The Homecoming — Ithaca (Home) (Ἰθάκη), landfall 15 of 15 on the voyage of odysseus

The unrecognized homeland

Odysseus wakes on his own beach and does not know it — Athena has wrapped the island in mist. Twenty years of longing, and his first act home is to count his treasure and assume the Phaeacians cheated him.

A young shepherd appears and names the island; Odysseus instantly invents a false biography — Cretan, a killer on the run. The shepherd laughs, becomes a grey-eyed goddess, and delivers the most affectionate insult in Homer: incorrigible, endlessly cunning — you would not stop your tricks even in your own country. She lifts the mist, shows him Ithaca piece by piece, hides the treasure in the cave of the Nymphs, and then they sit down against an olive trunk, goddess and man, to plot the destruction of the suitors like two old campaigners. She disguises him as an aged beggar: his own house is enemy territory.

“Bold man, crafty in counsel, never weary of wiles — not even in your own land would you cease from deceit.” — Odyssey XIII, 293–295

Argos

In the courtyard of his own palace, on a dung-heap, lies a dog. Argos — Odysseus trained him as a puppy twenty years ago, before sailing. Once the swiftest hound on the island; now old, abandoned, covered in ticks.

The beggar walks past. The dog cannot rise, but he knows — the ears drop, the tail thumps. Odysseus flicks away a tear where the swineherd cannot see, and must keep walking; one gesture of grief would unmask him. Argos has done the one thing left to him: he has seen his master again. Homer gives him the plainest death sentence in the poem — and having seen Odysseus in the twentieth year, the doom of black death took him.

The web

For three years Penelope held a hundred and eight suitors motionless with a loom. I will choose one of you, she promised, when I finish this shroud for old Laertes — it would be shameful to leave it undone. All day she wove where they could see her; every night, by torchlight, she unwove the day's work.

A maid betrayed her in the fourth year, and they caught her at it. But the trick had already done what tricks are for: bought time. Penelope is Odysseus' true match, and Homer says it in craft — he tells lies, she unweaves cloth, and both are weaving the same thing: delay, the space in which the impossible rescue can arrive.

The name for it: 'Penelope's web' became proverbial in antiquity for work forever undone and redone. Her formula — δόλους τολυπεύω, 'I wind my schemes like wool' — makes the metaphor explicit: in the Odyssey, weaving and plotting are the same verb, and she is as much a plotter as her husband.

The devouring of the house

A hundred and eight young nobles from Ithaca and the islands camp in the palace by day, slaughtering the herds, drinking the cellars, dicing in the doorway, courting the queen and plotting her son's murder. This is not romance; in a world without police, it is a slow-motion coup — eat the absent king's substance until his house cannot fight back.

Into this hall shuffles a beggar, led by the swineherd. The suitors mock him; Antinous, their ringleader, throws a footstool that thuds into his shoulder. The beggar takes it and keeps begging, crust by crust, man by man — measuring each of them, Homer says, learning who has a trace of decency and who has none. The audit takes two days. Almost none of them pass.

The first arrow

The contest of the bow: Penelope brings out the great horn bow that only Odysseus could string, and promises herself to the man who strings it and shoots through twelve axes. Suitor after suitor warms it, greases it, strains at it, fails. The beggar asks for a try, to jeering laughter.

He turns it slowly, checking for worm; then strings it without rising from his stool, easy as a singer stringing a lyre, and the string sings under his thumb like a swallow. The arrow goes through all twelve axes. Then he strips his rags, leaps to the threshold, spills the arrows at his feet — and the next shaft takes Antinous through the throat as he lifts a golden cup, the finest wine of his life half-drunk. The suitors are still shouting about accidents when Odysseus names himself.

“Dogs! You said I would never come home from the land of Troy — and so you ate my house, and wooed my wife while I lived.” — Odyssey XXII, 35–37

The reckoning

Four against a hundred and four: Odysseus at the door with the bow, Telemachus, the swineherd Eumaeus, the cowherd Philoetius — and Athena under the rafters in the shape of a swallow. The doors are barred, the weapons locked away in advance by the son.

It is not a battle but an execution that has to be fought like a battle: arrows first, then spears, then the grim work in the corners. Homer spares nothing — the priest who begs and is killed, the bard who begs and is spared, the traitor goatherd dealt with in the storeroom. When it ends, Odysseus stands in a lake of his own hall's blood, spattered like a lion from the kill, and forbids the old nurse to cry out in triumph: it is unholy, he says, to exult over slain men. They died of their own recklessness.

The bed of the living tree

Penelope has been lied to for twenty years and will not be rushed now. She tests the man who claims to be her husband with a single sentence: Nurse, move the bed out of our chamber and make it up for him.

Odysseus flares up exactly as only the true husband could: who moved my bed? He built the chamber himself around a living olive tree, trimmed the trunk into a bedpost, inlaid it with gold, silver and ivory — the bed cannot be moved without cutting the tree. It is their secret, the sēma no impostor could know, and it is also the marriage itself in one image: a bed rooted in living wood. Penelope's knees give way; she runs to him; and Athena holds back the dawn — literally lengthens the night — so they have time for love and for twenty years of stories.

“There is the great token: I built our bed around the living olive, and no mortal alive could shift it.” — Odyssey XXIII, 202–204

Peace, imposed

The Odyssey does not end in the bedroom. A hundred and eight households now have dead sons, and their kinsmen arm and march on Laertes' farm. Odysseus, his father and his son come out to meet them gladly — three generations, spears in hand, and old Laertes' cast kills the first man.

Athena ends it by decree: a shout that drops the weapons from the attackers' hands, a thunderbolt from Zeus at her own feet as a boundary-stone, and a sworn peace laid over the island. The poem closes not with vengeance but with the vendetta cancelled — the goddess of wisdom stopping the wheel of retaliation by force, because someone must. The nostos is complete: the man, the wife, the son, the father, the kingdom.