Dr Matthew Ward
speaker
106 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 4 Aug
Dr Matthew Ward’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 Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There's much debate, you know, about whether really the poet of the Odyssey knows the Iliad, but one of the things that the poem does is constantly refer back to Troy and to what happened in Troy.
So, as Catherine's already been saying, I mean, we get these moments where Odysseus takes up his Iliadic identity, where he tries to behave as a fighter in a way that he can no longer in the world of the Odyssey.
But as you've already mentioned, I mean, we get throughout the Odyssey a large number of stories about Troy and the things that aren't told in the Iliad.
So in book three, we hear from Nestor about how the Achaeans got home again.
In book four, we hear some stories from Helen and Menelaus about what was happening and what Odysseus did at Troy.
So, I mean, in some ways, the Odyssey itself is thinking about what it means to come after Troy.
about what it means for the race of heroes to now mostly be dead and mostly to have kind of finished their heroic journeys.
And that's why, as we go towards the end of the Odyssey, what you see is, as precisely as Catherine's been saying, a different mode of heroism.
One that relies more on language, that relies more on coming home and returning rather than going out and kind of conquering and fighting.
I think that's exactly right.
I mean, as we've been saying, the flashbacks both to Troy and to the adventures from book nine to 12 all come midway through the epic.
I mean, we start in book one, not with Odysseus.
We start with Telemachus.
We see the situation on Ithaca.
It's not until book five that we actually see the hero himself.
And then in what follows, we get all these flashbacks and flash forwards.
I think one of the ways of thinking about how the Odyssey structures its narrative is that we begin on Ithaca, then we slowly move further and further out in space and time, we go to Sparta, we go into the imaginary world of the adventures, and then all the major players come back together in the second half and things slowly close down and close down as the tension in the household ratchets up more and more.
So I think that will be perfect for the kind of time jumps that we're used to seeing in Nolan films.
I mean, one of the things I'll be interested to see, and this is what Catherine's been saying already, is how 9 to 12, how the story of Odysseus' adventures gets told.
Because it's clear he's telling that story in the Homer in the Odyssey.
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