The object of this paper is to examine some of the arguments which have been used to support current reconstructions of the Homeric House, and in particular of the House of Odysseus, as it is described in the Odyssey; and to add a few points of interpretation and of criticism which I have not succeeded in finding already in print. In order to make these latter intelligible, it will be necessary to recapitulate much that has been stated by previous writers on a subject which is ‘always with us’; and not a little that has been established with some degree of certainty. It is perhaps necessary also to add, that the interpretation which I propose is intended to apply, almost without exception, to the Homeric poems in their present state; and to determine the domestic architecture and domestic habits which were familiar both to rhapsodists and to their audiences at the time when the poems, and the ‘Vengeance of Odysseus’ in particular, were being reduced to the form in which, with but slight aberrations, they have survived. It is difficult to believe that men who were endowed with so keen a visualizing faculty as the rhapsodists and their patrons really tolerated unintelligible archaism in the domestic topography of their ballads; and we may fairly assume that the movements of the personages implicated in the ‘Vengeance,’ into and out of the House of Odysseus, were still intelligible, and even familiar, to both singers and listeners. That this was so in the Homeric Age, and that anachronisms in the description were currently corrected, as one custom and another became obsolete in daily life, is made very probable, if not certain, by the analogous case of Homeric armour; where, as Dr. Reichel has argued in his Homerische Waffen, the introduction of the θώρηξ and the consequent changes of drill and fence, are reflected in the poems by interpolated passages, introduced by θώρηξwearing rhapsodists to meet the critisisms of a θώρηξwearing public.