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

Starting point is 00:00:00 Why is The Odyssey such an important story? Well, it's a story that has affected a lot of people. I think because it has all of these really universal themes and problems that it relates to. I mean, any good literature does that, but maybe The Odyssey in particular. Chris Nolan talks about it as this sort of archetypal story that is somehow in all of the movies that he's done. You know, there's the theme of returning to your home. sacrificing on behalf of the community. One of the things that I think is really timely about The Odyssey,

Starting point is 00:00:37 and I don't really know how much the movie's going to get into this, but it's kind of a story about the collapse of the patriarchy and how it gets restored, what it takes to restore that, which maybe is timely for our day. Who wrote it? So Homer is the short answer. Who's Homer? Homer is the author, according to the Greeks, of the Iliad and the Odyssey, these two poems that, you know, modern scholars will kind of quibble about, was it one guy,

Starting point is 00:01:16 was it two guys? Was it a whole kind of crowd of men working or people working in this tradition? And we can get into that. bit, but essentially Homer is the attributed author who is this semi, semi, a very blessed epic bard. He's an epic poet, and this is a really special type for the Greeks. The epic poet is, there are other poets that sing other kinds of songs, and poetry and song are very aligned in the Greek mind, and there's a lot of interesting reasons for that. but he's traditionally conceived of as this blind bard who lived maybe in the 8th century BC.

Starting point is 00:02:02 And the fascinating thing for me about the Iliad and the Odyssey, which kind of are in dialogue with each other on some level, is, okay, the Greeks discover writing in the 8th century BC. They sort of steal it from the Phoenicians and modify it a little bit, make some improving tweaks. So the first time that they can really write down their language is the 700s BC. And, you know, out of the blue emerges two of the greatest works of literature ever written. Many people think the greatest. And it's all kind of maybe not decline from that, but everybody's always... The first album was really difficult to follow up. It's almost like, you know, what if today we were still talking about the first movie ever made?

Starting point is 00:02:56 Nobody's ever going to top, you know, Metropolis or Nosferatu, you know. And there's probably still people today that think that. But, you know, most would say that we've developed a little bit as, you know, as a, the movie culture has gotten somewhat better. But, you know, for the case of Homer, it's kind of amazing that these things kind of emerge, you know, straight from the mind of Zeus almost, fully formed with all these incredibly rich layers and they're so resonant and they have this depth to them, all these like symbolic aspects of them. And how do that happen? I think is a really interesting question. Is there any indication that this story existed before him? Is it his story?

Starting point is 00:03:41 So the backstory of this is, if you look at Homer and look at his language and look at the themes in it, all right, it's, it's, it's in Greek, but Greek is an Indo-European language. All of the Indo-European languages derive from the Indo-Europeans, this step people from the Middle Central Asia that went spread out and conquered all these regions. And, you know, other Indo-European languages include Latin and, Celtic and Germanic, also Indian or Sanskrit basically. The Indic peoples also are, they have this Indo-European kind of

Starting point is 00:04:25 cultural inheritance, especially in northern India. And it's the people that used to be called the Aryans. And now, you know, Twitter and Ones will call them Aryans. But, you know, so if you look at Homer's

Starting point is 00:04:40 language and themes, you can find very striking recognizable patterns in the Vedic epic tradition of the Mahabharata. And there's a kind of common ancestor, a common poetic tradition. So the argument goes. And I think it's really right that goes back thousands of years. So Homer's stories are uniquely Greek on some level, but they're also kind of developments that have been around for thousands and thousands of years of oral culture that kind of hits writing right around the age.

Starting point is 00:05:13 8th century and it's a kind of distillation of, you know, thousands of years of stories. And, you know, the stories of the Trojan War and the Greek heroes probably go back at least hundreds of years before Homer. Is there anything else to know about how? Was he blind? Was he who people think he is? Well, ancient poets, we don't know a lot about their lives, typically, the really ancient Greek ones.

Starting point is 00:05:36 And so people often, like later Greeks would look at clues to try to figure out who these guys were. And there's actually one of the reasons people think Homer is considered a blind poet is because there's actually a blind epic bard in the Odyssey that his name's Demodicus. He appears in book 8 and he seems to be a kind of Homer figure in the Odyssey itself. In the same way as painters in the Renaissance would paint themselves into that works. Yeah, very much that sort of thing. And you know, the idea is the gods have robbed him of his sight, but they've given him this. deeper vision and the mysteries of the universe and human suffering and so forth. All right. Tell me about the story. What happens?

Starting point is 00:06:21 So if, I mean, I want to get into the narrative and the details, but, you know, the story's pretty simple. There's a backstory. You might, you might have heard the Trojan War. That happens before the poem begins in the poem's chronology. But, you know, 10 years of war at Troy, the, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, you The cause of war was Helen of Troy or Helen of Sparta was seduced by this playboy Trojan prince, Paris, and he spirited her way to Troy, stole her away from the Greeks, Minolaeus of Sparta. And the Greeks assembled this massive army to go and take her back, essentially, and get some plunder along the way.

Starting point is 00:07:07 They, after 10 years, they finally end up sacking and destroying the city. And the man responsible for the victory, ultimately, in the Greek eyes, and certainly in the eyes of the Odyssey, is Odysseus himself because he came up with the idea of the Trojan horse. And that was, that was his idea. What, yeah, was this? So, you know, maybe it happened, maybe it didn't. I like to ascribe to the school of higher naivete. If we can't disprove it, like, let's just say, maybe something like that happened. And there's a lot of debates about this, but it would have been 1,200 BC, roughly.

Starting point is 00:07:47 So it's a combination of maybe some real world stuff with lots of mythology, trying to sort of root something in reality, but then also build it out into a bigger imagination. Yeah, I think it's better to think of Homer as historical fiction rather than just like pure fiction. That's certainly how the Greeks would have thought about it. Like, they believe that the Trojan War happened for the most part. And none of them are going to say, you know, it happened exactly like Homer told the story. But they thought it happened. And Homer's in the 8th century imagining this conflict 400 years earlier. Okay.

Starting point is 00:08:19 So it's a sequel in kind. It's a story sequel to this epic myth that may have happened, may not have happened quite the way that we think. it does. So this is set in about 1,200 BC. Right. Yeah. And and it, the, the Odyssey is kind of a sequel to the Iliad, which is a longer, somewhat longer poem. And, you know, this is a story about what happens at Troy itself. And Achilles is the big hero there. And famously, Achilles dies, you know, Paris shoots him in the heel and his Achilles heel, the only vulnerable spot on him before the city actually gets taken. And so, you know, but Achilles doesn't die in the Iliad, but his death is kind of hinted at. And then the Odyssey kind of picks up a little bit after the Ili... Well, 10 years, I guess,

Starting point is 00:09:10 after the Iliad would have ended. And makes the case that Odysseus was actually... There's this kind of dialogue between the Iliad and the Odyssey of who is the best of the Greeks, or the best of the Achaeans, as Homer calls them. The Achaeans are... Because in the first book, it was Achilles and in the second book. Right. It's Odysseus. Yeah. Obviously it's Achilles because whenever Achilles is there, the Greeks win, win, win, win, win, win. And whenever Achilles, you know, is absent from the battle, the Trojans win, win, win, win, win, but, you know, at the end of the day, who was it that was responsible for the victory? Did Homer write these in sequence? Do you write the Iliad first? Well, this is what the ancient critics thought. This is the kind of traditional narrative. Homer is one guy. And he wrote the Iliad as a young man, the kind of vigor of maybe he's 35.

Starting point is 00:09:57 and, you know, hanging around guys like you see in the Iliad, warriors. I mean, you're seeing spears go in and out of faces and just incredibly gruesome stuff that you see in the Iliad. A little bit in the Odyssey, but that he's one of those kind of warrior class people or hanging around those kind of guys, knows people like Achilles and Diomedes. And then in his older age, he pens the Odyssey. And it's a slower story. It's more kind of, you know, there's a little more digressions. There's more kind of slices of daily life or peacetime. And so he's kind of writing this in the twilight of his years. And I kind of like that because, you know, the Iliad is just so visceral and, you know, stark and immediate and violent and glamorous. It kind of glamorizes war, not uncritically. But then the Odyssey is, is kind of, if it's a poem by an old man,

Starting point is 00:11:00 it's also written for a wider audience. I think this has a lot to do with its appeal today to, and kind of in modernity. It just incorporates a higher range of human experience. And maybe it's for the young, especially, like Telemachus, who's this young guy that kicks off the poem. I mean, that might be the real target audience of the Odyssey. It's like a broader range of people.

Starting point is 00:11:25 And there's also women much more, you know, explored in depth in the Odyssey. So I don't have that interested the question. That's the background. That's how we arrive at the beginning of it. Yeah, yeah. So all the Trojan Wars ended, Odysseus had some trouble getting home. It's actually 20 years after the Trojan War started when the Odyssey timeline begins. And we learn in the first, you know, 100 lines or so of the Odyssey that,

Starting point is 00:11:55 Odysseus, you know, kind of got off course trying to get back from Troy. Several of the Greeks had this experience. And on his way home, he met these monsters and strange people, and he pissed off the god Poseidon. And for a variety of reasons, many of which are his own faults, many of which maybe not only his fault, he is stuck on this island with this divine nymph. a calypso and she's she's she's uh she's she kind of got him as a prisoner and she wants to make him her husband and so he's stuck there away from home and and then everybody at home back in his homeland

Starting point is 00:12:40 which is an island called ithaca is wondering where he is you know uh did he die he didn't die at troy the stories about the trojan war like circulating in in the kind of world of the poem people know something of what happened, but there's no, there's no news of Odysseus. What happened? Did he, did he get lost at sea? Did he just abandon his family? Is he going to go off and, you know, do more pirate adventures among the Ethiopians? What's going on with Odysseus? Nobody knows. And the poem kind of starts with this background in place, misadventures, meeting monsters, stuck on Calypso's Island. And that's all kind of before the story actually begins. And the story begins when the gods had this meeting.

Starting point is 00:13:30 And Poseidon happens to be distracted. He's pissed off at Odysseus and doesn't want him to get home. But Poseidon's off like partying with the Ethiopians. As you do. As one does, as the gods often do. I mean, they're a good hang. The Ethiopians. The Ethiopians, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:48 Good hang. Okay. That's news to me. Read Herodotus. There's many details. You know, were they northern, were they southern? Who knows? But they were fun. And they're far. So Poseidon's distracted. And then Athena says, all right, we're going to do something about Odysseus now. Athena is kind of Odysseus's divine champion.

Starting point is 00:14:08 She's his favorite goddess. He's her favorite hero. And she goes to Zeus, the king of the gods and sort of Lord of the Cosmos. And she says, Odysseus was a pious man. He was a good king. He was a good dad. It's just not fair that he just brought away on this island with this nymph. And his son is just, you know, growing up without a father. We got to do something about this.

Starting point is 00:14:32 And Zeus says, all right, we'll do something about this. Poseidon will just have to deal with it. And that's how the action kind of kicks off in the Odyssey. And long story short, you know, Odysseus gets released from the island by the God's will, Talimachus, his son is sent on this kind of vision quest, right of passage initiation journey, and Athena helps him out with that. Odysseus tells a story at the center of the book. And if you want to just skip all of the not a plus interesting parts of the Odyssey and just

Starting point is 00:15:07 get to the famous monsters and adventures, you can go to book 9 through 12, where Odysseus basically tells all of the backstory in his own voice. to an audience of people that he's met. So how much of the story is what happens when he gets back and how much is the retelling of what happened before? So the first eight books are him and Telemachus. There's 24 books. So the first book, four books are Telemachus.

Starting point is 00:15:37 Then there's four books about Odysseus getting from Calypso's Island to this intermediary destination. Skaria, it's called the The Featians or the people that help him get home. He tells them his story. And then from 13 to 24 is like him and Telemachus back on Ithaca and how they solve the big problem that is arisen at home, which we haven't treated yet, which is that his house is infested with suitors trying to woo his wife away, trying to steal his wife away. 50% of the book is Love Island. 50% right. The original Love Island.

Starting point is 00:16:17 Yeah. The Lodiceitas were Love Island. Sirens, yeah. Yeah. Okay. The feations, yeah. There's a lot of, there's a lot of kind of sexual tension. Okay, okay. Especially, you know, Odysseus with the fiation, which we should get to. Okay, so what's the right of passage thing? Yeah, so it's good to start with Telemachus probably. So when you, when you start the Odyssey, it's kind of like, wow, I thought this was about Odysseus and page after page. You don't meet the guy, really, until this five. fucking idiot son in this story someone. He's a weak little, but that's kind of the point, you know. Telemachus is stuck there at home. How old is he?

Starting point is 00:16:53 He's 20. So Odysseus left him as an infant, essentially, and he's never met his dad, only heard about him. And he's kind of grown up in this, in his world of women, you know, his mom and the maid servants who are very loyal. And, you know, there's loyal servants of Odysseus here and there. but telomachus's grandfather is kind of, uh, I'm too old to do anything and he's kind of, kind of shattered by Odysseus's absence.

Starting point is 00:17:21 Um, so it's, I think it starts with telemachus because Homer really wants to get you to feel viscerally what it's like when the father figure is absent. Like how bad things get when the leader is gone. And that kind of motivates the rest of the story. So, so telemachus is, um, You know, 20, he's getting bossed around. There's 108 suitors at his house from all over Western Greece, princes and big shots. Why is Odysseus' wife so desirable?

Starting point is 00:17:56 That's a good question. So Penelope is her name famously. She's, right. I mean, late 30s at the youngest, maybe early 40s. I mean, why is she the most desirable catch in, like, all of Greece? I think it's, I mean, obviously, like, women can be very attractive and alluring at that age, but, you know, for 108 eligible young, rich bachelors to come and try to love Islander. Yeah, it's closer to Bonnie Blue than Love Island, but, yeah.

Starting point is 00:18:31 That's the counter example, you know, you're always supposed to, you know, how could this go wrong? Yeah, yeah. He has a lot of options, right? So he, she's, I think she's desirable. She's very smart and well-bred, blah, blah, blah. But the real reason I think she's desirable is, you know, it's like memetic desire. It's kind of the Gerard.

Starting point is 00:18:54 Fucking knew you were going to say. You know, yeah. I went there. I want the wife of the guy that's a hero, because if I can take her, that means I'm a hero too. 100%. You might not believe me, but this is what people. sleep optimization looks like. I'm not talking about the nightgown. It's just for sex appeal.

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Starting point is 00:20:19 I mean, that's kind of the story that there's all these, like Homer lays out all these other versions of women making different choices to sort of highlight what Penelope could do if she goes off track. And why it's not unheard of. No, no. And, you know, there's a story that he, well, we'll get to it in a moment that all the kind of, you know, gruesome counter examples. So it is this memetic thing. I think that's one of the reasons why she's just not impressed by any of these young lads because she knows what they're trying to do, right?

Starting point is 00:20:53 They're trying to usurp the status of the greatest hero alive, maybe ever by just, you know, picking off his wife. and then I'll have Odysseus's wife and, you know, they're Timu Odysseus. Timu Adesius. Timu, yeah, like the Chinese knockoff of Odysseus. Right. And they're like, hey, she goes, I've got the, I don't need your like Huawei phone. I've got an iPhone. Yeah, and she's like, oh, they're like, oh, sweetie, iPhones are dead.

Starting point is 00:21:23 And, you know, they're never coming back. You got to, you know, Huawei. No, it's just back order. It's back ordeal. I believe, I believe. Yeah. So, so, I think that's why she doesn't want it to have anything to do with any of any of them. But she's kind of wondering, like, is he actually ever coming back?

Starting point is 00:21:39 So there's a kind of dramatic tension there. What's that like for the sun to be around this situation? Well, you know, the suitors have been there for like four years. You haven't been there the whole time. But, you know, he was 16 maybe when they came. And he's, he's far outnumbered. he doesn't feel like he's in control of his own house. And in fact, it's kind of anarchy.

Starting point is 00:22:06 Like, anarchy, you know, when the patriarcharkey is removed, you know, Penelope doesn't just like suddenly step in and become the man of the house. It doesn't work like that, in Greece at least. It's kind of the rule of the most assertive at the time, which is these suitors. And there's a kind of jockeying for status among them. But certainly Telemachus is the bottom of the food chain, as far as they're concerned. Because they outnumber him and they're older. and so he doesn't feel like he can reassert himself.

Starting point is 00:22:34 And this is exactly where Athena comes in to try to twist the situation. So she comes down herself, Zeus sends Hermes to go and sort out Odysseus with Calypso. But Athena comes herself in disguise as a man, minty, she takes on this alter ego and shows up at Telemachus' house. at Odysseus's house one day. And, you know, she doesn't get greeted at the gates, which is very bad hospitality. So the suitors are abusing the hospitality of the house. And they're actually not doing this whole courtship thing

Starting point is 00:23:15 the way you're supposed to. Like, the right thing to do from the Greek perspective would have been to go and talk to Penelope's dad and say, all right, well, she's eligible now. Like, which one of us do you approve of? But instead, they're just, eating away at the cows and enjoying the fruits of the estate of Odysseus' house. They're eating him out of a house at home, eating Telemachus out of house and home.

Starting point is 00:23:41 They're being bad guests, and they're not being good hosts. They're not acting like they own the place on all these levels. So when Athena gets there, she's just sort of like left hanging, even though she looks really respectable. And this is just seen as incredibly bad faux pa. Telemachus greets her and he's visibly annoyed that these people haven't greeted her. And he extends her hospitality. He welcomes her in. And she, you know, long story short, she says, you know, he explains a situation.

Starting point is 00:24:15 She's like, you know, my boy, have you heard of the story of what Arrestes did? And Telemachus says, no, tell me. Well, Arrestes was the son of Agamemnon. Agamemnon was the king of the Greeks, the leader of the Greeks at Troy, the biggest of the kings. He organized the expedition to capture Helen. And they won. And when he came back, like practically upon arrival, he gets murdered by his own wife, who was seduced by his cousin, who wanted to steal the throne from Agamemnon. And so Agamemnon's murdered by his cousin and his own, his own lovely wife, Clytemnestra.

Starting point is 00:25:01 And then they rule Argos in his absence for a few years. And then Arrestes, his son, sneaks back in and murders them both. Murders his own mother and his uncle and takes back Argos for the bloodline of Agamemnon. And Athena says, you might have to do just such a thing with these suitors. So she's trying to stir him up by this example of, you know. Is she trying to create a rift between him and his mother? I don't think, I don't think that's what's going on. You could have read it in that way using that example, right?

Starting point is 00:25:35 Yeah, but it does kind of point to the issue of, hey, you know, your mom has her own mind and she could go astray. Like, you have to be the man in the situation no matter what. And you have to be dangerous. You have to become a man of violence potentially. You have to be able to scare these guys. Okay, so Athena's come in to cockblock 108 suitors. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, get Telemachus to man up finally and, you know, go on his quest. And basically she's, she says, here's what you got to do.

Starting point is 00:26:06 Confront the suitors, call out their injustice, and then get out of town and go and meet some of your dad's friends. Meet some of Odysseus's old buddies on the mainland. And this is what he does, in short. And so he goes and he meets Nestor, this old guy, one of the wisest of the Greeks, very old, very talkative old man. It's kind of funny. And Nestor at Pylos tells Telemachus some news. He hasn't heard about Odysseus other than he got blown by the storm off into oblivion. Nobody knows what happened to him. but but nester tells telemachus about um give some more details about agamemnon actually which is

Starting point is 00:26:55 interesting for for the bigger plot so when agamemnon uh left uh to go to troy he left his wife was really good when he left clitam nestra was a wise woman she's well born she was actually the sister of helen who also started off good you know this is kind of the threat you know good women can go wrong if the circumstances are are wrong. What did he do to keep her on the straight and narrow? He left a bard there to look after her. So Agamon kind of left a homer there

Starting point is 00:27:34 with his wife, Clytemnestra, to tell her improving stories and tell her stories of what goes wrong when women behave badly or whatever it is. But, you know, the poet is sort of seen as this upholder of the moral order. It's slightly self-serving by Homer there? You know, you might think of it as pro-barred propaganda.

Starting point is 00:27:55 I think that would be fair, but it is not just Homer that thinks this. This is a very deep Greek idea that you could see it in Plato, you could see it in the tragedians. And it's like the poets are kind of, especially in an oral culture, poets are the ones who remember the things that need to be passed down from generation to generation, right? So they kind of, they have a lot of moral credibility if they're good ones. And, you know, there can be bad ones too. But as soon, so basically, Ejustis, Agamemnon's cousin, knew that he couldn't get to Clytemneth. He kept kind of making advances at his cousin's wife. And she just kept swatting him away. And then he realized, ah, the poet is the problem. So he captures the poet and he's,

Starting point is 00:28:44 sends him off to a desert island and then clytemnestra was morally defenseless and that's when just this swooped in and seduced her because the poet was away um so yeah there there i think this really does match how how the greeks would have thought of like why you need epic epic poetry it's like it is actually kind of moral pillar of society um so anyway he you know nestor says that's all i know, but Menelaus is alive. Go talk to Minnaleus. Maybe he knows more. I know another Greek hero from Troy.

Starting point is 00:29:21 Telemachus goes to talk to Minolaeus. And he actually meets Helen of Troy. She's back to being Helen of Sparta at this point. She's come back and... Repatriated? Repatriated, yeah. Return to a rightful owner. So, yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:41 And Helen, it's a really interesting interaction with Helen. And she's still kind of, she's kind of chastened, you know, she's become a matriarch instead of a maiden. But she still kind of got that spooky allure, femme fatal charm. She gives Helimachus, she slips some, some kind of drug into his drink at one point so he can enjoy himself better at this party that they're at.

Starting point is 00:30:08 They're throwing a big feast when he arrives, marrying off their menelaus' two kids. And they start to tell stories. And Helen puts a drug in his drink that would make any man forget about all desire of returning home. And even if his parents were slaughtered before his eyes, he would not care until the next day. It's this kind of like, I think it's symbolic of the power of the female charms over a man. Helen have tried not showering herself in glory across these two books. Fact. Definitely rolling some dice into the fray.

Starting point is 00:30:48 And the interesting thing, too, is she, so I could quibble with Emily Wilson on a translation point here, into the more popular Odyssey translation these days. So Helen says, she's the first person to recognize telemachus. It's common to not like, you welcome in a guess before you ask them who they are. only after you've fed them and, you know, given them some, you know, a nice robe to wear or whatever, then do you ask them who they are? But Helen recognizes Telemachus immediately. And she says, if I'm not mistaken, you are the son of Odysseus, who Odysseus left as a tiny infant.

Starting point is 00:31:32 When the Greeks all came to Troy to take me back the shameless one. And the Greek there actually says, You could be translated as shameless bitch. The Koonopes is the Greek word. It means dog face. It's a very rude thing. She calls herself, you know, a bitch or something. Like, it's, she kind of insults herself. And it's, it's really disarming, I think.

Starting point is 00:32:00 So Emily Wilson translated that line as something like, they came to take me back the one who, the one who, who hounded them or something. So the hound is kind of an illusion to the dog piece. But it kind of softens the fact that Helen is really kind of... Slightly more flattering. Yeah, it's more... But the point is, she seduces you by saying the bad thing that you had in mind about her. How can this woman just, you know, pretend like, we don't all know the terrible thing she did.

Starting point is 00:32:34 And that's the first thing she named and just like, oh. You can get away with anything with enough self-awareness. Yeah, yeah. She kind of insults herself to draw you in. And she does this in the Iliad, too. She's a really tricky woman. But, you know, she's behaving herself. And Menelaus seems happy.

Starting point is 00:32:53 There's a little bit of, there's a little bit of tension between the two of them. It's a really interesting scene, book four. But the point of this whole quest, to sum up the Telemachus piece, is he has to prove himself to the peers of his father when his father's not there. And he does this by making the journey, asking about his dad, and say, I'm just trying to get my house in order and kind of behaving himself well. He acts very tactfully. He's pious. And, you know, they're always in this trip, the houses that he meets are all these well-ordered households that there's this great contrast with the chaos at home. And one of the things that signals that they're well-ordered is there's always there's all these sacrifices to the gods. Like every time before a meal, They pray to the gods. They wash their hands. They have a sacrifice. Never, never do the suitors pray before a meal.

Starting point is 00:33:48 You know, it's a sign. They're godless. They're godless. They're chaotic. They're not doing what they're supposed to be doing. So Homer cares a lot about these things in the, more in the Odyssey than he does about the iliad. These little things that sort of signal, you know, good order in culture and society.

Starting point is 00:34:06 Okay. And is that the end of this rite of passage? Yeah. So that's basically, and Minalaeus invites Telemachus to stay as long as he wants. And Telemachus says, I got to get back. You've been very kind. I could stay here a whole year. It's so nice.

Starting point is 00:34:21 Minnaelius is like one of the richest Greeks. Thanks to drugging me. Yes. I've had a really good time. Let me tell you. But I got to get back to, and Minales offers him these horses. It's like really nice. It's like offering a kid of Ferrari, you know.

Starting point is 00:34:37 And Telemica says, you know, my island is not horse country. It's goat country. There's no place to ride around horses. It's an ugly, scraggly little island. But that's home for me. And I don't know, he knows he has to get back and take on the challenge and, like, suffer to, to become who he is. But that is the kind of end of it. And while he's away, it should be mentioned, the suitors also plan.

Starting point is 00:35:06 and they find out that he snuck off and they plan to ambush him with a ship on his way back and murder him. So he's got a target painted on him. What a bunch of bastards. They are again and again, Homer wants you to know. These guys are bad. All of them are bad.

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Starting point is 00:36:19 What are they supposed to represent philosophically at this stage? I think, so there's the whole anarchy versus patriarchy going on. There's the kind of usurped glory. I think the oddest... Good men, bad men, absence of good men means that, There's a vacuum for bad men to step in. 100%. And I think there's a kind of broader arc of the,

Starting point is 00:36:44 the Odyssey is about the clash between order and entropy and sort of dissolution of complex societies into barbaric or animal, you know, soup. And the suitors kind of represent those forces of violence and turmoil and primordial soup out of which order needs to be established sometimes, sometimes violently. Yeah. And that's justice. That's importantly. To establish that is about justice.

Starting point is 00:37:21 Okay. And then we switch and Odysseus wakes up one day on Calypso's Island, needs to get home. Staring off into the ocean, sitting there, weeping. longing for his homeland. Calypso is, you know, this incredibly hot, divine goddess who, he's washed up a shore on her island, and she offered him hospitality. And basically, they've been sleeping together for the past eight years. Okay.

Starting point is 00:37:52 But Odysseus points out, never did they win the heart within me. So it was kind of under compulsion. Got my penis, but not my heart. Yeah, yeah. It was just sex, baby, you know. And Homer seems to take this as an acceptable explanation. We're going to darken the environment appropriately. It's about to get spooky.

Starting point is 00:38:13 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. So that's, yeah, he wakes up. It's book five. And Hermes arrives as he was sent from Zeus. And Hermes goes to Calypso first. Well, first he gets to the island.

Starting point is 00:38:30 And he's just. just stunned. It's so beautiful. It's just lush fruit trees and pleasant breeze and verdant and perfect, not too hot, not too cold. It's not like Houston humid. It's just like, uh, so people are saying. It's like, Hermes arrives and he goes, I'm so glad I'm not in fucking Houston. Yeah. Well, well, you know, Houston is humid, but there's no, there's no place sweeter than one's homeland. Yeah. So, so, uh, Even the gods are amazed at how, you know, beautiful and how nice of a place this would be to spend eternity, which is precisely what Calypso is promising Odysseus. She says, forget about your wife,

Starting point is 00:39:16 forget about your son, just stay with me forever. I will make you immortal. And not just immortal, you'll be young and beautiful the rest of your years. Sometimes goddesses forget to promise the whole youth thing. There's a, a bad story about this happening with this guy, Thothonus, who the goddess, Dawn, Aos, managed to get it arranged so that he would be immortal, but forgot to ask Zeus that he would be made youthful forever. And so he just gets older and older and older. Just decrepit.

Starting point is 00:39:50 And never dies. He kind of shrinks to a little bug. Always got to read the small print. Yeah. Right. And, you know, you never know when you make a deal with a goddess, like there might be some loophole that screws you over okay yeah it doesn't always it's not always bad hermes arrives it's real nice uh Odysseus has been piping calypso for ages yeah unwillingly

Starting point is 00:40:13 yeah yeah i'm sure um but hermi says you got to let him go and calypso hymns and haws this is not fair uh he's my he's my boy toy but she says all right i'll help him get out of it's glimso like a gall She says. So she's a, she's a nymph, which is, which is a divine. Yeah, she's, she's a goddess, basically. Sort of lesser divinity. Right. And to all accounts, very beautiful.

Starting point is 00:40:42 I mean, she goes to Odysseus after Hermes gives her the bad news and she says, all right, well, I have to let you go. Zeus told me I have to let you go. But you don't actually have to go. We could still do the whole immortality thing. I mean, what does your wife have that I don't have? And Odysseus says, look, you're right. You are far more beautiful than my own wife. And this place is really nice.

Starting point is 00:41:06 But I miss my homeland. I miss my wife and my kid. And she, um, essentially, she's promising him something that, like, why is this unsatisfying? And it's kind of like your, your, your, island vacation. It lasts a week. It's nice. I needed that. All right, time to get back to work.

Starting point is 00:41:31 But what if the island vacation lasts weeks and weeks and months? We probably all felt that feeling. I think it's easy to understand why this offer is, like, ultimately not appealing to spend the rest of your eternity on this leisurely vacation with a little umbrella in your drink. But it's also, like, particularly pointed for Odysseus. In the story, Homer gives these people epithets. He's like recurring adjectives that describe them in the poetry.

Starting point is 00:42:01 Odysseus is many-turned polytropos. He is much, like many-crafted, you know, very, very crafty, polymatis. He is also much suffering or much enduring, polytlas. So all of the things about that kind of make Odysseus what he is, that he's crafty, that he's well-traveled, that he's, that he endures and endures. and it's just kind of what makes him special and what makes him who he is. It's like makes up his identity.

Starting point is 00:42:31 None of that would be true if he stayed on that island. He would kind of, it would be kind of like a loss of identity. I see why it's not appealing. But she, you know, she says, I'll help you go here. She goes to her tool shed.

Starting point is 00:42:46 Check with a tool shed, that's hot. Yeah, well, that was a vote of confidence for her. Apparently, not that great a conversation, but practical enough. Wonderful. She brings him an auger and an axe, whatever you need to make a, make a boat. And she says, all right, here are the tools. There are the trees.

Starting point is 00:43:05 Crack down. Are you on your own? So he has to make his own raft. He's here on his own. Yeah. Completely on his own. Totally. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:43:11 He's lost all of his comrades at this point. They're all dead. Sometimes it's his fault. Sometimes it's their fault. Sometimes it's both. But they're all gone. You know, 12 ships, I think is what he took to Troy. So a lot of guys dead.

Starting point is 00:43:25 and he has to make his own boat. And that's a really, like, interesting, symbolic moment there. So Odysseus is, we talk about Athena being his patron goddess. Athena is the god of craft. She's a kind of warrior goddess. She's a virgin goddess. She's depicted with the spear and the helmet. But she's a warrior goddess in the sense that sometimes you need to win wars through trickery and craft.

Starting point is 00:43:52 She is also the goddess of, like, weaving. She's goddess of the olive. Olive tree is a very domestic tree. You know, you have to plant it and wait many years before it ever gives you anything worthwhile. And the older and older it gets, the more and more olives it makes. So it's the sign of civilization. Athena is a goddess of civilization and also kind of a goddess of technology. So the fact that Odysseus knows how to make his own boat, a seaworthy boat, is kind of important.

Starting point is 00:44:22 It's kind of symbolic that, and he's about to go into sea, which is the realm of Poseidon, who is this god of wild nature. He's the god of storms at sea, earthquakes, you know, the brute force of nature. And so Odysse is going to confront those brute forces, the Poseidon world, with the kind of technology of Athena. That's really encapsulated well in that image. And this is a really important kind of polarity throughout the whole story. Aldrin chaos again.

Starting point is 00:45:00 Yeah, yeah. And this is actually, the Greeks really think of the world in these binaries, you know. There's civilization and barbarism, nature and culture, male and female. There is cooked and raw, you know. Do the people here eat their food cooked or do they eat it raw?

Starting point is 00:45:21 that's kind of a dividing point between man and animal or man and kind of wild men. So, you know, Odysseus is clearly on one side of that through throughout the story. And we'll see why it matters in a little bit. But so he escapes the island of Calypso. He has to kind of, and he has to do it nicely too, right? Like he has to have an amicable breakup because you don't want to piss off a goddess if you don't have to. And then he gets to this island of, he's built the ship. So he's built the boat, yes.

Starting point is 00:45:55 He builds the raft. Not a great raft, but it's seaworthy. And he's at sea for, you know, he ends up being at sea for 20 days, sailing, sailing, sailing. And at some point, Poseidon finishes his party with the Ethiopians. And he's like, what the hell? And he smashes Odysseus's raft with a storm. and Odysseus eventually has to swim to shore. Calypso gave him all of these fine, luxurious robes.

Starting point is 00:46:28 It's a parting gift. And he has to take all that off, because if he keeps it on, he's going to sink and die. So he ends up kind of scrambling ashore on this new land, totally naked, which I think is very symbolic. It's a kind of death and rebirth. Yeah, almost like baptism. And he gets to shore and just collapses underneath an olive bush.

Starting point is 00:46:52 And then he wakes up because a ball bounced into the grass next to him. And he discovers that he's on a civilized place. There are humans there. In fact, a bunch of attractive, nubile young ladies are washing some clothes in this little river. and and so he has to come up with the plan at that point. So this is a great scene because basically the next couple of stages for his journey have to do, just kind of like treating Calypso well to the extent he could, he has to really use women's agency to get him what he needs next,

Starting point is 00:47:39 to get home, to accomplish his. goal. And the first girl that he, the first woman he meets, happens to be the princess of the island. She's the daughter of the king and queen, as he finds out. Her name is now Sica. There's a lot of paintings of this scene, I mean many scenes of the Odyssey, but this one in particular. Odysseus is stark naked and he emerges from his bush and he holds a little like branch in front of his private parts so that to have a little bit of dignity and, you know, approaches these girls and all of them just, like, scream and run away

Starting point is 00:48:21 because he looks horrific. I mean, he probably looks like Tom Hanks from Castaway at this point, and he's caked in Brine, and, you know, they're thinking, is this guy going to try to... Savage. Savage us? Yeah. Ravage. Oh, please, no.

Starting point is 00:48:37 Mr. Seaman, don't savage me. Yeah. And that is an aspect of it. There's this kind of like tension. So all the girls run away except the princess. Now Sikaha is like, she's taller than the rest. She's more attractive than the rest. She's clearly braver than the rest.

Starting point is 00:48:55 And she's just like standing there waiting for him to explain himself. And she's 20-ish, Homer tells us. And, you know, he kind of builds up to this. She's actually, she went down to the, to the coach. thinking about marriage with like marriage on her mind. She wants to like clean some clothes and look nice and sort of make an appearance around town and see if any of the young man want to, you know, make a pass at her.

Starting point is 00:49:20 She's ready to kind of move on to the next stage. And so, you know, Odysseus addresses her from a few feet off. Wow, fair maiden, princess, I don't know whether you're a goddess or a mortal. Wow, you are just, I've never seen. seen anything like you. You're so beautiful. One time I saw something that was almost as beautiful as you. It was this little palm tree that grew up by the altar of Apollo at Delos, and I was leading many men there. So, you know, he's kind of giving him, giving her a little backstory about himself as a respectable man. And he says, may your parents or your brothers be happy if you're

Starting point is 00:50:03 immortal, and may you find a great husband, you know, kind of playing on the tension a little bit. could you please get me a towel and show me to the town? And she's kind of flattered. Like it worked. He's charmed her. He's like already got her charmed. And he doesn't refer to the fact that he's got a wife and kid at home. He's just kind of concealing that and, you know, luring her in a little bit.

Starting point is 00:50:31 And she, you know, long story short, she ends up telling him what he needs to do. and that is go talk to my mom, the queen. Not that she totally runs the show, but she's kind of like the back door to get to the king. Her mom is Arete, who is the prince, the queen of the island, and Odysseus makes his way there, and he kind of sneaks into the palace alone. She does give him more than a towel.

Starting point is 00:51:05 She actually, you know, her handmaidens, like, give him some actual clothes and some oil to rub himself. He takes a bath in the river. So he looks a little better, less like a, you know, wild sea man. And he sneaks in and he embraces Arete by the knees and says, oh, lady, I've traveled many days and been shipwrecked and I'm just trying to make my way home. I please, I supplicate you. Zeus is the god of suppliants. Would you please help me, blah, blah, blah. And he speaks well and she says, all right, stranger, you seem like a decent noble man.

Starting point is 00:51:41 Let me introduce you to my husband. She introduces him to Alcinous the king. And Odysseus just like, you know, charisma 11 out of 10. Like he charms his way into the ruling family of the island just with his words. And in fact, before they even know his name, they offer their daughter in marriage to him. He just gives you a sense of this is what he's famous for, right? Persuasion. But, you know, if he had screwed it up with the princess, if he had screwed it up with her mother,

Starting point is 00:52:16 he could have lost his head, basically. If he had offended him somehow, if he had, you know, savaged or given any hint of savaging, it would have been over for him. So these women have power, but they're dangerous too, you know. They could go either way. and then basically they throw a feast for him. They say, we'll get you home. We're going to send you home.

Starting point is 00:52:41 And he declines. The marriage invitation, of course. Let's get you on one of our magic ships. They have these magic ships. But first, let's have a feast for you. And so they throw this big party and they invite all the special people from the town. And that's where he tells his story eventually. at that party.

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Starting point is 00:54:04 or heading to join.wop.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.com slash modern wisdom. A lot of shrewdness that being upheld, like the caniness of Athena to be able to work around the issues of Poseidon, of Odysseus being able to leave in a, gentle manner that doesn't get him on the bad side of Calypso, his ability then to cajole and play the game when he lands on this new island.

Starting point is 00:54:44 So a lot of it is an upholding of being canny, being like a slick operator. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, would Agamemnon have charmed his way in with this young princess? I don't know. I mean, maybe. But this is the arts of Athena. And this is actually, it's actually, these kind of things, these kind of tricky, canny things are what he's going to need to eventually clean out the suitors and get his, get his home back. So, yeah, it's, this is, he is a hero who can't use violence in his great arc.

Starting point is 00:55:26 a little bit of violence, but mostly it's like trickery and in places where he just vastly outmatched in force. So there's this, this is the moment, actually, when he's at this party at the Fiatian's house where we meet Demodicus, the blind bard. So there's some athletic games, you know, the Fiatians challenge him to show his stuff.

Starting point is 00:55:55 And he's like, no, leave me alone. I'm tired. I was 20, 20 days at sea and like, oh, come on. You probably can't even throw a discus. He's like, all right, punks. And he stands up and he chucks this giant discus way bigger than any of the other discuses, way further than any other kids. And he shows them up. But then after the meal, they're relaxing and listening to the bar at Femius. He tells a few stories, some of them famous. He tells a story of Aries and Aphrodite. Aries, you know, stealing, Hepheysis his wife away. He's very pregnant sort of tales

Starting point is 00:56:30 of what goes wrong when the husband is away, putting that fear in your mind, like, what is going to happen? But then after the last story, Odysse himself asks the bard, Demodicus, to tell the story of the Trojan horse. And nobody knows who he is yet.

Starting point is 00:56:48 They still don't know. And Demodicus tells the story. And, you know, everybody knows it, but Greeks build a horse. They put a bunch of you know, warriors in there, Odysseus included. It was Odysseus' plan. The other Greeks go off to an island. The Trojans see this horse and they think it's some kind of talisman of power, the various versions of like, why did they bring this giant horse into their walls? But they do it,

Starting point is 00:57:14 and they bring it up to the citadel, doors close at night. The Greeks slip out, open the gates, city is sacked. Long story short. But it's interesting. While Demodocus is telling this story, Odysseus, I mean, apparently he's a good bard, you know, tragic. Odysseus just starts crying and he's trying to be discreet about it. But Homer says he weeps like a woman who's lost her husband at war and whose city has been sacked and she's been being led away by her captors. So it's almost like he's weeping like the victims of the tragedy he inflicted a upon Troy.

Starting point is 00:57:57 The very kind of poignant moment. Does that mean that he's sort of having sympathy for the people that he destroyed at Troy? And Homer kind of leaves it open. But Alcinois can tell the king. Yeah, you know, maybe that's enough epic poetry for tonight. Our guest is very tired. He can see it.

Starting point is 00:58:20 He's hysterical. So he says, stranger, I could tell that this story was bothering you. Did you have a brother or a cousin, perhaps a father who went off to fight at Troy? You know, right after they've heard the story of how Odysseus sacked Troy. And Odysseus says, all right, I'll tell you who I am at last. And that's when the great narrative begins in book nine, which is, I think, the high point, the best part of the story. And Odysseus is kind of playing the bard here, notably.

Starting point is 00:58:56 He's doing, he's basically let, he's allowed to be Homer for four books, just narrating these amazing tales. Filating himself. Yeah. Well, I mean, and he doesn't always come off as the best guy in the stories, which is interesting. But, you know, they do shine a good light on him. He's, he learns from his mistakes. And, and there's a moment, there's a pause in the, in the storytelling at this book 11, where everybody's just like, you know, gawking, jaws dropped, and he's enchanted the room, just like Homer enchants the room.

Starting point is 00:59:31 What's he telling? He's telling the story of Troy. So he says, I'm Odysseus. I was kept by Circe and Calypso, but they never swayed the heart in me. I'm from Ithaca. I'm just trying to make my way back to Ithaca. It's a crappy, rocky island, but everyone's homeland is the most you to them blah, blah, blah. And then he tells the story right after they left Troy, what happened on the return journey. And, um, you know, some of the familiar faces appear now. They try to have a cattle raid on these Thracians, Kikonase, and it goes well for a while. And then the Thracians invite their friends and, you know, basically slaughter and chase all the Greeks back to their ships and Dysius has to kind of run.

Starting point is 01:00:24 tail between his legs back to his ships and they go on. So it's the first sign that things aren't, aren't going to go perfectly. And then they, they meet the lotus eaters. That's the next people they meet. Very, very tempting,

Starting point is 01:00:41 uh, a very, a very tempting spot, you know, British podcasters who just talk about culture issue all, all day. But, uh,

Starting point is 01:00:51 no, the lotus eaters are, are basically like potheads, I think. And, um, The lotus flower just makes you want to forget your return journey home and just sit and eat lotus until you die. Kind of like opium or they were aware of opium.

Starting point is 01:01:08 But that's, and then the next monster they meet, you know, it's clear that they're sort of being tempted as they're traveling back. And they get blown off course to this island of the Cyclopses. And that's like the grand, I think, one of the best, the best stories of this whole journey. That brings a lot of these themes to the four. Why? Well, okay, Cyclopses are, Emily Wilson translates Cyclopses a couple places in her translation as Cyclopean people. like they're like people people of color

Starting point is 01:01:54 temporarily afflicted with being one-eyed monsters I don't know her take is a very DEI approach to a story from 3,000 years ago I know Emily she's she's good scholar she's good to her people but I like to take some pot shots at her translations because I mean

Starting point is 01:02:11 her take would be the Cyclopses are kind of you know Odysseus is this Greek colonizer and he's looking at everything through the kind of, you know, Greek man colonizer lens. And then all these people that he meets are just, they're just like people.

Starting point is 01:02:27 They're strange, but, you know, maybe they have their own way of doing things. And the Cyclops' way of doing things is to be a giant, one-eyed monster that eats people. So, um... Okay, so that's the indigenous wisdom of the... Right. Of the Cycloses.

Starting point is 01:02:42 Yeah. Yeah. All right. Um, but, uh, and he plays his trick on the Cyclops. You know, he goes and they go in the cave and, the Cyclops eats some of his men and traps Adyceus and his men

Starting point is 01:02:57 with this big rock. So you're watching the troops of Odysseus dwindle after each different stage. Round after round. And I think the Cyclops story is really interesting because the way that Odysseus describes it is they are they live in little family units. They do not care

Starting point is 01:03:19 about the gods. They think Zeus is a chump and every man is a law to his own wife and children. So they're giant forceful men that think law and order is, you know, for pussies. And, you know, they're kind of like extreme libertarians, you know. They don't have a social order other than the household. And this makes them vulnerable. This makes them underage. This makes them underage, estimate the power of trickery. They're not coordinated. They're not unified. Yeah, exactly. And they, so the Cyclops himself, Polyphemus is the one that Odysseus faces.

Starting point is 01:04:02 He had actually heard a prophecy that someday some man named Odysseus would come and blind him. And after he gets blinded, he tells this story and he's sort of raging. He said, I was not, a prophet once came and told us that I would get blinded by a man named Odysseus, but I thought he would be a strong man, not some little pipsqueak, you know. So he was not on guard for craft. They're men of force.

Starting point is 01:04:31 Again, this is this binary of like force and wildness versus cleverness and civilization. And Odysseus tricks him after they're trapped in the cave and a cyclop is kind of gradually eating the man that Odysseus brought with him and making him watch. Odysseus gives him some wine, some really, really good wine. And the Cyclops just doesn't have the cultural antibodies of moderation, you know?

Starting point is 01:04:58 And he just, it's like giving whiskey to the Native Americans or whatever. Exactly what I was thinking. He just slams it. Yeah. He gets really drunk. And he says, stranger, this is really good stuff. And he says, your gift, your, your guest friend gift, Cyclops is a very bad host, too, kind of like the suitors. your gift is going to be, I'll eat you last.

Starting point is 01:05:20 Yeah. Congratulations. Passes out, drunk. And meanwhile, Odysseus has made this spear or this kind of like steak, a six-foot steak that he's carved while the Cyclops was away, tending his sheep and hardened with the point and the fire. I mean, it's a very kind of like technological sort of act, too, kind of like building the ship. Yeah, Mulcraft. Yeah. craft and they you know they stab him when he's drunk in the eye and he's blinded and um so you know

Starting point is 01:05:54 moving on that's how he defeats the cyclops craft and oh and of course that's how he gets cursed in the first place because he makes the mistake as they're kind of sailing away from the cyclops's island the cyclops is foaming at the mouth and raging at them where are they where are they um Odysseus says, well, he told him, I should have probably mentioned the famous trick. When he introduces himself, he says, my name is nobody. And then when the Cyclops gets stabbed in the eye, he calls out to his fellow Cyclops, libertarians in the other household. And he says, nobody is hurting me.

Starting point is 01:06:33 Nobody is just, you know, forcefully harming me. And they say, well, if nobody's hurting you, then that's just tough luck. maybe you're sick and Zeus just makes people suffer. There's nothing we can do about it. Oh, very funny. So, and there's actually a play on words there. Because if you get into the Greek, when they say, when he says nobody's hurting me, it's Uttis, nobody is Uttis.

Starting point is 01:07:01 But if you put the no in an if clause, so the cyclops is, the other cyclopses respond, if nobody is killing you, then the U, the negative changes to a may. So it's if matis is killing you. And if trickery is killing you is how it sounds, it's two words in their mouth, but we hear it as one word, oh, if trickery is killing you. So basically, you know, it's just a very funny way of saying, trickery killed him and not violence. Or trickery, you know, blasted his eye. There's a double entendre.

Starting point is 01:07:34 Yeah. Yeah. How does he get cursed? So, yeah, he gets cursed by basically giving the Cyclops his name. He says, if anybody who asks, he says, if anybody who asks, he says, if anybody you asked you how you got blinded. Tell him Odysseus did it. And Polyphemus says, oh, I knew it. I knew it. And then he says, father Poseidon. Dysius is like, what? Father Poseidon, Poseidon is the father of Polyphemus, the Cyclops. Little did he know, little did he know

Starting point is 01:08:00 that he was blinding the son of the sea god Poseidon. And so Polyphemus curses him. May he never get home, or may he have a really, really, really, really hard time and lose all of his companions. And Poseidon listened, and that's what happened. Jared, you ever considered that you might have a drinking problem? I don't consider a lot, Chris. Well, you drank an entire case of athletic brinkgoe last night. But they're non-alcoholic. And that's not a problem? Sorry, man, I just kept chugging away for the regret to creep in. Never happen. See, most people, like Jared, don't want to change what they drink. They just don't want the next day to be a complete write-off. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co. They make the best

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Starting point is 01:09:25 So everybody sat around. Yeah. Mouths open. Yeah. Holy shit. This is an epic story. Yeah. And time is a, I mean, yeah.

Starting point is 01:09:37 This is only one of the, is like a fourth of the way through his long storytelling. So it's really an epic narrative. Yeah. Maybe a couple more episodes are worth kind of highlighting. So eventually they make their way to this other island, Circe's island. And here's another strained woman that he has to deal with. Circe is a divine witch goddess, sort of like calypso style, but a little bit more kind of dangerous or dark.

Starting point is 01:10:09 And Odysseus sends his men into the... the island, they see smoke coming up from this hut and he sends his men end. He waits at the ships. The men go, they find this hut in this clearing, and there are wolves and lions just prowling around like tame animals. Strange? And then there's this, you know, enchanting lady bustling around her hut, singing these strange songs.

Starting point is 01:10:39 Oh, she sees them. Oh, gentlemen, please. right this way. And they go and accept her hospitality. She feeds them. And she waxes them all in the head with a magic wand and turns them into pigs. So one of the men escapes as a pig. As a human.

Starting point is 01:11:00 Right. He doesn't go in. All the other guys are pigs. He just hustles back to Odysseus. Tells him what happened. It's fucked in there. There's this chick. She's got a wand.

Starting point is 01:11:09 All the guys are pigs. We shouldn't go. Yeah. Yeah. The nightmare party. Immediately go, go to the ship. This is like almost as bad as that cyclops guy. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:11:20 And this happens a few times on the journey. People are like, please Odysseus, can we just leave? He's like, no, I just want to see what might be in store for us here. Maybe they want to give me a present. So, and then this is another one of those instances. But he draws his sword and he's like ready for action, charges in. and Hermes stops him. He says, Odysseus, if you go in there, you're just going to become a pig.

Starting point is 01:11:49 She's going to turn you into a pig. Stop and let me help you. And he pulls out of the ground, this root. And it's, well, it says a plant with black root and a white flower. He says, this is moly. And this is not where we get the word holy moly, but if that helps you remember. Yeah. I know.

Starting point is 01:12:08 I looked it up as like, that's, it's too good. No, it is too good. But it is, you know, famous plant. And he tells Odysseus the nature of this plant is what Homer said. The fuses of this plant. This is the physis. It's where we get the word physics, you know, nature in Greek. And a lot of philosophers have made a lot about this.

Starting point is 01:12:28 We could maybe go into it. But this is the first occurrence of the word nature. Like the idea that there is a nature, that things have natures, is a sort of, like, that's an idea that had to develop. But Hermes tells him the secret of this plant and Odysseus like, rubs it on himself or he eats some. It's not really clear what, but it's an antidote to her magic. And so he goes in, you know, the pigs and the wolves and the lions are there. And Circe beckons him in and she feeds him and he plays dumb.

Starting point is 01:12:58 And then when she tries to whack him with the magic wand and turn him into a pig, nothing happens. And she's like, he stands up and he draws a sword. He's like, all right, Circy, she goes up. and she's like, how did you, how does you, you know, avoid my magic? And,

Starting point is 01:13:14 uh, and then she asks him, as, as you might expect, to go to bed with her. And Hermes had warned him that this might happen. She's going to ask you to go to bed with her. You got to do it. Dude, no choice. Take one for the team, dude. The pipe the pig lady.

Starting point is 01:13:35 Come on now. bear manna. Yeah. And he says, but she's actually trying to unman you. It's a trick, maybe. Who knows? But you got to get her to swear an oath. That she's not going to harm you.

Starting point is 01:13:50 And Odysseus makes her swear an oath. All right, we'll go to bed, but, you know, no harm to me or my companions. And you've got to change him back. And so she says, fine. They still go to bed. And then she changes his men back. Dysseus puts a shift in. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:14:04 The only people that Odysseus does. hasn't had sex with so far have been cyclops as far as I can see yeah well well and who knows he's the one telling the story the Odysseus sex tour thus far Matt Damon's really got his work cut out for known known the minds of many people many many men and women yeah and uh so you know he's he's he's taking one for the team day after day after day and it takes about a year she she's she's changed him back into men and and you know look it's a nice place right they get the food and there's fun little animals pets to play with. But the men are like, all right, Odysseus, it's been a year,

Starting point is 01:14:44 you're having a good time. This is a fine enough place, but we kind of miss our homes. Can we get out of here? And so he makes her help him get onto the next stage. And the next stage, as she explains, is, if you really want to get home, you have to go on a deeper, darker quest to the underworld. And basically he has to go consult this prophet Tyresius, who's dead,

Starting point is 01:15:16 this blind, another blind, wise person, who's died, famous Theban Tyresius. And to get to him, you know, you don't go down to the underworld in the Odyssey, you go out. And so you have to sail many days. And so long story, he sails many days, you know, it gets misty and weird. and they run aground finally on this strange land, and he has to do this right, dig a trench with his sword, and put honey and milk and barley, and he has to sacrifice some lambs,

Starting point is 01:15:47 drain their blood out into the hole. And then the ghosts of the dead come. So, like, you go out, and then the underworld comes to you. And this is, I think this is one of the best scenes in the whole book. But, you know, all of these wraiths come. these like gibbering rates and they're they're not intelligible um and they're kind of they're not like they're not like there's they're not like souls like your full identity is there they're sort of i don't know insubstantial remnants of people you might say but to basically to get them to speak to

Starting point is 01:16:26 him he has to let them drink this you know concoction in the ditch which includes blood so they get they get blood and they kind of have a little moment of liveliness so they can actually speak face to face to Odysseus and the first one he talked well the first one he talks to this guy El Pinoor who fell off the roof and died and Odysseus will you bury me yes all right next then he talks to Tyresius Tyresius tells him you know you're going to get home fine if if you can keep your hands and your mouth off, that came out wrong, off the cows of the sun. And you're going to run around on this island, the cattle of the sun. If you can restrain yourself and your men, you'll get home. But if you eat at the cows of the sun, you're going to get blasted and die. So it's going to take more kind of

Starting point is 01:17:21 restraint to get home. And he says also, you know, he tells him about the suitors who haven't actually arrived on the scene, but he's a prophet. And so, It's going to be really, really tough to get back home. And Odysseus says, all right, thank you. And there's also this other prophecy about a quest he has to go on, which we can omit for now. It's a very strange scene. But after that, he meets his mom because his mother has died since he's left.

Starting point is 01:17:49 And he meets his mom. He lets her drink the blood. He tries to embrace her. But his hands go right through her. And she tells him that's how it is with the dead. You can't embrace a dead person. And she kind of, you know, explains to him how the whole afterlife thing works.

Starting point is 01:18:06 And which I think is important for Homer somehow, that the knowledge that upholds civilization includes this kind of metaphysical stuff, that's weird afterlife stuff. That's my read, at least. And then I think one of the most interesting things is not often pointed out. The first group of the dead,

Starting point is 01:18:25 so he meets while he's down there, he meets the Ghost of Achilles, ghost of Agamemnon, Hercules, a few other guys. But the first people that he meets are not these heroes, these famous heroes from the Iliad. It's these famous women.

Starting point is 01:18:42 The mother of Amphion, who built the walls of Thebes. Let's see. A few other mortals who had bedded with gods. And as he's kind of letting them drink of the blood and conversing with them, it's almost like he's satisfying his curiosity. He's a very, like,

Starting point is 01:19:00 intellectually capacious man. He wants to know everything. He's that kind of guy. And all of these women come and they tell him the stories of their sons or their fathers, their brothers. They kind of tell him about these heroes that he wouldn't otherwise have access to. And, you know, I had a friend pass away a long time. ago. It was a little older than me, and it was kind of a mentor. And after he died, I think I helped, this moment kind of helped me realize this. After he died, I, I was hanging out with his mom after the funeral, and she was just telling me all these stories about him as a young man that I never really understood why he was so impressive or what he had to go through. And I think,

Starting point is 01:19:55 I think that this is kind of about how, how women fit into the story of the making of a hero. row, you know? It seems really important to me now. I never noticed it until that happened. But they're sort of serving that role, narrating the deeds of their family, upholding order. And one more person I want to mention while he's down there among the dead is he meets Achilles. And this is the moment where you see this tension between the Iliad, the Odyssey. Homer kind of poses the question, what is worth striving after? Achilles died young.

Starting point is 01:20:38 He traded a long life for eternal glory. He faced that choice in the Iliad, and he made his choice, and the Iliad says that was the right choice. When Odysseus meets the ghost of Achilles, he says, wow, you were so glorious in life, Achilles. It's amazing to meet you now that you're dead. We mourned you very much. And Achilles says to Odysseus,

Starting point is 01:21:02 don't make light of death in front of me. I would rather be a slave, a hireling of a man with no land to his name. Boulouet maine, caparruo seone, Thetelamenalo, Andri Paraclero, Omebiotos, Polise. I would rather be a higher servant, lowest status person on earth, then be king of the dead.

Starting point is 01:21:39 So it's, what does that mean? Achilles is telling him, maybe glory isn't all that it's cracked out to be. Maybe Odysseus got, is getting, or has the potential to get the better thing in life, which is continuation of his line. And the other thing that Achilles says to Odysseus is, if I had one more day of life,

Starting point is 01:22:04 you know what I would do? I would go to my father's house because I have heard that there are men in my country insulting my father, and I would go and slaughter all of them. I would avenge my father's name. And by the way, have you heard any news about my son? So Achilles, you know, this great, brilliant, glamorous warrior from the Iliad.

Starting point is 01:22:29 what he cares about in death is his family, you know? This is the thing that matters. I think that's one of the big messages of the Odyssey. What really matters in the long run? What is permanent? What can you make permanent? Is glory permanent? Is people talking about you far and wide after you died?

Starting point is 01:22:52 Is that really permanence? Or is permanence, sort of the biological continuation of the household? Yeah. Odysseus is maybe the greatest hero because he manages to get both of them, which requires cunning and craft and force, but also requires luck, you know? So whatever Odysseus thought of that, you know, makes his way back to Circe's Island. And there's more temptations to face. He has to go through the sirens, um, skill,

Starting point is 01:23:30 at Carybdis, they finally meet the cattle of the sun, and Odysseus falls asleep. At some, you know, a god put sleep upon him, maybe it was faded. And while he's asleep, his men sacrifice and eat all the cattle of the sun. And, but he doesn't eat of the cursed beef. Did he warn them at him? Yes, yes, he warned them again and again. And they said, I would rather, uh, One of his leaders of his men says,

Starting point is 01:24:03 Odysseus is asleep. He's been lying to us this whole time about this and that. But, you know, maybe he's telling the truth about the cows. Look, I'd rather eat and die than like starve, waste away. Like, we're going to die anyway. We might as well have a good time while we do it. So as soon as they eat the cows, the wind starts to blow. They get stuck on this island.

Starting point is 01:24:26 That's why they get hungry and hungrier. As soon as they eat the cows, the winds start to blow. And, you know, they get on the ship. Lightning bolt, they all die. Odysseus grabs a board and kind of floats to Circe's island or Calypso's island. And then he ends his story and the phyatians say, wow, okay. So will you be packing soon? Let's get you off to your homeland.

Starting point is 01:24:53 And they send them off on a ship back to, back to Ithaca. How easy is the drowning? that journey is incredibly easy he sleeps the whole time he they put him down on the on the boat he falls asleep they get all the way to ithaca they take him off the boat he's still asleep they stick him on the shore and they stick they loaded him up with gifts they stick all the gifts there on the shore and you know he wakes up and they're gone he's like wow uh those those bastards they left me on a, on a, what island is this? This doesn't look like my home.

Starting point is 01:25:31 But eventually it turns out that it is it, the guy that they left him on. It's like he fast traveled in a computer game. Yeah. In a video game, he just pressed a button and moved on the map from one location to another. Yeah, it's really weird. And I think it's kind of like,

Starting point is 01:25:46 I don't know, it's like, was it all a dream? I don't know. He was crossing this boundary from the, you know, adventurous mythical world where the, and the Faetians are kind of close to the gods. They don't have, there's no pirates. They have these magical ships. They have maybe these like robot dogs.

Starting point is 01:26:05 It's not clear, robot golden dogs guarding the palace. Maybe they can move, maybe they can't. Homer doesn't really specify, but it's an eerie, peaceful changri-relah. Again, it's kind of a temptation. Like, he could have stayed there and married that hot young girl. It was a real temptation. And she was, you know, she was like a young Penelope, too. It's a good, good, you know, great catch.

Starting point is 01:26:30 But he had suffering to do, he had more suffering to do. But, you know, he left that all behind. And I think it's like he's crossing this metaphysical boundary almost. Between the world of like monsters and myth to the world of the harsh reality. Where on the hero's journey is he, is he six o'clock? Is he seven o'clock? That's a good question. So, yeah, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he,

Starting point is 01:26:52 sort of, serving that wise counselor role. Maybe Tyresius is. There's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a catacal Abbasis, the dissent. He's come out with the knowledge that he needs to get back. So he's basically about to face the final boss. And it's a very long facing of the final boss. I mean, we're only halfway through the book at this point.

Starting point is 01:27:11 Yeah. He gets back. But I think it's, you know, you can dispense with it a lot quicker. So, but, you know, he's got to use all of these strategiesms that he's been sort of developing. through his sufferings because there's a hundred and eight suitors in the house he has no idea if anybody of his servants are still loyal he has no idea if one of these guys maybe is seduced his wife and they're gonna she's gonna play real nice and when he gets home and then they're gonna stab him in his bed yeah agamemnon right um when does he meet his son so he odysseus makes his way to the swineherds

Starting point is 01:27:54 hut, umayas, he's a, you know, pig, pig tender. And, uh, one of Odysseus is slaves, but like, uh, treated him really well. Love the Dysseus. He did Eumaeus. And, uh, he, you know, offers him hospitality, you know, the suitors took all the big fat pigs, but I can give you a little, a little kind of porker and we'll have a nice meal, you know, he hosts him for a few days. And Odysseus doesn't tell him who he is. He, he spends this kind of, cock and bull story about you know getting seized by Phoenicians

Starting point is 01:28:31 or something I mean but he's keeping his keeping his cards to his chest and then it just so happens that Telemachus gets back from his travel he eludes the kind of ambush somehow that the suitors were trying to launch on him and he

Starting point is 01:28:49 actually makes his way to this very swineherds hut and that's where they meet Odysseus and in disguise at first. And then Eumaeus goes to town, and then while he's away, Odysseus reveals himself to his son. So the first guy that he reveals who he is to is his son because he needs his son to help him launch a plan. And it's like gradually he every, you know, a couple of people find out here and there.

Starting point is 01:29:15 The nurse Euryclaea figures it out and he makes her swear to not tell anybody. And he eventually tells the swine herd right before they slaughter this. suitors, and his wife actually finds out very last, funny enough. But he goes into his palace. How does he find out about all of the suitors? Does he see them? Well, Telemachus tells him and Eumaeus tells him what's going on at home. And they say, you know, your wife has been faithful, but he doesn't know, right?

Starting point is 01:29:44 He still wants to test her, and he does in disguise eventually, dressed as a beggar, you know, famously. And he, there's one or two cool scenes that are worth narrating about this whole arc before the final gratifying bloodbath. He goes in and he wants to kind of test out the suitors himself. He wants to see it. What is the situation in my palace? And so he goes in dressed as a beggar and he gets harassed by some, you know, goat herd along the way that was a slave of his and he's like all right remember you and um and he goes around like begging for food as the suitors are all feasting and having a good time didn't wash their hands didn't pray before their meal of course and he goes and he asks each of them for a little bit of a little morsel and

Starting point is 01:30:39 most of them give him a morsel but one of them this guy antinous is well one of the kind of chief suitors of the suitors and he says uh man, get out of here. You're just cramping my style. You're, you're ruining the vibe. You may ask, why did you bring this beggar in here? And Odysseus kind of, kind of taunts him. But very, very subtly. He's, oh, you know, you seem like such a lordly prince, Antenuas. Zeus brings suffering on us all. You know, you might be down on your luck someday, just like I'm down on my luck. I was once like you, and Antinous is like, shut up and leave. And Odysseus knows what he's doing.

Starting point is 01:31:20 He's kind of needling him. And so eventually Antinous picks up like a footstool, and he chucks it at Odysseus. And Odysseus has just been prodding him. He's just been, like, riling him up. You know, very politely and very calmly. And Antinous just hurls a bench at him. He gets the kid that loses cool. And the bench just like hits Odysseus and like nothing happens.

Starting point is 01:31:48 You know? And he's like, do you feel better now? So I think he was sort of testing to see whether these were serious men. Confirmed his hypothesis that these are not serious men. They don't know how to act. A hard killer, like a cold-blooded warrior, would not throw a bench at a beggar. I mean, it's just, it's ungentlemanly, it's unmanly. I mean, if you want to get rid of this guy and you're Odysseus or Agamon or Achilles,

Starting point is 01:32:18 you're gonna like pick him up and throw him outside yourself. You're not gonna hurl a bench at him, right? So he kind of prods, prods and tests to see what's going on in his household, so he can come up with the plan. And one final moment that really underlines the endurance that this guy has to take. He's been given a blanket and a little cot by his wife. who doesn't know who he is. He's had a conversation with her,

Starting point is 01:32:51 and he's told her this tale. And they give him a cot, and he's lying there, stirring in his mind, how he's going to pull it all off. And he sees the maids go out, because there's like 50 maids, and 12 of them have basically been sleeping with the suitors.

Starting point is 01:33:10 They've been seduced. Maybe it's not their fault, but, I mean, Homer really treats it as though it's their fault. And Penelope is really pissed. She says, these are the maidens that have been disrespecting me and disrespecting your son. They're sleeping with the suitors, and they're, like, not loyal to the household. They're causing me problems.

Starting point is 01:33:31 They're disobedient, and, you know, they're not on our side, essentially. He sees them going out. He just wants to get them right there. It's a violent poem. But he says, endure my heart. You have endured worse. before when the Cyclops was eating your men. Mm-hmm.

Starting point is 01:33:52 So he has to use that same restraint that he used. Because if he had charged at the Cyclops when the guy was awake, you know, he would have, it would have been over. So this is a skill that he developed? Yeah, it's a skill that he developed and he's kind of reminding himself that the same kind of endurance that he had in Cyclops

Starting point is 01:34:10 is also helping him tolerate all the, you know, righteous indignation that he's feeling and... Notles in his house. Yeah, yeah. No? Biding his time. Binding his time. It's a man of much endurance, right?

Starting point is 01:34:22 It's a marathon. And how it eventually all kind of comes to head is Penelope has this idea. Who knows where she gets it? Why is Penelope in on this? So she's, I forgot to mention, there's a kind of crisis point that comes about at the beginning of the book. So she's been weaving this funeral shroud for, Laertes, Odysseus' dad, who's not dead yet, but we'll be dead any day now, really.

Starting point is 01:34:54 And she's been telling the suitors, I just want to finish my funeral shroud, and then I'll pick one of you. Let me just do my wifely duty for my old household, and I'll join your household. And of course, she's been weaving it during the day and unweaving it at night. She's tricking them using the craft of Athena, right?

Starting point is 01:35:10 But one of the maid servants, actually, one of these bad ones told the suitors what she was doing. She was tricking them. So they're like, all right, you have to decide now. We know this is all bullshit about your... Good bitch. You fucking knitting and unknitting. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:35:28 Yeah. They've had enough. And so she's basically feeling like she has to pick now. But she comes up with this contest. All right. Maybe Odysseus is coming back. She's getting all these signs. Odysseus in disguise says,

Starting point is 01:35:46 I think your husband's coming back. I really think he's coming back and you should just wait another day and she's like, I have this idea for a contest. And she tells it to him and he says, you should do exactly that. That is exactly what you will do. Which is get out Odysseus's bow, right?

Starting point is 01:36:04 And set up these axes that whoever, whoever strings his bow, it's like a big, hard, recurve bow that nobody could string but him and they could, if you shoot the arrow through these, axe holes. Whoever does that first can marry me. And, you know, it's a perfect kind of trick. It's a perfect contest because it brings out this memetic rivalry. Like the suitors all go in and start trying to string the bow. And none of them can even get the string on the bow. It's just too big and, you know, they're just not strong enough. And every, practically,

Starting point is 01:36:48 every single time, they're like, oh, I failed to string the bow of Odysseus. I do not measure up to Odysseus. It kind of underlines the fact that this was what it was all about in the first place, trying to usurp Odysseus's status, credibility, and his wife. And then, of course, he's a beggar still. Let me try it out, young lads. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. no no no beg no no this would no they're afraid they say this what if what if what if he actually

Starting point is 01:37:23 strings the bow what if this you know loser from out of town strings the bow he's going to make us all look bad and uh you know he manages to get his hands on the bow and of course shoots the arrow through and they're like shit well now we're ashamed but of course by this time telemachus has hit all the weapons and the armor odysseus has had the swineherd locked the door he's had Euryclaea, both the other doors. All the women are out. Penelope's out safe. They're all trapped in this prison.

Starting point is 01:37:58 And Odysseus shoots them all down, spears them. Hang on a second. So he's closed all of the doors. And now it's like, it's killing time. It's killing time. But it's just him. He's not bringing his son in to do it too. So his son is there with him.

Starting point is 01:38:14 His son is there with him. And he's got two other guys. There's basically four of them on 108, which, you know, it's the goat her and this, is it a cowherd, philoetius? One other guy, but like you're not, not like Iliatic warriors. Like, just, you know, worker dudes, and his two worker dudes, his son, and he himself. And then all these suitors who are not entirely unarmed, but, I mean, still, a hundred and eight guys. you might think they could take him.

Starting point is 01:38:51 But he set it up so well. He had to get them off guard. He had to have the bow, this great, deadly bow that only he could use. He had to have the weapons sequestered away. And he kills the leaders first. Antenuous, the guy who insulted him with the bench, first to get an arrow through the throat. He's like lifting up a cup and a dead. This just doesn't suspect what's going on.

Starting point is 01:39:23 And, you know, instant death. And it's a bloodbath. It really is a blood bad. It's, if you've been an 18-year-old kid just waiting for the action scene, it's very satisfying, you know, spears through, through guts and faces and such. Yeah. And basically, they all die. Every single one of them, even the,

Starting point is 01:39:47 ones that are arguably less guilty than the others, there's a kind of communal guilt. Yep. Some people think that he took it too far. Homer doesn't think that he took it too far. The justice of Zeus was coming down upon them. That's how everybody talks about it in the story. One guy sneaks up to Odysseus and grabs him by the knees. Leodes, the prophet, begs for his life.

Starting point is 01:40:15 Odysseus gosh I was always trying to tell them to lay off you know I never touched your maidens I was always the voice of reason and Odysseus says well you're a prophet

Starting point is 01:40:30 I'm pretty sure that if you were here for four years you prophesied many things to them about me being dead and maybe you prophesied to your own heart that you would walk away with my wife so die and he drives a sword through him It's just like, it's terrifying.

Starting point is 01:40:47 He's become, and there's a similar scene of failed mercy in the Iliad too or Achilles kills a young kid. That's, it's really ugly. It's really disturbing. But that's sometimes what it takes, I guess, to reestablish the patriarchy. But one final note on the bow in the Iliad, the bow is a shameful weapon. It's not honorable to kill somebody with the bow and you could kill, kill him with a spear. You don't face them, you know, head on. It's not man-to-man

Starting point is 01:41:19 challenging them. The bow is a kind of tricky weapon. Paris uses the bow. He's this unmanly playboy Trojan. Pandarus shoots Menelaus. It's a kind of sucker punch move. And, you know, Odysseus does his dirty work with the bow. I think that's kind of like, it's a bit, you know, well, it's a weapon of trickery, doesn't obey the rules of honor, but if you want to win at all costs, if you want to reestablish justice, maybe you need to be willing to use those weapons of trickery

Starting point is 01:42:00 to kind of bracket the whole honorable warrior thing and do what needs to be done. And that's at least one interpretation of how it all ends. And that's how the story ends? Well, actually, the story ends with all the suitors dead. And then immediately, you know, Odysseus,

Starting point is 01:42:23 so they actually end up hanging the 12 maidens who were sleeping with the suitors. A couple of other people get punished. But, and they clean the place up, heap up the bodies. And Odysseus tells them, all right, a lot of these guys' dads are nearby in the town some of them are off

Starting point is 01:42:45 you know across the seas we have to throw a party right now and make it sound like we're having a really good time so they don't suspect anything so they they start cooking up meats and they start playing music and it's really bizarre just but they're basically trying to buy time

Starting point is 01:43:03 before you know people find out that there's been a slaughter of some of the most prominent young men on the island. And probably my favorite scene at the end is you actually get a snapshot of them, the suitors gibbering race going down into Hades and wailing. Agamemnon and Achilles, the ghosts of Agamemnon or Achilles, just talking there, shooting the breeze. And the suitors come down.

Starting point is 01:43:37 And they're like, oh, Odysseus slaughtered us. And Agamemnon says, that's my boy. And, you know, they had it coming, of course, and the suitors complained. But really interesting, like that final moment there. Agamemnon says, amazing work, Penelope. Penelope, the wife that I didn't have, that it stayed faithful. this whole time. And he says, there's a kind of ambiguity in the Greek. He says, the glory of this person will last and be on the lips because of Penelope's virtue for the rest

Starting point is 01:44:25 of time. Who is this person? Most translators, I'm paraphrasing, but most translators say the glory of Penelope will always redound and she will be an honor to women. But one interpretation is that the glory of Odysseus will last forever because of Penelope's virtue, which will be sung among women. And why is that interesting and important? I think the message would be Homer sees Penelope's faithfulness and her trickiness. I mean, this bow scheme was really smart on her part, even though she didn't really know. She had this intuition maybe. Penelope was crucial to the story of the greatest hero that ever lived.

Starting point is 01:45:09 He could not have become Odysseus. the best of the Achaeans without Penelope's help. And it was a, it's not like Penelope gets glory and Odysseus get glory. They both get glory because they were a unit together. And that's, that's kind of the Greek archetype of the matriarch, of like, what a good,

Starting point is 01:45:28 what is like happiness for a woman? It's, it's to uphold the glory of a great household in short. But, you know, the, ending is very weird. The actual ending is like the townspeople form up a posse and Odysseus forms up a posse and they kind of, they start a battle, you know, a revenge battle. And then Athena kind of descends from heaven and says, stop. It's a deus ex machina. It's like the first dais ex machina. You know, the god coming from from on high and kind of solving this unsolvable problem in the plot.

Starting point is 01:46:08 But, you know, the god makes peace and then a couple of people die. Odysseus kills a couple of guys, but then the battle stops and they all go home and like shake hands. Peace is reestablished somehow. So he's got the favor of the gods. It seems like he's had mostly favor of the gods throughout, apart from Poseidon. Yeah, he's got the favor of the Olympian gods of order, of Zeus and, and, Athena. He eventually wins over Poseidon, like after the time frame of the story. Like, Terezius tells him how he's going to, like, make amends with Poseidon.

Starting point is 01:46:51 He doesn't have the favor. There's a lot of divine forces he has to struggle with, the sirens and Scilla and Charybdis and the sun god kind of spares him, Helios. But, but he has the favor of the gods because he is pious. And this is pointed out at the very beginning of the poem. He was always very meticulous doing sacrifices. He was always, okay, he's a tricky liar, but only to his enemies. You know, he doesn't defraud a friend. He's a just man. And, you know, that's part of the lesson of the poem.

Starting point is 01:47:20 Like, the good do win. This is not clear in the Iliad. But there's a kind of, there's two divine, two versions of divine justice, you might say. One of them is, eye for an eye, Halfield and McCoy, you kill my guy, I kill your guy. And then my son's going to kill your son and your son's going. And it just never stops. That's the kind of uncivilized, brute, like, furies justice. But Zeus and Athena represent this kind of,

Starting point is 01:47:52 the kind of justice that puts quarrels to an end, that actually makes a settlement that people can live in peace again. And so that's the kind of justice that the Odyssey cares about, that Zeus himself, Homer has Zeus himself say that, You know, the world actually is a fair place if you play by the rules. Look, mortals think that we bring suffering upon them, but it's generally they who bring suffering upon themselves. Just this is a case in point.

Starting point is 01:48:20 The guy arrested his murdered, his uncle. He had it coming. You know, we told him, we told him not to murder his own cousin and seduce his cousin's wife, but he did it anyway. And so, what do you know? He got what was coming. So revenge, another big thing. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:48:35 Just this. Very much revenge. Revenge is absolutely a part of justice, but it can't go on forever. Maybe that's what the end of the poem is kind of about, like, you know, there's a danger there at the end that it's going to keep spiraling and spiraling and spiraling and never end. But I don't know, the gods intervene to make sure that doesn't happen. And somehow it's important to get to that point somehow as a civilization after something bad has happened. Now that we know what the story is, are there any other elements of the writing process or Homer,

Starting point is 01:49:06 Homer's role, how it was written, the history of this thing coming to light that are interesting. Yeah, I think that this oral poetry thing is really interesting. So Nolan is apparently casted this rapper, Travis Scott, I think. I think he's from Houston. I should know him better. But anyway, as a bard, as Demonicas, I think maybe, maybe as Femius. because, hey, Homer is oral poetry, rap is oral poetry. So maybe there's something to that.

Starting point is 01:49:42 But, you know, I think that one of the differences between what we think of as like slam poetry, oral poetry, or rap. Is that a kind of pillar of the moral universe in the way that Homer is a pillar of the moral universe? And the way these bars kind of pious. When I think rap, I don't usually think pious. Would you have left, if you were going off for the Trojan War, you know, would you have left your wife with Chance the rapper? Yes. Or even. Or even Bob Dylan for that matter.

Starting point is 01:50:18 I mean, Alan Ginsberg, Lord Byron, would you have left your wife with Lord Byron? You know, I mean, it's a different mindset. But there are, you know, there's some parallels. The really interesting thing about oral poetry and the oral mental model of the universe or the kind of mental universe of cultures that don't have writing, you know, if you go to an oral culture

Starting point is 01:50:49 and you tell somebody, here's what I want done. Like, you know, detailed list of instructions. They'll be like, all right, And they'll go and do exactly what you told them to do. And then when they come back, they'll say, here's what you told me to do. They'll say verbatim, what you told them to do.

Starting point is 01:51:08 Because the brain has just been so trained to store oral information. When the pilgrims came to Massachusetts in the 1600s, they were shocked at the Native Americans' ability to just repeat. verbatim like you know these these Indian tribes whatever they didn't speak English like you could say a sentence to them they would repeat the exact sentence back to you like perfectly verbatim without understanding a word it was just that was part of what you get when you don't have writing is you have to really have this high fidelity oral brain and when when when oral poetry encounters a written paradigm when when writing

Starting point is 01:51:59 starts to be the way you store knowledge. You sort of lose that ability. It's like Google Maps, you know. Now I don't know my way around my own town. Something gets like offloaded cognitively. And that's, I think, one of the reasons why Homer is this glimpse of the way that people think in this world that is lost to us. We can't really go back.

Starting point is 01:52:25 Once you have writing, it's too advantageous. to ignore, you know, your enemies are going to beat you if you try to not have a written culture. It's just so powerful. You need, you know, you need writing to have science and philosophy and all kinds of stuff, record keeping. But something is also lost. Yeah, yeah. Something is profoundly lost, this tradition of storytelling and, um, and also like the role of the storytellers shifts, like it, I don't know, the storyteller doesn't, isn't like the, the, the pillar of society that he is in Homer. And I think you have to understand that to understand

Starting point is 01:53:03 why Homer has so much pro-barred propaganda, Kenealiyadh, for example. But I do think it's still, these things still matter. The stories that we tell still really matter a lot for people's, you know, ability to face their own problems and happiness and confidence in life. But it's not so visceral for us. How are you feeling in advance of the movie coming out? I'm going to see it as soon as I can. I mean, you know, it looks pretty awesome. People have complained about some casting choices. Let's say, you know, Helen of Troy seems to be an Ethiopian by the Greek.

Starting point is 01:53:43 Great at potting. Yes, which are great at parting. So maybe there's a logic to it. But, you know, people complain about the Listergonians. So I didn't mention, I don't think I mentioned the Listergonians. This is one of these monstrous people that Homer eats. After he meets the Cyclops, they're these giant people. They're not like super giants, but they're giant enough.

Starting point is 01:54:06 And they try to see if they can get a gift from the Listergonians or maybe make a little alliance and his men meet them and they just get eaten. So the Listergonians just charge out in force and slaughter the Greeks. They're the ones that are depicted with this sort futuristic steel armor, plate mail armor. People complained about that.

Starting point is 01:54:27 It's not historically accurate. I think that it's really cool. Even if I don't like the way that Nolan tells a story, which I don't know. I think he's a great director. He's filmed the whole thing on IMAX. The first time it's ever been done. It's almost three hours.

Starting point is 01:54:44 It's going to be a good thing to watch. I'm really excited about how we're talking about the Odyssey and we're debating about it, like just having the debate about what does this mean. I think it tells you something about what's going on in culture. that people care about this a lot. That Nolan would get so much criticism and so much attention from either direction. I think it shows that we sort of need this story somehow.

Starting point is 01:55:11 So you're going to see it? I will absolutely go and see it. I also have an admission to make, which is for the first time in history, I've decided to put my personal burnout health ahead of the podcast. we had the offer to do half an hour with half the cast and half an hour with the other half of the cast all on a single roundtable in New York in 10 days time. But I'd already booked to go and take the one digital detox week that I've ever done.

Starting point is 01:55:44 So I'd already booked this meditation retreat and I'd been working up to it and it's something that I really needed and I promised myself in January that I was going to take this time off and mania, mania, mania, mania on it for like, you know, 150 days or whatever, like 25 weeks. until I get to this, I've got this thing booked. And then it was like, yeah, sure. Like, of course, I love Nolan. I love, I love The Odyssey. It's going to be exciting.

Starting point is 01:56:03 Matt Damon's a legend. I get, you know, when it happens, or the media week is precisely at the back end of when you're supposed to be doing this thing. And I tossed and turned last week about it. And just the coin fell on the side of, I've made way too many sacrifices for like eight years of doing the show, 1,100 episodes.

Starting point is 01:56:24 And I was like, I think it's going to be kind of, of a sin. I really hope that I don't fucking regret it. But it feels like a symbolic decision to do something that helps my peace of mind and my longevity as opposed to like, fire up the fucking engines again. Let's do it. Let's spin up this huge production in New York as opposed to this one thing that was supposed to be for me. So anyway, all that being said, I'm going to have, I'll be conflicted watching it. So I'll be thinking, fuck like that. One of the big moments of the movies promo could have been or two of the big moments, right, with Tom Holland, he had Zendai, but

Starting point is 01:56:58 would have been on the show. But I'm pretty excited for it. It looks pretty cool. I'm not so excited for what might end up being another culture war. Flashpoint. You know, Nolan, the stories that he puts out are controversial because of what happens

Starting point is 01:57:19 inside of the movie is inception, at the end of inception is he in the dreamer, is he in reality tenant, is the guy secretly the father of the main dude, or is he actually not related? Or is he, but, but, but, but, that's cool. Casting choices, is this some sort of cultural commentary? That's less cool. So I'm kind of not, I hope that that doesn't happen because I'm a massive fan of everything that Nolan's done.

Starting point is 01:57:48 I wouldn't want it to be tarnished by that. But yeah, I'll be excited by that. I guess, do you know if he's used the Emily Wilson translation as the source material? He's talked about that, yeah. How do you feel about that? Well, he's commented on, you know, her calling Odysseus a complicated man. I think, this is like the first line of the poem. Tell me muse of a complicated man. It's how she translate this, polytropos, mini-turned. And to me, that sounds like he's a man of many issues, you know. I think that this is a guy that divine nymphs fall in love with, you know, he's like the most badass of all the Greeks that got back

Starting point is 01:58:31 from Troy. It's not the kind of guy that you would call complicated, probably. Complicated just seems a little bit like... How would you translate it? Well, it's many tons to you and that... Well, that's the kind of almost, you know, somebody might say, well, that's a failure to translate. It's just, you know, you have to interpret it to translate it. Polytropos. Tropos is this really multivalent word. It means. turn like he could be turning around in various places or spinning about the seas a turn is like a trick there's many many tricks or um at least in later greek it's a character it's like a kind of uh trope is like your your character he could be a man of many sort of guises many many sort of personas that he can

Starting point is 01:59:19 inhabit. So, I think that the word is about alluding to his, to his master of craft and trickery, not to his moral ambiguity. I think, I think this is, this would be my main, I wonder how, how no one's going to deal with this because, and he said something about, you know, Homer says, lying Odysseus said to her, I will tell you the truth, my lady. You know, just there is, he is a liar strategically. But I don't think that, my sense is that Wilson suspects Homer is, is, is, is, is

Starting point is 02:00:02 feels ambiguously about Odysseus. Like, is he really a hero worth emulating? What do you think Homer fails about Odysseus? 100% worth emulating. But that doesn't mean he's perfect. Like, you can be the greatest hero and somebody to admire, but you can also make mistakes. but is, you know, like, giving your name with the Cyclops, falling asleep when your comrades try to, you know,

Starting point is 02:00:29 are at risk of opening up the bag of the winds or eating the cattle of the sun, or even, you know, being a little too curious. Like curiosity is advice in some Greek philosophy, like wanting to know too much without necessarily having an end in mind. And this is curiosity is brought up by the Sirens example. where he wants to know and what the sirens say, plugs up his companion's ear with the wax and doesn't plug up his, but he gets himself tied to the mast.

Starting point is 02:01:02 Maybe that was playing with the line. He ended up fine from it. But I don't think that, I don't think that Homer questions Odysseus' values, which is civilization over barbarism, you know, Order over chaos, patriarchy over anarchy. That doesn't seem complicated. That part doesn't seem complicated to me. How long has it been since we've had a movie that was a relatively simplistic hero?

Starting point is 02:01:31 I mean, the closest thing has been fucking Top Gun 2. And like, even in that, Tom Cruise is trying to do this retcon, make the son of my ex-flight partner feel okay about me. there's this like supplanted patriarch thing that's going on where the parental figure comes back into his life and it's the redemption of the son through the success of the new father, which is the old father's knee like that, I guess. I remember looking at this video essay that explained how the world of the hero is just unsatisfactory anymore.

Starting point is 02:02:14 for some reason has removed from movies that it's no longer enough for protagonist who wants to make the world a better place, to work real hard, overcome challenges, be flawed but get through. Now it has to be somebody who has a dark streak and needs a kind of redemption that's not quite there. And then you get to come full circle all the way back around to something that's more like suicide squad. which is the bad guys are actually the good guys, but the only way that they can be the good guys is if they are their bad guy's self and their badness is,

Starting point is 02:02:54 the virtue and their badness is closer to congruence than it is to actual virtue. It's like they just know who they are and they are who they are and they're deployed. And all of the motivations for why they do these things, they're pulled around. And then Loki is Loki in Avengers is he really part of the hero, he flip-flops back and forth so much. you don't really land in a satisfying place with him. He's more a question mark,

Starting point is 02:03:17 even though he ends up being unbelievably powerful. And fucking Captain Marvel, who's the most powerful person in the universe, appears to be fucking off just like doing bullshit all the time. Like, why are you not? Anyway, I get the sense that that, like, complicated hero thing is kind of more. So obviously, it's, in some ways, is richer, right?

Starting point is 02:03:38 Because there's conflict and this tension. but I think it would be cool to just see what an uncomplicated virtuous hero that's flawed and overcomes his flaws what that would look like. Like just follow me the fucking hero's journey, please. Like just follow me some Campbell shit from 12 to 12 and let's see how that feels in 2026. I don't want to have to be an asterisk after every hero of good, but let's not forget. It's not forget when he, you know, that's, and I've got it in my head that part of the reason

Starting point is 02:04:24 what I'm doing with the show at the moment, spending time doing more stories, which you're just the fucking best at. Your storytelling ability is like out of this world. Learn from the best. also doing episodes where it's just me and the boys hanging just chilling out talking about what we've got going on are more um storytelling from other areas of life too like war stories and things like that from from special forces guys big part of that is i think people have got

Starting point is 02:04:58 a degree of exhaustion with overthinking yeah um i think there's a big anti anti optimization trend at the moment that we're feeling. And it's not necessarily people being against optimization. I think it's people being against the fatigue of trying to be perfect. And that is at least in part fed into by the fact that they're overwhelmed with information. And they feel like there is more input than they have time to be able to metabolize it. So this line that I came up with last year that most people consume information the same way that they consume calories and too high of a dosage to be able to metabolize.

Starting point is 02:05:30 And that was great. 500 years ago when there was like three bucks that you could read and almost everybody in the village couldn't read. And maybe there wasn't a printing press. I don't know. That was like 1400s, I think, something like that. Not so good now. When there's an abundance, we've gone from scarcity problem to an abundance problem. Same thing. Calorie spars to calorie dense. Information spars to information dense. People are sort of like, oh, fuck. Like I'm just a little overwhelmed with all of this. I don't want everything to feel like homework. I don't want everything to feel like there needs to be a decision that's made to it.

Starting point is 02:06:04 You know, we're going through a bunch of big business decisions on the show. And like some of the guys that I'm dealing with, I'm seeing in them, even these very, very impressive business people who are at the forefront of what they do. There is a sense when I'm speaking to them

Starting point is 02:06:16 of, dude, just fucking tell me what I want. Like, can you not, can you just fucking tell me what I want? Please, can you just give me a thing

Starting point is 02:06:24 that you are high conviction in and just deliver that. I'm like, I get it. I get it, that there is a fatigue, an exhaustion that a lot of people have. And I wonder, very long-winded way of saying, I wonder whether or not movies are going to start to mirror that with simplicity in the heroes. Again, complexity in the story, simplicity in the hero.

Starting point is 02:06:49 You know, we had adolescence, that thing on Netflix that was about young boys in the UK. And one of the reasons kind of, you know, pretty majestically that the, the, the series made such an impact was that it did not really tell you what to think. There was a lot of question at the end. How much was the young boy actually impacted by what he'd seen on the internet? How much was he a disciple of the manosphere and like an in-cell? How much was he to blame versus the lack of supervision that had come from his parents? How much did the parents blame themselves?

Starting point is 02:07:32 Was this a righteous comment on overreaches of the internet or just male loneliness like both sides, kind of raw shock test it to see it as their own propaganda to some degree? Is this kid a psychopath? At what point does a boy become a man and then therefore become culpable for his own actions? And what that resulted in was just this fucking furor of people debating what this means.

Starting point is 02:07:57 how important, what should we take away from this? Like, just tell them, how many times do people want to find out, ask Nolan, well, is, can't remember the guy that Leonardo DiCaprio, is Leonardo DiCaprio's character in the dream world or is he a lot? It's like, in some ways, that's not even Nolan's decision to make. After you get to that stage of a story, it's almost on you, but because of the lack of conclusion, it sucks in speculation,

Starting point is 02:08:29 and that's what drives a lot of the conversation about this stuff. I just generally get the sense and is sort of making a bet at the moment that not like telling people what to think, but just a little bit more simplicity, I think, the opportunity to sort of sit back in your own mind and just observe things as they go and not feel like, is another fucking decision I need to make? got there's more like work that I've got to do. I'm kind of exhausted by all of this stuff.

Starting point is 02:08:58 My future, is AI going to take my job in 10 years' time? I don't know. What about the Middle East? Apparently I should be worried about that. There's like some problems with gas prices I hear are inflation or like Taiwan do something with computer chips and I don't really know what I'm supposed to do. All of that together is making people fucking exhausted. And if you're not careful, people are going to find escapes that are way more destructive than just being able to relinquish, listen to an awesome historian, tell a story for a couple of hours,

Starting point is 02:09:27 the oldest story that's ever been written. And, oh, okay, that... I've had a bit of a reprieve. Isn't that nice? And you can't iterate movies as quickly. I can iterate this podcast three times a week, and I have done for a very long time. And I can lick my finger and sort of tell

Starting point is 02:09:48 where the cultural winds are going. And also most of this is just me doing it for me. Like, I don't want to leave and feel like I've got this big laundry list of things to do. I'm just left with, like, interesting philosophical questions and insights about the virtue of loyalty and justice and revenge and when you're supposed to apply aggression and when you're supposed to sit back and when you're supposed to be diplomatic and when you can be crafty and where the lying is justified in that, all of that stuff's just nice. I don't feel burdened by it. I don't feel burdened by learning about the story of the Odyssey. in the same way as I feel burdened if it's some very

Starting point is 02:10:25 prescriptive new life direction that I need to take and here is a huge big list of all of these things but actually there's not that much conclusion because maybe veganism might not be the different like either make it simple and direct or just give me a little bit of chance to breathe

Starting point is 02:10:45 and I think at the moment at least I'm feeling in me that's a motivation that I'm enjoying, that's a sense, the tether that I'm being pulled forward through. And maybe we'll see that crossover into other mediums as well. This is a good time for Homer to come back for that reason, I think. Because I think that this is, there is a kind of moral simplification. in a lot of ways to Homer, but he tells the story from multiple perspectives,

Starting point is 02:11:26 partly because he's, just like Nolan, you know, he's got a wide audience. Homer is, you know, these epic poets travel from city to city. They're going from Eolis to Sparta to wherever, Ithaca. And they have different people of different classes and different tastes everywhere. And, you know, they got to get a story about Odysseus to work for a lot of different people. Some people are going to want to take the side of Odysseus or some people are going to see themselves and the suitors or maybe that's not a great example. But, you know, some people are going to say, hey, this is a lying bastard and other people are going to say, no, he did what he had to do. And that's

Starting point is 02:12:05 kind of, that's on you. Like, to draw out the message is not so much the poet's job. I mean, he can have his own opinion, but really his job is to help you get charmed, get. Get, you. Get, disengaged, like Odysseus does for the feations, like the bards do in the story. And I think also, if I could kind of allegorize a little bit, the sirens in particular that we didn't go into too much. I think they're really, it's a timely image because, you know, for me, I kind of autobiographies Odysseus going to the sirens. All right, the sirens are these divine, they're kind of like bad bards. There are these women who sing whatever they sing and they make you just want to go and listen to them and piled up in front of the Sirens Island is just rotting bones of people who started

Starting point is 02:13:01 listening and they could just never leave and they starved and died. And I think the reason that Odysseus wants to hear is because he's this man of great curiosity. And when they actually speak to him, Homer, no, Odysseus tells them the phaetians. He tells what the sirens told him. And the sirens say, we can tell you the story of everything that happened at Troy. All the things that you didn't know, and I'm paraphrasing, but all the things you didn't know about the backstory, what was going on at Troy, all of the different, you know, perspectives of the generals that you were trying to guess that, but you just couldn't know, well, we know them. We know everything that happens on earth. They can give him infinite knowledge that,

Starting point is 02:13:48 whether or not they would say the same thing to his crew, that's what they're saying to him. And this is the thing that a man of those kind of proclivities wants most in life. Or at least he knows the power of that insider knowledge, that special insight into the universe, the Moli. He's seen how powerful it is to know the secrets of a little plant. The kind of power can give you. What if I could find out something interesting that I could apply to my morning routine from the sirens?

Starting point is 02:14:16 And for me, I think it's also the temptation of being an academic. It's one of the reasons I left academia because, well, it's one of the reasons I was in it because I had this. Tell me more. Tell me more. I want to read more. I want to find out the end of that story or, oh, geez, five more books I need to read. And that can, if you follow that too far, you end up potentially a rotting pile of bone. at the feet of the sirens and never getting home

Starting point is 02:14:43 and never doing what you need to do. It's this kind of temptation of knowledge. And, you know, maybe there's a person or two in your audience that can relate to the temptation of the university, but we can all relate to the doom scroll. Like, and it's often, it's not just like, it's not stupid humor all the time. A lot of it is you're, you tell yourself,

Starting point is 02:15:04 I'm going to get some insight on, you know, what the Bitcoin price is going to do from this Iran thing. and oh, well, how can I ignore that, blah, blah, blah. And it's, it's all, it all seems actionable. It's, it's constructed. It feels important. It's designed to feel important. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:15:21 Because it's risen up in the algorithm. And I think this is really speaks to a profound, uh, inclination that people have, a temptation that people face that leads in, not just to inaction as, you know, but, but to unreflection to. Well, certainly if you're permanently, on Absorb, you have very little time to do reflect. You know, if the fire hose of new information is buchakking you in the face, you don't have that much time to think about what you've already ingested, said Bonnie.

Starting point is 02:15:53 And when... At wise siege. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the philosopher B, Blue, that sense of, I'm drowning in information, I don't know what to do about it. This was a line that I had a Bill Thompson, this old information's expert from, worked at three-letter agencies, US, like, Army. He was basically the special forces queue from James Bond. And he would help them to get to where they needed to.

Starting point is 02:16:31 He would take phones apart, do all this sort of stuff. And I was asking him, my current working theory is not that most of the propaganda and most of, even the information online is trying to make people convinced of any one narrative. It's to drown them in so much information that they become apathetic and they just sort of give up entirely. Now, that might be that at some point in future,

Starting point is 02:16:53 their apathy can be formed into something useful and sort of thrust forward in like some vector. But for the most part, I think when you firehose people with information after long enough, they just go, dude, I'm fucking, I have no idea If you try and go down any rabbit hole, any conspiracy rabbit hole, for every one that you find out, there is an equal and opposite, the physics of the conspiracy system. For every conspiracy, there is an equal and opposite conspiracy, which is even deeper, and then there's an equal and opposite one. The iceberg never stops. It just comes out the other side of the planet, and that's the tip of the other side of the iceberg.

Starting point is 02:17:28 So, yeah, this endless auriboros of just looking at uncertainty and information. and yeah, I think I'm certainly feeling, I'm feeling detour, I'm feeling somewhat solved after getting in touch with something that's got a bit more firm foundations. And this is what you've got to think is so appealing to a person like Alcinous maybe or a person like Odysseus or a guy like Julius Caesar

Starting point is 02:17:58 about a great story like that because they've just got information coming in them and decisions to make and all the time. And a long narrative is a way of as a way of slowing down your brain and reflecting. But it's not just entertainment. It has something useful in there, that narrative structure. We're like programs to ingest and process information in that way

Starting point is 02:18:26 much more effectively in long form when it's put into a story. Yeah. Because we can remember. it and we can actually store that framework of here's what happened with Odysseus and then we can draw lessons out of it years and years later that that we need because we have that that archetypal narrative within us. I think this is one of the reasons why an oral culture like the Greeks spent so much time on these kinds of stories that about heroes, about somebody to emulate. And mind you, they're not they're not simplistic. I mean like the Odyssey does.

Starting point is 02:19:04 He doesn't, you know, he makes a lot of mistakes. You can debate about his actions. The Greeks would debate about his actions. I mean, a lot of the later Greeks thought he was a bad guy. He was, he was a liar. He's a cheater. A lot of the later Greeks thought he was the greatest hero. I mean, there's, it admits of debate.

Starting point is 02:19:22 And if you brought back real hero stories that didn't always have them having a meth addict addiction on the side or, you know, banging their secretary. in secret, you could still have complexity. You don't have to undermine everybody with a kind of secret mob story or a very open mob story. I think we need more of that to get through what we're facing, a lot of us at least. Alex Petkis, ladies and gentlemen,

Starting point is 02:19:49 dude, you're the best. Where should people go to check out all the amazing things you do? Cost of Glory podcasts, available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, at Cost of Glory on X, cost of glory.com. Cost of glory, cost of glory. Pretty easy to find. feel it for me. Dude, until next time. Let's come up with something else to talk about.

Starting point is 02:20:07 Do it. All right. Goodbye, my beauties. See you next time. Dude. Yeah. Fucking the man. Oh, God. Hey, y'all. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair.

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

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