Telemachus, whom Odysseus had left at home as a baby twenty years before, had been sent by Athena to seek his father. The goddess had appeared to him as he sat in his father’s hall in Ithaca, lowering upon those unbidden guests who were his mother’s suitors. She had asked what the unseemly revel might mean; and he had told of the long absence of his father.
“Ah but the spirits of storm to a death inglorious swept him,
Vanished, unseen and unheard of; and nothing but mourning and anguish
Me he bequeathed! Nor now do I sorrow and make lamentation
Only for him; for the gods send other and grievous afflictions.
All of the chief of the men who as princes rule in the islands....
All come wooing my mother and wasting the wealth of the homestead.
She dares neither reject their hateful proposals of marriage,
Nor can she end it; and thus do the men, consuming, devouring,