TRIGGERnometry - What The Odyssey Is Actually About

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00:00:51.120 Christopher Nolan, probably the most important director in the business,

00:00:54.500 has taken on a story which, historically, has been too big for Hollywood.

00:01:00.000 it resonates more deeply the older you get by it revealing that many things we're told in life

00:01:07.440 are a sham and a distraction and to keep us away from the things which deep down we know actually

00:01:13.760 matter and those are people and place life requires that quieter heroism of sacrifice

00:01:21.520 and suffering for whatever one takes to be the higher good i think what's really interesting

00:01:27.040 about Nolan taking on the Odyssey

00:01:28.960 is that it's the kind of film

00:01:31.220 Hollywood doesn't want to make.

00:01:33.420 The things I just described

00:01:34.620 are against the grain

00:01:36.100 of what not just Hollywood,

00:01:37.600 but a huge amount of cultural activity

00:01:39.320 has been doing.

00:01:43.760 This episode is sponsored

00:01:45.300 by our friends at Hillsdale College.

00:01:47.480 Right after this episode,

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00:01:56.780 Dr. David Butterfield, welcome back to Trigonometry.

00:01:59.340 It's a real joy to be back, gents.

00:02:00.940 Oh, it's great to have you back.

00:02:01.980 We only had you on recently to talk about ancient Greece in particular.

00:02:05.620 It was an amazing conversation.

00:02:07.040 It absolutely crushed.

00:02:08.020 People loved it.

00:02:09.460 And so we thought we'd bring you back on.

00:02:11.660 I don't know if you've heard, there's a movie about the Odyssey coming out.

00:02:15.380 It's based on a story, as I understand it,

00:02:17.440 that has been reimagined through a radical feminist lens,

00:02:20.200 which I'm sure has given it even more accuracy and intellectual and rigor and vigor. 0.98

00:02:25.780 as we'd expect. And so we actually thought it might be a good time to talk about The Odyssey

00:02:31.080 and tell that story. But first of all, based on what we've heard so far, some of the interpretations

00:02:37.700 of The Odyssey are quite interesting. What have you made of it? Well, first thing to say is indeed

00:02:42.440 Christopher Nolan, probably the most important director in the business with a huge catalogue

00:02:47.900 of fundamentally brilliant films behind him, has taken on a story which historically has been too

00:02:54.920 big for Hollywood. There's really only one attempt to make a film of the Odyssey way back in the

00:02:59.860 1950s. It's one of those sort of sand and sandals epics in Technicolor, but it's not a celebrated

00:03:08.520 film. And for the last 70 years, no one has had a go. Now Nolan has stepped forward and he's taken

00:03:14.740 on what probably is the most important story in the Western tradition. So it's a big deal

00:03:20.380 and it comes out soon but of course none of us have seen it we've only seen the trailers

00:03:25.960 so there's a big caveat in anything i would want to say about nolan's odyssey which is that

00:03:30.960 no one's seen it but from the trailers and from other other bits of information circulating about

00:03:36.960 it there certainly are some interesting things going on within it like what well for a start

00:03:43.360 we are attempting to tell the tale with historical realism.

00:03:50.420 This is a thing Nolan has been very clear about in his interviews,

00:03:54.500 about the level of research that he, his wife,

00:03:57.220 who actually is a trained classicist, and the team have gone into

00:04:01.060 in order to recreate what we might think a pure tale of fantasy.

00:04:05.620 But for the Greeks, it was meaningfully real.

00:04:07.940 It was a depiction of their own world in the second millennium BC,

00:04:12.140 in the late Bronze Age, their heroic ancestors who, yes, were able to engage with the gods and

00:04:18.780 with various monsters and so on, but they were seen as their forefathers. So there's a serious

00:04:24.880 attempt made in the film to depict what civilization might have looked like at that moment just before

00:04:31.840 it actually did collapse, the Bronze Age collapse in the 12th century. So that on the one hand is

00:04:37.740 really interesting but on the other there are some real problems when it comes to historical realism

00:04:42.380 if you're trying to tell a film about gods interacting with mortals that probably has not

00:04:48.480 happened that obviously in the realm of history so what we can gauge so far is that the film will

00:04:58.120 indeed focus on the one man at its heart Odysseus and will attempt possibly following the structure

00:05:05.240 of Homer's poem, possibly not, to chart his long 10-year struggle after the 10 years of the Trojan

00:05:12.880 War to get home to his island to the son he has never seen since his baby years and to the wife

00:05:22.340 who is currently beset by 108 men who want to be the man who will marry her and become the new king

00:05:29.080 of his home island Ithaca so that's the the structure as far as we can tell but the main

00:05:37.400 noise that has come out about the film to this point is not about its historical realism but

00:05:44.000 about its striking choices when it comes to casting and I presume you know something about

00:05:52.220 this yourselves but the one that's really got people talking which I think to some degree is

00:05:57.900 interesting but to some degrees not that interesting is about the most beautiful woman

00:06:02.720 in the history not just of the world but in the history of all world literature Helen. Helen as

00:06:09.660 you know was the queen of Sparta the wife of Menelaus and she gets abducted by the Trojan

00:06:19.300 prince Paris why it all goes back to a different female figure and FOMO the fear of missing out

00:06:30.580 because way back when there was a woman called Thetis a sea nymph so lived under the sea but

00:06:38.500 had divine powers and there was a prophecy that she would have a child who would be so powerful

00:06:43.680 that he would overthrow Zeus. So Zeus tries to downgrade the power of Thetis and her future child

00:06:52.040 by forcing this cenith to marry a mortal. She's not going to marry a deity and therefore the

00:06:58.640 offspring will be half divine and no particular threat to Zeus himself. So a forced marriage

00:07:05.580 happens and Thetis marries Peleus who was a hero on the Argo, Jason and the Argonauts getting the

00:07:12.820 golden fleece, so a man with good heroic pedigree, but still a man. They have a wedding, everyone's

00:07:19.780 invited, not just all mortals, but all deities, except one person doesn't make the list, and that

00:07:26.160 is Eris. Eris is a Greek word, means chaos, discord, strife, and so literally if Eris turned up at the

00:07:34.380 wedding party, there's going to be trouble. She learns that she's not on the invite list, and so

00:07:40.400 she takes a golden apple and inscribes it with one greek word kalister which means for the most

00:07:48.460 beautiful woman well three goddesses at the party i think this is literally addressed directly to

00:07:55.220 them there's hera wife and indeed sister let's not get into that obviously athena athena the

00:08:03.300 goddess of wisdom and of martial cunning, and Aphrodite, literally the sex symbol,

00:08:10.100 the embodiment of love. Well, they can't decide between them who actually is the most beautiful

00:08:15.480 woman. So to settle it, Zeus says, let's find some yokel. Let's go into the middle of the 0.89

00:08:22.240 countryside and find a shepherd and he can make the decision because I'm not making it

00:08:27.060 with my wife in the game. I'm not making that decision. So there is the shepherd called Paris.

00:08:33.300 who also happens to be a prince of Troy, but he's doing his shepherding work.

00:08:38.320 Maybe it's Duke of Edinburgh or something.

00:08:39.880 He's out there doing his thing.

00:08:43.060 And he is presented with the three goddesses.

00:08:46.480 Hera says, choose me, I'm the most powerful.

00:08:49.600 I'll make you the ruler of all of Europe and all of Asia,

00:08:52.260 which is basically almost all of the known world to the Greeks.

00:08:55.500 You'll be the most powerful man in the world.

00:08:58.400 Athena says, okay, that's not bad,

00:09:00.940 but I could give you the thing that really matters to humans.

00:09:03.780 I could make you the most intelligent man in the world.

00:09:07.560 And that would mean when it comes to the battlefield,

00:09:10.200 you would just outsmart everyone.

00:09:11.680 You would be the great hero.

00:09:13.780 As for Aphrodite, who comes last, she says,

00:09:16.460 well, I could just give you the most beautiful woman in the world.

00:09:20.680 And didn't take much deliberation.

00:09:22.680 Paris says, I'll choose that one, thanks.

00:09:26.420 Typical man.

00:09:27.140 And then the necessary has to happen, which means Helen, as I say, the most beautiful woman in the world, had to be taken from her husband and given to Paris as a prize.

00:09:39.820 And the tale is a bit ambiguous in different tellings, but Menelaus was away and Paris came over there, helped by Aphrodite and seduced and abducted Helen.

00:09:53.120 Why does that matter? Because her face is the face that launched a thousand ships.

00:09:59.780 The whole of the Trojan War, the whole subject of the Iliad, is about the Greeks not just trying to save their honor,

00:10:07.560 but trying to restore to her rightful place in Sparta the woman who was wrongly taken by a Trojan.

00:10:13.900 And so that whole sequence comes about from this troubled goddess Eris not being able to be at the party and the FOMO going loco.

00:10:23.120 so to cast Helen is tricky you need someone who credibly could be taken as one of the most

00:10:32.260 beautiful women of all time and none of us would want to make that call clearly it's a difficult

00:10:37.600 one to do but more troublingly Helen was born from an egg because her father was Zeus but in

00:10:46.200 the form of a swan and the swan and leader leda is the mother of helen zeus as swan got with leader

00:10:56.820 leader popped out an egg and out of the egg helen was born so where are you going to find someone

00:11:02.320 to cast with semi-divine semi-swan uh pedigree it's not going to be an easy one anyhow it's clear

00:11:10.220 from the trailers and what we know that the actress Lupita Nyong'o has been cast as Helen

00:11:16.280 and indeed as Helen's twin sister, Clytemnestra. We can come back to why she's interesting.

00:11:23.260 Lupita Nyong'o is of Kenyan extraction, sub-Saharan, and therefore clearly different from the majority

00:11:32.260 of the rest of the castings in the film. Most people in the film are white, they're mostly

00:11:37.740 American, but Helen in and among them is a pointedly different looking figure. Now, we could

00:11:45.760 say that's not that interesting. There is no realistic cast to call upon. And if the decision

00:11:54.720 is made that we'll have a black actor as Helen, so be it. And, you know, I've got a lot of sympathy 0.89

00:12:00.380 with that view. It's not that interesting. On the other hand, it has been taken by many people

00:12:05.700 to be a pointedly disruptive casting,

00:12:09.960 one that stands out in a way that perhaps it's not meant to.

00:12:13.340 For many people, it's not an issue of beauty

00:12:15.740 that stands out in the way that Helen might.

00:12:17.880 It's an issue of non-alignment

00:12:20.980 with the broadly white casting of the remainder.

00:12:24.780 Now, to be clear, we do not know precisely

00:12:27.900 what the heroes of the Odyssey looked like.

00:12:31.920 Nevertheless, for the Greeks who invented the tales, told them orally and then wrote them down once the alphabet arrived, they were their ancestors.

00:12:41.920 So broadly speaking, the poem is about people of a Mediterranean ethnicity.

00:12:47.920 The poem of Homer does not describe Helen in really any detail at all.

00:12:55.920 all we have the word kalepokamos which means pretty hair nice hair well that doesn't help us

00:13:02.640 but the one that's got a lot of attention is one of her epithets one of her standard adjectives

00:13:08.020 is lukolenos which means having white arms now if you're in a largely white society that's not

00:13:16.080 how you describe someone i wouldn't say oh do you know francis you know the guy with the white arms

00:13:21.280 It's not a natural way to describe someone.

00:13:24.000 So what that adjective probably means in effect, even though it's literally white-armed,

00:13:29.660 means a woman who kept her skin white and pale because she was of an aristocratic status

00:13:35.660 where she wasn't out working, wasn't getting tanned under the sun,

00:13:39.320 and therefore her arms were a sign of her high status.

00:13:43.020 That then takes us to the unsurprising fact that she was conceived of as someone,

00:13:47.620 broadly speaking white in a mediterranean context so in that sense it is a very striking casting

00:13:54.560 to go for she's a great actress as far as i can tell but it's made a lot of noise a very quick

00:14:02.580 question on that um in in the roman empire there would have been plenty of people from africa in

00:14:10.180 as part of it would that be fair it depends what you mean if you mean people from the continent we

00:14:14.860 call Africa. Certainly the North African coast was part of the Roman Empire. The Berber kind of

00:14:22.080 people are a much closer relation because the Phoenicians coming from modern Lebanon founded

00:14:29.640 colonies on what we now call North Africa and as such were broadly Mediterranean. Sub-Saharan as

00:14:36.840 you say these people were known of, tribes were known of and are occasionally described but they

00:14:43.280 were cut off from both Roman rule and indeed general Roman society. So black people do appear

00:14:49.960 in Roman accounts, but there's an element of novelty and difference to them. There isn't

00:14:56.200 conventional racism against non-white people in the Roman world. It's more pointing out aesthetic

00:15:05.500 differences rather than any kind of supremacy of whiteness. It's not a term used in the Roman

00:15:13.340 or indeed in the Greek world. They didn't talk about whites and non-whites. What the Greeks

00:15:16.900 talked about is us and the barbaroi, the blabbing non-Greeks. And you could be as white as could 1.00

00:15:23.560 be. It wouldn't matter. You're not Greek and therefore you're not good. And so the Greek 1.00

00:15:28.540 civilization preceding the Romans, I imagine there was even less contact with sub-Saharan

00:15:33.140 Africa at this point. Is that fair? Yeah, it would be. It would be the sort of thing that would

00:15:36.580 happen with far-ranging tradesmen or people journeying on some sort of mission or military

00:15:42.760 campaign. There would not be, I think I can say perfectly clearly, there would not be in the

00:15:48.800 Greek-speaking world regular interaction with sub-Saharan Africans at any point in the ancient

00:15:55.300 Greek world. And therefore, it would be quite inconceivable for the Queen of Sparta to be

00:15:59.260 a black woman i think yeah well it let's say for the sake of argument there was a queen of sparta

00:16:05.660 in the early 12th century bc that woman is definitely not black yes and if she were black

00:16:11.420 they might have mentioned it it would have been a more helpful adjective than a lucolinos to say um

00:16:17.420 she was black now it so happens that when where when homer's odyssey begins poseidon the god of

00:16:23.820 the sea, brother of Zeus, has headed deep into Africa to hang out with the Ethiopians, whose 0.82

00:16:31.900 ethnicity is quite hard to describe, but they were definitely dark skinned, black skinned.

00:16:36.460 And so there's an element of mixing real human geography with a sort of fantastic land where the

00:16:42.620 sun sets among the land of the Ethiopians. So it's not an unknown world, but it's not one that's

00:16:51.100 part of Greek society now. So let's focus on the story of the Odyssey, which is actually one of

00:16:58.260 my favourites. It doesn't matter how many times I hear it, I still think it's the greatest story

00:17:02.900 ever told. So let's start. I know the book, or the book, the poem starts in the middle of the

00:17:09.180 journey, but let's start at the beginning of Odysseus' journey chronologically. Where was he?

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00:17:47.480 he was in Troy so we will know plenty about and we'll talk about the two great Homeric poems

00:17:57.020 the Iliad and the Odyssey the Iliad comes first both in that its action is earlier it's about the

00:18:05.540 war not what happened after the war but probably as a composition it's the older the more more

00:18:10.760 complicated poem in several ways. The Iliad famously does not tell the most famous events

00:18:17.840 of the Trojan War. It doesn't talk about the Trojan horse and the fall of Troy. It doesn't

00:18:23.400 talk about the death of Achilles shot in his Achilles heel. Instead, it focuses specifically

00:18:29.260 on a character flaw in Achilles, which both makes him a hero and leads to tragic consequences.

00:18:38.100 That's his mareness, his wrath, his anger, which leads him to step away from the battlefield for a long time and thereby cause the death of many, many comrades, because without Achilles, they were in trouble.

00:18:51.800 So that's set in the 10th year of this 10 year war out in Troy, which in our terms is in northwest Turkey across the Aegean.

00:19:00.580 And then the Odyssey does not begin straight after the Iliad. In fact, it's in the seventh year of the 10-year wanderings of Odysseus that the action begins.

00:19:16.260 So where is he and how have we got here? He doesn't appear until book five. Books one to four are really important for some of the things we'll talk about.

00:19:25.600 they're about the baby who has become a boy and now has become a man but has no memory or

00:19:34.020 recollection of his father Odysseus because he was a babe in arms when duty called and Odysseus

00:19:41.360 had to leave his family. Odysseus didn't want to do that and he actually pretended to be mad

00:19:45.760 insane so that he would somehow avoid the call of war and he was going around doing mad things

00:19:53.380 like putting salt on his crops when the the team came to call on him and they tested him tested

00:19:59.540 his madness by putting the baby in front of a plow and just when it was about to be torn apart

00:20:06.260 by the the plowshare suddenly Odysseus snaps back into life and says okay it was just a stunt I'll

00:20:11.780 go so that boy called Telemachus whose Greek name means the guy far from battle has become a man

00:20:20.020 without a father figure in the house and in those four early books he's trying to become a man

00:20:26.500 without a clear model and he goes on a bit of a tour meet some meet some old warriors and tries

00:20:31.860 to get a sense of how he can assert authority over all of these suitors who were eating him

00:20:36.500 out of house and home as for Odysseus in that seventh year of his wanderings he's trapped by

00:20:44.500 a sex-mad goddess. It's a tough gig. He's trapped on the island of Ogygia. My heart bleeds for him.

00:20:51.140 Heart bleeds for him. But he is wracked with one of the great pains of all, nostalgia.

00:20:58.260 He has algos, pain, for his nostos. Nostos is the most important word in the Odyssey.

00:21:04.900 It is the journey home, the return back to where you belong, both in terms of place

00:21:11.460 but also in terms of people. That is the one thing motivating Odysseus in his struggles.

00:21:17.060 But this goddess, Calypso, whose name means the Concealer, has managed to successfully hide

00:21:23.620 Odysseus on his own on this island and every day sleeps with him. Every morning he heads down to

00:21:29.940 the beach and just cries all day. That's what we're told about the man. It looks as though

00:21:35.860 the hero Odysseus, this clever figure who invented the Trojan horse and therefore

00:21:39.860 took down Troy, is going to die in complete unknowable anonymity. His name means nothing,

00:21:49.860 no one's visiting him, no one knows where he is, and he stands for nothing.

00:21:55.200 But Athena, the goddess up in the clouds, has a very soft spot for Odysseus. She regards him

00:22:03.280 as a mortal version of her, someone who's really got the clever and the cunning to get out of

00:22:09.240 difficult situations so Athena begs that a message be sent from the gods by Hermes to say

00:22:17.780 Calypso enough is enough you've had your seven years with the man let him go and he is allowed

00:22:22.940 to go and in his wanderings thereafter we learn about what happened before and what happened

00:22:29.820 after he got there and he's been through some pretty wild adventures so let's talk about these

00:22:36.660 adventures of course uh the one that everybody knows the most famous one is the son of poseidon

00:22:43.620 the cyclops exactly the cyclops are a race and one of them called polyphemus is at the heart of this

00:22:52.500 story in in in book nine the cyclopes are odd not because they're massive giants not because

00:22:58.700 they've only got one big eye in the middle of their head nor indeed because they eat humans

00:23:03.800 and in that sense sort of cannibalistic.

00:23:06.980 They're odd because they stand as a rejection

00:23:09.840 of everything the Greeks thinks makes a civilization. 0.96

00:23:13.940 When I was last on, we talked about some of the terms

00:23:16.060 that would allow you to define something as a civilization or not.

00:23:21.340 Well, the Cyclopes on their island are set up as a sort of anti-civilization.

00:23:25.860 They don't meet one another and talk about politics.

00:23:29.500 They don't set legal codes.

00:23:31.100 They don't have any sort of real code of honor among them. 0.98

00:23:34.440 They live as savage individuals, which means they will not respect the one thing that in the Greek world is the most important. 0.69

00:23:44.600 Xenia. Xenia means being a good host.

00:23:50.240 And this still exists in the Greek world.

00:23:51.920 You know, we've been in Greece together.

00:23:53.040 But if you appear as a stranger at a Greek's home, you will be given food, drink, and it may be even bored. 0.99

00:24:02.920 You may be able to stay the night because that's the right thing to do.

00:24:06.820 And in ancient Greece, this was so important.

00:24:09.400 It was a sacred duty that you offer this help to someone even before you find out who they are.

00:24:15.360 And Xenia, the act of good hospitality, is completely trashed when Odysseus and his crew

00:24:24.480 land on the island of the Cyclopes.

00:24:27.700 But it's doubly trashed.

00:24:29.680 It's not just Polyphemus who abuses his writer's host by eating six of Odysseus's crew, then

00:24:37.500 rolling a big boulder in front of his cave and trapping them forever.

00:24:41.540 It's also abused in turn by Odysseus.

00:24:44.860 on arriving in Polyphemus' cave, first thing he does is says, okay, what can I nick? And there's

00:24:50.640 loads of wheels of cheese, and the crew are quite into their cheese by this point. And they steal

00:24:56.400 before they encounter the host. So there's a breakdown on both sides of what it means to be

00:25:02.820 a proper Greek. Anyway, you will know the tale. Our viewers will know the tale too. But to put a 0.60

00:25:10.340 story short, with the boulder rolled in front of the cave, they can't kill Polyphemus. The boulder

00:25:19.780 is so large that all of the men could not move it. They can only get out if Polyphemus himself

00:25:27.940 somehow removes it. But Polyphemus has said he's going to eat them all, and that's that.

00:25:33.380 So Odysseus uses his cunning and blinds that single eye of Polyphemus as he sleeps.

00:25:41.220 He's been made drunk by this powerful wine and he's blinded by a huge stake.

00:25:48.660 Then Odysseus and his crew get to the sheep which are at the back of the cave

00:25:54.340 and they hang from the bottom of the sheep and as he counts them out and puts them out to pasture

00:25:59.780 wondering what on earth's happened in his blinded state the men are able to be free now that should

00:26:05.260 be the end of the story a clever trick to get out of pretty hot water there's one thing you've

00:26:10.340 missed no man of course yes exactly that and and there's there's two levels to that thank you

00:26:15.420 francis so even though as i said the cycle peas are sort of pretty individualistic they don't

00:26:21.340 gather together in the way the greeks think we should if there's a major problem they might

00:26:26.760 shout alarm and they might come and help each other. Well, one of the things you are meant to

00:26:31.580 do as a good host and as a good guest is to give your name, to give your identity. That's the most

00:26:37.040 important thing about you. And for whatever reason, doubtless cunning, Odysseus does not give that

00:26:43.260 name. He gives a name that sounds similar, namely Udeis, not Odysseus, but Udeis. But that means

00:26:51.140 nobody no man so what happens when polyphemus learns of this and then is attacked is he cries

00:26:59.080 aloud no one is harming me no one is trying to kill me and the rest of the cyclopes think okay

00:27:07.420 thanks for sharing we'll be on our way then the flip side to that is that in a sense

00:27:15.360 Odysseus in that moment was acting like a nobody by not following the code of hospitality and

00:27:23.300 standing up as the man he's meant to be he was actually losing the real identity of the hero

00:27:29.080 but hubris in Greek tragedy will always take you down that arrogance that makes you feel you a

00:27:36.840 little better than even the gods perhaps does become the downfall of Odysseus and kills a great

00:27:44.600 great number of his men. Why? Because once they've got off the island, they're sailing away.

00:27:51.800 Odysseus calls back to the enraged Polyphemus on land. Now I'll tell you, it's Odysseus who did

00:27:58.760 this. Odysseus, son of Laertes from Ithaca, I'm the guy, and sort of raises two fingers at him.

00:28:05.320 Well, as you said, Polyphemus is the son of Poseidon, and Poseidon controls the sea.

00:28:14.020 So Polyphemus now has the one thing he needed to make a curse, the actual name of Odysseus.

00:28:20.120 And the curse is sent up to the god of the sea, or down to him, wherever he is at the time.

00:28:25.780 And he promises that he will cause untold troubles and death on the sea for Odysseus and his crew.

00:28:33.460 And for the rest of the narrative, Poseidon kills Odysseus' men because Odysseus couldn't keep his mouth shut and wanted to take the credit.

00:28:42.880 And that's a fascinating thing about Odysseus, is that his greatest strength is his greatest weakness.

00:28:51.120 And that's it's and the way that you see it's a very modern hero, isn't he, in many ways, because he's not like Achilles.

00:28:58.160 He doesn't have this incredible strength and power or like Heracles, who was a demigod.

00:29:03.460 This was somebody who's very much in the realm of the mortal. 0.94

00:29:07.500 That's right. And in the Greek's mind, he's more Greek in the sense that not all of us are set out to be heroic warriors whose martial valour will simply win the day by force.

00:29:19.700 Instead for the Greeks, it's about words, about how you use your brain to solve a situation.

00:29:27.000 And that, as you rightly say, is the great virtue of Odysseus.

00:29:30.920 He is Polomertes, a guy with all of the ideas. 0.59

00:29:34.940 He's Polomercanos, the guy with all of the tricks.

00:29:38.220 He's Polothropos, a guy who can turn things in all sorts of different ways.

00:29:42.500 He's Polophron, he's got loads of mental cleverness working within him.

00:29:48.500 But fundamentally, that is how the Greeks wanted to engage with the world around them.

00:29:54.520 That is their challenge, as we mentioned when we talked about philosophy,

00:29:58.620 to impose order and sense on a world that seems chaotic.

00:30:04.400 So in a real sense, the Odyssey moves on from the Iliad.

00:30:07.520 The Iliad is about the tragedies of the battlefield

00:30:10.200 and when human force causes damage to those around you

00:30:14.980 in ways you can't predict.

00:30:17.260 The Odyssey is about two things.

00:30:20.060 It's about the power of the mind over the body

00:30:23.500 And it's about the all-important draw of those two things that give life meaning, people and place.

00:30:34.000 Odysseus realises, as Achilles realised only once he had died, the heroic code of the Iliad,

00:30:41.440 the heroic Bronze Age code of what the good life and the good death look like, is hollow.

00:30:48.320 There's this concept of the kalos thanatos, the beautiful death. 0.78

00:30:51.560 well what's that well for a start it's death so it's the end of your life and secondly it's dying 0.98

00:30:57.540 on the battlefield in the middle of a killing spree why is that good because you will win

00:31:03.840 kleos and kleos literally means being talked about people will hear of that moment but you 0.81

00:31:10.920 have to die to win that which creates this catch-22 almost paradox which is the best thing

00:31:17.920 a man fighting a war to defend his family can do is to die in that war and not return to the family

00:31:25.620 he was fighting for. One of the most moving scenes in Homer's Odyssey, which is such a powerful poem

00:31:33.000 in all manner of ways, is when Odysseus confronts the ghost of Achilles in the underworld and

00:31:42.220 Achilles says you've just been praising me about being you know a great fighter saying I'm a great

00:31:48.620 fighter now down in the underworld well I'll tell you this I would rather be the lowest level

00:31:55.180 serf serving as a slave on the poorest estate possible than be the king of the whole of Hades

00:32:03.340 it means nothing to have lost your life you need to live and thrive and the reason that's so

00:32:10.860 resonant for Achilles is his mother told him early on in the Iliad, he had a choice. Very

00:32:17.820 unusual that a Greek hero can have any say over their fate. It's all predetermined. He has a 1.00

00:32:24.240 choice. There's a high road and a low road. He either will die young on the battlefield as the

00:32:30.280 greatest warrior of all time, but he'll die. Or he can retreat from the battlefield, go home and

00:32:38.180 live a long and happy life with the family he will build. Those are his options. And it looks

00:32:44.340 as though he's going to take the latter option at a stage in the Iliad. But only when his closest

00:32:49.880 companion, possible lover, Patroclus, is killed on the battlefield is he brought back in to the

00:32:57.300 life of the warrior and does indeed die the young death foretold of him. He now says to Odysseus,

00:33:04.400 it was a sham. I shouldn't have followed my own kleos, my own lust for glory. I should have headed

00:33:11.020 home and done what really matters in life. And Odysseus is in the same place. The goddess,

00:33:17.580 the sex goddess on the island for seven years is no good. He has been robbed of being a father.

00:33:24.120 He's been robbed of the childhood of his son. And the best he can do is to try and salvage something

00:33:30.560 with the little time that remains. And when they meet one of the most beautiful and poignant

00:33:36.940 similes in the whole of the poem is told, Telemachus finally realizes that the dad he couldn't

00:33:43.560 remember is back after 20 years of toil. They embrace and they start wailing, but their wailing,

00:33:51.840 their uncontrollable grief is described as the wailing that ospreys or vultures make when as

00:33:59.520 parents they see that their chicks have been stolen by humans before they could fly so the

00:34:06.260 reuniting of son and father is treated like a pair of parents who've lost the one thing they

00:34:14.080 were meant to do in the world namely have a childhood emerge from them it's extremely poignant

00:34:19.840 you can spend three hours in a cinema watching christopher nolan's movie adaptation of the

00:34:25.880 Odyssey. Or you can spend that same three hours understanding the actual poem for free, guided by

00:34:31.900 a Hillsdale College professor. Hillsdale College runs free online courses on the books that shape

00:34:37.180 the Western tradition, taught by their own faculty using the same materials their students study on

00:34:42.540 campus. The newest course covers Homer's The Odyssey. Professor Benedict Whalen walks you

00:34:47.860 through it. Courage, loyalty, leadership, temptation, family, and what it actually means to go home.

00:34:53.180 It has held an audience for close to 3,000 years.

00:34:56.540 This doesn't happen by accident.

00:34:58.200 For me, the scene that changed how I read the whole thing is Calypso offering Odysseus

00:35:02.720 immortality if he stays with her and he turns it down.

00:35:06.400 He picks a mortal life, an aging wife, a home that might not even want him back anymore.

00:35:12.020 That's the entire argument of the book in one scene.

00:35:15.000 There are more than 40 of these courses and I couldn't recommend them more highly.

00:35:18.840 Go to hillsdale.edu slash trigger to enroll.

00:35:22.240 it's totally free read the classics study the west that's hillsdale.edu slash trigger

00:35:30.160 that's very powerful and david just returning to the chronology how does uh do we know in the

00:35:39.700 odyssey how uh he ends up captured by calypso the sex goddess we do well take us from the trojan

00:35:48.240 war through to that moment. Of course. So Troy falls. The Trojans lose. One of the Trojans

00:35:55.240 ends up heading over to Italy and founds the Roman race. So the Romans believed they were

00:36:00.220 from the Trojans. But as for the Greeks, they've won. They get their booty, which is both material 0.99

00:36:07.500 wealth and people, concubines. They head back home to the different parts of Greece or the 0.98

00:36:18.220 for Odysseus and his crew of maybe 500, 600 men in the 12 ships he brought, things go wrong pretty

00:36:26.320 early. They stop at a place where the Ciconians live. They instantly raid the place, steal the 1.00

00:36:34.980 women, steal the property, and they actually lose a battle. So the first thing they do is basically

00:36:41.380 abuse another part of the ancient world they're then cast onto a different island and there they 0.97

00:36:50.260 meet huge giants who are cannibalistic they're the lystragonians and that's just a straightforward

00:36:58.100 disaster and they flee but the really interesting place they go to in these early wanderings

00:37:04.420 is the place of the lotus eaters, the Lohotophagoi.

00:37:09.600 And this is a community which is found.

00:37:12.600 There's a certain flower you can eat.

00:37:15.100 And if you eat the flower, you lose all longing

00:37:18.660 for the things that gave your life meaning.

00:37:21.800 You lose a longing for your true home, for your family.

00:37:25.880 You just tap out.

00:37:27.460 And it's a land of addicts who've given up

00:37:30.500 on what orientated their life.

00:37:33.160 And Odysseus sees this.

00:37:34.120 Although some of his men become lost to this life, he sees that there's a dark addiction at work here and his crew need to be re-motivated by returning to what ultimately orientates you in life, namely family and homeland.

00:37:50.780 so they keep going onwards they fall in with a witch called Circe who turns many of the men

00:37:59.420 into pigs and is attempting the same trick with Odysseus but he manages to dodge it

00:38:05.480 and he's able to escape from that island after a year but all the time Odysseus's crew are dying

00:38:16.160 in different ways. We mentioned that six are lost on the island of the Cyclopes.

00:38:22.600 But because of that cursing of Poseidon, again and again, they fall into various lethal and

00:38:30.280 bizarre deaths. Circe takes up one year of their time, but things meaningfully change

00:38:37.840 for Odysseus when they reach the land of the sun god Helios. Helios as the sun sees everything

00:38:51.000 and on his island he's got his favorite cattle. He loves those cows okay and there's a very simple

00:38:58.180 rule just don't mess with the cows. The winds are against Odysseus and his crew at this time

00:39:04.660 and they spend a month on the island and after a month some of the crew crack they need beef

00:39:10.620 so they kill some of his cattle and Helios is so outraged by this that he calls on Poseidon to

00:39:19.520 turn up the pain for Odysseus and his crew and every single man dies except Odysseus

00:39:27.920 they die in a shipwreck and Odysseus is on his own floating around as a single figure

00:39:33.240 and he washes up on the island of Calypso who because there isn't a crew to reorientate and

00:39:41.700 motivate Odysseus he's a lost man on that island he is a nobody again that takes us to the point

00:39:48.080 where the narrative begins year seven Athena says come on let's get him off there and he builds a

00:39:53.880 raft and heads to another land and this is the this is the really interesting episode less

00:40:01.040 fantastic, but it's the really important one. He lands on an island where a people called the

00:40:06.700 Phaeacians live, and they are perfect. They have a king and a queen who run a very Greek-like,

00:40:15.660 idyllic, utopian landscape. Everything is peaceful. They have the most beautiful daughter,

00:40:22.380 Nausicaa, who's ready for marriage, and she just wants to marry someone with kingly bearing. Well,

00:40:28.260 here's Odysseus turning up, who, despite his long-suffering wanderings, is a king, and he

00:40:34.760 would be a perfectly suitable husband. Everyone on the island is willing this to happen. It would be

00:40:41.260 perfect. Odysseus rejects it. He says, even though you are more beautiful than anyone I could

00:40:51.420 encounter, including my own wife, he said the same to Calypso, by the way, he wanted to marry him,

00:40:55.900 I am destined to be returned and restored to my homeland there is no other option for me

00:41:04.260 so again it's it's it's got a real moral weight to it this idea that even if circumstances be

00:41:13.080 they wealth or be they you know a particular change in your circumstances seem to on paper

00:41:19.720 give you everything you need. It's not worth the weight of anything if you cut your ties

00:41:28.380 to the people and the places that give you your real identity, not just in the Greek world,

00:41:33.780 but in our world. And where does he go from there? From there? Well, so he tells his tales to the

00:41:42.860 Phaeacians, who are probably the Phoenicians in disguise, a very interesting people, who introduced

00:41:47.940 the alphabet to the Greeks, among other things. He tells his tales of how he's got to that point,

00:41:53.380 but fundamentally they accept his refusal of marriage and they, the best seamen in the world,

00:42:00.820 take him back to Ithaca. And that's where the second half of the poem begins. He gets home,

00:42:06.500 but the last thing he can do is head home and say, hey guys, I'm Odysseus, I'm back.

00:42:11.620 Why? Because there are 108 men whose whole identity is predicated on being the new Odysseus.

00:42:20.740 The real Odysseus is dead. No one's seen him for 20 years. No one's heard tell of him. He must be

00:42:25.380 gone. All of these men didn't go to Troy. They're either the sons of warriors who went to Troy,

00:42:35.140 and therefore they've grown up without credible male role models. Or perhaps worse, they're people

00:42:41.860 who managed to dodge the draft and didn't head to Troy at all. They're true cowards. 1.00

00:42:47.700 And so the nature of these men, and they're portrayed in a really no-nonsense fashion, 0.99

00:42:52.740 is that these are anti-men. These aren't real men. They're entitled, arrogant folk who believe

00:43:00.420 that they've got status and purpose in the world when they've done nothing. They've done nothing 0.79

00:43:04.580 to earn it and they've never seen true men in action but all of them are queued up in the hope

00:43:10.260 that they will somehow win the hand of Penelope and be gifted wealth and comfort Odysseus is a

00:43:18.500 decent warrior but as someone who's been away for 20 years he's not single-handedly going to take

00:43:23.380 down 108 men so what he does over the last half of this this poem the last 12 books it's in 24 books

00:43:30.820 in the form we have it is strategize as to how he can slowly bring on side

00:43:37.940 old faithful friends who've never let him down this includes his dog argos and argos is in a

00:43:45.460 terrible way he's mangy sleeping on big pile of dung on his last legs but he recognizes the true

00:43:54.820 Odysseus, and is so overcome with joy, with dog joy, he dies. He dies in the moment.

00:44:02.260 That's so Greek. He dies in the moment. Exactly. That's his beautiful death. 1.00

00:44:10.420 But it's strategically helpful, but the last thing Odysseus would want in disguise is a dog

00:44:15.220 trotting after him who senses that something's up. So he turns to the lowest people in the

00:44:22.100 social hierarchy. He turns to the swine herd, the pig herd, Eumaeus, the cow herd, Philoetius,

00:44:28.500 and eventually he brings his son in. And with the help of Athena, the four of them ultimately

00:44:36.580 slaughter everyone. Now Odysseus was told by Tiresias, the great prophet, when he went down

00:44:42.500 to the underworld, not only that this needs to be done, but that it will happen. You've got to get

00:44:46.980 home you need to kill them all he kills 12 women which is a more controversial part of it he kills 1.00

00:44:52.760 12 women who've been sleeping with the suitors has them all hanged then he says that's not enough 1.00

00:44:58.880 all the families of the suitors are gonna you know create a longer civil war so he goes and 0.99

00:45:04.520 kills all of them and then athena says okay stop that's it let's now have peace and that is the end

00:45:11.340 of the poem can we just want because we missed out uh one of my favorite scenes which was with

00:45:17.100 the bow of course so the person i've said almost nothing about but is the other half of the poem

00:45:25.420 who needs to be remembered when reading almost any line is penelope penelope the wife of odysseus

00:45:34.140 the queen of Ithaca. She has no idea what has happened to Odysseus. She knows the Trojan War

00:45:41.380 is over. She knows that that took 10 years. But where's the husband? Literally everyone else

00:45:47.360 is either dead or they've got back. Any figure you can name in the Iliad, one of those things

00:45:53.540 has happened. They're at home and they're happy or they're not because they're dead.

00:45:57.160 different sailors different tradesmen pass through the palace and they tell her tales they lie to her

00:46:04.900 in order to get gifts from her they make up stories about Odysseus and she's basically given

00:46:10.060 up hope but not entirely she still has pistis she has faith that Odysseus lives and so she's been 0.96

00:46:18.600 trying to hold off these 108 bastards for uh for best part of a decade by various tricks 0.97

00:46:25.580 her main trick was said okay I will marry one of you when I finish this burial shroud I'm weaving 1.00

00:46:32.720 women in the Greek world if they were elite women the main thing they did domestically was weaving 0.98

00:46:39.400 and once that's finished promise I'll marry one of you so she spends her day weaving but every night

00:46:45.420 she unpicks it and removes that progress and delays indefinitely but the suitors now know this

00:46:52.220 they've learned the trick and they're getting very heavy-handed that marriage has to happen.

00:46:57.840 So Penelope, and it's very ambiguous what she's up to, says, okay, yeah, it's over. I need to

00:47:04.240 marry one of you. So let's set up a contest. We're going to have 12 axe heads in a row and 1.00

00:47:12.260 there's a hole on the axe heads. It's debated about quite what the hole looks like. And anyone

00:47:16.780 who can string my former husband's bow and shoot an arrow through all 12 axe heads, they win me.

00:47:25.100 They will be king and rightful ruler of Ithaca. Telemachus will have to leave because he'll be 0.90

00:47:30.780 a nobody. He won't be inheriting the kingdom and everyone else will have to get back to their 1.00

00:47:35.960 lives. So it looks as though the one thing Odysseus needs, restoration to his family,

00:47:41.320 is about to be lost well very cunningly of course this being Odysseus he is able as a beggar he's

00:47:50.480 dressed as a beggar so as not to arouse suspicion he's able to persuade the suitors who don't think

00:47:55.660 much of him that he could at least have a go none of them have been able to string the bow they

00:47:59.920 weren't strong enough only one guy was able to do it and that was Telemachus but he stopped by

00:48:06.680 odysseus from doing it and everyone else gives up for the day i say we'll try again tomorrow lads

00:48:12.720 too too strong a bow odysseus has a go instantly strings it we're told he strings it with the

00:48:19.500 same ease that someone can pluck the lyre that's homer the poet plucking the lyre as he tells us

00:48:24.900 that and having strung the bow shoots it through the axes and then just starts slaughtering everyone

00:48:31.460 so he's armed and dangerous and ready to go and the threat disappears by virtue of complete

00:48:39.160 dispatch of all 108 suitors and let's i love the story and you told it beautifully and every time

00:48:48.060 i hear the story i get utterly enraptured and when i used to teach it to my kids didn't matter

00:48:52.900 where the kids were from they love the story as well it's a very happy ending yeah exactly

00:48:57.600 It's revenge and that appeals to me. Now, let's focus on Homer because he seems to me to be quite

00:49:06.700 similar to Shakespeare. He created this amazing work of literature, but nobody knows if he wrote

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00:50:41.740 Brilliant question and so important. So the ancient Greeks knew about the same as us

00:50:48.260 about this thing we call Homer, i.e. almost nothing.

00:50:53.140 What existed was a very complex poetic tradition of song.

00:50:59.280 In the evening, you'd get round the fire, have a few drinks,

00:51:02.720 and some skilled musician would chant or sing a song

00:51:06.840 in this very complicated, metrical form,

00:51:09.700 which would tell a tale of the great figures of the past,

00:51:12.860 the heroes that we've learned about since we were yea high.

00:51:16.280 That is an oral tradition. Why? Because the Greeks lost writing. They had the technology

00:51:25.020 of writing in the second millennium BC, but the Bronze Age collapse caused them to lose

00:51:31.960 that very skill. So there is a Greek Dark Ages in the 11th, 10th, 9th, 8th centuries. 0.73

00:51:38.920 Nobody can write, so they've forgotten how to. In the 8th century, the Phoenicians reintroduce 1.00

00:51:44.780 an alphabet to the Greek world and the Greeks instantly take it up. That is when these oral 0.99

00:51:52.120 poems, which were told over a few hours each evening, take a written form. The name Homer

00:51:58.900 appears at that time. Who was he? He probably was a person. He probably was a very successful

00:52:04.740 performer, man in demand on the circuit. But crucially, he will have inherited almost all

00:52:11.900 the language, almost all the phraseology, and certainly almost all of the tales that are tied

00:52:17.620 to his name now. But maybe he had a way of framing and creating this really complex narrative pair

00:52:25.600 of poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in a way that was so successful and so powerful that they made

00:52:31.500 it into writing. Those were the ones to pause in time, to memorialize in a fixed form in writing.

00:52:38.360 I believe Homer existed. I believe he was from the Ionian part of Greece, so probably the eastern

00:52:45.940 side of the Aegean, the west coast of Turkey, on an island or on the mainland there. He probably

00:52:51.760 lived in the 9th or 8th centuries BC. He was a single genius, but drawing on a tradition that

00:52:59.640 was so old, we can't even say how old it was. It was at least 500 years old and could well be over

00:53:06.600 a thousand years old. Allegedly he was blind, but there's a poet inside the Homeric ethics

00:53:15.120 who's a bard and is blind, and that may be the reason for that. It may be an inference the wrong

00:53:20.720 way round. Not blind Homer putting in a blind poet to refer to him, but someone assuming Homer

00:53:26.540 was blind because the bard he describes was blind. Could it have also been in Greek mythology when

00:53:32.120 people are blind they have vision exactly yes that is really well put so two things to say there

00:53:38.900 francis the first is that there is an extremely intimate connection for the greeks between vision

00:53:44.120 and knowledge the very word i know in greek is oida but that literally means i have seen

00:53:51.260 you find knowledge empirically through the senses if you've experienced something you know it in a

00:53:58.080 meaningful way. It's not an intellectually abstract thing. You experience it and know.

00:54:03.480 But there's also a version of seeing beyond. And you see beyond by getting rid of the distraction

00:54:09.180 of your mortal vision. And it's the blind who have the ability to see beyond. So Tiresias,

00:54:15.600 whom I've already mentioned, that great prophet who could see the future, he was blind. Ironically,

00:54:22.800 Oedipus, the man who unwittingly kills his father and has children with his mother,

00:54:29.480 blinds himself on discovery because he thought he knew it all.

00:54:34.000 He thought he saw it all and could understand the situation.

00:54:37.260 He knew nothing.

00:54:38.680 And it's a sign of his transcendent knowledge that he blinds himself

00:54:43.360 and takes away that distracting vision which got in the way rather than liberated him.

00:54:49.300 So you are right.

00:54:50.020 It fits for Homer, who begins the poem by saying,

00:54:53.340 Andra moi ene per musa, polotropon, et cetera.

00:54:57.460 Sing to me muse, this deity, sing through me

00:55:02.940 of this polotropos aner, this man of many twists and turns.

00:55:08.100 So bards were thought to have a divine connection. 0.99

00:55:11.980 Divine song was meant to transmit through them. 1.00

00:55:14.900 And you're right that a blindness suggested

00:55:17.580 an ability to see beyond.

00:55:20.020 And David, why is it that this still resonates?

00:55:23.400 And the reason I ask that question is I've literally taught the Odyssey to kids all over London.

00:55:31.220 And it doesn't matter where the child comes from.

00:55:33.720 It really doesn't. 0.52

00:55:34.520 First generation immigrants, working class boys, kids from very affluent backgrounds.

00:55:39.880 The moment you tell the story of the Odyssey, they're hooked.

00:55:43.580 Yeah, I think it works on several levels.

00:55:46.120 And like all great literature, it resonates with you differently at different stages in your life.

00:55:51.900 No question the entry point that excites the young are the weird and wonderful monsters of The Wanderings of Odysseus.

00:55:59.120 It's a fantastic series of episodes which have inspired literature ever since.

00:56:05.880 but it resonates more deeply the older you get by it revealing that many things we're told in life

00:56:15.820 are a sham and a distraction. There are many things trying to dull our senses and to keep us

00:56:22.700 away from the things which deep down we know actually matter and those are people and place.

00:56:28.900 I fundamentally believe that you cannot orientate yourself in the world meaningfully without having

00:56:37.060 an attitude to space and time. The space you're from, the people who inhabit it, but crucially

00:56:43.400 time, past and future. You need to have a relationship to the history that brought you

00:56:49.400 here and you need to have a stake in the future such that your actions matter beyond your own

00:56:55.680 immediate benefit and that is what the whole suffering of the odyssey is about and as you

00:57:02.180 rightly say that's a universal tale and i think what's really interesting about nolan taking on

00:57:06.900 the odyssey is that it's the kind of film hollywood doesn't want to make what i mean by that

00:57:13.720 is the things i just described are against the grain of what not just hollywood but a huge

00:57:19.540 amount of cultural activity has been doing. Attempts to downplay that instinctive value

00:57:28.200 we place on the family unit and on multi-generational responsibilities. That natural yearning for

00:57:36.160 a return of some kind to the place that is home for you and no other place can be home.

00:57:42.660 Well, those kinds of orienting and structuring devices in life are not helpful to certain

00:57:48.540 political causes and we would not struggle between the three of us to think of films which in some

00:57:55.020 way have tried it to complicate or problematize those natural yearnings and we would struggle

00:58:02.060 to think of films which really valorize and celebrate those things from the last 20 or 30

00:58:07.580 years so i'm really pleased that nolan has taken the odyssey on and my only great and sincere hope

00:58:14.140 is that people in watching it will see the things that I've said

00:58:19.900 are so important about it and be inspired to go beyond the film

00:58:24.000 and to engage with the poem itself, which is uniquely powerful.

00:58:28.780 Because one of the things that I love about Greek mythology

00:58:32.660 is when it talks about heroism, it's something that we forget.

00:58:36.820 You know, nowadays we all want to be celebrities,

00:58:39.160 we all want to be heroes, but what we don't want is to sacrifice something.

00:58:43.280 And the nature of the hero is you have to sacrifice something. You have to give something of yourself.

00:58:49.780 You do. And in the Iliadic heroic code, that giving of something will be your own life.

00:58:55.960 You will give your life to serve the heroism that is demanded of you. Your duty goes beyond you.

00:59:03.580 But there's also this really important Greek idea of pathé mathos, learning through suffering.

00:59:10.120 not just experience, but actually genuine hardship. And I think about those two Greek

00:59:15.920 words all the time. That is how you grow and change and do good things in the world. Genuine

00:59:23.220 suffering. Now, you shouldn't will suffering upon yourself or upon anyone else, but you will not

00:59:29.080 learn without hardship. So one of Odysseus' epithets is polytlas, the man who suffered so

00:59:36.220 much. That's what fundamentally makes a new kind of hero out of Odysseus rather than the sort of

00:59:42.820 straightforward swashbuckling heroics of the battlefield. So these two foundational poems of

00:59:49.200 the whole Western literary tradition, the Iliad and the Odyssey, begin with a model of heroism

00:59:55.880 which is already difficult, complex, unfair and messy. It does not begin with a golden age when

01:00:05.060 just being a hero was a jolly good lark and everyone clapped at the end of the day. It's grim.

01:00:12.800 But life requires that quieter heroism of sacrifice and suffering for whatever one takes to be the

01:00:20.800 higher good. Well, the more we talk to you, with you rather, and listen to you primarily actually

01:00:25.940 about the Greek mythology and that period of time, I almost feel like the reason that these ideas as

01:00:32.960 Francis talks about have stayed with us and have stayed relevant. The Greeks were just a lot more

01:00:38.600 honest about human nature than we are. Is that a fair comment? Yeah, and I think it's multi-layered.

01:00:44.300 They were much more instinctively aware of the failings of the human condition.

01:00:51.600 All of their literature is motivated by finding these flaws that are in each of us,

01:00:57.320 dramatising them, hopefully in a way which makes us people who aren't heroes, who aren't the stuff

01:01:02.440 of myth, actually interrogate our own lives better. What did Socrates most famously say?

01:01:08.680 Not that the only thing I know is that I know nothing. More importantly, he said the unexamined

01:01:14.660 life is not worth living. It's unlivable. And what that means is if you will not interrogate

01:01:21.080 the nature of your character and the flaws within it, you're not living. You are not actually being

01:01:27.400 human. You're not a human being if you can't address, as difficult as it may be, the awkward

01:01:35.400 and difficult parts of your own human soul. And the Greeks understand that, and it motivates

01:01:43.240 almost everything they do artistically. Other cultures do the same, but it won't surprise you

01:01:50.260 for me to share my opinion with you which is that despite this constant narcissism of talking about

01:01:58.280 the self in our modern age we're actually acutely uninterested in interrogating our own personal and

01:02:06.440 societal problems you know your podcast exists in order to have the conversations which we deem

01:02:12.360 difficult to have well they weren't difficult for the greeks it was something that needed talking

01:02:17.520 about so let's talk about it let's use logos to make progress now there are lots of barriers to

01:02:23.940 having the kind of conversations and the sort of reflection that needs to happen in order for us

01:02:28.680 to thrive as humans do you think part of it is also is that the greeks fundamentally understood

01:02:35.060 the tragedy of life because if you look at their plays i mean they were fatalistic they were the

01:02:41.380 their outlook was fatalistic really like you know this is life your life was predetermined there was

01:02:47.100 nothing that you could do about it therefore it was tragic if you look at Oedipus Rex for example

01:02:52.220 killed his father married his mother and there was nothing that he could do correct so in terms

01:02:57.280 of myth and those inherited tales tragedies baked in and there's no escape however from the fifth

01:03:04.900 century onwards from the dawn of ethics with with Socrates and Plato and then to the emergence of

01:03:10.520 different rival philosophical schools, the academy, Aristotle and the Peripatetics, the Epicureans,

01:03:17.420 the Stoics, all of these groups actually come up with different ways of responding to the challenge

01:03:22.360 of being human. And they have very, very different views about whether things are fatalistic and

01:03:27.980 predetermined or whether life is what you make of it. So although I agree with you when it comes to

01:03:33.840 myths and the great tales actually the greeks as a people evolve evolve intellectually into

01:03:40.800 realizing that actually actually you have much more agency over your life than uh the great

01:03:46.320 tales might might suggest i i guess the question that i really wanted to ask deep down is what can

01:03:54.160 we actually learn from the greeks because when you classics is getting studied less and less

01:04:00.560 which i consider to be a tragedy actually what can we actually learn what have we forgotten

01:04:06.240 and what should we remember and what should we incorporate in our current society a big question

01:04:12.600 can be our last question in the style that we always ask what's the one thing we're not talking

01:04:17.260 about i see is that i think not only is everything in greek culture but everything is in homer what

01:04:27.880 my answer to your question would look like is the totality of the human condition so it's not

01:04:35.780 a set of insights or things we might put in a little list which we can keep in our pocket and

01:04:40.560 check when we need it it is a monumental modeling of the strengths and weaknesses of humans being

01:04:50.280 together in the world now the greek world is amazing because it's still connected in a linear

01:04:56.300 unbroken way to modernity. Modern Greek really is the language of Homer after

01:05:02.480 3,000 years of people speaking together and there's a continuity in Greek

01:05:06.620 culture which is I would say unique over the last 3,000 years in the world. So

01:05:13.460 although it seems so distant and so other to engage with literature in the

01:05:18.200 first millennium BC, it's actually looking deep into the genuine inheritance

01:05:24.560 of the Greek people. So I think Greece is kept out far too much of our modern conversation.

01:05:31.720 Greeks should be a more central player when it comes to thinking about what to do in the world.

01:05:37.080 And I may add that we talked about casting in the Odyssey to begin with. Well, who wrote an 0.90

01:05:43.520 open letter to Hollywood saying, why are none of us in the film? The Greeks. The Greeks don't

01:05:52.000 appear at all in the casting list of nolan's odyssey which for all its historic realism

01:05:58.640 to their mind shows an acute lack of interest in greek culture and greek actors so i think

01:06:05.360 that's almost a proof in a way of my sense that the greeks are not centralized enough

01:06:11.600 in some of our cultural conversations because everything is there in their culture

01:06:16.960 david before we head on over to substack where you answer questions from our supporters

01:06:21.120 tell everybody again where they can find your work and of course more about Ralston as well

01:06:25.200 thank you it would be a joy too the two things I'm most invested in in life are Ralston College

01:06:32.400 r-a-l-s-t-o-n you'll find the link below the video which is a new college that is trying to

01:06:39.360 teach the humanities properly beginning with ancient greek and teaching in greek in greece

01:06:46.560 on an island not far from where homer may have been born and we chart the arc of the western

01:06:53.920 tradition all the way through to modernity the greeks the romans medieval thought the influence

01:07:01.920 of christianity the renaissance and the rediscovery of the classical the early modern and beyond

01:07:08.960 it's fully funded uh for many people we've just finished our fifth uh our fifth admissions round

01:07:15.120 so I'll be heading to Greece shortly with our fifth cohort but keep an eye out in September

01:07:21.440 for our next admissions round and we welcome applications from all over the world as it

01:07:27.760 stands you've got to be based in America to some degree but that will change very soon

01:07:32.640 and you just need to have a BA in any subject and we will train you up to be an MA student in

01:07:39.520 the humanities so that's Walston College please check it out if these things interest you

01:07:43.680 And the other is a classics website I run with a small team of fellow colleagues and fighters who are motivated by the belief that the classics are there for everyone.

01:07:56.520 They are meaningfully universal and no one has the right or the arrogance to stop your access to them or the license to change the past so that it looks more convenient to us in the present.

01:08:10.720 We're against all of that.

01:08:11.800 We give you open, clear, free access to the ancient world in all of its complicated and fascinating ways.

01:08:19.960 Antigone Journal, type it in, head over there and please enjoy the 500, 600 articles we've got there.

01:08:27.460 And if you'd like to write for us, please just pitch and we can pay you.

01:08:31.700 It's a good project and I'm very proud to have spent the last five years working on that.

01:08:35.860 David, what a pleasure it's been to have you back.

01:08:37.800 I'm sure we'll have plenty more of these conversations in the future.

01:08:40.980 I hope we do. Anyway, head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where David's going to answer your questions.

01:08:48.900 An era I'm interested in is how Greek philosophy and Christianity

01:08:52.660 were combined to be the foundation of Western society.

01:08:55.940 Could you provide some examples of what Christianity took from the Greeks to turn it into what it is today?

01:09:10.980 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - July 22, 2026

What The Odyssey Is Actually About

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