Absent Fathers and Their Absent Sons
Epic Symbolism and Surrogate Themes
This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. Following the completion of book-by-book posts entries will fall into three basic categories: (1) new scholarship about the Iliad; (2) themes: (expressions/reflections/implications of trauma; agency and determinism; performance and reception; diverse audiences); and (3) other issues of texts/transmission/and commentary that occur to me. As a reminder, these posts will remain free, but there is an option to be a financial supporter. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis.
This post was followed by an essay in Neos Kosmos “Son to Father: Love, Legacy, and Loss”, published on June 18, 2024.
Odyssey 1.215-6
“My mother claims I am, in fact, his son. I don’t really know / no one can really witness their own begetting!”
Aesopic Proverbs, 19
“A father is the one who raised you, not the one who sired you.”
Interpretation:
“Let him be called ‘father’ who educated us; for the man who sired us was just a slave to pleasure.”
Πατὴρ μὲν ὁ θρέψας, οὐ μὴν δὲ ὁ γεννήσας.
῾Ερμηνεία: Πατὴρ καλοῖτο ἂν ὁ <τὰς> τροφὰς διδούς· / ῾Ο γὰρ φυτεύσας ἡδονῇ δεδούλευκεν.
Families may not be the the average reader’s first thought when someone mentions Homer, and children are certainly not at the top of the list—as Louise Pratt writes, “the Iliad is not about children in any obvious way” (2007, 25). But familial relationships do loom large in epic language. From parental similes evoking the nature of relationships (as Sophie Mills describes in her article) to the importance of surrogate parents in figures like Phoenix and Nestor, the structural framework of families is crucial for understanding Homeric epic. Again, Louise Pratt suggests that “the overall ethos of the Iliad is a parental one”, arguing that “the poem’s overall structure and conclusion…ultimately suggest that the kinds of sacrifice parents make for their children and the care they take on for their behalf are humanity’s best hope for redemption in the face of mortality.”
I share Pratt’s hope for the possibility of such an optimistic view, but I am also struck by how frequently epic emphasizes the absence of fathers or the distance between fathers and sons. The Iliad’s emotional charge increases heavily at the moment when Priam and Achilles acknowledge each other’s humanity through their grief, positioning themselves as a father bereft of a son and a son who will never see his father again. The Odyssey bases an entire subplot around the question of how not having a father around may have shaped Telemachus’ character development. And I think it is no accident that the epic ends with a brief reunion between Odysseus and his father Laertes, answering the absence created at the end of the Iliad and providing to Odysseus what Achilles never gets, the future he had hoped for Patroklos to take in his place:
Homer, Iliad 19. 309-340
“He said this and dispersed the rest of the kings,
But the two sons of Atreus remained along with shining Odysseus,
Nestor, Idomeneus, and the old horse-master Phoinix
All trying to bring him some distraction. But he took no pleasure
In his heart before he entered the jaws of bloody war.
He sighed constantly as he remembered and spoke:
‘My unlucky dearest of friends it was you who before
Used to offer me a sweet meal in our shelter
Quickly and carefully whenever the Achaeans were rushing
To bring much-lamented Ares against the horse-taming Achaeans.
But now you are lying there run-through and my fate
Is to go without drink and food even though there inside
Because I long for you. I couldn’t suffer anything more wretched than this
Not even if I learned that my father had died,
Who I imagine is crying tender tears right now in Pththia
Bereft of a son like this—but I am in a foreign land,
Fighting against the Trojans for the sake of horrible Helen.
Not even if I lost my dear son who is being cared for in Skyros,
If godlike Neoptolemos is at least still alive—
Before the heart in my chest always expected that
I alone would die far away from horse-nourishing Argos
Here in Troy, but that you would return home to Phthia
I hoped you would take my child in the swift dark ship
From Skyros and that you would show to him there
My possessions, the slaves, and the high-roofed home.
I expect that Peleus has already died or
If he is still alive for a little longer he is aggrieved
By hateful old age and as he constantly awaits
Some painful message, when he learns that I have died.”
So he spoke while weeping, and the old men mourned along with him
As each of them remembered what they left behind at home.
And Zeus [really] felt pity when he saw them mourning
Of course, Achilles’ imagined future is somewhat different from what we might expect at the beginning of the epic. It represents a significant shift in his sense of self, but one that is only completed when he replaces someone else in a father-son relationship. Here too, we can find a contrast between the Homeric epics. Odysseus returns home to reintroduce himself to his father, while Achilles imagines a surrogate-self, returning home to unite father, with son, to bridge the gap across three generations.
In one of my favorite articles on the topic of fathers and sons in Homer, Nancy Felson writes about the concept of threptra, the obligation of a child to care for a parent later in life in exchange for the care they received as a child. The inability to furnish threptra when a child predeceases a parent is an understated but by no means insignificant impact of war. When Hektor dies, he orphans a son, but he also deprives his father of a protector and a giver of care.
Achilles, too, is marked out as a son who will never be able to care for his father. Odysseus has him pointedly ask in the Odyssey if he has heard news of Neoptolemos’ accomplishments or the condition of his father Peleus. Achilles laments that he is not his father’s defender, that his life’s force was spent killing other people’s fathers and sons. To contrast him with his Iliadic running mates: Hektor stood, ready to die to protect the city and his son; Priam risked his life to save the body of his child; and Achilles sent his surrogate son/father to die in his place, thanks in part to his rage over slighted honor.
At the end of the Iliad Achilles’ future death and Hektor’s absence disrupt an idealized triptych of the heroic family, perhaps represented by those three men at the end of the Odyssey: Laertes, Odysseus, and Telemachus stand together at their epic’s end to face the families of the sons they killed, the father-son relationships they fractured when Odysseus slaughtered the suitors in his home. As Felson writes, a son’s sharing of “center stage with his son” is a crucial part of the epic’s familial dynamics, at play when Nestor advises Antilochus in Iliad 23, when Mentes (Athena) guides Telemachus in the Odyssey Phoinix tries to advise Achilles in Iliad 9. These surrogate paternal figures seem to be greater part of heroic myth: sons are often sent off to be raised by others, fostered with relatives or allies, or entrusted to the care of others to be trained. (This is the case of Achilles himself, separated young from his father under the care of the centaur Chiron).
Achilles’ inclination to help Priam, to listen to his plea is shaped in part by the permanent break in his own relationships and by his own internal lament that he will never be able to repay his father for his upbringing. And his emotional response may include even more than this one exchange: As Sophie Mills writes, Achilles is… “surrounded by surrogate fathers and sons and in the Iliad, and he fails nearly all of them” (200, 13).
Of course, this is about more than the failure of one relationship or the remaining debt from the obligation of reciprocity and exchange. Familial bonds are both metaphorical and real. But the expectations of social practice–the rituals of the roles we play for one another–help us find our way to act when our experience of the world overwhelms us. The ritualized behavior of exile and adoption connect Patroklos and Phoinix to Achilles’ final moments with Priam. As Robert Finlay notes, both Patroklos and Phoinix were welcomed into Peleus’ household as exiles who had come to Phthia fleeing trouble in their homeland.
This is in part why the simile that describes the arrival of Priam before Achilles in book 24 is so arresting.
Homer, Iliad 24.477-484
“Great Priam escaped their notice, and there he stood
Right nearby, and he took Achilles’ knees and kissed his hands,
Those terrible, manslaying hands that had killed his many sons.As when an intricate madness overtakes a man who then kills
Someone in his own country and has to go to another’s land
To a wealthy man’s household and wonder over takes those who see him—
Just so did Achilles feel wonder when he saw godlike Priam.
The rest felt wonder too, and they looked at one another.”τοὺς δ’ ἔλαθ’ εἰσελθὼν Πρίαμος μέγας, ἄγχι δ’ ἄρα στὰς
χερσὶν ᾿Αχιλλῆος λάβε γούνατα καὶ κύσε χεῖρας
δεινὰς ἀνδροφόνους, αἵ οἱ πολέας κτάνον υἷας.
ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἂν ἄνδρ’ ἄτη πυκινὴ λάβῃ, ὅς τ’ ἐνὶ πάτρῃ
φῶτα κατακτείνας ἄλλων ἐξίκετο δῆμον
ἀνδρὸς ἐς ἀφνειοῦ, θάμβος δ’ ἔχει εἰσορόωντας,
ὣς ᾿Αχιλεὺς θάμβησεν ἰδὼν Πρίαμον θεοειδέα·
θάμβησαν δὲ καὶ ἄλλοι, ἐς ἀλλήλους δὲ ἴδοντο.
This passage describes Priam as an exile who inspires wonder in others when he arrives as a supplicant in their land. Achilles slides into the paternal position here, at least at the first reading of the simile–he is the one in a position of amazement, observing this man who has risked everything for his son. But, properly speaking, Priam is not the one who has committed violence, he is not the one who has been dislocated from his community, and he is, by all rights, the more paternal character. So the narrative mixes things up for the audience–they all wonder at each other, at their mixed up roles, and the new set of obligations (re)created by their brief surrogate relationships. Achilles is the one who accepts an exile in his land as a suppliant. But he is also a foreigner without a father, like Hektor, an irretrievable son.
The collection Growing up Fatherless in Antiquity looks at the phenomenon from multiple perspectives, considering in part how ancient fatherlessness can help us understand modern sociological concerns about absent fathers and single-parent households. The introduction warns readers not to essentialize the gender or sex of the ‘father’ or the nuclear family, but instead to focus on the construction of the idea of fathers in different cultural milieus.
In one of the essays, Louise Pratt proposes that Diomedes’ depiction as a fatherless son would have “particular resonance” (142) in a world were many children did not know their fathers (perhaps echoing Telemachus there). In her sensitive reading, Pratt teases out implied psychological tolls on Diomedes, whose fatherlessness separates him from particular experiences and from the frameworks other heroes articulate. She concludes that Diomedes offers the example of a hero who succeeds without his father thanks in part to other support (mentors/surrogates). She even adds that his isolation and experience may actually make him a more empathetic figure, perhaps explaining (in my words) some differences between him and Achilles in the Iliad.
In his chapter, George Wöhrle positions the Odyssey as a “positive counter-image to the Iliad” when it comes to stories of fathers and sons, in achieving its “harmonious resolution of intergenerational conflict” (163). Wöhrle focuses in particular on absent or lost fathers–he notes how Andromache repeatedly imagines the impact of Hektor’s absence on Asytuanax’s life in the Iliad, noting that the particular force of meaning attached to orphaned children and widows in the Iliad has to be understood within the context of war and the sacking of the city. The Odyssey, in contrast, combines the figure of king and father for the city and for Telemachus, blurring lines in a different way. For Telemachus, as I explore somewhat in my work on the Odyssey, fatherlessness has a particular psychological impact.
Wöhrle notes that Telemachus was left in protective care when Odysseus departed for Troy, but one that did not distinguish between his paternal and political roles, leaving Telemachus with a problem of maturation within one of authority and sovereignty. Wöhrle suggests that “the Homeric father served as a medium to the outside world for his son” (172) and that while Athena serves as a surrogate in this process, Odysseus returns to complete it, culminating in the moment when Telemachus almost strings his father’s bow and wins his mother’s contest.
This threat–one I always jest at when teaching the Odyssey–points to some of the latent tension in Homer that is explicit in other Greek myth. Where for Oedipus or Jason or even Perseus (not to mention Zeus), overcoming a father figure is an essential part of the ‘circle of life’. Homeric fathers and sons seem locked in a different kind of relationship, forestalling any intergenerational conflict in favor of the possibility of working with each other against other threats.
This general non-contention between fathers and sons in Homer may actually be one of the most fantastic, yet most ingenuous of Homeric fictions. Fathers and sons are not at odds with each other, because they are rarely with each other. Absent fathers and absent sons create a kind of isolation or loneliness. The blending/blurring of lines with Achilles and Priam implies for me that that potential loss always has to be understood in both directions and that Achilles must learn to play role of aggrieved father and son to fully understand his place in the world and the loss his own existence necessitates. A father without a son or a son without a father does not lose their past experience and the world that shaped them; but in Homer’s world, they do seem to lose a sense of the future they might have built together.
Short Bibliography
n.b. this is not exhaustive. please let me know if there are other articles to include.
Avery, Harry C. “Achilles’ Third Father.” Hermes 126, no. 4 (1998): 389–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4477270.
Nancy Felson, ‘Paradigms of paternity: fathers, sons, and athletic/sexual prowess in Homer's Odyssey’, in Euphrosyne: studies in ancient epic and its legacy in honor of Dimitris N. Maronitis, ed. by John N. Kazazis and Antonios Rengakos (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999), pp. 89-98.
FELSON, NANCY. “‘THREPTRA’ AND INVINCIBLE HANDS: THE FATHER-SON RELATIONSHIP IN ‘ILIAD’ 24.” Arethusa 35, no. 1 (2002): 35–50.
Finlay, R.. “Patroklos, Achilleus, and Peleus. Fathers and sons in the Iliad.” Classical World, vol. LXXIII, 1980, pp. 267-273.
Mills, Sophie. “Achilles, Patroclus and Parental Care in Some Homeric Similes.” Greece & Rome 47, no. 1 (2000): 3–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/826944.
Pratt, Louise. “The Parental Ethos of the Iliad.” Hesperia Supplements 41 (2007): 25–40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20066781.
Pratt, Louise. “Diomedes, the fatherless hero of the Iliad.” Growing up fatherless in antiquity. Eds. Hübner, Sabine and Ratzan, David M.. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Pr., 2009. 141-162.
Rood, Naomi Jennifer. The many and the one: fathers and sons in Homeric epic. [S. l.]: [s. n.], 1999.
Wöhrle, Georg. “Sons (and daughters) without fathers: fatherlessness in the Homeric epics.” Growing up fatherless in antiquity. Eds. Hübner, Sabine and Ratzan, David M.. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Pr., 2009. 162-174.