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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Talking History with Patrick Geoghegan · The Odyssey · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

And it's clear that he's inflecting that story in particular ways.

So when he arrives at the island of the Cyclops, for example, he says, then we got to the land of the Cyclops, you know, they're lawless, arrogant beings.

Well, how does he know that they're lawless, arrogant beings?

His retrospective narration is colouring the kind of things that he says.

And it'll be interesting to see how Nolan deals with that.

Because with film, we're dealing with what we see, perhaps less so than Odysseus' rhetoric.

So it'll be interesting to see whether the truth claims of Odysseus get put under pressure in that moment.

Yeah, I was thinking, as you were saying just before the break, that the bits that we know about The Odyssey tend to be 9 to 12, the kind of stories, the sirens, the cyclops.

Scylla and Charybdis, but within one of the major focuses of the epic itself is the question of return and its relationship to violence.

Now, the problem that the poem has is that by the end, two large groups of men who rely upon Odysseus are dead.

So a family member of the suitors gets up at the end of the poem in the assembly and says, well, look at what Odysseus has done.

I mean, on the one hand, he took all the good young men of Ithaca off to Troy, and he's the only one who's come back.

Now, when he got back, he's killed all of the suitors in the palace, plus their attendants.

So how are we to deal with a man this violent, whose return involves all of this killing?

Now, you can extend that problem to Odysseus throughout his adventures too.

I mean, we've talked about the blinding of the Cyclops.

But you can think about the Lystragonians, his relation to the Phaeacians, all of these ways in which he's quite a traumatic visitor to have come to your island or your house.

So the poem, I think, is extremely anxious about this problem of violence and the fact that so many people end up dead in the end.

It's really concerned with how we can have a form of reconciliation after that.

And it does a couple of things to try to achieve that.

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