The True Story Of The Odyssey (and why it matters) - Alex Petkas - #1125

Why is The Odyssey such an important story? Well, it's a story that has affected a lot of people. I think because it has all of these really universal themes and problems that it relates to. I mean, any good literature does that, but maybe The Odyssey in particular. I mean, Chris Nolan talks about it as this sort of archetypal story that is somehow in all of the movies that he's done. You know, there's the theme of returning to your home, sacrificing on behalf of the community. One of the things that I think is really timely about The Odyssey, and I don't really know how much the movie is going to get into this, but it's kind of a story about the collapse of the patriarchy and how it gets restored, what it takes to restore that, which maybe is timely for our day. Yeah. Who wrote it? So, Homer is the short answer. Who's Homer? Homer is the author, according to the Greeks, of the Iliad and The Odyssey. These two poems that, you know, modern scholars will kind of quibble about. Was it one guy? Was it two guys? Was it a whole kind of crowd of men working or people working in this tradition? And we can get into that a little bit. But essentially, Homer is the attributed author who is this semi, a very blessed epic bard. He's an epic poet. And this is a really special type for the Greeks. The epic poet is, I mean, there are other poets that sing other kinds of songs. And poetry and song are very aligned in the Greek mind. And there's a lot of interesting reasons for that. But he's traditionally conceived of as this blind. Blind bard who lived maybe in the 8th century B.C. And the fascinating thing for me about the Iliad and The Odyssey, which kind of, you know, are in dialogue with each other on some level, is, okay, the Greeks discover writing in the 8th century B.C. They sort of steal it from the Phoenicians and modify it a little bit, make some improving tweaks. So, the first time that they can. And really write down their language is, you know, 700s B.C. And, you know, out of the blue emerges two of the greatest works of literature ever written. Many people think the greatest. And it's all kind of, maybe not declined from that, but everybody's always. The first album was really difficult to follow up. It's almost like, you know, what if today we were still talking about the first movie ever made? Nobody's ever going to top, you know, Metropolis or Nosferatu or, you know, there's probably still people today that think that, but, you know, most would say that we've developed a little bit as, you know, the movie culture has gotten somewhat better. But, you know, for the case of Homer, it's kind of amazing that these things kind of emerge, you know, straight from the mind of Zeus, almost fully formed with all these incredibly rich layers and they're so resonant and they have this depth to them, all these like symbolic aspects of them. And how did that happen? I think is a really interesting question. Is there any indication that this story existed before him? Is it his story? So the backstory of this is, if you look at Homer and look at his language and look at the themes in it, all right, it's in Greek, but Greek is an indigenous language. It's an Indo-European language. All of the Indo-European languages derive from the Indo-Europeans, this, this step people from the middle central Asia that went spread out and conquered all of these regions. And you know, other Indo-European languages include Latin and Celtic and Germanic, also Indian or Sanskrit, basically the, the, the Indic peoples also are, they have this Indo-European kind of. cultural inheritance, especially in Northern India. And it's the people that used to be called the Aryans. And now, you know, Twitter anons will call them Aryans. But, you know, so if you look at Homer's language and themes, you can find very striking recognizable patterns in the Vedic epic tradition of the Mahabharata. And there's a kind of common ancestor, a common poetic tradition, so the argument goes, and I think it's really right, that goes back thousands of years. So Homer's stories are uniquely Greek on some level, but they're also kind of developments that have been around for thousands and thousands of years of oral culture that kind of hits writing right around the 8th century. And it's a kind of distillation of, you know, thousands of years of stories. And, you know, the stories of the Trojan War and the Greek heroes probably go back at least hundreds of years before Homer. Is there anything else to know about Homer? Was he blind? Was he who people think he is? Well, ancient poets, we don't know a lot about their lives, typically, the really ancient Greek ones. And so people often, like later Greeks, would look at clues to try to figure out who these guys were. And there's actually, one of the reasons people think Homer is considered a blind poet is because there's actually a blind epic poem. And it's a poem by Homer. And it's about a man named Hicbard in the Odyssey, that his name is Demodocus. And he appears in book eight. And he seems to be a kind of Homer figure in the Odyssey itself. In the same way as painters in the Renaissance would paint themselves into their works. Yeah, very much that sort of thing. And, you know, the idea is that the gods have robbed him of his sight, but they've given this deeper vision into the mysteries of the universe and human suffering and so forth. All right. Tell me about the story. What happens? I mean, I want to get into the narrative and the details, but, you know, the story's pretty simple. There's a backstory. You might have heard the Trojan War. That happens before the poem begins in the poem's chronology. But, you know, 10 years of war at Troy, the cause of war was Helen of Troy or Helen of Sparta was seduced by this playboy, Trojan Prince Paris. And he spirited her way to Troy, stole her away from the Greeks, Menelaus of Sparta. And the, you know, the Greeks assembled this massive army to go and take her back essentially, and get some plunder along the way. They, after 10 years, they finally end up sacking and destroying the city. And the man responsible for the victory, ultimately, in the Greek's eyes, and certainly in the eyes of the Odyssey, is Odysseus himself. Because he came up with the idea of the Trojan horse. And that was his idea. What year was this? So this is, you know, maybe it happened, maybe it didn't. I like to ascribe to the school of higher naivete. We can't disprove it. Like, let's just say, maybe something like that happened. Yeah. And there's a lot of debates about this, but it would have been 1200 BC, roughly. So there's, it's a combination of maybe some real world stuff with lots of mythology, trying to sort of root something in reality, but then also build it out into a bigger imagination. Yeah. I think it's better to think of Homer as historical fiction rather than just like pure fiction. That's certainly how the Greeks would have thought about it. Like they believe that the Trojan war happened for the most part. And none of them are going to say, you know, it happened exactly like Homer told the story. But they thought it happened. And Homer's in the eighth century imagining this conflict 400 years earlier. Okay. So it's a sequel in kind. It's a story sequel to this epic myth that may have, may have happened, may not have happened quite the way that we think it does. So this is set in about 1200 BC. Right. Yeah. And, and it, the, the Odyssey is kind of a sequel to the Iliad, which is a longer, somewhat longer poem. And, uh, you know, this is a story about what happens at Troy itself. And Achilles is the big hero there. And famously Achilles dies, you know, Paris shoots him in the heel and his Achilles heel, the only vulnerable spot on him, uh, before the, the city actually gets taken. Um, and so, uh, you know, but Achilles doesn't die in the Iliad, but his death is kind of hinted at, uh, and then the Odyssey kind of picks up a little bit after the Iliad, well, 10 years, I guess, after the Iliad would have ended. Um, and, and makes the case that Odysseus was actually, there's this kind of dialogue between the Iliad and the Odyssey of who is the best of the Greeks or the, the best of the Achaeans, as, as Homer calls them, the Achaeans are. Cause in the first book, it was Achilles and in the second book, it's Odysseus. Yeah. Obviously it's Achilles because whenever Achilles is there, the Greeks win, win, win, win, win. And whenever Achilles, you know, is, is, is absent from the battle, the Trojans win, win, win, win, win. But, you know, at the end of the day, who was it that was responsible for the victory? Did Homer write these in sequence? Do you write the Iliad first? Well, this, this is what the ancient critics thought. This is the kind of traditional narrative. Homer is one guy and, uh, he wrote the Iliad as a young man and the kind of vigor of maybe he's 35 and, you know, uh, hanging around guys like you, you see in in the iliad warriors i mean he's seen spears go in and out of faces and just incredibly awesome stuff that that you see in the iliad and a little bit in the odyssey but that he's one of those kind of um warrior class people are hanging around those kind of guys knows people like achilles and diomedes and then in his older age he he pens the odyssey and it's a slower story it's more kind of you know there's a little more digressions there's more kind of slices of daily life or peacetime and and so he's kind of writing this in the twilight of his years and and i i kind of like that because you know the iliad is just so visceral and and um you know stark and immediate and violent and glamorous it kind of glamorizes war not not uncritically but then the odyssey is uh it's kind of if it's if it's a poem by an old man it's it's also written for a wider audience i think this has a lot to do with its appeal today too and kind of in in modernity it just it's incorporates a higher range of human experience um and it's maybe it's for the young especially like telemachus who's this young guy that kicks off the poem i mean that that might be the the real target audience of of the odyssey it's like a broader range of people there's also a much more you know explored in depth in the odyssey um so i don't know if that answers the question that's the background that's how we arrive at the beginning of it yeah yeah so uh all all the trojan war has ended odysseus has some trouble getting home it's actually 20 years after the trojan war started when the odyssey timeline begins and um we learn in the first you know 100 years after the trojan war started that odysseus you know kind of got got got off course trying to get back from troy several of the greeks had this experience and um on his way home he met these monsters and strange people and he pissed off the god poseidon and for a variety of reasons many of which are his his own faults many of which may be not only his fault uh he is stuck on this island with this divine nymph a calypso and she's she's she's uh she kind of got him as a prisoner and she wants to make him her husband and so he's stuck there away from home and and then everybody at home back in his homeland which is an island called ithaca is wondering where he is you know uh did he die he didn't die at troy the stories about the trojan war are like circulating in in the kind of world of the poem people know something of what happened but there's no there's no news of odysseus what happened did he did he get lost at sea you know that's did he just abandon his family is he you know gonna go off and you know do more pirate adventures among the ethiopians what's going on with odysseus nobody knows and um and and the the poem kind of starts with this background in place misadventures meeting monsters stuck on calypso's island um and uh that's all kind of before the story actually begins and the story begins when the gods had this meeting and uh poseidon happens to be distracted he's pissed off at odysseus and doesn't want him to get home but um poseidon's off like partying with the ethiopians as you do as as one does as as as the gods often do i mean they're they're they're a good hang and the ethiopians the ethiopians yeah yeah good hang okay that's news that's news to me read herodotus there's many details you know were they northern were they southern who knows but they were fun and and and they're far so so poseidon's distracted and then athena says all right we can we're going to do something about odysseus now athena is kind of odysseus's divine champion she's uh his favorite goddess he's her favorite hero and she goes to zeus the the you know the king of the gods and sort of lord of the cosmos and she says odysseus was a pious man he was a good king he was a good dad it's just not fair that he just brought away on this island with this nymph and his son is just you know growing up without a father we got to do something about this and zeus says all right we'll do something about this poseidon will just have to deal with it and and that's how the action kind of kicks off in in in the odyssey and long story short you know odysseus gets released from the island uh by the god's will telemachus his son is sent on this kind of vision quest rite of passage initiation journey and athena helps him out with that um odysseus tells a story at the center of the book and if you want to just like skip all of the like not a plus interesting parts of the odyssey and just get to the kind of the famous monsters and and adventures you can go to book 9 through 12 where odysseus basically tells all of the backstory in his own voice to uh an audience of people and and and and and and and people that he's met so how much how much of the story is what happens when he gets back and how much is the retelling of what happened before so the the first eight books are him and telemachus there's 24 books so the first book four books are telemachus then there's four books about odysseus getting from calypso's island to this sort of intermediary destination skaria it's called the pheasants or this people that help him get home he tells them his story and then from 13 to 24 is like him and telemachus back on ithaca and how they solve the big problem that has arisen at home which we haven't treated yet which is that his house is infested with suitors trying to woo his wife away trying to steal his wife away 50 of the book is love island 50 right the original love island yeah the low deceit is love island sirens yeah yeah okay the pheasants yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of kind of sexual tension okay okay uh especially you know odysseus with the pheasants which we should get to okay so what's what's the rite of passage thing yeah so it's good to start with telemachus probably so when you when you start the odyssey it's kind of like wow i thought this was about odysseus and we're page after page you don't meet the guy really until he's five fucking idiot son in this story so much he's a weak little but that's kind of the point you know telemachus is stuck there at home uh how old is he he's 20 so odysseus left him as a an infant essentially and he's never met his dad only heard about him um and he's kind of grown up in this in this world of women you know his mom and the maid servants who are very loyal and you know there's there's uh you know loyal servants of odysseus here and there but um telemachus's grandfather is is kind of too old to do anything and he's kind of kind of shattered by odysseus's absence um so it's i think i think it starts with telemachus because homer really wants to get you to feel viscerally what it's like when the father figure is absent like how bad things get when the leader is gone and that kind of motivates the rest of the story so so telemachus is um uh you know 20 he's getting bossed around there's a hundred and eight suitors at his house from all over western greece princes and uh big shots why is odysseus his wife so desirable that's a good question so penelope is her name famously she's um right i mean late 30s at the youngest maybe early 40s um i mean why are why why is she the most desirable catch in like all of greece i think it's i mean obviously like women can be very attractive and alluring at that age but you know for 108 eligible young rich bachelors to come and try to love island yeah it's closer to bonnie blue than love island but yeah right that's that's the counter example you know you're always supposed to you know how could this go wrong yeah yeah no he has has a lot of options right so so he uh she's i think she's desirable she's very smart and well-bred blah blah blah but the real reason i think she's desirable is you know it's like mimetic desire it's the 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That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Is there a mirroring of Helen of Troy being so very desirable, being whisked away, being stolen, and now this is a new version of the same, a similar kind of tension? Yeah, totally. I mean, that's kind of the story that there's all these, like Homer lays out all these kind of other versions of women making different choices to sort of highlight what Penelope could do if she goes off track and why it's important. It's not unheard of. No, no. And there's a story that he, well, we'll get to in a moment, all the kind of gruesome counterexamples. So it is this mimetic thing. I think that's one of the reasons why she's just not impressed by any of these young lads because she knows what they're trying to do, right? They're trying to usurp the status of the greatest hero alive, maybe ever, by just, you know, picking off his wife and then I'll have Odysseus' wife and, you know. The Timu Odysseus. Timu Odysseus. Timu, yeah. Like the Chinese knockoff of Odysseus. Right. And they're like, hey, she goes, I've got the, I don't need your like Huawei phone. I've got an iPhone at home. Yeah. And she's like, oh, they're like, oh, sweetie, iPhones are dead. And, you know, they're never going to come back. They're never coming back. You got to, you know. Yeah. Huawei. No, it's just backordered. It's backordered. I believe, I believe. So, so I think that's why it's, she doesn't want it to have anything to do with any of, any of them, but she's kind of wondering, like, is he actually ever coming back? So there's, there's a kind of dramatic tension there. What's that like for the son to be around this situation? Well, you know, the suitors have been there for like four years. They haven't been there the whole time, but, you know, he's, he was, you know, he's been there for like four years. He was 16 maybe when they came and he's, he's, he's far outnumbered. He doesn't feel like he's in control of his own house. And in fact, it's kind of anarchy, like anarchy, you know, when, when the patriarchy is removed, you know, Penelope doesn't just like suddenly step in and become the man of the house. It doesn't work like that in Greece, at least it's, it's kind of the rule of the most assertive at the time, which is these suitors. And there's a kind of jockeying for status among them. But certainly Telemachus, he's, he's, he's the bottom of the food chain as far as they're concerned, because they outnumber him and they're older. And, and so he doesn't feel like he can reassert himself. And this is exactly where Athena comes in to try to twist the situation. So she comes down herself, Zeus sends Hermes to go and sort out Odysseus with Calypso. But Athena comes herself in disguise as, as a man, mentis, she takes on this, you know, um, alter ego and shows up at Telemachus' house, at Odysseus' house one day. And, um, you know, she doesn't get greeted at the gates, which is very bad hospitality. So, so the suitors are, uh, abusing the hospitality of the house. And, um, they're actually not doing this whole courtship thing the way you're supposed to, like the right thing to do from, from the Greek perspective would have been to go and talk to Penelope's dad. And say, all right, well, she's eligible now. Like which, which one of us do you approve of? But instead they're, they're just eating away at the, the cows and enjoying the, the fruits of the, um, the estate of, of Odysseus' house. They're, they're eating him out of house and home, eating Telemachus out of house and home. They're being bad guests and they're not being good hosts. They're not acting like they own the place on all these levels. So when, when Athena gets there, hanging, even though she looks really respectable, and this is, this is just seen as incredibly a bad faux pas and Telemachus greets her and he's, he's like visibly annoyed that, um, that these people haven't greeted her and, and he extends her hospitality, welcomes her in. And, and, uh, and she, you know, long story short, she says, um, you know, he explains the situation. She's like, you know, my boy, have you heard of the story of what Orestes did? And Telemachus says, no, tell me, well, Orestes was the son of Agamemnon. Agamemnon was the king of the Greeks, the leader of the Greeks at Troy, the, the, the biggest of the Kings. He organized the expedition to capture Helen and they won. And when, when he came back, like practically upon arrival, he gets murdered by his own wife, who was seduced by his cousin, who wanted to steal the throne from Agamemnon. And so, um, Agamemnon's murdered by his cousin and his own, his own lovely wife, Clytemnestra. And then they rule Argos in his absence for a few years. And then Orestes, his son, sneaks back in and murders them both. Murders his own mother and his uncle and takes back Argos for the bloodline of Agamemnon. And Athena says, you might have to do just such a thing with these suitors. So she's trying to stir him up by this example of, you know. Is she trying to create a rift between him and his mother? I don't think, I don't think that's what's going on. You could have read it in that way, using that example, right? Yeah. But it does kind of point to the issue of, hey, you know, your mom has her own mind and she could go astray. Like you have to be the man in the situation no matter what. And you have to be dangerous. You have to become a man of violence, potentially. You have to be, you have to be able to scare these guys. Okay. So Athena's come in to cock block 108 suitors. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, uh, you know, get, get Telemachus to, to man up finally and, you know, go on his, his quest. And basically she's, she says, here's what you got to do. Confront the suitors, uh, call out their injustice and then get out of town and go and meet some of your dad's friends. Meet some of Odysseus's old buddies on the mainland. And this is what he does in short. And, um, and so he goes and he meets, uh, Nestor, this old guy, one of the wisest of the Greeks, very old, um, very talkative old man. It's kind of funny. Um, and Nestor at Pylos tells Telemachus some news. He hasn't heard about Odysseus other than he got, he got, uh, uh, you know, blown by the storm off into oblivion. Nobody knows what happened to him, but, but Nestor tells Telemachus about, um, give some more details about Agamemnon actually, which is interesting for, for the bigger plot. So when Agamemnon, uh, left, uh, to go to Troy, he left, his wife was really good when he left. Clytemnestra was a wise woman. She's well-born. She was actually the sister of Helen who also started off good. You know, this is kind of the threat, you know, good women can go wrong if the circumstances are, are, uh, are wrong. What did he do to keep her on the straight and narrow? He left a bard there to look after her. So Agamemnon kind of left a homer there with his wife, Clytemnestra, to tell her improving stories and tell her stories of what goes wrong when women behave badly or whatever it is. But, you know, the poet is sort of seen as this upholder of the moral order. Slightly self-serving by Homer there? You know, you might think of it as a pro-bard propaganda. Um, I think that would be fair, but it, it, it, it is not just Homer that thinks this. This is a very deep Greek idea that, you know, you could see it in Plato, you could see it in the tragedians. And it's like the poets are kind of, especially in an oral culture, um, poets are the ones who remember the things that need to be passed down from generation to generation, right? So they kind of, they have a lot of moral credibility if they're good ones. And, you know, there can be bad ones too. But as soon, so basically Aegisthus, Agamemnon's cousin, knew that he couldn't get to Clytemnestra. He kept kind of making advances at, uh, his, his cousin's wife, and she just kept swatting him away. And then he realized, ah, the poet is the problem. So he captures the poet and he sends him off to a desert island. And then Clytemnestra was morally defenseless. And that's when Aegisthus swooped in and seduced her because the poet was away. Um, so yeah, there, I think this really does match how, how the Greeks would have thought of like, why you need epic, epic poetry. It's like, it is actually a kind of moral pillar of society. Um, so anyway, he, you know, Nestor says, that's all I know, but Menelaus is alive. Go talk to Menelaus. Maybe he knows more. Um, and you know, another Greek hero from Troy, uh, Telemachus goes talk to Menelaus and he actually meets Helen of Troy. She's, she's back to being Helen of Sparta at this point. She's, you know, she's come back and repatriated, repatriated, yeah. Returned to a rightful owner. Um, uh, so, uh, yeah. And Helen, it's a really interesting interaction with Helen. She's still kind of, she's kind of chastened, uh, you know, she's, she's become a matriarch instead of a maiden, but she still kind of got that spooky allure, femme fatale charm. She gives Telemachus, uh, uh, She slips some kind of drug into his drink at one point so he can enjoy himself better at this party that they're at. They're throwing a big feast when he arrives, marrying off their Menelaus' two kids. And they start to tell stories. And Helen puts a drug in his drink that would make any man forget about all desire of returning home. And even if his parents were slaughtered before his eyes, he would not care until the next day. It's this kind of like. I think it's symbolic of, you know, the power of the female charms over a man. Helen of Troy not showering herself in glory across these two books. Fact. Definitely rolling some dice into the fray. And the interesting thing, too, is she. So I could quibble with Emily Wilson on a translation point here. In the more popular Odyssey, uh, translation these days. So Helen says she's the first person to recognize Telemachus. It's common to not, like. You welcome in a guest before you ask them who they are. Only after you've fed them and, you know, given them some, you know, a nice robe to wear or whatever, then do you ask them who they are. But Helen recognizes Telemachus immediately and she says, If I'm not mistaken, you are the son of Odysseus, who. Odysseus left as a tiny infant when the Greeks all came to Troy to, um, to take me back, the shameless one. And the Greek there actually says. It could be translated as "shameless bitch." "Kunops" is the Greek word. It means "dog face." It's a very rude thing. She calls herself, you know, a bitch or something. Like, it's. She kind of insults herself. And it's, um. It's rude. It's really disarming, I think. So, um, Emily Wilson translated that line as something like, um, "They came to take me back, the one who hounded them," or something. Oh. It. So the hound is kind of an allusion to the dog piece. But it kind of softens the fact that Helen is really kind of. Slightly more flattering. Yeah, it's more. But the point is, she seduces you by saying the bad thing that you had in mind about her. Yeah. How can this woman just, you know, pretend like we don't all know the terrible thing she did? And that's the first thing she names. And it's like, "Oh." You can get away with anything with enough self-awareness. Yeah, yeah. She kind of insults herself to draw you in. And she does this in the Iliad, too. She's a really tricky woman. Um, but, you know, she's behaving herself. And, um, you know, Menelaus seems happy. There's a little bit of. There's a little bit of tension between the two of them. It's a really interesting scene in book four. Um, but. But the point of this whole quest, to sum up the Telemachus piece, is he has to prove himself to the peers of his father when his father's not abs-- not there. And he does this by, you know, making the journey, asking about his dad, and saying, "I'm just trying to get my house in order." And kind of behaving himself well. You know, he acts very tactfully. He's pious. And, you know, they're always. In this trip, the houses that he meets are all these well-ordered households. There's this great contrast with the chaos at home. And one of the things that signals that they're well-ordered is there's always-- there's all these sacrifices to the gods. Like, every time before a meal, they pray to the gods, they wash their hands, they have a sacrifice. Never, never do the suitors pray before a meal. You know, it's a sign. They're, uh-- Godless. They're godless. They're-- they're chaotic. They're not doing what they're supposed to be doing. So, um, Homer cares a lot about these things in the-- in the-- in-- more in the Odyssey than he does about the Iliad. These are, like, little things that sort of signal, you know, good order in-- in culture and society. Mm-hmm. OK. And is that the end of this rite of passage? Yeah. So that's-- that's basically the end. Menelaus invites Telemachus to stay as long as he wants. And Telemachus says, I got to get back. You've been very kind. I could stay here a whole year. It's-- it's so nice. Menelaus is, like, one of the richest Greeks-- Thanks for drugging me. Yes. I've had a really good time, let me tell you. Yep. But, uh, I got to get back to-- Menelaus offers him these horses. It's, like, really nice. It's-- it's like offering a kid a Ferrari, you know? And-- and Telemachus says, you know, my island is not horse country. It's goat country. There's no-- there's no-- no-- no place to ride around horses. It's an ugly, scraggly little island. And-- but that's home for me. And I don't know. He-- he has to-- he knows he has to get back and take on the challenge. He has to, like, suffer to-- to become who he is. But that-- that is the kind of end of it. And while he's away, it should be mentioned, the suitors also plan-- they find out that he snuck off. And they plan to ambush him with a ship on his way back and murder him. So he's-- he's got a target painted on him. What a bunch of bastards. They are-- again and again, Homer wants you to know, these guys are bad. All of them are bad. They deserve everything that's coming to them. 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Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. What are they supposed to represent philosophically at this stage? I think-- so there's the whole anarchy versus patriarchy going on. There's the kind of usurped glory. I think the odyssey-- Good men, bad men, absence of good men means that there's a vacuum for bad men to step in. 100%. And I think there's a kind of broader arc of the-- the odyssey is about the clash between order and entropy and sort of dissolution of complex societies into kind of barbaric worlds. There's a kind of barbaric or animal, you know, soup. And the suitors kind of represent those forces of violence and turmoil and primordial soup out of which order needs to be established sometimes-- sometimes violently. Yeah. And that's justice. That's importantly. To establish that is about justice. OK. And then we switch, and Odysseus wakes up one day on Calypso's island. And Odysseus needs to get home. Staring off into the ocean, sitting there, weeping, longing for his homeland. Calypso is, you know, this incredibly hot, divine goddess who-- he's washed up ashore on her island, and she offered him hospitality. And basically, they've been sleeping together for the past eight years. OK. But Odysseus points out, never did they win the heart within me. So it was kind of under compulsion. Got my penis, but not my heart. Yeah. Yeah. It was just sex, baby, you know? And I-- Homer seems to take this as an acceptable explanation. We're going to darken the environment appropriately. It's getting-- it's about to get spooky. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. OK. So that's-- yeah, he wakes up. This is book five. And Hermes arrives as he was sent from Zeus. And Hermes-- goes to Calypso first. Well, first, he gets to the island, and he's just stunned. It's so beautiful. It's just lush fruit trees, and pleasant breeze, and verdant, and perfect, not too hot, not too cold. It's not like Houston humid. It's just like-- So what people are saying. It's like Hermes arrives, and he goes, I'm so glad I'm not in fucking Houston. Yeah. Well, you know, Houston is humid, but there's no place sweeter than one's homeland. Yeah. So even the gods are amazed at how beautiful and how nice of a place this would be to spend eternity, which is precisely what Calypso is promising Odysseus. She says, forget about your wife. Forget about your son. Just stay with me forever. I will make you immortal. And not just immortal, you'll be young and beautiful the rest of your years. Sometimes goddesses forget to promise the whole youth thing. There's a bad story about this happening with this guy, Tithonus, who the goddess Dawn, Eos, managed to get it arranged so that he would be immortal, but forgot to ask Zeus that he would be made youthful forever. And so he just gets older and older and older. Just decrepit. And never dies. And he kind of shrinks to a little bug. Always got to read the small print. Yeah. Right. You know, you never know when you make a deal with a goddess, like, there there might be some loophole that fucker that screws you over okay yeah it doesn't always it's not always bad hermes arrives it's real nice uh odysseus has been piping calypso for ages yeah unwillingly yeah yeah i'm sure um but hermes says you you gotta let him go and calypso hems and haws this is not fair uh he's my he's my boy toy but she says all right i'll help him get out of here so like a god says she so she's a she's a nymph which is which is a divine yeah she's she's a goddess basically sort of lesser divinity right um and um to all to all accounts very beautiful i mean she goes to odysseus after hermes gives her the bad news and she says all right well i have to let you go zeus told me i have to let you go but you don't actually have to go we could still do the whole immortality thing i mean what is your wife have that i don't have and odysseus says look you're right you are far more beautiful than my own wife and this place is really nice but i miss my homeland i miss my wife and my kid and she um essentially she's promising him something that like why is this unsatisfying it's kind of like your your island vacation it lasts a week it's nice i needed that all right time to get back to work but what if the island vacation lasts weeks and weeks and months and we probably all felt that feeling i think it's it's easy to understand why this offer is like ultimately not appealing to spend the rest of your eternity on this leisurely vacation with a little umbrella in your drink but it's it's also like particularly uh pointed for odysseus in the story homer homer gives these people epithets these like recurring adjectives that describe them in the poetry odysseus is many turned polytropos he is much like many crafted you know very very crafty polymatus he is also much suffering or much enduring polytlas so all of the things about that kind of make odysseus what he is that he's crafty that he's um that he's well traveled that he's uh that he endures and endures and it's just kind of what makes him special and what makes him who he is it's like makes up his identity none of that would be true if he stayed on that island he would kind of it would be kind of like a loss of identity so i see why it's not appealing um but she you know she says i'll help you go here she goes to her tool shed check the tool shed that's hot yeah well that that was a vote of confidence for her apparently not not that not that great a conversation but um practical enough wonderful she brings him an uh you know auger and axe whatever you need to make a make a make a boat and uh she says all right here are the tools there are the trees crack are you on your own so he has to make his own raft he's here on his own yeah completely on his own totally yeah he's lost all of his comrades at this point they're all dead some sometimes it's his fault sometimes it's their fault sometimes both but they're all gone uh you know 12 ships i think is what he took to troy so a lot of guys dead and uh um and he has to make his own boat and that's that's a really like interesting symbolic moment there so odysseus is um we talked about athena being his patron goddess athena is the god of craft she's a kind of warrior goddess she's a virgin goddess she's depicted with the spear and the helmet but she's she's a warrior goddess in the sense that sometimes you need to win wars through trickery and craft she is also the goddess of like weaving she's goddess of the olive olive tree is a is a very domestic tree you know you have to plant it and wait many years before it ever gives you anything worthwhile and the older and older it gets the more and more olives it makes and so it's the sign of civilization athena is their goddess of civilization and also kind of a goddess of technology so the fact that odysseus knows how to make his own boat a seaworthy boat is is kind of important it's kind of symbolic that and and and this is a really important kind of polarity of the world that's really encapsulated well in that image um and and this is a really important kind of polarity of the world that's really that's really encapsulated well in that image um and and this is a really important kind of polarity of the world that's really encapsulated well in that image um and and this is a really important kind of polarity of the world that's really encapsulated well in that image um and and this is a really important kind of polarity of the world that's really encapsulated well in that image um and and older and chaos again yeah yeah and and this is actually the greeks really think of the world in these binaries you know there's uh um civilization and barbarism nature and culture male and female um there is uh cooked and raw you know do the people here eat eat their food cooked or do they eat it raw that's kind of a dividing point between man and animal or man kind of wild man so um you know odysseus is clearly on one side of that through through throughout the story um and uh and we'll see why it matters in a little bit but so he he escapes the island of calypso has to kind of and he has to do it nicely too right like he has to have a an amicable breakup because you don't want to piss off a goddess if you don't have to and then he gets to this island of he's built the ship so he's built the boat yes he builds the raft uh not a great raft but it's seaworthy and he's at sea for you know he ends up being at sea for 20 days sailing sailing sailing and at some point poseidon finishes his party with the ethiopians and he's like what the hell and he smashes odysseus's raft with a storm and uh odysseus eventually has to swim to sea to swim to to shore um calypso gave him all of these you know fine luxurious robes it's a parting gift and he has to take all that off because because if he keeps it on he's going to sink and die so he ends up kind of scrambling ashore on this new land totally naked um which i think is very symbolic it's a kind of death and rebirth yeah almost like baptism and he gets to shore and just collapses underneath an olive bush and then he wakes up because a ball bounced into the grass next to him and uh he discovers that he's he's on a civilized place there are humans there in fact a bunch of you know attractive nubile young ladies are washing washing some clothes in this little river and um and so he you know has to come up with the plan at that point like uh so this is a great scene because he basically the the next couple of stages for his journey have to do just like kind of like treating calypso well uh to the extent he could he has to he has to really use women's agency to get him what he needs next to get home to accomplish his goal and the first girl that he first woman he meets happens to be the princess of the island she's the the daughter of the of the king and queen as he finds out her name is now sika there's a lot of uh like paintings of this scene i mean many scenes of the odyssey but this one in particular um odysseus is stark naked and um he emerges from his bush and he holds a little like branch in front of his private parts so that uh to have a little bit of dignity and you know approaches these girls and all of them just like scream and run away because he looks horrific i mean he probably looks like tom hanks from from castaway at this point and he's caked in brine and uh you know they're thinking is this guy gonna try to savage savage us yeah ravage oh please no mr seaman don't savage me yeah and that that is an aspect of it there's this kind of like tension so all the all the girls run away except the the the princess now sikaha is like she's taller than the rest she's more attractive than the rest she's clearly braver than the rest and she's just like standing there waiting for him to explain himself and and she's 20-ish homer tells us and she you know he tells he kind of builds up to this she's actually she went down to the to the coast thinking about marriage with like marriage on her mind she wants to like clean some clothes and look nice and sort of make an appearance around town and see if see if any of the young men want to you know make a pass at her she's she's ready to kind of move on to the future she's ready to kind of move on to the future she's on to the next stage and so you know odysseus addresses her from a few feet off uh wow fair maiden uh princess i don't know whether you're a goddess or a mortal wow you are just i've never seen anything like you you're so beautiful one time i saw something that was almost as beautiful as you it was this little palm tree that grew up by the altar of apollo at delos and i was leading many men there so you know he's kind of giving him giving her a little backstory about himself as as a respectable man and he says uh may your parents or your brothers be happy if you're immortal and may you find a great husband you know kind of playing on the tension a little bit and could you please get me a towel uh and show me to the town and uh she's kind of flattered like it worked he's charmed her he's like already got her charmed and he doesn't refer to the fact that he's got a wife and kid at home he's just kind of concealing that and uh you know kind of you know luring her in a little bit and she you know long story short she she ends up um telling him what he needs to do and that is go talk to my mom the queen not that she totally runs the show but she's kind of like the back door to get to the king her mom is arete um who is the um the prince the queen of the island and odysseus makes his way there and he kind of sneaks into the palace alone uh she does give him more than a towel she actually you know her handmaidens like give him some actual clothes and some oil to rub himself he takes a bath in the river so he looks a little better less like a you know wild seaman and he sneaks in and he and he embraces arete by the knees and says oh lady i've i've traveled many days and been shipwrecked and i just trying to make my way home i please i supplicate you as zeus is the god of suppliants would you please help me blah blah blah and uh he speaks well and and and she says all right stranger you seem like a decent noble man uh let me introduce you to my husband she introduces him to alcinous the king and odysseus just like you know charisma 11 out of 10 like he charms his way into the ruling family of of the island uh just with his words and in fact before they even know his name they offer their daughter in marriage to him it just gives you a sense of this is what he's famous for right persuasion um but he you know if if he had screwed it up with the princess if he had screwed it up with her mother he could have he could have lost his head basically if he had offended him somehow if he had you know savaged or given any hint of savagery it would have been over for him so these women have power but they're dangerous too you know they could go either way and um and then uh basically uh they they throw a feast for him they say we'll get you home we're gonna send you home and he declines the the marriage invitation of course let's let's get you on one of our magic ships they have these magic ships but um first let's have a feast for you and so they throw this big party and they invite all the all the special people from the town and that's where he tells his story eventually at that at that party this episode is brought to you by whoop according to my whoop i've tracked nearly 2 000 days of my life and the thing that still gets me is that i could have predicted almost every bad day before it happens that's because whoop gives you a complete picture of your health every single day your sleep your workouts your recovery your breathing your heart rate even your steps and over time you get to see what's working and what isn't and the whoop 5.0 is the best version yet it's seven percent 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doesn't get him on the bad side of calypso uh his ability then to cajole and and play the game when he lands on this new island so a lot of it is a yeah an upholding of being canny being like a slick operator yeah yeah i mean would agamemnon have charmed his way in with this young princess i don't know i mean maybe uh but but this is this is the arts of athena and this is actually it's actually these these kind of things these kind of tricky canny things are what he's going to need to eventually uh clean out the suitors and get his get his home back so yeah it's this is he is a hero who can't use violence in his great arc a little bit of violence but mostly it's it's like trickery and um in places where he just he's just vastly out out outmatched in force um so there's this this is the the moment actually when he's at this party at the phaeacian's house um where we meet demodocus the blind bard so there's some athletic games you know the phaeacians challenge him to show his stuff and he's like no just leave me alone i'm i'm tired i was 20 20 days at sea and like oh come on what you probably can't even throw a discus he's like all right punks and he stands up and he he chucks this giant discus way bigger than any of the other discuses way further than any other kids and he he shows them up but then um after the meal they're relaxing and listening to the bard phemius he tells a few stories some of them famous he tells a story of harry's and uh aries you know stealing hephysis's wife away and he's very pregnant sort of tales of what goes wrong when the husband is away putting that fear in your mind like what is going to happen but then after the last story odysseus himself asks the bard demodocus to tell the story of the trojan horse and nobody knows who he is yet they still don't know and demodocus tells the story and you know everybody knows it but the greeks build a horse they put a bunch of you know warriors in there and odysseus included it was odysseus's plan the other greeks go off to an island the trojans see this horse and they think it's uh some kind of talisman of power the various versions of like why did they bring this giant horse into their walls but they do it and they bring it up to the citadel doors close at night the greeks slip out and they're like oh my god i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die open the gates city is sacked long story short but it's interesting while demodocus is telling this story odysseus i mean apparently he's a good bard you know tragic odysseus just starts crying and um he's trying to be be discreet about it but homer says he weeps like a woman who's lost her husband at war and whose city has been sacked and she's been being led away by her captors so it's almost like he's he's weeping like the victims of the tragedy he inflicted upon troy a very kind of poignant moment does that mean that he's sort of having sympathy for the people that he destroyed at troy and homer kind of leaves it open but alcinois can can tell the king yeah you know maybe that's enough epic poetry for tonight uh our guest is uh very tired and he's like i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die uh he can see it's historical yeah so um so he says um stranger i could tell that this story was bothering you did you have a brother or or a cousin perhaps a father who went off to fight at troy you know right after they've heard the story of how odysseus sacked troy and odysseus says all right i'll tell you who i am at last and that's when the great narrative begins in book book nine which is i think the the high point the best part of the story and um and odysseus is kind of playing the bard here notably he's doing he's basically let he's allowed to be homer for four books just narrating these amazing tales relating himself yeah well i mean and he doesn't always come off as the best guy in the stories which is interesting uh but you know they do they do shine a good light on him he's he's he learns from his mistakes um and um and and there's a moment there's a pause in the in the storytelling at this book 11 where everybody's just like you know gawking jaws dropped and he's he's enchanted the room just like homer enchants the room what's he telling he's telling the story of troy so his he says i'm odysseus i was kept by cersei and calypso but they never they never uh swayed the heart in me um i'm from ithaca i'm just trying to make my my life better and i'm just trying to make my life better maybe way back to ithaca it's a crappy rocky island um but you know everyone's homeland is most dear to them blah blah blah and then he tells the story right after they left troy what happened on the return journey journey and um you know some of the familiar faces appear now they try to have a cattle raid on these thracians kikones and it goes well for a while and then the thracians invite their friends and you know basically slaughter and chase all the greeks back to their ships and deceased has to kind of run tail between his legs back to his ships and they go on so it's the first sign that things aren't aren't going to go perfectly um and then they they meet the lotus eaters that's the next people they meet um very very tempting uh um a very a very tempting spot you know british podcasters who just talk about culture issue all all day but uh no the lotus eaters are basically like potheads i think and um the lotus flower just makes you want to forget your return journey home and just sit and eat lotus until you die uh kind of like opium or they they were aware of opium but that that's the and then the next monster they meet you know it's clear that they're sort of being tempted as they're traveling back and um and they get blown off course to this island of of the cyclopses and that's that's like the the grand i think that one of the the best the best stories of of this whole journey that brings all a lot of these themes to to the four um why well okay cyclopses are emily wilson translates uh cyclopses a couple places in her translation as cyclopean people like they're uh like people people of color temporarily temporarily uh afflicted with being one-eyed monsters i don't know her take is a very dei approach to a story from 3 000 years ago yeah i know emily she's she's a good scholar she's she's good to her people but i i like to take some pot shots at her translations because i mean like her take would be the cyclopses are kind of uh you know odysseus is this greek colonizer and he's looking at everything through the kind of you know greek man colonizer lens and then all these people that he meets are just they're just like people and they're strange but you know maybe they have their own way of doing things but and the cyclops's way of doing things is to be a giant one-eyed monster that eats people so um okay so that's the indigenous wisdom of the yeah yeah all right um but uh and he plays his trick on the cyclops you know he goes and they go in the cave and um the cyclops um eats eat some of his men and traps traps odysseus and his men with this big rock so you're watching the you're watching the troops of odysseus dwindle after each different round after round and i think the cyclops story is really interesting because the way that uh odysseus describes it is they are um they they live in little uh family units they do not care about the gods they they think zeus is a chump and uh every man is a law to his own wife and children so they're they're giant forceful men that think law and order is is you know for pussies and you know they're kind of like extreme libertarians you know they don't have a social order other than the household and this makes them vulnerable this makes them underestimate the power of trickery they're not coordinated they're not unified yeah exactly and and they so the cyclops himself polyphemus is is the one that odysseus faces he had actually heard a prophecy that someday some man named odysseus would come and blind him and and after he gets blinded he tells this story and he's sort of raging uh he said i was not a prophet once came and told us that i would get blinded by a man named odysseus but i thought he would be a strong man not some little pipsqueak you know uh so he was he was not on guard for craft they're they're they're men of force again this is this binary of like force and wildness versus cleverness and civilization and odysseus tricks him you know after they're trapped in the in the cave and a cyclops is kind of gradually eating the man that odysseus brought with him and making him watch odysseus gives him some wine some really good wine and the cyclops just doesn't have the power to do anything about it he's just he doesn't have the cultural antibodies of of moderation you know and he just it's like giving whiskey to the native americans or whatever like exactly what i was thinking he just he just slams it yeah he gets really drunk and he says stranger this is really good stuff and he says your gift your your your guest friend gift cyclops is a very bad host too kind of like the suitors your gift is going to be i'll eat you last you know congratulations out drunk and meanwhile odysseus has made this this um spear or this kind of like stake a six foot stake that he's he's carved uh while the cyclops was away uh tending his sheep and hardened with the points and the fire i mean it's a very kind of like technological sort of act too kind of like building the ship yeah more craft yeah more craft and they you know they stab him when he's drunk in the eye and he's blinded and um so you know moving on that's how he defeats the cyclops craft and oh and of course that's how he gets cursed in the first place because he makes the mistake as they're kind of sailing away from the cyclops's island the cyclops is foaming at the mouth and raging at them where are they where are they um odysseus says uh well he told him i should have probably mentioned the famous trick uh when he introduces himself he says my name is nobody nobody and then when the cyclops gets stabbed in the eye he calls out to his fellow cyclops libertarians in the other households and he says nobody is is hurting me nobody is just you know uh forcefully harming me and they say well if nobody's hurting you then that's just tough luck you know maybe you're sick and zeus just makes people suffer there's nothing we can do about it oh very funny so and there's actually a play on words there because uh if you get into the like greek when when they say when he says nobody's hurting me uh it's utis nobody is utis but if you put the the no in an if clause so the cyclops is the other cyclops respond if nobody is killing you then the ooh the negative changes to a may so it's if matis is killing you and if trickery is killing you is how it sounds it's it's uh it's two words in in their mouth but we hear it as one word basically you know it's just a very funny like way of saying trickery killed him and not violence or trickery you know blasted his double on yeah so it yeah how'd he get cursed uh so yeah he gets cursed by uh basically giving the cyclops his name he says if anybody asked you how you got blinded tell them odysseus did it and polyphemus says oh i knew it i knew it and then he says father poseidon disease is like what father poseidon poseidon is the father of polyphemus the cyclops little did he know his son little did he know that he was blinding the son of the sea god poseidon and so polyphemus curses him may he never get home or may he uh have a really really really really hard time and lose all of his companions and poseidon listened and that's what happened jared you ever considered that you might have a drinking problem i don't consider a lot chris well you drank an entire case of athletic brewing co last night but they're non-alcoholic and that's not a problem sorry man i just kept chugging away for the regret to creep in never happened see 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storytelling so it's it's really an epic narrative yeah uh maybe a couple more episodes are worth kind of highlighting so um eventually they make their way their way to this other island cersei's island here's another strange woman that he has to deal with cersei is um It's a divine witch goddess, sort of like Calypso style, but a little bit more kind of dangerous or dark. And Odysseus sends his men into the island. They see smoke coming up from this hut, and he sends his men in. He waits at the ships. The men go. They find this hut in this clearing, and there are wolves and lions just prowling around like tame animals. Strange. And then there's this, you know, enchanting lady bustling around her hut singing these strange songs. Oh, she sees them. Oh, gentlemen, please, right this way. And they go and accept her hospitality. She feeds them, and she whacks them all in the head with a magic wand and turns them into pigs. So one of the men escapes as a pig. As a human. Right. He doesn't go in. All the other guys are pigs. He just hustles back to Odysseus, tells him what happened. It's fucked in there. There's this chick. She's got a wand. All the guys are pigs. We shouldn't go. Yeah, yeah. It's a nightmare party. Immediately go, go to the ship. This is like almost as bad as that Cyclops guy. Yeah, yeah. And this happens a few times on the journey. People are like, please, Odysseus, can we just leave? He's like, no, I just want to see what might be in store for us here. Maybe they want to give me a present. And this is another one of those instances. But he draws his sword and he's like ready for action. Charges in and Hermes stops him. He says, Odysseus, if you go in there, you're just going to become a pig. She's going to turn you into a pig. Stop and let me help you. And he pulls out of the ground this root and it's, well, it's a plant with black root and a white flower. He says, this is moly. And this is not where we get the word holy moly, but if that helps you remember that. I know I looked it up. I was like, that's too good. No, it is too good. But it is a famous plant. And he tells Odysseus the nature of this plant is what Homer said. The physis of this plant is the physis where we get the word physics, you know, nature in Greek. And a lot of philosophers have made a lot about this. We could. We could maybe go into it, but this is the first occurrence of the word nature. Like the idea that there is a nature that things have natures is a sort of like, that's an idea that had to develop, but Hermes tells him the secret of this plant. And, um, and Odysseus like, you know, rubs it on himself or eat some, it's not really clear what, but it's a, it's an antidote to her magic. And so he goes in, you know, the pigs and the wolves and the lions are there and Cersei beckons him in and she feeds him and he plays dumb and then when she tries to whack him with the magic wand and turn him into a pig, nothing happens. And she's like, he stands up and he draws a sword. He's like, all right, Cersei, she goes up. And, um, she's like, how did you, how did you, you know, avoid my magic? And, uh, and then she asks him as, as you might expect to go to bed with her. Uh, and Hermes had warned him that this might happen. She, she's going to ask you to go to bed with her. You gotta do it. Dude, no choice. Take one for the team, dude. Pipe the pig lady. Come on now. She goes grin and bear. Man up. Yeah. And, uh, he says, but she's actually trying to unman you. It's a trick. Maybe. Who knows? But you gotta get her to swear an oath that she's not gonna harm you. And Odysseus makes her swear an oath. All right, we'll go to bed, but you know, no harm to me or my companions. And you gotta change them back. And so she says, fine. All right, we'll go to bed. But you know, no harm to me or my companions. They still go to bed. And then she changes his men back. And Odysseus puts a shift in. Yeah. The only people that Odysseus hasn't had sex with so far have been Cyclops. Yeah. As far as I can see. Yeah. Well, and who knows? Because he's the one telling the story. It's the Odysseus sex tour thus far. Matt Damon's really got his work cut out for him. Known the minds of many people, many men and women. And so, you know, he's taking one for the team. Day after day after day. And it takes about a year. She's changed him back into men. And, you know, look, it's a nice place, right? They get the food and the fun little pets to play with. But the men are like, all right, Odysseus, it's been a year. You're having a good time. This is a fine enough place. But we kind of miss our homes. Can we get out of here? And so he makes her help him get on to the next stage. And the next stage, as she explains. Is if you really want to get home, you have to go on a deeper, darker quest. To the underworld. And basically he has to go consult this. Is to go consult this prophet, Tiresias, who's dead. This blind, another blind, wise person. Who's died. Famous Theban Tiresias. And to get to him, you know, you don't go down to the underworld in the Odyssey. You go out. And so you have to sail many days. It's a long story short. He sails many days. You know, it gets misty and weird. And they run aground finally on this strange land. And he has to do this right. Dig a trench with his sword. And put honey and milk and barley. And he has to sacrifice some lambs. Drain their blood out into the hole. And then the ghosts of the dead come. So, like, you go out. And then the underworld comes to you. And this is, I think this is one of the best scenes in the whole book. But, you know, all of these wraiths come. These, like, gibbering wraiths. And they're not intelligible. And they're kind of, they're not, like, they're not like souls. Like, your full identity is there. They're sort of, I don't know, insubstantial remnants of people, you might say. But to basically, to get to him. To get them to speak to him. He has to let them drink this, you know, concoction in the ditch. Which includes blood. So they get blood. And they kind of have a little moment of liveliness. So they can actually speak face to face to Odysseus. And the first one he talks, well, the first one he talks to is this guy, Elpenor. Who fell off the roof and died. And Odysseus, will you bury me? Yes. All right. Next. Then he talks to Tiresias. Tiresias tells him. Tells him, you know, you're going to get home fine. If, if you can keep your hands and your mouth off. That came out wrong. Off the cows of the sun. And you're going to, you're going to run around on this island. The cattle of the sun. If you can restrain yourself and your men, you'll get home. But if you eat of the cows of the sun, you're going to get blasted and die. So it's going to take more kind of restraint to get home. And he says, also, you know, you're, he tells him about the suitors who haven't actually arrived on the scene, but he's, he's a prophet. And so it's going to be really, really tough to get back home. And Odysseus says, all right, thank you. And the other is also this other prophecy about a quest. He has to go on, which we can omit for now. It's a very strange scene. But after that, he, he meets his mom because his mother has died since he's left. And he meets his mom. He lets her drink the blood. He tries to embrace her. Um, but you know, his hands go right through her and she tells him that's how it is with the dead. You can't, you can't embrace a dead person. And she kind of, you know, explains to him how the whole afterlife thing works. And, um, which I think is important for Homer somehow that, that, that, that the knowledge that uphold civilization includes this kind of metaphysical stuff. Weird afterlife stuff. That's my read at least. And then I think. One of the most interesting things that is not often pointed out the, the first group of the dead. So he meets while he's down there, he meets the ghost of Achilles, ghost of Agamemnon, Hercules, a few other guys. But the first people that he meets are not these heroes, these famous heroes from, from the Iliad. It's these famous women, the mother of Amphion who built the walls of Thebes. Um, see a few other mortals who had died. A few other mortals who had bedded with gods. And, and as he's kind of letting them drink of the blood and conversing with them, it's almost like he's satisfying his curiosity. You know, he's a very like intellectually capacious man. He wants to know everything. He's that kind of guy. And all of these women come and they tell him the stories of their sons or their fathers, their brothers. They, they kind of tell him about these heroes that he wouldn't otherwise have access to. And, um, you know, I had a, I had a friend pass away a long time ago. He was a little older than me and it was kind of a mentor. And after he died, I think I helped at this, this moment kind of helped me realize this. After he died, I, I was hanging out with his mom after the funeral. And she was just telling me all of these stories about him as a young man that I'd never really understood why he was so impressive or what, what he had to go through. And, um, I think, I think that this is kind of about how, how women fit into the story. the making of a hero you know it seems really important to me now i never noticed it until that happened uh but they're sort of serving that role um narrating the deeds of their of their family upholding order um all right and one more person i want to mention while he's down there among the dead is he meets achilles and this is this is the moment where you you see this tension between the iliad and the odyssey where homer kind of poses the question what is worth striving after achilles died young he traded a long life for eternal glory he may face that choice in the iliad and he made his choice and the iliad says that was the right choice but when odysseus meets the ghost of achilles he says wow uh you were so glorious in life achilles it's it's amazing to meet you now that you're dead we we mourned you very much and achilles says to odysseus uh don't don't make light of death in front of me i would rather be a slave a higher a hired a hireling of a man with no land to his name tell him and alo andre paraclero maybe i would rather be a hired servant uh lowest status person on earth then be king of the dead so it's what does that mean achilles is telling him maybe maybe glory isn't all that it's cracked up to be maybe odysseus got is getting or has the potential to get the better thing in life which is the best thing in life which is the best thing in life which is continuation of his line and the other thing that achilles says to odysseus is if i had one more day of life you know what i would do i would go to my father's house because i have heard that there are men in my country insulting my father and i would go and slaughter all of them i would avenge my father's name and by the way have you heard any news about my son so achilles you know this this great brilliant glamorous warrior from the iliad what he cares about in death is his family you know this this is the thing that matters i think that's one of the big messages of the odyssey what really matters in the long run what what is permanent what can you make permanent is glory permanent is people talking about you far and wide after you died is that really permanence or is permanence sort of the biological continuation of the household odysseus is maybe the greatest hero because he manages to get both of them which requires cunning and craft and and force but also requires luck you know um so whatever odysseus thought of that you know uh makes his way back to circe's island and and there's more there's more temptations to to face he has to go through the sirens um skillet charybdis they finally meet the cattle of the sun and odysseus falls asleep uh at some you know a god put sleep upon him maybe it was faded and while he's asleep his men sacrifice and eat all the cattle of the sun and uh but he doesn't he doesn't eat of the the cursed beef did he warn the men yes yes he warned them again and again and they said i would rather uh one of his his leaders of his men says odysseus is asleep he's he's been lying to us this whole time about this and that but you know maybe he's telling the truth about the cows look i'd rather eat and uh and die than than like starve uh waste away like we're gonna die anyway we might as well have a good time while we do it uh so as soon as they eat the the cows the wind starts to blow they get stuck on this island that's why they get hungrier and hungrier as soon as they eat the cows the winds start to blow and you know they get on the ship lightning bolts they all die odysseus grabs a board and kind of floats to cersei's island or calypso's island and uh and then he ends his story and the phaetians say wow okay um so will you be packing soon uh let's get you off to your to your homeland and they send him off on on a ship back to back to ithaca how easy is the journey that journey is incredibly easy he sleeps the whole time he they put him down on the on the boat he falls asleep they get all the way to ithaca they take him off the boat he's still asleep they stick him on the shore and they stick they loaded him up with gifts they stick all the gifts there on the shore and you know he wakes up and they're gone he's like wow uh he's like those those bastards they left me on a on a what island is this this doesn't look like my home uh but eventually it turns out that it is ithaca that they left him on it's like he fast traveled in a computer game yeah a video game he just pressed a button and moved on the map yeah one location to another yeah it's it's it's really weird and i think it's it's kind of like i don't know it's like was it all a dream i don't know he was crossing this boundary from the you know adventurous mythical world where the and the phaetians are kind of close to the gods they're they don't have um there's no pirates they have these magical ships they have maybe these like robot dogs um it's not clear robot golden dogs um guarding the palace uh maybe they can move maybe they can't homer doesn't really specify but it's it's an eerie peaceful shangri-la uh again it's kind of a temptation like he he could have stayed there and married that hot young girl it was a real temptation and she was you know she was like a young penelope too good good you know great catch but he had suffering to do he had more suffering to do uh but you know he left that all behind and i think it's like he's crossing this metaphysical boundary almost between the world of like monsters and myth to the world of the harsh reality where on the hero's journey is he six o'clock is he seven o'clock that's a good question so yeah he he cersei's a sort of maybe serving that wise counselor role maybe tiresias is there's a there's a katabasis the descent uh he's come out with the knowledge that he needs to get back so he's about basically about to face the final boss and it's it's a very long facing of the final boss i mean we're only halfway through the book at this point yeah it's back um but i think it's you know you can you can dispense with it a lot quicker um so uh but you know he's he's got to use all these stratagems that he's been sort of developing through his sufferings because there's 108 suitors in the house he has no idea if anybody of his servants are still loyal he has no idea if one of these guys maybe has seduced his wife and they're gonna she's gonna play real nice and when he gets home and then they're gonna stab him in his bed yeah agamemnon right um when does he meet his son so he odysseus makes his way to the swineherds hut eumaeus he's a you know pig pig tender and uh one of the deceased is slaves but like uh treated him really well loved odysseus did eumaeus and uh he you know offers him hospitality you know the suitors took all the big fat pigs but i can give you a little a little kind of porker and we'll have a nice meal you know he hosts him for a few days and odysseus doesn't tell him who he is he spins this kind of cock and bull story about uh you know getting seized by phoenicians or something i mean but he he's keeping his keeping his cards to his chest um and then it just so happens that telemachus gets back from his travel he eludes the the kind of ambush somehow that the suitors were trying to launch on him and he uh he actually makes his way to this very swineherd's hut and that's where they meet odysseus in disguise at first and then eumaeus goes to town and then while he's away odysseus reveals himself to his son so the first guy that he reveals who he is to is his son because he needs his son to help him launch a plan and it's like gradually he every you know a couple of people find out here and there the um the nurse euroclea figures it out and he makes her swear to not tell anybody and he eventually tells the swineherd right before they slaughter the suitors and his wife actually finds out very last funny enough um but he goes in he goes into this his palace you know how does he find out about all of the suitors does he see them well telemachus tells him and eumaeus tells him right what's going on at home and they say you know your wife has been faithful but he doesn't know right he still wants to test her and he does in disguise uh eventually dressed as a beggar you know famously and and he um there's one one or two cool scenes that are worth we're narrating about this whole arc before the final gratifying bloodbath the he goes in and he wants to kind of test out the suitors himself he wants to see it what is the situation in my palace and so he goes in dressed as a beggar and he gets harassed by some you know goat herd along the way it was a slave of his and he's all right remember you and um and he goes around like begging for food as the suitors are all feasting and having a good time didn't wash their hands didn't pray before their meal of course and he goes and he asks each of them for a little bit of a little morsel and most of them give him a morsel but one of them this guy antinous is well one of the kind of chief suitors of the suitors and he says uh man get out of here you're just cramping my style you're you're ruining the vibe you may ask why did you bring the suitors and he says uh man get out of here you're just cramping my style you're you're bringing this beggar in here and odysseus kind of kind of taunts him but very very subtly oh you know you you seem like such a lordly prince antinous um zeus brings suffering on us all you know you might be down on your luck someday just like i'm down on my luck i was once like you and antinous is like shut up and leave and odysseus knows what he's doing he's kind of like a footstool and he chucks it at odysseus and this has just been prodding he's been like riling him up you know very politely and very calmly and antinous just hurls a bench at him gets he gets the kid that loses cool and the bench just like like hits odysseus and like nothing happens you know he's like do you feel better now so i think he was he was sort of testing to see whether these were serious men confirmed his hypothesis that these are not serious men they don't know how to act a hard killer like a cold-blooded warrior would not throw a bench at a beggar i mean it's just it's ungentlemanly it's unmanly i mean if you want to if you want to get rid of this guy and you're odysseus or agamemnon or achilles you're gonna like pick him up and throw him outside yourself you're not gonna hurl a bench at him right uh so so he he prods and tests to to see what's going on in his household so he can come up with the plan and one one final moment that really underlines the um the endurance that this guy has to take he he's he's been uh given a blanket and a little cot by his wife who doesn't know who he is he's had a conversation with her and he's told her this tale and um and they give him a cot and he's he's stirring in his mind how he's going to pull it all off and he sees the maids go out because there's like 50 maids and 12 of them have basically been sleeping with the suitors they've been seduced um maybe it's not their fault but i mean homer really treats it as though it's it's their fault and penelope is really pissed she says these are the the maidens that have been disrespecting me and disrespecting your son they they're sleeping with the suitors uh and they're like not loyal to the household they're causing me problems they're disobedient and um you know they're they're not on our side essentially he sees them going out he just wants to get him right there it's a violent poem but he says endure my heart you have endured worse before when the cyclops was eating your men so he has to use that same restraint that he used because if he if he had charged at the cyclops when the guy was awake you know he would have it would have been over so this is a skill that he developed yeah it's a skill that he developed and he's kind of reminding himself uh that the same kind of endurance that he had in cyclops is is also helping him tolerate all the you know righteous indignation that he's feeling and assholes in his house yeah yeah no biding his time biding his time he's a man of much endurance right it's a marathon and um and how it eventually all kind of comes comes to a head is penelope um has this idea who knows where she gets it why is penelope in on this so she's she's um i forgot to mention there's a kind of crisis point that comes about at the beginning of the book so she's been weaving this funeral shroud for laertes odysseus's dad who's not dead yet but will be dead any day now really uh and she's been telling the suitors i just want to finish my funeral and i'm going to finish my funeral and i'm going to finish my funeral and i'm going to finish my funeral shroud and then i'll pick one of you let me let me just do my my wifely duty for my old household and i'll join your household and of course she's been weaving it during the day and unweaving it at night she's tricking them using the craft of athena right but one of the maid servants actually one of these bad ones told the suitors what she was doing she was tricking them so they're like all right you have to decide now we know this is all bullshit about your good bitch you're fucking knitting and unknitting yeah yeah they've they've had enough and uh and so she's basically feeling like she has to has to pick now but she comes up with this contest all right maybe this is coming back she's getting all these signs you know odysseus in disguise says i think your husband's coming back i really think he's coming back and you should just wait another day and she's like i have this idea for a contest and she tells it to him and he says you should do it exactly that that is exactly what you will do which is get out odysseus's bow right and uh set up these axes that uh whoever whoever strings his bow it's like a big hard recurve bow that nobody could string but him and they could if they shoot the arrow through the axe holes whoever does that first can marry me and um and you know it's a perfect kind of trick it's a perfect contest because it brings out this mimetic rivalry like the suitors all go in and start trying to string the bow and none of them can even get the string on the bow it's just too big and you know they're just not strong enough and every practically every single time they're like oh i failed to string the bow of odysseus i do not measure up to odysseus it kind of underlines the fact that it's a perfect contest because it brings out this mimetic rivalry that this was what it was all about in the first place trying to usurp odysseus's status credibility and his wife and then of course you know he's a beggar still let me try it out young lads and they're like no no no no no no no no no no this would no they're afraid they say this what if what if what if he actually strings the bow what if this you know loser from out of town strings the bow he's gonna make us all look bad and uh you know he manages to get his hands on the bow and of course shoots the arrow through and they're like shit well now we're ashamed but of course by this time telemachus has hit all the weapons and the armor odysseus has had the swineherd lock the door he's had eurycleia bolt the other doors all the women are out penelope's out safe they're all trapped in this prison and odysseus shoots them all down spears them hang on a second yeah so he's closed all of the doors and now it's like it's killing time it's killing time but it's just him he's not bringing his son in to do so his son is there with him his son is there with him and he's got two guys two other guys there's basically four of them on 108 uh which you know it's it's the goat herd and this um is it a cow herd or something like that and he's got two guys two other guys and he's got one other guy but like you're not not like iliatic warriors like just you know worker dudes and his two worker dudes his son and he himself and then all these suitors who are um not entirely unarmed but um i mean still 108 guys you might think they could take him but but he set it up so well he had uh he had to get them off guard and he had to get them off guard and he had to get them he had to have the bow this great deadly bow that only he could use he had to have the weapons sequestered away and he had and he kills the leaders first antinous the guy who insulted him with the bench first to get an arrow through the throat he's he's like lifting up a cup and this is doesn't suspect suspect what's going on um and you know instant death and and it's a bloodbath it's really is a bloodbath it's if you've if you've been an 18 year old kid just waiting for the action scene it's very satisfying you know uh spears through through guts and faces and such uh yeah and and basically they all die every single one of them even the ones that are arguably less guilty than the others there's a kind of communal guilt yep some people think that he took it too far i don't Humber doesn't think that he took it too far. He, uh. um the justice of zeus was coming down upon them that's how everybody talks about it in the story uh one guy sneaks up to odysseus and grabs him by the by the knees leotes the prophet begs for his life odysseus gosh i was always trying to tell them to to lay off you know i never touched your maidens uh i was always the voice of reason and odysseus says well you're a you're a prophet i'm pretty sure that if you were here for four years you prophesied many things to them about me being dead and maybe you prophesied to your own heart that you would walk away with my wife so die and he you know drives a sword through him it's just like it's terrifying he's become and there's there's a similar scene of failed mercy in the iliad too or achilles kills a young kid that's it's really ugly it's really disturbing you , but that's sometimes what it takes i guess to re-establish the patriarchy but one final note on the bow in the iliad the bow is a shameful weapon it's not honorable to kill somebody with a bow and you could kill him with a spear it's you don't face them you know head-on you know it's not man to man challenging them the bow is a kind of tricky weapon paris uses the bow he's this unmanly playboy trojan. panderous shoots menelaus it's a kind of it's kind of sucker punch move and uh you know odysseus does his dirty work with the bow i think that's kind of like it's a bit you know well it's a weapon of trickery doesn't obey the rules of honor but if you want to win at all costs if you want to re-establish justice maybe you need to be willing to use those weapons of trickery to kind of bracket the whole honorable warrior thing and do what needs to be done and and uh that's at least one interpretation of how it all ends yeah and that's how the story ends well actually the story ends with all the suitors dead and um and then immediately uh you know a few of the suitors are killed by odysseus so they they actually end up hanging the 12 maidens who were sleeping with the suitors a couple of other people get punished but um and they they clean the place up heap up the bodies and odysseus tells them all right a lot of these guys dads are near nearby in the town some of them are off you know across the seas we have to throw a party right now and make it sound like we're having a really good time so they don't suspect anything so they they start cooking up meats and they start playing music and it's really bizarre just but they're they're basically trying to buy time before um you know people find out that there's been a a slaughter of you know some of the most prominent young men on the island uh and my probably my favorite scene at the end is you actually get a a snapshot of them the suitors jibbering race going down into hades and uh wailing and agamemnon and achilles the ghosts of agamemnon achilles just talking there shooting the breeze and um and the suitors come down and they're like oh odysseus slaughtered us and agamemnon says that's my boy and uh you know um they had it coming of course and the suitors complained and but um really interesting like a final moment there agamemnon says amazing work penelope penelope the wife that i didn't have that uh it stayed faithful this whole time and he says there's a kind of ambiguity in the greek he says the glory of this person will last and be on the lips of the people who will be on the lips of the people who will be on the lips of the people who will be on the lips of the people who will be on the lips uh because of penelope's uh because of penelope's uh because of penelope's virtue for the rest of time who is this person virtue for the rest of time who is this person virtue for the rest of time who is this person most most translators i'm paraphrasing but the most most translators i'm paraphrasing but the most most translators i'm paraphrasing but the most translators say most translators say most translators say the glory of penelope will always redound and the glory of penelope will always redound and the glory of penelope will always redound and she will be an honor to women she will be an honor to women she will be an honor to women but one interpretation is that but one interpretation is that but one interpretation is that the glory of odysseus the glory of odysseus will last forever because of penelope's will last forever because of penelope's will last forever because of penelope's virtue which will be sung among women virtue which will be sung among women virtue which will be sung among women and why is that interesting or important and why is that interesting or important and why is that interesting or important i think i think the message would be i think i think the message would be i think i think the message would be homer sees penelope's faithfulness and homer sees penelope's faithfulness and homer sees penelope's faithfulness and her trickiness i mean this bow her trickiness i mean this bow her trickiness i mean this bow scheme was was really smart on her part scheme was was really smart on her part scheme was was really smart on her part even though she didn't really know she even though she didn't really know she had this like intuition maybe penelope was crucial to the story of the penelope was crucial to the story of the penelope was crucial to the story of the greatest hero that ever lived greatest hero that ever lived greatest hero that ever lived he could not have become odysseus the he could not have become odysseus the he could not have become odysseus the great the best of the achians without great the best of the achians without great the best of the achians without penelope's help and it was it was a penelope's help and it was it was a penelope's help and it was it was a it's not like penelope gets glory and it's not like penelope gets glory and it's not like penelope gets glory and odysseus get glory they both get glory odysseus get glory they both get glory because they were a unit together because they were a unit together because they were a unit together and that's that's kind of the greek and that's that's kind of the greek and that's that's kind of the greek archetype of the matriarch of like what archetype of the matriarch of like what archetype of the matriarch of like what a good a good a good what what is like happiness for a woman what what is like happiness for a woman what what is like happiness for a woman it's it's to it's it's to it's it's to uphold the glory uphold the glory uphold the glory of a of a great household of a of a great household of a of a great household in short in short in short but um yeah you know the ending is very but um yeah you know the ending is very weird weird weird uh the actual ending is like the uh the actual ending is like the uh the actual ending is like the townspeople townspeople townspeople form up a posse and odysseus forms up a form up a posse and odysseus forms up a form up a posse and odysseus forms up a posse and they kind of posse and they kind of posse and they kind of they start a battle you know a revenge they start a battle you know a revenge they start a battle you know a revenge battle and then athena kind of descends battle and then athena kind of descends battle and then athena kind of descends from from heaven and says stop from from heaven and says stop from from heaven and says stop it's a deus ex machina it's like the it's a deus ex machina it's like the it's a deus ex machina it's like the first deus ex machina you know the god first deus ex machina you know the god first deus ex machina you know the god coming from from on high and kind of coming from from on high and kind of coming from from on high and kind of solving this unsolvable problem uh in solving this unsolvable problem uh in solving this unsolvable problem uh in the plot the plot the plot um but you know the god makes peace and um but you know the god makes peace and um but you know the god makes peace and then then then a couple of people die odysseus kills a a couple of people die odysseus kills a a couple of people die odysseus kills a couple of guys couple of guys couple of guys but then the battle stops and uh but then the battle stops and uh but then the battle stops and uh they all go home and like shake hands they all go home and like shake hands they all go home and like shake hands peace is re-established somehow peace is re-established somehow peace is re-established somehow so he's got the favor of the gods it so he's got the favor of the gods it so he's got the favor of the gods it seems like he's had mostly favor of the seems like he's had mostly favor of the seems like he's had mostly favor of the gods throughout apart from poseidon gods throughout apart from poseidon gods throughout apart from poseidon yeah he's got the favor of the olympian yeah he's got the favor of the olympian yeah he's got the favor of the olympian gods of order gods of order gods of zeus and of zeus and of zeus and and athena and athena and athena he eventually wins over poseidon like he eventually wins over poseidon like he eventually wins over poseidon like after the time frame of the story like after the time frame of the story like after the time frame of the story like teresius tells him how he's gonna teresius tells him how he's gonna teresius tells him how he's gonna um um um like like like make amends with poseidon make amends with poseidon make amends with poseidon he doesn't have the favor there's a he doesn't have the favor there's a he doesn't have the favor there's a lot of divine forces he has to struggle lot of divine forces he has to struggle lot of divine forces he has to struggle with the sirens and skill and charybdis with the sirens and skill and charybdis with the sirens and skill and charybdis and and and the sun god kind of spares him helios the sun god kind of spares him helios the sun god kind of spares him helios but but he he has the favor of the gods but but he he has the favor of the gods but but he he has the favor of the gods because he is pious and this is pointed because he is pious and this is pointed because he is pious and this is pointed out at the very beginning of the poem he out at the very beginning of the poem he out at the very beginning of the poem he was always very meticulous doing was always very meticulous doing was always very meticulous doing sacrifices he was always okay he's a sacrifices he was always okay he's a sacrifices he was always okay he's a tricky liar but only to his enemies tricky liar but only to his enemies tricky liar but only to his enemies you know he doesn't defraud a friend uh you know he doesn't defraud a friend uh you know he doesn't defraud a friend uh he's a just man and uh you know that's he's a just man and uh you know that's he's a just man and uh you know that's part of the lesson of the poem like the part of the lesson of the poem like the part of the lesson of the poem like the good do win this is not clear in the good do win this is not clear in the good do win this is not clear in the iliad iliad iliad but there's a kind of there's two divine but there's a kind of there's two divine but there's a kind of there's two divine two versions of divine justice you might two versions of divine justice you might two versions of divine justice you might say say say one of them is eye for an eye hatfield and one of them is eye for an eye hatfield and one of them is eye for an eye hatfield and mccoy you kill my guy i kill your guy mccoy you kill my guy i kill your guy mccoy you kill my guy i kill your guy and then then and then then and then my son's gonna kill your son and your my son's gonna kill your son and your my son's gonna kill your son and your son's son's son's and it just never stops that's the kind of and it just never stops that's the kind of and it just never stops that's the kind of uncivilized brute uncivilized brute like fury's justice but zeus and athena represent this kind of uh the kind of justice that puts quarrels to an end that actually makes a settlement that people can live in peace again um and so that's the kind of justice that that the odyssey cares about that that that zeus himself homer has zeus himself say that you know the world actually is a fair place if you play by the rules look mortals think that we bring suffering upon them but it's generally they who bring suffering upon themselves like the justice is a case in point the guy arrest he's murdered his uncle he had it coming you know we told him we told him not to murder his own cousin and seduce his cousin's wife but he did it anyway and so what do you know he got what was coming so revenge another big thing yeah yeah very much revenge revenge is absolutely a part of justice but but it like can't go on forever and maybe that's what the end of the poem is kind of about like you know there's a danger there at the end that it's going to keep spiraling and spiraling and spiraling uh never end but i don't know the gods intervene to make sure that doesn't happen and somehow it's important to get to that point somehow as a as a civilization after something bad has happened now that we know what the story is are there any other elements of the writing process or homer homer's role how it was written the the history of this thing coming to light that are interesting um yeah i i think that this this oral poetry thing is really interesting so so nolan uh is apparently casted this rapper travis scott i think i think he's from houston i should know him better but anyway as home as a bar as demonicus i think maybe maybe it's phemius because hey homer is oral poetry rap is oral poetry um so maybe there's something to that but you know i think that one of the differences between what we think of as like slam poetry oral poetry or rap is that a kind of pillar of the moral universe and the way that homer is a pillar of the moral universe the way these bars kind of pious is it when i think rap i don't usually think pious would would you would you have left uh if you're going off for the trojan war you know would you have left your wife with chance the rapper yes or even p diddy or even bob dylan for that matter i mean alan ginsburg lord byron would you have left your wife with lord byron you know i mean it's it's a different mindset but there you know there's there's some parallels the the really interesting thing about about oral poetry and the oral like mental model of the universe or the kind of mental universe of cultures that don't have writing you know if you um if you go to an oral culture and you tell somebody here's what i want done like you know detailed instructions they'll be like all right and they'll go and do exactly what you told them to do and then when they come back they'll say here's what you told me to do they'll say verbatim what you told them to do because the brain has just been so trained to to store oral information when um when the pilgrims came to uh massachusetts in the you know 1600s they they were shocked at the native americans ability to just repeat verbatim like you know these these uh indian tribes whatever they didn't speak english like you could say a sentence to them they would repeat the exact sentence back to you like perfectly verbatim without understanding a word it was just that was part of what you get when you don't have writing is you have to really have this high fidelity oral brain and when when when oral poetry encounters a really high fidelity brain you know it's it's a very high fidelity brain and it's a very high fidelity brain and it's a very high fidelity brain and it's a very high fidelity brain paradigm when writing starts to be the way you store knowledge you uh you sort of lose that ability it's like google maps you know now i i don't know my way around my own town some something gets like offloaded cognitively and that's i think one of the reasons why homer is this is this glimpse of the way that people think in this world that is lost to us we can't really go back once you have writing it's i mean it's too too advantageous to to ignore you know your enemies are going to beat you if you try to not have a written culture it's just so powerful you need you know you need writing to have science and philosophy and all kinds of stuff record keeping um but something is also lost yeah yeah something is profoundly lost this tradition of uh storytelling and um and also like the role of the storytellers shifts like it i don't know the storyteller doesn't isn't like the the pillar of society that he is in homer and i think you have to understand that to understand like why homer has so much pro-bard propaganda in the iliad for example um but i do think it's still these things still matter the stories that we tell still really matter a lot for people's you know ability to face their own problems and happiness and confidence in life but it's not so visceral for us how are you feeling in advance of the movie coming out i'm gonna see it as soon as i can i mean you know it it looks pretty awesome uh people have complained about some casting choices let's say uh you know helen of troy seems to be an ethiopian if by the greek great at partying stands yes which which are great at partying so maybe there's maybe there's a logic to it um but i you know people complain about the lystragonians so i didn't mention i don't think i mentioned the lystragonians this is one of the things that i'm not sure about i don't think i mentioned the lystragonians this is one of these monstrous people that homer eats like after he meets the cyclops uh they're these giant people they're not like super giants but they're giant enough and uh they try to you know see if they can get a gift from the lystragonians or maybe make a little alliance and his men meet them and they just get eaten so um the lystragonians just charge out in force and slaughter the greeks they they're the ones that are depicted with this sort of futuristic steel and they're the ones that are depicted with this sort of futuristic steel armor plate mail armor uh people complained about that oh it's not historically accurate i think i think that uh it's really cool even even if i don't like the way that nolan tells the story which i don't know i i think he's a great director he's he's um he's filmed the whole thing on imax the first time it's ever been done it's almost three hours it's gonna be it's gonna be a good thing to watch i'm really excited about how we're talking about the odyssey and we're debating about it like just having the the debate about what does this mean i think i think it it tells you something about what's going on in culture that people care about this a lot that that that that nolan would get so much criticism and so much attention on from either direction i think it shows that we sort of need this story somehow um so you're gonna see it i will absolutely go and see it uh i also have an admission to make which is for the first time in history i've decided to put my uh like personal burnout health ahead of the podcast uh we had the offer to do half an hour with half the cast and half an hour with the other half of the cast all on a single round table in new york in 10 days time but i'd already booked to go and take like the one digital detox week that i've ever done so i'd already booked this meditation retreat and i've been working up to it and it's something that i really needed and i promised myself in january that i was going to take this time off and manana manana manana for you know 150 days or whatever like 25 weeks until i get to this i've got this thing booked and then it was like yeah sure like of course i love nolan i love i love the odyssey it's going to be exciting matt damon's a legend i guess you know when when it happens or the media week is precisely at the back end of when you're supposed to be doing this thing and i tossed and turned last week about it and uh just the coin fell on the side of i've made way too many sacrifices for like eight years of doing the show 1100 episodes and i was like i think it's going to be kind of a i really hope that i don't regret it um but it feels like a symbolic decision uh to do something that helps my peace of mind and my longevity as opposed to like fire up the engines again let's do it let's spin up this huge production in new york as opposed to this one thing that was supposed to be for me so anyway all that being said i'm gonna have i'll be conflicted watching it because i'll be thinking like that the one of the big moments of the movie's promo could have been or two of the big moments right tom holland um would have been on the show but i'm pretty excited for it it looks pretty cool i'm not so excited for what might end up being another culture war flashpoint you know nolan the stories that he puts out are controversial because of what happens inside of the movie is it's a very interesting story and i think it's a very interesting story to watch and i think it's a very interesting story to watch and i think it's a very interesting story to watch and i think it's a Homer feels ambiguously about Odysseus. Like, is he really a hero worth emulating? What do you think Homer feels about Odysseus? 100% worth emulating. But that doesn't mean he's perfect. Like, you can be the greatest hero and somebody to admire, but you can also make mistakes. But, you know, like, giving your name to the Cyclops, falling asleep when your comrades try to, you know, are at risk of opening up the bag of the winds or eating the cattle of the sun, or even, you know, being a little too curious. Like, curiosity is a vice in some Greek philosophy. Like, wanting to know too much without necessarily having an end in mind. And this curiosity is brought up by the siren's example, where he wants to know what the sirens say, plugs up his companion's ear with the wax, and doesn't think about it. Doesn't plug up his, but he sort of gets himself tied to the mast. Maybe that was playing with the line. He ended up fine from it. But I don't think that Homer questions Odysseus' values, which is civilization over barbarism, you know, order over chaos, patriarchy over anarchy. That doesn't seem complicated. That part doesn't seem complicated to me. How long has it been since we've had a movie that was a relatively simplistic hero? I mean, the closest thing has been fucking Top Gun 2. And, like, even in that, Tom Cruise is trying to do this retcon, make the son of my ex-flight partner feel okay about me. There's this, like, supplanted patriarch thing that's going on where the parental figure comes back into his life, and it's the redemption of the son through the success of the new father, which is the. old father's. Like, that, I guess? I remember looking at this video essay that explained how the world of the hero is just unsatisfactory anymore, for some reason has removed from movies that it's no longer enough for protagonists who wants to make the world a better place to work real hard, overcome, overcome challenges, be flawed, but get through. Now it has to be somebody who has a dark streak and needs a kind of redemption that's not quite there, and then you get to come full circle all the way back around to something that's more like Suicide Squad, which is the bad guys are actually the good guys, but the only way that they can be the good guys is if they are their bad guy self and their badness is. The virtue in their badness is closer to congruence. Mm-hmm. Than it is to actual virtue. It's like they just know who they are and they are who they are and they're deployed and all of the motivations for why they do these things, they're pulled around and then Loki is Loki in Avengers. Is he really part of the hero? He flip-flops back and forth so much, you don't really land in a satisfying place with him. He's more a question mark, even though he ends up being unbelievably powerful. Fucking Captain Marvel, who's the most powerful person in the universe, appears to be fucking off, just like doing bullshit all the time. Like, why are you not. Anyway. Anyway. I get the sense that that complicated hero thing is kind of more. Obviously, in some ways, it's richer, right? Because there's conflict and there's tension. But I think it would be cool to just see what an uncomplicated, virtuous hero that's flawed and overcomes his flaws, what that would look like. Like, just follow me the fucking hero's journey, please. Like, just follow me some Campbell shit from 12 to 12, and let's see how that feels in 2026. I don't want that to have to be an asterisk after every hero of good, but let's not forget, let's not forget when he, you know, that's. And I've got it in my head that part of the reason what I'm doing with the show at the moment, spending time, doing more stories, which you're just the fucking best at. Your storytelling ability is, like, out of this world. Learn from the best. Also doing episodes where it's just me and the boys, hanging, just chilling out, talking about what we've got going on. More storytelling from other areas of life, too, like war stories and things like that from Special Forces guys. Big part of that is I think people have got a degree of exhaustion with overthinking. I think there's a big anti-optimization trend at the moment that we're feeling, and it's not necessarily people being against optimization. I think it's people being against the fatigue of trying to be perfect, and that is at least in part fed into by the fact that they're overwhelmed with information, and they feel like there is more input than they have time to be able to metabolize it. This line that I came up with last year, that most people consume information the same way that they consume calories. Too high. They have a dosage to be able to metabolize, and that was great 500 years ago when there was like three books that you could read, and almost everybody in the village couldn't read, and maybe there wasn't a printing press. I don't know. That was like 1400s, I think, something like that. Not so good now when there's an abundance. We've gone from scarcity problem to an abundance problem. Same thing, calorie sparse to calorie dense, information sparse to information dense. People are sort of like, oh, fuck. I'm just a little overwhelmed with all of this, I don't want everything to feel like homework. I don't want everything to feel like there needs to be a decision that's made to it. We're going through a bunch of big business decisions on the show, and some of the guys that I'm dealing with, I'm seeing in them, even these very, very impressive business people who are at the forefront of what they do, there is a sense when I'm speaking to them of, dude, just fucking tell me what I want. Can you just fucking tell me what I want, please? Can you just give me a thing that you are high conviction in and just. deliver that? I'm like, I get it. I get it that there is a fatigue, an exhaustion that a lot of people have, and I wonder, very long-winded way of saying, I wonder whether or not movies are going to start to mirror that with simplicity in the heroes. Again, complexity in the story, simplicity in the hero. We had Adolescence, that thing on Netflix that was about young boys in the UK, and one of the reasons, it kind of, you know, pretty majestically, that the series made such an impact was that it did not really tell you what to think. There was a lot of question at the end. How much was the young boy actually impacted by what he'd seen on the internet? How much was he a disciple of the manosphere and like an incel? How much was he to blame versus the lack of, the supervision that had come from his parents? How much did the parents blame themselves? Was this a righteous comment on overreaches of the internet or just male loneliness like both sides kind of Rorschach tested to see it as their own propaganda to some degree? Is this kid a psychopath? Did he, at what point does a boy become a man and then therefore become culpable for his own actions? And what that resulted in was just this fucking furor of people debating what this means. How important, what should we take away from this? Like, just tell me, how many times do people want to find out, ask Nolan, well, is, can't remember the guy that Leonardo DiCaprio, is Leonardo DiCaprio's character in the dream world or is he alive? It's like, in some ways, that's not even Nolan's decision to make. After you get to that stage of a story, it's almost on you, but because of the lack of, of conclusion, it sucks in speculation and that's what drives a lot of the conversation about this stuff. I just generally get the sense and it's sort of making a bet at the moment that I don't like telling people what to think, but just a little bit more simplicity, I think, the opportunity to sort of sit back in your own mind and just observe things as they go and not feel like this is another fucking decision I need to make or there's more like work that I've got to do. I'm kind of exhausted by all of, all this stuff. My future, is AI gonna take my job in 10 years' time? I don't know. What about the Middle East? Apparently I should be worried about that. There's like some problems with gas prices I hear or inflation or like Taiwan do something with computer chips and I don't really know what I'm supposed to do. All of that together is making people fucking exhausted. Mm-hmm. And if you're not careful, people are gonna find escapes that are way more destructive than just being able to relinquish, listen to an awesome historian, tell a story for a couple of hours, the oldest story that's ever been written and, oh, okay, that, oh, I've had a bit of a reprieve. Mm-hmm. Isn't that nice? And I, you can't iterate movies as quickly. I can iterate this podcast three times a week and I have done for, you know, a very long time. And I can lick my finger and sort of tell where the cultural winds are going. And also what, most of this is just me doing it for me. Mm-hmm. Like I don't want to leave and feel like I've got this big laundry list of things to do. I'm just left with, interesting philosophies. philosophical questions and insights about the virtue of loyalty and justice and revenge and when you're supposed to apply aggression and when you're supposed to sit back and when you're supposed to be diplomatic and when you can be crafty and where the lying is justified in that all of that stuff's just nice i don't feel burdened by it i don't feel burdened by learning about the story of the odyssey in the same way as i feel burdened if it's some very prescriptive new life direction that i need to take and here is a huge big list of all of these things but actually there's not that much conclusion because maybe veganism might not be the different i do just fucking like either make it simple and direct or just give me a little bit of chance to breathe and i think at the moment at least i'm feeling in me that's a uh motivation that i'm enjoying that's a sense that's a tether that i'm being pulled forward through and um yeah maybe we'll see that crossover into into other other mediums as well this is uh a good time for homer to come back for that reason i think because i think that this is um yeah there is a there's a kind of moral simplicity in a lot of ways to homer but he he tells the story from multiple perspectives partly because he's just like nolan you know he's got a a wide audience homer is you know these epic poets travel from city to city they're going from eolus to sparta to wherever ithaca and they have different people of different classes and different tastes everywhere and this you know they got to get a story about odysseus to work for a lot of different people some people are going to want to take the side of uh of of odysseus or some people are going to see themselves in the suitors or you know uh maybe that's not a great example but you know some people are going to say hey this is a lying bastard and other people are going to say no he did what he had to do and and that's kind of that's on you like to draw out the message is is not so much the poet's job i mean he can have his own opinion but really his job is to is to help you get charmed get disengaged like odysseus does for the pheasants like the bards do in the story and i think also if i can kind of allegorize a little bit the sirens in particular that we didn't go into too much i think they're really it's a timely image because you know for me i i kind of autobiographize odysseus going to the sirens all right the sirens are these divine they're kind of like bad bards they're these women who sing whatever they sing and they make you just want to go and listen to them and piled up in front of the sirens island is just rotting bones of people who who started listening and they could just never leave and they starved and died and i think the reason that odysseus wants to hear is because he's this man of great curiosity and when they actually speak to him hunger no odysseus tells them the pheasants he tells what the sirens told him and the sirens say we can tell you the story of everything that happened to troy all the things that you didn't know i'm paraphrasing like all the things you didn't know about the backstory what was going on at troy all of the different you know perspectives of the generals that you were trying to guess at but you just couldn't know well we know him we know everything that happens on earth we they can give him infinite knowledge that whether or not they would say the same thing to his crew that's what they're saying to him this is the thing that a man of those kind of most in life or at least he knows the power of that insider knowledge that's special insight into the universe the the moly he's seen how powerful it is to know the secrets of a little plant the kind of power can give you what if i could find out something interesting that i could apply to my morning routine from the sirens and it you know for me i think it's also the temptation of being an academic is one of the reasons i left academia because well it's one of the reasons i was in it because i had this i just tell me more tell me more tell me more i want to read more i want to find out the the the end of that story or oh geez five more books i need to read and and that can if you if you follow that too far you end up potentially a rotting pile of bones at the feet of the sirens and never getting home and never doing what you need to do it's this kind of temptation of of knowledge and you know maybe there's a person or two in your audience that can relate to the temptation of the university but we can all relate to the the doom scroll like and it's often it's not just like it's not stupid humor all the time a lot of it is you're you're you tell yourself i'm going to get some insight on you know what what the bitcoin price is going to do from this iran thing and oh well how can i ignore that blah blah blah and it's it's it's all it all seems actionable it's it's it's constructed so it feels important it feels important it's designed to feel important because it's risen up in the algorithm and i think this is really speaks to a profound um uh inclination that people have a temptation that people face that leads in not just to inaction as you know but but to unreflection too well certainly if you're permanently on absorb you have very little time to do reflect you know if the fire hose of new information is bukkake you in the face you don't have that much time to think about what you've already ingested said bonnie and when at wise sage yeah yeah yeah the the philosopher b blue um that that sense of i'm drowning in information i don't know what to do about it this was a line that i had a bill thompson this this old uh information's expert from worked at three letter agencies u.s uh like army he was basically the special forces q from james bond and um he would help them to get to where they needed to he would take phones apart do all this sort of stuff and i was asking him my current working theory is not that most of the propaganda and most of even the information online is trying to make people convinced of any one narrative it's to drown them in so much information that they become uh apathetic and they just sort of entirely now that might be that at some point in future their apathy can be uh formed into something useful and sort of thrust forward in like some vector um but for the most part i think when you when you firehose people with information after long enough they just go i dude i'm fucking i have no idea if you try and go down any rabbit hole any conspiracy rabbit hole for every one that you find out there is an equal and opposite the physics of the conspiracy system for every conspiracy there is an equal and opposite conspiracy which is even deeper and then there's an equal and opposite one the iceberg never stops it just comes out the other side of the planet and that's the tip of the iceberg so yeah this this endless oraboros of just looking at uncertainty and information and and and uh yeah i think i'm certainly feeling i'm feeling detoxed i'm feeling somewhat salved after after getting in touch with something that's got a bit more like firm foundations so and this is what you got to think is so appealing to a uh a person like alcinous maybe or a person like odysseus or like a guy like julius caesar about a great story like that because they've just got information coming in them and decisions to make and all the time and a long narrative is a way of as a way of slowing down your brain and reflecting it's it's but it's not just entertainment it's it has it has something useful in there that narrative structure you're we're like programs to in ingest and and process information in that way much more um effectively in long form when it's when it's put into a story yeah because we can remember it and we can actually store that framework of here's what happened with odysseus and then we can draw lessons out of it years and years later that that we need because we have that that archetypal uh narrative within us i think this is one of the reasons why an oral culture like the greeks spent so much time on these kind of stories that um about heroes about somebody to emulate and mind you they're not they're not simplistic i mean like the odyssey doesn't is you know he makes a lot of mistakes yeah you can debate about his actions the greeks would debate about his actions i mean a lot of the later greeks thought he was a bad guy he was he was a liar he's a cheater a lot of the later greeks thought he was the greatest hero i mean there's it admits of debate and if you brought back real hero stories that didn't always have them having a meth addict addiction on the side or you know banging their secretary in secret you could still have complexity you don't have to undermine everybody with a kind of secret mob story or a very open mob story i think we need more of that to get through what we're what we're facing a lot of us at least heck yeah alex petkus ladies and gentlemen dude you're the best where should people go to check out all the amazing things you do cost of glory podcasts available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, at Costaglory on X, costaglory.com, Cost of glory, cost of glory, cost of glory. Pretty easy to find, if you look for me. Dude, until next time, let's come up with something else to talk about. Do it. All right. Goodbye, my beauties. See you next time. Dude. Yeah. Fucking the man. So good. So good. At Kroger, we love helping you save with pickup and delivery. Right now, you can save even more on fresh favorites with exclusive online deals. Like Kroger brand 80-20 select packages of ground beef for just $3.99 a pound. And fresh strawberries for only $1.99 a pound. Plus, get $20 off your first online order of $75 or more. Restrictions apply. See site for details. Download the app or visit our website to get started. Kroger. Fresh for everyone.