3.329–370

He must get back home to defend his position in Ithaka before the suitors gobble up all his worldly goods and take over. But first, he must consult Menelaus, who has returned to Sparta from his wanderings. Since the Spartan king has been traveling more recently, he may know more about Odysseus and will tell Telemachus the truth. Athena/Mentor urges Nestor to arrange a libation to Poseidon, and then s/he and Telemachus will go to bed on their ship. The old man is happy to have Mentor sleep on the ship but insists that Telemachus stay in the palace. Athena/Mentor heads off toward the ship, saying that s/he needs the ship to visit “the Kaukanes,” a people apparently from the western Peloponnesus, and will leave Telemachus to travel overland to Sparta in one of Nestor’s chariots. Mentor now disappears, and Athena wafts away in the form of a vulture.

The significance of Athena’s choice of birds is not clear. Vultures had various associations in Greek myths, as symbols of both happiness and, not surprisingly, death. Nothing in the passage suggests what the poet might have thought vultures symbolize. For our purposes, the more important thing to notice is that the goddess transforms herself in front of the mortals, prompting Nestor to recognize her. Disguised gods do not often reveal themselves to mortals in early Greek poetry, and when they do, it is usually meant to be a highly charged moment, awe-inspiring and sometimes frightening. The poet seems not to be interested in creating that kind of atmosphere in this case. Rather, the aim is to enhance Telemachus’s stature in the eyes of the Pylians. The young prince has the protection of a powerful divine patron, the same one who was known to favor Odysseus.

With the departure of Athena, the poet marks the end of her role in launching Telemachus from Ithaka into the wider world. She has led him away from home under the cover of night, playing a kind of surrogate adult to ease him on his journey, part mother, part male mentor. He has arrived safely at his first destination and, with some nudging from her, won the confidence of his hosts. His encounter with a new family and a new society has offered him a glimpse of what he has been missing at home since the suitors have moved in. Telemachus has not learned anything much about his father from Nestor, only that the other Greeks admired and respected him for his cleverness and skill as a speaker. The remainder of this episode is essentially an extended farewell, an elaborate show of hospitality from Nestor, with sumptuous dining and intricate sacrifices.

Nestor’s Pylos is the first society we encounter after Ithaka, and we have noted the marked contrast it presents to the chaos in Odysseus’s kingdom. Homer has an almost anthropological interest in different kinds of social organization, the relationships or lack thereof that each fosters between its members and with other societies, the virtues that produce success for its members and the causes for their failure. Still to come in this part of the poem are the royal household in Sparta, with its gleaming surface and simmering resentments, the uncanny island of Calypso, which exists outside of human time, and the sophisticated royal court of Alkinous and Arete. Once Odysseus begins to tell the Phaeacians the story of his adventures in Book 9, we are treated to a fantastically varied landscape of creatures both human and supernatural, the deadly Cicones and the claustrophobic kingdom of Aeolus, the atomized world of the Cyclopes and the realm of the powerful witch Circe, both dangerous and benign, the world of the dead, full of squeaking, impotent ghosts, longing for life, and the island where the Sun’s cattle live.

As we pass through this kaleidoscope, our guide is the ever-resourceful, polytropos Odysseus, who arrives at each place as a stranger, sizes up the local scene and figures out how to gain leverage for the next stage in his struggle. As he makes his way, he assumes personae that reflect some partial realization of his complex character, noble, deceitful, powerful, humble. Finally, when he arrives back at Ithaka, he brings with him all this experience, and we see his home again, this time through the prism of a richer world. Meanwhile, Telemachus leads us further toward Odysseus. The next stage of his encounter with his father’s life will be Sparta, which will offer a more complex—and darker—portrait both of postwar heroism and of Odysseus as hero than the one he has seen in Pylos.