Camp Gagnon - Did Odysseus FIND America?

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

​ @LanternJack  joins us in the studio today to talk about the theory of whether Odysseus reached America before Christopher Columbus and other interesting topics... WELCOME TO CAMP! 🏕��� Shoutout to our sponsors: MUDWTR, GLD, Mars Men and Brunt Work Wear -Go To https://mudwtr.com/CAMP And Use Code 'CAMP' And Get Up To 43% OFF -New Customers get 40% OFF With Promo-Code: "CAMP" When They Visit: https://GLD.com -Visit https://mengotomars.com and get 50% Off FOR LIFE, Free Shipping, and 3 Free Gifts with Code 'CAMP' at Checkout. -Get $10 off at BRUNT with code "CAMP" at http://bruntworkwear.com/CAMP Want the even WILDER theories? SIGN UP TO THE PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CampGagnon 👕🧢 Shop CAMP Merch: https://camp-rd.com/collections/ufo 🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets: https://markgagnonlive.com 🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.com Timestamps 0:00 Intro 1:37 The Realness of Homer 5:40 The “Ocean” in The Odyssey 10:13 Mapping Odysseus’ Journey 19:46 Did Odysseus Reach Scandinavia? 24:36 Is Circe’s Island Iceland? 28:40 The Land of The Dead = Newfoundland? 31:42 Homer’s Gulf Stream 38:42 Scylla & Charybdis in Bay of Fundy 43:08 Origin of Sirens 48:20 Sun God’s Cattle 55:23 Is Calypso’s Island Azores or Bermuda? 1:00:50 Phoenicians in The Caribbean 1:06:00 Preserving Myths + The Real Troy 1:09:38 The Real Troy 1:15:34 Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches 1:18:31 Texts Describing Lands Beyond the Ocean 1:21:15 Plutarch’s Greeks in North America 1:22:56 Archaeological Evidence in Newfoundland 1:30:42 Every Theory of Odysseus’ Voyage 1:35:28 Caribbean Lotus Eaters 1:38:24 “Floating Island” of Aeolus 1:41:23 Island of The Winds 1:44:50 Validity of The Odyssey 1:51:08 Reciting Odyssey Opening In Greek 1:53:50 Helen Drugs The Entire Party 1:55:54 Historical Mistakes 1:58:07 Helen’s Twin + Divine Bloodline 2:00:23 Casting Controversies 2:02:34 Additions & Removals From Nolan’s Odyssey 2:06:41 The Bow Challenge 2:11:30 The Civil War Ending #foryou #odysseyDid Odysseus Discover America? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For more than 3,000 years, we've treated the Odyssey as one of humanity's greatest myths, a world of monsters and witches and gods, and of course all of this is all myth, right? Well, what if some of these impossible places were real? Well, today I'm joined by Dr. Jack Viznick, better known as Lantern Jack, and he's here to explain the whole theory. He believes that parts of the Odyssey may preserve distorted memories of voyages that took place long before Homer, journeys beyond the Mediterranean, into the North Atlantic, and possibly all the way to America.

Because Homer describes a land where the summer days barely end, a harbor enclosed by enormous cliffs, an island where sailors lose track of where the sun rises and sets. Those clues could trace a route from Scotland to Iceland and all the way to Canada. This is obviously fantasy, right? Well, near Canada today lies the Bay of Fundy, a place of giant seals who bark like dogs, and one of the most powerful tidal whirlpools that appears exactly three times a day. Now, none of this proves that Odysseus himself discovered America. The theory is actually stranger than that.

Perhaps an unknown ancient explorer may have made this amazing journey, returned home, and had his experiences transformed into the monsters and magical landscapes of Homer. And even if part of this is true, then the ancient world was not nearly as isolated as we were taught. It would mean that sailors were crossing oceans, encountering new continents, and exchanging stories thousands of years before Columbus and Lee Ferrickson. Today we ask whether one of the oldest myths in Western civilization is actually hiding the memory of a forgotten journey to America. So sit back, relax, and welcome to campus. Dr. Jack Vishnik, how are you?

Doing great. Better known as Lantern Jack. I am a massive fan of your channel and of your podcast. You've made a video recently that I find absolutely fascinating with a video, or should I say an episode titled, Did Odysseus Discover America? Now, before we jump into that, there's a few things I want to say up top first for the viewer at home. Yeah, dude, you.

You may hear some disturbance during this episode. a band playing in the woods just adjacent to our tent here. So I apologize if you hear some some drums or bass coming through. And secondly, could you just explain for the audience at home who you are and what is your background in Greek literature? Sure. So I have a PhD in classics, which means in the study of ancient Greek and Latin and the literature and history of those peoples. and I produce a podcast and YouTube channel called Ancient Greece Declassified, where I explore topics from the ancient world that are of interest or relevant to today. Amazing.

Now, this episode that you did, did Odysseus discover America? People are probably hearing that and they're like, well, first off, Odysseus isn't a real guy, so no. And secondly, Christopher Columbus discovered America. So also no. How would you start to break down this argument? What do you mean when you say, did Odysseus discover America? Yeah. Right. So the title was tongue in cheek and some might accuse me of clickbait and I, guilty.

Whether or not Odysseus is a real character is explained early on as not the core issue there. The core issue is that we're not dealing with fiction in the modern sense, where some author sits at a desk and just conjures up a story from start to finish that has no bearing on reality. We're talking about an oral tradition. tradition that was operating over centuries. So even if there was a guy named Homer, which is debated, who finalized the final version that we have today, regardless of that, these stories were compiled and collected and developed and expanded over centuries. Like we can tell that linguistically. And during those centuries, all kinds of mythological elements were incorporated, probably real stories were incorporated.

incorporated. In fact, a lot of the bits from the illiate about the Trojan War have had archaeological corroboration. That was Schleiman? Well, that was the first thing. But even, so Shleiman discovered Troy. And at the time, nobody thought that he would. So at the time, people thought that Troy was made up. But he discovered Troy. And then he also excavated certain Bronze Age palaces in the mainland of Greece that people also didn't. think much of or that they didn't really reflect the Homeric reality. But more recently, people have studied the Hittite archives. Now, the Hittites were the main power in what's now Turkey during the Bronze Age. And if there was a Trojan war, it probably was between the

Hittites and the Greeks of the time, the so-called Achaeans that Homer refers to, over the region of Troy, which was a disputed area. It was both sides claimed that as a sphere of influence. This isn't like Western Turkey in the modern day. Yes, exactly. Right. And so we have these Hittite archives that refer to a region, a city in that area called Wilusa.

Now, if you take the word Wilusa and you put it through the sound changes that we know happen in Greek, namely initial WUHRW drops out, So it becomes ilusa. And then an S sound between vowels drops out. So it becomes Ilua. Start to sound like Ileon, which is the name of Troy in Homer's epics. Ah, Ileon. Yes.

Interesting. And it's the I see. Oh, that's fascinating. Now, this sort of theory is kind of, correct me if I'm wrong, that may be this idea that Homer, as we know, as maybe a person, as a collection of people, as a fictional character, that is just sort of the pseudonym given to whomever, whatever collection of people collected and wrote this great epic poem. Perhaps they are drawing on a knowledge at the time that there was some type of transatlantic travel, that perhaps some type of seafaring people

went across the Atlantic, they went to Newfoundland, they went to the Caribbean, and they did this ostensibly thousands of years before Leif Erickson or Christopher Columbus. And there's little tiny threads that most people would miss when reading the epic that seemed to reference a place beyond the waters of the Mediterranean. Could you take us through some of the more compelling lines that appear in the Odyssey that would lead someone to think, like, oh, maybe this isn't some part of Greece or maybe this isn't Italy?

Like, what are the lines that you find the most interesting? Well, so I imagine that this is a shock to most viewers right now, what you just said. And I should say, first of all, that many people have actually conjectured an Atlantic or even transatlantic interpretation of the Odyssey. So this is not like a new idea. And that's because the text itself that we have says that Odysseus is traveling the ocean.

And while, you know, if you go on like Airbnb and you book a hotel in Greece, he'll say ocean view, there's no ocean views in Greece. And no Greek would ever confuse the ocean with the sea. Right. The Mediterranean is an inland sea. The Romans called it their own lake because it was fully enclosed by the Roman Empire. Right. Now would someone say, oh, the dumb Greek?

you know 2,000 years ago they thought it was an ocean well we don't really see in other texts we don't really see a confusion between these terms right so the odyssey says that Odysseus is on the ocean and it even says at one point that he crosses the ocean and he comes to the the Beirata Gies the or Peirata Gaia is the the limits of the world mm so that's the that's the kind of the biggest direct statement in the actual text The seafaring people at the time knew the difference between an ocean and the sea, and they would never mistake the Mediterranean as a sea. So when they're saying the ocean, this implies that this is going beyond the Strait of Gibraltar.

This is somewhere in the Atlantic. That's the view of some people, which I tend to agree with. There are, of course, the skeptics who say, no, this is poetic exaggeration. Which is possible. Yeah. But we do know for a fact that the Phoenicians were out in the ocean at the time that Homer may have lived. In other words, at the time that these poems got their final form, the Phoenicians were already trading along the Atlantic coasts of what's now Spain or Portugal and northern Africa. And then earlier in the Bronze Age, we know for sure of indirect trade between the Mediterranean people and the Scandinavians, for example.

For example, there are beads found in Scandinavian tombs that are from the Mediterranean. There are some bull and chariot iconography that seem related. As of yet, there is no smoking gun, there's no shipwreck of a Mediterranean ship in Scandinavia found yet. Right. Because they wouldn't wreck, dude.

They'd be good. You know what I mean? These are good sailors. Hey, real quick, most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow, and you stay in the loop with every new drop. Religion camp, history camp, and Camp Gagnon.

Now, let's get back to it. Now, just as far as the timeline goes, Christopher Columbus 1492. Yeah. Leif Erickson going to Newfoundland around like 1,000 AD, something like that. Yeah. When is the Odyssey assembled and when are we talking about the time of Homer? What period is that?

The scholarly estimates, because these are estimates, range from late 800s BC to early 600s BC. So let's say like 820 BC to 675 BC. That's the window that we think these epic poems received their final form. We're talking 1500 years before the Vikings here. Yeah. Like what, another 2,000 years before Columbus? Yes.

I mean, that would be some pretty shocking information. If you're telling me like, oh, maybe some of these Phoenicians or that someone was going to America, that's wild. It is. Now, what other threads in there would indicate that this is not someplace in the Mediterranean? obviously going to the ocean, you're like, all right, you know, maybe it's, maybe it's flowery language, language. What else is pulling you that direction? Well, Christos, can you pull up the third image from the file? Yeah, there we go. So here. Odysseus's journey. Here's a list of the complete journey.

And by the way, I need to say, sorry, that during the epic poem, Odysseus gives various accounts of who he is, what his name is, where he's from, and where he's been. And they're all different. Okay, and this is why he's called, you know, the liar. Yes, the unreliable narrator. Exactly. So he's a master of disguise, he's a master of storytelling. And what we think of as the tribal narrative, the one that's in the movie and all the movies, that's the one he tells to the feations, second final stop in this outline. So he gives them the longest account of who he is and where he's been.

Of course, he needs their sympathy to get home. So he might have, it might be implausal. in the poem that he's embellishing the story. Right. But in any case, this is the one we're going to be talking about today. This is the main, the well-known travel narrative. And if you look at it, you see that there are multiple legs of this journey that have, that take many days of sailing nonstop without sight of land.

Mm-hmm. Nine days, again, nine days, six days, nine days, and then 17 days. Okay. And it's implied in all these cases that no land is seen. It's not stated directly, but it makes sense. It stands to reason that these long legs of the trip involve not seeing land anywhere. Right.

And for the guy listening right now, this is basically Troy, where of course Odysseus is battling to Asmaris to Cape Malaya. Is that pronounce correctly? And then nine days go by. Yes. No land. And he goes to the lotus eaters. Cyclops, Aolia, nine more days near Ithaca,

back to Aeolia, six more days. The Lastragonians to then Cerses Isle, then to the land of the deserts' is. dead back to Aia yeah back to the sirens and then the cilia and then Thranacea and then the cherubetus Carbdis Carybdis my bed Caribdis which is an interesting name and then nine more days to Calypso's Isle and then 17 days to Cheria basically the Scaria. Scaria my bet I'm thinking of your here and then back to Ithacaum so it's 17 days even just that period is so long but we'll get to that in a second yeah so nine

days with no land in sight. That would be hard to do in the Mediterranean. Exactly. And I should emphasize again that the text does not say no land was spotted for 17 days, but that's clearly implied. So, yeah, so it has been long recognized that these, so the Mediterranean Sea is an inland sea. It's full of narrow passages of archipelagos of many islands. You can't really sail anywhere in a straight line for more than a couple days without seeing land. Okay. And that's like it's like the biggest areas take a couple of days to to cross. So since antiquity, people have noted that these, these distances don't fit in the Mediterranean. And since antiquity, they've said, well, it's just poetic exaggeration.

Okay. Most people. Okay. When we get to, so we have the Homeric epics at the end of the so-called dark ages. After the Bronze Age collapse, around 1,200 BC, you have like 400, years of dark ages where Greece forgets the art of writing. Then a new system of writing comes back, the alphabet, and it comes back at the same time as the Homeric poems appear, and those two phenomena might be related. That's a different rabbit hole. And then we get the more familiar authors we know of, like Plato, Herodotus, Aristotle, so forth, right, for whom we know specific dates, where they lived, what they wrote, all that kind of stuff. And in those more familiar, well-documented authors, we learned that the Greeks had already kind of made a map of where they thought Odysseus had gone,

and they had made it in the Mediterranean. So, like Thucydides, I think, reports that the Kerkeran's, so Kerkira or Khorfu, is an island that's actually pretty close to Ithaca, okay? And the Kerkirrians had already claimed in his day, in the the 400s BC, that they were Scaria, the land of the feations. I see you. Now, that doesn't really make sense because Homer says that Scaria is like,

is again, beyond all inhabited lands, all other inhabited lands. So why would it be an island less than a day's sail away from Odysseus's home? Okay. And then people say, well, it only took one day for Odysseus to get to his home, from Scarea. But that ship is described as traveling autonomously,

like without any captain or oarsman. And it's going faster than a hawk flies. Now, a hawk is perhaps the fastest animal on the planet when it dives. Right. So this is clearly like a kind of magical link, right? So if you look at this chart again, I believe the storm at Cape Malaya

and the magical ship of the phaeasians at the end, That's the beginning and end bracket of the magical outlandish journey. That's where we have a different travel narrative than you would expect from a return from Troy to Greece. Right. And I think that is where Homer or whatever process crystallize these epics in the 8 and 700s BC probably introduced a separate travel narrative into the story of Odysseus, which did not originally have any of this. Interesting. And in order to square all that for Homer, he had to be like, hey, they traveled to the speed of light. They traveled as fast as we can possibly imagine in order to, in the literary sense, square the circle of going from this land all the way back to Ethica. Exactly. Where if it's just truly a day sailing, you don't need to do that for the story's sake.

Yes, exactly. And I should note that this idea that the fantastical travel narrative was introduced later is actually established among quite a few. scholars. So famously Martin West, famous homerist, he argued that the original, the original Odyssey, so to speak, was a homecoming tale of a king who was delayed at war, came home home after several years, and found his house in disorder, his wife is surrounded by suitors, his son's life is in jeopardy, so he comes back in disguise. And so like, it's the homecoming tale, kind of like the movie The Return, from the last year. where he has to be disguised and find some local loyal friends and then take his throne back. I think that also he thinks he argued that the main travel narrative was incorporated later

based on older stories such as the Argonautica and other fantastical or exotic travel narratives. Interesting. Now, what are the other lines specifically that would indicate some of these other places? Like you mentioned potentially reference to the Caribbean. You mentioned reference to Newfoundland in northern or I guess eastern Canada. What are those lines? Okay. So one of the, where is it, the Lysdragonians, as you, somewhere if you look at the middle of that chart,

the Lestragonians live in a place called Telepilos, which means the far away pylos. and so it takes it takes odysseus six days and nights to get there from somewhere that already seems to be far away from Greece okay and the narrator which is actually odysseus says that in this land the days are so long that a man could earn two wages if he doesn't need sleep hmm now the days never get that long in the Mediterranean but they get that long obviously in Northern Europe. Right. And if that was just a single data point, that would be easy to dismiss. But then we have other details that also point to Northern Europe.

First of all, the harbor is described as a kind of cliff harbor or maybe cleft harbor. It's a narrow inlet between two vertical cliffs that are so close to each other that you could stand on either cliff and throw rocks at the ships below. And you'd be really hard. press to find anything like that in the Mediterranean. But those are common features of the Shetland islands in Scotland and the Faroe Islands north of that and perhaps certain parts of Norway. And then we get other details like the Listergonians are, they're bigger than Odysseus and his men. And skeletal remains do show that, let's say, the Scandinavians of the Bronze Age were on

average several centimeters taller than Mediterranean people. Right. The equatoral folks are a little bit shorter and then people that live up in Scandinavia are quite tall. Well, that's not always true because you also have like the Bantu Africans who are the tallest. Oh, really? Yeah. I always heard that as like a little factoid, like near the equator like things are smaller, animals, people, etc. I mean, I think it's a little more complicated. Fair, probably, almost certainly. Now, is it controversial in the time to think that the Greeks knew about Scandinavia? Well, they speak of the Hyperboreans, which are the super far northerners. But again, the standard scholarly view is that this is all, you know, third or fourth hand information. So we know that it was an amber trade.

Amber is found in like the Baltic area of Northern Europe. And the Mycenaans, the Bronze Age Greeks, they loved their amber. And the theory has always been that, well, amber was passed through like four or five intermediaries before it got to the Greeks in the Mediterranean. And so they would have heard, you know, again, fourth or fifth-hand accounts of these super far northerners, the hyper-Boreans. That makes sense to me. Yeah. Right? Like, there's a trade route.

It goes through some merchants. And then eventually these stories come with the trade of, yeah, there are these places with these crazy cliffs and the sun never sets and the people are really tall. Yeah. So that seems like a very logical, I don't even know why that would be controversial by historical standards. Like, do any scholars dispute that? Scholars actually, several scholars actually acknowledge that, that they'll, you know,

Lysregonian episode is informed by indirect accounts of the far north of Europe. What they don't acknowledge is that they represent a memory of a Mediterranean vessel actually reaching that area and observing it directly. And you're thinking, you would say that it is possible at least. Possible. I see. That's interesting. And we know that this type of voyage did happen later in antiquity, famously Pithius of Masalia.

Masalia is what's now Marseille in south of France. So Pithias of Masalia did reach almost certainly either Norway or Iceland. He called it Thule. You've seen those Thule backpacks? Absolutely. That's like the end of the earth kind of land. Right. And then there's also an earlier lost so-called the Masaliot Periplus, 500s or 600 BC lost text,

but we know of it that also mentions a journey to the far north of Europe. Okay, so we know that like a thousand years after the, you know, the, the, the Mnohans, let's say, the Greeks did go up there, at least a few. Right. Okay. So it was possible and it did happen in what we call antiquity. I guess the question is, could somebody before Homer have done that? I see. Now, why do we need that if this sort of story interpolation through trade account does the explanation for us?

us. Like, why are you so, are you, would you speculate even further on the idea of an actual vessel pre-Homeric going to Scandinavia? Well, the, the story is, you know, it's like presented kind of what we would call cinematically as a first person view of a ship entering this harbor, right? So it's, it's presented as an eyewitness account to somebody coming by sea into this harbor and then scaling the cliff and looking around. And there's all these details that also are intriguing, for example, the people that live there, they have a palace or a main hall, and they have a meeting place where they assemble. And this is reminiscent of later like Viking society where there's like a main hall and there's the so-called thing.

The word thing referred to actually the public assembly of the Vikings. And Odysseus is surprised that there is no, he doesn't see any fields being cultivated. Okay. And this, in antiquate, in the Bronze Age, Scandinavia, let's say, or the north of Scotland, they were agricultural by this point. But they didn't have the kind of obvious agriculture that the Mediterranean had in terms of like vineyards and terraces and olive groves, stuff like that. So it is very, this seems to fit plausibly here. Okay. A Mediterranean mariner coming to this faraway land, being observing the societal structure. They have wagons. They have a timber kind of industry. They have a meeting place. They have a social structure. They weirdly don't have any fields. They have these vertical cliffs. They don't find the Mediterranean. And they're all and they're taller. And the day lasts way longer than it does back home. So these are a lot of different details that come together. When you lay down like that, it's like, yeah, they're describing Norway, like almost undoubtedly. It's like what it feels like to me. And then what did you say that the Vikings were not as sort of obviously agrarian because they were sea fans? and able to kind of like go grab other people stuff. Well, it's more because the climate up there is, it's very cold, right?

So you have a much shorter window to plant things, and they relied more on like pasture and livestock. And pillaging. There you go. A little bit of pillaging here. Yes, yes. That's interesting. Okay, so at this point, I'm happy to go with you

and I'll concede. I'm like, all right, as the staunch skeptic and a classical scholar that I am, sure, the pre-Homeric people probably knew about Scandinavia, maybe a vessel even went up there. But the transatlantic stuff, this is just poppycock. There's no way, right?

Well, let's see. So after the Listergonians, they go to the island of Eia, Circe's Isle. And this is uninhabited. I mean, Circe is a goddess. So there's this divine presence there. But besides this goddess,

there's no habitation on this island. Now that's strange. Okay, it's very hard to find an uninhabited island. At this point, the Mediterranean, everything is going to be inhabited. Yeah. It's also said to be surrounded by a limitless sea. Hmm. So when you're on this island, you cannot see any land anywhere else.

Okay. So it's also remote. Again, not that many islands in the Mediterranean have that feature. And then there's a few strange lines that. that I mentioned on my episode, if you want to revisit them, we could do, but there's some lines there where there seems to be some kind of solar confusion where the Odysseus and men, they're not sure where the sun rises and sets and they don't know where east and west is, which again, it could be just a lot of fog, but he doesn't say fog, and Homer does explicitly

mention fog other places. So if it's not fog, what else could explain not knowing where the sun rises and sets and where east and west is? is that could be that you're so far north now, even further north than the Lysregonians, that the north star is above you, so you don't really know where north is. And the sun spends most of the day in the summertime going around the horizon.

It might dip under the horizon for like an hour. But that's, again, really confusing if you've grown up with the sun going like this every day. And like even to this day, if we were to go to the Arctic Circle, you and I, Yeah. The sun would kind of just be going around us. Exactly.

And the North Star would be directly above us. And if we were skilled sailors with our sextants, we would be quite confused. Yes. Interesting. Now, what is that land? Is there a land that's like an island, perhaps, that's inhabitable there? I assume it's all ice. So there's a lot of different theories.

Okay, I went into this trying to make my own, you know, guess, okay? And by the way, I just want to say for like the nth time that I am, I'm not committed to this 100%, right? This is speculation. We're having fun. I want, like somebody commented in my video, is there a team that's trying to find the actual map? I was like, well, no, but I want there to be one. So I'm trying to. Now there is.

Yeah. It consists of two people, you and I. In Brooklyn. Yes. So we need an island that is isolated, very far north. Mm-hmm. It has trees. Yes.

and is uninhabited in the Bronze Age. There is none. There's Iceland. He did it again. Oh, we got Iceland. I forgot about ice. So, like, the detail about the trees, again, we don't, it's hard to know, you know, how much weight to give the different aspects of the story, right?

Because certainly these, if these tales do come from an actual voyage, they would have been embellished. They would have been modified. There would have been mutations in the story, right? Sure. So the trees might have just come into that later. But if we want to stick as closely to the text as possible, the only island I can think of that's, again, totally isolated, very far north,

and has trees and is uninhabited. I mean, the obvious one is Iceland. It's like the Faroe Islands that you might have heard of. They don't really have trees, for example. And there's a lot of them in short proximity to each other. So Iceland is possible. And then from there, Cursi tells Odysseus, you can't go home yet. You have to cross the ocean.

Yes. To the land of the dead. So he quote unquote crosses the ocean comes to, and we should note here that that word does not mean what we mean today. I mean there's so many, there's so many necessary digressions here, I apologize. By that means. It's most likely here that Homer or whoever at the time is telling these tales imagine the earth as a disk.

not never stated explicitly, but that seems to be the geography. And the ocean is this huge river that encircles basically Europe, Asia, and Africa, which is in the center. Okay. But that disk might be surrounded, like beyond that ring of ocean, there might be further. In fact, there are further lands in this mythology. Okay. So, uh, Sersi says, you can't go home yet. You have to cross the stream of ocean, the stream of Oceanos, and reach the land of the dead and there you'll get the prophecy from Tyreseus's ghost that will tell you how to get home. So he crosses the quote unquote stream of Oceanos and he comes to a land that is shrouded by perennial fog.

Okay. Now I remember like reading this in grad school and I just Google like I googled what's the foggiest place on earth and like the first five results were Newfoundland. Okay. And then since then I've looked it up more, you know, careful. And in fact, the easternmost tip of Newfoundland is often called the foggiest place on earth because that's where the Gulf Stream from the south, which is warm, and the Labrador Current from the north, which is cold meat, and the mixture, this constant mixture of cold and hot water, not hot, but cold and warm water creates this fog that covers the area for 200-something days of the year. Wow. Even to this day.

Yeah. Wow. That is fascinating. So we have the sequence of like three stops that that kind of fit on the exact journey that the Vikings took. The same journey that the Irish legendary monk St. Brendan may have took in around I think like five something AD. So there's also other candidates for pre, not only pre-Columbian but pre-Norse crossings. And then there's a text in Plutarch in the 100s AD that also some astronomers have claimed describes a similar North Atlantic crossing. So there's many rabbit holes, but there's various ancient data points that point to like a northern crossing and the Odyssey seems to fit that plausibly. Interesting. So amongst most scholars, would it be?

controversial to say that pre like let's say 800s bc greeks could have sailed to iceland that would be now we're getting crazy that would be very controversial okay and then this idea of because it says in the text crossing the river yeah the stream yeah now for most people they're like okay well the ocean's not a stream but you're saying because of that mythology of this river going around the known world being the ocean, that that would be what that's referencing. Yeah, and actually, this idea that the ocean is a stream is not actually, it's not stupid. Okay. If you're a Mediterranean civilization and you get through the Straits of Gibraltar, what you encounter

is a strong current, the so-called canary current, which is part of the North Atlantic gyre, which has the Gulf Stream. So the Gulf Stream and the canary current are part of this. never ceasing huge gyre that circles around the Atlantic. And that's the gyre that the European colonial seafarers used. Right. It's like an ocean highway, basically. So when you're looking at a map, it's an ocean.

But if you're a sailor and this is the way that you navigate the world, it is effectively a stream because there is a current that will just pull you if you get into it all the way to. Well, if you don't do anything, it'll pull you down the west coast of Africa and then take you west to Brazil. Oh. And similarly, if you head through the Red Sea in Egypt to the Indian Ocean, you'll also find a gyre there. So the two kind of choke points through which the Greeks or Phoenicians could have accessed

oceans, both in both cases, you would immediately be met with a strong current. So in both cases, it seems like you're dealing with a stream. Interesting. So it's not a dumb idea. Right. This mythology of like, oh, these dummies thought there was a. stream going around the world. It's like, well, if you're on a ship and this thing is pulling you, it is a stream quite literally because it's a Gulf stream and it's pulling you through the ocean.

That is fascinating. And now the foggy part, there's a lot of foggy places. Is there anything else that would indicate that perhaps this place is in North America? Well, here, the plot gets more entangled because there are several places later on in the journey that, you know, you know, you know, can be plausibly mapped in that area of what's now eastern Canada. The problem is that in, in Homer's text after the land of the dead, which might be Newfoundland, Odysseus goes back to EIA. So if that's Iceland, then he's back away from North America. Now, it's so hard to know where to go here because there's so many threads here, okay?

But so one thing I go over in my video is that we should not, if this is a memory of an older voyage, okay, we should not expect the order we get in Homer to be the exact original order. Okay. I actually think that there's textual reasons to believe that Circe might not have been present in the original story. Okay. So those lines about solar confusion I mentioned earlier, both of those were flagged by ancient scholars as being suspect because they don't fit the, they don't fit what's in the surrounding lines. Okay. So for example, the line is about not knowing where the sun rises and sets.

And here at Cresos, you want to pull up the text, I think it's called Ea passage. Okay, so, so midway down. So in the final lines of this passage is where we get the claim, you know, we can't tell east from west the dawn from the dusk, nor where the sun that lights our lives goes under earth, nor where it rises. So that's the solar confusion, okay? But right before that, it says all day long until the sun went down, we sat and feasted.

And then when the sun had set and night came, we did this and that. So you have a few lines that make it sound like a normal day and night cycle. They know where the sun is. Exactly. And then suddenly it's like, oh, we don't know where the sun rises and sets. Okay. It seems like these perhaps are two different places. Or it could be that in the hundreds of years where the story was accumulating features and evolving, somebody added something to a previous version. So, okay, so my one guess that I have here is that the original version, could have been the following.

They reach a far northern island that's uninhabited. They don't know where the sun rises and sets. There's little food there because it's, let's say Iceland, right? So they eat whatever they can, they eat like pigs, whatever they can find, maybe acorns or whatever. Then they don't know how to leave that place. So then the day, then the night comes and the night lasts for six months. and then finally when the days grow long again, they're able to leave.

And then Homer's like, ooh, instead of them foraging like pigs during six months of darkness, I'm going to make a witch who turns them into pigs and then Odysseus seduces her and then they stay for a year. But I forget to delete these lines here and there that speak of solar confusion.

Ah, okay. So, again, we're in speculation, territory here, but it is, you could make the case that there is evidence of an older, of an older narrative of a far northern region with solar confusion upon which Homer grafts this enchanting witch. Fascinating. Now, to be clear, this is, for anyone that is, like, maybe forgetting, this is not the claim that Odysseus is a real person that did this literal voyage, but more so that Homer's chilling and he hears a story about a sailor that goes to Iceland and is like, dude, there was no food.

We had to eat acorns. Like, I felt like I was a pig up there. Like, I was just eating whatever I could find on the ground. I barely survived. A bunch of my men died. But then I told them we're going to get back on the ship. We're going back to Greece. Yeah.

And if that is true, it absolutely rewrites our understanding of, you know, sea voyage at this time. Yeah. And it seems like these texts are referencing something that could be just pure speculation interpreted in that way. Yeah. That is fascinating. Okay, so now let's go back to the outline of the journey. So let's assume for the sake of argument that Homer added Circe, the witch, okay? If you remove the second visit to IEA, which he might have had reasons, poetic reasons to add there, sure.

Then there's a good case that several people have made, that more features fit the North... North American regions near Newfoundland. Okay, so for example, Skilla and Caribbdis has been suggested fits the Bay of Fundy in Canada, which has the most violent tides in the world. Caribis is a dangerous world pool. And then Skila is a monster with six heads that look and bark like dogs. The Bay of Fundy also has the largest,

one of the largest populations of seals in the world. And people commented on my video, like, there are seals in the Mediterranean. True, there are, but they're not nearly as big as the gray seals of the North Atlantic, which are so big they actually eat smaller seals. There are never as large populations as you find in the Bay of Fundy. And again, you know, the original story might have been like, whoa, we came to this bay, which had like extremely dangerous tides and, you know, more like these seals that were like 10 times bigger than normal seals.

And then over centuries that became a multi-headed monster and a whirlpool, you know. Wow. That's fascinating. Yeah, I could see a sailor coming back being like, dude, you would not believe it. Like the ocean almost ate our whole boat. And there were these barking dog swimming things. Yeah. Like that's a very like reasonable grounded story that then through retelling becomes this tall tale.

Even if it said, and there were giant seals that also could have been enough to inspire. stories. And there are many other details here. Okay, so like, Coribdis has all these features. It's a whirlpool that, that, you know, sucks down the brine and spits it out three times a day. And the, the Bay of Fundy has a famous world pool called Old Sao, which you can see form three times during the day in the long summer time, like the long summer daylight season. In the summer solstice, literally three times. You can see it form three times a day. Wow.

Because it forms both when the water flows into the bay through tidal phenomena and when it flows out of the bay. And these tides around like eight hour cycles or something. Yeah. So the whole thing is like 24 and a half hours. So there's four world pools. But during the summer solstice, when the day is long, you can see three of them. Wow. Also, Skila has massive cliffs.

There's cliffs in the Bay of Fundy. The, when the water is sucked away, the dark. Earth is exposed. That happens in the Bay of Fundy. There are trees on top of the cliffs. That's also in the Bay of Fundy. And there are several other famous North Atlantic world pools, but none of them have all these other features.

So you have like a big checklist that checks out. Right. The Bay of Fundy. And this part of Canada is also so interesting. We kind of mention it, but just to highlight, when the Vikings come over. Yeah. Documented Leif Erickson, that when they come from Norway or Norway?

Sweden. Scandinavia. Yeah. And they make it to North America. The first place they land is this exact area. Newfoundland, yeah. So it follows to reason like, hey, if there isn't even more nascent seafaring population that came, they would probably also land in a similar area.

It's the first stop. It is. Yeah. So one of the arguments in favor of this reconstruction is that it was done by several other cultures. Right. So, you know, we could go down the list, but the Sirens, right? The Sirens is an island where bird-like creatures sing in human-like voices. Right.

Which most people know them as mermaids. Like, it's kind of retold as mermaids. But that's not what Homer says. All right. So Homer says that they're women with, like, sparrow-like torsosos and heads. Which is a hilarious detail. Yeah, yeah. The fact that they get, like, reinterpreted later as being, like, super hot.

It's just kind of a funny, funny portion. So one one Greek guy, I think his name is Manolis Kutlis, he has his own oceanic odysy theory. And he points out that there was an island also in the same region we're talking about, okay? There's an island near Newfoundland called, I think it's called Funk Island, okay, or Funk Rock Island. Hell yeah. Funk Rock Island is sick. Exactly. That's awesome.

It could be the podcast name. Yeah, that's sick. And it has this huge population of these birds that from far away do sound like, you know, like there's a party going on. No. Yeah. Really? And there's sailors that have reported that when they sailed by this island, even far away from the island, they felt like they were hearing all these human voices carried over the surf. Is that something we could find?

Do you think there's something online that would have that recording of these birds? Well, so just to give credit to this guy, Manolis, Kutlis, if you, if you're a, if you're, if you're, search the YouTube video like I think it's called in the shadow odyssey I think his website is n skia which means in the shadow in greek e n skia.com he has a kind of video where he does his journey reconstruction and he has a clip that he got from somewhere of that island wow I don't know if you can find it now I'm not claiming to have a full itinerary here of course I'm just saying that there's some really interesting uh once again I could just imagine a sailor being like dude we're near this island. There's people there. Turns out not people. It's birds that sound like people.

And then over time, that gets turned into, there are these women that look like birds that are human women, or like bird women hybrids. Yeah. And I can see how that becomes the mythology based off of a real journey. Yeah. Hey guys, we're going to take a break really quick because if you know me, you know, I'm constantly trying to find the perfect level of stimulation. Yeah, I want enough energy at the beginning of the day to go to the gym, be a good dad, and then record a three-hour podcast about like ancient civilizations or the Knights Templar. or something like that. So, you know, I like a little caffeine,

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You've heard of this story, right? Mm-hmm. So they come to after Silla and Cribidus, they come to an island of Helios where there are cattle. And the ghost of the prophet Tyreseus had warned Odysseus. If you guys eat any of these cattle, you're not going to go home. Yes. It's a classic Garden of Eden type vibe. Don't eat this one cattle.

That's the only thing you need to do. Yeah, refrain from the barbecue. And what happens? Uh, you can, um, so, so they get to this island and there's all these, you know, cows walking around. And the strange thing is they're not tended by any, uh, herdsmen. There's nobody tending these flocks. You're just kind of out there, okay. And one one objection I got to my video in a lot of comments was like, there's no cattle in North America before colonization.

That's a good point. I was he going to say the same thing. Which is true. But, but if you go right north of the Bay of Fundy, a bit northeast, there's an island there. I forget what it's called. You can look it up. And that's where some people have thought Thernaisha is, the island of the sun. And there were Caribou there.

No. Yeah. Now, caribu are really, would be really strange to a Mediterranean observer, right? They're as big as cows. They're not domesticated, so there's no herdsmen leading them around. They're just kind of out there grazing. Lantern Jack, you're doing it again. I love this.

Oh, wow. And now, is there anything else in the retelling that would indicate that it's a cow, but there's something little special about it? Yeah, well, when his men succumb to their hunger and actually slaughter a cow, I think the meat keeps moving. I mean, then you get to like, then you get to really fictional aspects of the story. Right.

I mean. Is there any danger with eating a caribou? I don't know, but. I wonder if that warning is sort of baked into like an anthropology. Like, hey, these caribou will kill you or something like that. Or like, there's a danger that goes along with it. So there's a warning that sort of, you know, supersedes the men like, hey, don't eat the caribou. So I haven't, look, there's, there's, there's,

over 20 books that have been written trying to explain an oceanic voyage of Odysseus. I haven't read them. Fair. I actually have not encountered the Cariboy idea. I just kind of looked myself to see what could be interpreted as a... Breaking news. As cows without herdsmen. And they're indigenous to that island.

Potentially. Now, okay, there's a few thorns in this idea, which is that this island did not only have cows, but also as sheep. Okay. Now, there definitely were no sheep in North America. Okay. Then again, you could say that Homer added his detail. Mm-hmm. And there are...

Then you could say, well, why would he add that detail? Well, because the way the epic tradition works is that every bard memorizes thousands of phrases that fit into the line in certain metrical ways. Okay. So if I tell you, describe to me a beautiful garden, you instantly have, like, you know, 20 lines memorized that you can mix and match and put together and describe a generic beautiful garden. And it's always going to have olive trees and fig trees and, you know, a gentle stream and a delicious West Wing bringing refreshment, you know, West Wind, sorry. So it could be that

the kind of pressures of the genre made the mention of herds. It kind of just sucked in this mention of sheep as well. Now, why is it the case that when there's retellings, they have to kind of stick to certain, you know, memorized pre-written lines? Is it to keep the meter of the poem? Yeah. So the meter of the poem is it functions not only to make it entertaining and musical, but it functions as a mnemonic device. Mm-hmm. Okay.

Scholars understood this in the early 20th century when they went to Yugoslavia, which had, a which still has Serbia and Montenegro still has a living bardic tradition right and these people from this guy Milman Millman Perry an American scholar went to Yugoslavia studied how these bards work and you saw that they they memorize this huge body of data of metrical phrases that fit together and they can they can just zippity do do dog you like anything at any length any topic you can almost think like a freestyle rapper it's very much that okay interesting like there's words like a freestyle rapper will use that like whenever i say this word i'm going to rhyme it with this word exactly and i have my anchor points and then the things that i can add in i can

do at liberty but i need these anchors in order to make the rhyme work yes and it's the same thing with these these poems yeah so um if you look at the description of phasia or um calypso's isle or other places, you'll see a lot of lines repeat. And that's because they're part of this kind of automatic, uh, you know, automatic, uh, repertoire that comes to mind when you start doing this. And that's important when considering this caribou idea or the sheep or things like that because it kind of maybe flattens the true reality. Yeah.

Which would be perhaps seeing an island into something that's a little bit more poetic. But when you're reading through the lines of the poem, you're like, oh, there might have been something that was kind of omitted here that might reveal like a greater truth such as transatlantic sea travel. Yeah, right. So like when Odysseus is being sucked into the whirlpool of Caribdis and he grabs onto a fig tree above the cliff, there are no like fig fruit trees in North America natively. But so you could say, well, so you're not in North America, right? But there are trees that are fig like in the leaf structure, but also like that's such an unimportant detail. I think the most likely thing is that when the poet, the bard, is performing and he needs to

have some tree that he holds on to. Fig rhymes with whatever. Whatever tree fits the meter and is plausible gets inserted there. Yes. Without even thinking, like it's just like a, you're in the zone, you're flowing, right? Like you're rapping and- Right. I could see a rapper being like, yo, I took a toke and then I looked up, I saw a tree of oak. It's like you didn't really see an oak tree, but for the rhyme, you need to say oak.

So it just kind of fits. And it doesn't mean that you, you know, didn't have this experience. You're just pulling in details that rhyme with what the meter is. That is just so interesting. Okay. As we move forward, we go from Carybdis, this place that comes next. Ogigia. Ooh.

Calypso's Isle. They went for nine days. So, well, here Odysseus' ship is destroyed, right? And so he drifts for nine days. So it's going to be slower than a sailing journey. Mm-hmm. Okay. But then from Ogigia to the Phoeasians, he builds a raft with a mast and a sail.

So that's like, that's a sailing voyage. That's going to be much faster. Mm-hmm. So we have nine days drifting and then 17 days sailing. And that could, I mean, that's like on the scale of going from North America, back to Europe, you know, not exact. I mean, it's plausible. Right.

Okay. So a lot of people, even in antiquity, people thought, O'Gigia must be an Atlantic island, perhaps the Azores or Madeira. Or Atlantis. Well, or Plato later used those early stories to inspire his story of Atlantis. Fascinating. Potentially. Now, do you have any type of theory about where O'Gigia could be?

Well, you're pushing me into territory that I don't have an expertise on. Fair. This is not you as Dr. Jack. This is just you as Jack right now in this part of the episode. Yeah. So I'm just having fun here, okay? Yeah. This is not, I'm not going to publish a peer paper on this.

Fair. So I think, you know, a lot of people have suggested the Azores for a gigia, and that makes sense. because if you're going to go from North America, it makes sense in this context. If you're going to go from North America to Europe, you're going to take the northern arc of the North Atlantic gyre, and that's going to take you through the Azores, very likely. And, you know, it's conceivable that this checks out.

Another possibility is that, again, now we're going, into real crazy territory is that Ogegeia could be Bermuda Amazing And then the phyatians So like you need to work in the phyatians And Calypso

As two stops between North America potentially And the Mediterranean Sea Okay So possibly Ogegia is Bermuda The phyatians are the Azores And then we get back to Europe

Or possibly Ogegia is is the Azores, as has often been suggested, and then the phoacians are somewhere in Western Europe. Potent may be the Phoenician colony of Gadera or Cadiz in Spain, or maybe some other place in Western Europe. That's probably like also very likely of a fantasy land that Homer makes up in order to get Odysseus from this almost magical realm. back into the familiar geography of the eastern Mediterranean. Right. Now, what's going on on a gigia?

So Odysseus is stranded for, you know, like seven or eight years on this island in the middle of nowhere. And when, so he's stranded there with the nymph Calypso who wants to marry him. She wants him to be immortal. He doesn't want to be immortal. He wants to go home. And Athena, the goddess, takes pity on Odysseusia. and asks Zeus to let him go home finally. And so Zeus dispatches Hermes to go and tell Calypso,

okay, time's up, you've got to let him go home now. Okay. And she gets really upset, and she goes, she walks over to Odysseus, who's standing on the beach and looking across the waves and weeping for his homeland. And she says, okay, Odysseus, you can go home now. I'll bring you some tools to make a raft,

and you can be on your way. And he looks at her ever suspicious of everybody and says, what trickery is this? You want me to sail on a raft across a sea that not even ships can pass? So he's in a place where ships don't normally go on. So this, again,

this could be a remote Atlantic island like the Azores that normally no ships ever go to. And so he doesn't know how to, he doesn't know how to cross it. It's never frequented by sailors. and he asks her like, how do I even do this? And she says, well, just keep the, keep the polar star. She calls it the bear, but the bear means Ursa Minor, which means the polar star,

North Star. Keep the North Star on your left as you sail for 17 days. Again, that cannot fit in Mediterranean because the implication is that he doesn't see any land for 17 days. Right. So it's a 17-day eastward journey. with an almost constant wind pushing him eastward and he's steering his raft with the polar star on the left so that he's going eastward so the azores fits that now is there any other

description of the island like what it looked like who the people were that were there outside of obviously the mystical kind of godlike features well it's also uninhabited besides calypso which again fits the azores because they were not inhabited as far as we can tell in ancient times. And then there are people who have gone into more details of the actual description. I haven't, so I don't want to, you know, pretend. But there's people that have written about the Azores, yeah. Interesting. Are there any descriptions of a beautiful Caribbean island where they're like Odysseus looked in the water and it was perfectly blue and there was some coconuts or anything like that? Well, I think if there is any, okay, so the Caribbean doesn't really fit

this itinerary that we've been discussing, most likely. It's possible that there was a Phoenician expedition that did reach the Caribbean, possible. Possible. Maybe. Because we have these two later accounts in the Aristotelian corpus and in Diodorus, Icarus. So we're talking the 300s and then, I think the second century or first century, BC, two accounts that seem to tell the same story of Phoenicians getting blown off course in the Atlantic and finding an island paradise.

Okay. And in this island paradise, like, there was just so much lush vegetation and fruits growing everywhere that life was so easy that they wanted to just, the Carthaginians wanted to just pack up and leave there and live there. And the state was so afraid of the homeland getting depopulated that they banned all further expeditions to this island paradise. Okay. So there have been speculations that some Phoenician and the Carthaginians are Phoenicians, okay, that some Carthaginian or Phoenician vessel got blown off course outside of Gibraltar and landed in the Caribbean. Okay, that's been speculated.

Another data point here is that the Italian scientist and author Lucio Russo has argued that the lines of longitude given in certain maps, ancient maps, for the so-called Blessed Isles, also fit the Caribbean. Really? Yeah. And what lines in longitude are we talking about? Well, Chrysosos, you can pull out a map called the Lesser End. Antilles, I think. I love a map. Okay.

So those are the lesser Antilles. They have islands such as Trinidad and Tobago, other famous, you know, current vacation paradises. Right. So in Hellenistic and Roman era texts that describe geography, various ancient geographers tried to give a longitudinal. coordinates for the so-called islands of the blessed. And this guy, this Italian scientist, Lucio Russo, has argued,

based on several reconstructions of these texts. Okay, this is, there's like a long, there's a lot of room for debate here. But he argues that he can reconstruct the coordinates given by the astronomer Hipparchus in around 100 BC and that those coordinates line up perfectly with the lesser Antilles. interesting okay so that would speak to at least a knowledge of those islands what year roughly well so Hipparchus would have given this around 100 BC but that could have been based on earlier voyages I should note that the period of most extensive Greek exploration was like 330 BC to like 200 BC and almost all texts from that period have been lost

So we only have later very brief summaries of those explorations, often by people who don't believe that they could have happened. Really? Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. So, for example, the voyage of Pythias to either to Ultima Thule, which is either, you know, Norway or Iceland, we know of that because the geographer Strabo later, much later, mentions it before saying, but that's ridiculous. It's so funny how that happens. The same thing happens with like Gnostic texts. Yes.

Where like most of the Gnostic texts that we have are later church scholars debunking them as heresy. But we've lost the original transcripts and we just have the later interpretations. Yeah. And it's a similar thing here. That's a great example that a great analogy that like a lot of our knowledge of early heresies comes from debunkings of those supposed heresies. Right. Yeah. Now why would it be the case that?

that the transcripts of these fantastical journeys, of the literal journeys that happened, would have been lost a time. However, the stories that are mythologized about them would then persist. Well, because there's no reason to reject a good story. But if you think, you know, if I come to you and tell you a good story, you're probably going to, you're going to like it and you might pass it on.

If I tell you, oh, I went to like the moon, you'd be like, get out of here, you know. Right. That's a good point. So if someone like a street joke and they're like, yeah, I saw a priest and a rabbi walking around. If I'm telling you it under the context that this is a joke, you were more likely to tell it to another person and then another person. But if I'm going to you, like, you won't believe it. I saw a priest and a rabbi and then a chicken literally crossed the road and then all this other stuff happened. You'd be more like, all right, sure. And then you would just kind of disregard it.

Exactly. So here's a good analogy for that. The ancients had, some ancient philosophers had a pretty sophisticated atomic theory. a theory that the world is made of atoms and the only full text we have about this is a poem that the Roman poet Lucretius wrote and the reason why that text survived is because it's a poem so it survived on its poetic merits and if we didn't have that we wouldn't know nearly what we do now about this important philosophical school so like you know when you when you when you coat something in honey as Lucretius himself says or you you transform it into an entertaining entertaining medium it has a more a better chance of survival and it's almost possible to think like in 2000 years from now people might dispute that you know Neil Armstrong went to the moon but people might reference the film like the Martian yeah and they're like yeah well this is a story about a guy that tries to colonize Mars da da da da but the actual details of space travel going to the moon may be disputed

If this analogy fits, that is kind of a parallel. And this whole theory is so fascinating because, once again, using the moon example, imagine, you know, guy listening at home, that in 2000 years, the future people are like, yeah, Americans couldn't go to the moon at the time, space travel was impossible, they didn't have rockets, and the legitimate history is disputed. But then we have stories that describe the moon in explicit detail. And we have poems that describe space travel and, like, the technical aspects of the space travel in explicit detail.

The people in 2000 years are going to be like, well, if they couldn't go to the moon, how do they know these things or how do they have these vivid details in these stories that predate what we understand about space travel? And the only explanation is, oh, we did actually go to the moon prior to when this future civilization thought we did, which is kind of what we're speculating about now. I think you hit the nail on the head. Like this idea of using the Odyssey to try and speculate on a pre-executive. on a pre-Homeric voyage into the Atlantic Ocean,

perhaps beyond, is very much like somebody a thousand years from now using the Martian, the novel The Martian, to understand what the Apollo program, or what the Mars rover program might have found. Right. That's, that's, and obviously Andy Wier did his research, right? Right. Based off real science. Yeah. And I'm not saying Homer did his research,

but he certainly would have used, he would have used the stories available. He's not, the Homeric, the epic poets do not create from scratch. Right. As we found with Troy, right? For the longest time, it's like the city's obviously not real. This war was obviously not, it didn't happen. And as time has gone on, it seems to be the case that, no, Troy was perhaps a real city

and that there was some type of battle that happened in this actual place. And sure, the details and what catalyzes the battle is certainly, mythologized, but the actual events of an actual battle very likely occurred. Troy was almost certainly real city. The Hittites and Greeks almost certainly vied for control over it. And there was a local ruler named in the Hittite archives Al-Axandu, which, if it sounds like Alexander, it is. And so this one archive shows us that there was a Greek speech king ruler in an area claimed by the Hittites. So just from that, we see the Hittites and Greeks are vying for control over this area, right?

Right. And the name matches the name given by Homer. Right. And the name of the city matches the name given by Homer. Okay. So if the Iliad has these threads of truth to it, why would the Odyssey not also have these threads of truth to it? Exactly.

And in fact, now that we know more about the so-called sea peoples, a lot of the Odyssey has of the sea people voyages. That's another threat. I don't know. But like the Phoenicians, these were master sailors. Yes. Like I, why is there so much resistance from the mainstream historical community, if there is such a thing, you know, as a part of speech, that would resist these, you know,

threads as being perhaps evidence of transatlantic travel prior to Leaf Erickson? I wouldn't say it's resistance so much as it is in. indifference, okay? Like, I'll tell you a quick story. When I was starting my podcast as a grad student, one of my first interviews was with Richard Martin, who's one of the great Homeric scholars of our time at Stanford. And as I was in his office, like unpacking my microphones and cables and everything, he says to me, you're not slick Eddie, are you?

And I was like, no, who's that? He's like, oh, this guy's been emailing me asking me like where Odysseus went. I just want to make sure that we're not going to talk about that. And I was like, no, no, no, I'm not here for that. Which just goes to show you that, um, uh, scholars just haven't really cared about Homeric's geography for several decades now. It's not that they study it and dismiss these theories. Like it's just not part of what Homeric scholarship has been focused on.

Right. Um, and I should say that from antiquity till today, you've had like three camps of people. You've had the people that say, it's all made up. Like the 50 comments that say, it's. fiction idiot. Fair. That's an ancient perspective. Famously, Eritostony is the geographer said, you will find the location of Odysseus's voyage when you find the cobbler who sewed together the bag of winds for Odysseus. Okay. Funny. Then you have the people who have tried to fit it in the Mediterranean. People who have said, oh, these distances are too

long, let's shrink it down to scale and put it in the Mediterranean. And then you've had a smaller, probably the smallest group who have said, well, hold on, it says ocean here, it says long days, it describes these long journeys. Like if we take the text to be saying what it claims to be saying, we're

outside of the Mediterranean. So you've had all three perspectives going back forever. Right. I don't see this ending any time soon. Okay. Fair. What I do see potentially happening is right now in the past 100 years, you have a lot of people who are not Homeric scholars,

who don't know ancient Greek, but who love to sail, or they are history buffs, or they're obsessed with navigation technology. And they've written these independent works on trying to find Odysseus's itinerary, right? And then you have the scholars who are like, this is stupid. And one thing I wanted to do in my video is to create like a, to bridge the gap here. Okay. because these independent researchers, they all kind of, they all succumb to a few fatal flaws that are instantly apparent to all the scholars. And I think if they could just stop making those two fundamental mistakes, they could come closer to what would be scholarly acceptable by the scholars.

Right. And those mistakes are they try to begin and end the journey at Troy and ethics. but the scholarship has shown that the travel narrative is a later addition to the story. Okay, so, you know, a lot of people say, if he went into the ocean, you would expect him to describe Gibraltar. Well, not if Homer copy-pasted an Atlantic journey into an otherwise Mediterranean journey, beginning and ending with these two magical episodes, the storm and the Phoeatian robot ship okay so so I would say if anybody wants to like if if anybody's going to

to form a group trying to try to reconstruct some bronze age Atlantic voyages forget about Troy and forget about Ithaca and and also do not try to create one long itinerary because Homer or whoever other barred put this together might not have preserved the order of the original voyage. Right. They're not looking at it as a literal chronology. They're using these different places from these different stories to paint a picture that's convenient for the narrative.

Yes. Right. Are you familiar with the book? And Chris, I'm going to need you to look this up so I can get the actual title. Pigs, Witches, War, and something else. It's a famous 70s anthropology book that, basically the book is arguing for this idea of, he calls it cultural materialism.

Yes, this guy, cows, pigs, wars, and witches by Marvin Harris. It's a wonderful book, and it basically attempts to look at religious traditions and sort of like spiritual traditions and try to distill the cultural materialism behind them. So, for example, there's many Semitic cultures, whether it's Judaism or Islam, that say, hey, don't eat pigs. and the prevailing kind of thought was like, initially like, well, God, Allah said don't eat pigs. Hashem ordained this.

And then the later sort of thought was like, oh, well, pigs carry disease, yada, yada, yada. But Marvin Harris argues, well, any animal can carry disease. Like, why would pigs be explicitly excluded, whereas goats, cows, anything else, sheep, et cetera, can be eaten? And one of the arguments that he poses in the book is, at the time, if you look at the economic conditions of raising pigs in the Middle East with these specific types of pigs, they were extremely resource dense. They took a ton of energy and time and nutrients and resources to raise them and to actually,

you know, like domesticate them. And so it became a sort of an economic tradition to say, hey, it's actually not worth it for us to do this. We're going to cut them out. Same thing with cows in India. That the Hindu tradition says we don't eat cows. It's sort of the mother goddess. It represents all these things about creation. Well, he argues in this book, again, this is not religious, so I apologize if anyone holds this as a religious doctrine. He says this would be actually because the economic conditions of having cows versus killing cows is actually more advantageous to the society. And that if you are raising cows and taking the milk and all that, you will actually create more nutrients and sustenance over time with these specific cows at this

time than if you just kill them off. And so it's an interesting look where you take these religious threads and these religious stories that are rooted in a religious tradition. And then actually distilling the truth behind it. And it feels kind of similar to what we're doing now, where we're taking these stories, these mythologies about, you know, Greek antiquity and Odysseus, et cetera. And we're saying, well, what is the actual anthropological truth? Is there something underneath it that's in the subtext that we can actually ascertain

that if it's true, completely rewrites our understanding of sea travel, trade, exploration of this, you know, ancient period? Yeah, I think what it boils down to is, is you're trying to find a signal within the noise. Mm-hmm. And that's always a tricky endeavor. Of course. And certainly disputed and at no point will be settled soon.

Is there anything else from the text or even from the episode that you did that we didn't cover that you think is just an interesting thread that maybe paints a picture of travel outside the Mediterranean? Yeah, a few things. One is just the sheer number of ancient texts that mention lands. beyond the ocean. So Christos, if you can pull out, I think it's one of the files that begins with a zero. Yeah, so here is a non-exhaustive list of ancient texts that mention lands beyond the ocean.

Hmm. We've got everyone, Plato, pseudo-Arestodal, Pythius, Plutarch, Ptolemy, Seneca, Pliny the Elder. I mean, yeah, there's all these references to. Yeah. Now, to be clear, these are not all independent accounts. They might have some common sources. There might be some overlap.

But it's still striking just how many ancient texts speak of not only islands across the ocean to the west, but some even claim a great continent. And, you know, so Plato in the work, Timeas, which is famous for being the place where we get the Atlantis story, he speaks of, he says that Atlantis was outside. the pillows of Hercules, which means west of Gibraltar, and that behind Atlantis there were other islands, and then behind those islands there were there was a great continent. Now, people sometimes

say, why would you even mention the Tymeus? It's obviously a fiction. Well, just as when Andy Weir writes the Martian, he's going to use all the good scientific data he can get his hands on, even if Plato was making this up in

entirely he's going to use whatever geographical stories or or you know traditions he can get his hands on because he wants to make a believable tale right if you were to say to me you know how in the martian gravity is different on Mars yeah I wouldn't say to you why would you invoke the Martian that's BS that you're illustrating a point by using a pop culture film or book that I would understand exactly so when Plato says that there was a great continent behind Atlantis like there was be no reason for him to make that up you know like he's already pushing people's uh credibility i mean he's already kind of he's already going out on a limb in saying that there was atlantis right

he's already appearing crazy to people why would he add more details that make him even more crazy right it makes more sense that he is uh mentioning things that that had some basis in existing traditions or stories so uh so that's so besides plato there's a few others that also that also mentioned a great continent plutarch so plutarch's on the face which appears in the orb of the moon that's a handful on the face which appears in the orb of the moon i think that a nice meter to that's um probably the most fascinating of all these texts because it describes it purports to describe a carthaginian embassy to the so-called land of chronos which a recent team of greek astronomers has interpreted to be basically the same North Atlantic route

from Britain through the Faroe Islands and Iceland and then to Newfoundland. Okay. And Plutarch says that when the Carthaginian embassy gets to what has been interpreted as Newfoundland, there are Greeks there that have been living there since the time of Hercules or before the time of Hercules, which means centuries before the Trojan War,

and they live around a bay which has the size of what we know of as the Sea of Azov in the Black Sea. Now, the Gulf of St. Lawrence by Newfoundland, it has the same size as the Sea of Azov, and it has the same latitude as the Caspian Sea. And both those things fit

the Gulf of St. Lawrence by Newfoundland. Okay. I'm just saying that you can, you can keep going down this rabbit hole as far as you want, you know, as long as you want. Now, with the Troy example, how it's thought to be mythology and then it's now accepted as a real city,

the biggest thing here is that we have the ruins of an ancient city. Yeah. Now, the obvious question is, why are there no remnants, tools, weapons, bones of ancient Carthaginians? in Newfoundland. So great question.

Let's consider the Vikings for a moment. We know for a fact that the Vikings reached Newfoundland. We've found their settlements. But besides that one settlement, they have left zero genetic trace of their existence in North America. There have been no genetic study has found any like Viking genes among the native populations of North America. And if we hadn't found that one site,

we still wouldn't believe that they had reached North America. So this just goes to show how little is left behind by some of these expeditions. Okay. Now, do I believe that the Greeks, Carthaginians reached North America? I'm not sure, okay? I think if they did, it definitely was not done more than a few times because if there were an established trade route,

we would expect to find more evidence archaeologically. We would expect to find, like, North American crops taken to Europe and European crops taken to North America. We don't find that, right? So if it happened, it was like a one-off thing or a two-off thing, maybe like three or four times max. And if that's the case, you wouldn't really expect to find much archaeology. logically. Right. Now, is there something with like, I don't know, I'm trying to think like,

okay, dung or like feces, like, oh, we found a seed from North Africa that only grows there that now is indigenous, like in this place and it's a petrified piece of something or like anything that would indicate that, you know, again, if we're going based off the mythology, like, hey, Greeks have been here for, you know, centuries before the Carthaginians landed, just got to be something. Look, there are many such things. I'm not the expert on them, but, you know, like, I was just saw this YouTube video, uh, where this guy is claiming that, uh, Olmec monument number seven, I believe shows a bearded man carrying a flag who seems to be a Carthaginian, okay, like, there are people that have gone, love that. I haven't gone through this, nor probably will I,

but there are, if there is any evidence, it's very scant. And there are people who try to, find it. I mean, okay, one thing to mention is there are hundreds and hundreds of inscriptions that have been found in North America that are purported to be Egyptian or Greek or Phoenician. Almost all of them have been shown to be forgeries. Therefore, if there are any real ones, it's going to be really hard to convince anybody that they're real because of how many forgeries have been debunked. Right. You know. Now, this Viking settlement in New Finland, how robust is that settlement? Are you, are, are we? Are you, are, well, we're It's beyond my expertise.

Because I'm so curious if it's like, hey, we found like maybe a cave where they were posted up. Or if they're like, oh, no, this was a proper city with, you know, 2,000 people. And we have all these pieces of evidence here. Because that would maybe, that maybe like shake my skepticism. I'm like, all right, if they found like one bone and they're like, this is evidence of the Vikings. And it's like, well, you're just one bone beyond the standard. And I know it's fewer than 2,000 people. Right.

But where in that large spectrum? I can't tell you. Fair. Now, before we move on, is there anything else from this that you think are interesting little threads that would promote this theory? Oh, you know, we could go through some maps. So let's first look at numbers one, two, three, one, two, and three. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I got to tell you something. I had one of those days recently where I woke up super tired. I drank coffee and then I drank more coffee because I was tired. I trained badly because I had too much coffee. And then I couldn't sleep because I had too much coffee. And the frustrating part is I'm doing all the things. I'm lifting. I'm

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so you can try it and pay attention to how you feel and see whether Mars Men fits your routine. limited time, the listeners of this show, if you are a camper, you are going to get 50% off for life plus free shipping and three free gifts when you go to men go to mars.com. That is men go to mars.com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out. And after you purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about them. Make sure you tell them that Mark and Christos from the campsite sentia. Now let's get back to the show. Hey guys, we're going to take a break real quick because this episode is sponsored by Brunt Workwear. I got the Marin Boot right here. And What immediately stood out to me about this is the quality.

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And if you go to the next two files, you'll see similar ones. And so this is the explanation for the journey just being in the Mediterranean. So these are already in the classical period, so like 500 BC, the Greeks were doing this game where they were like putting dots on the map and connecting them. And most of these modern maps are based on those ancient reconstructions. Okay. and again all of these were done by Greeks who you know did not believe the distances in the text right they say these these nine day and 17 day voyages are just poetic exaggeration if we shrink it down to

scale this is what we get okay um now let's go to the map called mertz i think it's zero at the beginning So this is the most famous modern Atlantic reconstruction. And I actually made it myself based on Merz's book because I don't think anybody, she herself doesn't give the whole voyage. I think because it's so ridiculous if you put it all on the map. So I did it myself because I couldn't find one. And so she commits the fatal flaw of beginning at Troy and ending in Ithaca. Right.

And she also commits the fatal flaw. of trying to make it all one voyage. And as you can see, that forces her to make two, not one, but two full circuits around the Atlantic, to get everything in. So that's,

you know, that's kind of ridiculous. And, you know, people look at other books that she's written. And she used to be what's called a hyper diffusionist. It refers to these old theories that humans had explored much more than,

is plausible. Love that. So, yeah, she probably was a little cuckoo, but within, you know, she also did a lot of interesting research. And, you know, I think she came up with a Bay of Fundy idea. So, so there's a few nuggets within the craziest stuff. Hell yeah. Okay.

Now, what about Scaria being in, uh, Alabama? Yeah. So that to me is, is preposterous. I mean, she, so she puts the, she puts the land of the sun with the sun with the sun cattle north of the Bay of Fundy where I said that there's the caribou. Yeah. I don't think she mentions caribou. That's, uh, but from there, um, she has Odysseus drift to the Azores where Calypso is,

which I think is that that's implausible because he's just drifting. And drifting speeds is like one knot, you know, it's very slow. So I don't think nine days is enough to get you from Canada to the Azores if you're just drifting. And then when he see when Odysseus sees the land of the phacians, Poseidon comes back from vacation and is like, what? That dude again? And he sends his storms. And Odysseus is tossed about for three days before he, uh, reaches land. And Mertz has that. She thinks a tornado hits him in the Azores and takes him to Florida. Nice. Which is ridiculous. Not only is it ridiculous, but

It's clear in the text that he's tossed around for three days and then makes it to that land that he saw three days earlier. It's not a new land. Right. You know. Also, if you landed in the panhandle, you would remember, you know, that would be in there for sure. They'd be like, dude, we saw a gas station. You would not believe there's a buckies up here. There'd be way more reference.

People on spring break. Exactly. There'd be a whole bunch of stuff for sure. Wow. Okay, this is so fun seeing all the different. Also, she puts the land of the dead in West Africa, or say Hades, right? which is crazy because there's never any fog there. Like, ever.

Okay. So she puts what Homer calls the foggiest place anyone's ever seen in the desert. Interesting. Makes no sense. Right. But again, that's because she starts at Troy and you shouldn't do that. Right. It is interesting that basically all these maps put the lotus eaters in like Tunisia or like near Carthage.

Yeah. Is there a reason why it's kind of like accepted amongst everyone? Yes, because, okay, so remember how I said that the the imported, copy pasted earlier travel narrative that we're trying to reconstruct, um, begins and ends with these two magical episodes, the storm and the phacians, the robot ship. So if you don't see that, okay, so the storm happens, you see like just southwest of Troy, there's the tip of Greece and I have the arrow. yeah right there so that tip is called that that's cape malia okay that's where the storm hits him and it takes and hit and the storm takes his fleet for nine days over the sea now that's too big a journey for the mediterranean but anyway it takes him southwest and that takes you to the lotus eaters so that

that that would suggest a Libyan location or Tunisian location if you are trying to shruging to it down to scale and put it in the Mediterranean. Okay. But if instead, and this, by the way, I left your answer, I left your question unanswered about the Caribbean. This is where we get to that. If instead, the storm off Malaya acts as a, as the beginning of the copy-pasted narrative.

So we're suddenly now in a new place. You don't know where, but we're somewhere. And we're taken by a storm for nine, for nine days southeast. And we come to a land. where you could just eat food that's growing around you and not have any care in the world. Well, that sounds a lot like the Carthaginian island paradise they discovered that was so lush and desirable that people wanted to all move there from Carthage.

And Carthage was scared of their home being depopulated, so they forbade people from going there. Right. Like, I'm not saying, I'm saying if you're trying to find something in the existing ancient literature that matches the lotus eaters, the two accounts of the Phoenician slash Carthaginian ship being tossed on the sea for many, many days and coming to an island paradise where there's a lot of delicious fruit sounds like a candidate. Okay. Yes. So could Homer have heard this from some Phoenicians? Possible. It might not even be part of it.

of the same story as the northern adventures, right? He could have heard the Phoenician story of the island paradise and put that in the early part of the story. And then he might have heard a separate account of a northern journey with solar confusion. And between them is another magical episode, the island of Aeolus. Okay. Now, everybody in their mom has put Aeolus near Italy. You see that?

Mm-hmm. Can you put, can you bring up the, the file called Lipari, L-I-P-A-R-I? Okay, so this is the, to the west of the southern tip of Italy, north of Sicily, or this group of islands called, still called now the Aeolian Islands. It's a popular destination for sailors. And most people, since antiquity, have said that, the island of Aeolus, Aeolia, the island of the winds, is Lippari. Now the problem is, Odysseus sails, I think, for like nine days east of Lipari before he finds his

sea site of land. And within a day you would hit Italy. Okay. So that doesn't really work. And he also says that the island of Aeolus is a floating island. Now, what would make you think an island is floating. Something to do the stars, maybe, some type of rotation, maybe like, I don't know, now I'm guessing. Well, like, okay, let's say if you're on an island,

maybe if there's like waves or like if the island felt shaky. Like if you're on Long Island, okay? Yes. And you can see New York. Are you ever going to think you're on a floating island? No. Because the reference point stays the same. Right. What if you're on an island where there is

no other land you can see? And the things that you do see beyond your island, like the clouds and the currents, seem to be moving around you. Wouldn't you think that you are... Relatively, you're moving. That you're like a massive ship that's sailing in this sea. Right. So I think hints like that point to the island of Aeolus being also an Atlantic island. Super remote.

Very remote. where there are currents and clouds that make it seem like it's moving, and there is no big land you can see that serves as a reference point. And so it seems like you're just floating on the limitless sea. Would Aesores be a possibly? Or Madeira. Medeira is another candidate. So Madeira, unlike the Azores, doesn't have an archipelago. But even the Azo's is possible, because the Aesores are so far from each other that you can, could be on the easternmost Azor island and not really see the other ones. Interesting.

So I think for the island of Aeolus, Madera and the eastern Azores are both possible. And both of those would allow you to have a nine-day voyage before you hit land. And then, so the cool thing is this. So when Odysseus leaves the island of the winds, and by the way, why is it the island of the winds? that implies that it's an island that experiences all different winds north wind south wind east wind west wind plural winds yeah and both Madeira and the Azores because they're both kind of within this North Atlantic gyre like close-ish to the center not that not central but kind of far enough towards

center to have all the different winds and currents play role so you could experience all the different winds on either those islands and therefore it might be a floating island and one that has all the different winds come into play once in a while. So then Odysseus sails east with a steady westerly wind. And westerly means it's blowing you from the west. Okay. And he sails, I think, nine days. We can check that chart again.

So he sails from the island of Aeolus for nine days eastward. And then Homer says he sees Ithaca. they even see like the smoke from the chimneys of their homes. And just as they're about to get close, some of these idiots on board, they open the bag of the winds. Keep blown away. And the winds reversed,

and they get blown back to the island of Aeolus. Okay. Now, since you cannot sail for nine days towards, uh, where is it? Yeah, since you cannot sail for nine days east and reach Ithaca, it's impossible.

Let's just assume for the sake of argument that Homer substituted some other location with Ithaca. Let's just say Gibraltar or let's say Portugal or let's say Ireland. It doesn't really matter. Okay. It is very plausible that if you leave either the Azores or Madeira and you have an eastern, a westerly wind blowing towards the east, in both cases you could make the journey to, let's say, Gibraltar in about nine days. And in both cases, you could be hit by the canary current and an eastern wind. Randomly.

That will just blow you right back where you came from. And I can imagine, once again, a story of a sailor being like, dude, I was sailing, I left this island. We were just about to be there. And then out of nowhere, these winds pulled us all the way back to this other crazy place. I almost died. And then that story passes along. It becomes this map. Yeah.

Oh, that's so fun. That is fascinating. It's, it is fun. doing this. Like, it's fun because it suspends a lot of the strict sort of academic scrupulousness that goes along with being, you know, like a professor, so to speak, right? And it opens up so much more room to say, well, what if? And so often I find, like, when speaking with professors or people that adhere to like a very strict sort of academic guideline, they're like, well, if there's no other evidence for it or there's no other record for it,

then it couldn't be. But just to say, like, well, well, what if? And I think for in the gray of the what if, if even one of these is true. Yeah. If even one mention of Newfoundland or, you know, the funk islands or something is true. I mean, it just completely changes what we understand about this period. And to me, I'm like, why would you not want to even just experiment with the idea, right? Do you have other academics and other, you know, people of your, you know, scholarly standing that reach out to you, privately and they're like, hey, I think you're on something here, but I can't say it.

Well, my friends who are in academia, they enjoy this stuff. They tell me that. Right. And it's not like they're afraid to say it. It's just that it's just not what comes up in academia. Right. And again, it's like, I think it's more indifference than it is hostility. Sure.

I mean, of course, there are people who are hostile to anything that doesn't fall into their specialty and they're established, you know, what they've. established scholarship, but I think usually it's just they're indifferent to it, but if they come across it, they find it. So, like, I told a few of my friends who are now professors about this episode, and I was expecting them to be like, oh, we've lost you, you know, but they were like, oh, that's cool, you know. Right. Yeah. I can imagine historians and anthropologists to be the ones that are the more, uh, the more effusive, where they're like, hey, you're using mythology to try to suggest that what I know to be true is. wrong. Yeah. So get out of here. Yeah. And just to be extra clear, uh, you should ask me,

how much of this do I believe? Go ahead. How much of what we've talked about today? Do you believe 100%? Well, nothing 100%. I'm, I think it's very likely that either the Greeks or the Phoenicians or both wandered up the North Atlantic coast to Britain and Scandinavia. Reasonable. Given that we know that that happened later, I don't see why it couldn't have happened in the Bronze Age, especially given that they were looking for the sources of amber and for tin. So maybe 85% likelihood? I'd bet like, I'd bet a thousand bucks. Wow. Okay.

But I wouldn't bet anything on the other stuff. Okay. So Iceland, you know, even, I think it's. Well, I'll say that I think the Scandinavian stuff is, is, to me, sounds very likely. Because again, it happened later in antiquity. And the idea that nobody tried to follow the coastline and see where it went seems contrary to human nature. You know, like we have so many stories of other civilizations. I mean, the Polynesians, right, Polynesians that reached Easter Island, which is a thousand miles away from anything.

And it's a tiny little dot in the middle of the ocean. The entire Pacific, right? Like when the Europeans were like Captain Cook and others were in the Pacific, they found all these islands inhabited. It's like shooting a bullseye from, you know, a mile away, right? We have stories of African attempts to cross the ocean. Like there's the famous story of Mansamusa's predecessor. We don't know his name, but the king Mansa Musa of Mali, I think, told the story that his predecessor, like, ordered the construction of like a flotilla

and they just sailed west into the ocean and were never heard from again. Okay. So this is what humans do, you know, they, Merz has a, again, Mertz who is Kuku, but she has some good lines. She said if anybody told the ancient Greeks, don't go there because the edge of the world is there,

somebody would have been like, oh, let me go see. Right. If we had people leaving Mali to just sail west and see what's out there, putting their lives on the line, Yeah. It's hard for me to believe that only one guy in all of human history ever did that. Yeah. So I think traveling to the north of Europe is quite likely. Everything else is plausible. It's worth investigating further. I'm not committed to it. Can we still use this money metaphor? You put in a thousand bucks on Scandinavia.

How much money are you going to put on Iceland? I don't know, maybe 500. How much money are you putting in Newfoundland? One or 200. How much money are you putting on Bermuda? 50. That's fair. I think that's a very reasonable estimate.

And then what about the panhandle of Florida? Zero. I think that's fair. I think that kind of tracks for me. I think that makes sense, right? It's not, again, I am very fond of this idea that ancient civilizations are more clever, more advanced, and as curious, if not more curious, than we are at this very day.

And I think we don't always give them so much credit. Yeah. And I think we like to be like, oh, yeah, you know, they believe the earth was flat. They think this. And it seems like as time goes on, a lot of those assumptions about antiquity are maybe not so true.

And that I do think they were, in many ways, as smart and as clever and perhaps even smarter than us now in terms of specific local knowledge and information. Yeah. And so the idea of, I mean, like, even looking at, like, non-humans, like, homofluorienzus, they were seafaring. Yeah. Like, right? Like, they were, like, going distances.

Like, I think Nanderthals had boats. Like, all of these, like, proto-human. Australopithecus is Australia, right? Yeah, exactly. It's like, it's crazy to me that these even non-human sort of like proto-human hominids are doing sea travel. And the idea that, like, the, you know, the, the, the brightest, most elitans, you know, elite homo sapiens couldn't have done it just because we don't have a documented record of it. Yeah, it seems a little bit, I don't know.

It lacks a certain amount of curiosity to me. But I love this. This is so fun. And the detailing that you put into this, I think is, I just think it's like so enjoyable and really refreshing from someone with your pedigree and your authority on the topic to be willing and open to explore these types of things. I just think is awesome. and evidence by your channel and specifically this video's success,

I think it resonates with a lot of people as well. Thanks, and it's been really fun talking about it with you. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. Now, before we go, I think we have maybe 25 minutes. Can I ask you some questions about The Odyssey of the film? Sure. So, you saw The Odyssey, the most recent film by Chris Fernhalla.

Yeah. He's outside. I don't want to speak out of turn here. But you gave me a rating out of 10. Yeah. Could you share that with me now? Six or seven out of 10? Why?

Well, first of all, being a, being somebody who has read the Odyssey so many times, including an ancient Greek, I'm going to be more picky than most people. I mean, you can even recite the opening lines in ancient Greek? I can. Would you mind? Spin a little Greek for us? Do you have a drum? Oh, no, but I can give you a little beat, though. Can you do like a dumb?

There we go. Andra, my end up Mouyeen epimousa polytropon hosmala polla plangthe and treas here on ptolyethron eppercen

of all of the thrope or the astea cainoan-oan-e Egnon, Polly the Pondon, Pathern Aughtean

Aunuemenus Hesuchin Cainus the Tauron, Aulthus Ereus Ereusatok Emanos

Aughton gars Fethereiiiiii Astalii in Orlando. There you go. Amazing. I mean, that is so cool. And so that's how it would be told? Yeah.

And for how many... With a liar. How many hours would that go on for? We can't know for sure, but based on... Like, the length of an English audio book that covers the whole thing is about 12 to 14 hours. So it's possible that that's the time frame. Wow. That is fascinating.

That re contextualizes so much of it, right? Right? Because we read it in, you know, a class in high school or college. And it's just words on a page. It's kind of like when you read Shakespeare, you get the gist, but you lose so much because this is not a book to be read. It is a play or a performance to be experienced. And I imagine that this is probably the same exact way. Yeah. And in fact, we know for sure that the Homeric rhapsodes that perform this, they could mimic different voices.

They could get into like, like, Armadon's voice and then Helen's voice. and then, you know, whatever. Like, they could, they would really get into character with all the different figures. And what would be the context that I would be listening to this if I'm an ancient Greek? Well, in, in Athens, there were like state-sponsored festivals where you'd have a superstar on stage

and maybe a thousand people watching. In the age of Homer, we don't know, but probably, like, you know, probably the types of scenes depicted in the actual Odyssey where you have a feast put on by a king or local war, warlord in a great hall and a bard as entertaining, maybe like 100 people who are feasting. Would I be drinking? Definitely. I'd be hammered.

You would. Nice. Would I be on drugs? Possibly in book four of the Odyssey when Telemachus visits Menelaus. By the way, this is a great missed opportunity for Nolan. Because Homer's Helen is way more formidable than Nolan's Helen. Homer's Helen drugs the whole party. Really?

When she sees that Telemachus is the son of Odysseus, and Menelaus is going to start, like, waxing nostalgic about Odysseus and the Trojan War, which she caused in this storyline, she's like, okay, this is going to be bad for me. Let me drug everybody's wine. And she uses an Egyptian drug that is so potent that if you take it, even if your child is being torn to pieces in front of you, you will still not shed a tear. So there we have like this type of scene where a,

a bard might be present, he's not in this case, but drugs were definitely known and described. What do you think that could be? I mean, it sounds like ecstasy. The main theory is opium. So you're just on heroin. I'm not an expert, but yeah. That's wild.

I mean, again, I've never done heroin, not yet. But my understanding is like, that's how you, it's from the poppy, right? It's not, well, again, it's not mentioned that it's poppy. It's just mentioned that it's from Egypt, and there has been speculation that Egypt was importing opium from, you know, Central Asia or something. Again, through various indirect intermediaries. Now, what are the discrepancies from the film to your understanding of the original Greek?

Are you, uh, the, the first thing is like, why are they wearing helmets when they're rowing on the boat? Hilarious. Or wandering in a forest. Like, first of all, the helmets are anachronistic. These are much later helmets. They constrict your vision very severely. They're only useful if you are marching in a column of dudes and you're only going to go forward. If you're walking in a forest where there might be like dangerous creatures around you, you don't want to wear this helmet.

All right. I thought that the biggest problem was trying to force modern morality onto an ancient tale. Like it's to me, one of the main values of the Homeric epics is that they have such a a different morality. And even if we find it shocking or we don't want to accept that morality, shouldn't we know how other human societies saw the world morally? What's the clearest example? Well, the clearest example is that Odysseus kills all the suitors. Right. Right? Like, can we do spoilers here?

Yeah. I mean, it's a 2,000-year-old story. If you haven't heard of it now, I mean, too late. Well, because in Nolan's version, he doesn't kill all the suitors. Okay. He says, spares quite a few of them. In Homer, he only spares like two or three. That's another missed opportunity because you know how like in the final scene, Odysseus, Matt Damon Odysseus, prophecies that only songs will remember them,

that no writing will survive, right? Well, in the actual Odyssey, one of the few people that Homer, that Odysseus spares is the bard, the guy who's singing. Like, he is one of the suitors technically, but he's also like the singer of epic tales to the suitors. So how cool is that that you spare the guy

who you want to sing of your exploits? Right. You know? That's kind of a totally missed. Yeah, it's sort of poetic to be like, I'm gonna kill everyone, except for you, go tell this tale to the next person. And then when you're watching it live at a festival,

you're like, oh, that's the guy that got spared. Like it feels, it becomes meta in a way. Yeah. Oh, that's cool. Now, my friend Alex pointed out that he thought it was weird, that Helen has a twin. Yeah. Now, I know that in some retellings, and it's been disputed, that there is this twin theory with Helen. But he says, if she's the most beautiful woman ever that you're going to send a thousand ships for, if she has a twin sister, doesn't that kind of nerf that whole point?

Yeah. So, again, in the original, they are sisters, but not twin sisters. I'm not sure why Nolan did that, maybe just to not have to find another actor, you know. Right. It's a little cheaper. But there's these weird cases of twins where one twin is divine and the other isn't. Okay, so, like, have you heard of Castor and Pollux? Or, so Caster and Pollux and Helen and Clytemnestra are two cases where you have two twins, two pairs of twins. And in each case, for some reason, one twin gets the divine. parentage and the other does not. Sorry, they're not twins.

They're siblings, but one of them gets the divine parentage, one of them doesn't. I think it might be like, so you have this like, you know, beautiful woman and a god sleeps with her, but her husband also sleeps with her. And perhaps one of the children has the divine parentage. Anyway, it's a common theme in, or it's a well-known theme

in Greek mythology, you can have siblings where one of them is divine, one of them is not. So Helen is semi-divine, which is why after, which is why she and Manilaeus are never going to die in the strict sense, but they will be transported to the Isles of, to Elysium, to the Elysian field. And Manilaeus is prophesied too, that he will not die, but because he has a divine wife, they will be taken by the gods to the Elysian field across the ocean. another reference to a land across the ocean. Okay, right? Where they will live there forever, basically. Okay.

Ah. So Clytemnestra is, you know, a less attractive, less divine sibling in the original. Interesting. Now, my buddy Andrew pointed out, he said that he actually liked the casting because many people would say, like, I know there was a lot of uproar from specifically the Greeks, right, Chris does? Where they would say, like, oh, why are they casting a black woman in the space of a, you know, an ancient Greek. This is completely anachronistic. They're erasing Greek culture. My friend Andrew says,

she's actually the most exotic person and that like her ethnicity or her skin tone actually creates a distinction where she looks unique to the people. As far as the like the racial dynamic, it feels like it was a little bit overblown, but I'm curious your perspective as a historian on this specific time. Well, I think that there were, I think, there were so many more important issues that Nolan got wrong. You're worried about the helmets. It's very niche. Yeah, I mean, like, the only person in the cast who either was Greek or spoke Greek

was a person who played a non-Greek. Hilarious. So the first stop after Troy is Ismaris. It's not mentioned by name in the movie, but the first stop they make where they plunder this coastal village. and there's this survivor and he's this old man and he tells them they're like, we're Greeks from Ithaca

and he speaks modern Greek to them is like the actor is a Greek and in the movie he's speaking modern Greek and he's saying if you go west troubles away to you and then he has to be translated to these so-called Greeks hilarious.

It's just like seriously? Yeah, that is a good distinction right like Matt Damon is equally not Greek as Lupida Yeah. Like, they're both not Greek. And we're kind of putting like a modern racialized lens on a period where race wasn't really a thing, right? Like, it was just sort of nationality.

Is that fair to say? Well, I mean, I don't know how much race was a thing. I think, I think Greece was definitely not as multicultural as it appears to be in the film, you know, but there's a lot we don't know. They also weren't speaking English. Yeah. Now, another element that I mentioned before that is my favorite part of the books, at least when I read it in high school,

I was like, oh, that's so clever, is when he tells the Cyclops that he's nobody. Yeah. Like, do you have a theory as to why that was cut out? Did it bother you that that element was removed? Well, I did see that Nolan was asked this, I think, by John Stewart in an interview, and he says, we just couldn't work it in.

It was impossible. Hmm. So, I don't know. I mean, look, there's a lot of unfortunate the choices. I think maybe I should tell you like what I thought was done well though. Yeah, I mean, before we get to that, I was one enough. If there's any other details you were like, ah, this is a missed opportunity. This is the best part. Dada, da, da, da, da, things that people don't know. I mean, the land of the dead where he holds his mother three times and she evade, like, evaporates and moves through him and she dies of, you know, a broken heart waiting for him.

That's like the most beautiful part of the whole poem. Yeah. And it's also omitted. So I'm like, I mean, look, if you're going to take a, what was a 14-hour performance and make it into a, three hour film, you have to cut things that are going to be really sad to cut. Fair. Okay. At the same time, I think Nolan could have done some really awesome things that he didn't do. You know, like, one is to actually show the ancient morality in all its shocking alien aspects, right? And but I will say that there were some.

some really, really clever things that he did. Tell me. Okay. Like when Odysseus in the land of, in Circe's Isle, when he, when he goes hunting and he shoots the deer, and then he goes to retrieve the body and it's a human body, that's not in Homer. It's a brilliant touch to give Odysseus a way of understanding what's happening in this island, that you have a witch turning humans into beasts. And then here's one that he did that I think Aristotle.

would have approved. Because Aristotle said that the power of tragedy, and Homer, he takes to be a kind of related form of art to tragedy, the power of tragedy is most vividly seen in moments of reversal and recognition. So when fortune suddenly change or when somebody recognizes somebody, those are the powerful moments. And he says the best tragedies combine them. So the moment of recognition is also the moment of reversal of fortune.

And in this case, Nolan, it's not in the original, but Nolan made the moment where the dog Argos recognizes Odysseus to coincide with the moment where Telemachus recognizes Odysseus, which also then marks the reversal because now Telemachus knows that things are different, right? I'm not going to get killed, things are turning around. Exactly. So that would have been an arist, that would have the stamp of approval of Aristotle on it. Wow. That's a great way to look at this. I think so many people are trying to skewer the original and say like, oh, they ruined it and destroyed it and Hollywood effed up the whole movie. Well, there are elements that are changed. And perhaps some of those criticisms are legitimate. But it is also possible that in certain elements, Nolan did better than Homer. And that is quite an achievement, even if he does it once. I mean, I know this is probably breaking Chrysos's hard. He's like, no, Homer's the best. No one could ever be Homer. But that part, right there. It's not something I even considered. Like in that one single moment, it does two things at once that even the rhapsodes of old didn't do. Yeah. Wow. That's a great point. And that is also maybe the most beautiful part. Argos seeing his owner and being like, and then dying immediately

after and Odysseus shedding one single tear and wiping it away. Yeah. It's perfect. I mean, truly perfect. It's gold. Right. It's also a great name for a dog that I feel like not enough people are using. Right? Like, I always meet Fido's all the time. How many lunas have I met in the last year? Give me an Argos. That's the best dog name I've ever heard. I think there's going to be a big explosion. There's going to be a big explosion of Argoses in the next two years.

Watch. Now, anything else that you saw in the film that you thought could have been different, was a deviation, but you didn't mind or was even better than the original. Well, I like to think of the positive things because there's a lot of negatives. I don't want to, you know, do that. But one more thing that was cool is the sound. that the bow makes when you plug it. Yeah, yeah.

Now, that's totally unrealistic. Okay, a bow of that tension would have sounded like, you know? Hell right. Yeah, you want bass. What you hear is like the thickest, biggest string of a harp with that whole resonating chamber available to it, right? Feels like a tool intro, you know.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what you want. That was obviously like, you know, the sound was overlaid with harp or something. But what I like there, is that in the scene with the challenge of the bow, right?

Oh, another missed opportunity. The interview between Penelope and Odysseus, right? The original is way better, man. Like, she's so much smarter, and they kind of speak in codes, and he kind of signals to her that he's Odysseus without saying it outright. And then she kind of gets it, and then she says, so what should I do? And then he says, well, I think you should announce the bow challenge,

which is totally not in that. movie right right and then she's okay sounds good so like you can read it's not like you know it's not uncontroversial but you can read into that scene in homer that he's giving her a signal she's getting it she's asking for advice he gives it and then she's okay and it's like they've conspired together that's totally missed in the in the movie but then what what is cool is so he he starts stringing the bow and all these suitors are angry and they're jeering and they're insulting him and like you feel like at any moment they might just charge him and beat him up right and the and the music is growing and tension and growing and growing and then at the moment of the

climax of the musical crescendo he goes bang yeah and then the music stops right like shit just got real and it's like yeah it's awesome yeah but now also in the homeric i'm it's not something i ever understood and from my reading of the excerpts of the original where it's like okay he's talking to penelope he's like let's do this bow thing she's like all right let's do it And then even after he does that, she still is not sure. And she's like, move my bed out of the chamber. Yeah. And then he's like, well, you can't move the bed.

I've made that bed. It's an active on an olive tree. It's like this whole thing. It's like, it makes me think that she still didn't believe it. Even after this whole feat and threading the bow and shooting through the axe handles, all that. So in your interpretation from the original Homeric, did she, at what point does she know Odysseus is really him? Well, I think that I think the purpose of her. at least feigning disbelief and making him prove himself is because Homer wants her to be an equal to him in cunning.

If she had just said, oh, you're home, honey, think, oh, I think so much. No, prove it with the axe handles. That would be, but after you do that, then she got to come down and be like, all right, it's you. But Odysseus himself does this, right? Like when Odysseus goes, like Odysseus doesn't just check people's intentions. he double checks and triple checks and triple tests, right? Like after he kills the suitors and he goes to see his father, his father is like plowing the earth all muddy and dirty.

And you'd think he would just say, Dad, I'm home. But instead, he makes up yet another tale of who he is, which is a lie. And he says, oh, yeah, I saw this is he's dead. And his dad like collapses, almost dies of like a heart attack. It's like, oh, just kidding. It's me, dad. Right, yeah, just pump figs on it for no reason.

And you might be like, again, somebody with modern morality coming in, is like, that's so cruel. It's like, but this is why Odysseus survived because he's that kind of person who tests even the people that he should trust. He's that suspicious and that crafty and that cunning that of all the people that went on this long,

you know, saga, only he made it home, right? Right. And then Penelope, I think the poet, Homer, other bards, they want her to be his match. in cunning. And so she has to do the same thing. She has to like test him and double test him and triple test him. Right. And then finally they're united. And when they're united, they have homo frosune. They have like-minded relationship, which Odysseus says is the greatest thing on earth. So don't look at it as you know, a great hero that's godlike and a damsel in distress. Look at it almost as like spy versus

spy. Yes. Where it's like they're both testing each other the entire time all the way up until the very end. Now, in the disputed ending of the original Homer, there's a great civil war. And all the families of the suitors start fighting and there's a whole thing. And then Athena comes down and Zeus is like, guys, stop and wipes everybody's memory. I've heard it said that that's not really accepted. What, what say you on that rendition of the ending? What do you mean it's not accepted? I've heard that like a lot of scholars have said like, no, no, no, it ends after the olive tree, bed situation and then happily ever after. But that addition. But that addition, ending where there's a civil war and Zeus has to like throw a thunderbolt. Is that part accepted by

Homer's? There's always some scholars who think, well, maybe the original ending was here or maybe Homer should have ended it there, you know, but I mean, the manuscripts agreed that it ends after the divine intervention. And I think to me that, I think the existing ending we have is the best ending because to me, the Odyssey, in the same way that the Iliad is a faint, altered memory of the coalition warfare that attended the Bronze Age collapse the Odyssey to me is a faint memory of the chaotic

migrations that also followed the Bronze Age collapse and so when there is a sense in the ending of this epic poem that Ithaca will never be the powerful state it was once before right like

Odysseus regains his throne but at a huge cost to the community And he's not happy about killing them. Like there's this great line where after he kills all the suitors, except for like three, the nurse Heraclea who recognizes scar, she comes into the hall, right? And she's about to like, she opens her mouth to be like, woohoo! And Odysseus like grabs her throat and says, it is not right to rejoice over slain men. So he, the poem is at great pains to make it feel like he did this out of necessity. in order to establish order, to establish his rightful place, so forth.

But it's not a good, it's not a happy ending. It's not a good thing for Ithaca. I think it will never be the same. Just like after the Bronze Age collapse, the Greek, a lot of the Greek areas, they went on. They survived in a sense, but they never achieved their former glory until the end of the Dark Ages, four centuries later. And so there's a sense in this poem, like, yeah, order was restored, but this is now a kind of fallen world. Right. And the fact that the gods had to come down and wipe everyone's memory.

Yeah. Is that necessary? Like, sometimes it feels a little deus ex machina to me. It's a bit of a deus ex machino. Okay. Fair. All right. We agree on that. All right. Well, Dr. Jack, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for the time. Truly. I'm always honored to be in the presence of someone that is a scholar that is willing to come down to my level and explain the details and answer all my frivolous questions. So truly it means the world. And I would love to do it again. Thanks so much. I've been following your show for a while, so it's an honor to be here, and I hope to be back. Let's do it.

Hey, guys, if you love conspiracies and hypothetical history, well, I want to invite you to check out Signal 33. This is a companion pod to our podcast here at Camp. It's made and edited by the same team that runs all of our shows, and I choose the topics every single week. So check it out, subscribe, and start the dialogue in the comment section.