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- [00:00]
Charlotte Higgins
Well, it's a very big month for ancient Greek epic Marybeard, and therefore also for us.
- [00:07]
Mary Beard
It sure is. And the reason for that is obvious. It's July that sees the release of Christopher Nolan's adaptation of Homer's epic poem the Odyssey, one of the earliest and the most celebrated works in the whole of world literature.
- [00:28]
Charlotte Higgins
That's a huge deal when a director with Christopher Nolan's form. I mean, this is the man behind films like Oppenheimer, Inception and Dunkirk, takes on one of the giants of the literary canon. And there's been months and months of speculation about the casting, the scripting, the locations, basically everything about the movie.
- [00:49]
Mary Beard
We are really looking forward to it, but not without a bit of, of trepidation. See what he's done with it. But it also seems fair to speculate that more people are going to go and see the Odyssey movie than have read the actual Odyssey poem. And reading the Odyssey poem can, you know, let's be honest, seem quite a forbidding prospect.
- [01:18]
Charlotte Higgins
But it really definitely needn't be that way. The Odyssey is a truly rewarding poem to read and we're here to give you a helping hand because we have our book club, Exploring the Odyssey, which runs alongside our main Instant Classics feed. And in that, Mary and I have been reading the Odyssey together quite slowly for nearly a year now. And we really, really recommend that you join in with us. It's quite easy to catch up and you've got plenty of time, and we're still only just over halfway through, so, you know, it's still, there's still a long haul ahead, but it's really, really fun. So there's that there for you too. And the first two episodes are free to listen to, but we thought that
- [02:08]
Mary Beard
some people might appreciate something a little bit less leisurely. So today, and it's the first part in a three part series, we're just going to give you some, some answers to the big background questions, like what is the Odyssey? What are its main themes? And what are the basics you might want to be equipped with before you head off to the cinema?
- [02:35]
Charlotte Higgins
So next episode we'll go on to review the film and then in the episode after that, we're going to indulge a little bit of nerdishness and turn a more classical eye onto the film and dig into it a bit more in a, in a maybe more pedantic way.
- [02:54]
Mary Beard
This is Instant Classics. It's the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping the world today. And I'm Mary Beard and I'M Charlotte Higgins.
- [03:03]
Charlotte Higgins
Each week we dive into the myths, the dramas and the characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us. Now this week, the Odyssey. What to know before you go.
- [03:27]
Mary Beard
Morning decisions. How about a creamy mocha Frappuccino drink? Or sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe, or white chocolate mocha? Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. Okay, the bottom line, and we're going to, we're going to give you some kind of guide to the basic architecture of the poem and you know, talking about basically what the Odyssey is about. Now, the original poem, I mean that's the one that you can read if you go buy a copy. And there are plenty of translations around. We've been using Emily Wilson's recent translations, but there are plenty of others. Look, it's, it's 12,000 lines long and it comes in 24 books, so called. Don't be put off by that. They're more like chapter length in our terms. When's it written, When's it composed? And that might be a bit different. Well, that is hugely debated. But if you wanted to cut centuries, centuries of argument short on that, you could say probably it reached the form we can now read it in, in the late 8th century BCE, that's 3,000 years ago. And it was perhaps underlined, perhaps put together by a man whom the Greeks called Homer, and it's still called Homer's Odyssey. But it was a bit more complicated than that because it was also probably the, the product of decades, maybe more of so called aural composition of compositions by bards strumming around a campfire, riffing on the theme of the poem. And I have to say that I've cut a very long story short there. And in the book club, if you're keen on the details, we go into rather more microscopic detail on the problems of who put the Odyssey together when. But basically it takes its form in the late 8th century, probably not written down until a bit later. And I think it's also important to say that those bards who were kind of, you know, riffing around the campfire creating this great big story, they were not talking about their own time. They were looking back to a lost world before them, maybe 1200 BC, 1300 BC which is as much myth as history.
- [06:15]
Charlotte Higgins
So the backdrop to this whole poem, you know, what's the story about? Well, you probably need this sort of tiny bit of backstory which is the backdrop to the poem, the sort of the, the thing that Happens immediately before the poem begins is the Trojan War. So the Trojan War, it's a war against Greeks and Trojans. The Trojans are living in what is now Turkey. The Greeks attack Troy, or a sort of a conglomeration, an alliance of Greek leaders and their men attack Troy because the Trojan prince Paris has eloped with or abducted. This is. It's ambiguous. The wife of a great Greek leader, Helen of Troy, and the Greeks off to Troy. They besiege Troy and It takes them 10 years, but eventually they win. And our poem, the Odyssey, starts after the end of that victory. Although because this poem is a very twisty, turny kind of a poem, it doesn't, it doesn't sort of start at point A and move to point Z in a linear, straightforward fashion. You get lots of flashbacks to Troy and to the events of Troy within the poem. So it has this feeling, it has this. It is in some sense a sequel. It's in some sense a sequel to the other great Greek epic, ancient Greek epic, which is the Iliad. And the Iliad is set during the Trojan War. And in some senses the Odyssey picks up lots of loose ends about what happens to the Greek leaders after the end of the war and as they go home, centering on Odysseus. Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, who is trying to get home after the end of the siege of Troy. And things are made extremely difficult for him. It has taken him, when we first meet him in the poem, it's taken him already 8ish, 9ish years to try to get home. Bearing in mind the whole of the siege of Troy took 10 years as well. So it's a epic lengths of time to achieve these goals.
- [08:39]
Mary Beard
And he's had terrible trouble. I mean, you know, as you discover in the poem, all kinds of difficulties have stood in his way as he's tried to get home from the victory, the Greek victory at Troy, back to his palace because he's noble king, back to his palace on the island of Ithaca. Some of those troubles have been horrible, nasty monsters. Some of them have been sitting seductive women who've kind of seduced him from the path of going home. Right. And so what you have in the poem is one main strand, though it turns out to be a bit more complicated. As you've just said, Charlotte, one main strand is Odysseus's journey home. But the other main strand which we're looking at at the same time is what is going on in Odysseus's home palace of Ithaca while he is away. And there's that 10 years of the Trojan War. And then another, as it turns out to be about 10 years of homecoming. And there's his wife Penelope is waiting for him to come back. And his son, who was just a baby when Odysseus left. His son Telemachus is growing up, right? Odysseus hasn't seen him since he was in Napis or whatever the Greeks did for Napis. By the time Odysseus gets back, Telemachus is a young man.
- [10:11]
Sponsor
Right.
- [10:13]
Charlotte Higgins
So already getting this sense, I think, I hope, that this story, the poem the Odyssey is about many things. It's about coming home, story of a homecoming. It's the story of overcoming immense and magical and epic obstacles to getting home. It's also about growing up. Telemachus in this poem starts to grow up. It's also about a marriage that has been non functioning in the sense that Odysseus and Penelope have been apart for 20 years. You know, it's also the story of this marriage and then it's going to become about how you reintegrate yourself into your home after you've been away. A warrior in a completely different world, metaphorically and literally. But it's sort of super important to say that there's much more than that. By the way, it's a very, very rich and wonderful poem. And we'll come back in this episode to some, I think, some of those bigger themes about what we think it is about. But I hinted earlier that it's a non linear poem and this is one of the things that makes it so exciting and so fun to read. And we've got a whole episode on this at the beginning of exploring the Odyssey. But in the first line of the poem, Odysseus, the main character, is described as a complicated man. That's in Emily Wilson's translation, a complicated man. And that complication of Odysseus, he is a complicated and ambiguous figure. But the complication is also reflected in the way the poem is structured.
- [11:54]
Mary Beard
And I think that can be when you read the poem, that's one of its pleasures actually. But it's also one of the things that can be a bit confusing at first sight when you pick it up to read. Because you sort of expect this poem to start with Odysseus leaving Troy, have all his problems and then eventually get home in a kind of single narrative. But actually the narratives interweave, there are flashbacks and I mean, I think it's very important to kind of let yourself go a bit when you're reading the Odyssey and have fun with the fact that suddenly we've gone back to a little bit of an earlier time and we're retelling a bit of an earlier part of the story.
- [12:43]
Charlotte Higgins
And actually as soon as I heard that Christopher Nolan was adapting the Odyssey, I thought, right, this is a good fit. There's every chance that Christopher Nolan will be good on this particular aspect of the poem because he's got form, right? If you think about inception of strange interlocking embedded stories and messed up timelines, I would be really interested to see what he does with the timeline in the Odyssey. Because actually the Odyssey begins. If you plotted out the time, the actual real time in the Odyssey against the time that we understand that we're told that we're narrative that's narrativized in the poem. You sort of begin quite near the end. It's a sort of confusing because so much of the poem is told in flashback.
- [13:33]
Mary Beard
I think we can get back to basics though. First of all, we don't really meet Odysseus for five books of the poem. That's kind of a quarter of the poem. We get a glimpse of him at the very beginning and we discover that he's holed up, whether that's willingly or unwillingly becomes unwilling in the end with the gorgeous nymph Calypso.
- [14:03]
Charlotte Higgins
And by the way, a nymph is a kind of junior goddess. So she, she lives on a very remote island, far from all the other more senior gods. And she's very beautiful and kind of a very fun character in the poem. But yeah, this word nymph, which is a bit confusing. She's a goddess, but not a very, but sort of low grade one.
- [14:28]
Mary Beard
When we enter the poem where we get this tiny glimpse of Odysseus with Calypso, what we're really entering is a debate that the gods and goddesses, because deities, the Greek gods and goddesses, Zeus, Poseidon, Athena, etc play quite a big part in the Odyssey. They are having a kind of a big debate about Odysseus and about kind of whether it's not time to give him a bit of a hand to get home or not. We see that to start with, but then what happens almost instantly at the beginning of the poem, and it's going to be interesting to see how lowland does this is that once we kind of just. We've kind of plotted where Odysseus is and we've plotted the dilemmas of the gods about how they're going to help him or not to get home. We're right back to Odysseus's home and his wife and son Telemachus. Telemachus is now a kind of late teenager. What we discover is that while Odysseus has been away a load of what are kind of always rather romantically called suitors, local aristocrats who really want to try and get Penelope, Odysseus's wife, to marry them. Right? They, and I think they're better called thugs really. They're kind of, they've invaded Odysseus palace and, and they are kind of eating them out of house and home and they're wanting to say to Penelope, look, marry one of our Odysseus is never going to get back. Meanwhile, Telemachus, the son who is growing up is beginning to get old enough to actually mount a few inquiries about his dad, his himself. I mean, for most of Odysseus's absence he's been a kid, he's not been able to do very much. Now he thinks that he can go and find out from other Greeks who might possibly know other Greeks he'd fought in the Trojan War. He might be able to find out what has happened to father, which is what he does.
- [16:54]
Charlotte Higgins
So this part of the, this is like the first five books of the Odyssey. Basically most of this or the first four books is mostly, we're mostly on Ithaca with Penelope and with Telemachus, albeit we follow Telemachus on his mini journey to find news of his dad. But what it also sets up, I suppose is this sense of immense jeopardy in relation to Ithaca, what's happening in Ithaca. Like there's a sense that things are coming to a real head on Ithaca and it really needs daddy, Odysseus, husband, Odysseus, King Odysseus to come and sort it out. Because Penelope is under increasing pressure to select her husband. You know, nobody, kind of understandably nobody believes that he's ever going to come back after nearly 20 years. And she has been busily fending off the time that she has to make a decision. She has had this amazing ruse of telling them that she'll finish, she'll choose a suitor from among them when she's finished weaving her father in law's shroud, which she weaves during the day and then unravels during the night. When they've found her out quite late in the day, they're not so bright. And at the same time they're recognizing that Telemachus the son is becoming a threat. And after he set off to go and find news of his father on the Greek mainland. They decide that they are going to ambush him on his way home and kill him. So the sort of danger, danger is really mounting on Ithaca.
- [18:35]
Mary Beard
And at that point we go back to Odysseus and we invent after just that very, very brief glimpse of him at the beginning of the poem, we then focus from book five, we're focusing on Odysseus and what happens is that thanks to a bit of divine intervention, he's allowed to leave Calypso's island and he ends up, not without some difficulty, in the kingdom of the Phaeacians who live at the edges of the world. He set out on a boat, he's washed up there and he's ended up in this remote kingdom. And it is there with the audience of Phaeacians all around him who are saying, well, who are you? You know, you've washed up in our kingdom. How did you get here? Where he then, and this is as a flashback, tells the story of his wanderings from the end of the city of Troy to where he is now after Calypso. And it's in these several nights of storytelling where he entertains this generous and hospitable community. He kind of pays back by telling them some good stories and he tells them many of the stories which happened earlier in his wanderings about how he had confronted, you know, one eyed giants, seductive witches, how he lost all his men when they had slaughtered and eaten the cattle owned by the Sun God, etc. Etc. So we've got this long, several books of Odysseus telling his wanderings.
- [20:38]
Charlotte Higgins
The whole of the centre of the poem really, isn't it, Mary, is this flashback situation where we kind of emerge briefly for air, as it were, into the world of the Phaeacians and then go back down into Odysseus telling yet another, yet another part of his story, all the stuff that happened to him. I mean, you know, he left Troy with several ships full of warriors and how he ended up on his own, a washed up a beggar effectively on distant shores.
- [21:14]
Mary Beard
And he also, I mean, one of the most amazing things for I think for an ancient audience was he visits the land of the dead. In this he tells us about his visit to the underworld and something that only the biggest heroes ever managed to do, managed to do and get out again, right? So after he's done this, and this takes several books, he finishes the story and basically says to his host, I've got to go home now. There's a kind of slight question mark whether he's really going to end up marrying the princess of the royal house of the Phaeacians, Nausicaa Nau Sica. But he doesn't. And he gets sent off with plenty of presents. He gets sent off in a ship by these people who take him back to the island of Ithaca, which is his home, leave him, dump him on the shore with all the gifts that they've given him and they go home. And the rest of the poem, and this is half of it is taken up with how he deals with what he finds there. And part of that or a lot of that he spends in disguise. He doesn't out himself instantly. He doesn't say, you know, hello everybody, this is Odysseus, come back home. He's disguised as a beggar. He makes contact with some of his former slaves who are still around and help him. And the story then unravels, isn't it? He does gradually get recognized first actually his dog is the first, his old dog is the first person to recognize him, then promptly dies having recognized his master. He's recognized by his nurse, he's held nurse. And then eventually he's recognized by his wife Penelope.
- [23:17]
Charlotte Higgins
And then the whole thing wraps up actually in a really retributive violent. It becomes a bit of a revenge drama effectively. So having spent a huge amount of time in the poem so creeping around, being disguised, disguised as a beggar in his own home. I mean, it's the most extraordinary reversal from the great leader at Troy to the. To this beggar testing out. He's constantly testing out the loyalty of his household from the enslaved people who work there, right up to his wife and his son after he's gradually and very stealthily because one of the keynotes of Odysseus character is shrewdness, cleverness, caution. Odysseus never trusts anybody. That's his watchword, I would say.
- [24:12]
Mary Beard
And you should never trust. You should never trust. Odysseus is the other side of the.
- [24:16]
Charlotte Higgins
That is also. That is absolutely true. After, that is after he's been recognized by his family. And this kind of truly violent culmination occurs where the suitors, you know, with that awful euphemistic word, the louts who've been trying to marry his wife are dispatched and also the household slaves who have been disloyal, the female household slaves who've been disloyal and been sleeping with the suitors are dispatched in a really. Dispatched as a euphemism, they're hanged, the girls are hanged, the girls who slept with the suitors are hanged. So it actually becomes very dark in my view. And again, I am really intrigued. There are so many registers in the Odyssey, from wit and sexiness to extraordinary adventures, you know, the Cyclops, all these sort of cannibalistic monsters that Odysseus encounters, storms and shipwrecks, that kind of register. And then there's this much more domestic, you know, the man at home trying to regain his. His household, but doing it in this sort of stealthy, undercover way. And then having done that, it becomes a bloodbath. So it's gonna be super interesting to see what Nolan does with that, you
- [25:42]
Mary Beard
know, and in a sense, there is a happy ending in that Odysseus gets back home and he is reunited with his wife, but it's a very bloody happy ending. And there's another kind of bit of uncertainty that the original poem sews in here, and I don't know if Nolan will, is that it is prophesied to Odysseus on his journeys that he will get back home, but then he'll go away again, and we often forget that bit. And it'll be very interesting to see whether Nolan brings Odysseus back home once and for all to happy ever afterlife with Penelope, even though there's been a terrible bloodbath, or whether he will start to hint to us that Odysseus isn't going to stay here for very long.
- [26:31]
Charlotte Higgins
If I had to put money on it, I would. It's so irresistible as a filmic gesture to have him look longingly at the horizon and put his boots on again. We'll see. We shall see. We shall see. But after the break, Mary, let's think a bit more about the sort of big. What it's actually about this poem.
- [26:53]
Mary Beard
Yes, because the story is one thing, and we've given you kind of a quick resume of those 24 books, but what's it really about?
- [27:09]
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- [27:39]
Mary Beard
Hello, lovely listeners. If you're not yet part of our Instant Classics Book club. Well, now is the perfect time to join because we are making our way through one of the most exciting works of literature ever. That's Homer's Odyssey.
- [27:59]
Charlotte Higgins
We would love you to join our book club, which we absolutely adore. So please do join now to give you all the access to our previous episodes and loads of other perks like being able to join our online community and getting early booking access to our live events.
- [28:18]
Mary Beard
All details are on our website, instantclassicspod.com
- [28:26]
Charlotte Higgins
well, Mary, I think this poem is about a lot of different things and that is what makes it so, that's what makes it persist over time. That's the reason that we are still reading it now. That's the reason that it has been reinterpreted, reread, re adapted, turned into plays, turned into painting. I mean, it's about many, many things and I think it changes every time you read it.
- [28:57]
Mary Beard
No, it was wonderfully admired by Bob Dylan in his Nobel Prize speech where he talked about be Odysseus as, you know, the wandering man, right. And how important this had been for him. And so it's all those kind of different aspects which give everybody a chance to come and rethink it for themselves. But there are themes, really big themes that it's kind of impossible to think about the Odyssey without thinking about. And I mean, as you said, you know, the idea of what it is to come home has to be one of them.
- [29:37]
Charlotte Higgins
Yes. What, what is home? And how do you come back to your home after you have been completely alienated from it? And I think it's about the returning soldier, the soldier returning home. And I think that that really is. For as long as there are humans there is war. And for as long as there is war there are men and sometimes women who go off and experience something truly outside the realm of normal domestic, civic, political life and then come back and have to reintegrate themselves into peaceful society. That never stops being difficult. And it's absolutely part of the work of the poem is how do you, how do you. In the world of Homer? It's kind of, I think of it slightly as how do you, what toolkit do you need for survival in this civilian world or this non military world that is different from the toolkit that you need for survival as a military leader? It's like the world of the Iliad is set against the world of the Odyssey and you discover that you need really different survival skills in those two realms.
- [30:52]
Mary Beard
But there's also this and I Think in some ways, very familiar aspect here that if you think about homecoming, the home you come back to is never the same as the home you left. Right. You know, and, you know, that's true for, you know, students coming back home after their first term at university. They discover that the folks back home, Mum and dad, have got a new life, a different life, you know, so you. When you reintegrate, you always reintegrate into something which is significantly different from how you remember it. And I think that for me, that's rather strange comparison, in a sense, to think about the returning student and the returning warrior. But it's there, you know, I think that's right.
- [31:40]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah. I think you could take it back a level and say it's about how you're changed by experience.
- [31:47]
Mary Beard
The student is different. Odysseus is different from how he was when he left. And he's gone through these terrible experiences of war and struggle, but the home is also different. And so the idea that coming home is a simple idea of return is really significantly undermined by. It's showing you that coming home is one of the most difficult things you can ever do.
- [32:19]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah, it's all right. And I think, again, in this sort of slightly banal way, it's so borne out by experience. I mean, I'm sure there are so many people who will resonate with the idea that being on the big adventure is the easy bit. It's coming home to the household that actually can be really, really hard. I think if you look at it in a big structural way, Right. I think this poem is about the progression from a household and a social order that is all wrong, that is all out of joint. I'm talking about the situation on Ithaca. Basically, you know, nothing. The household is out of joint. And then the poem. By the end of the poem, the household has been put back in order. Now, that. That. That is a very sort of structural arc is the basic comic plot, right? That takes you from Shakespeare comedy to TV soap operas. And, you know, this is a. And I say comedy. I mean, there are laughs in the. In the Odyssey. You may not find it the most obvious comedy in lots of ways, particularly given the bloody ending. But it. But I think it is a. It is a sort of archetypal comic plot in that particular sense.
- [33:36]
Mary Beard
It's also what it's reminding us is there is Odysseus. He is coming home. He is putting the social order of Ithaca right, the order that has been disrupted, in a sense, after he left. But he's also telling us that there are awful costs to that. Reordering the society of Ithaca that has been so disrupted is a terribly bloody process. You know, it's. Again, it's a. You know, it's another thing which reminds us that how difficult homecoming is that, you know, if you find home a mess when you get back, you have to work very hard and sometimes quite nastily to. To re. Put together again what you thought you had left the society you thought you'd left. And of course, you then wonder whether those kind of reintegrations are kind of possible. And I think that when in the poem we're reminded that Odysseus is going to go away again, partly we are being reminded of the almost impossibility of putting the home back to what it was when you went away. And Odysseus isn't going to say, isn't going to see it out now. We shall find out. If Nolan makes that point, he may.
- [35:10]
Charlotte Higgins
I think one of the reasons that the poem is interesting and persistent is that it doesn't answer those questions very simply. I think it does invite us to think about what are the acceptable limits of reshaping your household back into acceptable order. What are the limits. Acceptable limits of revenge and violence and punishment? Yeah, I mean, the poem Emily Wilson, we're using Emily Wilson's translation in our Exploring the Odyssey. And it's a wonderful translation that, by the way, I would also recommend Daniel Mendelsohn's translation. But one of the things that Emily's translation, Emily Wilson's translation, is very invested in and all her surrounding essays and notes, I think, is this idea that the poem is very invested in thinking about social order and hierarchy and property. And there is something underlying the poem about, you know, hoarding your stuff, making sure your stuff is okay. You know, it has this sort of materialism underlying it, I think, which is kind of interesting. I have very little idea that Nolan will get into that, but that is definitely going on. And there is also this aspect of the poem that I think is not totally disconnected from that, where you do get this idea of. In some scenes in the Odyssey, when Odysseus is on his travels, he sort of thinks and talks about the landscapes he encounters, as you might expect a protocol colonialist to do. He's sizing up these lands as of potential places for trading or for agriculture. There is a sort of. You see this underlying sense of the sort of Greek acquisitiveness of this particular age, which was probably an age of a certain point in this poem's composition, the age of what is called Greek colonialism was beginning, which is not colonialism in the modern sense, but sort of founding, trading emporia in fairly distant bits of the Black Sea and all that. You definitely get that I in it,
- [37:32]
Mary Beard
you kind of, you know, I'm parodying slightly, but every now and then, you know, Odysseus says something like, oh, great profit might be made here, right, as he looks at an island full of sheep or whatever. And so you've got that, you know, that sense of wealth and property and as you say, acquisitiveness, which is running alongside this kind of more nostalgia. I mean, nostalgia basically means return, homecoming, the kind of nostalgic homecoming. But I mean, I think what makes it more complicated is that, and interesting is at the same time, you see question marks put over all the roles that people in this story, the family roles in particular, but not only that people have to fulfill. I mean, so one of the things that is, I think, very clear about it is that this is a story about Odysseus son as much as it is, almost as much as it is about Odysseus. And he has to learn what it is to be a man. I mean, he's starting out before the beginning of the poem, abandoned in a way, abandoned by his dad who goes off to fight. But we see him during the poem as kind of learning how to take control, learning what it is to go and find out about his father, learning what it is to stop being a child and to become a man. And meanwhile, Penelope, Odysseus's wife, has got all those questions about what is it to be a faithful wife? How long do you wait? Where does loyalty become stupidity? How long do you give the guy to come back? So there's about what it is to be a wife, what it is to be a son. And in the. The person of Odysseus, really there's what it is to be not just a man. And the first word in Greek of the poem is man. It's andra. So it's about manhood here. But what is it to be a leader? Or what is it to be a good leader? And Odysseus comes back and he's actually lost all his men. So he was leading the Ithacans to the Trojan War, he was bringing them back from the Trojan War. But in the end he only brings himself.
- [40:18]
Charlotte Higgins
It's so fascinating. And that word, Andra, the word man, the first word of the poem also means husband. And so we're also, you know, all of this is not just about these individuals but how they interlock together. Not just what it is to be a wife, but what it is to be a wife to a husband. And you know, how do sons and fathers recognize each other? How to be the son truly of your father? How do you know? You know, this is both metaphorical and literal, I think, like how do you know that you are the son of your father? And the poem gives us under the counter quite a lot of examples of marriages and father, son, father, son relationships to both avoid and aspire to more of that, but that's all you know, we won't go into detail, but all of that stuff is very heavily trailed in exploring the Odyssey. But there are. The poem lays trails for how not to return. The different stories are told to tell you how not to return home and how to, to return how you know, what makes a good son.
- [41:29]
Mary Beard
I think there are some kind of even bigger picture questions too though. You just mentioned Charlotte, the idea of tinges of a certain sort of colonial acquisition mentality here. You know, Greeks versus the outside. That for me there are recurring questions along those lines where we're being asked to think in what sense are Greeks civilized? What is civilization? What is it to be a Greek, a civilized Greek versus the different forms of quotes, barbarity that you find in many of the threats that Odysseus faces as he comes home. And I think when you first read the Odyssey, that seems very simple. You think that there is a good Greek civilized Odysseus coming home and he's battering away all the different monstrous, sometimes really monstrous threats. You know, the one eyed giant, Polyphemus, the cyclops. You know, the more times you read the Odyssey, the more I think you see that the poem is questioning slightly what the difference is between civilization and barbarousness. And there is, and this to judge from the trailer, will certainly be part of the Nolan movie. There is an amazing and horrifying incident when Odysseus gets imprisoned by this one eyed giant who's also a cannibal and the, the giant starts eating, literally eating Odysseus's men. But you then turn the focus onto the violence of Odysseus and you kind of start to wonder, or the poem is encouraging you to wonder quite who was the monster in all this? Does Odysseus ever get away his bloodthirstiness, his trickery? Does he ever get away with quite a clean bill of health? So it's asking you to I think, push to the very margins of what you can think about what it is to be a civilized person.
- [44:03]
Charlotte Higgins
You know, in the end, Mary, I think it's whatever Christopher Nolan does with this film, whether it's a triumph or a disaster, it's gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay for the Odyssey because the Odyssey is going to withstand whatever Nolan can do to it, because it's a poem that just keeps on being read. It keeps on feeling new. I mean, I think one of the big things for me also, and I'm sure for you, Mary, is that the poem asks questions all the time about how you should treat strangers who come to your shore. No, these are questions for our time. These are questions of the moment. And I think both you and I, Mary, have read this poem many, many times. And on each reading, it offers something different. We read through our own life and experience and the time that we live in, the moment that we live in. And this poem keeps on offering up things to meet our moment.
- [45:05]
Mary Beard
It was hugely important in thinking about the trauma of Vietnam veterans, for example. And I think it's quite important not to say, oh, look, that's just using misusing the Odyssey to kind of make a modern point. I think what's important about the Odyssey is it welcomes you in. It's a poem that encourages you in to see yourself and your own problems and the issues of your own time within it. And that's, you know, that's what you should be doing with the Odyssey, not turning it into a kind of fossil of the 8th century BCE. So if you've been interested by that and you want more detail, then go to the book club that we run exploring the Odyssey. But next time, you know, hot on the heels of having seen this movie for the first time, Charlotte and I will be giving you our first impressions of the Odyssey, the movie.
- [46:13]
Charlotte Higgins
Instant review coming up next. See you then. As ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions. And so if you have them, please do send them to us@instantclassicspodmail.com or on our social media at Instant Classics Pod. Bye.
- [46:43]
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