Telemachus

Telemachus is the son of Odysseus and Penelope, the boy who grows into a man while his father is away for twenty years. The first four books of the Odyssey, known as the Telemachy, follow his search for news of him.

He is still a baby when Odysseus sails for Troy. According to Hyginus, Palamedes exposes the father's pretended madness by laying the infant in the path of his plough; in Apollodorus he threatens the child with a sword. When the Odyssey opens, Telemachus is a young man watching the suitors devour his father's estate. Athena visits him in the guise of Mentes, an old guest-friend of the family, and urges him to act. He calls the first assembly Ithaca has held in twenty years, faces the scorn of Antinous and Eurymachus and, helped by the goddess now disguised as Mentor, sails secretly by night. In Pylos old Nestor welcomes him; in Sparta, with Menelaus and Helen, he learns that Odysseus is alive, held by the nymph Calypso. Meanwhile the suitors lie in wait to kill him on his way home.

Warned by Athena, he slips past the ambush and goes to the hut of the swineherd Eumaeus, where Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, reveals himself. At first Telemachus takes him for a god; then father and son weep together and plan their revenge. He removes the weapons from the hall, keeps the secret and, in the contest of the bow, would have strung it at the fourth attempt had his father not signalled him to stop. In the slaughter he fights at Odysseus' side, kills Amphinomus with his spear, speaks up for the bard and the herald, and hangs the disloyal maids.

Ancient authors disagree about the rest of his life. A fragment of Hesiod marries him to Polycaste, the daughter of Nestor who bathes him in Pylos; the lost epic Telegony makes him the husband of Circe after Odysseus' death; Hellanicus and Aristotle pair him with Nausicaa. Through Fénelon's novel The Adventures of Telemachus (1699), Mentor, the friend whose shape Athena borrows, gave modern languages the word mentor.