The young prince duteously accepts the counsel, as from his father’s friend, and prays his guest to tarry a while. But Minerva, her mission accomplished, suddenly changes her shape, spreads wings, and vanishes. Then Telemachus recognises the goddess, and feels a new life and spirit born within him. If we choose to admit an allegorical interpretation—more than commonly tempting, as must be confessed, in this particular case—it is the advent of Wisdom and Discretion to the conscious heart of the youth, hitherto too little awakened to its responsibilities.
Telemachus returns to his place among the revellers a new man. They are still listening to the minstrel, Phemius, who chants a lay of the return of the Greek chiefs from Troy, and the sufferings inflicted on them during their homeward voyage by the vengeance of the gods. The sound reaches Penelope where she sits apart with her wise maidens, like the mother of Sisera, in her “upper chamber”—the “bower” of the ladies of mediæval chivalry. She comes down the stair, and stands on the threshold of the banqueting-hall, attracted by the song. But the subject is too painful. She calls the bard to her, and begs him, for her sake, to choose some other theme. We must not be too angry with Telemachus because, in the first flush of his newly-awakened sense of the responsibilities of his position, he uses language, in addressing his mother, which to our ears has a sound of harshness and reproach. He bids her not presume to set limits to the inspiration of the bard—the noblest theme is ever the best. He reminds her that woman’s kingdom is the loom and the distaff, and that the rule over men in his father’s house now belongs to him. Viewed with reference to the tone of the age as regarded the duties of women,—compared with the parting charge of Hector in the Iliad to the wife he loved so tenderly, and even with a higher example in Scripture,—there is nothing startling or repulsive in such language from a son to his mother. To the young prince in his new mood, while the counsels of Minerva were yet ringing in his ears, the absence and the sufferings of his father might well seem the only theme on which he could endure to hear the minstrel descant; it was of this, he feels, that he needed to be continually reminded. And if hitherto he has allowed this riotous company to assume that, in the absence of Ulysses, the government of his house has rested in the weak hands of a woman, it shall be so no longer. He will take his father’s place.
The mother sees the change in her son’s temper with some surprise—we may suppose, with somewhat mingled feelings of approval and mortification. The boy has grown into a man on the sudden. The poet gives us but a single word as any clue to the effect upon Penelope of this evidently unaccustomed outburst of self-assertion on the part of Telemachus. “Astonished,” he says, she withdraws at once to her upper chamber, and there weeps her sorrows to sleep. Telemachus himself addresses the assembled company in a tone which is evidently as new to their ears as to those of his mother. He bids them, with a haughty courtesy, feast their fill to-night; to-morrow he will summon (as is the custom of the Homeric princes) a council of the heads of the people, and there he will give them all public warning to quit his father’s house, and feast—if they needs must feast—in each other’s houses, at their own cost. If they refuse, and still make this riot of an absent man’s wealth, he appeals from men to “the gods who live for ever” for a sure and speedy vengeance.
The careless revellers mark the change in the young man as instantly as Penelope. For a few moments they bite their lips in silence—“wondering that he spake so bold.” The first to answer him is Antinous, the most prominent ringleader of the confraternity of suitors. His character is very like that of the worst stamp of the “Cavalier” of the days of our own Charles II. Brave, bold, and insolent, there is yet a reckless gaiety and a ready wit about him which would have made him at once a favourite in that unprincipled court. He adds to these characteristics a quality of which he might, unhappily, have also found a high example there—that of ingratitude. He is bound by strong ties of obligation to the house of Ulysses; his father had come in former days to seek an asylum with the Chief of Ithaca from the vengeance of the Thesprotians, and had been kindly entertained by him until his death. The son now answers Telemachus with a taunting compliment upon the new character in which he has just come out. “He means to claim for himself the sovereignty of the island, as his father’s heir, no doubt; but the gods forbid that Ithaca should ever come under the rule of so fierce a despot!” Telemachus makes answer that he will at all events rule his father’s house. Upon this, Eurynomus, another leading spirit among the rivals—a smoother-tongued and more cautious individual—soothes the angry youth with what seems a plausible recognition of his rights, in order that he may get an answer to a question on which he feels an interest not unmixed, as we may easily understand, with some secret apprehension. “Who was this traveller from over sea? and—did he happen to bring any news of Ulysses?” But Telemachus has learnt subtlety as well as wisdom from the disguised goddess. He gives the name assumed by his visitor, Mentes, an old friend of the house. But as to his father’s return, the oracles of the gods and the reports of men all agree in pronouncing it to have now become hopeless. So the revel is renewed till nightfall; and while the feasters go off to their own quarters somewhere near at hand, Telemachus retires to his chamber (separate, apparently, from the main building), where his old nurse Eurycleia tends him with a careful affection, as though he were still a child, folding and hanging up the vest of fine linen which he takes off when he lies down to sleep, and drawing the bolt of the chamber door through its silver ring when she leaves him.
The council of notables is summoned for the morrow. No such meeting has been held since the departure of Ulysses for Troy. As Telemachus passes to take his place there, all men remark a new majesty in his looks.
“So when the concourse to the full was grown,
He lifted in his hand the steely spear,
And to the council moved, but not alone,
For as he walked his swift dogs followed near.
Also Minerva did with grace endear
His form, that all the people gazed intent
And wondered, while he passed without a peer.
Straight to his father’s seat his course he bent,
And the old men gave way in reverence as he went.”
He makes his passionate protest before them all against the insufferable waste of his household by this crew of revellers, and against their own supineness in offering him no aid to dislodge them. Antinous rises to answer him, beginning, as before, with an ironical compliment—“the young orator’s language is as sublime as his spirit.” But the fault, he begs to assure him, lies not with the suitors, but with the queen herself. She has been playing fast and loose with her lovers, deluding them, for these three years past, with vain hopes and false promises. She had, indeed, been practising a kind of pious fraud upon them. She had set up a mighty loom, in which she wrought diligently to complete, as she professed, a winding-sheet of delicate texture for her husband’s father, the aged Laertes, against the day of his death. Not until this sad task was finished, she entreated of them, let her be asked to choose a new bridegroom. To so much forbearance they had all assented; but lo! they had lately discovered that what she wrought by day she carefully unwound by night, so that the task promised to be an endless one. Some of the handmaidens (who had found their own lovers, too, amongst their royal mistress’s many suitors) had betrayed her secret. Antinous is gallant enough to add to this recital of Penelope’s craft warm praises of the queen herself, even giving her full credit for the bright woman’s wit which had so long baffled them all.
“Matchless skill
To weave the splendid web; sagacious thought,
And shrewdness such as never fame ascribed
To any beauteous Greek of ancient days,
Tyro, Mycene, or Alcmene, loved
Of Jove himself, all whom th’ accomplished queen
Transcends in knowledge—ignorant alone
That, wooed long time, she should at last be won.”—(Cowper.)
But they will now be put off no longer—she must make her choice, or they will never leave the house so long as she remains there unespoused. Telemachus indignantly refuses to send his mother home to her father; and repeats his passionate appeal to the gods for vengeance against the wrongs which he is himself helpless to deal with. At once an omen from heaven seems to betoken that the appeal is heard and accepted. Two eagles are seen flying over the heads of the crowd assembled in the marketplace, where they suddenly wheel round, and tear each other furiously with beak and talons. The soothsayer is at hand to interpret; the aged Halitherses, who reminds them all how he had foretold, when Ulysses first left his own shores for Troy, the twenty years that would elapse before his return. Now, he sees by this portent, the happy day is near at hand; nay, in his zeal for his master’s house he goes so far as to urge the assembled people to take upon themselves at once the punishment of these traitors. One of the suitors mocks at the old man’s auguries, and threatens him for his interference. The prophet is silenced; and Telemachus, finding no support from the assembly, asks but for a ship and crew to be furnished him, that he may set forth in search of his father. One indignant voice, among the apathetic crowd, is raised in the young prince’s defence: it is that of Mentor, to whom Ulysses had intrusted the guardianship of his rights in his absence. His name has passed into a synonym for all prudent guardians and moral counsellors, chiefly in consequence of Fénélon’s didactic tale of ‘Télémaque,’ already mentioned, in which the adventures of the son of Ulysses were “improved,” with elaborate morals, for the benefit of youth; and in which Mentor, as the young prince’s travelling tutor, played a conspicuous part. He vents his indignation here in a very striking protest against popular ingratitude:—
“Hear me, ye Ithacans;—be never king
From this time forth benevolent, humane,
Or righteous; but let every sceptred hand
Rule merciless, and deal in wrong alone;
Since none of all his people, whom he swayed
With such paternal gentleness and love,
Remembers the divine Ulysses more.”—(Cowper.)