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Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
The Odyssey Book Twenty-Two: Slaughter in the Hall with Dr. Adam Cooper
01:11:11
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- [00:00]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
The time has come. Odysseus stands at the threshold of his home, cries out to Apollo and lets loose an arrow straight through the neck of Antinous. It is chaos in the hall as the bread and meats were soaked in a swirl of bloody filth. Eurymachus attempts to broker a truce between Odysseus and the suitors, but it is rejected. Eurymachus calls the suitors to arms and is subsequently slaughtered by Odysseus. Telemachus brings armor and weapons to his father, the swineherd and the cowherd, but the goatherd, however, is able to sneak weapons and armor to the suitors as well. On his second run for weapons, the cowherd and swineherd intercept the goatherd and tie him up and hang him from the rafters. Athena first arrives in the guise of Mentor and then, like a sparrow perched on the rafters, assisting Odysseus in his slaughter. She reveals her man destroying shield of thunder and the suitors fall into a panicked madness as Odysseus and his men went wheeling into the slaughter, slashing left and right. The grisly screams broke from skulls cracked open, the whole floor awash with blood. With only a few suitors left in the hall, Odysseus has no mercy on their profit, but spares the bard and the herald. The slaughter of the suitors is complete. Odysseus has the old maid Eurycleia send in the female servants who were disloyal, and these women help to carry out the corpses and clean the home of gore. Telemachus then oversees the disloyal women being slowly hanged in the courtyard, a pitiful, ghastly death. The goatherd is retrieved and mutilated to death by the swineherd and the cowherd. Odysseus purifies his home with fire and brimstone and the book ends with the loyal maidservants of the house surrounding Odysseus, and the king breaks down and weeps. All right, welcome to Ascend, the Great Books Podcast. Please check us out on thegreatbookspodcast.com there you can find several resources, including a question answer guide to the Odyssey to help you with your read as we kind of get close to finishing out our Year of Homer. You can follow us on Twitter and on YouTube. Today we are discussing the Slaughter in the hall, book 22. We are very happy to have a guest today, Dr. Adam Cooper, who serves as the Assistant professor of Humanities and the trivium at Wyoming Catholic College. Welcome, Professor.
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Dr. Adam Cooper
Thank you. Wonderful to be with you.
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Host (possibly a podcast host)
So tell us a little bit about Wyoming Catholic College and your role there.
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Dr. Adam Cooper
Yeah. Wyoming Catholic College is one of a number of independent Catholic liberal arts schools that really represents a kind of movement, a wave in Catholic education today. We think of Thomas Aquinas in California and Magdalene and Thomas More in New Hampshire and University of Dallas and Belmont Abbey and as kind of sister schools who are really recovering the classical tradition and recovering it in connection with the revealed truths of Christianity and in a way that makes both the revealed truths of Christianity more incarnationally real and also makes the classical tradition come to light in ways that it really can't for the rest of the world, I think.
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Host (possibly a podcast host)
What does it mean to be a professor of the trivium?
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Dr. Adam Cooper
Yeah. So the trivium, of course, are three of the seven traditional liberal arts, according to the medieval division. These are the arts of language and of thought, grammar, logic, and rhetoric. So if you think of grammar as how meaning is constructed in its most basic elements, and logic as how a thought proceeds clearly, and rhetoric as kind of that sharing of the truth that extends a community around the truth, that's sort of how we think of trivium. The trivium program at Wyoming Catholic College is, in a sense, it's our version of a writing program. But it's a bit more exciting than your traditional writing program at a college. We begin from the very beginning thinking about writing as a rhetorical act. That is, think about whom you're talking to and find something you. You really want to say to them. Think about not just what you're saying and not just, but actually and speaking truthfully in that way, but thinking about how is the best, why should I be talking about this and to whom? And when you begin thinking about writing that way, it really opens up, makes writing essays seem not like some sort of exercise you have to complete for school, but really an act where you're called to reach down into what you care about and be transparent to the thing that you're talking about for the sake of a larger community and further further goals. So, yeah, and of course, the. Another distinctive part of the trivium sequence at Wyoming Catholic is the oration. So our kids sort of learn, internalize the form of the classical oration while they're studying the rhetorical tradition. And by the time they're seniors, they give a 30 minute presentation without any transcript of their senior thesis. And every time I witness this, I'm really amazed that they are part of a live tradition that actually I have haven't quite myself, gotten into. Even though I'm supposed to, supposedly the professor of. Of Trivian here.
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Host (possibly a podcast host)
Yeah, I like that a lot. That is. Now, the other thing, too, that's unique about the college is the horsemanship. So do you. Do you ride a horse? Is that. Is that part of your duties? How does that work?
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Dr. Adam Cooper
Yeah, once again, in a sense, our students know our curriculum better than I do because I have a deep and intense relationship with that part of it for which I am responsible. But they get the full formation, and so, yeah, they have a semester of horsemanship and a number of amazing outdoor adventures that are. And it makes a. I don't fully understand how it works. I understand that it works almost miraculously in the sense that our. For instance, our freshmen, they come back from 21 days in the wilderness before they enter their first classroom or seminar conversation, and already they have a deep relationship with each other, and they have a kind of honesty about them. None of them are. They've all kind of encountered tough realities together. And so there's the tendency of freshmen to sort of be really nervous or posturing or kind of insincere or showing off is completely gone. They're just ready to start encountering reality. They've encountered it together as mountains and cliffs and rainstorms and so on already and kind of finding their own way through the wilderness. And they're sort of ready to do that again with each other in. In reading Homer.
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Host (possibly a podcast host)
So now I think there's a lot of beauty there. It's very. You know, being here in Oklahoma, we appreciate good horsemanship. Right. Kind of the Western side of things. But I think there's also a beauty there of just like the poetics. Right. That kind of looks very incarnational, that very focus on the real and realism and getting outside. It's amazing how much that's kind of overlooked in education, but how those poetics tend to till the soil a bit before you get into the actual text. They kind of open the intellect to actually seeing these things that are real, that are actually in the text themselves, but you kind of have to experience it first. Right? You need to be outside. You need to do something spirited. And I think Wyoming Catholic College is really unique in that A lot of the pictures I see coming out of your institution are really just intriguing.
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Dr. Adam Cooper
And I love how you've connected that sort of outdoor and horsemanship adventure aspect of it to the poetic, because I think that's exactly right. In a similar way that just having these experiences of the grandeur and the Toughness and the beauty of the outdoors, or learning how to communicate with a horse, which is you have to communicate with your body and your kind of embodied will, your embodied reason, and not with. Not so much with words. Both of these things give you a kind of anchor in rich and deep experiences of reality. And in the same way, the kind of poetic education that we give that our students get in humanities is again, a kind of every. Every semester. It's sort of an immersion into another world or frame of experience that. That they're not supposed to be first reasoning about in all kinds of abstract ways, but. But actually entering into as an experience that then opens up new pathways for reflection and thought and. And so on, that we first receive the poem as a series of images or feelings or even a story that we can imagine our way into. And only after we've done that are we really ready to reflect about ethics and metaphysics and politics and really be grounded, knowing that we're talking about something and having a kind of living sense of what it is we're talking about.
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Host (possibly a podcast host)
So I have to ask, are you more an Iliad guy or an Odyssey guy?
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Dr. Adam Cooper
I get this sort of question from my students all the time, and I often tell them whichever one I'm reading. But I think initially in my college days and for many years afterwards, I was an Iliad guy. I just. I loved the almost spiritual severity of beauty and violence and the kind of unsparing world that nevertheless has depths of feeling and splendors of beauty in it. So. But I think as I grew older and began to think about getting married and finding stability in life, finding a place in the world, I really. The metaphors and the analogies and the images and the story of the Odyssey just opened up to me in a new way. And all the things that Odysseus begins to long for, alone there on Calypso's island and realizing that he'll be no. 1 if he doesn't recover them, I began to sort of understand how one could desire those things in the center of one's being. And so I think it has sort of shifted in my life. I began as an Iliad boy and became am now an Odyssey boy.
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Host (possibly a podcast host)
Yeah, I think that that really tracks, I think with a lot of people's experience, is that they tend to, you know, which one you like tends to somewhat be tethered to where you are in your own life. And, you know, which tale. I think the Iliad does speak to a lot of young men. Right. It's about glory it's about honor. A lot of people get speared in the face. It's a fun read in a lot of different ways. Right. And the Odyssey, I agree, it's. I've read it several times now, but now, you know, being married, having several children, trying to. Now they're getting old enough that I'm really kind of concerned about their place in the world. The Odyssey, in a lot of ways, speaks to me in ways that it didn't speak to me a few years ago. It really didn't. Right. And I have a greater appreciation, I think, for the coming of home story. And I think this time on my read through, it's actually Telemachus coming of age story that has captured my attention. Right. There's a lot about that that I'm noticing this time. You know, we just. We see these narratives of him being stoic in the hall, but his eyes are riveted on his father. Right. He kind of is able to become a young man under his father. Right. When his father's in the room, he kind of blossoms. And that's. I have a lot of young boys running around my house right now. And that's. And so again, this is tracking where I am in life. And I think those lessons are speaking to me in ways that they didn't speak to me, know, four or five years ago, you know, if I read it for the first time. Very good. Let's look at. Let's get into the text. Let's look at book 22, Slaughter in the Hall. So this is what we've been waiting for for a long, long time. Right. Finally it has occurred. Because, I mean, the back half of the Odyssey, the pacing can really drive you nuts. Right? I mean, we slow the pacing down tremendously. Homer's been building that suspense, but now it is. Now here it is, and we've. We finally have the slaughter in the hall. So let me just kind of set it up here. So we have Odysseus, you know, the beggar, and he's just kind of passed the archery contest. And we have him make kind of an invocation to Apollo. We should keep in mind that today, the day of the slaughter, is a feast day for Apollo. There's also an archery contest that has occurred. So there's certainly a motif that is happening here. And I think that no one is surprised, or at least no one is sad that the first suitor who's going to bite the dust is Antinous. Right. I mean, finally. Right. I mean, this. And even last book, he's so annoying in book 22 that Homer just goes ahead and tells you, by the way, Antinous will be the first one to die, Right? But it's just kind of like Homer just kind of gives that to us. And so here it is. But there's several things I think that are worth noting is that Antinous. I think the first thing we need to note is Antinous is killed while feasting. And Homer really blends these images together in a way, and I kind of tried to capture them in our opening narrative. But Antinous, when he's shot with the arrow straight through the throat, which is actually the second thing I'd like to point out, because I really kind of want Homer the teacher to be kind of making that significant, right? Antinous, whose voice we've been tolerating through the entire Odyssey, now gets shot in the throat. It's hard for me not to see that as a very intentional thing. But then he kicks over the table, etc. And we get these kind of filthy, kind of disgusting images of food showered across the floor, the bread and meats soaked in a swirl of bloody filth. And for me, when I read these, I think that, you know, Homer's being very intentional here of bringing together this kind of grisly slaughter with also food imagery. I think this goes into the guest friendship, right? That they've been feasting in his house. They've been, you know, bleeding his house white. And the. I think the end of the last book actually explicitly made this analogy where Odysseus tells Telemachus, it's now to provide them their supper, right? It's now to provide them their just feast. And so we're going to see this. This imagery of violence and food be kind of merged together, which I think very much like fits in the overall theme of guest friendship. I don't know, what do you think?
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Dr. Adam Cooper
Reminds me of the kind of horrible way that guest friendship plays out in the cave of the Cyclops, where you're supposed to, you know, offer your guest a meal. But the Odysseus's men are actually the dinner. But. And I think when you first look at the suitors, these kind of pampered sons of the lordly citizens of Ithaca, who, beside their wine, women in song, they listen to the voice of the poet, their sophisticated speakers, Antinous especially, they seem like they're sort of the farthest poles apart from the savage Cyclops, with one flattening eye and his whole gaze kind of centered on turning the world into food. But this Antinous, who's The he's like Odysseus when he first begs from him, he says, you know, you look to me like a king, Antinous. And no doubt inside his manly chest he's thinking, and you're sitting in the king's chair, mine, you look like a king. And so I'm going to ask you to show hospitality first and give me some food. And Antinous then, and in other places, responds with this amazingly condescending yet also hypocritical speech where he assumes that the beggar is a lazy, good for nothing man and isn't interested in doing any work all his life, while he is somehow better. And the beggar, then he's not entitled to much hospitality, even while he is doing no work at all and treating himself as very entitled to the hospitality of Odysseus. But nevertheless, when Antonio speaks, sitting in this position of power like a king, his words feel true and they feel authoritative, and all the other suitors, they follow him. So it seems like this subtle, hypocritical, judgmental voice of Antinous. It looks like reason, it looks like authority. It actually governs and guides men into a unity, but it serves his idling appetite for Odysseus swine and his women and his wine. And so it's so, you know, Odysseus is a liar who knows how to lie like truth. And he bends when he's tightening the bow, he tunes it like a skilled lyre player. And I think his deceptions or stories, they serve the truth. And at this moment, the rags are cast aside, deceptions are cast aside. He claims to be himself in his own house. Zeus thunders behind him, and with that arrow he points right at the truth of what Antinous is, because he pierces the throat down which the wine is pouring, that throat that has uttered these kinds of beguiling, misleading versions of reality at the very moment when it's obvious that his throat really serves his appetite. And so there's a kind of.
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Host (possibly a podcast host)
This is a fittingness, right? I mean, there's just a great fittingness in how Homer plays this out. And I'm really delighted, actually, to hear you draw that Cyclops comparison, because that was something on this read through that really caught my attention and something that I've been trying to play out is how much these two narratives actually play off each other, right? Where you have the Cyclops, you know, disease, arguably is the person in violation of guest friendship, right? He comes in, he wants the raid, he's going to steal, and then he's like, oh, wait, we could get guest friendship out of this, right? We could get some gifts. And the Cyclops comes in. And again, like you said, the great irony is that the host eats his guest, right? He doesn't feast him, he eats him. And this really strikes me that this is what's also happening here, that Odysseus. And it's probably part of the curse, right, that Odysseus brought in his own head through his actions. But he. He comes in and he has his own, you know, guests that are in violation of guest friendship. And in a certain way, he also consumes them. And I think that that's another reason we're seeing a lot of this food imagery mixed with violence in a somewhat unsettling way, is because it's supposed to be unsettling. It's unsettling the same way that we. The Cyclops was. What was the line where he's beating the men like puppies against the rock and bolting them down raw, right. And then washing them down with some. Some good raw milk. And so, you know, I think that these two kind of repulsive narratives are supposed to play off of each other in a lot of different ways.
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Dr. Adam Cooper
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It's as if one can think of the journey, the voyage of Odysseus from warrior at Troy to initially a kind of pirate raiding cities with which he's not at war, then showing up in the Cyclops cave, helping himself to cheese and thinking he can use the form of hospitality for his material gain and benefit, and knowing that he's going to meet a savage, lawless man, thinking he'll. He'll be able to get the better of him, which is not actually what hospitality is about, it seems like then things begin to go wrong for him in a big way, and he. He meets maybe things that look a little bit like hospitality but are not hospitality on the rest of his odyssey, until finally he has nothing. He's on the edge of becoming nothing on Calypso's island, and is welcomed back into the human community by the girl Nausicaa and her people, and at that point is both at the mercy of their hospitality and is given everything that he's undergone in his voyage, is poised to recognize the deeper goods that this cultural form serves, which if he wasn't, it seems like he could not be the dispenser of justice that we see him as at the end of the poem, where the one who can say, no, you. You've taken the order of goods that are embodied in the structures of hospitality, courtship, the Household itself, marriage, even kingship, and you've turned them all upside down. Hospitality is supposed to give an opportunity for strangers, a stranger, to first be welcomed in to your community, so that then, in the best possible light, we can find our way to who and what we are and who and what we might be in relationship to each other. Right? The guest is welcomed in, given food, maybe get bathed even, and drawn into the life of the community before he even tells his name or gives his story only afterward. Now, tell us what brought you here. Because in the stranger, in the guest, we recognize a potential, certainly a potential threat, but also a potential blessing, a potential friend, even potentially a God in disguise, as it happens. And so this structure is supposed to sort of provide a space for what is unknown in the other to reveal itself according to terms that I can't exactly dictate, and that who we are to each other might come to light and come to be in the best possible way. So, and it seems like, yeah, Odysseus here becomes the defender of the very forms that he maybe began violating early in the poem and has sort of had to be brought down to nothing and remade in order to stand for in that way.
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Host (possibly a podcast host)
Yeah, I like that. Almost in an avenger of the rules that he violated. Right, of these divine rules. No, I like. I'd like to play that out. So Odysseus is kind of like pushing the narrative forward a little bit. So it's funny that the suitors, they have this like, denial, right? Like, oh, no, maybe the beggar just accidentally shot Antinous in the throat, right? And so they try and like, play this off a little bit. Odysseus comes over the top, which is really kind of the reveal on that line. 40 or so. And then Eurymachis tries to broker this truce. And I mean, I don't think anyone thinks this is going to be successful, but the way that I read it that was kind of intriguing to me is there were two kind of relations that I think were being played out. One is that you really have a subpar rhetorician trying to be rhetorical with the master of rhetoric, right? So here's your machus trying to give this, like, rhetorical response and broker peace with Odysseus and the suitors. And you just, you get this feeling that, like, this is. This is immature, this is a juvenile trying to argue with an adult like, this is not going to work. And it doesn't. It falls very flat. The other relation that stood out to me, which I thought was worth exploring, was that Eurymachus does make the point that of, you're our king, right? So could you spare your own people? Right. Should the king spare his own people? And I thought actually, you know, despite thinking the overall thing was a little bit flat, I thought this was a good, a good argument, right? Like, you know, could you spare us, right, you're our king. It doesn't right at all. Odysseus is going to make them all pay in blood. But I did like this relationship between one, the rhetoricians and two, the king and his people. So pushing the narrative forward just a bit. So Eurymachus, his, you know, truce falls flat and so he calls them to arms, he calls the suitor to arms and he's immediately killed. He gets shot ripping his breast beside the nipple so hard it lodged in the man's liver, which kind of gives you the angle that he's, he's being shot at. You know, as well, to make that work. The other thing too is I had a bunch of flashbacks here from the Iliad. We haven't heard about, you know, an Iliad. It's very common to hear about nipples. And that's like Homer's best way of showing like where people get shot. It's like his little guiding post of letting you know where people got speared or arrowed. So we haven't heard about that in a while. So I had a little flashbacks here to the Iliad. And again though, we get this food imagery mixed with violence. So it says, flinging his food and his two handled cup across the floor, he smashed the ground with his forehead, writhing in pain. And then we get this kind of like gory, violent, you know, language mixed with the food, which goes into all the themes that we've simply just discussed. Amphimenus also is the next one to die, but he's actually killed by Telemachus. And I didn't know, you know, I'm not sure how you read this Telemachus, like, I don't know, I'm led to believe this might be the first man he's killed. Right. He hasn't been in war, he hasn't had a father, he hasn't done this. And this is the first man he kills. He happens to stab him in the back, which I'm not entirely sure is the best way to go about your first kill, but it's justified, I guess. And so you kind of get this little narrative of like, you know, he stabs him in the back and then he immediately fears, he immediately fears that he's going to get stabbed in return. And so then he basically runs directly to his father. And to me, I still see that kind of that childlike side of Telemachus here, right? The first kill is a stab in the back, immediately gripped by fear. And you run where you run straight to your father. So then we get. Let's see here. Telemachus then goes, and he is going to fetch the armor, right? That's his role. So he's going to fetch the armor and weapons. And you know, one thing here that I really kind of thought about, because my understanding is like, there's like a hundred suitors. Like, there's a lot of people here, and there's Odysseus standing in a threshold now they've locked the doors, and Odysseus is basically standing in a threshold. And so one thing that really kind of stood out to me here is that while Telemachus is getting the armor, Odysseus is picking off the suitors. To me, this is just a statement of their cowardice, because there's no way, if they all rushed him, this is going to work, right? But they're so afraid of being shot that they're basically allowing themselves to be picked off one by one where they really could rush him, right? And because I don't think there's. I mean, there's no way that if they all rushed him, they're not going to overwhelm him, but because of their fear and cowardice, it's going to allow them to be picked off one by one while Telemachus is getting the armor.
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Dr. Adam Cooper
And Odysseus chooses his first target very wisely in this regard. I think the fact that Antinous dies first makes it much harder for the suitors to work cohesively, given that he's the one whose words have justified their. Their behavior. And then the fact that Eurymachus dies second, Remicus being, those two being the sort of ringleaders, and of course, Euremachus is trying to rally them to act as one. And it seems like later on they do begin to begin to sort of what happens if we all six through at once. At that point you get the sense not only are these not. These are the kind of third and fourth leaders in the group kind of rising to that position out of necessity. And also they're the brave ones. There's maybe 10 or 12 brave ones, and the others are either already taken down, or they mostly just don't have it in them to unite and rush in that kind of way.
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Host (possibly a podcast host)
I like that. A lot. I like that. That they've been deprived of their leaders first. And, you know, this probably goes into why it was so important for Odysseus to come in as the beggar and to observe.
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Dr. Adam Cooper
Right.
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Host (possibly a podcast host)
If he just would have come in here roughshod, he doesn't know who to take out first. But here he takes out the two leaders, and now it's really handicapped them in their response. No, I think there's a lot of depth there. I'd like to think about that more.
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Dr. Adam Cooper
Yeah. So it seems like he's trying to. He is a kind of spy in their house, in his house in that way, and can kind of. It helps him plot their murder or their slaughter. But at some moments, it also seems as if he's trying to see whether they're really worthy of slaughter. And interesting. We just had the death of Amphimenus, whom, as you said, Telemachus spears in the back. But Amphinomus is one of the more decent suitors who is uncomfortable with their behavior. And one thinks that if Penelope really does have to consider the possibility that Odysseus isn't coming back and that she might have to settle with one of these men, hard though it would be to do so, that maybe she would have chosen him, but. So it's interesting that Odysseus tries to warn him to get out. And I've never quite understood why he's sad. He listens to the warning and he's sad, and you get the sense that it actually means something to him. But he goes and joins the rejoins them anyway. And again, I also wonder whether. Is there something. Is there some connection with Telemachus there, that Telemachus actually takes him out because he thinks he realizes that this man, on some level could have been the filled. I don't know. I don't know. Anyway.
- [34:47]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
No, I like that. Yeah. Because you think that there needs to be some kind of connection between the two. Homer seems to be very intentional here about the sequence of events and how people are dying. Yeah. And one of the ways that I've read it and that we've kind of been tracking on the podcast, too, is, you know, it doesn't really seem like the suitors have a whole lot of capacity for repentance once Odysseus shows up. Right. Athena seems to kind of come over the top of them at times, not even allowing them to repent, but then causing them to actually act worse. And so there seems to be a moment of no return. And, you know, if I had to pick one. It seems to be when Odysseus enters the home. And there's that line about Argos where the shadow of death, like Homer, couples those two lines very closely of Odysseus entering the home and the shadow of death coming over Argos. It just seems that then, like, once we get to that point, it doesn't matter. It really doesn't. Like, you. You could realize that something terrible is going to happen, and you just go back to feasting. The judgment's been cast, and now this is just, like, slow play of its actual execution. So we get this interesting narrative where the goatherd, then. And he's the bad guy. So the swineherd and the cowherd are the good guys. And so it's the goatherd. Then he's able to climb through the smoke ducks and go get some armor for everybody and some spears and arm the suitors. And again, this is something they intentionally were trying to stop, right? By removing weapons and locking doors. And there's two things here that really caught my attention. One, there's a little bit of an immaturity again on Telemachus, part right, he left the door unlocked. He left it ajar. Right, the storeroom. And so he kind of. But he does take ownership of this. That's like 165 or so, right? He does take ownership of it. And then the swineherd and the cowherd go. And this is. You know, this is something too, particularly the first time I read it, that really kind of boggled me about the violence of this book is Odysseus is literally fighting off I don't know how many people right now, and Telemachus is the only one in there helping him. And he, like. He gives these, like, long orders of, like, yeah, go in there and get him, but don't just kill him. Like, spend the time to, like, tie him up and then hang him from the rafters. And you just think, like, I find this so disproportionate. I mean, we'll see kind of as the book plays on, that there's a brutal hatred that gets kind of displayed towards the goatherd. But I think this is kind of the preliminary side of it that, like, why. Why take all the time to basically torture this guy when, you know, Odysseus and Telemachus are by themselves fending off all the suitors? I mean, this seems disproportionate to me, particularly the first time I read it, but I'm still not sure I have a Great answer for it.
- [37:34]
Dr. Adam Cooper
Yeah. This contrast between Eumaeus and Melanthius, the faithful swineherd and the really son of a bitch goatherd who not only kind of flatters the suitors and sucks up to them and forgets his. His master, but mocks the faithful servant. And you think violence, you know, when you have war between two nations, that's. It gets ugly. Civil war, it gets uglier. But war in a household where, you know, we know each other, we're. We're really part of the same family. And you, your. Your lord and father, your master and play up to, and play along with his, the people who are insulting his house. And I did the difficult thing and did my best to maintain his property despite it being under wasteful management and tried to uphold the guest friendship and the old ways and remembered how much my whatever is good about my lot in life I owed to him and that he was, as they always say about Odysseus, and he was a king. He was kind, like a father. I think I can understand the passions involved in the cruel treatment of Melanthius.
- [39:33]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
Yeah, There just seems to be a disproportionality here that needs to be kind of reconciled that's almost even jarring in a rational way to the narrative itself. Right? Like, why take this time? Like, why do this? And I like what you're saying, that the goat herd just ends up being the stand in of the disloyal servant in a certain way too. We're gonna see the disloyal women servants as well, which I think is also a narrative that is unsettling to a lot of people, particularly the first time readers. Okay, yeah, let's run with that because I think that's probably a good way to unpack this and maybe try and give some rationality to the disproportionality of not just the violence, but also like, why take the time? Like why do these things? But regardless, they do it right. They tie him up, they tie him up to the rafters in kind of an agonizing way. And then they're able to bring back more of these shields and everything, you know, for odysseus and Telemachus, etc. So then Athena shows up, finally, it's interesting, she shows up as mentor. And then there's like a little bit of play acting here because Odysseus knows that it's her, right. He says, thrilled to see her, and cries out, rescue us, mentor. Now it's life or death. Remember your old comrade all the service I offered you. We were boys together, right? So he's play acting here, which I, you know, which is part of one of the reasons I think Athena loves him, right? So the subterfuge, the cunning, the lies, you know, he can even do this on the fly in the middle of a battle, right? He can, he can play his part. And so then, you know, they think it's real mentor. So you get this argument, you know, back and forth. And then Athena. It's interesting. Athena's reactions are always somewhat intriguing. It's like 235 or so, she hits new heights of rage. But her reaction is not immediately against the suitors. It's the lash. Odysseus kind of into a frenzy, right? She kind of berates him and then disappears. She turns into. Looks like line 250 for all the world, like a swallow in their sight. She flew high on the perch. So now she's just up here watching, right? She's up here watching in the rafters as they kind of do this. Now granted, as you mentioned earlier, we're whittling down the suitors here. And so the ones we've got, what is it, six of them that actually have some fortitude to gather together and they all hurl at once. And this is how you know in a Homeric epic that you're all going to die terribly, right? Because you throw all your spears and not a single one of them come close. Like, as soon as that happens, you have to realize, yeah, we're, we're dead. Like, we're all dead. And of course, then, you know, the four throw their spears back and they all hit home right, Immediately. So, you know that this goddess is driving these spears. And the one thing I think that I would point out here is line, I don't know, 305 or so. Who is this? This is, I think this is the cowherd. Yeah, he's throwing a spear and he says, take this spear, this guest gift for the cow's hoof you once gave King Odysseus the beggar in his house. So this is referencing back when the guy threw the ox hoof at Odysseus. Odysseus had several things thrown at him. A couple stools, an ox hoof, et cetera. But two things that caught my attention here. One is that keep in mind that that action was inspired by Athena, right? It was actually Athena that kind of caused that guy to do that. And so now it's kind of coming full circle. The other thing too is that we get the explicit reference of the spear as a guest gift. We get explicit reference from a character, not just Homer, but from a character's mouth, that they understand that there's this irony that they're playing out guest friendship now in a violent way. Right. So here, you're my guest, I'm your host. Take my gift, which is this, you know, spear to the face.
- [43:47]
Dr. Adam Cooper
Yeah. There's a very much. It's the. There's a sort of home advantage that Odysseus as host here has. And using the like, again, like Polyphemus, in some way, inverting the way in which guest friendship works to bring home the seriousness of violating it to those who have been violating it so thoroughly. Yeah. And also, you know, what you say about Athena kind of leading the suitors on and then being there to bring home the payoff. Very, very interesting. It's as if something needs to be set up, almost like Moses and Pharaoh or something, where God is hardening Pharaoh's heart and trying to get him to be, you are Pharaoh, so be Pharaoh so that you can stand with all your gods behind you so that then I can smack you down. Something like that. Where as if what's at stake here isn't just the persons who have done wrong getting what they deserve, but some kind of symbol of justice, purification, and the seriousness of the things that have been violated that is supposed to last for a long time, for all time, maybe. But for. But to be a symbol, a symbol that Ithaca maybe needs as an island kingdom to get reordered, you think whatever sort of higher goods a society is supposed to be ordered towards, the suitors, as leaders of their society have turned everything upside down and they're no longer ruled by their own reason. There needs to be some serious bloody magnificent sign in order to start fresh bloodshed, filth, guest friendship turning on itself, fire and brimstone. And then I think, kind of beginning from the basics, the marriage bed, the family, the old country estate. And then can we. Can this household take charge of this city and show this city what the good life really looks like again? Something like that. I don't know.
- [46:37]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
No, I like that a lot. And yeah, I think there's a general recapitulation that is happening here. Right. So we're getting the violent side of that, the destructive side. Right. But then there's going to be a cleansing and then an establishment of beauty and order back into it. I think that's what we kind of see in the next. The next book as we see Odysseus and Penelope kind of rekindling their relationship as well. The, you know, this kind of leads into a somewhat humorous narrative of basically, now everyone's dead and there's a few people lingering in the hall. And so there's three people. There's a prophet, there's the bard, and there's the herald. And we pretty much know he's going to save the bard because we've been watching throughout this whole book that the bards play this special role. Right. I think there's kind of a comic thing going on here in Homer, right, where the bards are always inspired. Everyone always loves the bards. Odysseus talks about tipping your bards. Like, it's just funny, right? Because if you remember, this is going to be an oral thing over several days. The bard can't die. That's not going to happen. Right. The bards are always good. So, you know, one of the things, though, I think, to kind of parse this out is it's very clear, I think, from the narrative that while the bard and the herald were in the house, the prophet, though, was one of the suitors. Right? He participated as a suitor, which I don't think you see, of the bard and the herald. And so there's no mercy that's extended, you know, to the prophet, as opposed to the bard and herald do receive that mercy. So that's one way, I think, that we can make that distinction. Why Odysseus allows some people live and some others. Telemachus also plays an intercessory role here, which I think is important. Right. As another witness and observer in the home.
- [48:28]
Dr. Adam Cooper
Yeah. We see the prophet Leodes draw, attempt to draw the bow to win the hand of Penelope. And I just love what he tries to separate himself from the suitors as someone who was a restraining influence on them and who was better than them and was warning them. And then this line, 334, but I was just their prophet. My hands are clean and I'm to die the death. And then, well, we've seen Theoclymenus, the prophet, the true prophet who tells the suitors, your laughter is lamentation, and when you're feasting, you're really devouring blood. There is no way out for you. What kind of a prophet is this?
- [49:29]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
Right.
- [49:31]
Dr. Adam Cooper
He's one of their number. So. And Odysseus, of course, points out that whatever, only a priest, only a prophet. Priest and prophet, if they aren't really redirecting the society they're part of, are not less complicit. But more complicit because of the sacred role and the authority that they stand for. Only a priest, only a prophet. How hard you must have prayed in my own house that the heady day of my return would never dawn and my dear wife be yours, etc. So you die. Yeah.
- [50:17]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
I think it's interesting in Homer that you, with this ancient text that you get several examples of sarcasm, right? Like, I just think it's. It's wonderful, right, from someone who tends towards the sarcastic. There's several, several places inside the text that you just cannot read it without reading it in a sarcastic tone, right? Because that's just like the, the. The veneer on it.
- [50:38]
Dr. Adam Cooper
And it's actually, it seems true that you can't have a society that's gone wrong right down to its very roots unless you have a prophet and a priest, someone who will bless the proceedings in some way. And. Yeah, and that person, he's setting himself up for serious. A serious comeuppance.
- [51:07]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
Correct. Yeah, I very much agree. So it's interesting, too, that then when he shows mercy on them, I found it interesting that they don't, like, immediately, like, join him. Like, they don't join, like, in the fight or the cleansing. They actually both immediately run to the altar stone of mighty Zeus, right? Which again, like, there's all these themes of guest friendship and Zeus oversees them and et cetera, but they're just. They seem to be in a separate category, right? They, they don't join the fighting, they don't join the cleanup. I don't think they just run to the altar stone of Zeus, which I read that very much in the. The context of. Of guest friendship. So Telemachus, at his father's bidding, goes and grabs Eurycleia and calls her out. And I found this interesting as well because, you know, she finds Odysseus in the thick of slaughtered corpses, splattered with bloody filth, like a lion that's devoured some ox in the field. We get to some kind of wonderful imagery here. But what's interesting is, like, if you remember poor Eurycleia, right, she, she realizes it's Odysseus because of his scar. And her Odysseus response to this was basically grab her by the neck and say, like, if you say anything, I'm going to kill you, like, immediately. And then if you remember right after it, she's like, oh, no, like, it's okay, I'll be silent. Let me report on, you know, the women, and I'll tell you who's Good and who's bad, right? Who's loyal and who's disloyal. And he really just blows her off. And it's just like, please keep your mouth shut. Like, I. Like, I'm gonna go. I'm here to observe, right? That's what he's here for. Like, I'm the beggar. I'm here to observe. I'll make my own observations, thank you very much. So I found it really interesting that then here he calls her out and he asks her to do the exact same thing, right? He says, quick, report in full on the women in my halls who are disloyal to me and who are guiltless. It's interesting. I don't know. I found this interesting that he goes back to the question that she tried to help with, and now. Now she does play that role very clearly, right? She chooses life and death for the women in the hall. Some of them he clearly knows because. What was her name? Melantho? Was that her name?
- [53:17]
Dr. Adam Cooper
Yeah, that's right.
- [53:17]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
Right. He watched her be. He watched her disrespect Penelope, right? Directly. He also, when he was the beggar, was awake at night watching a lot of them slip out of the house. But even that kind of, like, direct epistemology, which I think is important in Homer, we see, you know, were you an actual eyewitness? Did you see these things with your own eyes? I think it's a theme that we see throughout the Homeric texts. He goes back to her and asks her this, and she does. I mean, she still reports, you know, as a faithful servant, and tells him, you know, basically, she just. She doesn't actually tell him. She just goes and gets the disloyal ones and brings them out, right? Because they're, I think, in a kind of a fittingness, they're the ones that are actually going to have to drag the corpses. Several of these are their, you know, formal former lovers. Yeah, right. They're now dragging the bodies of their. Of their former lovers. And they have to clean his house, which I think is highly analogous. Right. They have to actually clean up the slaughter. I mean, any. Any comments on this?
- [54:19]
Dr. Adam Cooper
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, so wonderful, as you've said, the. The bitter. The bitterness of the justice, if we want to call it that, of them cleaning up the messes of their. Their lovers and. And cleansing the house. Cleansing the house, finally, of their own. Their own filth seems to be the image, because then they're led out into the yard under Odysseus orders to be driven against the wall and the edge of the sword, though Telemachus, who's had to live with them, maybe in an act of vengeful bitterness, goes beyond that and has them strung up where he sees their legs kicking like birds in the net.
- [55:24]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
Yeah, he denies the McLean death.
- [55:26]
Dr. Adam Cooper
Yeah, right.
- [55:27]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
He goes beyond, he goes beyond his father's orders. Right, you're exactly right. He goes beyond his father's orders. He denies the McLean death. And again, we're sat here kind of curious of the relations and yeah, I mean, you're correct. These are the women that he grew up with in the home. You know, how did they treat him? If they'll disrespect Penelope, what would that mean that they would do to him, particularly as a young boy? And yeah, so there's again, this kind of disproportionality and I think that particularly for first time readers, I'm not sure what you think about with your students when you encounter them reading this text, but usually the slaughter of the serving women is an unsettling passage for people to read.
- [56:06]
Dr. Adam Cooper
Yeah, yeah, yes, the things you drew attention to earlier, the twisting of the goat herd in the ropes and then the slaughter of the maids or the hanging of the maidservants, no clean death for them. And then, and then the savaging that we're about to see of, of Melanthius the goatherd, it really, it strikes me that Homer must be making this unsettling purposefully and making us ask. So if I think, and I think we are willing to say Odysseus, overall purge of the house and purge of the kingdom is the just and necessary thing for restoring his house and restoring his kingdom and restoring some semblance of an order of goods that is meaningfully under the gods and meaningfully just and meaningfully creating the possibilities of happiness. If it's just and necessary for him to do that, especially as king in a usurped kingdom, that doesn't necessarily mean that it will be. The justice will be executed. With perfect justice you can have an overall just event that is being administered, an overall just act that is being administered by imperfect ministers. I think that's what you see here. And, and I think Homer is saying if you're looking for, you're looking for more justice from human beings in situations like this, you're probably asking for more than should expect from human natures, being not only reasonable but passionate creatures. And yes, it's good that Eumaeus is passionately attached to the idea of what a good servant should be and What a crying shame it is for Melanthius to be the opposite in the arrogant way that he is. And it's. And Telemachus sensing whatever the insult that the maidservants are involved in and their insult to Penelope into the house, maybe it's good that he has those passions, but the fact that these are human beings passionately involved in the justice that they are administering means that they're going. Even if the overall thing they're doing is right and good, it's can and I think does still happen that they go over the line. And I think we shouldn't be totally okay with it, but we should also be able to say this is what good people do when they are called upon to administer justice in a tough situation like this. They go over the line and don't. Yeah, you can standing, sitting in your living room here or your office at school or your classroom, you can say, oh, that was wrong and we shouldn't do that. But don't necessarily think that. That even you or even people you should and you could and should admire wouldn't do something like this. War is ugly and ugly things happen. And this actually connects also to Odysseus seems to me the most. I don't think even he is perfect in his. In what he does in the last books of the Odyssey, but he seems the most restrained. He orders the clean death for the maids that Telemachus goes beyond. He doesn't, he's not, doesn't participate in the ravaging of the body of Melanthius the goatherd. And when Eurycleia comes down and sees the suitors like, like a kind of hall of fish drawn up out of their element, dead in heaps, she is about to cry in triumph over them. And Odysseus says, restrain yourself, nurse. It's not holy to triumph over dead man. And I think we see here that same Odysseus who among the Phaochians, when he hears the story of the fall of Troy, his own great stratagem, his own great glory, he hears it again. And now he weeps like a woman weeping over the body of her slain husband because her city has been sacked while he was trying to beat off the day of destruction and she's being dragged into slavery at the butt of a spear, he weeps like that woman. And it seems to me that again we kind of see in Odysseus who has begun to think about everything he's experienced, everything he's done from every side, and therefore see is able to see the glory of his life and also the suffering that he's caused and the evil of his life. And therefore, even though he's doing something basically good and right, wants to restrain the cry of triumph and recognize that there's also a sense in which this is ugly and an inglorious thing to participate in book 24, needs to be restrained by a lightning bolt of Zeus. But.
- [62:06]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
No, I like that comparison a lot. Also, not that I think it makes it overly more palatable, but I, I, this time I noted that it was actually the serving women that were in charge of taking care of Argos the dog. Right. They were actually. Homer makes it very explicit that they were the ones that actually neglected him. And we get this kind of very emotive death of Argos as he kind of sees his master. So just, you know, if it helps you make it a little bit more palatable, they didn't take care of the family dog either. So just, I'm just gonna throw that out there as a, as a side note. So, you know, as we mentioned several times, Melanthius, this is the goat herd line 500. He's the guy that's hung up by the rafters. They bring him out and yeah, it is brutal, right? They hauled him out through the doorway into the court, lopped off his nose and ears with a ruthless knife, tore his genitals out for the dogs to eat raw, and in a manic fury, hacked off his hands and feet. So, I mean, again, yeah, this is very personable and I, I like the read of. This is disloyalty, right? This is what happens to the disloyal. This is the epitome of what happens to you if you act in an unjust manner towards your house, right? Towards your king, which, again, I mean, the brutality is difficult.
- [63:23]
Dr. Adam Cooper
It transcends the brutality of almost anything in the Iliad, I think.
- [63:29]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
Yeah, that's true. I mean, there's a lot of threats in the Iliad, right, of mutilating corpses and, etc, but this I, I do not recall. You know, some people get some bad spear wounds, right? Like the worst, the God of war hands out, right? Usually some guy gets stabbed in the bladder, down by the genitals or something because it's a slow, painful death. But this is, this is torture.
- [63:47]
Dr. Adam Cooper
Yeah.
- [63:48]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
And I don't, obviously Achilles does some things of just being inhuman and not extending mercy that bother us, but you're correct, I don't, I mean, even like the person, even the human sacrifices at Patroclus Death, if I recall correctly, are still clean kills, Right. This is a brutal, torturous death. I mean, basically, then the guy just bleeds out. Yeah, yeah. There's nothing. Yeah, you're correct. I don't remember anything in the Iliad that rises to this level of brutality. But again, I think it's the disloyal servant. And what that would have communicated to Homer's audience.
- [64:25]
Dr. Adam Cooper
Yeah. The betrayer in your own house, in your own family. That's the. That's the most stinging, kind of creates the most, the. The bitterest kind of enmity. Hopefully they get it all out of their system here. Yeah.
- [64:43]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
So as we kind of wind up the book here, Odysseus. Yeah. I mean, there seems to just be an analog, right, that we have to cleanse the home, Right. So we've. We've had the violence, some very, very brutal violence, and now just this cleanses the home, right. So if we're looking at this as a. As a pattern of restoration, this is where we are now. We're going to remove the carnage. We're going to remove what was evil because it's been conquered and defeated. And now we have this fire and brimstone that's going to come in and purify the home. And Odysseus, I think it's notable too, that Odysseus does this himself, Right? He doesn't delegate this to anyone. He does this himself. And it's only after he does this, then that the loyal women can come out. And when they do it, I mean, it ends in what I read is a very beautiful and emotive scene of. They basically surround him, right? The king has come home. The king not only has come home, but he's conquered the evil. He's conquered the suitors. They're overcome with a loving longing, broke down and wept deep in his heart. He knew them one and all. So it's not even that. It's just his. His maidservants, right. He knows these women, Right. He knows all of them, and they're loyal to him. And he's overcome with emotion. And we kind of end with, I think, this very beautiful picture of, I guess, loyalty in a certain way, and also a restoration of order in the home.
- [66:21]
Dr. Adam Cooper
So reminiscent of so many of Christ's parables, where the bridegroom shows up, or the master shows up unexpectedly at an unexpected hour. And there are people whose whole lives have been centered around longing for and preparing for his welcome. And then there are those others he sees and he knows them. And, yeah, Something satisfying. I think ultimately there should be something satisfying both about the king reappearing in his realm and embracing those who are his own, and something satisfying about him casting out and casting down the unfaithful servants and the usurpers and so on.
- [67:15]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
Yeah. So now we're kind of, you know, as we look to the next book, as we continue this kind of, like, pattern of reconciliation, obviously, then what we're all thinking about is Penelope. Right. There has to be this reunion between Odysseus and Penelope, which, you know, we anticipate is going to have a dance to it. Right. The matchless queen of cunning and Odysseus, a mastermind like Zeus, can't simply walk out and hug each other and say hello. Right. There's going to be a dance here.
- [67:45]
Dr. Adam Cooper
And Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, we are too wise to woo peaceably.
- [67:52]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
Right. You know, there's going to be a thickness here, I think, to a lot of the dialogue. Anything else, though, from your end? Anything in this book that we missed? Any final comments?
- [68:05]
Dr. Adam Cooper
Well, I like what you said at the very beginning, that this is kind of the moment we've all been waiting for, the climax. And if it's something like in the Iliad, the duel between Hector and Achilles, it's externally, in terms of the external action, in terms of the plot, this is the moment that everything has been heading towards, antagonist meets protagonist. But like the Iliad, again, that kind of reaches its deepest moments and its deepest revelations and suggestions about what is in the heart of the hero and what is in the heart of the human being. I think, really, it's book 23. That's the climax of the Odyssey, though. This is magnificently splendid. Bloody and dark and satisfying, I think, although satisfying. You ate. You were talking about this feast that you're eating and you eat and you eat. You eat enough that you're satisfied. And then also there's something turning in your stomach a little bit. Yeah.
- [69:26]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
Something slightly unsettling. Right. About the narrative. No, that's very good. All right. Well, Professor Cooper, we deeply appreciate you being here today. Where can people find you? Where can people find your work?
- [69:41]
Dr. Adam Cooper
You can find me in. In Lander, Wyoming, much of the year. If you knock on my office door, you may find me. And I love to talk about any of these things with anyone. I've. Let's see, I have one or two published essays, an essay in UD's graduate journal, Ramify on Eudora Welty, a poem in first things, St. Martha and the Dragon. But most of my works have yet to be done.
- [70:23]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
We'll look forward to them.
- [70:24]
Dr. Adam Cooper
It was a real pleasure being with you and I loved hearing your thoughts and insights into the poem. I think this was a lot of fun and I'd love to do it again at some point, either in front of the cameras or even as enjoyable. I'm sure just in your living room there with a glass of scotch or something. That would be great.
- [70:45]
Host (possibly a podcast host)
That's right. Well, I gotta come out and visit Wyoming College at some point, so I'll come out and say hello. I've got family in that area. I like Wyoming. It's very Oklahoma esque. So. All right, everyone. Well, we will see you next week as we look forward to the reunion of Penelope and Odysseus. See ya Ra.