A conversation with Dr. Paul Cartledge, A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow, Clare College, Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture
As audiences prepare for the release of The Odyssey, an epic fantasy fiction adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, starring Matt Damon and Tom Holland, critics and fans alike wait longingly to see how this classic tale will will unfold on the big screen. With its focus on Odysseus’s return to Ithaca after the Trojan War, the films maps his encounters with the various rich characters in this universe.
To explore the film’s interpretation, Dr. Richard Marranca spoke with Dr. Paul Cartledge, celebrated historian and expert on ancient Greece. In the discussion, Dr. Cartledge delves into the complexities of bringing such a complex figure and journey, that of Odysseus, for modern audiences, brought to life by Christopher Nolan’s grand vision.
How and why does Homer’s Odyssey continue to speak to us across centuries?
The Iliad: The Anger of Achilles, The Death of Hector
Trouble begins with Helen and Paris. Can you delve a little?
Paris aka Alexandros (both names are Greek) was a non-Greek Trojan prince, one of the many sons of King Priam of Troy and his wife Hecuba (Hekabe in Greek). He was a playboy prince, not at all like his resolutely civic-minded oldest brother Hector. While herding his father’s cattle on Mount Ida, above the city of Troy, he was approached out of the blue by three Greek goddesses: Hera (sister-wife of all-powerful Zeus), Athena (a daughter of Zeus), and Aphrodite (daughter either of Zeus or of his grandfather Ouranos).
Each offered him a gift that was in their special power. Paris was young and his hormones were raging, so without hesitation he opted for Aphrodite’s: the most beautiful (Greek) woman in the world. Alas, Helen was already spoken for, married to King Menelaus of Sparta. Nothing daunted, Paris exploited a supposed diplomatic mission to abduct Helen. Was she raped? Or did she go with him willingly? The ancient Greeks themselves were divided, but Homer (whoever he was or they were) said not a word. In the Iliad, a very partial account of the war that ensued, Helen’s presence in Troy with Paris is simply a given.
The Loves of Paris and Helen (1788). (Jacques Louis David/Public domain)
So, King Odysseus and Queen Penelope love each other. But Odysseus and others leave home on the hollow ships, heading for mayhem and war in Troy. Did they have to leave? Would Odysseus have realized that this could destabilize his kingdom and risk his family?
Myth is pliable and plastic. Versions multiplied, often mutually inconsistent. One version of the Trojan War myth figures Odysseus – and not only him, even Achilles – as reluctant to obey Agamemnon’s call to arms. Participation was not legally obligatory, not based on treaty relations, but a matter of personal honour; what was at stake was the self-image of Menelaus and his brother, but also the pride of Greece. No one, surely, would have guessed that the siege and capture of Troy would have taken a mythical decade, let alone that the Return from Troy to Ithaka would take anyone another decade.
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“Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans” (Iliad, Robert Fagles’ translation). So, Agamemnon snatches Briseis, the desirable war trophy of Achilles; and then, Patroclus, the cousin of Achilles, is killed. Are those equal reasons for Achilles’ anger? Anything else to upset him?
Fagles’ translation is overall excellent, but he errs in making ‘rage’ the sixth word of his first line; in the original it is the first, and as such it sets the tone as well as the theme of the entire poem. Achilles clearly was an irascible young man, as well as the Greeks’ finest individual warrior. Agamemnon, King of Mycenae as well as brother of Menelaus, was generally recognized as C-in-C, because of the power of Mycenae; but as a warrior he wasn’t a patch on Achilles. Non-Greek Briseis was a spear-won prize who according to Greek warrior norms belonged to Achilles, as an enslaved person. But she was more than that. The unmarried Achilles regarded her as the equivalent of his wife.
Apulian Red-Figure Amphora by the Painter of the Berlin Dancing Girl c. 430-410 BC depicting Achilles and Briseis. (Painter of the Berlin Dancing Girl/CC BY-SA 3.0)
So when Agamemnon, wishing to assert his authority and take Achilles down a peg or more, demanded that he surrender Briseis to him, that was both an insult to his personal honour and a hurtful interference in his personal life. Rage was the result, but Achilles being Achilles he didn’t direct it only at Agamemnon.
By withdrawing himself and his men (Myrmidons) from the fray, he directly damaged the entire fighting capacity of the Greek army. Only when the Greeks were at serious risk of defeat did he permit a cousin, Patroclus, to lead out the Myrmidons, causing panic by wearing Achilles’s armour. But Patroclus was killed by Hector aided by the god Apollo, and Achilles’s armour was stripped as a trophy. Talk about adding insult to injury.
Achilles responded (now wearing arms specially made for him by Hephaestus, the Olympian craftsman god), took out first on nameless Trojans, then finally in single combat on Hector. End of Iliad, though not the Trojan War.
The Odyssey: A Hero’s Journey
What does nostos mean? Is it inevitable to have thrills and spills, adventure and tragedy, the heights of joy and pain and hard-earned wisdom? It doesn’t get much worse than being eaten by Cyclopes, drowning at sea so far from home, or embracing in the underworld one’s deceased mother?
Greek nostos meant ‘return’, a return journey. Many Greeks made such nostoi (plural) from Troy back to their Greek homes, and several of them were feted in song on their return. However, only the nostos of Odysseus to rocky Ithaka, a small island off the northwest coast of mainland Greece, was considered so interesting and important that it was worth devoting 12000 lines of epic verse to it, and preserving it through memorization and multiple copying.
Alexandrian Greek poet C.P. Cavafy early last century wrote a famous poem entitled simply ‘Ithaca’, in which readers are urged to be grateful if they too get to experience a journey anything like as filled with wonders as Odysseus’s. A journey from which they too can learn – though what exactly Cavafy expected or hoped his readers would learn is left unspoken!
I’ve suggested above a couple of salutary lessons aimed at the Odyssey’s original audiences. Many of Odysseus’s experiences were challenging, indeed literally unbelievable. Most incredible of all, surely, was his trip to the world of the dead down below, to Hades, to embrace the spirit of the beloved mother who had died while he was away from home.
I recall that your friend, the brilliant scholar, Dr. Bettany Hughes, says “Helen is much more than a trophy wife.” What was the marriage of Penelope and Odysseus like? Where Helen is unfaithful, Penelope is faithful. Was Penelope admired more?
Helen was said to be a natural daughter of Zeus with Leda, not of her legal father King Tyndareus of Sparta. She was therefore a ‘catch’, a very suitable bride for the younger brother of the most powerful king in Greece. Clearly too she was talented as well as being stunningly good-looking. Ithaka by comparison with Mycenae was small beer. Penelope, also Spartan, was aristocratic but not royal by birth: a suitable bride for Odysseus in terms of social station. He could not have predicted that she would also become a byword for marital fidelity, something that male Greeks prized without fulfilling their side of any loyalty bargain.
(The argument between Ajax and Odysseus over Achilles' armour. Agostino Masucci/Public domain)
In the sixth book of the Odyssey Odysseus, now all alone and cast up on a beach naked, encounters the unmarried daughter of the magical island of Phaeacia’s king. He recommends marriage to her on the grounds that there’s nothing ‘nobler or more admirable’ than a union of married hearts thinking as one. He presumably had his own marriage – what he could remember of it – in mind. Both Helen and Penelope, figures of myth, were worshipped by real Greeks as heroines.
So, Circe was a witch. How would the Greeks conceive of a witch? How did she drug his men, his crew? Out of all the men she could be with, why is Odysseus the most desired?
Circe was indeed a witch and a magician. She presumably persuaded Odysseus to have sex with her because she fancied him, but why exactly, we’re not told. She could transform men into animals with a wave of her wand. She was also skilled in the preparation and application of many drugs and potions, but unfortunately Homer does not specify which. Jimsonweed, which induces amnesia and hallucinations, has been suggested. One – lethal - drug we know the historical Greeks applied as capital punishment was hemlock (coniatum maculatum). Plato’s mentor Socrates was its most famous victim.
On his long journey, Odysseus receives help and hospitality from many sources, from Athena to Nausicaa. Is it his charm, wily mind, the hospitality ethos and so on?
Hospitality (as discussed earlier) was key to the plots of both Homeric epics – or rather, egregious breaches of the accepted norms and rules of guest-host relations were. The treatment of Odysseus and his companions by giant Polyphemus is paradigmatic of how NOT to play host. Less extreme is the encounter with Aeolus, the god of all the winds, who provides his guest Odysseus with a bag containing and restraining all the unfavourable winds so that Odysseus may be blown along only where he wishes to go. Alas, his crew suspect the bag’s full of gold, and open it, whereupon the boat is blown straight back to Aeolus’s realm. An unforgivable breach of the hospitality code as well as a mighty inconvenience. A sceptical ancient scholar wanted to meet the cobbler who sewed the bag…
The Suitors – what do they want from Penelope? Do they desire her for her looks and brilliance as much as for the power and fame of kingship?
As presented by Homer the Suitors are young unmarried men, younger than Penelope mostly, who see marrying her as acquiring control of the – presumed dead – Odysseus’s kingdom. Penelope’s personal qualities were irrelevant to them. Besides her stubborn refusal, almost as much of an obstacle to their ambition was her son Telemachus, aged about 20, whom they’d tried but failed to kill.
Can you tell us about the recognition scene and marriage bed that Penelope and Odysseus shared?
We of course know that Odysseus was who he said he was when he finally disclaimed his beggar rags and reclaimed his kingdom after slaughtering the Suitors and his own unfaithful domestic staff. His old nurse Eurycleia too could confirm his identity, from a scar on his leg that was the remnant of a wound from the tusk of a wild boar. But Penelope demanded of her much-altered husband an even more intimate proof. Their marriage bed had been created and curated by Odysseus himself and cunningly constructed around the trunk of an ancient olive tree. According to the plot, the nature of the bed was a secret known only to Odysseus and to Penelope’s chambermaids (who had just been slaughtered along with the Suitors). To know the bed was thus to rekindle the marriage and with it the kingdom under its old management.
Erotic design in ancient Grecian cup. (Public domain)
Centuries after Homer, Plato wrote The Symposium. Is Plato’s vocabulary a useful tool to discuss love in the Iliad or Odyssey?
The vocabulary of love and sex didn’t change much between about 700 (Homer) and about 375 (Plato), but the reference of the words and the nature and level of critical analysis changed out of all recognition. The two words for sexual love, eros and aphrodisia, remained constant, as did the euphemism meixis (‘mingling’).
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But whereas Homer contains no explicit reference to homosexual love and sex (it was later readers who interpreted the affection between Patroclus and Achilles as sexual), Plato’s dialogists are able to cover the whole range – hetero, homo, and bi, as we might say.
Alexander the Great. Like Achilles, Alexander the Great was consumed by fame, conquest and journey. If Alexander had had more of Odysseus and less of Achilles, would he have recognized more powerfully the value of marriage and home?
Interesting counterfactual question! Home wouldn’t ever have meant to Alexander anything like what it did to Homer’s Odysseus. Pretty certainly he intended to base his new empire in Asia and had no intention of returning home to Pella in Macedonia except as a corpse. Like his personal hero Achilles, Alexander died young – but Achilles’s early death was divinely foretold, Alexander’s the predictably likely outcome of the great risks he always took with his life on and off the battlefield.
I've enjoyed our conversations about Homer over the last year or so and I learned a ton about Homer's epics, history and all sorts of psychology of these archetypal heroes, gods, goddesses and villains. It's odd that the humanities are not supported enough -- and yet most people love this stuff in whatever form. Such as movies. I know you weren't that impressed with some recent film adaptations of Homer. In a sentence, what are you hoping for with the upcoming Odyssey with a star-filled cast by Christopher Nolan?
