Summary
Odysseus, disguised, comes to the farmstead of Eumaeus the swineherd. The dogs attack him; Eumaeus drives them off, brings him in, seats him on brushwood and a goatskin, and kills two piglets to feed him — apologising that the good animals go to the suitors.
Eumaeus denounces the suitors, praises his absent master, and says he no longer believes the reports of travellers who claim news of Odysseus, having been deceived before by an Aetolian.
Odysseus tells a long false story: a Cretan, illegitimate son of a rich man, a soldier at Troy, a raider in Egypt, enslaved, escaped, and lately hearing that Odysseus is alive among the Thesprotians. Eumaeus takes the news as another lie but the guest as genuine.
To get a cloak for the cold night, Odysseus tells a second story, about a trick played at Troy to obtain a cloak. Eumaeus, understanding the request, lends him one, then goes out to sleep among the pigs with his sword and spear.
Narrative function
Establishes the loyal household from below, and sets the poem's standard of hospitality at the bottom of the social scale rather than the top.
Greek concepts in this book
- xenia
- Hospitality performed by a slave with nothing to spare. Eumaeus states the principle explicitly: all strangers and beggars are from Zeus.
- dmōs
- A household slave. Eumaeus is one, and the poem gives him a name, a history, an opinion and a moral position — which it does for very few.
Connections to other books
Book 15
Eumaeus tells his own life story — kidnapped king's son, sold to Laertes — in Book 15.
Book 21 · Book 22
He is one of the two servants let into the plan and armed for the killing.
Book 9
The hut is the exact inverse of the Cyclops's cave: poverty that gives, against plenty that devours.
Source notes
The narrator addresses Eumaeus directly in the second person at several points in Books 14-17 — one of very few characters in Homer to receive this. Explanations range from metrical convenience to authorial affection; none is agreed.
Reading it responsibly
The Cretan lies are not filler. Each is tailored to its audience, each contains true material rearranged, and each is more circumstantial than the truth would be. The poem is demonstrating that its hero's defining faculty operates continuously, on friends as well as enemies, and that he cannot stop doing it even when there is little to gain.