This text is part of:
The other suitors were much
displeased at this, and one of the young men said, "Antinoos, you did
ill in striking that poor wretch of a tramp: it will be worse for you
if he should turn out to be some god - and we know the gods go about
disguised in all sorts of ways as people from foreign countries, and
travel about the world to see who do amiss [hubris]
and who righteously."
Thus said the suitors, but
Antinoos paid them no heed. Meanwhile Telemakhos was greatly
distressed [penthos] about the blow that had been
given to his father, and though no tear fell from him, he shook his
head in silence and brooded on his revenge.
Now when Penelope heard that the
beggar had been struck in the banqueting-room, she said before her
maids, "Would that Apollo would so strike you, Antinoos," and her
waiting woman Eurynome answered, "If our prayers were answered not
one of the suitors would ever again see the sun rise." Then Penelope
said, "Nurse, every single one of them is hateful
[ekhthroi] to me, for they mean nothing but mischief,
but I hate Antinoos like the darkness of death itself. A poor
unfortunate tramp has come begging about the house for sheer want.
Every one else has given him something to put in his wallet, but
Antinoos has hit him on the right shoulder-blade with a
footstool."
Thus did she talk with her maids
as she sat in her own room, and in the meantime Odysseus was getting
his dinner. Then she called for the swineherd and said, "Eumaios, go
and tell the stranger to come here, I want to see him and ask him
some questions. He seems to have traveled much, and he may have seen
or heard something of my unhappy husband."
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.