“Telemachus, high-talker — you would fasten blame on us. The suitors are not at fault. It is your mother, and she knows wiles beyond others. Three years now — soon four — she has cheated the Achaeans’ hearts. She gives hope to all, sends each man messages, and sets her mind on other things.”
“Here is another trick she planned. She set up a great loom and began a fine wide web. ‘Young men,’ she said, ‘since Odysseus has died, wait for this marriage until I finish this cloth — a shroud for hero Laertes, for when death takes him. I would not have Achaean women blame me if he lay without a covering, he who won so much.’
“We were persuaded. By day she wove the great web; by night, with torches set, she unraveled it. Three years she escaped notice. In the fourth, one of her women told us; we caught her at it, and she finished against her will. So we answer you and all the Achaeans: send your mother away and tell her to marry whom her father bids and she herself chooses.”
“If she keeps vexing the sons of the Achaeans — thinking of the skill Athena gave her, work and cunning such as no woman of old knew, not Tyro or Alcmene or Mycene — we will keep eating your livelihood. She wins fame; you pay the cost. We will not go to our lands until she marries one of us.”
Telemachus answered: “Antinous, I cannot drive from the house the mother who bore me. My father is elsewhere, alive or dead. Hard for me to pay Icarius a great price if I send her back. Evil would come from her father, and she would call the Erinyes as she left — and blame from men. I will never speak that word. Leave these halls; feast at your own cost. If you choose to destroy one man’s goods without payment, keep at it. I will call on the gods. Perhaps Zeus will grant requital, and you will die here with no payment made.”