Page 232 - the-odyssey

received me.’
To this you answered, O swineherd Eumaeus, ‘Stranger,
though a still poorer man should come here, it would not be
right for me to insult him, for all strangers and beggars are
from Jove. You must take what you can get and be thank-
ful, for servants live in fear when they have young lords for
their masters; and this is my misfortune now, for heaven has
hindered the return of him who would have been always
good to me and given me something of my own—a house, a
piece of land, a good looking wife, and all else that a liberal
master allows a servant who has worked hard for him, and
whose labour the gods have prospered as they have mine in
the situation which I hold. If my master had grown old here
he would have done great things by me, but he is gone, and I
wish that Helen’s whole race were utterly destroyed, for she
has been the death of many a good man. It was this mat-
ter that took my master to Ilius, the land of noble steeds, to
fight the Trojans in the cause of king Agamemnon.’
As he spoke he bound his girdle round him and went to
the styes where the young sucking pigs were penned. He
picked out two which he brought back with him and sacri-
ficed. He singed them, cut them up, and spitted them; when
the meat was cooked he brought it all in and set it before
Ulysses, hot and still on the spit, whereon Ulysses sprin-
kled it over with white barley meal. The swineherd then
mixed wine in a bowl of ivy-wood, and taking a seat oppo-
site Ulysses told him to begin.
‘Fall to, stranger,’ said he, ‘on a dish of servant’s pork.
The fat pigs have to go to the suitors, who eat them up with-

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