![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I saw a truly dreadful television program about the Odyssey Sunday night. Train-wreck awful, but in an interesting way; the presenter had, it seems, managed to gather that the Odyssey is at heart about the affirmation of human life, the choice to live in the mortal world. What he hadn't understood is that "the mortal world" of the Greeks, was rather different from our own. So in this version Odysseus gets home in the nick of time, as you'd expect, but shoots an orange rather than killing all the suitors and then collapses into Penelope's arms. Ha! Lucky suitors, to have found themselves in a romance--they can slink home in safety. I was hoping that the tree he was shooting into would be an olive-tree, because that would manage to encapsulate the complete and utter way in which the program missed the point.
It was made even better by having actors to act out scenes from the epic as well as a whole set of scenes that weren't in the epic at all.
It always amazes me that people focus so strongly on the epic as adventure-story, since Odysseus' travels make up only about a third of the poem; the important stuff all happens after he gets back to Ithaka. And Odysseus narrates most of his own adventures (thur guaranteeing himself immortal fame, something the presenter failed to notice): I can't possibly be the only reader to assume that these have roughly the same truth-value as the Cretan stories he tells once he reaches Ithaka, can I? In other words, that Odysseus is making up some portions of his story.
This version was missing the Telemachy, the gods, Circe, the Lastrygonians, the Lotus-Eaters, Nausicaa, and most of the last twelve books of the epic. A bit like a version of The Lord of the Rings without the hobbits and elves, really. You can tell a story, but without Frodo and Sam it isn't quite the same.
It was made even better by having actors to act out scenes from the epic as well as a whole set of scenes that weren't in the epic at all.
It always amazes me that people focus so strongly on the epic as adventure-story, since Odysseus' travels make up only about a third of the poem; the important stuff all happens after he gets back to Ithaka. And Odysseus narrates most of his own adventures (thur guaranteeing himself immortal fame, something the presenter failed to notice): I can't possibly be the only reader to assume that these have roughly the same truth-value as the Cretan stories he tells once he reaches Ithaka, can I? In other words, that Odysseus is making up some portions of his story.
This version was missing the Telemachy, the gods, Circe, the Lastrygonians, the Lotus-Eaters, Nausicaa, and most of the last twelve books of the epic. A bit like a version of The Lord of the Rings without the hobbits and elves, really. You can tell a story, but without Frodo and Sam it isn't quite the same.
