A shipwrecked man, salt-crusted and friendless on a strange shore, is told that the road home runs not through the king he must petition but through the king's wife. In the sixth book of The Odyssey, the Archaic Greek epic of the eighth century BCE, the princess Nausicaa has clothed and fed the castaway Ulysses and now gives him careful directions into her father's hall. She will lead him as far as the town, then send him ahead alone to find her mother, whom he will come upon "sitting by the fire and spinning her purple wool by firelight", the king seated close beside her where "he sits and topes like an immortal god", drunk and easy as the deathless ones. And yet it is not the drinking king the suppliant must win.

Nausicaa's counsel is exact, and a little startling. Of her father she says only "Never mind him"; the whole weight of her instruction falls on the queen. She tells him to "go up to my mother, and lay your hands upon her knees if you would get home quickly" — the gesture of supplication, hands laid to the knees, which by rights belongs to the sovereign, the record routes deliberately through his wife. The promise is unambiguous: "If you can gain her over, you may hope to see your own country again". Power to grant the ship and the escort is the king's, but the power to move the king sits at the hearth beside him. Even the way in runs past him — the stranger is to reach "the house of my father Alcinous" and then go straight by the throne to the spindle.

The scene is brief, but it carries the pattern whole: the queen is the hinge on which a king's mercy turns. Why should the poem imagine the road home bending toward the woman at the fire rather than the man on the seat beside her?