Giving a shout of triumph the beggar showed himself to be Odysseus and fired arrow after arrow into the host of suitors. The suitors sought their weapons and began to put up some resistance, but when Odysseus ran out of arrows Telemachus brought him armor, spears, and swords. The father and son, who had stationed themselves in the doorway, cut the suitors down as they tried to escape. And at last the suitors were all dead. Only a poet and a priest were left. Odysseus killed the priest and spared the poet. Then he made the palace maids who had slept with the suitors clean up the mess, and after that he hanged them. Having set his house in order, Odysseus then revealed himself to Penelope, who had kept to her chamber. The two were happily reunited.
Odysseus' wanderings, however, were not at an end. He had to battle the relatives of the suitors. Athena proposed a truce and submitted the dispute to the king of the Epirot Islands, who decided that Odysseus should go into exile from Ithaca for ten years, that Telemachus should rule in his stead, and that the relatives should repay the losses that the suitors had caused. Odysseus undertook to placate Poseidon as Teiresias had advised. He marched inland on Epirus to a place where the natives had never seen an oar and mistook the one he carried for a winnowing-bat. There he sacrificed to Poseidon, who forgave him for blinding Polyphemus.
When ten years were up he returned to Ithaca, where he died at sea in a fight with his own son by Circe, Telegonus.
