ABSTRACT

In a famous scene from the Odyssey, the nurse Eurycleia is bathing Odysseus’ feet when she discovers a scar on his leg (19.386-507). At this moment, she realizes that the man whom she and everyone else except the gods and Telemachus (and the audience) thought was a wandering beggar is in reality her master, returned home after an absence of twenty years. The discovery of the scar in this scene carries much meaning, and not only for Eurycleia, but for modern readers of the Odyssey as well. In his well-known essay “Odysseus’ Scar,” Auerbach (1953) uses the bathing scene as the basis for his argument that Homer’s narrative lacks complexity and depth. Nothing that appears in the poem, Auerbach asserts, may be left “half in darkness and unexternalized” (1953: 5). That is to say, no character has thoughts that are not expressed, and events said to have taken place in the past are narrated in the foreground as though they were happening in the present. This foregrounding of all narrative action is, for Auerbach, fundamental to Homeric style. And so when Homer comes to relating Eurycleia’s discovery of the scar as she begins to wash Odysseus’ feet, poetic style dictates that the scar itself “must be set in full light, and with it a portion of the hero’s boyhood” (1953: 6). In this way, Auerbach accounts for the rather long “interruption” of the main narrative, during which the narrator recounts Odysseus’ birth and his boyhood visit to his maternal grandfather, where he went hunting, was charged and wounded by a boar, and earned his identifying mark (Od. 19.390-466). For a moment, the past becomes the present and “fills both the stage and the reader’s mind completely” (1953: 4-5) until Homer returns to the narrative’s actual present and resumes the bathing scene.