2.39–83

He begins by citing the burdens weighing on him: an absent father; suitors who are unwilling to ask Penelope’s father Ikarios for his daughter’s hand, preferring to stay at the palace, mooching off the royal family and wasting the substance of the household. At this point, his courage seems to falter. Rather than confronting the suitors, he tries instead to shame the local citizens into helping him push back against them. He admits that he and his family are too weak to fight the usurpers alone. Are the neighbors not scandalized by the cruelty visited on their royal family, ashamed before those gathered from other places? Have they no fear of the gods, who will not tolerate injustice? Now a further shift in tone, as a certain petulance surfaces: Everyone should just leave him alone and let wretched sorrow wear him away. Or—a last, increasingly unpromising gambit—maybe they could take over using up his stores. At least then he might be able to sue for damages! The slide into self-pity ends with Telemachus slamming the scepter to the ground amid a flood of tears.

The poet’s subtle portrait of Telemachus as a young man on the cusp of adult maturity continues. Buoyed by Athena’s encouragement, he becomes more assertive with the occupying suitors, but his courage and self-confidence waver in the face of their collective strength. He tries to rally the other citizens to help him, but finally he falls back into what looks like adolescent sulking. The next step for him, as Athena has arranged it, will be a journey to find out about his father, and that imperative reflects, as we have noted (see essay on 1.1–43) a common paradigm in Greek literature: to reach adult maturity, a young man must leave the protective nurture of his mother and come to terms with the hard wisdom of his father’s world. By traveling to Pylos and Sparta, Telemachus hopes to learn his father’s fate. If Odysseus is dead, then Telemachus must return alone to deal with the suitors as the head male of his household. If Odysseus is alive and returning to Ithaka, then his son must be able to stand with him against the usurpers. In either case, observing the households of Nestor and Menelaus, heroic survivors of the Trojan War, while learning what they might tell him about his father, will give him models for his own behavior.

Telemachus throwing down the scepter recalls another young man who struggles to accommodate himself to the demands of adulthood:

ὣς φάτο Πηλεΐδης, ποτὶ δὲ σκῆπτρον βάλε γαίῃ
χρυσείοις ἥλοισι πεπαρμένον, ἕζετο δ᾽ αὐτός:

So the son of Peleus spoke, and threw the scepter on the ground, 
studded with golden nails, and sat down again.

Iliad 1.245–46

Achilles, like Telemachus, has just failed to get his way in an assembly. His petulant gesture is the first step in his own torturous and destructive journey toward adult maturity, one that costs the lives of many warriors, both Trojan and Greek. Anger at Agamemnon keeps him from joining his fellow Greeks in their attempt to conquer Troy, and he only returns to avenge the death of his dear friend Patroclus at the hands of Hector, the Trojans’ champion fighter. The arc of his life in the Iliad looks very different from Telemachus’s here, but the underlying paradigm is similar. His mother Thetis, a sea goddess, laments that he cannot be immortal and supports all his destructive and self-destructive acts. He is semi-divine and in his willful pursuit of Hector, he reaches toward his divine side, which keeps him attached to his mother, brooking no opposition and mowing down anyone in his path. Only when he lets go of the desire for a godlike existence and comes to an accommodation with Priam, a mortal father figure, does he achieve a measure of peace at the end of the poem.  

To begin his journey toward adulthood, Telemachus too must separate from his mother. He will eventually slip away without telling her his plans, much to her distress (4.722–28). He will, however, have the support of a surrogate mother, Athena, to whom he pours out his despair on the lonely seashore (2.262–66), another parallel to the portrait of Achilles:

                                                    αὐτὰρ Ἀχιλλεὺς
δακρύσας. ἑτάρων ἄφαρ ἕζετο νόσφι λιασθείς,
θῖν᾽ ἔφ᾽ ἁλὸς πολιῆς, ὁρόων ἐπ᾽ ἀπείρονα πόντον:
πολλὰ δὲ μητρὶ φίλῃ ἠρήσατο χεῖρας ὀρεγνύς:

                                             But Achilles, 
weeping, sat apart from his companions 
on the shore of the gray sea, looking at the boundless deep. 
And stretching out his hands many times, he prayed to his dear mother:

Iliad 1.348–51

Both goddesses will stay close by, clearing the way for their charges. Only when each young man is able to enter his father’s world and learn from it is he ready for the responsibilities that adult males must bear. For Achilles, this movement is signified by his letting go of his corrosive anger and releasing the corpse of Hector to Priam; Telemachus successfully negotiates his father’s world in the moment when he could have contested Odysseus’s place as head male in Ithaka but chooses to take his place beside his father (Od. 21.128–35) (see essay on 1.1–43). Telemachus comes full circle in Book 22, from lamenting his weakness before the suitors and asking for help against them (2.60–61), to pretending to lack the strength to do a man’s work so that he can help his father defeat them.

Further Reading

Van Nortwick, T. 1992. Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: The Second Self and the Hero’s Journey in Ancient Epic, 41–44. New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 2008. Imagining Men: Ideals of Masculinity in Ancient Greek Culture, 27–38. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.

———. 2008. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey, 7. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.