What really struck me is the gap between what I'd expected due to cultural osmosis and what I actually got in the poem: I expected that Odysseus's slaughter of the suitors would be culturally approved, that everyone else on Ithaca would be like "Yeah, they had it coming" - but in fact the suitors' friends and relations are so outraged that they get up a war party and are only stopped by the blatant intervention of a god.
Of course, no one was marching on Odysseus in outrage over the slaughter of the maids (or the goatherd Melanthius, for that matter) but that reflects the fact that none of them care much about someone else's slaves as much as anything.
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Date: 2019-01-24 10:12 pm (UTC)Of course, no one was marching on Odysseus in outrage over the slaughter of the maids (or the goatherd Melanthius, for that matter) but that reflects the fact that none of them care much about someone else's slaves as much as anything.