Finally, he predicts that her husband will return as the old moon dies and a new moon rises that very month. (Critics mention this as one of several references to death and rebirth in the epic, other references being Odysseus' return from the Land of the Dead; his arrival, naked and caked with mud, on Phaeacia; and his return to Ithaca.) Penelope concedes the accuracy of the description of her husband but wonders, momentarily and beautifully, if he ever really existed: "Odysseus. There was a man, or was he all a dream?" (19.363)
The strongest case for concluding that Penelope is at least suspicious that the stranger is her husband begins with her call to Eurycleia to bathe the guest. She tells the nurse to "come and wash your master's . . . equal in years" (19.407). Penelope seems to have started to ask the nurse to wash her master's feet. She changes this, mid-sentence, to an unlikely phrase about the guest's being the master's age. Translator Fagles uses an ellipsis to indicate a pause, effected by word order in the Greek. Eurycleia, who cared for Odysseus when he was a boy, soon identifies him as her master (in large part because of the scar above his knee, which she sees while bathing him).
