688. The Odyssey: Return of the King (Part 2)

In the second half of their Odyssey series — timed to the release of Christopher Nolan's film — Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook pick up the poem where Homer actually starts it: not with monsters, but with Athena (voiced here in Dominic's Dame Edna register, the hosts having decided the Greeks were essentially Australians) visiting Ithaca to put courage into the drifting Telemachus. Twenty years after Odysseus sailed for Troy, his hall is overrun by 108 suitors; Penelope has held them off for years by weaving a shroud for Laertes by day and unpicking it by night, until a maid betrays the trick. Telemachus visits Nestor in Pylos and then Menelaus and the witchy, both-sides-playing Helen in Sparta, where he learns from the shape-shifter Proteus's report that his father is alive on Calypso's island.

Athena's lobbying gets Hermes sent to Ogygia, and Calypso reluctantly releases Odysseus — but not before offering him immortality. He turns it down in one of antiquity's few eulogies to married love, preferring to die with Penelope. Poseidon pulverizes his raft anyway; he washes up naked among the laundry-washing princess Nausicaa and the Phaeacians, an ideal society with a perfect microclimate and self-sailing ships the hosts note sound uncannily like AI. At the Phaeacian court a blind bard — probably the origin of the legend of blind Homer — sings of Troy, Odysseus weeps, reveals himself, and tells the adventures covered in episode one.

Deposited asleep on an Ithacan beach, Odysseus is disguised by Athena as a beggar, is recognized only by his dying dog Argos and by the nurse Eurycleia (via a boar-hunt scar), and reunites tearfully with Telemachus before the trap is sprung. Penelope's archery contest — string the great bow, shoot through twelve axe heads — defeats every suitor; the beggar strings it to a flash of lightning from a clear sky, shoots Antinous through the throat, and the slaughter is total. The hosts don't sanitize the aftermath: twelve slave girls hanged, the goatherd Melanthius mutilated, and they wonder aloud how much of this Nolan will film. Penelope, wily to the last, tests her husband with the secret of their bed built around a living olive tree before the reunion Athena extends by holding back the dawn. They close on why the poem endures, from Virgil and Dante to Tennyson's Ulysses.