A Long and Difficult Journey, or The Odyssey: Crash Course Literature 201 - YouTube (2)

“And so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband, her white arms round him pressed as though forever.”

Some ancient commentators believed the poem should end right there like any good romance would,

with Odysseus and Penelope blissfully reunited, but it doesn't.

See Odysseus and a couple of his friends, with a big assist from Athena, have slaughtered all the suitors,

and the serving maids, and that's a problem, because this isn't The Iliad.

They aren't at war.

The Iliad is a poem of war, and it's main concern is kleos, which means glory or

renown achieved on the battlefield that guarantees you a kind of immortality because your deeds

are so amazing that everyone's going to sing about you forever.

Achilles didn't get to go home. He had two choices:

he could stay and fight and win glory, or he could go home and live a long and quiet life.

In The Iliad, Achilles went for glory.

But The Odyssey is about the alternative.

It's about what we do after a war, how we put war away.

Odysseus isn't particularly good at this.

He's sort of an ancient example of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

He's been through so much that he doesn't know how to adjust to peacetime;

his response to young men taking over his dining hall and barbecuing all of his pigs is mass slaughter.

And the slaughter of the suitors leads to their relatives coming to try to slaughter Odysseus, and if Athena hadn't descended from Olympus, conveniently,

and put a stop to it, pretty soon there would have been no one left on Ithaca alive.

And that's a sobering final thought:

if it weren't for divine intervention, the humans in this story might have continued that cycle of violence forever.

The Odyssey is a poem set in peacetime, but it reminds us that humans have never been particularly good at leaving war behind them.

Next week we'll be discussing another story with lots of sex and violence and Greeks: Oedipus.

Thanks for watching. I'll see you then.

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