4.715–757

τὴν δ᾽ ἄχος ἀμφεχύθη θυμοφθόρον, οὐδ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἔτ᾽ ἔτλη
δίφρῳ ἐφέζεσθα πολλῶν κατὰ οἶκον ἐόντων,
ἀλλ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἐπ᾽ οὐδοῦ ἷζε πολυκμήτου θαλάμοιο
οἴκτρ᾽ ὀλοφυρομένη: περὶ δὲ δμῳαὶ μινύριζον
πᾶσαι, ὅσαι κατὰ δώματ᾽ ἔσαν νέαι ἠδὲ παλαιαί.

Soul-wasting pain poured over her, nor could she
even sit on a chair, though there were many in the house,
but she sank to the floor of her well-wrought bedroom,
weeping pitifully. And all around her maids were wailing,
all of them, young and old, who were in the house.

Odyssey 4.716–20

The Iliad again provides a telling parallel, when Achilles first hears the news of Hector killing Patroclus in battle:

ὣς φάτο, τὸν δ᾽ ἄχεος νεφέλη ἐκάλυψε μέλαινα:
ἀμφοτέρῃσι δὲ χερσὶν ἑλὼν κόνιν αἰθαλόεσσαν
χεύατο κὰκ κεφαλῆς, χαρίεν δ᾽ ᾔσχυνε πρόσωπον:
νεκταρέῳ δὲ χιτῶνι μέλαιν᾽ ἀμφίζανε τέφρη.
αὐτὸς δ᾽ ἐν κονίῃσι μέγας μεγαλωστὶ τανυσθεὶς
κεῖτο, φίλῃσι δὲ χερσὶ κόμην ᾔσχυνε δαΐζων.

So [Antilochus] spoke, and a black cloud of pain covered him [Achilles],
and grabbing filthy dust with both hands
he poured it over his head and fouled his handsome face,
and black ashes were settling on his godlike tunic.
And he lay stretched out mightily in his might
and disfigured himself, tearing his hair with both hands.

Iliad 18.22-27

As in the earlier two parallel passages, the Iliad presses the same imagery further. Patroclus is Achilles’s soulmate, and with his loss something in Achilles dies. By falling to the ground and pouring ashes over himself, he mimics the death of his friend in a way typical of grieving figures in early Greek literature. Penelope’s reaction to Telemachus’s absence as if it were a death portrays her as grieving her husband and son, and she will remain in that condition, withdrawn and weeping, until they return to Ithaka. Her reemergence from that numbed state is a crucial part of the eventual triumph of Odysseus over the suitors. It begins when Athena prompts Penelope to show herself to the suitors in Book 18 (158–303), part of a process that moves the queen toward a decision to remarry. The next phase occurs when Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, pretends in a private meeting with the queen to describe meeting “Odysseus” in Crete, releasing a flood of feelings in Penelope, expressed in one of Homer’s most lyrical similes (19.203–9). (see above, p.10) Penelope, too, is beginning to thaw from her frozen grief.

The subtle portrayal of Penelope’s inner life and her gradual movement from grief into action is one of the chief glories of the Odyssey. That the poet builds his portrait of this process on the queen’s earlier response to hearing of Telemachus’s clandestine journey is confirmed soon after the exchange that prompted the snow simile. Penelope, moved by the beggar’s story, orders her servants to clean up the man and give him fresh clothes. When the time comes for his feet to be washed, Odysseus insists that Eurykleia, his own childhood nurse, be the one to do it. The old nurse recognizes an old scar on the beggars’s leg and guesses his true identity. Odysseus convinces her to keep his identity a secret, while Athena distracts Penelope from hearing the exchange (19.466–90).

Eurykleia keeps an important secret from Penelope twice, both times to support a heroic mission that eventually leads to Odysseus’s triumph over the suitors. The first time marks the virtual disappearance of Penelope from the story. The second coincides with her reappearance as an agent in the return of her husband to his true identity as king, husband, father, and son.