The interview, the scar, and the dream

Summary

Odysseus and Telemachus remove the weapons from the hall. Melantho abuses the beggar again and is rebuked.

Penelope questions the stranger. He tells another Cretan tale, claiming to have entertained Odysseus twelve days on his way to Troy, and describes his clothing and his brooch in exact detail. She weeps, and the poem compares her tears to snow melting on the mountains. He swears Odysseus will return within the month.

Penelope orders the old nurse Eurycleia to wash his feet. Washing them she finds the scar of a boar's tusk on his thigh; the poem breaks off for some seventy lines to tell how he got it hunting on Parnassus with his grandfather Autolycus, and how Autolycus named him. She drops his foot into the basin; he seizes her throat and swears her to silence. Athena keeps Penelope's attention elsewhere.

Penelope tells a dream: an eagle kills her twenty geese and then speaks in Odysseus's voice. She then describes the two gates of dreams, of horn and of ivory, and doubts her own. Finally she announces the contest of the bow and the axes for the next day.

Narrative function

The poem's central psychological encounter, and the point at which the contest that ends the poem is set in motion.

Greek concepts in this book