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Notes -
Ages are funny among the Homeric Greeks, it's implied that Telemachus is not yet at full manhood though the timeline suggests he has to be about 21, while Odysseus is implied to be in his prime though he must be somewhere in his mid-forties to early 50s at least.
To some extent I suspect that the rise of firearms and peasant armies has permanently altered the perception of ages to modern men. Heroic-era warfare required a combination of physical strength, experience, and skill that peaks in the 30s; not at 18, which is the peak of the combination of endurance, stupidity, and raw courage that is ideal for firearms. Ancients thought of 20 year olds as barely fit for military service, in much the same way that only rare 20 year olds are physically mature enough for combat sports or the NFL, and thought that 35-40 year olds were still plenty fit to fight. While today we place 20 year olds as the ideal military recruits, and 35 is just barely legal to enlist.
The Odyssey does play into this trope somewhat, I agree, but it's pretty heavily implied throughout the Telemachy in the first four books that Telemachus is coming into his own, and will someday be a hero equal to his father. This is addressed in ancient days in the lost Telegony, in which Odysseus is killed by his bastard child of Circe, who then marries Telemachus. ((As a personal aside, reading Madeleine Miller's Circe there were a bunch of details, like Circe marrying Telemachus, that I thought had to be modern flights of fancy but were actually part of the mythological corpus))
Zulus were pressed into military service as older teens to 30 or 35 years old. That's approximately spending their 20s fighting in spear formations.
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The Greeks held full manhood to be at the age when a young man could grow a full beard- not any particular age(as the Romans and, later, Christian Europeans did). It’s entirely plausible that Telemachus could be in his early twenties and not able to grow a full beard yet.
The Romans usually drafted young men in their early twenties, rarely late teens, and sometimes late twenties or even thirties, but considered full manhood to be at 30- with 20-something men being under legal disabilities equivalent to teenagers today, not 18-20 year old Americans. I suspect that ancient views on full manhood had more to do with property division and economic role than combat prowess- Odysseus is basically a fantasy hero.
With the Romans we knew that they explicitly sorted soldiers based on experience. The Triarii were probably generally in their thirties, and while they were spared some of the scut-work they were kept in reserve precisely because their experience was valuable and potentially decisive.
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The Roman legions typically assumed that the youngest recruits would suck, and were expected mainly to serve as skirmishers and slow down the enemy lines, before the prime age formations moved in and fought, and if that didn't work the thirty-something men nearing the end of their primes were the reliable cleanup hitters.
We see pretty similar age ranges in, say, NFL offensive linemen. Who have a pretty similar job description, really, though obviously a different selection process and physique.
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