1. Auerbach (2003), 3.

2. Some of the most sophisticated include Goldhill (1988) and Murnaghan (1987).

3. On hospitality in general in the poem, Reece (1993).

4. I make use the text of the OCT and the translation of Richmond Lattimore throughout. As will soon become clear, I believe imprecisions in Lattimore's translation make the episode far harder to make sense of, but they are all the more instructive because of this.

5. Peradotto (1990), 122.

6. Havelock (1995), 193.

7. The hint of critical squeamishness here replays a better known critical embarrassment at the traditions that undermine Penelope's sexual purity. In both this scene and the later bed scene, the Odyssey maintains its decorum only by constantly hinting at the prohibited sexuality that helps define it. For an attempt to keep the text free of Penelope's sexuality, see Fredricksmeyer (1997) with Henderson (1986) as antidote.

8. Consider also Peradotto's brief summary of the scene: ‘She [Penelope] orders the stranger's feet bathed and, when he expresses reluctance to risk a young maiden's ridicule, it is his old nurse Eurycleia who is called to the task’ (Peradotto [1990], 120). There are so many imprecisions in this seemingly innocuous paraphrase as to make the episode almost impossible to understand, and this in one of the most insightful commentaries on the scene.

9. As the oracular riddle from Euripides' Medea, quoted at the top of this essay, shows. On this riddle in particular, Buchan (2008). On confusions between feet and penis in Greece's most famous riddle, Katz (2006), Oikonimides (1988).

10. I am indebted here to an unpublished paper by Richard Hunter delivered in April 2009 at Columbia University, on the sexual innuendo of this scene.

11. On this in general, see Griffith (2006) on the symbolic differences between comic, low-class donkeys and tragic, upper-class horses in the Greek imagination. The male donkey is unable to constrain his sexual appetite, and this is comic, whereas there is a well-preserved taboo on depicting the aristocratic horse as sexually aroused. The aristocratic Greek preference for small and thin penises is well established by Dover (1987).

12. I find it interesting that several responses to this paper have reduced it to the obvious bathetic ridiculousness of ‘Eurycleia washes Odysseus' penis’. Perhaps this misunderstanding of my argument points at something interesting. The sexual innuendo in this scene is not quite normal. It is a kind of ongoing plea for tact, a desire to keep bathing free from innuendo, and it fails for very specific narrative reasons. At any rate, Eurycleia and Odysseus have a tacit understanding that they will make the footbath innocent, and in doing so they align themselves against the sexually uncouth suitors and maidservants.

13. DeSmidt (2006), passim.

14. As Professor J.T. Katz points out to me, drawing on the work of Calvert Watkins, Iros' name is the one place in Greek literature where we have the cognate of the Latin word for man, uir. So when the suitors play on his name, Ἶρος Ἄϊρος, they comment on the quite literal un-manning that will characterize the episode. Odysseus' emergence as uir/aner coincides with the disappearance of Iros. The suitors thus unwittingly come close to answering, by this pun on Iros' name, the riddle that opens the Odyssey. Who is the un-named andra of the first line? The revelation of this limb would thus form a narrative closure, giving the game away. So when Odysseus later, in Book 19, worries that the bath will make everything clear, the scene remembers this one.

15. As Professor Katz has again pointed out to me, the reverse of Odysseus' obsession with recognition of his foot lurks behind a witticism in an anecdote about the classicist Maurice Bowra, recently retold by Bevis Hillier of his autobiography (Spectator, 17 December 2005). ‘He liked to sun himself at Parsons' Pleasure, the (since abolished) nude bathing place for men on the river Cherwell. The story was much told of how, when an illicit punt-load of women floated past, all the other men covered their genitals, but Bowra threw a towel over his face with the words, “I don't know about you chaps, but I am known in the streets of Oxford by my face”.’

16. Unsurprisingly, the Odyssey tends to connect dancing with feet. See, for example, Od. 8.250-53. But, as Professor Katz also points out to me, dancing is probably etymologically linked to the orkhis, the testicle, making the sexual connotations of the Odyssey's final two ‘dances’ more likely.

17. Odysseus is worried about something appearing from nothing, whereas what he forgets is that an absence can in and of itself be a sign. Critics routinely refer to the scar as a ‘recognition token’, but surely both the scar, and the possible out-jutting foot, complicate the very idea of a ‘token’. On a previous mistake of Odysseus on feet, see Buchan (2004b) on Odysseus' encounter with the Skylla's feet, an episode which also previews this scene. Freudians of course can easily spot castration anxieties in all such stories. Odysseus' coming of age story, when the boar hollows out a piece of his thigh but comes all too close to another organ, hints at what the assumption of manhood costs: the awareness that the penis itself is vulnerable, and can at any time be lost.

18. For the conceptual overlap between ‘knees’ and ‘sex’ in antiquity, Onians (1988), 174-86. Notice also further possible punning in the sideways movement of the boar. If the sideways gash doesn't reach ‘the bone’, it must come close to another organ, famously figured in the Works and Days as the ‘boneless one’ (Erga 524). The gashing out of the thing, in this rite of passage, comes close to another loss.