Symbols
This symbolizes Odysseus' coming of age, the connection between xenial Greeks, the righteousness of Odysseus' cause, Odysseus' unique value, and even (to Penelope) Odysseus himself.
What is the bow?
Outside the palace on their last morning alive, the suitors are planning to kill Telemachus when they see the bad omen of an eagle holding a wild dove and flying high on this unlucky side of them.
What is their left?
After a lion eats a grazing ox, its chest and jowls are thick with blood all over, a dreadful sight. Just so this person in this situation had blood all over him from hands to feet.
Who is Odysseus after having slaughtered the suitors (according to Eurycleia)?
This guy kicks Odysseus at the town fountain and says beggars are parasites who should be put to work. Later he's caught stealing armor from Odysseus' storeroom, so rival herdsmen ultimately cut off his nose and ears, rip away his genitals, feed them to dogs, and chop off his hands and feet.
Who is Melanthius?
When the Phaeacian ship that delivered Odysseus to Ithaca attempts to return home, this god turns it to stone.
Who is Poseidon?
This maid of Penelope is secretly sleeping with the enemy, Eurymachus.
Who is Melantho?
Odysseus' revenge plot is nearly undone because his old nurse recognizes this unmistakable identifier.
What is the scar above his knee?
This person tells beggar Odysseus that if her husband came back and cared for her again, she would regain her beauty and her status.
Who is Penelope?
This is a powerful symbol of Odysseus' craftsmanship and of the sturdy, enduring nature of the relationship between him and Penelope.
What is the olive tree bed?
As Telemachus is leaving Sparta, this person interprets an eagle flying up with a big white goose clutched in its claws as a good omen, a sign Odysseus is already back home and planning revenge on the suitors.
Who is Helen?
These are compared to doves or thrushes that spread their wings to fly home to their nests, but instead crash into a net, trapped and given a bitter bedtime.
Who are the 12 servant girls?
Each of these two suitors throws a stool at Odysseus, and Odysseus retaliates by killing them first: one gets an arrow to the throat, the other to the liver.
Who are Antinous and Eurymachus?
Athena often meddles with and directs this weapon, making the newly armed suitors miss with it and giving Laertes a surge of youthful vigor so that he can take out Antinous' father Eupeithes with it.
What is a spear?
This is how Odysseus buys the household time to regroup before Ithaca discovers the suitors’ massacre.
What is fake a wedding celebration?
Wanting to prove his manhood, Telemachus tries and almost succeeds at doing this.
What is string his father's bow?
Odysseus initially thinks these people have betrayed him when in fact they’ve taken good care of him, and their help only backfired on themselves.
Who are the Phaeacian shipmen?
Because of this, also a symbol of divine help and companionship, Odysseus can send Telemachus to bed and move the palace weapons in the darkness by himself.
What is majestic light from Athena’s golden lamp?
When Telemachus does this in the megaron, Penelope smiles, since in Greek culture it's regarded as a good omen.
What is sneeze?
These lie in blood and dust, like fish hauled up out of the dark-gray sea in fine-mesh nets; they're tipped out upon the curving beach's sand, gasping for water from the salty sea as the sun shines down and takes their life away.
Who are the slain suitors (as Odysseus sees them)?
When this loyal servant detects Odysseus' true identity, Odysseus grips her throat and threatens to kill her if she betrays his secret.
Who is Eurycleia?
Zeus throws a thunderbolt in front of his daughter Athena in order to ensure this happens.
What is a sworn truce between Odysseus and his fellow Ithacans?
Odysseus the beggar is happy to witness Penelope charm the suitors with pretty words and trick them into doing this.
What is lavish her with fine gifts?
You can’t fool a dog, and this one recognizes his long-awaited master, whines, thumps, and dies.
Who is Argos?
Penelope tells beggar Odysseus this trick of hers in order to trick him into telling her his own story.
What is buying time by weaving and unweaving Laertes' shroud?
Ithaca was young and vigorous when Odysseus left for Troy and becomes masterless, neglected, and enfeebled, a pitiful shadow of its old vigorous self, as symbolized by this creature abandoned to a maggoty fate on a dungheap.
Who is Odysseus' dog Argos?
Penelope tells beggar Odysseus that she had a dream in which 20 geese came to her house and ate her grain until a huge eagle swooped in and broke their necks, killing them. Then, she says, the eagle did this.
What is talk, saying he’s her husband and has come back to kill the suitors?
When Athena lifts this high, the frightened suitors who remain bolt through the hall like cattle roused and driven by a gadfly in the springtime, when the days are getting longer.
What is her aegis?
This ambivalent suitor, hardened by Athena, gets a spear to the back as Telemachus' first kill.
Who is Amphinomus?
Ithaca is having a festival for this god of archery on the very day Odysseus strings the bow and kills the suitors, who don't participate in honoring him but do use the occasion as an excuse to stop the contest when it's not going their way.
Who is Apollo?
When Telemachus returns from his fact-finding mission and Penelope wants a report, he doesn't let on that Odysseus has made it home, instead sharing only this "news" that Menelaus said he learned from a sea god.
What is Odysseus being trapped by a goddess on an island without a boat?
This is how Penelope determines that the beggar before her is truly Odysseus.
What is casually ask a servant to move their marital bed?
Athena does this so that when Odysseus finally awakens in his own native Ithaca, he groans and sobs and is unable to recognize home.
What is cast a mist over the land and harbor?
This place where Odysseus stores his Phaeacian treasure is a safe haven at the boundary of his otherworldly wanderings and his more grounded homecoming. It's a symbol of the interconnectedness of the natural and divine realms, and a reminder that divine forces are intimately woven into the natural world, always present but not always visible.
What is the Nerieds' cave?
Halitherses, the same fellow who correctly interprets the omen of the two eagles at the first Ithacan counsel in Book 2, gives the angry suitors’ families this advice in Book 24.
What is not to fight Odysseus?
These guys spring and strike just as eagles with their crooked beaks and talons swoop from the hills and pounce on smaller birds that fly across the fields beneath the clouds, victims with no help and no way out.
Who are the four fighters of Odysseus, Telemachus, Eumaeus, and Philoetius?
Even though his father tells him to take the 12 serving girls who "stepped away from honor" and hack them to death with long swords in the courtyard, Telemachus actually does this with them.
What is hang them all, stringing them up around the rotunda?
Athena does this to make sure Penelope's suitors go weak in the knees.
What is give her a huge glow-up, compel her to appear before them, and laugh mysteriously?
This servant is the suitors' favorite herald but also spies for Penelope and reports the suitors' plot against Telemachus; Telemachus later saves his life, saying he always cared for Telemachus when he was young.
Who is Medon?
Odysseus reveals his identity to Telemachus, and Telemachus does not believe him at first because of this.
What is the supernatural glow-up given him by Athena?
This beggar tries to chase Odysseus from his own home and threatens him, saying he will be dragged out by his foot; in fact Odysseus seizes this beggar by the foot and drags him out to the courtyard.
Who is Irus?
A representation of human agency and the capacity to navigate through life's metaphorical storms and challenges, this thing also symbolizes Poseidon's power and glory, as Odysseus cannot rest until he takes it where no one knows the sea and mistakes it for a winnowing fan.
What is an oar?
Early in the morning before the archery contest, when Odysseus asks Zeus for an outdoor sign and an indoor sign that he has been brought back home for a purpose, he receives these.
What is a thunderboom from a cloudless sky and the weakest servant’s prayer that the grain she is preparing will be the suitors’ final meal?
These squeak like bats in the secret crannies of a cave, clinging together and fluttering and squeaking more when one detaches and falls down.
What are the spirits of the slain suitors?
Odysseus is gifted the bow he uses in Book 22 by this fellow Greek, whose shocking murder by Heracles means the two can't visit each other's homes. (Because Odysseus wants to honor his friend by using the bow only when home in Ithaca, the bow is available to Odysseus when he needs it 20 years later.)
Who is Iphitus?
This god calls the suitors’ spirits out of Odysseus' house over open roads, across the Ocean stream, past the rock of Leucas and the gates of Helius the Sun, through the provinces of dreams and the fields of asphodel to Hades, the home of shadows.
Who is Hermes?
Eumaeus tells the beggar Odysseus how he began life as a royal until this person tricked him into slavery.
Who is his Phoenician nurse?
Odysseus proves to Laertes that he is in fact Laertes’ son by revealing his scar and by doing this.
What is sharing his childhood knowledge of the orchard's trees?
To receive a cloak for the cold night without having to ask for it directly, beggar Odysseus tells this man a story about how real Odysseus schemed to get him a cloak during an overnight ambush back in Troy.
Who is Eumaeus?
More than just a physical setting, this symbolizes both challenge and opportunity, respresenting unpredictability, the unknown, and life's obstacles; for Odysseus, it's both a barrier to his return and the path that will lead him home.
What is the sea?
This prophet escapes the palace before the slaughter because he sees the suitors' faces, heads, and bodies wrapped in night; their screams blazing out like fire; their blood spattered all over the palace ceilings and walls; and their ghosts on the porch and in the courtyard.
Who is Theoclymenus?
As when the daughter of Pandareus, the pale gray nightingale, sings beautifully when the spring has come, and sits among the leaves that crowd the trees, and warbles up and down a symphony of sound, in mourning for her son...whom she herself had killed in ignorance, just so does this pull Penelope in two directions.
What is her mind, and more specifically, the question of whether to marry a suitor or stay in the palace beside her son and keep everything the same?
Ctesippus from Same throws this at beggar Odysseus, who ducks it; it strikes the wall instead.
What is an ox foot?
On the morning of the contest that will allow a worthy suitor to win her as wife, a distressed Penelope implores this deity to shoot an arrow in her heart and strike her dead with her gaze fixed on Odysseus.
Who is Artemis?
Finally reunited with Penelope, Odysseus offers a thorough summary of his travels but tactfully (conveniently?) leaves out his one-year dalliance with this goddess as well as any mention of this Phaeacian princess who he agreed saved his life.
Who are Circe and Nausicaa?
Leodes, the only man among the suitors who disapproved of all their bullying, still courts Penelope and thus suffers this fate at Odysseus' hands.
What is a beheading by sword, so that his head, "still framing words," rolls in the dust?
This Ithacan who, in the final book, joins his six sons in fighting alongside Laertes, Odysseus, and Telemachus, is also the father of the traitors Melanthius and Melantho.
Who is Dolius?