The Odyssey: Hero of the Trojan Horse (Part 1)

**Tom Holland** (0:12)
Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways, to wander, driven off course, after sacking Troy's hallowed cape. Many of the peoples whose cities he saw, and whose ways of thinking he learned. Many of the toils he suffered at tea, anguished in his heart as he struggled to safeguard his life and the homecoming of his companions. But he did not save his companions even so, though he longed to, for their heedlessness destroyed them, theirs and nobody else's. Fools that they were, like children who devoured the sun god Hyperion's cattle. And so he took from them the day of their homecoming.
Goddess, start where you will. Daughter of Zeus, share the tale with us too.
So, that was the opening of Homer's great epic, The Odyssey, brilliantly translated by a friend of the show Daniel Mendelsohn. And there was only one person who was capable of reading that for us. And we're very grateful to the tremendous classical actor, Russell Crowe, for reading those words. And the reason that Russell agreed to do that for us is because The Odyssey is one of the great foundational moments, the foundational products in all Western culture and civilization. It ranks alongside Homer's other great poem, The Iliad, composed in the 8th or the 7th century BC. And of course, the Bible as an absolute building block of the culture that we now are so familiar with, Tom. So, the Odyssey has given us so many other stories, hasn't it?

**Dominic Sandbrook** (2:03)
You've said that it's kind of foundational work of Western culture, but it's in all kinds of ways a foundational work of Western literature and possibly beyond that because there are theories that perhaps the Sinbad cycle, the story of Sinbad the sailor in the Arabian Nights, that perhaps that derives from the Odyssey because I guess the central core idea is a pretty obvious one when you think about it, which is about a man far from home trying to get back to his wife, to his son, to his homeland. This episode is brought to you by the Lloyds 5k house deposit and this is something that was last seen in 1996

**Tom Holland** (2:49)
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**Dominic Sandbrook** (3:26)
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**Dominic Sandbrook** (4:43)
And in Greek, he has this kind of desperate yearning for a Nostos, they called it, this return back home. And on this journey along the way, he meets with monsters and he meets with menacing alien environments.
And he has brushes with powers beyond the limits of mortal understanding. And on top of that, there are strange distortions of time and space. You have multiple narratives and you have these kind of dizzyingly subjective experiences. So it is, I mean, you know, people have suggested that everything that Odysseus tells us in The Odyssey may actually not be true. I mean, we don't know. And that is kind of part of the fascination. It's, in one level, a very simple story, a man trying to get back home. And on the other, it's kind of brilliantly sophisticated and meta.