"Fifty women you have inside your house,
women we’ve trained to do their duties well,
to card the wool and bear the yoke of service.
Some dozen in all went tramping to their shame,
thumbing their noses at me, at the queen herself!"
– Homer
The Odyssey, Book 22, lines 446-450. Eurycleia responds to Odysseus, who asks what women in his halls were disloyal to him. Of the fifty women servants in the house, twelve "went tramping to their shame," she reveals.