Telemachus and Nestor's son drive into Sparta in the middle of a double wedding. Eteoneus, at the door, wonders whether to send the strangers away because the king is busy. Menelaus is angry at the thought. He was a stranger once, in other men's houses, and he will not refuse a guest while the meat is still on the fire. The young men are washed, clothed, and seated in a hall that shines with bronze, gold, amber, and ivory. Telemachus whispers that it looks like the home of the gods. Menelaus hears him and says no mortal house competes with Zeus. The shine still does not comfort the king. He talks of Cyprus, Egypt, and the other lands he stripped after Troy, then of the one friend who never came home. He thinks of Odysseus's old father, of Penelope, and of the boy left behind. At that name Telemachus hides his face in his cloak. Helen walks in, looks once, and says she has never seen anyone so like the child Odysseus left when the ships sailed. Pisistratus names him. Menelaus weeps too, remembering the friend he once hoped to settle near Argos and protect for life.
The whole company weeps until Pisistratus asks them to stop crying at supper and remember his own brother Antilochus, who died at Troy. Helen puts a drug in the wine so grief can sit at the table without wrecking the meal. Then she tells how Odysseus entered Troy dressed as a beggar, and how she alone knew him after she washed and clothed him. Menelaus answers with the wooden horse: Helen walked around it calling the hidden chiefs by name, and Odysseus clapped his hands over Anticlus's mouth until Athena led her away. That is the man Telemachus came to hear about. They sleep. At dawn Menelaus dresses like a king and asks why they have come. Telemachus does not decorate it. Suitors are eating his sheep and wine and waiting for his mother to break. He wants the truth about his father, even if the truth is death. Menelaus compares those men to deer asleep in a lion's den.
Then he tells how he himself was stuck off Egypt for twenty days with no wind. A goddess named Idothea taught him to seize her father Proteus at noon among the seals, hold him through lion, dragon, boar, running water, and tree, and wait for the true voice. Proteus names the dead: Ajax drowned after boasting against the gods, Agamemnon murdered by Aegisthus in his own house. Orestes later killed the murderer and cleaned the hall. Then Proteus names the living. Odysseus sits on Calypso's island, alive, sorrowing, with no ship. That is the news Telemachus crossed the sea to buy. Proteus also tells Menelaus he will not die in Argos: the gods will send him to the Elysian plain. Menelaus offers horses and a chariot. Telemachus asks instead for a silver mixing bowl made by Hephaestus, something he can carry home to rocky Ithaca.
The same day, in Ithaca, Noemon asks when Mentor will return the ship he lent. The suitors learn what they had refused to believe: the boy actually sailed, with a picked crew, and someone like Mentor at the helm. Antinous stops treating the voyage as a joke. He wants twenty men in the strait between Ithaca and Samos, and he wants the others with him. Medon the servant hears it and goes to Penelope. She falls with the news. No one told her her son had left. She asks why he left her, and whether he wants to die without a name behind him. Medon does not know if a god sent him or if he went on his own. She would rather have kept him home even if he had to leave her corpse behind. Euryclea admits she packed the stores under oath and tells her to wash her face and pray, not to drag old Laertes into a new grief. Penelope had been about to send a messenger to that old man. The nurse stops her. Penelope offers bruised barley to Athena and asks the goddess to keep the suitors from killing her son. That night a dream comes in the shape of her sister Iphthime. The dream says Telemachus travels with divine protection and will come back. It will not say whether Odysseus is alive. Penelope sleeps anyway. Out on the water the suitors pick twenty men, launch in the dark with weapons, and wait at the rocky island of Asteris, where a ship can hide on either side of the channel. In Sparta the son now knows his father lives. The fact does not make the water safe. On the sea road home, the men who have been eating his house wait to make sure the son does not.
