questions him about Odysseus. Their long conversation (which is interrupted by the
recognition scene involving his old nurse Eurycleia), since it is centred upon the
absent husband who is actually present, is full of irony and pathos. Penelope
unburdens herself to the stranger, telling him of the pressures she reluctantly faces to
remarry. Odysseus silently grieves for his sorrowing wife, trying to comfort her with
a tale that he has recently seen Odysseus whom he predicts will soon return.
Penelope, however, does not believe him and, in the course of their conversation, she
comes to the momentous decision to arrange for the contest with the great bow of
Odysseus; she will marry the man who can string it. This is the opportunity that
Odysseus has been waiting for. When none of the suitors proves adequate to the task,
he asks for the chance to try himself. Telemachus ensures that he is given the bow
and so starts the killing of the suitors.
The scene is now set for the climactic recognition scene between husband and
wife. Penelope is cautious and in turn tests Odysseus. When she finally suspends her
disbelief, she compares her position to that of Helen (who had yielded to the stranger
Paris, who then abducted her to Troy causing the war with the Greeks), thus
crystallizing for the audience the prudence of her conduct by contrast. In the final
book the scene shifts to the underworld where the shades of the suitors tell their
version of their miserable end to the shades of Achilles and Agamemnon, who sets
the seal of heroic approval upon the action of Odysseus and extols the virtue of
Penelope. ‘Blessed is Odysseus in the great virtue of his wife, always loyal to him. The
fame of her virtue (arete)will never perish, and the immortals will fashion a beautiful
song in honour of Penelope the wise’ (24, 192–202: echephron, having understand-
ing, prudent or self-possessed, the epithet given earlier by Athena to Odysseus).
Agamemnon, who had been murdered by his own wife Clytemnestra and her
paramour Aegisthus on his return from Troy, speaks feelingly here. So many Greek
myths show the dominance of cruel and treacherous passions indulged without any
restraint of civilised feeling or morality, but the Odyssey ends in a peace endorsed by
the gods when Athena intervenes to prevent any backlash from the relatives of the
slain suitors. In the happy ending of the Odyssey, Homer rewards the wise restraint of
his characters and serenely celebrates the most basic natural bonds of human life
between parent and child and above all between husband and wife.
Homer endows Odysseus with that quality of restraint that he exhibits himself in
the controlling artistry of his poems, manifested both in their measured style and their
balanced structure. Both poems may be said to recommend in different ways the two
great maxims of Greek culture inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi: gnothi
seauton, Know Thyself, and meden agan, Nothing in Excess.
EARLY GREECE: HOMER AND HESIOD 25