After the killing of the suitors, Eurykleia rushes to the bedroom of Penelope, waking her up. The queen has slept through it all—the first good night’s sleep she has had in the longest time, she admits. Eurykleia goes on to tell Penelope that Odysseus has really returned and has killed the suitors, but the patient wife will need one more test, to make it perfectly certain that she has recovered her husband. The sēma ‘sign’ of the royal bed that once was theirs and will be theirs once again can now seal their perfect mutual understanding.

Eurykleia waking Penelope (1773). Print by Thomas Burke, after a painting by Angelika Kauffmann. Image via the British Museum.

The ultimate sēma ‘sign, signal’ for the mutual recognition of Penelope and Odysseus is the immovable bed that the king had made to be shared with the queen. Within the space of the lines demarcated by O.23.107–230, the noun sēma recurs at O.23.110, O.23.188, O.23.202, O.23.206, O.23.225. The mutual recognition is confirmed by the verb anagignōskein ‘recognize’, when Penelope at long last overtly recognizes Odysseus at O.23.206.

Odysseus instructs his dear ones, together with the household servants, to make merry by singing and dancing, led off by the singing of Phemios to the tune of the lyre. It is as if they were all attending a feast in celebration of a wedding. Such a pretend-feast in heroic-time, where the purpose is to fool those on the outside of the royal household who would start to retaliate if they only knew what had really happened to the suitors on the inside, would be a mock feast, of course. But such a mock feast could also be seen as a preview, as it were, of the merry feasting that will happen at a seasonally recurring festival of Apollo in post-heroic time. By now the feasting would be real, no longer mock feasting—except insofar as the merriment at the feast would be mocking the misfortunes of the suitors while celebrating the eternally recycled sacred wedding of a righteous king and queen. On the epic stylization of Apollo’s festival, see the anchor comment at O.20.276–280; also the comments at O.21.404–411, O.21.429–430, O.21.429, O.22.285–291, O.22.437–479. On the mocking of the suitors in the context of such a festival, see the comments at O.21.429 and especially at O.22.437–479.

With reference to the mock feast that Odysseus has orchestrated, the use of this word molpē ‘singing-and-dancing’ at O.23.145 here makes it clear that the merriment of the feasting involves singing as well as dancing. On the use of this same word at O.21.430 with reference to singing and dancing at the festival of Apollo, see the comment at O.21.429–430. While molpē at O.23.145 refers to the actual singing-and-dancing, the playfulness of the song and dance is expressed by the verb paizein ‘play’ at O.23.147. For comparable wording, see the comment at O.06.100–101.

Odysseus is given a ritualized bath, in the course of which the goddess Athena transforms his appearance: he now looks the way he did on his wedding day. One detail here is of special interest: at O.23.158, the hero’s locks of hair are said to look like blossoms of hyacinth. Such a simile fuses the picturing of blossoms woven together in a garland with the picturing of the hair that is adorned by the garland. Similarly at I.17.051–052, the droplets of blood that are splattered over a dead hero’s locks of hair evoke a picturing of myrtle blossoms, but the simile here compares the locks themselves, not the droplets of blood, with the blossoms. Here again, then, we see a fusion in visualizing garland and hair. See the comment on I.17.051–052.

After a ritual bath in an asaminthos ‘bathtub’, O.23.163, Odysseus is described this way: ‘he [= Odysseus] emerged from the bathtub [asaminthos], looking the same as [homoios] the immortals in shape’ (ἔκ ῥ’ ἀσαμίνθου βῆ δέμας ἀθανάτοισιν ὁμοῖος). For parallel wording in a description of Telemachus emerging from a ritual bath in an asaminthos ‘bathtub’, see O.03.468 and the comment at O.03.464–468. For homoio- in the sense of ‘same as’ in a similar ritual context, signaling an epiphany, see the comment on O.16.172–212. At this point, Odysseus no longer looks like a middle-aged man: in the context of the ritual bath that he has taken, he looks like a perfect bridegroom, at the perfect age for a perfect wedding. Thus he looks like the Odysseus who slept with Penelope in her dream as described at O.20.087–090. I review here the essentials: in her wakeful agonizing, unable to fall asleep, Penelope had recalled a dream she once had: there she was, lying in bed with Odysseus at her side, and he was looking the way he had looked when she had last seen him twenty years earlier. It seemed to her then, she says at O.20.090, that this was not an onar ‘dream’ but a hupar esthlon ‘wakeful reality’ (οὐκ ὄναρ, ἀλλ’ ὕπαρ ἐσθλόν). But now at O.23.163, as Odysseus emerges from his ritual bath looking like a perfect bridegroom, that dream of Penelope is about to become a wakeful reality.

Big Ed and Norma have just now broken free of the troublesome relationships that have kept these lovers apart for 27 years. Now at long last they can have a life together. Still from Twin Peaks 3 Episode 15, reworked by Jill Curry Robbins.

analysis of the transformation of formula (A) to (B), which resumes the narrative after an order/exhortation by a man in authority to a group of men to do something (here, to wash hands), and conclusion that (A)’s eukhomenos was felt to be have sacral connotations inappropriate to the secular contexts of (B)