B (4:01)

Doing very well. Thank you for having me back, Deacon. It's always great to be on his end.

A (4:05)

Yeah, no, we really appreciate your insights. And we have Dr. Frank Grabowski, friend of the podcast, been around helping us for a long time. He's a diaconate candidate so he has to suffer through my Great Books program there as well. He's a member of our Sunday small group that reads great books at my house. He's a third order Franciscan and he is the dean of faculty at Holy family classical school. Dr. Grabowski, how are you?

C (4:31)

I'm doing wonderful. I'm looking forward to suffering through the podcast with you. I'm also looking forward to revisit this because, you know, we had sort of a brief chat before about how this is just such a delightful book and it just, it bears fruit. Every time you read it, it, it's again, this is why it's a great book. This is why it's a great text.

A (4:53)

Yeah, I don't get to revisit texts very often just because, you know, Ascend, we're on like the 50 Year Great Books cycle. We're a very slow burn, which is great, right? It's a slow, attentive read. You reap a lot of the benefits of these phenomenal texts. You know, the authors are the true teachers and so we spend a lot of time with them. But I really like using the movie as an excuse to revisit the Odyssey because for people who don't know, we kicked off our podcast with A Year of Homer. So we spent six months on the Iliad and then six months on the Odyssey as well. All those podcasts and videos are already posted. So this kind of like 12 week study that we're doing now, I find it incredibly refreshing. So before we jump into book one and maybe make it past the first line, we'll spend probably an hour trying to figure that out. I look forward to that. Maybe just like, okay, so Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos, what about like Wyoming Catholic? Like it's an interesting place. Can you just give me the high level summary? Like I think you get the right horses. What is Wyoming Catholic?

B (5:48)

Yes. So we are a Catholic college in Wyoming. As the name suggests, we take seriously the idea, not the idea, the truth that philosophers discovered in the church teaches as well that human beings are integrated body, soul, unities, and that we are made to know, love and serve God. And we take every part of that anthropology, every part of that understanding of what a human is seriously. So we want to educate the body and the soul, we want to educate the heart and the mind. And so we do that comprehensively. Our all of our freshmen start their four year studies with a 21 day backpacking trip in the Rocky Mountain wilderness. When they come back, they are incredibly refreshed. We have a pretty unique technology policy whereby our students give up smartphones, give up phones for the four years that they're here. Very low tech, low screen campus. So we're trying to prioritize living in one's body, living in community, having the mental and spiritual space to be attentive to the great texts in front of them, the beauty of God's creation, the reality of social life, with professors and with classmates and most importantly, the ability to pray and to speak and to live in the presence of God in the way that we're able to in this life. And so we're, we're a classical college. We, we study humanities, theology, philosophy, Latin, math and science from a classical approach through the four years. But what's, what, what's really distinctive about us is that, that very deep commitment to providing an education and a culture and a community that reflects the truth about human nature, the truth about the kind of creatures we are.

A (7:34)

Yeah, beautiful. Well said. Yeah, you guys just have a really unique charism and I deeply appreciate it. You've been very generous with the podcast and coming on, but many of your colleagues have as well. Always really impressed by your all's commentary on the great books. Also, Dr. Grabowski, so you are at kind of a new classical school, very much also launching into a high school. Tell us a little bit about like holy family classical school.

C (7:57)

So, yeah, we're so we're a classical school. We also have a technology free policy. You know, we're really just getting started. Our high school is small, but it's vibrant. We, at least within the humanities, theology, history and literature, we start with a four year sequence beginning with the ancients in literature, beginning with Homer in history with Herodotus, Thucydides. Theology is scripture. And, and so they spent an entire year just reading scripture. Then of course moves into the sophomore year, which is devoted to the medievals. Then junior year, the early modern period, and then senior year is the late, late modern period. And so they read everything that you'd expect a student at a classical school to read, from Homer and Plato to Shakespeare and Milton, all the way up to Dostoevsky. So our goal is to really prepare these students for whatever career, whatever life they choose to live, whether that's in academics, going to graduate school, or maybe going to a trade school. But we're forming Christian disciples and that's our primary mission.

A (9:12)

Yeah, beautiful. Well said. Okay, one last preliminary question. So Dr. Pavlos, you can kick us off. Why do we read this text? So you read it at Wyoming Catholic. You have these probably freshmen coming in. We have to read Homer. We have to read the Odyssey. Don't we already know this story? There's like a Cyclops, he makes it home. Like it's not that complicated. Right. So why do we read the Odyssey? Why is this a text worth wrestling with?

B (9:36)

Yeah, Iliad and Odyssey. Apparently the dichotomy there is war and peace, and there's some, there's some truth to that, although they are much more interwoven than that strict dichotomy would suggest in. In the poems and maybe in reality in the. In the Iliad. We see. Well, in both of these, to back up for a moment. I mean, why start with the Greeks at all? And why. Why start with Homer? You can make a historical argument that this is. This is the source of our tradition in some respect. This is the source of our literary genres. We begin with epic and we see tragedy and comedy develop later. And. And that is true, and that is itself a reasonable argument to make. I'd like to add a different perspective on this, though, to say that in. In our time, in a. In a democratic age, by which I mean an age that prioritizes equality and what. What we all have in common. There. There are very good versions of this when we speak about the truth of. Of how we're all made in the image and likeness of God and we all have a certain dignity in common. But our culture has for a very long time erred so far on the side of emphasizing what everyone has in common and the. The universal commonality of every person that we sometimes. It. It's sometimes uncomfortable for us to recognize distinction and hierarchy and the reality of virtue being better than vice and the very difficult discipline that is required for becoming a great man or woman and thereby distinguishing yourself from someone who is ordinary or vicious. And so we begin with Homer in part to give us the sense that there is such a thing as human greatness. And that human greatness is going to have something to do with proper connection to the divine. And maybe our theology is not identical to the theology that is there in Homer, although that's a. That's a conversation to be had. But certainly there's a relationship there and. And the sense of human greatness and. And human ambition. Proper and improper reading the ancients, and especially Homer, is a. Is a great way to see that there is an appeal and a proper appeal to. To be a great. To be a great human being and thereby to approach the divine sometimes in a. In a way that will be very unfamiliar and uncomfortable for us. Others.

C (12:01)

Other.

B (12:01)

Other ways, in a way that actually complements our. Our faith and what it teaches us. As for the Odyssey specifically, it is. It is a return home. And it wrestles with these eternal recurrent questions about what our obligation is to our own, what our obligation is to our home, what our obligation is to the particular, what it means to be a father and a king, a leader, what it means to be a son, what it means to be a wife and a mother and the role of all of these persons in a household, in a community. And so it's a great. It's a great exploration of how we ought to come into our own, in the duties that we have and how we have to make our way back in some way to an original order that. That has been disrupted. This is something that. That we all face in different ways. The most recent time that I taught this text, I was really struck by. And my students were really struck by. I'm sure we'll get into this. Telemachus's difficulty in becoming a man when his father has been absent almost his entire life. And so if you. If you want the. The more clickbaity version, that's very up to date.

C (13:14)

It's.

B (13:14)

It's the crisis of masculinity and the broken family and absent fathers and what happens to men when they have absent fathers. That's right there in. In this. In this very ancient text, among many other things. So I think there's a variety of reasons to read this text.

A (13:28)

Yeah, very well said. I appreciate. I appreciate your notion of the fact that the great texts, particularly Homer, who were approaching her as a teacher, he's the teacher of the text, can really yank us out of our modern mindset, and we should really welcome that to actually be yanked out of our own time in culture and try and understand what are the perennial truths that Homer is trying to teach us. And some of those things that you mentioned. Right. Hierarchy, glory, chaos. These types of things aren't. Yeah, they're kind of unsettling to us today. We're very egalitarian. We're very democratic in our mindset. And I think there's some lessons here and the Odyssey that can really help us to mature in our own understanding of reality. So I really appreciate your comments, Dr. Gobowski, what about on your end? Why do we read the Odyssey? I'm sure you have to answer this question to a younger crowd, to a high school crowd. Why did they read this text?

C (14:19)

Yeah, well, I think Pablo's touched on, you know, a number of the most important themes. I'm always surprised at how sophisticated an anthropology Homer has. I think that when you read both the Iliad and the Odyssey very closely through a philosophical lens, you discover that Homer is working out an account. He's not giving a philosophical account necessarily, but there's a deep philosophical reflection into the nature of man and the soul. And I think that this. If you eventually do get around to reading Plato, you can See the influence of Homer on Plato and also follow up to what Pavlos was saying about the gods, the divine and piety. Now, the Iliad really establishes, I think, a real problem for us, namely, what is the relationship between us and the gods, and what is the relationship between free will and the divine will? And I think that, you know, the Iliad can often be ready as posing many of these problems that will eventually at least try to be resolved or an attempt at resolving these problems in the Odyssey. So, yeah, I think that it is a great work of literature, but Homer just displays just this remarkable philosophical acumen, and it is impossible to understand Plato's dialogues, Aristotle, and even, I would say, within the Catholic philosophical tradition. You can't really grasp what. What the early church fathers are doing without having an adequate understanding and being well versed in Homer.

A (16:02)

Yeah, Homer is the fountainhead of so many perennial truths, the questions of mankind in the West. And so many of those questions then flow directly into Christianity as well. You know, we don't look at the pagan text as a threat to the Christian faith, but rather actually something that can perfect it, that can help lift it up and elevate it. I think of St. Basil's letter to the early church father who's like, hey, listen, we know you're like the branch. And reading scripture is like bearing fruit, but reading the pagans, particularly Homer, it's like bearing leaves. It helps you actually to bear better fruit. And I think that's the approach that we take. Okay, so here's what we're going to do. I'm just going to read the opening lines here, and then we'll kind of dig into it. But I think this is very much worth kind of hearing and working through, because the opening of the text, as we've learned on us in the Read Books podcast, the opening very much sets the tone and the structure, the infrastructure, if you will, of the entire great work. And so we really want to make sure that we start well here at the beginning. So sing to me of the man Muse the man of twists and turns Driven time and again off course Once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds Many pains he suffered Heartsick on the open sea Fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home but he could not save them from disaster Hard as he strove the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all the blind fools they devoured the cattle of the sun and the sun God Wiped from sight the day of their Return, launch out on his story. Muse, daughter of Zeus, Start from where you will sing for our time too. So this beautiful opening line that we have, right, Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns. There's three things that I really want to focus on and pull out of this. One is that the first word is actually man in the Greek Phagos doesn't capture that. Latimer doesn't capture that either. Thagil's captured it, though, in the Iliad, where he started off with rage. Here are the first words, man. Secondly, we get invocation to the muses. We gotta figure out what that is. And then we get this description, the man of twists in turns. What does that even mean? So Maybe, you know, Dr. Pavlos, what does it mean that the Odyssey starts with the word man? Man.

B (18:33)

Yeah. So the man, we'll later learn that this is Odysseus, but notably, his name isn't even mentioned in the. In the pro. Proper in these. In these opening lines. I think you're right to. To point to the opening lines in the opening word as the theme. And what we'll see is that man is the theme in. In several senses. So one is that man is neither a beast nor a God and will see the opportunity to slide into a beastial existence or the aspiration to improperly approach a divine existence. Throughout the poem, we'll see others fall into these. These mistakes. It seems like actually in the proem itself, you could say that the men, Odysseus's comrades, who he was trying to save, perhaps they felt they were subject to lower appetites in their hunger. And then that's what caused all this problem with the cattle of the sun. Right. You have an example there. But we're also going to see throughout the. The allure, sometimes proper and sometimes improper, of ascending to a superhuman existence, a more divine existence. And yet Odysseus is the man. And so this poem, and this is a note of contrast with the Iliad, this poem is going to focus on the man returning to his humanity and the man reinhabiting his humanity in the best possible way. So that's. That's one sense where, where is man in. In the hierarchy of being between beasts and gods? Secondly, there's a sex, sexual or gendered component which. A man and a woman. This is a. This is the masculine. This is an air andra. It's the man, not the human, the anthropos, which is his man, mentioned later in that prohib. Many, many cities of men, many Cities of humans he saw and learned their minds. There's the species human, which we sometimes call man, but there's also male and female. And Odysseus is a man, he's a manly man. And one of the challenges from the, from book one is how you become a manly man. And Telemachus is, is in this quandary of having grown up with his father away at war with a whole generation of men away at war. And he's left with a very good mother, but a mother, a nursemaid who's very loyal and good, but a woman, a nursemaid and eventually a crowd of, by the, by the time the action of the, of the poem begins, 20 something to 30 something young men who are, you know, too young to go to the war when it happened, but are old enough now to be adults, though they aren't mature in the way you might hope them to be. And so how does the son of the man, how does Telemachus become a man after his father when he does not have his father or has not had his father? So in fully inhabiting that role as man, and in the case of Odysseus, that does mean being the son to your father as well as the father to your son, being the husband to your wife, being the ruler of your household, and in his case, the king of his, of his kingdom, all of those roles, what does that actually mean? We'll explore that in the text. And so that entails that final one of how the boy becomes a man. And what does that mean in contrast? I'll just say one thing about the Iliad. The Iliad's proem begins with rage, and specifically the rage of Achilles, the son of Peleus in the first line of the Iliad. But by the end of the proem of the Iliad, in the seventh line of the Iliad, it is the quarrel between the son Atreus's son, the king of men, meaning Agamemnon, and godlike Achilles or Dios, Achilleus. And so the, the juxtaposition in the opening lines of the Iliad are between Achilles, the son of this mortal man Peleus, and Dios Achelous, Achilles, the godlike, or actually it's literally Dios, is also used to refer to Zeus. So it's Zeus Achelous. And so the trajectory in the Iliad is about Achilles becoming maybe, or trying to become not just the son of his mortal father, but a kind of godlike figure himself. And godlike is used as an epithet in this poem for heroes such as Odysseus but the focus is going to be on how he returns from the heroic to fully and properly embody the human realm as a. As a man ought to.

A (23:10)

Yeah, very good. My. Like, just a few, like, quick thoughts. Yeah. The comparing the opening of rage, the opening of man. One thing too, particularly the first time I read this text that really stood out to me was so much of the Iliad seems so fatalistic that there's the divine, the providential side seems to just control every aspect of. Whereas then in the Odyssey, it seems so much more like man has a free choice, that man is actually an agent of his own will. And so I've always seen that comparison between the opening of the Iliad and the opening of the Odyssey as well. One thing too, that I also have been thinking about, it's a raw thought, is you made a comparison at the very beginning that sometimes the Iliad is compared to the city at war, and the Odyssey is compared to the city at peace. And this peace and war comes from Achilles shield in the Iliad, these two cities. And it's interesting. I think these comparisons are worth it. They're meritorious for certain reasons. One thing I would point out is the City of Peace is not without conflict. It has ways to resolve the conflict. But one thing that occurred to me recently is that when you go back and look at Achilles Shield, the City of War, City of Peace, is that the gods are only mentioned at the City of War. They're not mentioned in the City of Peace. And that's really interesting to me that then the book that is the City of Peace, Odysseus, starts off with man, whereas in the Iliad seems to lean more into the divine. And I apologize if this is repetitive, but one of the things too to notice is that the rage that Iliad starts with is not just a normal human rage. It's a very particular type of rage that's reserved to the divine right to the gods. And this is what Achilles is participating in. So those two comparisons have always really kind of stood out to me as we kind of compare these two texts. Dr. Hrabowski, anything on your end?

C (24:51)

No, I would just say that the fact that the Iliad opens with Manus, this emotion that is really reserved for the gods. Right. So this is a very intense form of rage that Homer is attributing to Achilles and the fact that, yeah, the Odyssey begins with the word honor, so it is about a man, but it's about all of us. Because as the proem concludes, Homer says, at least in the Fagl's translation launch out on his story Muse, daughter of Zeus. Start from where you will sing for our time, too. And so I think that this is Homer's way of saying that this. Sing to me, Muse, but sing for all of us that this is not just about Amen, but it's about the universe on the end. And then, of course, we could transition to the other very interesting word, which I think is the most interesting word in the first line, which is polutropos. And so, if you don't mind me, maybe we can just briefly. Yeah, so this word has always fascinated me, and I'm sure Pablos will have much to say, too, about this word. There are many epithets that Homer uses to describe Odysseus, which is to be of many councils. Plutolos, which means much suffering. That one's used quite often. And I think that's something that we'll have to tease out maybe some of the later episodes once we get to, like, Book five. But Plutarpos is the first epithet. And so my understanding that's only used a few times in the Odyssey. It's not very. It's not very frequent, but it really does capture, I think, Odysseus's essence. And so the question that I think we have to ask ourselves is, what does it mean to be polyphenol? What does it mean to be a man of twists and turns? Because in one sense, it's quite obvious he's a man of twists and turns, insofar as he's. He's on this long journey home. And so spatial templ. Spatiotemporally, he's a man of twists and turns. He's going from here to there. He's meeting the. He's meeting the Cyclops. He gets stranded on Cersei's island, Calypso's island, and so on. But. But I think that the really interesting way in which he's Polutropos is inside of his soul that he undergoes. Just like Achilles experiences a deification arc in the Iliad, Odysseus undergoes a transformation as well, that he's a very different man by the time he gets home after all of this. He's very different from the Odysseus that we encounter in the Iliad, that's for sure. And so since we don't meet Odysseus until book five. Right. And then he has to relive his travels through his own storytelling, we'll see that later as well. So, yeah, I think. And I'll be happy to hand this off to Pavlos, but Plutarpos, I mean, to answer the question, what does it mean to be Plutarpos? I think is a key that really unlocks a lot of the mysteries to the Odyssey.

B (27:59)

Yeah, I'll just, I'll just add only a very little bit to that. Most literally, right? It's. It's many, many turns. Right. The polu part is the many. Right. And so he's got that multiplicity as, as you pointed out within him and also in, in his experiences. And that's, that's what the, the next couple of lines point, point us to, right, that he, many were many cities of men, he saw and learned their minds, and many pains he suffered, et cetera. So he, he had a grand tour, but he wasn't just passing through. Right. His grand tour was not of the vacationer, the tourist, but instead of the observer, the one who's, who's seeing and not just seeing, but knowing the minds, learning the minds of the many men. Maybe not just men. It's going to turn out to be gods and cannibals and monsters. But he seems to have a deep, intimate understanding. He's able to enter into different identities. This is one of the reasons Athena loves him so much. Is there kind of birds of a feather in this respect and that she takes on disguises. He takes on disguises. He, he weaves all kinds of stories and alternate identities in order to make his way through his adventures. But it seems like the proem is telling us that he's. He's also absorbing and learning something from all of these journeys. He doesn't just have a bag of tricks that enables him to get from A to B in a very roundabout way. In the course of those journeys and wanderings which he later recounts, he's. He's learning something and, and maybe if we put these, these terms together of the man of many twists and turns, maybe his twisting, turning character is. Is part of him becoming more fully the proper man. And having surveyed the full scope of how people can go right and go wrong and how they can live higher and lower existences approaching divine and falling down towards the bestial, maybe in. In that he is able to understand and properly inhabit the. The position of man in the cosmos.

A (30:14)

Yeah, very well said. I think that, you know, one thing I'd like to just emphasize here is that, you know, the man of twists and turns is like Polytropos, you know, obviously is both Odysseus and the narrative itself. And I think particularly for first Time readers, what you're going to get is like the first time I read this in a group, blood on the floor conversations, Odysseus as a hero. No, he's a scoundrel. Like, he's a villain. When we realize in this text is there are a lot of comparisons, there are a lot of tensions, if you will. I think that twists and turns really is the entire Odyssey itself. And these things are held in tension together. Like just even in the passage that I read when it says, like, you know, fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home, but he could not save them from disaster. Well, anyone who's read this text before, I think that's a thesis to be challenged, right? That at all times he was trying to save them from disaster. I would probably throw out that at certain times, Odysseus was, was the disaster that hit his men. So I think that in a certain way, like when you first read this book, you know, sometimes you want to go one way or the other. You interpret all these events in one way and you're like, no, no, no, he's a hero. No, no, no, he's a, he's a villain or whatever. I think that one thing I'm looking forward to is through this, read through, is trying to understand why does Homer put these things in tension? Is Homer just simply a flat echo of his time? He's just recounting these stories? Well, the reason they have all these contradictions and tensions is because he's just pulling from myriad of oral traditions and he's just thrown them at a wall and sometimes they don't work and et cetera. Or is Homer really a teacher? Is he a philosopher, dare I say, is he a theologian who actually invites you to contemplate the deeper truths of humanity in the tension itself? And like one of the texts that I've been reading recently, hold it up here, the Bow and the Lyre by Seth Bernadetti. Here is one of the. One of the thesis that he has at the beginning is simply that this is actually a poetic dialectic. And what I mean by that, because, like, okay, that's a fancy word. Like, what does that mean? Well, it means like, when you read Plato, if you're familiar, Plato, he writes in dialogues and in the conversation itself. It's not that one person's always right, another person's wrong. And, you know, Socrates vanquishes his opponents in every conversation. No, it's rather that in the dialogue itself, in the iron, sharpening iron, in that dialectic is where the truth is to be found. And the truth is not always immediately showed to you. Right. It's not told to you explicitly. A lot of times you have to dig for it. And actually you find yourself, if you're familiar with Plato, sometimes digging pretty deep through a lot of strata to get there. And the tension in the text is an invitation to dig into those deeper layers. And so the thesis here is, is that Plato actually learned this from Homer, he learned this from the playwrights. And so here, like, what's the tension here? It's not a dialogue. Yes, but the man of twists and turns is presented in different ways and that creates tension. We have stories that are retold and that creates tension because there's a difference between what happened and the story that's retold and why the person's retelling it and how they're retelling it. And also then we just get straight up lies from the gods, from Odysseus, from everyone. They take on Persona, they tell lies to each other. Okay, well, we could discuss the morality of that. But also the lies create strata, they create tension. Why is this lie being told? Why is this narrative compared to reality? What can we learn from this? And so I think one thing that I'm going to challenge myself on, I would challenge other kind of particularly first time readers, is that instead of being trapped and going one way or the other on these interpretations, the real benefit here is to notice the tension in the text and then ask yourself, like, what is Homer inviting me to contemplate? What is Homer the philosopher, if you will, posing at this as this, like poetic dialectic. What's he inviting me to contemplate? Because I think you see this even in the muses, right? So we said three things. So we had, you know, we had man, the muses and the polytropos. The muses, right. So we get the word amused. Museum, music, these types of things, these are the ones that come down and inspire you. And I really liked, I think it was Dr. Grabowski pointed out that we have a muse invocation at the beginning and then notice at the end it says, launch out on his story museum. But then it shifts and it says, sing for our time too. Or Latimer Singh says, sing our story. And that's another way that, just to reiterate that I think the man there is actually representative of humanity as well. This is somehow our story. We're also somehow a man of twists and turns, a man of contradiction. A man going through life sometimes isn't white and black Sometimes it's gray and we have to kind of discern these things as we move forward. But anyone who's also read Hesiod knows that Hesiod tells us also that the muses can lie. The muses at the beginning of the theogony tell Hesiod that they can lie. And they lie for whatever reason, whether it's a benefit or telling a story or whatever it is. So the fact the muses can lie and the muses are inspiring Homer. And the gods lie and Odysseus lies. A lot of people lie in this text. I think what it does is, is that it does create a lot of strata. It creates multiple layers to the text. And in that poetic dialectic, you know, we're not looking for contradictions in Homer. We're not looking for like, oh, he's just, you know, an echo of a Bronze Age culture. You know, they didn't even notice these contradictions, et cetera. Or rather like he's actually, we take this like in a thick sense that he really is a teacher. And all these things kind of are inviting us to a deeper understanding of the text itself.

C (35:39)

Harrison, I'd like to just add one point, and I love the way you really emphasize the tension within Odysseus. Odysseus is a very, a deeply ambiguous character. And what I mean by that is that I think as he's being presented to us in his many facets, we're having to work out our ideas about who he is and whether he's moral or whether he's immoral and whether he was, was justified in killing all 108 of the suitors. And so I think, you know, as we're working through the text, we become plutar post too. We become men of twists and turns as we're trying to unravel this deeply, deeply complicated and conflicted man. So, yeah, I mean, we've spent approximately half an hour on the prom. But that just goes to show you how, you know, if you're approaching a text like this for the first time, to take it slowly. I mean, you don't know how, you don't have to know the Greek. But Homer is very deliberate with his word choices. And so, you know, as an, as a man of genius, he's very deliberate in the way that he's describing Odysseus to us. And so we often have to pause and you'll find yourself changing your mind about Odysseus as we first encounter him on Calypso's island and as he mocks the cyclops Polyphemus. But as he returns home, he returns home a deeply changed man. And so I tend to be very sympathetic, but many of my students don't like him and think that he's. He deserved his fate in Dante's Inferno.

B (37:25)

One brief comment on the line of thought that Deacon was going down, that line that Fagles has, fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home. So one, one comment on the Greek there. Literally, it's fighting for his soul. It's his suke. And so that can mean you're fighting to preserve your life. Right. That's a. That's a fine translation. That's actually how most of the translations I've looked at render it. But you could also say he's in a battle for his soul and for his comrades return. So he's. He's trying to bring them home. And certainly he wants that as well. Although even that question at one juncture or another gets a lot. Little bit complicated. But there's something the proem is suggesting. There's something deeper, deeper psychologically or spiritually going on with Odysseus's own journey, that he's in a fight for his soul, whatever that might mean. It might go beyond merely preserving his biological life. There might be that profound spiritual battle or development that's unfolding in him through the. Through the journeys.

A (38:26)

Yeah, that's fascinating. That's a fascinating insight. Yeah. Because I will say, the first time I read this text, I read it with a group of men who really saw Odysseus as a hero. Like, he's coming back to his wife, he's coming back to his son. It's this beautiful family story. And I was like, what book are you all reading? Did you read this? Like, X, Y and Z. And so then I, you know, I've kind of softened on it. One thing that helped me was just thinking of Old Testament characters, like, is David perfect? Was Moses perfect? Like, who. Who can we not we. These are our holy men of our, you know, our patriarchs, our forefathers. Yet some committed deep, deep sins. So part of that, like, helped me kind of soften a bit. And then the more I've understood that, like, no, these contradictions here are here for a pedagogical reason. They're actually here to invite you into a deeper contemplation of the text. Again, the great books are great because you can reread them and reread them. You think you grasp them, they have more strata and they invite you really into a conversation about the condition of man. So I love it. Okay. I would like to jump to Aegistus and like, why? Who's Aegistus? And Zeus's commentary. Any other thoughts though on the opening or the fact that we get odysseus's name in 25. Anything else before we kind of jump to the story of Aegistus?

C (39:32)

Not for me. I'm really interested to hear Pablo's thoughts on Zeus's defense of the gods.

B (39:38)

Let's go right to it, or else we'll never get past the first ten lines.

A (39:43)

Okay, so maybe. Okay, so let me. I'll go in the shallow pool and then we'll kind of hand it off to you guys. All I want to do right now is actually just mention who is Aegistus. Right. I think that's actually important. And then we got to go to the concept of a fate. Right. So Aegistis is used, if you're looking at the text, I don't know, this is like line 35 or so he's mentioned. We have Athena going before Zeus, the gods are gathered, et cetera. And Zeus is going to give this commentary about man and fate and et cetera. But Aegistus is the one that's actually mentioned. So who is he? Okay, so like really short is Agamemnon comes home from the Trojan War. So this is a big surprise for first time readers of the Iliad. The fall of Troy is not there. The Trojan horse, all these things are not there. And it falls between the Iliad and the Odyssey. So what happens? Well, and we'll get some more. This story will get kind of thickened as we go on. Nestor, who loves to tell stories, will kind of give us some more details and things of this nature. But for our purposes here, Agamemnon comes home and what's he find? Well, he's welcomed by Aegistus and by his wife Clytemnestra, and he is murdered by them. Okay. And Homer kind of leans more into the Aegistus narrative of this. And so Aegistis had, you know, some reasons to want to kill Agamemnon. And so, for instance, Agamemnon's father, Atreus had, you know, invited Aegistus's father to a feast and killed all of his children and fed them back to him in the banquet. So, as you know, sins against hospitality and acts of violence go. That one's, you know, pretty brutal. And so Aegistus seduces Clytemnestra. They kill Agamemnon when he arrives, and Zeus's Point is, hey, we told him not to do this. And then what do you have? You have Orestes, who is Agamemnon's son, comes home from Athens and wreaks revenge. And so he kills Aegistus and he kills his own mother, Clytemnestra. And so this then will create a template, a parallel story to the entire Odyssey. And so what we're going to see as the text develops is that there's going to be a lot of comparisons between Telemachus, Orestes, between Odysseus and Agamemnon, both trying to cut, you know, both coming home from the war. And then also comparisons between Clytemnestra and Penelope, as we understand their development. And again, Homer's sketching of this is kind of light and different. But if you really want to dig into this, the Oresteia by Aeschylus, the triad that tells the story of Agamemnon's death and the revenge by Orestes is a beautiful, beautiful play. We've covered it on the podcast. I love it. He has kind of a different spin on a little bit, but goes deep into concepts of justice. But here that's a little backstory to who Aegistus is. And he's used then as the example by Zeus of fate. So who wants to kind of sally forth about Zeus's commentary here about man and fate?

C (42:32)

I'll get started and then I'll pass it off to Pablo. So. So I've always been fascinated by this particular apology by Zeus because again, we're going to be referring back to the Iliad, because I think the Iliad really poses for us this serious question. If you go back and you read the Iliad, we're told that the will of Zeus was moving towards its end. And so it raises this question about, well, to what extent do human beings, to what extent are human beings the authors of their own fate? Or is the will of Zeus really just manipulating, right, that we're just marionettes and Zeus and the other gods are pulling the strings. And so there you kind of get into a sort of voluntarism or divine command theory where the gods are deciding right what is right and what is wrong, and different gods have different opinions or different beliefs. And so you encounter this problem, well, if God A likes you and God B hates you, then right and wrong seem to somehow be contradictory. And so you get this, this, this big philosophical problem that you have to deal with. And so here Zeus is very, he's very explicit in saying that just this performed an act that was Hooper Moron. Which means, you know, it's this. There are many words that are translated in the Greek to fate. Moira isa. And so the question is, is Homer saying that the gods determine the outcome or do the gods are the gods themselves? How to put it, that they have to play by the same rules as the rest of us? And so I think that in this particular paragraph, Zeus is making it very explicit that, you know, the gods aren't responsible for the sufferings of man. That man is responsible. And Homer already establishes this in the proem with the cattle of the Sun. It's because of their mistake, because they did something that they weren't supposed to do. It has nothing to do with God's picking sides. It's that man, you know, their fate, their deaths lay at their own feet, that they are responsible. And so I think that this is Homer's way of approaching, maybe an answer to this question of, well, what is the relationship between the human will and the divine will? And where does morality fall in?

B (45:13)

Yeah, that's great. I'm going to add, I think these are more human notes and theological notes, but I'm a humanities professor, so forgive me, when, when Zeus is recounting the message that was conveyed to Aegisthus via Hermes, he, he says specifically that this is, this is a different translation. I'm looking at the lattimore around line 40. He says, he, he's warning him, don't kill the man, don't court his lady for marriage. Why? Because vengeance, vengeance would come on him from Orestes, son of Atreides, whenever he, whenever Orestes came of age and longed for his own country. So don't commit this crime.

A (45:59)

Why?

B (46:00)

Well, presumably it's bad in itself, but also because this is going to elicit a predictable response from a particular person and vengeance is going to come upon you through another human agent. And, and I find it very interesting. And of course, this is, this is setting up Athena's interest in turning the conversation towards her favorite Odysseus and so on, that, that Orestes is going to come and avenge him, not just out of the blue, but when he comes of age and longs for his own country, right when he is mature and when he wants to go home. And what we've got in the case of Odysseus is certainly he's, he's already of age, but he's longing for his, his home countries, he's trying to come home. And then you've got, in the case of Telemachus, he is now just coming of age when the. When the plot of the Odyssey begins in book one. And what we'll see, not to give away too much, but we'll see a cooperation between the man who is coming of age in the form of Telemachus and the man who is longing for home and returning home in the form of Odysseus, who in this have to be the virtuous example to the foil of everything that unfolds in the house of Atreus with Agamemnon and Aegistus and so on. And so one, one more note. This is going back to Deacon's commentary on who Aegistus is in the. In the setup. Aegistus son of Theestes, right. Theestes and Atreus are our brothers. And so. And there's crimes back and forth on both sides in the tradition of.

A (47:36)

Of.

B (47:36)

Of infidelity with Phyestes sleeping with Atreus his wife. And why is there a dispute in the first place? Because the question is who is going to become king? And there's some. Some reasonable dispute about who ought to be the next king and who ought to inherit it. And so you've got. Running through this story of the sad tragic fate of Agamemnon, you have disputes within the family about the family, about the polity, about rule, as well as violations of hospitality, as well as something deeply unnatural, making your brother eat his own children as well as infidelity. All of that is wrapped up. And so it seems like there's a concentrated symbol in that family of one thing goes wrong and everything is disordered, everything goes. Goes wrong together. And yet you have Orestes as a. In a sense ambiguous because he's killing his own mother. And that needs to be resolved as. As Escalus explores. And yet even there you have divine justice being executed through human agency. And so Zeus is not only saying that we, we warned the criminal, we warned a gist this. We said, you know, sin is crouching at your door and you can resist it.

A (48:54)

Something to that effect.

B (48:56)

But we also provide, we the gods through humans. We provided a kind of justice to be carried. Carried out and, and I guess my will to be done through human agencies.

A (49:09)

Yeah, one, I mean, one thing that like on that passage, like the first time I really read the Odyssey and I. I'm coming off the Iliad and I read the Odyssey and then I got into that passage of Zeus, I just laughed. I was like, there's no way. Like, what are you talking about? Like, we just got off the Iliad and Everything is fatalistic. And we're trying to figure out if there's any difference between Zeus and fate itself. And so I think this, you know, kind of goes back to that tension, to that poetic dialectic of Homer's offering us two very different ways at times of seeing the world. Is it completely fatalistic? Is it completely providential? Or is man an agent of his own free will, of his own destiny? And so I think this. It's a wonderful passage, and I appreciate both of you kind of leading us and guiding us through that. So maybe we should talk about where Odysseus is. So I'm looking at, again, Fagel's. We look at, I don't know, line 60 or so. This is Athena talking. We find out that Odysseus is on this dark, wooded island. He's held captive by Calypso, and he longs to die, which is around, like, 71 or so. And so she's appealing, right? She wants Zeus to do something about this. This is unfair for him. You know, one side note here that I've always found really fascinating is how similar Odysseus opening is to the opening of the Divine Comedy. That. Because we think about Klipto's island, which is true, but here it's referred as the dark, wooded island. And so you have two guys lost midway in their life in a dark wood that need the divine assistance of a female spirituality, right? One is Mary, one's Athena, to send them on a penitential journey so they can make it home and maybe even save their soul. As was mentioned earlier, there's some really deep parallels there. I'm very painfully aware that Dante did not have Homer. He's kind of receiving this. But I've always liked to dig into that more and see how much of that is intentional. Because we should note that in the Inferno and the Purgatorio, Dante the poet very much presents himself as a new Odysseus. He makes that comparison very explicit because he gives this narrative of Odysseus dying trying to make it to mount purgatory, whereas Dante the poet is able to make it to mount purgatory and to ascend. And there's all kinds of comparisons of sirens and the ship and all kinds of things. So I'm just flagging that as an aside, that it's something that I would like to explore of how much of Dante is actually being pulled from this tradition on Odysseus himself.

B (51:43)

That's great. I love that on the wooded island. I'm curious about that. That has never really stood out to me, but I think it's right for it to stand out and not only for the connection with Dante, but I'm thinking of the contrast with Ithaca, which is always rocky Ithaca and it doesn't seem like a L or densely wooded place. It's not, it's not presented that way. And it's, it's full of, you know, it's good for having sheep and goats and things like that. And it's also this island that Odysseus is held captive on by Calypso. It seems to be very remote in the middle of the sea, so it's isolated. And she, Calypso, his. His captor, is introduced as daughter of Atlas, daughter of a malignant Atlas. And who's Atlas, who has discovered all the depths of the sea and himself sustains the towering columns which bracket earth and sky and hold them together. So there's almost a. A sylvan forestry image there with Atlas's role in supporting. Supporting the heavens. But there's also this profundity to Calypso's father, which is that he. He knows all the depths of the sea and, and I wonder about this. Of course, Odysseus is. Is weeping here. He's crying for home. He wishes to return home to rocky Ithaca and to his family, his lineage, his father, his son, his wife. And yet where is he trapped? He's trapped with Calypso, whose name means. Right, hidden, covered, covered over. And she's the daughter of Atlas, who is here associated with knowledge of all hidden things, the most possibly hidden thing, the depths of the sea where no mortal can go. And he's a kind of cosmic principle of holding things together. Given what I know of Odysseus already, with him being Polotropos many turns and him knowing the minds of many, many men, there's a strange appeal to being with the hidden one who is the daughter of Atlas, who has this kind of cosmic principle going on and, and knowledge of. Of secret things under the sea. And so of course, his, when, when we meet him and, and, and throughout so much of the story, he is longing to return home. But he's also perhaps in some way torn between coming to know all that we can know and going back to the familiar. And those are. Those are two different kinds of appeals of knowing the full range of experience, knowing the full range of the world and the cosmos and ranging abroad to discover it and going to your home, the Nostos, the return home and being where you ought to be in the particular place the particular duties and persons. And so that, that has not jumped out to me. But, but the wood is, is dark and sheltering and unlike Ithaca in some way. And also this, this goddess figure who is captive, who has captured him, is very, in this respect, very unlike the particular human known, familiar realm that, that he's trying to get back to.

A (55:01)

I like that a lot. I like that because I think it sets us up for a theme of understanding the role of knowledge in the Odyssey, which is something that I think is at times subtle, at times very explicit. And it's something too, that Dante, like I said, plays off of, because the role of knowledge in its relationship to virtue is something that Dante the poet plays off when he presents himself as a new Odysseus. And so I think maybe as we wrestle with the text, one question to ask ourselves is what is the role of knowledge? And how does Odysseus engage in that knowledge? And at times, how is it a temptation to him as well? Okay, let's jump to. It was already mentioned around like 100, kind of the two things Athena says we're going to do, because this is important, because this is what gives structure to the text. And so to reiterate, what do we have, one is going to be we've got to bring Odysseus home. So we're going to go and we're going to tell Calypso that Odysseus has to come home. So that gives us one movement of the text, which is the coming home story. Then, as you've mentioned, the other one is, well, now we've got to go to Telemachus. Athena is going to go to Telemachus. And, and we're actually why she goes to him. And what the purpose of that is is something that I think we're going to have to ferret out. But broadly speaking, Telemachus is going to have a coming of age story. So here again, a young man, a fatherless man, in a house full of suitors. We've got to play this narrative out a little bit. But these are the two big movements of the text. We have a coming home story and we have a coming of age story as well. Part of Homer's brilliance again is to weave these together. So what stands out to you or what should we know about Athena coming down as mentees? So one of the things, if you're unfamiliar with, you know, Homer, you're unfamiliar with the Greek stories, the gods are going to come down, they take on a Persona and they're going to talk to someone and lead them, kind of push them into what the gods want them to do. And then there's always kind of a question about whether the recipient can discern that it's actually a God talking to them. Usually the gods take on someone that the person knows, etc. And so there's kind of a discernment going on. We saw this in the Iliad of, you know, sometimes guys were very good at discerning that, nope, that's a God. The gods are moving here. And some guys just seemed very opaque and had no idea that anything was going on at all. So what should we know about this kind of dialogue between Mentes and Telemachus?

C (57:20)

Let me. I'll begin. And this is just a very general observation for your audience, Deacon, and that is, those who are familiar with divine intervention from the Iliad come to expect the gods having a very direct, very violent interaction with the human, the mortal characters. And what we'll see here is Athena, who does serve, though she is in disguise as a mentor, as someone who is going to assist Telemachus in his search for his father, as well as assisting Telemachus and his growth into a man. And then, of course, later, she will assist Odysseus and Telemachus in the slaughter of the suitors, although she herself will not be involved in the same way that the gods were involved in the Iliad. And so here again, as we set these two texts beside each other, this is a transformation of the gods where rather than having a direct impact, they're having this indirect impact where they're inspiring man to become a greater. A greater human being.

B (58:36)

And that's, that's precisely the language that she uses that I'm. I'm going to go to arouse in his son courage. I'm going to put courage into his heart, stir up his son a little, put some confidence in him, to summon it for a specific purpose, to summon into assembly the flowing Herod Achaeans and make a statement to all the suitors. Okay, so, so there Athena is going to enter into Ithaca in order to help cultivate Telemachus into a man and to do so for a specific purpose. And that purpose, I think, ties back to what we were just discussing with the warning that Zeus gave to Aegisthus via Hermes, that, uh, we don't want a repetition of the Aegisthus situation in Ithaca. Right. Um, and so we ought to give a warning to the suitors and perhaps they won't heed it, and we'll find other ways of making sure that this situation does not repeat. And, and surely the difference in character between Penelope and Clytemnestra will make a difference here as well. But the gods are going to, in a way, do their due diligence in warning mortals before they careen off the cliff that they're driving towards. And it seems like Athena wants to build up Telemachus for that purpose, wants to actually have him appear to some extent as the man of the house and warn off the suitors who have been violating the rules of hospitality and, and attempting to. To court and marry the woman of the house, who's husband, it turns out, is still. Is still alive. And so working through the boy who's in the process on the cusp of becoming a man, she's going to try to help him become a man and also give him a specific task which will serve divine justice in warning the mortals before they. Before they suffer the consequences of their injustice.

C (60:34)

If I may, Pablo, I'm so happy you brought up that line. In the fables, the translation is slightly different. Different Fakels renders the Greek is inspire his heart with courage. What I like about what Homer does so often is how he speaks of man as having, or man's soul as having these different parts. And so Athena isn't just sprinkling magic pixie dust and bringing about this transformation, but she's actually working with the parts of Telemachus's soul that will allow him to grow. And so, and so Homer, a little bit later, he uses this expression time and again. The Greek is kata kai kata thuman. That there's this tension within us, that these parts of our souls are in conflict where we're wrestling with the mind or the heart and the soul, the Thumas. So it's like Athena knows how the human soul works, that the human soul, Homer's understanding of the human soul, it has a very, very discreet, a very explicit architecture. And so if she's going to help him grow into this man, she's going to have to tap into that part that has been deficient or that's been starved. And so she's going to have to feed that. And so, yeah, I just. I just again, Homer. Homer has such a sophisticated understanding of the human person. I don't think that Christopher Nolan's movie is going to capture that.

B (62:09)

We'll see. And just so we don't lose it, because we, we both got so excited about that one moment. There's, there's the last part of her agenda that she sets out, which is. And I'm going To send him to Sparta and to Pylos to ask after his father's homecoming to discover if there's any news which seems good in itself and, and feeds back into that purpose of inspiring confidence in his heart. But she. She closes the speech with. So that among people he may win a good reputation.

C (62:37)

Right.

B (62:37)

There's. There's the psychic condition, there's the interior condition of. Of whether Telemachus has really become a man or not. But there's also the perception of it. And he needs to go do something. He actually has to have a miniature adventure and prove himself so that he can, what, reassume the proper place or prime the pump in Ithaca for the return of the king? There's some kind of quality of being honored for one's exhibition of virtue that he hasn't yet had the occasion to do. And she's going to take him by the hand and lead him to that occasion.

A (63:11)

Yeah, Very well said. Look at one thing, there's a few things that caught my attention looking at Gannett Fagles is the fatherlessness. And what Telemachus has to escape from that. We're talking about the fact he has to have this maturation. He has to find courage in his spirit, his Thumas. He has to undergo his own Odyssey. And I think one of the questions we're gonna have to ask as the next couple books develop is what is the actual purpose of this Odyssey? What is it that his journeying around actually affects both in himself and in Odysseus? Journey home as we kind of discern what Athena's trying to do here. And so it's interesting, around like 250, just a few high points. He actually even doubts whether or not he's the true son. He's like, well, my mother's always told me, I mean, his fatherlessness is permeated deeply into him. You have to imagine what this is. So this is a young boy. He's never met his father. His father's been gone for 20 years and so he's never met him. He doesn't know him at all. He's been raised, I think, in a house that's deeply disordered. So at a certain point we can get the timeline later. The suitors come because Odysseus is dead. Everyone else is home from Troy. Odysseus has been gone. It's been 10 years, 20 years total, but 10 years from Troy and he's not here. So he has all of these antagonistic relationships. And we see this in this text where they don't treat him as a threat. And I think that's actually a big part that really reached out to me this time of his own maturation. This is the little boy, Telemachus, that grew up in the house. He's not a threat. And who is he raised by? Penelope and her serving women and his nursemaid. So I think in a lot of ways, as we look at what is Athena's point with Telemachus, he needs to, you know, become a man. And we see this very explicitly in the text. So if you look at around 3:10 says, I urge you now. And this is where she kind of starts this, like, very emphatic statement to him about what he needs to do and needs to become a man. And this is very explicit even around, like, 340. You must not cling to your boyhood any longer. It's time you were a man. Haven't you heard what glory prince Orestes won throughout the world when he killed that cunning, murderous Aegistus who killed his famous father? So what's interesting here is that the story of Aegistus is not just like a subtle literary parallel. It's actually a parallel that the characters themselves become aware of. Right. Odysseus becomes aware of Agabimon. Telemachus is aware of Orestes. And so they're playing out this narrative. One thing I'd like to maybe push into is Penelope. What really caught my attention this time is actually a little after Athena starts this kind of push. And by the way, one thing I should have mentioned is Athena comes down and even though she's a female goddess, what does she do? She takes on the guise of a man to try and tell Telemachus what to do. She takes on that masculine role to try and inspire the boy. But what caught my attention this time is that Athena does not actually seem terribly concerned or focused on reuniting Odysseus and Penelope. And I think that's really fascinating. So if you look at like a little after 3:10, she says, as for your mother, if the spirit moves her to Mary, let her go back to her father's house, a man of power. Her kin will arrange the wedding, provide the gifts and array that goes with a daughter dearly loved. It's interesting that Athena doesn't tell him, like, hey, you, you know, you've got to protect your mom and she has to stay. Odysseus is alive, et cetera. She's like, listen, if she wants to marry, just send her back to her father and let her get married. But what's important is, is that she's not marrying one of the suitors and she's not taking Odysseus's house. And I think that's really fascinating that Athena doesn't seem terribly interested in this moment of the reunion between Penelope and Odysseus, but rather about Telemachus stepping up into his role in securing the house for his father. I think you could have. I wonder how much you can push into this. Because the comparison to Orestes. Because one, like, one question I would have is, what if Penelope started to act contrary to the will of the gods? What if Penelope actually became a detriment to Athena's plan because Orestes, like we immediately think of Orestes murdering Aegistus. But Orestes has a whole nother layer to it in that story where Orestes ends up killing his own mother, Clytemnestra, because of what she's done, is unjust. And I just. It's something that I was thinking about as this read that hasn't stood out to me before because after, you know, Mentes gives him this kind of encouraging speech and this is what you need to do. And you have to go talk to your father's friends. There's this line where he tries to take the reins of the house. This is around like four, 10 or so, he said. This is Telemachus. He says, as for giving orders, men will see to it, but I, most of all, that I hold the reins of power in this house. So he tries to step up. Telemachus tries to step up, that I am actually the man of this house. And he gives Penelope a command because she's come out and we get her and she's had this entrance and now. And she's wailing because the bard is singing. And so Penelope. And so Telemachus says, you need to go back. You need to go, you know, get out of here. And it's interesting, her response to that is that she's astonished. And she withdrew to her own room and she took to heart the clear good sense in what her son had said, which then aligns her with then what Athena wants, what the gods want. And I wonder, just as I was reading through this, you know, I've always been captured, like most people, on the relationship between Penelope and Odysseus and this beautiful homecoming and things like this, which is, I think, where the imagination tends to ruminate. But I was very curious this time. The fact that Athena does not seem overly interested in that reunion. And two, that the Orestes comparison can actually cut both ways.

B (68:58)

I'm wondering if part. Part of what, so let me back up and rephrase. Is Athena trying to get Telemachus to think of himself being his own man by. By deliberately sidelining Penelope, not because of any fault of Penelope, but simply to create the space for the boy to become a man. And he. And then he stumbles into it. He actually does not do that impressive a job in book one. But he's working on it and he's going to keep working on it. But, but what we have in the first speech from Telemachus to Athena in disguise, after he welcomes her in and does a proper job of providing a very respectable seat for her away from the noise and sitting down and all of that, he does a good job of playing host. And then he says, stranger, forgive me for pointing this out, but gosh, these guys really get on my nerves. I'm paraphrase praising slightly here that, that he starts complaining about the suitors and wishing that his father would return home. But he's probably dead, right? That's what he says in that. In that speech. And all of that is well and good. And yet what it shows is that he is passive and he is at the point of being. The point of maturity, of being annoyed and somewhat indignant at the suitors. But he hasn't yet crossed into being his own agent. And so Athena is riling him up. I mean, what does it mean to put courage in his. In his soul? It means, did you hear about how much glory Orestes won for killing Aegisthus and also his mother? Which is pretty dark, right? That. That undertone. But I think it might be a necessary pedagogical step for Athena to take to light this fire in. In Telemachus. He already has something proper in him about hospitality, receiving a stranger, but not the other side of avenging, kicking out the. The intruders, right? He hasn't. Ha. He doesn't have that manly role yet. And he. He already has this. This proper sense that something is wrong. But he does not yet conceive of himself as more than a victim. And so he. He's looking for Odysseus return, which is well and good, but he hasn't yet conceived himself as being part of a solution to the problem. And so she. She has to stir him up. And that means setting aside Penelope, who with very good reason is moved to tears at the thought of her dead husband, right? All of that is well and good, but at some point it has to be bracketed There's a time for weeping and there's a time for action, and he has to be prepared for action.

A (71:44)

Yeah. Very well said. Yeah. Penelope cannot stand in the way of what Athena wants Telemachus to do. Telemachus has to escape, I think the feminine aspect that he's been under this culture. He's got his mom, he's got the housemaids, he's got his nursemaid. Because even in this book, it ends right, with this hilarious juxtaposition. I hold the reins of power in this house. The suitors are like, yeah, you're a little boy, thank you very much. They pat him on the head. And then the book ends with him being taken care of by his childhood nurse.

B (72:14)

Yes.

A (72:14)

So, again, right, there's this. Homer presents this juxtaposition, I think brilliantly, of an adolescent trying to step into that manhood. And I think that, like, one way, another way. I think the phrase, maybe a thesis here at the beginning, of what is the purpose of Telemachus journey? It is to find courage in his spirit. It is for him to escape, I think, the feminine and to take up the masculine. In another way, I think the phrase it is. It's for him to become a threat. He actually has to become a threat. He is not a threat to the suitors right now. They do not take him seriously. And I think that he then, in trying to. Right, we're going to see this in the next couple books. He tries to hold an assembly. He tries to do these things. He has part of him maturing from a boy to a man is he has to become a threat to the suitors who are assigned and an agent of injustice inside of his own home. Right? Not longing for his father to come fix things, not waiting on his mother to maybe make a choice. But he can be an actual agent of change. He can mature, have that courage in his thumos and become a threat. Well, what else? I mean, what else in book one stands out to you? I mean, there's. I mean, we could sit here and talk all night long and I would actually love to, but as we mentioned before the podcast, some of us have wives that would be somewhat. Probably upset if we spent the entire night talking about book one. But what. What else stands out to you? Here we are introduced to two suitors, kind of two of the main characters of the suitors. Maybe we should say something about them. I'm a little suspicious that their names have some meaning here. Does someone want to walk us through that? That's around line four. Hundred forty in fagals.

B (73:53)

So we've got Antinous, right. One of our suitors, Antinous. So nous is the word for mind or intellect. And antinous is anti mind. Right. Against mind. So there's something. Is it irrational? Contrary to what the properly discerned thing to do would be? Right there. There's a red flag in the name of Antinous.

C (74:22)

And we'll see.

B (74:23)

We'll see a virtuous king later, later in the poem who has a much more positive noose name than Antonous does. And then the second one is Eurymachus. Is that the other one you were thinking of? Yeah.

A (74:36)

What's. What's his. Yeah, Eurymachus. Eurymachus. I don't know. I'm from rural Oklahoma. Sometimes, you know, I struggle with these things. But, yeah, my understanding, because when I. When I read this text, this is. I don't know, my third or fourth time. These two always stand out as, like the two main people. And Antinous, like the anti noose, the anti intellect man, he plays that. That name out well. I mean, every time he's just a complete idiot throughout all these things, and he stands up and et cetera. You know, he'll get his comeuppance at some point. Eurymachus seems to be much more subtle in his approach. Now. He's very malicious, and we'll find that we'll see his character develop. But he represents, I think, in a lot of ways a much more dangerous suitor. Because if he's subtle, I mean, at certain times I saw him as an anti Odysseus, someone who also can engage in rhetoric, someone who also can weave these lies in deception as well. And so we get both of them introduced here. Antonis around 440, and Eurymachus is, I don't know, around probably 455 or so. Yeah.

C (75:35)

Something I would just add to the discussion is, I think as we're continuing our odyssey through the Odyssey, the trajectory of the suitors, their development, they become, and I think Pablo alluded to this earlier, they become quite bestial. Right. When we get to the latter books, as we near the great slaughter of the suitors, they're at one point described as eating this raw meat with blood dripping down their faces. So one of the questions that my students, again, often have, just to go back to a comment I made earlier, was the slaughter justified? Did they all deserve to die? And I think Homer is going to make a very deliberate argument that the slaughter of the suitors isn't really A slaughter of humans. These are slaughter. This is a slaughter of animals, or at least people who become very animal like. So, as Pablo's noted, Antinous. Antinous. That he is literally the anti. Mind. He is that which is opposed to the intellect, that which is opposed to right reason. And we'll see that manifest itself later where he and the other suitors become the way they're described in terms of moving in a pack like cattle. And so again, the slaughter, I think then becomes not so much a homicide as it is a sacrifice.

B (77:15)

And you're a Marcus. This is literally like wide battle or wide ranging battle. And so, Deacon, did you have in mind there that his name is suggesting, like how extensive this challenge is or how many resources he has at his disposal and tricks he has up his sleeves or. Yeah, what, what did you have in mind there with Eurymachus's, what Eurymachus name suggests?

A (77:40)

Yeah, I don't, I don't have an overly refined thought. I mean, I think certainly like I said earlier, I think that he, him and Antinous are the, are the two main suitors. I think that he's much more of a threat because he's much more subtle. We'll see later on where he was, will say very comforting things. And then behind the scenes, Homer tells us kind of like his inner thoughts as well. Yeah, his name doesn't seem as apparent to me, but rather maybe, you know, you could make comparisons there. You know, wide battle. This is what Odysseus is going to step into in a certain way. He's kind of an analog of the suitors overall. This is a battle that Odysseus has to play into. I think his name is something that invites us to further contemplation, maybe something we can play out. As we're looking at the text. The only other maybe subtle thought I would mention or minor thought is the role of bards. And this is something to pay attention to. So when Telemachus, you know, when Penelope tries to kind of silence the bard, Telemachus pushes back. That's around 400 or so. Why, Mother? Poised, Telemachus put in sharply. Why deny our devoted bard the chance to entertain us anyway? The spirit stirs him on. Bards are not to blame. Zeus is to blame. So I think for those who are unfamiliar, and we saw this at the beginning with the Muses, and what Homer's actually invoking is that the bards play, you know, a very almost mystical role in this, and that it's not just simply that they're giving this oral poetry of the stories of people and things like this, but rather that they are really inspired. And so I think one thing to track as we're kind of moving through the text is what is the role of the bards in the Odyssey? What roles do they play? And at times, people will step in and play the role of a bard. And what does that mean when they do that? And I think that, you know, one thing I showed you earlier, book that I was reading, another book I'm reading right now, which I find fascinating, is Homer the Theologian. I'll hold it up here for those on YouTube, which is a collection of. And really a wonderful insight, actually, into Neoplatonic mystical allegories, that Homer really was a theologian inspired by the divine, that actually wrote these deep philosophical and theological strata into the text for those who can see them. Right. He has a cave, and it's analogous to Plato's Cave, etc. And so. But it plays off this institution that the bards are really the voices of the gods. They really are amused. They're kind of. There's a mania that takes over them. And then they speak not on their own will, but to the will of the gods as we have to track their role within the Odyssey.

C (80:03)

Yeah, I think, too, there's something to note. This bard is actually one of the men who Odysseus spares at the end, along with Medon, who's a herald. And so, just to kind of build on what you've said, Deacon, one could say that Homer is Homer the bard. Homer the poet is saving one of his own. Right. But I think that what we see in book one is the power of language, the power of the logos. Right. How Athena, her words inspire Telemachus, Thumas. Right. And so here, too, we see the power of language. And that's also something I think that readers of the Odyssey should. Should track through the reading of the text is how language. That. That. Right. That the. The Iliad is very much about the power of muscle, the power of the sword, the power of physical confrontation. But what we see in the Odyssey, I think, is a far more subtle aspect of that power, and that is, again, through language, the power of language, through the power of poetry.

A (81:15)

Yeah, very well said.

B (81:16)

And it's just worth mentioning the particular content of this bard's singing. We hear from the narrative that he sang of the Achaian's bitter homecoming from Troy, which palace Athena had inflicted upon them. Okay. Is that the Achaeans, generally, some of them, have happy homecomings. Agamemnon, the most prominent unhappy homecoming, is not very happy. Menelaus. We'll find out later. It's somewhere in between, where it's. There's an element of wandering. It's not as extensive as Odysseus is. The homecoming is not as happy as Penelope and Odysseus being reunited. It's not as terrible as. As Clybnestra and Agamemnon. But there. There's something. This is the theme that he has taken up for this, for this evening. And Penelope's complaint is that you know lots of stories. Why are you telling this story? It's the one that upsets me. Please play a happier song tonight.

C (82:09)

Right.

B (82:09)

Something to that effect. And it. And that's when Telemachus silences her. But it's interesting that. That he is telling this story. That on the one hand, the. The bard. There's a kind of symbiosis between the. The singer and the doer, right? The poet and the. The warrior adventurer, where they. They need each other. The. The warrior needs. Needs a poet to commemorate his glorious deeds. And, and. And the. The poet needs things to be happening, to make stories out of and to recount stories. And for some reason Phemius has been singing this song this, this day. And it's appropriate, right? It's appropriate that it's the sad returns of the Achaeans that is the stuff of entertainment today.

C (82:54)

There's.

B (82:55)

There's something off about that because the suitors are hearing this and it's all vicarious for them and they're actually part of the problem. But it's also appropriate for Athena's intervention with Telemachus. Was this. Was the suit. Was the singer actually singing about Orestes and Agamemnon? That'd be interesting. It's not. It's not specified, but something of that theme. This is the. This is the thing that ought to be on everyone's minds. Maybe that singing itself is another form of the warning from the gods that the suitors should be thinking about the return of Odysseus as a prospect. And yet they're just sitting there partying and oblivious to fate, which is bearing down on them slowly.

C (83:35)

I love that Pablo and I would just make one. One additional point, that when Telemachus shuts down Penelope, what he says in the fagal's translation is, Odysseus was scarcely the only one whose journey home was blotted out at Troy. And that to me, it really resonates that, yes, we could wax nostalgic. That memory is very Important the bards preserve these stories of old. But there is a time and a place to reminisce. Right. And then there's a time and a place to be a man of action. And so I think that this for Telemachus is the green light, the invitation to not dwell on the past, but to seek out his father, to move forward and claim what is rightfully his.

A (84:28)

Yeah, very well said. There are lots and lots of things we could continue talk about. Book one is very thick. Lots of subjects. I'll just remind everyone. Check out the show notes. We have a whole guide to the Odyssey. So if you want to go deeper and ask lots of questions and it's in question answer format, please go check that out. But Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos, what would you say to first time readers of the Odyssey? So they're on this journey, we've discussed book one. What's something they need to keep in mind or ask themselves as they kind of journey through the rest of this text?

B (84:56)

Yeah, I think maybe this is repeating things we've said already, but that theme of, of how Odysseus is finding his place between the, the divine and the bestial and what is the, what is the actual good of the, of human existence here in this life? Living in time, living at home, living in your station, returning to it and living in this kind of genealogical community of being between being the link between the past and the future. He's going to have put in front of him all kinds of temptations, some of which pull at him stronger than others, of leaving that all behind, of choosing oblivion instead, instead of choosing a divine or quasi divine existence which is almost outside of history and outside of genealogy. And yet Odysseus makes the choice for his proper place in the here and now. And, and that's a very interesting complement to of course, the desire that we have for transcendence and to be beyond time and to, to be in the full presence of God and all of that. And yet there is a proper appeal and a proper station that we have in this life. And, and Odysseus embodies that inhabiting of that and, and telematic, what we've seen here is that you need to, you need to mature into the role, into the kind of person who can fill that role. And, and Telemachus is going to go through that, that journey in these first few books so that he can occupy the office that is his as son of the king in this particular place.

A (86:34)

Yeah, well said. Dr. Gralski, what about you? What what should people keep in mind as they're reading the rest of this text?

C (86:39)

Well, I, I, I love. Pavlos has now several times mentioned Odysseus as this kind of interstitial being between the gods and beasts. And that instantly brought to mind Symposium, Plato's Symposium, where Socrates describes the philosopher as this sort of strange interstitial creature who exists between knowledge and ignorance. And so I think I've mentioned this perhaps on a previous podcast, but I've always been fascinated by the parallel lives of Socrates and Odysseus. Socrates is very much this Odyssean figure and Odysseus likewise is very Socratic. And so it's a provocative claim to make. But Odysseus is very philosophical, right. He spent a lot of time on Calypso's island thinking about himself, thinking about home, thinking about who he was, who he has become, and whether he'll be able ever be able to sort of recapture his identity, right, that he's been separated from his wife, from his son, from his, his homeland. And so, you know, as, as we move forward in the text, I do think it's, it's quite useful and helpful to see Odysseus not as the hero that we knew him to be in the Iliad, but as this very deep thinker, as someone who is having his own philosophical journey.

A (88:13)

Yeah, well said. Just a few things that have helped me as a reader, actually. The end of book one. I've been writing like themes as we move through since I originally read this. My notes say 2018 is when I started making this list of just like things to track or some things to track. And this kind of captures in a different way the things that you've said. You know, first and foremost just the death of Agamemnon. If you're a first time reader of the Odyssey, that story right there is going to parallel a lot of this text and it's going to parallel both with like Agamemnon and Odysseus and then you have Orestes and Telemachus and then you're going to have Clytemnestra and Penelope and so that is going to give a lot of structure. And then each one has their own particular story. So for instance, Odysseus is going to have his coming home narrative and we have to track that. And like we said here, is there a maturation to that? Is Odysseus the person who comes home the same Odysseus that left? And if not, then you know, why? So we have Telemachus this coming of age story, he's gonna have to leave. He has to have courage in his Thumas. He has to, I think in a certain way, become a threat.

C (89:13)

Right.

A (89:13)

He has to take up that masculinity, that thematic life, and then return home. And then Penelope also has her own story, right. That I don't think should be overlooked. I was maybe a little harsh on her in book one. I think Athena's maybe a little harsh. You know, we have some illusions to Clive Tomnestra. What if Penelope gets in the way? What if Penelope doesn't play along and align herself to the gods? We've seen how that plays out. But at the same time, she's the matchless queen of cunning. She actually has arete, she has virtue, she's the only woman that Homer uses that term for. So she has her own narrative in the house and her own narrative of waiting for her husband in dealing with the suitors that I think is very meritorious and worthy of respect. And then, you know, the themes that really, particularly for first time readers, I think are helpful is tracking again, man, tracking that agency, that free will against fate. And what is Homer trying to teach us about our own choices? And then this read through particularly like for myself, where am I trying to grow? I'm really looking at that poetic dialectic. And just so many things that both of you have said would have been wonderful are so many things that are intention in the text. And so one thing I would invite people to like I'm trying to do is don't jump one way or the other. Well, I think Odysseus is like this, but no, he's actually like that actually. Then look at. Okay, well both of these can be read in this text. So what's that juxtaposition trying to teach us? How is this tension pedagogical? And I think give Homer the benefit of the doubt, give him a thick reading that he is a teacher, he is a philosopher, he's not a flat echo of his time. That there is a strata to this text that really can be unearthed. That there is a lot of treasury, I think here to be mined. And so those are just some things I think to keep in mind as we kind of work through the text. Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulopoulos, I always appreciate you joining us, always appreciate all your commentary. You know, we pushed back Plato's Republic. We were supposed to do Plato's Republic this summer, then the movie was going to come out. So we decided to do a 12 week study of the Odyssey. But Dr. Pavlos has already joined us and helped us through some sections on Plato's Republic as well, which we're going to start in the fall, which I deeply appreciate. Remind us where people can find out more about you and your work.

B (91:19)

Yeah, the best place is through just WyomingCatholic. Edu. That's my central work is the college IM, for better or Worse on X and other platforms. And I do write for popular outlets from time to time. But wyomingcatholic.edu is the best place to go.

A (91:38)

Wonderful. Well, thank you again. We really appreciate it.

B (91:40)

Thank you. And we'll have to wait for the Republic movie to come out to actually air those episodes.

A (91:45)

That's right.

B (91:45)

Maybe Nolan could do that. I think he would actually be good for that.

A (91:48)

Yeah. No, very good. And also, I mean, thank you to Dr. Frank Grabowski as well. He's going to be joining us for hopefully all, if not most of our episodes. He's agreed to be my mentor as we move through the odyssey as well. Dr. Grabowski, is there any way, you know, is there a place that people find out more about you and your work? You got some things published? You got some things hidden somewhere?

C (92:09)

Well, nothing current. I'm pretty busy with deconformation and just doing all the hard but very rewarding work of exposing these young, these young kids at Holy Family to these great works and just to really see their eyes light up. We're just working through. Just finished the Inferno a week ago, and we're moving into pregatorio. And it's amazing. Just again, see how these texts, they're so compelling. It's nothing that I necessarily do. It's Homer and it's Dante. So I will say, though, that, you know, whenever. Whenever I reread the Odyssey, and certainly this has been the case with. With your podcast, Deacon, is that I'm always coming up with new readings and new ideas. And so that's the beauty is that, you know, as. As we read through and as we have these conversations, we become students again. And that's something that I. I've always really loved about this profession, is that even though we are teachers that, you know, we're still students. And I'm always grateful to sit at the feet of those who know, like you, Deacon, and Pavlos.

A (93:19)

No, I deeply appreciate it. I mean, the great books are great because they merit a reread and a reread and a reread. There's always something that we can learn. You know, Homer is a teacher, and there's many many lessons for us. Okay, everyone, check us out on X, Facebook, YouTube. Now we have Instagram. Go look at that. That as well.

B (93:36)

Patreon.

A (93:36)

And next week, we will read books two through four, looking at Telemachus journey. Dr. Frank Hrabowski will join us, so go check us out. We always appreciate it. Thank you guys so much. And we'll see you next week.