After the suitors leave, Odysseus and Telemachus carry the weapons out of the hall into the storeroom. Telemachus tells Eurycleia to keep the maids in their quarters, and Athena lights the way with a golden lamp, filling the hall with a marvelous glow. Odysseus has prepared a cover story in case the suitors ask about the weapons: they have been moved because the smoke was damaging them and because drunken men might fight with them. Telemachus goes to bed, and Odysseus stays in the hall to test the maids and Penelope.
Penelope comes down and sits by the fire. Melantho insults the beggar again, and Penelope sharply rebukes her, since she knew her mistress wanted to question the stranger. Penelope asks who he is. Odysseus first praises her fame and asks not to be questioned about his homeland because it would make him weep. Penelope then opens her heart. Since Odysseus left, her beauty has faded, and the suitors are wasting her house. She tells him how she tricked them for three years with Laertes' shroud until disloyal maids betrayed her, and now she has no more excuses: her parents urge her to marry, and her son resents the loss of his estate.
Odysseus then tells another false story. He claims to be Aethon, a Cretan and the younger brother of Idomeneus, and says he hosted Odysseus in Crete when storms drove him there on his way to Troy. As he talks, Penelope weeps like snow melting on the mountains, while Odysseus keeps his eyes as steady as horn or iron, hiding his tears. To test him, she asks what Odysseus was wearing. He describes a purple woolen cloak fastened with a golden brooch showing a hound gripping a fawn, and a gleaming tunic. Penelope recognizes the clothes, which she gave him herself, and weeps again. The stranger then assures her that Odysseus is alive and close by, in Thesprotia, and will return within the month, swearing an oath by Zeus and by the hearth of Odysseus.
Penelope tells the maids to wash the stranger's feet and prepare a soft bed, but he refuses, asking only for an old woman who has suffered as much as he has. So Penelope calls Eurycleia, Odysseus's old nurse, who remarks how much the stranger resembles her master. Odysseus suddenly remembers the scar on his leg and turns away from the fire, but too late. The poem pauses for a long flashback: when Odysseus was a baby, his grandfather Autolycus, the greatest thief and liar of his time, named him Odysseus, a name connected to anger or hatred. As a young man, visiting Autolycus on Mount Parnassus, Odysseus went boar hunting, and a huge boar slashed his thigh above the knee before he killed it. Eurycleia's hands now feel that scar, and she drops his foot into the basin, spilling the water. She reaches out to tell Penelope, but Odysseus seizes her by the throat and whispers that she must keep silent or die with the disloyal maids. She swears to be as silent as stone or iron. Athena has turned Penelope's attention elsewhere, so she notices nothing.
Penelope then asks the stranger to interpret a dream. She has twenty geese that she loves to watch. In the dream, an eagle swooped down and broke their necks, then perched on the roof and told her in a human voice that he was her husband and the geese were the suitors. Odysseus says the dream is clear: the suitors will die. But Penelope says that dreams come through two gates: those that pass through the gate of ivory are deceptive, and those through the gate of horn come true. She does not think hers came through the gate of horn. Then she reveals her decision: tomorrow she will set a contest. Whoever can string Odysseus's great bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axes lined up in a row, as Odysseus used to do, will be her husband. The beggar urges her not to delay, because Odysseus will be home before any suitor can string the bow. Penelope goes up to her room and weeps until Athena sends sleep.
