Odyssey, Book 17 — Ulysses as Beggar at His Own Palace; Argus the Dog (Day 37 of the poem's main action; the swineherd's hut, the road down to the city, the palace gate, the great hall)

At dawn Telemachus binds on his sandals and takes his spear: Eumaeus, I am going down to the city now, to my mother; do not let her cry over me until she sees me. Bring the stranger to town when the sun is high; he can beg there, anyone who will give him a drink and a loaf will give it; I cannot keep him on the farm. Ulysses agrees gladly — a beggar does better in the town; a man in my rags wants the sun by him. Telemachus walks down the path.

He comes through the courtyard. The old nurse Eurycleia sees him first, drops the fleeces she is folding, runs to him weeping. The maids run after her. Penelope comes down from the upper chamber like Diana or like golden Venus and throws her arms round him and kisses his head and his eyes and cries: light of my eyes, you have come back to me; I thought never to see you again after you slipped off to Pylos in spite of me. Tell me what you heard. Telemachus answers gravely: do not cry over me, mother, do not lift my heart for what is still to come. Go up and pray to the gods. I have my own business in the assembly. He sets out into the city. As he goes Theoclymenus the seer comes up; with him is Piraeus, who has been keeping the gifts of Menelaus.

Telemachus refuses to bring the gifts into the palace yet — if I am killed by the suitors before I come to my own, I would rather Piraeus had the gifts than that they came into the suitors' hands. He takes Theoclymenus into the hall. Penelope, having bathed, comes down to the megaron and sits opposite her son with her spinning. Telemachus tells her in detail what he found: Nestor knew nothing further than what was already in the council; Menelaus had it from the Old Man of the Sea that Ulysses is alive on Calypso's island, held against his will, with no ship and no companions to take him home. Theoclymenus, hearing this, interrupts: queen, by Jove and by your hospitable hearth, hear me — Ulysses is already on Ithaca, sitting or moving among us in secret, planning evil for these suitors; the bird-omen I read for your son at the harbour-mouth was clear. Penelope answers carefully: stranger, if this proves true, you will have such gifts from me that any one meeting you will call you blessed.

The scene cuts to the road. Ulysses takes the staff and the wallet — and a poorer wallet I had never seen — and Eumaeus and he set out. They come at midday to the stone basin at the fountain that Ithacus and Neritus and Polyctor built long ago, by the poplar grove where the city draws its water. Coming up the path toward them, driving the best of the goats for the suitors' supper, comes the goatherd Melanthius son of Dolius, with two herdsmen behind. He sees the swineherd with the old beggar at his side and curses them both: here comes one filth leading another. Eumaeus, where are you taking this miserable rag-bag of a stranger? — he will get many wallets full at our master's house tonight, and many a footstool over the back. If you would set him to washing pens for me out at the goat-yards, instead of bringing him into the master's house to be a burden on the wine, I might give him something to do; but he is just the type of work-shy beggar that will not lift a hand and only stretches it out for free bread. As he passes he kicks Ulysses on the hip — yet Ulysses moved not from his place, though his whole heart was in two minds whether to spring on Melanthius and beat his brains out with the staff or to lift him by the heels and dash his head against the ground. He chose endurance.

Eumaeus, white with anger, prayed aloud: fountain-nymphs, daughters of Jove, if ever Ulysses burnt to you the thigh-pieces of lambs and kids covered with rich fat, grant my prayer — bring him home; he would scatter all this fine swagger that Melanthius struts with. Melanthius laughed back: what an idea! What a brave thing for me to be scared of. — As surely as the master will never come home, I would put you and your stinking stranger on a ship and sell you tomorrow for a good price. He pushed past and went into the palace and sat down at the suitors' feast opposite Eurymachus, for the herald who came in with the goats favoured him most.

Eumaeus and Ulysses reach the gate of the palace courtyard. The harp of Phemius is heard from inside, singing. Ulysses lays his hand on Eumaeus's wrist: this is the master's house I am at last; I know it by the size and by the bronze threshold and by the wall round the court. There must be many men eating in there. The smell of the meat is heavy and the harp goes on. Eumaeus answers: go in then; or shall I go first? They decide Eumaeus will go first. And as they spoke, an old dog who had been lying in the dust outside the gate raised his head and pricked his ears. The dog was Argus, whom Ulysses bred before he sailed to Troy, but had never put to work. Now he lay neglected on the heap of mule-dung and cow-dung that lay piled at the gates till the slaves should carry it away to manure the land — there he lay, infested with fleas. As soon as he was aware of Ulysses standing by him he wagged his tail and dropped both his ears, but he had not strength to rise and go nearer. Ulysses turned aside, wiping a tear that Eumaeus might not see it, and said only: Eumaeus, what a strange thing — that fine dog lying there on the dung-pile. He looks as though he had been a good hunter in his day, or only a table-dog, kept for show. Eumaeus: he was the dog of a man who is dead far away from home. If he were now as he was when Ulysses left for Troy, you would see what a hunter he was; nothing escaped him, no deer or hare in the wood. Now he lies neglected, the slaves never having taken any trouble for him since their master is no longer over them — for half the worth goes out of a man, says Jove, the day the day of slavery comes upon him. He walked on into the hall. Argus, having seen Ulysses again at last after twenty years, dropped his head in the dust and died.

Ulysses follows Eumaeus into the megaron. Telemachus, sitting between Antinous and Eurymachus, sees Eumaeus come in and waves him over. The swineherd takes a seat. Ulysses sits down on the threshold of the door, on the ash, his back against a cypress pillar that Ulysses himself had once planed and set. Telemachus calls a servant to bring meat and bread from his own table — and tell the stranger he may go round the suitors and beg from each; in poverty there is no place for pride. Ulysses eats; the harper plays on; he finishes his meal as the song ends, for Athena had put in his head that he should beg from every one of them to see what kind of men they were — but she had already decided that not one of them should be spared.

He goes round the hall left to right, with hand outstretched, as if he were no stranger to the trade. Most give a piece of bread or meat without comment. One man asked another who he was; the goatherd Melanthius answered: he is the man the swineherd brought down from the hills. Antinous turned on Eumaeus: you cursed swineherd, what did you mean by bringing this beggar into the town? Have we not enough of them already? Eumaeus answers him as a peasant answers a lord: Antinous, you may be a great man but your speech is not great. Who ever heard of inviting a stranger? — strangers come or are brought as suppliants. A priest, a healer of wounds, a worker in wood, a bard who sings for the gods — these are the public men one invites. But a beggar in his rags would not invite himself if invited. No one is harder on the servants of the house, especially on me, than you. Telemachus cuts in: Antinous, you scold him like a father — that I do not allow. Take some food from the table and give it him yourself. Antinous: Telemachus, you are a fine speaker and a hot-tempered one; if each of us gave him as much as I am about to give, he would not show his face here again for three months. He held up the footstool from under the table — but no, he did not give it yet.

Ulysses came up to him in the begging-round. He gave Antinous a careful flattering address: give me a piece, sir; you look like the best of them, a great lord; I will praise your name throughout the country. I was once myself a man with house and slaves; Jove turned me out of all of it; I was taken at sea by pirates and sold at the great market in Cyprus. Antinous: what god has brought this pest of a man to spoil our supper? Stand back from my table. Ulysses, quietly: I would not have thought it of you. You sit in another man's house, you eat his food without leave, and you cannot find a single bit of bread on his table to give a poor man. Antinous, furious, picked up the footstool and threw it. It struck Ulysses square on the right shoulder-blade at the top of his back. He stood like a rock, did not stagger, only shook his head in silence and went back to the threshold. He sat down, laid the wallet of bread heavy on his knees, said openly to the company: hear me, suitors of the famous queen. To take a blow fighting for one's cattle or sheep is no shame. But to take a footstool flung by Antinous for an empty belly is a shame, and I pray to Erinyes that he come to a bad end before his wedding day. Antinous: eat what you have, stranger, in silence, or I will have you dragged through this courtyard hand and foot and the skin flayed off you by my men. The other suitors shifted in their seats. Some muttered: Antinous, that was an ill thing to do, to strike a beggar. The gods walk this earth as strangers; you may have hit a god. Antinous shrugged.

Telemachus, though his eyes filled, no tear fell, and he shook his head in silence. Word reaches Penelope in the upper chamber. She comes out onto her own threshold and bursts out to her women: may Apollo strike Antinous so. Of all of them I hate Antinous most, like the very face of death. A poor wandering man came to our house and every one gave him something — except Antinous, who threw a stool at his right shoulder. She calls Eumaeus and says, bring the stranger up here. He has wandered the world; he may have seen Ulysses; he may have heard. Eumaeus goes down. Ulysses replies through him: queen, I know the master's fate well and have suffered with him; but I am afraid to pass through these violent men now. Let her wait till the suitors have gone to bed; let me sit by the fire then in my torn rags, and she will hear all I know. Eumaeus brings the message up. Penelope agrees: the stranger is right; the man knows the world. Eumaeus then takes leave of Telemachus — I will be back at dawn with the morning's pigs; keep yourself safe; many in this house wish you ill — and walks back up the hill in the dusk to his hut. The suitors after their supper turn to dancing and singing in the great hall, for it was getting on toward evening.

Analysis

Chapter 0067 — Analysis

The slowest book of the poem

Book 17 is the slowest book of the Odyssey, and deliberately so. The plot has been laid in book 16; the execution will not begin until book 21. Between them stretch books 17, 18, 19, and 20 — four books in which Ulysses, in disguise, walks every room of his own house and is insulted, tested, fed, and (twice) recognised by witnesses sworn or constrained to silence. The poem is taking its time. This is what twenty years of absence feel like: the king returning cannot just kick the door open; he must walk in slowly, take the abuse, watch what is happening, and hold his hand. The slowness is the poem's moral form. Anyone who has had a long-deferred reunion knows the truth of it: the moment cannot be hurried because the years cannot be hurried.

Argus the dog

The dog Argus is the most-loved minor character in the Odyssey. He occupies twenty lines and is the emotional centre of the whole back half of the poem. Bred by Ulysses before he sailed, never put to work because his master never came back, lying on a dung-heap at the gate, blanketed in fleas, too old to rise, he raises his head when Ulysses speaks, drops his ears in the recognition-pose, wags his tail. And then, having seen his master again at last after twenty years, he died. The detail destroys readers. The dog is the only character so far in the back half to recognise Ulysses without help from a transformation or a token — pure recognition, the body knowing what the eye cannot say.

The poem uses Argus to make several arguments at once. First, that recognition can be sudden and complete and need not be earned — the dog does not need Athena's wand removed. Second, that the household has been allowed to die under the suitors' rule — Argus on the dung-heap is the household itself, the loyalty no one any longer feeds. Third, that the cost of return is the recognition of what has been lost — the dog dies the moment its master returns; the master cannot save it, can only acknowledge it. Eumaeus's gloss is the saddest commentary in the poem: half the goodness goes out of a man the day the day of slavery comes upon him. The household has been enslaved by absence; the dog has died of it.

Butler's prose handles Argus with great restraint. He had not strength to rise and go nearer. Ulysses turned aside, wiping a tear that Eumaeus might not see it. Argus, having seen Ulysses again at last after twenty years, dropped his head in the dust and died. No elevation. No simile. Pope's couplets cannot resist heightening the moment; Lattimore's hexameters add weight; Wilson modernises. Butler's flat clean prose lets the dog die exactly as the dog dies.

Melanthius and the introduction of the bad servant

Melanthius the goatherd is the negative double of Eumaeus the swineherd. Both raise meat for the household; both pass through the palace daily; both have access. Eumaeus is loyal to the absent master; Melanthius is bought to the suitors. The two figures form the moral pole of the household-servant class as Eumaeus and Antinous form the pole of the host-guest relationship. The first encounter on the road — here comes one filth leading another — establishes Melanthius as the worst of the servants; book 22 will return to him in detail, when he is the man who fetches arms for the suitors during the slaughter, is captured, and is mutilated to death. The poem keeps account of who is who.

The first ritual humiliation

The footstool blow from Antinous is the first ritual humiliation Ulysses suffers at his own palace, and it is calibrated. Antinous does not strike to kill, he strikes to insult: the right shoulder-blade, at the top of the back, the part of the body that endures load. He stood like a rock; he did not stagger; he shook his head in silence and went back to the threshold. The discipline of holding back is staged for us — Ulysses, who could have killed Melanthius on the road and Antinous in the hall, accepts the blow and waits. The waiting is the poem's argument: revenge that is not held back is not just; the bow can only string for the man whose patience has stretched to the breaking-point of every reasonable expectation.

The other suitors react with a small moral flicker. Antinous, that was an ill thing — the gods walk this earth as strangers, you may have hit a god. The line is the poem's main theological argument: the law of the suppliant binds even when the suppliant is unidentified, because anyone might be a god. The suitors are guilty of breaching this law every minute they sit at Ulysses's table; the footstool-throw makes it visible.

Telemachus's restraint

Telemachus is given two beautifully measured moments of restraint in this book. When the suitors greet his return with fair words and malice in their hearts, he says nothing. When Antinous throws the footstool at the beggar, his eyes filled but no tear fell, and he shook his head in silence. Both gestures echo the father's. The discipline of the plan — take any insult, swallow it, turn it aside with cool words — is being executed in parallel by father and son in the same room. The Odyssey is interested in the correspondence of self-control across generations.

Penelope's first request to see the beggar

The book ends with Penelope summoning the beggar to her chamber, and Ulysses deferring the meeting until after the suitors have left for the night. The deferral is critical. The poem wants the husband-wife scene to happen in private, in firelight, late — when the masks have fewer audiences and the recognition has more space. Book 19's interview is set up here. The detail that Penelope's hatred crystallises around Antinous specifically — I hate Antinous like the face of death — is the poem's first signal that the queen, when she eventually moves, will move toward the bow herself.

Theoclymenus's prophecy

Theoclymenus's intervention in Penelope's hall — queen, by Jove and your hospitable hearth, Ulysses is in Ithaca, planning evil for these suitors — is the most direct prophetic statement made to Penelope in the poem. She receives it cautiously, with the formula of conditional gratitude (if it proves true, you shall have great gifts). Penelope is by now so accustomed to lying news-bringers that she does not allow herself to hope. The poem is preparing her for book 19 by showing how much she will resist easy belief.

Butler's prose at its rhythmic best

The walking-down-to-the-city sequence — the road, the fountain, the meeting with Melanthius, the dog at the gate, the entry into the hall, the begging-round, the footstool — is one of the most extended continuous-action sequences in the poem, and Butler's prose carries it superbly. The pacing of the encounters (the goatherd's insult-and-kick, the swineherd's prayer, the dog's recognition-and-death, the threshold-sitting, the begging-round, the footstool) reads like a chapter of a 19th-century novel. Butler's plain English is the right register for what is being shown: a long ordinary day on which a king walks home in disguise and is treated as a beggar.

What to watch for

• Argus the dog — the only un-helped recognition; the death-at-recognition that recurs across Western literature.
• Melanthius as Eumaeus's negative double — the bad servant who buys himself to the bad faction.
• The footstool blow — the first ritual humiliation; the discipline of standing like a rock.
• Telemachus's parallel restraint — the son executing the father's plan in the same room.
• Theoclymenus's prophecy and Penelope's caution — the queen too accustomed to false news to hope.
• The suitors' moral flicker — anyone might be a god; the theological argument the slaughter will execute.
• Penelope's summons of the beggar, deferred to after the suitors have left — setting up book 19.

Echoes across the cycle

Chapter 0067 — Echoes Across the Cycle

Backward echoes

The Argus episode reaches back into the Iliad's quiet animal moments (Hector's horses Xanthus and Balius weeping for Patroclus in Iliad 17, the prophetic horse Xanthus speaking in Iliad 19) and forward into the Odyssey's whole pattern of non-human readers of the master (the hounds at Eumaeus's hut, the dogs at Athena's arrival in book 16, the bird-omens of books 15 and 20). The Odyssey's repeated use of animals as truth-tellers is part of the poem's larger argument that recognition is a bodily fact, not just an intellectual one. The Iliad has nothing quite like Argus; the Iliadic horses weep but do not recognise; Argus recognises and dies.

The walk down to the city with Eumaeus is the structural mirror of the walk Telemachus made up the same road two books earlier on his way to the swineherd's hut. The path between hut and palace is one of the small geographical constants of the back half — every important transit moves through it. Melanthius's insult-and-kick rhymes with the kind of behaviour the suitors as a class have been allowed; he is their proxy in the working class.

The Phaeacian palace of book 7 — the long catalogue of bronze and gold and orchards — is silently invoked when Ulysses stands at the gate and admires his own house. The two great palace-arrivals of the poem rhyme exactly: the stranger comes invisible, takes in the architecture, recognises the wealth, prepares to enter. Phaeacia was perfect; Ithaca is broken. Both arrivals end with the stranger seated on the threshold.

Forward echoes

• Argus the dog is the most beloved minor character in the Odyssey and one of the most-rewritten figures in Western literature. Pope's translation of the passage moved Lord Byron to tears (his journals record the moment); Tennyson's Ulysses echoes the cadence; Robinson Jeffers's Hurt Hawks and Cassandra are written in the Argus key; Mary Oliver's dog-poems descend directly from this passage. In film, the loyal-pet-who-recognises-the-disguised-master is a stock device from Old Yeller to Lassie Come Home to Hachi: A Dog's Tale; all of them owe Argus.
• The footstool blow is the model for every "ritual humiliation the disguised king accepts" episode in Western drama. Henry V's incognito night before Agincourt; Edgar's poor naked wretch in King Lear; every later "king-in-disguise-suffers-an-indignity" episode is here.
• Melanthius the bad servant has a long after-life. The figure becomes the template for every later "treacherous servant" in literature — Edmund in King Lear, the various stewards-gone-bad in Renaissance drama, the betraying maid in modern crime fiction. The slaughter and mutilation of Melanthius in book 22 is one of the few moments of the Odyssey that has shocked readers across centuries; the figure is set up here as deserving it, but the poem is not gentle.
• The discipline of standing like a rock is the foundational text for the Stoic ideal of apatheia — the absorption of injury without reaction. Seneca cites the Ulysses-at-the-threshold image; the Marcus Aurelius tradition reads it as the model of imperial self-mastery. The figure passes into Christian asceticism (the saint who endures the blow without striking back) and into modern psychology (the discipline of holding back from immediate response).
• The hospitality theology — the gods walk this earth as strangers; you may have hit a god — is one of the foundational lines of the European tradition's reading of the stranger. The Latin hospes, the medieval peregrinus, the patristic exegesis of the Lukan road-to-Emmaus story (the disguised Christ as the unrecognised guest), all draw on this Odyssean theology. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me is the New Testament rewriting of the Odyssey's suitor-test.
• Theoclymenus's prophecy is taken up by Apollonius's prophets in the Argonautica and by the cycle of seer-prophecies that runs through later epic.
• Penelope's deferral of the meeting with the beggar is the structural model for every later "delayed interview" scene in romance — the heroine asks to see the stranger but agrees to wait till nightfall when the world is quieter. Tristan, Lancelot, the Provençal trobar, and the courtly-love tradition all use the night-interview as the form of consequential conversation.
• The walk from country to palace as a structural axis is the model for every later journey-to-the-court episode. Aeneid 8 (Aeneas's tour of the future Rome with Evander); the medieval romance's journey to the king's hall; modern political fiction's outsider-enters-the-court arc.

Cast in this chapter

Chapter 0067 — Cast In This Chapter

On stage

• Odysseus — "Ulysses"; as the old beggar walks down with Eumaeus, kicked by Melanthius, recognised by the dying dog Argus, takes the footstool from Antinous, defers Penelope's summons to the evening
• Telemachus — walks down at dawn, embraced by Eurycleia and Penelope, presents Theoclymenus, mediates between Antinous and the beggar, swallows the blow in silence
• Penelope — descends like Diana or Venus, hears Telemachus's news, hears Theoclymenus's prophecy with caution, hears of the footstool-blow and curses Antinous, sends Eumaeus to summon the stranger
• Eumaeus — escorts the beggar down to town, prays the fountain-prayer for his master after Melanthius's insult, serves Telemachus at table, carries Penelope's message back and forth, returns to the hut at dusk
• Eurycleia — the old nurse; first to see Telemachus return, drops the fleeces and weeps
• Argus — Ulysses's dog; bred before Troy and never used, lying on the dung-heap at the gate, recognises his master and dies
• Antinous — turns on Eumaeus, refuses the beggar bread, throws the footstool at Ulysses's right shoulder-blade, threatens to have him dragged through the courtyard and flayed

Mentioned / off-stage

• Zeus — "Jove"; the god of suppliants; named by Eumaeus's homily on slavery (half the goodness goes out of a man the day the day of slavery comes upon him)
• Apollo — Penelope's curse on Antinous (may Apollo strike you so); also the bird-omen of book 15 is his messenger
• Calypso — named in Telemachus's report from Sparta: Menelaus has it from Proteus that Ulysses is with her

Non-cast named figures: Phemius the bard (heard playing in the hall as Ulysses arrives); Theoclymenus (delivers the direct prophecy of Ulysses's presence on Ithaca to Penelope); Piraeus (Telemachus's friend who is keeping the Menelaus-gifts in safe custody); Melanthius son of Dolius (the bad goatherd; insults and kicks the beggar on the road; sits at Eurymachus's elbow at the suitors' table); Eurymachus (mentioned: Melanthius's particular protector among the suitors); Eurynome (Penelope's waiting-woman, agrees with the curse on the suitors); Medon (the herald who passed on the murder-council news in book 16, still implicit here); Phemius's song (a long song heard but not described); the fountain of Ithacus and Neritus and Polyctor (the public fountain by which Eumaeus prays); the Erinyes / Furies (invoked by Ulysses in the curse on Antinous's wedding).

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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.