Content area
Full Text
SUMMARY: The abortive messages that Dolios almost but never conveys from Penelope to Laertes and from Laertes' farm to Penelope in Books 4 and 24 of the Odyssey allude to alternative versions of Odysseus's ... in which Odysseus returned to Ithaca with an armed band and expelled the suitors with the knowing collusion of Penelope and Laertes. By referencing these epichoric variants, Homer creates a narrative opening for his original audience to infer that Penelope and Laertes conspire to use the palace and Laertes' farm as power centers from which to lead the insurrection against the suitors upon Odysseus's return, while at the same time articulating norms of licit and illicit means of trickery through the divergent fates of Dolios and his "bad seed" offspring Melanthios and Melantho.
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
INTRODUCTION
IN THE PAGES THAT FOLLOW, I ARGUE THAT THE RECURRENCE OF THE SLAVE Dolios at key junctures of the narrative can shed light on the Odyssey in two distinct ways. The first is by illuminating the contours of lost regional (epi- choric) alternative versions of Odysseus's homecoming that were familiar to Homer and his audience. Such versions, work by Reece and Marks has shown, may be provisionally reconstructed from "fossils" in our Odyssey, such as Odysseus's lying tales of less supernatural travels, and passing allusions to a version of Odysseus's slaying of the suitors through open force assisted by armed warriors rather than through the disguise and bow contest. Homer not only preserves traces of, but also purposefully alludes to, these epichoric variants in our Odyssey in order to guide how the audience fills in gaps and inconsistencies in the tale, such as the message that Dolios never gets a chance to deliver from Penelope to Laertes in Book 4. Familiarity with a variant tale in which Dolios actually assists in bringing about the slaying of the suitors might well have prejudiced listeners to infer that an arrangement exists be- tween Odysseus, Penelope, and Laertes: if something should go wrong in the palace during Odysseus's absence at Troy, Laertes will maintain the farm as a fallback position to which Odysseus will repair upon his return.
Second, the choices that Homer makes among variant versions of the story of Odysseus's...