"What a man you are! Cool-headed, quick, with a hunger for intrigue — even in your own country you'd never pass a chance to play the crafty, double-tongued deceiver."

~ Athena

Hello fellow-traveller,

Welcome to the Odyssey read-along. Here’s the schedule for you to navigate through this story.

This post, and the ones that will follow, are divided into sections so you can easily follow the text and re-read passages. It does not matter what translation you use — the lines should be the same, although translated differently.

This is the seventh post in the series, if you’re curious about what happened before, please feel free to read the previous weeks’ instalments.

In this journey, I am both an Odysseus and a Telemachus. I might get lost and get stuck on Calypso’s island, yet at the same time, like Telemachus, I need to awaken to act. These are the notes of a fellow-reader, not a scholar.

I’ve just released an interview with Emily Katz Anhalt, a Professor of Classics, discussing how we should read The Odyssey. You can listen to it here:

I hope you will enjoy it.

Subscribe now

This week’s journey (Summary) 🌊 :

WEEK 7 · Books 13–15 · “The Beggar King”

Book 13 Odysseus finishes his tale; the Phaeacians load him with treasure and sail him home through the night — He is set down asleep on the shore of Ithaca — Poseidon, enraged, turns the Phaeacian ship to stone as it enters harbour — Odysseus wakes and does not recognise his homeland; Athena appears disguised as a young shepherd — She reveals the truth, helps him hide his treasure in a cave, and transforms him into an old and ragged beggar so that none will know him

Book 14 Odysseus makes his way to the hut of the swineherd Eumaeus, the most loyal of his servants — Eumaeus receives the beggar with all the warmth of true hospitality, lamenting his absent master — Odysseus, still in disguise, tells an elaborate false tale of his identity — He tests the swineherd’s character and finds it sound; Eumaeus covers the beggar with his own cloak against the cold

Book 15 Athena appears to Telemachus in Sparta and warns him to hurry home, telling him his mother may remarry — Telemachus sails back, picking up the fugitive prophet Theoclymenus on the way — Theoclymenus reads an omen of eagles and promises that Odysseus is already on Ithaca plotting destruction — Telemachus lands quietly to avoid the suitors’ ambush and goes straight to Eumaeus’s hut

Proofread by

Subscribe now

BOOK THIRTEEN

I.

Chapter One: The Dream Crossing

My dear reader, we have arrived at the middle of our story where we find another threshold Odysseus must cross.

Last week, we looked at how he was cast onto the island of Calypso, alone, the sole survivor, after his crew violated the sacred order by slaughtering the cattle of the sun on Thrinacia. Odysseus had to tell his entire story to the Phaeacians before he could leave and sail back home. It seems that Homer hints that we, too, must become our own bards.

Read more

"By god, I'd rather slave on earth for another man — some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive — than rule down here over all the breathless dead."

~ Achilles

Hello fellow-traveller,

Welcome to the Odyssey read-along. Here’s the schedule for you to navigate through this story.

This post, and the ones that will follow, are divided into sections so you can easily follow the text and re-read passages. It does not matter what translation you use — the lines should be the same, although translated differently.

This is the sixth post in the series, if you’re curious about what happened before, please feel free to read the previous weeks’ instalments.

In this journey, I am both an Odysseus and a Telemachus. I might get lost and get stuck on Calypso’s island, yet at the same time, like Telemachus, I need to awaken to act. These are the notes of a fellow-reader, not a scholar.

I’ve just released an interview with Emily Katz Anhalt, a Professor of Classics, discussing how we should read The Odyssey. You can listen to it here:

I hope you will enjoy it.

Subscribe now

This week’s journey (Summary) 🌊 :

Book 11 Odysseus sails to the edge of Ocean and digs a trench where the dead come to drink blood — His dead companion Elpenor appears first, unburied, begging for rites — Tiresias drinks and prophesies: Odysseus will return, but alone and in misery; the cattle of the Sun must not be touched — Odysseus speaks with the shade of his mother Anticleia, who died in grief waiting for him, and cannot hold her — He sees the great heroines and heroes of the past — Achilles tells him that a dead slave on earth would outrank a king among the dead — The dead surge forward in thousands; Odysseus flees to the ship in terror

Book 12 Circe charts the course home — Odysseus alone hears the Sirens and survives, bound to the mast while the crew rows with wax-stopped ears — He steers past Scylla and Charybdis: Scylla takes six men; Odysseus watches helplessly — The crew lands on the island of the Sun against his warnings and slaughters the sacred cattle while he sleeps — Zeus destroys the ship with a thunderbolt; all die — Odysseus clings to wreckage through Charybdis and drifts nine days to Calypso’s island, where the tale began

Proofread by

Subscribe now

BOOK ELEVEN

I. Birth Through Mortality

There is a famous proverb which says that one has two lives, and the second one begins when one realises he has only one. It seems to be a part of an essential ancient wisdom that one must die to be able to live fully.

Our mortality reveals what is worth living our lives for.

In the Book XI, Odysseus crosses the Ocean River and at the edge of the world he digs a trench and pours a precise sequence of libations: milk and honey, mellow wine, water, and finally a sprinkling of glistening barley.

Scholars highlight that these chthonic offerings differ radically from standard Olympian sacrifice. An Olympian sacrifice is fundamentally a communal meal designed to feed the living, with only the smoke and thighbones offered to the gods. In contrast, Odysseus’s ritual is a kind of "anti-sacrifice" intended to provide physical sustenance directly to the dead.

Read more

"We can't tell east from west, the dawn from the dusk, nor where the sun that lights our lives goes under earth nor where it rises."

~ Odysseus

Hello fellow-traveller,

Welcome to the Odyssey read-along. Here’s the schedule for you to navigate through this story.

This post, and the ones that will follow, are divided into sections so you can easily follow the text and re-read passages. It does not matter what translation you use — the lines should be the same, although translated differently.

This is the fifth post in the series, if you’re curious about what happened before, please feel free to read the previous weeks’ instalments.

In this journey, I am both an Odysseus and a Telemachus. I might get lost and get stuck on Calypso’s island, yet at the same time, like Telemachus, I need to awaken to act. These are the notes of a fellow-reader, not a scholar.

I’ve just released an interview with Emily Katz Anhalt, a Professor of Classics, discussing how we should read The Odyssey. You can listen to it here:

I hope you will enjoy it.

Subscribe now

This week’s journey (Summary) 🌊 :

Book 9 Odysseus at last reveals his name and begins his tale — He tells of the raid on the Cicones, and of the Lotus-eaters whose fruit makes men forget home — He tells of the Cyclops Polyphemus, son of Poseidon, who traps the crew in his cave and eats them two by two — Odysseus gives his name as Nobody, blinds the giant with a burning stake, and escapes clinging beneath a ram — Safe on the water, he shouts his true name back at the blinded Cyclops; Polyphemus calls down his father Poseidon’s curse upon him

Book 10 Aeolus, master of the winds, gives Odysseus a bag holding all contrary winds; within sight of Ithaca the crew open it, and the ships are blown back — Aeolus turns Odysseus away in disgust — The giant Laestrygonians destroy all ships but one, spearing the crews like fish — At Circe’s island half the crew are turned to swine — Hermes appears and gives Odysseus the herb moly as protection; Circe is overcome and restores the men — The crew feasts on the island for a year, then demands to sail home — Circe tells Odysseus he must first descend to the house of the dead to consult the prophet Tiresias

Proofread by

Subscribe now

BOOK NINE

I.

Each book must have an end, each film must have its final frame, and each journey must have a destination. The same applies to our lives: it is a blessing to be born mortal.

Think of contemporary examples of film series where the director refuses to bring the story to a coherent end, choosing instead to continue the franchise until it devalues the superior earlier instalments.

Even the song of great blind bard Demodocus had an end and the Odysseus at the request of the king begins to tell his story. In his wonderful book on The Odyssey Charles Segal drew my attention to the fact that Odysseus praises the feast, the wine, the banquet hall.

The whole procession is important for this allows Odysseus to dive deep into his unconscious, as Segal points out, and to tell what he finds there safely. Telling this story in the first person is a psychological necessity it is the "resifting and re-erecting of his inward world to bring it into contact with the reality and objective human demands of Ithaca"

So, the next few books are going to be filled with giants and witches, challenges and obstacles. Each on one of them has a meaning, and the ones are Cicones.

II.

The first stop homeward from Troy is Ismarus, the city of the Cicones. Odysseus and his crew sack, kill the men, and divide the spoils among the crews. Their attitude, as one scholar notes, resembles a raid, an attack that one would unleash on enemy during war.

The minds of Odysseus and their crew still acts in inertia of war. They have just escaped it, and yet the attitude, way of thinking, brutality required for war is still in their minds. The war and battlefield has consumed them.

At first the violence is calculated, organised and distribution of gain fair but soon enough Odysseus’ crew disobeys him. By calling his men "fools" who perished through their own recklessness (atasthaliai), Odysseus establishes the moral framework of the epic: the crew's ultimate destruction is caused by their own lack of self-control, which simultaneously highlights Odysseus's superior mental toughness and exculpates him from their doom.

It is curious to observe that the discipline required in war no longer applies to the environment, therefore it falls apart, because greed and recklessness are the enemies of self-control.

Read more

In 1877, British mathematician William Clifford published an essay titled "The Ethics of Belief," in which he argued against belief, especially belief based on insufficient evidence.

He posited that if a shipowner, who doubts whether his old vessel is seaworthy, decides to send it out full of passengers, he is guilty regardless of whether the ship reaches its destination.

The shipowner is guilty because he suppressed his doubts since he chose to believe instead of inquiring.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

~ William Clifford

In Clifford’s view, there is no such thing as a private belief. All belief is inherently social because it dictates how you act, how you speak, and how you behave in the world. Consequently, the shipowner’s rule applies universally to all things.

The most powerful argument in his essay was the example of a society that acts entirely on insufficient belie, such a society rots from within: people lose the ability to distinguish empirical evidence from wishful conviction, and credulous belief becomes normalised.

To Clifford, the mind is obligated to inquire, to investigate, and to falsify its own hypotheses.

As Christopher Hitchens later echoed: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

Across the Atlantic, however, a namesake of Clifford’s wrote a sharp response, claiming the British mathematician’s view was “intellectually imperialistic.”

That namesake was William James.

In 1896, William James gave a speech where he said:

"I have brought with me tonight ... an essay in justification of faith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced. 'The Will to Believe,' accordingly, is the title of my paper."

In his speech, which later was published as an essay called ‘The Will to Believe’ William James addressed the gap in Clifford’s brilliant polemic.

James raised Pascal’s wager:

"If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is."

However, James rejects Pascal’s mechanical reasoning. Belief cannot be coerced; one cannot simply choose to believe in something through sheer will.

In his essay, he writes that there are two types of hypotheses when it comes to belief: live ones and dead ones.

A dead hypothesis carries no weight for people today, for instance, a belief in Zeus is “dead,” as ancient mythologies no longer hold transformative power over the modern mind. There are, however, live hypotheses: for many, the tenets of Christianity, Islam, and other faiths remain vibrant and “alive.”

James argues that these beliefs are not mechanical in the way Clifford suggests. Just as you cannot convince someone that the ceiling above them is made of cheese (this is my example, haha, not James’!), you cannot compel someone to believe in a dead hypothesis.

When it comes to genuinely vital questions about meaning, God, love, or whether the universe possesses a moral order, the choice is what James calls “forced.” You cannot stand outside of it. Every morning that you wake up and live, you are already answering these questions through your actions.

Subscribe now

The person who claims, “I am withholding judgment on whether God exists,” is not occupying neutral ground. They are living, practically and daily, as though the answer is “no.” In James’s view, suspending judgment is itself a verdict.

Imagine you are on a hike and come to a wide river. Standing on the bank, you contemplate whether you are capable of jumping across without falling in and getting soaking wet. It does not seem impossible, yet there is a clear risk that your leap might not be strong enough to reach the other side.

In this moment, you have two choices: you can either turn around and abandon the hike, or you can attempt the jump and see what happens. This is the core of James’s argument: whichever decision you make, you “open” a reality. There is no neutral ground; even the choice not to jump is an active decision that shapes your path.

It is worth pausing here to clarify for the reader that James does not deny that Clifford’s shipowner is obligated to ensure his vessel is safe for its passengers. Rather, James argues that Clifford’s example is applicable only to the calculable, material aspects of the world.

But how does one provide material evidence for love?

How inauthentic does love appear when it must be “proven” by material gifts?

How many cars or diamonds could ever serve as sufficient evidence for the reality of love?

Love is not a hypothesis you verify from the outside. It is a reality you enter, or you don’t.

It is the same applicable to friendship or parenthood. Clifford’s argument collapses under its own weight when it comes to immaterial nature of our beings.

Paralysed Life

William James’s argument resonates deeply within my heart: he suggests that Clifford’s logic produces paralysed individuals people who stand perpetually on the riverbank, choosing to abandon their journey rather than daring to leap.

There is only so much evidence one can collect to predict whether a relationship or a love will succeed. We have all known couples whose unions fell apart despite every material indicator, whether education, wealth, or background, matching perfectly. Conversely, we have seen those for whom the material evidence suggested failure, and yet they “lived happily ever after.”

And yet James’ argument goes deeper than this, he tells us that there are certain realities that unfold only through participation. You will never know whether you can reach the other bank of the river unless you try, you will never discover love if you do not participate in it, you will never find your vocation unless you participate in your inclinations.

Whether you choose not to act or to act, you still act.

Clifford assumes that the only legitimate relationship a person can have with a question is the scientific one: gather evidence, withhold judgment until the evidence is sufficient, and only then commit. But James points out that this standard, applied universally, does not produce rational people. It produces paralysed ones.

James accused Clifford of ‘intellectual imperialism’, because Clifford’s argument was transferred to the domain where it does not function at all. In the realm of material, measurable elements, where you could check the quality and the safety of the vessel Clifford’s argument clearly applies.

In the realm of heart however Clifford’s worldview paralyses our souls. Knowledge maps well where we are, but belief is what makes act.

Clifford and James are not enemies. They are cartographers of different territories. Clifford governs the world of ships, where evidence exists, where inquiry is possible, and where suppressing doubt is a moral failure.

James governs the world of rivers, where the evidence cannot settle the matter, where life will not pause for certainty to arrive, and where not choosing is itself a choice.

The mistakes applying one man's rules to the other man's territory.

Who won the debate?

In any debate between belief and knowledge, there will always be two types of people: the first will argue, “It’s better to live according to knowledge than on insufficient belief,” while the second will simplify the argument further by denying the authenticity of all knowledge to justify their own belief.

In my next post, I will explore this tension further and share details of a debate I had at the local philosophy club regarding these two concepts. There is far more to this discussion than a single post can contain.

Consider the Wright brothers designing their first plane, they planned carefully and based their experiments on existing knowledge, yet they could never truly know if their device would fly. Belief is the bridge that connects knowledge to action. Without belief, knowledge is sterile; without knowledge, belief is dangerous.

This is exactly what we will explore next.

Hello fellow-traveller,

Welcome to the Odyssey read-along. Here’s the schedule for you to navigate through this story.

This post, and the ones that will follow, are divided into sections so you can easily follow the text and re-read passages. It does not matter what translation you use — the lines should be the same, although translated differently.

This is the fourth post in the series, if you’re curious about what happened before, please feel free to read the previous weeks’ instalments.

In this journey, I am both an Odysseus and a Telemachus. I might get lost and get stuck on Calypso’s island, yet at the same time, like Telemachus, I need to awaken to act. These are the notes of a fellow-reader, not a scholar.

I’ve just released an interview with Emily Katz Anhalt, a Professor of Classics, discussing how we should read The Odyssey. You can listen to it here:

I hope you will enjoy it.

Subscribe now

This week’s journey (Summary) 🌊 :

Book 7 · “Place Title Here”

Athena, disguised as a girl, guides Odysseus through the city — He enters the palace of King Alcinous and throws himself as a suppliant before Queen Arete — He is welcomed as a guest; the Phaeacians, the world's finest sailors, promise to convey him home — Arete recognises the clothes as her own handiwork and questions the stranger — Odysseus tells of Calypso but does not yet reveal his name.

Book 8 · "The Bard and the Games"

The blind bard Demodocus is led into the hall of Alcinous and sings of a famous quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles — The stranger pulls his cloak over his face and weeps in secret; only the king notices — The Phaeacians go down to the shore for athletic games; a young man taunts the stranger as no athlete — Odysseus rises and hurls a discus far beyond every other mark — Demodocus sings the comic tale of Ares and Aphrodite caught in the golden net of Hephaestus — He sings a third song: the wooden horse and the fall of Troy — Again the stranger weeps, openly now, and Alcinous asks him who he is and why the songs of Troy undo him so.

Proofread by

Subscribe now

BOOK SEVEN

I.

"Pallas Athena, harboring kindness for the hero, drifted a heavy mist around him, shielding him from any swaggering islander who'd cross his path, provoke him with taunts and search out who he was."

(lines 16–19)

If Book Six was a book of thresholds, Book Seven is a book of entrances. Odysseus has to choose whether he is defined by what happened to him, or by what he chooses to become.

This book begins with Athena wrapping Odysseus in an invisibility mist so the members of this kingdom, who are not used to strangers, will not challenge or question him.

I can only interpret everything through my own perspective, and I see in this divine mist Athena suspending Odysseus from his identity. Our identity is always tied to our past and to our memories, and once our memories overwhelm our present selves, we get stuck on the island of Calypso —paralysed, motionless, unable to move on.

I believe this book is all about what identity truly is. True identity is woven like the hundreds of seams of a dress; the threads are our memories, and yet, it is how they are woven together that holds everything intact.

II.

"All they really trust are their fast, flying ships that cross the mighty ocean. Gifts of Poseidon, ah what ships they are — quick as a bird, quick as a darting thought!"

(lines 38–41)

Athena warns her beloved Odysseus that he should not engage the locals, since the Phaeacian folk are a people who trust only in their speed at sea. Notice, my reader, what these ships are compared to: they are described as being “quick as darting thought.”

Read more

Hello fellow-traveller,

Welcome to the Odyssey read-along. Here’s the schedule for you to navigate through this story.

This post, and the ones that will follow, are divided into sections so you can easily follow the text and re-read passages. It does not matter what translation you use — the lines should be the same, although translated differently.

This is the second post in the series, if you’re curious about what happened before, please feel free to read the previous weeks’ instalments.

In this journey, I am both an Odysseus and a Telemachus. I might get lost and get stuck on Calypso’s island, yet at the same time, like Telemachus, I need to awaken to act. These are the notes of a fellow-reader, not a scholar.

I’ve just released an interview with Emily Katz Anhalt, a Professor of Classics, discussing how we should read The Odyssey. You can listen to it here:

I hope you will enjoy it.

Subscribe now

This week’s journey (Summary) 🌊 :

Book 5 The gods hold council again and Hermes is dispatched to Calypso’s island with orders for Odysseus’s release — Calypso yields, weeping, and frees the man she has kept seven years — Odysseus fells trees and builds a raft alone; he sails seventeen days by the stars — Poseidon, returning from the Ethiopians, sees him on the sea and sends a catastrophic storm — The raft is wrecked; the goddess Leucothea gives Odysseus her veil and he swims for two days — He drags himself ashore on the island of Phaeacia, buries himself under leaves, and sleeps

Book 6 Athena visits the Phaeacian princess Nausicaä in a dream and sends her to the river to wash linen — Odysseus emerges from the undergrowth, naked and salt-caked, before the terrified girls — He speaks carefully, comparing Nausicaä to a young palm tree, and wins her compassion — She gives him clothes and food and directs him toward the city, warning him to approach her mother Queen Arete first

Proofread by

Subscribe now

BOOK FIVE

I.

Perhaps the most frightening prospect in human life is to be so concealed, so profoundly hidden, and so sedated by comfort that even the gods forget you.

We begin the story of Odysseus at a moment on Mount Olympus where Athena must remind Zeus and the other deities that Odysseus even exists. She describes him stranded and suffering, posing a fundamental question to Zeus: If a just man can suffer this much and still be forgotten, why should anyone in the world strive for justice at all?

My reader might have noticed that Athena does not tell Zeus to assist Odysseus because of his cunning intellect, or valour, but she invokes Odysseus’ fairness as a king, as a father, as a husband.

It seems that even gods sometimes must be reminded of the moral structure of the universe, that they cannot punish virtue and reward nothing.

Odysseus’ journey begins not on the sea, but in the divine mind. It is moving to consider that the Odyssey starts with the gods ‘remembering’ us. It leads one to wonder: are these forces, like Athena, always there to recall our existence even when they seem to have moved on? We find ourselves in desperate situations, much like Odysseus, but is it because the gods have forgotten us, or because we have forgotten the existence of the divine ideal?

This brings us to a crucial question: Who abandons whom first?

Does divine abandonment lead to our desperation, or do we bring it upon ourselves? In the opening scene of Book I, Zeus argues that mortals unfairly blame the gods for their misfortunes, when in reality, humans are responsible for their own ‘reckless ways’.

Perhaps the reason Odysseus remains ‘concealed’ and seduced by Calypso for seven years is that he, for a moment, abandoned the gods first. It is possible that his own lapse in memory or devotion is what left him stranded on Ogygia.

It is possible that the answer to the crucial question of “Who abandons whom first?” might be answered by no one else, but by the nature of Hermes - the divine messenger.

II.

To understand the communication between gods and mortals, we must look at Hermes, the divine messenger. He possesses a golden wand with a dual purpose: it can enchant the eyes of men into deep sleep or awaken us from it. This reveals that divine communication is not merely about moving a message from point A to point B; the very nature of the message and the state of the one receiving it, matters. The presence of the gods can either dull our senses or startle us into a new state of being.

Let me draw my readers' attention to Zeus's specific instructions to Hermes in Book 5. He decrees that there will be no divine escort and no ship provided by the gods for Odysseus’s return. Instead, Odysseus must construct a makeshift raft, lashed together by his own hands, and sail it through intense suffering. Zeus foretells that only on the twentieth day will the hero reach Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians—a people who are close kin to the gods and who will treat him with royal honor.

Read more

“The immortality the Greeks understood was of other people remembering you and telling your stories — as we are still doing with Odysseus.”

— Emily Katz Anhalt

Emily Katz Anhalt is Professor of Classics at Sarah Lawrence College, where she has spent her career asking what ancient Greek literature still has to teach us about how to live.

She is the author of Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths, Embattled: How Ancient Greek Myths Empower Us to Resist Tyranny, and Ancient Wisdom for Polarized Times: Why Humanity Needs Herodotus, the Man Who Invented History. You can also read her wonderful piece for the American Scholar here

In this episode, we talked about: Why does one of the greatest poems ever written begin not with its hero, but with a son who has never met his father? Why do the gods keep appearing — and what are they really? And why does Homer build his entire epic around a man who is, by his own admission, a brilliant liar? Professor Anhalt has spent her career inside these questions. In this conversation, she opens them up completely.

Subscribe now

Emily Katz Anhalt Deep-Dive Notes

Read more

Hello fellow-traveller,

Welcome to the Odyssey read-along. Here’s the schedule for you to navigate through this story.

This post, and the ones that will follow, are divided into sections so you can easily follow the text and re-read passages. It does not matter what translation you use — the lines should be the same, although translated differently.

This is the second post in the series, if you’re curious about what happened before, please feel free to read the previous week’s instalment.

In this journey, I am both an Odysseus and a Telemachus. I might get lost and get stuck on Calypso’s island, yet at the same time, like Telemachus, I need to awaken to act. These are the notes of a fellow-reader, not a scholar.

Later this month, I will also be publishing an interview about the Odyssey with Professor Emily Anhalt from Sarah Lawrence College on Genius & Ink.

I hope you will enjoy it.

Subscribe now

This week’s journey (Summary) 🌊 :

Book 3: Telemachus arrives at Pylos and finds old Nestor presiding over a vast sacrifice on the beach — Nestor tells him of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Menelaus after the fall of Troy, and of the disastrous homecomings of many heroes — He has heard nothing of Odysseus — The ordered piety of Pylos stands in contrast to the disorder of Ithaca — Nestor sends Telemachus on to Sparta in his own son Pisistratus’s chariot

Book 4 Telemachus reaches the dazzling palace of Menelaus and Helen in Sparta — Menelaus weeps at the mention of Odysseus and speaks of his greatness — Helen tells of seeing Odysseus in disguise within the walls of Troy; Menelaus tells how Odysseus held the men silent inside the wooden horse — Menelaus recounts his own delay in Egypt and how he wrestled the shape-shifting sea-god Proteus, who told him that Odysseus lives, trapped on Calypso’s island — Back in Ithaca the suitors discover Telemachus has sailed and plot to murder him on his return

Proofread by

Subscribe now

BOOK THREE

I.

The entirety of human existence is chemistry. It is composed of different substances, feelings, emotions, thoughts, and aspirations, and combined with one another they produce a wave of results that at the end we call destiny.

This is also the central initiatory line of the Telemachy.

When they land on the shore of Pylos, Telemachus feels shy; he is afraid to approach Nestor and strike up a conversation. Athena’s response contains some of the most powerful words I have read in literature:

“Telemachus, some of the words you’ll find within yourself, the rest some power will inspire you to say. You least of all—I know—were born and reared without the gods’ good will”.

This is a remarkable insight into our essence, and one that my reader might have experienced personally. You may have an idea within your mind, yet it is only by putting those ideas into action that the truth is revealed.

Athena does not tell Telemachus that she will simply dictate his words for him; instead, she points inward. She suggests that without being pushed into the “arena,” you cannot discover your true potential.

Certain things are born within us, as she says, “some of the words you’ll find within yourself”, but others must come from an external source: “the rest some power will inspire you to say”.

This is the marriage between our inner world and the external world. This is precisely why I love the Greek mind: they understood that the world does not just live deep within our hearts to remain there. Instead, existence is always the marriage between the inner and the outer—the chemical reaction that unites them.

This shyness that Telemachus experiences here is different from modesty. Shyness is not a virtue but the paralysis of someone who has not yet inhabited their own identity. Athena’s push forward is the poem’s first true initiation to wisdom, which is not given from outside; it is discovered in the act of speaking.

II.

"More than all other men, that man was born for pain.
Don't soften a thing, from pity, respect for me —
tell me, clearly, all your eyes have witnessed."

We see this chemical reaction already in motion. How different Telemachus is now, standing on the shore of Pylos and about to address Nestor, compared to when we first met him. Then, he was a lonely boy sitting off to the side, surrounded by suitors who were destroying his own house, his palace, and his shelter. In those opening scenes, he was merely a daydreamer, imagining his father dropping from the clouds to drive the suitors out and regain his pride of place.

Now, we see an “upside-down” image of that young man. He addresses Nestor with full authority, giving his name, stating his mission, and asking for the unvarnished, pure truth about his father. Look at the weight of the words used here: he acknowledges that his father, more than all other men, was “born for pain”. He demands of Nestor:

Read more

Hello fellow-traveller,

Welcome to the Odyssey read-along. Here’s the schedule for you to navigate through this story.

This post, and the ones that will follow, are divided into sections so you can easily follow the text and re-read passages. It does not matter what translation you use — the lines should be the same, although translated differently.

This very first post is unlocked as a gift to everyone, to provide a look at what to expect from this Odyssey journey as it unfolds over the next 12 weeks.

In this journey, I am both an Odysseus and a Telemachus. I might get lost and get stuck on Calypso’s island, yet at the same time, like Telemachus, I need to awaken to act. These are the notes of a fellow-reader, not a scholar.

Later this month, I will also be publishing an interview about the Odyssey with Professor Emily Anhalt from Sarah Lawrence College on Genius & Ink.

I hope you will enjoy it.

Subscribe now

This week’s journey (Summary) 🌊 :

The gods hold council on Olympus and Athena wins permission to act for Odysseus, held ten years on Calypso's island — She descends to Ithaca in the disguise of Mentes, a seafaring stranger, and finds the palace overrun by suitors devouring the estate of a man they believe will never return — She wakes the dormant spirit in young Telemachus, urging him to call assembly and take ship in search of his father — Telemachus silences his mother Penelope with unexpected authority and begins at last to act — He sleeps, his mind turning over the course the goddess has charted

Proofread by

Subscribe now

BOOK ONE

Speak, Memory!

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.

Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds, many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea, fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home. But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he

strove — the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all, the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun and the Sungod wiped from sight the day of their return.

They say it’s the survival of the fittest. They say it is the survival of those who can adapt to their environment. The Odyssey shatters both assumptions. For it’s the survival of those, and only of those, who can see clearly.

In the very opening of the poem we are told that Troy is left behind us. This is not a poem about war, but a poem about consciousness, of return to it. Odysseus is introduced as polytropos (”of twists and turns”), a man shaped by suffering and knowledge. His comrades were fit and adaptive, Odysseus suffered to bring them back home, but they could not see clearly:

“the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all, the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun and the Sungod wiped from sight the day of their return.”

Once again the origins of words reveal the truth hidden for those willing to search and see. For the Greek word for “return” (nostos) is etymologically connected to the words for “mind” (noos) and “coming back” (neomai). This linguistic tie suggests that Odysseus’s physical journey home can be read as a literal reawakening and return to consciousness.

So, this is the reason why I would love to read the Odyssey once again, my reader. Our fate is in our hands and yet it comes with conditions. That condition is seeing clearly. This duality that we have explored in Oedipus the King and Antigone, and that was the reason why I had done those read-alongs first. How do we see clearly? How do we become conscious? Why do some people awaken and act and alter their fate, find their way back home, while others in more accommodating circumstances don’t?

I.

The poem answers immediately. Zeus opens his divine council not with Odysseus or Telemachus but with Aegisthus — a man I have to say I missed the full meaning of when I read this poem for the first time. Perhaps some of the most powerful lines in the poem, I wrote about 15 pages in my journal to understand the full meaning of them:

“Ah how shameless — the way these mortals blame the gods. From us alone, they say, come all their miseries, yes, but they themselves, with their own reckless ways, compound their pains beyond their proper share.”

This is the wisdom of the poem: we compound our own doom. Yes, suffering is given to all of us mortals, but self-destruction remains optional. Aegisthus was warned by Hermes not to kill Agamemnon, the great leader of the Greeks in the Trojan War, and not to marry his wife, Clytemnestra. “Far in advance we told him so ourselves,” Zeus says, “but would Aegisthus’ hardened heart give way? Now he pays the price — all at a single stroke.” He ignored the divine warnings and was ultimately killed by Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, who is praised throughout the poem for returning justice to the world.

The story of Aegisthus and Orestes is a mirror of the story of Odysseus and Telemachus. The whole first four books — the Telemachy — are about whether Telemachus can become the kind of son who acts, who takes responsibility for his house, confronts the suitors, and avenges his father’s honour. Nestor, Athena, and Menelaus all hold up Orestes as the model: look what a son can do.

Before we proceed to Athena, I would love to draw the reader’s attention to one important theme in this journey. Gods are not passive beings in the Greek mind. They intervene, and even when they choose not to, it is in itself a form of action. They favour us when we do not run against them — that is their condition. They would not have saved Aegisthus because he violated the divine order of the cosmos. Conversely, they will favour Telemachus because he is innocent; he sees the suitors violating the divine order and destroying his household, yet he is too paralysed by fear to act.

And so Athena rises to speak. She introduces the image of Odysseus trapped on Calypso’s island, weeping on the shore, longing for home — “a wave-washed island rising at the center of the seas,” where a goddess, a daughter of Atlas, holds him captive, “forever trying to spellbind his heart with suave, seductive words and wipe all thought of Ithaca from his mind.” And yet Odysseus, “straining for no more than a glimpse of hearth-smoke drifting up from his own land, longs to die.”

Subscribe now

II.

I felt like a child who just discovered reading when we explored Sophocles’ plays last few months, and I do feel like a child right now. Calypso seduces our minds, my dear reader. We interpret comfort for the final aim, we get used to it, and refuse to long, to act, to search. Calypso’s song tells us that comfort without meaning is a form of death. And Odysseus, trapped on that island full of comfort, longs not for glory or treasure but for hearth-smoke — which is, in some sense, the most domestic sign of home. Home. But what is that we call “home,” my reader? It is a physical location, of course, and yet it is something more profound as well.

Athena then divides the rescue mission: she will dispatch Hermes to free Odysseus from Calypso, while she herself goes down to Ithaca to “rouse his son to a braver pitch, inspire his heart with courage.” For Odysseus to return, his home must be ready to receive him. It is interesting to see that Athena, the goddess of wisdom, does not travel to Odysseus himself but goes to Telemachus, while Hermes who represents not just the messenger of the gods but is also psuchopompos, the guide who leads the dead to the Underworldm goes to Ogygia.

Hermes does not just lead souls into the underworld; his wand also symbolises the power to “enchant the eyes of men” or “wake them from sleep.” Hermes unites the poles of dream and reality, failure and success. Telemachus needs wisdom to sort his house in order.

Odysseus needs to wake from his sleep.

Part II: The Awakening

5. Telemachus Daydreaming Among the Suitors (1.132–139)

First by far to see her was Prince Telemachus, sitting among the suitors, heart obsessed with grief. He could almost see his magnificent father, here . . . in the mind’s eye — if only he might drop from the clouds and drive these suitors all in a rout throughout the halls and regain his pride of place and rule his own domains! Daydreaming so as he sat among the suitors, he glimpsed Athena now

I can see myself in Telemachus. Daydreaming about things that I could be if only I’ve done what I should. I blame my parents for the things I’ve not become, circumstances for things that i could be, I was born in the wrong century.

This is the mind and a chain of thought of a child, a soul that has been guided by the elders, who has been told what decisions he should have made.

Telemachus is displacing agency onto an absent figure. He cannot yet imagine himself as the one who acts and he projects power onto a father he has never known. The daydream is the hallmark of someone who knows something must change but lacks the inner authority to begin.

The first four books that we will explore are precisely about him transforming from a day-dreamer into someone who can act.

In this state of daydreaming, Athena descends from Olympus in the guise of a guest named Mentes. It is essential to pay close attention to these details and dive deep into the meanings of these figures and their names, much as we previously explored the figures of Aegisthus and Orestes.

The Identity of Mentes

As the reader can see, these names are profoundly significant. We must examine who Mentes is, as he is a real person within the narrative: a seafaring trader and an old family friend of Odysseus. This choice of disguise is far from random. Because the name Mentes is etymologically connected to menos—signifying spirit-force, mind, and intention—a grasp of ancient Greek is vital to understanding these epics.

Later in the poem, Athena assumes the form of Mentor—a name that persists in the English language today and originates from the same root. Quite literally, she appears to Telemachus as the embodiment of “mind” and “intention.”

Intentionality and Maturity

Recently, I was reading the work of the American philosopher John Searle. Searle explores the idea that a key element of maturing and exercising free will is intentionality; he argues that the ability to take intentional actions is the primary sign of maturity. It is remarkable that a 20th-century philosopher, after years of studying neuroscience, would express an idea the ancient Greeks understood millennia ago.

When Athena arrives as “mind,” she does so as a trader rather than a warrior. A young man frozen in his own daydreams does not require a warrior to overwhelm him with greatness; instead, he needs a figure who models competence, mobility, action, and movement.

The Threshold of Consent

What is most psychologically compelling is where Athena-Mentes positions herself when she approaches Telemachus. She does not simply enter; she stands at the threshold. She is neither inside nor outside. This threshold represents a liminal space—the boundary between two distinct states of being.

This “mentor” who comes to Telemachus effectively demands that she not enter of her own accord; Telemachus must take the initiative to invite her in. This signifies that the awakening of the mind from a state of daydreaming requires our own consent. Transformation does not simply arrive; we must actively consent to the change.

Before we look at how Telemachus rushes to Athena and invites her in, it is worth pointing out his surroundings. He is essentially encircled by the suitors, who are lounging on the hides of oxen they have slaughtered themselves. They are literally sitting on the skins of his own animals, rolling dice and gambling, treating his house like a common leisure hall. Surrounded by this blatant disrespect, Telemachus sits quietly in a state of “daydreaming”. In this delirium of grief, he inadvertently becomes a passive observer of his own home’s destruction.

Yet, what pulls him out of this state is the sight of a guest—Mentes (Athena)—standing on the porch, awaiting an invitation. Telemachus is instantly struck by the shame of being a bad host; he is mortified that a stranger has been left standing at his doors while no one has welcomed her. This matters enormously. I am doing this read-along specifically to highlight these often-neglected concepts, such as xenia—the sacred law of hospitality.

This instinct for xenia lives within him despite his father, Odysseus, being gone since he was an infant. Telemachus had no father to teach him these sacred rites, and he has grown up in a household where hospitality has been perverted into a parasitic nightmare of uninvited guests who devour what is not theirs. He recognizes that his problem is not a lack of character, but a lack of authority.

Driven by instinct, he rises from among the suitors. He physically separates himself from the ugliness occurring in the heart of his home. He walks to the threshold—a space that, in all mythology, is deeply symbolic. He meets “Mentes” at this boundary and invites her into his soul’s domain. For a house is more than four walls; it is a sign of the soul. If your desk is messy, your mind is often messy; if your house is overrun, your spirit is besieged.

Telemachus clasps her hand, takes her spear, and places it in the burnished rack against a sturdy pillar. This is the same rack where the spears of the embattled Odysseus stand “stacked and waiting”. He then seats her in a high, elaborate chair of honor. There are such deep psychological layers here: the humility to place the true guest above oneself and to elevate wisdom. It is a gesture that reminds me of Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy, reaching for a higher logic when the world seems to have fallen into ruin. Telemachus does not need to be “made good”; he needs a revelation—a power—that gives him permission to act on the goodness he already possesses.

What follows is the pivotal conversation between Telemachus and Athena. If we pay close attention—and the ancient Greeks were masters of this kind of psychological nuance—we see Telemachus lean closer to her before speaking. He does this to reveal his deep contempt for the suitors, who lounge about with no care in the world, feasting on another man’s stores.

There are two psychological elements here that are deeply moving. The first is the agony of ambiguity regarding his father’s fate. Telemachus is trapped in a state of limbo; he does not know if Odysseus is alive or dead. This uncertainty paralyzes him. If his father is alive, perhaps he should simply wait for his return to deal with the suitors; if he is dead, it is time for Telemachus to finally take action himself. We see this same “frozen” state in Penelope, who is similarly unable to move forward while the status of her husband remains unknown.

The second element is even more crucial: the burden of reputation. Telemachus has been told he is the son of the great Odysseus — a man of incredible world-renown — and yet he lives entirely in the shadow of a father he has never actually met. He is defined by his origins, yet he lacks his own identity. He even goes so far as to express a heartbreaking wish: that he were the son of an ordinary, happy man. He would prefer mediocrity and a tangible presence over great origins that leave him with nothing but a void.

It is mind-blowing to see these themes explored two and a half millennia before modern existentialists began to dwell on the “anguish of uncertainty.” First, he recognizes that his world is broken; second, he recognizes the uncertainty of life; and third, he asks, “Who am I in the midst of this?” While later philosophers offer half-formed solutions, the ancient Greeks use this poem to chart a direct path toward the action one must take to claim their own life.

After Telemachus confesses his doubts, Athena responds with a call to action: she asks him to declare war on his enemies. For too long, Telemachus has viewed the suitors’ presence as a normal, if painful, reality. He intuitively senses it is wrong, but he hasn’t yet named it as an “outrage” . This is the first element of awakening: you define yourself by identifying who you are not. Athena makes him see clearly, and as we have noted, those who survive are the ones who begin to see.

Next, she addresses his paralysis regarding his father’s fate by pushing him to investigate. She essentially tells him to stop daydreaming and guessing; he must go and find those who actually have information. This is the birth of intentionality—the transition from being a passive observer to having agency over one’s own life.

She then provides a concrete, three-part plan: summon the assembly, sail to Pylos to question Nestor, and then to Sparta to see Menelaus . She sets a deadline: if he hears his father is alive, he must hold out for one more year; if he is dead, he must raise a tomb and give his mother to another husband . She is forcing him to end the “limbo” that has kept him frozen.

Perhaps the most remarkable psychological insight is Athena’s direct command: “You must not cling to your boyhood any longer. It’s time you were a man”. She reveals that by merely hoping his father will return to “sort things out,” he is avoiding his own maturity. He is wishing for someone else to tell him what to do.

Following these words, as Robert Fagles translates, Telemachus “felt his senses quicken”.

Before this visit, his mind was dulled by grief and habit. Now, his mind wakes up. This scene ends with a brilliant moment of internal recognition: when Eurymachus later asks about the stranger, Telemachus lies and calls him an “old family friend,” yet deep in his mind, he knows he has encountered an immortal goddess .

To a secular mind, this might seem like mere mythology, but the truly wise understand that a mortal encounter can deliver a revelation so profound it can only be described as divine.

When one begins to explore the great masterpieces of literature, it becomes clear why scholars dedicate lifetimes to them. Following the departure of Athena, Penelope descends from her chamber. She rebukes the bard Phemius for singing of the “Grim Return” from Troy, as she suffers from a psychological ambiguity nearly identical to that of Telemachus. Yet, while Athena has awakened Telemachus, Penelope remains in a vast space of uncertainty. She is the structural center of a household that is currently adrift, performing her grief in front of suitors in a way that is both genuine and strategic.

This is where we witness Telemachus’s mind at work for the first time as he begins to straighten his own household. In a moment of intense psychological tension, he silences his mother. His motive is not mere dominance; he is drawing a boundary between the private grief that belongs to their family and the public composure required in the presence of enemies. While his act is undeniably harsh, it raises a recurring question in the “Telemacheia”: can one grow up without causing harm?

After dismissing his mother, Telemachus confronts the suitors, calling them “insolent” and “overweening”. They bit their lips in amazement at his daring, yet we see he has not fully matured. His threat remains conditional; he tells Antinous they must leave or face divine punishment from Zeus. He appeals to cosmic justice because he lacks the personal agency to enforce his will alone. He buys time, suggesting they dine for the evening before the formal assembly he sets for the following morning.

The book closes with an essential psychological element. As the suitors retire, Telemachus goes to his bedroom escorted by Eurycleia. Homer pauses here to provide her biography: the daughter of Ops, purchased by Laertes for twenty oxen, and honored as highly as a wife—though never touched. Through this connection to his childhood, she remains the truest link to the old order—the time when Odysseus ruled and Penelope knew her husband was present. Eurycleia is a remnant of a stable past. The final image of the book is Telemachus alone in the dark, wrapped in a sheep’s warm fleece, thinking. The poem began as a story of consciousness, and its first book ends on exactly that: a mind at work in the silence.

BOOK TWO: Telemachus Sets Sail

I.

The second book opens with a profound physical and spiritual transformation. Telemachus, whom we left at the end of Book One weighing the course Athena had charted for him, now springs from his bed, slings his sword, and fastens his sandals. He steps out “handsome as a god,” a stark departure from the melancholy youth who sat daydreaming among the suitors just a day prior. Overnight, in the darkness of his reflections, something has changed; he has transitioned from the state of a nepios (infant, child) to a man capable of intentionality and free will.

He takes his first decisive action by ordering the heralds to summon the Ithacans to full assembly, an institution that has been silent for twenty years. As he strides into the meeting grounds with a bronze spear and two sleek hounds at his heels, we see a symbol of early mastery: he has tamed the animals within his own house before facing the “animals” of the city. When he takes his seat, he chooses the place of his absent father, claiming a position that should belong to him by right, though it must yet be earned through trial and metis (cunning). This newfound “splendor” is the work of Athena, making him visible to the community because he has finally aligned his path with a higher divine purpose.

II.

The assembly represents the community of Ithaca, but they receive Telemachus through a shared wound. The first to speak is the old lord Aegyptius, a man stooped with age who is still grieving for his son, Antiphus, who sailed with Odysseus and was eventually eaten by the Cyclops. This history of gruesome loss frames the moment Telemachus receives the scepter, the formal symbol of legal authority and themis (customary law).

Telemachus’s speech is a complex navigation of grief and accusation. He first addresses the personal and kingly wound, reminding the community that his loss is their loss. Odysseus was a “gentle father” to the whole land, and his absence has left Ithaca in a state of political stagnation. However, he then moves to a dangerous accusation, turning the blame outward. He states that the suitors are not just external thieves, but the “sons of the very men who are your finest here.” He identifies an internal corruption that has allowed the king’s house to be plundered while the community watched in silence. This is not merely a family dispute; it is a violation of the cosmic order.

III.

After stretching his newfound consciousness and authority to its absolute limit, Telemachus is overwhelmed by emotion. He dashes the speaker’s scepter to the ground and bursts into tears. This moment marks the vulnerability of a young man attempting to inhabit a role he cannot yet physically enforce.

“Pity seized the assembly. All just sat there, silent... no one had the heart to reply with harshness.”

A dark silence follows. The community feels pity for him, but pity without action is worthless. This provides a vital psychological lesson: the declaration of an injustice is necessary for one’s own internal integrity, but the world cannot be corrected by the sympathy of onlookers alone. It requires a movement the community is not yet ready to make.

IV.

The silence is broken by Antinous, whose name literally means “anti-mind” or “against the spirit” (anti + nous). He represents an “anti-awakening” force, attempting to pull Telemachus back into the sleep of passivity. Antinous aggressively redirects the blame onto Penelope, labelling her the “matchless queen of cunning.”

He reveals her weaving trick: how she used her own metis to suspend time for over three years, weaving a shroud for Laertes by day and unweaving it by night:

“So by day she’d weave at her great and growing web, by night, by the light of torches set beside her, she would unravel all she’d done. Three whole years she deceived us blind, seduced us with this scheme...”

Even Antinous admits the suitors were fooled; they were not outsmarted by force, but by a story. This mirrors Odysseus’s own victory via the Trojan Horse, a triumph of narrative over arms. Penelope’s weaving is the female counterpart to Odysseus’s cunning. She is polytropos in her own medium: the shroud is nominally about death, but her unweaving is an act of resistance against time itself. She refuses to let the narrative advance, suspending the story in an eternal present.

That the trick was ultimately betrayed by one of her own women adds another painful layer. The house is being attacked from within as well as without. The greatest danger comes not from the enemy at the gates but from the traitor inside the walls.

V.

Following this exchange, Zeus sends a sign: two eagles descending over the assembly, tearing at each other’s faces. While a modern secular mind might dismiss this as superstition, to the Greeks, signs were symptoms of a disease within the body of the state. The prophet Halitherses, representing a wisdom that is present but consistently ignored, reads the sign as a warning that Odysseus is near and destruction is coming for the lawless.

The response of the suitors reveals two faces of denial. Antinous represents aggressive denial, using rage to silence the truth. Eurymachus represents a smoother, more diplomatic sedation. He mocks the prophet, telling him to “go home and babble your omens to your children,” choosing a wilful blindness to the symptoms of the state’s collapse. Eurymachus is in many ways more dangerous than Antinous: where Antinous is openly brutal, Eurymachus makes inaction sound reasonable.

VI.

The scene reaches its political climax when the figure of Mentor rises. He does not direct his primary fury at the suitors, but at the public, the demos of Ithaca:

“I don’t grudge these arrogant suitors for a moment, weaving their violent work with all their wicked hearts... But all the rest of you, how you rouse my fury! Sitting here in silence... never a word put forth to curb these suitors, paltry few as they are and you so many.”

He is incensed that they have watched the destruction of their kingdom and remained neutral. His bitter sarcasm is devastating: “Never let any sceptered king be kind and gentle now... let him be cruel and always practice outrage.” If this is what Ithaca does to a good king’s legacy, then kindness itself is a mistake. Goodness is wasted on a community that will not defend it.

This institutional collapse is finalised when the suitor Leocritus dissolves the assembly without a resolution, and the people scatter “each to his own house, while the suitors strolled back to King Odysseus’ palace.” The word “strolled” is brutal in its ease. They are unhurried, unconcerned. The institution of the assembly has failed entirely.

If Telemachus represents our consciousness, then Ithaca represents the entire mind. When a conscience has fallen into delirium, it is impossible to heal the mind from within the same environment that lulled it to sleep. One must journey outside of the self, outside of Ithaca, to gain the perspective required to restore the household.

VII.

Having exhausted all earthly political tools, Telemachus walks alone to the beach, the threshold between the known and the unknown, and washes his hands in the foaming surf. This is ritual purification: he is cleansing himself of the assembly’s failure, preparing for something new. In Greek religion, you wash before approaching the divine. He is making himself ready.

Athena, appearing now as Mentor, a name growing closer to its root of “mindful” guidance, responds with a challenge:

“Few sons are the equals of their fathers; most fall short, all too few surpass them. But you, brave and adept from this day on, Odysseus’ cunning has hardly given out in you, there’s every hope that you will reach your goal.”

She provides the mobility and action the community refused him, giving practical steps: go home and pack rations. But before he can leave, there is one more test.

Antinous approaches him, “smiling warmly,” and invites him to eat with the suitors: “Come, eat and drink with us, just like the old days.” This is false hospitality, a trap. To dine with them is to accept the situation, to be complicit in the feast. Telemachus refuses: “How could I dine with you in peace and take my pleasure? You ruffians carousing here!” He draws his hand from Antinous’s grip “nonchalantly,” without drama. This is not a boy’s defiance. It is a measured, adult refusal of complicity.

VIII.

Telemachus then enters his father’s storeroom, “broad and vaulted, piled high with gold and bronze, chests packed with clothing, vats of redolent oil.” There, standing against the wall, “were jars of seasoned, mellow wine, holding the drink unmixed inside them, fit for a god, waiting the day Odysseus, worn by hardship, might come home again.” The storeroom is a portrait of the absent father. Everything in it is waiting.

He calls Eurycleia, his old nurse, and asks her to prepare rations in secret. She protests, bursting into tears: “Why, dear child, what craziness got into your head?... these brutes here, just wait, the moment you’re gone they’ll all be scheming against you.” She is the voice of love that wants safety over growth. She would have him stay, guard what he has, survive small. Telemachus answers: “Courage, old woman, there’s a god who made this plan.” He asks her to swear an oath not to tell Penelope. He is learning that action sometimes requires secrecy, that protecting the people you love sometimes means leaving them in the dark.

IX.

Finally, Telemachus sails into the night on a ship assembled by Athena, and in a beautiful image of partnership, the goddess and the prince sit side by side at the stern, steering the ship together through the dark waters:

“Suddenly wind hit full and the canvas bellied out and a dark blue wave, foaming up at the bow, sang out loud and strong as the ship made way, skimming the whitecaps, cutting toward her goal... and the ship went plunging all night long and through the dawn.”

They cross the ultimate threshold, leaving the stagnant land for the potential of the sea. The departure happens not in triumph but in darkness, in secret, under divine cover. This is the Odyssean departure: concealed, strategic, humble. He is leaving as his father would leave.

The book that began with Telemachus taking his father’s seat ends with him taking his father’s sea. He is no longer sitting. He is moving.

This piece is a companion to my Dante read-along : a series of one hundred posts exploring the Divine Comedy in full. That series is free, and it will always remain free.

And yet, something unexpected happened along the way. Many of you chose to become paid subscribers. You supported this work freely, out of generosity, out of something that I can only describe as trust, trust that the work was worth sustaining.

I have been thinking for some time about how to say thank you in a way that means something.

This post is that attempt. It is a small gift to people who support my work. You didn’t have to. You did anyway. Thank you immensely.

How does it feel to be in exile from your home for eighteen years?

Standing on the shores of Guernsey, the small island that became his refuge, Victor Hugo stared into the sea. He felt, almost with conviction, that his eyesight was strong enough not only to glimpse the distant coast of his beloved France, a country that had suffered so much and spilled so much of its own blood, but even to imagine, far beyond, the Gothic spires of Paris cathedrals rising on the horizon.

What did Hugo think in that moment? What parallels came to his mind?

We cannot fully enter his consciousness, but one thing seems likely. He must have asked himself a question that haunts every exile: will I ever return home again?

It is difficult to imagine that Hugo did not draw a parallel between his own fate and that of one of his greatest predecessors, Dante Alighieri. Dante, too, was exiled from his beloved Florence and never allowed to return. For centuries, his city kept him at a distance, only symbolically reversing that exile in the modern era.

Hugo must have felt the weight of that possibility. The thought that he might never see his native shores again would not have been abstract. It would have been immediate, almost physical.

And so, in Hauteville House, the home he created during his exile, Hugo built something remarkable. He built his own France.

Each room in the house was designed to reflect a different era of French history. What is striking is that, for many English readers, Victor Hugo is known primarily as a novelist, the grand architect of vast stories that stretch across hundreds of pages. Yet for a French reader, Hugo is first and foremost a poet.

And still, even that does not capture the full extent of his genius.

Beyond being one of the greatest poets of the French language, beyond being a monumental novelist, beyond being a sharp and fearless political voice of his time, Victor Hugo was also an interior designer of rare imagination.

Each room in Hauteville House becomes an expression of memory and identity, a deliberate act of reconstruction. For anyone interested, I would strongly recommend watching the documentary Romantics and Us, where Simon Schama walks through this extraordinary house, revealing its layers and meanings.

At the very top of the house, there is a writing room. Its windows face the sea.

It was here, in exile, that Hugo began writing Les Misérables, the work that would come to define his legacy. And it is extraordinary to think of this: while constructing one of the most intricate and expansive novels ever written, Hugo was also creating something else entirely. He began to draw.

Not with traditional materials, but with soot, ink, coffee, and sometimes even blood.

These were not casual sketches. This was not a pastime in the manner of someone like Winston Churchill, who painted to relax. Hugo’s drawings came from a different place altogether.

They were acts of descent.

Read more

"What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books.”

~ Gustave Flaubert

Current Book:

Starting May 3rd 2026: The Odyssey!

Dear friends,

Welcome to the main page of Slow-Reads at . Above you’ll find what we’re reading now (or, our most recent read-along) and below what we have covered so far.

The readers of Genius & Ink believe that reading is a spiritual exercise, it brings us closer to who we are and over the years I wrote several pieces that explain the philosophy and method behind our close reads:

👁️ What We Covered So Far

Dante’s Divine Comedy (100+ Posts)

Over 100+ posts covering each of 100 cantos in detail. It was an extraordinary journey through one of the books that will stay with me till I die. If you would like to know why you should read Dante → read this piece.

Sophocles’ Antigone

Unbelievable play on the power of will and our conscience. Antigone is a masterpiece of literature that I wish I read earlier. There are two posts in total in this read-along, so it’s quite short, but it’s going to change your life. I know this, because it has already changed mine.

Start Here

Sophocles’ Oedipus the King

This is the second installment of Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays. The first is Antigone, and the second is Oedipus the King. I cannot adequately describe to my reader how important this play is. It reveals the limits of human knowledge and illustrates how often we forget that the source of our problems lies within ourselves.

Start Reading Here

Subscribe now

Presents

The Odyssey

READ-ALONG

This is your invitation letter to join our crew and sail through The Odyssey read-along.

Please BookMark this Page!

You will find all the relevant information below, and if you have any questions please feel free to message me!

Subscribe now

Dear friend,

The Ancient Greek word deinos is perhaps the best word to describe the character of Odysseus. Deinos means both “remarkable” and “terrible,” and Odysseus is both of these things. Ever since I read Dante’s description of Odysseus in the Inferno, I could not stop thinking about his personality.

Dante portrays him as a doomed seeker of forbidden knowledge—a man who searches for the sake of searching. While there is no space here to fully describe Dante’s boundless wisdom, ever since I encountered those depths of the Inferno, I have kept thinking about Odysseus.

His personality represents so many figures I’ve met on my journey through life: intelligent people whose intelligence becomes their own demise; a cunning mind that can restore justice, yet destroy it in one swing; and perhaps the most precise archetype I’ve met: the eternal seeker who refuses to settle and continuously moves on.

I cannot deny that I see parts of Odysseus in myself. I am quite certain that through this read-along, you will as well. Perhaps this is why you should join The Odyssey read-along.

We are all heroes of our own stories—to use that cliché expression—and Odysseus shows us that going too far is both what makes a hero great and what makes them dangerous. Odysseus, they say, wept when he saw what the Trojan Horse, an invention of his own mind, brought to Troy. His intelligence and skill were his pain and his doom.

In other words, transcendence and transgression are the same act viewed from different angles. The Trojan Horse was glory to the Greeks, yet doom for the Trojans.

May the winds favor us as we sail through this masterpiece together.

Will you join my crew and sail through the pages of The Odyssey?

~ Vashik Armenikus, April 2026.

When does it start?

We are starting on Sunday, May 3 with the Books 1-2 and finishing on Sunday, 12th of July with the final part. Christopher Nolan’s film is hitting the screens of theatres on 17th of July, so you will be able catch up (if you’ve fallen behind) to head and watch

Subscribe now

👁️ THE TELEMACHY — “A son in search of a father”

Sun May 3 — Week 1 · Books 1–2 · “Speak, Memory”

The world without Odysseus. Telemachus wakes up.

Sun May 10 — Week 2 · Books 3–4 · “Rumours of a Living Man”

Telemachus visits Nestor and Menelaus. Three versions of homecoming.

─────────────────────────────────

🌊 CALYPSO TO SCHERIA — “The hero enters”

Sun May 17 — Week 3 · Books 5–7 · “A Raft, a Storm, a Shore”

Calypso releases Odysseus. He survives the sea. Nausicaä and Phaeacia.

Sun May 24 — Week 4 · Book 8 · “The Bard and the Games”

Demodocus sings of Troy. Odysseus weeps in secret.

─────────────────────────────────

🌊 THE GREAT WANDERINGS — “Monster, goddess, ghost”

Sun May 31 — Week 5 · Books 9–10 · “Nobody and the Witch”

The Cyclops. Aeolus. Circe turns the crew to swine.

Sun Jun 7 — Week 6 · Books 11–12 · “Among the Dead and the Sirens”

The Underworld. Achilles’ regret. Sirens, Scylla, the Cattle of the Sun.

─────────────────────────────────

🌊 THE RETURN — “A stranger in his own house”

Sun Jun 14 — Week 7 · Books 13–15 · “The Beggar King”

Ithaca at last — but in disguise. Eumaeus. Telemachus returns.

Sun Jun 21 — Week 8 · Books 16–18 · “The Palace of Humiliations”

Father and son reunited in secret. Penelope’s contest begins.

Sun Jun 28 — Week 9 · Books 19–20 · “Recognition and the Edge of the Knife”

The scar. Eurycleia knows. Penelope’s dream. The suitors’ last night.

─────────────────────────────────

🏹 THE RECKONING — “String the bow”

Sun Jul 5 — Week 10 · Books 21–22 · “The Bow and the Slaughter”

The contest of the bow. The hall runs red. Justice or massacre?

Sun Jul 12 — Week 11 · Books 23–24 · “Home” + Full Retrospective

The reunion of Odysseus and Penelope. The last ghost. And: what to watch for when you walk into the cinema.

─────────────────────────────────

🎬 Nolan’s The Odyssey — in cinemas Thursday, July 17, 2026

Which translation?

I selected the first few lines of the epic for you to read and choose which ones you prefer. I’ve been told Mendelssohn’s translation (2017) is good as well, but my wife will kill me if I get another edition of The Odyssey, so if everyone has it, please, paste the first 16 lines in the comment section below.

Robert Fagles Translation (My Choice)

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.

Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.

But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove —
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod wiped from sight the day of their return.

Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
start from where you will — sing for our time too.

By now,
all the survivors, all who avoided headlong death
were safe at home, escaped the wars and waves.
But one man alone . . .

Emily Wilson’s Translation

Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God's cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.
All the other Greeks
who had survived the brutal sack of Troy
sailed safely home to their own wives — except
this man alone. Calypso, a great goddess,
had trapped him in her cave; she wanted him

Martin Hammond’s Translation

Note: Hammond’s translation is just text, the way you see below. Every other translation divides it into verses, Hammond just decided to give us a wall of text.

Muse, tell me of a man: a man of much resource, who was made to wander
far and long, after he had sacked the sacred city of Troy. Many were the
men whose lands he saw and came to know their thinking: many too the
miseries at sea which he suffered in his heart, as he sought to win his own
life and the safe return of his companions. But even so, for all his efforts,
he could not save his companions. They perished through their own arrant
folly — the fools, they ate the cattle of Hyperion the Sun, and he took away
the day of their return.
Start the story where you will, goddess, daughter of Zeus, and share it
now with us.
At that time all the others, all those who had escaped stark destruction,
were in their homes, safe from war and sea. He alone was still yearning
for his return to home and wife. The great nymph Kalypso, queen among
goddesses, was keeping him in her hollow cave, eager to make him her
husband.

Philosophy as medicine

Epicurus on How to Clear Your Mind

In this episode of Genius & Ink 🖌, we explore the ancient Greek thinker Epicurus, who viewed philosophy not as a cold profession, but as a daily healing practice for the soul.

Epicurus teaches us that clarity, not consumption, is the true key to happiness.

He suggests that freedom from fear: fear of the divine, of death, and of unbridled desire is more nourishing than any feast. By inviting us to examine what we believe, what we want, and what we dread, he offers a philosophy of simplicity, courage, and tranquility. It is, in essence, a quiet revolution in how we live.

We follow Epicurus through his most powerful teachings, including:

• Lifelong Learning: Why philosophy should be studied at any age.

• Inner Peace: How superstitious beliefs can corrupt our mental state.

• Mortality: Why death is truly nothing to fear.

• Desire: How to categorise our needs for greater mental clarity.

• Pleasure: Redefining its true nature.

• Virtue: Why sound judgment is the root of a good life.

This episode is based on Epicurus’ Letter to Menoeceus, a foundational text that redefines what it means to live wisely and peacefully.

Four Ideas of Epicurus to Keep in Your mind:

1. Epicurus does not deny the divine but rejects the "angry/jealous" versions created by the masses. He literally says:

   "The irreligious man is not the one who destroys the gods of the masses, but the one who imposes the ideas of the masses on the gods".

Read more

Hello friends,

Before we begin, I would like to announce that the interview with Professor Simon Goldhill will be delivered to your inboxes next week. The readers of this read-along will have an exclusive access to it.

Professor Goldhill from Kings College Cambridge was directly involved in the adaptation of Oedipus the Rex by his student Richard Icke at London’s West End. He told in detail about his involvement, and I listened to his passionate description often forgetting how to breathe.

And now, finally, I would like to welcome you all to the final edition of Oedipus the King read-along.It has been an unbelievable journey and a life-changing read.

For those of you who have clicked on this post for the first time here are the full list of posts if you’d like to catch up:

There are children who are born to noble parents, who carry the coat of arms of greatness before they even achieve anything of their own. There is also another type of youth, the blood that was born not from noble veins, but one that has to draw the coat of arms on their own by the ink of their own blood.

Athens was such a city. Almost every other state in Greece had been mentioned in the Iliad or Odyssey, and yet Athens had dared to invent itself. It appropriated and retold myths from other traditions. It created theatre, as Edith Hall writes in her Furies, a form that didn't exist elsewhere in quite the same way to fill the cultural niche that epic occupied for Sparta and the East. Oedipus Rex is not just a great play. It is an act of cultural self-creation by a city that decided it would matter.

This self-creation was the result of a city-state that had seen success in the Persian wars. Athens led the Greek alliances that defeated the Persians (490 and 480 BCE), then converted that Panhellenic coalition into an empire, extracting tribute from her allied city-states. That money funded everything: the Parthenon, jury pay, the navy, and the broader public infrastructure of Periclean Athens.

Pericles, who remarkable was re-elected annually for over three decades (!), used those revenues to attract the best philosophers, architects, and artists, which enabled a concentrated explosion of cultural production across poetry, drama, music, and athletics.

I ask my reader to imagine their current leader to do the same - to use the wealth accumulated from the conquests and military victories to build theatres and fund philosophers, not of ordinary kind, but of the breed that my reader and I still discuss 2500 years later.

The precise date of when Oedipus Rex was written is unknown, but scholarly consensus places it in the early 420s BCE, which is just after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431.

This timing is not incidental. At the war's outset, a series of devastating plagues tore through Athens, killing roughly a quarter of the population and triggering civil unrest.

An audience watching a king desperately investigate a plague afflicting his city was not watching fantasy.

They were watching a mirror.

Chorus

My reader will soon understand why I had to do so much throat-clearing before we could move on to the final part of the play.

Last week, we paused just before the chorus, perhaps one of the most beautiful moments in the entire work.

"does there exist, is there a man on earth / who seizes more joy than just a dream, a vision? / And the vision no sooner dawns than dies / blazing into oblivion"

Joy and darkness. When Sophocles wrote this play, his city-state stood at the pinnacle of its power. The glory and wealth brought by victory in the Persian Wars were, by some, already taken for granted. Pericles, the great leader who attracted talent from across the Greek world, was regarded as wise and yet… of course Athens’ leader was wise and great; how could it be otherwise? Some might have whispered to one another.

Can my reader see the parallels here?

The great and wise Oedipus, whom we met at the beginning of the play, resembles Pericles. He solved the first riddle of the Sphinx, which asked: what creature walks on four legs in the morning, on two in the afternoon, and on three in the evening?

Read more

Fear? What should a man fear? It's all chance, chance rules our lives. Not a man on earth can see a day ahead, groping through the dark. Better to live at random, best we can."

~ Jocasta

Subscribe now

Hello friends,

Welcome to week 2 of Oedipus the King.

At the end of this read-along, I have a treat for all of you. I recently recorded an interview with Professor Simon Goldhill from King’s College Cambridge.

You must see how passionate Professor Goldhill is about Sophocles and this play. It was incredible. For the first time in my life, after recording more than thirty interviews, I found myself listening breathlessly to my guest, occasionally forgetting that I was supposed to be asking questions.

Anyway, haha, we have a lot to explore, so let’s dive in…

Previously in this series:

What is a crossroads?

It is where reality splits and merges, where one event becomes many, and many become one. It is the moment in your life that divides everything into before and after, and only by looking back from the distance of time can you see that your life could have taken Path A, but you are on Path B.

In the previous part of the play, we stopped at Jocasta, who came to calm the quarrel between Creon and Oedipus, and who attempted to pull her husband back from his relentless pursuit of the truth.

It is worth pausing here for a moment and seeing the story from her perspective. Laius, her first husband, was told that his son would kill him. This led Laius to dispose of their newborn son to prevent the prophecy from becoming true. For Jocasta, that son is dead. He has been dead for decades.

But here we must pause and ask: what was Oedipus running from in the first place? Years before he arrived in Thebes, before he solved the Sphinx, before he married Jocasta, a young man went to the oracle at Delphi to ask a simple question about his origins.

He came away with no answer to that question, but with something far worse. The oracle told him:

"You are fated to couple with your mother, you will bring a breed of children into the light no man can bear to see; you will kill your father, the one who gave you life."

And so he ran. He abandoned Corinth, the city he believed was his home, the parents he believed were his own, and set out in the opposite direction: toward Thebes, toward Jocasta, toward the very thing he was fleeing.

This is the unbearable irony at the heart of the play: every step Oedipus took away from the prophecy was a step toward it. And when Jocasta, decades later, mentions a crossroads in passing, as nothing more than a geographical detail, a piece of evidence in her argument against oracles, something stirs in him that has been lying dormant for years. He is not hearing new information. He is finally hearing the connection between two things he already knew.

Her logic is mathematical: when she adds the evidence together, it points to a different conclusion, one that has nothing to do with prophecy at all. And yet we, as readers and viewers, know that the evidence she holds is not entirely sound, which is why her conclusion is wrong.

This is why I find Jocasta’s role in this play so fascinating, if fascinating is even the right word of course. The evidence in our hands convinces us that we have made sense of the world. Sophocles, through her mind, shows us how completely we can fall in love with the evidence we hold. This is how the ideological mind operates: it holds a belief, say, in a world governed by chance, and constructs its reading of reality around that belief.

Read more

Hello friends,

I’ve piled up a number of scholarly articles on my desk, trying to grasp the full depth and meaning of this play, which seems almost bottomless more I look at it. At one point, I encountered the work of Professor Simon Goldhill, who is an exceptional thinker on Sophocles and Greek tragedy.

He argues that Nietzsche, Hegel, and Wagner have fundamentally shaped our modern perception of Sophocles’ masterpieces. Unfortunately for me, I discovered Goldhill’s work just as I was finishing this section. I suppose this invites another post (at some point!)—one that will explore the Three Theban Plays from his perspective as well.

If you’re new here, here are some previous posts that will help provide context:

Table of Contents

This post is a long one so I decided to include a table of contents to make navigation easier. A table of contents would also allow you to read it in parts and pick up where you left off.

I. The Sphinx as Quagmire: What the creature truly symbolises and why Sophocles opens with a city that cannot name what is killing it.

II. We Already Know the Ending And That Is the Point Why the greatest works of literature are not about outcomes, and what this part of this play is specifically mapping inside the mind of its hero.

III. Tiresias: The Truth That Finds You Before You Are Ready: The blind prophet as something we each encounter in our own lives and why Oedipus, of all people, cannot hear him.

IV. The Speed That Blinds: How the same intelligence that made Oedipus king becomes, scene by scene, the very instrument of his destruction.

V. Jocasta: The Comfort That Conceals: Perhaps the most interesting character in this half of the play. What her philosophy of chance really is and what it costs her, and the moment she hands Oedipus the weapon that begins to undo everything.

Hello friends,

At the opening of Oedipus Rex, we find the great city of Thebes paralysed. It is not at war, it is not under siege. It is strangled from within: crops failing, livestock dying, women are unable to bring children safely into the world. It is, in every sense, a civilisation caught in a quagmire: something is deeply, inexplicably wrong, and no one can name the cause.

The city is in the grip of the Sphinx. For Greeks, this creature is not merely a monster from the mythological past, but a symbol of their city’s condition itself.

We witness this in the third lines of this play, when Oedipus says:

Oh my children, the new blood of ancient Thebes,

why are you here? Huddling at my altar,

praying before me, your branches wound in wool.

‘Your branches wound in wool’ - this, as Knox reminds us, was reserved when the city has lost all hope except through divine intervention.

When a city, or a life, finds itself in the grip of something it cannot explain, when everything seems wrong and the source remains invisible, it is living inside the Sphinx (or, under the shadow of Sphinx). The Sphinx is the quagmire and the only way out of it is to solve the riddle it poses.

This is why Sophocles’ play speaks so directly across twenty-five centuries. We have all faced this in either personal or civilisational level: the sense that life has posed us a question we cannot yet read, that something is blocked, something is broken, and we cannot see from the outside what it is. What Thebes is undergoing is not merely political but also psychological. It is the condition of being human and stuck.

Oedipus tells his people that he has been reflecting on the city’s misery and has already sent Creon to consult the interpreters of the divine realm.

The news returns with Creon: to save the city from its suffering, as the oracle has declared, it must rid itself of the corruption that surrounds it.

What is interesting is that the Greek word for corruption was miasma, which literally, means a “stain,” as Knox reminds us in his introduction. Once again, we are brought back to the riddle: to heal the city, it must be cleansed of the stain that covers it.

Read more

In February we explored Sophocles’ Antigone, and I thought that would be enough.

However, I became somewhat possessed by it. I could not stop thinking about the play, and although I opened many other books filled to the brim with genius, I found myself unable to finish them.

I was haunted by that play, as if the blind prophet Tiresias had prophesied that I must also undertake an Oedipus Rex read-along.

So, while I usually plan every read-along meticulously (Dante 2025, one hundred posts a year, two 3,000-word posts each week) this one is driven more by the sublime genius of Sophocles.

🎭

🎭

When we look at the world around us, especially the material world, things such as the sky, the planets moving above us, or the gorgeous stars. We do not see anything that appears out of place.

There is no planet that seems to have appeared from nowhere, no animal that cannot survive in the environment of our planet. Everything in the observable material universe seems to make sense. Everything appears to be in the right place, and even when we cannot yet explain something, we remain confident that one day we will.

But this brings a thinking person to a terrifying thought: if the universe is so ordered, so organised, if everything is in its place, mechanical and predictable, then the question inevitably arises: what about freedom?

What about our lives?

Can there be anything more terrifying than the absence of mystery?

There must be some mystery somewhere. Mysterion, the Greek word, meant a hidden doctrine, a secret rite. Where can we find that doctrine?

Perhaps, the secret rite that we all subconsciously crave dwells in art. We encounter it when we read magnificent plays such as those of Sophocles.

If the world contained no freedom, if the characters in Sophocles’ play were not responsible for their actions, if they were merely mechanical beings acting only because they are what they are, then what would be the purpose of reading their stories?

Every story about Oedipus or Achilles would unfold in the same way. Their characters are fixed, and since character shapes fate, the outcome would always be predictable.

Everyone would act exactly as they were designed to act. No one would be responsible for anything. Everything would be predetermined.

And yet each story of Oedipus is different, just as every human life though shaped by similar forces, unfolds differently.

This, I think, is the kind of dilemma the ancient Athenians had begun to sense.

For, at the time when Oedipus the King was written, Athens was undergoing an enlightenment, perhaps, an enlightenment in a deeper sense than what we often call the Enlightenment today. The Athenians had discovered two civilisation-changing sciences: medicine and mathematics.

And when we read Oedipus, and listen carefully to its characters, we hear again and again the language of measurement: metaphors of health, healing, and medicine.

According to the great classicist Bernard Knox, these metaphors of measurement and inquiry were connected to the new sciences emerging in ancient Greece. These discoveries raised questions for which there were not yet clear answers.

Knox argues that there is no evidence that the concept of free will was known to the ancient Greeks. The concept itself had not yet been fully articulated, but what certainly existed, according to Knox, was individual responsibility.

And I want to pause here and ask the reader to imagine something very difficult: what would it be like not to know the concept of free will?

Whether you personally believe in free will or not is beside the point. Whatever your philosophical position may be, try to imagine that your mind has not yet developed such a concept. This is what fascinates me.

The very fact that human beings were capable of inventing a concept such as free will tells us something profound about the nature of the human mind. And Oedipus is one such story.

For our human life, the kind of life capable of creating such concepts, is mysterious and astonishing in itself.

This is where I find myself agreeing with Bernard Knox, the great classicist who famously put Jean Cocteau and W. B. Yeats in their place.

Both of these great artistic figures attempted to portray the story of Oedipus through supernatural and mysterious forces. Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale, for example, is filled with supernatural elements.

But when we actually read Oedipus the King, we discover something striking: there are no supernatural forces visibly present on stage. No monsters appear. No gods descend to intervene directly.

It is, as Knox observes, perhaps the most secular of Sophocles’ plays. And this is precisely where mystery reveals itself through art.

Life is mysterious itself. Sophocles did not need Cocteau’s supernatural forces to portray the majesty of existence.

The truth is that while the Ancient Athenians lacked the concept of free will, they had the concept of individual responsibility. If the characters in the stories we read were not individually responsible for their actions, we would not be able to relate to them. If we knew that a character had no freedom to choose, no freedom to act, we would not be able to care about what happens to them.

And yet the profound dilemma remains: the tension between what we choose to do and what is prophesied to us.

I think this is why Sophocles cast such a spell on me through Antigone.

Where, within ourselves, does the individual responsibility that Antigone exercised so courageously truly reside?

We clearly live in an organised universe, and yet we also experience a sense of freedom. Science may tell us how the stars move, but it cannot teach us how to live beneath them.

The world is neither purely mechanical, as science attempts to describe it, nor purely chaotic, as our longing for freedom might wish it to be.

This is why I agree with Knox: in Oedipus, Sophocles shows us that life is mysterious in its own way, both mechanical and mysterious at once.

Oedipus himself, who in many ways represents the Athenian spirit, speaks constantly in metaphors of healing and measurement, the very language of the sciences that were flourishing in Athens at the time.

He uses these scientific metaphors in order to investigate, to search for the truth and perhaps this is the deepest question that stands before us.

If the universe is organised, ordered, and intelligible, and yet we also experience freedom, then where exactly does that freedom begin and where does it end?

When we looked at Sophocles’ Antigone, we encountered a powerful image of freedom: the freedom of conscience, the freedom to choose, the freedom to act even against the commands of the state. Antigone seemed to show us what human freedom looks like when it stands with courage and dignity.

But perhaps the more difficult question is not whether freedom exists.

The more difficult question is: where does that freedom live?

Where, within this ordered universe, does the space for human choice actually reside?

This is precisely the question that Oedipus the King forces us to confront. Because if Antigone reveals the courage of freedom, Oedipus explores its limits.

The play brings us face to face with the mysterious boundary between what is destined and what is chosen, between the world that is governed by necessity and the world in which human beings must still act.

I cannot answer that question here. This is precisely why I abandoned every other piece I scheduled to write at Genius and Ink to explore this together.

I hope you will join me!

🎭

Hello friends,

In this post, you will find the schedule for our read-along, along with all the relevant links in one place. Every post dedicated to the second part of Sophocles’ masterpiece, Oedipus the King, will be collected here.

I already wrote about the different translations of Sophocles’ plays in my post on Antigone, which you can also find here, so I won’t repeat myself too much. There are several excellent translations of this masterpiece, but for this read-along I will be using Robert Fagles’ translation, together with Bernard Knox’s introduction and commentary.

I found them both deeply helpful: Knox’s reflections are illuminating, and Fagles’ translation strikes me as truly impeccable.

That said, please feel entirely free to use another translation if you prefer. And if you are reading Sophocles through several translations at once, I would love to hear how you find them.

Schedule (Table of Posts!)

March 15th - Oedipus the King: The Limits of Our Freedom, Infinity of Prophecy. (Read-Along 🎭 )

March 22rd - Part I: Up Until the scene of Crossroads

March 29th - Part II: What to Do at the Crossroads of Your Life? (Oedipus Rex 🎭 | Read-Along)

April 5th - Part III: Eyes Wide Shut

Translation

Feel free to use any translation you prefer or have at hand. I adore Robert Fagles’ translation. For more comparisons between different translators and editions, please consult Antigone Read-Along page.

If you have time…

If you have time I would recommend you to read my piece called ‘Why Read Sophocles?’. It explains my admiration of Sophocles.

and my video…

If any questions, send me a message:

In medieval Latin a florilegium (plural florilegia) was a compilation of excerpts from other writings. The word is from the Latin flos (flower) and legere (to gather): literally a gathering of flowers, or collection of fine extracts from the body of a larger work.

In the monastic tradition, a florilegium was a gathering of fragments taken from different texts, bound together not by chronology, but by inner resonance. This monthly Florilegium of mine follows the same gesture: tracing how ideas, figures, and questions that appeared separate during the month were, in fact, part of the same underlying preoccupation.

For monks, judgment (discernment) meant the ability to recognise what leads toward order, humility, and truth, and to reject what leads toward distraction, pride, or confusion.

Florilegia were not tools for remembering everything that was read, but for training this faculty of selection: deciding what was essential and letting the rest fall away.

Welcome to my little florilegium where I gather excerpts from some of my favourite reads. Here you can find my favourite ideas, quotes, references from books.

I explore Florilegium in more detail here

🍂🍂🍂

In this edition: Flaubert on art, Van Gogh on worth, Self and Memory, Sophocles.

It seems I have violated all the rules of the monastic elders when writing this edition. I did not remove the names of the authors, as they often did; nor could I condense the wisdom into a single sentence to make it more easily recalled. And yet, I believe I have followed the core spirit of the monastic practice.

That core wisdom rested on two questions: Can this wisdom govern life? and Is it organised thematically?

I have spent many evenings this month with Flaubert and his letters. I find myself on a journey of “learning how to see,” for while we admire artists for their craft and skill, we grow attached to them for their unique way of seeing the world.

These are notes I have been keeping in my commonplace book for years, so that I may remember them.

🍂🍂🍂

Flaubert: When Artist Becomes a Fraud

An artist becomes a fraud the moment they try to make and ugly situation look beautiful.

What does Flaubert mean?
The first stage of any artist’s formation is learning how to see. The fraudulent artist however skips this stage, they go directly to creation. This is why a fraudulent artist, according to Flaubert, decorates what pleases their ego.

I am keeping this wisdom as mantra. In the world where words such as courage, dignity, integrity are scarce, one is often tempted to decorate small glimmers that come close to these words to be interpreted as such.

(My video exploration here)

Van Gogh on the Present Worth

“If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.”

There is a myth that mediocre artists soothe themselves with. The myth is that if your art is not recognised or does not receive the attention you desire, the fault lies with the public, which is supposedly not ready to understand your genius. The truth is that the lack of recognition is more likely a reflection of mediocrity than of hidden greatness.

Do not confuse sterile fragments of stone with fertile seeds. The former will never grow; the latter simply takes time to mature.

In one of his letters, Van Gogh unveils a quiet truth that I often remind myself of: create something worthy, something meaningful, something that unites the past, the present, and the future.

For truth, time does not exist.

Martin Conway: How Our Memory Works

Our mind acts as an editor when it comes to memories. And the selection depends on the story you’re aiming to tell. Martin Conway was a British academic who dedicated his entire life on autobiographical nature of our brain. In his paper Memory and the Self he says that when our life has no goal, our memory does not know what memory to pull, what memory serves purpose and what not.

The reason why this is here - having a goal, purpose, responsibility is what allow our memory to be healthy. When you have a goal, according to Conway, our memory re-organises itself to serve the purpose.

I’ve talked about this in detail in my Patreon podcast.

Sophocles: Antigone

No, It is no disgrace for a man, even a wise man, to learn many things and not to be too rigid.

You’ve seen trees by a raging winter torrent. How many sway with the flood and salvage every twig. But not the stubborn. They are ripped out, roots and all. Bend or break, the same when a man is sailing. Haul your sheets to taut. Never give an inch, you’ll capsize. And go the rest of the voyage, keel up and rowing benches under

More you read, lesser you understand. I don’t mean you realise how much you don’t know. I mean that great masterpieces of literature are so deep, that they can be explored over and over in life, unveiling something new each time. I read Divine Comedy in 2025, wrote thousands of words on each canto and yet the day I finished it, I realised how much else is to explore there.

The reason I am digressing so much is that I am absolutely in love with Sophocles. What a genius! After Dante, I was wondering whom else I need to explore who could stand in par with him. Milton? I still need to study him to be able to explore Paradise Lost in detail. Virgil? Perhaps, I am more ready than with Milton, and yet not much.

So, I thought: ‘I will try Sophocles. It is a play after all. It will require less preparation’.

How wrong I was!

I don’t want to commit a literary crime by writing some mediocre thoughts about Antigone. If my reader allows me, I will redirect them to my read-along.

Other than books…

I’ve enjoyed the film Sentimental Value. It touches upon the themes I explore on : memory, inheritance, emotional weight our souls and objects around us carry. I enjoy cinema, sometimes I wonder if I should talk about it more in my newsletters.

I would also recommend Hania Rani’s soundtrack to the film. She is a genius. One of my favourite musicians.

My favourite pieces…

• I enjoyed making this video on Flaubert and Art.

• This episode of my podcast is about my visit of Alex O’Connor’s talk on consciousness, religion and life.

• Other than Antigone, I enjoyed writing this letter on how our souls die before our bodies do

🍂🍂🍂

Subscribe now

Dear Cicero,

Our immortal souls do not age in the same way as our mortal bodies do. I have known those whose souls have withered before their bodies, who remain youthful in form yet lifeless in spirit. Their desire to live, their curiosity, their passion for discovery long extinguished.

Since childhood, I have observed the great figures I admired and the age at which they attained their renown. Among those venerated in your time, I call forth Alexander, who by the age of thirty-two had conquered the world; Scipio, who at twenty-nine vanquished the fury of Hannibal; and Hannibal himself, who rose to command at but twenty-six.

In my previous letter, I spoke of an age in human history when mind and spirit were joined in unity. This age, later called Renaissance, gave rise to men whose works would render even you, great among orators, speechless. First among them is Michelangelo, who, at but twenty-six, carved the Pietà, a sculpture that seems to breathe with life itself. And from another time, yet working in same eternal city, Bernini, no less daring in his craft, shaped in marble the Rape of Proserpina - a work so divine that one forgets it is stone, and he, only twenty-three.

These souls never withered; even in the frailty of old age, they laboured and created with the vigour of youth.

Much later in time, nearer to my own age, there arose poets and musicians who, having attained great fame, came to believe that a premature death was the mark of high genius. Many who read their words or heard their melodies wept at their passing, mourning a genius stolen too soon. It is true that in some cases, their early deaths were not of their own making. Shelley, the poet, met the storm’s fury and was drowned; Byron, his companion in spirit, fell not by vice1 but by illness, in the midst of a battle for Greece’s freedom.

And yet, in my time, many depart by their own hand, too soon. The reasons are many, tangled and obscure, yet I cannot rid myself of the sense that their passing is not the result of an unbearable depth of feeling, but of a vessel shattering when it finds itself emptied, with no more wine left to fill the cups.

A great artist is one who matures through the years, yet carries within him the unspent vigour of youth. Genius has no relation to an early death. In my first letter, I vowed to recount the world that has unfolded in your absence, repaying in some measure my debt for your wisdom. I have shared much, and this letter gets long, yet allow me one more example, that I may bring my thought to a fitting close, weighted with meaning.

About 1800 years since your glorious orations, the lands that border Italy on her north gave birth to a great poet. This poet’s name is Goethe. He too walked the streets of Rome, and we may read of his travels in his own journals. A true genius is never confined to a single pursuit. Goethe was a polymath, mastering both the depths of science and the heights of art. Yet what compels me to speak of him is this: though he lived to old age, he never ceased to grow, never ceased to evolve. His vessel was never empty. It remained ever full, ready to pour fresh wine into waiting cups.

And so I return to the first words of my letter, our bodies age as nature has ordained, but our souls wither only by our own will.

I continue to reflect upon the wisdom of your letter, and I shall respond when my words have gathered the weight they require. Until then, farewell.

And as always,

Confide tibimet.