Five Minute Lit: The Odyssey

The Odyssey has been called the greatest work of literature ever written. Which is pretty remarkable because we know nothing about the guy who wrote it. Or even if he exists. Also, it's the rare sequel that's better remembered than the original. The Odyssey has everything: adventure, conquest, hubris, revenge, romance...wait, did you say romance? Yeah. Like we said. Everything.

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Transcript

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Coming to theaters this week is a little movie you might have heard about. It's the quintessential story of a man just trying to get home from work. It should have taken him just a couple of weeks, but he got a little held up for ten years. It wasn't all his fault, but he was far from blameless. His name was Odysseus, and he was the subject of the Odyssey by Homer, and we're talking about them both right now.

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We choose to go to the mall.

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Today's show is our monthly episode of Five Minute Lit, where we discuss a great work of literature in all the depth that five minutes will allow. And today, that work of literature is the Odyssey. It's considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, work of literature ever written. And starting this week, you can see that story on the big screen, courtesy of Director Christopher Nolan. So before we start, let's clear up a couple of things. First, the Odyssey isn't history. It's fiction. None of the people in this story are or were real. There are monsters, gods, witches, spells, curses also not real. And appropriately second, the Odyssey is a sequel. Now we know nothing about the author except that his name was Homer. No record of him exists and scholars these days believe that he didn't write these stories so much as he assembled them from oral tradition. His first work was called the Iliad. If you've heard of the Greek warrior Achilles and Helen of Troy and the Trojan War, that's all from the Iliad. In that story, the Trojan War was fought between Greece and Troy after Helen, the queen of Sparta, is either seduced or kidnapped by a Trojan prince. One of the characters in the Iliad was a Greek general and king of the island of Ithaca. Clever dude came up with the idea of tricking the Trojans into accepting a gift of a giant wooden horse. The Trojans didn't know that this horse was filled with Greek soldiers. At night, while the Trojans were drunk and celebrating, the Greeks emerged from this wooden horse and slaughtered them. That general's name was Odysseus. When the Odyssey opens, it's been ten years since the events of the Iliad, and everyone's gone home from the fighting. Except Odysseus. He's been MIA all those ten years. More than a hundred men have since moved into his house to eat his food and drink his wine and court his wife and threaten to kill his son. So what happened to Odysseus? Well, a lot. After leaving Troy, Odysseus and his men sailed to a town on the coast of the modern Greek mainland. There, they slay most of the men and take the women as their slaves. Reinforcements eventually arrive and force Odysseus to flee, but not before killing a bunch of his crew. So then they go home, right? Uh no. But at least they try. Strong winds blow their ship off course and they end up at an island inhabited by people who live off a plant that they call the lotus tree. Now they're not violent, just the opposite. You see, this plant makes you not care about anything. You forget about home and loved ones. All you want to do is stay there and eat more lotus. Lucky for him and his crew, Odysseus himself doesn't eat it, so he's able to force his crew back on board. Their next stop is the island of Sicily, home of Polyphemus. Polythemus is a Cyclops, a race of one-eyed giants. Polythemus traps Odysseus and his crew in his cave and starts eating them. To escape, Odysseus gets him drunk and then tells him his name is Nobody and then he stabs Polyphemus in the eye with a sharp stick. Polyphemus screams for help from his fellow giants by saying Nobody is trying to kill me and the other guys think Uh what's with him? Like, does he want someone to kill him? That's right, the Cyclops is a race of creatures with one eye and zero brain. So Odysseus gets away, but when he boards his ship, he yells to Polyphemus that if anyone asks who it was that put your eye out, say it was the valiant warrior Odysseus, son of Laertes, who lives in Ithaca. So bad move because Polyphemus is not just a one-eyed man eating dummy. He's also a bit of a Nebo baby. His dad is Poseidon, god of the sea. Not the guy to anger when you are on a boat. From then on, Poseidon's anger becomes the force that keeps Odysseus from getting home. He sends violent storms, blows him off course repeatedly, puts him in harm's way. They end up on an island where the witch Circe turns all his men into pigs. Then they have to sail past the sirens, whose song is so alluring that it drives men to their deaths. After that, they have to navigate a passage with a six-headed sea monster called the Scylla on one side, and the Whirlpool monster called Coryptus on the other. More of his men die. Odysseus' last ship is finally destroyed, and he ends up alone on the island home of the sea nymph Calypso, who keeps him there for seven years, until the gods finally intervene and force her to let him go. At long last, Odysseus makes it home. But he's got some business to attend to. Yeah, those guys are still at his house, still eating his food, drinking his wine, going after his wife, and when Odysseus shows up in disguise, they start mocking him. So we at Five Minute Trivia would never condone mass murder, but you do have to admit that these guys were kind of asking for it. Like we understand. And Odysseus? Yeah, he murders them. All of them. And then he and Penelope reunite happily. Until death do they part. You see, the Odyssey wasn't just the first epic. It wasn't just adventure on the high seas with conquest and angry gods and idiot monsters. No, it was at heart a love story. That's all for this week's show. Join us next time, and thanks for listening.