The meeting with Nausicaa

Athena enters the dream of Nausicaa, the young princess of the Phaeacians, and suggests that she and her maids go down to the river to wash the household's clothes — useful in case marriage is on the way. The princess wakes, asks her father for the mule cart, and goes. The river is wide and clear, the laundry stones flat and warm; the maids work in the morning sun. Afterwards they bathe, anoint themselves with oil, eat bread and wine, and start a ball game on the beach.

The ball goes into the water and the maids scream — and the scream wakes Odysseus, naked under his pile of leaves. He emerges, holding a branch in front of himself for modesty, salt-crusted and terrifying. The maids flee. Only Nausicaa stands her ground; Athena has put courage into her. He addresses her with extraordinary tact, calling her either a goddess or the most fortunate princess alive. She gives him food, oil, and fresh clothes, has the maids bathe him, and directs him to her father's palace.

But she tells him, gently and without explaining why, that he should walk a little behind her into town so the townspeople do not gossip. They do not exchange names. She slips out of the poem after Chapter 8. The whole episode is treated with extraordinary delicacy, neither explaining itself nor tipping into anything more — one of the first portraits in literature of an ordinary girl meeting an extraordinary stranger, both of them aware of what the meeting could be and choosing, with perfect courtesy, to let it pass.