The Odyssey of Homer

19:37Rebecca Schinsky:So you're going to hear me talk about that a little bit more. I also want to say here that the Homeric poems precedes this idea of genre that we have.

19:43Jeff O'Neal:Oh, totally.

19:44Rebecca Schinsky:There is no genre here. I mean, it's an epic poem, but they didn't know. This is just stories they told. There's no such thing as history. Well, let me put it this way. This is history. It is religion, like a religious text, like the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita or something. It is ethics, how you should be in the world. It's anthropology. How are humans? What's out there? Sociology, how are societies put together? It's metaphysics, like what's beyond the pale of our understanding. And I think first and last, it's also entertainment. It's also like going to the movies. It's also tell me these long descriptions of being at sea and being shipwrecked or being buffered around.

20:18Rebecca Schinsky:That's kind of their version of a car chase. That's exciting. That's interesting. What's going to happen? So I think it's helpful to think about it's all of these things wrapped up into one. And to try to separate it as a modern reader is going to be frustrating, fruitless, and I think beside the point. So it's an invitation to think differently about it at the same time. Homer. I refer to the Odyssey of Homer because I think that different prepositional phrase helps me a little bit.

20:46Jeff O'Neal:I'm really glad that you're saying that because as I have been writing the show notes and putting things in plans, typing out The Odyssey by Homer has just felt really strange. I think in conversation I tend to refer to it just as The Odyssey or Homer's Odyssey, which somehow works but doesn't make it sound like one guy sat down and just wrote all of this or created it. I think that's really what we're getting at, that these stories in the mythology of ancient Greece predated the existence of Homer or any collection of people that might have been thought of as Homer. Everyone knew about Athena and about Zeus and about Poseidon and about some of what happened in the Trojan War.

21:26Jeff O'Neal:Of course, in this book, they don't call it the Trojan horse. It's the wooden horse.

21:30Rebecca Schinsky:The wooden horse.

21:31Jeff O'Neal:And I was like, oh, yeah, because they would not have known that it was going to be mythologized for thousands of years at the time. and attached to that. And that it's like you're coming into it. You have to remember that the folks hearing these stories would have come in with this back knowledge and the repetition of the details and the reciting of the history is part of how they are invited to remember their people's history and their society's history. So at the moments where like my eyes wanted to glaze over because it's like an Odysseus arrived, but then there's 16 lines of like backstory about what had happened to him and who those people were all related to and when they had invited each other to parties.

22:11Jeff O'Neal:That was really important because it wasn't just storytelling. This is not just entertainment. This is working on, as you were saying, so many levels and serving multiple functions for people who were hearing the poem.

22:22Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, and the people hearing them, maybe they traced their ancestors to one of the people and a list of people that someone killed or that killed a bunch of people became important to them. You know, kind of like the baguette sections of the Bible where at the moment of time, it was interesting. But now it's more of an indication of what the work of the text was and interesting to a modern reader, too. We basically don't know who Homer is. At almost every point of what you might say about humor, you can find a serious someone who thinks about this stuff that that's probably wrong. The earliest references to Homer are from the 7th century BCE, about 100 years after people thought he maybe lived.

22:58Rebecca Schinsky:And 100 years at this time is a long time of cultural, intellectual and historical change. So, again, it's on the outer reaches of what we could understand at this moment. The earliest fragment we have of the Odyssey is from the 3rd century BCE. So already we're 500 years after the supposed time of Homer's life, which, again, is a long time even now. But the difference in the social record is very difficult to explain. And I don't even understand myself because I am not a primary document holder. But in reading about it over time, I've come to understand, like, the gap is huge. I think 500 years ago is like Shakespeare to us.

23:37Rebecca Schinsky:And that feels a long time ago. Right. Like, we were already writing then.

23:39Jeff O'Neal:The United States as it is now. Like, we don't have United States history from this version of the country that even goes back that far. We're half that old. Like, it's just wild to think about that. And to know that the Homeric question, the mystery of who authored this or who wrote it down, at least, is so significant that the scholars refer to it as the Homeric question, capital H, capital Q. This is a thing. No one knows. And the sources of debate are myriad and they've been going on for centuries and will continue. We're not going to know. And the not knowing, I think, is part of the fun here.

24:16Rebecca Schinsky:And we actually had to develop scholarship hundreds of years later for people who didn't think, huh, I wonder, wait a minute, Homer was real? Like, you know, like for a long time, people didn't question at all because they didn't think to question or there was no reason to question at the same time. Yeah, as you said, much debated whether Homer was one person or several oral poets who were then transcribed or was this the most famous of the poets of this day? So a lot of God attribute to him. We really don't know. I am relatively convinced that there was a poet called Homer who was meaningfully important in the creative force behind the document we know as the Odyssey.

24:53Rebecca Schinsky:Now, that sounds like a lot of caveats, and it is, but you could have more caveats about that. But that's kind of my sense. Is that what you get? Like, what is your sense of the authorship situation here?

25:02Jeff O'Neal:That seems right to me. The reading experience of it is pretty cohesive. And granted, like any English translation, the cohesion is also dependent on the translator. I read the Emily Wilson translation. I think you read the Fagels translation because we wanted to present a couple of different perspectives. But in the experience of it, at least, it felt like it hangs together enough that it can believably be the work of one person who had certain stylistic tics and tendencies and preferences and ways that they liked to describe things. I mean, having read the Bible growing up, like those stories and the ways that they are told seem much more disjointed.

25:41Jeff O'Neal:And I'm much more inclined to believe that that kind of text was the composition of a bunch of different people working and iterating on each other's work over time, where I can believe that there was one guy named Homer who was maybe the first one to set this down in writing or led the project of doing it. Maybe he was the, you know, like project editor and a bunch of people were working on it together. But Homer created the style guide as much as it could be. But I can believe that it was one person. Yeah.

26:10Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. I think about there's an analog that happens after the time of writing is introduced to the Greek world where Herodotus makes a name for himself by writing the histories. We'll get to the Protestants at some point, but, you know, the father of history, as people might not know, who goes around Greece orally reciting sections of his work. And that's how people knew him. And I can imagine something similar happening with someone called Homer going around Greece, telling these stories, you know, getting a bunch of people in the marketplace or the town center or whatever. And that is the last great poet the first people writing these things down could remember.

26:46Rebecca Schinsky:Like maybe they had seen them or their grandfather had. And then we get right. Oh, we should we're going to write that stuff. Oh, that story is by Homer. So that's kind of how I feel. Like I think a real person who gets a lot more credit for the origin of these stories rather than the specific language. But the specific language is probably more traceable to an individual than the specific myths like the Tantalus and Siren of Disney. The Trojan were all predate whoever this Homer person would have been by centuries in all likelihood.

27:11Jeff O'Neal:Just trying to ground ourselves in these were real people because the stories in the book are so strange and so far outside any of our experiences. I love this image of the rhapsodes like traveling from city to city or town to town and that maybe Homer is the one that like you hear he's coming and you're like, bro, Homer's coming to town. Yeah, we got to go see Homer on Wednesday night. You have not heard him do the story of Eumaeus, the noble swine herd. It's like he does it better than anybody else. We got to get in there. Wait till you hear when he does this part. And that sort of like legend around who this person was, who's already engaging with these legendary stories, that helps me to like get excited about something like this.

27:55Jeff O'Neal:the reading experience itself is wild. And I found it to be really fun. But remembering what was the world like, or trying to imagine what the world was like when people would encounter these stories as told to them by these poets, some of whom are living in their towns, some of them are traveling in and out. It would be exciting for the best storyteller to roll up. We've all been at a party where the one person who tells the best stories, it just takes center stage and everybody's like, Like, Jeff's going to tell the story about those raccoons on fire coming down the fireplace again, which is a real one and we'll have to tell it someday.

28:32Jeff O'Neal:But you get excited when that happens. And it's fun to think about that being the origin of Homer here, too.

28:37Rebecca Schinsky:And we'll talk about this a little bit, too. But, like, the excitement and the power of the story and the scene of storytelling is important in the text itself. Yes. You know, well, we'll get to the quotes. I'll save that. So the Homeric question is like the Shakespeare question on steroids. It's like what any individual expert or reader or Greek whoever thinks to be true about the idea of Homer is but one of many and likely says more about them than the reality because we just really don't have that much. I like to dwell in the maybes and what ifs and wouldn't that be interesting? I kind of like to hold in my head the possibility that there was a one Homer that maybe we don't have the direct sort of hand to paper to translation to whatever.

29:14Rebecca Schinsky:Or also I like the idea that there was a whole bunch of storytellers and it sort of coalesced around this name of Homer. I think both of them are evocative and interesting and that I get to have both readings and switch between them or hold them side by side. And, you know, to both have them race my chariot against the sun with apologies to Apollo is really interesting there, too. I will say it's taken me a while to get to the appreciation I have for the Odyssey. Rebecca, what was your first exposure to the Odyssey?

29:46Jeff O'Neal:I read this my freshman year in college in that I've talked about this class before, this sort of multidisciplinary honors seminar that crossed history, philosophy, theology, and literature. And, of course, the Odyssey does all of those things. And I think this was the first book. Like, that first semester we did Antiquity to the Middle Ages. And I'm pretty sure that the Odyssey is the very first thing we read in that seminar. It was—

30:11Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, how did you find it? I was so scared.

30:15Jeff O'Neal:I think we read the Fagels translation. I remember just being intimidated by, you know, like the halo around the Odyssey and being intimidated by these professors who really knew their stuff and by the like reputation that this class had for being really challenging. The test was they gave you a blue book and would give you a quote. Like it was five quotes, I think, from different parts of the Odyssey. And you had to say which book of the Odyssey that quote fell in and what was happening there. And like that, knowing that going into the reading just scared the crap out of me. Like, how am I going to remember all this stuff?

30:52Jeff O'Neal:But I do remember being really gratified by it and just kind of having my mind blown open by how fun and strange the book was. I had a wonderful teacher that makes all the difference. All the difference. This was the first time that I went back to it. And on the revisiting, I was like, oh, I can totally see how they arrived at that method of doing the test. Because it wasn't about tricking you. They would pick lines that were obviously anchored to key moments. But there are really just like a handful of key things that happen in this story. And the rest is fun storytelling adventure stuff. And maybe to know that going in is helpful.

31:29Jeff O'Neal:I remember the Fagel's language being a little elevated and that that was intimidating to me as well. I'll say the Wilson is very direct and I really loved that. It read like a house on fire this time. Yeah. OK. Tell me more about it taking you a while to get here.

31:44Rebecca Schinsky:Well, I had a mind numbingly dull high school class. I think it was called the Epic Tradition. I read a prose version of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which is was tough. And then I had a mind-numbingly dull college survey course where we had like it was a big lecture and you broke out into individual discussion sections and it wasn't enlivened. I had the occasion to teach it later in a course not unlike the one you took, a survey course, really a year-long survey course that began in antiquity. We did both the Odyssey and the Iliad. We did the Iliad first. And I was most – I wasn't afraid of teaching it.

32:18Rebecca Schinsky:I just wasn't looking forward to it because it wasn't one of mine. It wasn't one of my guys or gals, and I have many, but then it became my favorite thing. It was my most favorite thing to teach because of where it falls, what we do and don't know, and the reading possibilities, the interpretive possibilities, and how it sets the stage for what we do and don't know about what happened in the course of Western literature. Therefore, I think it's very freeing to know at this moment that there's a lot we don't know and that there's no correct read. The translators, the experts are all competing is not quite the right word, but the conversation goes on about what these things are, how to understand them, ways that they're important and why they still matter.

33:06Rebecca Schinsky:And I just really love teaching. And I think it is a way of they say this in medical school, right? You see one, do one, teach one. and in trying to find something to say to 18 year olds that wouldn't bore them to tears. I found having to find something exciting for me to talk about. And what's better than that, to engage with a text at the same time? As you say, it's depending on your translation, like older translations, 19th, 18th century, they can be pretty dense and difficult to parse. The Fagels that I did, I've also read the Lattimore, I've read the Wilson. They all, as you say here, are easier to read than Shakespeare.

33:45Rebecca Schinsky:Wilson is very, very approachable. I've spent the most time with the Fagal, so that's what Homer sounds like to me. But also, it's not hard. It's just not—you understand all the words. It's just not hard. It's not hard. It's not hard to get to.

33:58Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. I'll read just the intro to the Wilson, and maybe—do you have your Fagals at hand?

34:03Rebecca Schinsky:I'll break mine out here while you do that.

34:05Jeff O'Neal:And we can read that as well. So, tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went and who he met, the pain he suffered on the sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed, and for their own mistakes they died. They ate the sun god's cattle, and the god kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning.

34:34Rebecca Schinsky:Sing to me of the man mused, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course. Once he had plundered the hollowed heights of Troy, many cities of men he saw and learned their minds. Many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea, fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home. But he could not save them from disaster. Hard as he strove, the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all. The blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the sun god, and the sun god wiped from sight the day of their return. Launch out his story, Muse, Daughter of Zeus. Start from where you will.

35:07Rebecca Schinsky:Sing for our time, too. You know, it really comes down to me, Rebecca, that the tell versus sing as the verb. And I cannot adjudicate right is wrong. Emily Wilson is probably as right or righter. But I love the sing verb. I just do. And this idea of the rap episode and how it's performed, it just feels epic. It feels like we're in a special place. So that's where I am. That's where I am with this.

35:32Jeff O'Neal:The Fagels, I think, does feel epic in that way. And there's some similar stuff happening in the word order in the sentences in the Fagels that happens in Shakespeare where they're trying to make the meter happen. So you get a different adjective or you get the words coming in a different order than you expect. That didn't happen as much in the Wilson. She does the whole thing in iamic pentameter. The Odyssey is originally – in the Greek, it's composed in dactylic hexameter. which is not a specific rhythm, but is about a certain number of syllables and how they're captured and it can flow a few different ways.

36:08Jeff O'Neal:And you can see each of those writers or you can hear them trying to make their word choice happen. Some of that goes on in the, I think it's most illustrative, in the repetitive descriptions of things. So like the Dawn is rosy fingered, but sometimes Dawn reaches out her rosy fingers or sometimes like the rosy fingers of Dawn appear And it's always the same idea, but the number of words and the order in which they're arranged moves around based on what works for the poetry of the moment. But I think from having heard both of those intros, like you understand what's happening in that first chunk of text that we're hearing a story of this man who is complicated or he's been on many adventures and the rest of his men died.

36:53Jeff O'Neal:He couldn't stop them. They did a thing that they were not supposed to do. They ate the cattle of the sun god. And now here we go. He's on his journey home. If you've picked up some Shakespeare randomly without a guide and tried to just get into that language, it's a lot more difficult. So I really just want to, like, put in neon flashing lights. If you have been intimidated about picking up The Odyssey, it will be easier than you think and it will be easier than Shakespeare. here.

37:18Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. I mean, even the two we've decided, if you want to pick one up, like you can get on an ebook on your phone, a sample of both and read a couple of, maybe you want something that feels, maybe you like the Wilson's vibe. Maybe you like the Fagel's vibe. Maybe there's something else for you. So you can kind of pick your own filter for your, how to get the same time. Let's see. What else would I like to read this? Let's do a little bit more with the feeling of reading it before what it's all about is 24 books of various lengths. Some of them are longer and shorter. It is not broken up. It is not as much of the water stuff as people think.

37:55Rebecca Schinsky:There's a lot. The Telemachy, which is the beginning, is... I don't think Odysseus has a line until book five, if I remember correctly. The first four books.

38:02Jeff O'Neal:We don't hear from him at all until the first.

38:04Rebecca Schinsky:Our Telemachy, specifically, and Penelope. We're getting a sense of what's going on in Ithaca. Then we go up to Olympus, and the gods are like, ah, we need to get Odysseus moving. Then we do a bunch of books in the middle of Odysseus getting moving, telling stories, moving around. and then the end of the book is his return and then how they clean up the household and what happens there i'll save the hot take for later but there's a lot less there's a lot but there's a lot less of odysseus going from this place to this place to this place to this place and seeing weird stuff weird stuff weird stuff then you think for example the lotus eater story not only is only books nine and ten really the major things that we know from that the lotus eater thing is like nine lines long it's like yeah there's a lotus eaters they're eating stuff we get i gotta get out of here, you're gone.

38:47Rebecca Schinsky:Like, it's very, very brief. It's very surprising.

38:49Jeff O'Neal:Almost all of the things that we think of as the big set pieces for the Odyssey, the Lotus Eaters, the encounter with the Cyclops, the Sirens, they go to see Cersei. He fights the Lystra-Gonians, the Scylla and Charybdis, Whirlpool situation out at sea, the trip to Hades. That's all in books nine and ten. So two books out of the 24 books, or you can think of each book as like a long chapter. And my Wilson copy is like 500 and some odd pages. A hundred of that is introductory material. So the story itself is about 400 pages. And that breaks up into 20 to 25-ish page books. So you can really parse this out for yourself to make it quite a manageable reading experience, however you want to.

39:35Jeff O'Neal:But that like I was surprised to remember that like, oh, yeah, most of the things that you picture when you picture the Odyssey are those big cinematic moments. They happen in a really concentrated space in the book. A good chunk of it, like the full second half of the book is what is Odysseus going to do when he gets home? How are they going to get rid of these suitors? Can Telemachus grow the hell up and like become a man already? And what is what does Penelope know? That's a great mystery that runs through this because Odysseus arrives home. He hasn't been there in 20 years. He's dressed in rags.

40:12Jeff O'Neal:He looks like a beggar. He is acting like a beggar, posing as one. But then he's back around the palace in this role. And it's very ambiguous in a way that I find so delightful. of like, does Penelope recognize him? And does she know what's going on? I think it's fun to believe that she does and that she's in on the game. She is testing him in the ways that he is testing her. And that they're playing these games with each other. These people like to play games. This is not a book about people who said like, I don't want any drama in my relationships.

40:46Rebecca Schinsky:As you say, yeah. And then when you get back together and we have to figure out how to clean this mess up, it's like action-packed, exciting. There's palace intrigue. what's going to happen at the same time. I think it's helpful to remember that this, whatever this thing is, it was not meant to be read all in one sitting by yourself silently. That's not the scene of the performance. That's not the scene of the story. That's not the scene of the art. So if you break it up, that makes a lot of sense. Also, they're poetical lines, so they're short. So even if it's 450 pages, it's not the same as reading 450 pages of prose.

41:17Rebecca Schinsky:Like your eye goes down quickly. There is a temptation to speed up. And again, you can go back and read, I kind of suggest slowing down a little bit, like putting it down to the side. Think about what you just read. Give yourself a little bit of a breather between because, again, I think it kind of helps take the whole thing at once. Because as you say here, you can't. Your eyes can go through in the rhythm, in the meter, in the stories, and then moving around. There's so much movement between that it has a momentum from one scene to the next and one book to the next. That's pretty interesting.

41:48Rebecca Schinsky:Here, you're going to get repetitions of stuff. That's, as you say, a feature, not a bug. Some of that is you if they were distinct units, you could tell in different places you needed certain pieces right to be portable, but also helps the oral poet remember. Right. You know, you remember certain lines. You have basic units of performance that you can drop in as you go. And it makes a little thing a little bit easier to, you know, perform and understand and retain.

42:15Jeff O'Neal:It's not like if we're reading a novel today and you're like, oh, my God, every time he talks about the dawn, he says it's rosy fingered. Come up with a new way to say it, man. Like it is it's a feature of this writing and it serves that purpose. But I actually found that repetition to be quite lovely because there are so many, at least in the Wilson, there are variations on it. So you can have like your favorite version of how the dawn is described with her rosy fingers. And that was fun to me to see. Like how can a translator be creative within the constraints of that repetition?

42:49Rebecca Schinsky:We've done plot and character and scene and history. We haven't yet talked about the ideas that are being thought about, represented, contested here. What are some of the ideas that the text itself seems conserved with, Rebecca?

43:03Jeff O'Neal:As we love on this show, this is a story about fathers and sons, man. It's a story about a man trying to get back to his family. It's about desire for power and desire for permanence. Odysseus, the first time that we see him in the book is sitting at the edge of the coast and weeping. He's been on Calypso's Island and he wants to go home. And we, I think, should be careful not to project our modern Western understandings of romance on what's happening here. But he does miss his home. He misses his wife. He wants to be back among his people, and he wants to resume his place as the king of Ithaca.

43:44Jeff O'Neal:He wants to have that power and to have it in a kind of permanent way. So we're really about that. When Emily Wilson was on with us last month, she talked about the idea of Nostos. This is a story of homecoming, this trying to get back. Nostos is the word from which we get nostalgia. And it is also deeply concerned with hospitality, the term xenia from which we get xenophobic and other ideas. But of how you welcome strangers, what do you – spoiler alert for the big ideas art, the big questions art asks – what do you owe your neighbor? What do you owe a stranger? What is expected of welcoming someone into your home?

44:25Jeff O'Neal:And this concept of guest friendship is the way that Wilson translates it, where part of what was going on in the ancient world – because, like, they don't have a way to warn people when they're coming to visit. So you go somewhere. You just show up. It's all Popsins in the ancient world, Rebecca.

44:42Rebecca Schinsky:It's all Popsins.

44:43Jeff O'Neal:A hundred percent. Like with no notice. And they're expected to welcome you, to give you food and drink and tell you stories and entertain you and to do all of those things before they even ask who you are. And that once that happens, your families are bonded and that bond carries into future generations. So that then if they come to visit you, you do the same thing. Or if their children come to visit your children, it's like, well, our parents, our fathers were guest friends.

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45:51Jeff O'Neal:Prices and participation vary while supplies last. Not available on third-party ordering platforms. Tax extra. That connection and hospitality is really central. And obedience to the gods and to these concepts is really central and will determine your fate. You can be a good person and do a lot of good things and not have a good life if you have gone against what the gods have told you. And these gods are self-interested. This is not the Judeo-Christian god who's just in it to make you happy as long as you try to please him. These gods have their own agendas, and they're like—there's rivalries with each other.

46:27Jeff O'Neal:They have different agendas that they're trying to use humans to execute. And it's just—it's unruly. There's all this stuff going on all the time. The gods are so fickle.

46:37Rebecca Schinsky:You can't just do the right thing and good things are going to happen because their own agendas can change. The Phoecians really get it from Poseidon. They think they do everything well, being good hosts. And then later Poseidon just goes to Pistoth because they helped Odysseus a little bit too much and he puts a mountain around their island. Tough break for them, but that gives you a sense of the chaotic world in which they understood. But the people, the humans represented in these stories, just take that as read. They're not frustrated with the gods. That's just how things are. You know, it's in the middle.

47:06Rebecca Schinsky:I want to go back to the idea of Nostos, too, because my understanding is that we think there were probably other epics told of the other people returning from Troy. The Nostoi, they're generally referred to as the series of returns. We get mini versions of Agamemnon's here. That doesn't go great. Spoiler alert. But then we also get Nestor, which is the first person that, you know, really Telemachus goes sees. And that turned out fine. Like that's kind of the ideal homecoming. He's there with all of his sons. His wife was loyal. The house is in order. And then the question there is what's Ithacuna going to be like?

47:42Rebecca Schinsky:But I like to give an example. I used to give my students this thought of like, think of how we use the world of World War II as a storytelling generator. Right. Where there's so many stories. There was such a thing to engulf the whole world. And we could tell stories and will tell stories for the next hundred years about World War II and its aftermath. That's what the Trojan War was for the ancient world. And the Trojan War itself, we're not getting the specifics of it, but we'll get into the Iliad someday. They've been there for a long time. It was a cataclysmic event in the imagination of these people.

48:16Rebecca Schinsky:And Achilles versus Odysseus, looking for glory versus looking for home, that comes here too. Achilles starts to talk to us about, man, I'd rather be a slave on earth than be glorified in the afterlife. They're thinking about these things. They're thinking about their own mortality. They think about how history is going to happen, what happens to them after they're gone, and this idea of their return and what's going to find you there because you don't know. Because there was no email. There was not teletype. You couldn't send a note to somebody across the sea to find out. Like people had no idea what was going for years on end.

48:49Rebecca Schinsky:And that is hard to get your space, your mental space into. So much of this story is they encounter each other, as Rebecca, as you said, like, who are you? Where are you from? But they want to know what you know. I knew this guy. What happened to him? Or I heard there was this thing about this thing. What was your sense of this? Because that's all they had. What did you hear about the wooden horse? What did you hear about the wooden horse? So they're in these city states and moving around. There is no Greece as we know it, but there's these individual city states. They each have variations on the same kind of setup in terms of our understanding of how the world was put together.

49:25Rebecca Schinsky:But then one thing this story is doing is taking you outside the pale of the known to the Cyclops or the load. There are these there's a sense that there's other ways of being in the world that aren't like us. And we have to coexist with them or avoid them or conquer them or do something else at the same time. Let's see. Yeah. Questions of women's role and value. You know, Penelope is an interesting figure here for a lot of different reasons. She's cunning, but she has bounds to her ability to wield power, right? And I think there's a modern, I don't know, a modern desire is like, why can't Penelope be queen?

50:03Rebecca Schinsky:I'm here with you. Go read the Margaret Atwood Penelope. That's great. But that's not the world we live in, Rebecca. So how can she keep her household ready? But also she doesn't have authority to sort of do this indefinitely. Yeah.

50:14Jeff O'Neal:And like for the men to maintain some of their power, especially if they've married women who they inherited land by, you know, virtue of that marriage, fidelity matters a lot. And we see different versions of this. As you were saying, like Nestor comes back, his wife was faithful, they're all good. But you get Agamemnon and Clytemnestra had left him and gone with somebody else. Helen of Troy has been kidnapped and has gone off to live with another guy. There's all of these variations on what the women are doing because the women's fidelity is deeply connected to the power that the men can maintain or cannot maintain.

50:51Jeff O'Neal:And so the women's worth largely hinges on their fidelity. Like Odysseus seems like he's having a pretty good time with the ladies on this journey back. He's on Calypso's Island for seven years and she wants him to stay forever. And there aren't details about what Odysseus was getting up to, but he's been gone a while. I think his boots have been under a couple different beds. But he's really concerned about has Penelope remained faithful to him and glad to hear that she has not allowed any of the other suitors into the palace. Because if she had, it calls all of his power into question. If she's taken a new man, that new man is the new king and Odysseus comes back and it's too late.

51:34Jeff O'Neal:So gender stuff is really interesting here. Slavery is a given part of this world. It's set up and presented in a different way than like American chattel slavery was. and the royals, Odysseus and those folks, seem to have a different kind of relationship with the people that they have enslaved. Also, though, we get to see moments where the slaves have great power, that they know all the secrets, they know what everybody's up to, you don't want to cross them because they know everything that's going on, but also because folks seem to carry this awareness in the world that the oppressed people, if they were to get angry, could rise up and become more powerful than you are.

52:19Jeff O'Neal:So how Odysseus and the people in his sort of social tier of power navigate and interact with their slaves. And Wilson refers to them directly as slaves. I know some of the other translations kind of elide that relationship. That's one of

52:35Rebecca Schinsky:the weaknesses of the Fagles, I would say, for sure. Yeah.

52:39Jeff O'Neal:So that's just a thing to know about that world. And as a Western reader, especially as an American reader, trying to expand how I understood what a slave was doing in this place. Not that that's a great existence for anyone, certainly, but it carries just not a better or worse aura, but a different one.

53:00Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. And that's the point you make there about who knows what, and the lowlier in the household sometimes are overlooked, but also they're mucking out the toilets and getting the food to places. It's hard to hide in the comings and goings of a big household what's really the score is.

53:15Jeff O'Neal:They have all the intel.

53:17Rebecca Schinsky:And so knowledge and who knows what and how you know it is also at the core of this. Remember the thing that the sirens say or sing to Odysseus as he's lashed himself to the mast, because this is Odysseus's move, right? He is told, stop your ears up with wax so that you're not enchanted by the sirens and you could just blow by them. But he's like, I want to hear what they're doing. So all the ship, all the crew, you stop up here as well. But I'm going to keep mine unplugged, but lash me to the mast so I can hear. And what is their tantalizing thing? It's that they know everything and they can tell him everything.

53:49Rebecca Schinsky:It's knowledge, right? That's the genie in the bottle for Odysseus. But I think the wider world of the Odyssey is if you could but know, because information is a commodity and it's useful and it's powerful and dangerous if someone hails it and you don't. And that's something you're going to see at the same time. You're getting discussions thinking about free will. So the gods are powerful, but humans don't make it easier on themselves. It's like literally in the text, a couple of different places. We are somewhere between being subject to the divine, the natural, the non-human, and our own volition.

54:20Rebecca Schinsky:That feels quite modern. Isn't that kind of what we think? We have some control, but we call it structural whatever at this point. They would call it Poseidon. I think it's interesting to note, too, that Odysseus is the most heroic of the truly mortals. Because remember, Achilles, Hercules, these are demigods. Odysseus isn't. He's just a dude. I used to say, think of him as Batman to Achilles Superman.

54:44Jeff O'Neal:Odysseus is just a dude. Just a guy.

54:47Rebecca Schinsky:Just a dude. The questions of happy households versus unhappy ones. Nestor's household is the paragon of what this looks like. Suns all around, happy couple. You've got the meats on the spit. Agamemnon tough. And Odysseus is where am I going to fall on this continuum of things that await for me when I come back home. Story, story, stories. At one point, so we haven't talked about this. The setup is that the rapso, the poet, the performer would invoke the muse. Right. This is not my story. I'm just a vessel for this thing. This sleight of hand, song of dance. But at one point you have a scene of the muse telling us of what Odysseus was telling someone else, of what a shade in the underworld was telling him that someone told him.

55:27Jeff O'Neal:It's like seventh hand.

55:29Rebecca Schinsky:That is a nutty level of metatextuality. And like the structural theorist in me is like, that is what this is about. This is about story and how knowledge is imported and those multiple layers and those transmissions from one to the next in this scene of storytelling. It's also about the double-edged sword of curiosity and exploration, right? And Odysseus wants to know. Curiosity almost kills this particular cat, but he wants to know. But the other thing about actual curiosity is you go find things. You go discovery, right? That is what happens in the unknown. Sometimes you find people that want to kill you.

56:03Rebecca Schinsky:Sometimes you find the golden fleece. And that's just the deal.

56:07Jeff O'Neal:And going away from home and to have an adventure is how you grow up, or at least that's how we see Telemachus grow up. When it opens, Athena is sending Telemachus out. He's got to grow up and figure some stuff out. And she's like, okay, go on a journey. Go to see Nestor. Go see Menelaus. Find out if there's news of your father. And it's about both the news and the going away. And what's going to happen to Telemachus as he takes that journey? Like one of my best friend's kids just had to read this in their freshman year of high school. And we were talking about it driving around. I was like, what are they like?

56:42Jeff O'Neal:What's your paper assignment? And they were asked to write their paper on does Telemachus exhibit personal growth? And if he does, what does that look like? And if he doesn't, why not? And like, what are the stops and starts of it? And I think that's interesting to think about in this framework of curiosity and exploration. But it also connects to the gender role stuff. Early on, before Telemachus goes out on this adventure to get news of his father, the suitors are causing a lot of trouble. And Penelope comes down to try to talk to them. And Telemachus tries to show that he's a big man and, like, put his mother in her place in front of all the other bros.

57:20Jeff O'Neal:And, like, who has not seen a teenage boy try to do that? Try to look cool in front of his friends by being a jerk to his mom. Doesn't go well for Telemachus. Penelope is not intimidated. But that's part of Athena being like, OK, dude, you have some growing up to do. You got to go.

57:37Rebecca Schinsky:You got to get out of the house. Go see the world.

57:39Jeff O'Neal:Right. You got to go because you're either going to come back and have to get rid of these suitors and figure out how there can be a new king. Or maybe your dad's going to get back and the two of you can be powerful together. And that tension. And then when Telemachus and Odysseus return about the same time and they're on those parallel tracks, they're going to run into each other. They're going to find each other. Then they're going to make this plan to get rid of the suitors. It starts to get genuinely really exciting.

58:05Rebecca Schinsky:And there's a tension in the ancient Greek world. And I think it's one that still reigns in our own hearts and minds is Nostos versus Kleos. Nostos is being the return. The going back to the known or staying in the known. And the Kleos meaning glory. Going out to find the new, to make a name for yourself to go into the world. And I've got to say, honing in on that for a freshman in college is a very useful way of approaching this book. Or someone in transitional moments. A lot of us have this kind of choice to make in many moments. Am I going to do what's known, safe, comfortable? Or am I going to hazard my well-being, life, fortune out there on the open sea, metaphorically, figuratively, and find something new?

58:49Rebecca Schinsky:make a name for myself, discover something outside of myself. But that is a trade-off. Like that's a trade-off that exists in many different ways that we try to go through our lives. And it's here at the very beginning of our understanding of the making of a person, a making of identity, and how also humans exist in the world. Because there's a lot of this is about the disenchantment of the world, right? That the world is changing here from the worlds of heroes and gods to a more mortal coil. I think it's interesting to think of the text as manifestly being one of moving from the time of legend, Troy going back to the apple of discord, and we're not going to get all the whole backstory there, to the mortal concerns of who is going to marry whom and get this house straightened out.

59:31Rebecca Schinsky:Like that is the move here. And then also we're getting a sense that the people of the world and probably the listeners of them feel themselves lesser to the historical world they understand to be true. There's this quote, few sons are the equals of their fathers most fall short. All too few surpass them. If that is true, then in aggregate, the world is getting worse. It's getting less heroic. It's getting less misic. It's becoming, I don't know, more fallen in some kind of way. And that's happening in the text as well.

1:00:01Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. And it continues to happen through the rest of history, right? Like there's not a generation in recorded history where people were not concerned that it was worse than it used to be. Yep. That's right. And we have not had an original thought ever. People have been feeling this way for as long as people have been peopling. Anything else on the vibes, what it's like to read this?

1:00:22Rebecca Schinsky:I just want to say here, I think also that there is a sense of Penelope and Odysseus being a good match for each other, even outside of the gender roles. At one point, someone says, no finer, greater grift in the world than that when a man and a woman possess their home, two minds, two hearts that work as one. despair to their enemies, joy to all their friends, their own best claim to glory. So there's a sense of an equality within the relationship, if not the civilizations in what they work, which is there. I think that's important to say this is there at the beginning, this idea that there's idea of a match and equality, even if they don't have the same opportunity outside of the relationship.

1:00:57Rebecca Schinsky:But within the relationship, they are of two minds and they work as one, which is a lot different than head of the household and stuff we get a lot later. That's really helpful. Thanks.

1:01:06Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, they have just existed in just very different realms. Like the fellas, like Penelope is able to fool these suitors for so long because the fellas don't understand how weaving works.

1:01:16Rebecca Schinsky:Yes. They don't think of her as an equal. That's a wonderful point. They don't think of her as someone to be reckoned with.

1:01:20Jeff O'Neal:They've just chronically underestimated her. And so she tells them, I'll pick a new husband when I'm done weaving this burial shroud for Laertes, for Odysseus' father. And so she weaves by day. And then at night she unweaves. And the next day she reweaves the same section. And she does this for like more than a decade.

1:01:40Rebecca Schinsky:They're so dumb. I mean, and she gets ratted out by one of the women in the house. So the dudes don't even figure it out. They have to be told about it eventually.

1:01:47Jeff O'Neal:So they're just they are living in completely just separate realms. The flip side of that is that Telemachus, when he goes on his journey that Athena's ordered him to go on, tells one of the servants, don't wait 12 days before you tell my mom that I'm gone. Yes. So it's completely conceivable that they could go 12 days of not bumping into each other, that she could go almost two weeks without noticing that her son has left the island. They live in the same palace, but they exist in completely different realms. And I do appreciate that idea of Odysseus and Penelope as being like the biblical language would be equally yoked.

1:02:25Jeff O'Neal:Yes. That they are – or Shakespeare, it's a marriage of true minds. The merry war.

1:02:32Rebecca Schinsky:The merry war. Yes.

1:02:32Jeff O'Neal:They can hang with each other. And that she seems as crafty as he is in her own ways, I do think is really important.

1:02:41Rebecca Schinsky:You did a wonderful work here and gave us an incomplete list of the Homeric epithets of Odysseus, the epithet being the standard descriptions of a place, figure, God or whatever. Do you want to run through them real quick?

1:02:52Jeff O'Neal:Yes, we've got Odysseus the mastermind, godlike Odysseus, wily Odysseus the lord of lies, the man who can adapt to anything, clever rascal, Odysseus the city sacker, Odysseus great strategist, crafty Odysseus, the master of deception, devious Odysseus, inscrutable Odysseus, the man who thought of everything, and unwavering Odysseus. Amazing. And I know I didn't capture all of them.

1:03:19Rebecca Schinsky:Amazing. All right. Time for Stray Thoughts. our own personal observations, wondering musings as we got through the text. There's a lot of them here. We cannot get them all. Rebecca, where would you like to begin?

1:03:29Jeff O'Neal:Is Odysseus the OG unreliable narrator?

1:03:33Rebecca Schinsky:Is there a reliable narrator in the whole thing? It's a great question.

1:03:37Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, because he's relaying a lot of the stuff. He especially is the one relaying all those big set pieces of like, and this is how we killed the Cyclops, and this is how I escaped the big whirlpool, and here's how we did this. And Odysseus makes himself sound pretty dang good. Like it is the poet who's describing him with all of those epithets. But it's the kind of thing that if the guy is telling you all these stories, you might believe one of them if he tells you these stories at the bar. But when he's got 15 of them, it's a little like, OK, dude, we get it. You think you're hot shit.

1:04:12Rebecca Schinsky:I love this point because it's fun to think about the idea that Odysseus plays the role of the bard many times, and he's the last person standing we meet from his crew coming back from Troy. So he could say whatever. Isn't it useful? Wouldn't it be useful for him to come to someone's household needing help to tell them a really good, entrancing story to gain sympathy and affection with them? Boy, it's awfully convenient that he has all these amazing stories to tell when the thing that he could best bring without any material goods is a story. It's very convenient, Rebecca.

1:04:44Jeff O'Neal:And that he's the hero of all of them.

1:04:46Rebecca Schinsky:And he's the hero of all of them. Well, why don't you run through yours and then I'll go through mine.

1:04:50Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, I mean, I found some of the other gender stuff to be really interesting. Like, it is weird to see how much modern culture equates Greek masculinity with stoicism and toughness and violence. because these dudes cry a lot all the time. There's so much weeping and there's so much yearning. And I found it kind of refreshing to be like, yeah, you just came back from war. A lot has gone on. All of your friends have died. Also, you had to kill a cyclops and escape a whirlpool and be lashed to the mast of a thing so the sirens wouldn't get you. Your dudes didn't listen to you. They ate the cattle of the sun god.

1:05:25Jeff O'Neal:Now everybody's dead. Like, you'd have some feelings about that. or Wilson even refers to it as like conceive of him as having a version of PTSD. Think about the human experience of it. The body keeps the score, Rebecca.

1:05:38Rebecca Schinsky:We know this. The body keeps the score.

1:05:40Jeff O'Neal:I mean, and Odysseus, what a body we are given to believe.

1:05:43Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, all right. So you had this. He is a swordsman. We're given to understand. Yeah.

1:05:50Jeff O'Neal:How good is Odysseus in the sack? Apparently quite.

1:05:54Rebecca Schinsky:Calypso for a year. Circe for seven. Other way around. Oh, sorry. I get them confused all the time. Yeah, other way around. And also when he gets home to Penelope, they do not tarry in going back to their tree bed.

1:06:10Jeff O'Neal:Yes. I love the sauciness of her being like, if this man is really my husband, he's going to know some things. Yes. And the thing that he knows is that the bed is carved, like carved in and around this olive tree. And it's kind of immovable.

1:06:25Rebecca Schinsky:Well, he is the man of many tricks. I think she knows his moves. I think it's not just the bed that's a telling sign of whether or not this is Odysseus, right? He's got moves. He's the man of many tricks. Apparently. Clitoris is a Greek word. So there you go. Also notoriously hard to know where the origin of Clitoris comes from, ironically. Anyway, so.

1:06:48Jeff O'Neal:That is an after dark thought. It is 10 a.m., sir.

1:06:52Rebecca Schinsky:Let's just say that he knew the little hill to find Penelope on there. Let's see. I think this is the first instance. It has to be of the dog knows the real deal. So he gets home and his dog Argos is just waiting around. It's like he's in his beggar's Athena thing. That dog is old.

1:07:10Jeff O'Neal:20 years is an old dog.

1:07:12Rebecca Schinsky:Sorry, spoiler alert. The dog just sort of happily passes away after realizing that. Also, I think this might be the first Easter egg in the history of Western tradition because the Argonauts and Jason, And the Argonauts would have been the earlier idea of going out in a sea voyage. And so that Odysseus would name his dog Argos just because it'd be sort of like naming your dog Obi-Wan or something. Like it's referring to this other story that other people would get at the same time. It's really fun.

1:07:36Jeff O'Neal:There's like some of the like just ancient, long running social dynamics when Odysseus won't stay with Calypso. She does a version of like, well, what does Penelope have that I don't? And she's basically like, I know I'm hotter than her. like I know this ass like she she refers to her body parts and it's like I know I'm better looking than her right I I'm a goddess I've got to be better in the sack than she is and Odysseus is like yeah you're right you're prettier but that's my home and I want to go back yeah but that like so relatable we see this still what does she have that I don't yep uh something to keep in your back

1:08:15Rebecca Schinsky:pocket at one point Helen gets some like special medicine from someone she knows from Ethiopia So just in case you want to have Helen's connection to Africa in your back pocket for reasons, you know, it's certainly closer than, say, Boston, Massachusetts to the world of Greece. That may seem like a non-sec order, but if you know, you're no. Odysseus pulls the same move several times. He dresses up as a beggar to serve a Troy, dresses a beggar as he does in Ithaca. And then notably, the Trojan horse was his idea. So this example of always letting something into your house that you assume you understand to your peril, which is why, you know, circumspect Penelope, which is the epithet I always have in my mind of like she's going to hold an abeyance of judgment.

1:08:59Rebecca Schinsky:She's like she's not going to think she knows the deal until she really knows the deal. She's going to keep her cards close to the vest, but also not commit herself. And then those who too readily believe they know the deal are often swindled. So if you live with Odysseus, you trust but verify like a boss is my thought there.

1:09:18Jeff O'Neal:There is so much disguising and then so much testing of other people to see if they are who they say they are and if they recognize you for who you really are. And that's just part of it. Being a trickster, being able to go in disguise is not like deception doesn't carry the same sort of moral valence in this world that we might apply to it. Odysseus isn't doing something wrong or weird in his world when he appears as a beggar in front of his father to see if his father recognizes him. Like, that's just kind of part of what they're doing. And that it all goes back to the epithets for him. He is the trickster.

1:09:53Jeff O'Neal:He is the one who can pull off all of these things. He's the master of deception. And that's laudatory, if anything, is a description for him.

1:10:00Rebecca Schinsky:And then in, like, performances of magic, they call it the prestige when you sort of reveal. I also think don't underestimate the joy and all these the gods themselves find in the reveal of I'm actually this or it was actually this along. Like that's part of the fun at the same time, too. Homer never misses a chance to mention how great listening to great stories is. Here's one passage. There's nothing better than when deep joy holds sway throughout the realm and banqueters and up and down the palace and the ranks. Enthralled to hear the bard and before them all the table seeped with bread and meats and drawing wine from a mixing bowl.

1:10:32Rebecca Schinsky:The steward makes his rounds and keeps the wine cups flowing. So this is the scene of happiness. Sitting around, a lot of food, hearing a good story. Let's see. Telling war stories slash not wanting to talk about the war is here from the beginning. People want to talk about it. They won't talk about it. At the same time, there's this one great point where Homer kind of realizes that his metatextual Russian nesting dolls of stories have kind of gotten away from him because Odysseus is to say, well, or so I heard from the lovely nymph Calympso, who I think heard it herself, she said, from Hermes.

1:11:04So, like, I could be making this up.

1:11:06Rebecca Schinsky:You can just say you heard it from a god. People have to believe you. But it does even get away from Homer a little bit. One question I have is how distant from the time of these stories did the intended hearer understand them to be? So if you're like, let's say there was a Homer in the 8th century telling you the story of Odysseus and the Lotus Eaters. Is that itself way back in time? Was it a couple generations away? Nobody knows. But this is something with the customs and practices felt familiar. I just don't understand. You can't get into their mind. But this is one of my great questions. What's their own relationship to these stories is something I'd love to know.

1:11:44Rebecca Schinsky:And one of the great questions I would love to have the answer to, but I never can.

1:11:47Jeff O'Neal:The grill is shot. The chairs are held together by optimism. And what happened to the rug? Sounds like your outdoor setup is not ready for patio season. Fix it all with Wayfair. Shop Wayfair for grills, rugs, furniture, and more. With 20 million five-star reviews, room of choice delivery, and experts set up on qualifying orders, it's never been easier to do more for less. Get 10 % off your first eligible purchase. Hurry to Wayfair.com or download the app now. Yeah, that's a great one. A lot of notable quotes from the Odyssey. Yes, let's go on to quotes.

1:12:22Rebecca Schinsky:We will not do too many because the translation gets a, you know, that plays a part here. What does Goodreads say, Rebecca?

1:12:28Jeff O'Neal:The Goodreads' favorite quote is, Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bread that is weaker than man. which is the first chunk of a longer paragraph that goes in that like this is not actually the whole idea of that but count on goodreads to decontextualize something yes um a couple of my favorites um soon dawn was born her fingers bright with roses that was a variation on rosy finger dawn that i really liked um the forest on calypso's island is described as being it was full of wings And then there's a list of the different birds that are there. And like having been in beautiful places that are filled with birds to think of them as it was full of wings.

1:13:10Jeff O'Neal:Like what a lovely way to present that. Weapons themselves can tempt a man to fight.

1:13:17Rebecca Schinsky:Seems relevant. The problem with the standing army is you want to use it, as you've probably heard us talk about in a previous show.

1:13:23Jeff O'Neal:And he held his love, his faithful wife, and wept as welcome as the land to swimmers when Poseidon wrecks their ship at sea and breaks it with great waves and driving winds. A few escape the sea and reach the shore, their skin all caked with brine. Grateful to be alive, they crawl to land. So glad she was to see her own dear husband and her white arms would not let go his neck. It does get elevated at times. And when it does, it's really beautiful.

1:13:50Rebecca Schinsky:I'll just do a couple moments. So this is talking about as Odysseus is leaving the underworld, he sees that the shades are talking to themselves. So they traded stories. The two go standing there in the house of death, far in the hidden depths below the earth. So this idea that afterlife is just sort of telling the same stories over and over again. That's the end of life is that you have no new stories to tell in that particular moment. You get that in what was the R.F.

1:14:17Jeff O'Neal:Kwong book last year?

1:14:19Rebecca Schinsky:Oh, Catawbuses.

1:14:19Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, in Katabasis, they go to hell and they meet these shades and all the shades can do is tell you about the time, how they died.

1:14:26Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. I really like at the end of that first, that intro in mine, the idea is you're invoking the muse saying, start from where you will, start wherever you want, but sing for our time too. Like make it relevant, I think. Make it modern. Like tell us this that relates to our own particular lives. That's what always gets me thinking about what is there? Is there some version the muse could tell them like, we don't know what the hell you're, that seems like weird. I have no idea what that is. Also, if you can slow down there, you get weird descriptions, metaphors and similes. So this is just like pebbles stuck in the suckers of some octopus dragged from its lair.

1:14:59Rebecca Schinsky:So strips of skin torn from his clawing hands stuck to the rock face, like really specific and evocative. It can shock you at moments into like, whoa, that is an artist at work. Like that's a specific thing. That's not something that would just emerge out of sort of consensus at the same time.

1:15:15Jeff O'Neal:Sometimes you are reminded that it really is poetry. Yeah.

1:15:18Rebecca Schinsky:And also like when Odysseus or any of the heroes just say, I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, known to the world for every kind of craft. My fame has reached the skies. I mean, come on, let's go. Yeah.

1:15:27Jeff O'Neal:I got to work on how I introduce myself. I think so, too.

1:15:30Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. Let's see. If it's for you, Rebecca.

1:15:34Jeff O'Neal:I mean, if you want to get one of the foundational works of the Western canon, maybe the foundational work of the Western canon under your belt. And I think this is a great book for busting readerly imposter syndrome. Like, it is not that hard, especially with a straightforward translation. Most of the modern translations have notes. Like, the Wilson edition even has at the back summaries of each book. So if you finished a chapter and you were like, wait, what happened? You can flip and get the summary of what happened there. I found myself as I was reading, I would read one book and then I would go back to the front page of that book and put my own quick synopsis of what had happened there.

1:16:14Jeff O'Neal:But you can check the summaries and put these pieces together for yourself. The Wilson edition also has a glossary. So if you're like, what is that word and how do I pronounce all these names? If that stuff gets you hung up, there are references. But picking up a book like this, finding that actually you can encounter it, you can understand what's happening, is so good for readers' self-confidence. And as that accrues, you'll be able to pick up more and more difficult books. And even if you're not leveling up their difficulty, you will be less intimidated by them, which is so satisfying. So I think a great reason to pick this up.

1:16:50Rebecca Schinsky:And also, if you're the kind of person that likes to say that's not how it happened in the book, you're entering one of the great moments of all time for that. So get it under your belt. As you say here, maybe not. The ancient Greeks were not good about interiority. They're saying what they're feeling and thinking. You don't get a lot. Here's what I felt about that. Or here's the internal dialogue. This is not something that really happens. And you have to wait 500 years for that to get Syloquise and Shakespeare, really. The immortal questions that are asked, which of these are primary here? Am I just on the hook for the Odyssey?

1:17:24Rebecca Schinsky:But it's all of them, right? What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all their ears? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? Free will, real or no? Who am I? Who am I? Like literally all of them, Rebecca.

1:17:36Jeff O'Neal:Well, yeah, there's a little less who am I. Like there's not a lot of introspection.

1:17:40Rebecca Schinsky:Well, Telemachus is like, is Odysseus even my dad?

1:17:42Jeff O'Neal:I don't even know who this is. Okay, good point about Telemachus. so much about what do I owe my neighbor and who is my neighbor. And if you really sit with that, you can draw parallels to ideas of colonization, to ideas of immigration. Like there are ways to hang some of our modern hooks or to hang this book on some of our modern hooks. But how do I know what I know? A great question. Is this all there is? No, you can journey down to Hades and talk about what's going on down there.

1:18:13Rebecca Schinsky:Around the corner, there could be a whole different civilization with whole different rules and ways of being in the world that may want to eat you.

1:18:18Jeff O'Neal:Who knows? Yeah. Free will, real or no, plus like the cost of exercising free will in a world where the gods have agendas for you. But like this is, you know, one of the greats. So of course it does all of the questions.

1:18:33Rebecca Schinsky:It's one of the greats. Are we sure it isn't also about art and writing?

1:18:37Jeff O'Neal:Well, I'll just quote Emily Wilson here. The Odyssey suggests that poets have a particularly honorable place in society. It's certainly about storytelling.

1:18:46Rebecca Schinsky:Absolutely. If they had writing, it would be about writing.

1:18:49Jeff O'Neal:Yes, but it's definitely about art and stories. Then there's a lot of music and food. If you expand your idea of art, there's a lot of that happening here.

1:19:00Rebecca Schinsky:Could you get the most of the gist from watching the Signal adaptation, which we're about to get?

1:19:04Jeff O'Neal:Boy, I hope so. I think you could.

1:19:06Rebecca Schinsky:Where are you at on this right now? Are you feeling good about the Nolan Odyssey, Having read this right now, what's your confidence this is going to be an interesting, generally representative of what the Odyssey is trying to do?

1:19:17Jeff O'Neal:I'm pretty stoked. Zach Barron just had a big profile in GQ of Matt Damon, Tom Holland, and somebody else. And they were talking about the experience. Oh, and they interviewed Nolan for it as well. But the experience of making the movie and where they went and how hard it was and all the locations. And I have like, if anybody can do this well, I think it's Christopher Nolan. I'm curious mostly about those big set pieces from books nine and 10, because those are the kinds of things that if you went for CGI could be really weird. But Nolan doesn't do a lot of CGI. So like, are we just going to hear about like the whirlpool caribdis?

1:19:58Jeff O'Neal:And it won't be like personified in the way that it's personified. I'm pretty stoked. And I have a lot of I feel really curious about it. I'm very curious.

1:20:09Rebecca Schinsky:Yes.

1:20:09Jeff O'Neal:How do you capture these things? But I think maybe it could be great. Like it could be great. And I will say there was a good film a couple of years ago called The Return with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche as Odysseus and Penelope. That is just the last half of the book as Odysseus returns home and then has to get rid of the suitors. and that is it's exciting and compelling and sexy and done really well kind of a cheat because you get to do that without doing all of the weird sort of supernatural stuff but i think that like when they get home and they're cooking up the plan they're trying to get rid of these fellas and you got to shoot an arrow through the heads of 12 axes like that's exciting stuff yeah the

1:20:50Rebecca Schinsky:stuff with with um hathaway and pattinson and holland and damon in the room together like at the end is going to be pretty cool. I think that's going to work very well. Movie, musical, TV series, or Muppets? The Muppets would be unbelievable.

1:21:05Jeff O'Neal:High chaos potential for The Muppets. And I think I would go Telemachus as the only human. Oh, I love it. And let Odysseus be like Kermit and Peggy as Penelope.

1:21:17Rebecca Schinsky:Gonzo as Odysseus would be hilarious too at the same time. I love that idea of Telemachus. Miscellaneous, trivia application, rumors, misattributed quotes, and whatever. What do you got? What jumped out to you?

1:21:26Jeff O'Neal:There's so much, but a couple of fun ones. Faulkner took the title for As I Lay Dying from book 11 of the Odyssey when they're in Hades and Agamemnon is telling Odysseus his story of As I Lay Dying, these things happen. It's also not Homer, but Christopher Marlowe, who first describes Helen as being so beautiful that her face launched a thousand ships.

1:21:49Rebecca Schinsky:Is that the best description of all time of someone? Like if you got to draft how you would be memorialized. The face that launched a thousand ships is pretty good.

1:21:59Jeff O'Neal:Pretty good stuff there. There's a reference early in the book to the suitors while they're just like wasting time getting drunk on the lawn playing checkers. So I went Googling to find out about that. And there are variations of the game of checkers evident in ancient Greece as far back as 1400 BCE. So yeah, there's that. What'd you find?

1:22:20Rebecca Schinsky:Apparently the Roman Emperor Hadrian had his own headcanon that Homer was the son of Telemachus. Interesting. There's even stories that Homer was the son of Apollo or the Muses. You see what I'm saying? We just don't know. You can mis-ologize it forever. We don't think that the Odyssey was necessarily written, composed, whatever, after the Iliad. These stories existed contemporaneously. That's not a sequel necessarily. Some of the events of the Iliad, but not specific ones, are a revenge. You could have a different version of the Trojan War and the Odyssey would still hold up in a lot of different ways.

1:22:50Rebecca Schinsky:We cannot really map anything from the Odyssey onto actual geography. People have tried. Doesn't hold up. Again, mythic, legendary world. That's where we are. We have fragments of a quote-unquote sequel called The Teligony, which is about a son of Circe and Odysseus. And by fragments, I mean we have two lines. All their concepts are from later secondary sources. The Great Library of Alexandria was supposed to have several different editions of the Odyssey, but... Yeah. For those of you who don't know, it burned down and took most of antiquity with it. Who knows?

1:23:23Jeff O'Neal:I found it so humbling in a really lovely way to be reminded of scholars in the Library of Alexandria arguing over who was Homer, arguing over the different versions of the Odyssey that this story has been intellectually fascinating and troubling for that long. And we're in good company trying to figure it out.

1:23:43Rebecca Schinsky:You need to blast off a couple of hot takes, Rebecca?

1:23:46Jeff O'Neal:Would a guy who is really always best at every kind of trick get delayed by a decade getting home? Yeah.

1:23:56Rebecca Schinsky:That's a real story you got to tell about was four hours for you to pick up cigarettes. Right.

1:24:01Jeff O'Neal:Also, like, I'm so here for the hospitality, but I do think a few boundaries about guests would have done these people good. Like, they will let you crash a wedding without even introducing yourself. And then you can just overstay your welcome. Like hospitality extends so far that the suitors are just hanging out, eating, like literally eating them out of house and home. But it would be bad form to just tell them all to go home. So they have to come up with tricks to get rid of them instead. Like a little boundary would be good.

1:24:31Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. This whole thing gets kicked off with the before the Trojan War with the Apple of Discord because someone didn't get invited to a wedding. Like this etiquette stuff is here from the very beginning. It's hilarious.

1:24:41Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, I mean, I have to say, like, I think I would have just stayed on Calypso's Island. It sounds pretty sweet.

1:24:48Rebecca Schinsky:Yes.

1:24:48Jeff O'Neal:And my final hot take is that this is really a story about doing right by the people who work for you because they can screw you over when they know all your secrets.

1:24:56Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. And doing right by them really helps you when you need them, which goes into mind. The noble swineherd is the MVP. Take it. Let's hear it. The most valuable peasant. Like, he helps him get in. He gives him food and clothes. Like, he gives him the literal and figurative lay of the land. And also a really long book focusing on Eumaeus. Like it's really long. Like we get a lot of run. We get a lot of screen time. I was kind of wondering if there's an element to that of like the common people wanting to see themselves represented in these stories. Like you two have a role to play in the functioning of state.

1:25:27Rebecca Schinsky:I don't know. Just a thought there. I would have done poorly in this story. Bad with seasickness. I get queasy if I haven't eaten for a while. Bad vision. Not good at arms. I'm not a good liar. It's just a very tough beat for me. Poseidon blows Athena forever. I think we can take that as read. Waking up the shades by feeding them blood so you can talk to them for a few minutes is terrifying. Like generally horrifying stuff.

1:25:51Jeff O'Neal:Yes.

1:25:52Rebecca Schinsky:This should be called the Ithasiad. This is a story of Ithaca, not of the return. The return, the Odyssey is part of it, but it's mostly about Ithaca. And my hottest take is regular readers don't really need to care about translation questions.

1:26:05Jeff O'Neal:100 % agree.

1:26:06Rebecca Schinsky:Read it. Kind of know that you're not necessarily ever going to get the real story, but pick one that speaks to you and then run with it.

1:26:12Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. And like Emily Wilson said that when she was here, the right translation is the one that you will actually read. So check out a few of them. I think in that episode, we also talked about the fact that Claire Danes narrates the audio edition of the Wilson. Ian McKellen narrates the Fagels audio edition. Like you got some great voices to choose from if you want to hear it read to you in that oral performance style as well.

1:26:35Rebecca Schinsky:Rita likes Rebecca. Oh, Brother Where Art Thou is a sneaky. I don't think people know this is a version of the Odyssey, like the song is the man of constant sorrow, which sounds like it's probably a translation of an epithet that someone applied to Odysseus. It's fun. It's a ton of fun. I think Clooney, that's a score soundtrack by T-Bone Burnett. It's really wonderful to throw on.

1:26:55Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, I already shouted out The Return. Of course, you can read The Iliad. You can read Inferno. Other books inspired by this one. Ulysses by James Joyce. Ulysses is the Roman name for Odysseus. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, which you shouted out. Circe by Madeline Miller. And Jessamyn Ward's Sing Unburied Sing is a modern sort of inspired by their—it's a family on a road trip, but they are on a journey similar to the Odyssey, and it hits some of the same beats.

1:27:23Rebecca Schinsky:In the Greek world, if you were unburied, you were troubled. So you would often be calling out to be avenged or given the proper funerary rites, things like that. Which other zero to well-read titles does it connect to? I mean, obviously Oedipus because it's in the ancient Greek tradition, but I think it's a meaningful jump. I think it's interesting to think about the difference there. I put their eyes were watching God. Janie comes back. She's telling these stories on the porch of these things that's happened to her and a lot of people have been lost. She comes back with thinking about the good life and sitting on the porch and talking to her friend and telling her the stories.

1:27:53Rebecca Schinsky:That's the good life, not unlike the bards and the meats and the wines. I had that in mind. I love that poll. Throughout this as well.

1:28:00Jeff O'Neal:The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Those kids are in a big Greek seminar and they're obsessed with ancient history for better and mostly for worse. And then I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. She talks about reading this and the Iliad when she was quite young and becoming really excited by the story.

1:28:20Rebecca Schinsky:It's amazing. All right. Cocktail Party Crib Sheet. People are going to be talking about the Odyssey. What are you going to pull out over your mead when you're in your cups, which is the phrase that's in my edition? Drinking your wine out of an Anfora or your honeyed mead. What do you want to say to people?

1:28:34Jeff O'Neal:I mean, just that most of the things you're picturing when you think of the Odyssey happen in two of the 24 books. So there's so much more going on here. than you remember, probably. And also, it's just more weird and also more straightforward than you think it's going to be. He's trying to get home. Telemachus has gone to get news of him. They arrive home about the same time. They have their stories to tell. They have to get rid of the suitors. What does Penelope know? Is she going to stay faithful to him? Not hard to wrap any of our modern heads around.

1:29:08Rebecca Schinsky:No. So I've got to this idea that we can only barely glimpse Homer through the mists of mythic time, like the idea that someone's going to say they can't be this depicted in this way because of X is ludicrous beyond all reckoning, to my opinion. But like this is very much a transitional document. It's on the border between the known and the unknown, both in the text and outside of the text. And then this is the primordial swamp of Western literature. Like it's like things are just sort of stalling to crawl out and become birds and reptiles and slugs and snails and monkeys. Like it's all soupy and together here.

1:29:41Rebecca Schinsky:And I love this. I love this mix. It's like this fifth state of matter that happened right after the Big Bang before the world started to cool and differentiate itself from one another. And then you can see where things go from there. So that's one that I like to talk to people about when they ask about the Odyssey, which they do sometimes in Homer. Have you read that? Final beat or zero to well-read score. Each one gets a score of 10, with 10 being the highest. The easiest 10 in the history of all the things we've done here is historical importance gets a 10. So the readability, this is translation dependent.

1:30:15Rebecca Schinsky:I think in both of our cases, we think it's pretty high. The Wilson probably is the most readable of them all. I think so. But even the Fagels, it's not hard. You just aren't going to have a hard time reading it. I don't know what to do. Nine?

1:30:26Jeff O'Neal:I would go seven, eight, nine, somewhere in there. Yeah, let's do eight. Eight and a half? Eight and a half, sure. Okay.

1:30:32Rebecca Schinsky:Well, current relevance is central questions. The specifics, of course, we don't jibe with, but sometimes it's easier, even in a book that's written 50 years ago, than to drill down to the things underneath the things. We can so readily dismiss as being relevant to us specific modes of transportation or how they use phones or specific historical events or ways of being that you can see the bigger things somewhat clearly. I think one of the reasons these things stick around is because they're thinking about things and they're wondering about fundamental human conundrums, questions and situations.

1:31:07Rebecca Schinsky:So I don't know what to do with that. Eight and a half? Six? I could do whatever. Yeah.

1:31:12Jeff O'Neal:I'm picturing the moment from the trailer that's out now where we see Tom Holland as Telemachus going like, my dad's coming home. He's coming home.

1:31:19Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah.

1:31:20Jeff O'Neal:And there's nothing more relatable than you've been separated from your family and you miss them and you want to get back to the people you love.

1:31:27Rebecca Schinsky:Book Nerd Read Cred is an interesting one because it's high, but if you haven't read it for class, I think it's a 10.

1:31:34Jeff O'Neal:It's a 10. Yeah.

1:31:36Rebecca Schinsky:Oh, damn factor. I have to give it a 10. Yes. It just has to be a 10. It has to be a 10. I totally agree. That it exists as a miracle. It is. It's a human miracle it exists.

1:31:48Jeff O'Neal:And it's just a wonderful ride.

1:31:50Rebecca Schinsky:It's a wonder. It's a cabinet of curiosities in a treasure trove of wonders that's really hard for me to wrap my head around what it means for why we do this show. If you care about stories, if you care about art, the historical questions, what we do and don't know are just so endlessly fascinating that I don't feel like I'm ever going to get my head around it. Every time I re-engage with it, I'm re-enlivened by the questions that it poses, the world it represents, and sort of the wonder of the human imagination. That human imagining happened before science and writing and history is an important thing to remember.

1:32:28Rebecca Schinsky:And this really brings it home to me.

1:32:31Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. It's such a wonderful read. And it made me want to, like, set myself a reminder to maybe every five years just reread The Odyssey. Come back to it.

1:32:39Rebecca Schinsky:Just do it. Go to the well. Like, get well on the well. Return, if you will, to the Odyssey once again. You can go to patreon.com slash zero2wellread for guided read-alongs and membership options. You can go check out the special episode we did. We're going to record here in a few minutes, weirdly, to get people ready to read. You can follow us on the socials at zero2wellreadpodcast. Shoot us an email, zero2wellread at bookriot.com. We love your stories of reading, your read-alikes, your takes. We, like Homer, are in of and out of time. You can always email us about wherever you are. We just had someone email us about 1984 read-alikes, and I read it with gusto.

1:33:15Rebecca Schinsky:Today, thanks so much to Thrift Books for sponsoring this season of Zero to Well Read. And Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. A joy and a thrill, Rebecca.

1:33:27Jeff O'Neal:Always. But this was extra fun.

1:33:38Thank you.