The Odyssey - Book 15 - Telemachus comes home

• Telemachus sets sail

• The plot of the epic is coming together at this point. Odysseus is home, and now Athena goes to instruct Telemachus to come home. She stirs him to go home to make sure that if Penelope marries someone else, they don't carry off Telemachus's possessions. Menelaus and Helen give Telemachus going-away presents. Menelaus's son, Pisistratus, helps Telemachus. Telemachus asserts himself in his new manhood by making two decisions:
  • he will not say goodbye to Nestor because the departure would be too longwinded.
  • He extends friendship to a fugitive who had murdered someone, Theoclymenus.

• Meanwhile, back with the swineherd and Odysseus.

• The pace of the story slows down as Odysseus asks Eumaeus about how his own parents are.
• He also asks Eumaeus how he came to be a slave on Odysseus's homestead. It turns out that he had been abducted and deposited on this island as a youth. (Would Odysseus, if the same had happened to him, have remained?)