In his second appearance to Aeneas in Aeneid 4 Mercury drives the hero to flee Carthage with a false allegation that Dido is planning an attack, capping his warning with an infamous sententia about the mutability of female emotion. Building on a previous suggestion that Mercury's first speech to Aeneas is modelled on Athena's admonishment of Telemachus at the opening of Odyssey 15, this article proposes that Mercury's second speech as well is modelled on Athena's warning, in which the goddess uses misdirection about Penelope's intentions and a misogynistic gnōmē about the changeability of women's affections to spur Telemachus’ departure from Sparta. After setting out how Virgil divides his imitation of Athena's speech verbally and thematically between Mercury's two speeches, the discussion turns to why both Athena and Mercury adopt these deceptive tactics. The speeches are shown to be culminations of the poets’ similar approaches to creating doubt and foreboding around the queens’ famed capacities for using δόλος. Common features in the ensuing hasty departures of Telemachus and Aeneas further confirm Virgil's use of Odyssey 15 in devising Aeneas’ escape from Carthage.

This article focuses on the interrelationship between two events taking place simultaneously in Odysseus’ megaron: Phemius’ performance and the conversation between Telemachus and Athena. I argue that at Hom. Od. 1.298–302 Athena, in her mention of Orestes’ kleos, refers directly to Phemius’ song that Telemachus can hear from where he is sitting. This reading sheds new light on the characters’ receptions of Phemius’ song. Between the well-known contrasting responses of the nearest and the farthest audiences – the suitors’ silence and Penelope's over-reaction – stands Athena's cognitively constructive use of it, by which the goddess attempts to establish a shared understanding with Telemachus, whose kleos is one of the main concerns of her visit to Ithaca.

The regularly occurring Homeric motif τρὶς μέν … τρὶς δέ shares key characteristics with both formulas and type scenes. Like a formula, it is a group of metrically localized words that refers regularly to the same idea. Like a type scene, it describes a series of discrete events that feature ‘repeated attempts to do something, often by two different characters’. This motif evokes the same basic theme in the narratives of both Homeric poems: a vigorous hero gains the sympathy of the audience in the course of repeated attempts, usually in vain, to surmount a powerful opposing force. As with many forms of narrative repetition in Homeric epic, most of the instances of the τρὶς μέν … τρὶς δέ motif display regular narrative patterns, and then a few key scenes elaborate on those patterns in order to create moments of outstanding poetic and emotional force. Highly developed examples of this motif make significant contributions to the aristeia of Patroclus in Iliad 16, the death of Hector in Iliad 22 and Telemachus’ attempt to string Odysseus’ bow in Odyssey 21.