Homer’sThe Odyssey

Morning breaks bright over Scheria. King Alcinous calls an assembly of the Phaeacian lords and announces it plainly: the stranger who washed ashore will be sent home. A ship will be made ready, a crew chosen, oars fitted to the benches. But first — a feast, to send him off in style.

A herald leads in Demodocus, the singer of the Phaeacian court. He is blind. The Muse loved him greatly, Homer says, and gave him a double gift: she took away his eyes, but she gave him the sweetness of song. They seat him in a silver-studded chair set against a pillar, hang his lyre on a peg within easy reach of his hand, and set bread and wine at his elbow.

The Muse loved him greatly, and gave him a double gift — she took away his eyes, but gave him the sweetness of song.

Demodocus lifts the lyre and begins to sing of the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles at Troy — how the two greatest of the Greeks once clashed bitterly at a victory feast, and how Agamemnon secretly rejoiced to hear the two men trading insults, because an oracle had told him that discord among his best fighters would mark the beginning of Troy’s fall.

Odysseus listens. Then, quietly, without a word, he draws his purple cloak up over his head and weeps into it. Around him the hall is loud with wine and laughter. No one notices — no one except Alcinous, who is watching his guest closely, and who sees the cloak tremble.

After the song, Alcinous senses something is wrong with his guest and calls for a change of mood. Games, he decides — that will honour the stranger properly. The young Phaeacians go down to the field by the harbour and compete: running, wrestling, jumping, boxing, and the discus. They are famous sailors, not famous soldiers, but on this field they move like gods.

Odysseus watches from the sidelines and says nothing. He has just endured his own war sung back to him at a feast; games are the last thing on his mind. But a young noble named Euryalus — some call him Broadsea — decides the stranger’s silence looks like weakness, and says so in front of everyone.

“You don’t look like an athlete,” he says. “You look like a merchant captain who counts his cargo and worries about his profits — not like a man who competes.”

It is a deliberate insult, aimed straight at a guest who cannot yet say who he is.

Odysseus rebukes Euryalus first — that speech was ugly, he says, the words of a fool — then walks onto the field still wearing his cloak. He passes over the discuses the young men have been using and picks up the heaviest one on the ground, thick and weighty, far bigger than what a Phaeacian would throw. He whirls once and lets it go.

It flies. It flies past every mark already scratched into the sand. Athena, disguised as a spectator in the crowd, calls out the distance in a mortal’s voice so no one suspects a goddess is speaking:

“Even a blind man could find your mark, stranger — it is far beyond the rest!”

The field goes quiet. Odysseus, his blood up now, throws open a challenge to the whole court: box him, wrestle him, race him — he will take on any man there, any two men, gladly. Only running and archery does he concede, and only because his legs are still stiff from days adrift at sea. No one steps forward.

To smooth over the tension Euryalus caused, Alcinous calls Demodocus back for another song — and this time asks for something lighter. What the bard sings is the most purely comic scene in the entire poem.

He sings of the love affair between Ares, god of war, and Aphrodite, goddess of love — and how her husband, the smith-god Hephaestus, found out. Hephaestus is no fighter; he is a craftsman, lame from birth, mocked by the other gods for his limp. But he is also the finest metalworker in creation, and he takes his revenge with his hands rather than his fists.

He forges chains so fine they are invisible — a net that cannot be seen or broken — and rigs it above his own marriage bed. When Ares and Aphrodite next lie down together, the net drops and holds them fast, tangled and exposed. Then Hephaestus flings open the doors of the house and shouts for every god on Olympus to come and see.

They come. And they laugh — not cruelly, but helplessly, the way gods laugh when a joke is too good to resist. Hermes leans over to Apollo and jokes that he would happily trade places with Ares, nets and all, for one night beside golden Aphrodite.

Hermes only laughed, and said he would gladly trade places with Ares — nets and all — for a single night beside golden Aphrodite.

It is bawdy, funny, and deeply human — a moment of pure comic relief dropped into the middle of a poem about grief, war, and the long road home. Even the gods, Homer seems to say, are not above being caught.

Evening falls. Gifts have already been promised — bronze, gold, fine cloth — to send the stranger home in honour. Before the feast ends, Odysseus asks Demodocus for one more song, and this time he names it himself: the story of the wooden horse at Troy.

Before the final song, look back over the whole feast day at Scheria and put it in order.

Demodocus sings it exactly as it happened — how Odysseus himself devised the plan, how the bravest Greeks hid inside its wooden belly while the rest sailed off to fake a retreat, how the Trojans argued over the strange offering at their gates and finally, fatally, dragged it inside their own walls.

Odysseus weeps again. Not quietly this time. Homer compares his weeping to a woman who falls across the body of her husband, killed defending his city, as the spearmen close in and the city burns behind her — and the captors drag her off into slavery even as she grieves. The man who built the horse weeps like the people it destroyed. The conqueror weeps like the conquered.

He wept as a woman weeps, fallen across the body of the husband she has lost, while her city burns behind her and the captors drag her away.

This time, Alcinous stops the song. He has watched this stranger weep twice now, always at the mention of Troy, always hiding it under his cloak. He turns to Odysseus and finally asks the question that has been waiting since the stranger first washed up naked on the beach:

“Stranger, tell us your name. No one is truly nameless — tell us who you are, so we can send you home.”

The book ends there, on the question. In the hall of Arete and Alcinous, with Demodocus’s lyre finally silent and Euryalus’s silver-studded sword already given as an apology gift, Odysseus has been the stranger, the castaway, the unnamed man for eight books. Now he must answer.

Did you follow the feast day?

Five questions from the songs, the discus ground, and the question that ends the book.