ἦ τοι ὅ γʼ ὣς εἰπὼν κατʼ ἄρʼ ἕζετο, τοῖσι δʼ ἀνέστη
Μέντωρ, ὅς ῥʼ Ὀδυσῆος ἀμύμονος ἦεν ἑταῖρος,225
καί οἱ ἰὼν ἐν νηυσὶν ἐπέτρεπεν οἶκον ἅπαντα,
πείθεσθαί τε γέροντι καὶ ἔμπεδα πάντα φυλάσσειν·
ὅ σφιν ἐϋφρονέων ἀγορήσατο καὶ μετέειπεν·
"κέκλυτε δὴ νῦν μευ, Ἰθακήσιοι, ὅττι κεν εἴπω·
μή τις ἔτι πρόφρων ἀγανὸς καὶ ἤπιος ἔστω230
σκηπτοῦχος βασιλεύς, μηδὲ φρεσὶν αἴσιμα εἰδώς,
ἀλλʼ αἰεὶ χαλεπός τʼ εἴη καὶ αἴσυλα ῥέζοι·
ὡς οὔ τις μέμνηται Ὀδυσσῆος θείοιο
λαῶν οἷσιν ἄνασσε, πατὴρ δʼ ὣς ἤπιος ἦεν.
ἀλλʼ ἦ τοι μνηστῆρας ἀγήνορας οὔ τι μεγαίρω235
ἔρδειν ἔργα βίαια κακορραφίῃσι νόοιο·
σφὰς γὰρ παρθέμενοι κεφαλὰς κατέδουσι βιαίως
οἶκον Ὀδυσσῆος, τὸν δʼ οὐκέτι φασὶ νέεσθαι.
νῦν δʼ ἄλλῳ δήμῳ νεμεσίζομαι, οἷον ἅπαντες
ἧσθʼ ἄνεῳ, ἀτὰρ οὔ τι καθαπτόμενοι ἐπέεσσι240
παύρους μνηστῆρας καταπαύετε πολλοὶ ἐόντες."
τὸν δʼ Εὐηνορίδης Ληόκριτος ἀντίον ηὔδα·
"Μέντορ ἀταρτηρέ, φρένας ἠλεέ, ποῖον ἔειπες
ἡμέας ὀτρύνων καταπαυέμεν. ἀργαλέον δὲ
ἀνδράσι καὶ πλεόνεσσι μαχήσασθαι περὶ δαιτί.245
εἴ περ γάρ κʼ Ὀδυσεὺς Ἰθακήσιος αὐτὸς ἐπελθὼν
δαινυμένους κατὰ δῶμα ἑὸν μνηστῆρας ἀγαυοὺς
ἐξελάσαι μεγάροιο μενοινήσειʼ ἐνὶ θυμῷ,
οὔ κέν οἱ κεχάροιτο γυνή, μάλα περ χατέουσα,
ἐλθόντʼ, ἀλλά κεν αὐτοῦ ἀεικέα πότμον ἐπίσποι,250
εἰ πλεόνεσσι μάχοιτο· σὺ δʼ οὐ κατὰ μοῖραν ἔειπες.
ἀλλʼ ἄγε, λαοὶ μὲν σκίδνασθʼ ἐπὶ ἔργα ἕκαστος,
τούτῳ δʼ ὀτρυνέει Μέντωρ ὁδὸν ἠδʼ Ἁλιθέρσης,
οἵ τέ οἱ ἐξ ἀρχῆς πατρώιοί εἰσιν ἑταῖροι.
ἀλλʼ ὀίω, καὶ δηθὰ καθήμενος ἀγγελιάων255
πεύσεται εἰν Ἰθάκῃ, τελέει δʼ ὁδὸν οὔ ποτε ταύτην."
ὣς ἄρʼ ἐφώνησεν, λῦσεν δʼ ἀγορὴν αἰψηρήν.
οἱ μὲν ἄρʼ ἐσκίδναντο ἑὰ πρὸς δώμαθʼ ἕκαστος,
μνηστῆρες δʼ ἐς δώματʼ ἴσαν θείου Ὀδυσῆος.
Τηλέμαχος δʼ ἀπάνευθε κιὼν ἐπὶ θῖνα θαλάσσης,260
χεῖρας νιψάμενος πολιῆς ἁλὸς εὔχετʼ Ἀθήνῃ·
"κλῦθί μοι, ὃ χθιζὸς θεὸς ἤλυθες ἡμέτερον δῶ
καί μʼ ἐν νηὶ κέλευσας ἐπʼ ἠεροειδέα πόντον
νόστον πευσόμενον πατρὸς δὴν οἰχομένοιο
ἔρχεσθαι· τὰ δὲ πάντα διατρίβουσιν Ἀχαιοί,265
μνηστῆρες δὲ μάλιστα κακῶς ὑπερηνορέοντες."
notes
Telemachus has announced his intention to go to Pylos and Sparta to find out what he can about his father.
read full essay
Now Mentor, the man Odysseus left in charge of his household (οἶκον, 226) when he left for Troy, stands to address the assembly. This character is, as we have said (see essay on 1.1–43), a doublet for Mentes, the Taphian friend of Odysseus, whose persona Athena assumed when she first appeared to Telemachus (1.105). Mentor, like Athena (who echoes these verses verbatim at 5.8-12), is a surrogate for Odysseus, holding things together in the hero’s absence. His remarks offer a view of this hero that we have not yet seen:
μή τις ἔτι πρόφρων ἀγανὸς καὶ ἤπιος ἔστω
σκηπτοῦχος βασιλεύς, μηδὲ φρεσὶν αἴσιμα εἰδώς,
ἀλλ᾽ αἰεὶ χαλεπός τ᾽ εἴη καὶ αἴσυλα ῥέζοι:
ὡς οὔ τις μέμνηται Ὀδυσσῆος θείοιο
λαῶν οἷσιν ἄνασσε, πατὴρ δ᾽ ὣς ἤπιος ἦεν
Let no sceptered king be eager still to be
gentle and sweet, nor follow the justice of the gods,
but instead let him be harsh, and act severely,
since no one of his subjects remembers godlike Odysseus
and how sweet he was.
Odyssey 2.230–34
“Sweet” and “gentle” are not words we will come to associate with the calculating adventurer we meet during Odysseus’s journey home. They are only applied to him in these two places in the poem. We may chalk up the glowing portrait of Odysseus by Mentor and Athena to overzealous partisanship, of course, but the discrepancy is worth a further look, as it reflects the poet’s complex presentation of the hero’s character in the story.
As it happens, there is another Homeric hero with a past that clashes with what we know of him from the poem. Achilles, as he appears in the Iliad, exemplifies the dangerous qualities of the Homeric hero in their most extreme form. Grandiose, volatile, driven by an excessive pride that isolates him from his fellow warriors, he craves kleos above all and would cast off all the customary restraints that limit the actions of ordinary men. No figure in ancient literature embodies so purely the destructive aspects of the heroic code, the terrible imperatives that drive men to shut themselves off from others in pursuit of glory. Through his character, the Iliad explores the paradoxical nature of heroism, its alluring absolutism, its lethal isolation.
All that being said, Achilles also has a “back story,” a life history sketched out in various hints sprinkled through the poem. He was once a little boy, dandled on the knee of Phoenix (Il. 9.485–89); tutored by the wise centaur Cheiron, he could be healer as well as a killer (Il. 11.831–32); he is a man capable of long-term, intense friendships (Il. 11.769–78); other men love him and miss him when he is away (Il. 9.630–42); he has a father, sitting far away and pining for his only son (Iliad 11.785–88); he is a father and worries about his son (Il. 19.326–33); he has not always been so fiercely preoccupied with himself, has shown mercy to those he captured (Il. 6.425–27); he has always been a gracious host, no small thing in the world of the Homeric poems (Il. 11.776–79; 1.334–44; 9.193–204). In short, a complex, contradictory man, his essential nobility entwined with his destructive excesses.
In both cases, the discrepancy between the character we see and the one suggested but not in evidence raises some fruitful questions about the role of repeated narrative patterns in the characterization of the hero. In the case of Achilles, a tripartite repetition of the sequence, withdrawal of the hero, destruction in his absence, and return of the hero, informs his actions to such a degree that his thoughts and actions are hard to reconcile with the gentler, less volatile character we see fleetingly revealed. We can account for the discrepancy by saying that the anger that overcomes him temporarily distorts his usual persona. He is semi-divine, and the origins of his rage seem to reflect the godlike side of him, the refusal to accept limits on his behavior, the arrogant dismissal of mere mortals. He only transcends that anger after coming to accept that he, like all other mortals, must die. He can then release the corpse of Hector to Priam, a gesture that brings out the gentle, compassionate side of him again. The rhetoric of this characterization points to the hard truth behind all tragic stories in Greek literature: Every mortal must accept limits on his/her behavior, the most important of these being mortality; reaching toward divine transcendence of those limits is always self-destructive and destructive to others.
Odyssey is not a tragic story. Survival of hero and restoration of right order is the primary goal of the narrative, informing, as we have said, the moral universe of the story and the character of its hero. Accepting limits on his existence is not the definitive challenge for Odysseus. Rather, he must survive, no matter what it takes, so he can restore right order in Ithaka. To do so, he must overcome various obstacles, physical and psychic, the common denominator among them being the threat of being annihilated, made into nothing. Poseidon tries to drown him, Calypso tries to keep him in a timeless existence on her island, where he would never grow old, never change. Polyphemus would eat him, while the Lotus Eaters offer a variation on Calypso’s oblivion. He must visit the land of the dead, then escape to journey on. We may see the cunning, manipulative, detached, and ruthless behavior of Odysseus as necessary, given the threats he faces: He has to be this way, or he won’t get back home. But then comes the encounter of the beggar with Amphinomus, where we see the disguised Odysseus showing compassion for the doomed suitor, displaying a vision of human experience opposed to Athena’s relentless demand for vengeance. That vignette serves no purpose in the plot. Instead, we feel the storyteller tapping us on the shoulder, reminding us that human life is messier and more interesting than the story Athena wants to arrange about the triumphant return of the hero. When heroes exert their will in pursuit of the goal the story valorizes, there will be casualties. Still, the man Mentes remembers might still be inside the heroic conqueror, willing to live with human imperfection.
Further Reading
Murnaghan, S. 1987. Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey, 8–19. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Van Nortwick, T. 1992. Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: The Second Self and the Hero’s Journey in Ancient Epic, 54. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2008. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey, 3–5. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
224 κατ᾽ . . . ἕζετο: tmesis of καθίζομαι.
226 οἱ: “to him,” dative with ἐπέτρεπεν (ἐπιτρέπω Cunliffe 2, LSJ A.I.3).
226 ἰὼν . . . ἐπέτρεπεν: the subject is Odysseus, inferred from the genitive Ὀδυσῆος in line 225.
227 γέροντι: Commentators disagree wbout whether the γέρων is Mentor or Laertes, Odysseus's father. Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth (1988) note that the γέρων is "presumably Mentor himself . . . [and so] οἶκον must be understood as subject of πείθεσθαι and Mentor as subject of φυλάσσειν," that is: Odysseus entrusted the entire house to Mentor so that the household would obey Mentor, and Mentor would keep everything safe. The change of subject of the infinitives πείθεσθαι and φυλάσσειν is discussed in Monro 231 (and further discussion at Merry, Riddell, and Monro 1886). Others (Stanford 1947) following Eustathius (Commentarii ad Homeri Odysseam 1.94.12) argue that γέροντι referrs to Laertes, that is: Odysseus entrusted the entire household to Mentor so that Mentor would obey Laertes and keep everything safe. But, as Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth (1988) point out, Laertes "is not elsewhere elsewhere regarded as taking an active interest in Odysseus' household."
230 πρόφρων “willingly,” adjective with the force of an adverb.
230 καὶ ἤπιος: Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth 1988 note that the retention of the long quantity of a final long vowel or diphthong before hiatus at the end of the fourth foot is unusual. The phenomenon is repeated at 232: καὶ αἴσυλα. Monro (380) calculates that this is the case with -αι in only 1.3 percent of Homeric uses.
232 εἴη . . . ῥέζοι: optatives of wish as imperatives (Monro 299, Smyth 1820).
233 ὡς “since,” “because” ( = ὅτι).
233 τις . . . / λαῶν οἷσιν ἄνασσε: the indefinite τις modified by a partitive genitive λαῶν (Monro 147 N (2)), which becomes the antecedent of the relative clause. All of this should be taken together as the subject of μέμνηται.
233 Ὀδυσσῆος θείοιο: this line-ending occurs three times in Iliad and twenty-four times in Odyssey. θείοιο at line end is employed with other four-syllable genitives of names as well (Ὀϊλῆος Il. 13.694, Ἡρακλῆος Il. 15.25, Ἀχιλλῆος Il. 19.279, and Ἐνιπῆος Od. 11.238). In the Odyssey, θείοιο usually occurs at line-end, but twice spans the fourth and fifth foot (1.65, 4.395).
234 πατὴρ δ᾽ ὥς “like a father,” the ὥς is postpositive.
235 μεγαίρω “complain,” introducing an accusative and infinitive construction of indirect discourse, one of many constructions that follow μεγαίρω (See Cunliffe and LSJ A.I.2).
236 κακορραφίῃσι: dative of means. The plural emphasizes the various occasions and types of contriving of evil; there are many suitors and many kinds of evil thought among them (Monro 171(4), Smyth 1000)
237 παρθέμενοι “staking,” “risking” from παρατίθημι (LSJ παρατίθημι B.3).
239 ἄλλῳ δήμῳ “the rest of you people.”
239 οἷον “(seeing) how . . .,” explaining the reason for Mentor’s blame (νεμεσίζομαι). Expressions of blame are often followed by this type of indirect exclamatory clause (Smyth 2687).
241 παύρους “few” (Cunliffe and LSJ 2under παῦρος).
243 φρένας: accusative of respect.
243 ἠλεέ: vocative from ἠλεός.
243 ποῖον ἔειπες: a frequent expression of surprise at a speaker’s words in Homer (LSJ ποῖος).
244 καταπαυέμεν: infinitive.
244 ἀργαλέον: understand ἐστί. Commentators differ on the meaning of this passage. Does it apply to (a) the Ithacans (it is a pain for them, even with their greater numbers, to fight over feasting), or (b) Mentor (it is a pain [for you] to fight against men in greater numbers…), or (c) the suitors (it is a pain [for us] to fight…)? In the case of (a), the dative is a dative of interest and καί means “even.” In the case of (b) and (c), the dative follows μαχήσασθαι (“to fight against” + dative) and καί perhaps means “also.” (a) seems like the most straightforward reading, but Stanford prefers (b). The repetition of πλεόνεσσι in 251, referring to the suitors whom Odysseus would have to fight on his return home, does seem to support (b) as a parallel “one against many” situation.
246 εἴ περ γάρ κ(ε) “for even if . . .,” introducing a future less vivid conditional. The optative in the protasis (μενοινήσει[ε]) doesn’t appear until 248.
247 ἑόν: possessive.
248 ἐξελάσαι: aorist active infinitive from ἐξελαύνω. The verb is followed by a genitive governed by the prepositional prefix ἐξ–.
249 οἱ κεχάροιτο: the verb (aorist optative from χαίρω) takes a dative (οἱ). Note that the lost initial σϝ- of οἱ causes κεν to scan as a long syllable (Monro 391).
250 ἐλθόντ(ι): agreeing with οἱ, referring to Odysseus.
250 αὐτοῦ “on the spot,” that is, on his arrival.
250 ἐπίσποι “he would face” from ἐφέπω (LSJ ἐφέπω A.III).
252 σκίδνασθ(ε): imperative.
252 ἔργα “properties,” “estates,” “farms.”
253 τούτῳ: referring to Telemachus.
253 ὀτρυνέει . . . ὁδόν “will hasten his departure,” future active indicitive third singular from ὀτρύνω (LSJ ὀτρύνω 3). The verb is a contract future, which Homer leaves uncontracted, and singular, but with two subjects, Mentor and Halitherses.
254 οἱ: pronoun third singular dative masculine referring to Telemachus.
255 καί “even so” (that is, even with the help of Mentor and Halitherses). Leocritus doesn’t believe that Telemachus will actually make his intended journey.
256 πεύσεται: future from πυνθάνομαι, with the genitive coomplement ἀγγελιάων.
256 τελέει: an uncontracted contract future.
257 αἰψηρήν “quick to disperse” (Stanford, LSJ αἰψηρός).
257 ἀγορὴν αἰψηρήν: a spondaic fifth foot accomodating, as often, a word composed of three long syllables (Monro 368).
258 οἱ: that is, the Ithacans.
261 πολιῆς ἁλός: either a partitive genitive (“[with water] from the gray sea”) or local (“at the gray sea”). Stanford and Merry, Riddell, and Monro (1886) prefer the former.
262 κλῦθί μοι: "hear me favorably" aorist imperative with dative, although the genitive is more usual. See Cunliffe under κλύον sense 5. The form of this imperative is discussed at Monro 32.
262 χθιζὸς θεός: both to be taken in the predicate after ἤλυθες "you who came yesterday as a god." χθιζός is often used in agreement with a substantive or pronoun (Cunliffe sense 2).
262 ἡμέτερον δῶ: the accusative of the object to which motion is directed (terminus ad quem) is rare in Homer with simple verbs like ἔρχομαι, usually occurring only with words meaning "house," "city," or "native land" (Monro 140.4).
264 πευσόμενον: future participle from πυνθάνομαι, agreeing with μ(ε), expressing purpose (Monro 244).
265 τά: demonstrative, “these things,” meaning Telemachus’s journey.