W when, in OdysseyOdysseus finally returns to Ithaca after the Trojan War, he finds suitors vying for his wife Penelope and feasting in his palace. Disguised as a beggar, he strings his great bow and turns his furious vengeance on them. The seeker Antinous takes the first arrow to the throat as he raises his cup. In the course of one of the 24 books of the text, Homer describes how more than 100 seekers are mowed down among the ruins of the tables. The housemaids who have shared the beds of the suitors hang in a row, their pale legs quivering in death throes. Melanthius’ herd of goats, which helped the enemy, is mutilated at the warehouse door. Homer tells the tale without apology, indeed with a sense of satisfaction. While the modern reader is likely to find the scope of Odysseus’ revenge excessive, the world of the poem itself betrays no such concern.
Retribution, retributive justice and punishment are legal and criminological concepts. Revenge is not. It is a notion that many in modern liberal societies may find unpalatable. The state is the arbiter of legitimate force and personal grievances are a matter for the courts and legal machinery that characterizes civilized communities. Centuries after Homer sang, Aeschylus’ tragic trilogy Oresteia hammer home the harsh truth that revenge is exhausting and endless. But while society has turned retributive punishment into severe punishment, the impulse to revenge has not disappeared. Instead, we tell those who feel wronged that anger only poisons the bearer, that forgiveness is maturity, that revenge will not bring back the dead or buy closure.
of Odyssey presents a different point of view. The seekers have spent years gobbling up the hero’s fortune, falling in love with his wife, and plotting to kill his son. What Odysseus does is correct phthisispayment, repayment of a debt. Revenge for Odysseus is not the opposite of justice, but its manifestation. someonethe proper order of things is restored when the criminal is made to pay. The suitors also abused a beggar, although the stranger sits under the protection of Zeus, so to insult him is to scorn the god. They failed to pay attention to the viewer Theoklymenus, who read death in the air of the hall and laughed him out of the room.
In the opening lines of the poem, Zeus declares that mortals blame the gods for their pain, when in fact they destroy themselves through their recklessness. He cites Aegisthus, who slept with Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, and killed the king, despite being warned by the messenger god Hermes. Agamemnon’s son Orestes then killed Aegisthus in justified revenge. The poem’s first theological statement is a defense of revenge killing, establishing a moral framework long before Odysseus sets foot in Ithaca. We are told that those who transgress justice bring their own destruction and that the avenger is doing the work of heaven. For us, on the contrary, the avengers are usually seen as tragic figures, consumed by anger that they are unable to release and clearly disrespecting communal norms of justice.
The characters in Odyssey claim that Orestes gained immortal fame (cleos) taking revenge on his father. This is the standard by which Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, must be measured. Revenge is something that a son owes his father and that the Homeric community expects of him. Aristotle assumed that the man who fails to get angry about the things that ought to anger him is a fool, a man with the soul of a slave. Kindness and gentleness are virtuous aspects of character, but lack of anger is a vice. Does the epic, then, simply allow revenge and slaughter? There are limits. When the nurse Eurycleia sings of the dead suitors, Odysseus enters, saying that it is not right to rejoice over slain men. IN Iliadsimilarly, Achilles’ revenge on Hector oversteps its bounds when he drags his enemy’s corpse daily through the dust. The gods disapprove and send Priam to reward his son’s body and temporarily calm Achilles’ excessive rage. It is right to demand a debt, but it is wrong to overstep the bounds of righteous indignation.
Homer draws the line where revenge fiction often fails, since in them the pleasure of killing is largely the point. At the end of Odysseywhen the fathers of the murdered suitors take up arms and march on Odysseus to collect a debt of theirs, the demands of phthisis threaten to lead to an endless cycle of violence. Athena descends, Zeus throws a thunderbolt, swears, and an oblivion is imposed on Ithaca by order of the gods. Revenge is right, but it must end, as in Oresteia when the court of Athens turns the dynamics of revenge into the logic of the law.
If the lust for revenge has ancient origins, so too has license to indulge it in story and on stage. In Euripides Medea the wronged wife kills her children to avenge her husband’s infidelity; IN Hecuba the captive queen blinds the man who killed her son and slaughters his children. Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies march Hieronimon, Titus, and Vindice through stages that pile up bodies near the final curtain. Cinema portrays revenge with equal zeal. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in the COMMANDOS slaughters every member of a private army to retrieve his kidnapped daughter; Uma Thurman’s character in the Kill Bill open a path through all those who have wronged her. Revenge has been staged for 2,500 years and audiences have never tired of it.
Does it make any difference that the audience recognizes it as fiction? Uwe Boll’s film Vigilant Citizenreleased in June, features a vigilante who, after murdering his wife, hunts immigrant criminals across Europe, culminating in the massacre of an entire family. Unlike Kill BillThe film’s stylized frenzy points to a real, contemporary target. Germany’s rating board denied it a certificate as an incitement to violence, with Elon Musk posting it to his 240 million followers on X.
Ironically, however, where revenge leads to extreme and ubiquitous violence in real life, it is rarely called such. In interstate wars, killing is answered by killing, each side summoning its own dead to legitimize the next strike. Nations trade threats and strikes, each casting their actions as justified responses to the other. In any case, vengeance and revenge come wrapped in the language of security, restraint and law.
The appetite for revenge that politics denies in the boardroom is what it arouses at the ballot box, as the desire to right wrongs is a useful electoral trope. For the ancients a boundary had to be set from without, a bolt from heaven or a court placed over the parties. Among nations today there is no Zeus to cast his bolt, and no tribunal that all parties will invariably recognize.
We should not flatter ourselves that we have become gentler, or more inclined to pay attention to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” The “proper pleasure” (to use Aristotle’s term for tragedy) that readers and viewers take in Homer’s poem and in Christopher Nolan’s new film version suggests that we are at a loss to name the feeling—but the thrill of the epic’s conclusion shows how strongly the thought of revenge pulls. When Odysseus aims his deadly arrows at the suitors, he takes undisguised revenge for their actions. Homer’s audience revels in the bloody reversal, quietly calculating that a world in which evil deeds go unpunished means that evil has triumphed.
Armand D’Angour is Professor of Classics at the University of Oxford. His books include Socrates in love (Bloomsbury)
(Further reading: The shame of the Frida Kahlo industry)
