Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Eidothea.
The gallery
Menelaus wrestling Proteus (emblem from Achillis Bocchii Symbolicarum)
Giulio Bonasone, 1574
Homer names Eidothea as the daughter of Proteus who pitied Menelaus on the Egyptian coast and taught him to seize her shapeshifting father at midday among the seals. Bonasone's 1574 emblem for Bocchi's Symbolicarum quaestionum depicts the wrestling that follows her counsel — the moment when Proteus, held through lion, serpent, and tree, must speak the truth about Odysseus on Ogygia and the suitors' plot against Telemachus.
Helen Recognising Telemachus, Son of Odysseus
Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, 1775
Lagrenée's neoclassical painting stages Odyssey 4 in Menelaus' hall at Sparta: Helen recognises the prince by his likeness to Odysseus at the feast where the host will tell how Proteus in Egypt revealed that the king of Ithaca still lives. Eidothea does not appear on canvas, but the scene is the direct fruit of her instruction — the first sure news of Odysseus that Telemachus receives on his voyage.
Telemachus departing from Nestor
Henry Howard, c. 1800
Henry Howard's illustration for the Telemachus voyage shows the prince leaving sandy Pylos for Sparta after Nestor could tell him nothing certain of his father. The painting belongs to the same Odyssey book that will culminate in Menelaus' tale of Eidothea and Proteus at Pharos — the narrative chain by which divine pity on an Egyptian beach becomes news in a Lacedaemonian hall.