Character
Laertes
Odysseus's father · former king of Ithaca
Odysseus's father, who has withdrawn from the palace to a farm in the hills and let himself go grey with grief, sleeping among the servants in the ashes. He is the last person Odysseus reveals himself to, and the reunion is deliberately cruel and tender at once: his son tests him with a false story before proving who he is by naming the trees Laertes gave him as a boy. In the final book the old man puts on armour again and kills the man who leads the suitors' families against them.
Their reunion is the poem's most uncomfortable: Odysseus tests his grieving father with a lie before telling the truth, and readers have argued about why for centuries.