The bed cannot be moved: it is part of a living, growing olive tree - it cannot be moved without destroying it. Odysseus readily passes the test, but not before he gets upset. He addresses her as “strange woman” and she returns, mocking him, “strange man” and begins her test by asking Eurykleia to set up Odysseus’ bed outside of his bedchamber. How does one know that truth, especially from a master of lies? There are ways to test.Įven as Odysseus goes about his kingly business of keeping the suitors’ families at bay, Penelope remains chary and distant. This aged and silent man in front of her is both Odysseus and he is not, perhaps commenting on the theme of disguise and that runs throughout the Odyssey, finally, once and for all, asking the question who is the true Odysseus? as he confronts his wife after twenty years.
She found him - yes, clearly - like her husband,īut sometimes blood and rags were all she saw. In wonderment - for sometimes as she gazed Penelope vacillates between hope and disbelief, but she agrees to see “that strange one who killed” the suitors, for indeed he is a stranger after being gone for so long:Īnd, for a long time, sat deathly still Shrewd like her husband, she does not allow herself to believe Eurykleia’s report that the suitors are now dead by the hand of the returned king. She is, at first, dubious that Odysseus has truly returned. After the traitors have been dealt with and the hall cleansed, Odysseus meets Penelope for the first time in twenty years in book XXIII. These descriptions are disturbing, but suggest that one’s house is a sacred place as is one’s duty to that house. Since those maids are part of Odysseus’ own house, they meet a particularly brutal end - only after they clean the carnage of the great hall - as does Melanthios. Part of that infection are the twelve maids that helped the suitors by betraying Penelope. He has come by stealth and now uses combat to rid his home of the infection. The Odyssey book XXII reads stylistically similar to the Iliad book XXII: notice the Homeric, or epic, similes of war the brutality of war is not disguised with florid romanticism - Odysseus shows no mercy as deals out death to the suitors and those who supported them. At the point that Odysseus finally reveals himself, the suitors had been warned many times and in many ways to vacate the house of Odysseus, so the intensity has been building since Odysseus has returned home: the suitors will soon pay for their perfidy with their blood - nothing they can do will now will save them as book XXII begins with the death of the arrogant and somewhat dense Antinoos.īook XXII parallels book XXII of the Iliad: the deciding battles in both epics are decided. Odysseus and Telemachus kill the Suitors, Thomas Degeorge, 1812. You couldn’t ask for anything better out of Hollywood. Telemachus has finally accepted Odysseus as his true father and now stands beside the returned king at the end of Book XXI: Odysseus has cast aside his beggar’s rags and now stands regally before the doomed suitors, bow in hand, son by his side, and electrical effects from the gods themselves. Book XXI sets the stage for the slaughter of Book XXII. Odysseus finally returns home in Book XIII of the Odyssey, but “could not tell what land it was / after so many years away … The landscape looked strange, unearthly strange / to the Lord Odysseus.” Odysseus spends the next seven books carefully making his way around Ithaka, making allegiances, and practicing his trademark dissembling and contending in order to insinuate himself into the presence of the suitors to make them eventually “atone in blood!” The lessons of the voyage must come into play if Odysseus is to reclaim his house and kingdom so that he may set his lands in order and finally put the chaos of this wanderings behind him. TL DR: Notes on the latter books of Homer’s Odyssey.