Odysseus 23.163

After a ritual bath in an asaminthos ‘bathtub’, O.23.163, Odysseus is described this way: ‘he [= Odysseus] emerged from the bathtub [asaminthos], looking the same as [homoios] the immortals in shape’ (ἔκ ῥ’ ἀσαμίνθου βῆ δέμας ἀθανάτοισιν ὁμοῖος). For parallel wording in a description of Telemachus emerging from a ritual bath in an asaminthos ‘bathtub’, see O.03.468 and the comment at O.03.464–468. For homoio- in the sense of ‘same as’ in a similar ritual context, signaling an epiphany, see the comment on O.16.172–212. At this point, Odysseus no longer looks like a middle-aged man: in the context of the ritual bath that he has taken, he looks like a perfect bridegroom, at the perfect age for a perfect wedding. Thus he looks like the Odysseus who slept with Penelope in her dream as described at O.20.087–090. I review here the essentials: in her wakeful agonizing, unable to fall asleep, Penelope had recalled a dream she once had: there she was, lying in bed with Odysseus at her side, and he was looking the way he had looked when she had last seen him twenty years earlier. It seemed to her then, she says at O.20.090, that this was not an onar ‘dream’ but a hupar esthlon ‘wakeful reality’ (οὐκ ὄναρ, ἀλλ’ ὕπαρ ἐσθλόν). But now at O.23.163, as Odysseus emerges from his ritual bath looking like a perfect bridegroom, that dream of Penelope is about to become a wakeful reality.

Big Ed and Norma have just now broken free of the troublesome relationships that have kept these lovers apart for 27 years. Now at long last they can have a life together.
Still from Twin Peaks 3 Episode 15, reworked by Jill Curry Robbins.