Summary
Athena goes to Sparta and urges Telemachus to return, warning him of the ambush and telling him to land at the far end of the island and go first to Eumaeus.
Menelaus and Helen give parting gifts. As they leave, an eagle carrying a goose flies past; Helen interprets it as Odysseus's return and vengeance.
At Pylos Telemachus avoids delay by not going up to Nestor's house. A fugitive seer, Theoclymenus, asks passage and is taken aboard.
Meanwhile Eumaeus tells his own story: he was the son of a king of Syrie, stolen as a child by a Phoenician woman who had herself been enslaved, sold to Laertes, and raised in the household. Telemachus lands safely, sends the ship on to the city, and goes to the farm.
Narrative function
Brings father and son into the same building, and completes the Telemachy by returning its traveller.
Greek concepts in this book
- oiōnos
- A bird omen. Helen's reading of the eagle and goose is the second of three such omens pointing at the killing of the suitors.
Connections to other books
Book 4
Resolves the ambush prepared by the suitors in Book 4.
Book 14
Eumaeus's biography answers the question his hospitality in Book 14 raised: why a slave keeps faith with a house.
Book 16
Sets up the recognition between father and son in the following book.
Source notes
Eumaeus's account (15.403-484) is the poem's fullest description of the mechanics of enslavement: piracy, child-stealing, and sale by traders. It is told by a slave, about himself, without editorial comment.
Reading it responsibly
The poem gives its most loyal servant a royal birth. That can be read as sentimental — nobility will out — or as the sharpest thing the poem says about slavery: the difference between the man who owns and the man who is owned is, in Eumaeus's own account, a matter of who was on which ship. He says elsewhere that a man loses half his worth the day he becomes a slave. He is describing himself.