The Most At Home Person in the Odyssey Is a Slave Who Was Sold
Odysseus wanders twenty years and can't get home; Telemachus grows up among the suitors; the only person who treats Ithaca as solid ground is Eumaeus, the swineherd sold into slavery as a child — because it's the only place he has ever known.
The video won't play here. Listen to the audio instead:
The argument · tap a timestamp to hear it
The person who seems most at home is a slave sold as a child
This episode's theme is what home is. Eumaeus — the swineherd sold into slavery — is the one who feels most at home of anyone: he was sold as a child, this is all he has ever known, so he is like bedrock; everyone else is adrift. The speaker breaks homelessness into two layers: the literal having-nowhere-to-go, and a deeper one — you lack some connection to roots. That is exactly what Odysseus has been struggling with since Calypso's island: he is rebuilding his connection to home bit by bit, but still can't stop lying and disguising himself, maybe more than he should.
The swineherd taught him how to be a host
Odysseus has been gone twenty years, Telemachus grew up in a house full of suitors — how would he know how to be a host? The speaker realizes here: Eumaeus modeled it for him. Eumaeus has very low status, but his domain is caring for people — the scrap of land with his pigs; he acts as the most generous host from a position of low power. And Telemachus is already considerate to Athena disguised as a stranger at the start of this book, so it isn't something he learned on this trip: more likely the swineherd gave him the heart to want to do it.
Only with company can a person start to enjoy his grief
Eumaeus invites Odysseus to sit and drink, says such nights are wondrous, then delivers the episode's heaviest line: after long years of pain and being away from home, a person can begin to enjoy his own sorrow. The speaker presses: why did Laertes get eaten away by grief while Eumaeus can grow old with his? The answer lies in sharing — unloading the pain and having someone witness it is not just relief but a real, positive pleasure; the same logic behind mourning rituals where everyone tells stories together. It is fighting grief itself that makes you suffer.
The Phoenician nurse ends like a seagull
Eumaeus tells how he got here: Phoenician traders spent a whole year earning trust, and the nurse agreed to steal her master's son and sell him for money in exchange for being sent home. Seven days of fair wind, and on the eighth Artemis shot her dead with an arrow — she pitched headfirst into the cargo hold like a seagull, then was thrown into the sea to feed the fish. The speaker says the ending is so abrupt it reads as a declaration that fate is both cruel and arbitrary; we know little about the Phoenicians, partly because their records were written on papyrus and didn't survive, and most of what remains comes from Greeks and Romans who looked down on them. Odysseus hears it all and still says, you were lucky, you met good people — wrecking all the tact he'd just shown.
The first to embrace him is the swineherd
The moment Telemachus enters the yard, Eumaeus jumps up, the cup in his hand falls and the wine spills; he runs to kiss his master's face and shining eyes, weeping like a father seeing his only son return from abroad after ten years. The speaker stresses: this simile gives the position of father to the man who raised the child — in all the years Odysseus was gone, Eumaeus was more of a father than Odysseus. And in this moment only the swineherd can jump up; Odysseus is still trapped in the beggar's body and getup. It is also the first time in the whole poem anyone is called godlike Telemachus — until now that epithet has belonged to Odysseus.
He never got any joy from me — the line reads two ways
Explaining why the suitors can behave this way, Telemachus says the house is down to a single heir, and his last line is: he never got any joy from me. The speaker offers two opposite readings: one, he is grieving for his father, who never enjoyed the pleasure of raising a son — which resonates for a speaker who just had a son not quite two years old; the other, the father simply had no interest in raising a baby and ran off to fight a war nobody forced on him. Support for the second reading is Odysseus' own account that after returning from Crete he felt family life didn't suit him, back when he was still in a warrior's mindset. Neither of them can tell from the English translation, so they agree to check other translations next episode.
Testing everyone isn't caution, it's adaptation gone into overdrive
Odysseus tells his son to keep it secret from everyone, even Penelope — he wants to test her attitude first — and then all the male slaves. The two disagree here: one argues this is extreme suspicion, an overfiring adaptation — something that kept you alive in war now running out of control; the same speaker adds it could also be procrastination, self-preparation before the question of whether I can really kill them all, and admits he isn't sure. The skill Odysseus knows best is testing people, lying and impersonating others. Telemachus pushes straight back: testing them one by one takes too long, and the suitors will keep eating your estate.
However hard she lashes him, she never says I won't marry you
Penelope publicly tears into Antinous: you are a beast, a thief, a criminal; people say you are the cleverest of your peers, that isn't true, you are mad. She reminds him that when his father was hunted by the men of Ithaca, Odysseus saved him — and now he eats his benefactor's estate, courts his wife and wants to kill his son. But she never says the most direct thing: I will never marry you, get out. The speaker's explanation is that she too is stalling: if Odysseus really is dead, she still needs someone to support her, and the web woven and unraveled is I don't want to decide right now. In the same scene Eurymachus is worse — he says he loves Telemachus most of all, and that no one can harm him as long as he lives.
In their own words · checked verbatim
And then the feeling of being homeless, I think, is both literal, and I think that is like a distressing thing, but it also signals something that you're lacking, some deep connection with your roots.
I disapprove of too much friendliness and of too much standoffishness. A balance is best.
After many years of agony and absence from one's home, a person can begin enjoying grief.
for seven days we sailed and on the eighth Artemis struck the women with her arrows. She crashed into the ship's hold like a seagull.
He ran towards his master, kissed his face and shining eyes in both his hands, and wept just as a father when he sees his own dear son, his only son, his dear, most precious boy returned from foreign lands after 10 years of grieving for his loss, welcomes him.
Zeus gave my family a single line. … He had no joy of me.
it's a procrastination thing. It's a postponing of like I don't know if I'm fully back to being Odysius.
You are a brute, a sneak, a criminal. The people say you're the smartest boy of all those your own age on Ithaca. It is not true. You're insane.
Figures
| Time Odysseus has been away from home | 20 years | 8:31 |
| Period the Phoenicians were active | about 3000 years | 28:42 |
| The abduction voyage | 7 days of sailing; on the 8th Artemis shot the woman dead | 29:42 |
| Telemachus' age when the suitors flooded in | 15 | 37:48 |
| Total number of suitors | about 116 | 46:52 |
| Suitors from Ithaca itself | 12 | 46:52 |
Glossary
- golden mean
- Neither too warm nor too cold — don't go to either extreme.
- sitting shiva
- The seven days after a death when family and friends gather to tell stories and keep each other company.
- nepo baby
- Someone who enters a field on family connections; used in the episode to tease the prophet's descendant.
- Looney Tunes
- Classic Warner cartoons where characters get smashed flying and are none the worse for it.
How to listen
People who have read the Odyssey and want two philosophy professors going line by line through the father-son recognition scene.
The first two minutes of membership patter can be skipped; the two of them get lost themselves in Theoclymenus' four-generation genealogy.