"Telemakhos, insolent braggart that you are, how dare you try to throw the blame upon us suitors? We are not the ones who are responsible [aitioi] but your mother is, for she knows many kinds of kerdos. This three years past, and close on four, she has been driving us out of our minds, by encouraging each one of us, and sending him messages that say one thing but her noos means other things. And then there was that other trick she played us. She set up a great tambour frame in her room, and began to work on an enormous piece of fine fabric. ‘Sweet hearts,’ said she, ‘Odysseus is indeed dead, still do not press me to marry again immediately, wait - for I would not have skill in weaving perish unrecorded - till I have completed a shroud for the hero Laertes, to be in readiness against the time when death shall take him. He is very rich, and the women of the dêmos will talk if he is laid out without a shroud.’
80
"This was what she said, and we assented; whereon we could see her working on her great web all day long, but at night she would unpick the stitches again by torchlight. She fooled us in this way for three years and we never found her out, but as time [hôra] wore on and she was now in her fourth year, one of her maids who knew what she was doing told us, and we caught her in the act of undoing her work, so she had to finish it whether she would or no. The suitors, therefore, make you this answer, that both you and the Achaeans may understand - ‘Send your mother away, and bid her marry the man of her own and of her father's choice’; for I do not know what will happen if she goes on plaguing us much longer with the airs she gives herself on the score of the accomplishments Athena has taught her, and because she knows so many kinds of kerdos. We never yet heard of such a woman; we know all about Tyro, Alkmene, Mycene, and the famous women of old, but they were nothing to your mother, any one of them. It was not fair of her to treat us in that way, and as long as she continues in the mind [noos] with which heaven has now endowed her, so long shall we go on eating up your estate; and I do not see why she should change, for she gets all the honor and glory [kleos], and it is you who pay for it, not she. Understand, then, that we will not go back to our lands, neither here nor elsewhere, till she has made her choice and married some one or other of us."
