The contest
Penelope proposes that the suitors try to string Odysseus’s bow and shoot an arrow through a line of axes; the winner will marry her. The suitors fail one after another, unable even to bend the bow. Odysseus, still disguised as a beggar, asks to try, and Telemachus and Eurycleia arrange for him to handle it.
He strings the bow as easily as a bard strings a lyre, and the poem compares the sound to the voice of a swallow. The moment is the recognition the suitors cannot see: the beggar is the king.
The first shot
Odysseus shoots through the axes and then turns the bow on Antinous, killing him with an arrow through the throat. The bow becomes the instrument of revenge, and the suitors’ failure to string it is a public demonstration that none of them is fit to take Odysseus’s place.
The weapon is therefore more than a prop. It is a test of strength, identity, and legitimacy, and its successful use restores the household. The Odyssey’s climax depends on an object that has been waiting in the storeroom for twenty years.