Athena answered: “I am Mentes, son of Anchialus, and I rule the oar-loving Taphians. I put in with ship and crew bound for Temesa with iron, to bring back bronze. My ship lies off the fields in Rheithron harbor under wooded Neion. Our fathers were guest-friends — ask old Laertes, who no longer comes to town but grieves on his farm with an old woman to set his food. They said your father was among his people, so I came; but the gods still hinder him. Odysseus is not dead on earth. He lives somewhere on the wide sea, held on a sea-girt island by hard men against his will.”
“I will speak as the immortals put it in my heart, though I am no prophet: he will not be away from his land much longer, even if iron bonds hold him. He will find a way home — he is a man of many devices. But tell me: are you truly Odysseus’s son? Your head and eyes are terribly like his. We used to meet often before he sailed for Troy with the best of the Argives. Since then I have not seen him, nor he me.”
Telemachus said: “My mother says I am his. I for my part do not know — no one knows his own begetting for certain. I wish I were son to some man whom old age overtook among his own goods. As it is, they say the most ill-fated of mortals is my father.”
Athena said: “The gods have not left your house without a name, seeing Penelope has borne a son like you. But what feast is this? What need? It is no shared meal. They seem to feast outrageously through the house. A man of sense would be angry at these shameful acts.”
Telemachus answered: “Once this house was rich and blameless while he was among his people. The gods have willed otherwise and made him vanish more than any man. I would not grieve so if he had fallen at Troy among friends — the Achaeans would have made him a tomb, and fame would have been mine too. As it is the storm-spirits snatched him without fame. He is gone out of sight, and has left me only pains.”
“And I do not mourn him alone. All the nobles of Dulichium, Same, wooded Zacynthus, and rocky Ithaca court my mother and wear out my house. She neither refuses the hateful marriage outright nor can she make an end — and she has kept them waiting with her loom and her cunning. They eat away my substance, and soon they will break me myself.”