The Faithful Swineherd
'Here I sit, yearning and mourning for the best of masters and fattening his hogs for others to eat, while he himself, starving as like as not, is lost in foreign lands and tramping through strange towns - if indeed he is alive and can see the light of day. But follow me, old man, let's go to my hut. When you have had all the bread and wine you want, you shall tell me where you come from and what your troubles are.'
(The swineherd, Eumaeus, to Odysseus, in disguise. From Homer's The Odyssey, ch.14, ll.40-47; Penguin)
May Zeus forbid such a thing should befall
So contrary and brutal as befell King Ctesius,
Whose son was kidnapped by his nurse when small
And bought as a slave by the father of Odysseus!
Woe to be snatched from that hearth where he thought
He swayed the sceptre over a world of good,
To be gathering the buds of content from aught
That his master Odysseus felt that he should!
This life of manifold shifts undefines us -
And for this the swineherd bore his parentage in vain -
But in the house of our thrall, if dejection finds us,
We fare less well than the beloved swain
Who o'ermastered his servitude with the courage to be.
Mourning, but lulled in the arms of Odysseus,
Eumaeus redefined himself, not as compassed with misery,
The victim of circumstance, but heir to a spontaneous
And unquestioned tradition, where no one winks
At the keeping of slaves or misprizes tokens
That the master is friend. The ghost of a jinx
Was laid with the childhood illusion of omnipotence;