book 19

• After the Suitors have gone to bed, Telemachus and Odysseus remove the weapons. Athena lights the room for them so they can see what they’re doing.
• Telemachus tells Eurycleia that they’re storing the arms to protect them from damage.
• Telemachus retires after sorting out the weapons, whilst Odysseus is joined by Penelope. She tests his honesty by asking him to describe her husband, in which he does in meticulous detail and brings Penelope to tears.
• He tells the story of how he met Odysseus and came to Ithaca – which parallels the Cretan narratives he told Athena and Eumaeus. 
• He predicts that Odysseus will be back within the month.
• Penelope offers a bed for him to sleep in, but he declines. He reluctantly allows Eurycleia to wash his feet – which reveals his scar he got when he went boar hunting with his grandfather and Autoclyus. 
• Eurycleia realises that it is Odysseus, and throws her arms around him, but he silences her and even threatens to kill her if she reveals that he is Odysseus to anyone.  
• Before Penelope retires, she describes a dream she had to Odysseus in which an eagle swoops down and kills her twenty pet geese and then perches on her roof and says, in a human voice, that he is her husband and he has just put her lovers to death.
• Penelope says she doesn’t understand what the dream meant, and Odysseus explains it to her.  
• Penelope decides that she will choose a new husband regardless, and will marry the first man who can shoot an arrow through the holes of twelve axes in a line.