At dawn Menelaus sat beside Telemachus and asked what need had brought him to Lacedaemon. Telemachus said his house was being eaten by his mother’s proud suitors; he clasped Menelaus’s knees for any news of his father’s death or return — tell it straight, remembering any service Odysseus had done at Troy.
Deeply stirred, Menelaus said: “So these cowards would usurp a brave man’s bed? As when a deer nests her fawns in a lion’s thicket and the lion comes home — so Odysseus will bring a shameful doom on them. I wish he were as when he threw Philomeleides in Lesbos. Then those suitors would find a bitter wedding. Of all the unerring old man of the sea told me, I will hide nothing.”