A swineherd who lives "out of the way" with his pigs kills the best animal in his herd to feast a ragged stranger — not knowing the beggar is his own master, come home at last and unrecognized. When the droves are shut in for the night, Eumaeus gives the order: "Bring in the best pig you have". His men bring a "fat five year old boar pig" and "set it at the altar", and what follows is a full sacrifice performed by a poor man for a guest he cannot place.

Eumaeus does not "forget the gods". The first thing he does is "cut bristles from the pig’s face" and cast them into the fire, "praying to all the gods" that his lost lord might win his "return home again"; then he "clubbed the pig with a billet of oak". The carcase is jointed into seven shares, and "one of these he set apart for Mercury" and the nymphs before any man eats. At the meal's end he cuts the first piece and offers it "as a burnt sacrifice to the immortal gods", then pours "a drink-offering". More than once the singer breaks from the story to address the herdsman by name — "O swineherd Eumaeus" — as though he loved him.

The witness is The Odyssey (an archaic Greek epic, c. 8th century BCE); the served telling gives the hero and the gods their Roman names — Ulysses, Jove, Mercury. It is the only witness under this address wired to served text: the Icelandic authority the shelf keeps under Boberg and the Hawaiian one under Beckwith both wait unread. So the whole record of the hog as an offering rests, for now, on one swineherd's altar-fire on Ithaca.

There is something quietly moving in a servant sacrificing his master's own boar to honor his master — what is the gift worth, when the herd was never his to give?