Plain English with Derek Thompson - Why 'The Odyssey' Is the West’s Greatest Story

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey' is finally here, but how exactly has a 3,000-year-old story endured long enough to become the foundation of Western storytelling? Derek is joined by Karen Ní Mheallaigh, chair of Classics at Johns Hopkins University, to explore the mysterious origins of Homer's epic and the timeless themes that have captivated audiences for millennia. They discuss how 'The Odyssey' outlived thousands of other ancient poems, how its story of homecoming and hospitality shaped Western literature, and why filmmakers and creatives like Christopher Nolan keep returning to its core ideas. Subscribe to our YouTube channel here:https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek ThompsonGuest: Karen Ní MheallaighProducer: Devon BaroldiAdditional Production Support: Ben Glicksman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Oppenheimer. Nolan is one of my favorite directors and the themes that he's clearly obsessed with, the 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 Oppenheimer 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 Oppenheimer. It was one of our most popular episodes of the year. So I thought, you know what, let's just do it again.

Let's use a big Nolan blockbuster as a newspeg for a plain English history episode. And so 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. In 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 of Nostos 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 mass, 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. Three thousand years ago, people were listening to this story. Three thousand years ago. Imagine 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 Nivali. 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 ours. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Professor Karen Nevali, 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, diogenes, 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 and 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'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 D.C. You look around. You can see all of the classical columns and the classical architecture and the U.S. government, you know, uses words like Senate, et cetera, Capitol Hill. We're absolutely still immersed 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 the intriguing things to me is how alien, how different ancient thinking can be. And so the questions that really fascinate me 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 our 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 as a circle where the further away you get from the present period, you bend back toward the presence. 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, 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. And otherwise, why would we read it?

Why would someone like Christopher Nolan make a movie about it? Absolutely. Actually, I think you used a word there that I think is much better than the description that I, the way I was talking about, the ancient world. I mean, I was thinking more in terms of polarities. We're either immersed in it or we're 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 I don't know if we're going to talk about the Iliad. We'll talk about it a bit. No, no. I think I know where you're going. And I want you to save that point.

Thinking with a 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'd,

we get to talk about a little bit is, 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 3,000 years ago thereabouts. 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 oldest written works that we have in Greek literature. The Iliad is probably a little bit older. but 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. 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 Mendelsohn'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 at modern readers. It's a 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, 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, it's like when musicians, jazz or traditional musicians are playing nowadays, when you have improvisatory performance on the spot, 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, The Aaliyadh and 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 as 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 their 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, 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 an particularly talented poet who um

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 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 in nine hours, but they read 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, barred, 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, like, music. Like, when people listen to their favorite Taylor Swift songs, they don't, like, start at the beginning of the Uvra 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 guess it's very difficult for us to know because we don't have any sources that are sitting down and saying, hey, this is how the Iliad or 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 an extraordinarily self-conscious poem.

And it's a poem that is in many ways fascinated with the nature of poetry and performance as 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 Fyatians, 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 Demodicus, and he's an old blind bard. He's asked to sing some songs about, but to sing some songs. And he, 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, a poems being performed about Odysseus, which is extraordinary. So, 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, a lord, after banquet, entertainment for him and his aristocrats and guests, he would have a poet who he would have there in his employee 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 Ares 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 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 start the Maller Symphony and just go from the beginning of the end. They're like, oh, I just like that seven-minute movement toward the end.

And so you're saying that storytelling 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 really interesting. Yeah.

And we can see that probably poets, or we can make an educated guess, that probably these poets who were wander, they were itinerant, you know, they would wander from city to city, they could probably then adjust their song to appeal to the local audience. I mean, 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, 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? 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 it's more than that. And so this is my way 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? I mean, we'll talk about it in more detail and more granular detail. But, I mean, I'm actually interested to hear you handle a basic question like that first.

A basic question. What makes the story so great? Yeah. Well, first of all, just to say one of the, reasons that the Odyssey, like the Iliad survived, 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 armies, contingents from

Fessaly, from Mycenae, from Sparta, from, you know, the islands. So in a way, you know, I mentioned those travelling bards, 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 school kids are learning it off by heart. and writing it out. And that's one of the reasons it survives because it's a school text. So it gets, you know, the biggest reasons for texts not surviving is that they're not copied, not copied out. So but then to address your question, because of course, built in with that is it's not going to survive unless there's an audience there for it.

So, 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 is so good about it. There are so many ways I could answer that. 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 written tradition. We know it's been alive circulating in the oral tradition for many centuries. then it pops up somewhere in the 8th, 7th century BC

and it's this incredibly self-conscious, playful, artful piece of work. I mean, it's kind of up there with James Joyce. There's no accident that he used the Odyssey for Eulistades. It's experimental, it's extraordinarily clever. And I find that breathtaking. And I think

then there are, but that's okay, so 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. in its, Odysseus is the inquisitive curious hero, but the poem itself is curious. And whoever this was, or 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 this 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. So it's an extraordinarily curious poise. 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. I mean, a poem that is interested in the act of poetry, a poem that is 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 perform 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, I mean, you know, 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 consciousnesses shaping one poem and the other.

Or perhaps a better way to put it is, these are two poems that are products of rather 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, again, this is just personal. I find it an extraordinarily bleak poem. I mean, it's magnificent. It's profound.

It will, you know, rend 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 putting his life aside. And doing that for his friend's honour. And while he does it taking in with him a shield, which depicts just huge. human life, everything that he's giving up. I mean, this is an, it's an extraordinary meditation on the human, on mortality. So it's a high point. But the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the ELEAD is full of contemplations about, yeah, mortality, fate, justice.

What are the gods doing? What constitutes human life? What's it worth? Can we be happy? All of these really profound questions saturate the Eliad. The Odyssey is very, very different. I think it's about the surviving. 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, Odysseus is a very, in some ways, the antithesis of Achilles. He's the kind of slightly, maybe slightly getting saggy around the edges, middle-aged man who just wants to make it home to his wife, who's mortal and his son. and in order to do so, I mean, he loses everything.

And he's not going to get home by glory, by dint 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 very difficult question to get to 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, that is interesting

to me too. So the first thing I want to talk about, and you know, created the perfect on-ramp for this, is about power. Odysius' 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, is polytropos. He is cunning. And the difference between Achilles and Odysseus, these two great heroes of ancient Greek epic poetry,

sort of touch on these two categories of strength in 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, so Bia is this idea of force, violence, strength, brute strength. And Natus on the other side is the more intellectual, cunning, cleverness, whileness. And it's, I mean, it is very easy in simplistic terms to polarise them and to say that, okay, Achilles represents, you know, brute force and strength and violence. And there's no doubt about it. I mean, he embodies violence like almost no other character. He verges on the cannibalistic at some points in the Iliad. He goes beyond the human and his desire for violence. And yet we see him in book 9 of the Iliad on his own,

sitting by the waves strumming his liar 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 associated with heroism and masculinity and violence and all of that, all those Bia-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 wileiness, cunning, lies, deceit. So that's very much natus, 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 folks who aren't familiar with the plot,

can you give one or two sort of canonical examples of Odysseus's whiliness, 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 book Six of the Odyssey where he's lost everything. 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 the gods arrange for princess, the local princess Noussik has,

delightful character. to come and find him. Now this is a kind of a young girl meeting this 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 gets the proverbial fig leaf and sort of covers his nakedness a bit and then uses his speech. You know, in this extraordinarily vulnerable moment, he's but naked in front of this young girl. And he manages just through words to defuse the entire situation, to make her feel 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 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 Penelope 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. Not nothing relatable, but that kind of power is less relatable, which is a part of its glory.

But with Odysseus, right, the fact that his strength comes from cunning, that it comes from disguise, that he can put on a nymphs 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 I wonder the word that comes to mind is like is he a more populous character I definitely don't mean populist in like a political sense

but I mean there's there's a, there's a lower relatability to his power than with Achilles. And I, I wonder what that is getting at and how that distinguishes an epic poem like this with, 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, in our Iliad 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 scenes that stand out in my mind in the Odyssey.

that really tell us something about this relatability. One is, okay, 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 recognises 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 recognises his master and he dies.

He lifts his tail and 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 swineherd, 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 faithfully for his master. And one stormy night, they sit up telling stories to one another and the swineherd doesn't know it's Odysseus, his old master come home. But they swap stories, and we discover that, so we've got, we discovered that the swineherd,

Eumaas, 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 swineherd. So we've got this extraordinary scene between these two men, where you're you've got a swineherd who was actually formerly a 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, 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,

which makes it all the more extraordinary that this was a dispersed group project of epic poem weavers, to have made an alternate product that has such a resonant theme there, It 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 Nostos, 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, he kisses the wife,

who throws the baby in the air and it's like a hallmark postcard. He comes home, ravaged, recognizable alone, having lost everything, slaughters the suitors, has his son slaughtered the concubines, the slave servants? I mean, this is a strange, traumatic, violent homecoming. What is the meaning of that? What is the Odyssey saying about Nostos 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 close 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 their come-up and probably audiences will, yeah, okay, they've got to have. they've got to get floatered. What's much harder to swallow is the slaughter of the maid servants, for example, and who are just strung up, probably had very little choice in, you know, having sex with the suitors, but were punished with death for all that, for their disloyalty.

or the punishment of one, is it the cowherd, Melanthius? He's a servant who was particularly disrespectful to Odysseus in disguise, and he's not just killed, he's strung 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 you're 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, the recognition of the dog, the reunion with 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's familiar, though there is that poignant thing of he doesn't just get home.

People don't recognize him in it. In many ways that speaks 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 II, 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. You know, he's clearly 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 statement. The proper statement 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, you know, put down, and then all will be right with the world again. So there is something cosmological about that. You used that term earlier, you know, about the king, but the hierarchy being restored. And proper Xenia, I think you used that term, proper hospitality. So the suitors 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 reinstated, 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 Zania. It's X-E-N-I-A. This is ancient creed concept for hospitality, but which shares a root with the modern word 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 yes, you're absolutely right. I would say, you know, we see Odysseus being a guest time and time again. Most of 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 that's 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 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, polyphemus is 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 belongs to the world of the late 8th, 7th 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, it suddenly changes in the Greek world. And we have what used to be known as this orientalizing motifs 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 further cultures in the farther east in Babylon,

for example, the Phoenician world. The Phoenicians are all over the Odyssey. I mentioned, you know, they're the pirates. kidnapped the young child, Eumaeus. We hear that story. They're all over the place. 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, there isn't a 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 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 that's a piece of the story's 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 the 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 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' 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 godfather 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. And 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, for it 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 hesitate to be kind of to, I don't want to be teleological about it 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 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,

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. 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. Because they promise that it's such a brief part of the epic 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 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. know the answer to these eternal secrets of the cosmos. 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 dangers.

I mean, as he said with the siren, I mean, 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 himself. and the Odyssey would end. So this is in a way, the Siren Song is the song that threatens the anti-odicy. 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 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 is.

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 Eumaeus and Odysseus are exchanging stories, they talk about how helpful it is. Pain when you, so lived experience is painful. But we tell stories as a way to commute 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 visit to 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. That's part of what I mean by this is an audience that really wants more of the Iliad. But we see her. We see her now as the respectable middle-aged kind of wife back with Menelaus, her husband, her first husband. And after dinner, they're all feeling sad, thinking about Odysseus's 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, 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 film, and there is a genuine fascination with it's yeah, what's very beautiful. That's beautiful. By means of summing 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 in the jars of wine or, you know, 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, 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 this 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's waiting over 20 years. It's been really tough for her. But, yeah, Odysseus's family waits for him and he comes back and you know, he's re, there's 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, Liertes, and they're reunited in the orchard, and Odysseus remembers he can name all the trees, and 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 it is as well that it is very open. You know, Odysseus doesn't stay at home. He's got to, we know that he's got to take a journey 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 appease the anger of the God Poseidon. And that's a 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, where it's 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 Poseid and all will be well. In other words, the poem ends as another story opens up. And you get the sense that this story, maybe not Odysseus' story alone, but the story, the human story, is going to continue through generations. So, um, I think that's one of the reasons the Odyssey speaks to still so vividly. In a way, it's opened a door to us in the 21st century. Karen Uvali, thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Terry. It's a pleasure to talk with you.