Telemachus transforms in body and mind as Odysseus fights to return home from Troy. His development is split among three distinct stages: childhood, adolescence, and manhood. Before he is visited by Pallas Athena, he is merely a flighty, capricious boy. Galvanized by his visits from Athena, who is disguised as Mentes and then Mentor, Telemachus enters his adolescence as he prepares to sail to Pylos and Sparta. By the time he has successfully completed his journey and seen the return of his father and the downfall of the suitors, he has completed his metamorphosis and become a full-fledged man.
Prior to his visits from Pallas Athena, Telemachus is young, grief-stricken boy lacking hope. He is anxious and intimated by the suitors, and they do not regard him as much of a threat to mount the throne they so desire. His downtrodden, depressed, hopeless, and passive nature is well-outlined by this quote in Book 1: “First to see her (Athena) was Prince Telemachus, heart obsessed with grief. He could almost see his magnificent father... if only he might... regain his pride of place and rule his own domains!” (Book 1: Line 132) This quote illustrates Telemachus’s sheer wistfulness, youth, and inability to help himself.
Once he has conferenced with Pallas Athena, Telemachus is emboldened. Just the mere presence of a god has thrust him into adolescence and all of the instability and uncertainty that comes along with it. He is no longer a timid child; in fact, he can even be caught ordering around his own mother, a true sign of adolescence if ever there was one. “So mother, back to your quarters. Tend to your own tasks, the distaff and the loom, and keep the women working hard as well. As for giving orders, men will see to that, but I most of all: I hold the reins of power in this house.” (Book 1: Line 409) Further illustrating his development, some distinctly teenage emotional highs and lows plague Telemachus as he continues to grow. “Filled with anger, down on the ground he dashed the speaker’s scepter-- bursting into tears” (Book 2: Line 87) Grown men are allowed to cry; Odysseus himself does so frequently on Phaeacia. However, they are not allowed to throw the type of tantrum Telemachus threw while trying to chastise the suitors. He has grown some, but he still has yet a long way to go at this point in The Odyssey.
Telemachus is a full man upon his return to Ithaca, as demonstrated by his shrewdness and wittiness, but especially by his boldness and self-confidence. He no longer thinks of himself as a child, and has a sense of morality that Odysseus either lost or never had, as portrayed by his last minute decision: “…Prince Telemachus heard his pleas and quickly said to his father close beside him, ‘Stop, don’t cut him down! This one’s innocent. So is the herald Medon- the one who always tended me in the house when I was little- spare him too.’”(Book 22: Line 374). He also shows his maturity and patience while he and his father bided their time, waiting for the right moment to strike down the suitors. “So they (the suitors) jeered, but the prince paid no attention... silent, eyes riveted on his father, always waiting the moment he’d lay hands on that outrageous mob.” (Book 20: Line 428).Telemachus begins The Odyssey a boy not even on the cusp of adolescence. His maturation process is expedited by a visit from Pallas Athena, and her galvanizing visits send him off into the uncharted waters of adolescence. By the time he and Odysseus cut down the suitors in Odysseus’s halls, he is a grown man, and a shrewd one at that. He now possess strong ethics and a heightened sense of morality, and we begin to see some of the shrewdness and wit inherited from Odysseus himself. Telemachus truly embodies the growth of a boy to a man, yet another universal truth that allows The Odyssey to remain relevant even today.
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