Antinoüs Blames Penelope

5Thus angrily he spoke, and clashed to earth
The sceptre, shedding tears. The people felt
Compassion; all were silent for a space,
And there was none who dared with railing words
Answer Telemachus, save one alone,
Antinous, who arose and thus replied: —

6“Telemachus, you youth of braggart speech
And boundless in abuse, what have you said
To our dishonor? You would fix on us
A brand of shame. The blame is not with us,
The Achaian suitors; it is your mother’s fault,
Skilled as she is in crafty shifts. It is now
Already the third year, and soon will be
The fourth, since she began to cozen us.
She gives us all to hope, and sends fair words
To each by message, yet in her own mind
Has other purposes. This shrewd device
She planned; she laid upon the loom a web,
Delicate, wide, and vast in length, and said
Thus to us all: ‘Young princes, who are come
To woo me, since Odysseus is no more —
My noble husband —urge me not, I pray,
To marriage, till I finish in the loom —
That so my threads may not be spun in vain —
A funeral vesture for the hero-chief
Laertes, when his fatal hour shall come
With death’s long sleep. Else some Achaian dame
Might blame me, should I leave without a shroud
Him who in life possessed such ample wealth!’
Such were her words, and easily they wrought
Upon our generous minds. So went she on,
Weaving that ample web, and every night
Unravelled it by torchlight. Three full years
She practised thus, and by the fraud deceived
The Grecian youths; but when the hours had brought
The fourth year round, a woman who knew all
Revealed the mystery, and we ourselves
Saw her unravelling the ample web.
Thenceforth, constrained, and with unwilling hands,
She finished it. Now let the suitors make
Their answer to your words, that you may know
Our purpose fully, and the Achaians all
May know it likewise. Send your mother hence,
Requiring that she wed the suitor whom
Her father chooses and herself prefers.
But if she still go on to treat the sons
Of Greece with such despite, too confident
In gifts which Athena has bestowed on her
So richly, noble arts, and faculties
Of mind, and crafty shifts, beyond all those
Of whom we ever heard that lived of yore,
The bright-haired ladies of the Achaian race,
Tyro, Alcmena, and Mycene, famed
For glossy tresses, none of them endowed
As is Penelope, though this last shift
Be ill devised —so long will we consume
Your substance and estate as she shall hold
Her present mood, the purpose which the gods
Have planted in her breast. She to herself
Gains great renown, but surely brings on you
Loss of much goods. And now we go not hence
To our affairs nor elsewhere, till she wed
Whichever of the Greeks may please her most.”

7And then rejoined discreet Telemachus: —
“Antinous, grievous wrong it were to send
Unwilling from this palace her who bore
And nursed me. Whether he be living yet
Or dead, my father is in distant lands;
And should I, of my own accord and will,
Dismiss my mother, I must make perforce
Icarius large amends, and that were hard.
And he would do me mischief, and the gods
Would send yet other evils on my head.
For then my mother, going forth, would call
On the grim Furies, and the general curse
Of all men would be on me. Think not I
Will ever speak that word. But if you bear
A sense of injury for what is past,
Go from these halls; provide for other feasts,
Consuming what is yours, and visiting
Each other’s homes in turn. But if it seem
To you the wiser and the better way
To plunder one man’s goods, go on to waste
My substance. I shall call the eternal gods
To aid me, and, if Zeus allow
Fit retribution for your crimes, you die
Within this very palace unavenged.”