Laertes was born on Ithaca, the rugged island in the Ionian Sea off the western coast of Greece, the son of Arcesius, the king who ruled the island and its surrounding islets. His mother was Chalcomedusa, or in some accounts he was the son of Arcesius alone, the direct descendant of Cephalus, the eponymous hero from whom the island of Cephalonia took its name. Laertes grew up in a small kingdom where the soil was thin and the sea was everything, a land of goats and olive groves and hidden harbours that looked out toward the setting sun. He married Anticlea, the daughter of Autolycus, the master thief who lived on Mount Parnassus and who had taught his daughter the cunning that she would pass to her son. Their marriage united the island royalty with the mountain outlaws, and from it was born Odysseus, the child who would outwit every enemy he ever faced.

In his youth Laertes was a warrior and an adventurer. He sailed with Jason and the Argonauts, the band of heroes who sought the Golden Fleece in the distant land of Colchis on the Black Sea, and he fought in the great hunt of the Calydonian Boar, the monstrous creature sent by Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, to ravage the fields of Aetolia. These were the great heroic enterprises of the generation before the Trojan War, and Laertes took part in them as a young prince hungry for glory. But by the time the Trojan War began, he was already an old man, and he stayed behind on Ithaca while his son Odysseus sailed with Agamemnon's fleet. Some accounts say that Laertes had already abdicated the throne in favour of Odysseus, preferring the quiet of his estates to the burdens of rule. Others say that he simply grew too old to fight, and that he watched the ships depart from the cliffs of Ithaca with the foreboding of a father who knows he is seeing his son for the last time.

The twenty years of the war and the wandering that followed destroyed Laertes by inches. His wife Anticlea died of grief, unable to bear the uncertainty of her son's fate, and Laertes buried her on Ithaca and withdrew from the city to a farm on the edge of his land. He gave up his royal robes, dressed in the ragged clothes of a labourer, and spent his days digging in his vineyard, pruning the vines that he and Odysseus had planted together when the boy was young. He refused to enter the palace because he could not bear the sight of Penelope's suitors, the young nobles of Ithaca and the surrounding islands who had occupied his son's hall, consumed his son's cattle, and drunk his son's wine while they pressed Penelope to choose a new husband. Athena, the goddess of wisdom who loved Odysseus above all mortals, looked down from Olympus and pitied the old man, and she inspired Telemachus, Odysseus's son, to seek news of his father in the courts of Pylos and Sparta.

When Odysseus finally returned to Ithaca, disguised as a beggar by Athena's magic, he slew the suitors in a massacre that left the hall floor running with blood. But the revenge was not complete until he had seen his father. He travelled to the farm where Laertes lived, and he found the old man in his vineyard, wearing a filthy leather cap and a patched tunic, digging around a row of young trees with a pruning hook in his gnarled hands. Odysseus did not reveal himself at first. He pretended to be a traveller and spoke of Ithaca as if he were a stranger, and Laertes answered him with tears, describing the son he had lost and the kingdom that had been stolen from his family. Then Odysseus could bear it no longer. He showed his father the scar on his leg, the wound he had received as a boy from a boar's tusk on Mount Parnassus, and he named the thirteen pear trees, the ten apple trees, and the forty fig trees that Laertes had given him as a child, reciting their positions in the orchard as only a son could know. Laertes staggered, dropped his pruning hook, and fell to the ground weeping, and the two men embraced in the dirt of the vineyard while the old man's knees shook with joy.

The story does not end with the reunion. The families of the dead suitors gathered to attack Odysseus, and Laertes, though ancient, took up his armour and fought beside his son in the final battle. Athena intervened to stop the bloodshed, and peace was restored to Ithaca. But the image that survives is not of Laertes the warrior. It is of Laertes the father, kneeling in the dirt of his vineyard, clutching the son he had given up for dead, proving that the greatest journey in Greek literature ends not with a monster or a queen but with an old man and his trees.