Sirens screaming, a warrior, driven by revenge,
a son in search of a father and the trickiest journey home you could ever imagine.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is not some 21st-century urban rhyme.
It's one of the greatest stories ever told.
Homer's Odyssey has been ricocheting around the world for thousands of years...
..capturing the imagination of millions of people along the way
and it all started right here in the Greek shrine of Delphi,
when "The Blind Bard", Homer, travelled here from his far-away home island and stood up for
the first time to share his masterpiece with the expectant crowd.
Except it's not like that at all.
We know almost nothing about who composed The Odyssey,
when it was first composed or even when it was first sung.
Yet despite all of that, for almost 3,000 years,
it has exerted tremendous influence over world literature,
inspiring writers from Virgil and Dante to Margaret Atwood,
James Joyce and Ralph Ellison
and now me.
I want to know, what is it about this work that has made it such a classic
and why its origins have been shrouded in mystery for so long?
The ancients believed that The Odyssey was a true story and that
its main character, Odysseus, really existed.
But what do we actually know about this ground-breaking text
and its mysterious author?
In this film, I'm following in the footsteps of the Odyssey,
across the Mediterranean, as part of my quest
to compose my response to Homer's epic call.
Why is the story told?
What is the teller's mission?
What is the ultimate source of our deepest intuition?
To create this work,
I'll need to find out exactly what we know about its mysterious author...
We have the name, we have the poems,
and we have lots of stories,
but these immediately show us that people are speculating.
..come face-to-face with some of the main characters from the story...
This is the so-called mask of Agamemnon.
..hear how The Odyssey might have sounded to its first audiences...
HE SPEAKS ANCIENT LANGUAGE
..and discover how Homer's works helped the ancients
understand both life and death.
You're cutting into the heart of a really fundamental question,
aren't you, about what it means to be human?
The central theme of The Odyssey is
the irresistible urge to return home.
And so, to help complete my new song,
my journey culminates on the island of Ithaca,
the homeland which Odysseus spent so long striving to return to.
How will seeing the world of the Odyssey first-hand influence the way
I craft this 21st-century response?
This is my Odyssey.
The ability of language to change people's lives has always struck me as magical.
# Two households, both alike in dignity... #
It's one of the reasons that I became a hip-hop artist.
It's long been clear to me that poetry,
literature and music are all interconnected.
I've always loved the power of words and the beauty of poetry and
that's been exemplified with my work with the Hip-hop Shakespeare Company,
but there is one poet who's one of the daddies of the whole tradition
and that is, of course, Homer.
I didn't get the chance to study much of The Blind Bard's work
when I was at school here in Tufnell Park.
But right around the corner is a bookshop specialising in texts from
around the ancient world.
This is a treasure trove, which, as you can see, it's pretty big,
but the Homer that you're after is down here.
That's a lot of Homer! Enjoy.
It really makes you think about how many different translations there's been,
and for how long and, for some reason, the old dusty books,
even though I know they were printed recently, they kind of...
they feel almost like secret.
The Odyssey is an epic poem spread across 24 books that appears to date
back to the eighth century BC.
It begins with the lines "Sing, muse,
"of the man of many ways
"who suffered so much after he destroyed the citadel at Troy."
Words that immediately grab you and set up the grand nature of the story
that is about to unfold.
Though The Odyssey and another epic poem about the Trojan War called
The Iliad are most often attributed to the poet Homer,
we're still pretty much in the dark about who he was or whether the same
person even wrote both texts.
So what do we actually know about this literary genius?
We have the name, we have the poems
and we have lots of stories from antiquity about who Homer was,
but these stories immediately show us that, in antiquity, people were speculating
about Homer, trying to imagine him, rather than knowing facts.
But what interests me is that through these stories,
we can get a sense of what Homer meant to people in antiquity,
the fact that he was a traveller, that he was poor,
that he was disabled, he couldn't see, but he had this great poetic vision.
So, in terms of The Iliad and The Odyssey and the Homeric epics,
do they have any connections to motifs or ideas or influences from
other cultures and other epics?
Well, this is very interesting. So one thing was when finally Akkadian was the cipher,
the cuneiform script of the Babylonians,
and the epic of Gilgamesh came back to light, and lo and behold,
there were many similarities with the Homeric poems.
Dating from at least 1,000 years before the works of Homer,
the epic of Gilgamesh is the central text of ancient Babylonia,
present-day Iraq.
Throughout its 12 books, we see stories of a mighty king
battling monsters as part of a series of epic journeys
to learn the truth about himself.
So this really baffled people,
because the epic of Gilgamesh was composed a lot earlier,
somewhere else, in the Near East and also in a completely different language
and yet we have similes of the lines,
we have bigger stories such as the descent into the underworld.
These are motifs that repeat in different cultures,
partly because they're interesting to people belonging to different cultures.
So, do you believe that The Iliad and The Odyssey are the work of one single author?
Well, that's a difficult question.
They are well structured.
They have an incredibly complex and well thought out architecture
and they were clearly meant for re-performance.
Then the question is, did they improve in re-performance,
or was there a work of an original genius that was then diluted
and became worse in the course of time?
And that is where scholars argue a lot. OK.
That's what scholars in general think, but what do you think?
I'm quite open-minded about this. I do think that the Greeks
didn't want these poems changed too much.
What we have is pretty uniform,
but the tradition out of which they emerge is vast.
When The Odyssey was first composed over 2,500 years ago,
it wasn't through the written word the audience first heard it.
It was through public performances of travelling bards throughout Greece.
In many ways, this tradition is alive and well with today's performance poets.
# The galaxy stars surround you
# Space dust illustrates every step you walk
# The air that you dread to breathe, is the air that you make. #
Tonight, I'm in East London,
checking out some up-and-coming young talent
at an event organised by my friend, the writer and poet Anthony Anaxogorou.
# Don't you dare duck, because you were born to rise. #
AUDIENCE APPLAUDS
What do you think about the relationship between the spoken word
performance poetry and hip-hop or rapping?
Well, I think that's essentially what the debate comes down to -
different styles of poetics and nuance and references.
Obviously, there is a lot of hip-hop that is very pun heavy,
and hip-hop has its own distinct style of using poetry.
Hip-hop as a poetic medium is constantly being undermined by those
who deem more traditionalist styles of poetry as being acceptable.
But, when we look at something like The Odyssey, for example,
those epics were originally composed as songs,
essentially performed as the popular songs of their day.
The spoken world held a kind of reverence that we might not
necessarily see today and that's really what poetry's supposed to do,
to reactivate language and give it back to people
in a more exciting way.
She never likes to go back or look herself in the eye
Never learnt to move her body to a rhythm or forgive.
Just as people here listen to these poets tonight,
the first audiences of The Odyssey would have sat around taking in
performances quite like this.
From these beginnings, The Odyssey has echoed around the world,
inspiring writers and artists to dream up their own versions.
I first discovered this work through Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man,
which takes Homer's plot as its main structure, a device that is used,
too, in James Joyce's Ulysses...
..or even in the Cohn Brothers film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?
I think we should start quiet and build probably with...
..vocal and cello, I think...
..is my instinct.
Responses like these have inspired me to write my own new song
as a homage to Homer.
The impact of The Odyssey has been so great that when you think of The Odyssey, a poem about Odysseus,
it's become a byword for a challenge, a saga, trials and tribulations,
a journey. All of those things,
The Odyssey evokes and I think so many people have tried to recreate
or been influenced by it because it's been important for so long.
It was already an important text in the ancient world
and it has continued to hold that power and I think
there'll be loads more reactions to it.
As I craft my new work,
I'm going to head out to the lands of Homer to help me understand just
how The Odyssey was first created.
My first point of call has to be the centre of the ancient Greeks' world...
..the sacred Shrine of Delphi.
Today, we all know about the Olympic Games,
the ancient Greeks' athletic competitions,
but in the sanctuary here at Delphi, a rival festival,
known as the Pythian Games,
not only hosted religious celebrations and athletic tournaments,
but also encouraged poets and singers to compete head to head
in recitations of Homer.
I wonder what it must have been like to see poets take on one another as
part of these competitions.
Tell me a little bit more about the poetic element of the Pythian games.
Our understanding is that there were contests,
maybe held at the theatre or the stadium or in some location within the sanctuary.
They had to write songs in praise of Apollo and perform them.
So two and a half thousand years ago,
when the Pythian games were happening and all this was going on,
could you say there was such a thing as Greece as a nation at that point?
There was not such a thing as a Greek nation,
but there was such a thing as a Greek identity and that's actually
what's really interesting about Homer's era,
about those eights and sevens and even six centuries BC,
because what you see happening at that time in literature and also in
archaeology, you see how across the Greek world,
from Italy to mainland Greece, to the islands,
to what's now western Turkey, people are making an effort,
in a way, to define an identity
and they're doing this through literature, language,
poetry, sculpture, architecture, religion.
They're even developing the same style of warfare across this region,
so they're basically trying to be compatible.
So, to put it another way, then,
what was Homer's role in the creation of this Greek identity?
I think Homer was in a way, um...
..a sounding board.
He was an instrument that expressed that identity.
Basically, what Homer did,
whoever he was and whether there was one Homer or several Homers,
is that he took this long-standing, epic, oral tradition
and he formed the epic tradition,
choosing two epics that we know, The Iliad and The Odyssey,
and he made them something new. He made them into literature
and I think Homer, by producing both of those epics,
basically gives the Greeks some body of material that they can occupy
their minds with and that they can use to...
..to play off their differences and their similarities,
essentially, for the longest part of 1,000 years.
Do we know anything about audiences, both at the Pythian Games
and in terms of reception of Homeric epics generally?
Our understanding is that this was not like modern people
going to the opera. It was a lot more raucous
and there was a lot more participation,
in that people were actually experiencing the drama,
the dilemmas of the tragedies themselves, or the comedies, for that matter.
The ancient Greeks don't really distinguish high culture and other cultures
in a way that the modern western world does.
And so the audience was much more like Elizabethan English theatre
or a modern rock concert or a pop concert or a hip-hop concert even,
than traditional theatre today?
That's what I would imagine. Look, it's a religious festival,
so you have to imagine a mix of Lourdes and Woodstock,
if you can. OK.
I like that. I'm enjoying that. All right.
I think among the many interesting things that I took away from Heinrich
were really how little has changed or how much is continuous.
How human beings still do the same things, dancing, athletics and of course,
most interestingly from my perspective, competitive performance poetry,
which has obvious echoes with rap battles or poetry slams.
It was also interesting to hear about how much Homer was central to
the formation of this emerging Greek identity and hearing about the atmosphere
here at these Pythian games and other public festivals within the Greek world,
this kind of comparison that Heinrich made
of comparing Lourdes and Woodstock
in a fusion of the religious and spiritual.
Greece today is seen, ancient Greece as the epitome of high culture,
yet that wasn't really a concept the ancient Greeks had themselves.
It was just culture.
It's mad to picture bards performing Homer's epic to
its earliest audiences at a location as spectacular as Delphi.
# It's the word, the word, the word carries on
# It's our first, at birth, the search that we on... #
As part of the oral tradition,
the text of these poems wouldn't have been set in stone
from the very beginning.
Different performers would have been able to freestyle their way through the story.
A fact that tallies interestingly
with the way that I compose my own work.
# The Blind Bard's vision The Blind Bard's vision. #
There's worse places in the world to do your writing.
My writing process is quite strange.
So, when I was a much younger man
and I first started getting into making music for a living,
it was Jay-Z that I heard first saying that he doesn't write anything down on paper.
I thought, he's chatting rubbish. That's impossible
and also then I heard that Biggie did the same thing
and I started trying it.
I'd get a rhythm and then I'd get a line and then I'd get a few lines
and I'd get the building blocks of what I want to say
and then eventually, the benefit of writing this way,
by the time you've finished the composition process,
you know the whole thing off by heart, inside out. You've practised all the flow and all of that,
because you're saying it over and over to yourself so much and,
you know, in terms of inspiration, I've just been at Delphi all morning.
I've been soaking up all this ancient history
I can see the temple of Athena right down there, you know.
In terms of locations,
to walk round and mumble to myself and practise my craft, well,
I've been in worse places, so I'm going to get back to work.
But what did those early performances of The Odyssey actually sound like?
We know that Homer's works were originally sung,
but those first melodies have sadly long since been lost.
But some musicians today are hard at work creating replicas of instruments
from Homer's time to try and recreate those sounds.
This is the Phorminx.
This is the instrument of Phemius, of Demodocus,
maybe the instrument of Homer, if Homer existed.
It is always a question, if the ancient Greeks used to play chords,
but we can see, from the depictions, they muted some strings,
and the plectrum strummed.
These instruments were developed through the use of 3-D scanning
technology, based on depictions from ancient pots and vases.
In ancient times, musicians were restricted to gut strings only,
but today, this instrument is strung with nylon.
Recreating these sounds,
somehow evokes images of those ancient times making them feel even more real.
Talk to me about the performance of poetry in ancient Greek culture.
My understanding is that it was all performed with music.
There wasn't this separate category that we have today.
That came much later.
In ancient times, when we say the word "music",
it means three things altogether.
It is music as we can understand the music today, dance and poetry.
And poetry was the first thing. In the beginning was the word.
This is very Greek, as you can understand.
Today, there is almost a certain snobbery.
For example, when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
A, there was a question that music lyrics are not literature, but in
general, I have been part of many debates and it's a big debate now
in modern academia, where people feel that music performed to poetry
is lesser poetry and what's ironic is that this is coming often from
the same people who would elevate the Homeric epics as the greatest example of
poetry ever, but they were set to music in their own time.
You're right that this differentiation exists today.
But in ancient Greece, they had contests for music.
A poet-musician had to stake his fame
because they were the most famous.
Interesting. So, they were almost like early...
I don't want to say pop stars, but they were very, very popular.
Exactly, pop stars!
They were pop stars!
HE SPEAKS ANCIENT LANGUAGE
Anyway, just messing around.
Trying to come up with some little flavours and vibes.
I'm obviously, I'm a novice when it comes to this stuff.
But it's really beautiful just to sit and play.
And it was really interesting to hear, A,
the continuity between ancient performances of poetry and music,
but also art and music have had this tremendous power to evoke emotion
and reaction and behaviour in its audience. And just again, as an artist, to me,
it speaks to this tremendous power that art has within human society,
and music in particular.
But it was really interesting also to hear about how much details we
still know about how these very, very ancient instruments were played
and how similar it really is to modern forms of music.
So, again, a real interesting lesson,
and this particular instrument being the instrument of Homer,
if Homer existed.
If we can resurrect the sounds of Homer,
maybe we can resurrect his original locations, too.
Next up, I've come to the great citadel of Mycenae...
..home to some of the most well-known archaeological discoveries
of the past two centuries.
In The Iliad and The Odyssey,
this is the home of the general Agamemnon,
ally of Odysseus and leader of the Greek army at Troy.
For hundreds of years, it was believed that
the palaces of Homer belonged only in the realm of myth,
but when German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann dug up this site
150 years ago,
he thought he had found the legendary fort described in Homer's poems.
Could this really be the case?
The world of Homer, as far as we can tell,
was what we would call the world of the late Bronze Age,
what he might have called the Age of Heroes.
And that notion that the Homeric poems actually described,
or were about, a real period in history,
is something that has been sort of debated back and forth
for centuries, really. But particularly came to a head in the late 19th-century,
when Heinrich Schliemann excavated first at Troy in north-west Turkey,
and then here in 1876, and discovered the remains that we see around us,
which he thought demonstrated the reality, the historical reality,
if you like, of the Homeric poems. And for probably for about 50 or 60...
maybe a century after Schliemann's discoveries,
that was pretty much an accepted opinion.
What kind of things were found here?
Well, erm, one of the most famous discoveries...
Ah. ..is this.
This, I hasten to add, is a replica.
We didn't thief it, we promise! Yeah!
This is the so-called mask of Agamemnon.
When Schliemann excavated the grave circle which is just below us here,
Grave Circle A, he found a number of gold masks,
which had clearly sat on the faces of some of the people buried there.
And this one has become associated with the most famous occupant of
Mycenae, Agamemnon.
But if we follow the strict chronology of the Trojan War,
which many people place around about 1150-1200 BC,
the grave circle belongs to somewhere around about 1600 BC,
so by definition, unless he'd lived a very, very long time, Agamemnon,
if he was buried there, couldn't have been the person in the Trojan War,
or the Agamemnon of the Trojan War couldn't have been the person buried here.
So, how come it still stands that people think of this as the
mask of Agamemnon? He was one of the most famous inhabitants of Mycenae,
and therefore it's natural that Schliemann claimed to find the face of Agamemnon
on one of the tombs in Grave Circle A.
So, it's the mask of question mark, really?
It's the mask of some anonymous Mycenaean ruler of the 17th century BC.
So, we can't say for certain if Homer's works were based on these
mysterious Mycenaeans,
despite some similarities between them and his characters.
One of the main reasons we know so little about the people here is that
the writing system they invented seems to have disappeared at the collapse
of their civilisation, around 1200 BC.
With that expertise lost,
Greece appears to have become illiterate for hundreds of years.
Perhaps if the writing skill they had created was retained...
..we'd have more to help us understand their times
than the mysteries and myths in the tales of Homer.
Arguably, we live in an age of anti-intellectualism,
of contempt for experts.
Me, I'm a fan of the experts.
And you know what, what came out of talking to John for me was really how
contentious and contested everything is,
how much in the rush of the 19th century to name everything specifically,
things were assumed to be a particular way
that may not have been.
The mask of Agamemnon was the most obvious example.
I still believed until just that conversation that it was actually
the mask of Agamemnon. It turns out it probably wasn't.
It turns out a lot of the things we thought we knew are a bit more vague,
and that's fine. That's the grey space of history and archaeology and
ancient civilisation. And in many ways what Homer was doing was
speculating. There were things that perhaps that he felt that he knew
about the Trojan War, things that he knew about that period.
And then there were many parts that,
clearly, he filled in.
But how could The Odyssey itself have been written down once the Greeks
had lost the skill of writing at the demise of the Mycenaean Empire?
There's a clue on the sleepy island of Ischia...
..in the bay of Naples, a far-off Greek colony.
After a 400-year silence, here in the eighth century BC,
the Greeks started to become literate again,
pioneering a new system known as the alphabet,
to replace the hieroglyphic-like symbols of the Mycenaeans.
In a little cabinet in the small, unassuming museum here,
there's one object which speaks volumes about the dawn
of the alphabet and the origins of Homer.
Seeing precious items like this makes me think
of what a revolutionary innovation writing is.
While it may not look like much,
this little pot right here is arguably right up there with the Rosetta Stone
and the Cascajal Block, in terms of global cultural and literary significance.
Found in a nearby burial chamber,
it may be the oldest example of Greek alphabetical writing that we know of.
Inscribed on its side are a series of letters declaring it to be
the cup of the Homeric hero Nestor,
proving that these tales and stories were reaching the farest-off colonies
of mainland Greece,
right at the time that the technology of writing was being resurrected.
If it wasn't for the Greeks' development of the alphabet
and its system of vowels and consonants,
our method of writing might be vastly different today.
When this humble cup was first uncovered,
some scholars believed that the alphabet may actually have been invented
purely to record the works of Homer,
though that view is a bit old-fashioned nowadays.
From what we can tell,
the Greek alphabet arose from their trading connections with the most
powerful merchant civilisation in the Mediterranean...
..the Phoenicians of the Middle East and North Africa,
who were based mostly in today's Lebanon.
They had their own hieroglyphic-like style of writing featuring symbols
such as aleph, bet, gimel and dalet,
which clearly inspired the Greek letters alpha, beta, gamma and delta,
as well as Arabic letters, too.
Finds throughout the rest of the museum here at Pithecusae show that
this island, a stone's throw from Naples,
was not just one of the oldest Greek colonies,
but was also an important trading outpost with the Phoenicians.
Just as important as the presence of letters, though,
is their rhythm and pace, too.
These short lines carved on the side of the pot have their own curious sound.
What's really interesting about Nestor's cup is probably the fact
that we've got some hexameter on it.
So, it's one of the earliest examples of the dactylic hexameter
written in Greek.
So, what is the relationship between hexameter and Homer?
Homer and Hesiod are the two poets that first kind of lay down the
great hexameter poems,
and because they become these massively authoritative texts in the ancient world,
it becomes the meter that's associated with those
high forms of poetry.
Dactylic hexameter is a type of poetic meter or rhythm that was widespread
in the ancient world.
It's a much older rhythm than iambic pentameter...
# Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
# Thou art more lovely and more temperate. #
..which I use regularly when I perform the works of Shakespeare.
# Too short a date
# Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines
# And often is his gold complexion dimm'd. #
Why does the pentameter most famously used by Shakespeare work so
much better in English than the hexameter?
Because it follows the stress patterns in English.
And with hexameter, so, you've got six feet in a line.
What are feet, for the people at home?
So, feet, it's a way of breaking up a line, erm,
and it means it's like a collection of a sound.
Yep. So, you've got two long sounds or a long and two shorts.
So, it's like... Daa-da-da-daa-da-da-daa-da-da.
That's if you've got dactyls.
If you've got spondees, then it's daa-daa-daa-daa.
It's much slower.
And you can do that in Latin and Greek,
because you can follow the quantity,
the long sounds in words and kind of make sure that the rhythm fits.
So, if you think about the opening half line of the Odyssey,
you'll be able to hear the sound that I'm talking about.
Or the opening section of the Iliad...
You can feel that the sound and it's matching onto the long sounds in the
Latin and the Greek.
What I find really fascinating about pentameter poetry is obviously the...
..da-dush-da-dush...
The rhythm of the human heart, which...
What I found really interesting about that form,
especially for modern music, is,
it fits over so many different kind of beats.
If you take any different kind of speed of instrumental,
as long as it's not in a waltz or some 6/8 or some kind of weird time
structure... Yeah. Anything that's in 4/4, no matter what the speed,
you can transfer pentameter poetry over it.
And I believe that part of that is this kind of human heart
centre of the rhythm. Yeah, and I suppose as well -
because you've got much more regularity there, haven't you? -
in dactylic hexameter,
you've got options as to what you can do in every foot.
So, sometimes, if you wanted to convey something very serious,
then you might use lots of long sounds, and lots of spondees.
So, it would be like... daa-daa-daa-daa.
Whereas if you wanted to give the impression of speed,
then you'd use lots of dactyls, so...daa-da-da-daa-da-da-daa.
So, the fact that there's that flexibility within hexameter means
it doesn't offer the same immediate regularity that maybe you're talking
about there. And it's also why it's a little bit harder to grasp,
until you've got something in front of you and
you can feel the rhythm there.
My friend is a Brazilian-Portuguese rapper.
And it's weird, they can't rap in double time because Portuguese words
are so long. Right, yeah. So, like, the English accent lends itself...
Yeah. That's why we have, like, grime, because it's 140 bpm.
You can rap very, very quickly in an English accent,
because we squash our vowels. Yeah.
And our consonant pattern is very, er, percussive.
And so that's actually why the English accent lends itself to
rapping a lot faster than even American, but especially than the Portuguese.
Oh, that's really interesting. Because the words are so much longer
and stretched out.
Having discovered the context behind the Odyssey, from what music,
archaeology and rhythm can tell us about how it connected with its
first audiences, it's time to get to grips with some of the individual
tales from this masterpiece.
Many of the most well-known moments from the Odyssey,
such as the encounters with the Cyclops or the Sirens,
and even the descent into the Underworld,
are first told in a key section of the poem,
where Odysseus attends a banquet and tells his fellow guests
about the many trials and tribulations he has endured thus far
on his epic journey home to Ithaca.
The others seated around him are amazed to hear these fantastical
tales of bizarre creatures and supernatural happenings.
Because the ancient Greeks believed the Odyssey literally took place,
the tales of these adventures sparked much debate about the exact
locations where they occurred.
Writing my new work in answer to Homer,
I'm travelling to some of the places later linked with those stories to
find out their significance to the Odyssey's first audiences.
The most famous incident in Homer's Odyssey has to be the encounter with
the Cyclops.
Odysseus and his crew land on a strange island
and find a cave brim-full with fresh produce and tasty cheeses.
But they soon find out that the cave
is also home to a terrifying one-eyed monster
who traps them inside and begins to eat them one by one.
Odysseus manages to get the Cyclops drunk,
and then plunges a burning torch into his one eye, blinding him.
Once our hero makes his getaway back on board his ship,
the giant hurls boulders out to the sea in a futile bid to destroy
Odysseus's ships.
For generations,
these stacks of basalt poking up off the eastern coast of Sicily have led
many to believe that the home of the Cyclops may have been here.
The fact that so many people have spent energy looking for the origins
of the Cyclops, and even claiming that these rocks here are the very
rocks that the Cyclops threw in the sea after Odysseus,
tells you something about the enduring power of the Odyssey.
I myself, obviously I don't believe the Cyclops existed,
but I have always wondered if the Cyclops, like so much else in mythology,
is a metaphor for something deeper.
One of the reasons why stories like the Cyclops came to be associated
with Sicily is because the island was a colony of the Greeks.
In recent years, some have wondered whether the story is a critique of
the colonial experience, with Odysseus representing the greedy
invader, plundering another's land and disrespecting the customs
of the local people.
Later readers also like to think of Sicily's Straits of Messina,
its closest point to mainland Italy, as the location of some of the most
terrifying monsters from the Odyssey...
..including the haunting tale of the Sirens.
This is one of the episodes in the Odyssey, I'm most fascinated by -
the tale of these mythological creatures who tempt sailors in with
their singing only to cruelly dash them to their death upon the rocks.
Odysseus was forewarned of the danger before sailing by,
and so he stuffed his crew's ears with wax and tied himself to the
ship's mast. Despite pleading with his crew to sail toward the Sirens' call,
they could not hear his cries,
and thus escaped a narrow brush with death.
Though Odysseus's crew were never able to hear the Sirens' song,
the stories tell us that many other ships were thought to have been
destroyed once they followed these destructive goddesses' seductive call.
For the Greeks of thousands of years ago,
with much of their world still uncharted,
Homer's Sirens were a potent reminder of the danger of the seas.
With today's readers, though, the most powerful story from Odysseus's
wanderings is his descent into the realm of dead souls - the Underworld...
..which some believe to have taken place at Lake Avernus,
near Naples and the ancient Greek colony of Cumae.
As part of his journey home to Ithaca,
he is sent there to hear the advice of a long dead prophet about how to
navigate past some of his most perilous obstacles.
It's here that he meets many of his fallen allies from the Trojan War,
in an episode that echoes a similar tale in the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh.
Odysseus's encounters with the ghosts of his fellow Greek generals
offer a profound insight into how people in the ancient world
understood life after death.
As Odysseus is seeing all of these ghosts come forward,
one of the figures he sees is Achilles.
So, Achilles has been the most famous warrior in the Iliad.
And he's this figure that exemplifies everything about what it means to
live fast and die young.
But there's a moment when Odysseus sees him and he says, you know,
"You were so famous in life that shouldn't look so sad,
"because you've got to have the same sort of kudos down here as well."
And Achilles basically says, "You don't know what you're talking about, Odysseus.
"I would rather work for a man that doesn't own his own land than
"be king of all the dead." And it's such a powerful moment,
where you've got Achilles saying that life is the thing.
You know, death is...
It's just a shadow, and life is the thing that you should be really
focused on. And life at any cost, almost.
And that's obviously something that has a real resonance with the Odyssey,
where you've got Odysseus, who's going to be in some really
humiliating positions across the course of the poem,
and it kind of justifies it, in a way, for Achilles to say to him,
you know, "Anything that you have to do to stay alive,
"that's what you should do."
It seems almost like Shakespeare reverses that in tomorrow and
tomorrow and tomorrow... Yeah. Life is but a joke, a poor player...
Yeah. And actually, death is the big joke that life is playing on us,
so he almost reverses the importance and kind of dismisses life as
completely unimportant.
And, obviously, he was massively influenced by particularly Ovid,
but that whole tradition. Yeah, exactly. Well, it's a funny thing, isn't it?
Because there's always this tension.
We live as if we might live forever, and we don't.
And, actually, this is exactly what the poet Lucretius,
who's writing in the first century BC, picks up on.
He takes this Homeric idea about life after death,
and he uses it to say that it's wrong.
He's arguing for a universe where everything is made up of, erm,
atoms of... You know, it's a materialistic universe.
And he says, people are getting mixed up
when they talk about the Underworld,
when we hear those stories about what it's like to go down,
we're just reflecting something of life at that moment.
It's not true that there's anything after death,
and if we live as if there is something after death,
then we're actually missing out on the really important stuff,
which is now. We see in, you know,
several traditions this idea of the hero making a journey
to the Underworld in ancient Egypt, in Gilgamesh...
Are you saying that there was a direct transmission to the Homeric
tradition or it was more these were general motifs that were out
there that were picked up on?
So, this is part of a wider debate regarding Homer.
Some people have argued that we should see direct connections
between these, and that actually, the stories of Homer,
the Iliad and especially the Odyssey,
emerge directly from this kind of Middle Eastern poetic tradition.
And some people have argued that we should see this as part of a more
general picture.
There's something that's important across all cultures when it comes to
thinking about what might happen when we die.
And what we have in the Odyssey is a kind of crystallisation, I suppose,
of one idea about what death might look like,
and what the afterlife might look like.
When we talk about those other poems, Gilgamesh and so on,
it's absolutely the case that it's the Homeric version of things,
no matter who he was or how we understand him,
it's his version that becomes famous, and it's his version,
and the way that we understand Homer,
that affects later authors and makes them want to engage with the poetry
and also with the man. So, sort of like cover versions of songs.
Absolutely. So, if you think of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, for example,
you would never suggest that All Along The Watchtower was anything
other than Jimi Hendrix's.
Of course not! So...! With the greatest of respect to Jimi, no,
you wouldn't! Absolutely, because that's the version that pins it down.
Yeah. That is the one that matters.
It's always tempting to see Homer as the colossus at the dawn of the epic tradition.
But he's responding to what has gone before,
just as countless artists and writers have responded to his works.
I had known about the more recent examples, but to hear about ancient
Romans like Lucretius is a bit of an eye-opener.
To learn from Katharine that the appropriation of ancient Greek culture,
and Homer in particular, seeking that tradition as a source of legitimacy,
was not just something that began
with 19th-century European and, in particular, British imperialism,
it's been going on for thousands of years.
Homer was already seen as a source of legitimacy for particular
cultures or colonies back then.
And that was really interesting to learn.
And then to get a broader sense of the Greco-Roman pantheon of poetry
beyond Homer has really made me rethink my own writing process,
and I need to go and visit some of those other texts,
the Virgils of this world,
to get a context in which to place my own response to Homer's Odyssey.
So, really kind of a lot to think about and a lot of provocation
coming from Katharine, and I'm really looking forward to getting into...
Sort of maybe put together now a plan, a map for my own writing,
based in some of the things that I've learnt there.
So, looking forward to it.
# Is the teller's mission
# What is the ultimate source of our deepest intuition... #
From the sounds and rhythm of the first performances of the Odyssey,
to its main themes, plot and enduring archetypes...
..there is a lot to keep in mind as I write my new track.
Exploring these places associated with the Odyssey,
I have to admit that it might well be a waste of time to try and figure
out whether any of them are the real places Homer had in mind,
regardless of whether or not he really existed.
But as I prepare to complete my own new homage to the Odyssey,
there's one final stop-off I have to make.
The tiny island off the west coast of Greece that Odysseus was so
desperate to get home to.
I am almost at Ithaca.
You know, I feel a real sense of achievement, I imagine this epic journey,
which is actually a simple journey now, before the age of steam power,
and I genuinely feel a little bit like Odysseus coming to reclaim my
kingdom, or at least coming to seek answers in this final chapter of my Odyssey.
When Odysseus himself returned home after 20 years,
he found that his palace was under siege by a gang of local nobles.
Disguised in beggar's clothes, Odysseus watched them try to
convince his wife, Penelope, to give up on the hope of her husband ever
returning home and marry one of them instead.
In the poem's gruesome climax, the returned hero teams up with his son,
and together they violently slaughter the men and string up
the female slaves who had supported them.
One thing you can't help but reflect on when you read the Odyssey,
particularly toward the end with the slaughter of the suitors and the
hanging of the maids, is the question of violence within human
culture and human entertainment, from the gladiators to Shakespearean
plays to modern video games, or hip-hop, or many other forms, MMA.
We have this strange relationship with violence, where,
on the one hand, no-one really wants violence to be done to them or
their loved ones, on the other hand we have this perverse fascination
and even delight, including myself sometimes,
in violent stories and in violent entertainment.
And I'm sure the debate about the morality of violence within
entertainment will continue as long as there's entertainment and human beings.
But regardless of those questions,
the quality of this poetry and the merits of the story will stand.
The Odyssey is reborn each time a new work is created in response to it.
# Size up of 108, about time we got done with these fakes
# I want to carve these bastards' names
# In the marble of my father's grave... #
One that I'm particularly interested in is that of my friend, the Greek
Australian rapper, Luka Lesson.
So, tell me a little bit about your Odyssey project, where you're at now,
the conception of it, how long you've been working on it?
Yeah, it's been about two years since the very first idea came up.
I was offered to do a collaboration
with a composer at the Sydney Conservatorium.
And instead of just making some small idea,
I thought I'd just take on the biggest epic ever known to man!
So, it involves a full orchestra and choir and me telling the story of
the Odyssey in rap and spoken word poetry.
And projections on stage.
But at its essence, it's basically a storyteller recounting the journey
of Odysseus in his own words. Amazing, amazing.
And so what made you want to engage with the Odyssey in particular?
Man, I don't know. I think maybe because I come from a Greek background,
I kind of feel like I get sick of seeing these stories be told in
a Hollywood way, with not one Greek person on the crew or in the writing
team or anything like that.
And this idea that people have got that the Odyssey
or that ancient Greek culture is Western culture also kind of
irked me for a little bit.
But for me, I was like, what can I reinfuse into the Odyssey if I spoke
classical Greek onstage or I spoke modern Greek onstage, or I could
feel it in my bones as someone who feels like an ancestor of that?
You're not the first person to respond to the Odyssey in
a range of creative mediums, right?
It's interesting because for me, my way into the Odyssey came actually
via other people that had responded.
Derek Walcott, Ralph Ellison...
Nice. What do you make of some of those responses, and do you feel any
pressure being in this kind of long list of incredibly
talented people from all over the world, really,
who've been inspired by this text?
I feel pressure!
Which is why I don't read anybody else's interpretation!
I try not to get hung up about it.
It is a reinterpretation of a classic.
I see it as a... Really like a rite of passage for some artists that
choose to take it on.
It is such a historic story that we also feel like we have to do it
justice, and maybe that brings some greatness out of us that we may not
have had if it wasn't a project on this.
I saw when I first started doing this, that Prince actually did
a response to the Odyssey. I had no idea...
Called Glam Slam Ulysses, with Carmen Electra dancing on stage.
Before she got famous. I don't know anyone other than the people
in that room that might have seen it.
But, like, a lot of people have dealt with this thing,
and it seems to be like an essential part of many artists' movement and growth.
Despite his Greek heritage, Luka has never been to Ithaca.
But he does have a little bit of local info to share.
Do you know there's a rumour that Ithaca's not actually Odysseus's home,
and that actually it was in Cephalonia next door, the other island?
What?! Yeah, because Cephalonia has like different groves
and forests and stuff, and in the early part of the Odyssey,
they talk about Odysseus hunting and running through forests and all this type of stuff.
So, Ithaca's not big enough to have that, so some people
say that actually, ancient Ithaca was Cephalonia.
That's mad.
So what if I'm actually not in Odysseus's home?!
Wow, all right! Well, I'm going to have to look into that.
Thanks a lot, bro. Thanks for taking the time to speak to us.
Could Luka be right? Is the island that's called Ithaca today not the
place that Homer had in mind?
I've been digging a bit deeper
and I can see why some readers might have their doubts.
And that's because the description we see in the text again and again
and again is of a low-lying piece of land,
the most westerly of a group of islands.
Yet when I look around me, it's clear that there are mountains everywhere.
And according to the map, this is definitely not the most westerly.
So, is this definitely the island that the ancient Greeks were referring to?
To compose my own Odyssey, I started this journey in the footsteps of
Odysseus to find out more about the blind bard who first sang his tale.
Though the ancient Greeks believed that the events in the Odyssey
actually took place, and that Homer himself was a single poet...
..everywhere I've come, I've found that the truth is not so clear.
Even here, on the Western tip of Cephalonia,
I still can't know for certain whether this was the home which
Odysseus wanted so badly to reach.
I have to ask myself whether any of these questions of geography,
debated by scholars for centuries,
are relevant to understanding the text or informing my new song.
Is part of the beauty and intrigue of these ancient stories the fact
that they are now so shrouded in myth and mystery, and would more
specific knowledge actually take away a little bit of their magic?
And as Dublin's WB Stanford tells us,
"The uncertainty is caused by the fact that though Homer is probably
"describing actual places, he gives them a poetic and not
"precisely topographical description.
"For appreciation of his poem and story,
"it makes little difference whether Ithaca is Thiaki
"or the Isle of Man or Rhode Island.
"We have only ourselves to blame when we try to accommodate poetry to
"science and find it perplexing and troublesome.
"The poet did not write for geographers."
And that really eloquently sums it up.
We may never know whether Homer was man or woman,
group of people or individual, blind bard or fully-sighted athlete,
ancient Greek or ancient Egyptian.
These are all theories that were advanced from the most ancient of times.
We probably will never even know if there was a real Odysseus.
And over the last week or so, when I've travelled to Greece and its
former territories, I've concluded it doesn't really matter.
The Odyssey is one of the great epics of world literature.
It managed to soak up influences from all around the world and
itself has continued to influence people for over 2,500 years.
Again I say, this is my Odyssey.
# Yo, listen
# Yo, yo
# Yo
# Why is the story told?
# What is the teller's mission?
# What is the ultimate source of our deepest intuition?
# Why does the audience come and why did they listen?
# The blind bard's vision
# Why is the story told?
# What is the teller's mission?
# What is the ultimate source of our deepest intuition?
# Why does the audience come and why did they listen?
# The blind bard's vision
# The sweetest siren call, that spans time and distance
# The poet speaks the building blocks of our existence
# Who said it's master masons that build the base of nations
# Without the word there's nothing else, you can't replace it
# When all the towers fall, and all the powerful kings crush into dust
# Things left there to rust
# It's the word, the word, the word carries on
# And our thirst give birth to the search that we on
# Seeking solace with myths that promise
# If we just give our attention it will astonish it
# A bit of politics, splash of the supernatural
# Stitched together by syllables, weave a tapestry
# That's broad enough to span minds and generations
# Still it cannot be touched by much but contemplation
# You want to make a statement?
# Better you write a verse
# Want to create a nation?
# Better recite it first
# Preferably epic with no pen, let the mind collect it
# Practise it hundreds of times until it's time
# Perfected by the time they write it down
# They'll doubt that you're real
# Cos we're great at questioning other people's skill
# Yet we seek it still, the Mahabharata
# Virgil, Milton, Lucretius, the epic of Sundjata
# Gilgamesh
# Committed coffin text, yeah
# It's the blind bard we know best
# Is it cos your word was twinned to empires' wings?
# Or that we touched something deep within?
# Cos when you boil it down beyond mythology and God you find something
# That is just so human, do you not?
# A son in search of a father that he has lost
# A father trying to get back to his family at any cost
# A woman that's besieged by men with bad intentions
# And she does not want to be with them, but they won't accept it
# Cos there's men and gods, the pen and its gob
# There's a mind and a mouth that spout where you dare not
# The poet sings and speaks from streets to ancient Greece
# Defeat, then, is what you meet if competing is what you seek
# Whether the beat or lyre strings
# We are leviathans that speak sagas of this great species of hirelings
# Posing like we're highest kings
# To get as high as wings of God but we do not
# Do nothing but try a thing
# The poet sees how the falcons sees a view from the balcony
# No doubting he
# Pages are a alchemy
# And the magician is politician and prophet
# Premonition we got it
# Television and pocket couple queens
# That will keep us going flowing
# Yeah, we eat from poems
# If the teacher don't speak, how could we keep on knowing?
# What these questions to these answers are
# Curses and our blessings
# Confessions are just how deaf we are
# And obsessed with death, despite all our best attempts
# The Odyssean Underworld is the best we're left
# The same one from the book of the dead
# Who the myths, millennia hasn't put them to bed
# Philosophy is not the laws of motion, logic can't explain emotion
# So it makes sense, we come up with some other type of notion
# A myth is not a lie, it's a disguise from the truth
# So the wise can recite to the youth
# If the lines in our rhymes are to find any use
# It's the tries of our mind to decipher the clues
# Give my mind this thing called living
# Season the rhythms, turn of the earth to announce the beginning
# Look how we bounce on the rhythm
# Man could rap about all of the family
# Whole of your humanity, whole of the galaxy
# You want to talk about cars, that's fine
# Yes, you could say it is a chariot
# Carried on the wings of the night, even Zeus don't attack the skies
# Where the truth in the chapter lies
# I don't know, it's just a fact of life.
# The search of the journey, permanent purgatory
# Driven a Finca from Inca to Germany
# So what you gonna do? You gonna search?
# Or gonna stand on the side and rehearse?
# There's finding the time since your birth is so insignificant
# There's barely any worth
# Yeah, the heroes, faces are thousands
# If you listen you will hear what they're shouting
# They ain't telling you to listen to the doubting
# They're trying to get us ready for the outing
# But you would swear poets are mortal
# But we're not the same I assure you
# Cos we make words and portals, 26 letters and we will teleport you
# We're not the same, I assure you
# 26 letters and we will teleport you
# Why is the story told?
# What is the teller's mission?
# What is the ultimate source of our deepest intuition?
# Why does the audience come and why did they listen?
# The blind bard's vision
# Why is the story told?
# What is the teller's mission?
# What is the ultimate source of our deepest intuition?
# Why does the audience come and why did they listen?
# Blind bard's vision
# The blind bard's vision
# Blind bard's vision... #
HE MOUTHS