n and saw the miserable beggar completely
undone; "they threw up their hands and nearly died laughing;" a case of
blind fatuity, for they were soon to be in the place of Irus, every one
of them. A little later Telemachus suggests the connection: "Would that
the Suitors might droop their heads overcome in our house, as now Irus
sits at the hall gate with drooping head like a drunken man, and cannot
stand erect or walk home, since his dear limbs have been loosened."

Another note of warning is given specially to Amphinomus, who had
extended a very friendly salutation to Ulysses after the victory, and
who was the most honorable man of the Suitors. Ulysses again resorts to
fiction in order to convey his lesson, "Many were the wrongs I did;"
hence my present condition. "Let no men ever work injustice," such as
these Suitors are guilty of; the avenger "I now declare to be not far
away from his friends and his country." Hence the warning: "May some
God bring thee home" at once, for bloody will be the decision. But
Amphinomus does not obey, though "his mind foreboded evil;" he remained
in the fateful company and afterwards fell by the hand of Telemachus.

II. The real person for whose possession this whole contest is waged is
now introduced--Penelope. She appears in all her beauty; Pallas
interferes divinely in order to heighten the same, making her "more
stately in form and fairer than the ivory just carved." She is indeed
the embodiment of all that is beautiful and worthy in that Ithacan
life; loyalty to husband, love of her child, devotion to family, the
strongest institutional feeling she shows, with no small degree of
artifice, of course. Just now she reproves her son for having permitted
the recent fight: "thou hast allowed a stranger guest to be shamefully
treated." Thus she shows her secret unconscious sympathy with her
husband in disguise.

Then she turns her attention to the Suitors. She alludes to the parting
words of her husband as he set out for Troy: "When thou seest thy son a
bearded man, marry whom thou wilt and leave the house." The time has
come when she has to endure this hateful marriage; how the thought
weighs upon her heart! But we catch a glimpse of her deeper plan in the
following: "The custom of Suitors in the olden time was not such as
yours; they would bring along their own oxen and sheep and make a feast
for the friends of the maiden whom they wooed, and give her splendid
gifts; they consumed not o