Penelope outwits the wiliest man in Greek myth, and Prometheus steals fire that ends up making the gods obsolete. Stephen Fry used both figures to argue that Homer’s Odyssey has as much to say about artificial intelligence and gender as it does about ancient Greece.
The event took place at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January. Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill and ancient historian Josephine Quinn discussed Fry’s new retelling of the epic. Quinn moderated the session, and Fry joined as author and panelist.
Quinn laid out her case first. Penelope waits twenty years for Odysseus, fending off suitors with delay and invention. Odysseus, meanwhile, wanders the Mediterranean and fails to resist other women. Quinn asked whether this amounts to anything more than ancient sexism.
Goldhill disagreed. Reading Penelope as merely faithful, he argued, misses her power. He called her “the only figure in the whole history of Western rewritings of the Odyssey who out tricks the key trickster.” When Odysseus returns, she withholds recognition, tests him, and forces him to prove who he is.
Goldhill argued that Odysseus’s affairs are not what they look like either. Sex with a goddess threatens him in the poem. Circe threatens to unman him. With Calypso, the text states plainly that Odysseus does not want her and is coerced night after night.
Goldhill closed the argument with a line that drew laughs. “Is it patriarchal? Of course it is. Is it simply patriarchal? Absolutely not.”
Author Stephen Fry, Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill, and ancient historian Josephine Quinn, onstage at the Jaipur Literature Festival on Friday. (Express Photo)
The Gods
Fry traced his interest in Greek myth back to childhood, not to school. He loved the stories for their wit, their sex, and their strangeness. He called The Odyssey the point where myth starts to behave like literature, self-aware and psychologically complex. Homer’s gods, he said, “look the way the world feels, beautiful, terrifying and unfair.”
Goldhill traced a structure beneath the monsters. Wrongdoing brings punishment. Odysseus’s men die for their own errors, and Odysseus bears the cost of his pride. The poem holds a chaotic universe and a strict system of cause and effect side by side, and it never resolves the two.
Fry located the poem’s pull today in nostos, the ache for home. Calypso taunts Odysseus in the poem, telling him he must miss “the smoke of home.” That longing, Fry said, matters in a world where the hearth itself has broken apart.
Fire and AI
Fry drew a line from Prometheus’s theft of fire to artificial intelligence. The Greek gods were not all-powerful. They answered to fate and time, and they eventually fell. Once humans had fire, he argued, they built tools and systems that made the gods unnecessary.
Fry said humans are doing the same thing with AI. We are building entities that start as tools and may not stay that way. Zeus’s old fear of fire, in his reading, matches today’s fear of machine consciousness and control. Civilisations, like gods, assume they will last, until they don’t.
Fry closed by returning to the poem itself. The Odyssey, he said, is not a story about triumph. It is a story about survival, about intelligence used to create and to destroy, and about the narrow gap between the two.
Stephen Fry, raconteur and moderator, said his engagement with Greek myth began not in a classroom but in the “excess” of the stories themselves. (Image generated with AI) 
Author Stephen Fry, Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill, and ancient historian Josephine Quinn, onstage at the Jaipur Literature Festival on Friday. (Express Photo)
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