Welcome to the new ongoing series on the channel! Homer's Odyssey! I could not be more excited about this and I hope you are too - it is an epic poem that needs no introduction.
Book 1 of the Odyssey does not concern Odysseus very much but instead forms part of the 'Telemachae' - the part of the Odyssey that is all about his son, Telemachus and his bid to save Ithaca, and his mother Penelope, from the literal horde of suitors that have besieged his home since Odysseus left for the Trojan War.
For the curious, you may notice that Athena has two different voices depending on whether or not she is presenting as herself or as Mentes (a guest-friend of Odysseus.) This is to reflect the fact that in the Greek, Athena receives pronouns, adjectives and participles that all inflect with a feminine grammatical gender to reflect the fact that they're agreeing with Athena herself. However, when she is disguised and presenting as Mentes, all of her associated words shift their grammatical agreement to the masculine gender - which becomes emphatic to the audience because they know that Mentes is really Athena and Telemachus doesn't know. The change in grammatical agreement is intentionally designed to emphasise this and I have chosen to reflect this better in the English by adopting two different voices when reading the lines of either Athena or Mentes.
Please enjoy.