Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. What is a 3,000-year-old poem about gods and goddesses, monsters, shipwrecks? What could this possibly teach us here today in the present moment? The answer is... everything. The Odyssey is not just a work of art. It is the sum total of ancient wisdom. It was the means, the mechanism by which thousands of generations of young men and women were taught the lessons and the moral virtues of the ancient world. But with Christopher Nolan's incredible new movie and Emily Wilson's new translation, the Odyssey is back. And that's wonderful because it has so much to teach us. And that's what we are going to talk about in today's episode. Some of the most powerful and important lessons from the Odyssey, from the ancient world, from ancient literature that can help you get better here in your modern life.
Seneca 2,000 years ago in one of his letters is lamenting just people totally missing the point of the Odyssey. And I think it's fascinating to think that 2,000 years ago, people were having these debates about where was Troy? Where were the different islands? Did it actually happen or not? Just like today, we're like, is Homer really one person? Was he blind or not? And he was saying that this is not what it's about. Like, we're not supposed to be debating the trivia of the art, but we should be going to the essential...
questions of the art and that ultimately we should understand that Odysseus in his odyssey is a reflection of the human undergoing any kind of ordeal battling their sort of higher self and lower self you know the perils of hubris the impossibility of ever returning home he's saying like if what you're debating about the odyssey is not the philosophical questions then you're just engaging in culture war nonsense obviously he wouldn't have used that term and I think it's sad that it's devolved into sort of culture war nonsense but if if that's what you're fighting about then you're part of the problem there's like a lot of things to argue about in the odyssey and i there's a bunch of issues i would argue over interpretations and arguments that nolan's odysseus and odyssey are making not like because oh you have to be true to the text but But this choice versus that choice fundamentally changes the arc of the story. I'll give you a really good example. The premise in Nolan's Odyssey is that this sort of law of hospitality, how we treat strangers, how we treat others, we violate this at our peril. And so the tale of Polyphemus, the interaction with the Cyclops is so fascinating because, again, my children love this story, Odysseus. In the poem, he introduces himself as no man. He tells Polyphemus that his name is no man. So then when they blind Polyphemus and he's screaming to the other Cyclopses, which also don't exist in the movie, he's saying, they say, who hurt you? And he says, no one has hurt me or no man has hurt me. And they say, okay, well, if no one has hurt you.
Shut up. This isn't a problem. And then he goes away. And then Odysseus, having escaped, shouts out at him, hey. Actually, it wasn't no one that hurt you. It was me, Odysseus, sacker of cities that did it. And you'll know my fame. And so it's this moment of hubris and ego where Odysseus needs credit for what he inflicted on Polyphemus that sets in motion the central conflict of the book, which is he's cursed by the gods. So that's missing. And I think people will recognize that. But to me, the critical choice that Nolan makes is that they walk into the cave, they start to sense something is amiss, and then the Cyclops walks in and then begins eating them, right? So the Cyclops is indisputably the monstrous villain of the encounter. But in the poem and in the most retellings, Odysseus and the man walk into the cave.
see that it's full of sheep, slaughter the sheep and eat them. And then Polyphemus comes in and is enraged that someone has killed his sheep. And so it's actually Odysseus first who violates the law. And Polyphemus is, although monstrous and eats humans, somewhat righteous in his anger. And then Odysseus is cunning in his craftiness for getting out and then egotistical in claiming credit and then bringing the wrath of gods upon him. So it's like, obviously you have to simplify it in the movie, but I do think this is an essential simplification because first off, it makes it simple. And the whole point is that the Odyssey is complicated and it's hard to know.
who the good guy is, but also the idea that Odysseus just shoots Polyphemus with an arrow when he escapes and this is what makes the gods angry is really not what is the driving force of the Odyssey going forward. Odysseus doesn't want to go fight in the Trojan War. That's not something you see in this movie or in the Odyssey exactly. He tries to get out of it. And he actually claims that he's crazy at first. And only by the test that they prove that he's not crazy, he's like plowing his field. And they lay Telemachus down in front of him plowing his field. And when he stops to not run over his own son, that's how they realize that he's not actually crazy. Just the whole idea of this being this sort of insane war that shouldn't have happened in the first place, that he's sort of sucked into and fights in reluctantly because of this kind of pact that he'd made many years before. What's so lovely about Greek mythology and...
about philosophy, the more you know about it, the more it operates on all these other levels. Like this would be a modern analogy, but it's like, you can't watch Arrested Development one time. You've got to watch it like 30 times. And then you understand that it's operating on all these different levels and there are these callbacks. And so not only is the Odyssey something you should read and watch and read and watch again, but you should read multiple translations and then you have to read the other myths and then you have to read the poetry about it and the stories about it and the interpretations of it. What you start to get each time is just a slightly different understanding of it. And from that, you're able to consider these questions from all these.
different angles. And that each author has a different take on Odysseus, has a different take on Helen, has a different take on Polyphemus, as we're talking about, has a different take on Telemachus. You know, is Odysseus a hero or is he a villain? Is he both? Is Agamemnon a hero or a villain? Is Helen a hero or a villain? You know, was she kidnapped or did she fall in love? Or there's another version of it where she's like transported to Egypt. There's all these different versions of it. And so if we understand it more as like source material that people are riffing on over and over and over again, almost like a song sample, I think we understand a little bit more of what they're trying to do. And then the idea is each one
of these reads helps correspond to something ultimately in your own life this isn't just like debating what style of painting is best but this is like okay but what kind of person should i be and what you find is that ultimately all these things come down to some of the most fundamental questions in philosophy and in life like the trolley problem is really interesting in philosophy right this idea of if you do nothing the trolley runs over five people but if you pull this lever it runs over one person right that's the trolley problem but this is actually the choice that odysseus has to make between sylla and And he doesn't fully weigh it that much in the movie, but like between a rock and a hard place, or sometimes you'll hear people say Scylla and Charybdis as just meaning like a dilemma, like just a hard choice. But it's so much more than that. It's Odysseus has to choose between letting six of his men be destroyed for sure, or do they all go down in the whirlpool? And it's actually really interesting because in the movie, Nolan kind of...
has him trick the men into choosing for him. Like he kind of abdicates the moral choice, but as the band Rush would say, even if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. This is still, he's still the moral choice. So anyways, I just think it's so fascinating that you have this poem from 3,000 years ago, accidentally chancing upon, or not accidentally, but chancing on this moral question that philosophers are still debating to this day. There's something really trippy in the past where you can see yourself in it and you go back and you feel connected to it. And then there's other parts that are so inexplicable and impossible to fully understand. And I think you have to have both in your head at the same time. True. You know what? I'm going to give you another German word now. Ungeheimlich. It's the uncanny. That's the definition of the uncanny. Something that's...
both familiar and strange at the same time, like in a dream. Something that seems like, I kind of know that person, but I don't know them. And that's what history is like. Yeah, that's very true. I like even that it's a foreign country because people are people, right? So you travel to another country and they still do most of the same things they do, but then they have these cultural assumptions that are so different for ways of being. And you just go, oh, that's very different. And then it forces you to think about why you do the things that you do. Some of the things you go, that's a bad way of doing it. In other words, why do we do it the way that we do it? I'm writing a book on the sublime right now, and I have a chapter on pagan religions. And I got very deeply into Greek religion.
and the gods and their notion of religion and gods is so alien to us but it's so beautiful and it's actually something that you can think about in the present and apply to your life their idea is gods are not these living entities out there in the sky you know like we see in movies they're these kind of vibrating presence in nature that you feel kind of pass through you an energy that passes through you so that when Aphrodite passes through you it creates this kind of weird sexual energy in you but when Demeter passes through you it creates a whole different feeling or another god or Zeus or whatever there's a presence in the world that passes through you and takes hold of you and possesses you but this idea of being possessed by nature, by other forces outside of us, is actually, to me, very relevant in the future. I don't believe in Zeus. I don't worship Zeus, right? But there is something actually there. When you think about it, there is some truth to how they were describing the universe. Yeah, that is really interesting. Sorry, I didn't do that. No, no, no, it makes sense. And I think, yeah, sometimes we go, oh...
They can't really have believed these things because we are sort of projecting our modern cynicism backwards, but they did. Oh, very much so, very much so. Yeah, I describe in the book the Eleusinian mysteries and the actual route they take to go to Eleusis and the whole process. And I take you through it, and it's like this incredible drug experience, and they actually did have hallucinogenic drugs at the end, right? But the sense of being possessed by this god is very real. They believe it, and they take you on this journey where you actually think that you die.
Because they put you in the situation where you feel like you've died and everything is dark around you, etc. And then you're reborn. It's very dramatic and very powerful and very real. This is a slight aside, but I was telling my oldest the story of Odysseus. I had this weird experience. I'm telling him the story of the Cyclops. And the Cyclops asks Odysseus what his name is. And he says, my name is No Man. And so I can watch him sort of note that. And then I'm telling the whole story. And then you get to the punchline of, who did this to me? And he says, No Man. Or who did this to you? He says, No Man.
He just starts cracking up. Like, he gets the joke. He's laughing very, very hard. And it was this moment. It's like, here's this, what, three, four, several thousand-year-old joke that's slamming as if I just came up with it right then. And the timelessness of that. And so, so many parts of the Odyssey are inexplicable, you know, as he gets there. Not to spoil the ending, but, you know, there's just this sort of moment at the end where he just, you know, murders with his bare hands like a hundred people. And he's just like, of course he did, right? You know? Doesn't he kill the suitors? Well, he and his son tell him because they slaughter them. You know, it's a very brutal ending, which I had to skip over. But the point is... I mean, to your son. Yes, yes. The point is, some parts...
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You might not want to be Odysseus, but you also, the question is, Odysseus is the only survivor of all the people who leave. So everyone in his ambit dies in the course of his attempt to get back to Ithaca. One thing to say, I suppose, about all of this is that, and that again, obsesses people like us, is that there's no progress in all of this, which is very strange. I mean, you'd think, because we're talking about things that were written a very long time ago, and if we think that they're really intelligent, as we do, and deeply perceptive, as we do, the question is, why does it have to keep... getting repeated over and over again. Why does it never seem to catch fully? So why does it have to keep getting reinvented? I mean, I don't have the answer to it, but one of the great experiences of my whole life was when I was quite young in my early 20s. I went to Southern France and went to one of those caves, Font de Gaume, I think it was called, that have Paleolithic paintings on the walls. I've never got over it. It must have been in the early 1970s. I never got over the sense that those paintings are, there's been no improvement in painting, as it were. There's been an infinite number of fantastically interesting things that are done by Picasso, by Rembrandt, by Vermeer, by Chinese painters and so forth. There's a million different...
you can do these things and great artists keep inventing the ways of doing them but there's no way that you can say that the paintings in the wall 25 000 years ago 30 000 years ago are worse than the paintings that were done by picasso so what the hell does that mean how is it possible i mean because in everything else that we care about that involves thinking hard i want to if i have a gallbladder problem i want someone who is an expert on the gallbladder from late last night i don't want someone who had the idea of the gallbladder from 500 years ago god help me yeah because there's been progress there yeah But no progress in the things that we most care about, we, about art, about philosophy. How is it possible? There's a dark energy in human nature that we have not managed to isolate and remove. And every time we think that it's gone is precisely when we're most surprised by it. And the flip side of that is also true, which is there is a brilliance in human nature, in the capacity to think, in the capacity to represent, that never gets extinguished. That doesn't get better, but it doesn't go away. No matter what happens, the flame keeps coming up.
Odysseus is not a hero. He is a man to be pitied. He is tragic and flawed. His 20-year journey home, we find it inspiring, but we miss what he does almost the second he gets home, which is that he leaves again. He finally makes it back to Ithaca. He makes it here.
And what does he do? He almost immediately thereafter leaves to go on a series of raids to replenish his coffers. Odysseus is not a tragic figure because he is cursed by the gods. Odysseus is a tragic figure because he has cursed himself. He is endlessly restless. He can never, ever, ever be still. Actually, when you read the Tennyson poem, Ulysses, you get a sense of this. He says, I cannot rest from travel. The whole poem is about him sort of handing the reins over to his son, Telemachus, because he's going to travel again. How dull it is to pause, he says, to make an end, to rest unburnished.
not to shine in use he is a machine he is human doing not human being right in the poem he says you know to my son who i leave this kingdom to you're better than me you're wiser than me he envies his son because his son can be still his son can be king not a wanderer. And the Stoics pitied these kinds of people. Seneca, most of all, he talked about how many people travel not unlike the man who is flipping his pillow over and over again, trying to find the cool side as he tosses and turns and is unable to sleep. The Stoics understood that many people, when they travel, are traveling to flee themselves. Too many of us in our travels are running from something. Too many of us in our ambition are hoping that on the other side of a hill, on the other side of some accomplishment, we'll finally feel good, we'll finally feel sated. But we won't. We are subjecting ourselves to the same torture that Odysseus subjected himself to. It's worse than what the gods can inflict on us.
When Marcus Aurelius says that life is warfare and a journey far from home, he is describing, again, the tragic nature of his fate as the emperor. And that is the cautionary tale of the Odyssey, something we might miss in the first readings. But as we go over it over and over again, we start to see that, yeah, we wouldn't want to trade places with Odysseus. In fact, we don't want to be anything like him. Look, it would be wonderful if life was easy. It would be wonderful if things went the way that we planned, if we never ran into obstacles, if the gods were always on our side. But that's not how it goes in life. It's not how it goes in the Odyssey either. One of my favorite poems is a poem about the Odyssey called Ithaca by C.P. Cavafy. And there's this part at the end where it says, Keep Ithaca always in your mind, because arriving there is what you're destined for. But don't hurry the journey. Better if it lasts for years, so you're old by the time you reach the island. Wealthy with all you've gained along the way, not expecting Ithaca to make you rich. It says, Ithaca gave you a marvelous journey, and without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now. And then it ends, if you find her poor, Ithaca won't have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience. You'll have understood by then what these Ithacas mean. I guess that this is a long way of saying, like, the journey is the destination. It's what we learn along the way. It's what we learn about ourselves. That is what we're actually after. When the Stoics talked about how the obstacle is the way, they didn't mean that you would always arrive at the Ithaca you hoped for. It might take longer than you expect. It might throw you wildly off course. You might end up somewhere very different than you ever would have liked to go. This is, of course, what happens to Zeno.
is traveling in the same Mediterranean as Odysseus, and he suffers this shipwreck. He washes up in Athens, not his destination. He loses one career, but he gains another. He becomes a philosopher. And later he would say, you know, I made a great fortune when I suffered a shipwreck.
because it drove him to philosophy. So sometimes we think Ithaca, and this is Ithaca behind me, sometimes we think Ithaca is one thing, or we think Ithaca is supposed to be a certain way, but we don't know. We're not in control. The gods are in control. Fate is in control. Some timing we don't understand is in control. And so that's a good thing, or rather we can make it a good thing in how we respond to it and who we become as a result of it, and most of all, of course, what we learn from it.
One of the best translators of the Odyssey is T.E. Lawrence. Now, what qualifies him to translate the Odyssey? Is it his education in the classics at Oxford or is it his life experiences? He has this great quote where he says, you know, I have hunted wild boars. I have watched wild lions. He says, I have sailed the Aegean and sailed many ships. He says, I have lived with pastoral people. I have built boats and I have killed many men. His point was that the Odyssey wasn't just this work of literature to him. It was a set of experiences, many of which he'd had, which of course informs his understanding of the text and his understanding of what the word mean.
language and another. We're told that with his philosophy teachers, Arian and Rusticus, that Marcus Aurelius isn't content to allow them to remain mere pen and ink philosophers, meaning he wanted them to have real-world experiences. He wanted them to be engaged in politics and life. and business and i think this is essential for all of us we can't just remain with our books we can't just remain with our stories we have to be out there in the world we have to be engaged in the world this is something that plutarch talks about too who is both a writer and a politician and a priest at the temple of apollo he would say that it might seem strange to some but it was not so much by the words that he came to an understanding of things but it was his experiences that helped him come to understand what the words mean i think by traveling here i have a deeper understanding of the odyssey of course having my own experiences leading people having my own experiences with adversities and difficulties in my life having met some great men and women in my life you come to understand the ideas in the odyssey you come to understand the ideas in the text you come to understand the ideas from the stoics in the philosophy better which is why we have to remain a student of them which is why we also have to remain a disciple of experience we have to be going out and experiencing and learning new things and coming back to the text and of course bringing our texts to those very things
One of the most famous stories in the Odyssey has Odysseus lashing himself to the mast so that he won't be tempted by the sirens. The sirens being there on the rocks, not just singing beautiful songs, but telling people what they want to hear. So Odysseus is tempted by this. He wants to hear it, but he doesn't want to crash. So he lashes himself to the mast. He plugs the ears of his men and he tells him, no matter how much I cry or struggle, don't let me go. Don't listen to me until we are well past.
the sirens. Now, a couple of years ago, I was interviewing the behavioral psychologist, Dr. Katie Milkman on the Daily Stoke Podcast. We actually talked about this very example because she said it was one of the first examples in ancient literature of a forced commitment. You know you're going to do a thing or you know you're not going to do a thing. And so you find a device that forces you to do it or prevents you from doing it, right? You don't buy the Oreos or you lock the Oreos in a cabinet and you throw away the key. And actually, this has become known as an Odysseus pact or a Ulysses pact. And that's when you make an agreement with someone where you create a device that in some way limits you from doing
doing the thing that you might otherwise be inclined to do. And it's actually a pretty ingenious, if not rudimentary bit of basic psychology, right? You know you're tempted to eat something, so you don't buy it, or you lock it up, or you give it away, right? I heard someone say that what you can do when you order an entree at a restaurant, you don't eat all of it, is you tell the waiter, hey, I want you to cook this item, then box up half of it for me to take home, and serve me the other half. That's the same version of this very ancient device, right? There's apps that block the internet on your phone. A bunch of writers I know use them. The idea being, I'm going to be tempted, and I don't want to be tempted.
So I'm going to take away that temptation. I'll give you one in my own life. I don't have social media on my phone. It's on my wife's phone because I know I shouldn't be using it because I know it'll only get me into trouble. It'll only distract me. So if I want to use it, I have to ask permission from someone else. And I can tell her, hey, don't give it to me today. Don't let me do it today. I know other people, their assistant controls the password. But the point is, this is a, the reason the Odyssey has endured is because of little examples like this. It is this strange epic poem about not being lured by these mythical monsters. And yet at the same time, it's something imminently relatable to all of us. Look, the Stoics talk a lot about discipline and it's good to have it. But part of discipline is also knowing when your discipline is going to...
to be overrun when it is no match for the temptation you're going to be set against. Odysseus leaves Troy after 10 years of war. Does he have any idea what lies ahead? Does he have any idea what the gods have in store for him? 10 more years of obstacles and difficulties, 10 long years of travel, that he would come so close to the shores of his homeland, of his queen, of his young son, and then at the last minute he'd be blown back again. He'd face storms and temptations, a cyclops, deadly whirlpools, a six-headed monster, that he'd be held captive, that he'd suffer the wrath of Poseidon. Could he have known in those dark moments as he was suffering that back home
in Ithaca that his rivals were circling, trying to take his kingdom and his wife. It's unimaginable. How did he get through it? How did he make it home despite it all? The Odyssey is a story about creativity, of course, and craftiness and leadership and discipline and courage. It's a story of warning against hubris. It's a story about the power of the gods and the traditions. But I think most of all, the Odyssey is a story about...
perseverance. Persistence was Odysseus in the Trojan War, right? Trying everything until he finally gets something that works, until he chances upon the idea of the Trojan horse, right? But 10 years of trials and... tribulation of disappointments and mistakes without giving in having to check your bearings every day not just not inching closer to home but but getting further away knowing that back at home there are all these problems laying in wait for you enduring the punishments of the gods doing everything it takes to make it back home there's obviously at some point when persistence bleeds in to perseverance Persistence is hammering away at some difficult problem. Perseverance is something larger, something deeper, something more profound. It's the long game. It's not what happens in round one, but round after round after round as you're burying people, as you're getting older, as you're getting more and more exhausted. That, to me, is the primary message of the Odyssey. Because life isn't about one obstacle. Life is about obstacle after obstacle after obstacle. And that's what Homer is showing us about Odysseus, that we are all on our own kind of Odyssey, right? Persistence is an action. Perseverance is a kind of will. One is energy. One is endurance, right? It's the famous line in the Tennyson poem,
Not yielding. That's what endurance is. I think about this famous summary of the teachings of Epictetus. He says, persist and resist, right? That's what Odysseus is doing in the Odyssey. I think people are too soft these days. We give up too easily. We tell ourselves that something is impossible because it's hard, because it's taking a long time, because vested interests are working against. But Odysseus doesn't do this. He's stout-hearted. He's intense. He never gives up. He's always looking for a way forward. He's willing to put up with...
setbacks that last for years and even when he's retreating even when he is blown wildly off course there's always the final direction that he's never losing sight of and that determination that perseverance that's what the odyssey is about and ultimately that's what stoicism is about The violence at the end of the Odyssey never sat super well with me. Odysseus gets home, he finds the suitors have overrun his house, he proves that he's Odysseus, and then what does he do? He hides all the weapons, and then he and his son, Pelamachus, kill them. He kills not just the hundreds of suitors, but all the servants who cavorted with them. But it is shockingly violent and bloody and vicious. And I think fundamentally un-stoic. And we know this because a similar thing happens to Marcus Aurelius. Marcus has this chronic health condition, so rumors spread that the emperor has died. And his most trusted general, Ovidius Cassius, names himself emperor, which puts Marcus's children and his wife in danger. It puts the future of the empire in danger. I tell the story in The Obstacle as well.
we know how a Stoic would respond to this. And it's not with violence. Marcus does have to deal with it, but he tells his men that he wants to use this as an opportunity to teach future generations that there's a right way to deal even with civil wars. And Cassius is assassinated. We're actually told this happens over Marcus's objections, that he weeps when he's brought the head of his enemy because he has been deprived of the chance of granting him clemency. And then we're told that Marcus writes a letter to the Roman Senate and says that he wants everyone involved in this pardon. He says, do not stain my reign in their blood. He says, may it never happen.
There's this quote in Meditations about how the best revenge is to not be like that. And we find that Odysseus, over the course of his travels and then his arrival home, he has hardened. He has lost a part of himself. He has become vicious. He has become brutal. He has become cruel. He's become desensitized. And that's how, sort of like that, he's able to order the killing of dozens and dozens of people. He stains his palace in blood. He stains his reign in blood. And so I've always thought of that scene. How could Odysseus have handled it differently? Obviously, you can't let people walk all over you. People have to be held accountable for their excesses and their abuses, and in his case, for enormous expenses they levied on the kingdom. But there was probably...
some punishment between letting them walk all over you with impunity and murdering them in what is effectively cold blood.