The True Story Of The Odyssey (and why it matters) - Alex Petkas

Alex Petkas is a historian, writer, and podcaster. What’s the real story behind The Odyssey? As the ancient epic returns to the big screen, a historian reveals the original tale, the world that shaped it, and the timeless lessons hidden within it. Expect to learn why The Odyssey is such an important story, what type of person and writer Homer was, who the important women of The Odyssey were and which ones were benevolent, heroic, or dangerous, why revenge and justice are the key underlying themes in the story, what a real historian thinks of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey and much more… - Get up to $350 off the Eight Sleep Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com - 0:00 Why The Odyssey Still Matters Today 6:19 What Happens in The Odyssey? 9:41 Did Homer Write The Iliad First? 15:20 How Much of The Odyssey is Just Retelling? 16:31 Why is Penelope the Ultimate Prize? 21:43 Telemachus’ Quest to Live Up to His Father 36:19 How Order Can Slip into Anarchy 37:21 Why Odysseus Walked Away From a Goddess 54:13 The Power of Cunning 01:01:09 How Odysseus Outsmarted the Cyclops 01:07:35 The One Mistake That Cursed Odysseus 01:09:23 Is Family the True Heart of The Odyssey? 01:24:57 How Odysseus Finally Returns Home 01:27:48 The Reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus 01:29:57 The Fall of the Suitors 01:42:12 Is Penelope the Real Hero of the Story? 01:46:25 Why Divine Favour Changes Everything 01:49:02 The Hidden Role of Oral Storytelling 01:53:24 Why Nolan’s Films Divide Audiences 01:57:52 Is Emily Wilson’s Translation Accurate? 02:01:26 Has the Classic Hero Disappeared? 02:11:09 Why We Need to Beware Modern Sirens 02:19:48 Where to Find Alex - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Why is the Odyssey such an important story?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  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. I mean, Chris Nolan talks about it as this sort of archetypal story that is somehow in all of the movies that he's done. You know, there's, there's a 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

• 0:40Speaker 01

  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, what it takes to restore that, which, you know, maybe is, is timely for our day.

• 0:56Chris Williamson?

  Who wrote it?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  So Homer is the short answer. Who's Homer? 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, you know, people working in this tradition? And, 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.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  The, the epic poet is, 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 he's traditionally conceived of as this blind bard

• 1:58Speaker 01

  who lived maybe in the eighth century B.C. And the fascinating thing for me about the Iliad and the Odyssey,

• 2:08Speaker 01

  which kind of, you know, are in dialogue with, with each other on some level is, okay, the Greeks discover writing in the eighth century B.C. They, they, they sort of steal it from the Phoenicians and modify it a little bit, make some improving tweaks. So, so the first time that they can really write down their language is this, you know, 700s B.C. 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.

• 2:46Chris Williamson?

  The first album was really difficult to follow up.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  It's, it's almost like, you know, what if today we were still talking about the first movie ever made? Nobody's, nobody's ever going to top, you know, Metropolis or Nosferatu or, you know, and there's probably still people today that think that, but you know, most would say that we've, we've developed a little bit as, you know, as a, the, the movie culture has gotten somewhat better. But, you know, for, for the case of Homer, it's, it's kind of amazing that these things kind of emerge, you know, straight from the mind of Zeus, almost fully formed with all of these incredibly rich layers. And they're so resonant and they have this depth to them, all these like symbolic aspects of them. And how did that happen?

• 3:35Speaker 01

  I think is a really interesting question.

• 3:36Chris Williamson?

  Is there any indication that this story existed before him? Is it his story?

• 3:41Speaker 01

  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, it's, it's in Greek, but Greek is an Indo-European language. All of the Indo-European languages derive from the Indo-Europeans, this, this step people from the middle, central Asia that went, spread out and conquered all of these regions. And, you know, other Indo-European languages include Latin and Celtic and Germanic. Also Indian or Sanskrit, basically.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  The, the Indic peoples also are, they have this Indo-European kind of cultural inheritance, especially in northern India. And it's the people that, that used to be called the Aryans. And now, you know, Twitter Anons will call it, call them Aryans. But, you know, so, so 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, 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

• 5:05Speaker 01

  that have been around for thousands and thousands of years of, of, of oral culture that kind of hits writing right around the eighth century. And it's a kind of distillation of, you know, thousands of years of stories. And, you know, the, the stories of the Trojan War and the Greek heroes probably go back at least hundreds of years before Homer.

• 5:25Chris Williamson?

  Is there anything else to know about, was he blind? Was he who people think he is?

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Well, ancient poets, we don't know a lot about their lives typically, the, 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 the, one of the reasons people think Homer is considered a blind poet is because there's actually a blind epic bard in the Odyssey that, his name's Demodocus. He appears in book eight and he seems to be a kind of Homer figure in the Odyssey itself.

• 6:02Chris Williamson?

  In the same way as painters in the Renaissance would paint themselves into their works.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, very much that's, that sort of thing. And, you know, the idea is that the, the gods have robbed them of his sight, but they've given this deeper vision into the mysteries of the universe and human suffering and so forth.

• 6:17Chris Williamson?

  All right.

• 6:19Chris Williamson?

  Tell me about the story. What happens?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  So if, I mean, I want to get into the narrative and the details, but, you know, the story's pretty simple. There's a backstory, you might, you might've heard the Trojan War. That happens before the poem begins in the, in the poem's chronology. But, you know, 10 years of war at Troy, the, the, the cause of war was Helen of Troy or Helen of Sparta was, was seduced by this playboy Trojan prince, Paris. And he spirited her way to, to Troy, stole her away from the Greeks, Menelaus of, of Sparta.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  And the, you know, the Greeks assembled this massive army to go and take her back essentially and get some plunder along the way. They, after 10 years, they finally end up sacking and destroying the city. And the man responsible for the victory ultimately in, 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, that was his idea.

• 7:27Chris Williamson?

  What year was this?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  So this is, you know, maybe it happened, maybe it didn't. I, I like to ascribe to the school of higher naivete. We can't disprove it, like, let's just say, maybe, maybe, maybe something like that happened.

• 7:42Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  And there's, there's a lot of debates about this, but it would have been 1200 B.C.

• 7:46Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Roughly.

• 7:47Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  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, you know, it happened exactly like Homer told the story. But they, they thought it happened and Homer's in the eighth century imagining this conflict 400 years earlier.

• 8:19Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so it's a sequel in kind. It's a story sequel to this epic myth that may have, may have happened, may not have happened quite the way that we think it does. So this is set in about 1200 B.C.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. And, and it, the Odyssey is kind of a sequel to the Iliad, which is a longer, somewhat longer poem. And, you know, this is a story about what happens at Troy itself. And Achilles is the big hero there. And famously Achilles dies, you know, Paris shoots him in the heel and his Achilles heel, the only vulnerable spot on him before the, 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.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  And it 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.

• 9:24Chris Williamson?

  Cause in the first book, it was Achilles and in the second book.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:27Chris Williamson?

  It's Odysseus.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  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?

• 9:41Chris Williamson?

  Did Homer write these in sequence? Did he write the Iliad first?

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Well, this, this is what the ancient critics thought. This is the kind of traditional narrative. Homer is one guy and he wrote the Iliad as a young man, the kind of vigor of maybe he's 35 and, you know, hanging around guys like you see in, in the Iliad warriors, you mean, seeing spears go in and out of faces and just the incredibly gruesome stuff that you see in the Iliad, a little bit in the Odyssey, but that he's one of those kind of warrior class people or hanging around those kind of guys. Knows people like Achilles and Diomedes. And then in his older age, he, he pens the Odyssey and it's a slower story.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  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, and so he's kind of writing this in the twilight of his years. And, and I, I kind of like that because, you know, the Iliad is just so visceral and, and, um, you know, stark and immediate and violent and glamorous, it kind of glamorizes war, not, not uncritically, but then the Odyssey is, um, is kind of, if it's, if it's a poem by an old man, it's, 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, in modernity.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  It just, it's incorporates a higher range of human experience. And it's, maybe it's for the young, especially like Telemachus, who's this young guy that kicks off the poem. I mean, that, that might be the, the real target audience of, of the Odyssey. It's like a, like a broader range of people. And there's also women, much more, you know, explored in depth in the Odyssey. Um, so I don't know if that answers the question.

• 11:34Chris Williamson?

  That's the background. That's how we arrive at the beginning of it.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, uh, all, all the Trojan Wars ended. Odysseus had some trouble getting home. It's actually 20 years after the Trojan War started, when the Odyssey timeline begins. And, um, we learn in the first, you know, 100 lines or so of the Odyssey that Odysseus, you know, kind of got, got, got off course trying to get back from Troy. Several of the Greeks had this experience. And, um, on his way home, he met these monsters and strange people and he pissed off the god Poseidon. And for a variety of reasons, many of which are his, his own faults, many of which may be not only his fault.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  He is stuck on this island with this divine nymph, a calypso. And she's, she's, she's, uh, she's kind of got him as a prisoner and she wants to make him her husband. And so he's stuck there away from home and, and then everybody at home back in his homeland, which is an island called Ithaca, is wondering where he is, you know, uh, did he die? He didn't die at Troy. The stories about the Trojan War are like circulating in, in the kind of world of the poem. People know something of what happened, but there's no, there's no news of Odysseus. What, what happened? Did, did he, did he get lost at sea? Did, you know, did he just abandon his family?

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Is he, you know, going to go off and, you know, do more pirate adventures among the Ethiopians? What, what's going on with Odysseus? Nobody knows. And, um, and, and the, the poem kind of starts with this background in place. Misadventures, meeting monsters, stuck on Calypso's island. And, uh, that's all kind of before the story actually begins. And the story begins when the gods had this meeting. And, uh, Poseidon happens to be distracted. He's pissed off at Odysseus and doesn't want him to get home. But, um, Poseidon's off like partying with the Ethiopians.

• 13:41Chris Williamson?

  As you do.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  As, as one does, as, as, as the gods often do. I mean, they're, they're, they're a good hang.

• 13:46Chris Williamson?

  And the Ethiopians.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  The Ethiopians. Yeah, yeah.

• 13:48Chris Williamson?

  A good hang. Okay. That's news. That's news to me.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  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's divine champion. She's, um, his favorite goddess. He's her favorite hero. And she goes to Zeus, the, the, you know, 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.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Poseidon will just have to deal with it. And, and that's how the, the action kind of kicks off in, in, in the Odyssey. And long story short, you know, Odysseus gets released from the island, uh, 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 like, not A plus interesting parts of the Odyssey and just get to the, 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, uh, an audience of people that he's met.

• 15:20Chris Williamson?

  So how much, how much of the story is what happens when he gets back? And how much is the retelling of what happened before?

• 15:26Speaker 01

  So the, the first eight books are him and Telemachus. There's 24 books. So the first book, four, four books are Telemachus, then there's four books about Odysseus getting from Calypso's island to this intermediary destination, Skarea, it's called the Phaeacians or this 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.

• 16:11Chris Williamson?

  50% of the book is Love Island.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  50%.

• 16:16Chris Williamson?

  It's the original Love Island.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:18Chris Williamson?

  The lotus eaters were Love Island.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Sirens. Yeah.

• 16:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Okay.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  The Phaeacians, yeah. There's a lot of, there's a lot of kind of sexual tension.

• 16:25Chris Williamson?

  Okay, okay.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Especially, you know, Odysseus with the Phaeacians, which we should get to.

• 16:30Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So what's, what's the rite of passage thing?

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's good to start with Telemachus probably be, so when you, when you start the Odyssey, it's kind of like, wow, I thought this was about Odysseus and we're page after page, you don't meet the guy really until.

• 16:44Chris Williamson?

  Why is his fucking idiot son in this story so much?

• 16:47Speaker 01

  He's a weak little, but that's kind of the point, you know? Telemachus is, is stuck there at home.

• 16:53Chris Williamson?

  How old is he?

• 16:53Speaker 01

  He's 20. So Odysseus left him as an infant essentially, and he's never met his dad, only heard about him.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  And he's kind of grown up in this, in this world of women, you know, his mom and the maid servants who are very loyal. And, you know, there's, there's, uh, you know, loyal servants of Odysseus here and there. But, um, Telemachus's grandfather is, is kind of, uh, too old to do anything. And he's kind of, kind of shattered by Odysseus's absence. So it's, I think, 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, uh, you know, 20, he's getting bossed around.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  There's 108 suitors at his house from all over Western Greece, princes and, uh, big shots.

• 17:53Chris Williamson?

  Why is Odysseus's wife so desirable?

• 17:56Speaker 01

  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, why, why is she the most desirable catch in like all of Greece? I think it's, I mean, obviously like women can be very attractive and alluring at that age. But, you know, for 108 eligible, young, rich bachelors to come and try to Love Island.

• 18:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. It's closer to Bonnie Blue than Love Island, but yeah.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  That's, that's the counter example, you know, you're always supposed to, you know, how could this go wrong?

• 18:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  And only has, has a lot of options, right? So, so he, uh, she's, I think she's desirable. She's very smart and well bred, blah, blah, blah. But the real reason I think she's desirable is, you know, it's like memetic desire. It's the kind of the Gerard.

• 18:54Chris Williamson?

  Fucking knew you were going to say.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  You know, yeah, I went there.

• 18:57Chris Williamson?

  I want the wife of the guy that's a hero, because if I can take her, that means I'm a hero too.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 19:03Chris Williamson?

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• 20:11Chris Williamson?

  being whisked away, being stolen, and now this is a new version of the same, a similar kind of tension?

• 20:19Speaker 01

  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 she goes off track and why it's

• 20:35Chris Williamson?

  Unheard of.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  No, no. And, and, you know, there's a story that, that he, well, we'll get to it in a moment, that all the kind of gruesome counter examples. So it is this memetic, 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,

• 21:05Chris Williamson?

  The Timu Odysseus.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Timu Odysseus.

• 21:08Chris Williamson?

  Timu, yeah, like the Chinese knockoff of Odysseus.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:12Chris Williamson?

  And they're like, hey, she goes, I've got the, I don't need your, like Huawei phone. I've got, yeah, an iPhone at home.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And she's like, oh, they're like, oh, sweetie, iPhones are dead. And, you know, they're never coming back. You gotta,

• 21:26Chris Williamson?

  Huawei.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  No, it's just backordered. It's backordered. I believe, I believe. So, so 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? And so there's, there's a kind of dramatic tension there.

• 21:43Chris Williamson?

  What's that like for the son to be around this situation?

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the suitors have been there for like four years. They haven't been there the whole time. But, you know, he's, he was 16 maybe when they came and he's, he's far outnumbered. He doesn't feel like he's in control of his own house. And in fact, it's kind of anarchy, like anarchy, you know, when, when the patriarch 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, 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

• 22:27Speaker 01

  they outnumber him and they're older. And, 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 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, alter ego and shows up at Telemachus's house, at Odysseus's house one day. And, you know, she doesn't get greeted at the gates, which is very bad hospitality. So, so the suitors

• 23:08Speaker 01

  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, 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, which one of us do you approve of? But instead, they're, they're just eating away at the, the cows and enjoying the, the fruits of the, the estate of Odysseus's house. They're, they're eating him 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, when Athena gets there, she's just sort

• 23:52Speaker 01

  of like left hanging, even though she looks really respectable. And this is, this is just seen as incredibly a bad faux pas. And Telemachus greets her and he's visibly annoyed that, that these people haven't greeted her. And, and he extends her hospitality, welcomes her in and, and, and she, you know, long story short, she says, you know, 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, the biggest of the kings. He organized

• 24:35Speaker 01

  the expedition to capture Helen. And they won. And when, when he came back, like practically upon arrival, he gets murdered by his own wife, who was seduced by his cousin, who wanted to steal the throne from Agamemnon. And so Agamemnon's murdered by his cousin and his own, his own lovely wife, Clytemnestra. 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

• 25:18Speaker 01

  says, you might have to do just such a thing with these suitors. So he's trying to stir him up by this example of, you know,

• 25:28Chris Williamson?

  Is she trying to create a rift between him and his mother?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  I don't think, I don't think that's what's going on.

• 25:33Chris Williamson?

  You could have read it in that way, using that example.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  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 be, become a man of violence, potentially. You have to be, you have to be able to scare these guys.

• 25:52Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So Athena's come in to cockblock 108 suitors?

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and to, you know, get, get Telemachus to, to man up finally and, you know, go on his, his quest. And basically, she's, she says, here's what you gotta 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's old buddies on the mainland. And this is what he does, in short. And, 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, Pylos, tells Telemachus some news. He hasn't heard about Odysseus

• 26:40Speaker 01

  other than he got, he got, you know, blown by the storm, off into oblivion. Nobody knows what happened to him. But, 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, you know? Good women can go wrong if the, if

• 27:19Speaker 01

  the circumstances are, are, are wrong. What did he do to keep her on the straight and narrow? He left a bard there to, 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, when women behave badly, or whatever it is. But, you know, the poet is sort of seen as this upholder of the moral order. And

• 27:49Chris Williamson?

  It's slightly self-serving by Homer there?

• 27:51Speaker 01

  You know, you might think of it as pro bard propaganda. I think that would be fair, but it, it, 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, poets are the ones who remember the things that need to be passed down from generation to generation, right? So they kind of, they have a lot of moral credibility if they're good ones. And, you know, they can be bad ones too. But as soon, so basically, Agamemnon's cousin knew that he couldn't get to Clytemnestra.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  He kept kind of making advances at his, 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 Agistus swooped in and seduced her, because the poet was away. So, yeah, there, I think this really does match how, how the Greeks would have thought of, like, why you need epic, epic poetry. It's like, it is actually a kind of moral pillar of society.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  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 to talk to Menelaus and he actually meets Helen of Troy. Well, she's, she's back to being Helen of Sparta at this point. She's, you know, she's come back and

• 29:32Chris Williamson?

  Repatriated?

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Repatriated, yeah. Returned to her rightful owner. So, yeah, and Helen, it's a really interesting interaction with Helen. She's still kind of, she's kind of chastened, you know, she's, she's become a matriarch instead of a maiden. But she's still kind of got that spooky allure, femme fatale charm. She gives Telemachus, she slips some, some, 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, Menelaus's

• 30:12Speaker 01

  two kids. And they start to tell stories and, and Helen puts a drug in his drink that would make any man forget about all desire of returning home. And even if his parents were slaughtered before his eyes, he would not care until the next day. It's this kind of like, I think it's symbolic of, you know, the, the, the power of the female charms over, over a man.

• 30:40Chris Williamson?

  Helen of Troy not showering herself in glory across these two books.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Fact.

• 30:44Chris Williamson?

  Definitely rolling some dice into the, into the fray.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  And, and, and the interesting thing too is she

• 30:53Speaker 01

  So I could quibble with Emily Wilson on a translation point here. You know, the more popular Odyssey translation these days. So Helen says she's the first person to recognize Telemachus. It's, it's, it's, 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, you know, given them some, you know, a nice robe to wear or whatever. Then do you ask them who they are? But Helen recognizes Telemachus immediately and she says, if I'm not mistaken, you are the son of Odysseus, who Odysseus left as a tiny infant.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  When the Greeks all came to Troy to, um, to take me back, the shameless one. And the Greek there actually says, it could be translated as shameless bitch. The kunops is the, is the Greek word, means dog face. It's, it's a very rude thing. She calls herself, you know, a bitch or something like it's, it's, she kind of insults herself. And it's, um, it's really disarming, I think. So, um, Emily Wilson translated that line as something like, um,

• 32:08Speaker 01

  they came to take me back, the, the one who, who hounded them or something. It, so the hound is kind of a, an allusion to the dog piece, but it kind of softens the fact that Helen is really kind of.

• 32:22Chris Williamson?

  Slightly more flattering.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it, it's more, but the point is she seduces you by saying the bad thing that you had in mind about her. How can this woman just, you know, pretend like we don't all know the terrible things she did? And that's the first thing she named and she's like, oh.

• 32:37Chris Williamson?

  You can get away with anything with enough self-awareness.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. She kind of insults herself to, to, to draw you in. And she does this in the Iliad too. She's, she's a really tricky woman. But, you know, she's behaving herself and, um, Menelaus seems happy. There's a little bit of, there's a little bit of tension between the two of them. It's a really interesting scene in book four. But, 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, not, not there. And he does this by, you know, making the journey, asking about his dad and saying, I'm, I'm just trying to get my house in order. And kind of behaving himself well, you know, he's, he acts very tactfully.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  He's pious and, you know, they're always, in this, this trip, the, 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 always, there's all these sacrifices to the gods. Like every time before a meal, they pray to the gods, they wash their hands, they have a sacrifice. Never, never do the suitors pray before a meal. You know, it's a sign they're.

• 33:50Chris Williamson?

  Godless.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  They're godless, they're, they're chaotic, they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing. So, um, Homer cares a lot about these things in the, in the, in more in the Odyssey than he does about the Iliad. These are like little things that sort of signal, you know, good order in, in culture and society.

• 34:06Chris Williamson?

  Okay. And is that the end of this rite of passage?

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's, that's basically the, Menelaus invites Telemachus to stay as long as he wants. And Telemachus says, I gotta get back. You've been very kind. I could stay here a whole year. It's, it's so nice. Menelaus is like one of the richest Greeks.

• 34:23Chris Williamson?

  Thanks for drugging me.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Yes. Uh, I've had a really good time, let me tell you.

• 34:28Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  But, uh, I gotta get back to, uh, he, Menelaus offers him these horses. It's like really nice. It's, it's like offering a kid a Ferrari, you know?

• 34:39Speaker 01

  And, and Telemachus says, you know, my island is not horse country. It's goat country. There's, there is no, no, no place to ride around horses. It's an ugly, scraggly little island. Um, and, but that's home for me. And I don't know, he, he has to, he knows he has to get back and take on the challenge and like suffer to, to become who he is. But that, 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, uh, on his way back and murder him. So he's, he's got a target painted on him.

• 35:16Chris Williamson?

  What a bunch of bastards.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:24Chris Williamson?

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• 36:09Chris Williamson?

  We're going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. What are they supposed to represent philosophically at this stage?

• 36:23Speaker 01

  I think, so there's, there's the whole anarchy versus patriarchy going on. There's the kind of usurped glory. I think the Odyssey.

• 36:31Chris Williamson?

  Good men, bad men, absence of good men means that there's a vacuum for bad men to step in.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And I think there's a kind of broader arc of the, the Odyssey is about the, the clash between order and entropy and, um, and sort of dissolution of complex societies into kind of barbaric or animal, uh, you know, soup. And the suitors kind of represent those forces of, of violence and turmoil and primordial soup out of which order needs to be established, sometimes, sometimes violently.

• 37:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  And that's, and that's justice. That's importantly, to establish that is about justice.

• 37:21Chris Williamson?

  Okay. And then we switch and Odysseus wakes up one day on Calypso's island, needs to get home.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Staring off into the ocean, sitting there weeping, um, longing for his homeland. Calypso is, you know, this incredibly hot 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.

• 37:51Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  But Odysseus points out, never did they win the heart within me. So it was kind of.

• 37:58Chris Williamson?

  Got my penis, but not my heart.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It was just sex, baby, you know?

• 38:04Speaker 01

  And I, Homer seems to take this as, as an acceptable explanation.

• 38:09Chris Williamson?

  We're going to darken the environment appropriately.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  It's getting, it's about to get spooky.

• 38:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:14Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  So, so that's, yeah, he wakes up, it's book five. And, and Hermes arrives as, as he was sent from, 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.

• 38:47Chris Williamson?

  So what people are saying.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  It's like, Hermes arrives and he goes, I'm so glad I'm not in fucking Houston. Yeah. Well, well, you know, Houston is humid, but there's no, there's no place sweeter than one's homeland. So, so, uh, even the gods are amazed at how, you know, beautiful and how nice of a place this would, 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.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  This, there's a, a, a bad story about this happening with, um, this guy Thonus, who the goddess Dawn, Aos, uh, 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.

• 39:49Chris Williamson?

  Decrepit.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  And never dies. He kind of shrinks to a little, a little bug.

• 39:54Chris Williamson?

  Always got to read the small print.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:55Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  And, uh, you know, you never know when you make a deal with a goddess, like there, there might be some loophole that.

• 40:02Chris Williamson?

  Fuckery.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  It screws you over.

• 40:03Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. It doesn't always, it's not always bad.

• 40:05Chris Williamson?

  Hermes arrives, it's real nice. Odysseus has been piping Calypso for ages.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, unwillingly.

• 40:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  But.

• 40:14Chris Williamson?

  I'm sure.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  But Hermes says, you, you gotta let him go. And Calypso hymns and haws, this is not fair. He's my, he's my boy, toy, but she says, all right, I'll, I'll help him get out of here.

• 40:28Chris Williamson?

  Calypso like a god, says?

• 40:30Speaker 01

  So she's a, she's a nymph, which is, which is a divine, yeah, she's, she's a goddess, basically, sort of lesser divinity.

• 40:36Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  And, um.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  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, um, essentially, she's promising him something that like, why is this unsatisfying? And it's kind of like you're, you're

• 41:25Speaker 01

  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 and we probably all felt that feeling? I think it's, 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, it's also like particularly pointed for Odysseus. In the story, Homer, Homer gives these people epithets. He's like recurring adjectives that describe them in the poetry. Odysseus is many turned, polytropos.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  He is much like many crafted, you know, very, very crafty, polymathus. He is also much suffering or much enduring, politas. So all of the things about 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 this 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, of identity. So I see why it's not appealing. But she, you know, she says, I'll help you go here. She goes to her tool shed.

• 42:46Chris Williamson?

  Chick of the tool shed. That's hot.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that, that was a vote of confidence for her. Apparently it's not, not that, not that great a conversation, but, um, practical enough.

• 42:55Chris Williamson?

  Wonderful.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  She brings him an, uh, you know, auger and axe, whatever you need to make a, make a, make a boat. And, uh, she says, all right, here are the tools. There are the trees.

• 43:05Chris Williamson?

  Crack on.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  You're on your own. So he has to make his own raft.

• 43:08Chris Williamson?

  He's here on his own.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:10Chris Williamson?

  Completely on his own.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah. He's lost all of his comrades at this point. They're all dead. Some, 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, um, and he has to make his own boat. And that's, that's a really like interesting symbolic moment there. So Odysseus is, um, 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, 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 like weaving.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  She's got us of the olive. Olive tree is a, is a very domestic tree. You know, you have to plant it and wait many years before it ever gives you anything worthwhile. And the older and older it gets, the more and more olives it makes. And so it's 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, is kind of important. It's kind of symbolic that. And, and, and, and he's about to go into sea, which is the realm of Poseidon, who is this god of wild nature. He's the, the god of storms at sea, earthquakes, you know, the brute force of nature.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  And, uh, 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, and this is a really important kind of polarity with throughout the whole story because.

• 44:58Chris Williamson?

  Order and chaos again.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And, and this is actually, the Greeks really think of the world in these binaries, you know? There's, uh, um, civilization and barbarism. Nature and culture, male and female.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  There is, uh, cooked and raw, you know? Do, do the people here eat, eat their food cooked or do they eat it raw? That's kind of a dividing point between man and animal or man, kind of wild men. So, um, you know, Odysseus is clearly on one side of that through, through, throughout the story.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  And, uh, and we'll see why it matters in a little bit, but so he, 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 a, an amicable breakup because you know, you don't want to piss off a goddess if you don't have to. And then he gets to this island of.

• 45:53Chris Williamson?

  He's built the ship.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  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

• 46:11Speaker 01

  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, to swim to, to shore. Um, Calypso gave him all of these, you know, fine luxurious robes. It's a parting gift. And he has to take all that off because, because if he keeps it on, he's going to sink and die. So he, 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

• 46:54Speaker 01

  because a ball bounced into the grass next to him. And, uh, he discovers that he's, he's on a civilized place. There are humans there. In fact, a bunch of, you know, attractive, nubile young ladies are washing, washing some clothes in this little river. And, um, and so he, you know, has to come up with a plan at that point, like, uh, so this is a great scene because he, basically the, the next couple of stages for his journey have to do, just like, kind of like treating Calypso well, uh, to the extent he could. He has to, he has to really use

• 47:35Speaker 01

  women's agency to get him what he needs next, to get home, to, to, to accomplish his goal. And the first girl that he, the first woman he meets happens to be the princess of the island. She's the, the daughter of the, of the king and queen, as he finds out. Her name is now Sicca. There's a lot of, uh, like paintings of this scene. I mean, many scenes of the Odyssey, but this one in particular. Odysseus is stark naked and, um, he emerges from his bush and he holds a little like branch in front of his private parts so that, uh, to have a little bit of dignity. And, you know, approaches these girls

• 48:18Speaker 01

  and all of them just like scream and run away because he looks horrific. I mean, he, he probably looks like Tom Hanks from, from Castaway at this point, and he's caked and brine and, uh, you know, they're thinking, is this guy gonna try to?

• 48:31Chris Williamson?

  Savage.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Savage us.

• 48:32Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Ravage.

• 48:33Chris Williamson?

  Oh, please, no.

• 48:37Chris Williamson?

  Mr. Seaman, don't savage me.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  And that, that is an aspect of it. There's this kind of like tension. So all the, all the girls run away except the, the princess. Now Sicca is like, she's taller than the rest. She's more attractive than the rest. She's clearly a braver than the rest. And she's just like standing there waiting for him to explain himself. And, and she's 20 ish, Homer tells us, and she, you know, he tells, he kind of builds up to this. She's actually, she went down to the, to the coast thinking about marriage with like marriage on her mind. She wants to like clean some clothes and look nice and sort of make an appearance around town and see if, see if any of the young men want to, you know, make a pass at her. She's, she's ready to kind of move on to the next stage. And so, you know,

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Odysseus addresses her from a few feet off. Wow. Fair maiden, uh, 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, that grew up by the altar of Apollo at Delos, and I was leading many men there. So, you know, he's kind of giving him, giving her a little backstory about himself as, as a respectable man. And he says,

• 50:00Speaker 01

  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, uh, and show me to the town?

• 50:15Speaker 01

  And, uh, she's kind of flattered, like it worked. He's charmed her. He's like already got her charm. And she, 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, uh, you know, kind of, you know,

• 50:30Speaker 01

  luring her in a little bit. And she, you know, long story short, she, she ends up, um, telling him what he needs to do.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  And that is go talk to my mom, the queen.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Not that she totally runs the show, but she's kind of like the back door to get to the king. Her mom is Areté, who is the prince, the queen of the island. And Odysseus makes his way there and he kind of sneaks into the palace alone. She does give him more than a towel. She actually, you know, her handmaidens like give him some actual clothes and some oil to rub himself. He takes a bath in the river, so he looks a little better, less like a, you know, wild sea man. And he sneaks in and he embraces Areté by the knees and says, oh, lady, I've, I've traveled many days and been shipwrecked. And I just trying to make my way home.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  I please I supplicate you as Zeus is the god of supplience. Would you please help me blah, blah, blah. And he speaks well and, and, and she says, all right, stranger, you, 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, 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.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  But he, you know, if, if he had screwed it up with the princess, if he had screwed it up with her mother, he could have, he could have lost his head, basically. If he had offended him somehow, if he had, you know, savaged or given any hint of savaging, would have been over for him. So these women have power, but they're dangerous too, you know? They could go either way. And, um, and then, uh, basically, uh, they, they throw a feast for him. They say, well, we'll get you home. We're going to send you home and he declines the, the marriage invitation, of course. Let's, let's get you on one of our magic ships. They have these magic ships, but first let's have a feast for you.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  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, at that party.

• 53:01Chris Williamson?

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• 53:45Chris Williamson?

  Best of all, you can join for free, pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 5.0 strap. And you get your first month for free and there's a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now you can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and that 30 day free trial by going to the link in the description below. Or heading to join dot whoop dot com slash modern wisdom. That's join dot whoop dot com slash modern wisdom. A lot of shrewdness that being upheld, like the, the caniness of Athena to be able to work around

• 54:24Chris Williamson?

  the issues of Poseidon, of Odysseus being able to leave in a gentle manner that doesn't get him on the bad side of Calypso. His ability then to cajole and, and play the game when he lands on this new island. So a lot of it is a, yeah, an up, an, an upholding of being canny, being like a slick operator.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, would Agamemnon have, have charmed his way in with this young princess? I don't know. I mean, maybe.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  But, but this is, this is the arts of Athena. And this is actually, it's actually these, these kind of things, these kind of tricky, canny things are what he's going to need to eventually

• 55:14Speaker 01

  clean out the suitors and get his, get his home back. So, yeah, it's, this is, he is a hero who can't use violence in his great arc.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  A little bit of violence, but mostly it's, it's like trickery and in places where he just, he just vastly out, outmatched in force.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  So there's this, this is the, 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, leave me alone. I'm, I'm tired. I was 20, 20 days at sea and like, oh, come on, we probably can't even throw a discus. And 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 bard, Phemias. He tells a few stories, some of them famous. He tells the story of Ares and Aphrodite.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Ares, you know, stealing Hephaestus' wife away. 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, you know, warriors in there and Odysseus concluded 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.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  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 this story, Odysseus, I mean, apparently he's a good bard, you know? Tragic, Odysseus just starts crying and he's trying to be, 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.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  So it's almost like he's, 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.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  But Alcinous can, can tell the king, yeah, you know, maybe that's enough epic poetry for tonight. Our guest is very tired. He can see it.

• 58:20Chris Williamson?

  Historical.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  So, um, so he says, stranger, I could tell that this story was bothering you. Did you have a brother or, or a cousin, perhaps a father who went off to fight at Troy?

• 58:36Speaker 01

  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, the great narrative begins in book, book nine, which is, I think, the, the high point, the best part of the story.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  And, um, and Odysseus is kind of playing the bard here notably. He's doing, he's basically let, he's allowed to be Homer for four books, just narrating these amazing tales.

• 59:03Chris Williamson?

  Filleting himself.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, and he doesn't always come off as the best guy in the stories, which is interesting.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  But, you know, they do, they do shine a good light on him. He learns from his mistakes. And, um, and, and there's a moment, there's a pause in the, in the storytelling at book 11, where everybody's just like, you know, gawking jaws dropped and he's, he's enchanted the room, just like Homer enchanted the room.

• 59:31Chris Williamson?

  What's he telling? He's telling the story of Troy.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  So his, he, he says, I'm Odysseus. I was kept by Circe and Calypso, but they never, they never swayed the heart in me. I'm from Ithaca. I'm just trying to make my, my way back to Ithaca. It's a crappy rocky island. But, you know, 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, um, you know, some of the familiar faces appear now. They try to have a cattle raid on these Thracians, Kekonese. And it goes well for a while.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  And then the, 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.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  And then they, they meet the lotus eaters. That's the next people they meet.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  Very, very tempting.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  A very, a very tempting spot, you know, British podcasters who just talk about culture issue all, all day. But the lotus eaters are basically like potheads, I think. And the, the lotus flower just makes you want to forget your return journey home and just sit and eat lotus until you die.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Kind of like opium or they, they were aware of opium. But that, that's the, and then the next monster they meet.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  It's clear that they're sort of being tempted as they're traveling back and, and they get blown off course to this island of, 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.

• 1:01:38Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Well, okay. Cyclopses are, Emily Wilson translates cyclopses a couple of places in her translation as cyclopean people. Like they're,

• 1:01:52Chris Williamson?

  Like people, people of color.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Temporarily afflicted with being one eyed monsters. I don't know. Her, her take is-

• 1:02:00Chris Williamson?

  It's a very D E I approach to a story from 3,000 years ago.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  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,

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  her take would be the cyclopses are kind of a, 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 of these people that he meets are just, they're just like people and they're, they're strange, but you know, maybe they have their own way of doing things. But, and the cyclops's way of doing things is to be a giant one eyed monster that eats people. So.

• 1:02:37Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So that's the indigenous wisdom of the-

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:43Chris Williamson?

  All right.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  But, uh, and he plays his trick on the cyclops of it, you know, he goes and they go in the cave and, the cyclops

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  eats, eats some of his men and traps, traps Odysseus and his men with this big rock.

• 1:02:59Chris Williamson?

  So you're watching the, you're watching the troops of Odysseus dwindle after each different-

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  Round after round. And I think the cyclops story is really interesting because with the way that Odysseus describes it is they are, they, they live in little family units. They do not care about the gods. They, they think Zeus is a chump and every man is a law to his own wife and children. So they're, they're giant, forceful men that think law and order is, 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.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  And this makes them vulnerable. This makes them underestimate the power of trickery.

• 1:03:52Chris Williamson?

  They're not coordinated, they're not unified.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And, and they, so the cyclops himself, Polyphemus is, is the one that Odysseus faces. He had actually heard a prophecy that someday some man named Odysseus would come and blind him. And, and after he gets blinded, he tells this story and he's sort of raging.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  He said, I was not, a prophet once came and told us that I would get blinded by a man named Odysseus, but I thought he would be a strong man, not some little pipsqueak, you know? So he was, he was not on guard for craft. They're, they're, 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, in the cave and a cyclops is kind of gradually eating the man 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, of moderation, you know?

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  And he just, it's like giving whiskey to the Native Americans or whatever, like-

• 1:05:02Chris Williamson?

  Exactly what I was thinking.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  He just, he just slams it.

• 1:05:05Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  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. You know? 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 a point in the fire. I mean, it's a very kind of like technological sort of act too, kind of like building the ship.

• 1:05:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, more craft.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, more craft and they, you know, they stab him when he's drunk in the eye and he's blinded and.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  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 he makes the mistake as they're kind of sailing away from the cyclops's island, the cyclops is foaming at the mouth and raging at them. Where are they? Where are they?

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Odysseus says, well, he, he told them, I should have probably mentioned the famous trick. When he introduces himself, he says, my name is nobody.

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  And then when the cyclops gets stabbed in the eye, he calls out to his fellow cyclops libertarians in the other households. And he says, nobody is, is hurting me. Nobody is just, you know,

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  forcefully harming me. And, and they say, well, if nobody's hurting you, then that's just tough luck. You know, maybe you're sick and Zeus just makes people suffer. There's nothing we can do about it.

• 1:06:47Chris Williamson?

  Oh, very funny.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  So, and there's actually a play on words there. Because if you get into the, like the Greek, when, when they say, when he says, nobody's hurting me, it's utis, nobody is utis. But if you put the, the no in an if clause, so the cyclopses, the other cyclopses respond, if nobody is killing you, then the ooh, the negative changes to a may. So it's if matis is killing you. And if trickery is killing you is, is how it sounds. It's, it's, it's two words in, 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 than not violence. Or, or trickery, you know,

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  blasted his eye.

• 1:07:33Chris Williamson?

  It's a double entendre.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. How'd he get cursed?

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  So yeah, he gets cursed by basically giving the cyclops his name. He says, if anybody asks you how you got blinded, tell them Odysseus did it. And Polyphemus says, ah, I knew it, I knew it. And then he says, father Poseidon. And Odysseus is like, what? Father Poseidon? Poseidon is the father of Polyphemus, the cyclops. Little did he know, 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.

• 1:08:16Chris Williamson?

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• 1:08:51Chris Williamson?

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• 1:09:23Chris Williamson?

  This is locked in on him still telling the story. So everybody's sat around.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Chris Williamson?

  Mouths open.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:28Chris Williamson?

  Holy shit, this is an epic story.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And um.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  Time is a, I mean, 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.

• 1:09:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  Maybe a couple more episodes are worth kind of highlighting. So um. Eventually they make their way, their way to this other island, Circe's island. And here's another strange woman that he has to deal with. Circe is um. Divine witch goddess, sort of like Calypso style, but, but a little bit more, 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 um, and he sends his men in, he waits at the ships. The men go, they find this hut in this clearing.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  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. They, 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.

• 1:10:58Chris Williamson?

  As a pig.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  As a human.

• 1:11:00Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  He doesn't go in. All the other guys are pigs. He just hustles back to Odysseus. Tells him what happened.

• 1:11:06Chris Williamson?

  Fucked in there. There's this chick. She's got a wand. All the guys are pigs. We shouldn't go.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Let's, let's.

• 1:11:12Chris Williamson?

  Nightmare party.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  Immediately. Go, go to the ship.

• 1:11:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's almost as bad as that Cyclops guy.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  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, what might be uh, in store for us here. Maybe they want to give me a present.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  So um, and then this is another one of those instances, but he, he, he, he draws his sword and he's like

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  ready for action, charges in. And Hermes stops him. He says, Odysseus, if you go in there, you're just gonna become a pig. She's gonna turn you into a pig.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  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 this is not where we get the word holy moly, but if that helps you remember.

• 1:12:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  I know, I, I looked it up. It's like, that's, it's too good. No, it is too good, but um. But it is, you know, famous plant and he, he tells Odysseus the nature of this plant is what Homer said, the physis of this plant. This is the feces, 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 um, and Odysseus like, you know, rubs it on himself or eats some. It's not really clear what. But it's a, it's an antidote to her magic. And so he goes in.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  You know, the, 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, huh. He stands up and he draws his sword. He's like, all right, Circe, jig is up. And um, she's like, how did you, how did you, you know, avoid my magic? And uh, and then she asks him, as, as you might expect, to go to bed with her.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  Uh, and Hermes had warned him that this might happen. She, she's gonna ask you to go to bed with her. You gotta do it. Did no choice.

• 1:13:32Chris Williamson?

  Take one for the team, dude. Pipe the pig lady. Come on now.

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  Man up.

• 1:13:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  And uh, he says, but she's actually trying to unman you. It's a trick, maybe. Who knows? But you gotta get her to swear an oath that she's not gonna 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 gotta change him back. And so she says, fine. They still go to bed. And uh, then she changes his men back and.

• 1:14:02Chris Williamson?

  Odysseus puts a shift in.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know.

• 1:14:04Chris Williamson?

  The only, the only people that Odysseus hasn't had sex with so far have been Cyclops.

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:09Chris Williamson?

  As far as I can see.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, well, and who knows? Cause he's the one telling the story.

• 1:14:13Chris Williamson?

  The Odysseus sex tour thus far. Matt Damon's really got his work cut out for him.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  Known, known the minds of many people, many, many men and women. Um.

• 1:14:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  And uh, so, you know, he's, he's, he's taking one for the team, day after day after day, and it takes about a year.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  She's, she's changed him back into men and, and you know, look, it's a nice place, right? They get the food and there's fun little animal pets to play with, but the men are like, all right, Odysseus. It's been a year. You're having a good time. Uh, this is a fine enough place, but we kind of miss our homes. Can we get out of here? And so he makes her uh, help him get on to 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 um, basically he has to go consult this, is to go consult this prophet Tyresius, who's dead.

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  This blind, another blind, wise person who's died, famous Theban Tyresius. And to get to him, you know, you don't go down to the underworld in the Odyssey, you go out. And so you have to sail many days. And so, long story short, he, he sails many days, you know, it gets misty and weird and uh, 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 uh, and then the, the ghosts of the dead come. So like, you go out and then the underworld comes to you.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  And this is, I think this is one of the best scenes in the whole book. But, you know, all of these wraiths come, these like gibbering wraiths, and they're, 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 uh, remnants of people, you might say. 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, they get blood and they kind of have a little moment of, of liveliness so they can actually speak face to face to Odysseus.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  And the first one he talked, well, the first one he talks to is this guy Alpinor, who fell off the roof and died and Odysseus, will you bury me? Yes. All right. Next. Then he talks to Tyresius. And Tyresius um, tells him, you know,

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  you're gonna get home fine if, if you can keep your hands and your mouth off, that's came out wrong, off the cows of the sun. And you're gonna, you're gonna run aground on this island, the, 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 gonna get blasted and die. So it's gonna take more kind of restraint to get home. And he says also um,

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  you know, you're, he tells him about the suitors, who haven't actually arrived on the scene, but he's, he is a prophet. And so it's gonna be really, really tough to get back home. And Odysseus says, all right, thank you. And um, the, there's also this other prophecy about a quest he has to go on, which we can omit for now. It's a, it's a very strange scene, but um, after that, he, 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, um, but you know, his hands go right through her. And she tells him that's how it is with the dead. You can't, you can't embrace a dead person. And she kind of, you know, explains to him how the whole afterlife thing works. And um, which I think is important for Homer somehow, that, that, that, that the knowledge that

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  upholds civilization includes this kind of metaphysical stuff, that's weird afterlife stuff. That's my read at least. And then I think one of the most interesting things that is not often pointed out, the, 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, from the Iliad. It's these famous women. The mother of Amphion, who built the walls of Thebes. Um, let's see. A few other mortals who had bedded with gods and, and as he's kind of letting them

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  drink of the blood and conversing with them, it's almost like he's satisfying his curiosity. You know, he's a very like intellectually capacious man. He wants to know everything. He's, 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.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  And um, you know, I had a, 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 I helped, at this, this moment, it kind of helped me realize this. After he died, I, I was hanging out with his mom after the funeral. And she was just telling me all of these stories about him as a young man, that I'd never really understood why he was so impressive or what, what he had to go through. And um, I think, I think that this is kind of about how how women fit into the story of the making of a hero. You know, it, it seems really important to me now. I never noticed it until that happened.

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  But they're sort of serving that role, um, narrating the, the deeds of their, of their family, upholding order.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  All right. And one more person I want to mention while he's down there among the dead is he meets Achilles. And this is, this is the moment where you, you see this tension between the Iliad and the Odyssey. Where Homer kind of poses the question, what is worth striving after?

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  Achilles died young. He traded a long life for eternal glory. He may, 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, uh, you were so glorious in life, Achilles. It's, it's amazing to meet you now that you're dead. We, we mourned you very much. And Achilles says to Odysseus,

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  don't, don't make light of death in front of me.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  I would rather be a slave, a higher, a hireling, a hireling of a man with no land to his name. Bulloimain, uh, caparuro seon, te teomenalo, andri paraclero, omebiotos poluse. I would rather be a hired servant, uh, lowest status person on earth than be king of the dead.

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  So it's, what does that mean? Achilles is telling him. Maybe, maybe glory isn't all that it's cracked out to be. Maybe Odysseus got, is getting, or has the potential to get the better thing in life, which is continuation of his line. And the other thing that Achilles says to Odysseus is,

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  if I had one more day of life,

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  you know what I would do? I would go to my father's house because I have heard that there are men in my country insulting my father. And I would go and slaughter all of them. I would avenge my father's name. And by the way, have you heard any news about my son? So Achilles, you know, this, this great, brilliant, glamorous warrior from the Iliad. What he cares about in death is his family, you know? This, this is the thing that matters. I think that's one of the big messages of the Odyssey.

• 1:22:42Speaker 01

  What really matters in the long run? What, 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?

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  Odysseus is maybe the greatest hero because he manages to get both of them. Which requires cunning and craft and, and force, but also requires luck, you know?

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  So whatever Odysseus thought of that, you know, uh, makes his way back to Circe's island and, and there's more, there's more temptations to, to face. He has to go through the sirens, um, Skillet Corridus. They finally meet the cattle of the sun and Odysseus falls asleep. Uh, at some, you know, a god puts sleep upon him. Maybe he 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 cursed beef. Did he warn the men? Yes, yes. He warned them again and again. And they said,

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  I would rather, uh, one of his, his leaders of his men says, Odysseus is asleep. He's, he's been lying to us this whole time about this and that. But you know, maybe he's telling the truth about the cows. Look, I'd rather eat and, uh, and die than, than like starve, waste away, uh, like we're going to die anyway. We might as well have a good time while we do it.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  As soon as they eat the cows, the winds start to blow and, you know, they get on the ship.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  Lightning bolt, they all die. Odysseus grabs aboard and kind of floats to Circe's isle, or Calypso's island. And, uh, and then he ends his story and the Phaeacians say, wow, okay. Um, so will you be packing soon? Uh, let's, let's get you off to your, to your homeland. And they send him off on, on a ship back to, back to, back to Ithaca. How easy is the journey?

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  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, 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. It's like he fast- Those bastards, they left me on a, 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, it's, it's really weird. And I think it's, it's kind of like,

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  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're, they don't have, um, there's no pirates. They have these magical ships. They have maybe these like robot dogs. Um, it's not clear. Robot golden dogs, um, guarding the palace. Uh, maybe they can move, maybe they can't. Homer doesn't really specify, but it's, it's an eerie peaceful Shangri-La.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  Again, it's a kind of a temptation. Like he, 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. Uh, but you know, he, 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 myths to the world of the harsh reality. Where on the hero's journey is he? Is he six o'clock? Is he seven o'clock? That's a good question. So yeah, he, he, Circe's is sort of maybe serving that wise counselor role. Maybe Tyresius is, there's a, there's a catabasus, the descent. Uh, he's, he's come out with the knowledge that he needs to get back.

• 1:27:02Speaker 01

  So he's, he's about, basically about to face the final boss. And it's, it's a very long facing of the final boss. I mean, we're only halfway through the book at this point. Yeah. He's back. Um, but I think it's, you know, you can, you can dispense with it a lot quicker.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  So, uh,

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  but you know, he's, he's got to use all of these stratagems that he's been sort of developing through his sufferings. Cause there's a hundred and eight suitors in the house. He has no idea if anybody of his servants are still loyal. He has no idea if one of these guys maybe has seduced his wife and they're gonna, she's gonna play real nice and when he gets home and then they're gonna stab him in his bed. Yeah. Agamemnon. Right.

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  When does he meet his son? So he, Odysseus makes his way to the swineherd's hut. Eumaeus, he's a, you know, pig, pig tender. And, uh, one of Odysseus's 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, he spends this kind of cock and bull story about, uh, you know, getting

• 1:28:30Speaker 01

  seized by Phoenicians or something. I mean, but he, he, he's, he's keeping his, keeping his cards to his chest.

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  And then it just so happens that Telemachus gets back from his travel. He alludes the, the kind of ambush somehow that the suitors were trying to launch on him. And he, uh, 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.

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  The, um, the nurse, Euryclea, figures it out and he makes her swear to not tell anybody. And he eventually tells the swineherd right before they slaughter the suitors. And his wife actually finds out very last, funny enough.

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  But he goes in, he goes into this, this palace, you know? Hey, how does he find out about all of the suitors? Does he see them? Well, Telemachus tells him and Eumaeus tells him what's going on at home. And they say, you know, your wife has been faithful, but he doesn't know, right? He, he still wants to test her. And he does in disguise, uh, eventually. Dressed as a beggar, you know, famously. And, and he, um, there's one, one or two cool scenes that are worth narrating about this whole arc before the, the final gratifying bloodbath.

• 1:30:07Speaker 01

  The, he, 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. It 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, he goes and he asks each of them for a little bit of, a little morsel. And, uh, 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.

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  And he says, uh, man, get out of here. You're, you're just cramping my style. You're, 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. He's, oh, you know, you, you seem like such a lordly prince, Antinous.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  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, um, and so eventually, uh, Antinous picks up a, a, 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, gets, he gets the kid to lose his cool.

• 1:31:44Speaker 01

  And the bench just like, like hits Odysseus and like, nothing happens. You know, and he's like, do you feel better now?

• 1:31:53Speaker 01

  So I think he was, 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 wanna, if you wanna get rid of this guy and you're Odysseus or Agamemnon or Achilles, you're just, you're gonna like, pick him up and throw him outside yourself. You're not gonna hurl a bench at him. Right? So, so he, he kind of prods, prods and tests to, to see what's going on in his household so he can come up with a plan.

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  And one, one final moment that really underlines the, um, the endurance that this guy has to take. He, he's, he's been, uh, 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 and, um, and they give him a cot and he's, he's lying there stirring in his mind how he's gonna pull it all off. And he sees the maids go out, cause there's like 50 maids and 12 of them have, have basically been sleeping with the suitors. They've been seduced, uh, maybe it's not their fault, but I mean, Homer really treats it as though it's, it's their fault.

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  And Penelope is really pissed. She says, these are the maidens that have been disrespecting me and disrespecting your son. They, they're sleeping with the suitors, uh, and they're like not loyal to the household. They're causing me problems. They're disobedient and, um, you know, they're, they're not on our side, essentially. He sees them going out. He just wants to

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  get him right there. It's a violent poem.

• 1:33:44Speaker 01

  But he says, endure my heart. You have endured worse before when the cyclops was eating your men.

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  So he has to use that same restraint that he used, cause if he, if he had charged at the cyclops when the guy was awake, you know, he would have, it would have been over.

• 1:34:00Chris Williamson?

  So this is a skill that he developed?

• 1:34:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:34:15Chris Williamson?

  Assholes in his house.

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No, biding his time, biding his time. He's a man of much endurance, right? It's a marathon. And, um, and how it eventually all kind of comes, comes to head is Penelope,

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  has this idea. Who knows where she gets it?

• 1:34:35Chris Williamson?

  Why is Penelope in on this?

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  So she's, she's, um, I, I forgot to mention, she, 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's dad, who's not dead yet, but will be dead any day now, really. Uh, and she's been telling the suitors, I just wanna finish my funeral shroud and then I'll pick one of you. Let me, let me just do my, 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,

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  you have to decide now. We know this is all bullshit about your.

• 1:35:24Chris Williamson?

  Good bitch, you fucking netting and unnetting.

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're, they've, they've had enough. And, uh, and so she's basically feeling like she has to, has to pick now. But she comes up with this contest. All right. Maybe Odysseus is coming back. She's getting all these signs, you know, 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, and he says, you should do exactly that. That is exactly what you will do. Which is get out Odysseus's bow, right? And, uh, set up these axes that, uh, whoever, whoever strings his bow, it's like a big,

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  hard recurve bow that he, nobody could string but him. And they could, if they shoot the arrow through the axholes, whoever does that first can marry me. And, um, and you know, it's a perfect kind of trick. It's a perfect contest. Because it brings out this memetic rivalry, like the suitors all go in and start trying to string the bow. And none of them can even get the string on the bow. It's just too big and, you know, they're just not strong enough. And every, practically 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

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  underlines the fact that this was what it was all about in the first place. Trying to usurp Odysseus's status, credibility and his wife.

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  And then of course, you know, he's a beggar still. He's, 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. And they say this, what if, what if, what if he actually strings the bow? What if this, you know, loser from out of town strings the bow? He's gonna make us all look bad. And, uh, you know, he manages to get his hands on the bow and of course shoots the arrow through. And they're like, shit. Well, now we're ashamed. But of course, by this time, Horemachus has hid all the weapons and the armor. Odysseus has had the swineherd lock the door. He's had Euryklea bolt the other doors. All the women are out. Penelope's out, safe.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  They're all trapped in this prison and Odysseus shoots them all down, spears them.

• 1:38:01Chris Williamson?

  Hang on a second. So he's closed all of the doors and now it's like, it's killing time.

• 1:38:09Speaker 01

  It's killing time.

• 1:38:10Chris Williamson?

  But it's just him. He's not bringing his son in to do it.

• 1:38:13Speaker 01

  So his son is there with him. His son is there with him and he's got two guys, two other guys. There's basically four of them on 108.

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  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 Iliatic warriors, like just, you know, worker dudes. And his two worker dudes, his son and he himself. And then all these suitors who are, um, not entirely unarmed, but, um, I mean, still 108 guys, you might think they could take him.

• 1:38:51Speaker 01

  But, but he set it up so well.

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  He had, uh, 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 had, 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, he's like lifting up a cup and then this just doesn't suspect what's going on.

• 1:39:24Speaker 01

  And, you know, instant death and, and it's a bloodbath. It really is a bloodbath. It's, if you've, if you've been an 18 year old kid just waiting for the action scene, it's very satisfying, you know? Spears through, through guts and faces and such.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, 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.

• 1:39:52Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  Some people think that he, he took it too far. Homer doesn't think that he took it too far.

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  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. Leotis, the prophet begs for his life. Odysseus, gosh, I was always trying to tell them to, to lay off, you know, I never touched your maidens. Uh, I was always the voice of reason and Odysseus says, well, you're a, you're a prophet.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  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, you know, drives a sword through him. It's just like, it's terrifying. He's become, and there's, there's a similar scene of failed mercy in the Iliad two, or Achilles kills a young kid. That's, it's really ugly. It's really disturbing. But that's sometimes what it takes, I guess, to reestablish the patriarchy. But one final note on the bow. In the Iliad, the bow is a shameful weapon. It's not honorable to kill somebody with a bow and you could kill them with a spear.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  You don't face them, you know, head on, you know, 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, it's kind of sucker punch move. And, uh, 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,

• 1:41:56Speaker 01

  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, and, um, that's at least one interpretation of how it all ends. Yeah.

• 1:42:12Chris Williamson?

  And that's how the story ends?

• 1:42:14Speaker 01

  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, they clean the place up, heap up the bodies. And Odysseus tells them, all right, a lot of these guys dads are nearby in the town. Some of them are off, 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.

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  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 in the island. And my, probably my favorite scene at the end is you actually get a, a snapshot of them. Suitors gibbering race going down into Hades and wailing. Agamemnon and Achilles, the ghosts of Agamemnon, Achilles just talking there, shooting the breeze. And, um, and the suitors come down and they're like, oh, Odysseus slaughtered us.

• 1:43:40Speaker 01

  And Agamemnon says, that's my boy. And, uh, you know, um, they had it coming, of course, and the suitors complain and, but, um, really interesting, like kind of final moment there. Agamemnon says, amazing work, Penelope. Penelope, the wife that I didn't have, that, uh, it stayed faithful this whole time. And he says, there's a kind of ambiguity in the Greek. He says, the glory of this person will last and be on the lips

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

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

• 1:45:06Speaker 01

  Penelope was crucial to the story of the greatest hero that ever lived. He could not have become Odysseus, the great, the best of the Achaeans without Penelope's help. And it was, it was a, it's not like Penelope gets glory and Odysseus get glory. They both get glory because they were a unit together. And that's, that's kind of the Greek archetype of the matriarch of like, what a good, what, what is like happiness for a woman? It's, it's to uphold the glory of a, of a great household, in short. But, um, yeah, you know, the, the ending is, is very weird. The actual ending is like the townspeople form up a posse and Odysseus forms up a posse.

• 1:45:49Speaker 01

  And they kind of, they start a battle, you know, a revenge battle. And then Athena kind of descends from, 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 in the plot. But, you know, the god makes peace and then a couple of people die. Odysseus kills a couple of guys, but then the battle stops and, uh, they all go home and like shake hands and peace is reestablished somehow.

• 1:46:25Chris Williamson?

  So he's got the favor of the gods. Like it, it seems like he's had mostly favor of the gods throughout, apart from Poseidon.

• 1:46:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's got the favor of the Olympian gods of order, of Zeus and, and Athena. He eventually wins over Poseidon, like after the timeframe of the story, like Tereus tells him how he's gonna, like make amends with Poseidon. He doesn't have the favorite, there's a lot of divine forces he has to struggle with. The sirens and Skilla and Charybdis and the sun god kind of spares him, Helios. But, but he, he has the favor of the gods because he is pious. And this is pointed out at the very beginning of the poem. He was always very meticulous doing sacrifices. He was always, okay, he's a tricky liar, but only to his enemies.

• 1:47:12Speaker 01

  You know, he doesn't defraud a friend. Uh, he's, he's a just man. And, uh, 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 is 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, then my son's going to kill your son and your son's, and it just never stops. That's the kind of uncivilized brute, like Furies justice. But Zeus and Athena represent this kind of,

• 1:47:53Speaker 01

  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, that, that, 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 who resties murdered his uncle, he had it coming. You know, we told him, we told him not to murder his own cousin and seduce his cousin's wife. But he did it anyway. And so what do you know? He got what was coming.

• 1:48:33Chris Williamson?

  So revenge, another big theme.

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Revenge, very much revenge. Revenge is, is absolutely a part of justice. But you, but it like can't go on forever. I, maybe that's what the end of the poem is, is kind of about like, you know, there's a danger there at the end that it's going to keep spiraling and spiraling and spiraling, uh, 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, as a civilization, after something bad has happened.

• 1:49:01Chris Williamson?

  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, the history of this thing coming to light that are interesting?

• 1:49:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think that this, this oral poetry thing is really interesting. So, so Nolan, uh, is apparently casted this rapper Travis Scott, I think. I think he's from Houston. I should know him better. But anyway, as, as a bard, as Demodocus, I think maybe, maybe as Themius. 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, oral poetry or rap, is that a kind of pillar of the moral universe?

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  And the way that Homer is a pillar of the moral universe, the way these bars kind of.

• 1:50:00Chris Williamson?

  Pious. When I think rap, I don't usually think pious.

• 1:50:04Speaker 01

  Would, would you, would you have left, uh, if you were going off to the Trojan War? You know, would you have left your wife?

• 1:50:12Chris Williamson?

  My wife with Chance the rapper.

• 1:50:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:50:15Chris Williamson?

  Or even. Or P Diddy.

• 1:50:17Speaker 01

  Or even Bob Dylan for that matter. I mean, Alan Ginsberg, Lord Byron. Would you have left your wife with Lord Byron? You know, I mean, it's, it's a different mindset. But there, you know, there's, there's some parallels. The, the really interesting thing about, about oral poetry and the oral.

• 1:50:36Speaker 01

  Like

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  mental model of the universe, so the kind of mental universe of cultures that don't have writing. You know, if you

• 1:50:48Speaker 01

  if you go to an oral culture and you tell somebody, here's what I want done, like,

• 1:50:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:51:15Speaker 01

  When the pilgrims came to Massachusetts in the, you know, 1600s, they they were shocked at the Native Americans' ability to just repeat verbatim, like, you know, these these Indian tribes, whatever, they didn't speak English. Like, you could say a sentence to them, 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

• 1:51:58Speaker 01

  paradigm, when writing starts to be the way you store knowledge, you you sort of lose that ability. It's like Google Maps, you know? Now I I don't know my way around my own town. Some something is gets like offloaded cognitively. And that's, I think, one of the reasons why Homer is this 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 it's too too advantageous to to ignore, you know, your enemies are going to beat you if you try to not have a written culture. It's just so powerful. You need, you know, you need writing to have science and philosophy and all kinds of stuff, record keeping.

• 1:52:41Chris Williamson?

  But something is also lost.

• 1:52:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, something is profoundly lost, this tradition of storytelling. And and also, like, the role of the storytellers shifts, like, I don't know. The storyteller doesn't isn't like the 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 probar propaganda in the Iliad, for example. But I do think it's still, these things still matter. The stories that we tell still really matter a lot for people's, you know, ability to face their own problems and happiness and confidence in life.

• 1:53:23Speaker 01

  But it's not so visceral for us.

• 1:53:24Chris Williamson?

  How are you feeling in advance of the movie coming out?

• 1:53:29Speaker 01

  I'm gonna see it as soon as I can. I mean, you know, it it looks pretty awesome. People have complained about some casting choices. Let's say, you know, Helen of Troy seems to be an Ethiopian, if by the Greek.

• 1:53:43Chris Williamson?

  Great apogee.

• 1:53:43Speaker 01

  Stands, yes, which which are great aparting. So maybe there's maybe there's a logic to it. But, you know,

• 1:53:51Speaker 01

  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,

• 1:54:02Speaker 01

  there are these giant people, not like supergiants, but they're giant enough. And they try to, you know, see if they can get a gift from the Lystrogonians or maybe make a little alliance. And his men meet them and they just get eaten. So the Lystrogonians just charge out in force and slaughter the Greeks. They 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 I think that it's really cool, even 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 he's filmed the whole thing on IMAX, the first time it's ever been done. It's almost three hours. It's gonna be, it's gonna be a good thing to watch.

• 1:54:47Speaker 01

  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 I think it it tells you something about what's going on in culture, that people care about this a lot, that that that 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.

• 1:55:12Speaker 01

  So you're gonna see it?

• 1:55:14Chris Williamson?

  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 like, personal burnout health ahead of the podcast. We had the offer to do half an hour with half the cast and half an hour with the other half of the cast, all on a single roundtable in New York in 10 days' time. But I'd already booked to go and take the one digital detox week that I've ever done. 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 gonna 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.

• 1:55:58Chris Williamson?

  And then it was like, yeah, sure, like, of course, I love Nolan. I love I love The Odyssey, like, it's gonna be exciting. Damon's a legend. I get it. You know, when when it happens, the other media week is precisely at the back end of when you're supposed to be doing this thing. And I tossed and turned last week about it. And just the coin fell on the side of I've made way too many sacrifices for like eight years of doing the show, 1,100 episodes. And I was like, I think it's gonna be kind of a, I really hope that I don't fucking regret it. But it feels like a symbolic decision to do something that helps my peace of mind and my longevity as opposed to like,

• 1:56:39Chris Williamson?

  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 gonna have, I'll be conflicted watching it, because I'll be thinking, fuck, like that. The one of the big moments of the movie's promo could have been, or two of the big moments, right? Tom Holland, he's and I, ba ba ba ba ba.

• 1:57:00Chris Williamson?

  Would have been on the show, but

• 1:57:03Chris Williamson?

  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 or ba ba ba ba?

• 1:57:35Chris Williamson?

  That's cool.

• 1:57:37Chris Williamson?

  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'd be, I'll be excited by that. I guess, do you know if he's used the Emily Wilson translation as the source material?

• 1:57:56Speaker 01

  He's he's talked about that, yeah.

• 1:57:59Chris Williamson?

  How do you feel about that?

• 1:58:00Speaker 01

  Well, he's he's commented on, you know, her calling Odysseus a complicated man.

• 1:58:06Speaker 01

  I think

• 1:58:08Speaker 01

  yeah, this is like 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, you know? I think that this is a guy that divine nymphs fall in love with, you know, he's like the most badass of all the Greeks that got back from Troy. Not the kind of guy that you would call complicated, probably. Complicated just seems a little bit like.

• 1:58:37Chris Williamson?

  How would you translate it? What's many turns to you in that?

• 1:58:40Speaker 01

  Well, that's the kind of almost, you know, somebody might say, well, that's a failure to translate. It's just, you know, you have to interpret it to translate it. Polytropos, tropos is this really multivalent word. It means turn, like, he could be turning around in various places, sort of spinning about the seas. A turn is like a trick, many tricks. Or at least in later Greek, it's a character. It's like a kind of tropo is like your your character. He could be a man of many sort of guises, many, many sort of personas that he can inhabit.

• 1:59:22Speaker 01

  So I think that the word is about Alluding to his, to his master of craft and trickery, not to his moral ambiguity. I think, I think this is, this would be my main, I, I wonder how, how Nolan's gonna deal with this because, and he said something about, Homer says, 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, my sense is that Wilson suspects Homer is, is, is feels ambiguously about Odysseus. Like, is he really a hero worth emulating?

• 2:00:06Chris Williamson?

  What do you think Homer feels about Odysseus?

• 2:00:08Speaker 01

  Hundred percent 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 try to, you know, are, are at risk of opening up the bag of the winds or eating the cattle of the sun. Or, or even, you know, being a little too curious, like curiosity is a vice in, in some Greek philosophy. Like, wanting to know too much without necessarily having an end in mind. And this is, this curiosity is brought up by the sirens example, where he, he wants to know and

• 2:00:52Speaker 01

  what the sirens say, plugs up his companion's ear with the wax and doesn't plug up his, but he kind of gets, gets himself tied to the mast. Maybe that was playing with the line, he ended up finding from it. But I don't think that, I don't think that Homer questions Odysseus' values, which is civilization over barbarism, you know, order over chaos, patriarchy over anarchy. That doesn't seem complicated, that part doesn't seem complicated to me.

• 2:01:26Chris Williamson?

  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 two. And like, even in that, Tom Cruise is trying to do this retcon, make your, the son of my ex-flight partner feel okay about me. There's this like supplanted patriarch thing that's going on where the parental figure comes back into his life. And it's the redemption of the son through the success of the new father, which is the old father's. Like that, I guess.

• 2:02:03Chris Williamson?

  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, 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.

• 2:02:48Chris Williamson?

  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, why you not?

• 2:03:27Chris Williamson?

  Anyway, I get the sense that that like complicated hero thing is kind of more. So obviously it's, in, in some ways is richer, right? Because there's conflict and there's tension. But I would, I, I think it would be cool to just see what an uncomplicated virtuous hero that's flawed and overcomes his flaws, what that would look like. Like, just follow me the fucking hero's journey, please. Like, just follow me some Campbell shit from 12 to 12. And let's see, let's see how that feels in 2026.

• 2:04:08Chris Williamson?

  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 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. So your storytelling ability is like out of this world.

• 2:04:35Speaker 01

  Learn from the best.

• 2:04:39Chris Williamson?

  Also doing episodes where it's just me and the boys hanging, just chilling out, talking about what we've got going on, are more storytelling from other areas of life too. Like war stories and things like that from, from special forces guys. Big part of that is I think people have got a degree of exhaustion with overthinking.

• 2:05:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:01Chris Williamson?

  I think there's a big anti-optimization trend at the moment that we're, we're feeling. And it's not necessarily people being against optimization. I think it's people being against the fatigue of trying to be perfect. And that is, at least in part, fed into by the fact that they're overwhelmed with information. And they feel like there is more input than they have time to be able to metabolize it. 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 bucks that you could read. And almost everybody in the village couldn't read. And maybe there wasn't a printing press, I don't know, that was like 1400s, I think, something like that.

• 2:05:43Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 2:06:23Chris Williamson?

  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 gonna start to mirror that with simplicity in the heroes. Again, complexity in the story, simplicity in the hero. You know, we had Adolescence, that thing on Netflix that was about young boys in the UK. And one of the reasons, kind of, you know, pretty majestically, that the, the

• 2:07:03Chris Williamson?

  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. What, 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 Rorschach tested to see it as their own propaganda to some degree? Is this kid a psychopath?

• 2:07:45Chris Williamson?

  Did he, at what point does a, 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. How important, what, what, what, what should we take away from this? Like, just tell them, like, how many times do people want to find out? Ask Nolan, well, is, uh, 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.

• 2:08:29Chris Williamson?

  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. Of 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 gonna take my job in 10 years' time? I don't know, what about the Middle East? Apparently I should be worried about that, there's like some problems with gas prices I hear or inflation. Or like Taiwan do something with computer chips and I don't really know what I'm supposed to do. All of that together is making people fucking exhausted.

• 2:09:14Chris Williamson?

  And if you're not careful, people are gonna find escapes that are way more destructive than just being able to relinquish, listen to an awesome historian tell a story for a couple of hours, the oldest story that's ever been written. And, oh, okay, that, I've had a bit of a reprieve. Isn't that nice? And I, 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 what, what, most of this is just me doing it for me. Like, I don't want to leave and feel like I've got this big laundry list of things to do.

• 2:09:56Chris Williamson?

  I'm just left with like interesting philosophical questions and insights about the virtue of loyalty and justice and revenge and when you're supposed to apply aggression and when you're supposed to sit back and when you're supposed to be diplomatic and when you can be crafty and whether 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, dude, just fucking, like, either

• 2:10:40Chris Williamson?

  make it simple and direct or just give me a little bit of a chance to breathe. And I think at the moment, at least, I'm feeling in me that's a.

• 2:10:52Chris Williamson?

  Motivation that I'm enjoying, that sense, tether that I'm being pulled forward through. And maybe we'll see that crossover into other mediums as well.

• 2:11:09Speaker 01

  This is a good time for Homer to come back for that reason, I think, because I think that this is,

• 2:11:17Speaker 01

  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. And they have different people of different classes and different tastes everywhere. And they got to get a story about Odysseus to work for a lot of different people. Some people are going to want to take the side of Odysseus, or some people are going to see themselves in the suitors. Or maybe that's not a great example, but you know, some people are going to say, hey, this is a lying bastard.

• 2:12:02Speaker 01

  And other people are going to say, no, he did what he had to do. And that's kind of, that's on you. Like to draw out the message is not so much the poet's job. I mean, he can have his own opinion, but really his job is to, 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 autobiographizes Odysseus going to the sirens. All right, the sirens are these divine, they're kind of like bad bards.

• 2:12:47Speaker 01

  There are these women who sing whatever they sing and they make you just want to go and listen to them. And piled up in front of the sirens island is just rotting bones of people who, 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, Homer, no, 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 to Troy. All the things that you didn't know, and I'm paraphrasing, like all the things you didn't know about the backstory.

• 2:13:32Speaker 01

  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 moly. 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?

• 2:14:16Speaker 01

  And you know, for me, I think it's also the temptation of being an academic is one of the reasons I left academia. Cause well, it was one of the reasons I was in it because I had this, tell me more, tell me more, tell me more. I want to read more. I want to find out the, the, the end of that story or, oh geez, five more books I need to read. And, and that can, if you, 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, 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.

• 2:15:01Speaker 01

  A lot of it is you're, you're, you tell yourself, 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 inclination that people have, a temptation that people face that leads them not just to inaction, you know, but, but to unreflection too.

• 2:15:38Chris Williamson?

  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 bukkaking you in the face, you don't have that much time to think about what you've already ingested, said Bonnie. And when.

• 2:15:55Speaker 01

  At wise age.

• 2:15:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The philosopher be blue.

• 2:16:01Chris Williamson?

  That, that sense of,

• 2:16:07Chris Williamson?

  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 informations expert from, worked at three letter agencies, US like army. He was basically the special forces Q 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.

• 2:16:50Chris Williamson?

  Now that might be that at some point in future, that 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 fire hose 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. It's 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, this endless auroboros of just looking at uncertainty and information.

• 2:17:35Chris Williamson?

  And, and, and yeah, I think I'm certainly feeling, I'm feeling detached. I'm feeling somewhat salved after, after getting in touch with something that's got a bit more firm foundations. So.

• 2:17:49Speaker 01

  And this is what you got to think is so appealing to a, 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, is a way of slowing down your brain and reflecting. It's, it's, but it's not just entertainment. It's, it has, it has something useful in there, that narrative structure. You're, we're like programs to ingest and, and process information in that way. Much more effectively in long form, when it's, when it's put into a story.

• 2:18:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:33Speaker 01

  Because we can remember it and we can actually store that framework of here's what happened with Odysseus. And then we can draw lessons out of it years and years later that, that we need because we have that, that archetypal narrative within us. 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 that, about heroes, about somebody to emulate. And mind you, they're not, they're not simplistic. I mean, like the Odyssey doesn't, you know, he makes a lot of mistakes.

• 2:19:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:08Speaker 01

  You can debate about his actions. The Greeks would debate about his actions. I mean, a lot of the later Greeks thought he was a bad guy. He was, he was a liar. He's a cheater. A lot of the later Greeks thought he was the greatest hero. I mean, there's, it emits of debate. And if you brought back real hero stories that didn't always have them having a meth addict addiction on the side or, you know, banging their secretary in secret, you could still have complexity. You don't have to undermine everybody with a kind of secret mob story or a very open mob story. I think we need more of that to get through what we're, what we're facing, a lot of us at least.

• 2:19:47Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Alex Petkas, ladies and gentlemen, dude, you're the best. Where should people go to check out all the amazing things you do?

• 2:19:53Speaker 01

  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, killer for me.

• 2:20:04Chris Williamson?

  Dude, until next time, let's come up with something else to talk about.

• 2:20:07Speaker 01

  Do it.

• 2:20:08Chris Williamson?

  All right. Goodbye, my beauties. See you next time.

• 2:20:10Speaker 01

  Dude, yeah, fucking the man. So good.

• 2:20:16Speaker 02

  Hi there. I am fully charged and here to tell you Toy Story 5 is now on Disney Plus.

• 2:20:22Speaker 01

  It's been too long, cowboy.

• 2:20:24Speaker 02

  Woody, Buzz and Jesse are back for a brand new adventure with such seriously cool new tech. What? Holy butterscotch. You said it, Jesse. So save your batteries and watch the global phenomenon at home. And the best part, it's perfect for the whole family. Power up your movie night and watch Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5, now streaming on Disney Plus, rated PG.