As you progress through your summer reading, ask yourself: Do I really want to tackle “The Odyssey”? The Christopher Nolan-directed, star-jammed adaptation of the Greek epic arrives in movie theaters on July 17. And yet, do you want to lug Homer out to the beach this summer?
In need of some encouragement?
The ideal person for that job is Mary Beard, the professor emerita of classics at the University of Cambridge, and certainly the best-known ancient classicist in the world. She was in Evanston recently for a Chicago Humanities Festival talk at Northwestern University. We met near the beaches where Nolan, who was raised in Evanston, made Super 8 films as a child. She had long white hair and wore high-top sneakers covered in Batman comics word balloons. You might assume, at 71, with many, many books on Greco-Roman culture to her name — including “Pompeii,” “Pagan Priests,” “SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome,” “Confronting the Classics,” and her latest, “Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old,” inspired by a lecture series she gave at the University of Chicago in 2023 — that Beard is an advocate for ancient Greek and Roman literature.
And she is, but for the right reasons.
She said, “I deplore when people say stuff like you must read ‘The Odyssey,’ you must because it is textbook social history, and this and that — No! Just read it and enjoy it!”
Indeed, when we met, she was groaning to a friend about a question she was just asked, on how to square the study of Greek and Roman culture with the long “toxic” history of how its books, figures and aesthetics have been used in the service of fascism and racism. She bristled at that word, “toxic,” at teachers who erect roadblocks at the start.
“I mean, look, we don’t want to live like the ancients,” she said. “But there is a heavy burden placed on how much all of this stuff is to be admired or not. It’s never been clear to me where that comes from. We’d get so much more out of the ancient world if we could stop admiring it! If we could just stop revering everything about it! If we could just start asking: ‘What are these people even talking about, how do I feel about this?’”
“The Odyssey,” she said, is a perfect example of how ancient classics should not be read for grand truths and stoic takeaways but for how they question, dispute, debate.
“OK, so, we have Odysseus, our heroic leader, trying to make his way home, but he returns having lost all of his men. What kind of leader is that? If you’re alert to it, the book is asking this. Also, what kind of woman is Penelope, his wife — is she being clever trying to avoid marriage to a number of suitors? I say ‘suitors’ but these men are really thugs, who, mind you, she is sending little notes to! How do we understand the morality of these people? Take the cyclops. Odysseus invades the home of a one-eyed giant and drinks and eats, and the cyclops, a cannibal, eats a couple of Odysseus’s men, so Odysseus then gets the giant drunk and grinds out his eye. Who is in the right here? Are we certain where good and bad sit? That’s not Odysseus’s home! I’m not asking because we live in an enlightened society — the ancients raised those questions, too.”
In fact, though Homer is widely considered one of the foundational authors of literature, it’s never been settled entirely if the writer credited with “The Odyssey” existed. “People have theories,” Beard said. “The Greeks thought there was a poet named Homer, but we don’t know. And we don’t know when ‘The Odyssey’ was written down. It’s even hard to say when the book we can buy at a bookstore became the book we know. There’s debate. I don’t know where I stand. There’s a communal, oral bard tradition there — yet it’s so amazingly crafted I find it hard not to think an individual shaped it, start to finish.”
Beard credits her love for ancient classics to a chance event, the time a museum guard at the British Museum removed a 4,000-year old boomerang-shaped chunk of Egyptian bread out of a display case, so that Beard, five at the time, could examine it better, and smell it, and get a sense of just how ordinary ancient people could seem. As Beard came to know, ancient Greeks and Romans were ordinary, and also “completely weird.”
A leader might wear an ostrich head.
Greeks and Romans were not even sure what they looked like — without a mirror, which tended to owned only by the wealthy and powerful, they relied on placid pools of water.
On the other hand, like us, they didn’t always distinguish reality from fantasy.
A couple of days before we spoke, Elon Musk complained about casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. “There certainly can be a fuzzy boundary between mythology and reality in (ancient classics),” she said. “That’s true. But we have Musk saying Helen of Troy can not possibly be Black. And well, ‘The Odyssey’ is also a story. It didn’t happen. We should not confuse a mythological character with the people who actually lived. On the other hand, the Greeks did believe this was all historical, which is important to know. And there is a place called Troy. And Odysseus is going back to a place that does exist — there’s an Ithaca.
“But then, witches and whirlpools and one-eyed giants — those do no exist. People now, people then, people for thousands of years have been trying to plot Odysseus’s voyage in the real world. You know, some of the best minds in the world have wasted their time trying to do those things.
“But again, sorry — it’s fiction.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
