SO Penelope has heard the story that she's
going to hear from this stranger who came to her house about being a Cretan sailor.
She's not sure she trusts it, but she goes ahead and hears the story.
This sailor may know Odysseus, and so it goes.
They turn then to the next point in their conversation, and now Penelope has her
turn to talk for a little while. She extends the hospitality in her first
gesture saying well, you know, let's wash your feet and you can sleep here inside
the inner rooms. That's already a gesture to this person,
letting Penelope, letting the person know, you know, I'm interested in hearing some
more from you stranger. And then she says that to make the next
step here of foot washing, she has this trusting maid servant, Eurycleia, who just
so happened to have raised Odysseus at her knee, and know him extremely well.
And maybe she could wash your feet, stranger.
So when Eurycleia goes ahead and takes on this job, Odysseus kind of, before he
quite knows what's going on, it's upon him that this trusted servant is going to wash
his feet. At that point he thinks, oh my God.
She's going to see the scar. Odysseus has a scar.
He has a scar in the, nearby his inner thigh.
It's a, in other words, a part of his body that you wouldn't just necessarily see if
you saw him up on the street. It would be underneath his clothing.
It was close enough to his private areas that Odysseus is not going to have the
scar shown around to anyone at any time. Not everyone's going to know about it, but
some people do and it's surely the case that Eurycleia knows about this scar.
If she gets involved in the washing she's going to see it.
And it's true. In antiquity, as today, if someone's
trying to make sure that they have, verify an identity of someone, finding a scare is
as good as finding, you know, an, an identification badge.
Scars operate in order to identify people. Now why is that?
Well, scars are the remnant trace of some past.
A scare is a story. And individuals have stories that make
them different from everybody else and a scar is one of those things that captures
such a story. So Odysseus has one of these.
Eurycleia comes over to greet him. They get started on the footwashing with
some uncanny kinds of conversation recognizing how much he resembles
Odysseus. You seem a lot like him and oh, you know,
your hands are kinda like him too and oh my goodness.
And at that point she gets the bowl underneath his feet and lifts to see the
foot and at the same time sees the scar. Now at that point we hear a very long
extended discussion of where the scar came from.
Homer intrudes in this moment with a beautiful example of Rain Composition.
You'll remember we made a mention of what that is in an earlier lecture.
Now Homer will mention some specific, oftentimes concrete object, a long
digression about that object, and then he mentions the specific concrete digression
again to return to the story. Well, here we have that scar, that scar,
which. And then we go on for two full pages in
your translation of detailed conversation from Homer, nearly a 100 lines about where
this scar came from, and what it means. And all of this, you can imagine going
through Eurycleia's mind for that momentary.
Look, oh my gosh it's the scar, and if I were making a movie of this in Hollywood I
would position the camera above this and see the kind of foot dropping in slow
motion and have this reverie of the back story wash over Eurycleia in this very
quick style, and she is going through and re-living the memory of the scar.
So the scar is something we learn in the story, that is deeply connected to an
intimate part of Odysseus' past. His maternal grandfather has been to visit
the baby. Makes a deal so that the baby can come
visit him when he grows up a little, and is ready to become a man.
Odysseus then goes through in this kind of manhood ritual of joining a dangerous
hunt. Waking up early in the morning with a
chill in the air, carrying a spear. And goes with his, maternal side of his
fa, of his family, the grandfather and the uncles, out to seek a boar.
Now a boar is not just a pig. A boar is a very dangerous creature.
Here represented in a Roman stature of quite magnificent proportions.
The boar is a very dangerous creature. Those tusks in the front are nasty.
It itself is nasty and very strong. It's territorial and doesn't like it's
territory encroached upon. It also is very good food.
So people, indeed in antiquity, and still today hunt and kill boar, and then eat it.
So Odysseus is with this side of the family off to kill the boar.
Well the boar is quite dangerous. The boar is hunkered down, Odysseus is
approaching and making his lunge but the boar comes out and gets a gore out of him
first. Then Odysseus comes back and kills the
boar. So he gets his scar.
He earns his scar and the scar is forever attached to this moment in Odysseus's life
where he passes from being a boy to being a man.
So a pivotal part in Odysseus emerging into his own mature identity.
There are other things that happen during the story as well.
You will recall that Odysseus actually gets his name from such an event.
The maternal grandfather, at that point, bestows upon him the name Odysseus, which
he, at that point, ties to an, an etymology in Greek, linking that name with
Greek words for "pain." It's a little bit of a stretch, but it's good enough.
That the idea of painfulness dwells inside of the sounds that make up Odysseus's
name. And, Odysseus so then gets, earns his
name, earns that critical piece of his own identity, in this incident with the boar.
So not only is Eurycleia recognizing just any scar, a scar which acts as an identity
token to verify that this really is Odysseus, but it's one that Odysseus
himself earned, in earning his own identity and earning his own name.
So the scar is deeply tied in with Odysseus' own identity.
Homer also has a particular way of describing this very dangerous creature,
one that is gonna tie us back in to Odysseus himself.
Have a look at page, book nineteen, page 404 in your Fagles translation.
We have a discussion of that boar and where it is, just before it comes out and
lunges at Odysseus. Then and there a great boar lay in wait,
in a thicket layer so dense that the sudden gusty winds could never pierce it.
Nor could the sun's sharp rays invade its depths.
Nor a downpour drench it through and through.
So dense, so dark, and piled with fallen leaves.
This is the boar's thicket and where the boar is waiting to strike against
Odysseus. Compare it to what we saw at the end of
book five. Page 167 in the Fagles translation.
Remember Odysseus at this point is trying to find a spot to shelter himself.
So that he can have a lair in which he'll be protected for the night.
He found a grove with a clearing all around and crawled beneath two bushy
olives spring from the same root. One olive wild, the other a well bred
stock. No sodden gusty winds could ever pierce
them nor could the sun's sharp rays invade their depths nor could a downpour drench
them through and through so dense they grew together tangling side by side.
Homer repeats the exact same four sentence Greek description of the shelter that
Odysseus has at his most extreme moment. Just when he's about to maybe die over the
eve, over the night, but instead has another chance at life when he awakes the
next day. So this place, where a kind of, incubator,
where he can preserve his life over the night.
That description is precisely identical to the description of where the boar is
laying out in hiding. So Odysseus is here, tied to the boar.
He is made connected to the boar in the sense of not only having the challenge to
slaughter this thing so that he can. Have a great exploit.
It gives him a chance to move from being a boy to a man.
And also earns him his name. Well, we are connected even, Odysseus is
connected even further with the boar through this repetition of lines.
Showing that Odysseus' connection with the boar runs very deep.
So this scar, this one that Eurycleia gets us connected with, we get to see the
entire episode with the boar come out through this scar episode.
Eurycleia sees it. She ties Into it, and now she knows that
this is indeed Odysseus. Now, having made this connection, she is
sure that this person that is in front of her is the real Odysseus.
Now, it's a little bit frightening at this, at this moment, because there's
something. There's a, a secret that's now out there,
that shouldn't be out there. Odysseus is not ready.
For Penelope, for all the serving women that are sitting around the outsides that
are having, sleeping with the suitor, with the suitors.
He's not ready for that secret to get out. And knowing what's about to happen because
she sees, and he can tell that she knows. So, not only does she know, but he knows
that she knows. He then stops her.
Takes his hand and puts the secret back down in her mouth.
And says don't you dare tell or I'll kill you.
This is someone who's an intimate of his. A very close in with his family, this
serving woman, Euryclea, beloved by the family.
Not just Odysseus, but Telemachus also. All the way back to, the, the, back to the
times when Telemachus was a small child. So he, It is not that he takes her less
seriously. It is that he takes this secret very
seriously, it is not now time for it to come out.
So, he stops it from coming out of Eurycleia's mouth and even threatens her
own life to say I will kill you if you let the secret out.
It's not yet time. The secret code of knowledge can not yet
be shared. It's only something that Telemachus is in
on so far. Now, Eurycleia has figured it out but
Odysseus does not want her to share. Soon enough it's going to come to
Penelope, but he's not quite ready for that to happen.
He's certainly not ready for it to be public.
The next stage of this that's gonna happen is we're going to close off book nineteen
having a look at Penelope's dream.