What Odysseus Told Eumaeus After Dinner

On lying to one's own loyal swineherd

As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; but they were kept from recognizing him. —Luke 24:15-16

I’m in Book XV of Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey — and I still don’t mind it! Sorry BAP bros and other woman-haters. One recent scene stood out to me, so I wanted to put it up on the blog for posterity.

In Book XIV, Odysseus finally wakes up on the shores of Ithaca, and Athena quickly disguises him as an old vagabond, so that he won’t immediately be recognized. The first person he encounters is his loyal swineherd, Eumaeus. I’m going to quote from Lattimore’s translation because that’s the one I have handy, but I promise to do a review of Wilson’s version when I finish it.

After Eumaeus demonstrates classical xenia by feeding the man he thinks is a stranger, he inquires of him,

What man are you and whence? Where is your city? Your parents?
What kind of ship did you come here on? And how did the sailors
bring you to Ithaka? What men do they claim that they are?
For I do not think you could have traveled on foot to this country.

These are the standard questions put to traveling strangers after they are fed and made comfortable—so Eumaeus is not out of line at all in asking. Odysseus’ answer will fill consecutive pages, and it is a remarkable turn in the narrative. What makes it so noticeable is that Odysseus weaves an impromptu lie, or tall tale, about his identity and his origin. What makes it exceptional is that the story he tells, although false, gives a true indication of all that he has suffered. It is a tight metafiction worthy of Borges or John Barth, and it was composed 2,800 years ago. The lines go:

Then resourceful Odysseus spoke in turn and answered him:’
See, I will accurately answer all that you ask me.
I only wish there were food enough for the time, for us two,
and sweet wine for us here inside of the shelter, so that
we could feast quietly while others tended the work; then
easily I could go on for the whole of a year, and still not
finish the story of my heart’s tribulations, all that
hard work I have done in my time, because the gods willed it.
I announce that my origin is from Crete, a spacious
land; I am son of a rich man, and there were many other
sons who were born to him and reared in his palace…

None of this is true at all—it is pure fabrication. According to one excellent paper I read on this scene by Roisman, this storytelling mode gives rise to a “covert recognition,” where it gradually and sporadically dawns on Eumaeus who Odysseus really is.

One thing worth noting here is that even the Bible, for whatever reason, describes the Cretans as liars: “the Cretians are alway liars, evil beasts” (Titus 1:12). Presuming the reputation was already established in Odysseus’s day, we might speculate that he was hinting to Eumaeus that he was lying even as he went on with the lie by describing Crete as his place of birth. Yes, it’s a paradox: “If someone tells you they were born in Crete, be suspicious that they’re lying” — but of course, if they’re lying, then it’s not because Cretans are liars. Hmm.

A paper by Christos Tsagalis investigates Odysseus’s false tale as a record of earlier alternative versions of “the returns.” He writes,

…there are numerous passages in our Odyssey that testify to alternative versions of Odysseus’ return. The deep structure features traced in these passages point to two distinct groups of versions, one that I call (for lack of a better term) proto-Odyssey and one that scholars usually designate as alternative Odyssey. The former represents those versions that had been influenced by the epic of Gilgamesh, traditions about Heracles, women-catalogue poetry, as well as widely diffused folk material.

This is good stuff. It has always been obvious to thoughtful people that Homer’s poetry (and Hesiod’s) can’t simply have sprung out of nothing. Instead of understanding The Iliad and The Odyssey as the first tales in our literary history, it can be equally interesting to consider them as the final products of an earlier now-forgotten storytelling tradition, a tradition that certainly hearkened back to the Bronze Age, if not earlier. That in itself would be enough to make this scene important and fascinating, but I think something more is happening.

In my interpretation, this scene marks the beginning of Odysseus’s re-integration into a society he has been alienated from for many years. He has returned home, but it is not going to be a simple or smooth re-entry. In fact, in Book XIII, when Odysseus first wakes on Ithaka, he does not recognize it:

…now great Odysseus wakened
from sleep in his own fatherland, and he did not know it,
having been long away, for the goddess, Pallas Athene,
daughter of Zeus, poured a mist over all, so she could make him
unrecognizable and explain all the details to him,
to have his wife not recognize him, nor his townspeople
and friends, till he punished the suitors for their overbearing oppression.

See in my reading, the entire Odyssey is archetypes — Odysseus’s experience is the idealized experience of all men. Once you start to read for archetypes, a war far away from home that you didn’t even want to fight in might be recognizable as some decade in your own life. And the following decade, where you are tempted by mistresses and drugs and you lose all your friends might feel loosely recognizable in its own way. But if you survive all that, you might be lucky enough to “return home,” which would mean what? — something like reaching your goal, having what you want, being home. But this is the key: when you get there, when you finally arrive, having learned all that you have learned while you were away, you can’t just speak the truth.

The problem is, those who never left might not be able to hear the truth. So you’ll have to transform it—or as we say in internet parlance: hide your power levels.

But, if the example set by Odysseus is one that we can learn from, perhaps the lesson is that we can tell “parable” style versions of our history. There’s that glorious line near the end of The Scarlet Letter that I can almost cite from memory: “Be true! Be true! Be true! — show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worse may be inferred.”

So as you try to reintegrate with normies after being red pilled (LOL JK!), don’t tell them you went to the underworld (that you read Mein Kampf, LOL JK!). Instead, airbrush it all a little. If your men really ate the cattle of belonging to Helios, against the warning of the blind prophet, don’t say that — that would be too extreme. Say instead that your men went down to Egypt and plundered the Egyptians beautiful fields. This is a fair balance: it hints at what occurred without quite telling the whole truth. This transformation of the raw elements of the "true story” may make it possible for guarded listeners to really hear the deep structural meaning of what you are relating.

And keep in mind, this reintegration is a complicated process, suitable for “a complicated man” (Wilson’s translation). Odysseus begins to give his first (falsified) report of his journey after having dinner with his loyal swineherd in Book XIV, but it won’t be until Books XXI that Odysseus and Eumaeus make the mutual recognition reciprocal and explicit.

Look, I can’t quite say how I know this, but there really is something important about the scenes of recognition in these ancient texts. It’s not just Eumaeus and then Telemachus and Penelope (and Antinous!) recognizing Odysseus, it’s also Oedipus recognizing what he has done and who he is, and it’s the scene where Mary Magdalene thinks Jesus is the gardener (!) and the road to… oh my gosh, would you believe it: the road to Emmaus (not Eumaeus, but close!) where two of the disciples walk miles with Jesus without recognizing him until he finally breaks some bread with them at the table, allowing them to recognize him. The mildly heretical esoteric reading of this is that the reason they didn’t recognize Jesus is because he was in a literally different body: they recognized the acting soul itself, not the flesh and blood.

All I’ll say to wrap this up is that when we are young, we tend to think we understand the world—and a young understanding of the world may serve us from age 14 into our 30s. But I think these ancient texts so consistently emphasize scenes of metanoia, of re-cognition, of re-presentation, of re-integration, etc.—that there is a suggestion that a second level of understanding may be required of us. Listen to the storytellers. They may be saying more than they appear to be saying.