We are talking about the third and little-known poem that forms part of the trilogy composed of The Iliad and The Odyssey. In essence, it tells the fate of Ulysses after his return to Ithaca.
We must necessarily take a step back and return to the episode of Circe. The sorceress had turned the king’s companions into animals, but Ulysses had eaten an herb suggested by Hermes and was thus immune to Circe’s spells. She surrendered and offered herself to him, and he spent with her what seemed to him a short time, though it was actually more than a year.
In the end, the gods decided that it was time for Ulysses to visit the world of the dead, and Circe, reluctantly, showed him the route westward toward the land of the Cimmerians. After this further ordeal, Ulysses returned to Circe, who wished to keep him with her, but the gods ordered her to let him go.
Circe kept a secret: she had a son named Philogonus, conceived with Ulysses, who was unaware of his existence. Ulysses wandered for another nine years before finally returning to his rocky and beloved Ithaca. There he had to face the suitors and then their relatives, after the slaughter in his palace.
Meanwhile, Philogonus had grown up, and from his mother’s stories had learned that his father was the hero of Troy. At eighteen, he left his mother’s island to seek his father, not knowing whether he was still alive. He was accompanied by comrades, and as they traveled east, they sighted an island. Since they had no provisions left, they stopped to plunder it. It was, in fact, the very island he was searching for — Ithaca — and the king himself came out to defend his land.
The two fought, unaware that they were father and son, and in the end Philogonus triumphed over an aged Ulysses. When Philogonus discovered whom he had slain, he wept bitter tears and gave the hero of Troy a worthy burial. That did not prevent him, however, from marrying Penelope.
The poem does not fail to mention that, in an incredible twist of fate, Telemachus married Circe — the mother of Philogonus.
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