Demodocus Sings the Wooden Horse (*Odyssey* 8)

Demodocus Sings the Wooden Horse (Odyssey 8)

Catalogue ID: 04-trojan-cycle/235-demodocus-wooden-horse-song-odyssey-8

Cycle: Trojan — Odyssey / Phaeacian court / Trojan War in song

Version line: Homeric — bard’s lay of the horse; Odysseus weeps

Sources: Homer, *Odyssey* 8.469–520 (request and song); cf. 8.73–82 (earlier quarrel song), 8.266–366 (Ares–Aphrodite)

Source file: /workspace/greek-myth-catalogue/04-trojan-cycle/235-demodocus-wooden-horse-song-odyssey-8.md

Characters

Alcinous — host; halts the song; asks identity
Captains in the horse — content of the lay
Demodocus — Phaeacian bard; sings the horse
Epeius — agents inside the sung tale
Telemachus — commissioner; weeps at his own kleos

Places

Assembly — horse, citadel, sack
Scheria — Alcinous’s hall

Themes

Narrative

At Alcinous’s feast Odysseus sends Demodocus a choice cut of meat and asks the blind bard to sing the Wooden Horse—how Epeius built it with Athena’s help, how Odysseus filled it with captains and brought it into Troy’s citadel, how the Achaeans poured from the hollow belly and sacked the city. Demodocus sings as if he had been there. Odysseus weeps again, hiding his face in his cloak; Alcinous notices, stops the song, and finally asks the stranger’s name—opening the long nostos confession of Books 9–12. Where Demodocus’s earlier quarrel-song and Ares–Aphrodite lay show Phaeacian entertainments, this commissioned horse-song forces the hero to confront his own fame and grief. Catalogue it as the specific Wooden Horse performance, apart from the general “Troy song” weeping entry and from the cyclic horse narrative itself.