(Day 37 of the poem's main action, night; the great hall of the palace at Ithaca)

The suitors have gone home; the hall is empty. Ulysses and Telemachus, working alone, lift the spears and shields and helmets and swords from the wall-racks of the great megaron and carry them in armfuls up into the back store-room. Athena goes before them holding a golden lamp that filled the whole house with a wonderful brightness. Telemachus stops, struck by it: father, this is strange — the walls and the rafters and the pillars are all on fire. Ulysses: be quiet; this is the way of the gods who hold Olympus; speak not of it. Go to bed; I have business with your mother. Eurycleia, who has come up at the noise, is told it is the smoke that is darkening the gear and so the gear is being moved; she shuts the doors of the women's quarters and shoots the bolt. Telemachus goes to bed. Ulysses stands alone in the hall by the fire and the empty wall.

Penelope comes down from the upper chamber, like Diana or like golden Venus; her chair is brought to the hearth, an ivory and silver chair Icmalius the craftsman made for her father with a silver footstool; a great fleece is laid on it. The maids come in to clear away the suitors's tables and to sweep the floor. Melantho — who has had a word from Eurymachus all evening — sees the beggar still at the fire and rounds on him again: what, still here? trying to spy on the women through the night? out into the porch, or it will be the brand for you in a moment. Ulysses scowls: what have I done to you? You are well-fed, well-clothed, well-favoured; the day will come when your mistress will be angry with you, or her husband will come home; you may yet have your back beaten for what you say. Penelope hears and turns her own voice on the maid: you reckless thing, do not think I do not see what you are doing; you knew I meant to have words with the stranger; he had my own protection. You will answer for it with your life. The maid scurries away.

Penelope settles herself on the silver chair, the beggar on a low stool opposite, and begins the long interview that is the centre of this book. Stranger, who are you? where from? who were your parents? what city? Ulysses turns the first question aside with a long compliment — Queen, your fame goes up to heaven like the fame of a blameless king under whom the dark earth bears wheat and barley and the trees are heavy with fruit; do not ask me my country, for the words bring me weeping — and she allows the deflection. She tells him in turn her own grief: how the suitors press her, how her parents urge remarriage, how Telemachus is grown and chafes at the wasting of the estate, and how I have put them off these three years with the weaving of Laertes's pall — weaving by day and unpicking by night by torchlight in the upper chamber, until one of my maids betrayed me to them, and they caught me at it, and I was forced to finish the cloth. Now I have no further trick. I must give in and choose one of them — or the gods must do something.

Ulysses, pressed for his identity, delivers the longest of the Cretan lies. Stranger, you press me — I am Aithon, the younger son of Deucalion son of Minos, brother of Idomeneus the great Trojan-war captain. We lived in Crete, in Knossos, in the great city. I once entertained Ulysses your husband when the wind drove him in to the harbour of Amnisus on his way to Troy. I gave him twelve days of feasting until the north wind dropped. I sent him on his way with a black sheep and a flagon of wine. Penelope, weeping, tests him: and what was he wearing when he was with you? and who were his comrades? Ulysses answers with the precise material detail that will undo her: a fine cloak of double-folded purple wool, pinned at the throat with a gold brooch made like a hound holding down a struggling fawn — the hound's teeth in the fawn's neck, the fawn's small legs kicking, all wonderfully wrought in gold; a fine linen shirt that fitted him close as the inner skin of an onion and shone like sunlight; with him was a herald, Eurybates, hunched in the shoulders, dark-faced, woolly-haired — and your husband loved him beyond all his other men because he was a man of like mind with himself.

Penelope, hearing the description that only the wife could verify, melts as the snow melts on the mountain-tops when the south wind has thawed it after the west wind has piled it, and the rivers run full with the melting — she weeps for a long time at her own fireside in front of the man who is causing it, and Ulysses pities her in his heart but holds his eyes hard like iron between his lids without trembling, that no tear will come. She recovers and confirms: I gave him those clothes myself; that brooch I picked out and pinned on him with my own hand. I will never see him again. Ulysses presses on with the false news: my queen, do not weep so. I will tell you the truth as I lately heard it. He is alive. The Thesprotians put me up at Pheidon's palace and I saw with my own eyes the gold and bronze Ulysses has been collecting on his wanderings, piled in the king's storeroom. The king swore he had sent Ulysses across to Dodona to ask the oak of Zeus whether to come home openly or in secret, and that Ulysses himself would be in Ithaca within the month — within this very moon, perhaps even before the next month. He swears it by Jove and the hearth of Penelope's house. He will come.

Penelope answers with a beautiful sad caution: stranger, if it were so, I would give you a robe and a tunic and an escort wherever you wanted — but my heart does not let me hope. He will not come. There is no master in this house now to give a guest a proper bath or proper bed; but at least we can do what we can. She calls out: Eurycleia, come — wash the stranger's feet; he is of an age with my husband, and a man's feet wear like his fortunes; treat him with care. Ulysses cuts in: queen, let the woman who washes me not be one of the young or beautiful ones; let it be some old woman who has known suffering as I have. Penelope agrees and brings Eurycleia, the old nurse who suckled Ulysses as a baby and has lived in the household sixty years.

Eurycleia comes in carrying the basin of warm water and the salve. She kneels before the beggar — and as she pours the first ladle she stops and looks at him. Stranger — you are very like Ulysses. The same shoulders, the same voice, the same shape of foot. Many a travelling man has come into this house claiming to know him, but none has been so much him in the lift of the head and the carriage of the body. Ulysses, who had turned his face into the shadow so that she should see his thigh and not his eye, says only every one tells me that, who has seen us together. She bends to his right thigh.

Then comes the long flashback — one of the longest unprompted ekphrases in the poem — of how Ulysses got the scar. Autolycus his mother's father, the great-grandson of Hermes, the finest thief and oath-breaker of his time, blessed by Hermes for it — Autolycus came to Ithaca soon after the boy was born and named him Odysseus, the man of odyne, of grief, because I have given grief to many in my day and shall give more. He told them to send the boy to him at Parnassus when he was a young man, and he would give him gifts. The boy grew. He went up to Parnassus, was welcomed by his maternal uncles, feasted, and the next morning at dawn went out hunting with them. On the high oak-and-pine slopes the hounds put up a great wild boar from a thicket so dense that neither rain nor sun came through. The boar charged from the side; he gored Ulysses high above the knee with the curving tusk, and the white tusk took out a great long furrow of flesh — but it did not reach the bone; Ulysses, as the boar came on, drove the spear through the right shoulder of the boar so that the point came out the other side and the brute fell. The uncles bound up the leg, sang an epaode over it, the bleeding stopped; they brought him home to Ithaca with the wound healed but the long scar across the thigh. And that scar was the scar Eurycleia now had in her hand.

She knew him at the touch. The leg dropped from her hand. The bronze basin tipped and rang on the stone and the warm water spilled across the floor. Her eyes filled with tears and her throat with joy and grief mixed; her voice broke as she got out the word: Ulysses — my child — and I did not know you — and I have been touching the master. She turned to call across the hall to Penelope. But Athena had turned Penelope's mind aside, fixing her thoughts elsewhere, so that she did not see the spilled basin or hear the cry. Ulysses caught Eurycleia by the throat with his right hand and drew her in close with his left and put his face up to her ear. Nurse — would you ruin me? You who nursed me at this same breast? I have come home after twenty years; the gods sent me; this is no chance. Do not breathe a word, not to a single one of the women, until I have done what I have come for. And when I have killed the suitors, I will kill the disloyal women too — you, like the loyal ones, I will spare. But silence — or I will not spare you either. Eurycleia: my child, my child, what a thing to say to me — I will keep silent as stone or iron. And when you have done it, I will name the maids who are loyal and the maids who are not, one by one. He releases her. She fetches fresh water and finishes the bath in silence. Ulysses pulls his rags down over the scar and sits by the fire as if nothing has happened.

Penelope, recovering her attention as Athena lets it drift back, finishes with the long sad confidence that gives us her dream and her riddle. Stranger, the night is for sleep — but I cannot sleep; I sit weeping all day at my distaff and lie weeping all night in my widow's bed. My mind is like the nightingale's, the daughter of Pandareus, who killed her own son Itylus by mistake and now sings every spring in the dark wood with the long-shifting voice of grief — my mind tosses this way and that — should I stay with my son and keep the house? or should I go with the best of the suitors and leave it? — for my son has grown, his estate suffers. Hear me out about something else. I dreamed last night — twenty geese came up out of the water around the house and were eating wheat at the trough, and I loved to watch them; and out of the mountains came a great hook-beaked eagle and stooped on them and broke all their necks one after another and left them lying in a heap in the court and flew off into the high air. I cried out in my dream and my women gathered round me sobbing for the geese. Then the eagle came back, perched on the projecting house-beam, and spoke to me in human voice: do not be afraid, daughter of Icarius — this is no dream but a true thing that will come to pass; the geese are the suitors; I was the eagle a moment ago but now I am your husband, come home to bring them a foul end. Then I woke. Tell me, stranger, what do you make of it?

Ulysses: queen, there is no way to twist this dream; your husband himself has told you. The suitors will die, every one of them. Penelope: stranger, dreams are slippery things; not all of them work out. There are two gates that dreams come up by — the gate of horn, through which true dreams come; the gate of ivory, through which only false ones. I do not know that my dream came up from the horn gate. I would be glad if it did. She pauses and then says the line that begins the action of the next book: Stranger, I will speak now of the thing I have been holding off. Tomorrow morning I will set the suitors a contest. My husband had a great bow, and he had it set up in the courtyard with twelve axe-heads in line, and he would shoot through all twelve sockets. Tomorrow I will set the bow and the axes for the suitors. Whichever of them strings the bow easiest and shoots an arrow cleanest through all twelve will have me. I will leave this house with him — though I shall remember it as long as I live, even in my dreams. Ulysses: queen, set the contest. Ulysses will be here before any of these men has handled his bow.

Penelope rises, climbs to her upper chamber with her maids, lies down on her bed — the bed she has wet with tears since her husband sailed for Troy — and Athena, in pity, pours sweet sleep over her eyelids till dawn.

Analysis

Chapter 0069 — Analysis

The poem's most concentrated single book

Book 19 is the most-discussed book of the Odyssey. It contains the long interview between Penelope and the disguised Ulysses; the longest Cretan lie; the scar-recognition by Eurycleia; the brooch-and-tunic memory; the snow-melt simile; the nightingale-of-Pandareus simile; the dream of the geese; the riddle of the gates of horn and ivory; and Penelope's announcement of the bow-contest. Five of the most-studied passages in Greek poetry sit within five hundred lines. The book is the structural and emotional crux of the second half.

Did Penelope know?

The single greatest interpretive puzzle in the Odyssey is whether Penelope recognises the beggar in book 19. The arguments for yes are circumstantial but powerful: she allows the long private interview; she tests him with the question about the clothes (the brooch she picked out, the tunic she made); his answer is precise; she weeps as if recognition is being given to her, not concealed from her; she announces the bow-contest at the moment of his swearing-by-the-hearth. The arguments for no are textual: the poem at no point tells us she knows; Athena turns her attention aside at the moment Eurycleia drops the basin; her recognition in book 23 is staged as the first recognition, with the bed-test as the necessary token. Recent criticism (especially feminist criticism, e.g. Marilyn Katz, Penelope's Renown; Sheila Murnaghan, Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey) has argued for a third position: that the question is the question, that the poem deliberately leaves open whether Penelope half-knows or fully-knows or knows-without-knowing — that this ambiguity is the form Penelope's intelligence takes. The bow-contest is set up in such a way that either reading works: if she does not know, she is setting a contest the suitors cannot win, hoping the gods will intervene; if she does know, she is putting the bow into her husband's hand. The poem allows both.

The Cretan lie as autobiographical disguise

This is the third long Cretan lie and the one most carefully designed for its listener. The persona is now Aithon, the younger brother of Idomeneus the Cretan war-leader at Troy — that is, a brother of one of the great Greek captains and so a man Ulysses would plausibly have known. The detail about the brooch is the lie's master-stroke. Ulysses invents an episode of meeting his own self at Knossos and being given the famous purple cloak with the gold brooch of the hound with the spotted fawn in its teeth — and the listener is the woman who picked out that brooch herself. The lie reaches the truth by going around it. Penelope's tears are the response of the wife to the description; what she does not yet have is the body.

The snow-melt simile

The simile of Penelope's weeping — as the snow wastes on the mountain-tops when the south wind has thawed it after the west wind has piled it, and the rivers run full with the melting — is one of the most-cited single Homeric similes in the European tradition. The image of grief as snow-melting and rivers swelling reads forward into Petrarch (whose Canzoniere uses the snow-thaw image more than once), into the Renaissance lyric of grief (Drayton, Sidney), into the Romantic poets (Wordsworth's snow / thaw imagery in The Prelude), into Modernist poetry's grief-passages (Eliot, Stevens). The image trusts the natural cycle to give us the shape of human grief: a long piling-up, then a sudden thaw, then a flooding.

Ulysses's iron control

Set against Penelope's snow-melt is the line about Ulysses watching her weep without weeping himself: he pitied her in his heart but held his eyes hard like iron between his lids without trembling. The combination of pity and held-back tears is the discipline of the whole back half compressed into one image. The line will be cited by Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and every later Stoic on the discipline of grief; it is the foundation of the apatheia tradition.

The scar and the structure of recognition

The scar is the first physical token of recognition in the back half of the poem and the model for every subsequent token (the bed of olive in book 23; the orchard-tree list in book 24). The scar is recognised at the moment Eurycleia touches it. The recognition is bodily, immediate, and complete — the bronze basin tipped and rang on the stone — but it has to be suppressed. The poem grants the nurse the recognition that the wife is denied. The choreography is exact: Athena turns Penelope's mind aside; Ulysses's hand goes to Eurycleia's throat; the silence is sworn. The book holds back its own most important moment.

The long flashback to the boar-hunt on Parnassus and to Autolycus's naming of Ulysses (Odysseus from odyne, the man of grief, because I have given grief and shall give more) is the etymological centre of the poem. The name itself is announced, here, as a name of grief. The hero's name is what he does and what he is done to. Joyce's Stephen Dedalus discusses Odysseus etymology in the National Library scene of Ulysses; Borges wrote two essays on Autolycus's naming.

The Pandareus-nightingale simile

The simile of Penelope's mind as the nightingale of Pandareus's daughter — who killed her own son Itylus by mistake and now sings every spring in the dark wood with the long-shifting voice of grief — is one of the strangest in the poem. The connection between Penelope's situation and the infanticide myth is oblique; the link is the unending grief of an unsleeping woman whose voice cannot find its shape. The simile is read by every later poet of insomniac grief: Sophocles's Electra picks up Pandareus's daughter; Aeschylus references the nightingale; T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land III (Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug jug / So rudely forc'd / Tereu) uses the same family of myths.

The two gates of dreams

The riddle of the gates of horn and ivory — true dreams come through the gate of horn, false dreams through the gate of ivory; I do not know which gate mine came through — is the poem's most haunting moment of philosophical doubt. The image is taken up by Virgil at the close of Aeneid 6 (in one of the most disputed passages of Latin literature, Anchises sends Aeneas back into the upper world through the gate of ivory, the gate of false dreams — a passage scholars have debated since antiquity), by Macrobius in his Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, by all of medieval dream-vision literature (the Roman de la Rose, Chaucer's Book of the Duchess), by Borges, by Yeats. The gates are the foundational image of Western thinking about the uncertain status of vision.

The bow-contest set

The book ends with Penelope's announcement that the bow-contest will be tomorrow. The line is the trigger for the entire fifth act of the poem (books 20–22). Whether or not she knows the beggar is her husband, she has chosen the moment, set the test, and selected the weapon. The setting of the contest is, structurally, Penelope's. The bow that will kill the suitors is put in their hands at her invitation. The Odyssey's most consequential agency at the climax is hers.

Butler's prose at the recognition

Butler is at his peak in this book. The long interview reads cleanly; the brooch description has the precise material detail Butler does best; the snow-melt simile keeps its compactness in plain English; the scar-flashback is paced with old-novelistic skill; the Eurycleia recognition is rendered with the basin-on-stone clarity the moment requires. The two-gates riddle is given without elevation: I do not know that my dream came up from the horn gate; I would be glad if it did. Pope makes it ring; Lattimore weights it; Butler trusts the plain words.

What to watch for

• The brooch of the hound and the fawn — the master-token of the Cretan lie reaching the truth.
• The snow-melt simile — Penelope's grief as the natural cycle.
• The iron-eyed Ulysses — the model of apatheia in the Stoic tradition.
• The scar-flashback and the etymology of Odysseus from odyne — the name is grief.
• Eurycleia's recognition suppressed by Athena's distraction and Ulysses's hand — the choreography of the held-back token.
• The Pandareus-nightingale simile — Penelope as the woman whose voice cannot find its shape.
• The two gates of horn and ivory — Western literature's foundational image of uncertain vision.
• The bow-contest announced by Penelope — the most consequential agency at the climax is the wife's.

Echoes across the cycle

Chapter 0069 — Echoes Across the Cycle

Backward echoes

The interview by the fire reaches all the way back to Helen at Sparta in book 4: the queen at the hearth, the stranger opposite, the wine-and-talk, the inadvertent revelation. Helen's nepenthe and her tale of disguised Ulysses at Troy is the structural model for Penelope's tested questions to disguised Ulysses at home; the two scenes are mirror-images, with the difference that Helen knew Ulysses by glance and Penelope is denied the recognition. The snow-melt simile builds on the Iliad's natural-cycle similes — the great tree-fall of Iliad 13, the river-overflow of Iliad 21 — but converts them from violence to grief.

The scar-flashback to Autolycus and the boar-hunt on Parnassus is the Odyssey's longest explicit reach into the pre-Trojan generation of Ulysses's life. Autolycus the great thief, blessed by Hermes, links Ulysses by ancestry to the trickster-god whose patronage shapes the polytropos nature; the etymology Odysseus from odyne is the poem's most explicit claim about its hero's name. The episode also recovers the Iliad's interest in the boar-hunt as a coming-of-age trial (the Meleager-and-Atalanta cycle).

The Cretan-and-Phoenician materials of the Aithon lie reuse, again, the same Mediterranean slave-trade geography that produced both Eumaeus's true story and Ulysses's earlier lies. The poem is exhausting this set of materials by careful repetition.

Forward echoes

• The brooch of the hound and the spotted fawn as recognition-token via material description is the model for every later "missing-but-described object" recognition scene in Western literature: the handkerchief in Othello; the ring tokens of medieval romance; the locket-and-portrait of nineteenth-century novel; the recovered family-heirloom of modern detective fiction.
• The snow-melt simile for Penelope's tears reads forward into Latin elegy (Catullus, Propertius), into Petrarch's Canzoniere, into the whole Renaissance lyric of grief.
• The iron-eyed Ulysses holding back tears is the foundational image of Stoic apatheia and is quoted by Seneca (Letters 78), by Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 11.18), and by every later moral handbook on the discipline of grief.
• The scar-recognition is one of Aristotle's chief examples of anagnorisis by token in the Poetics. The mechanism — physical mark recognised by witness, recognition suppressed by command — is the foundational template for every later recognition scene in tragedy (Orestes by Electra, by the lock of hair and the foot-print and the embroidered cloth) and in romance (the scar of Tristan, the birthmark of the romance-hero) and in the modern novel.
• The etymology of Odysseus from odyne has had a continuous life from antiquity. Joyce's Ulysses makes the etymology a structural pun (Stephen in the National Library scene); Borges's essays on Homer engage it; Wilson's recent translation glosses it in the introduction.
• The Pandareus-nightingale simile is the seed of Sophocles's Electra's nightingale-passages, of Aeschylus's Agamemnon's reference to Itys, of the Tereus-Procne-Philomela myth that runs through Ovid and Shakespeare (Lavinia in Titus Andronicus) and Eliot's The Waste Land.
• The eagle-and-geese dream is the precise model for every later prophetic-bird dream in epic and romance: Aeneas's snake-on-the-altar omen in Aeneid 5, the various dream-eagles of medieval and Renaissance epic. The mechanism — animal vision that reveals itself within the dream as the symbolic agent — passes into all later literature of the prophetic dream.
• The two gates of horn and ivory are the foundational image of Western thinking on the uncertain status of vision. Virgil's choice at Aeneid 6.893–898 to send Aeneas out through the gate of ivory is one of the most disputed lines of Latin literature: does Virgil mean the entire Aeneid is a false dream? does he mean only that mortals must return through the ivory gate? does he mean nothing in particular and follow the Odyssey for the sake of the echo? The debate runs unbroken from Servius (the late-antique commentator) to Robert Fagles. Macrobius's Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, the Roman de la Rose, Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, every medieval dream-vision text inherits the gates. Borges has a poem and a short story on the gate of ivory.
• The bow-contest set by Penelope is the structural model for every later "bride-test" plot in folk tradition and romance, from the Indian Ramayana's contest for Sita to the Volsunga Saga's sword-in-the-tree to the medieval tournaments for the bride's hand. The Odyssey's twist — that the contest is set by the woman herself, not by her father or by an external authority — is unusual and has shaped the self-chosen ordeal topos in feminist re-readings of the romance tradition.

Cast in this chapter

Chapter 0069 — Cast In This Chapter

On stage

• Odysseus — "Ulysses"; moves the weapons with Telemachus, sits at the hearth opposite Penelope, tells the long Aithon Cretan lie, holds his eyes hard like iron at her tears, is recognised by the scar, silences Eurycleia, interprets the eagle-dream
• Penelope — descends, tells the loom-trick of three years, tests with the brooch-and-tunic question, melts in the snow-melt simile, hears the news that Ulysses is coming within the month, recounts the eagle-and-geese dream, names the gates of horn and ivory, announces the bow-contest for the next day
• Telemachus — helps remove the weapons under the cover-story of smoke-tarnish, marvels at Athena's golden lamp, sent to bed before the interview begins
• Eurycleia — the old nurse; brings the foot-basin, recognises the scar at first touch, drops the basin, sworn to silence by Ulysses's hand on her throat, agrees to identify the loyal and disloyal maids when the time comes
• Athena — "Minerva"; holds the golden lamp during the weapon-removal, turns Penelope's mind aside at the basin-drop, pours sweet sleep on Penelope at the end

Mentioned / off-stage

• Hermes — named as the patron of Autolycus, blesser of his thievery
• Zeus — sworn by; the oak of Dodona named in the false news (Ulysses gone to consult it)
• Laertes — the pall Penelope was weaving for him is the device by which she put off the suitors for three years
• Calypso — implicit in the false news's reconstruction of Ulysses's wanderings
• Poseidon — implicit: the storm that broke the ship at Thrinacia in the false news

Non-cast named figures: Melantho (the bad maid, second insult; threatened by Ulysses and rebuked by Penelope); Eurynome (Penelope's waiting-woman, sets the chair); Aithon (the false Cretan name Ulysses uses); Deucalion (the false Cretan father, son of Minos); Idomeneus (the false Cretan elder brother, the historical war-leader at Troy); Eurybates (the herald, described from old memory as the man Ulysses loved best for likemindedness — homophrosyne); Pheidon king of the Thesprotians (the false-news king who supposedly hosted Ulysses with the gold); Dodona (the oak-oracle of Zeus the false news has Ulysses consulting); Autolycus (Ulysses's maternal grandfather, the great thief blessed by Hermes; named the boy Odysseus for odyne, grief); the unnamed maternal uncles on Parnassus (the boar-hunt companions); the unnamed epaode-chanters who bound the wound; Pandareus and his daughter the nightingale, mother of Itylus (the lament-simile); Icmalius the craftsman (made Penelope's silver-and-ivory chair); the gate of horn and the gate of ivory; the twelve axes for the bow-contest.

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.