Homer: The Odyssey

Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics

BBC

Stand-up, History, Comedy

4.8 • 598 Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2022

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Natalie retells Homer's epic story in an extraordinary tour-de-force performance recorded in the BBC's Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House. The ancient original would most probably have been performed from memory, and Natalie does the same: twenty-four books in twenty-seven minutes. It's a story of homecoming.

Odysseus returns from the Trojan War, loses all his men in the course of his adventures, pauses for some pleasurable interludes of infidelity and some less pleasurable interludes of kidnap, and finally returns to his wife Penelope on the island of Ithaca after ten years of war and a further ten years of travelling.

‘Rock star mythologist’ and reformed stand-up Natalie Haynes is obsessed with the ancient world. Here she explores key stories from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. They might be biographical, topographical, mythological or epic, but they are always hilarious, magical and tragic, mystifying and revelatory. And they tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago.

This is the eighth series of the show and all the other episodes are available as podcasts on BBC Sounds.

Producer: Mary Ward-Lowery

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. So what we're going to do, if it's all right with you guys, is that we would make like a little mini extra thing for you tonight, but we might also do it as a little podcast special episode, in which I just tell you a little bit about The Odyssey. Yes? So we're going to do that as the warm-up essentially for the second.
0:21.2	Oh, great. No, I'm glad I was going to try and sell it to you, but no, it turns out I don't have to.
0:25.4	It's all fine. We've got that covered.
0:27.0	So The Odyssey is a 24-book poem, obviously an unusual 24-book poem.
0:32.4	It's named after its hero.
0:34.7	And he is quite a flawed hero, let's say, say insofar as you would think it would be named after
0:40.9	a guy who heroically gets his entire man home from no no the word odyssey is misused a lot
0:49.0	to mean going off on an adventure when of course course it means a journey home. The Odyssey is a
0:54.8	Nostos. It's a homecoming story from Troy back to Ithaca. But it's worth bearing in mind that of
1:00.0	all the Ithacans who set out from Troy, just the one of them gets home. There is no place more
1:07.2	dangerous for a man in Greek myth than anywhere near Odysseus.
1:12.9	Women avoid Theseus, like the plague. Men, Odysseus is your nemesis.
1:18.7	Go stand elsewhere is my advice. But again, it's worth mentioning that it's quite a strange poem.
1:25.0	I've thought about it a lot while I've been learning it for this. And, you know, things that are sort of common misconceptions about it are that it's like an adventure story.
1:32.1	And that is totally true of four books of it. But it's a 24 book poem.
1:37.6	So it is an adventure. And he does have adventures in the 10 years between the war ending and Odysseus getting back into his home, he does have adventures.
1:46.8	But here's the thing.
1:48.1	Fully one of those years, those 10 years, are spent on the island of Aeer with Circee, and seven of them are spent on the island of Ogagia with Calypso.
1:57.6	So he is having adventures, but they are the horizontal kind.
2:03.6	In fact, only one fifth of the Odyssey is him getting home having adventures, and the other
2:08.6	four-fifths are him having sex with people who aren't his wife. Still an adventure, but quite a
2:14.5	different ethical dimension, I think we can agree. Homer, who we attribute
	...

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