The Sacrifice of the Suitors
As Odysseus sails in return to Ithaca, he encounters often fantastic temptations that require the victory of domestic duty over wild desire to surmount. Whether enticed by the lotuses of the Lotus-eaters, fornication with goddesses, or the spellbinding serenade of the Sirens, Odysseus must continually regard his memory of home higher than the sensational pleasures offered to him by the different forms of temptress he meets; by doing so, he cultivates for himself a sense of lawfulness and fear of the gods. Thus, by the time he reaches Ithaca, he should be the epitome of the civilized, lawful, and god-fearing man, having surmounted temptations by the use of these qualities, all for his goal of reaching home. This follows what the Theban Tiresias prophesized in the underworld: “Even so, you and your crew may still reach home, suffering all the way, if you only have the power to curb their wild desire and curb your own”.
However, when Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca, his “wild desire” seems all but curbed. With regard to the repeated trope by which inhabitants of a land are judged — “What are they here — violent, savage, lawless? / or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men?” — Odysseus, in his brutal slaughtering of the suitors and maids inside his house, resembles more the first three qualities than the final two. What, then, shall we make of Odysseus’s character? Does the slaughter of the suitors prove the stronghold that bloodthirsty revenge and violence have in him? I suggest not. By first appealing to textual examples of the gods approving Odysseus’s actions, I will show that, rather than the spilt blood of the suitors evidencing Odysseus’s savagery, Homer presents his decision to kill the suitors as evidence of his obedience to the gods. Moreover, I will position the slaughter as Odysseus meant it and Homer intended it: as a blood sacrifice to the gods, offered both in gratitude and compensation for his safe return and the loyalty of his family and to insure the blessing of the gods on his waning years. Finally, by appeal to Menelaus and the Cicones, I will show that the seeming barbarity of Odysseus’ final slaughtering is exactly what the gods demand of a sacrifice: the rendering of “full, flawless victims”. This, then, will allow for consideration about why Odysseus sets the slaughter inside his halls. By positioning the slaughter of the suitors in this way, I intend to show that, instead of being the anomaly to void Odysseus’s lessons learned, the slaughter of the suitors is the (admittedly disturbing) culmination and final proof of Odysseus’s character development: from savage to lawful, desirous to dutiful, violent to god-fearing.
Textual examples of the gods’ approval of the slaughter are littered throughout the Odyssey, from the first instance of Athena appearing to Telemachus to the days before both Telemachus and Odysseus take up arms inside the palace. Rather than citing each example to the same effect, I will analyze the earliest mention — one that will serve us even more acutely later — of the slaughter of the suitors by a god, Athena disguised as Mentes.
“If only that Odysseus sported with these suitors / a blood wedding, a quick death would take the lot! / True, but all lies in the lap of the great gods, / whether or not he’ll come and pay them back, / here, in his own house”.
Thus we see that Athena is from the beginning against the suitors and for Odysseus, an allegiance that will hold to the end. Odysseus, then, acts in obedience to Athena when he murders the suitors. “But,” it might be objected, “often people act rightly but for the wrong reasons, seeming lawful and god-fearing on the surface but really harboring savagery and violence in their hearts — and thus Odysseus. What a convenience, a welcome coincidence, for Athena to want just what bloodthirsty, violent Odysseus wants! That Athena’s wishes happen to coincide with Odysseus’s savagery gives no evidence to his lawful, god-fearing character — indeed, it is as if the law condemned my worst enemy and appointed me the man to kill him. I would be only too eager, then, to follow the law!”
Such a charge can be reduced to saying Odysseus’s motivations and intentions do not match his seemingly god-fearing actions. However, as will be shown in the context of a blood sacrifice, nothing could be more inaccurate. With recourse to textual instances of sacrifice and Menelaus in Egypt, I will position the slaughter of the suitors as Odysseus intended it: not blood spilt to quench his savage blood thirst, but blood spilt both in retribution to the gods for his arrival home and to insure their goodwill on the waning years of his life. This done successfully, then, will void the assertion that the slaughter of the suitors proves Odysseus’s travels were for naught, in effect showing that the slaughter was, indeed, the culmination of his lessons learned, the final proof of his lawful character.
To begin, let us look more closely at the first mention of Odysseus taking revenge on the suitors, the quotation of Athena as Mentes to Telemachus. If observed rightly, it will show the slaughter was intended as a sacrifice from the first chapter of the book. Only after viewing the slaughter in its proper context as a sacrifice can we then proceed to answer what was intended by the sacrifice and explain the reasons for Odysseus’s methods.
“True, but all lies in the lap of the great gods, / whether or not he’ll come and pay them back, / here, in his own house”. At first look, the pronoun “them” seems to refer to the suitors, effectively casting the sentence to mean that whether or not Odysseus will get to return and take his revenge on the suitors — “pay them back” — is for the gods to decide. However, I contend that the reference to the suitors stopped with the end of the previous sentence; “them”, then, takes “the great gods” for its antecedent, changing the meaning of “pay them back” from an idiomatic colloquialism for revenge to a literal retributive repayment of debt that Odysseus owes to the gods for his safe return. Taken this way, the sentence, devoid of its pronouns, would read as follows: “True, but all lies in the lap of the great gods, / whether or not Odysseus will come and pay the gods back, / here, in his own house.” The sentence, viewed in this way, unquestionably refers to a sacrifice, the medium through which humans ‘pay gods back’.
My interpretation is supported by a closer look at the first sentence of the quotation: “… a blood wedding, a quick death would take the lot!”. Homer’s metaphor is brilliant: while the suitors scheme to wed Penelope, the only wedding they’ll receive is that of their blood and… and what? A literal wedding necessitates two people; figuratively, two things. What, then, does the blood of the suitors take for its spouse? The question, according to my interpretation, can be rephrased: what does the blood of a sacrifice take for its spouse? To what is sacrificial blood wedded? The answer can only be fire, for by fire the blood of a sacrifice is wafted to the gods. Accordingly, after all blood has been spilt and before he changes from battle-stained rags to royal robe, Odysseus insists for “Fire first… Light me a fire to purify this house”. Thus, the slaughter of the suitors takes on the exact form of a sacrifice to the gods: spilt blood, sent to the heavens by fire.
Having positioned the slaughter of the suitors as a sacrifice, I will proceed to explain what Odysseus intended by the sacrifice. Once his intentions are clarified, I will defend his seemingly barbaric murder of the maids as, quite literally (and disturbingly), nothing less than what was required by the gods.
Sacrifices in the Odyssey take on two forms, which I will label retributive and goodwill. The first, the retributive sacrifice, is that offered as gratitude or compensation to the gods for the protection or aid they gave. It is necessarily ‘after the fact’ — that is, the sacrifice is made after the gods have shown favor. Nestor outlines the logic of this sacrifice in his plea to Athena: “Give us high renown… And I will make you a sacrifice”. Acting, then, as a retributive sacrifice, the slaughter of the suitors is made by Odysseus both as thanks and compensation to the gods for his return and the safety and enduring loyalty of his wife and son.
The second, the goodwill sacrifice, is that offered to insure the grace of the gods during a journey or task soon to happen. It is necessarily ‘before the fact’, made in anticipation of the gods showing goodwill — indeed, even seen as insurance that the gods will show goodwill and grace. Not offering a goodwill sacrifice before his journey home is what waylaid Menelaus and crew: “You [Menelaus] should have offered Zeus and the other gods a handsome sacrifice, then embarked…”. Seen as a goodwill sacrifice, the sacrifice of the suitors is the medium through which Odysseus asks for the favor of the gods on the rest of his days.
Now I will shift from interpreting Odysseus’s sacrificial intentions to defending the methods he chose to perform the sacrifice. I will explain two perceived barbarisms of his methods — the hanging of the maids and his decision to shed blood inside his house — as being in conformance to both sacrificial formalities and what the sacrifice required to please the gods.
“I’d failed, you see, to render them [the gods] full, flawless victims, and gods are always keen to see their rules obeyed”. So said Menelaus in reference to the gods marooning him and his crew in Egypt. As stated, the reason for the gods’ wrath against him was his failure to offer to the gods a complete sacrifice: “full, flawless victims”. This concept of irrevocably giving over to the gods their complete due of either enemies or sacrificial victims (often one and the same) is commonplace in the Old Testament. “…when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy”. Likewise, Odysseus — not following the example of Menelaus in Egypt and heeding the punishment inflicted by Zeus, the cause of Odysseus and crew’s ten year delay) when Odysseus failed to completely render the Cicones full, flawless victims — showed no mercy to the women of his palace, hanging them with a ship’s cable (cf. Odysseus’ previous mistake of sparing the Cicone women, which caused his ship to be sent off course). Thus, while brutal and merciless, the women’s hanging is depicted as not barbaric; rather, Homer presents it as evidence of just how god-fearing and lawful Odysseus has become. Homer presents the maids’ defilement with those who defiled Odysseus’s house as marking them for death, in accordance with the aforementioned rule of complete sacrifice.
The second seeming barbarism — Odysseus’s decision to slaughter the suitors inside his halls instead of outside — presents a more complex problem. Foreshadowed from the beginning by Athena — “… whether or not he’ll come and pay them back, / here, in his own house (emphasis mine)” — the trouble with the matter is not whether the slaughter was intended to take place inside Odysseus’s house but why it was intended so. One cultural explanation is that Greek sacrifices were not of wild animals hunted in the fields but of animals that were part of one’s household. Thus, Odysseus slaughters the suitors within his home, in effect fulfilling the domesticity requirement of a typical sacrifice.
A better explanation is one from a literary perspective. For the last ten years, Odysseus underwent temptation after temptation designed to trap him in contentment before he reached home. Grazing with the Lotus-eaters, sex with Circe, serenaded by the Sirens — underlying each obstacle is the battle of desire vs. duty, savagery vs. lawfulness, pleasure vs. responsibility, self-indulgent hedonism vs. fearing the gods. To be god-fearing, Odysseus must suppress self-indulgence, and likewise with the other juxtapositions, all looking toward his goal of returning home. The suitors, sapping Odysseus’s comforts, personify self-indulgence, lawlessness, savagery, and desire; for Odysseus to complete his conquest over these uncivilized, savage traits — a conquest that is the means to his end of returning home — he must slaughter lawlessness in the very place that so motivated his conquest over lawlessness: his home. As he suppressed savagery with lawfulness in his soul to right his soul, so now must he, obedient to and fearing the gods, slaughter savagery in his home to right his home.
Thus the slaughter of the suitors transforms from the anomaly that taints the story of Odysseus to the culmination of his great moral and physical journey, emphasizing in a sweep of sacrificial implications the reverence he holds for the gods. While the gods predict and prefer the slaughter, it is not a situation of Odysseus’s bloodthirsty, vengeful intentions coinciding with the whims of the gods; rather, Odysseus understands his proper role as worshiper of the gods and intends the slaughter to act as his first sacrificial offering of recognition of and compensation for the gods’ support of his journey home — “a blood wedding”; a union of blood and fire; the formal reunion, through the spilt blood of a sacrifice, of Odysseus and Ithaca, Odysseus and Penelope, Odysseus and a domestic life of duty and god-fearing lawfulness.
