explores how the enigmatic Phaeacian queen, Arete, is at the heart of an epic-scale "poetics of interrogation" used throughout the to negotiate Odysseus' , or epic renown. Arete's interrogation of Odysseus has been especially problematic in scholarship, but diachronic and synchronic analysis of similar interrogations across Indo-European, Orphic, and Greek epigrammatic corpora show that the "stranger's interrogation" is a formula that demands performance and negotiation of status. Within the , this interrogation is part of an intraformular network used to generate , and the queen's question initiates the longest and most complex negotiation of Odysseus' status in epic and memory. Arete's role as interrogator not only explains her strange authority and resonance with both Penelope and comparative afterlife figures, but it also establishes a gendered, agonistic tension between she and her husband, Alkinoos, that influences the structure, genre, and narratology of performances across the Phaeacian episode. This book reinterprets the 's central episode and challenges several assumptions about Nausikaa and Alkinoos' famed hospitality, even demonstrating how the is organized as a response to competing inquiries into Odysseus' fundamental status in tradition. The ultimately navigates away from Odysseus' public reputation and roots his status in private memories, and Arete's carefully arranged interventions signal the larger process by which the immortalizes Odysseus in poetry as a hero. The queen and her question invite new applications of oral poetics that shed light on the structure, composition, and reperformance of the .