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
He was in Troy.
So we will know plenty about and we'll talk about the two great Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The Iliad comes first, both in that its action is earlier.
It's about the war, not what happened after the war.
But probably as a composition, it's the older, the more complicated poem in several ways.
The Iliad famously does not tell the most famous events of the Trojan War.
It doesn't talk about the Trojan horse and the fall of Troy.
It doesn't talk about the death of Achilles shot in his Achilles' heel.
Instead, it focuses specifically on a character flaw in Achilles
which both makes him a hero and leads to tragic consequences.
That's his meerness, his wrath, his anger, which leads him to step away from the battlefield for a long time and thereby cause the death of many, many comrades, because without Achilles, they were in trouble.
So that's set in the 10th year of this 10-year war out in Troy, which in our terms is in northwest Turkey, across the Aegean.
And then the Odyssey does not begin straight after the Iliad.
In fact, it's in the seventh year of the 10-year wanderings of Odysseus that the action begins.
So where is he and how have we got here?
He doesn't appear until book five.
Books one to four are really important for some of the things we'll talk about.
They're about the baby who has become a boy and now has become a man, but has no memory or recollection of his father Odysseus, because he was a babe in arms,
when duty called and Odysseus had to leave his family.
Odysseus didn't want to do that, and he actually pretended to be mad, insane, so that he would somehow avoid the call of war.
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