Summary
Eurycleia wakes Penelope with the news. Penelope refuses to believe it, first that the beggar is Odysseus, then that any mortal could have killed a hundred and eight men.
She comes down and sits opposite him in silence, sometimes seeming to know him and sometimes not. Telemachus reproaches her; she answers that if it is truly him they have signs known only to the two of them.
Odysseus, washed and restored by Athena, sits down again. Penelope orders Eurycleia to move the bed out of the bedchamber and make it up for him. Odysseus flares into anger: he built the bed himself, around a living olive trunk still rooted in the ground, and no man could move it unless a god had cut it free.
Her knees give way. She embraces him, explaining that she feared an impostor, and the poem compares her joy to the relief of shipwrecked men sighting land — a simile that belongs to his experience, given to her. Athena holds back the dawn. In bed he tells her of Tiresias's prophecy: that he must travel again, inland, carrying an oar, until he meets people who do not know the sea.
Narrative function
Completes the poem's central recognition, on the wife's terms and by her test rather than his.
Greek concepts in this book
- sēma
- The token. The bed is the poem's greatest sēma because it cannot be reported, only known: a fact about a room that only two living people and one dead servant ever knew.
- homophrosynē
- Like-mindedness. The scene demonstrates it: she sets a trap, he walks into it by being exactly who he is, and the trap is the proof.
Connections to other books
Book 19
Answers the interview of Book 19: there she tested and he evaded; here she tests and he cannot.
Book 11
The prophecy of further travel comes from Tiresias in Book 11 and is passed to Penelope here.
Book 5
The rooted bed is the counterweight to Calypso's offer of immortality: this is what was chosen instead.
Source notes
A note in the scholia records that the Alexandrian scholars Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus marked 23.296 as the peras or telos — the end — of the Odyssey. What that judgement meant, and whether the rest of the poem is a later addition, has been argued ever since and is not settled.
Reading it responsibly
The test of the bed is the only occasion in the poem where Odysseus is outmanoeuvred, and his wife does it. He is provoked into self-revelation by an insult to his craftsmanship. The poem has spent twenty-two books demonstrating that this man can control any disclosure of himself, and then shows the one person who can make him lose that control. It is the best-constructed scene in early European literature and it turns on a bedframe.