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Secret Life of Books
The Odyssey 1: Mary Beard on Homer’s masterpiece
Ep. 154
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To kick-start our series on the Odyssey, we're republishing a hit episode from early SLOB: a conversation with Dame Mary Beard, the world's favorite classicist.
The Odyssey - where stories began. Probably written down around 7th century BC - give or take a few centuries either way - by somebody or somebodies who may or may not have been called Homer. Leaving aside these mysteries, what is the Odyssey really about, why is it so violent and why is Odysseus himself - the lord of the lies - such an unlikeable hero?
Who better to navigate this intellectual Scylla and historical Charybdis than Mary Beard? Sophie and Jonty listen in admiration as Mary describes discovering The Odyssey aged 14 - a self-proclaimed swot with aspirations to be scruffy and cool (or, in Sophie’s parlance, a ‘dag’). How it - or at least the several incidents in which Odysseus’ wife Penelope is told to shut up and go to her room by her own son - inspired Mary’s best-selling book Women and Power. And how the whole poem, which begins with the word ἄνδρα (man), is a riff on toxic masculinity millennia before Andrew Tate was even in a twinkle in Zeus’ eye.
And listen, pithy mortals, to Jonty as he repeatedly mangles Ancient Greek names, particularly the ‘Laestrygonians’, to Sophie as she - not for the first time in this podcast - tries and fails to make a convincing link to The Reformation, and to all of us as we advocate the benefits of an oil rubdown every evening.
Further Reading:
Emily Wilson, trans, The Odyssey
Mary Beard books:
Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard (Profile Books, 2019)
Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations by Mary Beard (Profile Books, 2013)
The Parthenon by Mary Beard (Harvard University Press, 2002)
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