Book XIX · Episode 6 of 6
The Queen’s Dream and the Contest
Penelope shares grief, sets a contest
Scenes
- Penelope’s Nightly Grief — Penelope likens herself to a nightingale
- Eurycleia fetches a second basin of water
- Odysseus hides the scar beneath his rags
- She manages maids by day, grieves by night
- Torn between duty and the suitor’s riches
- Telemachus, now grown, wishes her gone
- The Eagle Dream — Penelope dreams an eagle kills her geese
- Twenty geese feed content in her courtyard
- Hook-beaked eagle swoops from the mountains
- The eagle speaks with a human voice
- The geese are suitors, the eagle her husband
- She wakes to find the geese unharmed still
- Reading the Omen — Odysseus reads the dream as doom
- Ivory-gate dreams are known to deceive
- Horn-gate dreams, by contrast, come true
- She doubts her vision counts among the honest
- She plans a contest with Odysseus’ own bow
- Twelve axe-rings, the prize is marriage
- Night Falls on Ithaca — Odysseus urges contest, Penelope weeps
- His company could keep her wakeful all night
- Even the sorrowful must eventually sleep
- She bids him bed down in the hall
- She withdraws to her bower with her maids
- Athena pours the balm of sleep over her