What The Odyssey Is Actually About

[00:00:02]Christopher Nolan, probably the most important [music] director in the business, has taken on a story which historically [music] has been too big for Hollywood. It resonates more deeply the older you get by it revealing that many things we're [music] told in life are a sham and a distraction and to keep us away from [music] the things which deep down we know actually matter. And those are people and place. Life requires that quieter heroism of sacrifice and suffering for whatever one takes [music] to be the higher good. And I think what's really interesting about Nolan taking on the Odyssey is that it's the kind of film Hollywood doesn't want to make. The things I just described are against the grain of what not just Hollywood but a huge amount of cultural activity has been doing.

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[00:01:07][snorts] >> Dr. David Butterfield, welcome back to Trigonometry.

[00:01:10]>> It's a real joy to be back, gent.

[00:01:11]>> Oh, it's great to have you back. We only had you on recently uh to talk about ancient Greece in particular. It was an amazing conversation. It absolutely crushed. People loved it. Uh and so we thought we'd bring you back on. I don't know if you've heard, there's a movie about the Odyssey coming out. Um, it's based on a story, as I understand it, that has been reimagined through a radical feminist lens, which I'm sure has given it even more accuracy and and intellectual and rigor and vigor, as we'd expect. Um, and so we actually thought it might be a good time to talk about the Odyssey and tell that story.

[00:01:43]Uh, but first of all, based on what we've heard so far, uh, some of the interpretations of the Odyssey are quite interesting. What have you made of it?

[00:01:51]Well, first thing to say is indeed Christopher Nolan, probably the most important director in the business with a huge catalog of fundamentally brilliant films behind him, has taken on a story which historically has been too big for Hollywood. There's really only one attempt to make a film of the Odyssey way back in the 1950s. It's one of those sort of uh sand and sandals uh epics in technical, >> but it's not a celebrated film. And for the last 70 years, no one has had a go.

[00:02:23]Now Nolan has stepped forward and he's taken on what probably is the most important story in the western tradition. So it's a big deal.

[00:02:32]>> Uh and it comes out soon, but of course none of us have seen it. We've only seen the trailers. So there's a big caveat in anything I would want to say about Nolan's Odyssey, which is that no one's seen it. But from the trailers and from other other bits of information c circulating about it, there certainly are some interesting things going on within it.

[00:02:51]>> Like what?

[00:02:52]>> Well, for a start, we are attempting to tell the tale with historical realism.

[00:03:01]This is a thing Nolan has been very clear about in his interviews about the level of research that he his wife who actually is a trained classicist and the team have have have gone into in order to recreate what we might think a pure tale of fantasy. But for the Greeks it was meaningfully real. It was a depiction of their own world in the second millennium BC in the late Bronze Age, their heroic ancestors who yes were able to engage with the gods and with various monsters and so on, but they were seen as their forefathers. So there's a serious attempt made in the film to depict what uh civilization might have looked like at that moment just before it actually did collapse, the Bronze Age collapse in the 12th century. So that on the one hand is really interesting, but on the other there are some real problems when it comes to historical realism. If you're trying to tell a film uh about gods interacting with mortals, that probably has not happened. Uh that obviously in uh in in the realm of history. So what we can gauge uh so far is that the film will indeed focus on the one man at its heart Adysius and will attempt possibly following the structure of Homer's poem possibly not to chart his long 10ear struggle after the 10 years of the Trojan War to get home to his island to the son he has never seen since uh his baby years and to the wife who is currently beset by 108 men who want to be the man who will marry her and become the new king of his home island Ithaca.

[00:04:43]So that's the the structure as far as we can tell. Um but the main noise that has come out about the film to this point is not about its historical realism but about its striking choices when it comes to casting.

[00:05:00]And I presume you know something about this uh yourselves. But the one that's really got people talking which I think to some degree is interesting but to some degree is not that interesting is about the most beautiful woman in the history not just of the world but in the history of all world literature Helen.

[00:05:19]Helen, as you know, was the queen of Sparta, the wife of Menaaus, and she gets abducted by the Trojan prince Paris. Why? It all goes back to a different female figure and FOMO, the fear of missing out because way back when there was uh a woman called Fetis, a sea nymph, so lived under the sea but had divine powers and there was a prophecy that she would have a child who would be so powerful that he would overthrow Zeus.

[00:05:57]So Zeus tries to downgrade the power of Thetus and her future child by forcing this cenymph to marry a mortal. She's not going to marry a deity and therefore the offspring will be half divine and no no particular threat to Zeus himself. So a forced marriage happens and and Thetus marries Pelus who was a hero uh on the Argo, Jason and the Argonauts getting the golden fleece. So, a man with good heroic pedigree, but still a man. They have a wedding. Everyone's invited. Not just all mortals, but all deities.

[00:06:33]Except one person doesn't make the list.

[00:06:36]And that is Eris. Eris as a Greek word means chaos, discord, strife. And so, literally, if Eris turns up at the wedding party, there's going to be trouble.

[00:06:48]She learns that she's not on the invite list. And so she takes a golden apple and inscribes it with one Greek word, calistheare, which means for the most beautiful woman.

[00:07:01]Well, three goddesses at the party think this is literally addressed directly to them. There's ha, wife and indeed sister. Let's not get into that. of Zeus. [laughter] >> Athena, Athena, the goddess of wisdom and of marshall uh cunning and Aphroditi, literally the sex symbol, the embodiment of love. Well, they can't decide between them who actually is the most beautiful woman. So to settle it, Zeus says, "Let's find some yokal. Let's go into the middle of the countryside and find a shepherd and he can make the decision because I'm not making it [laughter] with my wife in the game. I'm not making that decision. So there there is the shepherd called Paris who also happens to be uh a prince of Troy, but he's doing his shephering work. Maybe it's Duke of Edinburgh or something.

[00:07:50]He's he's out [laughter] he's out there doing his thing.

[00:07:53]>> And he is presented with the three goddesses.

[00:07:57]>> Hia says, "Choose me. I'm the most powerful. I'll make you the ruler of all of Europe and all of Asia." Which is basically almost all of the known world to the Greeks. You'll be the most powerful man in the world.

[00:08:09]Athena says, "Okay, that's not bad, but I could give you the thing that really matters to humans. I could make you the most intelligent man in the world, and that would mean when it comes to the battlefield, you would just outsmart everyone. You would be the great hero."

[00:08:24]As for Aphroditi, who comes last, she says, "Well, I could just give you the the most beautiful woman in the world."

[00:08:31]And didn't take much deliberation. Paris says, "I'll choose that one. Thanks."

[00:08:36]and the typical [laughter] man and then the the the necessary has to happen which means Helen as I say the most beautiful woman in the world had to be taken from her husband and given to Paris as a prize and the tale is a bit ambiguous in different tellings but Menaus was away and Paris came over there helped by Aphrodite and seduced and abducted Helen. Why does that matter? Because her face is the face that launched a thousand ships. The whole of the Trojan War, the whole subject of the Iliad is about the Greeks not just trying to save their honor, but trying to restore to her rightful place in Sparta the woman who was wrongly taken by a Trojan. And so that whole sequence comes about from this troubled goddess Eris not being able to be at the party uh and the FOMO uh going loco.

[00:09:34]Um so to cast Helen is tricky.

[00:09:39]You need someone who credibly uh could be taken as one of the most beautiful women of all time. And none of us would want to make that call clearly. Uh it's a difficult one to do. But more troublingly, Helen was born from an egg because her her father was Zeus but in the form of a swan. And the swan and leader uh l e d a is the mother of Helen. Zeus as swan got with leader.

[00:10:08]Leader popped out an egg [laughter] and out of the egg Helen was born. So where are you going to find someone to cast with semi- divine semi-swan uh pedigree?

[00:10:18]It's not going to be an easy one.

[00:10:19]Anyhow, it's clear from the trailers and what we know that uh the actress Leita Nyongo has been cast as Helen and indeed as Helen's twin sister uh Clyame Neestra. We can come back to why she's interesting. Uh Leita Nyongo is of of Kenyan extraction Subsaharan and therefore uh clearly different from the mo the majority of the rest of the of the the castings in the film. Most people in the film are white. They're mostly American. Um, but Helen in and among them uh is appointedly uh different looking figure. Now, we could say that's not that interesting. Uh there is no realistic cast to call upon and if uh the decision is made that we'll have a a black actor as Helen, so be it. And you know, I've I've got a lot of sympathy with that view. It's not that interesting.

[00:11:14]On the other hand, it has been taken by many people to be a pointedly disruptive casting, one that stands out in a way that perhaps it's not meant to. For many people, it's not an issue of beauty that stands out in the way that Helen might.

[00:11:29]It's an issue of non-alignment with the broadly white casting of the remainder.

[00:11:35]>> Now, to be clear, we do not know precisely what the heroes of the Odyssey looked like.

[00:11:43]Nevertheless, for the Greeks who invented the tales, told them orally, and then wrote them down once the alphabet arrived, they were their ancestors. So, broadly speaking, the poem is about people of a Mediterranean uh ethnicity.

[00:12:00]The poem of Homer does not describe Helen in really any detail at all. We have the word calamos, which means pretty hair, nice hair. Well, that doesn't help us. But the one that's got a lot of attention is one of her epithets, one of her standard adjectives is lucolenos, which means having white arms. Now, if you're in a largely white society, that's not how you describe someone. I wouldn't say, "Oh, do you know Francis? You know, the he's the guy with the white arms."

[00:12:32]>> It's not a it's not a natural way to describe someone. So what that adjective probably means in effect even though it's literally white armed means a woman who kept her skin white and pale because she was of an aristocratic status where she wasn't out working wasn't getting tanned under the sun and therefore her arms were a sign of her high status.

[00:12:53]That then takes us to the unsurprising fact that she was conceived of as someone broadly speaking white in a Mediterranean context.

[00:13:02]So, in that sense, it is a very striking casting uh to go for. Uh she's a great actress, as far as I can tell. Uh but it's made a lot of noise.

[00:13:12]>> A very quick question on that. Um in in the Roman Empire, there would have been plenty of people from Africa in as part of it. Would that be fair?

[00:13:22]>> Uh it depends what you mean. If you mean people from the continent we call Africa, certainly the North African coast, >> but not Subsaharan >> was was part of the Roman Empire. the Berber kind of people are a much closer uh relation because the Phoenicians coming from modern Lebanon founded colonies on what we now call North Africa um and as such were broadly Mediterranean subsaharan as you say uh these people were known of tribes were known of and are occasionally described but they were cut off from both Roman rule and indeed general Roman society.

[00:13:58]So, black people uh do appear in Roman accounts, but there's an element of novelty and difference to them. There isn't conventional racism against non-white people in the Roman world. Uh it's more pointing out aesthetic differences rather than uh any kind of supremacy of whiteness. It's not a term used in the Roman or indeed in the Greek world. They didn't talk about whites and non-whites. What the Greeks talks talked about is us and the barbaroy, the blabbing non-Greeks. And you could be as white as as could be. It wouldn't matter. You're not Greek and therefore you're not good. [snorts] >> And so the Greek civilization preceding the Romans, I imagine there was even less contact with subsaran Africa at this point. Is that fair?

[00:14:45]>> Yeah, it would be it would be the sort of thing that would happen with far far ranging tradesmen or people journeying on on some some sort of mission or military campaign. There would not be, I think I can say perfectly clearly, there would not be in the Greekeaking world regular interaction with subsahara and Africans at any point in the ancient Greek world.

[00:15:06]>> And therefore, it would be quite inconceivable for the queen of Sparta to be a black woman, I think.

[00:15:11]>> Yeah. Well, if let's say for the sake of argument, there was a queen of Sparta in the early 12th century BC, that woman is definitely not black. Yes.

[00:15:21]>> And if she were black, they might have mentioned it. It would have been a more helpful adjective than Luc Lucolinos to say um she was black. Now it so happens that when where where when Homer's Odyssey begins, Poseidon, the god of the sea, brother of Zeus, has headed deep into Africa to hang out with the Ethiopians >> who whose ethnicity is quite hard to describe, but they were definitely dark skinned, black skinned. And so there's an element of mixing real human geography with a sort of fantastic land where the sun sets uh among the land of the Ethiopians. So it's not an unknown world, but it's not one that's part of of Greek society. No.

[00:16:04]>> So let's focus on the story of the Odyssey, which is actually one of my favorites. It doesn't matter how many times I hear it, I still think it's the greatest story ever told. So So let's start. Uh let's I know the book or the book the poem starts in the middle of the journey but let's start at the beginning of Adysius's journey chronologically. Where was he?

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[00:17:00][snorts] He was in Troy. So, we will know plenty about and we'll talk about the two great herriic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad comes first both in that its action is earlier. It's about the war, not what happened after the war, but probably has a composition.

[00:17:19]It's the old uh the more more complicated poem in in several ways. The Iliad famously does not tell the most famous events of the Trojan War.

[00:17:30]>> It doesn't talk about the Trojan horse and the fall of Troy. It doesn't talk about the death of Achilles shot in his Achilles heel. Instead, it focuses specifically on a character flaw in Achilles which both makes him a hero and leads to tragic consequences. That's his madness, his wroth, his anger, >> which leads him to step away from the battlefield for a long time and thereby cause the death of many many comrades because without Achilles they were in trouble. So that's set in the 10th year of this 10-year war out in Troy, which in our terms is in northwest Turkey, uh, across the Aian. And then the Odyssey does not begin straight after the Iliad.

[00:18:15]In fact, it's in the seventh year of the 10-year wanderings of uh of Adysius that the action begins. So, where is he and how have we got here?

[00:18:30]He doesn't appear until book five. Books one to four are really important for some of the things we'll talk about.

[00:18:37]They're about the baby who has become a boy and now has become a man but has ne has no memory or recollection of his father Adysius because he was a babe in arms when duty called and Adysius had to leave his family. Adysius didn't want to do that. And he actually pretended to be mad, insane, so that he would somehow avoid the call of war. And he was going around doing mad things like putting salt on his crops when the the team came to call on him. And they tested him tested his madness by putting the baby in front of a plow. And just when it was about to be torn apart by the the plow share, suddenly Adysius snaps back into life and says, "Okay, it was just a stunt. I'll go.

[00:19:23]>> So that boy called Tmicus whose Greek name means the guy far from battle has become a man without a father figure in the house. And in those four early books he's trying to become a man without a clear model. And he goes on a bit of a tour meet some meet some old warriors and tries to get a sense of how he can assert authority over all of these suitors who who are eating him out of house and home. As for Adysius, in that seventh year of his wanderings, he's trapped by a sex mad goddess. He's It's a tough tough gig. He's trapped on the island of Ogia.

[00:20:00]>> My heart bleeds for him.

[00:20:02]>> Bleeds for him. But he is racked with one of the great pains of all.

[00:20:07]Nostalgia.

[00:20:09]>> He has algos pain for his nosttos.

[00:20:12]Nostto is the most important word in the Odyssey. It is the journey home, the return back to where you belong. Both in terms of place, but also in terms of people. That is the one thing motivating Adysius in his struggles. But this goddess Calypso, whose name means the concealer, has managed to successfully hide Adysius on his own on this island and every day sleeps with him. Every morning he heads down to the beach and just cries all day. That's what we're told about the man.

[00:20:45]It looks as though the hero Adysius, this clever figure who invented the Trojan horse and therefore took down Troy, is going to die in complete unknowable um anonymity. His name means nothing. No one's visiting him. No one knows where he is and he stands for nothing.

[00:21:06]But Athena, the goddess up in the clouds, has a very soft spot for Adysius. She regards him as a mortal version of her, someone who's really got the clever and the cunning to get out of difficult situations. So Athena begs that uh a message be sent from the gods by a Hermes to say, "Calypo, enough is enough. You've had your seven years with the man. Let him go." And he is allowed to go. And in his wanderings thereafter, we learn about what happened before and what happened after he got there. and he's been through some pretty wild adventures.

[00:21:45]>> So, let's talk about these adventures.

[00:21:48]Uh >> the one that everybody knows, the most famous one is the son of Poseidon, the Cyclops.

[00:21:56]>> Exactly. The Cyclops are a race and one of them called Polyphimas is at the heart of this story in in in book nine.

[00:22:06]The cyclopes are odd. Not because they're massive giants, not because they've only got one big eye in the middle of their head, nor indeed because they eat humans and uh in that sense sort of cannibalistic.

[00:22:17]>> They're odd because they stand as a rejection of everything the Greeks thinks makes a civilization. When I was last on, we talked about some of the terms that would allow you to define something as a civilization or not.

[00:22:32]Well, the cyclopes on their island are set up as a sort of anti- civilization.

[00:22:36]They don't meet one another and talk about politics. They don't set legal codes. They don't have any sort of real code of honor among them. They live as savage individuals, which means they will not respect the one thing that in the Greek world is the most important, genear.

[00:22:57]Genear means being a good host. And this still exists in the Greek world. You know, we've been in Greece together. But if if if you appear as a stranger at a Greek a Greek's home, you will be given food, drink, and it may be even board.

[00:23:13]You may be able to stay the night because that's the right thing to do.

[00:23:17]And in ancient Greece, this was so important. It was a sacred duty that you offer this help to someone even before you find out who they are.

[00:23:27]and Genia, the act of good hospitality is completely trashed when Adysius and his crew land on the island of the Cyclopes.

[00:23:38]But it's doubly trashed. It's not just Polyphimas who abuses his writer's host by eating uh six of Adysius's crew, then rolling a big boulder in front of his cave and trapping them forever. It's also abused in turn by Adysius. Adysius on arriving in Polyphimas's cave, first thing he does is says, "Okay, what can I nick and there's loads of wheels of cheese and the crew are quite into their cheese by this point and they they steal before they encounter the host."

[00:24:10]>> So, there's a there's a breakdown on both sides of what it means to be a proper Greek. Anyway, you will know the tale. Our viewers will know the tale, too. But to put a long story short, with the uh with the boulder rolled in front of the cave, they can't kill Polyphimas.

[00:24:30]The boulder is so large that all of the men could not move it. They can only get out if Polyphimas himself somehow removes it. But Polyphimas has said he's going to eat them all and that's that.

[00:24:44]So Adysius uses his cunning and blinds that single eye of Polyphimas as he sleeps. He's been made drunk by this powerful wine and he's blinded by a huge stake. Then Adysius and his crew get to the sheep which are at the back of the cave and they hang from the bottom of the sheep. And as he counts them out and puts them out to pasture, wondering what on earth's happened in his blinded state, the men are able to be free. Now, that should be the end of the story. A clever trick to get out of pretty hot water.

[00:25:20]>> There's one thing you've missed. No man.

[00:25:22]>> Oh, of course. Yes, exactly that. And and there's there's two levels to that.

[00:25:26]Thank you, Francis. So, even though, as I said, the cyclopes are sort of pretty individualistic. They don't gather together in the way the Greeks think we should. If there's a major problem, they might shout alarm and they might come and help each other. Well, one of the things you are meant to do as a good host and as a good guest is to give your name, to give your identity. That's the most important thing about you. And for whatever reason, doubtless cunning, Adysius does not give that name. He gives a name that sounds sim similar, namely udes, not odos, but udes. But that means nobody, no man. So what happens when Polyphimas learns of this and then is attacked is he cries aloud, "No one is harming me. No one is trying to kill me." And the rest of the cyclopes think, "Okay, thanks for sharing [laughter] and we'll be on our way." Then >> the flip side to that is that in a sense Adysius in that moment was acting like a nobody by not following the code of hospitality and standing up as the man he's meant to be.

[00:26:37]>> He was actually losing the real identity of the hero. But hubris in Greek tragedy will always take you down. That arrogance that makes you feel you're a little better than even the gods perhaps.

[00:26:51]does become the downfall of uh Adysius and kills a great great number of his men. Why? Because once they've got off the island, they're sailing away.

[00:27:02]Adysius calls back to the enraged Polyphimas on land. Now, I'll tell you, it's Adysius who did this. Adysius, son of Lertes from Ithaca, I'm the guy. And sort of raises two fingers at him. Well, as you said, Polyphimas is the son of Poseidon, and Poseidon controls the sea.

[00:27:24]So, Polyphimmas now has the one thing he needed to make a curse, the actual name of Adysius. And the curse is sent up to the god of the sea or down to him, wherever he is at the time. and he promises that he will cause untold troubles and death on the sea for Adysius and his crew. And for the rest of the the narrative, Poseidon kills Adysius's men because Adysius couldn't keep his mouth shut and wanted to take the credit.

[00:27:53]>> And that's a fascinating thing about Adysius is that his greatest strength is his greatest weakness. And that's it's such and the way that you see it's a very modern hero, isn't he? In many ways, because he's not like Achilles. He doesn't have this incredible strength and power all like Heracles, who was a demigod. This was somebody who's very much in the realm of the mortal.

[00:28:18]>> That's right. And in a in the Greek's mind, he's more Greek in the sense that not all of us are are set out to be heroic warriors whose marshall valor will simply win the day by force.

[00:28:30]Instead, for the Greeks, it's about words, about how you use your brain to solve a situation. And that, as you rightly say, is the great virtue of Adysius. He is Polomeis, a guy with all of the ideas. He's Polomeos, the guy with all of the tricks. He's Polythropos, a guy who can turn things in all sorts of different ways. He's Polron, he's got loads of mental cleverness working within him. Um but fundamentally uh that is how the Greeks wanted to engage with the world around them. That that is their challenge as we as we mentioned when we talked about philosophy to impose order and sense on a world that seems uh chaotic. So in in a real sense the Odyssey moves on from the Iliad. The Iliad is about the tragedies of the battlefield and when human force causes damage to those around you in in ways you can't predict.

[00:29:28]The Odyssey is about two things. It's about the power of the mind over the body and it's about the all important draw of those two things that give life meaning, people and place.

[00:29:44]Adysius realizes, as Achilles realized only once he had died, the heroic code of the Iliad, the heroic bronze age code of what the good life and the good death look like is hollow.

[00:29:59]There's this concept of the callos thanos, the beautiful death. Well, what's that? Well, for a start, it's death. So, it's the end of your life.

[00:30:07]And secondly, it's dying on the battlefield in the middle of a killing spree.

[00:30:12]>> Why is that good? because you will win ktos and klettos literally means being talked about. People will hear of that moment but you have to die to win that which creates this catch 22 almost paradox which is the best thing a man fighting a war to defend his family can do is to die in that war and not return to the family he was fighting for.

[00:30:38]One of the most moving scenes in Homer's Odyssey, which is is such a powerful poem uh in in all manner of ways, is when Adysius confronts the ghost of Achilles in the underworld and Achilles says, "You've just been praising me about being, you know, a great fighter, saying I'm a great fighter now down in the underworld." Well, I'll tell you this. I would rather be the lowest level surf serving as a slave on the poorest estate possible than be the king of the whole of Hades. It means nothing to have lost your life. You need to live and thrive. And the reason that's so resonant for Achilles is his mother told him early on in the Iliad he had a choice. Very unusual that a Greek hero can have any say over their fate. It's all predetermined.

[00:31:34]>> He has a choice. There's a a high road and a low road. He either will die young on the battlefield as the greatest warrior of all time, but he'll die. Or he can retreat from the battlefield, go home and live a long and happy life with the family he will build. Those are his options. And it looks as though he's going to take the latter option at a stage in the Iliad.

[00:31:59]But only when his closest companion, possible uh lover Patrick, is killed on the battlefield is he brought back in to the life of the warrior and does indeed die the uh the young death foretold of him. He now says to Adysius, "It was a sham. I shouldn't have followed my own clos, my own lust for glory. I should have headed home and done what really matters. uh in life. And Adysius is in the same place. The goddess, the sex goddess on the island for seven years is no good. He has been robbed of being a father. He's been robbed of the childhood of his son. And the best he can do is to try and salvage something with the little time that remains. And when they meet, one of the most beautiful and poignant simileies in the whole of the poem is told. Tmicus finally realizes that the dad he couldn't remember is back after 20 years of toil.

[00:32:58]They embrace and they start wailing. But their wailing, the uncontrollable grief is described as the wailing that ospreys or vultures make when as parents they see that their chicks have been stolen by humans before they could fly. So the reu the reuniting of son and father is treated like a pair of parents who've lost the one thing they were meant to do in the world namely have a childhood emerge from them. It's extremely poignant.

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[00:34:08]For me, the scene that changed how I read the whole thing is Calypso offering Adishious immortality if he stays with her and he turns it down. He picks a mortal life, an aging wife, a home that might not even want him back anymore.

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[00:34:42]>> That's very powerful. And David, just returning to the chronology.

[00:34:47]>> How does uh do do we know in the Odyssey how uh he ends up captured by Calypso, the sex goddess?

[00:34:56]>> We do.

[00:34:57]>> Well, take us from the Trojan War through to that moment, >> of course. So, uh, Troy falls, the Trojans lose. One of the Trojans ends up heading, uh, over to Italy and founds the Roman race. So, the Romans believe they were from the Trojans. Uh, but as for the Greeks, they've won. They get their booty, which is both, uh, material wealth and people, concubines. They head back home to the different parts of Greece or the Greek speaking world, and that should be that. But for Adysius and his crew of maybe 500 600 men in the 12 ships he brought, things go wrong pretty early. They stop uh at uh a place where the Kikonians live. They instantly raid the place, steal the women, steal the property, and they actually lose a battle. So the first thing they do is basically abuse another part of the ancient world.

[00:35:56]They're then cast onto uh a different island and there they meet huge giants who are cannibalistic, the the lystragonians and that's just a straightforward disaster and uh they flee. But the really interesting place they go to in these early wanderings is the place of the lotus eaters, >> the lofphagagoy.

[00:36:20]And this is a community which has found there's a certain flower you can eat.

[00:36:25]And if you eat the flower, you lose all longing for the things that gave your life meaning. You you lose a longing for your true home, for your family. You just tap out. And it's a land of addicts who've given up on what orientated their life. And Adysius sees this. Although some of his men become lost to this this this life, he sees that there's a a dark addiction at work here and his crew need to be remotivated by returning to what ultimately orientates you in life, namely family and homeland. So they keep going onwards. Uh they fall in uh with a witch called Cersei who turns many of the men into pigs and is attempting the same trick with Adysius, but he manages to to dodge it and he's able to escape from that island uh after a year.

[00:37:22]But all the time Adysius's crew are dying in different ways. We mentioned that six are lost uh on on the island of the cyclopes.

[00:37:33]But because of that cursing of Poseidon again and again they they fall uh they fall into various lethal and bizarre uh deaths.

[00:37:44]Cersei takes up one year of their time.

[00:37:46]But things meaningfully change for uh for uh Adysius when they reach the uh land of the sun god Helios. Helios as the son sees everything. And on his island he's got his favorite cattle. He loves those cows. Okay. And there's a very simple rule. Just don't mess with the cows.

[00:38:12]The winds are against uh Adysius and his crew at this time and they spend a month on the island and after a month some of the crew crack. They need beef. So they kill some of his cattle. And Helas is so outraged by this that he calls on Poseidon to turn up the pain for Adysius and his crew. And every single man dies except Adysius. They die in a shipwreck.

[00:38:40]Andius is on his own floating around as a single figure and he washes up on the island of Calypso who because there isn't a crew to reorientate and motivate Adysius, he's a lost man on that island. He is a nobody again.

[00:38:57]>> That takes us to the point where the narrative begins. Year seven, Athena says, "Come on, let's get him off there." And he builds a raft and heads to another land. And this is the this is the really interesting episode. Less fantastic, but it's the really important one. He lands on an island where a people called the Fiatians live. And they are perfect. They have a king and a queen who run a very Greeklike idilic utopian landscape. Everything is peaceful. They have the most beautiful daughter now Sika who's ready for marriage and she just wants to marry someone with kingly bearing. Well, here's Adysius turning up who despite his long-suffering wanderings is a king and he would be a perfectly suitable husband.

[00:39:48]Everyone on the island is willing this to happen. It would be perfect.

[00:39:54]Adysius rejects it. He says, "Even though you are more beautiful than anyone uh I could encounter, including my own wife." He said the same to Calypso, by the way. He wanted to marry him. I am destined to be returned and restored to my homeland. There is no other option for me. So again, it's it's it's got a a real moral weight to it.

[00:40:20]This idea that even if circumstances be they wealth or be they you know a particular change in your circumstances seem to on paper give you everything you need. It's not worth the weight of anything without if you cut your ties to the people and the places that give you your real identity not just in the Greek world but in our world.

[00:40:47]>> And uh where does she go from there?

[00:40:49]from there. Well, so he he tells his tales to the Fiatians who are probably the Phoenicians in disguise, a very interesting people who introduce the alphabet to the Greeks among other things. Uh he tells his tales of how he's got to that point, but fundamentally they accept his refusal uh of marriage and they the best seammen in the world take him back to Ithaca and that's where the second half of the poem begins. He gets home, but the last thing he can do is head home and say, "Hey guys, I'm Adysius. I'm back." Why?

[00:41:24]Because there are 108 men whose whole identity is predicated on being the new Adysius. The real Adysius is dead. No one's seen him for 20 years. No one's heard tell of him. He must be gone.

[00:41:38]All of these men didn't go to Troy.

[00:41:41]They're either the son the sons of warriors who went to Troy and therefore they've grown up without credible male role models or perhaps worse they're people who managed to dodge the draft and didn't head to Troy at all. They're true cowards. And so the nature of these men and they're portrayed in a a really uh nononsense fashion is that these are anti-men. These aren't real men. They're entitled, arrogant folk who believe that they've got status and purpose in the world when they've done nothing. They've done nothing to earn it. And they've never seen true men in action. But all of them are queued up in the hope that they will somehow win the hand of Penelope and be gifted wealth and uh comfort.

[00:42:28]Adysius is a decent warrior, but as someone who's been away for 20 years, he's not single-handedly going to take down 108 men. So what he does over the last half of this this poem, the last 12 books, it's in 24 books in the form we have it, is strategize as to how he can slowly bring on side old faithful friends who've never let him down. This includes his dog, Argos. And Argos is in a terrible way. He's mangy, sleeping on big pile of dung on his last legs. But he recognizes the true Adysius and is so overcome with joy, with dog joy.

[00:43:09]>> Um, uh, he dies. He dies in the moment.

[00:43:13]>> That's so That's so Greek.

[00:43:15]>> He dies in the moment.

[00:43:17]>> Exactly.

[00:43:18]Exactly. That's his beautiful death.

[00:43:20][laughter] But it's strategically helpful because the last thing Adysius would want in disguise is a dog trottting after him who senses that that something's up. So he turns to the the lowest people in in the social hierarchy. He turns to the swine herd, the pig herd, uh the cow herd, Feloius, and eventually he brings his son in >> and with the help of Athena, the four of them ultimately slaughter everyone. Now Adysius was told by Tyresius the great prophet when he went down to the underworld, not only that this needs to be done, but that it will happen. You've got to get home. you need to kill them all. He kills 12 women, which is a more controversial part of it. He kills 12 women who've been sleeping with the suitors, has them all hanged.

[00:44:08]Then he says, "That's not enough. All the families of the suitors are going to, you know, create a longer civil war." So he goes and kills all of them.

[00:44:16]And then Athena says, "Okay, stop.

[00:44:18]That's it. Let's now have peace." And that is the end of the poem. Can we just one because we missed out uh one of my favorite scenes which was with the bow.

[00:44:29]>> Of course. So the person I've said almost nothing about but is the other half of the poem who needs to be remembered when reading almost any line is Penelope.

[00:44:41]>> Penelope the wife of Adysius the queen of Ithaca.

[00:44:47]She has no idea what has happened to Adysius. She knows the Trojan War is over. She know she knows that that took 10 years. But where's the husband?

[00:44:57]Literally everyone else is either dead or they've got back. Any figure you can name in the Iliad, one of those things has happened. They're at home and they're happy or they're not because they're dead.

[00:45:09]Different sailors, different tradesmen pass through the palace and they tell her tales. They lie to her in order to get gifts from her. They make up stories about Adysius. and she's basically given up hope, but not entirely. She still has pistice. She has faith that Adysius lives. And so, she's been trying to hold off these 108 bastards for uh for for best part of a decade by various tricks.

[00:45:37]Her main trick was said, "Okay, I will marry one of you when I've finished this burial shroud I'm weaving."

[00:45:44]women in the Greek world, if they were elite women, the main thing they did domestically was weaving. And once that's finished, promise, I'll marry one of you. So, she spends her day weaving.

[00:45:55]But every night, she unpicks it and removes that progress and delays indefinitely. But the suitors now know this. They've learned the trick, and they're getting very heavy-handed that marriage has to happen. So Penelope, and it's very ambiguous what she's up to, says, "Okay, yeah, it's over. I need to marry one of you. So, let's set up a contest. We're going to have 12 axe heads in a row." And there's a hole on the axe heads. It's debated about quite what the hole looks like. And anyone who can string my former husband's bow and shoot an arrow through all 12 axe heads, they win me. They will be king and rightful ruler of Ithaca. Tmicus will have to leave, but he'll be a nobody. He won't be inheriting the the the kingdom, and everyone else will have to get back to their lives. So, it looks as though the one thing Adysius needs, restoration to his family, is about to be lost.

[00:46:54]Well, very cunningly, of course, this being Adysius, uh he is able, as a beggar, he's dressed as a beggar so as not to arouse suspicion. He's able to persuade the suitors who don't think much of him that he could at least have a go. None of them have been able to string the bow. They weren't strong enough. Only one guy was able to do it and that was Tmacus.

[00:47:16]>> But he's stopped by Adysius from doing it and everyone else gives up for the day and say, "We'll try again tomorrow, lads. Too too strong a bow." Adysius has a go. Instantly strings it. We're told he strings it with the same ease that someone can pluck the liar. That's Homer the poet plucking the liars. He tells us that and having strung the bow shoots it through the axes and then just starts slaughtering everyone. So he's armed and dangerous and ready to go and the threat disappears by virtue of complete dispatch of all 108 uh suitors >> and let's I love the story and you told it beautifully and every time I hear the story I get utterly enraptured and when I used to teach it to my kids didn't matter where the kids were from they love the story as well.

[00:48:06]>> It's a very happy ending.

[00:48:07]>> Yeah, exactly. It's revenge and that appeals to me now. [laughter] Um, let's look let's focus on Homer because he seems to me to be quite similar to Shakespeare. He created these amazing work of literature, but nobody knows if he wrote it or if he existed or even or who Homer was. Was he a collection of people? Is this oral storytelling that was then written down?

[00:48:32]What do we actually know about this person?

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[00:49:52]>> Brilliant question and and so important.

[00:49:55]So the ancient Greeks knew about the same as us about this thing we call Homer, i.e. almost nothing. Mhm.

[00:50:04]>> What existed was a very complex poetic tradition of song. In the evening, you'd get around the fire, have a few drinks, and some skilled musician would chant or sing a song in this very complicated metrical form which would tell a tale of the great figures of the past, the heroes that we've learned about since we were yehigh.

[00:50:28]That is an oral tradition. Why? Because the Greeks lost writing. They had the technology of writing in the second millennium BC.

[00:50:39]But the Bronze Age collapse >> cause them to lose that very skill. So there is a Greek dark ages in the 11th, 10th, 9th, 8th centuries. Nobody can write. They've forgotten how to. In the 8th century, the Phoenicians reintroduce an alphabet to the Greek world and the Greeks instantly take it up. That is when these oral poems which were told over a few hours each evening take a written form.

[00:51:08]The name Homer appears at that time. Who was he? He probably was a person. He probably was a very successful performer man in demand on the circuit. But crucially he will have inherited almost all the language, almost all the phrasiology and certainly almost all of the tales that are tied to his name.

[00:51:29]now. But maybe he had a way of framing and creating this really complex narrative pair of poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey in a way that was so successful and so powerful that they made it into writing. Those were the ones to pause in time >> to memorialize in a fixed form in writing. I believe Homer existed. Uh I believe he was from the Ionian part of Greece. So probably the eastern side of the Aian, the west coast of Turkey on an island or on the mainland there. He probably lived in the 9th or 8th centuries BC. He was a single genius but drawing on a tradition that was so old we can't even say how old it was. It was at least 500 years old and could well be over a thousand years old.

[00:52:20]allegedly he was blind but there's a poet uh inside the herriic epics who's a bard and is blind and that may be the reason for that it may be an inference the wrong way round not blind Homer putting in a blind poet to refer to him >> but someone assuming Homer was blind because the the bard he describes was blind >> could it have also been in Greek mythology when people are blind they have vision >> exactly yes that is really well put so two things to say uh Francis the first is that there is an extremely intimate connection for the Greeks between vision and knowledge.

[00:52:55]>> Mhm.

[00:52:56]>> The very word I know in Greek is ida.

[00:53:00]But that literally means I have seen.

[00:53:03]>> You find knowledge empirically through the senses. If you've experienced something, you know it in a meaningful way. It's not an intellectually abstract thing. You experience it and know. But there's also a version of seeing beyond.

[00:53:16]And you see beyond by getting rid of the distraction of your mortal vision. And it's the blind who have the ability to see beyond. So Tyreseius, whom I've already mentioned, that great prophet who could see the future, he was blind.

[00:53:32]Ironically, Edypus, the man who unwittingly kills his father and has children with his mother, blinds himself on discovery because he thought he knew it all. He thought he saw it all and could understand the situation. He knew nothing.

[00:53:49]>> And it's a sign of his transcendent knowledge that he blinds himself and takes away that that distracting vision which got in the way rather than liberated him. So you are right. It fits for Homer who begins the poem by saying Andra Musaon etc. Sing to me muse this deity sing through me of this polotropos anair this man of many twists and turns. So bards were thought to have a divine connection divine song was meant to transmit through them and you're right that a blindness suggested an ability to see beyond. And David, why is it that this still resonates? And the the reason I asked that question is I've literally taught the Odyssey to kids all over London.

[00:54:42]And it doesn't matter where the child comes from. It really doesn't. First generation immigrants, workingass boys, you know, kids from very affluent backgrounds. The moment you tell the story of the Odyssey, they're hooked.

[00:54:54]>> Yeah. I think it works on several levels. And like all great literature, it resonates with you differently at different stages in your life.

[00:55:02]>> No question, the entry point that excites the young are the weird and wonderful monsters uh of The Wanderings of Adysius. It's it's a fantastic uh series of episodes which have inspired literature ever since.

[00:55:18]But it resonates more deeply the older you get by it revealing that many things we're told in life are a sham and a distraction. There are many things trying to dull our senses and to keep us away from the things which deep down we know actually matter and those are people and place. I fundamentally believe that you cannot orientate yourself in the world meaningfully without having an attitude to space and time. The space you're from, the people who inhabit it, but crucially time, past and future. You need to have a relationship to the history that brought you here. And you need to have a stake in the future such that your actions matter beyond your own immediate benefit. And that is what the whole suffering of the Odyssey is about. And as you rightly say, that's a universal tale. And I think what's really interesting about Nolan taking on the Odyssey is that it's the kind of film Hollywood doesn't want to make. What I mean by that is the things I just described >> are against the grain of what not just Hollywood, but a huge amount of cultural activity uh has been doing. attempts to downplay that instinctive uh value we place on the family unit and on multigenerational responsibilities.

[00:56:44]That natural yearning for a return of some kind to the place that is home for you and no other place can be home.

[00:56:53]Well, those kind of orienting and and structuring devices in life are not helpful to certain political causes. And we would not struggle between the three of us to think of films which in some way have tried to complicate or problematize those natural yearnings.

[00:57:11]And we would struggle to think of films which really valorize and celebrate those things from the last 20 or 30 years. So, I'm really pleased that Nolan has taken the Odyssey on, and my only great and sincere hope is that people in watching it will see the things that I've said are so important about it and be inspired to go beyond the film and to engage with the poem itself, which is uniquely powerful.

[00:57:39]>> Because one of the things that I love about Greek mythology is when it talks about heroism, it's something that we forget. You know nowadays we all want to be celebrities.

[00:57:49]We all want to be heroes. But what we don't want is to sacrifice something.

[00:57:54]And the nature of the hero is you have to sacrifice something. You have to give something of yourself. You do. And and in the Iliadic heroic code that giving of something will be your own life. You will give your life to serve the heroism that is demanded of you. Your duty goes beyond you. Um, but there's also this really important Greek idea of of path mathos, learning through suffering, not just experience, but actually genuine hardship. And I think about those two Greek words all the time. That that is how you grow and change and do good things in the world. Genuine suffering.

[00:58:35]Now, you shouldn't will suffering upon yourself or or upon anyone else, but you will not learn without hardship. So one of Adysius's epithets is Pollas, the man who suffered so much. That's what fundamentally makes a new kind of hero out of Adysius rather than the sort of straightforward swashbuckling heroics of the battlefield. So these two foundational poems of the whole western literary tradition, the Iliad and the Odyssey begin with a model of heroism which is already difficult, complex, unfair and messy. It does not begin with a a golden age when just being a hero was a jolly good luck and uh everyone clapped at the end of the day. Um it's it's it's grim. But like life requires that quieter heroism of sacrifice and suffering for whatever one takes to be the higher good. Well, the more we talk to you with you rather and listen to you primarily actually about Greek mythology and and that period of time, I almost feel like the reason that these ideas as Francis talks about have stayed with us and have stayed relevant the Greeks were just a lot more honest about human nature than we are. Is that a fair comment? Yeah, I and I think it's it's multi-layered. They were much more instinctively aware of the failings of the human condition. All of their literature is motivated by finding these flaws that are in each of us, dramatizing them hopefully in a way which makes us people who aren't heroes, who aren't the stuff of myth, actually interrogate our own lives better. What did Socrates most famously say? Not that the the only thing I know is that I know nothing. More importantly, he said the unexamined life is not worth living.

[01:00:27]It's unlivable.

[01:00:29]And what that means is if you will not interrogate the nature of your character and the flaws within it, you're not living. You are not actually being human. You're not a human being if you can't address, as difficult as it may be, the the the the awkward and difficult parts of your own human soul.

[01:00:50]And the Greeks understand that, and it motivates almost everything they do artistically.

[01:00:57]other cultures do the same. But it won't surprise you for me to share my opinion with you, which is that despite this constant narcissism of talking about the self in our modern age, we're actually acutely uninterested in interrogating our own personal and societal problems. You know, your podcast exists >> in order to have the conversations which we deem difficult to have. Well, they weren't difficult for the Greeks. It was something that needed talking about. So let's talk about it. Let's use Logos to make progress. Now there are lots of barriers to having the kind of conversations and the sort of reflection that needs to happen in order for us to thrive as humans.

[01:01:41]>> Do you think part of it is also is that the Greeks fundamentally understood the tragedy of life? Because if you look at their plays, I mean they were fatalistic. They were the their outlook was fatalistic really like you know this is life your life was predetermined there was nothing that you could do about it therefore it was tragic if you look at Edypus Rex for example killed his father married his mother and there was nothing that he could do >> correct so in terms of myth and those inherited tales tragedies baked in and there's no escape however from the fifth century onwards from the dawn of ethics with with Socrates and Plato and then to the emergence of different rival philosophical schools, the academy, Aristotle and the parapotetics, the Epicurans, the Stoics, all of these groups actually come up with different ways of responding to the challenge of being human and they have very very different views about whether things are fatalistic and predetermined or where the life is what you make of it. So although I agree with you when it comes to the myths and the great tales, >> actually the Greeks as a people evolve evolve intellectually into realizing that actually actually you have much more agency over your life than uh the the great tales might might suggest.

[01:02:59]>> I I guess the question that I really wanted to ask deep down is what can we actually learn from the Greeks? Because when you classics is getting studied less and less which I consider to be a tragedy actually.

[01:03:14]>> What can we actually learn? What have we forgotten and what should we remember and what should we incorporate in our current society?

[01:03:22]>> A big question >> can be our last question in the style that we always ask. What's the one thing we're not talking about?

[01:03:28]>> I see. is is that >> I think it's that >> not only is everything in Greek culture, but everything is in Homer. What my answer to your question would look like is the totality of the human condition. So it's not a set of insights or things we might put in a little list which we can keep in our pocket and check when we need it. It is a monumental modeling of the strengths and weaknesses of humans being together in the world.

[01:04:02]Now, the Greek world is amazing because it's still connected in a linear unbroken way to modernity.

[01:04:09]>> Modern Greek really is the language of Homer after 3,000 years of people speaking together. And there's a continuity in Greek culture which is I would say unique over the last 3,000 years in the world. So although it seems so distant and so other to engage with literature in the first millennium BC, it's actually looking deep into the genuine inheritance of the Greek people.

[01:04:37]So I think Greece is kept out far too much of our modern conversation. Greeks should be a more central player when it comes to thinking about what to do in the world. And I may add that we talked about casting in the Odyssey to begin with. Well, who wrote an open letter to Hollywood saying, "Why are none of us in the film?" The Greeks.

[01:05:01]The Greeks don't appear at all in the casting list of Nolan's Odyssey, which for all its historic realism, to their mind shows an acute lack of interest in Greek culture and Greek actors.

[01:05:15]>> So I think there that's almost a proof in a way of my sense that the Greeks are not centralized enough in some of our cultural conversations because everything is there in their culture.

[01:05:27]David, before we head on over to Substack where you answer questions from our supporters, tell everybody again where they can find your work and of course more about Rolston as well.

[01:05:36]>> Thank you. It would be a joy to uh the two things I'm most invested in uh in life are Rston College, R A L S T O N.

[01:05:45]uh you'll find the link uh below the video which is a new college that is trying to teach the humanities properly beginning with ancient Greek and teaching in Greek in Greece on an island not far from where Homer may have been born and we chart the arc of the western tradition all the way through to modernity. the Greeks, the Romans, medieval thought, the influence of Christianity, the Renaissance and the rediscovery of the classical, the early modern and beyond. It's fully funded uh for many people. We've just finished our fifth uh our fifth admissions round. So, I'll be heading to Greece shortly uh with our fifth cohort, but keep an eye out in September for our next admissions round. And we welcome applications from all over the world. As it stands, you've got to be based in America to some degree, but that will change very soon.

[01:06:43]And you just need to have a BA in any subject and we will train you up to be an MA student in the humanities. So that's Roston College. Please check it out if these things interest you. And the other is a classics website I run uh with a small team of fellow colleagues and fighters uh who are motivated by the belief that the classics are there for everyone. They are meaningfully universal and no one has the right or the arrogance to stop your access to them or the uh the license to change the past so that it looks more convenient to us in the present. We're against all of that. We give you open, clear, free access to the ancient world in all of its complicated and fascinating ways.

[01:07:30]Antiggony journal, type it in, head over there and please enjoy the 500 600 articles we've got there. And if you'd like to write for us, please just pitch and we can pay you. It's a good project and I'm very proud to have spent the last 5 years working on that.

[01:07:46]>> David, what a pleasure it's been to have you back. I'm sure we'll have plenty of more of these conversations in the future. which I hope we do. Anyway, uh head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where David's going to answer your questions. [music] An area I'm interested in is how Greek philosophy and Christianity were combined to be the foundation of Western society. [music] Could you provide some examples of what Christianity took from the Greeks to turn it into what it is today?

[01:08:15][music] Heat. Heat.

[01:08:23][music]