Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Laertes.
The gallery
Penelope, Laertes and Telemachus (BnF Français 874, fol. 3v)
Unknown (French illuminator), c. 15th century
A fifteenth-century French miniature in the Bibliothèque nationale de France gathers Penelope, aged Laertes and young Telemachus — the Ithacan household waiting while Odysseus wanders. Laertes appears as the retired king, grief and orchard still ahead of him in the Odyssey's last books.
Penelope, Laertes and Telemachus (BnF Français 874, fol. 8v)
Unknown (French illuminator), c. 15th century
Another leaf from the same BnF manuscript returns to Laertes with Penelope and Telemachus, the court of Ithaca imaged as a late-medieval family group. The illuminator keeps the father of Odysseus inside the homecoming story long before the orchard recognition.
Fragment of a Sarcophagus with Odysseus and Laertes
Unknown Roman sculptor, c. 150 AD
A Roman marble sarcophagus fragment in the Museo Barracco, Rome, shows Odysseus reunited with his aged father Laertes. The orchard recognition of Odyssey XXIV — scar, trees, and tears — becomes funerary relief, the nostos carved as a son's return to an old man among his vines.