Did Odysseus FIND America?

For more than 3,000 years, we've treated the Odyssey as one of humanity's greatest myths, a world of monsters and witches and gods, and of course all of this is all myth, right? Well, what if some of these impossible places were real? Well, today I'm joined by Dr. Jack Visionek, better known as Lantern Jack, and he's here to explain the whole theory. He believes that parts of the Odyssey may preserve distorted memories of voyages that took place long before Homer, journeys beyond the Mediterranean into the North Atlantic and possibly all the way to America. Because Homer describes a land where the summer days barely end, a harbor enclosed by enormous cliffs, an island where sailors lose track of where the sun rises and sets. Those clues could trace a route from Scotland to Iceland and all the way to Canada. This is obviously fantasy, right? Well, near Canada today lies the Bay of Fundy, a place of giant seals who bark like dogs, and one of the most powerful tidal whirlpools that appears exactly three times a day. Now, none of this proves that Odysseus himself discovered America, the theory is actually stranger than that. Perhaps an unknown ancient explorer may have made this amazing journey, returned home, and had his experiences transformed into the monsters and magical landscapes of Homer. And even if part of this is true, then the ancient world was not nearly as isolated as we were taught. It would mean that sailors were crossing oceans, encountering new consonants, and exchanging stories thousands of years before Columbus and Leigh Farrickson. Today we ask whether one of the oldest myths in Western civilization is actually hiding the memory of a forgotten journey to America. So sit back, relax, and welcome to Canada. Now, before we jump into that, there's a few things I want to say at the top first for the viewer at home. Yeah, dude, you may hear some disturbance during this episode. There is a band playing in the woods, just adjacent to our tent here. So I apologize if you hear some drums or bass coming through. And secondly, could you just explain to the audience at home who you are and what is your background in Greek literature? Sure, so I have a PhD in classics, which means in the study of ancient Greek and Latin and the literature and history of those peoples. And I produce a podcast on YouTube channel called Ancient Greece Declassified where I explore topics from the ancient world that are of interest or relevant to today. Amazing. Now, this episode that you did, did Odysseus discover America. People are probably here, then, they're like, well, first off, Odysseus isn't a real guy. So no. And secondly, Christopher Columbus discovered America. So also no. How would you start to break down this argument? What do you mean when you say did Odysseus discover America? Right. So the title was tongue-in-cheek and some might accuse me of clickbait and I guilty, whether or not Odysseus is a real character, is explained early on as not the core issue there. The core issue is that we're not dealing with fiction in the modern sense, where some author sits in a desk and just conjures up a story from start to finish that has no bearing on reality. We're talking about an oral tradition that was operating over centuries. So even if there was a guy named Homer, which is debated, who finalized the final version that we have today, regardless of that, these stories. They were compiled and collected and developed and expanded over centuries, like we can tell that linguistically. And during those centuries, all kinds of mythological elements were incorporated, probably real stories were incorporated. In fact, a lot of the bits from the elite about the Trojan War have had archeological corroboration. That was a Schleeman. Well, that was the first thing. Even so Schleeman discovered Troy, and at the time nobody thought that he would. So at the time, people thought the Troy was made up, but he discovered Troy. And then he also excavated certain Bronze Age palaces in the mainland of Greece that people also didn't think much of, or that they didn't really reflect the Homeric reality. But more recently, people have studied the Hittite Archives. The Hittites were the main power in what's now Turkey during the Bronze Age. And if there was a Trojan War, it probably was between the Hittites and the Greeks of the time, the so-called the Keyons that Homer refers to, over the region of Troy, which was a disputed area. It was both sides claimed that as a sphere of influence. It isn't like Western Turkey in the modern day. Yes, exactly. Right. We have these Hittite Archives that refer to a region, a city in that area called Wylusa. Now if you take the word Wylusa, and you put it through the sound changes that we know happen in Greek, namely, an initial war drops out, so it becomes Illusa. And then an S sound between vowels drops out, so it becomes Illua, starts sound like Ilion, which is the name of Troy and Homer's epics. Ah, Ilion. Yes. Interesting. I'm the Iliad. I see. Oh, that's fascinating. Now, this sort of theory is kind of, correct me if I'm wrong, that maybe this idea that Homer, as we know, as maybe a person, as a collection of people, as a fictional character that is just sort of the pseudonym given to whomever, whatever collection of people collected and wrote this great epic poem, perhaps they are drawing on a knowledge at the time that there was some type of transatlantic travel that perhaps some type of seafaring people went across the Atlantic. They went to Newfoundland. They went to the Caribbean, and they did this, ostensibly, thousands of years before Leigh Farrickson or Christopher Columbus. And there's little tiny threads that most people would miss when reading the epic that seem to reference a place beyond the waters of the Mediterranean. Could you take us through some of the more compelling lines that appear in the Odyssey that would lead someone to think, like, oh, maybe this isn't some part of Greece or maybe this isn't Italy. Like, what are the lines that you find the most interesting? Well, so I imagine that this is a shock to most viewers right now, what you just said. And I should say, first of all, that many people have actually conjectured an Atlantic or even transatlantic interpretation of the Odyssey. Okay, so this is not like a new idea. And that's because the text itself that we have says that Odysseus is traveling the ocean. And while, you know, if you go on like Airbnb and you book a hotel in Greece, we'll say ocean view. There's no ocean views in Greece and no Greek would ever confuse the ocean with the sea. That's right. Mediterranean is an inland sea. The Romans called it their own lake because it was fully enclosed by the Roman Empire. Right. Now, what someone would say, oh, the dumb Greeks, you know, 2000 years ago, they thought it was an ocean. Well, we don't really see, in other texts, we don't really see a confusion between these terms. Right. So the Odyssey says that Odysseus is on the ocean. And it even says at one point that he crosses the ocean. And he comes to the, the Peirata gaze, the, or Peirata Gaias, the, the limits of the world. So that's the, that's the kind of the biggest direct statement in the actual text. To see fairing people at the time knew the difference between an ocean and the sea. And they would never mistake the Mediterranean as a sea. So when they're saying the ocean, this implies that this is going beyond the straight of Gibraltar. This is somewhere in the Atlantic. That's the view of some people, which I tend to agree with. There are, of course, the skeptics would say, no, this is poetic exaggeration. Which is possible. Yeah. But we do know for a fact that the Phoenicians were out in the ocean at the time that Homer may have lived. In other words, at the time that these poems got their final form, the Phoenicians were already trading along the Atlantic coasts of what's now Spain or Portugal and Northern Africa. And then, and then earlier in the Bronze Age, we know for sure of indirect trade between the Mediterranean people and the Scandinavians, for example. There are beads found in Scandinavian tombs that are from the Mediterranean. There are some bull and chariot iconography that seem related. As of yet, there's no smoking gun, like, there's no shipwreck of a Mediterranean ship in Scandinavia found yet. Right. Because they wouldn't wreck, dude. They'd be good. You know what I mean? These are good sailors. Hey, real quick. Most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow and you stay in the loop with every new drop, religion camp, history camp, and camp gagged on it. Now let's get back to it. Right. Just as far as the timeline goes, Christopher Columbus 1492, Lee Farrickson going to Newfoundland around like 1000 AD, something like that. When is the Odyssey assembled and when are we talking about the time of Homer? What period is that? The scholarly estimates, because these are estimates, range from late 800s BC to early 600s BC. So let's say like 820 BC to 675 BC, that's the window that we think these epic poems receive their final form. We're talking 1500 years before the Vikings here. Yeah. - Like, what, another 2,000 years before Columbus? - Yes. - I mean, that would be some pretty shocking information. If you're telling me like, oh, maybe some of these, you know, Phoenicians or someone was going to America, that's wild. It is. Now, what are their threads in there would indicate that this is not someplace in the Mediterranean. Obviously, going to the ocean, you're like, all right. You know, maybe it's, maybe it's flowery language language. What else is pulling you that direction? - Well, Christos, can you pull up the third image from the file? Yeah, there we go. So, here's a list of the complete journey. And by the way, I need to say, sorry, that during the epic poem, Odysseus gives various accounts of who he is, what his name is, where he's from and where he's been. And they're all different. Okay, and this is why he's called, you know, the liar. - Yes. - Right, the unreliable narrator. - Exactly. So he's a master of disguise, a master of storytelling. And what we think of as the tribal narrative, the one that's in the movie and all the movies, that's the one he tells to the fiatians. Second final stop in this outline. So he gives them the longest account of who he is and where he's been. Of course, he needs their sympathy to get home. So he might have, it might be implied in the poem that he's embellishing the story. - Right. - But in any case, this is the one we're gonna be talking about today. This is the main, the well-known tribal narrative. And if you look at it, you see that there are multiple legs of this journey that have, that take many days of sailing nonstop without sight of land. Nine days, again, nine days, six days, nine days, and then 17 days. Okay, and it's implied in all these cases that no land is seen, it's not stated directly, but it makes sense. It stands to reason that these long legs of the trip involve not seeing land anywhere. - Right, and for the guy listening right now, this is basically Troy, where, of course, Odysseus is battling to his maris to Cape Malaya. - Yes. - He's a proud, exactly. And then nine days go by, no land. And he goes to the lotus eaters, cyclops, Aolia, nine more days, near Ithaca, back to Aolia, six more days, the Lestragonians to then Cersei's Isle, then to the land of the dead. Back to Aia, back to the sirens, and then the Silia, and then Thrinatia, and then the Chair of Beatis. - Corribdus. - Corribdus, my bad. - Corribdus, which is an interesting name. And then nine more days, to Calypso's Isle, and then 17 days to Sharia, basically the-- - Sharia. - Sharia, my bad, I'm thinking to Sharia. - And then back to Ithaca. So it's 17 days, even just that period is so long, but we'll get to that in a second. So nine days with no land in sight. That would be hard to do in the Mediterranean. - Exactly. And I should emphasize again that the text does not say, no land was spotted for 17 days, but that's clearly implied. So, yeah, so it has been long recognized that these, so the Mediterranean Sea is an inland sea. It's full of narrow passages of archipelagos of many islands. You can't really sail anywhere in a straight line for more than a couple of days without seeing land, okay? And that's like the biggest areas take a couple of days to cross. So since antiquity, people have noted that these distances don't fit in the Mediterranean. And since antiquity, they've said, well, it's just poetic exaggeration, okay? Most people, okay, fair. When we get to, so we have the Homeric epics at the end of the so-called dark ages, after the Bronze Age collapse, around 1200 BC, you have like 400 years of dark ages, where Greece forgets the art of writing. Then a new system of writing comes back, the alphabet, and it comes back at the same time as the Homeric poems appear, and those two phenomena might be related. That's a different rabbit hole. And then we get the more familiar authors, we know of like Plato, Herodotus, Aristotle, so forth, right? For whom we know specific dates, where they lived, what they wrote, all the kind of stuff. And in those more familiar, well-documented authors, we learned that the Greeks had already kind of made a map of where they thought Odysseus had gone, and they had made it in the Mediterranean. So like Thucydides, I think, reports that the Caracurians, so Caracuda or Corfu is an island, that's actually pretty close to Ithaca, okay? And the Caracurians had already claimed in his day in the 400s BC that they were a scarier, plenty of the fiatians. - I see you. - Now, that doesn't really make sense, because Homer says that scarier is like, is again, beyond all inhabited lands, all other inhabited lands. So why would it be an island less than a days, sail away from Odysseus's home, okay? And then people say, well, it only took one day for Odysseus to get to his home from scarier, but that ship is described as traveling autonomously, like without any Captain or Orzman, and it's going faster than a hawk flies. Now, a hawk is perhaps the fastest animal on the planet when it dives, right? So this is clearly like a kind of magical link, right? So if you look at this chart again, I believe the storm at Cape Malia and the magical ship of the fiatians at the end, that's the beginning and end bracket of the magical outlandish journey. That's where we have a different travel narrative than you would expect from a return from Troy to Greece. - Right. - And I think that is where Homer, or whatever process, crystallize these epics in the 800 and 700s BC, probably introduced a separate travel narrative into the story of Odysseus, which did not originally have any of this. - Interesting. And in order to square all that for Homer, he had to be like, hey, they traveled to the speed of light. They traveled as fast as we can possibly imagine, in order to, in the literary sense, square the circle of going from this land all the way back to the Cape. - Exactly. - Where if it's just truly a day sailing, you don't need to do that for the story's sake. - Yes, exactly. And I should note that this idea that the fantastical travel narrative was introduced later is actually established among quite a few scholars, so famously Martin West, famous Homerist. He argued that the original, the original Odyssey, so to speak, was a homecoming tale of a king who was delayed at war, came home after several years and found his house in disorder, his wife is surrounded by suitors, his son's life is in jeopardy, so he comes back in disguise. And so like it's the homecoming tale, kind of like the movie The Return from the last year, where he has to be disguised and find some local loyal friends and then take his throne back. I think that, also he thinks he argued that the main travel narrative was incorporated later, based on older stories, such as the Argonautica and other fantastical or exotic travel narratives. - Interesting. Now, what are the other lines specifically that would indicate some of these other places, like you mentioned potentially reference to the Caribbean, you mentioned reference to Newfoundland in Northern, like Eastern Canada, what are those lines? - Okay, so, one of the, where is it? The Lystrogonians, if you look at the middle of that chart, the Lystrogonians live in a place called telepilos, which means the faraway pylous. And so it takes, it takes Odysseus six days and nights to get there from somewhere that already seems to be far away from Greece, okay. And the narrator, which is actually Odysseus, said that in this land, the days are so long that a man could earn two wages if he doesn't need sleep. Now, the days never get that long in the Mediterranean, but they get that long, obviously, in Northern Europe. - Right. - And if that was just a single data point, that would be easy to dismiss. But then we have other details that also point to the Northern Europe. First of all, the harbor is described as a kind of cliff harbor, or maybe cleft harbor. It's a narrow inlet between two vertical cliffs. They're so close to each other that you could stand on either cliff and throw rocks at the ships below, and you'd be really hard pressed to find anything like that in the Mediterranean. But those are common features of the Shetland Islands in Scotland and the Faroe Islands north of that, and perhaps certain parts of Norway. And then we get other details like the Lystergonians are they're bigger than Odysseus and his men. And skeletal remains do show that, let's say the Scandinavians of the Bronze Age were on average several centimeters taller than Mediterranean people. - Right, the equatorial folks are a little bit shorter, and then people live up in Scandinavia are quite tall. Well, that's not always true, 'cause you also have like the Bantu Africans who are the tallest. - Oh, really? - Yeah, I always heard that it's like a little factoid. Like near the equator, like things are smaller, animals, people, et cetera. I mean, I think it's a little more complicated. - Fair, probably, almost certainly. Now is it controversial in the time to think that the Greeks knew about it? Scandinavia? Well, they speak of the hyperboreans, which are the super foreign ortherners. But again, the standard scholarly view is that this is all, you know, third or fourth-hand information. So we know that it was an amber trade. Amber is found in like the Baltic area of northern Europe and the Myceneans, the Bronze Age Greeks, they loved their amber. And the theory has always been that while Amber was passed through like four or five intermediate areas before it got to the Greeks in the Mediterranean. And so they would have heard, you know, again, fourth or fifth-hand accounts of these super foreign ortherners, the hyperboreans. That makes sense to me. Yeah, right. Like, there's a trade route. Yeah. It goes through some merchants. And then eventually these stories come with the trade of, yeah, there are these places with these crazy cliffs and the sun never sets and the people are really tall. Yeah. So that seems like a very logical, I don't even know why they would be controversial by historical standards. Like, do any scholars dispute that? Scholars actually, several scholars actually acknowledge that that the Lycedragonian episode is informed by indirect accounts of the far north of Europe. What they don't acknowledge is that they represent a memory of a Mediterranean vessel actually reaching that area, observing it directly. And you think you would say that it is possible, at least possible. I see. That's interesting. And we know that this type of voyage did happen later in antiquity, famously pithias of Masalia. Masalia is what's now Marseille in South of France. Okay. So pithias of Masalia did reach almost certainly either Norway or Iceland. He called it Thule. He's seen those Thule backpacks. Absolutely. That's like the end of the earth kind of land. Okay. And then there's also in earlier lost so called the Masaliot Periplus, like 500s or 600 BC, lost text. But we know of it that also mentions the journey to the far north of Europe. Okay. So we know that like 1,000 years after the, you know them, them and no one's, let's say, the Greeks did go up there, at least a few. Right. Okay. So it was possible and it did happen in what we call antiquity. I guess the question is, could somebody before Homer have done that? I see. Now, why do we need that if this sort of story interpolation through trade account does the explanation for us? Like why are you so, are you would you speculate even further on that even actual vessel pre-Homeric going to Scandinavia? Well, the story is, you know, it's like presented kind of what we would call cinematically as a first-person view of a ship entering this harbor. Right. So it's presented as an eyewitness account of somebody coming by sea into this harbor and then scaling the cliff and looking around. And there's all these details that also are intriguing. For example, the people that live there, they have a palace or a main hall and they have a meeting place where they assemble. And this is reminiscent of later like Viking society where there's like a main hall and there's this so-called thing, the word thing referred to actually the public assembly of the Vikings. And Odysseus is surprised that there is no, he doesn't see, he doesn't see any fields being cultivated. Okay. And this in antiquity in the Bronze Age, Scandinavia, let's say, or the North of Scotland, they were agricultural by this point. But they didn't have the kind of obvious agriculture that the Mediterranean had in terms of like vineyards and terraces and all the gross stuff like that. So it is very, this seems to fit plausibly here. Okay. And Mediterranean Mariner coming to this faraway land, being observing the societal structure, they have wagons, they have a timber kind of industry, they have a meeting place, they have a social structure, they weirdly don't have any fields, they have these vertical cliffs, they don't find the Mediterranean and they're tall and the day lasts way longer than it does back home. So these are a lot of different details that come to go. When you lay down like that, it's like, yeah, they're describing Norway, like almost undoubtedly. It's like what it feels like to me. And then what did you say the Vikings were not as sort of obviously agrarian because they were seafaring able to kind of like go grab other people's stuff? Well, it's more because the climate up there is, it's very cold, right? So you have a much shorter window to plant things and they relied more on like pasture and livestock and pillaging. There you go. A little bit of pillaging here. Yes. That's interesting. Okay. So at this point, I'm happy to go with you and I'll concede. I'm like, all right, as the staunch skeptic and classical scholar that I am sure the pre-Homeric people probably knew about Scandinavia, maybe a vessel even went up there. But the transatlantic stuff. This is just poppycock. There's no way, right? Well, let's see. So after after the Listerugonians, they go to the island of Iea, Cersei's Isle. And this isle is uninhabited. I mean Cersei's a goddess. So there's this divine presence there. But besides this goddess, there's no habitation as island. Now that's strange. It's very hard to find an uninhabited island. At this point in the Mediterranean, everything's going to be inhabited. Yeah. It's also said to be surrounded by a limitless sea. So when you're on this island, you cannot see any land anywhere else. So it's also remote. Again, not that many islands in the Mediterranean have that feature. And then there's a few strange lines that I mentioned in my episode. If you want to revisit them, we could do. But there's some lines there where there seems to be some kind of solar confusion where the Odysseus and his men, they they're not sure where the sun rises and sets. And they don't know where East and West is. Which again, it could be just a lot of fog, but he doesn't say fog. And Homer does explicitly mention fog other places. So if it's not fog, what else could explain not knowing where the sun rises and sets and where East and West is. That could be that you're so far north now, even further north than the Lystergonians, that the North Star is above you. So you don't really know where north is. And the sun spends most of the day in the summertime going around the horizon. It might dip under the horizon for like an hour. But that's again, really confusing if you've grown up with the sun going like this, right? You know, every day. And like even to this day, if we were to go to the Arctic Circle, you and I, yeah. The sun would kind of just be going around us. Exactly. And the North Star would be directly above us. And if we were skilled sailors with our sections, we would be quite confused. Yes. Interesting. Now what is that land? Is there a land that's like an island perhaps that's inhabitable there? I assume it's all ice. So there's a lot of different theories. Okay. I went into this trying to make my own, you know, guess. Okay. And by the way, I just want to say for like the end time that I am, I'm not committed to this 100% right? This is this is speculated. I want like somebody commented in my video, is there a team that's trying to find the actual map? I was like, well, no, but I want there to be one. So now there is. Yeah. It's a consistent two people. You're not in Brooklyn. Yes. So we need an island that is isolated. Very far north. It has trees. Yes. And is uninhabited in the Bronze Age. There is none. There's Iceland. He did it again. Oh, we got Iceland. I forgot about ice. So like the detail about the trees. Again, we don't, it's hard to know, you know, how much weight to give the different aspects of the story. Because certainly these, if these tales do come from an actual voyage, they would have been embellished. They would have been modified. There would have been mutations in the story, right? Sure. So the trees might have just come into that later. But if we want to stick as closely to the Texas possible, the only island I can think of that's again, totally isolated, very far north and has trees and uninhabited. And I mean, the obvious one is Iceland. Because like the Faroe Islands, they might have heard of it. They don't only have trees, for example. And there's a lot of them in short proximity to each other. So Iceland is possible. And then from there, Cersei tells Odysseus, you can't go home yet. You have to cross the ocean. Yeah. So to the land of the dead. So he quote unquote crosses the ocean, comes to, and we should note here that that word does not mean what we mean today. I mean, there's so many. There's so many necessary digressions here. I apologize. By the means. It's, it's most likely here that Homer, or whoever at the time selling these tales, imagines the earth as a disc. It's not never stated explicitly, but that seems to be the, the geography. And the ocean is this huge river that encircles basically Europe, Asia and Africa, which is in the center. Okay. But that disc might be surrounded, like beyond that ring of ocean, there might be further. In fact, there are further lands in this mythology. Okay. So Cersei says, you can't go home yet. You have to cross the stream of ocean, the stream of oceanos and reach the land of the dead. And there you'll get the problem. prophecy from Tyracias' ghost that would tell you how to get home, okay? So he crosses the quote-unquote "stream of Okanos" and he comes to a land that is shrouded by perennial fog, okay? Now I remember like reading this in grad school and I just googled, "What's the fog is placed on earth?" and like the first five results were Newfoundland, okay? And then since then I've looked it up more, you know, carefully and in fact the the easternmost tip of Newfoundland is often called the fog is placed on earth because that's where the Gulf Stream from the South, which is warm, and the Labrador current from the North, which is cold meat, and the mixture, this constant mixture of cold and hot water, not hot, but cold and warm water, creates this fog that covers the area for 200 something days of the year. Wow, yeah. Even to this day. Yeah, wow. That is fascinating. So we have the sequence of like three stops that that kind of fit on the exact journey that the Vikings took, the same journey that the Irish legendary monk St. Brendan may have took in around I think like five something AD. So there's also other candidates for pre, not only pre-Columbian, but pre-Norse crossings. And then there's a text in Plutarch in the in the 100s AD that also some astronomers have claimed describes a similar North Atlantic crossing. So there's many rabbit holes, but there's various ancient data points that point to like a northern crossing, and the Odyssey seems to fit that plausibly. Interesting. So amongst most scholars would it be controversial to say that pre like let's say 800 BC Greeks could have sailed to Iceland, that would be now we're getting crazy. That would be very controversial. Okay. And then this idea of, because it says in the text crossing the river, yeah, the stream, the stream. Yeah. Now for most people they're like, okay, well the ocean's on a stream, but you're saying because of that mythology of this river going around the known world being the ocean, that that would be what that's referencing. Yeah, and actually this idea that the ocean is a stream is not actually, it's not stupid. Okay. If you're a Mediterranean civilization and you get through the Straits of Gibraltar, what you encounter is a strong current, the so-called Canary Current, which is part of the North Atlantic Gire, which has the Gulf Streams. So the Gulf Stream and the Canary Current are part of this never ceasing huge Gire that circles around the Atlantic. And that's the Gire that the European colonial seafarers used. Right. It's like an ocean highway basically. So when you're looking at a map, it's an ocean, but if you're a sailor, and this is the way that you navigate the world, it is effectively a stream because there's a current that will just pull you if you get into it all the way to, well if you don't do anything, it'll pull you down the west coast of Africa and then take you west to Brazil. Oh. And similarly, if you head through the Red Sea in Egypt to the Indian Ocean, you'll also find a Gire there. So the two kind of choke points through which the Greeks or Phoenicians could have accessed oceans, both in both cases you would immediately be met with a strong current. So in both cases, it seems like you're dealing with a stream. So it's not a dumb idea. Right. This mythology of like, oh, he's dumb. He stopped. There was a stream going around the world. It's like, well, if you're on a ship and this thing is pulling you, it is a stream quite literally because it's a Gulf stream and it's pulling you through the ocean. That is fascinating. And now the foggy part, there's a lot of foggy places. Is there anything else that would indicate that perhaps this place is in North America? Well, here the plot gets more entangled because there are several places later on in the journey that can be plausibly mapped in that area of what's now Eastern Canada. The problem is that in Homer's text after the Land of the Dead, which might be Newfoundland, Odysseus goes back to E. So if that's Iceland, then he's back away from North America. Now, yeah, it's so hard to know where to go here because there's so many threads here. Okay, but so one thing I go over in my video is that we should not if this if this is a memory of an older voyage. Okay, we should not expect the order we get in Homer to be the exact original order. Okay. I actually think that there's textual reasons to believe that Cersei might not have been present in the original story. Okay, so those lines about solar confusion I mentioned earlier. Both of those were flagged by ancient scholars as being suspect because they don't fit the they don't fit what's in the surrounding lines. Okay, so for example, the line the lines about about not knowing where the sun rises and sets. And here it is. You want to pull up the text. I think it's called E passage. Okay, so so midway down. Okay, so in the final lines of this passage is where we get the claim. You know, we can't tell East from West the dawn from the dusk, nor were the sun that lights our lives, goes under earth, nor were it rises. So that's the solar confusion. Okay, but right before that, it says all day long until the sun went down, we sat and feasted. And then when the sun had set and night came, we did this and that. So the so you have a few lines that make us sound like a normal day and night cycle. They know where the sun is. Exactly. And then suddenly it's like, oh, we don't we don't know where the sun rises and sets. Okay, it seems like these perhaps are two different places. Or it could be that in the hundreds of years where the story was accumulating features and evolving, somebody added something to a previous version. So okay, so my one guess that I have here is that the original version could have been the following. They reach a far northern island that's that's uninhabited. They don't know where the sun rises and sets. There's little food there because it's let's say Iceland, right? So they they eat whatever they can they eat like pigs, whatever they can find, maybe acorns or whatever, right? Then they don't know how to leave that place. So then the day then the night comes and light lasts for six months. And then finally, when the days grow long again, they're able to leave. Okay. And then Homer's like, oh, instead of them foraging like pigs during six months of darkness, I'm going to make a witch who turns them into pigs and then Odysseus seduce as her. And then they stay for a year. But I but I forget to delete these lines here and there to speak of solar confusion. Okay. So again, we're in speculation territory here, but it is you could make the case that there is evidence of an older of an older narrative of a far northern region with solar confusion upon which Homer grafts this enchanting witch fascinating story. Now to be clear, this is for anyone that is like maybe forgetting. This is not the claim that Odysseus is a real person that did this literal voyage. But more so that Homer's chilling and he hears a story about a sailor that goes to Iceland and is like, dude, there was no food. We had to eat acorns. I felt like I was a pig up there. I was just eating whatever I could find on the ground. I barely survived. A bunch of my men died. But then I told them we're going to get back on the ship. We're going back to Greece. And if that is true, it absolutely rewrites our understanding of, you know, sea voyage at this time. Yeah. And it seems like these texts are referencing something that could be just pure speculation interpreted in that way. Yeah. That is fascinating. Okay. So now let's go back to the outline of the journey. So let's assume for the sake of argument that Homer added Cersei, the witch. Okay. If you remove the second visit to E, which he might have had reasons poetic reasons to add there. Sure. Then there's a good case that several people have made that more features fit the North North American regions near Newfoundland. Okay. So for example, skill and caribbean has been suggested. Fits the Bay of Fundy in Canada, which has the most violent tides in the world. Caribbean is a dangerous world pool. And then skill is a monster with six heads that look and bark like dogs. The Bay of Fundy also has one of the largest populations of seals in the world. Wow. And people commented on my video like there are seals and Mediterranean true. there are, but they're not nearly as big as the gray seals of the North Atlantic, which are so big, they actually eat smaller seals. There are never as large populations as you find in the Bay of Fundy. And again, the original story might have been like, "Whoa, we came to this Bay," which had extremely dangerous tides and more, these seals that were 10 times bigger than normal seals, and then over centuries that became a multi-headed monster and a whirlpool, you know? Wow. That's fascinating. Yeah, I could see a sailor coming back, being like, "Dude, you would not believe it." Like, the ocean almost ate our whole boat, and there were these barking dog-swimming things. Yeah. Like, that's a very, like, reasonable grounded story that then through retelling becomes this tall tale. Even if it said, "And there were giant seals that also could have been enough to inspire stories," and there are many other details here, okay? So, like, Corridus has all these features. It's a whirlpool that sucks down the brine and spits it out three times a day, and the Bay of Fundy has a famous whirlpool called Old South, which you can see form three times during the day in the long, summer time, like the long, summer daylight season, and the summer solstice. Literally three times. You can see it form three times a day. Wow. Because it forms both when the water flows into the bay, through tidal phenomena, and when it flows out of the bay. And these tides are on, like, eight-hour cycles or something. Yeah. So, the whole thing is, like, 24 and a half hours. So, there's four whirlpools, but during the summer solstice, when the day is long, you can see three of them. Wow. Also, Skilla has massive cliffs. There's cliffs in the Bay of Fundy. When the water is sucked away, the dark earth is exposed. That happens in the Bay of Fundy. There are trees on top of the cliffs. That's also in the Bay of Fundy. And there are several other famous North Atlantic whirlpools, but none of them have all these other features. Okay. So, you have, like, a big checklist that checks out of the Bay of Fundy. And this part of Canada is also so interesting. We can't mention it, but just to highlight, when the Vikings come over, documented leaf erics, and when they come from Norway, or Norway, Sweden, Skilla, Scandinavia. Yeah. And they make it to North America. The first place they land is this exact area. Newfoundland, yeah. So, it follows to reason, like, hey, if there isn't even more nascent seafaring population that came, they would probably also land in a similar area. It's the first stop. It is. Yeah. So, one of the arguments in favor of this reconstruction is that it was done by several other cultures. Right. So, you know, we could go down the list, but the sirens, right? The sirens is an island where bird-like creatures sing in human-like voices. Right. Which most people know them as mermaids. Like, it's kind of retold as mermaids. But that's not what Homer says. So, Homer says that they're women with, like, sparrow-like torsos and heads, which is hilarious, do you know? Yeah. The fact that they get, like, reinterpreted later as being, like, super hot. Yeah. It's just kind of a funny portion. So, one one Greek guy, I think his name is Manolis Kutlis. He has his own oceanic Odyssey theory. And he points out that there was an island also in the same region we're talking about. Okay. There's an island near Newfoundland called, I think it's called Funk Island. Okay. Or Funk Rock Island. Hell yeah. Funk Rock Island is saying. Exactly. That's awesome. It could be the podcast name. Funk Rock Island. And it has this huge population of these birds that from far away do sound like, you know, like there's a party going on. No. Yeah. Really? And there's sailors that have reported that when they sailed by this island, even far away from the island, they felt like they were hearing all these human voices carried over the surf. Is that something we could find? Do you think there's something online that would have that recording of these birds? Well, so just to give credit to this guy, Manolis Kutlis, if you search the YouTube video, like, I think it's called In the Shadow Odyssey. I think his website is Nskeia, which means In the Shadow in Greek, E-N-S-K-I-A dot com. He has a kind of video where he does his journey reconstruction, and he has a clip that he got from somewhere of that island. Wow. I don't know if you can find it now. I'm not claiming to have a full itinerary here. Of course. Of course. I'm just saying that there's some really interesting, uh, once again, I could just imagine a sailor being like, dude, we're near the island. There's people there. It turns out not people. It's birds that sound like people. And then over time, that gets turned into, they're these women, they look like birds that are human women, they're like bird women hybrids. Yeah. And I can see how that becomes the mythology based off of a real journey. Yeah. Hey guys, we're going to take a break really quick, because if you know me, you know, I'm constantly trying to find the perfect level of stimulation. Yeah, I want enough energy at the beginning of the day to go to the gym, be a good dad, and then record a three-hour podcast about like ancient civilizations or the night's temple or something like that. So, you know, I like a little caffeine, but if I do too much caffeine, I can start to hear my own heartbeat coming through my chest. And that is where mud water comes in. 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So whether you want something subtle or you want a piece that completely changes your outfit, GLD makes it easy to upgrade your style without having to overthink it and of course without having to break the bank. In great news, for a limited time, if you are listening to this right now, if you are a camper, you are going to get an insane deal. When you use the code camp, C-A-M-P, you're going to get 40% off at GLD.com. 40% off with the code [email protected] and after you purchase, they're going to ask how you heard about them, make sure you tell them that Mark increased us from the campsite sent you. Now let's get back to the show. One last thing I will say though is the land of the sun's cattle. You've heard of this story, right? So they come to after Silen Gribbius, they come to an island of Helios where there are cattle, and the ghost of the prophet Tairisius had warned Odysseus. If you guys eat any of these cattle, you're not going to go home. Yes, right. Classic Garn of Eden type vibe. Don't eat this one cattle, that's the only thing you need to do. Yeah, refrain from the barbecue. And what happens? They get to this island and there's all these cows walking around. And the strange thing is they're not tended by any herdsman. There's nobody tending these flocks. They're just kind of out there. Okay. And one objection I got to my video in a lot of comments was like, there's no cattle in North America before colonization. That was a good point. I was going to say the same thing, which is true. But if you go right north of the Bay of Fundy, a bit northeast, there's an island there, if you got what's called, you can look it up. And that's where some people have thought Throneisha is, the island of the sun. And there were caribou there. No, yeah. Now caribou are really, would be really strange to a Mediterranean observer. They're as big as cows. They're not They're not domesticated, so there's no herdsman leading them around. They're just kind of out there grazing. Oh, let her jack, you're doing it again. I love this. Oh, wow. And now, is there anything else in the retelling that would indicate that it's a cow, but there's something a little special about it? Yeah, well, when his men succumb to their hunger and actually slaughter a cow, I think the meat keeps moving. I mean, then you get to really fictional aspects of the story. Is there any danger with eating a caribou? I don't know, but I wonder if that warning is sort of baked into an anthropology. Like, hey, these caribou will kill you or something like that. There's a danger that goes along with it. So there's a warning that supersedes the men like, hey, don't eat the caribou. So I haven't, like, there's over 20 books that have been written trying to explain an oceanic voyage of Odysseus. I haven't read them. I actually have not encountered the caribou idea. I just kind of looked myself to see what could be interpreted as a breaking news, as cows without herdsman. And they're indigenous to that island. Potentially. Now, okay, there's a few, there's a few thorns in this idea, which is that this island does not only have cows, but also sheep. Okay. Now, there definitely were no sheep in North America. Okay. Then again, you could say that Homer added this detail. Mm-hmm. And there are, then you could say, well, why would he add that detail? Well, because the way the epic tradition works is that every bard memorizes thousands of phrases that fit into the line in certain medical ways. Okay. So if I tell you, describe to me a beautiful garden, you instantly have, like, you know, 20 lines memorized that you can mix and match and put together and describe a generic beautiful garden. And it's always going to have olive trees and fig trees and, you know, a gentle stream and a delicious West Wing bringing refreshment, you know, West Wind, sorry. So it could be that the kind of pressures of the genre made the mention of herds, it kind of just sucked in this mention of sheep as well. Now, why is it the case that when there's retellings, they have to kind of stick to certain, you know, memorized pre-written lines? Is it to keep the meter of the poem? Yeah. So the meter of the poem is, it functions not only to make it entertaining and musical, but it functions as a mnemonic device. Okay. Scholars understood this in the early 20th century when they went to Yugoslavia, which had a, which still has Serbia and Montenegro, still has a living bardic tradition. Right? And these people from, this guy, Millman Perry, an American scholar went to Yugoslavia, studied how these bard's work, and he saw that they memorized this huge body of data, of symmetrical phrases that fit together. And they can, they can just zippity do dog you like anything at any length at any topic. You can almost think of like a freestyle rapper. It's very much that. Okay. Interesting. Like there's words like a freestyle rapper will use that like whenever I say this word, I'm going to rhyme it with this word exactly. And I have my anchor points. And then the things that I can add in, I can do it liberty, but I need these anchors in order to make the rhyme work. Yes. And it's the same thing with these, these palms. Yeah. So, if you look at the description of fascia or calypso's aisle or other places, you'll see a lot of lines repeat. And that's because they're part of this kind of automatic, you know, automatic repertoire that comes to mind when you start doing this. And that's important when considering this caribou idea or the sheep or things like that because it kind of maybe flattens the true reality, which would be perhaps seeing an island into something that's a little bit more poetic. But when you're reading through the lines of the poem, you're like, oh, there might have been something that was kind of omitted here. That might reveal like a greater truth such as translinuxy travel. Yeah, right. So like when Odysseus is being sucked into the whirlpool of Caribus and he grabs onto a fig tree above the cliff, there are no like fig fruit trees in North America natively. But so you could say, well, so he's not in North America, right? But there are trees that are fig-like in their leaf structure, but also like that's such an unimportant detail. I think the most likely thing is that when the poet, the bar is performing, and he needs to have some tree that he holds onto. Fig rhymes with whatever tree fits the meter and is plausible gets inserted there. Yes. Without even thinking, like it's just like you're in the zone, you're flowing, right? Like you're rapping. I can see a rapper being like, yo, I took a toke and then I looked up, I saw a tree of oak. It's like you didn't really see an oak tree. But for the rhyme, you need to say oak, so it just kind of fits. And it doesn't mean that you didn't have this experience. You're just pulling in details that rhyme with what the meter is. That is so interesting. Okay. As we move forward, we go from Caribus, this place that comes next. Oh, did you? Oh, collapse was aisle. They went for nine days. Well, here Odysseus' ship is destroyed, right? And so he drifts for nine days. So it's going to be slower than a sailing journey. But then from Oigigia to the Fatiens, he builds a raft with a mast and a sail. So that's like, that's a sailing boat. You're just going to be much faster. So we have nine days drifting and then 17 days sailing. And that could, I mean, that's like on the scale of going from North America back to Europe, you know. Not exactly. I mean, it's plausible. Right. So a lot of people, even an antiquity, people thought Oigigia must be an Atlantic island, perhaps the Azores or Madera or Atlantis. Well, or Plato later used those early stories to inspire his story of Atlantis. Fascinating, potentially. Now, do you have any type of a theory about where Oigia could be? Well, you're pushing me into territory that I don't have an expertise on. Okay. This is not you as a doctor, Jack. This is just you as Jack right now. Then in this part of the episode. Yeah. So I'm just having fun here. Okay. Yeah. This is not, I'm not going to publish a pure, pure paper on this. So I think, you know, a lot, a lot of people have suggested the Azores for Oigia. And that makes sense because if you're going to go from North America, it makes sense in this context. If you're going to go from North America to Europe, you're going to take the northern arc of the North Atlantic gyre and that's going to take you through the Azores very likely. And, you know, it's conceivable that this checks out. Another possibility is that, again, now we're going into real crazy territory is that Oigia could be Bermuda. Amazing. And then the fiatians, so like you need to work in the fiatians and Calypso as two stops between North America potentially and the Mediterranean Sea. Okay. So possibly Oigia is Bermuda. The fiatians are the Azores and then we get back to Europe or possibly Oigia is the Azores, as has often been suggested, and then the fiatians are somewhere in Western Europe. Potent maybe the Phoenician colony of Gadeira or Cádiz in Spain or maybe some other place in Western Europe. That's probably like also very likely a fantasy land that Homer makes up in order to get Odysseus from this almost magical realm back into the familiar geography of the Eastern Mediterranean. Right. Now what's going on in Oigia? So Odysseus is stranded for, you know, like seven or eight years on this island in the middle of nowhere. And when, so he's stranded there with the name of Calypso who wants to marry him, she wants him to be immortal, he doesn't want to be immortal, he wants to go home. And Athena, the goddess, takes pity on Odysseus and asks Zeus to let him go home finally. And so Zeus dispatches Hermes to go and tell Calypso, okay, time's up, let him go home now. And she gets really upset and she walks over to Odysseus who's standing on the beach and looking across the waves and weeping for his homeland. And she says, okay Odysseus, you can go home now, I'll bring you some tools to make raft and you can be on your way. And he looks at her ever suspicious everybody and says, what trickery is this? You want me to sail on a raft across the sea that not even ships can pass? So he's in a place where ships don't normally go on, okay? So this again This could be a remote Atlantic island like the Azores that normally no ships ever go to and So it's he doesn't know how to he doesn't know how to cross it It's never frequented by sailors and he asks her like how do I even do this and she says well just keep keep the Keep the polar star, which she calls it the bear, but the bear means or some minor, which means the polar star North star keep the North star on your left as you sail for 17 days Again, that cannot fit in Mediterranean Because the implication is that he doesn't see any land for 17 days, right? So it's a 17 day eastward journey with an almost constant wind pushing him eastward and He's steering his raft with the polar star on the left so that he's going eastward. So the Azores fits that Now is there any other description of the island like what it looked like Who the people were that were there outside of obviously the mystical kind of god-like features. Well, it's also uninhabited Besides Calypso, which again fits the Azores because they were not inhabited as far as we can tell in ancient times And then there are people who have gone into more details of the actual description. I haven't so I don't want to you know pretend but There's people that have written about the Azores. Yeah, interesting. Are there any descriptions of a beautiful Caribbean island where they're like a disease looked in the water and it was perfectly blue and there was some coconuts or anything like that Well, I think if there is any Okay, so the Caribbean doesn't really fit this itinerary that we've been discussing. Mm-hmm. Most likely It's possible that there was a Phoenician Expedition that did reach the Caribbean possible possible plausible maybe because we have these two later accounts in in the Aristotelian Corpus and in diadorous cyclists, so we're talking the 300s and then I think the 2nd century or 1st century BC Two accounts that seem to tell the same story of Phoenician's getting blown off course in the Atlantic and finding an island paradise okay And in this island paradise like there was just so much lush vegetation and fruits growing everywhere that life was so easy that they wanted to just the Carthaginians wanted to Just pack up and leave there and live there and the state was was so afraid of the homeland getting depopulated that they banned all further Expeditions to this island paradise, okay, so So there have been speculations that some some Phoenician and the Carthaginians are Phoenicians, okay, that some Carthaginian or Phoenician vessel got blown off course outside of Gibraltar and landed in the Caribbean Okay, that's been speculated another Data point here is that the the Italian Scientist and author Luccio Russo has argued that the the lines of longitude given in certain maps ancient maps for the so-called Blessed Isles Also fit the the Caribbean really yeah, and what lines in the longitude are we talking about? Well, Chris was you can pull out a map called the Leicester Antilles. I think I love a map Okay, so the Those are the Leicester Antilles they have islands such as Trinidad and Tobago other famous, you know current vacation Paranises right so in Hellenistic and Roman era texts that describe geography Various ancient geographers tried to give a longitudinal coordinates for the so-called islands of the blessed and This guy the Italian scientist Lucio Russo has argued Based on several reconstructions of these texts. Okay, this is there's like a long there's a lot of room for debate here but he argues that he can reconstruct the coordinates given by the astronomer Hipparchus in around 100 BC and that those coordinates Line up perfectly with the Leicester Antilles. Interesting. Okay. So that would Speak to at least a knowledge of those islands. What year roughly? Well So Hipparchus would have given this around 100 BC, but that could have been based on earlier voyages I should note that the period of most extensive Greek exploration was like 330 BC to like 200 BC and Almost all texts from that period have been lost So we only have later very brief summaries of those explorations often by people who don't believe that they could have happened really Yeah, oh, that's so interesting. So for example the voyage of Pithius to Either to ultimatul which is either you know Norway or Iceland we know of that because the geographer Strabo later much later Mentioned it before saying, but that's ridiculous. It's so funny how that happens the same thing happens with like Gnostic texts Yes, where like most of the Gnostic texts that we have are later church scholars debunking them as heresy But we've lost the original The original transcripts and we just have the later interpretations. Yeah And it's a similar thing here. That's a great example that a great analogy that like a lot of our knowledge of of early heresies comes from debunkings of those Supposedly heresies right now. Why would it be the case that the transcripts of these fantastical journeys of the literal journeys that happened would have been lost a time However, the stories that are mythologized about them would then persist Well, because there's no reason to reject a good story But if you think you know if I come to you and tell you a good story you're probably gonna You're gonna like it and you might pass it on if I tell you oh, I went to like the moon You'd be like get out of here, you know, right? That's a good point So if someone like like a street joke and they're like yeah, I saw a priest in a rabbi walking around Yeah, if I'm telling you it under the context of this is a joke You were more likely to tell it to another person and then another person, but if I'm going to you like you won't believe it Yeah, I saw a priest in a rabbi and then a chicken literally crossed the road and then all this other stuff happened You'd be more like all right sure and then you would just kind of disregard it exactly. So here's a good analogy for that The ancients had some ancient philosophers had a pretty sophisticated atomic theory okay a theory that the world is made of atoms and The only full text we have about this is a poem that the Roman poet Lucretius wrote and the reason why that text survived is because it's a poem So it survived and it's poetic merits and if we didn't have that we wouldn't know Nearly what we do now about this important philosophical school. So like you know when you when you When you coat something in honey as Lucretius himself Says or you you transform it into an entertaining entertaining medium. It has a more a better chance of survival And it's almost possible to think like in 2000 years from now people might dispute that you know Neil Armstrong went to the moon, but people might reference the film like the Martian Yeah, and they're like yeah, well, this is a story about a guy that got tried to colonize Mars that it out But the actual details of space travel going to the moon May be disputed if this if this analogy fits that is kind of a parallel and this whole theory is so fascinating because once again using the moon example Imagine you know guy listening at home that in 2000 years The future people are like yeah Americans couldn't go to the moon at the time space travel is impossible They didn't have rockets and the legitimate history is disputed But then we have stories that describe the moon and explicit detail and we have poems that describe Space travel and like the technical aspects of space travel and explicit detail the people in 2000 years are going to be like Well, if they couldn't go to the moon How do they know these things or how do they have these vivid details in these stories that Pre-date what we understand about space travel and the only explanation is oh, we did actually go to the moon prior to when this future civilization thought we did Which is kind of what we're speculating about now. I think you hit the nail in the head like This this idea of using the Odyssey to Try and speculate on a pre-homeric voyage into the Atlantic Ocean and perhaps beyond is very much like Somebody a thousand years from now using the Martian mm-hmm the novel the Martian to understand what the Apollo program or what the Mars rover program might have found right That's obviously Andy wire did his research right based off real science. Yeah, and I'm not saying Homer did his research But he certainly would have used You know, he would have used the stories available. Mm-hmm. He's not the Homeric the epic poets do not create from scratch Right as we found with Troy right for the longest time was like the city's obviously not real this war was obviously not it didn't happen and as This time has gone on, it seems to be the case that no Troy was perhaps a real city and that there was some type of battle that happened in this actual place. And sure the details and what catalyzes the battle is certainly mythologized, but the actual events of an actual battle very likely occurred. Troy was almost certainly real city, the hitites and Greeks almost certainly vied for control over it and there was a local ruler named in the Hittite Archives Al-Aksandu, which if it sounds like Alexander, it is. And so this one archive shows us that there was a Greek-speaking ruler in an area claimed by the Hittites. So just from that we see the Hittites and Greeks are vying for control over this area. And the name matches the name given by Homer. And the name of the city matches the name given by Homer, so if the Iliad has these threads of truth to it, why would the Odyssey not also have these threads of truth to it? Exactly. And in fact, now that we know more about the so-called sea peoples, a lot of the Odyssey has echoes of the sea people voyages. That's another threat, I don't know. But like the Phoenicians, these were master sailors. Why is there so much resistance from the mainstream historical community if there is such a thing as a part of speech that would resist these threads as being perhaps evidence of transatlantic travel prior to Leapherricksson? I wouldn't say it's resistance so much as it is indifference, like I'll tell you a quick story. And my podcast as a grad student, one of my first interviews was with Richard Martin, who was one of the great Homeric scholars of our time at Stanford. And as I was in his office unpacking my microphones and cables and everything, he says to me, "You're not like Eddie, are you?" And I was like, "No, who's that?" He's like, "Oh, this guy's been emailing me asking me where Odysseus went. I just want to make sure that we're not going to talk about that." And I was like, "No, no, no, I'm not here for that." It just goes to show you that scholars just haven't really cared about Homeric geography for several decades now. It's not that they study it and dismiss these theories, it's just not part of what Homeric scholarship has been focused on. And I should say that from antiquity till today, you've had like three camps of people. You've had the people that say, "It's all made up," like the 50 comments that say, "It's fiction, for you." That's an ancient perspective. Famously, Eratosthenes, the geographer said, "You will find the location of Odysseus' voyage when you find the cobbler who sowed together the bag of winds for Odysseus." Funny. Then you have the people who have tried to fit it in the Mediterranean. People who have said, "Oh, these distances are too long. Let's shrink it down to scale and put it in the Mediterranean." And then you've had a smaller, probably the smallest group who have said, "Well, hold on. It says ocean here. It says long days. It describes these long journeys like if we take the text to be saying what it claims to be saying, we're outside of the Mediterranean." So you've had all three perspectives going back forever. Right. I don't see this ending anytime soon. What I do see potentially happening is right now, in the past 100 years, you have a lot of people who are not Homeric scholars, who don't know ancient Greek, but who love to sail or they are history buffs or they're obsessed with, you know, navigation technology. And they've written these independent works on trying to find Odysseus' itinerary, right. Then you have the scholars who are like, "This is stupid." And one thing I wanted to do in my video was to create, like, to bridge the gap here, okay. Because these independent researchers, they all kind of, they all succumb to a few fatal flaws that are instantly apparent to all the scholars. And I think if they could just stop making those two fundamental mistakes, they could come closer to what would be scholarly, acceptable by the scholars, right. And those mistakes are they try to begin and end the journey at Troy and Ithaca. But the scholarship has shown that the travel narrative is a later addition to the story. Okay. So, a lot of people say, "If he went into the ocean, you would expect him to describe Gibraltar." Well, not if Homer copy-pasted an Atlantic journey into an otherwise Mediterranean journey, ending with these two magical episodes, the storm and the phasenrobot ship. Okay. So, I would say, if anybody wants to, if anybody is going to form a group trying to reconstruct some Bronze Age Atlantic voyages, forget about Troy and forget about Ithaca, and also do not try to create one long itinerary, because Homer or whoever other bard put this together might not have preserved the order of the original voyage. Right. They're not looking at it as a literal chronology. Yeah. They're using these different places from these different stories to paint a picture that's convenient for the narrative. Yes. Right. Are you familiar with the book? And I'm curious how many of you should look this up so I can get the actual title. These witches, war and something else. It's a famous 70s anthropology book that basically the book is arguing for this idea of, he calls it cultural materialism. Yes, this guy, cows, pigs, wars and witches by Marvin Harris. It's a wonderful book and it basically attempts to look at religious traditions and sort of like spiritual traditions and try to distill the cultural materialism behind them. So for example, there's many, you know, Semitic cultures, whether it's Judaism or Islam, let's say, hey, don't eat pigs. And the prevailing kind of thought was like, initially like, well, God, Allah said don't eat pigs. Hashem or Danielis. And then the later sort of thought was like, oh, pigs carry disease, yada, yada, yada. And Marvin Harris argues, well, any animal can carry disease like why would pigs be explicitly excluded? Whereas goats, cows, anything else, sheep, et cetera, can be eaten. And one of the arguments that he poses in the book is at the time, if you look at the economic conditions of raising pigs in the Middle East with these specific types of pigs, they were extremely resource dense. They took a ton of energy and time and nutrients and resources to raise them and to actually, you know, domesticate them. And so it became a sort of an economic tradition to say, hey, it's actually not worth it for us to do this. We're going to cut them out. Same thing with cows in India. That the Hindu tradition says we don't eat cows. It's sort of the mother goddess. It represents all these things about creation. Well, he argues in this book, again, this is not religious. So I apologize if anyone holds this as a religious doctrine. He says this would be actually because the economic conditions of having cows versus killing cows is actually more advantageous to the society. And that if you are raising cows and taking the milk and all that, you will actually create more nutrients and sustenance over time with these specific cows at this time, then if you just killed them off. And so it's an interesting look where you take these religious threads and these religious stories that are rooted in a religious tradition and then actually distilling the truth behind it. And it feels kind of similar to what we're doing now where we're taking these stories, these mythologies about, you know, Greek antiquity and Odysseus, et cetera. And we're saying, well, what is the actual anthropological truth? Is there something underneath it that's in the subtext that we can actually ascertain that if it's true, completely rewrites our understanding of sea travel, trade, exploration of this ancient period? Yeah, I think what it boils down to is you're trying to find a signal within the noise. And that's always a tricky endeavor, of course. And it's certainly disputed and at no point will be settled soon. Is there anything else from the text or even from the episode that you did that we didn't cover that you think is just an interesting thread that maybe paints a picture of travel outside the Mediterranean? Yeah, a few things. One is just the sheer number of ancient texts that mention lands beyond the ocean. So Christos, if you can pull out, I think it's one of the files that begins with a zero. Yeah, so here is a non-exhaustive list of ancient texts that mention lands beyond the ocean. Mm. Oh, God. Everyone played a pseudo Aristotle, Pithius, Plutarch, Ptolemy, Seneca, Pliny the Elder. I mean, yeah, there's all these references to. Yeah. But to be clear, these are not all independent accounts. They might have some common sources, they might be some overlap, but it's still striking, just how many ancient texts speak of not only islands across the ocean to the west, but some even claim a great continent. And you know, so Plato in the work Tymias, which is famous for being the place where we get the Atlantis story. He speaks of, he says that Atlantis was outside the pillows of Hercules, which means west of Gibraltar, and that behind Atlantis there were other islands, and then behind those islands there were, there was a great continent. Now people sometimes say, why would you even mention the tiniest? It's obviously a fiction. Well, just as when Andy Weir writes the Martian, he's gonna use all the good scientific data he can get his hands on, even if Plato was making this up entirely, he's gonna use whatever geographical stories or traditions he can get his hands on because he wants to make a believable tale. Right. If you were to say to me, you know how in the Martian gravity is different on Mars? I wouldn't say to you, why would you invoke the Martian? That's BS. You're illustrating a point by using a pop culture film or book that I would understand. Exactly. So when Plato says that there was a great continent behind Atlantis, like there would be no reason for him to make that up. You know, like he's already pushing people's credibility, I mean, he's already kind of, he's already going out on a limb and saying that there was Atlantis, right? He's already appearing crazy to people. Why would he add more details that make him even more crazy? Right. It makes more sense that he is mentioning things that had some basis in existing traditions or stories. So besides Plato, there's a few others that also mention a great continent, Plutarch. So Plutarchs on the face, which appears in the orb of the moon. That's a handful on the face, which appears in the orb of the moon. That's a nice meter, too. That's probably the most fascinating of all these texts because it describes, it purports to describe a Carthaginian embassy to the so-called land of Kronos, which a recent team of Greek astronomers has interpreted to be basically the same North Atlantic route from Britain through the Faroe Islands and Iceland and then to Newfoundland. Okay. And Plutarchs says that when the Carthaginian embassy gets to what has been interpreted as Newfoundland, there are Greeks there that have been living there since the time of Hercules or before the time of Hercules, which means centuries before the Shosh and War, and they live around a bay which has the size of what we know of as the Sea of Azav in the Black Sea. Okay. Now, the Gulf of Saint Lawrence by Newfoundland, oh, it has the same size and as the Sea of Azav and it has the same latitude as the Caspian Sea. And both those things fit the Gulf of Saint Lawrence by Newfoundland, okay. I'm just saying that you can keep going down as rabbit hole as far as you want, you know, as long as you want. Now, with the Troi example, how it's thought to be mythology and then it's now accepted as a real city. - Yeah. - The biggest thing here is that we have the ruins of an ancient city. - Yeah. - Now, the obvious question is, why are there no remnants, tools, weapons, bones of ancient Carthaginians in Newfoundland? - So, great question. Let's consider the Vikings for a moment, okay. We know for a fact that the Vikings reached Newfoundland. We've found their settlements, okay. But besides that one settlement, they have left zero genetic trace of their existence in North America. There have been, no genetic study has found any, like Viking genes among the native populations in North America, okay. And if we hadn't found that one site, we still wouldn't believe that they had reached North America. Okay, so this just goes to show how little is left behind by some of these expeditions, okay. Now, do I believe that the Greeks, Carthaginians reached North America? I'm not sure, okay. I think if they did, it definitely was not done more than a few times because if there were, if there were an established trade route, we would expect to find more evidence archeologically. We would expect to find like, North American crops taken to Europe and European crops taken to North America. We don't find that, right? So if it happened, it was like a one-off thing or a two-off thing, maybe like three or four times max. And if that's the case, you wouldn't really expect to find much archeologically. Right. Now, is there something with like, I don't know, I'm trying to think like, okay, Dung or like VCs, like, oh, we found a seed from North Africa that only grows there that now is in this place and it's a petrified piece of something or like anything that would indicate that, you know, again, if we're going based on the mythology, like, hey, Greeks have been here for, you know, centuries before the Carthaginians landed. There's gotta be something. Look, there are many such things. I'm not the expert on them, but, you know, like, I would just saw this YouTube video where this guy is claiming that Olmeck Monument number seven, I believe, shows a bearded man carrying a flag who seems to be a Carthaginian, okay? Like, there are people that have got love that. I haven't gone through this nor probably will I, but there are, if there is any evidence, it's very scant and there are people who try to find it. I mean, one thing to mention is there are hundreds and hundreds of inscriptions that have been found in North America that are purported to be Egyptian or Greek or Phoenician. Almost all of them have been shown to be forgeries. Therefore, if there are any real ones, it's gonna be really hard to convince anybody that they're real because of how many forgeries have been debunked, you know? Now, this Viking settlement in Newfoundland. How robust is that settlement? Are you aware? It's beyond my expertise. 'Cause I'm so curious if it's like, hey, we found like maybe a cave where they were posted up or if they're like, oh no, this was a proper city with, you know, 2,000 people and we have all these, you know, pieces of evidence here. Because that would maybe, that maybe like shake my skepticism when I'm like, all right, if they found like one bone and they're like, this is evidence of the Vikings and it's like, well, you're just one bone. I know it's more than one bone and I know it's fewer than 2,000 people, but where in that large spectrum I can't tell you, fair. Now, before I move on, is there anything else from this that you think are interesting little threads that would promote this theory? Oh, you know, we could go through some maps. So let's first look at numbers one, two, three. One, two, and three. What's up, guys, we're gonna take a break really quick because I gotta tell you something. I had one of those days recently where I woke up super tired. I drank coffee and then I drank more coffee because I was tired. I trained badly because I had too much coffee and then I couldn't sleep because I had too much coffee. And the frustrating part is I'm doing all the things. I'm lifting, I'm eating protein, I'm taking creatine, I'm trying to sleep. I'm occasionally fasting because someone on YouTube told me it was good, but sometimes I'm still walking around feeling like I'm only charged to like 60%. 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So head to bruntworkwear.com/camp. Use the code camp and enter the sweepstakes for a chance to win $50,000. No purchase is necessary. The sweepstakes end September 18th, 2026, and official rules apply. Go check out Brunt. So this is the typical map you'll find. And if you go to the next two files, you'll see similar ones. And so this is the explanation for the journey just being in the Mediterranean. So these are already in the classical period. So like 500 BC, the Greeks were doing this game where they were like putting dots in the map and connecting them. And most of these modern maps are based on those ancient reconstructions, okay? And again, all of these were done by Greeks who, you know, did not believe the distances in the text. Right. These nine day and 17 day voyages are just poetic exaggeration. If we shrink it down to scale, this is what we get, okay? Now let's go to the map called Merts. I think it's zero at the beginning. So this is the most famous modern Atlantic reconstruction. And I actually made it myself based on Merts' book because I don't think anybody, she herself doesn't give the whole voyage. I think because it's so ridiculous if you put it all in that on the map. So I did it myself because I couldn't find one. And so she can't, she commits the fatal flaw of beginning at Troy and ending in Aethika. And she also commits the fatal flaw of trying to make it all one voyage. And as you can see, it that forces her to make two, not one, but two full circuits around the Atlantic to get everything in. So that's, you know, that's kind of ridiculous. And, you know, people look at other books that she's written and she's what she used to be, what's called a hyper diffusionist. It's refers to these old theories that humans had explored much more than is plausible. Love that. So yeah, she probably was a little cuckoo, but within, you know, she also did a lot of interesting research. And, you know, I think she came up with a Bay of Fundy idea. So there's a few nuggets within the craziest stuff. Hell yeah. But what about scarier being in Alabama? Yeah. So that to me is preposterous. I mean, she, so she puts the, she puts the land of the sun with the sun cattle north of the Bay of Fundy, where I said that there's a caribou. Yeah. I don't think she mentions caribou, but from there, she has Odysseus drift to the Azores where Calipso is, which I think is that that's implausible because he's just drifting and drifting speeds is like one knot, you know, it's very slow. So I don't think nine days is enough to get you from Canada to the Azores if you're just drifting. And then when he sees, when Odysseus sees the land of the faecians, Poseidon comes back from vacation and is like, what? That dude again, and he sends his storms. And Odysseus is tossed about for three days before he reaches land. And Mertz has that, she thinks a tornado hits him in the Azores and takes him to Florida. Nice. Which is ridiculous, not only is it ridiculous, but it's clear in the text that he's tossed around for three days and then makes it to that land that he saw three days earlier. It's not a new land. Right. You know. Also, if you landed in the Panhandle, you would remember, you know, that would be in there for sure. I'd be like, dude, we saw a gas station. You would not believe there's a bucky's up here. There'd be way more rep. People on spring break. Exactly. There'd be a whole bunch of stuff for sure. Wow. Okay. This is so fun. She puts the land of the dead in West Africa, or say, Hades, right? Which is crazy because there's never any fog there. Like never. Okay. So she puts what Homer calls the foggyest place, anyone's ever seen in the desert. Interesting. Makes no sense. Right. But again, that's because she starts at Troy and you shouldn't do that. Right. It is interesting that basically all these maps put the Lotus Eaters in like Tunisia, like near a Carthage. Yeah. Is there a reason why it's kind of like accepted amongst everyone? Yes. Okay. So remember how I said that the imported copy pasted earlier travel narrative that we're trying to reconstruct? Begins and ends with these two magical episodes, the Storm and the Fatiens, the robot ship. So if you don't see that, okay. So the Storm happens, you see like just Southwest of Troy, there's the tip of Greece and I have the arrow, yeah, right there. So that tip is called, that's Kate Malia, okay. That's where the Storm hits them and the Storm takes his fleet for nine days over the sea. Now, that's too big a journey for the Mediterranean. But anyway, it takes them southwest and that takes you to the Lotus Eaters. So that would suggest a Libyan location or Tunisian location if you are trying to shrink it down to scale and put it in the Mediterranean, okay. But if instead, and this is, by the way, I left your answer, I left your question unanswered about the Caribbean. This is where we get to that. If instead, the Storm of Malia acts as the beginning of the copy-pasted narrative. So we're suddenly now in a new place. You don't know where, but we're somewhere. And we're taken by a storm for nine days southeast and we come to a land where you could just eat food that's growing around you and not have any care in the world. Well, that sounds a lot like the Carthaginian island paradise they discovered that was so lush and desirable that people wanted to all move there from Carthage and Carthage was scared of their home being depopulated so they forbade people from going there. I'm not saying, if you're trying to find something in the existing ancient literature that matches the lotus eaters, the two accounts of the Phoenician/Carthaginian ship being tossed on the sea for many, many days and coming to an island paradise where there's a lot of delicious fruit, sounds like a candidate. Okay. So could Homer have heard this from some Phoenicians possible? It might not even be part of the same story as the Northern adventures, right? He could have heard the Phoenician story of the island paradise and put that in the early part of the story. And then he might have heard a separate account of a Northern journey with solar confusion. And between them is another magical episode, the island of Aeolus. Okay. Now everybody, everybody in their mom has put Aeolus near Italy, you see that? When you bring up the file called Lui Pari, L-I-P-A-R-I, okay. So this is the, to the west of the southern tip of Italy, north of Sicily, there's this group of islands still called now the Aeolian Islands. It's a popular destination for sailors. And most people since antiquity have said that the island of Aeolus, Aeolia, the island of the winds is Lui Pari. Now the problem is Odysseus sails, I think, for like nine days east of Lui Pari before he finds his sight of land. And within a day you would hit Italy, okay. So that doesn't really work. And he also says that the island of Aeolus is a floating island. Now what would make you think an island is floating? Someone do the stars, maybe, some type of rotation, maybe like, I don't know, I'm guessing. Well like, okay, let's say if you're on an island, maybe there's like waves or like if the island felt shaky, like if you're on a long island, okay. Yes. And you can see New York. Are you ever going to think you're on a floating island? No. as the reference point stays the same. the same, right? What if you're on an island where there is no other land you can see? And the things that you do see beyond your island, like the clouds and the currents seem to be moving around you. Wouldn't you think that you are relatively, you're like a massive ship that's sailing in this sea? Right. So I think hints like that point to the island of Ayolas being also an Atlantic island, super remote, very remote where there are currents and clouds that make it seem like it's moving. And there is no big land you can see that serves as a reference point. And so it seems like you're just floating on the limitless sea. But the Azores be a possibly or Medeira as another candidate. So Medeira, unlike the Azores is this doesn't have a archipelago. But even the Azores is possible because the Azores are so far from each other that you could be on the easternmost Azor island and not really see the other ones. Interesting. So I think for the island of Ayolas, Medeira and the eastern Azores are both possible. And both of those would allow you to have a nine-day voyage before you hit land. And then so the cool thing is this. So when Odysseus leaves the island of the winds, and by the way, why is it the island of the winds? That implies that it's an island that experiences all different winds, north winds, south wind, east wind, west wind, plural winds. Yeah. And both Medeira and the Azores because they're both kind of within this North Atlantic gyro, like close-ish to the center, not that not central, but kind of far enough towards center to have all the different winds and currents play a role. So you could experience all the different winds on either those islands. And therefore it might be a floating island and one that has all the different winds come into play once in a while. So then Odysseus sails east with a steady, west-derly wind, and west-derly means it's blowing you from the west. Okay. And he sails, I think, nine days. We can check that chart again. So he sails from the island of Ayolas for nine days eastward. And then Homer says he sees Ithaca. They even see like the smoke from the chimneys of their homes. And just as they're about to get close, some of these idiots on board, they open the bag of the winds, get blown away. And the winds reverse and they get blown back to the island of Ayolas. Okay. Now since you cannot sail for nine days towards, where is it? Yeah. Since you cannot sail for nine days east and reach Ithaca, that's impossible. Let's just assume for the sake of argument that Homer substituted some other location with Ithaca. Let's just say Gibraltar or let's say Portugal or let's say Ireland doesn't really matter. Okay. It is very, it's very plausible that if you leave either the Azores or Madera and you have an eastern, eastern blowing, a, a west-derly wind blowing towards the east. In both cases, you could make the journey to let's say Gibraltar in about nine days. And in both cases, you could be hit by the Canary Current and an eastern wind that will just blow you right back where you came from. And I can imagine once again a story of a sailor being like, "Dude, I was sailing. I left this island. We were just about to be there." And then out of nowhere, these winds pulled us all the way back to this other crazy place, I almost died. And then that story passes along, it becomes this myth. Yeah. Oh, that's so fun. That is fascinating. It's, it is fun doing this like, it's fun because it suspends a lot of the strict sort of academic scrupulousness that goes along with being, you know, like a, a professor, so to speak, right? And it opens up so much more room to say, "Well, what if?" And so often I find like when speaking with professors or people that adhere to like a very strict sort of academic guideline, they're like, "Well, if there's no other evidence for it or there's no other record for it, then it couldn't be." But just to say like, "Well, what if?" And I think in the gray of the what if, if even one of these is true. Yeah. If even one mention of Newfoundland or, you know, the funk islands or something is true. I mean, it just completely changes what we understand about this period. And to me, I'm like, why would you not want to even just experiment with the idea, right? Do you have other, other academics and other, you know, people of your, you know, scholarly standing that reach out to you privately? And they're like, "Hey, I think you're on something here, but I can't say it." Well, my friends who are in academia, they enjoy this stuff. They tell me that. And it's not like they're afraid to say it. It's just that it's just not what comes up in academia. Right. And again, it's like, I think it's more indifference than it is hostility. Sure. I mean, of course, there are people who are hostile to anything that doesn't fall into their specialty. And they're established, you know, what they've established scholarship. But I think usually it's just they're indifferent to it. But if they come across it, they find it. So like, I told a few of my friends who are now professors about this episode. And I was expecting them to be like, "Oh, we've lost you." You know, but they were like, "Oh, that's cool." Right. Yeah. I can imagine historians and anthropologists to be the ones that are the more fusive where they're like, "Hey, you're using mythology to try to suggest that what I know to be true is wrong." Yeah. So get out of here. Yeah. And just to be extra clear, you should ask me, "How much of this do I believe?" How much of what we've talked about today do you believe 100%? Well, nothing 100%. I think it's very likely that either the Greeks or the Phoenicians or both wandered up the North Atlantic coast to Britain and Scandinavia, given that we know that that happened later. I don't see why it couldn't have happened in the Bronze Age, especially given that they were looking for the sources of amber and for tin. Okay. So maybe 85% likelihood? I'd bet like, I'd bet a thousand bucks. Wow. Okay. But I wouldn't bet anything on the other stuff. Okay. So Iceland, you know, even I think it's well, I'll say that I think the Scandinavian stuff is to me sounds very likely because again, it happened later in antiquity and the idea that nobody tried to follow the coastline and see where it went seems contrary to human nature. Like, we have so many stories of other civilizations. I mean, the Polynesians, right? Polynesians that reached Easter Island, which is a thousand miles away from anything. And it's a tiny little dot in the middle of the ocean. The entire Pacific, right? Like, when the Europeans were like Captain Cook and others were in the Pacific, they found all these islands inhabited. It's like shooting a bullseye from, you know, a mile away, right? We have stories of African attempts to cross the ocean. Like, there's the famous story of Mansa Musa's predecessor. We don't know his name, but the king Mansa Musa Mali, I think, told the story that his predecessor like ordered the construction of like a flotilla and they just sailed west into the ocean. And we're never heard from again. Okay. So this is what humans do. You know, the Merz has a, again, Merz who is Kuku, but she has some some good lines. She said, if anybody told the ancient Greeks, don't go there because the edge of the world is there, somebody would have been like, Oh, let me go see. Right. If we have people leaving Mali to just sail west and see what's out there, putting their lives on the line. Yeah. It's hard for me to believe that only one guy in all of human history ever did that. Yeah. So I think traveling to the north of Europe is quite likely. Everything else is plausible. It's, it's worth investigating further. I'm not committed to it. Can we still use this money metaphor? You put in a thousand bucks on Scandinavia. How much money you're going to put on Iceland? I don't know, maybe 500. How much money you putting in Newfoundland? One or 200. How much money you putting on Bermuda? 50. That's fair. I think that's a very reasonable estimate. And then what about the Panhandle Florida? Zero. I think that's fair. I think that kind of tracks for me. I think that makes sense. Right. It's not, again, I am very fond of this idea that ancient civilizations are more clever, more advanced. And as curious, if not more curious, then we are at this very day. And I think we don't always give them so much credit. And I think we like to be like, oh, yeah, you know, they believe they're at this flat. They think this and it seems like as time goes on. A lot of those assumptions about antiquity are, are maybe not so true. And that I do think they were in many ways as smart and as clever and perhaps even smarter than us now in terms of a specific local knowledge and information. And so the idea of, I mean, like, even looking at like non-humans, like, homophluoriensis. They were seafaring. - Yeah. - Like, they were going distances. Like, I think, Nandrathol's headboats. Like, all of these, like, proto-humans. - Australopithecus, Australia, right? - Yeah, exactly. It's like, it's crazy to me that these even non-human, sort of like, proto-human hominids are doing sea travel. And the idea of the, like, the, you know, the brightest, most elite homosapiens couldn't have done it just because we don't have a documented record of it. Yeah, it seems a little bit. I don't know. It lacks a certain amount of, like, curiosity to me. But I love this. This is so fun. And the detail that you put into this, I think, is, I just think it's, like, so enjoyable and really refreshing from someone with your pedigree and your authority on the topic to be willing and open to explore these types of things, I just think is awesome. And evidenced by your channel and specifically, this video's success, I think it resonates with a lot of people as well. - Well, thanks. And it's been really fun talking about it with you. - Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. Now, before we go, I think we have maybe 25 minutes. Can I ask you some questions about the Odyssey of the film? - Sure. - So, you saw the Odyssey. The most recent film by Chris Frenel. - Yeah. - Outside, I don't wanna speak out of turn here. But you gave me a rating out of 10. - Yeah. - Could you share that with me now? - 6 or 7 out of 10. - Why? - Well, first of all, being somebody who has read the Odyssey so many times, including an Ancient Greek, I'm gonna be more picky than most people. I mean, you can even recite the opening lines, Ancient Greek. - I can. - Would you mind, spit a little-- - Spend a little Greek for us? - Do you have a drum? - Oh, no, but I can give you a little beat though. Can you do like a dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb? (knocking) There we go. (knocking) Amazing, I mean, that is so cool. (laughs) And so, that's how we'll be told. (knocking) - There we go. - Amazing. I mean, that is so cool. And so, that's how we'll be told. (knocking) - So, that's how we'll be told. - So, that's how we'll be told. - Amazing, I mean, that is so cool. - Yeah, and for how many hours would that go on for? - How many hours would that go on for? - We can't know for sure, but based on the length of an English audiobook that covers the whole thing, it is about 12 to 14 hours. So, it's possible that that's the timeframe. - Wow. - That is fascinating. That re-contextualizes so much of it, right? Because we read it in, you know, the class in high school or college. And it's just words on a page. It's kind of like when you read Shakespeare, you get the gist. But you lose so much because this is not a book to be read. It is a play or a performance to be experienced. And I imagine that this is probably the same as that way. - Yeah, and in fact, we know for sure that the Homeric rap soads that performed this, they could mimic different voices. They could get into like, "I can mount on his voice." And then Helen's voice and then, you know, they could really get into character with all the different figures. - And what would be the context that I would be listening to this, if I'm an ancient Greek? - Well, in Athens, there were like state-sponsored festivals where you'd have a superstar on stage and maybe a thousand people watching. In the age of Homer, we don't know, but probably like, you know, probably the types of scenes depicted in the actual Odyssey, where you have a feast put on by a king or local warlord, in a great hall and a bard as entertaining, maybe like a hundred people who are feasting. - Would I be drinking? - Definitely. - I'd be hammered. - You would. - Nice. - Would I be on drugs? - Possibly in book four of the Odyssey, when Telemachus visits Menolias. By the way, this is a great missed opportunity for Nolan. Because Helen, Homer's Helen, is way more formidable than Nolan's Helen. Okay, Homer's Helen drugs the whole party. - Really? - When she sees that Telemachus is the son of Odysseus, and Menolias is gonna start waxing nostalgic about Odysseus and the Trojan War, which she caused in this storyline, she's like, okay, this is gonna be bad for me. Let me drug everybody's wine. And she uses an Egyptian drug that is so potent that if you take it, even if your child is being torn to pieces in front of you, you will still not shed a tear. So there we have this type of scene where a bard might be present, he's not in this case, but drugs were definitely known and described. - What do you think that could be? I mean, it sounds like an ecstasy. - The main theory is opium. - So you're just on heroin. I'm not an expert. - That's wild. I mean, I've never done heroin, not yet. But my understanding is that that's how you. It's from the poppy, right? It's not, well, again, it's not mentioned that it's poppy. It's just mentioned that it's from Egypt and there has been speculation that Egypt was importing opium from, you know, Central Asia or some things. Again, through various indirect intermedia areas. - Now, what are the discrepancies from the film to your understanding of the original Greek? Are you a dead body? - Well, okay, the first thing is like, why are they wearing helmets when they're rowing on the boat? (laughs) Or wandering in a forest. First of all, the helmets are anachronistic. These are much later helmets. They constrict your vision very severely. They're only useful if you are marching in a column of dudes and you're only going to go forward. If you're walking in a forest where there might be like dangerous creatures around you, you don't want to wear this helmet, all right? I thought the biggest problem was trying to force modern morality onto an ancient tale. Like, it's, to me, one of the main values of the Homeric epics is that they have such a different morality. And even if we find it shocking or or we don't want to accept that morality, shouldn't we know how other human societies saw the world morally? - What's the clearest example? Well, the clearest example is that Odysseus killed all the suitors. - Right. Like, can we just boilers here? - Yeah, I mean, it's a 2,000 year old story. If you haven't heard of it now, I mean, too late. - Well, because in Nolan's version, he doesn't kill all the suitors. Okay, he spares quite a few of them. In Homer, he only spares like two or three. That's another missed opportunity because you know how like in the final scene, Odysseus, Matt Damon Odysseus, prophecies that only songs will remember them. That no writing will survive, right? Well, in the actual Odyssey, one of the few people that Odysseus spares is the bard, the guy who's singing. He is one of the suitors, technically, but he's also like the singer of epic tales to the suitors. So how cool is that that you spare the guy who you want to sing of your exploits? - Right, you know? That's kind of a-- - That's totally missed. - Yeah, sort of poetic. To be like, I'm going to kill everyone, except for you, go tell this tale to the next person. And then when you're watching it live and a festival, you're like, oh, that's the guy that got spared. Like it feels-- it becomes meta in a way. Oh, that's cool. Now, my friend Alex pointed out that he thought it was weird, that Helen has a twin. Now, I know that in some retellings, and it's been disputed, that there is this twin theory with Helen. But he says, if she's the most beautiful woman ever, that you're going to send a thousand ships for, if she has a twin sister, doesn't that kind of nerf that whole point? - Yeah, so again, in the original, they are sisters, but not twin sisters. I'm not sure why Nolan did that, maybe, just to not have to find another actor, you know? - Right, so cheaper. - So cheaper. But there's these weird cases of twins where one twin is divine and the other isn't. Okay, so, like, have you heard of Castor and Pollock's? Or, so, Castor and Pollock's and Helen and Clyde of Nestra are two cases where you have two twins, two pairs of twins. And in each case, for some reason, one twin gets the divine parentage and the other does not. Sorry, they're not twins, they're siblings. But one of them gets the divine parentage, one of them doesn't. I think it might be the like, so you have this like, you know, beautiful woman and a god sleeps with her. But her husband also sleeps with her and perhaps one of the children has the divine parentage. - Yeah, okay. - It's a common theme in, or it's a well-known theme in Greek mythology that you can have siblings where one of them is divine, one of them is not. So Helen is semi-divine, which is why after, which is why she and Menleus are never gonna die in the strict sense, but they will be transported to the Isles of, to the Elysium, to the Elysian field. and Manelaus' prophecy too, that he will not die, but because he has a divine wife, they will be taken by the gods to the Elysian field across the ocean, another reference to a land across the ocean, where they will live their forever, basically. So Clad of Nestra is, you know, a less attractive, less divine sibling in the original. Interesting. Now, my buddy Andrew pointed out, he said that he actually liked the casting, because many people would say, like, I know there's a lot of uproar from specifically the Greeks, right? Christos. Where they would say, like, oh, why are they casting a black woman in the space of an ancient Greek? This is completely anachronistic, they're erasing Greek culture. My friend Andrew says, she's actually the most exotic person, and that, like, her ethnicity or her skin tone actually creates a distinction, where she looks unique to the people. As far as the, like, the racial dynamic, it feels like it was a little bit overblown, but I'm curious your perspective as a historian on this specific time. Well, I think that there were, I think there were so many more important issues that no one got wrong. Yeah, you're worried about the helmets. It's very niche. Yeah, I mean, like, the only person in the cast who either was Greek or spoke Greek was a person who played a non-Greek whole area. So the first stop after Troy is Ismerus. It's not mentioned by name in the movie, but the first stop they make where they plunder this coastal village, and there's this survivor, and he's his old man, and he tells them they're like, "We're Greeks from Ithaca." And he speaks modern Greek to them. The actor is a Greek, okay? In the movie, he's speaking modern Greek, and he's saying, "If you go west, trouble's a way to." And then he has to be translated to these so-called Greeks. Oh, there he is. It's just like, seriously? Yeah, that is a good distinction, right? Like, Mad Damon is equally not Greek as Lupita. Yeah. Like, they're both not Greek, and we're kind of putting like a modern racialized lens on a period where race wasn't really a thing, right? Like, it was just sort of nationality. Is that fair to say? Well, I mean, I don't know how much race was a thing. I think I think Greece was definitely not as multicultural as it appears to be in the film, you know? But there's a lot we don't know. So they always weren't speaking English. Yeah. Now, another element that I mentioned before that is my favorite part of the book. At least when I read it in high school, I was like, "Oh, that's so clever." Is when he tells the cyclops that he's nobody. Yeah. Like, do you have a theory as to why that was cut out? Did it bother you that that element was removed? Well, I did see that no one was asked this, I think, by John Steward in an interview. And he says, "We just couldn't work it in. It was impossible." So I don't know. I mean, look, there's a lot of unfortunate choices, I think. Maybe I should tell you, like, what I thought was done well, though. Yeah, I mean, before we get to that, there's one enough. There's any other details here, like, "Ah, this is a missed opportunity. This is the best part. Things that people don't know." I mean, the land of the dead, where he holds his mother three times and she evaporates and moves through him and she dies of, you know, a broken heart waiting for him. That's like the most beautiful part of the whole poem. And it's also omitted. So I'm like, "Ugh." I mean, look, if you're going to take a, what was a 14-hour performance and make it into a three-hour film, you have to cut things that are going to be really sad to cut. Fair. Okay. At the same time, I think Nolan could have done some really awesome things that he didn't do, you know, like, one is to actually show the ancient morality in all its shocking alien aspects, right. And. But I will say that there were some really, really clever things that he did. Tell me. Like, when Odysseus in the land of Cersei's Isle, when he goes hunting and he shoots the deer and then he goes to retrieve the body and it's a human body, that's not in Homer. It's a brilliant touch to give Odysseus a way of understanding what's happening on this island, that you have a witch turning humans into beasts. And then here's one that he did that I think Aristotle would have approved. Because Aristotle said that the power of tragedy and Homer, he takes to be a kind of related form of art to tragedy. The power of tragedy is most vividly seen in moments of reversal and recognition. So when fortune suddenly change or when somebody recognizes somebody, those are the powerful moments and he says the best, the best tragedies combine them. So the moment a recognition is also the moment of reversal of fortune. And in this case, Nolan is not in the original, but Nolan made the moment where the dog Argos recognizes Odysseus to coincide with the moment where telemicus recognizes Odysseus, which also then marks the reversal because now telemicus knows that things are different, right. So. I'm not going to get killed, things are turning around. Exactly. So that would have been an Aristotle, that would have the stamp of approval of Aristotle on it. Wow. That's a great way to look at this. I think so many people are trying to skewer the original and say like, oh, they ruined it and destroyed it and Hollywood f'd up the whole movie. Well, there are elements that are changed. And perhaps some of those criticisms are legitimate. But it is also possible that in certain elements, Nolan did better than Homer. And that is quite an achievement, even if he does it once. I mean, I know this is probably breaking Cresos's heart. He's like, no, dude, Homer's the best. No one could ever be Homer. But that part right there, it's not something I even considered. Like in that one single moment, it does two things at once that even the wrap soads of all didn't do. Yeah. Wow. That's a great point. And that is also maybe the most beautiful part. Argos seeing his owner and being like, and then dying immediately after. And Odysseus shedding one single tear in wiping away. Yeah, it's perfect. I mean, truly perfect. It's gold. Right. It's also a great name for a dog that I feel like not enough people are using. Right. Like I always meet fighters all the time. How many lunas have I met in the last year? Give me an Argos. That's the best dog name I've ever heard. I think there's going to be a big spot. There's going to be a big explosion of Argos is in the next two years. Watch now anything else that you saw in the film that you thought could have been different was a deviation, but you didn't mind or was even better than the original. Well, I like to think of the positive things because there's a lot of negatives. I don't want to, you know, do that. But one more thing that was cool is the sound that the bow makes when you plug it. Yeah. Now that's totally unrealistic. Okay. A bow of that tension would have sounded like, you know, hello. Yeah, you want you want bass. What you hear is like the the thickest, biggest string of a harp with that whole resonating chamber available. Yeah. Right. It feels like a tool in trail, you know, that was obviously like, you know, the sound was overlaid with a harp or something. But what I like there is that in the scene with the challenge of the bow, right? Oh, another misopportunity. The interview between Penelope and Odysseus, right? The original is way better, man. Like she's so much smarter and they kind of speak in codes. And he kind of signals to her that he's Odysseus without saying it outright. And then she kind of gets it. And then she says, so what should I do? And then he says, well, I think you should announce the bow challenge, which is totally not in the movie, right? Right. And then she's, okay, it sounds good. So like you can read it. It's not like, you know, it's not uncontroversial. But you can read into that scene in Homer that he's giving her a signal. She's getting it. She's asking for advice. He gives it. And it's okay. And it's like they've they've conspired together. That's totally missed in the in the movie. But then what what is cool is so he he starts stringing the bow and all these tutors are angry and they're jeering and they're insulting him. And like you feel like at any moment, they might just charge him and beat him up, right? And the music is growing intention and growing and growing and growing. And then at the moment of the climax of the musical crescendo, he goes, bang, yeah. And then the music stops, right? Like she just got real and it's like, yeah, it's awesome. Yeah. But now also in the Homeric, it's not something I ever understood. And from my reading of the excerpts of the original where it's like, okay, he's talking to Penelope. He's like, let's do this, both things. She's like, all right, let's do it. Yeah. And then even after he does that, she still is not sure. And she's like, move my bed out of the chamber. Yeah. And then he's like, well, you can't move the bed. I made that bed. It's an attitude on all of trade. It's like this whole thing. It's like, it makes me think that she still didn't believe it. Even after this whole feat and threading the bow and shooting through the ax handles, all that. So in your interpretation from the original Homeric, did she, at what point does she know Odysseus is really him? Well, I think that I think the purpose of her at least feigning disbelief and making him prove himself is because Homer wants her to be an equal to him in cunning. If she had just said, oh, your home honey, think, oh, thank you so much. Like, no, prove it with the ax handles. But after you do that, then she got to come down and be like, all right, it's you. I get Odysseus himself does this. Right. Like when Odysseus goes, like Odysseus doesn't just check people's intentions. He double checks and triple checks and triple tests, right? Like, after he kills the suitors and he goes to see his father, his father is like plowing the earth, all muddy and dirty. And you'd think he would just say, "Dad, I'm home," but instead he makes up yet another tale of who he is, which is a lie. And he says, "Oh yeah, I saw this, he's dead." And his dad like collapses, almost dies of like a heart attack. It's like, "Oh, just kidding, it's me, Dad." - Right, yeah. - Just pump things on him for no reason. - And you might be like, again, somebody with a modern morality coming in, it's like, that's so cruel. But this is why Odysseus survived, because he's that kind of person who tests even the people that he should trust. He's that suspicious and that crafty and that cunning that of all the people that went on this long, saga only he made it home, right? And then, Penelope, I think the poet, Homer, other birds, they want her to be his match in cunning. And so she has to do the same thing. She has to test him and double test him and triple test him. - Right. - And then finally they're united. And when they're united, they have homophrosune. They have like-minded relationship, which Odysseus says is the greatest thing on earth. - So don't look at it as a great hero that's godlike and a damsel in distress. Look at it almost as like spiver spy, where it's like they're both testing each other the entire time all the way up until the very end. Now in the disputed ending of the original Homer, there's a great civil war. And all the families of the suit are starting fighting and there's a whole thing and then Athena comes down and Zeus is like, guys stop and wipes everybody's memory. I've heard it said that that's not really accepted. What say you on that rendition of the end? - What do you mean it's not accepted? I've heard that like a lot of the scholars have said, like no, no, it ends after the olive tree bed situation and then happily ever after. But that additional ending where there's a civil war in Zeus has to like throw a thunderbolt. Is that part accepted by Homer's? - There's always some scholars who think, well maybe the original ending was here or maybe Homer should have ended it there, you know, but I mean the manuscripts agreed that it ends after the divine intervention. And I think to me that I think the existing ending we have is the best ending because to me the Odyssey, in the same way that the Iliad is a faint altered memory of the coalition warfare that attended the Bronze Age Collapse, the Odyssey to me is a faint memory of the chaotic migrations that also followed the Bronze Age Collapse. And so when, like there is no difference, there's a sense in the ending of this epic poem that Ithaca will never be the powerful state it was once before, right? Like Odysseus regains his throne but at a huge cost to the community. And he's not happy about killing it. Like this is a great line where after he kills all the suitors, except for like three, the nurse Hericklia who recognizes the scar, she comes into the hall, right? And she's about to like, she opens her mouth to be like, woohoo, and Odysseus like grabs her throat and says, it is not right to rejoice over slain men. So the poem is that great pains to make it feel like he did this out of necessity in order to establish order, to establish his rightful place, so forth, but it's not a good, it's not a happy ending. It's not a good thing for Ithaca. Ithaca will never be the same just like after the Bronze Age Collapse, the Greek, a lot of the Greek areas, they went on, they survived in a sense, but they never achieved their former glory until the end of the Dark Age is four centuries later. And so there's a sense in this poem, like yeah, order was restored, but this is now a kind of fallen world. - Right. - And the fact that the gods had to come down and wipe everyone's memory, is that necessary? Sometimes it feels a little Deus Ex Machina to me. - It's a bit of a Deus Ex Machina. - Okay, if we agree on that, all right. Well, Dr. Jack, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for the time, truly. I'm always honored to be in the presence of someone that is a scholar that is willing to come down to my level and explain the details and answer all my frivolous questions. So, truly, it means the world, and I would love to do it again. - Thanks so much. I've been following your show for a while, so it's an honor to be here, and I hope to be back. - Let's do it. Hey guys, if you love conspiracies and hypothetical history, well, I wanna invite you to check out Signal 33. This is a companion pod to our podcast here at Camp. It's made and edited by the same team that runs all of our shows, and I choose the topics every single week. So, check it out, subscribe, and start the dialogue in the comment section.