order and the routing-out from Ithaca of others who lack justice and piety: Athene cites "that wolf pack of the suitors / who prey upon [Odysseus's] flocks and dusky cattle" (I.115). In Book IV, Menelaus is imparting a cautionary moral when he compares the behavior of the suitors, who are "soft," not having been hardened by the war, to that of a deer that gives birth in a lion's lair and is eventually killed along with her fawns when the "lord" lion returns (IV.353-59). Thus The Odyssey can be interpreted as a narrative that clarifies life-governing principles and lays down ground rules for universal human order. The disordered domestic situation of Odysseus can be said to stand for the situation of all humankind. Odysseus becomes the agent for restoring order before the gods and man. Odysseus puts an interpretation of cosmic and solemn entitlement on slaughtering suitors, their retinue, and his own unfaithful servants. "They respected no one,
good or bad, who came their way. For this, and folly, a bad end befell them"(Od. XXII.273-4).
Whatever one may think of the blood lust of the "wiliest fighter of the islands" (XXII.1), the evidence of the text is that Odysseus's eventful journey home and his actions upon returning there are to be seen, overall, as a heroic enterprise.
Virgil's Aeneid offers another version of heroic action. There is, as in the Odyssey, a divine-human context for the action of the epic. It is established in the first book, when Virgil cites Juno's compelling Aeneas, "A man apart, devoted to his mission-- / To undergo so many perilous days / And enter on so many trials" (I.15-17). The mission is to establish a new society out of the remnant of vanquished Troy, the society that will become Rome, the Rome that Virgil's epic is meant to celebrate, since Aeneas "came to Italy by destiny, / To our Lavinian western shore" (I.3-4).
There are structural similarities between the Odyssey and the Aeneid, the latte...