Homer's Odyssey in Greece: one week immersion April - May 2023
Event Details
In 2022, following Covid, we returned to the beautiful Greek island of Agistri to immerse ourselves in Homer’s Odyssey. For 2023 we are delighted to announce more opportunities to read classical literature in a place that reflects and illuminates the beauty of the language. In April and May we will offer one week studying Homer’s Odyssey and a further week reading The Oresteia by Aeschylus.
The Odyssey study for April-May 2023 will use Homer’s epic poem to consider closely the guest-host relationship, the defining struggle of humans against overwhelming nature, the struggle to know ourselves in foreign spaces, our understanding of the heroic and the role of myth and epic in lived experience. Actor Jane Wymark and poet Caroline Hammond will join Salon Director Toby Brothers in leading this week-long study, sharing their insights into the spoken word, metre and translation and how to read out loud to greater effect. In an era where the epic poem is in eclipse (the novel and film having taken over as the preferred vehicles for complex narratives) we will explore aspects of the Odyssey as a work in the oral tradition.
The venue we have chosen is a small family-run hotel that is easily accessible (just one hour by ferry from Athens) on the beautiful and quiet island of Agistri. It provides the perfect setting for our study, offering a relaxing atmosphere, excellent food and opportunities for additional cultural and recreational activities.
SALON DETAILS
- Facilitated by Toby Brothers, Jane Wymark and Caroline Hammond
- 28 April-5 May 2023
- The study programme will run for four to five hours per day for five days, with one day left open. There will be time for other optional activities such as kayaking adventures, a trip to the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina, or for pure relaxation.
- Cost: £630 for the Salon study, to include preparatory meeting (via Zoom, 17 April 2023, 6.00-8.00pm UK time), background materials and opening notes.
- Payment methods: we understand that you may not want to pay the entire charge at once, so please email us if you would prefer to pay an initial deposit of £300 on registration, with the balance due on 1 February 2023. We have provided a PayPal link below, but you are also welcome to email us for bank details if you would rather pay by bank transfer.
- Refunds: please note that any refunds will be entirely at the discretion of the London Literary Salon, dependent on our ability to fill the place, and will be subject to an administration charge.
- Opening notes will be sent after registration and we ask you to read at least one of the following recommended translations before arriving on Agistri:
- The Odyssey translated by Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics, various editions) November 1997 ISBN-13:978-0140268867
- The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson (W.W. Norton & Co., Nov. 2018) ISBN-13: 978-0393356250
ADDITIONAL COSTS
Room and half board (breakfast and dinner each day) will be arranged with the hotel and paid for directly to them. A deposit to cover two nights accommodation will be required by the hotel and we will send you full details for payment on registration.
Accommodation prices per night at the hotel (Rosy’s Little Village):
- Single – €65 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €50 per day
- Double – €71 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €50 per person per day
- Triple – €77 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €50 per person per day
- Family room for two people – €83 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €50 per person per day
- Family room for three people – €98 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €50 per person per day
- Family room for four people – €110 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €50 per person per day
Flights to Athens:
When booking please make sure you can arrive in Piraeus by 15.00 local time on 28 April to make the ferry. We will not be meeting on 5 May, so you have choices about your return (ferries are frequent and the travel time to Piraeus is one hour).
Ferry to Agistri:
Normally €14 each way, but may be €30 for arrival if the group chooses to use a private water taxi.
Incidental expenses:
Lunches, extra trips etc.
If you would like further information please use the ‘enquire before you buy’ button below.
Participant reflections from the Odyssey travel study in 2022:
“overall the whole experience was 5 star! . . . I most enjoyed the group dynamic. I loved everyone’s enthusiasm for The Odyssey and the ideas that bounced around.”
“The group was amazing and I loved your insights and questioning of the text. It was an amazing and enriching experience.”
“Agistri and Rosy’s provided a wonderful setting which was both peaceful and invigorating. I so appreciated being surrounded by beauty – bees buzzing in orange blossom – and being by, and in, the sea. This scenery that Homer would have known really enhanced the experience of studying the text.”
“It was a wonderful week – stimulating, informative, fun. You laid all the necessary foundations and the group dynamic supplied that extra magic that made the week so memorable.”
“The trip to Aegina was wonderful, interesting and good fun. I think the landscape, especially round the islands is so seductive that you can see how these wonderful texts were written.”
About the epic . . .
The Salon has become a place to discover or rediscover the works that form the cornerstones of Western literary tradition. The Odyssey is a root feeding our understanding of ourselves as well as the words and ways of the ancients. How does it continue to shape our idea of the heroic? What do the dilemmas that Odysseus faces offer to us today? Can we still appreciate the lyric and narrative quality alongside a violent story filled with the suffering and death of nameless servants, slave girls and soldiers?
Many artists have used The Odyssey as an inspiration for their work, as Joyce does with Ulysses and the Coen brothers did for their film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? (in the process winning an Oscar for the best screenplay adaptation from Homer’s original). The epic struggle to return home and the exploration of the guest-host relationship both remain relevant across time.
David Denby, in his work Great Books, describes his engagement with The Odyssey as an essential exploration of the formation of the self for the reader as well as for Telemachus and Odysseus:
“Even at the beginning of the literary tradition of the West, the self has masks, and remakes itself as a fiction and not as a guiltless fiction either. . .
The Odyssey is an after-the-war poem, a plea for relief and gratification, and it turns, at times, into a sensual, even carnal celebration.”
And here, from Jane Wymark, a brief summary of some of the contemporary novels inspired by the Homeric epics . . .
“All of these books contain major spoilers of the plots of both The Iliad and The Odyssey and so are to be avoided if you’d rather approach the Homeric Epics completely innocent. On the other hand, without some background knowledge of the Greek Pantheon you will soon be at sea, so you might consider sacrificing surprise for context . . .”
The Silence of the Girls
Pat Barker
“An important, powerful, memorable book that invites us to look differently not only at The Iliadbut at our own ways of telling stories about the past and the present, an invitation to listen for voices silenced by history and power.”
Emily Wilson
Pat Barker is the author of the much respected award-winning Regeneration trilogy set during the First World War, and is thus very well qualified to retell the story of The Iliad in a style that displays its mythic universality. The first time that Achilles says ‘OK’ it lands as a shocking anachronism, but as you read on you realise that Barker is deliberately showing that the Trojan War has similarities to all wars in all times. Her central character, Briseis, is mentioned no more than a dozen times in Homer: she is an enslaved woman regarded simply as plunder.
The Song of Achilles and Circe
Madeline Miller
The Song of Achilles, Miller’s first book, became a major bestseller, published in 23 languages. It retells the story of the siege of Troy from the point of view of Patroclus, whose death Achilles avenged by the killing of the Trojan hero Hector and defiling the corpse by dragging it around the city walls behind his chariot. The book was less popular in some quarters: the New York Times described it as having ‘the head of a young adult novel, the body of The Iliad and the hindquarters of Barbara Cartland’ and there’s some truth in that criticism, despite its irritating snobbish tone. It’s certainly a very engaging read and Miller’s second book, Circe, is even more so. Circe is a nymph and witch on whose island home Odysseus and his men land. The book manages to weave in an enormous amount of Greek myth and legend in palatable form.
A Thousand Ships
Natalie Haynes
‘This subversive reseeing of the classics is a many-layered delight’.
Elizabeth Lowry
This is the most recent of the current crop of Homeric retellings. It is written in short chapters and covers the stories of many of the female characters, most of whom get fairly short shrift in Homer. Some are given more than one chapter – especially Penelope and the group Haynes calls The Trojan Women. Penelope’s chapters are written as letters to the absent Odysseus, a device taken from Ovid’s Heroides, but the dry witty tone echoes The Penelopiad, written by the great Margaret Attwood fifteen years earlier, which is definitely worth a read.
If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.
