The Suitors Get Theirs: The End of the Odyssey
Young Heretics
Spencer Klavan
4.9 • 4.5K Ratings
🗓️ 19 November 2024
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's payback time. Odysseus at last throws off his disguise and wages holy war on the men who tore up his house and home for ten years, in what is still one of the most metal sequences in all of world literature. Does he go too far? Lots of people think so--but I don't. I think he gets right up to the brink and then, in a key moment that brings the hero's journey to its close, his son pulls him back from the brink. After that it's really all over but the shouting--and a little husband-wife trickery--before we bring this journey to a close.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We've been waiting. It's been a long journey, long time coming, but today, at long last, the suitors get theirs. |
| 0:14.0 | All right, this is the outcome we've all been waiting to know about, right? I mean, I know we had the |
| 0:21.7 | election, whatever, whatever, something, something, the country and so on and so forth. But now, |
| 0:26.6 | finally, we're coming to the true thrilling conclusion of 2024. And just in time, because we started |
| 0:33.8 | this series on The Iliad and the Odyssey to get ready for the movie that's coming out in December. |
| 0:39.1 | And I sort of thought it wouldn't take me that long, that there would be a big gap between the end of the Odyssey episodes and the appearance of the Odyssey movie. |
| 0:50.1 | There will be a little bit of a gap. |
| 0:51.7 | And I think we might do some other episodes about Odysseus in pop culture after the Odyssey, after the original version. |
| 1:00.1 | But it's not that long before the movie comes out, and the movie is about exactly the stuff that we've just been talking about, the return home of Odysseus. |
| 1:08.4 | And I think this part now, this very last part that we're here to talk about today, |
| 1:13.6 | where the suitors are at last routed, overthrown, this is going to be the really important test of the movie for me. |
| 1:22.6 | When I go to this movie with Ray Fines about the return of Odysseus. I am going to be watching to see |
| 1:29.3 | how they deal with this episode because it's hard. It's a really difficult part of the poem |
| 1:34.7 | for us to grapple with. I think one part of what we have to talk about today, which is the |
| 1:40.2 | reunion of Odysseus and Penelope is extremely sweet to modern sensibilities. |
| 1:45.7 | We find this really touching and lovely and awe. Isn't that nice? They finally get back together. |
| 1:50.9 | There's a lot of beautiful stuff in it. Don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking it. |
| 1:54.7 | It's just that the other part, the part where he has to clean house of not only the suitors, |
| 1:59.7 | but the slave girls who have been unfaithful to him. |
| 2:03.7 | This is a very challenging part for modern sensibilities because it's gory, it's violent, |
| 2:10.1 | it seems to relish the gore and the violence. |
| 2:12.6 | There's not a lot of sympathy for the suitors, not a lot of mercy, not a lot of the sorts of forbearance that |
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