Odyssey 1.433 · Book 1, lines 433–435
Never touched, most beloved
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εὐνῇ δʼ οὔ ποτʼ ἔμικτο, χόλον δʼ ἀλέεινε γυναικός· ἥ οἱ ἅμʼ αἰθομένας δαΐδας φέρε, καί ἑ μάλιστα δμῳάων φιλέεσκε, καὶ ἔτρεφε τυτθὸν ἐόντα.
but never in the bed did he lie with her, and shunned his wife's anger. She it was who bore for him the blazing torches, and loved him most of the handmaids, and had nursed him when he was little.
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The setting
The account of the nurse concludes: Laertes' restraint toward her, out of regard for his wife, and her own devotion to the young Telemachus, whom she raised.
A note on this passage
The portrait finishes on two restraints and one tenderness. Laertes never took her to bed, out of regard for his wife's anger; and Eurycleia, for her part, carries Telemachus's torches, loves him beyond all the other slave women, and nursed him when he was small.
This is the quiet architecture of the household the suitors are wrecking. A bought woman is treated with continence and honor; she in turn gives the heir the love a mother gives. In a poem full of faithlessness — the disloyal maids, the treacherous Aegisthus, the besieged wife — Eurycleia is the still point of loyalty, and Homer plants her here, at the boy's bedside, before she is ever needed.
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