Telemachus comes home

Athena flies to Sparta and rouses Telemachus, who has been there for nearly a month and is in danger of forgetting that he is on a mission. Time to go home, she tells him; Penelope is wavering, her father is pressing her to choose a suitor, and the suitors themselves are planning to ambush Telemachus at sea on his return. Telemachus thanks Menelaus and Helen, takes their gifts — a silver bowl from Menelaus, a robe Helen has woven herself for his future wife — and rides the chariot back to Pylos before sailing east.

Athena diverts him from the ambush. He lands on a remote part of the Ithacan coast, sends his ship and crew on around to the harbor, and walks inland. Athena has arranged for him to meet a beggar in the hut of Eumaeus. Meanwhile in the hut, Eumaeus and the disguised Odysseus have been talking through the night; Eumaeus has told the long, painful story of his own life — how he was kidnapped from his royal nursery in Syria as a small child by a Phoenician trader and sold into slavery in Ithaca. He tells it without bitterness.

The two stories are about to come together. The chapter ends with Telemachus walking up the path to the swineherd's hut at sunrise, the dogs running out to meet him with their tails down (they always know him), and his father not yet ready to reveal himself. The reader knows what is about to happen; neither character does. The pacing is careful and deliberate, like a held breath — the poem's two long-separated story-lines arriving on the same page for the first time, with Eumaeus the witness who does not yet know what he is witnessing.