Meanwhile Philoitios slipped
quietly out and made fast the gates of the outer court. There was a
ship's cable of papyrus fiber lying in the gatehouse, so he made
the gates fast with it and then came in again, resuming the seat that
he had left, and keeping an eye on Odysseus, who had now got the bow
in his hands, and was turning it every way about, and proving it all
over to see whether the worms had been eating into its two horns
during his absence. Then would one turn towards his neighbor saying,
"This is some tricky old bow-fancier; either he has got one like it
at home, or he wants to make one, in such workmanlike style does the
old vagabond handle it."
Another said, "I hope he may be
no more successful in other things than he is likely to be in
stringing this bow."
But Odysseus, when he had taken
it up and examined it all over, strung it as easily as a skilled bard
strings a new peg of his lyre and makes the twisted gut fast at both
ends. Then he took it in his right hand to prove the string, and it
sang sweetly under his touch like the twittering of a swallow. The
suitors were dismayed [akhos], and turned color as
they heard it; at that moment, moreover, Zeus thundered loudly as a
sign [sêma], and the heart of Odysseus rejoiced
as he heard the omen that the son of scheming Kronos had sent
him.
He took an arrow that was lying
upon the table - for those which the Achaeans were so shortly about
to taste were all inside the quiver - he laid it on the center-piece
of the bow, and drew the notch of the arrow and the string toward
him, still seated on his seat. When he had taken aim he let fly, and
his arrow pierced every one of the handle-holes of the axes from the
first onwards till it had gone right through them, and into the outer
courtyard. Then he said to Telemakhos:
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.