fashion they
are told to change, to repent, to cease their wrong-doing. We observe
three parts: first is the conflict with the beggar Irus, foreshadowing
the conflict and outcome with the Suitors; second is the appearance of
Penelope, the female Ulysses in craft and in disguise, here hoodwinking
the Suitors; third is the male Ulysses, in craft and in disguise,
observing, testing, planning fate for the guilty.

I. Ulysses has assumed the part of a beggar, but he finds a real beggar
on the ground ready to dispute his right. Irus, this mendicant, has a
character on a par with the Suitors, violent, inhuman, insolent; he is,
moreover, one with the Suitors in taking other people's property for
nothing. There is no doubt that the poet casts an image of the Suitors
in the portrait of Irus, who acts toward Ulysses the beggar, as they do
toward Ulysses the ruler. It is manifest by word and deed that his
humble life has not given him the training to charity.

The result of the competition between the real and the disguised beggar
is a fight, which is urged on by the Suitors for the sport of the
thing; Antinous is specially active in this business, which is a
degraded Olympic contest. Homer too shows his love of the athlete by
his warm description of the body and limbs of Ulysses, who "showed his
large and shapely thighs, his full broad shoulders, his chest and
sinewy arms," when he stripped for the contest.

There can be only one outcome of such a fight under such circumstances,
especially in an heroic poem. But is not Ulysses himself inhuman and
uncharitable toward his poor beggar rival? Certainly he does not deal
with him gently, and the modern reader is apt to think that Ulysses
ought now to have his own test of charity applied to himself. Still his
defense is at hand: Irus sided with the Suitors, had their character,
Telemachus says they favored him; he is harsh and merciless to his
seeming fellow-beggar, and so he gets his own, though Ulysses at first
warns him, and wishes to be on good terms with him: "I do not speak or
do thee any wrong, nor do I envy thee getting alms; this threshold is
large enough for both of us; thou art a beggar as well as I. So beware
my wrath." Surely a sufficient warning, which, if unheeded, draws down
the fateful consequences.

But the chief justification of the poet lies in the fact that this
contest with Irus is sent before the main conflict as a prototype and a
warning. The Suitors looked o