RE-AIR: Conversations: A Man of Many Turns, Odysseus & the Odyssey w/ Joel Christensen

Happy Odyssey: a Modern Retelling Book Birthday!! This episode originally aired in May 2024 and features fan favourite Homerist, Joel Christensen. Like Liv, Joel has a new book about the Odyssey coming next month, Why Odysseus? https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-20987-0. Pre-order Liv's Odyssey adaptation (!!!), The Odyssey: a Modern Retelling. https://geni.us/TheOdysseyBook Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby. Enter ourpodcast guest https://www.mythsbaby.com/contact form if you'd like to be on the show as a conversation guest! Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liv Albert?

  Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/groups.

• 0:56Liv Albert?

  Hi, hello, welcome. This is Let's Talk About Myths, baby. I am your host Liv, here with a conversation episode. Guys, I, so, I had this conversation, firstly,

• 1:14Liv Albert?

  the conversation today is with Joel Christensen, who is always such a joy to have on the show, who was recently on to speak about Homeric Tradition and alongside the Bronze Age, that whole episode, just generally a joy. But about a year ago, we talked about having an episode dedicated to Odysseus, and how Odysseus is garbage, but like, why? And full of details. And so, it just, it didn't happen until now. And I'm honestly so glad, I'm so glad that it didn't happen until now, because I think that this is a considerably better episode, because it happened now, and I will, I will leave you all to determine what that might mean. But-

• 2:01Liv Albert?

  I don't even know. I literally just recorded it and usually I record these introductions much later. So now I'm just kind of still getting, getting my mind around everything we talked about. But generally, it's about the Odyssey broadly and how it can be read and how it has been misread and, and misappropriated by the Western world. But looking at the Greek itself and, and what these words can mean, what they're often translated as and all of this. And, and so Joel recited a lot of Greek and it was wonderful and, and just generally broke down the Odyssey in such a way that just had me with this enormous

• 2:44Liv Albert?

  smile on my face the whole time. Like, it was absolutely so fascinating to look at the Odyssey in this way and Odysseus in this way and really pull apart what is going on in the text itself, in our interpretation of it, in its lasting legacy. Just so many things. It's absolutely a joy of a conversation. And I didn't originally plan to, to release it when I'm releasing it, which is right after episode two of the, the Ion series of Euripides. But then we had this chat and I thought, nope, it's coming because it ended up fitting

• 3:26Liv Albert?

  in so well with also what I was saying in the Ion, in a just a beautiful way of very frustratingly reminding us all the ways in which these stories are timeless, absolutely, but also the ways in which the ancient Greek world has been completely misappropriated by quote unquote, Western civilization. And it just fit. It fits so well. And unfortunately, I wasn't able to, to have a conversation on the Ion, just because of how I'd been planning things and the time that I have. So this, this fits well. One day, I hope to find somebody to, to talk to me about the Ion because I still can't believe this play. It's blowing my whole mind. But for now, we're gonna look at Odysseus too, because

• 4:10Liv Albert?

  it all kind of pieces together in a really, really interesting way.

• 4:30Liv Albert?

  Conversations, a man of many turns. Odysseus and the Odyssey with Joel Christensen.

• 4:53Liv Albert?

  I have been guilty of romanticizing Odysseus too much, and I know that. So I'm happy to have somebody on the other side because he is generally a piece of shit.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. But we can start there or maybe end up there. We'll see where we go.

• 5:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that that sounds great. I'm trying to think of a good question to start it off, but like, I mean, why do you think Odysseus deserves any kind of hate? Maybe we'll just start real broad.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Why should somebody hate Odysseus?

• 5:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  So you start with the easy question. I'm not quite sure which way to answer this. So we'll start, I'll start broadly. Which is that I have a pet theory. And the pet theory is that the greatest trick Homer ever played was getting people to root for Odysseus.

• 5:40Liv Albert?

  Well, I fell for it.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  You did, right? But it's also totally, it's perverted our sense of what a hero is.

• 5:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Now, I want to edit that by saying, most people don't actually know what a hero is. We make terrible category errors in thinking that Odysseus and Achilles are people we should be looking up to. But I actually think there's something going on with Odysseus that's rather complicated. So if you'll permit me, I'd like to set up sort of the the argument about why he's terrible.

• 6:14Liv Albert?

  Can I just?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Talk about why he's not.

• 6:16Liv Albert?

  I mean, that sounds wonderful. And I just, because of the way you phrase that, I just have to say, we we need to fully start it with the first line of Emily Wilson's translation, which is, sing muse of a complicated man.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. So sing muse of a complicated man. So.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  We'll step back again though, right? I want to talk about the epithet. I want to talk about his name and I want to talk about sort of my like uneven relationship to the Odyssey.

• 6:43Liv Albert?

  Please.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  So I think, I can't remember why you first had me on your show before. It's a Homer thing, right?

• 6:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I was just talking about Homer as like a concept, so.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so, you know, I got, I've been studying Homer forever. Well, not forever, 25 years, that's long enough. And as I think I said in one of the interviews, you're traditionally either an Iliad man or an Odyssey man, and I use the word man intentionally.

• 7:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Because until like 30 years ago, it was always men. But I came to the Odyssey much later. And I came to the Odyssey from a position of teaching it again and again, and being really sort of surprised that I was total shit at teaching the Iliad, which is what I studied and wrote on. But students were constantly engaged with Odysseus's story, even though I considered it to be a lesser poem and a worse story. I don't believe either of those things now. But I just always found Odysseus to be kind of unimpressive in a way.

• 7:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  And his story to be, you know, more repetitive, less interesting, but turns out it's really just more subtle. And so, you know, when I sat down and started writing a book about the Odyssey, probably over 10 years ago, and it took me a while to get through it. And during that time, Emily Wilson's translation came out. And that choice of complicated as translating the first epithet, which I'll talk about in a minute, was one that people made a big deal about. They loved it, they hated it, you know, it reflected Greek poetic metaphors for weaving and all of those things. And I just want to say like, I like the translation.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  But there's no great translation of the epithet. The epithet is polutropos. And what it means in Greek is like the polu means many, like in polytheus, tropos means turn.

• 8:38Liv Albert?

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Right? So polutropos means a man of many turns. And you could take it different ways.

• 8:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Like, is it that he has many different features or faces? Is it that he's gone on many different journeys? Is it that he is different things? And the fact is, the right answer to that is that it's all true.

• 8:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  That Polutrapos is a loaded epithet. And if you read the Odyssey in Greek, there are like seven different polu compounds that described him. He's Polypenthes, a man of much suffering. Polu, I think, are a, so a man who's been prayed for much.

• 9:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Um, Polumekinos, a man of many devices.

• 9:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Um, but whatever it is, he's a man of muchness.

• 9:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Right?

• 9:23Liv Albert?

  Polly Polly.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's an excess in his character that I find pretty fascinating.

• 9:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  I haven't got to the Odyssey yet, but I still, I want to talk about his name for a minute.

• 9:34Liv Albert?

  Please.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  So you start out by asking, like, why do people hate Odysseus? Right? It's hardwired into his name according to the Odyssey. So one of the things that happens at the beginning of the Odyssey is, you know, it starts out and the gods are looking down and it's, look at the story of Agistus, right? The guy who helped Clytemnestra kill Agamemnon, Agamemnon's cousin. And while they're looking at it, Athena, like eventually pokes Zeus.

• 10:02Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  And is like, what the hell is going on with Odysseus? What are we doing with him?

• 10:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  And she says, why do you hate him so much? And the word she uses is odousao, which is a verbal form of his, the root of his name. So his name is related, according to the Odyssey, to a verb odusamai, which means to be hated or to be hateful.

• 10:27Liv Albert?

  Like, like Odious, yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 10:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Right? And, and it's unclear whether this is someone who hates or is hated or both.

• 10:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Right? And again, because it's Greek poetry, it's probably all fair game.

• 10:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Right? And so his name, and, and this is, this wordplay happens in Sophocles and Euripides, playing with the idea that he's someone who is hated for various reasons. Right? And so the thing about Odysseus that comes up, uh, so first I'll give you a fair, like a really fast reading of Odysseus as, as not a bad guy. And then I'll indict him for you.

• 11:06Liv Albert?

  Great.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Right? But not a bad guy, um, translation of Odysseus or approach to him. Is as follows, um, the big difference between Odysseus and Achilles and the largest difference between the Odyssey and the Iliad, um, is that Odysseus is immortal.

• 11:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Right. He is the first person we know of in like myth who's totally not like the son of a god. There's nothing impressive about him, except for his intelligence, of course, which we can talk about. But, and that's why the beginning of the Odyssey is in a way really revolutionary, right? The first line is Andra moyenepa musa palutrapos, um, hos malapala. Right? So that first word Andra means man as in mortal human being. And so the Odyssey is a part of this, uh, cycle of tales that takes us from like a garden of Eden type situation where gods and men are together.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Except it's like a bad garden, um, to one that's closer to our world where gods and humans are separate. And where they're not messing around with our lives. And so part of the function of Greek epic in this cycle is to explain to ancient audiences where the heroes went, why they're separate and all of these things. And so Odysseus is like, you know, he's like one of those here. He's like, he's Batman. You know, he has no special skills, right? You know, he's, he's not from Krypton. He hasn't been bitten by radioactive spider. Like he has to go through life.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Making it work with just the body he was born in, right? And so Odysseus is a survivor. He's a veteran. He is someone who in a way focalizes our interests in what it means to live in a complex and fucked up world. Um, and to think of it this way, like the, the Odysseus of the Iliad, he's like a master sergeant. He's the one who's carrying out all the bad ideas, all the policies that Agamemnon needs to just to keep things moving forward. All right. He is at some level, if you want to think of him, a cipher for what it takes to survive.

• 13:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  And it's not easy, right? When I teach the Iliad, the Odyssey, I say, look, the Iliad is a poem that teaches you how to die. It asks you to think about death, what's worth dying for and all of that. But the Odyssey.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Is a poem that's about how to live after everything's over. Right? When all your friends have died, when you've lost all your people, how do you pick up the pieces and keep going? When you've been apart from your family for five years, 10 years, 20 years, how do you go home?

• 13:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Um, and it asks questions that I think in like now that I'm older, right? That I think are actually harder to answer, which is knowing everything we do about the world. It's cruelty, it's disappointment, the cravenness of our leaders, the absence of any real justice in the world. How do we go on living?

• 14:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  And the truth is you go on living in a constantly compromised state. Right? And, and that's what Odysseus is. He's compromised, he's pragmatic, um, and he is complicated. And so I want to go back to that complicated thing because i- if we can, I think to make the claim that Odysseus is an everyman. Is a little too broad.

• 14:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Cause he's still a king and he's still like super smart and shit. But when we see Odysseus in the Iliad, he's not that interesting. And I think one of the most important descriptions of him in the Iliad, um, comes in book three. When Helen is describing the, or identified the Greek leaders for Priam. And Tanor, one of the Trojan leaders comes up too, and he's like, yep, that is in fact Odysseus. And then he describes this thing that doesn't actually happen in the Iliad. When Odysseus and Menelaus came with Nestor to try to, um, convince them through diplomacy to give Helen back. And they're like, look, you look at Odysseus and he looks like a schlub, right? He's just like a nobody, you know, he's shorter than some of the other people.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  But when he starts to speak, his words are like a torrent of, of snow. Like a, like a blizzard coming out of his mouth and he changes everything around him. Right? Um, and so, you know, Odysseus is in a way, uh, clearly opposed to Achilles. Doesn't have all these physical gifts, but he's also gives an opportunity for us to think about. Like, what can we do if we don't have the blessings of physical gifts? Like, what ability to change the world is left for people of middle age? Right? I say this admittedly at age forty-five, you know? And so, so he's completely unimpressive in a way until he's in action.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  And so, sticking with that, I actually think part of the challenge of the Odyssey is telling a compelling story about someone who at first glance, you might not think much of. But then, not resting on, letting it rest on his laurels and just being in a simple tale of how this regular guy had this great journey home. Right? And so now, before, I'm just talking too much.

• 16:27Liv Albert?

  No, I love it so much.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  But let's talk about Odysseus in the Odyssey as a bad dude, right? Rather than a good one.

• 16:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Right? And how sort of complicated his presentation is. Because the Odyssey, like if you go and ask relatively educated people, what's the Odyssey about? They, they're gonna be like, well, Odysseus gets home to his wife and son and avenges them. And maybe they'll remember his dog dies, and then he blinded the Cyclops, but that's it. Right? But if you start the poem and just, you know, if you can, you can assure listeners in the future that I'm not actually looking at the poem when I say this, but if you start it, it doesn't say anything about any of that.

• 17:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  It doesn't, the first twenty lines don't mention his name, doesn't mention Pelama, Penelope, Telemachus, the suitors. It starts out by saying, tell me about the complicated man who tried really hard to get home. And by the way, he tried to save the lives of his companions.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  But he failed.

• 17:29Liv Albert?

  The word try is doing a lot there.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  But from the beginning, Odysseus is posed as a failure.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Right? He didn't bring his companions home. And so I think the poem is from the beginning asks us to think about like, how is he a failure? And why? And then what it says, and I'm going to give you a little Greek again. It says that his companions, the sailors, died sveteresen et astaliessen because of their own recklessness. When they ate the cattle of the sun. Now, 20 lines later, when Odysseus is looking down at Agestus, he like, he goes, oh shit, mortals. They're always blaming the gods for their problems.

• 18:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  But they make their fates worse than they have to be because of their own recklessness.

• 18:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  And then using the same phrase, sveteresen et astaliessen.

• 18:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  The number one problem I have with Emily Wilson's translation is that she doesn't translate those phrases the same.

• 18:30Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  So you don't see that a correlation is being made there. And that Zeus is actually inviting us to read the entire poem from the following perspective. How do people make their fates worse than they had to be? And this is a very different perspective from the beginning of the Iliad.

• 18:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Which starts out, line nine, by saying, dias de telea tabule, and Zeus's plan was being completed.

• 18:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Right? So from that perspective, the beginning of the Iliad, everything in the poem is part of some larger plan set into action by the gods.

• 19:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  At the beginning of the Odyssey, Zeus is like, hold up. There's a plan. But there's agency within that plan.

• 19:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Right? Because I truly believe that the correlative of you can make your life, you make your fate worse because of your recklessness is, can you make it better?

• 19:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  By being smarter. Right? And so I think from the beginning, we acknowledge Odysseus's failure. We ask people to think about how human beings cause their own problems. And then we have 24 books of Odysseus suffering.

• 19:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  And we're supposed to be asked. Well, how did he solve it? How did he cause his own problems? You know, what's going on there? And so I want to answer that question, but then first, but first give you the indictment. All right. Indictment one. And so one of my favorite versions of this is actually in the book Odysseus in America. But by Jonathan Shay, he does a court martial of Odysseus near the end of the book, but he doesn't actually get. He doesn't, he only gets to like book 12 of the Odyssey, because he's treating him as a military leader. But really that's so when Odysseus gets home, he's lost 12 ships of men.

• 20:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  12. And I believe the catalog of ships in the Iliad says there were 50 men on each. All right. That's like 600 people, right?

• 20:26Liv Albert?

  Yep.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  All right. So he killed 600, lost 600 people, right? It, most of the time, if you send an officer out with 600 people and they come home with zero, like he's going to jail or he's getting hanged or something.

• 20:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's not a good, not a good average or not even an average, but yeah.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  And before we even see him, right, we find out that his son's just sitting there with no plan, that there hasn't been an assembly or a council in Ithaca for 20 years. And nobody knows what's going on, right? Like again, like imagine, I mean, you, maybe you wouldn't be upset if the Prime Minister of Canada just up and disappeared.

• 21:01Liv Albert?

  That'd be fine. Yeah.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  But if the entire government, probably you and I could both agree, if our government's disappeared, we'd be like, well, not bad.

• 21:09Liv Albert?

  Time to start fresh. Yeah.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  But imagine if they, there was no way for us to create a government in the meantime.

• 21:17Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Just no institutions of governance.

• 21:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Nothing. That's Ithaca for 20 years.

• 21:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  And so like the suitors, they're there because like, some people say, oh, they want Penelope or oh, they want power. Like, well, what if we think about it this way? What if we think of the suitors as protesters?

• 21:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Like they're not being taken care of like they've had no voice in government. There has been no government.

• 21:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  And like their brothers, their uncles, their cousins went to war and never came home. And war has been over for 10 years and it's 10 and and and they've got no news. Nothing's going on.

• 21:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah, and no one's making any effort to change that.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:55Liv Albert?

  And meanwhile, like the the palace is presumably and certainly like still full of wealth and food and yeah.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I mean, income inequality is driving up, you know, all those things, right? And so, so, you know, indictment one, this here skills all his people too. He's, you know, in charge of Ithaca. He leaves no um methods for governing it while he's gone, right? And then he comes home, you know, and he disguises himself. He has his son and the swineherd Emaeus disarm people, locks them in, murders 108 more people. Has his cowherd mutilated, um eyes, no, ears, nose, testicles cut off and then killed.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Has the enslaved women hanged um by his son Telemachus? And then even acknowledges in book 23 when he says to Euryclea, uh, don't make a lot of noise about this. Pretend it's a wedding because this is exactly the type of thing that you would kill someone for. As the Suter's families are coming to me, right? So like he's killed 708 of his own people, right? Mutilated, tortured and killed members of his own household, right? And then in book 24, he's ready to go to war with his people, right? Until Athena comes down and says, no, let's stop, right?

• 23:25Speaker 01

  And she says to the Suter's families, and they've split, you know, she says, look, um, you're gonna forget what's happened to you and you're all gonna live in peace together. Let wealth and peace be enough. And then the poem just ends. Alright, so just on the surface of the story, like, what has Odysseus done that's good?

• 23:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  He got home, right? That's it. Why are we rooting for a murderer, right? Who's a bad leader, right? But I don't think we're done yet, right? Because the big part I skipped over in telling that story is how all of his men died. Because the remarkable thing, and this is a, let's say, lack of continuity that I'd never really thought about too much, is that Odysseus takes 12 ships of men to Troy, and he leaves Troy with 12 ships. Right? So he had a fairly successful war. And the story he tells in books nine through 12 are, really is about how all his men died

• 24:30Speaker 01

  and how he ended up washed up on the island of Calypso, right? So that's the story he tells. And the thing I want to emphasize is there's no reason the story had to be told that way.

• 24:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Right? We have, some of our oldest Greek art is images of Odysseus blinding the cyclops. Eighth century BCE, we have so many images of this. We know that it had to predate any version of the story that we have.

• 24:58Liv Albert?

  Oh, cool.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  So I think that the Odyssey took this very famous giant killing tale and spun it in a way to answer the question Zeus asks us to think about at the beginning of the poem. How did Odysseus make his own life worse? Okay, and so when I teach this with students, I have a chart. It's called the Odyssey Blame Chart. And I ask, I ask them to go through books nine through 12 and, and count up every death and then explain the cause of that death, right? And the balance of it is that, like, Odysseus is at fault.

• 25:36Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  But there's a particular sequence that I just want to highlight before I stop talking so much. The sequence is this, right? Most famous scene in the Odyssey, right? And in fact, maybe in Western literature, is the blinding of the cyclops.

• 25:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Right? And the way it's set up, though, it doesn't actually glorify Odysseus.

• 25:55Liv Albert?

  No.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Right? And so there are three times where his men say, "That's a bad idea." And then there's a later moment with Tyreseas in book 11 where we find out why it's a bad idea.

• 26:20Liv Albert?

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• 27:02Liv Albert?

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• 27:42Liv Albert?

  just getting rid of the middlemen, you know, making things more affordable? So find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was me. Let's talk about myths, baby. It's the best way to support the show.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  So first, just to drop the scene, Odysseus and his men pull into Goat Island. At this point, they have most of their men still, right? And Goat Island is filled with goats. And they get to eat their fill, it's delicious. And yet, over there, there's another island, there's some smoke, and they hear some sheep bleeding. And Odysseus is like, "I'm gonna go over there and see what's happening." Right? And his men say, "Uh, why?" You know, like, "Got everything we need right here, man." He's like, "Nope, I wanna go see who's over there." Right? So he gets in the ship with one man, they row over, they go into a cave, and the cave has cheese in it. As well as, you know, lambs, goats, whatever.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  And so the men are like, stocking up on their cheese, they've got their lambs, they're like, "Alright, let's go." Right? And so, second time, they said, "Let's go." And Odysseus is like, "No, no, no. I wanna stay here and see who lives here, and if they'll give me a guest gift." Right? Now, this drives me bonkers for a couple of reasons. Like, one, so I used to teach in Texas, and it was always easy with students in Texas to be like, "So if you come home, and someone's sitting on your couch, drinking your beer and eating your chips, what can you do?" And they're like, "You can shoot 'em." Right? And no jury in Texas would convict somebody for shooting someone for eating their nachos on their couch. Right? It's just the way it goes.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  And so, but, but when Homerists and classicists in general read that scene, they're like, "Well, the problem is with Polyphemus, because he eats a guest." And I'm like, "Wait, like, Odysseus wasn't invited." Like, this is like vampire logic here, if you're not invited, you're not a guest. And then the worst thing is that oftentimes, people will say, "Well, Polyphemus isn't a human being, and he's described as not living in a city, so maybe those rules don't apply to killing him." And so, one of the things- Actually, that's really sort of insidious about this scene is it's really a model for Western settler colonialism.

• 30:35Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Because even before Odysseus goes in, you get this passage where he's narrating, he's like, it's a really good place for harbor. It's a really good place to settle down, but the cyclopates here, you know, they don't have laws and cities. And one of the things I emphasize when I'm teaching this is part of what ethnographic narratives do is they establish a society's definition of what it means to be human. And so for the Greeks, they're like, you live in cities and you trade and you farm and that makes you human. But then what does that do to nomadic tribes, right? Like the Scythians or people who don't live in cities, who don't trade. It says, well, you're not human, therefore we can do whatever we want to you.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  And so one of the things that drives me bonkers about the cyclop scene is that we get Odysseus articulating this specious logic. And then Western scholars parroting it for years, right? When the basic rules of Zenia are you don't go into somebody's house and take their shit.

• 31:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Like, isn't that what the whole Trojan War was about?

• 31:38Liv Albert?

  Literally.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Like at some level.

• 31:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  You know, so anyway, back to the scene though.

• 31:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Odysseus's men say, don't do it.

• 31:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Um, my friend David Elmer teaches at Harvard has a book called The Poetics of Consent. No, of Ascent. Um, it's about the Iliad and it talks about how crucial the the voices of the Assemble the keyans are in articulating normative values. All right. Um, and so he hasn't written about the Odyssey, but I think it applies there. Every time Odysseus's men say it's a bad idea, we should listen to him. So they're in the cave. Odysseus says, I'm going to ask for a guest gift and Polyphemus comes in, you know, rolls the rock around, traps them in. And then he eats Odysseus's men, right? And then eventually Odysseus asks for a guest gift and Polyphemus says, I'll give you a guest gift. I'll eat you last.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  All right. Um, and then we go through this process where he gets them drunk. Like he tells them his name is nobody. The joke there, and I don't know, you've probably heard this, is that the Greek word for nobody, when using the indicative mood, so real statements, is utis. It means nobody. But when you switch to subjunctive moves, moods that we use for conditionals or other types of unreal statements, you have to use a different negator. So it becomes matus. And that's a big joke, because matus, as one word, is the Greek word for wisdom or cleverness. And one of Odysseus' epithets is polymatus, right? A man who's very clever.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  So all of this is setting up for this elaborate wordplay that people are joking about, and this great scene where Odysseus sneaks out under the ram, it gets his men out, and it's a moment of victory, right? It's his greatest achievement. But as they're sailing away, and this, you know, Cyclops is blinded, you know, Odysseus starts to taunt his men. If you go, not taunt his men, taunt the Cyclops, and his men go shhh, right? Because the Cyclops is blind, and I guess he's using echolocation to throw stones at them. And then Odysseus gets carried away, and he brags about what he's done, right? Tell people that Odysseus, the son of Lyarides from Ithaca, blinded you. All right. Now, I've taken a long time to

• 33:59Speaker 01

  tell this story, because I want to get each of the steps out.

• 34:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Three times Odysseus' men tell him it's a bad idea.

• 34:06Liv Albert?

  Yep.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Three times he ignores them. When he finally gets to talk to Tyresius in the underworld, Tyresius says, "Look, you're going to end up on the island of Helios. Tell your men not to eat the cattle, the cattle of the sun, right? And you're going to end up there becalmed, because they're really pissed at you. Poseidon's pissed at you because you blinded Polyphemus."

• 34:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Right? So the logic, though, goes like this. If Odysseus hadn't blinded Polyphemus and bragged about it, they never would have ended up on the island of Helios, in a position to eat the cattle of the sun.

• 34:49Liv Albert?

  Yep.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  The suitors did not show up at Odysseus' home until year seventeen. They've only been there three years at the beginning of the epic. Odysseus blinds the Cyclops and brags about it in year eleven.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Six years transpire, right? And so at the beginning of the Odyssey, it's not beginning, the middle of the Odyssey is this elaborate coded narrative that answers that question. Like, how did Odysseus make his life work? You know, a simple reading is, well, make his life worse. The simple reading is through hubris, right? He, you know, bragged and did these things, but a more complex reading is that he didn't listen to his men. He mistreated them. He was a bad leader and almost every scene in his story illustrates this. When he sees the Lystragonians, when they get there, like, you know, they're not sure how dangerous it is. So he sends ten ships forward to investigate.

• 35:53Liv Albert?

  Ten.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  And they all get destroyed. He's got eleven ships, dude, send one.

• 35:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Right? Maybe send one.

• 35:59Liv Albert?

  Just like, let's use logic, just.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Right?

• 36:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  You know, when they get to the island of Calypso, right? Not Calypso, Circe.

• 36:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  People often see this as a great moment, like, he sends his men forward, they get turned into animals. He shows up and he's got special antidote from Hermes and he beats Circe at a game. And immediately she's like, oh, now I have to have sex with you. He's like, okay, right? And they do that for a year.

• 36:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  It's a year of them partying all the time.

• 36:29Liv Albert?

  Also, they have sex before she turns his men back is the thing that I remember very explicitly. Like, he's very much like, no, no, like, we'll go have sex, but then you've got to turn them back.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  And like, are the pigs and wolves and lions just like hanging around watching?

• 36:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  I don't really want to know. That's somebody else. I don't want to kink shame people or anything, right? But it's weird, you know? And I also think as a leader, I don't want to get too salacious here, but like, you're shackled up with this like, like nymph for a year and your men are just waiting around. What are they doing?

• 36:59Liv Albert?

  Yep.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  And what are they all eating?

• 37:02Liv Albert?

  Yep.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  It's a little disturbing.

• 37:04Liv Albert?

  Well, yeah, I mean, the idea that they, everything, every animal that they eat on Circe's island could be a human is like very real.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, right? Of course. And so, but the thing that I really think about that people often miss there is that Odysseus's men are the ones who say to him, can we go home now?

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Right? And so to go back to like, there are two scenes in the whole story about Odysseus, where people say, well, he did a good thing there, right? One is Scylla and Charybdis, right? Whereas like, he knows, like, you're gonna sail through and your options are lose the entire ship, or you lose six men to Scylla.

• 37:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  He doesn't tell anybody about it. And to be frank, how could you? You're not gonna get six volunteers to be eaten by a like dragon dog woman, you know? That's just not realistic.

• 37:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  And so, you know, maybe this is good like crisis leadership, you know?

• 38:03Liv Albert?

  That's a bare minimum.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Maybe, right? Let's be honest, he's also preserving himself there, right? But then, and he puts on weapons on purpose.

• 38:15Liv Albert?

  Yep.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  I think to look like he's doing something to the other men. You know, where he's like, oh, look what just happened to us. I tried. You know, again, I, maybe I'm saying this from being in high ride for too long and seeing some pretty bad examples of leadership.

• 38:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  But when I see Odysseus doing that, I'm like, oh, this is performative.

• 38:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  The other moment that I was thinking that I think more and more about are the lotus eaters.

• 38:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Right? Because this is one of the first scenes. And everyone, and they, you know, the men go inland to visit, see what's going on with the lotus eaters, who are essentially stoners, right?

• 38:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  And, you know, they're munching their lotus and they forget their homecoming, right? You know, who hasn't munched a lotus and forgotten to go home, you know?

• 38:57Liv Albert?

  Totally normal.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Not a big deal. But Odysseus comes, he beats them, takes them home, and he's praised by the narrator for like protecting his men. But I've come to believe that he took their agency away from them.

• 39:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  And also, they die soon after.

• 39:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  So my question for anybody right now is, Wouldn't they be better off munching the lotus and still alive?

• 39:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah, and also like they don't know anything else. So like, yeah, like it sure, you know, it's it's got its issues, but like, it's not like they would be stuck there and know that they're stuck there. Like, that's the whole point of it. So like, yeah, is anyone really mad? Like, do they really miss home if they have lost that consciousness like?

• 39:46Speaker 01

  Well, there's a, you know, that like, I think, um, one of the, uh, there's a line from a band called Morphine. Uh, where, you know, the line is like, uh, when they make a cure for pain, that's when I'll throw my drugs away.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Right? We're talking about like warriors who've been on a journey like, oh, leave them alone.

• 40:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  You know?

• 40:06Liv Albert?

  Let them smoke some weed and live a chill life.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Right, like honestly, to go back to what we were saying before, the Odyssey is about how you get by.

• 40:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  You know, um, and Odysseus is one of the things we're leaving out in the story of what a cat he is, um, is the less dramatic stuff.

• 40:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  He's a master manipulator.

• 40:27Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Is there someone he doesn't instrumentalize for his own ends? Is there someone he sees as a real person?

• 40:36Liv Albert?

  And that's what I was gonna say when you mentioned the, you know, performative nature of him putting on his armor. Like, you can see it as performative in that moment, or you can also just see it as self-preservation. And like neither is kind to him whatsoever, because he doesn't like, tell the men to put on their armor that he knows like six of them are gonna be eaten. Like he that he could have done something, but he's like, no, no, I'm gonna either protect myself or look like I'm helping you. Like either one is just as gross.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Well, well, you know, I mean, if he told six men to put the weapons on.

• 41:05Liv Albert?

  Well, I think you put all of them on and you just say, just in case, like, there is a possibility.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Just in case, there might be some bad shit going on.

• 41:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah, this is a dangerous spot. Let's all just put on our armor. Maybe hold on tight.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  You know, so I I do this shtick frequently where I try to get people to think about the suitors and take them seriously. And then maybe they actually do have qualms, right? And a few years back now, well, early in the COVID time, I was giving an online lecture about the end of the Odyssey to a retirement community, like 60 people on Zoom. And my daughter, who was 10 at the time, had just read Gareth Hines' really great graphic novel of The Odyssey.

• 41:44Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah, I haven't. Yeah.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And she burst into the Zoom window and started arguing with me about whether or not the suitors actually were at fault. And she's like, look, they abused Odysseus in his own home. They ate up all his possessions. They hassled his wife. He had, like, Athena told him to go home and do this.

• 42:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Right? I was like, no, it's not that complicated. I'm arguing with my daughter.

• 42:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Like, I'm like, they, the suitors are individuated in a way they didn't need to be. And if it's so simple that they were doing wrong, like if they had done wrong, they had transgressed xenia.

• 42:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Why would Athena need them to abuse Odysseus in his home? If it was so clear that the suitors were bad dudes, why would the narrator need to ensure that we all knew they were conspiring to kill Telemachus? Right? And if they're so bad, why do we have Telemachus telling people, I think my mom's going to marry one of them?

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, none of that adds up.

• 42:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  You know, not to sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist with a bulletin board and a string,

• 42:57Speaker 01

  but The Odyssey invites us to see complexity in the characters.

• 43:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  And we can see the suitors, perhaps, as an oligarchic coup against a tyrant.

• 43:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Right? Or we could see them as young people protesting unjust leadership.

• 43:14Liv Albert?

  And camping, how sometimes camping out in a place is the only way to do that, you know?

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Right. And if protest is not inconvenient, it is not protest.

• 43:25Liv Albert?

  Uh huh.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Right?

• 43:26Liv Albert?

  That's the whole point.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if you do not have access to the levers of power.

• 43:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Is writing a letter gonna do any good?

• 43:34Liv Albert?

  No, you've gotta put yourself in their faces and not leave.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  And that, I mean, you, we could call, maybe we could call the three-year stay Occupy Ithaca, right? You know, because that's what it is.

• 43:47Liv Albert?

  Yep.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  And then what does Odysseus do, but what power always does? Overreact and try to stub out any threat.

• 43:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah, you might even call it policing.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  You might.

• 43:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Call it policing. You might call it a unnecessary militarized response to a civic conflict.

• 44:04Liv Albert?

  A brutalization even in response to a protest.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  But I want to return, just briefly.

• 44:16Liv Albert?

  No, please. I'm glad we got to say that, but also keep going.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  To the amazing craft of the Odyssey in getting us to root for a bad guy.

• 44:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 44:58Liv Albert?

  Because I mean, I love the Odyssey, just to like, put that in there, like, because the Odyssey is my, it's the first one I read, it is my favorite, like, it has been a while and now you're just making me want to read it again. But like, I love it because to me, all of the different pieces are so interesting. So this is just, I mean, you're fueling my love so much, but it's also why I ended up liking Odysseus, because he's just part of this story.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:21Liv Albert?

  But also, yeah, is a piece of shit. So, but I'm fascinated by, yeah, please.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  So, so, and the way I think about it this way, um, now is that like, the Odyssey we have isn't necessarily the only Odyssey we could have had.

• 45:33Liv Albert?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Right? So if we think about Odysseus, one of the things I'm fascinated about is what's the relationship between this depiction of Odysseus and other different?

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Right? So you we were talking earlier about your love for Euripides, right? And and and Sophocles too, when you're when Odysseus shows up, it's usually bad news. Right? He's a person who who is going to convince Philoctetes to go back or manipulate Neoptolemus to bring Philoctetes back to Troy. He's the one who's tasked with making sure that a styon ax is killed. Right?

• 46:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  He's the one like, and this is, this is a deep cut that I think people often miss out on. In the in Plato's Apology.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  When Socrates has gotten a death sentence. He says, Look, this isn't such a big deal, because death is one of two things. Either it's a dreamless sleep for much I'll never wake up. Or I get to go down and pal around with the heroes in the underworld. And take up cause with people like me who've been unjustly convicted, like Palamedes. Palamedes is the one that Odysseus frames in the stories before the Iliad. Because Palamedes tricks Odysseus into coming to Troy. And so according to like Apollodorus, Odysseus plants gold and a letter from King Priam

• 46:58Speaker 01

  in Palamedes' tent and then calls up Agamemnon, who's like, We got a traitor in our midst.

• 47:04Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's another another story we get from that tradition is like, so there's this weird. You know, the sacking of Troy is like the worst Dungeons and Dragons campaign ever. Because the DM keeps giving different tasks you have to do, like it's a horse. No, it's not the horse. It's Heracles' bow. No, it's not. You have to get the Palladian from Troy. Okay. And so in that story, like Diomedes and Odysseus sneak into Troy.

• 47:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Steal the Palladian. And then on the way out, Diomedes just happens to see a shadow coming behind him of Odysseus about to murder him. Because he wants to take all the glory. And Diomedes is like, Whoa. And he marches Odysseus out of Troy on a swordpoint. So you have all these stories about Odysseus in which like, he's not a good guy.

• 47:53Liv Albert?

  Well, yeah, just to pull it back to what I'm doing on the show currently, like, I I'm not sure how how Fall of Troy fits in with like the, you know, lost epics or or fragments or whatever, but like. You know, there's an entire scene about Achilles' armor. Like, I know this is definitely, you know, part of broader mythology, like that Achilles' armor goes to Odysseus because he basically like talks his way into it. And then friggin Ajax kills himself because of it, because it's such a shame. And then Ajax was like their best hope. And so because of that, they have to go get Neoptolemus, and then it's a whole other thing.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Right. And like Ajax, sorry, in the underworld, Odysseus is like, I guess he's still mad at me. I don't get it. Right? Like, you get it. You're just a total cat. But what's really fascinating, though, is that, so I think in this, at least Athenian, fifth, fourth century millennia, Odysseus is a bad guy.

• 48:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  He is an anti-hero in a modern sense. But what happens later on, like under the Romans, is he gets adopted by Stoic philosophers as a Stoic sage, someone who suffers and sticks to, like, sticks to himself and stays true and wins out in the end. Right? And I, so I think part of our modern attachment to Odysseus comes via that connection. And I, but I also want to say, it's not at all surprising, but also a little disappointing, that the culture that started to worship Odysseus is one that was most about hierarchical, vertical

• 49:25Speaker 01

  power, and the accumulation of amazing amounts of wealth and violence. And then calling him a Stoic sage for doing so. A little creepy.

• 49:36Liv Albert?

  It's not, although, I mean, you know, it's not reminiscent of life.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Right, right. But then, so go back to the Odyssey, because we love it, and it turns out I do, too. I actually think that, that it's accomplishment in taking someone who is questionable.

• 49:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Really speaks to the complexity of being a human being.

• 50:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Right. And you get this from the beginning to the end in a way that we often miss out on because we don't read it from beginning to end. But you start with Telemachus and Telemachus, when we first find him, is sitting there daydreaming about, oh, what will happen when daddy comes home? Right? And Athena shows up as mentor in disguise. It's basically like, you don't need daddy to come home to get off your ass, kid. Here's a plan, right? And if you follow Telemachus from books one through four, he starts out by saying, well, if my daddy will ever come home, I'll be okay. And then he's like, I'll go find out news about my dad.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  And then by the end of book four, he's like, so my dad's dead and I have to go home and fix my problems. Right? And so that's one story. You're like, all right, Telemachus has grown up. He's gotten over his father.

• 50:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Okay. And then we get to Odysseus, beginning of book five. And so people often don't, you know, we recognize that part of the narrative structure of the, of Homer is delaying things, right?

• 51:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Creating anticipation, but also why is that moment, the moment that we switch to Odysseus?

• 51:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  It's because Telemachus doesn't need him anymore. Briefly. And then we get to Odysseus and he's actually just like his son, right? He's sitting there looking out across the sea, like he spent seven years having sex with Circe every night. Circe, Calypso every night, crying every day.

• 51:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  And the one line we hear about it is that, you know, he doesn't enjoy it anymore, even though he used to.

• 51:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I know. Cause a lot of people like to be like, oh, he's a victim in that. And it's like, like, not really like he's, he turned himself into a victim and then did nothing about it.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Right, and so the genesis of my book about the Odyssey was like, well, how do we understand Odysseus just sitting there? And why is he paired with Telemachus that way? And my idea in it is that there's this concept of learned called learned helplessness in psychology, which is when you encounter failure repeatedly. You not only tend to try to act less, but you're actually less successful when you try to do things. And over time, you just stop even trying.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  And so I actually think we have both Telemachus and Odysseus being paired as people who have no sense of agency, because either like with Telemachus, he's never been in a structure where he thinks he can do anything. Right? And Odysseus has failed so much, he's just giving, he's just given up.

• 52:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  And so part of the question of the Odyssey that follows is how do we recuperate agency when the world has beaten us down?

• 52:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah, though I will also say like some of this could be, well, I, I think a lot of it could be read as perceived failures and the perceived world letting you down.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  No, I absolutely agree with you, which is why I, I, you know, early on, I saw, I tried to use term like free will and I gave up on it.

• 52:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  And I use a sense of agency instead.

• 52:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Because for human beings, it's ultimately the same thing.

• 53:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Like I could have agency, but not feel like it. And so the outcome's the same.

• 53:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  Right? But my point in sort of recapping this is the beginning, first half of the Odyssey is deeply individual and personal.

• 53:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  It's about people figuring out how to act in the world and have agency on it and then acting upon it. And what we find out with both Telemachus and Odysseus is stuff that's confirmed with like modern therapies, both cognitive behavioral therapy and narrative therapy. And that's that to overcome a sense of lack of agency, you need to have small stake success.

• 53:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  You need to actually go out and act in the world, feel you can do it. And then you also need to change the way you think about yourself. So you need to talk about your story differently. You need to see yourself as an agent in the world. And I think part of what's going on in the story Odysseus tells is that he's retelling his own story in a way that he answers Zeus's question for us.

• 53:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  He says, ah, I fucked up. It's my fault. And by embracing his agency, he can start again. And then if you read the Odyssey from book thirteen on, he has no doubt once he gets home.

• 54:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Like, there's no hesitation at all. He uses his storytelling to bamboozle people. He tricks everyone until he gets the moment where he is actually the cyclops in the cave, cave, and he eats everybody up, like metaphorically.

• 54:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  But essentially, and so the second half of the Odyssey is about family and community. Right? So the first part is about growing up, about becoming a person, about acting in the world. And the second part is, well, we exist in a world with like other people. How do we relate to them?

• 54:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  And Odysseus's story is really, it's two sided. Because there's the wonderful narrative that that I deeply love of his reunions with other people.

• 54:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  And how he needs like tokens in the world to confirm who he is. Right? With Euryclea, it's the scar. With Penelope, it's the bed. With his father, it's the orchard. And you follow it, he goes like, he goes through the most significant relationships in his life to reconfirm who he is.

• 55:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  In a way that I think is powerful for each of us, because the narrative it tells us is we aren't anybody alone.

• 55:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  Right? Our identity is constructed in other people.

• 55:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Right? Which I think is actually a really anti ancient Greek idea. At least the way it's activated for us by like the Ayn Randians in the world. Right? The rugged individualist. What the Odyssey tells us is like you are who other people see you to be.

• 55:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  And that's the most important thing. Like, identity is extrinsic, not intrinsic, which is hard for us in our very individualistic age to accept. But then you get the whole problem of Odysseus's relationship to his family. Like, he can't return home to them without dominating them. Right? We often forget that when Euryclea recognizes him, Odysseus grabs her by the throat and tells her not to speak.

• 56:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  He'd never, he just tells his son, no other Odysseus will come home to you. With Penelope, you know, he manipulates and lies to her, lies to her and then sleeps with her. He's like, yeah, I'm gonna leave again soon. It's gonna be cool. And then with his father, he tricks him, tests him and like makes him cry and then he's like, I'm sorry, I'm Odysseus. And, you know, what's going on there?

• 56:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  And so, and so that, that, that nature of Odysseus, again, the double sidedness, the complicatedness. Like, what does it mean to be an agent in a world? And it speaks in to a way into like what we now call in social media, the main character syndrome.

• 56:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  No, but, but, but there's something to be said there. By centering yourself instead of others.

• 56:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  What kind of a family member are you?

• 56:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  What kind of a leader are you?

• 56:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  And so I, I really think that the complexity is meant for audiences as like a test case to think through.

• 57:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  And that we fail the test by rooting for Odysseus.

• 57:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Instead of rooting for or caring about the enslaved women, you wouldn't imagine how many homers are like, it's not a big deal.

• 57:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  Or Telemachus or Penelope, like, you know, Odysseus as a hero.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  Proves to us in a way what we're really like.

• 57:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. And it just screams, it screams Western values, that concept, like I say that, you know, with like as hating every sense of the words, like, yeah, this, this idea that like in order. I don't know. I don't even know in order of anything, but just the idea that the West is right, that like he is right, you know, he by, by thinking that he is the hero, we are just presuming that everything he did was right and that this is the like correct way of doing things. And that we should inflict it on other people. Like it reminds me of the Skindian thing you said earlier of just like what makes people worthy, worthy of living.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  So I, I saw a, a, a talk a few weeks ago, a few months ago now by Edith Hall called. It's on a book of hers that's coming out next year from Yale called Achilles in Green. And it's an eco-critical reading of the Iliad that makes a parallel argument to the one I suggested, Settler Colonialism and the Odyssey, by looking at the consumption and extractive relationships in the Iliad, positing that our relationship to the environment, as foretold in the Iliad, is one that ultimately is extractive in its nature entirely and not harmonious.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  And one of the things she points to is that, and she doesn't emphasize this too much, but this is at least a footnote, is the archaeology of Bronze Age often doesn't emphasize much enough how destructive the smelting of bronze is and how it destroyed and changed the natural world. Like how many trees are needed to light the fire that make it hot enough to do the metallurgy, right, of how hard it is to extract the metal from the earth, how damaging it is, and how everything in the heroic world, from the sacrifices of a hundred bulls, to the meals, to the drinking, to the burning of trees,

• 59:35Speaker 01

  points to a relationship with the environment that's totally about being maximally extractive, rather than being harmonious. And there's something that there is an ends justifying the means logic there that I want to point to at the end of the Odyssey as well. When Athena comes down, she says, "Let wealth and peace be enough." And what she's asked or told the suitors they have to do in order not to be in a constant cycle of vengeance, is that they have to forget That Odysseus killed their loved ones.

• 1:00:12Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  That he murdered their families. And the sad thing for me is that I don't know that the Western tradition has given any clearer or better solution for cyclical violence than that.

• 1:00:28Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  This is what we're told.

• 1:00:30Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  You want to live in the United States and enjoy its material abundance? Forget about crimes against indigenous people. Forget about slavery. Forget about our international policy that has killed millions of people and supports client states that are committing genocide. All right, forget all that.

• 1:00:50Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  Let your wealth and peace be enough.

• 1:00:52Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Because that end justifies any means to get there.

• 1:00:58Liv Albert?

  Just to, because it's impossible for me not to parallel this with Canada because like, you know, we're not quite the same, but we also are just, just yesterday, the, the RCMP, the, you know, people like to say the Mounties, but no one in Canada calls them that. We call them the RCMP. And so like, you know, our federal police uh, released a new uh, addition to their uniform. And it is a ribbon skirt. So it is an attempt to put indigenous clothing and art into the RCMP uniform. And if it is not just like the perfect settler colonial values, like notion, like

• 1:01:41Liv Albert?

  the RCMP, it's, it's, it actually is wild because also three days ago, we had um, the Victoria Day Parade here because, which is inherently, you know, it is celebrating settler colonialism. It's literally for Queen Victoria like, and, and then, and I happen to live above the parade route. So it was forced on me to look out my window because the noise was absurd and it was crazy. And, and at one point I looked out my window and I saw a cop car in the parade covered in indigenous art. Victoria Police has a, has a special car made that is like decalled with indigenous art that they drive through parades.

• 1:02:23Liv Albert?

  And I just like, it's so gross because it's it's essentially the same as like the cops in the States having a Black Lives Matter matter sign painted onto their their cars, right? Like, because literally the cops kill more indigenous people here than than they do anyone else. Like, anyway, it's just wild, but like, the settler colonialism of it all in the West and oh, my God.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  But but I actually think so, but I don't think that is an inconsequential thing to bring up with the Odyssey.

• 1:02:47Liv Albert?

  No, no, it's not.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Because part of what's going on, I think with Homeric Epic is an appropriation of dissenting voices. And so one way to think about the suitors in the Odyssey, if we're thinking about them as being anti-autocratic, is that their position in society has been appropriated into Epic to discredit them, right? Just become part of it. So you bring enough of it in in order to show that, you know, you gave him a fair chance, right? And so that's why I actually think, you know, earlier I mentioned the multiple counts against the suitors that the Odyssey trumps up, right?

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  If it were just enough that they were opposing Odysseus, you wouldn't have to frame them for abusing him. And you wouldn't have to show them planning to kill Telemachus. So you've taken this aristocratic group of men who didn't go to war and you're appropriating them into Epic and you're taking the oligarchic or anti-autocratic voices into it in order to discredit it, right? In the same way, like, you know, the levers of power will expropriate from other cultures in order to say, oh, we've integrated it. But you've integrated it the way the Borg integrates something, right? You just take what's useful so that you can continue on your extractive journey through the universe.

• 1:04:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it's, yeah, it's so much. And it's also like, Um, you know, looking at the, the, just the way you said, the, the suitors, you know, who, who didn't go to war. And I think that like, a lot of times we're, we're also expected to see them that way of like these men who didn't go to war. And so the, the, the idea comes in that, that that somehow is also a fault against them without considering the idea that the war has been over or has like things, they would have had to leave 20 years earlier. So they, but there's also no confirmation of their age. So like they literally could have been 10 when it started.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  You do hear, you hear one of them, I forget, one of the leading suitor suitors is like, I remember Odysseus from when I was young.

• 1:04:54Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Like they, they were too young to go to war.

• 1:04:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  And I think the youth of the suitors again is critical. Um, because if we want to use them as parallel for protesters, right? I mean, they're, they're the youth who don't know enough, right? The child, you know, the, the young.

• 1:05:09Liv Albert?

  He knows better.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  He does, right? Because he's done such a good job taking care of young people so far.

• 1:05:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:05:18Liv Albert?

  All the proof to show for it.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just feel like at the end, you know, the end of the Odyssey, you know, 23, Odysseus is, he's not so bad as to say, "Look what you made me do."

• 1:05:29Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God, yeah.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  Right? But he does acknowledge that people would kill him for it.

• 1:05:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Cause I just like, just back to that logic. I, I think we've run away with the wrong message.

• 1:05:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  From it, right? Because I, I think what happens at the end of the Odyssey is you have a magical solution to a problem. Like a deus ex machina from Greek tragedy. And what's that supposed, that's supposed to do is startle us. We're supposed to be like, whoa, was there no other solution to this problem? Right? Um, and we should say, wait, maybe we should rethink this.

• 1:06:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  Where did we miss a step along the way? Um, and instead though, I think we have traditionally taken away the, the, the worst message, which is that, you know, the, uh, power.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Is ultimately its own justification. You have to let wealth and peace be enough.

• 1:06:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  And forget your pains.

• 1:06:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  And the real toxic irony of that is that the biggest thing the Odyssey tries to teach us is that your pain defines you.

• 1:06:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  Odysseus's scar is a literal and a figurative symbol of the fact that your trauma makes you who you are.

• 1:06:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  Right? And so if at the end, you're told, well, you can live in peace with these people, but you need to forget your historical trauma. You need to forget your identity, then you're basically saying you didn't exist at all.

• 1:07:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  And that logic just defaults to the might makes right logic that we see, and this is a bit farther afield, but not inappropriate for your podcast, that we see in Thucydides.

• 1:07:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  I've been thinking a lot about Thucydides lately.

• 1:07:17Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I wonder why.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  The Melian dialogue, right? I don't, do you want me to recap that?

• 1:07:23Liv Albert?

  I would love to.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  Your audience knows. So, you know, there are two sort of really important moments in Thucydides's Peloponnesian Wars, where when it comes to characterizing Athens as a, as a political organization.

• 1:07:36Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  So for people who don't remember, Athens and Sparta are fighting this long 30-year war. And the difference is that Sparta is a land power, Athens is a sea power, and it dominates its allies.

• 1:07:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  And so the first of these things, Mytilene is not behaving and isn't paying tribute to Athens and isn't following Athens' rules. And so Athens dispatches a ship to carry out a sentence against Mytilene. And the sentence is to kill all the men and enslave all the women and children. And so they wake up the next day after making this decision and they send a ship to go super fast to rescind the decision. Because they're like, wait, these are our allies, these are human beings, we don't want this to happen. And the ship, you know, they row wicked hard, they get there and they're successful. And it's this moment where you're like, okay, sometimes when we all get together and talk things through, we can make bad things not happen.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  Right, but later on, there's a thing called the Melian Dialogue, where Athens goes to see its closer ally, Melos. They send ambassadors. And it's a fascinating thing, because what we get in Thucydides is a dialogue between Athens and Melos. And the representatives of Melos are like, "Look, you care about the gods and justice, and you want your other allies to respect you. Don't push us around, and don't make us do what we don't want to do, like, respect us." And the Athenians, basically, they're like, "Look, we have power. We can do it. And there's no other argument. This is what we want, so fall in line, or else we're gonna kill you." And they do end up carrying out, both historically and in the narrative,

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  the sentence that they denied to Mytilene on Melos. They kill all the men, and they enslave all the women and children, because it serves their interests and their power. And so when I think about, like, you know, the operation of imperial activities in the modern day, like, we have this notion of progress, that we only buy, some of us buy, because we live in countries insulated from those horrors.

• 1:09:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And well, yeah, I've been thinking a lot about the way that the West, it refuses to accept the idea that anything else should exist. Like, that, that, like, because we've decided that, like, our way of life is the best, then it is seen as, like, the thing that should be inflicted on other cultures, even if those other cultures don't want it. But it's like, we use, we use our, quoting it, "progressive" ideas to, like, enforce something on people who don't want it. And, yeah, like, it's just, I mean, what you said earlier too about, like, the, just going back to Odysseus, because I just had this thought, but like,

• 1:10:26Liv Albert?

  you know, the, this, the reading that we, what we take now, you know, the, the, like, sort of flawed reading, as we've just been talking about, like, That, that you know, like the, the ends justify the means that his getting home was worth the killing of 600 people. Um, just feels a little too real. Um, and I'm gonna just, you know, just, I guess, leave it that, just like the idea of saving one life is worth 600. Um, is yeah, a little, it's just a little too.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  Well, it's also the thing I often parrot with is so there, I'll, I'll quote it wrong, but I'll get the idea right. Um, there's this notion, um, that shows up in the Quran and the Babylonian version of the Talmud, which basically says, saving the life of one human being is saving the whole human race.

• 1:11:18Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  Killing one human being, killing the whole human race. Um, and it's pretty ancient stuff and it's probably part of an oral tradition before it got embedded in the Quran, but, um, don't tell religious people I put it that way.

• 1:11:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  Um, but it's just like, I mean, Odysseus is someone who we could, uh, quip contains multitudes.

• 1:11:42Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  Right? Um, but the real irony of the Odyssey is that it seems to deny that multitude in this nature to other human beings.

• 1:11:51Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  And so everybody in the Odyssey serves his story.

• 1:11:57Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  And that's the thing that I think is really dangerous about the Odyssey.

• 1:12:03Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  When people talk about, you know, Penelope, she's a strong woman. I'm like, well, until Odysseus comes home and ultimately her strength is just there to glorify him, to be a good match for him.

• 1:12:16Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  Telemachus is denied ever really truly growing up and having his own world. Everybody in the Odyssey exists only for Odysseus's purposes.

• 1:12:25Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Um, and so I really think that it's a clever epic that's supposed to make us stop. But that we read it wrong.

• 1:12:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  And we see it as a victory at the end, uh, because we read it like a Western. It's not Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven. Right? It's a Tarantino movie.

• 1:12:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  And we have to understand that the bloodshed there is supposed to make us stop and wonder what the fuck we're doing.

• 1:12:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this, this, but instead we've taken away this idea that, that because of whatever thing, one life is worth more than 600 because of whatever makes him special, he is worth more.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  And how, how much of that logic infects the way our economy works, you know? I mean, you know, whether you're Bill Gates or Elon Musk, the whole notion that you should be in charge because of historical accidents and luck.

• 1:13:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Right? Or that your life is worth more and all of these things and the power individuals have.

• 1:13:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  Um, and we are so embedded in this individualistic approach to humanity.

• 1:13:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  That to think of collective ways of being is to, is, is seen as, um, heretical.

• 1:13:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh, just that use of the word too, like makes me think of, and like the, the way that at this point too, in both of our countries, but in, in different ways, we are expected to have to pick of the, the least worst. And if we're not willing to, to go for the least worst, we are bad people.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  We're the problem.

• 1:14:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  And if we can't, if we don't want to choose between, you know, fascism light and straight up fascism, like then clearly like we're in support of the devil.

• 1:14:16Liv Albert?

  And, and who is it that decides which one is fascism light is another great question and like.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  Well, the one with a slightly kinder face.

• 1:14:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah, or, or, or I would argue it's the one who's.

• 1:14:32Liv Albert?

  One side helps one group, but it affects the whole world. Um, but the other side affects the whole world. And so it's the, it's the, the way that you can pick that like the West, the Western complex is slightly more benefited by one. And so if you don't pick them, you're the problem. It's not, the problem is not the them, it's not the, it's not the least worsts. And what makes it least worst?

• 1:15:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:08Liv Albert?

  Anyway.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  So, so like, you know, I mean, when people ask me, why does Homer matter? I'm like, look, this is a genealogy of our bad ideas. Right?

• 1:15:19Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God. That's such a good way of saying it.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  But it's also an opportunity to recuperate the very truth that the bad ideas weren't always our only options.

• 1:15:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  Right? So I do think like, at the end of the day, I think the Odyssey is a narrative that's mostly interested in supporting the power structures that are there.

• 1:15:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  But it embeds the other possibilities and lets us see the truth.

• 1:15:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  Right? Which is that Odysseus lives off of other people like a vampire. Right? Um, that's what he is. And I think the problem with it, and the problem of human psychology in the modern day is everyone thinks they're going to end up to be Odysseus.

• 1:16:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  When.

• 1:16:04Liv Albert?

  It's the American dream.

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. When like, you can't be Odysseus if you haven't murdered 708 people and dominated another few thousand.

• 1:16:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  So the math doesn't add up there.

• 1:16:14Liv Albert?

  No. Uh, what makes me think of the, this, the desire, the, the, the type of people that like idealize billionaires because they think that it, that they can reach that. When the truth is that the only reason that they can't reach that is because of the billionaires, like, you know, like it's, it's just, yeah, this, this psychology of, a psychology of, of individualism too, that we have in the West and just that like. Yeah, the, the who is better, who is better than everyone else and why? Like, like, why, why, what makes it better? And is it just power?

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  But also, and also what we come to embrace in Odysseus, right, is that ends versus ends justifies the means approach. Like, people, you know, I think this whole notion of Christian classical education and holding Odysseus up as like a model, like, all he does is lie and cheat and break commandments in order to achieve his ends. Like, why would this be a central person? How is this a Stoic sage, right? It's because like, we are addicted to this idea of this main character, right? Rather than sort of situating ourselves as, as not being so and making space for others.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  And so there's just, I mean, I think at some level, the question is, you know, are these texts too dangerous? I don't personally think they're too dangerous, but they need to be taught in such a way to understand that they are dialogues about power.

• 1:17:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  They're dialogues about the consequences of power. They're not hymns of praise.

• 1:17:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:56Liv Albert?

  This is the greatest conversation. I'm losing my mind. It's also just like so perfect for what I was writing before I sat down with you. And I just, but also now all I want to do is talk about the Iliad. So I think we have to talk about you coming back to talk about the Iliad and how it fits. Because I really want to dive deeper into this idea of like, the Iliad not being like the, the glory of war. And I think it like, it would so, it would just like, fit so well with this conversation too.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  Couple, I've got a couple of shticks on that.

• 1:18:22Liv Albert?

  I will to bet you do.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  Right, but, but I do, so, so, and this is going to be sort of the, the shameless self plug bit. But I have a book coming out on, on narrative in December or, or January about using biological narratives, the biological analogies to understand how narrative functions. As. It's having its own agency and its own place in the world. I talk about Homer a lot. So I'd be happy to send you the proofs of that so you can see it because it's, I think it might be crazy. I think I may, people are going to mock me, I'm sure. But I do have my current sort of thinking project and my next project is on, I'm calling it rehumanized,

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  trauma-informed readings of the Iliad. And it's really about, about violence and about war crimes. And how the Iliad approaches sort of a sanitized and desanitized view of war. So I'd love to talk to you about that and sort of figure out where I want to go next.

• 1:19:22Liv Albert?

  Oh my God, no, that's wonderful. Oh my gosh.

• 1:19:27Liv Albert?

  I, I won't, I won't keep you any longer, but this is like the absolute fucking best. And it was going to air in like a month and a half, but now because of everything we talked about, it's going to air next week. So.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  Well, hopefully we could, we can keep the tablo, the tagline, the absolute fucking best. And see where that, where that gets us.

• 1:19:48Liv Albert?

  Great. Thank you so much for doing this. Um, do you want to share anything with my listeners about like where to read more or find more from you at all?

• 1:19:56Speaker 01

  It's okay. They can find me. You can tell them, you know, I just think, you know, read some Homer, listen to live. We'll make our lives better.

• 1:20:05Liv Albert?

  Thank you.

• 1:20:22Liv Albert?

  Thank you all so much for listening.

• 1:20:26Liv Albert?

  I finished recording that conversation with a level of joy and just like, I mean, joy is maybe the wrong word, but it, it is right. Just joy. In a way of being able to, to look at this stuff and talk about it and share, share that, just share these, these views, these, these musings on the ancient world and how applicable it is to us today and how it has been taken and, and just, I don't like to use the word bastardized, but it's the only thing that's coming to me right now, but like just the ways in which we've fucked it all up.

• 1:21:12Liv Albert?

  It, you know, the world is an absolute fucking dumpster fire, but it, it is so possible to find joy in the solidarity of it and in, in looking at these things and in tying it to the ancient world and both seeing how timeless it is, but also the ways in which we can claw our way out, you know, just as, as people. Anyway, it was a really, really wonderful conversation. Joel is always such a joy to have on just because he's got to be the most supportive academic I've ever talked to in terms of the podcast, just truly, just truly so supportive of what I'm doing in

• 1:21:55Liv Albert?

  a way that it always is a great ego boost and sometimes when I really need it. So it's just absolutely lovely to have him on. Um, we're absolutely going to be talking again soon to look at the Iliad because as you've all, you know, if you've been listening to my Fall of Troy episodes, you know, I, I really think it is so important to look at these epics for what they actually were, which is not glorifying war, but just looking at how, how bad it is and how it damages everyone in so many different ways and how it benefits no one and. It, you know, we, we in the West just so often don't, don't see it that way because

• 1:22:36Liv Albert?

  we've been conditioned to accept that sometimes so many innocent people just, you know, quote unquote, need to die for Western values. You know, this idea of Western values. It's just, it's horrifying. But, you know, we can look to the ancient world and pick apart the ways in which it has been misused to promote those ideas that, that, that any, any one group of people is better than another. You know, we can, we can really look back at the ancient world and see, see what they really did think. And obviously, they weren't perfect and they had, you know, all of their own issues. But, but especially in these works, they, there is no one saying that one is better than the other. They are, they

• 1:23:20Liv Albert?

  are thought experiments. They are, are ways for us to, to, you know, look at these stories and, and relate to them and, and look at everything we just talked about, you know, at all the ways in which Odysseus should not be seen as a perfect person. He, we should look at him and, and consider, consider the cost of war and consider trauma and how people respond to it and the ways that people shouldn't respond to it because people die when they respond to those things that way. And the way that if, you know, say, if he just looked, looked, it just kind of stepped back and maybe examined things a little closer, really, or was able to see the flaws in himself, maybe it wouldn't have gone like

• 1:24:03Liv Albert?

  that, right? Like, that's what these things are for. If Achilles could have stepped back and, and thought, you know, maybe, maybe there's a flaw in my plan. If Agamemnon, if Menelaus, if anyone could have stepped back and really thought about it and, and been able to see that maybe what they're doing isn't always right. Maybe, maybe no one always knows what is right. And maybe, maybe there is no one who should be able to determine, you know, if, if, if one culture is more or less deserving of life, if one group of people is more or less deserving of life, it's never true. And, and. Uh, it's just, you know, it's dark. I don't know. This was such a just a wonderful, just a really

• 1:24:45Liv Albert?

  great conversation. Um, I've linked in the episode's description to Joel's Twitter and website because it's really, it's really great stuff to, as much as he doesn't promote himself. So it's, you can find more for sure. Um, there's a lot of really, really interesting and accessible translations of, of Greek stuff that you'd never find otherwise because it's just like weird, weird poems or just these things that aren't famous or even just like, you know, close looks at, at what's really going on. I do highly recommend it. Um, it's just about me trying to say the Latin, sententia antiquae. I don't know if that's right. Anyway, it's linked. Um, just, uh, thanks to Joel, truly. This is just, I'm still reeling from it. And, uh, it's just,

• 1:25:28Liv Albert?

  it was a really great, really great time and makes me so excited to go back to writing the Ion. So you can stay tuned for more of that because, oh, it's fucking good. I, you know, I'm saying it too early, but Jesus, I just, I fucking love the ancient world and everything we can learn from it. I really, it's just such a joy and I haven't felt this type of joy in it in a long time. So I'm pretty happy. Let's talk about this baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Smith is the Hermes to my Olympians, uh, my assistant producer. Laura Smith is the audio engineer and production assistant. The podcast is part of the iHeart Podcast Network. Listen on Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:26:12Liv Albert?

  Help me continue doing this by supporting the show, supporting the, the two free episodes I give you all a week on Patreon, patreon.com slash myths baby. Um, but don't, don't pick me over people who need help. Um, every time I've been saying this lately, I just want to be like, or go find a GoFundMe for people who are trying to just get out alive. Um, you know, so maybe do that instead. Thank you all so much for listening. I am Liv and I love this shit.

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