Part VII: Test of the Bow

Penelope's Contest

Penelope descends to the storeroom. She unlocks a chest and takes out Odysseus's great bow — the one he left behind twenty years ago when he sailed for Troy. She takes it to the hall, where the suitors are drinking, and makes an announcement:

She will marry whoever can string the bow and shoot an arrow through the holes in twelve axe-heads set in a line.

The suitors know instantly this is an impossible task. Odysseus's bow is famous. It is huge, stiff with age, and stringing it alone requires a strength none of them can produce. One by one they warm the wood, grease the string, brace the bow against the floor, and fail.

Meanwhile, Odysseus has slipped outside with the swineherd Eumaeus and the cowherd Philoetius and revealed himself to them. He shows them the old scar. He tells them what is about to happen. He posts them at the gates.

The Stringing of the Bow

Now, in his beggar's rags, Odysseus asks to try the bow. The suitors are furious — a beggar, trying where they have failed? But Penelope insists. The doors are locked.

Odysseus, when he had taken it up and examined it all over, strung it as easily as a skilled bard strings a new peg of his lyre and makes the twisted gut fast at both ends.

Then he took it in his right hand to prove the string, and it sang sweetly under his touch like the twittering of a swallow.

The suitors were dismayed and turned color as they heard it. At that moment Zeus thundered loudly as a sign, and the heart of Odysseus rejoiced.

He took an arrow that was lying upon the table and laid it on the centre-piece of the bow, and drew the notch and the string toward him, still seated. When he had taken aim he let fly, and his arrow pierced every one of the handle-holes of the axes from the first onwards till it had gone right through them.

Then he said to Telemachus: 'Your guest has not disgraced you, Telemachus. I did not miss what I aimed at, and I was not long in stringing my bow. I am still strong.'

The Slaughter

Odysseus drops his rags and stands on the pavement with the bow and quiver. Telemachus takes his place beside him, armed. The swineherd and cowherd move to guard the doors.

The first arrow kills Antinous — the worst of the suitors, their ringleader — as he is lifting a gold cup to his lips. He falls backward, feet kicking, overturning the table. The other suitors look for weapons and find none. Telemachus has already moved them.

Odysseus tells them who he is. Eurymachus tries to bargain. Odysseus refuses. The fighting is brief and absolute.

They fled to the other end of the court like a herd of cattle maddened by the gadfly in early summer. As eagle-beaked vultures from the mountains swoop down on the smaller birds that cower in flocks upon the ground, and kill them, for they cannot either fight or fly — even so did Odysseus and his men fall upon the suitors and smite them on every side.

They made a horrible groaning as their brains were being battered in, and the ground seethed with their blood.

Homer does not look away from this either. The poem was composed in a world where such things happened. He reports it and moves on.

Discussion

1. Penelope proposes the bow contest without knowing Odysseus is in the room. Is this coincidence, or is Homer suggesting she knows something she doesn't consciously know?
2. The bow string 'sang like a swallow'. Why does Homer use a simile comparing the sound of a weapon to birdsong at this moment?
3. The slaughter of the suitors is brutal and total. Homer describes it without apparent judgment. Do you feel it is justified? Does the poem seem to?