Could you just tell us the fuller story and import of the ghostly encounter with the common man, Elpenor?

Yeah.

So we only know a few names of Odysseus' shipmates, and they are the kind of second in command.

They're often sort of slightly rebelling against Odysseus.

There's a possibility of mutiny at various points.

They disagree with what Odysseus is telling them to do.

But it's quite telling that those people who get a name typically in the Homeric world, are the people of importance, the people of rank, right? This is a kind of aristocratic society.

So is it wrong for me to want him to come home and have a contentment that transcends the the the desire for for knowing and so on or do am i just not greek enough

What did he and Achilles talk about, and what did Odysseus take away from that conversation?

Yeah.

Again, this is unfortunately the film entirely cuts the character of Achilles, which is, to me, one of the more inexplicable choices that Nolan made.

I, you know, I think there are a couple of scenes and episodes in the Odyssey that are, it seems to me, just profoundly critical and key, and this conversation between Achilles and Odysseus is one of them.

I mean, here you have the two paradigmatic great heroic figures of the two, at least the extant epics that we have.

Uh, there may have been more, but these are, you could say, two poles of heroism.

You know, Achilles represents vigor and strength and kind of masculine, just brute capacity to defeat through physical force, to defeat any human that opposes him, and he even goes so far as to even contend against the gods, and there's a scene in the Iliad where he wants to take on the spirit of a river.

How does having a home allow someone to take risks and go on adventures and be ambitious?

Why does Homer still matter? Why does Odysseus still matter today in 2026?

So I would say that the aspect of the film that disturbed me the most, which includes many of the things we've been saying, but the story of Odysseus' journey, which of course has absolutely just fixated human beings for now thousands of years, all of the adventures he undertakes, all of the figures, the creatures, the gods he encounters.

Yeah.

It's a story of, you could say, the human soul or the effort to discover what our humanity is.

In a very allegorical form, Odysseus is being constantly tempted by the possibility of being more than a human to become like a god or to be less than a human to become like a beast.

And so that – of course, there are horrible monsters and creatures and different – you know, like the scene with the giants who attack and destroy his crew.

This is certainly a part of that homecoming.

profoundly moving scene yeah beautiful human moment you're right those tender little moments don't happen in epic poems regularly or not regularly

Can you tell us more?

Yeah, you know, it struck me as this wonderful, strange coincidence that the same month of the release of Christopher Nolan's blockbuster movie was also the month we were celebrating America's birthday, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

And I wanted to write a short book that emphasized the fact that this was maybe coincidence, but in a deeper sense, there was a kind of providential overlap of these two events that at the heart of the American experience is exactly that tension and paradox and dynamic that I just described.

We are maybe above all the people that have defined what it is to be an explorer, to be the pioneer, to be the person that is always pushing the boundaries, like Odysseus, who's always in some ways open to and exploring that which is at the edges of our civilization.

When we're talking about Christian themes, do we see any of that in the Odyssey?

Well, what we see in Nolan's version is a kind of, I think, perverted kind of Christianity in which the overarching theme of his film is guilt, is the guilt of Odysseus.

And, of course, it's a guilt that's post-Christian because there's guilt without any redemption or grace and forgiveness.

So I think the film is, in some ways, it's neither Christian nor its original sort of pagan sources.

Can you say a little bit more about that?

Yeah, and this is actually – this is one piece of, I guess you could say, where there's been a big debate lately over whether secondary scholarship is relevant to the great books and should you – you know, should professors be experts in what they teach and so forth.

And I can see myself sort of sympathizing with both sides of this argument, but there is something invaluable, of course, about knowing – the secondary literature.

And in the case of the Odyssey, I spent years when I was writing my dissertation reading just about everything I could on the Odyssey, about the Odyssey, you know, in different languages.

And one little data point that stuck with me that I didn't write about in the original book is precisely this, is that during a transition from the late medieval period in which Dante is writing to the Renaissance, the image of Odysseus shifts.

And particularly, let's say, the image of the afterlife or the after-Odyssey life of Odysseus shifts dramatically.

that Dante's presentation, which, I mean, we may discuss this, but imaginary tellings of what happens after the conclusion of the Odyssey begin almost immediately, right? It's just in, right, the conclusion of the Odyssey invites further reflection.

But it's also about the political, and it's in the political that Odysseus can find himself.

But who or what does The Wizard of Oz actually represent?

Yeah.

Well, th- this is actually I think the most interesting aspect of, of at least my rereading of the book in particular and, and then thinking about it in relation to the film.

It, The Wizard of Oz seems to me to be a figure in the book especially, who represents the yearning to be a, like a god.

Uh, and in some ways you could say comes pretty close to submitting to that.

In, in the book, he is portrayed as a As a figure who has, um, you know, he's accidentally, like the balloon takes him into Oz, and he is treated by the, the kind of quasi not quite fully human creatures that greet him.

They're, actually in, in Oz, in the book, they're about the same size as the Munchkins, so they're, so they're not complete humans.

Salinger.

... for the, uh, the abolition of slavery, if I can put it.

Yeah, that's, that, that's right.

So he, he understands that maybe we would technologically be able to sort of, you know, substitute for these forms of, you know, what are, what are degrading forms of human labor.

And frankly, it's not only slaves.

He says farmers, you know, are basically essentially a form of degraded human existence because most of their lives are lived in a kind of drudgery, which at that, certainly at that time, was certainly true.

So all of these forms of technological development have been, you could say, in one way or another oriented us to, with the aim of making us more human if we define humanity as that which is, you know, especially related to that, to, to that quality of thinking, of intelligence, of logos.

Uh, now I personally and many conservatives over the years have been critical of this undertaking as already undermining or dismissing an aspect of our, of our humanity, uh, that is actually central to who we are.

... of the executive, a more energetic executive as Hamilton might say.

Does one just put aside those attributes in a belief that the greater good is what's worth pursuing? Or is there a more delicate calculus than I'm aware of?

So I'll put on my political science hat here.

I'm not gonna speak of my own personal views on this, but I think the way to understand the religious right's relationship to Donald Trump is born of the experience of whether we think this is empirically true or not, and I'm sure many of your listeners will disagree with this assessment, but I think this is the felt sense among that community, of constant and continual loss, of constant and continual political weakening of their position, regardless of whether they elected a Republican or whether a Democrat was elected to office.

When the word RINO (laughs) is invented, it's been invented in part to express this, Republican In Name Only, that the party that the religious right supported, of course, since Ronald Reagan, maybe Barry Goldwater, continued to fail to support and advance those positions that were most of importance to people on the religious right.

This is especially, of course, in the social domain, family values and so forth.

Policies and court decisions and Supreme Court justices that ended up betraying what they thought they were getting, ended up leading, I think, people in this part of the political coalition to say, "You know what? It's not enough just to vote nice people who wear ties and say nice words, and they're just Chamber of Commerce Republicans that always vote to send factories overseas.

We want somebody who's gonna fight.

Oh, you're sticking to them?