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

by Daniel Mendelsohn

So I answered, It looks like they’re sharing these happy memories of Odysseus, but actually it’s pretty tense. Jenny smiled, then, and made a tiny motion with her sleek brown head. She wore a silver ring on her forefinger, made from an ancient Athenian coin and designed so that you could swivel the coin around to display either the obverse or the reverse, Athena’s profile or the owl, the goddess’s special animal. Go on, Dan, she said. Well, I said, the point of Helen’s story is that she’s sorry for having run away with Paris by now. She wants everyone to believe that she’s come around to the Greek cause, that now she’s helping Odysseus on his spying mission. Jenny nodded. But the whole point of Menelaus’ story is that it shows she’s lying. How? Because she was trying to get the Greeks who were hiding inside the horse to betray themselves. Which means she was still actually on the Trojans’ side. She looked pleased. Now tell me why she drugs the wine. I suddenly sat up straight in my seat. It’s as if she and Menelaus have told these stories before and she knows that his story exposes her as a traitor, and so she drugs the wine because after taking nepenthê no one can react to anything, no one can become outraged, no one can do anything about what the stories reveal…they’re eating and drinking and it looks like a nice feast, but underneath it all they’re actually fighting. Cocking her head again, Jenny exhaled. Then she looked us over. I’ll repeat my original question, then. ...