As soon as Eurykleia had got the
scarred limb in her hands and had well hold of it, she recognized it
and dropped the foot at once. The leg fell into the bath, which rang
out and was overturned, so that all the water was spilt on the
ground; Eurykleia's eyes between her joy and her grief filled
with tears, and she could not speak, but she caught Odysseus by the
beard and said, "My dear child, I am sure you must be Odysseus
himself, only I did not know you till I had actually touched and
handled you."
As she spoke she looked towards
Penelope, as though wanting to tell her that her dear husband was in
the house, but Penelope was unable to look in that direction and
observe what was going on, for Athena had diverted her attention
[noos]; so Odysseus caught Eurykleia by the throat
with his right hand and with his left drew her close to him, and
said, "Nurse, do you wish to be the ruin of me, you who nursed me at
your own breast, now that after twenty years of wandering I am at
last come to my own home again? Since it has been borne in upon you
by heaven to recognize me, hold your tongue, and do not say a word
about it any one else in the house, for if you do I tell you - and it
shall surely be - that if heaven grants me to take the lives of these
suitors, I will not spare you, though you are my own nurse, when I am
killing the other women."
"My child," answered Eurykleia,
"what are you talking about? You know very well that nothing can
either bend or break me. I will hold my tongue like a stone or a
piece of iron; furthermore let me say, and lay my saying to your
heart, when heaven has delivered the suitors into your hand, I will
give you a list of the women in the house who have been ill-behaved,
and of those who are guiltless."
And Odysseus answered, "Nurse,
you ought not to speak in that way; I am well able to form my own
opinion about one and all of them; hold your tongue and leave
everything to heaven."
Homer. The Odyssey. Rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original. Samuel Butler. Based on public domain edition, revised by Timothy Power and Gregory Nagy. A. C. Fifield, London. 1900 (?).
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.