The Odyssey’s forgotten epilogue

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0:20Welcome to the History Extra podcast. It's the final episode today of our four-part Sunday series on the Odyssey and its cultural afterlife, as Dr. Daisy Dunn tells Kev Lodgian about the extent to which we can map the ancient Greek epic onto the real world. Around 2,800 years ago, a poet, or perhaps many poets, set down a story that had been travelling by word of mouth for centuries. It told of a king trying to get home from a war. It should have taken him weeks. Instead,

0:51it took 10 years. The king was Odysseus, and the poem, the Odyssey. You might know some of his stories of the one-eyed cyclops, the sweet song of the sirens, or the witch that turned his crew into pigs. But beneath the gods and the monsters and the wine-dark sea, are there historical truths to be found? I'm Kev Lodgian, and I'm joined by Dr. Daisy Dunn, award-winning classicist, author, and all-round expert on the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Her books include The Ladybird

1:22Expert Book on Homer, and The Missing Thread, a new history of the ancient world through the women who shaped it. In this final episode, we're going to examine the moral codes of the Odyssey, and how the poem has been interpreted by cultures through the ages. Daisy, welcome back. Where I'd like to start with this episode is that there are a handful of themes that wind through the Odyssey, but the one that really leaps out to me is Xenia, and I wonder if you could introduce to us what that is. Xenia means guest friendship, and that really translates into treating your guest

1:57really, really well, and then reciprocally, your guest treating their host really well as well. So it's a two-way street. It's about being kind to strangers. And in the Greek world, and certainly within the poem, that means opening your door to anybody. There's so many times where it goes well, so many times it goes very, very wrong, and we see it a couple of times with Telemachus and Odysseus. They arrive at one of these great palaces, and these rules govern how they're received. So I'm paraphrasing this, but one of the places

2:33Odysseus turns up, it's like, it's two days, and he's there, and he gets food and a bath, and he tells a story, and then he goes to bed, and then he gets up, has another feast and some games. And it's only after that point that someone says, oh, what's your name again? Yeah, exactly. It is a very, very different thing. To us, that seems perverse. You're going to think, would you really trust anybody and let them into your house? But in the poem, it's a mark of a good society, of a good civilized culture, that you come across somebody who does that for you.

3:07Is the poem in any way acting as some kind of codicil or lowercase b Bible, as in, this is how you treat other guests of a certain social science? So is it like, this is how an elite man should behave? I think so. And I think that would have filtered out of the poem. It's very difficult to know initially how readers, how people listening to the poem would have interpreted it. Would they have brought that home and enacted it literally? Or was it more, okay, so this is an example of a perfect person and how they should behave in the heroic age. And we take a kind of more

3:41watered down version of that and put it into operation in our own society. Yeah, because the other point of that was on my mind is we just talked about Zeus and how he's the patron of strangers, if you like. Given this kind of sense that the gods are present in Greek society, is there ever a kind of thought that, you know, you have to welcome a stranger in because the stranger might be Zeus. And that does happen throughout Greek myth. That's precisely it. This is what you get in a lot of myths. It's often the gods going in disguise to unknown locations and they're dropping in and they're testing to see whether they're going to

4:15be treated properly. And it's almost saying, well, everyone should be treated as if they are a god because they might be in disguise because this happens so frequently. The number of myths where a god or a goddess turns up pretending to be often a beggar or a poor person in some guise, which doesn't make them look remotely godly, and they're let in. And sometimes they're treated well and sometimes they're treated badly. And that has major repercussions then on that person's life. I mean, it feels like a trap. It does feel a bit like a trap. It does feel like a trap. They speak quite loudly to me of what was

4:48expected of men and of their kind of, by men, I mean men and women, of people in society. You mentioned beggars and how anyone coming in, you treat them as revered guests until you kind of like you wine dine them and then you can ask them. But Odysseus in The Odyssey spends a fair amount of time in the second half of the book as a beggar. And in that guise, he's not treated quite so cordially. No. So the suitors are not practices of Xenia. They are bad hosts. They are bad hosts. They are horrible to him. They look at him and they taunt him. They treat

5:23him really, really badly as if he's, you know, absolute sort of scum of the earth. They don't give him food and wine. They're just rude and petulant and horrible. And that is Homer's way of saying, look, these are really bad people. I mean, as if we don't know that already. The suitors have been terrible. They're just eating him out of house and home. They are very rowdy among themselves. And from their perspective, and I'm not saying this in their defense, but one of them actually says, you know, Penelope has said that she might marry one of us. She

5:55hasn't said that she won't marry one of us. And we found out that she's been tricking us by weaving this funeral shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes, who isn't yet dead. And she's been unpicking it by night. And one of her maidservants, or rather her female slaves, has actually spotted her doing this and leaked it. And they found out what she's doing. And they're really angry about it. And so they are asking, so have we been hanging around here for no reason? Is there no prospect of us ever having a future here?

6:27And then there's this other contrast going on with Xenia in general, because occasionally crops up in the poem is piracy. And you have this episode with Polyphemus the Cyclops, where Odysseus is a bad host, but there's a bit where Polyphemus says, are you guys pirates? And clearly after he leaves Troy, then they go raiding, then they're not really being very good hosts there. They're pirating. So I just wondered if there's a kind of sense where, again, Xenia is something for the Greeks, and everyone else is like fair game.

7:01I think it is very much defined as a Greek quality. And certainly as you say, there are these piratical references throughout, which probably were current in Homer's time, certainly because of what's going on. We talked about the Greek sea peoples and the possibility of piracy in that period earlier. And I think with Odysseus and his men, they're not always on their best behavior. They are very keen on getting free goods, on getting presents, on piloting, on getting booty to bring home. Even women they're taking from the first place

7:31that they stop off on, Ismaris, among the Caconis. So they are not ideal people. We've seen that they're quite fallible, a lot of Odysseus' men. So I think a lot of the time, Homer's showing how easy it is to slide out away from that ideal. One example you told me about, you said this was one of your favorite kind of examples of Xenia, was King Alcinus' daughter. I'm not going to try and pronounce her name. Nasekeia. That's the one. Well, Nasekeia is young. She's not yet married in this world. Women marry very young. She

8:05encounters Odysseus just after he washes up on the coast. And he's come from his shattered raft off the sea. And he looks a wreck. He looks awful. He is naked. He is cut up. He is obviously unshaven. And she probably looks quite a sight. He has to get some photos to try and cover up his more manly bits from her. She's there playing ball with some of her friends. And she, nevertheless, is really kind to him. I mean, she says, you

8:36know, make your way to my parents' palace. They are the king and queen. After all, they have a palace. And so she gives him instructions. She doesn't say, oh, you know, get away from me. She's very much welcoming him there. And her parents do likewise. So she is very much the perfect host. She's someone who's not frightened by how someone looks, doesn't judge them on their appearance. And she follows through that process, even when it's quite an alarming situation. You have a naked man standing in front of you. Nasekeia is a really nice bridge for us to talk about some of the women in the Odyssey

9:10and how to represent it. And I thought we should probably start with Penelope, who we haven't actually spoken a great deal about. But while Odysseus has been wondering, she's being at home. How do you assess her role in this? She's central to the poem. I mean, she is there. She is shown to be incredibly clever, very resourceful, like Odysseus. Many of the epithets that apply to Odysseus apply just as well to Penelope. She's been having to hold forth all of these years at home. And

9:42we see the toll that this has had on her at the very beginning. I mean, it's often asked, why hasn't she acted sooner? I think she's almost paralysed by her inability to decide or do anything. She's just so frozen by the whole awfulness of her situation. She just doesn't know which way to turn. In terms of the narrative, I mean, she is the drive. She is the reason for Odysseus' travels. He would not have left Calypso and made that journey home had it not been for his longing for Penelope. And he's very clever. I mean, when he talks to Calypso,

10:16she says, well, I'm sure I'm prettier than your wife. I'm more beautiful. I'm taller than her. And Odysseus says, well, of course, yes, you are semi-divine. You are tall. You are beautiful. And Penelope can't compare to you in that respect. But I must get back to her. And then Penelope's cunning is widely kind of showcased through the story with the shroud, the weaving and the unweaving. I was really interested because you mentioned in our last episode when we were talking about the Myasinian palaces, how there was these huge spaces for

10:47weaving and everyone seems to do it in the Odyssey. And I just wondered what that was telling us, if anything, culturally about the Greek world at that time. Women were weaving across all different strata of society. So you have elite women and non-elite women all weaving. Doesn't matter who you are, you're weaving. You're weaving. Yeah. And we see that in the poem. I mean, Helen of Troy weaves in the Iliad. Well, when she's not drugging her husband in the whole court. Exactly. She needs some things to do. That's one of the things that she does. So she's been weaving the story of the Trojan War. Penelope is another one. She is a queen and she is weaving.

11:22Penelope is weaving a shield for her father-in-law and she might have got her servants to do that for her, her slaves to create it, but clearly it's important to her. So this is really borne out by the society, both in Homer's time and actually the setting in which this poem arises. So the late Bronze Age, women were weaving very much so. And it was incredibly important then because in Minoan and Mycenaean society as well, trade depends very heavily on the sale of cloth.

11:53And who's making these cloths is the women. So they are effectively driving the economy. And this is incredibly important within these palatial societies. We have certain rooms where there's evidence of weaving taking place. And it's very clear that women were working in these. And we have further evidence for that in the clay tablets, which were preserved after they were burned. After these palaces burned down, the clay was preserved even better than it would have been. That's lucky. Really lucky. It was the only good thing to come out of this Mycenaean palace collapse. So you have these tablets and they refer to women doing all kinds of jobs.

12:26And these are the linear B ones we mentioned in a previous episode. They are, yeah. So they're giving a really good insight into the kinds of jobs that Penelope, women like Penelope, would have been doing. So there are weavers and there are different types of weavers. So you have women who are working in groups, in a leather working group. Which we'd figured out is quite a traditionally male role now. We would. We would. But here it's being conducted by women. This was particularly at Pylos, that palace of Nesta that the evidence comes from. There are women who were doing sort of

12:59finishing. There are women who were making headbands and headbands for horses in particular. You know, so there would have been sort of military or ceremonial roles for their work that they were creating. There were wool spinners, there were carders, there were all just different aspects of the weaving process and fabrics women were involved in. And we have the names of some of these women as well. So we know that these are real women. They are also doing things like grinding flour. And we find references in the Odyssey to women grinding flour. So they really existed. We talked about earlier the bath that Telemachus had when he was visiting

13:34the palace of Nesta. We have the names of several bath attendants at Pylos. There are at least, I think, 37 of these women. They're all women and they were bath attendants. So you have an idea of the kind of roles that these women in these palaces were fulfilling. So in many ways, it's not surprising that Penelope is weaving because this is what women in her age really were doing. Do you get a sense of any kind of social strata within those jobs? Like a elite woman might be doing either a different type of work or weaving something different to essentially a common person?

14:06I think there is a real range. So I think some of these jobs are more highly skilled than others. So if you are preparing the wool, the kind of raw wool, that would have been a more hands-on, getting dirty kind of job, which probably wouldn't have been done by an elite woman. If you are in a palace, you're much more likely to be making something like a shroud, like Penelope. It's more refined work. And it's also quite sociable. They seem to have been sitting around together a lot of the time, women, and discussing it. It's not necessarily a solitary activity. So I think there was a really, really broad range.

14:39We should also talk about Calypso because we mentioned very briefly about the kind of Calypso saying, oh, I'm taller and I'm more beautiful. She also kind of calls out this double standard, which I'm really interested in, in terms of Greek myth. Like the Greek gods, the male gods can cavort with mortals, but in kind of Greek myth more broadly, it's like, it's littered with outrage when you have someone like Calypso, a goddess or a nymph doing the same. Exactly. And I mean, her initial reaction when Hermes comes to her and says, the gods have decided you've got to let Odysseus go. She's really angry. She's full of rage. She is

15:13upset. And her impression is, is that the gods are jealous of her and the love that she has for Odysseus and that they are begrudging her the opportunity to be with him. So I think there is certainly a double standard. I mean, Zeus is the worst offender of all. Oh, he's terrible. He's awful. He can just go down and get away with usually raping in most cases. I mean, that clearly is what's happening. Women everywhere, all over the Greek world. There are so many of them,

15:44princesses in particular. They seem to be his particular favorite. He just eyeballs it and is like, right. He goes, yeah. And then his wife gets really angry about it, but then he just carries on behaving in the same way. But he gets away with it. And it's different, I think, for these people. I think because Calypso, she's not a full goddess. She's not one of the Olympian gods. She's not in that inner circle, that sort of very elite group of gods and goddesses who are in that little cloud on Olympus, you know, very much being together. She is an outsider. She's somewhere between the

16:16two. She's between mortals and those gods. And she doesn't have the power that she needs in order to get her way. And no one can argue with Zeus. And that's the big problem. That is a tremendous problem through a lot of myths. We've talked a lot about named women from the poem, but there's a number of enslaved women who meet an unfortunate end at the poem's denouement. And I just wonder, we talked a bit about whether this was a tale that shows you how to be a good Greek man. Is this also a bit of a tale about how to be a good slave?

16:47I think certainly. I mean, I think, I mean, your reaction is right when you read the poem and suddenly you have Odysseus and his men, they kill all the suitors, but also the female slaves are killed because some of them have been having relationships with the suitors. And you think actually, they probably didn't have always have much to say in that matter. We don't really quite know what their situation was. Certainly one of them seems to have been leaking the story about Penelope weaving and unweaving to the men. So she is quite culpable in the story, but clearly not

17:23all of them. It seems a very, very harsh fate. So there certainly is a message within the poem that these people who are enslaved have very, very little rights. They are treated as a group more than they are as individuals. We have some who emerge as individuals. So we have the swineherd Eumaeus, for example. Yes. And he is almost, he stands alone. He is loyal. And he's someone who is trusted from the outset by both Telemachus and by Odysseus. He's really interesting that

17:58his kind of like, his approach to Odysseus is, I love my master. And Odysseus is in disguise at this point. He's not saying this to him. It's like, I love my master. My master is the best thing since sliced toast or cheese. And, you know, he's almost like, he's more loyal than the dog. He's brilliant. Yeah. I think you really like, I really like you most. If you'd like to learn more about women in the ancient Greek world beyond the bounds of the Odyssey, Daisy has you covered in a different episode of the History of your podcast. And you'll find out how they're doing much more than just weaving. You'll find that in my Beyond

18:29the Podcast picks in the episode description. Daisy, one of the other major themes of this book is Nostos, the idea of homecoming. How does this story for you compare with the Iliad? I think it's very much concerned with showing the aftermath and the legacy of war. I mean, the main word we associate with the Odyssey is Nostos. And Nostos is the homecoming, the homecoming of Odysseus, but it gives us nostalgia. But in nostalgia, we also have another

18:59Greek word, which is algos, which is pain. And I think this is what we're seeing in Odysseus. He's running back through everything he's been through, from the war to his travels. He's having to recount it all. And he certainly seems to do so with joy and with glee. But at the same time, when he's with Calypso, he hasn't been speaking to her really about what had happened for much time at all. So he seems to have bottled up a lot of what he's been through. And I think, you know,

19:29certainly today, there are a lot of people who look at Odysseus as someone who was suffering from PTSD, that he isn't able to engage with everything that happened in the full form that it did, because it's almost too painful to run back through everything. There's something I wondered about when he's retelling the story of his wanderings. Did any of it really happen, even to Odysseus? Because he's a master liar. But is it a kind of life of pie situation where he's kind of made up half the journey as he went along? This is a really, really popular question to ask. A lot of people think,

19:59oh, this doesn't seem to ring true. But if he's just an excellent storyteller, and he really wants to impress these Phaeacians, because he's got something to gain. He needs to get home. He needs to get home. So if he can win them over, this is the way to do it. I don't know. I quite like to believe that he went through some of these things. I mean, for us, it's very difficult. Where do you draw the line? Do you believe in Poseidon shattering a raft? That's a god. And so for the Greek readers, that's a god, you know, that's a credible thing. Is that so different from Cyclops and gobbling up the men? Like,

20:31where do you draw the line between fiction and reality? If you want to incorporate the gods, do we include those in the fictional realm? Or do we include those in the more real realm that people in Greece might have done? So it's quite challenging. I think he's definitely a slippery character, so he couldn't put it past him to make everything up. But in short, I believe that he did encounter some real challenges on his way home. This episode is brought to you by Adobe Firefly, the all-in-one creative studio with AI-powered image

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21:31Before we go into the kind of interpretations of the Odyssey Down the Ages, I thought this might be a good time to bring in your final myth of the week. So every time we've asked you to pick a story from the wider Greek canon that sits adjacent to what we've been talking about, Daisy, what have you got for us this time? I thought I'd tell the myth of why the Trojan War actually began to begin with. Do we know? Well, what's really interesting, we have the Iliad and the Odyssey, but we also have a series of other poems, something called the Epic Cycle. So there are six other poems that belong to this

22:04Epic Cycle, and they don't really survive apart from a few fragments and mainly retellings of little bits and kind of storylines in other authors. And one of these was called the Cypria. And it explained the real cause of the Trojan War. And it's absolutely fascinating. So what this myth tells us is that the earth was really buckling under the strain of the surging population. And the earth is personified. The earth is being weighed down by the number of people on top of it. And with this

22:35population surge, religion is declining. The situation on earth is becoming more fraught, more uncomfortable. And the earth is really growing exasperated by what it's kind of feeling and experiencing on top of it. So the earth appeals to Zeus for help. So Zeus, I really need some help here. I'm being weighed down. I'm being overburdened by all of this. And Zeus agrees to do something. He triggers a Theban War. So that's one cycle. And actually within the Epic Cycle, you have

23:06a whole cycle of myths relating to Thebes. But that wasn't enough. So then, Zeus decided to trigger the Trojan War. So the whole Trojan War was actually caused by Zeus. And specifically, it was so that Zeus's plan could be fulfilled. Zeus's plan is a form of genocide. Well, in order to help earth, because earth was so overburdened, the population was too big.

23:36So that was his solution. We'll kill off a load of the people. Which is an irony, because Zeus has created quite a lot of people, right? Like so many people trace our lineages to Zeus in the earth. Exactly. Exactly. So, but it's just really stunning, because I think we always think about the origins of the Trojan War with Paris, the judgment of Paris, the golden apple. He gave it to Aphrodite. And then she said, you could run away with the most beautiful woman. And that's Helen. And that's the start of the war. And certainly Homer knew that myth. That myth is older than

24:07the Odyssey and the Iliad. And that's certainly a backdrop to it. But it's just so interesting that there's also this additional layer that the war was seen to be needed by the gods because of the size of the population and declining religion upon it. You mentioned there the Epic Cycle, which is something we should talk about, because you have this idea that the Iliad and the Odyssey are the only two Epics. But as you alluded to, there's a bigger cycle there. So eight, I think it was? There are eight altogether. So there are six others. The Iliad and the Odyssey seem to have been the hit ones. They're the favorites. That's why we still have them. The others are less popular.

24:43But clearly interesting. So I mentioned the Cypria. That's one of them. And bear in mind, the Iliad, it opens in the 10th and final year of the war. So there's been nine years of war. So that was dealing with that. What's happening beforehand? How did the whole thing begin? We have something called the Ethiopis that describes the death of Achilles, which doesn't occur in the Iliad. You have the little Iliad and the sack of Iliad or the sack of Troy. So about the end. And that's where the Trojan horse myths were told in a bit more detail.

25:14You have the returns, describing the homecomings of all of the different soldiers, apart from Odysseus. He has his own story. And then we have a very curious one called the Telegony. The Telegony is my favorite, I have to say. It's very, very bizarre. It looks essentially at what Odysseus did after he got back. It's his epilogue, right? It's the epilogue. So, I mean, the whole idea with this epic cycle is that there are prequels and sequels to the Iliad and the Odyssey. So this is like the ultimate sequel. This is a sequel to the Odyssey. Odysseus is home in Ithaca, but he decides in this epic that he can't just sit still.

25:49I mean, maybe we shouldn't be surprised by that. After all that traveling, he can't just be done with it. He needs to do something. I'm absolutely not surprised. I'm not surprised either. So he continues on his travels. He travels inland. He meets another queen, Kallidoki, and he gets married and has a son. All that time where he was pining to get back to Penelope, straight away had a son. With someone else. Good, good. He then learns that Penelope is pregnant. She actually has a son who's his as well. And then he finds out he's got a third son. Circe has had a son all those years ago. And that

26:21son is Teleganus. And Teleganus means a sort of far away born. And this young man sets off to Ithaca to find Odysseus. And Odysseus has since gone back to Penelope, by the way. And so he arrives and he carries with him a barb of a stingray as a weapon. And he approaches land. And there's a kind of a bit of a tussle, more than a bit, a proper tussle between Odysseus and the Ithacans and this new stranger arriving. And accidentally, the son kills Odysseus. So

26:58Odysseus is killed by his own son by Circe, using a stingray barb. Quite bizarre, but it doesn't end there. Circe then comes back into the picture. She decides to take Odysseus off to the Isle, it's called the Isles of the Blessed, is where they took heroes, almost so they could be immortal. And then, even more bizarre, Penelope decided to marry Teleganus, this son. Right. And Telemachus, her son, married Circe.

27:31This is starting to feel, not literally, but thematically incestuous. Yeah. It's like fan fiction at its worst. So the Odyssey may not be a domestic epic, but the Telegany, maybe? Yeah. It's the EastEnders of the epic cycle, for sure. That is my favourite interpretation of the description of anything I think I've ever heard. I love that. That's an incredible epilogue to the story of Odysseus. Why do you think we don't have these books?

28:01It's, I mean, I would say they prove to be less popular. I mean, they seem to have been performed. We know that there was a group of poets calling themselves the Children of Home or the Sons of Home, the Hermeridae, performing on the island of Chios since the 6th century BC. And I think they were very much performing probably a whole range of these poems. But they just didn't make the cut. I mean, I think the Iliad and the Odyssey are so perfect as works of literature. And I think that was recognised from early on.

28:33And there was a real effort to write them down as soon as writing came into being. So it seems quite like these other poems just filtered out by the time that writing was really being sort of put into operation in Greece. We should talk about the kind of like the ongoing cultural relevance and interpretations around the Odyssey. And, you know, we've talked very much about how the Greeks thought Hymer as real. And we've seen how many elements of the Greeks at that time, their kind of culture was imprinted into the Odyssey. When we get into the centuries after, so kind of classical

29:05Greece, how is the Odyssey viewed by them? The Odyssey is viewed as a really, really important work. I mean, it has a gravity to it, even in ancient times. So the fact that it's being performed at religious festivals, it's being preserved, it's being spoken about. So 6th century, 5th century BC, it's really very much seen to be a crowning achievement of the Greeks already by that point. And that just continues all the way through ancient Greece. So Alexander the Great, for example, he had, he was given a copy of the Iliad rather than the Odyssey by his tutor Aristotle, and

29:39he slept with it under his pillow. And that's centuries later. So that just shows you. So he's using that kind of like a guidebook to how to be a warrior rather than Schliemann's how to find an ancient city. Exactly. And I mean, the Odyssey and the Iliad together, they are the canonical texts of the Greek world. Practically nothing that's written after them fails to refer back to them in some way. And so did you really shape classical Greek culture as they go on? Completely. They are seen to be like the Bible of the ancient Greek world. And I don't mean

30:10that from a sense of belief wholly, although there is that aspect. I mean from the fact that literature owes its beginning to the Iliad and the Odyssey. So everything is either a response to it or kind of response against what's written and an attempt to move on from Homer. So there's this constant thread you can trace of Homer all the way through literature, beyond Greece through into the Roman Empire as well. One thing you mentioned to me earlier, which I must bring into the conversation now, is

30:41that there's also, we take the Odyssey and the Iliad as being like they're having a long tail coming from them, but they've also got influence coming into them. Yes, they do. Yes. I mean, I think it's really important we acknowledge the fact that, I mean, these are the earliest works in the Western world that we have, but actually they're really, really indebted to works from the East as well, the ancient Near East. So in particular, the Epic of Gilgamesh, 12th century BC Mesopotamian epic. It's a brilliant tale. I mean, I recommend the Epic of Gilgamesh to anybody. And that's really a quest for eternal life by a central

31:15figure who has some characteristics which are shared in common with Odysseus. And certainly a lot of the gods in that poem are similar in terms of their characteristics to the gods in Homer as well. So there's a real debt to the ancient Near East. There's a real sort of idea that there are certain ideas which are quite common across several cultures, which are developing, some of them in tandem, some of them springing from one to the other, and actually tracing where something originated is sometimes quite difficult. But certainly the Epic of Gilgamesh is a major precursor

31:48to the Odyssey. You mentioned the Roman world there as well. What did they make of the poem? They adored it. They absolutely loved the Odyssey. It's really, really important to Latin literature. And what you then find is Virgil stepping forward and saying, well, I'm going to give the Roman people an equivalent in Latin. And he creates the Aeneid. And people usually see the Aeneid as half Iliad and half Odyssey. The first half is sort of more Odyssey-like. The second half is more Iliad-like.

32:19So they created that as their equivalent. It's their epic poem. So it's very much this idea that Homer lives on, but it's kind of changed in some way. And is that a sense that Virgil did that to give Rome its kind of founding mythos in the same way that the Greeks have the two Homeric poems? Exactly. Because he was literally connecting the Roman people and their genealogy, their lineage, to the survivors of the Trojan War. Because Aeneas, he's the one who sails away from Troy. He'd

32:54fought there. He has a band of refugees with them. And they all travel by boat and land in Italy. And the Roman people are descended from this group of travelers who've been fighting at Troy. So it's a heroic age group. So there's a complete continuity between the fiction of the poem and then the reality that people are living in. It's really interesting because when we talk about Odyssey, it's very much like, if you say I'm going on Odyssey, I'm going on a great adventure. I'm going outbound. Whereas Odysseus, he's coming home. It's kind of the opposite of me. But Aeneas feels like he's

33:25actually doing an Odyssey by which we mean it. That's really interesting, isn't it? Because I think we almost misuse that word, didn't we? Odyssey. Because it feels very, very different, as you say. One of them's going back and the other one's going forward. One thing I would love to get your perspective on as a classicist is all the versions of the Odyssey we talk about, they are translations. And I wonder how much the translator's interpretation of the text affects how much we take from the poem. A huge amount. A huge amount. So there have been so many translations of the Odyssey.

33:59I grew up reading Richmond Latimer. This is my version. And this is quite traditional. And I mean, it's not perfect. There are certain aspects of it which I think don't quite characterize the tone of episodes that it's describing. Emily Wilson's new one is very, very popular. And there's a whole generation who will get to know the Odyssey through that. And with translation, I think something that Emily Wilson's spoken about a lot with her translation is that in earlier translations, you find a lot of mistranslation. So when it comes to slavery or women, the word slave isn't always

34:33used when it's actually there in the Greek. You know, there's a lot of, and I will sometimes slip into this, maidservant, attendant, when we really, we mean slave. But because I think we're trying to, the translator was trying to create the image of a court, of a stately court, and trying to set it within that atmosphere, the word maidservant suddenly seems more appropriate because you have this kind of grand setting. Having slave there doesn't sound right. It doesn't, it kind of affects our image, you know, in our head. Do the various translations then start to

35:03give you the political and social mores of the translator's time? Because now we've got translations that are spanning decades and decades. Oh, totally. I mean, I think, you know, just to pick up on that slavery example, then I don't think people would have consistently picked up on all the vocabulary that's appropriate to describing slavery, even 20 years ago, because we weren't talking about it to the same degree as we are now. We are now a lot more sensitive to strata in society, to the right words, which are used to describe people from, I don't know,

35:35overseas. You wouldn't necessarily say foreigner, for example. You know, there are words which are imbued with meaning now, which they probably didn't have 50 years ago. So I think you very much carry that with you. And maybe someone reading some of the translations which are being created now, we think, oh, this is very careful. This person's being very careful to say the right thing. And is that true to the Greek? And so it encourages them to then go back to the Greek, which I think is really important. As much as the translation can be brilliant,

36:07if you can read the Greek or you have any way of accessing it and comparing it, even side by side, thinking this is, we have line references. You could then look up that word, you can actually get the Greek text up online, and you can click on the word. So even if you don't have a Greek dictionary, you can click on it and it will take you through to a Greek dictionary translation of it. And then you can see for yourself. And I think that's a really cool thing. We should talk about pop culture and the Odyssey. I owe you a debt of thanks because part of my researching for this has brought me back to something called Ulysses 31, which is just frankly incredible. I believe you know about this now because I said...

36:43Well, you mentioned it to me and I said, what on earth is that? But so I looked it up and I thought it's the most brilliant thing. So it's a 1980s. Do we call it anime? It's animated. I wouldn't call it anime. So top line is it's a French-Japanese animated cartoon of the Odyssey using the Roman name, Ulysses, in space. Yes. Daisy, I mean, what did you make of it when I said that to you? I mean, Odyssey in space, what's not like... I mean, what's not to like? I was genuinely surprised as to how accurate to the text this was.

37:20And I haven't watched all of this, I confess. I've saved some of this up because I need something to do in my evenings, you know. But I thought it was hilarious. I really, really liked it. It's so funny because it's very 80s, like it's in the escape of 80s, the kind of the graphical style, obviously the musical style, just everything about it. I loved it. But it's part of a tradition of interpretations of the Odyssey, which is now coming around with the new Christopher Nolan film. And I just wanted to get a sense from you of, you know, why we keep coming back to this in pop culture and why a poem composed approximately 2,800 years ago still kind of resonates with us.

37:59I think it's partly the age of it. We are fascinated with something that's so old. Being told it is the oldest or the second oldest, we think, okay, there must be something important about it for it to have survived so long. And because so many other people have turned back to it, we assume that it's due some kind of reverence. And I think it is. You know, we should be revering it as a text. We should be interrogating it as a text at the same time. And I think the fact that so many different interpretations have been given to these works, so many question marks remain about the composition, the power of the stories themselves.

38:36There are so many reasons just to keep coming back to it. And I think, I think this is why people are just drawn back, because there's always something new you can do creatively with it, because there are so many kind of gaps and anomalies and questions. What are your thoughts on the Nolan film from what you've seen so far? I'm quietly optimistic. I'm really genuinely excited. I will be in the queue to see that film the moment it comes out. Yeah. So, I'm very, very excited. I think, yes, I mean, I had some questions about the first trailer where we saw the kind of Batman-esque costume.

39:12I thought that was very, very early in the trailer. I thought, oh, no, oh, no. But actually, having seen the second trailer, I feel a bit more excited by it. We're coming to the end of our journey with Odysseus and the Odyssey, but I wonder, as a kind of a way of closing off, let's assume Homer does exist. If you could ask them to clarify any one thing from the text, a translation, an inference, what would it be? Oh, it's so difficult. I mean, I was going to say, I'd like to know whether he intended us to believe all of Odysseus' stories about his travels.

But I'm also, because I'm a writer myself, I'm really curious, as do his process. I want to know how he did it. We know that there were these kind of circulating versions and these myths. So, if he was the original Homer, how did he sit down and distill those into a coherent narrative?

40:07And if you had to leave the listeners with one thought about the Odyssey or kind of take home about this poem, what would you say to them? I should say something really profound. And my feeling about the Odyssey is that it's the one poem you should read before you read the Iliad, actually, even though it's the sequel to the Iliad. I think it is the truest way of entering into the ancient world and understanding a little bit about it.

40:38And yes, it's a fictional story. You don't have to go in there believing every aspect of it or thinking it's reflective of real society. But I think it is the one piece of literature that is most likely to immerse you in the Greek world. And for me, that is a really, really important thing. That's such a lovely note to end on. And with that, we've come home. Odysseus' journey is complete, if you don't count the telegony. And so is ours. So, Daisy, thank you so much for this. This has been wonderful. Thank you. I've had a really good journey.

41:11We all love a journey. It's been a podisy. If you would like more content like this, you can find all of our podcast series and video series ad-free on the History Extra app.

41:25Thank you.