12 Stoic Lessons from The Odyssey
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What Stoic virtues does The Odyssey illustrate and where does the episode begin?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. For nearly 3,000 years, it has reigned as perhaps the greatest story ever told. It is a story that has been told and retold, adapted and changed. It's inspired poems, it's inspired paintings, it's inspired music. I'm talking, of course, about the Odyssey. And it's a favorite of many people, but most of all, the Stoics. There is no work that the Stoics reference more than the Odyssey. I'm Ryan Holiday, the author of The Daily Stoic, and I traveled thousands of miles, not just to ancient Greece, where of course the Odyssey is set, but to Ithaca itself, where it begins and ends, to find out not just what the Odyssey is about, what it can teach us about life, but also why it so resonated with the Stoics and why it's resonating again today.
Odysseus would not have survived his odyssey without the help of Athena, but his son Telemachus would not have survived without Athena either. And I think it's illustrative the form that Athena takes, particularly when she is aiding Telemachus. She pretends she is an old family friend named Mentor. Basically, Odysseus and Telemachus are a product of their mentors, as we all are. Perhaps this is where the word comes from. But the idea is that we are guided by the people who teach us, who have been further ahead than us. Marcus Aurelius is mentored by Antoninus. Zeno is mentored by Crates. I was mentored by by the great Robert Greene. The idea that you want to learn these lessons by painful trial and error is insane.
You want to benefit from the experience of others. That's the joke any fool can learn by experience. I want to learn from the experience of others. And Odysseus does this. He is aided constantly throughout the Odyssey by Athena and then Telemachus as he is coming of age. This is when he is approached by Mentor as she is organizing the homecoming. You have to figure out who your mentors are in life. We are a product of our mentors. This is a valuable lesson inside the Odyssey. I think it's one of the great warnings against ego from ancient literature. That's Odysseus behind me, right? So Odysseus has defeated Polyphemus. He stabbed him in the eye. He's escaped the cave and he's gotten away with it, right? He's not just gotten away with it
But Polyphemus, the Cyclops, has no idea who Odysseus is. Because when Polyphemus had asked Odysseus his name, he'd said, my name is no man, or my name is nobody. So when the other Cyclops had said, who'd hurt you? Who'd done this? Polyphemus said, nobody did this. Nobody has hurt me. Odysseus has gotten away with it. And as he gets safely to his ship and he's sailing away, what does he do though? In an act of hubris, needing to get credit for his brilliance, he shouts out, you want to know who did this to you? Odysseus, sacker of cities, did this to you. And it is in this moment that he seals his fate, that he prevents himself from getting back to Ithaca for another 10 years because Polyphemus is the son of Poseidon.
And now Poseidon knows who's injured his son and Poseidon becomes Odysseus's sworn enemy and he creates all these obstacles on his way home. So the point is, if Odysseus hadn't needed credit, if Odysseus hadn't bragged about what he'd done, he would have gotten away with it, he would have gotten home safely. And so to me, this is a classic ego is the enemy type story. It's our desire for what Marcus Rios would call the third thing, for needing recognition, for needing credit, for needing attention for what we've done that gets us into more trouble than we could possibly deal with. Look, it would be wonderful if life was easy. It would be wonderful if things went the way that we planned, if we never ran into obstacles, if the gods were always on our side.
But that's not how it goes in life. It's not how it goes in the Odyssey either. One of my favorite poems is a poem about the Odyssey called Ithaca by C.P. Cavafy. And there's this part at the end where it says, keep Ithaca always in your mind.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What Stoic virtues does The Odyssey illustrate and where does the episode begin?
0:00–5:57
2
How does Athena-as-Mentor show the importance of mentorship in Odysseus’s journey?
5:57–11:48
3
How does Odysseus’s encounter with Polyphemus warn about ego and seeking recognition?
11:48–19:37
4
Why does the poem ‘Ithaca’ matter for understanding the Odyssey’s message about the journey?
19:37–28:48
5
How are the Sirens a metaphor for personalized modern temptations like algorithms and influencers?
28:48–29:44
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Daily Stoic
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