Characters
- Autolycus — maternal grandfather; host of the youthful boar-hunt (digression)
- Eurycleia — nurse who washed him in infancy; recognizes the scar; swears silence
- Lyssa — turns Penelope’s attention away
- Odysseus — disguised; silences Eurycleia by threat
- Sons of Autolycus — hunting companions on Parnassus (digression)
- Telemachus — present but diverted by Athena from perceiving the recognition
- The boar on Parnassus — wounds young Odysseus (aetiology of the scar)
Places
- House of Autolycus — starting-point of that hunt
- Mount Parnassus — site of the youthful boar-hunt and wounding
- Odysseus’s hall, Ithaca — foot-washing by the fire
Themes
Narrative
In the hall at night, Penelope converses with the disguised beggar and finally orders the old nurse Eurycleia to wash his feet. As Eurycleia bathes him she feels the scar above the knee—the mark left when young Odysseus hunted the boar on Parnassus with Autolycus’s sons. She knows him at once, drops his foot into the basin so that the bronze rings and the water spills, and turns to cry out to Penelope. Athena turns Penelope’s mind aside so that she neither sees nor hears. Odysseus’s right hand seizes Eurycleia’s throat; he hisses that he will kill her if she betrays him before he has punished the suitors. She promises silence and would speak of the women-servants’ disloyalty; he stops her and sends her for more water. The recognition is sealed and suppressed until the slaughter.
The scar scene is the poem’s most intimate recognition: touch and memory of nursing bind nurse to master across twenty years, while Athena still manages Penelope’s ignorance. Catalogue it as its own entry, including the brief Parnassus digression that explains the wound.