Odyssey 1.106 · Book 1, lines 106–108
The suitors at their games
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εὗρε δʼ ἄρα μνηστῆρας ἀγήνορας. οἱ μὲν ἔπειτα πεσσοῖσι προπάροιθε θυράων θυμὸν ἔτερπον ἥμενοι ἐν ῥινοῖσι βοῶν, οὓς ἔκτανον αὐτοί·
And there she found the haughty suitors. They, at that hour, were delighting their hearts with draughts before the doors, sitting on the hides of oxen they themselves had slain.
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The setting
What the goddess finds at the door: the suitors of Penelope — the young nobles who have filled Odysseus's house for years, courting his wife and eating his stores — at their ease over board games in the forecourt.
A note on this passage
Our first sight of the suitors, and it is a still life: lordly young men playing draughts before the doors, lounging on cowhides. The verb is ἔτερπον — they were pleasuring their hearts — the same easy delight the gods take at their own feasts, here worn by men in another man's forecourt.
The detail that carries the charge is the hides: οὓς ἔκτανον αὐτοί — oxen 'they themselves had killed.' The cattle were Odysseus's. The suitors are not merely idling; they are sitting on the evidence, upholstered in the household they are eating. Guests who slaughter the host's herds are xenia turned exactly inside out — and this poem opened with men destroyed for eating cattle that were not theirs.
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