687. The Odyssey: Hero of the Trojan Horse (Part 1)

The episode opens with Russell Crowe reading the invocation of the Odyssey in Daniel Mendelsohn's translation, and the hosts frame the poem as a foundational text of Western culture — possibly even the source of the Sinbad cycle — timed to Christopher Nolan's film adaptation releasing the week of recording. Unlike Homer, Tom Holland tells the story chronologically, pulling in sources outside the Iliad and Odyssey for context ancient listeners would have known: Odysseus, the poor but cunning king of Ithaca and favorite of Athena, tried to dodge the Trojan War by feigning madness — plowing a beach with salt — until an ambassador placed baby Telemachus in front of the plow and forced him to swerve.

The homeward voyage goes wrong immediately. Odysseus sacks Ismarus, sparing only Maron, a priest of Apollo, whose absurdly strong wine becomes the crucial prop later; a nine-day storm off Cape Malea blows the fleet into a dimension of monsters. The crew nearly lose the will to go home among the lotus eaters. In the Cyclops' cave, Polyphemus eats six men before Odysseus gets him drunk on Maron's unwatered wine, gives his name as 'Nobody', drives a heated stake into his eye and escapes under the bellies of sheep — then fatally taunts the giant with his real name, drawing Poseidon's curse: he will come home late, hapless, alone, on a ship not his own.

The curse unspools. Aeolus bags the contrary winds, and within sight of Ithaca's hearth-smoke the crew open the bag looking for treasure and are blown all the way back. The cannibal Laestrygonians smash eleven of the twelve ships. Circe turns the scouting party into pigs until Hermes gives Odysseus the protective moly herb; after a year on her island Odysseus sails to the land of the dead, where the prophet Tiresias warns him above all not to touch the cattle of the sun, and Achilles' shade delivers what Dominic Sandbrook calls the most interesting moment in the poem — that he would rather be a living serf than lord of all the dead. Forewarned, Odysseus survives the sirens tied to his mast and loses six men to Scylla, but his starving crew barbecue the sacred cattle anyway. Zeus destroys the ship; Odysseus alone drifts nine days to Calypso's island, where Part 1 leaves him.

Throughout, the hosts read the monsters as artifacts of the age of Greek colonization: Herodotus placed the lotus eaters in North Africa, the Cyclops and Laestrygonians were identified with Sicily — where Adrienne Mayor's dwarf-elephant-skull theory offers a possible origin for the one-eyed giant — and Scylla and Charybdis with the whirlpools of the Straits of Messina, each episode dramatizing what could go wrong for settlers probing hostile western seas.