Part V: The Homecoming
The Beggar King Returns
Books 13–16
Arriving in Disguise
Odysseus has finished his story. The Phaeacians are moved. King Alcinous loads him with gifts and puts him on one of their swift magical ships, which delivers him to Ithaca while he sleeps.
He wakes on the beach of his own island and does not recognize it — Athena has wrapped it in mist. When she lifts the disguise and he realizes where he is, he kisses the ground.
Athena appears and gives him the situation plainly: his house is full of over a hundred men who want to marry his wife and take his kingdom. Some of them have already plotted to kill Telemachus. He cannot simply walk in the front door.
She touches him with her wand and transforms him into an old beggar — stooped, ragged, his famous eyes dimmed to a watery blue. Then she goes to fetch Telemachus.
The Swineherd Eumaeus
Odysseus, in his beggar's disguise, finds his way to the hut of Eumaeus, his old swineherd, who has been loyal for twenty years to a master he believes is dead. Eumaeus does not recognize him. He invites the beggar in, feeds him, gives him a cloak against the cold, and speaks lovingly of his lost master.
Homer takes time with Eumaeus — more time than seems strictly necessary. He is not a king or a warrior. He is a servant. But Homer values loyalty wherever it appears, and he lets us see that the kingdom Odysseus is returning to has not entirely fallen apart, because people like Eumaeus have held it together quietly, out of love, for twenty years.
The introduction of servants as important characters is unusual in ancient epic. Homer seems to know something the genre usually misses: that ordinary faithfulness, in ordinary people, is as heroic as anything on a battlefield.
Discussion
- Athena turns Odysseus into a beggar. Why does Homer need Odysseus to be invisible when he first returns home? What does this disguise allow the story to do?
- Homer spends considerable time on Eumaeus the swineherd. Why might Homer elevate a servant to this level of importance? What does this say about what he values?