The slender plot fills out a gap in Homer's Odyssey, recounting the educational travels of Telemachus, son of Ulysses, accompanied by his tutor, Mentor, who is revealed early on in the story to be Minerva, goddess of wisdom, in disguise.

Over and over, Mentor denounces war, luxury, and selfishness and proclaims the brotherhood of man and the necessity of altruism (though that term would only be coined in the 19th century by Auguste Comte).

Although set in a far off place and ancient time, Télémaque was immediately recognized by contemporaries as a scathing rebuke to the autocratic reign of Louis XIV of France, whose wars and taxes on the peasantry had reduced the country to famine.

[2] One of the most popular works of the century, it was an immediate best-seller both in France and abroad, going through many editions and translated into every European language and even Latin verse (first in Berlin in 1743, then in Paris by Étienne Viel [1737–87]).

[7] One critic explains the popularity of Télémaque this way: Fénelon's story stood as a powerful rebuke to the aristocratic court culture that dominated European societies, with its perceived artificiality, hypocrisy, and monumental selfishness.

From its wellspring of sentimentality, a river of tenderly shed tears would flow straight through the eighteenth century, fed by Richardson, Greuze, and Rousseau, among others, finally to pour out into the broad sea of Romanticism.

[8]In Rousseau's Émile (1762), a treatise on education, the eponymous pupil is specifically given only two novels (although as a young man, he also reads poetry and other literature):[9] as a child he is given Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to inculcate him in resourcefulness and self-reliance; and when he becomes a young man, the political treatise Télémaque, which is put into his hands by his intended, Sophie, who has read it and fallen in love with the fictional hero.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus, To whom I leave the scepter and the isle Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill This labor, by slow prudence to make mild A rugged people, and through soft degrees Subdue them to the useful and the good.