“I grieve for myself and for us all; I grieve that I shall have to forgo the marriage, but I do not care nearly so much about this, for there are plenty of other women in Ithaca and elsewhere; what I feel most is the fact of our being so inferior to Ulysses in strength that we cannot string his bow.”
~ The Odyssey - Book XXI (Samuel Butler Translation. p303)
In Book 21, Penelope tells the suitors that the person who is able to string Ulysses’ bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axes in a line. No one is able to string the bow. Ulysses, disguised as the beggar, does it.
The most striking thing for me was when some of the suitors came to the realization that they were not worthy to take Penelope’s hand. Leiodes says - “My friends, I cannot string it; let another have it; this bow shall take the life and soul out of many a chief among us.” Eurymachus says, “What I feel most is the fact of our being so inferior to Ulysses in strength that we cannot string his bow.” I kind of felt sad that they had this realization after waiting for 10 years! Why didn’t they do some self-introspection earlier? I was immediately thinking of people who have been in the wrong job for 10 years, people who have been in the wrong relationships for 10 years, people who have been in the wrong place for 10 years, and so on. I think too many people linger on, doing the wrong thing for too long, feeling stuck and stagnated and often blaming someone else.