Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Eurycleia woke Penelope with news that Odysseus had come and killed the suitors. Penelope descended wary, sat opposite the blood-stained stranger, and neither embraced nor spoke. Telemachus rebuked her hardness; Odysseus waited. After he had bathed and Athena had shed beauty over him, Penelope still withheld herself and ordered Eurycleia to bring out the bed from their chamber—to move the bed Odysseus himself had built. Odysseus flared in anguish: that bed could not be moved. He had shaped the post from a living olive tree rooted in the chamber floor, then built the room around it; only a god could shift it, or a man who cut the olive. At that secret—known to them alone—Penelope’s knees loosened; she ran to him, wept, and accepted him as her husband returned. They told each other of the years apart; Odysseus recounted Teiresias’s prophecy of the inland journey still ahead. Athena held back the dawn so their night of reunion might lengthen. The bow’s violence thus yields to the private token of the rooted bed—cunning matched by fidelity.