INTRODUCTION

By the thirteenth book of Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus has finally reached Ithaca. At first, it seems to be yet another strange island on which he has been cast adrift as an outsider. It takes the last half of the poem for Odysseus to reclaim his identity as the father of Telemachus, Penelope's husband, Ithaca's king. The process begins in the hut of Eumaeus, his swineherd and slave. Odysseus is disguised as an old beggar and does not identify himself even when Eumaeus demonstrates his loyalty to the master who has been gone for so many years. Instead, he weaves a false tale of his origins as the son of a wealthy Cretan and a bought concubine. On equal footing with his legitimate brothers while his father was alive (says Odysseus), he was allotted only a pittance on his death (Od. 14.199–210). Later, Eumaeus reciprocates with his own life story. He was not born a slave but the son of a king. His slave nurse, however, took him with her when she sailed off with a Phoenician seducer. Artemis struck her down on the seventh day at sea, and Odysseus' father Laertes bought the young Eumaeus (15.403–84).

One of these stories is clearly fabricated in Odysseus' crafty fashion, the other (so far as we can tell) no more than the truth.