Odyssey 7.233 · Book 7, lines 233–236
Arete knows the clothes she made
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τοῖσιν δʼ Ἀρήτη λευκώλενος ἤρχετο μύθων· ἔγνω γὰρ φᾶρός τε χιτῶνά τε εἵματʼ ἰδοῦσα καλά, τά ῥʼ αὐτὴ τεῦξε σὺν ἀμφιπόλοισι γυναιξί· καί μιν φωνήσασʼ ἔπεα πτερόεντα προσηύδα·
And among them white-armed Arete began to speak; for she recognized the cloak and tunic, seeing the garments, the fair ones, which she herself had made with her handmaid women; and speaking to him she uttered winged words:
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The setting
Now the queen speaks first. White-armed Arete recognizes the cloak and tunic the stranger wears — the very garments she had woven with her serving-women, given by Nausicaa — and she turns to question him.
A note on this passage
The recognition that drives the rest of the book. Before anyone has named the stranger, Arete sees her own weaving on his back and knows it. Homer gives her the initiative — the queen, not the king, opens the questioning — and grounds it in a woman's exact knowledge of the cloth she made.
The telling detail is that the clothes are hers. They can only have reached a shipwrecked stranger through her daughter, and the fixed epithet ‘white-armed,’ the arms of the weaver, sits right beside the recognition. Her polite question — who are you, who gave you these? — is also a mother's careful probe. She has half-guessed that Nausicaa is somewhere in this story.
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