The hut of Eumaeus

Athena directs Odysseus, in his beggar's disguise, to the hut of Eumaeus, his old swineherd. Eumaeus is a man originally born noble, taken into slavery as a child by pirates, now keeping Odysseus's pigs at the edge of the estate. He has not seen his master in twenty years. He does not recognize the beggar at his door. He sets his dogs aside, brings him in, and sits him by the fire on a heap of soft branches covered with a goatskin — the small kindnesses of a man who has very little.

What he does is keep xenia. He invites the stranger in, slaughters two suckling pigs from his own stock, and serves them with bread and wine. He apologizes for not having more — the suitors, he says, take the best of everything for themselves. He talks lovingly of his absent master, whom he believes is dead. The disguised Odysseus tests him by inventing a long false story about himself, dropping in the suggestion that he met Odysseus in his travels and that the king is alive and on his way home. Eumaeus refuses to believe it. Too many wandering beggars have come through with the same story; he is tired of being lied to.

Homer at one point pauses to address the swineherd directly — “Then you, Eumaeus the swineherd, said in answer…” — a rare break in the third-person narration that reads, across thirty centuries, exactly like a gesture of authorial affection. The poem is making a quiet argument here about who counts as noble in a kingdom whose king has been gone too long. The man at the bottom of Odysseus's household, born a slave, is keeping the law of hospitality more faithfully than the aristocrats in the great hall.