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

by Daniel Mendelsohn

used to describe the remote origins of some disaster: arkhê kakôn, “the beginning of the bad

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.

“Someplace worth going” is a good way to summarize the great preoccupation of the Odyssey, which in certain ways is a sequel to the Iliad. A

provoke offense.” “Anodyne” is actually a compound of two Greek words which together mean “without pain”; the an- is the “without,” and so the -odynê has to be “pain.”

Odysseus, we know, is a tricky character, famed for his shady dealings and evasions and lies and above all his sly way with words; he is, after all, the man who dreamed up the Trojan Horse, a disguise that was also an ambush.

Modern Greek poetry, particularly a poem by George Seferis that contains the line, “The first thing that God made was love.”

This is the first of many instances when the distraught queen is put to sleep by the goddess—so many, in fact, that I’ve had students ask me whether Penelope is supposed to be suffering from depression, a question that had never occurred to me when I was in college.

I’m starting to wonder if he actually prefers Mentes or Mentor or whoever to Odysseus. Maybe, for him, the father figure is actually preferable to the real thing. I didn’t say anything. I’d never thought of this. What I’m thinking is this, Brendan went on. Could it be that Telemachus unconsciously hopes that Odysseus has died?

It’s the homecoming story you don’t want. The story of Agamemnon’s disastrous homecoming, a kind of negative Odyssey, weaves itself into the fabric of Odysseus’ epic from start to finish:

Helen gives Telemachus the confirmation of his identity for which he has been yearning since he first appears in Book 1.

What does Telemachus learn in Book 4? Into the silence she finally said, Remember, this is the first adult couple he’s ever encountered. Then it came to me. He’s learning about marriage, I said.

it was with the special joy it’s possible to feel only when you are a student about to embark on a course of study that you have long anticipated, an excitement in which satisfaction and yearning, plenitude and lack, are curiously mixed.

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—

But the Odyssey, I went on, is a poem about a postwar world. It’s set in the aftermath of war, and one of the things it explores is what a hero might look like once there are no more wars to fight.

Achilles is renowned for his physical prowess, his speed and strength. Odysseus, although he’s a distinguished warrior, is renowned above all for his stratagems, his intellectual brilliance. Achilles dies, but Odysseus survives. One question posed by the Odyssey is, What might a heroism of survival look like?

The point is—and this is a big point—that his preference for Penelope, who could never be as beautiful as a goddess and who anyway is now aging, maybe approaching middle age, means something. What? Madeline waved a hand at me; the red hair shimmered. That physical beauty and good sex aren’t the basis for a marriage?

And then may the gods fulfill whatsoever you desire: a husband and a home; may they grant you, too, like-mindedness, that noble thing. Nothing stronger or better than that— when a man and wife hold their home together alike in mind: great trouble to their foes, a joy to all their friends, the source of their renown.”

then may the gods fulfill whatsoever you desire: a husband and a home; may they grant you, too, like-mindedness, that noble thing. Nothing stronger or better than that— when a man and wife hold their home together alike in mind: great trouble to their foes, a joy to all their friends, the source of their renown.”

Homophrosynê, I said. Do you see how it’s being set up? Do you see what’s coming? Your physical appearance can change with time, but nobody can take away what? Brendan’s hand shot into the air. What you know, he said.

Children always imagine that their parents’ truest selves are as parents; but why? “Who really knows his own begetting?” Telemachus bitterly asks early in the Odyssey. Who indeed. Our parents are mysterious to us in ways that we can never quite be mysteries to them.

Agamemnon concludes his account with a double admonition to Odysseus to avoid the mistakes that he made: He must not trust his wife, and should return home in secret, rather than publicly. It is advice that Odysseus takes.

an Odyssey cruise. Everyone has a story to tell. And everyone has…has a flaw. Yes, I said. I guess everyone does.

How can you travel great distances without getting anywhere? By going in circles.

Cavafy’s disembodied second-person address to Odysseus, which emanates from who knows what source, puts the hero on the same plane as the reader (we all read “you” as “us”), creating the eerie impression that we could be Odysseus ourselves: the heroes of our own journeys.

Of course we must remember our destination, the anonymous speaker admonishes, whatever that may be; but it becomes clear that life’s meaning derives from our progress through it, and what we make of it: Always in your mind keep Ithaca. To arrive there is your destiny. But do not hurry your trip in any way. Better that it last for many years; that you drop anchor at the island an old man, rich with all you’ve gotten on the way, not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.

Cavafy’s poem articulates, at an exquisitely high level of refinement, what has become a cliché of popular culture: that the journey is more important than the destination.

So I guess that’s what people mean by the “destination” part: getting where you want, fulfilling your goals. I’m not so sure I believe that that’s not important. In life, you’re judged by what you accomplish. There’s no A for effort. I’d heard this before. But I can see the other side, too, he went on finally. You have to explore things, you have to try things…He grew quiet.

I’m not afraid of being dead, he said. At that point there’s no consciousness. You’re out of the woods.

But he was serious. It’s the lead-up to dying that I’m… His voice trailed off, and I realized he didn’t like to say the word “afraid.”

The three scenes with the dogs—the dogs that nearly attack Odysseus in Book 14; the dogs that fawn on their beloved master, Telemachus, in Book 16; and the wrenching telepathy between Argos and Odysseus in Book 17—are, in fact, designed to frame the recognition scene between Odysseus and his son in Book 16: to raise questions about how we recognize who someone is, and what true recognition means.

If you never knew your father to begin with, there’s actually nothing to recognize.

For the best teacher is the one who wants you to find meaning in the things that have given him pleasure, too, so that the appreciation of their beauty will outlive him.

In this way—because it arises from an acceptance of the inevitability of death—good teaching is like good parenting.

My father looked at his plate. He said, It must have been hard for him to have to sit there watching while his own son acted like that other guy was his real father.

Dad said the needles were really long, Andrew went on. And he told me that the whole time this was going on he was crying. Not because of the pain— (when Andrew said “not because of the pain” I knew he was quoting my father verbatim) —but because he knew for a fact whose dog it was. But the neighbor lied and so nobody believed him.

This is why the ring composition that spirals out from the bath and the scar isn’t just some digression. It’s crucial. If he got the wound by leading the pack when he was a teenager, but now, as we know, he likes to hang behind and suss out every situation before he gets into it, what does that mean? My father didn’t bother raising a hand. He simply called out, It means that in his life he’s learned something.

This endless tug-of-war between fathers and sons, successes and failures: I sometimes wondered what Homer’s father was like, if there had ever been a Homer. “Few men resemble their fathers. Few sons are better, most are worse…”

One of the strange things about teaching is that you can never know what your effect will be on others;

someone whom the teacher or the text has touched so deeply, for whatever reason, that the lesson will live beyond the classroom, beyond you.

Actually, the sex isn’t the most important part of the reunion. Talking is. I thought it was interesting that they make love first but then they spend the rest of the night telling stories to each other before they sleep.

think this part of the poem is very true. There are these things you have with someone, not physical things, but private jokes and memories you gather over time, little things that nobody else knows about.

I was realizing, for the first time, how much the Odyssey knew about this ostensibly trivial but profound real-life phenomenon, the way that small things between people can be the foundation of the greatest intimacy.

course Jay hated Odysseus! Odysseus was an adventurer, a liar. A risk-taker!

Why is it that, in Homer’s eyes, the only truly unimaginable lie is the one that a son might tell to his father?

but in the end my father really had been a “student,” a word that derives from the Latin noun studium, “painstaking application.” He’d been applying himself in ways I hadn’t dreamed of, and I hadn’t seen a thing.

she fixed her eyes on me and said, Your problem is that you see everything that doesn’t fit your theory as a problem, instead of as an opportunity to enlarge your thinking, to come up with a better theory. You’re so fixated on your own ideas that you don’t see what’s right in front of your face.

I’d been so intent on having the kids see things my way, so fixated on making sure that the interpretations I had absorbed as a student would be the ones that they took away, too, that I’d seen their resistances, their failures to notice what I wanted them to notice, as a problem, rather than as a solution—as a way to see something I’d never noticed myself. They’d tried to tell me all this, that day when they were so eagerly explaining their ideas about the Apologoi, about how maybe Homer was saying that Odysseus had made his whole story up; but I’d barely listened.

All semester long I’d vainly envisioned myself as some kind of pedagogical Odysseus, leading them on a thrilling adventure through the text, and in the end I’d turned out to be the Cyclops.

You never do know, really, where education will lead; who will be listening and, in certain cases, who will be doing the teaching.

concerned, the tombs or sêmata (the plural of sêma) that have such striking prominence in the Odyssey were means of signaling information about their occupants; they were meant to tell tales.