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
So in the beginning, it tells us really, really strongly that Odysseus was trying as hard as he could to save his men.
That's explicitly flagged in the proem.
And the other thing it does is it paints the suitors as kind of relentless baddies who are sat in the house of Odysseus, eating up the house, eating his food without producing, right?
Their burdens on Telemachus, their burdens on Penelope.
So it does all of these quite subtle rhetorical moves to try to convince us that what happens to them is okay, that they deserve what they get.
But within the poem is obviously, you know, the counter reading that it is Odysseus himself who is this violent visitor.
And the poem doesn't quite know how it can explain everything that comes with his return.
Yes, I mean, and that's a really striking moment because as you say, civil war seems to be about to break up on Ithaca and the gods, you know, Athena and Zeus speak and they say, okay, well, how are we going to make this come to an end?
And Zeus says, well, I'll tell you what we'll do.
We'll make them all forget.
you know they'll forget the killing of their brothers and their family and they'll live in harmony and they'll have peace forever and that sounds really lovely it sounds nice you know the earth will bear fruit and all the good things but within that I mean one of the things that epic is is a structure of memory it's a way as George has been saying of remembering all these heroes who've died remembering their names remembering their lives
But right at the end of a poem that figures itself as the end of the epic tradition, we get this really strange moment where we say, okay, now let's forget.
Let's forget everything that's gone before.
I think that too, it's kind of unsatisfactory as an ending, but I think it is for a reason.
It's there precisely to make us reflect on whether it would be possible to forget all of the violence that we've experienced and what it would mean to end epic with forgetting.
Oh, I don't know if I think that's true.
I think you still see it turning up, but perhaps less widespread than once before.
But I think that's part of the phenomenon that Catherine has already been outlining, right?
That right from, we don't know when the Homeric epics really came about, but right from the
and brought into things like speech, drama, other forms of epic, school, education, and so on.
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