Chapter summary
Telemachus and Peisistratus, son of Nestor, arrive by chariot in Sparta, at the palace of Menelaus, who is celebrating two weddings: his daughter Hermione, once promised at Troy to the son of Achilles, now departs for the land of the Myrmidons, and his son Megapenthes, born of a slave woman because the gods gave no more children to Helen after Hermione, receives a bride from Sparta. The servant Eteoneus sees the strangers at the door and asks the king whether he should unyoke their horses or send them to another host. Menelaus rebukes him for speaking like a child: he himself ate the hospitality of many before he reached home, hoping that Zeus would bring an end to his sufferings. He orders the guests unyoked, bathed, and seated, serves them, and only after they have eaten does he promise to ask who they are, for he thinks base people would not beget sons like these. Telemachus, in a low voice so that the others will not hear, tells Peisistratus that the brilliance of the palace is like that of Zeus on Olympus. Menelaus overhears and answers that no one can rival Zeus, and that he himself gathered that wealth in eight years of wandering through Cyprus, Phoenicia, Egypt, and Libya, while another, in secret and through the treachery of his wife, killed his brother. For this reason he does not enjoy what he has, and he would trade two-thirds of his possessions to have the men who died at Troy alive again. He weeps for all of them, but for one above the rest, Odysseus, of whom no one knows whether he is alive, and whom Laertes, Penelope, and Telemachus mourn. At hearing his father's name, Telemachus weeps and draws his cloak over his eyes. Menelaus notices and hesitates between letting him speak of his father or asking first.
At that moment Helen comes out of her room, like Artemis, with her attendants and her silver basket. She asks her husband whether she should speak the truth or lie (her spirit urges her to speak), and says she has never seen such a resemblance: the young man can only be Telemachus, whom Odysseus left a newborn when the Achaeans went to Troy because of her. Menelaus agrees, by his hands, his feet, his eyes, and his hair, and because the young man wept on hearing his father's name. Peisistratus confirms this and explains his silence: Telemachus is sensible and ashamed to speak too much on a first visit before a voice that sounds to them like a god's. Nestor sent him along as a companion because the young man wants advice or help from Menelaus, since a son whose father is far away suffers greatly when he has no one to defend him among the people. Menelaus, moved, says he would have given Odysseus a city in Argos, emptied by force, so that they might live nearby until death, but some god deprived him of the return. All weep. Peisistratus weeps for his brother Antilochus, killed by the son of Dawn, and asks that their weeping be set aside for the next day, for he does not like to weep at table. Menelaus praises him as Nestor's son and proposes to postpone the conversation with Telemachus until morning.
Then Helen pours into the wine a drug from Egypt, given by Polydamna, which banishes pain and anger and brings forgetfulness of all troubles, and she says that Zeus gives each man both good and evil. To lighten the table, she tells of a deed of Odysseus at Troy: after wounding himself with shameful blows and putting on a slave's rags, he entered the city as a beggar, and only she recognized him. She bathed him and anointed him, and he, after she swore not to betray him before he returned to the ships, told her the Achaeans' plan; then he came back after killing many Trojans. The other Trojan women cried out, but her heart rejoiced, for she already longed to go home and lamented the blindness that Aphrodite had given her when she brought her far from her beloved homeland. Menelaus says she spoke as was fitting and adds another deed: inside the wooden horse, the best of the Achaeans heard Helen walk around the horse three times, with Deiphobus, calling the leaders by name in the voices of their wives. He and Diomedes wanted to rise or answer, but Odysseus held them back, and when Anticlus was about to answer, Odysseus clamped a hand over his mouth until Athena led Helen away. Telemachus observes that this did not save Odysseus from death, nor make his heart iron, and asks to go to sleep. Helen has beds prepared in the portico, where the two young men sleep; Menelaus and Helen sleep in the back of the house.
In the morning Menelaus asks why Telemachus has come. He answers that he has come for news of his father: his house is being consumed, his mother's suitors slaughter the flocks, and therefore he embraces Menelaus's knees and asks for the truth without softening, whether out of shame or pity. Menelaus is indignant that weak men should wish to lie in the bed of a strong man; he likens them to the young of a doe in a lion's den, and he wishes Odysseus were as he was at Lesbos, when he struck down Philomeleides in the wrestling match; then the suitors would have a bitter wedding. He promises not to deceive the young man, and recounts what the old man of the sea told him. Held for twenty days on the island of Pharos, off Egypt, with no winds, because he had not offered hecatombs to the gods, with his food and his companions' strength running out, Menelaus was found by Eidothea, daughter of Proteus, who asked him whether he was a fool or enjoyed suffering. He said he was held by the gods and asked her which god was keeping him there. She explained how to catch Proteus, who knows the depths of the sea and serves Poseidon: at midday he comes out of the sea and sleeps in a cave among the seals. She covered Menelaus and three companions with freshly skinned seal hides and put ambrosia under their nostrils against the stench. Proteus counted the seals, lay down, and they seized him; he turned into a lion, a serpent, a panther, a boar, water, and a tree, but they did not let go, and when he grew weary he asked what Menelaus wanted. Menelaus asked which god was holding him and the way home; Proteus said he should have sacrificed to Zeus and the other gods before leaving, and that he would return only after going back to Egypt and offering hecatombs. Menelaus agreed and asked about the Achaeans. Proteus said that Ajax was shipwrecked: Poseidon saved him at the rocks of Gyrae, but he boasted of having escaped against the will of the gods, and the god split the rock and sank him. Agamemnon, rescued by Hera, was carried by a storm to the land where Aegisthus reigned; he arrived weeping for joy, was seen by the lookout whom Aegisthus had paid two talents of gold, and Aegisthus prepared a feast, hid twenty men, and killed him, with all his companions, like an ox at the manger. Menelaus wept on the sand, not wishing to live, until Proteus told him to stop weeping and return quickly, for perhaps he would still find Aegisthus alive, or Orestes would already have killed him and he would arrive in time for the funeral. Menelaus asked about the third, and Proteus said that Odysseus was on an island, weeping, held by force by the nymph Calypso, with no ships or companions. As for Menelaus, the gods will send him to the Elysian plain, because he is a son-in-law of Zeus. Menelaus returned to Egypt, offered the hecatombs, raised a tomb to Agamemnon, and reached home with a favorable wind.
Menelaus invites Telemachus to stay eleven or twelve days and promises him a chariot, three horses, and a cup. Telemachus declines to stay so long, because his companions are waiting for him in Pylos, and asks that the gift be something that can be kept: he will not take horses to Ithaca, which has no racecourses or meadows, and he leaves them with Menelaus, who rules a plain rich in pasture. Menelaus smiles, caresses him, praises his noble blood, and exchanges the gift for a silver mixing bowl with gilded rims, the work of Hephaestus, which Phaedimus, king of the Sidonians, had given him.
In Ithaca, Noemon asks Antinous and Eurymachus when Telemachus will return from Pylos, because he needs the ship he lent him. The suitors are astonished: they had thought the young man was in the countryside, among the flocks. Antinous questions Noemon: when he set out, who followed him, and whether he took the ship by force. Noemon says he gave it up willingly, because it would be hard to refuse anything to a man so distressed, and that the young man took the best of the youths and Mentor, or a god in Mentor's likeness, whom he saw in Ithaca the day before. Antinous, with eyes aflame, says that Telemachus has carried out against their will an enterprise they thought impossible, that he will become a menace further on, and asks for a ship and twenty companions to ambush him in the strait between Ithaca and Samos. All approve. The herald Medon, who heard the plan from outside the courtyard, tells everything to Penelope. She, who had supposed they had come to order the maids to stop their work, reproaches the suitors for devouring the house and forgetting how justly Odysseus treated their fathers. Medon reveals that they plan to kill Telemachus on his return. She faints, asks why her son has left, and Medon says he does not know whether a god or her son's own spirit prompted it. Penelope throws herself on the threshold, among the maids, and accuses them of not having woken her. She wants to summon the old servant Dolius to send word to Laertes. Eurycleia confesses that she knew: Telemachus made her swear silence for twelve days, so that Penelope would not ruin her face with weeping. She advises a bath, clean clothes, a prayer to Athena, and that they spare the old Laertes, for the gods should not hate the line of Arceisius. Penelope prays to Athena, recalling Odysseus's sacrifices, and asks her to save her son. The suitors, amid the noise, say the queen is preparing her wedding without knowing that her son is doomed, and Antinous orders them to be quiet, so that no one warns anyone inside the house. They choose twenty men, equip the ship, anchor in deep water, and wait for evening.
Penelope, neither eating nor drinking in the upper rooms, wonders whether her son will escape or fall into the hands of the suitors, like a lion hemmed in by men, until sleep overcomes her. Athena makes a phantom in the likeness of Iphthime, Penelope's sister, which consoles her: the gods will not let her weep, her son will return, for he has not offended the gods, and Athena is with him. Penelope asks about her husband, and the phantom replies that it will not say, because speaking to the wind is bad. The phantom dissolves, Penelope wakes with her heart warmed, and the suitors, at sea, reach the islet of Asteris, between Ithaca and Samos, where they wait in ambush.
Analysis
Telemachus travels to learn whether his father is alive, and returns with the shortest news possible: an island, a nymph, no ship. What the book gives him, beyond that, is an image of the father drawn by those who knew him: Menelaus weeps for Odysseus more than for all the others, Helen recognizes him in the son's face, and the two tell what he did at Troy, the beggar's disguise and the silence inside the horse. On the first night, Telemachus almost does not speak: he weeps with his cloak over his face and lets Peisistratus answer for him.
The stories in this book show what it costs to get home: paying what one owes to the gods (Menelaus's hecatombs), knowing how to keep silent (Odysseus in the horse), and not being seen before the hour (Agamemnon, handed over by Aegisthus's lookout). Antinous's ambush, with twenty men and a ship, repeats that of Aegisthus, who also used twenty men, and Proteus himself has already mentioned Orestes as the avenger. The reader follows the plan against Telemachus knowing how the story of Agamemnon ended.
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