122 - Odyssey 1: Society on the Brink

**Alex Petkas** (0:05)
Why does The Odyssey not begin with Odysseus? I mean, I know he's mentioned in the first line, but it's not by name. It's more like he's hinted at. The Odyssey begins with Odysseus' absence. We don't really get to meet the man that the poem is named after, until five books into the story.
What is going on?
A lot of people start The Odyssey and they give up, because they get bogged down in the first few books. It seems kind of boring. And isn't this supposed to be an adventure tale of gods and heroes and monsters? But if you care about the deeper philosophical point that The Odyssey is trying to make, or rather the true exhortation of the poem, the groundwork for all of it is really laid out in the first few books. And with that perspective, I think it gets pretty entertaining, because it's here that you start to see this is a very timely poem, especially for the modern man who finds himself wondering, what is going on in the world that I live in? What is wrong with it?
And you'll have to decide for yourself if you like Homer's answers.
If you're familiar with this show, you know that I'm Alex Petkas, a former professor of classics, and this is The Cost of Glory, and The Cost of Glory is dedicated to retelling the stories of the greatest heroes of Greece and Rome.
This is part one of our series on the Odyssey, and we'll be covering books one through four.
Now let's get to it. Something is very wrong in the opening scenes of the Odyssey. Our first glimpse of it comes a page or two into the story. So the goddess Athena shows up at the gate of Odysseus' house. It's on the island of Ithaca. She's taken on a disguise, and she's dressed up in the clothing and the body of a man named Mentes. And what does she see? The house is filled with suitors, arrogant men, doing what you'd expect these kind of people to be doing. Playing dice, lounging on stuffed cow hides. These are not their cow hides. They're not from cows that were theirs. They're from the flocks of the household. But the suitors slaughtered these for themselves and ate them. What is their angle? Well, servants are serving the suitors wine, wiping down the tables. Again, not the suitors tables. They're getting a feast ready, piling up more plates of meat for the suitors. And the owner of the house is somewhere else. We'll get there in a moment. But these suitors are helping themselves with the hospitality of the household anyway. Athena notices, however, that these suitors are not extending hospitality themselves. Nobody comes to greet Athena at the gates. And this is considered quite rude. Athena's dressed like someone respectable, a leader of men. So this is bad hospitality. And this is your first clue that something is profoundly wrong. You've got a rich household filled with people who clearly don't care about it. They don't care about maintaining its possessions or its good reputation. That's what people tend to do when they don't have that sense of ownership. When they didn't earn it, when it's someone else's money, they're not responsible. Athena has walked into the middle of a mess. And what has happened? Well, in a word, the patriarchy has collapsed. And this is what it looks like when that happens. When the patriarchy collapses, you don't get matriarchy, really, sorry, you get anarchy.
In practice, this means not peace and love, but the rule of whoever is most assertive at any given moment. And that is the suitors, more on them shortly. But how can patriarchy be reestablished? What kind of man does it take to reestablish it? Well, in this poem, Homer wants to show you how and who you have to be to do that. And Homer will also help you understand what tends to happen when you try to reclaim what's yours and reestablish order, and why so many forces, including strange beings, seem determined to thwart you when you do. So here's where the action and the answer begins. Because as Athena stands there at the gates, up comes a young man. A divine Athena can see, and Homer tells us so too, that this kid is infuriated, that a guest has been left standing at the gates without a greeting. Greetings, stranger. You are welcome among us, he says. First have some food, and then you can tell us who you are and how we can help you.
This young man is our hero for the first part of the Odyssey. His name is Telemachus. He is the son of the absent patriarch, and he's around 20 years old. The young man doesn't ask for his guest's name, doesn't ask his pedigree, what Ivy League school he went to. You don't wait for this kind of information before offering hospitality, if you're a good host. But Telemachus takes the stranger's spear, that's a kind of a ritual of trust, and he puts it next to the spears of his lost father, Odysseus. Then he brings Athena in and sits his guest down away from the crowd of suitors. He doesn't want his new friend to lose his appetite watching these rude men carry on.