Book 4 · Book Guide
At Sparta, Telemachus and Pisistratus arrive as guests of Menelaus and his wife Helen, in the middle of a wedding feast. Menelaus speaks warmly of Odysseus, and both he and Helen recognize the boy as Odysseus’s son. After much crying and storytelling, Menelaus finally gives the news Telemachus crossed the sea to hear: from the shape-shifting sea-god Proteus, he learned that Odysseus is still alive, but trapped on the island of the nymph Calypso, with no ship and no way home.
The scene then shifts back to Ithaca. The suitors discover that Telemachus has slipped away by sea, and Antinous leads a plan to ambush and kill him on his return. The herald Medon warns Penelope, who collapses in grief and fear for her son, until Athena sends a comforting phantom to her in a dream.
The most famous woman in the world is home in Sparta, calmly running her household as if the ten-year war fought over her happened to someone else. The poem lets that strangeness sit. She blames the madness on Aphrodite; she also, without embarrassment, tells a story where she recognized Odysseus inside Troy and kept his secret. Menelaus’s own story quietly cuts the other way — his Helen tried to trick the men inside the wooden horse. The poem doesn’t referee. It hands you both Helens and lets you decide.
Proteus is a minor sea god who herds seals and knows everything — but he answers questions only if you can hold on while he turns into a lion, a snake, a leopard, a boar, running water, and a tree. Pin him until he gives up, and he must tell the truth. It’s an old folk-tale shape: real knowledge has to be wrestled out of the world. His name is still with us — anything that keeps changing shape is called protean.
To the Greeks, Egypt was old beyond imagining — a land of enormous wealth, deep medicine, and marvels. Greeks really did sail there to trade (and sometimes to raid), so a storm-driven king coming home from Egypt loaded with treasure was an adventure an audience could believe. Even the drug Helen slips into the wine to stop grief comes from Egypt, where, the poem says, the earth grows more medicines than anywhere and every man is a doctor.
Proteus tells Menelaus he won’t die at all: the gods will send him to the Elysian plain at the world’s edge, where there’s no snow, no storm, and life is easiest for men. Don’t mistake it for heaven. Elysium isn’t a reward for being good — it’s for a lucky handful with family ties to the gods, and Menelaus qualifies only because marrying Helen made him Zeus’s son-in-law. Everyone else, hero or not, goes to the gray underworld — which Book 11 will show up close.
Telemachus and Pisistratus drive into Sparta and find Menelaus holding a double wedding feast, marrying off his daughter and bringing home a bride for his son. A servant, Eteoneus, asks whether to take the strangers in. Menelaus scolds him for even asking, remembering how often he himself depended on others’ kindness, and orders the guests welcomed.
The two young men are amazed at the gleaming wealth of the palace. They bathe, are dressed, and sit down to a feast. Telemachus whispers to Pisistratus that the place is like the court of Zeus. Menelaus overhears and says no mortal can match Zeus, but admits he came home rich after long suffering, having lost his brother to murder while he wandered.
Menelaus says that of all the men lost, he mourns Odysseus most, not knowing whether he is alive or dead, and pities his father, wife, and the baby son he left behind. At the mention of his father, Telemachus cries and hides his face in his cloak. Menelaus notices and wonders whether the boy is who he seems.
Helen comes down and at once says the young man must be the son of Odysseus, so closely does he resemble him. Menelaus agrees, and Pisistratus confirms it: this is indeed Telemachus, too modest to speak up himself. All of them are moved to tears, Menelaus wishing aloud that Odysseus had lived so the two friends could have grown old as neighbors.
To ease the grief, Helen slips a drug into the wine that takes away sorrow. Then she tells a story of Odysseus: how he once disguised himself as a beaten beggar and slipped into Troy as a spy. She alone recognized him, bathed him, and swore not to betray him, and he killed many Trojans and carried back word to the Greeks.
Menelaus caps the story with his own. Inside the wooden horse, with the best Greeks hidden, Helen circled it calling out in the voices of their wives, trying to make them give themselves away. Odysseus held the men silent, even clamping his hands over one man’s mouth, and so saved them all until Athena drew Helen away. Then everyone goes to bed.
At dawn Menelaus sits beside Telemachus and asks what brings him so far. Telemachus explains: his house is being devoured by suitors hounding his mother, and he has come to beg for any news of his father’s fate.
Menelaus is angry that cowards would try to take a brave man’s place, and promises Odysseus will destroy them if he returns. Then he tells how he himself was stranded on the island of Pharos off Egypt, becalmed for twenty days, until the sea-nymph Idothea pitied him and revealed that her father, the sea-god Proteus, could tell him how to get home.
Following Idothea’s plan, Menelaus and three men hide under seal skins among Proteus’s seals. At noon the old god comes ashore, counts his seals, and lies down. The men seize him, and he changes into a lion, a serpent, a leopard, a boar, running water, and a tree, but they hold on until he gives up and answers their questions.
Proteus tells Menelaus he must return to Egypt and make proper sacrifices before he can go home. Then he reveals the fates of the other Greeks: Ajax drowned after boasting against the gods, and Agamemnon was murdered at home by Aegisthus. Last, he tells Menelaus that Odysseus is alive, crying on Calypso’s island, held there with no ship and no crew. He also foretells that Menelaus himself will not die but be carried to the blessed Elysian fields.
Menelaus offers Telemachus horses and a chariot, but Telemachus gently declines, since rocky Ithaca is no place for horses, and asks instead for a gift he can store. Menelaus, charmed by his good sense, promises him a beautiful silver mixing bowl made by Hephaestus.
The scene shifts home. Noemon asks Antinous when Telemachus will return his ship, and the suitors realize with shock that Telemachus has actually sailed off to seek his father. Furious, Antinous calls for a fast ship and twenty men to lie in wait and kill Telemachus on his way home, in the strait near the island of Asteris. The others agree.
The herald Medon, who overheard the plot, tells Penelope both that her son has secretly sailed away and that the suitors mean to kill him. She collapses in grief and fear. The old nurse Eurycleia confesses she helped Telemachus go and urges Penelope not to despair but to wash, dress, and pray to Athena, who can save him.
Penelope prays to Athena to protect her son. As she finally falls asleep, the goddess sends a phantom in the shape of her sister Iphthime, which tells her to take heart, for Athena herself guides Telemachus. When Penelope asks about Odysseus, the phantom will not say, and slips away. Meanwhile the suitors sail out and lie in wait at Asteris to ambush her son.
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