Summary
Telemachus and Athena-as-Mentor arrive at Pylos during a great sacrifice to Poseidon. They are received and fed before being asked who they are — the correct order.
Nestor tells what he knows of the returns: the quarrel between Agamemnon and Menelaus, the scattering of the fleet, the deaths on the way home. He has no news of Odysseus.
He tells at length the story of Agamemnon's murder by Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, and of Orestes' vengeance, holding Orestes up to Telemachus as an example.
Athena departs in the form of a bird of prey, revealing her divinity to the household. Nestor sacrifices a heifer with gilded horns. Telemachus travels on to Sparta by chariot with Nestor's son Peisistratus.
Narrative function
Supplies the background of the returns and installs the Agamemnon story as the pattern against which Odysseus's homecoming is measured throughout.
Greek concepts in this book
- xenia
- Guest-friendship. Nestor's reception is a model performance: welcome, seat, food, and only then the question of identity.
- kleos
- Fame, what is heard of a man. Nestor tells Telemachus that Orestes won kleos by avenging his father — an instruction as much as a report.
Connections to other books
Book 1 · Book 4 · Book 11 · Book 24
The Agamemnon story recurs in every part of the poem and is told by a different speaker each time, with different emphasis.
Book 4
Telemachus's journey continues to Sparta; the two visits form a matched pair, an older world and a wealthier one.
Source notes
The house of Atreus material in the Odyssey is not the version familiar from Attic tragedy. In Homer, Aegisthus is the principal agent and Clytemnestra's role is smaller; Orestes' vengeance is unproblematic and no Furies pursue him. Aeschylus's Oresteia is a fifth-century reworking, not a source for Homer.
Reading it responsibly
The Telemachy is sometimes dismissed as delay. Its function is comparative: the poem shows the young man two functioning households before returning him to his own broken one, and the contrast is the education. He learns almost nothing about his father and a great deal about what a household in order looks like.