THERE was much grumbling among the lords of Ithaca when prince Telemachus insisted on bringing a ragged, heavily bearded stranger into the royal hall. However, the boy’s mother Penelope had welcomed him, thinking that a man so widely travelled must have some news of her husband, King Odysseus, who had gone to the Trojan War nineteen years before.* Moreover, the stranger had given their lordships some welcome entertainment, brawling with a fellow beggar, Irus, at the hall’s doors. The sport-loving earls had laughingly promised that the winner could join their company at table, and the stranger had secured his seat by felling Irus with a single blow of surprising strength.

This wanderer, it seemed, had fought alongside Odysseus many times; but glad as she was to hear his tales, Penelope did not feel that she had heard anything to make her believe that her husband would return. So it was that she resolved to carry on with a desperate plan she had formed some time before, at the prompting of the goddess Athene. The lords of the hall, she knew, wished to marry her, or at any rate her great wealth; so she would give one of her greedy suitors his heart’s desire.