Dmetor

Dmetor, son of Iasus, is a Cypriot king who appears only in the elaborate false autobiography that Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, recites to the suitor Antinous in Book 17 of the Odyssey. Though he never acts within the poem's primary narrative, Dmetor occupies a precise structural role: he is the purchaser who completes the chain of misfortune that Odysseus' invented persona claims to have suffered, and his name functions as a credential of authenticity in a story designed to probe the suitors' character while concealing the speaker's identity.

Identity and Background

Dmetor is identified as a great man in Cyprus, the son of Iasus. Odysseus' fictional self describes being given to Dmetor by the Egyptians who had captured him after his crew's disastrous raid on the Egyptian coast. The Egyptians, having killed many of the raiders and taken the rest alive for forced labor, handed the narrator over to Dmetor, who met them and took him to Cyprus. The name itself carries no further elaboration in the poem—no genealogy beyond the patronymic, no description of his court, no indication of his character beyond the implication that he was a man of sufficient standing to receive a slave as a gift from Egyptian captors.

Role in Odysseus' False Tale

The Dmetor episode forms the final stage of the elaborate lying narrative that Odysseus delivers to Antinous immediately after the footstool assault. In this tale, the speaker claims to have been a rich man who led a disastrous expedition to Egypt, where his men disobeyed orders, ravaged the land, and were overwhelmed by Egyptian forces. The survivors, including the narrator, were taken alive for forced labor, but the narrator was given to Dmetor, who took him to Cyprus. The story is crafted to elicit sympathy and to test whether Antinous possesses any capacity for pity or generosity. By placing Dmetor in Cyprus, Odysseus anchors his fiction in a real geographical location familiar to his audience, lending the tale an air of verisimilitude. The mention of a named, apparently reputable figure like Dmetor serves as a rhetorical device: it signals that the speaker has moved among the powerful and has suffered a reversal of fortune that any nobleman might recognize.

Narrative Significance

Dmetor's sole appearance occurs at a critical moment in the poem's long recognition-and-revenge sequence. Odysseus has just been struck by Antinous with a footstool, an act of gratuitous violence that crystallizes the suitors' moral bankruptcy. The false tale that includes Dmetor is Odysseus' immediate response—a performance of abject suffering designed to expose Antinous' cruelty and to gauge the reactions of the other suitors. The story succeeds in its immediate purpose: Antinous responds with further abuse, while some of the other suitors express discomfort at his brutality. Dmetor, though never seen or heard, thus participates in the poem's larger pattern of testing and revelation. He is a name that carries the weight of a fabricated past, a piece of stage property in Odysseus' great improvisation. The fact that Odysseus chooses to invent a Cypriot king rather than a figure from a more familiar region may reflect the poem's own geographical range or simply the need for a setting distant enough to resist verification. In any case, Dmetor remains a cipher—a name without a face, a king without a kingdom within the story, whose only function is to be named and then forgotten as the narrative moves toward its violent climax.