Historically High - Homer's Epic Poems - The Iliad and The Odyssey

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

We went long on this one....and well it seems only appropriate that we're covering Homer's most well known works, The Illiad and The Odyssey. In additional to Homer himself, or herself, or maybe it was a bunch of people, there's a lot to unpack with this one. From the mystery that is Homer, to separating the fact from fiction in his works, we're covering the ancient world as only we know how, stoned, curious, and calling bullshit whenever we can.  Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Herom's group had eight. They were dressed in a certain black leather and carried this. It's like, oh my God, dude, there's a thousand boats and we're going 30 at a time. You realize you're complaining about the same thing that you did when you're describing the accommodations for the Titanic, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that. Except for it was not the same thing over and over and over and over again. They were varying degrees. That's true.

Yeah, no, I went on too long for that. I can admit that. No, so what I was saying is that This is another one of those I feel like it's another topic That I hadn't really like Delved into since like either high school Or maybe just like

Like right after like maybe during like a college class or something But It The more that I actually like Read on the Odyssey I did not read the actual Odyssey You son of a bitch I did not reread it

I watched documentaries on it I actually know I'm sorry You made me read the Iliad and you didn't do did they make like the Iliad for TV Did they make it into like a movie or a miniseries? Okay well then that's your fault for not looking it up But what I watched on it I'm just like oh this is just like oh Homer was just like full of shit Oh yeah like a hundred percent he just used Homer or homers yes So he just used it just sounds like he used enough actual

like either places or people that people thought it might be real because it had some, it had ties to realistic events or people or places. Yeah. And I pretty much push everything up for the Odyssey to get the Iliad down.

Because the Eelian is actually the story of the Trojan War. So it's got to have, I mean, I'm sure it's embellished maybe, but it still has. Trojan War wasn't like a, like there's a, a lot of questions over if the Trojan War actually happened.

As far as, like, there are excavation sites where, like, they have found certain things in certain areas. So do you feel like the Trojan War is something that since, like, Homer, are you saying that people only think it happened because Homer documented it? Because I think there's other document, like, other, I don't know what you'd say, like, not documents, but, like, supporting, facts or sites that that proved that like Troy was real and that like the other Greek states were real correct? The Greek states yes

but as far as where Troy where they think like the general consensus is that it was in a part of northwestern Turkey. Yeah there was some stuff about them thinking they found it because they found like a site with just like extremely tall walls and like really fortified walls.

Back in that day which they're trying to say they think that the Iliad and the Trojan War happened right around 1184 BC. But when they go into different places like where they think that the site was and they dig down through the layers of sediment and everything, they're finding the things that are described in the Iliad and the things that are described about the war like around 500 BC instead of down lower or they're digging too far looking for something and going past. different things. So it's still questionable whether it happened. I mean, I don't think Achilles and Agamemnon

and all these fellas were a part of it. I think they were all characters. But I would say that more than likely the Iliad was like maybe a raid or something that had happened in this town, in this, basically this

fortress that was what they think was Troy. So you're saying that the story of the Trojan War, Trojan horse, all that kind of stuff. The way that most people believe it happened is the way that Homer describes it. Yeah. His description has had the most influence on how people view that event. Well, I don't want to spoil anything for you, but in the Iliad,

there's no mention of the Trojan horse or of Achilles' heel. Like, those two things didn't happen. We'll get into it kind of towards when we're talking about Homer. Speaking of Achilles' heel, we kind of just jump straight into this without our normal catch-up. But did you discover your Achilles' heel is glittery mimosis? It was so weird. I have so many high thoughts, but this morning kind of just has to overrule them. There for breakfast, and of course I had to prep up.

Got a little stone to go. And we show up. It takes about 45 minutes, maybe 50 minutes to get our food. It took about a half hour to get our mimosa's. And they do like the trees and the shambongs and all that stuff. Do they do like the carafe of the mimosa? You can get a carafe or you can do what's called a mimosa tree where it's like there's six or seven different ones.

You can do a flight. And then you've seen the shambongs, the ones that are like that. So we finally got the lady and asked about the flight. And she's like, yeah, the flight's cheap. but they're all littler ones yeah let's just get regular sized ones so I order one girlfriend orders one they both come out and she's looking at them why she goes oh my god there's this glitter in it they go no it's the bubbles or something like that like there's no way that they put glitter in mine was it did you guys just order like

traditional mimosis or was yours a flavored it was like a berry something and she got like a I don't know what her first one was but it was like a palm granite They were both special. Okay. But for some reason, mine was more special. And I had just played it off like it was just like bubbles or something coming up. So I head back to the bathroom, going to pull the door. Of course, it's locked.

There's a lot of commotion going on in there. So I said, all right, somebody's probably got some shit going on. Had a long night. They finally opened the door and like this four and this six-year-old come out, damn near slap fighting each other. Like, just going after each other. And I look down and I see it and I smile. And then the dad comes walking out and he looks at me and we make eye contact and I realize that I was just smiling and his two young boys.

I thought, okay, that's kind of weird. Probably shouldn't have done that right outside the bathroom. So go outside the bathroom. And this is a little insight into, I guess, me. Was it like an actual bathroom that should have had a lock on the door where it was? It was a two-hole. There was a toilet and then there was a urinal, which I always appreciated. Wait, so there wasn't a, and there was a divider.

There was a stall where the toilet didn't. No partition. Oh. Okay, that's why. So it's like you got a one or two. And so I go in there and I'm using the urinal. I look down and there's few things that just immediately pissed me off. But one of them was that there was a snooose packet sitting in the urinal on top of the thing.

So it doesn't flush. Everybody else has to see it. And you couldn't take the time as a person just to reach it, pull it out of your mouth and put it in the trash can. You had to spit it in the one place where it can't get. flush down. Or somebody else is going to have to at some point pick that thing. Yes. Regardless if it's their job or not, that's so fucking degrading and disrespectful. That

gum, people that spit gum in urinals, it's like, just being adult. All you have to do is being adult. There's not a lot of rules in society. You question the intelligence because they're like, you know the holes aren't that big. You know that piece of gum that you're going to spit out. It's bigger than those holes. What do you think is going to happen? The constant piss

and flushing is going to somehow degrade that gum? You're doing it intentionally. You're lazy, yeah. Not only that, but I knew was an adult because it was a packet of tobacco. So it wasn't like it was a dumb kid to do it or something like that. It was somebody who can legally drive. There's still some dumb people who can, some real dumb people can legally drive. So go to wash my hands and I'm looking around.

There's toilet paper strewn all about and there's trash and shit. It's in the morning. They're very busy. So I'm sure they didn't get a chance to come and clean it up. But I just kept looking around like, how do you miss the trash can? Like, it's literally right there. When you go to throw something in the trash, how can you miss it? and so I fire up the water and it sprays against it and just completely soaks my front.

It's one of the ones where the pressure is just, it's either like no pressure or full bore as soon as you move the app. And it's an old building, so it just sprayed me. So I'm looking at the front of my shorts like, God damn, I just look like I peed myself. I'm all fired up about the fact that nobody in here could be an adult when they go to the bathroom. And then I look like I urinated on my own pants. So I go walking back out there and sit down. We're waiting for our food some more. and this waitress bumps me and I turn around like oh sorry she goes oh no I'm trying to take a picture

I just I needed to get a little bit more room I was like I had no problem and I see her like visibly glanced down at my shirt and then her eyes snap up real quick and I was like she see the pee on my shorts what's going on and about five minutes later she comes back over from across the place and taps me on my shoulder she goes hey um this is gonna sound kind of weird but she's like I I really like your shirt. Where did you get that? Is it the one you're wearing right now? Yeah.

Ken Griffey Jr., just a rookie card shirt, just something that I found online that I liked. And I kind of looked up at her, like she's just trying to be overly nice because she bumped me and almost spilled some stuff or what. But I go, oh, I just got it online at the website, and I told her the website.

She goes, oh, can I write that down? And, like, went to the point of, like, writing down the website where it was from. She's like, I just, I really like that shirt. That's a very cool shirt. I'm a big fan of that. So I was like, all right, whatever. That was kind of weird.

That stuff seems to happen from time to time where somebody's like, hey, I really like your shirt. So we get done eating, get another mimosa. I order it was a, maybe now that I say it out loud, it sounds like it's probably fitting. But it was a fig and honey mimosa, which I didn't expect anything special to happen. Girlfriend orders it was an oranges and cream mamosa,

orange juice, a little bit of cream on. that kind of stuff. They come back out, set them down, and I look down, and mine is full of glitter again, and hers is not for a second time. And I realized that it was glitter, because when I finished the first one, I looked in the bottom, you could see the glitter sitting in the bottom of it that you didn't drink. So second time, mine is just, as the driven snow, just sparkling. After the first incident, did you, like, review the menu to see if you could spot anything pertaining to glitter? So it just said sparkling wine was the only thing. And so we come to get done, we got some shambongs and just blew these people's minds.

Like, they're pretty fairly common around here at brunch places now, I think. Yeah, and they're not huge. I mean, you're not like, it's just because it's champagne. People are like, oh, do you drink it like that? Yeah, we ordered a couple of them and shot them down real quick. And these other people, they were like, oh, my God, what was that? That was really cool. What was that?

It's like they're on the menu. Like, they're ever, everybody, literally everybody else around us had. so. And so we get done. Lady brings a checkover, and I just had to know. So I was like, I, just a quick question. Is somebody screwing with me in the back? She's like, what do you mean?

I go, why did both of my mimosa's have sparkles in them? And she kind of gets this little smile on her face. And I go, hers didn't. She goes, yeah, that's because you ordered the ones with this glitter in them. And I go, no, I didn't order the ones with the glitter in them. I just have glitter in them, man. She goes, well, that's what sparkling wine is. And I was like, no, no, man.

Sparkling wine? That's not what that is. Sparkling wine's just champagne. No, maybe she meant actually, like, not like sparkling is in, like, sparkling water. Maybe, like, sparkling isn't, like, sparkly. You need to, that's, those are two different things. But why, but they call it champagne. They don't call it sparkling wine.

Anything made outside of the champagne region. It's called sparkling wine, though. Okay, well, I did not know that. You're not a wine-consist. Listen, you're the one ordering sparkling mimosa, so. I didn't order a sparkly mimosas. You ordered a mimosa. You ordered two sparkly mimosas, it sounds like.

Were they, hey, were they good? That's the thing that made me question it, is they were both delicious. I would have kept drinking them. Yeah, I don't think the sparkles have a taste. No, they don't, but when you hold it up and you're my size. You poor bastard, you had to go have mimosas at brunch. I'm supposed to feel sorry for you. When you're 6'6 and you're a large individual,

and you hold up a glass that shimmers in the light. No, that's when you should feel the most comfortable doing it. You should be like, I'm at the point where no one's going to say anything to me if I enjoy this. That's one place you might be able to get away with it, but it just, it felt odd. It felt very weird. Do you know what else felt very weird? Huh. Reading this or not reading it, but going back through it and seeing it and understanding that it's,

you know what I kind of, it's akin to for me? The Odyssey is like, did you, do you ever watch the, like, Ernest movies? I love Ernest. Like Ernest P. Whirl?

Yeah. Yeah. Ernest. It was like, scared straight, Ernest goes to jail. Yeah. The Odyssey was like,

instead of Ernest, it's like Odysseus. So it's like, Odysseus goes home or tries to go home. I, we'll do Homer first to get him out of the way.

Then we'll do the Elyad and then we'll do the Odyssey. Just because that's the order. Like we were talking about earlier with like the books. Homer had eight works, but we really only know about two because those were the two complete ones that we found.

And it was the second book, which was the Iliad. And then it was the seventh book, which is yours, which was the Odyssey. They call them epic poems. These things, make no mistake. People, these things are books, and they're not just books. It's over the course of like many books.

Yes. So, epic poem. So Homer, I guess, is kind of, and I think you did a little more research actually on Homer than I did. So Homer kind of sounds like there's a little bit of a Shakespeare type theory to Homer, whether it was just one individual or like a collection of individuals using pseudonyms. Or a pseudonym. Yeah, a lot of it is what it feels just because of certain things that we'll get into,

but there was no written record and there are different theories. Like there is a, I believe it's a blind cleric. and it might have been in the Odyssey, that they believe was Homer writing himself into the actual novel, or the epic poem. So he's the blind cleric. They think that that's, one of the theories is Homer was a blind cleric,

which wrote all the different epic poems, which I have a hard time believing, because I don't know how a blind person would have written back in 725 BC. Like that doesn't quite add up. Well, he had his own language. Did you know that? Homeric. I know that he had like Homeric St.

and different things like that with his writing. Was it more, it wasn't, was it actually the, like, method of writing or was it the writing itself? Because I thought I read that his, like, language or what they would consider Homeric was almost kind of, like, an amalgamation of, like, several different Greek languages together, or am I getting that wrong? I didn't see really much about that. Maybe it was Homeric was more in reference to how he wrote, like, the prose and, like, how he structured everything. That's what it seems like. I'm not an intellectual and not a poetry reader, but there was something they had mentioned

called iambic pentameter, which is like the cadence and the valves that you use in lines. And Homer had basically like his own style to himself where his writings were, or their writings were in a certain Homeric style. Gotcha, okay. Supposedly there's a very weird, like,

when you read about people that do books on Homer, everybody has kind of a different theory. And the tough part is, was they were around so long ago that they were almost around before like written knowledge was a thing. So when you see different things, they have like different ideas of where he was and all that. The one that I saw that at least sounded like it was a certain spot and sounded like it was real was an island called kios, which was, is, it's called

Chios now, which I don't know why they had to change the K to a C.H. But, probably like Chris and Chris. It's a Greek island in the G&C that still exists today, and supposedly through some of the texts

that they had found, they knew that he had lived on that island for most of his life. But to me, it seems like it was more of a grouping of people just because some of the stuff that we'll talk about, but there's just

no way that one human being could have that much in his own brain. Yeah, it seems like, well, here's the other thing too, is it's not so much even having it in his own brain. It's the simple fact that he made references to so many geographical

locations and people and characters that for all of that knowledge to be available to him and him alone, it seems kind of a stretch. That supposedly if he was born around this, or if he lived around the 7th century BC, there were different geographical locations

that he was describing that they didn't end up finding until later on because the Greek empire hadn't spread as far as it did. Did you, um, shit, I just lost my thought. God damn it. I don't know why this happens. Um, keep going with what you're going to go. Keep going with yours. I'll figure it out.

Some of the things that you can point to are in the book, or in the first one, in the, I'm just going to keep calling a book because it felt like a book when I read it. But in the epic poet piece of the Iliad, the characters that were introduced weren't really introduced with backstories at that point. So it's kind of one of those things where it leads you to believe that if you're just getting introduced to these characters is like something that's common knowledge, it would have had to have been passed down through other oral traditions where people knew of these characters.

That's what I was going to tell you. I didn't know until researching this, and this is probably going to make me sound stupid, I didn't know that this period of time is what they refer to when they're calling it antiquity. Yeah. Like, I always akin to something like antiquity to mean something is a certain, like, artifact.

Yeah. I always thought it was in relation to it covered a certain sect of artifacts, which it probably does. I mean, stuff found in this is it would be from antiquity, but I didn't know that that term was specific to kind of this time, time frame in Greece. Just something that was kind of older, basically. Yeah, it is weird to know that that was an actual time,

like the Gilded Age and different things like that. Some of his characters that come into the Iliad, there's just no real backstory on them, but they do go into him later on. There's some that there's just flat out, like the king Agamemnon. There's really nothing that goes into really like where he came from or anything like that until you get to the later readings, which we found parts of, where it'll talk about like his homeland in the sixth book, something like that.

So they think that just because of that, that the Iliad and then his other stories had come out of, of other ancient traditions and other ancient kind of stories that were passed down just verbally and not ever written down because there was such a long time. If you were to think that the Trojan War happened in 1184 and this got written down between the 7th and 8th centuries,

there's a 500 year almost window there where it would have had to have stayed alive through history. Do you think in kind of in that event we were talking with multiple people all contributing in on it. Do you think that maybe like all these stories came in and collections of stories and then one day like one person just was able to access all of the stories or it was some. Homer to me actually this is really weird. He seems to be like a fan fiction writer.

Yeah, I could see that. To me he's like he's today's. He's like a fan fiction writer would be today. He takes something that's already established and known. Even if the Trojan War wasn't that big. But he takes something that maybe people have heard about, but they don't know a lot about. And he's like, I have all this information. And it's been long enough since the Trojan War that I could probably actually use some information, write this down, create some characters, embellish a little bit, and maybe see if people like that.

But it kind of sounds like maybe, to me, I think it'd be cool if Homer was the last guy in line. to come in and just like read all of this information that all these other people had put together throughout the years about people that were there, you know, places they had seen because the Odyssey takes him all the way to like North Africa. So like they would have to have knowledge of like certain islands because they were very, he was very detailed about this stuff. So they would have had to have information from to even know that there was a North Africa, you know?

Yeah, they would have had to have traveled. They would have spread out. Or someone had or would have had to brought back information. on it. But like you said, there was this huge gap in time from the actual belief of when, like, the Trojan War had happened and then when he actually writes the Iliad. I don't exactly know. When does the Ily, or when does the Odyssey take place? Is it say like when it was written anything? It's his return trip home from the Trojan War.

Yeah, but as far as like when it was like manuscripts and shit that they found, was it later on, or was it all together? I guess we don't really know that, do we? I think what happened, I don't know the dates on it or when it's supposed to be the dates. I know that like the Eliad where that ends. But you said the Trojan horse

doesn't appear in the Eliad, right? No, the Trojan horse appears in the next one, which is, or actually it appears in the fourth one, and then it is used in the fifth one. So the fourth book that we have a little bit of knowledge about, like we found pieces of it. It was called the Little Eliad. Oh, so the Eliad is actually like,

unfinished or like undiscovered like it was just basically like the next in line of the novels it was like the sorcerer stoned to the whatever the first one so i think so the odyssey takes place from like the time that they cast off from troy to to sell back to ithaca okay it was far as like published or anything like that or when he put it out because i have no clue in real oh i have no clue in the relation between like because the elyad came first right my whole belief on it is i think that homer may have existed but somebody whoever it was or if it was a collection at some point decided to write down all these different plays that they had and bards would go from town to town to different not like amphitheaters because that was more of like an italian

type deal, but they would have big areas where they would come and do these plays, and these plays would go on for two and three days at a time. So I think whoever ended up writing them down, if it was Homer or something, someone along those lines, it was probably somebody that wanted to write down all these plays just to have them in written knowledge. So instead of having like an oral tradition, it finally meets paper or papyrus, whatever it was, and then becomes an epic poetry book instead of just a play. What kind of thing about that?

So you'd have these traveling actors that came in and would perform these shows and when stuff wasn't written down, the only people that knew how to do these shows and the story were the actors or whoever put the acts together and then they would leave. So then you wouldn't have any entertainment.

So at the time when you could finally start getting these stories down or getting stories, you could then have like almost an arts type scene in your own city where You could have plays put on by actors that were from your city. And kind of, I guess that would be a little bit more. Like a script to keep basically for other...

Yeah. Just to have in town. That could absolutely be. I just can't help but think through some of the things that I saw as far as like, there's a time in the Iliad where it, towards the end of the book, it was, I don't even remember which chapter it was. but Achilles was handing out a piece of steel like an ingot of steel is like a gift.

Would it be more helpful to try to describe it during parts of the movie Troy starring Eric Bannon and Brad Pitt? Didn't watch it. I went straight literary on this. I didn't let... I'm actually glad you didn't. That probably would have tainted a little bit of it for you.

Yeah, it's... Movies just don't quite get things right. No, they don't. But towards the end of it, Achilles is handing out, out as a prize, a clump of silver, like an ingot of steel. And it was like a prize. You're handing something out. That's probably a pretty big deal. But in the fourth chapter, they are talking about how the arrowheads that are being used are made of steel. So at a certain time, like, thinking about handing out steel as a present, it was probably more precious. Whereas the fourth chapter was

written in a way that made it sound like iron and steel were kind of, not steel, just. iron ingots, but that it was commonplace and that it was used in a lot of different things. Gotcha. So there's certain chapters that are written that sound like they were older, but they were kind of towards the end of it, whereas the newer stuff that was put in as far as like the descriptions and the words were things that had come into existence later on. So it's kind of like it was thrown together eventually, or it could have just been like rewrites, like somebody's just cleaning it up a little bit, changing some of the wording.

Adding some more detail, make it more believable. Yeah, absolutely. So it's, I want to believe that these probably came from one person, but they had been touched up, they had been edited, and they had been gone over a lot. That makes sense, because if you're trying to teach someone how to, you know, right, and someone's just like, there was an army there, and they're like, okay, well, what did the army look like?

And they're like, well, you know, there were guys, and they had weapons, okay, can you tell me about, you know, what they were wearing and what their weapons looked like? Because the more detail you can provide, the more believable your story's going to be. Well, and if you have, like, a state, set up where these people are performing and you're seeing kind of their outfits or how they're dressed what they're using you can kind of see it in your head to put a little bit more detail in

so um I don't really know what else to go into about Homer just because he's he was a very important figure in kind of the Grecian writings as far as they would use it I feel like there was a little bit of plagiarism and bad research on me not looking this up But reading it, it reads so much like the Bible. It feels like there's an imposter somewhere. Yeah, there's a bunch of talk revolving around the Odyssey about. So basically the Odyssey is just this story of all these challenges. It's like a, you know, they have legends of like, you know,

Hercules doing the Seven Labors and all that stuff. So Odysseus is big claim to fame is he's just a mortal man where all of these other Greek, like, legends and myths are all involving, like, you know, of demigods or gods themselves. So Odysseus' big thing is that he's like the every man. He's not the strongest. He's smart and everything.

It's kind of a weird turnaround for what you would think at the time when at the time, nothing but like strength. It was the strongest. Strength was value most. But I'm trying to remember where I was even going with this.

Oh. One of the other things that was going to bring up to kind of lend the fact that it was multiple writers. When they go through it and analyze it and look at like the homeric pentameter and how it was written, about 20% of the lines don't fall into the same rhyme scheming, or not rhyme scheming, but like the patterning of syllables and different things. So that kind of lends to the idea that there was somebody else that got in on it,

just because that 20% of the writing and the lines look different from the rest of it. So those could have been edits from other people, but they couldn't really fit it in the same like scheme that he had it. So there were just kind of add-ons. Okay. All right. Well, do you want to go ahead and jump into the, okay, I finally figured out what I was talking about. This is going to have, I feel like this is going to have a lot during this episode.

So one of the things about the Odyssey is that these challenges that he had to go through, they almost always kind of like refer back to how these stories, because this was pre-Bible. was it? Yeah. I thought they were very close. They were written... No, because when this all is supposed to happen? You said you were talking about 700, you know, BC.

Yeah, when was the Bible written? After Jesus or after Jesus was born, because isn't he the... But the Old Testament was before Jesus. I don't think it's that far before Jesus. Let's look it up. All right. Continue. So what I was saying is that there's a lot of references.

They're saying that the Bible... hook from the Odyssey from these challenges that they could have like a biblical you know biblical and a biblical spin to them so like going through one of them it's like they compare

I want to say they compare Odysseus to like Mark because both were like in the book of Mark because both of them had to get like overcome challenges or something like that. Oh so there was actually like name to name comparisons in the documentary and the impression I was watching. No I

I don't know if it's something like, you know, the Old Testament reference. I don't think that occurred, no. So it says Christian Bible has two sections. The Old Testament, the New Testament. The Old Testament is the original Hebrew Bible. The sacred scriptures of the Jewish faith written at different times between 1,165 BC. So it could have been kind of in the same realm. So maybe it's in the New Testament because isn't like the book of Mark and everything?

Is that New Testament stuff? Matthew, Mark, Luke. John Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I guess that's what they're more referring to having inspiration for the chapters of the New Testament, the Bible. Boy, I had a little bit of church knowledge kick in there

and I started figuring out the... We sang a song in school. Oh, to tell you about the 18th. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Axe, and the Romans to go through and remember all the books. Oh, gotcha. I never read any of them, but I... You learned the song?

Yeah, I know where they are. You would have put the Bible to music. You had learned it. Maybe. All right. So, yeah, teach me about the Iliad. The Iliad is, like I say, I'm not an intellectual. I don't read a lot of books. There's not a whole lot. I don't think I have ADD, but there's a chance. That feeling is there, like, when I get into reading some of this stuff. I'm pretty sure everybody has ADD. Just like a layer of it. I'm pretty sure ADD has become something that we've just evolutionarily gotten. Because you think about it, like there's so much more. stuff to grab your attention, it's almost impossible to, like, not be focused on, like,

multiple things. You know what? You know what when it was easy to stay focused? When the only toy was a fucking stick and that wooden wheel, and you ran it down the street, or when there was only one video game to choose from. Either that, or it's like an evolutionary measure that we haven't kicked yet, because there's, there's the internet. I'm telling you right now, like, the internet and ADD, you could probably just look and see the spike. As soon as the internet became popular ADD probably went crazy. True. It just feels like you got to think if you were like caveman days and all that. You only had one thing you had to do, which was just stay alive.

But in that one thing to stay alive, like if you were out hunting, you had to be cognizant of everything else around you while you were hunting. Or if you were making something, you had to make sure somebody wasn't going to sneak up or like an animal. Oh yeah. We've lost definitely some of our like debt perception and field of vision and those like visual acuity of noticing movement and hearing sounds. Yeah, I think we've definitely lost that evolutionarily.

Well, ADD, though, you have to have your mind focused on 10 different things at a time, as opposed to just, like, sitting down and doing one. And what's crazy is if you have ADD and you're taking ADD medication, it's supposed to go ahead and dial that back to where you can focus on more than one thing. If you don't have full ADD, you take it and you just want to focus on everything. Grid looks awesome. You're just trying to focus on everything, and you're just wired. Yeah.

So getting into reading it, I had to just cut it up into as many sections as possible in order to get it in before, but I couldn't just sit down to read it. And I would listen to different talks from people talking about how they got it and they were going to read one chapter a night. And then one chapter turned into eight and then the next night was another 10 and just going through it. I thought, great for those people, but that's not. I can only click in for so long because there's just so much. It wasn't the page turner that it was advertised. No, but it was still a great story. It gives you a lot of, I'd look at it as it just, it would make a good movie, but it's almost two stories going on at the same time because you have the actual Trojan War that's happening on the ground, but you also have the fighting and the influx of anger with the Greek gods above them.

It's basically like the Trojan War is the Greek gods playing chess with the humans. Okay, so do you have different Greek gods on different? Oh, you do, that's right. You have different gods on different sides, but they're fighting like through the armies. They're not allowed to really fight each other. They're allowed to, like, influence each other's armies to try to beat the other one. They have these things. They're called Aristas, Aristias, I believe, is what they are that Homer uses, where there will be,

it's kind of like when you watch an action movie and guy starts going crazy, like Rambo going through the woods, gutting people. You go like berserker mode. Yeah, you see superhuman things come through. And Homer uses them in the Iliad for different warriors that are fighting on different sides where gods will actually like give those pushes to whoever is doing the majority of the fight. So it's basically like level up. Yeah.

And then you have like, you catch a turbo boost, you go nuts. So an easy way that I kind of figured out to go through and remember some of this stuff is you have the Greek side and you have the Trojan side. So what started the conflict? The conflict. Does it cover what started the conflict? Yeah. Okay. So just for some names that I'll be using, each side has a king, each side has what they call a champion, and then there's some other major characters.

So on the Greek side, Agamemnon is going to be the king. He's going to be, he's just a selfish prick that really doesn't care about anybody but himself. So he rules over like the large portion of the Greek Empire. So that like covers like Sparta and other areas. And this takes place in the Aegean. Yeah, the Aegean Sea. So they think that Troy basically where this site is, where they think it happened was up in northwestern Turkey across the Aegean Sea from where Greece was or Greece is.

What was the name of Agamemnon's like kingdom? was it mycinia? That's what it, yeah. Macedonia. There's so many words. I think it's Mycena or mycena. Miscina. Miscini, something like that.

The best thing that I could figure out was everything, all the Greek side was from the western side of the Egency and all the Troy side was the eastern side. Gotcha. So Agamemnon is going to be the king on the Greek side. Achilles is their champion. Kili's just an absolute badass throughout this whole thing. he really comes into his own towards the end and we'll get into that he's got a buddy kind of questionable whether it was buddy stepbrother lover

they don't really make it clear but his name is Petrochalus huh? That's probably the point yeah his name was Petrocholus and he was kind of like Achilles right-hand man they were always together they were always hanging out Petrocles? Petrocles Petrocles Petrocles I I think it's Petracles

Petracles, whatever. My favorite character, his name is Ajax. And Ajax was a giant. He was a big, large man that did a lot of fighting. Didn't ever get the shine from anybody else, but was just always there. Wait, are you kidding me?

He's got one of the most well-known, powerful dish detergents named after him or cleaning detergents named after him for your toilet. Ajax? Well, that and Eddie Murphy played Ajax. in Beverly Hillscott? Yeah. Yeah. So I guess he got a little bit of love after that.

He's getting his love now. Yeah, he actually did get another book that was written about kind of his adventures later on. I don't think that it was Homer. It was somebody else. Nestor, an old cleric that was just kind of out there.

He was a guy on the battlefield that had seen a lot of battle. Is that who they think Homer put himself into he was Nestor? Or is he? He wasn't blind. He was just kind of like the oldest warrior of the group. Okay.

There was, I'm going to fuck this name up for sure, and I heard it a million times. Menelaus. Menelaus. Menelaus. And he was the king of Sparta before it was absorbed into kind of the Greek area. So he plays a huge part in this whole entire thing because we'll get to it. But Menelaus, Menelaus, whatever, I'm going to go with Menelaus. Odysseus, who you'll get into, I'm sure, was a member of this.

And then... It was like a huge, like, assortment of, like, Greek states because they were all under this one ruler. And Troy was it, you know, a power in its own right? But you had all of these armies and being gathered just to go at Troy. Yeah, you're drawing from every part of the Greek Empire at that point to go after this one spot. So the ones on the Trojan side, Priam is the king on the Trojan side. He's got a lot of sons that play into this and are pretty much it's Pream's family that

runs Troy as far as where everything is. Their champion is Hector, who is Priam's son. He has another son named Paris, who's a pretty boy and basically the reason that this whole thing is happening. And then Helen of Troy. and Helen of Troy is basically what this whole thing gets centered on towards the end of it because Helena Troy was Metaleus's wife and Paris was a very good looking kid hair slick back just real sharp chin just apparently a very attractive man and one of the

gods on the Trojan side is Aphrodite's so the goddess of love yeah whatever horniness she took a liking to Paris so she really juued up Paris Paris ends up stealing Helen from Mennelais and that love triangle plays out towards the beginning it's kind of what could have ended the war in its ninth heading into its 10th year

but it just kind of outlines there's a push and pull of fighting in this whole thing but there's kind of a romance deal to it which like we talked about before with the natural disasters I think they probably had to have romance and some of the stuff to get it sold. So we're going to kick it off and start it.

One of the things before that was the way that Homer wrote this, there was no antagonist and protagonists, really. It was fairly even on both sides. Gotcha. So he didn't have a side that he essentially viewed, he wrote in a negative light. No. He was writing this as it you would just like, you know,

view an impartial. I was going to say impartial news report, but that doesn't happen. Those are, which again, I think that maybe falls into the line of having it from so many different sources. Yeah, you're going to see it from a bunch of different sides instead of just being one guy, because you're going to be biased towards one way or the other. Because if Homer's Greek, aren't you going to view Troy as the enemy? You'd think so. Yeah. This has taken place for nine years before this, so this was a very, very long war.

and in the beginning this is what kicked everything off was the Trojan Prince came over and abducted a Greek queen so this is Paris abducting Helen they end up hooking up getting married and of course that just absolutely pissed off So not abducting he stole her

Yeah She wanted she wanted to go I don't know if there's a little Stockholm syndrome in there or something but she she was happy being there She was kind of a malaise character. She didn't come from a lot before she met menelaus, so she doesn't, there's no like taste for the finer things. So the book actually starts talking about the rage of Achilles, which I think is kind of a badass way to start the book. I don't remember exactly word for word is, but it was talking about the rage of Achilles.

You come to find out really quick that Achilles has these two just kind of major things that happen in this book. and the first one was, was Agamemnon had taken a daughter of, one of Apollo, the gods priests, and he had taken him for a concubine for one of his own to be a part of his harem, and Apollo was pissed. Apollo was sending down all these plagues, just killing people left and right, sending down literal lightning bolts or figurative lightning bolts, whatever, killing people left and right. So the Greeks knew that even though they were still, giving praise to Apollo

Apollo was not happy about this happening and Agamemnon being the selfish prick that he was refused to give her up he refused to give her back to Apollo's priest didn't want anything else he said that he had valued

her or this woman who was very pretty higher up on his list of night bangs than his own wife so he really loved didn't want to give her up. But it was coming to a point

where the Greeks weren't going to beat Apollo. Apollo was just going to absolutely knock their dicks in the dirt and ride him into the ground. So Achilles being champion consults with a holy man. And the holy man tells him

you need to go tell Agamemnon. He needs to give back the priest daughter. And you need to make a sacrifice of 100 cows to Apollo. He'll let him. up, everything will be okay. Achilles goes and tells us to Agamemnon.

Agamemnon says, no way. That's not going to happen. She's my favorite. She's my bottom bitch, whatever you want to say. Yeah. And says, basically go to hell. So, Achilles and him get into an argument, get into a screaming match, and Achilles is really laying it on him, calling him a piece of shit. It ends up coming out that Agamemnon agrees to it if he can.

and take some of the treasure back from some of his soldiers as a payment from them, and he wants to take Achilles' wife instead of the priest's daughter. So, of course, Achimnon does rule over wherever Achilles is from. Yeah, he's the king of the Grecian Empire, I guess you would say. So Achilles, obviously, you're not going to take that very well. If the guy's like, I'll give her back, but I'm going to take your wife. You're my champion, so I should probably have a little bit more respect. Achilles threatens him, goes to pull out his dagger,

the guards step in, say this isn't going to happen. Achilles, very angry about this, goes to his mom, who his mom was a sea nymph. I don't know what the hell a nymph is, but somebody that's not a god, but in a godlike immortal sense. So Achilles is technically half god, half human. Yeah, a nymph is like,

like a sprightly, they're supposed to be like a young looking, like a younger looking girl, very like sprightly, and that's where they actually get the term nymphomania from is because they are, yeah. Really?

Yeah, because they're supposedly supposed to be just like horny. The word that they used when they were describing is they're, they're very sprightly. And I'm like, yeah, you mean horny. You don't mean sprightly. You mean horny. That makes sense. But that's, yeah,

that's where you get the term nymphomania. from. So does Sprite the soda? Is that supposed to make you boned up and horny or what? I don't know. Is that an a redneck? Is that why Sprite always makes me horny? Does it?

Redneck by acro. Is that what you're going to say? Baby, I got us a two liters of Sprite tonight. We're getting it on. So as Achilles goes and talks to his mom, he asks her for help from the gods in order to take over Agamemnon or Agamemnon and get his wife back. she goes to Zeus because Zeus owes her a favor

and Zeus is the god of the gods he's king dick at this point and she asks for basically revenge for her son and Zeus says okay I owe you one I'll agree to this we'll see what we can do about it and she basically says that she knows that Achilles will die one day even though he is half god

he's still mortal she said that she would rather see him die at war than she would see him die in being forgotten. So like you're a legend if you die on the battlefield if you go back you'd be forgotten.

And at this point Achilles had told Agamemnon to fuck himself. He went back to his boat. He said, I'm done fighting for you. I'm not doing it anymore. So she wanted to draw him back into the fighting and have him die that way. So he would be remembered for forever.

Well, Zeus agreeing to this, the big issue there was, his wife Oh shit Hera Huh? Hera, hera That's right

She's a big fan of Greeks We're getting real close to spill Okay I feel like you're close to spill That there you go Check it down Is that better? Yeah that's better for me So

Her being a fan of the Greeks She doesn't want to see anything bad To happen to Agamemnon She doesn't want to see anything bad to happen to them But Zeus has to figure out a way To get Achilles back into the fighting While doing this

so he tells her he's like god damn it he's like my fucking wife is on my ass about this he's like I gotta find a way to sneak this guy back into this shit even gods don't get a chance to they gotta deal with kids they gotta deal with wives

and they live forever and the gods are the worst fucking people about this like all the great gods are just fucking everything and making little demigods and then they don't like each other and it's just like a big shitty family that Zeus has to put up with being the guy.

So, um, the first step that Zeus takes is he goes down and gets into Agamemnon's dreams, tells Agamemnon some bad intel about the Trojans, um, that they need to attack sooner rather than later. Agamemnon wakes up the next day, tests his boys out, says, everybody go home. We're all going back to Greece. We're, we're done with this. Excuse me. And, um, I think it was.

Odysseus steps up and says, hey, this is a test. We're not leaving. He wants to see our loyalty. So goes, tells Agamemnon, we're sticking around. We're going to fight behind you all this stuff. He's like, sweet, that's what I wanted, which I don't know how you would get that confused. But they decide that they are going to go on the attack for the Trojans. And they're getting ready, getting geared up.

Well, part of it was the Trojans were about to attack them. So the Trojans were about to get the jump on the Greeks. I assume that the Trojans understanding what Paris had done and in taking that guy's life. Yeah. That there was going to be some reprisal. So instead of just sit back and wait for it, there was probably something, you know, we know they're coming after us. So we should probably put something together first. Well, and that happened nine years before.

So this is still the last year of this war is when it's... starts. Oh, got you. So this is just basically, like, the end of how everything finishes up. Okay. So there was nine years of fighting to the point to where the Trojan fort where they were staying, like, their stronghold, was a certain way away from the beach. And the Greeks had had their boats parked there for nine years.

And they were just fighting over the strip of land to the point to where, like, the Greeks had reinforced it with their own kind of fort walls. They had dug motes. They had dug spike pits, all this different stuff. Yeah, if you're going to be somewhere for 10, you know, for 19. 10 years, you're going to fix it up. Yeah. So Greeks are getting all fired up, getting ready. Trojans pop out of their fortress and start heading towards them.

The fighting breaks out almost immediately, and it's just a real bloodbath at that point going both ways. And at one point, Manilaeus steps out and starts talking shit because on this side, the Greeks don't have a champion anymore. Achilles is gone. He's out sitting on his boat with. Troclus, whatever he said his name was. And they're playing liars, which I didn't know what that was. I assumed it's a harp.

But I think, yeah, I think that is. Like a loot? Maybe. They need somebody to step up and Minalius is ready. Mitalias calls out Paris by name, obviously, because of the Love Triangle. And Paris is Hector's little brother. And he's just a terrible warrior. He's always worried about having his armor shined up.

He's not worried about killing people. Got other skills. Yeah. He's out here. He's a lover. Yeah, he's out here. Snake and other dude's chicks. So, Menelaus calls him out.

There's a separation. Paris goes out to talk to him. Menelaus threatens him, and he just basically tucks tail and run. And runs into Hector, and Hector's like, you got to do this. Like, this isn't. You're the reason that this whole thing has happened. Turn your ass around. Yep.

And fucking handle your shit. You remember when I used to beat you when we were young? Use some of that and get back out there. He gives him a pep talk. And it's decided in a treaty that whoever wins is going to be the winner of the war. So they use the champion system. They're just like, you call out your best warrior, you call yours, except in this situation, it's like, hey, I'm calling out the dude that's boned my wife. Let's settle this.

The love triangle started this and this is where it's going to end. It sounds like a gentleman's agreement. Yeah, well, you'll see what happens after that it just, it seems. like it was a good idea until it happened. So Paris goes out there. It starts, Homer has a weird way of starting these one-on-ones where the first thing that always happens is that there's spear throws. And the spear throws never hit. They never connect in a one-on-one. It's always a spear throw, then it goes to knives, and then it goes hand-to-hand combat. So both spear throws may-s, swords. Well, yeah, so the swords, they end up coming close contact, close quarters,

are fighting back and forth, end up going hand to hand, and Paris is just getting his ass beat. Just absolutely smoked. And it's very clear that the Greeks are going to come up on top. Helen's going back to Greece. She's going back to Sparta. And then Aphrodite's decides that she can't see Paris slain, so she pops herself down into the mortal world,

and scoops him up, sends out a gray mist, takes him off of the battlefield, and delivers him back to his room. so he's safe at the time but the Greeks are pissed because this didn't get finished they clearly they won who's this silver bitch floating down

out of the sky snaps what I'm saying the gods are in this whole war of trying to they want to see whoever they favor win so they're controlling all these different things and I don't know if it was just the fact that they wanted it to go on for their entertainment or what which again thinking about a fictional deity you can't explain anything.

Yeah, the other thing too is like you always see in Greek culture, then this might mean my brain, just merging fact and fiction. Well, the Greek mythology would be fiction anyway, but that the gods were only as strong as how much praise and worship they were getting. So, of course, they would want, you know, a war like this because it wouldn't just be, you know, the god of war being prayed to. It would be, you know, let my family back home be safe, so you would get like the god of the harvest and all that stuff

or my loved one miss my loved ones the god of love so like conflict was good essentially for the gods if that was the case that people believe that like Homer if part of his story was to say oh the gods were part of this because this is how they got their strength they were getting sacrifices they were getting praise yeah definitely and they definitely it feels like there are certain ones that sided up like hair with the Greeks Apollo with the Trojans Aries fights with the Trojans

there's different rivaling sides and it's just brothers and sisters choosing different sides in an argument basically so excuse me so that day of fighting stopped and I this whole thing seems like they were on good terms because there was certain I guess after nine years

you probably have to pound out like a council that will sit together and talk and so they're talking about just a complete ceasefire between the Trojans and the Greeks and they want to hold the gentleman's agreement as far as knowing that Greece won, but they didn't get the blood that they wanted to with the win. So it's kind of basically decided that the truth that they put in is going to be what happens on Earth.

Well, up top, of course, in Godland, in Mount Olympus, is that where they were, they're not happy about it because there wasn't an ending to it. And they need to figure out how to make something happen to continue this because they didn't feel a side of their wins. Yeah, well, they wanted it to basically continue. That's true. So one of the gods sneaks down at night and talks to one of the archers and says, hey, here's the deal. You're going to meet for the ceasefire. As soon as the Greeks turn around, you're going to fire an arrow through and you're going to try to hit Menelaus.

That's going to break the treaty. we're going to start the fighting again and it's all going to get rev right back up. So they have the treaty process that happens. The archer fires an arrow through and ends up drilling Menelaus like right. I think it was in the back shoulder they said. And at that point the Greeks knew that it was on. And they knew that they were going back and this wasn't over yet. So after that happens, it's just a big sweet war throughout that entire day.

and it goes back and forth the Trojans start to gain a little bit of land and then Diomedes one of the guys on the Greek side I don't know if I'd mentioned him earlier ends up getting his Eristia and goes

full on nuts to the point to where he takes on Ares, the god of war and ends up slicing him to the point to where he has to disappear from the battlefield and go back up to Mount Olympus and be treated So obviously he's not going to die

But he basically had an Aristia From one of the gods on the Greek side To the point to where he wounded The god of war To the point where he had to leave So a very badass scene And I just see this in video game terms

When it's like someone going Oh And then just like going nuts You just hit a power up Yeah Yeah Getting the Star in Mario Brothers

Yeah And just running through people So he gets his He cuts the god of war Harry's has to go back up to Olympus to heal. Yeah. So that day ends with another one-on-one challenge where Hector, who is the champion on the Trojan side,

says, we need to finish this day off. We need to make this happen. So I challenge anybody on the Greek side to step up and make this happen. Greece's not having a champion. Is he trying to end the war right there? Yeah. He wanted it to be done at that point. There's certain times where there's like whoever wins wins

and we all go home, which I'm sure is probably. probably the best thing that they could have done. So Hector's out there talking shit, telling him there's nobody that's going to step up, there's nobody that's going to happen, because Greek side doesn't have a champion. Achilles isn't there again. So he finally makes a couple references

to needing a man to step up and fight him. And nine Greeks step up. They say we're ready to go. They draw straws, which is kind of cool to know that that was still happening back in the day. And my guy Ajax wins. Ajax the Mighty is what he's referred to.

He's either referred to as Ajax the Giant or Ajax the Mighty. And I was looking up a couple sculptures of them. Very strong, hearty-looking dude, but he got the full Greek treatment. He got the Statue of David treatment, which is kind of a bummer. But they go, again, starts like the other one, throw their spears, two misses, end up knocking each other's weapons out of their hands, go to combat, and they fought for so long that it finally just got dark. And for some reason, darkness had stopped the war at this point

to where they ended up pulling them apart saying, we have no solution to this. We're just going to have to continue it on the next day. They get up, shake hands, exchange pleasantries. Like, hey, you're a good fighter. Hey, you're a good fighter, whatever. And freeze? We're going to find out what position you were in.

Okay, you were here, you were here. It's like, what will be positioned you? Like in wrestling where they're like, okay, you get down. They stood up for a timeout. Yeah. Which, again, just such a... The whole way that they fought wars was just so weird. The whole way that he described the war being fought.

Yeah, which I think that... I don't think that the Trojan War was necessarily like a big historic war. I really believed that this whole thing was just something that had happened probably fairly frequently when they would try to raid, like, other areas that weren't in the Greek Empire. And the Trojans or whoever they were at that time just put up a really good fight. this is one that got written about. So the Aegean, I was looking this up because it's going to play into the Odyssey. I was trying to figure out kind of comparably how big the Aegean is.

The sea? Yeah. So the Aegean see where all of this happens, you know, the area between Greece and Troy. It's smaller than the state of Utah, which in it's, but that's still like a lot of, it's not like you're looking from one island to the next, you know, the clips of Dover, over to France, and you can see the coast. Well, and it's by boat, so it's going to take forever. Yeah.

So, but I was always, I was always. was trying to figure that out because it's going to play in you'll see i'll tie it back into the honesty so they split up ajax and hector yep they decided that it's a draw um and at this point the trojans are like i know we screwed up last time i know that our archer fired the arrow let's have a treaty again let's see what happens here let's do a treaty let's just call it good we'll give you a bunch of our gold and the things that we have you guys walk away, we'll call it. And of course, at that point, there was no treaty being accepted.

No, you've already been there for what, nine years? Yeah, you're not taking it that. So, Zeus at this point, starts to tip it towards the Trojans, because he knows that the Greeks need to be on their backs for Achilles to come out of retirement, basically, and make it happen.

So the next day, Zeus has a hand in the Trojans, just absolutely mollywaping the Greeks to the point to where they were beating them down, to that point in the day where they had gained more ground than they had in the nine years that they had had before on the Greeks pushing them back towards their boats.

I was going to say, and you got to understand that the Greeks here are in like a foreign land. They probably established like you were saying forts and everything, but essentially the area between, you know, where their lines are, that's just them getting pushed back into the sea. Yeah, it's them getting pushed back to their boats. Or it's the Trojans getting pushed back into their stronghold. It's basically like an open field.

And at that point, seeing what the Trojans that did that day, Agamemnon really gets desperate. He's really thinking like this is something that we're probably headed home with the loss. We're not going to be greeted well at home after this happens. So that night they're pushed so far back that the Trojans are actually camping on the battlefield. And one of the things I forgot to mention after the Ajax Hector fight, was that they agreed to take a day off so that they could collect all their dead bodies on the fields and take them back and like dress them for burial and all that kind of stuff. So they had enough of a sense between them that like we can take a day off. We can have an armistice basically.

We can go out and get the things that we need to done without killing each other. So there was a little bit of mutual respect maybe between the two of them. You wake up one day and you're like, oh, thank God it's dead body day. Yeah. Thank God we get to go pick up all of our dead. What? I'm on the dead body team. God damn it. Your job is just to travel around with like just like a wagon and a horse and just that's probably what it was. Well, and you have to identify your soldiers, you know, based upon either what they're wearing or what they look like. They would probably at this point, think of over this course of time, how they just left death bodies out there. The disease would have killed everyone.

Well, that and then there'd just be no place to fight at that point. That's true. You do imagine rolling up on one of them and rolling them over and be like, hey, this looks like Steve. Is this Steve? I don't know if it's Steve And then you call over to the Trudges like, hey, is this one of yours? Is this dead guy laying here one of yours or is it one of ours? And like you're arguing over who has to take him. Just because everybody's mutilated at that point.

I don't recognize him. Do we leave him? You take half, we'll take half. You're showing up to guys that got their heads cut off. You're like, who was this? Yeah, no kidding. So that night, Agamemnon finally kind of looks in to realize that what he's done. is really caused this to be a big issue.

And what he did to Achilles just didn't work in their best interest. So he asked... You're going to tell me that asking for a dude's wife and making him give you, his wife is not going to increase that guy. Is that where his mistake was? He's like, oh, he's like, I really shouldn't have asked for his wife. Well, he makes a concession here that I feel like was something that he just threw in to make Achilles feel better.

situation. So he sends Ajax the Great and Odysseus to see Achilles down on his boats who he's just hanging out down in the Aegean watching all this happen. He tells them that he can have basically all the gold that he has in his tent and that he will return Achilles' wife, not just return

her, but he wanted them to assure Achilles that she was unbedded. So that he had her for all this time, but he never slept with her or did anything like that. He wanted them, he drove that point home. Make sure that she's unbedded. Make sure that he knows that. Make sure he knows that I didn't hump her. So they get down there and again, Achilles and Petroclus are down there playing their

liars. They're making some food on the boat. Keyles is pumped to see his two buddies that came down to see him. I just see them getting it set up and like they have like sand millies. volleyball. Set up down there and like they got a barbecue and everything. Someone's playing music. They're just like, hey, what's up?

They're grilling hot dogs out on the boat and throwing the, uh, the vortex on the beach. Yeah, because he's just sitting there in a lawn chair with one of those like reflective shades underneath his face. Uh, that could have happened. He walks in and he's like, so how's the war going? Yeah, we're talking about stuff that might or might not happen anything. You could say anything at this point.

But he greets them both. He's happy to see them. They stay for the night, and Patroclus and Achilles make them dinner. As they're talking over it, they break out what they called the relaxing wine, which I feel like the relaxing wine had to have a little THC in it because it just only makes sense. What's this stuff they've been finding in wine? I think it's called Urgot. It's like a psychedelic.

Oh, really? There's been, I don't know if it's been from antiquity. I got to use it. but they've started to find like clay pots from around like this era or like the Roman era and everything were that they would use to ferment wine in and they're able to detect even you know the wines dried up and all that kind of stuff but they're able to still from like a analysis standpoint find out what was in it and they found some wine containers that have ergot and ergotts like a psychedelic so they're thinking that that would be part of like ceremonial wine for like priests wanting to have visions and stuff like that they would

drink this, spiked wine. Well, maybe that's why they thought the gods existed. Which, here at historically high, we're pro-psychedelic podcast, so we're happy to hear that the Greeks were. We're pro-Greek mythology, Roman mythology. Yeah, we're there. At this point, Achilles hears the plan.

He hears that he's getting his unbedded wife back and tells them to tell Agamemnon to stick it. It says, I think that not an exact translation, but he said that that guy's the worst. He's like, not good. No, you're not going to get a guy back after you take his wife like that. So Ajax and... Odysseus.

Yeah, Odysseus. Head back. Tell Agamemnon the bad news. Agamemnon realizes at this point that he is going to have to step up and actually start pulling his weight. So next day... He gets set up and decides that he's going to lead the battle that day, gets all of his armor on, and he ends up catching his Eristia that day, and was cutting heads off, left and right, taking out generals, just working his way through the battlefield really well.

We're kind of getting down to where there's... It's very convenient that he catches that on the one day he decides to suit up. Yeah, the one day really tries. They end up pushing the Trojans all the way back. to their gates. So they took everything back that the Trojans had fought for that whole day by morning. And seeing that, we see Apollo come back down on the Trojan side, and he gives kind of a partial arishti at a Hector,

where Hector is doing the same thing. He's taking on full flanking sides of Greek soldiers and just slicing and dicing them going through. the point to where he gets him push so far back again, he almost fights and gets everything back that they had lost that morning, just basically by himself. And this whole time this is happening, Ajax is around Agamemnon protecting him,

making sure that he's not getting jumped or anything like that. There's people different... Like what they call that, like his royal guard. Yeah. Kind of like a group of soldiers whose job it is to make sure he doesn't die. There's commanders going down. Ajax has to be around. them to protect them.

And things are getting kind of clear that just the little push that they had this morning was going to be their last gasp. And Nestor, the guy that I was telling you about that was kind of like the oldest warrior, goes and is in his tent and Petroclus shows up. While Nestor's talking to him, he basically has another vision, whatever, and tells him that the only one, way the Greeks are going to win this war is if he were to don Achilles armor and lead Achilles troop

into battle because without excuse me without having the leader of Achilles there his whole troop of soldiers hadn't been in war or anything that he didn't have ready to lead them so they were going to be fresh they were going to be what they needed like if I'm not fighting my men aren't going to fight yeah so all those guys it was a royal something it was a special group of like the top fighters at Achilles imagine that if he's the champion, then his men are probably, like, trained under him.

Yep. He's probably very selective. He's probably got a pretty elite group of individuals that are fighting under him. They're like the special forces, basically. Yeah. And the whole time, they're just sitting on the sidelines watching everybody get their ass kicked. So at that point, Petroclus is like, yeah, I don't know. I'll think about it.

I'll go back. I'll talk to Achilles. We'll see what he wants to do if he'll let me have his armor, use his arm, or anything like that. Petrchley's Don's Achilles Armer Oh yeah Okay So

Um As that's happening Zeus thinks that everything's Kind of going his way He's getting to a point To where It looks really good on the Trojan side They're going to keep pushing him down

Before he has to make his move So he goes ahead And takes his eyes off the war And goes into something else In Godland He looks up towards the north Or something else that's going on He's like I haven't taken this shit yet

today. Is that? No, do you think, like, I have not taken a shit yet today? Yeah. I wasn't saying that for me. I'm like, Zuss is like, okay, this looks okay.

I think I can duck away for a couple minutes. Well, he had already told all the kids, it's time to step out of this. This isn't something that involves you, so you back off. And, of course, your kids are always going to listen to you. They're not going to do anything. Oh, of course.

But he didn't count on his brother Poseidon going ahead and getting involved to help the Greeks, of course Poseidon was on the Greek side, just like his wife was. And the winds kick up, the waters go nuts, and they start to push the Trojans back. And while this is going on, his wife, Hera. Hera sees that she needs to get involved too to make sure that Zeus doesn't turn around and see what Poseidon's doing. And so she dolls herself up real hot, real goddess hot, goes and sees Aphrodite's, gets a little love spell, and goes and sees the god of sleep to try and after they bang.

What was his, what was the god of sleep's name? I want to say it's something that they've named like a sleeping pill after nowadays. It was, oh man. I know that's something Ambien? But let's see. Hypnos. Hip, yep, okay.

That's a sweet name, Hypnos. So, Hypnos gives her the potion. She goes and finds Zeus. Zeus is like, damn, you look good. You look real good. She goes, I was just on my way

to help another couple of gods that were having sexual issues. I want to go help that. He's like, nah, no, no, you're staying here. She's like, oh, Zeus, we're on top of Mount Olympus right now. everybody could see us he's like i got this don't you worry about it all circle us all envelop us and a mist nobody'll see what's going on i just need to get you he's got like a version of the

clapper that he claps and just clouds just so down he's like little berry white kicks on it's just time to get it on um it in zeus is like of all the ladies that i've cheated on you with i've never wanted to bang somebody more than you right now you stick around let's make this all the women I fathered illegitimate children with none of them compared to you. So of course Zeus being the god of gods gets himself

to slice. He cuts himself off. There's some cheeks beaten in Mount Olympus and he... It's good to be the king. Oh yeah. He kind of starts to fall into his slumber takes a little look back, sees what's going on in the war,

sees that Poseidon is now pushing the Greeks back up, which if the are pushing and advancing at that point. Achilles isn't going to be able to get in there and Zeus isn't going to be able to keep his... It's like that last look you take it your phone before you set on the nightstand. He's just like, I just had sex.

I'm so sleepy. And he's just like, all right, well, what time is it? What the fuck? Yeah. Yeah, he sees it happen. It's the 1159 look and he got a notification saying that Poseidon was ruined and stuff. It's like Poseidon has joined the chat.

Well, I didn't know that Poseidon and Zeus were brothers, but Zeus was born first. So it's, because he's the god of the skies. Yeah, so Zeus, well, I don't know who was born first, but how it goes. I'm going to try to do this in like a minute. Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades are all brothers.

Their father was Kronos, one of the Titans. He ate all three of them. He would always eat his children. And I'm trying to think there was a situation in which he was getting ready to, you know, he didn't eat them. he was getting ready to eat them and his wife at the time switched out the kids for rocks. Apparently Kronos wasn't good about paying attention.

So he ate the rocks or something thinking they were the kids. And then after the kids grew up, they, Zeus led the other two brothers to defeat and imprison Kronos. And then Zeus, I don't think it was necessarily that he was the oldest one. I think he was just the one that kind of led them against the Titans. He was made the, it just happened to be. the gone to the sky and thunder and lightning Haiti's got forced to rule the underworld

and then Poseidon got the sea so Hades kind of got the shaft It said that once Zeus turned around and was angry with Poseidon Poseidon had to basically let his older brother take over so he had to listen to it

I thought you wanted me to do this dude yeah so I don't know how they were all born but it does reference Zeus being the oldest brother, which He might have been. Yeah, well, I mean, if they were trying to get eaten by their parents, it sounds a lot like they were pre-Elron Hubbard,

El-Rond Hubbard. The Greek gods are just as crazy as... Oh, yeah, there's no shortage of inspiration from all of this stuff. No, just nuts. So at that point, Zeus takes back over. Excuse me, he gives the Trojans a push to head back, and it gets to the point

to where their... push back to where they're fighting on the Greek ships and Tricolus sees what's going on and says, Achilles, I need your armor. Achilles gives him his blessing, gives him his armor. Trogloos shows back up. Agamemnon says,

all right, you're up, make it happen, let's go. And he leads them into battle. Achilles had told him before he left the boats, go up, push them as far up to the walls as possible. Don't overtake the fortress. because if you overtake the fortress and you take off your helmet

and everybody sees that it's you and not me, I'm going to look like a fool and I'm going to look like a weakling and you're going to be the hero. You're my second command, but I don't want you to outshine me. So his troops show up, his army shows up. They start absolutely tearing through the Trojans left and right, gets to a point to where Petroclus is leading them through and then Petrochlus takes an arrow to the back.

and slips just in between the armor, just right in between and catches him and takes him down. And he ends up just dying on the battlefield, basically, to where Hector walks up, stands over the top of him and says, this is it for you, this is it for your army, we're going to take everything else. And the last thing that Troclus says to Hector is Achilles. and as this is happening Achilles is watching from his ship and sees his half-brother lover

best friend die on the field and lets out a battle cry and a scream from his boat that's hurt across the entire battlefield that made everybody stop what they were doing. So Hector being the champion of the Trojans that he was went ahead and stripped Trocholus's armor

which was Achilles armor and strapped it up himself is the ultimate fuck you to the Greeks. I'm wearing your champion's armor. And at this point, we get into where the rage of Achilles just hits its high point, where it's just all out. His Aristia is by far and away

the baddest thing that happens. So he goes back to his mom. He tells his mom, I don't have my armor anymore. She goes to the Smith God and ends up smithing him a breastplate, a helmet, a sword and a shield that by all accounts everybody that's talked about it said that it was like one of the most specifically ornate writings that they had seen about just the detail of every single thing that was on there like it was like two paragraphs of just the description of it

and there's certain times in the iliad off material for metal files yeah there's certain times in the iliad and it may even be what you talk about two at the Odyssey, where Homer has this way of comparing things that are happening in war and in bad times to just the most beautiful things ever, like the happy times and the peaceful times. So it's almost like a cut in or a look into a different world of what there would be outside of like peace and happiness. But he's using those peace and happiness feelings to describe these things. So like there's times in the wars when Hector would go back and he would see his son and they would talk about Hector holding his son. And they would talk about Hector holding his son in an embrace and his son freaking out until the helmet comes off and the love that a son

feels for a dad as he snuggles in and there's all this different stuff where he goes back and forth well that was kind of what they did with this armor like this is the armor to end all armor this is the armor for achilles this is going to be the guy knowing full well achilles says multiple times that this will be the battlefield that i probably die on so um his mom brings him back the armor Achilles shows up, gets his ERISA, and is running down lines of Trojan soldiers, cutting heads off left and right, just blazing through entire troops, tearing up the battlefield, pushing them almost single-handedly by himself. I'm sure Ajax and everybody else were involved, Odysseus and all that were involved in the pushing back,

but is just taking everybody out. Just no prisoners, generals, running around the battlefield, he's on his chariot, driving by, cutting heads off on his chariot, and they get up to the gates. Was there is Aristia? Was it actually cocaine? It could have been. It could have been Greek cocaine. They always talk about...

You got any of that, like, you got any more that Eristia? It's kind of a sick name for it. Nobody's going to know what you're talking about either, so you can talk in code the whole time. You know what it was? It was a little bit of that concoction that they gave to the Germans during the Blitzkrieg. That was their Erestia. It was the math.

Yeah. Yeah, I guess ERISD is that he gets you hyped, right? Yeah, no kidding. Okay. So it gets to a certain point where there's a separation on the battlefield and Achilles has just wiped every Trojan out that he can get his hands on. And he calls out Hector. And Hector's like, oh, fuck.

Looks down, sees that he's wearing Achilles armor. Here's Achilles calling for him by name. He knows that his end is coming very quickly. He's fought against the other tough guys in the Greek army and didn't have a problem, but now it's champion versus champion, and this is going to settle the whole thing. So that is where it ends for that day. Next day, Hector is in talking with his dad Priam, and they're trying anything that they can to come up with an idea of how they can bribe their way out of this,

how Hector can still be alive. And there's just nothing that they're coming up with. they're basically saying over and over Achilles wants blood. This isn't... We're not getting out of this without Achilles taking Hector and killing him for killing

Patroclus, his boy. Or for his the perceived killing of him. Technically he didn't kill him. Technically, he didn't kill him, but from what Achilles saw, he saw the stripping of the armor. He had done it. Yeah, definitely.

So it's decided the only way they're getting out of this is Hector goes out and meets him. The only two that are on the battlefield that day. Hector walks out of the walls and they say if you can if you're in trouble try to get back to the walls

and we'll get you inside the fortress. And Hector makes a mistake of walking too far away from the fortress to meet Achilles down there. They have a back and forth. There's some shit talk going on. Achilles is basically like this is the day that you meet your maker. Do you think in reality

it was like Achilles talking and then Hector was like, I don't understand what you're saying. And then Achilles was like, I don't understand what you're saying. And so they're just trying to point each other and being like, you dead. Like drawn the thumb across the neck and he's like, no, you're dead. I think

at this point, Hector was just like, I'm sorry. I didn't do this. He has the arm where he just sets it out. He's like I did not mean to do this. Didn't know it was yours. No names. I didn't see Achilles on this. He's like looking on the inside of me. He's like, your name? I don't know. nowhere there.

So they finally engage and it's just kind of a, it doesn't matter at this point. Hector could get his ERISA, he could get whatever he felt was necessary, and it was just going to be an ass kicking to the point where Hector looks back, realizes that there's no way that he's going to get to the gates to be able to be protected and just basically has to take it,

begs and pleads for his life. And finally, the last death blow, is Achilles knowing his armor so well that he knows where the weak spots are and gets his sword in and jabs it straight in between the shoulder plate and the breastplate and kills Hector and then not only proceeds to kill Hector

but stabs two holes through his legs draws a leather strap through them attaches them to the back of his chariot and does circles around the fortress just spinning donuts with the dead body dragging his ass around there. Ends up. It's a power move.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Takes him back to the Greek camps. And at that point, they've already gotten Petroclus' body ready for disposal. Yeah, they're going to burn him. And they have what are called the... Again, it's just so weird. And it has to be like the fact that they do this to a play.

because they do something called the Patroclus Funeral Games, which is they have like races and they wrestle. And this is, excuse me, where I was talking earlier about one of the prizes being Achilles, giving somebody an ingot of iron. That was what you would get if you won the foot race to see who was the fastest. So all these guys that are still in the middle of war are like beating each other up and running and doing all this kind of different stuff to wear themselves out, just completely weird to throw in there.

But they're just absolutely mutilating Hector down there. They're cutting him up. They're burning his body. They're doing everything that they can to desecrate him. He's still got him hooked up to the chariot. He's still driving him around just for funzies out on the battlefield. And finally, Pyrium decides that they have to take a load of treasure down. I mean Priam.

Yeah, Priam. It has to take a load of treasure down to Achilles and make the switch because he needs his son back. Every other one of his sons is embarrassed him. He talks about how he doesn't have any sons anymore. He tells his living sons that he does not have any sons anymore. All in Paris's face,

who is still Helen's husband, Helen at this point is distraught to the point where she's crying and saying, I'm what caused Hector to die. I'm the reason you don't have any sons. No shit. Yeah. She's so sad about it. She said multiple times it should have been me.

It shouldn't have been him that died. I should have been the one that ended this by killing myself. Honey, he had nine years. Yeah, she did have a lot of time. Walk your ass over the Greek boats and go home. Oh, no. If only I could have done something. Yeah, Paris was the one that told her she could and couldn't, I'm sure.

So Priam gets down at night. He's protected by one of the gods that comes down and says, your son's okay. We cast it a safety net over the top. of him so he will look just fine no matter what they've done or desecrated him he'll still you'll still be able to recognize him and know that that's your son um protects him the whole way down they get to achilles tent he sneaks into his tent starts begging for forgiveness and tells achilles that if the situation was reversed he would like to know that achilles father would have

been able to receive his son after his death and this is the first time where achilles like realizes that what he did that day was just beyond anything to the point to where he knew that there was humility that had to come into effect to realize like what he did to heck them and all the bad shit that happened. So Achilles makes him a bed up that night. It says, please stay here and rest. I'll get you out. You'll be safe. We'll load Hector up into your cart and get you to go back. And he even looks down at him and he goes,

How many days do you need for your son's funeral? And Priam says 12. And he goes, okay, I can promise you, as my word, we will not attack for 12 days. So next night comes, darkness falls. The God protection comes back for Priam. He wheels his son's body up. They get the funeral and everything ready. On the 12th day, they are building, like, his tomb that they're going to put the bones in.

And then immediately go right back to war. or go right back to prepping because they don't know if it's like 12th day as soon as it hits dark 12th day, since it hits light, whatever. And it ends with the Greek army getting strapped back up to go attack on that

13th day of the day after. So, very hard hitting stuff, very just kind of fun to see. It feels like it's almost like a human alien thing when you factor in the gods and how it all is.

Yeah. It almost makes you realize like things that happen on this planet now you see them sometimes and you wonder why the hell they happen and it kind of makes you wonder a little bit like is somebody up there controlling the chips is this like a fun game for somebody to watch are we the reality show for someone else

yeah and in this case reading this reading the Iliad that's really what it was it was almost like it was just a way for the gods to humor themselves yeah and I mean the big thing too with you know both this you know the Iliad and the Odyssey and other you know, any, I think these are probably a little bit more of the exception, but, you know, people that lived in this area and lived in Greece and they could read this and fully 100% believe that it happened.

It was factual, because they have nothing to contradict it. They have no scope of what's possible or what's not possible. All right, I got a pee. Okay. And then we can hit the Odyssey. Yeah. All right. Yeah, P and Odyssey.

All right, Odyssey time. No, not the minivan. Okay, so my... That was bad. I know. My initial thought on the Odyssey when I, like, first, maybe got into, like, the first 10 minutes. I was like, how has this not, like, been a movie? Wasn't it Harrison Ford?

No, I looked... No. He was alive back when the Odyssey was probably written. Why? What do you have against Harrison Ford? He's old, and he needs to give up the indie type. That, okay, I do agree with that. We don't need an Indiana Jones that's going to break a hit.

And, you know how many planes that guys crashed? There's been several occasions. Anyway, so with the honesty, I thought, like, I was like, how was this not a movie? And then about 15 minutes into it, I was like, oh, it's total horseshit. So, again, it's Homer's stab at the Everyman story. I think it was, is what it is. I feel like I'm going to read this, and you stop me if I, I get two just like this is fucking ridiculous.

I just spent an entire week reading about how gods were playing chess with people. You think I'm going to go with ridiculous? I know, but yours seems to be based on what I actually feel like. It's probably a historical event, like, you know, the Trojan War. Could be? At least, okay, to some degree. But I feel like the stuff that he did in the Odyssey, he was just like, he did the Iliad, and he's like, oh, he's like, the history stuff isn't like the, trying to be accurate.

It isn't funny. he's like the fantastical shit is fun. So he's like, I'm just going to go and do this. Have you, do you ever dip your foot into the epic of Gilgamesh? No, I didn't. You never read that? That's what it almost feels like,

because it was more of like a, kind of a story with different, like stories within stories, kind of adventures. I feel like Homer, when he was writing The Odyssey, he just tried to use previously established characters and places that people would be familiar with,

and then he just went off the rails with shit. Oh, because, like, some of the guys that I talked about pop-up and this, like, didn't you say it's Odysseus's? It's, he's the main character. He's the journeyman at this point? Yeah. Zajak show up? No.

It's literally just Odysseus. And he's the only character that they even really, there's a couple more, they name by name within his crew, but it's like Odysseus and his crew. So after the Trojan horse. So basically, it comes to a standstill when the Greeks decide, Odysseus comes to them with a plan He's like one of the

So you have Agamemnon who's like King Dick Yep Then you have like his his lieutenants And Odysseus Ajax I think Achilles was technically one of them maybe But he was like They were the people that were like

The warlords in charge of their territories Does Achilles show up in this story at all? No Because he's dead at this point No I know Because he Paris Spoiler for something you're not going to read The arrow that's fired that hits Achilles in his heel and kills him

Fired by Paris the pussy from the Iliad That's in the movie actually too What movie? Oh Troy? Yeah See, that's what I'm saying I know but then they actually explained it That what really happened is they Achilles got shot by a bunch of arrows

But he was like pulling them out Like a badass And then as he was falling to die Paris came around the corner Shot him and went through his heel and then he had died from the other wounds but when they found Achilles' body The only arrow he had in him was that one

So that's why the Achilles heel Huh The legendary part of Achilles The reason the heel was a weakness Was because when his mother was dipping him In the River Styx The River that goes through the underworld It grants you

Like Achilles like invulnerability or whatever Superpowers basically You have to be tethered to the world By something though So she grabbed him as a baby on the heel Huh And dunked him into the right river sticks like that.

That's cool. Yeah. A lot of this shit is cool. This was just a little bit. It was too much. The Odyssey was too much at once. Okay. I'm excited.

I like too much. So Odysseus comes up with the idea of the Trojan horse. And because Troy was famous for their horses, his rationale is we're going to go ahead and build this giant wooden horse. We're going to hide myself in like an elite group of men inside. You guys are all going to leave, like, pack up. the camp, take all the ships, get out of like over the horizon or someplace

where they're not going to be able to see you. They're going to show up, see this, see we've left, assume we've given up, and they're going to think that this is like an offering to their gods. Which is exactly what happened. Troy or Troy was like, oh, they left us an offering to our gods because we won. So they take the horse and

they wheel the shit into the city. And that night, they come out of like the hidden compartment and the grease or Greek soldiers during the night the ships had come back in

to unload men on the shore and the Greek soldiers that were in the city they opened the gates allowed them to come in they sack the city and they destroyed it

so that's how the Trojan War ends huh I had never heard that whole like I know what the Trojan horse is I didn't know that was how they yeah I thought it was they like sprung out and got the jump on them but it was they opened the gate for them

that's why they called the Trojan horse because it's something that you welcome in yourself without knowing the danger to it. But that's what I thought, like, them jumping out and getting, like, an attack on them. They waited until everyone was asleep, and then they wouldn't open the gates for the hole. It wasn't just those guys that won the war. They had to open the gates and let all the soldiers inside. Crazy. So it was 10 years that he was gone from home from Ithaca for the Trojan War.

So he ends up leaving with everyone else. they want to say it takes like I'm trying to remember the time frame that they thought it might have taken to get across the Aegean back home because apparently it wasn't quick It was more than a few weeks It was something ridiculous It might have been like the people that left

Like got back home within a year Or something like that Going across Utah with a sail and maybe some oars is going to take you while No kidding So he leaves with 12 ships So after sailing for home And instead he actually decides to go and raid a Trojan ally that was a little bit like if you came off the coast of Turkey

and went north. So this whole thing is going to, you remember how I mentioned the whole earnest thing? I feel like Odysseus. Yes. So when, Jim Forney. Yeah, sorry. So when I was watching these documentaries, the people that are speaking about it,

I feel like they get confused and they're like merging Odysseus, the real person, the historical figure. into the character and they're trying to like describe him in both ways they're like and you'll see Odysseus's cleverness when he defeated this sea monster

and you're like what do you read like you're talking about a fictional character within this like he's not a real person do you think that might lend back to the whole idea that Homer's writings were like plays that people had already seen so there's already prior knowledge like that could have been

Maybe because like a part of a play that they had seen. Imagine like a playwright, or not a playwright, but a historian can, I can't even talk right now, a historian wrote down some facts about Odysseus and its contribution to the Trojan War. And then the next person takes a look at that and kind of pumps it up a little bit. And then before long you get this, where he's going to be a mortal man, but he's insanely smart. His decision making is fucking awful.

All they talk about is how fucking clever he is because he wasn't like super physically strong, he was very mentally gifted. But all he does is gets himself out of the shitty situations that he gets himself into. He just gets back to even. Yes. But they never say like, oh, it was his poor planning. They were like, and then he had to get him

out of it again. Okay, I'm going to get to it so you can see see the examples. So he goes to raid this village. They raid the city. Still the treasure. Wait a second. Is that what you meant by Ernest? Ernest did never get himself into those situations? No, I just meant like it was almost like a buffoonery type. Okay. He seems like a buffoon. Mr. Bean. Doesn't rob the bank to go to jail. Okay. I understand that. Sorry. No disrespect to Ernest. I love

big fan. Maybe is it more of a Mr. Bean situation then? Yeah, maybe a Mr. McGoo. Okay. He gets himself into the situation. He has to get himself out of him. I just, I wanted to clear Ernest. Okay. Okay. So they raid the city, steal the treasure, and then they go get drunk on the beach. like before getting on their ships and everything they just they're like hey I'm not sure how far they went to the city to get the treasure they just get hammered on the beach they all pass out

well then the locals track them down attack them and kill 72 of his men and they're like running back for the ships as these locals attack them like you can't even get on your boats before you get like and what's the worst thing that happens if you get on your boat you get drunk you just float yeah

and you don't get killed by the people that you literally just rated their city and robbed. So that's, that's exhibit A. Likes to party. So they're at sea for two weeks until they hit a hurricane.

The hurricane carries them from the Aegean to North Africa. So it's a pretty, you have to go out around Greece, yep, it's more like almost straightaway, it almost looked like, and I'm not even kidding, it looks like the island they were talking about was the one,

what, Phaestos or in Alexandria? Ferros. Where the lighthouse was? Yes. Yeah. It kind of, the diagram kind of looks. like that.

Call back to episode seven or seven. So it carries them all the way to North Africa. They wash up to an island where the natives are friendly. They're offering them food and all their food is made

from like a flower. So this is actually like the island of the lotus eaters. So the lotus flowers. So basically what the lotus flowers in Greek mythology they would create a drug that just basically made you feel euphoric

and forgetful. So basically you were stoned. Like that, yeah. Yes. You just, you're forgetful, but you just feel amazing. So basically, his men don't want to leave. Why would you? Yeah, it's keeping them there. It's keeping them complacent and they're happy. And so, of course, Odysseus is the only one that stays sober, realize what's going on. He's like, no, we got to get out of here. Go, go. The guy that got drunk on the beach and beat up was the only one that stayed sober.

I don't know if Odysseus. He may have not got drunk on the beach, but he knew that it was happening. He was the captain. Yes. So he ends up getting his men to, you know, kind of snap out of it and get back to the ships. So after they go from the lotus eaters, they come to an island. It has a bunch of like wild game on it. So they pull into the island and he's taken a group of it.

his men with him. I think he takes 12 men to explore the island with him. And they come upon like a cave and the cave is just full of food. And so of course they just start, you know, gorging themselves and eating and feasting and everything. They don't go back to the other guys of the ship

and they're like, oh hey, by the way, guys, we found a bunch of food. They're just like, let's get our turn first and then we'll head back and let them know where the, you know, if there's anything left over. I didn't think like this was gathered by somebody and they were eating somebody else's stock. Oh no, I think Odysseus knew that

And this is kind of a point that A ridiculous Greek tradition apparently Or some type of like point of Greek culture Is you were supposed to Greet a stranger to your house With a gift and a place to stay That's the exact opposite of what you think you should do So if a stranger came up to your house

Because they had traveled from another land Or a stranger to you or something like that You were supposed to be able to provide them like a Oh, welcome to our home. Here's a house. Here's a gift. That's how you get murdered. I know.

And, oh, by the way, do you need a place to... It was like good Greek manners to do that. So Odysseus is thinking to himself, like, I know this belongs to somebody, but when this person comes home, we're strangers. I want my gift. This is actually in the book. He's like, I want my gift.

The hell of the thought process. Yes. So it ends up being the cave of a fucking cyclops. Oh. Like a giant cyclops. Yeah, you probably... No. Of all the cave dwellers, a giant cyclops is probably the worst.

So they... Cyclops ends up getting home. And he's like... Dysius is like, where's my gift? After he gets home to the Cyclops. So the Cyclops eats two of his dudes. And the documentary I was watching, for some reason, I don't know if someone that was editing this just got...

boners for fucking weird images, but there was so much disgusting imagery of like a mouth, tearing it like raw meat and blood and stuff. Like any time they'd mention, they're like, and then he ate two of his men. And it would go into like a 10 second clip of like this weird mouth and like these different like cutscenes of a mouth like eating and pulling it. Like it was disgusting. It was unnecessary. Is this a pay site?

No. It was on YouTube. Okay. And it was on his and it was from history channel. That's really weird. Someone in the editing bay was like, you sure that's not like gross? And he's like,

no, I like it. You get a meat king, bro? Yeah, no shit. So, eats two of his dudes. Now, they can't just like wait for the cyclops

to fall asleep and then kill him because, of course, the door is a giant rock that he rolls into place, a la Jesus in the tomb. Too heavy to move. Okay, so it wasn't open when they got into it.

It was. He left it open. So it was open when they got into it. When the Cyclops comes home, though, he closes it. So they can't. It's so big they can't move it. So sunrise, Cyclos gets up, has two of his dudes for breakfast. So now he's down to himself and eight dudes.

Cyclops goes, opens the door, all of the sheep that he brings in at night that live on the island, they all come in. They all get to go out and graze. And he goes and he takes care of him. Barn cave. Yeah. And since he's got prisoners, now he seals the door behind him. So actually. And this is a weird thing about how we talked about the nympho thing.

Yeah. So there was, there's an actual disease. And it fucking talked about it, an image and showed an image for too long on the screen. It's called Cyclopia. And it's an actual deformative. Oh, no. And it's where, I might get this a little bit wrong. I'm going to try to, I had to kind of turn away.

Like, I'm weird about images like that. I can look at some stuff, but I can't look at other stuff. It's where, like, part of the. the ocular system merges together and it creates and then the brain doesn't develop, but it gives you the image of a single eye, but it almost isn't even an eye. It's like it almost looked like it was a see-through just like a red socket for an eye. Like kids don't like, I think they're born like they die within like minutes from being born if they have this

because they're not fully developed or something like that. They can't survive outside. But they showed like an image and they had it on screen for like 10 seconds and then it started doing the zoom-in thing on it. I was like, don't. Why are you doing this? much. So anyway, that's where they think the myth of the Cyclops come from, because if people were

so mortified or terrified by that, what would be scarier than that? A giant one that was alive. True. So what they do is Odysseus and his men, they find one of the Cyclops clubs and they sharpen the end of it. Cyclops comes back for the evening. Again, two more.

Seems to be a standard fare. Grapes two more dudes and eats him. So now I think he's down to he went from 12 to 10, 10 to 8. He's down to six guys and him. So Odysseus, before he left the ship with the 12 guys, they say that he made a very wise move. He turns back to the ship and he goes, throw me a goat skin full of wine.

I don't know if him and the boys were going to party party or anything. He's like, I got my 12 dudes. They know how to keep their mouth shut. We're going to party. So after he eats these two guys, Odysseus offers him the wine. And so the Cyclops drinks like three bulls. And then he ate two human men. How big is the thing of wine?

It's a goat skin, so I don't, the size of an entire goat. Okay. But I don't really think it's that size. I think it's made of goat skin. But what they said about wine, too, is there was stuff called like fortified wine. And it was basically like wine concentrate. So like if a bottle of wine would be like, what's standard for a bottle of wine? Like 17, 18% alcohol probably?

Yeah, probably 12 to 18. Okay. So fortified wine would be like almost like a malt. liquor of wine where it'd be like 60% and then you can add water to it stretch that's what you would do okay that's why they would carry it on ships because a little bit could go a long ways that makes a lot of so the giant drinks three bowls again the imagery of this goddamn documentary of showing this disgusting mouth and this wine bowl and like it's spilling down the sides of the mouth and it being like slopping like it's just fucking unnecessary so anyway the cyclops gets hammered off this wine

he has he's drunk and he's stumbling around The Cyclops asked for Odysseus' His name, and he says, my name's nobody. Again, hearkening back to how fucking clever Odysseus is. Trivy, yeah. Yeah. By the way, again, he lets his men another bad decision. He's just like, oh, this is somebody's food. I'll just wait to ask for my gift.

And this cave has to be a sizable cave, because the Cyclops is a fake man. The simple fact that any of the cups, cutlery, serving sizes, anything, would have been fucking giant size should have been an indicator. It's the jack and the beanstalk scenario. Or the club, like, oh my God, look at this giant wooden club.

You'd have to be insanely strong to reach, like, come on. So Cyclops passes out, and they position the club above him and just stab him right in the fucking eye. The door's still closed. I know. Just listen. So the other Cyclops, because apparently he's not the only cyclops on the island, hear him screaming and yelling, and, like, he's, you know, he just got stabbed in the...

I. And they're like, hey, and like, hey, buddy, is everything all right in there? He's like, nobody's hurting me. Nobody stabbed me. And they're like, oh, okay. Oh, no, okay. Yeah. Holy shit. I, it got me. Yeah, but it's like, what kind of humor would you call that? That's like, that's dad joke humor. Yeah, dad jokes, slapstick. Like, dad, I'm hungry. Hi, hungry. I'm dad. It's the who's on first. It's Abbott and Costello. That's what it is. Abbeck and Stella humor. those guys rip this off. That's the who's on first bit.

Yeah, exactly. So to get out, he opens the door. So he's sitting there by the door. He can't see anything. So Odysseus, he has his men strap themselves to the sheep's stomach that are in there. And as they pass, the giant is reaching down, filling the sheep to make sure none of the men are getting out. So he's just feeling the back of sheep.

So he gets all of his men out that way, just straps him to the bottom of sheep and they all get out. what the shit did you read i know no it gets crazier from there this is like mild it's gonna keep getting yeah it's gonna keep getting a little crazier okay so as they're sailing away odysseus can't help himself like the giant standing on the cliff like screaming and he's like hey and the giant like you know can't look at him but it gets the giant said he's like guess what my name's odysseus So he forgets that Cyclops are actually the sons of Poseidon.

So Greek mythology, Poseidon has like, how they create Cyclops is, I think Poseidon has to have, like, sex with a sea creature. I'm not sure what kind he makes a Cyclops, but it ends up, you know, he ends up creating Cyclops. So the Cyclops is pissed, asked Poseidon to kill him, and Poseidon's like, hey, I'll see what I can do. So during this time, the entire time that Odysseus is gone, he's the king of Ithaca. Okay. So that's why he was like in command. He was the king of this, one of these nations or whatever you would call.

Why he was higher below Agamemnon? Yeah. But he was, he was a lieutenant or a ruler within that kingdom. So his wife, Penelope, this whole time that he's been gone, apparently in this story, she's had all these suitors. like squatting at like the royal palace being like Odysseus is like gone oh yeah like he's gone like you need to pick one of us to hook up with yeah and so she is like no he's not gone I'm waiting I'm not doing any of this

so part of this book just keeps going back and forth to this situation I'm going to go ahead and just tell you how long he's also gone on the Odyssey another 10 years so 20 years and I think the suitors thing really comes in after people start getting back from the Trojan War. I think she had some there hanging out, but then it ramps up because then they're like, oh, he's not back when everybody else is back. He's gone. He's dead.

So she is basically holding off. I'm not even kidding. It says there's close to like a hundred of these dudes, squatting in the royal palace, just like getting drunk and partying all day and being like, one of us is going to bang this chick and then be the king of Ithaca. At no point, no one's like,

she doesn't have like a royal house guard or like men that can be like, she's like, can you get these guys the fuck out of my house? Yeah, I don't want to spoil, but you got the quilt in there? Oh, it's not the quilt, it's the burial shroud. Barrel shroud. Yes, I do have that in here. All right.

No spoilers, then. Okay. So the next island up is King Yolice, and he actually coincidentally has control over the winds. So he's like... Of course he does. Yeah, he's like... Hey, Odysseus, come here. He's like, see this bag?

He's like, I got all the winds in here. He's like, the only one I'm letting out is the wind that's going to blow you directly home. He's like, keep all the other, he's like, don't open it. All the other winds are in here. Very simple instructions. So, Odysseus stays awake for nine days while this wind is literally blowing him the exact direction of home. Day 10. One mile from Ithaca.

he just can't keep his eyes open any longer he's a mile away from home so he's been able to see it for a while as well yeah yep closes his eyes and as soon as he does his men are like the fuck's in this bag

he's been guarding this bag for nine days so they open this bag and the winds just go crazy they literally take his ship all the way back to the wind dude's island

you think the wind dude just played a prank on him and it was just like a bag and farts in a bag what happens is apparently like Poseidon I don't know if he spoke to Zeus and put some pressure on this wind dude

and so when they got back, Odysseus is like hey any chance you can help us out on that wind thing again I promise I'll make sure my men don't open this. Stay awake this time. I'll stay awake the full 10 days this time and he's like no can do dude he's like orders from the boss man from corporate we're not allowed to help you with this anymore.

So he has to sail just like normal. So he ends up sailing and tries to like kind of dock. He sees like this mysterious harbor. And so he starts kind of staring some of his ships into it. And he's attacked by these giant fucking cannibals. Like giant cannibals are enough to where they jump like off the cliffs and they're like chest deep in like the ocean.

And they're snatching dudes off boats, eating them hundreds of. all but one of his ships is destroyed. So 11 ships are destroyed. All because he ran into an island of cannibals he tried to dock at? Yeah, just got too close. Again, this is Odysseus. This is classic Odysseus up to this point.

Just horrible, horrible judgment. But through all of this, he's able to go ahead and survive and get him and what's left of his men out. So then he's like, okay, we're going to go a little. bit a little bit of ways down the coast because again a lot remember in a lot of this the sea faring i think we've kind of talked about this before when we were doing alexandru but the seafaring you'd be sticking to the coast as much as possible yeah yeah just because you know and their ships yeah their ships weren't ocean you know they were ocean-going ships but they weren't you know great sailboats they wanted to stay within side of land in case something happened so he sends a

scouting party after they get down the coast a little bit to a better spot. He sends a scouting party and they find a palace that's guarded by wolves and lions. On the cannibal island? No, no, no. So the can't, it wasn't even an island. It was like just part of like a section of the coast.

Okay, yeah, so they're following. There are and yeah, so, because if you look at like, did you look at like a map of the Aegean or that area? It's just a ton of tiny islands. Yeah. Like Mekanos and like all those like places like Ithaca is one of them. or I think it's like they pronounce it to like Athaka or something like that now

So So he finds another place Palace guarded by wolves and lions To me I'd be like Probably not the best place to go into There's wolves and lions Yeah that's that's an easy choice

So of course they go in And it's um This area is run by Circe The sorceress and her maids And they're all hot so she goes out to these guys this search party Odysseus is not with the search party by the way so these guys are on their own

so they might stand a fighting chance because the dipshit keeps getting them in trouble you would think that and then Circe invites him in for basically a buffet and an orgy so at that point these guys are stuck out at sea they didn't have a choice no they were just at war for 10 years I know

so as they're like so she invites them in and is basically like food and sex have at it and as they do you know again they've been at war for like 13 years at this point or like away from home that is settled for a roast beef sandwich and a slow blow yes so she starts you know as they start to give into like their appetites and become like slavs about it and everything she starts turning them into pigs that's entrapment yeah you're just like Hey, I know you haven't eaten in a week, but here's a baked potato and some steak. And then when you eat it all, you're like, oh, no, you ate it all?

Dirty pool. I don't blame one of those guys. No, it's entrapment. So one dude actually makes it out. He runs back. He tells Odysseus. Odysseus is like, I got to take a look at this orgy buffet for myself. So, of course, he goes to investigate.

And on the way, he just happens to meet Hermes, who's the messenger of the gods. Mm-hmm. And Hermes gives him like this drug or this root that makes him immune to Ceres like sorceress, like seduction powers. So was this the gods playing a factor in, do you think? I think so a little bit. I don't know who's on his side at this point, though. Oh, it might have been, I want to say it might have been Aphrodite because she was trying to get him back to Penelope or some shit like that. It might have been something completely different.

I know that Poseidon is pissed off at him. and I know at some point Zeus is going to get pissed off at him so I don't think he has many friends so he ends up showing up she tries to charm him it doesn't work she wants to bang at that point because she's like oh this ain't working you must be different now I really want to ban you and he's like

hey not so fast quit turning my guys into pigs and she's like fine let me at that dick good on him yes for his man He's got rules. He goes into the inner sanctum with her, and he does not come out for a year. A year?

Yes. He goes basically into her sex dungeon, sex room, and does not come out for a year. Huh. Well. And after a year, he's done. He's like, I miss my wife. So I need to leave. I need to leave this island.

I'm so empty right now. He's like, there was something I was supposed. supposed to do where was I trying to get he's like oh shit he goes walking out of the sex dungeon and all of his guys were they turned back from pigs or were they're still no he got him turned back from pigs okay he probably came out he's like he's like you guys can thank me later he's like uh Tuesday like bro it's Friday he's like oh wow he's like net the following year 775 you don't do it's 7 74 oh man where were we going home?

We're trying to get home. You know how long we had to sit outside this door and listen to what you were doing in there? So he convinces Searcy. He's like, hey, I got to leave. And at that point, she's probably like, all right, you know, whatever. So she's like,

because Poseidon is still having it out for you, you got to travel to the underworld to speak with the dead prophet, Teresius. And he's like, of course I do. Why wouldn't I have to do something like that? and you know it doesn't sound very hard the way they talk about getting in and out of the underworld but apparently odysseus is the only man to have ever done it the only mortal to ever done it and so that's a big deal

um does it say how it didn't get into that much well they played the choking game and the sex dungeon no it made it sound like he just like he's like okay i guess i'm going to hades snapped his finger and was something like that and apparently the underworld in greek mythology it wasn't how uh modern christian Christianity is kind of described it where it's like all hell fire and brimstone and hot. Yeah. So in Greek mythology, it was kind of just like cold and misty. It was always like shrouded in a mist and you could never really see anything, but it was kind of just cold. It was like an ice cave.

Yeah, like uncomfortable. And honestly, if I'm having my choice between the two, I hate being cold. I'd rather be too hot any day of the week. Oh, buddy. I'd take the ice cave 10 times out of 10. No, no. I don't, I'd rather take the heat. I'm miserable when I'm cold, man.

so I'm not sure how he ends up meeting Teresa's but he gets inside the gates of Hades and then it makes it sound like Teresa's just just hangs out at the gates he's like hey fans he's seeing you here so basically what he tells him in order to get home his big piece of advice is he's like

hey Helios has an island Helios is the sun god he's like he's got an island and he's got a bunch of cows he's like don't fucking eat the cows it's like whatever you do that's my advice for you don't eat cows. He's like, got it. Don't eat Heliosis cows. So he escapes the underworld and he sets sail for home. So he's got his one ship. So to get home, he's got to pass all of these other

challenges. So he's got to pass the island of the sirens. And basically, the island of the sirens, they were, I want to say that always shows him in three. So they were three kind of like human-looking sea creatures. I don't, I can't remember if they had bottoms that were fished, if they were like kind of mermaids too. Mm-hmm. But they would sing, and if you could hear them singing at all, basically it would draw you into them.

There was no resisting it. Your ship would crash and break apart on the rocks. You would die. I don't know if they ate you or did something, but it was their job to bring you in and crash your ships. It's pleasure into washing you crash your boat. Yes, it's a standard Greek, you know, villain or whatnot. So basically to get through that,

what Odysseus wants to do is he's like, hey, you guys all put wax in your ears so you can't hear him. I'm going to strap my ass to the mast of the ship so I can hear them but I can't go anywhere. So that's another one of his... He just wax his own ears. He wanted to, no, he wanted to be the man

that had heard the sirens, but lived. Because no one had ever heard the siren song because everyone got pulled in and died. So he wanted to be this guy. So they end up making it past and then it cuts to like a, like a scene of like actors and everything like that. and they're all slapping Odysseus on the back.

Like, hey, good job. Like, you did it. Like, you had a choice because you weren't strapped to it. Congratulations. Yeah. So. It's like Jack Black in, uh, Republic Thunder.

Yeah. He was just strapped there and he's telling him that he's going to. Well, and after all, like, a couple of these things, they always, like, go back to see what Homer's, like, um, inspiration within the real world would have been for this. So in the area where they believe, like, it's always been described that the sirens resided.

this area is actually it has this weird island off of the coast pretty close and the island is kind of shaped like a crescent moon and it's kind of like tall and skinny and apparently it's like almost like a natural like amplifier for acoustics

like if you make moons within this it launches it farther off the coast and you can hear it long so the sirens had a little backup acoustically but it wasn't but what they were saying is what was the sound it wasn't you know sea creatures or anything like that Oh, like in real life?

Yeah, they found that there were these seals that used to live there. And the seals barking and making noises and everything like that was probably the noise that sailors would hear out because they couldn't understand it and it sounded like jiverish and just noises, but they could hear it far out to sea. Okay. So they think that's what probably might have been the... Kind of cool.

Kind of the story behind the myth. Hopefully now one of those horny guys didn't get to one of those seals. No kidding, right. So, and then again, it shoots over back to Ithaca. So every night, Penelope, what she's doing is she makes a deal with all these horny suitor dudes. And she's like, fine. She's like, I'll pick one of you after I'm done creating a burial shroud to Odysseus' his father. So I'm not sure how that, like, they made it a point to say that.

So I'm guessing that's not incorrect, but I'm like, why would you make it for the father and not your suspected dead husband? So anyway, so all day she died in the waiting or something. I don't know. Oh, yeah, maybe. So, as she is working on it during the day and all the suitors can see her, at night, she just undoes whatever she does during the day. And she carries on like this for years. And at no point is one of these dudes like, hey, like, you've been in this spot for a long time. What's going on?

They're just like, okay, whenever you get done with it, I guess. I imagine if she was Odysseus' old lady, though, she was probably... Yeah, but come on. is not clever. None of these people were. She could be like I'm making a... Well, I understand. These guys got turned into pigs.

That's true. So the next on, after he ends up going through the sirens, the next stop or the next obstacle in his way is Silla and Carybdis. So the Silla, there's this straight and I want to say it's between

like Greece and another island. It's a really small straight where two Csia, in the Mediterranean meat. And so Silla in Greek mythology is basically like a water hydra. So isn't, I'm trying, no, not a hydra. Yeah, that's the one where you cut off its head and it grows the, two more.

Okay, so it's a water hydra. I don't think, I don't know about cutting off heads and growing more, but it's got like three heads. Okay. And it's on one side of like the straight. So one side of the coast. And it kind of juts out. And then on the other side is the crib. and the cryptis is a whirlpool.

It's a bad straight to go through. So the decision is basically like, okay, well, how many people can one kill and how many people can the other one kill? Well, if you go into a fucking whirlpool, it's going to destroy your ship and you're all dead. So, of course, you make the decision to sail next to the monster and it's going to snatch. I think they said it's like, it can snatch six because it's got three hands and three mouths. So it'll snatch it like most six. So the people in this documentary were like, and so Odysseus, through his wisdom,

is able to analyze the situation and determine, hey, I could lose six of my guys, or I could lose all my guys. And I'm watching this, I'm like, I'm like, yeah, I'm like, I'm like, anyone I feel can make, that's not a sign of intelligence. That's being like, hold out your hands, okay? Turn over your hand completely.

Or turn over your hand a little bit. How many freaking jelly beans do you have left in your hands? I don't got no jelly beans in this one. don't eat that one so he does have him sail next to the silla and it grabs six of his men and kills him I'm sure he feels bad about it

being that he's led every other ship and man into death by horrible horrible means well he had to have had that ship stacked right that one last one yeah I mean I'm sure there were survivors

after the cannibal attack well you know the cannibal attack then you have the pigs that got brought back but that was only a party of like 12. Yeah, but at the same time, like how many of them wolves and lions aren't eating those pigs? Yeah, oh, that's right.

The castle was surrounded by wolves and lions. Come on, man. These guys are, you know, life expectancy, especially when you're selling around the freaking sea probably isn't great. You're losing guys left and right to stuff. It's a story.

That's the thing is, that's what caught me to on this. Watching the history channel, they get people, I think, and I think this is hilarious, I think we talked about this before. You get people that, their topic is either so obscure or it's nuanced or like people just don't have a huge,

huge interest in it. Yeah. So you get professors that are subject matter on that and you get them into an interview and they're very like not polished and they're funny to watch. Yeah. They get like really animated but you can tell that they have no skill whatsoever in like talking about something. So you'll get these people during this Odyssey documentary that are talking.

about it like it's real about everything. Just antisocial, don't know how to get the information across. And they think stuff is funny or interesting. We'll make little clips like, and then he had to choose between Silla and Cribb to something. Like, that's supposed to mean something. Oh, and also, the reason

that he had to choose the whirlpool or the sea dragon with three heads, there was another way he could go, but it was this ocean of floating rocks. that would have of course floating rocks and ships don't work so it would have just pulverized his ship and sunk them if they're floating don't they move out of his way

no no no they would move it's like the iceberg thing so big that it would just destroy the ship without even mentioning like mountains not boulders yep so Zeus oh hold on so his men are like okay we just got done

having our buddy snashed by sea dragon can we take a break we need to land somewhere so he's like yeah cool So of course Oh, the autumn wind. I forgot to mute my phone, my bad. Okay. Is that what losing sounds like?

Do you really want to do this on here? No, no, I don't. Not now. Adam's a Packers fan just to provide context for that comment. So, of course, they land on Helios' Island. It's the first one they'd come to. The one rule that they had was don't eat the cows

on this island. And it sounds like almost instantly the men kill several of these cows to eat them. So the only person to not eat any of the beef of course is Odysseus. So Zeus doesn't

like take punishment on them right away. He waits till they get out to sea a little bit. Yeah, of course. Then destroys the ships and literally kills everybody except for Odysseus. And the ship? Oh yeah, ship's toast. So He ends up washing up.

Odysseus probably clings to some, you know, driftwood. He ends up washing up on yet the island of another sex god. So this is- You're going to land on an island. So this is- Yes. So this is Calypso's island. So she is, and this ties back into what I was telling earlier,

she is a, what they consider a nymph. So the way they describe nymphs, again, these professors are describing it. So they're probably just doing a very academic. academically, but they're... Max they've seen is two boobs in their life. Yes, but the way they're describing it is it makes it sound like the nymph has like the looks of like a young girl. I don't think like they're talking like preteen, but I think they're like right there

on the cusp of like, because think of like how girls when ages were viewed back in Greek culture. Like 16 and 15 and when you had your period, you were like, oh, time to marry you often have kids. You're a woman now. Yeah, exactly. So I'm guessing they probably meant maybe like 16, 17, 18. so yeah so it was she was a nymph

so she was addicted to sex and you know Odysseus being the man that he is stays there for seven years man of man of honor seven years where else is he gonna go I guess he's got to go home still but

it's not like anybody's waiting for him back on the ship no but still like he's trying to this whole thing has been about him getting home is the whole thing was about him getting home. Do you think he was like, okay, and when he got to the Nymphs Island, Calypso's Island,

do you think he was like, okay, I've been punished pretty hard and I only had sex with that, uh, other chick for Searcy for a year. He's like, they washed me up on another sex god's island.

Do you think I should have sex? I need to have sex with this one for longer, but how long? I've been through eight years of tragedy and I only got one year of pleasure. I'm going to need to even that a little bit. It's probably what it was. It probably got to year seven. He's like, I feel confident. I got a 50-50 of this being long enough that I can probably sell home at this point. So,

you know what? After seven years, he does the, he does the gentlemanly thing and he says, listen, I got to get home. So he builds himself a raft. Yes, he could have built himself a raft at any point. And they made sure to, you know, let you know that this wasn't just any common raft. No, this was, he was a carpenter as well. So this was a raft with, you know, a keel and like a rudder and like a mast and everything. All the bells and whistles. Yes, of course. And he just sails that bitch right home.

That's it? Well, no. So he sails at home. But he was that close? No, no. I'm not even kidding you. He was back by like in between the Wind God's Island and like the Cyclops Island. He was back that far.

He just somehow at this point like the rest of the gods were like, Oh, you know, maybe he's had enough or they let him go. I got an alternate theory for you here. Okay. That the story is horseshit. Well, that, but I think the blame was placed on Odysseus a tad early. Because from what I've heard, every time he had men with him, they either got drunk on the beach and stayed there. Or maybe they ran into the Cyclops' tomb and were eating all of his food.

Or maybe he knew that they were going to be dumb enough to fall for the sirens. I mean, they did open up the bag of wind after he fell asleep. He was being held down by all these other stupid guys. I understand that, but what do you leave in the bag of wind accessible for? Well, he fell asleep. He was up for eight days. Nine days. Why are you not sleeping for one of the first, like, after four days,

and you've been on course for four days and nothing's going wrong? Take a nap. Because he didn't trust those idiots. Then he should have stayed awake the last mile. I don't know what to tell you. I feel like he wasn't... Champions adjust. He wasn't the dumb one.

It was everybody else. Because when everybody else was gone, he made it home with no problems, right? Well, he did end up getting home, but at the point when he gets home, again, he's been gone for like 20 years at this point. Seven of the last 20 have been spent just plowing into some Greek mythological character. Okay.

So he gets home... He's not blameless. No. So he ends up getting back. to Ithaca and he kind of like disguises himself because he wants to find out if Penelope is still loyal

to him. Oh. So he's got to test her in this scenario to make sure. Well he wants to make sure she's faithful for all those years. So what he actually does is like at Athena's prompting,

Penelope gets the suitor. She's like, I'm finally ready to make a decision. She's like, how we're going to decide this is going to be an archery competition using my dead husband's bow and arrow. And so I guess this thing was like set up in a way that only Odysseus despite them always describing

him as not being like the strongest, he's like the only one that could string the bow and shoot it. Well it was his bow. We knew how it worked. Yeah. And they were supposed to shoot it through a dozen axe heads. So I'm guessing an axe head had like a space in it. Like have you seen

like when you see medieval axes sometimes they'll have like the middle portion of the axe. like cut out bearded eggs is that what it's called okay so yeah you'd have to shoot it through like a dozen of those and he ends up being one of the suitors he does it and then she's like oh my god he's back and then he actually uses like the bone arrow to kill another one of the suitors and then he literally I think along with his son maybe they just slaughter like a hundred dudes well I think I read part of it like the son was very angry that the suitors were still there

trying to replace his dad yeah he had hard feelings towards him well you think yeah no I get that I understand that but that's where all these dudes are here to plow my mom and now like like you're all literally here with him

in the sole goal of just plowing my mom he probably didn't have a great relationship like I just like I just lost my dad and now you're trying to lay this shit on me so Penelope doesn't even even know as this is going on. Odysseus' son knows that it's him because

I think they met up beforehand. When he got back, he was able to talk to his son. But he finally throws off his robe and he's like, ha ha, it's me. And she's kind of hesitant, but then recognizes him. And then he mentions that he made their

bed from like an olive tree, something that only he would know. And she's like, oh my God, you're back. She's like, why do you smell like scenic? Yeah, like strange. Yeah, like strange nymph pussy and he's like, I'm back. Isn't that all that's important?

He's like, you'll never believe what happened. My men were getting turned into rabbits. And on this island and I had to say, where are your men at? They didn't make it. You know what I think? Okay, even if you, let's imagine that The Odyssey for a second is real.

What I think happened is Odysseus just like hoard his way back home and got into a whole bunch of crazy shit and lost all of his men and money and ships and then when he showed up at home they're like what happened

he's like think and he just went into this story this is gonna sound crazy stay with me on it start making of names that people probably had never heard before no no trust me I live this You didn't.

He's like seven, she kept me prisoner for seven years. How tough that was on me. I still have PTSD. This was 24 bucks. Yeah, they're long. And obviously not being the best reader out there. I am a little bit bummed that we had all these other books that he had done are poetic. manuscripts that he had that we didn't get everything out of

because arguably the Iliad and the Odyssey were both two pretty great stories looking at him from the time when like can you imagine being like a just like a common person during this time never you know seeing the world was not an option for 99% of people in the scenario unless you were a slave or royalty or something or rich so imagine being someone that, you know,

you can read which in itself is a skill that not a lot of people have. It's not a necessary skill for survival. That's so weird to think about. Farming is a necessary skill, like that kind of stuff, survival, but not reading, which is strange. But you, like, imagine

you can read, or you have someone that is able to read to you, and they're reading you this book, and it just opens up, like, this whole world about, you know, heroes and monsters and gods and everything. all you know is you've never heard anything like this before. So how can it not be true?

Well, not even just reading it for the people that couldn't read, seeing something like this in a play. Yeah. And seeing it play out in front of you and scene sets and different things and learning about all these different things like sirens that you kind of knew existed because you'd heard about it before, but to actually like see a representation or to see it being read to you or reading it,

that would have to make you believe, like, oh, these things are real. This is one of an underrated movie that I think you and I have talked about a lot before, but this feels like a lot of the time of like the invention of lying. Yeah. Like these guys, I don't know if you would say that Homer would be. And then the nude Amazonian princess and the Space King married and all were happy. Yeah. I don't know.

Obviously in the Odyssey Odysseus is a dude from the office. Steve Carroll. Yeah, Steve Krill. The British office. Oh, Ricky Jervas. Yeah, Jervais. It's in the eventual line.

In The Odyssey, it's obviously Ricky Jervase being like, yeah, no, I did this. And everybody was like, oh, okay, we believe that. It sounds like someone he was telling the story, and someone just kept asking he would name something, and they're like, well, what is that? He's like, and then he had to make up what it was like. And then there was a Cyclops.

And they're like, what's the Cyclops? He's like, I don't know. It has one eye, a big giant eye, right? And they're like, oh, my God, that's horrible. He's like, yeah, it is, isn't it? He almost ate us. Yeah. He ate six of my guys.

Mm-hmm. The other thing that's cool about this, too, is like, this is so old. Yet somehow, like, this was selected. And I'm not saying that, you know, it gets selected for all schools and everything. But people are still. This is still relevant. Like, it's still there. There's a lot of dead texts that we see now

and a lot of books that kind of fall into the ether where their value to society people feel like really isn't something that is necessary anymore. But the Iliad and the Odyssey back in their time were things that people would point to as far as, like, moral conundrums and different things where you can point to it almost like scripture and say, this is,

what Achilles did in this situation. This is what Hector would do. This is the humility that they showed and I'm sure the bravery of the Odyssey, different things that they would point to to like make salient arguments. The other thing too is it's very like I'm sure so many like texts and books and documents and just everything. It's like you know we always talk about you know history's written by the victors. So you lose all of this like knowledge and all of this, you know, these books and stories, this one itself is low stakes because it is so fictional. It might not have seen fictional back then, but, you know, as things were able to disprove

all of this stuff, it happened, there was never anything in this book, aside from, you know, the Greek gods. There was nothing anything controversial in here because it was so fictional. If someone was going to come out and be like, I have a problem with your, um, portrayal of Cyclops. I'm with the Cyclops Alliance, and we do not act like that. Like, this is never going to happen.

Like, this in the Eliad, it's, yeah, it's low stakes literature. And I think that's also why it survived. Because anytime this, you know, someone had books on the chopping block or stories on the chopping block and the Odyssey came up there like, what's that about again?

Like, you know, it's the guy that, like, is trying to get back home and he runs into all the monsters. And they're like, oh, yeah, just keep that shit. Yeah, it provides more of an entertainment thing. People don't look to this. You can still pick it apart. Literists and people that are really into books, I'm sure can go through and pick apart, like, different feelings that happened during it and all that kind of thing. That's what through me, that's what was like so maddening to me about watching this documentary, though, is like, you know, what maybe,

maybe mad, maybe misunderstanding is the right term analogy for it, but you would get these people talking about the Odyssey, like it actually happened. Like they were trying to provide you talking to you in a way that it's like this really happened. This went through Odysseus's head. Exactly. This was his frame of thought. And there's so much like, I understand like this is 24 books. So there's a lot of information about Odysseus.

But there are people whose main study is Odysseus, a fictional character, not the historical. Their job is to go instead of the Odyssey and tell you what, Odysseus, the character. That's like if somebody, I'm trying to think of something that has a lot of like, backstory to it. Let's just say it's like somebody telling you the story of like Luke Skywalker and then Luke Skywalker felt this way. And Luke Skywalker was sad.

But Luke Skywalker knew that he had to persevere and get to the Death Star or something like that. Like a fictional historian. Yeah. I wonder if that's what their title would be. There's nothing there's nothing to draw from.

There's no other experiences. When you see this outside of the Homeric works and outside of some of the other Greek authors that wrote about some of the people that we've talked about, it's all just based on the character's values that the writer assess to them. There's no individuality to it.

Like there's no, what's the word I'm looking for? Like agency. These people didn't have agency. They were only given, like, what choices were made by the author. So. Well, yeah. How many of these people that are in,

this even knew that they were being, they didn't know they were being written about because it was written so far after. He's just, he's just picking and choosing. Like, he could add a list of names and been like, hmm, Odysseus sounds good. The Odyssey. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That sounds good.

Maybe, you know, Achilles was dead in the last book so he couldn't follow Achilles. You know, Odysseus. I don't know if Ajax was still alive, but the Ajaxias doesn't sound, actually that does sound, Doesn't sound bad, but yeah, maybe he just picked the character and was like, I'll just go with this. You just brought up Odysseus and Odyssey, and I just made the connection. Did you really? Yeah. Yeah, that took a while.

Huh. I would like to end on that. Yeah, it's good as places any of the end. All right. Guys, hopefully you stuck with us. I know this was a little bit longer one, but there was a lot to cover with Homer and his two well-known works. but thanks for sticking it out and join us next time. Peace.

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