![]() This understanding of damage and compensation is not merely the product of Eurymachos’ self-serving rhetoric, but has been rehearsed for Odysseus and the external audience in the song of Ares and Aphrodite (8.267-366), another narrative built around the question of compensation. ![]() With this offer on the table, Eurymachos attempts to turn the nemesis-theme back on Odysseus: the latter’s “righteous indignation” is understandable and justifiable, he asserts, but only until the offer of timē is made (πρὶν δ᾿ οὔ τι νεμεσσητὸν κεχολῶσθαι, 59). And his is no mean offer: the bronze and gold, to the value of 20 oxen per suitor, times 108 (or 107, subtracting Antinoos) suitors, amounts to over 2000 oxen-worth of precious metals. Eurymachos, in other words, denies the suitors’ collective guilt on the capital charge of lèse-majesté, while he simultaneously makes the dēmos collectively responsible for paying back Odysseus for the suitors’ ostensibly less serious atasthala. Thus he proposes timē ‘recompense’: each suitor is to gather bronze and gold “among the people” (κατὰ δῆμον, 55) in order to satisfy Odysseus’ desire for retribution (57-59). Odysseus is cast as an invader, with whom Eurymachos negotiates terms of surrender for the defeated community. Įurymachos’ rhetoric assimilates the suitors to the dēmos, the citizen body of Ithake, in a way that simultaneously excludes Odysseus and his oikos from it. Likewise, scholia to Odyssey 23.296, and Eustathios (1948.48-49), report that Aristophanes and Aristarchos (the Alexandrine scholars who took opposing positions on the Phaiakes’ fate) agreed in identifying this point as the τέλος and πέρας of the Odyssey, usually taken to mean the end, though perhaps rather something more like the dramatic climax. ![]() This view may go back to antiquity: according to one interpretation, the last line of Apollonios’ Argonautika, ἀσπασίως ἀκτὰς Παγασηίδας εἰσαπέβητε (4.1781), was modeled on Odyssey 23.296, ἀσπάσιοι λέκτροιο παλαιοῦ θεσμὸν ἵκοντο, in order to hint at a contemporary belief that this is the “true” end of the Odyssey, and the remainder of the vulgate text but a massive interpolation. Some scholars have even maintained that all of Odyssey 24 is a late and clumsy epilogue. It must be observed that the received ending of the Odyssey, to which I attach such importance in my interpretation, has been criticized as abrupt, forced, superfluous, and generally non-Homeric. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |