Why Does Odysseus Cry When He Hears About His Own Victory?

Odysseus is not ambushed by the song that makes him cry. He asks for it.

In Book 8 of the Odyssey, still hiding his identity at the court of the Phaeacians, Odysseus praises the bard Demodocus for singing the Achaeans' sufferings as if he had actually been at Troy. Then he proposes a test: sing about the wooden horse, the device Odysseus brought into the city filled with the men who would sack it.

Demodocus obliges. He sings the Greeks pouring from the horse and destroying Troy, and singles out Odysseus going with Menelaus to the house of Deiphobus, fighting there, and winning with Athena's help. This is about as close as heroic poetry gets to giving Odysseus a victory lap.

Odysseus weeps.

Homer does not compare the crying Odysseus to a Greek veteran. He compares him to a woman on the losing side.

The simile changes sides

Homer's comparison begins simply: “as a woman wails.” Her husband has fallen defending his city and children. She throws herself over him as he dies; enemy soldiers strike her from behind and lead her away into slavery.

The grief is private inside the scene. Odysseus conceals his tears from the court; only Alcinous, sitting near him, notices. The reader is therefore allowed to see the comparison more clearly than almost anyone in the room.

The placement is what makes the comparison so disturbing. Demodocus has just sung the Greek sack of Troy, with Odysseus' own cunning at its center. The poem then makes the architect of that victory resemble one of the people such a victory produces.

A commentary from Dickinson College points to the difficulty: the song celebrates Odysseus' mastery of deception, while the simile links him not to the invaders but to enslaved women who have lost their husbands. The simile does not solve the question of why Odysseus is crying. It makes the answer harder to reduce to one cause.

That caution matters. It is tempting to translate the scene immediately into modern psychological language and say that Odysseus feels guilty. Homer never tells us that. The grief is unmistakable; its exact object is not. Odysseus has already cried once during Demodocus' songs of Troy. He has lost friends, endured ten years of war and years of wandering, and still cannot go home under his own name.

The captive-woman simile does not cancel any of those explanations. It adds a perspective none of them supplies on its own. For a few lines, the poem moves Odysseus across the battle line.

Gregory Nagy's more specific reading

Gregory Nagy returned to a more specific reading of the simile in an August 3 interview with Johnathan Bi, building on an interpretation he has developed for years: the captive woman can be read as a screened image of Andromache, Hector's widow. The Odyssey never names her, so this remains an interpretation, but the case becomes sharper when the scene is placed beside the lost epic tradition about the sack of Troy.

In Proclus' surviving prose summary of the Iliou Persis, one of the poems of the Epic Cycle, the Greeks burn Troy, Odysseus kills Astyanax, the young son of Hector and Andromache, and Neoptolemus takes Andromache as his captive prize. The tradition was not uniform: another cyclic version gave Astyanax's killing to Neoptolemus. But in the Iliou Persis summarized by Proclus, the killer is Odysseus himself.

Those events belong to the stretch of the Trojan story that Demodocus' song is approaching when Homer breaks away from narrative and gives us the simile instead.

On Nagy's reading, the unnamed woman therefore does more than generalize the suffering of war. She allows the Odyssey to evoke Andromache without naming her, and places Odysseus emotionally inside the fate of a family his side destroys.

It is an elegant reading because it takes the exact placement of the simile seriously. It would be too strong to report it as a hidden identification that Homer has somehow solved for us. The woman remains unnamed, and the scene does not need a name for its larger effect to work.

Glory does not get the last word

The Greeks have a word, kleos, for the fame carried by song. Demodocus is doing precisely what heroic culture prizes: preserving the deeds of the great men at Troy. Odysseus even certifies the bard's accuracy before requesting the story of his own most famous stratagem.

Yet when that triumph comes back to him as poetry, the Odyssey places grief beside it. The next image is not another Greek hero but a woman whose husband has been killed defending his city and whose future is slavery.

This does not turn the Odyssey into an anti-war tract. The poem admires courage, cunning, endurance, and successful violence often enough, and nothing in the simile revokes Odysseus' heroism.

The Trojan Horse remains proof of his intelligence, and Demodocus' song still preserves his fame. Homer simply places beside that glory the experience of someone for whom the same victory meant a dead husband, a ruined city, and enslavement.

The scene never tells us exactly what part of that sorrow belongs to Odysseus. It does insist that Troy cannot be remembered only from inside the wooden horse.

Sources

• Homer, Odyssey 8.469-549, A. T. Murray translation, Perseus Digital Library.
• Johnathan Bi, “Interview with Gregory Nagy on Epic and Grief”, August 3, 2026.
• Dickinson College Commentaries, Odyssey 8.521-549.
• Gregory Nagy, “An unnamed woman's lament as a signal of epic sorrow”, Classical Inquiries, June 17, 2015.
• Center for Hellenic Studies, Proclus' summary of the Iliou Persis.