Friday, September 11, 2015
Fathers and Sons
During Telemachus' journey to Pylos and Sparta in Books 3 and 4, he meets or hears about several fathers and sons. He encounters Nestor and his son Psistratos, meets Menelaus as he celebrates his son's wedding and hears about the story of Agamemnon and his son Orestes. From these relationships what can we learn about the proper relationship between father and son in Bronze Age Greece? What are a father's duties to his son -- and a son's duties to his father? What does a father teach his son?
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During Telemachus’ journey to Pylos and Sparta he meets or hears of many great father and son relationships. Some of those relationships include Nestor and Psistratos, Menelaus and his son, and Agamemnon and Orestes. In these relationships you can see the love that there is between the father and the son, for example when Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, cheated on him with Aegisthus and later Aegisthus and Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon. After they had murdered Agamemnon, Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, came to avenge his father by murdering Aegisthus and his mother, Clytemnestra. This shows that back in the Bronze Age of Greece the relationship between a father and his son was a very tight knit relationship based on the fact that Orestes murdered his own mother, Clytemnestra, for his father, Agamemnon.
ReplyDeleteIn a father-son relationship a father has duties that he has to his son and a son has duties to his father. A duty that a father has to his son is to make sure he is prepared to carry on the legacy of the family name and in order to do that the father has to teach his son courage and bravery in order for his son to be worthy of ruling the kingdom that will be passed to him once his father dies. What a father teaches his son is all of the traits that his son will need to learn in order to once again carry on the legacy of the family with the family name. Duties that a son has to his father in the Bronze Age of Greece are to carry the family name once his father dies and to be able to avenge his father if any wrongdoing is done to him. An example of this is when Orestes kills Aegisthus and Clytemnestra because they killed his father, Agamemnon. All in all, that is how the father-son relationship in Bronze Age Greece was very important.
Telemachus learns from all these different stories and from the words of Athena that it is important to avenge your father’s name and pride. That it is a son’s duty to keep the families good name and glory. Telemachus is determined to find word of his father and to find closure over his father’s long absence from his life. Pride and glory is an important thing in Bronze Age Greece from the story of Agamemnon and his son Orestes, we learn much about avenging his father’s pride after he is killed by his wife. Telemachus is dead set on finding his father and keeping his father’s good name. The suitors he left behind with his mother are trying to take that name away and to replace Odysseus as the man of the household. Telemachus takes his role as Odysseus’s son seriously and knows it is his duty to take charge of his house hold after his father’s disappearance. All along his journey Telemachus hears great stories of father and son relationships and what sons have done to honor their fathers. Telemachus knows it is his time to do the same for his father and to keep his families good name by taking charge of his household. He knows by his father’s and Athena’s lessons that it is his time to run is household and to drive the suitors away from his mother and house. He learns from other examples around him and knows that it is time to grow up and keep his father’s spirit and household alive.
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