“It's like tenting your house. And yeah, the termites should die and probably the roaches ... nobody's going to shed a tear. But you might get some little poor rabbit or frog that was in your crawl space and that's going to die too because the house needs to be cleansed because it's rotten.”
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The hosts are reading the end of the Odyssey, where Odysseus kills the suitors who have taken over his house. Sommers notes that the poem treats them as an infestation and that Odysseus fumigates and scrubs the hall afterwards. He offers this as a way to read the killing as purification rather than justice, which would explain why some less guilty people die too.
If you were like a pain in the ass.
If you're a liberal. But, you know, at the very beginning in book 20, Odysseus is worried. He's like, all right. So say my plan works and I kill them. Like, what's going to happen to me? Like, I worry that people are going to come after me. Where can I run to escape my punishment? It's like he kind of knows that he might be maybe deserving of punishment if he meets out the revenge in the way that he's going to.
Yeah, there's two ways you can look at that. That's absolutely right. Like, is he just as a practical matter that starts a cycle of violence with now their families and stuff like that? And you'll see that will be alluded to in the later books. Not just alluded to, it becomes like a final plot point. But then also, like, does he think he might deserve it, but he has to do it anyway? That's what I mean. Like, because they've talked about the suitors as if they have been from the start, like an infestation on the house. Like, even just the sheer numbers of them are like, you know, just sort of getting out of control. They seem to multiply. And they are, as you said, defiling the house. They're making it impure. You know, the stuff that he does at the end after the battle with the fumigating and scrubbing and the sulfur, like, you know, it's like tenting your house. And yeah, the termites should die and probably the roaches. You're not, nobody's going to shed a tear. But, you know, you might get some little poor rabbit or frog that was in your crawl space and that's going to die too because the house needs to be cleansed because it's rotten. It's being eaten from within. And so like, sometimes I think of it also in those terms. Doesn't mean it's not just, certainly doesn't mean that someone like Antinous or Eurymachus doesn't deserve to die because I think they do. But, you know, there's some other questions about some of the other things and what Telemachus does to the slave girls. Yeah. Melantheo, man. Oh, man.
So like, just as my personal journey of this, I was talking to my wife about like where we were in the book. I was like, so I know like that everyone's going to die. I have no idea, though, like exactly what happens. So I like had no idea how bloody graphic. What I knew just from like living in culture was the axes and like the arrows. And then like I kind of knew then that, you know, he would kill everyone. But I did not know he would be chopping off like fucking Sicario style.
Yeah, like penises and penises and then hanging, hanging bodies. Yeah. And then just that he's doing all of this like buck naked and just has like blood and guts all over him. Like
you think we're going to get full frontal in the Nolan? I had