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Home , Ithaca, Thrasymedes (mythology)

Seeking ’s Sister Mary Ebbott

I had read and even taught the several times before I noticed that Odysseus has a sister. In fact, I became aware of her existence one day while teaching. It was the middle of the fall semester in my Greek and Roman Epic course. This is an introductory-level course in which we are reading the epics in English translations, and I do not assume that my students have any prior experience with them. We had read the in depth for several weeks and were now in the middle of , with the Aeneid yet to come. I was making some now-forgotten point about Eumaios, the noble and loyal swineherd, or maybe about Odysseus’s mother Antikleia and her death while Odysseus was away. I try to model paying attention to the details of the poetry and using evidence from the text, and so I flipped to this passage and started reading it aloud. Eumaios is answering the question the newly arrived stranger— Odysseus in disguise—has asked him, whether Odysseus’s mother and father are still alive. Eumaios has just told the stranger about the death of Antikleia from her grief over her missing son, and he reminisces about his relationship with her. There I was, reading the end of the passage to my students, when I came to these lines:

As long as that woman was alive, even though she was grieving, it used to be my pleasure to ask her probing questions, because she herself brought me up together with Ktimene of the flowing dress, her devoted daughter, the youngest of the children she bore. Together with her I was brought up, with just a little less honor. Then when we both reached the lovely prime of youth, her they gave in marriage at and took countless gifts in return, and then me—Antikleia, having clothed me in a cloak and tunic and very beautiful clothes, and having given me sandals for my feet, she sent me away to the fields. But she loved me with all her heart. Odyssey 15.361–3701

In my memory of the moment, my reading becomes more halting, my voice trailing off a bit as the information sinks in. Antikleia had a daughter? So Odysseus has a sister? Why didn’t I know that?

“Huh,” I said aloud, “I never realized Odysseus has a sister.” I was both confused and feeling exposed in my ignorance, so I went back to whatever my point was and moved on. If any of my students reacted to what I said, I didn’t notice. Since they were reading the Odyssey for the first time, I suppose every character and detail was new to them.

I, though, couldn’t shake my bewilderment. After class, safe in the privacy of my office, I searched furiously for the passage that stated that Odysseus was an only child, or so I had thought. When I found it, I realized my mistake. Odysseus’s son Telemachos describes himself as an only son of an only son of an only son. Telemachos happens to be an only child, but Odysseus need not be. He just doesn’t have any brothers.

A colleague stopped by to say hello and asked, as we do, how my class had gone. “Did you know that Odysseus has a sister?” I asked him.

“He does? Who is she?”

1 This is my own translation, rather than the one I was reading at the time.

1 “Eumaios mentions her, says her name is Ktimene,” I replied. “How could I have never noticed her?”

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Ktimene’s story I left home, left , just like my brother did, even though I was younger and a woman. But I suppose my journey, to the home of my new husband on the nearby island of Samos, wasn’t special enough to be told in song. A bride usually moves to her husband’s house. Maybe the fact that Menelaos moved into Helen’s house was a sign that their marriage would be the subject of song someday. I remember when my brother went to contend for Helen’s hand in marriage, confident that he could win her over with his intelligence alone. He didn’t figure on her choosing a husband simply because he was as good-looking as she (or nearly so). After he saw he had no chance of winning, it was my brother’s brilliant idea, which he whispered in Tyndareus’s ear, to make all the suitors swear an oath beforehand to defend the marriage of Helen and whichever suitor was chosen. It wasn’t the last time one of his schemes wouldn’t work out quite the way he planned.

When Odysseus and I were young, women often remarked how he and I had similar personalities—but disparate looks. “Your daughter is such a beauty,” they would say to my mother, “but her husband will have to be able to cope with her cleverness.” My mother wasn’t like these other women, though. She was pleased with my looks, but cherished my wits. “Your intelligence makes you who you are,” she said to me as I was growing up. “Even though beauty is more often what men sing about in songs, you will be known and remembered as a perceptive and wise woman.”

When it came time to choose my husband, no scheming was necessary. My mother knew what sort of man would suit me, and my father was always smart enough to listen to her. My brother married the woman of his choice, too: , daughter of Icarius—also a clever woman, a good match for him. Not long after she moved into our household, though, it was time for me to take my journey.

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Over the next few years, Ktimene came to mind from time to time when I was talking to students or colleagues about the epics, and especially about the experience of noticing for the first time what has been there all along. I would ask, “Did you know that Odysseus has a sister?” She was a winning conversation topic: the fact that she exists seemed to surprise and delight everyone I mentioned her to. But I didn’t find anyone who was already aware of her.

That day in class when I first noticed Ktimene, a panic surged through me. I didn’t know something that I should know. I had missed an important detail that was obvious to everyone else. As I gradually discovered that no one else I asked knew anything about her either, my reaction was pure relief. I wasn’t the only one. I wasn’t a bad scholar.

But why didn’t I take note of Ktimene for so many years, during the many times I had read the Odyssey? Why isn’t she better known? It is not as though her existence has gone completely unnoticed. You can go to a standard commentary on the Odyssey, look up these lines, and it will note that yes, Eumaios says that Odysseus has a sister. The hitch is that you have to notice her there before you would ever consult a commentary that confirms that she indeed exists. But isn’t it important that Odysseus has a sister? In the oral tradition that the Odyssey belongs to, she had a story of her own that a performer could choose to tell in greater detail, depending on his own repertoire and what the audience wants to hear. There are many such stories alluded to in what survives as the Iliad and Odyssey: some of these stories we can find elaborated in other sources that survive, but some we have to piece together as best we can with these sparse extant details.

2 There are very few facts about Ktimene offered in this passage, which is the only time she is mentioned at all in the Odyssey as it has been transmitted to us. Eumaios says that Ktimene is the youngest child of Antikleia, so I know that Odysseus is her older brother. I take that one step further and imagine that she grows up watching him and his exploits. She knows him as only a sibling does, giving her a special perspective on the stories about Odysseus.

Eumaios mentions only one major event of Ktimene’s life: she came of age (around the time he did) and was married to a man from Samos, a neighboring island. It is not surprising to me that her marriage would be the one thing mentioned. Marriage was considered a defining event in a woman’s life and her attainment of adulthood. In society (as often also in ours), marriage involved a change of household for the woman. The ancient Greek wedding enacted the bride’s physical transition from her parents’ home to her husband’s and reflected the transformation of her identity from daughter (child) to wife (woman).

One other detail in Eumaios’s words about her marriage is that her parents “took countless gifts in return.” In Homeric epic the usual practice is that a suitor brings gifts to the woman’s family as a means to impress them, to indicate the sincerity of his intentions, as an “exchange,” and sometimes as a way to beat out rivals by offering more than anyone else. When the epic describes these bridal gifts as “countless,” it signals how special and valuable the bride is. The marriage of and , the doomed husband and wife on the Trojan side that the Iliad makes us fall in love with, also began with Hector giving “countless bride-gifts” for her. We have less information about the other two couples whose marriages are described this way. Neleus gave countless bride-gifts for Chloris, whom he married “because of her beauty”—she is also a youngest daughter like Ktimene. Echekles gave countless bride-gifts for Polymele even though she had already given birth to a son by the god . These three couples give me the impression that marriages that start with the groom giving countless bride-gifts are true love-matches. So I begin to picture Ktimene’s marriage the same way.

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My wedding was a celebration on both islands. We started with a feast at my parents’ home on Ithaca. My bridegroom brought them myriad gifts: talents of gold, tripods and cauldrons, strongly-made chests full of finely woven cloaks, tunics and dresses, and a mixing bowl made of silver. He even included a beautifully made golden cup, which his grandfather once received from the hero Neleus when he helped Neleus recover his stolen cattle. It had been treasured by his family ever since, and my bridegroom told the story of how his grandfather had come to own it as he presented it to my father. Then we sailed to Samos, our arrival coinciding with the sun setting. Dozens of torch bearers met our wedding party on shore and accompanied us, illuminated for all to see, as my husband drove me to his home. There we feasted again. The night deepened. I bade my family farewell, embracing my mother for a long time as I realized that for the first time in my life I wouldn’t see her the next morning. They left, and I started my life as a wife.

As a new wife in a new place I learned about the people on Samos and came to know their ways of thinking. Most of all I learned about my new husband. We soon recognized that we were very happy with each other. On my wedding day my brother wished for us the best kind of marriage, when a husband and wife keep a home together with likemindedness in their thoughts. We had found such a marriage with each other.

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Another detail in the passage also highlights the importance of Ktimene’s marriage, although you might not guess so at first glance. When Eumaios names Ktimene, he does so with an epic epithet:

3 tanupeplos “with a flowing dress.” Homeric epic is famous, of course, for its epithets, those repeated descriptors such as “swift-footed ” or “the wine-dark sea.” A character who has an epithet has a fuller story within the tradition. The epithet contains the essence of that story and could activate it in the minds of the ancient audience, who are deeply familiar with these traditional stories and the language used to tell them. In the two epics that survive from the larger tradition about the , there are some epithets that only one character is ever given: for example, only Odysseus is called polutlas “much enduring.” These particular epithets suggest something special to the identities and the life stories of that one character. Other epithets, like Ktimene’s tanupeplos, are shared by characters and indicate what type of story they have in common.

Three other characters in the epics as we have them are called tanupeplos: Helen, , and Lampetie. If more of the poetry from this oral tradition survived, we might see more women with this epithet, and that might alter or modify the impression it gives. As it is, however, Ktimene is, via her epithet, grouped with two goddesses and the most beautiful woman in the world, who is herself the daughter of and will be worshipped by later generations as a goddess. Her “flowing dress” thus implies a kind of divine beauty for Ktimene herself. There is another, more provocative association between these characters: Helen and Thetis are both famous brides, and their weddings are the very roots of the Trojan war.

Thetis is a goddess greatly desired by the male gods but married off to a mortal man because of a prophecy that the son born to her would be greater than his father—a risk the male gods couldn’t take. The wedding of Thetis and Peleus included all the gods except , because who wants “Strife” at their wedding? But Eris crashed the party and, wanting to start a fight, brought the infamous golden apple meant “for the most beautiful goddess.” The dispute over the apple and the title of most beautiful among , , and led to the Judgment of , in which Aphrodite bribed Paris with the most beautiful woman as his reward if he chose her as the winner. That is, she promised him Helen, who was already married to Menelaos. When Paris took Helen from (and from Menelaos) to , the many suitors who had all sworn to protect Helen and her marriage from any outside threat brought their armies together to make war on Troy. Through her epithet, then, Ktimene is associated with these two brides whose momentous marriages are central to the epic tradition she is part of.

Lampetie, though, isn’t a bride in what we know of her story. All that is told of her in the Odyssey is that she is a , a daughter of (the Sun), who guards her father’s cattle and sheep along with her sister. So, what other connections could exist among all four of these characters with their flowing dresses? The other three are daughters of gods, but that doesn’t apply to Ktimene. All four are sisters, though. Like Ktimene, Lampetie has a brother who is more famous than she. Her brother Phaethon was killed as he lost control of the chariot of his father while trying to drive it across the sky. That story leads me to something else these characters have in common. Each in her own story, these woman are well-known lamenters—that is, performers of mourning songs for their beloved dead. Helen performs a lament for Hector at the end of the Iliad. Thetis laments her son Achilles in the Iliad and at his funeral as described in the Odyssey. Lampetie and her sisters lament their brother Phaethon to the point where they are transformed into poplar trees (which weep eternal “tears” of amber). Ktimene “of the flowing dress” should also have some connection to lament, to mourning the dead, in her story.

Ktimene’s story emerges from the relationships she has. That fact is again unsurprising since it is usually the case for women in these ancient stories. Her marriage is indicated as an important relationship, but Eumaios doesn’t name her husband. The ancient audience wouldn’t have needed him to, since they were already familiar with her story—that is how oral, traditional epic operates. We modern readers need help, though, and one form of help comes in the form of comments (called

4 “scholia”) that reside in the margins of the manuscripts that transmit the epic. Some of these scholia provide more details about the story that have otherwise been lost. The comment on the line that names Ktimene says that “her husband is presumed to be Eurylochos” because Odysseus refers to him elsewhere as “closely related to me by marriage.” So Eurylochos, another character in the Odyssey, is her husband. That detail allows me to dig further into Ktimene’s story.

I notice something strange as I do so, though. My academic training has prepared me to investigate and further imagine Ktimene’s story: I know how to read the special, traditional language of the epic poetry and how else to investigate the stories that the epic only alludes to. But that same expertise—which in some ways makes me feel as though I am truly getting to know Ktimene’s story—also restrains me from going further. I feel a deep internal resistance to going beyond what the epic or other ancient sources have already told me. All of the details of Ktimene’s story when I first imagined it were built from the Homeric epics themselves or at least from another ancient text I can point to. In other words, I could cite my sources, that most sacred of scholarly duties.

My scholarly approach to the epics, however, is to understand them as oral, traditional poetry with the variation and expandability that is natural to it. And so my reluctance to depart from surviving texts is paradoxical. I would argue strenuously for the existence of Ktimene’s story that ancient performers could tell and ancient audiences would be familiar with, yet I fear academic disdain when I myself try to re-create her story beyond these surviving scraps. An advocate for the oral nature of these epics, I find myself having a subconscious allegiance to texts. Maybe I am a bad scholar, after all.

Those surviving sources that I am depending on have already disregarded Ktimene. Her story was omitted, forgotten—she survives in just this one mention, generally unnoticed. Telling her story as her own, even as I base it in what the ancient sources say, requires me to reconsider what I have been taught about what I am and am not allowed to say about these ancient epics. To return Ktimene to the story, I will have to let go of those ingrained admonishments from my discipline, those established rules that erased women’s stories in the first place.

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When the news reached Samos that Helen had left Sparta with a Trojan prince, I knew war was coming, and I dreaded what that would mean for my life. When Menelaos and his brother began gathering forces to attack Troy and get Helen back, they reminded Helen’s former suitors of their obligations under their sworn oaths. They spent a month on Ithaca working at convincing Odysseus to join their coalition. My brother tried to scheme his way out of the oath he had schemed to get them all into, but eventually he had to agree. Once he was part of their expedition, though, he was as committed as anyone. He began recruiting men from Ithaca, Samos, and the other islands under his rule to go with him. Eurylochos immediately volunteered. Of course he did. How could he not support his own brother-in-law? The happiness of our life together wouldn’t persuade him otherwise.

My brother tried to reassure me, saying that he planned to help Menelaos negotiate for Helen’s return. He could convince the Trojans with words—perhaps they wouldn’t even have to fight at all, or at least not for long. Since my brother was constantly making up stories, I found it hard to tell just then if he was purposefully lying to me. Odysseus pointed out that Eurylochos would be his second-in-command and most trusted adviser. Their bond would become even stronger as they met together the difficulties of war and of the journeys there and back. He would bring Eurylochos back, that he swore to me. Didn’t he always make it home safe, no matter what trouble he got into? And Eurylochos looked up to my brother as a leader, admired his cunning intelligence—he was eager, even, to follow him to war.

5 Before Eurylochos boarded the lead ship of the twelve headed to Troy under Odysseus’s command, I asked him to promise to return. “Don’t be reckless with your life,” I pleaded.

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Not only is Ktimene’s husband a character in the epic, he is a memorable one. He is the most fully characterized of Odysseus’s “companions,” the men he took to war with him, and one of the few with any dialogue in the Odyssey. All of the companions who had survived the war died on the journey home from Troy. The story of their deaths is told in the Odyssey when Odysseus himself narrates the story of his journey at a banquet with the Phaeacians. Eurylochos makes Ktimene’s stakes in her brother’s story much higher. Just as her traditional epithet hinted, her marriage is indeed tied into the larger story of the Trojan war and the returns of the Greek warriors. And she has reason to lament the dead.

Eurylochos is active in several of Odysseus’s adventures, and he even challenges Odysseus’s leadership. He accuses Odysseus of being reckless with the lives of the companions and charges Odysseus with being responsible for the deaths of those companions whom the killed. Odysseus reports that he thought about killing Eurylochos during this argument. Their conflict is put aside when the other companions intervene, but remains simmering. Eurylochos speaks for the companions later on the journey when they need rest and asks Odysseus to land on the island Thrinakia. Odysseus lays the responsibility for doing so on him, saying that Eurylochos is “forcing” him to land where he does not wish to. had warned Odysseus that the cattle and sheep on this island were divine livestock belonging to the sun god Helios and that they must not be harmed. Odysseus makes the companions all swear an oath not to kill any of the cattle or sheep on the island. Once they have landed, they become trapped by adverse winds and run out of the food they had on board. They try eating everything else they can on the island but are slowly starving to death. When Odysseus goes off by himself to pray and ends up falling asleep, Eurylochos persuades the other companions that they should eat some of the cattle (they are right there for the taking!) and propitiate Helios later by building him a temple on Ithaca.

Their consumption of the cattle of Helios brings Lampetie (who, like Ktimene, “wears a flowing dress”) into the story. She is watching over her father’s cattle and sheep along with her sister. When the companions, at Eurylochos’s instigation, do kill some of the cattle to eat, she reports the theft to her father. Helios then demands that Zeus punish all the remaining companions with death. When the winds finally change and Odysseus and the companions set sail again into the open sea, Zeus sends a storm that wrecks the ship and kills all the companions, including Eurylochos. Odysseus alone is left alive to return to Ithaca.

There is one more epithet used for Ktimene in the brief description of her: she was a “devoted daughter” to her mother. That same adjective that I have translated as “devoted,” iphthimē, can be used to describe many kinds of strong social bonds: with family, spouses, friends, or comrades. “Loyal” or “steadfast” are other possible translations. It is used several times to describe devoted wives, including Penelope as devoted wife of Odysseus. So just as Ktimene was a devoted daughter, she is likely also a loyal wife. Like Penelope, she has been waiting for twenty years for her husband to return. But unlike Penelope’s, Ktimene’s husband never will.

A woman in classical Athenian culture, the time and place in ancient we know the most about, was always legally under the authority of a man, and she was a member of the household of that man

6 —the Greek term for him is her kurios. While she is young, her kurios is normally her father (if he has died, her kurios might be an uncle or adult brother). When she is married, her husband is her kurios. If her husband dies or divorces her, the authority over her reverts back to her natal family— her father again if he is still alive, or a brother or uncle—especially if she has no male children with her husband. It would be up to her kurios to decide whether and to whom she should be married again. We can see this system operating on at least a certain level in the story of Penelope in the Odyssey, with questions about the possibilities of her marrying again and her father’s assumed role in that decision. After Eurylochos’s death, the widowed Ktimene would return to her natal family. She would once again be living in the household to which her brother has returned, her brother to whom she entrusted her husband and who came home without him.

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I am waiting for my husband to return from the war. Like the other wives on Samos whose husbands sailed to Troy, I eagerly received the communiqués dispatched from the war. Those messages were not only months-old by the time they arrived, but they had been passed along from messenger to messenger so many times, who knows what distortions in the information occurred along the way. But then the unmistakable report came: Troy had fallen, the had won. I had received no report of Eurylochos’s death in battle, so I expected that he would arrive home within a few more months, maybe a year. A year passed, and no homecoming. More seasons have passed, no more news. Where could they be?

My loneliness in being separated from my husband for these many years became even more intense when my beloved mother died. Throughout the war she was confident that Odysseus would return home, but doubts crept in as the reports ended and he did not appear. My parents both were devastated by his continued absence and presumed death. My father can’t stand to be in his own home: he sleeps outside when the weather allows and in the slaves’ quarters when it doesn’t. My mother, though, died from the heartbreak of losing her son, and of the particular sadness of not knowing how he died, of not being able to bury and honor him in death. I cannot blame my brother, exactly, for causing her death, but he was the reason for it. Once she was gone I felt even more alone in the world.

Like everyone else, I hear the stories that now have become songs for entertainment: how Agamemnon and Menelaos quarreled and split the forces for the return home. How Athena impaled Locrian Ajax on a rock to show him what she thought of his rape of a woman who had taken refuge in her temple during the sack of Troy. made it home to with his surviving son Thrasymedes. made it home and discovered that his wife had been unfaithful, so he left again. Agamemnon made it home only to be killed by his wife and her lover (his cousin). Menelaos was blown off-course to Egypt, but he eventually brought Helen back to Sparta and lives there with her now. So many homecomings, so many ways for stories to end. But I don’t have an ending to Eurylochos’s war story, not yet. It remains incomplete, a hanging thread.

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When Odysseus returns to Ithaca, Ktimene would finally learn that Eurylochos is not coming home. What would Odysseus tell Ktimene about how Eurylochos died? Would our master storyteller offer her the same story he told the Phaeacians, in which he blames Eurylochos for his own death?

The invocation to the Muse at the very beginning of the Odyssey directs our understanding of the story to follow. It says that this is a story in which Odysseus did his best to get his companions home, but that he couldn’t do so, as much as he wanted to. It tells us even before the story has begun that the companions who devoured the cattle of Helios were destroyed by their own recklessness, and that Helios took away their day of homecoming. The specific mention of the cattle of Helios points directly to

7 Eurylochos, since he was the vocal leader who persuaded the rest of the companions to eat these cattle rather than starve to death. How might Ktimene react to this story of her husband’s death?

I had thought of Eurylochos as the villain in Odysseus’s story of how he lost all his companions, as the one to blame, since he insisted on stopping on Thrinakia and then ultimately convinced the remaining companions to kill some of the cattle. Odysseus is the one narrating those events within the epic as he tells his story to the Phaeacians, and so perhaps that characterization of Eurylochos was deliberate. Eurylochos, however, could tell a different story of the journey home. His might be a story in which he is an increasingly disillusioned follower of Odysseus, questioning Odysseus’s leadership more and more as they lose their comrades along the journey, finding fault with the decisions Odysseus makes. (Recall that in the Odyssey Eurylochos accuses Odysseus of being the reckless one.) When Odysseus asks them to continue starving on Thrinakia, Eurylochos’s choice to defy him is an outcome of this escalating disappointment in the man he once trusted and revered.

Investigating Ktimene’s story showed me how persistently this subversive way of reading the epic—a reading that questions Odysseus—is embedded in it. It is an exhilarating feeling in my research, when once I notice something in one place, I start seeing it all over. (That’s right: when I realize I hadn’t already known one thing, I panic, thinking I should have, but I find it thrilling to discover that I have missed it in several places.) The Odyssey announces itself as the story of Odysseus’s hardships in returning from the war at Troy, hardships that include his arriving home all alone. Odysseus’s own pain at his losses is the lens provided for viewing the story. Yet Ktimene could tell this story a different way— and she is not the only one. Another fleeting character in the Odyssey, Aegyptios of Ithaca, is mentioned (and speaks) once, but the way he is described is enlightening.

Then the hero Aegyptios began to speak to them in assembly. He was stooped with old age and knew countless things. His dear son, together with Odysseus, a match for a god, went to Troy famous for its horses in the concave ships, Antiphos, a spearman: him the savage Cyclops killed in the hollow cave, and made him his last meal. He had three other sons, one of them was even among the suitors, Eurynomos; and two kept their father’s estate always. But not even so did he forget the one, lamenting and grieving for him. Shedding a tear for him, he spoke in assembly and said among them… Odyssey 2.15–24

Aegyptios has four sons. Among them one went to Troy with Odysseus as a “companion” and was horrifically killed and eaten by the Cyclops during the journey home. Another is among the suitors. Even though he has more sons he cannot forget the one who sailed to Troy. For Aegyptios, then, this story is one of overwhelming grief. We are left at this early point in the story to imagine Aegyptios’s future reactions to learning that his son Antiphos will never return (will he ever find out exactly how he died, or only that Odysseus arrived home alone?) and that another son, Eurynomos, has been killed by the returned Odysseus. Aegyptios’s story indicates that Odysseus might be greeted by grief and anger rather than joy and relief on his homecoming. His own sister might be among the angry and grieving.

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If Eurylochos never comes home, I must return to my father’s house—well, even though my father is still alive, it is my brother’s house now, or maybe even my nephew Telemachos’s house. For over four years now that house has been beset by suitors for my sister-in-law Penelope. There were even 24 men from this island among them.

8 But just yesterday fishermen from Ithaca came to the families of those men, conveying their corpses and reporting that they had been killed by a small band of men. My brother and my nephew were among the killers. They did not say who else was fighting on their side. Perhaps Eurylochos was one of them? Has my husband finally returned home? I will make preparations to go to Ithaca, to see for myself whether Odysseus really is home, and whether Eurylochos is with him. If Eurylochos has returned, our life will be restored, even though we will have to face the anger of the families of those young men who were killed. If my brother is there but Eurylochos is not, I may at least learn what happened to him. What then will happen to me?

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The Odyssey seems not to know what to do with the grief and anger Odysseus has engendered. The epic ends in an abrupt and unsatisfactory manner. We don’t mourn for the dead enemy of the hero in this epic as we do at the end of the Iliad. In a mere three lines, the suitors are buried by their families or sent back to their home islands on fishing boats. Two famous ancient scholars, the scholia report, suggested that the story should have ended at the point when Odysseus and Penelope are reunited and have gone to bed. If it had, the messiness of what happens next, at least, would have been avoided. Because the families of the dead suitors do want vengeance for their loved ones. A father of one of the suitors in fact calls for revenge, not only for the suitors but also for the companions who never made it home. Not all of the Ithacans agree, but a group of them come after Odysseus. A fight begins, and it seems that Odysseus might end up killing even more of his own countrymen. (The father who called for revenge is in fact killed.) The conflict is resolved only by the intervention of the gods: the goddess Athena eventually breaks up the fight and, as Zeus had instructed her to, establishes pledges of friendship between the two sides. Odysseus becomes king once again and the gods cause the other men to forget how their sons and brothers died.

Even in this interrupted episode of vengeance, only men are involved. What the wives, sisters, and mothers think about the deaths of their loved ones isn’t included. They are once again missing from the story. Could we really expect Ktimene to forget what happened to her husband?

My students reading the Odyssey sense that this is a strange way to end the story. It feels like a forced happy conclusion that ignores the real consequences of what Odysseus has done. Odysseus is supposed to live on and be king of Ithaca again, and there seems to be no other way to get him to that traditional ending. I used to respond to their questions about the puzzling nature of the ending by saying that it is Greek tragedy that takes up these complex questions about revenge and its consequences. I think Ktimene would be even less satisfied with that answer than my students are. Ktimene, after all, is left with eternally unanswered questions.

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Ktimene’s lament for Eurylochos

Eurylochos, my beloved husband, I weep for you, wherever you are. When I last saw you, as you were leaving for Troy, you promised me that you would return to me, that we would see each other again. I knew the dangers of war, but year after year I heard that you were still alive, and so I began to believe that you would come home. Now, like a bird who went to find food for her fledglings and returns to find the nest empty—

9 some predator has made off with her precious children— I find that I am bereft of you, not even having your body to weep over and bury. Never again will I hear your voice, or touch your hand, never again will I kiss your lips. Speaking tender words to me in our bridal bed, you used to tell me about the life we would have together, the children we would raise in sweet harmony, the old age we would enjoy together. Now none of that will happen. I am no longer that bride of your youth that you left behind: after twenty years no youth or beauty remains for me. I trusted my brother to guard your life, for my sake if not for yours, but he has lost you on the journey home, while he survives to enjoy his marriage once again. What life remains for me now? Will my brother find me another husband? And will he kill that one, too? All the people of Samos will grieve your death, Eurylochos, but the pain of mourning is mine most of all, I who have been left with nothing.

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A recognition that women’s stories have been lost and must be recovered (albeit partially) through hard work is not new. But perhaps a reminder of the importance of such stories is timely and cyclically necessary. Why were women’s stories like Ktimene’s so compressed, their full details left out, as the oral epic performances became written texts? Was it an accident of survival? Was it because the performers (who were men) or the audiences didn’t find them interesting? Or was it because they found their stories difficult? The full implications of the stories of these women and of other women in this war (stories the tragedian Euripides would find so worthy of his focus) certainly put the epic heroes in a different light. Those differing viewpoints, or alternative readings, still exist within the epics, but you can easily ignore them if you choose to. Since we are no longer a traditional audience for these poems, and those who read them at all might read them only once, these details can get lost in the attempt to understand the whole.

Rather than the motivations and readings of others, however, it is my own that Ktimene shows me I need to re-examine. How can I find fault with others for ignoring her when I did so myself so many times? Noticing Ktimene and investigating her story has revealed to me another way of understanding the Odyssey—she adds another voice, a critique from within the story. She also has shown me what I have absorbed unconsciously from my academic discipline, what I have been privileging without even being aware that I was doing so. As much as I thought of myself as resistant to the patriarchal history of my field, I am brought up short by my own complicity in it. Ktimene’s questioning role within the epic, a role that has been suppressed with the truncation of her story, raises further questions about the received wisdom and assumptions about these epics within the professional discipline of Classics. I discover through her my own stake in how I read, interpret, and teach these epics.

Ktimene’s story culminates in her lament for her husband Eurylochos. Lament is a women’s song tradition in Greek culture. Within the ancient texts, the performance of lament provides an occasion for women to express themselves publicly, to tell their own stories and to give their views about the deaths of their loved ones, even to try to control the circumstances of their life after the loss they have

10 suffered. Laments can in these ways provide a strong counterpoint to the dominant messages of epic poetry. And so for now I leave her story in that moment of performance, suspended in time and in grief. As for me, I will continue to ask students or colleagues, “Did you know that Odysseus has a sister?” And now when I do, it will not be just to marvel at her unheralded existence and move on. I have much more to say about Ktimene as I seek to revive her story and reclaim what she has to tell us.

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