Professor Dame Mary Beard
speaker
106 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 13 Jul
Professor Dame Mary Beard’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
You never pin it down.
Partly, there's a sense there that this is what now strikes me most of all, I think, that this is the second oldest work of Western literature.
And you sort of think very old works of literature ought to be kind of simple.
Here we have an epic poem, which is so amazingly post-modernly complicated.
It starts in the middle of the story.
We don't meet the hero for books and books of it.
And then we discover that all the famous bits are actually in the mouth of the hero telling the story to somebody else.
So it's so tricksy, but it's also, it positions you, it makes you question how you think about some of the issues it's raising.
And the one that I suppose I've changed my mind about most obviously is when Odysseus and his men go to the cave of the Cyclops, Polyphemus.
Yes.
The one-eyed giant.
And he does eat them.
He does eat some of them for dinner.
And they then, in order to escape by a clever trick, they get the cyclops drunk and they put a stake in his eye and blind him.
And they managed to escape from his cave.
Now, I suppose when I first met that story...
I think it was in Tales from Homer's Odyssey when I was little.
It was absolutely clear to me that Odysseus was a great hero here.
He met a really nasty, cannibalistic giant.
And he had managed to escape by a clever trick, blinding the man after getting him drunk.
Showing 41–60 of 106 · page 3 of 6
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