Nestor: Homeric Parallel

In Book 2 of The Odyssey, Telemachus faces the suitors in council, is repudiated by them, and sails for the mainland to seek news of his father, as Athena in the guise of Mentor had counseled him. In Book 3 Telemachus arrives on the mainland and approaches Nestor, the "master charioteer" (3:17; Fitzgerald, p. 48), for advice. Pisistratus, the youngest of Nestor's sons, greets Telemachus; Nestor, though he knows only that Odysseus's homecoming is fated to be hard, affirms Telemachus's emergent manhood and recites part of the history of the homecoming of the Greek heroes, including the story of Agamemnon's homecoming and death and his son's punishment of the murderers, a story suggestive of what might be in store for Odysseus and Telemachus. In Book 4 Pisistratus guides Telemachus to the court of Menelaus, where Telemachus meets Helen and hears the story of Menelaus's homecoming.

(from Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, "Ulysses" Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's "Ulysses" [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], p. 30. The first numbers following quotes from The Odyssey [for example, 1:115] refer to book and line numbers in the Greek text; English translations, unless otherwise noted, are from The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fitzgerald [New York: Doubleday, 1961])