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

by Daniel Mendelsohn

Although I couldn’t know it then, since I knew little about Jenny’s family or personal history at the time, that sentence betrayed the presence of a certain intellectual inheritance as unmistakably as the curious circumflex shape of an eyebrow or the ripe Edwardian curve of a jaw can be the expressions of genes passed on from generation to generation. The intellectual DNA in this case, the penchant for rigor, was an inheritance from Jenny’s father, who at one point had also been her teacher, a man called Strauss, a Classics scholar and political philosopher who had grown up in Germany and was a product of the particularly rigorous classical training for which that country was famous; and beyond that to Strauss’ teacher and his teacher before him, back to Friedrich August Wolf himself, the German founder of classical philology. These chains of relationships between students and their professors—the Germans, with their combination of sentimentality and reverence for intellectual authority, rightly call such intellectual mentors Doktorväter, “doctor-fathers”—snake back in time as purposefully as the ever-narrowing limbs of a family tree, a lineage of study and scholarship, of intellectual tastes and idiosyncrasies, that expresses itself, just as real bloodlines do, in resemblances that persist from generation to generation.