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
And that's how it was always put over.
Odysseus was the clever, civilized one.
And Polyphemus was the cannibal, the barbarian.
I think you can't entirely get rid of that idea.
Polyphemus is presented as a cannibal.
You can't turn him into a nice vegetarian.
But increasingly, and I've been reading this for 50 years or so more, increasingly I've wondered about Odysseus.
There he is.
He's fetched up on the Cyclops' island, uninvited.
He goes into his cave, starts to make himself at home.
He can eyes up the whole kind of group of islands really for a bit of real estate, saying that this could be much better exploited for trade and profit.
You know, he is Mr. Imperialist.
It's the dilemma of imperialism.
He wreaks terrible violence.
on the guy who he's invaded and who actually probably wasn't a very nice guy anyway.
But whereas before I thought this was a simple story of goods overcomes bad,
I now see there's no firm ground to stand on when you're looking at Odysseus and the Cyclops.
And indeed, it's absolutely clear that later ancient readers realized there was a problem here, that what we think of Odysseus' conduct.
And in fact, overall, we don't know.
Odysseus is billed as the man.
Showing 61–80 of 106 · page 4 of 6
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