2.129–176

She is, after all, his mother, who bore him and nourished him. Anyway, he cannot afford to pay back the dowry to her father, even if he were willing to have her back. Ikarios will make trouble for him and on top of that, Penelope will call down the Furies against him if he sends her away, and others will resent him. He will not be the one to deliver bad news to her. His reasons reflect a curious mix of motives: love for his mother and a rather cold-hearted calculation of the possible costs of her remarrying; concern for his mother’s feelings but also fear of her anger and the vengeful spirits she could summon against him; a desire to avoid “trouble” from his grandfather and censure by others. In short, not a portrait of uncomplicated filial piety.

Telemachus’s variable motivation here reflects his unstable position throughout the first two books. He veers between being a boy lacking in self-confidence whose mother wants to keep him safe at home and a young man who feels pressure from both Athena and the importunate suitors to act, to break out of his adolescent paralysis and step up to his adult responsibilities. He wants to be an adult and deal with the suitors man-to-man, to be a responsible steward of the household wealth. But he is not quite ready to contemplate withstanding the criticism that will come with any choice he makes about his mother’s future, and periodically lapses into debilitating bouts of self-pity.

The relationship of the male hero to his mother reflects common assumptions about power and gender in ancient literature and myth. Generalizing about such a rich topic can be perilous, but we can identify a few expectations that seem to lie behind the portraits of this bond. Mothers work to maintain the intimacy that binds their sons to them and in return offer unwavering emotional support, even if that support encourages rash and even self-destructive acts by their sons. Thetis in the Iliad will give Achilles whatever he wants, encouraging him in his destructive and self-destructive drive to avenge Patroclus’s death. She laments that Achilles must die like other mortals, and has to be prompted by Zeus to let go of her son. Odysseus’s mother is already dead when we meet her in Book 11 (150–224). Her name, Antikleia, “Against Glory,” suggests that she would follow the pattern of holding onto her son as long as possible, another “detaining woman” like Calypso or Nausicaa. If, that is, she had not already died from the pain of from missing him (11.197–203). But her relationship with Odysseus is not a prominent part of the story, because he, unlike Achilles, has already passed through the drama of separating from her and entering his father’s world. When we meet him, he is a fully formed adult male. He has serious things to contend with but growing up is not among them.

We can also see the strength of these expectations in the disastrous counter examples of Orestes and Oedipus, especially as these figures appear in later Greek drama, a genre that focuses more on the potential for intra-familial conflict than does Greek epic. Aeschylus’s version of Agamemnon’s homecoming, with all its dark repercussions, draws on the expectations attached to the mother-son bond to create a chilling vision of matricide and its attendant pain in Libation Bearers, the second play of his Oresteia trilogy. The later Electra plays of Sophocles and Euripides focus on the same material and deepen the psycho-sexual trauma it implies. Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus dramatizes the catastrophic results of the hero’s failing both to separate from his mother and come to terms with the hard truths of his father’s world.

The relationship of Telemachus to his mother reflects the same dynamic, but with the darker potential in the bond less prominent. His sharp exchanges with Penelope in Book 1 do have an undercurrent of latent hostility. He feels the pressure to move forward against his father’s enemies but also perhaps the opposing tug of his mother’s passivity and need to hold him back. That tension surfaces in his speech here, as he veers from filial solicitude to annoyance at the cost of dealing with her remarriage. His tone will continue to be peremptory when he meets her after returning from his journey, showing a certain impatience with her anxious questions (17.34–56). When she is slow to acknowledge Odysseus as her husband, her son’s anger boils over (23.97–103).

The second imperative for Telemachus in his evolution toward manhood comes into focus, as we have seen, at the stringing of the bow. The tension of the string on the weapon mirrors the strain created by issues that hang over the movement of a male away from his mother’s nurture and into the new challenges of his father’s world. Though there is no expectation on the story’s surface that Telemachus could replace his father in his mother’s bed, the potential for sexual rivalry lurks as a placeholder for the intimate childhood bond that he must forsake. The power struggle between father and son prompted by the latter’s potential to force his way into ruling the kingdom finally subsides when Telemachus chooses to yield to his father’s warning nod (21.128–30).

Halitherses stirs up a hornet’s nest with his prediction that Odysseus is nearby and will return soon to punish the suitors. Prophecies are useful things for storytellers because of their inherent ambiguities. First of all, how do we know if someone is a legitimate seer or just some hack hired to deliver a particular message? Prophets are regularly accused of taking bribes in Greek literature (e.g., Tiresias: Soph. Oedipus Tyrannus, 380–407). And even if we trust the prophet, his prophecy—sometimes a riddle in itself—is subject to interpretation by his audience, as we see in the present exchange. All this uncertainty is welcome to the poet, because the less we know for sure about how things will come out, the more engaged we are in the story. Halitherses incurs anger and ridicule by claiming to have the answer to the poem’s most pressing questions: Where is Odysseus and if he is alive, when is he coming home? Homer has no intention of putting these quandaries to rest anytime soon.

Further Reading

Felson, N. 1997. Regarding Penelope, 84–86. 2^nd ed. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press.

Murnaghan, S. 1987. Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey, 163–165. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Van Nortwick, T. 1992. Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: The Second Self and the Hero’s Journey in Ancient Epic, 46–47. New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 2008. Imagining Men: Ideals of Masculinity in Ancient Greek Culture, 7–8. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.