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

by Daniel Mendelsohn

Both war and bad marriages come together in the most famous arkhê kakôn of them all: the moment when a prince of Troy called Paris stole away with a Greek queen called Helen, another man’s wife. So, according to the myth, began the Trojan War, the decade-long conflict waged by the Greeks to win back the wayward Helen and punish the inhabitants of Troy. (One of the reasons the war took so long to prosecute was that Troy was surrounded by impregnable walls; these finally yielded, after a ten-year siege, only because of a trick—the Trojan Horse—devised by the Odyssey’s notoriously crafty hero.) Whatever its basis in remote history may have been—there had indeed been an ancient city located on the Turkish site that my father and I visited, and it was destroyed violently, but beyond that we can only guess—the mythic cataclysm that resulted from Helen’s adultery with Paris has furnished poets and playwrights and novelists with material for the past three and a half millennia: countless deaths on both sides, the shocking sack of the great city, the enslavements and humiliations and infanticides and suicides, and then, finally, the wretchedly prolonged homecomings of those Greeks clever or lucky enough to survive the war itself.