How did Penelope know it was Odysseus?

First, the beggar

Odysseus comes home disguised by Athena as an old beggar, and for days his wife does not know him. Others do. His son is told the truth in the swineherd’s hut, and the first to recognize him without being told is his old dog Argos, at the palace gate. Penelope only questions the stranger. By the fire one night she says, “Now, stranger, I shall put you to the test,” and asks how her husband was dressed twenty years ago. The beggar describes a purple cloak and a gold brooch showing a hound holding a fawn in its forepaws. Penelope weeps: she gave Odysseus that cloak and that brooch herself. It moves her, but it proves nothing. Anyone who had met her husband could say as much.

The scar

That same night the old nurse Eurycleia, who had cared for Odysseus since he was a baby, washes the beggar’s feet. He turns away from the firelight, too late. She feels the scar on his leg, left by a boar’s tusk when he hunted on Mount Parnassus as a young man with his grandfather Autolycus, and she knows him at once. The foot drops, the basin rings and spills. She looks toward Penelope, but Athena has turned the queen’s attention elsewhere, and Odysseus grips the nurse and orders her to keep quiet. Before going to bed, Penelope tells the beggar her decision: tomorrow she will set the contest of the bow.

Her caution

After the suitors are dead, Eurycleia runs upstairs laughing to wake her. Penelope calls her mad: some god must have killed them, and Odysseus is dead far away. She comes down and sits across from the man by the fire in silence, sometimes looking him full in the face, sometimes fooled by his rags. Telemachus scolds her for a heart harder than stone. Her answer reveals a plan: “there are tokens with which we two are alone acquainted, and which are hidden from all others.” Odysseus smiles and lets her test him. Later she explains the wait: for years she had feared that someone would come “and deceive me with a lying story.”

The bed

Washed and dressed, Odysseus applies a little pressure. No other woman, he says, could keep away from a husband back after twenty years; he will sleep alone. Penelope answers by telling Eurycleia to carry his bed out of the bedroom he built. That is the trap, and he walks straight into it:

Wife, I am much displeased at what you have just been saying. Who has been taking my bed from the place in which I left it?

That bed cannot leave its place unless someone cuts down a tree. A young olive grew inside the palace grounds; he walled the bedroom around it, cut away the branches, shaped the trunk into a bedpost and built the bed onto it, inlaid with gold and silver. Apart from the two of them, only one maid had ever seen it. This time the king of disguises is the one caught out, and his fury counts as proof.

One mind

Penelope runs to him in tears and begs him not to be angry. “Heaven has denied us the happiness of spending our youth, and of growing old, together,” she says. Homer compares her joy to a shipwrecked sailor’s relief at reaching land, the very thing Odysseus had lived through on Scheria, as if the two had made the same voyage. It is what he once wished on the princess who found him: a man and wife of one mind. Athena holds back the dawn to give them a longer night. The story does not stop there, though: the families of the dead still want revenge.