Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Hermes led the suitors’ shades to Hades, where Agamemnon and Achilles conversed and Agamemnon praised Penelope’s fidelity against Clytemnestra’s crime. On Ithaca Odysseus went to the orchard where old Laertes labored in mourning garb. After a testing speech Odysseus revealed himself by the scar and by shared memory of the trees given him as a boy; father and son embraced, and Athena restored Laertes’ strength and stature for battle. The kin of the slain suitors, led by Eupeithes father of Antinous, armed and marched on the farmstead. Odysseus, Telemachus, Laertes, and their few retainers met them; Laertes, inspired by Athena, cast the first spear and killed Eupeithes. A general fight threatened until Athena, with Zeus’s thunderbolt for authority, cried out for peace. Both sides swore oaths; the blood-feud ended by divine arbitration. Odysseus resumed his kingship under the gods’ settlement—Teiresias’s inland atonement still ahead beyond the poem’s close. The *Odyssey* thus ends not only with private recognition but with civic peace imposed from Olympus.