Stephen Pimentel and Wolf Tivy discuss Homer. If Odysseus reveals his power level too soon, the suitors will kill him. To take back his home, he needs metis (μῆτις): practical intelligence under duress. Today's would-be reformers need metis as well.
Transcript
Intro (00:00)
Wolf: Welcome back to The Students. The Odyssey is in the news, by Homer. I hear there’s a movie. We’re not going to talk about that. We’re going to talk about the real thing.
So The Odyssey, and Homer’s work in general, is foundational works of Western literature and very important works. They cover many virtues, many of our fundamental myths and ideas and tropes that end up in other works all over the place. Certainly worth studying, but obviously, our interest here is to study them as guides to our modern situation—to our future, to our civilization. And so I’ve brought on Stephen Pimentel again to have a conversation about specifically “The Odyssey”, what we learn from it, and how we should read it. So, thank you, Stephen, for coming on.
What do we have to know about “The Odyssey”?
Stephen: The first thing I would say is read it. “The Odyssey” is an outstanding work. It is well worth reading. If some of the recent attention it’s gotten from the recent movie does good, I would say that would be to drive people to the actual text. So pick up “The Odyssey.”
Pick it up in a good translation. I like Richmond Lattimore’s translation. The Fagles translation is often also great. And read it for yourself. Don’t trust an adaptation of it.
It’s well worth reading in its own right.
Wolf: Yeah, totally. My kids love it. My son listens to it on audiobook. And so it seems to be for all ages. But, yeah.
There’s many themes in “The Odyssey.” There’s obviously this, it’s the aftermath of the Trojan War. Odysseus is trying to come home. He’s running into all these obstacles. One of the big themes is hospitality—how he stays with and treats the various people that he encounters along the way, how they treat him, and of course, contrasted with his home situation with the suitors, Penelope, Telemachus at Ithaca.
Restoring order in ancient Greece; Agamemnon’s warning (02:22)
Wolf: But I’m curious, what would you draw out as the most essential themes that we should be looking at as we read it?
Stephen: So a lot of times people say the core theme of “The Odyssey” is returning home, the so-called nostos, and that’s not wrong, but I think it’s easy to view that too literally and too narrowly. It’s not simply the physical fact of, well, I’m away from home, and I need to return home. It’s much more about returning home in this larger, almost metaphorical sense of rebuilding after a huge catastrophe—a huge civilizational level wreck, which is what the downfall of Troy and its aftermath eventually represented.
Wolf: Well, it was the Bronze Age collapse, effectively.
Stephen: The Bronze Age collapse is that same time, and some people speculate that the fall of Troy may have helped kick that off or may have been a consequence of things already underway. But in any case, it’s very much related.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I know background in “The Iliad” and in “The Odyssey” is the Greeks were raiding all up and down the coast of Asia there, and I think at one point, Odysseus says that he’d gone down to Egypt even. And so you get this very...
I think it’s very consistent with the Bronze Age collapse or what we know of the Bronze Age collapse, which is a whole bunch of those cities were burned in a span of a few years, and there’s people in boats running around causing trouble that the Egyptians called the Sea Peoples. But yeah. So it’s after this catastrophe, and you don’t usually think of it as a catastrophe for the Greeks, obviously, because they beat the Trojans. But as they come home, you’ve mentioned this, Agamemnon didn’t have a very good time of it when he got home. He got murdered by his wife and her suitor, and his son had to avenge that.
Meanwhile, Odysseus’s household is holding out a little better, but Odysseus taking longer to come home. The subtext is civilization’s collapsing on Ithaca, too.
Stephen: Yeah, you can view the Iliad and the Odyssey as bookends, where the Iliad is before the fall—and the Odyssey is after the fall, and it’s very interesting that Agamemnon is a bridging character between the two, and this is often missed because Agamemnon is already dead by the time of the Odyssey, but he’s nonetheless a very prominent shadow character in the background of the action of The Odyssey. So at the very beginning in Book 1, the fate of Agamemnon is actually mentioned by Zeus, so it’s like this framing thing. And then Agamemnon and his fate repeatedly comes up throughout the entire epic. Athena mentions him early on. Another character mentions him to Telemachus. The shade of Agamemnon appears to Odysseus and gives him warning.
And all the time, every single time he comes up, it’s the same theme, the same message. Agamemnon came home, was killed by his wife’s lover, Clytemnestra’s lover, Aegisthus—and eventually was avenged by Orestes. This is the whole story that Aeschylus would later write about in the Oresteia, centuries later in his tragedies. But that story, that myth was already very well established in Homer’s time, and it gets referred to in the background of the Odyssey. And the message, the consistent message to Odysseus is, “Don’t let this happen to you. This could very easily happen to you.”
And I think when he comes home and he kills the suitors, the whole retribution on the suitors, some people say, “Well, why did he have to be so violent? Couldn’t he have just come home and announced himself and maybe negotiated with them or something?” And the reality is, and the text makes this very clear, he just would’ve been promptly killed if he had tried to do that.
Wolf: Yeah, it’s extremely tense situations. As he comes home and deals with it, he has to sneak in, he has to sort of be very careful about revealing himself, about when he strikes, making sure that it’s all planned, because yeah, he’s massively overpowered, right? I think at the end, when they have the big fight with the rest of the people of the town, effectively, it’s Telemachus, Odysseus, and his father fighting against—sort of everybody else.
Stephen: Right. And eventually the gods intervene—
Wolf: The gods intervene
Stephen: and put an end to that.
Wolf: And end the story.
Now that’s in revenge for killing of the suitors, but it’s kind of, like you say, it’s the subtext of they would just kill him—if he came back without his men and without the power to compel them.
Stephen: And Athena is warning Odysseus about this, and even early on in the epic—Athena tells Telemachus that he needs to emulate Orestes and be proactive and not simply sit at home waiting around. So there’s this whole framing of, don’t be like Agamemnon. Don’t let what happened—to Agamemnon happen to you. And that’s kind of part of the context of what Odysseus has to deal with. So it’s not simply returning home in the sense of a geographic movement.
It’s this challenge to overcome an entire environment of assaults and obstacles that stand between you and restoring order. Restoring order, not only to his home, but also to his kingdom. So there’s this political dimension—as well, and it’s very much intertwined with the personal and familial dimension. And the whole question is: What kind of character, what kind of traits, what kind of virtues does Odysseus need in order to succeed in that super difficult situation?
The importance of metis (09:24)
Wolf: Yeah. Well, it’s easy to miss the relevance of this to our situation today, right? We’re not coming back after some big war, but nonetheless, there’s this sense that order in our household has collapsed.
Things are upside down.
We have to be very careful with how we approach the restoration of justice or the restoration of order, or what might happen to us there. This is kind of this implied analysis in talking about it here, but I want to make that more explicit. How do we see the themes of the Odyssey applying to our own time? Because I think that’s something to really have in mind as we go and talk about the character of Odysseus or any of these other things.
Stephen: So one of the virtues that Odysseus has and needs in order to succeed is metis, which is sort of practical intelligence under duress. And many people will accuse Odysseus of being a liar or very free to use deception. But if you go through the text, in most of those cases, he’s doing what he needs to navigate around forces sometimes more powerful than him in order to come out on the other side. And so if you look at our situation, we’re dealing with dysfunctional institutions at many levels—governmental and otherwise. Sometimes in a merely annoying and inert kind of way, but sometimes in an actively hostile kind of way.
It kind of depends on the situation and the level you’re dealing with. And, I think that it’s very much the case that we need metis. We need to have some cunnings, have some practical intelligence about how we expose ourselves—how we bring ourselves to the attention of institutions, how we interact with them, and yeah, I think it’s all very much applicable.
Wolf: Yeah. I mean, sort of hiding your power level and being strategic and maneuvering the situation in ways that other people don’t necessarily see or understand. That’s a huge part. I mean, Odysseus makes a great display of this as he comes back to Ithaca, where he puts all these little pieces in place before anyone even knows what’s going on. And then it’s just very suddenly, he’s able to make good on all of that, but—
Stephen: He plans and he executes, and he does not value shows of force—prior to being prepared to actually execute on them.
Wolf: Yeah, exactly. He’s not a flashy guy. He’s not a proud guy. He’s—
Stephen: He doesn’t hold demonstrations.
Wolf: Yeah. He’s not marching around complaining about things. He’s maneuvering things. And yeah, that’s an interesting question of what’s necessary at any given time. It’s implied in the Odyssey that that was the necessary virtue to come back successfully from the war.
But, at times, it does take these building up momentum with shows of force or demonstrations or appeals to justice publicly. Telemachus tries this at the beginning, if only to just state his case and let there be justice to it. It’s not unprovoked. He states his case right at the beginning. You guys are abusing the household.
You’re eating our food, desecrating the memory of Odysseus. You need to get out. This is the first thing that Athena has him do, is state the case justly. But that doesn’t work. But, we could get into the whole matter of what’s necessary in our time.
Stephen: There’s always this question of—
Wolf: Maybe that’s for later in the discussion. But, I think that’s a very important aspect.
Stephen: Yeah. There’s always this question of what time it is. Who are you and what time is it? If you are the king exercising your rule, then there may be times when visible displays of sovereignty are actually a good thing. If you are not yet in a position of rule because you’ve been displaced from it unjustly or for whatever reason, you may not want those kinds of displays prior to being able to make them effective.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, especially when Odysseus’ case, the real threat he represents is he’s not just a beggar, he’s actually the king. He actually does have a right, and because he has a right, he would have to be killed or surrendered to, right? The suitors can’t just—
Stephen: Ignore him
Wolf: they can’t ignore him if they know who he is.
And yeah, so it’s this complex situation. Violations of hospitality, I think are also very salient in our time. Especially, people have compared this to the whole situation with mass immigration—with some of the—fraud related to that. I remember when people were comparing the Minnesota Somali fraud situation some months ago to the Odysseus’ Ithaca situation. You’ve got these people, they’re kind of abusing hospitality, and it cries out for some kind of retribution.
The meaning of Odysseus’s challenges (15:34)
Wolf: People were very worked up about it. And I think, yeah, so there’s a lot of these parallels of various types. But maybe we should go back into the story itself, the themes of the story itself, really establish our understanding—and then bring those virtues and lessons into our time.
Stephen: Okay. I think one interesting avenue into that is to look at the sequence of challenges that Odysseus faces and—what are the things that are impeding him? Why does it take 10 years to make this journey that, obviously, just geographically could’ve been made much, much more quickly? And you see this whole sequence of being captured by Calypso, the Lotus Eaters, Circe, and each of these is posing some sort of challenge. Calypso offers him immortality, which in effect is basically the temptation to just abandon the game.
Abandon—
Wolf: To leave history.
Stephen: Just to leave his mortal life altogether. He might as well not be there. He’s not going to be a player anymore. He’s not going to be an agent—within the human world. And he turns that down, and some people say, “Well, how-”
Wolf: After seven years.
Stephen: Yeah. Well, it’s not that he wasn’t tempted.
People say, “Well, how could you turn down immortality?” And I think it’s just this matter of engagement with his actual world. His memory of who he is, who he came from, his identity on Ithaca, his wife, his son, his father, his kingdom, and he was like, “No, I do want to not merely return to those things, but rebuild, reestablish—
Wolf: Restore them
Stephen: those things. Exercise my agency in the human realm to build what can be built.” The Lotus Eaters is very directly an attack on memory. You take this drug, you forget. You forget who you are, you forget where you came from, you forget that there’s a world beyond that you could be acting in and engaging in. And he has to—refuse that forgetting. That forgetting would in effect be a kind of annihilation, a kind of almost like suicide. Because as a human being, you truly have no identity but for that web of relations. So to completely leave them behind in forgetting would just be self-destruction.
Wolf: Right. It’s another form of annihilation.
Stephen: And I think all of the different challenges you can see as some sort of attack. The eating of the cattle of Helios with his men—
Wolf: Yeah, that’s a really important one
Stephen: that is very important. It is mentioned right in the prologue in book one as sort of framing the whole thing. And in a way—
Wolf: It’s sort of the disorder of his men, isn’t it?
Stephen: Exactly, but in a way that relates to this whole question of xenia. It’s like they did to Helios what the suitors were doing to Odysseus back home on Ithaca. They were eating what they did not have a right to eat. They showed up someplace and consumed someone else’s goods inappropriately. And in the case of the cattle of Helios, they’re obviously violating this divine order.
But I think the real message of that is that the divine order of xenia sort of is the human order of xenia. That xenia, even on its human dimensions, is sacred to the gods precisely because it is this anchor of how one should and should not live.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, the gods often show up as beggars or as—in these stories, they show up as some stranger. And this is part of the whole theme of hospitality, is you should be generous to the stranger, kind of feed them before you know who they are, and so on, because you don’t know who they are. They could be a god, right?
And I think that’s sort of this flip side, right? So Odysseus and his men abusing the hospitality of Helios. But Athena comes and gets dinner at Ithaca right at the beginning.
Stephen: Yeah.
And then, of course, you have the famous episode with the Cyclops—where the Cyclops obviously violates xenia. In fact, Odysseus attempts to invoke xenia. Specifically said, “We are your guests. Please treat us well. Maybe even give us a little bit of wine or something.”
And instead—
Wolf: Well, they’re trading the wine for the milk and the cheese.
Stephen: Yeah, that’s right. And instead, he proceeds to eat the men, which is not very—hospitable. But then, this also illustrates that Odysseus is far from perfect. He’s not a moral exemplar. He is a hero, but his hero is not of a kind of moral kind, especially from a Christian perspective.
When after their escaping, he cannot resist boasting and finally telling the Cyclops his name in order to, why? In order to gain glory for himself. So a little bit of echo of Achilles here.
Wolf: It’s this interesting contrast with what you were saying about metis and the craftiness of Odysseus.
Stephen: Right. This is a failure of metis.
Wolf: It’s like the one time that he sort of approaches a situation with hubris, it kind of blows out his world for the next 10 years, right?
Stephen: That’s right, because it angers Poseidon. Polyphemus curses him to his father, Poseidon. Poseidon then imposes the additional years of suffering. So, that’s a failure of metis. Odysseus—
Wolf: Yeah, only takes one slip-up to kind of—
Stephen: Would’ve done a lot better if he had been more consistent.
Wolf: Right. But then we wouldn’t have a story.
Stephen: That’s right.
Circe, sorcery, and science (22:41)
Wolf: Yeah. Yeah, I wonder what you make then... These have been great little analyses of the meaning of the different kind of hospitality episodes in “The Odyssey.” The two that I’m kind of thinking of now are Circe and the Phaeacians—where he comes to Circe and his men obviously kind of fall to her temptation to turn into animals or whatever it is. But he is able to kind of, through comprehension of nature, physis of the plant, that’s taught to him by Hermes, I think.
He’s able to kind of overcome her charms and resolve that situation. And then with the Phaeacians, he washes up on the beach, meets Nausicaa, and is kind of able to, from this position of the arriving beggar, and them treating him well as a guest, and him treating them well as a guest, he’s able to sort of reestablish his identity as a king, as this lost guy, Odysseus. And finally, they send him home with the ship and the provisions and so on. And that’s finally when he’s successful in getting home, right, is this episode of things—having been done well.
Stephen: Right. That’s kind of a great framing. The whole Circe episode is fascinating, and we could have a whole talk just on that. Initially, the men go into her. They hear her singing.
They’re enchanted by it, and she gives them this mixed brew containing—the text says wicked drugs which turn them into pigs, or at least that is the report. There’s different interpretations.
Wolf: Right. Because this is, of course, being told by Odysseus at the hall of the Phaeacians.
Stephen: And Odysseus didn’t even witness this. It was first told to him by the one guy who didn’t join the crew going into Circe, but who sort of stayed outside and spied on them—while he supposedly saw what was going on. Then he panics and runs back to Odysseus and tells Odysseus this story about them being turned into pigs. So we’re actually getting it kind of third hand—when Odysseus finally tells this story.
And Odysseus says, “Well, I just need to go rescue them.” The dude’s all panicked out. He doesn’t want to help. But in approaching the palace, he’s sort of intercepted by Hermes, who points out to him a particular plant. It’s the moly plant, or I guess moly we say in English, not MDMA.
A much older word.
And this is sort of the antidote to her drugged brew. And it specifically, this is one of the first uses of the word phusis that we have in Greek, where in learning the nature of the plant, he is able to understand and avoid her entrapment. And some scholars have claimed this is a major advance in thought in understanding that things, in fact, have natures. That plants—have a stable character or nature, and not just plants, but obviously animals and ultimately humans as well, that is not simply utterly fluid, but that one could come to learn about ultimately through scientific investigation. But that’s jumping way ahead.
Wolf: Right. Yeah, it’s an interesting precursor to this kind of theme of triumph of rational understanding and science over this kind of heavy, magical, primordial sort of complex of temptation and transformation.
Stephen: And very appropriate that it’s Odysseus who first undergoes that or understands that, because sort of phronesis and metis, this sort of more intelligent understanding of the world, are his virtues. So it fits that he’d be the guy that first kind of understands this.
Wolf: Right. Yeah, it’s his kind of intelligence as opposed to—Achilles or Agamemnon or one of these guys—who—
Stephen: That would be weird
Wolf: approach things very differently.
The Phaeacians (27:30)
Wolf: Yeah. But then the Phaeacians, some people claim that Odysseus is kind of making up the whole rest of the story as he’s—telling them this kind of cooked story because he doesn’t want to talk about what actually happened, which is maybe what he told the swineherd about Egypt, right? Or getting—
Stephen: Or, yeah
Wolf: captured in Egypt or—some other story, just the actual reality of they went and just raided down the coast and brought a bunch more slaves.
Stephen: Or I hung out with a woman for—nine years, not eight, not seven years.
Wolf: Right. And yeah, until he got bored of that. But, yeah, I’m curious what you make of that episode with Nausicaa. People have speculated that Nausicaa is... There’s this funny theory that she’s Homer’s self-insert.
But yeah, there’s tons of complexity there. I would love to hear your thoughts on that.
Stephen: Yeah, no, there’s all kinds of meta-textual things, where there’s the bard within the Odyssey at one point, and then, of course, Odysseus himself is telling the tale that Homer is telling us, or part of the tale—that Homer is telling us. So it’s actually very sophisticated in its construction. People sometimes use the term postmodern, but that’s kind of a ridiculous term when you realize that—
Wolf: It’s hundreds of—
Stephen: Homer used these same techniques.
Wolf: 800 BC.
Stephen: And so did Cervantes and so did many other great authors. I think the truth is simply that great authors have always had access to this kind of—
Wolf: The complexity, the narrative complexity, yeah
Stephen: complex narrative, meta-textual tale-telling technique. But I do think there’s something to the notion of Odysseus narrating his own story and sort of being the creator, in a sense, of his own story. Not in some cynical, well, it’s all lies, or he just made it all up, although maybe he did make up some parts. But the fact that he’s fundamentally an active character. The whole return is basically an exercise of endurance, of overcoming obstacles and hardships in order to achieve what he wanted to achieve, which was returning to his kingdom and rebuilding it.
And—His ability to... And that itself is a kind of echo of this storytelling that he’s like, “No, I am going to exercise agency. I am going to construct my own story as best as I am able to,” which is not 100%. No one can do that 100%—because you’re living in an external world. There are other people, there are the gods, there’s storms, there’s tremendous adversity.
Eventually you will grow old and die. That’s what he’s chosen. But that’s okay. That doesn’t mean that he can’t continue to fight, that he can’t continue to navigate. And I don’t just mean on his boat, I mean intellectually—in terms of how he needs to problem solve, how he needs to use force very, very carefully and selectively.
So yeah, I just think it’s a wonderful illustration of all those things.
The recognition of nobility (31:26)
Wolf: Mm-hmm. Yeah, one of the things that always struck me as one of the little running themes in The Odyssey is people recognizing nobility—in others.
Stephen: Like on the beach.
Wolf: Like on the beach, yes.
Stephen: When he’s—
Wolf: When he gets washed up, he’s lost—
Stephen: He’s naked.
Wolf: He’s naked, he’s been at sea forever. He’s lost absolutely everything. He’s haggard, he’s covered in seaweed and salt, and he’s washed up, and Nausicaa recognizes him as a king.
Stephen: That guy looks like a king.
Wolf: And, so it’s kind of this commentary from Homer on the kingly nature is not in any of these trappings. It’s not in any of the surrounding social position of the person. It’s coming directly from his nature, from his bearing, and it’s something like that. And similarly, when Telemachus shows up at Sparta, and I think possibly Pylos as well, he’s immediately recognized—as like, “Oh, you guys are princes of some kind.” It’s Telemachus and Athena.
But, if I remember, disguised as Mentor.
Stephen: Mm-hmm. Yeah, phusis shines forth. His nature, his posture, his bearing, his speech—he does not look like a peasant. And she recognizes this correctly.
Wolf: Yeah.
Justice and retribution (33:03)
Wolf: So then I guess the sort of final episode that it feels like we should talk more about is the actual return. The kind of crafty maneuvering into that situation, kind of locking all the doors, proving himself by shooting through the axes, whatever that means. And then basically turning around and slaughtering the suitors. And I think that for a modern audience, that’s one of the most challenging aspects of the whole thing, right? We’re very trained, don’t react in anger, don’t take it out, don’t do collective punishment, try to see the innocence of the slave girls or the minor figures of the suitors or something.
But it’s sort of presented as righteous by Homer, that Odysseus comes back and just kills absolutely everybody who’d been abusing the situation.
I think it’s one of the most morally charged aspects of the story. I think it’s usually not treated with its full reality in adaptations.
Stephen: Mm-hmm. Yes, it is a very bloody scene.
So going to the end of it, I would simply note a couple things. One, he does not have all the slave women killed—only those who collaborated with the abusive suitors. And he actually rebukes one of the servants who is laughing with glee in the aftermath of it, looking at all the dead bodies. He says, “This is no occasion for glee. This was retribution that was needed to restore order. These people brought their fate upon themselves through their great offense of xenia and to the gods, but there’s nothing gleeful about it.”
Wolf: Yeah, they’ve just lost another generation of men from the whole town, right? This is, it’s serious
Stephen: yes, it’s obviously undesirable in that respect. All the men that Odysseus left with have been lost, and now another crew has been lost. I think the best way to view that is that these were people who were clearly set on his death, that clearly would have killed him if given the opportunity, and that he calculated, “How can I succeed in reestablishing rule over the palace?” In the sort of...
It may sound strange to say, but I think it’s actually accurate, using the minimal force necessary to effectively do that. And if you look at—
Wolf: Sometimes that’s a lot.
Stephen: Yeah. But if you look at the number of people he had on his side, there was Telemachus, there was himself. It’s not like he had some whole army to surround the palace and then just like—meted out punishment to them. No, this was what was necessary to overcome them. And, so yeah, I think if we want to look at a challenging message, I think one of the messages that Homer does in fact intend here is that retribution is sometimes part of justice.
And that it is simply not true that retribution is always wrong, or that justice can always be adequately served without it. There are some situations in which retribution is, in fact, part of justice.
Wolf: It’s necessary—to restore order.
Stephen: And that should not be allowed to run loose in an unbounded manner. And we see that at the end, where there’s potential further warfare with the family of the people who were killed, and the gods step in and say, “No. Enough.”
Wolf: Yeah, that’s enough of that.
Stephen: “Stop. This is the limit. This is the limit. We establish peace now.” Retribution should serve the restoration of order.
It should not just be an unbounded—
Wolf: Yeah. It can’t become this kind of feud fighting where you’re sort of going at it generations on end.
Stephen: You don’t want it to. I mean, it can, but you don’t want it to.
Wolf: Yeah, certainly.
Stephen: It’s very bad.
Wolf: It can. I mean, it can’t be allowed to, right? You don’t want it to.
Stephen: It mustn’t be. It shouldn’t be.
Restoring order today (38:05)
Wolf: Yeah, so I guess I’m curious then, bring all these lessons back to our own time, back to our own situation. We are in a broken house to some extent. How do we restore order in our kingdom? What does that look like for us? What virtues are necessary for us?
Does a young man reading The Odyssey today, kind of, if he reads it with that in mind, what does he learn and how does he apply it?
Stephen: I think it’s a call to seriousness. I think it’s a call to engagement. I think it’s a call to the cultivation of a very practical intelligence in navigating difficult situations. You cannot assume the world is always friendly. We’re going to encounter situations with institutions that are not friendly.
Some of them are very dysfunctional, as I said before. Some of them are hostile, and you don’t simply respond to that with anger or abuse. Don’t be like Odysseus sailing away from the Cyclops where you—
Wolf: Yeah. “It was me, Odysseus”
Stephen: You just want to shout abuse. No. Leave that off. You’re not going to help yourself that way. But do learn to navigate.
And this is important, this whole aspect of memory, I think—is this really important theme. You cannot restore something if you do not remember what it was. You cannot build or rebuild if you have no notion of the kinds of relationships that you’re trying to build or rebuild. So for Odysseus, this includes family, his wife, his son, his father, the dead, to whom he owes respect, his kingdom. So there’s this integrated familial and political aspect.
All of this is part of his identity and memory.
How great stories and great men transcend the present moment (40:08)
Wolf: This is maybe another reason to read The Iliad and The Odyssey is, again, it’s this foundational work of Western literature. In reading it, we see these people aren’t exactly our ancestors, but they’re related to our ancestors, and we descend from them intellectually, at the very least. And it shows this other world, something that some of us had. And when you go and read, compare it with Beowulf, the Germanic epics, with other things in our cultural heritage, these same themes, these same kind of patterns emerge, and you realize, “Oh, wow, there was something.” Right?
You restore that memory of who we are, what our civilization is based on, what it’s been through, where it came from, kind of that whole memory complex of all these things. And this is something that I think is very important as well. There’s so much of the information control system, the way that people end up kind of trapped in the myths of the day or trapped—in kind of what almost amounts to slavery in the matrix. So much of that is just having accepted sources of understanding of who you are and where you came from and what the past looks like that are controlled by your enemies, that cut you off from that. If you don’t know who you are, you don’t know what you had, you don’t know where it came from, you’re weak and manipulable.
But if you do have that, it makes you very strong. And I remember one of my favorite articles with Palladium Magazine was about that, kind of like living in the golden age of heroism. That it’s this thing that very often you get these great men like Cortés or—Caesar or Napoleon, and they’re not contemporaries with their contemporaries—if you know what I mean. Right? They’re reading these deep memories of the past.
Napoleon studying Caesar’s battles. Cortés is comparing himself to Achilles and Alexander. And they’re—in kind of accessing that memory, they realize they’re actually part of something bigger, they’re part of a larger space of possibilities, and they’re given power in the world as a result of that. Not to say that everyone who reads “The Odyssey” is going to become Napoleon, but there’s this leverage on the world that you get by knowing these things, and this is maybe why the study of these works has been called the liberal arts. These are the works that will make you free if you understand them because they give you that grounding, they give you that understanding, they give you that history.
And yeah, so it’s interesting to kind of compare that meta note of why we read this stuff with also the themes in the work itself—of telling the stories and remembering who he is and all this.
Stephen: Almost like Homer, yeah. Yeah, the great men have more in common with each other than with their immediate contemporaries—and that’s true of the great authors as well.
Wolf: Because they’re plugged into this unified tradition—of the memory of greatness, whereas the contemporary kind of shifts all over the place.
Stephen: Yeah, one of the things I’d say about Homer is don’t be afraid of his strangeness. His strangeness is actually of benefit. His strangeness might be a distant memory of your home.
Wolf: Yeah, it’s not actually strangeness. You’re used to—
Stephen: You are estranged
Wolf: you’re used to strangeness.
Stephen: And you need to be estranged—
Wolf: Homer is normal
Stephen: in order to—
Wolf: Yeah. Homer is normal. Homer is the return to normalcy. Yeah, maybe that’s—
Stephen: Homer is real. You aren’t.
Wolf: Yeah, exactly. Well, that’s sort of this—yeah, people try to deconstruct the idea of Homer. They say, “Oh, it was just a tradition.” But of course, I don’t know, this all seems kind of silly to me. But yeah, Homer is this—and especially “The Odyssey” is the story of the return to normalcy, right?
And like—you return to normalcy by reading “The Odyssey” and understanding it from your heart.
Stephen: But a particular kind of normalcy. This very highly agentic—we’re going to rebuild kind of normalcy.
Wolf: Yeah, the normalcy of great agency.
Well, maybe we can leave it at that. This has been a great survey of “The Odyssey.” It certainly inspired me to go back and look at these themes again, read it with my son, and—
Stephen: Yeah, I think it’s great. You should do that
Wolf: yeah. And I hope the audience is inspired as well to pick up a book, the real book, start that journey into understanding our own foundations, our own mythical foundations, our own historical foundations, and our memories of who we are through works like “The Odyssey.”