Homer offers only one example of ololugē proper, i.e. the high-pitched ritual scream uttered by female attendants of animal sacrifice when the victim is stunned, marking the beginning of bloodshed and expressing at once the horror and triumph felt during the ritual killing (Od. 3.450); in all other cases this intrinsically ambivalent utterance is catachrestic, underlining the emotional component of symbolic sacrifice (Il. 6.301, Od. 4.767) or even signalling a sacrificial metaphor applied to brutal homicide (Od. 22.408). On this premise, the following article argues for double coding in Od. 22.398–418: when Odysseus prohibits Eurykleia from ululating at the sight of the bloody corpses of the suitors, he deceitfully explains her ritual move as a sacrilegious attempt to boast over the dead in the manner of an Iliadic warrior. In reality, though, the very use of ololuzō brands the domestic slaughter of the foes as a perverted sacrifice, recalling the triggering simile “as one would kill an ox at its manger” for the murder of Agamemnon (Od. 11.411) — a pattern inverted by Odysseus at his own homecoming. Close readings of passages pertinent to kin murder as human ‘sacrifice’ in Aeschylus point towards a constant combination of ololugē and euchos originating from a conscious and playful reworking of Homeric ambiguity, a device culminating in the gory scene of Klytaimestra’s triumph.
