Where does the word “mentor” come from?

Mentor in Homer

In the Odyssey, Mentor is an old friend of Odysseus, left in charge of the household when the king sailed for Troy. He speaks once in his own voice, in book 2, scolding the people of Ithaca for sitting still while the suitors devour the estate and Telemachus’s mother holds them off with her web. Nearly everything else ‘Mentor’ does in the poem is done by a goddess wearing his face. Athena takes his likeness and voice to promise Telemachus a ship, sails with him to Pylos, and coaches him when he is too shy to question old King Nestor:

“Some things, Telemachus,” answered Minerva, “will be suggested to you by your own instinct, and heaven will prompt you further; for I am assured that the gods have been with you from the time of your birth until now.”

Butler, like the Romans, calls her Minerva. That is a mentor’s method in one sentence: trust yourself, and help will come. When she leaves, she flies off in the form of an eagle. Back on Ithaca, the man who lent the ship is baffled: he saw Mentor go aboard as captain, or some god exactly like him, and yet he has seen the real Mentor in town since. Athena wears that face again in the fight in the hall and in the poem’s last lines. Her first disguise, in book 1, is a different man, Mentes, king of the Taphians; the two names are easy to mix up.

From Homer’s name to Fénelon’s word

For more than two thousand years Mentor stayed a minor name. The word came from France. François Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai, was tutor to the Duke of Burgundy, Louis XIV’s grandson, and for his pupil he wrote a prose epic about Telemachus’s travels in search of his father. He never meant to publish it; he later said it escaped him through a dishonest copyist. Les Aventures de Télémaque appeared in 1699. Louis XIV read its lessons on kingship as an attack on his own reign, and Fénelon never regained his place at court. Readers across Europe made the book a bestseller anyway.

The novel opens where the Odyssey left a goddess grieving: “Calypso ne pouvait se consoler du départ d’Ulysse,” Calypso could not get over the departure of Ulysses. Telemachus is shipwrecked on her island, and through every adventure his guide is Mentor, teaching him to rule justly, distrust flatterers and love his people. Only at the end does Mentor reveal himself as Minerva, Athena’s Roman name, and take his leave: “Fils d’Ulysse, écoutez-moi pour la dernière fois,” son of Ulysses, listen to me for the last time.

How a name became a word

Fénelon’s Mentor was so famous that his name turned into a description. Within a century of the book, a mentor meant any wise and trusted guide, in French and in English, and the word has kept that meaning ever since. So the answer comes in two parts: the name is Homer’s, the word is Fénelon’s.

Is mentor a Greek word?

The name is Greek, and it may carry its own meaning. Many linguists connect it with the ancient root men-, ‘to think,’ which also gave English mind and Latin mens, so Mentor may mean something like ‘adviser.’ The translator Samuel Butler had a sharper suspicion: the line that brings Mentor to his feet in book 2 repeats, almost word for word, a line that introduces Nestor in the Iliad, and Butler wondered whether the name was coined from Nestor’s. Either way, the Odyssey’s real teacher is a goddess, and what she teaches Telemachus is to stop needing one. At the very end, it is she, in Mentor’s shape, who makes the peace.