Dr. David Butterfield
speaker
616 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 22 Jul
Dr. David Butterfield’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
and the curse is sent up to the god of the sea, or down to him, wherever he is at the time.
And he promises that he will cause untold troubles and death on the sea for Odysseus and his crew.
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.
That's right.
And in the Greeks' mind, he's more Greek in the sense that...
Not all of us are set out to be heroic warriors whose martial valor will simply win the day by force.
Instead, for the Greeks, it's about words, about how you use your brain to solve a situation.
And that, as you rightly say, is the great virtue of Odysseus.
He is polymertes, a guy with all of the ideas.
He's polymerkenos, the guy with all of the tricks.
He's polythropos, a guy who can turn things in all sorts of different ways.
He's polyphron, he's got loads of mental cleverness working within him.
But fundamentally, that is how the Greeks wanted to engage with the world around them.
That is their challenge, as we mentioned when we talked about philosophy, to impose order and sense on a world that seems chaotic.
So in a real sense, the Odyssey moves on from the Iliad.
The Iliad is about the tragedies of the battlefield and when human force causes damage to those around you in ways you can't predict.
The Odyssey is about two things.
It's about the power of the mind over the body, and it's about the all-important draw of those two things that give life meaning.
people and place.
Odysseus realizes, as Achilles realized only once he had died, the heroic code of the Iliad, the heroic Bronze Age code of what the good life and the good death look like,
Showing 261–280 of 616 · page 14 of 31
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