Fighting From Afar
At some point in the night I awoke from a dream with a single word in my mind. Each and every time waking after this, when I’d normally try to remember any dreams to add later to my notes for therapy, instead I told myself to remember this name: Telemachus.
I’m not a woo-woo guy. I don’t believe in divination, by dream or otherwise. I’m quite sure that at some point in my life I unconsciously registered the name Telemachus and for some entirely random reason my brain decided to surface it now, in my sleep.
So, I’ve had to google Telemachus. Like any good blogger, I’m writing about it as I do so.
Naturally enough, we start with Wikipedia:
Telemachus, in Greek mythology, is the son of Odysseus and Penelope, who is a central character in Homer’s Odyssey. When Telemachus reached manhood, he visited Pylos and Sparta in search of his wandering father. On his return to Ithaca, he found that Odysseus had reached home before him. Then father and son slew the suitors who had gathered around Penelope. According to later tradition, Telemachus married Circe after Odysseus’s death.
Further, under its etymology:
Telemachus’s name in Greek means “far from battle”, or perhaps “fighting from afar”, as a bowman does.
Still on Wikipedia, it turns out there also was a Saint Telemachus, “a monk who, according to the Church historian Theodoret, tried to stop a gladiatorial fight in a Roman amphitheatre, and was stoned to death by the crowd”.
Later retellings of the story have differed from Theodoret’s in a number of details. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs claims that Telemachus was first stabbed to death by a gladiator, but that the sight of his death “turned the hearts of the people”.
There is also an alternative form of the story, in which Telemachus stood up in the amphitheatre and told the assembly to stop worshipping idols and offering sacrifices to the gods. Upon hearing this statement, the prefect of the city is said by this source to have ordered the gladiators to kill Telemachus, and they promptly did so.
Yikes, although I do appreciate this as a sort of fable about what happens to people who urge us not to turn on each other for the benefit and spectacle of those with power rather than turning to each other in order to build capacity and solidarity.
On the fandom wiki for something called Mission Odyssey, Telemachus is described as “a fun-loving, playful and imaginative kid” who “is also very adventurous and curious”.
Over in the Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary entry there’s a few examples of people using “Telemachus” in a sentence, including one a piece in The New Yorker: “think of Telemachus, of Oedipus, of Hamlet, poor guys driven to distraction, or long-distance travel, or murder by the spectre of Dad”.
Then there’s Mythology.net who simply introduces Telemachus by stating that “his life was filled with trials and tragedies from the time he was an infant”.
To be honest, I can’t remember if we read Homer’s Odyssey in school. Even if we did we almost surely did not discuss the etymology of the name Telemachus, but I admit that “far from battle” feels at least somewhat apt given my increasingly-shrinking world, if for “battle” we read “life”.
For that matter, “far from life” to some extent also describes living for decades unknowingly autistic, and certainly describes my middle ages and my later ages to come as I get further squeezed out of everything due to not being of any use.