CHAPTER 2

The Odyssey

PART ONE: AT SEA, ON THE ROAD

Following the course of the sun

The Odyssey's characters are freer than the Iliad's to rest at night and resume activity in the morning. They rise naturally to start the day. The narrative takes the time to follow the cycle of sleep and wakefulness and to describe arrangements for the night: the selection of a place to lie down, the making of the beds, the quality of the beddings and the distribution of the sleepers. Retiring scenes, an anomaly in the Iliad, belong to the Odyssey's thematic core, Odysseus' recovery of his household and wife. There are also twice as many books ending with sleep.¹

This fact might be considered insignificant if we dismiss the book divisions as non Homeric. Their origin is a thorny issue. Are they coeval with the epics? And what does ‘coeval’ mean, considering the nature of oral poetry, which defies fixity? A great number of scholars believe that the book divisions were created as late as the Hellenistic period. What matters, however, is not their authenticity (whatever the term might mean in a context of evolving oral composition), but the fact that the editors who put them in place saw in sleep an appropriate marker of endings.² Furthermore, even if we should disregard the book divisions, the Odyssey, compared to the Iliad, has a far greater number of narrative units that conclude with a mention of sleep.

The sequence, ‘they went to sleep, and on the morrow’ is almost a refrain, which gives the rhythm to the day and to the narrative by creating a pause between episodes, be they legs of a journey or gatherings in a palace. Illustrations of this pattern are countless. For instance, at end of Book 3 Telemachus and Pisistratus ride ‘all day’, then, ‘when the sun set and all the streets were shadowy’, they arrive in Pheres, where they rest that night to leave again at dawn and travel all day until darkness. Earlier in the same book Nestor has a last drink with his people and his guests, then the locals go home to sleep, while Telemachus, Nestor and his family do so in the palace (3. 396–403). At sunrise they get up and assemble (3. 404–14), just as at sunrise Athena departs (3. 366).³ Likewise Menelaus, in recounting how he and his companions trapped Proteus during his daytime nap, takes care to note that they stopped on the previous night: they prepare a meal and lie by the shore, but ‘when early-born rosy-fingered Dawn appeared’, they start on their way (4. 429–31). Upon returning that night, he also relates, they prepare another meal and again lie by the shore, but ‘when early-born rosy-fingered Dawn appeared’, they start on their way (4. 574–6). A night of rest followed by dawn rising also frames the Cyclops episode at both ends (9. 168–70; 558–60).

To appreciate the Odyssey's pattern of regulating activities according to the cycle of the sun, we might compare Athena's words urging Telemachus to action in Book 1 and the dream's exhortation to Agamemnon in Iliad 2.⁴ The dream just says, ‘arm the Achaeans’, without specifying, ‘tomorrow morning’. It is still night when Agamemnon awakens, gets dressed and starts off. Dawn rises while he is on his way. Conversely, Athena instructs Telemachus to ‘summon the Achaean heroes to assembly tomorrow and speak to them all’ (Od. 1. 272–3). He obliges: ‘at dawn let us go to assembly’ (1. 372); and though he cannot sleep, he waits for the new day to dress and act (2. 1–7).

We might also compare two scenes, one from each epic, in which a deity visits a mortal by night and speeds him on his way. In Iliad 24, Hermes awakens Priam, frightening him and causing him to rise and set out before dawn without saying goodbye to his host. In Odyssey 15, by contrast, Telemachus cannot leave at night as he wishes but has to wait. After being counselled by Athena, he kicks his travelling companion awake: ‘Up, Pisistratus, […] yoke the single-hoofed horses under the wagon, so we can take to the road’ (Od. 15. 46–7). But Pisistratus protests: ‘In no way can we drive through the dark night, no matter how eager we are for the journey. And soon it will be dawn’ (15. 49–50). Telemachus' desire to leave before sunrise clashes with the travelling protocol. In addition he is a guest, and as such he is expected to wait for his host's rising (see 15. 56–66).

Characters in the Odyssey strongly feel that there is a time for sleep, and they pontificate on the subject. Athena is the first to give voice to the sentiment when Nestor finishes his story and night comes: ‘Let us mind slumber. For it is time. The light of the sun has already gone under the horizon’ (3. 334–5). Odysseus and Alcinous exchange views on the relative appropriateness of sleep and storytelling (11. 330–1, 373–9), while Eumaeus reminds Odysseus that going to bed too early is not right (15. 392–4), and Penelope would not wish to keep Odysseus awake longer than is fitting (19. 591–3). Timeliness, of sleep and activity, is an organizational principle in the epic, where things, from the simplest to the most complex, run according to a schedule.⁵ So, in the first place, does Odysseus' nostos, which is given impulse only ‘when, as time rolled on, the year came’ in which it was due (1. 16–8).⁶

Odysseus' slumber at the helm

The section of the epic that is most fraught with sleep disruptions is Odysseus' narrative of his wanderings, which are paired with the war because of the pain they caused him.⁷ He spends two sleepless nights in the Cyclops' cave and many more on troubled waters. The storm that hits him after he leaves Calypso forces him to swim two days and two nights (5. 388–9) after seventeen days of uninterrupted sailing (5. 278–9; 5. 271): some twenty days without a nap! Sequences such as ‘so many days and nights’ or ‘so many nights and days’ often appear in conjunction with Odysseus' navigation, used to describe either his unrelenting sailing or the long time he spends lying exhausted by the seashore after strenuous sailing.⁸

Nine nights without sleep cause Odysseus to yield to an irresistible, and unfortunate, slumber, just as he is about to arrive in Ithaca thanks to Aeolus' wind-controlled conveyance:

Nine days we sailed, night and day. On the tenth my native land appeared, and we were so near as to see men tending fires. Then sweet sleep came upon me, for I was tired. I had ever held the sheets of the ship and not given them to anyone else, in order to reach my native land more quickly. But my comrades talked to each other, saying that I was bringing home gold and silver […] Looking at each other they would say…

(10. 28–37)

Ithaca has just come into view when Odysseus' slumber causes the ship to turn around, preventing the foreclosure of the plot, since he would otherwise have reached home too quickly on account of Aeolus' magic and his own unremitting control of the navigation.⁹ His enduring wakefulness at sea prior to dozing off – pointed up by the redundant ‘nine days, night and day’, which stretches the duration of his sailing¹⁰ – connects this episode to the last storm in his journey, which likewise causes him to sleep from extreme tiredness (5. 493; 6. 2), but after landing. While his rest at that point marks the end of a leg of his journey, his slumbering at the helm on his way to Ithaca reverses the journey's purposefulness by allowing the chaotic winds out. After he is blown back to Aeolus and his prayer for help is rejected, he and his crew start on an aimless navigation: a ‘sending from’, ἀποπέμπειν (10. 76), which undoes the directionality of Aeolus' conveyance, his πομπή (10. 18, 79). The travellers fall back into the pattern of sailing ‘further’, with no specification of direction or wind.¹¹

In recalling his sleep, Odysseus speaks in the voice of the acting character. For, though he knows how much sorrow it caused him, he calls it ‘sweet’, reliving his experience of it, whereas later, in explaining to Aeolus what happened, he stresses its disastrous effects by calling it ‘dire’ (10. 69) and emphatically placing the adjective in enjambment at the beginning of the line.¹² Sleep was sweet when, with Ithaca's silhouette on the horizon, Odysseus thought it safe to give in to his tiredness. The memory of his relaxation informs his account even as far as the rhythm of the line that describes his abandoning himself to Morpheus, ἔνθ’ ἐμὲ μὲν γλυκὺς ὕπνος ἐπέλυθε κεκμηῶτα (‘Then sweet sleep came upon me, for I was tired’): a brisk succession of dactyls stopped by a spondaic fifth foot coinciding with ‘tired’. The rhythm slows down as if Odysseus were re-experiencing his fatigue and his yielding to sleep, heavily.

Though he adopts the perspective of the acting character, Odysseus fills his sleep with his companions' conspiratory words, reported verbatim. In so doing he behaves like the omniscient narrator of Homeric epic, who knows all of his characters' movements, thoughts and speeches. But how could Odysseus know what his comrades said? One commentator attributes this narratological slip to ‘[Odysseus’] – or the primary narrator's – desire to expose the foolishness of his companions', which ‘overruled narrative logic’.¹³ Alternatively, the speech can be taken as a reconstruction after the fact, Odysseus' own dramatization of his companions' behaviour, how he imagines them to have acted while he was sleeping. In any case, the effect of the speech is to lengthen the duration of his slumber and make it not just the originator, but also the container, of the baneful action.¹⁴

Odysseus' isolation: sleeping on Trinacria

Odysseus dozes off inopportunely another time, and with more dire consequences, after a month of forced detention on Trinacria:

Then I went apart, up the island, in order that I might pray to the gods, if one could show me a way to go. And when I got far from my comrades, walking through the island, I washed my hands in a place sheltered from the wind and prayed to all the gods who hold Olympus. And they poured sweet slumber over my eyelids.

(12. 333–8)

The immediate effect of Odysseus' sleep is once again a mutinous speech, and he again reports its literal words. This time, though, the words have an individual speaker, Eurylochus, who leads the mutiny. His rebelliousness had already confronted Odysseus and forced him to come ashore. As night was approaching and the ship was nearing the island, Odysseus, mindful of Tiresias' and Circe's warnings, had urged his companions to steer clear:

But Eurylochus instantly replied with a hateful speech: ‘you are hard, Odysseus, you have strength beyond other men, your knees do not get tired. All about you is of iron, since you do not let your comrades, worn with fatigue and sleep, set foot on land. There, on the sea-girt island, we could once more prepare a pleasant meal, but you urge us even as we are to wander through the swift night, driven away from the island, on the dark sea. At night dire winds are born, the ruin of ships […] No, let's now obey black night and prepare a meal by the swift ship. And at dawn we will go aboard and put out into the vast sea’.

(12. 278–87; 291–3)

Eurylochus is the spokesman for the dejected crew, whose fatigue has soared after so many dreadful experiences. At the start of the journey Odysseus' companions are more energetic. The rhythm of their actions on the island near the Cyclopes' is dictated by the rhythm of the sun, not by abnormal tiredness. They reach the island at night, go to sleep (9. 151) and explore the site at dawn; they feast all day, lie down at night (9. 168–9) and the next day at dawn Odysseus calls the assembly (9. 170–1). After they escape from the monster, the sun regulates their actions again: they eat all day, sleep and at dawn resume their journey (9. 556–62). Nonetheless, they depart in utter dejection (9. 565–6).

Fatigue and dejection become palpable in the Circe episode. Upon touching the shore Odysseus and his men ‘lay down two nights and two days, eating our hearts from tiredness and suffering’ (10. 142–3).¹⁵ This time it takes three days, not one night, for the action to resume. And only Odysseus finds enough strength to get up and go hunting. As Eustathius saw, the tragedy in Polyphemus' cave is to blame for this state of affairs: ‘before the happenings at the Cyclopes’, hunting was a common business, but now the others lie down from much weariness, while much-enduring Odysseus alone finds food for his friends' (Od. 1. 373. 40–1). When he comes back, he encourages his comrades. Does he find them asleep?

Odysseus says, ‘I ἀνέγειρα my companions with honeyed words, standing near each man’ (10. 172–3). The verb ἀνέγειρα has been variously read, to mean ‘awoke’, ‘reanimated’, ‘reassembled’ or ‘heartened’. However we take it, it is undeniable that Odysseus' companions have run out of steam. And on the morning of their departure from Circe's palace they would have slept well past dawn if Odysseus had not called them: ‘I urged on my companions with honeyed words, standing near each man: “now sleep no longer, drowsing in sweet slumber”’ (10. 546–8). As the repetition of the phrase ‘my companions with honeyed words, standing near each man’ suggests, Odysseus behaves here as he did in the earlier episode; but this time he makes it clear that his comrades are asleep and draws attention to their slumber with a redundant phrase. Though shortly beforehand it had fallen on them to shake Odysseus out of his oblivion by reminding him of his journey (10. 472–4), they still seem to be keen on the decadent life of feasting – and sweet sleep – provided by Circe.

By the time they reach Trinacria, Odysseus' men no longer bear up with his endurance but let their tiredness direct the journey. Eurylochus singles Odysseus out as the one who does not need to rest and does not want to respect the orderly sequence, ‘stopping for the night, leaving at dawn’, which often structures the rhythm of travelling in the Odyssey. The taunt resonates with Odysseus' own reproach to Achilles in Iliad 19, where he insists that the Greek warriors, who have long been without food, cannot wage war on an empty stomach. The reversal in Odysseus' role from sensible leader to insensitive superman matches the different situations he is in, for eating before fighting would be safe, while stopping on Trinacria, even for one night, could be fatal. As was often the case during the Trojan War, the night cannot be obeyed this time. The reappearance, unique in the Odyssey, of the Iliadic phrase ‘let us obey the night’ highlights the warlike danger of the circumstances. Odysseus alone is ready to disobey the night, as in Book 10 he alone endures nine days and nights of wakeful sailing.

Though Odysseus' endurance both times singles him out, the second episode shows him further apart from his comrades, preparing for his irrecoverable severance from them.¹⁶ While the mutiny that disrupts the navigation from Aeolia is without a leader, and no one makes protestations to Odysseus openly, on Trinacria the crew's riotous inclinations predate his sleep and are stirred up by one fearless individual. Signs that Odysseus is losing his grip on his men can be traced back to the Circe episode, where Eurylochus speaks against him, opposing his request that they go with him to Circe's palace. Eurylochus attacks his foolishness, reminding everyone of the tragedy at the Cyclops' cave (10. 431–7). On this occasion, though, the defiant voice remains isolated and finally even Eurylochus agrees to go along. On Trinacria he gains the crew's approval (12. 294), forcing Odysseus to step ashore on the fateful island.

Sleep patterns reflect the increasing separation between the crew and its leader. The night they land near the Cyclops' territory, they lie together by the shore to rest, and the next morning Odysseus shares his plan (9. 168–71). On Circe's island they behave identically (10. 185–8). But at the end of their stay there, Circe takes Odysseus aside and instructs him all night long until dawn (10. 541) while his companions are slumbering. The separation is strongly marked by means of opposing particles and the emphatic personal pronoun: ‘And when the sun sank and darkness came, they, on the one hand (οἱ μέν), went to sleep in the shadowy halls, but I (αὐτὰρ ἐγώ) went up to Circe's beautiful bed’ (10. 478–80).

Further enhancing the separation is the echo in these lines of the description of the night's rest in the earlier episodes: ‘And when the sun sank and darkness came, we slept by the edge of the sea’ (9. 168–9; 10. 185–6).¹⁷ The first line is identical, but in the earlier instances Odysseus is among the sleepers: ‘we slept’, not ‘they slept’, as at the end of the Circe episode. At dawn, as we have seen, Odysseus awakens his comrades, quite possibly for the first time in the journey. The pattern is largely repeated when they return from Hades. They sleep together one more time upon landing (12. 7), but soon thereafter, ‘when the sun sank and darkness came’, Circe takes Odysseus by the hand, apart (ἀπονόσφιν) from his companions, to map his journey while they are resting (12. 31–3). Dawn again rises as soon as she has explained everything (12. 142).

After Circe sends her guests on their way the second time, Odysseus and his men no longer sleep simultaneously and in the same spot. Odysseus himself emphasizes their division in his account of the first night on Trinacria:

We drew the well-built ship in a hollow harbour […] My companions went off the ship, and then skillfully prepared a meal. But when they were sated with food and drink, they remembered and mourned their friends […] and […] sweet slumber came upon them.

(12. 305–11)

Odysseus does not participate in eating, lamenting, or resting.¹⁸ Sleep functions as one of the markers of the crew's distance from its leader, as is further underscored by the reappearance of the inclusive first person plural in the narrative of the resumption of activity on the next day: ‘But when early-born, rosy-fingered Dawn appeared, we moored the ship’ (12. 316–7).

After a month of being detained on the island, Odysseus' comrades do not even share daytime activities with him. They fish, hunt and eat anything they find, worn down by hunger (12. 330–2), while he physically removes himself from them to pray. His behaviour ‘is more in the individualistic manner of a Hebrew prophet than typical of the very communal and ceremonial religion of the Homeric hero’.¹⁹ This un-Homeric ritual individualism demonstrates Odysseus' separation from his companions. To be sure, his removal and subsequent sleep are in keeping with a pattern of Homeric narrative: actions happening simultaneously in different settings are presented sequentially, or, to put it a different way, only one action and its protagonists are in the focus of the narrative at any given time, while the other characters sit idle and are meant to step into the background.²⁰ Odysseus withdraws from the group and falls asleep, and the narrative returns to the group that stays awake. His departure, however, has thematic relevance: it is the culmination of his growing alienation from his men. As happened on the journey from Aeolia, he dozes off in the daytime, but this time he does so in a separate location, which he has deliberately sought. His sleep creates a vacuum of leadership, allowing Eurylochus to take over.

This greater separation is in keeping with the greater seriousness of the fault committed by the crew. While in Book 10 Odysseus' companions show mistrust and envy but do not betray orders, in Book 12 they rise up against his injunctions, tread on their oath and breach divine law. And both the greater separation and the greater seriousness of the fault are in keeping with the more destructive power of sleep in the second episode, as perceived by Odysseus himself. As in Book 10, he describes his daytime slumber according to how he experienced it: sweet when it came, still sweet when it left him (12. 338, 366). But after he smelled the roasted meats it became a νηλέï ὕπνῳ, a ‘pitiless sleep’ (12. 372). Odysseus chooses an epithet unique for sleep²¹ but common for the bronze of weapons, which his nap literally replaces by occupying the same metrical position as bronze in the formulaic phrase νηλέï χαλκῷ: the last two feet of the line. His sleep is a killing weapon indeed, for it brings about his comrades' death.

Odysseus' claim that the gods caused him to doze likewise underscores the dire consequences of his slumber. The claim sounds like an excuse, a way of denying responsibility.²² Why indeed would Odysseus seek a windless spot if he were not tempted by a nap? His choice of locale calls to mind his search for a bushy shelter when he lands on Scheria (at the end of Book 5) and Eumaeus' retiring to a protected area to spend a wintry night (at the end of Book 14). But more than just self-exculpation is at stake in Odysseus' emphasis on the divine origin of his slumber. In the parallel episode in Book 10 he blames not the gods but, less dramatically, his tiredness. The supposedly divine provenance of his sleep on Trinacria is in line with its more tragic effects. The skillful narrator suggests the inevitability of the catastrophe it caused by casting it as the gods' immediate response to his prayer.

A covering sleep

When Odysseus reaches Scheria after twenty nights of sailing and swimming, he seeks a place to rest (5. 472). Ruling out the possibility of sleeping near the river and opting instead for ‘thick bushes’ (5. 471), he chooses two entwined together, through which neither wet wind nor sun nor rain can go (5. 478–80), and he makes a large bed of leaves. He lies in the middle, ‘poured’ (ἐπεχεύατο) more leaves upon himself and ‘covered himself’ (καλύψατο) with them. Athena acts in sync, ‘covering’ (ἀμφικαλύψας) his eyes by ‘pouring’ (χευ᾽) slumber upon them (5. 487–fin.). Sleep's enfolding properties demonstrate its corporeality. Like night, which also covers, sleep is a substance.²³

The book that begins with Odysseus leaving Lady Cover, Calypso, ends with him enwrapped in leaves and sleep: ἀμφικαλύψας is the book's last word.²⁴ These two movements in counterpoint play up the fundamental ambivalence of covering in Homeric epic:²⁵ a protective gesture, but only if the cover is eventually lifted, as when gods save their favourite heroes from death in battle by pouring clouds or mist over them just in time to snatch them away. A permanent cover is (like) death.

Odysseus must leave Calypso in order not to disappear; but once his departure is granted, the text emphasizes the warmth and comfort of cover, in a love scene shrouded in darkness at the heart of Calypso's hiding dwelling. Night descends, and the pair retires to the ‘innermost part of the hollow cave’ to taste the pleasure of love (5. 225–7). Now that Calypso has promised not to hide Odysseus any more, night comes to envelop him in love's embrace and take him far inside the nymph's cave. This sketched retiring scene starkly contrasts with the way Odysseus had been forced to lie by the nymph in the same hollow cave – but, significantly, not in its ‘innermost part’ – for nights on end, when the cover had not been lifted, and night after night of constrained proximity alternated with day after day of tearful staring at the sea (5. 151–8). The last night with Calypso, and the first of joyful love after many years, is followed by a description of dawn rising to lift the cover of darkness and give impulse to the preparations for the new journey: ‘But when early-born, rosy-fingered Dawn appeared’ (5. 228). This line, which always marks a fresh start, looks ahead to that journey.

Even the sleep that ends the journey, however, has an engulfing, deathlike quality, pointed up by Odysseus' effort to keep the winds completely out of it²⁶ and by the simile that compares him, as he covers himself with the leaves poured thickly around him, to someone who seeks to preserve the spark of a firebrand by burying it under embers, since he has no neighbour to ask for help (5. 488–91). The simile casts cover and the absence of wind as a life-saving shield, but also suggests that Odysseus, like the firebrand, might lose his spark – his life – under his blanket in that windless spot.²⁷ His deathlike slumber is worrisome indeed, for it lasts well into the next afternoon and would have lasted even longer if Athena had not interfered (6. 112–3).

Odysseus' sleep attracts much narrative attention. The detailed descriptions of his preparations, including the choice of the locale and the making of the bed, how he lay down in the middle of it and covered himself, give the narrative a slow tempo. His sleep also seems to last longer in the narrative, because it bridges the end of Book 5 (‘Athena poured slumber over his eyes, so that it would quickly end his distressful tiredness, covering his eyelids’) and the beginning of Book 6 (‘So there he slept, the much-enduring, noble Odysseus, worn by sleep and tiredness’). We mark a pause between the two sentences, but instead of dawn rising in the second to restart the narrative, it is continuing slumber that fulfils this role. The prolonging of sleep in the authorial account matches Odysseus' own recollection, for he dwells on his sleep as expansively as Homer, and calls it ‘boundless’:

Ambrosial night came, and I […] lay down in the bushes and gathered leaves around me. And a god poured boundless slumber over me.²⁸ And there on the leaves I slept, with sorrow in my heart, all night until dawn and midday. The sun was declining [or set] when sweet slumber left me.

(7. 283–9)

We face a textual problem here: the Oxford Classical Text prints δείλετο, which makes the sun ‘declining’, rather than the transmitted δύσετο, ‘set’. The emendation goes back to the Hellenistic scholar Aristarchus, who objected to δύσετο because much happened between Odysseus' awakening and sunset. A modern critic, however, notes that δείλετο would occur only in this instance, and suggests, ‘Homer might have been careless here’.²⁹ According to this interpretation, the reading δύσετο is correct, but Homer did not see that it was the wrong verb. But is it wrong? Could not δύσετο rather be meant to point to the duration of Odysseus' ‘boundless slumber’? Thus another commentator: ‘The poet's evident desire […] is to exaggerate the length of Odysseus’ exhausted sleep'.³⁰ Odysseus would have wished it to last longer than Athena allows, as he suggests by calling it ‘sweet’. Though ‘sweet slumber’ is a standard phrase, this time the adjective is marked, because only Odysseus uses it, and not the primary narrator. Already when he is seeking the right spot to make his bed, Odysseus calls sleep ‘sweet’ in anticipation (5. 472), whereas Homer chooses the unmodified noun, and twice (5. 492; 6. 2). As we shall see, the weary traveller still desires sweet slumber in Alcinous' palace.

Athena's control of sleep and the beginning of the Odyssey

When Athena enwraps Odysseus in slumber, she has just reappeared by his side. She enters the stage by administering sleep, first to all the winds except Boreas (5. 384), then to the exhausted victim of shipwreck himself. Athena controls the Odyssey's action largely by manipulating its characters' sleep and wakefulness. Soon after pouring slumber on Odysseus, she rouses Nausicaa by a commanding dream, then rouses Odysseus in turn, to effect his encounter with the princess. In the formulaic phrase, ‘but grey-eyed Athena had another thought’, which often prefaces an attempt to steer the action away from an unwanted course, the thought is in most cases a decision to send sleep, to work on it or to prepare the conditions for either sleeping or awakening.³¹ The goddess' interferences demonstrate the importance of sleep and wakefulness in the development of the Odyssey's plot.

We first meet Athena as a controller of sleep on Ithaca. She pours ‘sweet slumber’ over Penelope's eyes (1. 362–4) but keeps Telemachus from sleeping. When the suitors retire, he goes to his bed ‘pondering many things in his mind’ (1. 427), and ‘all night long, covered with a sheep's fleece, he considered in his mind the journey that Athena had shown him’ (1. 443–fin.).

This instance of wakefulness near the epic's beginning recalls the one at the beginning of the Iliad, when sleepless Zeus causes Agamemnon to wake up. The two episodes unfold identically: a group (the gods in the Iliad, the suitors in the Odyssey) retires (Il. 1. 606= Od. 1. 424 except for particles); a character (Zeus, Telemachus) is singled out as he withdraws to his bedchamber (Il. 1. 609–11; Od. 1. 425–7), where he ends up staying awake, ‘deep in thought’ (Il. 2. 3: μερμήριζε; Od. 1. 427: μερμηρίζων); a deity (Zeus, Athena) rouses a human (Agamemnon, Telemachus) to action. Eustathius connects the two scenes, taking Telemachus' sleeplessness as an illustration of the appropriateness of the dream's reproach to Agamemnon (‘a man who bears the scepter should not sleep all night’).³²

These detailed correspondences, however, underscore meaningful thematic differences. In the Iliad the deity who makes the decision is Zeus, who is himself sleepless, while the deity in the Odyssey is Athena, and it is not she who is sleepless, but the human who must implement her decision. The two configurations highlight Zeus' different modes of presence in the two poems and the different relationships between gods and mortals in them. Zeus' launching action is more ‘bossy’ in the Iliad and more mediated in the Odyssey, where he remains in the background and acts indirectly. Instead of conceiving his plan upfront in sleepless solitude, he stimulates Athena's intervention.³³ And the goddess intervenes by stirring Telemachus and causing him to think after sharing her plan with him, while Zeus, the Iliad's wakeful thinker, shakes Agamemnon out of sleep to make him carry out a plan about which he knows nothing. This difference reflects Zeus' inscrutability in the Iliad as opposed to his, and Athena's, stronger sense of justice in the Odyssey, which determines also the treatment of sleep and wakefulness. While the gods in the Iliad (with the exception of Hermes in Book 24) do not help humans by interfering in their sleep patterns, in the Odyssey Athena repeatedly manipulates them to help Odysseus and his family, or to harm the suitors. A god-sent slumber never hurts a well-deserving character.³⁴

Athena's choice to goad Telemachus awake is in keeping with the coming-of-age subplot in the epic. Odysseus' son cannot sleep because he ponders the goddess' exhortation to leave: that is, he is roused to his duties as a man. His night filled with thinking is a vigilia in armis;³⁵ and it is set off against the suitors' irresponsible and unaware relaxation. Just when Telemachus realizes Athena's stirring action (1. 420), they start dancing and singing. And ‘black evening came upon them while they were taking their joy, and each of them went home to lie down’ (1. 423–4). The evening is markedly black, because the suitors are blind and sleepy even before going to bed.³⁶

Wakefulness also distinguishes Telemachus from Penelope. The goddess keeps the son up all night and lulls the mother to sleep, separating the one from the other now that Telemachus must find news of his father, come closer to him, become like him and leave motherly nurture behind.³⁷ This is vividly signified by the discrepancy between Euryclea's treatment of Telemachus as a spoiled child when she sees him to his bed and his inability to sleep like a spoiled child that night.³⁸ The account of his retiring sends conflicting messages, for he behaves like an adult and specifically his father, ‘pondering’ (1. 427: μερμηρίζων), while Euryclea, ‘who nursed him as a baby’ (1. 435), makes sure that he is safe and comfortable in his childhood bed. She follows him with lighted torches, folds and hangs his clothes, then locks the door of the room. When she leaves, he is all tucked up in his blanket: but his mind has already taken to the road indicated by Athena. Two women are competing for his attention: the caring nurse who locks him in his cosy bedroom and the goddess who sends him out into the world. And the goddess wins. The book (or the episode) ends with her name.

When Telemachus makes the final preparations for his journey, his wakefulness is once again set off against his mother's sleep, which allows him to act unbeknownst to her, to leave her in the dark while she is slumbering. He plans to fetch the provisions for his journey in the evening, ‘whenever Penelope shall go up to her quarters and be mindful of sleep’ (2. 358–9).

The rousing effect of Athena's action is consistent with her behaviour towards Telemachus throughout the epic: she never puts him to sleep, as she does with his father. While she reappears by Odysseus' side with her hypnotic wand in Book 5 and applies it again on the night before the slaughter in Book 20, she appears by Telemachus' side to prevent him from sleeping in Book 1, and does not use her wand when he lies sleepless on the night before his return journey in Book 15. Athena's penchant for rousing Telemachus reflects the necessity for him to keep steadily at his task of earning his place in the world. He is not, not yet, entitled to the soothing slumber to which Athena treats his much-tried and much-battered father.

The pleasure of sleep, the pleasure of tales: in Menelaus' palace

During his visits in Pylus and Sparta Telemachus sleeps on comfortable beds, carefully made. Offering good bedding is a mark not only of hospitality but also of wealth: ‘I am not destitute’, protests Nestor when Athena and Telemachus prepare to leave the palace and retire by the ship, ‘but I have plenty of covers to make soft beds for my guests’ (3. 346–55, summarized). After arranging for Telemachus to rest under the portico on ‘an inlaid bedstead’ next to his unmarried son, he himself ‘slept in the innermost part of the lofty palace, and besides him was the lady his wife, who had made the bed and the couch’ (3. 402–3).

This is the first retiring scene in the epic. The second is in Menelaus' mansion, where the hosts again sleep ‘in the innermost part of the lofty palace’ while Telemachus and Nestor's son Pisistratus do so on the porch (4. 302–5). These orderly arrangements create a stark contrast with the imbalance that upsets Ithaca. During the three years of the suitors' besiegement, Penelope withdraws to her bedroom each night to weep; the suitors leave each night for their homes; Laertes, who has moved to the fields, sleeps outside or in the dust near the fire, without a bed (11. 188–94)³⁹ and Telemachus supposedly sleeps in his childhood bedroom – though when we first meet him there, he is wide awake. His stays with Nestor and Menelaus lead him to discover something he did not know: a harmonious household, with a married couple retiring together.⁴⁰

In Menelaus' palace, however, sleep is delayed by storytelling. The evening must have already been advanced when he and his guests engage in conversation after a meal. For Pisistratus tries to stop that conversation, which has taken a tearful turn, by telling his host: ‘I do not delight in postprandial weeping. And early-born Dawn will come’ (4. 193–5). Menelaus' sorrowful reminiscing about Troy has revived in the young man a distressful longing for his dead and never known brother. To counter it, he invokes the late hour.

But Pisistratus' move clashes with his own desire to remember. Right after asking Menelaus to stop, he nonetheless endorses the human need to mourn and speaks of his brother (4. 195–202). It is now Menelaus' turn to stop the concert of tears and adjourn the conversation: ‘Let us cease from lamenting […] and think of supper […] There will be tales at dawn for Telemachus and me to tell to each other to the full’ (4. 212–5).

Like Menelaus' words, the authorial narrative that follows creates an anticipation of sleep: a herald pours water on the diners' hands, and they ‘threw their hands on the food laid before them’ (4. 218). This formulaic line is normally complemented by another, ‘and when they put away their desire for food and drink’, which marks the end of the meal and, almost always, the beginning of a conversation or a poetic performance.⁴¹ But in this episode, the first line of the pair stands alone. This anomaly may suggest to a trained audience that there will be no more conversation indeed, that the party is closing down.

The next line, though, defies this expectation, since ‘Helen had another thought’ (4. 219). Her intervention, like Athena's when she alters the course of the action (‘has another thought’), causes an abrupt move.⁴² And the move is the unexpected resumption of speeches, with a corrective: the nepenthe, the drug that Helen pours into the wine to remove the pain that the stories were causing for Menelaus and his guests, making them wish for sleep. As soon as the drugged wine is served, she tells her tale. Thus, storytelling takes the place of the suggested rest.

Helen promises her audience ‘delight of speeches’ (4. 239), confident that the drug will prevent personal memories from marring aesthetic pleasure. Does her nepenthe work? While under its influence, Helen and Menelaus recall Odysseus' exploits at Troy. Menelaus compliments his wife on the exactitude of her narrative (4. 266), which he has apparently enjoyed. But after he tells his story, Telemachus asks for sleep instead. He finds those recollections of Odysseus' heroism ‘all the more painful. For those deeds did not ward off mournful death, though he had a heart of iron inside. But please send us to bed, so that we may lie down and delight in sweet slumber’ (4. 292–5). Τέρψις (‘delight’) does not settle on one object during the long night in Menelaus' palace, but shifts from stories to sleep and vice-versa. Sleep wins in the end, and all retire in grand style (4. 296–305).

At dawn Menelaus asks Telemachus the reason for his coming (4. 312). The young man's request for news of his father prompts the long narrative of Menelaus' encounter with Proteus, which leaves Telemachus spellbound: ‘I would hold on even for a year, sitting here with you, and feel no longing for home or parents, for I exceedingly delight in listening to your words and stories’ (4. 595–8). While on the previous night Telemachus sought the delight of sleep, now he enthusiastically clings to the delight of Menelaus' narrative. Telemachus did not enjoy the stories of the previous night because they did not prove to him that Odysseus was alive. Now he rejoices in hearing a tale that for the first time gives him news of his father in the present tense. At last he is receiving the information he is after.

The inconclusive back-and-forth between the desire for rest and the desire for stories on the night of Telemachus' arrival has the narrative function of delaying the climax.⁴³ For on that night Menelaus already knows, or should know, that his guest is paying him a visit to hear about Odysseus or receive help. Telemachus does not disclose his identity, but is nonetheless recognized, and the goal of his trip is explained by Pisistratus (4. 162–3). Yet Menelaus ignores his guest's wish until the next day, when he asks him, ‘what do you need?’ and this time honours his request for information. The leisurely description of Menelaus' rising at dawn, getting dressed and leaving his room to find Telemachus (4. 307–11) gives the new day a strong forward-looking impetus. Sleep erases the painful and pointless conversation of the previous evening to prepare for the hope-inducing revelation.

Telemachus' response provides a model for the audience's. For he listens with true delight to a tale – Menelaus' ambush of Proteus – that does not belong, like the stories told on the previous night, to the Trojan War, to a pre-Odyssey past, but to the aftermath of the war: a tale, in other words, that is fully Odyssey material.⁴⁴ Considered from this angle, the richly described retiring scene that ends the previous night in sleep has the narrative function of turning the page, so to speak, from stories still informed by memories of Troy to stories more directly related to the Odysseus of the Odyssey, to his nostos.

The pleasure of sleep, the pleasure of tales: in Alcinous' palace

Odysseus arrives at the palace of Alcinous in the evening. It is sunset when he reaches the nearby grove of Athena (6. 321), and bedtime when he appears at the hearth: ‘He found [the Phaeacians] pouring libations to sharp-sighted Hermes, to whom they made libation last, when their thoughts turned to sleep’ (7. 138). Odysseus' arrival, though, like his son's in Sparta, postpones sleep, by causing Alcinous to offer another libation (7. 164–5; 179–81) and to have a table set and a meal prepared for the suppliant (7. 173–7). After the libation Alcinous dismisses his Phaeacian guests: ‘Now that you have dined, go home to lie down’ (7. 188). At dawn they will make sacrifices, entertain the stranger and think about his conveyance.

In fact, however, no one leaves until Odysseus rebuffs Alcinous' suggestion that he might be a god, says that his hunger prevents him from narrating his story and renews his request for conveyance. After making more libations, the Phaeacian people finally ‘went each to their homes to lie down’ (7. 229). But Odysseus cannot go to sleep yet, for he has to answer Arete's question about his clothes. To satisfy her he provides a longer narrative (7. 241–97), whose incipit (‘It would be hard, queen, to tell all of my tale of woes, since the gods of heaven have given me many’) harks back to the phrase with which he earlier put his need for food upfront: ‘I could tell you a longer tale of all the ills I have suffered by the will of the gods. But let me eat, for all my sorrows’ (7. 213–5). After quieting his hunger, Odysseus gives his hosts a tantalizing sample of his character, adventures and narrative skills, whetting their appetite for more. Sleep's long deferral foreshadows its downright denial on the next night, when Alcinous, eager to hear Odysseus' story to the full, keeps him awake against his expressed desire.

In the Phaeacian chapter Odysseus is remarkably drowsy. The sailor who can keep his eyes fixed on the stars night after night, is always ready to doze off while on Scheria.⁴⁵ His fatigue upon landing sharply contrasts with his hosts' cult of sleep: not so much a necessity as an indulgence. As Odysseus learns from Alcinous, his people cherish ‘the feast, music and dance, clothes often changed, warm baths, and the bed’ (8. 248–9). These words resonate with Menelaus' in the Iliad: sleep, love, song and dance are things of which one would rather take one's fill than of war (13. 636–9). The life of the peace-loving Phaeacians is a permanent party with sweet slumber as one of its attractions. They sleep for pleasure, as they eat for pleasure. Nausicaa and her friends ‘delight’ in their picnic (6. 99), while starved Odysseus eats with a ferocious hunger (6. 249–50). The Phaeacians are neither hungry nor sleepy, because they live in plenty and are close to the gods. They do not know what it is to labour even when they travel, which they do ‘without effort’ (7. 325). Poised between gods and men, untried by storms, they have no experience of the ‘distressful tiredness’ (5. 493) that plunges Odysseus into a deathlike slumber upon arriving on their island.

After Odysseus is offered hospitality and promised conveyance, his somnolence becomes a sign of relaxation, spurred by the confidence that his return to Ithaca is close, and that it will be, as Alcinous says, ‘without toil or pain’ (7. 192). The ever-wakeful sailor will this time be carried, ‘overcome by slumber’, on windless waters (7. 318–9). His eagerness to sleep seems reflected in the extended retiring scene that concludes his first evening in Alcinous' palace:

While they were so talking to each other, white-armed Arete asked the maids to put a bedstead under the portico and throw shining purple blankets on it, spread rugs, and put fleecy coverlets on top for him to wear. And the maids left the hall with torches. When they had busily spread the sturdy bed, they came to Odysseus and called him with these words: ‘rise, stranger. A bed is made for you’. So they said, and sleeping seemed welcome to him. So there he slept, the much-enduring, noble Odysseus, on a corded bed under the echoing portico. And Alcinous lay in the innermost part of the lofty palace, and next to him was the lady his wife, who made the bed and the couch.

(7. 334–7)

Odysseus takes part in a formal retiring scene for the first time in the epic. His new role fits his new circumstances: he is no longer in a world in which ‘hosts’ either issue deadly threats or wish to detain their guests forever, but is back in the civilized world, where guests enjoy proper hospitality and are not kept against their will (7. 315–8; 15. 68–9). For the first time in his journey, Odysseus has his own bed, a comfortable, richly decked-out one, where he is glad to retire. The repetition of the line ‘So there he slept, the much-enduring, noble Odysseus’, which describes him as he lies in the bushes at the beginning of Book 6, draws the audience's attention to the different conditions and spirit in which he now rests: his bed is no longer made of leaves and he is no longer beaten by extreme fatigue (6. 2), but anticipates sleep's pleasure. The detailed description of the bed's preparation replaces the mention of exhaustion, pointing up Odysseus' reentry into civilization. The leisurely narrative also conveys the extent of his eagerness to make up both for sleep's long postponement on that night and for many past nights he spent in discomfort and danger, whether asleep or awake.

On the next evening Odysseus is reminded that he will ‘sleep a sweet slumber’ through his homeward journey (8. 445). He must think it imminent, because he has been promised conveyance on that day (7. 318), which is almost over (8. 417), and he has been told that ‘the journey will not be delayed, but the ship is launched and the crew is ready’ (8. 150–1). Odysseus has received signal after signal that his departure is upcoming, and he is ready to leave. But when the songs of the bard stir him to tears, Alcinous asks not just for his name and the name of his native country, but also for an accurate narrative of his wanderings and losses at Troy (8. 572–86). As he is soon to find out, he will not sleep that night, either on the ship that is supposed to take him home or even in the palace.

Sleep is denied to Odysseus throughout the next four books: the longest night of the epic in narrative time, filled with the account of his adventures. At the end of Book 8, Alcinous asks a question that looks ahead, creating suspense and anticipation: ‘Tell me why you weep. Did any of your relatives die at Troy, or one of your friends? For wise friends are as good as brothers’ (577–fin., abridged). The audience cannot take a break at the end of the book but is eagerly projected onward, towards the answer to come. Its introduction, moreover, increases this sense of continuation by an atypical use of a common formulaic line: ‘And in answer much-cunning Odysseus said’ (9. 1). The line normally punctuates a back-and-forth conversation between two speakers in the flow of events, whereas in this instance, and in this instance only, it introduces a book and a sole-authored narrative. Whatever the origin of the book divisions, their author(s) felt that a transition from a speaker ending one book with a question to another starting the next with the answer was appropriate for the expectation of narrative created by Odysseus' protracted reticence.

Odysseus, though, does not give up on his desire for sleep. While he is listing the heroines he saw in Hades, he abruptly interrupts himself, telling his audience that he cannot mention them all, since there would not be enough time: ‘immortal night would be gone. But there is also a time to sleep, whether I go to the swift ship to join the crew or stay here. And my conveyance will be your concern and the gods’' (11. 330–2). Odysseus' pronouncement on the late hour recalls Athena's, likewise issued in the expectation of a departure (3. 334–5): goddess and hero are connected even in their shared appreciation of timely sleep.

But what exactly is Odysseus' goal? It could be that his interruption is purely rhetorical, a strategy to frustrate his listeners and pique their curiosity. This reading is supported by his choice to end his story with an anticlimax, a hurried list of heroines, whereas Alcinous wanted to know about the heroes who died in Troy, a request he repeats in response to Odysseus' claim that it is time to sleep (11. 370–2). But Odysseus' decision to end on a bland, low-key note could also suggest that he is indeed getting tired and is rushing to an end.⁴⁶

Unlike his son in Sparta, however, Odysseus does not say, ‘let us go to bed’, but couches his wish in a maxim (‘there is also a time to sleep’).⁴⁷ This is a tactful move, for should not the hosts decide when to break up the party? Normally it is they who initiate a retiring scene.⁴⁸ When Priam urges Achilles to have a bed made for him, he demonstrates his uncontrived candour. Young Telemachus is likewise direct. Conversely, his father hides behind a dictum, as he does again to restate his desire for rest when his host objects that the night is young: ‘There is a time for many speeches, but also a time for sleep’ (11. 379). This roundabout phrasing also legitimizes Odysseus' desire with the cachet of gnomic wisdom.

In reply to his guest's first protestation, Alcinous rejoins: ‘this night is very long, marvellously long. It is not yet time to sleep in the hall. Tell me of your wondrous deeds. And I would hold on even until bright dawn, as long as you are willing to tell me the tale of your woes’ (11. 373–6). Alcinous calls the night measureless, colouring it with his eagerness to listen and countering Odysseus' claim that it is fading.⁴⁹ His rejoinder emphasizes the enchanting atmosphere, stronger than sleep, that poetry creates⁵⁰ and might be directed to the external audience.

According to an attractive theory, the Iliad was performed in three nights and the Odyssey in two, and mentions of night and sleep marked the end of each stretch of the performance.⁵¹ The Iliad's first part would run to the end of Book 9, when the Achaean leaders fall asleep after the embassy to Achilles, and the second part, which would begin with dawn rising at the opening of Book 11,⁵² would end with night at 18. 354. Though dawn does not appear right at the start of Part Three but at 19. 1, it has been announced towards the close of Part Two (18. 136). Part One of the Odyssey would conclude with the description of Odysseus slumbering on the Phaeacian ship that carries him to Ithaca in Book 13, and Part Two would begin with the mention of dawn rising on the island.

If we adopt this theory, the comment on Odysseus' sleep-chasing narrative would have come very late in the performance and might have served as an encouragement to stay up for its last stretch: ‘Heed my words!’ Alcinous would be saying, ‘The story is worth the effort of remaining awake an extra hour!’⁵³ To secure his grip on the audience, the bard praises the performance's magic at a relatively dull point before redirecting the narrative. We hear a second beginning when Alcinous repeats his request for narrative in exactly the same words he used the first time: ‘But tell me this, tell everything exactly, whether you saw any of your godlike companions’ (11. 370–1), which harks back to, ‘But tell me this, tell everything exactly, whither you wandered’ (8. 572–3). Like a scene of actual sleep, but more emphatically, this protracted interruption – caused by the tension between the narrator's desire to call it a night and his audience's eagerness to hear more tales – leads to a fresh and revitalized new start.

Sweet slumber at the crossing

At the end of the long night of storytelling, the Phaeacian people go to sleep (13. 17), and perhaps Alcinous, his family and their guest do too; but the narrative is elliptical and moves straightaway to the rising of dawn (13. 18). This lack of a retiring scene to round off Odysseus' poetic feat projects the plot forward to his return, his only desire. Almost nothing happens on the new day, and Odysseus only wishes for it to end: ‘He would often turn his head to the bright sun, eager for its setting, for he very much wanted to go home’ (13. 29–30). Like a labourer who looks forward to his dinner after a long day of work and welcomes the sunset when he goes home, his knees broken with tiredness, ‘thus welcome to Odysseus was the sinking of the sun’ (13. 35). The simile conveys the length of his waiting and his weariness with it. Now, evening is longed for as much as sleep was the first night in Alcinous' palace (7. 343).

At last, Odysseus boards the ship:

And they spread a rug and a linen cover for Odysseus on the deck of the hollow ship, so that he might sleep soundly on the prow. He went on the ship and lay down in silence. And they [the crew] sat each at their benches in order, and loosened the cable from the pierced stone […] and sweet slumber fell on his eyelids, a sound, most sweet (ἥδιστος) slumber, very much like death […] Thus the ship swiftly running cut the waves of the sea, carrying a man the equal to the gods in counsel, who before had suffered very many sorrows in his heart, passing through wars of men and grievous waves, and now was sleeping, motionlessly, oblivious of all that he had suffered.

(13. 73–7; 79–80; 88–92)

Sleep is instilled into Odysseus by the soothing, lullaby-like rhythm of the three lines that prepare for departure (13. 75–7): they all start with a spondee coinciding with one word and have a similar metrical pattern (identical in the last two), which creates a monotonous effect.⁵⁴ An ancient audience is likely to have been sensitive to the hypnotic force of the passage, at least if we believe a Byzantine rhetorician's appreciation of an Iliadic line used to wake a sleeper: ‘You sleep, son of Tydeus, the fierce breaker of horses?’ (Εὕδεις Τυδέος υἱὲ δαΐφρονος ἱπποδάμοιο). He notes that the rhythm of the line, which quickens after the first spondaic word, makes it suitable for its context: ‘You see how the verse imitates arousal from sleep: it begins with long sounds, as if with lulling ones’.⁵⁵

Odysseus' transporting slumber is more lavishly described than any other Homeric instance of sleep. It has four epithets, one of which, ἥδιστος, is unique,⁵⁶ and the account of its qualities and effects occupies four lines. The episode also invited an array of interpretations in antiquity.⁵⁷ Some of these may appear fanciful to us: that Odysseus was naturally somnolent; that he faked sleep to avoid appearing ungrateful to his hosts for not inviting them to his palace, which would have led to his being recognized by his family; that the Phaeacians put him to sleep to prevent him from realizing where Scheria was and exposing it to attacks, or alternatively to show their respect for their guest by making it impossible for them to ask for a ferrying fee! More appealing to modern sensibilities and closer to the text is Eustathius' observation that Odysseus' deep slumber compensates for his long suffering by drowning it in forgetfulness.⁵⁸ The man who ‘suffered many sorrows in his heart at sea’ (1. 5) becomes the man ‘who before had suffered very many sorrows in his heart’. Poseidon frowns on Odysseus' sleep (13. 134) because it makes his journey painless. While the god thought that his enemy would return home ‘suffering many woes’ (13. 131), sweet slumber turns suffering from wars and waves into a pluperfect, ἐπεπόνθει (13. 92).⁵⁹

By harking back to the introductory presentation of Odysseus, however, the line ‘who before had suffered very many sorrows in his heart’ endows sleep with more than just a healing function: it also announces that the first part of the Odyssey, as well as the first night of the performance, is over.⁶⁰ The audience can go to sleep along with Odysseus and reconvene, energized, the next night to hear the second half. The ‘before’ that modifies the allusion to the beginning of the Odyssey signals the transition to Part Two, in which Odysseus will still suffer, but no longer from the sea or foreign wars. His own silence as he prepares himself for sleep puts an emphatic ending to the Phaeacian chapter, dominated by his storytelling. Both Odysseus' grievous wanderings and his account of them are over.

Yet another narrative marker for this transition is the abruptness with which Odysseus ceases to sleep and breaks into the final episode of the Phaeacians' chapter. We meet them for the last time as they sacrifice to Poseidon, ‘standing around the altar. And noble Odysseus awoke’ (187: ἑσταότες περὶ βωμόν. ὁ δ᾽ἔγρετο δῖος Ὀδυσσεύς). Our ears are drawn to ὁ δ᾽ἔγρετο, ‘he awoke’, by the position of the phrase: after the pause, which marks it out. Odysseus' aoristic awakening in the middle of a line, with the action suddenly switching from Scheria to Ithaca, represents perhaps the strongest narrative discontinuity in the Odyssey. There are two more instances where a character stops sleeping in coincidence with a switch in narrative focus in the course of a line: ‘they [Nausicaa's friends] cried aloud. And noble Odysseus woke up’ (6. 117), and ‘limb loosening [of Odysseus’ sleep], but his true-hearted wife woke up' (20. 57).⁶¹ In these instances, though, the subjects who share the line eventually converge, whereas Odysseus' awakening on Ithaca occurs along with the definitive disappearance of the Phaeacians from the narrative.

This emphatically transitional sleep advances the plot and Odysseus' wishes, both homeward bound. Thematic parallels conjure up Odysseus' slumber at the helm when he almost reaches Ithaca in Book 10: the magic aid he receives and the real or suspected treasures he carries. But in the earlier episode Odysseus' wishes clash with the plot's design. He ‘has’ to sleep for the plot to continue, whereas in Book 13 it is time for him to return, both in the gods' scheme and in the scheme of the narrative, which moves on from Odysseus' wanderings to the planning of his revenge, and from fantasy land to humanity and geographical reality.⁶² In Book 10 Odysseus' eagerness to return meets with both divine and poetic opposition: the gods are not by his side (he is ‘a man hateful to the blessed gods’, 74), his return is not yet fated, and it would cut off the fun of more fabulous wanderings. In Book 13, by contrast, Odysseus' wishes are supported by both Athena and the now centripetal movement of the narrative.

Odysseus slumbers at the junction of two worlds and portions of narrative already at the end of Book 5, before his first reentry into human society.⁶³ The parallel role of sleep as he transitions from the world of wandering to Scheria and from Scheria to Ithaca is pointed up by identical associations, with cover, absence of wind, and death.⁶⁴ Just as Odysseus sleeps on Scheria in a wind-blocking shelter, so he is carried to Ithaca on a ship shrouded in mist and clouds (8. 562) and sailing without wind (8. 556–60; 7. 328). His magical slumber on that ship is called ‘un-awakening’ νήγρετον, and indistinguishable from death.⁶⁵ As these two episodes of sleep signify, he comes close to the breathlessness of death both when he enters Scheria and when he leaves it.⁶⁶

Odysseus' deathlike slumber at each crossing back to the human world befits the heroic way he embraces the mortal condition. Odysseus chooses mortality⁶⁷ and, with it, the necessity of sleep. In this important respect, he is the opposite of Gilgamesh, with whom he is often compared because both wander to the outer limits of human experience. But Gilgamesh's wanderings are a quest for immortality and are characterized by a horror of sleep, which he identifies with death. Seeing his friend Enkidu dead, he asks, ‘What is this slumber that has seized you?’ (Tablet 8), and then wanders relentlessly, sleeplessly (Tablet 10). His aspiration to find immortality takes the shape of an ever-wakeful search. Accordingly, the test of immortality he is given consists of seven nights without sleep (Tablet 11). He fails. His failure proves that he is mortal and sends him home to die.⁶⁸

Odysseus does not need to learn this lesson. His extraordinary wakefulness is not dictated by repulsion for sleep but by the urgencies of travelling and survival, just as his wanderings are not a quest but a detour. His greatest feat of wakefulness occurs not along a journey to find immortality but as he sails to reenter the human world after declining an offer of immortality. Odysseus forsakes sleep to survive as a human and return to humankind. And as soon as he lands on Scheria, he falls into a boundless, deathlike slumber: a confirmation, or even a recovery, of mortality.

Back to light and life

The deathlike quality of Odysseus' sleep as he is transported to Ithaca equates his homecoming with a return to life. This identity is further underscored by the timing of the journey from night to the rising of the morning star, which inspires an extended and non-formulaic description: ‘When that brightest of stars rose, which more than others comes to announce the light of early-born Dawn, then the sea-cleaving ship approached the island’ (13. 93–5).

Arrival at daybreak foreshadows safety, while night-time landings tend to mark journeys particularly fraught with misadventures. The strange night that takes Odysseus to the Cyclops in retrospect foreshadows ill, imprisonment in a cave and death. When he leaves the island, it is dawn. The early-morning departure, though standard in the Odyssey, contrasts with the nocturnal arrival and highlights the end of danger. It is again evening when Odysseus catches sight of Trinacria (12. 265), and night when he lands on Calypso's island (12. 447), the island of disappearance. The most dangerous and the darkest realm of all, Hades, is also entered via sunless regions. After sailing ‘all day’, at the coming of night the crew reaches the limits of Oceanus and the land of the Cimmerians, wrapped in a perennial, dreadful night (11. 9–19). The journey to Hades is a descent from day to night, while the return to Circe is to the dwelling of daybreak, ‘the house of early-born Dawn’ (12. 3). As one critic puts it, ‘Odysseus sails from darkness to light, from night to morning, death to life’.⁶⁹

Dawn rises again to show Odysseus Scheria the first time he hopes he can reach it, after Poseidon has covered land and sea with clouds to make ‘night rise from the sky’ (5. 294). For ‘two nights and two days’ Odysseus is adrift and expects death, but ‘when fair-tressed Dawn brought the third day to its birth, the wind stopped and a windless calm came to be. And he saw the land nearby’ (5. 388–92). The phrase, ‘nights and days’, highlights the magnitude of the storm and of Odysseus' stamina,⁷⁰ and it is also appropriate because daylight ends the night of the storm and of wandering. The first time Scheria appears (5. 279) prior to the storm, no dawn rises. The island's appearance then neither brings salvation nor builds a contrast with darkness: Odysseus has been sailing without sleeping for ‘seventeen days’ (5. 278), not ‘seventeen days and nights’. The mention of the birth of day in combination with the end of the storm in the second instance emphasizes his return to life. (Though the waves resume, the sight of the land in daylight announces deliverance, for the comparison of Odysseus to a child seeing his father unexpectedly recovered from a deadly illness occurs at this point [5. 394–8].) As on his journey to Calypso's island, Odysseus is the victim of shipwreck, is alone, naked and carried on the waves for days on end;⁷¹ but that journey, with its nocturnal landing, takes him to the swallowing night of the nymph's cave, while the journey to Scheria, with dawn appearing on the horizon, advances his return to life and home.⁷²

Sleep and disorientation

When Odysseus awakens on Ithaca, dawn has risen, but a mist poured by Athena prevents him from recognizing his native country. His slumber prepares for the disorientation that follows it by effacing his memory and by keeping him in the dark while he is transported from one place to another and when he is landed on Ithacan soil.⁷³ The verse describing Odysseus' failure to recognize Ithaca points up sleep's responsibility by beginning with ‘sleeping’ and ending with ‘he did not know’: εὕδων ἐν γαίῃ πατρωίῃ, οὐδέ μιν ἔγνω (13. 188). εὕδων and ἔγνω are interlocked not only by their symmetrical positions but also by their identical metrical pattern (two spondees). We hear sleep turn into disorientation.⁷⁴

Odysseus' experience of disorientation colours the story he tells Athena just after discovering that the strange land he sees is Ithaca. He casts himself as a wanderer who has lost his way. He was headed to Pylus or Elis, he says, but the Phoenician ship taking him there was hit by a storm, and

Wandering we came here by night. Eagerly we rowed into the harbour, and none of us was mindful of food, though we sorely needed to eat, but we all left the ship just as we were and lay down. Then sweet sleep came upon me, for I was tired. They took my goods from the hollow ship and placed them down where I was lying on the sand. And they went on board and left for the well-peopled land of Sidon. But I was left here, troubled in my heart.

(13. 278–86)

This is the first of Odysseus' ‘lies similar to the truth’ (19. 203). It is true that he was carried on a foreign ship, that he slumbered and that upon awakening he found himself alone but with his goods safe and next to him. It is not true that he arrived on Ithaca at night or that he was headed elsewhere. But even these lies reflect his real state of confusion when Ithaca appeared to him as an unknown land, shrouded in mist if not in darkness. The real personage, like the fictional one, was headed elsewhere indeed, to Ithaca, not to the unrecognizable land where he found himself. Odysseus' choice of line to describe sleep's onset (‘Then sweet sleep came upon me, for I was tired’) pushes him back to the world of wandering. The line repeats 10. 31, reminding the audience of Odysseus' unfortunate slumber when he was about to reach Ithaca the first time around and lost his return. The detail that he was stranded on Ithaca at night likewise conveys his experience of disorientation, because nocturnal landings, as we have seen, are associated with perilous crossings. Though he lands at the rise of dawn this time, he does not see its light until Athena, over 160 lines after he awakes, scatters the fog (13. 352).

Odysseus' disorientation is one more feature connecting his return to Ithaca with his arrival on Scheria, where he likewise awakes suddenly from a long and deathlike sleep and in the middle of a line (‘they cried aloud, and Odysseus awoke’). There too he realizes that he does not know where he is and asks the same questions, the ones he used to ask during his wanderings: where have I come? Are the people here friendly or violent? (6. 119–21=13. 200–2) These questions build up dramatic irony by highlighting Odysseus' ignorance and keeping him from returning, when we know that his homecoming is imminent (on Scheria) or accomplished (on Ithaca).

PART TWO: ON ITHACA

In Eumaeus' hut: sleeping arrangements and sleep-chasing stories

The arrival of Odysseus at Eumaeus' dwelling prompts an account of the swineherd's husbandry. He has set up sleeping quarters for his master's livestock: ‘Inside the farmstead he had built twelve sties next to each other, as beds for the swine. And in each of them were kept fifty female swine for breeding, which slept on the ground. But the boars slept outside’ (14. 13–6). The care with which Eumaeus tends the animals is reflected in the neat arrangements he has made for their rest. They ‘retire’ each to their appointed place. Like the members of a well-functioning household, they have regular sleeping habits (14. 411).

The swineherd has his sleeping habits as well. He prefers to remain near the animals rather than in his hut. On the first night of Odysseus' visit, he prepares a bed for him by the fire, then leaves:

Odysseus lay down there. And he [Eumaeus] threw upon him a thick and large cloak, which he kept at hand to wear whenever a fierce storm would arise. So there Odysseus slept, and next to him the young men slept. But it did not please the swineherd to make his bed there, to sleep far from the swine.

(14. 520–7)

Eumaeus plays the host in a retiring scene by preparing for his guest's night, and himself retiring after him. But this host's arrangements reverse the typical locations of the sleepers in such scenes, for he makes his bed outside. Seizing sword and javelin and wearing a thick cloak, he ‘went to lie down where the white-toothed swine slept, beneath a hollow rock, under shelter from the north wind’ (14. 532–fin.). The reversal displays his devotion, which causes him to put his job before his comfort, to his master's delight (14. 526–7). Spending the night outside is the decisive mark of his good husbandry.⁷⁵

Spending the night outside also isolates Eumaeus from the other swineherds, who stay inside. His physical separation from them betokens the distance between the young servants who can sleep in comfort and the old one who is beset with worries because he knew Odysseus.⁷⁶ Eumaeus' worries affect the manner of his departure by keeping him alert and his muscles at attention. For he leaves after performing a combination of two type scenes – a dressing and an arming scene – that normally introduce action.⁷⁷ The narrative focuses on his wakeful energy rather than his desire for rest.

A large part of the next night is spent without sleeping. When asked to tell his story, the swineherd prefaces it by exhorting his guest to remain awake:

Stranger, since you ask and question this of me, now listen in silence and take delight, drink your wine and sit. These nights are marvellously long. There is a time for sleep, and a time for taking delight in listening to tales. And you should not lie down to sleep before the right time. There is distress also in excessive slumber. As for the others, if their heart and spirit so bid them, let them leave and sleep […] But as for us, let us drink and eat in the hut, and take delight in each other's grievous woes, as we remember them. For with time man takes delight even in sorrows, whoever has suffered much and wandered much. I will tell you what you ask and question of me.

(15. 390–402)

Eumaeus' words call to mind those of Alcinous when, to oppose Odysseus' desire to sleep, he claims that the night is ‘marvellously long’.⁷⁸ Eumaeus' comment, however, does not follow but introduces a narrative, and is made not by an enchanted listener who wants to hear more stories but by a speaker who advertises the delight of prolonged storytelling before narrating his own story. It is offered, moreover, to a listener who needs no such advertisement, because he has given no sign of impatience. On the contrary, he has solicited the story, as Eumaeus himself stresses by framing his exhortation to remain awake with the phrase ‘you ask and question of me’ at both ends. What is the purpose of this emphasis on the inappropriateness of sleep and the delight of stories, since Odysseus is willing to listen in any case?

When Alcinous urges Odysseus to forsake slumber and continue his tale, he compares him to a poet. Eumaeus, by ‘imitating’ Alcinous but with reference to his own story, sets himself up as a poet preparing for a performance that will match those of Odysseus, both in Alcinous' palace and in Eumaeus' own hut the night before.⁷⁹ Homer endows the swineherd's narrative with poet-like qualities from the outset by putting in his mouth words that an enchanted listener uses earlier to praise a poet-like performance. Eumaeus' request that Odysseus should sit in silence further casts the speaker in the role of the poet, and his guest in that of the audience. For poets ought to be listened to in silence (1. 325–6 and 369–70; 17. 513–4).

Eumaeus, however, isolates Odysseus from the group by addressing his exhortation only to him, and allowing the other men present to retire. If he offers to let them withdraw, it is because they already know his story.⁸⁰ But the result of this separate treatment is to create a strong connection between himself and Odysseus, who will stay up late and talk in intimacy. Eumaeus stresses this bond by using dual forms to describe their wakeful entertainment (15. 398–400) after sending the others off to sleep.

There is no such privileged bond between Odysseus and Alcinous in the parallel scene in Book 11. No one is sent to sleep, and Odysseus performs in front of a large audience, composed of Alcinous' family and the Phaeacian nobles. The difference relates to the different expectations attached to the performance by both performer and audience in that scene. As many have noted, Odysseus and the Phaeacians do not live in the same world. While he is the suffering wanderer, they are close to the gods. His performance accordingly charms them but does not stir their hearts.⁸¹ They all appreciate the beauty of the story, but no one has any reason to feel emotionally close to the storyteller, to stay up alone with him. In Eumaeus' hut, by contrast, poetic τέρψις (‘delight’) hangs on a delicate equilibrium between detachment and identification.⁸² Though the passage of time has removed speaker and listener from the narrated events, Eumaeus' story touches Odysseus deep inside: ‘You stirred my heart with each thing you said, all that you have suffered in your heart’ (15. 486–7). One heart has suffered; the other is moved by the tale. And the movement is reciprocal, for when Odysseus tells ‘his’ tale to Eumaeus, he responds in exactly the same way (14. 361–2=15. 486–7).⁸³ Stories on Ithaca are no longer pure entertainment, but a means for Odysseus to rebuild solidarity with the members of his household.⁸⁴ By inviting his master alone to stay awake and listen, Eumaeus creates an atmosphere of commonality that would be out of place in the Phaeacian episode.

Telemachus' second bout of sleeplessness and the three men's bonding

While Eumaeus and Odysseus tell each other stories through the night, Telemachus is nearing Ithaca. His homeward journey repeats his journey out in a number of features, among which is the rhythm of his travel and sleep patterns. The first leg of his outward journey is nocturnal and profits from the fair wind sent by Athena (2. 420). To start him off on his way back, Athena tells him that he will have to sail all night and that the gods will send a fair wind to speed up the trip (15. 34–5).⁸⁵ In the account of both voyages, the line ‘the sun set and all the ways grew dark’ introduces, not an arrival, which is typical,⁸⁶ but a departure (2. 388)⁸⁷ or a swift sailing onward (15. 296). The two journeys also follow corresponding sequences of sleep and waking. Telemachus forsakes sleep at both ends, while in the central stretch, from Pylus to Sparta and vice-versa, he stops in the same place to rest until dawn (3. 487–91=15. 185–90).

Another feature that connects the two voyages is Telemachus' sleeplessness on the eve of both. When Athena arrives in Sparta to urge him to depart, she finds him deep in thought while Pisistratus is resting: ‘The son of Nestor was overcome by soft sleep, but sweet slumber did not hold Telemachus. In his heart thoughts of his father kept him awake through the ambrosial night’ (15. 6–8). Pisistratus' sleep smoothes over the change of scene from Ithaca to Sparta at the transition between Books 14 and 15 by repeating the activity performed at the end of the earlier book: just as Odysseus and Eumaeus are resting on Ithaca, Nestor's son is resting in Sparta.⁸⁸ The repetition also enhances Telemachus' wakefulness by casting it as a lonely vigil, set off against the sleep not only of his friend near him, but also of his father and his servant far away. We are sent back to the end of Book 1, where Telemachus is deep in thought while everyone is slumbering. In the later episode, though, he is not goaded by Athena but by his own mind. The wakeful man is attuned to the goddess' prompting.

Telemachus cannot wait to leave. He wants to do so in the middle of the night, but Pisistratus stops him (15. 44–50). His impatience further clashes with Menelaus' retentive hospitality. Though he knows that a good host should not detain the guest who wants to depart (15. 68–70), he himself is unable to follow this protocol. Even after offering gifts and a meal, he pours one more libation and greets his guests (15. 147–53). The untypical presence of a greeting scene in conjunction with a departure (rather than an arrival) is owing to ‘an amusing tension that has developed between Telemachus’ impetuous eagerness to return home and Menelaus' persistent failure to incorporate this in his mind'.⁸⁹ Telemachus is wary of being delayed further by Nestor, and for this reason he begs Pisistratus to let him leave Pylus without visiting his palace (15. 199–201).

The journey quickens both in actual speed and in narrative time in its last leg, from Pylus to Ithaca. With the help of Athena, who sends a wind that ‘blows strongly’, the ship ‘runs’ through the sea, sails on and on as evening comes (15. 292–9) until … we enter Eumaeus' hut, where he and Odysseus are having the supper that is followed by their long night of storytelling. At dawn, after servant and master have rested only little, Telemachus lands (15. 494–5). The double switch in locale and actors as day transitions to night and night to day highlights the wakefulness shared by the three men. The day-to-night transition does not bring sleep but action in a different setting (Eumaeus' hut), and the night-to-day transition heralds the return of a traveller who has sailed all night. Telemachus further accelerates his pace towards the book's end: ‘His feet bore him swiftly as he walked on, until he reached the farmstead where his thousands of swine were. By them the worthy swineherd used to spend the night (ἐνίαυεν), he who had kind thoughts for his masters’ (15. 555–fin.).

It is unclear whether Eumaeus is taking the short nap mentioned earlier (15. 494) or whether ἐνίαυεν refers to his habit of spending the night at the sty. I favour the second reading because the next book opens with Eumaeus and Odysseus preparing their breakfast at dawn, and dawn had already risen with Telemachus' arrival on Ithaca (15. 495).⁹⁰ Whatever the case, wakefulness is the keynote in the behaviour of the three men, who will soon stay up another night, this time jointly, to kill the somnolent suitors while Penelope sleeps.

Slumbering Penelope

It is Penelope's habit to retire upstairs and weep, and Athena's to put her to sleep. The pattern recurs four times. What is its purpose? Each time, Penelope's sleep rounds off an episode and expedites a scene change: from her room to the halls (1. 362–5; 21. 356–60), the portico (19. 603–20. 1) or Eumaeus' hut (16. 450–3). Her god-induced slumber, though, not only helps narrative shifts but also removes her from the theatre of the action in a more definitive way than would her withdrawal alone. That sleep is not just a means of transitioning from one locale to another emerges especially from the first and the last episodes (in Books 1 and 21), where no true transition occurs. For the narrative follows Penelope upstairs, but as soon as she dozes it returns downstairs, right where it was before she retired. Sleep draws a black curtain around her and prevents her not just from acting, but also from following the actions of others.

This pattern reverses what used to happen in Penelope's pre-Odyssey past, the three years in which her nights were spent in unsleeping activity. Like the ever-wakeful herdsman who could earn double wages from the extraordinary length of the day in the land of the Laestrygonians (10. 84–6), Penelope used to work double shifts, weaving her shroud in the day and unweaving it at night. Her wakefulness was a major aspect of her ability to control her plot, woven by her nightly unweaving, during the time when she pretended to be the least active.⁹¹ In contrast, her first appearance in the Odyssey ends with her withdrawing to her room not to plot but to weep and finally sleep, while Telemachus makes plans for the morrow. In the Odyssey's prehistory she acts unbeknownst to others during their nightly rest and is formidably capable of pushing sleep away; within the epic, others act unbeknownst to her while she slumbers and she cannot control either her sleep or her wakefulness.

This reversal does not speak in favour of an active Penelope. Her mode of presence in the epic has prompted a lively discussion in the last few decades, spurred especially by feminist readers or readers otherwise sympathetic to her. For them she is more active than she has traditionally been held to be.⁹² I cannot fully engage with this question here, but only wish to argue that Penelope's sleep patterns severely limit her presence onstage, even as spectator, and suggest a strong discontinuity between her past weaving and her present weeping.⁹³ It is true that she weeps for the same reason she used to weave: because she keeps the memory of Odysseus alive. By preserving his memory, her weeping makes his return possible.⁹⁴ Her unremitting lamentation is her way of keeping herself for him, as Athena suggests by mentioning it at the crucial juncture in which she sits with him to plan his revenge (13. 336–8). By the time Penelope enters the stage of the Odyssey, however, her memory is no longer creative but only painful. And, at least in the lonely hours of the night, she wishes she could find oblivion in sleep (20. 85–6).

Advocates of an active Penelope find support in a simile that describes her as she lies in her chamber,

Without eating, without touching food or drink. She pondered whether her blameless son would escape from death or be killed by the haughty suitors. As a lion in a throng of men ponders, seized with fear, when they draw a cunning circle around him, thus she pondered, and sweet slumber came upon her. She leaned back and slept, and all her joints were loosened. But Athena had another thought.

(4. 788–95)

Since ‘lion images are typically reserved for heroic men’, the simile is taken to suggest that Penelope ‘has come remarkably close to enacting the role of a besieged warrior’.⁹⁵ Penelope-lion, however, does not actively find a way out of her prison but falls asleep while thinking, and Athena sends her a revealing dream that replaces her thinking and changes her mindset with the good news that Telemachus will survive. Penelope-lion is at an impasse, the resolution of which comes to her unawares, with sweet slumber as the vehicle for an orientating dream. And her earlier sleep, which allows Telemachus to leave on the sly, deprives her of an opportunity for action normally granted to epic mothers and wives, who often attempt to detain their departing sons or husbands.⁹⁶ Indeed, Penelope scolds her maids for not rousing her when Telemachus was leaving; otherwise, he would have had either to stay or to see her dead (4. 729–34).

Penelope's sleep patterns set her passivity off against the active wakefulness of Odysseus and Telemachus. Of the four formulaic episodes in which Athena lulls her to sleep, two effect a transition from her inaction to Odysseus' activity, with him replacing her by name immediately after she dozes off. Athena pours sweet slumber over her eyes, ‘but in the evening the trusty swineherd went to Odysseus and his son’ (16. 452–3); Athena pours sweet slumber over her eyes, ‘but noble Odysseus was lying under the portico’ (20. 1). The contrast is even starker with Telemachus, who literally sets in motion the other two instances of Penelope's formulaic sleep (1. 360–4=21. 354–8) by sending her to her room, where Athena shuts her eyes and mind.

Penelope's ‘beauty sleep’

Penelope is about to join the suitors downstairs when Athena ‘had another thought’ and ‘poured sweet slumber over Icarius’ daughter. She leaned back and slept, and all her joints were loosened, there on the couch. And meanwhile the goddess gave her immortal gifts, so that the Achaeans might admire her’ (18. 187–91). After completing the beauty treatment Athena leaves. Penelope awakes when she hears the maids talking: ‘Sweet slumber released her, and she rubbed her cheeks with her hands and said: “in my dire suffering a soft, deep sleep (κῶμ’) enfolded me all over”' (18. 199–201).

The episode parallels those in which Athena beautifies Odysseus by reversing the ageing process (for Penelope she uses the lotion of Aphrodite) and increasing his stature (for Penelope, see 18. 195). The goddess, however, always acts on Odysseus while he is conscious, and she even speaks to him before providing the treatment (16. 167–71), whereas Penelope is enwrapped in a magically deep slumber.⁹⁷ Sleep clears Odysseus' loyal wife of any suspicion of coquetry.⁹⁸ It is also consistent with the way Athena interacts with her, always indirectly and without her noticing.

Penelope's ignorance of the goddess' presence calls to mind Odysseus' unawareness of it before he reaches Ithaca. Athena reappears by his side during the last storm but intervenes unbeknownst to him: she ‘puts thoughts’ into his mind (5. 427; 5. 437) as she does into Penelope's (18. 158; 21. 1), and she sends him to sleep as she does her. Odysseus, though, becomes aware of Athena's presence when they plan his revenge together. If she hides herself from him while he is still abroad, it is to avoid incensing Poseidon (6. 329). By contrast, the indirectness with which she treats Penelope is her only mode of communicating with her. Athena orients her actions to make her fit the plot, even against her wishes, for her beauty sleep is forced on her and is not even meant to help her deal with her immediate circumstances, to soothe her heart and dry her tears, but rather to remove her resistance.⁹⁹

Though the κῶμα is forced on Penelope, it feels sweet to her nonetheless. When she awakens she seems to regret that it is over, for she calls it ‘soft’ and asks for a similarly ‘soft death’ to come quickly (18. 202–3). In the parallel scene in Iliad 14 it is Hypnos, the sender of κῶμα, who calls it ‘soft’. Its recipient, Zeus, has no fond memory of it, for obvious reasons, and does not comment on it, whereas Penelope dwells on its gentle embrace, foregrounding the pleasure only suggested by the formulaic ‘sweet slumber’ with which the primary narrator describes her state.

Penelope's appreciation of her κῶμα is in line with her keenness to talk about sleep. Her interest in it is a feature she shares with her husband, one of the many facets of their like-mindedness. Odysseus, we noted, dwells on his ‘boundless slumber’ and on occasion records his feelings when sleep seized him and left him, or cost him dearly. Penelope comments on her sleep at greater length and even compares her sleep experiences. As we shall see, the eerie slumber that takes her unconscious through the slaughter is, in her words, the best she has had since Odysseus left for Troy.

Closural sleep and mounting wakefulness

Book 16 ends with Eumaeus, Odysseus and Telemachus sleeping at last in the swineherd's hut: ‘But when they put away their desire for food and drink, they thought of rest and took the boon of sleep’. The joint slumber of the three men betokens their connivance and their sympathy for one another by building a unity among them. As noted above, simultaneous sleep is a mark of harmony and peace: the orderliness in the households of Nestor, Menelaus, Alcinous and, I will now add, Aeolus (10. 8–12) is mirrored in regular and shared sleep patterns, whereas Odysseus and his companions cease to rest in the same place and at the same time when they drift apart. In Odysseus' besieged estate domestic harmony is relegated to Eumaeus' hut, the only setting of a formal and harmonious retiring scene.

The three men's sleep signals a major transition in the plot: the conclusion of Telemachus' journey, culminating in his recognition of Odysseus, and the transference of the action to the palace, with Odysseus as the main protagonist. The Odyssey progressively gravitates towards one centre.¹⁰⁰ Until Book 13 there are three centres: the wanderings of Odysseus, the journey of Telemachus and the happenings on Ithaca. When Odysseus leaves Scheria, he leaves his wanderings behind in his sleep; soon thereafter, the Phaeacians leave the stage; Telemachus returns and he and his father get ready to move to the palace, where the action is concentrated from Book 17 on. This final narrowing of focus is preceded by the three men's slumber with its closural force, enhanced by the formulaic phrase ‘they took the boon of sleep’, which appears two other times at book endings.¹⁰¹

As the slaughter approaches, Odysseus' wakefulness comes to the forefront. His power to push sleep off was a winning weapon already against the Cyclops, in the feat that Odysseus himself deems his highest achievement during his wanderings, just as he deems the nocturnal attack on the slumbering Trojans his highest achievement in the war. Odysseus' ability to forsake sleep is a manifestation of the endurance that his guileful methods demand. He has the stamina characteristic of other embodiments of cunning intelligence, such as fishermen and hunters, who cannot succumb to their tiredness.¹⁰² His unsleeping cunning in the Cyclops' cave exploits his victim's drunken slumber, which Odysseus himself contrives. It is not a god that causes the Cyclops to doze off, as Athena does Alcyoneus when Heracles kills him;¹⁰³ and not godlike magical powers, such as those with which Medea lulls the dragon that guards the Golden Fleece to sleep in Apollonius' Argonautica.¹⁰⁴ Nor does Odysseus receive divine guidance in his attack on the monster in the manner of Perseus when he beheads the Gorgon¹⁰⁵ or of Menelaus when he ambushes Proteus during his siesta.¹⁰⁶ Odysseus has no god and no godlike helper by his side, but his wakeful mind comes up with the idea to debilitate the enemy through sleep and with another to destroy him. Odysseus also accomplishes a feat of endurance unparalleled in other stories of heroes killing sleeping monsters, for he stays up two nights and one day to conceive and carry out his plan.

The slaughter is likewise an accomplishment of Odysseus' mental and physical stamina over carelessly feasting and drowsy victims. He takes the initiative to ask the maidservants to entertain Penelope, stating that he will tend the lamps for the suitors' party: ‘I will offer light to all, even if they should wish to wait for dawn of the beautiful throne, and in no way will they beat me. I am much enduring’ (18. 318–9). The offer sends hints of Odysseus' power by suggesting the sudden appearance of light that accompanies divine epiphanies¹⁰⁷ and by foregrounding his wakefulness. The double entendre in ‘they will not beat me’ both looks to the next night, the night of Odysseus' victory, and puts forward his ability to go without sleep. The maidservant Melantho unwittingly underscores the winning force of his wakefulness by blindly reading it as madness and wishing he would go to bed instead (18. 327–8).

While Odysseus' staying power heralds his victory, the suitors' long-drawn preparations for retiring at the end of the same evening foreshadow their doom. Their sleep carries more and more sinister overtones as their end approaches. The first time their retiring, though surrounded by a gloom that signifies their folly, is unremarkably formulaic: ‘They turned to dance and lovely song and took their joy of them, waiting until evening. Black evening came upon them while they were taking their joy, and each of them went home to lie down’ (1. 421–4). On the next night, however, their desire for sleep is unnatural and their retiring is described in non-formulaic language: ‘[Athena] poured sweet slumber over the suitors, made them wander in their drinking and cast the cups from their hands. And they rose to go to sleep throughout the city and no longer sat there, since slumber was falling on their eyelids’ (2. 395–8). Athena engulfs the drinking suitors in a heavy and disorientating sleep just before urging wakeful Telemachus on his night journey.

The next and last time the suitors retire, the evening that falls on them while they are feasting is, like the first, black (18. 306). But against its blackness this time shines the light that Odysseus offers for their nightlong revelling. And this time they do not leave as soon as black night comes but linger on until the very end of the book, when at last they retire in an unusual way and at an unusually slow pace. They do not depart of their own accord but following Telemachus' request:

Good sirs, you are mad and no longer hide in your heart that you have eaten and drunk. Some god is moving you. But now that you have well feasted, go home and lie down, whenever your hearts bid you. I will drive no one out.

(18. 406–9)

In spite of the corrective ‘I will drive no one out’, the suitors feel the sting of Telemachus' words (they ‘bite their lips’, 18. 410). One of them calls for a last drink, ‘that we may pour a libation, and then go home and lie down’ (18. 419). The drink is served, and they ‘drank the sweet wine after offering libation to the blessed gods. But when they made libation and drank to their heart's content, they went each to their home to lie down’ (18. 425–fin.). The suitors take 28 lines to retire, during which very little happens. This unprecedented emphasis on their preparations for sleep announces that it will be their last. The beginning of the next book further collapses their sleep and their approaching death by picturing Odysseus ‘as he pondered the killing of the suitors with the help of Athena’ (19. 2). The narrative transitions from the suitors retiring to rest to Odysseus wakefully planning their death. Their dragged-out movement towards sleep sets their unawareness of their fate against Odysseus' heightened vigilance.

Telemachus is as wakeful as his father. After storing away the arms with his help, Odysseus tells him to go up to bed. And the young man

Went through the hall by the light of glowing torches to lie down in his room, where he used to sleep before, when sweet slumber would come. And even then he lay down there and waited for bright Dawn.

(19. 47–50)

Telemachus does not sleep. The phrases describing his behaviour suggest anxiety. The line ‘where he used to sleep before, when sweet slumber would come’ is applied to Zeus retiring to his bed only to be unable to stay asleep (Il. 1. 610). Likewise, the expression ‘waiting for dawn’ suggests mental tension and orientation towards the future. It is used for the Trojan horses that stand by the chariots at the end of Iliad 8, on the night in which the victorious Trojans cannot wait to resume the fighting; for Phoenix as he lies in Achilles' tent, unsure of his friend's plans for the morrow (Il. 9. 662); by Antinous narrating the suitors' nightlong sailing to ambush Telemachus (Od. 16. 368); and by Odysseus when he offers to hold the lights for the suitors' nightlong feast (Od. 18. 318) and when he recalls the two nights in the Cyclops' cave (Od. 9. 306, 436) as well as the many wakeful nights during the war (Od. 19. 342). The additional mention of sleep in two other instances (Od. 9. 151; 12. 7: ‘they slept, waiting for dawn’) is further evidence that the phrase does not include it.¹⁰⁸ Telemachus' waiting for dawn in his childhood bed is his second vigilia in armis. It harks back to his sleepless night in the same bed on the eve of his journey, but also demonstrates that he has grown up: this time, there is no caring nurse to illumine his way to his room and fold his clothes.

Telemachus, though, however wakeful he may be, has removed himself from the action, which progressively centres on his father, preparing for his long night with Penelope (see 19. 46). Odysseus is ‘left behind’ on stage, first by the suitors' retiring (19. 1), then by his son's (19. 44), and is isolated in his plotting vigilance. Each time he is left behind he ‘ponders the killing of the suitors with the help of Athena’ (19. 2=19. 52).

Odysseus and Penelope on sleep

As soon as Odysseus is left behind awake, Penelope comes down from her room to meet the stranger. Their conversation touches on sleep and its disturbances. The two reconnect also by dwelling on their similar sleep patterns, for neither has enjoyed restful nights since severed from the other: Odysseus has lain awake on the battlefield, Penelope on a bed of tears. He tells her that he has hated covers since he left Crete for Troy, where he spent many sleepless nights waiting for dawn on a poor bed (19. 336–42). And she, more expansively:

Soon it will be time for pleasant rest, for him at least to whom sweet slumber should come in spite of his cares. But to me a god has given sorrow beyond measure. In the day I delight in mourning, in weeping and looking to my household tasks and those of the maids, but when night comes, and sleep takes hold of all, I lie in my bed, and thick, sharp cares stir my sorrowing heart, while I mourn.

(19. 510–7)

The stranger's presence and his talk of Odysseus further interfere with Penelope's rest. Though she generalizes in describing her condition (see also 17. 102–4), she experiences more severe sleep disturbances after Odysseus comes back and she receives predictions of his return. While he is still away, her sorrowful waking is ended by Athena's magic wand. That wand works successfully again in Book 16, when Penelope still knows nothing about the stranger's presence near the palace and has heard no announcement about Odysseus' return. But soon thereafter she finds out what Telemachus knows of him (17. 106–50) and hears Theoclymenus' prophecy, Eurynome's loud wish that the suitors would die on that very day (17. 496–7) and Eumaeus' praise of the stranger's charm (17. 514–21). Finally, she herself meets him, entertains him and hears more predictions of Odysseus' return from him. When she retires at the end of that night, the application of Athena's wand (19. 603–4) fails to lull her sorrow, for she is awakened by a dream that upsets her (20. 87–90).

Penelope's sleep-depriving sorrow is fed by and merges with the pleasure of the stranger's conversation, likewise sleep chasing. Penelope mourns Odysseus consciously, and her mourning keeps her awake; she is attracted to the stranger subliminally, and her attraction keeps her awake. Mourning and attraction are in fact the same emotional force: they have the same object, both absent and present, and the same effects.¹⁰⁹ Penelope draws as much pleasure from mourning as from the stranger's stories, which in turn cause renewed mourning with its attendant pleasure (19. 213; 19. 251). She would like to detain him longer than she herself thinks appropriate, countering by her wish the ideal of timely sleep that pervades the Odyssey and in which she herself believes. Though she gives directions for the stranger's bed to be made as soon as he finishes answering her questions about Odysseus (19. 317–20), in fact she wishes for ‘a little more’ conversation – just a little, because ‘soon it will be time for pleasant rest’ (19. 509–10). After listening to the stranger again, however, she has to force herself not to detain him further. Her guest is delighting her so much that she could stay up all night to hear him talk:

Stranger, if you should wish to sit in the hall and give me delight, slumber would not be poured over my eyelids. But it is impossible for humans to be without sleep always. The immortals have set for mortals an appointed time for each thing upon the earth, giver of grain.

(19. 589–93)

The emphasis with which Penelope again pontificates on sleep's timeliness betrays the effort it takes her to abide by it and separate from her guest. Her desire to listen to him all night long and longer has drawn her dangerously close to him. To reestablish her distance, to check that desire, she switches from the personal mode (‘slumber would not come to me’) to an impersonal, gnomic statement (‘it is impossible for humans not to sleep’), marking the switch with the adversative particle ‘but’. With another ‘but’ she announces that she will go to rest and invites the stranger to do the same, though emphatically not near her: ‘But I (ἐγώ) will go upstairs and lie in my bed’, while ‘you (σύ) will lie down in the house’ (19. 594 and 598). She abruptly severs herself from her guest by cutting their conversation short and by specifying their separate sleeping quarters.¹¹⁰

Penelope offers Odysseus the option of lying on the floor or on a bedstead (19. 598–9). She gives him this choice because he had rejected her earlier offer of a soft bed near the fire, ‘with a bedstead, covers, and shining rugs’ to stay warm until dawn (19. 317–9). By refusing a bed, Odysseus aims to ‘keep himself in total opposition to the suitors regarding physical circumstances as if savouring the irony: the usurpers enjoy all the comforts of the palace while the rightful king has no more than a beggar’.¹¹¹ Odysseus' refusal demonstrates his ability to wall himself within his role even when he is facing his hardest trial: a warm conversation with his wife, who offers him all-too-warm hospitality.¹¹²

We might contrast Odysseus' decision to decline Penelope's offer with his wholehearted acceptance of the cosy bed offered by Eumaeus on their first night together. The two nights share patterns: in both, Odysseus and a loyal member of his household exchange personal stories and develop a strong sympathy for each other.¹¹³ However, Odysseus does not feel compelled to play the beggar through and through when treated royally by his loyal servant. He does not decline Eumaeus' offer because he does not need to keep him at a distance. On the contrary, he stresses their common destiny as wanderers and lets his warm feelings out when Eumaeus finishes his narrative. Sharing stories with him on a long night is a pleasure he can control. But on the night with Penelope he plays with fire. By refusing the bed she offers, he protects himself from the temptation of recognition, of getting too close to her to keep his secret.¹¹⁴

Odysseus' ascetic hardness, so to speak, starkly contrasts with his sleepy disposition in the land of the Phaeacians. In his own palace he chooses to lie on the floor and does not even express a desire to rest, but as the guest of Alcinous he keeps bringing up his tiredness and is happy to accept the comforts proffered to him. These opposite attitudes reflect the different situations and narrative junctures he is in. On Scheria Odysseus is weary from his wanderings, and the section of the epic concerned with them is drawing to a close. His expressed need for sleep is a need for an ending: for him, an end to his wanderings, and for the poet, to the narrative of them. Both indeed end with Odysseus' deep slumber, as he is carried back home and the narrative moves to Ithaca with him. In his palace Odysseus is recharging for his revenge and the narrative is building towards it. His choice to forsake the comforts of a bed – and, as we shall see presently, his inability to sleep altogether – betokens both his urgency to punish the suitors and the narrative's forward-looking thrust, aimed at the same goal.

Odysseus' sleeplessness on the eve of the slaughter

At the beginning of Book 20,

Odysseus lay awake, with evil thoughts for the suitors in his heart. And through the hall went the women who before were accustomed to lie with the suitors, laughing and making merry with each other. And his heart was stirred in his chest, and he considered much in his mind and heart, whether he should rush upon them and kill each of them or whether he should let them lie with the suitors for the last time. But his heart was barking within (4–13).

Odysseus succeeds at quieting his heart but not his body, which ‘tossed from side to side’ (28). The agitation and anxiety that keep him awake are atypical of him. Normally his wakefulness is caused by discomforts, or by situations that demand his active presence, such as storms. We can also imagine that he would forsake sleep for material profit, as is clear from his appreciative comment on the boreal nights in the land of the Laestrygonians (10. 84–6), so short that an ever-wakeful man could have two jobs tending two herds of cattle. Odysseus wished he were such a man.¹¹⁵ But at the opening of Book 20 there is no emergency or lure of profit to keep him from resting, only inner upheaval. His body participates in his disquiet, reminding us of the sleepless Achilles, tossing and turning for nights on end.¹¹⁶

In spite of his Achilles-like restlessness, however, Odysseus is not unproductively drowned in his emotions. While Achilles feeds on his feelings and is not seeking to overcome them, he is grappling with his predicament and trying to plan for his revenge. He is the protagonist of a vigilia in armis, as is pointed up by his recollection of his fortitude in the Cyclops' cave: ‘You endured until a cunning trick got you out’ (20. 20–1). The dominant note in his sleeplessness is still one of his signature verbs, μερμηρίζειν (‘to consider’), which recurs four times (20. 10, 28, 38, 41) in the description of his state. Odysseus is in the grip of intense deliberation.

But μερμηρίζειν this time yields little. Though Odysseus' first effort to make a decision (‘kill the maids or not?’) implicitly results in self-restraint, in the narrative it evolves into a rebuke to his seething heart: his internal monologue goes from deliberative (‘he considered whether’) to exhortative (‘bear up, my heart!’).¹¹⁷ His second attempt at decision making (‘how to kill the suitors? Where to find refuge?’) ends when Athena chides him for his lack of confidence: another man would obey even a lesser helper, while she is a goddess and protects him unfailingly (45–8):

‘But let slumber come over you. There is distress also in staying awake all night, and soon you will come out of your troubles’. Thus she spoke and poured sleep over his eyelids. […] And sleep caught him, freeing his heart from cares, limb loosening.

(52–7)

While in Book 13 Athena answers Odysseus' question, ‘how shall I take revenge?’ (386), by giving him instructions, now she only reassures him. And instead of engaging in μερμηρίζειν with him, as she does twice earlier on the same evening (19. 2 and 52), she lulls him to sleep after lecturing him on the painfulness of excessive waking.¹¹⁸ Why does she turn off the light this time instead of planning the revenge with him?

Athena's main reason seems to be to provide the poet with a means of keeping the audience in suspense over how the revenge will come about.¹¹⁹ In Book 13 she does not strategize the slaughter but only instructs Odysseus to keep his identity hidden and stay with Eumaeus while she travels to Sparta to urge Telemachus on his journey home. Now that she would have to give more specific instructions in reply to Odysseus' questions, she avoids spoiling the effect of surprise, leaving him and the audience in ignorance and disappearing immediately after sending her protégé to sleep (20. 55).

Athena's intervention is also geared to stress that she has taken control of the action. The goddess' presence is felt more tangibly as the slaughter approaches: in Book 19 she magically illuminates the room where Odysseus and Telemachus store the arms, deliberates with Odysseus and distracts Penelope's attention from Euryclea's recognition of him.¹²⁰ When in Book 20 Odysseus lies awake, she reminds him of her power and for the first time in fact decides for him, after his renewed attempts at μερμηρίζειν (38, 41);¹²¹ then she switches off his mind.

This time, and this time alone, Odysseus seems to be aware of Athena's wand. Normally when characters ascribe their sleep to a god it is to Zeus or a generic god. Lacking the omniscience of the primary narrator, they cannot know which deity, if any, caused it.¹²² This holds true for Odysseus when he attributes his boundless slumber to ‘a god’ (7. 286), while the audience knows that the deity is Athena (5. 491–3). In Book 20, though, it is otherwise, for Odysseus hears from Athena that he will doze off: ‘let slumber come over you’. The goddess is closer to him than when she put him to sleep in Book 5: she now acts openly. But her hypnotic action distances him from her planning by removing him from the scene, just as it removes Penelope. By touching both husband and wife with her wand (see 19. 604–5), Athena diminishes the gap between them. If sleeping Penelope remains unaware of any plan made for revenge, sleeping Odysseus, who was striving to make such a plan in his insomniac pondering, becomes unaware of the goddess' strategy.

Sleep and wakefulness: a duet

The slumber Athena pours over Odysseus' eyes has a marked quality: it loosens the limbs. ‘And sleep caught him, freeing his heart from cares, limb loosening’. We are sent back to Achilles' nap shortly before the burial of his friend, except for that marked quality, which takes the place of the unmarked, formulaic pleasantness in the description of Achilles' slumber: ‘And sleep caught him, freeing his heart from cares, sweet’ (Il. 23. 62–3). Odysseus' sleep has the same melting powers as love, which is also limb loosening. The choice of epithet might suggest that he is giving in to longing for Penelope, whose nearness he has just felt but from whom he has forced himself to keep at a distance. Now that he lies alone in the vestibule and is off guard in his slumber, he surrenders to his desire. Sleep reunites him with his wife upstairs.

The two draw nearer in the last hours of that night of forced separation. They experience alternatives of sleep and wakefulness, which connect them as if in a musical duet, but do not yet bring their voices together. Odysseus cannot rest while Penelope dozes; when he succumbs to slumber she stirs (20. 57), and her lamentation in turn rouses him (20. 92). The two suffer similar disruptions in their sleep, but not simultaneously. The ‘ping-pong’ has a cumulative effect: it builds up tension and suspense by transferring anxiety from one spouse to the other and back. When Odysseus dozes off and Penelope rises from sleep at the same time, the immediate shift of anxiety is conveyed by the coexistence in the same line of his abandoned slumber and her sudden awakening: ‘…limb loosening [sleep], but his true-hearted wife awoke’ (20. 57). One has just relaxed into a sleep filled with sweet longing when the other begins to cry (20. 58).¹²³

The ways in which sleep and sleeplessness are transferred from one spouse to the other mark their growing proximity, because the second time the awakening of one spouse affects the other: whereas Penelope ceases to sleep when Odysseus dozes off, with no explicit causal connection, Odysseus stirs because Penelope has awoken and he hears her voice. He also thinks that she has recognized him, and sees her standing by his head in a dreamlike vision (20. 93–4), as if he were connecting with the dream she has just had of him lying by her side (20. 88–90). This is the closest they have ever come in 20 years, and the closest Odysseus ever comes to dreaming.

Sleeping and dreaming in Odysseus' family

Penelope receives guidance in her slumber. Athena sends a vision from which she learns that Telemachus will survive. The knowledge she acquires in her sleep reverses a pattern in the Odyssey, according to which the sleeper is unaware and the wakeful in the know. While Penelope is slumbering, the suitors take their meal and prepare to leave at nightfall (4. 786); they are sailing to their post of attack (4. 842–7) when she awakes comforted (4. 839–40). We have an echoing in reverse of the sequence at the end of Book 2, where Athena pours heavy sleep on the drunken suitors (395–8) but urges Telemachus to sail, and he sails all night (434). In Book 4 she enlightens Penelope in her sleep, whereas the suitors stay up to prepare for an ambush that will not succeed.

Odysseus does not receive any such guidance. Though Athena puts him to sleep, she does not send him visions. On his insomniac night she plays the role of a reassuring dream but appears to him in person while he is fully conscious and reveals her identity.¹²⁴ Athena makes it clear that she is replacing a dream by mimicking one. She takes the posture of Homeric dreams by standing above Odysseus' head (20. 22), but spells out that she is no dream by asking him, ‘Why are you awake?’ (20. 23) and eventually putting him to sleep, whereas dream visions, including the one she sends to Penelope, ask, ‘why are you asleep?’ (4. 804) and rouse the sleeper.

Athena does not send dreams to Telemachus either. Her decision to speak to him while he lies sleepless at the beginning of Book 15 matches her succoring appearance to his sleepless father at the beginning of Book 20.¹²⁵ Though she does not reveal herself quite so openly to Telemachus, and though it is not even clear whether he recognizes her,¹²⁶ she helps them both in an up-front manner, while they are awake. Why then does Athena make herself manifest to Odysseus and Telemachus in their waking hours but send a dream to Penelope and never appear to her?

One reason could be that Odysseus and his son are actively in on the goddess' plot, at least to some extent, while Penelope is not. Athena makes plans with Odysseus and instructs Telemachus openly, whereas she inspires Penelope or, when she sends the dream, simply reassures her without asking her to do anything. Athena also brings her closer to the plot that is being played around her and without her knowledge, for the vision enlightens her about a fact, Telemachus' safe return, that is vital not only for her well-being but also for the plot's success.

Athena's choice to send dreams only to Penelope also fits a more general pattern: at no point in the narrative is Odysseus or Telemachus ever said to dream, be it with or without explicit divine interference. While he sits among the suitors, Telemachus ‘sees his noble father in his mind’ (1. 115): a reverie perhaps, but not a dream. Though the disguised Odysseus tells a tale in which ‘Odysseus’ had a ‘god-sent dream’ (14. 495), he is lying. Conversely, Penelope has two more dream visions, which follow in close succession on the eve of the slaughter and have Odysseus at their centre. In the first he is the interpreter. She sees her pet geese killed by an eagle and is told while she sleeps, by the eagle turned Odysseus – and later, by the stranger in whom she is confiding – that the vision portends Odysseus' revenge (19. 535–58). In the second he is the protagonist: ‘This night he lay by me, similar to the man he was when he went on the expedition. And my heart rejoiced, because I thought it was not a dream but a true vision’ (20. 88–90). The emotional strain of the last hours bursts into a dream in Penelope's night, but not in Odysseus', whose sleep before the slaughter is as dreamless as usual.

The closest Odysseus comes to Penelope's visions of him is not in a dream but in a fantasy: ‘Noble Odysseus heard her voice as she wept, and he considered (μερμήριζε), and it seemed to him in his heart that she knew him and stood by his head’ (20. 92–4). Critics debate the exact nature of the vision. An attractive interpretation locates it in the intermediate state between sleeping and waking,¹²⁷ of which later poets and thinkers demonstrate awareness.¹²⁸ Another reading, however, ‘emphatically asserts that it [Odysseus’ vision] is a waking impression, noting how rich the Odyssey is in words expressing strong imagination'.¹²⁹ Whatever the case, Odysseus' vision follows, or is simultaneous with, an act of thought and one described by the verb which, more than any other, captures the fervid movement of his mind: μερμηρίζειν.¹³⁰ His thinking engages with everything he sees, even a dreamlike fabrication.

Why is it then that Penelope dreams while her husband does not? Is the difference related to their different ways of looking at reality? As is well known, several critics have attributed to Penelope an intuitive cast of mind, contrasting her with the purely rational Odysseus: he sees what is around him and thinks about it, whereas she always walks with a veil before her face, suggesting an ‘involuted, indirect perception’.¹³¹ If we embrace this view, it is tempting to read Penelope's susceptibility to dreams as one aspect of her intuitive mind, which can see subconsciously, whereas Odysseus' cannot. While Penelope's sleep has content and orients her thoughts and feelings, sleep for Odysseus is a break from thought and feeling. While he sees reality in the bright light of day, she touches upon it in the twilight of a dream-filled sleep.

The theory of an intuitive Penelope, however, has been challenged on a number of grounds.¹³² Here I will consider only issues connected to her dreams. Scholars have read them either as wish fulfilling,¹³³ or as coming from an outside force, a deity.¹³⁴ In favour of the first interpretation are Penelope's own comments: in one case she avows that she would be happy if her dream should indeed portend Odysseus' return and revenge (19. 569), and in another she dwells on the pleasure of the vision while it lasted and seemed real to her (20. 89–90). It is true that the recollection of it upsets her, for she says, ‘But upon me a god sends bad […] dreams’ (20. 87). This comment, however, does not qualify the joy she had while dreaming. On the contrary, the vision appears bad to her because it contrasts with her waking reality (or so she thinks),¹³⁵ because the intense memory kindled by it crushes her,¹³⁶ making her long for oblivion in sleep. There can be no doubt that Penelope this time wishes that her dream would come true.

Yet, the dreams might simply be in accordance with Penelope's desire, not fashioned by it. Athena might be the efficient cause of both visions, as she is of the one in Book 4 and of Nausicaa's in Book 6, which also match the dreamer's desires.¹³⁷ On this reading, Penelope is not the origin of the dream but its instrument, through which Athena works out her plan. To speak for this interpretation are again Penelope's own words, when she comments on the second vision: ‘But upon me a god sends bad dreams’. She does not perceive her erotic dream as her own but as god sent.¹³⁸

According to either interpretation, the dreams are not Penelope's way of predicting the future with subliminal intuition, of sensing the truth. If wish fulfilling, they reveal her state of mind; if god sent, they reveal Athena's action. Indeed, Penelope's stark disbelief in the truth of her first vision (19. 568–9) and her despair about the second one speak strongly against the theory that she is intuitively divining Odysseus' presence in her dreams. Far from anticipating or even hoping for Odysseus' nearness, she wishes for death.

Instead of invoking the theory of an intuitive Penelope to explain her tendency to dream, we might look at what she does in the epic. She lives a confined and static life, a life in which sleeping or trying to sleep is one of her main activities. She spends much of her time in her upstairs quarters, where she is described as she weeps and cannot find rest, as she is lulled to sleep by Athena and as she dreams. Penelope dreams perhaps because sleeping in whatever way – well, badly, not at all – is one of her few modes of presence in the epic. Even her thoughts are hardly known. By dwelling on her dreams, the narrative allows us a glimpse of her inner life.

Things are different for Odysseus, who sleeps but does many more things as well. When he sleeps it is to rest from those things, which take up his time and energy and are the main focus of the narrative. He does not dream because the narrative does not give him the time to do so, not because we are supposed to imagine that he has no experience of dreams or does not care about them. In fact, the one he makes up in a fabricated tale (14. 495) may reflect his actual experience, as do many other features of those tales. The narrative does not spend time on Odysseus' dreams but on his thoughts, directly connected to the plot in which he plays an active role.

By putting a premium on Odysseus' thinking as opposed to his dreaming, Homer casts him as a hero who can fight his tough battles without total reliance on divine help. We might contrast his blank sleep with Aeneas', filled with visions. Virgil's hero dreams at crucial junctures: on the night of Troy's fall, Hector appears to him to urge him to leave with the city's penates (Aen. 2. 270–301); in Crete the penates themselves direct him to Hesperia (3. 147–71) and in Italy the god Tiberinus guides him to his final home (8. 36–65). Whereas Aeneas' journey receives major impulses from dreams, which push him along his destined path, Odysseus is given no guidance on his homeward-bound journey until its last stretch, and when Athena sits by his side to plan his revenge, she treats him more like her mortal peer than like her subject. They ‘think together’ (13. 373). The dreamlessness (in the narrative) of Odysseus' sleep points up his creative imagination and spirit of initiative.

Long day's journey into night

The title of Eugene O'Neil's drama seems appropriate to capture the length of the hours in Odysseus' palace as the slaughter approaches.¹³⁹ The eve of the massacre is slow to end, and it keeps ending. It starts in the first line of Book 17, which closes with the coming of the afternoon and the anticipation of the next day: ‘And wise Telemachus answered [Eumaeus]: […] go take your afternoon meal, but at dawn come and bring good sacrificial victims […] And they [the suitors] were taking delight in dance and song, for already the afternoon had come’ (17. 599–600 and 605–6). This afternoon lasts until 18. 305–6, when ‘black evening’ sets in. The extended narrative time that separates the beginning of the afternoon from the coming of darkness has the effect of lengthening the declining day. And activity continues through the long evening until the very last line of Book 18. Towards its close the suitors accept Telemachus' exhortation to call it a night and leave, yet they take a long time to retire, further extending the evening hours with their slow movement. Even when they are gone, the scene is further prolonged, as Telemachus and Odysseus store away the arms and then Penelope and Odysseus converse at great length, until both retire at the end of Book 19. The long day comes to an end a second time with this second preparation for sleep, but again it is not over, because Odysseus cannot sleep. The subsequent shifts in narrative focus, from Odysseus slumbering to Penelope awakening to Odysseus stirring again, draw out the transition from sleep to wakefulness and from night to day. When Odysseus hears Penelope's voice, dawn rises (20. 91): 1,128 lines after it was first alluded to (17. 600). The day has taken up 1,728 lines.

The next day, the suitors' last, is almost as long. Evening must be approaching around the middle of Book 21, when the suitors (265) and mockingly Odysseus (280) suggest reconvening the next morning, and Penelope goes to sleep a little later (357–8). Nevertheless, evening is not mentioned at all and night only after the recognition in Book 23 (243). But activity (in the form of storytelling) continues through the night, an immobile night, the course of which is suspended by Athena until Odysseus has had his fill of sleep (23. 347). The day has taken up 1,585 lines.

An almost obsessive emphasis on the rising of characters marks this day's beginning. At dawn Odysseus asks for an omen from ‘one of those who are awaking’ (20. 100), and the person who delivers it is not even getting up but has not slept at all, while her co-workers are resting:

And a woman who worked at the mill uttered an omen from a house nearby, where the mills of the shepherd of the people were. Twelve women applied their strength to them, preparing barley and wheat meals, the marrow of men. The other ones were sleeping, since they had ground their wheat, but she alone had not yet stopped, for she was the weakest. And standing by the mill she spoke.

(20. 105–11)

The omen gains resonance from the background of sleepers and the nightlong wakefulness of the figure who utters it. Shortly thereafter Telemachus is reported to get out of bed (20. 124) and, according to a manuscript variant, even the maidservants who kindle the fire are said to be awake.¹⁴⁰ It is tempting to read in this concentrated stress on wakefulness a message to the audience, especially if the Odyssey was originally performed in two consecutive nights. The poet would be urging his listeners to push sleep off as the performance reaches the wee hours of the second night and the story its climax.

When the sun goes down (possibly shortly before 21. 258), the day of the slaughter is lengthened further by the absence of formulaic sleep at the end of formulaic eating and drinking. After Eurymachus fails to string the bow, Antinous suggests that they should leave for the night, following a familiar pattern: let's put down the bow, make a libation and go home, and the next day ‘at dawn’ we will sacrifice to Apollo and resume the contest (21. 259–68). The heralds bring around water for their hands, young servants the cups for the wine. They make the libation and drink, acts that typically mark the end of a day and effect a transition to the evening rest. The suitors expect to go home and sleep as they have done every night for three years. But of course they will not. For the audience, who is in on the plot, Antinous' exhortation to the other suitors to follow the cycle of the sun is laden with dramatic irony.¹⁴¹

The irony deepens after the last libation, when Odysseus intervenes with a speech that both agrees with the suitors' wishes to suspend the match and makes it impossible for them to retire: ‘Now stop the contest and leave this with the gods, and at dawn a god will give strength to whomever he wishes. But come, give me the polished bow, so that I can try my hands and my strength among you’ (21. 279–82). Odysseus purportedly suggests resting for the night with words that chillingly wink at Antinous' on account of their sinister emphasis on next day's dawn; but his request to handle the bow causes a stirring and the resumption of action, preventing the suitors from going to sleep as they were planning and as was the normal pattern.¹⁴²

This disruption in the normal pattern is subtly underscored by an untypical use of the formulaic line, ‘after making libations and drinking to their heart's content’ at 21. 273, where it applies to the suitors. The line appears five other times to introduce a movement towards retiring.¹⁴³ The suitors themselves have lived by this sequence as recently as the previous night, when, ‘after making libations and drinking to their heart's content, they went each to their homes to lie down’ (18. 427–8). But on their last night the formulaic line is followed by Odysseus' non-formulaic intrusion: ‘And much cunning Odysseus spoke to them with crafty thoughts’ (21. 274). His sudden interference counters the expectations created by the standard phrase and intimates, even before Odysseus asks for the bow, that the suitors will not sleep.

Odysseus' last words before the slaughter further bring out the exceptionality of that day by suggesting a normal closing activity, a feast: ‘Now it is time that a meal too be prepared for the Achaeans, while there is light, and afterwards that they amuse themselves in other ways, with song and the lyre, for those are the accompaniments of a feast’ (21. 428–30). This exhortation echoes the narrative of the suitors' feast on the first day we meet them, when they behave just as Odysseus recommends here: they eat their fill, then turn ‘to song and dance, for those are the accompaniments of a feast’ (1. 152),¹⁴⁴ and they retire to sleep thereafter (1. 421–4). Odysseus' suggestion recalls the pattern of that day by reminding the suitors that the present day is waning, that they ‘should’ sport while there is light.¹⁴⁵ He also gives voice to the sentiment of timeliness, which he and others invoke elsewhere to regulate the course of a peaceful day, ending with dinner, drink and sleep. This day's dinner is as timely as every day's, but it is in the hands of armed chefs, whose preparations for it turn the fading light of day into the threatening shimmer of weapons, with which Book 21 ends: ‘And he [Telemachus] stood by the chair near his father, armed in shining bronze’.

By inscribing the suitors' impending doom into the cyclic rhythm of a day's activities, Odysseus intimates that their punishment naturally and appropriately fits into the course of a well-regulated day, with its timely awaking, eating and sleeping. The punishment of Melanthius is likewise set off against his day's routine and turned into an unexceptional happening. Tied to a pillar for the night, he is reminded of his daily job: ‘Now indeed you will keep watch the whole night through, lying on a soft bed, as befits you. And you will not miss the Early-Born rising from the streams of Oceanus on her golden throne, at the time when you bring goats to the suitors to prepare a meal in the house’ (22. 195–9). The mention of Melanthius' normal day casts Odysseus' revenge as its appointed substitution.

Penelope's sweetest sleep ever

For a long part of the long day of Odysseus' victory, Penelope has been slumbering in her room (21. 358–23. 5). ‘A god’ caused her sleep, Euryclea tells Odysseus, as she sets out to awaken his wife (22. 429). And we know from the omniscient narrator that the god was, as always, Athena.

To Penelope, this god-sent slumber is the best that she has been given in twenty years. She rebukes Euryclea for rousing her with the unbelievable news that Odysseus has returned and killed the suitors: ‘Why do you tell me this foolish tale and awaken me from sleep, the sweet slumber that has bound me and covered my eyelids? For I have never had such a sleep since Odysseus left’ (23. 16–9). Penelope's distress upon awakening is not new,¹⁴⁶ but here it rings ironical to the audience, who knows that her reality this time is even better than the blissful slumber she does not want to relinquish.¹⁴⁷

This episode of sleep, while consistent with the pattern of removing Penelope from the action at crucial moments, also has a specific narrative function: it postpones the coming recognition and gives it prominence by keeping her offstage during the slaughter.¹⁴⁸ The scene of her awakening creates a smooth shift from the slaughter to the staging of the recognition. For Euryclea tells Penelope, who asks her how Odysseus, being one, could kill the suitors: ‘I did not see, I did not ask. I only heard the groaning of men being killed. We sat inside the well-built chambers […] Then I found Odysseus standing among the bodies of the slain’ (23. 40–6). By stating her ignorance of the story we have just heard, Euryclea puts it aside, while by urging Penelope to meet her husband (23. 52–3), she looks ahead to the recognition.

Penelope's slumber, however, is not just a narrative device to get her out of the picture.¹⁴⁹ It has a rich thematic relevance, deeper than the other episodes of sleep, which merely bespeak her passivity and unawareness of the actions around her. This time her sleep is emphatically without dreams. It has ‘bound’ – the only time in Homer – Penelope, stopping all mental activity, all sense perception. The sleep's dreamlessness is highlighted by the substitution of the real Euryclea for a vision: ‘She stood above her head and said: ‘awaken, Penelope!’’ (23. 4–5). The real thing assumes the position of dreams and, like them, rouses the sleeper. A blank slumber is not an unmarked blackout for Penelope but it is a treat because, in her own account, her nights are normally filled with upsetting dreams. Dreamlessness is part and parcel of this sleep's exceptional delight.

(Dreamlessness is associated with pleasant sleep in other cases, too. The blackness of Penelope's sweetest slumber illustrates a belief shared by Greek authors as well as by Shakespeare's Hamlet: the best sleep carries no visions. Witness for instance Atossa's complaint of having lived ‘in the constant company of dreams’ since her son's departure to Greece [Aesch. Pers. 176–7]; or Socrates in Plato's Apology, who argues that if death should be ‘like a sleep in which the sleeper does not even dream, it would be a wonderful gain. For anyone, if asked, would say that the night in which he slept a dreamless slumber was one of the most pleasant times of his life’.¹⁵⁰)

Penelope's sleep is dreamless for another reason: it brings her back to Odysseus. It is the equivalent to the deathlike slumber that twice advances his homecoming. Her description of her sleep resonates with Homer's description of Odysseus', both upon arriving on Scheria and on his way to Ithaca. Just as his transporting slumber is not just ‘sweet’ but ‘the sweetest’, she underscores the exceptional sweetness of hers by decomposing the formulaic phrase ‘sweet sleep’. She markedly separates noun and adjective¹⁵¹ and has the latter begin a line and occupy the entire first foot, the dactylic rhythm of which further stretches the duration of that sweetness: ἐξ ὕπνου μ᾽ἀνεγείρεις/ ἡδέος (literally: ‘from sleep you awake me/ sweet [sleep]’). Her blissful slumber shares another quality with Odysseus', this time with his sleep on Scheria: it ‘covers her eyelids’ and with the same phrase (5. 493; 23. 17). The phrase appears only in these two instances for actual sleep, singling out husband and wife and bringing them together by the workings of sleep on them. Penelope has at last obtained the healing slumber she had been praying for night after night, a sleep ‘that makes one forget everything […] when it covers the eyelids’ (20. 85–6).

The sweetest slumber brings Penelope home, just as it does Odysseus. As critics have noted, when she recognizes him she also reaches the end of a nostos, though not physically but emotionally.¹⁵² Penelope's homecoming is figured in the justly celebrated simile that compares her, as she holds Odysseus after the recognition, to a shipwrecked swimmer finally seeing and reaching the shore. As one scholar puts it, ‘The full simile is a capsule description of Odysseus’ landing on Scheria, but now the brine-laden, ship-wrecked mariner touching soil is Penelope. Both sailors are at last home from the sea'.¹⁵³ In the reading of another critic, while even in her last dream Penelope was attached to the prewar past, she now ‘takes on the mature Odysseus’ experiences as her own'.¹⁵⁴ Like Odysseus, Penelope has returned, and she has done so, like Odysseus, during a deep, dark sleep. For both, the sweetest slumber marks the end of the ‘storm’. And when they awaken, both refuse to believe that they have returned: Odysseus that he is on Ithaca, Penelope that the stranger is Odysseus and that he has killed the suitors.¹⁵⁵ The sleeping Odysseus has not followed the navigation, has not seen where the ship was going. The sleeping Penelope has heard and seen nothing, not even a dream. In both cases the abrupt awakening into a new reality makes that reality appear unreal.¹⁵⁶ A perfectly black slumber adds to the disorientation and destabilization that precede both returns.

The longest night and the first ending of the Odyssey

After the climactic recognition there comes the final retiring scene of the epic, towards which the others have been building:¹⁵⁷

Meanwhile Eurynome and the nurse made ready the bed with a soft cover, by the light of blazing torches. And they spread the sturdy bedstead, keeping busy; then the old woman went back home to lie down, while Eurynome, the chambermaid, led them [Odysseus and Penelope] as they went to their bed, holding a torch in her hands. She led them to their bedchamber and then went back. And they came gladly to their old rite of the bed.

(23. 289–97)

The couple's first night together after twenty years demands careful preparations. The narrative not only details the making of the bed, but also involves two women in it and accounts for their movements in and out of the bedchamber, the centre of the house towards which the whole Odyssey has gravitated and which Odysseus and Penelope now enter as newlyweds, by the light of a ceremonial torch. The focus on the long-travelled-to bedchamber has produced a peculiar retiring scene, one in which the elaborate arrangements for the night are made not for guests, as is the rule in Homer, but for the master and the mistress of the house. The surrounding characters are reported to go to sleep after them and to do so unceremoniously: ‘But Telemachus, the herdsman and the swineherd ceased from the dance, stopped the women, and they themselves went to bed in the shadowy hall’ (23. 297–9). The security and stability finally achieved are reflected in another anomaly in the sleeping arrangements: Odysseus' servants, who technically do not reside in the palace, sleep there. Their help in the slaughter has brought them inside as full-fledged members of Odysseus' household, or rather family.¹⁵⁸

The preparations for the retiring scene begin even earlier, when Penelope's lasting embrace of her husband inspires Athena to hold back the sunrise and retain the night, presumably to allow the couple long hours together with no disturbance:¹⁵⁹

And rosy-fingered Dawn would have appeared upon them weeping had not Athena, the grey-eyed goddess, had another thought. She held the long night at the end of the heavens and checked Dawn of the golden throne at the streams of Oceanus.

(23. 242–4)

Athena produces the first instance in western literature of the motif that I will call, after a French tune from 1966, ‘Retiens la nuit’: the unnaturally long night of love, either enjoyed, as in the Odyssey and in Plautus' Amphitryon or, far more frequently, prayed for (as in the French song, in Ovid's Amores, or in a number of epigrams from the Palatine Anthology).¹⁶⁰ In most instances night is only for lovemaking and talk. There is no leisure to sleep, and the lovers curse dawn for forcing them to part.¹⁶¹ Odysseus and Penelope, in contrast, can take their fill of love, storytelling and finally sleep: ‘She took delight in listening to him, and sleep did not fall on her eyelids until he told all the tale’ (23. 308–9); ‘Thus he ended his tale, when sweet slumber, limb loosening, leapt on him, freeing his heart from cares’ (23. 342–3). This emphasis on rest at the end of the longest night points up the legitimacy of the couple's union. Odysseus and Penelope are not lovers who meet on the sly but husband and wife celebrating a second wedding, officially extended by Athena, and enjoying the recovery of marital tranquility.

The couple's togetherness is brought into bold relief by the perfect synchrony of their sleep,¹⁶² in stark contrast to the alternating bouts of sleep and wakefulness at the beginning of Book 20, the night before, a night of growing proximity, but one still marked by separation. On that night Odysseus' slumber is also limb loosening, and it frees his heart from cares (20. 56–7). But it comes only because Athena helps him, and just when he is plunging into it, Penelope awakens and her lament in turn rouses him. Here, by contrast, sleep comes to him naturally and lasts as long as needed for him to enjoy it to his heart's content. Athena makes dawn rise only ‘when she thought in her heart that Odysseus had taken his fill of being in bed with his wife and of slumber’ (23. 345–6).

Sleep, though, also fixes Odysseus and Penelope in different roles: he as a narrator, she as a listener, and a listener so enchanted that she remains awake until he ‘told all the tale’. Penelope fulfils the desire she had expressed the previous night to listen to ‘the stranger’ indefinitely. On that night she had to check her eagerness and did so by invoking the human need for rest; now she can drink in Odysseus' story to the full. Sleep comes to her only in the negative (not until…) whereas it engulfs him in its limb-loosening embrace.

The emphasis on Odysseus' sleep rather than on Penelope's is meaningful in at least two ways. First, it is nicely attuned to their different roles during the slaughter, for he has fought while she has been unconscious through it. He is exhausted, as is plain from his earlier request: ‘Let us go to bed, wife, so that now we may take our joy of rest, lulled by sweet sleep’ (23. 254–5). Odysseus' tiredness is conveyed by the sudden manner in which limb-loosening slumber ‘leaps’ (343) on him, as it does on Achilles after the nightlong funeral of Patroclus (Il. 23. 232). Second, and more important, the unequal treatment of the couple's sleep suggests that the story we have just listened to, from Homer and from Odysseus himself, is his more than Penelope's: the protagonist and narrator deservedly plunges into a melting slumber when his story ends.

The two references to sleep that frame the recapitulation of Odysseus' adventures thus give the epic the luster of a narrative that can keep the audience awake for many hours through its delightfulness, and at the end of which the virtuoso performer – as character and as narrator – can rest. Odysseus' dozing off as narrator beautifully merges with his sliding into sleep as acting character: sweet slumber leaps on the raconteur as he is telling how the Phaeacians ‘sent him with a ship to his dear native land, giving him bronze, gold and clothes in plenty’ (23. 340–1) – right before sleep overcomes him.

Odysseus' relaxing slumber draws the curtain on the stage. Coming as it does after lovemaking and the recapitulation of his adventures, it is strongly closural. It has the quality of a final surrender, the surrender of love or even of death, which also loosens the limbs. The melting effects of sleep on Odysseus replicate the likewise melting and deathlike effects of the recognition on Penelope: ‘her knees were loosened’ (23. 205).¹⁶³ Soft slumber for the hero who has wandered much and told many stories including this last one is the equivalent of the recognition for the heroine who has patiently waited for him: the end of the efforts and of the tensions, the happy ending.

Further enhancing the finality of Odysseus' sleep is the contrast it builds with Telemachus' inability to find rest at the opening of the epic. Athena presides over Odysseus' slumber as over Telemachus' wakefulness; the setting of the two scenes is the same, a bedroom, and the retiring of the protagonists follows a similar script: both Telemachus and his parents have escorts who take them to their rooms by torchlight, and Euryclea assists in both scenes.¹⁶⁴ To plot-launching sleeplessness responds closure-bringing sleep.

Sleep's closural force, however, is qualified by the narrative of future events that precedes even the couple's retiring. As soon as Athena lengthens the night, Odysseus tells Penelope:

We have not yet come to the end of our trials, but hereafter there will be measureless toil, much and hard […] But come; let us go to bed, so that now we may take our joy of rest, lulled by sweet sleep.

(23. 248–50 and 254–5)

Odysseus' words upset the a-temporal and immobile equilibrium created by Athena's gesture.¹⁶⁵ Breaking into a night held ‘at the end of the heavens’, they deny the end to both his suffering and his story and reintroduce indefinitely endless time. Odysseus, though, gives almost no detail and urges sleep instead. For the much-suffering hero, the call of the bed and of slumber is a call to oblivion, of past and future toils, and for the poet telling his story, it is a call for an ending. But Penelope cannot agree to this call, after the future has broken into the immobile night:

The bed will be ready for you whenever you wish in your heart, since the gods have indeed caused you to come back to your well-built house and native land. But since you have thought of this and a god has put it into your heart, tell me of that trial.

(23. 257–61)

Odysseus starts off by announcing his future destiny, but then steps back and calls for sleep; Penelope begins by engaging with his wish, but then she does not honour it and asks him to tell his tale. Her request postpones the climactic retiring scene by pushing sleep off and replacing it with a story of new trials, when the story being told and the trials hitherto endured are reaching their end.

But even the story told and the trials endured in the Odyssey are not quite over with the couple's sleep, because news of the slaughter is going to reach the suitors' relatives. Athena's next intervention is consistent with the openness of the Odyssey's first ending. While her gesture of holding the night works towards closure by creating expectations of the couple's sleep and their renewal of their ‘old rite’ (expectations, as we have seen, instantly challenged by the couple's concern over post-Odyssey events, which delays their retiring), her gesture of making dawn rise reopens the narrative within the timeline of the Odyssey, reestablishing the natural cycle of night and day and giving impulse to renewed activity along with the return of the sun. The sun she causes to rise causes Odysseus to rise in the same line (23. 348). He tells Penelope that he is going to the fields to see his father and leaves, armed, to rouse Telemachus and the servants who have slept in the palace (23. 366–8). This chain of wake-up calls gives a strong forward movement to the new day and the activities it brings.

The sunlight will also carry news of the slaughter, which the nocturnal dance had muffled. Odysseus worries: ‘quickly the rumour will go out with the rising of the sun’ (23. 362–3). We follow this broadcasting light as it grows brighter: from Athena's awakening of it, to Odysseus' anticipation of its spreading, to its actual shining. When Odysseus leaves with the three men, all armed, ‘there was light over the earth’ (23. 371), a light from which Athena protects them by means of a sudden artificial night (23. 372). Though her gesture harks back to the scene in which she poured mist about Odysseus to prevent the Phaeacians from seeing him (7. 14–5), the cover of night also calls to mind the darkness in which the gods envelop their favourite heroes on the battlefields of the Iliad. The book ends with the threatening image of armed men shrouded in night, as they set out for the fight that Athena will abruptly stop at the end of the epic's last book.