Telemachus Pepnumenos: Growing Into an Epithet

TELEMACHUS PEPNUMENOS: GROWING INTO AN EPITHET by JOHN HEATH A critical consensus has emerged over the past forty years that through the course of the Odyssey Telemachus grows up. 1) Scholars often disagree on just when, in which ways, how successfully, and with what thematic signi cance this maturation unfolds, but it has become increasingly clear that in a variety of ways Homer has care- fully marked for his audience the stages of Telemachus’ growth. Deborah Beck has recently demonstrated that Homer even manip- ulates the speech introductory verses of both Telemachus and Odysseus to parallel the development of the young man into his 1)Two early and representative interpretations of Telemachus’ journey are H.W. Clarke, The Art of the Odyssey (Englewood Cli Vs, NJ 1967), 30-44, and N. Austin, Telemachos Polymechanos , CSCA 2 (1960), 45-63; most recent scholarship follows more or less in their foosteps, e.g. P.V. Jones, The KLEOS of Telemachos: Odyssey 1.95 , AJP 109 (1988), 496-506, who sees Telemachus’ journey as a pursuit of his own identity in terms of his father’s famous characteristics: endurance, restraint, intel- ligence, and deception. An important argument, with bibliography, against the apparent development of Telemachus through the rst four books of the epic, is chapter four in S.D. Olson, Blood and Iron: Stories and Storytelling in Homer’s Odyssey (Mnemosyne Suppl. 148; Leiden 1995). Olson steers a middle course, suggesting that Telemachus undergoes no fundamental personal growth since he has in fact already changed sometime shortly before the Odyssey begins. Still, he does see a change in Telemachus’ actions. By the end of Book 1, Telemachus has moved out “of a passive acceptance of his world and into an active and engaged rela- tionship with it and thus with storytelling (especially 1.358-9). All the same, to speak of him as ‘developing’ on an internal level over the course of this scene is to mistake Homer’s real interests and concerns. In fact, Telemachos is the same from rst to last here; what has changed by the end of Book 1 is that he has begun to act on the feelings and desires he has had from the very start, which is to say he is attempting to live out what he takes to be his father’s story in his own person. Not until Book 16 does he really escape the impotence and isola- tion. ..” (78-9). I have no argument with this analysis, but nd that these acts themselves in the opening books represent development. One is measured in the Homeric world by actions, both physical and verbal. Homer is not interested in internal maturation per se but the degree to which Telemachus takes on the words and deeds of his father. Most recently see the remarks of W.G. Thalmann, The Swineherd and the Bow: Representations of Class in the Odyssey (Ithaca 1998), 206-22 (v. infra). ©Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2001 Mnemosyne, Vol. LIV, Fasc. 2 130 JOHN HEATH father’s son. 2) She examines the reunion of the two in Book 16 and their subsequent actions, focusing on speech introductions contain- ing the phrase ßer¯âw Thlem‹xoio (used seven times in the epic, six of which are found in Books 16-22) which always shows Telemachus actively engaged in dissembling to the suitors or for their bene t. She concludes that “the language for Telemachus changes in the same way as the character himself does: it recognises, or at any rate parallels, his reunion with his father and his subsequent increase in maturity”. 3 ) I want to suggest that Homer uses Telemachus’ much more frequent epithet, pepnum¡now—applied to him forty-six times in the epic—in a similar and even more pervasive fashion to mark points in Telemachus’ maturation that begin long before the reunion of father and son. Most importantly, pepnum¡now, while diYcult to de ne, is not as “relatively colorless” as Beck suggests, but is in fact the very characteristic that marks Telemachus’ successful journey to adulthood. The epithet, that is, belongs to the Telemachus of the tradition, the ‘ nal’ version of the adult Telemachus who is hinted at with each speech introduction along the way. 4) One way Homer has framed this maturation is by showing us Telemachus’ shedding of childhood as embodied in the word n®piow (with its various con- 2) Speech Introductions and the Character Development of Telemachus , CJ94 (1998-9), 121-41. 3) Beck (supra n. 2), 135. On the general topic, see M.W. Edwards, Homeric Speech Introductions , HSCP 74 (1970), 1-36. 4) A parallel to this can be found in the speed epithets of Achilles which keep the swift-footed Achaean of tradition in the mind of the audience even though his speed will not be an issue until Books 22 and 23, only to be downplayed in Book 24 where Homer moves the hero beyond the norms of his epithet; see R. Dunkle, Swift-Footed Achilles , CW 90 (1997), 227-34. In the language of scholarship on oral poetry, particularly as worked out by J.M. Foley, Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic (Bloomington 1991), this is “traditional referential- ity”; that is, the uttering of a noun-epithet formula refers not so much to the character of the particular moment, whether suitable or not at that instance, but rather summons the character as found in the tradition. E.J. Bakker, Poetry in Speech: Orality in Homeric Discourse (Ithaca and London 1997), 156-83, expands on this. He argues that instead “of ascribing a property to an absent referent, noun-epithet formulas make this absent referent present, conjuring it, in its most characteristic form, to the there and now of the performance, as an essential part of the universe of discourse shared between the performer and his audience” (161). He refers to these as an “epiphany” of the epic gure eVected by the performance out of the time- less world of the myth. Though he thereby downplays the signi cance of an indi- vidual appearance of a noun-epithet formula in a given context, I think these insights can be applied to a diachronic study of the epics..

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