Why 'The Odyssey' Is the West’s Greatest Story

This is a special summer Friday episode, because this is a special summer Friday. One of the most anticipated films of the year, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, comes out today. This is Nolan's follow-up to his Oscar award-winning film Up and Hymer. Nolan is one of my favorite directors and the themes that he's clearly obsessed with, Nature of Time, Technology and Magic, Mastery and Obsession, Being a Dad. These are some of my favorite themes in literature and film and life. The Week Up and Hymer came out. We had the eminent historian Richard Rhodes on this show to discuss his book The Making of the Atomic Bomb and His History of Up and Hymer. It was one of our most popular episodes of the year. So I thought, "Let's do it again. Let's use a big Nolan blockbuster as a news peg for plain English history episode." That's what today is all about. An entire episode, maybe the first of two, on The Odyssey, which might be the greatest and most important story in Western history. If you're familiar with Nolan's work, you might say that he's made this movie before. An Inception, a father on a metaphysical adventure through time and space and dreams, is really just trying to get home to his family. In Interstellar, a father on a cosmic adventure through space and time, is really just trying to get home to his family. The ancient Greek word "nostos" refers to an epic hero's journey home. It is the root of our modern word nostalgia. And the quintessential story ofnostos in Western literature is, of course, Homer's The Odyssey, in which our hero Odysseus overcomes many temptations and creatures and threats to return home after doing battle in the Trojan War. Most people know the basics about The Odyssey. They know it's an epic poem, they know it's a sequel of sorts to the Iliad. Maybe they remember some famous highlights of The Poem, like the Cyclops or Odysseus binding himself to the mast to withstand the songs of the sirens. But what makes The Odyssey most interesting to me, at least, is everything we don't know for sure. Where did the story come from? What did it mean to the people who first performed it and heard it? What do its themes tell us about the ancient world from which it originated? And maybe above all, what makes it so great? The ancient Greek poets performed hundreds or thousands of poems. Most of them are washed away to the tides of history. The Odyssey not only survived, it's become a defining story of Western civilization. The troubled journey home is so central to our artistic sensibility that genius directors like Christopher Nolan literally cannot stop directing versions of this story over and over and over again. The Odyssey has survived its own improbable journey to make it to us. 3,000 years ago, people were listening to this story, 3,000 years ago. And by analogy that people will be experiencing Star Wars or Harry Potter or Dune in the year 5,000 AD. Today's guest is Karen Nivalli. She is the chair of classics at Johns Hopkins. Today we talk about what makes The Odyssey so great, what made it so unusual for its own time and what makes it so right for hours. I'm Derek Thompson, this is Planoche. Professor Karen Nivalli, welcome to the show. Hello, Derek, lovely to meet you, hi. Tell me a little bit about what you study and teach at Johns Hopkins. So I work on Greek literature mainly and it's been for many years I've worked on ancient fiction, which has meant largely the ancient Greek novels, which were written in the Roman imperial period, so under the Roman Empire. But I'm interested in fiction more generally and I got particularly interested in the moon at one point and so interests have developed from that into cosmology more generally. The classics seem like such an interesting discipline to me because it's one where I feel like there is such extraordinary passion among those who study it and specialize in it. Well, you've got these outsiders who are like, what is it they're obsessed with over there? Like, you know, deagenese, like Epicurus, like aren't they extremely dead? And you know, maybe this is just coming from mere jealousy, like I majored in political science and, you know, I like it just fine, but I don't have like a passionate love affair with, you know, the corpus of political science. So again, knowing that this question is coming out of love rather than jealousy rather than out of some kind of criticism, what's so captivating to you about the classics and about the ancient imagination? Well, I mean, one of the things I'd start by saying is I think one of the reasons that classicists are so tend to be so passionate about the topic is because you have to kind of work hard to get to the topic. It's not really widely studied, you know, it's a kind of a niche interest. So if you're committed, you're committed. And for me, I've always felt that the past is something of an alien planet, an alien world. And so it's an opportunity to, and there are classicists who feel very differently, who feel who've got into studying this world because precisely because they feel that it's shaped the world we live in. And I get that. And I think that's valid, you know, you look around everywhere. You're in DC. You look around. You can see all of the classical columns and the classical architecture and the the US government, you know, uses words like sentence, et cetera, capital hill. They're absolutely still immersed in the, in the world of Greece and Rome in many ways. But for me, I'm not just interested in the world of Greece and Rome. And I, one of the intriguing things to me is how alien, how different ancient thinking can be. And so the questions that really fascinate me are, are some of the really basic questions that they ask like, what is the universe made of? And they have very different answers in some ways. So for me, it's kind of, that's what ignites my imagination. It's so different to the way we think now. One thing I love about that answer is that in a weird way, it's the opposite of my interest in the Odyssey. I'm interested in the Odyssey because I feel like a relationship to this text or this original performed epic poem almost treats time less like a line where we are 3,000 miles away from its original composition and therefore so long along this time series. But almost more like time is a circle where the further away you get from the present period, you know, you bend back toward the present. Like there's elements of the Odyssey that are so unbelievably modern or modern seeming to me. And yet the fact that they emerged from what you call this ancient or alien cosmology, is this alien way of thinking about our relationship to time and fate and life and the gods. Like that's very cool. That tension between, it's both an alien composition and one that clearly reflects on our own modern condition. Otherwise, why would we read it? Why would someone like Christopher Nolan make a movie about it? So. Absolutely. Actually, I think you used a word there that I think is much better than the description that I was the way I was talking about the ancient world. I mean, I was thinking more in terms of polarities where either immersed in it or where alien from it and you use the word tension. And I think that goes to the heart of the complexity of our relationship with the ancient world much better because there are so many things that strike us as modern, particularly about the Odyssey, the Iliad. I don't know if we're going to talk about the Iliad, the Iliad. No, talk about it a bit. No, no, no. I think I know where you're going. And I want you to save that point. I think we're the compliment. This is going to be the last time that I frame anything, even remotely equivalent to you as someone who took exactly zero classics classes at college. I think you're right, though. I think there's a mixture. And I hope that's something we get to talk about a little bit is there is so much that feels very modern and relatable about the Odyssey. There are some really alienating parts of the Odyssey as well. And I'm really curious to see if Christopher Nolan goes there. I don't know where. Anyway, we may come to that. I don't know. So obviously our subject is the Odyssey. And I'd like to understand the Odyssey as a piece of history, even before we talk about it as a work of art. This is a story that some scholars believe was first told in some form three thousand years ago. They're about what do we know about the origin story of the Odyssey? Where did this come from? So actually that's the million dollar question. I mean, we don't really know. It's among the older. oldest written works that we have in Greek literature. The Iliad is probably a little bit older, but where the general consensus is probably we're talking about, you know, late 8th, very early 7th century BCE for the Odyssey. So this is, yeah, the Iliad and the Odyssey are among the earliest texts we have in the Greek tradition. And there are clear signs within the poem itself, one of the peculiarities that strike readers almost immediately when you start reading a translation, like Emily Wilson's translation or Daniel Mendelssohn's translation, you see very quickly that there's a lot of what looks like repetition of phrases or even entire scenes. And that can jump out of modern readers, the very eccentric. And maybe that's part of that alienating quality that I was talking about. What that quality is, is why it's there is because it's a sign that this was originally an oral poem, a poem that was sung rather than written and was sung over generations. So it's very likely that the roots, that the poem we think got written down in the form more or less that we know it sometime maybe in the 7th century BCE. But it's likely to have been performed, to have had a prehistory in oral tradition, going back centuries earlier than that. And when people, if like when musicians, jazz or traditional musicians are playing nowadays, when you have improvisatory performance on the thought, you know, a musician or an artist will fall back on these standard motifs that they'll repeat and then weave in and embellish and a poet would do the same thing. And that's why we have these repeated features which are then embellished on. So it's a sign that these poems have, theleady on the Odyssey, have this prehistory like a whole iceberg floating beneath the surface centuries of oral improvisatory performance. And you're describing a collective process by which the Odyssey was. I don't even want to say written, conceived of performed and then maybe centuries later written and then centuries after that rewritten and then centuries after that written in a form that allows someone like Emily Wilson to produce a translation that, you know, modern readers would read or listen to a book on tape. And this speaks to a question that I know is a live wire in the field of classics, which is when we see the book, the Odyssey, it says by Homer. But you're not describing a process by which a blind poet named Homer sat down conceived of this, memorized it himself, spoke it a few times and then a scribe said, "Oh, this is really fantastic, Homer," and then wrote it down. You're describing a process that's much more collective. So is it at this point generally understood that Homer is a word that we or people 2,000 years ago gave to a really collective process for which there really is no authoritative author of the Odyssey. It was written collectively and sort of is almost like a dispersed group project in ancient Greece. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would say, you know, quite honestly, the jury is still out and we would still find scholars who subscribe to the idea of there being a single creative intelligence, if you like, behind. And we might as well call him Homer, but we don't know. We don't know anything about this historical person that we give the name Homer to. But I would say probably the consensus now probably sits somewhere in the middle that what we're talking about is this oral tradition, which may somewhere in the 7th century, 8th, 7th century BCE, which seems to have been a critical period in the formation of the poem in the shaping of it, there may have been a bard, a particularly talented poet who intervened in the oral tradition and shaped it in a particular way. It's pretty clear, for example, that the Odyssey as we have it, it's pretty good. The Odyssey seems to refer to other alternative versions of its own story that it knows were circulating at the time. It's pretty clear that this poem was composed in the shape that we have it now. It could have taken other shapes, but the shape that we have it now was catering to an audience that knew the Iliad. So a lot of there are a lot of connections and bridges built across to the Iliad, but it also, it's quite careful to avoid treading on exactly the same territory as the Iliad. So it's clearly kind of appealing to a fan base, if you like, that knows and loves the Iliad and wants to hear an updating of the Iliad. So there are things that we can glean about the situation. And it's probably a combination of a great oral tradition meeting a talented bard who shaped it for a particular time and place, but I don't think we can think of an author in the modern conventional sense, creating it out of like his own or her own inspiration. It's not, there is a tradition behind this. I'm very interested in getting my head around how the Odyssey was originally performed and experienced 2,500, 3,000 years ago. I mean, today, literally today, people are sitting in theaters to watch one contiguous three hour Odyssey by Christopher Nolan. Other people buy the book and they read it linearly. Maybe they don't read it, you know, all in one day and nine hours, but they read, you know, books one through five. They read books, you know, six through nine. But I feel like maybe, you know, more than 2,000 years ago, the experience of the Odyssey was neither contiguous. Like, people didn't maybe sit down at 8 a.m. and say, now, bard, like, please just tell me the whole story in the next, you know, nine hours. And it might also not have been linear. People might have like come in and out the way people listen to music. Like when people listen to their favorite Taylor Swift songs, they don't like start at the beginning of the over and like work their way through it chronologically. So what do we think we know about the way the Odyssey was quote unquote originally performed and experienced in the 7th, 8th century BC? So I get it. It's very difficult for us to know because we don't have any sources that are sitting down and say, hey, this is how the early adder the Odyssey was performed. But what we do have particularly in the Odyssey is, I mean, it's one of the extraordinary things about it is it's extraordinarily self conscious poem. And it's a poem that is in many ways fascinated with the nature of poetry and the performance of poetry. So it stages these scenes repeatedly of poetry being performed. Can you give a quick example of that? Yeah, yeah, sure. So when Odysseus gets washed up on the shores of the Faesians, he's entertained by the king and the queen. And after their great banquet, he's given hospitality, major theme in the poem. And there's after dinner entertainment and the court bard, whose name is Demardicus, and he's an old blind bard. He's asked to sing some songs about, bought for things from songs. And he chooses to sing about episodes of heroic exploits at Troy amongst other themes. And so Odysseus sits there, he's not revealed who he is yet. Nobody knows it's Odysseus, but he's listening along with us to songs, poems being performed about Odysseus, which is extraordinary. So scenes like that, and it's not the only one, give us clues like kind of windows that are built into the poem itself, which suggests this might have been the sort of scenario that the poet and his audience were familiar with. And if that's right, then we're talking about aristocratic settings, you know, a king or a queen or a local aristocrat or lord. After banquet entertainment for him and his aristocrats and guests, he would have a poet who he would have there in his employ to perform to entertain. And yeah, it looks again like these are short episodes that the bard is called on to pull out of his repertoire. Tell us the story about the wooden horse or tell us the story about the quarrel of Achilles and Odysseus or tell us that great story about the god Aries and Aphrodite when they had their love affair. You know, and the bard can just pull out all of these stories and perform at a later period. So it looks like that's our best guest, really, for the 7th, 8th, 7th century. This is closer, I think, to the modern experience of music, right? Like many people will listen to a track of Taylor Swift, or they'll just listen to one movement of a Mahler symphony. Like they don't need to listen, like start the Mahler symphony and just go from the beginning to the end. They're like, oh, I just like that, that that's seven minute movement toward the end. So you're saying that that story telling in the in the in the in the in the form of or in the style of the Odyssey was a little bit more like this our modern relationship to music oh play me track seven we love that one of the cyclops that's real that's interesting and we can see that probably poets or we can make an educated guess that probably these poets who are one do they were our tenorons you know they would wander from city to city they they could probably then adjust their song to appeal to the local audience. Obviously that's going to you know get them more employment to do that so it's a malleable kind of tradition that you can then tailor to wherever you're being performed wherever you're performing. One of the things I think is really fascinating and almost haunting about the classics is just knowing that we have lost most of this work right something like what 80 90% of ancient texts are gone whether it's you know libraries crumbling burning Alexandria wars we just don't have most of what they had. And so when if we're interested in the question of how is the Odyssey stood the test of time I think we have to at least put luck on the table right that the fact that it survived is at least in part an element of luck but I don't want to think that luck is the only ingredient here I want to think that is more than that and so this is my way of of gearing up to ask you what I think is on the one hand maybe an incredibly basic or stupid question but it's also maybe the question that I want to understand the most. What makes the Odyssey so great. We'll talk about it in more detail and we're granular detail but I mean I'm actually just interested to hear you handle a basic question like that first what makes the story so great. Well first of all just to say one of the reasons that the Odyssey like the Iliad survived it well there would be two ways I would address that one is that it's pretty clear that these are two poems early on that seem to capture the imagination of not just one local part of Greece but of actually all over the Greek world so if you think about the expedition to Troy it's got some of the armies contingents from Bethel from Mycenae from Sparta from you know the islands so in a way you know I mentioned those traveling birds and this isn't just a local vision this is a story that's going to appeal all over the Greek world and so I think that's one factor in its success and then later on in antiquity it became a school text we know this so people school kids are learning it off by heart and you know and writing it out and and that's one of the reasons it survives because it's it's a school text so it gets you know large the biggest reasons for text not surviving is that they're not copied not copied out so but then to address your question and because of course built in with that is it's not going to survive unless there's an audience there for it so the group you know appealing to a wide Greek audience and it's also just a cracking great story and so that's coming to your question of what what is so good about there are so many ways I could answer that and one of the astonishing things to my mind is that this just emerges okay we know it's been centuries you know submerged away from the the written tradition we know it's been alive circulating in the oral tradition for many centuries then it pops up somewhere in the eight seven century BC and it's this incredibly self-conscious playful and artful piece of work I mean it's kind of up there with James Joyce and there's no accident that he used the Odyssey for Ulysses experimental it's extraordinarily clever and I find that breathtaking and and I think then there are but that's okay so if you're if you're a reader who loves kind of cleverness loves poems that are thinking about poems and stories that are thinking about the value of stories the Odyssey is definitely your cup of tea but then on another level entirely it's an extraordinarily human poem maybe much more so than the Iliad in some ways because the Odyssey is very porous and curious I mean it's Odysseus is the inquisitive curious hero but the poem itself is curious and whoever this was or the the the poets behind this poem it's a poem that's interested in how is the world experienced not just by elite male heroes but about women it's interested in enslaved peoples it's interested in animals one of the things I've seen in the Christopher Nolan trailer I don't know if you've noticed it or if you've seen the trailer but there's a quick scene where we see Odysseus with his little puppy Argos and then there's a snapshot to later where he's stroking the dog so we go from the puppy to the elderly dog that's in the Odyssey the Odyssey is interested in how the world is experienced by animals as well it's an extraordinarily curious poem that's full of human experience and I think that's one of the things that makes it brilliant wow I love that answer another cut at this is not what makes the Odyssey so great but what makes the Odyssey different and I think you were getting at this because I can't imagine that every poem that was popular in 900 BC Sparta Athens was as postmodern as you're describing the Odyssey a poem that is interested in the act of poetry a poem that is interested in not just the experience of the great Swift footed Achilles but also the animals and the enslaved people and the women and go so far as to humanize these figures who are maybe swept aside in other contemporary works of of performed poetry how does the Odyssey have a different theory of even cosmology of the world compared to the Iliad yeah so for my money they're very different poems and for my you know you we mentioned the authorship question and I don't think we're talking about an author but for my money I can I have the sense of different poetic consciousness is shaping one poem and the other perhaps a better way to put it is these are two poems that are products of rather a different world views however you want to that might be a better way to think of it to kind of get out of the author straight jacket yeah I mean the Iliad is an again this is just personal I find it an extraordinarily bleak poem it's magnificent it's profound it will you know render your heart there is it's one of the high points I mean the idea of Achilles going into battle knowing that he's in doing so he's he's putting his life aside he and doing that for his friends honor and why he does it taking in with him a shield which depicts just human life everything that he's giving up I mean this is an extraordinary meditation on the human one mortality so it's a high point but the the Iliad is full of contemplations about yeah mortality and fate justice what are the gods doing what is what constitutes human life what's it worth and can we be happy all of these really profound questions that the Iliad the Odyssey is very very different I think it's it's it's about the survivor it's about what happens after the glorious it's the next morning it's the next day after the battle it's about middle age it's about a hero just trying to find his way home and it's not glorious in fact if anything this is a very in some ways the antithesis of Achilles and he's the kind of slightly maybe slightly getting saggy around the edges middle age man who just wants to make it home to his wife who's mortal and and his son and and in order to do so I mean he loses everything and he's not going to get home by glory by by by dent of you know glorious fighting the way that Achilles achieves his glory the only means that are open to him he relies on a lot of women to help him and in many ways he relies on very ignoble strategies like lying and disguise and deceit in order to make his way home so it's a very different vision of heroism I think and I want to hang on that point because I think I want the rest of our conversation to be about the question what is the Odyssey about and I don't mean what is it about like what happens in the story I think many people if not most know the story if they don't there's some very good translations out there if they do not wish to read the books there are some very easily discovered summaries out there. This is not a very difficult question to get to the bottom of what happens in the Odyssey. But I'm after a deeper question, which is what is the Odyssey trying to say about the world, about the values of ancient Greece? And what does this timelessness say about our values? I mean, that it is still like evolutionarily fit for our times as well, like that is interesting to me too. So the first thing I wanna talk about, and you created the perfect on-ramp for this, is about power. Odysseus's power, as you said, is not the same as Achilles' power. Achilles is the great warrior. Odysseus, as you described him, is, he is wily. He is polytropos, he is cunning. And the difference between Achilles and Odysseus, these two great heroes of ancient Greek epipoetry, sort of touch on these two categories of strength and Greek mythology, called Metis and Bia. I think those are the pronunciations. Tell me about Metis and Bia, and what the Odyssey has to say about them. - Sure, so yeah, Bia is this idea of force, violence, strength, brute strength. And Metis on the other side is the more intellectual, cunning cleverness, wildness. And it is very easy in simplistic terms to polarize them and to say that Achilles represents brute force, some strength and violence, and there's no doubt about it. I mean, he embodies violence like almost no other character. And he verges on the cannibalistic at some points in the Iliad, and he goes beyond the human and his desire for violence. And yet we see him in book nine of the Iliad on his own, sitting by the waves, strumming his lyre and singing about the exploits of heroes of old. In fact, singing what is probably a snatch of an epic song. So this is an epic character within an epic poem, singing an epic song. So that's one of the Iliad's self-conscious moments. But why I point that out is I think it's important for us to remember that Achilles for all that he is a sociable with heroism and masculinity and violence and all of that BS, all those BS like qualities. He does also have this intelligent side to him. And then Odysseus, on the other hand, is the polar opposite in many ways. He's the hero of wildness, cunning, lies, deceit. So that's very much native to the intellect. And he's also, he's intelligent. He's curious about the world. He's the intellectual. He's a master of words. And for the two who aren't familiar with the plot, can you give one or two canonical examples of Odysseus's wildness, his ability to master the art of disguise, whether it's at the level of a Trojan horse or disguising himself personally? Yeah, so there are two that jump to mind. One of them is a scene that always strikes me as quite humorous, which is at the beginning of books, "Fix the Odyssey," where he's got, he's lost everything. And he's been shipwrecked. He's even lost, he's lost all of his men. He's lost all of his clothes. And he's washed up on the shore. And God's arrange for princess, the local princess Mausica's delightful character, to come and find him. Now, this is a kind of a young girl meeting with strange older man, older naked man who's lurking in the bushes. And it's an extraordinarily awkward moment. And he knows everything relies on him being able to get her goodwill to help him. He needs her help. But, you know, he could be some kind of would-be rapist. And there's this very delicate scene where he sort of get the proverbial fig branch, fig leaf, and sort of covers his nakedness a bit. And then uses his speech, you know, in this extraordinarily vulnerable moment. He's both naked on front of this young girl. And he manages, just through words, to defuse the entire situation, to make her feel it at ease, respected, to let her know that all is well, and to solicit her goodwill. And she takes him in, and she brings him home to the king and queen. And, you know, that's an extraordinary moment. And the other moment, I suppose, is, of course, his disguise as a beggar when he gets back to his home island of Ithaca. Nobody-- well, gradually, people, a chosen few people, he reveals himself to them, or they recognize him. But he fools everybody. Except Penalope, at the end. Right. I wonder what you think this is trying to say or capture about the audience of ancient Greece, because I can imagine myself as an audience member of the Iliad or the Odyssey. And in the Iliad, you have Achilles, who is practically a God, who has access to not only strength, but also athleticism, that no one else does. I mean, he's the Michael Jordan of warriors. And so you can respect and revere him, but there's nothing relatable-- never not nothing relatable-- but that kind of power is less relatable, which is a part of its glory. But with Odysseus, the fact that his strength comes from cunning, that it comes from disguise, that he can put on a nymph's veil, or rely on women, or use deceit. For better or worse, these are all skills that an ordinary person has. An ordinary person can put on a mask. An ordinary person can lie, or deceive, or use cunning. And the word that comes to mind is he a more populist character. I definitely don't mean populist in a political sense. But I mean, there's a lower relatability to his power than with Achilles. And I wonder what that is getting at, and how that distinguishes an epic poem like this, with a hero who, as you said, gets by with strategies that are somewhat ignoble. What do we make of that? Yeah. So I think-- well, again, I can think of in our early art class, I can remember having vigorous arguments about how relatable Achilles was. And one student, in particular, I can recall, was very, very determined that Achilles was a relatable character. But I'm with you on this. I find him quite alien in many ways. But Odysseus is different, I think. And one of the-- I mean, there are two-- I suppose two things that stand out in my mind in the Odyssey that really tell us something about this relatability. One is, OK, I'm saying this as a dog lover. But the scene with his dog is extraordinary, where he doesn't actually-- in the poem, he doesn't, if I'm remembering fully, he doesn't get to touch the dog. But the dog sees him after 20 years being away, and he recognizes him. And there is just a moment, a glimpse of recognition between the animal and his owner, from 20 years ago. And I think Odysseus sheds a tear, because the dog-- he's old, he recognizes his master, and he dies. What Knifts' tale, I'm dies. And Odysseus sheds a tear. He's not able to express his grief, because if he does, he'll give his identity away. He's in disguise. But there's an extraordinary moment of tenderness there. The other moment that strikes me as really extraordinary is a scene between Odysseus, who's in disguise as a beggar, and his swine herd, the guy who keeps his pigs, who's one of the servants who has remained loyal to him in the 20 years that he's been away. And he's still looking after the pigs, thankfully, for his master. And one stormy night, they just-- they fit up telling stories to one another. And the swine herd doesn't know it's Odysseus. He's old master, come home. But they swap stories. And we discover that-- so we've got-- we discovered that the swine herd, Eumeus, was once a prince, was once the son of a king. And he was abducted by Phoenician pirates and sold into slavery. And he lived out the rest of his life as a swine herd. So we've got this extraordinary scene between these two men of the king. And you've got a beggar who is, in fact, the king, come home. And I think that's the poem really saying raising questions. How do you know? What is identity? How do you know people have histories? And I think that's an extraordinarily rich moment in the poem. And it's full of moments like that. So that's one of the things that makes it great, I think. No, I just think it's so interesting to juxtapose Achilles and Odysseus here once more to-- There's an aspirational hero here, and there's a more relatable hero here. Yeah. And the aspirational hero dies in battle and the relatable hero comes home. And there's just something very fitting and beautiful about that. And which makes it all the more extraordinary that this was a disperse group project of Epic poem Weaver. To have made an alternate product that has such a resonant theme there, just strikes me as a small piece of magic. I want to keep going on these themes because I think maybe the most famous theme of the Odyssey is No Stoas, the ancient Greek term for homecoming. And I am curious to know what you think homecoming really entails in ancient Greece in this poem because this isn't like Odysseus comes home. And it's like Yay Daddy's home. Kisses the wife who throws the baby in the air and it's like a hallmark postcard. He comes home, ravaged, unrecognizable, alone, having lost everything. Slotters the suitors has his son slaughtered the concubines and the slave servants. I mean, this is a strange, traumatic, violent homecoming. What is the meaning of that? What is the Odyssey saying about No Stoas and home? That's a really, really good observation. I think those episodes that you have in mind, they were the ones that I have in mind about when I said that there are parts of this poem which feel very toast to us, but parts that feel really quite alienating. And I think probably, I'm very curious to see whether Christopher Nolan goes there. I think he has to go there with the slaughter of the suitors. And I think probably in a sense of the baddies getting there come up and probably audiences will, yeah, okay, they've got to have, they've got to get slaughtered. What's much harder to swallow is the slaughter of the maid servants, for example, and who are just strong up. Probably have very little choice in having sex with the suitors, but we're punished with death for all that, for their disloyalty. Or the punishment of one, the cow herd, Melantheus, he's a servant who was particularly disrespectful to Odysseus and the skies, and he's not just killed, he's strong up, and his nose and ears are cut off, his genitals are cut off, and then his feet and hands are amputated. I mean, it's not just your dead, it's mutilation. These are extremely difficult moments. And so I would say that, I mean, one of the things that I find really curious is that you have these extraordinarily tender moments that the recognition of the dog, the reunion with his, his wife, the recognition of Odysseus again and again and again. As he said, he's a man who's lost everything, he's become unrecognizable, literally, he's in disguise, he's like a beggar. He's a man who even lost his name at one point, he became known as no man, he has literally known what it's like to lose everything. And the homecoming is partly about going back to what Samir, though there is that poignant thing of, he doesn't just get home it, people don't recognize it, in many ways that speak to, I think, the experience that people can trauma survivors can have. And it's very interesting that survivors of the concentration camps, for example, in World War 2 have used Odysseus as a way to think about what it means to be the only survivor, the only witness to atrocities and loss that will anyone believe you. Odysseus kind of becomes a way to think about these things. Or we might think of post-traumatic syndrome after wars, he's clearly been, he's been rendered unrecognizable in certain ways by his experiences. But there are these moments of tenderness as well, but the homecoming is also about a reassertion of identity and power. And the slaughter is part of that. And I suspect that that's one of the ways in which the poem was more palatable to its ancient probably aristocratic Greek audiences than it is for us today, because that's saying, yes, the proper status quo is being reinstigated here. The king is back, it's the return of the king who has to be at the top of society, his enemies put down, and then all will be right with the world again. So there is something cosmological about that, you used that term earlier, but the king, but the hierarchy being restored. And proper exenia, I think you used that to proper hospitality, so the fitters have been ravaging his home for 20 years. And now the proper care stewardship of the land, the animals on it, the goods that are grown, that's all going to be reinstate at the proper treatment of guests in the palace. I want to go further on that, because one of the themes of this work that I'm most interested in is Zenia. It's exenia. This is ancient creed concept for hospitality, but which shares a root with the modern words xenophobia. Odysseus is not just the host of a house that is ravaged by bad guests in the form of the suitors. He is often a guest himself in the worlds that he enters. And the poem seems incredibly interested in this theme of hospitality, what it means to be a good guest, what it means to be a good host. What is that about? Why would an epic poem of this time be so interested in the theme of hospitality? Yeah, that's a really good question. And what, yes, you're absolutely right. I would say, you know, we see Odysseus being a guest time and time again. Most the time he's a good guest, but there is an extraordinary episode of course, where he is a bad guest. And it gets him, it causes all the problem. And it's not the episode with the Cyclops, where he invades the Cyclops home and steals food. He basically behaves the way the suitors are behaving back at home. So we see Odysseus and this is that the, I guess we're thinking about the author, playing fast and loose with his hero. This is showing him up in not a very good light actually here. There's nothing admirable about the way Odysseus is behaving, although we might be in thinking of, well, okay, polyphemous as monstrous, but anyway, there are lots of ways of reading that. But to answer your question, why hospitality? Why is this poem so interested in hospitality? And I think one of the answers has got to be, what sort of world does this belong to? And it belonged to the world of the late eighth, seventh century BC. What's happening in the Greek world at that time? The Greek world is a really exciting time. It's opening up to the farther Eastern worlds of Mesopotamia. We know this because the material record of the time we can see in the art, this suddenly changes in the Greek world. And we have what used to be known as this orientalizing motif, appearing everywhere, which is just a no longer very fashionable term for saying suddenly the Greek artists are becoming aware of the art of the farther cultures in the farther East, in Babylon, for example, Phoenician, the Phoenician world. The Phoenicians are all over the Odyssey. And I mentioned, you know, they're the pirates who's kidnapped the young child, and you may as we hear that story. They're all over the place. And the Odyssey is a poem that's full of travel. We know that the Greek world at this time was opening up to the East. People were beginning, Greeks were beginning to leave home and travel and form colonies in farther reaches of the Mediterranean and beyond. And so if that's the kind of world you're in, hospitality suddenly becomes much more important. You are the resident of Hilton chain of hotels, you know, you need people that you can go and stay with. You need to know that your host isn't going to try and kill you when you spend a night with them to get your money. You need, and your host needs to know that, okay, this guest is going to know how to behave themselves. So I think there's an obsession with hospitality because this is a world where people Greeks are traveling a lot more suddenly and becoming open to the wider world. And this is a piece of the stories. That's a beautiful explanation. And I think it's a piece of the stories. Timelessness. I mean, multiculturalism has not exactly fallen out as a theme of the 21st century. It's still something that we are reckoning with, something we debate whether in our stories or in our politics. The last theme of this story that I want to discuss with you is one that you've already put on the table. And that is this theme of self-consciousness. We are watching or listening to Odysseus watch or listen to a poem singing a poet singing about him. This is, as you said, a poem that is interested in poetry that is interested in the power of the spoken word. Even you could say the danger of the spoken word. In the case of the sirens who are singing Odysseus's men to shipwreck. I love you to go once more on this theme because again, I said this before and you already brought up James Joyce, the guy father of modernist novel writing, there's something unbelievably modern, even postmodern about a poem that is interested in poetry and reveals itself as a poem about poems. What do you make of the odyssey's almost postmodern interest in the power of the spoken word itself? Well, I mean, again, it's difficult as a modern reader, as a modern person, not to think in terms of an author, and these being a particular author's interest. I think we can't really quite think in those ways, although we can, I think, think of maybe a bard who is shaping a traditional poem and has particular interests that he like turns the volume up on, but clearly this, for the to work, it must have appealed to audiences that were fascinated by the power of words. And this is something that we're, you know, I, I has to take to be kind of too, I don't want to be teleological of Azure in the sense of saying, oh, well, the odyssey was leading naturally up to certain things that then happened, but we're not a million miles away in terms of time from a period where in the, in the Greek world, they're going to start asking questions about what's the world made of? Why does the moon behave the way it does? These, the beginnings of ancient scientific thinking or ancient philosophical, natural philosophy, and pretty soon in the wake of those kinds of questions, we get an interest in words on the power. The odyssey is clearly fascinated by the power of words. And we can see that in episodes, as he said, the sirens illustrate, it's not just words, but it's knowledge, I think, in particular. I mean, they promise that it's such a brief part of the, at the poem, it's ironic that it holds such weight in our modern culture, but it's just a few lines. But they are promising knowledge, right? That is what they're, what they're singing or speaking to the ship is we have all the knowledge. And that's interesting too, because it connects directly to where you were going. Again, not to be overly teleological, but this idea that it is tantalizing to be promised knowledge implies that the audience of this poem, some 3,000 years ago, were tantalized by the promise of knowledge that there were things about the world they wanted to know. And my God, they would leave their families and, you know, swim to an island and die if they could just know the answer to these eternal secrets of the cosmos. Like, that's a really interesting idea. Yeah, and what do you see time and time again is fascination with words, with stories, with knowledge. And it's dangerous. I mean, as he said with the siren, I mean, whatever the siren, whatever it is, the sirens know, it threatens to halt the Odyssey. I mean, if Odysseus hadn't tied himself up, he would have shipwrecked and the Odyssey would end. And so this is in a way, the siren song is the song that threatens the ante Odyssey. It's kind of the poem imagining, like, antimatter to its own matter. It's the siren song threatens the existence of the Odyssey. So, I mean, there, there have been readings of the Odyssey, which are also, which explore how the poem itself is beginning to show, to anticipate, to show that it contains within itself awareness of other traditions of song. And the beginnings of an interest in what will become, say, historiography will become the world of prose and history writing. So it's a poem that's, and again and again, it's a poem that's playing with the fascination of stories, the therapeutic value of stories. So, on that night when you met us and Odysseus are exchanging stories, they talk about how helpful it is, pain when the lived experience is painful, but we tell stories as a way to channel, to commute that pain into pleasure, because painful experiences make good stories. And in telling them, we kind of heal ourselves. But then you have the visitor Helen, for example, shout out to Helen, who is a character from the Iliad, which she's brought back on stage for a brief cameo appearance in the Odyssey. As part of what I mean by this is an audience that really wants the elite, more of the Iliad, but we see her, we see her now as the respectable middle aged kind of wife back with Menelae at her husband, her first husband. And after dinner, they're all feeling sad, thinking about Odysseus' absence. And Helen brings some wine and some drugs that she has got from Egypt. And she pours it into the wine, and she says it'll help them forget their woes. And going alongside that is the telling of stories. And there's this peculiar concoction of the feminine, the very seductive Helen, with the drug and the wine and forgetfulness and easing of pain. That concoction is all there at the background for the telling of stories. So the poem is thinking about the power, the therapeutic value of stories, and but also the dangers of stories. And I think it's something it is speculative, but it must have been something to do with the world at that time. Maybe they were becoming in opening up to the art of the farther east. Maybe they were also hearing some of the great stories, the epic stories of the world of Babylon, Gilgamesh and so on. There is a genuine fascination with it's, yeah, that's just beautiful. By means of something up, I like to think about ancient stories a little bit like tombs, where if you're an archaeologist and you find some ancient tomb, you can look around that tomb and see within it what that civilization valued. You can look at the jewels and the jars of wine or evaporated beer or the pictures on the walls. And you can say this is a reflection of the values of the community that built this tomb. And I think you can do the same with ancient stories. So with Exodus in the Old Testament, for example, I think that tells us something very specific about the Jewish experience and psychology of exile, maybe following the Babylonian captivity or with Beowulf, I think that's telling us something very clear about the values of ancient Germanic warrior culture. And I think we've done it. We've shown that that very well might be true of the Odyssey. And so I like this sort of, you know, almost archaeological approach to the story. I think the last thing that we haven't talked about and this is very connected to Nostos homecoming is that Odysseus doesn't just come home to an island. He comes home to a family. What is this? What is the story telling us about family? So I think it's saying something. It's very poignant, very hopeful about family is something that endures. So Penelope is waiting over 20 years. It's been, it's been really tough for her. But yeah, Odysseus' family waits for him and he comes back and, you know, he's reared as a wonderful scene in book 24, which is in many ways regarded as a problematic book. We're not sure if it was originally, whatever originally exactly means. It was a later, possibly a later add-on in antiquity to the poem. There are theories that the poem ended with Odysseus and Penelope being reunited in their marriage bed. I think in book 23. And then you have book 24 that's added on. Be that as it may, there is a wonderful scene in book 24 for all its oddities where Odysseus is reunited with his father, his old, his elderly father, Liar Tees. And they're reunited in the orchard. On Odysseus remembers he can name all the trees. That's how they recognize each other. He remembers as a child, his father working on the orchard and learning the names of the trees. And he can still remember them. And Telemachus, his own son, is there with them. And you have this sense of the generations being set in this flourishing space of the orchard. And so there's a sense of it's a poem that's looking to the future. And it's not just looking back at the past, the Iliad. It's also open in a curious way to the future. And I think that one of the interesting things about Odysseus as well that it is very open. Odysseus doesn't stay at home. He's got to, we know that he's got to take a journey as pretty much as soon as he gets settled and reestablishes himself at home. He's got to take off again. He's still got to appear. the anger of the God Poseidon and that's the journey that's going to take him far into some remote interior, far away from the ocean, so far away from the world that we've known from the poem with its islands and seas, into the interior of a continent. We're so far from the ocean that nobody's even going to recognize what an ore is anymore and as soon as he gets that far, he's going to plant his ore and then he will make sacrifice to the God Poseidon and all will be well. In other words, the poem ends as another story opens up and you get the sense that this story may be not a dici as a story alone, but the story, a human story is going to continue through generations. So I think that's one of the reasons the Odyssey speaks to us still so vividly in a way it's opened the door to us in the 21st century. Karen Yvalli, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Terry, good pleasure to work with you.