The Odyssey - post X

This epic comes to an end and it has not been the experience I expected at all being much more accessible and enjoyable. You expect this to be a heavy tome that is full of intellectual but irrelevant content but that is far from the reality

Bullet points from chapters twenty two to twenty four

Twenty two
This is a chapter of carnage as one by one the suitors are slaughtered and Odysseus gets his revenge with the text merrily describing the punishment he hands out to the suitors

He then goes further and gets the women, twelve of them, who have betrayed him and gets those maids to take the corpses out and wash down the blood then they are taken and hanged for their disloyalty

Twenty three
There are some scholars, I got his surfing the web, that believe this is where the story should have ended and the next chapter was added later and it makes sense because it is the moment Odysseus and Penelope are reunited

Initially the wife refuses to accept that Odysseus has come back but then he reveals a secret only he would have known and she embraces him and listens as he recounts all that has happened on his travels

Twenty Four
The suitors head into the underworld and recount their tale of woe and blame Penelope for leading them on

Meanwhile Odysseus goes to visit his father and as before pretends at first to be a stranger and back in the town the fathers and friends decide to avenge the suitors deaths and a battle is just on the brink of starting when Athena comes down and orders them to stop and make peace

That’s all so I will post a full review in the next couple of days…