ife, who is seeking to
thwart the attempt of the Suitors to make her marry one of themselves;
thus she is heroically preserving the Family. She, with the loyal part
of her household, co-operates with Ulysses, though not aware who he is.
Between the second and third strands are many interweavings, both being
opposed to the Suitors. Penelope, to delay her marriage, proposes the
Bending of the Bow, which gives the weapon and the opportunity to
Ulysses. (Book XXI.)

II. The second stage of the grand movement is given in one Book (XXII).
This is the single bloody Book of the poem, it makes up all
deficiencies in the way of sanguinary grewsomeness. The destroying
Suitors are themselves destroyed by Ulysses, who therein is destroyer.
Hence the blood-letting character of the Book and of the deed; 116 men
skin, 12 women hung, and one man mutilated unto death.

III. But the destroyer Ulysses destroys destruction, and so becomes
positive; in the last two Books he is shown as the restorer of the
institutional order which the Suitors had assailed and were
undermining. He restores the Family (Book XXIII), and the State (Book
XXIV). This is, then, the end of the Return, indeed the end of the
grand disruption caused by the Trojan War, to which Ulysses set out
from Ithaca twenty years before. The absence of the husband and ruler
from home and country gave the opportunity for the license of the
Suitors. But the Return has harmonized the distracted condition of the
land; institutions, Family and State, are freed of their conflict; even
the Gods, Zeus and Pallas (authority and wisdom) enforce the new order,
bringing peace and concord.

Still, despite the bloody death of the Suitors, there runs through this
portion of the Odyssey (the last eight Books) a vein of charity, of
humanity, sometimes even of sentiment, which seems to link the poem
with our own age. Yet the other side is present also; there is little
pity for the unrighteous, and justice is capable of becoming cruel. The
Suitors and their set of servants are represented as unfeeling and
inhuman; Penelope and the whole loyal household on the other hand show
sympathy with poverty and misfortune. Such, indeed, has been their
discipline, that of adversity, which softens the heart toward the
victims of hard luck.

The disguise of Ulysses is continued, and also the craft of Penelope.
The moral questioning which these two characters have always roused
does not diminish. The hardest p