πρῶτον ἔπειτα γέροντα καθαπτόμενος προσέειπεν·
"ὦ γέρον, οὐχ ἑκὰς οὗτος ἀνήρ, τάχα δʼ εἴσεαι αὐτός, 40
ὃς λαὸν ἤγειρα· μάλιστα δέ μʼ ἄλγος ἱκάνει.
οὔτε τινʼ ἀγγελίην στρατοῦ ἔκλυον ἐρχομένοιο,
ἥν χʼ ὑμῖν σάφα εἴπω, ὅτε πρότερός γε πυθοίμην,
οὔτε τι δήμιον ἄλλο πιφαύσκομαι οὐδʼ ἀγορεύω,
ἀλλʼ ἐμὸν αὐτοῦ χρεῖος, ὅ μοι κακὸν ἔμπεσεν οἴκῳ 45
δοιά· τὸ μὲν πατέρʼ ἐσθλὸν ἀπώλεσα, ὅς ποτʼ ἐν ὑμῖν
τοίσδεσσιν βασίλευε, πατὴρ δʼ ὣς ἤπιος ἦεν·
νῦν δʼ αὖ καὶ πολὺ μεῖζον, ὃ δὴ τάχα οἶκον ἅπαντα
πάγχυ διαρραίσει, βίοτον δʼ ἀπὸ πάμπαν ὀλέσσει.
μητέρι μοι μνηστῆρες ἐπέχραον οὐκ ἐθελούσῃ,50
τῶν ἀνδρῶν φίλοι υἷες, οἳ ἐνθάδε γʼ εἰσὶν ἄριστοι,
οἳ πατρὸς μὲν ἐς οἶκον ἀπερρίγασι νέεσθαι
Ἰκαρίου, ὥς κʼ αὐτὸς ἐεδνώσαιτο θύγατρα,
δοίη δʼ ᾧ κʼ ἐθέλοι καί οἱ κεχαρισμένος ἔλθοι·
οἱ δʼ εἰς ἡμέτερον πωλεύμενοι ἤματα πάντα,55
βοῦς ἱερεύοντες καὶ ὄις καὶ πίονας αἶγας
εἰλαπινάζουσιν πίνουσί τε αἴθοπα οἶνον
μαψιδίως· τὰ δὲ πολλὰ κατάνεται. οὐ γὰρ ἔπʼ ἀνήρ,
οἷος Ὀδυσσεὺς ἔσκεν, ἀρὴν ἀπὸ οἴκου ἀμῦναι.
ἡμεῖς δʼ οὔ νύ τι τοῖοι ἀμυνέμεν· ἦ καὶ ἔπειτα60
λευγαλέοι τʼ ἐσόμεσθα καὶ οὐ δεδαηκότες ἀλκήν.
ἦ τʼ ἂν ἀμυναίμην, εἴ μοι δύναμίς γε παρείη.
οὐ γὰρ ἔτʼ ἀνσχετὰ ἔργα τετεύχαται, οὐδʼ ἔτι καλῶς
οἶκος ἐμὸς διόλωλε. νεμεσσήθητε καὶ αὐτοί,
ἄλλους τʼ αἰδέσθητε περικτίονας ἀνθρώπους,65
οἳ περιναιετάουσι· θεῶν δʼ ὑποδείσατε μῆνιν,
μή τι μεταστρέψωσιν ἀγασσάμενοι κακὰ ἔργα.
λίσσομαι ἠμὲν Ζηνὸς Ὀλυμπίου ἠδὲ Θέμιστος,
ἥ τʼ ἀνδρῶν ἀγορὰς ἠμὲν λύει ἠδὲ καθίζει·
σχέσθε, φίλοι, καί μʼ οἶον ἐάσατε πένθεϊ λυγρῷ70
τείρεσθʼ, εἰ μή πού τι πατὴρ ἐμὸς ἐσθλὸς Ὀδυσσεὺς
δυσμενέων κάκʼ ἔρεξεν ἐυκνήμιδας Ἀχαιούς,
τῶν μʼ ἀποτινύμενοι κακὰ ῥέζετε δυσμενέοντες,
τούτους ὀτρύνοντες. ἐμοὶ δέ κε κέρδιον εἴη
ὑμέας ἐσθέμεναι κειμήλιά τε πρόβασίν τε.75
εἴ χʼ ὑμεῖς γε φάγοιτε, τάχʼ ἄν ποτε καὶ τίσις εἴη·
τόφρα γὰρ ἂν κατὰ ἄστυ ποτιπτυσσοίμεθα μύθῳ
χρήματʼ ἀπαιτίζοντες, ἕως κʼ ἀπὸ πάντα δοθείη·
νῦν δέ μοι ἀπρήκτους ὀδύνας ἐμβάλλετε θυμῷ."
ὣς φάτο χωόμενος, ποτὶ δὲ σκῆπτρον βάλε γαίῃ80
δάκρυʼ ἀναπρήσας· οἶκτος δʼ ἕλε λαὸν ἅπαντα.
ἔνθʼ ἄλλοι μὲν πάντες ἀκὴν ἔσαν, οὐδέ τις ἔτλη
Τηλέμαχον μύθοισιν ἀμείψασθαι χαλεποῖσιν·
notes
Telemachus steps up to make his case. We expect him to attack the suitors directly, and he starts down this path, but his youthful inexperience shows in the wavering focus of the speech.
read full essay
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.
40 οὐχ ἑκὰς οὗτος ἀνήρ: predicative, "not far (is) that man." οὗτος ἀνήρ referrs back to τίς and τίνα in line 28, "this man (you ask about)" (Merry, Riddell, and Monro 1901; Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth 1988). The phrase is not a simple periphrasis for ἐγώ; in lines 40-44 Telemachos directly answers Aegyptius's rhetorical question in lines 28-32.
41 λαόν: the final syllable has the metrical value of a long syllable, a kind of lengthening which usually occurs before a pause (Monro 375).
41 ὃς . . . ἤγειρα “(it is I) who assembled . . . ,” only now does Telemachos confirm what is obvious to all: he has called the assembly in Odysseus's place.
42–44 these lines answer lines 2.30–32. The diaeresis at the end of the third foot in line 42 is unusual (Monro 367).
43 εἴπω: the optative εἴποι in line 31 is here changed to a subjunctive, indicating a more vivid future. In the temporal clause, the verb remains in the optative, indicating a future possibility.
45 ἐμὸν αὐτοῦ χρεῖος: the object of πιφαύσκομαι and ἀγορεύω after τι δήμιον ἄλλο is rejected. αὐτοῦ strengthens ἐμόν (Monro 252(1)).
45 ὅ . . . κακόν: ὅ (accusative singular neuter of the relative) serves as a conjunction equivalent to ὅτι "because," "seeing that" (Monro 269(1), citing this passage). See Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth 1988.
46 δοιά: this can be taken as adverbial, “in two ways” (Cunliffe under δοιός, LSJ under δοιοί), or as assimilated in number to the double trouble, described as τὸ μέν and πολὺ μεῖζον in lines 46, 48, "seeing that evil has fallen on my house—twin evils" (Merry, Riddell, and Monro 1901).
46 τὸ μέν: indicates the first trouble, balanced by νῦν δ᾿ αὖ καὶ πολὺ μεῖζον (κακόν) in line 48.
46 ὑμῖν / τοίσδεσσιν “you here” dative plural masculine from ὅδε (Cunliffe, LSJ I.2 under ὅδε).
48 πολὺ μεῖζον: understand κακὸν ἔμπεσε from line 45.
49 ἀπὸ . . . ὀλέσσει: tmesis equivalent to ἀπόλλυμι.
50 μοι: either an ethical dative (“I would have you know,” so Merry, Riddell, and Monro 1901) or possessive, or disadvantage. Merry, Riddell, and Monro (1901) and Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth (1988) consider it difficult to decide between the three.
50 ἐπέχραον: imperfect or aorist from ἐπιχράω (LSJ ἐπιχράω B.1).
53 Ἰκαρίου: Penelope’s father was Ikarios, the brother of Tyndarius, who was the father of Helen and Clytemnestra (Smith Dictionary Icarius).
53 ὥς κ(ε) . . . ἐεδνώσαιτο: a purpose clause formed with ὡς and the optative (Monro 306(1)(a), see also Smyth 2202a.). Homer uses the optative after a present time principal clause when the clause bears a negative meaning, as here: ἀπερρίγασι νέεσθαι, “they shrink from going,” that is, they don’t go, so that the optative expresses an imaginary, or conditional, result (Stanford 1947 and Merry, Riddell, and Monro 1901), perhaps to be translated with “might.” On κεν in this construction see Monro 306(1)(c).
54 δοίη: understand αὐτήν, “her” (i.e., Penelope), as the object.
54 ᾧ κ(ε) “to whomever . . . ,” introducing a conditional relative clause (Monro 305).
54 οἱ: a dative pronoun, referring either to Ikarios or Penelope herself. After the καί, a relative pronoun is implied: “and (to whoever) . . . ”
56 ὄις: accusative plural (Cunliffe under ὄϊς, Smyth 274D).
58 τὰ δὲ πολλά: in Homer, the article is usually a demonstrative pronoun, so here τὰ would be “these things.” πολλά then becomes a substantive standing in apposition,“these things, many of them …” (Smyth 1102) or adverbial (“much”), so Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth 1988. Smyth points out that this comes close to the use of τά as a definite article (“these many things”). Merry, Riddell, and Monro (1901) insist on preserving the demonstrative use here, claiming that the use of the demonstrative as a definite article is a later development, but both Smyth and Palmer (p. 138) see Homer as transitional in this regard.
58 ἔπ᾽: = ἔπεστι.
59 ἔσκεν: iterative imperfect from εἰμί.
59 ἀρήν “harm,” “ruin.” The α– is a short vowel, distinguishing it from ἀρήν, “prayer,” with a long α.
59 ἀμῦναι: Infinitive of purpose, as usual in Homer (Monro 231, see also Smyth 2008).
60 ἡμεῖς: in Homer, the first person plural is often used to refer to the members of a family (Stanford).
60 τοῖοι: understand ἐσμέν.
60 ἀμυνέμεν: infinitive of purpose, as in line 59.
60 ἦ καὶ ἔπειτα “in fact, even then . . . ,” elliptical, “in fact, even if we do try to prevent ruin . . . ”
61 οὐ δεδαηκότες “unskilled in” (+ accusative), perfect active participle from δάω (Cunliffe δάω 2).
63 ἀνσχετά: a syncopated Homeric form of ἀνασχετά (LSJ ἀνασχετός).
64 διόλωλε: the second perfect form of διόλλυμι is intransitive (Smyth 819), and the perfect tense represents the enduring result of a completed action (“has been ruined,” that is “is in a state of ruin,” “is ruined”).
64 νεμεσσήθητε: second plural aorist passive imperative.
65 ἄλλους τ᾽ αἰδέσθητε “and be ashamed of what others will think” (Merry, Riddell, and Monro 1901). For this use of αἰδέομαι with an accusative, see Cunliffe αἰδέομαι 4.
65 περικτίονας ἀνθρώπους: the final syllable of περικτίονας is metrically long, as often in words ending in -ν, -ρ, or -ς when the syllable so lengthened falls at the start of a foot. This example is unusual because this lengthening is usually found before a pause (Monro 375) and because a fifth foot spondee is unusual in Homer (Monro 366).
67 μεταστρέψωσιν “cause a reversal of fortune” (Autenrieth μεταστρέφω). Subjunctive in an object clause of fearing (Smyth 2225).
67 ἀγασσάμενοι: the basic meaning of the verb ἄγαμαι is “to wonder,” but the verb can have both good connotations (“to take delight in” or “to admire”) and bad (“to be angry at” or “to envy”). (LSJ ἄγαμαι).
68 Ζηνὸς Ὀλυμπίου ἠδὲ Θέμιστος: πρός usually appears before the genitives in prayers and oaths (LSJ πρός I.4), but here it is omitted.
69 καθίζει “convenes,” a transitive use of the verb (LSJ καθίζω Ι.4).
70 φίλοι: Telemachus is addressing the γέροντες, the elders of Ithaka, who are more likely to be friendly to him than the suitors are.
71 τείρεσθ᾽:= τείρεσθαι, present passive infinitive from τείρω.
72 ἔρεξεν: the verb (LSJ ῥέζω A.I.3) takes a double accusative: “to do (accusative) to (accusative).”
73 τῶν μ᾽ ἀποτινύμενοι: τῶν, demonstrative = τούτων. The verb ἀποτίνυμαι takes an accusative and a genitive: “to punish (accusative) for (accusative)” (Autenrieth ἀποτίνυμαι).
74 τούτους: that is, the suitors.
75 ὑμέας: Telemachus is still addressing the elders of Ithaka.
76 εἴ χ᾽: εἴ κε, introducing a future less vivid conditional.
77 τόφρα . . . /. . . ἕως “as long as . . . ,” a correlative pair. The optatives with ἄν / κε indicate that Telemachus is referring to a potential (less vivid) future (Smyth 2405).
77 ποτιπτυσσοίμεθα: = προσπτυσσοίμεθα (LSJ προσπτύσσω).
78 ἀπὸ . . . δοθείη: first singular aorist passive optative, tmesis equivalent to ἀποδίδωμι (LSJ ἀποδίδωμι). Telemachus’s argument is that it would be easier to obtain redress of his grievances from his own countrymen than from the foreign suitors.
80 ποτὶ . . . βάλε: unaugmented imperfect. tmesis, equivalent to προσβάλλω (LSJ προσβάλλω).
81 ἕλε: third singular aorist active indicative from αἱρέω.