687. The Odyssey: Hero of the Trojan Horse (Part 1)

23:51Tom Holland:They're laid out having this barbecue and outside the sun is setting and towards dusk the earth starts to shake. So it's a little bit like the scene in Jurassic Park when the glass of water on the jeep starts to shake. And it's not a tyrannosaur that appears but a monstrous giant human figure and he is driving flocks of sheep and goats ahead of him and he enters the cave and as he enters the cave he blocks out the light as the eyes of the achaeans adjust they look up into his face and they see that he has only a single eye so this is a cyclops and it's a cyclops by the name of polyphemus and polyphemus is of immense size and therefore strength and he picks up a giant boulder and uses it to seal the entrance.

24:45Tom Holland:It would be completely impossible for Odysseus and his men to move it. And then he looks around with his single eye and he spots Odysseus and his men cowering at the back of the cave and he demands to know who they are.

24:59Dominic Sandbrook:And just to check, do they know what he is? Do they have a sense of him? Or is he something they've never heard of and never seen before?

25:06Tom Holland:I think the general vibe is that he's not good news. Okay. He's enormous. He's fierce looking. He's got a single eye. I don't think that this is the kind of person that you probably want to run into when you've been grilling his cheese. But he's hopeful that perhaps he could get this guy on his side. And so he conquers his fear and he steps forward and he introduces himself. He introduces himself as an Achaean, but he doesn't really give any more detail. And when Polyphemus asks Odysseus, you know, well, where is your ship? Odysseus lies and says that they've lost it in a storm. He loves a fib.

25:40Tom Holland:He doesn't want to give away too much because he is clearly nervous about whether Polyphemus is the kind of person you want within whose cave you want to be stuck. And when Polyphemus learns that their ship has been sunk, he reaches for two of Odysseus' men, smashes out their brains on the floor, devours them, falls asleep, stretched out among his flocks. So there, Dominic, is your answer. He's not good news. He's not the kind of person you want to be stuck in a cave with.

26:09Dominic Sandbrook:He's blocked them in the cave with a boulder, which is crucial. So they can't just kill him because they wouldn't be able to move the boulder, right? Exactly so.

26:16Tom Holland:So they have no choice but to pass this completely miserable night. And in due course, as Homer puts it, morning-born dawn touches the sky with her rosy fingertips. Polyphemus wakes up. And for breakfast, he has two more of Odysseus' men. You know, he smashes them again on the kind of the side of the wall and devours them. and then he moves the boulder drives out his flocks and then seals the cave up again with the boulder so again you know Odysseus and his men are stuck there so you know what are they going to do now this is seems an impossible situation but Odysseus fortunately you know he is blindingly smart and so he looks around and he realizes that there is a possible way out because Polyphemus has got a club and this club is enormous it's kind of like the size of the trunk of an enormous tree, the length and scale of the mast of a ship.

27:08Tom Holland:So Odysseus gets his men to whittle this club down to a very, very sharp point. And then when they've done that, they conceal it under kind of sheepskins or whatever. And when Polyphemus returns that evening, he devours two more men. Odysseus steps forward and he offers Polyphemus a cup of Maron's delicious, and did I mention it's very strong wine they brought the wine with them crucial and polyphemus is clearly a barbarian because he does not water it down instead he guzzles it down neat and then when odysseus comes forward and offers him another two cups of this wine he guzzles that down as well and once he's had these three cups of wine he asks odysseus for his name and odysseus does not give his real name instead he says my name is utis which means in greek no one oh so clever and polyphemus says well you know as a thank you for the wine here is what i'm going to do i will eat you last great giant laugh he then falls asleep and as he falls asleep he kind of belches and vomits up wine and bits of hand and bits of flesh and it all spews out onto the floor of the cave and polyphemus just kind of rolls over vomits up a bit more and then he's flat out and he's snoring and the cave echoes to the sound of the snores and this is the chance that Odysseus has been waiting for so he and his men remember have got this club which they've sharpened into a a spike and they heat this giant spike in the fire and then they clamber up the body of the sleeping cyclops and they aim it over his single eye point rests on the lid Odysseus gives the signal and then it's driven deep into the eye of the cyclops and to quote Homer his eyelids and his brows were blistered all around by the blast as the eyeball burned its roots crackling in the fire and understandably polyphemus screams and howls he pulls the spike out of his eye and hurls it against the side of the cave and starts bellowing for help and there are other cyclops you know his neighbors and they hear his cries and they come down and they ask him what has happened and again to quote homer from inside the cave mighty polyphemus made his reply friends no one is killing me and so his friends answer well if no one is killing you if no one has harmed you and it's clearly then just a malady sent by Zeus you must pray to your divine father for relief and polyphemus's divine father is poseidon the god of the sea so a very very powerful god indeed not

29:53Dominic Sandbrook:good news if you want to get home by sea right i mean to have poseidon against you absolutely

29:57Tom Holland:so brilliant from odysseus he's come up with the you know with the spike in the eye wheeze and also the whole you know calling himself nobody means that the other cyclops think that nothing's the matter with polyphemus but they're still not out of danger because what polyphemus does now is to push back the um the boulder because he's got to let his flocks of of sheep and goats go out and as they kind of start milling out through the cave entrance he feels each one to make sure that odysseus and his men aren't trying to kind of creep out um hidden among the flocks but again odysseus is equal to this challenge so what he does is he ties each of his men underneath the belly of um of a sheep and they all kind of managed to get out and polyphemus doesn't realize that they're kind of tied on under the bellies of the sheep and then he himself there's one giant ram and he hugs on to the fleece of this giant ram and the ram trots out and polyphemus he strokes the ram and realizes that this is you know his beloved ram and feels that it's walking slowly because of the weight but he thinks that the ram is walking slowly out of grief for his blinded master so very sad anyway Odysseus and his men managed therefore to get out of the cave cut themselves free from from the sheep they drive the entire flock of sheep down towards their ship they load the the sheep onto the boat so that you know they can kind of roast them later and have another barbecue and then they pull out to sea but Odysseus is a warrior and he wants the person he's defeated to know who has vanquished him.

31:33Tom Holland:And so he taunts the blinded cyclops from his ship as it's pulling out. And Polyphemus is so furious that he kind of gropes for the top of a mountain and pulls the summit off and hurls the rock in the direction of Odysseus. And it lands just in front of Odysseus' ship. And there's a great tsunami and it washes Odysseus' ship back towards the shore. And it looks like they're going to be shipwrecked on it. So Odysseus takes a pole and It's kind of like a punt, you know, trying to kind of push it off the side of the river. So he pushes the ship back out to sea. He and his men row frantically. And then again, he cannot help himself.

32:09Tom Holland:And he stands on the rear of the ship and he yells taunts at Polyphemus again and fatally reveals his true identity. He announces himself as Odysseus, sack of cities, the son of Laertes, who holds his home in Ithaca. And when Polyphemus hears this, he gives a great groan and he raises his arms and he prays to Poseidon, the god of the sea, his divine father. Hear me, Poseidon, earthshaker, you of the deep blue Maine. Grant that Odysseus, sacker of cities, may never reach his home, that son of Laertes who holds his home in Ithaca. but if his fate is to see his loved ones once more and make it back home to his strong-built palace and to the land of his fathers then let him come late and hapless after losing all his comrades on a ship that is not his own and may he find trouble at home that bodes very ill for Odysseus

33:15Dominic Sandbrook:if Poseidon hears his son's prayer and if Poseidon does hear that prayer of course then And Odysseus' prospects of getting back to Ithaca with all of his men are hanging in the balance. And we'll find out what happens next after the break. Hello and welcome to Doing It Anyway, a brand new series from Goalhanger. I'm Katty Kay. I've spent years studying the science and art of confidence, writing books about how we can close the confidence gap between men and women, and talking to experts and younger women about how to pass it on. confidence means taking risks, acknowledging your fears and, well, doing it anyway.

33:52Dominic Sandbrook:In this series, I'll be talking to psychologists, entrepreneurs and business leaders to unpack how you can rethink challenges and grow your own confidence. We'll talk about how to spot the difference between confidence and competence, how to deal with office politics and stolen credit and, yes, handling rejection, and ultimately how you can become a better leader, teammate and yes a better person doing it anyway with catty k every friday wherever you get your podcasts hi everybody it's dominic here from the rest is history i just wanted to let you all know that on our sister podcast the book club we have just released an episode digging deep into george rr martin's a game of thrones the first book in his song of ice and fire sequence we go deep into the history behind Game of Thrones.

34:43Dominic Sandbrook:So we go into the Wars of the Roses, Hadrian's Wall. We talk about the influence of J.R.R. Tolkien in comparisons with The Lord of the Rings. But Tabby, we also talk, don't we, about George R.R. Martin's apparent stagnation and whether he's actually ever going to finish the books.

34:57Tom Holland:We investigate why it is that he has battled to finish them at all and whether he will ever be able to. But if you want to hear lots more about the history behind some of the greatest novels of all time fear not coming up on the book club we have the leopard by giuseppe tomasi de lampetusa which is all about italian unification we talk about circe where we delve into a particular part of the odyssey and then after that we are doing the 39 steps which dominat

35:25Dominic Sandbrook:you chose and you love please join us at the book club it's loads of fun and you will never find a better way to spend your life bye bye hello there it's al murray here and james holland they're

35:35Tom Holland:They're hosts of the Second World War pod, We Have Ways of Making You Talk. Al and I have been on The Rest is History a few times now, talking all things World War II with Tom and Dominic. If you've enjoyed their recent topics on 20th century history, then we have good news for you. Yes, that's right, Jim.

35:51Dominic Sandbrook:We have our own show, all about the fascinating history of World War II.

35:55Tom Holland:Every Tuesday and Thursday, WW2 pod, We Have Ways of Making You Talk,

36:00Dominic Sandbrook:discusses the fascinating people, amazing innovations and terrible tragedies of this most pivotal period in human history. Yeah, and the bottom line is, other history has absolutely nothing on this. This past year alone,

36:12Tom Holland:we've done series on visionary US presidents like FDR and Truman, HMS Hood versus Bismarck, and Japan's Road to War. We've also explored daring night raids behind enemy lines like Bruneval and the nerve-wracking Atlantic convoys.

36:26Dominic Sandbrook:And right now, we're doing the truly titanic Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi-German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. So now is a great time to subscribe and get into the action.

36:38Tom Holland:Search We Have Ways wherever you get your podcasts. That's We Have Ways wherever you get your podcasts.

36:53Dominic Sandbrook:Welcome back to The Rest is History. So our hero Odysseus has been swept by gales and storms far from the familiar waters of Greece and the Aegean. And he has ended up in a very mysterious and murky dimension, a place where people are off their faces on narcotic lotuses, where one eyed monstrous giants are dashing people's brains out and having them for breakfast. Now, to the original listeners of this story, because people would have listened to it, that have heard it rather than read it, I think. Would they have seen these adventures? I mean, is this the stuff of fairy tales and fantasy or did they think these things really happened?

37:33Tom Holland:I mean, on one level, obviously it is fantasy, but there was a sense that these islands could be located in the geography of the Mediterranean Sea. So we've heard that Herodotus, the first great historian, he located the land of the Lotus Eaters in North Africa. And there was a tradition as well among the Greeks that the cave of Polyphemus had lain beneath Mount Etna in Sicily. and etna of course is a volcano so there's a sense of of fire hidden in the mountain and the story was that um the the cyclops used these fires of etna to forge the thunderbolts that they then gave to zeus and that polyphemus is one of these cyclops that were working on the thunderbolts there is a brilliant theory about why one-eyed giants might have been identified with sicily so there's a wonderful book by a paleontologist called adrian mayer who's written about you know what what the ancients thought ancient fossils were and she suggested that there were dwarf elephants on sicily so they've gone extinct long before ancient greek times but their skulls might might have been discovered and because you have you know you have the trunk the nasal cavity if you look at the skull of an elephant it does look a little bit like a kind of single eye i mean there's no proof for it but it's a kind of it's a wonderful idea is this not trying too hard to

39:03Dominic Sandbrook:find a sort of banal mundane explanation for what's clearly um a fantastical story i mean to me it would seem like this isn't inspired by skulls of like elephants this is inspired by the fear of the unknown the fear of the monstrous all of that kind of stuff i think that the story

39:20Tom Holland:of these monsters lurking on strange islands that these are anxieties that are bred of the age in which the Odyssey is being written down. And it's an age when Greek colonists are starting to settle Sicily and the western reaches of the Mediterranean. And I think that Polyphemus is a kind of nightmarish vision of a barbarian who does not live by the rules of life that the Greeks associate with civilization. So that's why Homer specifies that he drinks his wine neat. It's why he specifies that there's no agriculture these are people who by the standards of the greek colonists are backward and savage and kind of frightening for that reason so clearly as you say i mean polyphemus is a figure of fantasy one of the most memorable figures in the whole history of fantasy but he is clearly i think bringing to life the anxieties of adventurers who are sailing into strange seas and settling lands that are often very hostile.

40:30Tom Holland:So there is a brilliant book on this by a scholar called Carol Doughty, The Raft of Odysseus. And to quote from that, embedded within a familiar mythic story pattern of a time and people long ago are details and themes that belong to the contemporary world of its audience. And that's kind of what you would expect. And it reminds me a bit of the way in which in the 1960s in Star Trek, if you watch it now, it's Captain Kirk going around strange planets and all of that. But so many of those episodes are plainly about anxieties and complex that are manifest in 1960s America. And you would think that probably, you know, Mutatis Mutandis, the same is true of what's going on in the Odyssey.

41:12Tom Holland:that this is fantastical but it is also kind of drawing on all kinds of anxieties that reflect

41:19Dominic Sandbrook:the character of the age in greece so let's take the next adventure they have so this is the island

41:25Tom Holland:of king aeolus and he is what he's the god of the winds yeah he's the god of the winds um and on one level as with the cyclops he's plainly a fantastical figure because his island is um it floats and it has ramparts made of unbreakable bronze. And yet at the same time, the Greeks were so confident where his island was anchored that to this day, we call the archipelago of islands the Aeolian Islands. Oh yeah, of course. It was clearly a very, very strong tradition as to where Aeolus had actually been. I've been to the Aeolian Islands. They're very nice. Lovely. There you go. You're following in the footsteps of Odysseus.

42:02Tom Holland:And Aeolus, unlike Polyphemus, is a very civilized man And he's obedient to the Greek laws of what they call xenia, which is hospitality towards foreigners. If you meet a foreigner, the kind of mutual exchange of gifts. The contrast with Polyphemus is very obvious and deliberate, I think. And Iolus hosts Odysseus and his men for an entire month in his kind of magnificent palace with its great bronze walls and all of that. and then he places all the contrary winds the winds that would prevent Odysseus from getting back to Ithaca in a massive great bag and he gives this bag to Odysseus to keep in his hold so you can imagine the bag kind of bulging and moving with all these winds trying to get out so that the west wind will blow him back home and Iola says you'll be absolutely fine with this it's just you know just bear in mind the one thing whatever you do do not open that bag and And just to reiterate, whatever you do, do not open that bag.

43:01Tom Holland:And so Odysseus, to make absolutely sure that the winds do not escape from the bag for nine days and nights, he doesn't sleep. He sits there kind of keeping his eye on the bag. And finally, they are so close to Ithaca that Odysseus can see smoke rising from hearth fires on the island. He is so nearly there. you know he's been awake all this time and so fatally he dozes off very briefly and his men seeing him at sleep you know they're aware that he's been watching this bag and so they start muttering among themselves and say well what's in the bag i mean what's you know why is he so anxious about it clearly it must be full of treasure and he's keeping it for himself and he's not sharing with us and it's not fair so let's open up the bag and share the treasure out among ourselves before we arrive in Ithaca and they pull on the rope they undo the bag the winds come screaming and howling out of the bag massive great storms Odysseus is blown all the way back to the island of Iolus and when he goes up to Iolus and says what has happened have you any more winds well basically says you know will you put them in the bag again and Iola says no get out for it's clear that you've come here as one hated by the gods and again you could see how if you're venturing say into the western mediterranean from greece a knowledge of the winds is going to be really important you know getting information from local sources would be a requirement for anyone who wants to make it make a successful voyage so again i think you can see how that might feed

44:38Dominic Sandbrook:into a story like this yeah completely so things have gone wrong for them um and for the next six days they have to row don't they six days and nights and they arrive in this fantastic harbor it's a perfect harbor yeah high cliffs headlands encircling it um and 11 of the ships go in and odysseus's ship stays outside and this is odysseus being smart again because tom what happens next

45:07Tom Holland:Yeah, because he can see it's a perfect harbour, but that also makes it a perfect trap. And Odysseus is very sensible not to have just gone ploughing in because this turns out to be the land of a people called the Lestragonians, who, again, are giant cannibals. And there are thousands of them. And they all mass on the cliffs that surround this perfect harbour. And again, to quite Homer from the cliffs, they kept hurling down boulders, any one of which a man would be hard pressed to lift. And the ships, you know, they're trapped inside this harbour and they are rapidly reduced to matchwood. And the Lestragonians then wade out into the sea and they spear Odysseus's men like their fish, like their tuna.

45:50Tom Holland:And only Odysseus and his now solitary ship escape the slaughter. So people will remember that curse that Polyphemus had laid on Odysseus that he would return without his men. Well, 11 of those ships have gone.

46:05Dominic Sandbrook:And again, is there a real life equivalent to this? So you were talking about the Aeolian Islands and the Lotus Eaters, you know, the explanation is the Lotus Eaters. What do historians think about the Lestragonians?

46:18Tom Holland:The Greeks identified it again with Sicily. And this is a period where they're starting to settle Sicily. And again, I think the story speaks of anxieties about murderous natives. And I think there's the specific twist here, which is with your ships, you see a perfect spot for a colony. I mean, it might be a perfect spot, but that might make it all the more dangerous because perfect spots would presumably already be settled and there would be people who would not welcome your arrival. So, again, I think you can see how these stories of colonization and settlement that are coterminous with Homer's composition of the Odyssey, that this is probably what's going on, probably feeding into stories like that.

47:00Dominic Sandbrook:Okay, so we've had a few stories that seem quite obviously to reflect anxieties about the Greek age of colonization. But the next adventure is much stranger, isn't it? And this is much more like a sort of going into some fantasy dreamscape or something.

47:17Tom Holland:Yeah, again, to kind of pursue the science fiction parallel, this is, you know, you're going through a wormhole or experiencing a singularity. You're going into a different dimension where the rules of what are normal are suspended. however it's not immediately obvious to Odysseus that this is what has happened so they've made their escape from the Lestragonians they keep sailing as the wind blows them and they arrive at another island they moor off it and at first everything seems completely normal Odysseus goes on a scouting mission he runs into a stag he kills it he brings it back they all have another barbecue The next day Odysseus wants to go deeper into the hinterland of the island.

48:04Tom Holland:So he divides his men into two groups, one led by him, one led by a particularly brave crew member called Eurylochus. And lots of cast to see which one of them, which of these two groups will go and explore and which will stay and look after the ship. And the lot falls on Eurylochus to go inland and to try and scout out who or what might be on this island. So Eurylochus and his his scouting party head inland. And in due course, they come to a beautiful palace with spreading lawns and gardens. And there are wolves and lions in this garden. And so understandably, Eurylochus's men draw their swords.

48:42Tom Holland:They're nervous of these predators. But the lions and wolves seem weirdly tame. And they fawn on Eurylochus and his men like that, you know, domestic dogs. and while they're wondering about this and thinking what on earth's going on here from inside the palace they hear the beautiful voice of a woman and she's singing and she's clearly working on a loom and they call out to her and this woman comes to them and she opens these great gleaming doors and she invites them in and she is fabulously gorgeous beautifully dressed i mean clearly a queen. And so all Eurylochus' men, except for Eurylochus himself, they walk inside.

49:27Tom Holland:Eurylochus, who's clearly been chosen by Odysseus because he has a quality of suspicion and intelligence that Odysseus identifies with, he stays outside. He doesn't trust this woman, thinks of something a little bit sinister about her. And he's not wrong because the woman seats Eurylochus' men down on couches and then she brings them food, cheese and barley and tawny honey together with pramni and wine. And this food and this drink, we're told, are mixed with sinister drugs. And Eurylochus's men eat and drink their fill. And then once they have gorged themselves, the woman walks around the dining area and she taps them with a wand and immediately they start turning into pigs their heads their grunts their bristles their bodies although their minds were as sound as they'd always been so they are humans trapped in the bodies of a pig and eurylochus has watched all of this and he manages to get away and he runs back to odysseus reports it to odysseus and from this point on the story becomes even stranger so odysseus is determined to redeem his men from the spell you know aside from anything else he needs them he won't be able to kind of row the ship without them.

50:44Tom Holland:So he sets off to confront this woman who is patently a sorceress. And on his way, he meets for the first time in the course of his wanderings, a bona fide Olympian, one of the top 12 gods on Mount Olympus. And this is Hermes, the messenger of the gods, so has clearly been sent by someone, we presume Athena, to help him out. And Hermes gives Odysseus an awesome drug of his own and this is a black rooted herb with a white flower called the moly and armed with the moly and it's unclear exactly what the moly might be based on but anyway it's very powerful has great magic Odysseus proves immune to the sorceress's spells and this is despite the fact that we discover this sorceress is herself a goddess she is a daughter of the sun and her name is Circe of the Beautiful Braids and at sword point Odysseus forces Circe to submit and Circe submits and then invites Odysseus to bed and Odysseus says no way unless you could bear to swear a great oath to me goddess not to plot any more evil that is meant to do me harm and Cersei swears the oath and then Odysseus goes to bed with her she then restores his men to human form younger than before far more handsome now and much taller to look upon so

52:10Dominic Sandbrook:that's all worked out well but then the the twist you might expect Odysseus to to rush off you know but he doesn't he stays for a year he and his crew stay with Cersei for a year don't they and actually Odysseus seems to be enjoying this so much that it's his men who come to him and say have you forgotten about going home we were meant to be going home your house with its high built roof and the land of your fathers is still is waiting for you Ithaca and come on let's crack on and leave and what is going on here do you think so is this an allegory for sexual desire Is it female wiles? What's all this about?

52:52Tom Holland:It clearly complicates the notion of Odysseus as a man driven by a kind of, you know, an absolute focus on getting back to Ithaca and to his beloved wife, Penelope. And just, you know, people will obviously be wondering about this. Odysseus is meant to be devoted to his wife. His sexual relationship with Circe is a complete non-issue to Homer. It's expected that a man, no matter how much he may be devoted to his wife, will obviously sleep around him. It's an absolute given. I think there is a kind of eeriness to this episode, though. Obviously, it's not naturalistic because it's a woman who's turning people into pigs.

53:27Tom Holland:But I don't think we should understand the passage of time here as simply being, you know, he's having a great time. He fails to notice what's going on. And then before you know it, a year's gone by. I think that there's a kind of quality of the shaman about Cersei. The sense that she has conducted Odysseus and his men into a dimension of mystery and magic where time moves at a different pace. And so what she's offering Odysseus, I think, is a kind of akin to an initiation. And the year passes pretty much in the blink of an eye. And when Odysseus goes through and says, I really want to carry on.

54:04Tom Holland:Cersei doesn't object to this, but she says, before you do this, you must go even further beyond my island to the dwelling place of Hades and dread Persephone. And Hades and Persephone are the king and queen of the dead. They rule the underworld. And Cersei is sending Odysseus on to the land of Hades. because here in the land of the dead you've got mist you've got cloud it shrouds the farthest boundaries of ocean if he gets to the land of the dead he can consult with someone who will be able to tell him the best way to get back home and this is the great prophet teresias and we have already met him in an episode of the rest is history the episode that we did on Oedipus and he's died and he's now in the underworld and I think there is something it's a kind of something of the superhero franchise isn't there here that um characters who are the star of one film kind of reappear as a bit of a bit part in another yeah this is the

55:11Dominic Sandbrook:cinematic universe actually have you read Madeline Miller's novel about Cersei yes brilliant isn't it it gives you the whole episode from her perspective anyway Odysseus and co they go off to the land of Hades and this is something that nobody's ever done before they're the first ship ever to sail to I mean who knew that you could sail there this was a surprise to me this is why you need Circe

55:32Tom Holland:to tell you such things right no one had ever thought to do it before and also Circe has told him what to do when he lands on the land of the dead how to get the ghost to talk to him because there is a complication once you are a ghost your ability to speak fades very rapidly until you have drunk blood. And so Cersei has said, take a load of sheep, dig a trench. Then when you've dug the trench, slit the throats of the sheep and fill the trench with blood. The ghosts will be drawn by it like vampires. And you have to keep the dead at bay until Tiresias has drunk. And this is what Odysseus does.

56:07Tom Holland:Tiresias drinks the blood and then is able to talk. And he gives Odysseus all kinds of brilliant travel tips. So he says, this is the crucial thing you have to bear in mind. you may find yourself landing on an island called thrynacea and this island is sacred to helios the sun god hyperion this is the god mentioned in the opening that you read dominic if you find yourself on this island no matter what you do do not kill and barbecue the cattle you have the vibe of people who love nothing more than a barbecue he's absolutely kind of you know he's he's he's put his finger on them yeah australians don't have a barbecue just don't do it because if you do everything will go wrong and a teresius tells odysseus the details of what will go wrong you will get back home late and hapless after losing all your comrades on a ship that is not your own and of course that is echoing the curse that polyphemus had laid on odysseus earlier and And Tiresias goes on and says that if you and your men kill this cattle, you will find your halls when you get back home filled with braggarts pestering and courting your wife.

57:19Tom Holland:So just, you know, just don't go there. So Tiresias, you know, he's drunk his fill and then he gives this advice and then he kind of flits away in a kind of spectral manner. And then all the other shades start to feed on the blood. And I think, you know, an incredibly sinister scene. and then Odysseus talks to some of them and among them is his mother who had died while he was away in Troy you know he hadn't realized that she was dead and three times he he tries to embrace her and three times she just kind of melts in his arms like a shadow or a dream he meets Agamemnon the king of men the commander of the Achaeans at Troy he's been murdered by his wife Clytemnestra And so he tells Odysseus the story of that.

58:02Tom Holland:And then very famously, Odysseus meets the great hero of the Iliad, the greatest of all the Achaean warriors, Achilles, the man who at the end of the Iliad had killed Hector, the greatest of the Trojan warriors. And Achilles had been offered the choice when he was very young of a life short but full of glory or a long life but living in obscurity. And Achilles tells Odysseus, I made a terrible mistake. I went for the short life full of glory, but I would far rather live off the earth as the serf of another man, some man with a pitiful portion who barely ekes out a living than rule here as the Lord of all those who are dead and gone.

58:43Dominic Sandbrook:So to me, that is the single most interesting moment of the entire Odyssey, because it undermines the cult of the hero and the sort of the emphasis on glory and martial vigor and writing your name in neon letters that will never fade and all of that kind of thing. And basically, Homer is implying that there is an argument for saying, it's a bit like in the Madeleine Miller book, Circe, this is what Telemachus says, it's better to be obscure. It's actually better to have a nice, quiet life and no one knows you even exist than to be a great hero and, you know, to be wreathed in glory and stuff. That is all that that all passes and it's meaningless.

59:21Tom Holland:Yes, I think that's absolutely what it's saying. But also what is what Achilles is saying essentially is the greatest of all gifts is immortality. You know, you never want to die. if you ever get offered the gift of immortality you want to embrace it with open arms i mean that is essentially what he's saying and that is something that will impact on a decision that odysseus has to make in due course but we will come to that but do you think homer genuinely

59:44Dominic Sandbrook:means it that his listeners should have a think about their cult of glory and and all of that

59:50Tom Holland:or not i think that um it is one of the things that shadows the greek devotion to competition to heroism, to courage, to glory, is the fact that there is no equivalent of the Christian or Muslim heaven for all but the very greatest. That death is a shadowy, dull existence where you're a kind of a gibbering shadow who has to drink blood even to speak. I mean, there's nothing there. And so it makes the blaze of life all the more kind of glorious. So anyway, as you say, I mean, it is an amazing amazing moment in the poem and in the kind of broader sweep of of ancient greek culture so odysseus has got what he came for he's got this advice from teresius and so now he goes back to the lady cersei who feasts them and then after the meal she says to odysseus okay just go as soon as dawn appears set sail and she then advises him on how he should negotiate the various dangers that will be awaiting him on the next stage of his voyage and she says you are going to be passing the island of the sirens and these are carnivorous creatures heads of women uh bodies of birds um they have irresistibly beautiful voices so that's what the word siren means and they sit on this island perched amid a great pile of bones and cersei has a suggestion she says all your men should put wax in their ears so they can't hear it and you if you want to hear the song of the sirens get your men to tie you to the mast and you will hear the song you will order them to set you free tell them on no account to set you free and that way you you can hear the song of the sirens and live to tell the tale and then after that you will pass two terrible monsters scylla and charybdis and these guard the passage between two cliffs and you have to sail between them and in one of these cliffs and this is a cliff which reaches all the way up to wide heaven and is ringed by a cloud of dark blue, there is a cave.

1:01:51Tom Holland:And inside this cave lurks the monster Scylla. And Scylla makes a noise like a little newborn puppy. So it's so very, very sweet. However, Scylla has six necks, enormously long. And on top of each of the necks is a head harrowing sight, each with three rows of teeth. So not good news. A bit like the alien in the Scorny Weaver film. And from the other cliff sprouts a huge wild fig tree. And beneath that, in the depths of the waters, lurks Charybdis. This is the second monster. And every day, Charybdis sucks the water down. And then thrice each day, she vomits it up. Thrice, she gulps it back down.

1:02:33Tom Holland:And this creates a monstrous whirlpool. And any ship that gets caught in the whirlpool is doomed. It will be dragged round and round, down and down into the jaws of Charybdis. And everyone on that ship will be eaten. And so Cersei's advice is steer clear. of uh the whirlpool stick close to sylla's rock for as cersei says it is better by far to mourn six of the men from your ship than to mourn all of them together and as for the cattle of the sun which teresius had been majoring on cersei says look just don't land there it's too dangerous she's obviously sussed out the enthusiasm of this is men for barbecues and says just you know they let them have the temptation so edisius has got this advice from cersei um he follows it to the letter he does indeed become the only man to have heard the siren sing and live to tell the tale he does lose six men to the six snaking necks of scylla that kind of descend from her cave and grabs them and kind of pulls them up into her cave and devours them but they manage to avoid the whirlpool of charybdis and that's the main thing and they sail on and they see the island of the sun and odysseus says okay we're not stopping here no way because this is the bit remember

1:03:39Dominic Sandbrook:Tiresias you're better to avoid it do not touch them of course we all as soon as Tiresias said

1:03:44Tom Holland:that surely we all knew what was going to happen yeah Odysseus's men when he says look we're not stopping here they all complain they say look oh god we're shattered you know we really need a break uh it looks really nice please come on so very reluctantly Odysseus says okay but guys whatever you do don't touch the cattle you know just don't don't go there we will stop there for a single afternoon and then we will continue on our way so they land and then unfortunately the moment they land there is a massive great storm and it blows for a month and it is clearly of divine origin it is preventing them from leaving the island and so they're stuck there and they're really really hungry their supplies are running out and Odysseus can see his men starting to eye up the cattle and thinking how nice you know chunks of this cattle would be if it were on a spit you know in a lovely kebab and so in desperation he he thinks well listen clearly there is a god here who's angry i need to get up onto the top of the um the mountain at the center of this island and uh raise a prayer there so that's what he does and he leaves his men behind and he heads off to the the summit of the mountain um on the top in the middle of the island to raise prayers to the gods and presumably before he goes he does remind them guys don't eat the cattle don't eat the cattle did i mention don't eat the cattle he reaches the mountaintop as before with the winds of iolis in the bag so now faithfully he falls asleep so there's something of the lafayette about odysseus falling asleep at crucial moments and as he sleeps his men obviously do what they've been told not to do they kill and roast the sacred cattle and the smell of kebabs drifts into the nostrils of Odysseus he wakes up he looks down he sees the smokes rise he goes oh no and he runs down and for six days his men make a feast the wind you know they can't leave because of the winds but it is very obvious that nothing good is going to come of this barbecue because the skins of the slain cattle keep moving around and the meat on the kebab sticks keeps lowing that's like a vegan's fantasy isn't it like yeah and it's not surprising because it is i think hard to overemphasize the scale of the insult that has been done to the sun god because um these are clearly solar cattle and notions of solar cattle seem to have been very widespread um in the myths of the ancient indo-europeans so uh the greeks are indo-europeans the um you get it in hindi mythology and irish mythology from india to ireland in other words and their theft in all these stories no matter where they're told it always represents a kind of massive insult to the cosmic order and so it is in the odyssey helios the sun god complains to zeus zeus stills the storms so there's a very sinister calm and this allows odysseus and his men to set sail and then all at once once the ship is out at sea zeus thundered and hurled his lightning at the ship and the mast of the ship snaps and as it falls it brains the helmsman and knocks him into the sea so they now have no one to steer them the ship spins round and round the decking blazes with smoke like sulfur and all of Odysseus's men are tossed into the kind of the great boiling royal of the sea looking just like cormorants they bobbed about on the waves all around the black hulled ship the god snatched their homecoming from them but only one man survives the shipwreck and this is Odysseus himself.

1:07:29Tom Holland:Somehow he manages to fashion a raft out of all the wreckage, all the flotsam and jetsam. But even now, even though he's got his raft, he's still not safe because the wind changes and blows him back the way he had come towards Scylla and Charybdis. And of course he can't steer, so the whirlpool is swirling downwards. Charybdis is sucking the water down deep into her jaws and Odysseus's raft gets caught up in the kind of the spinning and the whirling of the of the waters as it's going down Odysseus leaps up from the raft and he clings onto that giant fig tree remember which Homer had told us was leaning over the whirlpool and he manages to hold onto it until the raft is spat back up by Charybdis and he drops down from the branch that he's been holding on to down beside the timbers and sitting on top of them he said as he later describes it i used my hands to paddle away and for nine days and nine nights he drifts and he is the only man left alive out of what had originally been a fleet of 12 ships and the loss of those men in homer's poem is very deeply felt because the odyssey throughout the account of its its hero's voyages and obviously the focus is very much on the hero nevertheless it is unusual for the the emphasis that it places on the minor characters you kind of come to know them we haven't really been talking about them much because we haven't had the time but when you're reading the poem you you feel for them you mark their fates even if they are idiots with their enthusiasm for barbecues

1:09:10Dominic Sandbrook:I mean, they've only got themselves to blame, to be honest. And again, Scylla and Charybdis, all of this stuff, you can see how this reflects the anxieties of an ancient exploration and sea travel. The whirlpool, the cliffs, all of that.

1:09:23Tom Holland:So Scylla and Charybdis was identified with the Straits of Messina between Sicily and Italy, where you have whirlpools and riptides, and it was generally dreaded by ancient sailors. And through nature, the island of the cattle means three headlands. sicily has three headlands so again um it was identified with with sicily and sicily was the kind of main focus for greek colonization this period so it's perhaps not surprising that it generated all these kind of all these myths but now with the loss of his men and his ship odysseus i think is drifting back from the the kind of the shipping lanes that greek sailors might recognize back into a dimension beyond the mortal back through the kind of the Homeric equivalent of a wormhole and it's it's telling I think that Homer does not describe in detail what happens next all he really reports is that after nine days of drifting on the open seas and this is a discerning at this point on the 9th of the 10th I was brought by the gods to the island of agigia home of calypso she of the beautiful braids dread goddess who speaks like a mortal she welcomed and cared for me so it's slightly cersei like but the difference here is

1:10:45Dominic Sandbrook:that whereas he stayed with cersei voluntarily calypso will not let let him leave that's right isn't it he's staying here almost against his will day after day month after month year after year he is you know weeping he's thinking about penelope he's thinking about his son telemachus about ithaca his home and the you know the greatest punishment of all every night he has to go to bed with the calypso what a terrible ordeal this must have been yes to quote homer

1:11:14Tom Holland:compelled by the goddess to do so he unwilling she all too willing so basically dominic he's become a beautiful goddess's sex slave to a terrible fate oh no what a terrible fate that is

1:11:27Dominic Sandbrook:so wow will he ever escape tom and if so how will he do it and what will happen when he gets back to ithaca if only there was some way i could find out the answers to all these questions because

1:11:38Tom Holland:i know you have amazing stories yet to tell us i do and brilliantly dominic there is a way you can find out um you can listen to the second episode of this literally epic i mean literally epic yeah and if you would like to get early access um and you're not already a member of the rest is history club then you can join our own intrepid band of barbecuing mariners at the

1:12:02Dominic Sandbrook:rest is history.com and the amazing news tom on top of that is that we're actually running a summer sale at the moment so for a limited time only you can get 20 off annual membership if you use the code summer 26 and that code is valid until the 31st of august so do it's what odysseus would have wanted certainly what homer a great fan of storytelling uh would have wanted go online use this code get your discounted membership and listen to that next episode right away and of

1:12:33Tom Holland:course also dominic they'll be able to listen to the bonus episode with daniel mendleton the great

1:12:37Dominic Sandbrook:translator of the odyssey great translator of the odyssey so it's just insane value all around isn't it i think too many benefits actually now this is too good we're giving stuff away and it's madness right on that bombshell we'll see you next time to find out what happens to our hero odysseus bye Bye-bye.