Eurycleia Recognizes Odysseus — The scar and the footbath

Book 19 of The Odyssey by Homer

When the suitors had gone to their lodgings, Odysseus and Telemachus were left alone in the darkened hall. Odysseus told his son that they must remove every weapon from the walls, all the helmets and shields and sharp spears that hung there. If the suitors asked why the arms were taken down, Telemachus should say he had put them away from the smoke that had tarnished them since Odysseus left for Troy. They worked together by the light of Athena, who went before them holding a golden lamp that cast a wondrous glow. Telemachus marveled at the light on the walls and said surely one of the gods was with them. Odysseus told him to be silent and ask no questions, and sent him to bed.

Penelope came down from her chamber to speak with the stranger. Her maids set a chair for her near the fire, inlaid with spirals of ivory and silver, and she sat opposite the beggar with her veil drawn about her. The firelight played across her features, worn with long grief, and she studied the stranger with careful eyes. She bade him tell her who he was and where he came from, for no man springs from the earth like a tree or a stone, but has a lineage and a homeland.

Penelope told the stranger of her own long suffering. She recounted how the suitors pressed her to marry, and how she had devised a trick to delay them. She set up a great loom in the palace and began weaving a burial shroud for old Laertes, Odysseus's father, declaring she could not marry until it was finished. By day she wove, and by night she unraveled what she had done, so that the web never grew. For three years her stratagem held, but in the fourth year, one of her treacherous maids revealed the secret. The suitors came upon her at night unraveling the cloth, and they forced her to complete it. Now she had no more devices and could not escape their demands.