“Telemachus, I shall go upstairs and lie down on that sad couch, which I have not ceased to water with my tears, from the day Ulysses set out for Troy with the sons of Atreus.  You failed, however, to make it clear to me before the suitors came back to the house, whether or no you had been able to hear anything about the return of your father.”

“I will tell you then truth,” replied her son.  “We went to Pylos and saw Nestor, who took me to his house and treated me as hospitably as though I were a son of his own who had just returned after a long absence; so also did his sons; but he said he had not heard a word from any human being about Ulysses, whether he was alive or dead.  He sent me, therefore, with a chariot and horses to Menelaus.  There I saw Helen, for whose sake so many, both Argives and Trojans, were in heaven’s wisdom doomed to suffer.  Menelaus asked me what it was that had brought me to Lacedaemon, and I told him the whole truth, whereon he said, ’So, then, these cowards would usurp a brave man’s bed?  A hind might as well lay her new-born young in the lair of a lion, and then go off to feed in the forest or in some grassy dell.  The lion, when he comes back to his lair, will make short work with the pair of them, and so will Ulysses with these suitors.  By father Jove, Minerva, and Apollo, if Ulysses is still the man that he was when he wrestled with Philomeleides in Lesbos, and threw him so heavily that all the Greeks cheered him—­if he is still such, and were to come near these suitors, they would have a short shrift and a sorry wedding.  As regards your question, however, I will not prevaricate nor deceive you, but what the old man of the sea told me, so much will I tell you in full.  He said he could see Ulysses on an island sorrowing bitterly in the house of the nymph Calypso, who was keeping him prisoner, and he could not reach his home, for he had no ships nor sailors to take him over the sea.’  This was what Menelaus told me, and when I had heard his story I came away; the gods then gave me a fair wind and soon brought me safe home again.”

With these words he moved the heart of Penelope.  Then Theoclymenus said to her: 

“Madam, wife of Ulysses, Telemachus does not understand these things; listen therefore to me, for I can divine them surely, and will hide nothing from you.  May Jove the king of heaven be my witness, and the rites of hospitality, with that hearth of Ulysses to which I now come, that Ulysses himself is even now in Ithaca, and, either going about the country or staying in one place, is enquiring into all these evil deeds and preparing a day of reckoning for the suitors.  I saw an omen when I was on the ship which meant this, and I told Telemachus about it.”

“May it be even so,” answered Penelope; “if your words come true, you shall have such gifts and such good will from me that all who see you shall congratulate you.”