When I was celebrating my birthday around the time my son, Iskander, was three years old, he was surprised that I had not grown noticeably “bigger” over the year. He explained this by suggesting that, instead, I was “growing down” and eventually I would be the baby and he would be the daddy and take care of me. This is one of my “flashbulb” memory moments–I can still see the light coming through the windows, sense his weight on my lap, and feel my tears forming immediately when I recall it.

Iskander’s imagined future unsettled me because of its Epic insight into human lives and its essential generosity, that he expected to care for me in the future. I found it intellectually touching because it reminded me of a concept in Greek epic, the notion that heroes owe threptra (basically the value of their own upbringing) to their parents in their old age. Emotionally, it was also a reminder of my own mortality and the impossibility of ever doing the same thing for my father, who had died less than a year before his grandson was born.

Generations

One of the primary lessons of Homer’s Odyssey comes from the eponymous hero’s scar. When Odysseus’ nurse Eurykleia recognised him by the wound he received on his thigh as a child, it triggers the unfolding of memory and identity. The scar is both an object and sign of a shared past, even a shared set of expectations about the world. It is also a metaphor: our lives’ experiences are written on our bodies and minds. We carry the past with us wherever we go.

When my grandmother (my father’s mother) was in her final years, she told me that knew she was done with the living because most of the people she had known in her life were dead–she had buried two husbands, a grandchild, her own son (my father) and who knows how many other friends and relatives in a life that spanned 94 years. Her catalogue of the dead also reminded me of the Odyssey.

In book 11, Odysseus tells of the ghosts from the underworld lined up to speak to him, the fathers and mothers inquiring after their sons. In Homer’s world, the dead are deeply invested in the world of the living, perhaps undermining epic’s own emphasis on heroic fame. Even in Homer, parents want to know the future will be ok.

When we talk about Greek epic and myth, we generally focus on heroism, war, violence, and eternal renown and rarely center families. Indeed, any average reader of myth might draw back a bit when invited to think about their own father in heroic terms. The story of the creation of the universe as told by Hesiod in the Theogony is all about sons replacing fathers. Such ‘paternal replacement anxiety’ is reflected as well in heroic tales like those of Jason or Perseus who are betrayed by or must overcome paternal figures. All of this coalesces most clearly in Oedipus’s literal replacement of his father Laios.

But there’s a surprising thing about Homeric epic: there’s very little of this intergenerational strife. If anything, the Iliad and the Odyssey present a fantasy ideal of three generations united. As Nancy Felson has described it, Greek epic seems to see a man standing with his father and his son as a heroic goal.

In my father’s telling, he was haunted by the violence–the images of what he saw in Europe and the testimonies he received while translating the words of captured German soldiers. His body bore the burdens too: a wrecked back, and multiple heart attacks before the final one at age 49.

When Achilles laments the death of Patroklos, he explains that he always expected Patroklos would replace him and return home to introduce Achilles’ son to his father Peleus. The Odyssey aims at the reunion of two father-son sets (Odysseus/Telemachus; Laertes/Odysseus) and ends with the three standing together to face the angry families of the suitors Odysseus and Telemachus killed.

But this ideal is offered, I think, to create a contrast with reality. Homeric epic is marked more deeply by the absence of fathers. Achilles’ father Peleus looms in the background as a hero of another age who advised his son to “always be the best, be better than the rest” and whose potential judgment is used rhetorically by people like Odysseus to try to manipulate Achilles. Diomedes is shaped deeply by the father he never met–as Louise Pratt has argued, the Iliad may mean for us to understand that the differences in his character are shaped by his experience of fatherlessness.

Absent Fathers, Absent Sons?

When my father died suddenly at age 61, I operated on autopilot: we had to fly from Texas to Maine to make funeral arrangements. Even as I viewed his body in the morgue (another flashbulb memory now), it was as if I were watching a character play out a role. But as the weeks and months went on, I felt the absence in small ways: when I thought to text him or call him to tell him about something his granddaughter had done; when I published an article, when I was worried about money. It dawned on me that for my entire life, my father had been something of a psychological safety net. I was less afraid to fail merely because he was there.

I don’t know if I could have realised how much my father’s mere presence, his basic existence, strengthened me until he was gone. Pratt’s analysis of Diomedes certainly may seem quintessentially modern, but the impact of a father’s absence shapes both Homeric epics. In the Odyssey, for example, many have identified the lack of a father figure as a cause for Telemachus’ inaction and prolonged adolescence The Homeric answer to this–as we see with figures like Phoenix for Achilles in the Iliad–is to provide surrogate parents. Telemachus is ‘mentored’ by Athena/Mentes, an older figure who shows up and tries to shake Telemachus out of his lassitude.

What the Odyssey consistently emphasises, though, is how much our lives can be shaped by the absence of any of our loved ones. Telemachus doesn’t know his father–and doubts that he ever really could–but Odysseus’ wife Penelope certainly suffers from his absence and his father Laertes withdraws from the household, living on his own in a garden and orchard. And the Iliad echoes this as well, both literally and figuratively: Hektor’s death is the fall of the city of Troy. When that is too difficult or large to grasp, the import of his loss is conveyed through what he meant to his mother, his father, his wife, and his son.

Where the Iliad explores the fragility of these family bonds, the Odyssey shows how hard it is to regain them. The fuller meaning of the reunion between Laertes and Odysseus at the epic’s end draws on the dynamic of fathers and sons in the Iliad. Throughout the epic, Andromache and Hektor anticipate what a world is like without him.

Andromache imagines the terrible life of an orphaned Astyanax, pushed away from the tables of his father’s friends, left to fend for himself. Hektor worries about what will happen to his city and his father if he dies. And Priam himself articulates this best at the end of the epic, when he asks Achilles to think of his own father, to compare him to Priam. Neither of them will have someone to protect them in their old age. No one will return threptra for them.

Part of the reason the three-generational union of fathers and sons is such a powerful image in Greek epic is that it is about continuity–the present, the past, and the future–and because it emphasises the duty of the ‘hero’ in the present tense. Hektor is dually responsible for the protection and raising of his son and the safety and comfort of his father. His death not only erases the present, but it also undermines the past and endangers the future.

These tensions are part of what makes the Iliad’s denouement so powerful. When Priam approaches Achilles to ransom Hektor’s body in book 24, the narrative provides a striking simile to frame the scene. Priam’s appearance fills Achilles with wonder, the kind of amazement people feel when they see an exile appear in their city as a suppliant. In this moment, Achilles is in a paternal position–he is the one accepting a suppliant just as we learn earlier in the epic that his own father accepted Phoenix and Patroklos as suppliants before the Trojan War. However briefly, Priam is an exiled son–then, in that remarkable moment, Achilles and Priam weep together, each recalling the absence of the son or father who helped to define who they are.

Fathers AND Sons

As I write in my book on the Odyssey, The Many Minded Man, I never really identified with Odysseus or his epic until I taught the poem after becoming a father and losing my own. In one of the first classes I returned to book 24 to try to explain to students why Odysseus tests Laertes and then recites for him the trees in the orchards they tended together, I could barely hold back the tears because I understood for the first time what was happening. They were recreating their relationship by recalling the past they shared together, the work they did in the world that represented not just their inheritance (the past), but their relationship (the present), and a shared interest in years to come. I had spent similar time with my own father in rural Maine: building stone walls, planting gardens, caring for the land we shared together.

Our experience of the world necessarily transforms our response to narratives. When Laertes cries at Odysseus’ false tale, predicting ‘Odysseus’ has yet to come home, the hero relents almost immediately, desperate to relieve his father, to confirm he is in fact his son. Even though it is brief, Achilles accepts Priam and mourns with him from a similar drive, to restore the lost relationships, to dial back the clock and become a son again. Homeric epic is about families because families are destroyed by war. The grief at the end of the Iliad and relief at the end of the Iliad suggest that neither spoils, nor honor, nor the promise of eternal fame, are worth the rupture of the bonds that shaped us.

My father was 19 years old when he lost his own father to a heart attack while changing a tire on the side of the road. My life was filled with stories of John Albert Christensen, the first–the son of a Danish immigrant who was assigned to be a forward observer in World War II, partly due to his ability to speak German. His body and mind were both casualties of the war. In my father’s telling, he was haunted by the violence–the images of what he saw in Europe and the testimonies he received while translating the words of captured German soldiers. His body bore the burdens too: a wrecked back, and multiple heart attacks before the final one at age 49.

Ancient audiences of epic were no strangers to the horrors of war and the traces they leave over time. The tragic end of the Iliad speaks to their experience of loss–of the fathers, uncles, brothers and sons who never came back from war, or who were fundamentally changed by it. The comic end of the Odyssey offers a dream of a reunion, of a world where father, son, and grandson stand alone, but together, able to face any conflict they encounter.

I think of this image every year when Father’s Day comes around, incidentally only a few weeks before my father’s birthday. This year would have been his 75th. I have a picture from just a few weeks before he died that I cherish: he and I stand by the side of his mother, who holds my daughter Aalia on her lap. Years before my wife and I were even married, my father–awkwardly–kept asking when he was going to have grandchildren. While my children’s lives will always be shaped by that absence and filled with his stories, my father got to meet at least one of them and it filled him with joy.

In that one way, at least, I paid back my threptra. He got to be a grandfather, to hold the child of his own son. And I like to think it brought him comfort. She was the future to my present. He seemed comfortable playing the part of the past.

Joel Christensen is Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at Brandeis University. He has published extensively and some of his work include Homer’s Thebes (2019) and A Commentary on the Homeric Battle of Frogs and Mice (2018). In 2020, he published The Many-Minded Man: the Odyssey, Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic with Cornell University Press.