What Was Happening Back in Ithaca While Odysseus Was Gone
While Odysseus was fighting at Troy, then drifting across the sea for years, then sitting on Calypso's island staring at the horizon — his son grew from a baby into a young man, his wife held off a palace full of men who wanted her dead husband's kingdom, and the whole household slowly fell apart. This is the other half of the Odyssey that doesn't always get told.
By BookOfWorldHistory·May 8, 2026·History·12 min read · 2,280 words
Originally published at: https://www.bookofworldhistory.com/blog/telemachus-penelope-suitors-ithaca-odysseus-away-odyssey
While Odysseus was fighting at Troy, then drifting across the sea for years, then sitting on Calypso's island staring at the horizon — his son grew from a baby into a young man, his wife held off a palace full of men who wanted her dead husband's kingdom, and the whole household slowly fell apart. This is the other half of the Odyssey that doesn't always get told.
The Odyssey is Odysseus's story — his name is in the title, his travels fill most of the pages, his cleverness and stubbornness carry the plot. But there is a parallel story running alongside his, happening in the same years, carrying its own weight of grief and patience and quiet courage. It's the story of the people he left behind.
Telemachus was still a baby when his father sailed for Troy. By the time the events of the Odyssey begin, he has grown into a young man who has no real memory of the hero everyone compares him to, who has watched strangers eat through his household year after year, and who has had to stand quietly at the edge of things while men far older and more powerful than him ran roughshod over everything his father built.
Penelope held on. The story she told the suitors — that she would give them her answer when she finished the robe she was weaving — bought her three years. Every night she undid the day's work with her own hands in the dark. Every morning she started again. It was a delaying action, not a solution, and eventually someone in her household told the suitors what she was doing. The night unraveling had to stop. The pressure came back, harder than before.
This is what Ithaca looked like while Odysseus was at Troy, then lost at sea, then imprisoned on Calypso's island for eight years.
While Odysseus was lost at sea for twenty years, Penelope kept the suitors at bay through patience, cleverness, and a weaving trick that bought her three years — and Telemachus grew from a baby into a young man trying to hold his father's kingdom together against men far more powerful than himself.
The Suitors — What They Were Actually Doing
The lords and chiefs of Ithaca had always admired Penelope. She was beautiful and known to be wise — qualities that attracted attention. But what actually drove the suitors to move into Odysseus's palace was something less romantic: the land and money that came with her. Odysseus was almost certainly dead, they said. Telemachus was young and couldn't stop anything. So they came, and they stayed.
They ate the food that belonged to Odysseus's household, drank the wine, entertained themselves, and every day pressed Penelope to name which one of them she would marry. Year after year. The roughness and greed of it wore on her constantly, but what troubled her more was the impossibility of the situation — she could not marry any of them, but she also could not make them leave.
Her solution with the loom was genuinely clever and bought her years. She told the suitors she would give her answer when she finished weaving a robe. She worked on it visibly every day. What the suitors didn't know was that every night she unpicked the day's weaving in the dark and started fresh in the morning. The robe never got finished because she made sure it wouldn't.
Three years this worked. Then a maid told the suitors what she was doing, and the trick was finished. Complete the robe, they told her. No more delays. Choose a husband.
Telemachus watched all of this and could do very little about it. The suitors dismissed him openly — he was only a lad, they said, what could he do? They were wrong about what he was becoming.
Penelope's trick of weaving by day and unraveling by night bought her three years before a maid revealed the scheme to the suitors — a quiet act of defiance that preserved her freedom for as long as it could while the men eating through her household grew more aggressive with every passing season.
The Stranger at the Door — Athene Visits Telemachus
One day Telemachus was sitting at the palace door watching the suitors drink and carry on, thinking about his father, when a stranger appeared at the courtyard gate — a warrior from elsewhere, carrying a heavy bronze spear.
Telemachus didn't know he was looking at a goddess. Athene had come to Ithaca in disguise, and at the same moment the gods had agreed to allow Odysseus to leave Calypso's island, they had agreed she could come and do something about his son. She came dressed as a warrior, not as the grey-eyed goddess she was.
Telemachus stood up, welcomed the stranger properly, took the spear, gave up the best seat in the hall, and had food and wine brought. He kept the stranger away from the noise of the suitors. When the guest had eaten, he spoke — quietly, and with more feeling than he might have shown to someone he didn't trust for no reason he could name.
He spoke about his father. He talked about the suitors. He asked if this warrior had perhaps traveled through places where Odysseus might have been heard of.
Athene told him what he needed to hear: his father was alive, held on an island, but not for much longer. The wandering was coming to an end. And then she looked at him directly and told him something that mattered as much as the news about Odysseus — that he looked like his father, had his face and his eyes, and that it was time to act like it.
What Athene Told Him to Do — and What Changed in Him
She laid out a plan. Tomorrow, call a council of the lords — something that hadn't happened since Odysseus sailed for Troy. Stand up in front of everyone and tell the suitors to go home. Then fit out a ship with twenty oarsmen and go looking for news of his father, because a son who doesn't know what happened to his father is not yet fully himself.
She told him he was tall and handsome and should be brave enough that people would still be praising his name years later. She told him the way a father speaks to a son he is proud of.
Telemachus said he would never forget what she had said, and he meant it. He wanted to give her a gift before she left. She wouldn't take one. What she left behind instead — though he didn't know it until she was gone and the difference in himself was too obvious to miss — was something placed directly into his heart. Strength. Courage. The decision that whatever happened, he would act.
When she flew away across the sea like a bird, what remained in Odysseus's hall was not the frightened, sad boy who had been sitting at the door watching men destroy his household. Something had shifted.
Athene came to Telemachus disguised as a warrior from another land — bringing news that his father was alive and would return, and leaving behind something she placed directly into the young man's heart that turned a frightened boy who had been watching helplessly into someone ready to act.
The Night Before the Council — Telemachus Speaks to His Mother
That same evening, a minstrel in the hall was singing about the Greek warriors returning home from Troy. Penelope heard it from her room upstairs. She came down, stood by the door and listened for a moment, then asked the singer, through tears, to please choose something else — she couldn't bear songs about return from Troy when her husband was the one who never returned.
Telemachus answered before the minstrel could. He spoke to his mother in a way that made her look at him differently, with something between surprise and recognition.
He told her, gently but clearly, not to blame the singer. Sad songs came from the gods, not from the men who sang them. She wasn't the only woman in the world who had lost someone at Troy. She should go back upstairs, and let him handle what happened in this hall, because he was now the head of the house.
Then he turned to the suitors and told them they could finish their feast tonight, but tomorrow there would be a council meeting, and the question of whether they were going to keep doing this or whether he was going to be master of his own house was going to be settled once and for all.
The suitors were angry. They mocked him. Some of them answered rudely. Telemachus paid no attention to any of it, went upstairs, and lay wrapped in wool thinking through everything Athene had told him, until sleep came.
The Council — Eagles Overhead and Suitors Who Wouldn't Listen
At dawn Telemachus dressed, buckled on his sword, took a bronze spear in hand, and had heralds summon the lords to assembly. When he walked into the hall and sat in his father's seat, the oldest men moved aside to make room. Athene had put something on him that made him look, one lord said, like a young god.
An old lord welcomed the council — the first one since Odysseus had sailed — and wished the man who called it well. Telemachus stood up and spoke. He talked about his father's absence with grief that was genuine and years old. Then he talked about the suitors with the sharp, burning anger of someone who has been watching something wrong happen for a very long time and has finally decided to say so out loud. The feasting. The drinking. The wasting of his household. The daily pressure on Penelope. The contempt for him.
He finished speaking and burst into tears. The hall was quiet.
Then one of the suitors stood and pushed back. Penelope was the problem, he said — she was the one who had been stringing them along with the weaving trick for three years. She needed to finish the robe and pick a husband. Until she did, the suitors weren't going anywhere.
Telemachus tried again to move them. As he spoke, two eagles came over from a mountain crest, flying side by side until they were directly over the assembly. Then they wheeled on each other, tore at each other's heads with their talons, and flew away. An old man read the sign plainly: Odysseus was coming back, and the wooers would suffer for what they had done.
The suitors jeered at him. Go prophesy to your own children, they said. Odysseus is dead. And to Telemachus: we'll keep feasting until your mother chooses one of us.
Only one other man in the assembly, a friend named Mentor, spoke up for Telemachus. The suitors laughed at him too.
The council broke up. The suitors went back to the palace to feast again. Telemachus walked down to the shore alone.
The council Telemachus called in Ithaca — the first since Odysseus had sailed for Troy — produced two eagles fighting overhead as an omen of the king's return, interpreted correctly by one old man and dismissed with contempt by suitors who had no intention of leaving the palace they were steadily consuming.
The Voyage — Leaving Without Telling His Mother
At the shore Telemachus knelt in the sand where the small waves broke and called out to the stranger who had visited him. He knew now he had been speaking to a god. He asked how he was supposed to find a ship and crew with no one willing to help him.
Athene came swiftly and told him not to worry about the ship — she would handle that. He should go back and get provisions ready, and she would find the fastest ship in Ithaca and man it with willing men.
He went back through the palace courtyard where the suitors were slaughtering goats and burning pig fat and getting ready for another large meal. They mocked him as he passed — there goes Telemachus, plotting against us. If he goes on a voyage maybe he'll be like his father and never come back, and then we'll split the estate among ourselves.
Telemachus ignored them and went down to his father's storeroom where the gold and bronze were kept, the great jars of wine, the piles of fine clothes. The old woman who had been his nurse since childhood kept the keys. He told her what he needed — corn and wine in sealed containers for the voyage. Keep it quiet, he said. Don't tell my mother I'm going until she notices I'm gone. I don't want her face ruined with weeping.
The old nurse cried. She begged him not to go. He was their only one, she said. Odysseus was probably dead. What could one young man do sailing alone across the sea? The suitors would plot against him the moment he left.
Telemachus told her Athene had told him to go, so he was going. He asked her again to keep the secret, and she promised.
That night, after Penelope had gone to bed, Athene — wearing Telemachus's face — went through Ithaca and found twenty young men willing to crew the ship. She also sent sleep over the suitors so they wouldn't notice the movement at the harbor. When darkness was full, Telemachus led his chosen crew quietly down to the water, loaded the provisions the old nurse had prepared, and went aboard.
Athene sat beside him as the ship moved out. A west wind filled the sails and the dark water surged up at the bow as the hull cut through it. All through the night and into dawn the ship sailed. When the sun rose they made land, and Athene gave Telemachus into the care of the rulers of that place while she flew away as a sea-eagle, leaving the people on shore staring after her knowing they had seen a goddess.
Back in Ithaca the suitors eventually noticed the ship was gone and that Telemachus was with it. Their reaction was immediate and what you'd expect: they got a ship of their own and sailed to a narrow strait between Ithaca and a rocky neighboring island to wait. When Telemachus came back, they were going to kill him.
Penelope found out. Someone told her, not gently. Her son was at sea. Men with spears were waiting to intercept his ship. The grief of it on top of everything else she had been carrying nearly broke her.
The old nurse, when Penelope turned on her, admitted she had known and kept the secret on Telemachus's orders — he didn't want her face ruined with weeping, the nurse said. And then she said the thing that was true and that Penelope needed to hear: Athene had told him to go. The goddess who had already intervened to start bringing Odysseus home was watching over his son as well.
Penelope wept for a long time that night. When she finally slept, Athene came to her in a dream — a shape that looked like her sister — and told her Telemachus would come home safely. She woke with a lighter heart than she had fallen asleep with.
Out on the dark water, in the rocky strait between islands, the suitors sat in their ship with spears in their hands, waiting for a young man they planned to murder before he could bring his father back.
Telemachus slipped out of Ithaca by night with a crew of twenty willing men and a west wind Athene sent to fill the sails — while behind him, the suitors who discovered his absence immediately took their own ship to a narrow strait between islands and sat there with weapons, waiting to kill him on his return.