This week we finally shut up about translations and get into some juicy themes and character analysis.
Telemachus: why is he such a dweeb compared to his dad? Rich argues that he’s doing the best he can growing up with an absent father. The others are less sympathetic.
Odysseus: is his paranoid murderous rampage justified? what are his singular heroic attributes? Is he portrayed more as admirable or a hubristic figure? Why won’t his men obey him?
On homecoming: Why was Odysseus away for so long? Was he kinda dragging his heels on the return voyage? How much strange was he getting? What motivated him to finally come home?
The Ancient Greek marshmallow test: exploring the recurring themes of self-denial, time preference, binding mechanisms, and whether playing the long game could arguably be the central theme of the whole poem.
Telemachus the failson
Cam: The plot of the Odyssey is not long in the telling. A man has been away from home for many years. Poseidon is on the watch for him. He is all alone. As for the situation at home, his goods are being laid waste by the suitors, who plot against his son. After a storm-tossed journey, he returns home where he reveals himself, destroys his enemies, and is saved. So that’s Aristotle quickly.
Rich: Yeah, that’s pretty tight. We’ve got to get him on the pod.
Cam: Yeah, I’ll get my people on it.
Cam: So one thing that’s potentially a bit odd about the Odyssey is it doesn’t actually start with Odysseus. Instead, it starts with his son and his wife and his rivals — but mainly his son, Telemachus. As we know, Odysseus is this great hero. Well, we’ll get to that question in a bit, but he’s certainly impressive at the very least. And the other thing that’s potentially a little bit odd is the son maybe doesn’t seem all that Odyssean.
Benny: Yeah, I was a bit surprised. It’s like the genetics got a little diluted. You have Odysseus, who’s the most cunning man in the land, super strong, extremely good looking — and then you have Telemachus, who is his son, who was only a few years old when Odysseus left. Odysseus left for the Trojan War; by the time he gets back he was gone for 20 years; we’re picking up sort of near the end of that. So our experience of Telemachus is presumably a young 20-year-old, but we’re told pretty early on that he doesn’t really know how to fight. This may not seem strange now, but looking back, young twenties, you’re supposed to be at the peak of manhood, right? And presumably the great warriors have already sort of made their name by then, are already super skilled fighters. So the fact that he can’t fight off the suitors by himself — his mom is sort of being terrorized by these many dozens of suitors who are now living in her house and eating all her food — and he has this bizarre relationship with them where he’s sort of friendly with them, tries to stick up for his mom if they’re overly rude or aggressive but just can’t really hold his own against them.
Rich: Are they his age, the suitors as well? Like, because that’s an extra strange dynamic, right?
Benny: Some of them must be, right.
Rich: I think Antinous is talked about as a young man. So it’s really like — you’ve got dozens of these guys in your house and they’re like, “I’m gonna fuck your mom” basically, and they’re your peers, some of them. Yeah. Well, she must be 40 or something, right? Roughly, or late 30s perhaps.
Cam: I didn’t think of the age gap between Penelope and the suitors. She must be.
Benny: But presumably they got married quite young, I would imagine. But she’s still described as extremely beautiful and young.
Cam: I mean, Telemachus is kind of coming across as a little bitch, right? At the start, at least. I was surprised how much. I grabbed some texts in there. So this is Telemachus: “There is no man to save the house, no man like Odysseus. I cannot fight against them, I would be useless, I have no training. If I had the power, I’d do it. It is unbearable what they have done, they ruined my whole house. It is not fair. You suitors all should feel ashamed.” So he’s super annoyed, but he can’t do it. And it’s kind of, yeah, he’s like 20, which doesn’t feel that young, right? I sort of wondered why he’s such a weakling. I suppose it’s a way to set up the political instability at home, which could get overshadowed otherwise. He’s like, “I’ve got this missing father and this missing husband”, but also what’s going on is the kingdom’s been overrun by these bastards really, and Telemachus can’t deal with it. And it sets up a contrast between Telemachus and Odysseus and sets up this absolute need for Odysseus to return. Even Athena finds out about what’s happening and she’s like, “this is monstrous, we need Odysseus to come back and to sort this out.” So it sets up a big need for the story.
Benny: This is making me realise that I’m not sure to what extent lineages are important for the Greeks. For instance, say medieval England — you think of kings and their lineages, right? It’s important that the king’s son inherits the throne and continues to carry the family honour. And typically last names are important here, because you want to know who’s related to who. But for one, in the Odyssey, many people are just referred to as either their first name or a solo name — Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, Laertes — you don’t know who is related to who just by their names.
Cam: Badass Benny or whatever, yeah.
Benny: Sleek-tongued Odysseus or something. So now I’m wondering, are lineages just not an important —
Cam: I think the opposite. I think they’re hugely important — a hugely important theme. Maybe you could even argue it’s the main thing. Well, maybe not the main thing, but —
Benny: But you’d think in some sense then, the fact that Odysseus’s son is like a loser by all of their standards and unable to stand up for himself and his family — wouldn’t that bring shame to Odysseus? But in fact, when he gets home and teams up with his son, he doesn’t seem to be mad at him in any way. He seems to just accept that, okay, this kid can’t handle it, he’s not as sharp or as strong as me.
Cam: Well, he was a kid, right?
Rich: Yeah, can we just stop to defend Telemachus for a second? I didn’t realise until the suitor fight at the end that there’s like 50 or 60 of these guys.
Cam: I think I read 108.
Rich: Oh really? Okay. Yeah, so even imagine Telemachus is just as good a warrior and just as clever as Odysseus — there’s basically nothing that he can do about it either way. I mean, maybe there is, all problems are soluble, but it’s not at all surprising that he needs help from Odysseus. And crucially, not just from Odysseus — the gods also massively put their thumbs on the scale, which we’ll get to when we talk about how the suitors actually get defeated. Yeah, I just want to push back slightly. He’s meant to be a kind of not fully formed man or something, but I don’t think he’s meant to be contemptible or pitiable by Odysseus or by anyone else.
Cam: Yeah, yeah, he’s like a kid. It is a bit funny, I suppose, that he’s 20. I suppose it’s because Odysseus has been away for so long. Sometimes I wonder, did he need to be away for 20 years? Because it makes a few things — yeah, Telemachus is a little old, and the dog, surely it’s pretty old for a dog. Just make it 15 years sort of thing. Because, you know, 10 years at the war and 10 years trip.
Rich: And he’s not grown up with a father figure either, right? I mean, he has other people like Laertes and the swineherd and maybe some other good masculine figures, but he doesn’t actually have a dad.
Cam: Yeah. So there’s a few threads I want to pick up on here. I just thought another reason why he’s set up as weak at the front — this actually ties both questions. So Benny asks about lineages, and I think that’s a huge reason why Telemachus leaves home. Because one, he wants to find out if his father Odysseus is alive, but two, he wants to find out if his father Odysseus is his father. That’s important to him for identity and just like, am I king, am I the ruler? You can’t spit in a tube in those days.
Rich: You have to go ask some ancient king.
Cam: Yeah, so he asks people at the start and someone’s like, “yeah, you resemble him, you’re pretty torn.” And Telemachus says, explicitly, “I’m not sure”. Yeah, I’ll quote him here —
Benny: “Yeah, I’m not sure because I’m an idiot and I can’t fight. Unlike my dad.”
Cam: Yeah. He’s like, you’d worry, you’re worried about it.
Benny: There’s good reasons to be doubtful.
Rich: Also implying that his mom might be a hoe. No one trusts Penelope. She’s never given anyone reason to doubt them, even her own son.
Cam: She’s got 30 guys, man, she’s stringing along. But he just hasn’t grown up with a father, right? And I think he explicitly says, “my mother says I’m a son, but I cannot be sure since no one knows his own beginning”. So he wants to find that out, and he goes overseas and he meets Nestor in Pylos, and then he goes and meets Menelaus, famous from Troy, and Helen — even more famous. And I think Helen’s the one that recognises him. She has him for a dead ringer. She’s like, “man, I’ve never seen someone who looks so much like Odysseus.” So I think that’s confirmation. You don’t have DNA tests back then — it’s when you look like someone.
Benny: Can we just also, while we’re in Sparta visiting Menelaus and Helen, can we just pause for one second on the fact that it’s insane that the entire Iliad was caused by Helen running away with the Prince of Troy and causing a war, and then when the Greeks win the war, she just goes back home with Menelaus and now they’re like a happy family again. Like, it’s wild, dude.
Cam: I think there is a slight question mark on how complicit she was in running away.
Rich: Yeah, wasn’t she kidnapped, or did she go?
Cam: Yeah. It’s kind of like — but she kind of loves them maybe as well. I even noticed it was a bit awkward at one point when someone brings up Troy, right? And she’s kind of like — I think she ends up drugging the drinks.
Rich: Whoopsie!
Cam: “Let’s have a bit of a party.”
Cam: And so also, there was this other interesting quote. I was just rereading the first four books yesterday, and there’s this interesting quote where Athena questions Odysseus — when she’s questioning his lineage. Fagles says it like: “few sons are equals of their fathers; most fall short, all too few surpass them.” And Wilson says: “it is rare for sons to be like fathers; only a few are better, most are worse” — which has a slightly different meaning. And Lattimore has “to be equals of —”. Yeah, there’s almost this kind of Freudian, Oedipus-complex thing going on here that is really setting up like, Telemachus, you’re not going to measure up to Odysseus. He’s like the greatest father you can have. So she’s surely going to have hangups.
Cam: And then I wondered if Telemachus even wanted Odysseus to return — which I think he does, obviously, in the later books. But I was talking to my partner around there, and she grew up without a father, and she was saying there is this kind of tension inside you. Part of you wants him just to be gone forever, like there’s this crisis of not having him in your life, but then there’s also this crisis of meeting him. Because Telemachus almost seems to go back and forth. He doesn’t start off as super hopeless and then hopefully — at the start he’s kind of like, “I think Odysseus is not my father or no, dead”, and then he goes away, “I’m gonna find him”, and then later on Athena says he’s alive, and he doesn’t believe Athena, he’s just kind of questioning him again. So I sort of thought he was —
Benny: We should also say that Athena nudges him — or pushes him, rather — to go try and find Odysseus. It’s not of his own accord. Athena visits him and says, “you now should go look for your father, go look for news of his returning.” And I think his motives are maybe a little murkier than you’re making them out to be. I think part of it is just selfishness in the sense that you want to know if you’re king, you want to know if your dad’s dead or if he’s coming home, and these suitors are making your life hell. So if your dad came back and was able to drive them away, that would be great for your family. So I get the sense it’s less about lineage in the sense of “I need to know who my father is”, and more the practicalities of just wanting him back to make day-to-day life better. But again, he doesn’t even do this of his own accord. Athena needs to come down and say, “I’ll help you, go look for news of your dad, here’s what you should do.” She helps him get a boat, she helps him go to Pylos and Sparta in the first place, makes sure everything kind of works out for him because he’s a pussy and can’t make things work out for himself. So yeah, I’m still not super impressed. I mean, why not earlier? He’s been a fully grown adult now for several years.
Cam: One answer for why he left is just because Athena told him to, right? I mean, I think it’s also setting up growth for later on when he returns.
Rich: And his histrionics, I think they’re surprising because that’s the first thing you encounter in the book. Like you said, Cam, it’s set in medias res and it begins with Telemachus, and you’re like, “oh man, these Greek heroes are not so tough.” But then, as we’ll come to later, that’s actually not unusual at all. There’s a lot of histrionics from tough guys throughout this book. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in that respect, and that’s not actually a sign of lacking manliness or heroism or courage or whatever — the fact that you bemoan your misfortune and cry and stuff like that.
Rich: But I wanted to say one other point, which is — this reminded me a little bit of the judge’s point in Blood Meridian about a man whose father is killed being euchred out of his patrimony, which is that they’re just being lionised and eulogised in a way that might not be in touch with how they were as a man — their pettiness and their meanness and faults and flaws. And so Telemachus has the worst of both worlds, where he doesn’t have a father to provide him any helpful direction growing up, and his father’s shoes are so big to fill. Like, everyone is always talking about how wonderful he is. That’s hard to live up to. Of course he’s going to be a failson, or the Greek equivalent of selling nudes on OnlyFans or whatever. It’s inevitable. It’s amazing that he does as well as he does, I reckon. Well no, that’s too far — he’s still, we should still look down on him a little bit, but it’s not all that surprising.
Cam: Yeah, you’re right, he’s growing up without a father, so he doesn’t know. I think that’s the other reason — well, maybe not the reason why he left, but it’s one thing he got away from going. So before he goes, Eurycleia — the old nurse, sort of slave nurse who is later famous for washing Odysseus’s feet, we might talk about later — she even says, “sweet child, why are you going? You’re the only child.” So he’s the heir. If Odysseus isn’t coming back, he’s the only one left, albeit he’s not sure about that. But if he leaves, it’s going to be even worse probably for his mom and the suitors. So there’s this risk of going — like why are we even going? But one thing he got away with — one, he found out that he is related — but the other thing he got away is he kind of learned what it’s like to rule the kingdom. He doesn’t know that, because he hasn’t had Odysseus, and he’s seen the opposite of just people being absolutely terrible at home. But then he goes and he sees two successful kingdoms being ruled, and this whole thing of bringing gifts and hospitality. So he has learned and grown in that sense. At first I felt like he didn’t grow that much, maybe because I’m just not valuing that stuff enough — it’s been the most important virtue.
Rich: Yeah, he was scared to go up in front of those guys and speak his piece and say who he was and so on, and then he had to confront his fear and do some public speaking.
Cam: And he ends up impressing them.
Rich: He wins them over and gets their aid and so on. So there is some character development right from the outset. And also Athena sets him on his path, but she’s not making every single thing happen — he plays his part well, I think.
Cam: I did, as you guys know, I’ve just been rereading some of Infinite Jest this last week, making fan art. And there is this little Telemachus reference in there that I didn’t catch obviously the first time. It’s when Hal, the main character, is on the phone to his brother, and he’s clipping his nails and not really listening, and at one point he says, “this seems like an exercise in telemachry” — spelled like Telemachus. And then Orin goes, “do you mean telemetry?”, which is this classic Wallace-ian word that you have to look up — it means collecting data from various sources and bringing them to a centralised location. So it comes across as an innocent malapropism, but then you think, well, Wallace wouldn’t have done that accidentally, but Hal himself as well, he’s a verbal genius and it would be odd him saying a word that doesn’t even exist really. And then you just think, like, there are similarities — Hal’s grown up without a father, and Telemachus thinks his father’s dead. There’s maybe a bigger discussion when we’re talking about Infinite Jest of those parallels. Okay, that’s maybe enough of Telemachus. I did see that apparently there is this lost epic out there called the Telemachy, potentially, that’s just lost for the ages.
Rich: I thought the first few books were called the Telemachy. Or is that something else?
Cam: They are, they get called that as well. I think that was maybe after the fact, but there’s this other epic that’s all about him.
Rich: Man, they were doing reboots and sequels even back then.
Cam: Yeah, yeah. “Why don’t we make one about Telemachus?”
Rich: The big studios, trying to print more money.
Why the poem spends so much time on household politics
Benny: So let me ask you guys this. How would the main themes and main takeaways of the book be different if you just skipped right to Odysseus’s story? So if you just omitted Telemachus’s journey for the first few chapters, you started the book with Odysseus arriving at the island of Sheria or whatever, book five basically, and then you only learn he has this sort of weakling son when he actually gets back to Ithaca and is ready to fight the suitors. Would things actually be any different?
Cam: I saw someone online even recommending that. It was one of those viral posts. She’s like, “if you want to read the Odyssey, here” — like five tweets down. She was like, “if you want to skip the first four, if you want to skip to the action”.
Rich: No, I think you need to set up Odysseus’s problem that he’s trying to solve. Right before you even meet Odysseus, it’s helpful to know where is he from, what’s the situation that needs to be resolved by the end of this book. Set that up for a few books, then go to Odysseus, and then you can see how he might struggle to solve that and how his son probably is not going to get it done in his absence. So I like it. I mean, I’ve got other complaints about some chapters that could be cut from this book that we might get to later. The first four is not one of them.
Benny: So you think it’s just set and setting though — you don’t think Telemachus, by that account, isn’t actually adding that much to the story. It’s just basically setting up the actual situation of the book, right? And it seems like you could do that faster. When Athena goes to petition Zeus to let Odysseus escape Calypso’s clutches on Ogygia, presumably she could give that background — like, look, this man has been gone from his family for 20 years, his home is being besmirched by 108 suitors who are all trying to marry his wife, he’s suffered enough, let him go home. That’s all you’d really need to set up the problem, right? You don’t need his son travelling, talking to Nestor, talking to Menelaus. It is kind of odd, to be honest. I’m not quite sure what to make of the whole thing.
Rich: Well, since you bring up the question of pacing — it’s fascinating throughout this book, and I think it does tell us something about what’s important to these people. Because yeah, you get these first four books which set up this situation in detail, and then far more egregiously in my opinion at the end, when Odysseus finally gets back to Ithaca, you get like ten more books about him chasing out the suitors in an incredibly convoluted, some would say unnecessarily detailed and convoluted way. So that makes I think well over half the book is about resolving this problem, and then his actual adventures — sometimes they just skim over things that sound fascinating, that sound like they could be a whole book in and of themselves. He’s fought against some cool monster, or even on the island with Circe, that’s not described for all that long. You can imagine if you’re a studio head today, you could easily do a monster-of-the-week Odysseus show, where one week it’s the Cyclops episode, another week it’s Circe, another week it’s Calypso, and then all the tales that get told — each of those could be a frame story. I’d love to hear more about those, but those are just little asides, and then there’s so much detail paid to the cleansing of the suitors. I mean, it must be something to do with what they prioritise. That’s my best guess.
Cam: Yeah, I think that’s right. It’s funny, because that’s what most people know about the Odyssey, right — there’s all those stories where he conquered all these monsters with his cleverness, and that’s what you know about it. And then you read it and it’s like, you know, a few books, often in the context of him telling stories. The main context is where he’s staying and he’s recounting them. And the Odyssey is mainly about different political situations, hosting and welcoming your guests and hospitality and telling stories and stuff like that, which I suppose was one of the important virtues and values of the time — how a proper king should act. And then sprinkle in some cool adventures in between.
Benny: It’s annoying that they skip literally the most exciting thing that happens in Telemachus’s storyline, which is that the suitors plan to ambush him on the way back from Sparta — and then we just never hear about it. So the end of book four ends with them putting that plan into action, and then we jump right to Odysseus and his story, and then I guess we’re just supposed to think that Athena sort of unravelled their plans and didn’t let him and his crew be ambushed. But book three and four were just totally building up to this fact that the suitors were unhappy that he was going to look for news of his father and wanted to kill him, which I thought was going to result in some cool scene where he finally had to fight someone and prove his mettle or something. But no, the whole thing unravels and then we never hear about it again. It’s extremely odd.
Rich: We do hear about it at the beginning of the ending section, but you’re right, it’s a total damp squib. They’re just like, “oh, then they must not have been able to find them, and they got back and they’re pulling up on the beach now”, and it’s like, oh okay, it’s a bit of a Chekhov’s gun. But we’ve got to give Homer some credit. It’s crazy how good the story is, in spite of the occasional loose end here and there.
Cam: I just saw this — have you guys seen this game show where the question is one of those quiz game shows, and the question is, “in his epic poems, Homer often refers to nectar as the drink of the gods, and what food —” and it goes to the contestant. The contestant is like, “well, I know he likes donuts, Greg, I’m gonna lock in donuts.” And you can see the host’s face just scrunch up.
Rich: That’s awesome.
Benny: All right, should we talk a bit about Odysseus?
Cam: Yeah, take us.
Benny: So obviously in many respects Odysseus is the prototypical Homeric hero — he’s strong, cunning, brave, exactly what you’d expect of the perfect Greek specimen. And so then I was trying to think, well, okay, is the narration glowing about him the whole time? Like, do they only talk about his virtues, and is everything he does tinged with respect and admiration? And then I was thinking, no. There are times when it feels like the narration is sort of negative about him, sort of implying that he probably fucked up. And a few of those —
Cam: He’s complicated.
Benny: A few of those seem to be around the Cyclops, right? When they’ve almost escaped — we talked a bit about this last time — they’ve almost escaped, he turns around and taunts the Cyclops, and then that almost gets them caught again. Then there’s the whole thing where he’s sort of secretive with his men about the bag of wind that Aeolus gave him. Basically he didn’t tell his men what the bag contained. The bag was given to him to help them speed their way back to Ithaca and make the journey easy for them. He doesn’t tell his men what’s in the bag, they think it’s treasure, when he’s asleep one night they open it, and the winds escape and push them way off course again. Hence their troubles renew.
Cam: I knew you couldn’t trust those bitches, man.
Rich: Just imagining like a giant whoopee cushion.
Benny: Yeah, except — that’s honestly what I was thinking. You can definitely imagine the animated version of that, where it’s just a bag boy in the ship being pushed all around the world. And then maybe at the end when he’s maybe slightly too bloodthirsty and wants to kill the townsfolk who are railing against him, because he had taken revenge on the suitors and killed them all, and then Athena has to step in and stop there being more bloodshed. So you could maybe argue that’s a time when he’s taking things too far. There’s some parts where he’s portrayed in a negative light. And then I was thinking, okay, is there a case to be made that he doesn’t want to go home? Where he’s having adventures with his men, maybe he wanted to stay with Calypso on Ogygia permanently or something. I’m not sure if you can summon that sort of textual evidence, but I’m curious what you guys think.
Cam: Sort of went out for that pack of cigarettes one too many times, right?
Benny: Yeah, exactly. Like, dude, pull it together.
Cam: There’s always another step. I mean, with Calypso on the island — she’s this goddess, he’s there for ages, like seven of the ten years.
Benny: Seven years, yeah.
Rich: She’s holding him captive, and she just seems to be incredibly hot.
Cam: Yeah, so quote Richard’s quote and quote fingers, right? “It wasn’t my fault, baby.”
Benny: I mean, that’s the question, right? She was gorgeous.
Rich: “And I would go down to the seashore and I would sit there and stare at the horizon and cry every day, I promise you.”
Benny: “It was my biology.”
Cam: “I never let her give me head on the side of the bed.”
Cam: So I think there is a bit of that. Like, mate, he’s not there of his free will, she’s not letting him go. Does Rich want to maybe talk about what he thinks a Homeric hero is, or some key attributes?
Bronze Age morality redux: what have we learned?
Rich: Yeah, Rich would like to do that. I think the way Rich will approach it is — I want to compare what I had in my head, my preconception of what a Homeric hero is, and then how it was subverted or refined from actually reading this book more carefully. The idea I had in my head is very much coming from especially Bronze Age Pervert’s book, which I read a year ago or something, and the sort of Nietzsche-lite stuff that we’ve talked about — about the will to power and Dostoevsky’s conception of the extraordinary man, which we talked about for the better part of an episode in the Crime and Punishment series. The central idea is just that you are this person who is not concerned with maximising the goodness of your actions. You just do whatever pleases you and exert your will and influence over the world and everything in it, which means physically claiming space, taking dominion over things, over geography, over people. And that is the highest form of morality.
Rich: So partly that aligns with Odysseus’s behaviour. We talked about a couple of the traits last week — arete, how do you say that, arete? Yeah, pursuit of excellence. And kleos in particular —
Cam: Don’t ask me, man.
Rich: — which is this desire to become famous and to have your name remembered, to seek glory by doing great things and to have others respect you and give you the respect that is due — this kind of mafioso respect economy thing. So that’s all definitely true. One thing that slightly surprised me is even those are more about adherence to social norms in some way, rather than trying to rebel against them. You still are trying to impress people or want people to talk about you. You’re quite interested in other people’s conception of you, which seems somewhat at odds with what I would consider a true heroic figure, or at least my preconceived notion of what a true heroic figure would be like.
Rich: Some more meaningful ways in which my expectation was subverted. The first I mentioned before is that — a small thing maybe, but Odysseus cries like a baby, right? Like, seriously — he’s wailing, he’s sobbing —
Cam: Yeah, he’s described as wailing at one point.
Rich: He’s ugly crying. And it’s not once.
Cam: Seven years on the island, and then later when he’s with the poet — it’s all the time.
Rich: Yeah, I wanted to count up all the instances, but it must have been ten times I reckon. And it’s accompanied by sort of emo style self-pity, where he’s always talking about how he’s the unluckiest man alive and woe is me. It’s just interesting how that particular notion of masculinity has varied so much throughout history. When I’m reading — like if I’ve read Bronze Age Pervert, I can’t imagine him — it’s not what springs to mind, the idea of someone being very self-pitying and very emotional and willing to weep over your own plight and the plight of others. He’s really sad about his bros who got killed and he’s really sad about losing his men, at least some of the time. And it’s not just him also — his soldiers cry at least one time that I noticed. So he’s not even unusual in that respect.
Cam: But in reconciliation he kind of does something about it. He has this kind of will-to-power type thing of conquering or taking revenge on his enemies, and just showing no — I mean, he gets help from the gods, I suppose. Because my understanding of sort of BAP-style stuff is this rejection of probably Christian influence, egalitarian kind of norms, right — it’s just less concern or no concern of that, and it’s more about this vitality and glory. Because remember, the first thing he does on his journey — actually, they get blown off course and they just conquer a nearby city. They’re in Troy, they get blown up to the Thracian coast, and it’s the Cicones — he just whacks them, right? It’s one of the first things he tells Penelope — wait, when he gets back, telling stories like, “yeah no, we went there, raided the city” — and again going back to potentially some of those flaws, like, I think they stay there too long, right?
Cam: This is this other thing — he doesn’t seem to have control over his troops. There’s several mutinies, right? Right at the start they want to stay there, and he’s like, “no, we need to go”, and of course they stay and get raided. And as you said, he’s asleep with this bag of wind, and his right-hand man — like, what is your fucking name, man, Eurymachus and Eurylochus, I think Eurylochus is the one away with Odysseus, he’s like his right-hand man, always trying to one-up him, he’s like, “let’s open the bag” —
Rich: Sun god’s cattle, do not eat the cattle, do not eat the cattle, do not eat the fucking cattle.
Cam: Yeah, do not eat the fucking shit. And they just have to wait. It’s funny, they know the prophecy — like, this will definitely kill you, and they’re like, “oh man, sick of fish.”
Benny: I’m sick of fish.
Rich: Yeah, but you are right that — okay, so basically, Bronze Age heroism is much more complicated than I was led to believe through the silly BAP stuff. It’s much more nuanced. And I’m way more sympathetic to Emily Wilson actually reading some moral complication into these characters and into this text, which I think it’s not a stretch, and it does exist in there. Because you have Odysseus who’s clearly being pointed out as displaying hubris, right, and his actions are condemned. So wistfulness about wanting to escape from violence to some degree. And there’s a lot of messaging around trying to control your urges and not merely act upon your base instincts, but actually sublimate them to second-order consequences. Obviously the sirens — avoiding the sirens, the lotus eaters, feasting at Circe’s house, not eating the sun god’s cattle — that’s the most obvious one, which sort of cuts against BAP’s point somewhat. Or maybe it doesn’t, maybe it’s more just like, if you want to keep your eye on the prize you have to avoid these petty, self-gratifying pleasures if you want to actually achieve the big second, third, and fourth order outcomes.
The Ancient Greek Marshmallow Test
Rich: It’s kind of like the Greek marshmallow test or something, right? But way more hardcore. Can you self-sacrifice now to get the big reward later?
Cam: Yeah, like — you either don’t have the marshmallow and you’ll be at home, or have one now and the sun god will kill you for sure.
Rich: Kill you and all of your men.
Cam: I did wonder about this addiction stuff. So you have — the first the second place they go to is the land of the lotus eaters, and you eat these lotus plants and just want to chill and not leave. And then you have the famous sirens, which everyone knows about. It’s funny, I’m just reminded of how old this kind of theme is. This battling with second- and third-order desires is as old as we have in literature. One form of self-control in the literature gets called Odyssean self-control — Odysseus ties himself to the mast as his way of not falling victim to his impulse. And that’s what we do when we get all the chocolate out of the house, or download some app that means you can’t go on social media.
Cam: It was funny, us three in the book club, we all met kind of because we read David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity and liked it. And it is a great book — one of the best along with Homer and stuff. But there’s also a bunch of batshit crazy stuff in there, or seemingly batshit crazy stuff. One is — it’s kind of implicit in there and in his work — this disbelief in this issue of addiction. Or maybe if I was to phrase it differently, there’s this thought that everything you do is active, there’s no issue of like passive consumption, doomscrolling or video gaming or all that stuff, which, you know, is the big theme of Infinite Jest. I think there’s some truth there. Like sometimes the lower-status stuff we view as passive consumption, but it’s just lower status. As soon as it’s higher status — like if it’s chess or piano — if you’re doing that every day everyone’s like, “oh, that’s great, you’re not addicted to it.” So there’s some truth there, but it kind of goes too far as well. I’d set up a lot of these — I do these Pomodoro things, I go out of the house to do my flashcards, this bloody book club, it’s this commitment device to read tough stuff and not get distracted by the lotus flowers and the sirens and stuff, which always happens, right? You see these images online of this beautiful home library and the beautiful chair, and the first thought is like — I saw a tweet just saying, “I can’t wait to get home after a long shift and doomscroll there.” I think the kind of social-dilemma type worries are real, and it’s just interesting how old this stuff is.
Rich: Yeah, and how sophisticated the problem solving is here. Because as you point out, I actually used a lot of Odysseus’s story when I was writing my book in this section on akrasia, which is also the Greek name for that state — not necessarily of addiction, but of having two competing desires in your mind at the same time, of wanting to do something on some base or instinctive level and of not wanting to do it because it interferes with whatever your long-term goals are. The Greeks were really clever about this stuff — the idea of tying himself to the mast, of blocking his sailors’ ears, and all the various other tricks they use to bind themselves. I still do things exactly like that today. They call them Ulysses pacts.
Cam: Yeah, they got the dynamic exactly right.
Rich: My take on this is that there is no such thing as willpower, really. All you ever do is guide and channel your impulses in one direction or another, and the way to do that is to change your incentive structure and environment accordingly to channel your energy in one direction or another. I’m like a willpower extremist — I don’t really think willpower exists. You can just make your life easier or harder through your choice architecture and these kind of contracts with yourself.
Cam: Not sure if I’d go that far, but I sort of take your point that most of it, at the very least, is this kind of just changing —
Rich: Well, it’s in doing what you think is fun, but the secret is that you can tweak various variables to make things more or less fun, right? Make things that you don’t want to do less fun, and make things that you do want to do more fun. Then it becomes more or less effortless rather than trying to fight against your own self all the time, which I personally have never managed to succeed with at all. I’ve never developed any more willpower. I’ve only ever used Ulyssean and Odyssean style tricks.
Cam: Yeah, I need to do it. Man, I gotta get thin for your wedding in like two weeks. Since I’ve been back, three weeks, just going straight down. How am I? I’m in the ice creams. We’ve got someone staying with us at the moment, and apparently she said, “man, Cam goes through a lot of ice cream.” My nickname used to be Toucan Cam.
Rich: Damn.
Cam: I always got two drinks.
Benny: What’s interesting about especially the Ulysses pact — where he asks his men to tie him to the mast so that he can still hear the sirens but they can go by safely — is that the problem solving involves still letting yourself partake in the pleasure of the activity. Which we’ve actually lost a bit of today, I think. A lot of this problem solving now has this moral tone as well, where it’s like you should deprive yourself of something because it’s good for you, and experiencing that thing in and of itself is just now bad, it’s icky, right? But Odysseus’s problem solving is much more nuanced. It’s like, no, I’m gonna experience as much of the good thing as possible, but I’m just going to make it so that the second-order consequences are now manageable. So I know I can get myself out of the situation when needed. You know, “I’m gonna eat the junk food because the junk food is great” —
Cam: So you’re just saying I should eat the ice cream and vomit it up?
Benny: — “but I’m gonna make sure I don’t fill my fridge with ice cream like Cam, because then I’m never going to stop eating the ice cream.” And there’s now sort of moral overtones with this problem solving, where there’s this claim that deprivation in and of itself is a good thing. Whereas that’s not what’s being done in the Odyssey. Deprivation is necessary insofar as it helps you avoid certain problems, but deprivation in and of itself is no good because experiencing pleasure is still a good thing. And yeah, I guess that’s another theme in general — just the desire for pleasurable activities, right? Like good food, good sex, good visits, being tanned and oiled up all the time, you know?
Rich: Yeah, sounds awesome.
Benny: Massages, all this stuff.
Rich: These guys love to party. They’re always feasting, they’re always drinking wine as sweet as honey, they’re always slaughtering fat young calves.
Benny: Yeah, I know, it’s enough to make me want to eat meat again. God damn it.
Cam: Donuts.
Rich: On Circe’s island, they feast non-stop for one year. I’m like, don’t you have a wife? Don’t you have a wife and child that you’re desperate to get home to?
Benny: Yeah, actually that’s a good piece of evidence to maybe bolster what I was saying earlier. It’s maybe hard to make it, but there’s some sort of reading of this where you can argue that he doesn’t really want to go home.
Cam: He’s taking his time.
Benny: Yeah, he’s taking his time.
Cam: I mean, yeah, I think you can’t go fully there because at one point — Calypso is this kind of half-goddess nymph, and so is Circe but she’s more kind of a witch. But Calypso asks — she wants him to stay there, she loves him and she’s like, “I’ll give you immortal life, this is beautiful, I’m beautiful.” And he even concedes — he’s like, “yeah, you’re probably hotter than my wife —”
Rich: “You’re hotter than Penelope.”
Cam: ”— you are a goddess.” But he’s like, “I want to go home.” He does want to go home. But I kind of know what you mean — he’s taking his time, sort of having his cake and eating it too. He’s “one more trip”.
Rich: The Circe one is slightly different though, because she’s not controlling him and keeping him trapped. They’re just straight up staying there having a great time.
Cam: Yeah, maybe I’d get the timeline wrong. She’s this witch that turns his squad to pigs, and then he wants to go save them, and the only way —
Rich: Which he has to have sex with her, unfortunately, to save his men.
Cam: Well, he has to drink — he has to drink the potions, who knows what was in there, right? They put in some molly, I think it’s called.
Rich: It’s a molly.
Benny: Awesome.
Rich: Oh yeah. Fluid bonding.
Cam: At one point I think even Hermes the god says like, “she’ll ask you to get in bed, make sure you promise an oath” — like some shit. It almost does sound part of the deal. I suppose that’s the other temptation he’s dealing with.
Benny: So yeah, I mean, one way to resolve this, I guess, Cam, like you said, is to say okay, he actually does want to get home, and that’s why he denies Calypso’s offer — or declines, rather, Calypso’s offer of immortality. But another way to read it is that he just knows that that’s a virtue all good Greeks are supposed to embody. You’re supposed to embark on this journey of a nostos, it’s called, which is homecoming. That is what you’re supposed to do. But his actual desire is maybe to stay with Calypso on the island. It’s just a moral duty that he has to go home. If he could mould the world as he wanted it, he would actually become a god. Because otherwise you have to ask, why wouldn’t he become a god, right? She’s offering him a great life of immortality. Why do we think he says no to that?
Cam: Yeah. Well, there is this question, how much he wants to go home to his wife and how much he wants to go home to his kingdom. But I think the simple answer is, whether it’s his duty or not, being home is the most important thing to him. And it is this deep theme for people of wanting to return home after a big journey.
Rich: I get the sense that it’s less to do with affection for his wife and family, and it’s more to do with assuming the mantle — or reassuming the mantle — of king of Ithaca, as his sort of duty to that land. I know he does feel emotionally attached to it, but I’m not —
Cam: I think that’s right. I think it’s both, but I think that’s a big part of it for sure — to get back and be king, and there’s a kingdom in disrepair.
Rich: Yeah, take back his place in the world, have all of his resources back at his command, bring home treasure, et cetera. I’m not sure how much of it is intrinsic allure of home itself, versus again like the extrinsic, social-status type stuff of having your correct position in the world.
Cam: Yeah, I mean, he does want to get back to his wife as well. It certainly sets up — it directly contrasts with Agamemnon, who was also at the Battle of Troy and leaves to go home, and his wife Clytemnestra has left him for another man, cheated on him, and they ambush him and kill him. And Odysseus talks to him in the underworld, and he’s just saying like, “damn, she got me”, sort of like —
Benny: “She got me good.”
Cam: It sets up a direct foil, a direct contrast of his wife — one was like, you know, her fidelity was not pure, but also they killed him, and like watch out when you get home. So Odysseus knows that he can’t trust everyone when he gets back. He knows it’s gonna be dangerous, but he wants to get revenge — I think that’s driving him. And he also wants his wife to be faithful and there for him as well. The text is probably telling us that.
Odysseus’ slow homecoming
Rich: Is this a good time to talk about how long is a reasonable period of time to mourn your missing husband before you move on? 20 years. And you’ve probably been together for like five years, maybe.
Cam: I mean, yeah, I have thought about that. I mentioned this last time, but I was just watching a really good TV show, Prisoners of War, which Homeland is based on, where two soldiers are captive away for 14 years and both finally return in Israel. This is an early 2000s TV show. They both have wives, and one has two young kids who he hasn’t been a part of. And yeah, there’s just really strong Ithacan themes. One of the wives has left him for her brother in this case, and the other one stayed. And everyone hates the wife that left him — she kind of betrayed him. That was his one hope, his thing in some way, and he gets back and she’s left him. But then also you see the other wife — she stayed, but she’s had a tough time. And what happens if he never returned? She’s kind of wasted her life. I mean, Penelope at one point describes what it was like for her — it was like being away at a shipwreck. So it’s a journey for her as well. 20 years is a long time.
Rich: Yeah, this is the closest I get to the feeling that the polyamory people have a point. If you really love someone, you really care about their wellbeing, you want them to be happy, even if it means them taking on another partner, getting remarried or whatever. It’s much clearer with death, right? If I died, I would want Phoebe to remarry.
Cam: Yeah, death changes it. It changes everything.
Rich: Because I would want her to have a good life. But if I was merely missing for a long time, I still would. It’s just that it would be so heartbreaking to get home —
Cam: Well, even during this TV show, he’s away in captivity and he sees the newspaper, because it’s massive news. That takes away everything. That was worse than any of the torture he’d had in the TV show — that his wife is not waiting for him the same way that he’s waiting for her.
Cam: I mean, there is this question of how much Odysseus is keeping clean.
Benny: That’s not much of a question. We know the answer.
Cam: Well, no, but I think at one point he’s captive with Calypso, she sort of keeps him there.
Rich: And he also kind of has to sleep with Circe as well, right? To save his men. Are those the only two instances we get of him cheating? Like directly?
Cam: Well, okay, there is — he certainly almost flirts with Nausicaa. So that’s the Phaeacians, this utopian, semi-godlike people. The trees are always in bloom and they have super fast ships.
Benny: Oh, is that the island of Sheria?
Cam: It’s the island of Sheria and they’re the Phaeacians, and the king is Alcinous. That’s where he arrives. We first read — he kind of shows up on the shore and she’s down there doing her laundry, because Athena tells her to, and he sort of shows up naked and grabs a leafy bush, holding that to cover him. He says she’s like a goddess as well, she looks like a goddess and beautiful. But there is an interesting — this is like book five or six — at one point he says to her, “I want you to find a worthy husband” — and he says, “I want you to find a like-minded husband.” The Greek word is homophrosyne or something, this kind of like-mindedness. I thought that was interesting early on, that he was saying — and Homer was telling us — this seems to be the most important characteristic to have in this other partner: this kind of like-mindedness, similar values or intellectual partner.
Cam: Well, it does make Penelope a bit of a porg at one point. Yeah, literally when he returns — Athena freshens her up a bit and she says, “make your skin white as ivory” and thick. Emily Wilson uses “shapelier”, but I’ve seen some translations use —
Rich: Fatten up that ass.
Cam: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But rather than Calypso — he’s sort of conceding “Calypso, you’re more beautiful, and you live forever” — but what’s bringing him back to Penelope is perhaps this, what he’s told Nausicaa, this kind of like-mindedness is the most important value. And there’s textual evidence to show that Penelope shares some of this like-mindedness, some Odyssean type qualities.
Benny: I mean, she’s definitely clever, right? And the whole unweaving of the shawl — is that what she tells the suitors, “when I’m done sewing this shawl I’ll finally pick one of you”, and then every evening she’s actually secretly unsewing it so that it takes her many years.
Cam: Yeah. These are all Odysseus-type tricks, right?
Benny: These sort of tricks are very Odyssean.
Rich: Yeah, the test with the bow and arrow which reveals who Odysseus is.
Cam: Even her tests for Odysseus, right — when she doesn’t fully believe he’s Odysseus because he’s been in disguise. This kind of trick — she tricks him about, “oh, just move the bed around for you”, and he’s like, “wait, you can’t do that.” Which is an interesting trick because I was thinking it kind of doubles as proof of fidelity as well. Insofar as that works as a test for Odysseus, only Odysseus knows about the bed, so it shows no one else has been in the bed for the last 20 years. Sorry, Benny, you were going to say something?
Godhood and rat bastard cunning
Benny: No, I was going to change slightly and just go back to the offer of immortality, which I find fascinating for whatever reason. So he declines, and then what I think is interesting is Homer has him almost become godlike throughout the Odyssey, mostly with Athena’s help. So she’s always ensuring that he wins battles, making him look like a god, making him very strong, often growing his hair or enlarging his muscles, things like this. So he declines this offer to actually become a god, and then actually gains all these godlike qualities in scenes throughout the book. And I’m wondering if the lesson here is just something as simple as you should not aspire to be the gods themselves, but you should aspire to be like the gods as much as possible. But it’s anathema for humans to actually be trying to become gods or usurp the actual positions of gods. There’s obviously a very clear separation between humans and gods in the Homeric world — but gods are much more human-like, as we discussed last time, than judeo-christian conceptions of gods or something. And so it’s possible for mortals to try and become more and more like the gods in various ways. So it seems like that’s maybe the ethic here. Like you should try and exert your will on the world as much as possible without actually trying to be a god yourself — not raise yourself to the level of a god.
Rich: Yeah, I think that’s right. There’s a real vein of fatalism here and of knowing your place, which again doesn’t gel or mesh very nicely with what I would consider the notion of heroism, which is sort of spitting in the eye of God, basically. So another way in which a simplistic Bronze Age mindset type reading of Homeric morality seems wrong to me — the idea of being an extraordinary man is to do exactly as you please and to have no masters above you and so on. But everyone in this book is just very different to the gods. And I think you’re right, Benny, that there maybe is that warning that there’s essentially two classes of beings and never the twain shall meet.
Rich: The bit which I noted down is when Eurylochus says — so they’re on Helios’s island and they’ve been told don’t eat the cattle, because that will seal your fate, you will all die. They’re going hungry, fishing and scrounging food, waiting for the wind to change. And Eurylochus says, “I would prefer to drink the sea and die at once than perish slowly.” He’s invoking them to eat the sun god’s cattle and we’ll ask forgiveness later, which is kind of like rock and roll, right? He’s like, “fuck the gods. I don’t care, I’m going to live like a man” — which is what I would consider to be the BAP-style morality. But in fact, in Homer’s story, that’s the wrong decision. Poseidon sends a storm and they will die, and he shouldn’t have done that. Whereas Odysseus is more like the goody-goody scold who’s like, “no, no, no, don’t do that, we were told not to eat the cattle.” So there is this class of beings who you must defer to.
Rich: The other interesting thing, talking about — well, we haven’t talked about yet, but female characters. We got a little bit into the gender politics last time. The most powerful man in this book is like a bug compared to the least god, really. Like Calypso and Circe both have, not absolute power over Odysseus, but he is their plaything to varying degrees. And then Athena is like the coolest, most badass character in this entire book by far. She’s a deadly, incredibly deadly skilled warrior, and she’s a woman, and she’s not like a pushover amongst the gods or a lesser god — she’s like front and centre. She’s Zeus’s daughter, sprung straight from his head. So that’s interesting too, that the best man is worse than the least female god even. And if you think that the ancient Greeks were very patriarchal and so on, then I think that also tells you exactly how concrete that division is between mortals and the deathless gods.
Benny: Yeah, nice. The gods are very intriguingly egalitarian, right? Even the fact that Athena is able to petition Zeus to send Hermes to get Odysseus released from Ogygia — this is against Poseidon’s wishes. And Poseidon, in some sense, is a higher god than Athena. He was of the original cast, the original generation of Olympians. He’s sort of like Zeus’s brother. Zeus got the skies and Poseidon got the seas and Hades got the underworld, and Earth belongs to all three. So these gods are sort of equal, and yet Athena is able to petition Zeus to basically overrule Poseidon. So there’s no sense that male gods definitely —
Rich: Such a daddy’s girl.
Cam: Was it “the boss”? But yeah, no, I mean, it is interesting, that the gods are both genders. I think Athena herself is actually a little bit unclear sometimes, but often gets talked as a woman.
Rich: Wait, what do you mean? Athena is straight up a female, isn’t she?
Benny: Yeah, I thought — what do you mean it’s unclear?
Cam: She, in some portrayals, is a bit androgynous in some sense. She also has masculine traits. I think Wilson herself takes a political motive when she translates her as “child of God” rather than “daughter of God”. It says “daughter of God”. But I think she wants to emphasise that Athena — I think Athena is kind of an androgynous god, although mainly talked about, or always maybe talked about as a female in this story.
Rich: You mean her appearance is androgynous? Like she’s got fake bro tattoos and a baggy whatever.
Cam: Yeah, yeah. Just small tits or something. I don’t know exactly, but I know there’s a take out there that Wilson herself, I think, endorses as well.
Cam: I mean, the other interesting thing is the gods just do a lot for the people, right? There is this take of, like, how much does Odysseus or Telemachus or whoever deserve this hero status? Because in almost all cases — well, you know, the god did that, or the god helped that, and you wouldn’t have done that. At one point they talk about his impressiveness at Troy — and he did that himself, you know, he was the mastermind behind it and disguised himself as a beggar and stuff. But these days — I mean, there’s even disguises which I don’t love in this story. The gods just change how people look. They make Odysseus look old and shrivelled, and then they make him look all-powerful, and they turn Penelope into a fresh porg. It’s just a little bit weird.
Rich: What don’t you like about it? Like cheating, like plot armour?
Cam: Yeah, I just found it a bit cheating. It’s kind of like, yeah, he gets home to his wife and it’s about this like-mindedness, and then it’s just like, “oh yeah, make you both look like bombass.” I don’t know.
Rich: Some of it’s weird, like when he gets to Ithaca and Athena disguises it so it looks like it’s not Ithaca, and then she approaches him as a little girl, but then she’s like, “welcome back, don’t you recognise Ithaca?” It’s like, what was the point of — and why are you appearing as a little girl, why not just be like, “hey, it’s your old friend Athena, we’ve interacted many times before”? Anyway, let’s get into the plot. It’s like this extra elaborate — I think she’s just showing off at this point. Was there a test there?
Cam: I don’t know — because he doesn’t know where he is at first, he’s like, “where am I?” And then he kind of figures it out.
Rich: He pretends to be from Crete. He’s so good at coming up with incredibly elaborate backstories on the fly. We should talk about this as his central attribute, the Odyssean attribute specific to him — that I don’t know if all heroes share — which is that he’s like a trickster and an amazing bullshitter. When he gets to Ithaca and he is trying to keep his identity secret — fortunately Athena’s given him this old man guise, which I’m imagining is like the Jackass Bad Grandpa kind of prosthetics —
Cam: Yeah, walking stick.
Rich: So he visits his good faithful slave — is it Eumaeus, I can’t remember the name — and obviously he asks, “where are you from, traveller?” And then Odysseus just spins this huge convoluted yarn about — I can’t even remember what it was.
Cam: But he’s got details, right? It’s not just — yeah, yeah, it seems flawed.
Rich: When he meets Penelope he tells her this long-ass fake story. He’s just able to effortlessly trick people and fool people. And some of it seems excessive, even.
Cam: Right at the end when he talks to his dad, he tricks him as well.
Rich: Some of it seems like — okay, yeah, he’s doing the loyalty tests and stuff, those bits make sense, or he has to conceal his identity. But I think he revels in it and is even proud of it. There was one bit where I thought the text even suggested that lying is fine and good. Let me see if I wrote it down or not. Well, in any case, he’s not that embarrassed to be called —
Cam: Is it talking about his grandfather? Because when it flashes back when he’s a young kid and how he gets a scar, they mention his grandfather, and he was the lord of the thieves and lord of oaths. I think Wilson calls him “lord of these and all those”. That’s his epithet, which Odysseus inherits a little bit. There’s this impressiveness there.
Rich: The guy who named him “the unlikeable one” because he’s like, “yeah, I don’t like anyone either” — so a boy named Sue.
Cam: I did read this cool little thing around Odysseus’s scar. He has this scar on his leg, which gets recognised by the old nurse slave Eurycleia. Which also made me think — at one point Penelope offers someone to clean Odysseus, and he’s like, “do you have someone old, like an old woman?” And she’s like, “yeah, I’ve got just the person.” And then this person is the one that raised Odysseus. She’s washing his feet and then recognises the scar and knows that it must be Odysseus. He’s like, “make sure we keep this quiet, because I’m gonna ambush everyone.”
Rich: No, he doesn’t say that. He says, “if you let the secret out I’ll fucking kill you.”
Benny: Yeah, I will kill you.
Cam: Yeah, fair enough.
Rich: “And I don’t care that I used to feed from your breast and you raised me.”
Cam: Yeah, I was being euphemistic.
Rich: Another little moment where I’m like, man, this guy kind of sucks.
Cam: But I did see this cool bit of commentary around his scar being what is used to identify Odysseus. And then it goes to this backstory of how he got it — he’s a young kid and he’s boar hunting with his elders. He goes out, he can’t wait, and the adults hold back, and he’s this young kid, he can’t wait and he goes to hit the boar, and the boar kind of gets the better of him and he gets the scar. But the very thing that identifies him — that’s not very prototypical, that’s not very typical of Odysseus. Part of Odysseus’s virtue, as well as these wiles and cleverness, is this kind of patience. A lot of times it’s his men that are not patient — they want to feast and they want the cattle and stuff. And he has this restraint. Even when he gets home, he disguises himself and he has this restraint. He doesn’t say who he is, even with his wife. At one point it’s saying his heart’s beating a bit, but he keeps it cool and he just knows he needs to get the job done. The very scar that identifies him is this inversion of what he is and what he’s grown out of. When he was young he was impulsive.
Rich: A scar of impulsivity.
Cam: A scar of impulsivity, which I thought was kind of nice.
Benny: Why does he hide his identity for so long when he gets back? What is the point here? I was getting kind of frustrated reading these last three chapters, honestly, when he just wouldn’t tell anyone. Because I couldn’t quite understand what the point here was. Just say, “I am Odysseus.” I mean, I can understand not revealing yourself to the suitors so that you can effectively ambush them. But to not reveal himself to Penelope — and you know, it took him a long time to reveal himself to his own son, to his father, etc. The only person he trusts, and still after quite a long time, is sort of the older slave hand, I guess. I forget his name, but he’s the only person that knows for a long time. So what was going on here? He had opportunities to let people know who he was. There can’t just be in and of itself a virtue of deception. Presumably it’s for some sort of reason, right?
Cam: Just constant lying and trickery wherever you go, never say who you are.
Benny: Yeah, exactly.
Cam: Well, part of it is he’s testing loyalty, right, I think. To contrast again to Agamemnon, who gets home and gets ambushed. He can’t necessarily trust everyone. So he wants to test the loyalty of the slave hand, who kind of passes with flying colours. And he wants to test the loyalty of even his son and of Penelope. He can’t trust everyone — it’s not just the suitors. He wants to test everyone’s loyalty. I think that’s the main reason. Unless your question is “I did it a bit long”.
Benny: Yeah, I think it took him long, and I don’t think he really tested — he definitely tests the loyalty of the slaves that are still working for them, because he wants to know that they’ll be on his side when it comes to the fight, and so that’s all practical and makes sense. But he doesn’t really test Telemachus’s loyalty. And presumably Penelope’s loyalty should be evident from the fact that she hasn’t married anyone else and has waited 20 years, right?
Cam: Yeah, I mean, I suppose —
Rich: I think he wants the opportune moment, right, which is another big thing in Greek philosophy — waiting, like what you were saying Cam, is patience, and then striking at the exact moment. The idea would be that you don’t want anyone to preemptively give you away, or maybe inadvertently reveal that you know who they are, right? Because his plan does hinge on —
Suitor slaughtering time
Rich: Just to cover the incredibly sophisticated plan that he and Telemachus and Athena hatch up together — which is like comic-book level silly — basically the suitors are all invited into the hall, he gets the slaves to lock the doors, he and Telemachus hide their weapons except for they leave themselves a sword and a spear for themselves. And then that’s when Penelope does the contest with who can string Odysseus’s bow, right, to see which suitor is worthy of her.
Cam: Kind of the Cinderella shoe contest, kind of.
Rich: And Odysseus strings it. He’s the only one who can. Am I right in saying he immediately just starts fucking —
Benny: Yeah, I think he shoots —
Cam: Well, it kind of puts a weapon in his hand, right? He gets —
Benny: Alcinous first, who’s sort of the main suitor. Through his neck or something.
Cam: Antinous — and then he gets Antinous in the throat, and he gets Eurymachus in the nipple or some shit.
Rich: Yeah, he just starts slaughtering them. Athena comes and fights by his side, which seems extra unfair.
Cam: And she makes — he’s like Matrix dodging. Maybe I misread that.
Benny: No, she makes all their arrows miss for sure.
Cam: Because otherwise — one guy versus hundreds. But they do hide the weapons, right? And I think Telemachus fucks up there as well, which is interesting in light of what we were talking about before — about him being a failson. He’s like, “you got one job, mate, move the weapons.” And then he doesn’t lock it, doesn’t lock them away, and then they get in and they get some armour.
Benny: Someone sneaks in there, yeah.
Cam: And it just seems to be annoyed about that.
Benny: And then his dad has to come up with a plan to save him, right? He’s like, “oh shit, someone got into the weapon store. Dad, what do we do?” And then Odysseus has to come up with a plan to catch this guy. It’s insane.
Cam: And his first thought is he’s been betrayed. He’s like, “someone must have — you know, one of my loyalty tests worked.” And then Telemachus — maybe to his credit he admits it. He’s like, “no, no, sorry dad”, which is maybe an impressive form of growth, I don’t know.
Benny: My bad.
Rich: Yeah, you do get the sense that Odysseus is losing it a little bit. He is very paranoid and cynical and jumping at shadows, I think. I don’t think it’s a stretch to read that into the text — that he is being portrayed as going too far and losing control somewhat, and not being perfectly reasonable in all these crazy tests he’s making everyone do and all these convoluted plans he’s coming up with.
Benny: Especially when he’s ready to kill all the townsfolk, right? I mean, he’s literally their king. And presumably part of the reason he wanted to return home was to take up the mantle of leading these people again. And as soon as he gets home he’s ready to kill them all instead of trying to bargain or talk them down or anything. And throughout the whole book he’s portrayed as this very clever trickster who can talk himself out of most situations, so presumably there would have been a way for him to talk the townsfolk down, get them to lay down their arms. But he’s ready to fight at that point. He’s just going to keep slaughtering people.
Cam: Part of it is the Bronze Age mindset of like, that’s not necessarily as bad a thing as it sounds to us. But —
Benny: But these are literally his denizens, right? That’s what’s so odd.
Cam: Well, I know there’s — maybe I’m — yeah, well, Telemachus —
Rich: Well, the suitors all had families. Some of the suitors were from Ithaca, for instance — they weren’t all foreigners.
Cam: Yeah. I didn’t read him as necessarily paranoid as well. From our vantage we know Penelope is not going to betray him, but it sets up in contrast that he really has to worry about this. Agamemnon congratulates him at the end — he’s like, “thank god, you’re so lucky” — but that’s what could have happened.
Final thoughts on Odysseus and bronze age heroism
Rich: Where do you guys land on the slaughter of the suitors? And maybe I’ll broaden the question out a bit — where do you land on Odysseus as a person?
Cam: As a man.
Rich: Good guy?
Cam: Complicated.
Benny: I mean, to be honest, Odysseus confuses me a bit. Maybe to just start with the suitor question, though. I think the most straightforward reading there is simply that revenge is okay when people have actually done you harm. And I think coveting another man’s wife in this case is viewed as just a bad thing. So I think Homer’s writing it thinking that the reader is going to be very sympathetic with the death of the suitors, and then possibly thinking killing the townsfolk is too much. But I didn’t get the sense in the narration that we should be hesitant to see the suitors killed. I got the sense that we should sort of be elated that they’re finally getting what’s coming to them.
Benny: Odysseus as a hero, for me, is a bit less clear. I think had this been written in the modern day, you would have seen a slightly different arc. You would have seen something like Odysseus doing something maybe in the Trojan War that would have earned him the respect of the gods, and then that would have won Athena over to his side, and then Athena would have helped him get home because he had done this good deed, whatever that good deed had been. But that’s not really how it unfolds. We’re not really privy to the reason why Athena favours Odysseus so much. We’re just told that she’s been on his side from the beginning. She also, I guess, was helping him kill people during the Trojan War and beforehand. So she’s just chosen him as a human to favour, which is pretty arbitrary, right?
Cam: A quick bit of background context is that Aphrodite supports Troy in the Trojan War, because Paris, the good-looking brother that takes Helen — she kind of loves him, and he chooses her over Hera and Athena, I think. And then they’re like, “well, fuck Troy, we’ll go with the Greeks then.” And then Ares — is that the war god? — he’s married to Aphrodite, so he supports Troy. So there’s a little bit of background of why they chose. But yeah, I think also like Odysseus just becomes her favourite, I think.
Benny: But that doesn’t tell you why they chose Odysseus out of all the Greeks, right?
Cam: Maybe because he’s like Athena, right? He’s clever and impressive.
Benny: But my point is, she also bolsters his cleverness and his impressiveness, right? He wouldn’t be nearly as impressive without the help of the gods.
Cam: “Look how great he is, look how great my son is” — you’re doing it all.
Benny: Yeah, like “look how jacked he is” when she — you know, he’s just eating pigs on Circe’s island for a year. Presumably him and his men would get fat without the intervention of the gods. So I think that’s what I struggle with the most — there seems to be an inherent arbitrariness built into all of like, who is a hero, who dies, who wins, who are we supposed to look at with fondness, who are we supposed to dislike. And yeah, it’s a little hard for me to get around that arbitrariness. Some of the big moral themes we touched on last time a bit, I think some of them are clear, but just in terms of who the gods favour, why — it’s hard for me to get around that arbitrariness.
Cam: Also, Athena kind of puts her feet up for a bit. It’s Hermes actually that’s helping him when he’s away. Hermes comes in and convinces Calypso to go, and then Hermes goes to Circe’s island. And like you said, and Athena’s kind of just like — and as soon as Odysseus gets back, Athena’s like, “okay, I’m here now.”
Benny: Also, she disappears when he’s about to drown, when Poseidon’s wrecked his ship and now he’s trying to swim to Sheria and he almost drowns.
Cam: I didn’t remember that.
Benny: It’s only because of the goddess Ino, I think, who gives him this scarf or whatever that he can float on. So yeah, it is weird. It’s like she abandons him sometimes. Where do you guys come down on Odysseus?
Cam: I mean, probably similar to you guys, I think. He’s pretty cool.
Rich: This is from the guy who also loves Tony Soprano and thinks Tony Soprano is a hero.
Cam: Bronze Age morality is not the same as our current morality, so you sort of have to just be mindful of that, really.
Rich: The big difference is the expansion of moral circles, right, which the Christian victim morality falls under. If you think about modern heroes like superheroes, they are so milquetoast and neutered, but I think that is because we can no longer have this kind of conquest. But it’s interesting, because valorising Odyssean exploits or heroism — descriptively, I do feel some resonance there. This is what it is to be a man in the fullest sense, or to have, as a person, full dominion. The extraordinary man stuff, the judge’s morality from Blood Meridian, Satan in Paradise Lost — I think it is kind of interesting and true, and it’s hard to remember in our modern context because none of us are free like that. But I like seeing it represented. It’s not something that I want to have, and our world would be kind of nightmarish if we did have the more Bronze Age style morality. So I’m really glad that we live in this world. But I think it’s interesting to recognise it as, in my view, a kind of accurate depiction of masculinity and human nature.
Rich: And then the question in modernity and with civilisation becomes, how do we redirect those impulses? I think we do redirect them pretty well, with sports and entrepreneurship and startups seem to be some of the more obvious modern things. Like Elon Musk is clearly this type of a guy. I think I’ve said before, I think he’s a pretty shitty person, but he’s also a great man. Trump is a great man but not a good man. These kind of people, they are able to exert their will to power in the world. With Trump maybe you’d say in a less destructive way than they might otherwise if they actually were out conquering countries or something, and then with Musk in an actual net positive way where maybe he does some bad things but on the whole he makes an amazing positive impact on the world. But you have to recognise those impulses and try to not fully neuter them and try to not deny their existence, I think. That’s something where I kind of think reading Bronze Age Pervert is actually quite interesting, or people from this actual age, to just get a wildly different perspective of what it is to be a fully formed, fully embodied person in the world.
Benny: Yeah, it’s interesting to think about that through the lens of constraints, which seems to be the difference among some of the characters you mentioned. So if you take it at face value that one of the things you should try and do is sort of maximise your agency in the world — which seems to be one of the lessons of the Odyssey, right? Like, you should take things into your own hands and try and be as agentic as possible. Then in the Odyssey’s case, that’s all subject to the will of the gods. So that’s the constraining system. You should try and be as agentic as possible, unless the gods have prevented you from doing something, in which case you better listen to them. The judge in Blood Meridian basically has no constraints, and I think that’s what makes him such an evil character. Because he’s just trying to totally maximise his own agency, divorced even from what he thought five seconds ago. He’s just an unleashed cannon on the world, which makes him so sadistic and difficult to predict and dangerous. And you might argue something similar about Trump, right? He’s also sort of divorced from what he even thought or said five seconds ago, and doesn’t seem to respect any sort of constraints. So if your ethic is something like maximise agency in the world, it’s interesting to ask, subject to what — subject to what sort of constraints? At least in the Odyssey there’s something like godlike constraints, whereas for some of these other characters, there’s nothing.
Rich: And maybe some social constraints too, right? Like your legacy and your people’s perception of you. Whereas the judge could not give a fuck about what anyone thinks about him.
Benny: Yeah, nice.
Cam: Yeah, I suppose to separate the judge and the extraordinary man in nature from the Bronze Age hero — what they have in common, I suppose, is that they don’t have this egalitarian care of the victims that we have, probably from this Christian ethic, which is now just part of secular humanism. But where they differ is there are these constraints, whether it be the gods or these other socially constructed virtues.
Cam: It is hard to grok just reading the history and the prehistory of humanity, of just like, it’s all conquerers, man. Like when Odysseus says that, “we just went there and we conquered this place” — when you read the ancient DNA and stuff, it’s like, it’s groups of people just conquering other people, right? It’s so foreign to our current norms and morality. It’s interesting that we’ve got these texts that somewhat capture it, although it’s not as deep as our history goes.
Rich: And necessarily written by the victors, right? Especially in this case.
Benny: All right, anything else before we wrap up here? I gotta go pretty soon.
Rich: The last thing I want to say is that, with the examples you guys have brought, you have sort of halfway convinced me that this entire text is actually a marshmallow test. The Odyssey is like the ancient Greek marshmallow test. Because everything in there actually boils down to not letting your base instincts steer you away from what is the ultimate good or the higher good or even just the more strategic choice. Including the whole point of him coming home — and then when he comes home, not immediately going up to Penelope and embracing her, which would be the thing that you’d want to do, but taking the hard choice and putting off the reconciliation. Everything about it is about behaving tactically and imposing these constraints on yourself to get what you want. It’s fascinating, I hadn’t thought about that at all. Well, I’d thought about the sirens and that thing as a sort of a mini bit, but maybe the whole book is kind of about that, really.
Cam: Yeah, it’s a massive theme. Someone else was talking about — the other big thing I took away, which I mentioned, was this kind of like-mindedness, this homophrosyne or something, that Penelope and Odysseus have, and that just being an important value in a relationship. That was something new I took away from this reading.
Rich: Yeah, and that all of this stuff is really nuanced and quite impressively so. I mean, there’s all the bloodthirsty killing and conquest, but it’s not simplistic at all. That’s also been quite surprising for me. It’s really sophisticated in all kinds of ways — storytelling, the morality, some of the plot beats and arcs, the messaging. It’s not as simple as other texts of this era. Like the Bible feels — the Old Testament feels less sophisticated than this.
Cam: I have to do that next time.
Rich: We should, yeah.
Benny: Yeah, it’d be interesting to read the Bible, to be honest. I can only imagine what it would be like to have you have certain characters that are looking as hard as they can for meaning in the Bible. So I put Jordan Peterson in this camp, for instance, and he’s obviously extremely good at it, like extremely talented. And I think he’s probably eking more out of the Bible than is actually there, more than it deserves. But he tells these compelling stories about it, and that’s fine. It would be interesting if he was to attack the Odyssey in the same way. I kind of agree with you that there’s probably more there that you could extract if you had these very dedicated — and I’m sure there are these dedicated scholars who try and do the same thing. But Peterson obviously has a knack for doing it in a very public-facing, provocative way that gets him a lot of attention. I’m not actually that familiar with his biblical writings and whatnot, but he’s persuaded a lot of people and written a lot about it. It would just be fascinating to have someone do the same for the Odyssey.
Cam: Yeah, it’d be good.
Benny: At least it’s longer.
Cam: My prior is kind of more to the Bible, for no other reason — it’s a much bigger book.
Rich: Yeah, we should read at least a couple of the interesting books from the Bible. Although I think the New Testament is more interesting. We definitely should do that at some point.
Benny: I’d be up for that.
Cam: Are we keen to do the Iliad at some point?
Rich: Yeah, we didn’t even talk about Achilles in here, who makes another fascinating appearance which cuts against the idea of bloodthirsty pillage being the point of your existence.
Cam: Yeah, that’s a bit weird, which seems to go against earlier today. Achilles says — because he gets met in the underworld, and he says, “well, you know, went with such glory”, and Achilles says he’d rather just be a swineherd or something, then the lord of everyone in the underworld. Which is maybe a bit of evidence that the different authors —
Rich: It’s kind of a mixed message, because he says that, and then immediately after, Odysseus asks Achilles about his son, and Odysseus is telling him about what an amazing warrior he is and how he’s slaughtering all his foes, and Achilles leaps away with a spring in his step. So he’s still absolutely stoked.
Cam: It’s funny, it doesn’t take long to get him back. He’s just living as a ghost and he hates it today, but as soon as you start talking about battles —
Rich: Yeah, yeah. But again, fascinating, right, to have that contradiction embodied right there.
Cam: Ages of all. It definitely failed a martial artist.
Listener mailbag and next book announcement
Rich: All right, let’s wrap it up. So we probably don’t have time for listener feedback today — you’ve got to go, Benny — I think it doesn’t require us to address it, so maybe I’ll just read it out.
Benny: I gotta go pretty quick, unless it’s on the shorter side, I guess.
Rich: So this is a message from Joseph Joe, who says he started listening a few months ago, thought the Christmas wrap-up episode was great, and he mostly wants to say keep it up and great work. He came across the pod because he was looking for some views on David Foster Wallace, but he knows Cam through uni friends in Wellington and was very surprised once he linked his voice back to his person. So a big thank you to the Spotify search algorithm. That’s so funny.
Cam: I’ve been doxxed.
Benny: That’s hilarious.
Rich: He says, “looking forward to the Blood Meridian episodes, assuming you released them.” Yes, we will. They’ll be up by the time you hear this. “Just listened to the Moviegoer episode — you guys have got me thinking it might just be worth reading despite your general consensus, don’t do it.”
Benny: No, don’t do it. Don’t do it. Oh my god. That’s too funny. Our negative reviews are inspiring people to read these books.
Cam: He’s going to check out The Razor’s Edge, which I think wouldn’t be as —
Benny: Holy shit. Oh yeah, definitely read The Razor’s Edge. The Razor’s Edge was great.
Rich: He’s excited to read some Ted Chiang and Crime and Punishment, and references to The Razor’s Edge and David Foster Wallace placed them high on my to-read list. Yep, that sounds great. And he also makes a suggestion for us, which is an existentialist book “I think you would at least dissect well, if not enjoy, is The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato. Camus appears to have liked it, and it’s a quick read.” I’ve actually got a copy of that, so we should look into it.
Cam: I haven’t even heard that one.
Rich: It’s very short as well.
Cam: Well read, Matt.
Benny: Yeah, I’ll be up for doing that soon. Yeah, Cam will love it.
Rich: We’ve gone literally weeks without reading an existentialist book.
Benny: Yeah, let’s do it. That’d be fun.
Cam: Joe might also like our next book.
Rich: Yeah.
Cam: Don DeLillo, White Noise, if he wants to grab it.
Rich: Yeah. So Benny, you picked that one out. Do you want to say a little word about that, if people want to pick it up and read along with us?
Benny: I don’t know if I have much to say. Our next book is White Noise by Don DeLillo. Do I know what it’s about? No. It was ranked high on our massive spreadsheet of books, and I own it — which wasn’t particularly important.
Cam: Athena told you to read it.
Benny: Yeah, exactly.
Rich: And White Noise also the working title for this podcast, before we found out that Cam is part indigenous.
Cam: I thought you were actually talking about our bad sound quality.
Benny: That’s too funny. Imagine that is the podcast, how you’d be fighting with all the white noise soundtracks on Spotify. It’d be a nightmare.
Rich: Your SEO would be completely fucked.
Rich: If someone downloads it and tries to go to sleep and they just hear these horrible New Zealand accents —
Benny: What the fuck is this?
Cam: There was — on the top of my Spotify Wrapped one year was just white noise.
Benny: Oh my god.
Cam: But now they’ve taken it out of the algorithm of your favourite songs. Yeah, it’s white noise and rain noises.
Benny: Nice. All right.
Rich: Cool, sweet. Anyway, thanks to Joe for writing in. He says, “your podcast is already great and likely will only get better, the vibe’s positive and I love knowing there’s a curated list of books to read that have some great discussion to listen to after.” So it’s fun that people are doing it in that way as well — taking some inspo for their reading list. If you want to write in, we love to get messages like this, or if you want to weigh in on the Odyssey, I’d love to hear what you thought we got right or wrong or any other ideas that you have.
Rich: You can write to us at doyouevenlit at gmail.com. There’s been some more confusion about this lately — someone was trying to email that address and couldn’t get it through. It’s d-o-u-e-v-e-n-l-i-t — just the letter U, not the word “you”. Some other motherfucker is parking on that domain, which is insane. I have no idea why they have it, but there it is. So write in: do-u-even-lit, just the letter U, at gmail.com.
Benny: Or send that other email account a bunch of spam to get them to delete their account. That would also be great.
Rich: I suggested that, but apparently it’s bouncing back. It’s like a server error or something. What does that mean — does that mean they’re not even using the address?
Benny: Yeah, that’s odd. I mean, normally that would mean the address is not serviceable, it’s not in action, but you can’t get it. So —
Rich: Maybe I should try to get it again.
Cam: We have to change our name.
Rich: Yeah, we’ll change the email again. For the fourth time.
Benny: I’ll see you guys in a couple weeks.
Cam: We could keep both, maybe.
Rich: Yeah.
Rich: See you guys in a couple of weeks. White noise. Bye bye.
