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

On the other hand, it has been taken by many people to be a pointedly disruptive casting, one that stands out in a way that perhaps it's not meant to.

For many people, it's not an issue of beauty that stands out in the way that Helen might.

It's an issue of non-alignment with the broadly white casting of the remainder.

Now, to be clear, we do not know precisely what the heroes of the Odyssey looked like.

Nevertheless, for the Greeks who invented the tales, told them orally, and then wrote them down once the alphabet arrived, they were their ancestors.

So broadly speaking, the poem is about people of a Mediterranean ethnicity.

The poem of Homer does not describe Helen in really any detail at all.

We have the word which means pretty hair, nice hair.

Well, that doesn't help us.

But the one that's got a lot of attention is one of her epithets, one of her standard adjectives is which means having white arms.

If you're in a largely white society, that's not how you describe someone.

I wouldn't say, oh, do you know Francis?

You know, the guy with the white arms.

It's not a natural way to describe someone.

So what that adjective probably means in effect, even though it's literally white-armed, means a woman who kept her skin white and pale because she was of an aristocratic status where she wasn't out working, wasn't getting tanned under the sun, and therefore her arms were a sign of her high status.

That then takes us to the unsurprising fact that she was conceived of as someone, broadly speaking, white in a Mediterranean context.

So in that sense, it is a very striking casting to go for.

She's a great actress as far as I can tell, but it's made a lot of noise.

It depends what you mean.

If you mean people from the continent we call Africa,

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