{"id":4860,"date":"2026-07-19T07:08:32","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T07:08:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=4860"},"modified":"2026-07-19T07:08:32","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T07:08:32","slug":"read-the-odyssey-with-mary-beard-not-with-elon-musk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=4860","title":{"rendered":"Read \u2018The Odyssey\u2019 with Mary Beard, not with Elon Musk"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As you progress through your summer reading, ask yourself: Do I really want to tackle \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d? The Christopher Nolan-directed, star-jammed adaptation of the Greek epic arrived in movie theaters on July 17. And yet, do you want to lug Homer out to the beach this summer?<\/p>\n

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In need of some encouragement?<\/p>\n

The ideal person for that job is Mary Beard, the professor emerita of classics at the University of Cambridge, and certainly the best-known ancient classicist in the world. She was in Evanston recently for a Chicago Humanities Festival talk at Northwestern University. We met near the beaches where Nolan, who was raised in Evanston, made Super 8 films as a child. She had long white hair and wore high-top sneakers covered in Batman comics word balloons. You might assume, at 71, with many, many books on Greco-Roman culture to her name \u2014 including \u201cPompeii,\u201d \u201cPagan Priests,\u201d \u201cSPQR: A History of Ancient Rome,\u201d \u201cConfronting the Classics,\u201d and her latest, \u201cTalking Classics: The Shock of the Old,\u201d inspired by a lecture series she gave at the University of Chicago in 2023 \u2014 that Beard is an advocate for ancient Greek and Roman literature.<\/p>\n

And she is, but for the right reasons.<\/p>\n

She said, \u201cI deplore when people say stuff like you must read \u2018The Odyssey,\u2019 you must because it is textbook social history, and this and that \u2014 No! Just read it and enjoy it!\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, when we met, she was groaning to a friend about a question she was just asked, on how to square the study of Greek and Roman culture with the long \u201ctoxic\u201d history of how its books, figures and aesthetics have been used in the service of fascism and racism. She bristled at that word, \u201ctoxic,\u201d at teachers who erect roadblocks at the start.<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, look, we don\u2019t want to live like the ancients,\u201d she said. \u201cBut there is a heavy burden placed on how much all of this stuff is to be admired or not. It\u2019s never been clear to me where that comes from. We\u2019d get so much more out of the ancient world if we could stop admiring it! If we could just stop revering everything about it! If we could just start asking: \u2018What are these people even talking about, how do I feel about this?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Odyssey,\u201d she said, is a perfect example of how ancient classics should not be read for grand truths and stoic takeaways but for how they question, dispute, debate.<\/p>\n

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\u201cOK, so, we have Odysseus, our heroic leader, trying to make his way home, but he returns having lost all of his men. What kind of leader is that? If you\u2019re alert to it, the book is asking this. Also, what kind of woman is Penelope, his wife \u2014 is she being clever trying to avoid marriage to a number of suitors? I say \u2018suitors\u2019 but these men are really thugs, who, mind you, she is sending little notes to! How do we understand the morality of these people? Take the cyclops. Odysseus invades the home of a one-eyed giant and drinks and eats, and the cyclops, a cannibal, eats a couple of Odysseus\u2019s men, so Odysseus then gets the giant drunk and grinds out his eye. Who is in the right here? Are we certain where good and bad sit? That\u2019s not Odysseus\u2019s home! I\u2019m not asking because we live in an enlightened society \u2014 the ancients raised those questions, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

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In fact, though Homer is widely considered one of the foundational authors of literature, it\u2019s never been settled entirely if the writer credited with \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d existed. \u201cPeople have theories,\u201d Beard said. \u201cThe Greeks thought there was a poet named Homer, but we don\u2019t know. And we don\u2019t know when \u2018The Odyssey\u2019 was written down. It\u2019s even hard to say when the book we can buy at a bookstore became the book we know. There\u2019s debate. I don\u2019t know where I stand. There\u2019s a communal, oral bard tradition there \u2014 yet it\u2019s so amazingly crafted I find it hard not to think an individual shaped it, start to finish.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beard credits her love for ancient classics to a chance event, the time a museum guard at the British Museum removed a 4,000-year old boomerang-shaped chunk of Egyptian bread out of a display case, so that Beard, five at the time, could examine it better, and smell it, and get a sense of just how ordinary ancient people could seem. As Beard came to know, ancient Greeks and Romans were ordinary, and also \u201ccompletely weird.\u201d<\/p>\n

A leader might wear an ostrich head.<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

Greeks and Romans were not even sure what they looked like \u2014 without a mirror, which tended to owned only by the wealthy and powerful, they relied on placid pools of water.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, like us, they didn\u2019t always distinguish reality from fantasy.<\/p>\n

A couple of days before we spoke, Elon Musk complained about casting Lupita Nyong\u2019o as Helen of Troy. \u201cThere certainly can be a fuzzy boundary between mythology and reality in (ancient classics),\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s true. But we have Musk saying Helen of Troy can not possibly be Black. And well, \u2018The Odyssey\u2019 is also a story. It didn\u2019t happen. We should not confuse a mythological character with the people who actually lived. On the other hand, the Greeks did believe this was all historical, which is important to know. And there is a place called Troy. And Odysseus is going back to a place that does exist \u2014 there\u2019s an Ithaca.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut then, witches and whirlpools and one-eyed giants \u2014 those do no exist. People now, people then, people for thousands of years have been trying to plot Odysseus\u2019s voyage in the real world. You know, some of the best minds in the world have wasted their time trying to do those things.<\/p>\n

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\u201cBut again, sorry \u2014 it\u2019s fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Christopher Nolan’s movie arrives, we spoke with a classics expert about the right way to read it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4859,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-things-to-do"],"yoast_head":"\nRead \u2018The Odyssey\u2019 with Mary Beard, not with Elon Musk - Next City Digest<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=4860\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Read \u2018The Odyssey\u2019 with Mary Beard, not with Elon Musk - Next City Digest\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As Christopher Nolan's movie arrives, we spoke with a classics expert about the right way to read it.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=4860\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Next City Digest\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-19T07:08:32+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nextcitydigest.com\\\/?p=4860#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nextcitydigest.com\\\/?p=4860\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nextcitydigest.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/13065d40d633843429ac57d4e5c06f9b\"},\"headline\":\"Read \u2018The Odyssey\u2019 with Mary Beard, not with Elon Musk\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-19T07:08:32+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nextcitydigest.com\\\/?p=4860\"},\"wordCount\":1045,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nextcitydigest.com\\\/?p=4860#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nextcitydigest.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/fba819e97b588366220f602e5d28ccb3.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Things To Do\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/nextcitydigest.com\\\/?p=4860#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nextcitydigest.com\\\/?p=4860\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nextcitydigest.com\\\/?p=4860\",\"name\":\"Read \u2018The Odyssey\u2019 with Mary Beard, not with Elon Musk - 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