Telemachus assembles the people, but he has not the heart to carry out Athene’s advice. He cannot send the wooers away, nor turn his mother out of her house. He rather weakly appeals to the wooers’ consciences, and announces his intention of going to seek his father. They answer with scorn, but are warned of their fate, which is even at the doors, by Halitherses. His prophecy (first made when Odysseus set out for Troy) tallies with the prophecy of Teiresias, and the prayer of the Cyclops. The reader will observe a series of portents, prophecies, and omens, which grow more numerous and admonishing as their doom draws nearer to the wooers. Their hearts, however, are hardened, and they mock at Telemachus, who, after an interview with Athene, borrows a ship and secretly sets out for Pylos. Athene accompanies him, and his friends man his galley.
DAY 3 (Book iii).
They reach Pylos, and are kindly received by the aged Nestor, who has no news about Odysseus. After sacrifice, Athene disappears.
DAY 4 (Book iii).
The fourth day is occupied with sacrifice, and the talk of Nestor. In the evening Telemachus (leaving his ship and friends at Pylos) drives his chariot into Pherae, half way to Sparta; Peisistratus, the son of Nestor, accompanies him.
DAY 5 (Book iv).
Telemachus and Peisistratus arrive at Sparta, where Menelaus and Helen receive them kindly.
DAY 6 (Book iv).
Menelaus tells how he himself came home in the eighth year after the fall of Troy. He had heard from Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, that Odysseus was alive, and a captive on an island of the deep. Menelaus invites Telemachus to stay with him for eleven days or twelve, which Telemachus declines to do. It will later appear that he made an even longer stay at Sparta, though whether he changed his mind, or whether we have here an inadvertence of the poet’s it is hard to determine. This blemish has been used as an argument against the unity of authorship, but writers of all ages have made graver mistakes.
On this same day (the sixth) the wooers in Ithaca learned that Telemachus had really set out to “cruise after his father.” They sent some of their number to lie in ambush for him, in a certain strait which he was likely to pass on his return to Ithaca. Penelope also heard of her son’s departure, but was consoled by a dream.