Characters
- Circe — mother of Telegonus; grants immortality; marries Telemachus (cyclic close)
- Daughters of Celeus — Thesprotian queen; wife of Odysseus; mother of Polypoetes
- Odysseus — returns from Thesprotia; slain unknowingly by Telegonus
- Polypoetes — son of Odysseus and Callidice; left as Thesprotian king
- Teiresias — earlier prophecy of a death “from the sea” (*Odyssey* 11)
- Telegonus — son of Odysseus and Circe; seeks his father; kills him; takes survivors to Aeaea
- Telemachus — taken to Aeaea; married to Telegonus in the summary
Places
- Circe’s land — Circe’s island; Telegonus’s home; final immortalizations
- Ithaca — cattle raid; death of Odysseus
- The deep — source of the stingray spine; Teiresias’s riddle
- Thesprotia — Odysseus’s post-*Odyssey* sojourn and marriage
Themes
Narrative
After the slaughter of the suitors and the restored peace on Ithaca, the *Telegony* (as Proclus summarizes) sends Odysseus to the Thesprotians. He marries their queen Callidice, leads them in war, and, when she dies, leaves the kingdom to their son Polypoetes and returns to Ithaca.
Meanwhile Telegonus, Odysseus’s son by Circe on Aeaea, grown to manhood, sails in search of his father. Landing on Ithaca, he raids the island’s cattle; Odysseus comes out to defend his herds. In ignorance father and son fight; Telegonus kills Odysseus with a spear tipped with the spine of a stingray—fulfilling Teiresias’s riddle that death would come “from the sea.”
When Telegonus learns whom he has slain, he laments, takes the corpse, Penelope, and Telemachus to Aeaea. Circe makes them immortal (or confers lasting life). Telegonus marries Penelope; Telemachus marries Circe—closing the cycle in a strange afterlife of reconciliations on the witch’s island. Apollodorus preserves related genealogical closes (including variants of Odysseus’s end). The *Telegony* thus caps the Trojan cycle with patricide unrecognized and a final voyage beyond Homer’s homecoming.