The story of the twelve slave girls hanged on the one rope like the birds on a wire...: (as described in "Rereading Ancient Slavery" - the original story after the Homer's Odyssey): The most poignant and most socially instructive display of violence against slaves within the Homer's Odyssey is however perpetrated against those who are considered to have transgressed incontrovertibly. The climax to the punishments meted out in the epic is the mass execution of the twelve ‘disloyal’ slave-girls whom Eurycleia identifies in book 22:
‘ … Of these there are twelve in all who have trodden the path of shamelessness, heeding neither me nor the queen herself. As for Telemachus, he had only begun to grow towards manhood, and his mother would not let him assume command over these women.'
The girls’ disdain for the authority of Eurycleia and Penelope (Telemachus is here exempted on the ground of his youth) is coupled with the sexual transgressions constituted by their liaisons with the suitors. As Odysseus’ property, the right of sexual access to them belonged to him. By bestowing sexual favours on the suitors, therefore, they were effectively stealing from Odysseus what was rightfully his. (...) The slave girls become models for the undesirable slave, in particular the undesirable female slave. (...)
' ... Then Telemachus addressed his helpers: ‘Never let it be said that sluts like these had a clean death from me. They have heaped up outrage on me and my mother; they have been the suitors’ concubines.’ So he spoke, and stretched a ship’s cable between a tall pillar and the round-house, fastening it high up so that no woman’s feet could touch the ground. Just as long-winged thrushes or just as doves, on their way to roost, strike against a snare set in a thicket and find their death in what should have been their sleeping-place, so with their heads in a single line the women’s necks were all caught and noosed, to make them die the most piteous death. For a little while their feet kept writhing, but not for long. (22.465-72).'
It has been suggested that Telemachus’ use of hanging symbolically serves to close the slave-girls’ genitals, an interpretation which draws upon the close association of mouth and genitals in Greek medical texts.
In tragedy, hanging seems more widely associated with young women than older ones, and with women rather than men. Dying by the sword could perhaps be seen as more dignified, ‘masculine’ and even honourable, certainly less humiliating than Telemachus’ idea of a mass hanging on a makeshift collective noose.
It is no surprise that as a slave-owner Odysseus wishes to exact a punishment for the perceived misdemeanours of his household slaves, even though he uses what to a modern audience may seem to be extreme violence.