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- [00:01]
Movie Trailer Announcer
Get your tickets now for the Dog Stars. It's no surprise how fast civilization can disappear out there. Kill or be killed. Jacob Elordi. There are people out there. They need our help. Josh Brolin. Shoot first and inquire afterwards. Margaret Quality.
- [00:20]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Okay, tough Guy.
- [00:21]
Movie Trailer Announcer
And Guy Pierce. Arm up. The Dog Stars. Directed by Ridley Scott. Theaters Aug. 28. Get tickets now. Rated R. Under 17. Not admitted without parents.
- [00:30]
Sponsor Voice
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- [01:06]
Podcast Host Introduction
Welcome to the History Extra podcast. It's the final episode today of our four part Sunday series on the Odyssey and its cultural afterlife. As Dr. Daisy Dunn tells Kevlotchen about the extent to which we can map the ancient Greek epic onto the real world.
- [01:23]
Kev Velocin
Around 2,800 years ago, a poet, or perhaps many poets, set down a story that had been traveling by word of mouth for centuries. It told of a king trying to get home from a war. It should have taken him weeks, instead it took 10 years. The king was Odysseus and the poem the Odyssey. You might know some of his stories of the one eyed cyclops, the sweet song of the sirens or the witch that turned his crew into pigs. But beneath the gods and the monsters and the wine dark sea, are there historical truths to be found? I'm Kev Velocin and I'm joined by Dr. Daisy Dunn, award winning classicist, author and all round expert on the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Her books include the Ladybird Expert book on Homer and the Missing A new history of the ancient world through the women who shaped it. In this final episode we're going to examine the moral codes of the Odyssey and how the poem has been interpreted and by cultures through the ages. Daisy, welcome back. Where I'd like to start with this episode is that there are a handful of themes that why in through the Odyssey but the one that really leaps out to me is Xenia and I wonder if you could introduce to us what that is.
- [02:34]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Xenia means guest friendship and that really translates into treating your guest really really well and then reciprocally your guest treating their host really well as well. So it's a two way street it's about being kind to strangers. And in the Greek world. And suddenly within the poem, that means opening your door to anybody.
- [03:01]
Kev Velocin
There's so many times where it goes. Well, so many times it goes very, very wrong. And we see it a couple of times with Telemachus and Odysseus. They arrive at one of these great palaces and these rules govern how they're received. So I'm paraphrasing this, but one of the places that he turns up, it's like it's two days and he's there and he gets food and a bath and he tells a story and then he goes to bed and then he gets up, has another feast and some games. And it's only after that point that someone says, and what's your name again?
- [03:32]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yeah, exactly. It is a very, very different thing to us. That seems perverse. You kind of think, would you really trust anybody and let them into your house? But in the poem, it's a mark of a good society, of a good civilized culture that you come across somebody who does that for you.
- [03:53]
Kev Velocin
Is the poem in any way acting as some kind of codicil or lowercase b? Bible? As in, this is how you treat other guests of a certain social stand. So is it like this is how an elite man should behave?
- [04:07]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I think so. And I think that would have filtered out of the poem. It's very difficult to know initially how readers, how people listening to the poem would have interpreted it. Would they have brought that home and enacted it liter, or is it more. Okay, so this is an example of a perfect person and how they should behave in the heroic age. And we take a kind of more watered down version of that and put it into operation in our own society.
- [04:31]
Kev Velocin
Yeah, because the other point that was on my mind is we just talked about Zeus and how he's the patron of strangers, if you like. Given this kind of sense that the gods are present in Greek society, is there ever a kind of thought that, you know, you have to welcome a stranger in because the stranger might be Zeus? And that does happen throughout Greek mythology.
- [04:50]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
That's precisely it. This is what you get in a lot of myths. It's often the gods going in disguise to unknown locations and they're dropping in and they're testing to see whether they're going to be treated properly. And it's almost saying, well, everyone should be treated as if they are a God because they might be in disguise. Because this happens so frequently. The number of myths where a God or a goddess turns up pretending to be Often a beggar or a poor person in some guise which doesn't make them look remotely godly. And they're let in, and sometimes they're treated well and sometimes they're treated badly. And that has major repercussions then on that person's life.
- [05:27]
Kev Velocin
I mean, it feels like a trap.
- [05:28]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
It does feel a bit like a trap. It does feel like a trap. They speak quite loudly to me of what was expected of men and of their kind of. By men, I mean men and women, of people in society.
- [05:40]
Kev Velocin
You mentioned beggars and how anyone coming in, you treat them as revered guests until you've kind of like you wine, dine them and you can ask your name. But Odysseus in the Odyssey spends a fair amount of time in the second half of the book as a beggar. And in that case he's not treated quite so cordially.
- [05:56]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
No. So the suitors are not practices of Xenia.
- [06:00]
Kev Velocin
They are bad hosts.
- [06:02]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
They are bad hosts. They are horrible to him. They look at him and they taunt him. They treat him really, really badly, as if he's, you know, absolute sort of scum of the earth. They don't give him food and wine. They're just rude and petulant and horrible. And that is Homer's way of saying, look, these are really bad people. And as if we don't know that already, the suitors have been terrible. They're just eating him out of house and home. They are very rowdy among themselves. And from their perspective, and I'm not saying this in their defense, but one of them actually says, you know, Penelope has said that she might marry one of us. She hasn't said that she won't marry one of us. And we found out that she's been tricking us by weaving this funeral shroud for her father in law, Laertes, who isn't yet dead. And she's been unpicking it by night. And one of her maidservants, or rather her female slaves, has actually spotted her doing this and leaked it. And they found out what she's doing and they're really angry about it. And so they are asking, so have we been hanging around here for no reason? Is there no prospect of us ever having a future here?
- [07:13]
Kev Velocin
And then there's this other contrast going on with Xenia in general, because occasionally what crops up in the poem is piracy. And you have this episode with Polyphemus the Cyclops, where, you know, Odysseus is a bad host, but there's a bit Where Polyphemus says, are you guys pirates? And clearly after he leaves Troy and they go raiding, then they're not really being very good hosts there, they're pirating. So I just wondered if there's a kind of sense where again, Xenia is something for the Greeks and everyone else is like fair game.
- [07:46]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I think it is very much defined as a Greek quality. And certainly, as you say, there are these piratical references throughout which probably were current in Homer's time. Certainly because of what's going on. We talked about the Greek sea peoples and the possibility of piracy in that period earlier. And I think with Odysseus and his men, they're not always on their best behavior. They are very keen on getting free goods, on getting presents, on pirates, on getting booty to bring home. Even women. They're taking from the first place that they stop off on Ismarus among the Cicones. So they are not ideal people. We've seen that they're quite fallible, a lot of Odysseus men. So I think a lot of the time Homer's showing how easy it is to slide out away from that ideal.
- [08:33]
Kev Velocin
One example you told me about, you said this was one of your favorite kind of examples of Xenia was King Alcinous daughter. I'm not gonna try and pronounce her name.
- [08:42]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Nausicaa.
- [08:42]
Kev Velocin
That's the one.
- [08:43]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Well, Nausicaa is young, she's not yet married. In this world, women married very young. She encounters Odysseus just after he washes up on the coast and he's come from his shattered raft off the sea and he looks a wreck. He looks awful. He is naked, he is cut up, he is obviously unshaven and he probably looks quite a sight. He has to get some foliage to try and cover up his more manly bits from her. She's there playing ball with some of her friends and she nevertheless is really kind to him. I mean, she says, you know, make your way to my parents palace. They are the king and queen, after all, they have a palace. And so she gives him instructions. She doesn't say, oh, you know, get away from me. She's very much welcoming him there and her parents do likewise. So she's very much the perfect host. She's someone who's not frightened by how someone looks. She doesn't judge them on their appearance. And she follows through that process even when it's quite an alarming situation. You have a naked man standing in front of you.
- [09:49]
Kev Velocin
Now Zakaea is a really Nice bridge for us to talk about some of the women in the Odyssey and how they're represented. And I thought we should probably start with Penelope, who we haven't actually spoken a great deal about. But while Odysseus has been wondering, she's being at home. How do you assess her role in this?
- [10:09]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
She's central to the poem. I mean, she is there. She is shown to be incredibly clever, very resourceful, like Odysseus. Many of the epithets that apply to Odysseus apply just as well to Penelope. She's been having to hold fort all of these years at home, and we see the toll that this has had on her at the very beginning. I mean, it's often asked, why hasn't she acted sooner? I think she's almost paralyzed by her inability to decide or do anything. She's so frozen by the whole awfulness of her situation. She just doesn't know which way to turn in terms of the narrative. I mean, she is the drive. She is the reason for Odysseus travels. He would not have left Calypso and made that journey home had it not been for his longing for Penelope. And he's very clever. I mean, when he talks to Eucalyptus, she says, well, I'm sure I'm prettier than your wife. I'm more beautiful, I'm taller than her. And Odysseus says, well, of course, yes, you are semi divine, you are tall, you are beautiful. And Penelope can't compare to you in that respect. But I must get back to her.
- [11:16]
Kev Velocin
And then Penelope's cunning is widely kind of showcased through the story with the shroud, the weaving and the unweaving. I was really interested because you mentioned in our last episode when we were talking about the Mycenaean palaces, how there was these huge spaces for weaving and everyone seems to do it in the Odyssey. And I just wondered what that was telling us, if anything culturally about the Greek world at that time.
- [11:41]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Women were weaving across all different strata of society. So you have elite women and non elite women, all weaving.
- [11:48]
Kev Velocin
Doesn't matter who you are, you're weaving, you're weaving.
- [11:50]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yeah, and we see that in the poem. I mean, Helen of Troy weaves in the Iliad.
- [11:55]
Kev Velocin
Well, when she's not drugging her husband and the whole court.
- [11:57]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Exactly. She needs some things to do. That's one thing that she does. So she's been weaving the story of the Trojan War. Penelope is another one. She is a queen and she is weaving. Penelope is weaving a shield for her father in Law. And she might have got her servants to do that for her, her slaves to create it. But clearly it's important to her. So this is really borne out by the society of both in Homer's time and actually the setting in which this poem arises. So the late Bronze Age women were weaving. Very much so. And it was incredibly important then, because in Minoan and Mycenaean society as well, trade depends very heavily on the sale of cloth. And who's making these cloth is the women. So they are effectively driving the economy. And this is incredibly important within these palatial societies. We have certain rooms where there's evidence of weaving taking place. And it's very clear that women were working in these. And we have further evidence for that in the clay tablets which were preserved after they were burned. After these palaces burned down, the clay was preserved even better than it would have been.
- [13:01]
Kev Velocin
That's lucky.
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Dr. Daisy Dunn
Really lucky. It was the only good thing to come out of this Mycenaean palace collapse. So you have these tablets and they refer to women doing all kinds of jobs.
- [13:12]
Kev Velocin
And these are the Lanier B ones we mentioned in a previous episode.
- [13:15]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
They are, yeah. So they're giving a really good insight into the kinds of jobs that Penelope. Women like Penelope would have been doing. So there are weavers and there are different types of weavers. So you have women who are working in groups, in a leather working group, for example, which is.
- [13:32]
Kev Velocin
We'd think of that as quite a traditionally male role now.
- [13:34]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
We would, we would. But here it's being conducted by women. This was particularly, I think, at Pylos, at that palace of Nestor that the evidence comes from. There are women who were doing sort of finishing. They're women who were making headbands, headbands for horses in particular, you know, so there would have been sort of military or ceremonial roles for their work that they were creating. There were wool spinners, there were carders. There were all just different aspects of the weaving process and fabrics women were involved in. And we have the names of some of these women as well. So we know that these are real women. They are also doing things like grinding flour. And we find references in the Odyssey to women grinding flour. So they really existed. We talked about earlier the bath that Telemachus had when he was visiting the palace of Nestor. We have the names of several bath attendants at Pylos. There are at least, I think, 37 of these women. They're all women and they were bath attendants. So you have an idea of the kind of roles that these women in these palaces were fulfilling. So in many ways it's not surprising that Penelope is weaving because this is what women in her age really were doing.
- [14:41]
Kev Velocin
Do you get a sense of any kind of social strata within those jobs? Like a elite woman might be doing either a different type of work or weaving something different to essentially a common person?
- [14:52]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I think there is a real range. So I think some of these jobs are more highly skilled than others. So if you are preparing the wool, the kind of raw wool, that would have been a more hands on, getting dirty kind of job, which probably wouldn't have been done by an elite woman. If you are in a palace, you're much more likely to be making something like a shroud. Like Penelope. It's more refined work and it's also quite sociable. They seem to have been sitting around together a lot of the time, women and discussing it. It's not necessarily a solitary activity. So I think there was a really, really broad range.
- [15:24]
Kev Velocin
We should also talk about Calypso because we mentioned it very briefly about Calypso saying, oh, I'm taller and I'm more beautiful. She also kind of calls out this double standard which I'm really interested in. In terms of Greek myth, like the Greek gods, the male gods can cavort with mortals, but in kind of Greek myth more broadly, it's like it's littered with outrage when you have someone like Calypso, a goddess or a nymph doing the same.
- [15:49]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Exactly. And I mean her initial reaction when Hermes comes to her and says, the gods have decided you've got to let Odysseus go, she's really angry, she's full of rage, she is upset. And her impression is that the gods are jealous and the love that she has for Odysseus and that they are begrudging her the opportunity to be with him. So I think there is certainly a double standard. I mean, Zeus is the worst offender of all.
- [16:17]
Kev Velocin
Oh, he's terrible, he's awful.
- [16:19]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
He can just go down and get away with usually raping in most cases. I mean, that clearly is what's happening. Women everywhere, all over the Greek world, there are so many of them, princesses particularly, they seem to be his particular favorite.
- [16:33]
Kev Velocin
He just eyeballs it. And is that right?
- [16:35]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
He goes, yeah. And then his wife gets really angry about it. But then he just carries on behaving in the same way. But he gets away with it. And it's different, I think, for these people. I think because Calypso, she's not a full goddess, she's not one of the Olympian gods. She's not in that inner circle, that sort of very elite group of gods and goddesses who are in that little cloud on Olympus, you know, very much being together. She is an outsider. She's somewhere between the two. She's between mortals and those gods. And she doesn't have the power that she needs in order to get her way. And no one can argue with Zeus. And that's the big problem.
- [17:10]
Kev Velocin
That is a tremendous problem. Through a lot of myths. We've talked a lot about named women from the poem, but there's a number of enslaved women as well who meet an unfortunate end at the poems denouement. And I just wonder. We talked a bit about whether this was a tale that shows you how to be a good Greek man. Is this also a bit of a tale about how to be a good slave?
- [17:33]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I think certainly. I mean, I think, I mean your reaction is right when you read the poem and suddenly you have Odysseus and his men. They kill all the suitors, but also the female slaves are killed because some of them have been having relationships with the suitors. And you think actually they probably didn't always have much say in that matter. We don't really quite know what their situation was. Certainly one of them seems to. To you have been leaking the story about Penelope weaving and unweaving to the men. So she is quite culpable in the story. But clearly not all of them. It seems a very, very harsh fate. So there certainly is a message within the poem that these people who are enslaved have very, very little rights. They are treated as a group more than they are as individuals. We have some who emerge as individuals. So we have the swineherd, Eumaeus for example.
- [18:31]
Kev Velocin
Yes.
- [18:32]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
And he is almost. He stands alone, he is loyal and he's someone who is trusted from the outset by both Telemachus and by Odysseus.
- [18:42]
Kev Velocin
He's really interesting that his kind of like his approach to Odysseus is I love my master. And Odysseus is in disguise at this point. He's not saying this to him. It's like, I love my master. My master's the best thing since sliced toast or cheese. And you know, he's almost like he's more loyal than the dog.
- [18:59]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
He's brilliant. Yeah. I think you really like. I really like you, Mace.
- [19:02]
Kev Velocin
If you'd like to learn more about women in the ancient Greek world beyond the bounds of the Odyssey, Daisy has you covered in a different episode of the history of your podcast and you'll find out how they were doing much more than just weaving. You'll find that in my beyond the podcast picks in the episode. Description. Daisy, one of the other major themes of this book is nostos, the idea of homecoming. How does this story for you compare with the Iliad?
- [19:27]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I think it's very much concerned with showing the aftermath and the legacy of war. I mean, the main word we associate with the Odyssey is nostos, and nostos is the homecoming, the homecoming of Odysseus. But it gives us nostalgia. But in nostalgia, we also have another Greek word, which is augos, which is pain. And I think this is what we're seeing in Odysseus. He's running back through everything he's been through, from the war to his travels. He's having to recount it all, and he certainly seems to do so with joy and with glee. But at the same time, when he's with Calypso, he hasn't been speaking to her really about what had happened for much time at all. So he seems to have bottled up a lot of what he's been through. And I think, you know, certainly today there are a lot of people who look at Odysseus as someone who is suffering from ptsd, that he isn't able to engage with everything that happened in the full form that it did because it's almost too painful to run back through everything.
- [20:29]
Kev Velocin
There's something I wondered about. When he's retelling the story of his wanderings, did any of it really happen, even to Odysseus, because he's a master liar. But is it a kind of life of pie situation where he's kind of made up half the journey as he went along?
- [20:41]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
This is a really, really popular question to ask. A lot of people think this doesn't seem to ring true. Well, if he's just an excellent storyteller and he really wants to impress his Phaeacians because he's got something to gain, you know, he wants.
- [20:52]
Kev Velocin
He needs to get home.
- [20:53]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
He needs to get home. So if he can win them over, this is the way to do it. I don't know. I quite like to believe that he went through some of these things. I mean, for us, it's very difficult. Where do you draw the line? Do you believe in Poseidon shattering a raft? That's a God. And so for the Greek readers, that's a God. You know, that's a credible thing. Is that so different from Cyclops and gobbling up the men? Like, where do you draw the line between fiction and reality. You if you want to incorporate the gods, do we include those in the fictional realm or do we include those in the more realm that people in Greece might have done? So it's quite challenging. I think he's definitely a slippery character, so we couldn't put it past him to make everything up. But in short, I believe that he did encounter some real challenges on his way home.
- [21:46]
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- [23:15]
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- [23:47]
Kev Velocin
Before we go into the kind of interpretations the Odyssey down the ages, I thought this might be a good time to bring in your final myth of the week. So every time we've asked you to pick a story from the wider Greek canon that sits adjacent to what I've been talking about. Daisy, what have you got for us this time?
- [24:03]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I thought I'd tell the myth of why the Trojan War actually began to
- [24:08]
Kev Velocin
begin with, do we know?
- [24:10]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Well, what's really interesting, we have the Iliad and the Odyssey, but we also have a series of other poems, something called the Epic Cycle. So there are six other poems that belong to this epic cycle, and they don't really survive, apart from a few fragments and mainly retellings of little bits and storylines in other authors. And one of these was called the Cypria, and it explained the real cause of the Trojan War. And it's absolutely fascinating. So what this myth tells us is that the Earth was really buckling under the strain of the surging population. And the Earth is personified. The Earth is being weighed down by the number of people on top of it. And with this population surge, religion is declining. The situation on Earth is becoming more fraught, more uncomfortable, and the Earth is really growing exasperated by what it's kind of feeling and experiencing on top of it. So the Earth appeals to Zeus for help. Says Zeus, I really need some help here. I'm being weighed down. I'm being overburdened by all of this. And Zeus agrees to do something. He triggers a Theban war. So that's one cycle. And actually within the epic cycle, you have a whole cycle of myths relating to Thebes. But that wasn't enough. So then Zeus decided to trigger the Trojan War. So the whole Trojan War was actually caused by Zeus. And specifically it was so that Zeus's plan could be fulfilled.
- [25:42]
Kev Velocin
Zeus's plan is a form of genocide.
- [25:46]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Well, in order to help Earth, because Earth was so overburdened, the population was too big. So that was his solution, will kill off a load of the people, which
- [25:56]
Kev Velocin
is an irony, because Zeus has created quite a lot of people. Right. Like, so many people trace their lineages to Zeus in the Earth.
- [26:02]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Exactly, exactly. So, but it's just really stunning because I think we always think about the origins of the Trojan War with Paris, the judgment of Paris, the Golden apple. He gave it to Aphrodite, and then she said, you could run away with the most beautiful woman, and that's Helen, and that's the start of the War. And certainly Homer knew that myth. That myth is older than the Odyssey in the Iliad and that's certainly a backdrop to it. But it's just so interesting that there's also this additional layer that the war was seen to be needed by the gods because of the size of the population and declining religion upon it.
- [26:35]
Kev Velocin
You mentioned there the epic cycle, which is something we should talk about because you have this idea that the Iliad and the Odyssey are the only two epics, but as you alluded to, does a bigger cycle there. So eight, I think it was.
- [26:49]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
There are eight altogether. So there are six others. The Iliad and the Odyssey seem to have been the hit ones. They're the favourites, that's why we still have them. The others are less popular, but clearly interesting. So I mentioned the Cypria, that's one of them. And bear in mind the Iliad opens in the 10th and final year of the war. So there's been nine years of war. So that was dealing with that. What's happening beforehand? How did the whole thing begin? You have something called the Ethiopas that describes the death of Achilles, which doesn't occur in the Iliad. You have the little Iliad and the sack of Ilion or the sack of Troy. So about the end, and that's where the Trojan horse myths were told in a bit more detail. You have the returns describing the homecomings of all of the different soldiers apart from Odysseus. He has his own story. And then we have a very curious one called the Telegony. The Telagony is my favourite, I have to say. It's very, very bizarre. It looks essentially at what Odysseus did after he got back.
- [27:49]
Kev Velocin
It's his epilogue.
- [27:50]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Right? It's the epilogue. So I mean, the whole idea with this epic cycle is that they're prequels and sequels to the Iliad and the Odyssey. So this is like the ultimate sequel. This is a sequel to the Odyssey. Odysseus is home in Ithaca, but he decides in this epic that he can't just sit still. I mean, maybe we shouldn't be surprised by that. After all that traveling, he can't just be done with it. He needs to do something.
- [28:09]
Kev Velocin
I'm probably not surprised.
- [28:10]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I'm not surprised either. So he continues on his travels. He travels inland, he meets another queen, Kallidice, and he gets married and has a son.
- [28:19]
Kev Velocin
All that time where he was pining to get back to Penelope, straight away
- [28:23]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
had a son with someone else.
- [28:24]
Kev Velocin
Good, good.
- [28:25]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
He then learns that Penelope is pregnant. She actually has a son who's his as well. And then he finds out he's got a third son. Circe has had a son all those years ago, and that son is Telegonus. And Telegonus means sort of far away born. And this young man sets off to Ithac to find Odysseus. And Odysseus has since gone back to Penelope, by the way. And so he arrives and he carries with him a barb of a stingray as a weapon. And he approaches land and there's a kind of a bit of a tussle, more than a bit, a proper tussle, between Odysseus and the Ithacans and this new stranger arriving. And accidentally the son kills Odysseus. So Odysseus is killed by his own son, by Circe, using a stingray barb. Quite bizarre, but it doesn't end there. Circe then comes back into the picture. She decides to take Odysseus off to the isle. It's called the Isles of the Blessed. It's where they took heroes almost so they could be immortal. And then even more bizarre, Penelope decided to marry Telegonus, this son.
- [29:43]
Kev Velocin
Right.
- [29:43]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
And Telemachus, her son, married Circe.
- [29:47]
Kev Velocin
This is starting to feel, not literally, but thematically incestuous.
- [29:51]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yeah, it's like fan fiction at its worst.
- [29:54]
Kev Velocin
So the Odyssey may not be a domestic epic, but the Telegony maybe.
- [29:59]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yeah, it's the eastenders of the epic cycle for sure.
- [30:02]
Kev Velocin
That is my favorite interpretation of the description of anything I think I've ever heard. I love that. That's an incredible epilogue to the story of Odysseus. Why do you think we don't have these books?
- [30:18]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I mean, I would say they prove to be less popular. I mean, they seem to have been performed. We know that there was a group of poets calling themselves the Children of Homer, or the Sons of Homer, the Home, performing on the island of chios since the 6th century BC. And I think they were very much performing probably a whole range of these poems, but they just didn't make the cut. I mean, I think the Iliad and the Odyssey are so perfect as works of literature, and I think that was recognized from early on, and there was a real effort to write them down as soon as writing came into being. So it seems quite like these other poems just filtered out by the time that writing was really being sort of put into operation in Greece.
- [31:01]
Kev Velocin
We should talk about the kind of like the ongoing cultural relevance and interpretations around the Odyssey. And, you know, we've talked very much about how the Greeks thought Homer as real. And we've seen how many elements of the Greeks at that time, their kind of culture, was imprinted into the Odyssey. When we get into the centuries after, so kind of classical Greece, how is the Odyssey viewed by them?
- [31:24]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
The Odyssey is viewed as a really, really important work. I mean, it has a gravity to it, even in ancient times. So the fact that it's being performed at religious festivals, it's being preserved, it's been spoken about, so 6th century, 5th century BC, it's really very much seen to be a crowning achievement of the Greeks already by that point. And that just continues all the way through ancient Greece. So Alexander the Great, for example, he was given a copy of the Iliad rather than the Odyssey by his tutor Aristotle, and he slept with it under his pillow. And that's centuries later. So that just shows you.
- [31:59]
Kev Velocin
So he's using that kind of like a guidebook to how to be a warrior rather than Schliemann to how to find an ancient city.
- [32:06]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Exactly. And I mean, the Odyssey and the Iliad, together, they are the canonical texts of the Greek world. Practically nothing that's written after them fails to refer back to them in some way.
- [32:17]
Kev Velocin
And so did you really shape classical Greek culture, like, as they go on?
- [32:21]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Completely. They are seen to be like the Bible of the ancient Greek world. And I don't mean that from a sense of belief holy, although there is that aspect. I mean, from the fact that literature owes its beginning to the Iliad and the Odyssey. So everything is either a response to it or kind of response against what's written and an attempt to move on from Homer. So there's just this constant thread you can trace of Homer all the way through literature, beyond Greece, through into the Roman Empire as well.
- [32:53]
Kev Velocin
One thing you mentioned to me earlier, which I must bring into the conversation now, is that there's also. We take the Odyssey and the Iliad as being like they're having a long tail coming from them, but they've also got influence coming into them.
- [33:04]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yes, they do, Yes. I mean, I think it's really important we acknowledge the fact that, I mean, these are the earliest works in the Western world that we have, but actually they're really, really indebted to works from the east as well, the ancient Near East. So in particular, the epic of Gilgamesh, 12th century BC, Mesopotamian epic. It's a brilliant tale. I mean, I recommend the Epic of Gilgamesh to anybody. And that's really a quest for eternal life by a central figure who has some characteristics which are shared in common with Odysseus. And certainly a lot of the gods in that poem are similar in terms of their characteristics to the gods in Homer as well. So there's a real debt to the ancient Near East. There's a real sort of idea that there are certain ideas which are quite common across several cultures which are developing, some of them in tandem, some of them springing from one to the other. And actually tracing where something originated is sometimes quite difficult. But certainly the Epic of Gilgamesh is a major precursor to the Odyssey.
- [34:05]
Kev Velocin
You mentioned the Roman world there as well. What did they make of the poem?
- [34:10]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
They adored it. They absolutely loved the Odyssey. It's really, really important to Latin literature. And what you then find is Virgil stepping forward and saying, well, I'm going to give the Roman people an equivalent in Latin. And he creates the Aeneid. And people usually see the Aeneid as half Iliad and half Odyssey. The first half is sort of more Odyssey like. Second half is more Iliad like. So they created that as their. Their equivalent. It's their epic poem. So it's very much this idea that Homer lives on, but it's kind of changed in some way.
- [34:46]
Kev Velocin
And is that a sense that Virgil did that to give Rome its kind of founding mythos, in the same way that the Greeks have the two Homeric poems?
- [34:57]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Exactly, because he was literally connecting the Roman people and their genealogy, their lineage to the survivors of the Trojan War. Because Aeneas, he's the one who sails away from Troy. He'd fought there, he has a band of refugees with them, and they all travel by boat and land in Italy. And the Roman people are descended from this group of travelers who've been fighting at Troy. So this heroic age group. So there's a complete continuity between the fiction of the poem and then the reality that people are living in.
- [35:29]
Kev Velocin
It's really interesting because when we talk about an Odyssey, it's very much like, if you say, I'm going on Odyssey, I'm going on a great adventure and I'm going outbound. Whereas Odysseus, holding him, Nostos, he's coming home. It's kind of the opposite. But Aeneas feels like he's actually doing an Odyssey, by which we mean it.
- [35:44]
Sponsor Voice
Mm.
- [35:44]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
That's really interesting, isn't it? Because I think we almost misused that word, don't we, Odyssey? Because it feels very, very different. As you say, one of them's going back and the other one's going forward.
- [35:53]
Kev Velocin
One thing I would love to get your perspective on as a classicist is all the versions, Odyssey we talk about, they are translations. And I wondered how much the translator's interpretation of the text affects how much we take from the poem.
- [36:07]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
A huge amount. A huge amount. So there've been so many translations of the Odyssey. I grew up reading Richmond Latimer. This is my version, and this is quite traditional. And I mean, it's not perfect. There are certain aspects of it which I think don't quite characterize the tone of episodes that it's describing. Emily Wilson's new one is very, very popular, and there's a whole generation who will get to know the Odyssey through that and with translation. I think something that Emily Wilson's spoken about a lot with her translation is that in earlier translations, you find a lot of mistranslations. So when it comes to slavery or women, the word slave isn't always used when it's actually there in the Greek. You know, there's a lot of. And I will sometimes slip into this maid servant attendant when we really. We mean slave. But because I think we're trying to. The translator was trying to create the image of a court, of a stately court and try and set it within that atmosphere. The word maidservant suddenly seems more appropriate because you have this kind of grand setting. Having slave there doesn't sound right. It doesn't kind of affect our image in our head.
- [37:17]
Kev Velocin
Do the various translations then start to give you the political and social mores of the translator's time? Because now we've got translations that are spanning decades and decades.
- [37:28]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Oh, totally. I mean, I think, you know, just to pick up on that slavery example, then I don't think people would have consistently picked up on all the vocabulary that's appropriate to describing slavery even 20 years ago, because we weren't talking about it to the same degree as we are now. We are now a lot more sensitive to strata in society. To the right words which are used to describe people from, I don't know, overseas. You wouldn't necessarily say foreigner, for example. There are words which are imbued with meaning now, which they probably didn't have 50 years ago. So I think you very much carry that with you. And maybe someone reading some of the translations which are being created now would think, oh, this is very careful. This person's being very careful to say the right thing. And is that true to the Greek? And so it encourages them to then go back to the Greek, which I think is really important. As much as the translation can be brilliant. If you can read the Greek, or you have any way of accessing it and comparing it, even side by side, thinking we have line references, you could then look up that word. You can actually get the Greek text up online, and you can click on the word. So even if you don't have a Greek dictionary, you can click on it and it will take you through to a Greek dictionary translation of it, and you can see for yourself. And I think that's a really cool thing.
- [38:45]
Kev Velocin
We should talk about pop culture and the Odyssey. I owe you a debt of thanks because part of my researching for this has brought me back to something called Ulysses 31, which is just frankly incredible. I believe you know about this now because I said. She.
- [38:58]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Well, you mentioned it to me, and I said, what on earth is that? So, yeah, I looked it up and I thought, it's the most brilliant thing. So it was the 1980s. Do we call it anime?
- [39:07]
Kev Velocin
It's animated. I wouldn't call it animated, but topline is it's a French Japanese animated cartoon of the Odyssey using the Roman name. Ulysses in space. Yes. Daisy. I mean, what did you make of it when I said that to you?
- [39:27]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I mean, Odyssey in space. What's not. Like, what's. I mean, what's not to like? I was genuinely as to how accurate to the text this was. And I haven't watched all of this. I confess I've saved some of this up because I need something to do in my evenings, you know, But I thought it was hilarious. I really, really liked it.
- [39:45]
Kev Velocin
It's so funny. Cause it's very 80s like, it's inescapable. 80s. The kind of. The graphical style, obviously, the musical style, just everything about it. I loved it. But it's part of a tradition of interpretations of D Odyssey, which is now coming around with the new Christopher Nolan film. And I just wanted to get a sense from you of, you know, why we keep coming back to this in pop culture and why a poem composed approximately 2,800 years ago still kind of resonates with us.
- [40:15]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I think it's partly the age of it. We are fascinated with something that's so old being told it is the oldest or the second oldest. We think, okay, there must be something important about it for it to have survived so long. And because so many other people have turned back to it, we assume that it's due some kind of reverence. And I think, you know, we should be revering it as a text. We should be interrogating it as a text at the same time. And I think the fact that so many different interpretations have been given to these works, so many question marks remain about the composition, the power of the stories themselves. There are so many reasons just to keep coming back to it. And I think this is why people are just drawn back. Because there's always something new you can do creatively with it. Because there are so many kind of gaps and anomalies and questions.
- [41:05]
Kev Velocin
What are your thoughts on the Nolan film from what you've seen so far?
- [41:09]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I'm quietly optimistic. I'm really genuinely excited. I will be in the queue to see that film the moment it comes out.
- [41:16]
Kev Velocin
Midnight showing.
- [41:17]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yeah. So I'm very, very excited, I think, yes. I mean, I had some questions about the first trailer where we saw the kind of Batman esque costume. And I thought that was. That's very, very early in the Trainer. I thought, oh no. Oh no. But actually, having seen the second trailer, I feel a bit more excited by it.
- [41:36]
Kev Velocin
We're coming to the end of our journey with Odysseus and the Odyssey. But I wonder, as a kind of a way of closing off, let's assume Homer does exist. If you could ask them to clarify any one thing from the text, a translation, an inference, what would it be?
- [41:54]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Oh, so difficult. I mean, I was gonna say I'd like to know whether he intended us to believe all of Odysseus's stories about his travels. But I'm also, because I'm a writer myself, I'm really curious as to his process. I want to know how he did it. You know, we know that there were these kind of circulating versions and these myths. So if he was the original Homer, how did he sit down and distill those into a coherent narrative?
- [42:23]
Kev Velocin
And if you had to leave the listeners with one thought about the Odyssey or kind of take home about this poem, what would you say to them?
- [42:31]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I should say something really profound. And my feeling about the Odyssey is that it's the one poem you should read before you read the Iliad. Actually, even though it's the sequel to the Iliad, I think it is the truest way of entering into the ancient world and understanding a little bit about it. And yes, it's a fictional story. You don't have to go in there believing every aspect of it or thinking it's reflective of real society. But I think it is the one piece of literature that is most likely to immerse you in the Greek world. And for me, that is a really, really important thing.
- [43:11]
Kev Velocin
That's such a lovely note to end on. And with that, we've come home. Odysseus's journey is complete, if you don't count the telegony. And so is ours. So, Daisy, thank you so much for this. This has been wonderful.
- [43:24]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Thank you. I've had a really good journey.
- [43:26]
Kev Velocin
Yeah, we all love a journey. It's been a pottery. If you would like more content like this, you can find all of our podcast series and video series ad free on the History Extra app.