In Book 23, when it starts off what's
happening is that Penelope, Penelope's dream literally becomes a reality.
Look at what Eurycleia does to trundle upstairs and give Penelope the news.
The description that Homer gives at the beginning of 23, is as follows.
Her knees bustling, feet shuffling over each other till hovering over her
mistresses head, she spoke, Penelope, child, wake up and see for yourself with
your own eyes, all you're dreamed of all your days, he's here, Odysseus, he's come
home at long last. That all you dreamed of gives us already
an indicator that what we're talking about is a kind of world of dreams that's
actually coming true. Further, the way Homer positions
Eurycleia, he puts her precisely in the shape of a dream.
Remember, what we did earlier when we talked about dreams and how they appeared
to people. They come down, stand at someone's head
and say, hey, why are you asleep? You should be awake.
There's stuff you need to know about, stuff you need to do.
And then, after that, people wake up and start to carry on with, with whatever it
is that's urgent. And that's Eurycleia that wakes them up to
the dream. Eurycleia is precisely in the position
here from Homer of one of these dreams. The way she shuffles over trundling over
to where Penelope is, standing at, hovering at her head, speaking at her,
Penelope, wake up. These things all position Eurycleia in
precisely the spot of a dream. So now, Penelope is being given the, the
word Odysseus is here. She, immediately, is thrilled but then,
she holds back. Penelope is circumspect.
She's very careful. She's going to jump for joy a little bit,
but then, she'll hold herself back, too. She asks more proof, Eurycleia tells her
of the scar. Penelope hears that and that's pretty good
evidence but still Penelope is not going to just jump right in and say, that's
fine. She needs more testing.
Odysseus now has gained access to this circle the inner rooms, he's cleared house
in the, in the exterior rooms he's earned his way in, but Penelope's not quite ready
to have him. In order to get into that next stage, he's
going to have to pass the final test that she's going to give him.
Now when she walks in there's, or when Odysseus walks in, there's this quite
marvelous scene. She then sees Odysseus and Homer tells us,
as soon as she stepped across the stone threshold, slipping in, she took a seat at
the closest wall and radiant in the firelight-faced Odysseus.
Now, circumspect Penelope is making herself available to Odysseus, she's ready
to start to hear what he has to tell her. But there are bits that need to come up.
There's some more information that needs to pass.
Her contemplation, she's thinking things through.
She's calculating where we are. And they haven't quite come to the point
where they're ready to have a shared embrace.
Odysseus is pretty much there but not quite Penelope.
He and her, are going the two of them are going back and forth in these, in these
closing books trying to find their mode of connection.
And Penelope says, eventually, to in a kind of short, sharp retort as both
Eurycleia and Telemachus are saying, come on Penelope, you should relent.
She cuts them off, page 459, and says, but if he truly is Odysseus home at last, make
no mistake. We, too, will know each other even better.
We, too, have secret signs known to us both, but hidden from the world.
It's a way for her to say, step back, Telemichus, you don't know the full story
here. You're not in control.
In fact, I am in control. So, Penelope is now going to jump in to
figure out in her final test whether this really is the true Odysseus.
Now, we've talked in this cover in our thinking through this epic about the real
deep importance of storytelling for understanding ones own identity.
Knowing your past having it as a cohesive story, sharing it with people all of these
things the, the idea of telling and re-telling all of these things are very
important and built in to a Greek notion of what an identity is.
Penelope gives us another way into this whole question.
For her, she, her, her story registers for us the importance in a Greek context of
sometimes not telling, of sometimes keeping some things secret.
We've seen different ways of measuring what these secrets are.
Remember, Odysseus tried to keep his secret of the scar by holding back
Eurycleia's mouth and swearing her to secrecy under pain of death.
He hid his scar underneath his underneath his clothes so that people wouldn't see
it. But it's something that is public and
visible, and he can show it to people. It's a kind of static mark.
It is there that's ready for him to pull out.
He can share it with people to verify who he is and when he does, it's a simple
sharing of information from him to someone else.
Penelope has a different kind of sign of who she is and also who Odysseus is.
The two of them can only verify each other's identity , can verify each other's
identity, through this sign. And for Penelope, it's her last way of
making sure that the person in front of her is truly Odysseus.
The final sign, the sign of signs is, of course, her bed.
This bed that Penelope is going to use in this last proof draws an analogy to
another bed that we've seen in this epic at the close of Book five.
Remember, Odysseus there as the firebrand trying to figure out if he could make it
through the night. Calculating whether it was better off to
bury himself under some leaves so that he could have some shelter and keep his way
or not die from exposure to the elements and then also trying to avoid taking too
much shelter in the forest and making himself a victim to animals at that to be
eaten by animals. At that point, he scoops up a bunch of
dead leaves around him. He's overjoyed at the site, and he buries
himself in the leaves of an olive tree. That bed, at the end of Book five, made it
the far, made it the far ends of Odysseus' journey, is made at the far, is made with
material drawn from the farthest point away from the root of the olive tree.
The leaf growing past the roots and then the, and, and the, the trunk and out the
edges of the branches and out to the very farthest edges we've got the leaves that
are sitting out there, well, those then themselves fall off.
So, what the farthest root from an olive tree that we can possibly be.
Odysseus scoops these together, makes his bed, it's very primitive.
There's room for one he's only trying to keep himself on holding onto that last
piece of his identity, his, his own life. This bed, that, that Penelope starts to
make a reference to in her reference to secret signs that only she and Odysseus
are going to know. This bed is from a different part of the
olive tree. It's actually rooted, isn't it?
It's rooted. Odysseus himself crafted the bed.
He made it with his axe handle. We've seen him wield axe's before to great
effect his skill with this is tremendous. He took a living, breathing tree carved up
pieces of it. Cut other, cut olive wooden valves linked
it all together, and left the rooting in the ground.
This is a living tree. It's not the farthest removed dead part of
the tree, it's the living core of the tree.
It's deeply rooted in the ground. It's immovable.
It is a kind of gravitational center of Odysseus and Penelope's life together.
Now, when, when Penelope makes her very sly, very sly gesture at the very end
saying, yes, yes. He may be Odysseus but we can't really be
sure. We're going to have to wait another night,
at which point, everyone's exasperated. She, at that point, says, just go ahead
and we don't want our stranger to have to sleep on the ground, let's bring out a bed
for him. In fact, let's bring out my own bed so
this man can enjoy it and lie down in it. At which point Odysseus realizes that all
of the sly, subtle subterfuges of Penelope have been put in place because she is
testing him with the final test. The only response that is possible if he
truly is Odysseus is the one that he knows, you can't move that bed.
It's rooted in the ground and I'm the one that made it that way.
Now, Penelope then is able to prove that is truly Odysseus but he, she proves
something else to him at the same time. The reason that the secret configuration
of what this bed is all about and how it works still works for Penelope as a sign
of verification, is because she, herself, has kept it secret all those years that
Odysseys is gone. Imagine if she let lots of people into her
bedroom, and lots of people into her bed while Odysseus was gone.
There's no way she could use that bed to verify that this is truly Odysseus.
Anyone would know about it. But instead, what she's doing is saying,
yes, I can verify who you are, Odysseus, because I'll know that you know about that
bed. But because she's exhibiting to him that
she's relying on it to verify his identity, she's also communicating to him
that I have kept our bed secret. Meaning, that our marriage is exclusive
and remains so. In that communication back and forth not
only does Penelope get to verify who Odysseus is.
She gives verification to Odysseus that she has kept exclusive rights to her with
him. The gender balance is such that Odysseus
has not done the same thing, she doesn't seem to demand it from him.
But it's, it's quite a, a subtle craft that she's able to pull in verifying both
Odysseus and herself and having them both be verified to each other.
This is something that she could not have done had she not lived up to what Odysseus
expected of her. And what those expectations are, are
according to, I think, probably our own contemporary [unknown] imbalanced but she
does live up to what her part of the bargain from an Ancient Greek perspective
is supposed to be. Comparing these two signs is, is
interesting. Remember Odysseus is a marker of his
identity, is this one exhibition on his body, it is a marker of past pain.
It's got a story embedded into it, but it's visible by everybody.
What does he have to do to maintain it as being a marker of Odyssiusness?
Nothing. He doesn't carry it around with him and
deciding he was going to show it to. He will verify himself to whomever he
wishes to. When he gives away information that I am
truly Odysseus, he doesn't give anything extra away.
Penelope's sign, her marker of her bed, is something that she actively must maintain
in an ongoing act of the exclusivity of their marriage, her faithfulness, if you
will, to Odysseus. This ongoing sign is a, is a continuous
kind of dynamic sign that she must maintain in pursuing that she does just as
we said maintains her connection also with Odysseus and her ability to verify that to
him. So now, by the close of 23 the two are
becoming to the point where the reunion is almost ready to happen that's going to
come in our next lecture.