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Dan Snow's History Hit
The Real History Behind The Odyssey
00:53:21
Is there any truth in the Odyssey, and what does it all mean?
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- [00:00]
Dan Snow
Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard iii. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries plus new releases every week and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyit.com subscribe. You're on the banks of the Thames, it's 1666 and the city is a towering inferno. In front of you, the Great Fire rages through the Stuart capital. If you're visiting London this summer, let me, Dan Snow, historian and born and raised Londoner, be your personal guide in a brand new series of audio walking tours from History Hit. I tell you the stories of where some of England's most explosive history happened. We'll follow the destructive path of the Great Fire of London and explore where and how King Charles I met his grisly end. All you need is your smartphone and the voice map app. Using your location, it triggers the story automatically so you can keep your phone in your pocket and your eyes on the history as you walk. Step into London's past. The download VoiceMap from your app store or go to VoiceMap MeHistoryHit. That's VoiceMap MeHistoryHit.
- [01:34]
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- [02:08]
Dan Snow
Welcome to Dan Snows. History Hit. So Odysseus has made it home to Ithaca. Ten years after the end of the Trojan War, he's faced trial after trial, storms in quick succession, sirens, the Cyclops. He's lost all his men, every single one. And he finally returns to his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus with armfuls of treasure bestowed on him by kind souls who helped him along the way and who met a grisly end for doing so. There have been so many versions, reversions, translations. Some of those highlight the stories of the kind of gods and monsters. Some focus on the women of the story. Some turned Odysseus journey into a kind of retribution arc for his role in the sacking of Troy. But let's strip all that away and let's try and ask ourselves what Homer or the poets who created the Odyssey were trying to teach us, the audience, what do they want us to think at the end of it to help us to make sense of it? Well, I've drafted in the big guns here, folks. The best people on earth to talk about Homer's work. The goat, Professor Dameiry Beard, who I recently sat next to. This was such a good seating plan. I sat next to her during the premiere of the new Christopher Nolan movie. And let me tell you folks, she was taking notes. Wowee. And I'm also joined by the equally brilliant Professor Edith hall, who probably knows this story better than anything anybody else. I recommend the best place to start really is you. Check out the previous episode in this series. I just tell you my own version of the Odyssey. All the stuff you need to know, just the story, the raw story which will inform this episode and our discussion. You can find a link to that in our show notes. So here we go folks. This is the Odyssey explained. Mary. For us, the Odyssey feels like this is one of the most important texts out there. It's so foundational. Did the ancient Greeks think it was always just one of many wonderful stories they told each other?
- [04:29]
Professor Mary Beard
Oh, the ancient Greeks thought it was foundational too. It wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that ancient Greece and Rome, they were very backward looking cultures in some ways. They didn't look forward to the great progress. They tended to look back to the greats of the past. And I think that for the Greeks and Romans, it would be a contradiction in terms to imagine that there had ever been any better literature than Homer. The best you couldn't better Homer.
- [04:57]
Dan Snow
And do they think it was true? Do they think it was history?
- [05:00]
Professor Mary Beard
The short answer to that is yes. And the idea that the Trojan War happened and the idea that the Greeks after the Trojan War had trouble getting back home, that's sort of historical. Now I don't actually think that everybody did think that there were one eyed giants waiting to eat you up. And like us, there's a blurry boundary between the history and the fantasy and the myth. What the Odyssey does is it provides a way of thinking about big questions of classical Greek, later Roman and indeed our society.
- [05:41]
Dan Snow
The Odyssey, we think based on the technology, the events, the places described in the poem, takes place in the late bronze age, roughly 1200 BCE. But we think Homer wrote it all down about 400 years later in the 8th century BC, and he was looking back at the twilight years of this age of great civilizations, as Mary says. The poem's divided into 24 books. And we actually meet Odysseus part of the way through. He's trapped on Calypso's island. He's actually pretty much at the end of his long journey back to his home, Ithaca, from Troy. And it's after a further voyage, after leaving Calypso, that he arrives at a friendly place and finally recounts his story. That's where we learn all, all about the extraordinary adventures that he has. The final portion of the book takes us back to what's happening on Ithaca. Suitors have taken over the palace virtually. They're feasting on Odysseus, food and wine. They're desperate to marry his wife, who they believe to be a widow. She's called Penelope, the mother of his son Telemachus. And Telemachus is trying to work out to get rid of all of these suitors and protect his mother, his home, his wealth and his crown. He wants to inherit from his dad. He wants to take over as king because they're slowly coming to the conclusion that Odysseus is never gonna return. The Odyssey is the second of the great Homeric works, the first being the Iliad, which takes place during the siege of Troy, the epic siege of Troy. And actually the Iliad's quite a circumscribed story. You don't really get the wooden horse, all that kind of thing in the Iliad. You just get the tale of Achilles and his lord Agamemnon, having a very serious falling out. Here's Professor Edith hall to explain what we know about the history and how it might have inspired the myth. Edith, how do we need to think about the Odyssey? It's worth trying to ask whether these people actually lived and whether Ithaca was Ithaca or these places might, might have been, as somehow described by this poet.
- [07:34]
Professor Edith Hall
It tells us a huge amount about the mindset of Greeks in the 8th 7th century BCE. I don't think it's historically specific. I think trying to find the actual locations and so on is misguided. But if you want to think yourself into how an ancient Greek peasant farmer felt about the new horizons that colonization had opened up for him as a sailor and a farmer and somebody who need to make his living from the soil, I think it's immensely rich document of the cultural imagination.
- [08:10]
Dan Snow
Okay, so it's a wonderful piece of history, but a piece of history about the time that it was written down. Rather than about the time it purports to describe.
- [08:20]
Professor Edith Hall
Well, that's the really complicated thing about both Homeric epics, because the more we know about the Mycenaeans, so these are the bronze. Late Bronze Age civilizations portrayed in the Iliad and the Odyssey when the Trojan War happened. The more we know about them, the more we know that these poems actually originated at those times. There are absolutely technical, metrical, linguistic and archaeological details in them that show that these poems were being recited without any writing orally for at least 500 years before they were written down. So that means that they've got accrued layers of historical knowledge and technical vocabulary and so on in them. It would be like having some medieval tales that had circulated orally about Robin Hood or something, or King Arthur. Finally, after five or six hundred years of being retold and retold, getting into the script for a new film.
- [09:23]
Dan Snow
Homer, though ancient Greeks thought he existed. They thought he was blind. Do you think he was a person?
- [09:28]
Professor Edith Hall
I'm not sure that there was a person named Homer. It's a very strange name, right? It means hostage in Greek. Omyros. It's a very peculiar name. What I do believe with the Odyssey, even more than the Iliad, is that there was a master literary aesthetic brain involved. I don't think that the beautiful ring composition and structure of something that takes you two whole days and nights to recite could be achievable without writing. You would have to be able to whip back and see how you'd frame that motif in the early passages and how it comes back. So I do think there was a master literary figure involved in finessing it. We can call him Homer because that's what the ancient Greeks called him, language wise.
- [10:16]
Dan Snow
Are there any hints about where in the Greek world? Because it extends far beyond what today people think of as Greece, where it was first sort of written down, codified.
- [10:24]
Professor Edith Hall
Well, that's. I wish there was a simple answer to that. Broadly speaking, we're talking about Ionia. That's Anatolia. That's the western seaboard of what's now Turkey. There were many Greek populations there. And the islands close to that seaboard, especially Chios, they have this Ionic dialect. The Greeks had four different sub dialects. But it also seems to have had a period where it developed extensively in the mainland and around Thebes and Uber, where a different layer went in. Now, this may sound complicated, but actually what it does is show us the richness and the Panhellenic that is the all Greek contributions to it. I think everybody wanted from every city, state and every village in ancient Greece, wanted to feel that they had contributed something. Now, that's more apparent in the Iliad, where you have the famous catalogue of ships from every single town in Greece and the islands that went to Troy. And you can quite imagine a local bard deliberately altering that every time to get their details in. It's a truly Pan Hellenic text, both in how it was created and in how it was used in later antiquity.
- [11:42]
Dan Snow
Well, this feels like such an important point, because do we have the Iliad and the Odyssey because of lucky survival, like bits of Tacitus, or was it so important to Greekness and Greek people in the period we might call Ancient Greece? That's why it survives and was transmitted.
- [12:00]
Professor Edith Hall
Absolutely. It's an ethnic text of this ethnos, by which I mean people who spoke Greek. They define Greek identity primarily by language. Right. The Greek speakers everywhere are united. They can live in the Black Sea, they can live in Spain, they can live in Marseille, which they founded, but they are Greeks because they speak Greek
- [12:21]
Dan Snow
and they're going to learn Homer when they go to school in the morning or at their mother's knee. Okay.
- [12:25]
Professor Edith Hall
And they learned Homer. Homer was the absolute basis of all education. We know that from many different kinds of source. We know that if you're an aristocrat, you were expected to know them both epics off by heart. I even think it's possible that writing was invented in the phonetic Alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians in order to write these things down. Plus the other great epic, which is by Hesiod, which explains the generation of the gods and the cosmos, because it happens at the dawn of really mass emigration and colonization to very remote places. Your ship, when you went off with lots of other rather disenfranchised, bitter younger brothers who haven't inherited anything to colonize Libya or to colonize Ukraine, you needed a copy of those poems because they contained everything you needed to know about being Greek. So that meant that there was a proliferation of manuscript everywhere the Greeks went. Well, papyri originally, which meant that by the time we get to Byzantium, where these epics remained core to the curriculum despite the Christianity, there were far more manuscripts being copied out in the Byzantine world, you know, dozens and dozens. Every single scriptorium in every single Greek monastery would have its copies of these, which is why there were plenty to be exported in the late 14th and 15th centuries. And they arrived in time just before the Ottomans burnt down Constantinople. They got to Italy and into print in the 15th century. But there was never any risk that we wouldn't get them, whereas there was a total risk we wouldn't get tragedy or lyric poetry.
- [14:16]
Dan Snow
Okay, so it reminds me of these early English settlers heading out with a Bible and a Shakespeare under their arm on their leaky hulls.
- [14:23]
Professor Edith Hall
You've absolutely got it. How do you remember your Greek? You take your epic poems and they have practical advice in them. I have to say, in the Iliad, you have these very long scenes of sacrifice. If you couldn't remember how your grandparents did the animal sacrifice, you've got 50 line descriptions, minute descriptions of how to do the sacrifice. If you don't know how, what wood to use to make a raft, a small sailing craft to go fishing in. You've got it right there. In the Odyssey, when Odysseus makes his craft, they're full of practical Greek lore. The Odyssey's got lots about how to build an orchard, what trees you need for an orchard, right in Laertes Garden. So it's a combination of how to be Greek, how to entertain yourselves, and the long nights on that cold, dark shore of southern Ukraine. You've got a copy, so you can recite it to each other with actual practical instructions. I love it.
- [15:20]
Dan Snow
You said at the beginning it's important not to get so hung up on historical locations. The events that the Iliad and the Odyssey sort of revolve around are this Greek expedition to, we think, Asia Minor to a place called Troy, the siege of Troy, and of course, the journey home from Troy. Is it useful to ask whether we think that expedition took place?
- [15:40]
Professor Edith Hall
Yes, it's useful enough to ask. I think you're going to come up with a negative for the very specific expedition. There is no way there were a thousand ships. Even Thucydides already by the 5th century said this was completely impossible. You know, your average colonial expedition, it might have five triremes or something. I mean, there wasn't enough wood in Greece. There wasn't enough forest to chop down to make a thousand ships. But there were collaborations between different city states, where these, as I say, disaffected young men who can't get married because they haven't got an inheritance. This is the classic colonist. They get together and they'll get together with two or three other city states, usually speaking the same dialect. It's quite triable. It's the same type of Greek. And they would go off together and they would arrive in Libya or the Ukraine or even Egypt, north shore of Egypt, and they would intermarry. They didn't take women with them, they intermarried. Which is one of the fascinating things about how cosmopolitan ancient Greeks were when it comes to the particular site which people have identified since the 19th century with a place called Hisarlik in the Troad that is the northwest corner of Turkey under the mountain range Ida, which plays such a prominent place in the Iliad. The fact is that's exactly the kind of place where Greeks wanted to expand to. The idea of the story as an example of colonial expansion, because the Greeks never had mainland Greece is intensely rocky and mountainous. They had huge problems with arable farming and timber resources because you needed so much to make bronze and pottery. So they were expanding precisely into Asia Minor. And of course the Dardanelles have forever been somewhere everybody wanted to control. Right. It's a place you want because you want to control that Black Sea trade so badly. So the idea that the Greeks were going over there to fight and to get things, remember, they come back with loads of loot as well as the retrieved Helen is totally plausible. It's just that the particular siege of Vesalik, none of the archaeology there has really demonstrated a 10 year siege ending in a conflagration at the right time.
- [18:05]
Dan Snow
What about the organization of the Greek world? This is where we come to the bit that we started on about the Odyssey as a useful historic source for, well, the various periods in which it was written. We hear a lot about places like Mycenae, Sparta, Pylos. We now know from the archaeology those do seem to have been in around that period, late Bronze Age period, quite important, powerful places. So it's conceived people, they would have been foremost in these coalitions. For example, what can you tell me about this kind of aristocratic royal Greek world?
- [18:36]
Professor Edith Hall
Yes, this is what's called Mycenaean palatial civilization. That's because conurbations were built around a central palace. It's a highly feudal structure with top down monarchical rule, large bureaucracies. They have their own Alphabet which we call linear battle, which was not phonetic, it was sort of dots and things. But they didn't use it, sadly for literature, they used it for inventories. And some of those inventories include large numbers of sailors names to sail off to Samos or somewhere east. And what they come back with, these oarsmen are spices, material resources and slaves, women and children slaves. So the idea in the Iliad that we're going to come back with all these concubines is completely fitting into that palatial civilization. And the place names in the Homeric catalogue of ships are ones where we, you're quite right, have dug up extensive evidence of Mycenaean palace civilization. Notably, you've already said them, Pylos, Mycenae, Argos, Knossos. In Crete, these are where these kings were. And the Linear B evidence also shows many names, personal names, that there are actually people who are called things like Orestes in those inscriptions. Now, that wasn't discovered till we crack linear B in the 1950s. And it was a total revelation in terms of the historicity of the Mycenaean world portrayed.
- [20:14]
Dan Snow
Let's talk about that phenomenon. I love maritime history. I love the sense this is a maritime culture. Could you talk a little bit about whether that is sometimes accurately reflecting or see what we might learn about that? And also, therefore, hospitality. Because if you're traveling from island to island, there aren't hotels, there isn't money. As I understand it, although, correct me, you need to rely on the fact you're going to be able to turn up, someone's going to look after you, because next time it might be them going on a trade mission or a raiding mission, and they might need to stay in your palace or your stable or whatever. Is that a world that you think probably is rooted in the actuality of this period?
- [20:48]
Professor Edith Hall
Yes. All the evidence is that this Greek identity was absolutely grounded in a sense that they were the masters of the sea. In fact, they weren't the only masters of the sea. They learned an awful lot from the Phoenicians, who were building incredible fleets of trading ships as well as warships at the same time. And if we knew more about the Phoenicians, and sadly, Scipio burnt down the great library at Carthage a few hundred years later. If we knew more about the Phoenicians, I think an awful lot more about the maritime culture and the Odyssey would come clear. The Phoenicians make sinister appearances, pirates. They're the sort of people who are brilliant ships, but will suddenly turn up on horizon and abduct you and sell you into slavery. But the Greeks, it's sailing and swimming. Just being in control of the water is so crucial to the Greek mentality. The word for mind and ship is come from the same root. You expanded your horizons by sailing around. This gave you this mental acuity. The first few lines of the Odyssey say Odysseus, the man who traveled to many cities and learned their minds in his ship and the swim, I mean, his great swim to Phaeacia, he does this epic swim, five days swim, survives in the water because if you were a Greek islander and you got your living from fishing and trading, as well as your small holding, you absolutely had to be able to swim and dive brilliantly. And the Greeks were very aware of that and very proud of it. And that's why we get a great epic swim in the Odyssey as an example to young men of what being a proper man is. You know, you've got to be able to swim. So that is fundamental. I really want to ban the word hospitality from discussions of Homer. There's this word ksenia, which means things to do with being, other things to do with being an alien. Alienism, okay? We get it in our word xenophobic. So that's fear of the xenos. What it was like to travel into unknown places where you have no previous contacts. Often you hadn't got someone to look after you and have to trust people. I think there were hotels, by the way. I think there were plenty of hotels in Seasideport. But how could you trust that hotel manager not to stab you to death in the middle of the night? Because nobody knew who you were. There were no passports, take all your money and dump you in the sea, right? Equally, if you're living on the island of Ithaca and a ship turns up from another island or maybe another country, Phoenicia, how are you going to take somebody into your. Your house or entertain them without deep fear that they could run off with your wife, like Alexander? Okay, so this was an absolute obsession. And how the Greeks dealt with it was that they created what they called an unwritten law, absolute imperative, religious imperative, that it was sacrilege to harm either a vulnerable person who came into your community or somebody who was looking after you in another community when you got there. If you did, you would be blasted by Zeus's thunderbolt, just like that. And this was so strongly felt. We also know there were thousands of violations of this, right? But the Greeks told stories about how people who had violated it, they might not get punished. But look, seven generations after all their children died of the plague also. So they created stories to support the terror of harming an alien. The word hospitality ludicrously misrepresents this life or death situation. The Odyssey, more than any other text in ancient Greece, repeatedly stages scenes of people arriving in an alien community with examples of how to do it well and examples of how to do it very badly. Now, Odysseus has absolutely no right to go into that Cyclops cave. People don't say this often enough. He had not been invited. He's Already broken the protocols. Okay, the Cyclops overreacts by actually eating some of the invaders. But that is an example of how to do it badly, both as host and as guest. Whereas when you get to Phaeacia, the utopian island, there's an example of how to do it very well indeed. Both host and guests behave extremely well, give presents to each other and part on wonderful terms. There is no more integral rule or protocol in Greek culture than Xenia, and
- [25:30]
Dan Snow
that's what lies at the heart of the Odyssey. You mentioned someone being smashed by a thunderbolt, a lightning bolt. We got to talk about the gods. I'm so struck by. The gods appear very human. They have very human emotions. They don't seem to be particularly cleverer than us and working on a higher plane. And what I find very interesting is that Zeus is such a. He's such a classic leader and he's got various gods coming up to him saying, we've got to kill Odysseus, we're going to look after this. And Zeus kind of agrees with all of them. Their interventions are very human. Is this how ancient Greeks would have felt?
- [25:59]
Professor Edith Hall
I think that most Greeks, certainly as early as this, you know, we haven't got to the philosophers who start to question the existence of gods, that's two, 300 years later. I think most Greeks absolutely believed that they were surrounded by divinities. And not just these major Olympians, but, you know, every stream, every river, there's a really, really crucial goddess called Hestia we hear little about. Because she was so important, they didn't even need to talk about it. That's the goddess of every household. Half who you would pray to. Every time you cooked, she was with you. If you were a tradesman, you would have Prometheus, Hephaestus and Athena. These are technology gods with little shrines in your own workplace. It's impossible really for us to put. I think after 2000 years of monotheisms and 50 years of mass Gnosticism, anyway, it's quite impossible for us to put ourselves into this numinous mindset. Their behavior I find delightful because the humans are so much more noble for the simple reason they're going to die. Okay, so the gods can behave like naughty children, which they do. They're motivated by highly selfish designs. They've got their own beloveds amongst the mortals and they're happy to sacrifice and murder plenty of other humans to look after their own. If they're sexually motivated, they just do it. It's all without accountability. They hardly ever get called to account. So this is humans imagining, I think, through the gods, what life would be like if there was no payback time.
- [27:34]
Dan Snow
I love that. Some bits of the Odyssey we find very difficult today. Raiding communities, just talking about killing men and taking their wives. These are things that are thankfully unfamiliar to people. But one thing is the importance of home, the importance of that central marital relationship. We live in a society where, despite breakdown, lots of us aspire to meet that special someone and live and get old with them and love them. And that relationship to indigenous. And Penelope, in that way, feels something that people can still relate to or aspire to today. And indeed, the importance of home. Getting back to your place, undergoing all these hardships to get to that safety and that family home. How are things similar in Bronze Age and Iron Age Greece?
- [28:18]
Professor Edith Hall
It's highly relatable now. It was highly relatable then.
- [28:20]
Dan Snow
Okay.
- [28:21]
Professor Edith Hall
Many Greek men had to travel an awful lot. They're a very warlike lot. They were always off on expeditions and raiding parties. A bit like Vikings. They are away for the summer months, the sailing season all the time. And having a thoroughly competent wife who will after your household was an invaluable resource. He's away for 20, well, 19 years. But it's an experience that's integral to them all. I've got a friend, former PhD student, whose husband was in the RAF, and she's written a whole book about Homer and army wives. Because these women who have to hold the fort. What's very beautiful about the Odyssey, though, and I have to say this, of course, it's deeply sexist. And it reflects the hopelessly sexist worldview of an archaic Greek peasant farmer, in that he's allowed to have sex in every port, has a girl in every port, or a nymph in his case. But it's unique in ancient literature, or almost unique in that Penelope's competence and intelligence is celebrated. That is really unusual in later Greek literature. Women's intelligence is regarded with great suspicion. Clytemnestra Medea. Right. These highly powerful women. It's seen as very destructive and threatening to the patriarch. Oh, no. Odysseus is so proud of his wife because she's getting presents out of the suitors. She's kept that whole shebang together. His father is pathetic. He's just got into a lifelong depression. Penelope's got to hold the whole fort together and bring up the son. And she does it magnificently. And that is why he wants to go home to Calypso, offers him immortality and he likes to sleep with her. We told he likes sex with her. She says, no. Penelope and I are like two peas in a pod. We think the same. He actually says this. We are of the same mind. And I don't care if she's going to get old and ugly and die. She's my girl. And I actually still cry when I read that bit.
- [30:22]
Dan Snow
Yes. And that is something that feels so modern. And yet there it is, over 3,000 years old.
- [30:29]
Professor Edith Hall
It feels modern, but in fact, in purely anthropological terms, the structure of the modern Western family is pretty identical with that of the ancient Greek family. There have been many family structures in human history. There's been polygamy, there's been matriarchies, there's been Sparta, where the women were encouraged to have sex with more than one man in order to get lots and lots of sons.
- [30:51]
Professor Mary Beard
Right.
- [30:52]
Professor Edith Hall
Ours is not. We have patrilocal, so mainly women moving into the male households. Patriarchal married women cannot have sex without being vilified. Married men, they're being a bit of a lad. But we have protocols, just as the ancient Greek did. Like, you don't bring your mistress from the other side of the city to your household. Your wife gets fundamental respect as running the household. That's her domain, provided she keeps her legs together. When you're off sailing, which, of course, Penelope famously does,
- [31:28]
Dan Snow
you listen to Dan Snow's History. There's more coming up.
- [31:37]
Tristan Hughes
Ever wondered what it feels like to be a gladiator facing a roaring crowd and potential death in the Coliseum? Find out on the Ancients podcast from History hit twice a week. Join me, Tristan Hughes, as I hear exciting new research about people living thousands of years ago, from the Babylonians to the Celts to the Romans. And visit the ancient sites which reveal who and just how amazing our distant ancestors were. That's the ancients from history hit.
- [32:08]
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When finance professionals need trusted insight, they turn to CFA Institute. Now, as private markets become essential to modern portfolios, we bring the same commitment to ethics, education and professional excellence that has defined our work for over 75 years. With professional certificates, a new private markets pathway in the CFA program, the latest research and more, we are helping professionals build deeper knowledge and stronger judgment in a complex field. Visit cfa institute@cfainstitute.org to learn more.
- [32:46]
Post University Announcer
Now.
- [32:47]
Dan Snow
The women in the Odyssey are fascinating, and it's a very complex thing to think about. In recent years, there's been loads of retellings of this story from the points of view of the female characters. You've got Madeline Miller's Circe. You've got Margaret Atwood's the Penelopoid. There's a great book about this whole subject. I really recommend Emily House's Mythica. She explores the history of the women in the Odyssey. That's a whole other episode, actually, we might do soon. But I just want to briefly touch on Penelope a little more in this discussion. Here's Mary again.
- [33:14]
Professor Mary Beard
We discovered that she's been sending little notes to the suitors. Come on, notes. Okay. She's been now sensibly, very good. She's refused to marry any of them. But there's a very strong sense that maybe the similarities between Odysseus and Penelope are a bit deeper than they look.
- [33:35]
Dan Snow
What does it tell us about women in this world?
- [33:38]
Professor Mary Beard
I think that is very puzzling. With my historian's hat on, I've said I'm not sure how far you can historicize the Odyssey, but there is. There is something very funny about the social structure of Odysseus palace. Because the old king, Laertes, Odysseus, dad, is sort of in retirement, like a modern pope somehow. And yet the person who is going to rule Ithaca, it's made quite clear it's the man who marries Penelope because
- [34:06]
Dan Snow
Telemachus is an adult son.
- [34:08]
Professor Mary Beard
Yeah, and getting straight with all the lines of succession here is quite hard. Now, I think there's all kinds of ways in which, you see. I mean, there's the canniness of Penelope. You know, Odysseus is best known really for being a trickster. Well, so is Penelope, because Penelope is saying to them, eventually, look, okay, I'll decide to marry you. When I finished weaving the shroud for my father in law, Laertes, who's very old, he's going to die sooner. Penelope's trick is that she unpicks the shroud every evening, so she never finishes it, you know. And so there's a canniness to Penelope which I find very appealing. And yet there is also the sense that she is disempowered. And I suppose one of my least favorite bits at the beginning of the Odyssey is when Penelope has been doing her weaving upstairs and she comes down and she finds the bard singing a rather sad song about the trouble that Odysseus and the other Greeks are having when they're coming back home from the Trojan War. Penelope totally reasonably says, you know, can we put on a more cheerful record, please, bard? You know, can we sing a cheerier song? At this point, her son Telemachus, late teenager, comes up to his savvy mother. Telemachus who's still growing up and says, mother, speech is man's business. Go back to your room. And she does. Now, I read the Odyssey for decades before I spotted that scene. You know when it is the originary moment in the west, where wet behind the ears, teenager tells his savvy mum to shut up, right? And it has been repeated millions of times since Homer composed it.
- [36:08]
Dan Snow
He can tell his mum shut up, but he can't get the suitors out of his. I mean, is there something there about he's so impotent when it comes to establishing his own birthright, but he's able to pick on his mum sometimes?
- [36:19]
Professor Mary Beard
Well, I think teenage boys often start to learn about what power is by taking it out on their mums.
- [36:25]
Dan Snow
Can I ask about heroism? What does a hero mean to us today? And what does a hero mean in the context of the Odyssey? How is the audience thinking about Odysseus? I'm not sure you'd want him to be your boss or dad or husband maybe.
- [36:43]
Professor Edith Hall
He is a different type of hero from the Iliad and we can talk about that. But he grows in this poem, he grows up and it's the education of Odysseus. He goes from being a terrible leader who risks his own men's lives for reasons just to do with curiosity. For example, he doesn't have to go to the Cyclops island. They've been on another island where they've replenished their water and food supplies. He says, I hear voices. I've just got to find out. I've just got to find out. And that's why he loses all those men on the Cyclops island.
- [37:14]
Professor Mary Beard
But.
- [37:15]
Professor Edith Hall
But he learns from that. And by the time it comes to the Sirens, right, a later episode, he's learned how not to risk his men while indulging his curiosity. So he gets tied up to the mast so we can hear the Sirens song, because they know everything, they're omniscient. But he puts wax in the men's ears to look after them. By the time he gets to Ithaca, he's learned patience, right? He stays for weeks in these rags, in disguise, being insulted. He's learned how to prepare everything. He makes sure that all the arms and weapons are locked up. He keeps up the secrecy. We've shown him evolving into a very good leader through learning from experience. So we go on a journey with him where we learn lessons about how to be a good leader. I'm very adamant about this because lots of scholars say he doesn't evolve. And I think it's patently obvious to me that there's a real effort. So the other example is boasting after the Cyclops incident, he does not need to reveal his name. You've got to know the name to curse. And it's that curse that causes all the subsequent problems and deaths. That's why when he gets to Ithaca, he does not have a name. He keeps it under his hat till he wins the contest of the bow, rips off his rags and says, hey, I'm back. Payback time. So he's learned patience, self control, concern for his lieutenants and his men, and proper preparation. So he becomes the hero we all want to emulate.
- [38:51]
Dan Snow
This is the bit that I find exciting and strange about the Odyssey, is that on the one hand, it's Bronze Age, super masculine, charismatic warrior leaders just doing their thing. But on the other hand, then he goes down to the underworld and you've got Achilles, the most celebrated warrior in history. He goes, do you know what? It's really rubbish being dead. I'd rather just be a farmer. And I can't really work out what Homer is telling us. Thrusting young chaps, what should we learn from this? Should we be more like Achilles and die young on the battlefield? Leave a beautiful corpse and a reputation that will last forever? Man killing Achilles. Or should we realize how stupid that is, like the desire to be a hero?
- [39:32]
Professor Edith Hall
I was delighted you've raised that, because my view of the Odyssey is that it is proto philosophy, right? The Greeks invented ethics. How should we live? What is happiness in Plato and Aristotle, only 2, 300 years after this was written down, all those questions are asked in exactly the scenes that you're raising. So the young man listening to this is offered alternative ways of life and a discussion point, a rubric, for after you've heard the bards sing these poems, long debates in your local taverna in your colony over whether it's better to want a simple life with an honest wife and tilling the land, or whether we should be off on escapades and who cares if we die because our names will live on forever? Life is complicated. We are all pulled different ways. And the poem doesn't give you just one blueprint. Homer contests everything ethically, and that is why it's so good. You do not have that philosophical depth in the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Egyptian epics we've got, or the Ramayana. We do not have that. We have a much more Unitarian model of heroism.
- [40:49]
Dan Snow
Yeah. And because when the people die, Odysseus weeps And they spend so much time crying in the Odyssey. And he spends time with the sword swineherd. And the swineherd tells him that he used to be kind of an important guy, but he was taken by slave traders and sold into a life of so. And Odysseus goes, that sounds terrible, man. I'm really sorry for you. But also, I'm also going to go out and capture slaves and kill people. And so I find that fascinating. And that kind of brings us really to the climax of the Odyssey when we've had all these discussions of the sadness of people dying and heroes dying young and pointless deaths. And then Athena says to Odysseus, we're gonna kill some guys, man. Come on, let's do this. Athena's, like, hungry. She's the goddess of wisdom. She can't wait for the blood to be on the floor of the palace. And Odysseus kills everybody in this enormous hyper masculine epic at the end. How should we think of that final epic when he's slaughtering everyone in the palace?
- [41:42]
Professor Edith Hall
I'm going to ask you a question. When you watch a Clint Eastwood movie, which is one of the many genres that has a direct link back to Homeric epic, if you've gone through 90 minutes of a lone guy whose wife and child, classic situation, you know, have been murdered by some bad guys, and you spent 90 minutes with him undergoing humiliations and sufferings and setbacks, and then drums roll, you get the shootout at the OK Corral or whatever, and Clint shoots every single bad guy into smithereens, Right? Don't you feel satisfied?
- [42:20]
Dan Snow
I'm probably with Clint at that point.
- [42:22]
Professor Edith Hall
This is fiction, man. There is nothing like a really good revenge tragedy where people who have behaved badly get their just desserts. And do you know what? I've read about the neurology of revenge? And there've been some experiments by a team at UCL which have shown that pleasure zones light up in male heads when they watch punishment, which is deserved on screen. Right? Bad guys getting it, a pleasure zone lights up. And that is actually a weird difference because it doesn't in women. And the psychological anthropologists say this is because men had to learn over many, many, many tens of millennia to be the policeman of their state. It doesn't light up if the guy's a good guy. It's not just watching the suffering, it's watching justice delivered to bad guys. Okay, so yes, of course, in ethical terms, you could say killing over 100 people when they haven't even managed to Kill Telemachus. Right. They haven't actually even managed is over the top. Of course it is. But in terms of the emotional satisfaction we get, especially after several books of them taunting him, of them throwing stools at him, of them making him do show fights with a beggar, we go through all that humiliation with him. So you can either look at it ethically, in which case it's deplorable, or you can look at it as if you're watching a Clint Eastwood movie with a formula where all the pleasure comes with the final shootout.
- [43:58]
Dan Snow
Okay, you've won me over. Now I can enjoy it unambiguously because I've been feeling a bit guilty about that. So I'm really happy about that. So, lastly, this is the forgotten ending of the Odyssey, because whenever I would read it to my kids, the sort of versions that we get, the wonderful children's versions, it's Penelope and Odysseus embrace, and that is that. But in fact, there's some interesting kind of final bits. The Odyssey. One is there's a little sort of mini civil war in Ithaca, which I'll just part for a sec. But the other is this thing hanging over them all, which is that he has to get back out there because he's got to still deal with Poseidon's curse. He's got to travel, according to Tiresias, the blind prophet. He's got to go inland to a place where no one's ever seen and plant an ore and sacrifice things. So he's got to get back out there. And this bit to come, because my favorite poem is Ulysses by Tennyson, and Tennyson imagines an older Ulysses, and he kind of taps into that idea that are we meant to think that Odysseus actually a hero's can never be still, is the idea that he is going to enjoy a comfortable old age. Is it hinted in the Odyssey that actually the point about guys like Odysseus is that they don't get home. They need to keep going. There will always be more adventures. And actually, eventually you kind of know that Odysseus is going to die in a watery grave, or a sword tip of a young man on a distant promontory.
- [45:10]
Professor Edith Hall
I love your admiration for the Tennyson poem. It captures that one last heave, you know, one last over into the sunset. Come on, comrades. Yes, I think that there is a tragic undertow to the Odyssey. I mean, it's much lighter and more humorous and frivolous in some ways than the Iliad. But there is a Tragic undertow, that restlessness, Restlessness in men. Really very difficult social problem to solve. And Homo sapiens had to be restless. You know, we had to carry on going out and conquering new mountains and finding new places. We wouldn't be sapiens if we didn't have that drive. But it has a desperately tragic undertone, which meant that a very great deal of ancient Greeks died away from. From their homes and their wives, never to be seen again. The never to be seen again, I think is very important because these days it's much easier to trace where people died and possibly get their remains back. The number of men who just went off and never came back. And that's Penelope's problem. She doesn't know if he's dead or not. She has no idea. We have a, I think it's in law, seven years rule that if someone's not heard of for seven years, you can get married, you can assume they're dead. But she's just left in this limbo hoping he'll come back because there's no definitive information that he's dead. But then, yes, he says, I've got to go off again. And Tiresias told me I'm going to die somewhere far from the sea when I meet someone with a winnowing fan. We don't know what any of this really means, but it's a tragic and dark and lonely death awaits him despite this one period of joyful reunion.
- [46:47]
Dan Snow
Yes, I'm nervous about why I find that kind of restlessness and death, lonely death, far from home on some stupid quest. I don't know why I find that so personally disturbing. I have to take that to my therapist.
- [46:58]
Professor Edith Hall
Well, I have this with my husband. My husband is a somewhere person, doesn't like traveling. He loves being at home. And I'm miserable if I don't have a flight booked upcoming. I just need to know that it's coming. And I sleep best. Traveling. I'm a nomad. I completely get it. The idea of living and dying in the same sort of bit of suburban England forever is terrifying to me. But we are also all afraid. And with hospitalised death these days, we are all afraid of dying in an alien place without our loved ones around us. All of us, we all want to die in our loved ones embrace in our own house. And most of us don't anymore.
- [47:36]
Dan Snow
Well, Edith, it sounds like our discussion is turning into the kind of discussion that you are saying would have been precipitated in ancient Greece when they actually listened to this poet recite The Odyssey and then everyone goes to the tavern and discusses exactly this. But I'm pleased to hear that you like me. When I'm out climbing up a nice mountain in a foreign country, having had no sleep, I feel very alive. But this is a separate discussion, but I'm glad that you obviously feel the same way. And as I say, I'm very glad that we are responding to the Odyssey in the way that perhaps Homer and those poets intended. There's a dance knows history. There's more on this topic coming up.
- [48:15]
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- [49:06]
Professor Mary Beard
Eduardo.
- [49:20]
Dan Snow
So what does all that leave us feeling about Odysseus? Well, there have been so many different responses to Odysseus. Some see his journey as a as a trial, a neat redemption arc as the hero makes up for mistakes and and crimes in his earlier life. Other people suggest that he's an anti hero. We wouldn't root for him in real life, but we're happy to do so in fantasy. Other people have just pointed out that he's savage. He's happy to pillage and kill and burn. He's a ruthless colonizer, he's manipulative, he's a liar. Men die under his command and it's his fault. I suppose we're able to get all those different interpretations because Homer doesn't make it simple for us. And that's on purpose. Human beings aren't just one thing. They are good and bad at the same time. It is very messy. Here's Professor Mary Beard again.
- [50:15]
Professor Mary Beard
I think why it's a perennial best seller and why the Greeks are right in a way, I think, is that it's constantly preoccupying. You never pin it down. And I partly there's a sense there that this is what now strikes me most of all. I think that this is the second oldest work of Western literature. And you sort of think Very old works of literature ought to be kind of simple. Here we have an epic poem which is so amazingly post modernly complicated. It starts in the middle of the story. We don't meet the hero for books and books of it, and then we discover that all the famous bits are actually in the mouth of the hero telling the story to somebody else. So it's so tricksy, but it's also, it positions you, it makes you question how you think about some of the issues it's raising. And the one that I suppose I've changed my mind about most obviously is when Odysseus and his men go to the cave of the cyclops Polyphemus, the one eyed giant, and he does eat them, he does eat some of them for dinner and they then in order to escape by a clever trick, they get the cyclops drunk and they put a stake in his eye and blind him and they manage to escape from his cave. Now I suppose when I first met that story, I think it was in sort of tales from Homer's Odyssey when I was little, it was absolutely clear to me that Odysseus was a great hero. Here he met a really nasty cannibalistic giant and he had managed to escape by a clever trick, blinding the man after getting him drunk. And that's how it was always put over when Odysseus was the clever civilized one and Polyphemus was a cannibal, you know, the barbarian. Now I think you can't entirely get rid of that idea. You know, Polyphemus is presented as a cannibal, you can't turn him into a nice vegetarian. But increasingly, and I've been reading this for 50 years or so, more increasingly I wondered about Odysseus. There he is, he's fetched up on the Cyclops island, uninvited, he goes into his cave, starts to make himself at home. He can eyes up the whole kind of group of islands really for a bit of real estate, saying that this could have been much better exploited for trade and profit. You know, he is Mr. Imperialist. It's the dilemma of imperialism. He wreaks terrible violence on the guy who he's invaded and who actually probably wasn't a very nice guy anyway. But whereas before I thought this was a simple story of good overcomes bad, I now see there's no firm ground to stand on when you're looking at Odysseus and the cyclops. And indeed it's absolutely clear that later ancient readers realized there was a problem here that what we think of Odysseus's conduct, and in fact, overall, we don't know. Odysseus is billed as the man. He's the hero, he's the great leader. He's bringing his men back home to Ithaca. He loses the mock. There's Odysseus. What kind of leader, what kind of responsible leader loses all their men and he blames them. He's always saying, oh, if they'd done what I told them to, they wouldn't have been killed.
- [53:56]
Dan Snow
Did the ancients love it? It's just a wonderful, extraordinary story. Did they get the same as we do out of it? What does it mean to them?
- [54:03]
Professor Mary Beard
That is in some ways quite hard to say. I mean, we can see that it never goes away. We can see that people are always reworking the story. They're always having another look at it. They're always conscious that they can never do it as well. I think that it is the Odyssey combined with the Iliad to absolutely home in on really central ideas of what it is to be a human being, what it is to be a man, what it is to fight, what it is to be a hero. I mean, the other thing is that they do it in such a complicated, tricky, sophisticated way that the composer. The composers of the Odyssey really make you see the complexity of what it is to tell a story. Right? And they don't start at the beginning. Stories often don't, you know, there's never a beginning to a story because there's always a beginning before there's a beginning. And the Odyssey acts that out. And so it is looking both at the central issues of how human beings think about themselves, but it's also, at least, I think, is just as important. It's looking at central issues about how you tell the story, about what it is to be a human being. And it's always complicated. The best stories are complicated.
- [55:37]
Dan Snow
We could spend hours talking about all the different interpretations of the Odyssey. There are so many little nooks and crannies, avenues, themes, ideas, so many ways to explore it. As Mary says, it's why it's endured for so long, and it's why there's a new adaptation out at the moment, Christopher Nolan's massive interpretation of that old tale. But I really hope this episode's given you a little bit more grounding. I also hope that our brilliant guests have helped you to think a bit more about what it might mean and what it tells us about the ancient Greeks. And this is difficult. Both the ancient Greeks of the Bronze Age in which it sets, but probably more importantly, the ancient Greeks of the 8th century when it was written down. Clearly it does give us an insight into their beliefs, their anxieties, values, traditions, ambitions, and just the culture that made Greeks Greek. We are going to continue our History behind the Odyssey series on Monday to explore more about the time in which it set that late Bronze Age, that era of great Mediterranean civilizations that are happy to trade with each other and exchange and send lavish gifts one year and fight each other the next. So join Join me next Monday for our deep dive into the Mycenaean age and also our search for why that age came to an end so abruptly, why the late Bronze Age so mysteriously collapsed. And if you want more history from Professor Mary Beard, I should check out her podcast, Instant Classics. As always, please leave us a review at Dan Sinners History wherever you get your pods. If you've enjoyed the series, and if you haven't enjoyed the series, just purge yourself. Make up a nice review. It makes a huge difference to us. It helps other people to find this content that you are already enjoying. Thank you so much.
- [57:18]
Tristan Hughes
Bye bye.
- [57:40]
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- [57:56]
Dan Snow
You're on the banks of the Thames, it's 1666 and the city is a towering infant inferno in front of you. The Great Fire rages through the Stuart capital. If you're visiting London this summer, let me Dan Snow, historian and born and raised Londoner, be your personal guide in a brand new series of audio walking tours from History hit. I tell you the stories of where some of England's most explosive history happened. We'll follow the destructive path of the Great Fire of London and explore where and how King Charles I met his grisly end. All you need is your smartphone and the Voice map app. Using your location, it triggers the story automatically so you can keep your phone in your pocket and your eyes on the history as you walk. Step into London's past. Download VoiceMap from your app store or go to VoiceMap Me Historyhit. That's VoiceMap Me Historyhit. Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard iii. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discuss. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past, just visit historyit.com subscribe.