Odyssey 3.464 · Book 3, lines 464–465
Polycaste bathes Telemachus
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τόφρα δὲ Τηλέμαχον λοῦσεν καλὴ Πολυκάστη, Νέστορος ὁπλοτάτη θυγάτηρ Νηληϊάδαο.
Meanwhile fair Polycaste bathed Telemachus, the youngest daughter of Nestor, son of Neleus.
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The setting
While the meat roasts, the scene cuts to the women's quarters. Nestor's youngest daughter, Polycaste, gives Telemachus the honored guest's bath — an intimate courtesy of the great house.
A note on this passage
The narrative crosses from altar to bath-chamber. Polycaste, Nestor's youngest daughter, washes the young guest herself — the top honor a household can pay a visitor, and in the epic normally the work of a princess or the lady of the house rather than a slave.
That an unmarried daughter of the king performs this most personal service tells us how completely Telemachus has been taken in. There is no impropriety in it; the guest-bath is a formal courtesy. But the intimacy is also quietly biographical: a later tradition married Polycaste to Telemachus, and the scene has often been read as the poem letting the two young people meet at exactly the age when such things are noticed.
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