Some, on the other hand, go to court over a child because they "have a right" to them and are utterly unwilling to admit that the child's right should be primary. I had a patient whose ex-husband took their two-year-old daughter every other week from Prague to Ostrava, where he lived in a hostel with his partner. The little girl started wetting herself and screaming in her sleep. It took three months before, with the help of an acquaintance of mine—a willing lawyer and ombudsman—the distressed child could return to her mother.
Hellenic culture, to which we so readily refer, has left us two damnably different types of father. The first is Odysseus, who did not want to take part in the Trojan expedition and feigned madness, much as during my youth and adulthood the applicants for the "blue booklet"[^1] did. When Agamemnon's recruiters came for him, they found him behind a plow, plowing sand and sowing salt into it[^1]. Odysseus was cunning, but among the delegation there was an even more cunning man named Palamedes, who placed Odysseus's little son Telemachus before the plowing man. Odysseus avoided him, from which everyone concluded that he was sane and had to go to war.
The image of Odysseus as a wily fellow who can talk his way out of any jam is simplistic. The fullness of Odysseus's character is complemented by the fact that Moira[^2]—a beast so fearsome even the gods were afraid of her—allotted by lot to Odysseus such a measure of suffering that no other mortal could bear. Thus there is the fateful bond of an eternal heavy burden, which, in the absence of wartime opportunities and maritime adventures, is fatherhood.
The opposite is Oedipus's father, Laius. He was supposed to teach the neighboring king's son horsemanship and instead sexually abused him. For that, the boy's father cursed him, and part of the curse was that if Laius had a son, that son would become the ruin of the entire lineage. So Laius strenuously avoided conception, until one day his wife Jocasta stopped using contraception and—bam! The baby was on the way.
When the boy was born, the father pierced his feet, bound them with a strap, and gave him to a servant to abandon the child in the woods, where wild beasts would tear him apart. That did not happen, however, and the child was taken in by the neighboring king Polybus, who named him Oedipus (literally a diminutive for "swollen foot"). Upon reaching adolescence, the young man learned at the oracle that he would be the ruin of his parents, and since no one had informed him about his adoption, he considered Polybus and his wife to be his parents. To outwit the prophecy, he fled into the world.
On the way, he argued at a crossroads with some old man and, in an escalating quarrel, killed him. He had no idea it was his biological father, Laius. After defeating the Sphinx, he made his way to Thebes, where the young queen Jocasta was waiting in vain for her husband's return. He still did not return; moreover, the young hero was handsome, so they married and had several children. And he had no idea she was his mother (she must have had him young, as she was still very attractive). Now the hypocritical gods began demonstratively to shudder with disgust, and although Oedipus had gotten into this mess as innocently as Pilate into the Creed, they sent a plague upon Thebes that would only abate once the city's moral credit was normalized.
Sophocles conceived his play Oedipus Rex as a detective story well worth seeing. It begins at the end, and the theatre company recalls an ancient actor whom they drag out of a retirement home onto the stage to play the servant who was supposed to take the child into the woods. As the story unravels, the truth comes to light (meaning on stage, though not in a separate character; for duller audience members, a chorus stands at one edge of the scene, connecting and commenting on the action), and the consequences follow. Jocasta hangs herself; Oedipus gouges out his eyes, which did not see what they ought to have seen, and, accompanied by his daughter Antigone, sets off on a long journey ending with Oedipus's reconciliation near Athens and his death.
So there are two classical models, and another exemplar can be Zeus, who truly had "children like weeds," while with his lawful wife—extraordinarily jealous and vengeful Hera (not to be confused with the brand of butter bearing her name)[^3]—he had only three: Ares, Hephaestus, and Hebe. The father could not protect Hephaestus, and his raven mother Hera, for his weakness and ugliness, hurled him from Olympus. Nymphs saved him and taught him the smith's craft. His wife was Aphrodite, who was unfaithful to him with Ares. When he caught them in an ingenious net, he was mocked by the other gods. His fate is thus that of a deprived man, lame to boot. Miroslav Plzák[^4] advises against entering marriage with jealous and quarrelsome women. He likewise advises women against marrying an erotomaniac. Thus the chief Olympians are an example of an ordinary marriage, an example taken to extremes on both sides. They were lucky—and we unlucky—that there was no marriage counseling on Olympus; we would have had plenty of quality material. To escape a jealous scene, Zeus gave birth to the goddess of wisdom, Pallas Athena, himself; he had her spring from his own head. It is the only recorded birth by a man; it is not known whether he had labor pains in his head.
A view from the other side is offered by Marcus Aurelius[^5]: "From my father I learned gentleness, and unyielding persistence in every well-considered decision; also indifference to so-called honors, and a love and steadfastness in work… He knew how to keep his friends, and his affection for them was never fickle or blind. In all circumstances he was self-sufficient and always in good measure. He thought far ahead and provided for every little detail in advance, but without ostentation. He rejected ovations and all flattery, constantly watched over the needs of the empire, curtailed public expenditure, and bore reproaches in these and similar matters well." Given the quality of the author of these lines, I am convinced this is true.
Lest we do Homer an injustice, Luigi Zoja draws our attention to one positive example: Paris's brother Hector from the Iliad. As is well known, the good guy always gets the short end, so nothing special is known about this hero, even though he was an example of a model, indeed an exemplary father, while also a patriot. Returning from battle, Hector turns to the Trojan women and gives them hope and courage. He refuses offered rest and shelter within the walls of Troy and never stops thinking about its defense. Then he seeks his wife and little son. When he finds them, the child is frightened by his armor and helmet. So Hector removes the plumed helmet, takes his son in his arms, and with a characteristically paternal gesture, lifts him high[^6]. And whereas until now the epic had always only glorified the past, Hector here breaks the laws of epic convention and cries out: "Zeus and all you gods, grant that this my son may be as I am, preeminent among the Trojans, equally strong and mightily rule in Ilium, and may someone someday say of him: 'He is far better than his father!'"[^7]
At a time when men fought only for honor and glory, Hector fights also for his children. — Luigi Zoja
Hector ultimately fell in single combat with Achilles, who behaved despicably: despite a promise of dignified burial for the defeated, he tied Hector's body to his chariot, dragged it around the walls, and then cast it to the dogs and vultures. In the end, he let himself be persuaded and bribed, and returned the body to Priam, Hector's father. Nevertheless, under Greek law, he had committed hubris—an unacceptable transgression of ethical rules. Therefore Nemesis appears in the form of Paris's deadly arrow, which the god Apollo guided into Achilles' heel, his only vulnerable spot.
Hector, in the world of ancient Greece, comes across almost with a Judeo-Christian view of the family. He establishes the model of a patriarchal family with a father who is simultaneously a member of the family and a warrior against a hostile world. Zoja[^8] adds to this: Fathers, sons of culture and history, one day made a covenant of responsibility toward women and children. This responsibility had no instinctive foundation; it had to be learned and, in the course of self-education, continuously instilled into the individual psyche. Observance of this duty is threatened not only from without by a possible decline of culture, but also by psychic forces that tempt fathers back toward indifference.
We can clearly see this "possible decline of culture," and the decline of fatherhood as well.
[^1]: I saw this method of spring sowing as a boy at my grandfather's on small fields, where the plow was most often pulled by an ox with a ring in its nose (piercing?) and the plowman scattered grain from a large kangaroo-like pouch on his belly into the furrow being cut. [^2]: In Odysseus's time, Moira was singular; later she tripled, and Clotho spun the thread of life, Lachesis wound it, and Atropos cut it at the appointed time. [^3]: Hera is also the name of a brand of butter on the Czech market. [^4]: Plzák, M.: Key to Choosing a Partner for Marriage. Repeated citation. [^5]: Marcus Aurelius: Meditations. Svoboda, Prague, 1975. [^6]: In the textbook on nonverbal communication—Jurgen Ruesch and Weldon Kees: Nonverbal Communication, University of California Press, 1956—there is a pair of photographs showing how parents show the world to a small child. While the mother bends down to the child's level, the father lifts the child to his level. As the Iliad and everyday experience show, sometimes even higher. [^7]: Iliad VI.476–479 [^8]: Zoja, L.: The Decline of the Father. Repeated citation.