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

by Daniel Mendelsohn

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.