Telemachus at Sparta with Menelaus and Helen

Telemachus and Nestor's son Pisistratus drive on to Sparta and arrive at Menelaus's palace mid-celebration: two weddings on the same day, one for the king's daughter Hermione, one for his son Megapenthes. Menelaus orders the travelers brought to the table without first asking who they are — the law of xenia is older than knowing the guest's name. At dinner he speaks of his lost friend Odysseus, and Telemachus weeps quietly into his cloak. Helen, coming down from her chambers, recognizes the boy at once: the likeness is too exact to be anyone else.

To break the spell of grief Helen drops a drug into the wine — nepenthe, "without grief," brought from Egypt. Whoever drinks it forgets sorrow for a day. She tells a story to put Telemachus at ease: once during the war, Odysseus disguised himself as a beggar inside Troy, and she alone recognized him — and helped him. Her heart, she says, had already turned toward home. Menelaus gently tells a different story: the night the Greeks lay hidden inside the wooden horse, Helen walked around it three times, calling out the men's names in the voices of their wives. Only Odysseus's discipline kept the others quiet.

The two stories are about the same person and they are not the same Helen. The poem makes no attempt to reconcile them. Menelaus then tells how, on his own way home, he wrestled the shape-shifting sea-god Proteus to learn the captains' fates: Agamemnon dead, Ajax dead, and Odysseus alive — held captive on Calypso's island, weeping on the shore, with no ship and no way to leave. It is the first hard news Telemachus has had in twenty years. Meanwhile in Ithaca the suitors discover that he has sailed, and they plot to ambush him on his return.