Odyssey | Cyclops, Circe and Calypso

What if the world’s most famous homecoming was really a nightmare of monsters, gods, and one very stubborn king trying to get back to Ithaca? In our new series Tristan Hughes and classicist Dr. Emily Hauser dive into Homer’s Odyssey, an epic of shipwrecks, sorcery, giants and divine meddling, where Odysseus is never quite sure whether the next shore will save him or destroy him. They trace his journey from the ruins of Troy to Calypso’s island, the Phaeacians, Circe, the Cyclops, and even the Underworld, asking what kind of hero Odysseus really is, and why his story has lasted for more than 2,500 years. Ahead of the release of Christopher Nolan's new epic film, get across the story and all the key characters and plot lines, including rich historical context. MORE The Iliad Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-iliad/id1520403988?i=1000699639733 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/0coOZoqYFWf4lvEldmGqBn?si=fcde2192543b4913 Homer Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/homer/id1520403988?i=1000562402765 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/41Uayy5vU4udgt08Z0TVuv?si=cd6aac63b1d44ebb We're going on *TOUR* to Australia and New Zealand! - grab your tickets here https://fane.com.au/whats-on/an-evening-with-tristan-hughes/. The Ancients is now on YouTube! Watch here: @TheAncientsPodcast https://www.youtube.com/@TheAncientsPodcast Presented by Tristan Hughes. Edited by Natasha Hughes. The producer is Joseph Knight. Video producer is McKenna Fernandez. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week PLUS early access ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe. Ten years after the fall of Troy, a king is still missing. His name is Odysseus, war hero, liar, survivor, and the man at the heart of one of the most influential stories ever told.

• 0:44Tristan Hughes?

  Now, Homer's Odyssey is an epic poem over two and a half thousand years old, charting a heart pounding journey filled with storm tossed ships, with shape shifting monsters, witchcraft, and a hero forever at the mercy of the gods winds. I'm your host, Tristan Hughes, and today we're getting to know Homer and his leading man, Odysseus, king of Ithaca. Guiding us through these treacherous waters is the classicist and storyteller Emily Howser. We'll meet our cunning king, explore how Homer shapes him on the page, and follow him from the ruins of Troy through perilous seas and fateful encounters as he attempts to reach home.

• 1:24Tristan Hughes?

  This is a Bronze Age world of warlord kings and an interconnected Mediterranean, a strawberry of survival and shipwreck. Odysseus rides the waves between glory and disaster, never quite sure whether the next shore will save him or destroy him. Welcome to The Ancients.

• 1:54Tristan Hughes?

  Emily, it is great to have you on the show.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. It's a joy to be here.

• 1:58Tristan Hughes?

  And this is the first time, the first time ever, that we are recording an episode in our brand new Ancient studio. You are our first guest here with a lovely bookshelf.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  I've been admiring it. I have to say, I really love it. I feel like I've just kind of slotted straight in at home.

• 2:13Tristan Hughes?

  Well, exactly. And this is the first of many. It's a new, new era for Ancients. And What a topic to kick it all off.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've got to start with the Odyssey.

• 2:24Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, first off, to summarise and to get people invested straight away. What is the Odyssey? Who is Odysseus? And why should we care about it today alongside the fact that we have this epic movie just around the corner all about it?

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, three short questions.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  But yeah, absolutely. So what is the Odyssey? Well, it's an epic poem. And what we mean by that is it's a long verse poem. It's written in hexameter. That's a particular type of meter that pertains to epic. So it's, these are kind of all the like definitions that will tell us something about the genre. And that's what it's kind of made up of, as it were. And then what it's doing is it's telling the story of Odysseus, its central hero, and it's telling the tale of his voyage home. So we've got a long epic poem, it's being kind of sung probably in oral poetry, and it's telling the tale of a hero.

• 3:18Tristan Hughes?

  And why it matters today after, you know, 2000 years, more than 2000, 2500, 2007, maybe even 3000 years since it was first composed, and it still has so much meaning today?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's easy to sort of say, well, I've given you a definition that makes it sound like it's a kind of rather antiquated type of poem. And it's about one hero, like, why should we care about this? I think there are a couple of different ways really of going into it. The first is that it's just a jolly good story. It really is just an amazing kind of story of adventure, of kind of heartbreak, loss and longing, kind of one man's discovery of himself and his journey home. But also perhaps more deeply than that, it's a story that has been taken for millennia to kind of mean something to people. And people have read it in different ways, they've responded to it. So yes, Christopher Nolan is responding to it. But at the same time, he is kind of the end of just many different people who have had this poem as part of their lives.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  And for me, that's a really good reason to keep reading it.

• 4:16Tristan Hughes?

  And the person who we always go back to with the story of the Odyssey, who's seen almost as this, this author figure, but I appreciate it's much more complicated than that. Who is this figure of Homer?

• 4:28Speaker 01

  We had to get into the Homer question.

• 4:29Tristan Hughes?

  Sorry, it's a difficult question.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  No, no, it has to be done. So I mentioned right at the beginning that we are looking at song poetry here. So you might be thinking, well, what does that mean? We're, when we're talking about the Odyssey, you've got a translation of the Odyssey over there.

• 4:44Tristan Hughes?

  I've got one right here.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Oh, you've got one right next to you. Exactly. And that's a text that's written. So what happened there? Well, initially, these were song poems that would have been what we call composed in performance. So you would have had bard's experts in this kind of poetry who would have been singing and piecing together these poems every single time they sang for an audience. Now, those got passed down over hundreds of years. And eventually, somewhere probably between the 8th and the 6th centuries BCE, those poems were written down. And that became what we now call at least an early version of the Odyssey. Now, in the ancient world, that was ascribed to the poet Homer. So they thought that Homer was the poet of this particular version of the Odyssey. I think what we're seeing now

• 5:28Speaker 01

  is that actually it's a lot more complicated than that. And we're seeing a poem that is the end product of centuries and centuries of what we call transmission. So that's handing down over the years between different bards. And instead of just talking about one Homer, we're probably going to talk about a lot of Homers, a lot of bards, a lot of different poets who were contributing to this epic.

• 5:48Tristan Hughes?

  But this is what I find so interesting, this idea that for hundreds of years before this figure of Homer, or you know, maybe figures and so on and so forth, wrote down what we have as the Iliad and the Odyssey today, that you can go back into what we consider that the Late Bronze Age centuries before, which actually might be the origin point for when these stories were told. And then thinking just how different those stories could well have been back then.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  It's so exciting. And I actually love this because you think of archaeology and you think of archaeology like it's digging up stones in the ground. But actually, you can do an archaeology of these poems as well. And that's really amazing. So you can think about, okay, well, yes, what we've got is looking at kind of that 8th to 6th centuries BCE. But behind them, standing behind them, there are centuries of oral tradition that yes, as you say, go back to the Late Bronze Age. So one of my favourite sort of clues. Sort of almost fingerprints that we can find within the poems of the fact that they do look back to a late Bronze Age world. And by the way, when I say late Bronze Age, I'm talking about kind of the period from about seventeen hundred to twelve hundred BCE. But those kinds of origins, we can see a fingerprint in the poems because there are

• 6:55Speaker 01

  some words that the poet uses that actually aren't words that they would have been using at the time when they were written down. So one great one is the example of what Agamemnon gets called, right? So Agamemnon, Lord of Men, King of Mycenae, exactly, Mycenae rich in gold. And he gets called in the Homeric poems, Anaxandron. That means Lord of Men. But that word Anax would initially have actually been pronounced Wanax. And that comes up in the writing, the Linear B tablets of the late Bronze Age. And that's a word that they were not using at the time that these poems were written down. So it's almost like a sort of like archaeological fragment that's been left behind in the poem.

• 7:33Tristan Hughes?

  Did you know that the ancient world's greatest monster killer? Well, he was also a man who left death and destruction all around him wherever he went. From the snake-filled crib at Thebes to the impossible labours that took him across the ancient Greek world, Heracles, or Hercules, if you prefer the Roman version. Well, he's one of the most extraordinary figures in myth, a hero whose life was as thrilling as it was brutal. I'm Tristan Hughes and I'm thrilled to be bringing Heracles's story to Australia this August on the Ancients Live Tour. I am going to be joined by the brilliant Alistair Blanchard, Professor of Classics and Ancient History. And together, we're going to dig into the

• 8:15Tristan Hughes?

  myths, the geography and the archaeology behind the labours. From the Nemean Lion and the Hydra, to Troy and the tragic end of Greece's greatest hero. Now, tickets are on sale. We are coming to Sydney on the third, Brisbane on the fourth, Perth on the sixth, and finishing in Melbourne on the ninth of August. It's going to be epic. Tickets are selling fast, so book yours now so you don't miss out at fein.com.au. I cannot wait to see you there. This style of literature from over two and a half thousand years ago, you know, this epic, these epic poems focused on these large-than-life kind of warrior figures, these heroes. Why was this?

• 9:00Tristan Hughes?

  This hero literature, these hero stories, why were they so popular in ancient Greece?

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Well, it's not just a question of popularity, because what we're looking at here are epics that are, in some sense, preserving the memory of the past. So if you think about what's happening over the kind of hundreds of years that these oral stories are being handed down, at that point, after the end of the Late Bronze Age, around 1200 BCE, we get a massive civilization collapse of that Late Bronze Age.

• 9:28Tristan Hughes?

  The Bronze Age collapse.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  The Bronze Age collapse, exactly. And writing disappears. So all you have left at that point are the songs that tell the glory stories of the days that have gone and the men that went before you, the generations of kings, to understand who you are. So for the Greeks, this was very much a project of understanding themselves and their history. And there's one little anecdote that I really love, which is that apparently the Greeks believed that if all of the Greeks who'd been returning from the Trojan War had died on their way home, then they actually, as a civilization, would have become extinct. So it's really like a founding event for them. So yes, you're thinking about heroes, but this isn't quite the same as kind of thinking about the Marvel superheroes, because

• 10:11Speaker 01

  these are heroes who help you to understand who you are in the world. They're also heroes you're probably going to be worshipping through hero cult. So you're really interacting with and engaging with these heroes.

• 10:22Tristan Hughes?

  But are they also, are figures like Odysseus, are they people that the Greeks, the people listening to these stories, they would think, I want to try and be like them? Are they try, like, like our idea of a hero today is someone like you look up to, but at the same time, like, I quite like to be like them almost?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  I think a hero is actually quite different for the ancient Greeks.

• 10:40Tristan Hughes?

  Interesting.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's really interesting to kind of plum that difference. So the word is the same. So the ancient Greek word for hero is heros. It's where we get hero from. But there are kind of two things I think we can pull out from that. One is that a hero really means someone who is between the time when the gods walked the earth and the time when it was just a kind of impoverished time of mortals battling each other out. So the heroes are demigods. They're sort of, you know, think Of Achilles, who's the son of Thetis, a goddess, or Helen, who was the daughter of Zeus. We've got these sort of larger than life figures, and that is what a hero is. They're from an earlier time period that stretch back to the gods. But the other thing I mentioned is hero cult.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  So they are also people who, when they die, you are going to go and worship to ask them to maybe kind of intercede with you or to kind of give you a little bit of a kind of closer stepping point into the gods. So I'm not sure that you're ever thinking you're going to be like them. They are from a time that has gone, but they can help you and they're people that you can call on.

• 11:41Tristan Hughes?

  And they're not faultless at the same time, as we're going to explore. There are lots of, there are lots of people who suffer ruin at the hands of heroes like this figure of Odysseus around them.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, indeed. So that's the other thing is that heroes, and that's not really kind of implicit in the word. That's what we see from their action. Heroes are people who are actually deeply destructive to their communities. And I feel like this is something that we kind of as modern readers, when we see the word hero, we don't think about. But if you think about someone like Odysseus, when he gets home at the end of the Odyssey, he ends up killing pretty much everyone who is in his palace, all of the men certainly. If you think of someone like Achilles, who starts off the Iliad, he begins the Iliad by deciding to retreat from the war in order that his fellow Greeks get killed, so he gets glory. In fact, Achilles' name, there's one kind of version of the etymology of his name that actually means grief to the people.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  So a hero is like deeply destructive.

• 12:37Tristan Hughes?

  So the period in which this is all set, in the last episode, we explored kind of the Bronze Age world in which the Trojan War is set and getting more understanding kind of the kernels of truth behind these stories. And so we think of it as the late Bronze Age world, but the ancient Greeks, like, as you're saying, this age of heroes, when there was still contact between gods and men. But this is a time when we should be imagining Greece as not one country divided up between states, palaces, kings as well, but at the same time.

• 13:07Tristan Hughes?

  The world in which it's part of, it's interconnected with other great powers. That's the late Bronze Age world we should be thinking of with stories like the Odyssey and Odysseus.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So if we're thinking about looking at late Bronze Age history, and obviously, kind of, we've got to make the qualification here that we're not seeing kind of any easy continuity between, okay, like, well, the Odyssey is definitely depicting the late Bronze Age. What we're saying instead is that probably the late Bronze Age is one layer in a historical memory that is kind of making up the Odyssey. But yes, what we're looking at when we're looking at the Bronze Age, or indeed periods of history later, is that we are not seeing a kind of unified country that is called Greece, that call themselves Greeks. Instead, you've got what we call city-states, where you've got a kind of citadel, a kind of sitting at the heart of a larger kind of element of land.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  And the kind of famous ones in the late Bronze Age are, and this, we have this from kind of archaeology, from the evidence of the different citadels, we've got Mycenae, which is a big one on the Peloponnese, we've got Pelos on the southwest Peloponnese, we've got Tiryns. So we've got these kinds of locations. And what's really interesting is that many of those actually match up with the places that are come, some of the core locations in Homer.

• 14:21Tristan Hughes?

  And Odysseus, he is from this place called Ithaca. Now, where are we talking with Ithaca?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  So Ithaca is so difficult because, you know, I mentioned that we've got these lovely matchups like Mycenae, which is an incredibly wealthy citadel. It's got lots and lots of gold in the archaeology. What does Homer say? He says it's a wealthy citadel, rich in gold. So it's very easy to make kind of easy connections there. With somewhere like Ithaca, it reminds us, I think, to be a lot more careful. And the reason I say that, you might be thinking, well, hang on a minute, there is an island called Ithaca. Why is this not a problem? There is a modern island, Ithaki. The problem that we have with that is that in Homer, Homer actually gives a really detailed description of Odysseus's island of Ithaca. He says that it lies low down to the sea. It is a group of four islands, the Ionian Islands,

• 15:12Speaker 01

  and that of those group of islands, it's furthest to the west. And the issue is that modern Ithaki is none of those. So we've got only three islands. Ithaki is very mountainous and it's not the furthest to the west. So in terms of kind of where we're putting Odysseus, it throws a bit of a spanner in the works.

• 15:28Tristan Hughes?

  But we won't delve much into the archaeology, but do we get a sense at all that this island of Ithaca, wherever it was, somewhere in those western islands, a prominent player at the time that the Odyssey is set? Or is this very much an outlying power?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  It's more of an outlying power, I would say, because we get a couple of different sort of signs towards that. One is in fact what Odysseus and also his son Telemachus say about their island, and they talk about it as being like quite rocky, not very fertile, only good for goats, that kind of thing. So that's their own testimony. It's not like somewhere where Mycenae has this epithet, an adjective, which calls it rich in gold. We're not getting that. The other thing is in terms of the number of ships that it sends to Troy, and we're seeing Agamemnon, the kind of wealthy overlord of the Greeks, he is sending a lot of ships. Odysseus is not kind of matching the same. So we're not looking at one of the principal powers in Homer's world.

• 16:27Tristan Hughes?

  Let's introduce Odysseus now, his character, before we explore his story in the Odyssey, because there's a lot of information about him before the events of the epic, you know, his namesake epic. Shall we start with his origins first of all, and his background? Do we know much about that?

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Well, we do. We know about his parents. So for instance, we know his father is called Laertes, because we meet him in the Odyssey. He's at the end, he's sort of cracking up a little bit because his son is taking a while to get back home. We know about his mum, Anticlae, who also has issues with grief because her son doesn't come home, and we meet her in the Odyssey in the underworld. So we've got a bit of his backstory there. We know that he grew up on Ithaca, and in fact, we even know the name of his enslaved nurse, Euriclae, because she is the one who, we're told, brought him up. She has an important role to play, which we'll find out later. And we also know that he got into quite a serious hunting accident when he was a boy, in that he was out hunting a boar, and he

• 17:24Speaker 01

  had a run in with the boar, and he got a massive scar down his leg, which obviously is quite handy if you're trying to identify a hero who's been travelling for 20 years and comes back home. But that's kind of quite a significant part of his youth. We then get to kind of... The fact of, you know, into the Trojan War, he is sort of one of the suitors for Helen. So, you know, this is the first time.

• 17:45Tristan Hughes?

  For Helen of Sparta.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Helen of Sparta, exactly. We're starting Helen of Sparta. So Helen of Sparta, most beautiful woman in the world. We've mentioned she's, she's the daughter of Zeus. And she essentially kind of goes on the marriage market, or at least her father puts her on. And makes a stipulation that there is going to be a kind of contest for her hand. So all of the suitors flock to Helen. And in fact, it's Odysseus who has the idea that Helen should be the one to choose her own suitor.

• 18:13Tristan Hughes?

  Does he expect, does he expect that she's going to choose him?

• 18:17Speaker 01

  He doesn't. He expects that he's going to get a reward from Helen's father. So this is Odysseus through and through. He's very canny, canny operator, exactly. And so he knows that he, if he suggests this very clever solution, he's going to get a reward. And his reward is the hand of Penelope, who is Helen's cousin.

• 18:33Tristan Hughes?

  So that's another key figure in the story, Penelope, his wife.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 18:37Tristan Hughes?

  And so how do we get to Odysseus then being involved in the Trojan War? What are the key events that we should think of primarily with Odysseus when it gets to that time when Helen of Sparta becomes Helen of Troy?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Well, exactly. And that's at the point, right, where Paris has come to Sparta, Paris, the prince of Troy. He has, you know, basically been given Helen as his prize by Aphrodite, the goddess of love. And Odysseus then kind of is, as all of the Greeks are, in a bit of a pickle because Menelaus, Helen's husband, who has been wronged, whose wife has been stolen from him by this, this Trojan prince, goes to Agamemnon, lord of all of the Greeks, Agamemnon, his brother. And he says, I need to get my wife back. And Agamemnon immediately says he's going to round up all of the Greeks. Well, Odysseus quite clearly doesn't want to go. And this is quite interesting because many of the other Greeks are sort of quite happy to, to get on with the business,

• 19:30Speaker 01

  get themselves a little bit of glory, but not Odysseus. And what he does is he pretends to be mad. So he pretends that he can sort of try and get away out of the, the conscription essentially. But this kind of trickster called Palamedes, who is every bit as tricky as Odysseus, realizes that. He might be kind of pulling one over his eyes. And so he takes his baby, his baby son at that point, Telemachus, Penelope and Odysseus's son. And he puts the baby son in front of the plough, where Odysseus is pretending that he's kind of gone crazy.

• 20:01Tristan Hughes?

  He's plowing sand, isn't he, or something like that?

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. He's this kind of loony farmer. And Palamedes puts the baby in front of the plough. And of course, Odysseus steers his plough around the baby. And so Palamedes has proven that Odysseus is not mad and he can go to Troy.

• 20:17Tristan Hughes?

  And is his hesitancy, is there also, because I feel this is important for the story of the Odyssey itself. Is there a prophecy that if he goes to Troy, he's not going to be able to return to Ithaca for some time?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  There isn't, no. So there's no sense of him kind of knowing that this is going to be a long voyage home. So when he goes to Troy, I don't think anyone expects that it's going to be a 10 year war. And then, you know, similarly, I don't think anyone expects he's going to take 10 years to get back home again. So, no, this is just the start of a long and winding voyage. He does get other prophecies later in the story about where he's going next.

• 20:52Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  But not right now.

• 20:53Tristan Hughes?

  And shall we briefly then mention also, what are the key highlights of Odysseus during the Trojan War itself? The, the episodes where he, his cunning, isn't it, more than anything, really takes centre stage?

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's easy to think of Odysseus as only the hero of the Odyssey. Because that's got his name stamped right up there on the front. But actually, he has quite a lot to do in the Iliad. Now, we've been talking about the Iliad and mentioning this name, but for those who aren't familiar, that is the other epic poem ascribed to Homer in antiquity. The Epic of the Trojan War, although it actually only tells quite a small bit of the Trojan War. And what we're looking at in terms of these kind of epics that I mentioned, these songs that tell the stories of the Trojan War. There are actually a lot of other ones as well. So, yes, we've got the Iliad and we've got Odysseus in the Iliad. And what he does there is, it's not all cunning, actually, interestingly. He's quite, kind of, he's mentioned as being quite stocky. Quite kind of strong. He does plenty of fighting of his own.

• 21:49Tristan Hughes?

  But Odysseus.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  You know, absolutely. He does a little bit of a spy reconnaissance mission in one book of the Iliad. Goes out, kills a few Trojans at night. But then, of course, famously, and this is outside the Iliad, this is in another one of those epics. He is the one who comes up with the idea of the Trojan horse.

• 22:06Tristan Hughes?

  The Trojan horse, okay, right.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  And that is really where his kind of cunning comes into play. This idea that, you know, you could get this massive build, a massive wooden horse, fill it with Greeks. Pretend that you had left all of the Greeks, their ships creep over the horizon, hide behind one of the islands. The Trojans think that this is an offering to the gods, they drag it into the city. And then all of the Greeks leap out and they manage to raise Troy to the ground. So that is Odysseus's idea.

• 22:31Tristan Hughes?

  And he's one of the masterminds, therefore, behind the fall of Troy.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  He is indeed.

• 22:35Tristan Hughes?

  And in other tragedies, after Achilles's death, there's the fight for his armour. And Odysseus wins Achilles's armour as well.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  There is, and it's a really tragic episode because basically the Greeks start squabbling over who gets this great honour to have Achilles armour. It's also some of it made by the gods, so it's also incredibly kind of costly and precious armour. But the main kind of ones who are kind of putting themselves forwards are Odysseus and Ajax, who is another Greek hero. And when Ajax loses, he just absolutely cannot deal with this kind of insult to his honour. And he actually ends up committing suicide really tragically. So Odysseus is very much embroiled in all of the kind of politics of the Trojan War and the Greek camp.

• 23:16Tristan Hughes?

  And these stories, therefore, we have of Odysseus before the Odyssey, kind of setting him up for the Odyssey. It's made very clear then that he's a major character in the story. And yes, he's not a king on the same level as Menelaus or Agamemnon. We should still view him as a king with men as well that have followed him to fight in the Trojan War.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Absolutely, we should see him as a king, we should see him as a warrior. You know, he is not just the Odysseus of the Odyssey, who is the man who is trying to get home. That is what that particular epic poem is doing, that's what it's about. But when you put him in the Iliad, when you put him in a war epic and you put him in a Trojan War. He is going to fight and he's going to be a warrior and a king, just like all of the other Greeks.

• 23:56Tristan Hughes?

  So how do we think, how should we think of Odysseus then? Now we get to the the beginning of the Odyssey, from all the other sources that survive that give us more information about Odysseus's role before he leaves Troy. Do we have an idea very much of the context in which he is leaving Troy? Is it very much after, is it a traumatic experience or was he feeling very, very good about himself before all of his, his successes and his cunning and so on?

• 24:23Speaker 01

  We don't have evidence from the literature about how he's feeling, but we know what's happening and what is happening is pretty dire. So when Troy has been burned to the ground, one of the key features of that burning is that the women of the Trojans all get enslaved and captured by the Greeks and they are particularly keen to enslave women who are high status. So they all get portioned out and Odysseus gets given Hecuba, who is the queen of Troy. So he gets an incredibly high status enslaved captive woman. So there is a huge tragedy there and that's something that later writers are really interested in. At the same time, what is happening in the kind of capture of Troy is deeply unsalutary.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  And one of these kinds of like moments where it just really shifts towards the dark side is when we get another Ajax. Now, this isn't the same Ajax we talked about earlier. Helpfully, we call him the lesser Ajax, just to differentiate him. But he ends up horribly raping Cassandra and he rapes her as she's clinging to the statue of Athena. And it's a horrible kind of moment, but it's really a step too far for the Greeks. And Athena, who has always been a patron goddess of the Greeks, is both kind of outraged by this, but also deeply insulted because of kind of what's happened to her, her shrine, her temple. And so she lays a curse on the Greeks and this curse, this huge storm is that they are not going

• 25:47Speaker 01

  to get home, or if they do, there's going to be real trouble. And this is the beginning of the troubles that Odysseus encounters.

• 25:53Tristan Hughes?

  This is the beginning and we're going to explore that next.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  If you love a good story, why aren't you listening to Dan Snow's History Hit Podcast? It's a show where we tell you every amazing, crazy and important thing that's ever happened in human history. From the perilous voyages of the first Polynesians, the discoveries of Captain Cook, the deadly Viking raids on Britain and Ireland, the rise and fall of the great English kings and queens. We'll tell you how Waterloo was won, the Alamo was lost and all the history in between. So make sure you check it out, Dan Snow's History Hit, for the best true stories ever told, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 26:40Tristan Hughes?

  Right, so let's get into the Odyssey itself. And I find it fascinating, but it kind of harkens back to what you were saying there. The first way that Odysseus is described right at the beginning is as polytropos. What do we mean by that?

• 26:56Speaker 01

  I mean, we could spend an entire episode on this one word.

• 26:58Tristan Hughes?

  Let's not.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Let's not, let's not, let's not, but it's fascinating. So let's start with the basics of what it is. It's an adjective or what we would call an epithet. Now, these epithets are basically words that are attributed to particular characters, particular words, nouns. So you get them kind of often put together. So you get like rosy fingered dawn is a really famous one, wine dark sea. And here we've got polytropos odysseos. So we've got Odysseus and here is his epithet, polytropos. Now, what does that mean? What's it telling us about him that he is getting this tag, as it were? It's kind of made up of two different parts. Polu means much or many, tropos means turning or turned.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  So he is the man who makes many turns, but he is also the man who is much turned. And what I love about that is that it suggests he's someone who's cunning. He can make things happen for himself. He can make turns, he can make voyages, but he's also someone who is the object of the wrath of the gods, someone who is turned about on his way home. So we start the opening of the Odyssey with this man who already is kind of resisting definition. He is both someone who makes things happen, but also things happen to him.

• 28:10Tristan Hughes?

  Gosh, that's interesting. That adds more complexity to his character straight away. And you would then expect that the Odyssey will begin well at Troy. You know, he's going to start his journey home and then it all goes horribly wrong. That's not quite the case though, is it? This is a nonlinear narrative.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  It really is, and it can be sort of quite confusing. You, a little bit like Odysseus, you're getting sort of tossed and turned about in the narrative. But that's part of kind of the, I think, what makes it such an exciting adventure to go on because you are sort of joining Odysseus as he tries to wend his way home. So yeah, we start the Odyssey, in fact, sort of very close to the end of his travels, where he is being kept on the Island of Calypso, at least that's what he says, that he's been kept prisoner, uh, island called Oghidja. Um, and he's trapped there for seven years. Um, and Athena storms onto Mount Olympus and says to Zeus, it's time that we let Odysseus go. Will you not take pity on him? And Zeus ultimately relents and he says, okay, I will send Hermes, the messenger of the gods. And Hermes wings his way towards Odysseus's island.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  And that's kind of the point where we get into the story where, okay, Odysseus is going to be set free from the place where he has spent most of his time on his return. And maybe he's going to start getting home.

• 29:22Tristan Hughes?

  And we do have to mention the prequel before this as well, because otherwise people will say, well, what about those first four books in there, four books? Or actually, you don't really talk about Odysseus at all. You focus on his home, on Ithaca and the troubles of his son Telemachus as well. So should we, should we briefly mention what this is as well? I feel this important.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Well, what's interesting is that, and this is incredibly kind of advanced narrative making, because we've got two narratives happening at the same time. As Athena decides, hey, she's set Odysseus's release in motion. Hermes is flying down from Mount Olympus. At the same time, Athena then leaves and she goes to Ithaca. And she lands on Ithaca disguised as a man and she meets Telemachus, the son of Penelope and Odysseus. Now, by now he is a teenager. He's been waiting for his dad the whole way through the Trojan War. And then you've got the 10 years also of the return, um, or nearly 10 years at this point. So, you know, he's coming close to kind of being a man. Um, and we get the first few books of the Odyssey while Hermes is on his way to go and get Odysseus.

• 30:23Tristan Hughes?

  It's like in real time.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  In real time. At the same time, we get Telemachus's story. And we get Telemachus going on his own little sort of mini voyage. And I kind of love this because he really wants to be like his father. So instead of doing an Odyssey, he's Telemachus, so he does a Telemachy. Um, and he goes, he goes to Sparta and he goes to Pylos. And he goes basically to the big kings of time to try and get information about where his father is.

• 30:45Tristan Hughes?

  But I always think it's really clever that because it, it does that, it introduces you to the fates of the other big figures that you'd have heard from the Trojan War. So you hear in that story, the, the, the bad fate of Agamemnon when he's murdered by either his wife. Her lover Augustus when he gets back to Mycenae, Helen of Sparta.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's Sparta again now.

• 31:05Tristan Hughes?

  Also Helen of Egypt, though, right as well. That's another story to go down that we won't today.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  She's had a bit of a detour on the way home.

• 31:11Tristan Hughes?

  Well, exactly. And then Menelaus and Nestor, wise sage old Nestor liking his sacrifices on the beaches and his chariots and all that. So you get all the, it's like, almost like a backstory, like those first four books, as well as Telemachus is doing his thing. By the way, this is what happened to the other figures before we get to the main man, Odysseus himself.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  It is, it's a backstory, but what it's also doing is it's also pegging itself into all of those other epics that would have been told about these figures. So I mentioned that, you know, there were all of these other songs and poems circulating and these were called the returns, the nostoi in Greek. And so basically you would have had a return epic of Menelaus, you know, the king of Sparta. You'd have had a return epic of Nestor and we get these kind of in miniature as Telemachus goes around. He's almost collecting little epic tales of all of the Greeks and how they returned home.

• 31:59Tristan Hughes?

  Gosh, okay. Well, let's go. We just also mentioned the other big theme and you've touched on it already. The likes of Athena, Hermes, Zeus and so on. The massive role that the gods will also play in this epic, in the return, in the homecoming of Odysseus.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, you can't talk about the Odyssey without talking about the gods. And I think it's really important to remember, we start with a council of the gods, you know, trying to get Odysseus home. So they are part and parcel of the return. I mean, we have them popping up in so many different ways. For the Odyssey, probably the main one is Athena. She is the daughter of Zeus, goddess of war and wisdom. And she really takes it upon herself to be a kind of the proactive protector, a guider of Odysseus and making sure that he gets home. And he really has quite a kind of intimate relationship with her where they have conversations back and forth. And a really kind of strong sense of these being two quite similar characters, you know, goddess of wisdom and he's quite a cunning chap.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  And so they really can kind of see that and sympathise with each other. But you also get other gods and also sort of lesser gods as well coming in like the nymph Calypso. So, or Cersei, who is the daughter of Helios, the sun god, so all kinds of other gods as well.

• 33:14Tristan Hughes?

  Well, on the ancients, we're gonna very much keep true to the original order of the Odyssey. So we've mentioned that Telemachy and you've already highlighted how the start of Odysseus's story is not at the Trojan War. It's actually several years later, when he's on this island and being held there by this figure of Calypso. Let's introduce Calypso. Who is this figure?

• 33:40Speaker 01

  So Calypso's great. Her name means the concealer in Greek, comes from kaluptin, which means to hide or conceal. So already we're getting this sense that she's sort of hiding Odysseus away on her island. He is there for seven years. We find that out as Hermes flies down onto the island of Aggadja and demands that she let Odysseus go. And Calypso makes this extraordinary request where she says essentially, I want him to stay with me and I would make him immortal. If I, if I could, if he would stay, I'd make him immortal. So, you know, a real sense that Calypso wants Odysseus to stay behind. But we see Odysseus on the shore of her island weeping, thinking back to Ithaca, thinking of Penelope. So he really kind of does want to go home.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  And eventually she accedes to Hermes' request and she gives him what he needs, which is he needs the tools to make a raft and he needs a sail and clothes to get on his voyage.

• 34:34Tristan Hughes?

  Right, so this isn't kind of a sneak away escape. This is, Calypso gives in because the gods have said, it's enough. It's been seven years now. You can't keep him any longer.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, exactly. And there's almost a sense of kind of the right divine order of things being upended, you know? A goddess does not live with a mortal is kind of what Hermes is saying. And in fact, Calypso speaks back and she says, well, actually, there's plenty of examples I can give you. So she's quite sassy about her response. But the sense is, no, the hierarchy has spoken, Zeus has spoken, and Calypso kind of has no choice but to let Odysseus go.

• 35:07Tristan Hughes?

  And do you think because the story of Odysseus proper in the Odyssey starts there, that we're meant to have that kind of, that mist, that lack of clarity as to the many trials and tribulations he'd suffered up to that point? And then you're kind of. You're left knowing that that will be revealed in time, how he got to Calypso's island. Like it's deliberately, it starts at Calypso's island and leaves that, what happened before, shrouded in a mystery to be revealed at a later time.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, what's difficult is you're thinking probably about where the audiences are coming to this from. And probably audiences who are dealing with this and listening to this story, they kind of already know where it's going. And that gives a flexibility to the storytelling, because it means, you know, you've already started the epic. So the epic begins with what we call a proem, which is essentially the opening few lines that kind of set out the stakes and the narrative and where it's going. And that sort of covers all of the trials and tribulations that he went through, all the cities he sacked, the men he lost as he was trying to get them their voyage home. So we kind of know that that's happened, but we don't know the details. And it's a beautiful moment of sort of like, well, you've got to wait. And when do you have to wait until, you've got to wait until Odysseus tells the story himself.

• 36:18Tristan Hughes?

  And we're getting there, aren't we? So the story is, he's allowed to build a raft. And does he escape?

• 36:24Speaker 01

  He does. Yep. So he gets off Calypso's island. He has another massive storm. Obviously, storms on the Mediterranean, very much a feature of Odysseus's journey. And he gets washed up on another island, which is the island of the Phaeacians.

• 36:38Tristan Hughes?

  The Phaeacians. Okay, I've heard of the Phoenicians, I've heard of the Phocaeans, never heard of the Phaeacians.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Yes. So very confusingly, their island in Homer is called Skeria. So doesn't have anything to do. So I like to call it the island of the Phaeacians, just to kind of, you know, keep ourselves on the same page. But yeah, so he washes up on this island, completely naked. He's lost his raft, he's got nothing. And as he washes up on the shore, who should happen to be there at that moment, but the princess of the Phaeacians, Nausicaa.

• 37:07Tristan Hughes?

  Nausicaa. Okay, I've heard the word Nausicaa before.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:10Tristan Hughes?

  And so what happens next?

• 37:12Speaker 01

  So Nausicaa, in a kind of beautiful moment, has basically kind of been sent out with her dowry clothes. And she essentially has been packing up all of these beautiful clothes that she is going to take with her when she gets married. And she's just kind of had this intimation from Athena, that it might be a good idea to take these to the shore and wash them. In case she gets married any time soon and she meets a naked man on the beach. And Nausicaä, of course, is very much taken by this and starts thinking, well, potentially.

• 37:40Tristan Hughes?

  This is my man.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  This is my man. Odysseus, it must be said, does nothing to dispel that. And he very much kind of plays on that. He says, you know, whoever manages to get you and kind of manages to marry you will be very lucky indeed. So there's definitely an element of kind of courtship going on here. In any case, Nausicaä offers him clothes. She has clothes with her, that's lucky. And she leads him back to the city of the Phaeacians. And there he has to supplicate, that means throw himself at the mercy of the queen, whose name is Areti.

• 38:12Tristan Hughes?

  Exploring kind of the kernels of truth behind these stories, I sometimes love looking on a map and where people like to think that these islands were in the ancient Mediterranean. Do we have any idea where they they placed the island of Calypso and then the island of the Phaeacians?

• 38:27Speaker 01

  So odyssey hunting has been a favorite sport of Homeric scholars and in fact, many kind of amateurs alike over the centuries. So lots of people have kind of engaged in trying to find these different locations. You find all kinds of different examples given. So for Calypso, sometimes you get Malta, for instance, as one of the islands that's put forward. For the island of the Phaeacians, Corfu, which is obviously just north of where we've got the modern day Ionian Islands.

• 38:55Tristan Hughes?

  Not far away by that point.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  It's not that far away. And in fact, you know, this is his his last stop before he gets back to Ithaca. To me, I feel like that kind of games maybe slightly reduces the sense that we are still in fantasy land, you know. And this is when when he comes to the palace of the king, whose name is Alcinaeus. This palace is surrounded by an orchard with fruit that never dies, you know, it's it's fruiting all through the year. That idea that, you know, we are in some kind of mystical paradise that does not exist in the real world. I think we want to kind of make sure that we remember that this is very much a kind of other land that he then gets drawn back into the real world of humans.

• 39:31Tristan Hughes?

  No, it's very true and to highlight that. But I mean, I do, and I will ask those questions again and again, because at the same time. The real kind of longevity of those stories that they have for actual real ancient populations who lived in those areas that become associated with key parts of, let's say, the Odyssey, with the sirens later and so on, that they believed that they lived in that kind of area of the world, and then it becomes a part of their identity as well. I love that part of the story.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  It absolutely does. And I think you're right. And that's kind of goes back to what I said at the beginning, that this is a poem that people have lived with. And I really love that, that it's something that has become a part of people. So yes, if we're talking about the Odyssey itself, and we're talking about what it's doing for the narrative, maybe we can sit in fantasy. But if we can think about what it's meant to people, then absolutely, let's do that.

• 40:15Tristan Hughes?

  So the island of the Phaeacians, wherever it is, princess expecting to be married, finds naked man on beach, gives naked man clothes, naked man, seems to be a bit of a courtship there as well, Odysseus. And then she takes him to, as you do with every naked man who washes up on the beach, takes him straight away to her mum, to the queen.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely, to her parents. And her mum says, why is he wearing something that I've woven? Because obviously she has woven the tunic that he's wearing. So yes, but no, that's what Odysseus needs. He needs a ship home. And in order to get that, he has to ask this kind of biggest favour from the queen of the Phaeacians, who we're told is the one who really kind of makes all of the decisions in the land, which is really interesting. And he asks for hospitality. This is a key theme that runs throughout the Odyssey, this theme of xenia hospitality, and the fact that, you know, if you have nothing, you can throw yourself on someone's mercy and you can ask them for something. And that's exactly what the Phaeacians do. So Oriti immediately gets lovely gifts for

• 41:21Speaker 01

  him, makes sure that he has a bath, they give him a feast, they have a bard play songs for him, they give him games and athletics. And at that point, they also then send him home on a brilliant ship that actually can, you know, go by itself. It doesn't even need oars. So, you know, they are the paradigmatic good hosts.

• 41:39Tristan Hughes?

  And so the king is there as well, but he seems to almost be second fiddle compared to the queen.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  He is there as well. We're told that he is less important in making this decision, but he absolutely is the one who is initiating the feasts, the games, and is very much a part of it. But no, Nausicaä, both Nausicaä and Athena are very clear that Oriti is the one who has the power here.

• 41:57Tristan Hughes?

  Interesting. And so this is clearly the last episode before Odysseus returns home. They're the people who see. Make, allow him to make that last journey to his homeland. And so as we've been hinting at, this is the perfect setting when he's being treated by the royal family. If I'm thinking of the Bronze Age world, maybe in a palace-like building gathered around the central hearth after a lovely feast or lovely food. And is that the setting when you have Odysseus? He reveals his story.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, absolutely. And he doesn't actually mean to reveal his story, but it's actually quite interesting. I mean, he is the master of disguise, right? So he doesn't necessarily kind of want to give away who he is. And actually, in terms of the rules of xenia, of hospitality, you don't actually have to, to reveal your name. Your host doesn't need to ask your name. But what happens is, I mentioned a bard, and the bard sings a song in A Tale of Troy, and he talks about a quarrel between Achilles and Odysseus. And Odysseus hears this, and he weeps, and he weeps like a woman whose city has been captured, right? And so we're now thinking back to all of those Trojan women who we encountered

• 43:09Speaker 01

  on the shores of Troy, who were being captured by the Greeks, and he feels their grief.

• 43:14Tristan Hughes?

  So, so Odysseus is hearing a bard telling the story that had, that was already being told of him whilst he'd been away?

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. He hears his own story being told, and it moves him to tears. And at that point, the king, Alcainus, asks Odysseus, you know, why are you weeping? And what is your name? And that's when Odysseus then says, I am Odysseus. I come from Ithaca. And he gives the story of his travels.

• 43:40Tristan Hughes?

  And that is what we're going to explore next.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  If you love a good story, why aren't you listening to Dan Snow's History Hit Podcast? It's a show where we tell you every amazing, crazy, and important thing that's ever happened in human history. From the perilous voyages of the first Polynesians, the discoveries of Captain Cook, the deadly Viking raids on Britain and Ireland, the rise and fall of the great English kings and queens. We'll tell you how Waterloo was won, the Alamo was lost, and all the history in between. So make sure you check it out, Dan Snow's History Hit, for the best true stories ever told, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 44:28Tristan Hughes?

  So Odysseus has revealed his identity at this time. And this is when we get the real meat of the story. This is when he now, we start to hear all the trials and tribulations that he's faced since the Trojan Wall. This is when we start to actually get the narrative itself, can we say?

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's interesting because this is something that most people, I think, who haven't read the Odyssey don't realise. They think the Odyssey will be the story of Odysseus's wanderings and we'll start sort of in Troy and we'll go through. But in fact, we have to wait eight books. It's not until the ninth book out of 24 books of the Odyssey that we start getting actually the story of what happened after Odysseus left Troy.

• 45:07Tristan Hughes?

  And when we say a book, we mean, I mean, these are hundreds of lines of text, aren't they?

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's later. So basically what happened is as the poems were written down, later scholars then decided, okay, we're going to cut a book here, a book there. But at the same time, yes, hundreds of lines of poetry that we're looking at before we start getting Odysseus giving his story. And it's kind of miraculous because we're actually not just hearing this from a poet. We're purportedly hearing this from Odysseus, from his own lips. And so it's really kind of exciting as a storytelling moment that Odysseus basically becomes his own bard.

• 45:41Tristan Hughes?

  It's a storyteller within a story, you know, kind of thing, which is lovely.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:45Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, so how does it all begin?

• 45:48Speaker 01

  So we have Odysseus leaving Troy. He does a couple of raids on his way down.

• 45:53Tristan Hughes?

  Because he's not alone at this point.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  He's not at that point, he's got all of his ships, all of his men. If you remember back to the poem of the Odyssey, it's talking about him trying to get a return home for his men. So it's not just him here, it's also him trying to kind of get all of his men home. We've also got Hecuba.

• 46:09Tristan Hughes?

  I was going to say, do they actually mention Hecuba in the Odyssey? Does he mention him?

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Not in the Odyssey, no, but we've got a later tradition where Hecuba actually dives off the boat and turns into a dog. This is in, perhaps to no one's surprise, Greek tragedy, where things can get a little bit spicy. But, you know, Hecuba isn't mentioned here, but you know, that's part of his return. In any case, we've got a couple of raids. He does some sort of typical Homeric swashbuckling where he burns down a city, kills men, enslaves women, takes some booty, some wine, and then he carries on on his voyage.

• 46:43Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, quite frankly, in the kind of the Bronze Age world, well... The kernels of truth and bronze age world, that seems quite relatable to what we have from the text of what Mycenae is probably did. So that feels more relatable, more historical.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, at that point, we're still in the real world. Yeah.

• 46:58Tristan Hughes?

  But then.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  But then.

• 46:59Tristan Hughes?

  What happens?

• 47:00Speaker 01

  We enter into the world of fantasy and the world of reality. And we go through a couple of different stops, basically, that Odysseus does on his way. We have the lotus eaters, where Odysseus and his men eat the flower of the lotus that induces forgetfulness. Now, obviously, that is probably the most dangerous thing you can do on your way home.

• 47:19Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, how do we sail again or something like that? How do we get home?

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Exactly. So Odysseus has to be the one to make sure that he's sort of bringing his men back into line and getting them back onto the ships. And that's one of the adventures they have. We've got some giants. We've got the Lysistragonians, who kind of severely kind of worry the crew and pose a difficulty for them because they throw massive rocks and boulders down at the ships. And then we get some of the more famous episodes. So we get, for instance, the Cyclops.

• 47:46Tristan Hughes?

  Yes. So let's, because so Lysistragones, I didn't really know about the Lysistragones at all. And but they are, they are giants, but they are different to the Cyclops. These are two different episodes.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 47:56Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  They are completely different. So the Lysistragonians are kind of a civilization, a dwelling of giants in themselves. The Cyclopes, they live on their own island. And they are kind of differentiated by having this one eye. They are sons of Poseidon. And they all kind of lived there together and herded their sheep on this kind of rather idyllic sounding island, to be honest.

• 48:16Tristan Hughes?

  And also, you say Cyclopes is the plural.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  It is, yes.

• 48:20Tristan Hughes?

  Cyclops is the singular.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Excuse this.

• 48:22Tristan Hughes?

  The Cyclops is.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Group nerd.

• 48:23Tristan Hughes?

  So many people say Cyclops is bad. If you want to get nerdy.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  I know. Yes, Cyclopes, plural of Cyclops.

• 48:30Tristan Hughes?

  Three in total?

• 48:32Speaker 01

  So, yes, we've got multiple brothers. I mean, I think it's three in the later myths. I don't know if Homer actually specified whether it's three or not. But the one that we're concerned with is called Polyphemus.

• 48:41Tristan Hughes?

  Let's delve into the myth of the Cyclops and Polyphemus then. And Odysseus is running with them. So what happens? How does, does he and his men, how do they end up on the island of Polyphemus, the Cyclops?

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, they're on their way trying to get back home. They see a beautiful island. That looks very lush and verdant and, you know, they need somewhere to sleep. So they they run their boats up onto the shore and they go up and explore. Odysseus, an inveterate explorer, and they find a cave that is full of lovely yummy cheeses. And so they go in and they help themselves to the cheese. Now, we were talking about Xenia earlier, we were talking about good hospitality. This is a very bad act of being a guest because you have not waited for your host to come home. You've eaten his food, you haven't kind of asked for permission. So Odysseus and his men already doing something quite transgressive.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  The cyclops, Polyphemus, then comes back to find this group of men in his cave, having consumed some of his cheeses. And he then ends up doing something which is also not very good hosting, which is that he eats some of Odysseus's men. So we've got kind of transgressions of Xenia on both sides. There are real problems here. Odysseus then has to work out how to get out of the cave. He comes up with this very cunning idea of a steak which he heats up in the fire and drives through the cyclops's eye.

• 50:02Tristan Hughes?

  This is, yeah, this is the brutal part, isn't it?

• 50:04Speaker 01

  It's really, really brutal. And there's a horrible simile, basically comparing what he does when he he puts the steak into the eye to a drill. Going in and sort of, you know, it's just, it's a really, really very kind of traumatic moment. But the cyclops is blinded and then Odysseus essentially manages to trick his way out by hiding underneath the sheep. And as the cyclops's sheep go out into pasture, he and his men cling underneath and they go out through the door.

• 50:31Tristan Hughes?

  And isn't there this, well, I don't know if this is the latest story, but I always remember it in that the cyclops, he opens the the door to his cave. And he feels the sheep, the tops of the sheep and doesn't feel the men who are clinging to the undersides of the sheep as they go out.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  That's exactly it. So this is the source of Odysseus's cunning because the cyclops is blind and he feels the tops, but he doesn't feel the men beneath.

• 50:53Tristan Hughes?

  So Odysseus escapes the cave of his men.

• 50:57Tristan Hughes?

  Hasn't escaped the island yet though, because there's still a bit more to the story, isn't there?

• 51:01Speaker 01

  No, it sounds like it's all good, right? It sounds like he's got out of the island, he's defeated the monster. Perhaps he hasn't been the best guest, but you know, that can all be-

• 51:09Tristan Hughes?

  Lost a few men as well, so it's not completely brilliant.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  Not great leadership.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  But then he's out on the ocean in his boat and he cannot resist having one last vaunt, one last boast. Now, what he did when he was with the Cyclops was that he tricked him by saying when the Cyclops asked his name. We've seen that between guest and host when Alcinaeus asked for Odysseus's name, the Cyclops also asked for his name. He says, "My name is no one." And so, of course, when the Cyclops gets blinded, he then shouts out to his brothers, "No one has blinded me." Very clever trick. And then they're like, "Well, great, thanks for telling us. On with our life."

• 51:49Speaker 01

  So, very, very clever of Odysseus. However, he cannot resist having his name told. And so he turns around in the ship and he shouts back to the Cyclops that he should know that the person who tricked him was Odysseus, son of Laertes.

• 52:02Tristan Hughes?

  And do you think, you mentioned much earlier about the word hero and how this figure can also bring around a lot of devastation to those around him.

• 52:13Tristan Hughes?

  That act in particular, his men probably didn't know at the time, they're probably like, "Ha, ha, yeah, you tell him, you tell him, Odysseus, what you've just done." No idea that, "He's just doomed us all, hasn't he?"

• 52:23Speaker 01

  He has. And exactly, we talked about Odysseus and heroes being destructive to their communities. I mentioned the men that he kills when he gets back to Ithaca, but he also loses all of his men. You know, every single man who went from Ithaca with him to Troy gets lost, apart from Odysseus. So this is not really what I think we would call a heroic homecoming that we're going to see. And you're absolutely right, it's that moment of pride, what the Greeks would call hubris.

• 52:48Tristan Hughes?

  Hubris.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Right? Which is where you've got this excessive pride that kind of leads almost to punishment by the gods. And of course, that's exactly what happens because then the Cyclops has the key piece of information that he needs, which is the name in order to curse Odysseus.

• 53:03Tristan Hughes?

  And how does he curse Odysseus?

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, he goes straight to his father, Poseidon. It's good if you've got a daddy god. And he asks Poseidon to curse Odysseus in his voyage back home. And, you know, because he can name him, then Poseidon immediately knows who he's looking for. And that is then the reason why Odysseus has all of these awful wanderings.

• 53:22Tristan Hughes?

  And lots of storms, I'm guessing as well.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Plenty of storms, plenty of troubles. Yeah, yeah, Poseidon knows how to stir up a sea.

• 53:28Tristan Hughes?

  No, I know there are lots of, as we use the words in our T and T, lots of trials and tribulations that follow. I like us to get to Circe. That's another kind of big episode. But are there key episodes that we need to highlight before we get to Circe between the Cyclops and her island?

• 53:43Speaker 01

  I think the main one is Circe, the next one, kind of in the voyage, in terms of kind of those big hitters, in terms of who kind of really matters for Odysseus's voyage home.

• 53:50Tristan Hughes?

  So how do they arrive on this island? Set the scene before we introduce this figure of Circe who they meet there.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  It's a very similar situation to the island of the Cyclopes. And I think at this point, Odysseus and his men must be starting to feel that there's a sort of haunting similarity to these dangerous islands that they keep rocking up on. But yes, they come up to shore and a party of them decide, well, first they go hunting and they shoot a stag and that's all well and good. But then a party of them decide to explore a little bit further into the island. And they go up, they wander up into the island, and they come across this beautiful palace in the middle of nowhere in the island. And it's got sort of wolves and lions prowling around the door, already kind of rather strange. They hear a woman singing inside and they hear the clicking and the clacking of a loom. And as they go

• 54:41Speaker 01

  in, they are welcomed by this beautiful goddess, Circe. She takes them in, she gives them kind of food and drink. And as they kind of consume this, they then get turned into pigs.

• 54:53Tristan Hughes?

  So once they eat something, that's the, that's the secret formula.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's the secret formula. She does have a wand that she kind of strikes them with, like a switch, almost. And they kind of go trotting off into the pig's dies. However, one man stayed behind. He saw all of this and he runs back to Odysseus and reports.

• 55:13Tristan Hughes?

  You mentioned a one there.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:15Tristan Hughes?

  The classic association with Cersei is that she's a witch.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:18Tristan Hughes?

  Is that accurate? Is that fair to say?

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Well, look, she turns men into pigs.

• 55:22Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, that's quite a big indicator.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  It's quite witchy. And certainly later generations, later kind of readers of Homer, thought that she was a witch. I think what's really interesting is that, in fact, in Homer, she's never called a witch. The word that is used for her is is an adjective, it's polypharmacos. Now, there's poly again, which we heard.

• 55:43Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, much, much.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Much, exactly. And pharmacos is where we get pharmacy from, is the word for drug. And a drug, just like in English, it can be good or it can be bad. And so she's someone who knows a lot about good drugs and bad drugs.

• 55:58Tristan Hughes?

  Many drugs, Cersei.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And I think that changes things because that's not really a witch, that's someone who knows how to take herbs and use them to do what she wants to do with them. And just as she can turn the men into pigs, later, when she transforms them back, she uses a kind of ointment. So she's again using her drugs. And when they turn back into men, they're actually much younger and better looking than they were before. Which, you know, I've signed me up, I want to know where to buy that one from, absolutely. But Cersei, I think, you know, she could do good things as well. And so we've got to complicate that a bit.

• 56:31Tristan Hughes?

  And so halfway through the story, with that one person who isn't turned into an animal, who goes back to Odysseus to say, hey, there's something weird happening up there. What follows from there? How does Odysseus decide to try and tackle this new threat, this new issue?

• 56:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think there would be two ways to go with that. There would be like, you know, let's get the hell out of here or, you know, go and save the men. Odysseus is perhaps more on the, I'm really curious and want to know what's happened kind of spectrum. So he heads in and he decides he wants to kind of find out. Now, you know, everyone is saying, don't go, this is too dangerous, but but he he heads off. On his way, he is visited by Hermes, the messenger god who we saw earlier coming to Calypso's island, delivering the message from Zeus. Now Hermes here has come to help Odysseus and he has essentially come to also warn him that. Cersei has this knowledge of herbs and he gives him a herb in return. And this is a herb called in the Greek moly.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  We're not entirely sure what it was. We think it might be some kind of early sort of wild garlic type thing. So it's meant to have black roots and a white flower. And he's told to consume this and this will protect him from Cersei's drugs.

• 57:44Tristan Hughes?

  And so is it the case that he then happily, well, confident that he's got this protection?

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:50Tristan Hughes?

  Goes to Cersei's home, Cersei welcomes him in.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:53Tristan Hughes?

  And then he starts eating, tries to tap him on the shoulder with the wand. That's the idea of God. And they're like, it's not working.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  It's not working. Exactly. No, he's very confident because he knows that he's got this help from the gods. And then at that point, yeah, she's sort of, okay, well, he hasn't turned into a pig. She then recalls a prediction that has been made to her that Odysseus will come. And so this has been prophesied. She kind of recognised, he draws his sword as Hermes has told him to, kind of rushes at her. And she sort of says, no need for that, you know, let's go to bed. And he says, well, not before you've turned my men back into men for pigs. So she does that. And then they go to bed and he stays on her island for a year, having sex and having lots of nice food.

• 58:36Tristan Hughes?

  Right, okay. All of a sudden, the desire to get back to Penelope as quickly as possible is not, not quite there in the story anymore.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  And in fact, he actually, it's really interesting because we talked about the lotus eaters, the danger of forgetting. Well, here he does forget and here it's actually his men who remind him at the end of a year, remember about getting back home, Odysseus?

• 58:54Tristan Hughes?

  But his men have been there as well, have they? They've just been.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  They've been there, yeah, they've been there as well, yeah. But it's them who remind him, it's not Odysseus.

• 59:00Tristan Hughes?

  Interesting. So that's a whole year on Cersei's island. So she's a big part of the narrative. Is it a couple of books or?

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Well, she's a really big part of the narrative because she's the one who gives him the instructions about where he needs to go next.

• 59:13Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  So actually he goes on from her, he does his next bit and then he comes back to her again. So it's a really important, she's a really important kind of motivator for this.

• 59:22Tristan Hughes?

  And so where does she tell him? If it's not like Calypso, not seven years, but she agrees that Odysseus has got to go. Odysseus' men say, come on, we've got to go now. Where do they go next? What's the next big episode?

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Well, his next thing that he's got to do, and this is what Cersei sets him up for, is the underworld.

• 59:38Tristan Hughes?

  This, I think this is the final big episode we'll cover in this episode.

• 59:44Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, let's, let's explore this, going to the underworld.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  Well, and Cersei's a really appropriate one to point him towards the underworld because she is a goddess who is, as we've seen, implicated in kind of herbal magic. She's a goddess who is implicated in sex and she's also a kind of goddess of death. And she points him towards the land of the dead and she says, if you want to get back home to Ithaca, you need to go and you need to commune with the spirits of the dead. Above all, Tyresias, who is a blind prophet, who is the one who knows more than anyone else. And he will be able to tell you how to get back home.

• 1:00:16Tristan Hughes?

  And how does one do this?

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's pretty specific and Cersei is the one who knows the instructions. So luckily for Odysseus, she knows the way. So she tells him kind of where to sail. She tells him what to do, basically to get to the banks of the river Akaron.

• 1:00:30Tristan Hughes?

  River Akaron, okay.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:00:32Tristan Hughes?

  A place that you've been to recently as well.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  Been to it and, you know, I have to say, very, very beautiful. But, you know, in the ancient myth, there were nine different rivers feeding into the underworld or in the underworld. And the Akaron was one of the rivers that actually was in kind of the world of the mortals and then kind of, you know, dipped its way through towards into the underworld. So it's a sort of portal, a place where death and life meet. So go to the banks of the Akaron, draw up your ships there. And on the shore, he needs to do a very specific ritual where he needs to kind of dig a pit. He needs to slaughter some animals and he needs to put them with their heads down into the pit. So that the blood trickles down into the ground. Now, of course, this is what spirits of the underworld want. Because the spirits of the underworld are completely lifeless.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  They have no form, they have no substance, they don't even have any voice, they just kind of squeak away. So what they want is to be able to drink blood and get some of that kind of vital energy back into them. And so he's got to get that blood in there. He's got to summon the spirits of the underworld. He's got to ward them all off until Tyresias comes. And when Tiresias drinks the blood, then he can speak to him and Odysseus will know his way home.

• 1:01:38Tristan Hughes?

  So this is Odysseus doing kind of like vampiric necromancy.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  It's necromancy, yeah, it is, it's absolutely necromancy. And it's a really kind of interesting moment where Odysseus also gets to meet not just the figures of his own past, but also the figures of the Trojan War past. So we're also looking back to the Iliad, you know, we talked about those return stories that are kind of encapsulated in the early books of the Odyssey. Well, here we have the stories of the Trojans, sorry, the Greeks who died in the Trojan War and what happened to them after Troy.

• 1:02:08Tristan Hughes?

  So is Agamemnon one of them that he sees?

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  Exactly, we've got kind of the big trio, we've got Agamemnon, we've got Ajax, who is obviously very annoyed about what happened with the armour of Achilles and he doesn't talk to Odysseus at all, he just sulks and stalks off in the opposite direction. And then we've got Achilles, so we've got the sort of triad.

• 1:02:25Tristan Hughes?

  The big three, and then Tare- so you kind of have that crescendo of big heroes.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Well, we start with Tareseus.

• 1:02:30Tristan Hughes?

  Sorry, okay, you do actually start with Tareseus.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Absolutely, so we've got Tareseus and actually there were a couple before Tareseus, which is interesting. One of them is basically one of Odysseus's shipmates who managed to get himself a bit drunk when he was on Circe's island, fell off a roof, didn't get buried properly and wants to ask Odysseus for burial. But then Tareseus comes in and he's really kind of the reason that we're there. And Tareseus, very oddly, doesn't really, I think, you know, the reader, the audience listening to Homer, we're expecting kind of a roadmap, right? This is how you get back to Ithaca from here. And instead, what he does is he basically tells him what is happening on Ithaca. He gives him information and he tells him what is going to happen in the future to him. So typical prophet, he kind of just goes completely off piece and it's all very kind of vague.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  But it's really important because this is the time where Odysseus finds out what is happening in his halls at home in Ithaca. The suitors, who are basically laying siege to his wife, his wife kind of holding out, Penelope waiting for him to return. And he also finds out that when he gets back to Ithaca, he's actually going to have another voyage again.

• 1:03:34Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, because we mentioned, we actually already talked about the suitors at all because we're going to cover that in the next episode.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Tristan Hughes?

  But highlight, can you mention now kind of what these suitors have been? Been doing. So what is this information that is revealed to Odysseus about what is happening in his palace?

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50Tristan Hughes?

  You know, to his servants, to his wife. What's been going on? What gives him the motivation to try and get home then after that?

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Well, this is the big problem that Odysseus is dealing with. And it's essentially, we've been talking about these kinds of different stories that are bubbling away at the same time. We saw Telemachus go off on his own little journey, but as he was going off on his journey, we had a glimpse into what was happening at Ithaca. And while Odysseus was spending his 10 years in the Trojan War, his 10 years of his voyage home, at the same time, Penelope has been basically sole queen of Ithaca. She's had a son who is too young to rule and all of the surrounding kings, both from Ithaca and from the surrounding islands, have come and have basically kind of sat in the palace, have consumed all of their food, their drink, have been kind of behaving extremely badly, probably also kind of raping the enslaved women within the household.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  And all of them demanding that Penelope is going to make one of them her husband. So she's really been holding out for a long time. Now for Odysseus, this is a massive threat to him because it's not just a threat to, you know, his kind of claim to Penelope. It's also a threat to his claim for the kingship of Ithaca. So he has to get home pronto to make sure that he's going to get back into that kingship.

• 1:05:01Tristan Hughes?

  And that is, I mean, that's the motivation. That's almost his revelation.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07Tristan Hughes?

  At this moment at the Akkorion with Tyresias, which lays, well, sets the foundations for that next, shall we say, is it half of the Odyssey?

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  It is. And it's not a coincidence that is happening almost exactly halfway through. So we're in book 11 at this point and there's 24 books. So we are about halfway through and we are going to kind of switch around through that halfway. And Odysseus is catalyzed from someone who is kind of wandering aimlessly to someone who has been told by a prophet, this is what is happening and this is where you need to go.

• 1:05:34Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, so we go everything from serpents to sirens to whirlpools to the great homecoming itself, still, still to happen. This is, this is the midway interval in the story of the Odyssey. And it's going to be the interval in our chat today. Emily, this has been so much fun so far and. Just goes to me to say, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'll see you shortly for part two.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  It's been great. Let's continue the odyssey.