The Fathers of Telemachus

The poet of the Odyssey exhibits great artistic flexibility in his handling of the highly conventional elements of early Greek epic: larger themes and narrative patterns, character and episodic doublets and triplets, type-scenes, and even short formulaic phrases. The poet’s presentation of a sequence of ‘just as a father to his own son’ formulas over the course of the Odyssey is examined here, with a view to illustrating how they interact with one another to convey sentiments that are at first genuinely pathetic, arousing in the audience sadness and sympathy, but then increasingly ironic and even sarcastic.