Telemachus Sets Sail — The assembly at Ithaca and departure

Book 2 of The Odyssey by Homer

When the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared, Telemachus rose from his bed, dressed himself, slung his sword over his shoulder, bound on his sandals, and came forth from his chamber looking like a young god. He ordered the heralds to call the people to assembly, and when they had done so and the crowd was gathered, he went to the place of meeting with a bronze spear in his hand, attended by his two fleet hounds. Athena had shed a grace upon him so that all the people marveled at his bearing as he took his father's seat among the elders.

The aged hero Aegyptius spoke first, a man bowed with years whose own son Antiphus had sailed with Odysseus and been devoured by the Cyclops in his cave. He asked who had called this assembly, the first to be summoned since Odysseus departed for Troy, and what urgent matter pressed upon the caller. Telemachus took up the staff and addressed the people. He declared that no public matter brought him before them, but his own private grief. He had lost his noble father, and now the sons of the chief men among them forced their way into his house, wooing his mother against her will, eating his oxen and sheep and fatted goats, and drinking his store of wine as though it were water.

Then Antinous, the most arrogant of the suitors, stood and answered him with scorn. He said that Telemachus should not blame the suitors but his own mother, that most cunning of women. For three whole years she had deceived them with a stratagem. She had set up a great loom in the palace and begun to weave a shroud, telling the suitors that she must finish this winding-sheet for the hero Laertes, Odysseus's aged father, before she could choose a new husband, lest the women of Achaea blame her if he lay unburied. By day she wove the mighty web, and by night, by torchlight, she unraveled it again. Thus for three years she kept her secret and beguiled the Achaeans, but in the fourth year one of her maids who knew the truth betrayed her, and they found her undoing her beautiful work.