An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

by Daniel Mendelsohn

The cruise, we read, would follow the mythic hero’s convoluted, decade-long itinerary as he made his way home from the Trojan War, plagued by shipwrecks and monsters. It would begin at Troy, the site of which is located in what is now Turkey,

we took the cruise, which lasted ten days in all, one day for each year of Odysseus’ long journey home.

we never saw Ithaca, the place to which Odysseus strove so famously to return; never reached what may be the best-known destination in literature. But then, the Odyssey itself, filled as it is with sudden mishaps and surprising detours, schools its hero in disappointment, and teaches its audience to expect the unexpected. For this reason, our not reaching Ithaca may have been the most Odyssean aspect of our educational cruise.

There is a term that comes up when you study ancient Greek literature, occurring equally in both imaginative and historical works, used to describe the remote origins of some disaster: arkhê kakôn, “the beginning of the bad things.”

Arkhê kakôn. The second word in that phrase is a form of the Greek kakos, “bad,” which survives in the English “cacophony,” a “bad sound”—a reasonable way to describe the noise made by women as their young children are thrown over the walls of a defeated city, which is one of the bad things that happened after Troy fell.

The first word in the phrase, arkhê, which means “beginning”—sometimes it has the sense of “early” or “ancient”—also makes its presence felt in certain English words, for instance “archetype,” which literally means “first model.” An archetype is the earliest instance of a thing, so ancient in its authority that it sets an example for all time. Anything can be an archetype: a weapon, a building, a poem.

parenting partner, Lily,

But which is the true self? the Odyssey asks, and how many selves might a man have?

All classical epics begin with what scholars call a proem: the introductory lines that announce to the audience what the epic is about—what will be the scope of its action, the identities of its characters, the nature of its themes.

proem of the Iliad, an epic poem of fifteen thousand six hundred and ninety-three lines devoted to a single episode that takes place in the final year of the Trojan War: a bitter quarrel between two Greek warriors—the commander-in-chief, Agamemnon, son of Atreus, and his greatest warrior, Achilles, son of Peleus—that threatened the mission to destroy Troy and avenge the abduction of Helen. (For Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, the war is personal: Helen’s cuckolded husband, Menelaus, the king of Sparta, is his younger brother. Achilles, for his part, fights only for glory. “The Trojans never did any harm to me,”

Epics, despite their great length, are in fact tightly focused on whatever theme is announced in their proems.

The proem of the Iliad is concerned simply with the quarrel between the two Greek warriors, its causes and effects, and what it reveals about the characters’ understanding of honor and heroism and duty and death.

In epic, we need the proem because it reassures us, at the very moment we set out upon what might look like a vast ocean of words, that this expanse is not a “formless void” (like the one with which another great story, Genesis, begins) but a route, a path that will take us someplace worth going.

A poem of twelve thousand one hundred and ten lines, it takes as its subject the convoluted and adventure-filled return home of one of the Greeks who took part in the war against Troy.

Most classicists agree that the proem of the Odyssey consists of its first ten lines:

Just as the man himself had widely wandered, so does the proem.

some scholars have argued that the proem of the Odyssey itself strays: that, in fact, it runs for the first twenty-one lines of the poem.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are the most famous epics in the Western tradition, but they are far from being the only ones to come down to us from Greek and Roman days.

A proem could memorialize other poems. Take, for example, the proem of Virgil’s Aeneid, which knowingly alludes to the opening lines of both the Iliad and Odyssey:

The Aeneid revisits the world of Homer’s poems but radically shifts their point of view to that of the losers: it retails the adventures of Aeneas, one of the few Trojans to survive the Greek obliteration of Troy. After escaping the burning wreckage of his city with (this is one of the epic’s most famous and touching details) his father strapped to his back and his young son in tow, Aeneas first undergoes a series of elaborate wanderings (meanderings that remind us of the Odyssey) before he settles in Italy, the land that has been promised to him as the homeland of the new state that he will found, where he must then fight a series of grim battles against the locals (warfare that reminds us of the Iliad) in order to establish himself and his people forever.

Aeneas does embody a dogged sense of filial obligation, a quality much prized in Roman culture and signaled by the Latin adjective most often used of Virgil’s hero: pius, which means not “pious,” as might seem natural to an English-speaker’s eye, but “dutiful.”

A proem, therefore, can not only summarize its own action, look into its own future, and forecast, in miniature, what is to come, but can nod gratefully backward in time at the earlier epics, the archetypes, to which it is indebted.

How, my father would ask when he told this story, can you travel great distances without getting anywhere?

The answer to the riddle was this: If you travel in circles.

“the portion for the day” became the word for “trip”: long ago, when a journey might take months and even years—

long ago it was safer and more comfortable to speak not of the “voyage,” the viaticum, what you needed to survive your movement through space, but of a single day’s progress.

Over time, the part came to stand for the whole, one day’s movement for however long it takes to get where you’re going—which could be a week, a month, a year, even (as we know) ten years. What is touching about the word “journey” is the thought that in those olden days, when the word was newborn, just one day’s worth of movement was a significant enough activity, an arduous enough enterprise, to warrant a name of its own: journey.

What is the connection to arduousness? “Travel,” as it happens, is a first cousin of “travail,”

palimpsest,

“travel” suggests the emotional dimension of traveling: not its material accessories, or how long it may last, but how it feels.

one word in the English language that combines all of the various resonances that belong severally to “voyage” and “journey” and “travel”—the distance but also the time, the time but also the emotion, the arduousness and the danger—comes not from Latin but from Greek. That word is “odyssey.”

A story that is told within the Odyssey describes the day on which the infant Odysseus got his name;

The hero of this vast epic of voyaging, journeying, and travel is, literally, “the man of pain.” He is the one who travels; he is the one who suffers.

As much as it is a tale of husbands and wives, then, this story is just as much—perhaps even more—about fathers and sons.

“battle fa-ti-gyoo”!

it was too bad that I couldn’t appreciate the “aesthetic dimension” of math, a phrase that made no sense to me whatsoever

My father was a man who felt his responsibilities deeply, which I suppose is why, when I asked him a certain question years later, he replied, simply, Because a man doesn’t leave.

That night when I was four years old I sat there, quiet next to my quiet father, as the plane leaned heavily on one wing so that it could spin its vast arcing circle, not unlike the way in which, in Homer’s epics, a giant eagle will wheel high in the sky above the heads of an anxious army or a solitary man at a moment of great danger, the eagle being an omen of what is to come, victory or defeat for the army, rescue or death for the man;

it never occurred to either one of us to talk to the other.

The boy, the man, the ancient: the three ages of man.

polytropos. The literal meaning of this word is “of many turns”: poly means “many,” and a tropos is a “turning.”

“Apotropaic,” to take a less cheery example, is an adjective that means “turning away evil”: it is used of superstitious rites that are intended to avert bad luck—such as the custom, common among Eastern European Jews of my grandparents’ era, of tying a red ribbon around the wrist of an infant in order to keep the Evil Eye away. Oh, my mother loved you so much, my mother will occasionally say to me, even now, when she took you to the park she would tie a red ribbon around your wrist!

there is a plainer sense of polytropos. For “of many turns” also refers to the shape of the hero’s motion through space: he is the man who gets where he is going by traveling in circles. In more than one of his adventures, he leaves a place only to return to it, sometimes inadvertently.

the biggest circle of all, the one that brings him back to Ithaca, the place he left so long ago that when he finally comes home he and his loved ones are unrecognizable to one another.

The Odyssey narrative itself moves through time in the same convoluted way that Odysseus h...

(Books 1 through 4);

(Books 5 through 8);

(9 through 12),

(Books 13 through 22).

(Book 23)