(Day 34 of the poem's main action, evening; the swineherd's stockade on the high pasture above the harbour of Phorcys on Ithaca)

Ulysses walks up from the harbour through the rough country to the great stockade Eumaeus has built — with his own hands during his master's absence — for the pigs. The walls are of unmortared stone topped with thorn-bush; twelve sties inside, fifty sows in each, the boars (fewer, because the suitors eat them) penned apart. Four hounds fierce as wolves run barking at the beggar; he drops his staff and sits down quickly, but they would have torn him if Eumaeus had not come out of the doorway shouting and pelting them with stones. Stranger, my dogs nearly killed you — and that would have been a shame on me on top of all the others I have to bear. He brings the old man inside, spreads rushes and a wild-goat skin on the floor for a seat. Stranger, even a poorer beggar than you should be welcome here; for all strangers and beggars come from Jove.

He explains his life as he settles to entertain his guest. I keep these pigs for a master who has been long away — gone to fight at Troy and never come back. The thieves who court his wife eat his sheep and his pigs and his goats every day; not one day passes without a sacrifice of his stock, and not one libation goes without a drink of his wine. Then he catalogues the master's wealth as it had been: twelve herds of cattle on the mainland and twelve flocks of sheep, twelve droves of pigs and twelve flocks of goats, and on Ithaca itself eleven goat-flocks watched by hired men, and all of these being eaten down to nothing. He kills two young pigs for the stranger's supper — not the fat ones, those go to the suitors — singes them, spits them on hot ash, cuts them up, sprinkles them with white barley, fills an ivy-wood bowl with wine, sits down opposite the beggar. Eat, stranger; this is a slave's pig. They eat.

After the meal Ulysses tests the swineherd. Tell me about this master of yours. I have wandered far; I may have met him. Who was he? Eumaeus answers without hesitation that no traveller who comes through can persuade Penelope or Telemachus that their man lives — every wandering rogue with an empty belly comes here and tells them a tale, and gets clothes and a meal, and disappears, and the wife sits up at night weeping over the lies he told. He himself believes that wolves or birds have torn Ulysses or the fishes have eaten him, and his bones lie now somewhere on the shore wrapped in sand. He never thinks of his master without grief.

Ulysses then delivers the first long Cretan lie — the longest sustained false autobiography in the poem. He is, he says, a Cretan, son of one Castor son of Hylax, born to a slave-concubine but reared by the wife of the father with full honour. He grew rich by raiding before Troy. He took men to Troy and fought nine years there in the company of Idomeneus. After the war he went home, stayed only a month, and the heart in me drove me to go to Egypt with a good ship and chosen men. He had nine ships. The crew, against his orders, sacked an Egyptian village — killed the men, took the women and children, gathered the cattle — and the king of Egypt brought his army down on them at dawn. Most were killed; some were taken alive into slavery; he himself ran straight to the king's chariot, fell at his knees, was spared, kept for seven years at the king's court in honour. In the eighth year a Phoenician trickster persuaded him aboard a ship for Phoenicia, then bound for Libya as a slave-cargo; Jove smashed the ship in mid-passage; he clung to the mast for nine days and washed up on the coast of Thesprotia. There the king Pheidon entertained him — and showed me Ulysses's treasures piled in his store-house, enough for ten generations — and told him that Ulysses had been there himself, had gone over to Dodona to consult the oracle of Zeus on whether to come home openly or in secret, and was about to return. The king put the old man aboard a Dulichian ship; the crew stripped him of his good clothes mid-voyage, tied him up, and were going ashore for supper when he slipped his bonds, dropped silently into the sea, and swam ashore here.

Eumaeus hears the long tale through. Stranger, all that you have told me is moving and I do not doubt it for the suffering — but the part about Ulysses I will not believe. Why must you tell lies? I know his fate. The gods hated him. He died unburied somewhere far away. I sit here and feed his pigs and grieve. Once an Aetolian came and swore he had seen the master at Idomeneus's house in Crete refitting his ships and would come back by summer or by autumn. He never came. I will give you food and a place to sleep because Jove protects suppliants, but I will not believe your news.

Ulysses raises the stakes. Then let us swear an oath: if your master comes home, you give me a fine cloak and tunic and send me on to Dulichium; if he does not come, you order your slaves to throw me over yonder cliff so other beggars will learn not to lie. Eumaeus refuses with a kind laugh: I would be a fine man, would I not, if I killed the stranger I had taken in to my own hut. Come, drop it. It is supper-time. The three under-shepherds bring the pigs back from pasture; the herd squeals into the stockade. Eumaeus calls out bring in the best of the boars; for this stranger, and let us at last have a good meal ourselves — we have been keeping the others fat enough for the suitors. The boar is brought in, clubbed at the altar with a billet of oak, singed, jointed; Eumaeus, a man of good principles, did not forget the gods — he cuts hairs from the boar's forehead and burns them with a prayer for Ulysses's return; he cuts the first thigh-piece for the gods, the second for Hermes son of Maia and for the nymphs; the rest he divides into seven equal portions for the four shepherds and the stranger and the household; Ulysses gets the long backstrap, the cut of honour. Ulysses thanks him: may Jove be as kind to you, Eumaeus, as you have been to this wretched stranger.

Mesaulius, the servant Eumaeus bought out of his own savings from the Taphians while his master was away, lays the bread on. They eat. The night comes on stormy with rain and a hard west wind. Ulysses, in the warmth of the wine, tests his host one more time. Forgive me a story — wine makes a man talk. He tells the cloak-trick anecdote: long ago at Troy, on a winter ambush in the marsh-reeds outside the walls under Menelaus and Ulysses, the cold was bitter and snow fell. I had set out in haste in just my tunic, no cloak. Toward midnight I nudged Ulysses — friend, I shall die of this cold, I have no cloak, the gods deceived me about the weather. Ulysses, crafty as he was brave, called out to the captain Thoas: I had a dream, comrades — we are too far from the ships, someone go back and ask Agamemnon for more men, or we will be cut off. Young Thoas, eager, threw off his great cloak and ran. And I lay in his cloak the rest of the night, warm enough. If only I were that strong young man still, one of you would lend me a cloak; but now my rags are my rags.

Eumaeus laughs in genuine pleasure. Stranger, you told the story well, and there is no superfluous word in it; you shall lack nothing tonight; a cloak you shall have to sleep in. But tomorrow, you must shake out your own rags again — we are not rich in second cloaks here, every man has but the one. When the master's son comes home, he will see you properly clothed. He lays him a deep bed of sheepskin and goat-skin in front of the fire and throws over him the spare great cloak he keeps for the worst weather. The shepherds settle to sleep too. Eumaeus alone takes a sword and a thick coat and a goat-skin cape and a javelin and goes outside in the storm to lie in the shelter of an overhanging rock with the boars — for he would not sleep apart from his charges, even in his own house, while his master was away.

Analysis

Chapter 0064 — Analysis

The poem's most surprising single chapter

Book 14 is the most surprising single chapter in the Odyssey. After thirteen books spent on Olympus, Trojan camp, Spartan palace, Phaeacian court, and the wonder-islands of the wanderings, the poem now spends a full book in a pig-stockade on a hillside. The hero — the king — sits on a goat-skin in a swineherd's hut and eats from a wooden bowl and lies down to sleep on the floor by the fire. The poem is making a moral and aesthetic claim. The first man on Ithaca who is loyal to the king is the swineherd; the first hospitality the king receives in his own kingdom is the swineherd's two young pigs; the only character so far who refuses to believe lies about his master is the swineherd. The Odyssey here is announcing what its second half will spend ten books on: the household's true ruler is not the strongest or the noblest but the most faithful. Eumaeus is the moral counterweight to the suitors. The poem in this book is reading itself.

The narrator's apostrophe

A small but striking detail unique to Eumaeus: the poet, twice in this book, addresses Eumaeus directly in the second person — and you answered him, swineherd Eumaeus — a usage Homer almost never employs for any other character. The device, called apostrophe in the technical sense, marks the figure of Eumaeus as one to whom the poem owes special tenderness. The only other characters Homer apostrophises with this frequency are Patroclus (in Iliad 16) and Menelaus (occasionally in the Iliad). The pattern places Eumaeus in the small company of figures the poetic voice cherishes most. Butler's prose flattens the apostrophe (he renders it as ordinary third-person dialogue tags), but in Greek it is one of the most affecting small signals in the poem.

The longest Cretan lie

Ulysses's first long Cretan lie is the most fully developed of the four. He has now told a brief version to Athena in book 13 (Crete, Orsilochus, Phoenicians, here); he gives a longer version here to Eumaeus; he will give versions to Antinous (book 17) and to Penelope (book 19). Each version differs in detail. The poem is interested in what changes from telling to telling and what stays fixed. Here, before the swineherd, the emphasis is on suffering — slave-childhood, war, Egypt, slavery, shipwreck, kindness from Pheidon, betrayal at sea, swimming naked to shore. The lie is calibrated for the listener: a slave-born raider's story for a slave-born swineherd. Eumaeus is moved by the suffering and rejects the news of the master. The lies serve the truth they are concealing: they make Ulysses identifiable as a man like Eumaeus without revealing him as the master.

The cloak-trick anecdote

The story Ulysses tells over the wine is one of the few episodes from the Trojan War not in the Iliad. It is the Odyssey's contribution to the Trojan corpus — a small, perfectly chosen vignette that establishes (a) Ulysses-on-the-inside of a winter ambush, (b) Ulysses-as-cunning-tactician under pressure, (c) the importance of cloaks in a winter campaign. The anecdote functions on three levels. It is a test of Eumaeus's generosity (the beggar tells a story about needing a cloak to provoke the offer of one). It is an advertisement of Ulysses-the-master (he praises his master's cleverness without naming him). And it is a displacement of the truth (the beggar tells a story in which "Ulysses" appears in third person, while being himself Ulysses). Eumaeus reads the message and offers the cloak. The whole transaction is conducted by indirection, in a poem about indirection.

Hospitality from below

The protocols of xenia — bath, meal, place to sleep, gift, ask-name-after — that the Odyssey has been demonstrating in the palaces of Nestor, Menelaus, and Alcinous are here demonstrated, perfectly, in a hut. Eumaeus has no bath to offer (there is no water and the beggar is filthy), no formal seat (just a goat-skin), no purple-edged tunic (just the spare cloak he keeps for the worst storms). What he has, he gives in full. The poem is making the point as carefully as it can: xenia is not a matter of palace wealth but of moral discipline. The swineherd is a better host than the suitors. The hierarchy of class and the hierarchy of virtue are inverse in this book.

Eumaeus's small autobiography in detail

Eumaeus mentions casually that he bought Mesaulius from the Taphians out of his own savings while his master was away. The detail is small but it tells us Eumaeus has been earning and saving in the master's absence; he is not just keeping the pigs going but expanding the establishment. His own backstory will be told in book 15 (he was a king's son in Syria, kidnapped as a child by Phoenicians, sold to Laertes, raised in the household). Here we only get the discipline of his daily life: the stockade he built himself, the hounds he trained, the four under-shepherds he supervises, the loyalty maintained through twenty years of absence. The Odyssey takes him seriously as a person, not as a class-type. The Greek archaic tradition rarely gives this kind of attention to a non-noble; the Odyssey gives Eumaeus more interior life than most of its Iliadic warriors.

The negative portrait of the suitors

The most damning portrait of the suitors so far comes not from Telemachus's complaints in book 2 nor from Penelope's grief in book 4 but from Eumaeus in book 14. Not a day or a night passes without two or three of his cattle being killed; they take the run of his wine; they laugh and feast as if the master would never return. Through the swineherd's eyes the suitors are not merely impolite suitors but the men who consume the household every day while the man who works the household every day cannot eat his own master's pigs. The class injustice is precisely seen. The poem is preparing the moral ground for the slaughter of book 22: by the time the bow is in Ulysses's hand, the reader has heard at the household-economy level just how much has been taken.

Butler's prose at its best

Butler is at his very best in this book. The flat clean prose is exactly right for the working-life of a stockade, for the technical details of pig-keeping, for the choreography of the meal. He cut the firewood himself, while his men were singeing the pig and cutting it into joints — Butler renders the agricultural Greek as plain English farmwork. The cloak-trick anecdote, told in the first person, has a relaxed conversational shape that hexameter struggles with and prose carries easily. Pope and Chapman elevate the swineherd toward courtly speech; Wilson modernises with sharp directness; Butler trusts the dignity of the working register to take care of itself.

What to watch for

• The poem's apostrophe to Eumaeus — the voice's special tenderness for the swineherd.
• The longest Cretan lie — calibrated for a slave-born listener, framed as suffering rather than cunning.
• The cloak-trick anecdote — the Odyssey's small contribution to the Trojan corpus, doing three jobs at once (testing, advertising, displacing).
• The hospitality protocols performed in a hut — xenia as discipline not wealth.
• Eumaeus's catalogue of the master's stock — the household-economy basis for the moral case against the suitors.
• The figure of Mesaulius bought out of savings — Eumaeus as a man with his own life, not merely a function.
• The closing image of the swineherd going out to sleep with his pigs in the storm — duty as the form of love.

Echoes across the cycle

Chapter 0064 — Echoes Across the Cycle

Backward echoes

Book 14 reads as the moral inverse of the Cyclops episode (book 9). Both are about a stranger arriving at a herdsman's enclosure on a remote hillside; both involve the offering or refusal of hospitality; both turn on the question whether the law of Jove the guest-protector binds the host. Polyphemus rejects the law and eats his guests; Eumaeus invokes it as his first principle and feeds them. The two scenes form one of the cleanest moral pairings in the poem. The cloak-trick anecdote of Ulysses-at-Troy reaches back into the Iliad's catalogue of nights-on-watch (Iliad 10's Doloneia is the closest cousin) but is a story the Iliad does not tell — the Odyssey here completes the Iliad with a small displaced episode of cunning on the cold-night front line.

Eumaeus's apostrophe by the poet — and you answered him, swineherd Eumaeus — echoes the Iliad's apostrophes to Patroclus in Iliad 16. Both figures are loved beyond their station by the poetic voice; both are the moral counterweight to the violence around them; one will die for Achilles, the other will live for Ulysses.

The first long Cretan lie reaches back to the Apologoi (books 9–12) and reuses the same materials in a different register: shipwreck, Phoenician treachery, swimming naked to shore. The materials of the wanderings have been broken up and reassembled into a plausible mortal autobiography — an unmagical version of the wanderings that could be told to a swineherd without raising suspicion. The lie is the poem's first explicit statement of the principle that the Apologoi are also a kind of telling: the magical version told to the Phaeacians, the mortal version told to Eumaeus, both the work of the same speaker.

Forward echoes

• Eumaeus as the model of the loyal servant is the foundation of one of the deepest patterns in Western literature. The Aeneid will give Aeneas no Eumaeus — Virgil is interested in companions of equal class (Achates) rather than retainers from below; but every later epic and many later novels rebuild the figure. The Old Testament's Joseph as Pharaoh's steward, the New Testament's parable of the faithful servant (Luke 12), the medieval romance's vavasseur and yeoman, Sancho Panza, Sam Gamgee — all are versions of Eumaeus.
• The cloak-trick anecdote is the model for every later "story-within-a-story to ask indirectly for a gift" — Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, Boccaccio's framing in the Decameron, the Arabian Nights tradition of nested narratives where each tale earns the teller one more day of life.
• The Cretan lie sequence (here, then in book 17 to Antinous, then in book 19 to Penelope) becomes the model for every later "hero in disguise tells variant stories to test his audience" — Twelfth Night's Viola, Henry V's incognito night, Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, every con-man novel.
• The household-economy critique of the suitors in Eumaeus's catalogue (so much cattle eaten, so much wine drunk, so many pigs taken) is the moral foundation of the eventual slaughter. The Odyssey is one of the first European texts to make a precise economic case for revenge. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics later cites Homer on the question of what is owed to one's household; the medieval political economy tradition reads Eumaeus as the steward-figure, the loyal manager whose accounts are the moral ledger of the household.
• Mesaulius, the slave Eumaeus bought from the Taphians with his own savings, has a small but consequential afterlife: the recognition that a slave can have his own slave and his own savings is one of the foundational details of Roman peculium law and later medieval serf-economy. The Odyssey here sketches a hierarchical world in which loyalty travels through the chain of command.
• The pig-sacrifice with the divine portion and the seven equal shares is one of the clearest descriptions of commensality in archaic Greek literature and shapes every later anthropological reading of the gift and the meal — Marcel Mauss's The Gift, Marshall Sahlins, and Catherine Bell's Ritual Theory all cite the Eumaeus meal.
• The swineherd as moral counterweight to the suitors is the structural pattern that the Aeneid will not borrow (Virgil has Iarbas and Mezentius as opponents, but no positive servant) and that the medieval romance will rebuild on the chivalric model (Lancelot's loyal squires). The figure passes through Renaissance pastoral (the shepherd-as-truth-teller) into Romantic-era poetry's investment in the rural labourer (Wordsworth's Resolution and Independence, Hardy's loyal stockmen).
• The closing image of Eumaeus going out to sleep with his boars has had a strange afterlife as the visual emblem of the loyal-servant tradition — illustrated in nineteenth-century editions of the Odyssey, painted by Gustave Doré, photographed by Italian neorealismo directors as the image of the contadino who works through the night to defend the master's property.

Cast in this chapter

Chapter 0064 — Cast In This Chapter

On stage

• Odysseus — "Ulysses"; as the old beggar, attacked by the dogs, received with hospitality, eats the slave's pig, tells the first long Cretan lie, swears the cliff-oath, tells the cloak-trick anecdote, accepts the spare cloak by the fire
• Eumaeus — the loyal swineherd; calls off the dogs, prepares the meal, denounces the suitors, refuses to believe the news of Ulysses's return, gives the cloak, goes out to sleep with the boars in the storm

Mentioned / off-stage

• Penelope — Eumaeus's account: she takes in every wandering beggar in hope of news, asks each one questions, weeps; her grief drives the household economy of the lie-traders
• Telemachus — named: when the master's son comes home, he will give you cloak and tunic and send you on your way
• Laertes — Eumaeus's master before Ulysses; bought him from the Phoenicians; the off-stage old king
• Agamemnon — named: Ulysses went to Troy in his cause
• Zeus — "Jove"; the god of strangers, of suppliants; Eumaeus's reason for not killing the beggar
• Hermes — "Mercury son of Maia"; given the second thigh-piece of the boar by Eumaeus's pious portion
• Menelaus — named in the cloak-trick story: the captain alongside Ulysses on the winter ambush at Troy
• Idomeneus — named in the Cretan lie: the Cretan king alongside whom the beggar fought at Troy

Non-cast named figures: Castor son of Hylax (the beggar's fictional Cretan father); the four under-shepherds (Eumaeus's working crew); Mesaulius (the slave-servant Eumaeus bought from the Taphians with his own savings); the king Pheidon of Thesprotia (named in the Cretan lie as the man who showed Ulysses's treasures); Thoas (named in the cloak-trick anecdote — the young captain tricked out of his cloak); the dogs of Eumaeus (four, fierce as wolves); the unnamed Aetolian (Eumaeus's previous lie-trader who claimed Ulysses was refitting ships in Crete); the Phoenician (the trickster of the Cretan lie); the king of Egypt (who spared the beggar at his chariot in the lie); the nymphs (sharing Hermes's portion at the sacrifice); Dodona (the oracle of Zeus to which Pheidon's Ulysses had gone for consultation).

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.