Fénelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus, the Son of Ulysses is a prose epic, written in French by the Archbishop of Cambrai and translated here by John Hawkesworth. It follows the wanderings of Ulysses’ son after the Trojan War as he searches for his father, guided by the goddess Minerva disguised as his tutor Mentor. The narrative unfolds across the Mediterranean world of Greek myth—Sicily, Egypt, Tyre, Crete, Cyprus, and the shores of Italy—and was composed for the instruction of a young French prince, a fact that shapes everything in it.
“Alas ! my dear Telomachus, your own experience will confirm this truth but too well.”
The poem rests on a single large premise, stated most plainly in the critical remarks appended to the text: that all the world is one republic, God its common father, and every nation one family. Fénelon chose the primitive manners and antique forms of the heroic age precisely to avoid any resemblance to the reign of Louis XIV, though malice read allusions into it anyway. The result is an epic that is also a mirror for princes, in which adventure and instruction are never far apart.
From Sicily to the Shores of Italy
The Preceptor and the Archbishop
The book opens with the life of its author, François de Salignac de Lamotte-Fénelon, born in 1651 at the family castle in Périgord and educated at Cahors and in Paris under his uncle. A public examination at nineteen, preached before a distinguished audience, so alarmed the Marquis de Fénelon that he packed the young man off to the Seminary of St Sulpice lest early applause corrupt him. Ordained at twenty-four, he spent a decade as superior of the Nouvelles Catholiques, wrote his treatise on the education of girls for the Duchess of Beauvilliers, and in 1683 was sent by Louis XIV on a mission to Poitou, where he refused the help of dragoons and converted without persecuting. Madame de Maintenon’s favour made him preceptor to the dauphin, a post he held five years without asking or receiving anything; the king gave him the Abbey of St Valery and in 1694 the archbishopric of Cambrai, consecrated by Bossuet in 1695.
His sympathy with Madame Guyon’s doctrines of pure love brought him into collision with Bossuet, who had her arrested and demanded Fénelon condemn her. He refused, published the Maximes des Saints, and was denounced to the king. When his palace at Cambrai burned, he remarked that it was better the fire consumed his dwelling than a poor labourer’s cottage. Ordered to quit court, he submitted his book to the holy see; a commission of ten cardinals hesitated while both sides wrote furiously, and only fresh letters from Louis extorted a softened condemnation in 1699, which Fénelon hastened to sign. The Télémaque, composed years earlier, was published through a servant’s treachery; suppressed in France, it was reprinted in Holland and read across Europe, with malicious readers hunting allusions to Louis’s reign—absurd, the Life argues, since Fénelon chose primitive manners and antique forms precisely to avoid resemblance. He retired to Cambrai, taught his clergy and catechized children, fed the whole French army through the winter of 1709, and died on 7 January 1715, four months after the Duke of Beauvilliers. His saying is preserved: he loved his family better than himself, his country better than his family, and the human race better than his country. An extract from Ramsay’s discourse on epic poetry follows, holding that the Telemachus was written to instruct a young French prince fond of fables, uniting Homer’s enthusiasm with Virgil’s magnificence, its grand principle that all the world is one republic under God the common father.
The Altars at Anchises’s Tomb
Telemachus takes up his tale to Calypso. Acestes’s people, resolved to sacrifice the strangers, lead him and Mentor to the tomb of Anchises, where two altars stand prepared, fire kindled, a knife laid out, the victims garlanded, and compassion overborne by zeal. Mentor demands audience of the king and warns him: unless Acestes pities the young Telemachus, who never bore arms against Trojans, his own danger should awaken him. His skill in omens tells him that within three days barbarians will rush down from the mountains; Acestes should arm his people and bring valuables within the walls. If the prediction fails, the altars may be stained with their blood; if it is confirmed, Acestes should not kill those to whom he will owe deliverance. Acestes suspends the sacrifice and prepares for invasion. Women, the aged, and children crowd into the city with sheep and cattle; the principal citizens think Mentor an impostor prolonging his life, until before the third day ends dust and armed savages of the Nebrodian mountains appear, and the scoffers lose slaves and cattle. Acestes declares he forgets they are Greeks, calls them friends sent by the gods, and asks their aid. Mentor arms and leads the soldiers, routing the enemy; Telemachus kills the king’s son who commanded the invasion, is nearly crushed by his falling armour, strips the body, and returns. Acestes, fearing Æneas’s fleet might return, furnishes a vessel and presents but no rowers or pilot, sending Phoenician merchants instead—men the gods devote to other evils.
Captivity, the Desert, and the Tower
A Tyrian fleet takes the Phoenician ship; the prisoners are brought past Pharos and up the Nile to Memphis and Thebes. Mentor praises Egypt’s wise government and instructs Telemachus in kingship; the young man despairs, and Mentor revives his courage. Sesostris receives them and is moved by Telemachus’s youth, ordering inquiry whether they are Greeks or Phoenicians. The corrupt Metophis separates them and has them treated as Phoenicians; Telemachus is sent to the desert Oasis to tend flocks under the slave Butis. In despair he hears a voice from a cave promising that he must become great by patience, will return to Ithaca, and must love his people and detest flattery; he adores Minerva. He meets Termosiris, priest of Apollo, who gives him books, tells the story of Apollo’s exile as shepherd to Admetus, and urges him to civilize the shepherds; his music and teaching transform them, and he kills a lion with his sheep-hook. Sesostris hears of this, learns of Metophis’s deceit, imprisons him, befriends Telemachus, and prepares a fleet to return him to Ithaca and deliver Penelope from her suitors. Telemachus delays to seek Mentor; Sesostris dies, mourned universally. His unworthy son Bocchoris rules tyrannically, frees Metophis, and imprisons Telemachus in a tower near Pelusium. From it he watches a sea battle: Bocchoris, brave but undisciplined by adversity and corrupted by flattery, is struck by a Phoenician dart, falls from his chariot, and a Cyprian soldier cuts off his head.
Narbal, Pygmalion, and the Stranger from Egypt
Bocchoris’s successor releases the Tyrian prisoners and sends Telemachus to Tyre on Narbal’s vessel; Narbal describes Pygmalion and Tyre’s commerce. Pygmalion orders Telemachus seized, but Astarbe preserves him. The narrative resumes: by treaty the Phoenician prisoners are restored, and Telemachus is set free and put aboard. Narbal asks his name and country; he answers that he is Telemachus, son of Ulysses, king of Ithaca. A dispute follows in which Telemachus refuses to lie, arguing that falsehood is unworthy of one who speaks before the gods and is perpetually obliged to truth; the gods can deliver them, or they will die martyrs of truth, preferring virtue to life. He regrets only the danger to his dear Narbal. A breathless officer interrupts, sent by Astarbe—superhumanly beautiful and fascinating, sprightly yet insinuating, but cruel and malignant like the Syrens, concealing the worst purposes by dissimulation.
The Phoenician Ship and Adoam
The open sea brings rescue. A Phoenician vessel bound for Epirus lies at anchor, its crew having glimpsed Telemachus swimming during his earlier passage from Egypt without recognizing him. Mentor calls across the water, appealing to the sailors’ humanity and their reverence for the gods, and the commander answers that it is enough that they are men in distress. Hauled aboard, the two exhausted swimmers recover and change clothes. Questioned about how they entered the goddess’s island ringed with dangerous rocks, Mentor explains that a storm drove them ashore, that they are Greeks of Ithaca near Epirus, and asks to be landed at their own port. Telemachus keeps silent, made prudent by the faults he committed on Calypso’s island, and watches Mentor’s looks for guidance. The commander suspects he has seen the young man before; Telemachus likewise recalls seeing him in Egypt or Tyre. The Phoenician then names him as Telemachus, friend of Narbal, and reveals himself as Narbal’s brother Adoam, who once voyaged to Boeotica. Asked after Narbal and whether he suffered under Pygmalion’s suspicion, Adoam promises to land Telemachus at Ithaca before continuing to Epirus. The wind rises and he weighs anchor.
The Fall of Pygmalion and the Rise of Baleazar
Adoam recounts the tyrant’s end. Pygmalion trusted no one and sacrificed his own guards to suspicion, so that his search for security made safety impossible. Astarbe, enamored of Joazar, persuaded the king that his son Pliadael conspired against him, and the boy was put to death; the second son, Baleazar, was sent to Samos, but a corrupted crew wrecked the ship and threw him into the sea. Duped by Astarbe yet driven by avarice to kill Joazar for his riches, Pygmalion ate privately, dressing his own food and living on fruit, roots, and water drawn from a locked fountain, making Astarbe taste everything first. She fortified herself with a counterpoison from an old woman; at the repast the old woman made a noise at the door, and while Pygmalion ran to check it, Astarbe poisoned his golden cup. She drank first, he drank, and sank insensible; she lamented loudly, then smothered him, took the signet and diadem, and presented them to Joazar. Her partisans failed her, the palace fell into confusion, and the people rejoiced at the king’s death. Narbal pitied Pygmalion’s misfortunes while detesting his vices, and rallied the friends of the country against Astarbe. Baleazar, saved by swimming and taken up by Cretan merchants, had tended sheep in Syria, contacted Narbal, and received the ring when Pygmalion died; he arrived at Tyre and was acknowledged king for his amiable disposition. Narbal assembled the chiefs, elders, and priests, and Baleazar was proclaimed. Astarbe, deserted by sycophants—the wicked fear the wicked—was seized, rescued from the mob by Narbal, and allowed to speak; she flattered the new king and accused Narbal of conspiracy, but Baleazar called his guards and imprisoned her. Judges found she had poisoned and smothered Pygmalion; condemned to burn by slow fire, she swallowed concealed poison, refused relief, defied the gods, and died in agony. Baleazar began his reign differently: reviving commerce, taking Narbal’s advice without submitting to it blindly, hearing all opinions and deciding himself. He is the idol of his people, master of more wealth through affection than his father’s avarice hoarded, secured by public love rather than guards, with Narbal as his minister. Adoam wishes Narbal could see Telemachus and place the son of Ulysses on Ithaca’s throne.
The Banquet at Sea
Touched, Telemachus embraces Adoam and recounts his own wanderings: his departure from Tyre, the passage to Cyprus, finding Mentor, the voyage to Crete, the games held to elect a king after Idomeneus’s flight, Venus’s resentment, the shipwreck, Calypso’s welcome, her jealousy of Eucharis, and his being thrown into the sea by Mentor on sighting a Phoenician vessel. Adoam orders a magnificent entertainment: young Phoenicians in white, crowned with flowers and perfumed with gums, serve the guests while flutes and the lyre and voice of Achitoas fill the air; Tritons, Nereids, and sea deities crowd around the ship; the youths dance in the Phoenician manner, then Egyptian, then Greek; trumpets sound; night, a calm sea, and moonlight beautify the scene. Telemachus relishes the pleasures but distrusts them, mindful of Calypso, watching Mentor’s looks. Mentor, pleased, tells him not to fear pleasures that neither inflame the passions nor efface virtue.
The Oracle’s Last Words
Idomeneus, still stunned, cannot reply, while Telemachus tells Mentor that the promise of glory does not much move him; he wants only to know the meaning of the oracle’s broken last words, “Thou shalt again behold”—whether they mean his father or only his country, and why the sentence was left unfinished, increasing his uncertainty. He fears his wishes deceive him into hope and complains that one word more would have made him completely happy. Mentor answers that he should reverence what the gods have revealed and not pry into what they have hidden; presumptuous curiosity should be covered with confusion. The gods, in wisdom and mercy, have concealed the future in impenetrable darkness; it is proper to know the outcome of what depends wholly on ourselves, and equally fit to be ignorant of events beyond our influence. Telemachus feels the force of this reply but restrains himself only with difficulty.
Idomeneus’s Confession
Recovered, Idomeneus thanks Jupiter for sending Telemachus and Mentor to give him victory over his enemies. After a magnificent entertainment following the sacrifice, he addresses the strangers. Returning from Troy to Crete, he had not sufficiently learned the arts of government; his misfortunes excluded him from the sovereignty of that island, and he shall think them more than atoned if they teach him wisdom and repress his passions. He traversed the seas a fugitive, pursued by the vengeance of heaven and earth; his former elevation aggravated his fall. He sought an asylum for his household gods on this desert coast of thorns, brambles, ancient forests, and almost inaccessible rocks sheltering wild beasts, glad to take possession of the wilderness with a few soldiers and friends.
The Quarrel with Phalanthus
Left to himself, Telemachus finds his passions breaking out more violently than ever. He cannot stomach the arrogance of the Lacedaemonians and their commander Phalanthus, whose colony at Tarentum was founded by young men born during the siege of Troy—uneducated, of doubtful birth, raised amid their mothers’ license, and savage enough to resemble robbers rather than a Grecian settlement. Phalanthus interrupts Telemachus in council, mocks his advice as the prattle of a feeble, effeminate boy, points out his smallest failings to the allied chiefs, and stirs jealousies to make his haughty manner hateful to them. When Telemachus takes some Daunian prisoners, Phalanthus claims them as his own, insisting he broke the party and that Telemachus merely gave quarter to men already routed; Telemachus answers that he prevented Phalanthus’s defeat and turned the scale. The dispute goes before an assembly of all the princes of the alliance, where Telemachus, provoked past endurance, threatens Phalanthus, and only the interposition of the assembly prevents a fight.
The Fight with Hippias
Phalanthus’s brother Hippias, famed for strength and horsemanship and more brutal than truly brave, notes the menace to his brother and hurries the prisoners toward Tarentum before the assembly can decide. Told of it, Telemachus rushes after him like a wounded boar, challenges him, and hurls his spear with such fury that it flies wide. He draws the gold-guarded sword Laertes gave him at parting from Ithaca; Hippias grapples for it and the blade breaks. They lock together like savage beasts, and the advantage goes to Hippias, whose full maturity overpowers the youth’s tender age. Telemachus’s breath fails and his knees tremble; he is on the point of paying for his temerity when Minerva, watching from afar, sends Iris, who descends in a thin vapour and covers her charge with the goddess’s shield at the very moment Hippias believes victory certain. New vigour floods Telemachus as Hippias’s strength drains away before something invisible and divine; Telemachus throws him down with a crash like an oak of Ida yielding to a thousand strokes.
Remorse and the Treachery of Eurymachus
The aegis brings wisdom with its strength: at the instant of victory Telemachus feels the shame of attacking the brother of a prince he came to assist, remembers Mentor’s counsels, and is ashamed of having conquered. He spares Hippias’s life, praising his valour and bidding him yield, while Phalanthus, raging, dares not cast his spear for fear of piercing his brother too. The notes then turn to the treachery of Eurymachus and Adrastus’s surprise attack, and to Telemachus’s reflections on war and his care for the wounded.
Tartarus and the Punishment of Kings
In the underworld, Pluto permits Telemachus to seek his father—among wicked kings punished in Tartarus or good kings in Elysium—but he must pass through Tartarus first. He enters the gulf and sees men of mean birth punished for fraud and violence, and hypocrites punished more severely than parricides or traitors, because they wish to be vicious with the reputation of virtue. The ungrateful follow, those ungrateful to the gods most severely of all; Minos argues that ingratitude to God is worse than to parents or friends, and the less censured on earth, the more avenged in hell. One condemned man protests that he did only good; Minos answers that his virtue terminated wholly in himself, without reference to the gods who gave it—he was his own deity—and he is delivered up to himself, his own heart the avenger. Telemachus then sees kings who abused power, a fury holding a mirror of their vices and another repeating the praises of flatterers, the contrast punishing their vanity. They are delivered to the capricious tyranny of slaves; their crimes are their punishment, and they wish for a second death. Many are punished not for mischief done but good neglected, since every crime committed under unenforced laws is the king’s crime. Telemachus quits Tartarus relieved as if a mountain were lifted, terrified that kings are punished more severely than other offenders, and reflects on the folly of wishing for royalty. Advancing, he sees the pure light of Elysium, where good kings reside.
Pholoe, and the Slaughter of Adrastus
Pholoe, promised to whoever slew the winged serpent, lost Eleanthus to the war before their union; her tears flowed so abundantly that she was changed into a fountain, still bitter, with no herbage on its banks and only the cypress for shade. Adrastus hunted Telemachus with thirty picked Daunians sworn to kill him, and would have cut him off had Minerva not turned the band aside. Mistaking Nestor for Telemachus, Adrastus would have slain the old king had a troop of Pylians not surrounded him; the field became a chaos of arrows, groans, and blood, with Mars and Bellona driving pity and humanity away while Minerva turned from the scene in horror. Philoctetes limped to Nestor’s aid, and Adrastus laid low Etesilaus, Eutiphron, Pterelaus, and Aristogiton, who could take any form but was left motionless by one stroke of the lance.
The Death of Pisistratus
Nestor watched his son Pisistratus defending him, and saw the fatal moment come when he was to feel once more the misery of having lived too long. Pisistratus’s lance narrowly missed Adrastus, and before he could recover, a javelin opened his belly; his bowels followed the weapon in a torrent of blood, his colour faded like a flower broken from its root, and Alcaeus his governor caught him and placed him in his father’s arms before he expired. He opened his lips to give the last token of tenderness, and the spirit issued with his breath. Nestor, defended now by Philoctetes, pressed the body to his bosom, hating the light, his grief bursting into exclamation.
The Confession of Love
At Salentum, Telemachus confesses to Mentor his love for Antiope, daughter of Idomeneus, insisting it differs from his blind impulse for Eucharis: this is calm reason and esteem, a desire for a companion for life. He praises her modesty, her diligence in her father’s house, her contempt of finery, and vows to conceal his love and depart until Ulysses is restored. Mentor agrees, praising Antiope’s prudence and her soothing of her father, and warns that any proposal would have cost Telemachus her esteem, since she leaves herself wholly to her father’s disposal.
A Prince Under Correction
The book’s central relationship is not the search for Ulysses but the education of Telemachus, and its instrument is Mentor—Minerva in the likeness of an old man. Again and again Mentor checks the young hero at the point of his worst impulses. When Telemachus, provoked by the Lacedaemonian Hippias, fights with a fury that is “no longer Telemachus enriched by Minerva with wisdom, but an enraged lion,” he wins only because the goddess’s shield is lent him, and his first feeling afterward is shame: he is “ashamed of his victory and conscious he ought to have been vanquished.” The pattern repeats in the underworld, where he sees kings punished more severely than other offenders and recoils from his own ambition for royalty.
Around this pair Fénelon arranges a gallery of rulers. Sesostris of Egypt governs wisely and dies mourned; his son Bocchoris, corrupted by flattery, falls in battle and has his head cut off by a common soldier. Pygmalion of Tyre, ruled by avarice and by the beautiful, malignant Astarbe, is poisoned in his own palace; his son Baleazar reigns by public affection rather than guards. Idomeneus, who lost Crete through pride and flattery, is treated by Mentor with a compassion Telemachus cannot at first share—a god only, Mentor says, could fulfil the duties of dominion, and the prince is not less to be pitied than the people. The faithful Narbal, who will not lie even to save himself, and the flatterers who surround Protesilaus like worshippers at a shrine, mark the two poles of conduct the book measures its kings against.
The Judgment of the Dead
The descent into Tartarus is the book’s moral center. There Telemachus sees hypocrites punished more severely than parricides, because they wish to be vicious with the reputation of virtue; the ungrateful, above all the ungrateful to the gods; and a man whose virtue “terminated wholly in himself,” delivered over to his own heart as his avenger. Wicked kings are shown their vices in a fury’s mirror, then shown the flattery that was lavished on them in a second mirror, and the contrast is their punishment. Many are condemned not for mischief done but for good neglected, since every crime committed under unenforced laws is the king’s crime. The lesson is sharpened by the Elysium that follows, where good kings enjoy a light and peace Tartarus cannot imagine.
The Book That Taught a Dauphin
Fénelon wrote the Telemachus years before it reached print, and it was published through a servant’s infidelity; suppressed in France, it was reprinted in Holland and read throughout Europe, with readers hunting for allusions to Louis XIV’s reign. The Life prefixed to this edition insists the hunt was absurd—Fénelon chose antique forms to avoid exactly such resemblances—but the book’s afterlife as a political mirror was already fixed. Its admirers ranked it with Homer and Virgil: Ramsay’s discourse argues that poetry consists in sentiment, fiction, figures, and images rather than versification, and that Telemachus unites Homer’s enthusiasm with Virgil’s magnificence while offering a more perfect hero and a purer morality. Dr Blair is quoted on the epic grandeur of its plan and the sweetness of its pastoral scenes. For a book written to instruct one prince, that is a wide and lasting classroom.
