Charles Campbell, Purdue University
The autobiographical tale told by the swineherd Eumaeus to the disguised Odysseus in book 15 of the Odyssey has been appreciated as a “brilliant digression” (Kirk 367), a clever meta-narrative surprise (Minchin), and an expression of the poem’s dominant slaveholding ideology (Thalmann, 84-87). What has proven difficult, however, is to identify the function of Eumaeus’ narrative at the level of plot: why should the character tell this story at this juncture?
In this paper, I wish to suggest that the question of the story’s function within the plot can be approached via a study of its generic form. Building on narratological studies of the Odyssey (De Jong), and studies of the rhetoric of storytelling in Homer (King), I will show that Eumaeus as storyteller observes a careful economy of knowledge and ignorance in the narrative of his abduction. The abduction is essentially told twice, first prospectively through the embedded speech of the Phoenician slave woman, who acts as omniscient narrator (15.414-454), then retrospectively, through the eyes of the child Eumaeus (15.457-484).
Next, I show that this economy of information conforms to an identifiable generic pattern: in this type of story, pathos is evoked through a narrative dynamic of knowledge and ignorance. Thanks to the way in which the narrator discloses information, events unfold intelligibly for us but inscrutably for the character experiencing them. The technique is exemplified in two later texts: the twice-told abduction of Persephone in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (first in 3rd person, lnn. 4-18; then in 1st person, lnn. 405-440); and Io’s 1st-person narrative in Prometheus Bound (646-682).
Tracing this generic lineage, I suggest, offers a path to understanding the story’s function within the plot. In his conversation with Odysseus in book 14, Eumaeus showed himself a model audience for Odysseus’ tales, with an “almost boundless appreciation of narrative and … acquaintance with epic conventions” and is “something of a connoisseur” (Louden 97; Doherty apud Louden 110). Now, in book 15, he rivals Odysseus himself as storyteller. Eumaeus’ choice of genre responds to the peculiar aesthetic and rhetorical demands of the moment. He at once arouses pathos in his (disguised) master at his experience of enslavement yet disclaims any desire or possibility of reversing this trauma. Rather than seek nostos in the past, his home, and his parents, Eumaeus as storyteller projects his own nostos onto the future return of his absent master.