The gods in council; Athena visits Ithaca

The Odyssey begins on Olympus. Zeus is talking; Athena interrupts him to plead the case of Odysseus, the only Greek hero from the Trojan War who has not yet come home. He has been stranded for seven years on the island of the nymph Calypso, who loves him and will not let him go. Poseidon, his enemy, is away at a feast among the Ethiopians. Athena seizes the moment. The other gods agree: Hermes will be sent to Calypso with the order to release him.

She herself flies to Ithaca disguised as Mentes, an old family friend. There she finds Odysseus's son Telemachus — twenty years old, never having known his father — sitting miserably among the suitors who have moved into the palace. A hundred and eight young aristocrats from Ithaca and the neighboring islands have been camped in the great hall for three years, eating Odysseus's food, drinking his wine, and pressing his wife Penelope to choose one of them as a husband. The bard Phemius sings to them, against his will, the song of the Greek captains coming home from Troy.

Athena, in her disguise, gives Telemachus what no one has given him in twenty years: a plan. He is to call an assembly tomorrow and denounce the suitors publicly. Then he is to sail to Pylos and Sparta and find news of his father. She vanishes — and Telemachus, recognizing for the first time that he has been visited by a god, goes to bed a different person from the one he was that morning. The poem opens here for a reason: Odysseus is the famous name, but the journey home begins with a son finding the will to act.