What the Odyssey Gets Right About Mentoring

By Jean Rhodes

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens this week in theaters, and audiences will watch Zendaya play Athena, the shape-shifting goddess who guides young Telemachus while his father, Odysseus, is lost at sea. Athena appears to Telemachus, played by Tom Holland, in the form of Mentor. She accompanies him, encourages him, and helps him find his way through a crisis that he is not yet prepared to face alone. This part of the movie offers a useful reminder about where mentoring came from and why a young person may accept guidance from one adult more readily than from another.

THE MYTH WE BUILT A FIELD ON

But let’s start by exploring why our field is built around Mentor. Books and articles about mentoring often begin with a brief nod to Homer’s epic poem to explain its etymology. In the poem, the legendary Greek king Odysseus asks his old friend Mentor to watch over his household and son Telemachus before leaving to fight in the Trojan War. The field of mentoring is a living tribute to Mentor, the personification of the protective, guiding, and supportive figures that we all deserve. This ancient myth neatly encapsulates our vision of the ideal intergenerational relationship and has helped to unify the thousands of programs as well as the eponymous organization MENTOR around common mentoring goals.

A closer reading of the poem, however, suggests that this field might have just as logically been named shepherd, seagull, ship captain’s daughter, or swallow, all of which were forms that the Greek goddess Athena inhabited to dispense her wisdom. Mentor was by no means a major figure in this epic poem and provided very little in the way of support, protection, advice, or counsel to young Telemachus. Mentor actually allowed Odysseus’s household to sink into ruin and be overrun with unwanted suitors who bullied Telemachus and harassed his mother, Penelope. This is a far cry from the image of a wise and nurturing advisor.

FÉNELON’S FAN FICTION

We owe our archetypal notions of Mentor not to Homer’s Odyssey, but to one of the most popular and subversive books of the seventeenth century, Les aventures de Télémaque, a French novel by Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai and tutor to the Duke of Burgundy, who was the grandson of Louis XIV. In recounting the original poem to his royal pupil, Fénelon took a fan-fiction writer’s creative liberty, spinning it into a new tale of the educational travels of Telemachus and his tutor, Mentor. The reframed novel became a scathing rebuke of the autocratic reign of the king, the excesses of wealth, and royal preferences for luxury at the expense of everyday laborers. This reframing may help to account for both the enormous appeal it had and Fénelon’s banishment from the court of Versailles.

As historian Andy Roberts and other scholars have argued, it was this book that precipitated the popular use of the term “mentor” to describe a caring, older adult. Indeed, although there had been no mention of the term “mentor” in the previous centuries, it came into common usage in the decades following the publication of this book. As Roberts notes:

It is Fénelon’s Mentor, not Homer’s, that should be referred to when considering the popular environmental connotations that the word mentor now implies. Any reading of The Odyssey will not find such rich references to the character Mentor that counsels, guides, nurtures, advises and enables.

It is perhaps fitting that our collective understanding of Mentor was built on a foundation of mythology and inaccuracy. It is also quite remarkable that so many of us tacitly accepted this mythical origin story when evidence to the contrary requires little more than a cursory read of the ancient poem. Yet, although the field took its name from a stand-in, the poem gives us a more complicated picture of how guidance works. The usefulness of advice depends partly on the relationship in which it is offered.

WHAT THE RESEARCH TELLS US

A recent longitudinal study supports this point. Westley Fallavollita and Michael Lyons followed 1,368 young people over two years and examined the connections among mentoring relationships, relationships with parents, and relationships with peers. They found no significant cross-lagged associations between the strength of the mentoring relationship and the quality of young people’s relationships with parents or peers. Changes in parent and peer relationships also did not reliably predict later changes in the mentoring relationship (Fallavollita & Lyons, 2026).

The results show that, in this sample and over this period, the strength of one relationship did not reliably predict later changes in the others. The mentoring relationships grew, and that growth became stronger during the second year of the match. So, one conclusion is that a relationship can matter without serving as a bridge to every other relationship in a young person’s life. Young people may remain close to their parents while also wanting to establish a separate point of view. Research on adolescent family relationships has shown how autonomy and relatedness develop together rather than as opposing forces (Allen & Hauser, 1996).

Parents also occupy a particularly complicated position. They know the young person’s history. They carry responsibility for safety and well-being. They have lived through earlier arguments, disappointments, and attempts to set limits. Advice from a parent may be caring and well informed, but it arrives within that larger history. A nonparent can offer perspective or suggest a next step without carrying this weight.

WHAT ATHENA UNDERSTOOD

Athena is close enough to guide Telemachus, but well separated from the history and authority of the parent-child relationship. She can accompany him while he takes on responsibilities that his parents cannot take on for him. Her changing forms also suggest that support must fit the situation. At different moments, Telemachus needs a companion, a source of information, a model of courage, or someone who can help him see a larger path forward. In assuming so many different mentoring personas, Athena seemed to intuit that a single tree cannot possibly shade a child’s entire path to adulthood.

Many of us have had multiple and even concurrent mentors, from professional providers and formal mentors to people in our families and everyday lives. There is also the issue of Mentor’s fallibility. Mentor himself may not have lived up to his mythology, but his mortal imperfections suggest a more realistic understanding of the limits and complexities of the role. Exaggerated expectations for what mentors and programs can and should deliver have intimidated and dissuaded potential volunteers while minimizing the contributions of the many everyday caring adults and program staff members who, collectively, play a role in supporting youth development.

Mentors do not need to replace parents, repair every family relationship, or become the one adult a young person depends on. They can offer a trustworthy relationship with its own history, pace, and purpose. That relationship may help a young person solve a problem, imagine a future, or take a step that would have been difficult to take alone. For programs, the practical implication is straightforward: invest in the quality and endurance of the match itself, and treat a strong, lasting relationship as an outcome worth measuring in its own right, rather than expecting it to transform a young person’s other relationships.

REFERENCES

Allen, J., & Hauser, S. (1996). Autonomy and relatedness in adolescent-family interactions as predictors of young adults’ states of mind regarding attachment. Development and Psychopathology, 8, 793–809. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579400007434

Fallavollita, W. L., & Lyons, M. D. (2026). Two years and counting: The dynamics of long-term youth mentoring and association with parent and peer relationships. American Journal of Community Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.70073

Fénelon, F. de S. de la M. (1699). Les aventures de Télémaque. Paris.

Homer. The Odyssey.

Rhodes, J. E. (2020). Older and Wiser: New Ideas for Youth Mentoring in the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Roberts, A. (1999). Homer’s Mentor: Duties fulfilled or misconstrued. History of Education Journal, November 1999. Also published as “The origins of the term mentor,” History of Education Society Bulletin, No. 64, pp. 313–329.

Sterrett, E. M., Jones, D. J., McKee, L. G., & Kincaid, C. (2011). Supportive non-parental adults and adolescent psychosocial functioning: Using social support as a theoretical framework. American Journal of Community Psychology, 48, 284–295. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-011-9429-y

van Dam, L., Smit, D., Wildschut, B., Branje, S. J. T., Rhodes, J. E., Assink, M., & Stams, G. J. J. M. (2018). Does natural mentoring matter? A multilevel meta-analysis on the association between natural mentoring and youth outcomes. American Journal of Community Psychology, 62, 203–220. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12248