As he said this Eurykleia left
the room to fetch some more water, for the first had been all spilt;
and when she had washed him and anointed him with oil, Odysseus drew
his seat nearer to the fire to warm himself, and hid the scar under
his rags. Then Penelope began talking to him and said:
"Stranger, I should like to speak
with you briefly about another matter. It is indeed nearly bed time -
for those, at least, who can sleep in spite of sorrow. As for myself,
a daimôn has given me a life of such unmeasurable woe
[penthos], that even by day when I am attending to my
duties and looking after the servants, I am still weeping and
lamenting during the whole time; then, when night comes, and we all
of us go to bed, I lie awake thinking, and my heart becomes prey to
the most incessant and cruel tortures. As the dun nightingale,
daughter of Pandareus, sings in the early spring from her seat in
shadiest covert hid, and with many a plaintive trill pours out the
tale how by mishap she killed her own child Itylos, son of king
Zethos, even so does my mind toss and turn in its uncertainty whether
I ought to stay with my son here, and safeguard my substance, my
bondsmen, and the greatness of my house, out of regard to the opinion
of the dêmos and the memory of my late husband, or
whether it is not now time for me to go with the best of these
suitors who are wooing me and making me such magnificent presents. As
long as my son was still young, and unable to understand, he would
not hear of my leaving my husband's house, but now that he is
full grown he begs and prays me to do so, being incensed at the way
in which the suitors are eating up his property. Listen, then, to a
dream that I have had and interpret it for me if you can. I have
twenty geese about the house that eat mash out of a trough, and of
which I am exceedingly fond. I dreamed that a great eagle came
swooping down from a mountain, and dug his curved beak into the neck
of each of them till he had killed them all. Presently he soared off
into the sky, and left them lying dead about the yard; whereon I wept
in my room till all my maids gathered round me, so piteously was I
grieving because the eagle had killed my geese. Then he came back
again, and perching on a projecting rafter spoke to me with human
voice, and told me to leave off crying. ‘Be of good
courage,’ he said, ‘daughter of Ikarios; this is no dream,
but a vision of good omen that shall surely come to pass. The geese
are the suitors, and I am no longer an eagle, but your own husband,
who am come back to you, and who will bring these suitors to a
disgraceful end.’ On this I woke, and when I looked out I saw my
geese at the trough eating their mash as usual."
"This dream, lady," replied
Odysseus, "can admit but of one interpretation, for had not Odysseus
himself told you how it shall be fulfilled? The death of the suitors
is portended, and not one single one of them will escape."
And Penelope answered, "Stranger,
dreams are very curious and unaccountable things, and they do not by
any means invariably come true. There are two gates through which
these insubstantial fancies proceed; the one is of horn, and the
other ivory. Those that come through the gate of ivory are fatuous,
but those from the gate of horn mean something to those that see
them. I do not think, however, that my own dream came through the
gate of horn, though I and my son should be most thankful if it
proves to have done so. Furthermore I say - and lay my saying to your
heart - the coming dawn will usher in the ill-omened day that is to
sever me from the house of Odysseus, for I am about to hold a
tournament [athlos] of axes. My husband used to set up
twelve axes in the court, one in front of the other, like the stays
upon which a ship is built; he would then go back from them and shoot
an arrow through the whole twelve. I shall make the suitors try to
perform the same feat [athlos], and whichever of them
can string the bow most easily, and send his arrow through all the
twelve axes, him will I follow, and quit this house of my lawful
husband, so goodly and so abounding in wealth. But even so, I doubt
not that I shall remember it in my dreams."
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.