Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Odyssey of the Odyssey

Starting point is 00:00:00 For thousands of years, a tale of war, wandering, monsters, and homecoming has traveled across oceans, languages, and civilizations. Its journey from ancient performance to written masterpiece reveals a story that survived empires, religious upheavals, and technological revolutions. And along the way, it's been preserved, translated, reimagined, and shared by countless generations. Learn more about the historical journey of The Odyssey. On this episode of everything everywhere daily. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows.

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Starting point is 00:01:51 For nearly 3,000 years, the journey of Odysseus has shaped how people think about adventure, heroism, loyalty, and the struggle to return home. The Odyssey is an ancient Greek epic poem traditionally attributed to Homer that tells the story of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and his 10-year journey home after the Trojan War. along the way he faces monsters, gods, storms, and temptations, including the Cyclops Polyphemus, the Sirens, and the enchantress, Circe. Meanwhile, his wife, Penelope, and his son Temeculus, struggle to protect their home from suitors who believe Odysseus is dead. The poem ends with Odysseus returning to Ithaca, reclaiming his household, and reuniting with his family. The Odyssey began as an oral tale sung by bards in the ancient Greek world. Bards'ard journeyed from town to town performing their versions of epics for anyone who was willing to pay.

Starting point is 00:02:46 In telling these stories, bards routinely took liberties with Greece's core myths, knowing that a story was only as good as its performer, and a flat, lifeless delivery meant going home empty-handed. The credited author, Homer, who said to be a blind 8th century bard, was almost certainly not the author of the stories. Most historians agree that even if a man named Homer existed, these stories were far older than he was. He was simply one of a long chain of storytellers. For these stories to survive into the modern world, they couldn't have been handed down orally for thousands of years.

Starting point is 00:03:23 They eventually had to be written. The earliest societies in the region developed unique systems of writing. In the era, writing was used for very different purposes, primarily for record-keeping and economic transactions. Writing at the time wasn't built for epic-com. storytelling and its sophisticated themes and complex poetic meter. The Minoans, a civilization on the island of Crete, wrote in an underciphered script that researchers have called Linear A, while the Greek-speaking Mycenaans used Linear B.

Starting point is 00:03:55 This complex administrative code vanished entirely when the palaces fell during the chaotic Bronze Age collapse in the 12th century BC. This plunged the Aegean world into a dark age, an era in which centralized government and cultural and economic interactions virtually vanished, along with the written scripts that sustain them. Evidence suggests that literacy returned to the region during the 8th century BC as a direct result of expanding trade routes between Greek merchants and Phoenicians across the Mediterranean. The Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, and through a complex evolution that took centuries, developed a new alphabet that paired with the Greek spoken language.

Starting point is 00:04:36 The Odyssey undoubtedly evolved over the centuries between its earliest origins, sometime around the 13th century BC, and the return of literacy in the Greek world in the 8th century. It's hard to imagine that the moment literacy return, someone sat down to write a massive epic that high schoolers read an abridged form and college students wrestle with in Classics 101. While we generally hold the Greeks in very high regard as brilliant thinkers, the shift to a fully literate society was a surprisingly slow multi-century process. Because writing materials were so scarce and expensive, Bards created shortened, competing scripts that left plenty of room for live improvisation.

Starting point is 00:05:19 And this explains why our oldest surviving copies of the Odyssey come from Egypt during the Greek-ruled Ptolemaic dynasty. As the Greek world awakened from its dark age, rulers worked to codify the story's text into a standard version. The man credited with finally unifying the script of the Odyssey was the infamous 6th century Athenian tyrant, Pisistratus. Pissistratus was a master of political theater. He was the same guy who once seized power in Athens by dressing a tall local woman in armor and parading her through the city as the goddess Athena to sanction his rule.

Starting point is 00:05:55 In that same spirit of theatrical control, he ordered an official master copy of the Odyssey to be compiled and recited at the Panathenaic Games, a major rival to the early Olympics. His objective was to captivate the audience, outshine rival city-states, and place Athens squarely at the cultural center of the Greek world. The modern version that we're accustomed to has its origins at the famed Library of Alexandria. Their scholars collected hundreds of local variations written down across the Hellenistic world, sifting through them to resolve contradictions and a limelistic world, sifting through them to resolve contradictions and a subducissuous editions. This massive effort culminated in the second century BC when Aristarchus

Starting point is 00:06:37 of Samothrace produced the master's standardized text that serves as the backbone of every edition we read today. In an age before the printing press, sharing this standardized text took a massive manual effort. In Athens and Rome, a lector would read the story line by line to a room full of scribes, as many as 30 at a time, who would copy the story verbatim onto fresh pieces of papyrus or parchment. These early editions would have posed a great challenge for modern readers, as they were compiled without spaces between the words, in a style called scripto-continua. As the version was standardized and written down for enhanced public consumption,

Starting point is 00:07:21 it was also spread into other cultures. During the earliest stages of the Roman Republic in 240 BC, a Greek named Livia Andronicus translated the story for the first time into Latin. At this point in Roman history, its literary tradition was far more limited than that of Greece. As a result, Andronicus's translation became a cornerstone of early Roman education, helping generations of children learn to read while absorbing Greek culture. Rome also had a unique relationship with the story. The name Odysseus was changed to Ulysses, and the Romans had a very very very very important.

Starting point is 00:07:57 different interpretation than the Greeks. In Greece, Odysseus was lauded for his skill as a leader, his prowess as a soldier, and his keen intellect. He was the mind behind the famed Trojan horse. To the Greeks, he and Achilles represented heroism. The Greeks aspired to display the same endurance and stamina, marveling at his decade-long struggle to survive his hardships, and finally return home to his wife. Yet in Rome, many of his virtues ran counter to Roman values. To the Romans, the wisdom of the Trojan horse was actually treacherous and dishonest. It represented cowardice, as Odysseus didn't face his enemies on the battlefield with courage and valor. The Roman attitude towards Ulysses can be seen in the epic poem commissioned by the Emperor Augustus, the Aeneid.

Starting point is 00:08:45 Functioning sort of as book three of the Trojan War trilogy along with the Iliad, the story shifts the focus to the Trojan prince Aeneas, as he escapes the destruction unleashed by the scheming Ulysses, Aeneas flees the burning Troy, carrying his elderly father on his back, leading his young son by the hand, and guarding his ancestral gods, personifying the ultimate Roman ideals of duty, family, and civic virtue. Sailing west to settle in Italy, Aeneas becomes a founding figure of Rome. Emperor Augustus went so far as to claim a direct lineage to him, framing the epic as a tool of political legitimacy. By tying his own family tree to the Trojan,

Starting point is 00:09:26 hero, the emperor made his newly formed empire feel less like a political takeover and more like the ultimate fulfillment of Roman destiny, with its roots in the Odyssey. The Eastern Roman Empire, aka the Byzantine Empire, embraced the story just as passionately. In Christian Constantinople, educated Byzantines read and preserved Homer's original Greek text, not just as mythology, but as an essential textbook for rhetoric, grammar, and philosophy. The Byzantines viewed themselves as the guardians of Greco-Roman tradition, and teaching the Odyssey was an essential part of their intellectual journey. In the 12th century Eustathius, the Archbishop of Thessalonica, vigorously defended teaching

Starting point is 00:10:10 Homer to students by noting, quote, someone might escape the beautiful bewitchment of Homer's sirens by not starting at all, by stuffing wax in his ears, or by turning in some other direction to avoid the charm. But if he does not refrain, could he be able to be. ever be anything but enchanted? Homer is a vast ocean of words and thoughts. There is no art, no discipline, no human wisdom that does not take its starting point from him." End quote. The Renaissance brought renewed European interest in ancient Greek literature. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, many Greek scholars fled to Italy, bringing manuscripts with them.

Starting point is 00:10:49 This helped fuel the renewed interest in classical texts in Western Europe. The first printed edition of the complete Greek text of Homer appeared in 1488 in Florence, Italy, produced by the Greek scholar Demetrius Calco Condilis. The Odyssey isn't just a treasure of literature and culture. The clues and descriptions in the epic have provided details about bronze and iron age technology, commerce, and religious beliefs. The specifics in the story have also led archaeologists and historians to try to prove some of its details. While Heinrich Schliemann used the Iliad to unearth key discoveries about the historic city of Troy, clues in the Odyssey have led scholars to wonder where Odysseus's Ithaca was actually located.

Starting point is 00:11:35 One line in the Odyssey has consistently intrigued classical scholars. Quote, It lies low furthest out to sea towards the sunset, while the other islands lie apart towards the dawn and the sun. The modern Ionian island of Itaki has long been celebrated as the Heroes Kingdom, but its geography doesn't match Homer's description in the Odyssey. Despite that contradiction, the island has provided key archaeological finds of Bronze Age weapons, pottery and cooking tripods that do match Homer's descriptions.

Starting point is 00:12:07 To solve the puzzle, management consultant Robert Biddlestone teamed up with geologist John Underhill and classicist James Diggle in 2005 to continue the search. Together, they proposed that the Paliki Peninsula on the neighboring island of Cephalonia offers a far better match to the clues in the Odyssey. They argued that during the Bronze Age, landslides triggered by earthquakes and fallen debris choked a narrow marine channel conjoining Palakie to Cephalonia. As a separate island, Paliki would have matched Homer's geographic descriptions, while also sitting low on the horizon and anchoring the westernmost edge of the island chain,

Starting point is 00:12:46 widely believed to be the kingdom of Odysseus. Scholars don't expect to find an exact match to confirm the location of Odysseus's Ithaca, as there are too few details to provide confirmation. But it won't stop them from looking for his island or other locations featured prominently in the story, such as the Strait flanked by Silla and Carybdis. Scholars don't believe that a pair of sea monsters flanked a narrow canal, but the mythology may point to a real place. the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland.

Starting point is 00:13:20 Silla, the six-headed creature, dwelt in a dark cave high atop a jagged sea cliff that plunged straight into the water. And that scene closely mirrors the sheer rock promontory found near the coast of mainland Italy. Directly opposite off the Sicilian shoreline, violent colliding tides often create treacherous whirlpools, giving the appearance of a turbulent swirling abyss. The two sites are about two miles apart, far too long for an arrow shot, but the Greek barred were prone to exaggeration. The story of Odysseus has survived for nearly 3,000 years, because it's more than a tale of

Starting point is 00:13:58 monsters, gods, and distant seas. It's a story about the human experience and the search for home. From ancient Greek storytellers to modern readers around the world, each generation has found new meaning in Odysseus's journey. And it all began, with some ancient bards telling a story to try to make some money. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. Research in writing for this episode was provided by Joel Hermanson. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon.

Starting point is 00:14:33 Your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord, as this is where everything happens outside of the podcast. As always, if you leave a review on any of the major podcast apps, you two can have it run in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Odyssey of the Odyssey

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