The interview, and the scar

After the suitors have gone to bed, Penelope sends for the beggar. She wants to ask him about her husband. Odysseus, still in disguise, tells her a long, careful, mostly false story — but seeded with one detail he could only know if he had really seen Odysseus: the cloak the king was wearing when he left for Troy, with a brooch shaped like a dog seizing a fawn. Penelope weeps. She believes that part of the story, anyway. He tells her, with quiet certainty, that her husband is on his way, almost home.

Penelope orders the old nurse Eurycleia to wash the beggar's feet. Eurycleia is the woman who raised Odysseus from infancy, then his son, then his grandson; she has been in this household longer than anyone alive. She dips a sponge in warm water, and as her hands move up his thigh she feels a long scar — the scar from a boyhood boar-hunt that she had bandaged herself when he was a young man. The poem stops. It pauses, mid-action, for a long flashback that explains how Odysseus got the scar — gored on a hunt with his grandfather, bandaged at the lodge.

It is Homer doing on the page exactly what memory does in a body: a single sensation triggers the whole scene. When the flashback ends, Eurycleia has gasped and almost cried out. Odysseus seizes her by the throat and silences her with one whispered word. She nods and finishes washing his feet. Penelope, sitting nearby, has missed the whole exchange — Athena has turned her thoughts elsewhere. She announces, almost on impulse, a contest for tomorrow: whoever can string Odysseus's old bow and shoot an arrow through the holes of twelve aligned axe-heads will be her husband.