(Days 35–36 of the poem's main action; Sparta, Pylos, the open sea, the Ithacan shore, and the swineherd's hut)

Athena flies south to Sparta. She finds Telemachus and Pisistratus lying in the porch of Menelaus's house, Pisistratus asleep but Telemachus wakeful with thoughts of his father. She stands by his head: Telemachus, you cannot stay here longer; your goods are wasting, your mother is being pressed to marry the suitor Eurymachus — and on your return the suitors are lying in wait for you in the strait between Same and Ithaca. Sail at night, hug the coast, avoid the towns. When you land, send the ship around to the city but go yourself to the swineherd Eumaeus; he is loyal; he will keep you out of sight until you have sent for your mother. She vanishes.

At dawn Telemachus rouses Pisistratus and asks to leave at once. Menelaus rises from beside Helen; the queen is told and is up in a moment. They cannot keep Telemachus longer; gifts must be exchanged. Menelaus gives him a great silver mixing-bowl with gold rim (the gift of Phaedimus king of Sidon), Megapenthes adds a double-cup, and Helen comes down with one of the robes she has woven herself, the most beautiful and the largest — Keep it for your bride when you marry; until then let it lie in your mother's chamber. A meal is laid; the company drinks the parting cup; the chariot is ready in the court.

As they begin to drive away an eagle flies overhead from the right with a great white tame goose in its talons, snatched from the courtyard. Men and women shout after it. Pisistratus, the more thoughtful, asks Menelaus whether the omen is for him or for the guest. Menelaus thinks; Helen answers first. I will read it as the gods have put it in my heart. As that eagle came down from his mountain and snatched the goose from your yard, so Ulysses will come home from his long wanderings and have his revenge — or perhaps he is already there, planning what the suitors shall pay. Telemachus, moved, prays: Jove, may this come true, and I will pray to you in your country as to a god.

They drive two days, lodging the first night with Diocles at Pheraea, reaching Pylos at the next sunset. Telemachus, who does not want to be drawn back into Nestor's long-talking hospitality, asks Pisistratus to drop him at the ship without going up to the palace. Pisistratus agrees against his own father's wishes; I know my father, he would force you to come and entertain you on and on. The two part with promises of guest-friendship.

At the ship a young stranger appears at Telemachus's elbow. Sir, what man are you, and where do you sail? Take me on board as a suppliant — I am a man fleeing for my life. He gives his name and his lineage at length: he is Theoclymenus, descended in the male line from the great seer Melampus — Melampus, who once stole the cattle of Iphiclus and was bound for a year in chains before he prophesied to his captors and won them and the bride; the line goes Melampus → Antiphates → Oicleus → Amphiaraus (who was murdered by his wife Eriphyle's gold-bargain at Thebes); and from a junior branch through Mantius → Polypheides → Theoclymenus himself. He has killed a kinsman in Argos and is now hunted by the relatives. Telemachus accepts him: fellow, come aboard; you shall share what we have. They put to sea. Athena sends a fair wind. Through the night the ship runs along the coast — past Crouni and Chalcis, past Pheae, past the headland of Elis — at first light they are at the harbour of the goat-island opposite Ithaca, and Telemachus wondered whether he would be taken alive or whether he would escape.

They drop the sail, run in to land, beach the ship in the small harbour at the southern end of Ithaca, away from the city, away from the suitor-ambush. Telemachus tells his men: take the ship round to the city; I am going across the island to inspect the herds; I will be with you tomorrow night for the parting-feast. As they push off, a hawk — the swift messenger of Apollo — flies up at the right with a small dove in its claws, plucking feathers as it goes; the feathers fall on the ground between Telemachus and the ship. Theoclymenus draws Telemachus aside. That is a sign for you. No house in Ithaca is more kingly than yours; your line shall be lord here for ever. Telemachus puts him into the care of his friend Piraeus son of Clytius: take him to your house, give him every honour, until I come into the city.

Piraeus and the crew row away. Telemachus walks across the island toward the high pasture of Eumaeus.

The scene cuts back to the hut. Ulysses and Eumaeus are still at the supper-fire. The four under-shepherds are out with the herds. Ulysses, testing him, says: Eumaeus, I will be a burden to you no longer; tomorrow I will go down to the town to beg, and perhaps to find work as a servant in one of those great houses — I can lay a fire and cut wood and pour the wine, I have the skills, and Hermes who blesses every man's work would be with me; perhaps even those suitors would take me on. Eumaeus is appalled. Stranger, do not go near the suitors. They have all the young men they want at their feast, dressed in cloaks and tunics; you would be insulted and pushed out and beaten with hands and fire-brands. Stay here with me. Wait for the master's son to come. He is the kindest of men; he will give you cloak and tunic and send you on your way wherever you wish.

The wine and the fire and the long night make Ulysses ask the swineherd for his own story. Eumaeus, you have not always been a slave; were your parents killed in a raid, were you taken as a child? Tell me, the night is the longest of the year, there is time for sleep and for telling. Eumaeus tells the longest single autobiography given by a non-noble character in Homer.

I was born on an island called Syria — beyond Ortygia, where the sun makes his turnings — a small island but rich, with fine pasture and grain and wine, where no man knows hunger and no plague comes; when the people grow old, Apollo and Diana come and take them with kind arrows, painlessly. My father was Ctesius son of Ormenus, a king of two towns there. We had in the household a Phoenician slave-woman, tall and beautiful and clever in handiwork; the slavers had taken her years before from her own house in Sidon and sold her to my father. One day a ship of Phoenician traders put in to our harbour, full of trinkets. The woman went down to wash linen and the captain met her at the spring; she gave herself to him; she made a bargain with him — take me home to Sidon, and I will bring with me as much treasure as I can carry, and the king's son to sell as a slave at any port you choose. The bargain was made. For a year the traders stayed and traded; the woman raised me — for I was the youngest, two or three years old, the spoilt one — taking me everywhere on her shoulders. One day the signal came from the ship: she sent a man into the hall under a story to lift three cups while the household drank in the porch; she took my hand and ran; we came down to the ship as the sun set; they hauled in the gangplank and put out to sea. Six days they sailed. On the seventh day Diana struck her with a soft arrow and she dropped down dead in the hold — they threw her overboard to the seals and the fishes — and the wind brought the ship to Ithaca, and Laertes bought me. The old king's daughter Ctimene was my age; my mother (in fact the queen) raised me as her own, alongside Ctimene; we ate together, we played together, until she grew up and was married to a man of Same and went away with her dowry. I was the loved one. Now I am the swineherd and they are all gone — and you ask me for my story.

Ulysses listens through. You have suffered, Eumaeus, but at least you came among kind people. You are with the right house. I have wandered farther and found less mercy. They sit on awhile, but the night is mostly gone; the dawn is on the way. Telemachus is by now nearly at the door of the hut. The book ends in the dying firelight, with the host and the guest each carrying his own secret, and the king's son walking up the last slope.

Analysis

Chapter 0065 — Analysis

The poem's interweaving begins

Book 15 is the first book in which the two halves of the plot — Ulysses on the high pasture, Telemachus on the road home — explicitly braid toward each other. Athena begins it by going to Sparta; the book ends with Telemachus a few paces from his father's hut. The double action that has run in parallel since book 1 (the Telemachy and the wanderings) is now collapsing into a single scene. The Odyssey's structural cleverness is at full stretch: the cuts between Sparta and Ithaca are timed so that father and son arrive at the same point at the same hour without yet meeting; the meeting will be the first act of book 16. The Aeneid will adopt this technique of intercut parallel actions (the Trojans in Latium, the Latins gathering for war) but never with the Odyssey's small-scale precision.

Helen's reading of the eagle

The most striking thing about the omen at Sparta is who reads it. Menelaus thinks; Pisistratus asks; Helen answers first. The wife of the captain-of-kings is a prophet of the household's future, and she reads the eagle confidently and correctly. This continues the poem's strange treatment of Helen in book 4: she is unreliable, drugged, but also clear-sighted; she alone in book 4 recognised Telemachus on sight, and here she alone reads the omen on the road. The Odyssey gives Helen the second sight as a kind of compensation for her doubleness; she sees what is coming because she has known what is gone. Aeschylus's Agamemnon will give the same kind of seeing to Cassandra, captive after the sack — the woman who knows what is coming because she has seen what has been lost.

Theoclymenus as the poem's last shade-figure

Theoclymenus is one of the poem's strangest minor characters. He appears unannounced at Pylos as a fugitive seer with a long ancestor-genealogy stretching back to Melampus (the great cattle-fetching seer of the pre-Trojan generation); he attaches himself to Telemachus; he reads the second omen (the hawk and the dove) on the Ithacan beach; he stays in Piraeus's house until book 17, then prophesies at the palace in book 20 (the suitors will not see another sunrise; the hall is full of shrouds and ghosts; the sun is going out). Then he disappears. The character has no organic plot function — none of his prophecies do anything; they are read or ignored — but he serves as the poem's chorus-of-one for the second half. Where Demodocus in book 8 supplied song, Theoclymenus supplies prophecy. The two figures bracket the second half of the Odyssey with the two registers of poetic foreknowledge: the bard's narrative of the past, the seer's vision of the future. The poem keeps a wide-angle on the kinds of knowing it depends on.

Eumaeus's autobiography

The longest story told by a non-noble character in Homer is Eumaeus's account of his kidnapping. The story is shaped exactly like an inverted Cretan lie: where Ulysses's Cretan lies use the materials of the wanderings to construct a mortal version of his own adventures, Eumaeus's true story uses the actual materials of the slave-trade to construct a deeply human account of childhood loss. The two registers — the wandering hero's lying autobiography and the loyal slave's true autobiography — sit side by side in books 14 and 15. The poem trusts the reader to feel the contrast.

The details of Eumaeus's story are precise: the small island of Syria where the people die without pain, struck by the kind arrows of Apollo and Artemis; the Phoenician trader-ship that comes to the harbour for a year; the seductive captain at the spring; the slave-woman's bargain; the abduction by deception; Artemis's punishment of the kidnapper at sea; the wind that brings the ship to Ithaca; Laertes the buyer. The story positions Eumaeus as the precise mirror of his master: both were taken from their proper place by Phoenician treachery, both spent years in transit, both ended in households where they were loved as their own (Calypso, Circe, Phaeacians for Ulysses; the queen of Ithaca for Eumaeus). The poem makes the symmetry clear without naming it.

The omens as parallel readings

Two omens are read in book 15. The eagle-and-goose at Sparta is read by Helen (Ulysses is coming home like the eagle, the suitors are the goose). The hawk-and-dove at the Ithacan beach is read by Theoclymenus (no house in Ithaca is more kingly than yours; your line shall rule for ever). Both omens go in the same direction — the right, the lucky side — and both involve a raptor and its prey. The Odyssey is establishing a kind of ornithological prophecy: the bird of prey from the right is always the master returning, and the small bird is always the suitors. The pattern will be activated one final time in book 20 when Telemachus reads a third such omen the morning of the slaughter.

Ulysses's testing of Eumaeus

The small scene where Ulysses proposes going down to the town to beg from the suitors is another test. Eumaeus reacts as the swineherd should — appalled at the idea, protective, urging the stranger to stay. The Odyssey is interested in what each character does when given the cue to fail. Eumaeus passes every test put before him. The same kind of tests will be put before Penelope (books 18–19, the will-she-marry probes), before the maids (the test of the spinning), before Laertes (book 24, the testing at the orchard), before the suitors continuously (the begging-for-bread test, the wrestling-Irus test). The Odyssey works by probative scenes in which the secret of identity is conditional on the loyalty of the witness.

The long winter night

Eumaeus mentions, in introducing his story, that the night is the longest of the year. The detail places the action of the back half of the Odyssey at the winter solstice — the bow-stringing in book 21 will be on the festival of Apollo, which classical commentators connected to the new year. The poem is using the calendar as quiet structure: the dark night for the swineherd's storytelling, the cold morning for the long return, the new-year festival for the slaughter and the rebirth of the household. T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding — Midwinter spring is its own season — knows this.

Butler's prose in the genealogy

Butler is at his best with Eumaeus's narrative and at his weakest with Theoclymenus's genealogy. The genealogy passage — Melampus → Antiphates → Oicleus → Amphiaraus → Mantius → Polypheides → Theoclymenus — is one of those Homeric set-pieces that benefits from hexameter's rolling cadence; Butler's prose lists it competently but without elevation. The Eumaeus autobiography, by contrast, is exactly the kind of plain personal narrative Butler's register catches without strain. The voice of the swineherd telling his life by the fire is one of the highest moments in this translation.

What to watch for

• The first sustained interweaving of the two plot-lines — father and son converging on the same hut on the same night.
• Helen as second-sighted reader of omens — the poem's strange compensation for her doubleness.
• Theoclymenus as the seer-counterpart to the bard Demodocus — the two figures of poetic foreknowledge bracketing the second half.
• Eumaeus's autobiography as the inverted Cretan lie — true rather than false, low rather than royal, but using the same materials.
• The two omens (eagle, hawk) as the back half's ornithological prophecy pattern, completed in book 20.
• The probative scene — Ulysses's testing of Eumaeus by proposing to leave for the town.
• The longest night of the year as the calendar-setting for the back half.

Echoes across the cycle

Chapter 0065 — Echoes Across the Cycle

Backward echoes

The Spartan farewell rhymes precisely with the Spartan arrival of book 4. The wedding-feast of Megapenthes and Hermione was the backdrop then; the wedding-robe Helen now gives Telemachus to keep for his bride is its private continuation. Helen's reading of the eagle-omen rhymes with her nepenthe and her doubled-voice stories at the welcome-feast: the woman who drugged the wine to talk about Ulysses is the woman who now reads correctly the bird that announces his return. The two scenes — book 4 arrival, book 15 departure — frame Helen as a kind of household oracle whose vision is paid for by complicity.

Eumaeus's Phoenician-kidnap story is the dark mirror of Ulysses's own Cretan-Phoenician lies in book 14. Both stories use the slave-trade route through the eastern Mediterranean (Sidon, Phoenicia, Crete, the Aegean islands) as the matrix of personal disaster; both involve treacherous Phoenicians; both end with the protagonist washed up on Ithaca and absorbed into Laertes's household. The poem is making the symmetry explicit: master and slave are both brought here by chance against their will, and the household they belong to is the household they were given to by a sea-accident. This is one of the Odyssey's quieter levellings.

The Theoclymenus genealogy reaches back into the pre-Trojan generation of heroes — Melampus, Amphiaraus, the Argive cycle around Thebes — and so functions as the Odyssey's small acknowledgement of the Theban cycle, the sister-tradition Aeschylus and Sophocles will later expand into the Seven Against Thebes and the Oedipus and Antigone dramas. The Iliad mentions Thebes only in passing (Tydeus's embassy in Iliad 4); the Odyssey mentions it through Theoclymenus's lineage. The two heroic-age traditions overlap in this minor character.

Forward echoes

• The double action converging — father and son arriving at the same hut on the same night — is the structural model for every later "lost relatives reunited" recognition plot. New Comedy (Menander), Roman comedy (Plautus, Terence), Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, Dickens's Oliver Twist and David Copperfield all use intercut parallel action to bring relatives together at a single climactic moment. The technique was invented here.
• Helen as second-sighted reader survives into Aeschylus's Cassandra in Agamemnon and into the broader Greek tradition of the prophetess-by-paying — the woman who sees because she has suffered. The figure is the model for every later war-survivor seer in Western literature, from the Sybils of Virgil to the gypsy-fortuneteller of Romantic and Victorian fiction.
• Theoclymenus has a longer afterlife than his small scenes suggest. He is the model for every later attached seer who reads omens and is mostly ignored — Cassandra most obviously, but also the Beggar-prophet in King Lear's Edgar-as-Tom, the half-mad oracle in folk tradition, the fool who tells truth. His prophecy in book 20 (the suitors will not see another sunrise; the hall is full of ghosts; the sun is going out) is the Odyssey's most disturbing single piece of supernatural seeing and is read by every later katabatic poet.
• Eumaeus's autobiography is the foundation-text for every later "loyal-servant origin story" — Sancho Panza's accounts of his peasant childhood in Don Quixote; the backstory of Friday in Robinson Crusoe; the slave-narrative tradition (Equiano, Douglass) which deliberately echoes the Phoenician-kidnap shape; the loyal-retainer biographies in nineteenth-century novel and twentieth-century film.
• The eagle-and-goose omen at Sparta is read by every later epic. Virgil rewrites it in Aeneid 2 (the omen of fire on Iulus's head, of the snake on Anchises's altar) and Aeneid 12 (the eagle and the swans before the duel of Aeneas and Turnus). The bird-of-prey omen as readable forecast of dynastic vindication is one of the Odyssey's most influential motifs.
• The convergence of the two plots in book 16 is the poem's structural climax of recognition, set up here. Every recognition-driven narrative in Western literature, from Greek tragedy through modern detective fiction, is built on the same delay-and-convergence pattern.
• The Theoclymenus-Eumaeus pairing — the noble fugitive seer and the kidnapped slave swineherd both arriving in Ulysses's house at the same season — gives the poem two figures from radically different social positions who are both displaced and both bound up with the master's fate. The pattern of class-spanning solidarity will be picked up across the Western literary tradition's interest in companions of misfortune.

Cast in this chapter

Chapter 0065 — Cast In This Chapter

On stage

• Telemachus — at Sparta when Athena rouses him, parts from Menelaus and Helen with the eagle-omen, sails by night around the suitor-ambush, takes on Theoclymenus as suppliant, lands on Ithaca, sends the ship ahead, walks to Eumaeus's hut
• Athena — "Minerva"; goes to Sparta and rouses Telemachus, sends the fair wind, lays out the route past the ambush
• Menelaus — gives the silver-and-gold mixing-bowl, the last royal gift; reads the omen with hesitation
• Helen — gives the wedding-robe she has woven, reads the eagle-omen correctly as the master's return and the suitors' end
• Odysseus — "Ulysses"; at the hut, tests Eumaeus by proposing to leave for the town, draws out the swineherd's autobiography
• Eumaeus — refuses to let the beggar go to the suitors, tells the longest non-noble autobiography in Homer (Syrian prince, Phoenician kidnap, sold to Laertes, raised with Ctimene)

Mentioned / off-stage

• Penelope — Athena says the suitors are pressing her to take Eurymachus; Telemachus's chamber will hold Helen's robe for his future bride
• Poseidon — implicit in the suitor-ambush in the strait
• Zeus — invoked by Telemachus at the eagle-omen
• Apollo — sends the second omen (the hawk and dove); his kind arrows take the old without pain on Syria; the god of Theoclymenus's craft
• Hermes — invoked by Ulysses as the god who blesses every man's craft work
• Laertes — Eumaeus's owner who bought him from the Phoenicians

Non-cast named figures: Pisistratus (the always-thoughtful companion); Eurymachus (the suitor Athena says is pressing Penelope hardest); Megapenthes (Menelaus's son, gives the double-cup); Eteoneus (Menelaus's herald); Diocles (host at Pheraea on both journeys); Theoclymenus (the fugitive seer from Argos, descended from Melampus, joins Telemachus at Pylos); Melampus (the great pre-Trojan seer, ancestor); Antiphates, Oicleus, Amphiaraus, Mantius, Polypheides (the lineage); Eriphyle (the wife who took gold to betray Amphiaraus); Iphiclus (the king whose cattle Melampus stole); Piraeus son of Clytius (Telemachus's friend, takes Theoclymenus into his house in Ithaca-town); Ctesius son of Ormenus (Eumaeus's royal father on Syria); the unnamed Phoenician slave-woman who kidnapped him; the Phoenician traders; the island of Syria (Eumaeus's homeland); Ortygia (the landmark beside it); Ctimene (Laertes's daughter, Eumaeus's foster-sister, married off to Same).

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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.