Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook on Odysseus’s Monsters, Greek Colonisation Anxieties, and the Slaughter of the Suitors
Holland and Sandbrook narrate the whole of Homer’s Odyssey in strict chronological order — Troy’s fall, the Cyclops, Circe, the underworld, Calypso, and the bloody return to Ithaca — reading the poem’s monsters as both literary invention and encoded memory of Greek anxieties about colonising the western Mediterranean.
Key ideas
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Odysseus’s cunning, not his strength, drives the whole epic. From feigning madness to dodge the Trojan expedition, to devising the Trojan horse, to blinding Polyphemus and escaping tied beneath his sheep, to infiltrating his own hall disguised as a beggar, Odysseus wins by intelligence where other Homeric heroes rely on force. Athena favours him for exactly this: she tells him he is ‘by far the best of all mortal men for schemes’.
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Every disaster against a monster follows the same pattern: appetite over discipline. The massacre at Ismaros, the crew who nearly abandon the voyage among the Lotus-Eaters, and above all the slaughter of the Cattle of the Sun on Thrinacia all destroy Odysseus’s men through greed, hunger, or plain refusal to leave when told. Odysseus alone survives the full voyage, because his will to reach home outlasts every appetite along the way.
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The poem’s monsters map onto real anxieties of Greek colonisation. Holland reads the Lotus-Eaters (placed by Herodotus off North Africa), Polyphemus’s Cyclopes (identified with Sicily and Mount Etna), the cannibal Laestrygonians, and Scylla and Charybdis (identified with the Strait of Messina) as literary encodings of 8th–7th century BC Greek expansion into Sicily and the western Mediterranean — hostile natives guarding perfect harbours, treacherous straits, and the general terror of unfamiliar coastlines that colonists were then actually settling.
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Poseidon’s curse, provoked by Odysseus’s own vanity, structures the rest of the voyage. Odysseus blinds Polyphemus and could escape anonymously, but cannot resist shouting his real name back at the shore — allowing the Cyclops to name him in a prayer to his father, Poseidon. Every subsequent disaster (the storm that kills eleven ships’ crews, the wreck off Thrinacia, seven years marooned with Calypso) traces back to that single lapse in an otherwise disciplined cunning.
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The underworld scene inverts the poem’s own heroic values. Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Iliad, tells Odysseus he would rather live as a landless labourer than rule as a shade among the dead — undercutting the Greek cult of glory that the Trojan War itself was fought to serve. The scene sets up Odysseus’s later refusal of Calypso’s offer of immortality in favour of growing old with the mortal Penelope.
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Penelope matches Odysseus trick for trick. She stalls her many suitors for years by secretly unweaving Laertes’s shroud each night, and Holland argues she may recognise the disguised beggar in her hall well before the bow contest confirms it — playing the same game of concealment her husband plays with her. Homer leaves this deliberately ambiguous.
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The homecoming ends in disciplined, total violence. Having strung the bow no suitor could bend, Odysseus kills Antinous first, then every suitor in the hall with Telemachus, the swineherd Eumaeus, and the cowherd Philoetius at his side. Beyond the suitors themselves, he has the twelve slave women who slept with them hanged and has the disloyal goatherd Melanthius mutilated — violence Homer narrates without sentiment.
Context
A two-part compilation, released days before Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation opened in cinemas (17 July 2026), opening with Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation of Homer’s proem read by Russell Crowe. Holland and Sandbrook deliberately depart from Homer’s own structure: the poem itself opens in medias res, ten years after Troy’s fall, with Athena’s visit to Telemachus in Ithaca, then flashes back to Odysseus’s own telling of his wanderings at the Phaeacian court. The hosts instead narrate events in strict chronological order, from the fall of Troy through to the reunion with Penelope, folding in material from outside the Odyssey itself (the wooden-horse ruse, Odysseus’s feigned madness, his infiltration of Troy as a beggar) that Homer’s original audience would have already known.
Related
- Tom Holland — co-host; supplies the close classical readings (Odysseus’s cunning, the colonisation-anxiety framing, the underworld’s inversion of heroic glory).
- Dominic Sandbrook — co-host; presses the modern comparisons and questions the historical readings Holland proposes.