Episode 185: Ethics in Homer’s “Odyssey” Feat. Translator Emily Wilson (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: So, Emily, you had connected this ethic of glory that he has to having an intact home, you know, an estate, supporters property, cattle, things like that, that there's something. It's not just having great deeds or that there's some connection between being renowned for great deeds and having this material symbol of that, the estate. And so that it's very important for him. You know, it's tragic, everybody recognizes it as tragic that his whole estate is being eaten up while he's gone. That his cattle, even though it's. He's described as having a ridiculous number of pigs and cattle and things, but everybody recognizes that this is a crime, that this is. Am I right? That this is kind of tantamount to tarnishing his reputation, that the material and the.

0:44 Emily: Yeah, I mean, I guess I would hesitate over your phrase, the ethic of glory. I mean, there's an idea that kleos, of course, is what people want. People want to be renowned and glorious and have honor. I'm not sure why we would tag ethic onto that, but there's definitely a real preoccupation with getting stuff and it's definitely one of the. In the whole Trojan War, why go to war? In order to get stuff and slaves. And in order to get that stuff, you have to fight and do the great deeds. And I guess there's also this linguistic play that happens over and over on the suitors are eating up the whole of Odysseus's biotos, which is a word that means his livelihood and suggests that they're being quasi cannibalistic.

Eating his sheep and cows and cattle. They're also metaphorically eating him. There's a whole play on who is the cannibal, who's eating who. Who is the one who's destroying somebody else's person in order to make them not eat him, he has to kill them. I'm not sure if I would hesitate to say ethic too quickly there, but that's how it's being set up. This kind of problematic scenario about who's the one who's first aggressor.

1:52 Mark: Sure. I mean, also, it seems like it's the same. This is why I'm attracted to the word ethic. But the same code, the same set of considerations that has made it so necessary to go after the kidnappers of Helen. Right. To have the Trojan War in the first place, that there's something about the sanctity of the home being violated. If you're a powerful enough person that then the mutual defense pact of the Greeks comes in. Or do you think that a lot of the rationale for the Trojan War is not just defending Menelaus honor against Helen being stolen, but the Greeks see this as a chance for glory and let's just go get some stuff.

2:32 Emily: It's glory in getting stuff. But you're right, he's figured in terms of a violation of Xenia. Right. What Paris has done is being the bad kind of guest who rather than just having a nice time hanging out and having drinks with the wife, instead takes her back home with him. So that's bad guestmanship for sure. I mean, I guess where I'm hesitating is that I think this is a multi layered literary text which is showing the fault lines in how the application of this principle is breaking down. As well as articulating the principles is also showing us this is how it might not always work out.

We've talked a lot about the Cyclops and about how Odysseus and his men invade somebody's home and take stuff and there are bad consequences. In that instance, it's Greeks who are invading somebody else's home and there are bad consequences. It's not sort of showing. It's always the foreigners who break the code. Right. It's just showing that the code can be broken in all kinds of ways. And it might also be a problematic code and can be that there's slippage between who's the bad host, who's the bad guest.

3:34 Dylan: There's something similar at the end, right, where after Odysseus has killed all the suitors, of course, their families, and he recognizes that the families of the suitors are going to raise up in rebellion the rest of the Ithacans. And we end with another battle. The father, Antinous, leads a rallying cry against them and then he ends up getting killed. And then Athena basically says, enough of this.

3:58 Emily: Yes, the war has, one might say, been started by the goddesses. Right. But it started by Athena, Aphrodite and Hera. As a result of the judgment of Paris, the Trojan War starts and then Athena has to stop this war. That's a proliferation of that same war. And it seems somewhat arbitrary. And I think it sort of shows you this scary idea that in fact it could go on forever. The cycle of violence could go on forever. If it weren't for the helpful goddess, it would go on over multiple generations.

4:25 Dylan: This isn't the book we're talking about, but of course it makes me think of Eumenides, Right. Athena playing this role there.

4:31 Emily: Yes. And obviously Aeschylus was thinking of the end of the Odyssey and composing the Eumenides and thinking of how might Athena's role at the end of the Odyssey be bolstered. If only she had the democratic institutions of 5th century Athens, then she could really say no.

4:45 Mark: Yeah, yeah, we should spell this out for the listener. That presented as a potential outcome for Odysseus is the story of Agamemnon, which is the beginning of Oresteia, where Eumenides being the end of that, who, while he was gone. The way that it's told in this story is just that his wife remarried someone and that person that she remarried killed Agamemnon when he showed back up instead of welcoming him back home. Of course, there was much more to the story that we see in the play by Aeschylus about this, that it wasn't just that she remarried, it's that she in that play is the aggressor, the main aggressor against him because he killed their daughter as a way of making the seas calm so they could go to Troy in the first place. Right.

5:32 Emily: So the wind would blow. Artemis had sent the curse on the Greeks, preventing the fleet from setting sail from Aulis to make war on Troy and Artemis said that the order, or at least through the prophet Calchas, Artemis was said to have said, the only way to make the wind blow so that you can go and make war on Troy is for Agamemnon to kill his own daughter. He summons the daughter on the premise that she's going to get married to Achilles. And here's this wonderful party, and instead he slits her throat. And that's referred to. There's the amazing first choral ode of the Agamemnon, which goes through.

What's the root of this cycle of violence? The root starts with Helen, but it also starts with that moment when Agamemnon slit his daughter's throat. And you're quite right that the Odyssey. It's quite possible that the poet or poets composing this poem knew about other aspects of the story, but that doesn't come into it at all. We never get any reference to Iphigenia. We never get the backstory of why did Clytemnestra. Even Clytemnestra's role is somewhat minimized in the Odyssey compared to in tragedy.

6:36 Mark: Yeah, there's not that concern, maybe with the cycle of violence in the way that came out in the Eumenides, that. It's just the story is, Agamemnon was betrayed, his son avenged him. What a good son.

6:49 Emily: Right. So there's the focus on the son. There's also, I think, a sort of. The fact that Clytemnestra is sometimes there, sometimes not, I think, suggests some of the ambivalence the poem has about the role of Penelope. Right. About how much does she want her husband to come home? Might she in her mind be, you know, thinking Clytemnestra thoughts or Helen thoughts as well, that there were those two possible alternatives for Penelope, rather. And waiting faithfully and then welcoming him back. She could either get married or go off with someone else, like Helen, or she could kill him when he comes home, like Clytemnestra. But the poem doesn't emphasize those in a way that I think, in keeping with keeping the veils on Penelope's mind as well as her face, I think

7:28 Wes: the account of Helen and Menelaus as sort of content power couple. It's really one of my favorite parts of the.

7:36 Mark: Right.

7:37 Dylan: Out of the house of Cards or something. Right.

7:39 Emily: Sort of content. Definitely powerful. Definitely nouveau riche. Yeah.

7:42 Wes: They're enjoying the good life. They like their things.

7:45 Emily: And yes, they have so many lovely accessories.

7:48 Wes: Yes, exactly. So one of the things I found interesting, and this might be a misreading so you can disabuse me. So this is on page 160 of your translation where she's giving this account of Odysseus sneaking in to Troy and going around killing a bunch of people. And. And she says this is after she's given them all drugs, by the way. So this is Telemachus is visiting, so she says. He told me all the things the Greeks were planning. On his way back, he used his long bronze sword to slaughter many Trojans, and he brought useful intelligence to tell the Greeks.

The Trojan women keened in grief, but I was glad. By then I wanted to go home. I wish that Aphrodite had not made me go crazy when she took me from my country and made me leave my daughter and the bed I shared with my fine, handsome, clever husband. So really, really flattering the hell out of Menelaus. So, first of all, I don't remember the Iliad well enough, but that story doesn't sound very plausible at all. And then Menelaus says something entirely contradictory. First he says, yes, wife, quite right. And then, if I'm not misreading it, he tells a tale where she essentially tries to betray them and reveal who, get them out of the horse.

And no one bats an eye at that. I just think that's hilarious.

9:04 Emily: Remember that, as you said, they've taken the drug Nepenthe, and the whole question of why do they need this drug right at this moment? And maybe they need this drug because that's what makes this unbearable marriage bearable.

9:17 Dylan: Yeah.

9:18 Wes: And so you get this sense that Menelaus is kind of clueless and can say, yes, you're right, and then tell the story of how she tried to betray the Greeks and not think anything of it, as if it sort of supports her, the account that she's just given. So I guess that turns us, you know, back to this theme of the possible betrayal of Penelope, the betrayal of Helen and the betrayal of Clytemnestra, that sort of parallel.

9:44 Emily: But also the betrayal of Odysseus. Right. I mean, what those stories also establish is the close connection between Odysseus and Helen. That she, unlike all other elite women, oils him, which is a very intimate physical thing, especially for an elite wife to be doing with a man. But then also that she defines herself as somebody who can see through Odysseus, disguises, even when nobody else can. She's smarter than him. But then what Menelaus story shows us is that she can, like him, be like, pretend convincingly to be something she Absolutely isn't. She can pretend to be the faithful wife, she can speak in that voice or multiple voices.

10:24 Wes: Right.

10:24 Emily: So she has cunning intelligence in a way, a similar kind to his. And she uses her cunning intelligence and then ultimately gets back with her spouse. And that's the same story that we get about Odysseus Nostos and manages to

10:37 Wes: patch things up despite the ten year war and all the loss of life and everything is just fine now.

10:44 Mark: Yeah. So one of the things that Emily, you emphasized in your intro is the brand of sexism here. Of course, there's a double standard, that Penelope is expected to be faithful, much like all the servants. That a lot of this Odysseus going back and revealing himself not just all at once, but to person after person individually is because he's testing all. He has to test everybody.

11:03 Emily: Let's say slaves, not servants. Yes, yes.

11:06 Mark: Even though it's been 20 years since he's been gone, everybody has to have Odysseus just top of mind and be like, oh God, if only Odysseus would come back right now.

11:15 Emily: It's as if I be on pause for the last 20 years and now finally I'm being woken up.

11:21 Dylan: Even his dog.

11:23 Emily: The dog also is the marker that in fact time can't get a raise. Right. For a dog, if you're 20 years old, it's all over.

11:29 Dylan: There's no but in some ways, isn't it the greatest fidelity there? Because the dog waits around until he comes back and then dies just after having recognized him.

11:38 Emily: But it's a relationship that's only partly re established because Odysseus doesn't then sort of pat him and say, good dog. Whereas with all the other recognitions, there's this mutual, oh, it's really you. It's so great. And Odysseus says, yes, it is me. It doesn't get to do that with the dog.

11:54 Mark: So it seems like the women are put in the same category as the slaves, where they're expected to be faithful in a way that Odysseus is not. But this description of Helen we've been giving makes it sound like the highborne women, you know, the ones that are the stars of the story, just like the goddesses among the Olympians. They're part of the hero pantheon here that they can do things that are larger than life and turn on a dime and be a little unpredictable and beyond judgment in a certain way.

12:21 Emily: Right. Remember who Helen's father is. She's the daughter of Zeus. So Helen and Clytemnestra are a different category from the mortal women. And the standards applied to them are significantly different. I mean, remember that we have in the inset narrative, the song of Demodocus in book eight, the story of Ares and Aphrodite and how Aphrodite has this adulterous affair with Ares and Hephaestus. The husband gets back and traps them, but all the gods just laugh and then off they go. It's all fine. Adultery, it doesn't really matter in that same way.

So the standards for mortal women are clearly different. And Helen occupies this ambiguous position because she's half mortal, half immortal. And she seems to be sort of framing her own faithlessness or her own adultery as if. If the standards of Olympus are applying. So it's not just one set of double standards. Right. There's a double standard of male versus female, but that's also. It's intersectional with double standards that have to do with class and the double standards that have to do with whether you're going to die or not.

13:23 Mark: Okay, so you're saying that we can't really use the treatment of Helen to unlock what is going on with Penelope. And how does the story regard her, because she is mortal and she really is being put, for the most part, in the same category as the slaves, although she does have a certain amount of agency. And she's praised for her cleverness and her various other virtues as well.

13:45 Emily: I don't think Penelope. I think it's more differentiated than that. I don't think Penelope is in the same category as the slave women or the slave men. I think the poem shows this both preoccupation with presenting Penelope's mind and intentionality as ambiguous and cloudy, but then also sometimes revealing it to us, at least partially by the accounts we get of her dreams. And we get, for instance, that famous dream where she dreams she has geese in her yard and the eagle swoops in and kills her geese. And in the dream, she's crying. And I don't think the narrative is saying if she's crying at the slaughter of the suitors, that makes her a bad woman.

That's the kind. The judgment that's imposed by Nestor and Agamemnon, who have their own particular axes to grind about, you know, gender roles and particularly about the roles of their own wives. I'm not sure that the poem is saying if Penelope wished she had some agency that would make her a bad person. That seems to me importing something on the poem that isn't there. The complexity about how odysseus wants to present Penelope's role. Is that the same as the way Penelope herself sees it? I think the poem is allowing us to see that that might be different, those might be different.

14:55 Dylan: Part of the evolution of her agency. We see in her relationship with Telemachus the repeated story that seems to most strongly talk about her agency is the leading the suitors on with the weaving of the shroud for Laertes. For three or four years she's weaving it every night and then unweaving it the next day and saying, you know, I'll make my decision once I get this done. And then she's betrayed about the sacrifice by some of the slave women to the suitors and the jig is up. Then that sort of. The clock starts ticking more then. And that seemed to me the best example of her agency as told in the story.

But then we have the relationship between her and Telemachus where she's surprised in his own sort of growing up and trying to take on the mantle of the household and his sort of ham fisted ways of, of asserting his authority there by diminishing her. Several different times she's described as being sort of taken aback, but she submits.

15:56 Emily: But twice Penelope comes downstairs, which isn't a big deal in itself, and tries to make an intervention. So first she tries to stop the poet Phemius from singing. And Telemachus says, no, go back upstairs. Muthos, which is a word much debated in the Iliad, seems just public speaking as opposed to domestic speaking. It's not clear if that's what it means. Here he says, speech belongs to men and especially me. And then later on he stops her from doing anything about the contest with the bow and says, no, the bow belongs to men and especially me.

So he definitely clamps down on her. And in Mary Beard's book Women and Power, she takes the first instance of Telemachus shutting Penelope up as sort of classic case of that's what men always do with women, shut them up. Which I think is. There's definitely a whole discourse in the poem about the problem of women's voices, the problem of the voices of the Sirens, the mouths of Scylla and Charybdis. Women's mouths are problematic. But I feel like there's also more going on specifically about the relationship of this not quite man with his almost single parent mother, such that it's not just any man, any woman, it's also this particular, very intertwined relationship and codependent relationship.

17:09 Dylan: Yeah, because he doesn't quite even by the end of the book, I mean, maybe he's sort of transitioning into being a full man at the foot of his father, having returned. But it still seems like he's a mere shadow of Odysseus.

17:25 Emily: That's essential to the premise of the poem, that he can't quite grow up, right, because otherwise he would be in control in Ithaca, or there'd be competition for Odysseus. So the poem has this agenda, both to present him as he's going to show himself, his true father's son. He's always going to stay the son that even when we get that final military sequence in which Laertes and Telemachus and Odysseus are all slaughtering the people of Ithaca together, Telemachus is still wanting his father's approval and sort of looking to him rather than acting totally independently.

17:59 Dylan: It makes me think that there's a whole other story that that isn't exactly told. If we think of one part of the Odyssey as being a story of homecoming and what the role of home is, and Odysseus getting his power and in some ways his immortality back by coming home. But there's another story of how it transitions from one generation to another, which is just absent.

18:21 Emily: In some way, he gets his mortality, right? He chooses mortality. And in order to get kleos to be famous in the world of men, we need to be willing to die. And then you have the glorious funeral pyre with all the stuff. It's a mistake to equate getting power and getting glory with getting immortality.

18:38 Dylan: Yeah, I agree that that's the wrong word, especially in the context of the immortality that Calypso would have promised. Maybe it's not permanence, it's just the mortal reality that Odysseus gets out of that honor. Maybe it's just a story not of transition for Telemachus, and maybe it's a story that he could never have, which is his own glory and honor in the way in which Odysseus comes about.

19:02 Emily: Right?

19:03 Dylan: And whether or not maybe it's just either an open question or maybe we just would say that, well, look, Telemachus is just never going to be like Odysseus. He's never going to be that kind of man.

19:12 Emily: Right. I mean, I guess the poem sort of leaves open what's going to happen next. Is there any possible next? The only next that we know about for sure from the poem is that he's going to leave again and go to find the place where they don't know what an Oar is. And then beyond that we don't know. I think it's interesting also that in antiquity there was multiple attempts to try and figure out what would the sequel be. And in Lucian's true History, we have this fantastic sequence in which Calypso is there and Odysseus wants to write her a letter saying, I should never have left you.

It was such a huge mistake. I wish I could come back now and be immortal. And then there are also all those legends about how Odysseus was killed by his son by Circe Telegonus, and then also other legends about Odysseus being sent into exile by the people of Ithaca. So questions about what kinds of consequences are there from the behavior that we've seen in the poem, which clearly people in antiquity, as well as us, were worrying about.

20:08 Mark: You mentioned the Sirens as an example of women's voices. I wanted to actually read for folks from your page 307 what the sirens actually sing. Because this is something that it's so short in the text, but it's become a prominent and well known cultural theme, perhaps the best known theme that has come out of here. And it just opens up the imagination of what wonders they could be revealing and how amazing their song is and, well, what they actually sing here. So he's tied to the mast. Odysseus, come here. You are well known for many stories. Glory of the Greeks.

Now stop your ship and listen to our voices. All those who pass this way hear a honeyed song poured from our mouths. The music brings them joy and they go on their way with greater knowledge. Since we know everything. The Greeks and Trojans suffered in Troy by God's will and we know whatever happens anywhere on Earth. And he says their song was so melodious. I long to listen more. That's all there is. It's almost. They're saying what a great song this is. Everybody who hears it thinks it's great. Like the lyrics are terrible.

21:09 Emily: I think that's a terrible. I mean, you guys are a philosophy podcast. They promise knowledge of everything. Yeah, I think it's pretty tempting.

21:18 Dylan: Mark, I think you're reading the Exorcist a little too literally.

21:22 Emily: Notice how beautiful it is. I mean, it's only seven lines, but it's very, very beautiful.

21:26 Dylan: Oh, is it?

21:28 Emily: I would say. But I also think you're right to be surprised too, because it has such a huge part in the cultural imagination. And the section of the poem, it's such a well known episode and it is relatively short in the actual Odyssey, you're right.

21:42 Mark: Yeah, we can see. Looking at this again. So I read this, I think, freshman year in college, a different translation, my Great books course. And I think that was the last time I read this and just hadn't remembered how far off from the movie, from the 70s, the 80s, whatever that movie was, that they would show us in high school. And I think even in like fifth grade, I remember seeing this, which is all about the adventure part, which is all about the Sirens. It's all about the cyclops and being what gave us this image of a cyclops. Whereas that's really just something that he tells.

That's all in his voice. When the Phaeacians. His whole story, that's only even about half his time with the Phaeacians. There's this athletic contest and other stuff that we don't hear about. And even that is only just a blip. That's a significant portion of the chronology that's being covered in the story, including all the flashbacks. But that the whole story is so much more page count is taken up by how are we going to kill the suitors? Pretty soon we're going to kill the suitors. How are we going to trap the su. You know, just the emphasis is much different than one would remember.

It seems like different things would capture the imagination of the original audience. Perhaps then would make us want to go on and on and tell further stories about the Sirens and the Cyclops and all the cool stuff.

23:00 Emily: Well, I do. I mean, it seems to me that in fact, in our culture we do have an interest in plotting suspense. I mean, in literary. Cultural texts that are focused on plotting suspense and relationships. And how do we build up or recreate a broken society? How do we analyze what's going wrong in a social context where things are going wrong? It's not that all of our art and poetry is comic book monsters. That's actually not true. It's just that's for whatever reason the element of the Odyssey that got seized upon in modern times. And of course, that's not the element that Aristotle seizes on in the Poetics.

He summarizes the plot of the Odyssey and doesn't mention the wanderings. He just mentions it as a plot that has to do with different endings for different characters. There's a double narrative arc such that it ends differently for the suitors versus Odysseus. So it's perfectly possible to read this poem in Skip to Science. I guess. I hesitate to say it shows something about the Odyssey itself that the only interesting bit is the wanderings, because I actually don't think that's true. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff that relates to things we're interested in in our own culture to do with belonging, identity, otherness, alterity, time, change.

Right.

24:14 Mark: It's just that it's a different and perhaps less fantastical story. The way that you emphasize it is it's these three characters. It's Odysseus and his son, Telemachus and his wife, all trying to put their nuclear family back together.

24:29 Emily: You know, I wouldn't emphasize it that way. I would emphasize it in terms of the Oikos. And that's not just the nuclear, it's not just the biological. It includes all the slaves. It includes all the people who have invaded the house, who it assist, wants to get out of the house. Sachin. I think it's a much more complex social story than just family drama because it's about the whole community on Ithaca as well, and the whole community within the Oikos. There's no Greek word which means biological, nuclear, family. There's genos, which suggests lineage, kind of family, and then there's Oikos, which suggests household. But the Oikos, which is what Odysseus is trying to get cleaned up, is a world that includes the slaves as well as the people who are related to each other.

25:10 Dylan: It's like it's his state, including the people, as well as his. His land as well as his possessions, his riches, all that stuff altogether.

25:19 Emily: Right. Well, then I guess estate sounds so fancy.

25:22 Dylan: It does. I know, I know, to make it

25:24 Emily: less sort of Edwardian fancy, but.

25:27 Wes: Yeah, well, he does have polished double doors, don't forget.

25:30 Emily: Yeah, he has some good stuff.

25:34 Mark: Well, maybe let's again connect that to this notion of hospitality. So you describe this as something that, when you have a very decentralized, I don't want to say society, because that's the whole point is it's not a single society, but you've got different little units scattered around, that this was a way to sort of have ambassadorship between them. But at the same time, as we were saying, there are certain, whether it's characteristics that you can spot, that he decides the Cyclopses are not civilized, they're not to be really legitimately included in this offer of ambassadorship.

And there's an interesting play with class here, because if it's another noble house that's visiting you, then, well, you shower them with gifts and send them on their way. But at the same time, even if it's a beggar. And of course they're very aware of social mobility, that a lot of the stories here of somebody who was of a noble house and now is a beggar was taken into slavery at some point. So maybe that mobility is part of what makes the caste system less rigid. That this hospitality does extend to even somebody you don't know who it is and it's unwashed and all this stuff.

Say a little more about this as a political system and how this interacts with class.

26:49 Emily: Right. So it seems as if there's a. We talked about the various gendered double or triple or quadruple standards, but we also, I guess, need to talk about the conflicts in the idea about who does and who doesn't deserve to be part of the network of Xenia, the network of hospitality that we get. The character Irus, who's the real professional career beggar and hasn't been slumming it as an elite person who got enslaved or became homeless. He's no fault of his own, not a God in disguise. And the right way to treat a real beggar is to beat him up and humiliate him.

The right way to treat a beggar who's not really a beggar but a God or hero in disguise is to welcome him, give him a nice bath, that's all fine. Probably he's a hero in disguise, as is the case for Odysseus. So I think there's a real sort of tension in the conceptualization of where are the boundaries and how do we police them, about which characters you're allowed to. That it's absolutely ethically essential to welcome into your home. It's ethically essential to treat, you know, visiting noblemen down on their luck or people who might be gods or heroes in disguise as the potential God or hero in disguise that they are.

But that's not the case for the real life low class person. And I think there's also. I mean, similarly, we should talk about the characterization of the slave swineherd Eumaeus, who gives a harrowing account of how he grew up in a noble elite house and then was trafficked into slavery thanks to his Phoenician slave babysitter and taken on a Phoenician ship and then sold to Laertes, Odysseus father. And he's presented as this is the right way to be a slave because he's completely subsumed his own identity to that of his owner Odysseus. Even though the owner's been away for 20 years, he still doesn't think of his life as meaningful unless he gets that original owner back.

And then there's also this idea that he's able, despite being a slave, to provide good hospitality to the visiting guest, who Odysseus in disguise. Showing not just that, there's an idea that the Odyssey is sort of exploring whether you can sort of have a noble or elite kind of soul, regardless of your social class, or is it that in fact, if you have a noble or elite soul, it's probably because you were born into a noble or elite household? And it seems if it's actually suggesting both possibilities, on one level, you might think Eumaeus is noble because he's a good person, but in fact, no, he was a prince as a little boy.

And Irus does not have a noble soul because he's been a beggar all his life. So I think there's a sort of tension about how socially mobile is the society that's being imagined here. It seems as if it's both constantly insisting Zeus looks out for beggars and strangers in need, but does he do that especially? Or maybe only when there are strangers in need who happen to be disguised

29:43 Dylan: aristocrats, as you're talking. I wanted to go down the road of the difference between somebody's being or their particular type of soul versus their circumstance. And the case with Eumaeus seems to, like you said, have a lot of tension there, because if he has the soul of a prince, that might be one of the reasons why you would treat him well. But on the other hand, as you say, he's the poster child for a good slave.

30:10 Emily: So he also has the soul of the Uncle Tom, right? He has the soul of the totally beaten down guy who has no sense even that he would like, were it possible to get back to his biological family, because they're meaningless compared to his owner.

30:24 Dylan: So it makes me think about the notion of sense of place within a society and knowing your place. And there's a lot of seem to be a lot of that going on, knowing you're a noble or hero and living up to that and acting in those ways, knowing you're a woman and where your place is, knowing you're a slave and knowing where your place is, knowing you're a God and knowing where your place is and both the privileges and the obligations, therefore.

30:53 Emily: Right. That also makes me think about the imagery of dogs and people calling each other dogs. The dog is the animal that eats the same food as humans and shares the same house as a human. But isn't Actually a human. And the dog may have the wrong idea about how important it is. So to call somebody else a dog in this poem suggests you've made a mistake. You think you're people, but you're not people. That's also partly why the word dog is constantly applied, especially to slave women, because that occurs for them more than for anybody. They're the lowest on the social hierarchy. And we have that scene in which Melantho, the bad slave woman, tries to speak and tries to align herself with the wrong owners who are the suitors. And not just Odysseus shuts her up, but also Penelope shuts her up and calls her a dog.

31:44 Dylan: Because she is the lowest and is explicitly not acknowledging what her place is.

31:51 Emily: She's refusing to keep her place. And this also gets back to the problem of female voices. That she's able to speak even though she doesn't have physical power. She can say the wrong things and use her voice to say that she sides with the new owners of the household. There's been a thread linking Melantho's willingness to speak against Penelope and Odysseus to what happens to her and the 11 others. They get the rope around their throats, which is the clear way to stop the voices that say the wrong thing. Yeah.

32:21 Mark: After they're made to clean up the bodies of the suitors, clean up the whole palace.

32:26 Dylan: Right.

32:27 Emily: Yes. It's pretty chilling.

32:29 Mark: Our hero.

32:33 Emily: Yeah.

32:34 Wes: I was just thinking about Eumaeus a little bit. In the 20 years that Odysseus is away, it seems like there's some opportunity for him to actually engage in his own homecoming. And he doesn't. Right. I think he has access to plenty of wealth there, and slipping away with it wouldn't be a problem. So maybe I might be overestimating that. But arguably he stays for the same reason that Odysseus leaves Calypso, which is that what's important to him is a certain place within the hierarchy. For Odysseus, it's at the top of the hierarchy.

33:05 Dylan: Right.

33:05 Wes: So he's going to sacrifice immortality for that place. And for Eumaeus, it's a meaningful hierarchical, and it's not exactly at the bottom. Right. He has people who work under him.

33:16 Emily: And I would hesitate to go too far with why didn't Eumaeus leave? Because the poem doesn't ask that question. Right. So I think if you're talking about literary text and the poem doesn't seem to raise, doesn't seem to frame it as a decision, I'm not Sure that we should quite go there.

33:30 Wes: I'm speculating thematically about the idea that one's well being might be sacrificed for some sort of place within a hierarchy. So.

33:39 Emily: Well, I think it's important just to think about how does Eumaeus himself define his relationships. And he's constantly being defined in ways that some people want to read as poisson, mock heroic, that he has this epithet that's usually applied to generals. He's the orchamos andron, he's the general of the pigs. So I think the poem is sort of emphasizing that he does have power over quite a lot of living beings, just as Eurycleia, the other quote, unquote good slave, has quite a lot of power within the items of the household and over the subordinate, less powerful female house slaves.

So I think it's important just to sort of see that in each of those cases the good slave is one whose happy with their position because they conceptualize themselves as being in control over lowlier beings, even if it's pigs. And then also imagining the relationship with the owner as if it were a family relationship. Eumaeus is constantly saying I see Odysseus as a family member of mine, and denying that he sees him as his owner and doesn't know the same kind of thing. In treating Odysseus as her own quasi son. He's the one that she's raised in Westbed.

34:49 Wes: You know, I just. I think it's important because it helps us get a little bit at the concept of a homecoming and what that means. Exactly. So it's not just that home is where the heart is, it's that home is where the hierarchy is.

35:03 Emily: Home is where you get to have some sphere of influence, some kind of power.

35:06 Wes: Exactly.

35:07 Emily: At least for those characters. I mean, I guess, I wonder, for some characters there is no sphere of power available. Now that's obviously the problem for those at the absolute bottom of the hierarchy.

35:17 Dylan: I thought part of what Wes was raising is both the having of the power and so that would be thinking of the hierarchy as being where I am in that and who is below me. And then there's also thinking about hierarchy as having a connection both below and above, sort of more locked in, rather than just the top of a whole bunch of different cones.

35:40 Emily: Then it matters that Odysseus reunites with his father as well as with his wife and son. And with his wife and son it's clear that they're subordinate to him. And with the father it's less clear. But the connection that Also speaks to being embedded in time as well, that he's able to reconnect with the roots of the trees that have been there for more than 20 years and that his father taught him the names of.

36:04 Wes: It's not just about having power over others. There's something seductive about others having power over you. So I think about Hegel's master slave dynamic here a little bit. The master, in some sense needs the slave. So that's the paradoxical part of that dynamic. And so there is some sense of power in some strange sense in that relationship. And then I'm also thinking about Burke reflections on the Revolution in France, where Burke essentially argues that these hierarchies that are being dismantled, they are what holds a society together, they are the fabric of a society. And to undo them is to undo social relations altogether. So when I think about what homecoming here is, what exactly that means, those are the sorts of avenues that I start to go down.

36:46 Emily: Yeah, I guess I'm also thinking about that. It's about power and being within this particular network of those below, those above. And it's about memory and continuity with a deep past. And it's also about a place where crying openly is possible. When he's in these alternative homes, like in Phaeacia or in the island of Calypso, Odysseus is either covering his face with a cloth when he's crying, or he's sitting off by himself on the beach crying. Whereas once he gets back with Laertes and with Penelope, he cries and they cry too. And there's a mutual sharing of emotional vulnerability.

37:24 Mark: So maybe if we can bring some of the lessons here to the present. You were saying at the beginning, Emily, that you thought one of the philosophical themes here was to apply this network of hospitality to how we deal with other countries. And that maybe is the response to Wes's point about Burke, that yes, in a tight knit hierarchical society, then the hierarchy is what holds things together. But once you get rid of that, we've not followed Burke's advice. And it's sort of the goal of a lot of people to follow it even less, to get rid of more of the hierarchy. So what remains, well, maybe a response to Burke is some modern analog of this hospitality situation. But I was having a hard time following your lead, Emily, and trying to figure out really concretely how this model of hospitality could in any way be applied to our present thinking about ethics and dealing with other people.

38:21 Emily: Yeah, I mean, I have a hard time doing it in any sort of concrete. This shows that the policy about immigration must be X. I think it shows there's this anxiety about people moving from one culture to another and how. What kinds of norms and behavior can make that either result in mass slaughter or not result in mass slaughter. The whole question of what's the mass or cultural social psychology about our anxieties about other people being in our homes and how do we. How might we be made to feel okay or not okay about that? So I think it's resonant rather than absolutely prescriptive of this is how we would apply it this way or that way. And I don't think you can sort of say because Homer says this, then let's vote white.

39:12 Dylan: We've been talking a lot about the tension of hospitality. That there's either implicit or maybe it's basically implicit criteria for who's in and who's out regarding hospitality. That there's this realm of people that you ought to be hospitable towards. When they show up at your doorstep, you burn the fatted calf, then you have a great big party for them and others who are not part of that, and they may be beggars. And what you should do, you should beat the crap out of them. And there's something about. We use the word oikos that is used in the poem for Odysseus home, his household, so to speak.

And then there are the people who aren't part of your household, that would be strangers that you need to show hospitality towards. So this is a different relationship than you have with the ones who are in your household. Your relationship with them isn't one of hospitality. And then there's the whole other group that are both outside your household, but outside of the realm of hospitality. So I say all that. And I'm wondering if there's something about where those boundaries are that we can see in the Odyssey, particularly the boundary between who ought to be part of hospitality, who is automatically out of hospitality.

Is it civilization like with Polyphemus, or is it status in sort of nobility of some sort?

40:44 Mark: Yeah. Is there any explanation given with that first settlement after he leaves Troy and he, as you say, kills the men, takes the women prisoners, takes all this like. Like that. That is just as Wes pointed out at the beginning, just thrown out there. It's just. That's just something that we did on the way and a couple people died.

41:00 Wes: He tells Penelope about all this stuff and they reunite. And as she dreamily falls asleep, as if he's telling her these warm hearted tales of.

41:10 Mark: But what was it about that society that made that okay. Like oh well they were black, so that was okay. You know, that's just not stated like was there. Cause he's right near Troy and we just waged war on Troy. And so everybody that is Trojan or vaguely Trojan, I think it's presented one

41:25 Emily: Khan reads it as he's still in warrior mode, just been sacking a City for 10 years and he's going to continue to sack cities. This is the same thing that he's been doing at Troy for the last 10 years. The poem doesn't even raise the question of is this justifiable? And it doesn't say it is justifiable. It also just says, as he does, one of his epithets, one of his many epithets is sacker of cities. He's the city sacker. There he goes, doing what he does so I can get another city enslaving yet more people.

41:51 Wes: Well, he talks toward the end of the poem when they're worrying what to do about after killing the suitors. He says, meanwhile I have to go on raids to steal replacements for all the sheep those swaggering suitors killed and to get the other Greeks to give me more until I fill my fold. So that's sort of amoral.

42:08 Emily: Right. And also we're told that the reason that the palace Ithaca was doing so well in the first place is Laertes did the same thing. That's why he deserves the fancy shroud, is that he's managed to sack and rape so many people from the neighboring villages and get the palace in Ithaca to be in really great shape.

42:25 Mark: So it seems like the tied to this hospitality ethic is the fact that you have some sort of elite, that you have an in and out group. Obviously not within a particular social hierarchy, but across that we recognize the nobleman. Basically every money or breeding is a cross culturally recognized. So. But once you have too many people that come to your door, even if they're of the right sort, right. That's essentially what happens with the suitors, is that these are all the best bred folks in Ithaca, but they're just too damn many of them and they stay too long.

And so they can't extend them the sort of hospitality that would be expected. I mean, it's presented as well they stayed too long, it's their fault, they don't have good intentions. They're planning to kill Telemachus. But also just the sheer number of them makes it so it doesn't really work. And so that's what makes it hard for me I mean, that this seems pre social to me. Rather than something that we could apply now. And think of this. I was just surprised how different this ethic of hospitality is from what shows up then in the Bible. Which I'd sort of thrown them together as one and the same thing.

I don't even remember, which is a specific Bible story of some angels are in disguise. And the poor people can take in the other beggars. Who are actually gods in disguise. Or they can shunt them away. And they will be judged based on that. That. That's supposed to be a more generally applicable. Be nice to everybody. The stranger could be anybody. Your neighbor is whoever is in need. But we're really far from that in the way Homer describes this whole thing.

43:54 Wes: Well, we have hotels now.

43:56 Emily: We have hotels. Yes. Which of course, only if you can pay for the hotel as the hotel.

44:02 Mark: Well, each hotel should have a stable, should have a car park, something like that. Like if you can't afford it, then you can just. Yeah, park your car in the lot. And I'm trying to think what. What the modern equivalent of the way Homer says. At least you can let the slave sleep in your hall. There are certain things. It's not that you always beat on them. It's okay to invite the slave in, but you don't treat them that well. They get the scraps. You can allow them to walk around and beg from people. As long as they don't make a nuisance of themselves.

44:32 Emily: I guess I'm thinking about how it's tempting to think of Xenia, the code of hospitality, in terms of this is the opposite of war. If you're going to go around the Mediterranean. Either you're going to sack and kill everyone that you meet. Or else you enter into this relationship of guest and host. And it involves giving gifts and getting a nice hot bath. And getting the stabling for the horses, if you have horses, and whatever else. But in a way, they're not necessarily opposites. Right. Because it's also that through Xenia, you build up the networks with the right kind of potential warrior class people.

That will allow you to go on the extra big raid, like the raid on Troy. So I think it also makes sense of. Why are there particular categories of people that you want to establish this Xenia relationship with. Which is a permanent relationship then between your households through subsequent generations. It's not something that you're establishing with females. Because they're not going to be going around. And they're not going to be any use in the battlefield. Context.

45:29 Dylan: So that way of talking about it makes Xenia political. In fact, maybe it's even more directly related to a kind of polis. Maybe not a polis that's as small as Athens or Sparta, but the kind of greater polis of multiple different cities together.

45:48 Mark: That's what I was describing as ambassadorship. More than be nice to strangers.

45:53 Emily: Ambassadorship seems right. I think this is home was composed of a time when there weren't poleis.

45:58 Dylan: Yeah, sure.

46:00 Emily: We should be using terms like oikos rather than polis, because clearly there are strongholds, there are particular powerful households. That's not the same as having a whole city state.

46:11 Dylan: I was definitely overstating it. The way you were talking about Xenia made me think that it was. Maybe the word's pre political, but it's political. It's before pre polei, but in that direction. Right. Greater than the oikos.

46:26 Emily: So it's certainly about establishing a kind of community that goes beyond the oikos. Yeah, I would call it protopolitical, for sure.

46:32 Mark: Are there other significant topics that anybody wanted to bring up that we haven't hit yet?

46:37 Dylan: Well, I have an insignificant one that I wanted to ask about, which goes back to Eumaeus. You translate Telemachus as calling him grandpa, which made me think again about the other good slave, Eurycleia, who suckled him. I guess I wondered about that word. It surprised me. I mean, I haven't read tons of translations of it. I imagine there must be a term of endearment, that he's using a term

47:01 Emily: of endearment for an old man. And I think sometimes it's translated as something like old sir. But that doesn't bring out the endearment element to.

47:08 Dylan: No, it doesn't.

47:09 Emily: There is a word in English which does that, which sort of has a fiction, a way of talking to an old man who you might not actually be related to, but it's as if you are because you feel so close to them. It is possible in English to call an old guy grandpa if you feel either you're dismissing him or you're trying to be nice to him.

47:25 Dylan: Absolutely. In my own family, thinking about people that I grew up calling uncle or aunt who weren't biologically related to me at all.

47:33 Emily: Yeah, I think there were many families where you have lots of aunties and you call everybody auntie, just as they way of saying you're part of our kinship network, even if you're not actually biologically an aunt.

47:42 Dylan: Maybe part of our oikos, perhaps.

47:46 Emily: Yes.

47:47 Wes: We could talk A little bit about the role of the gods in this. The way the divine is interwoven into the everyday events is really fascinating. And Emily, I think, as you point out, it creates a. I don't think magic is the word you used or charming, but it's something like that in the whole tone of the story. So take the case of Nausicaa and I think it's Athena who basically, in order to create the situation which he meets Odysseus, makes her realize she has to do her laundry. What's so fascinating is that it would be completely a plausible plot element if she just realized she had to do her laundry and went down.

It wouldn't be a huge coincidence. It's really gratuitous to use Athena in that way. And similarly, even with someone takes a bath and puts on nice clothes and yeah, you might just think they clean up well, but Athena is also covering them in attractiveness and making them look sturdier and stronger. So I'm fascinated by that, that sort of gratuitous element and then also by the futile element, which is just the fact that every time you eat, you can call it a feast and you can pour libation to the gods and you can give them thigh bones and fat and all of that stuff, but it just doesn't make any difference.

There's somewhere in the poem where someone says Odysseus is more than anyone. He's given Zeus all these sacrifices and Zeus hates him. So the gratuitousness and the futility. And yet, of course, obviously the gods have their role, but what is that?

49:16 Emily: They add magic, they make the plot of the poem, which could be. You're quite right, it could be the same plot without Athena, but they add a purposiveness to this. Is all the perfectly plausible on the human level things that happen, it's all actually happening through the agency of Athena.

49:32 Wes: Yeah, it adds this intelligent design element to what we might think of as just natural forces or contingency or happenstance.

49:40 Emily: I think you're quite right to be drawing out how it makes sense anyway. The humans are having perfectly plausible things that they want to do for particular reasons that make sense. Of course, Nausicaa wants to find a cute guy and of course she wants to do laundry. Those things make sense anyway. And then it also happens that the goddess has given her this particular intention from her dreams. There's repeatedly in her double motivation that it both happens for reasons that make sense naturalistically and it also happens because of the gods.

50:09 Wes: Right. And the gods also supply this constant alibi. Oh, Aphrodite made me crazy. I wish that hadn't happened.

50:18 Emily: Particular instances of what's called ate. Agamemnon in the Iliad says the same thing, that Ate took away his wits. That's why he picked a fight with Achilles. He shouldn't have died. And then similarly with Helen, because Aphrodite gave her that kind of ate divine madness made her do it. So there's always a get out if you want to go with that.

50:38 Dylan: There's also the characteristic of being godlike yourself. There's a conduit for you to glorify yourself by talking about how Athena came to speak to you as well as Athena. You know, I looked at, you know, really, really great after I took my bath because Athena made me look awesome.

50:57 Wes: That little girl was actually Athena.

50:59 Dylan: Yes.

51:01 Emily: That's also part of what distances. I mean, even though the Homeric poems on some level describe a world which is presumably quite like the world of real life, archaic Greece, it's also totally unlike in real life. You don't necessarily have people suddenly turn into birds and fly up into the rafters. But. But in this poem, people are actually godlike. It's the world of mythical heroes and real gods walking among us and goddesses.

51:26 Wes: There's so much craft and techne, or even technology in the poem too. And there's some tension with that. Right. All these fancy artifacts, bows and double doors which are emblems of human power and cleverness, like Odysseus's cleverness and even the Trojan Horse, where it's not a pure act of force getting into Troy, it's this fancy piece of technology. So I find that also this fascinating tension, as if the poem is ambivalent about something it's desperately trying to preserve. And this is in a way is one of the earliest acts of preservation. Right. This writing down, even as it's nostalgically looking back to, I'm right to say, right, the Greek Dark Ages, the time

52:11 Emily: when Greece didn't have writing. Yes.

52:13 Wes: Yeah. And there's no, as you pointed out in your introduction, there's no references to anyone writing anything down or reading anything. But of course you do see all this other artifice. I don't know if it's some sort of ambivalent relation to this period of something about what can be done with a merely oral tradition. The same sort of ambivalence we see in the Phaedrus about what happens when you start writing things down or what happens at a certain moment in history and the desire to preserve something earlier, even as the cleverer people become more a more prominent factor in a society.

52:48 Emily: Let's say I agree with you that there's this focus on technological achievement and craft, but I'm not sure that I agree that there's a tension between craft and the divine. Because of course, the presiding deity is the goddess of craft, goddess of techne and mechane and metis. Athena is known for her. Her craftiness and her ability to weave strategies and to weave military plots as well as to weave on the loom. And Odysseus sort of shares that with his patron goddess that he has this technological interest.

53:18 Wes: I mean, just in the sense that unequivocally, craft is a result of human intention and choice and action, but running off with Paris is not something that the gods did.

53:30 Emily: References to craft. We get very often that people are taught by Athena and Hephaestus, the craft god, how to be technological innovators.

53:39 Wes: The point where they learn those things, they're no longer simply beholden to forces outside of them, to what buffets them this way and that on their journeys. They have that, and that becomes a source of agency.

53:52 Mark: So I was thinking that with the divine, that the fix was in, like he had to win all his battles. But actually, looking at some of the details, it seems that the gods do about half the work. So in the final scene where he's fighting the suitors along with Telemachus and a couple of his slaves, the suitors throw spears at him and Athena makes all their spears miss. But then they throw spears and Athena doesn't make the spears hit. Like they're just good at throwing spears. So she provides the shield, but not the accuracy. And that seems kind of typical that there are so many things, like even Athena coming and telling Telemachus, hey, your father's alive, which happens right near the beginning.

It's not sufficient to make him actually put believe that if she just said, look, I'm a goddess, your father's alive, then he'd be, oh, great, my father's alive. No, she's. Why don't you go out and ask some people who may or may not know whether your father's alive, but at least saw him more recently than you did. Why don't you go sail on a big journey to talk to those people? That doesn't make any sense. If Athena really had the causal power to simply give him the information, that's

54:53 Emily: a topic which the ancients, as we know from The Scholia, the ancient comments on the Odyssey, they came up with pretty much that reading and suggested that of course this is a stupid journey it's thing for Telemachus to be sent off on a dangerous journey when he has absolutely no clue how to do anything. Why does Athena think this is a good idea? In fact, Athena is an allegorical representation of his phronesis. There's some intellectual quality which is prompting him and of course a lot of allegorical readings of Homer in antiquity as well as then into Neoplatonists of reading the Odyssey in terms of this is a journey of the soul and here is Athena being the promptings of whatever rational part of the soul you want to have people believe in.

That then led into Christianizing allegories of this, the journey of the soul towards a different kind of nostos. I personally don't think that that quite works and I think that's an element in it. As you've been emphasising, that's part of what Athena seems to be, that she seems to pump up impulses that human beings already have. And she's also defined as a particular character with her own particular complex relationship with her father and particular things that she cares about.

56:00 Mark: Well, yeah, speaking of that, the whole book starts with this council of the gods and Athena's appealing to Zeus. Hey, Odysseus is stuck on the island with Calypso. Can you just talk to Calypso and make her let him go? And Zeus says, okay, I'll send Hermes. Then book five comes along, they're having another Zeus and Athena are there again. And Zeus says, oh yeah, I'll send Hermes down to Calypso. So no progress has been made between books one and five. Even though Athena has gone around and sent Telemachus on this trip and helped him at several points. We're still back at basically the same point as far as Zeus actually sending Hermes down there. Is this just a hole in the plot or is this some kind of, again, the will of the gods is not quite efficacious or something.

56:40 Emily: Yeah, I would be more inclined to say this is a function of oral storytelling and the habits of oral storytelling rather than necessarily saying something metaphysical or theological. If you're imagining that the audience is used to oral storytelling where you can't say, as you'll remember from chapter three, blah, blah, blah. Let me sum up back to chapter three if you forgot. Nobody's going to flip back to chapter three if it's an oral performance. So you have to make sure we're all on Board with the premises. There was this divine conversation. If need be, repeat the divine conversation, and then we can move on.

57:13 Dylan: We talked about earlier about some of the translation and the process of doing it. But I wondered what made you want to translate the Odyssey?

57:23 Emily: I guess I was asked to do it. I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't been asked. Pete Simon at Norton asked me to do it, and that didn't necessarily predetermine that I was going to do it. Then once he asked me because they were looking for a new translation, both for the anthology and as a standalone thing. I then went and looked at some of the other translations, many of which I didn't know well before that because I didn't grow up in the States. I didn't grow up studying the Odyssey in translation. I'd read it a lot of times in Greek. Once I looked at.

And that sounds like such an awfully decided from other translations, I realized there were certain things that I felt were really betrayed in the original that I thought I could bring out more clearly. Such as the fact that most translations produced in the 20th century don't have any clear meter at all. They're just totally irregular. Even the ones that are laid out like verse are not metrical verse. So I hated that. I also, as I think, is already implicit in what we were saying at the start of this conversation. I didn't like the way that this tendency either to have a lot of archaisms or have a lot of foreignisms or have a lot of bombast or do all of those things to make it more obscure or more melodramatic or more sentimental or more ethically simple than I think the original is.

So I just felt like there were some really important elements in the complex focalization and in the clarity of the storytelling and in the metrical music of the original, which were mostly getting obscured by translations. And then there's things like not calling slaves slaves. That also is a problem.

58:49 Mark: Yeah, we should mention that you actually diverge from the original in that the original uses this oral tradition quality of repeating certain expressions time and again. Dawn always comes early with rosy fingers. And that you just say at the beginning, look, I'm just going to use the fact that that's repeated 19 times in here to just. Just change it up every single time and kind of explore the ambiguity in that phrase so it stays interesting to a modern reader. Instead of just having this stupid thing

59:17 Emily: that's the same stupid thing that's the same. I mean, I guess it's also Just about what exactly is the translator's job in terms of what are you conveying? And I think you have to convey not just there are some words and they mean this if you look them up in the dictionary, but also this is the kind of impact these words have. The impact of a repeated formulae in Homer is this says, this is very important. And you need to take it to heart. Because that's what the cultural import of repetition in an oral culture is. It means it matters. Whereas if you keep on repeating yourself in a literary text, in a literate culture like ours, that doesn't say, this is very important, you need to take it to heart.

It says, yawn. So over these cliches. And I'm just going to skip. So I just wanted to make sure that I'm conveying the same, or at least something like the same punchiness, which makes it feel like. Like rosy fingers and early bornness and the goddess Dawn. You can feel it and you can feel that it matters. And it's a living metaphor every time.

1:00:10 Dylan: I think that works too.

1:00:12 Mark: When I pull the ancient Greek up here in Google, it says, this is an ancient Greek. Do you want Google to translate it into English? And then I press it and it's fine, it looks fine. No, I.

1:00:24 Dylan: It's really interesting to me that your introduction to your experience of first reading the Odyssey was basically working through it in Greek. I just think that would be on my list of things to be jealous of. I think that's really interesting. The first time I read the Iliad or the Odyssey was when I started at St. John's so I was like 30. And it's the first two books that are read at that college. And I had never read them. So I read them before I got there, like eight months before I was supposed to start working. And both the Iliad and the Odyssey, I had to just flog myself to read through those books.

I found them incredibly challenging to read. And then when I read them again, very approximate to the time that we were doing class, you know, like within a week of that, and it was like reading a different book. One of my colleagues said, the mistake you made is that you should never read the Iliad the first time. And it made me realize that for someone, even putting aside the writing of it, reading it in written form the first time, but if it was part of an oral culture at all, you would never have heard it the first time time. If you grew up in it, there would never be that experience of hearing it the first time.

You would Always be hearing it over and over again.

1:01:42 Wes: I had the same experience, except that I was younger. I'd actually started memorizing Fitzgerald's translation of the Iliad when I was in high school. But I don't think I had ever really fully read the Iliad and the Odyssey until I was at St. John's and then it wasn't captivating at all. It was a slog. So I think, Emily, your translation helps. It's completely possible to be absorbed in this. There's never a point where I wanted to put it down. Just absolutely fascinating to read. Some of it is also just a function of age, I think. And like Dylan said, it being something I've read before and then also having read so many other things now between the age of 19 and now having different ways to think about all of this stuff. But overall, yeah, just such a rewarding experience.

1:02:27 Mark: Yeah, I love the prose. I mean, some of the digressions which of course were built into the text. There's nothing you can really do about it. But he's going to stop and talk for a minute about where Odysseus got his spear and who gave him the spear and the sad thing that happened to the guy that gave him the spear. Like no, just move on with. So they're definitely things that if you were trying to get a real page turner that you would clearly edit out, but given the material you had to work with, you just an amazing job.

1:02:54 Dylan: Just that crappy Homer story, given the

1:02:56 Wes: material you had to work with, that's.

1:02:59 Emily: That's very digressive and multi inset narrative and I love that, I love that it's so complex on all these levels including there are multiple different stories going on at once. When you're following one story, there's another story that's also relevant to and there's going to be boxes within boxes. But of course, if you want the straight ahead Achillean or thrillerish narrative, this is not it.

1:03:20 Dylan: I just wanted to say thanks to Emily for coming on. I really enjoyed the conversation and I was excited about the fact that you said yes. And so thanks.

1:03:29 Wes: Yes. Yeah. Thank you. It really was a pleasure.

1:03:33 Emily: Thank you.

1:03:34 Mark: All right, next time we're going to talk about J.L. austin's how to Do Things with Words. Get details at partiallyexaminedlife.com, join our Facebook group, follow us on Twitter, etc, etc and by all means go out and get Emily Wilson's version of the Odyssey. It is a beautiful looking book. It is a beautiful feeling book. You can read it aloud to your family. It has 101 uses.

1:03:56 Wes: It is many weighed.

1:04:01 Mark: Our closing song is by Erica Rose, spelled A R R I C A. It's called Tiny Broken boats from her 2014 Wave Function album. You should listen to me interview Erica on Nakedly Examined Music, episode 66. Check it out at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com and Good Night, everybody.

1:04:18 Dylan: Good night.

1:04:18 Emily: Good night. Thank you. No room for regret in the final magic time Moving on set sail Moving on seems wise I rise in the setting on boundaries I'm batting down actually ears that's why I should have gave me it on but whispers of your w Tiny broken bones. I so I love mo with each passing day Imagining an unlocked unknown grave to love his soul to love is to lose Like a passing cloud makes a pillow for the full wear that's why embrace to show I should have carry along but the west whispers love no. So I In the dark I see It's a silver lining you need from me it's not the underdog I fear it's the rip side of the mind My dear Sam.

1:06:51 Mark: Broken do

1:06:55 Emily: Tiny broken notes. Tiny broken bones. Sam.