With the star-studded new Odyssey feature film by Christopher Nolan in the works, everyone is talking about Homer and his epic tales about the Trojan War and Odysseus’ long journey home following its conclusion. With this in mind, Richard Marranca spoke to Dr Paul Cartledge, Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge, about the context of the epic poems, the technology described in the works, and the messages the Odyssey had for its original ancient Greek audiences.
Paul Cartledge is Emeritus A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge and a Global Distinguished Professor at NYU. He was chief historical consultant for the BBC series The Greeks and the Channel 4 series The Spartans — and has been a guest on BBC’s In Our Time and many other programs. Professor Cartledge is also a holder of the Gold Cross of the Order of Honor of Ancient Greece and an Honorary Citizen of Sparta. He has published major books on Ancient Greece, Sparta, Alexander the Great, Democracy, and more.
Context: Composition of the Iliad & the Odyssey
RM: Whoever Homer was, a blind bard, an editor, or no one, the works attributed to him were recorded in the 700s BCE, but also nostalgically harked back to a romanticized past of great kingdoms and heroes for the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Does that sound about right?
PC: Nostalgia was certainly a part of it. However, the epic tradition predated the 700s, when the two monumental epic poems were created and later written down, to the 1200s, when the events celebrated and commemorated in Homer’s verses may have happened. So, the past that the poets, or just “Homer” in shorthand, were looking back to over those five centuries was in a constant state of flux, and the messages conveyed to their audiences and later readerships differed accordingly.
The scenario of the Iliad, a massive invasion of Asia by a vast Greek army, was utterly unhistorical for all the original Homeric audiences. That would only eventually happen in the 330s BCE under Alexander the Great. But the scenario of the Odyssey, involving Greeks travelling around the eastern Mediterranean, was not altogether unfamiliar in the 700s.
The powerful kingdoms and heroes? Yes, there were very powerful kingdoms, far more powerful indeed than the Homeric poets living in their ruined shadow seem to have been able to comprehend. There were also heroes, but they belonged in a mythological world of legend rather than real Greece in the 1200s or the 700s.
RM: I just listened to your Hay Festival discussion with author Adam Nicolson. You mentioned that the Iliad focuses on one thing, and the Odyssey another. Can you explain that?
PC: The Iliad takes its name from one of the two names the ancient Greeks gave to what we call Troy: Ilion, also known as Ilium in Latin. Yet the Iliad does not end with the fall and destruction of Troy, but with the death and burial of Troy’s chief champion. That was Hector, the oldest son of King Priam, killed by the “man-slaying hands” of the greatest Greek hero, Achilles.
Why? Because whoever made this selection from the many poetic tales of a war of Greeks against Troy chose to focus on the “rage” of Achilles, rage being the first word of the Iliad, and not on the war as a whole. A war that was not about Achilles, but Menaleus, the king of Sparta, who was robbed of his wife, Helen, by the younger Trojan prince Paris. The Iliad really should have been called the Achilliad!
The Odyssey, on the other hand, does what it says on the tin. It is all about the trials and tribulations, especially the travels and travails, of King Odysseus of Ithaca. He was one of the many Greek kings who answered the call of Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, to help him recover his sister-in-law, Helen. That took the Greeks ten years of siege, though the Iliad focuses only on a few weeks in the tenth year. Odysseus’s nostos, or return, to Ithaca curiously took him exactly the same length of time.
Naval Technology
RM: “A thousand ships,” they have brought the Greeks to Troy. Ten years later, Odysseus and the others, if they survived Poseidon’s wrath and various monsters, headed home. Were these ships advanced in technology? Who rowed them? Did the Greeks navigate with instruments or maps? If I may add, how did they tell time?
PC: Let’s be precise. It was allegedly 1,207 ships, not around 1,000. No positively identified Greek ship, warship or merchant, dating to the period around 1200 BCE, when the Iliad and Odyssey are set, is known to have survived. A shipwreck dating to around 1300 BCE was excavated off Ulu Burun, Turkey. It was a merchantman carrying copper, tin, glass ingots, pottery jars containing resin, gold and silver jewellery, metal weapons and tools, and assorted food items. It was sail-driven, reducing the number of crew, and headed, possibly, from the Levant to an Aegean Greek port.
Odysseus’s ships, all but one of which were lost en route back to Ithaca, were described as oared warships crewed by about 20 sailors each. Instruments are not known to have existed, so steering was done by dead reckoning and by the stars. Ships were usually made of cedar using the “shell-first” method, with planks assembled edge-to-edge and sealed with resin.
Motivations for War
RM: If there was a Trojan War, would the Greeks have wanted horses, slaves, land, fame, and the usual things of conquest? Or was it really because of Helen and Paris?
PC: If, and that is a big if, the Trojan War really happened, there could have been something to the case of Helen. There is documentary evidence from non-Greek areas in the eastern Mediterranean, such as Egypt and the Levant, during the Late Bronze Age that royal women were key players in international diplomacy. But a pan-Hellenic expedition to get her back that lasted ten years, when the real Troy, Hisarlik, was well within range of normal Greek communications and commercial exchange? I don’t think so!
Thoroughly excavated, Hisarlik was densely populated and well fortified, and therefore a suitable target. However, there is no archaeological evidence of a siege, specifically by the Greeks, at the relevant time, at excavation levels VIh or VIIa. The Greek myth of Troy does not envision occupation following conquest, just recovery and plunder. One-off punitive raids for horses, slaves, and fame are plausible, but not the overblown Trojan War scenario.
Modes of Warfare
RM: In the Iliad and Odyssey, were weapons bronze or iron? Chariots? Did they fight in singular combat, small bands, or large armies? Was this era before the brilliant phalanx formation?
PC: The Iliad is the poem of war. There is fighting in the Odyssey, but not regular battlefield warfare. In the Iliad, weapons are almost entirely of bronze, appropriate for the Bronze Age. But iron is known to the poets and mentioned as used for other types of objects, such as a key part of a chariot. Iron as a metaphor, for example, “iron-hearted,” is quite common. Chariots are in regular use in the Iliad, but not as fighting vehicles so much as taxis to take the heroes to and from the front line.
The storyline dictated that the action focus on individual Greek heroes fighting duels with their Trojan counterparts. However, there are several descriptions of massed, phalanx-like fighting, which probably owe more to the real world of the 700s than to 1200 BCE.
Cleanliness & Medicine
RM: Homer depicts the heroism and horror of war. Can you discuss medical treatment then? And how did people wash?
PC: It is one of the Iliad’s enduring appeals that the poem combines the tragedy of mortality with the glory of the death of a worthy opponent. In the real world of the Late Bronze Age, we have documentary evidence for the use of plants that could have served as medicinal drugs, but we can’t identify the “bitter root” with analgesic and styptic properties that Patroclus, Achilles’s bosom buddy, crumbled over a comrade’s gaping wound. Medicine of that era was mainly a combination of tried-and-tested, hand-me-down wisdom and religious invocation, especially of Asclepius, a son of Apollo. There appears to have been no qualified medical professionals, such as doctors or surgeons.
Bathing in heated water in individual bathtubs was an elite privilege, as the epics and archaeology agree. But cleanliness was a universal preoccupation. Ubiquitous olive oil was widely used for soap, applied by no less ubiquitous sea sponges.
Greek Astronomy
RM: Did the Homeric Greeks have astronomy? Did they represent the mythos stage rather than the logos stage?
A. The word “astronomy” is originally from ancient Greek, meaning the study or observation of the stars. Hesiod, an early Greek poet contemporary with the creation of the monumental Homeric epics around 700 BCE, produced a farmer’s almanac in verse, drawing heavily on heavenly observations. Constellations such as Orion and the Great Bear, as well as the Pleiades, a star cluster within the constellation Taurus, and Sirius, the Dog Star, all get a mention.
But Greek astronomy, in the sense of a disciplined application of geometry to cosmic problems, borrowing from earlier recorded observations by Babylonians and Egyptians, came later. Sometimes the progress of Greek intellectual thought towards the “scientific” rationalism of Classical times is described as a progress from mythos (myth) to logos (reason). But ancient Greek myth could be rational on its own terms, and it was never entirely confined to the rubbish bin of history.
Odysseus’ Return to Ithaca
RM: If I may, let’s return to Ithaca, where Odysseus was king. What was going on there with Odysseus’ family?
RM: There was the royal family, there were aristocratic families, and then there were all the rest, the families of ordinary, poor, non-elite Ithacans. They are represented in the epic by Odysseus’s servant swineherd Eumaeus and his old nurse Eurycleia, both enslaved and, untypically, born into aristocratic families. Odysseus’s parents both play important roles at different points in the epic. His father, Laertes, appears right at the end, when he is rather mysteriously still alive, having given up the role of king to his son at least two decades before. His mother Anticleia appears when Odysseus sorrowfully visits her shade in the underworld.
But it’s wife Penelope, a Spartan girl by origin, and their only son, Telemachus, who are far more key. Telemachus indeed bookends the whole tale. At the start, he comes of age and wants to know where on earth his dad is. At the end, he crucially helps his father recover his throne and wife. Wise Penelope, as smart and as “full of many wiles” as Odysseus, finally tests her husband to check that he really is who he says he is. His demonstration with a special bow was not enough for her.
The suitors are young men of aristocratic families, claiming descent from some god or hero and distinguished not by their appalling manners but by their wealth in holdings of land and animals.
Q. What level of administration and technology existed in Odysseus’s Ithaca? Did the capital have defensive walls?
Ask me that question of Agamemnon’s Mycenae, and I could answer without hesitation that the real-world Late Bronze Age Mycenae was the seat of a king who ruled a complex economy with the aid of a skilled literate scribal bureaucracy and lived in a palace on a hilltop surrounded by massive walling. But what of Odysseus’s Ithaca? There is even legitimate doubt as to whether the island so named is to be identified as the real island underlying the Homeric story.
Accepting that it is, nothing remotely comparable to the real Mycenae has yet been found on the island, and not for want of trying or of claims to have identified a suitable “palace” site, minus the defensive walling that any actual palace of that period would undoubtedly have possessed. The bureaucratic records of Mycenae and other contemporary kingdoms, such as Thebes, Knossos on Crete, and Sparta, were inscribed on clay tablets in a syllabic, not alphabetic, script known to scholars as Linear B. The words, eked out by pictograms, are the earliest known form of Greek. The Ithacans of the 1200s BCE were presumably also Greek-speakers, but as of now, that cannot be proven.
Bronze Age Diet
RM: Did they farm and fish? Was their diet sort of a Blue Zone or Mediterranean Diet? The Suitors are described as eating their way through the stores of food and meat at the palace. On average, was it a low-meat diet in contrast to the way the Suitors gorged?
PC: Certainly, they did both farm and fish, more the former. Their diet would have been the classic “Mediterranean” diet, high in cereals like barley and wheat, with plenty of wine and olive products, and low in meat. The heroes of the Iliad, however, gorged themselves more on meat, partly to boost their growth, physical development, and overall health, in part to demonstrate that they were aristocrats, a cut above the hoi polloi with their vegetarian diet.
RM: Are the Suitors and Cyclopes similar in being breakers of hospitality?
PC: Spot-on! The plots of both the Iliad and the Odyssey depend on breaches of hospitality. Menelaus suffers the abduction of his wife by his foreign palace-guest Paris. Odysseus suffers the near-destruction of his palace stores and the near-loss of his wife to the suitors, who lay siege to both. But, and it’s a big but, the suitors are human, all too human, whereas Polyphemus the Cyclops was the wholly divine son of Poseidon and a sea-nymph mother.
The lessons to be drawn from their stories were therefore very different. The poem insists that Polyphemus is utterly barbarous. Eating people is always wrong. Eating strangers or guests without even cooking them first, as he did, is even worse. Greek-style hospitality toward strangers was utterly alien to that barbarous monster.
Women of the Odyssey
Q. During his return on the wine-dark sea, Odysseus has affairs with Calypso and Circe. Can’t he just stay with them and be ageless, never dying? Must he return home?
PC: Calypso, my favorite Homeric character of all, and Circe were both divine in a theological sense. Calypso was also divine in our colloquial sense, whereas Circe was a nefarious witch-like character. But their relationships with Odysseus were as starkly different as night and day. Odysseus stayed with Calypso for seven years, more than two-thirds of the ten years it took him to get back to Ithaca. Allegedly, he was dying to return home when Zeus’s messenger Hermes ordered him to move on from Calypso, but I have my doubts. That he had to get back to Ithaca, however, there is no doubt. The plot demanded it, or there would have been no nostos of any kind. It’s crucial that Odysseus, unlike Calypso, was a mortal human being. One part of the Odyssey’s message was to teach what it was to be human in a good way.
Q. Is Penelope like Odysseus in wisdom and heroism?
PC: It’s a remarkable feature of the Odyssey, unlike the Iliad, that it features a female character of equivalent heft to that of the poem’s eponymous hero. In the real ancient Greek world, Penelope was indeed worshiped as a heroine. People sacrificed oil and wine to her as a dead mortal, to gain her support in the trials of everyday life.
In the Odyssey, she, like Odysseus, who was also worshiped posthumously, is wholly human but behaves in an almost superhuman way and, moreover, without the divine assistance that bailed out her husband more than once. Their marriage was, in the usual elite way, an arranged one, but the pair seems to have possessed an uncanny similarity in their craftiness and wiliness. Penelope showed hers by telling the suitors she would choose one of them to marry just as soon as she’d finished weaving her elderly father-in-law’s funeral shroud. Every night she undid what she’d done during the day.
That her yarn was wearing thin, however, when at last, after ten years, someone arrived in her palace claiming to be Odysseus, disguised as a beggar. The audience knows it is Odysseus, as do a few other key members of Odysseus’s family and household. But Penelope, Homer’s Penelope, will not allow herself to be convinced, or reunited with him sexually, until Odysseus passes the “bed test.”
Odysseus’ Bow
RM: Not to give away too much of the plot, but what kind of bow was Odysseus able to string?
PC: Odysseus alone could string the bow with which he proved, to almost everyone’s satisfaction except Penelope, that he was indeed the king of Ithaca, despite his beggar disguise. The bow as described was of the composite type, formed of wood strengthened with sinew, dried animal tendon, and bellied with compressible plates of animal bone and horn. A type of bow that originated not in the settled communities of Greece but amongst the nomads of central Asia.
RM: In your Hay Festival talk, you mentioned that the Odyssey is more than “one damn thing after another.” The adventure is a great one, but it is even more than that. What did you mean?
PC: By that phrase, I meant that, over and above the narrative excitement and entertainment generated by the tales and horrors of Odysseus’s return, the poem has a very big ethno-political lesson to teach. There was no single ancient state of Greece in 700 BCE. Actually, there was no unified Greek state until 1832 CE, but that is another story. Instead, there were Greeks, who called themselves “Hellenes,” it was the Romans who called them all “Graeci,” living widely scattered around the Mediterranean and Black Seas. They had nothing much in common except that they were all ethnically and culturally Hellenes. They believed in a common ultimate ancestry, perceived commonality of language, with dialectal differences, and identified shared social customs, especially religious. What the Odyssey taught along its long and winding way was Greekness, how to be Greek, and how being Greek differed from, and was superior to, being not-Greek.
Homer’s Legacy
Q. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are the most important early books of Greece. Alexander carried the Iliad and people read Homer in Alexandria. Are they among the most important books of all time?
PC: They are immortal, eternal, and for all time because the supposed events and personages never actually existed outside the poets’ fertile imaginations. That’s my view, anyhow. But they were originally not “books” as we understand them. They were papyrus rolls, many of them, in the cases of the Iliad and Odyssey. Most ancient Greeks did not read Homer. They heard the poetry and memorized what they heard. Papyrus reed was an expensive import from Egypt, and it took an age to write out the Iliad’s 1500 and the Odyssey’s 1200 lines of hexameter verses. And it then required a practiced eye and the patience of Job to read them as texts.
Alexander’s Iliad text, comprising several scrolls, was said to have been prepared for him by his former boyhood tutor, Aristotle, the smartest guy in the whole Greek world of that time. But I’d bet my bottom dollar that the writing was actually done by one or more skilled enslaved persons to the master’s dictation. What was good enough for Alexander proved good enough for the entire Western literary and cultural tradition. Although Homer is now almost always read in vernacular translations, not the original, archaic, artificial, epic, dialect of Greek.
RM: A while back, you mentioned that you weren’t favorable to the movie Troy (2004) and hadn’t seen The Return (2024). What are you hoping for with the upcoming Chris Nolan Odyssey? It stars Matt Damon, Charlize Theron, Tom Holland, Robert Pattison, Anne Hathaway and others. Quite a cast.
PC: What a cast indeed! And what a director! But will Nolan go for magical-realism? It would be very appropriate for at least some parts of the Odyssey! Or will he embrace realist-realism in the manner of Petersen’s Troy (2004), in which there were no gods or goddesses, apart from a paddling Thetis played by Julia Christie? Or will it be something in between, recalling, say, Jason and the Argonauts (1963), an old-style adventure story with stunning special effects for the day, 1963? I hope the latter. The original epic poem is the classic picaresque tale, tricked out with monsters, magic, and sex. Nolan can’t go wrong, can he?
