An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2017. Daniel Mendelsohn
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he couldn’t be all that crazy, and took him away to the war.
The conflict was indeed vast—but so are Odysseus’ trials during his protracted homeward voyage. For he is continually harassed and delayed, shipwrecked and castaway, by the machinations of the angry sea god, Poseidon, whom Odysseus has offended (for reasons we learn later in the poem) and whom the hero will learn to appease only after he finally gets home. Odysseus’ far-flung wanderings over ten years as he struggles to return to his wife, Penelope, and their son—to get back to his family and home—stand in stark contrast to the immobility of the Greeks as they sat before the walls of Troy during the ten years of their war. So, too, does the mutual devotion of the couple at the heart of the Odyssey—Odysseus, whose allegiance to the wife he hasn’t seen in twenty years withstands the seductive attentions of various goddesses and nymphs whom he encounters on his way home, and Penelope, who remains true to him in the face of the aggressive attentions of the Suitors, the dozens of young men who have taken up residence in her palace, intent on marrying her—stand in sharply ironic contrast to the adulterous affair between Paris and Helen that was the cause of the war in the first place: the arkhê kakôn.
Most classicists agree that the proem of the Odyssey consists of its first ten lines:
A man—track his tale for me, Muse, the twisty one who
wandered widely, once he’d sacked Troy’s holy citadel;
he saw the cities of many men and knew their minds,
and suffered deeply in his soul upon the sea
try as he might to protect his life and the day of his men’s return;
but he could not save his men, although he longed to;
for they perished through their wanton recklessness,
fools who ate of the cattle of Hyperion,
the Sun; and so they lost the day of their return.
From some point or another, Daughter of Zeus, tell us the tale.
It is an odd way to begin. After modestly introducing his subject as, simply, “a man”—Odysseus’ name isn’t mentioned—the poet seems to wander away from this “man” to other men: that is, the men whom he had commanded and who, this proem tells us, died through their own recklessness. Just as the man himself had widely wandered, so does the proem.
Perhaps inevitably, in the case of this meandering work about a meandering and unexpectedly prolonged homecoming, some scholars have argued that the proem of the Odyssey itself strays: that, in fact, it runs for the first twenty-one lines of the poem. The eleven additional lines describe the circumstances in which Odysseus’ divine patroness, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, urges her father, Zeus, king of the gods, to bring Odysseus home at last despite the implacable opposition of the enraged sea god:
… tell us the tale.
Now all the others—those who’d fled steep death—
were home at last, safe from war and sea;
but he alone, yearning for home and wife,
was detained—by the Lady Calypso, most heavenly of goddesses,
in her hollow caves: she longed to marry him.
But then the time came in the course of the whirling years
when the gods devised a way to bring him home
to Ithaca; but even there he was hardly free of woe,
even when he was back among his people. All the gods felt pity
for him except Poseidon, who raged hotly against
Odysseus, that godlike man, until he reached his homeland.
And so, again very much like Odysseus, the proem not only wanders, but may wander on longer than it had intended to.
The Iliad and the Odyssey are the most famous epics in the Western tradition, but they are far from being the only ones to come down to us from Greek and Roman days. The landscape of classical Greek and Roman literature, from the two Homeric poems in the eighth century B.C. to Christian verse epics composed in the fifth century A.D., was dotted with epic poems, which reared up from those landscapes much the way that Troy must have risen from its smooth plain above the sea, seemingly unassailable and permanent. Even when the poems themselves were lost over the millennia, as many of them were, the proems often survived, precisely because of their gripping succinctness.
A proem could memorialize other poems. Take, for example, the proem of Virgil’s Aeneid, which knowingly alludes to the opening lines of both the Iliad and Odyssey:
Wars and a man I sing: the first who came
from Troy to Italy and to Latium’s shores,
exiled by Fate: tossed about on land and sea
by the violence of the gods above, all because
of the ever-wakeful wrath of savage Juno;
he suffered greatly too in war, so he could found
his city and bring his gods to Latium, whence arose
the Latin people, the Alban fathers, and the walls of lofty Rome.
The Aeneid revisits the world of Homer’s poems but radically shifts their point of view to that of the losers: it retails the adventures of Aeneas, one of the few Trojans to survive the Greek obliteration of Troy. After escaping the burning wreckage of his city with (this is one of the epic’s most famous and touching details) his father strapped to his back and his young son in tow, Aeneas first undergoes a series of elaborate wanderings (meanderings that remind us of the Odyssey) before he settles in Italy, the land that has been promised to him as the homeland of the new state that he will found, where he must then fight a series of grim battles against the locals (warfare that reminds us of the Iliad) in order to establish himself and his people forever. While he lacks the cruel glamour of the Iliad’s Achilles or the seductive slyness of Odysseus, Aeneas does embody a dogged sense of filial obligation, a quality much prized in Roman culture and signaled by the Latin adjective most often used of Virgil’s hero: pius, which means not “pious,” as might seem natural to an English-speaker’s eye, but “dutiful.” The proem of the Aeneid is seven lines long; the first of these, in which the poet announces that he will sing of “wars and a man,” arma virumque, is itself a nod to both the Iliad, which is above all about “wars” or “arms,” arma, and to the Odyssey, whose own first line, as we know, announces that it is about “a man.”
A proem, therefore, can not only summarize its own action, look into its own future, and forecast, in miniature, what is to come, but can nod gratefully backward in time at the earlier epics, the archetypes, to which it is indebted.
When I was growing up, there was a story my father liked to tell about a long journey he and I once made, a story that hinged on a riddle. How, my father would inevitably ask at some point as he told this story, not quite looking you in the eye while he talked—a habit my mother disliked and about which she would sometimes scold him because, she would say, it makes you look like a liar, a reproof that amused us children because one thing that everyone knew about my father was that he never lied—How, my father would ask when he told this story, can you travel great distances without getting anywhere? Because I was a character in this story, I knew the answer, and because I was only a child when my father started telling this story, I naturally enjoyed spoiling his telling of it by giving the answer away