Cast portrait: Telemachus

This portrait is released the day Telemachus's arc peaks in the cycle, after Odyssey XVI — Recognition of Telemachus. Read it as a coda — the full cross-cycle portrait, gathered after the moment.

Epics: Odyssey. First appearance: Odyssey 1.

Lineage

Telemachus is the only son of Odysseus and Penelope. He was an infant when his father sailed for Troy; he is twenty when the Odyssey opens. He has therefore never known his father — has only stories, only Penelope's account, only the contemptuous reports of the visiting Achaean kings. He is heir to the kingdom of Ithaca and the islands round about, but in the absence of his father his inheritance is being eaten alive by the suitors crowding the great hall.

The Telemachy

The first four books of the Odyssey form a self-contained subplot — the Telemachy — in which Telemachus is the focal character before his father appears on stage. Athena, taking the form of his father's old guest-friend Mentes (then Mentor), visits him and tells him to act: hold a public assembly, denounce the suitors, sail to Pylos and Sparta to seek news of his father. He does so. The assembly in Book 2 is the first time he has spoken as a man rather than a boy — his voice cracks, the assembly mostly dismisses him, but he has done it. He sails by night.

At Pylos he is received by old Nestor, who gives him kind hospitality and the account of the Achaean homecomings — Agamemnon's murder by Aegisthus, the long sufferings of others, and the rumour that Odysseus is somewhere alive on the sea. Nestor sends Telemachus on to Sparta with his own son Pisistratus. At Sparta in Books 3–4 he is received by Menelaus and Helen — both now reconciled, both rich on the spoils of Troy. Menelaus tells him the famous Proteus episode: he forced the sea-god to reveal that Odysseus was alive but trapped on Calypso's island. With that knowledge, Telemachus turns home.

The recognition

He returns to Ithaca in Book 15 and is met not by his mother but by his father — in disguise as a beggar at the hut of Eumaeus the swineherd. The recognition in Book 16 is one of the Odyssey's most controlled and tender scenes. Athena removes the disguise; Odysseus stands before his son in true form; the two men weep on each other's necks "more passionately than birds, vultures or sea-eagles whose young have been stolen". Then father and son sit down and plan the slaughter of the suitors.

The slaughter and after

In Books 17–22, Telemachus is his father's right hand. He stands by him through the abuse the disguised beggar receives in the great hall; he conceals weapons from the suitors at his father's instruction; he is the second man with a bow at the slaughter in Book 22. He kills several suitors himself. He is the one who carries out the hanging of the twelve faithless serving-women — a scene of unflinching cruelty Homer presents in plain prose. After the killing, in Book 23, he is present for the slow recognition between his parents but mostly silent — the boy has done his part; the recognition is theirs.

In Book 24 he stands with his father and his grandfather Laertes for the brief skirmish with the suitors' kin, before Athena enforces the peace.

The coming-of-age structure

The Odyssey is famously two stories braided: the nostos of Odysseus and the coming-of-age of his son. Telemachus's arc is the structural argument for the nostos: a household needs the father, and a son needs to learn to become him. Athena is his sponsor as she is his father's — and her guidance is part of what makes the coming-of-age work. By the end he is a competent adult man, sword at his hip, able to kill and to govern. The Telemachy is the first surviving European Bildungsroman.

Across the cycle

Telemachus does not appear in the Iliad, Posthomerica, or Aeneid. But the figure of the son-coming-of-age in his father's absence has cyclic resonance: Ascanius in the Aeneid, who shoots his first man (and is told to stop) at Apollo's command in Book 9, is Virgil's pendant — a boy growing into the man his father needs. Neoptolemus in Posthomerica 7 (and Aeneid 2) is the dark mirror: a son who arrives at Troy to take his dead father's place and becomes a butcher. Telemachus, between them, is the moderate version — a son who grows up well.

The scholarship

Read Telemachus as the Odyssey's second hero — the structural answer to Odysseus, the second man whose journey the poem traces. Without the Telemachy, the Odyssey is a wanderer's tale; with it, it is a household's restoration.

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.