[Telemaque] Fenelon, François de Salginac de la Mothe.

Les Aventures de Telémaque, fils d’Ulysse. Avec un petit Dictionnaire Mythologique & Geographique : Nouvelle Edition. Revue exactement sur toutes les precedentes, corrigee avec soin, et Enrichie de Figures en taille-douce. [With 11 engravings and a larger fold-out-map: “Carte des Voyages de Telemaque”].

A Londres [London], Chez Nourse & Vaillant, 1756. Octavo (10.8 cm wide x 18 cm high). Pagination: Frontispiece, XXXII, 386 pages plus 22 unnumbered pages of a Dictionary for Mythology and Geography to the rear of the volume. With ten engravings plus one folded map throughout the Volume [resulting in 11 engravings including Frontispiece plus Map]. Hardcover / Original full leather with gilt lettering on spine-label. Edges of bookblock and binding slightly rubbed. Overall in very good and firm condition with only minor signs of wear. Few dogears. Front free endpaper partially torn, name of pre-owner, Reverend Richard Meade, verso the frontispiece. From the library of Richard Meade (Ballymartle), with his Exlibris / Bookplate loosely inserted.

“Les Aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse” (English: The Adventures of Telemachus, son of Ulysses) is a didactic novel by François Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambrai, who in 1689 became tutor to the seven-year-old Duc de Bourgogne (grandson of Louis XIV and second in line to the French throne). It was published anonymously in 1699 and reissued in 1717 by his family. The slender plot fills out a gap in Homer’s Odyssey, recounting the educational travels of Telemachus, son of Ulysses, accompanied by his tutor, Mentor, who is revealed early on in the story to be Minerva, goddess of wisdom, in disguise.
The tutor Mentor is arguably the true hero of the book, much of which is given over to his speeches and advice on how to rule. Over and over, Mentor denounces war, luxury, and selfishness and proclaims the brotherhood of man and the necessity of altruism (though that term would only be coined in the 19th century by Auguste Comte). He recommends a complete overhaul of government and the abolition of the mercantile system and taxes on the peasantry and suggests a system of parliamentary government and a Federation of Nations to settle disputes between nations peacefully. As against luxury and imperialism (represented by ancient Rome) Fénelon holds up the ideal of the simplicity and relative equality of ancient Greece, an ideal that would be taken up by in the Romantic era of the 19th century. The form of government he looks to is an aristocratic republic in the form of a constitutional monarchy in which the ruler-prince is advised by a council of patricians.

Although set in a far off place and ancient time, Télémaque was immediately recognized by contemporaries as a scathing rebuke to the autocratic reign of Louis XIV of France, whose wars and taxes on the peasantry had reduced the country to famine. Louis XIV, who had previously banished Fénelon from Versailles and confined him to his diocese because of a religious controversy, was so angered by the book that he maintained those restrictions on Fénelon’s movements even when the religious dispute was resolved.

Yet a few years later royal panegyrists were hailing the young king Louis XV as a new Telemachus and flattering his tutors as new “Mentors”. Later in the century, royal tutors gave the book to their charges, and King Louis XVI (1754–93) was strongly marked by it.

The French literary historian Jean-Claude Bonnet calls Télémaque “the true key to the museum of the eighteenth-century imagination”.[2] One of the most popular works of the century, it was an immediate best-seller both in France and abroad, going through many editions and translated into every European language and even Latin verse (first in Berlin in 1743, then in Paris by Étienne Viel [1737–87]). It inspired numerous imitations (such as the Abbé Jean Terrasson’s novel Life of Sethos (1731); it also supplied the plot for Mozart’s opera Idomeneo (1781).

With its message of world peace, simplicity and the brotherhood of man, Télémaque was a favorite of Montesquieu and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and through him of the French revolutionaries and of German Romantics such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who approvingly quotes Fénelon’s remark “I love my family more than myself; more than my family my fatherland; more than my fatherland humankind”. It was also a favorite of Thomas Jefferson, who re-read it frequently. It was also widely read in the Ottoman Empire and in Iran.

One critic explains the popularity of Télémaque this way:

Fénelon’s story stood as a powerful rebuke to the aristocratic court culture that dominated European societies, with its perceived artificiality, hypocrisy, and monumental selfishness. The book did not simply express these feelings; it helped shape and popularize them. From its wellspring of sentimentality, a river of tenderly shed tears would flow straight through the eighteenth century, fed by Richardson, Greuze, and Rousseau, among others, finally to pour out into the broad sea of Romanticism.

Influence on Rousseau

In Rousseau’s Émile (1762), a treatise on education, the eponymous pupil is specifically given only two novels (although as a young man, he also reads poetry and other literature): as a child he is given Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to inculcate him in resourcefulness and self-reliance; and when he becomes a young man, the political treatise Télémaque, which is put into his hands by his intended, Sophie, who has read it and fallen in love with the fictional hero.

The education of Émile is completed by a journey during which the institutions of various nations are to be studied. His tutor inculcates principles into him which sum up the essentials of the Social Contract. But it is with a Telemachus in hand that teacher and pupil establish a “scale of measurement” for judging various existing societies. Fénelon’s story presents models and counter models of monarchs. The princes and governments of the real world will be compared with them.

In Rousseau’s novel, Émile and his tutor travel to Salento (which formerly included much of what is now Calabria and Apulia, Italy) to seek the “good Idomeneo”, whom Fénelon’s novel had relocated from his former kingdom in Crete to the kingship of a new and reformed government.

Contrary to Louis XIV, whom he resembles in many traits of character, Idomeneus renounces conquest and is able to make peace with his neighbors. The prosperous fields and laborious capital are schools of virtue, where law rules over the monarch himself. Everything here is brought down to a “noble and frugal simplicity”, and, in the harmony of a strictly hierarchical society, everything combines in a common utility. (Wikipedia)

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Telemachus (Romanized: Telemakhos, lit. ‘far-fighter’) is the son of Odysseus and Penelope in Greek mythology, and 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 slayed the suitors who had gathered around to woo Penelope. According to later tradition, Telemachus married Circe after Odysseus’s death.

The first four books of the Odyssey focus on Telemachus’s journeys in search of news about his father, who has yet to return home from the Trojan War, and are traditionally given the title Telemachy.

Telemachus’s name in Greek means “far from battle”, or perhaps “fighting from afar”, as a bowman does.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Telemachus, under the instructions of Athena (who accompanies him during the quest), spends the first four books trying to gain knowledge of his father, Odysseus, who left for Troy when Telemachus was still an infant. At the outset of Telemachus’s journey, Odysseus had been absent from his home at Ithaca for twenty years due to the Trojan War and the intervention of Poseidon. During his absence, Odysseus’s house has been occupied by hordes of suitors seeking the hand of Penelope. Telemachus first visits Nestor and is well received by the old man who regales him with stories of his father’s glory. Telemachus then departs with Nestor’s son Peisistratus, who accompanies him to the halls of Menelaus and his wife Helen. While there, Telemachus is again treated as an honored guest as Menelaus and Helen tell complementary yet contradictory stories of his father’s exploits at Troy. Telemachus also learns from Menelaus that his father was last seen stranded on Ogygia.

Telemachus focuses on his father’s return to Ithaca in Book XV. He visits Eumaeus, the swineherd, who happens to be hosting a disguised Odysseus. After Odysseus reveals himself to Telemachus due to Athena’s advice, the two men plan the downfall of the suitors. Telemachus then returns to the palace to keep an eye on the suitors and to await his father as the beggar.

When Penelope challenges the suitors to string Odysseus’s bow and shoot an arrow through the handle-holes of twelve axe heads, Telemachus is the first to attempt the task. He would have completed the task, nearly stringing the bow on his fourth attempt; however, Odysseus subtly stops him before he can finish his attempt. Following the suitors’ failure at this task, Odysseus reveals himself and he and Telemachus bring swift and bloody death to the suitors.

The Telegony was a short two-book epic poem recounting the life and death of Odysseus after the events of the Odyssey. In this mythological postscript, Odysseus is accidentally killed by Telegonus, his unknown son by the goddess Circe. After Odysseus’s death, Telemachus returns to Aeaea with Telegonus and Penelope, and there marries Circe.

Seemingly later tradition included the character of Cassiphone—the daughter of Odysseus and Circe, and therefore half-sister of Telemachus—in the narrative. In this account, Telemachus still marries Circe, but Odysseus is resurrected by Circe at some point.

From the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology: In the post-Homeric traditions, we read that Palamedes, when endeavouring to persuade Odysseus to join the Greeks against Troy, and the latter feigned idiocy, placed the infant Telemachus before the plough with which Odysseus was ploughing.

In Contest of Homer and Hesiod, it is alleged that the Roman Emperor Hadrian asked the Delphic Oracle about Homer’s birthplace and parentage. The Oracle replied that Homer came from Ithaca and that Telemachus was his father by Epicasta, daughter of Nestor.
According to Aristotle and Dictys of Crete, Telemachus married Nausicaa, King Alcinous’s daughter, and fathered a son named Perseptolis or Ptoliporthus.
Eustathius says that the mother was Polycaste, the daughter of Nestor. Others relate that he became the father of Latinus by Circe. He is also said to have had a daughter called Roma, who married Aeneas.
Servius makes Telemachus the founder of the town of Clusium in Etruria. (Wikipedia)

• Keywords: 18th / 19th Century Country House Library of Richard Meade – Ballymartle · Altphilologie · Books with vintage Maps · Catalogue Greek History & Philosophy · Classical Literature · Classical Literature – Rare · Classical Philology · Classical Studies · Classical Studies – Rare · Classics · Education – Rare · Greek History · Greek Mythology · Greek Philosophy · Map of the Mediterranean · Meade Library Ballymartle · Odysseus · Odyssey · Philologie · Philology · Telemachus (Son of Odysseus and Penelope)
• Language: Français
• Inventory Number: 32426AB

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