Summary

The Twenty Second Chapter opens with Circe asking Telegonus why he thinks Penelope and Telemachus arrived at Aiaia. Though he reveals that Penelope suggested the trip, he replies that he has no clue why she requested as much. The two return to the house and wait out the afternoon doing menial chores. After dinner, Penelope and Telegonus go to bed, and Circe tells Telemachus stories of his father. These stories, however, are not the versions she had told Telegonus, "with their happy endings and non-fatal wounds" (319). Circe tells the youth how Odysseus murdered and abandoned and tricked his brethren, how he slit mens throats while they slept and slept with a multitude of women. She finishes by telling Telemachus of Odysseus' encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus, whom Odysseus blinded with a stake. When she is done, Telemachus...