A Long and Difficult Journey, or the Odyssey #9

Hi, I'm John Green, welcome to Crash Course Literature! You can tell I'm an
English teacher because I'm wearing a sweater, but you tell I'm the kind of
English teacher who wants to be your friend because I'm wearing awesome
sneakers. This is actually season two of Crash Course Literature. If you want
to watch season one, you can do so over here. It's season four of Crash
Course Humanities – it might even be like, season 7 or 8 if you count all the
science stuff. Whatever let's just get started! [Theme Music] We're going to
start at the beginning of literature, or, at least, a beginning of literature. Sing
in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of a man who lets all his
shipmates die, lies to everyone he meets, cheats on his wife with assorted
nymphs, and takes 10 years to complete a voyage that, according to Google
Maps, should have taken 2 weeks. That man is, of course, one of the great
heroes of the ancient world. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Odysseus, star of
Homer’s The Odyssey. Did I just say the odd at sea? That’s a good pun. Not
in the original Greek though. Now everyone knows that you can’t properly
enjoy a book until you know a lot about its author, so before we discuss The
Odyssey, we’re going to begin with a biographical sketch of Homer, the
legendary blind poet of ancient Greece. What’s that? Apparently we know
nothing about him. Well, in fact we know that whoever wrote them didn’t
actually write them, because they were composed orally. And was Homer
even blind? Well, there are some verses about blindness in the Homeric
Hymns and there’s a blind bard who appears in The Odyssey, But if authors
only wrote about characters who were like themselves, then James Joyce’s
characters would have all had one eye, and I would be an astonishingly
handsome seventeen-year-old. As for the subject of Homer’s poems,
archeological evidence tells us that the Trojan War occurred around the
twelfth century BCE, although it probably included far fewer gods and
similes than in the epics based on it. Then again, maybe not; it’s not like we
have pictures. Anyway, Homer composed The Iliad and The Odyssey in the
eighth century BCE, so centuries after the events it describes. And then no
one bothered to write them down for another 200 years, which means that
they probably changed a lot as they were passed down via the oral tradition,
and even today there are arguments about which parts are original and
which parts are additions. There were a lot of competing poems about the
Trojan War, but Homer’s were by far the most famous, and they are now
the most famous because they were also the only ones to survive the
burning of the Library at Alexandria. So The Iliad and The Odyssey are epic
poems, and we define an epic as “a long narrative poem; on a serious
subject; written in a grand or elevated style; centered on a larger-than-life
hero.” By the way, that was an example of dactylic hexameter, just like you
see in epic poems. So the events of The Odyssey take place after those of
The Iliad, so let’s have a brief recap Thought Bubble. So Helen, the wife of
Menelaus, runs off with Paris, a Trojan prince; or maybe she’s abducted, it’s
not clear. Anyway, Menelaus’s brother Agamemnon gathers allies and goes
to Troy to get her back, but the war drags on for ten years. At which point
everyone is really tired and bored and wants to go home, until things
suddenly get pretty tense because Agamemnon seizes a concubine of
Achilles’ and Achilles gets really angry and says he won’t fight anymore. And
things go really badly for the Greeks until Patroclus – Achilles’ best friend
and maybe also lover, it’s not clear – goes into battle in his place and does a
pretty awesome job until he’s slain by Hector, the Trojans’ great warrior.
Which forces Achilles to reconcile himself with his own mortality, and return
to the field where he becomes the ultimate death-dealing machine, slaying
hordes of Trojans including Hector, whose body he drags behind his chariot
because that’s how Achilles rolls, until Hector’s father, Priam, comes and
begs for his son’s corpse and Achilles relents and they have dinner together,
and then the book ends with the war still going on and nothing really
resolved. And that’s The Iliad. When The Odyssey opens, it’s 10 years later,
and everyone is already back home except for Odysseus. His son
Telemachus and his wife Penelope don’t know if he’s dead or alive, but
Homer reveals that he’s on the Isle of Ogygia. Imprisoned by the nymph
Calypso, who’s so hot for Odysseus even though he pends his days laying on
the beach and crying that she won’t let him go. But finally the gods
intervene and after a series of adventures and a whole lot of backstory he
finally returns home to Ithaca in disguise, and kills several dozen suitors who
have been drinking all of his wine, eating his beeves, annoying his wife and
plotting to kill his son. And it seems like a cycle of violence is just going to
continue on, probably forever, until the goddess Athena who loves Odysseus
intervenes and restores peace. The end. Thanks, Thought Bubble. So, some
of the big questions around The Odyssey are Odysseus’ heroic
characteristics, the epic’s double standard for women, and whether you can
ever actually stop a cycle of violence. Odysseus hardly appears in The Iliad
and he’s not a particularly great fighter; in fact, he’s a pretty sleazy guy. He
leads a night raid into the enemy camp and kills a bunch of sleeping Trojans.
That’s not particularly glorious. But it is typical of Odysseus, who will pretty
much do whatever it takes to survive. I mean, his distinguishing quality is
metis, which means skill, or cunning. Odysseus is smart; he’s really smart. I
mean, he’s an incredibly persuasive speaker and he can talk his way out of
the stickiest of situations, even ones that involve, like, Cyclopses. He’s also
kind of a monster of self-interest, and if he weren’t so smug and
overconfident he might have gotten home in less than, you know, like, a
gajllion years. The best example of this is probably Odysseus’ encounter
with the Cyclops. So Odysseus and his men land on the island of the Cyclops,
and he and several of his guys settle into the Cyclops’ cave, feasting on the
delicious goat cheese that the Cyclops has hoarded, and then, expecting the
Cyclops to return and offer them gifts, because that’s what you do when
someone breaks into your house. I mean yes, there was an ancient Greek
tradition of hospitality, but that’s taking it pretty far; and for the record, it’s
also pretty much exactly what the suitors are doing in Odysseus’ house, for
which he kills them. So the Cyclops comes home and he’s so thoroughly not
psyched about these guys in his cave that he begins to eat them, and in
response Odysseus gets the Cyclops drunk and then blinds him with a
flaming spear, which is fairly easy to do because of course he only has one
eye. Odysseus has given his name as Noman, so when the Cyclops cries out,
“No man is hurting me! No man is killing me!” the other Cyclopes don’t
come to his aide, because you know they think there’s no man hurting him.
It’s a pun. It’s a blindingly good pun. But then when it seems like Odysseus
might get away with it, he can’t tolerate the idea that “no man” is going to
get the credit so he announces his actual name, causing the Cyclops to call
down curses on him, which culminates in all of his men being killed. Just as a
rule of thumb, you do not want to be friends with Odysseus, and you also
don’t want to be his enemy. Just stay away. So Odysseus is a trickster and a
liar and a pirate and a serial adulterer, and he’s responsible for the death of
a lot of people, and he also has probably the worst sense of direction in all
of Greek literature. But is he a hero? Yes. To the Greeks, heroism didn’t
mean perfection, it meant that you had an extraordinary attribute or ability,
and Odysseus definitely does. It’s not for nothing that he’s the favorite of
Athena, the goddess of wisdom. I mean, she applauds all of his tricks and
stratagems, and she encourages us to applaud them too, even though from
our contemporary perspective, he’s a pretty shady dude. Speaking of
contemporary perspective, one of Odysseus’ least stellar qualities is his
attitude toward women. He’s really big on this sexual double standard in
which the exact same behavior types women as sluts and men as studs.
Actually the whole epic in general is incredibly—wait, why is my desk
moving? Oh, the secret compartment is open. It must be time for the open
letter. What have we got today? Well, it’s Medusa, a representation of
woman as a monstrous serpent. An open letter to the patriarchy: how are
you so incredibly resilient? Also, please explain something to me: How is it
that the only way for someone to become like a good heroic strong man is
to have sex with lots of women, but if a woman has sex with lots of men,
she’s like tainted and impure and horrible? Patriarchy, I don’t want to get
too deeply into math but in order for men to have sex with a lot of women,
a lot of women have to have sex with men. That’s it, that’s the only way,
patriarchy! So basically you’re saying that the only way for men to achieve
manliness is for women to fail at womanliness! It’s bad! Actually, it’s evil! I
hate you! Best wishes, John Green. Yeah, so the whole epic is incredibly
paranoid about female sexuality. I mean the story that haunts The Odyssey
is that of Agamemnon, the leader of the Achaeans, who returns victorious
from the war, only to be murdered by his wife and her lover. And then when
they meet in the underworld, Agamemnon’s ghost warns Odysseus that he
better come home in secret because Penelope might try and have him killed
too. And the misogyny doesn’t end there; I mean this is a book full of
monsters, and, Cyclops aside, a lot of them are female; like the Sirens who
lure men too their deaths, or Scylla, who’s basically an octopus with teeth.
And then of course there’s Charybdis, a hole that sucks men to their doom.
You can explore the Freudian implications of that one over at Crash Course
Psychology. Meanwhile Odysseus sleeps with like every manner of magical
lady and nearly marries an island princess, but he assures us that he was
always true to his wife “in his heart.” Which is nice, but it would be even
nicer if he were true to his wife in his pants. Stan, who is ever the stickler for
historical accuracy, would like me to acknowledge that Odysseus didn’t wear
pants because they weren’t a thing in Greece yet, so he wasn’t true to his
wife in like his toga or his loincloth or whatever. Anyway, even as he’s
sleeping around, Odysseus is incredibly concerned with whether or not
Penelope is chaste. If she isn’t, he’ll likely kill her. After all, he later executes
all the housemaids for sleeping with the suitors, and he’s not even married
to them. The epic seems like it’s building to a climactic scene wherein
Odysseus is going to test Penelope’s faithfulness, but instead it’s Penelope
who tests Odysseus. When he reveals himself to her, she doesn’t recognize
him. She forces him to prove himself by speaking the secret of their
marriage bed, and only then does she embrace him in one of the most
beautiful lines in all of Homer: “And so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her
husband, her white arms round him pressed as though forever.” Some
ancient commentators believed the poem should end right there like any
good romance would, with Odysseus and Penelope blissfully reunited, but it
doesn’t. See Odysseus and a couple of his friends, with a big assist from
Athena, have slaughtered all the suitors, and the serving maids, and that’s a
problem, because this isn’t The Iliad. They aren’t at war. The Iliad is a poem
of war, and it’s main concern is kleos, which means glory or renown
achieved on the battlefield that guarantees you a kind of immortality
because your deeds are so amazing that everyone’s going to sing about you
forever. Achilles didn’t get to go home. He had two choices: he could stay
and fight and win glory, or he could go home and live a long and quiet life. In
The Iliad, Achilles went for glory. But The Odyssey is about the alternative.
It’s about what we do after a war, how we put war away. Odysseus isn’t
particularly good at this. He’s sort of an ancient example of Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder. He’s been through so much that he doesn’t know how to
adjust to peacetime; his response to young men taking over his dining hall
and barbecuing all of his pigs is mass slaughter. And the slaughter of the
suitors leads to their relatives coming to try to slaughter Odysseus, and if
Athena hadn’t descended from Olympus, conveniently, and put a stop to it,
pretty soon there would have been no one left on Ithaca alive. And that’s a
sobering final thought: if it weren’t for divine intervention, the humans in
this story might have continued that cycle of violenceforever. The Odyssey is
a poem set in peacetime, but it reminds us that humans have never been
particularly good at leaving war behind them. Next week we’ll be discussing
another story with lots of sex and violence and Greeks: Oedipus. Thanks for
watching. I’ll see you then. Crash Course is made with the help of all of these
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