(Day 38 of the poem's main action, the festival of Apollo; the great hall of the palace at Ithaca)

Athena puts it in Penelope's mind to bring out the great bow. She rises from her chair, takes the bronze key with the carved ivory handle, climbs to the high store-room at the back of the palace where the master's treasures are stored, unlocks the door and pushes it open with a soft moaning sound, like the lowing of a bull. The bow lies in its case on a peg, the curved horn-tipped weapon Ulysses received in his youth from Iphitus son of Eurytus of Oechalia. The poem gives the full history of the gift in a brief flashback. Ulysses had gone to Messenia as a young man on his father Laertes's business to recover stolen sheep from a Messenian raid; he met there Iphitus son of the great archer Eurytus (the man who challenged Apollo and was killed) who was on a similar errand looking for lost mares; they exchanged guest-gifts on the spot, the bow for a sword and a spear; later Heracles murdered Iphitus over those mares while Iphitus was Heracles's guest. The friendship was unfinished. Ulysses kept the bow at home and used it only on Ithaca; he did not take it to Troy. Penelope lifts down the bow and the quiver of arrows; her women carry the chest of iron and bronze axes — the twelve axe-heads the contest will use.

She comes down to the hall, stands by the central pillar with her veil across her face, two women on either side, the chest at her feet, the bow in her hands. Hear me, suitors, who have eaten this house for three years and made wooing into a feast. Here is the contest I set: my husband's great bow, and twelve axe-sockets in line. Whoever strings the bow and shoots an arrow clean through the sockets of all twelve axes will take me with him out of this house. She lays the bow on the polished bench and sits down, the maids beside her.

Eumaeus carries in the bow and the axe-chest and weeps to see them; Philoetius the cowherd hides his face. Antinous turns on them: fools, why are you bawling? Get out if you cannot bear it. Here, the contest is set, and I doubt that any of us will string this bow easily — for there is no man left here so strong as Ulysses, I remember him from when I was a boy. And so he spoke, hoping in his heart that he would be the one to draw it; but he was to be the first the bow would take, struck through the throat.

Telemachus springs up: Jove and the other gods have taken away my wits — I find myself laughing in a wretched moment. But the contest is fair. I will set up the axes for the test — and I will try the bow myself first, for if I can string it I have first right to keep my mother from leaving this house. He goes outside, digs a long trench in the courtyard, sets the twelve axes in a line in the trench, stamps the earth back around them, and never having seen the axes set so before, but doing it perfectly by the gods's prompting. He comes back into the hall, takes the bow, plants his foot, strains at it three times trying to string it, and on the fourth attempt has it almost bent when Ulysses, sitting at the threshold, signals him no with a small shake of the head. Telemachus lets the bow down — I am too young; I am not yet a man, or perhaps the gods will not give it to me today. Let the older and stronger men try.

Antinous calls the order of trial: we will go round from left to right, beginning at the place where the cup-bearer pours wine — the same order in which the wine goes round at the feast. Leiodes the diviner is first, the one suitor who hated their excesses, who alone was disgusted by what they did. He takes the bow, tries it, his weak fingers fail at once, he lays it down: I cannot string it; let another try. But hear me — this bow will take the life-breath out of many of us today; it is better to die quickly than live without the queen we have all come to win. Antinous: Leiodes, what a thing to say. A bow is a bow; the fact that it has beaten you does not mean it will beat the others. He calls Melanthius the goatherd: fetch fire, heat the bow, grease it well with the lard of a fat boar's chine; it has stood too long in the cold, the horn has stiffened.

Melanthius brings the fire and the lard. The bow is warmed; one suitor after another tries it; each one fails. Eurymachus tries hard; he warms it in his own hands, drawing the bow-string against his belly; he cannot bend it. Disgrace, he says, not so much for losing the bride, since other Greek women remain, but for being seen by the world as so much less of a man than Ulysses.

Antinous, who has not yet tried, speaks: today is the festival of Apollo the archer; it is not a day to be drawing bows in his face. Let us put the bow up, leave the axes standing, drink a libation, slaughter goats tomorrow morning to Apollo god of the bow, and try again tomorrow with the god's blessing. The suitors agree, glad of the postponement.

Meanwhile Ulysses has slipped out into the outer courtyard after Eumaeus and Philoetius, who have gone out weeping. He follows them and stands by them. Eumaeus, Philoetius — let me ask you something. If a god brought your master back to his house today out of nowhere — would you take his side against the suitors, or the suitors's side? Both answer instantly: we would take his side, every step of it; we would die for him. Ulysses: I am he. After twenty years I have come home. I am the one. Here, look at the scar of the boar on my thigh, where the white tusk took me on Parnassus when I went up to Autolycus. He shows them the scar. Both servants throw their arms around him, weeping; he weeps back, kisses their heads; they would have wept until sundown if he had not stopped them: enough; quietly back into the hall now. Eumaeus, you bring me the bow when I call for it, though they will try to stop you; Philoetius, you bolt the outer gate of the courtyard with the ship's-cable they keep there, and put the cross-bar; Eurycleia is to lock up the women in the women's-quarters, whatever they may hear, and tell them not to come out. Go.

They go in separately, take their places. Ulysses follows, sits back down at the threshold as the beggar. He waits a moment, then speaks to the company: gentlemen, hear me. The bow has had its trial today and the result is what it is. Let me have one go at it — I want to see if there is any of my old strength left in my arms, or whether the wanderings and the hunger have taken it all. Antinous explodes: cursed nuisance of a stranger — first you turn up out of nowhere to eat at our table, now you sit there as if you might be one of us. Get back to your wine. Try the bow and I will pack you on a ship to Echetus the king who cuts off the noses and ears of men with the cruel bronze. Remember the centaur Eurytion who got drunk at Pirithous's wedding and was driven mad by mutilation; do not be his second case. Penelope steps in: Antinous, why this rage? It is not right to deny a guest in this house. The man will hardly take me away if he strings the bow; he is a beggar; do you think I would marry him? Eurymachus: queen, our shame is not that he might take you, but that the people will say — these suitors are nothing, they could not string the bow of Ulysses, and a starving beggar came and strung it as a sneeze. Penelope: that is not the kind of fame you can avoid, eating up the house of an absent man. Let the stranger try; if he strings it I shall give him a fine cloak and tunic, a spear, a sword, sandals, and a passage where he will. Telemachus stands up: Mother, the bow is the master's business; the master is my business; this is my house. Go upstairs to the loom and the spindle; tell the women to keep at their work. The men's business is mine, and chiefly mine. Penelope, astonished at the boy's voice, goes up. Athena lays sweet sleep on her in the upper chamber.

Eumaeus picks up the bow to carry it across to Ulysses. The suitors shout at him: fool, where are you going with that? are you mad? we will set the dogs on you, the dogs you fed yourself, to tear you for taking our bow away from us. Eumaeus, frightened, sets the bow down. Telemachus from the inner door calls out: Eumaeus, take it on; I am the man here; obey me. The boy's voice, harsh, makes the suitors laugh — the young master, what a temper — and Eumaeus carries the bow to Ulysses. As he gives it he murmurs in his ear: Eurycleia, the inner doors are locked; Philoetius slips out, runs across the courtyard, draws the gate-cable taut, pegs it with the cross-bar, comes back.

Ulysses takes the bow. He turns it over carefully, lifts each end, examines the horn for woodworm and the gut-string for fraying — as a skilled bard handles a new peg in his lyre to see whether it is true. The suitors mock him: what a craftsman, what a connoisseur; perhaps he is a bow-collector at home in his own country. Ulysses pays them no attention. He sits down on the low stool, plants the bow on his thigh, draws the string smoothly into the notch as easily as a singer strings a new peg of his lyre, and twangs the string with his thumb — it sang sharp and clear like the cry of a swallow. The suitors went sick at heart. Jove thundered a long roll out of a clear sky above the palace. Ulysses smiled. He picked up from the table the one arrow that had been laid out for the contest (the others were still in the quiver at his side), nocked it on the string, sat upright on the stool, drew the string and the arrow's notch toward him to the cheek, sighted along the shaft, and let fly. The arrow went through the socket of the first axe and the second and the third and so on through the sockets of all twelve, and came out the other side without touching any, and stuck in the bench at the far wall. He turned to Telemachus: the guest you took into your house has not disgraced you; I did not miss the mark, and I had no great trouble stringing the bow; my strength is still here. Now, son, the supper-hour is on us; let it be a different supper-hour. There is music to be played and dancing to be done in this house tonight. And he winked at his son. Telemachus, who had been waiting for this for hours, belted on his sword and his sharp spear and took his stand beside his father's stool with the bronze armour bright on him.

Analysis

Chapter 0071 — Analysis

The book of the bow

Book 21 is the book the Odyssey has been pointing at since book 1. The bow is the recognition-token that converts the disguised beggar back to king. Of the four great tokens of the back half — the scar (book 19), the bow (book 21), the bed (book 23), the orchard-trees (book 24) — the bow is the public token. It is the only one performed in front of the suitors; the only one of the four they can witness; the only one that acts (the others are tested and accepted). The scar Eurycleia recognises in private; the bed and the orchard-trees are spoken privately to wife and father; only the bow is brought out in the hall and made to do its thing in front of the people who must be killed by it. The bow is the form recognition takes when there is no longer time to defer it.

The bow's biography

The Odyssey is unusual in giving the bow its own backstory. Most weapons in Greek epic are given only their craftsmanship (the shield of Achilles in Iliad 18; the armour of Aeneas in Aeneid 8); this bow has a biography. It was given to Ulysses in his youth by Iphitus son of Eurytus when both men were strangers on a sheep-recovery and mare-recovery errand; Iphitus was later murdered by Heracles in a breach of xenia over those very mares; Ulysses kept the bow on Ithaca and never took it to Troy. The flashback does several things: it establishes the bow as the weapon of guest-friendship-betrayed (Heracles broke xenia to keep Iphitus's mares, just as the suitors are breaking xenia to keep Ulysses's house); it establishes the bow as something belonging specifically to the home (it never went to war); and it associates Ulysses with the lineage of the great archer Eurytus, whose son made the bow. The bow is the only weapon Ulysses has that is older than the war and stayed at home through it. The poem will use it to kill men who broke the same law of xenia that Heracles broke against its first owner.

The order of trials

The order of trial through the suitors is calibrated. Telemachus tries first and almost strings the bow — held back by his father's signal. The poem will not let the son string it; the bow belongs to the father. Then Leiodes the diviner, the only suitor disgusted by the rest's conduct, tries first and fails and prophesies that the bow will take the lives of many. Then the lesser suitors. Then the heating-with-fire-and-grease ritual. Then Eurymachus. Then Antinous, who postpones with the Apollo's-feast-day excuse. The pattern is exhausted: the suitors's collective failure, the postponement, the moment of the beggar's request. The whole choreography is set up so that only Ulysses can string the bow, and so that the suitors's own failure has dropped them out of the way for him.

Leiodes the diviner

The minor figure of Leiodes — the one suitor who hated the rest's excesses — is the poem's most carefully drawn picture of a man unable to leave the bad faction he belongs to. His prophecy — this bow will take the life-breath out of many of us today; it is better to die quickly than live without the queen we have all come to win — is one of the most haunting small speeches in the poem, and it will be fulfilled in book 22 when Leiodes himself is one of the first to die. The poem grants Leiodes the foresight and refuses him the action; like Amphinomus in book 18, he sees what is coming and cannot leave. The two figures form the poem's small picture of the good man in the bad company — the figure Greek tragedy will inherit (the chorus of decent citizens in Euripides; the courtiers who know the king is wrong but stay).

The revelation to the loyal servants

The revelation of Ulysses to Eumaeus and Philoetius outside the hall is the third recognition of the back half (after Telemachus in book 16 and Eurycleia in book 19), and the first that is open rather than constrained to silence. The token is the same — the scar above the knee — but the gesture is the embrace, not the held breath. The two men weep at his shoulders; he weeps at theirs. The choreography of the embrace is exact: they would have wept until sundown (the Odyssey's signature for embrace-too-long-to-be-bounded) had he not stopped them to give the orders. The loyal servants have been the moral foundation of the back half; here they receive the recognition the poem has owed them since book 14.

Penelope's role in the contest

Penelope sets the contest. Telemachus arranges the axes. The suitors try and fail. Ulysses strings the bow. But it is Penelope who has put the bow into his hand. Whether or not she knows the beggar is her husband (the puzzle of book 19), her action here is decisive: she has chosen the test, selected the weapon, and brought it down from the store-room. The bow that kills the suitors is the bow she has put in their reach. The poem allows both readings — she has set up a test the suitors cannot win and a god may resolve, or she has set up a test only her husband can pass. Either reading makes her the agent of the killing.

The detail of her withdrawal at Telemachus's command — go upstairs to the loom; the men's business is mine, chiefly mine — has been read variously by feminist criticism. Penelope obeys; she sleeps under Athena's hand; she is not in the hall for the slaughter. The poem absents the wife from the killing. Whether this is patriarchal tidying or sparing-her-the-sight is a matter of reading.

The act of stringing

The string-the-bow itself is rendered with a single perfect simile: as easily as a skilled bard strings a new peg of his lyre. The image converts an act of force into an act of craft. The bow and the lyre share the same construction (curved wood, taut string); the poet and the archer share the same skill. The Odyssey at this moment makes its hero an artist of his weapon. The follow-up simile — the string sang sharp and clear like the cry of a swallow — sustains the conversion: the weapon's first sound is birdsong. Pope's couplet on this line is the most-quoted English Homer (twang'd short and sharp, like the shrill swallow's cry); Lattimore renders it more flatly. Butler's it sang sharp and clear like the cry of a swallow is exactly right.

Zeus thunders out of a clear sky as Ulysses sights the arrow — the second thunder of the day, the formal divine sanction. The arrow goes through twelve axe-sockets without touching any. The poem grants the technical impossibility as fact. Whatever the original Bronze Age technique for the axe-socket shot may have been (scholars disagree; some think the axes had ring-shaped sockets above the blade, others think the axes were buried in the ground with their handle-eyes lined up), the Odyssey wants the precision. It is the moment of kleos recovered.

The closing wink

The poem ends the book with the smallest possible piece of choreography. He turned to Telemachus and winked. Telemachus belts on his sword and his spear and stands beside the stool with the bronze armour bright on him. The signal is set; the slaughter is about to begin; the book breaks here on the held breath before book 22. The technique of breaking the book on the moment of cocked readiness is the Odyssey's signature; the form of the chapter-break is the form of suspense itself.

Butler's prose at the contest

Butler is at his best in the technical detail. The carrying of the bow, the trench for the axes, the heating with fire and grease, the careful examination of the horn for worm-damage, the planting of the foot, the smooth draw of the string — all of it reads as the choreography of a working man's act. The high moments (the simile of the lyre, the thunder, the arrow through the axes) Butler hands to us cleanly without elevation. Pope and Pope's followers heighten; Lattimore weights; Wilson modernises. Butler's flat prose lets the bow do its own work.

What to watch for

• The biography of the bow — the xenia-betrayed history that the suitors are repeating.
• The order of trials — the suitor pattern exhausted before the beggar's request.
• Leiodes the diviner — the decent man in the bad company; the prophet who cannot leave.
• The revelation to Eumaeus and Philoetius — the third recognition, the first one not silenced.
• Penelope's setting of the contest — her decisive agency at the climax.
• The string-as-lyre and the swallow-cry similes — force converted into craft.
• Zeus's thunder as divine sanction.
• The wink to Telemachus as the cocked-and-loaded chapter ending.

Echoes across the cycle

Chapter 0071 — Echoes Across the Cycle

Backward echoes

The bow's history reaches back into the pre-Trojan generation of Heracles, Iphitus, and Eurytus — the same lineage that produces Philoctetes (who inherits Heracles's other bow and brings it to Troy at last in Posthomerica 9). The Odyssey's bow and the Posthomerica's bow are two weapons from the same generation of archers — Eurytus father of Iphitus, the great archer; Heracles the murderer; the bow as a token of xenia-tradition. In our project, chapter 0033 (Posthomerica 9, Philoctetes Recalled from Lemnos) sees Philoctetes brought back with Heracles's bow to fulfil the prophecy that Troy cannot fall without it; chapter 0071 here sees Ulysses string Eurytus's bow to fulfil the prophecy that the suitors cannot live without their dying by it. The two great bows of the Trojan cycle bracket the close of the war and the close of the nostos. The Odyssey is in formal dialogue with the Posthomerica's archer-figure.

Ulysses's boast in book 8 (only Philoctetes among the Achaeans at Troy was a better bow than I) is now activated. The Phaeacian-court boast is now executed. The book has been waiting for this moment since the games on Scheria.

The scar-revelation to Eumaeus and Philoetius reactivates the scar-revelation to Eurycleia in book 19 — the same token, the same body, used three times: silenced for the nurse, open for the loyal servants, and (in book 23) declined for the wife because she does not need it. The bow is the wife's recognition; the bed will be the wife's recognition.

Forward echoes

• The bow-contest as plot-resolution device is one of the most influential single passages in Western literature. The motif of the impossible test the rightful king alone can pass enters folk tradition wholesale: the sword in the stone in Arthurian legend; the bow of Rama in the Ramayana (the bride-test for Sita, which only Rama can string); the bow in countless folktales of the disguised true ruler. The Odyssey's specific version — the bow returning to the hand of its owner — has shaped the Excalibur topos in particular.
• The string-as-lyre simile is the foundational text for the European tradition of reading the bow as instrument of music as well as of war. Heraclitus's famous fragment (the name of the bow is life and its work is death; the harmony of the world is like the harmony of the lyre and the bow) is in direct conversation with this passage. The simile passes through Plato (Republic on the harmonia of bow and lyre), into Apollo's iconography (bow in one hand, lyre in the other), into the Renaissance topos of Mars and Apollo (the warrior-musician). Eliot's Four Quartets picks up the bow-and-lyre image.
• The arrow-through-the-axes as the foundational image of the impossible technical feat that proves identity is the type of every later signature-shot in Western romance: William Tell's apple-shot, Robin Hood's splitting-the-arrow, the bullseye-after-the-bullseye of every later sharp-shooter narrative.
• Leiodes the doomed prophet-suitor is the structural model for every later good man in the bad faction — Boromir in Tolkien; the loyal courtier of doomed kings in countless tragic dramas. The Odyssey grants him the foresight and the inability to leave; the pattern survives intact.
• The revelation by scar to the loyal servants outside is the foundational scene-type of every later master-and-faithful-servants recognition in Western literature: the recognition of Lear's faithful Kent and Fool; the parable of the prodigal son's father-and-servants (Luke 15) read in Augustinian and patristic tradition as a recognition-by-token; every later king-and-his-true-men scene in the chivalric romance.
• Penelope's setting of the contest has been the focus of feminist criticism since Vico (1744) noticed that Penelope's agency at this moment is structurally decisive. Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, Marilyn Katz's Penelope's Renown, Sheila Murnaghan's Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey, Emily Wilson's introduction to her translation — all read the bow-contest as the climactic instance of Penelope's intelligence. The contest is the queen's move; the killing is the king's; the recognition is shared.
• The Centaur Eurytion at Pirithous's wedding is a long-lived motif: the centaur-feast-mutilation tradition recurs in classical art (the metopes of the Parthenon's south side; the Apollonian-Olympian assertion of order over the centaurs's drunkenness) and in modern reception (Mary Renault, John Updike's The Centaur).
• The wink of Ulysses to Telemachus as the cocked-and-loaded book-ending is the foundational technique of every later cliffhanger chapter-break in serial fiction. The book splits the killing from the preparation; the cliff-hanger is the form of suspense in serialised narrative from Dickens onward.

Cast in this chapter

Chapter 0071 — Cast In This Chapter

On stage

• Odysseus — "Ulysses"; reveals himself to Eumaeus and Philoetius outside with the scar, asks for the bow inside, takes it from Eumaeus, examines and strings it easily, shoots through all twelve axes, winks to Telemachus
• Penelope — fetches the bow and axes from the upper store-room, announces the contest, defends the beggar's right to try, withdraws under Telemachus's command to the upper chamber where Athena puts her to sleep
• Telemachus — digs the trench and sets the twelve axes, almost strings the bow before his father signals no, sends his mother upstairs, overrides Eumaeus's hesitation about giving the bow to the beggar, belts on his armour at the wink
• Eumaeus — weeps to see the bow, follows Ulysses outside, recognises him by the scar, brings the bow to him at his hand against the suitors' shouting, locks Eurycleia and the women in
• Athena — "Minerva"; puts the bow-contest idea into Penelope's head, lays sleep on Penelope in the upper chamber
• Antinous — orders the trial-order from left to right, calls for Melanthius's fire and grease, postpones the contest on the Apollo's-feast-day excuse, refuses the beggar's request with the Echetus threat, cites the Centaur Eurytion at Pirithous's wedding

Mentioned / off-stage

• Zeus — "Jove"; thunders from a clear sky as Ulysses sights the arrow, the divine sanction
• Apollo — his festival today; god of the bow; the suitors's pretext for postponement
• Eurycleia — instructed by Eumaeus to lock up the women in their quarters, whatever they may hear

Non-cast named figures: Iphitus son of Eurytus (the giver of the bow to Ulysses in youth, murdered by Heracles over the mares); Eurytus of Oechalia (the great archer father of Iphitus, who challenged Apollo and was killed); Heracles (the murderer of Iphitus, breaker of xenia); Laertes (Ulysses's father, named in the sheep-recovery context of the gift); Philoetius the cowherd (recognises Ulysses by the scar outside, bolts the courtyard-gate with the ship's-cable); Leiodes the diviner (the decent suitor, first to fail, prophesies the bow will take many lives); Melanthius the goatherd (brings the fire and the lard at Antinous's order); Eurymachus (sweats trying the bow, laments the shame); Echetus the mainland tyrant (Antinous's mutilation-threat); Eurytion the Centaur (named in Antinous's warning-tale about Pirithous's wedding); Pirithous (host of the wedding); the festival of Apollo (the day's celebration); the twelve axes (the contest-target).

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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.