Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit What Happens in The Odyssey? About this episode Dan narrates his own epic retelling of the Odyssey - following Odysseus' route around the Mediterranean. He tells the story of the many trials and tribulations the Greek hero faces on his 10-year journey home to his kingdom of Ithaca. From the Trojan War in Turkey to Cyclops' cave, to the clutches of Circe on her island near Sicily (we think), Dan travels to some of the real-world locations that could have inspired Homer and tries to make sense of what happens on the voyage.
Written by Dan Snow, produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore
You can watch Dan's adventures in Greece in his Odyssey documentary on the History Hit TV platform. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.
We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6
Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcast
You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] .
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript 12,309 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dan Snow? Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com/subscribe or sign up in your podcast player.
0:32 Speaker 01 This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favourite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.
1:15 Speaker 01 Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.
1:27 Dan Snow? It is the original story. It's foundational. It is essential. A man goes on an adventure. He goes on a voyage. Many different things happen to him. Terrible things, deadly things, romantic, beautiful, fantastic, lucky. He experiences the lowest of the lows. He is inches from death. And it all ends with a showdown, an epic climax, followed by love, wealth, family and hope. It is every story that has come before and every story that has come since.
2:13 Dan Snow? And that is the story I'm going to be telling today, folks. As I look to the east, rosy-fingered dawn has done her work. The sky is the colour of roses, it's early in the day, a full day at sea awaits. The rig is taut, my provisions are packed.
2:30 Dan Snow? Ahead of me, as I look to the south, I can see the wooded slopes of Ithaca. Friends, we are following in the wake of Odysseus, through the Mediterranean.
2:43 Dan Snow? In this Odyssey season, we're going to be exploring the actual history behind the myth, and what could have been the true inspiration for the trials and tribulations that Odysseus faces on his voyage? And what is it about this story that keeps us coming back, time and time again?
2:57 Dan Snow? In this episode, I am on my sun-sailed vessel, cleaving through the water, and I am going to tell the story of the Odyssey. So take your places on the benches, grip an oar, push off, and smite the wine-dark waters. You're listening to Down to Snow's History, and together, we are making for Ithaca.
3:44 Dan Snow? The Odyssey is a sequel. It's an account of the ten years that follow the conclusion of the Trojan War, the massive Greek expedition to Asia Minor to subdue the proud city of Troy, and bring home Spartan queen Helen, who had eloped, or been tricked into, leaving her husband and moving to Troy with her boyfriend. It's a story divided up into 24 sections, or books. And Homer starts the story not with Odysseus, but by talking about the chaos on the island of Ithaca, home of the hero, Odysseus. We learn in this first section that Odysseus is missing in action, presumed lost at sea.
4:26 Dan Snow? He's been away and accounted for for nearly 10 years. His wife, Queen Penelope, is holding out hope. His teenage son, Telemachus, is sad and angry in a very teenage way. He misses the father he never knew, and he's also being belittled, he's being threatened, he's being mocked by a horde of men in his own palace, a horde of suitors. They want to marry his mum, and they probably want to steal his kingdom and treasure. It's not until around 20% of the way into the story that we finally meet our hero, the sacchar of cities, the wily, Odysseus.
5:08 Dan Snow? When we first glimpse Odysseus, he's trapped on an island, specifically Calypso's island. He's been there for seven years, and he's suffering terribly, folks. This is the very sad part of the story. He's held against his will. He is forced to live on this tropical island, making love to a beautiful goddess that isn't his wife. It's a terrible ordeal. It's only from that point onwards that we really hear about the journey, the adventure that he's been on. Now, for the purposes of this telling, for this episode, I'm going to go straight to the start of Odysseus's journey, I'm going to tell that chronologically from the beginning, without jumping around like Homer does. The focus in this episode is going to be on that epic voyage home, and what happens when he gets home.
5:51 Dan Snow? There'll be other episodes in this series that can look at all the bigger themes of the Odyssey. Is there any basis in historical fact here? Might something like this have happened? But also, what it tells us about ancient Greek fatherhood, kinship, all that sort of thing. But for now, let's just revel in the story. And that story starts in Troy at the end of the war.
6:15 Dan Snow? My journey starts here. It is a beautiful spring day. I'm on a raised hill, a raised piece of ground. There's lots of beautiful wildflowers swirling in the wind all around me. Got poppies as far as the eye can see. It's a riot of red. I'm at one of the great hinge points of history. This is where Europe meets Asia. Because I'm here on the Asian coast of Turkey, and I'm looking out and I can see Europe. To the north, there's a tiny little ribbon of water. It's the Dardan Elves. It's such a narrow stretch of water. That's the only passage between the Mediterranean and the world's oceans and the Black Sea. It's one of the most important strategic choke points in the world, one of the most important waterways in the world.
6:59 Dan Snow? And for that reason, this part of the world has always mattered. That's why Byzantium was here, Constantinople, Istanbul. And that's why we think Troy was here as well. And it's the ruins of Troy that brought me here today. It was the city of Troy that brought Odysseus and the Greeks here thousands of years ago. I'm looking down at what, according to Homer, would have been the field of battle for a decade, for 10 years. All the terrible sights and sounds of conflict. Men dropping their guts in rough trenches. Corpses, filth, carrying for birds of prey and breeding grounds for pestilence. In those fields down there, men watch their mates coughing blood.
7:42 Dan Snow? They cradle them in their dying moments. Their intestines loosed by Trojan bronze. Down there, the Greeks would have wept beside funeral pyres, wondering what madness had brought them to these ringing plains of windy Troy. Now, if I turn around and face the other way, I wrench my eyes away from the view, and I'm looking at the ruins of Troy, largely uncovered in the... 1870s by the eccentric and treasure-seeking archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. He's the man who excavated here, he excavated at Mycenae in Greece as well. He was determined, he was driven by the urge to find hard evidence for the myth of the Trojan War.
8:24 Dan Snow? And as a result, his excavation was sloppy and destructive. And partly because of that, the ruins of Troy can be quite hard to decipher today. There's no obvious structures that stand proud, no temples like you get elsewhere in the ancient world. But it's not entirely his fault, it's also because there was constant activity here for thousands of years. There was building work here 4,000 years ago, and it continued as an important settlement right the way through the Roman period. So archaeologists of roughly nine different eras of Troy, nine different Trois, if you like, each one would be destroyed by fire, or earthquakes, or abandoned, or sacked by an enemy, and then people would go and build on top of those ruins.
9:06 Dan Snow? And so you've got elements of all nine of those Trois, spread across two millennia. The Trois that we think now are interesting, because they roughly speaking fit the dates of the Odyssey and the Iliad, are Trois VI and VII. There's evidence of magnificent walls. In fact, I'm looking at some of these walls now, huge big blocks of stone. Even today, they stretch six or seven metres above the ground, but they would have reached more than that, nine, 10 metres. There are big square watchtowers you can see the foundations of. And there would have been palatial buildings on the top of this hill. Recent discoveries suggest there was a much wider settlement that flowed down the slopes of this hill and out into the plain below, of which perhaps only 2% has been excavated today.
9:50 Dan Snow? So you're talking about a very serious site, late Bronze Age, so 1700-ish BCE to 1200-ish BCE. Now archaeologists and historians are attached to that, because that roughly corresponds to the flourishing of a place called Mycenae in the Greek world, which in the Trojan War myth is the king of Mycenae was Agamemnon, the overall commander of the Greek force. So we can say that this was a big, important, rich settlement, taking advantage of all the passing trade of its key position in the world. And we can also say that in just after 1200 BCE... This site was destroyed. There is destruction evidence, there is evidence for burning.
10:30 Dan Snow? So perhaps it was destroyed by a foreign enemy, perhaps they were Mycenaeans, perhaps they were Greeks, and perhaps there were people called Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus in that Greek force. But now sadly we're entering the realms of absolute speculation. But this is a podcast all about that myth, so let's just keep speculating. It was here that we are told, that the Greeks and the Trojans were locked in stalemate for a decade. But eventually all wars come to an end, and the Greeks owed victory to one of their number. A man celebrated for his cleverness, his deceptions, his lies, his trickiness.
11:13 Dan Snow? Don't get me wrong, he was godlike in battle. He could take his place beside Ajax, even the demigod Achilles. But he was also smart. He had brains as well as brawn. His name was Odysseus, and he was the king of the island of Ithaca. The horse was his idea. You know the story. The Greeks built a massive horse made of wood. The Trojans were famous horsemen, so the Greeks left it outside their gates. It was an offering, it was an apology, a reparation, a parting gift. Well certainly it looked
11:54 Dan Snow? as if the Greeks had left. The lookouts on the battlements saw no ships. Their oar-powered vessels had been hauled off the beach. They'd gone. Their camp, once a city of tents and people, was now just a sea of junk. Detritus, abandonment. The Trojans had a debate. There was a prophetess, Cassandra. She was shrieking dire warnings about what would happen if the horse was dragged inside the gates into the city. The warnings were dismissed as hysteria. In came the horse. The Trojans dragged it in and
12:36 Dan Snow? then partied with the last of their carefully hoarded wine, their bread, and their meat.
12:42 Dan Snow? They celebrated the end of the war. And they were almost right. The war was nearly finished. In the dead of night, a hatch opened in the horse's belly, and out climbed the elite of the Greek army. Godlike Odysseus, daring Neoptolemus, son of Achilles with a point to prove, Thrasamides, son of wise old King Nester and others. They tipped over comatose revelers, overpowered the sleepy gate guard, lifted the mighty beam that held those towering gates in place, and threw them open.
13:24 Dan Snow? Those lofty gates, barred for a decade, now wide open, and in, like a torrent, rushed the rest of the Greek army, which had hidden itself round the corner and had snuck back under cover of darkness. The ensuing slaughter can be imagined. Men butchered, blood ran in torrents, drenching the earth. Women and children screaming. Shackled, marched off to the boats. A lifetime of enslavement ahead. Troy burned. The Greeks bickered over the spoils of war, of course. They sailed home in their contingents. There was no Greece after all.
14:08 Dan Snow? A quarrelsome galaxy of stateless with them, shared language, religion and culture, and interest in other people's treasure and women. There were Spartans, Myrmidons, Cretans, Ithacans, and now they all went on their way, their hulls groaning with booty. The voyage home had begun.
14:32 Dan Snow? The Odyssey is a story about bad weather. There are no pastures in The Odyssey where Odysseus lies under a shady canopy complaining about the heat. This is not the Greek yachting holiday that you might have in your mind's eye. There are storms. And frankly, from the description of sailing and weather and shivering nights under woolen blankets, I would tell you, if I had to take a guess, that this story was actually set in the Isles of Scilly or Orkney. It's a reminder, I suppose, the Mediterranean can be a lot more violent in its weather than us vacationers give it credit for.
15:12 Dan Snow? We get our first storm right off the bat. It's the first of many storms that Odysseus will experience. The gods were angry at the Greeks for their astonishing, rapacious violence. Friends, it takes a lot for the Greek gods, who love war seemingly, to say, no, that is too much, too much, you crossed the line. But the Greeks managed it. Trojan temples have been despoiled, priestesses are brutalised, and the gods were angry. And so, as the fleet sailed across the Aegean, heading home, they were smashed by a storm. Some of these Greeks were blown so far off course, they went and settled in Libya. Or even the Balyarics, Ibiza enters the chat at this point.
15:54 Dan Snow? Others, like Ajax, the mighty Ajax, were killed. Their corpses food for fishes. Odysseus, for his part, is only blown to Thrace, not very far away, it's in northern Greece. He takes the opportunity there to sack another city. As he put it in his own words, "I sacked the town and killed the men. We took their wives and shared their riches equally among us." And at this point, probably worth mentioning, that a close reading of the Odyssey, I have to say, makes it a little tricky for a modern audience to really root for Odysseus. But, you know, different times, I guess. I had a fascinating chat on that subject with the classist Emily Hauser, and she gave me a really valuable insight. The word hero in English is unambiguous.
16:35 Dan Snow? It's a character we root for, and that most time we admire, we approve of, we maybe want to be like. In Greek, it's something much more nuanced. A hero in one of these epic tales is someone who is so ambitious to be remembered, someone who is so thirsty for fame and immortality, that it leads them to go on these great journeys and adventures, but it also leads them eventually to utter ruin. And not just their own ruin, but of their community, of their family. They're a gigantic character, they're hungry for honour and fame. The audience are fascinated by them, they're drawn to them, they're kind of impressed by them perhaps, but one whose ambition will eventually burn everything down. And there's definitely a whiff of Napoleon here.
17:20 Dan Snow? Millions might die as they try and sate their appetite for glory. It's not a great parallel, but I wonder if a useful, modern approximation is Tony Soprano. We can't look away. We're almost impressed by so many elements of his character and his deeds. But we know that it all ends in death and ruination for everyone he's close to. We're drawn to him, but it's not a matter of straightforwardly admiring, sympathising or rooting for. And that's why Odysseus, the hero, is not always sympathetic in the Odyssey. He often makes mistakes, and most of those mistakes come from his overweening ambition.
18:04 Dan Snow? And on this occasion, we get an example of that. In Thrace, he overreached himself. He later blames his men, obviously, but responsibility was his. While the Ithacans were enjoying their stolen wine and other men's wives, the Thracians counter-attacked. They came like leaves and blossoms in the spring at dawn. Odysseus and his men were driven back to their ships. Bronze swords flashed. Odysseus had to make a fighting retreat. They dragged their ships off the beach. Casualties were high. They managed to escape, but they sailed with heavy hearts, lamenting their fallen comrades. And those fallen soldiers would not be the last.
18:52 Dan Snow? Well, the weather's nice and clear now. No storms about. In fact, it's so calm that we've had to turn the engine on. Unlike Odysseus, we're lucky enough to be able to push our boat through the water when there's no wind with an engine. We don't have to row. I've got time to look around me now, and what you realise first of all is it's just a multitude of islands here in the Ionian. But I think I can probably see about a dozen. I've got Lefkas, mighty Lefkas, to my starboard side as we're heading down here. Ahead, I can just about see here. I've got lots of little, tiny, small ones. One or two private islands, I'm told, as we head down here. And Greece, it's famous the world over. People love coming for holidays, vacations. But actually, these islands have shaped the Greek character, the Greek story.
19:36 Dan Snow? Greece is Greece because of its particular geography. These islands, the wiggly coastlines, the headlands, the bays, there's lots of little coves, places to stop, little sheltered spots. There's harbors and caves all over the place. The geology of this area, the plate tectonics, the seismic activity ensured that the Greek world had huge advantages. For example, deposits of copper were forced up to near the surface in Cyprus, which is an essential raw material in the Bronze Age. You can't have a Bronze Age without copper. But there are also a thousand places to hide your ship from gales, sudden squalls, or even enemy ships. There are just so many little harbors you could put in, pull your ship up on the beach,
20:20 Dan Snow? trade, communicate with the local inhabitants, exchange and spread your language, your culture, your ideas. And this geography of these islands and headlands and a rocky mountainous interior, let's not forget, all of that meant that a diverse collection of statelets popped up. They were ever shifting. Sometimes one island would hold sway over a neighbour, other times it might be the other way around. There were pirates, there were kings all over this scattered landscape, and often they were one and the same person. Each island that I'm looking at might have its own government, to a certain extent its own rules, society, character, idiosyncrasies. And the odyssey, our hero bounces from island to island, and he never quite knows who he's going to fight. And that idea brings us to his first unreal experience.
21:06 Dan Snow? Odysseus has been flung across the waves by a savage gale, which ripped his sails, heeled his ships right over, and he arrived at an island, a lush island, where the population were addicts.
21:27 Dan Snow? Well, I've come ashore, just climbing up the thickly wooded slopes of one of these islands now, and it really is one of the great pleasures of this part of the world, and that's exploring each new island you land on. There are so many of them, just like Odysseus. He would have sailed on the coast, he'd have found an anchorage. We hear in the Odyssey that they would drop heavy stones as anchors with ropes, lines tied to them, and then they would swim ashore, wade ashore, they would then tie rope to trees and rocks on the shore, so they're anchoring themselves in the water and tying themselves to land, so securing themselves really well. They'd drag their ships right
22:08 Dan Snow? up on the beach. These ships had flat bottoms, they were designed to be hulled up on the shore and left there, and the crews would typically camp on the beach beside the hulls. On this particular occasion, Odysseus sent men inshore to have a recce, to look for supplies of fresh game meat, meet any locals, find freshwater springs, and those men instead found the lotus eaters. These were people who were addicted to a special, sweet, delicious fruit. Odysseus tells us that once they ate it, they lost the will to come back, they had forgotten home. In the end, Odysseus had to go and find them, and he dragged them back to the boats, he tied them up below the deck, and he ordered his men to get back
22:53 Dan Snow? on their benches and smite the grey waters with their oars. This is an interesting story because this is the first brush with the supernatural, and in the Odyssey, it would be the first of many.
23:07 Dan Snow? Next, Odysseus pulls up at another island, this one home to the cyclops, the one-eyed giant. Now, we have obviously no idea where this is. Euripides, the ancient Greek playwright, he locates the land of the cyclops on the Isle of Sicily. He thinks it's near Mount Etna. Now, Virgil, the Roman epic poet, he has the cyclops also living on Sicily, also near Mount Etna. Now, who am I to disagree with Euripides and Virgil? Let's say that Odysseus's next voyage is up here to north-east Sicily in the shadow of Etna.
23:55 Dan Snow? It's far famous. There are caves all over this landscape. They've been sacred sites, they've been storehouses and now many of them tourist attractions. The hillside here is absolutely dotted with them. So it feels like the right place to get back to our epic story. Because Odysseus's next trial would take place in a cave. It is one of the most famous set pieces of the Odyssey, of that epic tale. One that interestingly shows Odysseus at his most foolish, but also his cleverest, his most wily. It's from this story I think we get that reputation that he was a trickster, cunning, a brilliant man.
24:38 Dan Snow? A man capable of planning a subterfuge like the Trojan horse. But this particular episode is hugely important. Because it is one that determines his and his men's fate.
25:02 Dan Snow? He pulled his ships up onto the beach in a good natural harbour. It was an island cloaked in fog. And after sleeping on that beach, he explored inland. He was pleased to see there were lots of goats here for the cooking skewers. They ate well, the meat washed down with strong wine. And the next day, he pushed further inland, having good explore. He and 12 of his favourite men found a cave in which somebody lived, was well appointed. But everything was on a massive scale. It was obviously a home, but it was a home to a giant. There were crates weighed down with cheese, there were pens full of lambs, there were well crafted bowls for milking.
25:46 Dan Snow? His men urged him to steal as much they could and then get out of there, hurry back. But Odysseus refused, he wanted to stay, he wanted to meet the giant. Odysseus later admits in his words that leaving would have been the better choice. He brought no joy to my companions. And that, friends, is an understatement. At dinnertime, the giant came back, brought in his flock of sheep, and rolled a huge rock over the entrance to the cave. Then he built a fire and he did some chores. And it was only then that he noticed the band of Ithacans skulking in a corner. After a brief exchange, in which oddly Odysseus asks for a gift,
26:28 Dan Snow? this giant with one eye, this cyclops, grabbed two men and then, in Odysseus's words, knocked them hard against the ground like puppies, so that the floor was wet with brains. Then he devoured them like a mountain lion. Odysseus wanted to kill the giant, but he realised that he wouldn't be able to shift the entrance stone. His surviving men would just eventually die beside the corpse of the cyclops which they'd killed. So he'd have to think of a plan. And it would have to be quick, because in the morning, the cyclops gobbled another two men and left with his flocks for the day. Odysseus had worked out a way to escape.
27:11 Dan Snow? As the cyclops came back that evening and ate another two men, Odysseus approached him and offered him the strong wine that he and his men were carrying with them. The cyclops loved it. He was unused to wine. He was more a goat-smelt kind of guy. Odysseus tells the cyclops in a slightly friendly chat that his name was No Man. The cyclops then fell into a drunken stupor. We hear that he vomited out the wine with chunks of human flesh in it. At that point, Odysseus leaps into action. He'd spent the entire day whittling a huge log into a sharp-pointed spear. His men now shouldered that weapon and heated the tip in the fire.
27:53 Dan Snow? Then, they rammed it with all their strength into the eye of the cyclops. They plunged it in and twisted as a man drills wood for shipbuilding. Cyclops's blood poured out. The sound was like the shriek of a red-hot axe head when a blacksmith drops it into ice-cold water. So did his eyeball crackle on the spear, Odysseus later says. Horribly then he howled. Neighbouring cyclopses came running and asked if he was okay. He roared that no man was killing him. So they told him to shut up and get a grip. In the morning, the wounded cyclops rolled back the rock to let his flocks out.
28:37 Dan Snow? They still had to go out and graze. He couldn't keep them locked in the cave for the rest of their lives. But to make sure Odysseus couldn't escape, he put his massive arm across the entrance and carefully felt the sheep before letting them out one by one. Odysseus ordered his men to cling to the undersides of the sheep, lashing themselves to the lustrous, thick, curly fleeces. The cyclops checked each one of them, but only by brushing his hand over their backs and sides. He didn't think to check underneath. And Odysseus and his men escaped. They herded the beasts aboard their ship. They pulled their oars through whitening waters. They rowed for their lives.
29:22 Dan Snow? And then Odysseus does something inexplicably stupid. Odysseus, giddy with the excitement of the escape, roared abuse at the cyclops. The giant bellowed back and hurled boulders in a blind rage. They almost hit the ship. The crew begged their leaders to shut the hell up. Stop taunting this wild man. Again, the crew were right. Instead, Odysseus decided to shout that he was Odysseus of Ithaca. He wanted the cyclops to know who had done this to him. And the cyclops raised his arms into the heavens and bellowed,
30:05 Dan Snow? "Listen, earth shaker, blue-haired Lord Poseidon. Acknowledge me, your son, and be my father. Grant that Odysseus the city Saka will never go back home. Or if it is fated that he will see his family, then let him get there late and with no honour, in pain and lacking ships, then having caused the death of all his men, and let him find more trouble in his own house." Well, that sent ice through the soul of every man aboard. The cyclops turned out unfortunately to be the son of the sea god Poseidon. Surely they were now cursed men.
30:51 Dan Snow? They sailed on, no doubt looking at the sea around them uneasily, mourning the ever-mounting casualty list, terrified by the cyclops' incantations. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. Don't go anywhere, there's more to come. This episode is brought to you by Decagon. If you've ever been trapped in phone-tree hell, pushing zero fifty times while a voice robot pretends not to hear you, you know true psychological warfare. It's brutal, folks. Thankfully, that kind of horror is now confined to the history books. Customer service has evolved. Decagon helps companies create personalised,
31:32 Dan Snow? concierge-style customer experiences with AI agents across chat, email, voice, and SMS. They're available 24/7, feel natural to talk to, and can resolve customer requests on their own, so businesses can keep up with requests without losing their personal touch. Plus, because workflows can be updated using natural language, teams can make changes themselves. Decagon gives your team full visibility into why agents make decisions and what's happening across every conversation, helping to power millions of conversations every day. Ready to transform your customer support? Go to decagon.ai/dansnow to see what Decagon can
32:10 Dan Snow? do for your team. That's decagon.ai/dansnow. Check Decagon out at decagon.ai/dansnow.
32:22 Dan Snow? This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery. A detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what will baffle historians about us: mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.
33:05 Speaker 01 This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound? Means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.
33:48 Speaker 01 Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.
33:57 Speaker 02 Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, host of Echoes of History, the podcast that plunges you into the ranks of the Knights Templar across ancient Egypt and behind the barricades of history's great revolutions to explore the worlds recreated in Assassin's Creed. In our new series, Chasing Shadows, we're in feudal Japan alongside samurai warlords and shinobi spies. Whether you're gearing up for Assassin's Creed: Shadows or captivated by Japan's rich history, this podcast, brought to you by Ubisoft and History Hit, is a must-listen. Chasing Shadows is out now on the Echoes of History podcast.
34:43 Dan Snow? At first, it all went reasonably well. They arrive at another mythical island called Aeolus, a floating island where the inhabitants feast and live at ease. The king gave Odysseus a leather bag tied with silver wire. In it was wind, gusty winds. Because this king was steward of the winds, appointed by Zeus, king of the gods. So Odysseus now sets sail and for nine days and nights, they had the perfect breeze because all the contrary winds were locked up in the leather bag. Ithaca appeared on the horizon. They'd made it, they were almost home. But at that point, Odysseus, who'd been steering constantly, not trusting anybody else, was overcome with exhaustion.
35:26 Dan Snow? And fell asleep. His men grumbled that Odysseus was hoarding all the precious mysterious treasure that had been given to him by the king of Aelius. They snuck into the stern. They undid the bag to look inside and instantly all the winds rushed out at once. They were flung in the opposite direction. The blasts of storm winds pushed them all the way back to Aelius. Odysseus walked up to the palace, hoping for more feasting and perhaps another bag of wind, but no. The king was sure now that Odysseus was hated by the gods. He sent him away. Odysseus says that they were dispirited and they grew worn out with the agony of rowing because their folly had deprived them of fair winds. They apparently rode for
36:09 Dan Snow? a week before coming to Lystragonia. Here they met more giants. As a tall agent, I have to say, I resent the implications made in the Odyssey that height is usually an indicator of extreme barbarity. But sure enough, these were pretty barbarous dudes. The people of Lystragonia ate his men. They rushed to cliff tops and rained down rocks on his fleet. Ships splintered into flotsam. Men in the water were speared like fish. Odysseus cut through the cables of his ship with his sword and roared at his men to row. They pulled for their lives and just reached the open sea. Once out of range, they took stock. They were alone. They were the only crew to survive.
36:53 Dan Snow? Now, I find it very strange that this is the moment when Odysseus loses his entire fleet. This is one of the greatest disasters of this disaster strewn story. And yet the Lystragonians, they don't really get their fair share when it comes to art and stories and culture. This is the forgotten catastrophe of the Odyssey. And I have a little feeling that might be put right in the forthcoming movie. Let's see. After all their losses at Troy, the vast majority of the Thetians are wiped out here. Their flesh devoured by these giants or by the fish in the abyss to which the ships were sent by the barrage of rocks. Off the survivors sailed. The lonely ship reached
37:37 Dan Snow? another island. This one Aya. They lay on the beach exhausted, their hearts consumed with grief. It was only on the third day that they went inland and explored. A recce party apparently wept as they pushed through the trees. They were so sure they'd meet some deadly enemy like those they'd only narrowly escaped from thus far. Instead though, they found a beautiful house, surrounded by drugged animals, wolves and lions just lolling about. And from inside this house, they heard singing. It was Circe, who we're told was a beautiful, dreadful goddess. The men approached. She welcomed them. She gave them food and wine. One man alone remained cautious.
38:22 Dan Snow? Once bitten, twice shy, as they say. He hid himself. And he was the witness of the monstrous scene that unfolded. Circe tapped the men, one by one, with a wand as they gorged at this banquet. And they were transformed into pigs. They squealed in terror as they were herded into a pen. The witness, the only survivor, sprinted back to the ship. Through his tears, he recounted what he'd seen. He begged Odysseus not to go inland to rescue his men, to cast off the mooring lines, haul the ship back into the deeper water, for the men to take their places on the rowing benches, and they could make their escape. Instead, Odysseus, determined to go back for his crewmen. No man would be left behind.
39:07 Dan Snow? He strapped his silver-studded sword across his back and went. But thankfully, he was stopped in his tracks by a god at this point, the boyish messenger god Hermes, who tipped him off and gave him the antidote to Circe's magic, a white flower with a black root. Thank goodness for that. He arrived at Circe's house and he was invited in. She sat him down in a lovely chair, pushed a footstool beneath his feet, mixed him a drink in a gold cup, into which she slipped her drug. After he took a deep draught of this drink, she tapped him with her wand and ordered him to the pigsty. Odysseus drew his sword and stood over her, ready to strike. How do you like that? She begged him to stay his hand. There's a great quote here.
39:50 Dan Snow? "Now sheathe your sword and come to bed with me. Through making love, we may begin to trust each other more." Words to live by. Odysseus shows more self-control than most men, I suspect, would have done at this point. When confronted with such an invitation from a beautiful goddess with braided hair, he made her promise first to turn his men back into, well, men, and not do any more harm to them. And with those formalities over, Odysseus tells us, "I went up to the dazzling bed of Circe." And it must have been dazzling, because they stayed in this enchanted place for a year. Every day, they feasted on meat and sweet, strong wine. The later literary
40:32 Dan Snow? traditions tell us that Circe actually gave birth to children by Odysseus, but there's no mention of that in the Odyssey itself. Eventually, his men came to him and said, "Sir, it's time to go." And Odysseus says, "My warrior soul agreed." Circe reluctantly let him go, but she did tell him what he needed to do next, and it was daunting. He had to go to the underworld. Yes, the place where the dead go, to the house of the god Hades, to ask the spirit of the prophet Tyresias for guidance on how to get home, and how to lift Poseidon's curse. He did as instructed, blown by a convenient magical wind to the shores of the underworld. He disembarked, he made his offerings, he
41:16 Dan Snow? called upon the dead. It was an ordeal. Ghosts of the dead crowded around, affected by the warm, fresh sheep's blood that he poured onto the ground. They came like moths to a flame. He saw many of his former comrades. Agamemnon, lord of men, slaughtered by his wife and her lover the moment he arrived home. Achilles, greatest of the Greek heroes. Patroclus, Achilles' dearest friend. Ajax, second only in looks and strength to Achilles himself. He also saw Minos, Heracles, Sisyphus, Tansilas, Orion the hunter. It was a who's who of Greek mythology. He was heartbroken then to see his mother's spirit. She had
41:59 Dan Snow? died while he was away at the war. Three times you tried to hug her, three times her wraith vanished in his arms. He did get to talk to Tyresias, though. The prophet told him to steer clear of the island on which the sun god Helios grazed his precious cattle.
42:21 Dan Snow? Just avoid the whole place. If he do go there, do not on any account kill and eat any of those animals. If he restrained his crew, if they avoided the sweet meat of Helios, then they may well make it home. If not, his ship and his crew would be destroyed. Simple as that. If he was lucky enough to survive, he would still be much delayed in going home and face all kinds of challenges when he did in fact get there. His only way of living into a comfortable age, any way of dealing with Poseidon's curse, would be to go on another epic journey. He had to heft an oar on his shoulder and walk inland as far as
43:03 Dan Snow? he could go until he reached a place where the people knew nothing of the sea or ships. So, once they said, "What on earth is that on your shoulder?", he would know he'd got far enough. And once there, he should plant the oar in the ground, sacrifice a bull to Poseidon, and then, finally, a prosperous, a peaceful old age would be his. So, essentially, Tyrese is saying, "You've got to undertake some missionary work on behalf of Poseidon." And with that, quite the night for Odysseus came to an end. On they sailed. Circe had warned him of perils that lay in his course. The first was the sirens, with their shriveled
43:47 Dan Snow? skin. These were monsters that used their sweet voices to bewitch sailors. Entranced, they forgot all desire to reach wife, children, home, and instead they tried to go ashore where the sirens would devour them. Warned by Circe, Odysseus used wax to block all his men's ears. But curious about their sweet songs, he had himself tied to the mast, with the strictest of instructions to his men not to untie him no matter how hard he begged, wriggled, or pleaded. The men, there is blocked up, rode past the island, no problem. The sirens broke into their honeyed song. They called out Odysseus by name. They tempted
44:29 Dan Snow? him ashore. Now, interestingly, they tempted him ashore not with some of the later tellings, because they were all so beautiful and lovely, but because they sang a heroic song about Odysseus. That thing which all men desire more than anything, to listen to their own praises. He bellowed to be let free, he wriggled, he struggled, he strained, but thankfully, his men ignored him. On they went, out of the range of the sirens, but not out of trouble. Ahead were an arrows, a tiny stretch of water no wider than a bow-shot, which contained not one but two monsters. Odysseus marched the length of the deck, exhorting his men.
45:10 Dan Snow? They had to row hard, to avoid being sucked down by Charybdis, a monster who sucked black sea-water down and then belched it out three times daily. As luck would have it, Charybdis did indeed take a great big slurp of water down. At exactly that moment, there was a dreadful gurgling noise, and as she expelled it all, the water spouted up, churning like a boiling cauldron on a huge fire. The men hauled on their oars in terror, keeping to the other side, when from above them, another monster, Scylla, burst out of her cave, stretching her six long necks down, each with a gruesome head, jaws lined with three rows of teeth.
45:53 Dan Snow? She snatched up six men from the crew. They screamed as they were taken aloft, reaching out to Odysseus in their death throes. It was, he later said, "The most heart-rending sight I saw in all the time I suffered on the sea."
46:14 Dan Snow? The next island they came across was, surprise, surprise, the island on which grazed the sun-god's cattle. Odysseus begged his men to bypass it, but his second-in-command said that, "You may be strong, you never seem to tire, you must be made of iron, but we men have had no rest and no sleep." So Odysseus gave in. Ashore they went, but he made the men swear a most binding oath, a mighty oath, we're told, that they would not kill or eat any cows or sheep they found on that island. And they happily swore the oath. That night, the winds got up. They were trapped, they couldn't leave the island. A storm blew in and lasted for one month.
46:59 Dan Snow? They ate all of their supplies. They tried to catch fish and birds. Hunger gnawed at their bellies. It was desperate. On one particular day, Odysseus left the group and went off to pray for guidance, and he fell asleep. He awoke with the smell of roasting flesh in his nostrils. The men had got together and decided that death at sea at the hands of the gods was preferable to a slow, miserable death from starvation. Odysseus ran back to the beach and watched as they ate the cattle of the sun god. He was careful not to touch a morsel himself. The wind died the very next day. Suspicious. They set out.
47:44 Dan Snow? The punishment of the gods was swift and decisive. I'll quote the next bit of the Odyssey at length, because it's one of my favourite and I think most important bits. "When they'd left the island, we could see no other, only the sky and the sea. Zeus made a mass of dark-blue storm-cloud hang above our ship. The sea grew dark beneath it. For a moment the ship moved on, but then came zephyr, which is a kind of wind, shrieking, noisily rushing with torrential tempest. A mighty gust of wind broke off both forestays. The tacking was all scattered in the hold. The mast was broken backwards and it struck the pilot in the stern. It smashed his skull. His bones were crushed, his skeleton smashed.
48:28 Dan Snow? He fell down like a diver from the deck. His spirit left his body. At that instant Zeus thundered and hurled bolts to strike the ship, shaking it, filled with sulphur. All the men fell overboard, and they were swept away like seagulls on the waves beside the ship. The gods prevented them from reaching home."
48:49 Dan Snow? Only Odysseus lived to tell the tale. He managed to cling to some wreckage and drifted for ten days, until he was washed up ashore on another island. And on this new island was what he would later describe as the dreadful, beautiful, divine Calypso. To be fair to Odysseus, he didn't have much choice. He had no way of sailing across the ocean, leaving that island behind. And so there he stayed. Calypso loved and cared for him. He was forced to have sex with her, living in this succulent island prison, wanting for nothing, apart from his freedom and home. Now, some people criticize Odysseus here.
49:34 Dan Snow? They say he stayed here for seven years because he liked making love to a divine woman. But Homer reminds us he had no choice. He wept on the shore. He dreamed of wife and home. He's the victim here, folks. Let's have some sympathy. The years went by. Odysseus is trapped in this terrible place. At home in Ithaca, meanwhile, his wife assumes fears that he'd been lost at sea. His son Telemachus grows into adolescence, not remembering the father who'd left reluctantly to go to Troy when he was but a baby. Bachelors from around Ithaca and nearby islands have gathered to press their case with the widowed queen. These suitors, dozens of them,
50:17 Dan Snow? arrived to claim the most eligible widow in the Ionian Islands. They feasted by day, abusing the traditions of hospitality, drinking the house dry. They ordered servants around, assaulted slave girls, rendered Queen Penelope a virtual prisoner in her own palace. And their presence was an obvious threat to her son Telemachus's inheritance and his life. Odysseus had been told of this by various people in the underworld, so he knew what was going on. And he knew what his absence meant for his wife, his son, his possessions, his kingdom. He longed for home. And in the end, Odysseus caught some luck because he did still have allies in high places, the highest of places.
51:01 Dan Snow? Athena, she of the shining breastplate, horsehair-plumed helmet, she with her bronze-tipped spear, as happy skewering enemies on the battlefield as she was outwitting them with her enormous wisdom. She, the goddess Athena, persuaded her father Zeus, king of the gods, the Thunderlord, to release Odysseus and let him continue his journey. Zeus was willing. He liked Odysseus. He was more, and I quote, sensible than other humans. You also get the sense here that Zeus tends to take the pass of least resistance, agreeing with the last powerful woman in his life who's given him instructions. Hermes, the messenger, was sent to tell Calypso to release Odysseus. So down went the handsome youthful god.
51:46 Dan Snow? Calypso was distraught, but she did not dare to defy Zeus. She brought Odysseus some tools. She led him to some stout trees, and she helped him fashion a raft. After one last night together in the cave, Odysseus set off with wine and food and a gentle wind in his makeshift sail. He stayed by the stars at night, and after seventeen days, he reached the island of the Phaeacians. But Poseidon, who'd been distracted doing something else, suddenly realised that Odysseus had got away and spotted him clinging to his little raft. Furious, he thrust his trident into the ocean and stirred. A nightmarish squall smashed Odysseus, wind blowing from all directions. He barely survived.
52:30 Dan Snow? Saved by divine intervention, you'll be surprised to learn. He manages to get ashore. He's washed up, naked, freezing. His entire expeditionary force is now dead. He's got no money, no booty, no clothes, no ship, nothing at all. He covers himself in leaves for warmth. He's terrified of the dangers that lurk for him on this new shore. But instead of giants, witches, and monsters, he hears the laughter of girls. The daughter of the king of Phaeacia is throwing a ball with her entourage on the beach, possibly the first recorded ballgame in history. Odysseus talks his way out of a pretty challenging situation and ends up in the palace being wined and dined by her father.
53:11 Dan Snow? Eventually, he tells everyone who he is, and he tells his story. The court are spellbound. The king instantly orders that a ship be readied, heaped with treasure, and Odysseus is sent aboard. The final voyage to Ithaca is strangely uneventful. Odysseus is fast asleep when they arrive, and they leave him in a cove, a mound of goodies, treasure beside him, more wealth in fact than he'd accumulated from the sack of Troy. These generous Phaeacians then sail off home, but there's no happy ending for them. That's so often with people who Odysseus reaches out and touches, they come to sticky ends.
53:50 Dan Snow? Poseidon turns the ship and its crew into a rock in punishment as they neared their home port. So as usual, Odysseus is fine, the supporting cast gets absolutely rinsed.
54:09 Dan Snow? Oh, I tell you what, I am absolutely freezing. I've just swam ashore on the coast of Ithaca. It seemed like a sort of romantic, Byronic idea when we were planning this podcast a few months ago, but I'm regretting it now. I'm just going to get my sandals on because the rocks here are so spiky and sharp, and my little feet can't cope, and I'm going to head inland to explore Ithaca and try and find a towel and warm up.
54:36 Dan Snow? Well, the good thing about these islands is that if you are a bit chilly when you get out of the water, you you warm up pretty quick because they rise so steeply out of the waters of the Ionian that you get a good a good sweat on climbing up the hills. I'm climbing up the sides of Ithaca now. This is that famous island, one of the most famous islands in the world because of Homer and the Odyssey. We do need to clear something up. There is a heated debate, which is for the real geeks like me, is is modern Ithaca the Ithaca that's described in the Odyssey? And that really gets us into the discussion about what elements of the Odyssey, if any, are sort of rooted in history, in geography?
55:20 Dan Snow? Was there a king of Ithaca called Odysseus? Now, big health warning at this point. It hasn't been clear until now, or let me say categorically, this is a story in which a man consorts with gods. Survives a run-in with a one-eyed giant, a six-headed monster. He gets to look after a bag of wind. He goes into the underworld to chat with his dead mum and his former besties. This, friends, is not a true story. However, clearly, a real culture, real places, people, stories, landscapes inspired this epic. And it is possible that the modern island of Ithaca is among those places.
56:00 Dan Snow? It is also possible that Homer had never been to Ithaca. It was just a romantic, far-flung island on the very edge of the Greek world. And the poets who wrote the Odyssey, Homer, whatever you want to call them, they just thought Ithaca had a nice ring to it. We do not know. It is also possible, everyone, now we're getting into it, that Ithaca is not actually Ithaca. Ithaca was another island. It's even possible that Ithaca was a peninsula of nearby Cephalonia that actually was formerly an island and is now not because of various seismic and other activities. But anyway, we don't have to get into that, folks. I'm on an island called Ithaca, and this is where I'm going to tell the rest of the story of the Odyssey. What is interesting is there is evidence of Bronze Age Greek, we call it Mycenaean period,
56:44 Dan Snow? building activity here on Ithaca. And I'm heading up to a site now. There's a set of archaeological remains here on this lofty hillside, which do date from the right kind of period in which the Odyssey, we think, was set. It has been called the Palace of Odysseus, not just by modern tourists and local entrepreneurs, and not even just by sort of romantic Victorians. It's been called the Palace of Odysseus for a very, very long time indeed. There is evidence at this site that I'm going to, that there was an Odysseus cult here way back in ancient times. So, we associate with Odysseus, but so did the Romans, so did the Hellenistic Greeks. They came here to commune with the spirit of Odysseus, to connect
57:29 Dan Snow? with one of the great stories. So, look, maybe, maybe, just maybe, this was a royal palace, maybe there was a king called Odysseus. But for the purpose of this podcast, telling the story of the Odyssey, it doesn't really matter, because this is where I'm going to go to talk about where our complicated, our much-turned-hither-and-thither hero finally ends up.
58:00 Speaker 01 Yet to come. Stick with us.
58:07 Speaker 01 This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.
58:49 Speaker 01 Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.
58:58 Speaker 02 Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, host of Echoes of History, the podcast that plunges you into the ranks of the Knights Templar across ancient Egypt and behind the barricades of history's great revolutions to explore the worlds recreated in Assassin's Creed. In our new series, Chasing Shadows, we're in feudal Japan alongside samurai warlords and shinobi spies. Whether you're gearing up for Assassin's Creed: Shadows or captivated by Japan's rich history, this podcast, brought to you by Ubisoft and History Hit, is a must-listen. Chasing Shadows is out now on the Echoes of History podcast.
59:46 Dan Snow? The strange thing about the Odyssey, well, actually, one of the very many strange things, is Odysseus' behaviour when he reaches Ithaca. He doesn't just march straight into his palace and shout, "I'm home." First things first, he hides the treasure he was given by the unfortunate Phaeacians. All that bronze, all the precious stuff. He and Athena, who is on hand, they stash it in a cave. Then he knows he has to play it very cautious. Now, I think this gives us an insight into power and authority in Homer's Greece. He's been away for 20 years. So lots of his key allies and supporters, they're going to be dead or enfeebled. A young generation will have grown up owing him nothing but the most superficial loyalty. He has lost the entire expeditionary force with which he sent sail.
1:00:30 Dan Snow? 20 years before, the firstborn sons of Ithaca, many of the elite, the pride of their parents, well, they disappeared over the horizon with Odysseus, and not one of them had come back. Not one. Their bones are whitening on the dusty plains of Anatolia, or being nibbled by sea creatures, or lining the edge of Scylla's cave, or, you know, you get the point. It is a military and demographic catastrophe of the highest order. He's the only survivor, and embarrassingly, he also has a mountain of treasure. He has to assume that his welcome might be a little bit frosty. Young bucks are eyeing his wife, his wealth, his crown. He cannot rely on a posse of old loyal comrades to re-establish his rule.
1:01:12 Dan Snow? I think we can assume that power in Homer's Greece ebbed and flowed. Loyalty was transactional. Leadership was asserted, not gifted. So Odysseus and Athena decide that what they need to do first is conduct a thorough reiki. She turned him into an old man, and he went for a stroll. First, he called in on an old slave, his pig man, his swineherd, who he thought he could rely on. And sure enough, old Eumaeus, as he was called, welcomed Odysseus in. The king was, remember, disguised as an old man. He's an old beggar, he's got rags on his back. But Eumaeus fed him and sheltered him in his humble abode and told him of the goings-on in the palace. Odysseus' wife was being pressured by suitors to pick one of them. She was resisting, and while that stalemate went on, the suitors were helping themselves
1:01:57 Dan Snow? to Odysseus' food and wine. Odysseus decided he'd take a closer look. He went to the palace itself. Outside it, on a dung heap, knackered, neglected, ancient, was a flea-bitten dog.
1:02:10 Dan Snow? As Odysseus approached, it roused itself. Its ears went back, and with a yelp it recognised its old master, who had cradled it as a puppy twenty years earlier and then disappeared. It's a very touching moment. The old dog staggered to its feet and then dropped dead. Sorrowful, Odysseus goes inside. Now, old beggar man that he was, he's abused by the cockshaw young suitors in their fancy clothes. Food was thrown at him. Homer gives us a glimpse into what a palace feast was like. The housegirls brought baskets of bread and heaped it up beside them, and houseboys filled their wine bowls up with drink. They reached to take the good things set before them.
1:02:52 Dan Snow? Once they were satisfied with food and drink, the suitors turned their minds to other things: singing and dancing, glories of the feast. A slave brought out a well-tuned lyre and gave it to Themys, the man the suitors forced to sing for them. Food, wine, song and dance. At the fringes of the room were beggars, and Odysseus has to fight another beggar for table scraps. You'll be shocked to hear that the other guy took an absolute pasting. Odysseus had a look at things. He takes the lyre of the land, then he returns to the swineherd's hovel, where he reveals himself to his son Telemachus. Athena briefly conveniently changes him back into his actual form, and he and father and son cling to each other weeping.
1:03:36 Dan Snow? But they also plan. He tells his son, "The key thing is to take all the ornamental weapons off the wall, ostensibly for cleaning." Athena does the rest. She places an idea inside Penelope's head. Then she turns Odysseus back into an old beggar, and he and his son Telemachus go to the palace. They witness the queen announcing to the assembled suitors that she will indeed marry one of them. Odysseus must be dead by now, but to choose which one, they must prove themselves. Inspired by Athena, she sets them a challenge. She wants them to match her former husband's skill and strength. "His mighty, massive bow was fetched from a storeroom,
1:04:18 Dan Snow? arrows brought, and twelve battle axes placed one behind the other in a perfect line. In each was a hole, and she demanded that the suitors bend the bow, attach the bowstring, fit an arrow, draw it back, and shoot that arrow through all of the axes."
1:04:35 Dan Snow? The suitors can't believe their luck. They squabble as to who will go first. But one after the other, they try and they fail. They can't even string the bow. That is, they can't bend it enough for them to fix the bowstring into the notches at either end. None of them certainly can get an arrow off. They turned nasty. They accused her of setting an impossible challenge. But then, an old, frail voice calls out from the back of the room. The beggar demanded his turn. There was laughter and scorn. That skinny old bag of bones. Telemachus, though, called out that he should indeed be allowed. There was silence as Odysseus stepped forward.
1:05:17 Dan Snow? He caressed the bow with the grip of an expert, checking for weakness, reconnecting with his precious weapon. In a liquid move, he wraps it round a leg and heaves back the other tip, slipping the bowstring over it. He plucked the string, which sang like swallow song. So far, so good. The suitors, horrified, grew pale. Zeus, from his lofty perch, unleashed a peal of thunder. Odysseus, emboldened by that sign from the son of Cronos, lord of the gods, picked an arrow. He notched it. The fletching next to the string, the wooden shaft resting on the bow.
1:06:01 Dan Snow? Left leg forward, right back, shoulders square but relaxed, head turned, looking straight over his left shoulder. He breathed in and in one movement brought up the bow, right arm back, bicep swollen, left arm thrusting the centre of the bow forward, tricep like steel. With this push and pull, he now stood, bow bent into a shallow U, bronze arrow tip resting on the fingers of his left hand, white with gripping the bow. One eye closed, a pause, a breath out, steady as a statue. An old beggar with the strength and poise of a demigod. The room spellbound. And then, the fingers on his right hand released the string.
1:06:44 Dan Snow? The arrow hurtled straight and true. Through the ax as it went, thudding. Into a solid beam. Roar. Shouts of protest, confusion, chaos. Odysseus had his moment. His enemies were confounded. He ripped off his rags. He stood naked, muscles like knotted wood, scars of battle and hunting like tattoos across his body. The embodiment of a hero. He bellowed, "Playtime is over." He whipped another arrow up to his cheek and trained the bow, this time on a man, the leader of the suitors, Antinous, just taking another swig from a golden goblet. He saw the flash of bronze streaking for his throat, felt the impact, and the last
1:07:29 Dan Snow? thing his brain registered was the torrent of hot blood that erupted from his neck. The gold cup clattered to the floor. His twitching feet lashed out and kicked the table over, bread and meat splashing into a pool of blood. It began. The suitors scrambled to defend themselves. They clawed at the walls for weapons but found they'd been taken down. They ripped at the doors to escape and found them bolted. In the uproar, Telemachus took his place, shoulder to shoulder with his father, sword at his side, spear in his hand, bronze weapons flashing. The suitors still didn't understand. They thought perhaps this beggar accidentally killed Antinous. They screamed at Odysseus that the vultures would feed on his corpse.
1:08:13 Dan Snow? And Odysseus roared back, "Dogs! So you thought I would not come back home from Troy? And so you fleeced my house while I am still alive? You thought no man would ever come back to take revenge? Now you are trapped inside the snares of death." Now they knew. Now they understood. Their blood ran cold in their veins. They saw death in that naked bowman. Some desperately yelled that they were sorry. "It was all Antinous. It was his fault. Have mercy, we'll pay you back for the food and wine. We didn't mean any disrespect." Odysseus laughed and told them to fight or die. Their knees buckled. Their hearts stopped.
1:08:58 Dan Snow? The braver ones tried to make a fight of it. One of them tried to take the lead, upturn the tables, use them as shields, use your knives, swords if you have them at your sides. Odysseus sent an arrow smashing into his chest, which sent more food smashing to the ground. Darkness drenched his eyes. The fight back effort decapitated before it even started. Odysseus shot until the arrows were spent. Then he put on the horsehair plumed helmet that his son fetched for him, gripped a bronze tipped spear in both hands and went to work. Odysseus the city-sacker, Odysseus the manslaughterer. The suitors lay in piles, like fish hauled up in a net from the deep, gasping in the hot sun as the air steals their lives.
1:09:42 Dan Snow? Odysseus was smeared in blood like a lion that's gorged on an ox. A dreadful sight, chest and jowls red, panting. He looked upon his work, the suitors were dead to a man.
1:09:59 Dan Snow? I'm just sitting on a boulder looking at these old, time-worn stones. Here, at Odysseus's so-called palace, in Ithaca. And, folks, you'll forgive me for getting a little bit carried away, a little bit romantic here. It is intoxicating to imagine something like that actually happening here. A version of it. Imagine if these, some of these stones witnessed that terrible slaughter that day. After the battle in the palace, Odysseus ordered the bodies of the men he'd slaughtered to be cleared out. He sort of takes control very vigorously. The king is back in his palace at this point.
1:10:44 Dan Snow? He orders that the floors be scrubbed, the walls cleaned, and the air fumigated. He also orders, and this is the bit that doesn't often appear in the retellings of the Odyssey. He's very clear, he orders the slave girls, members of his household, who had slept with the suitors, who seemed to have sided with the suitors. He ordered them to be taken outside and executed in cold blood. And after all that was done... He sent for Penelope. She was brought downstairs. And she was disbelieving. She couldn't really understand where all those clamorous, insistent suitors had gone. The palace suddenly seemed very, very quiet. And she also couldn't believe that this beggar,
1:11:28 Dan Snow? who'd been knocking about the palace for the last few days, now had been transformed into a younger, more handsome, a god-like man. Because I should say Athena, rather usefully, transformed Odysseus, literally back into his old self. He was tall, strong. We hear that his hair was as thick and curly as hyacinth.
1:11:50 Dan Snow? So, well done Athena. But he was a wise woman, and she was nervous at this point that it was in fact a god in disguise, which was a pick-up trick they often used to try and convince mortal women to make love to them. And so she tested Odysseus, and she ordered that her bed be brought down from her room and placed at this man's disposal. And this just exploded. He was furious. He said, "You can't move our marriage bed." He had carved it out of a tree trunk and branches. All those years before. It was locked into the fabric of the house. It was then that Penelope could relax. This was her husband. He was back. Only he could know that intimate detail of their lives.
1:12:34 Dan Snow? And she threw herself into his arms. Odysseus was home.
1:12:43 Dan Snow? There's a more complicated ending than most retellings suggest. The families of the dead suitors are understandably outraged. Dozens of the foremost families on the island are now without sons and fathers. Odysseus's final act in the Odyssey is to fight a little civil war against these furious, grieving people. Odysseus, his father and son, line up, shield overlapping shield, and with Athena's help, fight a sharp skirmish against their own people. But an even greater elephant in the room is that Odysseus has to explain to Penelope that his journeying is not yet done. There is no rest and retirement for Odysseus. First, and I love this detail, he explains that he has to go raiding to replace all the livestock gobbled up by the suitors during the long courtship of Penelope. Secondly,
1:13:28 Dan Snow? don't forget, he has to placate Poseidon on a strange mission to make amends for blinding Poseidon's son. Odysseus must travel inland carrying that oar until he meets someone who knows nothing of the sea, and then plant the oar in the ground and make the sacrifice the bull to earn his peace. So the Odyssey ends with Odysseus not at rest. He cannot rest. For Odysseus and men like him, there is no end.
1:14:01 Dan Snow? There is, however, an end to this podcast, and this is it right now. That has been my explainer of what happens in the Odyssey. Thank you very much for listening. I want to say a huge thank you to the brilliant classicist Emily Wilson. She did the most recent translation of the Odyssey, and that is the Odyssey that I've been quoting a lot throughout this podcast. In our next episode, we're going to be delving deeper into the poem itself, what Homer was trying to tell us, what's it reveal about ancient Greek life and power and fantasy myth anxieties, and we're going to try and unravel the mysteries around its author, because spoiler alert, Homer may not have been a real person. He or she may have been many people. I'll be joined by two of the greatest classicists of our time, Professor Edith Hall and the legendary Professor Dame Mary Beard.
1:14:46 Speaker 03 It is looking both at the central issues of how human beings think about themselves, but it's also, and this I think is just as important, it's looking at central issues about how you tell the story about what it is to be a human being. And it's always complicated. The best stories are complicated.
1:15:07 Dan Snow? Make sure you hit follow in your podcast player so you won't miss those two national treasures talking about all the great works of Western literature. What's Not to Like? It'll be out next Monday. And if you want to watch the documentary I made whilst on the track following the wake of Odysseus, walking in his footsteps, and you need to check out our TV documentary, just click on the link in the show notes, sign up to our History Hit TV channel. You don't want to miss that. Thank you as ever for listening. See you next time.
1:15:56 Speaker 01 This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless Goldflake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.
1:16:39 Speaker 01 Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.
1:16:47 Dan Snow? Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
Previous The Birth of America Explained Next A Day in the Life of a Gladiator Page updated October 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
