Demodocus sings three songs at the Phaeacian feast. The first is about a quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles. Odysseus weeps. The second is about Ares and Aphrodite caught in Hephaestus’s net. Everyone laughs. Odysseus asks for a third: sing the wooden horse, sing how the Greeks took Troy.
Demodocus sings it. How the Trojans debated what to do with the horse. How Odysseus and Menelaus stormed Deiphobus’s house. How Odysseus, with Athena’s help, conquered at last.
The song is about what Odysseus did. He asked for it. He hears his own victory narrated by another voice, and he weeps.
The simile compares his weeping to a woman whose husband has fallen in battle before the city, fighting to save his people and his family. She sees him shuddering in death’s final throes. She presses herself against him and wails. The enemy strikes her across the back and shoulders with the shafts of their spears and leads her away into slavery and lasting grief. Her cheeks grow gaunt from sorrow.
So the tears fell from Odysseus’s eyes.
The woman in the simile is a casualty of the sack of a city. The man to whom the simile is applied is the one who sacked the city. Her husband died defending it. Odysseus was the attacker. The victors who beat her and drag her away are his soldiers, or soldiers like his, doing what soldiers did when Troy fell.
The poem does not point this out. The simile arrives, does its work, and passes. The tears are compared, and the comparison stands without commentary. The man who led the destruction of Troy is placed inside the body of a woman destroyed by the destruction of a city, and the text does not flinch or explain.
He asked for this song. Demodocus was singing something else, and Odysseus interrupted to request the wooden horse. He wanted to hear his own story. What he hears makes him weep, and what the weeping looks like, the poem says, is the suffering his kind of victory produces.
Only Alcinous notices. He sits nearby, hears the heavy sighing, and stops the performance. He does not know who this stranger is. He asks: tell me your name, tell me your country, tell me who you are. The next line of the poem — the first line of Book Nine — is the answer: I am Odysseus.
Between the weeping and the naming, between the simile and the revelation, the poem holds the moment where a man inhabits the consequence of his own action and has not yet said his name aloud.