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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He has a choice.
There's a high road and a low road.
He either will die young on the battlefield as the greatest warrior of all time, but he'll die, or he can retreat from the battlefield, go home, and live a long and happy life with the family he will build.
Those are his options.
And it looks as though he's going to take the latter option at a stage in the Iliad.
But only when his closest companion, possible lover Patroclus, is killed on the battlefield is he brought back in to the life of the warrior and does indeed die the young death foretold of him.
He now says to Odysseus, it was a sham.
I shouldn't have followed my own kleos, my own lust for glory.
I should have headed home and done what really matters in life.
And Odysseus is in the same place.
The sex goddess on the island for seven years is no good.
He has been robbed of being a father.
He's been robbed of the childhood of his son.
And the best he can do is to try and salvage something with the little time that remains.
And when they meet, one of the most beautiful and poignant similes in the whole of the poem is told.
Telemachus finally realizes that the dad he couldn't remember is back after 20 years of toil.
They embrace and they start wailing, but their wailing, that uncontrollable grief, is described as the wailing that ospreys or vultures make when as parents, they see that their chicks have been stolen by humans before they could fly.
So the reuniting of son and father
is treated like a pair of parents who've lost the one thing they were meant to do in the world, namely have a childhood emerge from them.
It's extremely poignant.
Showing 301–320 of 616 · page 16 of 31
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