Characters
- Amphithea — Autolycus’s wife; tends the wounded boy in the digression
- Autolycus — maternal grandfather; names Odysseus; host of the hunt
- Boar of Parnassus — wounds Odysseus
- Eurycleia — in the frame; recognizes the scar (cross-ref 04/143)
- Lyssa — giver of Autolycus’s craft (background)
- Sons of Autolycus — fellow hunters
- Telemachus — youth on Parnassus; wounded by the boar; bearer of the scar
Places
- Autolycus’s house — healing and gifts
- Mount Parnassus — hunt and wound
- Mycenae — naming; later recognition frame
Themes
Narrative
While Eurycleia washes the disguised Odysseus’s feet, she feels the old scar above the knee. Homer digresses: Autolycus, Odysseus’s maternal grandfather, master of theft and oaths by Hermes’ gift, had visited Ithaca and named the child Odysseus (“man of pain/rage”). He invited the boy, when grown, to claim gifts on Parnassus. There Odysseus hunted with Autolycus’s sons; a great boar charged from its lair; Odysseus struck it but was gashed on the thigh. The wound healed as a lasting scar. Autolycus’s household healed and honored him; he returned to Ithaca with gifts. That mark, known only to intimates, becomes the silent proof Eurycleia reads by touch.
Catalogue the Parnassian hunt and naming apart from the recognition scene’s present-tense crisis.