The Odyssey - Part 1 transcript PDF

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World Humanities 101 Prof. Václav Paris CCNY, CUNY, Fall 2020 Odyssey Lecture Transcript Part 1 of 6 Hello everyone. My name is Václav Paris. I am going to be giving the lectures on Homer’s Odyssey for this World Humanities course. Every week for the next three weeks there are going to be two short video lectures (about 15 or 20 minutes each) and then a multiple choice quiz. In addition, of course, you’ll have your smaller-group discussion sections in which I hope you get to raise questions, talk about some of the issues mentioned here, and look at other parts of the Odyssey that I don’t manage to cover. Just one note, before I get going, if you don’t understand what I’m saying, or if you’re having difficulty with my accent, or if you want to go back over the lecture for whatever reason, I am including the transcript of all six of these video lectures. All six transcripts should be posted to the Blackboard site as pdfs. Make sure you look over these before you do the quiz, if you’re uncertain about anything. — — — — -In this first introductory, video, I’m going to give you some background on Homer and then we’ll have a look at the first book. Homer – slide. So, who was Homer? Homer is incredibly important for European civilization and literature. Everything really begins with Homer. However, we don’t actually know very much about this semi-legendary figure. Although for a long time people thought of Homer as an old and blind bearded man, we actually don’t know if it was one person, or (more plausibly) a group of people. We don’t know if Homer was male, or as Samuel Butler claimed, an “authoress.” I’m going to refer to Homer, at least in this opening lecture, as “they.”

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What we do know is: 1. that Homer lived in about 800BC. That’s 2,820 years ago. 2. They lived near the Meditteranean sea, and spoke Homeric ancient Greek. Their culture and religion was that of Ancient Greece, so in these poems we’ll meet the Pantheon of Greek gods: Zeus, Athena, Apollo, Hera, and so on. 3. They composed two long, epic, poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey. I say “composed” rather than wrote, because there was no written Greek in 800BC. The Iliad and the Odyssey were composed orally, meaning that whoever made up these poems, did so by remembering them and then reciting them. But it’s not the case that Homer made up the world, the heroes, and stories that these poems talk about from scratch. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey rely on a common background of stories and mythology and what for their listeners would have been common knowledge of the history of the Trojan War. And actually, if you’re interested, and do some researcy on this, you’ll find that there were other epic poems, most of them lost, composed by Homer and other figures, which dealt with other parts of this history. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey only tell parts of it. In order to understand them well, it’s important for you to have an idea of the whole story and to be able to fit them into the bigger picture. The Trojan War So briefly, let’s go through the major events of the Trojan War: 1. The story of the Trojan War begins with a scene called the apple of discord, or what later painters depicted as the Judgement of Paris. Eris, the goddess of Strife, writes the words “To the Most beautiful” on a golden apple, and throws it towards a group of three Goddesses, Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite. These three Goddesses start to bicker about whom the apple was meant for. In order to work it out they ask a young prince from Troy, Paris, to choose the most beautiful. Each of them bribes Paris with something if he chooses her. Athena offers him power, Hera offers him wisdom, and Aphrodite offers him the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris, of course, chooses Aphrodite, and he gets given Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world.

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2. Helen, unfortunately, is already married. She’s the wife of Menelaus, a Greek. Menelaus therefore sets off to Troy with an army of Greek heroes to get her back. These heroes include: Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemmenon, Ajax, Patroclus, and a few others. 3. It takes the Greeks ten years before they manage to destroy Troy. A short portion of this period is covered in Homer’s The Iliad, which is all about the “rage of Achilles,” the arguments between the Greeks, and the fighting with the Trojans. The Iliad ends with the death of one of Paris’s brothers, Hector. 4. After the Iliad, Troy is destroyed, thanks to the trick of Trojan Horse – for which, by the way, Odysseus is supposed to have been responsible. He’s the genius behind this trick. 5. After Troy is destroyed, the Greek heroes return home. Remember it’s been ten years, and a lot of things change. Some heroes when they get back, don’t find the welcome they were expecting. One example is Agamemnon, who when he gets back, discovers his wife, Clytemnestra, has taken a lover Aegisthos. They kill Agamemenon when he gets home. Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, then avenges his father, by killing Aegisthos. This is a story that Zeus mentions right at the beginning of the poem, book 1 about line 40. 6. Other heroes have a lot of trouble getting home. One of these is Meneleus, the husband of Helen. And another one is Odysseus. It’s the story of Odysseus’s homecoming that is recounted in the Odyssey. The key term of this book is homecoming, or in Ancient Greek, nostos. (That’s where we get the word nostalgia from – which is something like the “pain of not being home.”) Narrative Stucture - slide You may be expecting from my description here, that the story of the Odyssey begins with the fall of Troy, when the Greeks win the war, and follows Odysseus all the way home to his island of Ithaca. Those of you who have read the first few chapters, however, know that this isn’t how Homer decides to tell the story. The epic doesn’t begin with Troy or Odysseus. Instead we begin “in the middle of things” or, as literary critics say, in medias res.

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Odysseus, we learn, is stuck somewhere, half-way home. Athena is worrying about him, but instead of going straight to him, she visits his son Telemachus. [Note that the Odyssey is divided into 24 books, not chapters. That’s just the word that we use for these sections of the poem. These divisions were made later, when the poem was written down. They’re not from the time when Homer composed, however they are quite useful.] In the first book, Telemachus is visited in Ithaca by Athena. In the next three books, that is, books 2-4, we get a description of how Telemachus sets off to go and find information about his father Odysseus. It’s not until book 5 that Homer actually turns to Odysseus himself. Books 5-12 are then all about Odysseus’s adventures on his way hom to Ithaca. And the second half of the epic, from books 13-24, are about Odysseus on Ithaca, how he deals with the suitors, and takes back his house. You can see this structure laid in this simple table. Why does Homer arrange things in this way? Why does he mess up the chronological order? Why does he begin not with Odysseus, but with his son, Telemachus? I’m sure you can think of various reasons. Firstly, and maybe, most obviously, it’s to show how badly Odysseus is needed in Ithaca. He’s needed by his wife, Penelope and he’s needed by his son Telemachus. Starting in Ithaca allows Homer to show how bad things have got there. It allows us to see the suitors, behaving badly. It provides an additional set of motivations for the reader to want Odysseus to return home. It lets us enter to book in the position of his son waiting for him. Secondly, it adds something like dramatic irony. Dramatic irony is when the reader or viewer knows more than the characters. Think of Titanic, the film. The ship hits an iceberg, and for a while nobody really notices. The crew tell everyone to keep eating and dancing. But we know that the ship has hit an iceberg. Just as we know that Odysseus is coming back, and the suitors’ time is limited. And thirdly, it allows Homer to teach us various things. Telemachus is a boy becoming a man within Homeric society. He’s going through a process of education. 4

By starting with him, showing how Athena teaches him to act, Homer provides us with the moral compass for the book. It allows us to see how the society function s, especially when Telemachus sets off in search of his father. This – how to act correctly in Homer’s world - is something that I’ll talk about more in the next video – part 2.

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