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

by Daniel Mendelsohn

What I liked is the thing with the dogs in Book 16, Madeline said. What she was referring to was this: At the beginning of Book 14, when Odysseus (who, following Athena’s transformation of him, is to all appearances nothing more than a wizened old beggar) approaches Eumaeus’ hut, he is nearly killed by the swineherd’s snarling guard dogs, escaping only because he sinks down to the ground and drops his beggar’s staff until he’s rescued by Eumaeus, who tells him that he’s lucky to be alive. “One moment more and these dogs would have torn you to pieces!” But when Telemachus makes his way to Eumaeus’ hut at the beginning of Book 16, the hounds that had nearly killed his father simply fawn on him: “not a growl as he approached.” The youth is known here, is welcome, in a way that his father, gone for so many years that this new generation of dogs does not know him, is not. Madeline said, It’s one of the things that reminds you that Odysseus has become a stranger in his own land.

The dogs’ failure to recognize Odysseus looks forward to, and is pointedly contrasted with, one of the best-known moments in the epic. In Book 17, Odysseus, accompanied by his loyal servant, finally makes his way to the gates of his palace, which he plans to infiltrate. As he passes by, a mangy dog lying on a dung heap outside the palace walls pricks up its ears: this, we are told, is the loyal hound Argos, which Odysseus had trained as a puppy and which now, like his master, has been made unrecognizable by the passing years—“an object of revulsion, his master long since gone.” And yet the dog miraculously recognizes Odysseus: But when he sensed that Odysseus was close by he wagged his tail and lay his ears down flat, but no longer had the strength to come to his Master…

Constrained by his need to protect his disguise, Odysseus can’t let on that he knows the dog: the sole, unbearably poignant sign of his repressed inner emotion is a single tear that trickles down his cheek, which he takes pains to conceal from Eumaeus. And just then, Homer says, Death’s darkness then took hold of Argos, who had seen Odysseus again, after twenty years. This moment of recognition, with its implication that there is some inner quality in Odysseus that has remained intact despite the passage of years and the hardships he’s endured, in turn looks forward to his subsequent confrontations with Penelope, who will sense, in the beggar who has come to the palace, something familiar…

The three scenes with the dogs—the dogs that nearly attack Odysseus in Book 14; the dogs that fawn on their beloved master, Telemachus, in Book 16; and the wrenching telepathy between Argos and Odysseus in Book 17—are, in fact, designed to frame the recognition scene between Odysseus and his son in Book 16: to raise questions about how we recognize who someone is, and what true recognition means.

At first, Telemachus recoils in disbelief when Odysseus declares who he is. This rejection reminds us of the vehemence with which, in the first few books of the epic, he had kept dismissing the notion that his father could still be alive: No—you’re not Odysseus, my father, but some spirit is bewitching me, that I may lament my woes more loudly. For no mortal man could ever contrive such tricks by his own devices, not unless some god came down intent on making him either young or old. Just now you were old and wrapped in rags, but now you look like the gods who rule the wide heavens. To this exclamation, Odysseus makes an oddly unsatisfying, almost legalistic reply. “No other Odysseus is ever going to come here,” he tells his son, “but I am such a one as he.” As for his transformation, that, he says, is indeed Athena’s work; the gods can do anything, after all. It’s at this point that Telemachus breaks down and embraces his father, who then dissolves in tears, too, the two of them “shrilly weeping,” Homer says, like birds of prey whose nests have been plundered by farmers. It is a peculiar, even disturbing simile: the simultaneous characterization of them as both victims and predators points ahead to the murderous destruction that this touching father-son reunion sets in motion.

Brendan said, Homer pretty much tells you how to interpret the whole book. When Telemachus comes to Eumaeus, it’s a real homecoming, and the simile compares him to an actual father, but when he’s reunited with Odysseus he’s compared to a bird of prey. Trisha looked up. There’s a kind of hysteria in the scene between the biological father and son, she said. It’s almost like they’re overcompensating. I was impressed. Overcompensating for what, do you think? She said, For the fact that the emotion between them is sort of…abstract. It’s what fathers and sons should feel. But with Eumaeus, it’s real.

I think it’s because you sort of have to take it all on faith. They’ve never really known each other, Telemachus was just a baby when he left. So… He stopped then, looking sheepish. So what? I said. Yes, the emotion in the scene is abstract; yes, Telemachus has to take Odysseus on faith. What does it add up to? I looked around the room. It was Brendan who broke the silence, and the point he went on to make forced me to wonder—not for the first time since he’d speculated, during our discussion of Book 3, that maybe Telemachus was unconsciously hoping that Odysseus was dead—what his relationship with his father was like. Brendan said, If you never knew your father to begin with, there’s actually nothing to recognize.

It was from Fred that I understood that beauty and pleasure are at the center of teaching. For the best teacher is the one who wants you to find meaning in the things that have given him pleasure, too, so that the appreciation of their beauty will outlive him. In this way—because it arises from an acceptance of the inevitability of death—good teaching is like good parenting.

The Cattle of the Sun! Madeline said loudly. You keep talking about how it’s the only one of Odysseus’ adventures to be mentioned in the proem, how they ate the cows and sheep, and they all had to die. So we know it’s important—you know from the start that this is a big deal, how eating something you’ve been told not to eat gets this really vicious punishment. So it’s like what happens to the Suitors, that they all have to be killed, even the nice ones, is foreshadowed all along. Jack said, I still think it’s pretty harsh. My father suddenly chimed in from his corner. No. A crime is a crime. If you’ve done wrong, you’ve done wrong. There’s no gradations (his voice soured on the word gradations, and I knew what he was thinking: moral gradations were like sloppy arithmetic, that it was a contradiction in terms)—there’s no gradations in breaking the law. It’s either not broken or it’s broken! That’s what justice is. Jack looked over at my father. Rough justice! My father looked at him and grunted. It’s a rough world, he said.

Penelope’s growing sympathy for the beggar who has come to the palace sets this great scene in motion. By the end of Book 17, rumors about the unusual vagrant, together with reports of Antinoüs’ disgraceful treatment of him, have reached the queen’s ears, and she summons him to her chambers. The two finally meet at the beginning of Book 19. (Odysseus’ encounters with the various Suitors and his exchanges with the villain Antinoüs and the doomed Amphinomus take up most of Book 18. Penelope shrewdly insists on meeting with the beggar later that evening in secret, after the Suitors and their henchmen have gone to bed.) The beggar and the queen talk late into the night. Pretending to be a Cretan prince down on his luck after the Trojan War—another of his Cretan tales, which so confusingly blur the boundaries between fact and fiction; Odysseus himself, as we know, being a king who’s been down on his luck since the Trojan War—Odysseus insists to the queen that he has recently seen her long-lost husband, and that he is not only alive but about to return to Ithaca at long last. Since many travelers and guests have passed through Ithaca’s palace over the years claiming to have news of Odysseus, he demonstrates his bona fides by describing a certain brooch that, he tells Penelope, Odysseus was wearing when they met. Of course the description is accurate, and on hearing it the queen dissolves in tears. Collecting herself at last, she declares to her maidservants that the beggar must ...

All that the poet tells us is that the disguised hero is thrilled to see his wife manipulating the Suitors into giving her presents: …much-suffering, godlike Odysseus exulted since she’d wheedled gifts from them, charmed their hearts with her honeyed words; and meantime he was pondering other deeds. It may not be the reaction we expect, but it is, in fact, wholly in keeping with the poet’s ongoing emphasis on a trait of Odysseus’ that is of paramount importance to the plot of his epic: the hero’s ability to keep his emotions in check in the pursuit of his larger goal. Had he erupted in tears, run toward his wife, he’d have betrayed his disguise and sacrificed the success of his mission. Another theme that this strange scene underscores is that of homophrosynê. For in finagling the gifts out of the Suitors, Penelope displays the same wiles practiced so often by her husband, the man who’d managed to end his sojourn among the Phaeacians loaded down with gifts, he who’d arrived on their island naked, a nobody. However much it may disappoint modern expectations of this fraught encounter, the scene of Odysseus’ first glimpse of his wife reminds us of what has motivated this couple’s actions for so long: they are a perfect match. And now, in Book 19, Odysseus once again manages to remain in Penelope’s presence—much closer, this time, as the two sit talking into the night—without betraying a flicker of emotion. At the moment when the “beggar” describes the brooch Odysseus was wear...

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...

I’ll say this about your father: all that reading did him good. He learned something, in his life. In his life, he learned something.

This endless tug-of-war between fathers and sons, successes and failures: I sometimes wondered what Homer’s father was like, if there had ever been a Homer. “Few men resemble their fathers. Few sons are better, most are worse…” But then, this has to be the case for the Odyssey to work. After all, if Telemachus were his father’s equal all along—if he were able to kill the Suitors, marry off his mother, take charge of Ithaca—there’d be no reason for Odysseus to come home; there’d be no Odyssey. Whatever its emphasis on Telemachus’ education, the Odyssey can’t really let him—so to speak—graduate.

One of the strange things about teaching is that you can never know what your effect will be on others; can never know, if you have something to teach, who your real students will be, the ones who will take what you have to give and make it their own—“what you have to give” being, in no small part, what you yourself learned from some other teacher, someone who wondered whether you would absorb what she had to give, someone who is, by the time you’re old enough to write about the experience, as old as your parents, perhaps even dead—can never really know which of the young people clustered around the seminar table is someone whom the teacher or the text has touched so deeply, for whatever reason, that the lesson will live beyond the classroom, beyond you. But then, the process of education, of pedagogy, of leading a child into knowledge, is a delicate and unpredictable one, its mechanisms and effects often mysterious to student and teacher alike.

For weeks I had been preparing the students for this climax, which is also the climax of the epic’s ongoing preoccupation with identity and recognition. The Greek word for “recognition” is anagnorisis, I’d told them, explaining that this is a key term in the vocabulary classicists use when talking about how plot works. Aristotle in his Poetics, for instance, says that certain plots in tragic drama pivot on a moment of anagnorisis, and others pivot on a sudden and total change of fortune, or metabasis; but the best kind of plot, Aristotle says, is the kind in which the moment of recognition is also, simultaneously, the moment of reversal of fortune. For Aristotle, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is the ideal play in part because it effects this double plot: Oedipus’ recognition that his wife is really his mother is also the moment of his downfall. But this twinning of recognition and reversal happens in the Odyssey, too, although there the outcome is a happy one: the moment when Odysseus’ true identity is recognized is also when his fortunes are restored and he wins back his wife, his family, his household, his kingdom.

The recognition scene between Odysseus and Penelope is also the culmination of another of the epic’s ongoing themes. I reminded them of all the other females who had enticed Odysseus during the course of his long journey home, mortal and immortal: of Calypso and Nausicaa and Circe, all of whom were alluring alternatives to Penelope, alternatives that, in the end, he rejected. I had reminded them of Odysseus’ pointed use of the word homophrosynê, the “like-mindedness” that he recommends in Book 6 to the Phaeacian princess as the hallmark of an authentic relationship, a true marriage, the very quality that was lacking in his entanglements with the goddesses with whose beauty Penelope could never hope to compete. I reminded them of the many physical transformations that had been effected throughout the poem, starting with Athena’s transformations, first into Mentes and then into Mentor, continuing with the disguise that Odysseus uses to sneak into Troy during the escapade that Helen recalls in Book 4, going on to include the way that Athena beautifies Odysseus in order to impress the Phaeacians in Book 6 and the way in which she makes him wizened and ugly once he returns to Ithaca, in Book 13, the better to deceive the Suitors, who are indeed fooled by the appearance of the bald, shriveled old man in their midst, a great hero in disguise. I had reminded them of all those transformations, metamorphoses that, whatever their charm or their value for the plot, force the reader of...

Like Cinderella’s sisters trying on the glass slipper, one Suitor after another tries to string the bow and fails. Finally, the “beggar” offers to have a try, much to the derision of the Suitors. Antinoüs wheels on him: how outrageous for someone as lowly as he to insert himself into the proceedings! Here Penelope herself slyly intervenes—suggesting, at least to some readers, that she has known all along that the beggar is her husband. Does Antinoüs really think, she laughingly declares, that she’d marry the old drifter if he wins? Certainly not. But since everyone else has failed, could it really hurt to let the old man have a go? Despite the mutterings and imprecations of the disgruntled Suitors, loyal Eumaeus takes the great weapon and carries it across the crowded room to the beggar, into whose hands he places it. Odysseus picks up the weapon, testing it to see whether “the worms have been at the horn in its master’s absence.” Then, finding it sound, in one fluid motion—as graceful, Homer says, as a bard stringing his lyre—he strings it. At which point, from the Suitors there rose up a mighty groan, their skin turned white; and Zeus let crash a mighty thunder-sign, while much-enduring, godlike Odysseus rejoiced that wily Cronus’ child had sent this portent. An arrow lay there on the table—he took and let it fly; the others, still within the quiver, the Achaeans soon would taste. And then the mayhem begins.

The jarring reference to the Suitors as “Achaeans”—the word Homer uses to refer to the Greek allies in the Iliad—prepares us for the fact that, however much the Odyssey has been preoccupied till now with its hero’s ability to use his wits to conquer his enemies, the climactic act of vengeance for which he has waited so long will be characterized by the kind of violence we associate with this poem’s great predecessor. After stripping off his rags and declaring to the astonished Suitors his true identity, he takes aim first at the loathsome Antinoüs; the arrow he shoots catches the leader of the Suitors in the throat just as he’s downing a cup of wine—a fitting ending to the character who, more than any other, emblematized the Suitors’ arrogance and impiety in defying the laws of hospitality. “You dogs,” Odysseus explodes at last, you never thought that I’d be home again from Troy! And so you ate my household up, forced yourself upon the servant girls, courted the wife of a man who was still alive, outraging the gods who hold up the wide heavens as if no one would ever take revenge: now dire destruction waits for all of you! Eurymachus dies next, after trying to smooth-talk his way out of his predicament (he blames everything on Antinoüs), and then poor Amphinomus, speared through the back by Telemachus as he tries to flee the hall. But the vengeance that ensues doesn’t, at first, go quite as Odysseus had planned. In a final nod to the theme of Telemachus’ education, Homer t...

Odysseus scans the carnage to see whether any Suitors are left breathing. But no; all are dead, lying in the gore like fishes that the fishermen have hauled from the iron-gray sea onto the winding shore meshed in the intricate nets; and they, the fish, lie there on the sand, croaking for the salty waves, but the blazing Sun beats the life from them… An undignified simile for an unworthy group of men.

It is only after the gore has been cleaned up and the palace ritually purified that Odysseus encounters his wife once more and finally reveals his identity to her. And yet, as with the scene in Book 16 that reunites the father and his son, the reunion between husband and wife in Book 23 starts off with a disconcerting anticlimax. Penelope, we are told, has slept through the mayhem; now she is waked by Eurycleia, who announces the great news to her mistress—Odysseus has returned and killed the Suitors! But to the nurse’s bewilderment and to the stupefaction of Telemachus, the queen doesn’t believe a word of it. Indeed, she turns out to be as suspicious and wary now as her husband has been throughout the poem. Her cautiousness in this scene, so like Odysseus’, is simultaneously a marker of the couple’s genuine like-mindedness, homophrosynê, and a frustration for Odysseus, that notorious deceiver and trickster, who finds himself in the odd position of not being believed when he finally wants to be—when he is finally telling the truth.

Exactly how are these two going to prove to each other who they are? After all, so much time has passed, twenty years, difficult years, years of hardship and shame and tribulation. The magical transformations effected by the gods, I suggested, are merely supernatural parallels to the force that really does transform our faces and bodies, withering us, making us bald and wrinkled: Time. When the exterior, the face and body, have changed beyond recognition, what remains? Is there an inner “I” that survives time?

The “sign” is received and understood: now, at last, Penelope recognizes that the stranger is truly Odysseus. For the secret of the bed’s special design, knowledge of which went deeper than any physical marking, was shared by one man: her husband, the only man who had ever had access to her bedchamber and her bed. The bed is, therefore, a dual marker: a sign of Odysseus’ identity and a symbol of Penelope’s fidelity. The queen, “her knees and heart gone slack,” throws herself weeping into her husband’s arms; he weeps, too. The sight of him, Homer says at this moment, is as welcome to Penelope as the sight of dry land is to men swimming away from a shipwreck: a simile that not only suggests, once again, how alike this husband and wife are, but implies that Penelope’s years at home have constituted an “adventure” every bit as harrowing as the ones her husband has had. Only now does the couple retire to the great bed for their first night together in twenty years—a night that, in one of the poem’s loveliest touches, Athena extends, restraining Dawn so as to give the couple more time for their reunion. First they make love; then, the poet tells us, each narrates to the other at length everything that has happened over the past two decades. To my delight, the students perked up a little as we started talking about the scene. I think it’s very fitting that Penelope’s final test for Odysseus is so clever, Tommy said. She doesn’t ask for a sign, but instead tries to trick him. It’s...

I think, she said, that when Odysseus talks about the immovability of the bed he’s really referring to his unwavering faith and love for his wife. Tommy offered what I thought was the most interesting observation anyone made that day. Actually, the sex isn’t the most important part of the reunion. Talking is. I thought it was interesting that they make love first but then they spend the rest of the night telling stories to each other before they sleep. It’s like they need to emotionally process what they’ve been through, and the way they do that is through storytelling. The real emphasis is on communicating, you could say. It’s like the Cyclops story. In the end, it all comes back to language. Yes, I said. Remember, we were just saying that bodies are unreliable, that outward appearances can be altered, whereas the inner self remains—

I know something about this. The students were looking at him. And then he went on. Face it! I’m the only one here who knows what it’s like to be with someone so long that they don’t look anything like the person you started out with. Of course he was right. They were eighteen, maybe nineteen. I couldn’t imagine, on this May day when my father started speaking about what it was like to watch as someone you knew long and well grew unrecognizably old, someone whom the habits of love and intimacy had grooved into your body and your soul the way that ivy will incise itself into the bark of a tree—I couldn’t imagine how old eighty-one must seem to these kids. As he began to speak I imagined the students silently studying his lined face, the age spots, the thin fluff clinging to his taut scalp. I looked at him, too, and suddenly I thought, This is what Athena makes Odysseus look like when she waves her wand at him in Book 13. “The skin withered on his curved limbs / the flaxen hair vanished from his head, and round / all his limbs she fixed an old man’s skin / and the light went out of his eyes, which were once so lovely.” I know about this, Daddy was saying. His mother, he went on, shaking his head and staring down at the floor, his mother was the most beautiful girl. Not pretty—beautiful. As I had done once many years before, when I was in high school and he was telling a neighbor how terrific my mother had looked at some event, a bar mitzvah or wedding, I thought, Why doesn’t...