This conversation between a podcast host and Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy explores the relationship between grief (penthos) and glory (kleos) in Homeric epic, using Odysseus’s weeping at the Phaeacian court as the entry point to understand why true epic must contain sorrow, how Achilles and Odysseus represent competing models of heroic immortality, and why the poet may ultimately surpass the hero.
The Scene That Reveals the Genre
Odysseus weeps uncontrollably when the bard Demodocus sings of the Trojan Horse — his own greatest triumph — because the song stops exactly before the war crime he committed: throwing Hector and Andromache’s child Astyanax from Troy’s walls.
His grief mirrors Andromache’s own: Homer describes Odysseus crying “as a woman whose city is sacked, whose family is killed and led into slavery,” fusing perpetrator and victim in a single image of penthos.
Virgil captures this same insight when Aeneas sees the Trojan War depicted in Carthage and declares “sunt lacrimae rerum” — there are tears in the very atoms of the universe — recognizing that epic is built on sorrow as much as on boasting of brave deeds.
Aristotle’s catharsis and the Greek concept of pathei mathos (learning through suffering) both operate here: the audience’s emotions are both purged and educated by witnessing heroic grief.
Helen in Sparta drugs her guests with nepenthe (anti-penthos) before telling Trojan War stories, creating “false epic” — a shoot-‘em-up version that removes lamentation, which Nagy argues is 60% of the Iliad’s poetic substance and primarily a woman’s medium.
Pindar confirms the genre’s architecture: the Muses began the song of Achilles as a lament for his death, and that lament transformed into kleos; real epic cannot exist without the ingredient of sorrow.
Achilles and Odysseus: Two Paths to Kleos
Achilles in Iliad 9 is offered a choice between nostos (safe homecoming with a song about it) and kleos (dying young at Troy with unwilting glory); he does not choose kleos there — he is pushed into it only by the unbearable grief of Patroclus’s death.
Patroclus’s name means “glory of the ancestors” (kleos of the fathers); he is “Mr. Epic” waiting to continue the tradition, but his death is the price of that continuation — proof that epic requires sorrow.
Odysseus, unlike Achilles, must have both nostos and kleos: his kleos is his nostos, because Achilles already owns the Iliad and the title “best of the Achaeans.”
The Sirens are “counterfeit Muses” who promise Odysseus infinite variants of the Trojan War story (“we know everything that happened at wide Troy”), but in none of them is he the hero — he would listen forever and die, never achieving kleos.
The true Muses know the one authoritative version (our Iliad); the Sirens represent the inexhaustible multiplicity of local traditions where Odysseus can never be #1.
Immortality: Kleos vs. Apotheosis
Kleos offers a form of immortality: Achilles’ glory is “unwilting” like a flower that never loses color or scent because it is reborn at every Panathenaic festival when the Iliad is performed.
The gods do not need kleos — they already possess immortality; heroes must die first to win it.
Heracles achieves literal immortality (apotheosis): he dies by Zeus’s thunderbolt, then Hera simulates giving birth to him on Olympus — the stepmother becomes mother — but Homeric poetry censors such stories because every valley has a different version of hero immortalization.
Odyssey 24 hints that Achilles dwells in the meadow of asphodel, a paradise beyond Hades, but Homer refuses to narrate it directly.
Odysseus is offered immortality with Calypso but refuses; his kleos is prophesied by Agamemnon in the underworld, not yet achieved within the poem.
The Iliad and Odyssey as Formal Twins
The two poems are “formulaic twins” that slot names into identical structures, yet represent competing worldviews: the Iliad is the Platonic ideal of kleos; the Odyssey explores the alternative — kleos won through trickery, loss, and return.
Achilles saves the Greek civilization (without him, Greeks would not exist); Odysseus saves only himself, losing every companion.
The Iliad is called Iliad (not Achilleid) because Achilles owns the Trojan War itself — even though he didn’t capture Troy, he is the unqualified “best of the Achaeans.”
Plato’s Apology treats Achilles as the gold standard: Socrates wants to interview him in the afterlife; in the Republic’s Myth of Er, Plato rewrites Odysseus choosing a simple farmer’s life over kingship, positioning Socrates as a new kind of hero.
Penelope: The Key to Odysseus’s Kleos
Penelope is the key not only to nostos but to kleos: Odysseus wins a Penelope rather than a Clytemnestra, and her steadfastness creates the space for his dignified vengeance on the suitors.
The contrast with Agamemnon’s failed homecoming (murdered by Clytemnestra) highlights Penelope’s role as the guarantor of genuine nostos and thus genuine kleos.
In the underworld, Achilles asks whether Penelope remains steadfast or “has the best of the Achaeans won her already” — recognizing that her fidelity makes Odysseus the true best of the Achaeans.
The Poet as Master of Kleos
The poet invokes a single Muse (Calliope, muse of kings) and becomes the medium through which kleos flows: “you goddesses know everything; we poets only hear the kleos and know nothing” — but then the poet recites it to the audience, controlling the glory that may be a hero’s.
In the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, the people acclaim Homer but the king awards the prize to Hesiod; Homer survives into the democratic era, outlasting kings.
Plato calls Homer ho poietes — the poet, the craftsman who makes art — and Homer himself receives hero cult in the classical period.
The host suggests the poet may be the true “best of the Achaeans”: Achilles wins kleos without nostos, Odysseus wins both but with deep grief, while the poet wins kleos without grief — though Nagy resists, noting the poet serves the tradition, not himself.
