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

by Daniel Mendelsohn

At first, Telemachus recoils in disbelief when Odysseus declares who he is. This rejection reminds us of the vehemence with which, in the first few books of the epic, he had kept dismissing the notion that his father could still be alive: No—you’re not Odysseus, my father, but some spirit is bewitching me, that I may lament my woes more loudly. For no mortal man could ever contrive such tricks by his own devices, not unless some god came down intent on making him either young or old. Just now you were old and wrapped in rags, but now you look like the gods who rule the wide heavens. To this exclamation, Odysseus makes an oddly unsatisfying, almost legalistic reply. “No other Odysseus is ever going to come here,” he tells his son, “but I am such a one as he.” As for his transformation, that, he says, is indeed Athena’s work; the gods can do anything, after all. It’s at this point that Telemachus breaks down and embraces his father, who then dissolves in tears, too, the two of them “shrilly weeping,” Homer says, like birds of prey whose nests have been plundered by farmers. It is a peculiar, even disturbing simile: the simultaneous characterization of them as both victims and predators points ahead to the murderous destruction that this touching father-son reunion sets in motion.