1.178–229

As his story unfolds, we see the goddess making her way toward the crucial information she needs to impart, that Mentes is an old family friend of Odysseus, which allows her to step more easily into the role of advisor. The name the goddess chooses for her fictional persona already links her to Mentor, the elder Ithakan whom we will meet in Book 2 (225) and whom the goddess later impersonates (2.267). (The likely etymology for both names connects them to the root *men, “to think,” as in μέμονας and the Latin moneo.) The two characters are doublets, with a similar function in the story (e.g., Eurykelia/Eurymedousa, benevolent servants who nurture royal children; Melantho/Melanthius, unworthy servants who taunt the disguised Odysseus), but with one important difference: Mentes can respond to the situation in Ithaka as an outsider with a fresh perspective, while Mentor carries authority by virtue of his long association with the local scene. By creating both personae, Homer gives the goddess wider scope for weighing in on Telemachus’s dilemma.

Athena’s response to Telemachus has much in common with the “false tales” that Odysseus will tell about himself when he reaches Ithaka. His stories are fictional but contain elements that we would recognize as similar to what we know of him from the preceding adventures, his bold, restless nature, the obstacles that appear in his path along the way home. (refer to Intro here?) Likewise, Athena’s autobiography must be fiction, and yet she does have a special relationship with Odysseus that prompts her to push Telemachus toward action. These parallels are part of the paradigm the poet begins to create with Athena’s appearance in Ithaka, of the stranger arriving in a new place, bringing exciting and sometimes dangerous changes, which Odysseus will perform over and over as he makes his way to Ithaka. Each iteration of the pattern will repeat elements from earlier examples while enriching them in their new context. Tracing this developing complex of meaning is the key to understanding how a poet like Homer could use repeated forms on multiple levels, verbal, thematic, and structural, to create an entirely new work of art within a traditional medium like early Greek hexameter poetry.

Mentes/Athena has heard about the wretched existence of Laertes, Odysseus’s father. We—and Odysseus—will learn more about him from the hero’s mother Antikleia in the Underworld:

                        πατὴρ δὲ σὸς αὐτόθι μίμνει
ἀγρῷ οὐδὲ πόλινδε κατέρχεται. οὐδέ οἱ εὐναὶ
δέμνια καὶ χλαῖναι καὶ ῥήγεα σιγαλόεντα,
ἀλλ᾽ ὅ γε χεῖμα μὲν εὕδει ὅθι δμῶες ἐνὶ οἴκῳ,
ἐν κόνι ἄγχι πυρός κακὰ δὲ χροῒ εἵματα εἷται:
αὐτὰρ ἐπὴν ἔλθῃσι θέρος τεθαλυῖά τ᾽ ὀπώρη,
πάντῃ οἱ κατὰ γουνὸν ἀλωῆς οἰνοπέδοιο
φύλλων κεκλιμένων χθαμαλαὶ βεβλήαται εὐναί.
ἔνθ᾽ ὅ γε κεῖτ᾽ ἀχέων, μέγα δὲ φρεσὶ πένθος ἀέξει
σὸν νόστον ποθέων, χαλεπὸν δ᾽ ἐπὶ γῆρας ἱκάνει.

                          Your father remains there
on his farm and never comes to the town. He has
no bed, nor blankets and shining coverlets,
but sleeps on the ground with the servants in the lodge,
in the dirt by the fire, with rags for clothing.
But when the summer comes, and the crops ripen,
anywhere on a rise of the fruit-bearing earth
the bed is thrown on a pile of fallen leaves.
He lies there grieving, and great sadness grows in his mind,
as he longs for your return. Harsh old age has come for him.

Odyssey 11.187–96

The portrait of old men in the Homeric poems is mixed. In the Iliad, Nestor and Phoenix are accorded respect for the wisdom that comes from long experience. More often, however, the physical decline that comes with age makes old men objects of amusement, like the elders who chirp like cicadas when Helen walks by (Il. 3.151–53) or pity, as when Priam imagines his own dogs tearing at his corpse (Il. 22.66-76). The pitiful condition of Laertes underscores the serious dysfunction that has settled on Ithaka in Odysseus’s absence. His condition is so debased that the possibility of his stepping in for his son, presumably a valid option in the circumstances, is never mentioned in the poem.

Yet even as he scrabbles in the dirt, Laertes maintains a lonely outpost of fruitful right order for his son. After retaking the palace from the suitors, Odysseus finds his father in the country, cultivating his crops:

ὦ γέρον οὐκ ἀδαημονίη σ᾽ ἔχει ἀμφιπολεύειν
ὄρχατον, ἀλλ᾽ εὖ τοι κομιδὴ ἔχει, οὐδέ τι πάμπαν,
οὐ φυτόν, οὐ συκέη, οὐκ ἄμπελος, οὐ μὲν ἐλαίη,
οὐκ ὄγχνη οὐ πρασιή τοι ἄνευ κομιδῆς κατὰ κῆπον.

Old man, you clearly are no beginner when it comes 
to cultivating an orchard. Things are well cared for, nothing 
lacks attention, no plant, no figs, no grape vine, no olives, 
no pears, no vegetable of any kind goes without your care.

Odyssey 24.244–47

Though things are out of joint in the palace, Laertes preserves a harmony with the forces of nature, husbanding the energy of rebirth that will grow when his son returns. Eumaeus, the faithful swineherd with whom Odysseus will stay when he first returns to Ithaka, plays a similar role, maintaining his master’s flocks in a carefully managed compound, a residual cosmos that awaits the king’s return to reestablish order in the kingdom.

Athena, still in disguise, now replays her initial encounter with Telemachus, but with the roles reversed. He began by saying that his father is lost forever and then asked about the stranger’s identity (158–77); now the goddess predicts that Odysseus will return soon and asks Telemachus about his identity (200–12). Telemachus’s reply widens the scope of the exchange—how can anyone know his own birth?—touching on the ever-present anxiety that runs under patriarchal societies surrounding the legitimacy of birth, the key to ensuring the passage of property from one generation to the next. This continual focus on issues of identity fits the immediate situation—care must be taken to ensure the safety and integrity of the household—but also launches one of the poem’s major themes. The Odyssey can be understood as a prolonged meditation on the mysteries of human identity: Who are we and what makes us what we are? The poem invites us to ponder two insistent questions about its hero. The first, “Where is Odysseus?” hovers over the royal household in Ithaka at the beginning and end of the story. The second and more challenging quandary appears as the stranger makes his way through many and varied societies on his way home: “Who is Odysseus?” The poem offers no firm answers, and indeed, the uncertainty about the returning hero is central to its enduring power.

Athena now moves the conversation away from identity to another fruitful topic: What is going on in this household? Is this a wedding feast? Again, the reference is to immediate events, but points toward a continuing theme in the poem, marriage as the emblem of fruitful harmony emerging from past darkness. Telemachus will come upon a double wedding in Sparta when he visits Menelaus and Helen, a hint of some healing in that troubled household after the rupture that sparked the Trojan War (4.3–14). When he arrives at the island of the Phaeacians, Odysseus becomes the object of the royal princess’s desire for a husband, a perilous situation from which he barely escapes. In his first speech to Nausicaa on the beach, he asks for her help getting to the royal palace and offers a blessing in return:

ἄστυ δέ μοι δεῖξον, δὸς δὲ ῥάκος ἀμφιβαλέσθαι,
εἴ τί που εἴλυμα σπείρων ἔχες ἐνθάδ᾽ ἰοῦσα.
σοὶ δὲ θεοὶ τόσα δοῖεν ὅσα φρεσὶ σῇσι μενοινᾷς,
ἄνδρα τε καὶ οἶκον, καὶ ὁμοφροσύνην ὀπάσειαν
ἐσθλήν: οὐ μὲν γὰρ τοῦ γε κρεῖσσον καὶ ἄρειον,
ἢ ὅθ᾽ ὁμοφρονέοντε νοήμασιν οἶκον ἔχητον
ἀνὴρ ἠδὲ γυνή: πόλλ᾽ ἄλγεα δυσμενέεσσι,
χάρματα δ᾽ εὐμενέτῃσι, μάλιστα δέ τ᾽ ἔκλυον αὐτοί.

Guide me to the town and give me some rags to wear 
if you had any kind of cloth when you came here. 
And may the gods give you everything you desire in your heart, 
a husband and a home, and bestow on you sweet agreement too. 
For nothing is stronger and better, than when man and a woman, 
thinking just alike, keep a home together. 
Much pain they give to their enemies and pleasure to their 
friends. And their fame reaches far.

Odyssey 6.178–85

The “sweet agreement” (ὁμοφροσύνην, 181) Odysseus wishes for Nausicaa and her future husband is finally what he and Penelope achieve, hard-won but all the more sweet, when she finally acknowledges him after the suitors are dead (23.305–30). The role of marriage in a comic narrative, as the emblem of happiness and right order restored, begins here in western literature. If we listen closely, we can hear Mozart faintly in the distance.

Further Reading

Falkner, T. 1995. The Poetics of Old Age in Greek epic, Lyric, and Tragedy: Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Van Nortwick, T. 2008. Imagining Men: Ideals of Masculinity in Ancient Greek Culture, 134–135. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.

———. 2008. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey, 74–77. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.