How many suitors did Penelope have?

The count

Homer gives the number once, and he gives it as a shock. In the swineherd’s hut, Odysseus has just revealed himself to his son and asks how many enemies they face. Telemachus answers:

There are not ten suitors only, nor twice ten, but ten many times over; you shall learn their number at once. There are fifty-two chosen youths from Dulichium, and they have six servants; from Same there are twenty-four; twenty young Achaeans from Zacynthus, and twelve from Ithaca itself, all of them well born.

Add it up and you get 108. Telemachus also counts their household: the six servants of the Dulichians, the herald Medon, a bard and two carvers. Against all of them stand a beggar, a young man and, as it turns out, two loyal herdsmen. Penelope names the same four islands when she unburdens herself to the stranger by the fire: the chiefs of Dulichium, Same, Zacynthus and Ithaca itself are all courting her against her will.

Who they were

They were the young nobility of Ithaca and the neighboring islands, wooing a woman whose husband had been gone so long that they took him for dead. Whoever married her would gain a queen, a great house and perhaps the leadership of the island. They did not court her from a distance. They moved in, slaughtering the absent king’s cattle, sheep, goats and pigs and drinking his wine day after day, for three years and close on four by their leader’s own account, while Penelope stalled them with her famous web. When Telemachus sailed for news of his father, they laid an ambush at sea to kill him on his way back.

Two of them lead. Antinous, son of Eupeithes, is the boldest and cruelest; he throws a footstool at the beggar in the beggar’s own hall. Eurymachus is smoother and no kinder. Homer singles out one decent man, Amphinomus of Dulichium, whose conversation Penelope liked best and who argued against killing Telemachus. The disguised Odysseus even warns him to go home while he can. He stays.

The contest of the bow

Penelope ends the waiting herself. She brings out the great bow that Iphitus once gave Odysseus in friendship, and promises to marry the man who can string it and shoot an arrow through twelve axes set in a row. Telemachus plants the axes and nearly strings the bow on his fourth try, until his father signals him to stop. The suitors fail one after another, though they warm the bow by the fire and grease it with lard. Antinous proposes putting the contest off, since it is a feast day of Apollo. When the beggar asks for a turn, they protest, and Penelope overrules them: “Give him the bow, and let us see whether he can string it or no.”

He strings it as easily as a bard fits a new string to his lyre, and when he plucks it, “it sang sweetly under his touch like the twittering of a swallow.” One arrow flies through all twelve axes.

Why did Odysseus kill them?

In the poem’s eyes, the suitors had broken the bond between host and guest, which Zeus himself protects, by devouring a house that was not theirs, mistreating strangers and plotting murder. So Odysseus throws off his rags, and with Telemachus and the two herdsmen he fights until no suitor is left alive; only the bard Phemius and the herald Medon are spared. Their families saw it differently, and the Odyssey’s last book turns on whether the killing will end in a feud.