Odysseus leaves the haven and takes the rough track over the mountain to the place Athena named. He finds Eumaeus sitting in front of his house, cutting himself a pair of sandals from an ox-hide. The swineherd has built twelve sties with his own hands, fifty sows in each, and the boars sleep outside. Every day he still has to send the best of them to the suitors. Four dogs, fierce as wild beasts, rush the stranger. Odysseus sits down and drops his staff. Eumaeus shouts, drives them off with stones, and says the dogs would have torn him to pieces, which would have brought the swineherd shame on top of his other sorrows. He brings the man inside, strews brushwood, throws a shaggy goat-skin over it for a seat, kills two young pigs, and sets them before his guest with wine in a bowl of ivy-wood.
He talks about his master as if the wolves and birds have already torn him, or the fishes have eaten him and the bones lie in sand. Travellers keep arriving with their mouths full of lies for a shirt and cloak. Penelope takes them in, makes much of them, and weeps. Eumaeus will not carry those stories to her any more. He is more cut up about Telemachus, who was growing into his father's likeness until someone unsettled his mind and sent him to Pylos. The suitors lie in wait to leave the house of Arceisius without a name in Ithaca.
Still in rags, Odysseus swears by Zeus, by hospitality, and by the hearth he has come to: the master will return this same year, at the end of this moon and the beginning of the next, and take revenge. Do not pay me, he says, until it happens. Eumaeus will not buy the oath. Drink your wine and talk of something else. Odysseus then tells a long Cretan life: son of Castor by a bought concubine, doughty in ambush, nine years at Troy, then a raid on Egypt that ends in forced labour and a Thesprotian wreck. King Pheidon, he says, hosted Odysseus, showed a treasure for ten generations, and sent him to Dodona to ask Jove's oak whether to come home openly or in secret. Eumaeus feeds him out of respect for Zeus. He will not be fooled again. An Aetolian already sold him that hope, and he will not have the stranger thrown from the precipice after taking him in.
Night comes stormy and very dark, no moon, a wet west wind. Odysseus tests whether the swineherd will spare a cloak, and tells how, before Troy, he got Thoas to run for help and slept in the cloak that was left. Eumaeus praises the tale, throws goatskins and sheepskins down, and covers him with his own heavy spare cloak, kept for extraordinarily bad weather. Then he will not sleep away from the pigs. He slings a sword over his shoulders, puts on a thick cloak, takes the skin of a well-fed goat and a javelin, and goes out under an overhanging rock to guard the herd from the North wind. The beggar sleeps. The steward keeps the night.
