Homer: The Odyssey/Chapter 10

Penelope, far off in her chamber, has not heard the tumult, for the doors between the men's and women's apartments had been carefully locked by Eumæus, by his lord's order. Even when the nurse rushes up to her with the tidings that Ulysses himself has returned, and made this terrible lustration of his household, she yet remains incredulous. The riotous crew may have met their deserved fate, but the hand that has slain them must be that of some deity, not of Ulysses. Yet she will go down and look upon the corpses. There, leaning "by a pillar" in the royal place—like King Joash at his coronation, or King Josiah when he sware to the covenant—she beholds Ulysses. But he is still in his beggar's weed, and after twenty years of absence she is slow to recognise him. Both Eurycleia and Telemachus break into anger at her incredulity. The king himself is outwardly as little moved as ever. He will give tokens of his identity hereafter. For the present there are precautions to be taken. The slaughter of so many nobles of Ithaca will scarce be taken lightly ​when it is heard in the island; it must not be known abroad until he can try the temper of his subjects, and gather a loyal host around him. All traces of the bloody scene which has just been enacted must be carefully concealed; the house must ring with harp, and song, and dance, that all who hear may think the queen has made her choice at last, and is holding her wedding-feast to-day—as, in truth, in a better sense she shall. Ulysses himself goes to the bath to wash away the stains of slaughter. Thence he comes forth endued once more by his guardian goddess with the "hyacinthine" locks and the grand presence which he had worn in the court of Phæacia. He appeals now to his wife's memory, for she yet gives no sure sign of recognition:—

Penelope does recognise the form and features—it is indeed, to all outward appearance, the Ulysses from whom she parted in tears twenty years ago. But such appearances are deceitful; gods have been known, ere now, to put on the form of men to gain the love of mortals. She will put him to one certain test she wots of. "Give him his own bed," she says to the nurse; "go, bring it forth from what was our bridal chamber." But the couch of which she speaks is, as ​she and he both well know, immovable. Its peculiar structure, as detailed in Homer's verse, is by no means easy to unravel. But it is formed in some cunning fashion out of the stem of an olive-tree, rooted and growing, round which the hero himself had built a bridal chamber. Move it?—"There lives no mortal," exclaims Ulysses, "who could stir it from its place." Then, at last, all Penelope's long doubts are solved in happy certainty:—

When they retire to rest, each has a long tale to tell. The personal adventures of Ulysses alone (however careful he might have been to abridge them in some particulars for his present auditor) would have made up many an Arabian Night's entertainment. There would surely have been little time left for Penelope's story, but that Minerva's agency lengthens the ordinary night—

Here, according to our modern notions of completeness, the Odyssey should surely end. Accordingly some critics have surmised that the twenty-fourth and last book is not Homer's, but a later addition. But we may very well suppose that the primitive taste for narrative in the poet's day was more simple and child-like; that an ancient Greek audience would inquire, as our own children would, into all the details of the sequel, and not be satisfied even with the comprehensive assertion that "they lived happy ever afterwards." We have therefore, in the text as it has come down to us, a kind of supplement to the tale, which, as is the case ​with the later scenes in some of Shakespeare's tragedies, rather weakens the force of the real catastrophe. An episode at the beginning of this last book shows us again the regions of the dead, to which the god Mercury is conducting the spirits of the dead suitors—pale ghosts who follow him, gibbering and cowering with fear, into that "sunless land." The main purpose of the poet seems to be the opportunity once more of introducing the shades of the great heroes, Achilles and Agamemnon; the latter contrasting his own miserable and dishonoured end with that of Achilles, blest above all mortals, dying in battle with all the flower of Ilium and Greece around him, and leaving a name which is a sound of glory over the whole earth. So also does he contrast, to Penelope's honour, her fidelity with the treachery of his own queen Clytemnestra; giving voice to a prophecy which has been fulfilled almost beyond even a poet's aspirations:—

Ulysses himself has yet to visit and make himself known to his aged father Laertes, who is still alive, but living in sad retirement on his island-farm, solacing himself as well as he may with pruning and tending his orchard-grounds. The recognition scene, in which the scar left by the boar's tusk is once more the touchstone, will seem tedious, as savouring too much of repetition, to most readers of our day. But there is one point ​which has a special and simple beauty of its own. When Laertes seems yet incredulous as to his son's identity, Ulysses reminds him how, when he was yet a child, following his father about the orchards, and begging with a child's pertinacity, he had given him "for his very own" a certain number of apple, fig, and pear trees and vines—all which he can still remember and enumerate. The token is irresistible, and the old man all but faints for joy.

An attempt at rebellion on the part of some of his Ithacan subjects, who are enraged at his slaughter of their nobles, and which is headed by the father of the dead Antinous, fails to revive the fading interest of the tale. The ringleader falls by a spear cast by the trembling hand of Laertes, and the malcontents submit, after a brief contest, to their lawful chief.

A hint of future travel for the hero leaves his history in some degree still incomplete. A penance had been imposed upon him by the seer Tiresias, by which alone he could appease Neptune for the cruel injury inflicted on his son, the giant Polyphemus. He must seek out some people who had never seen the sea, and never eaten salt, and there offer sacrifice to the god. Then, and only then, he might hope to reign for the rest of his life in peace amongst his islanders. Of the fulfilment of this pilgrimage the poet tells us nothing. Other legends represent Ulysses as meeting his death at last from the hand of his own son Telegonus (born of his amour with Circe), who had landed in the island of Ithaca on a piratical enterprise. We may remark the coincidence—or the imitation—in the later legend of ​the British Arthur, who is slain in battle by his illegitimate son Mordred. The veil which even tradition leaves hanging over the great wanderer's fate is no in-appropriate conclusion to his story. A life of inaction, even in his old age, seems hardly suited to the poetical conception of this hero of unrest. In the fragmentary legends of the Middle Ages there is almost material for a second Odyssey. There, the Greek voyager becomes the pioneer of Atlantic discoverers—sailing still on into the unknown West in search of the Earthly Paradise, founding new cities as he goes, and at last meeting his death in Atlantic waters. The Italian poets—Tasso, Pulci, and especially Dante—adopted the tradition. In the 'Inferno' of the latter, the spirit of Ulysses thus discloses the last scenes of his career:—

Thus also Mr Tennyson—drawing from Dante not less happily than he so often does from Homer—makes his Ulysses resign the idle sceptre into the hands of the home-keeping Telemachus, and tempt the seas once more in quest of new adventures:—