An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2017. Daniel Mendelsohn
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those being promoted by John Locke in England and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France, which emphasized the practical aims of education, its role in preparing students for “real life.” What, these philosophers were wondering, could studying the ancient classics possibly teach students in the present day? Locke, like many parents today, derisively wondered why a working person would need to know Latin. Wolf’s answer was, Human nature. For him, the object of his new literary “science”—“philology,” from the Greek for “love of language”—was nothing less than a means to a profound understanding of the “intellectual, sensual, and moral powers of man.” But to study the ancient texts and cultures properly, one had to approach them as scientifically as one did when studying the physical universe. As with mathematics or physics, Wolf argued, meaningful study of classical civilization could arise only from mastery of many essential and interlinked disciplines: immersion not only in Ancient Greek and Latin (and, often, in Hebrew and Sanskrit), in their vocabularies and grammars and syntaxes and prosody, but in the history, religion, philosophy, and art of the cultures that spoke and wrote those languages. To this immersion, he went on, there had to be added the mastery of specialized skills, such as those needed to decipher ancient papyri, manuscripts, and inscriptions, such mastery being as necessary, ultimately, to the study of ancient literature as the mastery of plane and solid geometry, of arithmetic and algebra, and, indeed, of calculus is to proper study of the field we call mathematics.
And so classical philology was born. When I learned about this in graduate school, I shared it with my father. He winced and shook his head and said, Only science is science.
The silence between my father and me started to thaw when I began my graduate study in Classics, when I was twenty-six. Yes, only science was science; but as time went by, it was as if the arduousness of the course of study to which I was devoting myself were eroding his resistance. Whatever he might think of the mushy, subjective business of literary interpretation, he had a grim respect for the classical languages themselves, their grammars as impervious to emotion or subjectivity as any mathematical proof; through mastering them, I had become worthier in his eyes. He started to ask me, with real interest, about the progress of my studies, about what I was reading and how the seminars were conducted. It was at this time, in fact, that he reminisced about his own Latin studies so many years before and shared with me the story of how he’d read Ovid in high school but quit before he’d been able to read Virgil.
During my first year of graduate school I took a seminar on the Aeneid. My father asked me to xerox some pages from Book 2 and send them to him; he wanted to have a go at them, he said. Now as it happens Book 2 is the part of the epic in which the Fall of Troy is recounted in harrowing detail: the awful climax to which the Iliad and Odyssey allude but never fully describe, the one peering into the future toward the devastating event, the other gazing backward at it. It is Virgil, the Roman, who gives us the whole story at last: the Greeks hidden within the gigantic Trojan Horse, which the Trojans have taken inside their city’s walls; then the ambush in the dark, the smoke from the burning city, the panic and the flames; the image of the headless trunk of the murdered Trojan king, Priam, a pitiable old man, the quintessential epic father, who is slain before the altar at which he desperately prays for the safety of his city by Neoptolemus, the son of the now-dead Achilles—a youth who, by killing the elderly king, seeks to outdo his own father in cruel bravery. My father wanted to see some pages from Book 2 because, he said, he was curious to know whether he’d be able to follow the Latin. But too much time had passed since those days decades earlier when he had read Oh-vid so fluently.
It’s no good, he told me over the phone one night, with that tight rueful tone he could sometimes have, a tone of voice that was the vocal equivalent of someone frowning and waving a hand dismissively, as if to say, Why bother?
It’s no use. I’m just no good at this anymore, he said after he’d had a go at Priam and Neoptolemus. It’s too late.
Oh, well, I said. It was so long ago. Nobody could remember all that.
To which my father replied, It’s okay. Now you’ll read it for me.
A sweet comment. Although my father was hard, was tough, every now and then he would say things or let slip a remark that was so unexpectedly tender or generous or poetic that you’d be confounded—would find yourself in a state of what Greeks called aporia, “helplessness.” (The word literally means “without a path”; “a feeling of being stranded” would be one way of translating it.) But then, this was the parent who, for all his hardness, despite the severity that had etched itself into his very flesh—the stern horizontal lines running across his forehead like the rulings of the black-and-white-marbled composition books we dutifully took notes in, the sunken vertical planes of his cheeks beneath the ridged cheekbones and the high symmetrical arcs of his eye sockets shadowing the spheres beneath like illustrations in a geometry textbook—had somehow acquired the comically incongruous nickname “Daddy Loopy.” Daddy Loopy! we would cry on the rare occasions when he’d tickle or tease us, Who’s your Daddy Loooooopy?! he would say, slightly self-conscious but also obscurely pleased, as he tucked me in tightly, a super-duper-tucker-inner, like a mummy! which is the way I preferred it when I was four or five and he’d come into my bedroom, sitting carefully on the edge of the narrow bed he had built for me, would read me Winnie-the-Pooh.
That’s okay, you’ll read it for me, I heard him say, this sweet thing he said one autumn evening half a lifetime ago, and I thought, not for the first time, Who is this man?
And so my father and I started talking again, thanks to Virgil. I would call him throughout the term and recap the seminar discussions, and sometimes he would take out the pages I sent to him and we would make our laborious way through a passage over the phone, and every now and then there would be a pleased little swagger in his voice as he recognized some grammatical principle he had learned sixty-five years earlier and then forgotten, as for instance when we were reading some lines from Book 2, the book with the dreadful descriptions of the Fall of Troy, lines from a scene in which the aged king Priam feebly dons his old battle gear in hopes that he might defend his beloved city one last time. Oh, sure, I see, sumptis armis is an ablative absolute there, my father said, and I said, Yes, that’s right!; and we talked about how, in the line ipsum autem sumptis Priamum iuvenalibus armis, “Priam himself, having taken up the arms he bore in his youth,” the detail that the arms that the old king struggles to wield—because he yearned to protect his palace from the Greeks who had sprung from the belly of the wooden horse, the notorious ruse dreamed up by Odysseus—were the very ones he had borne when he was young and strong, added a special poignancy to the scene. And my father said yes, he could see that. We had many such conversations in the autumn of my first year at graduate school, which were not like any conversations we had had before.
It is for this reason that I can say that I didn’t really feel that I got to know my father until I began to study the Classics in earnest.
From some point or another.
Unlike the tightly focused proem of the Iliad, the proem of the Odyssey rambles, is filled with ambiguity. In the first line of the Iliad the poet calls on the Muse to sing his great theme, which is summed up in the first word of that first line: “rage.” Whose rage? The rage of Achilles, the son of Peleus. Compare with this the opening of the Odyssey, which begins by asking the Muse to follow the story of “a man” but doesn’t give his name: it could be anyone. As the line proceeds, of course, we get more information from the subordinate clauses that start piling up: the man who wandered widely, after he sacked Troy’s sacred citadel, who was a great sufferer, who tried and failed to save his men. But the proem’s attention proceeds to slither away from “the man” to those men, delving in curiously elaborate detail into a specific episode that apparently doomed them: the eating of the forbidden flesh of the Cattle of the Sun. By the time you reach the end of the proem, you’re acutely aware of the discrepancy between the wealth and specificity of certain information you’ve received about this man and the gaps that remain, not the least of which, of course, is his name: a glaring omission, to say the least, in a passage whose purpose is to introduce him. Of course we know that “the man”