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

by Daniel Mendelsohn

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...