Odyssey 1.413 · Book 1, lines 413–416
My father's homecoming is lost
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Telemachus — Εὐρύμαχʼ, ἦ τοι νόστος ἀπώλετο πατρὸς ἐμοῖο· οὔτʼ οὖν ἀγγελίῃ ἔτι πείθομαι, εἴ ποθεν ἔλθοι, οὔτε θεοπροπίης ἐμπάζομαι, ἥν τινα μήτηρ ἐς μέγαρον καλέσασα θεοπρόπον ἐξερέηται.
Eurymachus, truly the homecoming of my father is lost. Nor then do I heed a message any longer, if one should come from anywhere, nor do I care for any prophecy which my mother might inquire of, calling a seer into the hall.
Word by word
The setting
Telemachus answers Eurymachus's probe. Publicly, he gives the suitors what will disarm their fear: he declares his father's return dead and hopeless, and says he trusts neither travellers' news nor the prophecies his mother summons seers to give.
A note on this passage
Telemachus says the thing the suitors most want to hear: Odysseus is not coming back. He renounces the two channels by which hope arrives in this world — a traveller's report and a summoned prophecy — and names his mother's seers dismissively, as if her grief were a habit he has outgrown.
The undercurrent is that he is lying, and the poem has just told us so. Athena came in person, promised the father's return, and left; the son felt the god in the room. His public despair is a screen. Where his own father's weapon is the useful falsehood, the boy takes his first turn at it here — concealing real news behind a show of hopelessness, in front of the very men that news would destroy. It is Telemachus's coming-of-age move: not a sword, but a guarded tongue.
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