Book 11
My summary: Odysseus meets famous dead people.
Hey, this section came up in 15MAD was at the beginning of the year.
Odysseus is starting to come out of his asshole phase: "One shade came first--Elepenor, of our company,/ who laid unburied still on the wide earth/ as we had left him dead in Kirke's hall,/ untouched, unmourned, when other cares compelled us." (He fell off a roof he was drunkenly sleeping on.)
The shade asks for a proper burial, and he agrees.
Many of the shades want to drink blood, which is not a thing we really spirits today.
There is a heartbreaking segment where he tries to hug his mother, Penelope: "with longing to embrace her,/ and tried three times, putting my arms around her,/ but she went sifting through my hands[...] this embittered all the pain I bore,/ and I cried in the darkness:"
Agamemnon shit talks women a bunch, they're all deceivers, never trust them, etc. After Odysseus willingly spent the last year with Circe, it doesn't hit very strongly.
A bunch of other Iliad characters show up and talk about the Trojan war.
Hebe has "ravishing pale ankles."
This is an interesting book, but I feel like it gets a bit more attention than it deserves. It's much more popular to talk about than, for example, and of the Telemachus books.
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