TRIGGERnometry - What The Odyssey Is Actually About

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

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Drink responsibly. Christopher Nolan, probably the most important director in the business, has taken on a story which historically has been too big for Hollywood. It resonates more deeply the older you get by it revealing that many things we're told in life are a sham and a distraction and to keep us away from the things which deep down we know actually matter. And those are people and place. Life requires that quieter heroism of sacrifice and suffering for whatever one takes to be the higher good. And I think what's really interesting about Nolan taking on The Odyssey is that it's the kind of film Hollywood doesn't want to make.

The things I just described are against the grain of what not just Hollywood, but a huge amount of cultural activity, has been doing. This episode is sponsored by our friends at Hillsdale College. Right after this episode, go check out the incredible online courses, which are absolutely free at hillstale.edu slash trigger. Dr. David Butterfield, welcome back to Triggerometry. It's a real joy to be back, Jens. Oh, it's great to have you back.

We only had you on recently to talk about ancient Greece in particular. It was an amazing conversation. It absolutely crushed. People loved it. And so we thought we'd bring you back on. I don't know if you've heard, there's a movie about the Odyssey coming out. It's based on the story, as I understand. that's been reimagined through a radical feminist lens,

which I'm sure is given it even more accuracy and intellectual and rigor and vigor, as we'd expect. And so we actually thought it might be a good time to talk about the Odyssey and tell that story. But first of all, based on what we've heard so far, some of the interpretations of the Odyssey are quite interesting. What have you made of it? Well, first thing to say is, indeed,

Christopher Nolan, probably the most important director in the business, with a huge catalogue of fundamentally brilliant films behind him, has taken on a story which historically has been too big for Hollywood. There's really only one attempt to make a film of The Odyssey. Way back in the 1950s, it's one of those sort of sand and sandals epics in Technicolor, but it's not a celebrated film. And for the last 70 years, no one has had a go. Now Nolan has stepped forward and he's taken on what probably is the most important.

important story in the Western tradition. So it's a big deal. And it comes out soon, but of course none of us have seen it. We've only seen the trailers. So there's a big caveat in anything I would want to say about Nolan's Odyssey, which is that no one's seen it. But from the trailers and from other bits of information circulating about it, there certainly are some interesting things going on within it. Like what? Well, for a start, we are attempting to tell the tale with historical realism. This is a thing Nolan has been very clear about in his interviews, about the level of research that he, his wife, who actually is a trained classicist

and the team have gone into in order to recreate what we might think a pure tale of fantasy. But for the Greeks, it was meaningfully real. It was a depiction of their own world in the second millennium BC, in the late Bronze Age, their heroic ancestors, who, yes, were able to engage with the gods and with various monsters and so on, but they were seen as their forefathers. So there's a serious attempt made in the film

to depict what civilization might have looked like at that moment just before it actually did collapse, the Bronze Age collapse in the 12th century. So that, on the one hand, is really interesting. But on the other, there are some real problems when it comes to historical realism if you're trying to tell a film about gods, interacting with mortals, that probably has not happened that obviously in the realm of history.

So what we can gauge so far is that the film will indeed focus on the one man at its heart, Odysseus, and will attempt possibly following the structure of Homer's poem, possibly not, to chart his long 10-year struggle after the 10 years of the Trojan War, to get home to his island, to the sun, he has never seen since his baby years, and to the wife who is currently beset by 108 men who want to be the man who will marry her and become the new king of his home island, Ithaca. So that's the structure as far as we can tell. But the main noise that has come out about the film to this point is not about its historical realism, but about its striking choices when

comes to casting. And I presume you know something about this yourselves, but the one that's really got people talking, which I think to some degree is interesting, but to some degrees not that interesting, is about the most beautiful woman in the history, not just of the world, but in the history of all world literature, Helen. Helen, as you know, was the queen of Sparta, the wife of Menelaus. And she, She gets abducted by the Trojan Prince Paris. Why? It all goes back to a different female figure and FOMO, the fear of missing out.

Because way back when there was a woman called Fetis, a sea nymph, so lived under the sea but had divine powers. And there was a prophecy that she would have a child who would be so powerful that he would overthrow Zeus. So Zeus tries to downgrade the power of Thetis and her future child by forcing this synapse to marry a mortal. She's not going to marry a deity and therefore the offspring will be half divine and no particular threat to Zeus himself. So a forced marriage happens and Thetis marries Pilius, who was a hero on the Argo, Jason and the Argonauts getting the golden fleece, so a man with good heroic pedigree.

but still a man. They have a wedding, everyone's invited, not just all mortals, but all deities, except one person doesn't make the list. And that is Eris. Eris is a Greek word means chaos, discord, strife. And so literally, if Eris turned up at the wedding party, there's going to be trouble.

She learns that she's not on the Invi list, and so she takes a golden apple and inscribes it with one Greek word, stare, which means for the most beautiful woman. Well, three goddesses at the party think this is literally addressed directly to them. There's here a wife and indeed sister. Let's not get into that of Zeus. Athena, Athena, the goddess of wisdom and of martial cunning. And Aphrodite, literally the sex symbol, the embodiment of love. Well, they can't decide between them who actually is the most beautiful woman. So to settle it, Zeus says, let's find some yokel. Let's go into the middle of the

countryside and find a shepherd and he can make the decision because I'm not making it. With my wife in the game, I'm not making that decision. So there is the shepherd called Paris, who also happens to be a prince of Troy, but he's doing his shepherding work. Maybe it's Duke of Edinburgh or something. He's out there doing his thing. And he is presented with the three guys. Odysesses. Heera says, choose me, I'm the most powerful. I'll make you the ruler of all of Europe and all of Asia, which is basically almost all of the known world to the Greeks. You'll be the most powerful man in the world. Athena says, okay, that's not bad, but I could give you the thing that really matters to humans. I could make you the most intelligent man in the world. And that would

mean when it comes to the battlefield, you would just outsmart everyone. You would be the great hero. As for Aphrodite, who comes last, she says, well, I could just give you the most beautiful woman in the world. And didn't take much deliberation. Paris says, I'll choose that one, thanks. Typical man. And then the necessary has to happen, which means Helen, as I say, the most beautiful woman in the world, had to be taken from her husband and given to Paris as a prize. And the tale is a bit ambiguous in different tellings, but Menelaus was away, and Paris came over there, helped by Aphrodite and seduced and abducted.

Helen, why does that matter? Because her face is the face that launched a thousand ships. The whole of the Trojan War, the whole subject of the Iliad, is about the Greeks not just trying to save their honor, but trying to restore to her rightful place in Sparta, the woman who was wrongly taken by a Trojan. And so that whole sequence comes about from this troubled goddess, eris, not being able to be at the party and the FOMO going loco.

So to cast Helen is tricky. You need someone who credibly could be taken as one of the most beautiful women of all time, and none of us would want to make that call clearly. It's a difficult one to do. But more troublingly, Helen was born from an egg because her father was Zeus, but in the form of a swan. And the swan and Lida, L-E-D-A is the mother of Helen, Zeus as swan, got with Lida. Leader popped out an egg, and out of the egg, Helen was born. So where are you going to find someone to cast with semi-divine semi-swain pedigree?

It's not going to be an easy one. Anyhow, it's clear from the trailers and what we know that the actress Le Peter Njongo has been cast as Helen and indeed as Helen's twin sister, Clytemnestra. We can come back to why she's interesting. Le Pita Njongos of Kenyan extraction, sub-Saharan, and therefore clearly different from the majority of the rest of the castings in the film.

Most people in the film are white. They're mostly American, but Helen in and among them is a pointedly different-looking figure. Now, we could say that's not that interesting. There is no realistic cast to call upon. And if the decision is made that we'll have a black actor as Helen, so be it. And, you know, I've got a lot of sympathy with that view. It's not that interesting. On the other hand, it has been taken by many people to be a pointedly disruptive casting,

one that stands out in a way that perhaps it's not meant to. For many people, it's not an issue of beauty that stands out in the way that Helen might. It's an issue of non-alignment with the broadly white casting of the remainder. Now, to be clear, we do not know precisely what the heroes of the Odyssey looked like. Nevertheless, for the Greeks who invented the tales, told them orally, and then wrote them down once the alphabet arrived, they were their ancestors. So broadly speaking, the poem is about people of a Mediterranean ethnicity. The poem of Homer does not describe Helen in really any detail at all. We have the word cal lepocamos, which means pretty hair, nice hair.

that doesn't help us. But the one that's got a lot of attention is one of her epithets, one of her standard adjectives, is lucolenos, which means having white arms. Now, if you're in a largely white society, that's not how you describe someone. I wouldn't say, oh, do you know, Francis, you know, the guy with the white arms. It's not a, it's not a natural way to describe someone. So what that adjective probably means it in effect, even though it's literally white armed, means a woman who kept her skin white and pale because she was of an aristocratic status where she wasn't outworking,

wasn't getting tanned under the sun, and therefore her arms were a sign of her high status. That then takes us to the unsurprising fact that she was conceived of as someone, broadly speaking, white in a Mediterranean context. So in that sense, it is a very striking casting to go for. She's a great actress, as far as I can tell. but it's made a lot of noise.

A very quick question on that. In the Roman Empire, there would have been plenty of people from Africa as part of it. Would that be fair? It depends what you mean. If you mean people from the continent we call Africa, certainly the North African coast... But not sub-Saharan. Was part of the Roman Empire. The Berber kind of people are much closer relation because the Phoenicians coming from modern Lebanon,

founded colonies on what we now call North Africa and as such were broadly Mediterranean. Sub-Saharan, as you say, these people were known of, tribes were known of and are occasionally described, but they were cut off from both Roman rule and indeed general Roman society. So black people do appear in Roman accounts, but there's an element of novelty and difference to them. There isn't conventional racism against non-white people in the Roman world. It's more pointing out aesthetic differences rather than any kind of supremacy of whiteness. It's not a term used in the Roman or indeed in the Greek world. They didn't talk about whites and non-whites.

What the Greeks talked about is us and the Barbaroi, the blabbing non-Greeks. And you could be as white as could be. It wouldn't matter. you're not Greek and therefore you're not good. And so the Greek civilization proceeding of the Romans, I imagine there was even less contact with sub-Saharan Africa at this point. Is that fair? Yeah, it would be the sort of thing that would happen with far-ranging tradesmen

or people journeying on some sort of mission or military campaign. There would not be, I think I can say perfectly clearly, there would not be in the Greek-speaking world, regular interaction with sub-Saharan Africans at any point. in the ancient Greek world. And therefore it would be quite inconceivable for the Queen of Sparta to be a black woman, I think is... Yeah, well, let's say for the sake of argument, there was a Queen of Sparta in the early 12th

century BC, that woman is definitely not black, yes. And if she were black, they might have mentioned it. It would have been a more helpful adjective than Lucolonos to say she was black. Now, it so happens that when Homer's Odyssey begins, Poseidon, the god of the sea, brother of Zeus has headed deep into Africa to hang out with the Ethiopians, whose ethnicity is quite hard to describe, but they were definitely dark-skinned, black-skinned. And so there's an element of mixing real human geography with a sort of fantastic land where the sun sets among the land of the Ethiopians. So it's not an unknown world, but it's not one that's part of Greek society,

now. So let's focus on the story of the Odyssey, which is actually one of my favorites. It doesn't matter how many times I hear it, I still think it's the greatest story ever told. So let's start. I know the book, the poem starts in the middle of the journey, but let's start at the beginning of Odysseus's journey chronologically. Where was he? The trigonometry merch store is built on Shopify, Because the moment someone's actually ready to pay, Shopify make sure they can. And if they've bought before, their details are already saved, so it's one tap and done. That's time back to grow the business instead of running it. If you want to start the same way, that's Shopify.com.uk slash trigger.

With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at Shopify.com.uk. slash trigger. Start your free trial at Shopify.com.uk.org slash trigger. He was in Troy. So we will know plenty about and we'll talk about the two great hermeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad comes first, both in that its action is earlier. It's about the war, not what happened after the war, but probably as a composition, it's the older, the more complicated poem in several ways.

The Iliad famously does not tell the most famous events of the Trojan War. It doesn't talk about the Trojan horse and the fall of Troy. It doesn't talk about the death of Achilles shot in his Achilles heel. Instead, it focuses specifically on a character flaw in Achilles, which both makes him a hero and leads to tragic consequences. That's his meerness, his wrath, his anger, which leads to. him to step away from the battlefield for a long time and thereby cause the death of many, many comrades, because without Achilles, they were in trouble. So that's set in the 10th year of this

10-year war out in Troy, which in our terms is in northwest Turkey, across the Aegean. And then the Odyssey does not begin straight after the Iliad. In fact, it's in the seventh year of the 10-year wanderings of Odysseus that the action begins. So where is he? And how have we got here? He doesn't appear until book five. Books one to four are really important for some of the things we'll talk about. They're about the baby who has become a boy and now has become a man, but has no memory or recollection of his father Odysseus because he was a babe in arms when duty he called and Odysseus had to leave his family. Odysseus didn't want to do that and he actually pretended to be mad, insane,

so that he would somehow avoid the call of war. And he was going around doing mad things like putting salt on his crops when the team came to call on him. And they tested him, tested his madness by putting the baby in front of a plow. And just when it was about to be torn apart by the plough share, suddenly Odysseus snaps back into life and says, okay, it was just a stunt, I'll go. So that boy called Telemachus, whose Greek name means the guy far from battle, has become a man without a father figure in the house.

And in those four early books, he's trying to become a man without a clear model. And he goes on a bit of a tour, meet some old warriors, and tries to get a sense of how he can assert authority over all of these suitors who are eating him out of house and home. As for Odysseus in that seventh year of his wanderings, he's trapped by a sex-mad goddess. It's a tough gig. He's trapped on the island of Ogitya. My heart bleeds for him. But he is wracked with one of the great pains of all, nostalgia.

He has algos pain for his nostos. Nostos is the most important word in the Odyssey. It is the journey home, the return. turn back to where you belong, both in terms of place, but also in terms of people. That is the one thing motivating Odysseus in his struggles. But this goddess, Calypso, whose name means the concealer, has managed to successfully hide Odysseus on his own, on this island, and every day sleeps with him, every morning he heads down to the beach and just cries all day. That's what we're told about the man.

It looks as though the hero Odysseus, this clever thing, who invented the Trojan horse and therefore took down Troy is going to die in complete unknowable anonymity. His name means nothing. No one's visiting him. No one knows where he is, and he stands for nothing. But Athena, the goddess up in the clouds, has a very soft spot for Odysseus. She regards him as a mortal version of her, someone who's really got the clever and the cunning to get out of difficult situations. So Athena begs that a message be sent from the gods by Hermes to say, Calypso, enough is enough. You've had your seven years with the man. Let him go. And he is allowed to go. And in his wanderings thereafter, we learn about what happened before

and what happened after he got there. And he's been through some pretty wild adventures. So let's talk about these adventures. The one that everybody knows, the most famous one, is this son of Poseidon, the Cyclops. Exactly. The Cyclops are a race, and one of them called Polyphemus is at the heart of this story in book 9. The Cyclopes are odd, not because they're massive giants, not because they've only got one big eye in the middle of their head, nor indeed because they eat humans and in that sense sort of cannibalistic. They're odd because they stand as a rejection of everything the Greeks thinks makes a civilization. When I was last on, we talked about some of the terms that would allow you to define something as a civilization or not.

Well, the cyclopees on their island are set up as a sort of anti-civilization. They don't meet one another and talk about politics. They don't set legal codes. They don't have any sort of real code of honor among them. they live as savage individuals, which means they will not respect the one thing that in the Greek world is the most important,

Xenia. Xenia means being a good host. And this still exists in the Greek world. You know, we've been in Greece together, but if you appear as a stranger at a Greek's home, you will be given food, drink, and it may be even bored,

you may be able to stay the night, because that's the right thing to do. And in ancient Greece, this was so important. It was a sacred duty that you offer this help to someone even before you find out who they are. And Gzania, the act of good hospitality, is completely trashed when Odysseus and his crew land on the island of the Cyclopees. But it's doubly trashed. It's not just Polyphemus, who abuses his... writer's host by eating six of Odysseus' crew, then rolling a big boulder in front of his cave and trapping them forever. It's also abused in turn by Odysseus. Odysseus on arriving in Polyphemus's

cave, first thing he does is says, okay, what can I nick? And there's loads of wheels of cheese, and the crew are quite into their cheese by this point. And they steal before they encounter the host. So there's a breakdown on both sides of what it means to be. a proper Greek. Anyway, you will know the tale. Our viewers will know the tale too, but to put a long story short, with the boulder

rolled in front of the cave, they can't kill Polyphemus. The boulder is so large that all of the men could not move it. They can only get out if Polyphemus himself somehow removes it. But Polyphemus has said he's going to eat them all,

and that's that. So Odysseus uses his cunning and blinds that single eye of Polyphemus as he sleeps. He's been made drunk by this powerful wine and he's blinded by a huge stake. Then Odysseus and his crew get to the sheep, which are at the back of the cave, and they hang from the bottom of the sheep. And as he counts them out and puts them out to pasture, wondering what on earth's happened in his blinded state, the men are able to be free. Now, that should be the end of the story,

a clever trick to get out of pretty hot water. There's one thing you've missed, no man. Of course, yes, exactly that. And there's two levels to that. Thank you, Francis. So even though, as I said, the cycle peas are sort of pretty individualistic, they don't gather together in the way the Greeks think we should,

if there's a major problem, they might shout alarm and they might come and help each other. Well, one of the things you are meant to do as a good host and as a good guest, is to give your name, to give your identity. That's the most important thing about you. And for whatever reason, doubtless cunning, Odysseus does not give that name. He gives a name that sounds similar, namely Udaeus, not Odysseus, but Udais. But that means nobody, no man. So what happens when Polyphemus learns of this and then is attacked is he cries aloud, no one is harming me. No one is trying to kill me. And the rest of the cyclope is think,

okay, thanks for sharing. And we'll be on our way then. The flip side to that is that in a sense, Odysseus in that moment was acting like a nobody by not following the code of hospitality and standing up as the man he's meant to be, he was actually losing the real identity of the hero. But hubris in Greek tragedy will always take you down. That arrogance that makes you feel you a little better than even the gods, perhaps, does become the downfall of Odysseus and kills a great number of his men. Why? Because once they've got off the island, they're sailing away. Odysseus calls back to the enraged Polyphemus on land.

Now I'll tell you, it's Odysseus who did this. Odysseus, son of Laertes from Ithaca, I'm the guy, and sort of raises two fingers at him. Well, as you said, Polyphemus is the son of Poseidon, and Poseidon controls the sea. So Polyphemus now has the one thing he needed to make a curse, the actual name of Odysseus. And the curse is sent up to the god of the sea, or down to him, wherever he is at the time. and he promises that he will cause untold troubles and death on the sea for Odysseus and his crew. And for the rest of the narrative, Poseidon kills Odysseus's men because Odysseus couldn't keep his mouth shut and wanted to take the credit.

And that's a fascinating thing about Odysseus is that his greatest strength is his greatest weakness. And the way that you see, it's a very modern. hero, isn't he in many ways? Because he's not like Achilles. He doesn't have this incredible strength and power, all like Heracles, who was a demigod. This was somebody who's very much in the realm of the mortal. That's right. And in the Greek's mind, he's more Greek, in the sense that not all of us are set out to be heroic warriors whose martial valor will simply win the day by force. Instead for the Greeks, It's about words, about how you use your brain to solve a situation. And that, as you rightly say, is the great virtue of Odysseus.

He is polymertes, a guy with all of the ideas. He's Polymarchanos, the guy with all of the tricks. He's Polarthropos, a guy who can turn things in all sorts of different ways. He's Polo Fron. He's got loads of mental cleverness working within him. But fundamentally, that is a lot of... is how the Greeks wanted to engage with the world around them. That is their challenge, as we mentioned,

when we talked about philosophy, to impose order and sense on a world that seems chaotic. So in a real sense, the Odyssey moves on from the Iliad. The Iliad is about the tragedies of the battlefield and when human force causes damage to those around you in ways you can't predict. The Odyssey is about two things. It's about the power of the mind over the body,

and it's about the all-important draw of those two things that give life meaning, people and place. Odysseus realizes, as Achilles realized only once he had died, the heroic code of the Iliad, the heroic Bronze Age code of what the good life and the good death look like, is hollow. There's this concept of the callos thanatom. the beautiful death. Well, what's that? Well, for a start, it's death. So it's the end of your life.

And secondly, it's dying on the battlefield in the middle of a killing spree. Why is that good? Because you will win Kletos. And Kletos literally means being talked about. People will hear of that moment. But you have to die to win that, which creates this catch-22 almost paradox, which is the best thing a man fighting a war to defend his family can do is to die in that war and not return to the family he was fighting for. One of the most moving scenes in Homer's Odyssey, which is such a powerful poem in all manner of ways, is when Odysseus confronts the ghost of Achilles in the underworld, and Achilles says, you've just been praising me about being a great fighter, saying I'm a great fighter now down in the underworld.

well I'll tell you this. I would rather be the lowest level surf, serving as a slave on the poorest estate possible, then be the king of the whole of Hades. It means nothing to have lost your life. You need to live and thrive. And the reason that's so resonant for Achilles is his mother told him early on in the Iliad, he had a choice. Very unusual that a Greek hero could have any say over their fate. It's all predetermined. He has a choice, and there's a high road and a low road. He either will die young on the battlefield as the greatest warrior of all time, but they'll die. Or he can retreat from the battlefield, go home, and live a long and happy life with the family he will build. Those are his options. And it looks as though he's going to take

the latter option at a stage in the Iliad. But only when his closest companion, possible lover, Patroclus, is killed on the battlefield, is he brought back in to the life of the warrior and does indeed die the young death foretold of him. He now says to Odysseus, it was a sham. I shouldn't have followed my own Cleos, my own lust for glory, I should have headed home and done what really matters in life. And Odysseus is in the same place. The goddess, the sex goddess on the island for seven years is no good. He has been robbed of being a father. He's been robbed of the childhood of his son.

And the best he can do is to try and salvage something with the little time that remains. And when they meet one of the most beautiful and poignant similes in the whole of the poem is told, Telemachus finally realizes that the dad he couldn't remember is back after 20 years of toil. They embrace and they start wailing, but they're wailing, that uncontrollable grief is described as the wailing that ospreys or vultures make when as parents they see that their chicks have been stolen by humans before they could fly. So the reuniting of son and father is treated like a pair of parents who've lost the one thing they were meant to do in the world, namely have a childhood emerge from.

them. It's extremely poignant. You can spend three hours in a cinema watching Christopher Nolan's movie adaptation of The Odyssey, or you can spend that same three hours understanding the actual poem for free, guided by Hillsdale College Professor. Hillsdale College runs free online courses on the books that shaped the Western tradition taught by their own faculty using the same materials their students study on campus. The newest course covers Homer's The Odyssey. Professor Benedict Waylon walks you through it, courage, loyalty, leadership, temptation, family, and what it actually means to go home. It has held an audience for close to 3,000 years. This doesn't happen by accident.

For me, the scene that changed how I read the whole thing is Calypso offering Odysseus immortality if he stays with her and he turns it down. He picks a mortal life, an aging wife, a home that might not even want him back anymore. That's the entire argument of the book in one scene. There are more than 40 of these courses, and I couldn't recommend them more highly. Go to Hillsdale.edu slash trigger to enroll. It's totally free. Read the classics. Study the West.

That's hillsdale. org. Slash trigger. That's very powerful. And David, just returning to the chronology, how does, do we know in the Odyssey how he ends up captured by Calypso, the Sex, We do. We take us from the Trojan War through to that moment.

Of course. So Troy Falls, the Trojans lose. One of the Trojans ends up heading over to Italy and founds the Roman race. So the Romans believe they were from the Trojans. But as for the Greeks, they've won. They get their booty, which is both material wealth and people, concubines. They head back home to the different parts of Greece, or the Greek speaking. world, and that should be that. But for Odysseus and his crew of maybe 500, 600 men in the 12 ships

he brought, things go wrong pretty early. They stop at a place where the Kekonians live. They instantly raid the place, steal the women, steal the property, and they actually lose a battle. So the first thing they do is basically abuse another part of the ancient world. They're then cast onto a different island, and there they meet huge giants who are cannibalistic. They're the Listergonians, and that's just a straightforward disaster, and they flee. But the really interesting place they go to in these early wanderings is the place of the lotus eaters, the loatophagoi. And this is a community which is found. there's a certain flower you can eat, and if you eat the flour, you lose all longing for the things

that gave your life meaning. You lose a longing for your true home, for your family, you just tap out. And it's a land of addicts who've given up on what orientated their life. And Odysseus sees this, although some of his men become lost to this life, he sees that there's a dark addiction at work here and his crew need to be remotivated by returning to what ultimately orientates you in life, namely family and homeland. So they keep going onwards. They fall in with a witch called Circe, who turns many of the men into pigs, and is attempting the same trick with Odysseus, but he manages to dodge it, and he's able to escape from that island after a year.

But all the time, Odysseus' crew are dying in different ways. We mentioned that six are lost on the island of the Cyclopees. But because of that cursing of Poseidon, again and again, they fall into various lethal and bizarre deaths. Circe takes up one year of their time, but things meaningfully change for Odysseusian. when they reach the land of the sun god, Helios. Helios as the sun sees everything.

And on his island, he's got his favourite cattle. He loves those cows, okay? And there's a very simple rule, just don't mess with the cows. The winds are against Odysseus and his crew at this time, and they spend a month on the island, and after a month some of the crew crack. They need beef. beef. So they kill some of his cattle. And Helius is so outraged by this that he calls on Poseidon

to turn up the pain for Odysseus and his crew. And every single man dies except Odysseus. They die on a shipwreck and Odysseus is on his own floating around as a single figure. And he washes up on the island of Calypso, who because there isn't a crew, crew to reorientate and motivate Odysseus, he's a lost man on that island. He is a nobody again. That takes us to the point where the narrative begins. Year 7, Athena says, come on, let's get him off there. And he builds a raft and heads to another land.

And this is the really interesting episode. It's less fantastic, but it's the really important one. He lands on an island where a people called the Featians live. And they are perfect. They have a king and a queen who run a very Greek-like, idyllic, utopian landscape. Everything is peaceful. They have the most beautiful daughter, now Sika'a, who's ready for marriage. And she just wants to marry someone with kingly bearing.

Well, here's Odysseus turning up, who, despite his long-suffering wanderings, is a king, and he would be a perfectly suitable husband. everyone on the island is willing this to happen. It would be perfect. Odysseus rejects it. He says, even though you are more beautiful than anyone I could encounter, including my own wife. He said the same to Calypso, by the way, he wanted to marry him. I am destined to be returned and restored to my homeland.

There is no other option for me. So again, it's got a real moral weight to it, this idea that even if circumstances, be they wealth, or be they, you know, a particular change in your circumstances, seem to, on paper, give you everything you need. It's not worth the weight of anything without, if you cut your ties to the people and the places that give you your real identity, not just in the Greek world, but in the Greek world. in our world. And where does he go from there?

From there, well, so he tells his tales to the the Phoeatians, who are probably the Phoenicians in disguise, are very interesting people who introduce the alphabet to the Greeks, among other things. He tells his tales of how he's got to that point. But fundamentally, they accept his refusal of marriage. And they, the best seamen in the world, take him back to Ithaca.

And that's where the second half of the poem begins. He gets home, but the last thing he can do is head home and say, hey, guys, I'm Odysseus, I'm back. Why? Because there are 108 men whose whole identity is predicated on being the new Odysseus. The real Odysseus is dead. No one's seen him for 20 years. No one's heard of him. He must be gone. All of these men didn't go to Troy. They're either. The sons, the sons of warriors who went to Troy and therefore they've grown up without credible male role models, or perhaps worse, they're people who managed to dodge the draft and didn't head to Troy at all. They're true cowards. And so the nature of these men, and they're portrayed in a really no-nonsense

fashion, is that these are anti-men. These aren't real men. They're entitled, arrogant folk who believe that they've got status and purpose in the world when they've done nothing. They've done nothing to earn it and they've never seen true men in action. But all of them are queued up in the hope that they will somehow win the hand of Penelope and be gifted wealth and comfort. Odysseus is a decent warrior, but as someone who's been away for 20 years, he's not single-handedly going to take down 108 men. So what he does over the last half of this poem, the last 12 books, it's in 24 books in the form we have it, is strategy. as to how he can slowly bring on side old faithful friends who've never let him down. This includes his dog, Argos, and Argos is in a terrible way. He's mangy, sleeping on big pile of

dung on his last legs. But he recognizes the true Odysseus and is so overcome with joy, with dog joy, he dies. He dies in the moment. It's so Greek. He dies in the moment. He's so happy. Exactly. That's his beautiful death. But it's strategically helpful, but the last thing Odysseus would want in disguise

is a dog trotting after him who senses that something's up. So he turns to the lowest people in the social hierarchy. He turns to the swine herd, the pig herd, Yumaeus, the cow herd, Philoiteus. And eventually he brings his son in. And with the help of Athena, the four of them ultimately, slaughter everyone. Now, Odysseus was told by Tyresius, the great prophet when he went down to the underworld, not only that this needs to be done, but that it will happen. You've got to get home.

You need to kill them all. He kills 12 women, which is a more controversial part of it. He kills 12 women who've been sleeping with the suitors, has them all hanged. Then he says, that's not enough. All the families of the suitors are going to, you know, create. a longer civil war, so he goes and kills all of them. And then Athena says, okay, stop. That's it. Let's now have peace. And that is the end of the poem. Can we just want to, because we missed out one of my favorite scenes, which was with the bow. Of course. So the person I've said almost nothing

about, but is the other half of the poem who needs to be remembered when reading almost any line is Penelope. Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, the queen of Ithaca. She has no idea what has happened to Odysseus. She knows the Trojan War is over. She knows that that took 10 years. But where's the husband? Literally everyone else is either dead or they've got back.

Any figure you can name in the Iliad, one of those things has happened. They're at home and they're happy, or they're not because they're dead. Different sailors, different tradesmen pass through the palace. And they tell her tales. They lie to her in order to get gifts from her. They make up stories about Odysseus. And she's basically given up hope, but not entirely. She still has pistis.

She has faith that Odysseus lives. And so she's been trying to hold off these 108 bastards for best part of a decade by various tricks. Her main trick was said, okay, I will, one of you when I've finished this burial shroud, I'm weaving. Women in the Greek world, if they were elite women, the main thing they did domestically was weaving. And once that's finished, promise I'll marry one of you.

So she spends her day weaving, but every night she unpicks it and removes that progress and delays indefinitely. But the suitors now know this, they've learned the trick, and they're getting very heavy-handed that marriage has to happen. So Penelope, and it's very ambiguous what she's up to, says, okay, yeah, it's over. I need to marry one of you. So let's set up a contest. We're going to have 12 axe heads in a row, and there's a hole on the axe heads.

It's debated about quite what the hole looks like. And anyone who can string my former husband's bow and shoot an arrow through all 12 axe heads, they win me. they will be king and rightful ruler of Ithaca. Telemachus will have to leave, but he'll be a nobody. He won't be inheriting the kingdom. And everyone else will have to get back to their lives. So it looks as though the one thing Odysseus needs, restoration to his family is about to be lost.

Well, very cunningly, of course, this being Odysseus, he is able as a beggar. He's dressed as a beggar so as not to arouse suspicion. he's able to persuade the suitors, who don't think much of him, that he could at least have a go. None of them have been able to string the bow. They weren't strong enough. Only one guy was able to do it, and that was Telemachus.

But he's stopped by Odysseus from doing it, and everyone else gives up for the day. I'll say, we'll try again tomorrow, lads. Too strong a bow. Odysseus has a go. Instantly strings it. We're told he strings it with the same ease that someone can pluck the liar.

That's Homer, the poet, plucking the liars. He tells us that. And having strung the bow, shoot it through the axes, and then just start slaughtering everyone. So he's armed and dangerous and ready to go, and the threat disappears by virtue of complete dispatch of all 108 suitors. And let's, I love the story, and you told it beautifully. And every time I hear the story, I get utterly enraptured. And when I used to teach it to my... my kids. Didn't matter where the kids were from. They loved the story as well. It's a very happy ending. Yeah, exactly. It's revenge and that appeals to me. Now, let's focus on Homer, because he seems

to me to be quite similar to Shakespeare. He created these amazing work of literature, but nobody knows if he wrote it or if he existed or who Homer was. Was he a collection of people? Is this oral storytelling that was then written down? What do we actually know about this person? Let's talk about underwear. Nobody wants to, nobody thinks about it. Everybody just wears whatever turned up in the multi-pack and calls it a day, which is a shame because there are solutions.

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you'd get round the fire, have a few drinks, and some skilled musician would chant or sing a song in this very complicated metrical form which would tell a tale of the great figures of the past, the heroes that we've learned about since we were yea high. That is an oral tradition. Why? because the Greeks lost writing. They had the technology of writing in the second millennium BC. But the Bronze Age collapse caused them to lose that very skill. So there is a Greek dark ages in the 11th, 10th, 9th, 8th centuries. Nobody can write, so they've forgotten how to.

In the 8th century, the Finnishians reintroduce an alphabet to the Greek world and the Greeks instantly take it up. That is when these oral poems, which were told over a few hours each evening, take a written form. The name Homer appears at that time. Who was he? He probably was a person. He probably was a very successful performer, man in demand on the circuit. But crucially, he will have inherited almost all the language, almost all the phraseology, and certainly almost all of the tales that are tied to his name now. But maybe he had a way of framing and creating this really complex narrative pair of poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in a way that was so successful and so powerful that they made it into writing. Those were the ones to pause in time, to memorialize in a fixed form in writing.

I believe Homer existed. I believe he was from the Ionian part of Greece, so probably the eastern side of the Aegean, the west coast of Turkey on an island or on the mainland there. He probably lived in the 9th or 8th centuries BC. He was a single genius, but drawing on a tradition that was so old, we can't even say how old it was. It was at least 500 years old and could well be over a thousand years old. Allegedly he was blind, but there's a poet inside the the Homeric epics, who's a bard and is blind.

And that may be the reason for that. It may be an inference the wrong way round. Not blind Homer putting in a blind poet to refer to him, but someone assuming Homer was blind, but the bard he describes was blind. Could it have also been in Greek mythology when people are blind, they have vision? Exactly. Yes, that is really well put.

So two things to say there, Francis. The first is that there is an extremely intimate connection for the Greeks between vision and knowledge. The very word I know in Greek is Oida, but that literally means I have seen. You find knowledge empirically through the senses. If you've experienced something, you know it in a meaningful way. It's not an intellectually abstract thing. You experience it and know. But there's also a version of seeing beyond. And you see beyond by getting rid of the distraction of your mortal vision. And it's the blind who have the ability to see beyond. So Tyresius, whom I've already mentioned, that great prophet

who could see the future, he was blind. Ironically, Edipus, the man who unwittingly kills his father and has children with his mother, blinds himself on discovery because he thought he knew it all. He thought he saw it all and could understand the situation. He knew nothing. And it's a sign of his transcendent knowledge that he blinds himself and takes away that that distracting vision which got in the way rather than liberated him. So you are right. It fits for Homer, who begins the poem by saying Andra moyenne pusa, polytropon, etc. sing to me news, this deity sing through me of this polytropos an air, this man of many twists and turns. So, bards were thought to have a divine connection.

Divine song was meant to transmit through them. And you're right that a blindness suggested an ability to see beyond. And David, why is it that this still resonates? And the reason I asked that question is, I've literally taught the Odyssey to kids all over London. And it doesn't matter where the child comes from. It really doesn't. First generation immigrants, working class boys. kids from very affluent backgrounds, the moment you tell the story of the Odyssey, they're hooked.

Yeah. I think it works on several levels and like all great literature, it resonates with you differently at different stages in your life. No question, the entry point that excites the young are the weird and wonderful monsters of the wanderings of Odysseus. It's a fantastic series of episodes which have inspired literature ever since. But It resonates more deeply the older you get by it revealing that many things we're told in life are a sham and a distraction. There are many things trying to dull our senses and to keep us away from the things which deep down we know actually matter. And those are people and place. I fundamentally believe that you cannot orientate yourself in the world meaningfully without having an attitude

to space and time. The space you're from, the people who inhabit it, but crucially, time, past, and future. You need to have a relationship to the history that brought you here, and you need to have a stake in the future such that your actions matter beyond your own immediate benefit. And that is what the whole suffering of the Odyssey is about,

and as you rightly say, that's a universal tale. And I think what's really interesting about Nolan taking on the Odyssey, is that it's the kind of film Hollywood doesn't want to make. What I mean by that is the things I just described are against the grain of what not just Hollywood, but a huge amount of cultural activity has been doing. Attempts to downplay that instinctive value we place

on the family unit and on multi-generational responsibilities. That natural yearning for a return of some kind of kind to the place that is home for you and no other place can be home. Well, those kind of orienting and structuring devices in life are not helpful to certain political causes. And we would not struggle between the three of us to think of films which in some way have tried it to complicate or problematize those natural yearnings. And we would struggle to think of films which really valorize and celebrate those

things from the last 20 or 30 years. So I'm really pleased that Nolan has taken the Odyssey on. And my only great and sincere hope is that people in watching it will see the things that I've said are so important about it and be inspired to go beyond the film and to engage with the poem itself, which is uniquely powerful. Because one of the things that I love about Greek mythology is when it talks about heroism, It's something that we forget. You know, nowadays we all want to be celebrities. We all want to be heroes.

But what we don't want is to sacrifice something. And the nature of the hero is you have to sacrifice something. You have to give something of yourself. You do. And in the Iliadic heroic code, that giving of something will be your own life. You will give your life to serve the heroism that is demanded of you. Your duty goes beyond you. But there's also this really important Greek idea of Pathé Mathos, learning through suffering,

not just experience, but actually genuine hardship. And I think about those two Greek words all the time. That is how you grow and change and do good things in the world, genuine suffering. Now, you shouldn't will suffering upon yourself or upon anyone else, but you will not learn without hardship. So one of Odysseus' epithets is Polatlas, the man who's suffered so much, that's what fundamentally makes a new kind of hero out of Odysse, rather than the sort of straightforward swashbuckling heroics of the battlefield. So these two foundational poems of the whole Western literary tradition, the Iliad and the Odyssey,

begin with a model of heroism, which is already difficult, complex, unfair, and messy. It does not begin with a golden age when just being a hero was a jolly good lark and everyone clapped at the end of the day. It's grim. But life requires that quieter heroism of sacrifice and suffering for whatever one takes to be the higher good. Well, the more we talk to you, with you rather, and listen to you primarily, actually, about the Greek mythology and that period of time, I almost feel like, The reason that these ideas, as Francis talks about, have stayed with us and have stayed relevant, the Greeks were just a lot more honest about human nature than we are. Is that a fair comment?

Yeah. I think it's multi-layers. They were much more instinctively aware of the failings of the human condition. All of their literature is motivated by finding these flaws that are in each of us, dramatizing them, hopefully in a way which makes us people who aren't heroes, who aren't the stuff of myth, actually interrogate our own lives better. What did Socrates most famously say? Not that the only thing I know is that I know nothing. More importantly, he said the unexamined life is not worth living. It's unlivable. And what that means is if you will not interrogate the nature of your character and the flaws within it, you're not living. You are not living. You are not living. not actually being human. You're not a human being if you can't address as difficult as it may be

the awkward and difficult parts of your own human soul. And the Greeks understand that and it motivates almost everything they do artistically. Other cultures do the same, but it won't surprise you for me to share my opinion with you, which is that despite this constant narcissism of talking about the self in our modern age, we're actually acutely uninterested in interrogating our own personal and societal problems. Your podcast exists in order to have the conversations which we deem difficult to have.

Well, they weren't difficult for the Greeks. It was something that needed talking about. So let's talk about it. Let's use Logos to make progress. Now there are lots of barriers to having the kind of conversations and the same thing. sort of reflection that needs to happen in order for us to thrive as humans. Do you think part of it is also is that the Greeks fundamentally understood the tragedy of life?

Because if you look at their plays, I mean, they were fatalistic. Their outlook was fatalistic, really. You know, this is life. Your life was predetermined. There was nothing that you could do about it. Therefore, it was tragic. If you look at Oedipus Rex, for example, killed his father, married his mother, and there was nothing that he could do.

Correct. So in terms of myth and those inherited tales, tragedies baked in and there's no escape. However, from the 5th century onwards, from the dawn of ethics with Socrates and Plato, and then to the emergence of different rival philosophical schools, the Academy, Aristotle and the peripatetics, the Epicureans, the Stoics, all of these groups actually come up with different ways of responding to the challenge of being human. And they have very, very different views about whether things are fatalistic and predetermined, or where the life is what you make of it. So although I agree with you when it comes to the myths

and the great tales, actually the Greeks as a people evolve, evolve intellectually into realizing that actually, actually you have much more agency over your life than the great tales might suggest. I guess the question that I really wanted to ask deep down is, what can we actually learn from the Greek? because when you, Classics is getting studied less and less, which I consider to be a tragedy, actually. What can we actually learn? What have we forgotten? And what should we remember and

what should we incorporate in our current society? A big question. It can be our last question in the style that we always ask. What's the one thing we're not talking about? I see. Is that? I think it's that. Not only is everything in Greek culture, but everything is. in Homer. What my answer to your question would look like is the totality of the human condition. So it's not a set of insights or things we might put in a little list which we can keep in our pocket and check when we need it. It is a monumental modeling of the strengths and weaknesses of humans being together in the world. Now the Greek world is amazing because it's still connected in a linear unbroken way to modernity. Modern Greek really is the language of Homer after

3,000 years of people speaking together. And there's a continuity in Greek culture, which is, I would say, unique over the last 3,000 years in the world. So although it seems so distant and so other to engage with literature in the first millennium BC, it's actually looking deep into the genuine inheritance of the Greek people. So I think Greece is kept out far too much of our modern conversation. Greeks should be a more central player when it comes to thinking about what to do in the world. And I may add that we talked about casting in the Odyssey to begin with. Well, who wrote an open letter to Hollywood saying, why are none of us in the film? The Greeks. The Greeks don't appear at all in the casting list of Nolan's Odyssey, which for all its historic realism, to their mind, shows an acute lack of interest in Greek culture and Greek actors.

So I think that's almost a proof in a way of my sense that the Greeks are not centralized enough in some of our cultural conversations, because everything is there in their culture. David, before we head on over to Substack where you answer questions from our supporters, tell everybody again where they can find your work and of course more about Rollstone as well. Thank you. It would be a joy too. The two things I'm most invested in in life are Rolston College, R-A-L-S-T-O-N. You'll find the link below the video, which is a new college that is trying to teach the humanities properly, beginning with ancient Greek and teaching in Greek, in Greece on an island not far from where Homer may have been born. And we chart the arc of the Western tradition all the way through to modernity.

The Greeks, the Romans, medieval thought, the influence of Christianity, the Renaissance and the rediscovery of the classical, the early modern and beyond. It's fully funded for many people. We've just finished our fifth admissions round, so I'll be heading to Greece shortly with our fifth cohort. But keep an eye out in September for our next admissions round and we welcome applications from all over the world. As it stands, you've got to be based in America to some degree, but that will change very soon. And you just need to have a BA in any subject and we will train you up to be an MA student in the humanities. So that's Ralston College. Please check it out if these things interest you. And the other is a class.

The classics website I run with a small team of fellow colleagues and fighters who are motivated by the belief that the classics are there for everyone. They are meaningfully universal and no one has the right or the arrogance to stop your access to them or the license to change the past so that it looks more convenient to us in the present. We're against all of that. We give you open, clear, free access to the the ancient world in all of its complicated and fascinating ways. Antigone Journal, type it in, head over there,

and please enjoy the 500, 600 articles we've got there. And if you'd like to write for us, please just pitch and we can pay you. It's a good project, and I'm very proud to have spent the last five years working on that. David, what a pleasure has been to have you back. I'm sure we'll have plenty more of these conversations in the future.

I hope we do anyway. Head on over to triggerpod.com.com. UK where David's going to answer your questions. An era I'm interested in is how Greek philosophy and Christianity were combined to be the foundation of Western society. Could you provide some examples of what Christianity took from the Greeks to turn it into what it is today?