Omens, and the suitors' last meal

Odysseus cannot sleep. He lies in the hallway staring at the ceiling, planning. He hears the disloyal maids slipping out to spend the night with the suitors and grits his teeth — he has decided already that they will hang. Athena appears beside him in the dark and tells him to rest; she will see to the rest. He sleeps, briefly. Penelope, in her chamber upstairs, prays to Artemis to be released from her grief — to die in her sleep before another day of this. The reader, alone with the gods, knows she has only one more day to wait.

The suitors gather for breakfast, then for a final feast. They are louder and crueler than before — a strange manic edge. Theoclymenus, the seer Telemachus brought back from Pylos, suddenly stands up and says he sees omens of disaster: the walls of the hall running with blood, the suitors' faces becoming the faces of dead men, the porch full of ghosts. He tells them all to leave while they can. They laugh and drive him from the hall. The disloyal maids serve them. The chapter is one of the quietest in the poem and one of the most charged.

Outside, Odysseus and his small party — Telemachus, Eumaeus, Philoetius the loyal cowherd whom Odysseus has just revealed himself to in the courtyard — make their final preparations. The bow is brought out for tomorrow's contest; the back doors are checked; the loyal maids are told to lock themselves in. The poem holds a deep breath. The hour before the slaughter, in Homer's careful hands, is more terrifying than the slaughter itself — because the men about to die are still laughing at the strangest things.