Quote 1
(Eumaios:) ‘You too, old man of many sorrows, since the spirit brought you here to me, do not try to please me nor spell me with lying words. It is not for that I will entertain and befriend you, but for fear of Zeus, the god of guests, and for my own pity.’ (14.386-389)
Odysseus, for the first time, has proven an unworthy guest by telling lies to his host. Eumaios sees this, but overrides his hesitation at this dishonesty out of respect to Zeus. The rules of the gods, we see, are all-important.
Quote 2
Odysseus seems to agree with his men that hunger is the worst kind of suffering.
(Eumaios:) ‘All too much with enduring heart she does wait for him there in your own palace, and always with her the wretched nights and the days also waste her away with weeping.’ (16.37-39)
Quote 3
Penelope’s grieving is implicitly compared to that of Odysseus.
(Eumaios:) ‘Shall I on the same errand go with the news to wretched Laertes, who while he so greatly grieved for Odysseus yet would look after his farm and with the thralls in his household would eat and drink, whenever the spirit was urgent with him; but now, since you went away in the ship to Pylos, they say he has not eaten in this way, nor drunk anything, nor looked to his farm, but always in lamentation and mourning sits grieving, and the flesh on his bones is wasting from him.’ (16.137-145)
Quote 4
(Eumaios:) ‘[…] any vagrant who makes his way to the land of Ithaka goes to my mistress and babbles his lies to her, and she then receives him well and entertains him and asks him everything, and as she mourns him the tears run down from her eyes, since this is the right way for a wife when her husband has perished.’ (14.126-130)
Penelope’s actions are driven by her loyalty for her husband – perhaps this loyalty is the very reason she refuses to accept the common (and, given the length of his absence, quite reasonable) belief that he is dead.
Quote 5
(Eumaios:) ‘[…] but the longing is on me for Odysseus, and he is gone from me; and even when he is not here, my friend, I feel some modesty about naming him, for in his heart he cared for me greatly and loved me. So I call him my master, though he is absent.’ (14.144-147)
Eumaios is so loyal to Odysseus that, despite the common notion that the man is dead, he still considers him lord and master.
Quote 6
(Eumaios:) ‘From the heart she [Penelope] loved me dearly. Now I go lacking all these things, but the blessed immortals prosper all the work that I myself do abiding here, whence I eat and drink and give to people I honor; but there is no sweet occasion now to hear from my mistress in word or fact, since the evil has fallen upon our household […].’ (15.370-375)
Many of the servants in Odysseus’s house hold a familial loyalty for the royal family.