The Homecoming
The Return to Ithaca: Disguise and Deception
When Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca in Book 13, the goddess Athena disguises him as an old beggar. This disguise is essential to his plan: Ithaca is filled with over a hundred suitors who have taken over his palace, are consuming his wealth and are competing to marry his wife Penelope. If Odysseus is recognised too soon, he will be killed before he can prepare. The disguise is one of the most sustained and elaborate acts of deception in the poem, and it lasts through Books 13 to 22.
The theme of disguise and recognition is one of the Odyssey’s most powerful structural devices. Homer builds intense dramatic irony by allowing the audience to know what the characters in the poem do not: the ragged beggar shuffling through the halls of his own palace is the great king Odysseus. This gap between what the audience knows and what the suitors assume — that they are safe, that Odysseus is dead, that they may treat a helpless beggar with contempt — makes their eventual destruction feel both inevitable and just.
Book 19: Penelope and the Recognition by Eurycleia
In Book 19, still in his beggar’s disguise, Odysseus has a long, remarkable conversation with Penelope. She does not know she is speaking to her husband. She tells the “stranger” about her famous trick: she has been weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus’s father Laertes and has promised to choose a new husband when it is finished. Every night she unpicks the weaving she has done during the day, buying herself years of time. This deception is a mirror of Odysseus’s own resourcefulness — husband and wife are revealed to be perfectly matched in their use of cunning to protect what matters most to them.
The recognition scene that follows is both touching and tense. Penelope calls for the old nurse Eurycleia to wash the beggar’s feet — an act of hospitality appropriate for a guest. As Eurycleia washes his legs, her hands find a scar on his thigh. The poem pauses the action entirely to tell the story of how Odysseus received the scar as a young man, hunting a boar on Mount Parnassus with his grandfather Autolycus. This long digression — a retardation technique, not the anagnorisis itself — is a deliberate slowing of the pace that builds the dramatic tension almost unbearably. The anagnorisis comes immediately after: the moment Eurycleia’s hands find the scar and she realises the beggar is Odysseus.
Eurycleia gasps and looks up. Odysseus grabs her throat and silences her with a warning: no one must know. She agrees. This is the first human recognition in the palace, and it confirms for the audience what Odysseus has known all along — that there are loyal people in Ithaca waiting for his return, and that his plan can succeed.
Penelope’s weaving deception is her equivalent of Odysseus’s cunning: she weaves a shroud for Laertes by day and unpicks it by night, delaying her choice of a husband for years. The parallel between husband and wife — both using deception to hold off those who would take what is theirs — is one of Homer’s most deliberate structural echoes.
Book 21: The Contest of the Bow
In Book 21, Penelope announces a contest to decide who she will marry: any man who can string Odysseus’s great bow and shoot an arrow through the sockets of twelve axe-heads in a row may have her hand. The great bow of Odysseus, given to him long ago by the hero Iphitus, is an object of enormous symbolic importance. It is kept under lock and key and has not been used since he left for Troy. To string it requires enormous strength and skill.
One by one, the suitors try and fail to string the bow. The wood is seasoned and stiff; the string requires a technique that none of them can master. The contest grinds to a humiliating halt. Then Odysseus, still in his beggar’s disguise, asks to be allowed to try. The suitors mock him furiously. Penelope supports his right to attempt it. Odysseus strings the bow with casual ease — “as a skilled musician strings a lyre,” as Homer says in one of his most elegant extended similes — and shoots cleanly through all twelve axe-heads without rising from his stool.
The homecoming books contrast loyal and disloyal servants carefully. The swineherd Eumaeus and the cowherd Philoetius remain loyal to Odysseus throughout: they refuse to side with the suitors, treat the disguised beggar with xenia, and are entrusted with a role in the final battle. Eurycleia recognises Odysseus and keeps his secret.
In contrast, twelve maidservants have slept with the suitors and sided against Penelope. The goatherd Melanthius has actively helped the suitors and insults Odysseus even when disguised. After the slaughter of the suitors, these disloyal servants are punished: the maidservants are forced to clean up the bodies before being hanged in the courtyard, and Melanthius is mutilated. The poem’s treatment of these characters reflects a worldview in which loyalty to a rightful lord is a supreme virtue, and its betrayal demands the harshest punishment.
Book 22: The Slaughter of the Suitors
The moment after Odysseus strings the bow is the pivot of the whole poem. He turns, shoots the leading suitor Antinous through the throat, and announces himself: “You thought I would never come home from Troy. You have been wasting my household, violating my maidservants, and seeking to take my wife while I still lived. Dogs — you never feared the gods who rule the spacious heaven, or the anger of men to come. Your day of reckoning has arrived.” The battle that follows is swift and brutal. Odysseus and three loyal helpers — his son Telemachus, Eumaeus and Philoetius — kill all the suitors in the great hall.
The massacre is presented by Homer as an act of dike — justice — rather than mere revenge. The suitors have violated the sacred rules of xenia by abusing their host’s hospitality for years. They have dishonoured Penelope, threatened Telemachus and wasted Odysseus’s wealth. The gods, particularly Zeus, have sanctioned the punishment. Athena appears in the hall to tip the balance at a critical moment, showing that divine approval stamps the act as righteous.
The suitors are killed by Odysseus, Telemachus, Eumaeus and Philoetius in Book 22. Homer frames the slaughter as divinely sanctioned justice: the suitors violated xenia, threatened the rightful king’s household, and dishonoured the gods. Athena’s presence in the hall confirms divine approval.
The scale of the killing in Book 22 — over a hundred young noblemen murdered in the great hall — can shock modern readers. Homer is not naive about this: the families of the suitors object in Book 24 and Odysseus faces a further threat of civil war. Yet throughout the poem Homer has built a careful moral case. The suitors were repeatedly warned. The gods disapproved. Odysseus returned precisely in time to prevent Penelope being forced into a new marriage. The contest of the bow — Penelope’s idea, not Odysseus’s — gave the suitors every opportunity to redeem themselves if any had the strength to string the bow.
The poem’s final moral position is that the gods uphold justice, and that those who violate the sacred laws of xenia and respect for a rightful king will be punished. Odysseus is the instrument of that punishment. Whether readers find this satisfying or disturbing often depends on whether they share Homer’s worldview — and that difference of response is itself worth discussing in a good exam answer.