Professor Edith Hall
speaker
337 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 13 Jul
Professor Edith Hall’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
So he's learnt patience, self-control, concern for his lieutenants and his men and proper preparation.
So he becomes the hero we all want to emulate.
I'm delighted you've raised that because my view of the Odyssey is proto-philosophy and
Right.
The Greeks invented ethics.
How should we live?
What is happiness?
In Plato and Aristotle, only two, three hundred years after this was written down.
All those questions are asked in exactly the scenes that you're raising.
So the young man listening to this is offered alternative ways of life and a discussion point, a rubric for after you've heard the bard sing these poems, long debates about
in your local taverna, in your colony, over whether it's better to want a simple life with an honest wife and tilling the land, or whether we should be off on escapades and who cares if we die because our names will live on forever.
Life is complicated.
We are all pulled different ways, and the poem doesn't give you just one blueprint.
Homer contests everything ethically, and that is why it's so good.
You do not have that philosophical depth in the epic of Gilgamesh or the Egyptian epics we've got or the Ramayana.
We do not have that.
We have a much more Unitarian model of heroism.
I'm going to ask you a question.
When you watch a Clint Eastwood movie, which is one of the many genres that has a direct link back to American epic, if you've gone through 90 minutes of a lone guy whose wife and child, classic situation, you know, have been murdered by some bad guys,
And you spent 90 minutes with him undergoing humiliations and sufferings and setback.
Showing 261–280 of 337 · page 14 of 17
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