Character
EurycleiaEuryclea in this translation
The old nurse · raised both Odysseus and Telemachus
The old nurse who raised Odysseus and, a generation later, Telemachus. Laertes bought her as a girl and never took her to his bed, out of respect for his wife — one of the few glimpses the poem gives of what an enslaved woman could expect. She is the first person in Ithaca to know the beggar is her king: washing his feet, her hands find the old boar-scar above his knee, and he catches her by the throat to keep her silent. Hers is the recognition scene every later writer remembers.
The poem breaks off here for a long flashback to how he got the scar. Erich Auerbach opened Mimesis with this digression, which is why it is probably the most closely read paragraph in Homer.