The lost sequel to the Odyssey: a poison stingray spear, ancient plagiarism, coded pottery
So we all know Homer’s *Odyssey* ends with Odysseus safely back home, but there's an ancient sequel that ends with him getting killed by his own son using a poison stingray spear. Hey Grace. Wait—a stingray spear? I thought the story just stopped when he, you know, got back to Ithaca and took his house back. Hey Salt.
It does for us, but in antiquity the Trojan cycle kept going. That stingray spear ending belongs to the *Telegony*. It was—it's an epic poem written in the 6th century BCE by a guy named Eugammon of Cyrene. Okay, so who's this son killing him? Because it can't be Telemachus, right?
Right, it isn't Telemachus. The killer is Telegonus, the son Odysseus had with the sorceress Circe, but before Telegonus even shows up, Odysseus leaves Ithaca again because the *Telegony* outlines these, like, bizarre adventures where he travels to the mainland, marries a queen named Callidice, and leads her army in a war against a neighboring tribe. He gets married again? What about Penelope? She stays in Ithaca.
He just goes off, has another son with Callidice, and fights this whole other war. He only returns to Ithaca after Callidice dies. And that's when Telegonus sails in, searching for his dad, and they end up fighting on the beach without realizing who the other is. Wow. Yeah.
Odysseus survived a ten-year siege at Troy, a ten-year voyage home, and another random war, just to get taken out by his own kid. Telegonus stabs him with this spear tipped with a venomous stingray spine. Just brutal. Very. Odysseus dies, they figure out what just happened, and then it gets weirder.
Telegonus takes his father's body, his widow Penelope, and Telemachus back to Circe's island. Awkward boat ride. And then they they do a double wedding on the island of Aeaea. Telemachus marries Circe, and Telegonus marries Penelope. You're kidding.
No, that's the literal ending of the Trojan War cycle. The two books of the *Telegony* finish the narrative. But the the catch is, we don't have the text itself. Not a single original line of poetry survives to today, in 2026. Hold on.
If zero lines survive, how do we know about the stingray and the double wedding? We have to reconstruct it from other people's notes. The main source classicists use is an epitome—a summary—from the 9th century CE, roughly fifteen hundred years after Eugammon lived. It was written by Patriarch Photius of Constantinople. So we're relying on a book report by a Byzantine patriarch.
Basically. We we cross-reference Photius with some notes a monk scribbled in the margins of a 10th-century CE *Iliad* manuscript. But scholars also use physical archaeological artifacts to verify those medieval summaries. I assume you mean pieces of pottery. Yes, specifically Hellenistic Megarian bowls.
They date from the 3rd to 2nd century BCE. And they have these relief carvings that, um, depict scenes from the epics. So scholars can—they just look at a bowl and say, right, there's the beach fight with the spear, the plot matches the summary. But if Eugammon is writing this hundreds of years after Homer, did the Greeks view this as official canon, or was it seen as sort of ancient fan fiction? Oh, they argued about his authorship early on.
Around 200 CE, the early Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria accused Eugammon of stealing the poem. Stealing it from who, I guess? From Homer? From a legendary, semi-mythical poet named Musaeus. Clement claimed Eugammon just lifted Musaeus's work wholesale and put his own name on it.
I mean, how did plagiarism even work back then? There were no formal intellectual property laws to break. The concept of literary theft, or *klope*, definitely existed in ancient Greece. It was less about legal IP and more about claiming the prestige of an ancient, divine source. Taking credit for a great epic was a way to elevate yourself and your hometown.
Okay, so why did Eugammon want his name on this story, then? Why make up all this stuff about a stingray spear and a double wedding to begin with? Well, there's a big political angle. Eugammon came from the city of Cyrene, which was founded around 631 BCE in North Africa. And in the *Telegony*, he he invents another son for Odysseus named Arcesilaus.
Okay. It matters because Arcesilaus was the name of several ruling kings of Cyrene in the 6th century BCE, right when Eugammon was writing his epic. Ah. So he's, uh, just sucking up to the local king by telling him he's descended from Odysseus. Exactly.
He's giving his city's dynasty a direct blood tie to the biggest hero of the Greek world. It's epic genealogy functioning as civic propaganda to secure prestige for the ruling class. As we piece together a masterpiece from nothing but ancient summaries and pottery fragments, you kind of have to wonder what other foundational stories of our culture vanished, leaving only echoes in the margins of history. Thanks a lot for listening to Daybrain.
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