The Odyssey 1: Mary Beard on Homer’s masterpiece
About this episode
A conversation with Mary Beard about Homer's The Odyssey and its themes, including toxic masculinity and women's roles.
To kick-start our series on the Odyssey, we're republishing a hit episode from early SLOB: a conversation with Dame Mary Beard, the world's favorite classicist. The Odyssey - where stories began. Probably written down around 7th century BC - give or take a few centuries either way - by somebody or somebodies who may or may not have been called Homer. Leaving aside these mysteries, what is the Odyssey really about, why is it so violent and why is Odysseus himself - the lord of the lies - such an unlikeable hero? Who better to navigate this intellectual Scylla and historical Charybdis than Mary Beard? Sophie and Jonty listen in admiration as Mary describes discovering The Odyssey aged 14 - a self-proclaimed swot with aspirations to be scruffy and cool (or, in Sophie’s parlance, a ‘dag’). How it - or at least the several incidents in which Odysseus’ wife Penelope is told to shut up and go to her room by her own son - inspired Mary’s best-selling book Women and Power. And how the whole poem, which begins with the word ἄνδρα (man), is a riff on toxic masculinity millennia before Andrew Tate was even in a twinkle in Zeus’ eye. And listen, pithy mortals, to Jonty as he…
More episodes of Secret Life of Books
- The Odyssey 4: Christopher Nolan's Odyssey review
- The Odyssey 3: Tennyson's Ulysses
- The Odyssey 2: How the Odyssey conquered the world
- The Declaration of Independence at 250
- TS Eliot 2: The Waste Land
- TS Eliot 1: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
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