Catherine Nixey
speaker
98 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 6 Aug
Catherine Nixey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Look up Odyssey in the British Library catalogue and you are offered 34,000 titles, almost three for every line of the poem.
A couple of weeks ago, we went to meet fans standing in a pendant area near Leicester Square, waiting to be let into the red carpet area for the premiere.
There are two ways to see the squabbles that have erupted over the Odyssey.
One is to engage with them on their own terms.
The gripes that people have about the trailer seem to have some validity.
In Homer, Helen is clearly described as white-armed.
Odysseus probably didn't wear a red-plumed helmet, as red was a Spartan habit.
And Odysseus' son definitely didn't say dad, because he was talking in ancient Greek.
But the other way to see these arguments is as proof of the Odyssey's malleability.
It can fit almost any age.
In an era anxious about the excessively manly manosphere, it allows people to fret over excessively manly armor.
In an era driven by debates over race, it allows people to engage in a bad-tempered argument over casting.
Each generation remakes the Odyssey in its own image.
You get the version you deserve.
So the clever, quarrelsome ancient Athenians took Homer and transformed him into clever, quarrelsome tragedies.
In the 20th century, the modernists took Homer and turned him into brilliant modernist prose and poetry.
The simplistic, visual modern world has now taken Homer and turned him into online spats about race and a very silly cyclops.
And thus, it has turned Homer into a tragedy that is all our own.
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