This is KZSU, Stanford.

Welcome to Entitled Opinions. My name is Robert Harrison, and we of Ulysses across the ages.

He's one of the great archetypes of the Western unconscious.

He haunts the modern imagination, and

he's quintessentially Greek.

Along with Freud, Jung, and George Steiner, I believe that the Greeks gave names and form

to almost all the major archetypes.

Prometheus, Orpheus, Orypus, Narcissus, Medea, Antigone, Cassandra, to mention a few of them.

The main criterion for archetypes is reiteration, and no story in the Western tradition has reiterated more often, or in more versions, than the story of Ulysses.

I should use the plural here because there are as many stories within Homer's Odyssey

as there are archetypes. The sirens, the descent into Hades, Homecoming, Penelope, the Cyclops,

Silla, and Caribdis, Circe, Calypso.

All are seared into our psyche and all populate an epic that revolves around the figure of Ulysses,

whose name in Greek is Odysseus.

To get us underway, here's a quote from a letter that James Joyce wrote in 1917.

The most beautiful, all-embracing theme is that of the Odyssey. It is greater than that of

Hamlet, Don Quixote, Dante, Faust. The subject of Ulysses is the most human in world literature.

Ulysses didn't want to go off to Troy.

He knew that the official reason for the war, the dissemination of the culture of Helas,

was only a pretext for Greek merchants who were seeking new markets.

When the recruiting officers arrived,

he happened to be plowing. He pretended to be mad. Thereupon they placed his little two-year-old son in the furrow. Observe the beauty of the motifs, the only man in Greece who is against the war

...