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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But I think the Odyssey problematizes the relationship between gods and mortals in a way that the Iliad really doesn't at all.
It's interested in just what the boundary is between the most that a mortal can do.
And what a God can do.
And quite interestingly there are moments in the Odyssey where
When Odysseus gets the better of Athena.
So it's as if because of his great intellect and his cleverness, which is constantly alluded to throughout the poem, he's the man of many wiles, the man of great inventiveness, you know, the man of many tricks up his sleeve.
So the Odyssey is interested in a character who is challenging.
the boundary or pushing at the boundary.
Between gods and mortals.
There's a very funny exchange in book thirteen, when actually the book in which she gets back to Ithaca and Athena shows up in disguise, and there's a little banter between them, and then she reveals who she really is, and she thinks she had fooled him.
In a previous adventure, by showing up in disguise, and he reveals in that conversation that he knew it was Athena all along.
So it raises this question.
What are the gods for if you have a mortal character who is
actually cleverer.
Than the goddess of wisdom.
Right.
So I think it's very interesting.
And it's interesting because the the Odyssey ends with a sort of Deus ex machina.
Odysseus is
Fighting a battle, he's been told he shouldn't fight it.
Showing 401–420 of 599 · page 21 of 30
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