François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon: Telemachus, Son of Ulysses. Books VII-XI. Patrick Riley translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

 

Telemachus and Mentor escape Calypso on a Phoenician vessel bound for Epirus and captained by Adoam, the brother of their friend, Narbal. Telemachus lets mentor do the talking, as “the faultiness of his conduct in the isle of Calypso had much increased his wisdom,” making him “more aware of his own weakness,” including his propensity to run his mouth (VII.98). Adoam, who recognizes Telemachus from the previous voyage to Egypt, reports that Astarbé poisoned the tyrant Pygmalion; upon being arrested, the queen poisoned herself. Pygmalion’s good son, Baleazar, inherited the throne of Phoenicia. A pious man, Baleazar regularly sacrifices to the gods, works to rebuild Phoenicia’s commercial life, “consults Narbal in all matters of importance” while not neglecting “to see everything with his own eyes” (VII.105). He retains “the best of all guards, namely the love of his people,” having left them in the enjoyment of their own property and hence neither “idle nor indolent” but “industrious” (VII.105). “Thus Phoenicia has arrived at the highest pinnacle of glory and grandeur” (VII.106).

Adoam puts on a shipboard feast, which Telemachus initially fears to enjoy. “Since the mortifying proof he had experienced in the isle of Calypso, how violent the passions of youth are, he was afraid even of the most innocent pleasures; all was now suspect to him” (VII.107). Mentor kindly remarks that “such fear may be carried too far,” and goes on to instruct him in the governance of pleasure. “The pleasures to be indulged are such as will relax the mind, yet leave you in possession of yourself; not such as will bewitch and enslave you”—pleasures that are “calm and serene, which do not take your reason from you” and do not denature you, pleasures that “do not turn a man into a savage brute” (VII.107). Unlike Fénelon’s contemporaneous Puritans, men animated by “true wisdom” avoid “all austerity and affectation,” as “all true pleasure” derives from true wisdom, which “blend[s] mirth and sport with serious and important business, amusement with application, and diversion with labor” (VII.107). As an illustration of his teaching, Mentor takes up the lyre and sings a song of the birth of Minerva from the head of Zeus, “by which is meant that is formed therein, and from which descends to illuminate docile men,” followed by the contrasting stories of self-loving, self-destroying Narcissus and of Venus’ incapacity to restore the life of her mortal lover, Adonis, torn to pieces by a wild boar (VII.108).

Telemachus does indeed now mix business with pleasure, asking Adoam to describe the country of Bétique, a little-known land of “wonders” which Adoam had visited (VII.108). The legends are true, Adoam relates: “In this country the golden age seems still to exist” (VII.109). The people of Bétique live simply, themselves wondering at why other nations corrupt themselves with “superfluities” which “enervate, intoxicate, and torment those who possess them,” leaving them no more “healthy and robust than we,” nor longer lived, no more united, enjoying no “greater liberty, tranquility, and contentment” (VII.110. “On the contrary, they must be jealous of one another; mean, spiteful, and envious; and continually harassed by avarice, fear, and ambition; incapable of true genuine pleasure, since they are enslaved by so man false necessities” (VII.110). Better look to “simple nature alone” for wisdom (VII.110). 

Nature teaches that fathers may punish their children and grandchildren for misbehavior but not before considering “the advice of the rest of the family”—a constitutional patriarchy, as it were (VII.110-111). Such punishments are rarely needed in Bétique, given its ethos of “innocence, sincerity, obedience to parents, and abhorrence of vice” (VII.111). The residents are monogamous; husbands and wives divide household management between tasks performed outdoors by the men, indoor tasks by the women. While a wife’s “whole ambition is to please” her husband, she thereby “gains his confidence, and engages his affection more by her virtue than by her beauty”—a model Rousseau follows when Emile’s governor advises Sophie. The people drink no wine, and this too may contribute to domestic peace.

The regime needs no judges, as the consciences of the people suffice. There is no property; “everything is common among them,” and “the people are so sober and easily satisfied” that the common store is enough (VII.111). With “no interests to pursue, they love one another with a brotherly affection that nothing can trouble,” “free and equal” except for the “ancient sages” who rule in light of their experience and “some young men” of “uncommon wisdom” (VII.111). They waste no blood on civil strife or foreign wars. Viewing conquerors elsewhere, they shrug, “What madness, to place one’s happiness in ruling strangers, a task so difficult and troublesome, if it is performed according to the dictates of reason and justice” (VII.111). “If a man is ambitious for glory,” they ask, “will he not find enough in ruling, with wisdom, those whom the gods have committed to his charge?” (VII.111). 

How do they defend themselves against military attack? Part of the answer lies in geopolitics. “Nature has separated them from other nations—on one side by the sea, on the other by high mountains towards the north” (VII.113). But more tellingly (again with an eye toward the Europe of Fénelon’s time, but not only then and there), the people of Bétique are respected for their virtues; their neighbors often choose them as arbitrators and as rulers of territories and cities under dispute. “As this wise nation never does any violence, no one is distrustful of them,” and indeed they “are entirely free of pride, vanity, deceit, and all desire of extending their territories” (VII.113). Ready “to submit to the loss of their lives or their country, rather than be made slaves, they are equally incapable of enslaving others, and of being enslaved themselves” (VII.114). They eschew navigation, politely rejecting Phoenicians’ offer to teach it, as “they think it a pernicious art,” one that opens a nation to desires for “more than is sufficient to satisfy their real needs” (VII.114). In sum, “by following nature and right reason,” they are “at the same time wise and happy” (VII.114). In seventeenth-century Europe, one might suspect, they resemble the Swiss.

Telemachus may think he knows all he needs to know to return to Ithaca and eventually to rule it. The gods think differently and have other plans. Venus and Neptune remain angry with him, and Venus asks her father, Jupiter, to take her side against sister Minerva. Jupiter refuses but promises to make Telemachus continue to wander for a while, since “the destinies do not admit of his perishing, or being overcome by those pleasures, with which you allure mankind” (VIII.116). Neptune agrees to deflect Adoam’s ship away from Ithaca. Mentor-Minerva breaks the news to Telemachus, telling him that “Jupiter aims not at your destruction, but only tests you; and he tests you only in order to lead you to glory,” even as he tested Hercules and your father. Therefore, “You must, by resolution and patience, tire out the cruel fortune that persecutes you” (VIII.120). They land at Salente, the city (it will be remembered) that the exiled Phoenician king Idomeneus and his friends had founded on the coast of Hesperia.

Idomeneus welcomes the son of Ulysses and recalls meeting Mentor at Troy. Mentor immediately establishes a tone of frankness, not flattery, by remarking that the king has aged considerably since then, then sympathetically adds that “kings wear faster than other men” because their peacetime pleasures and wartime stresses “hasten the approach of old age before the natural date of its arrival”—not incidentally, a word of caution to Telemachus (VIII.123). The king takes no offense, instead conducting his guests to the temple of Jupiter, where an elderly priest prophesies that these men will enable the Sarentines to win a war they have recently undertaken.

The remainder of his prophecy is obscure, suggesting but not confirming that Telemachus will see his father again. Mentor is no less frank, and no less comforting, to him. “A rash curiosity deserves to be confounded. It is an effect of the wisdom and goodness of the gods, that the destinies of weak mortals are wrapped up in impenetrable darkness. It is an advantage to foresee whatever is controllable by our will; but it is no less for our good and quiet to be ignorant of what is independent of our will, and of the fate for which we are reserved by the decrees of heaven (VIII.126). This calms Telemachus and induces Idomeneus to reflect upon his own fate. He admits “that I was not sufficiently acquainted with the art of government when I returned from the siege of Troy to Crete,” but “I may still be happy, if these heavy calamities serve as lessons to me, and teach me moderation” (VIII.126). He requests the aid of Telemachus and Mentor in the conduct of the war, promising to send them to Ithaca when it’s over. Telemachus agrees.

Mentor cautions him. Recall that your father’s practical wisdom and moderation, his “cool, deliberate valor,” not Achilles’ “headlong, blind ferocity” won the Trojan War; “Minerva surpasses Mars,” Minerva in the guise of Mentor assures him (IX.129). Mentor therefore requests that Idomeneus “first to explain to us whether the war is just; then tell us with whom it is to be carried on; and lastly, on what forces and resources your prospect of success is based” (IX.130). The king readily answers. The war is against the Mandurians, “a savage race” who roam the forests, hunting and gathering (IX.130). The Mandurians met a small hunting party of Cretans, who had inadvertently encroached upon their territory, with humaneness but then attacked the larger Cretan force that soon followed. After the initial fighting, the Mandurians offered peace, saying that they preferred it to war so long as the Cretans restricted their occupation to the coastal areas and let the Mandurians alone in the mountains. “We abhor that brutality which, under the gaudy names of ambition and glory, madly ravages whole provinces, and sheds the blood of men who are all brothers” (IX.131). That is, savages are not necessarily ‘savage’; rather, they are uncivilized, and happily so. In words that will become characteristic of Rousseau, Fénelon has the Mandurian elders say as much: “If the sciences to which the Greeks apply themselves so closely, and the politeness on which they value themselves so highly, inspire them with such a detestable injustice, we cannot but think ourselves happy in not having such advantages. We will always glory in being ignorant barbarians, but just, humane, faithful, and disinterested, satisfied with little, and despising that vanity and delicacy that cannot be gratified without wealth. We value health, frugality, liberty, and vigor of body and mind: the love of virtue, the fear of the gods, a natural goodness towards our neighbors, attachment to our friends, fidelity to all the world, moderation in prosperity, fortitude in adversity, courage always bold to speak the truth, and abhorrence of flattery.” (IX.131). The Cretans happily agreed to peace but the war renewed the next day because a Cretan hunting party, ignorant of the treaty, violated its terms. 

This time, the Mandurians have allies, including the Locrians, themselves civilized Greeks. Although Telemachus remains eager to fight, Mentor asks how this could be. He tells the king that the gods “have not yet finished your instruction” because you have yet to learn “how to act in order to prevent a war” (IX.133). For example, “you might have exchanged hostages” with the Mandurians, sent some of your officers with them to escort the elderly envoys safely back to their people; you might have apologized for the violation of the treaty and explained that it was done out of ignorance, not malice. Idomeneus explains that “I thought it would be stooping too low, to endeavor to pacify these barbarians,” but Mentor bluntly tells him that such “pride and haughtiness give rise to the most dangerous wars” (IX.131). It was “these barbarians” who “gave you a valuable lesson,” in proposing peace: “Why did you not imitate their moderation?” (IX.134). You have stirred the fear and animosity not only of the Mandurians but of many of your neighbors, when you could have earned their confidence with a policy of “justice, moderation, [and] good faith” (IX.134).

What will you do now? Idomeneus sees that the neighboring Greek colonies, along with the other Hesperian states, fear “that we have a design upon their liberty,” that if the Salentines defeat the Mandurians we will be “ambitious of extending our conquests still further” (IX.135). Indeed so, Mentor replies. “By wanting to appear too powerful, you have ruined your power; for, while abroad, you are the object of the hatred and jealousy of your neighbors, you exhaust yourself at home in the efforts and preparations necessary to maintain a war against them” (IX.135), a lesson Mentorian Fénelon obviously intends for Bourbons old and young. Idomeneus gratefully accepts Mentor’s offer to serve as his negotiator with Nestor of Pylus, one of the Mandurians’ Greek allies. Mentor’s appeal to Nestor turns out to be a critique of war itself, and he takes as his example the carnage at Troy, which after all began as a fight over an adulterous abducted wife. Following his own advice to king, he gives Telemachus to Nestor as a hostage, “the most valuable pledge we can offer for the good faith of Idomeneus” (IX.141). Although the Mandurians remain suspicious and angry, Mentor succeeds in persuading the Greek allies by adding himself and twelve additional Salentine hostages and by offering to remove the king’s troops from his strategic forts, replacing those troops with neutrals. “It is no less your interest to prevent the native inhabitants of Hesperia from destroying Salente, a new Greek colony, like that which you yourselves have planted, than to restrain Idomeneus from usurping the territories of his neighbors. Hold the balance even between him and them.” (IX.143). If you reject this prudent and just arrangement, “Idomeneus will have the gods, whom before he had reason to fear were offended at him, on his side” (IX.144). 

Mentor concludes with a peroration on universal justice. Someday, “your several nations…will be but one, under different names and governors”; “the just gods, who formed and love the human race, would have them united in an everlasting bond of perfect amity and concord,” given the fact that “all mankind are but one family dispersed over the face of the whole earth” (IX.147). “War, it is true, is sometimes necessary,” but this fact only “reflects disgrace on human nature”; it usually occurs because kings seek glory, yet “true glory cannot exist independent of humanity”; it can be “acquired only by moderation and goodness” (IX.147). He reprises his beatus illi theme, this time as it can be applied to politics foreign and domestic: “Happy the king, who loves his people, and is beloved by them; who trusts his neighbors, and is trusted by them; who, far from making war upon them, prevents their going to war with one another, and who makes the happiness his subjects enjoy under his government, to be envied by all other nations” (IX.148). To give these fine sentiments some institutional substance, he recommends an assembly of all the kings in the region, to be held every three years, to renew the treaty and to “deliberate on their common interests” (IX.148). 

Nestor accepts the offer. But he then warns not against Idomeneus but Adrastus, the king of the Daunians, a man who “despises the gods, and thinks the whole race of mankind were born for no other purpose but to be his slaves, and to promote his glory” (IX.148). Adrastus would replace the gods with himself, as “it is not enough for him to have subjects, and to be the king and the father of his people; he will have slaves and worshipers, and actually causes divine honors to be paid him” (IX.148). The reason for the allies’ haste in laying siege to Salente was to get rid of it, the weaker enemy, first, then “afterwards turn our arms against the other and more formidable” (IX.148). If we treat with you, we want not only peace but your support against the tyrant. Mentor returns to Idomeneus for his concurrence.

Once again, he spurns flattery, prefers just rebuke. “While these kings were extolling your magnificence” at the peace conference, “I reflected within myself on the temerity of your conduct” (X.151). Idomeneus resents that, but restrains himself, allowing Mentor to continue. “Kings ought to be respected, and treated with delicacy, even when reproved. Truth is apt enough of itself to offend them, without the addition of harsh terms; but I thought I might venture to speak with the utmost plainness” because I intend “to accustom you to hear things called by their proper names” (X.151). The words addressed to kings by their advisers are crucial to the welfare of their regimes and their peoples. “Hard language” has no place in public discourse, but “it is useful that a man without interest and without importance should to speak to you in private” in exactly such terms (X.151). The king takes the point. Admitting that he has been accustomed to flattery, to being addressed in improper terms, he acknowledges that he owes to Mentor the security of his newly-founded city and accepts him as an honest counselor. Most immediately, this is Fênelon’s appeal to the Sun King, but as always it has universal application.

Thus encouraged, Mentor minces no words. “You deserve nothing but blame for that very conduct which was so highly extolled,” namely your construction of “magnificent edifices” at Salente (including the temple of Jupiter?) when you “had so many enemies [outside] your walls”; you exhausted your revenues, did nothing to encourage the industriousness of your people or the cultivation of the fertile lands you control—the “only solid foundations of your power” (X.152). “By aiming at appearing great and powerful, you have almost destroyed your real power and greatness,” as measured by “the number, submission and attachments of the inhabitants” of your realm (X.152-153). 

Idomeneus admits these charges but points to the danger of admitting them. “Shall I confess my weakness” to the other kings in Hesperia, exposing himself to “shame and dishonor”? (X153). Mentor agrees that “the interest of state requires that care be taken of your honor”; the way to save face is for Mentor to tell them that the King of the Salentines has promised to restore Ulysses, “if he is yet alive, or at least his son, on the throne of Ithaca” against the forces of Penelope’s suitors (X.153). Being preoccupied with this task, he can only send a token supply of troops against the Daunians, although Telemachus will be among them. This satisfies his alliance partners and leaves him free to reform his regime according to the advice of Mentor. It also lets Telemachus seemingly test his own “wisdom and virtue,” no longer relying on Mentor, although in fact Minerva covers the young man with her aegis and “inspir[es] him at the same time with the spirit of wisdom and foresight, intrepid valor, and calm moderation: virtues that are seldom found united” (X.155).

Mentor takes the opportunity to correct Telemachus’ too-sharp criticisms of the king, which the young man offered in “a presumptuous vein of censure” typical of “inexperienced youths” (X.159): “What philosopher,” Mentor asks, “had he been in his place, would not have been the worse for flattery” and deception? (X.157). “Alas! my dear Telemachus, you will one day be too well convinced of this” (X.157). “A private station, accompanied with a little intelligence to speak well, hides every natural defect, sets off shining talents, and makes a man appear capable and worthy of the highest employments from which he is so far removed. But it is authority which put talents to a severe trial, and brings great defects to view.” (X.158). “Grandeur is like certain glasses that magnify every object” (X.158). “Those who judge [a king] are unacquainted with his situation. They know nothing of his difficulties, they will not allow him to have any human weaknesses and failings, but expect he should be altogether perfect.” (X.158). Simply in admitting his faults without rancor Idomeneus has displayed magnanimity, “a true greatness of soul” (X.159). Indeed, “to reform mankind would require gods!” the goddess in the form of a man exclaims. She will now undertake exactly that task, in Salente. 

With Telemachus safely packed off to the war, Mentor advises Idomeneus on re-founding his regime. The first task is to gather the relevant information through a census, an economic survey, and an assessment of the military. Preparatory to the economic survey, the king will promulgate a law requiring merchants to give a thorough accounting of their property, profits, expenses, and investments, while preserving full “liberty of commerce” (X.161). He also establishes sumptuary laws, prohibiting foreign merchandise “that might introduce luxury and effeminacy” and establishing regulations of dress and diet (X.162). For example, social ranks will be denoted primarily by the color of clothing, not by gold, silver, and jewels. Rank itself will be determined by ancestry because that is the distinction “least exposed to envy” (X.162). Above all, the king himself must set an example, as no one will dare “complain of a regulation to which the king himself submitted” (X.164). In all this, the laws of Minos, Idomeneus’ ancestor and therefore the source of his own rank, are restored.

Turning next to the arts, “Mentor suppressed that oft and effeminate music that tended to corrupt the manners of the youth” as well as “that bacchanalian music which intoxicates almost as much as wine, and is productive of impudence and violent passions” (X.164). Only music in temples on festival days, in honor of the gods and heroes, shall be permitted. Architecture shall be unornamented—no columns, pediments, or porticoes—but “beautiful and simple,” consisting of “airy hous[ing] convenient for a numerous family” whereby “order and neatness might be easily preserved and the whole maintained at a small expense” (X.164). As for the artists themselves, only such youths “as have a promising genius and are likely to excel” should be schooled in the high arts; others who “are designed by nature for arts less noble…may be usefully employed by the ordinary occupations of the republic” (X.165). 

A republic: the new regime will be a mixed-regime monarchy, not an absolute monarchy. To defend itself cities ruled by the latter regime, war preparations will proceed “in the midst of a profound peace” (X.166). To strengthen republicanism, city artisans will be transferred to the countryside, in order to strengthen agriculture and rural life generally, aiming at increasing the number of “moderate industrious men” instead of prideful and luxurious urban oligarchs and courtiers who “involve so many of their fellow creatures in all the horrors of poverty” (X.168). Families that “are industrious and multiply” should be rewarded with “more lands to cultivate in proportion to their increase,” a reform which will obviate the necessity, or temptation, to send children off to the cities for employment in servile jobs (X.168). “The profession of a husbandman will no longer be despised, being no longer attended with such misery and distress” (X.168). 

Idomeneus worries that if his people become prosperous under such conditions of “peace and plenty, luxury will corrupt their manners, and they will employ against me the wealth that I have given them” (X.169). This was what happened in Phoenicia, and it poses a threat to any monarchy, absolute or not. It stands as a frequent justification for absolutism or even tyranny, at least in the minds of monarchs. Mentor assures the king that such a condition “may be easily prevented” because the farmers’ lives will remain “laborious,” “notwithstanding their abundance,” as “they will have nothing more than necessities, because we have proscribed all the arts that furnish superfluities” and because big families are unlikely to be rich families (X.169). Further, never “allow any one family, of what rank soever, to possess more land than is absolutely necessary to maintain the number of persons of which it shall consist”; this will prevent aristocrats from “aggrandiz[ing] themselves at the expense of the poor” while requiring every family to engage in true household economy, cultivating land “with great care”—not only working hard but working smart, engaging minds as well as bodies (X.169). Consistent with the sumptuary laws, growing wine grapes shall be discouraged.

The laws of Minos also provided for public education by which “the youth may be taught to fear the gods, to love their country, to respect the laws, and to prefer honor to pleasure and even to life itself” (X.170). Magistrates shall be appointed “to watch over the families and the morals of the individuals that compose them,” and you, King Idomeneus, should “share this task yourself” as “shepherd of your people” (X.170). Punish violations of the laws “with the utmost severity,” for “to make examples is an act clemency,” stopping “the progress of iniquity”; “by a little blood shed seasonably a great deal is saved” (X.170). (Rousseau will endorse this in his lapidary sentence, “pity for the wicked is a great cruelty to men.”)

At the same time, ever-moderate Mentor insists, “What a detestable maxim it is for a sovereign to think he cannot be safe without oppressing his people!” (X.170). Driving your people “to despair by terror and dismay,” putting them “under the hard necessity either of shaking off the yoke of arbitrary power or bidding adieu for ever to liberty,” are hardly “the paths that lead to glory” (X.170). On the contrary, “the countries where the power of the sovereign is most absolute are those where the sovereigns are least powerful” because by treating “the whole state [as] their property” such monarchs remove incentive to work and to reproduce; he “gradually diminishes his own power by the continual diminution of his people, from whom his wealth and influence flow” (X.170). True, “his power is absolute, his subjects by consequence…all slaves. But wait till the smallest revolution happens, and you will find that this despotic power, being over-strained, is only of short duration, as not being supported by the affections of the people…. By the first blow that is struck the idol is overturned, broken to pieces, and trodden underfoot” as “contempt, hatred, fear, resentment, distrust, in short, all the passions unite against such odious despotism” (X.171).

Idomeneus implements every one of Mentor’s recommendations. Seeing their salutary results, he “acknowledged to Mentor that he had never known joy equal to that of being loved, and making such multitudes happy” (X.172). “My heart [had] been poisoned from my earliest infancy in regard to the authority of kings. This has been the occasion of all the misfortunes of my life.” (X.172). He goes on to tell how this happened—a cautionary tale, characteristically aimed at Louis XIV in particular and kings generally. 

Years earlier, in Crete, Idomeneus had a true friend and a false friend. Pious, great-souled yet moderate, and frank in remarking the king’s faults, Philocles found an enemy in his rival, Protesilaus. Idomeneus recalls that Philocles wanted Idomeneus to imitate “my ancestor Minos” (XI.173); Protesilaus wanted no such thing, persuading the king to send Philocles on a naval expedition, getting him away from the royal court. The king went along with this, as he confesses, out of weariness in finding himself “between two men who could never agree”; “I weakly chose to risk the interest of the public in some measure to breathe in freedom” (XI. 175).  In Philocles’ absence, Protesilaus had a corrupt servant, Timocrates (which means ‘rule of the honor lovers,’ ironically enough) claim that Philocles intended to turn the fleet against the king. A complex conspiracy culminated in Timocrates unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Philocles at the behest of the traduced king. “Philocles, shocked to find so much malice in mankind, took a part that was full of moderation,” telling his loyal troops that Timocrates was innocent, a mere instrument of his monarch; he then resigned his commission and self-exiled to the island of Samos, “where he lives quietly in poverty and solitude” (XI.179). 

Even after Idomeneus “found out by degrees the artifices of Protesilaus and Timocrates” (“and the sooner by their falling out,” as “it is difficult for bad men to continue long united”), he kept them on, in fear of Protesilaus and also because he found him so “easy, obliging, attentive to gratify my passions, and zealous for my interest”; he “had never known what true virtue was,” and rather supposed it nothing more than “a beautiful phantom,” existing nowhere (XI.180). Removing one corrupt minister would only saddle him with an equally ruinous replacement, he reasoned. And he was lazy, “too averse to business, and too indolent to be able to extricate myself from his hands” (XI.180). The other members of the king’s council dared speak no truth to the king’s power, or against the influence of his false friend. “You know, my dear mentor, the false ridiculous notions of glory and grandeur in which kings are brought up: they will never be in the wrong. To cover one blunder, they must commit a hundred” (XI.181). This was what led him to embark on the siege of Troy, leaving the government of Crete “in the hands of Protesilaus, who acted with haughtiness and inhumanity during my absence,” his tyranny unreported because the people “knew I was afraid of discovering the truth” (XI.181). The revolt of the Cretans upon his return “was not occasioned so much by the death of my son,” as readers had earlier been led to think, “as the wrath of the gods, who were offended at my weak conduct, and the hatred of the people, which Protesilaus had drawn upon me” (XI.182). 

Most remarkably, to this day, at Salente, Idomeneus has kept Protesilaus and Timocrates with him. He explains: “Being used for so many years to be guided by these two men, was like a chain of iron that fastened me to them; besides, I was watched and beset by them continually” (XI.182). They are the ones who urged him on in undertaking “all those expensive projects that you know of, and have quite drained this infant settlement,” and “they too were the occasion of the war,” from which you, Mentor, have extricated me, “inspir[ing] me with the courage I lacked” (XI.183). Since Mentor’s arrival, Protesilaus has attempted to dissuade the king of the reforms he undertook. Thinking of himself, now removed from the French court, and, quite possibly, Bishop Bossuet—who had been his friend but became his determined enemy at court and a fervent defender of absolute monarchy— Fénelon has Mentor say, “You now recognize, O Idomeneus, that bold perfidious men, if suffered to be about weak, indolent princes, will gain an ascendancy over them, and mislead them; but there is another misfortune to which those princes are subject, not less than the other, which you ought also to be aware of, and that is of easily forgetting the virtue and services of one that has been obliged to be absent any time” (XI.185). 

Mentor recommends the obvious remedy: the dismissal of the blackguards, the recall of Philocles. The king hesitates, fearing “the severity of Philocles,” only to be reminded that this was precisely what he needed (XI.185). Philocles, however, has no desire to return. Here on Samos, he tells the king’s messenger, “men no longer deceive me, for I seldom see them, or hear their flattering, deluding speeches; I do not need them,” preferring the company of “my well-chosen books,” which “teach me to make good use” of my “profound tranquility and delightful liberty” (XI.191). He only unbends after “having consulted the gods” and finding “it was their pleasure that he should go along with his friend” (XI.192). Upon returning he still eschews life at court, preferring to stay in an isolated part of Salente and to make himself available for consultation.

He and Mentor agree on the importance of public education. As Mentor puts it, children “belong not so much to their parent as to the public; they are the children of the state, its hope and strength; it is too late to attempt to reform them after they have been corrupted” (XI. 194). “Vigorous bodily exercises” to “prevent idleness and effeminacy, which are the bane of the most promising geniuses,” can be encouraged with “a great variety of games and shows”; their souls should be “taught to despise hardship and death, to place honor in undervaluing riches and pleasure to account lying, ingratitude, injustice, and effeminacy infamous vices; to sing the praises of heroes who have been loved by the gods, have performed great actions for the good of their country, and demonstrated their valor in battle,” while at the same time “elevat[ing] their minds and civiliz[ing] their hearts with “the charms of music” (XI.195). They will then “be kind to their friends, faithful to their allies, just to all men, even their most inveterate enemies, and to dread death and torture less than he reproaches of their own conscience” (XI.195). Finally, “for the sake of order and decorum” you should have youth “marry early, and their parent to leave them at full liberty to choose such as were agreeable to them, in respect of both body and mind, for wives; and not to impose them upon them from interested views” (XI.195).

Philocles, “who loved war,” disagreed on Mentor’s policies of peace, which will only leave Salente vulnerable to conquest, thanks to creeping “effeminacy, luxury, and corruption of manners” (XI.195). Mentor refutes this argument, first by recalling the evils of war (“worst of all is that the best laws would be weakened, and a corruption of manners ensue”), then by explaining “how the martial spirit of a nation may be kept up in time of peace,” not only by the bodily exercises they have already instituted in Salente, not only by the celebration of heroism in story and song in the schools, and not only the advantages “of a sober, laborious life,” but also with policy (XI.196). Salente already has formed an alliance with many kingdoms in Hesperia. When future wars occur, send “the flower of youth” to it, but especially those who “reveal a military genius, and are most likely to profit by the experience” (XI.196).  Not only will your alliance be welcomed, even “courted,” but “without having a war to carry on at your own expense, or in your own country, you will have a gallant and intrepid youth” (XI.196). Attacks on Salente itself will be rare, since “the surest way to prevent war and to secure a long peace is to have your people trained to arms; to distinguish those who are eminent in the profession; to have always some officers who have served abroad and are acquainted with the forces and discipline of the neighboring nations, and their manner of waging war; to be alike incapable of making war from ambition, and of dreading it from sloth and effeminacy”—ready to fight necessary wars while deterring almost all enemies (XI.197). “In this state, should a neighboring people attack you unjustly, it will find you trained to arms and prepared; and, what is still more, it will find that you are loved and will be supported; all you neighbors will take the alarm, fully persuaded that their common safety depends upon their supporting and defending you” (XI.197)

“And thus did Minerva, in the guise of Mentor, establish the government of Salente upon the best laws and the most useful maxims of government; not so much to make the dominions of Idomeneus flourish as to show Telemachus, when he returned, by a visible example, how much a wise administration contributed to render a nation happy, and to procure a good king a lasting glory” XI.197). The new regime imports the natural virtues of the men of Bétique into Greek civilization.

 

François de Selignac de la Mothe-Fénelon: Telemachus, Son of Ulysses. Patrick Riley translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

 

Ordained in the French Catholic Church in 1675, François de Selignac de la Mothe-Fénelon served as tutor to the seven-year-old Duke of Burgundy, grandson of Louis XIV. He fell from favor after the publication in 1697 of his Maxims of the Saints on the Inner Life, in which he argued that the highest practice of Christianity consists of a prolonged noetic apprehension of the Holy Spirit, leading to a life of contemplation not action with no expectation of divine reward or punishment. Given the clear Gospel command to spread the Gospel (“faith without works is dead”) and the equally clear promise of eternal reward, it would have been difficult for the Catholic Church not to condemn the work, which it did in 1699. The same year saw the unauthorized publication of Telemachus, which Professor Riley calls “the most read literary work in eighteenth-century France (after the Bible),” a success that infuriating the Sun King, who rightly considered it an unsparing critique of absolute monarchism generally and of his own rule in particular. More than a period piece, it became a favorite of the young Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who incorporated many of its themes in his Emile. As Riley remarks, Fénelon’s resolute rejection of what’s now called ‘eudaimonism’ in morality would find its most rigorous expression in the theory of Immanuel Kant.

Contemporaries of Fénelon would have regarded the Telemachus as a historical novel insofar as they took the Homeric heroes to have been real persons, even as they declined to worship the gods of the Greek pantheon. The story begins with goddess-nymph Calypso, who “remained inconsolable for the departure of Ulysses,” her lover of seven years, whom she had permitted to leave her island only after receiving a command from Jupiter to let him go (I.1). Her very immortality worsened her melancholy, which now seemed likely to endure forever. Her mood brightened when she saw Telemachus, shipwrecked on her island, accompanied by the elderly Mentor, his friend and adviser in his voyages in search of his father. Mentor is really Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, whom Calypso doesn’t recognize because “the superior gods conceal whatever they please from the inferior deities” (I.4). As superior gods are to lesser ones, gods generally are to mortals; Calypso herself conceals “the joy in her heart” at seeing the young man, “so much the image of his father” (I.4). “Come to my habitation, where I will receive you as my own son; come, you will be my consolation in this solitude, I will crown you with happiness, provided you know how to enjoy it” (I.5) Admiring “the splendor of her beauty,” Telemachus readily follows her, followed by “Mentor, with down-cast eyes” (I.5). Mentor’s foreboding will prove correct.

Decorated entirely with natural objects, Calypso’s grotto contains no artifacts other than clothing, articles of bodily adornment; she is a nature-deity, even as eudaimonism is a naturalistic form of ethics. Telemachus himself is given over to natural sentiments—first for Calypso, then for a white tunic and a purple robe embroidered with gold—royal colors—Calypso has laid out for him. He “surveyed this magnificence with those emotions of pleasure so natural to the mind of youth” (I.6). Mentor disapproves, appealing to logos and especially to thumos against material eros. “A young man who delights in gaudy ornaments like a weak woman, is unworthy of wisdom and of glory; glory is the portion of that heart alone which can endure affliction, and spurn pleasure with disdain” (V.6). Telemachus protests (“No, no; the son of Ulysses shall never be vanquished by the charms of a base effeminate life”) but Mentor doubts his conviction. “You have more reason to dread [Calypso’s] deceitful caresses than those rocks and shallows on which our vessel was wrecked; shipwreck and death are less fatal than those pleasures that attack virtue,” pleasures to which youth, “presumptuous and self-sufficient in all things,” weak while “believ[ing] itself all-powerful,” tends not to fear (I.7). He exacts a promise “never to take any resolution without first waiting for my advice,” i.e., without submitting to the rule of wisdom (I.7). But mere words will hardly restrain young Telemachus.

Calypso has her own words for him. She laments the “blind passion” of his father, who preferred to reject her promise of immortality and to return “to his miserable country” instead of staying on her island of pleasure (I.8). “Profit by such a melancholy example!” now that you have “nothing more to hope, neither to see him again, nor to reign his successor in the island of Ithaca”; “you here find a divinity ready to make you happy, with a kingdom in your reach” (I.8). She is lying: In the Odyssey, Mercury tells her that Ulysses will return to Ithaca and reunite with “his loved ones,” which must include not only with his wife, Penelope, but Telemachus; if Calypso does not release him, she will feel Zeus’s anger. But of course Telemachus knows nothing of this. Confident that she can deceive the not-so-wily youth, she worries instead about Mentor, in whom she glimpses “something divine” beneath is “appearance” (I.9). An Olympian might well know the real destiny of Ulysses.

The first six books of the Telemachus present this first temptation of the hero, the temptation of sexual eroticism. If considered alongside the Emile, these chapters correspond with Book V, which concerns Emile’s own erotic education, also managed by his ‘mentor,’ the “governor” or tutor. Both Emile and Sophie read the Telemachus and profit from it, although part of Rousseau’s intention is to educate not a future king but a young aristocrat, primarily in the way not to rule in any formal way. Nor does Rousseau avail himself of a deus ex machina; though wise, Emile’s mentor is fully human.

Knowing how much, and how long, men will talk about themselves if what they can say might impress a woman, Calypso has Telemachus tell the story of his adventures and hardships before the shipwreck. With these accounts, Fénelon begins a lesson within the lesson, a teaching on ‘comparative regimes’ parallel to Emile’s travels in the final part of Rousseau’s Book V.

With Mentor’s help, Telemachus escaped a Trojan flotilla only to be captured by Trojans on Sicily. King Alcestes ordered them to be sacrificed to the gods but Mentor stayed the execution by appealing not to the king’s “compassion” but to his “own interest,” warning him of an impending barbarian attack (I.12). When the attack occurred, Alcestes gratefully announced, “I forget that you are Greeks. Our enemies have now become our faithful friends: the gods have sent you to save us from destruction: I expect no less from your valor than the wisdom of your advice; make haste and fly to our assistance.” (I.13). This the battle-ready young man happily did, his “eyes sparked with” the “vivacity of courage as confounds the boldest warriors” (I.13). The combined forces routed the barbarians, a triumph of wisdom and martial valor over hostile savagery. Thus, the first political comparison Fénelon offers is the elementary one between civilization and barbarism, between political life (shared and prized by both Greeks and Trojans, despite their mutual animosity) and the life of the clan.

As a civilized man, the king rewarded Telemachus and Mentor with safe passage out of Sicily on a ship manned by Phoenicians, a people who, “as they carried on an open trade with all the world, had nothing to fear” from any of the rivals in the Trojan War (I.14). There is nonetheless a problem with a commercial regime, the regime that attempts to elide the differences among other regimes on the grounds that every regime needs stuff. Every regime needs a physical place, a geographic location. Phoenicia has a capital city, Tyre, built on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean in today’s Lebanon. The Tyrians were prideful, Telemachus relates; “the riches they had acquired by commerce, and the strength of the impregnable city of Tyre…had inflated the heart of those people” (II.15). King Sesostris of Egypt had imposed a tribute upon them, had provided troops for his rival brother, who had intended to assassinate him. Sesostris prudently made no attempt on Tyre itself but “resolved to interrupt their commerce in all the seas” (II.15). If a commercial regime becomes rich it may become arrogant; if arrogant, it may provoke the anger of one or more nearby regimes, which will undertake to humble it, to bring it to heel, by attacking the source of its wealth, its commercial shipping. 

Telemachus had hoped for safe passage to Ithaca. An Egyptian ship intercepted the Phoenician vessel and takes the Greek passengers in the opposite direction, to Egypt, where they could observe the regime of a wise and just monarch, the sort of king Louis XIV should be. In her guise as Mentor, the goddess of wisdom invoked the beatus illi theme: “Happy are the people governed by a sage monarch! They live happy in the midst of abundance, and love him from whom their happiness is derived.” (II.16). This is how you should rule, Telemachus, when you accede to the throne of Ithaca. “Love your subjects as your own children”—as indeed the Aristotelian king does—enjoy “the pleasure of being beloved by them”—not the bodily pleasures of the self-indulgent monarch, who is a tyrant—and “behave in such a manner that they shall never be sensible either of peace or happiness without remembering that it is their good king to whom they owe these rich presents” (II.16). Contra Machiavelli, who deems it better to be feared than loved, because fear is within the prince’s power to inspire, whereas love is reciprocal, offered freely, Mentor teaches that “kings whose sole endeavor is to excite the fear of their subjects, that in being depressed they may become more submissive, are the plagues of the human race” (II.16). Human beings, however oppressed, retain their freedom of will; fear-inspiring monarchs “are hated, detested, and have still more cause to dread their subjects, than their subjects have to be afraid of them” (II.16).

Telemachus, however, is in no more mood to listen to such wise maxims of statecraft than the Machiavellian state-builder Louis XIV proved to be. He despairs of returning to Ithaca. “Let us die, Mentor, we have nothing else to think of; let us die, since the gods have no pity on us” (II.17). ‘Mentor’ knows more about the sentiments of the gods than the mortal does, rebuking him: “Know that you will one day return to Ithaca and see your mother Penelope” and “the invincible Ulysses” himself, “in his pristine glory,” a man “whom adverse fortune never could depress, and whose disasters, still greater than yours, ought to teach you never to despair” (II.17). How ashamed he would be were he to learn that “his son does not know how to imitate either his patience or his courage” (II.17). Mentor thus instructed Telemachus on the true legitimacy of the succession of rule in a monarchic regime: not mere ‘bloodline’ or inheritance but the succession of virtue, which is learned by imitation and not passed on by birth. It is a point that should not have been lost on the Bourbons.

Mentor went on to teach Telemachus about kingship, the good form of monarchy. He “made me remark the joy and abundance that overspread the whole country of Egypt,” a happiness following from “wise policy,” most noticeably “justice exercised in favor of the poor against the rich,” “the proper education of the children” in the virtues of obedience, labor, and sobriety, “the love of arts and literature, and the care with which “ceremonies of religion were performed” (II.17). The wisdom of this set of policies inculcated the moral sentiments of disinterestedness, love of honor, honesty in dealing with men, and reverence for the gods. In making his people happy, the king makes himself “happier still,” finding “his reward in his own virtue,” loved instead of feared, “not only obeyed” but “king of all hearts” (II.17). “Each individual, far from wishing to be rid of his dominion, would lay down his own life for him” (II.17).

King Sesostris gladly met with the two foreigners. Given his fatherly love for his subjects, he considered strangers as persons from whom he “should always learn something useful,” as “the manners and customs of remote countries” might have something in them that could be adapted for the good of Egyptians (II.18). Devoting his days to ruling, and especially to “administering impartial justice” over his subjects, Sesostris accordingly spent his evenings not in self-indulgence, in Phoenician luxury, but in “hearing the discourses of learned men, or in conversing with the most virtuous individuals, whom he well knew how to choose, as companions worthy to be admitted into his familiarity” (II.18). His error consisted in “having triumphed with too much pride over the kings he had vanquished” and in choosing one malicious adviser (II.18).

This adviser, Metophis, “deceitful and corrupt,” “perceived that Mentor’s answers” to the king’s questions “savored more of wisdom than mine”; he “looked upon him with aversion and distrust” since “the wicked are always incensed against the good” (II.19). He separated tutor from pupil with the intention of tricking Telemachus into whatever secret Mentor might be concealing. “He did not really desire to know the truth; but wanted to find some pretext for telling the king that we were Phoenicians, that he might be able to make us his slaves” (II.20). In this he succeeded, which provides Telemachus with an opportunity to draw a lesson intended for the Bourbons, and indeed kings everywhere: “Alas! to what [misrepresentations] a king is exposed! Even the wisest are often deceived.” (II.20). Even a king who sets out to learn from the learned and the good is prey to manipulation by the deceitful and corrupt, who feign learning and goodness.

Separated from Mentor and again despairing, Telemachus, reduced to the status of a shepherd tending Metophis’ sheep, heard a divine voice, admonishing him again to emulate his father. And more, “when thou shalt master of the lives of other men, remember thou thyself hast been as weak, and poor, and miserable as they”; in your compassion, “take pleasure in relieving their burdens” (II.21). In listening to this divine revelation, Telemachus experienced a conversion: “I calmly rose, and kneeling with uplifted hands, adored Minerva, to whom I thought myself indebted for this oracle. At once I found myself a new man; my mind was enlightened by wisdom; and I felt within me an agreeable energy sufficient to moderate all my passions, and restrain the impetuosity of my youth” (II.21. From then on, “my affability, patience, and the exact discharge of my duty appeased at last” even his cruel slave master (II.21). Without being a philosopher, he had “philosophy enough to be satisfied with the sweets of an innocent life” (II.21). Unlike Rousseau’s Emile, however, he lamented the absence of books. 

A priest of Apollo gave Telemachus a vocation among the shepherds. Giving him books “to console me,” Termosirus told him the story of Apollo, exiled from Olympus, teaching the arts to shepherds who had “led a brutal and and a savage life” hitherto (II.23). At the same time, Apollo did not ruin them by inducing them to move to a city but “taught the swains to know the charms of a country life, and to enjoy every delight which simple nature can produce” (II.23). Perhaps it takes a god to reconcile civilization and nature; Rousseau is more skeptical of such efforts. “Since you are now in the same station which Apollo filled, cultivate this wild land, like him make the desert flourish, and teach all those shepherds the charms of harmony; soften their savage hearts; display the amiable side of virtue, and make them feel how happy it is to enjoy, amidst their solitude, those innocent pleasures which nothing can deprive them of. One day, my son, one day, the pains and cruel cares that environ royalty, will make you think with regret of a pastoral life, even while you sit upon a throne.” (II.24). That is, a future king is best educated when he is ‘down and out,’ as in that condition he will see and remember the natural standard to be superior to the civil-conventional standard and to the authoritative offices charged with enforcing the laws of the kingdom.

A subsequent Hercules-like act of heroism, protecting the shepherds from an attacking lion, brought Telemachus to the attention of King Sesostris, who recalled him to court, discovered Metophis’ treachery and deceit, jailed him and promised to allow Telemachus to proceed to Ithaca. But the elderly king died and his son “possessed neither his humanity towards strangers, nor his curiosity for the sciences, nor his esteem for virtuous men, nor his love of glory,” nourished as he was “in effeminacy and brutal pride,” “count[ing] men as nothing, believing that they were only made for him, and that he was of another nature than they” (II.26). Unsurprisingly, King Bocchoris released Metophis from prison and confined Telemachus, but after a joint Phoenician-Cyprian naval attack on Egypt the country descended into civil war. The young king, “naturally good” but “poisoned by the flattery of his masters” and “believ[ing] that all things ought to yield to his impetuous desires,” came to behave “like a savage beast” (II.28). Unlike Telemachus, “he had never been taught by ill fortune” (II.28). “Abandoned by his natural good humor, as well as by his rational powers,” he lacked the wisdom Telemachus had come to revere,” lost the loyalty of his best servants, and was overwhelmed by the invaders (II.28). “If I ever reign,” Telemachus tells Calypso, “I shall not forget after so happy an example, that a king is only worthy to command, and happy in his power, in proportion as he himself submits to the restraints of reason” (II.28). Calypso “listened with astonishment to such wise words” (III.29), and particularly at the young man’s self-criticism (II.29). She loves him more intensely still, but in her increased passion she fails to see that he has told her why he will not stay with her.

Saved from the Egyptians by the friendly Phoenicians, Telemachus made the acquaintance of the ship captain, Narbal, a “naturally generous and sincere man,” “touched by my misfortunes” and impressed when he learned he was speaking with the son of Ulysses (III.30). A pious man as well, Narbal acknowledges “that you are beloved by the gods whom I have always served,” whose “pleasure” it is “that I should likewise love you” (III.31). He offers Telemachus advice, on condition that he keep it secret. It happened that Telemachus had acquired this habit, “the foundation of the wisest conduct…without which all other talents are useless,” from his father. Before leaving Ithaca for the Trojan War, Ulysses had told him that “whoever cannot keep his own counsel, is unworthy to govern” (III.31). In the increasingly dangerous household of his mother, Penelope, infested as it was with unworthy suitors in the absence of her husband, Telemachus had the opportunity, not to say the necessity, of learning to keep confidences. That is, Telemachus grew up in a royal household not unlike the one at Versailles, where intriguers were everywhere and one needed to learn whom to trust in order to survive.

Hearing this, Narbal entrusted him with the secret of “the power of the Phoenicians” (III.32). It is true, he says, that the Phoenician navy makes them formidable to “all the neighboring nations”: it is true that they derive their wealth, which “surpasses that of the most flourishing nations,” from their skill at seafaring; it is also true that they “were too rich and powerful to bear patiently the yoke of subjection” under Egypt, and so “recovered our liberty” and then vindicated it thanks to the death of the wise Sesostris and the passing of his power to Bocchoris, “who was totally destitute of wisdom” (III.32). But the ruinous secret is that “while we deliver others, we are slaves ourselves,” ruled by a tyrant, Pygmalion, who “persecutes the rich and fears the poor” (III.32). “Virtue condemns him; he hates and reviles her in return. Everything disturbs, frets, and disquiets him; he is afraid of his shadow, and sleeps neither night nor day: to complete his misery, the gods heap riches upon him which he dares not enjoy. What he seeks in order to be happy is precisely what prevents his being so.” (III.33). “Alone, sad, immured in the most secret part of his palace” for fear of being assassinated, he hides in secret because he cannot trust anyone with his secrets; he is a foreigner to his own human nature, “a stranger to every sweet enjoyment,” including friendship, “the sweetest of all” (III.33). “Fool! not to see that the cruelty, in which he trusts for his safety, will one day prove his ruin!” (III.33). Narbal feared the gods, not men, but he feared the tyrant enough to swear Telemachus to secrecy, telling the young man never to let Pygmalion know that he is the son of Ulysses, as Bocchoris surely would hold him in prison, for ransom. Telemachus followed that advice after landing in Tyre, where he confirmed the accuracy of Narbal’s judgment: Pygmalion “seems to command all other men, and yet has not the command of himself, for he has as many masters and executioners as he has violent desires” (III.34). Comparing this miserable tyrant to the good Sesostris, he recalled that the Egyptian “feared nothing, and had nothing to fear,” whereas Pygmalion “fears all, and has all to fear,” exposed as he was to “a violent death, even in his inaccessible palace, in the midst of his guards” (III.34). To be sure, the good Egyptian king was deceived for some time by a malevolent courtier, but he had the capacity to distinguish good from bad, and eventually found him out. In his fearful unwisdom, Pygmalion can do no such thing. He was a wrong-headed egalitarian. He think all men are indeed created equal, but only in lacking any “sincere virtue”; if anything, the supposedly good ones were worse, having added pretense of goodness to their other vices (III.35). 

Repelled by the tyrannical regime of the Phoenicians, Telemachus nonetheless admires their commercial way of life. (In this, his reader Rousseau will depart from him.) The “great city” of Tyre “seems to float on the surface of the waters, and to be queen of the sea.” (III.36). It is a cosmopolitan place, seeming to belong “not to one people in particular, but to all nations in general,” thronged as it is with traders from so many countries (III.36). The Phoenicians are industrious, as “all the citizens apply themselves to commerce, nor do their great riches ever produce in them an aversion to the labor necessary to increase their store” (III.36). “I could never tear my eyes away from the magnificent spectacle of that great city, where all was in motion,” the men loading and unloading their ships, transporting and selling merchandise, keeping their accounts with trading partners; the women too were busy, “never ceas[ing] to spin wool, or make designs for embroidery, or fold rich stuffs” (III.36). How did this people come to follow this regime, this way of life, which made them “masters of the whole commerce of the world, thus enriching themselves at the expense of all other nations?” (III.36). 

Narbal explained. First, Tyre has the right geographical location, “happily situated for commerce”; second, “we have the glory of having invented navigation,” the first men “who ventured to sea in ships,” long before Greece’s Argonauts; third, we learned astronomy from Egyptians and Babylonians, putting that science to good use for navigation, enabling us “to unite so many nations whom the sea had separated” (III.37). Fourth, we have the virtues necessary for commerce, not only industry but patience, willingness to work, cleanliness, sobriety, and frugality; having combined these moral virtues with “well-regulated administration” and civic peace, “never was there a people more firm and steady, more candid, more loyal, more trusty, or more kind to strangers” (III.37). Should we lose these qualities, “you would soon see this power, that now is so much the object of your admiration, dwindle away to nothing” (III.37). This is likely the cause of his concerns about the tyrant, who so evidently undermines all that Phoenicians have established.

How can I establish such commerce in Ithaca? Telemachus wanted to know. Give foreign traders safe haven, Narbal replied—assure their “security, convenience, and entire liberty” while “never suffer[ing] yourself to be blinded by avarice or pride” (III.37). “The true secret to gain a great deal, is never to grasp at too much, and to know how to lose suitably,” “steadily observ[ing] the rules of commerce,” making them “simple and explicit” and “accustom[ing] your people to adhere to them invariably” by severely punishing mercantile fraud and “even remissness and extravagance,” as “these ruin commerce, by ruining those who carry it on” (III.37). “Above all things beware of cramping trade in order to make it favor your views” as the king; that is, “leave the whole profits of it” to your subjects”; by enhancing the wealth of the people, your country will grow stronger, and its king with it (III.38). One of the tyrant Pygmalion’s worst policies has been heavy taxation. “Thus our commerce begins to languish and decline” (III.38). “If Pygmalion does not alter his conduct, our power and glory must soon pass from us to a people better governed than we”; indeed, as Narbal had already mentioned, Dido, Pygmalion’s sister, had already escaped Tyre and founded “a noble city, Carthage,” the next great commercial power of the Mediterranean (IIi.32).

But how did the Tyrians render themselves “so powerful by sea”? (III.38). We obtain ship timber from the forests of Lebanon, taking care to conserve this resource by prohibiting its use for any other purpose. We employ the most skillful workmen to build the ships, culling them from the sturdy population of the countryside and rewarding them well. More generally, “here we treat with honor those who excel in the arts and sciences that contribute to the improvement of navigation”—geometers, astronomers, pilots, carpenters, rowers (III.39). “Authority alone will never do, nor is a bare submission sufficient; men’s hearts must be one, and they must be made to find their advantage in a compliance wherever their service is wanted” (III.39).

Pygmalion soon put Telemachus’ habit of secrecy to the test. Suspicious as ever, he had the young man arrested, intending to question him closely. The alarmed Narbal assured him that “there is nothing that is not innocent” in a lie told to such a man; “the gods themselves cannot condemn it; nobody will suffer by it, and it will save the lives of two innocent persons,” namely, you and me (III.40). If you insist on telling the truth to a tyrant, “you carry the love of virtue and the fear of wounding religion too far” (III.40). Not so, replied high-minded Telemachus: “falsehood is falsehood,” and “he who injures the truth offends the gods, and even himself, by speaking against his conscience” (III.40). He will rely not on human prudence but divine protection. “If the gods have pity on us, they will know how to deliver us: if it is their will that we should perish, we shall then fall victims of truth, and leave to mankind an example that unblemished virtue is to be preferred to long life” (III.41). In the event, the gods did protect them, using as their instrument the tyrant’s mistress; spurned by another young man with whom she was infatuated, she pretended that he was Telemachus in order to get him killed, meanwhile advising Narbal to get the real Telemachus out of the city. Thus did Pygmalion become “the sport of a woman lost to all shame” while the virtuous men were rewarded for their sincerity by “the goodness of the gods” (III.42). 

A goddess herself, but perhaps rather lacking in shame, Calypso lets Telemachus and Nestor rest, not before feasting him on flattery by telling him that he is the superior of Hercules, Theseus, Achilles, and father Ulysses in wisdom and courage. Once they are alone, Mentor brings his pupil up short, rebuking him for seducing himself, taking pleasure in telling his life story and thereby “charm[ing] the goddess,” “more and more inflam[ing] her passion, and prepar[ing] for yourself a dangerous captivity” (IV.45). “The love of vainglory has betrayed you into speaking with imprudence,” “inform[ing her of all she wanted to know; such is the art of deceitful and passionate women” (IV.45). You have temporarily forgotten the habit of secrecy you learned from your father, the habit which won you the confidence of Narbal and so enabled you to escape the tyrant of Tyre. I, Mentor, “am the only one who knows you, and who loves you so, as to warn you of all your faults,” rather than exploiting them for my own purposes (IV.46). At this point, you may as well continue your story, but do it in such as way “as to excite her compassion alone,” not her lust (IV.46). For example, you might have told her, simply, that you had been a prisoner in several countries; “this would have been enough; the rest has served only to increase the poison that burns her heart” (IV.46). In continuing your speech tomorrow, “give her an account of what further the gods have done in your favor, and learn another time to speak more moderately of what you may have done deserving in any measure of praise” (IV.46). Telemachus takes the point.

And so for his next story he tells of a vision of Venus he had had on his voyage from Tyre to Cyprus, not far from the Phoenician coast; he had intended Cyprus to be his first stop on the way home. In the dream, Venus called Cyprus part of her “empire,” the “native seat of pleasure, mirth, and frolic” (IV.47). Do not resist me, “the most powerful of goddesses, who wants to make you happy” (IV.47). Venus’ son, Cupid, tried to shoot him with an arrow, but Minerva protected him—a telling hint to Calypso, and more than a suggestion that Venus is not the most powerful goddess. “Get you gone, rash boy,” Minerva commanded Cupid; “never will you subdue any but effeminate souls who are more enamored of your shameful pleasures than of wisdom, virtue, and glory” (IV.48). Upon awakening, Mentor immediately told him to “flee this cruel land, this pestilent isle, in which they breathe nothing but voluptuousness” (IV.48).

Still at sea with a Cypriot crew, Telemachus took the helm when a storm whipped up, as the “effeminate men, devoted to pleasure, lack[ing] the courage to face danger” succumbed to “bitter wailings and lamentations” and “vain promises to sacrifice to the gods, provided they would bring them safe to port,” lacking “the presence of mind either to direct or execute the steps that were necessary for our preservation” (IV.49). That is, whereas the gods protect the virtuous truth-tellers endangered by tyrants, they do not protect those weakened by the vices unregulated commerce can foster. Telemachus guided the ship through the storm, and “this deliverance appeared like a dream to all those whose lives I had saved; they gazed on me with amazement” (IV.49). 

Unsurprisingly, when he arrived on Cyprus Telemachus found that the Cypriots didn’t work, much. The girls on their way to the temple of Venus lacked “that noble simplicity” and “amiable modesty” which constitute “the great charm of beauty” (IV.50). Nonetheless, Telemachus gradually yielded to the ethos of the Cypriot regime. “At first, I could not behold these things without abhorrence, but that wore off insensibly. Vice no longer shocked me: every company inspired me with a greater propensity to debauchery, by mocking my innocence; for my continence and modesty served only for subjects of mirth and ridicule to that abandoned people” and “the virtuous education I had received was no longer able to support me” (IV.51). A regime and its way of life can overpower the habits of mind and heart in a young man educated but not fully habituated to the way of life of his own regime. Eventually, “I could neither recover the use of my reason, nor recall the memory of my father’s virtues,” as “a secret soothing languor took possession of my soul,” symptomatic of “the agreeable poison that insinuated itself from vein to vein, and penetrated to the very marrow of my bones” (IV.51).

Mentor rescued him, having arrived unexpectedly on Cyprus. He wasted no time denouncing “infamous effeminate pleasure,” which “suffers no virtue to exist,” and in commanding Telemachus to flee this country, where “the very air you breathe is poisoned) IV.52). With this, Telemachus undergoes a turning-around of his soul, similar to that described by Socrates in Plato’s Republic. “He spoke, and immediately I perceived, as it were, a thick cloud dissolve from my eyes and disperse, so that I beheld the pure light: a gentle joy, and an undaunted resolution sprang up again in my heart. It was a joy very different from the childish, effeminate delight with which my senses had been intoxicated: the latter is a drunken, troubled joy, shot through with furious passions, and cutting remorse; the former is a rational joy, fraught with something blissful and divine; it is always pure, even, and inexhaustible: the more it is indulged, the more delightful it is: it ravishes the soul without disquieting it” (IV.52-53). Now he understands the beatus illi theme Mentor had sounded in Egypt: “Happy are those men who have behold virtue in all her charms! For they who see her, must love her, and they who love her, must be happy.” (IV.53).

This happiness immediately came under threat when Mentor announced that they must separate again. His former slave masters sold him to a Syrian, Hazael, in whom Mentor has piqued curiosity about Greek moeurs, especially as instanced on the island of Crete, where Hazael intended to study “the wise laws of Minos,” Crete’s founder (IV.53). They only stopped at Cyprus because the prevailing winds compelled them. Telemachus immediately went as a suppliant to Hazael, begging him to take him along as his slave to Crete, as well. With “looks of good nature and humanity,” Hazael accepted the offer, while explaining that in Mentor he found not a slave but “a faithful friend”—the “most valued of any I have on earth” (IV.55). As with Telemachus, so with Hazael; Mentor “found wisdom” with him, “and to him I am indebted for the love I bear to virtue” (IV.55). In gratitude he declared both men free. At this, Hazael and Mentor “began to discourse together of that supreme power that formed heaven and earth,” the “simple, infinite, unchangeable light” that is “eternal reason” (IV.55-56). Reason is, “as it were, a vast ocean of light, and our souls are a sort of little rivulets, that issue from it, and that afterwards return to it, and are lost in its immensity” (IV.56). Fénelon’s pagans thus resemble Neoplatonists on the cusp of perceiving the Logos of the Gospel of John.

They disembarked on Crete, whose regime differed not only from that of hedonistic Cyprus but also from commercial Tyre. Under Minos’ laws, Cretans practice agriculture, exhibiting the truth that “the more people there are in a country, the greater plenty they enjoy, provided they are industrious” and moderate in their desires (V.59)—a point Rousseau reprises in the Emile. Mentor calls Minos “the wisest and best of all kings”: “the education he ordained for children renders their bodies healthy and robust,” as they are “early accustomed to a simple, frugal, and laborious life” (V.59). Rejecting “sensual pleasure of every kind” as enervating to “body and mind,” the Cretans have become “invincible through virtue” (V.59-60). For them, courage consists not only in “despising death amidst the dangers of war, but also in disdaining excessive wealth, and shameful pleasure” (V.60). The punish three vices “which remain unpunished in other countries: ingratitude, dissimulation, and avarice” (V.60). 

The regime is a monarchy, and Telemachus asked what the king’s authority consists. Mentor explained that the king “can do anything to the people, but the laws can do anything to him” (V.60). He thus has “an absolute power in doing good, but his hands are tied from doing wrong” (V.60). “The intention of the laws is that one man by his wisdom and moderation should promote the happiness of such numbers and not that such numbers by their misery and abject slavery should serve only to flatter the pride and luxury of a single man” (V.60). Among his people, he ought to be the most virtuous of all; abroad, “he is to defend his people and command their armies” (V.61). The line of succession extended from Minos to his children, but only “upon condition that they observed these maxims,” given that the founder “loved his people even more than his own family” (V.61). “It was by such wisdom and moderation that he rendered Crete so powerful and happy, and eclipsed the glory of all those conquerors, who were for making the people serve only to promote their own glory, that is, their vanity: in fine, it was through his justice that he became one of the judges of the dead in the regions below” (V.61).

Crete’s current king, Idomeneus, fought with his fellow Greeks at Troy. He has fallen into calamity. During a storm at sea on the return voyage he promised the gods he would sacrifice the first person he saw upon his return, if they would grand him safe passage. This first person he saw was his son. Although advised by “old Sophronimus” (“Wise One”) that he need not follow through on such an “imprudent” vow (“the gods will not be honored by cruelty”), and that an animal sacrifice will do, his son averred that he’s ready to die, “if by my death your life may be secured” (V.63). “Torn by the internal furies,” he killed his son and would have killed himself, had his attendants not prevented him (V.63). It is of course a pagan version of the story of Abraham and Isaac, but here no god prevents the son’s sacrifice and the result isn’t the reinforcement of the laws but the compromise of monarchic rule, as the people viewed “with horror” the “barbarous act of the father, exclaim[ing] that the just gods had abandoned him to the furies” (V.63). Civil strife erupted, and Idomeneus had to flee to the Hesperian coast, where he and his friends “have just founded a new kingdom in the country of the Salentines’ (V.63). His misrule on Crete shows that the rule of law depends upon the gods, the rule of gods acts through human vows, but such vows must be understood in accordance with the intention of the law—that is, the lawgiver. Reasonable laws require reasonable interpretation, adaptation to given circumstances—equity, as modern judges would say.

The Cretans now needed to elect a new king, and here they will exhibit exactly such prudential reasoning based on Minos’ laws. At the invitation of the Cretans, Telemachus participated in the games organized for the occasion, winning three competitions. The people then retired to “an ancient and sacred wood,” where their sages consulted the laws of Minos (V.66). “Wisdom alone acted in them, and the fruit of their long virtue had so well defeated their humor that they enjoyed without pain the sweet and noble pleasure of reason”—so much so that Telemachus “wished it had been in my power to forego a part of my life, in order to arrive speedily at so estimable an old age” (V.66). Acknowledging that “it is the laws” of Minos, “and not men, that ought to reign,” the president of the council of sages proposed three questions “to be determined by the maxims of Minos” (V.67). 

First, who is the freest of men? Opinions ranged from the king “whose authority is absolute” (rather like Louis XIV) to the rich man who can “gratify all his desires” to the bachelor who travels from country to country, “without subjecting himself to the laws of any” to the savage who lives in the woods, “a stranger both to need and to government” to the freed slave, who enjoys more than any other the value of liberty” to those about to die, “because death deliver[s]” them from all earthly powers (V.67). But Telemachus knew the right answer, having learned it from Mentor: “The freest man is he who can be free even in slavery,” who “in whatever country or condition” he finds himself, “fears the gods, and them only”; “the truly free man is he who, detached from all, is to bid defiance to fear and all desire, is subject only to the gods and to his reason” (V.67). This, the sages agreed, was Minos’ answer, as well—Minos and Telemachus both having had Minerva as their teacher.

Second, who is the most wretched of all men? A sage from Lesbos claimed that the most unhappy man is the one “who thinks himself so,” the one who “lacks patience in suffering” (V.68). Telemachus, again following Mentor’s teachings, proposes a more kingly answer: “The most wretched of all men is a king who thinks himself happy in making others miserable,” being “doubly wretched, in being so blind as not to see his misery,” lacking in self-knowledge and therefore prey to “a crowd of flatterers” and “tyrannized by his passions”; “the gods will at least confound him through an eternal punishment” (V.68).

Third, which is better, a king who wins all his wars (as Louis XIV had done, at the time Fénelon was writing) or “one without any knowledge or experience in the art of war, but well qualified to govern a nation in time of peace”? (V.68). Most of the Cretans preferred the warrior-king. But Telemachus replied that both the warrior-king and the pacific king are only half-kings, the pacific king is the better half. “A king who is entirely for war would be always for extending his glory and dominions, and would ruin his people,” making them miserable; “when war has set a country all on fire, the laws, agriculture, and the arts languish” (V.69). Why win your wars if you cannot enjoy the apparent fruits of victory? The pacific king, however, will never threaten his neighbors; “his allies will love him,” not “fear him,” and neighboring kings will call upon him to serve as “the arbiter of all the states which surround his” when they quarrel amongst themselves (V.70). Unburdened by unnecessary wars, his people will prosper, and will defend the regime if threatened; indeed, “the gods themselves would fight for him” (V.70). Once again, the sages declared that “Minos was of the same way of thinking as I” (V.71). 

More, Minos had consulted a god who had told him that a stranger would come to Crete one day, “to put the laws in force” (V.71). Can this person be any other than Telemachus, “who understands the laws of Minos better than any other person”? (V.71). Telemachus might well have accepted this interpretation of the prophecy, had Mentor not reminded him that he must not “renounce your country,” forgetting your mother and father, “whom the gods intended to restore to you” (V.71). Telemachus thinks of a supremely prudent, diplomatic answer: Yes, the oracle stated that Minos’ line will cease to rule Crete when a stranger arrives to enforce Minos’ laws, but the oracle “does not say that the stranger will reign” (V.71). I am indeed a stranger, and I have in fact “enforced” the laws of Minos by showing “the true sense” of them, so that they will rule the king you choose, but “for my part, I prefer my country, the poor, little island of Ithaca, to the hundred cities of Crete. Allow me to fulfill my destiny.” (V.72). “I had rather execute the commands of my father Ulysses, and console my mother Penelope, than be sovereign of the whole universe” (V.72). With this statement of filial piety, he extricates himself from the invitation without offending his hosts. It is the mirror-image of his refusal to lie to the tyrant Pygmalion at Tyre: there, he displayed rectitude in the face of punishment; here, he displayed rectitude in the face of the highest earthly reward.

The Cretans then asked him to choose the next king. Telemachus deferred to Mentor, who also declined the honor but defined the qualities of such a man before identifying him. “I would have you choose one who knows you well, since he must govern you, and who fears to govern you,” inasmuch as “he who desires royalty does not know it,” does not know the burdens of rule (V.73). Mentor chose Aristodemus, now living in an out-of-the-way part of the island, cultivating “his small farm with his own hands” with the help of his devoted sons (V.75). Frugal and industrious, his family enjoyed a surplus of goods, which they shared with sick and impoverished neighbors—rather as Rousseau would have rightly-educated aristocrats do. He is “the father of every family” in the region (V.75), and he also had experience in war. “There is your king, if you want to make the laws of the sage Minos reign” (V.75). Called to the kingship by his fellow citizens, Aristodemus consented on three conditions: that he would resign after two years “if I cannot make you better than you are at present, and if you resist the laws”; that he would be “free to continue my simple and frugal life,” with no obligation to display royal pomp; and that “my children shall not be entitled to any rank and that after my death, they shall be on the same footing with the other citizens, and treated according to their merit” (V.76). The Cretans agree; Telemachus and Mentor left the island.

It was well that Telemachus declined the kingship, and not only because his destiny and his filial piety draw him back to Ithaca. He had learned the maxims of Mentor-Minerva. He had yet to integrate them into his soul, as he demonstrated on Calypso’s island after he finished his account of his adventures.

At sea, they survived another storm, one commanded by Neptune at the behest of Venus, who remains angry at Telemachus’ resistance to her on Cypress. By this point in Telemachus’ series of stories, Calypso suspected Mentor of being “a divinity under the form of a man”; she separated him from Telemachus and cross-examined him, but he has didn’t know that Mentor is Minerva, and so could honestly mislead his inquisitor (VI.81). When she interrogated Mentor she got nowhere, since Minerva is the more powerful goddess. She then found an ally in Venus, who left her son Cupid with her. Calypso found herself beginning to desire him, and so handed him off from one of nymphs, Eucharis. “But alas! how heartily did she afterwards repent of having done it!” (VI.83). For Cupid is a mischief-maker, a “false malicious child [who] caressed only to betray, and never laughed but on account of the cruel evils he had done or wished to do” (VI.83). He soon had all of Calypso’s nymphs secretly pining for him.

Telemachus watched this with ambivalence. He “was struck by [Cupid’s] beauty and good humor,” and he finds the nymphs charming (unlike the Cypriot women), “but he soon felt an uneasiness, the cause of which he could not discover” (VI.83). As usual, Mentor did not hesitate to lay it out: “O Telemachus: the dangers of the isle of Cypress were nothing, when compared to those of which you have not the least awareness at present. Gross vice excites abhorrence, but modest beauty is much more dangerous: in loving it we imagine we love only virtue, and thus are insensibly caught by the delusive bait of a passion of which we are seldom aware until it is too late to extinguish it” (VI.83). As for that winsome boy, he is Cupid, “brought here by his mother Venus to take vengeance on you for despising her cult” at Cypress (VI.84). When Telemachus tried to talk Mentor into staying, Mentor showed the link between the capacity to reason and erotic passion; “blind passion” makes us find ingenious arguments to justify it (VI.84). Threatening to leave him behind, Mentor chastised him as the “base son of so wise and generous a father”—contemptuous words that “stung Telemachus to the heart” (VI.84). “What then,” the youth pleaded, “do you count the immortality offered me by the goddess as nothing?” (VI.85). “I count as nothing whatever is contrary to virtue, and to the will of the gods”; virtue beckons (“call[ing] you to your native country”) and prohibits (“forbid[ding] you to give way to a foolish passion”) (VI.85). If you give way to “that shameful tyrant,” bodily eros, offered by a goddess who offers you bodily immortality, “what would you do with an immortal life, without liberty, without virtue, and without glory,” a life that “would only be so much the more miserable in being immortal, inasmuch as it would never end”? (VI.85).

But at this stage of passion, speeches wouldn’t work with Telemachus. Reason by itself has authority only in souls prepared to heed it. Knowing that Telemachus “no less loved the young nymph Eucharis” than Calypso loved Telemachus, Mentor “resolved to excite the jealousy of Calypso” (VI.85). That is, to defeat the love-god Cupid, Minerva intended to use love’s effects against love, “employ[ing] against the god of love the jealousy inseparable from love itself” (VI.87). Raging at her beloved, Calypso ordered him off the island, threatening revenge: Neptune prepares “more storms for thee”; you shall see your father again, but not recognize him; and you shall rejoin him in Ithaca only after “having been the sport of the most cruel, unrelenting fortune” (VI.90-91). 

Horrified by Calypso’s ugly rage, Telemachus could only turn to Mentor, who drew the lesson his pupil could finally understand in his heart, not only in his head. He suffers because the gods have willed him to suffer. The gods have willed him to suffer because “he who has never felt his own weakness and the violence of his passions, cannot be said to be wise; for he is unacquainted with himself, and knows not how to distrust himself. The gods have led you, as it were, by the hand, to the very edge of the abyss, to show you the depth of it, without letting you fall into it. Understand now what, without experience, you never would have comprehended.” (VI.92). This “inspir[ed] Telemachus with a courage that he had never experienced since he came into the isle” (VI.94). They escaped Calypso and her posse of nymphs. “In proportion as Telemachus got away from the island, he found his courage and his love of virtue revive. ‘I now experience,’ he said, ‘the truth of what you told me, and which, for lack of experience, I could not believe: namely that vice can only be conquered by flight…. I now fear neither storms, winds, nor seas; i only fear my passions. Cupid alone is more to be dreaded than are all shipwrecks.'” (VI.96).

This ends the first part of Telemachus’ education in kingship, which begins where Locke leaves off—at the time when a young man confronts his own sexual passion, and when a future king must begin to consider the ways of ruling. The two are closely associated. As Louis XIV’s example shows, an absolute monarch, being unconstrained by natural or civil law, likely will multiply his amours because, as a later chief executive put it, he can. His appetite for the bodies of women will often be matched by his appetite for rule over others—not only his own subjects but foreign peoples over whom he will seek to extend his imperial rule. 

This education has consisted of a series of lessons in love and friendship, ruling and being ruled. At the beginning of their stay on Calypso’s island, Mentor warned Telemachus of Calypso’s deceit. Telemachus understood the danger notionally if somewhat vaguely, reciprocating her hospitality by telling her of his voyages. During them, he visited five cities, each with a distinct regime. The Trojan king of Sicily, initially hostile to the young Greek, sought his alliance when attacked by barbarians; on Sicily, the conflict wasn’t between regimes as between civilization and savagery. The king released the Greeks out of respect for the law of nations which all civilized peoples recognize. At Tyre, Telemachus saw a monarchy with a commercial way of life; such regimes are susceptible to pride and decadence unless the people remain industrious, as Narbal the sea captain carefully explained. In Egypt, Telemachus saw a monarchy that is justifiable when its king loves his subjects as a father loves his child; under such rule, his ‘children’ will reciprocate his love. In this way, it is better to be loved than feared. The good king also loves learning, not for the sake of noetic apprehension, as a philosopher does, but as one mode of parental care, of learning foreign practices which may serve useful to his subjects. But even good kings can be deceived, and there is no guarantee that a good king’s son will be good.

Cyprus was under a tyranny, but seems not to be ruled by anyone but the goddess Venus. Her love is anything but parental. She rules her subjects for her own amusement, and that of her impudent son, Cupid. The regime of Cyprus might, then, also be described as no-regime, a realm of erotic anarchy. 

Finally, the best practicable regime Telemachus had visited was Crete, an agrarian not a commercial monarchy founded by Minos, who left it with a sound set of laws. An agricultural way of life is better than a commercial one because it requires the virtue of industriousness all the time. There is no making a profit and then indulging oneself in spending it. Farmers spend their profits on seed and equipment for the next season or, as in the example of Aristodemus, charity towards neighbors. Crete’s king, Minos’ grandson, fell away from those salutary laws by making a foolish vow to the gods. Laws need prudential interpretation, and Crete has a set of ruling elders who can provide it.

Calypso’s regime is almost the same as that of Cyprus, except that Venus and Cupid rule indirectly. As in Cyprus, the only remedy for the temptation of a regime of physical eros is escape. Temptation is impossible to withstand forever, but to flee it one must recognize it for what it is and for how it insinuates itself into human hearts and minds. As in Rousseau’s Emile, virtue is above all a struggle, a struggle to claim or to reclaim the good for the human soul, a good without which monarchs cannot well rule themselves or their people because only parental love, love for the good of his ‘children’ or subjects can result in right rule. Emile, however, is no monarch; by Rousseau’s time the monarchy Fénelon sought to reform was failing, and a new regime would need to be founded.

 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile, or, on Education. Allan Bloom translation. New York: Basic Books, 1979.

 

1. Travel rightly understood

As Rousseau has insisted throughout, “Too much reading only serves to produce presumptuous ignoramuses” (V.450). Parisians being among the most widely-read persons in the world, they stare at foreigners uncomprehendingly for the simple reason that they have only read about them. “One has to have seen the bourgeoisie of this great city close up and to have lived with them to believe that people with so much cleverness can be so stupid”; “a Parisian believes he knows men, and he knows only the French” (V.451). Parisians prove that books “are good for learning to babble about what one does not know” (V.451). For his part, Rousseau writes, “I hold it to be an incontestable maxim that whoever has seen only one people does not know men; he knows only the people with whom he has lived” (V.451). 

Travel alone does not educate, however. The aristocratic and bourgeois practice of sending their young men on a ‘grand tour’ of Europe is another instance of stupidity. “There are many persons who are informed still less by travel than by books, because they are ignorant of the art of thinking,” incapable of “see[ing] anything on their own” (V.452). “It is necessary to know how to travel” (V.452). “The instruction that one extracts from travel is related to the aim that causes travel to be undertaken” (V.454). He who travels to confirm “a system of philosophy” will “never see anything but what he wants to see”; he who seeks profit learns only how to cut deals (V.454). Serious travel “is suitable for only very few people,” those “sure enough about themselves to hear the lessons of error without letting themselves be seduced and to see the example of vice without letting themselves be carried away” (V.455). If, as a wise man of antiquity said of ruling authority, it “shows the man,” “travel pushes a man toward his natural bent and completes the job of making him good or bad” (V.455). Power corrupts the already corrupt and ennobles the good because it releases him from many conventions, gives him freedom to act; travel does that, too, getting men away from the laws and customs of their own country, unmooring them. Inasmuch as most young men have been badly educated, “more men come back” from their travels “wicked than good, because more leave inclined to evil than to good,” “contract[ing] all the vices of the peoples they frequent and none of the virtues with which these vices are mixed” (V.455). But those, like Emile, “whose good nature has been well cultivated, and who travel with the true intention of informing themselves, return better and wiser than they left” (V.455). It is easy to imagine Chateaubriand and Tocqueville reading this passage.

Intelligent travel, then. But it isn’t enough to decide to gather information. “Everything that is done by reason ought to have its rules” (V.455). As a child, Emile learned about “his physical relations with other beings” and the limits those other natural beings impose upon him; in youth he learned “his moral relations with men,” the limits imposed by natural and conventional right (V.455). In young manhood he must “consider himself in his civil relations with his fellow citizens,” beginning “by studying the nature of government in general, the diverse forms of government, and finally the particular government under which he was born, so that he may find out whether it suits him to live there” (V.455). He is now a young adult, and so has the right to reaffirm or to renounce his citizenship. He has attained the age of self-government. Emile plans to establish a household. “This plan is laudable; it is one of man’s duties,” the governor tells him (V.456). “But, before marrying, you must know what kind of man you want to be, what you want to spend your life doing, and what measures you want to take to assure yourself and your family of bread. Although one ought not to make such a care his principal business, one must nonetheless think about it once.” (V.456). 

Emile thinks, briefly, and avers that he only wants Sophie and a field to till. If he were alive today, he would say he wants only Sophie, a cellphone, and a laptop to tap on. The problem is exactly the same, however. Where will you till or tap? “In what corner of the earth will you be able to say, ‘Here I am master of myself and of the land which belongs to me?'” (V.457). Where can you go to find a place “where one can be independent and free” without needing to harm others or fearing harm? (V.457). Farming (or working at home with a cellphone and a laptop) brings more independence than most forms of employment. “But where is the state where a man can say to himself, ‘The land I tread is mine?'” (V.457). “Be careful that a violent government, a persecuting religion, or perverse morals do not come to disturb you there,” to say nothing of “boundless taxes that would devour the fruit of your efforts” and “endless litigation that would consume your estate” (V.457). Where, “above all,” can you go to “shelter yourself from vexation by the noble and the rich”? (V.457). You cannot maintain your property without political influence, and vice-versa. Political life is indispensable. In your travels you had better learn about politics, not from books so much as from citizens and subjects.

 

2. Knowledge of political right

“The science of political right is yet to be born, and it is to be presumed that it never will be born,” Rousseau writes, in a book published in the year The Social Contract was published, and as he prepares a condensed version of the argument he makes there for his pupil. “The only modern in a position to create this great and useless science was the illustrious Montesquieu. But he was careful not to discuss the principles of political right,” “content to discuss the positive right of established governments,” which is hardly the same thing (V.458). But to “judge soundly” what has been established, one must know “what ought to be” (V.458). The governor will interest Emile in this inquiry by guiding their travel with two questions: “What importance does it have for me?”—the familiar question of ‘what good is it?’—and “What can I do about it?”—the question of capability and limitation, again familiar to Emile from his childhood, on (V.458). 

To this matter of judgment Rousseau adds a “second difficulty,” one that derives from “the prejudices of childhood, from the maxims on which one has been raised, and above all from the partiality of authors who always speak of the truth” while only thinking of “their interest” (V.458). This will not be so great a problem for Emile as it is for most. “He hardly knows what government is. The only thing important to him is to find the best one,” and his nearly book-free, opinion-free education has prepared him for that (V.458).

The third difficulty, “more specious than solid,” is that many will say that judging political conventions well is difficult, a hard task even for philosophers. Rousseau disagrees. “I am certain that in researches of this kind great talents are less necessary than a sincere love of justice and a true respect for the truth” (V.458).

How, then, to establish the standard of judgment, the principles of political right? This task requires not travel but thought. It is preliminary to travel. “By first going back to the state of nature, we shall examine whether men are born enslaved or free, associated with one another or independent” (V.459). Do they “join together voluntarily or by force”? (V.459). If by force, can this force “form a permanent right by which this prior force remains obligatory, even when it is surmounted by another,” or indeed whether it forms any right at all (V.459). Is force providential, therefore right because God ordains it? If force is indeed providential, and God ordains that we are ruled by a bad regime, have we the right to overthrow it. (Or as Rousseau puts it, “We shall examine whether one cannot say that every illness comes from God, and whether it follows from this that it is a crime to call the doctor.”) (V.459). Or does conscience oblige me to give my purse “to a bandit who demands it on the highway, even if one could hide it from him”? (V.459). “After all, the pistol he holds is also a power” (V.459). Indeed, can ‘power’ not be subdivided into ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ power, and consequently be made “subject to the laws from which it gets its being”? (V.459).

Rejecting “this right of force” for “the right of nature,” Rousseau identifies the right of nature with “paternal authority” (V.459). He suggests paternal authority has no greater extent than “the utility of the child, his weakness, and the natural love the father has for him” (V.459). At maturity the child becomes “the sole natural judge of what is suitable for his preservation” and therefore “his own master,” “independent of every other man, even of his father,” given the fact that “the son loves himself” even more than his father loves him (V.459). This rules out the kind of absolute patriarchal authority in families and in civil societies praised by Robert Filmer, among others.

Such independent individuals could form civil societies rightly “by choice,” only, their amour de soi directing them to form a “free and voluntary association” (V.459). No one can justly consent to a condition of unconditional slavery, which would be to “renounce his person, his life, his reason, his I, and all morality in his actions—in a word, [to] cease to exist before his death in spite of nature, which gives him immediate responsibility for his own preservation, and in spite of his conscience and his reason, which prescribe to him what he ought to do and what he ought to abstain from doing” (V.460). And if a slave “cannot alienate himself without reserve to his master, how can a people alienate itself without reserve to its chief?” (V.460). As with individuals, so with groups of individuals: they remain judges of the freely consented-to social contract they have entered.

A people, then, consists not of an ethnic or linguistic community but a group of individuals who have formed either an explicit or a tacit contract with one another. “The social contract is the basis of every society,” whatever its regime may be (V.460). “The tenor of this contract” is simply stated: “Each of us puts his goods, his person, his life, and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and we as a body accept each member as a part indivisible from the whole” (V.460). This collective body is a moral entity, its powers limited by the natural rights it should be designed to protect. “This public person, understood generally, takes the name body politic; its members call it state when it is passive, sovereign when it is active, and power when it is compared to other bodies politic. Speaking of the members collectively they take the name people; individually they are called both citizens, as members of the city or participants in the sovereign authority, and subjects, as subject to the same authority.” (V.460). This implies “a reciprocal commitment of the public and the individuals”—ruling and being ruled (V.460). There being “no common superior who can judge their differences,” the individual and the body politic remain the only ones entitled to break the contract (V.461)—by self-exile in the case of the individual, by expulsion of the individual by the body politic. Since “the individuals have subjected themselves only to the sovereign, and the sovereign authority is nothing other than the general will…each man who obeys the sovereign obeys only himself,” making himself “more free under the social pact than in the state of nature,” where he needed to guard himself against other individuals who also respected no ruling authority (V.461). 

The general will must indeed be general, not particular. For example, the sovereign authority “has no right to touch the possessions of one or more individuals” but it “can legitimately seize the possessions of all, as was done at Sparta in the time of Lycurgus” (V.462). Debt forgiveness, which aims at a particular group, is outside the legitimate power of the sovereign authority. That is, all laws must be truly general, applicable to all citizen-subjects. “The sovereign never has the power to make any statute applying to a particular object,” although of course in enforcing its laws the sovereign acts on individuals and groups (V.462). The executive should be elected by the sovereign people. This will put some constraint on the dangerous power to act on individuals, inasmuch as “the particular will” of the individual who wields that power “will often be contrary to the general will,” as “private interest always tends to preferences, and the public interest always tends to equality” (V.462-463). Another constraint on executive power is the law, enacted by the general will.

Rousseau doubts not only that a people can have a rightful master but also whether it can have a rightful set of representatives. Even representative government involves particular wills too much in the formation of the laws by which those individuals, along with everyone else in the body politic, should be governed. Only small bodies politic can govern themselves without masters or representatives, and so it is hard “for a large populace to be its own legislator” (V.463). Rousseau proposes that the body politic, in its capacity as sovereign, must have no more power than the “power of the citizens, who are on the one hand subjects and on the other sovereigns” (V.463). This is because “the more the state expands, the more liberty diminishes,” and the citizens must have the power to resist encroachments on their rights, including liberty (V.463). 

There is also the opposite danger: The sovereign people might become corrupt. “The less the particular wills correspond to the general will—that is, the less morals correspond to laws—the more the repressing force ought to increase” (V.464). Such an increase in force doesn’t entail an increase in the number of government officials, however, as a bloated sovereign will only get in its own way. “The more the state expands, the more the government ought to contract, so that the number of chiefs decreases in proportion to the increase in the size of the people” (V.465). As a reader of Fénelon’s Telemachus, Rousseau admires the way Mentor advises King Idomeneus to single-handedly reform the morals of the people of Salente, which the king had allowed to become lax. 

“From this we can draw the conclusion that there is not a single and absolute constitution of government, but that there ought to be as many governments differing in nature as there are states differing in size,” and in citizen virtue (V.464), although roughly speaking there are three main regime types: democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. “The combinations of these three forms can give rise to a multitude of mixed forms, each of which is multipliable by all the simple forms” (V.466). Generally speaking, the larger the state the more it will require a small but powerful sovereign authority; an empire, for example, will likely require a monarch or “prince.” A medium-sized state should be an aristocracy. A small state can be a democracy, wherein “the particular and individual will ought to be almost nonexistent,” since all citizens participate in the formation of the laws in accordance to a general will that is readily determined by voting, with no need for representatives. Rousseau is no ‘idealist’; he recognizes that “according to the natural order” the particular will is always “preferred over all the others” (V.464). Under democracy, possible only in a small body politic, these self-loving particular wills coalesce into the general will by the act of voting directly on the laws that will govern them. 

“By following the thread of these researches, we shall come to know what the duties and the rights of citizens are, and whether the former can be separated from the latter” (V.466). Emile will also know what a true “fatherland” is, a body politic that really does serve the utility with its citizens insofar as they are subjects, a body politic that doesn’t take advantage of the weakness of the individual citizen and that respects his amour de soi.

 

3. Guarding natural right in a world of sovereign “powers”

Given the diversity of size and moral character seen in the many peoples of the world, “we shall compare them in order to observe their diverse relations” (V.466). Travel is the best way to undertake what is now called ‘comparative political science’. Such study gives an intelligent purpose to travel. “Tyranny and war” are “the greatest plagues of humanity,” and even if the formation of bodies politic may lift men out of the perils of the state of nature the dangers such bodies pose to one another will make Emile wonder “whether it would be better to have no civil society in the world than to have many” (V.466). After all, in the state of nature an individual may hold himself in relative isolation from others, whereas in civil society he is subject to the depredations of foreign peoples, often organized for plunder or conquest. Moreover, if small bodies politic are the only ones amenable to the regime of democracy, the regime which best aligns particular wills with the general will, how will such small and therefore relatively weak entities defend themselves against the larger and often less just aristocracies and monarchies?

Typically, small bodies politic defend themselves by entering into leagues and confederations for mutual defense. “We shall investigate how a good federative association can be established, what can make it durable, and how far the right of confederacy can be extended without jeopardizing that of sovereignty,” a perennial problem in Europe seen in the proposal of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, who “proposed an association of all the states of Europe in order to maintain perpetual peace among them” (V.466). Even if such an association could be established, would it last? Given the likelihood of war, “we shall lay down the true principles of the right of war,” which the main authority on the subject, Hugo Grotius, has failed to propound (V.467).

The governor now reveals the real reason why he has had Emile take Sophie’s copy of the Telemachus on this journey. In that novel, Fénelon has his hero visit a variety of cities, variously governed; he has him fight wars according to strict standards of natural right (no deception of the enemy, no countenancing of individuals from the enemy side who offer to betray their own country to you); he has his hero’s guide frame a just regime, a standard by which other regimes may be judged. However, “since Emile is not a king” like young Telemachus “and I am not a god” like Telemachus’ governor, Mentor, who is Minerva in human form, “we do not fret about not being able to imitate Telemachus and Mentor in the good that they did for men. No one knows better than we do how to keep in our place, and no one has less desire to leave it” (V.467). Emile and the governor travel to learn but never intervene in the affairs of the peoples amongst whom they travel. Not only are they not kings, they do not aspire to be kings, even the best of whom “do countless real evils without knowing it for the sake of an apparent good” they believe they are doing (V.467). 

Traveling to learn and not to rule or to teach, they will avoid the capital cities. “All capitals resemble one another. All peoples are mixed together in them, and all morals are confounded. It is not to capitals that one must go to study nations. Paris and London are but the same city in my eyes.” (V.468). Instead, we shall “go to the remote provinces, where there is less movement and commerce, where foreigners travel less, where the inhabitants move around less and change fortune and status less—in order to study the genius and the morals of a nation” (V.468).

For the ideal, Fénelon’s Telemachus. For the real, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. “One can do no better than have recourse to this work” to study “the necessary relations between morals and government” (V.468). For Emile, Rousseau again boils things down, offering “two easy and simple rules for judging the relative goodness of government” (V.468): population growth (or at least stability) and the even distribution of the population throughout the territory of the country. With respect to population growth, Rousseau stipulates that it be natural, not immigrant-based; a naturally growing population indicates general prosperity. With respect to population distribution, an even distribution indicates a predominantly agrarian population; “it is big cities which exhaust a state and cause its weakness”; indeed, “France would be much more powerful if Paris were annihilated” (V.469). 

If you want to understand a people, get out of the cities. “You gain nothing by seeing the apparent form of a government disguised by the machinery of administration and the jargon of administrators if you do not also study its nature by the effects it produces on the people and throughout all the levels of administration” (V.469). Outside the cities you will see the land—quite literally, the country—and the people who live on it, “who constitute the nation” (V.469). What is more, “the closer they are to nature, the more [the people’s] character is dominated by goodness,” as Rousseau has made evident by his description of Emile’s education at every stage, his education in self-government by means of constant attention to things, to facts, to the limits imposed upon human passions and imaginings by nature, which is the true ‘governor’ or ‘tutor’ (V.469).

His travels completed, and “with a heart no less tender than it was before his departure, Emile brings back to [Sophie] a more enlightened mind, and he brings back to his country the advantage of having known governments by all their vices and peoples by all their virtues” (V.471). Having been introduced to “some man of merit” in each country he has visited, Emile will correspond with them regularly, a “useful and agreeable” practice which serves as “an excellent precaution against the empire of national prejudices which attack us through life and sooner or later get some hold on us” (V.471) by “giv[ing] us the means to pit one set of prejudices unceasingly against the other and thus to guarantee ourselves from them all” (V.471). And so Emile will be armed with another way to combat the sway of opinion, with its insistent appeals to amour-propre.

 

4. Combatting the apolitical

If anything, Emile returns from his travels more the ‘idealist’ than the ‘cynic,’ very far indeed from having been corrupted by foreign ways. He determines not to depend upon his inheritance. “Rich or poor, I shall be free. I shall not be free in this or that land, in this or that region; I shall be free everywhere on earth. All the chains of necessity are broken for me; I know only those of necessity.” (V.472). Death itself is no punishment but yet another “law of nature” (V.472). “Come, give me Sophie, and I am free.” (V.472).

The governor kindly brings another natural necessity to his pupil’s attention. “This extravagant disinterestedness does not displease me at your age. It will decrease when you have children.” (V.473). Yes, it is true that human laws and other conventions usually disguise “only individual interest and men’s passions” (V.473). And it is true that “the eternal laws of nature and order to exist,” taking the place of “positive law” for “the wise man” (V.473). They are indeed “written in the depth of his heart by conscience and reason: It is to these that he ought to enslave himself in order to be free” (V.473). These truths notwithstanding, however, “where is the good man who owes nothing to his country?” (V.473). In the state of nature, a man would live “happier and freer”; he would be good but not, as the governor has emphasized before, lacking in virtue (V.473). “The public good, which serves others only as a pretext, is a real motive for him alone. He learns to struggle with himself, to conquer himself, to sacrifice his interest to the common interest.” (V.473). It is the laws which “have taught him to reign over himself,” although they have surely not made him free (V.473). 

Therefore, Emile’s generous cosmopolitanism, his proto-Kantianism, will not suffice. You were born in civil society and you thereby contracted duties to it. “Your compatriots protected you as a child; you ought to love them as a man,” living among them, making yourself useful to them by living “where they know where to get you if they ever have need of you” (V.473-474). 

Rousseau thus teaches aristocrats to prefer natural to conventional right while never abandoning civil society and their duties within it. He would have them abandon the great city, Paris, the palace at Versailles where absolute monarchs have drawn them in order to corrupt and rule them. Live, then, in the countryside with Sophie, but “do not let so sweet a life make you regard painful duties with disgust, if such duties are ever imposed on you,” as Roman Cincinnatus consented to be called from his plow to save the republic. And, of course, modern France being no ancient Rome under the republic, “if this function is onerous to you there is a decent and sure means to free yourself from it,” namely, “to fulfill it with enough integrity so that it will not be left to you for long” (V.474-475). “As long as there are men who belong to the present age, you are not the man who will be sought out to serve the state” (V.475). With the impending regime change Rousseau has predicted, however, who knows?

 

5. The married couple

Trusted, the governor advises Emile and Sophie on the right conditions of intimacy. To Emile he urges respect. “Obtain everything from love without demanding anything from duty, and always regard Sophie’s least favors not as your right but as acts of grace,” the grace of nature (V.477). “The lover who has delicacy and true love” will discern “his beloved’s secret will”; be guided by it (V.477). “Even in marriage pleasure is legitimate only when desire is shared” (V.477).

The next day, alone with Sophie, he explains why he said these things. It is true that “in becoming your husband, Emile has become the head of the house. It is for you to obey, just as nature wanted it”—it being recalled that men are physically stronger than women (V.478). “However, when the woman resembles Sophie, it is good that the man be guided by her. This is yet another law of nature.” (V.478). As I said yesterday, you will be “the arbiter of his pleasures”; this will “give you as much authority over his heart as his sex gives him over your person” (V.478). Accordingly, so long as “you reign over yourself” you will “reign over him” by means “of love”—if “you make your favors rare and precious,” never severe but modest, never cold but chaste (V.478-479). 

This is how he will come to “give you his confidence, listen to your opinions, consult you about his business, and decide nothing without deliberating with you about it,” enabling you to “bring him back to wisdom”—very much in accordance with the meaning of her name—when “he goes astray,” leading him “by gentle persuasion” and “mak[ing] yourself lovable in order to make yourself useful” (V.479). The governor calls this “us[ing] coquetry in the interests of virtue and love to the benefit of reason” (V.479). 

This is how a marriage can be made to endure. “Enjoyment wears out pleasures, and love is worn out before all others,” but if you can make it last for a while, “a sweet habit fills the void it leaves behind, and the attraction of mutual confidence succeeds the transports of passion” (V.479). “When you stop being Emile’s beloved, you will be his wife and his friend,” the mother of his children, “his other half to such an extent that he can no longer do without you” (V.479). The link the governor has forged between eros and agape (reconceived as natural), love and compassion, finds its embodiment in an (again natural) version of the Christian conception of the marital bond as ‘one flesh.’

Then, in front of them both, the governor announces, “Here my long task ends, and another’s begins,” Sophie’s task as Emile’s new “governor” (V.479). But when Sophie becomes pregnant with their first child, Emile invites the governor to remain, to “advise and govern us” both (V.480).