Dr. David Butterfield

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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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TRIGGERnometry · What The Odyssey Is Actually About · 22 Jul 2026 podcast

And my only great and sincere hope is that people in watching it will see the things that I've said are so important about it and be inspired to go beyond the film and to engage with the poem itself, which is uniquely powerful.

You do.

And in the Iliadic heroic code, that giving of something will be your own life.

You will give your life to serve the heroism that is demanded of you.

Your duty goes beyond you.

But there's also this really important Greek idea of pathē mathos, learning through suffering.

not just experience, but actually genuine hardship.

And I think about those two Greek words all the time.

That is how you grow and change and do good things in the world, genuine suffering.

Now, you shouldn't will suffering upon yourself or upon anyone else, but you will not learn without hardship.

So one of Odysseus's epithets is polytlas, the man who suffered so much.

That's what fundamentally makes a new kind of hero out of Odysseus, rather than the sort of straightforward, swashbuckling heroics of the battlefield.

So these two foundational poems of the whole Western literary tradition, the Iliad and the Odyssey, begin with a model of heroism which is already difficult, complex, unfair and messy.

It does not begin with a golden age when just being a hero was a jolly good lark and everyone clapped at the end of the day.

It's grim.

But life requires that quieter heroism of sacrifice and suffering for whatever one takes to be the higher good.

Yeah, and I think it's multi-layered.

They were much more instinctively aware of the failings of the human condition

all of their literature is motivated by finding these flaws that are in each of us, dramatizing them, hopefully in a way which makes us people who aren't heroes, who aren't the stuff of myth, actually interrogate our own lives better.

What did Socrates most famously say?

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