Telemachus visits Nestor at Pylos

Telemachus and Athena (still disguised as Mentor) arrive at Pylos to find Nestor and his sons making sacrifice on the beach — black bulls to Poseidon, the god whose anger has kept Odysseus from getting home. Nestor is the wisest of the surviving Greek heroes from Troy, and one of the few who came home cleanly. He receives the young man with full hospitality before he asks his name. Telemachus, prompted quietly by Athena, says he comes for any news at all of his father, whose fate no one has known in ten years.

When Telemachus tells him who he is, Nestor begins to talk — and Nestor is a great talker. He tells of the disastrous departure from Troy, the gods' anger, the deaths of the lesser captains. He tells of his own clean homecoming. And he tells the story that will hang over the rest of the poem: the homecoming of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, who walked into his own palace and was murdered in his bath by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Orestes, his son, eventually killed them both to avenge the father.

Nestor tells the story without commentary, but the parallel is exact. Odysseus is the king who has been away too long. Penelope is the wife at home. Telemachus is the son. The story is a warning — and an instruction — that runs through the rest of the poem: Telemachus must be ready to be Orestes if his father turns out to be Agamemnon. Nestor sends him on to Sparta the next morning in a chariot with his own son Pisistratus, and the journey ends, for now, on the rocky road south.