← Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
Loading summary
Transcript50 lines
- [00:01]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend the Great Books Podcast, we are talking about Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragic plays. We'll talk about the Greco Persian War. We'll also talk about how the Greek poets create a intellectual bridge between Homer and, say, the philosophers of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. We will talk about why on his tomb he had it written that he fought at the battle of Marathon and what that means for Athens and for the West. And we'll give a brief mapping of the Oresteia, the trilogy of tragic plays that we'll be reading over the next couple weeks. So join us today for Ascend the Great Books podcast.
- [00:57]
Adam Minahan
Welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. My name is Adam Minahan, here with Deacon Harrison Garlick. We've made it through a Year of Homer. Hey, how you feeling, Deacon?
- [01:08]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I'm doing well. I'm doing well. I am. I'm happy about how our Year of Homer went. I think we got a lot of good feedback. I enjoyed the conversation I had on Hesiod on his Theogony with Mr. Thomas Lackey and Dr. Frank Verbowski. But now I am excited now to get into more of the classical plays.
- [01:27]
Adam Minahan
Yeah, it'll be interesting to have a little bit of this background as we kind of creep into Plato here pretty soon. I'm very anxious to get to Plato because with our Send a Great Books club that we have that you host, we read Plato first. Right. We read the five dialogues first. And I had not read Homer or any of the Greek plays ahead of this right before reading that. And so it was very enriching. I loved reading Plato. I thoroughly enjoyed it. But now that I have a lot more of the backstories, and now that I understand a lot more of what his references are, I'm really anxious to get into actually Plato.
- [02:09]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think it'll be good. I mean, again, we have to keep in mind that the Great Books is also a great conversation. And so as you read these authors, they tend to snowball. So. So if you just jump straight to Plato, you can certainly do that. The first Great Books program that I was in did that because it was more just, you know, philosophy 101. But then what happens is that you find out that Plato is dialoguing with Homer and say, like, in his Republic, he's talking a lot about Homeric poetry and what he finds wrong with it. He's going to offer his own Socratic poetics, if you will. So I think one thing, and why it's worth the effort is as we kind of trudge through at times, the great books, you do enter the great conversation. And in a lot of ways, that's why we're reading the plays, because we read Homer. We looked at Hesiod, which is kind of like contemporary, and he offered us, I think, some, you know, mythological clarifications. But he also, I think, brought to the table some philosophical insights. He's not a philosopher, but he's a teacher. But I do think that his way of mapping out the cosmos and the gods underneath that did have some philosophical insights. Right. Like Eros, I think, is. Is one of them. So as we jump, because we're gonna have a big jump, because Hesiod was again, in, like, the late 700s, early 600s, we're jumping again, and now we're going to have these classical plays. And now they're coming into the 500s, the 400s, the 3 hundreds. They're going to provide for us an intellectual bridge, kind of an intellectual history, if you will, that we can see how the thoughts that were somewhat nascent in Homer have matured, how they've developed. And that will set us a good stage then for Socrates coming on the scenes.
- [03:57]
Adam Minahan
Yeah, so, I mean, that's a good point. That's a great starting point, is, like, when we think about reading these ancient texts, you have. I have a tendency of, like, lumping them all together, basically. Oh, within a very short amount of time period because it's been. It's so far removed from. From. From today, you know, So I think, like. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, Homer, Aeschylus, like Hesiod, like all these guys. I mean, you know, all this is basically the same time period, you know, but you kind of forget. Yeah, there's like multiple hundred years in between these. So what time period are we talking about here? Like, where. Where are we in the timeline when we're starting? Kind of the Oresteia and Aeschylus.
- [04:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So we're looking at 499bc is where we should probably start. So, again, this is a. This is an intro to Aeschylus. Aeschylus, his name's not always immediately apparent, if you look at it, how to pronounce it. Not that that distinguishes it much from a lot of the names we look at. But Aeschylus, he's a playwright, but he's also a warrior. And I think that's something to take in context with him. So if we're kind of looking at major world events, how do we kind of see this movement from Homer to the classical playwrights, these Athenian authors of these tragic poems, One of the things we really look at is the Greco Persian War. So we don't really talk about the Persian Empire a lot. A lot of people know about it only from the 300, right. Thermopyla Gates. So if you step back from that a little bit, the Persian war was kicked off by something called the Ionian Revolt. So if you remember Asia Minor, this is modern day Turkey. If you remember Troy, Troy was a hellenized Greek city state, but it was in Asia Minor and we saw that it basically had a lot of Hellenistic attributes. For instance, it worshiped the same pantheon, but then at times it had more Eastern practices. For instance, Priam had 50 sons, right? You have these like, very large guy was busy. He was. Yeah, he was interesting. So there, what you need to think of is like, because we don't really think of like Greek city states when we think of Asia Minor. But, but if you remember where Troy is, that whole Asia Minor side did have these city states. And at a certain point they became subjected to this massive Persian empire that stretched basically from Iran, modern day Iran, into Asia Minor, down through modern day Israel and into Egypt. So this is a massive, massive empire. So the Ionian revolt was, was basically a bunch of Greek or hellenized city states in Asia Minor that decided to try and shed this Persian yoke, right? They were going to rebel and they were backed by Athens. So if you have our guide, we have a guide, we should mention that, right? We're gonna have a guide to Aeschylus. And so we kind of a breakdown, like if you're interested in a lot of dates and things like this. But in 4, 499 B.C, right, the Ionian Revolt kind of kicks off. Athens backs these city states and what you get is kind of this proxy war now with the Persian Empire. Long story short, the Greek city states lose. And so King Darius, this is Darius the first. Sometimes we hear about him in history, you might be familiar, King Darius. He then decides that the next step is to punish Athens, right? So they're going to now move from controlling their city states in Asia Minor to now we're going to kick off an invasion. And so usually we talk about the Greco Persian War, we talk about that there's two invasions from the Persians over into Greece. So again, kind of looking at our guide, it's in this context that Aeschylus is born and matures into a young man. And it's kind of interesting to track because during the same time period Athens had also had its own internal transition of moving from being underneath A tyrant to shedding that tyrant and moving into its kind of fledgling states of democracy. So Aeschylus is as a young man is seeing Athens take on this kind of democratic spirit and push back against tyranny. And at the same time he is seeing now that this Persian empire is starting to invade ancient Greece.
- [08:26]
Adam Minahan
I think that there's a. Didn't Xenophon write about this Persian, like one of the Persian wars or like, I think it's called like Persian Expedition or something like that.
- [08:36]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
He might have the Herodotus, the, the ancient historian. Herodotus, I think is the main. Because if I remember correctly, the only histories we have on this war mainly come from the Greek side, which again leads to lots of speculation about things, right? But really that first. So this is important to understand because Aeschylus then is a young man and joins the Athenian army to fight against the Persians. And this kind of gives you the context in which he was formed. So again, just kind of looking at our guide, the first invasion of the Persians into ancient Greece, they basically go back and forth. The dispositive battle that ends the invasion is the battle at Marathon in 490 BC. Now again, if you're unfamiliar, you're new to the great books, you're new to taking history seriously. We're in B.C. things are counting downward, right? We are counting down to Jesus Christ. We are before Christ. So you got about what, a nine year period there of this invasion occurring. And the battle of Marathon is this incredibly decisive victory for the Greeks against the Persians. And Escalus and his brother fight in this battle and unfortunately Escalus, his brother dies.
- [09:50]
Adam Minahan
Now, is this the first time that we've read from an author who's a warrior as well?
- [09:59]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's a good question. Homer was considered, you know, a blind bard, sometimes even a slave.
- [10:05]
Adam Minahan
Right.
- [10:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Hesiod was the son of a merchant and by all accounts was a shepherd and a farmer. So, yeah, I mean, I think we're moving and I think too in a certain way also nobility. Aeschylus was born into a noble family. And the reason I wanted to start with the wars, to give him the context, is one, I think it provides a lot of insights into his plays, but also I think there's a certain spiritedness here. And so if you remember, when we read particularly the Odyssey, but also the Iliad, we talked about the spirit, the Thumas, right, To have this thumotic act. And the spirit is this thing that seeks honor and glory. It can overcome difficulties. And you know, Odysseus at this point is when we're reading about him, he's, he's probably a real character, but he has a strong veneer of Homeric, you know, artistry over him. And so who is he really, etc. Here? Aeschylus is a real character, right? Here he is. We're not talking about his plays, we're talking about him. And he is a warrior, right? He is. At the battle of Marathon, he turns Persia back. And this is a decisive victory not just for Greece, but really for the West. There's a lot of Western history that points back to Marathon and the Greeks saving this kind of nascent western culture from the Persians. Now for the Persian empire, it stopped their invasion, but it was, it's a huge empire, so they can recover pretty well. Right. So it's not exactly proportionate to each side.
- [11:38]
Adam Minahan
What, what I'm anxious to, to track here, reading this for the first time with it being an author who is an actual war, is how if there is like very many fight scenes or battle scenes throughout, like how, how descriptive they are, verse, how like grandiose, you know, the, you go through some of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Right. And some of the battle scenes there, especially the Iliad, it's like, you know, very grandiose and you know, guys speared through the eyeball and guys rolling down the hill like they're like, they're a log and like, you know, all these like, very descriptive, very marvel esque type of descriptions of war. Right. And so it'll be interesting to track how a warrior portrays different types of fighting and things like that. And how is there a contrast between the reality of war from a warrior's perspective versus a guy who's telling a story or you know, a poem or something epic and really, you know, kind of buttering up the story?
- [12:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's something to track, I think as we go through. That's a good question about whether we can see his military history informing the text at all. It certainly could take the form of a straight one for one like, hey, look at these military details or this description of violence. This is clearly done by a man who's seen combat. That, that is certainly true. I think another way we're going to see it too is this man knows what it means to be spirited. This man knows what it means to be in the thick of things, to have those emotions, to have your brother die, to defend basically your civilization. I mean these are things that are known to him. And I think that as we kind of read through him, that's where my mind has wandered is can we see that kind of greatness of spirit that we see in this man? Can we see that imprinted into his texts? I think, yeah. So I think that's something to watch. And how does his history kind of be baked in here? I think too, before we move on from Marathon, that name is familiar to us. And so we should probably mention that this is the battle that gives birth to the legend of the Athenian soldier running 26 miles back to Athens to tell them that they have won, that there's been an Athenian victory. And then he, in a lot of versions, right, he becomes exhausted and dies. And so he runs this, you know, 26 mile marathon, which is now where we, you know, have our custom of running marathons. It's probably most likely a conflation of a couple different stories. The guy, there was a guy that ran back for a different purpose. And then also the whole army had to move several miles very quickly. So it's kind of been, I think, kind of bumped up into a little bit of myth. Even in the classical period, it had already kind of taken on a life of its own. But just so, you know, like, oh, marathon. That sounds familiar. Yeah, because this is where the story comes from actually.
- [14:43]
Adam Minahan
Didn't sound familiar at all. I don't, I don't really run unless somebody's chasing me. So I don't either, obviously. But yeah, no, that's, that's good. That's good caveat. So let's talk about, let's talk about the actual, like the plays where when we say the Oresteia. What is the Oresteia? What is it composed of? Like, what are we, what are we about to jump into?
- [15:03]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's a good question. Let me, let me take one more caveat though, on his military history, because I said there was two invasions, right? And so the first one was repelled. King Darius led that and it was repelled. The second invasion was by his son Xerxes. And this is then where you get the famous. Right. He's trying to move his army through. They have to go through the narrow pass which is known as the Hot Gates. This is the famous Spartan kind of last stand, right? The, the Brave 300, which is really a Spartan army collective of about 7,000 soldiers that stood in this narrow path against up to 120 to 300,000 men, right? Persians. So, I mean, this is King Leonidas. This is a famous last stand. It's certainly worth, I think, time of attention and looking at it. But Aeschylus is clearly not at the.
- [15:55]
Adam Minahan
Hot gates, but is Leonidas one of your top picks for a boy name?
- [16:02]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I remember when that movie came out, the 300. I remember, like, how many people that I knew, like on Facebook who started naming their kids Leonidas. And I just.
- [16:12]
Adam Minahan
Are you serious? That's awesome. The kid's not getting beat up. I mean, no one's going to pick on him. I mean, his name is not.
- [16:18]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I was not Catholic then and so my, my circles were slightly different. Yeah. But yeah, no, I. We know a few. Little Leonidas now running around, little Leos that are actually Leon Midas.
- [16:28]
Adam Minahan
Do they have a zigzag?
- [16:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, they don't, unfortunately, run around in a red cape, so. You know, one of the things I want to point out about the second invasion is that Aeschylus then was involved in all those wars. And it was actually a great naval battle. And it's where the Athenians turned the Persians away in a really significant way through this naval battle. And again, they were able to repel Xerxes, clearly because Persia did not conquer Greece. But again, he actually is involved in this actual battle. Right. And this one actually is a naval battle with ships, et cetera, the whole nine yards. And he. Does your intuition is correct. Not only does I think this inform his writing, but he actually has a whole play called the Persians, which then is actually greatly informed by his own military experience. So then looking at, let's maybe following your lead, shift from Escalus the warrior to Escalus the poet. Right. So Escalus the poet, he actually wrote like 70 to 90 plays. We only have seven of them.
- [17:35]
Adam Minahan
How do we know they have 70 to 90?
- [17:37]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Because they're referenced in other works.
- [17:40]
Adam Minahan
Okay.
- [17:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Also, we do have fragments. I haven't memorized all the fragments, but, you know, you should definitely do that, like list them. But we do have seven of his main works. And so we're going to look at the Oresteia, and I've already mentioned the Persians, and he has a few others. And one thing about Aeschylus is that he actually competed against a young Sophocles, which is another poet that we're going to look at. But Aeschylus ends up winning these poetry competitions and we kind of need to flesh this out because that sounds very flat to us, almost lame. Like, okay, we had this poetry competition and this guy's winning awards. Like, what does that mean? Well, these competitions were basically that you had like these, these Greek plays. And it was tragedy. Right. Tragedy was the story of heroes. And they would take these. They would take the corpus that they knew from Homer and from Hesiod and from all these other kind of writers, many of which, you know, we don't have, but were in their traditions, this. This kind of poetry or poetic heritage that they were receiving. And it seemed very much like these dramatists. They really never really just invented things wholesale. They always tethered it to something, right? They tethered it to the Iliad, they tethered it to the Odyssey, they tethered it to mythology. They were kind of building this wonderful corpus of this Greek mythology, this Greek heritage. And they're kind of playing out these kind of loose ends, if you will, or going deeper in certain ways. So Aeschylus, when he's competing in these things, these competitions have deep political and spiritual ramifications. So they're not just like a flat poetry contest. They are basically both a civil and religious festival mainly dedicated to Dionysus, right, the God of wine and poetry. We'll see this very clearly. This comes up again when we'll read Plato's Symposium, which is really about a poet, Agathon, who has won one of these competitions. And they go back to his house, if I remember correctly, to then celebrate, and they decide to give speeches about Eros.
- [19:54]
Adam Minahan
Symposium is drinking party. That's what that is, right?
- [19:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's a drinking party where you give speeches. And. And so with escalation.
- [20:02]
Adam Minahan
I would kill. I would kill at symposiums. I'm just letting you know, like, I would be. I would. I would. Well, I would not be. I would not be a Socrates there, but I would definitely be one of the guys who's talking a lot.
- [20:17]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I'm going to figure out exactly how I want to test that theory, but I will think about it. So actually, in the medieval Renaissance period, they would host symposiums on the Symposium. And so they. The guests would feast and drink and then go around. And you had to give a speech about one of the speeches. Father Facino, who was kind of the lead priest, scholar of the Medici Academy, Neo Academy in the Renaissance, his commentary on the Symposium is a dialogue about a symposium that he held on Plato's birthday, about the Symposium. So, you know, this rapid meta. I know this keeps going downhill. So anyway, I think we have to take seriously because it's somewhat foreign to us that these poetry competitions have deep political and spiritual ramifications about who Athens is, who are they as a people. And it has this kind of religious veneer to it, mainly being dedicated to Dionysus. And so when you Win this. I mean, this. This is a big deal. And not because it's not just that you. You've won a prize. Your writings then impact, in a lot of ways, the very identity of the Athenian people. Like, who do we see ourselves as? Because you've helped us parse out our heritage and come to know more about this. And this is really where I think Aeschylus shines and thrives. And so he wins this multiple times. I think 14, 17 times he wins this. He wins this so often that after he dies, his plays are repeated. Even though he's dead, they still compete, his plays against living poets, and they still win awards. So he has this, like, deep lineage. And even at the time, right, the Athenian people saw him as someone who, I think, in many ways was crafting their own heritage. And so he's not the first tragic poet. No poet you've probably picked up by context. We're using that broadly speaking. Aristotle will use it broadly. Right. We're including plays, not just poems, but plays as well. He's not the first tragic poet, but because of his fame and because he's also one of the few that. That's old, that we actually have the writings, he is, in a lot of ways the father of Greek tragic plays, of Greek tragic thought. Right. He plays that role.
- [22:45]
Adam Minahan
Very cool. Very cool. Okay, so. So these three. So the Oresteia is composed of three plays, which I did not know coming in, like, I thought the worst. I was just like, okay, this. This is a book. And then I, As I was going into it, obviously, I realized, okay, these are. These are three plays. What translation should. Should we be using or that we're going to be. Which one are we going to be using as we reference these plays?
- [23:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That is a good question. So personally, I am reading. I'll hold it up for those who can see. So I am staying with Fagles. So we read the Fagl's translations when we went through Homer. I think the Fagles. I think Fagles provides a dynamic, easy to read, but faithful translation. So you. You seem to be able to track well, what he is saying. Sometimes it's not overly poetic to the degree that it becomes obscure, but at the same time, it remains, I think, a beautiful text. So I really did appreciate his Iliad and Odyssey. I enjoyed reading them, so I figured I would stay with him. And so I am reading his Orestaya. And as you said, the Orestia is actually a trilogy. Right? It's a collection of plays. The other one, though, probably unsurprisingly, just like I did with Homer. The other one that I am reading is the Latimer. And I think for a lot of people, if you talk to people who are in the classics, who actually enjoyed the classics, you talk to people who have a love of the great books, a lot of them are going to turn to Latimer. Latimer is the classic. I mean, this is like the 1940s classic translation. Fagl's, I think, came out in the 90s with his Homeric translations. I'm actually not sure off top of my head when he did the Orestaya. So he's. He's a little bit newer. There are a lot of terrible translations out there that either ideological or just too flat or the Greek is bad, you know, their translations. So if you're going to read with us through the Orestaya, I would. I would first, particularly if it's new to you. If you have not read them before, I would recommend Fables. If you have read them before or you're looking for maybe a more challenging literal text, then I would probably point.
- [24:52]
Adam Minahan
More towards the Latimer and all three of these plays. I mean, they're not long. I mean, we just tracked through both the Iliad and the Odyssey, but we're talking a total of under 4,000 lines.
- [25:08]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh, yeah. So if you remember, in the year of Homer, we basically read one book, you know, one chapter of Homer a week. And for Homer, that's going from anywhere from 400 to a thousand lines. We're basically reading, you know, Max, 4,000 lines a month. The plays off the top of my head are usually between a thousand and seventeen hundred lines. So they're much shorter. You know, we're going to read them, I think, at a. At a good. At a good pace. Usually about two weeks a play. That's enough for you to read it twice easily. I mean, honestly, you sit down at night, pour a drink, relax and read through the text. You easily can get through half of it, particularly if you're trying to do kind of a deep, slow read. But if you kind of want to do a quick read just to kind of get like the literal, because that's always what we're trying to do first. Let's just try and track the literal, what's actually happening. You can read this in a single evening like it's an enjoyable read. So I think the reading pace overall, I would say slows, even though the text themselves, as plays have more movements in them and are a little bit more complicated than what we saw in Homer, and certainly more complicated than what we saw in Hesiod.
- [26:12]
Adam Minahan
As a first time reader, what do you advise? Like, what should I be paying attention to? What should I be tracking? Are the things that I should kind of like flag as we go through?
- [26:24]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's a great question. So one of the things I would say is that the Oresteia. So let's talk about just in general, I don't want to give any kind of spoilers away, but let's talk about just like the.
- [26:36]
Adam Minahan
Everybody dies.
- [26:37]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Everybody dies, yeah. So this, speaking of dying, this is about the death of Agamemnon. That's the catalyst of the play. So the Oresteia basically occurs between the Iliad and the Odyssey. So if you remember, we have a gap between those two texts and the gap is basically the whole, basically everyone else making it home except Odysseus. So when the Odyssey starts off, everyone has made it home except for Odysseus. And so the Oresteia, in short, is about Agamemnon's coming home. And so the first play, which is aptly called Agamemnon, is going to recount his death, right? And we know he died because we read the. It's not giving anything away. We've read the Odyssey and that if you remember in the Odyssey, this was a major underpinning that Agamemnon was killed by, you know, in the. His wife and her lover Aegistus. And so this is where it sets place. And so I think one thing to watch is does Aeschylus, though he's receiving a Homeric tradition, does he shift it? Does he focus on different things? Are there things that Homer gave us that were kind of straightforward or flat about the narrative, that then when we get to actual narrative or Aeschylus's interpretation of it, has it kind of blossomed? Is it thicker? And so I think that's one thing for us to watch as we move through it. Is, is this different than what I saw in Homer? And if so, why? What is Aeschylus trying to do? And I will say just about the Oreste as a whole. The first one is about Agamemnon's death. And in a lot of ways it's, it's very, it's beautiful. In a lot of ways it's tragic. I think there's some wonderful lines in it. I think it really does help fill a gap in the Homeric text, which I greatly appreciated. But in a lot of ways it's a very straightforward text. It's a narrative. The next one, the Libation Bearers is also, in a lot of ways, a straightforward text. This is Orestes, right? Agamemnon's son seeking revenge, which he's praised for throughout the entire Odyssey, right? So we know that he goes back home and he seeks revenge on his mother and on a justice. And the first time I read this, which by the way, was not too long ago, I actually read it during our Year of Homer to kind of give greater context. I really was like, wait, what is the third play about? Like what? Like. Because I was like, oh, it's about the death of Agamemnon and Orestes Revenge. And I would say that when you read through it, be prepared that the first two really are straightforward narratives. And you might like them, you might not. You might think they're not too complicated. You might. Aeschylus, he can have some really wonderful writing. People might think it. It is a little bit on, like, the purple prose side. Like, it's a little bit over the top on the emotions. But he wants to go down deep into some of his characters. And I think it's beautiful. It's wonderful. We're seeing, like, this birth of this tragic, you know, tradition inside Greek thought. But honestly, it's the third one, Eumenides, that sold the trilogy for me, because when we get to, you know, I don't want to give a whole lot away because it's a new narrative. We don't know. You don't know what happens in there, because he's moved past the Homeric text in a lot of ways. But I will say this one, we move from kind of a flat narrative, and that's probably too much of a pejorative, but we move from a flat narrative to Aeschylus all of a sudden just revving up into a story that kind of goes to the heart of who the Athenian people are and how they see themselves at this time. And it moves from the particulars of a family, like Agamemnon's family, because this is like a family drama. It moves from the particulars of a family to the universals of a people. And in a lot of ways is actually universals of the West. And what I loved about it is the concept that it takes up is justice, which is going to be a theme that we see the Greeks constantly return to over and over again. It takes up the theme of justice. And I think what. I will throw this thesis out and then we'll see if it plays out well or if people like it. I think the Oresteia, the end of it, the Eumenides, I think it gives us the ending that we wanted in the Odyssey. So if you remember the end of the Odyssey, all of a sudden we've had an act, the killing of the suitors. But what ends up happening? Well, we have this kind of primal justice, lex talionis, this eye for an eye and blood for blood. And so what ends up happening? Well, of course, all the kinsmen of the suitors are like, well, Odysseus murdered our kinsmen, we need to go murder Odysseus. And we get this kind of context where you have Odysseus and his side versus the kinsmen redeemers, right? These blood avengers versus then the gods overseeing this. And what I really wanted the first time I read the Odyssey is like, oh, this is going to be a conversation about what is justice like, who actually acted justly? Was it the suitors acting in just or unjust because of their actions inside the house with Penelope, or was it Odysseus that he, you know, misstep and he shouldn't under guest friendship, he killed his guests. And we don't get that at the end of Odyssey. What do we get? We get this deus ex machina. Athena just says, stop it. And that's how the cycle stops, right? That's how the cycle of blood vengeance stops, is Athena just says, stop, you're done. Zeus says, you have to make a pact of peace. We're over. It's not philosophical, right? It's actually Homer the teacher, I think, sets up a tension that then it's difficult for him to resolve. I don't think he has like the cultural depth at that moment to resolve it. And so at the end of the Orestaya, I think Aeschylus gives us an ending that basically mirrors in a lot of ways the ending of the Odyssey, but gives us a much more satisfying question or answer to what is justice?
- [32:31]
Adam Minahan
It'll be interesting to go through and read because, you know, Agamemnon, as we've seen in the Iliad, has many faults, has many. You know, we even find out about him, you know, killing his own daughter or allowing his daughter to be killed. You know, so he. He's got some family problems. So it'll be interesting to see how that tracks through throughout this, throughout this text to see. See what other kind of family problems he has.
- [32:59]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You're absolutely right. And we should kind of just remind everyone following along with us about that narrative, that, long story short, Agamemon sacrificed his own daughter, deceiving her to come to the island where Artemis had kind of trapped them by not giving them good wins and had deceived her under the pretense that she was going to get to marry Achilles. And then he engaged in human sacrifice and killed her to satisfy the wrath of Artemis. That narrative very much percolates into the Oresteia that that act has not been settled amongst the family and it becomes a catalyst.
- [33:37]
Adam Minahan
Shocker. I can't, I can't believe that not.
- [33:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Everyone was okay with the daughter. It's gonna be surprising.
- [33:44]
Adam Minahan
Yeah. Okay, well, very good. Anything else that we need to be aware of as we, as we kind of jump into the text. Anything that that is, is pertinent to, to the reader for the first time or, you know, as, as some of our friends are following along with us.
- [33:58]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, like I said, I, in a lot of ways I'm a first time reader. I only read this recently and I'm reading it again with the podcast. So I, it's a, it's a fresh text for me and so I, I appreciate kind of being on this journey with everyone else. We're gonna have some of our friends from our Sunday Great Books group, which is also taking up these texts, join us for the conversation. So I'm looking forward to it. You know, I, you know, just as like, why to read. We talked about this a little bit, but I've been kind of reflecting on it this evening. You know, it does these playwrights, escalists, the other ones we're going to read Sophocles, Euripides, these guys are the intellectual bridge between Homer and Socrates and Plato. So if you're really like, man, I would really actually just like to read the philosophers. Just give them time. I think it's worth it. We're spending six months on these poetics. I think it's going to cause you to have a lot richer background. And coming into Plato, the other thing I would say too, as I mentioned, he's the father of the tragedians. Right. He's the father of Greek tragedies in a lot of ways too. Like, if you enjoyed Homer, Aeschylus fills in a lot of gaps and so do the other playwrights. And so it kind of gives you a bigger picture. So if you're like, well, I really liked Homer. I'm not sure if I'm going to like the plays as much. I think you will because it's going to give you a lot more details and a lot more ways actually to compare the Homeric text, you know, with another take on these myths. Because, again, Homer doesn't originate these things. And so these playwrights have the right to come in and kind of fiddle with the story a little bit, but they do. So I think, for a pedagogical end, and that's something I think to stress, is that because these plays had a deep political and religious undertone, they are catechetical, right? They have a pedagogy to them. So Aeschylus is a teacher and something to watch for throughout the text is what is he teaching us? What is he teaching the Greek people, the Athenians? And what does that have to do with us in the west today?
- [35:54]
Adam Minahan
I mean, that's a great point, Deacon. And one of the things that I've. Some of the fruits of having the podcast thus far that maybe I didn't realize was going to be a fruit until it started happening is really the interaction that we've been receiving from those who've been reading with us, right? Either on the comments on YouTube or, you know, the comments that we've had on X, you know, as people have reading, been reading with us, whether they agree with us or disagree with us, or they just want to add more context to our conversation, they chime in. And so, as you said, we always try to take these texts as the author is the teacher, right. That we're the students and we're just trying to work through the text together. And you've provided somewhat of a tutor format for me as I've been reading it. But we're both students of the text, and so it's really great to engage with other students, so to speak, of those who are reading with us and providing more insights and more details within the text that maybe we didn't get a chance to cover, didn't realize, didn't consider. So I've really been enjoying getting the feedback from those who have been listening with us.
- [37:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I appreciate it. Iron sharpens iron. And, you know, with Escalus being the teacher, know that means that, you know, we're students and we take that seriously. I think there's a certain docility that comes to the text. And I. I have really appreciated just whether it's on YouTube or X or all the other places that people can find us, people sharing their insights. It's amazing what other people see, right? That you might have read a text a hundred times and someone comes in and says, well, have you ever noticed that this and this are related? And I love that, right? You join the great conversation, not just with yourself, but also with your friends. And so we'll be reading basically one Greek play every two weeks, which is a good reading pace, but it's enough for you to reread it, to read slowly, and to absorb what I think the teachers have to offer.
- [37:49]
Adam Minahan
Yeah, that's awesome. So make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel if you have not already and hit that little bell. So, you know, every time that we post, every time that we kind of go through these plays and make sure to go back and if you haven't had a chance to. To re. Read the Iliad, read. Read the Odyssey or if you have questions about specific books. We've already gone through all of that. We've gone through the Hesiod as well. So Hesiod's work, man, that was rough. But. So you can go to check those out as well. You can go check us out on patreon.com and maybe give us a tip if you've been enjoying this and be able to check out some of the show notes and the guide that you've been working on. Deacon and I guess the next few weeks we'll be. We'll be jumping into Esclis.
- [38:37]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, we will. So I appreciate it, and I look forward to reading it with everybody.
- [38:41]
Adam Minahan
All right, man. Well, hey, we'll see you next week.