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Sirens screaming, a warrior, driven by revenge, | 0:00:02 | 0:00:06 | |
a son in search of a father and the trickiest journey home you could ever imagine. | 0:00:06 | 0:00:13 | |
This, ladies and gentlemen, is not some 21st-century urban rhyme. | 0:00:13 | 0:00:18 | |
It's one of the greatest stories ever told. | 0:00:18 | 0:00:21 | |
Homer's Odyssey has been ricocheting around the world for thousands of years... | 0:00:21 | 0:00:24 | |
..capturing the imagination of millions of people along the way | 0:00:26 | 0:00:30 | |
and it all started right here in the Greek shrine of Delphi, | 0:00:30 | 0:00:34 | |
when "The Blind Bard", Homer, travelled here from his far-away home island and stood up for | 0:00:34 | 0:00:40 | |
the first time to share his masterpiece with the expectant crowd. | 0:00:40 | 0:00:44 | |
Except it's not like that at all. | 0:00:45 | 0:00:47 | |
We know almost nothing about who composed The Odyssey, | 0:00:47 | 0:00:50 | |
when it was first composed or even when it was first sung. | 0:00:50 | 0:00:53 | |
Yet despite all of that, for almost 3,000 years, | 0:00:53 | 0:00:56 | |
it has exerted tremendous influence over world literature, | 0:00:56 | 0:00:59 | |
inspiring writers from Virgil and Dante to Margaret Atwood, | 0:00:59 | 0:01:02 | |
James Joyce and Ralph Ellison | 0:01:02 | 0:01:05 | |
and now me. | 0:01:05 | 0:01:06 | |
I want to know, what is it about this work that has made it such a classic | 0:01:08 | 0:01:12 | |
and why its origins have been shrouded in mystery for so long? | 0:01:12 | 0:01:15 | |
The ancients believed that The Odyssey was a true story and that | 0:01:17 | 0:01:20 | |
its main character, Odysseus, really existed. | 0:01:20 | 0:01:23 | |
But what do we actually know about this ground-breaking text | 0:01:23 | 0:01:27 | |
and its mysterious author? | 0:01:27 | 0:01:29 | |
In this film, I'm following in the footsteps of the Odyssey, | 0:01:29 | 0:01:33 | |
across the Mediterranean, as part of my quest | 0:01:33 | 0:01:35 | |
to compose my response to Homer's epic call. | 0:01:35 | 0:01:39 | |
Why is the story told? | 0:01:39 | 0:01:41 | |
What is the teller's mission? | 0:01:41 | 0:01:42 | |
What is the ultimate source of our deepest intuition? | 0:01:42 | 0:01:45 | |
To create this work, | 0:01:47 | 0:01:48 | |
I'll need to find out exactly what we know about its mysterious author... | 0:01:48 | 0:01:52 | |
We have the name, we have the poems, | 0:01:52 | 0:01:54 | |
and we have lots of stories, | 0:01:54 | 0:01:56 | |
but these immediately show us that people are speculating. | 0:01:56 | 0:01:59 | |
..come face-to-face with some of the main characters from the story... | 0:01:59 | 0:02:03 | |
This is the so-called mask of Agamemnon. | 0:02:03 | 0:02:06 | |
..hear how The Odyssey might have sounded to its first audiences... | 0:02:06 | 0:02:11 | |
HE SPEAKS ANCIENT LANGUAGE | 0:02:11 | 0:02:14 | |
..and discover how Homer's works helped the ancients | 0:02:15 | 0:02:18 | |
understand both life and death. | 0:02:18 | 0:02:21 | |
You're cutting into the heart of a really fundamental question, | 0:02:22 | 0:02:25 | |
aren't you, about what it means to be human? | 0:02:25 | 0:02:29 | |
The central theme of The Odyssey is | 0:02:29 | 0:02:31 | |
the irresistible urge to return home. | 0:02:31 | 0:02:34 | |
And so, to help complete my new song, | 0:02:34 | 0:02:37 | |
my journey culminates on the island of Ithaca, | 0:02:37 | 0:02:40 | |
the homeland which Odysseus spent so long striving to return to. | 0:02:40 | 0:02:44 | |
How will seeing the world of the Odyssey first-hand influence the way | 0:02:46 | 0:02:50 | |
I craft this 21st-century response? | 0:02:50 | 0:02:54 | |
This is my Odyssey. | 0:02:54 | 0:02:56 | |
The ability of language to change people's lives has always struck me as magical. | 0:03:03 | 0:03:08 | |
# Two households, both alike in dignity... # | 0:03:08 | 0:03:12 | |
It's one of the reasons that I became a hip-hop artist. | 0:03:12 | 0:03:15 | |
It's long been clear to me that poetry, | 0:03:15 | 0:03:18 | |
literature and music are all interconnected. | 0:03:18 | 0:03:21 | |
I've always loved the power of words and the beauty of poetry and | 0:03:21 | 0:03:24 | |
that's been exemplified with my work with the Hip-hop Shakespeare Company, | 0:03:24 | 0:03:28 | |
but there is one poet who's one of the daddies of the whole tradition | 0:03:28 | 0:03:31 | |
and that is, of course, Homer. | 0:03:31 | 0:03:33 | |
I didn't get the chance to study much of The Blind Bard's work | 0:03:35 | 0:03:38 | |
when I was at school here in Tufnell Park. | 0:03:38 | 0:03:42 | |
But right around the corner is a bookshop specialising in texts from | 0:03:42 | 0:03:46 | |
around the ancient world. | 0:03:46 | 0:03:48 | |
This is a treasure trove, which, as you can see, it's pretty big, | 0:03:48 | 0:03:51 | |
but the Homer that you're after is down here. | 0:03:51 | 0:03:53 | |
-That's a lot of Homer! -Enjoy. | 0:03:53 | 0:03:56 | |
It really makes you think about how many different translations there's been, | 0:03:56 | 0:03:59 | |
and for how long and, for some reason, the old dusty books, | 0:03:59 | 0:04:04 | |
even though I know they were printed recently, they kind of... | 0:04:04 | 0:04:06 | |
they feel almost like secret. | 0:04:06 | 0:04:09 | |
The Odyssey is an epic poem spread across 24 books that appears to date | 0:04:09 | 0:04:14 | |
back to the eighth century BC. | 0:04:14 | 0:04:16 | |
It begins with the lines "Sing, muse, | 0:04:18 | 0:04:20 | |
"of the man of many ways | 0:04:20 | 0:04:22 | |
"who suffered so much after he destroyed the citadel at Troy." | 0:04:22 | 0:04:27 | |
Words that immediately grab you and set up the grand nature of the story | 0:04:27 | 0:04:30 | |
that is about to unfold. | 0:04:30 | 0:04:33 | |
Though The Odyssey and another epic poem about the Trojan War called | 0:04:35 | 0:04:38 | |
The Iliad are most often attributed to the poet Homer, | 0:04:38 | 0:04:42 | |
we're still pretty much in the dark about who he was or whether the same | 0:04:42 | 0:04:46 | |
person even wrote both texts. | 0:04:46 | 0:04:48 | |
So what do we actually know about this literary genius? | 0:04:49 | 0:04:53 | |
We have the name, we have the poems | 0:04:53 | 0:04:55 | |
and we have lots of stories from antiquity about who Homer was, | 0:04:55 | 0:04:58 | |
but these stories immediately show us that, in antiquity, people were speculating | 0:04:58 | 0:05:03 | |
about Homer, trying to imagine him, rather than knowing facts. | 0:05:03 | 0:05:07 | |
But what interests me is that through these stories, | 0:05:07 | 0:05:10 | |
we can get a sense of what Homer meant to people in antiquity, | 0:05:10 | 0:05:14 | |
the fact that he was a traveller, that he was poor, | 0:05:14 | 0:05:17 | |
that he was disabled, he couldn't see, but he had this great poetic vision. | 0:05:17 | 0:05:21 | |
So, in terms of The Iliad and The Odyssey and the Homeric epics, | 0:05:21 | 0:05:24 | |
do they have any connections to motifs or ideas or influences from | 0:05:24 | 0:05:28 | |
other cultures and other epics? | 0:05:28 | 0:05:30 | |
Well, this is very interesting. So one thing was when finally Akkadian was the cipher, | 0:05:30 | 0:05:36 | |
the cuneiform script of the Babylonians, | 0:05:36 | 0:05:39 | |
and the epic of Gilgamesh came back to light, and lo and behold, | 0:05:39 | 0:05:43 | |
there were many similarities with the Homeric poems. | 0:05:43 | 0:05:46 | |
Dating from at least 1,000 years before the works of Homer, | 0:05:46 | 0:05:50 | |
the epic of Gilgamesh is the central text of ancient Babylonia, | 0:05:50 | 0:05:54 | |
present-day Iraq. | 0:05:54 | 0:05:57 | |
Throughout its 12 books, we see stories of a mighty king | 0:05:57 | 0:06:00 | |
battling monsters as part of a series of epic journeys | 0:06:00 | 0:06:03 | |
to learn the truth about himself. | 0:06:03 | 0:06:05 | |
So this really baffled people, | 0:06:07 | 0:06:09 | |
because the epic of Gilgamesh was composed a lot earlier, | 0:06:09 | 0:06:12 | |
somewhere else, in the Near East and also in a completely different language | 0:06:12 | 0:06:17 | |
and yet we have similes of the lines, | 0:06:17 | 0:06:19 | |
we have bigger stories such as the descent into the underworld. | 0:06:19 | 0:06:23 | |
These are motifs that repeat in different cultures, | 0:06:23 | 0:06:27 | |
partly because they're interesting to people belonging to different cultures. | 0:06:27 | 0:06:31 | |
So, do you believe that The Iliad and The Odyssey are the work of one single author? | 0:06:31 | 0:06:36 | |
Well, that's a difficult question. | 0:06:36 | 0:06:37 | |
They are well structured. | 0:06:37 | 0:06:39 | |
They have an incredibly complex and well thought out architecture | 0:06:39 | 0:06:44 | |
and they were clearly meant for re-performance. | 0:06:44 | 0:06:47 | |
Then the question is, did they improve in re-performance, | 0:06:47 | 0:06:50 | |
or was there a work of an original genius that was then diluted | 0:06:50 | 0:06:55 | |
and became worse in the course of time? | 0:06:55 | 0:06:58 | |
-And that is where scholars argue a lot. -OK. | 0:06:58 | 0:07:02 | |
That's what scholars in general think, but what do you think? | 0:07:02 | 0:07:07 | |
I'm quite open-minded about this. I do think that the Greeks | 0:07:07 | 0:07:12 | |
didn't want these poems changed too much. | 0:07:12 | 0:07:15 | |
What we have is pretty uniform, | 0:07:15 | 0:07:17 | |
but the tradition out of which they emerge is vast. | 0:07:17 | 0:07:22 | |
When The Odyssey was first composed over 2,500 years ago, | 0:07:23 | 0:07:28 | |
it wasn't through the written word the audience first heard it. | 0:07:28 | 0:07:31 | |
It was through public performances of travelling bards throughout Greece. | 0:07:31 | 0:07:36 | |
In many ways, this tradition is alive and well with today's performance poets. | 0:07:36 | 0:07:42 | |
# The galaxy stars surround you | 0:07:42 | 0:07:43 | |
# Space dust illustrates every step you walk | 0:07:43 | 0:07:46 | |
# The air that you dread to breathe, is the air that you make. # | 0:07:46 | 0:07:49 | |
Tonight, I'm in East London, | 0:07:49 | 0:07:51 | |
checking out some up-and-coming young talent | 0:07:51 | 0:07:53 | |
at an event organised by my friend, the writer and poet Anthony Anaxogorou. | 0:07:53 | 0:07:59 | |
# Don't you dare duck, because you were born to rise. # | 0:07:59 | 0:08:01 | |
AUDIENCE APPLAUDS | 0:08:01 | 0:08:03 | |
What do you think about the relationship between the spoken word | 0:08:05 | 0:08:07 | |
performance poetry and hip-hop or rapping? | 0:08:07 | 0:08:10 | |
Well, I think that's essentially what the debate comes down to - | 0:08:10 | 0:08:12 | |
different styles of poetics and nuance and references. | 0:08:12 | 0:08:15 | |
Obviously, there is a lot of hip-hop that is very pun heavy, | 0:08:15 | 0:08:19 | |
and hip-hop has its own distinct style of using poetry. | 0:08:19 | 0:08:24 | |
Hip-hop as a poetic medium is constantly being undermined by those | 0:08:24 | 0:08:29 | |
who deem more traditionalist styles of poetry as being acceptable. | 0:08:29 | 0:08:33 | |
But, when we look at something like The Odyssey, for example, | 0:08:33 | 0:08:36 | |
those epics were originally composed as songs, | 0:08:36 | 0:08:38 | |
essentially performed as the popular songs of their day. | 0:08:38 | 0:08:41 | |
The spoken world held a kind of reverence that we might not | 0:08:41 | 0:08:46 | |
necessarily see today and that's really what poetry's supposed to do, | 0:08:46 | 0:08:50 | |
to reactivate language and give it back to people | 0:08:50 | 0:08:54 | |
in a more exciting way. | 0:08:54 | 0:08:55 | |
She never likes to go back or look herself in the eye | 0:08:55 | 0:08:59 | |
Never learnt to move her body to a rhythm or forgive. | 0:08:59 | 0:09:03 | |
Just as people here listen to these poets tonight, | 0:09:03 | 0:09:06 | |
the first audiences of The Odyssey would have sat around taking in | 0:09:06 | 0:09:09 | |
performances quite like this. | 0:09:09 | 0:09:12 | |
From these beginnings, The Odyssey has echoed around the world, | 0:09:12 | 0:09:16 | |
inspiring writers and artists to dream up their own versions. | 0:09:16 | 0:09:19 | |
I first discovered this work through Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man, | 0:09:21 | 0:09:26 | |
which takes Homer's plot as its main structure, a device that is used, | 0:09:26 | 0:09:31 | |
too, in James Joyce's Ulysses... | 0:09:31 | 0:09:33 | |
..or even in the Cohn Brothers film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? | 0:09:34 | 0:09:37 | |
I think we should start quiet and build probably with... | 0:09:37 | 0:09:40 | |
..vocal and cello, I think... | 0:09:41 | 0:09:44 | |
..is my instinct. | 0:09:44 | 0:09:45 | |
Responses like these have inspired me to write my own new song | 0:09:45 | 0:09:49 | |
as a homage to Homer. | 0:09:49 | 0:09:51 | |
The impact of The Odyssey has been so great that when you think of The Odyssey, a poem about Odysseus, | 0:09:52 | 0:09:57 | |
it's become a byword for a challenge, a saga, trials and tribulations, | 0:09:57 | 0:10:01 | |
a journey. All of those things, | 0:10:01 | 0:10:03 | |
The Odyssey evokes and I think so many people have tried to recreate | 0:10:03 | 0:10:07 | |
or been influenced by it because it's been important for so long. | 0:10:07 | 0:10:11 | |
It was already an important text in the ancient world | 0:10:11 | 0:10:13 | |
and it has continued to hold that power and I think | 0:10:13 | 0:10:16 | |
there'll be loads more reactions to it. | 0:10:16 | 0:10:19 | |
As I craft my new work, | 0:10:20 | 0:10:22 | |
I'm going to head out to the lands of Homer to help me understand just | 0:10:22 | 0:10:26 | |
how The Odyssey was first created. | 0:10:26 | 0:10:28 | |
My first point of call has to be the centre of the ancient Greeks' world... | 0:10:31 | 0:10:36 | |
..the sacred Shrine of Delphi. | 0:10:37 | 0:10:39 | |
Today, we all know about the Olympic Games, | 0:10:40 | 0:10:43 | |
the ancient Greeks' athletic competitions, | 0:10:43 | 0:10:47 | |
but in the sanctuary here at Delphi, a rival festival, | 0:10:47 | 0:10:49 | |
known as the Pythian Games, | 0:10:49 | 0:10:52 | |
not only hosted religious celebrations and athletic tournaments, | 0:10:52 | 0:10:56 | |
but also encouraged poets and singers to compete head to head | 0:10:56 | 0:11:00 | |
in recitations of Homer. | 0:11:00 | 0:11:03 | |
I wonder what it must have been like to see poets take on one another as | 0:11:03 | 0:11:06 | |
part of these competitions. | 0:11:06 | 0:11:09 | |
Tell me a little bit more about the poetic element of the Pythian games. | 0:11:11 | 0:11:14 | |
Our understanding is that there were contests, | 0:11:14 | 0:11:17 | |
maybe held at the theatre or the stadium or in some location within the sanctuary. | 0:11:17 | 0:11:22 | |
They had to write songs in praise of Apollo and perform them. | 0:11:22 | 0:11:25 | |
So two and a half thousand years ago, | 0:11:25 | 0:11:27 | |
when the Pythian games were happening and all this was going on, | 0:11:27 | 0:11:30 | |
could you say there was such a thing as Greece as a nation at that point? | 0:11:30 | 0:11:34 | |
There was not such a thing as a Greek nation, | 0:11:34 | 0:11:36 | |
but there was such a thing as a Greek identity and that's actually | 0:11:36 | 0:11:39 | |
what's really interesting about Homer's era, | 0:11:39 | 0:11:41 | |
about those eights and sevens and even six centuries BC, | 0:11:41 | 0:11:45 | |
because what you see happening at that time in literature and also in | 0:11:45 | 0:11:48 | |
archaeology, you see how across the Greek world, | 0:11:48 | 0:11:52 | |
from Italy to mainland Greece, to the islands, | 0:11:52 | 0:11:54 | |
to what's now western Turkey, people are making an effort, | 0:11:54 | 0:11:59 | |
in a way, to define an identity | 0:11:59 | 0:12:01 | |
and they're doing this through literature, language, | 0:12:01 | 0:12:05 | |
poetry, sculpture, architecture, religion. | 0:12:05 | 0:12:09 | |
They're even developing the same style of warfare across this region, | 0:12:09 | 0:12:13 | |
so they're basically trying to be compatible. | 0:12:13 | 0:12:16 | |
So, to put it another way, then, | 0:12:16 | 0:12:17 | |
what was Homer's role in the creation of this Greek identity? | 0:12:17 | 0:12:20 | |
I think Homer was in a way, um... | 0:12:21 | 0:12:24 | |
..a sounding board. | 0:12:25 | 0:12:27 | |
He was an instrument that expressed that identity. | 0:12:27 | 0:12:32 | |
Basically, what Homer did, | 0:12:32 | 0:12:34 | |
whoever he was and whether there was one Homer or several Homers, | 0:12:34 | 0:12:38 | |
is that he took this long-standing, epic, oral tradition | 0:12:38 | 0:12:42 | |
and he formed the epic tradition, | 0:12:42 | 0:12:45 | |
choosing two epics that we know, The Iliad and The Odyssey, | 0:12:45 | 0:12:49 | |
and he made them something new. He made them into literature | 0:12:49 | 0:12:52 | |
and I think Homer, by producing both of those epics, | 0:12:52 | 0:12:55 | |
basically gives the Greeks some body of material that they can occupy | 0:12:55 | 0:13:00 | |
their minds with and that they can use to... | 0:13:00 | 0:13:04 | |
..to play off their differences and their similarities, | 0:13:05 | 0:13:08 | |
essentially, for the longest part of 1,000 years. | 0:13:08 | 0:13:12 | |
Do we know anything about audiences, both at the Pythian Games | 0:13:12 | 0:13:15 | |
and in terms of reception of Homeric epics generally? | 0:13:15 | 0:13:18 | |
Our understanding is that this was not like modern people | 0:13:18 | 0:13:21 | |
going to the opera. It was a lot more raucous | 0:13:21 | 0:13:24 | |
and there was a lot more participation, | 0:13:24 | 0:13:26 | |
in that people were actually experiencing the drama, | 0:13:26 | 0:13:29 | |
the dilemmas of the tragedies themselves, or the comedies, for that matter. | 0:13:29 | 0:13:34 | |
The ancient Greeks don't really distinguish high culture and other cultures | 0:13:34 | 0:13:38 | |
in a way that the modern western world does. | 0:13:38 | 0:13:40 | |
And so the audience was much more like Elizabethan English theatre | 0:13:40 | 0:13:43 | |
or a modern rock concert or a pop concert or a hip-hop concert even, | 0:13:43 | 0:13:47 | |
than traditional theatre today? | 0:13:47 | 0:13:48 | |
That's what I would imagine. Look, it's a religious festival, | 0:13:48 | 0:13:51 | |
so you have to imagine a mix of Lourdes and Woodstock, | 0:13:51 | 0:13:54 | |
-if you can. -OK. | 0:13:54 | 0:13:56 | |
I like that. I'm enjoying that. All right. | 0:13:57 | 0:14:00 | |
I think among the many interesting things that I took away from Heinrich | 0:14:02 | 0:14:05 | |
were really how little has changed or how much is continuous. | 0:14:05 | 0:14:09 | |
How human beings still do the same things, dancing, athletics and of course, | 0:14:09 | 0:14:13 | |
most interestingly from my perspective, competitive performance poetry, | 0:14:13 | 0:14:17 | |
which has obvious echoes with rap battles or poetry slams. | 0:14:17 | 0:14:20 | |
It was also interesting to hear about how much Homer was central to | 0:14:20 | 0:14:24 | |
the formation of this emerging Greek identity and hearing about the atmosphere | 0:14:24 | 0:14:27 | |
here at these Pythian games and other public festivals within the Greek world, | 0:14:27 | 0:14:32 | |
this kind of comparison that Heinrich made | 0:14:32 | 0:14:34 | |
of comparing Lourdes and Woodstock | 0:14:34 | 0:14:37 | |
in a fusion of the religious and spiritual. | 0:14:37 | 0:14:40 | |
Greece today is seen, ancient Greece as the epitome of high culture, | 0:14:40 | 0:14:43 | |
yet that wasn't really a concept the ancient Greeks had themselves. | 0:14:43 | 0:14:46 | |
It was just culture. | 0:14:46 | 0:14:48 | |
It's mad to picture bards performing Homer's epic to | 0:14:51 | 0:14:54 | |
its earliest audiences at a location as spectacular as Delphi. | 0:14:54 | 0:14:58 | |
# It's the word, the word, the word carries on | 0:14:59 | 0:15:03 | |
# It's our first, at birth, the search that we on... # | 0:15:03 | 0:15:07 | |
As part of the oral tradition, | 0:15:07 | 0:15:08 | |
the text of these poems wouldn't have been set in stone | 0:15:08 | 0:15:11 | |
from the very beginning. | 0:15:11 | 0:15:14 | |
Different performers would have been able to freestyle their way through the story. | 0:15:14 | 0:15:18 | |
A fact that tallies interestingly | 0:15:18 | 0:15:20 | |
with the way that I compose my own work. | 0:15:20 | 0:15:22 | |
# The Blind Bard's vision The Blind Bard's vision. # | 0:15:22 | 0:15:27 | |
There's worse places in the world to do your writing. | 0:15:29 | 0:15:32 | |
My writing process is quite strange. | 0:15:32 | 0:15:34 | |
So, when I was a much younger man | 0:15:34 | 0:15:38 | |
and I first started getting into making music for a living, | 0:15:38 | 0:15:40 | |
it was Jay-Z that I heard first saying that he doesn't write anything down on paper. | 0:15:40 | 0:15:44 | |
I thought, he's chatting rubbish. That's impossible | 0:15:44 | 0:15:46 | |
and also then I heard that Biggie did the same thing | 0:15:46 | 0:15:49 | |
and I started trying it. | 0:15:49 | 0:15:51 | |
I'd get a rhythm and then I'd get a line and then I'd get a few lines | 0:15:51 | 0:15:54 | |
and I'd get the building blocks of what I want to say | 0:15:54 | 0:15:56 | |
and then eventually, the benefit of writing this way, | 0:15:56 | 0:15:59 | |
by the time you've finished the composition process, | 0:15:59 | 0:16:01 | |
you know the whole thing off by heart, inside out. You've practised all the flow and all of that, | 0:16:01 | 0:16:05 | |
because you're saying it over and over to yourself so much and, | 0:16:05 | 0:16:08 | |
you know, in terms of inspiration, I've just been at Delphi all morning. | 0:16:08 | 0:16:11 | |
I've been soaking up all this ancient history | 0:16:11 | 0:16:13 | |
I can see the temple of Athena right down there, you know. | 0:16:13 | 0:16:16 | |
In terms of locations, | 0:16:16 | 0:16:18 | |
to walk round and mumble to myself and practise my craft, well, | 0:16:18 | 0:16:21 | |
I've been in worse places, so I'm going to get back to work. | 0:16:21 | 0:16:24 | |
But what did those early performances of The Odyssey actually sound like? | 0:16:29 | 0:16:33 | |
We know that Homer's works were originally sung, | 0:16:38 | 0:16:41 | |
but those first melodies have sadly long since been lost. | 0:16:41 | 0:16:44 | |
But some musicians today are hard at work creating replicas of instruments | 0:16:46 | 0:16:51 | |
from Homer's time to try and recreate those sounds. | 0:16:51 | 0:16:54 | |
This is the Phorminx. | 0:16:56 | 0:16:58 | |
This is the instrument of Phemius, of Demodocus, | 0:16:58 | 0:17:03 | |
maybe the instrument of Homer, if Homer existed. | 0:17:03 | 0:17:06 | |
It is always a question, if the ancient Greeks used to play chords, | 0:17:07 | 0:17:12 | |
but we can see, from the depictions, they muted some strings, | 0:17:12 | 0:17:16 | |
and the plectrum strummed. | 0:17:16 | 0:17:20 | |
These instruments were developed through the use of 3-D scanning | 0:17:42 | 0:17:45 | |
technology, based on depictions from ancient pots and vases. | 0:17:45 | 0:17:49 | |
In ancient times, musicians were restricted to gut strings only, | 0:17:49 | 0:17:53 | |
but today, this instrument is strung with nylon. | 0:17:53 | 0:17:57 | |
Recreating these sounds, | 0:17:57 | 0:17:59 | |
somehow evokes images of those ancient times making them feel even more real. | 0:17:59 | 0:18:04 | |
Talk to me about the performance of poetry in ancient Greek culture. | 0:18:04 | 0:18:09 | |
My understanding is that it was all performed with music. | 0:18:09 | 0:18:11 | |
There wasn't this separate category that we have today. | 0:18:11 | 0:18:14 | |
That came much later. | 0:18:14 | 0:18:15 | |
In ancient times, when we say the word "music", | 0:18:15 | 0:18:20 | |
it means three things altogether. | 0:18:20 | 0:18:24 | |
It is music as we can understand the music today, dance and poetry. | 0:18:24 | 0:18:30 | |
And poetry was the first thing. In the beginning was the word. | 0:18:30 | 0:18:35 | |
This is very Greek, as you can understand. | 0:18:35 | 0:18:37 | |
Today, there is almost a certain snobbery. | 0:18:37 | 0:18:39 | |
For example, when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. | 0:18:39 | 0:18:43 | |
A, there was a question that music lyrics are not literature, but in | 0:18:43 | 0:18:46 | |
general, I have been part of many debates and it's a big debate now | 0:18:46 | 0:18:50 | |
in modern academia, where people feel that music performed to poetry | 0:18:50 | 0:18:55 | |
is lesser poetry and what's ironic is that this is coming often from | 0:18:55 | 0:18:58 | |
the same people who would elevate the Homeric epics as the greatest example of | 0:18:58 | 0:19:03 | |
poetry ever, but they were set to music in their own time. | 0:19:03 | 0:19:06 | |
You're right that this differentiation exists today. | 0:19:06 | 0:19:11 | |
But in ancient Greece, they had contests for music. | 0:19:11 | 0:19:16 | |
A poet-musician had to stake his fame | 0:19:16 | 0:19:22 | |
because they were the most famous. | 0:19:22 | 0:19:25 | |
Interesting. So, they were almost like early... | 0:19:25 | 0:19:27 | |
I don't want to say pop stars, but they were very, very popular. | 0:19:27 | 0:19:29 | |
Exactly, pop stars! | 0:19:29 | 0:19:31 | |
They were pop stars! | 0:19:31 | 0:19:34 | |
HE SPEAKS ANCIENT LANGUAGE | 0:19:44 | 0:19:47 | |
Anyway, just messing around. | 0:20:49 | 0:20:52 | |
Trying to come up with some little flavours and vibes. | 0:20:52 | 0:20:54 | |
I'm obviously, I'm a novice when it comes to this stuff. | 0:20:54 | 0:20:57 | |
But it's really beautiful just to sit and play. | 0:20:57 | 0:20:59 | |
And it was really interesting to hear, A, | 0:20:59 | 0:21:01 | |
the continuity between ancient performances of poetry and music, | 0:21:01 | 0:21:05 | |
but also art and music have had this tremendous power to evoke emotion | 0:21:05 | 0:21:09 | |
and reaction and behaviour in its audience. And just again, as an artist, to me, | 0:21:09 | 0:21:12 | |
it speaks to this tremendous power that art has within human society, | 0:21:12 | 0:21:16 | |
and music in particular. | 0:21:16 | 0:21:18 | |
But it was really interesting also to hear about how much details we | 0:21:18 | 0:21:21 | |
still know about how these very, very ancient instruments were played | 0:21:21 | 0:21:25 | |
and how similar it really is to modern forms of music. | 0:21:25 | 0:21:27 | |
So, again, a real interesting lesson, | 0:21:27 | 0:21:29 | |
and this particular instrument being the instrument of Homer, | 0:21:29 | 0:21:33 | |
if Homer existed. | 0:21:33 | 0:21:35 | |
If we can resurrect the sounds of Homer, | 0:21:37 | 0:21:39 | |
maybe we can resurrect his original locations, too. | 0:21:39 | 0:21:42 | |
Next up, I've come to the great citadel of Mycenae... | 0:21:47 | 0:21:50 | |
..home to some of the most well-known archaeological discoveries | 0:21:52 | 0:21:55 | |
of the past two centuries. | 0:21:55 | 0:21:57 | |
In The Iliad and The Odyssey, | 0:22:00 | 0:22:02 | |
this is the home of the general Agamemnon, | 0:22:02 | 0:22:06 | |
ally of Odysseus and leader of the Greek army at Troy. | 0:22:06 | 0:22:09 | |
For hundreds of years, it was believed that | 0:22:13 | 0:22:16 | |
the palaces of Homer belonged only in the realm of myth, | 0:22:16 | 0:22:19 | |
but when German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann dug up this site | 0:22:19 | 0:22:23 | |
150 years ago, | 0:22:23 | 0:22:24 | |
he thought he had found the legendary fort described in Homer's poems. | 0:22:24 | 0:22:28 | |
Could this really be the case? | 0:22:30 | 0:22:33 | |
The world of Homer, as far as we can tell, | 0:22:35 | 0:22:37 | |
was what we would call the world of the late Bronze Age, | 0:22:37 | 0:22:39 | |
what he might have called the Age of Heroes. | 0:22:39 | 0:22:42 | |
And that notion that the Homeric poems actually described, | 0:22:42 | 0:22:47 | |
or were about, a real period in history, | 0:22:47 | 0:22:51 | |
is something that has been sort of debated back and forth | 0:22:51 | 0:22:55 | |
for centuries, really. But particularly came to a head in the late 19th-century, | 0:22:55 | 0:22:59 | |
when Heinrich Schliemann excavated first at Troy in north-west Turkey, | 0:22:59 | 0:23:03 | |
and then here in 1876, and discovered the remains that we see around us, | 0:23:03 | 0:23:09 | |
which he thought demonstrated the reality, the historical reality, | 0:23:09 | 0:23:14 | |
if you like, of the Homeric poems. And for probably for about 50 or 60... | 0:23:14 | 0:23:19 | |
maybe a century after Schliemann's discoveries, | 0:23:19 | 0:23:21 | |
that was pretty much an accepted opinion. | 0:23:21 | 0:23:25 | |
What kind of things were found here? | 0:23:25 | 0:23:26 | |
Well, erm, one of the most famous discoveries... | 0:23:26 | 0:23:29 | |
-Ah. -..is this. | 0:23:29 | 0:23:32 | |
This, I hasten to add, is a replica. | 0:23:32 | 0:23:34 | |
-We didn't thief it, we promise! -Yeah! | 0:23:34 | 0:23:36 | |
This is the so-called mask of Agamemnon. | 0:23:36 | 0:23:39 | |
When Schliemann excavated the grave circle which is just below us here, | 0:23:39 | 0:23:43 | |
Grave Circle A, he found a number of gold masks, | 0:23:43 | 0:23:47 | |
which had clearly sat on the faces of some of the people buried there. | 0:23:47 | 0:23:51 | |
And this one has become associated with the most famous occupant of | 0:23:51 | 0:23:55 | |
Mycenae, Agamemnon. | 0:23:55 | 0:23:57 | |
But if we follow the strict chronology of the Trojan War, | 0:23:57 | 0:24:01 | |
which many people place around about 1150-1200 BC, | 0:24:01 | 0:24:05 | |
the grave circle belongs to somewhere around about 1600 BC, | 0:24:05 | 0:24:09 | |
so by definition, unless he'd lived a very, very long time, Agamemnon, | 0:24:09 | 0:24:13 | |
if he was buried there, couldn't have been the person in the Trojan War, | 0:24:13 | 0:24:16 | |
or the Agamemnon of the Trojan War couldn't have been the person buried here. | 0:24:16 | 0:24:19 | |
So, how come it still stands that people think of this as the | 0:24:19 | 0:24:22 | |
-mask of Agamemnon? -He was one of the most famous inhabitants of Mycenae, | 0:24:22 | 0:24:26 | |
and therefore it's natural that Schliemann claimed to find the face of Agamemnon | 0:24:26 | 0:24:31 | |
on one of the tombs in Grave Circle A. | 0:24:31 | 0:24:34 | |
So, it's the mask of question mark, really? | 0:24:34 | 0:24:36 | |
It's the mask of some anonymous Mycenaean ruler of the 17th century BC. | 0:24:36 | 0:24:41 | |
So, we can't say for certain if Homer's works were based on these | 0:24:42 | 0:24:45 | |
mysterious Mycenaeans, | 0:24:45 | 0:24:47 | |
despite some similarities between them and his characters. | 0:24:47 | 0:24:50 | |
One of the main reasons we know so little about the people here is that | 0:24:52 | 0:24:56 | |
the writing system they invented seems to have disappeared at the collapse | 0:24:56 | 0:25:00 | |
of their civilisation, around 1200 BC. | 0:25:00 | 0:25:03 | |
With that expertise lost, | 0:25:05 | 0:25:07 | |
Greece appears to have become illiterate for hundreds of years. | 0:25:07 | 0:25:10 | |
Perhaps if the writing skill they had created was retained... | 0:25:14 | 0:25:16 | |
..we'd have more to help us understand their times | 0:25:17 | 0:25:20 | |
than the mysteries and myths in the tales of Homer. | 0:25:20 | 0:25:23 | |
Arguably, we live in an age of anti-intellectualism, | 0:25:25 | 0:25:28 | |
of contempt for experts. | 0:25:28 | 0:25:30 | |
Me, I'm a fan of the experts. | 0:25:30 | 0:25:31 | |
And you know what, what came out of talking to John for me was really how | 0:25:31 | 0:25:35 | |
contentious and contested everything is, | 0:25:35 | 0:25:37 | |
how much in the rush of the 19th century to name everything specifically, | 0:25:37 | 0:25:42 | |
things were assumed to be a particular way | 0:25:42 | 0:25:43 | |
that may not have been. | 0:25:43 | 0:25:44 | |
The mask of Agamemnon was the most obvious example. | 0:25:44 | 0:25:47 | |
I still believed until just that conversation that it was actually | 0:25:47 | 0:25:49 | |
the mask of Agamemnon. It turns out it probably wasn't. | 0:25:49 | 0:25:52 | |
It turns out a lot of the things we thought we knew are a bit more vague, | 0:25:52 | 0:25:55 | |
and that's fine. That's the grey space of history and archaeology and | 0:25:55 | 0:25:58 | |
ancient civilisation. And in many ways what Homer was doing was | 0:25:58 | 0:26:01 | |
speculating. There were things that perhaps that he felt that he knew | 0:26:01 | 0:26:04 | |
about the Trojan War, things that he knew about that period. | 0:26:04 | 0:26:07 | |
And then there were many parts that, | 0:26:07 | 0:26:09 | |
clearly, he filled in. | 0:26:09 | 0:26:11 | |
But how could The Odyssey itself have been written down once the Greeks | 0:26:11 | 0:26:15 | |
had lost the skill of writing at the demise of the Mycenaean Empire? | 0:26:15 | 0:26:19 | |
There's a clue on the sleepy island of Ischia... | 0:26:23 | 0:26:25 | |
..in the bay of Naples, a far-off Greek colony. | 0:26:26 | 0:26:29 | |
After a 400-year silence, here in the eighth century BC, | 0:26:31 | 0:26:35 | |
the Greeks started to become literate again, | 0:26:35 | 0:26:38 | |
pioneering a new system known as the alphabet, | 0:26:38 | 0:26:41 | |
to replace the hieroglyphic-like symbols of the Mycenaeans. | 0:26:41 | 0:26:45 | |
In a little cabinet in the small, unassuming museum here, | 0:26:47 | 0:26:51 | |
there's one object which speaks volumes about the dawn | 0:26:51 | 0:26:55 | |
of the alphabet and the origins of Homer. | 0:26:55 | 0:26:58 | |
Seeing precious items like this makes me think | 0:26:58 | 0:27:00 | |
of what a revolutionary innovation writing is. | 0:27:00 | 0:27:03 | |
While it may not look like much, | 0:27:05 | 0:27:07 | |
this little pot right here is arguably right up there with the Rosetta Stone | 0:27:07 | 0:27:11 | |
and the Cascajal Block, in terms of global cultural and literary significance. | 0:27:11 | 0:27:16 | |
Found in a nearby burial chamber, | 0:27:16 | 0:27:18 | |
it may be the oldest example of Greek alphabetical writing that we know of. | 0:27:18 | 0:27:22 | |
Inscribed on its side are a series of letters declaring it to be | 0:27:22 | 0:27:26 | |
the cup of the Homeric hero Nestor, | 0:27:26 | 0:27:28 | |
proving that these tales and stories were reaching the farest-off colonies | 0:27:28 | 0:27:32 | |
of mainland Greece, | 0:27:32 | 0:27:34 | |
right at the time that the technology of writing was being resurrected. | 0:27:34 | 0:27:37 | |
If it wasn't for the Greeks' development of the alphabet | 0:27:40 | 0:27:43 | |
and its system of vowels and consonants, | 0:27:43 | 0:27:45 | |
our method of writing might be vastly different today. | 0:27:45 | 0:27:48 | |
When this humble cup was first uncovered, | 0:27:51 | 0:27:53 | |
some scholars believed that the alphabet may actually have been invented | 0:27:53 | 0:27:57 | |
purely to record the works of Homer, | 0:27:57 | 0:28:00 | |
though that view is a bit old-fashioned nowadays. | 0:28:00 | 0:28:04 | |
From what we can tell, | 0:28:04 | 0:28:06 | |
the Greek alphabet arose from their trading connections with the most | 0:28:06 | 0:28:09 | |
powerful merchant civilisation in the Mediterranean... | 0:28:09 | 0:28:12 | |
..the Phoenicians of the Middle East and North Africa, | 0:28:14 | 0:28:16 | |
who were based mostly in today's Lebanon. | 0:28:16 | 0:28:20 | |
They had their own hieroglyphic-like style of writing featuring symbols | 0:28:20 | 0:28:24 | |
such as aleph, bet, gimel and dalet, | 0:28:24 | 0:28:27 | |
which clearly inspired the Greek letters alpha, beta, gamma and delta, | 0:28:27 | 0:28:33 | |
as well as Arabic letters, too. | 0:28:33 | 0:28:35 | |
Finds throughout the rest of the museum here at Pithecusae show that | 0:28:35 | 0:28:39 | |
this island, a stone's throw from Naples, | 0:28:39 | 0:28:42 | |
was not just one of the oldest Greek colonies, | 0:28:42 | 0:28:44 | |
but was also an important trading outpost with the Phoenicians. | 0:28:44 | 0:28:48 | |
Just as important as the presence of letters, though, | 0:28:50 | 0:28:53 | |
is their rhythm and pace, too. | 0:28:53 | 0:28:56 | |
These short lines carved on the side of the pot have their own curious sound. | 0:28:56 | 0:29:01 | |
What's really interesting about Nestor's cup is probably the fact | 0:29:03 | 0:29:07 | |
that we've got some hexameter on it. | 0:29:07 | 0:29:09 | |
So, it's one of the earliest examples of the dactylic hexameter | 0:29:09 | 0:29:14 | |
written in Greek. | 0:29:14 | 0:29:17 | |
So, what is the relationship between hexameter and Homer? | 0:29:17 | 0:29:20 | |
Homer and Hesiod are the two poets that first kind of lay down the | 0:29:20 | 0:29:25 | |
great hexameter poems, | 0:29:25 | 0:29:26 | |
and because they become these massively authoritative texts in the ancient world, | 0:29:26 | 0:29:31 | |
it becomes the meter that's associated with those | 0:29:31 | 0:29:34 | |
high forms of poetry. | 0:29:34 | 0:29:37 | |
Dactylic hexameter is a type of poetic meter or rhythm that was widespread | 0:29:38 | 0:29:43 | |
in the ancient world. | 0:29:43 | 0:29:44 | |
It's a much older rhythm than iambic pentameter... | 0:29:44 | 0:29:47 | |
# Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? | 0:29:47 | 0:29:50 | |
# Thou art more lovely and more temperate. # | 0:29:50 | 0:29:52 | |
..which I use regularly when I perform the works of Shakespeare. | 0:29:52 | 0:29:55 | |
# Too short a date | 0:29:55 | 0:29:57 | |
# Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines | 0:29:57 | 0:29:59 | |
# And often is his gold complexion dimm'd. # | 0:29:59 | 0:30:01 | |
Why does the pentameter most famously used by Shakespeare work so | 0:30:01 | 0:30:04 | |
much better in English than the hexameter? | 0:30:04 | 0:30:07 | |
Because it follows the stress patterns in English. | 0:30:07 | 0:30:09 | |
And with hexameter, so, you've got six feet in a line. | 0:30:09 | 0:30:14 | |
What are feet, for the people at home? | 0:30:14 | 0:30:16 | |
So, feet, it's a way of breaking up a line, erm, | 0:30:16 | 0:30:21 | |
and it means it's like a collection of a sound. | 0:30:21 | 0:30:25 | |
-Yep. -So, you've got two long sounds or a long and two shorts. | 0:30:25 | 0:30:30 | |
So, it's like... Daa-da-da-daa-da-da-daa-da-da. | 0:30:30 | 0:30:35 | |
That's if you've got dactyls. | 0:30:35 | 0:30:37 | |
If you've got spondees, then it's daa-daa-daa-daa. | 0:30:37 | 0:30:41 | |
It's much slower. | 0:30:41 | 0:30:42 | |
And you can do that in Latin and Greek, | 0:30:44 | 0:30:45 | |
because you can follow the quantity, | 0:30:45 | 0:30:47 | |
the long sounds in words and kind of make sure that the rhythm fits. | 0:30:47 | 0:30:52 | |
So, if you think about the opening half line of the Odyssey, | 0:30:52 | 0:30:56 | |
you'll be able to hear the sound that I'm talking about. | 0:30:56 | 0:30:59 | |
Or the opening section of the Iliad... | 0:31:02 | 0:31:04 | |
You can feel that the sound and it's matching onto the long sounds in the | 0:31:07 | 0:31:13 | |
Latin and the Greek. | 0:31:13 | 0:31:14 | |
What I find really fascinating about pentameter poetry is obviously the... | 0:31:14 | 0:31:17 | |
..da-dush-da-dush... | 0:31:17 | 0:31:19 | |
The rhythm of the human heart, which... | 0:31:19 | 0:31:21 | |
What I found really interesting about that form, | 0:31:21 | 0:31:23 | |
especially for modern music, is, | 0:31:23 | 0:31:25 | |
it fits over so many different kind of beats. | 0:31:25 | 0:31:27 | |
If you take any different kind of speed of instrumental, | 0:31:27 | 0:31:30 | |
as long as it's not in a waltz or some 6/8 or some kind of weird time | 0:31:30 | 0:31:34 | |
-structure... -Yeah. -Anything that's in 4/4, no matter what the speed, | 0:31:34 | 0:31:37 | |
you can transfer pentameter poetry over it. | 0:31:37 | 0:31:40 | |
And I believe that part of that is this kind of human heart | 0:31:40 | 0:31:43 | |
-centre of the rhythm. -Yeah, and I suppose as well - | 0:31:43 | 0:31:46 | |
because you've got much more regularity there, haven't you? - | 0:31:46 | 0:31:49 | |
in dactylic hexameter, | 0:31:49 | 0:31:51 | |
you've got options as to what you can do in every foot. | 0:31:51 | 0:31:54 | |
So, sometimes, if you wanted to convey something very serious, | 0:31:54 | 0:31:58 | |
then you might use lots of long sounds, and lots of spondees. | 0:31:58 | 0:32:01 | |
So, it would be like... daa-daa-daa-daa. | 0:32:01 | 0:32:05 | |
Whereas if you wanted to give the impression of speed, | 0:32:05 | 0:32:07 | |
then you'd use lots of dactyls, so...daa-da-da-daa-da-da-daa. | 0:32:07 | 0:32:11 | |
So, the fact that there's that flexibility within hexameter means | 0:32:11 | 0:32:14 | |
it doesn't offer the same immediate regularity that maybe you're talking | 0:32:14 | 0:32:20 | |
about there. And it's also why it's a little bit harder to grasp, | 0:32:20 | 0:32:23 | |
until you've got something in front of you and | 0:32:23 | 0:32:26 | |
you can feel the rhythm there. | 0:32:26 | 0:32:28 | |
My friend is a Brazilian-Portuguese rapper. | 0:32:28 | 0:32:31 | |
And it's weird, they can't rap in double time because Portuguese words | 0:32:31 | 0:32:34 | |
-are so long. -Right, yeah. -So, like, the English accent lends itself... | 0:32:34 | 0:32:37 | |
-Yeah. -That's why we have, like, grime, because it's 140 bpm. | 0:32:37 | 0:32:40 | |
You can rap very, very quickly in an English accent, | 0:32:40 | 0:32:42 | |
-because we squash our vowels. -Yeah. | 0:32:42 | 0:32:43 | |
And our consonant pattern is very, er, percussive. | 0:32:43 | 0:32:46 | |
And so that's actually why the English accent lends itself to | 0:32:46 | 0:32:49 | |
rapping a lot faster than even American, but especially than the Portuguese. | 0:32:49 | 0:32:52 | |
-Oh, that's really interesting. -Because the words are so much longer | 0:32:52 | 0:32:55 | |
and stretched out. | 0:32:55 | 0:32:56 | |
Having discovered the context behind the Odyssey, from what music, | 0:32:57 | 0:33:01 | |
archaeology and rhythm can tell us about how it connected with its | 0:33:01 | 0:33:05 | |
first audiences, it's time to get to grips with some of the individual | 0:33:05 | 0:33:09 | |
tales from this masterpiece. | 0:33:09 | 0:33:11 | |
Many of the most well-known moments from the Odyssey, | 0:33:15 | 0:33:18 | |
such as the encounters with the Cyclops or the Sirens, | 0:33:18 | 0:33:21 | |
and even the descent into the Underworld, | 0:33:21 | 0:33:23 | |
are first told in a key section of the poem, | 0:33:23 | 0:33:27 | |
where Odysseus attends a banquet and tells his fellow guests | 0:33:27 | 0:33:31 | |
about the many trials and tribulations he has endured thus far | 0:33:31 | 0:33:35 | |
on his epic journey home to Ithaca. | 0:33:35 | 0:33:38 | |
The others seated around him are amazed to hear these fantastical | 0:33:39 | 0:33:43 | |
tales of bizarre creatures and supernatural happenings. | 0:33:43 | 0:33:46 | |
Because the ancient Greeks believed the Odyssey literally took place, | 0:33:47 | 0:33:51 | |
the tales of these adventures sparked much debate about the exact | 0:33:51 | 0:33:55 | |
locations where they occurred. | 0:33:55 | 0:33:57 | |
Writing my new work in answer to Homer, | 0:34:07 | 0:34:09 | |
I'm travelling to some of the places later linked with those stories to | 0:34:09 | 0:34:13 | |
find out their significance to the Odyssey's first audiences. | 0:34:13 | 0:34:17 | |
The most famous incident in Homer's Odyssey has to be the encounter with | 0:34:20 | 0:34:23 | |
the Cyclops. | 0:34:23 | 0:34:24 | |
Odysseus and his crew land on a strange island | 0:34:24 | 0:34:27 | |
and find a cave brim-full with fresh produce and tasty cheeses. | 0:34:27 | 0:34:32 | |
But they soon find out that the cave | 0:34:32 | 0:34:34 | |
is also home to a terrifying one-eyed monster | 0:34:34 | 0:34:37 | |
who traps them inside and begins to eat them one by one. | 0:34:37 | 0:34:41 | |
Odysseus manages to get the Cyclops drunk, | 0:34:43 | 0:34:46 | |
and then plunges a burning torch into his one eye, blinding him. | 0:34:46 | 0:34:50 | |
Once our hero makes his getaway back on board his ship, | 0:34:52 | 0:34:55 | |
the giant hurls boulders out to the sea in a futile bid to destroy | 0:34:55 | 0:34:59 | |
Odysseus's ships. | 0:34:59 | 0:35:01 | |
For generations, | 0:35:02 | 0:35:04 | |
these stacks of basalt poking up off the eastern coast of Sicily have led | 0:35:04 | 0:35:08 | |
many to believe that the home of the Cyclops may have been here. | 0:35:08 | 0:35:11 | |
The fact that so many people have spent energy looking for the origins | 0:35:14 | 0:35:17 | |
of the Cyclops, and even claiming that these rocks here are the very | 0:35:17 | 0:35:21 | |
rocks that the Cyclops threw in the sea after Odysseus, | 0:35:21 | 0:35:23 | |
tells you something about the enduring power of the Odyssey. | 0:35:23 | 0:35:26 | |
I myself, obviously I don't believe the Cyclops existed, | 0:35:26 | 0:35:29 | |
but I have always wondered if the Cyclops, like so much else in mythology, | 0:35:29 | 0:35:32 | |
is a metaphor for something deeper. | 0:35:32 | 0:35:34 | |
One of the reasons why stories like the Cyclops came to be associated | 0:35:35 | 0:35:39 | |
with Sicily is because the island was a colony of the Greeks. | 0:35:39 | 0:35:42 | |
In recent years, some have wondered whether the story is a critique of | 0:35:44 | 0:35:48 | |
the colonial experience, with Odysseus representing the greedy | 0:35:48 | 0:35:52 | |
invader, plundering another's land and disrespecting the customs | 0:35:52 | 0:35:56 | |
of the local people. | 0:35:56 | 0:35:58 | |
Later readers also like to think of Sicily's Straits of Messina, | 0:36:06 | 0:36:10 | |
its closest point to mainland Italy, as the location of some of the most | 0:36:10 | 0:36:13 | |
terrifying monsters from the Odyssey... | 0:36:13 | 0:36:15 | |
..including the haunting tale of the Sirens. | 0:36:16 | 0:36:19 | |
This is one of the episodes in the Odyssey, I'm most fascinated by - | 0:36:20 | 0:36:24 | |
the tale of these mythological creatures who tempt sailors in with | 0:36:24 | 0:36:27 | |
their singing only to cruelly dash them to their death upon the rocks. | 0:36:27 | 0:36:31 | |
Odysseus was forewarned of the danger before sailing by, | 0:36:31 | 0:36:35 | |
and so he stuffed his crew's ears with wax and tied himself to the | 0:36:35 | 0:36:38 | |
ship's mast. Despite pleading with his crew to sail toward the Sirens' call, | 0:36:38 | 0:36:43 | |
they could not hear his cries, | 0:36:43 | 0:36:44 | |
and thus escaped a narrow brush with death. | 0:36:44 | 0:36:47 | |
Though Odysseus's crew were never able to hear the Sirens' song, | 0:36:51 | 0:36:55 | |
the stories tell us that many other ships were thought to have been | 0:36:55 | 0:36:59 | |
destroyed once they followed these destructive goddesses' seductive call. | 0:36:59 | 0:37:02 | |
For the Greeks of thousands of years ago, | 0:37:06 | 0:37:08 | |
with much of their world still uncharted, | 0:37:08 | 0:37:11 | |
Homer's Sirens were a potent reminder of the danger of the seas. | 0:37:11 | 0:37:14 | |
With today's readers, though, the most powerful story from Odysseus's | 0:37:18 | 0:37:22 | |
wanderings is his descent into the realm of dead souls - the Underworld... | 0:37:22 | 0:37:28 | |
..which some believe to have taken place at Lake Avernus, | 0:37:30 | 0:37:33 | |
near Naples and the ancient Greek colony of Cumae. | 0:37:33 | 0:37:36 | |
As part of his journey home to Ithaca, | 0:37:38 | 0:37:40 | |
he is sent there to hear the advice of a long dead prophet about how to | 0:37:40 | 0:37:44 | |
navigate past some of his most perilous obstacles. | 0:37:44 | 0:37:47 | |
It's here that he meets many of his fallen allies from the Trojan War, | 0:37:50 | 0:37:54 | |
in an episode that echoes a similar tale in the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh. | 0:37:54 | 0:37:58 | |
Odysseus's encounters with the ghosts of his fellow Greek generals | 0:38:00 | 0:38:04 | |
offer a profound insight into how people in the ancient world | 0:38:04 | 0:38:08 | |
understood life after death. | 0:38:08 | 0:38:09 | |
As Odysseus is seeing all of these ghosts come forward, | 0:38:11 | 0:38:15 | |
one of the figures he sees is Achilles. | 0:38:15 | 0:38:17 | |
So, Achilles has been the most famous warrior in the Iliad. | 0:38:17 | 0:38:22 | |
And he's this figure that exemplifies everything about what it means to | 0:38:22 | 0:38:28 | |
live fast and die young. | 0:38:28 | 0:38:30 | |
But there's a moment when Odysseus sees him and he says, you know, | 0:38:30 | 0:38:34 | |
"You were so famous in life that shouldn't look so sad, | 0:38:34 | 0:38:37 | |
"because you've got to have the same sort of kudos down here as well." | 0:38:37 | 0:38:41 | |
And Achilles basically says, "You don't know what you're talking about, Odysseus. | 0:38:41 | 0:38:46 | |
"I would rather work for a man that doesn't own his own land than | 0:38:46 | 0:38:50 | |
"be king of all the dead." And it's such a powerful moment, | 0:38:50 | 0:38:53 | |
where you've got Achilles saying that life is the thing. | 0:38:53 | 0:38:57 | |
You know, death is... | 0:38:57 | 0:38:59 | |
It's just a shadow, and life is the thing that you should be really | 0:38:59 | 0:39:02 | |
focused on. And life at any cost, almost. | 0:39:02 | 0:39:05 | |
And that's obviously something that has a real resonance with the Odyssey, | 0:39:05 | 0:39:09 | |
where you've got Odysseus, who's going to be in some really | 0:39:09 | 0:39:13 | |
humiliating positions across the course of the poem, | 0:39:13 | 0:39:16 | |
and it kind of justifies it, in a way, for Achilles to say to him, | 0:39:16 | 0:39:19 | |
you know, "Anything that you have to do to stay alive, | 0:39:19 | 0:39:22 | |
"that's what you should do." | 0:39:22 | 0:39:23 | |
It seems almost like Shakespeare reverses that in tomorrow and | 0:39:23 | 0:39:27 | |
-tomorrow and tomorrow... -Yeah. -Life is but a joke, a poor player... | 0:39:27 | 0:39:30 | |
-Yeah. -And actually, death is the big joke that life is playing on us, | 0:39:30 | 0:39:33 | |
so he almost reverses the importance and kind of dismisses life as | 0:39:33 | 0:39:36 | |
completely unimportant. | 0:39:36 | 0:39:37 | |
And, obviously, he was massively influenced by particularly Ovid, | 0:39:37 | 0:39:40 | |
-but that whole tradition. -Yeah, exactly. Well, it's a funny thing, isn't it? | 0:39:40 | 0:39:43 | |
Because there's always this tension. | 0:39:43 | 0:39:45 | |
We live as if we might live forever, and we don't. | 0:39:45 | 0:39:48 | |
And, actually, this is exactly what the poet Lucretius, | 0:39:48 | 0:39:52 | |
who's writing in the first century BC, picks up on. | 0:39:52 | 0:39:54 | |
He takes this Homeric idea about life after death, | 0:39:54 | 0:39:58 | |
and he uses it to say that it's wrong. | 0:39:58 | 0:40:01 | |
He's arguing for a universe where everything is made up of, erm, | 0:40:01 | 0:40:06 | |
atoms of... You know, it's a materialistic universe. | 0:40:06 | 0:40:08 | |
And he says, people are getting mixed up | 0:40:08 | 0:40:10 | |
when they talk about the Underworld, | 0:40:10 | 0:40:12 | |
when we hear those stories about what it's like to go down, | 0:40:12 | 0:40:15 | |
we're just reflecting something of life at that moment. | 0:40:15 | 0:40:18 | |
It's not true that there's anything after death, | 0:40:18 | 0:40:20 | |
and if we live as if there is something after death, | 0:40:20 | 0:40:24 | |
then we're actually missing out on the really important stuff, | 0:40:24 | 0:40:27 | |
-which is now. -We see in, you know, | 0:40:27 | 0:40:28 | |
several traditions this idea of the hero making a journey | 0:40:28 | 0:40:31 | |
to the Underworld in ancient Egypt, in Gilgamesh... | 0:40:31 | 0:40:34 | |
Are you saying that there was a direct transmission to the Homeric | 0:40:34 | 0:40:37 | |
tradition or it was more these were general motifs that were out | 0:40:37 | 0:40:40 | |
there that were picked up on? | 0:40:40 | 0:40:41 | |
So, this is part of a wider debate regarding Homer. | 0:40:41 | 0:40:47 | |
Some people have argued that we should see direct connections | 0:40:47 | 0:40:49 | |
between these, and that actually, the stories of Homer, | 0:40:49 | 0:40:53 | |
the Iliad and especially the Odyssey, | 0:40:53 | 0:40:54 | |
emerge directly from this kind of Middle Eastern poetic tradition. | 0:40:54 | 0:40:58 | |
And some people have argued that we should see this as part of a more | 0:40:58 | 0:41:02 | |
general picture. | 0:41:02 | 0:41:03 | |
There's something that's important across all cultures when it comes to | 0:41:03 | 0:41:07 | |
thinking about what might happen when we die. | 0:41:07 | 0:41:11 | |
And what we have in the Odyssey is a kind of crystallisation, I suppose, | 0:41:11 | 0:41:16 | |
of one idea about what death might look like, | 0:41:16 | 0:41:19 | |
and what the afterlife might look like. | 0:41:19 | 0:41:21 | |
When we talk about those other poems, Gilgamesh and so on, | 0:41:21 | 0:41:25 | |
it's absolutely the case that it's the Homeric version of things, | 0:41:25 | 0:41:28 | |
no matter who he was or how we understand him, | 0:41:28 | 0:41:31 | |
it's his version that becomes famous, and it's his version, | 0:41:31 | 0:41:35 | |
and the way that we understand Homer, | 0:41:35 | 0:41:37 | |
that affects later authors and makes them want to engage with the poetry | 0:41:37 | 0:41:41 | |
-and also with the man. -So, sort of like cover versions of songs. | 0:41:41 | 0:41:44 | |
Absolutely. So, if you think of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, for example, | 0:41:44 | 0:41:49 | |
you would never suggest that All Along The Watchtower was anything | 0:41:49 | 0:41:54 | |
other than Jimi Hendrix's. | 0:41:54 | 0:41:55 | |
-Of course not! -So...! -With the greatest of respect to Jimi, no, | 0:41:55 | 0:41:58 | |
-you wouldn't! -Absolutely, because that's the version that pins it down. | 0:41:58 | 0:42:01 | |
-Yeah. -That is the one that matters. | 0:42:01 | 0:42:03 | |
It's always tempting to see Homer as the colossus at the dawn of the epic tradition. | 0:42:07 | 0:42:11 | |
But he's responding to what has gone before, | 0:42:11 | 0:42:14 | |
just as countless artists and writers have responded to his works. | 0:42:14 | 0:42:18 | |
I had known about the more recent examples, but to hear about ancient | 0:42:19 | 0:42:23 | |
Romans like Lucretius is a bit of an eye-opener. | 0:42:23 | 0:42:25 | |
To learn from Katharine that the appropriation of ancient Greek culture, | 0:42:27 | 0:42:32 | |
and Homer in particular, seeking that tradition as a source of legitimacy, | 0:42:32 | 0:42:37 | |
was not just something that began | 0:42:37 | 0:42:39 | |
with 19th-century European and, in particular, British imperialism, | 0:42:39 | 0:42:43 | |
it's been going on for thousands of years. | 0:42:43 | 0:42:45 | |
Homer was already seen as a source of legitimacy for particular | 0:42:45 | 0:42:48 | |
cultures or colonies back then. | 0:42:48 | 0:42:50 | |
And that was really interesting to learn. | 0:42:50 | 0:42:52 | |
And then to get a broader sense of the Greco-Roman pantheon of poetry | 0:42:52 | 0:42:56 | |
beyond Homer has really made me rethink my own writing process, | 0:42:56 | 0:42:59 | |
and I need to go and visit some of those other texts, | 0:42:59 | 0:43:02 | |
the Virgils of this world, | 0:43:02 | 0:43:04 | |
to get a context in which to place my own response to Homer's Odyssey. | 0:43:04 | 0:43:08 | |
So, really kind of a lot to think about and a lot of provocation | 0:43:08 | 0:43:12 | |
coming from Katharine, and I'm really looking forward to getting into... | 0:43:12 | 0:43:15 | |
Sort of maybe put together now a plan, a map for my own writing, | 0:43:15 | 0:43:19 | |
based in some of the things that I've learnt there. | 0:43:19 | 0:43:21 | |
So, looking forward to it. | 0:43:21 | 0:43:23 | |
# Is the teller's mission | 0:43:24 | 0:43:26 | |
# What is the ultimate source of our deepest intuition... # | 0:43:26 | 0:43:31 | |
From the sounds and rhythm of the first performances of the Odyssey, | 0:43:31 | 0:43:35 | |
to its main themes, plot and enduring archetypes... | 0:43:35 | 0:43:38 | |
..there is a lot to keep in mind as I write my new track. | 0:43:40 | 0:43:43 | |
Exploring these places associated with the Odyssey, | 0:43:46 | 0:43:49 | |
I have to admit that it might well be a waste of time to try and figure | 0:43:49 | 0:43:52 | |
out whether any of them are the real places Homer had in mind, | 0:43:52 | 0:43:56 | |
regardless of whether or not he really existed. | 0:43:56 | 0:43:58 | |
But as I prepare to complete my own new homage to the Odyssey, | 0:44:01 | 0:44:04 | |
there's one final stop-off I have to make. | 0:44:04 | 0:44:07 | |
The tiny island off the west coast of Greece that Odysseus was so | 0:44:11 | 0:44:14 | |
desperate to get home to. | 0:44:14 | 0:44:16 | |
I am almost at Ithaca. | 0:44:20 | 0:44:22 | |
You know, I feel a real sense of achievement, I imagine this epic journey, | 0:44:22 | 0:44:26 | |
which is actually a simple journey now, before the age of steam power, | 0:44:26 | 0:44:29 | |
and I genuinely feel a little bit like Odysseus coming to reclaim my | 0:44:29 | 0:44:32 | |
kingdom, or at least coming to seek answers in this final chapter of my Odyssey. | 0:44:32 | 0:44:37 | |
When Odysseus himself returned home after 20 years, | 0:44:39 | 0:44:42 | |
he found that his palace was under siege by a gang of local nobles. | 0:44:42 | 0:44:46 | |
Disguised in beggar's clothes, Odysseus watched them try to | 0:44:46 | 0:44:50 | |
convince his wife, Penelope, to give up on the hope of her husband ever | 0:44:50 | 0:44:54 | |
returning home and marry one of them instead. | 0:44:54 | 0:44:56 | |
In the poem's gruesome climax, the returned hero teams up with his son, | 0:44:58 | 0:45:03 | |
and together they violently slaughter the men and string up | 0:45:03 | 0:45:06 | |
the female slaves who had supported them. | 0:45:06 | 0:45:08 | |
One thing you can't help but reflect on when you read the Odyssey, | 0:45:12 | 0:45:14 | |
particularly toward the end with the slaughter of the suitors and the | 0:45:14 | 0:45:17 | |
hanging of the maids, is the question of violence within human | 0:45:17 | 0:45:20 | |
culture and human entertainment, from the gladiators to Shakespearean | 0:45:20 | 0:45:24 | |
plays to modern video games, or hip-hop, or many other forms, MMA. | 0:45:24 | 0:45:28 | |
We have this strange relationship with violence, where, | 0:45:28 | 0:45:30 | |
on the one hand, no-one really wants violence to be done to them or | 0:45:30 | 0:45:33 | |
their loved ones, on the other hand we have this perverse fascination | 0:45:33 | 0:45:36 | |
and even delight, including myself sometimes, | 0:45:36 | 0:45:38 | |
in violent stories and in violent entertainment. | 0:45:38 | 0:45:40 | |
And I'm sure the debate about the morality of violence within | 0:45:40 | 0:45:43 | |
entertainment will continue as long as there's entertainment and human beings. | 0:45:43 | 0:45:47 | |
But regardless of those questions, | 0:45:47 | 0:45:49 | |
the quality of this poetry and the merits of the story will stand. | 0:45:49 | 0:45:53 | |
The Odyssey is reborn each time a new work is created in response to it. | 0:45:54 | 0:45:59 | |
# Size up of 108, about time we got done with these fakes | 0:45:59 | 0:46:02 | |
# I want to carve these bastards' names | 0:46:02 | 0:46:04 | |
# In the marble of my father's grave... # | 0:46:04 | 0:46:06 | |
One that I'm particularly interested in is that of my friend, the Greek | 0:46:06 | 0:46:10 | |
Australian rapper, Luka Lesson. | 0:46:10 | 0:46:13 | |
So, tell me a little bit about your Odyssey project, where you're at now, | 0:46:13 | 0:46:16 | |
the conception of it, how long you've been working on it? | 0:46:16 | 0:46:19 | |
Yeah, it's been about two years since the very first idea came up. | 0:46:19 | 0:46:23 | |
I was offered to do a collaboration | 0:46:23 | 0:46:25 | |
with a composer at the Sydney Conservatorium. | 0:46:25 | 0:46:28 | |
And instead of just making some small idea, | 0:46:28 | 0:46:31 | |
I thought I'd just take on the biggest epic ever known to man! | 0:46:31 | 0:46:34 | |
So, it involves a full orchestra and choir and me telling the story of | 0:46:34 | 0:46:38 | |
the Odyssey in rap and spoken word poetry. | 0:46:38 | 0:46:42 | |
And projections on stage. | 0:46:42 | 0:46:44 | |
But at its essence, it's basically a storyteller recounting the journey | 0:46:44 | 0:46:50 | |
-of Odysseus in his own words. -Amazing, amazing. | 0:46:50 | 0:46:53 | |
And so what made you want to engage with the Odyssey in particular? | 0:46:53 | 0:46:57 | |
Man, I don't know. I think maybe because I come from a Greek background, | 0:46:57 | 0:47:01 | |
I kind of feel like I get sick of seeing these stories be told in | 0:47:01 | 0:47:05 | |
a Hollywood way, with not one Greek person on the crew or in the writing | 0:47:05 | 0:47:09 | |
team or anything like that. | 0:47:09 | 0:47:11 | |
And this idea that people have got that the Odyssey | 0:47:11 | 0:47:15 | |
or that ancient Greek culture is Western culture also kind of | 0:47:15 | 0:47:19 | |
irked me for a little bit. | 0:47:19 | 0:47:21 | |
But for me, I was like, what can I reinfuse into the Odyssey if I spoke | 0:47:21 | 0:47:24 | |
classical Greek onstage or I spoke modern Greek onstage, or I could | 0:47:24 | 0:47:28 | |
feel it in my bones as someone who feels like an ancestor of that? | 0:47:28 | 0:47:32 | |
You're not the first person to respond to the Odyssey in | 0:47:32 | 0:47:35 | |
a range of creative mediums, right? | 0:47:35 | 0:47:37 | |
It's interesting because for me, my way into the Odyssey came actually | 0:47:37 | 0:47:41 | |
via other people that had responded. | 0:47:41 | 0:47:43 | |
Derek Walcott, Ralph Ellison... | 0:47:43 | 0:47:44 | |
-Nice. -What do you make of some of those responses, and do you feel any | 0:47:44 | 0:47:48 | |
pressure being in this kind of long list of incredibly | 0:47:48 | 0:47:51 | |
talented people from all over the world, really, | 0:47:51 | 0:47:53 | |
who've been inspired by this text? | 0:47:53 | 0:47:55 | |
I feel pressure! | 0:47:55 | 0:47:57 | |
Which is why I don't read anybody else's interpretation! | 0:47:57 | 0:48:01 | |
I try not to get hung up about it. | 0:48:01 | 0:48:03 | |
It is a reinterpretation of a classic. | 0:48:03 | 0:48:05 | |
I see it as a... Really like a rite of passage for some artists that | 0:48:05 | 0:48:10 | |
choose to take it on. | 0:48:10 | 0:48:11 | |
It is such a historic story that we also feel like we have to do it | 0:48:11 | 0:48:16 | |
justice, and maybe that brings some greatness out of us that we may not | 0:48:16 | 0:48:19 | |
have had if it wasn't a project on this. | 0:48:19 | 0:48:22 | |
I saw when I first started doing this, that Prince actually did | 0:48:22 | 0:48:26 | |
-a response to the Odyssey. -I had no idea... | 0:48:26 | 0:48:28 | |
Called Glam Slam Ulysses, with Carmen Electra dancing on stage. | 0:48:28 | 0:48:33 | |
Before she got famous. I don't know anyone other than the people | 0:48:33 | 0:48:36 | |
in that room that might have seen it. | 0:48:36 | 0:48:38 | |
But, like, a lot of people have dealt with this thing, | 0:48:38 | 0:48:42 | |
and it seems to be like an essential part of many artists' movement and growth. | 0:48:42 | 0:48:48 | |
Despite his Greek heritage, Luka has never been to Ithaca. | 0:48:48 | 0:48:53 | |
But he does have a little bit of local info to share. | 0:48:53 | 0:48:56 | |
Do you know there's a rumour that Ithaca's not actually Odysseus's home, | 0:48:56 | 0:49:01 | |
and that actually it was in Cephalonia next door, the other island? | 0:49:01 | 0:49:05 | |
-What?! -Yeah, because Cephalonia has like different groves | 0:49:05 | 0:49:09 | |
and forests and stuff, and in the early part of the Odyssey, | 0:49:09 | 0:49:12 | |
they talk about Odysseus hunting and running through forests and all this type of stuff. | 0:49:12 | 0:49:17 | |
So, Ithaca's not big enough to have that, so some people | 0:49:17 | 0:49:20 | |
say that actually, ancient Ithaca was Cephalonia. | 0:49:20 | 0:49:24 | |
That's mad. | 0:49:24 | 0:49:25 | |
So what if I'm actually not in Odysseus's home?! | 0:49:25 | 0:49:30 | |
Wow, all right! Well, I'm going to have to look into that. | 0:49:30 | 0:49:32 | |
Thanks a lot, bro. Thanks for taking the time to speak to us. | 0:49:32 | 0:49:37 | |
Could Luka be right? Is the island that's called Ithaca today not the | 0:49:37 | 0:49:41 | |
place that Homer had in mind? | 0:49:41 | 0:49:43 | |
I've been digging a bit deeper | 0:49:44 | 0:49:45 | |
and I can see why some readers might have their doubts. | 0:49:45 | 0:49:48 | |
And that's because the description we see in the text again and again | 0:49:49 | 0:49:52 | |
and again is of a low-lying piece of land, | 0:49:52 | 0:49:55 | |
the most westerly of a group of islands. | 0:49:55 | 0:49:57 | |
Yet when I look around me, it's clear that there are mountains everywhere. | 0:49:57 | 0:50:02 | |
And according to the map, this is definitely not the most westerly. | 0:50:02 | 0:50:05 | |
So, is this definitely the island that the ancient Greeks were referring to? | 0:50:05 | 0:50:10 | |
To compose my own Odyssey, I started this journey in the footsteps of | 0:50:10 | 0:50:14 | |
Odysseus to find out more about the blind bard who first sang his tale. | 0:50:14 | 0:50:18 | |
Though the ancient Greeks believed that the events in the Odyssey | 0:50:22 | 0:50:25 | |
actually took place, and that Homer himself was a single poet... | 0:50:25 | 0:50:29 | |
..everywhere I've come, I've found that the truth is not so clear. | 0:50:31 | 0:50:34 | |
Even here, on the Western tip of Cephalonia, | 0:50:38 | 0:50:41 | |
I still can't know for certain whether this was the home which | 0:50:41 | 0:50:45 | |
Odysseus wanted so badly to reach. | 0:50:45 | 0:50:47 | |
I have to ask myself whether any of these questions of geography, | 0:50:47 | 0:50:50 | |
debated by scholars for centuries, | 0:50:50 | 0:50:52 | |
are relevant to understanding the text or informing my new song. | 0:50:52 | 0:50:55 | |
Is part of the beauty and intrigue of these ancient stories the fact | 0:50:58 | 0:51:03 | |
that they are now so shrouded in myth and mystery, and would more | 0:51:03 | 0:51:06 | |
specific knowledge actually take away a little bit of their magic? | 0:51:06 | 0:51:10 | |
And as Dublin's WB Stanford tells us, | 0:51:11 | 0:51:14 | |
"The uncertainty is caused by the fact that though Homer is probably | 0:51:14 | 0:51:17 | |
"describing actual places, he gives them a poetic and not | 0:51:17 | 0:51:20 | |
"precisely topographical description. | 0:51:20 | 0:51:22 | |
"For appreciation of his poem and story, | 0:51:22 | 0:51:24 | |
"it makes little difference whether Ithaca is Thiaki | 0:51:24 | 0:51:27 | |
"or the Isle of Man or Rhode Island. | 0:51:27 | 0:51:29 | |
"We have only ourselves to blame when we try to accommodate poetry to | 0:51:29 | 0:51:32 | |
"science and find it perplexing and troublesome. | 0:51:32 | 0:51:34 | |
"The poet did not write for geographers." | 0:51:34 | 0:51:37 | |
And that really eloquently sums it up. | 0:51:39 | 0:51:40 | |
We may never know whether Homer was man or woman, | 0:51:40 | 0:51:43 | |
group of people or individual, blind bard or fully-sighted athlete, | 0:51:43 | 0:51:47 | |
ancient Greek or ancient Egyptian. | 0:51:47 | 0:51:49 | |
These are all theories that were advanced from the most ancient of times. | 0:51:49 | 0:51:52 | |
We probably will never even know if there was a real Odysseus. | 0:51:52 | 0:51:55 | |
And over the last week or so, when I've travelled to Greece and its | 0:51:55 | 0:51:58 | |
former territories, I've concluded it doesn't really matter. | 0:51:58 | 0:52:01 | |
The Odyssey is one of the great epics of world literature. | 0:52:01 | 0:52:04 | |
It managed to soak up influences from all around the world and | 0:52:04 | 0:52:07 | |
itself has continued to influence people for over 2,500 years. | 0:52:07 | 0:52:11 | |
Again I say, this is my Odyssey. | 0:52:11 | 0:52:14 | |
# Yo, listen | 0:52:17 | 0:52:18 | |
# Yo, yo | 0:52:19 | 0:52:21 | |
# Yo | 0:52:21 | 0:52:23 | |
# Why is the story told? | 0:52:29 | 0:52:31 | |
# What is the teller's mission? | 0:52:31 | 0:52:33 | |
# What is the ultimate source of our deepest intuition? | 0:52:33 | 0:52:36 | |
# Why does the audience come and why did they listen? | 0:52:36 | 0:52:39 | |
# The blind bard's vision | 0:52:41 | 0:52:43 | |
# Why is the story told? | 0:52:43 | 0:52:45 | |
# What is the teller's mission? | 0:52:45 | 0:52:46 | |
# What is the ultimate source of our deepest intuition? | 0:52:46 | 0:52:50 | |
# Why does the audience come and why did they listen? | 0:52:50 | 0:52:53 | |
# The blind bard's vision | 0:52:55 | 0:52:57 | |
# The sweetest siren call, that spans time and distance | 0:52:57 | 0:53:00 | |
# The poet speaks the building blocks of our existence | 0:53:00 | 0:53:03 | |
# Who said it's master masons that build the base of nations | 0:53:03 | 0:53:07 | |
# Without the word there's nothing else, you can't replace it | 0:53:07 | 0:53:10 | |
# When all the towers fall, and all the powerful kings crush into dust | 0:53:10 | 0:53:15 | |
# Things left there to rust | 0:53:15 | 0:53:17 | |
# It's the word, the word, the word carries on | 0:53:17 | 0:53:20 | |
# And our thirst give birth to the search that we on | 0:53:20 | 0:53:24 | |
# Seeking solace with myths that promise | 0:53:24 | 0:53:27 | |
# If we just give our attention it will astonish it | 0:53:27 | 0:53:31 | |
# A bit of politics, splash of the supernatural | 0:53:31 | 0:53:34 | |
# Stitched together by syllables, weave a tapestry | 0:53:34 | 0:53:38 | |
# That's broad enough to span minds and generations | 0:53:38 | 0:53:41 | |
# Still it cannot be touched by much but contemplation | 0:53:41 | 0:53:45 | |
# You want to make a statement? | 0:53:45 | 0:53:46 | |
# Better you write a verse | 0:53:46 | 0:53:48 | |
# Want to create a nation? | 0:53:48 | 0:53:50 | |
# Better recite it first | 0:53:50 | 0:53:51 | |
# Preferably epic with no pen, let the mind collect it | 0:53:51 | 0:53:55 | |
# Practise it hundreds of times until it's time | 0:53:55 | 0:53:57 | |
# Perfected by the time they write it down | 0:53:57 | 0:54:00 | |
# They'll doubt that you're real | 0:54:00 | 0:54:02 | |
# Cos we're great at questioning other people's skill | 0:54:02 | 0:54:05 | |
# Yet we seek it still, the Mahabharata | 0:54:05 | 0:54:08 | |
# Virgil, Milton, Lucretius, the epic of Sundjata | 0:54:08 | 0:54:13 | |
# Gilgamesh | 0:54:13 | 0:54:14 | |
# Committed coffin text, yeah | 0:54:14 | 0:54:17 | |
# It's the blind bard we know best | 0:54:17 | 0:54:19 | |
# Is it cos your word was twinned to empires' wings? | 0:54:19 | 0:54:23 | |
# Or that we touched something deep within? | 0:54:23 | 0:54:26 | |
# Cos when you boil it down beyond mythology and God you find something | 0:54:26 | 0:54:30 | |
# That is just so human, do you not? | 0:54:30 | 0:54:32 | |
# A son in search of a father that he has lost | 0:54:32 | 0:54:35 | |
# A father trying to get back to his family at any cost | 0:54:35 | 0:54:39 | |
# A woman that's besieged by men with bad intentions | 0:54:39 | 0:54:42 | |
# And she does not want to be with them, but they won't accept it | 0:54:42 | 0:54:46 | |
# Cos there's men and gods, the pen and its gob | 0:54:46 | 0:54:49 | |
# There's a mind and a mouth that spout where you dare not | 0:54:49 | 0:54:52 | |
# The poet sings and speaks from streets to ancient Greece | 0:54:52 | 0:54:56 | |
# Defeat, then, is what you meet if competing is what you seek | 0:54:56 | 0:54:59 | |
# Whether the beat or lyre strings | 0:54:59 | 0:55:02 | |
# We are leviathans that speak sagas of this great species of hirelings | 0:55:02 | 0:55:07 | |
# Posing like we're highest kings | 0:55:07 | 0:55:09 | |
# To get as high as wings of God but we do not | 0:55:09 | 0:55:12 | |
# Do nothing but try a thing | 0:55:12 | 0:55:14 | |
# The poet sees how the falcons sees a view from the balcony | 0:55:14 | 0:55:18 | |
# No doubting he | 0:55:18 | 0:55:19 | |
# Pages are a alchemy | 0:55:19 | 0:55:20 | |
# And the magician is politician and prophet | 0:55:20 | 0:55:24 | |
# Premonition we got it | 0:55:24 | 0:55:25 | |
# Television and pocket couple queens | 0:55:25 | 0:55:27 | |
# That will keep us going flowing | 0:55:27 | 0:55:29 | |
# Yeah, we eat from poems | 0:55:29 | 0:55:31 | |
# If the teacher don't speak, how could we keep on knowing? | 0:55:31 | 0:55:34 | |
# What these questions to these answers are | 0:55:35 | 0:55:38 | |
# Curses and our blessings | 0:55:38 | 0:55:39 | |
# Confessions are just how deaf we are | 0:55:39 | 0:55:41 | |
# And obsessed with death, despite all our best attempts | 0:55:41 | 0:55:45 | |
# The Odyssean Underworld is the best we're left | 0:55:45 | 0:55:48 | |
# The same one from the book of the dead | 0:55:48 | 0:55:50 | |
# Who the myths, millennia hasn't put them to bed | 0:55:50 | 0:55:54 | |
# Philosophy is not the laws of motion, logic can't explain emotion | 0:55:54 | 0:55:58 | |
# So it makes sense, we come up with some other type of notion | 0:55:58 | 0:56:02 | |
# A myth is not a lie, it's a disguise from the truth | 0:56:02 | 0:56:05 | |
# So the wise can recite to the youth | 0:56:05 | 0:56:08 | |
# If the lines in our rhymes are to find any use | 0:56:08 | 0:56:11 | |
# It's the tries of our mind to decipher the clues | 0:56:11 | 0:56:15 | |
# Give my mind this thing called living | 0:56:15 | 0:56:17 | |
# Season the rhythms, turn of the earth to announce the beginning | 0:56:17 | 0:56:20 | |
# Look how we bounce on the rhythm | 0:56:20 | 0:56:22 | |
# Man could rap about all of the family | 0:56:22 | 0:56:24 | |
# Whole of your humanity, whole of the galaxy | 0:56:24 | 0:56:26 | |
# You want to talk about cars, that's fine | 0:56:26 | 0:56:28 | |
# Yes, you could say it is a chariot | 0:56:28 | 0:56:29 | |
# Carried on the wings of the night, even Zeus don't attack the skies | 0:56:29 | 0:56:32 | |
# Where the truth in the chapter lies | 0:56:32 | 0:56:34 | |
# I don't know, it's just a fact of life. | 0:56:34 | 0:56:36 | |
# The search of the journey, permanent purgatory | 0:56:36 | 0:56:38 | |
# Driven a Finca from Inca to Germany | 0:56:38 | 0:56:39 | |
# So what you gonna do? You gonna search? | 0:56:39 | 0:56:41 | |
# Or gonna stand on the side and rehearse? | 0:56:41 | 0:56:43 | |
# There's finding the time since your birth is so insignificant | 0:56:43 | 0:56:45 | |
# There's barely any worth | 0:56:45 | 0:56:46 | |
# Yeah, the heroes, faces are thousands | 0:56:46 | 0:56:48 | |
# If you listen you will hear what they're shouting | 0:56:48 | 0:56:50 | |
# They ain't telling you to listen to the doubting | 0:56:50 | 0:56:52 | |
# They're trying to get us ready for the outing | 0:56:52 | 0:56:54 | |
# But you would swear poets are mortal | 0:56:54 | 0:56:56 | |
# But we're not the same I assure you | 0:56:56 | 0:56:58 | |
# Cos we make words and portals, 26 letters and we will teleport you | 0:56:58 | 0:57:00 | |
# We're not the same, I assure you | 0:57:00 | 0:57:02 | |
# 26 letters and we will teleport you | 0:57:02 | 0:57:03 | |
# Why is the story told? | 0:57:03 | 0:57:05 | |
# What is the teller's mission? | 0:57:05 | 0:57:07 | |
# What is the ultimate source of our deepest intuition? | 0:57:07 | 0:57:10 | |
# Why does the audience come and why did they listen? | 0:57:10 | 0:57:14 | |
# The blind bard's vision | 0:57:15 | 0:57:17 | |
# Why is the story told? | 0:57:17 | 0:57:19 | |
# What is the teller's mission? | 0:57:19 | 0:57:21 | |
# What is the ultimate source of our deepest intuition? | 0:57:21 | 0:57:24 | |
# Why does the audience come and why did they listen? | 0:57:24 | 0:57:27 | |
# Blind bard's vision | 0:57:29 | 0:57:30 | |
# The blind bard's vision | 0:57:33 | 0:57:34 | |
# The blind bard's vision | 0:57:36 | 0:57:38 | |
# The blind bard's vision | 0:57:40 | 0:57:41 | |
# Blind bard's vision... # | 0:57:43 | 0:57:45 | |
HE MOUTHS | 0:57:46 | 0:57:50 |