At dawn Telemachus calls the first assembly Ithaca has held since Odysseus left for Troy twenty years earlier. Holding his father's spear and with Athena lending him grace, he takes his father's seat while the elders make way. The old lord Aegyptius, whose own son went to Troy with Odysseus and never returned, asks who has summoned them. Telemachus explains that his trouble is private, not public: the suitors are devouring his family's estate, refusing to approach Penelope's father Icarius properly and instead camping in his house day after day. In anger and frustration he dashes the speaker's staff to the ground and bursts into tears, and the people feel pity for him.
Antinous answers that the fault lies not with the suitors but with Penelope herself, "for she is a very artful woman." For three years, he says, she deceived them. She told them she would choose a husband once she finished weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus's aged father, Laertes. Each day she wove at the great loom, and each night, by torchlight, she secretly unraveled her work. Finally one of her maids betrayed her, and the suitors caught her undoing the cloth. Antinous demands that Telemachus send his mother back to her father so she can be married; until she chooses, the suitors will not leave.
Telemachus refuses to force his mother out of her home, and he calls on Zeus to punish the suitors. At once two eagles sweep down from the mountain, wheel over the assembly, and tear at each other's faces and necks before flying off. The old seer Halitherses interprets the omen: Odysseus is near, and he is planning death for the suitors. Eurymachus mocks the old man, claiming that birds fly about all the time and mean nothing, and threatens him with a fine. Then Mentor, an old friend whom Odysseus had left in charge of his household, rebukes the ordinary Ithacans for sitting silently while a few men plunder their king's house. The suitor Leocritus scoffs that even if Odysseus came back, he would die fighting so many. The assembly breaks up having accomplished nothing.
Alone on the beach, Telemachus prays to the god who visited him the day before. Athena appears again, this time disguised as Mentor, and encourages him: he has his father's spirit, and if he shows it, his journey will not be in vain. She promises to find him a ship and crew. Telemachus returns to the palace, where Antinous mockingly invites him to eat and drink and forget his plans. The suitors joke that he may come back with allies, or perhaps poison, or that he may die on the voyage, leaving them to divide his property.
Telemachus goes down to the storeroom and asks the old nurse Eurycleia to prepare wine and barley meal for the trip. She begs him not to go, fearing he will be killed, but he reassures her that a god is behind the plan and makes her swear not to tell Penelope for eleven or twelve days. Meanwhile Athena, now disguised as Telemachus himself, gathers a crew and borrows a swift ship from Noemon. She then pours sleep over the suitors so that they stagger home early. As night falls, Telemachus and his crew load the supplies in secret. Athena, as Mentor, sits beside him at the stern, sends a favorable wind, and the ship runs all night across the dark sea toward Pylos.
Quoted lines are from Samuel Butler’s 1900 prose translation (Project Gutenberg #1727).
