by Homer
Books 18–20
Odysseus’ return coincides with and precipitates the new independence of both his son and his wife; Penelope’s reaction both to her son’s maturity and to the now more authoritative reports of Odysseus’ safety is carefully described. Homeric psychology maps easily onto modern – any modern novel could convincingly translate the scene where Athene put it in the heart of Penelope that after years of waiting and mourning she should now smarten herself up and show herself to the suitors in order that she should demonstrate her desirability to her husband and son . . . and herself:
Who laughing yet, to show her humour bore
No serious appetite to that light show,
She told Eurynome, that not till now
She ever knew her entertain desire
To please her wooers’ eyes, but oft on fire
She set their hate, in keeping from them still;
Yet now she pleas’d t’appear . . .
Although Penelope and her nurse Eurynome are frank about the ravages worked by time and dull grief, a beauty bath and facial and a revivifying sleep contribute, with Athene’s help, to her radiant appearance. Penelope says several times that Odysseus took with him her bloom and value as a woman (arete), but both are now restored: wearing
So thin a veil, that through it quite there shone
A grace so stol’n, it pleas’d above the clear,
And sunk the knees of every wooer there,
Their minds so melted in love’s vehement fires,
That to her bed she heighten’d all desires.
As a man demonstrates his arete in contest, in battle, in the assembly and by the gifts that accrue, so a woman demonstrates hers by the dowry she can command, by the gifts she can inspire. Odysseus, from his beggar’s seat, sees both her and the suitors’ reaction. He is going to have to compete against the others to [re]win Penelope, a wife whose status and desirability have been reasserted.
Penelope’s state of mind is sensitively described. Coming round from her beauty sleep, she had wished she could stay in that soft sleep for ever and never awake to the grief and longing that has been her life for twenty years; when she is fully awake it is as if she is reborn to another life. She acknowledges her son’s beard as a rite de passage for her too: she offers to marry but demands proper wooing gifts. Although she says she cannot believe reports that Odysseus is alive and coming back, in Book 19 she dreams of his return. But it is an ambivalent dream – he is the eagle that slaughters the geese of the household (the suitors) – geese that she ‘joy’d to see’ and for whose death she cries and sorrows. Odysseus’ return may be a consummation devoutly to be wished, but it is also a threat to her newly-found status as a woman.
Penelope’s consciousness of Odysseus is shown by her concern for him after his ‘duel’: she upbraids Telemachus for not taking better care of a stranger guest. Telemachus is now assured enough to feign helplessness when it will serve his and his father’s cause. For the first time, too, he speaks out against the suitors’ carousing – he sends them to their homes to sleep it off and himself goes to bed, leaving the palace quiet for Odysseus’ and Penelope’s meeting, in the half-shadows of the empty hall. In one last delay, Odysseus has to fight for his place once more, this time against the wicked maidservant Melantho. Penelope joins him in condemning the woman; when it comes, Odysseus’ purge will extend to the servants who have consorted with the suitors as well as the suitors themselves.
When Penelope and Odysseus finally come together their exchanges are in character but strike common resonances – Odysseus addresses her as one whose fame goes up to heaven, as like a king ruling as a lord (Odysseus elsewhere has cried like a woman who long missed her husband). He is too full of grief to tell his tale; Penelope represents herself, again, as one whose arete has been destroyed by longing. She explains the trick with which she has kept her suitors at bay for years: she has made the weaving of a shroud for her father-in-law the defining act which has to be completed before leaving Odysseus’ household for a new one. In a device worthy of ‘Odysseus, full of tricks’, weaving all day she has each night unpicked her work. In answer, Odysseus embarks on another ‘Cretan’ tale, where he claims to have entertained Odysseus. He thus establishes a bond between himself and Odysseus, one that moves Penelope to tears.
Thus many tales Ulysses told his wife,
At most but painting, yet most like the life;
Of which her heart such sense took through her ears,
It made her weep as she would turn to tears.
And as from off the mountains melts the snow. . .
So down her fair cheeks her kind tears did glide,
Her miss’d lord mourning, set so near her side.
Odysseus himself is near to tears, but conceals them. Despite her emotional sympathy with the stranger, Penelope decides to test him by asking him to describe Odysseus’ clothes and appearance. Odysseus of course can describe exactly the outfit Penelope made for him, can describe how he looked when she last saw him.
When all these signs she knew for chiefly true,
Desire of moan upon her beauties grew,
And yet, ev’n that desire suffic’d, she said:
‘Till this, my guest, a wretched state array’d
Your ill-us’d person, but from this hour forth
You shall be honour’d, and find all the worth
That fits a friend . . . ’
He has passed the test, and through his beggarly appearance she has accepted him as an worthy link to her husband. He tries to offer one further bond with Odysseus – he says he has seen his stockpile of rich gifts amassed on the way home. (He would have been home long before but has travelled to accrue wealth: a harsh statement but one which likens him to a suitor amassing wedding gifts . . . ) Penelope however will not accept such proof of his survival. But the story has turned her mind away from Odysseus as he left, the young hero, to Odysseus as he must be now, battered by experience and like the man in front of her. She orders Odysseus’ old nurse to bathe him:
‘Euryclea, rise, and wash the feet of one
That is of one age with your sovereign gone,
Such hands, such feet hath, though of alter’d grace.
Much grief in men will bring on change apace.’
Euryclea imagines the man in front of her as Odysseus and weeps for both. Her recognition of the scar brings to her and us a vivid evocation of his naming ceremony and young manhood. Like fond carers through the ages she sees the man but remembers and is bonded to the boy; like sons through the ages Odysseus is conscious of everything in his identity that is not continuous with his early self; he threatens her and prevents her from revealing who he is to Penelope.
Penelope keeps Odysseus with her until late, confiding in him her indecision and her unwillingness to have confidence in the prediction of Odysseus’ return and reclaiming of his own. While talking to him a bond is established; she decides to set up a bridal contest – her new husband must match her old in shooting an arrow through a line of twelve crossed axes. Both, separately yet similarly, pass a turbulent night.
Books 21–22
Book 21 is a tense, exciting, self-contained book – the trial of the bow. Penelope takes out and weeps over this attribute of Odysseus, now a symbol of his power and loss. Its history points to its significance – an heirloom given to Odysseus before its owner was murdered while Heracles’ guest; so potent a symbol and so precious that Odysseus left it behind when he went to Troy. The suitors are ambivalent about the test – worried that they might fail, might prove themselves inferior to Odysseus, yet secretly hopeful of being the bow’s master. The narrator points to the baselessness of their hope – they will die by the bow, long eager to revenge abuse of hospitality, safely back in its rightful owner’s hands.
Telemachus highlights the significance
of this trial of men – he describes his mother’s many attractions and tries to string the bow in order that he might replace his father as his mother’s lord and guardian. As he is about to succeed he glances at Odysseus – through tact, cunning and/or inhibition he then pretends to be too young and weak. All except the two leading suitors try and fail; Odysseus reveals his identity to two more faithful servants and shows his scar as a proof of identity, a sign. The chief suitor tries and fails, acknowledging the ignominy of being so demonstrably weaker than Odysseus. The final contestant consoles him and himself with pointing out that this fateful day is that of Apollo the archer – of course they will fail (and Odysseus succeed) on such a day. When the bow is lain aside Odysseus’ proposition that he just try his strength with the bow (he is carefully not entering the competition but transforming the feat into the prelude to his revenge) is met with outrage and the accusation that he is drunk. A warning story of the vengeance wreaked by a centaur when his animal passions were aroused by alcohol misfires, pointing as it does to the terrible fury Odysseus will with justice wreak on them.
There is continued tension between Telemachus, Penelope and Odysseus: Penelope’s continued interest in standing up for the beggar encourages him to try to string the bow and promises rich rewards. Telemachus leaps to assert his authority over the bow and tells her to take her distaff and go back to the women’s quarters where she belongs. He has had it in his power to win her himself: he now feels able to stand as an independent man in front of his mother (and perhaps of his father). The stringing of the bow has indeed been a test of manhood. The book finishes with the long-anticipated sight: Odysseus easily stringing his great bow and sending an arrow surely through the twelve crossed axeheads.
With Book 22 comes the vengeance – a complete cleansing of the suitors and their consorts, completed by Odysseus purifying the palace with fire and brimstone. The deaths are described with delight in the skill and appropriateness of the shot or stroke and perhaps with a certain bloodthirstiness that, despite its battlefield setting, is less a feature of the Iliad.
Antinous is shot through the throat in the act of drinking and in falling overturns the banquet table – a fitting start to the punishment of the suitors’ greed. He is killed by Odysseus in the guise of the stranger-beggar who has been insulted and buffeted; then Odysseus declares who he is and kills the other suitors as the returning, vengeful lord. Now Telemachus can act without guile as his father’s helpmeet – he helps Odysseus arm and together with the two loyal retainers, gets access to the armoury. Melanthius the collaborator is, literally, strung up – dangling from the roof timbers all night, he waits to be finished off and mutilated. Odysseus’ henchmen repay the insults to their master – the suitor who threw an ox-hoof at Odysseus now has an answering ‘guest gift’ – death.
Some sue for mercy – Liodes the suitors’ diviner pleads non-involvement but is denied on the grounds that he must have wished for Odysseus’ death in his wish to wed and bed his wife:
‘If you be priest amongst them, as you plead,
Yet you would marry, and with my wife too,
And have descent by her. For all that woo
Wish to obtain – which they should never do,
Dames’ husbands living. You must therefore pray,
Of force and oft, in court here, that the day
Of my return for home might never shine;
The death to me wish’d therefore shall be thine.’
Odysseus comes as avenger, as bringer of justice, as punisher of those who sought to replace him.
The poet Phemius has a more persuasive suit and is allowed by the poet Homer to make it very powerfully: the bard is in charge of heroes’ reputations and Odysseus’ fame is in his and his brethren’s hands. He is allowed to live, when Telemachus vouches that he sang for the suitors under duress. Chapman makes Telemachus appeal for clemency as a prince to a king:
This did the prince’s sacred virtue hear,
And to the king, his father, said: ‘Forbear
To mix the guiltless with the guilty’s blood.’
With Athene’s help, all the rest are killed like fish caught in a net; Odysseus is covered in gore like a lion feeding on an ox. In a ghastly episode, the twelve maidservants who have been consorting with the suitors are made to clean up the slaughter in the hall and then are led out and killed by being strung up by the neck as a pigeon ‘in any grove caught with a . . . net, With struggling pinions ’gainst the ground doth beat Her tender body’; their feet soon stop kicking. In blackly comic contrast, the old Nurse refuses to fetch fire and brimstone to cleanse the gore of the mass killing until she has first brought Odysseus a cloak: it is not proper that the Master should go round in rags. The book ends with the faithful women servants embracing him in joy at having him back, a recognition which brings tears to his eyes:
And plied him so with all their loving graces
That tears and sighs took up his whole desire;
For now he knew their hearts to him entire.
Book 23
Book 23 is the final twisting together of the stories of the Odyssey – of Odysseus’ final and completing recognition by his wife, of Telemachus’ establishment as a grown son within a two-parent household, of Odysseus’ final narration of his adventures – to his wife.
Now only Penelope, sunk in the deepest sleep she has known since Odysseus’ loss, does not know of Odysseus’ return. Euryclea flies upstairs with the speed of youth; Penelope is only with difficulty convinced that it might indeed be Odysseus: even the scar, she points out, might be faked by a god!
This reserve, this caution, this insistence on putting the stranger to the test, is what marks Penelope as Odysseus’ ‘other half’. Precisely because it is how Odysseus would have acted, he is both amused and understanding; in answer to Telemachus’ anger at his mother’s ‘flint hard heart’ he says:
‘Take
Your mother from the prease, that she may make
Her own proofs of me . . . But now, because I go
So poorly clad, she takes disdain to know
So loath’d a creature for her loved lord.
For Penelope, least of all, is the recognition that of simple continuity of identity – she has to accept him back. Chapman’s understanding and sensitivity makes the exchange between them one of the most moving parts of his Odyssey (he embroiders Penelope’s speech by adding the parts in brackets):
Like an immortal from the bath he rose,
And to his wife did all his grace dispose,
Encount’ring thus her strangeness: ‘Cruel dame,
Of all that breathe, the gods past steel and flame
Have made thee ruthless. Life retains not one
Of all dames else . . . as twenty years
To miss her husband, drown’d in woes and tears,
And, at his coming, keep aloof . . .
[Penelope replied]
[‘Your mean appearance made not me retire,
Nor this your rich show makes me now admire,
Nor moves at all; for what is all to me,
If not my husband? All his certainty
I knew at parting; but, so long apart,
The outward likeness holds no full desert
For me to trust to.] Go, nurse, see address’d
A soft bed for him, and the single rest
Himself affects so. Let it be the bed
That stands within our bridal chamber-stead
Which he himself made. Bring it forth from thence,
And see it furnished with magnificence.’
This is a test (the bed, as the real Odysseus well knew, was immovably constructed round a living olive tree) worthy of Odysseus the cunning – a trick that he recognises and wonders at:
This said she to assay him, and did st
ir
Ev’n his establish’d patience, and to her;
Whom thus he answer’d: ‘Woman, your words prove
My patience strangely.Who is it can move
My bed out of his place? . . .
For in the fixture of the bed is shown
A masterpiece, a wonder; and ’twas done
By me, and none but me.’
Penelope has held out against hope ever since the first signs that Odysseus was alive and returning, has refused to believe even when told that he had killed the suitors, has demanded proof even when he stood in front of her. Now the last barrier is removed:
This sunk her knees and heart to hear so true
The signs she urg’d; and first did tears ensue
Her rapt assurance; then she ran and spread
Her arms around his neck, kissed oft his head . . .
Meanwhile, Telemachus is given a job to do: he is to arrange the festivities of his mother’s wedding, to create the impression that Penelope has accepted the suitor who succeeded in the bow competition (as, in a sense, she has).
The book ends with Penelope and Odysseus making love:
The king and queen then now, as newly wed,
Resum’d the old laws of th’embracing bed.
and exchanging stories – it is as if all the suffering and losses are redeemed by becoming the means of intimacy:
The bride and bridegroom having ceas’d to keep
Observed love-joys, from their fit delight
They turn’d to talk. The queen did then recite
What she had suffer’d . . . Great Ulysses then,
What ever slaughters he had made of men,
What ever sorrows he himself sustain’d,
Repeated amply; and her ears remain’d
With all delight attentive to their end.
Book 24
There are still some loose threads to be resolved in Book 24 – Melanthius’ story is woven into those of the other heroes of Troy by the narrative following the souls of the suitors down to the Underworld. Here the dead heroes are given voice by the narrator and can talk to one another as if for the first time. Agamemnon tells Achilles about Achilles’ funeral and contrasts it sadly with the way his own dead body was treated. There has been a running contrast between Odysseus’ story and that of Agamemnon and Menelaus: Telemachus adjured to live up to Orestes’ example in ridding his household of rivals to his absent father’s bed; Penelope in her constancy compared favourably with Clytemnestra; in her prudence and chastity with Helen. Now, the news of Odysseus’ avenging homecoming being brought by the suitors to Agamemnon in the Underworld, these stories are stitched together; the end of Odysseus’ story told to the heroes of Troy forms a fitting conclusion to both the Iliad and the Odyssey.