Eurycleia

The old nurse of Odysseus, bought by his father Laertes for the price of twenty oxen when she was a girl and kept in the palace ever since — she had nursed Odysseus himself and then, in her old age, his son Telemachus. On the night of the return, disguised as a beggar, Odysseus asked only for a washing of his feet, and it was Eurycleia who knelt with the basin and recognised him by the long scar on his thigh from the boar-hunt on Parnassus in his boyhood. He seized her throat to keep her silent; she obeyed, and revealed nothing to Penelope until the slaughter of the suitors was done (Homer *Odyssey* 19.386-502).

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