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 I think that's part of that phenomenon where people are always reusing elements of the Iliad and Odyssey that come to stand as shorthand, precisely as you say, for these wider modes of expression.
And that tells you something about the lasting influence that Homer's had, I think.
Yes, I mean, in a sense, you're touching on what is the biggest problem and most debated issue in scholarship on the epics, which is where did they come from and how did we get them now?
What we can say, I mean, in truth, we don't know where the Iliad and the Odyssey came from.
we're certain given its repetitive language and its use of repeated scenes we're certain that these are oral poems that they in some way came from a genesis over hundreds of years that involved repeated singings but we have no idea really when they were written down and how they made their way from that first moment where they were written down through the rest of antiquity
But what we can say, I mean, I think in Nolan and Ellsworth, what we can say is that throughout the Odyssey, we get a number of singers, which is clearly a way of reflecting on the kind of oral nature of the poem.
So in book one, we have a song on Ithaca right from the beginning.
We see Phemius the bard.
On Scaria, amongst the Phaeacians, we have Demodocus, whom you mentioned earlier, the singer who sings about the Trojan horse and other things.
And then we see Phemius again on Ithaca in the later books, where he's one of the few spared from the slaughter of the suitors on the grounds that he is a singer and singers are worthy of respect.
So although we don't know where the Odyssey itself came from, we can make some educated guesses, but that's as far as we can go.
What we can say is that within the poem is very concerned about the role and the prestige of singers, about what they sing and about who they sing to.
So I think having a kind of inset singer within the film is an extremely good idea.
And it picks up on one of the major concerns of the Odyssey, which is in a sense storytelling.
I mean, I think that's what we've all been saying.
Yes, I mean, I think that's true.
If I could just add on what Catherine was saying as well, I mean, one of the things that's always worth bearing in mind is that no ancient Greek spoke Homeric Greek.
It's a completely artificial language that was never used.
So one of the challenges in translating Homer is actually capturing the fact that you're dealing with a language that nobody really speaks.
So there's some reason to keep part of the strangeness of the language.
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