S4, Episode 8: Odysseuses

[00:00:00] Deborah Beck: Welcome back to Musings in Greek Literature. This is Episode 8, the last one of Season 4, which has been devoted to the character Odysseus. I am Professor Deborah Beck, and I’m very happy to be joined for our last episode by Professor Leslie Dean Jones. Um, those of you who are devoted fans of our series will remember that the first episode of this season Uh, was co hosted by our current chair, Professor Sean Gird, and it seems like a nice piece of Homeric Ring composition.

Then our last episode is going to be co hosted by our most recent chair, Leslie Dean Jones. So, um, before we continue, I’d like to invite Dr. Dean Jones just to say a little bit about herself, introduce herself, and whatever she’d like to say about her own teaching and research experience with the character Penthesius.

[00:00:52] Lesley Dean Jones: Well, my research has primarily been in the area of Greek medicine, Greek philosophy, but I have taught more often Greek literature, and I’ve been teaching at UT now for 37 years. And I think every year, that I’ve been teaching. I’ve taught one course in Greek literature in some way or another.

[00:01:14] Deborah Beck: That’s going to work out excellent for today because our plan for today is to offer kind of a retrospective over the course, over the plays in the course, um, Homer’s Odyssey, which is where we started.

And the sort of the consistent characteristics and qualities of Odysseus. that make him such an interesting character to think with and make him one of the most commonly portrayed characters in Greek mythology and Greek literature, or for that matter, going on to Latin literature and beyond. Dante, for example, in Dante’s Inferno, one of the characters in the underworld there is Odysseus.

So starting at the other end, starting at the very beginning of what we have attested for the story of Odysseus, Greek literature’s portrayal of him begins, as did our course, with Homer’s Odyssey, which is a sort of positive, heroic version of the character of Odysseus that sort of sets the baseline in time, Um, but it’s also kind of uncharacteristic of the bulk of later Odysseuses, which tend to be more negative, or at any rate more nuanced, than the Odyssey is.

Um, that was the subject of the first episode recorded by me and Dr. Gerd. Then we had three student episodes about Sophocles Ajax, which were recorded by Kristen, Kayla, and Megan. Um, as we remember in Sophocles play, Odysseus doesn’t like Ajax at all. Um, and Ajax disliked Odysseus so much that he tried to kill him, and that’s because, of course, um, Odysseus was awarded the arms of the dead Achilles, um, that Ajax wanted so desperately that when he didn’t get them, he tried to kill his Greek comrades.

despite that fact in the Ajax, Odysseus is a fundamentally sort of moral and decent guy in the sense that he defends Ajax’s right to a proper burial even though they hated each other when Ajax was alive. That being said, I think it’s also relevant in the context of the Ajax to, to remember that Odysseus’s cleverness and his deception is really put into perspective by the prologue, um, which features, um, Even greater deception.

And I think for a lot of our students, vindictiveness from the goddess Athena. So whatever Odysseus does is kind of dwarfed and contextualized by the tone that’s set by Athena at the beginning. Then when we got to Sophocles Philoctetes, about which we had episodes from Nicholas, Zach, and Caroline, um, Odysseus is just.

seems like a very amoral guy because he’s in favor of whatever will give him the results he wants, which is to fulfill the prophecy of the Trojan Seer Helenus for how the Greeks can defeat Troy by taking Philoctetes captive and taking him and his bow to Troy by force. So that they can end the war. So in all of these very different portrayals of the character of Odysseus, front and center are his nature, his deception in particular, and his cleverness, and the effect that those things have around him.

So Leslie, given that you’ve taught all of these texts a million times, do you have anything you want to add just to kind of the overview? Like what we’re dealing with in terms of how Odysseus appears in all of these different texts?

[00:04:25] Lesley Dean Jones: Yeah. Um, I think, you know, I, I was listening to the, the podcast you did with Sean and in it, you, you said the word that you use to describe Odysseus, liar or deceptive or whatever says what you think about him.

And I think sometimes Because he appears in literary portrayals, we forget that he is the trickster hero of myth. And many, many, many, and practically all myth, I think, has a trickster hero. So, I mean, there’s Loki, um, there’s Coyote in Native American, Brown Rabbit, Upna Pishtim in, um, Gilgamesh. And very often, the deception is beneficial to the collective.

So as with Prometheus, Prometheus is a trickster. And I think very often Odysseus deception is beneficial to the collective. I think that sometimes that’s missed. I have a different take on the Philoctetes than most people. I don’t think Odysseus is completely, is meant to be viewed completely negative.

Now, I’m not saying, I’m not rehabilitating him as a moral character, but I think one of the things that’s missed, and we’re directed to it fairly early in the play, I think, is that Philoctetes focuses on Odysseus for his hate and his revenge and his cursings, but in fact, the guilt is the Greeks. The guilt is a collective guilt, and when Neoptolemus tells the story that Odysseus wouldn’t give him the arms of his father back, the first thing Philoctetes says is, Well, what about Ajax?

Didn’t he stand up for you? But he never says to himself, Why didn’t Ajax come back and get me? Why did Achilles let them all sail on without me? And so sometimes Odysseus is used by the Greeks as a sort of a shield, as a sort of a sin eater. Because he is who he is, he’s allowed to go beyond the bounds of, What we would normally consider moral and we see that even in our own trickster hero, Captain Kirk in Star Wars, when in one of the films, you know, the character played by Kirstie Alley can’t beat the, the computer game.

And they said, the only person that’s ever done it is James T. Kirk. And she said, well, how did he do it? Well, he reprogrammed the computer.

[00:07:04] Deborah Beck: Yeah.

[00:07:04] Lesley Dean Jones: So I think that this idea of. Morality. Now, I think because he becomes a literary character, as, as time progresses, he does become more culpable for amorality. But I’m not so sure that Sophocles audience would have seen it like that.

[00:07:23] Deborah Beck: That’s a great point. Um, and I think it’s so, that’s one of our favorite things in the class actually was to read, read Greek aloud. And try to imagine what the performance would have been like for the contemporary audience, which, you know, we’re missing so much information that that’s really hard to do, but the students love doing it.

I’m also really glad that you brought up collective benefit of Odysseus’s trickery, because one of the things that I wanted to talk about today, because we started talking about this at the end of the class, and because it’s a nice way to kind of open up Odysseus for people to think about more on their own, is Other places and contemporary literature, uh, that Odysseus is represented.

I mean, we’ve said a million times, he’s one of the most prominent characters in ancient Greek and Roman mythology more generally, but there’s also lots of other Odysseuses just in this, in the fifth century when Sophocles was writing his plays that bring out sort of other genres. approach to Odysseus.

So, um, among contemporary playwrights and dramatic genres that were at the, happening on the Athenian stages at the same time as Sophocles plays that we read, Odysseus appears in several plays by Euripides, and one of them is the Cyclops, which is the only surviving example of the genre known as satyr play.

Um, so a Seder play would be performed at the end of a day of a dramatic festival, on which a single tragic playwright staged three tragedies, one of which might have been the Ajax or the Philoctetes, and then after those three tragedies, the last play would be a Seder play, and those were, um, burlesques.

on mythological themes, and what the Cyclops is about is, um, the encounter between Odysseus and the Cyclops, and it’s very closely based on their encounter in Book Nine of the Odyssey, where they wind up on the Cyclops island, and after various shenanigans, they end up shut up in his cave, and he’s trying to eat them all.

But he’s, he’s sort of shut them in there with a stone that’s too big for them to move. So Odysseus craftily gets them all out by having everybody kind of go underneath one of the, the sheep that live in the cave with, with the Cyclops. And then the Cyclops takes the stone away from the door. All the sheep leave and everybody escapes.

Similarly, um, we have a few fragments of an Odysseus, that is to say plural of Odysseus, which I absolutely love as a title, by the comic playwright, Crotinus. We don’t have any complete plays by Crotinus, but we have a bunch of fragments of this play. We have 27 titles. We have various fragments of various plays, and they were being performed at the same time in the mid fifth century to when we think that Sophocles, for example, Sophocles Ajax was performed.

The Philoctetes was much later, and we don’t know whether Crotinus was still alive, but for sure the Ajax and the plays of Crotinus were being, were contemporaries, um, and sort of like the Seder play. Crotinus wrote a lot of comic recastings of myth, um, like the Cyclops. Besides that, we can also sort of notice that Odysseus’s clever stratagem for escaping, where you go underneath the sheep, is a very popular image on surviving vase painting.

People love to paint that, and you can kind of see why, right? You look at a vase painting and there’s this sheep with this guy underneath, and it just looks like it would have been so fun to make that. as a work of art. And, you know, Leslie, as you say, that’s a kind of trickery that’s kind of different, not only because it benefits the collective, which it clearly does, and only a few people get eaten because they managed to escape instead of everybody getting eaten, which is what they’re facing if they don’t figure out how to leave that cave.

But there’s another difference too, I think, which is There’s a fundamental difference between sort of using your trickery or your cleverness to overcome a kind of big, dumb monster character like Polyphemus versus using it to try to get the better of your own Greek comrades, which at least to some extent is, is part of the stories in all of the texts that we read.

[00:11:13] Lesley Dean Jones: I don’t see the Philoctetes as quite so, so black and white. Because the only reason that they know about the prophecy from Helenus is that Odysseus caught him, and he’s described as Dolios by catching him, so he caught it. Helenus by Doss. So that’s trickery.

[00:11:36] Deborah Beck: Yeah.

[00:11:37] Lesley Dean Jones: So, and at this point, all the Greeks want to sack Troy.

The question is, to what extent is Philoctetes or is, is, is Odysseus justified in not considering Philip Tethys as a comrade because he’s working against what everybody in the Greek army wants. So if it’s okay for Odysseus to trick an enemy, And he thinks of, and again, you know, I’m just, this is from the trickster hero, amoral type, then if he views Philoctetes as working against what the collective want, is he justified in tricking him then?

[00:12:20] Deborah Beck: You raise a really interesting point, which is that the Philoctetes doesn’t speak explicitly about the sort of unsavory things that Achilles did in order to get people to Troy in the first place. It seems like, you know, We’re focusing on the specific qualities of each character that are the ones we want for our story.

Even though, as is always the case with Greek mythology, there’s lots of other stories that show, at minimum, a more complicated and sometimes a more paradoxical sort of set of conflicting characteristics. And I think, you know, a lot of what you’ve been saying really highlights one of the main questions that Odysseus character raises in the various places where we see him, which is, what do we mean by cleverness?

Like one of my students is writing a paper where the word wisdom is quite crapping up and I keep saying, what do you mean by wisdom? And I think the different words we use to talk about this person’s good at being smart in their head is really kind of a blank slate for us for thinking about, well, us as the audience and the storyteller too, how we feel about the ability to say one thing while meaning something else.

You can make your speech and your actual opinion look different. Well, one way that you can do that is you can make the weaker argument appear the stronger. And what that entails, that divergence between what we say and what we actually mean, what that entails and how it affects those around us. I think are matters of keen interest to most people, most of the time, which is partly what makes Odysseus so alluring and so good to think with.

Like we all want to be clever, right? We all want to be a smart person. Nobody wants to be the person who’s taken in by somebody else’s clever stratagem. But I, Odysseus is like right in there with, with that experience that we all have all the time and thinking about, you know, what is that? What does clever look like?

What is how, what does that like? For the people around Odysseus for the people with whom we live, how does it affect society more broadly as you were saying, there’s often a collective good. I think there’s a really interesting tension in the Odyssey in particular between the collective good for the society of Ithaca, which clearly.

is going astray in some very fundamental ways without Odysseus at the core of it. But at the same time, I don’t think that the Odyssey wants us to overlook this, the significant societal disruption that’s caused by the deaths of all of those suitors.

There’s some similarities in the ends of the Odyssey and the Philoctetes where either a god, in the case of the Odyssey, or perhaps a god, and perhaps Odysseus, come deus ex machina at the end of the Philoctetes. That’s a real contrast with the Age Act, where the humans fix it themselves. Yeah. Um, and no gods participate in the action at all after Athena and the prologue.

And I think that’s a really important reminder that how things end, whether it’s a play of Sophocles or anything else, a speech, a movie, an event in our own lives, is how it ends. Changes or effects at the minimum, affects how we feel about everything that happens before the end. In the same way, the beginning of something shapes our expectations and prologue of the Ajax and the conversation between Odysseus and Athena, in which Athena is so sort of seems almost bloodthirsty towards Ajax.

Shapes our response, not only to Odysseus character, but to all of the unfolding events that happen in the rest of the poem. And I’m glad, you know, since this is the last episode of our podcast, I’m, I’m glad to be thinking about all these different endings and how, how that affects our feeling or doesn’t really affect it about, about each of them.

To me, the end of the Ajax, where all these people who don’t like each other, they’re managed to put aside their differences in order to reach a consensus about honoring this, this hero who was so deeply flawed. I always find that very moving. The whole, I mean, that’s one of the reasons that the Ajax is one of my favorite plays is Ajax is a deeply unlikable guy.

And yet he’s very, he’s a very sympathetic, engaging character. You care about whether he gets buried. You care that all these bad things happen to him and you, and the speeches where he’s just horror stricken that he’s going to let the family down and in terms of how much honor they’ve had over time.

It’s To me, those are really, those have a really sort of palpable human connection to them. And I always am glad for Ajax that whatever else went wrong, at least everybody was able to come together at the end of the poem and say, yeah, I don’t like you, but we’re going to work together to bury Ajax because he deserves a good burial.

And then he gets buried.

[00:17:01] Lesley Dean Jones: Well, I think there’s something, I mean, You know, we don’t believe in the tragic flaw or whatever anymore, but I think there’s something in Titi’s, which is sympathetic, obviously, but also the more the play goes on, the less, I mean, it’s almost the less sympathetic he gets, right? I mean, in the end, Diop Thomas says, Oh, stop cursing.

Cursing everybody. And yes, he’s, you know, he’s suffered. Incredibly, he suffered incredibly, but he has the chance to get his foot healed and be a hero. But at one point he says something like, I would assume that Theatria Dionysius perish as I would be relieved of my suffering. And it’s like, well, that’s, you know, that’s And the chorus tell him you’re going overboard here, you know.

Well, Neoptolemus does too.

[00:17:56] Deborah Beck: Yeah, everybody does, absolutely. And the students were very struck by that. Is that even though Philoctetes suffering is so vividly acted out on the stage, in that incredibly moving scene where he’s just howling in pain, so that you get a real sense of what he’s gone through, that neither the chorus nor Neoptolemus You know, shies away from saying, you have a chance to make it so that, as you said earlier, everybody wins and you’re stuck in this, things are terrible and I’m not going to do anything to help myself.

And I, that was really interesting to me because I think that is a very realistic portrayal of a certain kind of just calcification that can happen when people have just overdosed on suffering. They cannot. They cannot transcend their suffering, or at least not right away. Because they’re so, they’re so trapped by it that they’re just like, that’s who they are.

[00:18:51] Lesley Dean Jones: But at one point, Philip T. T. ‘s even says, Neoptomus, I recognize you’re my friend, and you’re giving me the best advice. But I’m not going to take it right. In a way, I think that’s similar to the end of the Ajax. I think we see humans working it out, but as you pointed out, the problem is if that is the way it happens, then Philoctetes is deceived and that affects how we feel about what’s happening.

I think.

[00:19:20] Deborah Beck: For sure. Yeah.

Maybe we. Spend a few minutes before we conclude this episode and we conclude this season of the podcast, just sort of reflecting more broadly on our own experience as teachers with Odysseus. And I mean, I think for the same kinds of reasons that Odysseus appears in so many different stories, and with so many different kind of colorings to his character, sometimes he almost seems like a different character from one version to another.

Every time I teach a class or I spend time reading a text with Odysseus in it, I think I see something different. I mean, I feel like his deceptions look different to me depending on what’s happening in the world at the time. Sometimes I didn’t identify with Odysseus. Sometimes I identify with the people he deceives.

In that sense, Odysseus is like most complex fictional characters who look different to us at different times in our lives. And, you know, so if we reread the same book repeatedly over the course of our life, it looks different to us as a young person, as a middle aged person, as an older person, not just different in relation to different times.

Things that are going on in the world, which it certainly does, but also just ourselves as different people have their like, are there things that particularly stick in your mind as memorable experiences or incidents when you were teaching Odysseus in your classes? How does Odysseus work in your courses on moral agency and Greek tragedy?

That was definitely something I was wondering about when I was writing the notes for this.

[00:20:45] Lesley Dean Jones: Right. So, obviously, the PhiloTeachers, I’ve just finished teaching it, which is why all the topoi, uh, in my mind, but the thing that came up to this time, which I hadn’t really thought about before, was how much, although Odysseus was unwilling to go to Troy, right?

He was pretending to be insane and Palamedes through Telemachus in front of the plow. Right. So he was trying not to go to Troy. Once he’s there, he is the person that keeps it all on the straight and narrow. So when Agamemnon has that dream and for whatever reason, he says, let’s all go home and the Greeks say, yeah, let’s go home.

It’s Odysseus that drives them all back. It’s Odysseus who steals the Palladian because Troy won’t fall as long as the Palladian’s in Troy.

[00:21:38] Deborah Beck: The cult stature of Athena.

[00:21:40] Lesley Dean Jones: Right. And it’s Odysseus who does the Trojan horse. And of course, Odysseus has that spite against Palamedes because Palamedes revealed his deception about his insanity.

But when Palamedes is arguing for them all to go home, Odysseus puts the gold in his tent and says he was being bribed by Priam. So it’s sort of, it’s, it’s. One thing about Odysseus is, and this is one of the things he says in the Philoctetes, once he’s committed to a cause, he will do what is needed to win that cause.

And I think in a sense, his career at Troy is more about that side of him than the deception which comes from him. Uh, more in his journey homeward and his arrival in Ithaca.

[00:22:33] Deborah Beck: Absolutely. And I think, I think one of the things that’s important for us to keep in mind, and which I try to do in my classes, but I, I don’t always as much as I would like, is the earliest telling of Odysseus story, the Odyssey, is from, as you say, the sort of later part of the story, long after Troy has fallen, when he’s almost, when he’s on the verge of getting home and then is at home in Ithaca.

So in mythological time, that’s near the end of Odysseus story, but in literary time, it’s near the beginning. And so Sophocles in the Ajax, for example, is writing a play that’s clearly deeply involved with Homeric stories about Troy that were told earlier in literary history, but that, in the case of the Odyssey, happened later in mythological time.

And so there’s a lot of that kind of play in Greek tragedies that are about, um, things at Troy that happened before the Homeric epics. I think that’s one of the fun things about reading, uh, pieces of literature, not just one at a time, but in groups where we can see how the individual texts are talking to each other and how the authors are talking to each other.

And it’s incredibly frustrating. For example, that Euripides Cyclops is the only surviving satyr play and that we only have fragments of Cratinus’s Odysseus. I wish we knew more about that conversation involving Odysseus in particular because clearly kind of the coloring and the details of Odysseus’s character were one of the things that people loved to fiddle with and think about.

And it’s something that I like talking to my students about in many different kinds of classes. And I think these students that I had this semester really were very interested in thinking about why Odysseus does the things he does and how he justifies them to himself, how he justifies them to other people, how the other people respond to those things.

So, so I, I feel really pleased that they were able not only to read lots of Greek and to learn a lot from each other, which is something that they all said was one of their favorite things about the course. And I think they all enjoyed that from the podcasting too, that they enjoyed working together, you know, in the co hosting relationship.

And I certainly really enjoy co hosting with my colleagues because I always come away from these recording sessions, really impressed at all the cool things my colleagues know. And, and Odysseus has just been a great kind of linchpin for all of those kinds of work. So I’m looking forward to reading their final papers.

We’re recording this before the course is over, but by the time it’s released, the course will be over, grades will be submitted. We’ll be into summer vacation and you, Leslie, will be in a whole different chapter of your life.

[00:25:13] Lesley Dean Jones: Oh, this

[00:25:14] Deborah Beck: is, this is Leslie’s last semester teaching at UT after 37 years, which is.

You know, I think a welcome change for her, but not at all a welcome change for her colleagues who will really miss all of the thoughtful engagement and enthusiasm that she brings to pretty much everything that she does. So part of the reason I wanted to have Dr. Dean Jones as my co host is to say goodbye to her as a colleague in this kind of You know, public enduring way, uh, and just to have a chance to say how, how much I feel I’ve improved, uh, as a class assistant, as a colleague from, from working with her.

So thank you from myself and I know that my students who’ve been taught by you would say the same.

[00:25:59] Lesley Dean Jones: Well, I have learned a lot, both from my students and from you.

[00:26:03] Deborah Beck: Well, it’s been a real pleasure. I learned a lot from you about the Philoctetes, especially, I can tell you just taught it, but also about, you know, bringing all these plays into conversation with each other, um, and thinking about, you know, how best to bring these poems to life for our students, which is really what we’re here to do.

So I hope that the students have brought the material to life, which they presented to you in their episodes. I want to thank them. I want to thank the podcasting staff at the Liberal Arts Information Technology Services office at the University of Texas at Austin. And for this last episode, I especially want to thank Dr.

Dean Jones and to wish her all the best in her well deserved retirement.

[00:26:46] Lesley Dean Jones: Well, thank you. And thank you for inviting me. It’s been very enjoyable.