The suitors have gone home for the night. Odysseus instructs Telemachus to gather the weapons and hide them where they will not be readily available to the suitors the next day. Melantho, the disrespectful servant girl who sleeps with Eurymachus, confronts the beggar/Odysseus once more.
Finally alone with Penelope, Odysseus offers convincing evidence that he knew her husband. Penelope seems suspicious about his identity. An old nurse, Eurycleia, is assigned the duty of bathing the guest. She innocently comments on how much he resembles her king, whom she raised from early childhood. Stunned, she identifies a scar, over his knee, left by a boar’s tusk, and realizes that she is, indeed, bathing, her master. Odysseus immediately and sternly swears her to silence, forbidding her even to tell Penelope his identity.
After the bath, Penelope rejoins the beggar/Odysseus and reveals that she will conduct a contest the following day to select a husband and satisfy the suitors. The challenge involves a feat that only Odysseus has performed before: stringing his great bow and shooting an arrow through a straight row of twelve axes. Odysseus enthusiastically approves of her plan.
