Imagery, Poetry, and Natural Right in Homer's Odyssey

Athens Corner

This is my second discussion on Homer's Odyssey for the Fathers & Sons series on my website (AthensCorner.com). I've provided the entirety of the discussion here because I believe that what Homer provides us with is still so very urgent and relevant for us today and, in particular, for fathers seeking to have a direct involvement in educating their sons toward virtue. A few of the ways I demonstrate how fathers can do that in this discussion consists in showing how such an education from reading the Odyssey translates into everything involved in the following constellation of overlapping themes:
(1) The meaning of justice in the life of man and the divine
(2) The unmanliness of gossip in the becoming of a man from adolescence and, just as importantly, the effeminacy of men regressing into adolescence by trafficking in gossip
(3) The importance of the element of experience for knowledge to properly be called knowledge, with emphasis upon Achilles in Hades
(4) The meaning of "nature" and, in particular, "natural right"
(5) The relevance of poetry for Aristotle as a helpful lens through which to understand the opening scene with Odysseus's son Telemachus
(6) The meaning of the imagery of the bow and the lyre in Homer
(7) The relevance of Glaucon and Socrates from Plato's Republic for understanding Telemachus and Athena in the absence of Odysseus
(8) The meaning of fathers and sons amid nihilism
(9) The meaning of all these things for what we call "life" and "education"