2.224–266

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.