Idomeneus

He never appears. He’s a name dropped in a lying tale. When Odysseus walks up to Laertes in the orchard, he doesn’t reveal himself first. He pretends to be a traveler with news. He says he met a man named Odysseus once, in Crete, at the palace of King Idomeneus, blown off course by storms. A good man. A man of consequence. Then the lie tightens: dead, the ship went down, no one survived. He watches his father break in front of him to test what is left of the old man. Idomeneus is the prop: a real Trojan War hero, a Cretan king who fought at Troy alongside Odysseus, exactly the kind of name Laertes would recognize and trust as anchoring detail in a stranger’s tale. Homer uses Idomeneus’s court as the standard backdrop for Odysseus’s lying tales. The retelling uses him the same way, once, then drops him.