The contest of the axes

Penelope, Odysseus, and ancient Greek creativity

Okay, mythology buffs. Does this speech sound familiar to you?

Now listen, lords. You keep on coming
to this house every day, to eat and drink,
wasting the wealth of someone who has been
away too long. Your motives are no secret.
You want to marry me. I am the prize.
So I will set a contest. This great bow
belonged to godlike King Odysseus.
If anyone can grasp it in his hands
and string it easily, and shoot through all
twelve axes, I will marry him, and leave
this beautiful rich house, so full of life,
my lovely bridal home. I think I will
remember it forever, even in my dreams.

(Odyssey 21.65-78, translation the talented Emily Wilson)

This is one of the most famous speeches from Greek myths, the announcement by the hero Penelope, the wife of hero Odysseus, that she is setting up a contest of strength and skill to determine her choice for new husband now that Odysseus is presumed dead.

Of course, at this point in the Odyssey, we readers know Odysseus is not dead, but actually in disguise as a beggar in his own home and plotting revenge on the 108 suitors who have invaded his property and, through Penelope and his son Telemachus, grievously abused his hospitality.

We also know that the goddess Athena has prompted Penelope to set up the contest so Odysseus can get his hands on his bow and gain the means by which to defeat the suitors.

So much has been and can be written about this episode. To me, it is one of the most brilliant passages of creativity in the world.

Here, I want to focus on one thing that has puzzled scholars for centuries: what does Penelope mean by “shoot through all twelve axes”?

I am not going to propose any amazingly novel solutions, but I will say what I think is the most likely, and, to me, the most fun of the theories.

Hmmm… the technical details

First, we are reasonably sure that the axes are set up in a row in the courtyard of Odysseus’s house with the handles buried in the ground and the blades up. Telemachus digs a trench, presumably puts the handle-end of each axe in the ground, and then tamps the earth flat so the axes will stand up.

The contestants will have to shoot an arrow along this row of axes so that the arrow somehow travels all the way down the row without being stopped or deflected.

How does one “shoot” an arrow “through” axes?

The poem isn’t specific.

Does Penelope just mean you have to shoot the arrow over or next to the axe-blades, accurately and with the right aim, so that the arrow doesn’t hit the axes? The trajectory of the arrow would certainly have to be correct, since gravity makes a difference to the flight of any type of missile.

That would certainly be a tough shot, but it doesn’t count as literally “through.” And the Greek word (dioisteuo) does mean “shoot through,” suggesting “pierce.”

So maybe Penelope means the shooter has to pierce all twelve axe-blades with the one arrow. 

That just seems impossible, although the impossible is often done in myths.

But there may be a third way.

What kind of axe?

To me, the question is, what kind of axe are we talking about? If it’s a conventional wood-chopping axe, I don’t know that there’s anything you can do with that to shoot it “through” except shoot next to it. There’s just a blade and a handle.

How do you shoot through that?

Done.

But maybe we are not talking about an axe that is familiar to us.

In the Bronze Age, of which this story preserves a memory, there were special double-bladed axes that were used in religious ritual.

Note curvature of blade creating space between blades.

As you can see in the image, the double blades of the axe curl back, creating a space between them and the handle.

If you shoot an arrow within the space created by the curl of the blade, you can definitely say you are shooting “through” the axes. It is also a heroically difficult shot to get the arrow through that space without gravity pulling the arrow down far enough that you’d hit an axe.

At the same time, with this method you don’t run into the problem of the arrow having to pierce twelve separate metal objects without breaking trajectory.

Here is another type of axe, not Greek, but the same idea, which gives a sense of how you could shoot “through” without piercing blades:

From Northern India, c. 1750 CE, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

So this solution has the advantage of being correct in terms of ancient Greek material culture, while being very difficult but not impossible to do. It really depends on how close the axes are positioned. The closer they are to each other, the easier it would be to get an arrow through. The farther away, the more difficult.

But the poet of the Odyssey does not spend a lot of time worrying about the specifics of the contest, since, in fact, the suitors cannot even bend Odysseus’ bow enough to be able to string it, and therefore the only person who actually does make the shot is Odysseus himself.

And he succeeds with no problem.

With myths, we can ask questions, but the mythmakers may not be inclined to give answers.

Bonus content for those inclined to keep reading

I was actually put in mind of the contest because in my recent research I came across a famous comparison of this contest in ancient Sanskrit epic poetry, in a poem called the Mahābhrāta.

I won’t go into the details of the poem here, but there is a contest very much like Penelope’s contest, where competitors have to perform a feat of singular skill with the bow in order to win a princess’s hand in marriage.

Here, the specifics of the contest are even less specific. According to Professor Stephanie W. Jamison, the arrow-shot

involves shooting five arrows into a golden target…through an object suspended in air known as a yantram—felicitiously translated by van Buitenen as “contraption.”

Jamison suggests that in both the Greek and the Sanskrit poems, there may be no intent on the poet’s part to determine how the shot can be actually made. For the Sanskrit,

[W]e are simply meant to consider the shot fiendishly difficult… too accurate a description might distract the minds of the warrior audience into speculation about their own powers to perform the same.

But in a footnote, Jamison reports the scholarly contention that the “technical details” of the Greek contest may have been borrowed from Egypt!

So maybe the idea of shooting through axes isn’t so fanciful as it seems.

All of which lends more credence to my sense that Greek myths are not the product of a pure Greek imagination, but were enhanced and their popularity and relatability strengthened by their mixing images, characters, and stories from other contemporary cultures.

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