Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors
used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Food
Although throwing a feast for a guest is a common part
of hospitality, hunger and the consumption of food often have negative
associations in the Odyssey. They represent lack
of discipline or submission to temptation, as when Odysseus tarries
in the cave of the Cyclops, when his men slaughter the Sun’s flocks,
or when they eat the fruit of the lotus. The suitors, moreover,
are constantly eating. Whenever Telemachus and Penelope complain
about their uninvited guests, they mention how the suitors slaughter
the palace’s livestock. Odysseus kills the suitors just as they
are starting their dinner, and Homer graphically describes them
falling over tables and spilling their food. In almost all cases,
the monsters of the Odyssey owe their monstrosity
at least in part to their diets or the way that they eat. Scylla
swallows six of Odysseus’s men, one for each head. The Cyclops eats
humans, but not sheep apparently, and is gluttonous nonetheless:
when he gets drunk, he vomits up wine mixed with pieces of human
flesh. The Laestrygonians seem like nice people—until their queen,
who is described as “huge as a mountain crag,” tries to eat Odysseus
and his men (10.124).
In these cases, excessive eating represents not just lack of self-control, but
also the total absence of humanity and civility.
The Wedding Bed
The wedding bed in Book 23 symbolizes
the constancy of Penelope and Odysseus’s marriage. Only a single
maidservant has ever seen the bed, and it is where the happy couple
spends its first night in each other’s arms since Odysseus’s departure
for Troy twenty years earlier. The symbolism is heightened by the
trick that Penelope uses to test Odysseus, which revolves around
the immovability of their bed—a metaphor for the unshakable foundation
of their love.
