Historicity of this figure
Belongs to poetic or mythological construction rather than to history. This page describes a figure of a literary and mythological tradition. Where the tradition disagrees with itself, the disagreement is set out rather than resolved.
In the Odyssey
He is present in the poem long before he appears. Anticleia tells her son among the dead in Book 11 that his father no longer comes to town, sleeps in the ashes by the fire in winter and on fallen leaves in the vineyard, and grieves. Penelope's shroud — the trick that holds the suitors off for three years — is woven for him, which is why the excuse is unrefusable.
He appears in Book 24, in his orchard, spading around a plant, in a patched tunic and stitched leather leggings and a goatskin cap, looking like a slave. Odysseus watches him and weeps.
And then, instead of revealing himself, he tests him. He invents another false story — a man from Alybas, who entertained Odysseus five years ago — and watches his father pour dust over his head and groan. Only then does he say who he is, and prove it twice: by the scar, and by naming the trees Laertes gave him when he was a boy following him around the garden. Thirteen pear trees, ten apple, forty fig, and rows of vines.
Athena then makes him taller and stronger, and in the fight that follows he throws the spear that kills Eupeithes, the father of Antinous. Three generations of the family stand in the field together before Athena stops the fighting.
Why the scene is there
The testing of Laertes is the most criticised thing Odysseus does in the poem, including by readers who accept the massacre. There is no strategic reason for it. The suitors are dead; the secrecy is over; the old man is broken with grief.
The poem offers no justification and does not need one. It has spent twenty-two books establishing that this is a man who cannot approach anyone without a cover story, and Book 24 shows the habit outlasting its usefulness. Whether that is characterisation or a defect of the poem is one of the arguments about the authenticity of Book 24.
The recognition by the trees is, against that, the gentlest thing in the poem. The proof is a boy walking through an orchard asking for the names of things, remembered accurately forty years later.
Other ancient traditions
Some later sources list him among the Argonauts. Homer does not.
Later reception
Little independent life. He is a component of the Odysseus story rather than a figure with his own tradition.
In modern adaptation
He is the character adaptations cut most reliably, including the 2026 film, which omits him entirely. The reason is structural: he belongs to a final movement that runs past the emotional climax of the marriage bed, and film endings do not easily accommodate a second recognition after the reunion. What is lost with him is the poem's three-generation frame and the sense that a household is a thing that persists over time rather than a couple. See what the film changed.
What this page does not claim
No historical claim is made.