Return to Ithaca — Return to Ithaca (Ἰθάκη), landfall 5 of 5 on the search of telemachus
Homer's Odyssey, Book XV–XVI. Past the ambush, to the swineherd's hut — and the reunion. Traditional location: Ithaki, Ionian Islands, Greece.
Warned by Athena that death waits in the strait, Telemachus sails from Pylos by night. At the ship he takes aboard a fugitive — Theoclymenus the seer, fleeing a blood-feud — and steers wide of the channel where the suitors' ship lurks off Asteris, slipping past the ambush in the dark.
As he lands on Ithaca, a hawk sweeps by tearing a dove — Theoclymenus reads it plainly: no house on the island is more kingly than yours. Following Athena's instructions, Telemachus goes not to the town but inland, to the hut of Eumaeus the loyal swineherd — where an old beggar sits by the fire.
When Eumaeus steps out, Athena touches the beggar with her wand: taller, younger, in fresh clothes — his father. 'I am no god,' Odysseus says. 'I am your father.' Telemachus, who has never seen him, falls into his arms; the two weep louder than birds robbed of their young. Together, by the fire, they begin to plot the suitors' destruction.
The fugitive seer
Athena comes to Telemachus in the night at Sparta: time to go — and go carefully, for the suitors have set a ship in ambush. He takes his leave, drives back to the coast, and at the gangplank at Pylos a stranger comes running: Theoclymenus, a seer of the great mantic line of Melampus, a killer with kinsmen's blood-vengeance at his heels, begging passage.
Telemachus takes him aboard without hesitation — the fugitive suppliant is under Zeus' protection, and the young man has learned his courts well. He is also, without knowing it, bringing home the voice that will prophesy the suitors' doom at his own table.
Running the ambush
The suitors' ship waits in the strait of Asteris, between Ithaca and Same, with lookouts on the windy heights — twenty picked men under Antinous, sworn to kill the prince at sea and make it look like the sea.
Warned by the goddess, Telemachus does what his father would do: sails the other geometry. Out past the Elian coast by night, then a hard cut across open water to Ithaca's southern shore, standing away from the harbour entirely. The map shows the wide berth. The ambush watches an empty channel until, days later, the suitors' ship slinks home; Antinous' first plan has failed in the dark without a spear thrown.
Apollo's hawk
As Telemachus steps ashore, a hawk — Apollo's swift messenger — sweeps past on the right, a dove in its talons, tearing the feathers out between the ship and the boy himself.
Theoclymenus draws him aside from the crew and pays his passage in the seer's coin: no house in Ithaca is more kingly than yours; yours is the power forever. The fugitive's first prophecy on new soil, and it lands on the right ear at the right hour — the prince comes home knowing the gods are voting for his house.
Ashore by stealth
Following Athena's instructions to the letter, Telemachus sends the ship on to the town without him — let the suitors see it arrive empty of its target — and strikes inland on foot, alone, across his own island by the hill paths.
His destination is not the palace. It is a pig-farm in the uplands: the steading of Eumaeus, the loyal swineherd, the one household of the kingdom where a son of Odysseus is perfectly safe. The lesson of Agamemnon, taught at Pylos and Sparta, has been learned: never walk straight through your own front door.
The swineherd's hut
Eumaeus drops his work and kisses the prince like a father — like a father, Homer insists, welcoming a son home from ten years abroad; the slave swineherd is the poem's model of faithfulness, addressed by the poet himself, uniquely, in the second person: 'then, Eumaeus, you answered...'.
By the fire sits yesterday's guest: an old beggar in wretched rags, who rises to give the newcomer his seat. Telemachus courteously refuses to displace him. Father and son are now in one room, and only one of them knows it.
The rags fall away
Eumaeus is sent to the palace with a message for Penelope, and the moment he is gone Athena appears at the gate — visible to Odysseus and the dogs, not to the boy — and touches the beggar with her golden wand.
Taller, firm-fleshed, dark-bearded again, in fresh clothes: Telemachus averts his eyes, certain this is a god transformed. The answer is the plainest sentence in the poem, twenty years in the making: I am no god. I am your father — for whose sake you have grieved and suffered, and borne men's violence in your house.
“I am no god — why liken me to the immortals? I am your father.” — Odyssey XVI, 187–188
Louder than birds of prey
Telemachus throws his arms around his father and both men break at once — they wail, Homer says, more piercingly than birds of prey, ospreys or vultures, whose unfledged young the farmers have taken; and they would have cried till sundown had the boy not thought to ask how his father came home.
Then, that same evening, by the swineherd's fire, the two of them count the enemy — a hundred and eight suitors against the two of us? — and begin to plot the reckoning that ends the Odyssey. The son's journey is complete: he sailed away a boy looking for news of a dead man, and sits down beside a living father as his ally in war. Here the two voyages of this map become one story.
Asteris found?: Homer's ambush island 'in the strait between Ithaca and rugged Same, not large, with harbours open both ways' is usually identified with Daskalio, the only islet in the channel between Ithaca and Kefalonia — barely a ship's length of rock. On this map it is marked where the suitors waited, as the annotation on the return leg.