whether mother still holds out in the halls
or some other man has married her at last,
and Odysseus’ bed, I suppose, is lying empty,
blanketed now with filthy cobwebs.”
(ref)
At his meeting with Penelope, who weeps as she speaks of her fears that he would never return alive —she knew about the ship the suitors had sent out to waylay him —he is brusquely ungracious; he does not even answer her questions about news of Odysseus but tells her not to stir up his emotions and sends her off to her room to bathe and pray; he has business to attend to, men’s business. She has to ask him later, and hesitantly, before he tells her what he learned at Sparta about her husband.
But she is not always so submissive. When she comes into the great hall after Odysseus has won his fight with Irus, she rebukes her son for exposing a stranger-guest to the risk of bodily harm. In her speech we can hear the tone of maternal reproof that Telemachus must often have heard and resented in his boyhood and adolescence:
“Telemachus,
your sense of balance is not what it used to be.
When you were a boy you had much better judgment.
Now that you’ve grown and reached your young prime . . .
now your sense of fairness seems to fail you.”
(ref)
Telemachus’ reply is, for once, conciliatory, even apologetic. He no longer feels the need to assert himself against her; his father is home, and he has been assigned a principal role in the final reckoning with the suitors. But he can still speak unflatteringly of her behind her back, as he does to Eurycleia after the nightlong interview between husband and wife:
“Dear nurse, how did you treat the stranger in our house?
With bed and board? Or leave him to lie untended?
That would be mother’s way —sensible as she is —
all impulse, doting over some worthless stranger,
turning a good man out to face the worst.”
(ref)
And he rebukes her to her face when she stubbornly refuses to recognize the bloodstained ragged beggar sitting opposite her as Odysseus. “Oh mother,” he says,
“cruel mother, you with your hard heart!
Why do you spurn my father so —why don’t you
sit beside him, engage him, ask him questions?
What other wife could have a spirit so unbending? . . .
your heart was always harder than a rock!”
(ref)
Penelope answers him gently but firmly; she denies him any competence in the matter at hand: “. . . if he is truly / Odysseus . . . we two will know each other . . . we two have secret signs” (ref). And Odysseus, with a smile, sends Telemachus away.
Penelope’s attitude to both the suitors and her disguised husband has given rise to much controversy and diverse interpretation. That she is faithful to Odysseus we are assured several times, as Odysseus is assured by Anticleia and Agamemnon in the world of the dead and by Eumaeus in the land of the living. On this score even Telemachus can have no doubt. It is also clear that she has done everything she can to avoid the marriage the suitors are trying to force on her. In his indictment of her before the Ithacan assembly, Antinous pays reluctant tribute to the subtlety of her delaying tactics —the shroud for old Laertes that for three years she wove at her great loom by day and unraveled by torchlight at night. Yet though her resolve to avoid marriage is firm, she would not be human if she did not feel flattered by the suitors’ infatuation with her; a woman whose husband has been away for twenty years, and for whose return she has almost given up hope, could hardly remain indifferent to the ardent courtship of so many young princes. When, in Book 18, Athena inspires her with a longing “to display herself to her suitors, fan their hearts, / inflame them more” (ref), she is prompting impulses that lurk dormant below the surface of Penelope’s conscious mind, just as she played on Telemachus’ deep suspicions of his mother’s intentions in Book 15. That same hidden layer of Penelope’s emotions is revealed in the dream about the pet geese slaughtered by the eagle, which she describes for Odysseus. In the dream the eagle identifies himself as Odysseus and the geese as the suitors, but not before Penelope has spoken of her delight in watching the geese and her unbridled sorrow at their destruction. In these few lines Homer shows more understanding of how dreams work than is to be found anywhere in the four books of the Interpretation of Dreams written by Artemidorus of Daldis in the second century of the Christian era.
None of these feelings affects Penelope’s refusal to choose a husband from among the suitors, but during her long interview with Odysseus she suddenly tells him that she has decided to do so: she will marry the suitor who can string the great bow of Odysseus and shoot an arrow through the twelve axes lined up in a row. There are good reasons for yielding to the suitors’ pressure at this point, and she states them clearly. After the betrayal of her delaying tactics with the shroud, she can think, she says, of no further expedient. Her parents are pressing her to remarry, and her son broods impatiently as the suitors devour his inheritance; he too, she says, beseeches her to leave. She has previously told Eurymachus what Odysseus had said to her when he left for Troy:
“ ‘. . . once you see the beard on the boy’s cheek,
you wed the man you like, and leave your house behind.’
So my husband advised me then. Now it all comes true . . .”
(ref)
For the plot of the Odyssey, of course, her decision is the turning point, the move that makes possible the long-predicted triumph of the returning hero. But why, critics have asked, does she make up her mind to do it now, when her dream clearly announces the return of Odysseus and the slaughter of the suitors, when the disguised Odysseus has convinced her that he saw Odysseus in person long ago on Crete and assured her that Odysseus had lately been seen in nearby Thesprotia and was now on his way home; when, even earlier, the prophet Theoclymenus had assured her that Odysseus was actually in Ithaca, planning destruction for the suitors? Many critics have found her decision utterly implausible. “The poet,” writes one learned and influential scholar (Page, p. 123), “could not possibly have chosen a worse moment for Penelope’s surrender.” For those who suspect multiple authorship of the poem a simple explanation lies ready to hand: Penelope’s decision comes from an alternate story line, in which husband and wife join in conspiracy to entrap the suitors. They find support for the theory in Book 24, where the shade of the suitor Amphimedon tells Agamemnon that it was Odysseus, “the soul of cunning,” who “told his wife to set / the great bow and the gleaming iron axes out” (ref). But it was only natural that the suitors should think so, since Penelope, at a critical moment, had argued strongly against Antinous that Odysseus should be allowed to try his hand at stringing the bow.
One modern critic (Harsh) has developed a subtly argued theory that she does in fact recognize her husband in the course of their long night interview and, while forwarding his purpose, withholds from him her realization of his identity. This reading, however, runs into an immovable obstacle in Book 23, where, to Telemachus’ disgust and Odysseus’ frustration, she refuses to recognize him as her husband and tests his knowledge of those “secret signs” she had mentioned before, signs “known to us both but hidden from the world” (ref). Other critics have suggested that without recognizing the stranger’s identity, she has been profoundly impressed by him and deeply moved by his proof that, unlike so many others who have come to her with sightings of Odysseus, he really has seen her husband. The disguised Odysseus, in the words of a recent sensitive interpreter (Russo, Commentary, III, pp. 11–12), “has come to mean much more to Penelope than would normally be possible in a relationship between a famous queen and a wandering stranger . . . an unusual and almost improper intimacy.” When they go off to their separate beds, each dreams of the other. “Homer is showing us that Penelope has some kind of intuitive awareness of her husband’s presence but . . . it is active on a less than conscious
level.” All this prompts her “to take a risk, to commit herself to life and to life’s chances after years of defensive, calculated maneuvering.”
This is a brilliant and attractive reading, but like many other interpretations, it does not take full account of the fact that Penelope does not have a choice in the matter. She has eloquently stated the reasons why she must decide now —pressure from her parents and her son, compounded by the threat to her son’s life, demand a decision at this point. But what she proposes is not a “surrender.” What the suitors have been demanding is that Penelope, or her father, choose one of them for her husband, “the best man in Achaea,” the one “who offers her the most [gifts]” (ref). But she faces them with something quite different: a challenge, a test in which each of them must measure himself against Odysseus by stringing his bow and shooting an arrow through the twelve axes. She is, of course, running a risk. As she tells Odysseus of her decision, she speaks as if the outcome will be the marriage she has so long avoided, and later, in her bed, she prays for death to save her from having to “warm the heart of a weaker man” (ref). Yet she must have foreseen the possibility that none of these inferior men, youths who spend their days and nights feasting, playing board games, dancing, hurling javelin and discus, would have the strength to string the bow of Odysseus and the skill to shoot an arrow through the line of twelve axes. Antinous, in fact, though he secretly hopes to succeed, expresses a fear that they may all fail to pass the test Penelope has imposed on them:
“No easy game, I wager, to string his polished bow.
Not a soul in the crowd can match Odysseus —
what a man he was . . .”
(ref)
Failure on the part of all the suitors might free her from their attentions; both Leodes and Eurymachus, the two suitors who try their hand and fail, speak of wooing other women elsewhere. In any case, failure would, as Eurymachus says, demonstrate their inferiority to Odysseus —“A disgrace to ring in the ears of men to come” (ref). It would be a fatal blow to the suitors’ prestige and might well turn opinion in Ithaca against them. Penelope’s surprising move looks more like a counteroffensive than a surrender. She told Odysseus that after her work on Laertes’ shroud was exposed as a fraud, she could not think of another “deft way out” (ref). The word so translated is mêtis; it is the word that characterizes Odysseus —he is polumêtis, a man of many twists and turns. Penelope is from the same mold as her husband, a worthy partner —and adversary. As she demonstrates by the mêtis she deploys against him before she will accept him fully as her husband.
Even when he has bathed, exchanged the filthy rags of the beggar for splendid raiment, and been given the grace and beauty of an immortal by Athena, she still sits apart from him, silent. He reproaches her for her coldness, using words that recall what Telemachus said to her earlier: “She has a heart of iron in her breast” (ref). He orders Eurycleia to prepare a bed for him, apart and alone. Penelope’s response shows that she is almost convinced: “You look —how well I know —” she says, “the way he looked, / setting sail from Ithaca” (ref), but nonetheless she insists on testing his knowledge of those “secret signs” she mentioned when she answered Telemachus’ angry outburst. She orders Eurycleia to move Odysseus’ bed out of the room. For the first and only time in the poem, Odysseus is taken aback. Up to this point he has always been the calculator, the manipulator, the dissembler, who played on the emotions of others, whether to win sympathy or to provoke hostility, but now Penelope has usurped that role. In a furious emotional outburst —“Woman —your words, they cut me to the core!” (ref) —he tells the story of the bed’s construction, and even though he realizes that he has given her the sign that she was seeking, he ends nevertheless with an accusing speculation:
“Does the bed, my lady, still stand planted firm? —
I don’t know —or has someone chopped away
that olive-trunk and hauled our bedstead off?”
(ref)
Penelope is convinced at last; in tears of joy she embraces him as she explains her hesitation. “In my heart of hearts I always cringed with fear / some fraud might come, beguile me with his talk” (ref). Homer and his audience had not heard of Martin Guerre, but they knew the story of Alcmena and Amphitryon (both mentioned in the Odyssey) — how Zeus assumed the appearance and personality of Amphitryon, who was away at the wars, to lie with Alcmena and beget Heracles. In the lower world, Odysseus hears a similar story from Tyro, deceived by Poseidon, who took the form of her lover, the river Enipeus. Penelope, in fact, when Eurycleia brought her the news that the stranger was Odysseus and that he had killed all the suitors, had replied, “the story can’t be true, not as you tell it, / no, it must be a god who’s killed our brazen friends.” (ref).
Even among those who believe that the Odyssey is the work of one poet there may be those who doubt that an oral poet, using writing to construct, over the course of many years, a poem on the scale of the Odyssey, could deploy so effectively so subtle an understanding of the emotions that drive men and women together and apart. But this same sympathetic understanding of the human, especially the female, heart is at work not just in the scenes set in Ithaca but everywhere throughout the poem. Calypso, for example, when she starts Odysseus on his journey home, does not tell him that she does so under duress, on orders from Zeus, but takes credit for the action herself. And even when it is clear that he is determined to go, she cannot refrain from asking him how he can possibly prefer Penelope to her own divine person. Nausicaa on Scheria manages, with exquisite tact but in unmistakable terms, to offer her hand in marriage to Odysseus without committing herself. And at Sparta, behind the splendid facade of marital harmony in the royal palace lies the reality of subdued but barely repressed embarrassment and resentment. The embarrassment is revealed obliquely in the self-exculpatory story Helen tells of her encounter with Odysseus during the war that was fought for her sake. He came into Troy, she says, disguised as a beggar; she recognized him but helped and protected him:
“. . . my heart had changed by now —
I yearned
to sail back home again! I grieved too late for the madness
Aphrodite sent me . . .”
(ref)
The resentment is clear in Menelaus’ story of Odysseus at Troy; Odysseus was the one who saved their lives in the wooden horse by holding them back when Helen, imitating the voices of their wives, called on them by name to come out. What is more, she was accompanied by Deiphobus, the second Trojan prince she had married, after the death of Paris.
There are two remarks which Alexander Pope made about Homer that readers of the Odyssey should bear in mind. The first is that “Homer is frequently eloquent in his very Silence.” And the second: “Homer has taken in all the inward Passions and Affections of Mankind to furnish his Characters.”
THE END OF THE ODYSSEY
At the Greek line 296 of Book 23 of the Odyssey, husband and wife go joyfully to bed, the bed that served Penelope as the test of Odysseus’ identity. We know Aristophanes and Aristarchus said that this was the “end” of the poem. We do not have their own statements, and our sources cite two different Greek words for “end.” One of them, peras, means something like “limit” or “boundary,” and the other, telos, besides meaning “end” in the temporal or spatial sense can often mean something more like “fulfillment,” “consummation” —“end” in the Aristotelian sense. Some modern scholars have taken the words literally and pronounced the remainder of Book 23 and all of Book 24 a later addition composed by a different, and inferior, poet. They cannot, however, claim Aristarchus as their authority, for we know that he excluded the Greek lines 310–43 of Book 23 (in which Odysseus tells Penelope the tale of his travels) and lines 1–204 of Book 24 (the arrival of the shades of the suitors in the lower world). There would have been no point in doing so if he had already decided that the original poem ended at the line which put Odysseus and Penelope to bed.
In any case the poem cannot
end there; too many loose ends remain to be tied up, like the consequences of the slaughter of the suitors; too many scenes have been carefully prepared for, like the meeting between Odysseus and Laertes. The first of these themes was introduced as far back as Book 20, when Odysseus discussed with Athena the plan to kill the suitors. He was appalled by the odds, one man against so many, but that is not all. “There’s another worry,” he tells her,
“that haunts me even more.
What if I kill them —thanks to you and Zeus —
how do I run from under their avengers?”
(ref)
It is with this in mind that later, in Books 22 and 23, with the corpses of the suitors cluttering the hall, he tells Telemachus to have it cleared and to organize music and dance so that passersby will guess that Penelope has at last chosen a new husband. No rumor of the truth will get out before Odysseus and his followers leave for his father’s farm in the country —where Homer will stage the last of a series of recognition scenes. It is a scene for which audience expectation has been expertly aroused: in the opening book Athena-Mentes describes Laertes mourning for his son in isolation in the country, a theme taken up later by Anticleia in the world of the dead and by Eumaeus in his hut. The poem cannot end without a meeting between father and son; their reunion is in fact one of the three large units of which the final book consists.
The first, the descent of the suitors to the lower world, where they meet Agamemnon and Achilles, was condemned by Aristarchus as an interpolation. For once, we have some information about an Alexandrian editor’s reason for such an opinion: the scholia, comments written on the margins of the medieval manuscripts, give us a selection. Some of them seem trivial; the fact that elsewhere in the poem Hermes is not called Cyllenian, for example, or the claim that a White Rock is not an appropriate landscape feature for the world of the dead. Others are more serious, such as his assertion that elsewhere in Homer the shades of the unburied are not allowed to cross the river into Hades, and the suitors’ bodies are still in the hall of Odysseus’ palace. It is true that in the Iliad the ghost of Patroclus, appearing to Achilles in a dream, tells him he cannot cross the river until Achilles gives him burial. But in the Odyssey, Elpenor begs Odysseus to bury his body, which has been left behind on Circe’s island, and he is in Hades and makes no mention of a river. The laws and the terrain of Hades are obviously not strictly defined; they remain somewhat vague even in Virgil —it was Dante who gave Hell strict logic and a fixed geography.
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