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

by Daniel Mendelsohn

It’s true that Odysseus—like us—is ever mindful of the fate of his comrade Agamemnon, slaughtered by his unfaithful wife upon his return. And yet by this point in the poem many readers will wonder just why he has to be so stony, so cautious. His testing of Penelope here—whose sly manipulation of the Suitors he has just delightedly witnessed, after all—begins to seem as superfluous as his testing of Eumaeus was in Book 14, after Athena herself had assured him of the swineherd’s loyalty. The emphasis in the first part of Book 19 on the hero’s maniacal need to hold back, his off-putting ability to keep normal human impulses in check—the characteristic the students were so eager to condemn that day—is, in fact, cunningly connected to the story of the scar that dominates the latter part of this book, the part the students had no interest in. The scar, we remember, is the telltale sign that identifies Odysseus to Eurycleia, and its history deeply entwines the poem’s themes of pain and identity: the hero’s strange name, “the man of pain,” is given to him at birth by Autolycus, the lone-wolf grandfather who’d caused so many people so much pain, and it is while visiting this same grandfather that he goes on the boar hunt during which he receives the wound that will become the scar. Which is to say, both of the things that identify Odysseus, the markers of who he is, his name and his scar, are connected to pain. What’s interesting is how he got the scar. Homer goes out of his way to...