Odyssey 1.443 · Book 1, lines 443–444
Awake all night, planning the voyage
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ἔνθʼ ὅ γε παννύχιος, κεκαλυμμένος οἰὸς ἀώτῳ, βούλευε φρεσὶν ᾗσιν ὁδὸν τὴν πέφραδʼ Ἀθήνη.
There, all night long, wrapped in a fleece of wool, he pondered in his own mind the journey that Athena had shown him.
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The setting
The last lines of Book 1. Left alone, Telemachus lies awake through the night, thinking over the journey the disguised Athena told him to make — to sail in search of news of his father.
A note on this passage
Book 1 closes on a single image held still: Telemachus awake the whole night through, wrapped in a fleece, turning over the voyage Athena told him to make. The house is asleep; he is not.
The book that opened in the council of the gods, deciding a father's return, ends with a son lying awake planning his own first departure — the action passed from Olympus down to one human bed. And the verb is βούλευε: he is deliberating, weighing, choosing. This morning others ran his life; tonight, sleepless under the wool, Telemachus has begun to plan. The coming-of-age the whole book has pushed toward happens, quietly, in the dark, as the poem lets Book 1 go.
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Odyssey 1.443 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/1.443/