Eurycleia

Yeah, good.

Eurycleia, Maggie Smith.

Have fun with that.

I forgot to cast someone as your client.

Let's look at how two absolute masters of literature executed these time shifts, literally millennia apart.

Whether it's the old nurse, Eurycleia, recognizing a physical scar on Odysseus' leg, or Marcel Proust's narrator tasting a madeleine cake dipped in tea, both Homer and Proust seamlessly transport us into the past using a concrete object as the gateway.

It's brilliant.

They don't just name a feeling.

And immediately Penelope just says, you're crazy.

And then Eurycleia says, no, no, no, this is real.

He was here.

He was that beggar.

But the other element of this is that the gods, like she thinks the gods might have punished the suitors, or at least that's what she says.

We know the gods can kind of disguise themselves in all sorts of forms.

So even after Eurycleia says, I have like DNA evidence of this period, right? Like that same scar, I saw it.

I just couldn't tell you.

And maybe- You'd like to think that that's what, what's her name, the granny slave?

Uh, Eurycleia.

Eurycleia.

Eurycleia.

That, that she knows which ones.

[laughs]

Then the swineherd, Eumaeus, carries the bow, and Telemachus says to give it to him.

Uh-

It is the point to which all the action has been rising, and it is that that we now see.

At the opening of Book 23, Eurycleia goes up to Penelope's chamber, where Penelope is sleeping.

"Up to the rooms the old nurse clambered, chuckling all the way, to tell the queen her husband was here now, home at last.

Her knees bustling, feet shuffling over each other, till hovering at her mistress's head she spoke, 'Penelope, child, wake up and see for yourself, with your own eyes, all you dreamed of all your days! He's here! Odysseus! He's come home at long last.

They have that power, putting lunacy into the clearest head around.'" Or setting a halfwit on the path to sense.

They've unhinged you, and you were once so sane.

Why do you mock me? Haven't I wept enough? Now, Eurycleia goes on to insist to Penelope that Odysseus is indeed there, and Penelope starts to get excited.

Homer tells us, "Penelope's heart burst in joy.

in the battle to come.

And Eurycleia washes Odysseus's feet, among other things.

There's so much going on that I think this definitely warrants its own episode.

Yeah, yeah.

If she recognized him, I think she would wanna do all those things.

So if you read with that lens, I think Book 19 makes much more sense.

There's still a couple loose ends, for sure, but it makes, like, a lot more sense than thinking she hasn't recognized him because I think if you think that, you don't know why anyone is doing anything, or if that's too strong, it's just much harder to make sense of, right? The test of the purple cloak, Eurycleia washing his feet, Penelope telling the stranger the dream, the dream itself, Penelope just deciding to do the bow contest the next day.

It makes so much more sense with that reading.