Characters
- Anticleia — shade of Odysseus’s mother; reports Ithaca; explains the nature of shades
- Artemis — death-bringer Odysseus first suspects (rejected cause)
- Autolycus — Anticleia’s father (genealogy)
- Circe — sender of the underworld voyage (mentioned)
- Odysseus — living visitor; thrice fails to embrace her
- Penelope — faithful, weeping (reported)
- Telemachus — holding the property (reported)
- Tiresias — consulted before she is allowed to drink (sequence)
Places
- Circe’s land — Circe’s isle (point of departure)
- Countryside — where the old man grieves
- Hades — scene of the dialogue
- Ithaca — household reported by Anticleia
Themes
Narrative
Among the women who gather at the blood Odysseus sees the shade of his mother, Anticleia daughter of Autolycus. He weeps but holds her off until he has questioned Tiresias. After the seer’s prophecy, he lets her drink. She asks how he has come alive to Hades and whether he has yet reached Ithaca. He tells of Circe’s command and his still-unfinished voyage. He asks her death: did Artemis’s gentle arrows take her, or lingering illness? She answers that neither; longing for him, grief for his delayed return, wasted her life.
She reports the household: Penelope endures, weeping; Telemachus holds the estates as a man among the people; Laertes keeps away in the countryside, sleeping in ashes of fire, grieving. Three times Odysseus tries to embrace her; three times she flutters from his hands like a shadow or a dream. She explains the law of mortals: sinews no longer bind flesh and bone after the pyre’s fire; the soul flies as a dream. He must desire the light. The meeting is Homeric pathos at the center of the nekyia: news of home from the dead mother, and the failed embrace that defines shade against living body. Catalogue it apart from Tiresias and the hero-shades.