The number shifts in the telling, fifty, fifty-two, more than a hundred, but the reality is the same. The suitors are not visitors. They are an occupying force. They have moved into the palace, sleep on the floors, wake hungry, eat through cattle and wine and bread meant for years. They court Penelope while drinking her dead husband’s cellar. They sprawl on the high seats. They send a ship to ambush Telemachus in the strait. They are too many for any one man to fight in the open. That is the problem the back half of the poem is built around. A siege normally happens at a wall. This siege is happening in the dining hall, around the hearth, in the rooms where Odysseus’s son grew up. The math of it is what forces the disguise, the patience, the bow. There is no way to walk in and clear them. The room itself has to become the trap.
The Hundred Suitors
Roughly a hundred armed men camped in his hall for years, eating his stores, courting his wife, planning to kill his son. A siege from inside.