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A
Today on Stand the Great Books podcast, we are finally here. We are discussing the slaughter of the suitors. After many weeks of reading, many weeks of building up to this moment, we are finally here in book 22 of the Odyssey. As part of our 12 week study of Homer's fantastic text, we are discussing the slaughter of the suitors. And as part of the conversation, we get to ask ourselves several important questions. One, is this even just? Is it just to slaughter the suitors as they were slaughtered? Two, Homer's mixing a lot of imagery between food and gore. What is he trying to teach us about the role of Odysseus? And how is the role of Odysseus reclaiming his home? Somewhat similar to the Cyclops narrative? Three, we have the famous slaughter of the maidservants, one of the most unsettling scenes in the entire Homeric corpus. And also the slaughter, the torture, the killing of the goatherd, one of the worst deaths that we see in all of Homer, Iliad or Odyssey. Why were the maidservants killed like this? Why is the goatherd killed like this? Can this be justified? What is Homer the Teacher trying to show us here? And finally, is violence necessary for political rule? Do you have to have violence if you are going to remake a political body to reestablish a political rule? All of these are fantastic questions. They are deep questions that Homer the teacher, Homer the philosopher offers us. And we have a fantastic guide. We have a wonderful mentor. We have Dr. Alex Preux returning to the podcast. I always learn a lot from him. He's fantastic. You guys probably couldn't ask for a better guide than through book 22. And just as a quick aside, just to remind everyone, we recently redid our entire Patreon page, where we have collections of all the great books that we have read together, where we are publishing articles, videos, podcasts, written guides, all kinds of things to help you read the great books. Our goal is to create an entire resource library so you can read these fantastic texts together or in a small group. So please go check out our Patreon page. But before we jump into the conversation today, we are going to read a summary of book 22 from our hundred question answer guide on the Odyssey. So what happens in book 22? The time has come. Odysseus stands at the threshold of his home, cries out to Apollo and lets loose an arrow straight through the neck of Antinous. It is chaos in the hall as the bread and meats were soaked in a swirl of bloody filth. Eurymachus attempts to broker a truce between Odysseus and the suitors, but it is rejected. Eurymachus then calls the suitors to arms and is subsequently slaughtered by Odysseus. Telemachus brings armor and weapons to his father, the swineherd and the cowherd, but the goatherd, however, is able to sneak weapons and armor to the suitors. On his second run for weapons, the cowherd and swineherd intercept the goatherd and tie him up and hang him from the rafters. Athena first arrives in the guise of Mentor and then becomes like a sparrow perched on the rafters, assisting Odysseus in the slaughter. She reveals her man destroying shield of thunder and the suitors fall in a panicked madness as Odysseus and his men went wheeling into the slaughter, slashing left and right, and grisly screams broke from the skulls cracked open, the whole floor awash with blood. With only a few suitors left in the hall, Odysseus has no mercy on the prophet, but spares the bard and the herald. The slaughter of the suitors is complete. Odysseus has his old maid Eurycleia send in the female servants who were disloyal, and these women help to carry out the corpses and clean the home of Gorr. Telemachus then oversees the disloyal women being slowly hanged in the courtyard, a pitiful, ghastly death. The goatherd is retrieved and mutilated to death by the swineherd and the cow herd. Odysseus then purifies his home with fire and brimstone. The book ends with the loyal maidservants of the house surrounding Odysseus and And the king breaks down and weeps. Welcome to Ascend, the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I live in rural Oklahoma with my wife and five children, serve as deacon at Holy Family Cathedral and as Chancellor General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. In my free time, I like to help people read the great books. And so that's the purpose here at Ascend, is to help you read the great books. We can be like a small group to you. Go check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters who have access to our written guides and to community chats on the great books and visit thegreatbookspodcast.com all right, so we're continuing our 12 week study of the Odyssey. We are discussing book 22, Slaughter in the Hall. So it is finally Happening. I'm excited about the conversation today. We have a wonderful guest returning to the podcast. We have Dr. Alex Preux, who serves at the University of Austin as a professor of political philosophy, very active on X. A lot of people know him from the new Thinkory, has also published several books, including Musing on Plato's Symposium, which I own and greatly appreciate it. So, Dr. Prayer, welcome to the podcast.
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B
Hi. Thank you for having me. Deegan.
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A
Yeah. So I should say that this will be your first time on the podcast published, but it's your second time coming and having a conversation with me because you actually kick us off for Plato's Republic, which is going to come out on the podcast in October, which I greatly appreciated. And you also, speaking of Plato's Republic, you just edited a new volume of lectures on Plato's Republic. Can you tell us about that?
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B
Yeah, they're lecture notes by David Bolatin, longtime tutor at St. John's College. He gave the lectures in 1989 at the University of Chicago as a seminar. And they've circulated in sort of photocopies of his handwritten notes, which are at times a little messy times, have small errors. So we went through them, transcribed them. Mr. Balatin gave us our permission after we sort of said we think it's publishable, and we went through, cleaned them up, just sort of typographical things, made sure they were all nice and tidy, all the necessary references were there, and then published it through the good people at Political Animal Press, who also did musings on Plato's Symposium. And, yeah, we're very, very happy to bring them out. They circulated in manuscript form for so long and were read for now near 30 years, because they are simply just a treasure trove of insight and a very sort of coherent and provocative interpretation in many parts and very lucid. Often lecture notes are not this clear, and they really, they read, you know, as sort of very interesting sort of vignettes or interpretive vignettes on various parts of the dialogue being developed and over time. So some really remarkable stuff in there. So I commend it to you all. It is, I think, one of the finest resources on Plato's Republic available.
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A
Yeah, I already picked up a copy. I'm excited to kind of read it alongside our workthrough of Plato's Republic later this year. So you're very much known for Plato, which we appreciate, et cetera. You're here today to talk about the Odyssey. Tell us your affinity for Homer and for the Iliad and Odyssey.
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B
So when I first Got interested in Plato. The dialogue that really got me was Plato's Parmenides. And there you have an aged Parmenides educating the young Socrates. And so obviously I have to do my homework and try to study Parmenides fragments, make some sense of them. And I did that in that work, but then also in a subsequent article. And. And then if you're going to just write about Plato on Parmenides, you have to be thinking about the Fluxus and Heraclitus. So reading Heraclitus. Heraclitus has these really confounding statements about Hesiod. I'm digging into Hesiod. I took a graduate course in the Classics department on Hesiod. And then I finally found myself, obviously with Homer. And I was very much interested in the question of divine providence, which comes up briefly in Plato's Parmenides. And you can track some element of divine wisdom, divine knowledge in relation to human action, something like divine providence. And you can trace it all the way back to the Iliad. And so I found myself teaching the Iliad, studying it, and I eventually wrote something on it that was only published, I think last year or so. But I've also written a bit on Homer, you know, Homer's Odyssey, I should say, which does figure a little bit in the background of Parmenides fragments. Also some of the later dialogues in Socrates life, the Theotetus, sophist and statesman. The sophist opens with an allusion to the Odyssey. And so I've written on that in relation to the Odyssey and gotten a lot out of it, and then taught the Odyssey with some care at the University of Austin. So initially primarily interested in the Iliad from this larger question of how does philosophy or political philosophy come into being out of the pre philosophic worldview, this sort of where there are sort of men of action and they either are or not supported by the gods much, often to their misunderstanding. Right. And that issue then carried over to the Odyssey, which also has to do with the role of the gods in human life though, I think, and this will come out even just reading book 22, the role of the gods in human life is undergoing some change from the Iliad to the Odyssey. And the kind of regime therefore human beings are to live under will will undergo some. Some change and the killing of the suitors. It's a big part of that.
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A
And that might be a good segue or you might have answered it in part, but I was curious. So like when I reached out to you to join for this 12 week study, you were able to select which book you wanted to. You selected this book, the Slaughter of the suitors, book 22. Any, like, just kind of to get us into the text. Any kind of reason you picked this particular book?
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B
Well, it was not my ultimate. When you sent me the list, there were a few slots already taken, which it was nice to know I was that low down on your list. But no, there were a few slots taken, but then I was thinking about which ones are the best. And, I mean, if I had my druthers, I'd do like, maybe 22 through 24, because they really fit together. But. And I'll touch a little bit on that as we're talking anyways. But, you know, the whole Odyssey, the guy is gone. You're thinking about, you see these suitors acting badly.
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You.
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B
And you kind of want some revenge. You need to see some justice, right? And then in 22, you get the revenge, right? You get some kind of revenge, the revenge you've wanted. But do you want this revenge? Are you actually happy with it? I mean, one of the things people debate is, is Odysseus, what Odysseus did, just, is it right? Maybe to Antinous, that's probably the easiest case. But to the maidservants who are made to clean up and then. And then hung up like, what is it, pigeons or finches or whatever he says, is that satisfying? And so I think we're forced to face maybe some of the uglier side of our longing for justice or just revenge, that somehow we're taking pleasure in horrible things happening at times to some very somewhat admirable people. Homer calls them brave, raised men, right? He at times sympathizes with them a little bit, right? You get the sense that there is something horrific. And this is one of the difficulties, if you look at some of the languages, is you see some pretty bad things happening. And this is kind of what the longing for just punishment is, right? You want to see bad things happen to somebody. And the question is, why is it justified to do these things? And if it's not justified as simply just or as simply moral, is it necessary in some way? And then in light of what, is it necessary? Right? You can't just say it's necessary to get your home back because they're willing to cut a deal at the beginning, at least Urimachus is right. And so you have to, I think, at some point, wrestle with this deeper tendency that's been building up with you as you read and say, okay, I want this Am I happy? And if not, why? What am I supposed to take away from that? Because I think Homer intends us to raise these questions.
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A
Yeah, that's an excellent, excellent preamble. Yeah. So let's dive into the text. Let's start to kind of take this one step at a time. So, yeah, so like you mentioned, like, I really want to jump right immediately to Antonous dies. Like, that's what I want to jump to. Because we, and Homer even knew that his audience wanted this because we even got a pre. Like an appetizer already to this, that he was going to be the first one to die. But the first thing that catches my attention, that we should probably just simply note, is just to remind people, as Homer does here at the beginning of the text, that this is on Apollo's feast day. And it seems right that there seems to be at least a surface level connection of like, okay, he's Apollo's the archer God, and this is via archery and Odysseus has his bow and etc. You know, Apollo is also, though, the God of the sacred order and of punishing those who transgress it. And I think that's important because one thing that I just kind of looking at the whole antinous kind of thing here, the invocation of Apollo at the beginning and antidous being shot in the throat. Like, one of the things that really caught my attention here was how Homer mixes the imagery of food and gore. I mean, there's some pretty strong language here. So right after Anton is shot, as we have this red, thick red jets. I'm looking at the Fagl's translation showering all over it says, the bread and the meats soaked in a swirl of bloody filth. And he has this like, deep imagery that he gives us. I think one thing I'd like to point out here at the beginning is the connection and the tetherings between this whole narrative and the Cyclops narrative that as particularly insofar as, like, I think Homer is particularly drawing these two narratives together here, where just like as Odysseus, I think you can present Odysseus as someone who violated guest friendship, who violated zinnia, was a violator in the cave in book nine, now has to become the avenger for the sacred rights, the sacred order that he violated. I think there's a lot of interesting parallels between the Cyclops narrative and this one. And I think Homer gives that to us in many ways. But I think one here at the beginning is the mixing of the food and the gore imagery. Because it's hard not to think of the Cyclops gobbling down. Instead of feasting his guests, he feasts on the guest. And we see that here. So I'd like to. I'd like to explore the idea of Odysseus kind of playing the role of the Cyclops and consuming the people who have violated Zinnia in his home.
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B
Yeah, you know, there's the Cyclops narrative. It's very difficult because he does go in and start taking from him, though he has an intimation already going up that these are lawless creatures, whatever they are. So. And that's what he learns shortly thereafter, is there never was going to be a bond of guest friendship. There is something similar here where you get this. You have this sense that the suitors are godless by this point. They threaten Odysseus when he's a beggar with this cannibal, weird king, Echitus, right? I don't know if you had occasion to discuss it, but he mutilates people and does all these barbarous things. And it seems clear to me that that absence divinely supported justice. You're going to have something like threats of violence from this kind of monstrous king type, right? And you see this even with Arimachus, right, where he sort of gives. He gives Arimakis a no, no option, right? Arimachus says, hey, we'll give you everything, right? And he says nothing will reconcile him. So he has to choose, right? What is he gonna do? He's gonna rally others is what he decides to do. And he declares war. Now he looks like his hand is forced, but you could say something like martyrdom. Standing up for justice, expecting the gods to support you, saying I am innocent is not even an option for him. So there's all these allusions to the fact that there's just no trust in the gods. And that part of what needs to happen is a restoration of trust in the gods, which takes place in these last three books. But, but the, the really. So if you draw a line from the Cyclops's cannibalism to something like somebody like Akitas, to then finally to the end what they do to Melanthius, which is word for word exactly what they say Echus will do to Odysseus, right? You've got this really difficult question, which is it might be that justice, or at least restoring order in some way requires pretty ugly, violent deeds and it might bring things out of human beings and that are pretty barbaric and violent and cannibalistic, but they might be necessary. And one way to do that is to connect it back to food. There's a few similes used starting about halfway through and then towards the end. And sometimes it's vultures, sometimes it's a fly versus cattle. But it's always these kind of. There's fishermen, right? Men on the hunt. There's always this kind of element of eating. Right. And one question I would raise is, okay, there might be certain things that are necessary for justice and order. Are they sacred as a result of that? Are these sacred violations one has to do to bring order about? That's a very difficult question, I think, to wrestle with, at least in the context of this. But to get back to your original question about. About violating guest friendship, it might be that. That some kind of violation like that proves necessary in the establishing or the restoration of political order.
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A
Yeah, I like that a lot. One thing that I would like to recall is the fact that you can see the idea, or at least you can make the proposal, that the sacking of Troy was a just act that was done unjustly, that they had the right to go in and do this, but then they did it in a manner that was unjust. I think that's really interesting to then look and say, well, do you run into the same problem with Odysseus retaking his home? Right. So it's just for him to retake his home from the suitors, but does he do it in a just manner? And how do we even judge that? I think would be a question I have going into the text. What do you make of. So you just. It has to be Homer playing with us to. Antinous gets shot right in the throat because we've had to deal with him talking the entire book. But what do you. This time around? What do we make of the fact that he dies, this anti Mind, the Anti Nous. He dies without even realizing what has happened. Odysseus hasn't come out yet. Odysseus is still the beggar. And even when Antinous dies, you still have the suitors groping, frantic, each one persuading himself the guest had killed the man by chance. They're like the rest of the suitors, haven't even caught on until Odysseus then says his name here, you know, pretty quickly. So what do we make of the fact that Antidous dies without even realizing what has happened?
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B
So there's two questions there, and I'm going to post the one about not recognizing Odysseus. I want to hold off on that, because the question of recognition is much larger. But we should talk about it, return to it. But I would compare the death of Antinous, the first death, with the last death, the death of Melanthius, right? And I would say it's weird. You want Antinous to get what's coming him, but you want him to know. You want him to know Odysseus is back, why he's doing that. You don't get any of that. You. And this is, I think, a brilliant, very restrained choice on Homer's part. He does not indulge his audience, and he makes his audience want a little more violence or a little more knowing, certainly revenge. You want the person to see what's happening, know what's happening, and to acknowledge that they deserve it. And if you don't get that, it somehow feels incomplete, right? So there's some kind of connection between punishment and. And self understanding, understanding one's own baseness or. Or wickedness, one's own deservingness of punishment. In Plato's Gorgias, there's this myth told at the end where it seems like the lashes on the body leave marks on the soul. That's what we kind of want, right? We want, you know, and anybody who yells at their kids or, you know, sends them to a room, something that. That's a little bit harsh. You kind of hope it gets through, and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. You just feel kind of a little nasty. So. And then you get to the end, you get. Melanthius gets this, frankly, I think, overkill, punishment. He's, you know, in no way deserving of this mutilation, this horrific. He's strung up for hours with his arms tied behind him, essentially being tortured, and then he's mutilated before being killed. And then you have to ask yourself, well, what if they had done that to Antinous? How would I have felt that? And I don't think you feel that great still. So it's interesting in it's. You asked exactly the right question because, you know, you read the Odyssey, you kind of know what's going to happen. You've heard about it a lot, right? You've, you know, people kind of give spoilers. It's, you know, nearly 3,000 years old. Spoilers are allowed at this point, right? But he, you know, and everybody wonders, do the suitors deserve this? Do they really deserve this? But I think that leads us to pass over too quickly this question of Antinous, which is, why do we get such an unsatisfying death with him. And I think it's for that reason it's not satisfying because he doesn't know. And then you have to ask, well how is the rest of this somehow imparting knowledge to anyone? I don't think anybody comes to understand, certainly the ones who are guilty of less wickedness than Antidous.
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A
Yeah, that's really interesting because then you kind of have to punt, you know, outside of this book to the afterlife for them then to have a recognition then and maybe step back and see the picture as a whole. Because yeah, Antinous, the anti mind doesn't get it here. I think that's really fascinating, you know, jumping to what you've already kind of sketched out for us is Eurymachus. Because one thing I would point out here, at least the way that I read it is the leaders of the suitors are being killed off first. So Antinous is gone then we're going to see right now that your mock is gone in a different way. And I think that's important. And I think we should then tether this to why Odysseus had to spend time as a beggar inside his own home, why he had to observe these things, why he had to see who the leaders were. Because I think we'll see and I think a lot of first time readers too when they read this text is they'll say things like, I mean, I know, I had this feeling, why don't there's like a hundred of you guys just, just run at him. He's got a bow, it's not a machine gun, like just run. And I think that one of the things to think about there is that's what Eurymachus here in the text tries to do. So the first thing he tries to do is he tries the bargain. And I really actually liked the idea that he appeals to Odysseus the king. That's around line 60 in Fagos, right? Spare your own people. He appeals to him as king when Odysseus doesn't do that. And actually what's really fascinating is that Odysseus responds that you can fight me or flee. Which actually I don't think is true. I don't think there is a capacity to flee anymore. And so he's guarding them from fleeing. Yeah, yeah. I mean the cowherd is helping, they've shut the gates, they've done these things. Athena's certainly not going to let anyone. He's standing in the threshold of the, of the house. There is no fleeing, which is Kind of fascinating why he says that that's not an option. And then Eurymachus does what I think a lot of us think would be the only option they have, which is he tries to get them all to charge. So at least your Marcus has some thematic response here where he tries to charge. And I mean, he dies, he is shot and it goes down into, you know, lodges in his liver. But I'm just curious, like, what do we. I mean, you've kind of already alluded to this. I think the hardest thing to take here is that the plea for mercy, that the plea to have some type of like recompense, Right. We can pay you back, we can do these things, is rejected. And like, it seems like the only thing that will satisfy this is death.
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B
Yeah. And I think this raises this larger issue about piety, Right. If Arimachus doesn't is not willing to say this is wrong. Right. And killing us is wrong, he's the worst. He committed. Antinous is the worst, he committed the worst transgression. But we need to come to terms, otherwise you've done something incredibly wrong. That's a real issue. But he doesn't say this is wrong and the gods will punish you, et cetera. And he's not willing to be a martyr for that or anything. Then I think it proves the point. There is no piety here. And that means what Odysseus has to do is to establish some fear of God again, which is accomplished in part by saving Medon, for example, who will testify in book 24 to the sort of the disturbed families of the students that no, no, Athena was by his side. He's wrong, by the way. He gets the facts wrong. This is all made up, right? And this will make some of these families, not all of them blame themselves, internalize this. Right? And so being unwilling to listen to force or to reason or to be self restrained by some notion of piety and guest friendship, you need to have a restoration of that order. And I think the harder thing to ask that is, well, okay, anybody can question the justice of it, but can you question the necessity? Is this necessary to restore order? And part of that question then is, what was the old order, the original order, what is the current order and what is the coming order? That's where you start to, I think, get into a sense that, yeah, it might mean that there is some need for a purging, right? A pious purging. And it ends, the book 22 ends with burning and cleaning. And then Odysseus eases up and he weeps. Right. And there's. When he sees the innocent maidservants coming out. Right. So there's a transformation that occurs in the course of this book and the laying of a kind of groundwork for the later order that's coming up.
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A
Yeah, I like that a lot. Yeah. Two thoughts on that. One is, obviously, it's really interesting to me that Eurymachus attempts the rhetorical path because I think we've seen in previous books where in a certain way Eurymachus was. Was very similar to Odysseus. They both speaking of the Gorgias, they both had rhetoric that was serving as a mask of who they really were. So Odysseus the beggar has his rhetoric and Eurymachus was actually presenting as, you know, he was a very kind and understanding suitor when reality, you know, he had machinations of murder on his mind. So it was also intriguing to me that here then you have the two rhetoricians come together and one tries this rhetorical plea and it falls flat. And Odysseus doesn't. There's really no rhetoric in return. It's just simply death to restore whatever order. No, you have to die. There's no other option here. I think, too, the second point to maybe try and justify this to a certain degree, because I do think this is where a lot of people become very unsettled. Book 22, and Dr. Frank Grabowski, who's been on most all the episodes with us, he's under the weather today. He couldn't join us. He talks about, like, his students. So he's in high school, at a classical school. Like, when they get to this book, like, there's a lot of wrestling with this. I think the one thing to point out too, though, is how many times the suitors were warned, how many times you talked about their piety. So how many prophecies they had, how many times they had the bird signs, the omens to everything. And I think you could push and say, okay, at some point, Athena very clearly won't let them repent. There is no Metanoia. You can't turn around. Like at some point their fates are sealed. There seems to be a long time prior to that in which they had a lot of warnings. And you see these young bucks kind of push them off and say, no, those are just birds. Don't worry about it. And so here then is really the comeuppance, I think, particularly for a. What would you say that a certain sacrilege, a certain blasphemy, where they just simply don't seem to respect the gods and the signs.
- [29:26]
B
Yeah. I mean, I would go even a step further, though. This is a harder pill to swallow. Right. And that makes it somewhat justified. Tiresias tells Odysseus this is all going to happen long before the suitors have shown up. They've only been there three years or so, and he goes down to Hades seven years before, I think, if my timeline is correct. So this is all foreordained, Right. Think about the death of Ctesippus. This is a very interesting example. And I think it's Eumaeus vaunts over his body, right. And says, oh, you get this for throwing the hoof at Odysseus. We'll go back and read the passage where he throws the hoof. It says there, Athena, you know, declined to restrain them, wanted them to commit this hubris. This is, I think, again, maybe we should shift to this, this point. I'll just go right into it. But if the goal is to establish a new order, Right. You need to have this transformative process. Right. So at some point, let's talk a little bit about the political history of Ithaca. At some point, Laertes was in power and Odysseus took his place. He's still alive. It's some kind of hereditary monarchy, but it's moved on a little quickly. It seems like this is one of the difficulties to sort of rec. And he's living outside the city walls, Right. Sort of a peaceful, bucolic life. Right. And then Odysseus goes off to war and Telemachus is just a baby, Right. And, and at that point he's supposed to grow up. It's still a kind of hereditary monarchy. And it's said when Odysseus left, everything was peaceful and happy. And it seems to have maintained itself that way for many, many years. Much of the time Odysseus is gone. And then the suitors show up and, you know, a lot of the heroes are back or they've died. Odysseus, it sounds like it's probably just dead somewhere. Like, what are we doing? Come on, let's move on. It's been long enough. And Penelope establishes this oath between herself and the suitors. I'll sort of weave this shroud for Laertes and whenever that's done, then I'll choose a, A, a new husband. Right. And so that's kind of the, the, the trajectory of things. But then the maidservants, Melantho in particular, discover this deception where she's unraveling it at night. And the oath is broken and they've betrayed her, the maidservants in particular, Melantho. And now the suitors are indignant. They've got a kind of righteous indignation. You agreed. And then the gods don't get involved. And so that would be a kind of story about why piety has dwindled in Ithac. The suitors. And what's come in its place is this. You know, they have deliberations, they call and dismiss meetings. They're deciding amongst themselves whether how to kill Telemachus. It's become a kind of decayed hereditary monarchy with. With the heir being sort of not taken seriously and a kind of deliberative oligarchy of kinds. And they're just gobbling things up. Right, okay. And there's no piety anymore. Right. The oath is broken. And it seems like something stronger than oaths, something stronger than princes is needed. And the result, I think, is something like, with Zeus's withdrawal, this sort of fear and trembling that's being instilled in them at the end. So from that perspective, if you're trying to come to a more stable order than the heroic order before it,
- [33:20]
A
if
- [33:20]
B
you're going to try to come to that order, you're going to have to engage in a kind of purging. Now, what exactly is being purged? Well, there's this reference to Helen, to Aphrodite at the end. There's a sort of a sense that people like Achilles are no longer possible. Right. The boasting and vaunting, that's got to go. And what's coming in, this is said in book 21 is Odysseus has promised Philoitius and Eumaeus that they'll hold equal rights with his son and they'll have wives, presumably among the maids, her. It's all legitimated. So a kind of natural aristocracy is the counterpoint to the oligarchy, divinely supported, but a kind of reduction of the role of erosion and sort of personal glory. What that plays. Right. Telemachus will be humbled a bit, and the swineherd and Oxford will be raised up, and that'll be something like that order, a kind of fear and trembling, a sort of a more equal sort of order. And then from there a kind of a sense of balance from that. Right. And I'll just say there's one little note. I know I've gone on for quite a while, but let me just add one more note. A lot of this is built on what Odysseus learned with his men, they rebel against him. There's a more equal order, there's a vying for control of the ships, right? He has to learn how to rule a bit and how you make some concessions to people, right? It's not enough to be one alone, right? He tries to sail the boat home alone and then he falls asleep. You are limited by your body. You are limited by. By the men around you. And you have to make some kind of concession to that. All of that is implemented, I think in books 22 up through 24, but here you see it transforming. But to get there, to get that kind of fear and trembling, you need to have this bloody cleansing that has a kind of mark of divine endorsement on.
- [35:24]
A
Yeah, I like that a lot. I particularly like the idea there that his relationship to his men has been pedagogical to him about how he's supposed to then rule when he comes back to Ithaca. Because that's something I've tried to be more sensitive to on this read through is how is his journey not simply punitive but pedagogical? What was it teaching him along the way to not only retake his house, but then as you've pointed to, I think you push us to the next level of then to actually not just reclaim the house, but then rule the house. Well, I like that a lot. The other thing that comes to mind just to make a biblical illusion is the story of Pharaoh. So as far as the divine being involved, is that there's a hardening of Pharaoh's heart so that basically God gives Pharaoh into everything that's wrong with Pharaoh, so that the order, the reign of God can be shown even against, you know, the might of Egypt and all of its splendor. So here you might see something similar that at some point I think it's really when Odysseus enters the home, that shadow of death with Argos the dog and Odysseus enters the home, right? Somewhere in there is where Athena shows them that their fates are sealed. There's a doom. And so now they're almost play acting no matter what they do. So it's going to be, you know, she makes them, there's a frenzy, there's a point where they're almost acting in a kind of insane, kind of demoniac way where they're laughing. It's not even their voices, right? She gives them over to this so that the re establishment of the order can be even that much greater. I really like though what you said about the natural aristocracy because that helps to understand or at least I think please push back. Is that one of the contrasts that I think a lot of people notice here is that the king reclaims his kingdom with a swineherd, with a cow herd against then these kind of little princelings. There's no suitor that comes and then helps Odysseus, right. It seems Homer seems to make a very clear distinction between kind of, for lack of a better term, the socioeconomic strata of Ithaca, of who's faithful to the king, it can help him retake it, and who then forms this oligarchy or simply consuming his house, you tethering that to him. Learning about a natural aristocracy I think is really fascinating.
- [37:41]
B
I would almost compare it to the Golden Calf in a way where he. It's a kind of Machiavellian point. But once the people have been given form, this matter has been given form and they're, they're not in the right direction, you got to get rid of them. Similarly here, all of the suitors, a portion of the maidservants and even some of, you know, in the case of these herdsmen, right, the goatherd, they, they need to go. They are not going to have their piety restored. And in fact it's, it's their destruction that will firm up the piety of, of the others, right, That'll, that'll bring it about. And that's one of the, the, the, the key political lessons here, right is that if a people is malformed or too early formed or not formed in the right way, the moment is lost, right? The opportunity is lost. And in that process it might be quite ugly what, what needs to happen, right, that kind of purging. But the result of it is presumably we don't know the later history of Ithaca in Odysseus view at least, but the outcome of that is going to be hopefully a more stable, healthier and richer political order to come. But you see this in history where I would compare the American Revolution to the French Revolution to Germany after the First World War. Moments of incredible opportunity. And the one was just, was a better law giving American Revolution. I should say the French Revolution had opportunity but they could not, they could not brook Napoleon and Napoleon made errors of his own. And, and, and well we all know what happened after World War I, World War II, right. So you know, these are moments of, of you know, open endedness that, that in which a people can decide now that we're not that anymore, what are we going to be? You need to have a good hand on the rudder. And Odysseus is such a hand. But he has to learn about Odysseus education. I want to make this point just to connect it, since we're on it. Something happens on Calypso's island that we don't understand. He gets there and he feels. It's said he's welcomed, or he feels welcomed there. And then you fast forward and he's weeping on the shores. What happens? Odysseus is presumably reflecting on his time. He's been thinking about what it means. And that's the time that Homer allows him, allows him to take over the narrative. And what you get in that narrative is Odysseus's original experience as colored by his later understanding of his experience. Right? And so he. You. He sees his own arrogance. He describes himself in terms other than Odysseus on the stage, understands himself. Odysseus in the story, he's both poet and character. It's a big key in what Homer's doing, right? Which is the experience of the character versus Homer's understanding of it. You have to square them against one another somehow. That's the key. How Odysseus later understands his misunderstanding of his initial experience. That's somehow the key to how he understands the political process. Now, that only gets you to book 12. It's really only four books, right? Nine through 12 and then 13 on which is this very long. It's half the book, right? The. The epic. But there's also a further learning process up until, I think, the very end when Athena and Zeus have to intervene. Right. But that. That process of understanding what was at stake in the Cyclops case with the Laestrygonians, with the choices he has to make along the way. And how does he then instantiate that or make it happen?
- [41:36]
A
Yeah, no, that's pretty good. I mean, do you want to dig into that anymore? Like what? Like what would be a good example of what you think? Like when he's reflecting on. Because he has seven years with Calypso. You're correct. Like she. It says that he, you know, first enjoyed her, now no longer. He's thinking about these things. It's also kind of interesting that when Tiresias tells him about the suitors and these types of things, Tiresias doesn't tell him when it starts. So the whole time on Calypso's island, he is thinking that his wife is being wooed, his kingdom's being destroyed, it's being consumed. He has all these things to think about. So it would be like A good example of something that he takes from that experience that's being applied when he retakes his home.
- [42:17]
B
Yeah. So aside from what I said about concessions one has to make towards others, right. That as wise as he is or as cunning as he is, that wisdom and cunning needs to be diluted, if not altogether replaced. Telemachus is not his equal. He learns to man up a bit and he has to learn it quick. Right. And arguably it's better for him because Odysseus comes off as really nasty and Telemachus is a little bit scared at first. Then he does these nastier things at the end, but it doesn't seem as permanent a state for Telemachus as it's become for Odysseus. All of that is part of it. I think the deeper thing, and this is connected to that is the fact, the big lesson, the thing that really sets his whole future wrong and it determines his future after the slaying of the suitors, where he has to go off and make a sacrifice for Poseidon, is the episode with the Cyclops. And not just the cannibalism stuff that we talked about before, but the revelation of his name. Right. That he wants to be known as the person who's unknowable. And I think he has to realize that if wisdom ultimately establishes a role in which it does not have a place and which it is of which it is not an end. Right. You don't make new Odysseus in this new order. How Odysseus comes about is a very particular set of circumstances, to say nothing of just the man himself, his own. His own nature. This question comes up again in the end of the book with the series of recognitions. Telemachus seeing him, where he has to appear a certain way, Argus recognizing him and then that kind of touching him, Eurycleia recognizing him, Penelope speaking to him, it seems like she recognizes him, but he can't tip his hat that it's him. So he has to his father, right? There's a whole series of elements to. Even in this book, to go back to this book, the suitors, right? He casts it off. Antinous doesn't even see him. And so he dies not knowing it. So the others, even though he's taken off the rags, they don't recognize him as Odysseus. And so he has to pronounce it right. And then finally to early in book 23, the next book, where Penelope sees him bloodied first and then washed.
- [44:52]
A
And
- [44:54]
B
you could say the bloodied Odysseus is closer to the true Odysseus than the queen Odysseus. And one way to interpret that, or the way I've been thinking about it just in preparing for this, is that, well, Penelope needs to know that this is Odysseus. She needs to know who this man really is. But I don't think she can know what he really is. She has to sleep through all this. And then when she sees the aftermath on him and she gets a glimpse of it, she can't believe it. She needs to see him cleaned up, somehow resembling his old self, but he's not his old self. And this is one of the tragedies I think of the Odyssey is the relationship between them. He's gonna leave. And it's intimated at one point she might not be there when he gets back. She might be dead. And so they would have gotten married, had a kid. He goes off, comes back, this weird tense moment, he goes off again, she dies. It's a very sad, sad situation there. But that would be something he needs to see. And maybe he's coming to terms with that in saying, I'm going to let her see me for what I am. And then he has to clean up. Because that's what people need, is they need the true Odysseus, the ugly necessity, the bloody part that gets you where you need to be. It has no place once that order is established. It needs to go away and it needs to be cleaned up. And somehow this is a way saying, given divine stamp, right, it needs to be purged and be blessed by the gods if it's going to sort of create a stable order.
- [46:29]
A
Yeah, I like that a lot. You know, when we talked about Calypso on the podcast, one of the things that we talked about is that, you know, if he accepts her offer, then there's a way to read that, that he truly would become a nobody, as he told the Cyclops, right? He would lose that chaos. He would lose. It's a very appetitive life that he would kind of fall into. But I like what you've said as well, of tethering that to his return of, you know, at certain point he is a nobody as he comes in, right? He is the beggar. Then you have this series of recognitions that he has to go through. But those are also somewhat pedagogical to him as he grows and then learns how to return and become king of his own household. I like that a lot. I like to think about that more.
- [47:12]
B
There's a very interesting place where UTIS comes up in line 67. I'm using the latimore, but this is in the Greek also line 67. This is in the discussion with Arimachus. Odysseus says, now the choice has been set up before you. This is what you were talking about before, either to fight me or run, if any of you can escape death and its spirits. But I think not one man. Tinu.
- [47:36]
A
It's.
- [47:36]
B
Tis in the accusative. So UTIs, which is nobody. And it also is a pun on Metis, which is nobody, but also means mind. Or in some context, like in book nine, it means your cunning plan. Right. I think not one man will escape from sheer destruction or UTIs will escape sheer destruction. He has to choose not to be nobody. But in a way that does make him nobody. Nobody faces that choice. Right. And really, you know, and so there's tons of puns all over the Odyssey. I mean, I haven't found them all, but every time I'm reading, I feel like I find another one. It's all over the Odyssey. He has to at some point say, I'm not nobody. I am this man. Right. I am Odysseus. And so he longs for home. He wants to come home. He wants to be moral. Because somehow there's something to that. Right. There's something more dignified about that than this appetitive life. Right?
- [48:43]
A
Yeah. No, very good. Just pushing forward into the text a little bit. What do we want to make of Telemachus? First kill. Right. Which I assume is his first kill. Right. So this is not quite.
- [48:57]
B
It seems like he's never even. He has to learn a lot of the stuff with Menelaus, I think one of the places where he learns these skills, which is remarkable. He's way too skilled. But he spends a couple of weeks, I think it is. Right. With. With. Or a month with Menelaus. And it's said there, I think, that he's learning how to hunt. So, you know, he's been just raised by his mother and maid servants. He's not had a man in the house. And so he has to pick up a lot in very short time.
- [49:22]
A
Yeah, it's. It's kind of. I don't know what to say, an immature kill. Right. He stabs him in the back, which. And then. And then he immediately kind of has a fear and runs to his father is what he does. So it's almost a boy. I mean, if there's such a thing as a boyish kill, this seems to be one. And it's not the first time he does this because then what we get is, you know, the whole just to kind of frame out a little bit of the text here. What we see then is that Telemachus goes to the storehouse to get the weapons and armor because they've removed them all from the main hall. So this is how it's supposed to work. Is that Telemachus, Odysseus, the goat, or not? The goatherd, the cowherd, the swineherd will all be armed against unarmed suitors. Telemachus goes and gets the armor for them, but he leaves the door ajar. And then the goatherd is able to go through the smoke shaft, like almost like Die Hard esque, and get in there and get weapons for the suitors. It's an interesting commentary on Telemachus, his kill and then his job here. And he leaves the door ajar. He's still. He's matured. I think he's, to a certain degree, found his Thumas. He's spirited, but he makes these little mistakes. And he's constantly looking at his father. Right. His eyes are riveted on his father as they go through this experience together.
- [50:43]
B
Yeah. I mean, you could not have a greater gap in experience. Right. I mean, it's as wide a gap in experience. I don't know about other qualities, but, you know, I found myself on this reading raising a couple questions about the doors being left open. Right. And he's afraid, but he's killed the man in the back. It's an accident. But is it also maybe a mistake? You know? Sorry, it's an accident. It's a mistake. But is it maybe also on purpose? Maybe he feels guilty, like they're unarmed. He's just picking them up. One of the reasons they're not attacking, even though there's a ton of them, is they don't really have arms. If they have anything, they have like a sword or a knife. But he's got a bow, an arrow. Right. Which is typically the coward's weapon. This is like in the Iliad, they always mock these guys, but. Right. You can just pick them off from afar. As long as you got arrows, they're. They're going to sort of hold off. I mean, this guy has just shot an arrow through all these areas. This. He's a good shot. You're not going to go after him. Telemachus is afraid, but is he also feeling guilty? Right. Is he afraid of doing something as nasty as they've been doing? Right. Isn't this A bit like beating a beggar or something like that to just be killing guys. And now this is possibly maybe too psychological a reading or maybe it's like a Freudian reading or something like that. But I think it's worth entertaining whether he, he's having some misgivings about what he now realizes he has to, to do. And yeah, I don't know, that's just a thought out there, but he's clearly inexperienced. It's most likely an accident or a mistake. And this almost costs them everything, right?
- [52:35]
A
I mean it even shakes Odysseus to a certain degree. Yeah. That reading, it's interesting. I did not pull that from the reading. If I was going to support that, then I would say to go back and look at when Telemachus can't string the bow because that's where we see that he has adopted a certain level of like rhetoric and play acting that his father has. So there he can't string it. And he talks about, gosh, I'm so weak and anyone could come in and kill me and I can't do anything about my house. It's all play acting, it's all a lie. So that would be interesting then to say, you know, can he then do that in reverse, you know, to his own father? That's an interesting concept.
- [53:13]
B
Yeah. Another, another. I don't know how much time we have left to discuss this, but another thing I, I, I, I think is worth bringing in on this question of, of how fair of a fight it is, right? Uh, we don't really get that many similes, uh, until there's a really good one around close to line 302.97ish. And so we have this question of necessity and divine justice or injustice, right? And then Athena comes in and gets involved and starts helping. She's making sure the spears don't hit, right? They're making kills, waves of kills. And finally she brings in the aegis, right. A little bit after this, right? Or actually no, maybe it's around this time. Yeah, you get the aegis and then you get the similes. So the similes only start after the goddess gets involved in a full on assault, right. And just starts blowing through them, right? And they're bewildered and he says they're bewildered and they stampeded about the hall like a herd of cattle set upon and driven wild by the darting horsefly in the spring season at the time when the days grow longer. Right. So here, that's a nice image that we want it to be, right. It's like a Fly versus cattle. And they somehow do it, right? It's. It's. It's like those impossible moments in kung fu movies, right? Where one Guy takes out 100 people and you're like, wow, they did it. And it's. It's too satisfying, in a way. And then you realize that doesn't work. He says, but the other men who were like hook, clawed beak, bent vultures descending from the mountains to pounce upon the lesser birds, and these on the plain, shrinking away from the clouds, speed off. But. But the vultures plunge on them and destroy them. Nor is there any defense, nor any escape, right? That's the choice given Arimakis. Right, by the way, right? And men are glad for the hunting. And then she. He suddenly, Homer breaks the metaphor before the assembly, before it's done, because they say so, these men, right? So it's. It's a. It's a. It's. I forget what it's called, but when you, You. You break the simile and you bring it inside, the first part, it's a drawing. Really, really lovely move. But then you realize that this isn't a fly against cattle. This is a. These are vultures against much weaker birds who cannot do anything. And why? Because Athena's there. That's what changes the fly into. Into vultures and. And it turns the man into manhunters, right? And suddenly, I think you're kind of moved from this underdog thing to this kind of predatory thing to manhunting, and you're like, this is a little bit. And so here's the question. You want justice. You want to be the agent of justice. You want the gods to support justice. But if the gods are supporting justice, it becomes, in a way, an unfair fight. And it looks kind of like. Just like shooting fish in a barrel. And that's, I think, the problem that's. That's undergoing here, that when you really have this kind of transformative effect with the gods, it doesn't feel right until men say, oh, there's a reason I'm getting this. There's a reason I deserve. And they internalize it. Which doesn't happen with the suitors. The suitors will not get that, but their families will, as eventually some of them, at least do. They say, you know what? They went too far. We've done something wrong. We need to just reconcile ourselves that this is what's right. The gods have supported this, but they have to have that sense of guilt, that internalization, which ends up restraining the kind of Achillean longings for personal Glory. Right. Or the transgressive eros of a Paris, or the suitors. Right, right. That brings them back around and it kind of creates a cap on human glory. And it means you're going to have a kind of aristocracy, but it's going to be less impressive than the heroic age, but it will be more stable precisely because men, when they think of exceeding others, are made to feel a sense that the gods might cut them down like vultures. Right. But that ugly thing has to be transformed somehow by the gods and into a. A sort of self. Sort of restraint to a more level playing field, in effect.
- [57:43]
A
Yeah, no, very good. Just a few thoughts. One is. Yeah. I think one thing to think about here is that it's not a fight, it's just simply a sacrifice.
- [57:52]
B
Yeah.
- [57:52]
A
I think that's. That's one way to look at it is that it's. It's simply just. It's not even a fight. It's not even supposed to be a fair fight. No more than, you know, taking out the. The cow to slaughter it, to sacrifice it to the gods. So there's a certain way, I think, to look at it like that because I. It's interesting. I looked at the same passage that you just talked about with the birds and read that as basically them becoming the bird sign, that they're the sign of divine justice. So they're like the eagles swooping down. It's interesting. Faggles translates it as eagles, which has a slightly different connotation, and that they become this bird sign of the divine justice. So there's divine Athena helping them, et cetera. The other thing I would notice about that passage that actually then tethers it back to the Cyclops as well, is that they're aware of the irony of guest friendship. So it's not simply that we see a perversion of guest friendship and they're playing that out, but rather the characters in the story themselves are aware of it. Because just above that, I believe it's the cowherd. He says to the suitor, take this spear and this guest gift for the cow's hoof, which is what you mentioned earlier. You once gave King Odysseus begging in this house. So they're even contextualizing the violence. Right. As a parody of guest friendship.
- [59:08]
B
Yeah. But again, I mean, not to beat a drum. Athena is the one who sort of encourages the throwing of the hoof in the first place. Right. So, I mean, one of the difficult similes that comes up later on, which, by the way, now that similes Come in. As the goddess comes in, I think there's a connection there between poetry and piety. Right. Everything is a bit more clinical before that. Here it comes in. Once she raise the aegis, it's like now we have to sort of start giving this a kind of poetic flourish. But the poetic flourish is always a double edged sword because there's implications to the similes. But another one is with the fishermen, right? Where they're compared to fishermen cleaning up the bodies as fish and they get baked in the sun and you start to tease it out and you say, okay, well the fisherman are the four men who are fighting, right. The fish are the suitors. Their death is somehow necessary to survival. Right. It's just part of how the world operates. Who's the sun pulling the life out of them? Right. What's the salt water that nourished them before? And, but you could say something like this, that the fishermen need to extract from something that's inimical to their survival. Salt water, to say nothing of just water. Right. This destructive force. They need to extract something from it, kill it and somehow feed off of it. Right. Or they're parasitical of it. And you know, you can read stuff like, you know, on scapegoating, like you read Girard on this kind of stuff, but the need for a kind of violence or Machiavelli, right. You need to somehow make the violence sacrosanct and that, that will. And maybe that's what the sun is, is Athena sort of drying them out and kind of giving it a kind of endorsement. But yeah, it's, it's, it's a, it's a very sort of. It is this violation of guest friendship, but it's also this, just this thing that has to happen. Right? Right. You know, before the, any of them have arrived, right. It's foreordained, they're gonna die. So Athena needs to make sure Ctesippus throws that hoof and so he can kill him back. And there is this thing, but you know, this is like again, like the hardening of the heart, right. At some point, reading the biblical narrative, you're like, well, Pharaoh might have eased up a bit, but essentially the Egypt's regime is transformed by Joseph and then destroyed.
- [61:42]
A
Right.
- [61:42]
B
Like it's never going to be the same again. It's somehow a shell of itself that has to happen on some level for this sort of new order to come about. Right. Similar, similar things going on here.
- [61:55]
A
Yeah. And I think that tethers really well simply because guest friendship is a Sign of civilization, and it's deeply embedded into piety. And so these things really can't be extracted from one another. And it's probably a good segue. I mean, what do you, what do you make of the killing of the priest, the killing of the prophet?
- [62:13]
B
This is a, this is difficult because Tesius, the prophet, foredains all this stuff and the herald and the singer can survive, but not the seer. Now, the difficulty with this particular prophet is that he was the first to try to string the bow. And Odysseus alludes to this. It's the only time he's mentioned. There's no mention of any of his resistance that he claims or innocence. He's just been a kind of nonentity throughout the epic. But he alludes to this, that he wanted to marry his wife. Maybe he's compromised because he's both suitor and seer, and maybe he's not so much of a seer, a false prophet. But one question you could ask to sort of heighten what I think you're driving at is, is there room for prophecy in the new order? Or at some point do the prophets need to go away and the order continues on its own? Right. False prophets are disruptive and to some extent, the fear and trembling and the lawful order that's to come of that is maybe the replacement of prophecy. So you might want a singer, obviously, and a herald, right, who especially the singer, can speak of these events as a way to maintain the order. But do you want a profit predicting new comings, new changes? Maybe you don't. Maybe this is happens and then it's done. No more speaking. And he too, he dies as he's talking. Right. So he has to be silenced. Yeah, like Antigrus.
- [63:56]
A
Yeah, it's an, it's an interesting image. And obviously if we, if we lean into Homer the teacher, Homer the philosopher, him leaving these three quote, unquote suitors at the end who all play a particular role. Like, it's just a deeply instructive passage where you have to ask, like, why is he doing this? And so, yeah, the. I, yeah, I reflected on the death of the priest, the death of the prophet. There seems to be maybe some passage here of the role of piety and the role of justice that then, you know, the piety can't override this, that the prophet, you know, you see, the prophet back in book 21, he, he talks about being outraged by the, the suitors. He's the, you know, he's the prophet is outraged by, you know, their Violations of guest friendship. But then he goes and sits at the table with them and acts like a suitor. And that's why I think on, on a surface level, that's what I took to be the distinction between the prophet and the bard and the herald is that the prophet participated as a suitor. So even though he understands the violations, even though he can see kind of the shortcomings of their own behavior and how they're, you know, acting disloyal to the house of Odysseus, he still participates in it. Doesn't free. Just the fact he's a priest or prophet doesn't seem to exempt him from being able to, you know, act according to justice. And so that's what I kind of read it as, was just simply like what is the role of, of justice and that this piety, you know, it can't exempt you. If anything, I think that it actually holds you further accountable to it. Because he knew, right, he could observe the violations, yet he stayed and participated.
- [65:34]
B
Yeah, two things to sort of signal that it's a different kind of piety and that maybe this kind of prophet needs to go. As in line 412, when Eurycleia comes back in, he says, 4 11, he says, keep your joy in your heart, old dame. Stop. Do not raise up the cry. It is not piety to glory. So over slain men. That's a repudiation of the Iliad. Okay, so that's a really important point. And then again at 4:44. Sorry, at 4:40, he says, then after you've got all, all the house back in good order, lead all these maidservants out of the well built palace between the roundhouse and the unfaulted wall of the courtyard, and hew them with the thin edge of the sword until you have taken the lives from all. And they forget Aphrodite, the goddess they had with them when they lay secretly with the suitors. Also a repudiation of the two forms of Eros, you could say, that show up in the Illid Achilles, Eros and Paris's Eros. There's to be a greater restraint. Only the pious herdsmen, the pious maidservants, they're apparently going to get married. Maybe Telemachus too will raise one of these maidservants up. But also the sort of vaunting glory over slayed men and his desire to purge yourself of that sort of thing. Right? This is, you know, the maidservants and the suitors, they're trying to raise themselves up in the world. And on some level, you can't blame them. But that's not to happen. Right? The path to ascent. Here's your pun on your podcast. Name. The path to ascend is to be through a different sort of piety, right? Not this one that casts off old orders, but accepts them and operates through those sort of pathways. And this is in a way, the moment that the kind of ancient city comes into birth. Right. And I want to be clear about this. The princes of the Iliad, that's not really, you know, these, these basileists, these are. These are kind of local princes. But the idea of there becoming a more egalitarian order, not simply egalitarian, it's not a democracy, but one in which there are a number of rulers ruling alongside each other with equal prerogatives or equal rights. This is new and it comes out of the Odyssey, in effect. But Homer's very clear. The basis of that has to be a kind of lawful, respectful order and of organized and pious competition, as opposed to a simplifying. Now, how you get there doesn't seem so pious. It's a little bit harsh, but Homer's being, I think, exceptionally blunt in this work.
- [68:21]
A
I really like the comparison between his statement to not glory over the dead and compare that to Troy. That was something on this read through that I really thought about of. And going back to that of. Can you. What's the comparison between the taking of Troy, the sacking of Troy and the retaking of Odysseus's home? Like, these can both be just things. It's just to do this thing. But it can also be done unjustly. It can be. You can violate what you were mandated to do by taking it too far, kind of maybe like we see little Ajax with Cassandra in the temple of Athena. So here it's interesting that he does what I think he thinks he's been called to do. The mandate by the gods, which again, tethers the guest friendship. Because if you're going to kill the guest in your home, Zeus oversees all this. You have to have a divine mandate, I think, to do this. And then he just kind of sets back and doesn't take it any further than that. He doesn't glory over it. I liked it a lot. But is there. Okay, so if. If the erotics go pick up on
- [69:18]
B
that, like, there's a fine line that's very hard to discern. It really depends on who you are as a person between the love of glory and hubris. Right. And this is a problem throughout The Iliad and even leading into the Odyssey, that it's one thing in a war now, it's establishing a domestic order. How do you get people to second guess their love of glory? It's through a kind of guilt or a sort of second guessing yourself and introspection. Right. Nietzsche has this wonderful line in Twilight of the Idols where he says the bite of the conscious is educative or instructive. Which is strange. You think from Nietzsche, oh, morality is all. But no, no, he thinks morality somehow is the key to self knowledge or part and parcel of self knowledge. It can't be all of it. But there's something about this, that, and maybe this is what makes the Greeks ultimately philosophic is a sort of self criticism and self contemplation about your own sort of desires, your longings, your ambitions and then sort of second guessing them and, and, and cutting yourself down to size. Sometimes people cut themselves too down to size. And Nietzsche complains about this. You're like a caged lion or whatever. But there's also quite a bit that's educative in second guessing your own ambitions and asking, well, what can I really do and what is the path to my happiness?
- [70:37]
A
I like that a lot. Yeah. If I could reiterate in my own words. Yeah. It seems that the erotics of the appetitive and the thematic, neither one of those are wrong per se, but both have to be moderated. But in this kind of image that you've given us, then what's the Eros then of the Odyssey? Is it of nous? Is it the intellect that we're seeing then that there's a love of knowledge that becomes superior? So if there's this two, the two images. Check these two parts of the soul, the two things, the two beauties they love. Is there something then that like an erotics that the Odyssey is pointing us towards?
- [71:16]
B
I would suggest it's a very truncated Eros in that there is something about fear and trembling before, and obedience before a divinely supported order. But you're given maybe equal prerogatives to other. But not vying is fundamentally a curtailing of, of Eros. Right. And that this is just a trade off one has to, has to accept. Right. Eros might have some connection to philosophy, has some connection to tyranny. Right. And, and you need to be very careful about how you cultivate and unleash that, that, that beast. And I think the outcome is rather, it needs to be channeled on a lower, lower level. Right. And this is something Plato has to deal with when the old orders are cast off after the Battle of Salamis in Athens. And. And then, you know, Pericles says you have to have Eros for. For the city and her power. And it's not clear whether it's for the city or for the power. Right. Eros becomes unleashed, it becomes imperial. And no longer do they have respect for the gods, as you see in the Melian dialogue, but they themselves want to be masters of the scene now. Quetorius. Right. And it's a kind of Poseidon like power. And they want to instill fear and trembling. That's their path to safety. But it's also their. Their path to. To their own sort of self. Self understanding and self worth or redemption from the ugliest things that they've done as well. We are like gods. Yeah, we'll dwindle, but we'll have our. Our moment. That's a very unstable and dangerous, yet at the same time seductive and for a time quite powerful passion. But it needs to be eventually curtailed and contained and directed to a more egalitarian, less. Less hierarchical than. Than Eros would like that kind of order.
- [73:10]
A
Yeah, no, I like that. Yeah. So there's a certain. You said curtailing. I think I said moderation of erotics that's. That's actually needed for civilization, for an actual, like, functioning polis. I like that. Okay, let's talk about the serving women. So you've already kind of pointed us towards this. I mean, probably one of the most difficult passages for a lot of people to process in the Odyssey. So just maybe to sketch this out. So what's interesting is the first thing I always notice is the fact that Odysseus tells Eurycleia to report who. Who are the women that have been loyal to us, disloyal, etc. I think it's interesting. I don't have a great answer for the fact that Eurycleia actually offered to do that for him previously when she found out who he was. And he very much chastised her and said he doesn't need to know, that he'll make. He'll understand himself. So now he turns to her, kind of like how Telemachus was, you know, gave some kind of commentary and was almost an intercessor for the Herald. Now Eurycleia is going to come in and be some type of judge or intercessor, if you will, on the serving women. That's one thing I noticed. The other thing is, is that the standard that she gives. So he Says don't wake her yet. This goes to your point that Penelope gets to sleep through all this, which I think is fascinating, but the crafty man returned. You tell those women to hurry here at once. Just the ones who've shamed us all along. And I was curious to the degree that Odysseus there is giving a standard that is maybe the most merciful. So he doesn't say just pick out the ones that were loyal to me. He also doesn't say pick out the ones that have ever shown disloyalty. He picks out the ones who have shamed us all along. I don't know, maybe that seems to be my one read there that I had or thought was, is he picking out intentionally? The worst. Those are the ones that are brought here, so of course they have to come out. And what does Odysseus say? He says to hack them with your sword, slash out their lives, blot out their minds and joys, loved, etc. This is what he gives. This is the order that he gives, which seems to imply a quick, cleaner death. Slash them down with your swords. Telemachus then, somewhat famously, when he actually goes out to the courtyard to do this, says, no clean death for the likes of them. By God, not for me. They showered abuse on my head and my mother's too. And what's he do? They hang them. This is no breaking of the neck, you know, Western hanging. This is just a slow, terrible suffocation where they tie them. I think you mentioned earlier the simile that's used was like, you know, little birds that have been, you know, tied up.
- [75:50]
B
Yeah.
- [75:51]
A
And so they get all strung up and slowly killed. I mean, what are we supposed to take from the killing of the maidservants?
- [75:58]
B
And let me add another wrinkle. When he first attacks the suitors, he says you basically accuse them of rape of the ma. To reply that they're, they're innocent and, but they're not treated like that as such. So there's some very suspicious stuff. There's a couple, couple questions you have in there. The first, I, I, like, I hadn't noticed this, but the idea that maybe Odysseus is, is sparing some of them who have done some wrong. And I think this important points to the fact that women are quite important. You need them. Right. You don't have to look long at the founding of Rome to realize that if you don't have women, it's going to create political problems for you. Right. You have to take somebody else's women and they don't like it. And that's a can of worms you're opening, right? But yet kind of realism, I guess, about that. Also the fact that, you know, I don't know. So like, even the maidservants who are killed, you know, it's good to give them maybe a quick death because, you know, here they are, there's disorder. Somebody else is going to come into the order. This is an opportunity. These are possible princes, and this is a possible way to ascend, maybe get gifts at least, right? This is a. It's their ticket right out of. Out of. You know, out of. Out of this. This poor situation. They're just trying to. To maybe get ahead in life. And. And, you know, there's a worst of them. Melantho is the worst by far. But. But do they all deserve this? And then you see Telemachus, who was a little bit scared at first, now doing some pretty harsh stuff. He's killed a few men now, and now he. He strings up a bunch of women and the choice of birds as an example, being snared after having to clean up, you know, if these, if they really did look at the suitors, as I'm sort of throwing out, there's a possibility as a. As a possible chance at a new life, a better life than being a servant their whole lives like Yuri Clay. Do they want to end up like her? Right? If. If that is. Now they have to clean up their blood shavings as their bodies are carried carried out. This is a really. I mean, it's a tough, tough thing for them to see and, and to have to do. And then they're given this, like, choking death on the one hand. The other hand, from the standpoint of can they remain? The answer, I think, is a resounding no. Especially if you've killed their. Their lovers. They. They have to go. They are not part. They've shown no faith, no piety, over and against, over and against the, the dissolute sort of attitude that's emerged in Ithaca. And they are obedient to Odysseus, and they will therefore be obedient to his new founding in Ithaca. And he needs that. He needs women. He needs women like that, but he also can't have certain women. The worst of them there. Telemachus, on the other hand, I don't know. This does. Maybe this is him saying, okay, yeah, you want to give him a swift death. I've seen what they've done. I've heard them in the halls every night. They deserve Worse than that. And maybe this is his own sense of right coming in, that they need to suffer a bit before they die. Maybe.
- [79:17]
A
Yeah, It's a difficult scene. Yeah. Two thoughts. One is that I think in a lot of ways loyalty is the standard. Were you loyal to the king? And if you're the disloyal servant, this is what happens to you. The other thing I noticed on this read that I had not noticed before is if you go to the very end, and you already mentioned this, where he's. It actually ends like in a somewhat beautiful scene of all the loyal maidservants coming out and they see Odysseus and there's this kind of beautiful thing. They flung their arms around Odysseus, hugged him home at last, kissed his head and shoulders, seized his hands and he, overcome by a lovely longing, broke down and wept. And then. It's the very last line. Deep in his heart, he knew them one and all. So the question I asked is, is he's been gone for 20 years. So does this mean that only the older maidservants were loyal and the ones that we just strung up were the young ones? Which means that the ones that we strung up were the ones that had never seen him. He was the king that they had never known.
- [80:21]
B
That's a really good question. So let me just.
- [80:24]
A
Standard, right?
- [80:25]
B
Yeah. I mean it's loyalty, I would say faithful to keep a tone of piety in the word that we use. I'll just point out at 4:78 it says their work was ended or the deed was done. Right. It was completed. And then it says Odysseus said to the beloved nurse Eurycleia, bring me brimstone, old day and the cure of evil. So now they go to the cleansing and the suffering and the emotion can come in the reunion of them. It's a good question. Right. He recognized all these women. The very last line would suggest that these women were. They're maybe 30 at the oldest, right. He's been gone 20 years. They would have been maybe 10 at the youngest, when they were really young. And these would be remarkably different looking women by this point. Right. But yeah, it might mean, you know, these, the. I mean, this is said when he leaves, right. That it was all in good order, they loved him. And it kind of maintained itself for quite some time under, under Penelope's. Under Penelope's rule. Right. And maybe for some of those people, they have that. But younger people, they want to have, have a place. Right. They want to have some kind of work I would say if they are like 30 to 40, you know, maybe that's a good age for the swineherd and the ox herd, who are probably a little older then, but. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe not for Telemachus, who would be marrying an older. Maybe he'll find a nice princess somewhere. But anyways, those speculations aside. Yeah, it's. It's a. It's. It's. It is a jarring moment. I hadn't considered that, but that sounds right to me. Right. If there's a moment of. Of recognition, this would be. But, yeah, I guess I wonder if. If they recognize him or they were too young. It is one way. It seems like there. I mean, if I look at the text real quick, it says, yeah, he recognized all in his mind. Fressi. Right. So it is one way in the text for whatever you want to make of that.
- [82:39]
A
Yeah. It's just an interesting standard, I think, because then you're kind of very much like the suitors as well. Like, this is the return of a king that is not known. He's only known by his fame and reputation. There's no personal relationship here for a lot of them, which I think is fascinating. The death of the goatherd, probably, I think maybe the worst death in all of Homer. I don't know anyone. I mean, one you already mentioned. He's basically tortured in a. Somewhat of a weird scene that we went through quickly, where the cowherd and swineherd in the midst of Odysseus being attacked by 100 people. Right. Spend a lot of time to go and find him and to tie him up and to hang him by the rafters. I mean, that's one thing that caught my attention the first time, is like this deed is worth doing because they are spending a lot of time in an otherwise chaotic situation to string him up. And then, of course, then he's mutilated and basically. I think he just basically bleeds out.
- [83:34]
B
Yeah.
- [83:34]
A
What do you think of this? Like, horrific seen. I mean, is this pedagogical somehow from Homer? Like, why. Why does this happen to the disloyal servant?
- [83:43]
B
This is. I mean, this is what's remarkable about the language here is that it's. It's repeated from this. This boogeyman King Echitus. Right. That the suitors threaten Odysseus with who's. Who's violent and awful. Right. And if Echetus is, as I. As I threw out there earlier, the only cause of stability and order when faith in the Gods has subsided. And then now that same language is being used of how Melanthius is being treated. This is the hard thing, right? When you hear that somebody has put a human being, locked a human being in their basement, right? And this person's innocence, you're. You're horrified. The living conditions, whatever. When you hear that, then see people like that in prison, you feel better about it. And the question is, why? Well, the one is just, they deserved it, they're guilty. The other ones were. Were innocent. So. So that's the difference. But the act in and of itself is. Is the same. So there's. There's all this evaluative label language that used of this, that's used of this. And it's early on, the horrible binding, the, you know, the terrible being pulled back. And the problem is, is even though it's evaluative and negative, you're not necessarily supposed to feel negative about it, right. You might feel quite good about it, right. Like you feel some comeuppance has happened. And this is the difficulty. How is it good for bad things to happen? Right. Should one not pity the fool? Right. That would be one way to put it. But there's also this other side, this is true of the Bible as well, is that on the one hand, there is this very pitying side of sinners. On the other hand, there is some yearning to see some punishment, some fire and brimstone. And Homer's version of this is to say that men must do the same as Echetus, but in the name of justice. And when you look at it applied specifically to a goatherd, should one torture a hubristic goatherd? I don't think so. I mean, Antinous, you should have this, right? But then you read back and you're like, do I want to see Antinous actually tortured? Like physically tortured? I'm not sure about that. Right. Isn't that cruel and unusual punishment? You can see we still wrestle with this issue and people want to abolish prisons and people want to. Want to get. And this is foolish from a political standpoint because they are unnecessary on the one hand. On the other hand, it is right, and probably good that we find some discomfort with that because it's a restraint on our barbaric impulses and a nudge towards humanity. Of course, you can't be so merciful that you become cruel again in not maintaining order. But I think that's in a way what Homer's trying to get us to wrestle with. The thing you wish happened to Antonus but didn't get now happens to Melanthius and suddenly you don't feel like doing it. And you realize this is a lot like being just barbaric king that's used as a boogeyman. Being a boogeyman for justice is still being a boogeyman. It doesn't feel great. How do you deal with that? How do you come to terms with those longings? Necessary, maybe even just, but also ugly and a little unjust. These are real realities about politics that. That need to be explored for a healthy order. Possibly undermined it if you push them in the wrong direction. But you have to face these realities at some point or another.
- [87:22]
A
Yeah, no, very good. Yeah. Everyone likes justice. Few like to be the one that enacts it. And we, A lot of times we just like to push that away and we don't want to see it. So we like justice, we like the effects, the fecundity of it, but we don't like to actually see it enacted. I think if I was going to try and give a defense here, a few things stand out to me. One is that it's interesting that it's not a suitor per se. It's not one of the young lord princelings, but it's another person from this bucolic class. It's someone like the swineherd and the cowherd that is punished to this degree. And what. I don't have a textual reference in mind, but if you take him as an analogy to the other two, which I think you know very clearly, there's the swineherd and the go herd, but the other two are old enough to remember Odysseus, unlike a lot of the suitors and unlike, if you take the theory, a lot of the young maidservants. So in certain ways you could argue that he is the worst of them because he remembers him. He knows who the king was. He had that experience with him. He saw him. And this is a betrayal, a disloyalty, an unfaithfulness, if you want to put it in pious language, because you have to be pious towards your polis that really just can't be forgiven. The other ones get a different type of death. He gets this torturous death because he's the worst.
- [88:35]
B
Yeah, possibly. Still seems like overkill, the pains of using the wrong word, but it does feel like overkill. I think we're supposed to take it that way. And I. And certainly the. By repeating the language from echodists, we. This is something Homer does by the way, quite a lot is choice repetitions that sometimes there's modifications. It's somebody just repeating what another person said, but modifies it in ways that are interesting. Most famously, I think the list of gifts that Agamemnon sends to Achilles. Odysseus, when he repeats it, removes the final lines about. About obedience. But also when Odysseus is hiding out after, when he arrives at the who are the people he comes to where they find him naked in the woods.
- [89:32]
A
The Phaeacians.
- [89:33]
B
The Phaeacians, yeah. The language there of hiding out I think is also used when he's in the cave of the Cyclops as well. I might be getting this wrong, but you have to try to make sense of these repetitions. This is one of them that I think is a little easier to make sense of, which is the guys whose side you're on are as nasty and bloodthirsty as a vulture, as Acitus. And you know, you gotta come to terms with that. You're doing ugly things for a just cause. Does that mean justice has an ugly side to it? There's no accident that just punishment is, while alluded to, very much absent from the Republic, but totally an issue in the Gorgias. Right. It has no place in political idealism, but it does have its place in real politics. So that tells you something about it. It's something we'd like to get rid of, but we have to face. And our commitment to justice, even enduring punishment, that's something that is a part of it, whether you like it or not.
- [90:38]
A
Yeah. No. Very well said. Dr. Prieau. I've really appreciated you kind of guiding us through this book. Many things to think about. I'm very thankful. Any other kind of final thoughts or Comments on book 22?
- [90:50]
B
I'll just go back to something I said before. The problem of recognition in political rule. A wise ruler who's going to establish an order, which is something that Odysseus seems to be trying to do, cannot be known in and of himself somehow he has no place where he's going to be, and so he needs to hide away. The problem of recognition, of the desire for recognition and the problem of, of. Of founding are, Are deeply related. And it's. It's much as it is in life. Right? I mean, an easy version of this is, okay, you're president, you stopped a nuclear bomb from coming to the US and you save all these lives, but for reasons of national security, you can't say you'll have done a thing you can never be known for what you actually did find.
- [91:42]
A
Enough.
- [91:43]
B
This is a deeper version of that problem. And it's in a way the idea of recognizing someone. You can look somebody in the eye, say, I know that person. That's so and so. That's knowing who someone is, not what they are and what they've actually done. And the same is true of any thinker, any, any, any author. You read, you read the book, you read Homer, and there are times where you feel like you are finally on the trail of what they're thinking, how the work coheres and how it works. And that's a wonderful moment where you suddenly realize, oh my gosh, I really didn't understand this person. And guess what? You probably don't understand it now. You might not be fully on their, their trail. And that's, that's part of maybe being part of any civilization. Is that the true narrative, the true thread is somehow hidden from us? And we might know who the greats are, but we might not know what they actually.
- [92:36]
A
Yeah, no. Very well said. I appreciate you kind of unearthing that strata here in the text. The political read is something I deeply appreciate. Again, thank you for coming on. Thank you for guiding us through this. You've been a mentor to us as we've moved through this book. Remind us where people can find out more about you and your work on
- [92:54]
B
Twitter is probably the best place. I have a substack where I post things. Academia. Edu. I post all my academic work and some of my non academic work there. So most articles I've written, you know, snippets of books and things like that and, and then, yeah, I guess just, just out and about somewhere. Yeah, you'll see me. You can always email me. Right.
- [93:17]
A
All right, everyone, thank you so much for joining us this week. We'll be back next week finishing the odyssey. We got a couple professors from Hillsdale coming on, help us finish strong. In the meantime, go check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon and Instagram and we will see you guys next week. Thank you.
- [93:34]
B
Thank you so much.