Character
Melanthius
The goatherd · the servant who sides with the suitors
The goatherd who takes the suitors' side: he kicks the disguised Odysseus on the road, insults him in his own hall, and during the battle smuggles armour to the suitors from the storeroom. He is caught, strung up, and at the end mutilated and killed. His punishment, and that of the twelve maids hanged beside it, is the ugliest passage in the poem and the one modern retellings return to most often.
What is done to him afterwards is the ugliest passage in the poem. The portrait stops at the treachery; the text does not look away.