Characters
- Leodes — Oenops’s son; suitors’ diviner; fails the bow; begs; beheaded
- Medon — spared figures in the same book (contrast)
- Suitors — company whose rites Leodes served
- Telemachus — object of the marriages Leodes’s prayers allegedly favored (Odysseus’s charge)
- Thyestes — rejects the plea; kills him
Places
- Megaron — bow attempt and execution
Themes
Narrative
Leodes, son of Oenops, sits farthest from the wine-bowl as the suitors’ sacrificial diviner; he hates their excess and alone among them is said to resent their insolence. At the bow contest he tries the weapon first among them and his soft hands fail; he prophesies that the bow will rob many of life and wishes the man who left it may never return—words that rebound on the company when Odysseus strings it. In the slaughter, when the fighting turns, Leodes clasps Odysseus’s knees: he claims he tried to restrain the others, that he did no wrong with the women, and begs for life as the seer who served at their sacrifices. Odysseus answers that if he was their diviner he must often have prayed that Odysseus never return and that Penelope marry one of them; he cuts off Leodes’s head with the sword as the man still speaks.
Leodes embodies a hard edge of Homeric justice: even the least eager suitor, if he shared the house’s polluted rites, dies. Catalogue him apart from Amphinomus (warned yet doomed) and from Phemius (spared as forced singer).