Duplicitous Dolios? Conditioning Audience Response to Deceit through Two Kinds of Deception in the Back-Story of the Odyssey

Benjamin S. Haller (Lawrence University)

Dolios is a perplexing character in the Odyssey, resurfacing in the story so infrequently and in such contradictory roles that some have suggested that there are actually two or three separate slaves named Dolios (Page 1955, 109 among others). The greatest difficulty in his representation is his children: in Book 24 (223, 497) he has six dutiful sons on Laertes’ farm, whereas the “other” Dolios is cited as the father of Melantheus and Melantho, both of whom are, lamentably, rotten to the core (see Thalmann 1998, 67-68 for the relevance of this dichotomy to Homer’s portrayal of slaves). His name, too, is provocative: commentators note its likely derivation from the word dolos (Heubeck 1992 ad 24.222; cf. Thalmann 1998 69n54).

My contribution explores the consequences of the proposition that there is but one Dolios in the epic. If this is the case, his intermittent reappearance in the narrative becomes instrumental in creating a coherent back-story to string together the chronological triptych of events in antebellum Ithaca, Ithaca during Odysseus’ absence, and the island at the time of his return (cf. P. V. Jones 1992). The key to this back-story is 4.735-741, where Penelope briefly entertains sending Dolios to Laertes in order to encourage him to weave a stratagem (metin huphenas) whereby he may engender pity among the populace.

Recent scholarship suggests that Laertes was never sole king of Ithaca (cf. Halverson 1986, Finkelberg 1991, Westbrook 2003, Hall 2007) and that he carved out his garden as a temenos (cf. 17.299, Donlan 1989, Hanson 1999). I argue that Penelope and Laertes have agreed that Laertes will retreat to this countryside temenos to await Odysseus’ arrival in what evidence suggests was likely Odysseus’ childhood home – a logical secondary destination for a basileus who returns to find his palace overrun. Penelope’s remarks in Book 4 suggest that Laertes is to stir up sympathy for Odysseus’ regime. These efforts bear fruit when Odysseus returns and meets Eumaeus. The swineherd, as evidenced by the rather ignominious circumstance of his being Laertes’ supplier of dung, has been in contact with the aging son of Arceisios (17.299) and enthusiastically aids Odysseus in taking the first steps to reclaim his kingdom.

Dolios’ involvement in this plot diffuses tension between the myriad varieties of deceit which are brought to bear by the epic’s main characters – the disloyalty of the servants, Penelope’s deceit of the suitors, Odysseus’ deceit of first Penelope and then of his father, and many others. By establishing a character named “Deceitful” who has two sets of offspring, one good and one bad, Homer funnels a complicated array of morally ambiguous acts into a tidy dichotomy between good and evil deceit, mediating between the two antithetical social codes of Autolycan outsider and of king which have competed in Odysseus from the outset of the epic.