Then Ulysses called the servants and bade them carry the bodies away. And he ordered Euryclea to wash the blood-stained floors, and to bring sulphur and torches that the place might be purified.
And that night great beacons flared on the hills, and far out to sea the fishermen saw them and said, “Surely the king has come home again.”
And while the music rang though the lighted palace and the people passed before the gates shouting for joy, old Euryclea spread the marriage bed of the king by the light of flaming torches.
And when all was prepared, the old nurse went to Ulysses and Penelope and led them to the door of the marriage chamber, as she had led them twenty years before.
Then the music ceased in the palace halls and silence fell over all the house.
A NOTE ON HOMER AND ULYSSES
The uncertainty which prevails as to the actual birthplace of Homer also extends to the exact period at which he flourished. Doubts have been expressed by some modern scholars as to whether the poet ever existed as a personality. The view that the Iliad and Odyssey were not the work of an individual, but merely a collection of old folklore verse welded into a whole by many hands, made compact by ages, a self-born epic rising from crystallised tradition, is, however, not a tenable one, and need not be discussed here.
As far as we are able to place the poet in his period correctly, we can say with some certainty that he flourished at a time between 800 and 900 years before the birth of Christ.
The Arundelian marbles fix his era at 907 years before the dawn of Christianity. About the life of the most ancient of all poets nothing whatever is known. There is a tradition that he had a school of followers in the Island of Chios, and we have early records of celebrations held there in his honour every few years. But no proof whatever exists of the truth of the supposition, though up to quite modern times the islanders maintained and believed in it.