οὐ γὰρ ἀπὸ δρυὸς ἐσσὶ παλαιφάτου οὐδ’ ἀπὸ πέτρης
‘For surely you are not from an oak, going back to an old saying, or from a rock.’
In asking the disguised Odysseus to reveal his origins, Penelope says she assumes that the genealogy of this unidentified man is not all that difficult to trace: surely this man does not need to trace his ancestry all the way back to the prototypes of humanity, which would be an exercise in a special kind of mythology that can best be described as anthropogony. In the anthropogonic myths that have survived in the Greek language—as also in other Indo-European languages—two most common alternative versions claim that the First Human originated from a tree or from a rock. The tree is commonly pictured as an oak. The epithet palaiphato- ‘going back to an old saying’ here at O.19.163 applies not only to the proverbial drūs ‘oak’ but also to the comparably proverbial petrē ‘rock’. Both versions of such an anthropogonic myth center on a violent act that is simultaneously destructive and regenerative: the ignition, as it were, of the First Human happens when a thunderbolt strikes a primordial tree or rock. Details in GMP ch. 7, “Thunder and the Birth of Humankind.” See also Forte 2015.