[SPOILER: This is the problem the slaughter creates. Odysseus has killed roughly a hundred men. Each of those men had a father, a brother, a kinsman with a spear and a memory. The fathers come up from the town in a tide, Eupeithes at the front, Antinous’s father, the rest behind him. They have spent twenty years watching their sons drink another man’s wine and they have just buried the bodies and they are coming for blood-price. The sentence in the chapter does the work: a feud doesn’t end when one side kills the other. It ends when everybody’s dead. The reckoning was supposed to be the ending. It is not the ending. It is the start of the next round. Laertes throws the first spear and Eupeithes goes down. Odysseus and Telemachus step into the wound the old man’s throw opened. The two sides face each other across the courtyard with the promise of more blood, endless blood, and that is where the poem is sitting when the gods finally intervene.]
The Cycle of Revenge / Feud
A feud doesn't end when one side kills the other. It ends when everybody's dead.