The Odyssey
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Talking History with Patrick Gagan. This is News Talk.
We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.
And out of their silence came thousands of voices. The strategy of the white man has always been divide and conquer.
It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. I look to the end. I guess...
Akosha Odysseus Don't you remember?
Thunder
Death.
I remember a wife, a son, home.
Good evening and welcome. We're Talking History on Newstalk 106208 with me, Patrick Gagan. In tonight's show, we're exploring one of the foundational texts of Western civilisation, the Odyssey, and we'll be finding out why it continues to enthrall and inspire nearly 3,000 years later. You can send us your thoughts and comments to talkinghistoryatnewstalk.com and we'd love to hear from you. Nearly 3,000 years after it was first composed, Homer's epic continues to shape literature, cinema and popular culture. It's a story of monsters and magic, of gods and vengeance, and also of family, identity, exile and the longing to return home. This summer, Christopher Nolan brings the Odyssey to the big screen and interest in the ancient poem has never been greater.
And so in tonight's show, we want to explore the history of this remarkable epic. And to help me do this, I'm delighted to welcome our panel of experts. Dr. Alexandra Medeva is in the Department of Classics at Trinity College Dublin and is a former Irish Research Council, now Research Ireland postdoctoral fellow there. She's the author of The Argonautica by Orpheus, writing pre-Homeric poetry in late antiquity. Dr. Catherine Ware lectures in Classics at University College Cork and is an expert in Greek and Roman epic, ancient heroism and late antique literature. and her books include Claudian and the Roman Epic Tradition. Dr Matthew Ward is teaching Associate in Classics at the University of Cambridge.
An expert in the Homeric Epic, his PhD was on vehicles of meaning, ships, materiality and the boundaries of the Iliad. And his new project is The Politics of Quotation in Homeric Epic. Dr. George Gazis is Associate Professor in Greek Literature and Philosophy at Durham University, an expert on archaic Greek epic and lyric. He is the author of Homer and the Poetics of Hades. Well, you are all very welcome. And Catherine, I might begin with you. This is a hugely complicated book, a complicated story, a complicated central character. So tell us about The Odyssey.
As you say, we get the word complicated, certainly in Emily Wilson's translation in the very first line, introducing Odysseus himself. But the story itself is also very complicated. It's not linear. We're not plunged into an epic at the beginning, working our way through to the end. We get... We get somebody else's story first. We get a parallel narrative to Odysseus' homecoming. Then we switch to his son for four books. Then we get to Odysseus. And the bits that we think we know, which are the story about the cyclops and the sirens, that's told in his own words in flashback in the middle of the book. So you end up wondering, what do we know? How much is his invention? And of course, he himself is very complicated.
He is the man of many ways. He is resourceful. And we have to see him getting in and out of many different difficult situations.
He's a different kind of hero.
To, say, Achilles.
Well, to Achilles or to maybe heroes that we might be more used to on screen or in stories. And I'll be getting to the film adaptation. But he's a trickster. He finds ways of getting around what he wants to do, including, you know, something that's only mentioned, but the idea of the Trojan horse to win the Trojan War.
Yes. So he is a Trojan hero. He features in the Iliad where we're presented, we're told about him through, in Helen's words, she's pointing out the various heroes on the field. And King Priam says, who's that fellow? And she says, well, that's Odysseus. He's a A great man. And somebody else who's next to her chips in and says, you are absolutely right.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–16:33
2
How is the Odyssey structured and why is its non-linear narrative important?
16:33–17:20
3
What makes Odysseus a ‘complicated’ or trickster hero compared to Achilles?
17:20–40:53
4
How does the Odyssey position itself 'after Troy' and reference the Iliad?
40:53–49:41