His name is Odysseus...
and he's on a mission
to return home to the woman he loves before she marries someone else.
Blocking his way are bloodthirsty monsters,
enchanting seductresses,
treacherous seas and angry gods.
This is the continuing journey of Odysseus,
the epic quest of the greatest mythical hero of all time.
To us it is myth,
but to the ancients it was reality
and perhaps even a blueprint for one of the Christian gospels.
This is the real story as it was originally told
of the Odyssey.
The story of Odysseus, King of Ithaca,
is not like tales of other mythological heroes.
He's not a god with special superpowers.
Instead his character is written as a regular man
trying to get home from a ten-year war to his wife and son.
Everybody can relate to this guy.
This is all of us,
I'd like to spend more time with my family,
I don't like my job,
I'm not treated the way I ought to be,
and I'm tired, I want to go home.
That's Odysseus' story.
But the Odyssey is not just a return home,
it's a race against time.
As Odysseus battles danger on the high seas,
his wife, Penelope, anxiously awaits his return
and wonders if she has become a sailor's widow.
Meanwhile, a rogue's gallery of suitors is knocking at her door,
pressuring her to forget her husband and marry again.
And according to custom, he who wins the queen,
will win the crown.
If Odysseus doesn't get home in time,
he'll lose his family and his kingdom.
The aristocracy of the area start saying,
"Odysseus isn't coming home.
"We don't know what happened to him but he's not coming back.
"So we need to decide who's gonna be king instead of him. "
The person who would be a candidate would be the person who marries Penelope
since everyone assumed that she was now a widow.
Odysseus' struggle to get home in time
is the central focus of the Odyssey.
This epic myth was the Greek author Homer's most famous work.
And to the ancients it was more than just entertaining fiction,
it was a guidebook to living in a dangerous world.
We need to understand, we need to tell stories
to make sense of our world.
So the Greeks had myths...
These are incredibly human characters
going through incredibly human emotions.
Odysseus' adventures on the high seas
reflected how the Greeks viewed the unknown world beyond their shores.
His myth was written at a time when their empire
was just beginning to expand across de seas.
Odysseus represents someone who is very, very prototypical Greek.
Greece at the time was a very poor country.
It's a rocky place surrounded by the sea.
So people had to make their fortunes by being adventurous.
It was the only way you could make it in ancient Greece.
In the myth, Odysseus' heroic journey home began with his departure from Troy,
where he had spent 10 years fighting the Trojan war.
He had hoped his return to his home island of Ithaca
would be quick and painless.
But for him and his soldiers, it turned into a trip from hell.
On a stop for supplies, several weeks into the journey,
Odysseus narrowly escaped death
at the hands of a man-eating cyclops,
only to draw the wrath of the monster's father,
the powerful sea-god Poseidon.
By attacking the son of a god he makes a double mistake -
one is he angers a god, but the second is he angers the god of the sea.
He's sailing home!
And that's the curse
that is working against Odysseus the entire rest of his journey.
Poseidon, one of the most powerful gods,
has this personal antipathy to Odysseus.
Now Odysseus is way off course,
months into a journey that should have taken weeks.
Little does he know he's got years still to go.
But Odysseus is not one to surrender in the face of adversity.
He may be knocked down just as much as all the rest of us,
and even harder than all the rest of us, but he can always get back up,
he can always find a way.
And I think that really crystallizes this desire that all of us have
to make it through, to persevere.
He's just a human being up against all kind of odds,
up against gods, and he has to make it through
simply on his intelligence.
Desperate for an escape from Poseidon's stormy seas
the hero and his men make landfall at a coastline overflowing with food.
Odysseus sends a scouting party to investigate
while he stays close to shore.
The men discover a stone palace surrounded by wolves and lions.
There they meet the beautiful sorceress
Circe.
For these Greek warriors who have been out at sea for the past four months
she's a stirring sight.
And so are her maids.
Circe invites the men into her home to enjoy a sumptuous feast
of food and flesh.
Circe is supposed to show us what happens when men
get led astray not by drugs but by sex.
And men coming home, when you've got sexy women with great power
that can make you happy, give you anything you want,
well, what does that do? It turns men to pigs.
As Odysseus' men indulge their appetites
the sorceress teaches them a hard lesson.
She literally transforms the men into swine.
But one man manages to escape Circe's spell
and returns to warn Odysseus.
Without hesitation, he sets out to confront the goddess.
He has this almost optimism about the way things are.
He has this idea that any challenge that comes his way he can overcome.
And he never seems to falter in that.
According to the myth, on the way to Circe's palace,
where his men have been turned into pigs,
Odysseus crosses paths with a valuable ally,
the ancient Greek messenger god, Hermes.
He's often the god who's sent from Mount Olympus down to Earth
to perform errands, essentially.
He's sent to Odysseus with a drug called "moly".
We don't really know what this was but it has mystical powers.
He gives it to Odysseus and he takes it
so he's actually not subject to Circe's powers.
Ancient storytellers may have referred to this mythical wonder-drug
as "holy moly" and inspired the phrase we know today.
With the power of his moly protecting him
Odysseus swaggers into Circe's palace.
Circe tries to turn him into a pig but fails,
so she changes tactics -
she lures him into her bedroom,
but Odysseus plays hard to get.
Odysseus responds, "Not so fast! Before I agree to this
"you have to promise to turn my men back into human beings,
"and you have to promise no more funny business,
"no more turning any of us into animals. "
And Circe agrees to these terms.
With that, Odysseus enters the inner sanctum of the sex goddess
and doesn't come out for a whole year.
This, to us, seems like an extra-marital affair.
Homer doesn't seem to think that this is a problem in any way.
This likely has to do with the double standards in Greek society,
that is to say, women were expected to be chaste and loyal,
not to seek or particularly enjoy sexual relationships
whereas men could go out and have a lot of different extra-marital affairs
without anybody thinking that it was wrong.
After one year Odysseus decides enough is enough.
He's had his tryst but his heart is with his wife Penelope,
and he must get home.
I think at this point the Odyssey
is trying to show us something about Odysseus.
He is a man like any other man.
He should be striving to get home.
He owes Penelope and he owes Ithaca a king,
and the longer he spends with Circe,
the more he is denying what is owed.
But before he can set sail for his home island of Ithaca,
he'll have to make another detour to visit a place that isn't on the map...
but beneath it.
The underworld of the dead.
It is a harrowing chapter in Odysseus' journey
that some scholars believe even influenced one the Christian gospels.
Odysseus, the mythical hero in Homer's Odyssey
has been away from his family and kingdom for almost 12 years.
He spent a decade fighting the Trojan war,
and a full year in the bedroom of Circe, the sex goddess.
Now he knows the time has come to move on and get home.
Circe consents to his leaving but imparts an ominous warning:
to overcome the curse of the sea-god Poseidon and get home
he'll need instructions from the blind prophet Tiresias.
Just one problem,
Tiresias is dead.
Odysseus must now make an unplanned stop
in the underworld
of Hades.
You think you're just going home
and you're going some place that you didn't expect to go,
you're going to Hell.
Odysseus is horrified of this thought.
No human has ever gone to Hades and survived.
But Odysseus has no choice.
Poseidon's power over the seas is strong,
and he's getting nowhere fast.
If he ever hopes to reclaim his family and his kingdom
he must seek out Tiresias in the underworld.
Today we picture Hell as a pit of fire and brimstone,
but the ancient Greeks saw it differently.
The ancient Greek underworld is mostly characterised
by being misty and cool
in contrast to later ideas that come in with Christianity
of the underworld as being a place of eternal punishment,
it's not a kind of nasty, hot, fiery furnace,
instead what we've got is a grey area that's difficult to see,
that's misty, murky and very far away.
Odysseus makes a harrowing descent into Hades.
The agonised cries of perished souls echo from all sides.
Inside the gates he comes face to face with the prophet Tiresias
who explains that Odysseus and his men
can overcome the wrath of Poseidon and make it home...
if they follow his instructions.
Tiresias gives them very specific advise -
"Above all, what you need to do
"is not eat the cattle of the Sun-god Helios.
"No matter what else you do, do not eat this cattle. "
It's advise that will come back to haunt Odysseus.
As the souls of the dead begin to close in on him,
Odysseus makes his escape from the underworld
more determined than ever to get home.
He has done what no living man is supposed to be able to do,
survive a trip to Hades.
So goes the myth, but what is the link to reality?
Some scholars believe this chapter of the Odyssey
influenced one of Christianity's most sacred texts,
the Gospel of Mark.
It's almost impossible to overestimate
the importance of Homer for ancient Greeks.
Mark, of course, was a Greek speaker, the gospels are written in Greek,
he almost certainly would have known the story of the Odyssey,
so if there are things in the Book of Mark that reminds us of the Odyssey
that may well not be an accident.
A close comparison of the Odyssey and the Gospel of Mark
reveals some shocking parallels.
Both stories revolve around the hardships of a suffering hero,
Odysseus and Jesus.
Both main characters have carpentry backgrounds.
Odysseus was a skilled woodworker who even built his own palace in Ithaca.
Jesus was the son of a carpenter,
and in one passage in the Book of Mark,
he himself is referred to as "The Carpenter".
But the most intriguing connection
is the similarity between Odysseus' visit to Hades
and Jesus' last days on Earth.
Both stories begin with a banquet.
Odysseus and his men feasting at Circe's palace;
Jesus and his apostles at the Last Supper.
Then, as their comrades sleep,
both men agonise about their impending encounter with death.
When Odysseus learns from Circe that he needs to go to Hades,
he despairs of it.
The reason is, and he says so,
that no mortal has ever gone to Hades and returned.
Jesus is about to die, he has a last supper with his disciples.
He despairs of life because he knows he must face the cross.
Ultimately, Odysseus would travel to the underworld of the dead
and return.
Jesus would die on the cross,
and then rise to new life.
Could these parallels be more than coincidence?
As the myth continues,
Odysseus leaves Hades and sets sails for Ithaca.
He is finally on his way home again.
But in his path lurks another obstacle,
the island of the Sirens.
The Sirens are these creatures
whose songs are so beautiful
that they pull you off course
and you shipwreck.
Odysseus knows he is approaching the island of the Sirens,
so he orders his men to plug their ears with bee's wax
to prevent them to hear the Sirens' song.
But Odysseus, a man of insatiable curiosity,
is the exception to his own rule.
He has the crew tie him to the ship's mast.
This way he can listen to the Sirens without steering the ship
toward the island's rocky shores.
As the row through, he's screaming "Untie me! Untie me!",
but they can hear him.
And he hears what the Sirens' song is.
The only human who's done it and survived.
But for the ancients,
you see this scene depicted again and again
on vase painting after vase painting.
And it's meant to show you what the ideal man is about,
doing whatever is necessary to learn something new.
Odysseus' encounter with the Sirens
is one of mythology's best known stories.
But new evidence suggests the song of the Sirens
may be more than just a legend.
Italy's Li Galli Islands.
Traditionally they have been cited as the setting of the story.
Centuries ago they were even called "Le Sirenuse",
"the islands of the Sirens".
In 2004, a team of German scientists
set out to investigate their link to the Odyssey
and made a stunning discovery.
What the German team found on this island
was that there was a naturally occurring formation of rocks
that served as a kind of natural megaphone.
Any sound source that happened to be located there,
the sound waves would bounce off them and they would amplify them
out off the coast.
But even with this built-in megaphone,
human voices are impossible to hear offshore.
So what could have made such a loud sound?
Monk seals.
Centuries ago they were common throughout the Mediterranean,
including the Le Galli islands.
The German team was able to demonstrate the sound of their cries
actually could be heard quite clearly off the coast.
Could this be the call that lured sailors to a rocky grave?
Back on the high seas,
Odysseus has survived his brush with the Sirens,
but an even deadlier challenge lies beyond the next wave.
To make it home to Ithaca,
he'll have to confront one of two terrifying threats.
Some researchers believe these dangers were real
and may still be out there.
Odysseus' shrewdness has helped him survive
a series of deadly obstacles on the high seas.
But he's not the only one using his wits.
Hundreds of miles away in his kingdom of Ithaca,
his wife is keeping her suitors at bay with a clever ruse of her own.
She promises she will marry one of them
as soon as she finishes weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus' father.
But each night she unweaves what she has woven during the day.
This trick has been buying her time for years.
Just as Odysseus is characterized by his craftiness and his cleverness
and his ability to weave plots and plans,
so also Penelope has her claim to being able to weave plots and plans.
Penelope is doing her best to remain hopeful,
but she doesn't know what has become of her husband.
She really has no idea whether Odysseus is still alive,
and if he is still alive whether he's on his way back to her,
or maybe he's just decided to go somewhere else.
It's a terrible state of not knowing.
Meanwhile, a horrific set of new obstacles stands
between Odysseus and home.
He must now choose between two deadly routes.
The first runs through the "wandering rocks",
floating boulders that smash ships apart.
The second slips through a narrow channel flanked on one side
by a man-eating sea-monster called the Scylla,
and on the other by a massive whirlpool known as the Charybdis.
Scylla is this terrifying sea monster
with many heads and many eyes,
this terrifying creature who you know for a fact
will grab up six of your men and eat them.
If you sail by Scylla, that is what will happen.
Facing the Scylla is the Charybdis, a giant vortex
that twirls around and sucks into itself and sort of vomits back up
all the stuff in any nearby area.
If Odysseus would go close to that, he would risk having his whole ship
capsized and sucked down into the bottom of the seabed.
Odysseus is literally trapped between a rock and a hard place.
In fact some believe this is where the cliché originated.
He orders his men to avoid the wandering rocks,
and instead sail for the hard place,
the strait of Scylla and Charybdis.
There Odysseus faces two grim options -
death to some...
or death to all.
He realises in a cold, calculated way
that losing his whole ship would be a worse outcome
than losing a few of his men.
So he decides, actively, to steer closer to the Scylla.
There's a lesson here, of course, and the lesson is
the most gentle and caring commander
sometimes has to be willing to sacrifice some of his men
in order to get the mission accomplished.
As they enter the strait,
the sky goes dark.
Suddenly multiple tsunamis appear out of nowhere.
Odysseus leads the ship away from the Charybdis.
As they pass by, the giant whirlpool sucks up the ocean,
seizing everything within its reach.
Suddenly, from the opposite side of the ship,
the Scylla strikes.
It snatches six men off the ship's deck and swallows them whole.
Odysseus describes this as the worst moment of his travels.
His men being carried away in the mouths of this awful creature
crying his name.
"Odysseus help us! Help us!"
And he can't, and not only that,
Odysseus knows that those men are dying because of his decision.
For centuries, scholars of the Odyssey puzzled
over what might have inspired Homer's monstrous Scylla.
Then, in the mid-1800's,
corpses of massive tentacled beasts washed up on shores across the globe.
This was the answer.
Giant squid.
Overnight fiction became fact.
A giant squid is a creature that's basically as long as a school bus.
Now, imagine how big a giant squid had to look to sailors
who were in boats that were just a few dozen feet long.
Was the Scylla based on real sightings of a giant squid?
And what about its neighbour, the whirlpool, Charybdis?
Modern oceanographers have discovered a giant whirlpool zone
that matches its description
in the narrow Strait of Messina between Italy and Sicily.
To the north you have the Tyrrhenian Sea,
to the South, the lonian Sea.
The waters of the Tyrrhenian and lonian Seas
actually are quite different.
As a result, the water moving back and forth through these straits
is tremendously churned up,
and you get huge whirlpools and vicious tides.
We can scarcely imagine just how powerful they must have been
back in ancient times.
Especially for sailors who are going through them.
Giant squids, treacherous whirlpools,
two real life threats faced by ancient sailors.
Could they have been the inspiration behind this chapter of the Odyssey?
In the myth, Odysseus has just seen six of his men torn apart by the Scylla.
When his ship reaches safety,
he gives in to his shellshocked crew's demand for rest.
Despite the prophet Tiresias' warning
to stay away from the sun-god's cattle,
he agrees to make landfall on the island
where the cattle are kept.
Odysseus sees the cattle and says to his men,
"Ok. We're on the island overnight. Whatever you do, don't eat those.
"Do not eat those!"
But with supplies running low and starvation setting in
the crew disobeys Odysseus and butchers the cattle.
It will be the last meal they ever eat.
Helios, the sun-god, is furious and turns to Zeus,
the king of gods, for justice.
Angering a god in antiquity was one of the worst moves you could make.
The gods didn't have a lot of qualms about using their powers
to punish mortals that they disapproved of.
Zeus agrees to punish the trespassers.
He sends a perfect storm that strikes down Odysseus' ship.
All the men perish.
Except for one.
Odysseus is spared because he alone didn't eat the cattle.
But this is where the good news ends.
Now he has no men, no boat,
and no idea where he is.
After three years at sea Odysseus has lost all his men and ships.
He is alone, isolated and still no closer to home.
He is washed up on the island paradise of another beautiful seductress,
the nymph Calypso.
In Greek mythology, nymphs were pretty young girls with magical powers.
Every man's wildest fantasy.
They lived in forests and in woodlands.
As their name implies, nymphs, or nymphomaniac as our English word,
they were very sprightly in their behaviour.
At this point, Odysseus is relieved just to be alive.
Washing up on the island of a beautiful nymph
is an unexpected bonus.
While his wife Penelope faithfully preserves her chastity back home,
Odysseus treats himself to another extra-marital tryst.
This time he winds up staying 7 years.
Odysseus is given license to pretty much sleep with whoever he wants.
There doesn't seem to be in Homer's tale any particularly negative connotation
that's attached to Odysseus' dalliances.
In fact they seem to make him into a greater, more powerful kind of man
because he can conquer all these women.
Calypso promises Odysseus immortality if he'll stay with her forever.
But he refuses knowing he must return to his wife and his kingdom.
In some ways, it's a stupid choice -
to pick mortality and being a man over being a demi-god -
but for Odysseus it's not a question, he must reject Calypso,
he must leave Calypso to fulfil his fate as a man.
But with no ship to take him home
Odysseus must take matters into his own hands.
He builds himself a boat.
For ancient Greeks carpentry was understood to be
one of the great gifts
in the intellectual accomplishments in antiquity.
We often call Odysseus' craft a raft,
but it's anything but a raft, it's got a mast, it's got a rudder,
it's got gunnels.
It was a metaphor of his wisdom, it's a part of his cleverness
that he's able to be such a wise carpenter.
When the boat is finished Odysseus returns to sea.
He has spent nearly 20 years away from home.
Now the end of the road is finally in sight.
And it's not a moment too soon.
Back on the home front
his loyal wife Penelope has exhausted all of her stall tactics
to ward off the men who have pursued her year after year.
Her suitors are loosing their patience.
The suitors say, "He's not coming home. He's not coming back.
"His ship must have been destroyed on the way.
"You must choose one of us as Odysseus' successor. "
Can Odysseus get back to Ithaca before it's too late?
Like many elements of Homer's Odyssey
the island home of Odysseus has a clear connection to reality.
For centuries scholars have pondered which Greek island the author had in mind
when he wrote his epic story.
Traditionally it is believed to be a Greek island known today as Ithaki,
but Homer's writings about Ithaca don't match up with its modern-day namesake.
Look at what Homer says. He says, "Ithaca is the western island.
"The furthest out to sea and it's low-lying,"
and you think, Hallo! This is completely wrong.
Ithaki is not the furthest out to the west,
it's not the furthest out to the sea.
When researchers compared ancient maps with modern-day satellite images,
and island called Kefalonia next to Ithaki,
caught their attention.
It seemed to match Homer's description of Ithaca
in every way but one.
What Homer describes is four islands.
He says there should be four islands here.
Well, we have a problem, there's only really three. Where's the fourth?
And he also says that Homer's Ithaki, Odysseus' Ithaca,
should furthest to the west.
Now, you solve the problem if you split Kefalonia in half.
If you say that the western peninsula of Kefalonia,
3000 years ago might have been a free standing island.
Could the single island once have been two?
In 2006 a team of scientists set out to solve the mystery.
Using high-tech surveying equipment, the kind used in oil and gas exploration,
they drilled a 400-foot hole into the ground of the low-lying valley
that lies between Kefalonia's east and west branches.
If there was ever a split in the island
this would have been the place.
We went on drilling until we run out of drill stem, actually,
and was about 15 meters below sea level,
and at no point did we hit solid mountain bedrock.
Now, you know, how unlikely is that?
The simplest explanation of that is to say that
at some point the sea went through that valley
and you can still see residue of that today.
These results suggest that the valley was once under water
and it makes Kefalonia a prime candidate for being Homer's Ithaca.
The island Odysseus finally saw in the horizon
20 years after he went off to fight the Trojan war.
Odysseus never gave up.
He spent years trying to get home
but he was gonna get home one way or another.
Against all odds, Odysseus is finally home.
It is the moment he has been dreaming about the past two decades,
but there is no homecoming parade waiting for him.
Instead, the final arrangements are being made to redistribute his power.
Unless he can pull off one more miracle
Odysseus will lose everything he's fought to come home to.
It is the setup for a dramatic ending.
But could Odysseus' homecoming have really happened
and if so, when?
Using clues buried in the Odyssey,
modern astronomers have been able to pinpoint
the exact date Homer had in mind.
Odysseus' return to Ithaca was a journey that took 20 years,
sent over 600 men to their graves and 14 ships to the sea floor.
Finally, after all that, the hero was home.
But, is he too late to save his wife...
and his kingdom?
When Odysseus returns home
his island-kingdom of Ithaca is in a state of complete chaos.
Everything has been going terribly wrong.
His wife is beset, his household is beset by suitors, 108 suitors.
Odysseus realises he can't just walk into his palace
and reclaim his former life.
These suitors have long coveted his queen and his kingdom.
If they find out that Odysseus has returned
they will undoubtedly try to kill him before he can recapture his throne.
One last time Odysseus must outwit, outlast and outplay
his enemies to survive.
When Odysseus arrives in Ithaca he doesn't come with a great following.
He doesn't arrive as the great returning king.
He actually disguises himself as an old beggar.
And he does this, probably partially because
he's not sure of what reception he'll receive.
Meanwhile, Odysseus' long-suffering wife Penelope
finally yields to the suitors' pressure
and announces an archery contest to determine her new husband.
Whoever can string Odysseus' bow and shoot an arrow through 12 axes
will win her hand in marriage.
It is the fateful day in Ithaca.
Just before the game is about to begin,
Homer writes that the Sun is blotted out of the sky.
For centuries this one line has been scrutinized.
Is it a poetic devise to build suspense,
or the record of a real event?
Even the ancient Greeks thought this maybe meant that
Odysseus was returning home on the day of a total eclipse.
Recently scientists examined the Odyssey for astronomical evidence
that could reveal the exact date Homer was referring to.
They looked more closely at all the references in the Odyssey
that might refer to something about astronomical events.
They then tried to match up those combinations of events
with their eclipse dates.
And they found that, in fact, it all matched for one of those eclipses,
one that took place on April 16th, 1178 BC.
So, it's possible...
that that was the day when Odysseus returned home to Penelope.
In the myth, a two-decade pursuit of Penelope
now comes down to one main event.
One suitor after another prove too weak to string Odysseus' bow.
They are all about to give up
when a tattered beggar steps forward.
And then the beggar steps up and wants a turn.
Well, by the rules he should have a turn.
Their response is to be irate and to deride him.
But the beggar strings the bow without any hesitation
and the laughing suddenly stops.
He lines up a shot.
It flies straight through the 12 axe-handles.
The contest is over,
but the suitors are not about to give up without a fight.
Odysseus' final battle ends with the suitors slaughtered
and the hero victorious.
He has won back his throne.
Now he has to win back his woman.
The king of cunning has one last test to pass.
After Odysseus has slaughtered all the suitors
then he and Penelope enjoy a very intimate moment,
and they sit across from each other lit only by firelight.
Penelope has one last test.
After a long conversation she says to her servants,
"I want this stranger to be comfortable,
"so please bring my own bed out of my chambers
"and put it on the porch and let this stranger sleep in my own bed. "
At that point Odysseus realises that his wife is giving him a final test,
and he says, "Penelope, I know this is a test.
"I built our bed around this tree rooted into the ground.
"Our bed cannot be moved. "
Because she has never let anyone inside of that bedroom,
she knows for sure only Odysseus would know that that bed's not movable.
Odysseus' long journey, his Odyssey, is at its end,
but his legend will endure.
It was common among ancient Greek warriors
to have as a decoration on their armour the figure of Odysseus.
He was there for them as a symbol of someone who had always endured pain.
Odysseus's very name, in Greek, means "man of pain".
He suffers like all of us suffer.
But maybe unlike all of us, Odysseus always also endures.
So it's that ability, I think, to always get back up after being knocked down
that makes him a character that's so relatable to people over many centuries.