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

by Daniel Mendelsohn

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...