(Days 38–39 of the poem's main action, night and dawn after the slaughter; Penelope's upper chamber and the great hall of the palace at Ithaca)

Eurycleia runs up the back stair to the upper chamber laughing, her old knees made young by the news, and bends over Penelope as she sleeps. Penelope, my darling, wake up — come and see for yourself what you have been waiting for all these years. Ulysses has come home. He has killed the suitors who have wasted his house and dishonoured his son. Penelope, slow in waking, refuses to believe. Old woman, the gods have driven you out of your wits. They turn the wise out of their mind and put folly into the foolish; you were always sensible and now you are mocking me. Do not raise me out of my sleep for nothing. If anyone but you had brought me this story I would have shouted at her and sent her away in tears; you are too old for me to scold. Eurycleia: I do not mock you, my child. The stranger you have all been mistreating in your house was Ulysses, and Telemachus knew all along but kept it to himself. The hall is full of dead suitors, and the master is standing in the middle of them like a lion who has just been at the cattle. I myself washed the scar on his thigh — the boar-scar — when I bathed his feet. He clapped his hand over my mouth.

Penelope sits up. The proof shakes her, but she does not let herself yet believe. Old woman, do not be too eager. The gods do as they please. A god may have come down and killed the suitors for their hubris — for they were eating up a great man's house and dishonouring his wife. As for Ulysses himself, he is dead far from home. Eurycleia: what a word to say at such a time — your own husband below you in the hall and you refuse to come down. Penelope: come, let us go down. There are signs that he and I alone will know.

She follows Eurycleia down the stair, her heart pondering whether to stand off from her husband and ask him questions, or run straight to him and clasp his head and kiss it. At the foot of the stair she crosses the stone floor of the cloister and sits down opposite Ulysses by the fire, against the wall. He sits on a low stool against one of the bearing-pillars, his eyes on the floor, waiting to hear what his good wife will say to him. She sits silent, bewildered, looking at him across the firelight — sometimes his face seemed to her to be her husband's, sometimes the shabby clothes made her doubt.

Telemachus loses patience. Mother, no other woman could keep herself from her husband as you are doing — twenty years he has been gone, he has come back at last, and you sit there with a heart of stone. Go to him. Penelope answers quietly: my child, I am in such amazement that I cannot speak to him or look him in the face. If he is truly Ulysses, the two of us alone will know each other by signs no one else knows. Ulysses smiles at this and turns to his son. Telemachus, let your mother test me. She will know me by and by. As for now, she sees me in dirt and rags and she is right to wait; she will be sure soon enough. — But first there is a real matter: we have killed all the best men in Ithaca; their kin will rise; let us put the matter into the gods' hands but plan as if we were on our own. First, that no one outside the house knows what has happened tonight, let us all bathe and put on clean clothes; then Phemius the bard will strike up a wedding-tune on his lyre, and let the women dance, and any passers-by in the street will say, the queen has married one of her suitors at last. The plan is set.

Telemachus, Eumaeus, Philoetius, and the servants bathe and dress. The harp begins; the women dance; and any traveller passing the courtyard wall would have said, well, the queen has chosen her suitor at last and the wedding is on. Inside the inner room, Eurynome the housekeeper bathes Ulysses, rubs him with olive oil, dresses him in a fresh tunic and a fine mantle. Athena pours grace over his head and over his shoulders, makes him taller and broader, makes his hair fall in close-curling rings like hyacinth blossoms, as a skilled craftsman trained by Hephaestus and Athena overlays silver with gold, and gives a finished piece of beautiful work. He comes out like one of the immortal gods, sits down again opposite Penelope. He says, with anger: what a strange woman the gods have given me — what other woman, after twenty years, would not run to her husband returning? Eurycleia, make me up a separate bed; I will sleep alone tonight; this one has a heart of iron.

Penelope answers him. I do not pretend to a heart of iron, sir, nor a heart of stone either. I know exactly what you looked like the day you left Ithaca for Troy. Come, Eurycleia, make up the great bedstead in the bedroom Ulysses himself built — bring it out into the cloister and lay rugs and fleeces upon it. The lure is set and the husband walks straight into it. Ulysses bursts out in grave anger, the anger of the true husband: wife, what a thing you have said! Who has moved my bed? It would take a god to come down and move that bed. No mortal could shift it, no matter how strong, for there is a great secret to that bed and only I made it. There was a single olive-tree growing inside the precinct of the house with a trunk thick as a pillar; I built the room round it; I put up walls of close-fitted stone, a roof above it, doors fitted; only then did I lop off the upper branches of the olive, polish the great trunk smooth, square it from the ground up, bore it for the bed-frame, and round it built the bed itself, inlaying gold and silver and ivory and lacing the leather ox-hide cross-pieces over the trunk-foot of the olive. That is the secret no one knows but you and me, and the maid your father gave you when you came as a bride, Actor's daughter. Now tell me whether someone has moved the bed by cutting the olive at the root, or whether it stands where I left it.

The words break Penelope. The knees and the heart go out from under her. She knew the signs that Ulysses had given. She ran across the floor to him and threw her arms round his neck and kissed his head: do not be angry with me — you of all men I would not have angered, you who have suffered most. The gods have grudged us our youth together. Now do not blame me for not having known you instantly. My heart was always afraid that some lying stranger would come into the house pretending to be you, for the world is full of such schemers; not even Helen would have lain with the strange Trojan if she had known what would come of it — she did it because some god put it in her heart, and brought all our griefs down on us. But you have spoken now of the signs only we two could know; my heart, that doubted so long, will doubt no more. The dam breaks. Ulysses melts at last; the tears come up out of his eyes; he held his wife in his arms — a woman like land to a swimmer. The simile is one of the most-quoted in the poem: as the sight of land is welcome to men who have been swimming long in a sea where Poseidon broke their ship with the fury of his winds, only a few of them reach the shore with their bodies blackened by the brine and their hearts glad to step on solid earth, having escaped a great evil — so welcome was her husband in her sight, and she could not loose her white arms from his neck. They would have wept till dawn, but Athena held the night back in the western sea so that they might have time.

When at last they fell apart Eurynome led them up to the bedchamber with a torch. Telemachus and Eumaeus and Philoetius, who had been dancing in the hall with the women through the long evening, set the dance aside and lay down to sleep. The torch led the husband and wife to the bed of olive, the bed they had not shared in twenty years; they came together with joy. Then, lying side by side in the warm dark, they began the long telling. Penelope first: how she had suffered, how she had spun the loom-trick for three years, how the suitors had wasted the house, how the press of the marriage came to her. Ulysses second: in summary now, the whole of the wanderings, every episode the Apologoi told the Phaeacians compressed into a sleep-side recital — the Cicones, the Lotos-eaters, the Cyclops, the bag of Aeolus, the Laestrygonians, Circe, the journey to the dead and Teiresias's prophecy, his own mother, the Sirens, the Wandering Rocks and Scylla and Charybdis, the Cattle of the Sun, the storm and the keel he rode alone, Calypso who offered him immortality, the Phaeacians who treated him like a god. Penelope did not let herself sleep until he had told it through. Then sleep took them both.

Before dawn Athena stirs the gold-throned Morning. Ulysses rises and sits up. Wife, we have had enough of the journey of weeping, between the two of us. Today I must go up to the country, to my old father Laertes, who has grieved over me for twenty years. The news of the killing will get out before sunrise; you and the women stay here in the upper chamber; do not come down, do not speak to anyone, do not ask questions. As for the loss of stock, I will recover the cattle and the sheep that have been eaten by raids on the neighbouring estates, in time. He arms himself; he rouses Telemachus and Eumaeus and Philoetius to arm. They go down through the silent courtyard. Athena wraps them in mist again — the same mist that hid the harbour from him on his arrival in book 13 — and leads them through the morning lanes of the city out into the open country, toward the orchard on the hill where Laertes is at work.

Analysis

Chapter 0073 — Analysis

The book the poem was always going to write

Book 23 is the recognition the poem has been moving toward since book 1. Every recognition before it has been preliminary: Telemachus (book 16, easy, with the wand still present); Eurycleia (book 19, by the scar, immediately silenced); Eumaeus and Philoetius (book 21, outside the hall, urgent and brief); the suitors and the loyal maids (book 22, the wrong recognition by the wrong audience and the right one by the right one). Book 23 is the recognition that has to happen for the poem to end, and it is the only one Penelope controls.

The book's structure is exactly the inversion of the deception structure: where Ulysses deceived everyone for nine books with calibrated lies, here Penelope deceives him with one calibrated lie (the moving of the bed), and the lie produces the truth. The wife who has had to hold off lying suitors for years uses the same skill on the truthful husband to make him prove himself. The recognition is conducted in the same currency as the deception: a piece of false information offered to provoke a response.

Penelope's caution

The book's opening is one of the most discussed passages in the poem because of what it tells us about Penelope's mind. Eurycleia comes laughing with the news; Penelope refuses to believe; Telemachus rebukes her; she sits silent opposite Ulysses by the fire; Ulysses smiles. Some readers have read her caution as evidence of slow understanding, others as evidence of strategic patience. The poem allows both. What is clear is that Penelope will not give the recognition until she has the sign no impostor could have. The bow-test in book 21 may have been her first test; the bed-test in book 23 is the certain test. The double pattern is consistent with a woman who has had three years of false strangers bringing false news and who has learned by experience to demand proof.

The poem makes the caution morally serious. Her line not even Helen would have lain with the strange Trojan if she had known what would come of it tells us how she frames the danger: I am Helen's opposite, and I will not be Helen by accident. The reference to Helen is one of the Odyssey's most precise pieces of moral self-positioning: Penelope is the woman who has not let the stranger in, and she will not let one in now no matter how plausible. Her caution is the form her virtue takes.

The bed-as-token

The bed of olive is the Odyssey's most carefully imagined object. Built from a living olive-tree growing inside the precinct of the house — the trunk thick as a pillar — Ulysses topped the tree, polished the trunk smooth, squared it, bored it for the bed-frame, and built the bedroom around it with stone walls and a fitted roof. The bed cannot be moved without cutting down the tree at the root. Penelope's instruction to bring the bed out of the bedroom is the lie that the bed itself refuses. Ulysses's response — who has moved my bed? a god could move it, a mortal could not, no matter how strong — is the proof Penelope was waiting for. Only the husband and the wife and one trusted maid know the secret.

The bed of olive is also a symbol of unusual depth. The marriage is rooted in the living tree — a tree that grows, that cannot be moved, that is fitted to the architecture of the house, that is the secret centre of the household. The olive has been Ulysses's signature tree across the back half of the poem (the bed of leaves under the twin olives at the river-mouth in book 5; the moly-plant and the olive-stake in the Cyclops episode; the olive at the harbour of Phorcys in book 13; the great olive in the courtyard now). The recognition is given in the form of the same tree the poem has been growing.

The lion-from-the-sea simile

The reunion-simile is the most-quoted in the poem. As the sight of land is welcome to men who have been swimming long in a sea where Poseidon broke their ship with his winds, only a few of them reach the shore with their bodies blackened by the brine and their hearts glad to step on solid earth, having escaped a great evil — so welcome was her husband in her sight. The simile inverts gender expectations: the shipwrecked sailors are men, but the perspective is given to her. Penelope is the swimmer who has at last reached the shore. The poem grants the wife's reunion the same heroic figure of language it has used for Ulysses's own arrivals (the swim to Phaeacia in book 5, the polyp-simile of the hands on the rock). The husband-figure becomes the land the wife reaches. The image quietly equalises the two arrivals.

Athena holds back the night

The detail that Athena holds the night back in the western sea so that the husband and wife may have time is one of the smallest and most affecting acts in the poem. The goddess who has spent twenty-three books arranging the action stops time for the wife. The image is Helen-of-Troy-in-reverse: where Aphrodite gave Helen the disastrous beauty, Athena gives Penelope the extra hour with her husband. The poem grants the gift quietly and without ceremony.

The compressed wanderings as pillow-talk

The compressed retelling of the wanderings in pillow-talk is the poem's signature meta-gesture. The four-book Apologoi (9–12) are summarised in twenty lines. The Cicones, the Lotos-eaters, the Cyclops, Aeolus, the Laestrygonians, Circe, Hades, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the Cattle of the Sun, the storm, Calypso, the Phaeacians. Penelope hears the whole journey in shorthand; she does not let herself sleep until he has finished. The compression is the poem's quiet acknowledgement that the Apologoi were always partly a performance — when told to the wife, only the bare list is needed. The wife knows the man; the Phaeacians needed the music.

The detail that Penelope listens to the whole telling before sleeping is also the poem's gift to her. She has been listening for twenty years to other people's news of her husband; tonight she gets it from his mouth.

The dawn departure

The book ends with the same image with which it began: the gold-throned dawn rising, Athena's mist wrapping the men as they leave the city. The morning-mist of book 23 is the morning-mist of book 13 (Athena's first mist when Ulysses arrived). The two mists frame the second half of the poem. The book closes on the husband walking out to find his father — the last living recognition still to be done. Book 24 will close it.

Butler's prose at the recognition

Butler is at his very best at the recognition. The bed-description has the kind of practical material detail Butler's flat register handles perfectly (the squared trunk, the bored frame, the leather cross-pieces, the gold-and-silver inlay). The lion-from-the-sea simile is rendered with the simple cumulative grammar Butler does well (the swimmers, the blackened bodies, the glad hearts, the welcome husband). Pope makes it ring with rhyme; Lattimore weights the hexameter; Wilson modernises with directness. Butler's prose lets the reunion be the reunion.

What to watch for

• Penelope's caution as the form of her virtue — not even Helen would have lain with the stranger if she had known.
• The bed of olive as the most carefully imagined object in the poem — the marriage rooted in the living tree, immovable, secret.
• The lion-from-the-sea reunion-simile, with the wife given the swimmer's-perspective.
• Athena holding the night back in the western sea — divine restraint at the moment of reunion.
• The compressed wanderings as pillow-talk — the meta-gesture about the Apologoi as performance.
• The mist of book 23 closing the mist of book 13 — the poem framing its second half.
• The departure toward Laertes — the last recognition still to be done.

Echoes across the cycle

Chapter 0073 — Echoes Across the Cycle

Backward echoes

The bed of olive reaches back into every olive of the poem: the bed of leaves under the twin olives at the river-mouth in book 5; the moly-plant and the heated olive-stake in the Cyclops cave in book 9; the great olive at the harbour of Phorcys in book 13; the cypress and olive pillars of the megaron mentioned in passing through the back half. The olive is Ulysses's signature tree — the wild plant that has protected him in his wanderings, the planted plant that roots his marriage. The recognition is given in the form of the tree the poem has been growing.

The lion-from-the-sea simile reaches back to the Iliadic-Odyssean tradition of shipwreck-and-survival similes (Iliad 14's storm at sea; Odyssey 5's polyp-on-the-rock; Odyssey 12's sea-gulls in the storm). But where every earlier simile took the shipwrecked sailor's view, this one places the wife in the swimmer's perspective. Penelope is now the survivor; her husband is the shore. The reversal is the poem's quiet equalisation of the two arrivals.

Penelope's reference to Helen — not even Helen would have lain with the stranger if she had known what would come of it — reaches back to the long Helen-tradition of the cycle: Iliad 3 (Helen on the walls); Odyssey 4 (Helen at Sparta with the nepenthe); Odyssey 11 (Helen named as one of the heroines among the dead, though she is still alive); the Posthomerica's brief recoveries of Helen at the sack; Aeneid 2's Helen-at-the-altar episode. Penelope frames herself as Helen's deliberate opposite. The Trojan cycle's most discussed woman becomes the negative pole against which the Odyssey's most patient woman defines herself.

The Athena-mist that wraps the morning departure reaches back to the Athena-mist of book 13 (the arrival on Ithaca). The two mists frame the back half of the poem; the second half is itself bracketed by them.

Forward echoes

• The bed-test as recognition-token is the most-influential single recognition-device in Western literature. The pattern — the lie offered to provoke the proof that only the husband can give — survives intact into Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well (the bed-trick, inverted); into the recognition tropes of every later romance plot (the mole on the shoulder of Cymbeline; the ring-tokens of Imogen and Helena); into countless modern novels of identity-testing.
• The bed of olive built around the living tree has been one of the poem's most-imitated single images. The marriage rooted in a living tree passes into Renaissance emblem-literature, into Italian Romantic poetry (Leopardi's olive-tree poems), into Yeats's Among School Children (labour is blossoming or dancing where / the body is not bruised to pleasure soul), into Heaney's Bann Valley Eclogue and the whole Heaney-tradition of tree as marriage. The image of the unmovable bed rooted in the unmovable tree is the foundational text for the European poetry of marriage as grounded by a living thing.
• The lion-from-the-sea simile reaches forward through Latin tradition (Catullus's reunion-poems; Virgil's reunion of Aeneas and Dido in the underworld at Aeneid 6, where the embrace fails because the lover is dead — the inversion of book 23's success) into medieval romance's countless long-parted-lovers-reunited scenes, into modern novel (the reunion of Pierre and Natasha at the end of War and Peace reads exactly this simile-cadence), into modern poetry (Eliot's Marina, Heaney's The Skylight).
• Athena holding back the night is taken up by the medieval-Christian tradition of saints who pause the sun for a moment of grace (the miraculum solis trope). The image passes into Renaissance and modern poetry (Donne's The Sunne Rising; Marvell's To His Coy Mistress; Auden's Lullaby — time and fevers burn away).
• The compressed wanderings as pillow-talk as a meta-narrative device is the foundational text for every later "story-summarised-in-bed" scene. Aeneid 4 (Aeneas and Dido at the start of their relationship); the Decameron's frame-tales; Don Quixote's pillow-tales; the One Thousand and One Nights; the contemporary tradition of the "shorthand backstory" in romance and novel.
• Penelope as the deliberate opposite of Helen has had a long life in feminist criticism. Marilyn Katz's Penelope's Renown and Sheila Murnaghan's Disguise and Recognition both read book 23 as the poem's most self-conscious framing of the Helen-Penelope contrast. The pair becomes the foundational binary for every later treatment of the dangerous woman and the faithful woman in Greek and Latin epic, in courtly love, in Shakespeare (Cressida and Helen and Patient Griselda).
• The mist-bracketed second half (book 13 and book 23) is the structural model for every later "frame opened and closed by the same atmospheric detail" in long-form narrative. The technique is used by Apollonius (the Argonautica's frame of departure and return), by Virgil (the Aeneid's storm-and-arrival in book 1 and the storm-and-arrival in book 7), by the medieval romance tradition.
• The recognition by Penelope ends the anagnorisis movement of the Odyssey. Only Laertes remains. Book 24 will close that loop and the cycle.

Cast in this chapter

Chapter 0073 — Cast In This Chapter

On stage

• Odysseus — "Ulysses"; bathed and enhanced by Athena like a craftsman gilding silver, recognised by Penelope through the bed-of-olive secret, embraces her, tells the compressed wanderings as pillow-talk, leaves at dawn for Laertes
• Penelope — wakes to Eurycleia's news in disbelief, comes down to sit silent opposite Ulysses, sets the bed-trap, breaks at his angry secret of the olive-rooted bed, weeps in the lion-from-the-sea simile, hears the wanderings till the night is gone
• Telemachus — rebukes his mother for her coldness, takes orders for the cover-up dance, lies down to sleep after the dance, arms for the morning-walk to Laertes
• Athena — "Minerva"; gilds Ulysses like a craftsman, holds the night back in the western sea for the reunion, wraps the morning departure in mist
• Eurycleia — runs upstairs laughing with the news, gives the proof of the boar-scar, calls down for the cover-up bath
• Eumaeus — present at the cover-up dance, lies down to sleep, arms for the morning departure

Mentioned / off-stage

• Zeus — implicit in the divine machinery; the day of the festival continues
• Poseidon — named in the lion-from-the-sea simile (a sea where Poseidon broke their ship)
• Helen — named by Penelope as the cautionary figure (not even Helen would have lain with the stranger if she had known)
• Laertes — the destination of the morning walk; the last living family-figure
• Calypso — named in the compressed pillow-talk wanderings
• Circe — named in the compressed pillow-talk
• Polyphemus — named in the compressed pillow-talk (the Cyclops)
• Tiresias — named in the compressed pillow-talk

Non-cast named figures: Eurynome the housekeeper (bathes Ulysses, leads the couple to the bedchamber with a torch); Philoetius the cowherd (joins the dance, arms for the morning departure); Phemius the bard (strikes up the wedding-tune for the cover-up dance); Hephaestus and Athena in the craftsman-simile; the daughter of Actor (the one trusted maid who shared the secret of the bed when Penelope came as a bride); the olive-tree at the heart of the bedchamber; the unnamed neighbours in the street outside whose mistaken interpretation of the dance the poem captures.

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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.