The True Story Of The Odyssey (and why it matters) - Alex Petkas - #1125

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Why is The Odyssey such an important story?

**Alex Petkas** (0:03)
Well, it's a story that has affected a lot of people. I think because it has all of these really universal themes and problems that it relates to. I mean, any good literature does that, but maybe The Odyssey in particular. I mean, Chris Nolan talks about it as this sort of archetypal story that is somehow in all of the movies that he's done. There's the theme of returning to your home, sacrificing on behalf of the community.
One of the things that I think is really timely about The Odyssey, and I don't really know how much the movie is going to get into this, but it's a story about the collapse of the patriarchy and how it gets restored, what it takes to restore that, which maybe is timely for our day.

**Chris Williamson** (0:56)
Who wrote it?

**Alex Petkas** (0:57)
So Homer is the short answer. Who's Homer? Homer is the author, according to the Greeks, of The Iliad and The Odyssey. These two poems that modern scholars will quibble about, was it one guy, was it two guys, was it a whole crowd of men working, or people working in this tradition? We can get into that a little bit, but essentially Homer is the attributed author who is this very blessed epic bard. He's an epic poet, and this is a really special type for the Greeks. The epic poet is, and there are other poets that sing other kinds of songs, and poetry and song are very aligned in the Greek mind, and there's a lot of interesting reasons for that. But he's traditionally conceived of as this blind bard who lived maybe in the 8th-century BC.
The fascinating thing for me about the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are in dialogue with each other on some level, is the Greeks discover writing in the 8th-century BC. They steal it from the Phoenicians and modify it a little bit, make some improving tweaks. The first time that they can really write down their language is the 700s BC.
Out of the blue emerges two of the greatest works of literature ever written. Many people think the greatest. Maybe not decline from that, but everybody's always.

**Chris Williamson** (2:46)
The first album was really difficult to follow up.

**Alex Petkas** (2:50)
It's almost like, what if today we were still talking about the first movie ever made? Nobody's ever going to top Metropolis or Nosferatu. There's probably still people today that think that, but most would say that we've developed a little bit, as the movie culture has gotten somewhat better. But for the case of Homer, it's amazing that these things emerge straight from the mind of Zeus, almost fully formed, with all these incredibly rich layers, and they're so resonant, and they have this depth to them, all these symbolic aspects of them.
How did that happen? I think is a really interesting question.

**Chris Williamson** (3:36)
Is there any indication that this story existed before him? Is it his story?

**Alex Petkas** (3:42)
The backstory of this is, if you look at Homer and look at his language, and look at the themes in it, it's in Greek, but Greek is an Indo-European language. All of the Indo-European languages derive from the Indo-Europeans, this steppe people from the middle Central Asia that went spread out and conquered all of these regions, and other Indo-European languages include Latin, and Celtic, and Germanic, also Indian, or Sanskrit basically. The Indic peoples also have this Indo-European cultural inheritance, especially in Northern India.
These are the people that used to be called the Aryans, and now Twitter and Anons will call them Aryans. If you look at Homer's language and themes, you can find very striking recognizable patterns in the Vedic epic tradition of the Mahabharata. There's a common ancestor, a common poetic tradition, so the argument goes, I think it's really right, that goes back thousands of years. Homer's stories are uniquely Greek on some level, but there are also developments that have been around for thousands and thousands of years of oral culture that hits writing right around the 8th century, and it's a distillation of thousands of years of stories, and the stories of the Trojan War and the Greek heroes probably go back at least hundreds of years before Homer.

**Chris Williamson** (5:25)
Is there anything else to know about him? Was he blind? Was he who people think he is?

**Alex Petkas** (5:30)
Well, ancient poets, we don't know a lot about their lives, typically the really ancient Greek ones. People often, later Greeks would look at clues to try to figure out who these guys were. There's actually one of the reasons people think Homer is considered a blind poet is because there's actually a blind epic bard in The Odyssey.