The Test of the Marriage Bed — The Odyssey

Euryclea runs upstairs laughing. Penelope says the gods have stolen the nurse's wits. Even after Euryclea names the stranger in the cloister, the blood, the sulphur, and the scar she was not allowed to report, Penelope answers that some god killed the suitors; Odysseus is dead far from the Achaean land. She comes down anyway. She sits opposite the ragged man by the fire and does not speak. Telemachus calls her heart as hard as a stone. She says they have tokens hidden from all others. Odysseus smiles and lets her test him. Then he turns to the real danger: they have killed the stay of a whole town. He orders shirts, a dance, and Phemius's lyre so the street will think a wedding, not a massacre, until they can reach his woods.

Athena makes him taller, with hair like hyacinth. Still Penelope is not struck by his looks. She tells Euryclea to take his bed outside the room he built. Odysseus is furious. He describes the living olive he left as a stump, the room of stone he raised around it, the gold and silver inlay, the crimson hide. No man could move it unless a god helped, or unless someone cut the tree at the root. She breaks, kisses him, and asks him not to be angry. Helen, she says, would never have gone with a foreigner if she had known what would follow; twenty years have taught Penelope to fear a lying story. Only she, he, and Actor's daughter have ever seen that bed.

Athena holds Dawn in the west. He tells her they have not reached the end. Teiresias ordered him to walk inland with an oar until a wayfarer calls it a winnowing shovel, then sacrifice to Poseidon, and wait for a gentle death from the sea. She asks to hear it now rather than later. After they go to the old bed he tells the whole voyage, from the Cicons and the Lotus-eaters through the Cyclops, Circe, Hades, the Sirens, Scylla, the sun-god's cattle, Calypso, and the Phaeacians. At daylight he tells her to stay upstairs with the women and see nobody. He arms Telemachus and the two herdsmen. Athena hides them in darkness and leads them out of town toward Laertes.