In Our Time - The Odyssey

Episode Date: September 9, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The Odyssey by Homer, often claimed as the great founding work of Western Literature. It's an epic that has entertained its audience for nearly three thousand years: It has shipwrecks, Cyclops, brave heroes and seductive sex goddesses. But it’s also got revenge, true love and existential angst. The story follows on from Homer's Iliad, and tells of the Greek hero Odysseus and his long attempt to get home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what has given the Odyssey such a fundamental position in the history of western ideas, what are the meanings behind the trials and tribulations that befall Odysseus and how the Odyssey was composed and by whom. With Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek at King's College, Cambridge; Edith Hall, Leverhulme Professor of Greek Cultural History at Durham University; Oliver Taplin, Classics Scholar and Translator at Oxford University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the Odyssey by Homer is often claimed as one of the two great founding works of Western literature. It's an epic that has entertained its audiences for nearly 3,000 years. It's got shipwrecks, it's got monsters, brave heroes,

very seductive sex goddesses. There's revenge and, of course, there's love. The story follows on from Homer's Iliad, and essentially it's a tale of the Greek hero Odysseus and his long attempt to get home to Ithaca after the Trojan Wars. But what has given it such a fundamental position in the history of Western ideas? What are the meanings behind the trials that befall Odysseus on his way?

And who really wrote the Odyssey? With me to discuss the Odyssey is Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at Durham University, Oliver Taplin, classic scholar and translator at Oxford University, and Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek, at Cambridge University. Simon Goldhill, it took 10 years for Dysius to get home from Troy after fighting against the Trojans for 10 years. So can you briefly take us through that 10-year journey of his,

the highlights of it were, as he were, as he went from Troy to back to his home kingdom at Ithaca? Certainly. He goes through a series of events by which he loses all his men. He starts off as a great hero with a retinue, and he ends up as a single man alone on a beach. He goes via some monsters that are the most familiar monsters in the world, the Cyclops, the one-eyed giant who eats people alive, the sirens who lure people to their death. And he ends up in a sort of magical kingdom of extraordinary luxury called Scarier,

where the fayations live, and it's they who send him home finally in a special boat. So we have these adventures, and who are the principal, you've mentioned a few of the principal characters, can we just develop it a little more before we move on from the story? Certainly, he spends most of the ten years locked up on an island with a witch called Calypso, who forces him to have sex every night with her and won't let him leave. After that, he goes straight to Fyacia, but before he has that, he has the witch, Circe, who's another person who turns men into animals. He meets lystrogenians who are giants, who fish on men.

There's really a whole series of these extraordinary creatures. And Trowd is having a battle with the sea, isn't he? He has to get from sea to land, and that's one of the major themes of the Odyssey, escaping the flux of the sea to the solidity of the land. And while Odysseus is coming from Troy, those ten years, Adithica, another plot is going on. Absolutely.

His wife, Penelope, is waiting. for him. His son is growing up and his wife is beset by suitors who are trying to marry her and above all steal his property. And at Ithaca, Euthall, there's not only his wife, Penelope, well, as has been mentioned by Simon, his son, Telemachus,

as I've been taught to pronounce it, about ten minutes ago. Can you tell us what is going on between the two of them and the suitors on the island of Bithica? Well, there's an intense struggle for power. You've got the suit is led by one or two who are more influential than others

and clearly fancied their chances with Penelope, above all Eurymachus and Antinous, you've got some extremely loyal servants like the swineherd Eumaeus and the old ladies of the court, the nurses, Eureclare and

Eurinamy, and you've got an awful lot of naughty wenches who are actually having sex with the suitors and this sexual infidelity is something of which a very great deal is made. So it shows you a whole range of reactions to the absence of the man, the householder,

the man of the household. Some remain loyal, some just can't cut it. The most interesting figure, though, is Telemachus because he's trying to grow up and assert his authority. And right at the beginning we see him try to call an assembly and assert his manly authority bursts into tears. And the poem is very much about this young man growing up.

In this story, we've been told that, about Simon, that this fantastical journey back, which still has enormous roots in a sort of psychological reality. Ithaca seems to be a different case. It seems to be much more straightforward. There she is, Penelope, waiting for her husband, weaving the cloth by day, unweaving it at night, so she will never finish it, so they can never propose to her.

This sun is growing up. Is it much more portrayed and much more concrete, realistic, if you can use that word. Why? Absolutely. Ithaca is where real life goes on. People have to garden, people have to grow fruit, people have to we, people have to work. People have to make their food.

They have to have animals, and it's extremely hard work, and there's an awful lot of cleaning and bathing and scrubbing that goes on. The other worlds that Odysseus travels in are the worlds where things grow freely on vines, and you don't have to do any work, and people can lie around all day eating lotuses. It's very much a contrast between the hard work of real human life, at Ithaca, to which Odysseus actually wants to return, and the fantasy life of the other places. And the borderline is actually Fyatia,

the very last place that he visits. It's somewhere between the two. And Fyatia, as Simon says, takes him home. It's a transition. What role does Athena play in this? Well, Athena's a fascinating goddess. I mean, her relationship with Odysseus is really quite unique, even in the epic, heroic tradition.

She's a virgin goddess, but if she ever were to marry any of what it would want to have, an affair with any human, it would definitely be Odysseus. Athena is goddess of intellectual, of cunning, of machination of intelligent warfare, as opposed to just mindless violence. She's also goddess of carpentry, and she's also goddess of weaving. And it's because of those particular kinds of handicrafts that require a certain amount of intelligence that she loves Odysse's so much.

And when he finally ends up on the beach in Ithaca, and he returns, the best flirtation scene in all of ancient epic occurs between this goddess and Odysseus. She just adores this boy. Right. Oliver... It's getting hot under the collar here. This is supposed to be a Greek epic. Oliver Taplin, Odysseus is constantly given epithets like nimble-witted, shrewd, reinventive. He uses great cunning. Can you... And the cunning was a characteristic that people appreciated and has been appreciated by writers and interpreters ever since. Can you give us some examples of this? cunning. Yeah, well, he's constantly using his clever tricks. He's constantly using his intelligence to get himself out of scrapes. He uses his mind to survive. And the most famous story of all,

of course, is how he gets his men out of the cave of Polyphemus, the Cyclops. He has to be very careful and very clever about that, because this giant puts this huge stone across the door. So if they simply kill the giant while he's asleep, that's easy. But then there's no way they're going to get out. So he really has to, what he calls, weave his cunning. And he comes up with this trick about calling himself no man. So that when Polyphemus cries out and says, help, help, I'm being harmed, all his neighbours come around, and they say, well, surely no man's giving you trouble, no man's harming you. And he says, yes, no man's harming me. And they say, well, that's all right, then, and they go back to sleep. So that is perhaps the archetypal survival

scene of the poem where Adissus shows his cunning, his intelligence. You know in the Homeric epic, in this kind of early epic, characters have epithets, they have adjectives that come for them again and again and again. And Dissus has his little cluster that are special to him. And there's one which means with much cunning or many kinds of cunning, polymatus. It comes over 80 times in the poem. It's his kind of trademark epitherto. that. It's a bit like sort of the

Shaharazard, isn't it? The cunning person, the person who wins by trickery, the person who wins by brute force. It's almost opposed to the Iliad where Achilles, the stronger wins because he is stronger. It's somebody wins because... Well, there's also a kind of key moment

in the Iliad when Achilles says I hate like the gates of hell the man who says one thing and hides another in his heart. And the person he's saying that to is Odysseus, who is the great master of saying one thing, and hiding another in his heart. Adisius is the great. He's economical with the truth.

He's the spin doctor. He's the con man. I actually find that what fascinates me most about Odysseus and all this deception business is that he actually knows it himself that it's double-edged. He doesn't just think it's simple. One of the most wonderful moments in The Odyssey's when he listens to a bard singing about the wooden horse, which he invented, he took into the city of Troy,

and he managed... So he was a tricky one, yeah. And as he listens to it, do you know what, he weeps, like a woman who has cast her body over the slain corpse of her dead husband as her city goes down in flames. That is how he weeps. It's as though that simile, that extraordinary simile,

shows that he knows what people like him do to other people. He actually is aware at some deep level of how dangerous his sort of cunning is to human beings. and that is what makes the Odyssey so special. Do you feel that he was a person in the book and at the time who would be rather despised, the ambivalence, has Odysseus anything, the root of the word,

anything to do with odious? Are we talking about someone who is risking being thought of badly? Well, yes, I mean, in the interpretation of the poem, he certainly can be read negatively, often has been read negatively. As for his name, well, we can't really say, it's not actually a Greek name by origin, but within the poem, his name is associated with a word that means to be angry with, to show disrespect for.

And his grandfather actually gives him that name, and his grandfather says, I'm a person who a lot of people have been annoyed with, so I'm going to give you this name which sort of means annoyer. And when he gets back to Uthaca, Simon, his behavior there is not that of the classical hero, is it? He gets back to Uthaca, there's his wife, there are the suitors, there are the maids from his own household who have slept with the suitors. in those 20 years, I suppose, and then his behaviour can only be described as extremely brutal.

Well, that's at the end of the story. He comes back, of course, in disguise in order to test people. And the one thing he does that no other great hero does is he's prepared to appear as an old man in rags. He has things thrown at him. He gets mistreated. This is the exact opposite of Achilles, who whenever he feels that his honour has been challenged,

and he stamps his foot and cries and causes an epic row. where Odysseus is quite happy to have things thrown at him because he's testing people, and that's very strange. And having tested everybody, he then finds them guilty and kills them. So he's the man who comes back, having lost all his troops, and then he kills all the princes of the realm. He brutally kills the women who've been sleeping with the suitors. And then he's going to go off again at the end of the epic.

It's hardly surprising that later Greek in particular has found him a very ambivalent character indeed. The way the story is told has around, a enormous, quite rightly enormous amount of interest, but because of the complexity, the structure of the story. Let's go straight to the meat, Oliver. What is it about the structure of the story

that is so radical and attractive even now? Well, I suppose what works so well, even though it's on such a huge scale, is that it doesn't simply tell things from start to finish, that it starts in the present, it goes back into the past, returns into the present so that the past is

reconstructed, extremely cleverly. The past going right back to the time when Odysseus left home, and then the past of the war, and then the past of his journeys all the way home. And these are spliced into the story sometimes straightforwardly,

sometimes deceitfully. So that the time, if you look at it in terms of time scale, instead of it simply trotting along through the years, you're constantly having to juxtapose the present and the past. Was that complex structure unique in the period?

Aristotle in his poetry actually says most epics tell the story either of one person or one war from start to finish and the Iliad and Odyssey are different because they don't do it that way. So you think that gives it, well I think people think that gives it tremendous resonance it makes it self-reflective

and it gives it a sort of depth that one of the things that's carried it for nearly 3,000 years. I think that's right. The way it's constructed is one of the ways it gets its audience to think rather than just to be passive listeners. Edith Hall, the big question about authorship now, like most people listening,

I was brought up to think that Homer wrote this. You say, no, it's a collection of folk tales, oral traditions, stitched together, and Homer might or might not have been the editor, but you're not even sure about that. This is a grave disappointment to many people, so you'd better make a good case. Melvin, can we just,

drop the word wrote. Can we just get rid of it? This is oral poetry. In the 1930s. You can write things in your head. I do all the time. Curious letters to news papers. We have lost the art of memory. We do not understand how memories work. Any other culture... I don't think that's true, but

never mind. It doesn't have a point of the time. This was composed orally originally. These are songs in a pre-literate or illiterate culture that are developed and handed on. It's only at a very late stage in terms of the history of stories in this kind of poetry, the thing gets put together.

Like you, I feel that there is certainly a continuous sensibility in the poem. It seems to me that whoever collaborated in it all, whoever they were, whether there were lots of different wandering bards or whoever, whoever we call Homer, I think there is a continuous sensibility from beginning to end. And if there wasn't, it wouldn't be so good. I actually think, you know, it's to waste two minutes of your 50 minutes to even talk about this. Let's talk about the poem. No, I'm interested in this, and so are a lot of other people off this.

You don't join in, that's fine. Are you saying two things, are you having, I hope, the best of both worlds, saying, look, there were a lot of stories around coming from different sources, spoken and remembered by different parts of oral storytelling. We know a lot about that. But one person did, in the end, weave it. The notion that you hear that Homer was composed by committee is not on. insofar as many poets contribute to it

and many generations of poets contribute to it that's not a committee if you like it's a tradition of songmaking and Homer and his audience are the great beneficiaries of this tradition of songmaking it is I think as Editha's saying it's very likely that you have here

in fact I think much more likely you have an organising mind it's also the case that in Athens in the 6th century there was a tyrant called Pysistratus. And Pysstratus, we're told, decided to clean up the text because there were people adding bits to his beloved Homer. And some people believe that this was the moment in which the text was fixed. Because what's remarkable about it is that the text that we have is pretty well unchanged for a very, very long period. And so that's why it's in a sense, it's pointless to argue about what happened before this fixed text, because we can only imagine. But this is

This text has been fixed for a long time. People have read it for a long time in this way, and that's why we like to talk about the poem. We must sound very mystifying, but I mean, there are actually portraits within the poem of two epic bards at work, which give us some idea of what went on. One is called Demodicus,

and he sings a great big song on the island of Fyatia, and the other is the actual Edisius' own bard, Femius, whose life he spares. But we actually see these guys tune up and get in touch with the muses and start to sing in ways that we know songs that are familiar. You can actually ask them for a theme.

You can say, tell us the one about the Trojan horse, or tell us the one about Ares and Aphrodite going to bed together. But at the same time, they actually are going down new piles of song, and they say that. They're going to be creative every time. It's going to be a little bit different. Is it significant, Oliver, that it's composed in hexameters? Certainly.

I mean, that is the rhythm, the pulse, the music that this tradition had built up. So everyone listening to that, ever since they were children, They've been hearing this kind of poetry with this kind of musical accompaniment, this kind of puls and rhythm and way of being made. I mean, this is composed to the accompaniment of music in a rhythm, a metre that's not quite like what we're used to an English meter, and that you don't have a fixed number of syllables per line, but you do have a fixed pattern of syllables in each line. And of course it makes it easier to remember, because the oral tradition was obviously part of the way. Have you anything else to say about the structure?

Well, I think what's remarkable is that we have a first-person narration right in the middle, that we have Odysseus telling his own story in retrospect. And that allows us really to get a sense of an individual. The first word of the poem is man. And the poem is about what is it to be a male adult in society. We have Telemachus growing up into manhood, and we have Odysseus looking back at his life, thinking about what he's done as a man,

and then going into Ithaca and rebuilding his relationships as a man with all the different elements of his family, his father, his wife, his son, his dog. And that is what gives the poem some of its immense power in the West because it's about this central idea of masculinity, about what it is to be an adult male, and not just about some adventures. But though we're talking about structures and about how important structures have been, as Edith pointed out, to novelists ever since,

it's been a great influence on artists and perhaps it was proto-philosophy. You can come to that in a moment. At the time, one has to say, a bit like the Shakespeare's plays at the time, it was the alarms and excursions, exit pursued by a bear, cyclops, the sirens.

I think we're maybe passing by the big, dramatic, popular appeal it must have had if people were standing in marketplaces trying to get others to come and listen for at least 20 hours over the week or two that this was being recited. Absolutely. It's a great story.

It's a great story. And I actually think it's got something for everyone. And I think if you're going to explain its popular appeal in antiquity, where Homer was, the two ethics, were the education for children, then the stories of the Cyclops and so on, which still appeals so much to our children. I mean, they're still very popular in myth books,

helps to explain that. There's something in it for everybody. I mean, it's like the best kind of soap opera. You've got the young people, you've got the middle-aged people, and you've got dear old Laertis who you meet at the end. So there's something in it for every member of the audience. I think it's not just about adult males, actually, Simon.

I understand what you're saying, but I actually think that you could, you know, women and young people and old people can get an awful lot out of this poem. Yes, I was trying to go back to more the surface and just to refresh ourselves. It's all these tremendous things going on, these adventures, really, and what happened next? Did he escape?

Almost all the adventures are... Did he get off the beach? Would Calypso let him go and night after night after night? Absolutely. And it has pace. You know, it doesn't have longguers. The whole thing moving... along with this terrific momentum

which carries its audience with it. And he's on his own and he has to use so many different types of skill. I think the polymertes, the many different types of cunning, actually come out just in physical skills as well. I mean, he has the biggest epic swim in world literature. He has to swim for five days to get

away from that island to now Sika. It's one of the most beautiful pieces of prose. He's a fantastic carpenter. He's a fantastic plower we hear. He can do ploughing competitions. He can toss a discos to win the Olympics. I mean, he can do practically everything. He made his own bedroom.

Yeah, absolutely. And the versatility of this man, he's actually like a very clever peasant farmer. He's much more interesting than Achilles who can just balk people on the head. And the idea of being self-reliant was a very important factor in the Greek idea of the perfect, of the great man, wasn't it, being someone who could look after himself from beginning, the building, the fishing, the swimming, the fighting, the lying. He's proto-democrat from that point of view. he's actually Aristotle's altarctic man, Altarcair's, this self-sufficiency.

And although in some ways it's a very reactionary poem about absolute monarchy and the absolute right of the household to rule, I think there's not a very positive and progressive tendencies in Odysseus as the self-sufficient peasant farmer. Simon Goldhill, it's essentially, but it's about a lot of things that we keep saying. This is about that, it's about the other other, which is perhaps a definition of very great heart. But it is also about a homecoming. he's going home.

Home is Ithaca. Home is where the wife and child and... Now, why was that a significant... We think of Greek society, we don't think, oh, they're going to go home to their wives, not superficially. But maybe we should stop thinking superficially. But there you go.

Why was that such a sort of drive at that time as an idea? Well, man is defined by where he lives. His home is the definition of who he is. You can't move house. you can't sell a house in ancient Greece. I mean, it was your absolute root and place. And what it meant to come home is a very, very big question for these people. It was a redefinition for Odysseus of who he was.

It was finding these relationships. And it's not just, it's difficult to say, what does it mean to go home? It doesn't mean simply to walk into your house. It means to go to a land. It means to go to a farm. It means to go to a particular group of people. All of those things have to be. in place because they define who you are.

And how do you find that you? Do you find it, is that in terms of the, of a feminist point of view, is that something that surprises you or do you find it more reactionary than liberating? Well, I certainly think it is a reactionary poem and the big question in Odysseus is mine throughout the entire poem is whether Phinellope has been chased or not. and he's allowed to have sex wherever he wants and does so. I mean, it is deeply problematic from that point of view. What's interesting recently, though,

is in post-feminist female poets, are very much recuperated Penelope and have got very interested in rewriting odysses from the point of view of what it's like to be the woman who waits at home and raised all sorts of questions about just how difficult it would be if you've been running the show and running the homestead for all those years, actually to adapt when the man comes back.

And I think there is enough in the poem already there about her discomfiture and her resentment of Odysseus's absence. I actually do think that ancient Greek males were aware an awful lot, either on business or in the Black Sea on commerce or at war. And I think an awful lot of women spent an awful lot of the time running their households, and this was actually reflects a real psychological problem. But it also tells you something that when you first find it issues, he is on the Calypso's Island.

It's an absolute paradise, and there is this wonderful, unaging goddess for him to have sex with. And there he is sitting, wishing there is back on his rocky little island, with his aging human wife. So there is, if you like, attention. And he does have this drive, this drive to re-establish himself within his home. It's also remarkable that when he's asked to say, what is the ideal of marriage?

Odysseus actually says that a woman should have like-minded qualities with a man. And that's very, very rare in ancient culture of any sort to suggest that women should be in some sense equal mentally with their husbands, and she is Trixie just like him. And it's a surprisingly faithful, fiddle idea, which it transfers easily to, let's say, the sort of courtly idea in the middle age and the sort of the woman has to be gone back to. At the basis of it, it could be interpreted in praise of monogamy, couldn't it?

Well, in many ways it is. I mean, it's true that Odysseus has sex elsewhere, but he's usually forced to have sex by witches. It's not a good thing. If you fall in the hands of a witch, Edith, you don't have much option I'd be in terms. Well, okay. But I actually do think that the poem as a whole, one way you can read it, if you want to read it, sociologically, justifies patriarchy. It is quite simply justifies man on top in society. The other weird world he goes into, women are more powerful or female figures are more powerful than men, even at the court of fiatians. Queen Ariti seems to wield extra power. It's all about coming home and saying, no, this place is in a mess because a woman is running it, I am back. I mean, taken as a whole, it is impossible to read it in any other way. Yeah, well, actually, I don't disagree with you,

but I just have come in under a different slide. That would seem to me to be blindingly obvious that in about 3 or 4,000 years ago, when you have a heroic society with men at war all the time, it's going to be a patriarchal. What's interesting, isn't that? Because that's bound to be the case. What's interesting is that these women have real place,

real power, real position. They're moving around with ideas with which we are still moving around. That's really interesting. I mean, Odysseus cries like a woman, he tricks like a woman, as the text says. And Penelope actually has a certain sort of strength. She's not just a passive figure. And it's the way in which the text allows a more positive image, a more collective image of a couple to come through,

that is really unparalleled in this period. That's what's remarkable. Yes, if we're talking about masculine feminine, and Calypso exercises a draconian will, which a lot of people think is masculine. She enslaves this person. Now, she happens to be a she, and he happens to be a... but it's still an act of enslavement,

which we often think of, you would have think of, as sort of patriarchal monopoly. But there it goes, and that's interesting too, that our hero falls in the hands of this sexually over-demanding woman. She's quite resentful when the gods tell her that she's got to let her discus go. She says, yeah, that's typical of you male gods.

You have as many affairs as you want, but you don't like it when we female gods have affairs. But it is, at the same time, The bed, that bed that is made out of a tree is in many ways the goal of the poem, the target of the poem. And we are waiting for this moment when it is Houston, Penelope, after all these years and all these sufferings are reunited. But it's not just then scattered with confetti. Penelope herself says, we've lost the best years of our lives together. Why's going to leave again?

I mean, surely that takes the wind out of all the sails of it. We're told almost immediately after the great reunion in the bed that he's going to die far away from home. Well, I think he's going to die back at home. But he's going to have to, I mean, at least that's the way I've read it. It is true that they go to bed and he says, I'm sorry, darling, I'm going to have to go again. I've been told me.

I really think that the looseness of the translations that some of you scholars have made has taken a wind out of my respect. But he is going to have to go on yet another one there, but he is going to die at home. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks for diving in. That amazing book, thank you to Edius Hall, Oliver Tapplin and Simon Goldhill, and thanks for listening.

We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com. com.com.com.