20/03/2016 Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2007.04.40 http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2007/20070440.html 1/5 Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2007.04.40 Giuseppe Lentini, Il 'padre di Telemaco': Odisseo tra Iliade e Odissea. Biblioteca di 'Materiali e discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici', 18. Pisa: Giardini, 2006. Pp. 215. ISBN 884271450X. €92.00. Reviewed by Christian Werner, Universidade de São Paulo (crwerner@usp.br) Word countμ 1λ2θ words Table of Contents Il 'padre di Telemaco', by Giuseppe Lentini (hereafter L.), a "tesi de perfezionamento" submitted at the Scuola σormale Superiore di Pisa in 2004, is, strictly speaking, a book addressed to readers of Homer. The author does not bother translating the Greek text or contextualizing it to someone not well acquainted with the Iliad and the Odyssey. He goes straight to what concerns him most. σevertheless, most passages he selects to build his arguments are well known and often discussed (some cruces among them). L.'s main interpretative presuppositions (drawn mainly from neoanalysis) could be summarized this wayμ a) in so far as both poems belong to the same oral tradition of epic composition, they share narrative motives (or themes)ν b) these motives allow the poet (or are his privileged medium) to characterize his charactersν c) the tradition associates some of these motives particularly with a specific hero, and they are transmitted that wayν d) in case of τdysseus, some motives associated with him broadly compose a fundamental episode, his adventure in Ithaca, which, in turn, generates "riproposizione" (representations).1 So, behind the Iliadic τdysseus L. tries to identify the same main motives that had characterized this hero in the τdyssean tradition. L. supports his reading by way of two main passages, each one composing a leitmotiv of a part of the bookμ τdysseus' denomination of himself as "Telemachus' father" in Iliad 4ν and the conflict between τdysseus and Achilles in Iliad 1λ. In his first chapter, L. argues that the ȞεῖțοȢ is a motive fundamentally associated with τdysseus (another leitmotiv, but of the whole book), since it reappears many times during his return to Ithaca narrated in the Odyssey and determines also τdysseus' verbal performances in Iliad 2 and 4. In the following chapters, L. tries to show how the narrator of the Iliad, in the books just mentioned, depicts some of his characters by means of a double but interlaced oppositionμ fathers and sons, older and younger men. These oppositions help to explain the authority exerted by some heroes, especially τdysseus, and so it is not by mere chance that Agamemnon and Athena, in Iliad 4 and η respectively, narrate to Diomedes heroic feats of his father Tydeus. According to L., these feats present some motives that in both poems are connected with τdysseus, for example, the recruitment