Daniel Mendelsohn
speaker
599 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 16 Jul
Daniel Mendelsohn’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 — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
until the second half of the poem at least, is Athena, who is the patron goddess of Odysseus.
He's the cleverest mortal, she's the cleverest god, she clearly has a
has a fondness for this character.
But otherwise, they're not around anymore.
They've receded.
And you really feel that the Odyssey is a kind of mopping up.
operation in a funny way that the loose ends of the Trojan War, this is the one lingering loose end, that this is Odysseus is the one hero who still hasn't come home yet.
In fact that's stated very explicitly in the first thirty lines of the poem.
Athena approaches Zeus and says, You know, come on, Dad.
Everyone else got home, and this poor guy Odysseus still needs to come home.
And Zeus says, Okay, let's get him home.
But otherwise
They're not really there.
And I think the Odyssey is much more interested.
In
A kind of character that I increasingly think again anticipates the modernist in a funny way.
Which is alone
Quite sceptical, ingenious characters sort of let loose in a hostile landscape.
Having to
make his way in a world in which all the old rules have vanished.
Showing 361–380 of 599 · page 19 of 30
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