Telemachus tells his mother of his journey, and his friend Theoclymenus, who has the gift of second-sight, prophesies the speedy return of Odysseus. Soon the hero himself appears as a beggar in his own halls, and is roughly treated by the haughty wooers. He soundly whips the braggart beggar Irus, and the story of his presence is noised throughout the house.
Constant Penelope is ever anxious to hear some word of her lord, and every wandering stranger with a tale to tell could win rich gifts from her by devising some story of Odysseus. She has heard of the beggar in her halls, and summons him to her presence and questions him, and tells him of her grief and her longing for more news of the absent one. When crafty Odysseus fashioned a story of his entertaining her lord in Crete, her tears flowed as she listened, and she wept for her own lord who was sitting by her. The disguised hero had compassion for his wife; but he craftily hid his tears, and described the appearance of Odysseus so fully that she could not deny the certain likeness.
Then the aged nurse Euryclea, who had tended him in his youth, is asked to wash the feet of the old man. As the crone makes ready the caldron, a sudden fear seizes Odysseus lest when she handles his foot she might know the scar of the wound that the boar had dealt him with its white tusk in his boyhood. When the old woman took the scarred limb, she knew it by the touch, and grief and joy seized her, and she called him Odysseus, her dear child. Then would she have revealed the glad news to Penelope, had Odysseus not seized her by the throat and made her swear to keep his presence secret until the slaying of the lordly wooers.
CIRCE
After the painting by Henri P. Motte.
The myth of Circe turning the companions of Ulysses
into swines shows the religious belief, in ancient Greece, in
magical transformation of human beings into animals.
Next day occurs the famous trial of the bow of Odysseus, which none of the suitors can draw; then Odysseus gets the bow into his hands, strings it, sends the arrow through the axheads, and finally, leaping on the stone threshold, deals his shafts among the wooers. The wretched company are all slaughtered, the faithless women of the household are hanged, and ominous silence reigns over the palace of Odysseus.
Euryclea hastens to the upper chamber to bring to Queen Penelope the good news that Odysseus has surely come and has slain the haughty wooers. The fair lady can with difficulty believe the tidings, but she is finally persuaded to go down to see the wooers dead and him that slew them.
"With the word, she went down from the upper chamber, and much her heart debated whether she should stand apart and question her dear lord or draw nigh and clasp his head and hands. But when she had come within and had crossed the threshold of stone, she sat down over against Odysseus, in the light of the fire, by the further wall. Now, he was sitting by the tall pillar, looking down and waiting to know if perchance his noble wife would speak to him, when her eyes beheld him. But she sat long in silence, and amazement came upon her soul, and now she would look upon him steadfastly with her eyes, and now again she knew him not, for that he was clad in vile raiment. And Telemachus rebuked her, and spake and hailed her:
"'Mother mine, ill mother, of an ungentle heart, why turnest thou thus away from my father, and dost not sit by him and question him and ask him all? No other woman in the world would harden her heart to stand thus aloof from her lord, who, after much travail and sore, had come to her in the twentieth year to his own country. But thy heart is ever harder than stone.'