The Homecoming
Odysseus Stop 8 of 8
In brief
- After twenty years away, Odysseus returned to Ithaca in disguise to find his palace overrun by suitors demanding his wife Penelope remarry.
- Penelope had held them off for years with a trick, unweaving by night the burial shroud she claimed to be finishing by day.
- Revealing himself only once he had strung his own unbendable bow, Odysseus and his son Telemachus slaughtered every suitor in the hall.
Twenty years after he first left for Troy (ten years of war, ten more of disastrous voyage home), Odysseus finally reached the shores of Ithaca, aged and battered, disguised as a beggar by the goddess Athena so he could assess the situation before revealing himself.
What he found was dire. Believing him long dead, more than a hundred suitors had taken over his palace, feasting on his household's wealth and each demanding that his wife Penelope choose one of them to marry. Penelope had held them off for three years with a clever trick, weaving a burial shroud by day for Odysseus's elderly father, and secretly unweaving it every night, insisting she could not remarry until the shroud was finished.
With the trick finally discovered and her excuses running out, Penelope announced a contest: she would marry whichever suitor could string her husband's old hunting bow and shoot an arrow through the aligned holes of twelve axe heads, a feat no ordinary man could accomplish. One by one, every suitor tried and failed even to bend the bow.
Still disguised as a beggar, Odysseus asked to try, to the suitors' mockery, and strung the bow effortlessly, the one man alive still capable of it. Revealing his true identity at last, he turned the bow on the suitors themselves, and with his son Telemachus and a pair of loyal servants at his side, he and his family slaughtered every last one of them in the hall, finally reclaiming his home, his wife, and his throne after twenty years away.
