Ὁμήρου Ὀδύσσεια (Ραψῳδία 23) - The Odyssey (Book 23)

Book 23 of the Odyssey contains what may be the most moving reunion scene in Western literature. After twenty years of separation, ten fighting in Troy, ten struggling home, Odysseus returns to Ithaca in the guise of a beggar. Penelope, who has refused hundreds of suitors while waiting for her husband, tells her serving women to move his bed outside the chamber. But the bed is carved from an olive tree rooted in the earth, and only Odysseus knows this secret. When he protests in fury, Penelope knows him at last, and weeps in his arms. This is not a simple happy ending. It is the moment a wife has spent two decades hoping for and dreading in equal measure. It is a husband who has lost everything, finally finding the one person who truly knows him. Homer gives us the quiet aftermath of violence: no more arrows, no more suitors dying, just two people standing in their bedchamber trying to remember how to be together. This book delivers the emotional climax of the greatest homecoming story ever told.