Summary
Telemachus and Peisistratus arrive at Sparta during a double wedding feast. Menelaus receives them; Helen enters, recognises Telemachus by his likeness to his father, and the company weeps.
Helen puts into the wine a drug from Egypt that quiets grief and anger, and tells a Troy story: Odysseus entered the city disguised as a beggar, and she alone recognised him and kept his secret. Menelaus tells another: Odysseus inside the wooden horse, holding the men silent when Helen walked around it calling out in the voices of their wives.
Menelaus recounts being becalmed in Egypt and ambushing Proteus, the shape-changing Old Man of the Sea, to learn how to get home. From Proteus he learned that Ajax had drowned, Agamemnon had been murdered, and Odysseus was alive, held on an island by a nymph.
The scene returns to Ithaca. The suitors discover Telemachus has gone and set an ambush in the strait. Penelope learns of both, and grieves; Athena sends a phantom in the likeness of her sister Iphthime to reassure her.
Narrative function
Confirms that Odysseus is alive, gives the audience its first outside view of him, and closes the Telemachy by returning the danger to Ithaca.
Greek concepts in this book
- nēpenthes
- The 'no-grief' drug Helen mixes into the wine (4.220-221). It suspends mourning rather than healing it — a pointed detail in a poem about memory.
- dolos
- Trick, guile. Both Troy stories are stories of dolos, and both are told in the presence of the trickster's son.
Connections to other books
Book 8
Demodocus sings the wooden horse to Odysseus himself in Book 8; here Menelaus tells it to Odysseus's son. The poem never narrates it directly in its own voice.
Book 15
Telemachus's departure from Sparta and the failed ambush are resolved in Book 15.
Source notes
The wooden horse is referred to at 4.271-289 and sung at 8.499-520; it is not narrated at length anywhere in Homer. The extended account familiar to most readers, including the character Sinon, belongs to the Epic Cycle and above all to Aeneid 2. See our page on the works attributed to Homer.
Reading it responsibly
Helen and Menelaus tell incompatible stories, in the same room, minutes apart. Hers makes her Odysseus's secret ally inside Troy; his makes her the voice that nearly killed the men in the horse. The poem sets them side by side and declines to arbitrate. It is the clearest early example in European literature of a narrative that treats memory as contested rather than recoverable.