Then the goddess, grey-eyed Athene, answered him:  ’Nay, let him not be heavy on thy heart.  I myself was his guide, that by going thither he might win a good report.  Lo, he knows no toil, but he sits in peace in the palace of the son of Atreus, and has boundless store about him.  Truly the young men with their black ship they lie in wait, and are eager to slay him ere he come to his own country.  But this, methinks, shall never be.  Yea, sooner shall the earth close over certain of the wooers that devour thy livelihood.’

Therewith Athene touched him with her wand.  His fair flesh she withered on his supple limbs, and made waste his yellow hair from off his head, and over all his limbs she cast the skin of an old man, and dimmed his two eyes, erewhile so fair.  And she changed his raiment to a vile wrap and a doublet, torn garments and filthy, stained with foul smoke.  And over all she clad him with the great bald hide of a swift stag, and she gave him a staff and a mean tattered scrip, and a cord therewith to hang it.

And after they twain had taken this counsel together, they parted; and she now went to goodly Lacedaemon to fetch the son of Odysseus.

Book XIV

Odysseus, in the form of a beggar, goes to Eumaeus, the master of his swine, where he is well used and tells a feigned story, and informs himself of the behaviour of the wooers.

But Odysseus fared forth from the haven by the rough track, up the wooded country and through the heights, where Athene had showed him that he should find the goodly swineherd, who cared most for his substance of all the thralls that goodly Odysseus had gotten.

Now he found him sitting at the vestibule of the house, where his courtyard was builded high, in a place with wide prospect; a great court it was and a fair, with free range round it.  This the swineherd had builded by himself for the swine of his lord who was afar, and his mistress and the old man Laertes knew not of it.  With stones from the quarry had he builded it, and coped it with a fence of white thorn, and he had split an oak to the dark core, and without he had driven stakes the whole length thereof on either side, set thick and close; and within the courtyard he made twelve styes hard by one another to be beds for the swine, and in each stye fifty grovelling swine were penned, brood swine; but the boars slept without.  Now these were far fewer in number, the godlike wooers minishing them at their feasts, for the swineherd ever sent in the best of all the fatted hogs.  And their tale was three hundred and three-score.  And by them always slept four dogs, as fierce as wild beasts, which the swineherd had bred, a master of men.  Now he was fitting sandals to his feet, cutting a good brown oxhide, while the rest of his fellows, three in all, were abroad this way and that, with the droves of swine; while the fourth he had sent to the city to take a boar to the proud wooers, as needs he must, that they might sacrifice it and satisfy their soul with flesh.