"There was a branching olive-tree inside our court,
grown to its full prime, the bole like a column, thickset.
Around it I built my bedroom, finished off the walls
with good tight stonework, roofed it over soundly
and added doors, hung well and snugly wedged.
Then I lopped the leafy crown of the olive,
clean-cutting the stump bare from roots up,
planing it round with a bronze smoothing-adze –
I had the skill – I shaped it plumb to the line to make
my bedpost, bored the holes it needed with an auger.
Working from there I built my bed, start to finish."
– Homer
The Odyssey, Book 23, lines 214-224. Odysseus indignantly tells Penelope how his marriage bed came into being, so that it cannot be moved. He built the bedroom around an olive tree and then incorporated the tree into the bed. Penelope challenged him with a test on his knowledge of their unique marital bed and Odysseus is proving his identity to her. The bed, an immovable part of the house, symbolizes the solid and stable marriage between Odysseus and Penelope. Like the olive tree, their relationship has stood up to the test of time.