In terms of the Odyssey, Mr. Deasy, the stuffy, Polonius-like administrator, represents Nestor, the aged Greek soldier and rhetorician who helped to keep order among the military principals during the ten-year siege of Troy (described in the Iliad and who was the first friend of Odysseus that Telemachus visited after he left Ithaca in search of information about his father. In this chapter, several parallels between the two men are found. Nestor, though often useful at Troy, is frequently satirized by Homer because of his ponderous verbiage; and it is significant that Telemachus does not gain any valuable information about him. Mr. Deasy, too, may have some sense of national and civic pride, as seen in his concern for sick cattle, but his virtue is outweighed by his militant anti-Semitism, his veneration of money, and his bland interpretation of the place of Protestantism in Irish history. In addition, Nestor was well known as a charioteer and a tamer of horses, and this fact is mirrored in Deasy's horse-racing mementos, whose descriptions foreshadow Bloom's entanglement with the misinterpreted "tip" on the horse Throwaway.
Other obscure but useful and significant allusions to the original Nestor Episode in the Odyssey add to the irony of Joyce's Ulysses. The contemporary Nestor restores order on a hockey field, not on a battleground, and his men are children; although he is old (an explicit parallel with Nestor of the Odyssey), Deasy assures Stephen that he occasionally likes "to break a lance" (argue jestingly) with him; and at the conclusion of the chapter, the sun casts spangles on Deasy's shoulders, suggesting the shining armor of a retiring soldier.
But this chapter is really "about" history, the nightmare from which Stephen is trying to awaken, and the "history" here is personal as well as national and military. While Stephen is inattentively lecturing to his inattentive class, his thoughts remain fixated on the subject that occupied him in "Telemachus," the reason why he has vowed to wear black for a year: his mother's ghastly death. When the boys ask him to tell a ghost story (in the middle of the disorderly class period), he immediately thinks of Milton's Lycidas, a poem wherein Milton promised immortality for his drowned friend, Edward King. In the poem, there is much water imagery, and this idea continues the water motif that Joyce began in the first chapter, while blending in the image of green bile that Stephen constantly associates with Mary Dedalus's death.
