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VII. the FINAL FIGHT Swiftly Through the Town Runs Rumor The VII. THE FINAL FIGHT Swiftly through the town runs Rumor the Messenger, telling of the suitors' terrible death and fate. A crowd soon gathers at the palace of Odysseus; the bodies of the foreign suitors are dispatched to their several homelands, and the Ithacan corpses are buried by their kinsmen. The Ithacans then gather in assembly. Against the advice of Medon the herald and Halitherses the seer, the majority of the Ithacans rally around Eupeithes the father of Antinoos, and prepare to meet Odysseus in battle. A brief interlude on Olympus follows, in which Zeus encourages Athene to make peace, and sug­ gests that the gods should overlook Odysseus' blood-guilt. The party of Odysseus goes to meet the enemy; Laertes, with Athene's help, kills Eupeithes. The Ithacans are put to flight, and Odysseus and his allies are in hot pursuit when they are stopped by a thunder­ bolt from Zeus. Athene, in the guise of Mentor, concludes the treaty of peace, establishing Odysseus in his kingdom at last. The objections to this final episode all, so far as I know, fall into one category only: aesthetic objections. But the critics make up in vehemence for what they lack in concrete evidence: "In extremo deinde libro," says J. G. Schneider,1 "auctorem ingenium et spiritus plane defecisse videtur: ita, ut in rerum multarum satis gravium narratione brevitate inepta, partim etiam obscura de­ functus, lectoris exspectationem plane fallat." Spohn, who quotes this statement, particularly objects to the brief Olympian council, which he thinks hasty and badly written; Page concurs in this opinion, and adds,2 "From this moment onwards the story rushes spasmodically and deviously to its lame conclusion." "It may be judged," writes Kirk, "a suitably weak or inept conclusion to a final episode, that is ludicrous in its staccato leaps hither and thither, its indigestible concoction of rustics, thunderbolts, feeble old men and a goddess disguised or undisguised." 3 The last episode of the Odyssey, then, is said to be lame, hasty, awkward, abrupt. I must admit that I agree. This last scene is the one part of the 1 Praef, Orph. Argonaut. (1806), pp. 34 ff., cited in Spohn. 2 Page, Homeric Odyssey, p. 113. 8 Kirk, Songs, p. 250. THE FINAL FIGHT Conclusion which seems to me to bring Homer's name scant credit, the one scene which I would like to imagine the dying poet entrust­ ing to his dutiful but prosaic son, with instructions about necessary contents, but none, alas, about style. But my wish and my value judgment have no bearing on whether or not the scene is genuine. In the 20th century, in English, we place greatest emphasis on the last words of a sentence, a paragraph, a poem, a long work; clearly, this was not the taste of the ancient Greek. The great Oedipus ends in a way which seems to us weak, anticlimactic, disappointing, but it is unquestionably the work of Sophocles. The ending of the Iliad, too, is rather weary and mechanical: appropriately so, for the funeral of Hector marks the end of the Trojans' hope. In the Odyssey, the tone of exhaustion, of getting the whole thing over with, is less appropriate. But the ancient audience, not expecting a grand finale, may not have minded in the least. And even if they did mind, if the ending is poor even by ancient standards, we still cannot know that Homer did not write it. It is a necessary scene; that we do know. What features do we find in this last episode which make it seem necessary or particularly fitting for the last scene of the Odyssey? First, the Olympian Council, which Page and Spohn find offensive and unnecessary, is important both to give dignity and importance to the closing scene-as Pope saw-and to free Odysseus and Ithaca officially from the miasma of blood guilt. The latter feature of the scene is particularly important; Odysseus had committed murder -if justly-and some sort of purification was clearly called for if no act of vengeance was to take place. How could such an issue be settled except by divine fiat? Carpenter, Lang, and Wolf concur about this function of the Olympian conference and of Athene's interference at the end. "Except by a Dea ex machina," says Lang,4 "this feud, according to heroic manners, could in no wise be re­ conciled." We would leave the performance still fearing for Odys­ seus, says Wolf, 5 "nisi amnestia et pax fieret deorum interventu et subita µ:rixocv~." And the dea ex machina ending, suggests Car­ penter,6 "may have appealed as much to a Homeric as to a later Euripidean audience, being a proper Greek way to end a heroic narrative of violence." 4 Lang, Homer and the Epic, p. 318. 6 Proleg., p. 136, cited by Spohn, op. cit. 8 Carpenter, Folk Tale, etc., p. 193. .
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