Inside a packed tent that seemed to hold its breath, the ancient world was proving its modern weight. Onstage at the Jaipur Literature Festival, Author Stephen Fry, towering like a benevolent Olympian on stage, was discussing his retelling of “The Odyssey.” With him were the Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill and the ancient historian Josephine Quinn.
The topic, ostensibly, was Homer. But, soon it became a dissection of why this particular epic, a bedrock of the Western canon, was capable of diagnosing the present.
The discussion ranged across the poem’s vast geography, and from the nature of the gods to the ache of homecoming. At one point, it slipped into a spirited nok jhok between Quinn and Goldhill over a question that refuses to go away — is The Odyssey fundamentally patriarchal; or does it quietly unsettle the very order it appears to endorse?
Author Stephen Fry, Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill, and ancient historian Josephine Quinn, onstage at the Jaipur Literature Festival on Friday. (Express Photo)
Quinn framed it: Penelope waits for twenty years, fending off suitors with ingenuity and delay, while Odysseus, roaming the Mediterranean, seems conspicuously unable — or unwilling — to resist female attention. Was this anything more than ancient sexism dressed up as epic?
It was a provocation, neatly placed. Goldhill, relishing the intellectual combat, shot back: To reduce Penelope to a symbol of passive fidelity was to misread her radical agency.
She is, he argued, the poem’s most formidable intelligence, the one who “out-tricks the master trickster himself”. When Odysseus finally returns, it is Penelope who withholds recognition, tests him, and forces him to reveal himself, on her terms.
Nor is Odysseus’s sexual freedom, Goldhill continued, quite what it appears. To sleep with a goddess is to risk being unmanned; in Calypso’s case, he noted, the poem makes clear that Odysseus is coerced rather than willing.
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Goldhill summed up with a line that drew laughter and nods: “Is it patriarchal? Of course it is. Is it simply patriarchal? Absolutely not.”
The exchange demonstrated why The Odyssey still induces argument rather than consensus, and why it resists tidy moral verdicts.
Gods as capricious, superhuman forces
Fry, raconteur and moderator, said his engagement with Greek myth began not in a classroom but in the “excess” of the stories themselves — the wit, the sex, the strangeness. For him, “The Odyssey” marks the moment myth begins to “behave like literature,” becoming self-aware and psychologically complex. He spoke of Homer’s gods not as moral authorities but as capricious, superhuman forces who “look the way the world feels: beautiful, terrifying and unfair”.
Strip away the monsters and enchantments, Goldhill suggested, and “The Odyssey” is, at its core, a stern lesson in consequence. Odysseus’s men are devoured for their transgressions; the hero himself bears the scars of his pride. This tension — between a chaotic, amoral universe and a relentless system of cause and effect — is one the poem never resolves.
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As for the epic’s contemporary pull, Fry found it in the Greek concept of nostos, the haunting ache for return. In the epic, Calypso taunts Odysseus: “I suppose you miss the smoke of home.” That yearning, Fry suggested, resonates in a world where the hearth — the literal and spiritual center — has fragmented.”
AI as Promethean fire
In a characteristic leap, Fry connected Prometheus’s theft of fire to the rise of artificial intelligence. The Greek gods, he said, were not all-powerful, but subject to fate, to time, and ultimately to obsolescence. “Once humans were given fire,” he argued, they began to develop tools, systems and intelligence that gradually made the gods redundant.
Humans, Fry warned, are in the process of creating entities — AI systems — that begin as servants and tools, but may not remain so forever. The anxiety voiced by Zeus about fire, he said, echoes contemporary fears about consciousness, autonomy and control. Civilisations, like gods, tend to assume their permanence until they cease to exist.
It was a dark note on which to end, but an unmistakably Homeric one. The Odyssey, after all, is not a poem about triumph but survival — about intelligence used both creatively and destructively, and about the thin line between ingenuity and catastrophe.
Author Stephen Fry, Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill, and ancient historian Josephine Quinn, onstage at the Jaipur Literature Festival on Friday. (Express Photo)
