Chapter summary
The old nurse Eurycleia climbs laughing to the upper room, with steady knees and light feet, to tell her mistress that her husband is home. Odysseus has arrived, though late, and has killed the suitors who troubled the house, devoured its goods, and did violence to the son. Penelope does not believe it. She says the gods have driven the nurse mad, the nurse who used to be sensible, asks why she is mocking her and wakes her from the sweetest sleep she has had since Odysseus left, and says that if another maidservant woke her like this, she would send her back in anger. Eurycleia swears she is not mocking: the guest whom everyone scorned in the hall is Odysseus, and Telemachus already knew but hid his father's plans until he had taken his revenge. Penelope rejoices, embraces the nurse weeping, and asks how one man could face suitors who were always together. Eurycleia had heard only the groans, shut in with the others at the back of the room, until Telemachus called her, and then she saw Odysseus among the dead. Now he is purifying the house with fire and sends for her.
Penelope, however, draws back. She asks the nurse not to exult, for she knows how welcome Odysseus's return would be to everyone, and above all to her and her son, but what the nurse says is not true. Some immortal killed the noble suitors, angered by their insolence and wicked deeds, because they honored no man; as for Odysseus, he lost his return far away and died. Eurycleia reprimands her: what word has escaped her teeth, saying that her husband, at home by the hearth, would never come? Her heart is always incredulous. She then gives another clear sign, the scar the boar made on him, which she saw when washing his feet and wanted to tell her mistress, but he, with his cunning, put his hand over her mouth. She offers her own life as a wager, if he is deceiving her. Penelope answers that it is hard, even for a very shrewd nurse, to grasp the designs of the gods, but she goes to her son to see the dead suitors and who killed them.
Penelope comes down hesitating: she weighs whether to question her husband from afar or to draw near, kisses his head, and takes his hands. She enters, crosses the stone threshold, and sits down before him in the firelight, by the opposite wall. Odysseus, beside the tall column, looks down and waits for his wife to speak. She stays silent a long time, overcome with amazement: now she looks at him face to face, now she does not recognize him, because of his wretched clothes. Telemachus rebukes her: what a hard mother, who keeps away from her father and does not sit beside him or ask him anything. No other woman would stay so far from a husband returning in the twentieth year, and her heart is harder than stone. Penelope answers that her heart is astonished, that she cannot speak, nor ask, nor look at him face to face; if he is truly Odysseus, they will know each other even better, because they have signs that only the two of them know. Odysseus smiles and tells Telemachus to let his mother put him to the test: she does not recognize him because he is filthy and wrapped in rags.
Then Odysseus thinks of the city. Whoever kills a single man among the people, even without many avengers behind him, flees the homeland; they have killed the pillar of the city, the best young men of Ithaca. Telemachus hands the decision back to his father, whose cunning is the greatest among men, and says they will follow him with all their vigor. Odysseus orders everyone to wash and put on tunics, the maidservants to choose clothes, and the divine aoidos, with his lyre, to lead a dance, so that whoever hears from outside, or passes in the street, or lives nearby, will think there is a wedding, and the rumor of the slaughter will not run through the city before they set out for the countryside of many trees, where they will decide what the Olympian puts in their hands. They do so. The house rings with feet, and whoever hears from outside says that someone has married the queen so sought after, who could not bear to keep the great house until her husband returned. The housekeeper Eurynome bathes and anoints Odysseus and dresses him, and Athena pours beauty over him, taller and stronger, with hair like hyacinth flowers, like a goldsmith who overlays silver with gold. He comes out of the bath like the immortals and sits down again on the chair, facing his wife.
Odysseus rebukes her: the gods gave her an unbending heart, no other woman would stay so far from her husband, and he asks the nurse to make the bed, since he will sleep alone, as her heart is iron. Penelope answers that she takes no pride, nor scorn, nor wonder, and that she knows well how he was when he left Ithaca. She orders Eurycleia to set out the firm bed outside the solid room he built himself, with fleeces, cloaks, and gleaming coverlets. The narrator says she speaks to test her husband. Odysseus, irritated, asks who moved the bed elsewhere, something that would be hard even for someone who knew, unless a god did it with ease. No living mortal, not even a young one, could move it without effort, because there is a great sign in it. He describes the olive tree in the courtyard, the room built around it, the crown cut, the trunk trimmed and drilled, and the bed made from it, with gold, silver, ivory, and a leather strap dyed purple. He ends by saying he does not know whether the bed is still firm or whether some man has moved it, cutting the trunk at the base.
Penelope's knees and heart give way as she recognizes the firm signs. She runs weeping, throws her arms around his neck, kisses his head, and asks him not to be angry: she has always been prudent, and it was the gods who gave them grief and denied them the chance to stay together in youth and reach old age. She asks him not to be angry that she did not welcome him at once when she saw him, for her heart always feared that some mortal would deceive her with words, since many plot for ill gain. Not even Helen, daughter of Zeus, would have joined herself to a foreign man if she had known the Argives would take her back; a god drove her to the shameful act, and she did not foresee the ruin from which the grief of the two of them was also born. Now that he has described the signs of the bed, which no other mortal has seen, only the two of them and one maidservant, Actoris, who guarded the door of the room, her heart is convinced. He weeps with his wife in his arms; for her, her husband is as welcome as land to shipwrecked men, and her white arms do not let go of his neck. Dawn would have appeared over the two of them weeping, if Athena had not held back the night at the end of the world and kept Dawn in Ocean, without yoking her horses Lampus and Phaethon.
Odysseus then warns that they have not yet reached the end of all the trials: a labor without measure remains, long and hard, which he must complete, as the soul of Tiresias prophesied to him on the day he went down to the house of Hades to seek the return of his companions and his own. He wants to go to bed and sleep. Penelope agrees, but asks him to tell her the trial: she will know it later anyway, and knowing it now is no worse. He speaks without hiding, saying her heart will not rejoice, nor will his. Tiresias told him to go to many cities of mortals with a well-made oar in his hands, until he reaches men who do not know the sea, nor eat food seasoned with salt, nor know red-prowed ships or oars, which are the wings of ships. The sign will be another traveler saying that he carries a winnowing fan on his sturdy shoulder. Then he must plant the oar in the earth, sacrifice to Poseidon a ram, a bull, and a boar, return home, and offer hecatombs to all the gods. Death will come to him gently, from the sea or far from it (the Greek expression admits both readings), when old age has overcome him, with happy peoples around him. Penelope answers that if the gods will make his old age better, there is hope of escaping evils.
Meanwhile Eurynome and the nurse prepare the bed by torchlight; the nurse goes back to sleep, and Eurynome leads the couple to the room with a torch. The two arrive, happy, at the ancient rite of the bed. Telemachus, the cowherd, and the swineherd stop the women's dance and go to sleep in the dark hall. After love, the couple delight in telling each other what they went through: she, all she bore in the hall, watching the crowd of suitors who slaughtered oxen and sheep because of her and emptied jars of wine; he, all he made men suffer and all he himself endured. She delights in listening, and sleep does not fall on her eyelids until he has told everything. He begins with the victory over the Cicones, then the land of the Lotus-eaters, the Cyclops and the revenge for the companions devoured, Aeolus and the wind that carried him back to sea, the Laestrygonians who destroyed the ships, the arts of Circe, the descent to the house of Hades and the soul of Tiresias, the companions and his mother, the Sirens, the Wandering Rocks, Charybdis and Scylla, the cattle of the Sun, and the thunderbolt of Zeus that destroyed the ship. Then comes Calypso, on the island of Ogygia, who held him back, wanting him as a husband and promising to make him immortal, and did not win him over; and the Phaeacians, who honored him as a god and sent him home by ship with bronze, gold, and clothes. That is the last word he speaks before the sweet sleep comes.
Athena, however, has something else in mind: when she judges that Odysseus has had his fill of bed and sleep, she makes Dawn rise from Ocean. He gets up and tells his wife: they have both had their fill of many trials, she weeping over his difficult return, he held back by Zeus and the other gods far from his homeland. Now he will recover the goods, in part by taking for himself the sheep the suitors devoured, in part by receiving gifts from the Achaeans, until the pens are full. He will go to the country of many trees to see his father, Laertes, who suffers for him. To his wife, though she is sensible, he orders that soon the fame of the suitors' deaths will spread with the sun: she must go up to the upper floor with the maidservants, sit still, and neither look nor ask anyone anything. He puts on his armor, wakes Telemachus, the cowherd, and the swineherd, and orders them all to take up arms; they go out, with Odysseus in front. Light was already over the earth, but Athena hides them in the darkness and leads them out of the city.
Analysis
The recognition has three stages. First comes Eurycleia, who announces it and is not believed; then the two of them, who look at each other without recognizing one another; and only then the test of the bed, the sign Penelope chooses for herself. The poem does not let Odysseus identify himself by what anyone could know about him, but by what only the two of them know, and that is what Penelope announces before any proof.
Penelope gives two reasons for the delay, and the text leaves both: the rags that kept her from recognizing him, and the fear of being deceived by words. When Eurycleia offers the scar, she does not make use of it; only the bed, which she herself chooses, convinces her. Odysseus announces the trial still to come, and the next morning he leaves the house, hidden by Athena, leaving his wife in the upper room.
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