TELEGONUS

Son of Odysseus and Circe. At his mother's command he set out to find his father. Landing on the coast of Ithaca, he began to plunder the fields, and Odysseus came out armed against him. Telegonus did not recognise his father, and mortally wounded him with the spine of a sting-ray which Circe had given him to serve as the barb of his lance. When he learned that the wounded man was his father, he took the body home with him, accompanied by Telemachus and Penelope, and subsequently married the latter. He was supposed to be the founder of Tusculum. [Horace, Od. iii 29, 8] and Praeneste, near Rome. [Plutarch, Parall. Min. 41, and Propertius, ii 32, 4. The legend of Telegonus was the theme of the Telegonea, by the cyclic poet Eugammo, of Cyrene. The strange manner in which Odysseus met his end is mentioned in Oppian, Halieutica ii 497.]