To read is not to agree: the hardest Odyssey passage

Loving a classic often seems to require defending everything in it, and that is not how reading works. The Odyssey, by Homer, has a passage that proves this in the harshest possible way: after Odysseus kills the hundred and eight suitors who had taken over his house, his son hangs twelve slave women, and the poem moves on without saying whether that was right or wrong.

The scene that summaries skip

The killing of the suitors is the best-known part of the Odyssey's ending, but it does not end there. After the men are dead, Telemachus is ordered to deal with the household's slave women who had slept with the invaders. He chooses the most humiliating death available for them, and the poem describes the result without softening it:

"Their feet convulsed for a while, indeed not for long." (Odyssey, Book XXII, 457-473, based on the Portuguese translation by Christian Werner, Cosac Naify, 2014)

In the same passage, Homer compares the bodies of the twelve women to birds caught in a net (Odyssey, Book XXII, 468-472), a precise, visual image, stated and immediately abandoned. There is no line of condemnation, justification, or mourning. The poem changes the subject.

What that world saw, and what it did not see

Reading this scene today hurts, and it is difficult because the distance is real. That world treated those women as damaged property, goods belonging to the house that had been used by those who should not have used them, and the poem, at no point, questions that framing. This is not a translation slip or an exaggeration of contemporary reading: it is what the Greek text says, and pretending it says something else would be lying about the book in order to like it more.

Reading is not agreeing

This is exactly where the rule applies that separates someone who reads a classic from someone who only looks for confirmation in what they read: reading is not agreeing. It is seeing what the work sees, with all the clarity it truly has, and also seeing what it does not see, without trying to hide either behind the other. The same Odyssey that treats those women as objects is the one that gives Penelope the most rigorous test of identity in the entire poem, and both things are equally true about the same text.

Neither excusing it nor discarding the book

There are two ways to get this wrong, and both avoid the real work of reading. The first is to look away: treat the hanging as a period detail, mention it quickly and move on, as if naming the problem were worse than the problem itself. The second is to discard the whole book because of it, as if a classic only deserved to be read when it agrees with today's reader on everything. Neither path teaches anything. What teaches something is holding both truths at once, the beauty and the blind spot, without letting go of either hand.

Continue: Penelope and the test of the bed · Argos, the dog of Odysseus · The Odyssey, by Homer: summary and analysis · Why is Macbeth "the Scottish play"?
Source class: Odisseia, de Homero