Eurycleia Washing the Feet of Odysseus

A ragged, bearded traveler leans on a stick while an old woman bends over his outstretched foot. It is Odysseus in disguise and his childhood nurse Eurycleia, at the instant her fingers find the old scar that gives him away.

The scene is painted on the other side of the same Chiusi cup that shows Penelope at her loom — husband and wife on opposite faces of one vessel, neither knowing how close the other is. Few objects tell the story so economically.

Odysseus walks into his own palace as a beggar and takes the suitors' abuse — Antinous throws a footstool at him — while he counts men and memorizes the room. At the gate, one creature knows him instantly: Argos, the hunting dog he trained as a puppy, now old and discarded on a dung heap. The dog thumps his tail, and dies. Odysseus wipes away a tear without breaking stride.

That evening Penelope, kind to the strange beggar who claims news of her husband, orders the old nurse Eurycleia to wash his feet — the woman who nursed Odysseus as an infant. Her hands find what the rags hide: the long white scar above his knee, from a boar hunt when he was a boy. She knows him at once. His hand closes on her throat, gently, and he swears her to silence. The household is now one secret away from war.

The Penelope Painter was an Athenian vase painter of the mid-fifth century BC, named after his image of Penelope on this cup. His scenes favor still, weighted moments over action.