7 Essential Lessons We Can Learn From Homer’s Odyssey

0:00Are all batteries the same? That's like asking if all soccer players are the same. Take Messi, the most decorated player ever. Is there any other player who has achieved that? No, just him. Now take Duracell. Is there any other battery with Power Boost ingredients inside? No, just Duracell. Remember, goats only trust goats because they're built different. And Messi only trusts Duracell. The Odyssey, written about two and a half thousand years ago, is one of the foundational books of Western literature, of Western culture really. It follows the story of the Greek hero Odysseus, as he tries to get home after the end of the Trojan War.

0:45Now its influence is so profound that it crops up everywhere, and it will be everywhere this summer, as Christopher Nolan's new film comes out, starring Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as his wife Penelope. One of the reasons Homer's epic has endured is because of what it says about the human condition, what it tells us about the human psychological response to stress, to war, suffering, grief, parenthood, love. So if you want to better enjoy Nolan's film, or if you just want to show off to your friends about your knowledge of the classics, this is for you. From New Scientist, this is The World, The Universe and Us.

1:23I'm Dr Rowan Hooper. I'm joined today by Dr Sam Akbar. Sam is a clinical psychologist, but also a classicist. And she's just written a book on the Odyssey and our brains called The Odyssey Mindset, Seven Timeless Lessons on Resilience, Strength and Purpose. Welcome to the podcast, Sam. Thank you so much for having me, Rowan. I'm really happy to be here. Great. Well, let's kick off with why, apart from the, you know, happy coincidence that you're riding on the coattails of Chris Nolan's gigantic film, Why write this now? What has this Greek myth got to do with us? Well, it's kind of very convenient timing to be writing a book about the Odyssey, obviously.

2:02But I wanted to come, yeah, I know, very good for the old PR. I wanted to come at it from a slightly different angle because I sort of occupy these sort of two worlds of being a clinical psychologist and a classicist. We all know why, or there's lots in the media at the moment about why the Odyssey is such an important cultural influence for us. But I also think there's so much in it about being a human being and the psychology of being a human being. And that's why I think it's actually so fascinating. If you think about really great writers throughout history, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, they are great psychologists.

2:44They're great observers of human behavior. That's really what makes a great writer. And what makes Homer so fantastic is his observations of human nature, how we behave under stress or pressure. We still can learn so much from that. So I would say we should be interested in the Odyssey. Of course, I'm going to say that I'm a classicist, I'm a paid up classicist. We go around going on about Homer all the time. But I also think there's a lot to be learned about how to take some lessons for living your life, how you can transform your life with these lessons that are two and a half thousand years old.

3:24I mean, that is amazing that we can take that. Yeah. You know, until actually, until I just started thinking about your book, what I remembered of the Odyssey is all these great adventures. And I didn't actually. The sort of psychological insight had passed me by. And in my mind, really, that starts with Shakespeare. So it's kind of remarkable that actually, no, it starts thousands of years before him. Well, let's start with perhaps a summary of the story. For people who might have forgotten their reading of the Greek myths when they were kids, can you set it up for us? Okay. So the story, which isn't told chronologically, but just I'm going to say, is that Odysseus has been at Troy.

4:05They've won at Troy. He was the one who came up with the great ruse of the wooden horse. Troy has fallen, and now it's time for the Greeks to begin what we call a nostos. That's their journey home. Only for him, what should be about a week-long journey from Western Turkey back to Ithaca in Greece is actually 10 years. On the way, the stories that we are so familiar with. He meets goddesses, monsters, whirlpools, lotus eaters, all the stories we're familiar with. And eventually he makes it back to Ithaca, but he discovers there that suitors are after his wife Penelope. They all think he's dead.

4:49They want to marry his wife. And so he slaughters them and takes back his palace and is reunited with his wife. and yeah so for a good chunk of time he's sort of you know one thing that one forgets or doesn't notice as a child is that of his 10-year adventures seven of those years are spent with the goddess Calypso in a sort of love nest and then another year is spent with the goddess Circe in another love nest and it's a kind of question of what goes on on Nostos stays on Nostos you might not You might not reveal that to your wife when you get home. Yeah, it's a bit of a double standard there, isn't there?

5:33Because, you know, if Penelope has been up to no good while he's been away, then all hell would, you know, he'd probably kill her when he got home. Completely. And yet, yeah, oh, sorry, I was just distracted by this goddess. Totally on my way home. But, you know, things happen, Penelope. And actually, you have told it in a linear way, but Homer was the original Christopher Nolan, wasn't he? Telling this in an amazingly non-linear way. Christopher Nolan is the modern day Homer because he's such a sophisticated storyteller. He doesn't need to tell things in a linear fashion. His films are sophisticated and nuanced and complicated.

6:17Similarly, Homer tells this in an incredibly sophisticated way for 3 ,000 years ago, doesn't follow a linear narrative. In fact, all the stories that we are familiar with, the Cyclops, Skillon, Charybdis, the Sirens, are told by Odysseus in kind of flashback form. So it's absolutely made for Nolan. No wonder he was drawn to it. So you came across the story of the Odyssey as a child, like most of us did, and then you studied classics at university. I wondered, what was it about the story that stayed with you? So I think it works on a couple of different levels. So I remember it as a child, Tony Robinson, Baldrick from Blackadder, used to do this brilliant series when I was about 11 where he would just tell the story of the Odyssey, talking to camera, and he would race home to see it.

7:11And I loved the stories, and I loved the cleverness of Odysseus. Like, he was such a tricky, wily character. You never knew, kind of, how is he going to get out of this? And he gets out of it in a brilliant way. And so I loved it for that, for the entertainment, the storytelling. But as I've got older, I feel like the odyssey meets me where I am in my life, and it has done at different stages. And I think that's what's always drawn me to it. You love it. You learn to love it for its adventure, but ultimately you love it for its humanity because it speaks to you about when you are older, the things that you have been through, you realize, and it can sound cliche to say this, but these are things that all human beings have gone to.

7:59And whilst it might be cliche to say that, actually it links you so profoundly with human beings who've heard these stories before and found their solace in them. And actually, I think it brings a togetherness with those who've gone before us. yeah okay so we've been talking about um why it's a great piece of literature a great piece of art let's shift focus as to why in particular it's useful for you in your day job as a clinical psychologist um maybe take us through some of the lessons um and one that just you just mentioned about the cyclops when Odysseus blinds the cyclops and then brags about it can you tell us about that being a no one.

8:43I like this story. Yeah. Odysseus is in the cave of the Cyclops and he blinds him. For readers who don't know, he kind of says, my name is No Man. When the Cyclops is blinded, he shouts for help saying, no man is hurting me, is killing me. The other Cyclops go, what's your problem, you lunatic, if no man is hurting you? and off they trot. And it's a brilliant pun, right? It's how if you were really clever, you'd get out of that situation. And so Odysseus escapes and he gets away with his men and you're like, great. Only just at the last moment, he cannot help himself. He goes, just so you know, Cyclops it's actually Odysseus who blinded you ha yeah he has to have that moment of ego what's so interesting psychologically uh in in that episode is at the first part he's able to put away his ego he's he can literally say I am no one I'm no one and I can get out of the situation by just standing back.

9:55I don't need to claim the glory for myself. But what makes him such an appealing character is that he's so flawed and that he leaves and he cannot help but have his massive brag that will ultimately, this is the moment where his journey really goes awry. He would have been home very quickly if it weren't for that because Polyphemus the Cyclops prays to his father Poseidon and says, don't let this guy get home. And that's why it all takes so long. So this idea of the self, the ego part of yourself that needs the accolade, that needs the external validation, he can put it aside for one moment, but then it outs.

10:41And I just think it's that lovely kind of yin and yang of him. Yeah. I mean, Odysseus is by no means an unblemished hero, as you say. And that makes him relatable, doesn't it? He's not like this perfect demigod who's doing all heroic things. He does have all these faults. But it's really interesting how when he's recounting his own story, he becomes very honest with it. In a way, he's giving himself talking therapy, perhaps. I mean, I'm thinking of the year he spent with Cersei and how he then describes what was going on there. He doesn't try to say, you know, I was held against my will the whole time.

11:23He admits that actually he was, it wasn't all bad. Yeah. Again, things you might not mention when you get back to your wife. Yes, he sort of says it was my, although he goes back to Penelope and said, you know, I wanted to leave, I think. But his crew are the ones who say, you've forgotten about home. we should be going now and actually he's his whole this period where he is with the phaetians yeah so that's a period of time where he is washed up on their shores and and they take him in and and through that time he begins to tell them his story and that's really is for me being a trauma therapist, a process of kind of narrating your traumas.

12:12And you can see through that, that he starts to understand them. He starts to understand his role in them that might have been very different from when they happened. He's making different meanings. And what's so interesting to me in that respect is obviously I'm working with post-traumatic stress disorder all the time. That's my speciality. And a lot of our work is about helping people take different meanings about their traumatic event, about themselves, about the world, about others, and about the future. And you can see him doing that. And it's why Homer is such a great clinical psychologist, actually.

12:54So you see that process of meaning-making happen, which is where change happens psychologically. And you talk about Homer using CBT, cognitive behavioural, well, what we would call CBT, cognitive behavioural therapy. Is that what you mean when, as Edeus is recounting his story, he's kind of healing himself in that way? Yes, that's definitely part of that. So, the actual CBT is about kind of looking around your thoughts around an event and taking different perspectives. He also does something else evidence-based, which essentially does a kind of therapy called narrative exposure therapy, which is the evidence base for working with refugees with multiple traumas.

13:39It's about narrating your traumas or your life from beginning to end in chronological order. He does this for his trauma period of his wanderings. You do it in detail. And what you're allowing your brain to do is to process those memories, to make sense of those emotions and those experiences. In PTSD terms, it allows the memories to process so they're not coming back to you as flashbacks and nightmares. Homer's not talking about that exactly, but he's certainly talking about processing emotion and making different meanings through this narration of your trauma history. I mean, that's kind of extraordinary.

14:22Yeah. And the more you look, the more you find in this story. So when Odysseus has to go into the underworld, that's an extraordinary bit there. The people he meets, he meets his dead mother, who he didn't know she'd even died because he's been away so long. He meets her in the underworld. And there's this bit where he tries to embrace her, but she's a spirit. Let me just find that and read it out, actually. It says, then in my heart, I wanted to embrace the spirit of my mother. She was dead and I did not know how. Three times I tried longing to touch her, but three times her ghost flew from my arms like shadows or like dreams.

15:05So what's happening there? Well, I don't think anyone who is listening to this who knows grief, everyone would understand what that feels like, that longing. I know after my mother died, I dreamt of her a lot and not being able to get to her. It's such a universal thing with loss. He's trying to do the most basic human thing, which is connection, which is reaching out for his mother, which is wanting the comfort of his mother. And I mean, it's so moving, that whole period in the underworld where really, I think, Rowan, you can look at that and you could think that is grief now. It hasn't changed.

15:50Yeah. We still feel it the same. And this is 3000 years old. And you would know exactly how Odysseus felt. And that I find is an astonishing thing. Yeah. Well, my mother died recently. So that bit really, really struck me as well. and then when he meets Achilles in the underworld as well there's an amazing bit there because Achilles you know one of the greatest of all heroes tells Odysseus that basically he wishes he hadn't been a hero he'd rather he'd rather have had none of it it reminds me a bit of Falstaff in Henry IV part one where Falstaff is saying I don't want honour I'd rather just be a drunk in his case.

16:32Achilles would say, I'd rather have just been a peasant farmer. That's an extraordinary bit as well. Oh my God, it's one of the most shocking moments of the Odyssey. The Odyssey is about this post-war world of Troy, living in a world where everything's been turned upside down. It follows on for the Iliad. The Iliad is the story of part of the Trojan War. It's extremely moving, but it's much more about being a hero. In this Greek culture, what really mattered is that you died a really glorious death. You won kleos, glory for yourself, and people talked about you afterwards. That's how you lived on.

17:18And Achilles, as many of your listeners will know, makes this famous choice to live a glorious but short life. So he's given that choice by the gods, is he at the beginning or when he's a young boy? Is he given that choice or his mother's given the choice? I think his mother's given the choice, I think. I can't remember actually. But she dips him in the river Styx and that makes him invincible except for his heel. She holds him by his heel. and he says you know so we've had the Iliad and we're in this weird world of the Odyssey where you know is what got you through the Iliad going to be enough to get you through the Odyssey you need different skills now and he meets Achilles this great hero like the most famous hero of all everyone knows who Achilles is and Achilles just says I would rather be the slave of a poor man than be dead it's shocking it's like no i regret my life choices to live is the thing you should burn for and so it's such a different thing to what we've heard gone before and in a way it's a bit like it's a bit like what happens in life after you know the kind of you're standing on the battlefield and you've killed all your enemy and your breastplate is flashing bronze in the sun and you are like a god.

18:50That's where you imagine what heroes are like. This is the slightly crappier bit that comes later where you go, no, it wasn't worth it. That moment of great glory was not worth it. That is a phenomenal psychological insight. Yeah. Although, you know, Achilles is saying he came to that too late for him, but perhaps others should read it and think twice before they go for glory. Well, what's it telling us? What's it asking us to look at? Now, you know, you and I aren't going to be like killing people on battlefields, I hope, but it might ask us to consider how we are living our lives. Are we making other costs in our lives that we're going to get to the end and think that was not worth it.

19:39Maybe we're at work too much. Maybe we're not putting effort into relationships. Maybe we're not looking after our health. Like it's not a literal, I'm not literally saying, you know, it's about being a hero, but it's what Homer's doing. And anyone listening to this wouldn't have been like a hero either. They'd have been ordinary people. Homer's saying, what matters to you? Life is short. What matters to you? When our pets start to slow down, we tend to think, well, that's just old age doing what old age does. But what if we've been looking at ageing all wrong? In the latest New Scientist CoLab podcast, sponsored by Royal Cannon, meet veterinary specialists Dr Tanya Schuman and Dr Kat Henstridge as they explore the evidence that ageing is a modifiable process that pet owners can influence.

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21:04Let's talk about some of the other characters a bit. Telemachus, Odysseus' son, basically doesn't know his dad because he went off to fight the Trojan Wars when Telemachus was a baby 20 years go by. What's happening there with his search for a father? This is actually how the Odyssey opens with the story of Telemachus. He's on Ithaca in the present day and the palace is being overrun by suitors. His mother's being pressured to marry. And he's like this sort of 20-year-old kid with no one to really guide him. We first meet him. He's sitting in the halls and he's wishing his dad would come back.

21:47His dad, as Christopher Nolan uses these kind of more colloquial terms, he wishes his father would come home and wreak havoc on the suitors and basically rescue him. And he's at this sort of liminal point between being a kid and an adult. And so Athena comes to him and says, you know, you've got to do something. She comes disguised as a friend of Odysseus. And so you've got to get out of Ithaca and go and find out what's happened to your father. Go to his old war colleagues, Menelaus and Nesta. So effectively, Telemachus goes on a little gap year to find himself. I mean, that's sort of what it's like.

22:27A mini-odyssey. A mini odyssey. He is having his mini odyssey. And what I really like about it is that actually that is how, when we're young, we find out about ourselves by leaving home. And that's what he's doing. He's going away to find out more about himself. He's finding out about his father from people who knew his father, and he's seeking out himself in the world. And really, if you think about it, we find out it's so interesting when we hear about our parents from their friends of what they were like when they weren't with us. Because who knew they have lives outside of us? But it's really revealing because you see them in a very different way.

23:10And maybe a stage of real emotional maturity and growth is to be able to see your parents as quite separate from you and as having separate lives and experiences, because that's the maturity that you see there flawed. And actually, you really get to that when you're older and you realize, oh my God, they were just trying to hold it together like I'm trying to hold it together. And we don't think that. So he's going away to do that. And I think, again, it's a really perceptive and incisive way of understanding what it's like to be at this cusp of sort of kidhood and adulthood. So you mentioned Athena there and we've talked about Penelope a bit.

23:53So let's talk about the women in the story a bit more because they will get overshadowed by the story of Odysseus and all his swashbuckling and all his trials that he goes through. But they are not just fill-in characters, are they? They do have their own lives and agency. Absolutely. So I really wanted to make sure that I wasn't writing a book that was just about Odysseus. I wanted to include Penelope as much as I could. And what's so interesting about Penelope is she's this very inscrutable character and can't quite ever tell what she's thinking. And what I really like, the kind of psychological frame that I've put on her, is in Ithaca, she's famously bought herself time by pretending to weave her father-in-law's funeral shroud.

24:44She says to the suitors, when I've done that, chaps, then I'll marry one of you. She weaves by day and at night, she pads downstairs and she unweaves it and she buys herself three years of time. What I love about that is it's an act of resistance. If you want to think about this in a modern day parlance, she is in a society where she has a very narrow range of ability to operate. She has no power as a woman, but she can still have this act of resistance. And I like to think of her, she might be going down, but she's not going down without a fight. She's going to say, this is not who I am. I'm not going to give in.

25:28And maybe I'll win and maybe I won't. I don't know. But this speaks to who I truly am. And the psychological frame around that is she has an internal locus of control. So she believes she can influence the outcome of things around her. And we generally know that that is associated with being more resilient. And I kind of, you know, so it's more than a clever ruse, right? It buys her time, but it also buys her authenticity with herself. Tell us a bit about the neuroscience of vision and imagination, because you talk about this in really how Odysseus imagines his way or imagines home. So there's that, but then there's also what you call the straight path fallacy.

26:17So how he thinks it's going to be an easy way or a relatively easy route home, but then all these obstacles in his way. Yeah. So I'm a real kind of imagery pusher. I love using imagery in my work. A technique called imagery rescripting is one of those brilliant techniques you can use in post-traumatic stress disorders, very good evidence base. What I really like about the kind of neuroscience of imagery is that it is well established that if you imagine something very vividly in your mind's eye, your brain responds as though it's real, as though it can't quite tell the difference. So we know this from sexual fantasy, your body will respond in a certain way if you imagine things.

27:02But we also know it from studies where people who imagine voting are more likely to vote. If you imagine going to the gym, you're more likely to go to the gym. Even there's a study very recently about older adults imagining doing strength training and there's a change in their muscle mass, which I am delighted by. Should I just give up my gym membership now? Sadly, it turns out you can't sit on the sofa eating crisps and imagining you're at the gym and it all works out fine. But I love the science of that because I'm using it to such power effect in my clinical work. And how I saw that in the Odyssey was that actually what Odysseus does, like many great sports people, is he keeps the end in mind.

27:55He's got his goal. Now, there are two parts of neuroscience of achieving your goals. One is the end result and one is visualizing the process. So you have to imagine the process of doing the training and all of that. Otherwise, obviously, we would all just be eating biscuits in our pants on our sofas and getting the same results. Oh, that that were true. So he is always, Ithaca is always in his mind. That is his like beacon. It's there. He's visualizing it. He's thinking about going home. That's what he wants. And that's what keeps him going, right? It's at the forefront. Now you could argue with me and say, well, it wasn't at the forefront when he was with his goddesses, but it returned.

28:43So maybe I'm laboring the point a little bit, But then the idea as well, that's a great tool. Imagery for anyone who wants to do this is a great tool for achieving your goals. And so the other thing that is really that you have to accept alongside that, I think, and the reality of, you know, if you're working clinically, is that you can imagine those outcomes and they make it more likely. but you are not what human being ever has a straight route to that end result. It is always a mess of a journey. And that's the straight path fallacy, which again, seems very obvious, but actually we're always flawed by the troughs, not by the peaks.

29:32We're like, this is great, but they're always these ups and downs. And essentially the Odyssey really speaks to that because it is a poem of transition and a poem about flux in this new world. That's very relevant for us. Maybe human beings always are, but we are in a significant period of transition with advances in AI and technology and how we live, what's happening with the climate, global disruption. We are having to deal with extraordinary levels of flux. There's a lot for us to learn from this post-war world when nothing is what it was before. This is brilliant. I feel you've really enriched my future experience of seeing the film, but also I've taken so much more from everyday life, just from this conversation.

30:25So thanks so much, Sam. I think that's all we've got time for. So thanks to our guest, Sam Akbar. Her book, The Odyssey Mindset, Seven Timeless Lessons on Resilience, Strength and Purpose is out now. And thanks to you for listening. Do subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts. Bye for now.