This is how the Odyssey begins: the hero himself nowhere in sight, the crises precipitated by his absence taking center stage. However long the proem of the Odyssey actually is—ten lines, twenty-one lines—it turns out to be misleading: despite its promise to tell us about “a man,” the fact is that this man appears at first only as a memory, a ghost about whom we hear stories, reminiscences, rumors. He’s on his way home, someone says; someone else recalls having glimpsed him back in Troy, disguised as a beggar on a spying mission. Another, rather unsavory story surfaces: Ah yes, Odysseus, he once came looking for some poisoned arrows. (These, we understand, are not at all the weapons that noble warriors are supposed to use.) The rumors whirl and eddy, but the hero himself—“the man”—is nowhere to be seen, either on Ithaca or in Homer’s narrative. And all the while, the wife weeps, the populace seethes, the son daydreams hopelessly. It’s as if the Muse had mischievously decided to take the words of the proem literally—to begin at random, at “some point or another,” and that starting point turns out to be a different one altogether from the one we had expected.
It is hard not to feel that Homer’s decision to obscure and blur and postpone our view of the epic’s main character is designed to pique our curiosity about this shadowy figure, who, in these crucial first pages, seems to lurk at the far edges of his own story, curiously small and difficult to make out, like one of those tiny figures in a Dutch painting that you risk not noticing at all because your eye is drawn to the painting’s ostensible subject, the figure in the foreground, and only when you peer at the picture more closely do you realize that this smaller, more distant, even partial shape is of deeper interest after all, is the element that will reward the closest study—is, perhaps, the painting’s true subject. The most famous example of this visual sleight of hand is a painting called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, by the Netherlandish master Pieter Brueghel, which hangs in a museum in Brussels and takes as its subject another of antiquity’s many father-son dramas: the myth of the great inventor Daedalus and his son Icarus, who sought to fly on artificial wings made of feathers bound by wax. In the best-known version of the myth, which appears in a poem by Ovid, Daedalus warns his son not to fly too high, since the sun’s warmth will melt the wax; but the heedless son, giddy with excitement, disobeys his father, soars too high, loses his wings, and crashes into the sea. With poignant irony, Brueghel’s canvas illustrates the split second in time just after Icarus has fallen: the painting is almost entirely taken up by the shore and the sea and, especially, by three peasants who go about their business, plowing, herding, and fishing, utterly unaware of the catastrophe—the only sign of which is a tiny detail off in the corner, which turns out to be poor Icarus’ legs waggling pathetically just above the waterline. In Brueghel’s hands, Ovid’s tale of a son’s willful rejection of his father’s wisdom becomes a story about the need for a kind of humility—for, you might say, perspective; an admonition about what we miss when we are intent on our own narratives, about the dangers of mistaking the foreground for the whole picture.
The character who stands front and center as the Odyssey begins, and who remains the center of our attention during its first four books, is the person who slowly gathers all the rumors, gossip, and stories: Odysseus’ son. When we meet him, a little after the proem ends, Telemachus cuts a melancholy figure. He is, Homer says, “sorrowing in his heart” as he sits forlornly in the great hall of the royal palace at Ithaca, watching powerlessly as the Suitors laugh and feast uproariously around him. Having no idea how to assert himself, Odysseus’ only child is reduced to helpless fantasies,
picturing his noble father in his mind, wishing that
he’d come and sweep the Suitors from the house!
The problem is not simply that no one knows for sure just where his noble father is; the greater dilemma is that nobody knows if he’s even alive. This uncertainty triggers further questions: whether Penelope is a wife or a widow, still married or now marriageable; whether the hero’s son can, if necessary, be the king and man his father had been. At present, the answer to this last question is clearly no.
The agonizing suspense in which the royal family, the Suitors, and the populace have been languishing is vividly evoked by means of a story we hear during these first few books of the Odyssey, the books from which Odysseus himself is absent. The tale, which concerns the best known of the ruses that Penelope has employed to keep the Suitors at bay, has an obvious symbolic meaning. The queen, one of the Suitors angrily complains, had once promised to marry one of them at last, but only after she finished weaving a funeral shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes, the decrepit old man who now glumly tends his farmstead far from the scene of his absent son’s humiliation. The Suitors agreed to her plan; but every night, in secret, the cunning queen would unravel what she had woven during the day, thereby indefinitely postponing the completion of her handiwork. This deceit worked for several years, until one of Penelope’s maids, a faithless girl who’s been sleeping with one of the Suitors, exposed the ruse. The Suitors confronted the queen, who was then forced to complete the shroud. Since then—all this, we learn, took place three years before the Odyssey begins, three years before the moment when the prince sits helpless and forlorn in his hall, wishing his father could miraculously appear—the queen has disappeared into her chambers.
This story tells us a great deal about Penelope’s desperation—and about her cunning, which is every bit a match for her husband’s well-known wiles. But even more, the weaving and unweaving, knotting and then loosening, speeding and then delaying, beautifully capture the torpor, the lack of forward motion, that characterizes life on Ithaca during Odysseus’ long absence. This seesawing, the surf-like back-and-forth, is, too, the rhythm of the Odyssey itself: the forward push of the plot, the backward pull of the flashbacks, of the backstories and digressions without which the main narrative would seem thin, insubstantial.
So the great epic of travel, of voyages, of journeying, begins with its characters frozen in place. The unwholesome sense of stalemate that characterizes that state of affairs on Ithaca also raises a number of questions that are, in essence, literary. How to start the poem? Where does a story begin? How do you put an end to the past and turn it into the present?
One answer to that question is, By an act of will. After the proem ends, the action moves to the lofty peaks of Mount Olympus, the heavenly home of the gods, where Athena, moved by pity for her favorite mortal, prods her father, Zeus, to break the ten-year-long deadlock. Recalling his affection for the wily mortal, the king of the gods agrees. The divine plan to get Odysseus home will have two parts. First, Hermes, the messenger god, will hasten to the island where the lovesick nymph Calypso has been holding Odysseus captive for the past seven years, and there he will order her to let her prisoner go. But this scene is, in fact, postponed until Book 5—the book in which the action will finally pick up Odysseus’ story. Until then, the poem is preoccupied with the other part of the divine plan, which unfolds on Ithaca and involves the hero’s son.
After flying down to the island kingdom, Athena infiltrates the palace disguised as an old friend of Odysseus’ called Mentes; slipping into the banquet hall where the Suitors are feasting and dancing, she contrives to meet Prince Telemachus. (The youth’s name means “the far-off warrior”: the son who defines himself by the absence of his father has a name that recalls both the absence and the reason for it.) As he politely converses with the disguised Athena, Telemachus bitterly betrays his insecurities, which run very deep indeed: at one point, he sulks that although his mother, Penelope, has always insisted that Odysseus is his father, he can’t know for sure. After pausing to remark on the “outrageous arrogance” of the Suitors’ insulting behavior, Athena seeks to assuage the young man’s anxieties. She assures him, first, that Odysseus is not at all dead but in fact alive on an island, being held captive by “savage men” (with amusing delicacy, she edits out the lovely nymph Calypso); she comments, too, on the young man’s strong physical resemblance to his father: the head, those fine eyes …
But the best medicine for him, she knows, would be to act, and so she takes him in hand. First, she says, he should call a council of Ithaca’s citizens and “speak his mind” to them: “command the Suitors to scurry back home!” Then she tells him to get hold of a ship and travel to the homes