Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Telemachus.
The gallery
The Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis
Jacques-Louis David, 1818
David's late Neoclassical oil (J. Paul Getty Museum) shows Telemachus parting from the nymph Eucharis on Calypso's island — an episode drawn from Fénelon's Télémaque rather than Homer, yet inseparable from the modern image of Odysseus's son. Painted in Brussels in 1818, the canvas pairs the youth's averted resolve with Eucharis's clinging embrace under cool, sculptural light. It is among the most famous post-Homeric portraits of Telemachus as a sentimental hero of education and duty.
The Sorrow of Telemachus
Angelica Kauffman, 1783
Angelica Kauffman's Metropolitan Museum canvas (1783) finds Telemachus grieving on Calypso's shore, mentored by Athena in the guise of Mentor — again the Fénelon Telemachy that eighteenth-century Europe read as a mirror for princes. Soft colour and measured gesture turn the Homeric son's search for Odysseus into a lesson in virtuous melancholy. Paired with her companion piece of the nymphs of Calypso, the painting fixed Telemachus as a subject of Grand Tour sensibility.
Telemachus and the Nymphs of Calypso
Angelica Kauffman, 1782
In this Metropolitan Museum pendant of 1782, Kauffman stages Telemachus among Calypso's nymphs — the island episode from Fénelon's Les Aventures de Télémaque in which the son nearly forgets Ithaca. Pastoral landscape and graceful grouping translate Homeric wandering into Rococo-Neoclassical charm. Together with The Sorrow of Telemachus, the pair became a staple of Anglophone collecting and of Telemachus's afterlife beyond the Odyssey's first four books.
On screen
The Odyssey
Andrei Konchalovsky
The miniseries follows Telemachus from the suitors' hall to Menelaus' court and back — the son's search for news of his father as the Odyssey's second spine.
Ulysses
Mario Camerini
Camerini's peplum keeps Telemachus in the Ithacan climax — the boy who helps string the bow and clear the hall beside the beggar who is his father.
In play
Les Aventures de Télémaque
François Fénelon
Fénelon's pedagogical romance sends Telemachus wandering with Mentor — the Homeric son rewritten as a mirror for princes, and one of the most-read books of the eighteenth century.
Telemachy
Scholars still call Odyssey books 1–4 the Telemachy — the son's story named as its own epic unit inside the father's.