How does the Odyssey end?

After the reunion

Book 23 brings husband and wife back together through the test of the bed, and many readers feel the story could stop there. Some ancient readers apparently did. The Alexandrian scholars Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus are reported to have called line 23.296, where the couple go to bed, the end of the Odyssey. What they meant is still argued over, and many scholars today defend book 24 as part of the poem. Even before that line, Odysseus has warned his wife: “Wife, we have not yet reached the end of our troubles.”

The oar still owed

The trouble is a prophecy. In the land of the dead, the seer Tiresias told Odysseus that once home he must set out again, carrying an oar, until he reached people who knew nothing of the sea and did not even salt their food. When a stranger asked why he carried a winnowing shovel, he was to plant the oar in the ground and sacrifice a ram, a bull and a boar to Poseidon. Only then could he go home for good, to a gentle death in old age, far from the sea or out of it: the Greek can be read both ways. Penelope hears this on their first night together and answers calmly that, if the gods grant them a happier old age, there is hope.

Laertes in the vineyard

Book 24 opens in the underworld, where the ghosts of the suitors meet Agamemnon, who praises Penelope’s faithfulness against his own wife’s treachery. Then Odysseus goes to find his father. Laertes is alone on his farm, hoeing a vine in a patched shirt, with leather leggings against the brambles. Even now Odysseus cannot resist a test. He tells a false story first, until the old man pours dust over his head in grief. Then he shows the boar scar and names the trees his father gave him as a boy: thirteen pear trees, ten apple trees, forty fig trees and fifty rows of vines.

The families and the peace

Meanwhile Ithaca learns what happened in the palace. The suitors were sons of the island’s leading families, and their kin arm themselves under Eupeithes, the father of Antinous, though more than half the assembly refuses to follow him. Odysseus, his son, his father and a handful of loyal farmhands go out to meet them. A short fight begins, and old Laertes, given new strength by Athena, kills Eupeithes. Then the goddess raises her voice:

“Men of Ithaca,” she cried, “cease this dreadful war, and settle the matter at once without further bloodshed.”

The attackers drop their weapons and run. Zeus sends a thunderbolt as a warning, and Odysseus obeys. In the poem’s last lines Athena, once more in the shape and voice of Mentor, makes a covenant of peace between the two sides. Zeus had already set the terms: Odysseus keeps his throne, and the gods make the families forget the killing of their sons and brothers.

Peace, not an ending

So the Odyssey stops with Odysseus home, his house cleared, a feud ended by divine order and a journey still hanging over him. Later poets pulled that loose thread. The Telegony, a lost sequel known from a summary by Proclus, has him perform Tiresias’s sacrifices, travel again and finally die at the hands of Telegonus, his son by Circe, who does not know him. Dante sends him past the Pillars of Hercules to drown; Tennyson’s old Ulysses (1842) cannot bear to stay home and sails off “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Homer leaves all that open. He gives the couple their peace and lets the road wait.