The Long Return II — The Debate in Ithaca

Telemachus calls the men of Ithaca together and discovers that truth is not yet authority.

By morning, courage had become something Telemachus had to put on in front of other people.

He had slept little. The house had not helped him. Even after the suitors had gone from the hall, leaving their cups overturned and their laughter caught among the beams, the place did not settle into peace. Men who misuse a house do not leave it when they leave its rooms. They remain in the wine on the floor, in the grease on the tables, in the servants’ lowered eyes, in the small disorder of things that should have been put back where they belonged.

Telemachus rose before the light had fully entered.

For a little while he stood beside his bed and listened. Somewhere below him a woman was drawing water. Somewhere in the courtyard a man coughed and said nothing. Beyond the walls, Ithaca was waking into the same day it had woken into for years: a day in which Odysseus was absent, Penelope waited, and the men who called themselves her suitors ate another man’s food as though hunger were a claim.

Only Telemachus was not quite the same as he had been the day before.

That is the trouble with a god’s visit. It does not change the world at once. It changes the measure by which the world can be endured.

Athena had come to him in the likeness of a stranger and had spoken as though the shame of his house were not simply a thing to be suffered. She had told him to call the men of Ithaca together, to stand in public, to speak, to send the suitors away if they could be sent away, and then to take ship for Pylos and Sparta in search of news of his father.

It had sounded possible while a god was saying it.

By daylight, in his own room, with his own hands fumbling at the fastening of his cloak, it sounded like madness.

He was not a child. That was part of the pain. Had he been smaller, helplessness would have been natural. Had he been older, perhaps authority would have sat on his shoulders without sliding off. But he was in the narrow country between the two, old enough to feel insult burn cleanly through him, young enough for other men to remember him naked in a nurse’s arms, crying for his mother.

He washed. He put on clean clothes. He took his sword, not because there would be fighting, but because a man who came into the assembly without the signs of manhood would be granting the laughter before it began. He stepped into the courtyard and called the heralds.

His voice did not shake.

That surprised him.

It surprised the servants too. They looked up from their tasks. One of them, an old man who had served Laertes before he served Odysseus, stared at Telemachus as if he had seen, not Odysseus himself, but a line of Odysseus drawn hastily in charcoal on a wall.

“Call the assembly,” Telemachus said.

The heralds obeyed.

News travels differently on an island. It does not spread; it crosses thresholds. It goes from courtyard to courtyard, from market to harbour, from man to man, each receiving it with the small tightening of someone who understands that an old discomfort has finally been given a public name.

An assembly had not been called in Ithaca since Odysseus sailed for Troy.

There had been disputes in those years, certainly. There had been quarrels over goats, debts, fishing rights, boundary stones, marriages promised and regretted. Men had shouted in doorways and in fields. Old women had settled matters more efficiently than judges. But no one had called the island together beneath the old forms. No one had taken up the staff of speech and made the people remember that a kingdom is not merely land under one name, but a community with an ear and a conscience.

So they came.

They came slowly at first, then in clusters: men from the town, men from the farms, men who had served under Odysseus and men who had been boys when the ships went out; grey-bearded men who had learned to measure time by who did not return; younger men who knew Troy mostly as a story told by others. They came because curiosity is sometimes stronger than duty, and because in a small place no one wants to be absent from the day something begins.

The suitors came too.

They came laughing, not loudly, but enough. Antinous walked among them as though the assembly had been called for his entertainment. Eurymachus smiled in that smoother way of his, the smile of a man who liked rooms better when he already knew how they would answer him.

Telemachus saw them arrive and felt the first coldness of the day enter his body.

He had imagined, foolishly perhaps, that once the assembly was called, the thing would possess its own dignity. But forms do not become powerful merely because they are old. A cup may have belonged to a noble house and still be used by a drunkard. A staff may have passed through honourable hands and still tremble in the grip of a young man whom no one has yet agreed to fear.

They sat. They settled. They waited.

Then Aegyptius rose.

He was very old, and age had left him not with majesty but with a kind of weathered persistence. One of his sons had gone to Troy with Odysseus and had not come back; another sat among the suitors, which is one of the quieter cruelties by which life teaches old men not to speak too confidently of grief.

“Men of Ithaca,” he said, “we have not been called together like this since our king sailed away. Whoever has summoned us, whether for public danger or private need, let him speak. It is no small thing to wake an old custom.”

There was a murmur at that. It was not hostile. It was worse: uncertain, interested, waiting to see which way the day would lean.

Telemachus stood.

The herald placed the staff in his hand.

It was heavier than it looked.

He had seen men hold it easily. His father, they said, had held it as though the wood itself knew him. But Telemachus felt every eye upon his fingers, his shoulders, his mouth. The staff gave him the right to speak. It did not give him the habit of being heard.

Still, he spoke.

“Men of Ithaca,” he said, and heard, with a kind of shameful astonishment, that his voice carried. “I have not called you here because danger is coming from outside the island. No army is on the shore. No raiders have landed in the night. The danger is already inside my house.”

The murmur died.

“My father is gone,” he said. “You know that. There is no man here who does not know it. If he died at Troy, then he died with other men, and I would have mourned him as a son may mourn. If he died on the sea, then the sea has him, and there is no court where I can bring my complaint. But while he is absent, my house is being devoured by men who call themselves suitors.”

He did not look at Antinous. Not yet.

“They come each day. They slaughter our animals. They drink our wine. They order the servants of my house as though they were masters there. They press my mother, though she has not chosen. They say they are waiting for marriage, but they behave like men who have already inherited.”

Now he looked.

Antinous did not lower his eyes.

“That is my grief,” Telemachus said. “But it should be your shame. If you have pity for me, show it. If you remember Odysseus, show it. If you fear the gods, show it. If you do not fear the gods, then at least fear what men will say of Ithaca: that a king’s house was eaten in full view of his people, and no one had the courage to call it wrong.”

There are speeches that gather strength as they move, and there are speeches that spend the speaker as they go. Telemachus felt himself being spent. The words had come hot and clean, but beneath them was the old wound, and he had opened it in public.

He had meant to finish standing like a man.

Instead, he threw the staff down.

Then he wept.

Not because he was weak. That would have been simpler. He wept because the grief of the house had been carried too long in private, and once brought into daylight it did not know how to stand apart from him.

Some of the men looked away.

That was the first judgement of the assembly.

Antinous rose before any decent man could decide what decency required of him.

“Telemachus,” he said, and the name in his mouth was almost gentle, which made it worse, “you speak boldly, and perhaps a son may be forgiven for thinking his own house the centre of the world. But you blame the wrong people.”

A few of the suitors shifted, pleased already. They knew this voice. It had fed them often.

“No one here denies that we come to your house. No one denies that we feast there. But why? Because your mother, clever Penelope, has kept us waiting beyond all custom. She gives hope to each man, promises no man, and uses her grief as a loom to weave delay.”

The word entered the assembly like a hand drawing back a curtain.

Loom.

Everyone knew of it. Some had heard the story from servants. Some from the suitors. Some had embroidered it with that pleasure people take in another household’s difficulty.

“She told us,” Antinous continued, “that she could not marry until she had woven a burial shroud for old Laertes, lest he lie one day without honour. A pious thing. A daughter-in-law’s duty. We respected it. We waited.”

He paused. He knew how to make patience sound injured.

“But by day she wove, and by night she unravelled what she had done. For years she tricked us. Not with force. Not with divine power. With a woman’s cunning, praised by some perhaps, but costly to those who were made its victims.”

Victims.

Telemachus felt the word strike and turn in him. In the suitors’ mouths, even plunder could dress itself as grievance.

“So,” Antinous said, “send your mother back to her father. Let Icarius arrange her marriage. Let her choose, or let those with authority choose for her. Then your house will have peace. Until then, do not accuse us of disorder when the delay is hers.”

A low sound passed through the assembly.

Not agreement exactly.

Recognition of an argument.

That was enough to make Telemachus afraid.

He took the staff again. His hand was damp.

“I will not send my mother out of her own house against her will,” he said. “How could I? Her father would demand back the gifts. The gods would despise me. Men would say, rightly, that I drove out the woman who bore me because other men had eaten too much and grown impatient.”

There was sharpness in that, and some heard it.

Antinous heard it too. His face changed only a little.

“If my father is dead,” Telemachus said, “then let the gods make that clear. If my mother chooses, let her choose freely. But I will not repair your shame by committing a greater one.”

For a moment, the assembly stood on the edge of something. It is important to know this. Not all failures are inevitable from the first breath. There are instants when a room might yet become honourable, when one man standing, one voice breaking the wrong way, one old loyalty remembering itself, may change the day.

Then the eagles came.

They appeared high above the assembly, two of them, strong-winged and dark against the morning sky. They flew together at first, close and terrible, then wheeled above the men and tore at one another with beak and claw. Feathers loosened and fell. Their cries cut through the air. Then they swept away over the houses and were gone.

No one spoke immediately.

The gods, when they choose, can make even foolish men silent.

Halitherses rose slowly.

He was one of those old men whom a town keeps and ignores in equal measure: useful at births, funerals, boundaries, sacrifices, weather signs, and every other place where memory has not yet been replaced by confidence. He had watched the ships leave for Troy. He had known Odysseus before absence had made him half legend. He had warned men before and been disliked for being right.

Now he leaned on his staff and looked first at the sky, then at the men beneath it.

“Men of Ithaca,” he said, “this sign is not empty. Odysseus is not dead. He is near. He will return, and when he returns he will bring ruin on those who have wronged his house.”

The words should have frightened them.

Perhaps they did. But fear, among proud young men, often comes out as laughter.

Eurymachus stood this time.

“Old man,” he said, “go home and prophesy to your children. Let them profit from it, if prophecy is profitable. Birds fly where they will. If every wing above us carried Zeus’s verdict, no man could cross a courtyard without consulting the sky.”

There was laughter now, freer than before.

Eurymachus lifted his hand, graciously allowing himself to be reasonable.

“We all know what this is. Telemachus is angry. His mother delays. The house is strained. But do not frighten the people with tales of Odysseus returning like a storm from nowhere. If he were coming, he would have come. If he were alive, some word would have reached us. The dead are often most useful to those who speak in their names.”

A god had sent a sign. An old man had named its meaning. A clever man had made both seem provincial and foolish.

The assembly leaned back toward comfort.

Mentor rose then.

Not Athena in disguise. Not yet. The real Mentor, old friend of Odysseus, guardian in name of what had not been guarded enough in fact. There was anger in him, but also something sadder than anger.

“Suitors are what they are,” he said. “I will not spend my breath being astonished that hungry men eat. But the rest of you — that is where the shame lies.”

The laughter thinned.

“You sit here in silence while the house of the man who led you is consumed. You remember Odysseus when it costs nothing. You speak well of him after wine. You tell stories of his courage, his counsel, his anger in battle, his hand upon the oar. But his son stands before you asking for justice, and you look at the ground.”

Some men did look at the ground then, which is not the same thing as repentance.

“Not one of you will stand with him,” Mentor said. “Not one of you will say to these men: enough. You are many. They are few. Do you think their strength lies only in their arms? No. It lies in your unwillingness to be troubled.”

That sentence should have ended the matter.

It did not.

Leocritus answered him, and his answer was useful precisely because it said aloud what others preferred to leave unspoken.

“Mentor, you speak as if words can put meat back on the bone. Even if Odysseus came home, do you think he could easily drive out so many? He may have been a great man once. But one man is still one man. If Telemachus wants news of his father, let him go and seek it. Let him take a ship, if he can find men foolish enough to row for a boy’s hope. As for us, we are done here.”

That was how the assembly ended.

Not with judgement.

Not with reconciliation.

Not even with a proper decision.

It dissolved.

Men stood, stretched, muttered, avoided one another’s eyes. The suitors walked away laughing again, louder now because the day had gone their way and laughter is the cheapest form of victory. Antinous did not look back at Telemachus. Eurymachus did, and smiled.

Telemachus remained where he was until the assembly place had almost emptied.

The staff was no longer in his hand.

He did not remember putting it down.

He left the assembly and went down to the shore.

There are times when the sea is a comfort, not because it is gentle, but because it is at least honest about its restlessness. The shore did not pretend that things were settled. It took the waves and broke them, took them and broke them, as it had done before Odysseus was born and would do after every man in that assembly had become a name someone half-remembered.

Telemachus stood where the water thinned around the stones.

Then he prayed.

Not beautifully. Not like a priest. He spoke because there was no one left on the island to whom he could speak without being measured.

“Athena,” he said, though he did not know by what name she wanted to be called, “if you were the one who came to me yesterday, do not leave me now. I did what you told me. I spoke. They heard me and did nothing. If I am to go, show me how. If I am to stay, tell me how to bear it.”

The answer came in a man’s voice.

“Bearing it is not the same as obeying it.”

Telemachus turned.

Mentor stood near him.

Or rather, the shape of Mentor stood near him, and in that shape something brighter than Mentor’s age looked out. The air seemed clearer around him. The gulls had gone quiet. Telemachus knew then, not by proof but by recognition, that the god had returned.

“You spoke as you had to speak,” Athena said. “Do not mistake their failure for yours.”

“They laughed,” Telemachus said.

“Yes.”

“They will laugh again.”

“Yes.”

The sea drew back from the stones and returned.

“You will take ship tonight,” Athena said. “Not tomorrow, when they have had time to thicken their watchfulness. Tonight. I will find men to row. I will find a ship. You will go first to Pylos, to Nestor, who came home from Troy. Then to Sparta, to Menelaus. If you hear your father lives, endure another year. If you hear he is dead, return, raise his mound, honour him, and let your mother marry.”

The words struck him harder than the assembly had done.

Let your mother marry.

There are griefs a person can carry because they remain shapeless. Give them a shape, and they become heavier.

“If he is dead,” Telemachus said.

“If he is dead,” Athena said, “you will still have work to do.”

That was a god’s mercy: not softness, but direction.

She sent him back to the house.

The suitors were there already, as of course they were. They had returned to the hall after the assembly as men return to a table they have paid for. They called to him when he entered. One asked whether he had found a crew among the old men. Another offered, with broad generosity, to lend him a cup for the voyage. Antinous watched him with cheerful malice.

Telemachus had thought anger would be the difficult thing to hide.

It was not. Hope was harder.

He answered them as little as possible. He moved through his own hall like someone with no errand. He did not look toward the storerooms. He did not look for his nurse. He did not let his eyes rest on the things he would need.

When evening came and the suitors were loud with food and wine, Athena moved through the town in Telemachus’s likeness, speaking to men whose names would not be sung loudly later, though without them no ship has ever left a harbour. She found rowers. She borrowed a vessel from Noemon, who did not yet know how many troubles can begin with the lending of a ship. She gathered the practical courage of men who do not stand in assemblies but know how to set an oar into water.

Meanwhile Telemachus went to the chamber where provisions were kept.

Eurycleia was there.

She had nursed him as an infant. That is the trouble with nurses: they remember the body before it learned dignity. They know what kings looked like when they had fever. They know what young men looked like when their teeth came through. It is difficult to become heroic in front of someone who once cleaned milk from your chin.

She had a lamp beside her and a tablet of stores in her hand. The little flame made the jars look larger than they were, each one sealed and waiting in the wall-shadow: wine, oil, meal, the hidden wealth of a house that had to count what others wasted.

She looked at him once and knew.

Not everything. Not the route. Not the goddess. Not Pylos or Sparta or the old kings whose memories he had been told to seek.

But she knew leaving.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I need barley meal,” he said. “Wine too. In jars that can be carried. Enough for a voyage.”

Her hand tightened on the tablet.

“No.”

“I am going to Pylos,” he said. “Then Sparta.”

“No.”

The word was not command only. It was fear, history, milk, fever, lullaby, and all the nights she had kept him alive before he had any idea that life was a thing requiring defence.

“You must not tell my mother,” he said.

At that, the old woman began to weep.

Not loudly. She had lived too long in a house under siege to waste sound. But the tears came down her face and made her look suddenly older than she had seemed an hour before.

“Your grandfather is in the fields with his grief,” she said. “Your father is lost. Your mother sleeps only when sorrow exhausts her. And now you would go out over the sea in the dark, with men who want your house and would be glad to hear you had drowned.”

“I would,” Telemachus said.

She stared at him.

Perhaps that was the first moment in which she saw that the boy was leaving whether or not she blessed the journey. This is another sorrow of those who raise children: one day fear is no longer authority.

“Swear to me,” he said. “Do not tell her for eleven days. Or twelve. Unless she asks. Unless she hears and asks you directly. Let her sleep while she can.”

Eurycleia turned towards the shelves. For a moment he thought she meant to refuse him by work: to begin counting oil or checking seals or doing any of the thousand small tasks by which grief can pretend not to hear.

Instead, she took down a jar.

Then another.

She did not bless the journey. Not at first. She packed against it.

Barley meal in well-sewn skins. Wine in jars that could be lifted by one man. Food that would keep. Folded cloth. A cloak. Small things, necessary things, the kind a house gives when it cannot give protection. Her hands moved quickly, angrily, tenderly. Once she stopped and pressed her fingers against the mouth of a jar as though sealing more than wine inside it.

“Eleven days,” she said.

“Or twelve.”

“Or twelve.”

Then she swore.

The suitors did not notice.

Why would they? They were full of meat and the belief that tomorrow would resemble today.

Night deepened.

At the harbour, the ship waited.

The men Athena had gathered stood ready. The mast was set. The ropes lay dark and coiled. No one sang. No one called out more than was needed. The work of departure was done quietly, as though Ithaca itself might wake and object.

Athena came aboard in Mentor’s form and sat near Telemachus.

The oars lowered.

For a moment, before the first stroke, Telemachus looked back.

He could not see his mother’s room. He could not see the storeroom lamp. He could not see the hall clearly, or the place in the assembly where he had stood and wept. The island was already becoming shape rather than wound.

Then the oars entered the dark water.

The ship moved.

Behind him, Ithaca kept its lamps and its danger. Before him lay Pylos, Sparta, rumour, kings, old men with long memories, and perhaps one word — alive or dead — that would alter the whole weight of the world.

The shore receded.