Telemachus

Telemachus was a baby when the war began. In Homer's Odyssey, Helen says Odysseus left him a newborn child when the Greeks sailed for Troy. Apollodorus's Epitome tells how his infancy ended the war's first trick. Odysseus feigned madness to stay home, and Palamedes snatched the child from Penelope's arms and drew a sword on him. Fearing for his son, Odysseus admitted the pretence and went to war.

Twenty years later, the Odyssey finds him grown and powerless. Suitors for his mother fill the palace and eat through his father's herds. Athena arrives disguised as Mentes, a Taphian chief, and asks whether he is truly Odysseus's son. His answer is bleak: his mother says so, but no man knows his own parentage. She tells him to seek news in Pylos and Sparta, and to plan how to kill the suitors.

The next day he calls the first Ithacan assembly since his father left. He demands that the suitors leave his house, then dashes the staff to the ground and bursts into tears. Nobody helps. Athena, now in the likeness of Mentor, gathers a crew and a ship for him. He swears the old nurse Eurycleia to silence and sails by night without telling his mother.

At Pylos he tells Mentor that a young man is ashamed to question an elder. Nestor has no news of Odysseus. When Mentor leaves in the form of a sea-eagle, Nestor recognises Athena and says the gods are guiding the boy. Nestor's youngest daughter Polycaste bathes him, and his son Peisistratus drives him to Sparta. There Helen knows him at once by his likeness to his father. Menelaus passes on what the sea god Proteus told him: Odysseus is alive, held by the nymph Calypso.

Back in Ithaca, the suitors learn of the voyage and set an ambush in the strait between Ithaca and Samos. Athena warns Telemachus in Book 15 and tells him to sail by night. He lands safely and goes to the hut of the swineherd Eumaeus. In Book 16 Athena restores Odysseus's true shape, and the father reveals himself. Telemachus at first thinks he is a god. Then the two embrace and weep, wailing louder than birds robbed of their young.

In Book 21 Telemachus tries his father's bow first. He sets up the axes and makes the bow quiver three times. On the fourth try he might have strung it, but Odysseus nods to stop him. In the fight of Book 22 he kills the suitor Amphinomus with a spear, fetches armour from the storeroom, and admits he left its door open. In Book 24 he stands beside his father and grandfather Laertes, who rejoices to see son and grandson vying in courage.

The Odyssey ends before Telemachus marries, and later sources give him two different wives. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, quoted by the Byzantine scholar Eustathius, says Nestor's daughter Polycaste bore him a son, Persepolis. That is the same Polycaste who bathes him in Odyssey Book 3.

The strangest ending comes from the Telegony, a lost epic by Eugammon of Cyrene. Proclus's summary says Telegonus, a son of Odysseus by Circe, killed his father without knowing him. He carried the body to Circe's island with Penelope and Telemachus. Circe made them immortal, Telegonus married Penelope, and Telemachus married Circe. Hyginus's Fabulae tells the same story and adds a son for Telemachus and Circe: Latinus, who gave his name to the Latin language.

Apollodorus's Epitome follows the Telegony only in part. It has Telegonus kill Odysseus with a spear barbed with a stingray's spine, marry Penelope, and go with her to the Islands of the Blest. It says nothing of Telemachus marrying anyone. Hyginus also changes the story of his infancy. In Fabulae 95, Odysseus yokes a horse and an ox to a plough, and Palamedes sets the baby in front of it.