The bow: pedigree, contest, recruitment, and the stringing.
1And now the goddess put it in her mind — gray-eyed Athena,
in the mind of Icarius' daughter, watchful-minded Penelope —
to set before the suitors the bow and the gray iron
in the halls of Odysseus: the contest, and the beginning of the slaughter.1
5She climbed the high stairway of her house
and took the bent key in her strong hand —
a beautiful key of bronze, with an ivory handle —2
and went her way with her attendant women
to the last storeroom. There the master's treasures lay:
10bronze, and gold, and iron wrought with labor.
And there lay the backsprung bow, and the quiver
for the arrows, with many groan-laden shafts inside —3
gifts that a guest-friend gave him when they met in Lacedaemon:
Iphitus, Eurytus' son, a man like the immortals.4
15The two had crossed paths in Messene,
in the house of thoughtful Ortilochus. Odysseus
had come to collect a debt the whole people owed him:
for Messenian men had lifted sheep out of Ithaca —
three hundred, with their herdsmen — in their many-benched ships.
20For their sake Odysseus came that long road on embassy,
a boy still, sent out by his father and the other elders.5
And Iphitus came hunting horses — twelve mares
he had lost, with hard-working mules at suck beneath them —
the same mares that afterward became his death and doom,
25when he came to the strong-hearted son of Zeus,
the man Heracles, that expert in great deeds,
who killed him — a guest in his own house.6
Ruthless: no shame before the gods' watching eye, nor for the table
he himself had set the man; he killed him even so,
30and kept the strong-hoofed mares in his own halls.
Asking after these, Iphitus met Odysseus, and gave him the bow
that great Eurytus carried in the old days, and left
to his son at his death in the high house.
And Odysseus gave him a sharp sword and a strong spear —
35the start of a binding friendship; but they never knew
each other's tables: before that, the son of Zeus killed
Iphitus, Eurytus' son, that man like the immortals,
who gave the bow. And noble Odysseus never
took it with him going to war in the black ships:
40it stood in his halls at home, a memorial
of a beloved guest-friend; on his own land he carried it.7
And when she reached that storeroom, the shining among women,
and stepped up on the oak threshold — which a carpenter once
planed with skill and trued to the line,
45and fixed the doorposts in it, and hung the shining doors —
at once she quickly loosed the thong from the hook,
slid in the key, and shot back the bolts of the doors
with a straight thrust. And they bellowed like a bull8
at pasture in a meadow — so loud the beautiful doors
50bellowed at the key's stroke; and they flew open before her.
She stepped up onto the high floor, where the chests
stood full of clothing laid away in fragrance.
Reaching up from there she took the bow off its peg,
bright in the bow-case that enclosed it.
55And she sat down right there, with the case on her knees,
and wept aloud, and shrill, and drew out the master's bow.9
And when she had taken her fill of tear-heavy mourning,
she went her way to the hall, to the lordly suitors,
holding in her hand the backsprung bow and the quiver
60for the arrows, with many groan-laden shafts inside;
and beside her handmaids carried the box where the iron
lay in plenty, and the bronze: the master's gear of contest.
And when she reached the suitors, shining among women,
she stood beside the pillar of the close-built roof,
65holding her glistening veil before her cheeks,
a trusted handmaid standing on either side,10
and spoke at once among the suitors, and said her word:
"Hear me, you lordly suitors, who have fastened on this house11
to eat and drink your way through it without ever a pause,
70its master long gone; nor could you offer any other
excuse in all this time, any word at all,
except your lust to marry me and take me to wife.
Well then, you suitors — come: here stands your prize before you.
I set out the great bow of godlike Odysseus.
75Whoever strings the bow most easily in his hands
and shoots an arrow through all twelve axes —
him I will follow, forsaking this house,
this house of my marriage, this beautiful house, full of all
that sustains life. I think I shall remember it even in my dreams."12
80So she spoke, and told Eumaeus, the noble swineherd,
to set the bow before the suitors, and the gray iron.
In tears Eumaeus took them and laid them down;
and the cowherd wept on his side, when he saw the master's bow.13
And Antinous rebuked them, and spoke a word, and named them:
85"Idiot rustics! — brains that stop at the day's end!14
Wretched pair, why are you streaming tears, and stirring up
the heart in the woman's breast? Her heart lies deep enough
in grief already, since she lost her dear husband.
Sit and feast in silence — or take your bawling
90outside, the two of you, and leave the bow right here,
a trial for the suitors none will slip through: for I do not think
this polished bow is going to be strung with ease.
There is no man in this whole company
such as Odysseus was. I saw him myself —
95I remember it well — though I was still a witless child."15
So he spoke; but the heart in his breast was hoping
that he would string the bow and shoot through the iron.
In fact he was to be the first to taste an arrow16
from the hands of blameless Odysseus — the man he was dishonoring
100that moment, sitting in his hall, and egging on all his companions.
And the sacred strength of Telemachus spoke among them:
"Ah — Zeus the son of Cronos has made me witless!17
My own dear mother — sensible as she is — declares
she will follow another man and forsake this house;
105and I laugh, and enjoy it, with my witless heart.
Come then, you suitors — since here stands your prize:
a woman whose like there is not now in all Achaea,
not in holy Pylos, not in Argos or Mycenae,
not on Ithaca itself, not on the dark mainland —
110but you know that yourselves. Why should I praise my mother?
Come — no dodges, no dragging it out; no more
hanging back from the stringing of the bow. Let us see it!
And I myself might make a trial of the bow as well:
for if I string it, and shoot through the iron,
115then it would be no grief to me that my honored mother
should leave this house and follow another man — since I would stay behind
man enough at last to lift my father's beautiful prizes."18
He spoke, and flung the crimson cloak from his shoulders,
rising to his full height, and put off the sharp sword from his shoulder.
120First he set up the axes, digging one long trench
for all of them, trued to a line,
and stamped the earth firm round them. Amazement took every man
who watched — how squarely he set them, who had never seen it before.19
Then he went and stood on the threshold and began to try the bow.
125Three times he set it shaking, hot to draw it home;
three times he eased his force, hoping still in his heart
to string the cord and shoot through the iron.
And now, hauling a fourth time, his strength would have strung it —
but Odysseus shook his head, and checked him, keen as he was.20
130And the sacred strength of Telemachus spoke among them again:
"Ah — so I will be a weakling and a coward all my days!
Or I am too young yet, and cannot trust my hands
to defend a man when someone picks a quarrel first.21
Come then, you who are stronger than I am —
135come try the bow, and let us finish out the contest."
So speaking he set the bow away from him on the ground,
leaning it against the joined and polished panels,
with the swift arrow propped on the fine door-hook there,
and sat back down on the chair from which he had risen.
140And Antinous spoke among them, Eupeithes' son:
"Up, all you companions — in order, left to right,
starting from where the wine is always poured."22
So spoke Antinous, and his word pleased them well.
And the first to rise was Leodes, the son of Oenops,
145who was their sacrifice-diviner, and always sat
in the farthest corner by the beautiful mixing-bowl: to him alone
their reckless outrages were hateful; he was indignant at all the suitors.23
He now was first to take the bow and the swift arrow,
and went and stood on the threshold and began to try the bow.
150He could not string it: long before that, hauling, his hands
gave out — his soft, unhardened hands; and he said among the suitors:
"Friends, I cannot bend it. Let another take it now.
Many chief men this bow is going to strip24
of life and breath — since truly it is better far
155to die than live on and miss the mark we gather here for
day upon day, forever, waiting on hope.
Now every man of you hopes, every heart is set
on marrying Penelope, Odysseus' bedmate.
But once he has tried the bow, and seen —
160well, let him woo some other fair-robed Achaean woman
with his bride-gifts then, and seek her; and let this one
marry the man who gives the most, and comes as her fate."
So he spoke his say, and set the bow away from him,
leaning it against the joined and polished panels,
165with the swift arrow propped on the fine door-hook there,
and sat back down on the chair from which he had risen.
And Antinous rebuked him, and spoke a word, and named him:
"Leodes — what a word has slipped the fence of your teeth!25
A dreadful word, a bitter one — I am angry just to hear it —
170that this bow, if you please, will strip our chief men
of life and breath — because you cannot string it!
No: your honored mother did not bear you the kind of man
who has it in him to draw a bow and shoot;
but the other lordly suitors will string it, and soon."
175So he spoke, and gave his orders to Melanthius the goatherd:
"Look alive, Melanthius — light a fire in the hall,
and set a big bench by it with a fleece on top,
and bring out the great wheel of lard from the stores inside,
so we young men can warm the bow, and grease it
180with the fat, and try it, and finish out the contest."
So he spoke; and Melanthius quickly kindled the unwearying fire,
and carried up the bench and set it there with a fleece on it,
and brought out the great wheel of lard from the stores inside.
With that the young men warmed the bow and made their trials — and still
185they could not string it: they fell far short of the strength it took.26
But Antinous still held off, and godlike Eurymachus,
the suitors' chiefs: in prowess they were far the best of them.27
Now out of the house those two had gone together,
the cowherd and the swineherd of godlike Odysseus,
190and after them Odysseus himself, the noble one, came out.
And when they were outside the doors and the courtyard,
he raised his voice and spoke to them with gentle words:
"Cowherd — and you, swineherd — shall I say a thing to you,28
or keep it to myself? My heart tells me to say it.
195What kind of men would you be, to fight for Odysseus,
if he came from somewhere — like that, out of nowhere — some god bringing him?
Would you fight for the suitors, or for Odysseus?
Speak out, as your heart and spirit bid you."
Then the cowherd answered him, the master of the oxen:
200"Father Zeus, if only you would accomplish this desire:
that the man himself come back, and a god guide him home —29
then you would learn my strength, and how my hands follow it!"
And in the same way Eumaeus prayed to all the gods
that Odysseus of the many designs might come home to his own house.
205And when he had proof of the true mind in both of them,
he found words again, and said to them in answer:
"He is home — here — I am the man myself. After suffering many pains,30
I have come in the twentieth year to my fathers' land.
And I know that of all my slaves, to you two only
210my coming is what you prayed for. Of the rest I have heard
not one man praying that I come home again.31
So to you two I will tell the whole truth of what shall be.
If a god brings the haughty suitors down beneath my hands,
I will find wives for you both, and give you possessions,
215and houses built near mine; and from that day
you shall be to me the companions and brothers of Telemachus.32
And come — I will show you a plain sign besides,
so you may know me for certain and trust it in your hearts:
the scar — the wound the boar dealt me with its white tusk
So speaking, he drew the rags back from the great scar.
And when the two had seen it, and taken in each detail,
they wept, and threw their arms round thoughtful Odysseus,
and kissed his head and shoulders, welcoming him home;
225and in the same way Odysseus kissed their heads and hands.34
And the light of the sun would have gone down on their weeping
had not Odysseus himself checked them, and said:35
"Enough of weeping and wailing — someone coming out
of the hall might see, and tell them there inside.
230Go back in one at a time, not all together:
I first, you after. And let this be the signal:
all the others — all the lordly suitors — will refuse
to let the bow and quiver be given to me;
but you, noble Eumaeus, carry the bow up the hall
235and set it in my hands; and tell the women
to bar the close-fitted doors of their quarters,
and if any one of them hears groaning or the crash of men
inside our walls, let her not run out,
but stay where she is, at her work, in silence.
240And you, noble Philoetius: your charge is the courtyard gates —
bolt them with the bar, and quickly lash the fastening on."36
So speaking he entered the well-settled house
and went and sat on the stool from which he had risen;
and then the two slaves of godlike Odysseus came in too.
245Eurymachus by now was handling the bow,
warming it this side and that at the glow of the fire —
and even so he could not string it. His proud heart groaned aloud,
and bursting out in anger he spoke a word and named it:
"Damn it — here is a grief for me, for myself and for us all!
250It is not the marriage I mourn so much, though that stings too:
there are plenty of other Achaean women, some right here
in sea-circled Ithaca, some in other towns.
No — it is that we fall so far short in strength
of godlike Odysseus that we cannot string
255his bow. A disgrace for even men unborn to hear of!"37
Then Antinous answered him, Eupeithes' son:
"Eurymachus, it will not stand so — and you know it yourself.
Today, through all the land, is the feast of the god —
his holy day. Who could be bending bows? No —38
260set it down and be easy. And the axes: why not leave them
standing, all of them? No one, I think, will carry them off —
no thief is coming into the hall of Laertes' son Odysseus.39
Come — let the cupbearer pour first-drops in the cups,
so we can make libation, and lay aside the curved bow;
265and in the morning tell Melanthius the goatherd
to drive in goats, the pick of all his herds,
so we can lay thigh-pieces on the altar of Apollo, lord of the bow,
and then try the bow, and finish out the contest."
So spoke Antinous, and his word pleased them well.
270And heralds poured water over their hands,
and young men crowned the mixing-bowls with drink
and served it round to all, with first-drops in the cups.
And when they had poured, and drunk as much as their hearts would have,
Odysseus of the many designs, with craft in mind, spoke among them:
275"Hear me, you suitors of the far-famed queen,
while I say what the heart in my breast commands.
To Eurymachus above all, and to godlike Antinous,
I make my plea — since he spoke this word too as it should be:
for now, let the bow rest; turn it over to the gods;
280and in the morning the god will give the mastery to whom he will.40
But come — give me the polished bow, so among you
I can try my hands and my strength: whether the force
is still there, that once lived in my supple limbs,
or wandering and neglect have destroyed it by now."41
285So he spoke; and they were all outraged past measure,
in dread that he would string the polished bow.42
And Antinous rebuked him, and spoke a word, and named him:
"You wretched stranger — not a grain of sense in you, not a trace!
Is it not enough that you feast at your ease with us,
290the great ones — never stinted of the meal, listening in
on all our speeches and our talk? No other stranger,
no beggar, gets to listen to our speeches.43
It is the wine that has you — the honey-sweet: it damages
any man who gulps it wide-mouthed past his measure.
295Wine — it was wine that maddened the Centaur, famous Eurytion,44
in the hall of great-hearted Peirithous,
on his visit to the Lapiths. And when the wine had maddened his wits,
raving mad he did his evil in Peirithous' house;
and grief seized the heroes, and they leapt up and dragged him
300out through the porch to the open air, and shore away
his ears and nose with the pitiless bronze; and he, his wits
destroyed, went off in his witless heart, hauling his ruin with him.
From that came the feud between Centaurs and men;
but he found the evil first for himself, heavy with wine.
305Just so I proclaim great trouble for you, if you should string
that bow. You will meet no kindness
in this land of ours — we will pack you straight off in a black ship
to King Echetus, the maimer of all mankind,45
and out of his hands nothing will save you. Sit easy,
310drink, and do not set yourself against younger men."
Then watchful-minded Penelope answered him:
"Antinous — it is not fine, and it is not just, to stint46
the guests of Telemachus, whoever comes to this house.
Do you think — if this stranger strings the great bow of Odysseus,
315trusting his hands and his own strength —
that he will lead me home and make me his wife?
He himself has no such hope in his breast.47
Let none of you sit at the feast here grieving
over that: it would not be seemly — no, and it is not thinkable."
320Then Eurymachus, Polybus' son, answered her:
"Daughter of Icarius, watchful-minded Penelope,
it is not that we think he will lead you off — unthinkable —
but we shrink from the talk of men and women:
that one of the baser Achaeans may say someday,
325'Men far weaker are wooing a blameless man's
wife — and they cannot even string his polished bow;
and then some other man, a wandering beggar, came
and strung the bow with ease, and shot through the iron.'
So they will say; and for us that would be shame heaped on shame."48
330Then watchful-minded Penelope answered him:
"Eurymachus — there is no fair fame in the land, and cannot be,
for men who dishonor and devour the house
of their better. Why count this thing your shame?49
The stranger here is very tall, and firmly built,
335and declares himself the son of a well-born father.
Come — give him the polished bow. Let us see it.
For I will say this outright, and it will be accomplished:
if he strings it — if Apollo grants him that glory —
I will dress him in a cloak and a tunic, fine clothing,50
340and give him a sharp javelin, to keep off dogs and men,
and a two-edged sword; and I will give him sandals for his feet,
and send him wherever his heart and spirit bid him go."
Then clear-headed Telemachus answered her:
"Mother mine — the bow: no Achaean has better right than I
345to give it or to refuse it to whomever I will —
not one of all who lord it through rocky Ithaca,
nor in the islands over toward horse-grazing Elis:
not one of them shall force me against my will, not even if I choose
to give the stranger this bow outright, to carry off for good.
350Go into the house and see to your own work,
the loom and the distaff, and command your handmaids
to go about their work. The bow belongs to men —
to all men, and to me above all: mine is the power in this house."51
In wonder, she went back into the house,
355for she laid her son's clear-headed word to heart.
Climbing to her upper room with her serving-women,
she wept there for Odysseus, her dear husband, until
gray-eyed Athena cast sweet sleep upon her eyelids.52
And the noble swineherd had taken up the curved bow and was carrying it —
360and the suitors, all of them, burst out shouting through the halls;
and a man of the arrogant young men would say:
"Where are you carrying that curved bow, you pitiful swineherd —
you drifter? Soon enough, out with your pigs, alone, away from men,
the swift dogs you raised yourself will eat you — if Apollo
365will only be gracious to us, and the other deathless gods."53
So they spoke; and he set the bow down where he stood, carrying it no further,
frightened, because the crowd of them was shouting through the halls.54
But Telemachus, from the other side, called out his threat:
"Old father — carry the bow on. You will soon be sorry, obeying them all.
370Watch out, or younger though I am I will chase you into the fields
pelting you with stones. In strength I am the better man.
If only I stood as far above all the suitors
in this house — in force of hands and strength —
I would soon send more than one of them off in misery,
375out of our house: for they devise evils."
So he spoke; and all the suitors laughed at him sweetly,55
and let go their bitter anger against Telemachus.
And the swineherd carried the bow up the hall
and stood by thoughtful Odysseus and set it in his hands.
380Then he called out the nurse Eurycleia and said:
"Telemachus commands you, watchful-minded Eurycleia:
bar the close-fitted doors of the women's hall,
and if any woman hears groaning or the crash of men
inside our walls, let her not run out,
385but stay where she is, at her work, in silence."
So he spoke; and for her the word stayed wingless.56
And she barred the doors of the well-settled halls.
In silence Philoetius slipped out of the house
and barred the gates of the well-fenced courtyard.
390Under the colonnade there lay a curved ship's cable
of byblus fiber; with it he lashed the gates, and went back in,57
and went and sat on the stool from which he had risen,
with his eyes on Odysseus. And he was handling the bow already,
turning it round and round, testing it this way and that,
395for worms that might have eaten the horn while its master was away.58
And a man would say, with a glance at his neighbor:
"Quite the connoisseur of bows! An expert eye — a thief's!59
No doubt he has bows like this one laid up at home —
or means to make one. Look how he turns it over,
400this way and that — the vagrant schooled in trouble!"
And another of the arrogant young men would say:
"May all his profit in life come out exactly
as his luck in ever managing to string that thing!"60
So the suitors talked. But Odysseus of the many designs,
405the moment he had hefted the great bow and eyed it everywhere —
as when a man skilled in the lyre and in singing
easily stretches a string around a new peg,
making the twisted sheep-gut fast at either end —
so without haste, without effort, Odysseus strung the great bow.61
410Then his right hand took hold and tried the string,
and under his touch it sang sweet, like a swallow's voice.62
A great ache took the suitors; the color changed
in every face; and Zeus thundered loud, showing his signs.63
And much-enduring noble Odysseus was glad
415that the son of crooked-counseled Cronos sent him an omen;
and he took up the swift arrow that lay bare on the table
beside him — the rest were stored inside the hollow quiver,
the ones the Achaeans were shortly going to taste.64
He set it on the bridge of the bow, drew back the string and the notched butt
420from the very stool where he sat, and let the arrow fly
with a straight aim, and did not miss a single axe —
from the first helve-ring clean on through: the arrow
heavy with bronze passed through and out. And he said to Telemachus:65
"Telemachus — the guest who sits in your halls does not
425disgrace you: I did not miss the mark, and I was not long
about stringing the bow. My strength stands yet unbroken —
not as the suitors' taunts would have it, in their disrespect.
But now it is time that supper too be made for the Achaeans,
while there is light — and after that, the other entertainments:
430the dance and the lyre. For these are the garnish of a feast."66
He spoke, and signaled with his brows. And he slung on his sharp sword,
Telemachus, the dear son of godlike Odysseus,
and closed his hand around his spear, and there beside him,
close by his chair, he stood — armed in the flashing bronze.67
1 line 1 — The opening names the double agency that runs the whole book: Athena puts it in Penelope's mind. Whose act is the contest? The line's last words refuse consolation: the bow is set out as "the contest, and the beginning of the slaughter" (ἀέθλια καὶ φόνου ἀρχήν) — prize and price in one breath. Whatever Penelope knows, the poem knows, and says so in line four. ↩
2 line 6 — The key: bent, bronze, ivory-handled — the most lovingly detailed lock-hardware in ancient literature, and she takes it "in her strong hand" (χειρὶ παχείῃ), a formula elsewhere reserved for the thick hands of warriors (Ctesippus threw the ox-hoof with it, 20.299). The poem arms Penelope with an epithet before it arms her husband with the bow. ↩
3 line 12 — "Groan-laden shafts" (στονόεντες ὀϊστοί) — the arrows carry their future tense in their epithet: freighted with the groans they will cause. Stored beside the treasures for twenty years, the quiver has been holding Book 22 in escrow. ↩
4 line 13 — The bow's pedigree is a xenia tragedy in miniature: given by Iphitus in Lacedaemon — a guest-gift beginning a friendship the two men never got to use, because Heracles killed Iphitus as a guest in his own house, shameless "before the gods' watching eye, nor for the table he himself had set." The weapon that will punish the abuse of hospitality enters the poem wrapped in the paradigm crime against it. Even Heracles, son of Zeus, is filed here as σχέτλιος — the poem's morality outranks its heroes. ↩
5 line 20 — Odysseus "a boy still," sent on embassy over a raid of three hundred sheep: the earliest datum in his biography besides the naming and the scar (19.393ff) — and it is debt-collection. The poem's economy is consistent from the cradle: he began his public life recovering stolen livestock, and today he finishes it the same way. ↩
6 line 27 — The Heracles digression cuts both ways: it damns the guest-killer, and it quietly warns that even a hero's house can become an abattoir — which is what this house becomes by nightfall. The difference the poem insists on: Heracles killed his guest; Odysseus will kill the men who made themselves no guests at all. ↩
7 line 38 — The bow never went to Troy: it stayed home, "a memorial of a beloved guest-friend," carried only on his own land. So the poem's climactic weapon is not war-gear but a relic of friendship — kept out of the epic's great war precisely so that it could wait here, domestic and sacred, for the war that matters: the defense of the house itself. ↩
8 line 48 — The storeroom doors "bellowed like a bull at pasture" at the key's stroke: the house has a voice, and it lows like the herds everyone in it keeps stealing. Long shut, the room protests its opening — or announces it: the sound is a fanfare exactly as loud as an omen. ↩
9 line 55 — She sits with the bow-case on her knees and weeps before drawing out "the master's bow" — the second time an object has stood in for the man (his clothes at 19.255ff; the bed still to come). She holds the bow as one holds a child or a corpse; then she carries it to the suitors. The gesture contains the whole book: grief in the storeroom, statecraft in the hall. ↩
10 line 63 — The veil entrance, fourth and final performance (1.333–335; 16.415–416; 18.209–211): pillar, veil, two handmaids. Every prior entrance stopped something — a song, a plot, a mood. This one starts something: the formula that always marked her intervention in the men's world now delivers the instrument of its ending. ↩
11 line 68 — Her speech to the suitors is an indictment disguised as an invitation: you have eaten this house "without ever a pause," and in all these years could produce no pretext but wanting me. Then the terms, repeated verbatim from her midnight announcement (19.577–581), down to the sentence that broke on the beggar's ears: "I think I shall remember it even in my dreams." ↩
12 line 75 — "Whoever strings the bow most easily" — ῥηΐτατα: ease, not strength alone, is the criterion she sets, and ease is exactly how the poem stages the winner (409: "without haste, without effort"). Her contest specifies its victor in the adverb. ↩
13 line 82 — Eumaeus weeps taking the bow; Philoetius weeps at the sight of it. The two sworn men cry in public over their master's weapon minutes before they are recruited by their master's scar — grief as credentials, publicly filed. Antinous reads it as rustic sentimentality; the poem reads it as the muster-roll. ↩
14 line 85 — "Brains that stop at the day's end" (ἐφημέρια φρονέοντες) — Antinous' sneer at the herdsmen accidentally quotes the beggar's great doctrine (18.136–137: the mind of man is the day the father sends). What was wisdom in Odysseus' mouth is contempt in his: the suitor flings the poem's deepest anthropology as an insult at the men who will help kill him. ↩
15 line 94 — Antinous' memory — "I saw him myself... though I was still a witless child" — is the book's strangest tenderness: the ringleader is old enough to remember Odysseus, and the memory surfaces as awe ("there is no man in this whole company such as Odysseus was"). For one line he tells the truth about the house he is destroying; then he organizes the queue to take it. ↩
16 line 98 — The narrator hangs Antinous in open court: "he was to be the first to taste an arrow from the hands of blameless Odysseus." The tasting returns in the English at 418 for all of them (the Greek varies its verb). Twenty-one books of restraint, and the poem cannot keep its own secret the last three hundred-odd lines to the payoff — the prolepsis is a reader's mercy and a judge's sentence. ↩
17 line 102 — Telemachus' clowning — "Zeus has made me witless! ... I laugh, and enjoy it, with my witless heart" — is tactical: the armed conspirator plays the giddy boy so the room reads the day as farce. Under it, one true sentence stands at 110: "Why should I praise my mother?" — the son declining to auction his mother's worth to her buyers. ↩
18 line 113 — His secret motive, stated in the open where no one can hear it: if I string the bow, I could bear her leaving — the master's gear would still have a master in the house. The contest has a third contestant no one invited, playing for a different prize: not the bride but the succession — proof that the bow stays home whoever takes the wife. ↩
19 line 120 — The axes: one long trench, trued to a line, earth stamped firm — and amazement takes the room, "who had never seen it before." Never seen the trick, or never seen the boy do a man's engineering? Both: the set-up is itself a feat, executed from inherited instinct by a son who was an infant when the bow last sang. The stage crew for his father's masterpiece is his own blood. ↩
20 line 128 — The three pulls, and the fourth that "would have strung it — but Odysseus shook his head." The poem's quietest enormous moment: the succession is real — the boy is one haul from his father's equal — and it is deferred, not denied, by a headshake. Telemachus obeys an instruction no one else saw, swallowing the triumph of his life. The plot needs the bow in older hands today; the epilogue of the gesture is that someday it will not. ↩
21 line 131 — His cover-speech recycles his own words from 16.71–72 ("too young... cannot trust my hands to defend a man") — a self-description that was true then, deployed now as camouflage precisely because it no longer is. The poem lets us hear the difference between the sentence meant and the sentence performed. ↩
22 line 141 — "Left to right, starting from where the wine is poured" — Antinous organizes the failure procession with liturgical tidiness: sunwise, from the cupbearer's station, like a libation. The suitors do everything in feast-order to the end; the deaths, hours away, will begin with the man who set the rotation. ↩
23 line 144 — Leodes: the suitors' own diviner, seated "farthest in" by the mixing-bowl, the only one who hates their outrages. The poem builds an ethical gradient even inside the mob — and then makes its decent man's hands "soft, unhardened" priest's hands, first to fail. His plea at 22.310ff will cite exactly what the poem certifies here; Odysseus will answer that a diviner who stayed prayed daily for the master never to come home. Decency without departure, once again, saves no one. ↩
24 line 152 — Leodes' outburst is prophecy in its working clothes: "Many chief men this bow is going to strip of life and breath." He means it figuratively — the contest will kill their hopes and it were better to die than keep missing the mark. The diviner speaks truer than his own reading; the bow will take him literally. ↩
25 line 168 — Antinous answers the true prophecy with the household's shock-formula — "what a word has slipped the fence of your teeth!" (1.64's line, last used by Eurycleia to Odysseus' death-threat, 19.492). The formula for unspeakable words keeps attaching itself to speech that is exactly accurate. ↩
26 line 184 — The lard, the fire, the warming: the young men treat the great bow like a stiff boot — grease it, soften it, coax it. The technology of failure is lovingly itemized; what the bow wants is not fat but its owner. Meanwhile the two chiefs "held off" — rank as an excuse for postponing the test rank cannot pass. ↩
27 line 186 — "In prowess far the best of them" — the poem's flat concession that Antinous and Eurymachus are the real men of the company, granted at the moment both are dodging the trial. Best of the suitors is a measurement the bow is about to calibrate exactly. ↩
28 line 193 — The recruitment question is a masterpiece of operational caution: hypothetical ("if he came from somewhere"), theological ("some god bringing him"), binary, and unsigned. He asks the two men to declare a side before revealing there is a side to declare. Philoetius answers with his 20.237 vow verbatim; Eumaeus with his standing prayer. Only then — "when he had proof of the true mind in both of them" — does the grammar change person. ↩
29 line 200 — "That the man himself come back, and a god guide him home" — Philoetius unknowingly repeats Eumaeus' prayer at the fountain (17.243) word for word. The two loyalists have never coordinated; the formula system testifies that loyalty in this poem is one text with several readers. ↩
30 line 207 — "He is home — here — I am the man myself" (ἔνδον μὲν δὴ ὅδʼ αὐτὸς ἐγώ): the syntax stumbles homeward — inside; this man; myself; I. Four ways of saying the same noun, stacked, after twenty years of aliases. To his son he said "I am your father"; to his slaves he says "I am the man" — each audience gets the identity in the grammar it prayed in. ↩
31 line 209 — "To you two only... Of the rest I have heard not one man praying that I come home." The intelligence file is cold: among all he has personally overheard in the disguise, the prayers for his return number two — and the loyalty roll he can vouch for is two herdsmen, a nurse, a son, and a wife. The killing, hours away, is scaled to that arithmetic. ↩
32 line 214 — The promises: wives, possessions, houses built near his, and the title "companions and brothers of Telemachus." Nothing in Homer comes closer to a manumission scene — and what it offers is not freedom downward into mere liberty but elevation toward kinship: slave-brothers of the heir in everything but name. The poem's answer to the slavery it has documented so unflinchingly is not abolition (it cannot imagine that) but embrace. ↩
33 line 219 — The scar again — shown now voluntarily, "so you may know me for certain": the wound Eurycleia found by accident becomes a credential presented on purpose. Same verse as 19.393: the boar, the white tusk, Parnassus, the sons of Autolycus. The body is the document; this is its third notarization (nurse, herdsmen; the fourth, for Laertes, waits at 24.331). ↩
34 line 223 — The embrace is symmetrical: they kiss his head and shoulders, "and in the same way Odysseus kissed their heads and hands." The master kisses the slaves' hands — the hands he has just contracted for the fight. No other Homeric king kisses a slave; the poem spends the gesture here, where the class line matters most and holds least. ↩
35 line 226 — "The light of the sun would have gone down on their weeping" — the same line that closed the father-son recognition (16.220). Reunions in this family run on past sundown unless someone stops them — there it was Telemachus, here Odysseus — happiness cut short on schedule. Grief-discipline is the family art: weep fully, then exactly stop. ↩
36 line 230 — The orders, distributed by station: Eumaeus delivers the bow against the room's will and carries the word to Eurycleia to bar the women's hall; Philoetius bars the courtyard. Bow, women, gates — weapon, witnesses, exits. Twenty years of siegecraft compressed into three assignments — and the locking itself is done, as it should be, by the housekeeper's own hands (387). ↩
37 line 249 — Eurymachus' grief is the truest sentence he ever speaks, arrived at for the vainest reason: "It is not the marriage I mourn so much... it is that we fall so far short of godlike Odysseus." The comparison is the disgrace — "for even men unborn to hear of." He has, for one moment, exactly measured himself; posterity got the report he feared, in this poem. ↩
38 line 258 — Antinous' theology of postponement: it is the archer-god's holy day — "who could be bending bows?" The answer is sitting in the hall with the bow already promised to him. On Apollo's feast, Apollo's own instrument comes back to tune; the piety that defers the contest hands it to the one man the god's day fits. ↩
39 line 261 — "No thief is coming into the hall of Laertes' son Odysseus" — Antinous reassures the room about the axes with the poem's finest unwitting joke: the man in the hall is not coming for the axes, is no thief (he owns them), and is the grandson of the greatest thief in Greece. Every clause wrong in a different direction. ↩
40 line 278 — Odysseus seconds Antinous' motion — "since he spoke this word too as it should be" — praising the postponement he is about to make irrelevant. The courtesy is real strategy: by ratifying "tomorrow for the contest," he reframes his own request as no contest at all, just an old man's curiosity about his strength. The suitors' rules are always his best tools. ↩
41 line 282 — "Whether the force is still there... or wandering and neglect have destroyed it" — the request wears the beggar's whole biography as its cover story, and it is also, under the mask, a true question. Twenty years, the sea, Calypso, the rags: the man does not entirely know what the trial will show. The poem lets the suspense be real even for its rigger. ↩
42 line 285 — "In dread that he would string the polished bow": the room's fear has been gathering its evidence all along — the thighs and shoulders under the rags (18.66–74), Irus dropped with one careful blow. The dread is the truth in them that their mockery keeps down; they refuse him the bow because some animal part of every suitor has already recognized its owner. ↩
43 line 289 — Antinous' catalogue of the beggar's privileges — he eats with "the great ones," he hears our speeches — offered as generosity, lands as evidence: the man has indeed heard everything. The suitor's boast of inclusion is the prosecution's exhibit list. ↩
44 line 295 — The Centaur parable: Eurytion, wine-mad in Peirithous' hall, dragged through the porch, ears and nose shorn off — "he found the evil first for himself." Antinous means it as a warning to the drunk beggar; the poem means it as a mirror: a feast, an outrage, a mutilation in the doorway — it is Melanthius' exact fate (22.474ff) and the suitors' general one. He proclaims "great trouble for you if you string that bow"; the trouble is his, and the bow is already in the hall. The mythological threat is the book's most complete boomerang. ↩
45 line 308 — Echetus again (= 18.85, the same verse): the offshore bogeyman-king as the suitors' all-purpose deterrent. Their imagination of punishment is always elsewhere, outsourced, someone else's hands; the punishment actually scheduled is local, in-house, and the man they are threatening holds its instrument. ↩
46 line 312 — Penelope opens on Ctesippus' own line (20.294–295): "it is not fine, and it is not just, to stint the guests of Telemachus." The words that dressed an ox-hoof as a guest-gift come back washed — mock-courtesy re-minted as real justice, in the mouth of the woman of the house. The formula system runs its quiet court: the suitors' phrases keep being subpoenaed. ↩
47 line 317 — "He himself has no such hope in his breast" — the poem's dramatic irony at its most delicious, and possibly its most double. She is right for the room's purposes (a beggar cannot mean marriage) and wrong in every other register: the stranger's whole hope is precisely to lead her home — he is already there. Whether some part of her says it because it can be said safely, the poem keeps sealed. ↩
48 line 324 — Eurymachus' nightmare gossip — "a wandering beggar came and strung the bow with ease, and shot through the iron" — is an advance transcript of what is about to happen in this hall, accurate in every substance if not in wording. He drafts the case posterity will make and calls it the unbearable one. The poem grants him full authorship of his own disgrace: no bard said it better. ↩
49 line 331 — Her retort dismantles the shame-logic at its root: men who "dishonor and devour the house of their better" have no fair fame left to protect — the reputational account they are guarding is already empty. It is the shortest complete moral audit of the suitors anyone delivers, and it comes from the person they propose to marry. ↩
50 line 338 — The clothing-promise, final and fullest form: cloak and tunic, plus javelin, sword, sandals, and the fixed close "send him wherever his heart and spirit bid him go" (14.516–517 → 15.337–339 → 16.79–81 → 17.550 → now). The earlier promises clothed the beggar; Penelope's version arms him. She proposes, in open hall, to equip the stranger with weapons — one sentence before her son sends her upstairs and the equipping happens another way. ↩
51 line 350 — Lines 350–353 repeat Telemachus' first assertion of manhood (1.356–359) with one word changed: μῦθος has become τόξον — "the word belongs to men" is now "the bow belongs to men." The poem measures the whole epic's arc in that substitution: in Book 1 the boy claimed speech; in Book 21 the man claims the weapon — and the claim's real content is operational: she must be out of the hall before the arrows. The famous line does its tender, brutal work twice at once — asserting the son's authority and saving the mother's life. ↩
52 line 354 — Her exit = 1.360–364 entire, the refrain's last performance: wonder, the son's word laid to heart, the stairs, the weeping, Athena's sleep. She will sleep through the slaughter — the goddess's anesthesia, sparing her the hall she has managed for twenty years at the one hour it cannot be managed. When she next wakes, the poem will owe her a husband. ↩
53 line 362 — The threat to Eumaeus — his own dogs will eat him among his pigs, "alone, away from men" — is the suitors' cruelty in its purest form: they curse the swineherd with the exact solitude in which his loyalty lives. The Apollo-clause tacked on ("if Apollo will only be gracious") keeps their piety current while they threaten a slave with dog-death on the god's feast day. ↩
54 line 366 — The plan's one wobble: Eumaeus, shouted at by the whole hall, sets the bow down mid-carry. The poem allows its most faithful man a moment of ordinary fear — a hallful of lords screaming at a slave — so that Telemachus can rescue the delivery, and so that we see the bow's last meters to its owner's hands are walked on courage, not script. ↩
55 line 376 — Telemachus saves the handoff with comedy: the mock-threat to stone the old swineherd back to the farm, the rueful wish to be stronger than the whole room. The suitors laugh "sweetly" — and their anger dissolves precisely as the bow completes its journey. He has learned to weaponize his own harmlessness: the boy-act buys the bow its last steps. ↩
56 line 386 — The wingless word, third flight (17.57; 19.29 and now, Eurycleia both these times): she obeys without a syllable and bars the doors. The formula for wordless obedience has become the sound of the trap closing — softly, on well-oiled hinges, with the housekeeper's own hands. ↩
57 line 390 — Philoetius bars the gates with a ship's cable of byblus — Egyptian papyrus rope, ocean gear. The sea that kept Odysseus from the house for ten years now lends its tackle to lock the house shut around his enemies: the poem's maritime half reaches ashore for one last knot. ↩
58 line 393 — The worm-check: the master turns his bow "this way and that," inspecting the horn for twenty years of beetle damage, in front of men who read the inspection as a vagrant's covetousness. It is the book's thesis in dumb-show: knowledge looks like presumption to those who cannot imagine the knower. He is not admiring the bow; he is auditing his own long absence. ↩
59 line 397 — "An expert eye — a thief's!" (ἐπίκλοπος): the mocker reaches for an insult and lands, blind, on genealogy — the man is Autolycus' grandson, heir of the master-thief "in thievery and the oath" (19.396). Taunt after taunt in this book lands as accidental documentary; the suitors have been right about him all day in every register but the one that counts. ↩
60 line 401 — The luck-wish — may his life's profit match his chance of stringing it — is the last kledon of the poem, and like all the others it executes exactly as worded: his profit and the stringing come out identical, both total. The suitors have now blessed him twice (18.112ff) and cursed him once, and every utterance has filed itself on his side of the ledger. ↩
61 line 406 — The stringing simile: as a singer stretches a new string on his lyre's peg — easy, familiar, both ends made fast — "so without haste, without effort, Odysseus strung the great bow." The poem's final self-portrait: bard and bowman are one craft, tension mastered into music. The man who told lies like truth (19.203, the poet's simile) now strings death like a lyre. Everything the Odyssey believes about skill — that its summit looks like ease — is in the two words ἄτερ σπουδῆς. ↩
62 line 411 — He plucks the string and it "sang sweet, like a swallow's voice": the bow speaks under its owner's thumb again, and the note is birdsong — and the swallow is the spring migrant, the bird that returns to the house it nested in. The whole homecoming compressed into an instrument-check; the room hears a chirp, the poem hears the year turning. ↩
63 line 412 — The triple response: the suitors' ache and change of color (their bodies, again, ahead of their minds — cf. 20.345ff); Zeus's thunder, second of the day (20.103), the god countersigning; and Odysseus "glad" — the same quiet joy he took in the kledones. Sky and flesh have both voted; only the arrow remains to publish the result. ↩
64 line 416 — The bare arrow on the table — singular, unquivered, lying in the open all through the feast like a loaded fact — "the rest... the ones the Achaeans were shortly going to taste" (in the English an echo of 98; the Greek varies its verb). The inventory is exact: one for the axes, the quiver for the house. ↩
65 line 419 — The shot: seated, from his stool, no stance, no rise — through all twelve, "from the first helve-ring clean on through." The contest specified ease (75); the champion performs it from a chair. Every failed suitor stood braced on the threshold; the owner does it sitting down, the way a man signs his name. ↩
66 line 428 — The coded speech: "supper... while there is light — and after that... the dance and the lyre: the garnish of a feast." Every noun is a codeword the room cannot read: the supper is the "graceless" one promised at 20.392–394; the lyre has just been strung; the dance is Book 22. He announces the massacre in the vocabulary of hospitality — the language the suitors abused for four years, handed back to them with its meanings loaded. ↩
67 line 431 — The nod — the eyebrow-signal the son has been watching for — and the final tableau: the father seated with the strung bow, the son standing at his shoulder "armed in the flashing bronze." No suitor has moved; the room still thinks it is at dinner. The book ends in the drawn breath between the omen and the arrow — Book 22 will name the target eight lines in. ↩