An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

by Daniel Mendelsohn

Like Cinderella’s sisters trying on the glass slipper, one Suitor after another tries to string the bow and fails. Finally, the “beggar” offers to have a try, much to the derision of the Suitors. Antinoüs wheels on him: how outrageous for someone as lowly as he to insert himself into the proceedings! Here Penelope herself slyly intervenes—suggesting, at least to some readers, that she has known all along that the beggar is her husband. Does Antinoüs really think, she laughingly declares, that she’d marry the old drifter if he wins? Certainly not. But since everyone else has failed, could it really hurt to let the old man have a go? Despite the mutterings and imprecations of the disgruntled Suitors, loyal Eumaeus takes the great weapon and carries it across the crowded room to the beggar, into whose hands he places it. Odysseus picks up the weapon, testing it to see whether “the worms have been at the horn in its master’s absence.” Then, finding it sound, in one fluid motion—as graceful, Homer says, as a bard stringing his lyre—he strings it. At which point, from the Suitors there rose up a mighty groan, their skin turned white; and Zeus let crash a mighty thunder-sign, while much-enduring, godlike Odysseus rejoiced that wily Cronus’ child had sent this portent. An arrow lay there on the table—he took and let it fly; the others, still within the quiver, the Achaeans soon would taste. And then the mayhem begins.