peace; he wants home and he wants family. He wants to be done with the battles and the monsters, but he can’t achieve either until he fulfills the quest that the gods seem determined to corral him through. When he finally returns home after a myriad of trials, he isn’t allowed to rest; his hero’s ending is transformed into a final battle. Suitors have been trying to force his wife Penelope to remarry and have effectively usurped his hall, and with Athena’s help, Odysseus slaughters them all. Only after this final controversial conflict is he reunited with his wife. He recounts to her his story and then finally blissfully sleeps by her side.
Odysseus has completed his goal of returning home, saved his family, reestablished his right over his house, and is relatively happy and at peace. By any expected standard, this is where the story would end. Instead, the reader is introduced to one more book.
Book XXIV begins with the intent of tying up loose ends—Odysseus needs to reunite with his father, who has been in hiding, and work on replenishing his house’s livestock. However, the text soon moves its lens away from Odysseus, and you realize that the book is aiming to tie up everyone’s loose ends. The suitors’ fathers want revenge against Odysseus for killing their sons. Odysseus’ happy ending comes with consequences that the last book intends to address, and when Odysseus learns of it, he steels himself for a second slaughter.
Throughout the epic, Athena has been urging Odysseus to use his tactical skills and cunning. He is a favorite hero of hers, and Athena is the goddess of war and strategy, so by all means, I thought she would want Odysseus to fight, but she doesn’t. She requests a meeting with Zeus, and this is where the book really gets memorable.
First, some context on Zeus’s role in this story. Throughout The Odyssey, Zeus has consistently functioned as a permission-keeper. All the gods have their squabbles, but they don’t enact revenge on each other unless they make a formal request to Zeus. He’s both secretary and parent; he figures out who is already feuding with who and decides which actions are reasonable. He generally accepts every request the gods ask for throughout the story, but when the suitors and Odysseus have formed all the men around them into two camps and are about to go at each other’s throats, Athena unexpectedly asks Zeus for advice.
Athena wants to know what Zeus’s plans are, whether to let them continue the bloodshed or to stop them and form peace. Zeus chides her for not taking responsibility as the one who orchestrated Odysseus’ revenge against the suitors. For the first time in the whole epic, one of the Pantheon has to face—or at least acknowledge—the consequences of their actions. He does work to solve her problem immediately after, but he at least doesn’t let Athena off the hook without hearing her own influence on the human conflicts.
Based on the conversation, Athena lets Odysseus kill the leader of the revenge party. Then she addresses the crowd, calls for peace, and mentions Zeus (who doesn’t appear, but does send a lightning bolt) as a way to keep everyone in check. This method proves effective, and the tale abruptly ends.
When considering the point of this epilogue, I kept returning to one specific line of dialogue that stood out even among the whole strange exchange between Zeus and Athena. When Zeus gives Athena ideas for how to make peace, he promises her that the memory of Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors will be erased from history.
Within the world of The Odyssey, Zeus is the one who lets gods and goddesses manipulate waves and construct challenges for Odysseus to encounter. Despite sitting in the background, Zeus has largely influenced Odysseus’s journey. Putting it another way, Zeus acts as an editor for the story of Odysseus. Odysseus has completed a hero’s quest, and when Zeus encounters a scene that contradicts the heroic ending he has allowed Odysseus to ultimately conclude with, Zeus can revise the error by making it forgotten to time.
Today, when discussing The Odyssey and whether Odysseus is a hero, the slaughter of the suitors gets used by people who argue that Odysseus is not. Within the world itself, however, Zeus claims that Odysseus won’t have such a problem. Odysseus’s home retains its peace, Odysseus remains established as king, and Athena has, in one form or another, responded to the more averse side effects of her actions. Book XXIV may overextend the Hero’s Journey, but only to ensure the reader that, in-world, the structure will remain intact.
Agree? Disagree? Did you know about this ending? Would love to hear your thoughts.
Will there be another post in the future about The Odyssey? Only time will tell.
there are actually a few scholars that theorise the last chapter of the odyssey was not written by homer, due to the rush to tie up as many ends as possible, despite book 23 and his reunion to Penelope being the best place to end the book thematically(also supposed stylistic variations in the greek which I can neither confirm nor reject) and because most epic poetry ends on a cliff-hanger (Aeneas and turnus, hector's funeral etc.) - but it is an interesting ending nonetheless!
You've given me a new appreciation for the Odyssey's ending.