The Lotus Eaters Episode 5: Circe, Cyclops, and Psychedelics (Oh My!)

Very Bad Wizards

In this episode of 'The Lotus Eaters,' Tamler and David dive into Books 9 and 10 of Homer's Odyssey, exploring Odysseus's harrowing journey after

Key takeaways

• The nonlinear storytelling structure enhances emotional impact by revealing Odysseus's suffering before detailing his adventures, creating a more nuanced portrayal of heroism.
• Odysseus's journey is not one of triumphant victory but of gradual psychological breakdown, marked by despair and weeping even when nearing home.

Main topics

• The Odyssey's narrative structure and storytelling techniques
• Odysseus's psychological deterioration over ten years

Notable quotes

'It's like when you're waiting on a tarmac for an hour and a half. Totally.' – Speaker 1, describing Odysseus's despair upon seeing Ithaca.

Conclusion

This episode reveals that Odysseus is not a triumphant hero but a broken man whose past adventures are

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Dear listeners, thank you for joining us on our voyage into Homer's Odyssey. You're listening to The Lotus Eaters, a 12-part series on Homer's Odyssey that was funded by our generous supporters over at patreon.com. It's because of that support that we're able to release this series for everyone. If you'd like to join them in supporting us, please head over to patreon.com slash verybadwizards. One of the benefits will be that you'd get access to all of The Lotus Eaters at once rather than having to wait every week for a new episode. episode to drop, but you'd also get access to hundreds of hours of other bonus content and Zeus would smile down upon you for your generosity in supporting us. So thank you for listening. Let's get to the episode. Speaker 1 (1:24) Welcome to another episode of The Lotus Eaters, a podcast on Homer's Odyssey. We cover two books per episode, and we are on books nine and ten. This is the first part of the Odyssey that everyone kind of remembers. This is Odysseus telling the story of his adventures since the Trojan War, getting us caught up. on what has happened that led him ultimately to the Phaeacian Islands 10 years after the war was over. So this is where we're going to learn a lot about how he arrived at the destination that we already have been with him at for a while. So it's an interesting structure to do it like this. And in these two books, you get a bunch of very famous things. You get the Lotus Eaters. which inspired the name of this podcast, you get probably most famously the Cyclops or the... Keyclops. Yeah. The Keyclops. You get the Sikones, Sikones. You get Circe, the goddess Circe. You get, although I always forget about them, every time I revisit the Odyssey, I was like, oh, yeah, the Last Dagonians, those big mountain people. And, you know, maybe most tragically, we'll see Odysseus get so, so close to Ithaca that he can see people burning fires on the land only to be blown back out to sea for another nine and a half years or whatever. It's brutal. Speaker 2 (3:10) Yeah, absolutely brutal. Speaker 1 (3:12) It's like when you're waiting on a tarmac for like an hour and a half. Totally. Speaker 2 (3:17) And then you start to just see, like you think the tarmac's moving, but it's just the plane next to you that was moving. You're just stuck. Speaker 1 (3:25) Must be what Odysseus was feeling when he saw the fires. That's a good metaphor. That's a kind of Homeric simile you might see. Speaker 2 (3:33) Yeah, I was excited because this is, of course, having never read the Odyssey before, this is everything, like you were saying, everything that you hear about the Odyssey in popular culture. And I was just eating it all up. I was like a cyclops in my cave, chewing on it. Speaker 1 (3:52) Binge reading. Exactly. Speaker 2 (3:54) The overwhelming feeling I got, like what you were describing when he gets to that despair of seeing Ithaca, but also just, you know, we are currently in the Phaeacians, like Hall, and he's telling the story. So I really did feel like, I think we mentioned this before, but it just, it was like that kind of trope, the Sunset Boulevard, like you might imagine what got me Speaker 1 (4:15) here. But Speaker 2 (4:16) you get the sense of like, okay, what broke this man? And it wasn't just the war. It's like the hope. The hope that he's slowly been losing this whole time. Because you imagine like in war, you're focused. You don't have that much time to like despair for things that are going on. You're just surviving. You finish the war and you have this hope of like getting home. And this is just like what has happened in 10 years to like slowly break this man to the point where he's weeping openly. Speaker 1 (4:44) Yeah. Although it seems like they were doing plenty of weeping. That too. But yes, I totally agree with what you're saying. Like, how did he get to this just sob ridden, diminished state that he's in with still flashes of his earlier self, but really just flashes. Right. Speaker 2 (5:03) Because he was even like chastising his men for crying. Remember? Yes. Like he was kind of the hard one. Speaker 1 (5:10) Now, yes. He's like, maybe they were right. Now, anything, you know, you put him in front of like as good as it gets and he's going to be a basket case. But yeah, so like we're getting a sense of how Odysseus became the Odysseus as we're seeing him right now. But at the same time, also seeing him try to like reclaim his identity to some degree. Now, what that means, I think, is kind of open ended. Yeah. What do you think that? decision to structure the text like this, like, what does it allow the text to accomplish that it might not otherwise. So first you got Telemachus and his adventures. Then we finally meet Odysseus kind of roughly at the same time as what's going on with Telemachus. And we get four books of him on the Phaeacian Island. I guess we're getting a glimpse into how he is right now. And then the decision to only now tell the stories of how he got to this point. Because you could have just told it. chronologically the whole way. And that's not what happens. Instead, to like round out the first half of the text, we only get the story of his adventures now. And from his perspective, like told first personally. Speaker 2 (6:27) Right. Speaker 1 (6:27) Yeah. What do you think about the structure and what it allows? Speaker 2 (6:31) You know, my thoughts aren't too sophisticated about it, given it's my first reading. But here's like a couple of things that were popping in my head as I've been reading it. One is it's such bullshit to attribute this to modern storytelling. So like the nonlinear aspect, like as if somehow within the last hundred years, we've figured out that story structure is sometimes best suited in nonlinear ways. I also keep thinking about like, what would it be like to be around a campfire and listening to this and like the growing action of the story and hitting this like almost midway point. where you start getting some of the most intense action, like the timing is great. Like it's the way to tell an enjoyable story. Like you've, they've built it up in such a way that it's just like, you know, it's obviously kind of a brilliant way to tell a story. You don't shoot your shot. You don't shoot your load early on. Speaker 1 (7:24) And Speaker 2 (7:24) like, it helps for us to know like who he is already. Like I have some intimacy with Odysseus and like part of that intimacy didn't start until after the Telemachus. saga or whatever but that was one way of getting to know him like it was like a distant way like then we're getting a little closer and now we're like at the heart like so this is a physical journey we're like in his mind now we're in the intra-psychic journey yeah Speaker 1 (7:49) i like that first of all just on the like arc of a good story it's true like chronologically these books are the earliest of any of them, aside from like just brief stories that people will tell of the Trojan War. And this is where so much of the exciting stuff happens. So if you put that first, then you would get the Phaeacians and then him on Ithaca kind of planning. You would get this whole massive ocean of not much happening except, you know, really interesting stuff psychologically. But to put this later, I think from a storytelling rhythm, is kind of ideal in that way. Speaker 2 (8:27) And you can imagine that if this was a story that had been told for a thousand years or so before it even got written down, that what you would have is a bunch of people telling the story. And you would almost get like a natural selection for what the best way of telling it is. And you can just imagine the first guy to be like, maybe I'll start actually with Telemachus. Like, Speaker 1 (8:48) let's Speaker 2 (8:49) see how that will work. Speaker 1 (8:50) Yeah. Their little like writer's room, composer room. Yeah, totally. With their index cards. What if we put... Move to this move that there. I Speaker 2 (9:01) love Speaker 1 (9:03) that beat There's a couple other interesting things one is it's one thing to hear these stories when he's in full glory mode It's another thing to hear these stories when we have already been intimately presented with the cost of those stories and we're seeing that this isn't somebody who came out of all these adventures just a champion, like holding up the belt. That's not at all what happened. This is a guy who, as long as we've seen him, has been weeping, talking about how much he's suffered. Occasionally he can get pushed too far, so he'll fuck people up in a discus throwing contest. But for the most part, we've already seen what this led to, and we're ambivalent about that at best. It's a different tone that kind of colors how we're going to see. these adventures and then it's Speaker 2 (9:54) a Speaker 1 (9:54) really interesting choice and i think necessary for him to have to tell the story from a first person perspective because he wouldn't just be telling that to himself as he was doing it, right? So because you're doing it this way, he has to be the one to tell the story. You know, like there's potential unreliable narrator or at the very least, maybe rationalizing that he's doing. But at other times, he's very hard on himself during these stories. So that's just another layer, another. level of analysis that you have to take into account that this is coming from him. Unlike the rest of the story, which comes from a kind of omniscient perspective, this is purely Odysseus telling the story. Speaker 2 (10:36) Right, right. And then Cersei was like, oh, yeah, I want to fuck you. Yeah. Speaker 1 (10:40) Sure, buddy. That would be funny if they discovered this part of book 23 where it's just like, oh, I made all this shit up. For the Phoenicians, because I wanted to give them a good story before I left. None of that happened. Speaker 2 (10:58) But I like what you said about the cost. Like, I hadn't really thought about that. But as you said it, I was like, oh, psychologically, it's such a different feel when I'm reading, like, how he's talking shit to the Cyclops. Knowing already the tragedy that has occurred. Like, I see those moments for what they are. like a flawed character who doesn't know when to shut up, where I would not necessarily see that. Like I would have to wait until after that moment to know what the consequences were. Yeah. Speaker 1 (11:29) And that's just a totally different like storytelling dynamic. And I think this works better for sure. Yeah, Speaker 2 (11:36) for sure. You know, as we record, like you and I spoke a couple of days ago about like, you know, online or on. Twitter there was some renewed chatter about this translation yeah and people always focus on the opening line to tell me about a complicated man and compare it to the other translations and one of the things that I saw people saying is like oh it's downplaying Odysseus as a hero you know by like complicated doesn't sound nearly as heroic which I guess is true But when I was reading these two books, I was like, no, complicated is right. Speaker 1 (12:07) Like Speaker 2 (12:07) this is a complicated man. Like anybody who thinks that you can read this and just think that he is like unconditionally heroic in any, you know, straight forward sense of the word is just wrong. Like this is a man who is complicated in the negative ways too. Like he just makes mistakes. His gifts are his curses too. Yes. Speaker 1 (12:24) Yeah. No, I think when people make that complaint about this translation, I... highly doubt that they've read the Odyssey in any translation because you know this is the last translation that I've read but for the first like 12 years or whatever, I was reading all the ones that they like. And it's so blindingly obvious in those translations that Odysseus is a flawed character and that, you know, he can be heroic, but it's always open to question just how good of a person, even the Greeks viewed him this way. All the Greek tragedians would often make him a villain in their plays. So like, it's not that she's kind of doing this revisionist take where. she doesn't glorify Odysseus like the text does. The text definitely doesn't, and no translation of the text would ever show him as anything but a complicated man in that sense. Speaker 2 (13:21) Yeah. Well, so that makes even more sense why I was going to ask, like, why this section opens by calling him the Lord of Lies. Yeah. Speaker 1 (13:28) Why Speaker 2 (13:29) Odysseus, the Lord of Lies, answered. Speaker 1 (13:31) Yeah. And he even says, I am Odysseus's. Larrity's son, known for my many clever tricks and lies. So it's like lying is a good thing. It's like a weapon, I think, in the sense that he's using it there. And I also think it relates to disguises. He's also a lord of disguise. Speaker 2 (13:54) There was one other thing I wanted to say that I really enjoyed about this section, just sort of thematically, and that is being on the fringes of... the world and like seeing these creatures that are both physically different but like specifically not human in the moral way in like the way that they don't respect like gods or laws that humans all seem to just internally know like we just kind of know you don't do that or you don't do this yeah Speaker 1 (14:27) uh and really has been throughout like he gets close to ithaca Then back to the fringes, and certainly Calypso's island is even farther fringes. And then the Phaeacians are a kind of fringe island in themselves. So no wonder he's confused about who he is or whether he even exists, you know, because he's been on the periphery of everything. Right. Speaker 2 (14:49) But I do think, like we were saying when he first got to Phaeacia, and it makes even more... sense to me now that like finally when he gets there