W hen, in the Odyssey, Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca after the Trojan War, he finds the suitors competing 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 suitor Antinous takes the first arrow through the throat as he lifts his cup. Over the course of one of the text’s 24 books, Homer describes how more than 100 suitors are mown down among the wreckage of tables. The housemaids who have shared the suitors’ beds are hanged in a line, their pale legs twitching in their death throes. The goat-herd Melanthius, who aided the enemy, is mutilated at the storeroom door. Homer tells the tale without apology, indeed with a sense of relish. While the modern reader is likely to find the extent of Odysseus’s revenge excessive, the poem’s own world betrays no such unease.
Retaliation, retributive justice and punishment are juridical and criminological concepts. Revenge is not. It is a notion that many in liberal modern societies may consider distasteful. The state is the arbiter of legitimate force, and personal grievances are a matter for courts and the legal machinery that characterise civilised communities. Centuries after Homer sang, Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy Oresteia hammered home the harsh truth that vendetta is exhausting and endless. But while society has turned vengeful retribution into condign punishment, the impulse for vengeance has not disappeared. Instead, we tell those who feel wronged that anger poisons only the one who holds it, that forgiveness is maturity, that revenge will not bring the dead back or buy closure.
The Odyssey presents a different viewpoint. The suitors have spent years devouring the hero’s wealth, courting his wife and plotting to murder his son. What Odysseus does is exact tisis, payment, the settling of a debt. Retaliation for Odysseus is not the opposite of justice but its manifestation. Dikē, the right order of things, is restored when the criminal is made to pay. The suitors also abused a beggar, even though the stranger sits under the protection of Zeus, so that to insult him is to slight the god. They have failed to heed the seer Theoclymenus, who read death in the air of the hall, and laughed him out of the room.
In the poem’s opening lines, Zeus declares that mortals blame the gods for their sorrows, when in truth they bring ruin on themselves through their own recklessness. He cites Aegisthus, who slept with Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, and slew the king, despite being warned off by the messenger god Hermes. Agamemnon’s son Orestes then killed Aegisthus in justified revenge. The first theological statement of the poem is a defence of a revenge killing, creating a moral framework long before Odysseus sets foot on Ithaca. We are told that those who trample on justice bring about their own destruction, and that the avenger is doing the work of heaven. To us, by contrast, avengers are usually seen as tragic figures, consumed by anger that they are unable to release and conspicuously failing to abide by communal norms of justice.
Characters in the Odyssey assert that Orestes won undying fame (kleos) by avenging his father. This is the standard against which Odysseus’s son Telemachus must be measured. Vengeance is something a son owes his father and that the Homeric community expects of him. Aristotle supposed that the man who fails to grow angry at 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 the want of anger is a vice. Does the epic, then, simply license vengefulness and slaughter? There are limits. When the nurse Eurycleia crows over the dead suitors, Odysseus steps in, saying that it is not right to exult over slain men. In the Iliad, similarly, the vengeance Achilles exacts on Hector overruns its bounds when he drags his enemy’s corpse daily through the dust. The gods disapprove, and send Priam to ransom his son’s body and temporarily assuage Achilles’s excessive fury. It is right to exact a debt, but wrong to exceed the bounds of righteous anger.
Homer draws the line where revenge fictions often fail to since, in them, pleasure in killing is largely the point. At the end of the Odyssey, when the fathers of the slain suitors take up arms and march on Odysseus to collect a debt of their own, the demands of tisis threaten to lead to an unending cycle of violence. Athena comes down, Zeus throws a thunderbolt, oaths are sworn and a forgetting is imposed on Ithaca by command of the gods. Vengeance is righteous but must be ended, just as in the Oresteia when Athena’s court turns the dynamic of vendetta into the logic of law.
If the lust for revenge has an ancient pedigree, so does the licence to indulge it in story and on stage. In Euripides’s Medea the wronged wife murders her own children to avenge her husband’s faithlessness; in Hecuba the captive queen blinds the man who killed her son, and slaughters his children. Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies march Hieronimo, Titus, and Vindice across stages that accumulate a heap of bodies by the final curtain. The cinema portrays vengeance with equal zeal. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in Commando slaughters every member of a private army to recover his kidnapped daughter; Uma Thurman’s character in Kill Bill hacks a path through everyone who wronged her. Revenge has been staged for 2,500 years and audiences have not tired of it.
Does it make a difference that audiences recognise it as fiction? Uwe Boll’s film Citizen Vigilante, released in June, features a vigilante who, after his wife’s murder, hunts migrant criminals across Europe, culminating in the slaughter of an entire family. Unlike Kill Bill’s stylised rampage, the film points at a real and contemporary target. Germany’s ratings board refused it a certificate as an incitement to violence, whereupon Elon Musk posted it to his 240 million followers on X.
Ironically, however, where vengefulness leads to extreme and ubiquitous violence in real life, it is rarely named as such. In inter-state wars killing is answered with killing, each side invoking its own dead to legitimise the next blow. Nations trade threats and strikes, each casting its actions as the justified response to the other’s. In every instance, revenge and retaliation come wrapped in the language of security, deterrence and law.
The appetite for revenge that politics disowns in the seminar room is one it elicits at the ballot box, since the desire to see wrongs righted is a useful electoral trope. For the ancients a limit had to be imposed from outside, a thunderbolt from heaven or a court set above the parties. Between nations today there is no Zeus to hurl his bolt, and no court that all parties will invariably recognise.
We should not flatter ourselves that we have grown gentler, or are more inclined to heed what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”. The “proper pleasure” (to use Aristotle’s term in relation to tragedy) that readers and viewers take in Homer’s poem and in Christopher Nolan’s new film version suggests that we are squeamish about naming the feeling – but the thrill of the epic’s denouement shows how strongly the thought of vengeance appeals. When Odysseus aims his deadly arrows against the suitors, he wreaks undisguised revenge for their actions. Homer’s audiences delight in the bloody reversal, tacitly reckoning that a world in which wicked actions were left unavenged would mean that evil had triumphed.
Armand D’Angour is a professor of classics at the University of Oxford. His books include Socrates in Love (Bloomsbury)
[Further reading: The shame of the Frida Kahlo industry]
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This article appears in the 08 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Great Con
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