When evening was come the suitors betook themselves to music and dancing.  And Ulysses leaned his back against a pillar from which certain lamps hung which gave light to the dancers, and he made show of watching the dancers, but very different thoughts were in his head.  And as he stood near the lamps, the light fell upon his head, which was thin of hair and bald, as an old man’s.  And Eurymachus, a suitor, taking occasion from some words which were spoken before, scoffed and said, “Now I know for a certainty that some god lurks under the poor and beggarly appearance of this man, for as he stands by the lamps, his sleek head throws beams around it, like as it were a glory.”  And another said, “He passes his time too not much unlike the gods, lazily living exempt from labour, taking offerings of men.”  “I warrant,” said Eurymachus again, “he could not raise a fence or dig a ditch for his livelihood, if a man would hire him to work in a garden.”

“I wish,” said Ulysses, “that you who speak this, and myself, were to be tried at any task-work, that I had a good crooked scythe put in my hand, that was sharp and strong, and you such another, where the grass grew longest, to be up by day-break, mowing the meadows till the sun went down, not tasting of food till we had finished, or that we were set to plough four acres in one day of good glebe land, to see whose furrows were evenest and cleanest, or that we might have one wrestling-bout together, or that in our right hands a good steel-headed lance were placed, to try whose blows fell heaviest and thickest upon the adversary’s head-piece.  I would cause you such work, as you should have small reason to reproach me with being slack at work.  But you would do well to spare me this reproach, and to save your strength, till the owner of this house shall return, till the day when Ulysses shall return, when returning he shall enter upon his birth-right.”

This was a galling speech to those suitors, to whom Ulysses’s return was indeed the thing which they most dreaded; and a sudden fear fell upon their souls, as if they were sensible of the real presence of that man who did indeed stand amongst them, but not in that form as they might know him; and Eurymachus, incensed, snatched a massy cup which stood on a table near, and hurled it at the head of the supposed beggar, and but narrowly missed the hitting of him; and all the suitors rose, as at once, to thrust him out of the hall, which they said his beggarly presence and his rude speeches had profaned.  But Telemachus cried to them to forbear, and not to presume to lay hands upon a wretched man to whom he had promised protection.  He asked if they were mad, to mix such abhorred uproar with his feasts.  He bade them take their food and their wine, to sit up or to go to bed at their free pleasures, so long as he should give licence to that freedom; but why should they abuse his banquet, or let the words which a poor beggar spake have power to move their spleens so fiercely?