Ritual Baths in the Odyssey by Richard Seltzer
Posted on Medium September
18, 2025
Feedback welcome. seltzer@seltzerbooks.com
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I am a novelist, not a scholar. To me, Homer’s characters, even the most minor, are living people, with individual perspectives and motivations. Hence to me, in The Odyssey, the age of Polycaste, daughter of Nestor, makes a difference.
Nestor is about 80. Like Priam, he has many sons and daughters. His oldest daughter would probably be post-menopausal. His youngest would be marriageable, and her bathing of Telemachus would be a sensuous scene, a temptation and a suggestion of marriage, an appetizer.
Telemachus is on a coming-of-age voyage. He should be looking for a bride, but he’s immature. He isn’t interested. He wants to get away as soon as h can.
Nestor doesn’t make the offer immediately, which would have been natural in a culture of xenia, in which strangers were to be treated with great respect on arrival. Rather he waits until the second day, when he knows who Telemachus is, knows he’s an eligible bachelor, a natural match for his youngest daughter.
Telemachus goes to Sparta next. He arrives when Hermione, the only daughter of Helen and Menelaus, has just left to marry Neoptolemus. In this case, Telemachus isn’t offered a bath. Rather Helen gives him advice on how to win a bride.
The Odysseus washing scene in Ithaca is a reverse parallel of the Telemachus-Polycaste one.
Like
Nestor with Telemachus, Penelope doesn’t immediately offer the
stranger a ritual bath. She waits until she and the
stranger have talked
at length and she has determined that if he is not her husband
he is someone
very like him, someone she could become seriously interested
in, a possible
match for her. And when she makes the offer, Odysseus
explicitly asks for an
old woman, not a young one. That signals to Penelope that he
doesn’t want to be
tempted by a young woman. He’s flirting with her, and she
suspects he might be
Odysseus. so she chooses Eurycleia, his nurse, who knew
Odysseus far longer and
far better than she did, who might recognize him in any
disguise. In any case,
his declining the offer of a young girl for bathing makes him
all the more interesting
to her.
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