Medon the herald overheard the plot and told Penelope. She asked why the suitors had sent him — to order her women to cook? Let this be their last feast; they wasted Telemachus’s goods and forgot what Odysseus had been among their fathers — never unfair, never arrogant. Medon said a greater evil: they meant to kill Telemachus with the sharp bronze as he came home from Pylos and Lacedaemon.
Her knees loosed; for a long time she could not speak. Why had her child gone on ships that serve as horses of the sea — so not even his name would be left among men? Medon did not know whether a god or his own spirit had driven him. Penelope sank on the threshold weeping; her women wailed with her. She had lost a husband of a lion’s heart, whose fame went wide through Hellas and mid-Argos, and now the storm-winds had snatched her son — and none of the hard-hearted women had woken her when he boarded.
Euryclea confessed she had known and given him bread and wine under oath not to tell until the twelfth day. “Bathe, put on clean clothes, go upstairs, and pray to Athena to save him. Do not trouble old Laertes yet. I do not think Arcesius’s line is utterly hated by the gods.” Penelope bathed, went up with barley in a basket, and prayed: if ever Odysseus burned thigh-bones for Athena in these halls, remember it now and save her dear son from the suitors’ pride. The goddess heard.
The suitors uproared below, joking that the queen prepared a wedding — not knowing death was made ready for her son. Antinous hushed them and chose twenty men, the strongest he could find. They launched a black ship, fitted oars and sails, moored her in the channel, prepared supper, and waited for evening, intent on murder.
Penelope lay upstairs without food or drink, wondering whether her son would escape. As a lion is troubled when men draw a crafty circle about him — so she was troubled. Then sweet sleep came. Athena sent a phantom in the likeness of her sister Iphthime. It stood above her head: the gods did not allow her to weep so — her son would come home; he had done them no wrong. One went with him whom many would be glad to have stand beside them — Pallas Athena.
Penelope asked also of that other unhappy one — alive or dead? The phantom would not say for certain; idle talk was useless. It slipped away by the door-bolt into thin air. Penelope woke refreshed, so vivid had been the dream. Meanwhile the suitors sailed the watery ways. Mid-channel between Ithaca and rugged Samos lies a rocky islet, Asteris, not large, with harbors on both sides. There the Achaeans waited in ambush for Telemachus.