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.
There's the theme of returning to your home, sacrificing on behalf of the community.
One of the things that I think is really timely about the Odyssey, and I don't really know how much...
The movie'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.
Yeah.
Who wrote it?
So Homer is the short answer.
Who's Homer?
Homer is the author, according to the Greeks, of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
These two poems that, you know, modern scholars will kind of quibble about.
Was it one guy?
Was it two guys?
Was it a whole kind of
Crowd of men working or people working in this tradition.
And we can get into that a little bit, but essentially Homer is the attributed author who is
This semi, semi, a very blessed epic bard.
He's, he's an epic poet.
And this is a really special type for the Greeks.
The, the epic poet is, um, I mean, there are other poets that sing other kinds of songs and poetry and song are very aligned in, in the, in the Greek mind.
And there's a lot of interesting reasons for that.
But, um,
He's traditionally conceived of as this blind bard who lived maybe in the 8th century BC.
The fascinating thing for me about the Iliad and the Odyssey, which kind of, you know, are in dialogue with each other on some level, is, okay, the Greeks discover writing, right?
In the eighth 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, you know, 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 declined from that, but everybody's always...
The first album was really difficult to follow up.
Right.
It's almost like, you know, what if today we were still talking about the first movie ever made?
Nobody's ever going to top, you know, Metropolis or Nosferatu, 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, 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 together.
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 layers.
Aspects of them and um how did that happen
I think is a really interesting question
Is there any indication that this story existed before him
Is it his story
So the the backstory of this is if you look at homer and look at his language and look at the themes in it
All right, it's in Greek, but...
Greek is an Indo-European language.
All of the Indo-European languages derive from the Indo-Europeans, the steppe people from the middle Central Asia that went spread out and conquered all of these regions.
And 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 cultural inheritance, especially in northern India.
And it's the people that used to be called the Aryans and...
Now, Twitter Anons will call them Aryans.
If you look at Homer's language and themes, you can find very striking recognizable patterns in the Vedic
Epic tradition of the Mahabharata.
And there's a kind of common ancestor, a common poetic tradition, so the argument goes, and I think it's really right, that goes back thousands of years.
So Homer's stories are...
Uniquely Greek on some level, but they're also kind of developments that have been around for thousands and thousands of years of oral culture that kind of hits writing right around the 8th century.
And it's a kind of
Of thousands of years of stories.
And the stories of the Trojan War and the Greek heroes probably go back at least hundreds of years before Homer.
Is there anything else to know about Homer?
Was he blind?
Was he who people think he is?
Well...
Ancient poets, we don't know a lot about their lives, typically, the really ancient Greek ones.
And so people often, like later Greeks, would look at clues to try to figure out who these guys were.
And there's actually...
One of the reasons people think Homer is considered a blind poet is because there's actually a blind epic bard in the Odyssey that his name is Demodocus.
He appears in book eight and he seems to be a kind of Homer figure in the Odyssey itself.
In the same way as painters in the Renaissance would paint themselves into their works.
Yeah.
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 this deeper vision into the mysteries of the universe and human suffering and so forth.
All right.
Tell me about the story.
What happens?
Uh
So if i mean i want to get into the narrative uh and the details but you know the story's pretty simple
Uh there's a back story
You might you might have heard the trojan war
Um that happens before the poem begins in the in the poem's chronology but you know
10 years of war at Troy, the cause of war was Helen of Troy or Helen of Sparta was seduced by this
Playboy Trojan prince, Paris, and he spirited her way to Troy, stole her away from the Greeks, Menelaus of Sparta, and the Greeks assembled this massive army to go and take her back, essentially, and get some plunder along the way.
After 10 years, they finally end up sacking and destroying the city.
And the man responsible for the victory, ultimately, in the Greek's eyes, and certainly in the eyes of the Odyssey, is Odysseus himself, because he came up with the idea of the Trojan horse.
And that was his idea.
What year was this?
So, this is, you know, maybe it happened, maybe it didn't.
I like to...
Ascribed to the school of higher naivete.
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 1200 B.C.,
Okay roughly so there's
It's a combination of maybe some real world stuff with lots of mythology trying to sort of root something in reality but then also build it out into a bigger imagination
Yeah i think it's better to think of homer as historical fiction rather than just like pure fiction
That's
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
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, 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 1200 bc right yeah and and it the odyssey is kind of a sequel to the iliad which is a longer somewhat longer poem and uh
This is a story about what happens at Troy itself.
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 Iliad, well, 10 years, I guess, 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...
It's Odysseus.
Yeah, obviously it's Achilles because whenever Achilles is there, the Greeks win, win, win, win, win.
And whenever Achilles, you know, is 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?
Did he 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, in the kind of vigor of maybe he's 35 and...
You know, hanging around guys like you see in the Iliad, warriors, I mean, seeing spears go in and out of faces and just incredibly gruesome stuff.
That you see in the Iliad and 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 kind of, if it's a poem by an old man,
It's also written for a wider audience.
I think this has a lot to do with its appeal today, too, and kind of in 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.
And there's also women much more, you know, explored in depth in the Odyssey.
So...
I don't know if that answers the question.
That's the background.
That's how we arrive at the beginning of it.
Yeah, yeah.
So all the Trojan War has ended.
Odysseus has some trouble getting home.
It's actually 20 years after the Trojan War started.
When the Odyssey timeline begins.
And we learn in the first hundred lines or so of the Odyssey that
Odysseus 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 for a variety of reasons.
Many of which are his own faults, many of which may be 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 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 then everybody at home back in his homeland, which is an island called Ithaca,
Is wondering where he is.
Did he die?
He didn't die at Troy.
The stories about the Trojan War are circulating in the world of the poem.
People know something of what happened.
But there's no news of Odysseus.
What happened?
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 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.
And the ethiopians
The ethiopians yeah yeah good hang
Okay that's news
That's news to me
Read herodotus
There's many details
You know were they northern were they southern who knows
But they were fun and and and they're far so
So poseidon's distracted and then athena says all right we can we're going to do something about odysseus
Now athena is kind of
Odysseus' divine champion.
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.
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, Odysseus gets released from the island by the gods' will.
Telemachus...
His son is sent on this kind of vision quest, rite 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 like...
Skip all of the not A-plus interesting parts of the Odyssey and just get to the famous monsters and adventures, you can go to book nine 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.
Then there's four books about Odysseus getting from Calypso's Island to this sort of intermediary destination, Skaria.
It's called the Phaeacians 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 has arisen at home, which we haven't treated yet, which is that his house is infested with suitors trying to woo his wife away, trying to steal his wife away.
50% of the book is love Island, 50, the original love Island.
Yeah.
The Lotus eaters love Island sirens.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
The fiatians.
Yeah.
There's a lot of, there's a lot of kind of sexual tension.
Okay.
Okay.
Uh, especially, you know, Odysseus with the fiatian, which we should get to.
Okay.
So what's the, what's the rite of passage thing?
Yeah, so it's good to start with Telemachus probably.
So 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 he's five.
Why is this fucking idiot son in this story so much?
He's a weak little...
But that's kind of the point, you know?
Telemachus is stuck there at home.
How old is he?
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 world of women, you know, his mom and the maid servants who were very loyal.
And, you know, there's loyal servants of Odysseus here and there, but Telemachus' grandfather is kind of...
Too old to do anything, and he's kind of shattered by Odysseus' absence.
So 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?
That's a good question.
So, Penelope is her name, famously.
She's, um...
Right.
I mean, late 30s at the youngest, maybe early 40s.
I mean, why is she the most desirable catch in all of Greece?
I think it's, I mean, obviously like women can be very attractive and alluring at that age, but you know, for 108 eligible, young, rich bachelors to come and try to love Island.
Yeah.
It's closer to Bonnie blue than love Island, but yeah, that's, that's the counter example.
You know, you're always supposed to, you know,
How could this go wrong?
And he has a lot of options, right?
So I think she's desirable.
She's very smart and well-bred, blah, blah, blah.
But the real reason I think she's desirable is, you know, it's like mimetic desire.
It's kind of the Girardian.
Fucking knew you were going to say that.
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.
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Is there a mirroring of Helen of Troy being so very desirable, being whisked away, being stolen, and now this is a new version of the same, a similar kind of tension?
Yeah, totally.
I mean, that's kind of the story that there's all these, like, Homer lays out all these kind of other versions of...
Women making different choices to sort of highlight what Penelope could do if, if she goes off track and why it's unheard of.
No, no.
And, and, uh, you know, there's a story that, that he, um, well, we'll get to in a moment that all the kind of, you know,
Gruesome counter examples.
Um, so, so it is this mimetic thing.
I think that's, 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?
Like 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,
The timu odysseus timu odysseus timu yeah like the chinese knockoff yes of odysseus right and uh they're like hey she goes i've got the i don't need your like huawei phone i've got
Yeah.
Yeah.
And she's like, Oh, they're like, Oh sweetie, iPhones are dead.
And you know, they're never coming back.
You got to, you know, it's just backward.
It's backward.
I believe, I believe.
Um, so, so, uh, I think that's why it's, she doesn't want it to have anything to do with any of any of them, but she's kind of wondering like,
Is he actually ever coming back?
So there's a kind of dramatic tension there.
What's that like for the son to be around this situation?
Well, you know, the Sutras have been there for like four years.
They haven't been there the whole time.
But, you know, he was 16 maybe when they came.
And he's far outnumbered.
He doesn't feel like he's in control of his own house.
And in fact, it's kind of anarchy.
Like anarchy, you know, when the patriarchy is removed, you know, Penelope doesn't just like suddenly step in and become the man of the house.
It doesn't work like that, in Greece at least.
It's 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.
And this is exactly where Athena comes in to try to
Twist the situation so um she comes down herself zeus sends hermes to go and sort out odysseus with calypso but athena comes herself in disguise as as a man mentees she takes on this you know um
Alter ego and shows up at Telemachus' house, at Odysseus' house one day.
And 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 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 them out of house and home, eating Telemachus out of house and home.
They're being bad guests and they're not being good hosts.
They're not acting like they own the place on all these levels.
So when 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 pas.
And 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 the situation.
She's like, you know,
My boy, have you heard of the story of what Orestes did?
And Telemachus says, no, tell me.
Well, Orestes was the son of Agamemnon.
Agamemnon was the king of the Greeks, the leader of the Greeks at Troy, the 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 lovely wife, Clytemnestra.
And then they rule Argos in his absence for a few years and then Orestes, his son, sneaks back in and murders them both.
Murders his own mother and his uncle and takes back Argos for the bloodline of Agamemnon.
And Athena says, you might have to do just such a thing with these suitors.
So she's trying to stir him up by this example of, you know... Is she trying to create a rift between him and his mother?
I don't think that's what's going on.
You could have read it in that way using that example, right?
Yeah, but it does kind of point to the issue of, hey, you know...
Your mom has her own mind, and she could go astray.
Like, you have to be the man in the situation no matter what.
And you have to be dangerous.
You have to become a man of violence, potentially.
You have to be able to scare these guys.
Okay, so Athena's come in to cockblock 108 suitors.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And get Telemachus to man up, finally, and go on his quest.
And basically, she says, here's what you got to do.
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' 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 this.
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 Nestor tells Telemachus about...
Gives some more details about Agamemnon, actually, which is interesting for...
For the bigger plot.
So when Agamemnon left to go to Troy, he left, his wife was really good when he left.
Clytemnestra was a wise woman.
She's well-born.
She was actually the sister of Helen, who also started off good, you know?
This is kind of the threat.
Good women can go wrong if the circumstances are wrong.
What did he do to keep her on the straight and narrow?
He left a bard there to look after her.
So Agamemnon kind of left a Homer there
With his wife, Clytemnestra, to tell her improving stories and tell her stories of what goes wrong when women behave badly or whatever it is.
But, you know, the poet is sort of seen as this upholder of the moral order.
Slightly self-serving by Homer, though.
You know, you might think of it as pro-Bard propaganda.
I think that would be fair.
But it is not just Homer that thinks this.
This is a very deep Greek idea that, you know, you could see it in Plato.
You could see it in the tragedians.
And it's like the poets are kind of, especially in an oral culture context,
Poets are the ones who remember the things that need to be passed down from generation to generation.
They have a lot of moral credibility if they're good ones and they can be bad ones too.
Basically, Aegisthus, Agamemnon's cousin,
Knew that he couldn't get to Clytemnestra.
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 sends him off to a desert island.
And then Clytemnestra was morally defenseless.
And that's when Aegisthus swooped in and seduced her because the poet was away.
So yeah, I think this really does match how the Greeks would have thought of like...
Why you need epic poetry.
It's like, it is actually a kind of moral pillar of society.
So anyway, he, you know,
Nestor says, that's all I know, but Menelaus is alive.
Go talk to Menelaus.
Maybe he knows more.
I know another Greek hero from Troy.
Telemachus goes talk to Menelaus, and he actually meets Helen of Troy.
She's back to being Helen of Sparta at this point.
She's, you know, she's come back and... Repatriated.
Repatriated, yeah.
Returned to a rightful owner.
So...
Uh yeah and helen it's a really interesting interaction with helen she's still kind of she's kind of chastened uh you know she's she's become a matriarch instead of a maiden
But she still kind of got that spooky allure femme fatale charm.
She gives Telemachus, she slips some kind of drug into his drink at one point.
So he can enjoy himself better at this party that they're at.
They're throwing a big feast when he arrives, marrying off their, uh, Menelaus' two kids, and they start to tell stories, and, um, 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, uh, I think it's symbolic of, you know,
The power of the female charms over a man.
Helen of Troy not showering herself in glory across these two books.
Fact.
Definitely rolling some dice into the fray.
And the interesting thing, too, is she...
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 guest before you ask them who they are.
Only after you've fed them and given them a nice robe to wear or whatever, then do you ask them who they are.
But Helen recognizes Telemachus immediately and she says,
If I'm not mistaken, you are the son of Odysseus, who Odysseus left as a tiny infant when the Greeks all came to Troy to take me back, the shameless one.
And the Greek there actually says,
It could be translated as shameless bitch.
Kunops is the Greek word.
It means dog face.
It's a very rude thing.
She calls herself, you know, a bitch or something.
Like, she kind of insults herself.
And it's...
It's really disarming, I think.
Emily Wilson translated that line as something like,
They came to take me back the one who hounded them or something.
So the hound is kind of an allusion to the dog piece, but it kind of softens the fact that Helen is really kind of- Slightly more flattering.
Yeah, 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 and that's the first thing she names and she's like...
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.
There's a little bit of tension between the two of them.
It's a really interesting scene in 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, you know, 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.
You know, he acts very tactfully.
He's pious.
And, you know, they're always...
In this trip, the houses that he meets are all these well-ordered households.
There's this great contrast with the chaos at home.
And one of the things that signals that they're well-ordered is there's 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.
It's a sign.
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, 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.
Okay.
And is that the end of this rite of passage?
Yeah.
So that's basically the end.
Menelaus invites Telemachus to stay as long as he wants.
And Telemachus says...
I got to get back.
You've been very kind.
I could stay here a whole year.
It's so nice.
Middle East is like one of the richest Greeks.
Thanks for drugging me.
Yes.
I've had a really good time.
Let me tell you.
Yep.
But I got to get back to... Menelaus offers him these horses.
It's like really nice.
It's like offering a kid a Ferrari, you know?
And Telemachus 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
And take on the challenge and like suffer 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, 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.
They deserve everything that's coming to them.
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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...
The Odyssey is about the clash between order and entropy and sort of dissolution of complex societies into kind of barbaric or animal, you know,
Soup and the suitors kind of represent those forces of violence and turmoil and primordial soup out of which order needs to be established sometimes violently.
And that's justice, that's importantly.
To establish that is about justice.
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 man.
Divine goddess who uh he's
He's washed up ashore on her island and she offered him hospitality and basically they've been sleeping together for the past eight years
Okay but Odysseus points out never did they win the heart within me
So it was kind of my penis but not my heart
Yeah yeah it was just sex baby you know
And I...
Homer seems to take this as an acceptable explanation.
We're going to darken the environment appropriately.
It's about to get spooky.
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 and he's just stunned.
It's so beautiful.
It's just lush fruit trees and pleasant breeze and verdant and perfect.
Not too hot, not too cold.
It's not like Houston humid.
It's just like, uh...
So what people are saying, it's like Hermes arrives and he goes, I'm so glad I'm not in fucking Houston.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Houston is humid, but there's no place sweeter than one's homeland.
So 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, forget about your son, just stay with me forever.
I will make you immortal.
And not just immortal, you'll be young and beautiful the rest of your years.
Sometimes goddesses forget to promise the whole youth thing.
There's a bad story about this happening with this guy, Tithonus, who the goddess Dawn, Eos,
Managed to get it arranged so that he would be immortal, but forgot to ask Zeus that he would be made youthful forever.
And so he just gets older and older and older.
Just decrepit.
And never dies, and he kind of shrinks to a little bug.
Always got to read the small print.
Yeah.
Right.
And, uh, you know, you never know when you make a deal with a goddess, like there, there might be some loophole that screws you over.
Okay.
It doesn't always, it's not always bad.
Hermes arrives.
It's real nice.
Uh, Odysseus has been piping Calypso for ages.
Yeah.
Unwillingly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm sure.
Um,
But Hermes says, you got to let him go.
And Calypso hymns and haws, this is not fair.
He's my boy, toy.
But she says, all right, I'll help him get out of here.
Is Calypso like a god, she says?
So she's a nymph, which is a divine.
Yeah, she's a goddess, basically.
Sort of lesser divinity.
Right.
And to all accounts, very beautiful.
I mean, she goes to Odysseus after Hermes gives her the bad news and she says, all right, well, I have to let you go.
Zeus told me I have to let you go.
But you don't actually have to go.
We could still do the whole immortality thing.
I mean, what 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, but I miss my homeland.
I miss my wife and my kid.
And she essentially says,
She's promising him something that, like, why is this unsatisfying?
It's kind of like your island vacation.
It lasts a week.
It's nice.
I needed that.
All right, time to get back to work.
But what if the island vacation lasts weeks and weeks and months?
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 particularly pointed for Odysseus.
In the story, Homer gives these people epithets.
He's like,
Recurring adjectives that describe them in the poetry.
Odysseus is many-turned, polytropos.
He is much, many-crafted, very crafty, polymetus.
He is also much-suffering or much-enduring, polytlos.
So all of the things that kind of make Odysseus what he is
That he's crafty, that he's, um, that he's well-traveled, that he's, uh, that he endures and endures and it's just kind of what makes him special and what makes him who he is.
It's like, makes up his identity.
None of that would be true if he stayed on that island.
He would kind of, it would be kind of like a loss of identity.
I see why it's not appealing.
Um...
But she, you know, she says, I'll help you go here.
She goes to her tool shed.
Chick 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 ax, whatever you need to make a vote.
And she says, all right, here are the tools.
There are the trees.
Crack on.
You're on your own.
So he has to make his own raft.
He's here on his own.
Yeah.
Completely on his own.
Totally.
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 both.
But they're all gone.
You know.
12 ships, I think, is what he took to Troy.
So a lot of guys dead.
And he has to make his own boat.
And that's a really interesting symbolic moment there.
So Odysseus is, we talked about Athena being his patron goddess.
Athena is the god of craft.
She's a kind of warrior goddess.
She's a virgin goddess.
She's depicted with a spear and a helmet.
But she's a warrior goddess in the sense that sometimes you need to win wars through trickery and craft.
She is also the goddess of weaving.
She's goddess of the olive.
Olive tree is a very domestic tree.
You have to plant it and wait many years before it ever gives you anything worthwhile.
And the older and older it gets, the more and more olives it makes.
And so this is the sign of civilization.
Athena is this 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.
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 Odysseus 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.
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?
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 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.
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' raft with a storm and Odysseus eventually has to swim to sea, swim to shore.
Calypso gave him all of these
You know, fine, luxurious robes as 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.
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 so he, you know, has to come up with a 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...
He has to really use women's agency to get him what he needs next, to get home, to accomplish his goal.
And the first girl, 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 Sika.
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 branch in front of his private parts to have a little bit of dignity.
And, you know, approaches these girls and all of them just like scream and run away because he looks horrific.
I mean, he probably looks like Tom Hanks from 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.
Yep.
Ravage us.
Oh, please, no.
Mr.
Seaman, don't savage me.
And that is an aspect of it.
There's this kind of like tension.
So all the girls run away except...
The princess.
Now, Sekaha is like, she's taller than the rest.
She's more attractive than the rest.
She's clearly braver than the rest.
And she's just standing there waiting for him to explain himself.
And she's 20-ish, Homer tells us.
And he kind of builds up to this.
She went down to the coast thinking about marriage, with marriage on her mind.
She wants to clean some clothes and look nice and sort of make an appearance around town and see if...
See if any of the young men want to, you know, make a pass at her.
She's 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 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 he's kind of 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 immortal and may you find a great husband, you know, kind of playing on the tension a little bit.
And could you please get me a towel 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 kind of, you know,
Luring her in a little bit.
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 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.
She actually...
You know, her handmaidens like give him some actual clothes and some oil to rub himself.
He takes a bath in the river.
So he looks a little better, less like a, you know, wild seaman.
And he sneaks in and he 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.
Please, I supplicate you as 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.
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.
It just gives you a sense of, this is what he's famous for, right?
Persuasion.
But if he had screwed it up with the princess, if he had screwed it up with her mother,
He could have lost his head, basically.
If he had offended them 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.
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.
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...
All the special people from the town.
And that's where he tells his story eventually, at that party.
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A lot of shrewdness that being upheld like the the canniness of athena to be able to work around the issues of poseidon of odysseus being able to leave in a uh
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.
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...
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 home back.
So...
Yeah, it's, this is, he is a hero who can't use violence
In his great arc, a little bit of violence, but mostly it's, it's like trickery and, um, in places where you just, you just vastly out, out, outmatched in force.
Um, um,
So there's this, this is the moment actually when he's at this party at the Phaeacians house where we meet Demodocus, the blind bard.
So there's some athletic games, you know, the Phaeacians challenge him to,
Show his stuff, and he's like, no, just leave me alone.
I'm tired.
I was 20 days at sea.
And they're like, oh, come on.
You probably can't even throw a discus.
He's like, all right.
Punks and he stands up and he, he chucks this giant discus way bigger than any of the other discuses way further than any other kids.
And he, he shows them up.
But then, um, after the meal, they're relaxing and listening to the bar at Phemius.
He tells a few stories, some of them famous.
He tells a story of Ares and Aphrodite, uh, Ares, you know,
Stealing hephaestus's wife away and he's very pregnant sort of tales of what goes wrong when the husband is away putting that fear in your mind like what is going to happen
But then after the last story odysseus himself
Asks the bard, Demodocus, to tell the story of the Trojan horse.
And nobody knows who he is yet.
They still don't know.
And Demodocus tells the story.
And you know, everybody knows it, but
The Greeks build a horse.
They put a bunch of 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 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 the 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.
Mm-hmm.
So it's almost like he's weeping like the victims of the tragedy he inflicted upon Troy.
A very kind of poignant moment.
Does that mean that he's sort of having sympathy for the people that he destroyed at Troy?
And Homer kind of leaves it open.
But Alcinous can tell the king.
Yeah, you know, maybe that's enough epic poetry for tonight.
Our guest is very tired.
He can see himself.
Hysterical.
Yeah.
So...
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.
He's basically let...
He's allowed to be Homer for four books, just narrating these amazing tales.
Filleting 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 there's a moment, there's a pause in the storytelling, it's book 11, where everybody's just like, you know, gawking, jaws dropped.
And he's enchanted the room, just like Homer enchants the room.
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 most dear to them, blah, blah, blah.
And then he tells the story of right after they left Troy, what happened on the return journey.
And, you know, some of the familiar faces appear now.
They try to have a cattle raid on Troy.
These Thracians kick Cone ace and it goes well for awhile.
And then the Thracians invite their friends and, you know, basically
Slaughter and chase all the Greeks back to their ships.
And Odysseus has to kind of run tail between his legs back to his ships and they, they go on.
So it's the first sign that things aren't, aren't going to go perfectly.
Um, and then they, they meet the Lotus eaters.
That's the next people they meet.
Um, very, very tempting, uh,
Um, a very, a very tempting spot, you know, British podcasters who just talk about culture issue all, all day.
But, uh, no, the Lotus eaters are basically like potheads, I think.
And, um, the, the Lotus flower just makes you want to forget your return journey home and just sit and eat Lotus until you die.
Uh,
Kind of like opium or they were aware of opium.
And then the next monster they meet, 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, that's like the, the grand, I think that one of the, the best, the best stories of, of this whole journey that brings all, a lot of these themes to, to the fore.
Um, why?
Well, okay.
Cyclopses are – Emily Wilson translates cyclopses a couple places in her translation as cyclopean people.
Like they're – Like people of color.
Temporarily afflicted with being one-eyed monsters.
I don't know.
Her, her take is a very DEI approach to a story from 3000 years ago.
Yeah.
I know Emily, she's, she's a good scholar.
She's, she's good to her people, but I, I like to take some pot shots at her translations.
Cause I mean, like her take would be the Cyclopses are kind of, uh,
You know, Odysseus is this Greek colonizer and he's looking at everything through the kind of, you know, Greek man colonizer lens.
And then all these people that he meets are just, they're just like people.
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 cyclops yeah yeah all right um but uh and he plays his trick on the cyclops you know he goes and they go in the cave and
Um, the Cyclops, uh, eats, eats some of his men and traps, traps Odysseus and his men with this big rock.
So you're watching the, you're watching the troops of Odysseus dwindle after each different round after round.
And I think the Cyclops is,
Story is really interesting because the way that uh odysseus describes it is they are um they they live in little uh family units
They do not care about the gods they they think zeus is a chump and um 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.
Yeah.
This makes them underestimate the power of trickery.
They're not coordinated.
They're not unified.
Yeah, exactly.
So the Cyclops himself, Polyphemus, is the one that Odysseus faces.
He had actually heard a prophecy that someday some man named Odysseus would come and blind him.
After he gets blinded, he tells the story and he's raging.
He said, 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.
So he was not on guard for craft.
They're men of force.
Again, this is this binary of like force and wildness versus cleverness and civilization.
And Odysseus tricks him, you know, after they're trapped in the cave and Cyclops is kind of gradually eating the men that Odysseus brought with him and making him watch.
Odysseus gives him some wine, some really good wine.
And...
The Cyclops just doesn't have the cultural antibodies of moderation, you know?
And he just...
It's like giving whiskey to the Native Americans or whatever.
That's 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 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 yeah congratulations
Passes out drunk and meanwhile Odysseus has made this this spear or this kind of like stake a six foot stake that he's
He's carved while the Cyclops was away tending his sheep and hardened with the points and the fire
It's a very kind of like technological sort of
Act too kind of like building the ship yeah more craft yeah more craft
And you know they stab him when he's drunk in the eye and he's blinded and um
So you know moving on that's how he defeats the cyclops craft and oh and of course that's how he gets cursed in the first place because
Makes the mistake as they're kind of sailing away from the cyclops's island
The cyclops is foaming at the mouth and raging at them
Where are they
Where are they um
Odysseus says uh
Well he told him i should have probably mentioned the famous trick
Uh when he introduces himself he says my name is nobody
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.
Nobody is just 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 ootis.
Nobody is ootis.
But if you put the no in an if clause, so the other cyclopses respond, if nobody is killing you, then the oo, the negative, changes to a may.
So it's if maytis 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 like way of saying trickery killed him and not violence or trickery, you know,
Blasted his double on
Yeah yeah how'd he get cursed uh
So yeah he gets cursed by uh basically giving the cyclops his name
He says if anybody asked you how you got blinded tell them
Odysseus did it
And polyphemus says oh i knew it i knew it
And then he says father poseidon
And Theseus is like, what?
Father Poseidon?
Poseidon is the father of Polyphemus, the Cyclops.
Little did he know- Oh, he fucked up his son.
Little did he know-
That he was blinding the son of the sea god Poseidon.
And so Polyphemus curses him.
May he never get home, or may he have a really, really, really, really hard time and lose all of his companions.
And Poseidon listened, and that's what happened.
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This is locked in on him still telling the story so everybody sat around yeah mouths open
Yeah holy shit this is an epic story yeah and um
Time is a
I mean yeah this is only one of the is like a fourth of the way through his long storytelling
So it's it's really an epic narrative
Yeah uh maybe a couple more episodes are worth kind of highlighting
So um eventually they make their way their way to this other island cersei's island and here's another strained woman that he has to deal with
Cersei is a divine witch goddess, sort of like Calypso style, but a little bit more kind of dangerous or dark.
And...
The Odysseus sends his men into the island.
They see smoke coming up from this hut and he sends his men in.
He waits at the ships.
The men go, they find this hut in this clearing and there are wolves and lions just prowling around like tame animals.
Strange and then there's this you know enchanting lady bustling around her hut singing these strange songs oh she sees them oh gentlemen please right this way and they go and um
Accept her hospitality.
She feeds them and she whacks them all in the head with a magic wand and turns them into pigs.
So one of the men escapes as a pig, as a human, right?
He doesn't go in.
All the other guys are pigs.
He just hustles back to Odysseus.
Tells them what happened.
Fucked in there.
There's this chick.
She's got a wand.
All the guys are pigs.
We shouldn't go.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's, let's the nightmare party immediately.
Go, go to the ship.
Yeah.
This is like almost as bad as that Cyclops guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this happens a few times on the journey.
People are like, please, Odysseus, can we just leave?
He's like, no, I just want to see what might be in store for us here.
Maybe they want to give me a present.
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
She's going to turn you into a pig stop and let me let me help you and he pulls out of the ground this root
And it's well it's a plant with black root and a white flower he says this is moly
And
And this is not where we get the word holy moly, but if that helps you remember.
Yeah.
I know.
I looked it up.
I was like, that's too good.
No, it is too good.
But, um,
But it is, you know, famous plant.
And he tells Odysseus the nature of this plant.
It's what Homer said, the physis of this plant.
This is the physis, where we get the word physics, you know, nature in Greek.
And a lot of philosophers have made a lot about this.
We could...
We could maybe go into it, but this is the first occurrence of the word nature.
Like the idea that there is a nature, that things have natures is a sort of like, that's an idea that had to develop.
But Hermes tells him the secret of this plant and Odysseus like rubs it on himself or 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.
And then when she tries to whack him with the magic wand and turn him into a pig...
Nothing happens.
And she's like, he stands up and he draws a sword.
He's like, all right, Cersei, she gives up.
And, um, she's like, how did you, how did you avoid my magic?
And, 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.
No choice.
Take one for the team, dude.
Pipe the pig lady.
Come on now.
Man up.
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.
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 got to change them back.
And so she says, fine.
They still go to bed.
And then she changes his men back.
Odysseus puts a shift in.
Yeah.
The only people that Odysseus hasn't had sex with so far have been Cyclops.
Yeah.
As far as I can see.
Yeah.
Well, and who knows?
Because he's the one telling the story.
It's the Odysseus sex tour thus far.
Matt Damon's really got his work cut out for him.
Known the minds of many people, many men and women.
Yeah.
And so, you know, he's taking one for the team day after day after day.
And it takes about a year.
She's changed him back into men.
And, you know, look, it's a nice place, right?
They get the food and there's fun little pets to play with.
But the men are like, all right, Odysseus.
It's been a year.
You're having a good time.
This is a fine enough place, but we kind of miss our homes.
Can we get out of here?
And so he makes her help him get 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, Tiresias, who's dead.
This blind, another blind, wise person.
Who's died, famous Theban Tiresias.
And to get to him, you know, you don't go down to the underworld in the Odyssey, you go out.
And so you have to sail many days, and it's a long story short,
He sails many days, you know, it gets misty and weird, and they run aground
Finally on this strange land, and he has to do this right, dig a trench with his sword and put honey and milk and barley, and he has to sacrifice some lambs, drain their blood out into the hole.
And then the ghosts of the dead come.
So like you go out and then the underworld comes to you.
And I think this is one of the best scenes in the whole book.
But, you know, all of these wraiths come, these like gibbering wraiths, and they're not intelligible.
And they're kind of, they're not like, they're not like souls, like your full identity is there.
They're sort of, I don't know, insubstantial remnants of people, you might say, consciousness.
But to basically to get them to speak to him, he has to let them drink this, you know, concoction in the ditch, which includes blood.
So they get blood and they kind of have a little moment of liveliness so they can actually speak face to face to Odysseus.
Mm-hmm.
And the first one he talked, well, the first one he talks to is this guy, Elpenor, who fell off the roof and died.
And Odysseus, will you bury me?
Yes.
All right, next.
Then he talks to Tiresias.
Tiresias tells him, 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 of the cows of the sun, you're going to get blasted and die.
So it's going to take more kind of restraint to get home.
And he says also, you know, 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.
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.
Which I think is important for Homer somehow, that the knowledge that
Uphold civilization includes this kind of metaphysical stuff, weird afterlife stuff.
That's my read at least.
And then I think one of the most interesting things that is not often pointed out, the first group of the dead, so he meets, while he's down there, he meets the Ghost of Achilles, Ghost of Agamemnon, Hercules, a few other guys.
But the first people that he meets are not these heroes, these famous heroes from the Iliad.
It's these famous women.
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 intellectually capacious man.
He wants to know everything.
He's that kind of guy.
And all of these women come and they tell him the stories of their sons or their fathers, their brothers.
They...
They kind of tell him about these heroes that he wouldn't otherwise have access to.
And, you know, I had a friend pass away a long time ago.
He was a little older than me, and he was kind of a mentor.
And after he died, I think this moment kind of helped me realize this.
After he died,
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'd never really understood why he was so impressive or what he had to go through.
And I think that this is kind of about how women fit into the story of the making of a hero, 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 and the Odyssey, where Homer kind of poses the question, what is worth striving after?
Achilles died young.
He traded a long life for eternal glory.
He faced that choice in the Iliad and he made his choice.
And the Iliad says that was the right choice.
But when Odysseus meets the ghost of Achilles, he says, wow, 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, 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.
I would rather be a hired slave
Servant uh lowest status person on earth then be king of the dead so it's what does that mean achilles is telling him maybe maybe glory isn't all that it's cracked up to be maybe odysseus got
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, 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, this great, brilliant, glamorous warrior from the Iliad,
What he cares about in death is his family.
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, is that really permanence?
Or is permanence sort of the biological continuation of the household?
Odysseus is maybe the greatest hero because he manages to get both of them.
Which requires cunning and craft and 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, Scylla and Charybdis.
They finally meet the cattle of the sun and Odysseus falls asleep.
Uh at some you know a god put sleep upon him maybe it was faded and while he's asleep his men sacrifice and eat all the cattle of the sun and uh but he doesn't
He doesn't eat of the the cursed beef
Did he warn the men
Yes yes he warned them again and again and they said
I would rather, one of his leaders of his men says, Odysseus is asleep.
He's been lying to us this whole time about this and that.
But maybe he's telling the truth about the cows.
Look, I'd rather eat and die than starve, waste away,
Like we're gonna die anyway
We might as well have a good time while we do it
Uh so as soon as they eat the the cows the winds start to blow
They get stuck on this island
That's why they get hungrier and hungrier
As soon as they eat the cows the winds start to blow and you know they get on the ship
Lightning bolt, they all die.
Odysseus grabs a board and kind of floats to Calypso's island.
And then he ends his story and the Phaeacians say, wow, okay.
Um, so will you be packing soon?
Let's get you off to your, to your homeland.
And they send them off on, on a ship back to, back to, back to Ithaca.
How easy is the journey?
That journey is incredibly easy.
He sleeps the whole time.
He, they put him down on the, on the boat.
He falls asleep.
They get all the way to Ithaca.
They take him off the boat.
He's still asleep.
They stick him on the shore and they stick, they loaded him up with gifts.
They stick all the gifts there on the shore and, you know, he wakes up and they're gone.
He's like, wow, those bastards, they left me on a, what island is this?
This doesn't look like my home.
But eventually it turns out that it is Ithaca that they left him on.
It's like he fast traveled in a computer game.
Yeah.
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...
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 Phaeacians 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.
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 Shangri-La.
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.
Good, good, you know, great catch.
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... Cersei's a sort of
Maybe serving that wise counselor role.
Maybe Tiresias is.
There's a catabasis, the descent.
He's come out with the knowledge that he needs to get back.
So he's basically about to face the final boss.
Mm-hmm.
And it's a very long facing of the final boss.
I mean, we're only halfway through the book at this point.
It is 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 stratagems that he's been sort of
Developing through his sufferings.
Because there's 108 suitors in the house.
He has no idea if anybody of his servants are still loyal.
He has no idea if one of these guys maybe has seduced his wife and they're going to
She's going to play real nice.
And when he gets home and then they're going to stab him in his bed.
Yeah.
Agamemnon.
Right.
Um, when does he meet his son?
So he, Odysseus makes his way to the swineherds hut.
Eumaeus, he's a, you know, pig, pig tender, um,
And, uh, one of Odysseus' slaves, but like, uh, treated him really well.
Loved Odysseus, did Eumaeus.
And, uh, he, you know, offers him hospitality.
You know, the suitors took all the big fat pigs, but I can give you a little
A little kind of porker and we'll have a nice meal.
You know, he hosts him for a few days and Odysseus doesn't tell him who he is.
He spins this kind of cock and bull story about, you know, getting,
Seized by Phoenicians or something.
I mean, but he's 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 actually makes his way to this very swineherd's hut.
And that's where they meet Odysseus in disguise at first.
And then Eumaeus goes to town and then while he's away, Odysseus reveals himself to his son.
So the first guy that he reveals who he is to is his son because he needs his son to help him launch a plan.
And it's like gradually he, every, you know, a couple of people find out here and there the...
Um, the nurse, your Clea figures it out and he makes her swear to not tell anybody.
And he eventually tells the swine herd right before they slaughter the suitors.
And his wife actually finds out very last funny enough.
Um,
But he goes into his palace.
How does he find out about all of the suttas?
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?
He still wants to test her.
And he does in disguise eventually.
Dressed as a beggar, you know, famously.
And 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 said all right remember you and um
And he goes around like begging for food as the suitors are all feasting and having a good time
Didn't wash their hands didn't pray before their meal of course
And he goes and he asks each of them for a little bit of a little morsel
And most of them give him a morsel.
But one of them, this guy Antinous, is one of the kind of chief suitors of the suitors.
And he says, man, get out of here.
You're just cramping my style.
You're ruining the vibe.
Eumaeus, why did you bring this beggar in here?
And Odysseus kind of...
Kind of taunts him, but very, very subtly is, Oh, you know, you, you seem like such a lordly Prince Antinous, um,
Zeus brings suffering on us all.
You know, you might be down on your luck someday, just like I'm down on my luck.
I was once like you.
And Antinous is like, shut up and leave.
And Odysseus knows what he's doing.
He's kind of needling him.
And so eventually Antinous dies.
Picks up like a footstool and he chucks it at Odysseus.
And Odysseus has just been prodding him.
He's been like riling him up, you know, very politely and very calmly.
And Antinous just hurls a bench at him.
He gets the kid to lose his cool.
And the bench just hits Odysseus and nothing happens.
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 Agamemnon or Achilles, you're going to like pick him up and throw him outside yourself.
You're not going to hurl a bench at him, right?
So he kind of prods and tests to see –
What's going on in his household so he can come up with a 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 and he's told her this tale.
Yeah.
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.
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.
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.
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 been over.
So this is a skill that he developed.
Yeah, it's a skill that he developed and he's kind of reminding himself
Uh, that the same kind of endurance that he had in Cyclops is, is also helping him tolerate all the, you know, righteous indignation that he's feeling and assholes in his house.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No biting his time, biting his time.
It's a man of much endurance, right?
It's a marathon.
And, um,
And how it eventually all kind of comes to a 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.
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?
But one of the maidservants 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- Bitch, you fucking knitting and unknitting.
Yeah.
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, 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' bow, right?
And set up these axes that whoever strings his bow, it's like a big, hard recurve bow that nobody could string but him.
And they could shoot the arrow through the ax 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 mimetic rivalry.
Like the suitors all go in and start trying to string the bow.
And none of them can even get the string on the bow.
It's just too big.
And, you know, they're just not strong enough.
And every, practically every single time they're like, oh, I failed to string the bow of Odysseus.
I do not measure up to Odysseus.
It kind of...
Underlines the fact that this was what it was all about in the first place, trying to usurp Odysseus' status, credibility, and his wife.
And then, of course,
You know, he's a beggar still.
He's like, oh, let me try it out, young lads.
And they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Beg, no, this would, no.
And they're afraid when they say this.
What if he actually 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 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 hid all the weapons and the armor.
Odysseus has had the swineherd lock the door.
He's had Eurycleia bolt the other doors.
All the women are out.
Penelope's out safe.
They're all trapped in this prison and Odysseus shoots them all down, spears them.
Hang on a second.
Yeah.
So he's closed all of the doors and now it's like, it's killing time.
It's killing time.
But it's just him.
He's not bringing his son in to do it.
So his son is there with him.
His son is there with him and he's got two other guys.
There's basically four of them on 108.
Uh, which, you know, it's, it's the goat herd and this, um, is it a cow herd?
Philoetius, one other guy, but like, you're not, not like Iliadic warriors, like just, you know, worker dudes and his two worker dudes, his son and he himself, uh,
And then all these suitors who are not entirely unarmed, but I mean, still 108 guys, you might think they could take him.
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.
Antinous, the guy who insulted him with the bench, first to get an arrow through the throat.
He's like lifting up a cup and it just doesn't suspect what's going on.
And, you know, instant death and-
And it's a bloodbath.
It really is a bloodbath.
If you've been an 18-year-old kid just waiting for the action scene, it's very satisfying.
Spears through guts and faces and such.
Yeah.
And basically they all die.
Every single one of them.
Even the ones that are arguably less guilty than the others.
There's a kind of communal guilt.
Yep.
Some people think that he took it too far.
Homer doesn't think that he took it too far.
He...
The justice of zeus was coming down upon them that's how everybody talks about it in the story uh one guy sneaks up to odysseus and grabs him by the by the knees leotes the prophet begs for his life
Odysseus, gosh, I was always trying to tell them to lay off.
I never touched your maidens.
I was always the voice of reason.
Odysseus says, well, you're a prophet.
I'm pretty sure that if you were here for four years, you prophesied many things to them about me being dead.
And maybe you prophesied to your own heart that you would walk away with my wife.
So die.
And he drives a sword through him.
It's just like, it's terrifying.
He's become, and there's a similar scene of failed mercy in the Iliad 2 where Achilles kills a young kid.
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 a bow when you could kill them with a spear.
You don't face them, you know, head on.
It's not man to man challenging them.
The bow is a kind of tricky weapon.
Paris uses the bow.
He's this unmanly playboy Trojan.
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 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.
Yeah and that's how the story ends
Well actually the story ends with all the suitors dead and um and then immediately uh you know odysseus so they they actually end up hanging the 12 maidens who were sleeping with the suitors
A couple of other people get punished but um
And they clean the place up, heap up the bodies.
And Odysseus tells them, all right, a lot of these guys' dads are...
Near nearby in the town
Some of them are off you know across the seas
We have to throw a party right now and make it sound like we're having a really good time so they don't suspect anything
So they they they start cooking up meats and they start playing music and it's really bizarre just but they're
They're basically trying to buy time
Before
Um you know people find out that there's been a slaughter of you know some of the most prominent young men on the island
Uh and my probably my favorite scene at the end is you actually get a a snapshot of them
The suitors jibbering race going down into Hades and wailing.
Agamemnon and Achilles, the ghosts of Agamemnon and Achilles just talking there, shooting the breeze.
And the suitors come down
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 kind of final moment there.
Agamemnon says...
Amazing work, Penelope.
Penelope, the wife that I didn't have, that 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 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 or 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 like intuition maybe.
Penelope was crucial to the story of the greatest hero that ever lived.
He could not have become Odysseus, the best of the Achaeans, without Penelope's help.
And it's not like Penelope gets glory and Odysseus get glory.
They both get glory because they were a unit together.
Mm.
And that's, that's kind of the Greek archetype of the matriarch of like what a good, what, what is like happiness for a woman?
It's, it's to uphold the glory of a house, of a great household in short.
But the ending is very weird.
The actual ending is like the townspeople form up a posse and Odysseus forms up a posse and they start a battle, 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 deus ex machina you know the god coming from from on high and kind of solving this unsolvable problem uh in the plot um but you know the god makes peace and then a couple of people die odysseus kills a couple guys but then the battle stops and uh
They all go home and 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 Athena.
He eventually wins over Poseidon after the timeframe of the story.
Tiresias tells him how he's going to make amends with Poseidon.
He doesn't have the favor.
There's a lot of divine forces he has to struggle with.
Sirens and Scylla and Charybdis and...
The sun god kind of spares him, Helios, 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.
Okay, he's a tricky liar, but only to his enemies.
He doesn't defraud a friend.
He's a just man.
And, you know, that's part of the lesson of the poem.
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, Hatfield 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 to... And it just never stops.
That's the kind of uncivilized, brute, like, furies justice.
But Zeus and Athena represent this kind of
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
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.
The guy I arrest, he's murdered his uncle.
He had it coming.
You know, 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.
Oh, justice.
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.
You know, there's a danger there at the end that it's going to keep spiraling and spiraling and spiraling, 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, 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 cast as this rapper, Travis Scott, I think.
I think he's from Houston.
I should know him better.
But anyway, as a bard, as Demodocus, I think maybe, maybe as Phemius.
Because, hey, Homer is oral poetry.
Rap is oral poetry.
So maybe there's something to that.
But, you know, I think that one of the differences between what we think of as like slam poetry or 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?
In the way these bars kind of- Pious.
Is it pious?
When I think rap, I don't usually think pious.
Would you have left, if you were going off to the Trojan War, would you have left your wife- My wife with Chance the Rapper.
Yes.
Yes.
Or even Bob Dylan, for that matter.
I mean, Allen Ginsberg.
Lord Byron, would you have left your wife with Lord Byron?
I mean, it's a different mindset.
But there's some parallels.
The really interesting thing about oral poetry and the oral...
Like mental model of the universe or the kind of mental universe of cultures that don't have writing.
You know, if you, if you go to an oral culture 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 because the brain has just been so trained to 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 Indian tribes, whatever, they didn't speak English.
You could say a sentence to them and 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 writing 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.
Once you have writing, it's too advantageous to ignore.
Your enemies are going to beat you if you try to
Not have a written culture
It's just so powerful
You need you know you need writing to have science and philosophy and all kinds of stuff record keeping um
But something is also lost yeah yeah something is profoundly lost this tradition of uh storytelling and um
And also like the role of the storytellers shifts.
Like, I don't know, the storyteller isn't like the pillar of society that he is in Homer.
And I think you have to understand that to understand like,
Why Homer has so much pro-bard propaganda in the Iliad, for example.
But I do think these things still matter.
The stories that we tell still really matter a lot for people's 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.
Great at partying.
Yes, which are great at partying.
So maybe there's a logic to it.
But, you know,
People complain about the Lystrogonians.
So I didn't mention, I don't think I mentioned the Lystrogonians.
This is one of these monstrous people that Homer eats.
Like after he meets the Cyclops,
Uh, there are these giant people.
They're not like super giants, but they're giant enough.
And, uh, they try to, you know, see if they can get a gift from the Lystrigonians or maybe make a little alliance and...
His men meet them and they just get eaten.
So the Lystrigonians just charge out in force and slaughter the Greeks.
They're the ones that are depicted with this sort of futuristic steel armor, plate mail armor.
People complained about that.
Oh, it's not historically accurate.
I think that it's really cool.
Even if I don't like the way that Nolan tells the story, which I don't know.
I think he's a great director.
He's...
He's filmed the whole thing on IMAX.
It's the first time it's ever been done.
It's almost three hours.
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...
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.
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 round table in new york in 10 days time but i'd already booked to go and take like the one
Digital detox week that I've ever done.
So I'd already booked this meditation retreat and I'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 manana, manana, manana 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.
Matt Damon's a legend.
I get it.
You know, when, when it happens or the media week is bad,
Precisely at the back end of when you're supposed to be doing this thing and i tossed and turned last week about it and uh just the coin fell on the side of i've made way too many sacrifices for like eight years of doing the show 1100 episodes and i was like i think it's going to be kind of a
I really hope that i don't fucking regret it
Um but
And 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 because I'll be thinking, fuck.
Like that, one of the big moments of the movie's promo could have been, or two of the big moments, right?
Tom Holland, Zendaya, would have been on the show.
I'm pretty excited for it.
It looks pretty cool.
I'm not so excited for what might end up being another culture war.
Flashpoint, you know, Nolan, the stories that he puts out are...
Controversial because of what happens inside of the movie is Inception, at the end of Inception, is he in a dream or is he in reality?
Tenet, is the guy secretly the father of the main dude or is he actually not related?
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.
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 her calling Odysseus a complicated man.
I think this is the first line of the poem.
Tell me, muse of a complicated man.
It's how she translates this.
Polytropos, many turned.
And to me, that sounds like he's a man of many issues.
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 from Troy.
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 in 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 means turn, like he could be turning around in various places, spinning about the seas.
A turn is like a trick.
There's many tricks.
Or, at least in later Greek, it's a character.
It's like a kind of...
Uh, Trump boy is like your, your character.
He could be a man of many sort of guises, many, many sort of personas that he can inhabit.
Uh, 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 this would be my main...
I wonder how Nolan's going to deal with this because... And he said something about... Homer says...
Um, lying, lying
Odysseus said to her, I will tell you the truth, my lady, you know, there is, he is a liar strategically, but I don't think that I, my sense is that Wilson suspects Homer is, is, is feels ambiguously about Odysseus.
Like,
Is he really a hero worth emulating?
What do you think Homer feels about Odysseus?
100% worth emulating.
But that doesn't mean he's perfect.
Like, you can be the greatest hero and somebody to admire, but you can also make mistakes.
But, you know, like, giving your name to the Cyclops...
Falling asleep when your comrades are at risk of opening up the bag of the winds or eating the cattle of the sun, or even being a little too curious.
Curiosity is a vice in some Greek philosophy, wanting to know too much without necessarily having an end in mind.
And this curiosity is brought up by the siren's example where he wants to know what the sirens say, plugs up his companion's ear with the wax and doesn't plug up his, but he gets himself tied to the mast.
Maybe that was...
Playing with the line, he ended up fine from it.
But I don't think that Homer questions Odysseus' values, which is civilization over barbarism, you know, order over chaos, patriarchy over anarchy.
Mm-hmm.
That doesn't seem complicated.
That part doesn't seem complicated to me.
How long has it been since we've had a movie that was a relatively simplistic hero?
I mean, the closest thing has been fucking Top Gun 2.
And like, even in that Tom Cruise is trying to do this retcon, make the son of my ex-flight partner feel okay about me.
There's this like supplanted patriarch thing that's going on where the parental figure comes back into his life and it's the redemption of the son through the retcon.
Success of the new father, which is the old father's... Like that, I guess.
I remember looking at this video essay that explained how the world of the hero is just...
Unsatisfactory anymore, for some reason has removed from movies that it's no longer enough for 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 self and their badness is...
The virtue in 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, even though he ends up being unbelievably powerful.
Fucking Captain Marvel, who's the most powerful person in the universe, appears to be fucking off just like doing bullshit all the time.
Like, why are you not?
Anyway, I...
Get the sense that that like complicated hero thing is kind of more so obviously it's in some ways is richer right because there's conflict and there's tension um 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.
Just follow me the fucking hero's journey, please.
Just follow me some Campbell shit from 12 to 12 and
Let's see, let's see how that feels in 2026.
Um, I don't want that to have to be an asterisk after, after every hero of good, but let's not forget, let's not forget when he, you know, that's, and I, I, I've got it in my head that, um,
Part of the reason what I'm doing with the show at the moment, spending time doing more stories, which you're just the fucking best at.
Your storytelling ability is like out of this world.
Learn from the best.
Also doing episodes where it's just me and the boys hanging, just chilling out, talking about what we've got going on.
More...
Storytelling from other areas of life too, like war stories and things like that from special forces guys.
A big part of that is I think people have got a degree of exhaustion with overthinking.
I think there's a big anti-optimization trend at the moment that we're feeling.
And it's not necessarily people being against
I think it's people being against the fatigue of trying to be perfect.
And that is...
At least in part, fed into by the fact that they're overwhelmed with information and they feel like there is more input than they have time to be able to metabolize it.
This line that I came up with last year that most people consume information the same way that they consume calories and too high of a dosage to be able to metabolize.
And that was great 500 years ago when there was like three books that you could read.
And almost everybody in the village couldn't read.
And maybe there wasn't a printing press.
I don't know.
That was like 1400s, I think, something like that.
Not so good now when there's an abundance.
We've gone from scarcity problem to an abundance problem.
Same thing, calorie sparse to calorie dense, information sparse to information dense.
People are sort of like, oh, fuck.
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.
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 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 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.
Um you know we had adolescence that thing on netflix that was about um young boys in the uk and
One of the reasons kind of, you know, pretty majestically that the series made such an impact was that it did not really tell you what to think.
There was a lot of question at the end.
How much was the young boy actually impacted by what he'd seen on the internet?
How much was he a disciple of the manosphere and like an incel?
How much was he to blame versus the lack of supervision that had come from his parents?
How much did the parents blame themselves?
Was this a righteous comment on overreaches of the internet or just male loneliness like both sides kind of raw shark tested 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.
What should we take away from this?
How many times do people want to find out...
Ask Nolan well is can't remember the guy that Leonardo DiCaprio is Leonardo DiCaprio's character in the dream world or is he alive
It's like in some ways that's not even Nolan's decision to make
After you get to that stage of a story it's almost on you
But
Because of the lack of conclusion, it sucks in speculation, and that's what drives a lot of the conversation about this stuff.
I just generally get the sense, and 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 this is another fucking decision I need to make or there's more like work that I've got to do.
I'm kind of exhausted by all of this stuff.
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 some problems with gas prices I hear or inflation.
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
Oh okay that I've had a bit of a reprieve isn't that nice
And I you can't iterate movies as quickly I can iterate this podcast three times a week and I have done for you know a very long time and I can lick my finger and sort of
Tell where the cultural winds are going.
And also, most of this is just me doing it for me.
I don't want to leave and feel like I've got this big laundry list of things to do.
I'm just left with interesting philosophical questions and insights about
The virtue of loyalty and justice and revenge and when you're supposed to apply aggression and when you're supposed to sit back and when you're supposed to be diplomatic and when you can be crafty and where the lying is justified in that all of that stuff's just nice.
I don't feel burdened by it.
I don't feel burdened by learning about the story of the Odyssey in the same way as I feel burdened.
If it's some very prescriptive new life direction that I need to take, and here is a huge big list of all of these things, but actually there's not that much conclusion because maybe veganism might not be the difference.
I do just fucking either.
Make it simple and direct, or just give me a little bit of chance to breathe.
And I think at the moment, at least I'm feeling in me that, uh, uh,
Motivation that I'm enjoying.
That's a sense that the tether that I'm being pulled forward through.
And, um, yeah,
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 simplicity in a lot of ways to Homer, but...
He tells the story from multiple perspectives, 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 Aeolus to Sparta to wherever, Ithaca.
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...
Of, of, of Odysseus or some people are going to see themselves in the suitors or, uh, maybe that's not a great example, but you know, some people are going to say, Hey, this is a lying bastard.
And other people are going to say, no, he did what he had to do.
And, and that's kind of, that's on you.
Like to draw out the message is
Is not so much the poet's job.
I mean, he can have his own opinion, but really his job is to help you get charmed, get disengaged, like Odysseus does for the Phaeacians, 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 autobiographize
Odysseus going to the sirens.
All right, the sirens are these divine, they're kind of like bad bards.
They're these women who sing whatever they sing and they make you just want to
Go and listen to them.
And piled up in front of the Sirens Island is just rotting bones of people who started listening and they could just never leave and they starved and died.
And I think the reason that Odysseus wants to hear is because he's this man of great curiosity.
And when they actually speak to him, Odysseus tells them,
The Phaeacians, 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 at, but you just couldn't know.
Well, we know them.
We know everything that happens on Earth.
They can give him infinite knowledge.
That, whether or not they would say the same thing to his crew, that's what they're saying to him.
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 it can give you.
What if I could find out something interesting that I could apply to my morning routine from the sirens?
And it, you know, for me, I think it's also the temptation of being an academic is one of the reasons I left academia because, well, it was one of the reasons I was in it because I had this, I just,
Tell me more, tell me more, tell me more.
I want to read more.
I want to find out the 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 bones at the feet of the sirens and never getting home and never doing what you need to do.
It's this kind of temptation of 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're, you tell yourself like,
I'm going to get some insight on, you know, what, what the Bitcoin price is going to do from this Iran thing.
And, oh, well, how can I ignore that?
Blah, blah, blah.
And it's, it's, it's all, it all seems actionable.
It's, it's, it's constructed.
It feels important.
It feels important.
It's designed to feel important because it's risen up in the algorithm.
And I think this is really speaks to a profound, um,
Inclination that people have, a temptation that people face that leads in not just to inaction, you know, but to unreflection too.
Right.
Well, certainly if you're permanently on absorb, you have very little time to do reflect.
You know, if the fire hose of new information is bukkake-ing you in the face, you don't have that much time to think about what you've already ingested, said Bonnie.
And when...
Wise sage.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The philosopher B.
Blue.
That that sense of i'm drowning in information i don't know what to do about it this was a line that i had a bill thompson this this old uh information's expert from
Worked at three-letter agencies, US Army.
He was basically the special forces cue from James Bond.
And he would help them to get to where they needed to.
He would take phones apart, do all this sort of stuff.
And I was asking him, my current working theory is not...
That most of the propaganda and most of even the information online is trying to make people convinced of any one narrative
It's to drown them in so much information that they become apathetic and they just sort of give up entirely
Now that might be that at some point in future 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, 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.
So yeah, this endless Ouroboros of just looking at
Uncertainty and information.
And, and, and, uh, yeah, I think I'm certainly feeling, I'm feeling detox.
I'm feeling somewhat salved after, after getting in touch with something that's got a bit more.
Firm foundations
So and this is what you gotta think is so appealing to a person like Alcinous maybe or a person like Odysseus or like a guy like Julius Caesar about a great story like that because they've just got information coming in them and decisions to make and all the time and a long narrative is a way of
As a way of slowing down your brain and reflecting.
It's, it's, but it's not just entertainment.
It has, it has something useful in there, that narrative structure.
You're, we're like programs to,
Ingest and process information in that way much more effectively in long form when it's put into a story 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 archetypal narrative within us.
And I think this is one of the reasons why an oral culture like the Greeks spent so much time on these kinds of stories about heroes, about somebody to emulate.
And mind you, they're not simplistic.
I mean, like the Odyssey doesn't,
Is, 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 a liar.
He's a cheater.
A lot of the later Greeks thought he was the greatest hero.
I mean, there's, it admits of debate.
And if you brought back
Real hero stories that didn't always have them having a
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.
Heck yeah.
Alex Petkus, ladies and gentlemen, dude, you're the best.
Where should people go to check out all the amazing things you do?
Cost of Glory podcast, available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, at Cost of Glory on X, costofglory.com, Cost of Glory, Cost of Glory, Cost of Glory.
Pretty easy to find, if you look for me.
Dude, until next time, let's come up with something else to talk about.
Do it.
All right.
Goodbye, my beauties.
See you next time.
Dude, yeah.
Fucking the man.
So good.
