Who Exactly was Mentor?: A Stunning Revelation
by Jean Rhodes
Books and articles about mentoring often begin with a brief nod to Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey to explain its etymology. In the poem, the legendary Greek king Odysseus asks his old friend Mentor to watch over his house hold and son Telemachus before leaving to fight in the Trojan War. When the goddess Athena visits Telemachus, she appears in the form Mentor so that she can provide help and guidance.
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. Granted, Athena’s first appearance was that of “a Taphian chieftain named Mentes,” but Mentor was still 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 house hold 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.
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 Telemaque, a French novel by Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai and tutor to the Duke of Burgundy, who was the grand son 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. In doing so, 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 the 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 de cades following the publication of this
book. As Roberts notes: It is thanks to Fénelon, and the “age of enlightenment” that the
modern-day allusions of the word mentor were brought into the language at all. It is thanks to Fénelon that the term mentor was resurrected from circa 1000 b.c. and brought into the language circa 1750 a.d., thus filling a gap of some three millennia. . . . 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.
Fénelon’s twist notwithstanding, The Odyssey does impart some valuable lessons about mentoring. First, there is 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.
Additional wisdom appears in both the poem and in Fénelon’s interpretation. In assuming so many differ ent mentoring personas, Athena seemed to intuit that a single tree cannot possibly shade a child’s path to adulthood. Many of us have had multiple and even concurrent mentors, from professional providers and formal mentors to people in our families, schools, and everyday lives.
And finally, with proposed tax breaks to the top 1% alongside deep cuts to social saftey net programs, Fénelon’s critiques of wealth concentration and his calls for economic justice remain as relevant today as they did under Louis XIV.
