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

by Daniel Mendelsohn

Claire’s house was as exciting and unpredictable as her schemes and plots.

Chihuahua named Benny B. Boychikl.

Boychikl, which is Yiddish for “little boy,” was what Claire called me,

Because we grew up knowing that my father was a mathematician, we had, inevitably, thought that he must be the model for all mathematicians:

He had, at best, a handful of close friends, the relatively small number of which stood in reproachful contrast to the vastness of my mother’s circle, which may or may not have been the result of her emotional extravagances,

When I was young this contrast seemed a confirmation of my sense that my father was somehow the inverse of my mother…

Book 4 is the longest book in the Odyssey—twice as long as most of the other books.

great deal of weeping ensues as Menelaus, Helen, and Telemachus recall the absent Odysseus. Even young Peisistratus, Nestor’s son, works up a few tears—not about Odysseus, of course, since he never knew him, but about a brother of his who died at Troy; weeping, the Greeks knew, can be a kind of pleasure.

Helen decides, before launching into her reminiscence about Odysseus, to lace the wine with a powerful drug.

The drug is called nepenthê, which means “no grief,” the penthê in nepenthê deriving from the noun penthos, “grief.” It is, indeed, a word formed much the same way that anodyne, “without pain,” the word that points to the origins of Odysseus’ name, is formed.

You’re not reading closely enough if you’re missing what’s actually at issue between Menelaus and Helen in this scene. Don’t just accept what the characters are saying; read between the lines. You have to tease the meaning out of the text. What’s really going on here—the drug, the stories, the sarcasm?

But the fact is that my incredulity was disingenuous. I hadn’t seen it right away, either.

What does Telemachus actually learn from this passage?

So I answered, It looks like they’re sharing these happy memories of Odysseus, but actually it’s pretty tense.

said, the point of Helen’s story is that she’s sorry for having run away with Paris by now. She wants everyone to believe that she’s come around to the Greek cause, that now she’s helping Odysseus on his spying mission.

But the whole point of Menelaus’ story is that it shows she’s lying.

Because she was trying to get the Greeks who were hiding inside the horse to betray themselves. Which means she was still actually on the Trojans’ side. She looked...

because after taking nepenthê no one can react to anything, no one can become outraged, no one can do anything about what the stories reveal…they’re eating and drinking and it looks like a nice feast, but underneath it all they’re actually fighting.

Then it came to me. He’s learning about marriage, I said.

moderns tend not to question the wisdom of Athena’s instructions to Telemachus in Book 1 of the Odyssey. Most readers have taken it for granted that his voyages to Pylos and Sparta will somehow be, in and of themselves, educational—that (like going away to college, say, or taking a junior year abroad) the mere fact of leaving home and being on his own will play a crucial part in Telemachus’ maturation.

many scholars and ordinary readers have seen the first four books of the Odyssey as an early if not indeed pioneering instance of the genre the Germans would later call the Bildungsroman, “formation novel”: that is, a tale that charts the ethical and moral growth of a young person.

Porphyry, who wrote a number of treatises on Homer.

paideusis, “education.

pais, “child,”

paideuô, “to e...

Education, in other words, is what you do...

the brick-and-stucco neoclassical pavilions, grouped around a central building inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, left me cold. I declared myself an admirer of Christopher Wren, and ostentatiously played a cassette tape of Purcell’s Funeral Music for Queen Mary as we drove along the Virginia interstate.

obsession with precision. For instance, the Greeks have a form, neither singular nor plural, called the “dual,” which is used only for things that typically come in pairs—oxen, eyes, hands—

At the root both of paideuô, “to educate,” and of the corresponding noun paideusis, “education,” the word that Porphyry, the third-century A.D. philosopher, chose to describe the theme of the first four books of the Odyssey, is the Greek word pais. When compounded with other words, pais, which means “child” or sometimes just “boy,” becomes paed- (or ped-), as for instance in such English words as “pedagogy,” “the leading of children into knowledge,” and “pederasty,” “the erotic desire for paides, ‘young boys’ ” (boyhood, for the Greeks, being a state that ended when the first traces of the beard appeared)—the latter being the kind of yearning that, as Plato expounded in one of his dialogues, represented the lowest rung of a ladder which with any luck might lead to a love for higher concepts.

Another thing that my father didn’t like about Odysseus was the fact that the hero weeps.

It is in Book 5 that the poet at last turns his attention fully to his main character, abandoning Telemachus (who will not reappear until Book 15) and his search for his father and zeroing in on the lost hero himself.

Odysseus, as we know from Book 1, is stranded on Calypso’s island. Now, as the epic zooms in on him, the hero is described as “wailing” with grief every day

groaning” because he cannot see the home fires of h...

So why does everyone keep saying “the hero” this and “the hero” that? He’s supposed to be a soldier. A father! A leader! A king! Well, I said after a moment, he is. The Iliad has lots of scenes that show Odysseus as both an effective military leader and an honorable fighter.

one of the Odyssey’s agendas, as we’ll be seeing during the course of this semester, is to redefine what a hero is.

In the Iliad, which is a poem about war, heroes die all the time, but they’re willing to die if their heroism on the battlefield brings them glorious renown, which the Greeks called kleos. The most famous instance of this is the choice of Achilles, the greatest of all the heroes, who chooses a short, glorious life over a long, undistinguished life.

But the Odyssey, I went on, is a poem about a...

it explores is what a hero might look like once there are no ...

One question posed by the Odyssey is, What might a heroism of survival look like?

his older brother, had become conflated with the illness that had crippled him. To be ill was to be like Bobby.

you weren’t allowed to be sick. To show any kind of vulnerability in his presence seemed somehow dangerous, an invitation to reproach.

It’s beautiful, Dan. I was so surprised that I couldn’t think of anything to say in reply. Then he suddenly made one of his faces and said, almost to himself, But this idea about perfect love is shit, and thrust the sheaf of papers back to me. So I never let my father see me cry.

In Greek epic heroes do cry. You just have to accept it.

Recently, when I was asking my siblings what they remembered Daddy saying about his military service, it turned out each one of them had heard something different.

Book 4 and the visit to Helen and Menelaus provides a discomfiting glimpse of one of the most notoriously troubled marriages in Western literature, Books 5 and 6 seem designed to provoke questions about marriage more generally—about why some couples are better suited to each other than others, and about what special qualities distinguish a successful match.

Book 5 begins with part two of the gods’ plan to bring Odysseus home: rescuing him from Calypso.

the male gods, she declares, often take mortal women as their lovers, but never allow female deities to remain with their mortal lovers—and indeed often kill these unfortunate young men.

Calypso promises Hermes that she will set Odysseus free. When she goes to bring her lover the news,

Homer goes out of his way to mention that the goddess has “compelled” the mortal man to make love to her each night, a detail intended, perhaps, to let Odysseus off the moral hook that my father was so eager to hang him on. He cheats on his wife, he sleeps with Calypso!)

we learn a crucial fact: Calypso had once offered Odysseus immortality and eternal youth on the condition that he stay with her, but he had refused—because he wants to return to the mortal Penelope and “see the smoke of his own chimneys” again.