The True Story Of The Odyssey (and why it matters) - Alex Petkas - #1125

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Is Penelope the Real Hero of the Story?

At 1:42:30 · chapter starts 1:42:12

After the slaughter, the suitors' families form a revenge posse — and the poem briefly threatens to become an endless Hatfield-and-McCoy spiral. Then Athena descends and says: stop. Alex identifies this as the first deus ex machina in literature, and reads it not as a cop-out but as a philosophical statement. Homer distinguishes two kinds of divine justice: the primitive eye-for-an-eye cycle that never ends, and the Olympian justice of Zeus and Athena that actually makes settlements and restores peace. Odysseus has the favour of the gods because he is meticulous in his piety — always sacrificing, never defrauding a friend, only lying to enemies. The poem's opening assertion, put in Zeus's mouth, is that mortals bring most of their suffering on themselves, as illustrated by Aegisthus: he was warned, ignored the warning, and was duly punished. The gods are just. The world is fair if you play by the rules. That is the Odyssey's final, quiet, controversial claim.