The Odyssey

"Yes, speaking of war. Here we have the introduction in Western literature to the concept of prudence, embodied in the character of Odysseus. You could even conceive of The Iliad and The Odyssey as a two-volume study of the nature of prudence and imprudence, because it begins with the imprudence of Achilles. Achilles has a fit about something that in the context of war is an extremely low priority. He’s pissed off because he doesn’t get some slave girl as a prize. He makes a low priority a top priority, which is one of the hallmarks of imprudence. And he does so in service of self, which is another. There you go. And then you have Odysseus, in contrast. The epithets about Odysseus are always about his cunning and his prudence. In the first book of The Odyssey he is referred to as a “master tactician”. He’s always careful, and we see that most of all in his return to Ithaca and his wife. He doesn’t just waltz in, he comes in disguise. There’s no equivalent of a Western hero in modern times who would do the same. They would walk in with guns blazing. But Odysseus is careful. Why? Because he doesn’t know what he’s going to find. Odysseus is the great hero of prudence in all of our literature. He thinks before he acts, and bases that action on caution. And his wife, Penelope, is the heroine of prudence in literature. She’s a single mother, she doesn’t know if her husband is coming back or not, and she has all of these suitors. She’s in an extremely vulnerable position – how can she say “yes” to one of the suitors when her husband might come home, but how can she say “no” and possibly invoke their wrath – so her best option is to keep them hanging on. That’s why she weaves and unweaves her tapestry at the loom every night. She says she will choose one of her suitors as husband when she finishes her tapestry, but she has no plan ever to finish it. Exactly. All in the service of delaying them. In my book on decision making, one of the guidelines that comes through very strongly is: Don’t decide until you have to. That’s what Penelope does. Let me read to you a short passage of hers that captures that note of prudence. This is in Book 19, and she’s talking about a dream. She hasn’t acknowledged that Odysseus is Odysseus yet. She wants to test him first. He tells her about a dream and she says: “Friend, many and many a dream is mere confusion, a cobweb of no consequence at all. Two gates for ghostly dreams there are: One gateway of honest horn, and one of ivory. Issuing by the ivory gate are dreams of glimmering illusion, fantasies, but those that come through solid polished horn may be borne out, if mortals only know them.” These are not the words of a foolish woman. This is the voice of someone who knows that you have to test the promptings of your heart. That the dreams that come from you, or seem to be given to you, might be given by good or bad forces, might be helpful or destructive. They have to be tested by thought and experience. And that is essential to prudence. The impulsiveness of Greek heroes is legendary. Just look at Oedipus. Here is a man who was given a prophecy that he was going to kill his father and sleep with his mother. A minimally prudent person, hearing that prophecy and believing it as a good Greek of his day should have, would not then kill an older man and sleep with an older woman. Yet he did, and that was his downfall. Antigone, on the other hand, was faced with a tragic choice about whether to bury her brother with the honour he deserved in spite of the king having forbidden it. She was prudent because she did what she felt was best, with full and thoughtful awareness of the terrible consequences of her action."

"It’s a very easy read, and a completely different world from The Iliad . Whereas The Iliad depicts a militaristic and war-wrecked world, The Odyssey is like a fairy tale and it’s fascinatingly complex. It’s told in flashbacks, it has time that’s extended and time that’s compressed, and it’s told from different viewpoints. We think of it as Odysseus’s story – his ten-year journey from Troy back to his home in Ithaca – but also a large part of it, which a lot of people forget, or don’t know, is about his son Telemachus, growing up in Ithaca and becoming a man: recognising, both literally and metaphorically, that he is the true son of his father. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The Odyssey has monsters, witches, beautiful maidens, hilarious flirtations between Odysseus and various wise and wily women, and then in the second half of the poem he’s back in Ithaca trying to reassert himself, to find a place for himself in his homeland which has been completely taken over by his wife Penelope’s suitors. The moment when Penelope recognises Odysseus is extraordinarily moving. There’s a wonderful simile that compares her relief to the relief a sailor must feel when, shipwrecked, he grapples his way back on to dry land. And that is, of course, just what Odysseus has been doing. What I love about it is that Penelope and Odysseus are made to be equal characters. Penelope is Odysseus’s true partner. Part of me wonders why he didn’t just turn up rather than wafting around Ithaca in disguise for an awful lot of the poem, hanging out and living with his old swineherd. Why all the cloak and dagger stuff? Well, the interesting thing is that throughout the poem we are constantly being reminded of what happens when you get that bit wrong. When Agamemnon goes back to Mycenae his wife Clytemnestra, who’s been living it up with her lover, kills him. That’s what happens if you don’t play it right. The women in The Odyssey are great. Samuel Butler wrote a hilarious book called The Authoress of the Odyssey, claiming that it had to have been written by a woman because all the female characters are so fabulous and all the men so drippy. I think his argument sucks but it does say something about how great the female characters are."

"I first read this when I had pneumonia when I was about nine. I was at my parents’ beach house and my brothers were going in and out to the beach and I was stuck on the sofa for a month. Can you imagine? It was the Odyssey in comic book form. My dad bought me the Iliad and the Odyssey , but I found the Iliad kind of boring – there were all these ships going in and out and a lot of waiting around. War is like that really – a lot of waiting around. But the Odyssey was wonderful. I read it again in high school and I think you need to focus on it, you need a kind of mindfulness to read it. I can’t take it all in at once. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s about wanting to go home! The thing I loved about Odysseus was that he’s so in love with adventure and with love. He stays on the island with Calypso for seven years and he’s so close really to Penelope, who’s there waiting for him and knitting her shroud all this time. And he keeps getting delayed, finally by Calypso. I am such a useless, sappy romantic – I think with my heart not my head – and I love this longing for home but the kind of unreality of it, the truth that you can never really go back. But he does get home. It’s a love story and it’s about our…conflicting longings, I suppose."

"I love ancient Greek mythology, and I love stories about journeys. Anyone who believes in the idea that it’s more about the journey than about the destination will enjoy this work. In the Iliad , the warrior Achilles leaves home; in the Odyssey, Odysseus is traveling home to Ithaca after the Trojan War . In ancient Greek mythology, there are two ways of earning glory: either you leave home or you return home. The Greek word kleos refers to glory earned through deeds that will be remembered for eternity. The pursuit of glory is a universal theme. Odysseus wants to return home because he wants to be reunited with his family, but he is also motivated by glory. Achilles leaves home to earn glory by fighting in the war. I find the Odyssey so fun to read because it is partly about impression management. In addition to being a strong, savvy, competent hero figure, Odysseus is a storyteller with great powers of persuasion and negotiation. He influences people and convinces them that he’s trustworthy. At times, he needs to trick people. Because this is my area of interest, I am often asked whether I manipulate other people. I never consciously try to manipulate others. As most people are able to detect whether someone is being genuine, I believe that being genuine is the best way to make a favorable impression in most situations. Coming back to the concept of kleos , the way to earn glory is not only through physical force. In many instances, you have to use language and charm, which are related to impression management. You must be a good storyteller."

"I was in a play of the Odyssey , actually, but I guess I first read it as a kid – my granddad was really good at buying us books. I can’t quite remember but I assume it was one of those Roger Lancelyn Green volumes, his Tale of Troy . So I would’ve been familiar with the story pretty young, and then when I was a teenager I was in this play that went to Edinburgh [Festival] and it was probably the happiest time of my life; I guess because puberty was happening and it was all very romantic and full of charged encounters with girls and boys and we were all part of this crazy experimental music and theatre company. I think what was happening was that I was falling in love with certain types of person, like the person who played Odysseus was a guy who later ended up having quite a hard time, but he was one of those electric light people – he had this gorgeous natural light flowing from him and, for me, that summer when we went to Edinburgh, when I was about 13, it was just a combination of admiring these older kids and having these revelatory moments. I remember falling in love with that kind of person who was just so unlike the shitty kids I was at school with, and the experience of putting on this play was so unlike the graded experience of school – of doing SATs and tucking shirts in. It was all very loose and free. And the fact that it was the Odyssey – which I learnt was just a membrane, this fluid thing that can be told anyway you want to tell it – was incredibly exciting. That’s exactly right, and you have to realise that all those odysseys are valuable odysseys. I still have an image of Odysseus in my head from when I was a child: it’s like one of those Michael Foreman style watercolours that lots of children’s books used to have. He is still a part of my odyssey, in a sense – he’s very Anglo-Saxon and stubbly, he looks a bit like Michael Fassbender. As you grow up, all the different versions begin to coalesce and you realise that there’s this invitation to read the thing again as a grown up. I didn’t really do that until I was about 16 or 17 – I never did it at school, I never studied Classics – but then I had the satisfaction of reading the whole thing, and then, later still, came the satisfaction of reading it in verse, and discovering various translations. “As a portrait of a manic ego that is as old as time itself, Odysseus just makes me giddy” The poetry of the Odyssey is startling, astonishing. I started to get obsessed with people’s versions of it. In the last 10 to 15 years I’ve collected them, first as a bookseller and then as an editor. I’m increasingly preoccupied with versions and translations and the liberties you can take and how you can separate the text from the circumstances, and the questions you can ask. Why is, say, an Italian Odyssey different to an English one? How has masculinity been so differently approached? How does it work as a lens to understand how civilizations have ended up as they have? How do we share stories? And then there’s simply the pleasure of the thing – the sheer, unlimited joy of reading it, the fun of it. I still think it’s the most fun book to read. And Odysseus is just such a prick! As a representation of a bloke, he’s just the greatest hero there could ever be – he is such a monstrous twat. Yeah, and each retelling of the story, of his character, has to reckon with what you do with the fact that he is such an arsehole and that, actually, when faced with a major moral challenge – like: do you cheat on your wife? – he says, basically, ‘Yes, absolutely, because I am a hero.’ For me, as a modern male, reckoning with the absence of my father and father figures, this is an important question. My book was originally going to be about Telemachus because I wanted him to be this figure who could move through time and who, as the good son, is always awaiting the return of his father. Even when the father comes back, figuratively there’s no dad. Dad is always hollow, he’s always a creation to work around or to interrogate or to be disappointed by. Dad becomes just one of the sea of squabbling men, and his heroism, his cunning, all the things that make him great, are just fantasy. So I guess, as I’ve grown up and I’ve becoming more interested in fantasy, it all seems like such a modern creation; Odysseus is still such an arsehole, and there’s the whole failure of the fraternal in him too. He loves all his comrades, he’s so dedicated to them, and yet he’ll also quite happily sacrifice them. As a portrait of a manic ego that is as old as time itself, it just makes me giddy. I’m kind of letting you into my big secret here, which is that my next book is going to be about the Odyssey . It’s all part of my thinking about families and the constant role-playing nature of being in a family. And what do you do if you’re in a family but you’re also a character is a very famous book, possibly the most famous book of all time? How do you live with that? It’s a kind of postmodern reckoning of the significance of the self, of the Hero."

"I’ve written my own version of the Odyssey which I use in classrooms. I tell it very much in the oral tradition, I tell the story to the class. That story is a favorite of theirs. The question we usually use around that story is not an ethical one, but exploring the nature of mythical creatures. So we use that story as a springboard for discussing whether or not Cyclopes exist, how many eyes Cyclopes would have, and things like that. But you’re right, most of the stories in the Odyssey focus more on ethical than metaphysical issues. There’s the classic dilemmas. So, for instance, Scylla and Charybdis, where you’ve got the two monsters on either side of the rock faces the ship has to pass through. There’s a whirlpool to the right, and what the crew don’t know is that there’s a six-headed monster hidden in the cliffs to the left. I’ve done versions of the trolley problem with this story. Odysseus knows about the six-headed monster, but the crew don’t. So as they’re going through, if they go too close to the whirlpool the whole ship will be sunk and everyone will die. Odysseus’s dilemma is: Should I tell the men about the monster on the left they can’t see? Because if he tells the men about the monster, he risks them being too nervous to go near the cliff on the left hand side and jeopardizing the whole ship by going too close to the whirlpool. If he doesn’t tell them, they won’t be prepared for the six-headed monster and he’ll lose six men. Yes, it’s much more interesting when you add in the issue of information, which crops up again and again in the Odyssey . it’s absolutely full of it, because Odysseus — and other characters but mainly Odysseus — gains information through prophecy or demigods and so on. Very often, his dilemma is what should he reveal? Interestingly this is also the storyteller’s dilemma. The Odyssey is an oral story, and the storyteller’s dilemma is always, what should I reveal and when to the audience? That’s the plan. One of the things I’ve written about in my own book about the Odyssey, The If Odyss ey and also a book about storytelling, Once Upon An If , is that these stories enable us to rehearse bad situations without actually having to be in danger. What we would do under these circumstances? It’s a kind of rehearsal for the moral agent, particularly when you’re discussing the ethical dilemmas and issues that come up in the Odyssey over and over again. My aim with the use of stories is to activate the audience as a participant, as an active moral agent. One simple device with a story would be not to read it to the end, but to simply stop it at the point where the characters are faced with a dilemma or whenever there’s a tension or conflict. Then you say to the audience, ‘What would you do?’ Or, ‘What would you do if you were him or her?’ These are different questions and you can engage the children in these different ways. Sign up here for our newsletter featuring the best children’s and young adult books, as recommended by authors, teachers, librarians and, of course, kids. Another interesting thing about role-play and making use of the audience in this way is that you can give dilemmas their bite back. Very often, in philosophy discussions, the children inhabit a kind of netherworld of sitting on the fence. You’ll often find them saying “I think yes because of this and I think no because of that.” We don’t want to be too violent with the children. I’ve actually had a discussion with someone who said the trolley problem is a form of ethical violence, because it puts a person in a very uncomfortable situation. You’re saying to an 8 year old, “Are you going to pull it or aren’t you?” It seems really unpleasant. However, to say to them, “I’d like you to imagine that you are Odysseus, who is the captain of a ship, which means you have to make the decision one way or the other. Would you tell the men or would you not? I know you’ve given me reasons for both sides, but now I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you, as captain of the ship, to make a decision. It’s a really powerful way to give the dilemma its sting, as Nietzsche used to call it."

"The experience of reading Homer—unless you decide to learn ancient Greek —will always be deeply affected by the skill of the translator. Fortunately Stephen Fry has some recommendations. He writes, “There are so many books of the historical facts behind Troy and its fall, and many magnificent translations of Homer. I particularly recommend Emily Wilson’s Odyssey and either Stephen Mitchell or Robert Fagles’s Iliad .” Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey —which covers Odysseus’s long journey home—comes with an introduction that contains a wealth of information. We also have an interview with Emily Wilson about the Odyssey."

"Homer was prototypical literature, and in a sense the holy book of ancient Greece . It laid out much of the fundamental mythology; and for a certain period it was even performed on state occasions. It was the ultimate classic for the ancient world, so I think Homer was a natural choice as a model for Virgil. There was also the connection to Aeneas. The myth already existed that Aeneas, a hero of the Trojan War , traveled as a refugee to the West and had adventures, much like Odysseus does in the Odyssey . “Virgil thought very seriously about a range of bad choices for dealing with human differences” In Virgil, Aeneas is thus ‘coming home’ to a new land, to Italy. Odysseus comes to his original home in Ithaca. In the Aeneid , Virgil performs a neat structural trick: he turns Homer around. The war book, the Iliad , which depicts one segment of the Trojan War, is the model for the second part of the Aeneid : the Trojans come to Italy and they have to fight for a foothold in that country. The Odyssey , showing the hero’s wanderings in the Mediterranean, is the model for the first part of the Aeneid , and includes many of the same places where Odysseus finds himself in his wanderings. We know almost nothing about what was in Virgil’s head. He was the most uncommunicative of the leading Roman authors of the Augustan, early imperial era. There is, I think, a relationship between his greatness and his impersonality. That seems to be the case with Shakespeare , too. This is somebody who was wholly about his work. He almost erased himself. We can look at his attitude only side-on. There was propaganda being put out long before the Aeneid appeared. Augustus’s circle was eagerly manufacturing buzz that this poem was going to be even greater than Homer. You have Virgil, silent in the middle of this, just working away. Apparently, but we shouldn’t read into this too much of our own ideas about propaganda. In the mid-20th century, after the great confrontation with authoritarianism, an interpretation arose that, in its extreme version says that Virgil was almost a slave, that he was forced to propagandize for Augustus, but that he was covertly resistant to blowing the emperor’s horn. This is highly anachronistic."