en are gay
without reason. 'Unhappy that you are,' cried Theoclymenus, 'what is
coming upon you? I see shrouds covering you about your knees and about
your faces, and tears are on your cheeks, and the walls and the pillars
of the roof are dripping blood, and in the porch and the court are your
fetches, shadows of yourselves, hurrying hellward, and the sun is
darkened.'

On this all the wooers laughed, and advised him to go out of doors,
where he would see that the sun was shining. 'My eyes and ears serve me
well,' said the second-sighted man, 'but out I will go, seeking no more
of your company, for death is coming on every man of you.' Then he
arose and went to the house of Piraeus, the friend of Telemachus. The
wooers laughed all the louder, as fey men do, and told Telemachus that
he was unlucky in his guests: one a beggar, the other a madman. But
Telemachus kept watching his father while the wooers were cooking a meal
that they did not live to enjoy.

Through the crowd of them came Penelope, holding in her hand the great
bow of Eurytus, and a quiver full of arrows, while her maidens followed,
carrying the chest in which lay the twelve iron axes. She stood up,
stately and scornful, among the wooers, and told them that, as marry she
must, she would take the man who could string the bow and shoot the
arrow through the axes. Telemachus said that he would make the first
trial, and that, if he succeeded, he would not allow any man of the
wooers to take his mother away with him from her own house. Then thrice
he tried to string the bow, and the fourth time he would have strung it,
but Ulysses made a sign to him, and he put it down. 'I am too weak,' he
said, 'let a stronger man achieve this adventure.' So they tried each in
turn, beginning with the man who sat next the great mixing-bowl of wine,
and so each rising in his turn.

First their prophet tried, Leiodes the Seer, who sat next the bowl, but
his white hands were too weak, and he prophesied, saying that the bow
would be the death of all of them. Then Antinous bade the goatherd light
a fire, and bring grease to heat the bow, and make it more supple. They
warmed and greased the bow, and one after another tried to bend it.
Eumaeus and the cowherd went out into the court, and Ulysses followed
them. 'Whose side would you two take,' he asked, 'if Ulysses came home?
Would you fight for him or for the wooers?' 'For Ulysses!' they both
cried, 'and would that he was come indee