1. Kleos and Oral History

This passage is cast in the form of a ring-composition. [5] Its centerpiece describes schematically the content of the abstract image that passes through Telemachos’ mind (Odyssey 1.115: ὀσσόμενος … ἐνὶ φρεσίν ‘picturing … in {2|3} his mind’). [6] As others have observed, the Odyssey is in large part “psychological drama.” [7] The poet evinces a marked penchant for recording or representing internal, psychological states already in Odyssey 1.114ff., where he gives the first information about Telemachos. [8] To be sure, as Friedrich Klingner remarks in one of the most penetrating articles ever written on the Telemachy, the poem does not commence with the violence of the Iliad or the Aeneid but instead (as he shows) with inner conflict, represented by the youth’s festering mental anguish. [9] This “helpless martyr” daydreams, “plunged into isolation and humiliation” or in Homer’s words, “aggrieved in his heart” (Odyssey 1.114). The unseen but keenly felt “spiritual presence of Odysseus” overshadows from the outset the entire scene with Mentes; this presence haunts the prince’s thoughts, rendering him especially susceptible to Mentes’ ensuing psychological intervention. Telemachos is well prepared for a process in which each, prince and guest, will “seek after and find in the other elements of Odysseus.”

From Pain to Strength and Back Again

The phrase ἦε καὶ οὐκί ‘or not’ (Odyssey 1.268), though common enough, is perhaps one of the most startling and cruel occurrences of a disjunction in ancient Greek literature. Klingner has already remarked the descent from “idealisation” (we might say ‘phantasy’) to unadorned reality expressed in theological terms (Odyssey 1.266–267). [22] According to this scholar, Athena calculatingly raises the alternative of abandoning Odysseus as idealized avenger in {5|6} order to force Telemachos to realize his duty to act (as opposed, one might add, merely to daydreaming): σὲ δὲ φράζεσθαι ἄνωγα (“Now as for you, I urge you to consider,” Odyssey 1.269). The divine interlocutor, in other words, resumes her encouragement of the youth but coarsens it for outright “paedagogical” reasons, converting Telemachos’ pain to strength, as Klingner also notes. [23]

The Implied, Anonymous Man

The Father’s Imago

Σὸν πάτερ’: Putting a Name to the Indefinite

In nomine patris

Generally speaking, kleos as such, especially when it emanates from a military deed, can be transferred to the laos ‘people’ (see Iliad 12.315–328) {16|17} or less diffusely to the philoi ‘friends, intimates’ of a hero. This associative, or synecdochic, transference is a predictable concomitant of a “shame culture.” [62] Jones remarks that the young man is appropriating, by hereditary right, the consequences of his father’s deeds. [63] Moreover the youth’s resort to an exemplum in order to validate his request is highly conventional. [64] What is of particular relevance to the educational dimension of the Telemachy is the fact that in his plea the prince consciously interweaves the past and present and in so doing substitutes his father (living or dead) for himself.

The Little Prince’s Lineage

“Now tell me, being so large and tall, whether you are Odysseus’ own son?”—so, in effect, begins Mentes’ provocative oblique question. Given that Athena has already identified her interlocutor as the son of Odysseus (see especially Odyssey 1.195–196), her query is superfluous. Yet it provides Telemachos with a springboard for further thought and psychological searching. Contradicting her previous statements, Athena feigns ignorance in order to elicit from him an anxious reaction (Odyssey 1.214–220); acting as a mirror, she forces him to re-examine his relationship with his absent progenitor. [75] From a strictly logical point of view the syntax of her question is elliptical; this is the ellipsis of colloquial speech. Mentes immediately corrects this, explaining the reasons for his question. First, as an adult (a secondary implication of τόσος, literally, ‘so big’, Odyssey 1.207; compare τηλίκος ‘of such an age’, Odyssey 1.297), the young man bears a surprising (see αἰνῶς ‘uncannily’, Odyssey 1.208) and attractive (see κεφαλήν τε καὶ ὄμματα καλὰ ‘in your head and beautiful eyes’) resemblance (ἔοικας ‘you look like’) to his father’s physiognomy. [76] Second, inasmuch as τοῖον ‘to such an extent’ in verse 209 does not modify the adverb θαμά ‘often’ {20|21} but may be connected instead in sense to the verb ἐμισγόμεθ’ ‘we associated with, were intimate with’, [77] the goddess is citing another element that father and son share: “because we often associated with one another so closely or so well [sc. as you and I are now doing].” Athena’s recognition of these points in common reflects a leitmotif of the Telemacheia that has already been observed by other scholars. [78] She is the first character to mention this resemblance, and she does so in a manner that cannot but flatter her interlocutor (compare ὄμματα καλὰ ‘beautiful eyes’).

The Consequences of Lineage

Kleos and the Shame of Not Having a Tomb

Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth (1988:104) and R. Dawe (1993:63) unnecessarily suggest that Odyssey 1.238 be obelized; the formers’ view, in particular, that φίλων ‘of friends, intimates’ must refer to Odysseus’ family is debatable. [101] In a foreign and, moreover, hostile land such as Troy, all Greeks would have been φίλοι ‘friends, intimates’. I suggest keeping verse 238 but reading ἠδὲ ‘and’ instead of the disjunctive conjunction ἠὲ ‘or’. (If emended in this way the verse suits even better the context of Odyssey 4.490, where it is repeated.) Telemachos, in effect, wishes that his father had been killed in action at the conclusion of the {27|28} war (‘ἐπεὶ πόλεμον τολύπευσε᾽; compare Odyssey 5.308–512) at Troy, where Achaians of widely diverse origins would have buried him: [102] In Archaic society a hero’s post-mortem kleos vitally depended on, above all else, the existence of an oral tradition concerning him; proper burial rites and the physical evidence of a tomb were not enough. [103] A mute tomb on its own, as Telemachos assumes—robbed of a narrative about, say, Odysseus’ death in battle—could scarcely sustain the hero’s particular kleos. [104] A memorializing oral tradition arising out of ritual lamentation at the funeral would, of course, have been a significant step towards preserving this kleos ὀπίσσω ‘for posterity’ (that is, in a systemic sense; see below). Yet no funeral took place and no one—neither Nestor nor Menelaos nor a fortiori Telemachos—knows “the end to Odysseus’ story” as S. Murnaghan has remarked (1989). Given this incomplete record, the integrity of Odysseus’ kleos, which definitionally has a commemorative aspect, is at risk. His presumably posthumous kleos indeed exists but only as an unfinished story. It is its incompleteness that Telemachos-with some exaggeration—believes will thwart the transferral of his father’s kleos to himself.

Homeric Man as a Version of Narrative

The Personal Narrative

In epos, incidentally, ‘history’ per se may be conceived as little more than a series of separate ‘personal narratives’, the equivalent of oral ‘life stories’ or ‘autobiographies’ delivered by heroes in the course of the action. Sometimes heroes will resort to reminiscences derived from ‘family traditions’ or straightforwardly cumulative accounts such as genealogies—both being classes of interpretative testimony with African analogues (see Vansina 1985:17–24.) In the instance of a {33|34} genealogical reminiscence that traces back spectacularly to a god, as Aineias’ at Iliad 20, the hero may be rehearsing a chapter in ‘cosmic history’, which, as B. Graziosi and J. Haubold argue (2005), is the general subject of the Homeric and Hesiodic epics. In the Odyssey, where the actions of gods and mortals are emphatically, indeed programmatically, separated (see Graziosi and Haubold 2005, especially 76–77, 80–81, 143, 146), ‘history’ is by and large based on stories in which gods only rarely play a visible role. This more ‘secular’ focus, for all the primitive, strange supernatural or semi-mortal beings (e.g. the goddess Kalypso, Poseidon, half-divine Kyklops), is, in my view, an advance on cosmic history. Returning to the ‘personal (experience) story’, modern folklorists and ethnographers recognize the genre, [131] and it is with the help of such evidence, much of it drawn from fieldwork in the United States, that we might approach the Apologoi and the Telemacheia. As defined by S. Stahl, the ‘personal story’ is “a prose narrative relating a personal experience; it is usually told in the first person” and its content is “seemingly idiosyncratic” (hence ‘nontraditional’) while at the same time expressing “folklore attitudes, values, prejudices, and tastes” (Stahl 1989:12–13, 19). In the setting of an interview or discussion, the teller relates his or her ‘actual’ experiences, much as Odysseus publicly records his adventures, albeit in verse, in the Apologoi. The three cardinal features of this ‘literary folk genre’ may recall the Apologoi still further. These are, in Stahl’s words (1989:15): “(1) dramatic narrative structure, (2) a consistently implied assertion that the narrative is true, and (3) the selfsame identity of the teller and the story’s main character (the Ich-Bericht form).” But Odysseus’ proud promulgation of his kleos in Book 9 clearly touches something more than anecdotal, multi-episode ‘personal narration’. It adumbrates also the domain of impersonal ‘history’ he has just entered. The conflation of a ‘personal experience story’ with collective ‘history’ in Homer, particularly in the Apologoi and the Telemachy, makes sense sociologically: for the narration of personal experiences (by which, as will be noted shortly, the reminiscing narrator aims to convey and to fix his well-defined identity) is shaped in a social environment which subsumes and at the same time transcends exponentially the aggregate of individual memories. As the sociologist M. Halbwachs argues, autobiographical memory—the stuff of a ‘personal story’—intersects collective memory and is decisively influenced by it. [132] {34|35}

Footnotes