Odyssey 1.208 · Book 1, lines 208–212
You have his head and eyes
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αἰνῶς μὲν κεφαλήν τε καὶ ὄμματα καλὰ ἔοικας κείνῳ, ἐπεὶ θαμὰ τοῖον ἐμισγόμεθʼ ἀλλήλοισιν, πρίν γε τὸν ἐς Τροίην ἀναβήμεναι, ἔνθα περ ἄλλοι Ἀργείων οἱ ἄριστοι ἔβαν κοίλῃς ἐνὶ νηυσίν· ἐκ τοῦ δʼ οὔτʼ Ὀδυσῆα ἐγὼν ἴδον οὔτʼ ἔμʼ ἐκεῖνος.
Wondrously you resemble him in head and fair eyes, since often, just so, we mingled together, before he went up to Troy, where the other Argives, the best, went in hollow ships; but from that time neither did I see Odysseus, nor he me.
Word by word
The setting
Athena presses her disguise further, claiming an old acquaintance with Odysseus. Telemachus, she says, is strikingly like his father in face; they used to meet often, before Odysseus sailed for Troy with the best of the Greeks — and she has not seen him since.
A note on this passage
Athena embroiders the guest-friendship with warmth: the boy is the image of his father, and she recalls their frequent meetings before the war. The remembered detail — Odysseus 'went up to Troy with the best of the Argives' — quietly places her fictional friendship among the great names of the Iliad.
The likeness she flatters is also load-bearing. The whole scene is meant to make Telemachus grow into his father; telling him he wears Odysseus's face is the first push. And the timeline she invents — 'not since he left for Troy' — is the true measure of the household's wound: twenty years, a son who has never met the man he resembles, a war that took the father before the boy could remember him.
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