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

by Daniel Mendelsohn

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,...