The Odyssey Marriage Bed Quotes

A rippling prelude –
now the bard struck up an irresistible song:
The Love of Ares and Aphrodite Crowned with Flowers…
how the two had first made love in Hephaestus’ mansion,
all in secret. Ares had showered her with gifts
and showered Hephaestus’ marriage bed with shame
but a messenger ran to tell the god of fire –
Helios, lord of the sun, who’d spied the couple
lost in each other’s arms and making love.

– Homer

The Odyssey, Book 8, lines 300-308. Demodocus plays a song about a betrayed husband Hephaestus, and the adulterous love affair between his wife Aphrodite with Ares. Hephaestus is god of fire and smiths, Aphrodite goddess of sexual love and Ares god of war. The bard’s tale will end with Hephaestus trapping the lovers in his marriage bed, bound in chains forged by the divine smith. There are certain parallels between the story and the situation of Penelope and the suitors. But there is one distinct difference: Aphrodite is the archetypal unfaithful wife, while Penelope is exemplary of wifely fidelity. They are two different examples of female power.

"Look how limping Hephaestus conquers War,
the quickest of all the gods who rule Olympus!"
"The cripple wins by craft."

– Homer

The Odyssey, Book 8, lines 373-375. The gods laugh and cry out at the end of the bard Demodocus’ story, when crippled god of fire Hephaestus finds wife Aphrodite and lover and god of war Ares in his marriage bed. Hephaestus cleverly traps the pair with "cunning chains" which he forged so they "could not move a limb or lift a finger." This act of divine justice foreshadows how Odysseus will lay a trap for Penelope’s suitors and inflict a surprise defeat on them.

"How shameful! That’s the bed
of a brave man of war they’d like to crawl inside,
those spineless, craven cowards!
Weak as the doe that beds down her fawns
in a mighty lion’s den – her newborn sucklings –
then trails off to the mountain spurs and grassy bends
to graze her fill, but back the lion comes to his own lair
and the master deals both fawns a ghastly bloody death,
just what Odysseus will deal that mob – ghastly death."

– Homer

The Odyssey, Book 17, lines 132-140. Telemachus repeats to Penelope what Menelaus said to him about the suitors attempting to crawl inside the marriage bed of a brave warrior. Menelaus makes a prediction that Odysseus will punish the suitors with "ghastly death," foreshadowing their bloody end at the hands of Odysseus. In an epic simile, Penelope’s suitors are compared to fawns and Odysseus to a powerful lion into whose lair they have stumbled.

"Strange man,"
wary Penelope said. "I’m not so proud, so scornful,
nor am I overwhelmed by your quick change…
You look – how well I know – the way he looked,
setting sail from Ithaca years ago
aboard the long-oared ship.
"Come, Eurycleia,
move the sturdy bedstead out of our bridal chamber –
that room the master built with his own hands.
Take it out now, study bed that it is,
and spread it deep with fleece,
blankets and lustrous throws to keep him warm."

– Homer

The Odyssey, Book 23, lines 192-202. When Penelope issues her marriage bed test for the man who says he is Odysseus, she shows herself to be as cunning as her husband. Within earshot of the man, she asks Eurycleia to move the bed, knowing that the real Odysseus will be aware the bed is immovable. This passage is an example of situational irony: Penelope doubts Odysseus’ identity but readers would have expected her to be happy to see her husband who has been missing for so long.

"Woman – your words, they cut me to the core!
Who could move my bed? Impossible task,
even for some skilled craftsman – unless a god
came down in person, quick to lend a hand,
lifted it out with ease and moved it elsewhere.
Not a man on earth, not even at peak strength,
would find it easy to prise it up and shift it, no,
a great sign, a hallmark lies in its construction."

– Homer

The Odyssey, Book 23, lines 205-212. Odysseus ignites with fury when Penelope tests him by asking Eurycleia to move their marriage bed, knowing that it cannot be moved. Odysseus erupts that it is impossible due to its construction, adding that it would take a god to do that. Even after Odysseus has slaughtered the suitors and sheds the beggar disguise, Penelope still hesitates to recognize him as her husband. Showing her power, she cleverly devices a test that only he could pass.

"There was a branching olive-tree inside our court,
grown to its full prime, the bole like a column, thickset.
Around it I built my bedroom, finished off the walls
with good tight stonework, roofed it over soundly
and added doors, hung well and snugly wedged.
Then I lopped the leafy crown of the olive,
clean-cutting the stump bare from roots up,
planing it round with a bronze smoothing-adze –
I had the skill – I shaped it plumb to the line to make
my bedpost, bored the holes it needed with an auger.
Working from there I built my bed, start to finish."

– Homer

The Odyssey, Book 23, lines 214-224. Odysseus indignantly tells Penelope how his marriage bed came into being, so that it cannot be moved. He built the bedroom around an olive tree and then incorporated the tree into the bed. Penelope challenged him with a test on his knowledge of their unique marital bed and Odysseus is proving his identity to her. The bed, an immovable part of the house, symbolizes the solid and stable marriage between Odysseus and Penelope. Like the olive tree, their relationship has stood up to the test of time.

"There’s our secret sign, I tell you, our life story!
Does the bed, my lady, still stand planted firm? –
I don’t know – or has someone chopped away
that olive-trunk and hauled our bedstead off?"

– Homer

The Odyssey, Book 23, lines 227-230. Odysseus gives Penelope the secret sign to let her know that she is talking to her husband and not someone else. The sign is the story of how he constructed their bedroom and bed around an olive tree. The bed cannot be moved, he says, unless someone chops down the olive tree. This is why Book 23 is titled "The Great Rooted Bed."

"But now, since you have revealed such overwhelming proof –
the secret sign of our bed, which no one’s ever seen
but you and I and a single handmaid, Actoris,
the servant my father gave me when I came,
who kept the doors of our room you built so well…
you’ve conquered my heart, my hard heart, at last!"

– Homer

The Odyssey, Book 23, lines 253-258. After twenty years of separation and sorrow, the strong love between Penelope and Odysseus wins out in the end. Penelope accepts that Odysseus is her missing husband after he reveals the secret sign of their marriage bed. They are now fully reunited at last.

"Dear woman…we have still not reached the end
of all our trials. One more labor lies in store –
boundless, laden with danger, great and long,
and I must brave it out from start to finish.
So the ghost of Tiresias prophesied to me,
the day that I went down to the House of Death
to learn our best route home, my comrades’ and my own.
But come, let’s go to bed, dear woman – at long last
delight in sleep, delight in each other, come!"

– Homer

The Odyssey, Book 23, lines 282-290. As Odysseus and Penelope retire to their marriage bed, after his twenty-year absence from it, he tells of one more trial to be endured. He is referring to Tiresias’ prophecy of a sacrifice he must make to Poseidon for the hurt Odysseus caused the sea god’s son Polyphemus.
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