{|xiii} This book was born in the classroom. Starting in 2000, I taught the Telemachy first in translation in the School of Education and then in the original in the Department of Greek Philology in the Democritean University of Thrace. With few research sources to hand I resorted to the standard commentaries on the Odyssey. Commentaries, I found out anew, can be daunting, at times throttling, yet at others times they may deliver piercing perspectives, and when they skirt the Mandarin disease they can be positively beneficial, even if merely as a fillip for disagreement and further thought. This book grew out of my attempts to explain the Odyssey, particularly Books 1–4 and 15, to my students with the help of the relevant commentaries, after having first subjected the modern day scholiasts to close interrogation. My debts to S. West, I. de Jong, R. D. Dawe, and P. V. Jones, among others, will be apparent both in the main text and especially the footnotes. Without too much philological dalliance—and sometimes with arrow-like swiftness—they have guided me and my students as we moved through the Telemachy, trying to make sense of the ways in which the Little Prince expresses and experiences the process of growing up.

As my lecture notes proliferated the outlines of a book emerged. My subsequent phenomenological progress through the Telemachy would literally have been unthinkable had I not had direct access to a number of fine libraries, fine scholars, and academic audiences. Intermittently over the years 2004–2006 I worked in the libraries of the University of London (UCL) and the Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS) in Washington, DC. I am grateful to the staff of these libraries. I would like also to express heartfelt thanks to Lady Marina Marks and her son, Mr. Alex Collins, for friendship and support in difficult days. My stay at the CHS in the summers of 2005 and 2006 was funded by the Center. Earlier versions of Chapters 2, 5, and 6 were presented as lectures and seminar papers {xiii|xiv} at the European Cultural Center of Delphi, the CHS’s facility in Nafplion, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, and, thanks to the generous support of the University Seminars Program of the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation in 2008, at Harvard, Stanford, and Ohio State Universities and Rhodes College. For their salutary comments and criticism I therefore thank Professors E. Bowie, P. Themelis, Ph. Kakridis, D. N. Maronitis, A. Mayor, K. Morrell, Gregory Nagy, and A. Rengakos as well as the members of my American audiences. I am moved to record my appreciation for the priceless translation of the Odyssey by the late Robert Fitzgerald, who immersed me as an undergraduate in the world of Telemachos and his parents. The Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania kindly appointed me Visiting Scholar in the summer of 2009. This enabled me to work, in considerable comfort, on the English version of this book in the University’s Van Pelt-Dietrich Library. Many thanks to Professor Joseph Farrell for his scholarly feedback and to the staff—especially the student staff—of this philoxenous library. I wish to thank the editor-in-chief, Professor Gregory Nagy, the executive editor, Professor Casey Dué, and the entire production team of CHS publications, particularly the production manager Ms. Jill Curry Robbins and Mr. Noel Spencer, for their patience and professionalism. Finally, I wish to thank Ms. Lydia Hadjidakis for her long-suffering technical assistance in preparation of the original version of this text and Fathers Vlasie and Chrysotomos of the St. Gregory Palamas Monastery (Etna, CA) for further technical aid.

This book is dedicated to my sister, Vicki, ἰφθίμῃ κασιγνήτῃ τῇ ὁμοῦ ἐτρεφόμην. I hope that she and her family will derive many hours of pleasure from the Odyssey. As Eumaios tells Odysseus, ‘ἔστι δὲ τερπομένοισιν ἀκούειν’ (“There is ample time to enjoy hearing a story”).

The critical texts of the Iliad are those of D. B. Monro and T. W. Allen, eds., Homeri opera I–II, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1902, 1920); the texts of the Odyssey are those of T. W. Allen, Homeri opera III–IV, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1908, 1917–1919); the text of the Homeric Hymns is that of T. W. Allen, Homeri opera V (Oxford, 1912). (All the Greek in the main text has been translated; the rather literal and workmanlike renderings have been provided by me.) {xiv|}