Characters
- Ajax — sons recalled through their mothers
- Alcinous — Phaeacian audience of the tale
- Hades — sends the women forth
- Phaedra, Procris, Ariadne, Maera, Clymene, Eriphyle — further shades in the review
- Telemachus — narrator; keeper of the blood
- Tyro, Antiope, Alcmene, Megara, Epicaste (Jocasta), Chloris, Leda, Iphimedeia — principal named heroines
Places
- Gates of Hades — scene of the catalogue
- Scheria — where Odysseus narrates to the Phaeacians
Themes
Narrative
After Anticleia, Odysseus holds the blood-pit while the shades of famous women approach, sent by Persephone. He sees Tyro (who loved Enipeus and bore Pelias and Neleus to Poseidon), Antiope (mother of Amphion and Zethus by Zeus), Alcmene (mother of Heracles), Megara (Heracles’ wife), Epicaste/Jocasta (who married her son Oedipus unwittingly), Chloris (Neleus’s queen; mother of Nestor and Pero), Leda (mother of Castor and Polydeuces), Iphimedeia (mother of Otus and Ephialtes), Phaedra, Procris, Ariadne (whom Theseus brought from Crete and left on Dia; Artemis slew her on Dionysus’s testimony in this version), Maera, Clymene, and Eriphyle (who took gold for her husband’s life).
Odysseus tells Alcinous he cannot name or number all he saw. The panel is a Homeric *Catalogue of Women* inside the Nekyia: maternity, divine lovers, and famous crimes pass in review before the poem returns to male warrior-shades. Catalogue it as that genealogical underworld atom.