most precious boy, returned from foreign lands
after ten years of grieving for his loss,
welcomes him; so the swineherd wrapped his arms
around godlike Telemachus and kissed him,
as if he were returning from the dead. (16.17–23)
Eumaeus, Nestor, and Menelaus all show their deep, fatherlike love for Telemachus, and each models for the boy, in significantly different ways, the skill of hospitality, which is an essential aspect of elite masculine adulthood.
But only his real father, Odysseus himself, can help Telemachus achieve what he most wants: a position of greater power in his own household. When father and son are reunited, they weep together, as if for Telemachus’ lost, fatherless childhood:
They both felt deep desire for lamentation,
and wailed with cries as shrill as birds, like eagles
or vultures, when the hunters have deprived them
of fledglings who have not yet learned to fly. (16.216–19)
After these tears, Telemachus seems more sure of himself, and he can begin the process of joining the adult, male world, by plotting with his father how to kill the suitors.
Telemachus is an only child; his lack of brothers is emphasized in the poem and was presumably unusual in the context of archaic Greek society. He seems markedly more confident after he has formed a close friendship with Pisistratus, Nestor’s son, who becomes like a brother to him. The suitors—boys roughly his own age, who act like bullying older brothers—threaten his life and his position in his own home. Unable to stand up to the suitors by himself, Telemachus instead practices masculine self-assertion by putting down his mother.
The relationship between Penelope and Telemachus is painful, full of conflict and secrecy. She sees his vulnerability too clearly and worries for him, which makes him all the more eager to distance himself from her. Penelope cannot do for her son what a father could do, which is introduce him to the world of male power. Under the instructions of Athena, Telemachus pointedly keeps his journey from Ithaca a secret from his mother. Underlining his emotional distance from his mother by insisting that her feelings matter only insofar as they might affect her looks, he tells Eurycleia, who is in on the secret,
“Promise me you will not tell
Mother, until she notices me gone.
Say nothing for twelve days, so she will not
start crying; it would spoil her pretty skin.” (2.373–76)
Eurycleia is an alternative mother-figure for Telemachus, and a preferable one, in that—being a slave—she always does exactly what he tells her to do. Athena is a second and even better mother-figure: she enables him to succeed on his trip away from Ithaca, proving his ability to act independently of his human parents, albeit always under her watchful eyes.
Telemachus makes several attempts to put his real mother in (what he regards as) her place. In Book 1, Penelope tries to stop the singer Phemius from telling of the disastrous homecoming of the Greeks from Troy, because it makes her cry too much; Telemachus roughly intervenes, telling his mother,
“Go in and do your work.
Stick to the loom and distaff. Tell your slaves
to do their chores as well. It is for men
to talk, especially me. I am the master.” (1.356–59)
The passage is echoed in Book 21, when Odysseus, disguised as an old homeless beggar, asks to be given a turn at the ongoing contest to string the great bow. The suitors try to prevent it, but Penelope insists that the stranger ought to be treated with dignity and kindness, and should be allowed to try the bow, if he so desires. At that, young Telemachus intervenes, scolding his mother for speaking as if she had the authority to decide who should and who should not have access to the weapons of his father. He sends her back upstairs to the women’s quarters, declaring,
“Go up and work
with loom and distaff; tell your girls the same.
The bow is work for men, especially me.
I am the one with power in this house.” (21.350–53)
These outbursts are startling, since most of the time Telemachus carefully avoids direct confrontations with his mother—as if nervous that he might not be able to hold his own against her. The lines in Book 21 seem to allude to a moment in The Iliad when Hector tells his wife, Andromache, that she should not attempt to prevent him from going back to the battlefront, although he may be killed. It is, he declares, his task, as an elite male warrior, to fight on the front lines and risk his life to gain honor—just as it is the task of women to do the household chores and weaving. “War,” says Hector, “is work for men, especially me.” Telemachus is trying to assert his masculinity and adult status by assuming the role of the heroic fighter who risks his life for his honor and the defense of his city. But the reference does not entirely suit the situation: Telemachus is not planning to fight with the bow himself, only to have control over who else gets access to it. Moreover, the person who is about to assume “power in the house” is not Telemachus but Odysseus, to whom the boy will give the bow. Telemachus is overjoyed at being taken under his father’s wing, but he is also overshadowed by his father’s position as the eternal head of the household. It would be a problem for the poem’s narrative if Telemachus grew up all the way, since there must be only one man running the house in Ithaca forever, and that man needs to be Odysseus.
Telemachus is consistent in his notion that masculine maturity means the suppression and exclusion of women and the suppression of female voices. When Odysseus slaughters the suitors, he leaves a final task to his son, Telemachus: the killing of the “doglike” slave women who have been sleeping with the suitors. Odysseus instructs his son to hack at the girls with swords, to eradicate all life from their bodies and all memory of what they did with the murdered men:
“They will forget the things
the suitors made them do with them in secret.” (22.444–45)
The episode is one of the most horrible and haunting of the whole poem, the culmination of a pattern in which the homecoming of Odysseus prevents other people—elite boys and slave girls alike—from reaching their homes and their comfortable beds:
As doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly
home to their nests, but someone sets a trap—
they crash into a net, a bitter bedtime. (22.468–70)
These terrible murders are not quite presented as punishments for a nonexistent crime; these women are slaves, who presumably had little choice about their treatment by the suitors. Rather, Odysseus wants the girls dead because their memories threaten his total ownership of his household. As long as they are still alive, the trace of the suitors is still present in their bodies and their minds, and hence in his home. By slashing them with “long swords,” Odysseus suggests that his own male line can regain complete control.
But Telemachus takes initiative, to an almost unprecedented degree, and decides that the women should instead be hanged, saying,
“I refuse to grant these girls
a clean death, since they poured down shame on me
and Mother, when they lay beside the suitors.” (22.462–64)
This puzzling, disturbing intervention is a defining moment for Telemachus. Why exactly does he want them hanged, rather than hacked to death with swords? One possible answer has to do with cleanliness and pollution. Despite Odysseus’ various attempts to present his killings as revenge for moral outrages committed against him, it is clear that at least some of the murders are primarily motivated by a desire to restore a sense of purity to a house that has been subject to imaginary dirt. The choice of hanging over hacking is beneficial in that it keeps the girls’ dirty blood off the clean floors, and maintains the “tainted” bodies in their self-contained state. Hanging also allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls’ abused, sexualized bodies. The boy here demonstrates a newfound maturity in two highly problematic ways: he asserts himself by defying his father’s instructions, and he belittles the women he slaughters. But Telemachus is still resisting the adult male role of the warrior, which involves a quasi-sexual act of penetration—using a sharp weapon to pierce and kill human bodies at close quarters.