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

by Daniel Mendelsohn

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.” Most often the “bad things” in question are wars. The historian Herodotus, for instance, trying to determine the cause of a great war between the Greeks and the Persians that took place in the 480s B.C., says that a decision taken by the Athenians to send ships to some allies many years before the actual opening of hostilities was the arkhê kakôn of that conflict. (Herodotus was writing in the late 400s B.C., approximately three and a half centuries after Homer composed his poems about the Trojan War—which, according to some ancient scholars, had taken place three centuries before Homer lived.) But arkhê kakôn can be used to describe the origins of other kinds of events, too. The tragic playwright Euripides, for instance, uses it in one of his dramas to describe an unhappy marriage, an ill-fated union that set in motion a sequence of events whose disastrous outcome furnishes the climax of his play.

Both war and bad marriages come together in the most famous arkhê kakôn of them all: the moment when a prince of Troy called Paris stole away with a Greek queen called Helen, another man’s wife. So, according to the myth, began the Trojan War, the decade-long conflict waged by the Greeks to win back the wayward Helen and punish the inhabitants of Troy. (One of the reasons the war took so long to prosecute was that Troy was surrounded by impregnable walls; these finally yielded, after a ten-year siege, only because of a trick—the Trojan Horse—devised by the Odyssey’s notoriously crafty hero.) Whatever its basis in remote history may have been—there had indeed been an ancient city located on the Turkish site that my father and I visited, and it was destroyed violently, but beyond that we can only guess—the mythic cataclysm that resulted from Helen’s adultery with Paris has furnished poets and playwrights and novelists with material for the past three and a half millennia: countless deaths on both sides, the shocking sack of the great city, the enslavements and humiliations and infanticides and suicides, and then, finally, the wretchedly prolonged homecomings of those Greeks clever or lucky enough to survive the war itself.

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 earlie...

This last period was one in which (as we would say later on, retelling the remarkable story over and over as if to convince ourselves that it was all real) “his old self” had reappeared: a term that raises questions first posed, as it happens, in the Odyssey, a work whose hero must, at the end of his decades-long absence from home, prove to those who once knew him that he is still “his old self.” But which is the true self? the Odyssey asks, and how many selves might a man have? As I learned the year my father took my Odyssey course and we retraced the journeys of its hero, the answers can be surprising.

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. While he lacks the cruel glamour of the Iliad’s Achilles or the seductive slyness of Odysseus, 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.” The proem of the Aeneid is seven lines long; the first of these, in which the poet announces that he will sing of “wars and a man,” arma virumque, is itself a nod to both the Iliad, which is above all about “wars” or “arms,” arma, and to the Odyssey, whose own first line, as we know, announces that it is about “a man.”

The 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.”

So we know about the voyages and the journey, the space and the time. What very few people know, unless they know Greek, is that the magical third element—emotion—is built into the name of this curious hero. A story that is told within the Odyssey describes the day on which the infant Odysseus got his name; the story, to which I shall return, conveniently provides the etymology for that name. Just as you can see the Latin word via lurking in viaticum (and, thus, in voiage and “voyage” as well), people who know Greek can see, just below the surface of the name “Odysseus,” the word odynê. You may think you don’t recognize it, but think again. Think, for instance, of the word “anodyne,” which the dictionary my father gave me defines as “a painkilling drug or medicine; not likely to 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.” This is the root of Odysseus’ name, and of his poem’s name, too. 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.

Much later, when I was a freshman in college learning Greek, I sat in a classroom with three other students every weekday morning at nine o’clock, and we would recite, precisely the way you might play scales, the paradigms of nouns and verbs, each noun with its five possible incarnations depending on its function in the sentence, each verb with its scarily metastasizing forms, the tenses and moods that don’t exist in English, the active and passive voices, yes, those I knew about from high-school French, but also the strange “middle” voice, a mode in which the subject is also the object, a strange folding over or doubling, the way a person could be a father but also a son. And yet I happily endured these rigorous exercises because I had a clear idea of where they were leading

I was going to read Greek, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the elaborately unspooling Histories of Herodotus, the tragedies constructed as beautifully as clocks, as implacably as traps…Years after all this, whenever my father made this comment about how you couldn’t see the world clearly without calculus, I’d invariably reply by saying that you couldn’t really see the world clearly without having read the Aeneid in Latin, either. And then he’d make that little grimace that we all knew, half a smile, half a frown, twisting his face, and we’d laugh a sour little laugh, and retreat to our corners.

It is not for nothing that, in the original Greek, the first word in the first line of the twelve thousand one hundred and ten that make up the Odyssey is andra: “man.” The epic begins with the story of Odysseus’ son, a youth in search of his long-lost father, the hero of this poem; it then focuses on the hero himself, first as he recalls the fabulous adventures he has experienced after leaving Troy, then as he struggles to return home, where he will reclaim his identity as father, husband, and king, taking terrible vengeance on the Suitors who tried to woo his wife and usurp his home and realm; then, in its final book, it gives us a vision of what “a man” might look like once his life’s adventures are over: the hero’s elderly father, the last person with whom Odysseus is reunited, now a decrepit old man alone in his orchard, tired of life. The boy, the man, the ancient: the three ages of man. Which is to say that, among the journeys that this poem charts, there is, too, a man’s journey through life, from birth to death. How do you get there? What is the journey like? And how do you tell the story of it?

The first adjective used to describe the man with whom the proem begins—the first modifier in the entire Odyssey—is a peculiar Greek word, polytropos. The literal meaning of this word is “of many turns”: poly means “many,” and a tropos is a “turning.” English words containing the element -trope are derived, ultimately, from tropos. “Heliotrope,” for instance, is a flower that turns toward the sun. “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! And then she’ll cluck her tongue sadly, tskkk, and sigh. The anecdote, I am aware, is not just about my grandmother’s great devotion to me: her deep emotion in this story is meant to stand in contrast to the relative lack of interest in me shown by my father’s parents, who didn’t meet me until I was two years old as the result of one of the grim silences that occasionally arose between my father and his brothers and his parents.

It is difficult to resist the notion that there is something suggestive, programmatic, about making this particular adjective, “of many turns,” the first modifier in the first line of a twelve-thousand-line poem about a journey home. 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. So in one sense polytropos is figurative: this is a poem about someone whose mind has many turns, many twists, not all of them strictly legitimate. And yet 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. And then of course there is 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.

What, these philosophers were wondering, could studying the ancient classics possibly teach students in the present day? Locke, like many parents today, derisively wondered why a working person would need to know Latin. Wolf’s answer was, Human nature. For him, the object of his new literary “science”—“philology,” from the Greek for “love of language”—was nothing less than a means to a profound understanding of the “intellectual, sensual, and moral powers of man.” But to study the ancient texts and cultures properly, one had to approach them as scientifically as one did when studying the physical universe. As with mathematics or physics, Wolf argued, meaningful study of classical civilization could arise only from mastery of many essential and interlinked disciplines: immersion not only in Ancient Greek and Latin (and, often, in Hebrew and Sanskrit), in their vocabularies and grammars and syntaxes and prosody, but in the history, religion, philosophy, and art of the cultures that spoke and wrote those languages. To this immersion, he went on, there had to be added the mastery of specialized skills, such as those needed to decipher ancient papyri, manuscripts, and inscriptions, such mastery being as necessary, ultimately, to the study of ancient literature as the mastery of plane and solid geometry, of arithmetic and algebra, and, indeed, of calculus is to proper study of the field we call mathematics.

A sweet comment. Although my father was hard, was tough, every now and then he would say things or let slip a remark that was so unexpectedly tender or generous or poetic that you’d be confounded—would find yourself in a state of what Greeks called aporia, “helplessness.” (The word literally means “without a path”; “a feeling of being stranded” would be one way of translating it.) But then, this was the parent who, for all his hardness, despite the severity that had etched itself into his very flesh—the stern horizontal lines running across his forehead like the rulings of the black-and-white-marbled composition books we dutifully took notes in, the sunken vertical planes of his cheeks beneath the ridged cheekbones and the high symmetrical arcs of his eye sockets shadowing the spheres beneath like illustrations in a geometry textbook—had somehow acquired the comically incongruous nickname “Daddy Loopy.” Daddy Loopy! we would cry on the rare occasions when he’d tickle or tease us, Who’s your Daddy Loooooopy?! he would say, slightly self-conscious but also obscurely pleased, as he tucked me in tightly, a super-duper-tucker-inner, like a mummy! which is the way I preferred it when I was four or five and he’d come into my bedroom, sitting carefully on the edge of the narrow bed he had built for me, would read me Winnie-the-Pooh. That’s okay, you’ll read it for me, I heard him say, this sweet thing he said one autumn evening half a lifetime ago, and I thought, not for the first...

By the time you reach the end of the proem, you’re acutely aware of the discrepancy between the wealth and specificity of certain information you’ve received about this man and the gaps that remain, not the least of which, of course, is his name: a glaring omission, to say the least, in a passage whose purpose is to introduce him. Of course we know that “the man” is Odysseus; so why doesn’t Homer just say so? One possible answer to that question is that, by drawing attention to the tension between what he allows himself to say (“the man”) and what he knows and we know (Odysseus), the poet introduces an important theme that will continue to grow throughout his poem, which is: What is the difference between who we are and what others know about us? This tension between anonymity and identity will be a major element of the Odyssey’s plot. For its hero’s life will depend on his ability to conceal his identity from enemies—and to reveal it, when the proper time comes, to friends, to those by whom he wants to be recognized: first his son, then his wife, and finally his father.

The proem’s sly refusal to commit itself to a name is mirrored in another bizarre evasion. The Iliad begins with a precisely worded request to the Muse to start singing from a specific moment in the story—from the moment when first the two stood forth in strife, / Atreus’ son, the lord of men, and Achilles, a man like a god. The poet of the Odyssey, by contrast, doesn’t seem to care particularly about where his epic ought to begin. He asks the Muse to begin telling her story at “some point or another,” hamothen—anywhere in Odysseus’ journey that suits her. But hamothen also has a temporal overtone: “from some point in time or another,” “at any random moment in the narrative.” In the Odyssey’s opening lines, space and time are themselves suggestively vague, indistinct from each other.

This is how the Odyssey begins: the hero himself nowhere in sight, the crises precipitated by his absence taking center stage. However long the proem of the Odyssey actually is—ten lines, twenty-one lines—it turns out to be misleading: despite its promise to tell us about “a man,” the fact is that this man appears at first only as a memory, a ghost about whom we hear stories, reminiscences, rumors. He’s on his way home, someone says; someone else recalls having glimpsed him back in Troy, disguised as a beggar on a spying mission. Another, rather unsavory story surfaces: Ah yes, Odysseus, he once came looking for some poisoned arrows. (These, we understand, are not at all the weapons that noble warriors are supposed to use.) The rumors whirl and eddy, but the hero himself—“the man”—is nowhere to be seen, either on Ithaca or in Homer’s narrative. And all the while, the wife weeps, the populace seethes, the son daydreams hopelessly. It’s as if the Muse had mischievously decided to take the words of the proem literally—to begin at random, at “some point or another,” and that starting point turns out to be a different one altogether from the one we had expected.

The most famous example of this visual sleight of hand is a painting called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, by the Netherlandish master Pieter Brueghel, which hangs in a museum in Brussels and takes as its subject another of antiquity’s many father-son dramas: the myth of the great inventor Daedalus and his son Icarus, who sought to fly on artificial wings made of feathers bound by wax. In the best-known version of the myth, which appears in a poem by Ovid, Daedalus warns his son not to fly too high, since the sun’s warmth will melt the wax; but the heedless son, giddy with excitement, disobeys his father, soars too high, loses his wings, and crashes into the sea. With poignant irony, Brueghel’s canvas illustrates the split second in time just after Icarus has fallen: the painting is almost entirely taken up by the shore and the sea and, especially, by three peasants who go about their business, plowing, herding, and fishing, utterly unaware of the catastrophe—the only sign of which is a tiny detail off in the corner, which turns out to be poor Icarus’ legs waggling pathetically just above the waterline. In Brueghel’s hands, Ovid’s tale of a son’s willful rejection of his father’s wisdom becomes a story about the need for a kind of humility—for, you might say, perspective; an admonition about what we miss when we are intent on our own narratives, about the dangers of mistaking the foreground for the whole picture.

I started with the controversy known as the Homeric Question, a centuries-old debate about how Homer’s epics had come into being—whether they had started as written texts or as oral compositions. It was important for the students to grasp the fundamentals of the debate, since significant questions of interpretation hang on which theory you subscribe to. The Greeks themselves tended to think that there had been a poet called Homer who wrote down his poems. Herodotus thought that Homer must have lived around 800 B.C., four hundred years before his own time; several centuries after Herodotus, Aristarchus, the head of the Library of Alexandria (the greatest scholarly institution of the ancient world) and a renowned authority on Homer’s texts, surmised that the poet had lived about 1050 B.C., a century and a half after the Trojan War itself was supposed to have taken place. It was generally believed that Homer wrote both the Iliad and the Odyssey; but some ancient scholars, called the Separatists, thought the poems were written by two different people. No fewer than seven cities in ancient times claimed Homer as a son. That was the received wisdom until, in the late 1700s, a French scholar called Villoisin discovered a tenth-century manuscript of the Iliad moldering away in a library in Venice. This manuscript was unlike others that had circulated over the centuries: along with the Greek text of the epic it included transcriptions of the marginal notes of ancient commentators, ...

I told the smiling students this story and said, You see? You’d be surprised how often we make things up as we go along in front of an audience. Even as I said the words, I was thinking, like teaching.

I went on to catalog the special features of Homer’s poetry, starting with the long, six-beat, oom-pah-pah meter, called dactylic hexameter, to which every one of the Odyssey’s twelve thousand one hundred and ten lines dances: BUM-buh-buh BUM-buh-buh BUM; buh-buh BUM-buh-buh BUM-buh buh BUM BUM

I talked about the stock epithets, so useful for quick identification of the characters, so crucial for oral composition. I told them to look out for “epic similes”: passages in which the poet pauses to compare a character or an action in his fabulous tale, sometimes at considerable length, to something belonging to the everyday world of his audience—of us. (My favorite of these crops up in a battle scene in the Iliad, when the poet compares a warrior who drives a spear through an enemy’s head and cantilevers the poor man out of his chariot to an expert angler landing a fish.) The point of these lengthy similes is simultaneously to make the fictional action more present, more vividly knowable to the audience, and yet, by briefly returning to the familiar realities of our humdrum lives, plowing and fishing and cooking, to give the audience a respite from the world of the poem, unforgivingly violent or strange as it often is.

I talked about ring composition, that remarkable narrative technique that weaves the present and the past together, that allows the account of a specific episode in a character’s life to expand to encompass his entire life.

Well, you can’t begin to write anything until you’ve read everything. It was a sentence I found strangely exciting, with its promise of scholarly rigor and difficulty; I felt that if I devoted myself to a career whose training was painful, my father might approve of it. As she spoke I looked around her office: the wooden shelves neatly lined with books in Greek and Latin and French and German and Italian and English, the heavy plaster bust of an unsmiling Athena on top of one tall bookcase, a touch of humor provided by the many images and figurines of owls, Athena’s bird, which Jenny loved. You can’t write anything until you’ve read everything. I heard that sentence as I looked around the office, and I swallowed hard and thought, Okay.

Although I couldn’t know it then, since I knew little about Jenny’s family or personal history at the time, that sentence betrayed the presence of a certain intellectual inheritance as unmistakably as the curious circumflex shape of an eyebrow or the ripe Edwardian curve of a jaw can be the expressions of genes passed on from generation to generation. The intellectual DNA in this case, the penchant for rigor, was an inheritance from Jenny’s father, who at one point had also been her teacher, a man called Strauss, a Classics scholar and political philosopher who had grown up in Germany and was a product of the particularly rigorous classical training for which that country was famous; and beyond that to Strauss’ teacher and his teacher before him, back to Friedrich August Wolf himself, the German founder of classical philology. These chains of relationships between students and their professors—the Germans, with their combination of sentimentality and reverence for intellectual authority, rightly call such intellectual mentors Doktorväter, “doctor-fathers”—snake back in time as purposefully as the ever-narrowing limbs of a family tree, a lineage of study and scholarship, of intellectual tastes and idiosyncrasies, that expresses itself, just as real bloodlines do, in resemblances that persist from generation to generation.

I understood as I turned out the light in my study after putting my books away, the pale blue, the faded red, had been in Jenny’s mind that day thirty years before when she had murmured, Well, you can’t begin to write anything until you’ve read everything. How lucky I had been in my teachers, who had invited me to become a link in the chain that connects the past to the present. And how much my father had missed, as I saw only now, when he turned the invitation down. Like father, like son. Not always, I thought. Not all genealogies, I said to myself that January night after the first class session, are genetic.

By emphasizing the inadequacies of the son, the poet makes us, too, long for the appearance of the father, whose authority and competence are beyond dispute. In this way, the Odyssey enacts the truth of one of its most famous and troubling lines, which the poet puts in Athena’s mouth at the end of the assembly scene: “Few sons are the equals of their fathers; most fall short, all too few surpass them.”

For a boy who never even met his father, the question is, Which is the larger crisis: living out your life without a father, or actually meeting him for the first time twenty years later and having to get to know him? I looked at him and said, Now that is scathingly brilliant. It was at this point that my father jumped in. I just don’t understand why Telemachus is supposed to be getting an “education.” All he does is just follow orders. He doesn’t really think for himself at all. I looked up and down the seminar table, but no one was talking. Well, I finally said, but there is some educational value here, isn’t there? Telemachus travels and sees new cultures and meets new people, and from that he learns. And remember that we are learning, too—we hear stories that fill in some of the blanks about what happened at the end of the Trojan War. So what do we learn in these books? Nina’s eyes met mine. I think it’s interesting that when Telemachus and Athena arrive in Pylos in Book 3, there’s a big ceremony going on. Telemachus and Athena are strangers, but they’re treated with the utmost respect. It’s a big contrast to Ithaca, where there’s a lot of feasting and drinking, but in that case, it’s just freeloading. There’s no mention of sacrificing to the gods on Ithaca. Excellent, I said. Yes. In Nestor’s kingdom there’s proper respect for the gods, something that’s sorely lacking back home.

Homer’s skillful manipulation of the parallel homecomings reminds us of a familiar psychological truth: that a strong sense of what our own family is like, what its weaknesses and strengths are, the relative degrees of its conventionality and eccentricity, its normalcy or pathology, is often impossible to establish until we are old enough to compare it intelligently with the families of others; something we start doing only when we begin to perceive, as happens at the end of childhood, that our family is not, in fact, the entire world.

A 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. Ostensibly because all these tears are getting to be overwhelming, Helen decides, before launching into her reminiscence about Odysseus, to lace the wine with a powerful drug. This potion—which, we are told, the Spartan queen obtained in Egypt, home to the greatest sages and healers in the world—has the effect of severing the cord between inner emotion and outward expression: to drink it is to lose the ability to weep, to shed a tear, even if one’s mother and father were to die, even if one’s brother or darling son should be killed before one’s eyes. 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. Helen’s remarkable ability to recognize people is, in fact, the subject of the story she now proceeds to tell, apparently to satisfy Telemachus’ desire to learn more about the father he has never known. She recalls how, toward the end of the war, Odysseus infiltrated Troy disguised as a beggar, wearing filthy rags and, more extraordinarily, having whipped himself with a...

So I answered, It looks like they’re sharing these happy memories of Odysseus, but actually it’s pretty tense. Jenny smiled, then, and made a tiny motion with her sleek brown head. She wore a silver ring on her forefinger, made from an ancient Athenian coin and designed so that you could swivel the coin around to display either the obverse or the reverse, Athena’s profile or the owl, the goddess’s special animal. Go on, Dan, she said. Well, I 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. Jenny nodded. But the whole point of Menelaus’ story is that it shows she’s lying. How? 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 pleased. Now tell me why she drugs the wine. I suddenly sat up straight in my seat. It’s as if she and Menelaus have told these stories before and she knows that his story exposes her as a traitor, and so she drugs the wine 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. Cocking her head again, Jenny exhaled. Then she looked us over. I’ll repeat my original question, then. ...

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. A millennium and a half after Porphyry, in the nineteenth century—when, as I’d explained to the kids in my introductory lecture, there was suddenly a great fashion for dividing the Iliad and the Odyssey into discrete episodes—some classicists held that the first four books of the Odyssey had once formed an independent mini-epic that had only later been grafted onto the Odyssey. So strong, they argued, was the narrative arc of its young protagonist’s development from passivity to activity, from mere observer to energetic seeker; so forceful was the novelistic trajectory of the Telemachy, that mini-bildungsroman in which the character of Odysseus’ young son comes to be molded, educated, ...

The Greek word that I’ve translated as “like-mindedness” is homophrosynê. The homo- root comes from the adjective homoios, which means “the same” and which makes itself felt in such English words as “homeopathy”—to treat a disease, pathos, with the same, homoios, thing that causes it—and “homosexual.” The phron- root has to do with the intellect, the mind; our word “phrenology” derives from it. (The word I’ve translated as “alike in mind” a few lines later is, in the original, a form of the verb that’s connected to homophrosynê: homophronein, “to think in the same way.”) Not least because of the central place of the Odyssey in the Greek tradition, homophrosynê has become the canonical word in the study of Greek literature for the quality that is the sine qua non for a successful relationship between two people. As we discussed Books 5 and 6 and pondered the Odyssey’s troubled pairings, we talked about homophrosynê. I pronounced it aloud for them: ho-mo-fro-SOO-nay. Think, I said to them. Why do you think a perfect like-mindedness is the most important thing a couple can have between them, according to Odysseus in Book 6?

I turned back to the students. Now let me ask again: Why do you think like-mindedness is the most important thing according to Odysseus in Book 6? Especially in light of what we know about the relationship between Calypso and Odysseus, about how after a while she had to compel him to sleep with her, how sexual desire, even with the most beautiful of females, can fade after time? Madeline wiggled her hand. Because the physical isn’t enough? Odysseus and Penelope will both be so much older when they reunite than they were when he left. I guess the question is, How will they be able to recognize each other, physically, when he comes home? Yes, I said, and how will they be able to recognize each other, do you think? Jack said, Spoiler alert! They cracked up. I said, I doubt there’s anyone here who doesn’t know the ending… Trisha was serious. She stopped writing in her notebook and said, It will be something in their minds, not their bodies? Jack said, Homo…? 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. Over in his corner on the left, my father had grown serious. Your memories, he said. The students bent over their books and started writing furiously.

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. Or, I thought a moment later, maybe both were his true selves. Maybe Daddy, too, was polytropos; maybe, as that adjective suggests so powerfully in the Odyssey, identity is less a matter of binary oppositions, the contemptuous or the kindly, the father or the husband, the father or the son, than it is of kaleidoscopic perspective. Maybe it’s a question of which section of the circle, the loop, you happen to be in a position to see.

The Greek name that tradition has assigned to this part of the poem—the long-awaited narration of Odysseus’ adventures, which, for many readers, are the most memorable part of the Odyssey—is the Apologoi, the “Narratives.” This title reflects a crucial fact: the narrator of these tales is none other than Odysseus himself. Thus far, everything we know about Odysseus, his imprisonment by Calypso, the shipwreck after his departure from her island, his discovery by Nausicaa, his arrival at the palace of the Phaeacian king and queen, is narrated by the poet of the Odyssey. But the adventures that have become so famous that even people who haven’t read the Odyssey know about them—his encounters with the Lotos-Eaters, addicted to a drug that can make men forget their homelands; the fearsome monsters Scylla and Charybdis, who inhabit opposite sides of a narrow strait, preying on the sailors who pass through; his encounter with Circe, who turns his men into pigs; the one-eyed monster Cyclops—are related by him. Hence “Narratives”: a title that underscores Odysseus’ wondrous way with words, his sly expertise as a raconteur and fabulist.

I emphasized that the famous adventures of Odysseus are, in fact, narrated by their own hero. Why, I asked as the students settled down around the table, weren’t these episodes related by the narrator of the poem? What is the poet accomplishing by having the protagonist of the tales narrate them?

But the wordplay in this remarkable passage is more intricate than any translation can convey, as I went on to explain. Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his name is “Nobody.” Now, the Greek word for “nobody” or “no one” is outis: ou means “not,” and tis is the indefinite pronoun “one.” Ou-tis, “no-one.” Odysseus, outis. The name Odysseus gives to the Cyclops is actually a kind of slurred version of his actual name. Nina said, It’s an alias, but it’s also sort of his real name. He’s both lying and telling the truth at the same time. Yes, I said. That’s a great point. But it’s even better than that. Think about the word “nobody.” In English, when you ask a question to which the answer will be “nobody,” you have to use the pronoun “anybody”—as in “Is anybody home?” “No, nobody’s home.” Greek has more or less the same syntactical feature. In Greek, one way to convey “is anybody” is actually a two-word phrase, mê tis, pronounced may tiss. That, in fact, is the phrase the Cyclops’ neighbors use when they rush up and ask him if anybody is stealing his sheep or trying to murder him: “Is anybody [mê tis] killing you?” To which he replies, “No, nobody [outis] is killing me.” I paused for breath and was pleased to see that they were a bit breathless themselves, waiting for whatever the payoff was going to be. I asked them to think about what Nina said, about how by calling himself Outis, “Nobody,” he’s both telling the truth and lying at the same time. This was not only because outis ...

Now do you want to say anything about why he starts the recitation of his adventures by boasting about his reputation for trickery? Madeline hesitated, but only for a moment. Because the adventure itself is about trickery? And it’s a trick that’s wrapped in language. So it’s all about tricks and words. Yes! I said. Words! In the end, what dooms the Cyclops is his inability to distinguish between two homophones. It’s funny, and it’s also kind of brilliant. Brendan’s hand went up. I wonder if you think we could say it’s a story about listening? About how your own perspective affects how you hear things? I mean, the real problem in this story is that from the very start Polyphemus hears what he wants to hear. If someone came up to you and said “My name is Nobody,” you’d do a double take, right? It’s so obviously weird. But he doesn’t take the Greeks seriously, because he’s bigger and stronger than they are, and so he doesn’t actually hear what Odysseus is saying.

Odysseus’ journey to Hades, the Land of the Dead, in Book 11 is traditionally known as the Nekyia. Strictly speaking, this Greek term, derived from the word nekys, “corpse” (the English “necropolis” is related to it) refers to the dread rites by which the living summon the ghosts of the dead in order to speak to them; Homer’s description of these rituals, which involve some shivery, unexplained arcana, has the unsettling power you associate with the best horror movies. After arriving at the spot designated by Circe—a level shore marked by a rock at the meeting place of two rivers—the hero first digs a pit, each side the length of the distance from the tip of the third finger to the elbow; around this pit he then pours a libation of milk, honey, wine, and water; afterward he sprinkles barley around the perimeter; and finally he cuts the throats of a ram and a black ewe, turning their heads in one direction as he turns his own head in the opposite direction, and then letting their blood fill the pit. Only after the ghosts drink this blood is the power of speech granted to them.

Over time, nekyia, the word for the rites that summon these inarticulate zombies, has come to stand for the entire episode, which occurs just before the halfway point of Odysseus’ long journey home. The strategic positioning of this episode suggests an important moral: In order to move into the future, we must first reconcile ourselves with our pasts.

The pain Odysseus feels in the Underworld is incredibly palpable, she said. The passage about him trying to hug his mother who can’t be held was just heart-wrenching. I wondered how many of them could know grief well enough, so early in their lives, to appreciate the devastating aptness of the symbol Homer contrived for the gulf between the living and the dead: the armful of air, the impossible embrace. Why is it three times? Don Quixote Tom suddenly asked. I thought for a moment. Well, three is a kind of magic narrative number, right? Think of how jokes are organized around triplets—a rabbi, a minister, a priest—and the structure is tripartite, too: x, x, then y; and y is always the punch line. There’s something structurally satisfying about the number three, I suppose. Imagine if he’d tried to embrace her just once, the scene would have no impact.

Nina said, I thought it was interesting that he meets the ghost of Agamemnon. There’s been so much about Agamemnon’s story, but finally we hear from him what happened when he got home, so it’s like proof of that. His story shows Odysseus what to avoid. She was right: it is in Hades that we get the fullest narration thus far of Agamemnon’s homecoming—this time, from Agamemnon himself. We must remember that at the time the two heroes of the Trojan War meet, Odysseus has no knowledge of Agamemnon’s fate: we, the audience, have heard about it, and Telemachus hears about it in Books 3 and 4, but Odysseus knows nothing. This encounter in Hades represents the first time that the hero of the Odyssey hears the tale that we have been getting from the start: the story of Agamemnon’s return home from Troy, that inverse-Odyssey in which the wife has yielded to her suitor and betrays her returning husband. Agamemnon’s bitter description in Book 11 of the ambush at the welcome-home feast—the dead bodies bleeding among the plates and goblets, he himself cut down “as if (he tells Odysseus) I were a fat beast in a slaughterhouse”—gives the most detailed account thus far of that awful narrative, one that is sure to be at least as instructive for Odysseus as are the warnings that he gets from Teiresias. And indeed, 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 p...

The night before class, as I read through their postings on the discussion board, I’d been perplexed that no one had mentioned the most remarkable encounter that Odysseus has in the Land of the Dead: the one with the ghost of Achilles, hero of the Iliad. It is the last conversation Odysseus has with someone he knew personally. The climactic quality of this meeting is heightened by an astonishing admission on the part of Achilles. In the Iliad, Achilles recalls how he had willingly exchanged the possibility of a long life in return for a short life with undying glory, kleos, that paramount motivation for heroic action. In the Odyssey, Odysseus meets his former comrade in Hades and is eager to assure the dead hero that his choice was the right one: But never before has a man been more blessed by fortune than you, Achilles, nor will there ever be again. While you lived we Argives honored you as if you were a god; and now you wield great power here among the dead. So do not let death grieve you, Achilles. And yet Achilles disagrees: Don’t sweet-talk me about death, brilliant Odysseus. I’d rather serve another as a land-bound serf, some man without a portion, no livelihood, than be the lord of all the withered dead. The exchange represents a shocking rejection of the values embraced by Achilles and endorsed throughout the Iliad. For the hero of the Iliad, a poem that celebrates the dark glamour of early death, to announce to the hero of the Odyssey, a poem that celebrates the o...

I said, So that’s why you’re on the cruise—because you love the Odyssey? The man with the wound on his leg said, I am here because I loved my teacher. I always thought that someday I should find a way to honor him, and to me this seemed the best way: to experience the journey of Odysseus. He paused and then said, He is long dead, but I hope he would approve.

By the time Odysseus and his men land on the coast of a place called Thrinakia, his crew has been warned by both Teiresias and by Circe—warnings repeated, now, by Odysseus—to avoid touching the beautiful cattle that roam there, enormous herds of cows and sheep that belong to the sun god Hyperion. Each herd, the poet goes out of his way to point out, numbers precisely three hundred and fifty head. At first the men take pains to obey the orders they’ve had, but after they’re stranded for some time on Thrinakia because of bad weather, they succumb to their hunger. Taking advantage of a moment when Odysseus has gone off to pray to the gods for help, they slaughter some of the animals, roast the meat on spits, and eat it. But the all-seeing Hyperion takes offense and cries to the other gods that the Greeks must be punished; if not, he threatens, he will go to Hades and shine among the dead—a grotesque, a horrible, inversion of the natural order of things. The gods oblige him, sending a terrible storm at sea as the Greeks set sail from Thrinakia. Odysseus is the sole survivor of this final calamity; which is why, in the end, he gets to make his nostos alone, gets to be the hero of his epic. I wanted to discuss the Cattle of the Sun, which shares with the trip to the Underworld some of the poem’s spookiest moments. (For instance, after the cattle have been slaughtered, the dead animals’ skins continue to move, and the flesh that is roasting on the spits baas and moos.) Above all,...

I couldn’t get the students interested in the Cattle of the Sun—or, at least, couldn’t get them interested in what had interested me, in what I had once learned. (Think, Jenny had said thirty years earlier. They belong to the sun, they cannot die. There are three hundred and fifty of them, which is very nearly the number of—what? And then I said, Days of the year? I was confused, and she smiled. It’s about time.)

Well, we know he was with Calypso on her island because Homer tells us. It’s the part of the poem that he gets from the Muse, right? But he tells us about Circe as part of the story he’s telling the Phaeacians about his adventures, and she’s an awful lot like Calypso. And there are other weird parallels. I know this may seem contrived, but I was going to say that what I noticed in Book 10 was how much the Laestrygonians were like the Phaeacians. Odysseus lands on their island and then right away meets the royal princess, then the queen, then the king, but with the Laestrygonians it’s like a nightmare version of the Phaeacians. Yes, that’s right, I said. We talked about that last week. Blond Tom was nodding. It’s true. So many stories that Odysseus tells to the Phaeacians are like dark parallels to something we know for a fact that Odysseus experienced in the earlier part of the book. Nina looked over from her seat next to Jack. Pretty much everything he tells in the adventures stories comes off as a kind of lurid dream. It’s familiar and bizarre at the same time. I dunno, Brendan interrupted. I guess it feels like—okay, so I’m just going to say it. Do you think it’s possible that the stuff he’s telling the Phaeacians is totally made up? To me it feels like he’s just making it up as he goes along, basing the Apologoi on what actually happened to him. I pondered this. I see where you’re going, I said, and I will say that it’s really interesting, very intriguing. You’ve come ...

Blond Tom said, I actually think there is a point. I think it’s really philosophical. We’re always talking about storytelling and how important it is in the Odyssey, how you have to read between the lines of people’s stories, like with Helen and Menelaus in Book 4. So maybe by presenting the Apologoi as based on truth but not representing the whole truth, Homer is making you wonder what “truth” is to begin with. Madeline said, slowly, It’s funny that we’re even having this conversation about what adventures are “real” as opposed to the adventures that may be “fiction,” since the whole poem is a fiction. Tom nodded and then looked up at me again. So I think, he said, I think this is the climax of the whole storytelling theme that we have talked about so much. If you read the whole thing this way, by the end of Book 12 you’re, like, how do you know what’s true?