Characters
- Eurycleia — identifies the twelve
- Suitors — their corpses cleared first
- Telemachus — hangs the maids
- Twelve disloyal maidservants — hanged (including Melantho)
Places
- Mycenae — megaron and courtyard
Themes
Narrative
When the suitors lie dead, Odysseus calls Eurycleia to name which serving-women shamed the house. She counts twelve of fifty who went the suitors’ way. Odysseus orders them first to carry out the corpses and wash the hall with water and sulfur sponge. Then Telemachus, declining the sword so that they may not have “a clean death,” takes a ship’s cable, binds it to a pillar of the courtyard, and hangs the twelve in a row—their feet twitching like thrushes or doves in a snare, the poet says, until the life leaves them.
The hanging completes the purge of the household’s interior betrayal: not only the foreign wooers but the women who shared their beds and mockery die before Odysseus reunites with Penelope.