After overcoming great challenges, including escaping the cyclopes, resisting the sweet calls of the sirens, surviving an encounter with the monsters Scylla and Charybdis, and Journeying through Hell, Odysseus finally returns to his family. Odysseus’s epic journey home creates the main storyline in Homer’s epic, yet there is an underlying story of his son, Telemachos, accomplishing the journey into manhood. Telemachos is introduces as merely a boy, yet throughout the epic he is forced to overcome seemingly impossible hardships. By completing each difficulty, he gains new insights and grows in his experience. When his father retakes authority over his home Telemachos has grown from a child into a man.
Telemachos is introduced as being fearful of the suitors. Still immature, Telemachos clings to his childlike imagination. “his heart deep grieving within him, imagining in his mind…show more content… You should not go on clinging to your childhood. You are no longer of an age to do that. or have you not heard what glory was won by great Orestes among all mankind, when he killed the murderer of his father, the treacherous Aigisthos, who had slain his famous father? So you too, dear friend, since I can see you are big and splendid, be bold also, so that in generations to come they will praise you.6
This is Athena’s call to action to Telemachos to shed his childlike qualities and develop into the man the he needs to be. Athena tells him of the glory other sons have already gained because they took action. Telemachos did not need to rely on another in order to get saved, but he can save himself. He can become the man that is needed in order to take back the household.