15 Homer's Meta-Odyssey w/ Richard Martin

Ancient Greece Declassified

Dr. Lantern Jack

History, Education

4.8 • 587 Ratings

🗓️ 5 January 2018

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mythology expert Richard Martin joins us to discuss why the Odyssey has been considered great story-telling by audiences across millennia.

As we talked about in episode 2 (on the Iliad), the Homeric epics came out of a long tradition of oral storytelling that stretched back hundreds of years into the Bronze Age. If there was a Homer, he did not just make up all these monsters and adventures up the top of his head. He inherited most of the individual episodes from the oral tradition. If we want to understand what makes the Odyssey great story-telling, we should look not for originality in the story per se, but at how the author weaves all the episodes together, puts them in a certain order to achieve maximum effect, and plays around with different tropes and formulas in order to tell a familiar type of narrative in an exciting way.

To find out more about the Odyssey (including our recommended translations) and about Richard Martin's books on mythology, visit the webpage for this episode at greecepodcast.com/episode15.html
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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, thanks for tuning in to ancient Greece, Declassified.
0:13.7	Episode 15, Homer's Meta Odyssey.
0:21.6	The Odyssey.
0:23.2	The original Odyssey, the OG of all adventure sagas, which continues to inspire art, books, and
0:29.7	movies to this day.
0:31.1	It's such a classic, it's become an everyday word.
0:34.1	It's also the source of other words we use, like Cyclops, Siren, and Mentor. Its central theme of
0:41.3	Nostos, or homecoming in Greek, has given rise to the term nostalgia, the yearning to get back.
0:48.8	Get back. Get back to where you once belonged. Get back, Odysseus. Your family's waiting for you.
0:56.7	The underlying question of today's episode is, what's the big deal with The Odyssey?
1:01.7	Why has it been considered such a classic?
1:04.7	With us today, to help us appreciate the storyteller's art, is a world expert on epic poetry and Greek mythology.
1:12.6	Richard Martin is Professor of Classics at Stanford University.
1:16.6	His book, Myths of the Ancient Greeks, is widely considered the authoritative English rendition of the Greek myths.
1:23.6	He also has a new book out called classical mythology the basics which
1:28.7	explains how myths have been interpreted throughout history as well as the role
1:32.9	of myth in modern art culture and politics Richard Martin welcome to
1:37.9	ancient Greece declassified great to be here classicists are often asked
1:43.2	what got them into such an arcane field.
1:46.8	So I'm curious, was there a book that you read early on that got you into the classics?
1:53.1	And was it Homer, perhaps?
1:55.8	Well, it's hard to think back so long, but I think it was a series of books, and it wasn't quite Homer. Back
	...

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