Did Odysseus FIND America?

Summary

Camp Gagnon – Podcast Summary
Episode: Did Odysseus FIND America?
Host: Mark Gagnon
Guest: Dr. Jack Vishnik (“Lantern Jack”)
Date: August 11, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into a provocative theory with Dr. Jack Vishnik, a classicist and host of Ancient Greece Declassified, exploring whether The Odyssey—rather than being pure myth—might preserve echoes of real prehistoric voyages, potentially as far as the North Atlantic and even America. Through a careful analysis of Homeric geography, oral tradition, and ancient navigation, Dr. Vishnik discusses how details in The Odyssey could correspond with actual northern and transatlantic locales, challenging conventional narratives that ancient Greeks were Mediterranean-bound.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Oral Tradition and Myth as Distorted Memory

• The Odyssey isn’t pure fiction in the modern sense.

  • Dr. Vishnik emphasizes that The Odyssey results from oral tradition, layered over centuries with myth and fact mingling (02:59).
  • Some elements from Homeric tales (e.g. the Trojan War) have been archaeologically corroborated, suggesting kernels of truth in the epics (03:09).
  • “We’re not dealing with fiction in the modern sense...we’re talking about an oral tradition that was operating over centuries.” – Dr. Vishnik (02:59)

• Homer may be a collective pseudonym.

  • There’s uncertainty about Homer’s identity; he may represent a community of storytellers (05:39).

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The Odyssey's Journey: Beyond the Mediterranean?

• Textual clues suggest travel outside the Mediterranean:

  • Homer repeatedly refers to the “ocean,” not the “sea,” and describes Odysseus traveling to the “limits of the world” (07:24).

    • The ancient Greeks knew the difference between ocean and sea; the Mediterranean is an inland sea.
    • “There’s no ocean views in Greece. And no Greek would ever confuse the ocean with the sea.” – Mark, 07:24

  • Multiple Homeric passages imply long voyages (six, nine, up to seventeen days) “without land in sight”—impossible within the confines of the Mediterranean (11:18–12:48).

• Physical geography matches North Atlantic features:

  • Descriptions such as harbors enclosed by cliffs, lands where days are extremely long, and magical whirlpools all have counterparts in northern Europe and Atlantic Canada (18:50–19:36).

• The Laestrygonians episode:

  • Odysseus describes a place where days are so long “a man could earn two wages” (17:46), reminiscent of northern latitudes.
  • The harbor's geography—vertical cliffs, inlets—matches locations in the Shetland or Faroe Islands (18:53).
  • Locals described as much taller, matching Bronze Age Scandinavian skeletons.

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Ancient Knowledge and Contact

• Indirect knowledge of the far north:

  • The amber trade and archaeological finds (e.g., Mediterranean beads in Scandinavian tombs) indicate contact or knowledge of northern Europe (20:02).

  • Ancient Greeks spoke of the “Hyperboreans”—distant northerners (20:02).

  • However, mainstream scholars believe such references are third- or fourth-hand, not firsthand accounts.

  • “Several scholars actually acknowledge that the Laestrygonian episode is informed by indirect accounts of the far north of Europe. What they don’t acknowledge is that it represents a memory of a Mediterranean vessel actually reaching that area and observing it directly.” – Dr. Vishnik (20:58)

• Voyages did occur later:

  • Pythias of Massalia, in roughly the 4th century BC, reached Norway or Iceland, known as Thule (21:23).
  • This suggests technical ability could have existed earlier.

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Transatlantic Travel: Wild or Possible?

• Circumstantial clues for North Atlantic and American crossing:

  • After Laestrygonia, Odysseus visits Circe’s Isle—a remote, uninhabited northern island, possibly Iceland (28:06).
  • The narrative contains “solar confusion”: uncertainty about east and west, or where the sun rises/sets—a phenomenon experienced at very high latitudes (26:54).
    • “If it’s not fog, what else could explain not knowing where the sun rises and sets and where east and west is? That could be that you’re so far north now, even further north than the Laestrygonians, that...the sun spends most of the day in the summertime going around the horizon.” – Dr. Vishnik (25:26)

• Voyages to Newfoundland and Canada:

  • The Land of the Dead, shrouded by perpetual fog, may correspond to Newfoundland—the “foggiest place on Earth” (30:55).
  • The Bay of Fundy (Canada) features tidal whirlpools and enormous barking seals, paralleling the Charybdis and Scylla episodes (39:16).
    • “The Bay of Fundy has a famous whirlpool...which you can see form three times during the day in the long summertime.” – Dr. Vishnik (41:19)
  • Funk Island, near Newfoundland, is home to seabirds whose calls can sound eerily human—potential basis for the Siren story (43:21).
    • “Sailors that have reported...they felt like they were hearing all these human voices carried over the surf.” – Dr. Vishnik (43:58)

• Sun Cattle as Caribou:

  • The “Sun’s cattle,” untended, could be local caribou—a strange sight for Mediterranean sailors (49:49).

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Ancient Sources and Later Interpretations

• Other ancient references to a Western continent:

  • Plato, Pliny, Plutarch, Pythias, and others mention lands/islands beyond the ocean—sometimes even a “great continent” (79:24, 81:12).

  • “Plato in the Timaeus...says that Atlantis was outside the pillars of Hercules...and there was a great continent.” – Dr. Vishnik (80:01)

    • Plato’s goal: stories must be believable, so he’d incorporate known geographical traditions, regardless of whether Atlantis was real.

  • Plutarch’s “On the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon” (2nd c. AD) refers to a Carthaginian embassy journeying north and finding Greeks living around a bay with a size similar to the Sea of Azov—matching the Gulf of St. Lawrence (82:14).

    • “Plutarch says...there are Greeks there that have been living there since the time of Hercules or before the time of Hercules, which means centuries before the Trojan War.” (82:14)

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Methodological Pitfalls and Academic Debate

• Difficulties in mapping Odysseus’ voyage:

  • Many modern “Atlantic Odyssey” theorists try to make the journey start at Troy and end at Ithaca, forcing implausible routes (92:21–93:10).

  • Some versions require Odysseus to circle the Atlantic multiple times, which Dr. Vishnik sees as unrealistic (93:10).

  • “If anyone wants to reconstruct some Bronze Age Atlantic voyages, forget about Troy and forget about Ithaca. And do not try to create one long itinerary because Homer...might not have preserved the order of the original voyage.” – Dr. Vishnik (76:08)

• Oral tradition and poetic formulas:

  • The bardic tradition (like modern freestyle rap) relies on formulaic lines, which may insert generic details (sheep, figs, etc.) that can obscure the underlying reality (53:24).
  • “If I tell you, describe to me a beautiful garden, you instantly have...20 lines memorized...It’s always going to have olive trees and fig trees.” (52:33)
  • This can flatten the real accounts, complicating literal interpretations.

• Why no physical evidence in America?:

  • Lack of robust genetic or material remains isn’t surprising: even Vikings, whose settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows (Newfoundland) is archaeologically confirmed, left almost no trace otherwise (84:01).

  • If Greeks or Phoenicians made the journey, it was likely only a handful of times.

  • “If it happened, it was like a one-off thing or a two-off thing, maybe three or four times max. And if that’s the case, you wouldn’t really expect to find much archaeologically, right now.” – Dr. Vishnik (85:27)

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Academic Reception & Concluding Thoughts

• Scholarly skepticism is more indifference than hostility:

  • Most scholars focus elsewhere; a few have considered non-Mediterranean interpretations, but real-world claims are rare (73:14).
  • Dr. Vishnik hopes for a more nuanced dialogue between scholars and independent researchers.
  • “Usually it’s just indifference...But if they come across it, they find it [interesting].” (105:45)

• Probability assessment—where would Dr. Vishnik put his money? (106:42)

  • Greeks reaching Scandinavia: very likely; he’d bet $1,000.
  • Iceland: possible; he’d bet $500.
  • Newfoundland: possible but less likely; $100–200.
  • Bermuda or beyond: very unlikely ($50 or less).
  • Panhandle of Florida: zero.

• Overarching insight:
  Even a single authentic tale of transatlantic contact dramatically expands our view of ancient capabilities—theoretical possibilities and the spirit of curiosity are as important as the evidence currently available.

  • “It seems like as time goes on a lot of assumptions about antiquity are maybe not so true and that I do think they were in many ways as smart and as clever, and perhaps even smarter than us now.” – Mark (109:43)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On speculative reconstruction:

  • “This is not the claim that Odysseus is a real person that did this literal voyage, but that Homer’s chilling and he hears a story about a sailor that goes to Iceland...” – Mark (38:12)

• On the myth surviving while records are lost:

  • “If you transform something into an entertaining medium, it has a better chance of survival.” – Dr. Vishnik (67:39)

• On the mapping challenge:

  • “If you try to begin and end the journey at Troy and Ithaca...that forces you to make two, not one, but two full circuits around the Atlantic. So that’s...ridiculous.” – Dr. Vishnik (93:10)

• On the ancient worldview:

  • “If anybody told the ancient Greeks, don’t go there because the edge of the world is there, somebody would have been like, oh, let me go see.” – Dr. Vishnik recounting Mertz (108:52)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |-----------|------------------------------------------------| | 00:00–02:17 | Introduction; framing the theory | | 02:17–06:40 | Oral tradition and origin of The Odyssey | | 06:40–08:09 | Homeric geography: ‘ocean’ vs. ‘sea’ | | 09:26–10:02 | Comparing Odyssey timeline to Viking/Columbus | | 11:18–12:43 | Outlandish voyage durations | | 17:46–20:58 | Laestrygonian episode and northern clues | | 26:54–28:06 | Solar confusion & the far north (Iceland) | | 30:55–32:08 | Land of the Dead in Newfoundland | | 39:16–41:28 | Bay of Fundy: Tides, whirlpools, seals | | 49:49–52:24 | Sun’s cattle and caribou/shamanic retelling | | 76:08–77:00 | Pitfalls in journey reconstruction | | 79:24–83:38 | Ancient sources: Plato, Plutarch, etc. | | 84:01–85:27 | Archaeological traces: why so little remains? | | 106:42–109:40 | Probability of various places: Scandinavia, Iceland, Newfoundland, Bermuda | | 109:43–111:34 | Ancient curiosity and seafaring parallels | | 112:00–118:45 | Review of the new “Odyssey” film: accuracy vs. drama | | 118:45–134:35 | Homeric structure, storytelling, and morality |

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Closing Reflections

The episode concludes with Mark and Dr. Vishnik reflecting on the enduring relevance and power of myth, the limitations of historical evidence, and the undervalued curiosity and ability of ancient peoples. While hard proof of Greek or Phoenician voyages to America remains elusive, the tantalizing correspondences in myth, geography, and oral tradition invite a more open-ended view of ancient history—one that values “signals in the noise” and pursues interdisciplinary, cross-cultural discovery.

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Recommended for Listeners Who Enjoy:
Ancient history, mythology, archaeological mysteries, seafaring adventure, speculative history, classics, and reflective, evidence-based discussions that leave room for wonder.

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Transcript

[A]

For more than 3,000 years, we've treated the Odyssey as one of humanity's greatest myths. A world of monsters and witches and gods. And, of course, all of this is all myth, right? Well, what if some of these impossible places were real? Well, today I'm joined by Dr. Jack Vishnik, better known as Lantern Jack, and he's here to explain the whole theory. He believes that parts of the Odyssey may preserve distorted memories of voyages that took place long before Homer journeys beyond the Mediterranean, into the North Atlantic, and possibly all the way to America. Because Homer describes a land where the summer days barely end. A harbor enclosed by enormous cliffs, an island where sailors lose track of where the sun rises and sets. Those clues could trace a route from Scotland to Iceland and all the way to Canada. This is obviously fantasy, right? Well, near Canada today lies the Bay of Fundy, a place of giant seals who bark like dogs, and one of the most powerful tidal whirlpools that appears exactly three times a day. Now, none of this proves that Odysseus himself discovered America. The theory is actually stranger than that. Perhaps an unknown ANC explorer may have made this amazing journey, returned home, and had his experiences transformed into the monsters and magical landscapes of Homer. And even if part of this is true, then the ancient world was not nearly as isolated as we were taught. It would mean that sailors were crossing oceans, encountering new continents, and exchanging stories thousands of years before Columbus and Leif Erikson. Today, we ask whether one of the oldest myths in Western civilization is actually hiding the memory of a forgotten journey to America. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. Doctor Jack Vishnik.

[B]

How are you doing? Great.

[A]

Better known as Lantern Jack. I am a massive fan of your channel and of your podcast. You've made a video recently that I find absolutely fascinating with a video, or should I say an episode titled, did Odysseus Discover America? Now, before we jump into that, there's a few things I want to say up top. First, for the viewer at home. Yeah, dude, you. You may hear some disturbance during this episode. There is a band playing in the woods just adjacent to our tent here. So I apologize if you hear some. Some drums or bass coming through. And secondly, could you just explain for the audience at home who you are and what is your background in Greek literature?

[B]

Sure. So I have a PhD in classics, which means in the study of ancient Greek and Latin and the literature and history of those peoples. And I produce a podcast and YouTube channel called Ancient Greece Declassified, where I explore topics from the ancient world that are of interest or relevant to today.

[A]

Amazing. Now this episode that you did, did Odysseus discover America? People are probably hearing that and they're like, well, first off, Odysseus isn't a real guy, so no. And secondly, Christopher Columbus discovered America, so also no. How would you start to break down this argument? What do you mean when you say, did Odysseus discover America?

[B]

Right. So the, the title was tongue in cheek and some might accuse me of clickbait and I guilty. Whether or not Odysseus is a real character is explained early on is not the core issue there. The core issue is that we're not dealing with fiction in the modern sense, where some author sits at a desk and just conjures up a story from start to finish that has no bearing on reality. We're talking about an oral tradition that was operating over centuries. So even if there was a guy named Homer, which is debated, who finalized the final version that we have today, regardless of that, these stories were compiled and collected and developed and expanded over centuries. Like we can tell that linguistically. And during those centuries all kinds of mythological elements were incorporated. Probably real stories were incorporated. In fact, a lot of the bits from the Iliad about the Trojan War have had archaeological corroboration.

[A]

That was Schliemann.

[B]

Well, that was the first thing. But even so Schliemann discovered Troy and at the time nobody thought that he would. So at the time people thought that Troy was made up, but he discovered Troy and then he also excavated certain Bronze Age palaces in the mainland of Greece that people also didn't think much of or that they didn't really reflect the Homeric reality. But more recently, people have studied the Hittite archives. Now the Hittites were the main power in what's now Turkey during the Bronze Age. And if there was a Trojan War, it probably was between the Hittites and the Greeks of the time, the so called Achaeans that Homer refers to over the region of Troy, which was a disputed area. It was both sides claimed that as their sphere of influence.

[A]

This is in like western Turkey in the modern day.

[B]

Yes, exactly right. And so we have these Hittite archives that refer to a region, a city in that area called Wilusa. Now if you take the word Wilusa and you and you put it through, the sound changes that we know happen in Greek, namely initial W drops out, so it becomes Ilusa. And then an S sound between vowels drops out, so it becomes Ilua starts to sound like Elion, which is the name of Troy in Homer's epics.

[A]

Ah, Ilion. Yes, interesting.

[B]

Hence the Iliad, I see.

[A]

Oh, that's fascinating. Now, this sort of theory is kind of, correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe this idea that Homer, as we know as maybe a person, has a collection of people as a fictional character that is just sort of the pseudonym given to whomever, whatever collection of people collected and wrote this great epic poem. Perhaps they are drawing on a knowledge at the time that there was some type of transatlantic travel, that perhaps some type of seafaring people went across the Atlantic, they went to Newfoundland, they went to the Caribbean, and they did this ostensibly thousands of years before Leif Erikson or Christopher Columbus. And there's little, like little tiny threads that most people would miss when reading the epic that seem to reference a place beyond the waters of the Mediterranean. Could you take us through some of the more compelling lines that appear in the Odyssey that would lead someone to think, like, oh, maybe this isn't some part of Greece, or maybe this isn't Italy. Like, what. What are the lines that you find the most interesting?

[B]

Well, so I imagine that this is a shock to most viewers right now, what you just said. And I should say, first of all, that many people have actually conjectured an Atlantic or even transatlantic interpretation of the Odyssey. Okay? So this is not like a new idea. And that's because the text itself that we have says that Odysseus is traveling the ocean. And while, you know, if you go on like Airbnb and you book a hotel in Greece, it'll say ocean view. There's no ocean views in Greece. And no Greek would ever confuse the ocean with the sea, Right? The Mediterranean is an inland sea. The Romans called it their own lake because it was fully enclosed by the Roman Empire, right?

[A]

Now would someone say, oh, the dumb Greeks, you know, 2,000 years ago, they thought it was an ocean.

[B]

Well, we don't really see. In other texts, we don't really see a confusion between these terms.

[A]

Right?

[B]

So the Odyssey says that Odysseus is on the ocean. And it even says at one point that he crosses the ocean and he comes to the Peirathages or Peiratha Gaius the. The Limits of the World. So that's the kind of the biggest direct statement in the actual text.

[A]

The seafaring people at the time knew the difference between an ocean and a sea, and they would never mistake the Mediterranean as a sea. So when they're saying the ocean, this implies that this is going beyond the Strait of Gibraltar. This is somewhere in the Atlantic.

[B]

That's the view of some people, which I tend to agree with. There are, of course, the skeptics who say, no, this is poetic exaggeration, which is possible. Yeah. But we do know for a fact that the Phoenicians were out in the ocean at the time that Homer may have lived. In other words, at the time that these poems got their final form, the Phoenicians were already trading along the Atlantic coasts of what's now Spain or Portugal and Northern Africa. And then earlier in the Bronze Age, we know for sure of indirect trade between the Mediterranean people and the Scandinavians. For example. For example, there are beads found in Scandinavian tombs that are from the Mediterranean. There are some bull and chariot iconography that seem related as of yet. There is no smoking gun. There's no shipwreck of a Mediterranean ship in Scandinavia found yet.

[A]

Because they wouldn't wreck, dude. They'd be good. You know what I mean? These are good sailors. Hey, real. Most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow and you stay in the loop with every new drop. Religion, camp, history camp, and Camp Gagnon. Now, let's get back to it. Just as far as the timeline goes. Christopher Columbus, 1492.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Leif Erikson going to Newfoundland around, like, 1000 A.D. something like that. When is the Odyssey assembled? And when are we talking about the time of Homer? What period is that?

[B]

The scholarly estimates? Cause these are. Estimates range from late 800 B.C. to early 600 B.C. so let's say like 820 B.C. to 675 B.C. that's the window that we think these epic poems received their final form.

[A]

We're talking 1500 years before the Vikings here.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, what, another 2000 years before Columbus?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

I mean, that would be some pretty shocking information if you're telling me, like, oh, maybe some of these, you know, Phoenicians or someone was going to America. That's wild.

[B]

It is.

[A]

Now, what other threads in there would indicate that this is not someplace in the Mediterranean? Obviously going to the ocean? You're like, all right, maybe it's flowery language. What else is pulling you that direction?

[B]

Well, Christos, can you pull up the third image from the file? Yeah. There we go.

[A]

Odysseus Journey.

[B]

Here's a list of the complete journey. And by the way, I need to say, sorry, that during the epic poem, Odysseus gives various accounts of who he is, what his name is, where he's from and where he's been. And they're all different. Okay. And this is why he's called, you know, the liar. Yes, right.

[A]

The unreliable narrator.

[B]

Exactly. So he's a master of disguise, he's a master of storytelling. And what we think of as the tribal narrative, the one that's in the movie and all the movies, that's the one he tells to the Phaeacians, second final stop in this outline. So he gives them the longest account of who he is and where he's been. Of course, he needs their sympathy to get home. So he might have. It might be implied in the poem that he's embellishing the story.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But in any case, this is the one we're gonna be talking about today. This is the main, the well known tribal narrative. And if you look at it, you see that there are multiple legs of this journey that have. That take many, many days of sailing nonstop without sight of land. Nine days. Again, nine days. Six days. Nine days and then 17 days. Okay. And it's implied in all these cases that no land is seen. It's not. It's not stated directly, but it makes sense. It stands to reason that these long legs of the trip involve not seeing land anywhere.

[A]

Right. And for the guy listening right now, this is basically Troy, where of course, Odysseus is battling to Ismarus, to Cape Malea. Is that pronoun correctly? And then nine days go by.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

No land. And he goes to the lotus eaters, Cyclops, Aeolia, nine more days near Ithaca, back to Aeolia, six more days, the Lastrygonians, to then Cersei's Isle, then to the Land of the Dead, back to a. Yeah, back to the Sirens, and then the Cilia, and then Thracia, and then the Cherubitus.

[B]

Charybdis.

[A]

Charybdis.

[B]

My bad.

[A]

Charybdis, which is an interesting name. And then nine more days to Calypso's isle, and then 17 days to Sharia, Basically the Scaria. Scaria, thank goodness you're here. And then back to ithaca. So it's 17 days. Even just that period is so long. But we'll get to that in a second.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So nine days with no land in sight, that would be hard to do in the Mediterranean.

[B]

Exactly. And I should emphasize again that the text does not say no land was spotted for 17 days. But that's clearly implied. So. Yeah, so it has been long recognized that these. So the Mediterranean Sea is an inland sea. It's full of narrow passages of archipelagos, of many islands. You can't really sail anywhere in a straight line for more than a couple days without seeing land. Okay. And that's like, it's like the biggest areas take a couple of days to cross. So since antiquity people have noted that these distances don't fit in the Mediterranean. And since antiquity they've said, well, it's just poetic exaggeration. Okay. Most people, okay, fair. When we get to. So we have the Homeric epics at the end of the so called Dark ages, after the Bronze age collapse, around 1200 B.C. you have like 400 years of dark ages where Greece forgets the art of writing. Then a new system of writing comes back, the Alphabet. And it comes back at the same time as the Homeric poems appear. And those two phenomena might be related. That's a different rabbit hole. And then we get the more familiar authors we know of, like Plato, Herodotus, Aristotle, so forth, for whom we know specific dates, where they lived, what they wrote, all that kind of stuff. And in those more familiar, well documented authors, we learned that the Greeks had already kind of made a map of where they thought Odysseus had gone and they had made it in the Mediterranean. So like Thucydides, I think, reports that the Karakureans, so Kerchira or Corfu, is an island that's actually pretty close to Ithaca. Okay. And the Kerchireans had already claimed in his day, in the 400-bc that they were Scheria, land of the Phaeacians. I see. Now that doesn't really make sense because Homer says that Scheria is like is again beyond all inhabited lands, all other inhabited lands. So why would it be an island less than a day's sail away from Odysseus home? Okay. And then people say, well, it only took one day for Odysseus to get to his home from Scheria. But that ship is described as traveling autonomously, like without any captain or oarsman. And it's going faster than a hawk flies. Now a hawk is perhaps the fastest animal on the planet when it dives.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So this is clearly like a kind of magical link. Right. So if you look at this chart again, I believe the storm at Cape Malaya and the magical ship of the Phaeacians at the end, that's the beginning and end bracket of the magical outlandish journey. That's where we have a different travel narrative than you would expect from a return from Troy to Greece.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And I think that is where Homer or whatever process crystallized these epics and the 8 and 700s BC probably introduced a separate travel narrative into the story of Odysseus, which did not originally have any of this.

[A]

Interesting. And in order to square all that for Homer, he had to be like, hey, they traveled to the speed of light. They traveled as fast as we can possibly imagine in order to, in the literary sense, square the circle of going from this land all the way back to Ithaca.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Where, if it's just truly a day sailing, you don't need to do that for the story's sake.

[B]

Yes, exactly. And I should note that this idea that the fantastical travel narrative was introduced later is actually established among quite a few scholars. So famously, Martin west, famous Homerist, he argued that the original Odyssey, so to speak, was a homecoming tale of a king who was delayed at war, came home after several years and found his house in disorder. His wife is surrounded by suitors, his son's life is in jeopardy, so he comes back in disguise. And so it's the homecoming tale, kind of like the movie the Return last year, where he has to be disguised and find some local loyal friends and then take his throne back. I think that also he thinks, he argued that the main travel narrative was incorporated later based on older stories such as the Argonautica and other fantastical or exotic travel narratives.

[A]

Interesting. Now, what are the other lines specifically that would indicate some of these other places? Like you mentioned, potentially reference to the Caribbean. You mentioned reference to Newfoundland in northern, or I guess eastern Canada. What are those lines?

[B]

Okay, so one of the. Where is it? The Laestrygonians. If you look at the middle of that chart, the Laestrygonians live in a place called Telepilos, which means the faraway Pylos. And so it takes Odysseus six days and nights to get there from somewhere that already seems to be far away from Greece. Okay. And the narrator, which is actually Odysseus, said that in this land, the days are so long that a man could earn two wages if he doesn't need sleep. Hmm. Now, the days never get that long in the Mediterranean, but they get that long, obviously, in northern Europe.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And if that was just a single data point, that would be easy to dismiss. But then we have other details that also point to northern Europe. First of all, the harbor is described as a kind of cliff harbor or maybe cleft harbor.

[A]

It's

[B]

a narrow inlet between two vertical cliffs that are so close to each other that you could stand on either cliff and throw rocks at the ships below, and you'd be really hard pressed to find Anything like that in the Mediterranean, but those are common features of the Shetland Islands in Scotland and the Faroe Islands north of that, and perhaps certain parts of Norway. And then we get other details. Like the Laestrygonians are. They're bigger than Odysseus and his men. And skeletal remains do show that. Let's say the Scandinavians of the Bronze Age were on average several centimeters taller than Mediterranean people.

[A]

Right. The equatorial folks are a little bit shorter. And then people that live up in Scandinavia are quite tall.

[B]

Well, that's not always true because you also have like the Bantu Africans who are the tallest.

[A]

Oh, really? Yeah, I always heard that as like a little factoid, like near the equator, like things are smaller, animals, people, et cetera.

[B]

I mean, I think it's a little more complicated.

[A]

Fair, probably. Almost certainly. Now, is it controversial in the time to think that the Greeks knew about Scandinavia?

[B]

Well, they speak of the Hyperboreans, which are the super far northerners. But again, the standard scholarly view is that this is all third or fourth hand information. So we know that it was an amber trade. Amber is found in the Baltic area of northern Europe. And the Mycenaeans, the Bronze Age Greeks, they loved their amber. And the theory has always been that, well, amber was passed through like four or five intermediaries before it got to the Greeks in the Mediterranean. And so they would have heard, you know, again, fourth or fifth hand accounts of these super far northerners, the Hyperboreans.

[A]

That makes sense to me. Yeah, right. Like there's a trade route, it goes through some merchants and then eventually these stories come with the trade of. Yeah, there are these places with these crazy cliffs and the sun never sets and the people are really tall.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So that seems like a very logical. I don't even know why that would be controversial by historical standards. Like, do many scholars dispute that?

[B]

Scholars actually, several scholars actually acknowledge that the Laestrygonian episode is informed by indirect accounts of the far north of Europe. What they don't acknowledge is that they represent a memory of a Mediterranean vessel actually reaching that area and observing it directly.

[A]

And you're thinking you would say that it is possible, at least.

[B]

Possible.

[A]

I see. That's interesting.

[B]

And we know that this type of voyage did happen later in antiquity, famously Pythias of Massalia. Massalia is what's now Marseilles in the south of France. Okay, so Pythias of Massalia did reach almost certainly either Norway or Iceland. He called it Thule. You've seen those Thule backpacks Absolutely. That's like the end of the earth kind of land. Okay. And then there's also an earlier lost, so called The Masaliot Periplus, 500-00 or 600-bc lost text, but we know of it that also mentions the journey to the far north of Europe. Okay. So we know that like a thousand years after the, you know, the Minoans, let's say the Greeks did go up there, at least a few.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Okay. So it was possible and it did happen in what we call antiquity. I guess the question is, could somebody before Homer have done that?

[A]

I see. Now why do we need that? If this sort of story, interpolation through trade account does the explanation for us? Why are you so would you speculate even further on the idea of an actual vessel, pre Homeric, going to Scandinavia?

[B]

Well, the story is presented kind of what we would call cinematically as a first person view of a ship entering this harbor. So it's presented as an eyewitness account of somebody coming by sea into this harbor and then scaling the cliff and looking around. And there's all these details that also are intriguing. For example, the people that live there, they have, they have a palace or a main hall and they have a meeting place where they assemble. And this is reminiscent of later like Viking society where there's like a main hall and there's the so called thing. The word thing referred to actually the public assembly of the Vikings. And Odysseus is surprised that there is no. He doesn't see, he doesn't see any fields being cultivated. Okay. And this in antiquity, in the Bronze Age Scandinavia, let's say, or the north of Scotland, they were agricultural by this point, but they didn't have the kind of obvious agriculture that the Mediterranean had in terms of like vineyards and terraces and olive groves, stuff like that. So it is very. This seems to fit plausibly here. Okay. A Mediterranean mariner coming to this faraway land, observing the societal structure. They have wagons, they have a timber kind of industry, they have a meeting place, they have a social structure. They weirdly don't have any fields. They have these vertical cliffs that you don't find in the Mediterranean. And they're all. And they're taller and the day lasts way longer than it does back home. So these are a lot of different details that come together when you lay

[A]

it out like that. It's like. Yeah, they're describing Norway like almost undoubtedly. It's like what it feels like to me. And then what did you say the Vikings were not as sort of obviously Agrarian. Because they were seafaring and able to kind of like go grab other people's stuff.

[B]

Well, it's more. Because the climate up there is. It's very cold. Right. So you have a much shorter window to plant things. And they relied more on, like, pasture and. And livestock and pillaging. There you go.

[A]

A little bit of pillaging here.

[B]

Yes. Yes.

[A]

That's interesting. Okay, so at this point, I'm. I'm happy to go with you. And I'll concede, I'm like, all right, as the staunch skeptic and classical scholar that I am sure the pre Homeric people probably knew about Scandinavia, maybe a vessel even went up there. But the transatlantic stuff, this is just poppycock. There's no way. Right.

[B]

Well, let's see. So after the Laestrygonians, they go to the island of Aeaea, Circe's isle. Okay. And this isle is uninhabited. Okay. I mean, Circe is a goddess.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

So there's this divine presence there. But besides this goddess, there's no habitation on this island. Now, that's strange. Okay. It's very hard to find an uninhabited island. Okay.

[A]

At this point in the Mediterranean, everything's going to be inhabited.

[B]

Yeah. It's also said to be surrounded by a limitless sea. So when you're on this island, you cannot see any land anywhere else. Okay. So it's also remote. Again, not that many islands in the Mediterranean have that feature. And then there's a few strange lines that I mentioned on my episode. If you want to revisit them, we could do, but there's some lines there where there seems to be some kind of solar confusion, where the. Odysseus and his men, they're not sure where the sun rises and sets, and they don't know where east and west is, which, again, it could be just a lot of fog. But he doesn't say fog, and Homer does explicitly mention fog other places. So if it's not fog, what else could explain not knowing where the sun rises and sets and where east and west is? That could be that you're so far north now, even further north than the Laestrygonians, that you know the North Star is above you, so you don't really know where north is. And the sun spends most of the day in the summertime going around the horizon. It might dip under the horizon for like an hour. But that's, again, really confusing if you've grown up with the sun going like this.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You know, every day.

[A]

And, like, even to this day, if we were to go to the Arctic Circle, you and I. Yeah. The sun would kind of just be going around us.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

And the North Star would be directly above us. And if we were skilled sailors with our sextants, we would be quite confused.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Interesting. Now, what is that land? Is there a land that's like an island, perhaps, that's inhabitable there?

[B]

I assume it's all ice, so there's a lot of different theories. Okay. I went into this trying to make my own guess. Okay. And by the way, I just want to say for the nth time that I'm not committed to this 100%. Right. This is speculation.

[A]

We're having fun.

[B]

I want, like somebody commented in my video, is there a team that's trying to find the actual map? I was like, well, no, but I want there to be one. So I'm trying to.

[A]

Now there is. It consists of two people, you and I in Brooklyn.

[B]

Yes. So we need an island that is isolated very far north. It has trees.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And is uninhabited. In the Bronze Age, there is none. There's Iceland.

[A]

He did it again. Oh, we got Iceland. I forgot about Iceland.

[B]

So, like, the detail about the trees again, we don't. It's hard to know, you know, how much weight to give the different aspects of the story. Right. Because certainly these. If these tales do come from an actual voyage, they would have been embellished, they would have been modified, there would have been mutations in the story. Right, sure. So the trees might have just come into that later. But if we want to stick as closely to the text as possible, the only island I can think of that's, again, totally isolated, very far north and has trees and is uninhabited. I mean, the obvious one is Iceland, because, like the Faroe Islands that you might have heard of, they don't really have trees, for example, and there's a lot of them, in short, proximity to each other. So Iceland is possible. And then from there, Circe tells Odysseus, you can't go home yet. You have to cross the ocean.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

To the land of the dead. So he, quote unquote, crosses the ocean, comes to. And we should note here that that word does not mean what we mean today. I mean, there's so many. There's so many necessary digressions here. I apologize. By all means. It's. It's most likely here that Homer, or whoever at the time is telling these tales, imagines the Earth as a disk. It's not never stated explicitly, but that seems to be the geography. And the ocean is this huge river. That encircles basically Europe, Asia and Africa, which is in the center. Okay. But that disk might be surrounded by like beyond that ring of ocean, there might be further. In fact, there are further lands in this mythology. Okay, so Circe says you can't go home yet. You have to cross the stream of ocean, stream of Okeanos, and reach the land of the dead. And there you'll get the prophecy from Tiresias ghost that will tell you how to get home. Okay, so he crosses the quote unquote stream of Okeanos and he comes to a land that is shrouded by perennial fog. Okay, I remember like reading this in grad school and I just googled like I googled what's the foggiest place on Earth? And like the first five results were Newfoundland. Okay. And then since then I've looked it up more, you know, carefully. And in fact, the easternmost tip of Newfoundland is often called the foggiest place on Earth because that's where the Gulf Stream from the south, which is warm, and the Labrador current from the north, which is cold, meet. And the mixture, this constant mixture of cold and hot water, not hot, but cold and warm water, creates this fog that covers the area for 200 something days of the year.

[A]

Wow. Even to this day?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Wow, that is fascinating.

[B]

So we have this sequence of like three stops that kind of fit on the exact journey that the Vikings took, the same journey that the Irish legendary monk St. Brendan may have took in around I think like 5 something A.D. so there's also other candidates for pre, not only pre Columbian, but pre Norse crossings. And then there's a text in plutarch in the 1002 AD that also some astronomers have claimed describes a similar North Atlantic crossing. So there's many rabbit holes, but there's various ancient data points that point to like a northern crossing. And the Odyssey seems to fit that plausibly.

[A]

Interesting. So amongst most scholars, would it be controversial to say that pre, like, let's say 800-7-Greeks could have sailed to Iceland? That would be. Now we're getting crazy.

[B]

That would be very controversial.

[A]

Okay. And then this idea of, because it says in the text, crossing the river.

[B]

Yeah, the stream. The stream, yeah.

[A]

Now for most people, they're like, okay, well the ocean's not a stream. But you're saying because of that mythology of this river going around the known world being the ocean, that that would be what that's referencing.

[B]

Yeah. And actually this idea that the ocean is a stream is not actually, it's not stupid. Okay. If you're a Mediterranean civilization and you get through the Straits of Gibraltar, what you encounter is a strong current, the so called Canary Current, which is part of the North Atlantic gyre, which has the Gulf Stream. So the Gulf Stream and the Canary Current are part of this never ceasing huge gyre that circles around the Atlantic. And that's the gyre that the European colonial seafarers used. It's like an ocean highway, basically.

[A]

So when you're looking at a map, it's an ocean. But if you're a sailor and this is the way that you navigate the world. Yeah, it is effectively a stream because there is a current that will just pull you if you get into it, all the way to.

[B]

Well, if you, if you don't do anything, it'll pull you down the west coast of Africa and then take you west to Brazil. Oh, and similarly, if you head through the Red Sea in Egypt to the Indian Ocean, you'll also find a gyre there. So the two kind of choke points through which the Greeks or Phoenicians could have accessed oceans both. In both cases, you would immediately be met with a strong current. So in both cases, it seems like you're dealing with a stream.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

So it's not a dumb idea, right?

[A]

This mythology of like, oh, these dummies thought there was a stream going around the world. It's like, well, if you're on a ship and this thing is pulling you, it is a stream, quite literally, because it's a Gulf stream and it's pulling you through the ocean. That is fascinating. And now the foggy part. There's a lot of foggy places. Is there anything else that would indicate that perhaps this place is in North America?

[B]

Well, here the plot gets more entangled because there are several places later on in the journey that, you know, can be plausibly mapped in that area of what's now eastern Canada. The problem is that in, in, in Homer's text, after the Land of the Dead, which might be Newfoundland, Odysseus goes back to Oea. So if that's Iceland, then he's back away from North America. Now it's so hard to know where to go here because there's so many threads here. Okay. But, so one thing I go over in my video is that we should not. If this is a memory of an older voyage, we should not expect the order we get in Homer to be the exact original order. Okay. I actually think that there's textual reasons to believe that Circe might not have been present in the original story. Okay, so those lines about solar confusion I mentioned earlier, both of those were flagged by ancient scholars as being suspect because they don't fit what's in the surrounding lines. Okay, so for example, the lines about not knowing where the sun rises and sets. And here at Chrisos. You want to pull up the text? I think it's called I. A passage. Okay, so. So midway down. Okay, so in the final lines of this passage is where we get the claim. You know, we can't tell east from west, the dawn from the dusk, nor where the sun that lights our lives goes under earth, nor where it rises. So that's the solar confusion. Okay, but right before that, it says, all day long until the sun went down, we sat and feasted. And then when the sun had set and night came, we did this and that. So the. So you have a few lines that make it sound like a normal day and night cycle.

[A]

They know where the sun is exactly.

[B]

And then suddenly it's like, oh, we don't know where the sun rises and sets. Okay.

[A]

It seems like these perhaps are two different places.

[B]

Or it. It could be that in the hundreds of years where the story was accumulating features and evolving, somebody added something to a previous version. Okay, so, okay, so my one guess that I have here is that the original version could have been the following. They reach a far northern island that's uninhabited. They don't know where the sun rises and sets. There's little food there because it's, let's say, Iceland. Right? So they eat whatever they can. They eat like pigs. Whatever they can. Fine. Maybe acorns or whatever. Right. Then they don't know how to leave that place. So then the day, Then the night comes, and the night lasts for six months. And then finally, when the days grow long again, they're able to leave. Okay. And then Homer's like, ooh. Instead of them foraging like pigs during six months of darkness, I'm going to make a witch who turns them into pigs. And then Odysseus seduces her, and then they stay for a year. But I forget to delete these lines here and there that speak of solar confusion. Okay, so again, we're in speculation territory here, but it is. You could make the case that there is evidence of an older. Of an older narrative of a far northern region with solar confusion upon which Homer grafts this enchanting witch.

[A]

Fascinating story. Now, to be clear, this is for anyone that is, like, maybe forgetting this is not the claim that Odysseus is a real person that did this Literal voyage, but more so that Homer's chilling and he hears a story about a sailor that goes to Iceland and is like, dude, there was no food. We had to eat acorns. Like, I felt like I was a pig up there. Like I was just eating whatever I could find on the ground. I barely survived. A bunch of my men died. But. But then I told him, we're going to get back on the ship, we're going back to Greece. And if that is true, it absolutely rewrites our understanding of sea voyage at this time. And it seems like these texts are referencing something that could be just pure speculation interpreted in that way. That is fascinating.

[B]

Okay, so now let's go back to the outline of the journey. So let's assume for the sake of argument that Homer added Circe the witch. Okay. If you remove the second visit to Oea, which he might have had reasons, poetic reasons to add there.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

Then there's a good case that several people have made that more features fit the north North American regions near Newfoundland. Okay, so for example, Scylla and Charybdis has been suggested fits the Bay of Fundy in Canada, which has the most violent tides in the world. Charybdis is a dangerous whirlpool. And then Scylla is a monster with six heads that look and bark like dogs. The Bay of Fundi also has the largest, one of the largest populations of seals in the world.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And people, people commented on my video, like, there are seals in the Mediterranean. True, there are, but they're not nearly as big as the gray seals of the North Atlantic, which are so big they actually eat smaller seals. There are never as large populations as you find in the Bay of Fundy. And again, you know, the original story might have been like, whoa. We came to this bay which had like extremely dangerous tides and you know, more like these seals that were like 10 times bigger than normal seals, and then over centuries that became a multi headed monster and a whirlpool, you know.

[A]

Wow, that's fascinating. Yeah, I could see a sailor coming back being like, dude, you would not believe it. Like, the ocean almost ate our whole boat. And there were these barking dogs, swimming things. Yeah, like that's a very like, reasonable, grounded story that then through retelling becomes this tall tale.

[B]

Even if it said and there were giant seals, that also could have been enough to inspire stories. And there are many other details here. Okay, so like, Charybdis has all these features. It's a whirlpool that, you know, sucks down the brine and spits it out three times a day. And the Bay of Fundi has a famous whirlpool called Old Sow, which you can see form three times during the day in the long summertime, like the long summer daylight season in the summer

[A]

solstice, literally three times.

[B]

You can see it form three times a day.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Because it forms both when the water flows into the bay through tidal phenomena and when it flows out of the bay.

[A]

And these tides are on like eight hour cycles or something.

[B]

Yeah. So the whole thing is like 24 and a half hours. So there's four whirlpools, but during the summer solstice, when the day is long, you can see three of them.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Also, Scylla has massive cliffs. There's cliffs in the Bay of Fundy. When the water is sucked away, the dark earth is exposed. That happens in the Bay of Fundy. There are trees on top of the cliffs. That's also in the Bay of Fundy. And there are several other famous North Atlantic whirlpools, but none of them have all these other features. Okay. So you have a big checklist that checks out. The Bay of Fundy and this part

[A]

of Canada is also so interesting. We kind of mentioned it. But just to highlight, when the Vikings come over, documented Leif Erikson, that when they come from Norway or Norway, Sweden, Scandinavia.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And they make it to North America, the first place they land is this exact area, Newfoundland.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So it follows to reason, like, hey, if there is an even more nascent seafaring population that came, they would probably also land in a similar area. It's the first stop.

[B]

It is. Yeah. So one of the arguments in favor of this reconstruction is that it was done by several other cultures.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So, you know, we could go down the list. But the sirens, Right. The sirens is an island where bird, like creatures sing in human, like, voices.

[A]

Right. Which most people know them as mermaids. Like, it's kind of retold as mermaids,

[B]

but that's not what Homer says. So Homer says that they're. They're women with, like, sparrow, like, torsos

[A]

and heads, which is hilarious detail.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

The fact that they get, like, reinterpreted later as being, like, super hot.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

It's just kind of a funny, funny portion.

[B]

So one. One Greek guy, I think his name is Manolis Kutlis, he has his own oceanic odyssey theory. And he points out that there was an island also in the same region we're talking about. Okay. There's an island near Newfoundland called, I think it's called Funk Island. Okay. Or Funk Rock Island.

[A]

Hell, yeah. Funk Rock island is sick.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

That's awesome.

[B]

It could be the podcast name, Funk Rock Island. And it has this huge population of these birds that from far away, do sound like, you know, like there's a party going on.

[A]

No.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Really?

[B]

And there's sailors that have reported that when they sailed by this island, even far away from the island, they felt like they were hearing all these human voices carried over the surf.

[A]

Is that something we could find? Do you think there's something online that would have that recording of these birds?

[B]

Well, so just to give credit to this guy, Manolis Kurtlis, if you. If you search the YouTube video, like, I think it's called in the Shadow Odyssey. I think his website is Enskia, which means in the shadow in Greek. E N S K I A dot com. He has a kind of video where he does his journey reconstruction, and he has a clip that he got from somewhere of that island.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

I don't know if you can find it. Now, I'm not claiming to have a full itinerary here, of course. I'm just saying that there's some really interesting.

[A]

Once again, I could just imagine a sailor being like, dude, we're near this island. There's people there. Turns out, not people, it's birds that sound like people. And then over time, that gets turned into. There are these women that look like birds that are human women. They're like bird women. Hybrids.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I can see how that becomes the mythology based off of a real journey.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Hey, guys, we're gonna take a break really quick because if you know me, you know, I'm constantly trying to find the perfect level of stimulation. Yeah. I want enough energy at the beginning of the day to go to the gym, be a good dad, and then record a three hour podcast about, like ancient civilizations or the Knights Templar or something like that. So, you know, I like a little caffeine, but if I do too much caffeine, I can start to hear my own heartbeat coming through my chest. And that is where Mud Water comes in. Mud Water is a coffee alternative made with functional mushrooms and adaptogens with about like 1/7 the caffeine of a regular cup of coffee. So you're going to get that morning ritual. You're going to get the focused energy without feeling like you're cracked out or without the crash that you get from caffeine. So I've been trying the OG blend, which is like cacao. You got a little bit of Chai. You know, you get some, some reishi and then of course you get functional mushrooms. It's warm, it's a little spicy, it's got like a little chocolatey vibe and it basically tastes like chocolate. Chai had like a health conscious child, you know. Their starter kit is the best way to try it because you're going to get a full size tin of whichever blend you choose. A free rechargeable frother, free gifts and free shipping. They have four amazing flavors. OG coffee, matcha and turmeric. So whether you're just trying to quit coffee completely or just trying to cut down on your caffeine use, there is an option for you if you want to make the switch to cleaner energy. Go to mudwater.com camp and grab the starter kit. Use the code camp when you check out to get up to 43% off. The frother alone is absolutely worth it. That's right up to 43% off with the code camp at M U d w t r.com go to mudwater.com camp and after you check out, make sure you tell them that the good folks here at camp sent you. It really helps out the show. Now let's get back to it. Hey guys, we're gonna take a break really quick because it's summertime and I gotta tell you something. There's a specific point every summer where you realize that your entire personal style has just been like the same jacket or the same pair of shoes. And that's why I've been rocking with gld. You see it on my neck. I wear it in every single episode. I wear it all the time. I mean, look at this. The first thing I noticed when I picked it up is like the weight. It's genuinely substantial. It feels great. It has like an actual, like, like an actual texture to it. It's awesome. And the details look even better in person. I didn't expect it. The website, it looks good, but when it's in my hand and around my neck, it actually is way better. I got this crucifix here. Of course I'm catholic. I gotta represent Jesus Christ. And I wear it while I'm recording, while I'm going out, traveling, even when I'm sleeping, even when I'm showering. And it's great. I don't have to completely reinvent my wardrobe. Just one little chain elevates all my looks. GLD has chains and pendants and bracelets and watches at pretty much every price point. You can get the 18 karat gold plated piece like this, along with options in solid gold and even natural diamonds. GLD also has more than 2 million customers and over 50,000 five star reviews. And every piece is guaranteed for life. So whether you want something subtle or you want a piece that completely changes your outfit, GLD makes it easy to upgrade your style without having to overthink it and of course, without having to break the bank. And great news for a limited time, if you are listening to this right now, if you are a camper, you are going to get an insane deal. When use the code camp C A M P. You're going to get 40% [e-mail] 40% off with the code camp gld.com and after you purchase, they're going to ask how you heard about them. Make sure you tell them that Mark and Christos from the campsite sent you. Now let's get back to the show.

[B]

One last thing I will say though, is the land of the Sun's cattle. You've heard of this story, right? So they come to after Scylla and Charybdis, they come to an island of Helios where there are cattle. And the ghost of the prophet Tiresias had warned Odysseus, if you guys eat any of these cattle, you're not gonna go home.

[A]

Yes, Classic Garden of Eden type vibe. Don't eat this one cattle. That's the only thing you need to do.

[B]

Refrain from the barbecue.

[A]

And what happens.

[B]

So they get to this island and there's all these cows walking around. And the strange thing is they're not tended by any herdsmen. There's nobody tending these flocks. They're just kind of out there. Okay. And one, one objection. I got to my video and a lot of comments was like, there's no cattle in North America before colonization.

[A]

That's a good point. I was gonna say the same thing, which is true.

[B]

But. But if you go right north of the Bay of Fundy, a bit northeast, there's an island there. I forget what it's called. You can look it up. And that's where some people have thought the Rhaenaia is the island of the sun. And there were caribou there.

[A]

No.

[B]

Yeah. Now, caribou would be really strange to a Mediterranean observer. Right. They're as big as cows. They're not domesticated. So there's no herdsmen leading them around. They're just kind of out there grazing.

[A]

Lantern Jack, you're doing it again.

[B]

I love this. Oh, wow.

[A]

And now is there anything else in the retelling that would indicate that it's a cow. But there's something a little special about it.

[B]

Yeah, well, when his men succumb to their hunger and actually slaughter a cow, I think the meat keeps moving. I mean, then you get to really fictional aspects of the story.

[A]

Is there any danger with eating a caribou?

[B]

I don't know.

[A]

But I wonder if that warning is sort of baked into an anthropology, like, hey, these caribou will kill you, or something like that. Or there's a danger that goes along with it. So there's a warning that sort of supersedes the men, like, hey, don't eat the caribou.

[B]

So I haven't. Look, there's over 20 books that have been written trying to explain an oceanic voyage of Odysseus. I haven't read them Fair. I actually have not encountered the caribou idea. I just kind of looked myself to see what could be interpreted as a breaking news as cows without herdsmen.

[A]

And they're indigenous to that island potentially.

[B]

Now, okay, There's a few thorns in this idea, which is that this island does not only have cows, but also has sheep.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Now, there definitely were no sheep in North America. Okay. Then again, you could say that Homer added this detail. And there are. Then you can say, well, why would he add that detail? Well, because the way the epic tradition works is that every bard memorizes thousands of phrases that fit into the line in certain metrical ways. Okay? So if I tell you describe to me a beautiful garden, you instantly have, like, you know, 20 lines memorized that you can mix and match and put together and describe a generic beautiful garden. And it's always going to have olive trees and fig trees and, you know, a gentle stream and a delicious west wing bringing refreshment, you know, west wind. Sorry. So it could be that the kind of pressures of the genre made the mention of herds. It kind of just sucked in this mention of sheep as well.

[A]

Now, why is it the case that when there's retellings, they have to kind of stick to certain, you know, memorized pre written lines? Is it to keep the meter of the poem or.

[B]

Yeah, so the meter of the poem is it functions not only to make it entertaining and musical, but it functions as a mnemonic device. Okay. Scholars understood this in the early 20th century when they went to Yugoslavia, which still has Serbia and Montenegro, still has a living bardic tradition. Right. And people from this guy Milman Perry, an American scholar, went to Yugoslavia, studied how these bards work, and he saw that they Memorized this huge body of data of metrical phrases that fit together and they can just zippity doo dog you anything at any length on any topic.

[A]

You can almost think of like a freestyle rapper.

[B]

It's very much that.

[A]

Okay, interesting. So, like, there's words like a freestyle rapper will use that, like, whenever I say this word, I'm going to rhyme it with this word.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

And I have my anchor points, and then the things that I can add in, I can do at liberty. But I need these anchors in order to make the rhyme work.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And it's the same thing with these poems.

[B]

Yeah. So if you look at the description of Phaeacia or Calypso's Isle or other places, you'll see a lot of lines repeat. And that's because they're part of this kind of automatic, you know, automatic repertoire that comes to mind when you start doing this.

[A]

And that's important when considering this caribou idea or the sheep or things like that, because it kind of maybe flattens the true reality, which would be perhaps seeing an island into something that's a little bit more poetic. But when you're reading through the lines of the poem, you're like, oh, there might have been something that was kind of omitted here that might reveal a greater truth. Such as transatlantic sea travel.

[B]

Yeah. Right. So, like, when Odysseus is being sucked into the whirlpool of Charybdis and he grabs onto a fig tree above the cliff. There are no, like, fig fruit trees in North America natively. But so you could say, well, so he's not in North America. Right. But there are trees that are fig, like, in their leaf structure. But also, like, that's such an unimportant detail. I think the most likely thing is that when the poet, the bard, is performing and he needs to have some tree that he holds onto.

[A]

Fig rhymes with whatever.

[B]

Whatever tree fits the meter and is plausible, gets inserted there.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Without even thinking, like, it's just like, you're in the zone. You're flowing. Right. Like, you're rapping.

[A]

Right. I could see a rapper being like, yo, I took a toke and then I looked up, I saw a tree of oak. It's like you didn't really see an oak tree, but for the rhyme, you need to say oak. So it just kind of fits. And it doesn't mean that you, you know, didn't have this experience. You're just pulling in details that rhyme with what the meter is. That is so interesting. Okay. As we move forward, we Go from Charybdis, this place that comes next, Ogygia.

[B]

Ooh, Calypso's isle.

[A]

They went for nine days.

[B]

So. Well, here Odysseus ship is destroyed. Right. And so he drifts for nine days. So it's gonna be slower than a sailing journey. Okay. But then from Ogygya to the Phaeacians, he builds a raft with a mast and a sail. So that's like. That's a sailing voyage that's gonna be much faster. So we have nine days drifting and then 17. 17 days sailing. And that could. I mean, that's like on the scale of going from North America back to Europe, you know, not exact. I mean, it's plausible. Right, okay. So a lot of people even, even in antiquity, people thought Ogygia must be an Atlantic island. Perhaps the. The Azores or Madeira or Atlantis. Well. Or Plato later used those early stories to inspire his story of Atlantis.

[A]

Fascinating.

[B]

Potentially.

[A]

Now, do you have any type of a theory about where Ogigya could be?

[B]

Well, you're pushing me into, into territory that I don't have an expertise on. Okay, fair.

[A]

This is not you as, as, as Dr. Jack. This is just you as Jack right now in this part of the episode.

[B]

Yeah, so I'm just having fun here. Okay. Yeah. This is not. I'm not going to publish a peer review paper on this.

[A]

Fair.

[B]

So I think, you know, a lot of people have suggested the Azores for a Gygya, and that makes sense because if you're going to go from North America, it makes sense in this context. If you're going to go from North America to Europe, you're going to take the northern arc of the North Atlantic gyre, and that's going to take you through the Azores. Very likely. And, you know, it's conceivable that this checks out. Another possibility is that again, now we're going into real crazy territory, is that Ogygia could be Bermuda.

[A]

Amazing.

[B]

And then the Phaeacians. So, like, you need to work in the Phaeacians and Calypso as two stops between North America potentially, and the Mediterranean Sea. Okay. So possibly Ogygia is Bermuda, the Phaeacians are the Azores, and then we get back to Europe. Or possibly Ogygia is the Azores, as has often been suggested, and then the Phaeacians are somewhere in Western Europe, maybe the Phoenician colony of Gadera or Cadiz in Spain or maybe some other place in Western Europe that's probably like, also very likely a fantasy land that Homer makes up in order to get Odysseus from this almost magical realm back into the familiar geography of the Eastern Mediterranean.

[A]

Right? Now, what's going on in Ogygia?

[B]

So Odysseus is stranded for, you know, like seven or eight years on this island in the middle of nowhere. And when. So he's stranded there with the nymph Calypso, who wants to marry him, she wants him to be immortal. He doesn't want to be immortal, he wants to go home. And Athena, the goddess, takes pity on Odysseus and asks Zeus to let him go home finally. And so Zeus dispatches Hermes to go and tell Calypso, okay, time's up, gotta let him go home now, okay? And she gets really upset and she goes, she walks over to Odysseus, who's standing on the beach and looking across the waves and weeping for his homeland. And she says, okay, Odysseus, you can go home now. I'll bring you some tools to make a raft and you can be on your way. And he looks at her, ever suspicious of everybody, and says, what trickery is this? You want me to sail on a raft across a sea that not even ships can pass? So he's in a place where ships don't normally go on. Okay, so this again, this could be a remote Atlantic island like the Azores that normally no ships ever go to. And so it's. He doesn't know how to, he doesn't know how to cross it. It's never frequented by sailors. And he asks her, like, how do I even do this? And she says, well, just keep the Polar star. She calls it the Bear, but the bear means Ursa Minor, which means the Polar star, North Star. Keep the North Star on your left as you sail for 17 days. Again, that cannot fit in the Mediterranean because the implication is that he doesn't see any land for 17 days.

[A]

Right?

[B]

So it's a 17 day eastward journey with an almost constant wind pushing him eastward, and he's steering his raft with the Polar star on the left so that he's going eastward. So the Azores fits that.

[A]

Now, is there any other description of the island, like what it looked like, who the people were that were there outside of, obviously, the mystical kind of godlike features?

[B]

Well, it's also uninhabited besides Calypso, which again fits the Azores, because they were not inhabited, as far as we can tell, in ancient times. And then there are people who have gone into more details of the actual description. I haven't, so I don't want to pretend, but there's people that have written about the Azores. Yeah.

[A]

Interesting. Are there any descriptions of a beautiful Caribbean island where they're like Odysseus looked in the water and it was perfectly blue and there was some coconuts or anything like that?

[B]

Well, I think if there is any. Okay, so the Caribbean doesn't really fit this itinerary that we've been discussing. Most likely it's possible that there was a Phoenician expedition that did reach the Caribbean. Possible. Plausible maybe, because we have these two later accounts in the Aristotelian corpus and in Diodorus Siculus. So we're talking the three hundreds and then I think the second century or first century B.C. two accounts that seem to tell the same story of Phoenicians getting blown off course in the Atlantic and finding an island paradise. Okay. And in this island paradise, like there was just so much lush vegetation and fruits growing everywhere that life was so easy that they wanted to just. The Carthaginians wanted to just pack up and leave there and live there. And the state was so afraid of the homeland getting depopulated that they banned all further expeditions to this island paradise. Okay, so. So there have been speculations that some Phoenician and the Carthaginians are Phoenicians. Okay. That some Carthaginian or Phoenician vessel got blown off course outside of Gibraltar and landed in the Caribbean. Okay, that's been speculated. Another data point here is that the Italian scientist and author Lucio Russo has argued that the, the lines of longitude given in certain maps, ancient maps for the so called Blessed Isles, also fit the Caribbean.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And what lines of longitude are we talking about?

[B]

Well, Chrisos, you can pull out a map called the Lesser Antilles.

[A]

I think I love a map.

[B]

Okay, so those are the Lesser Antilles. They have islands such as Trinidad and Tobago, other famous current vacation paradises. So in Hellenistic and Roman era texts that describe geography, various ancient geographers tried to give longitudinal coordinates for the so called Islands of the Blessed. And this guy, this Italian scientist Lucio Russo has argued based on several reconstructions of these texts. Okay, there's like a long. There's a lot of room for debate here. But he argues that he can reconstruct the coordinates given by the astronomer Hipparchus in around 100 B.C. and that those coordinates line up perfectly with the Lesser Antilles.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

Okay, so that would speak to at least a knowledge of those islands.

[A]

What year roughly?

[B]

Well, so Hipparchus would have given this around 100 BC, but that could have been based on earlier Voyages. I should note that the period of most extensive Greek exploration was like 330 BC to like 200 BC, and almost all texts from that period have been lost. So we only have later, very brief summaries of those explorations, often by people who don't believe that they could have happened.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Oh, that's so interesting.

[B]

So, for example, the voyage of Pythias to either. To Ultima Thule, which is either Norway or Iceland. We know of that because the geographer Strabo later, much later, mentions it before saying, but that's ridiculous.

[A]

That's so funny how that happens. The same thing happens with, like, Gnostic texts.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Where, like, most of the Gnostic texts that we have are later church scholars debunking them as heresy. But we've lost the. This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace, and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message, and it turned

[B]

out the seller was super chat daddy,

[A]

kind of funny and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for from a browse to a bike ride this summer. Find more on Facebook. Original. The original transcripts, and we just have the later interpretations. Yeah, and it's a similar thing here.

[B]

That's a great example that. A great analogy that, like a lot of our knowledge of. Of early heresies comes from debunkings of those supposed heresies.

[A]

Right. Now, why would it be the case that the transcripts of these fantastical journeys, of the literal journeys that happened would have been lost to time? However, the stories that are mythologized about them would then persist.

[B]

Well, because there's no reason to reject a good story. But if you think, you know, if I come to you and tell you a good story, you're probably gonna. You're gonna like it and you might pass it on. If I tell you, oh, I went to, like, the moon, you'd be like, get out of here. You know?

[A]

Right. That's a good point. So if someone like. Like a street joke, and they're like, yeah, I saw a priest and a rabbi walking around. If I'm telling you it under the context that this is a joke, you are more likely to tell it to another person and then another person. But if I'm going to you, like, you won't believe it. I saw a priest and a rabbi, and then a chicken literally crossed the road. And then all this other stuff happened, you'd be more like, all right, sure. And then you would just kind of disregard it.

[B]

Exactly. So here's a good analogy for that. The ancients had, some ancient philosophers, had a pretty sophisticated atomic theory, okay? A theory that the world was made of atoms. And the only full text we have about this is a poem that the Roman poet Lucretius wrote. And the reason why that text survived is because it's a poem. So it survived on its poetic merits. And if we didn't have that, we wouldn't know nearly what we do now about this important philosophical school. So, like, you know, when you coat something in honey, as Lucretius himself says, or you transform it into an entertaining medium, it has a better chance of survival.

[A]

It's almost possible to think like, in 2,000 years from now, people might dispute that Neil Armstrong went to the moon, but people might reference a film like the Martian, and they're like, yeah, well, this is a story about a guy that tries to colonize Mars. Da, da, da, da. But the actual details of space travel going to the moon may be disputed. If this analogy fits, that is kind of a parallel. And this whole theory is so fascinating because once again, using the moon example, imagine guy listening at home that in 2000 years, the future people are like, yeah, Americans couldn't go to the moon at the time space travel was impossible. They didn't have rockets. And the legitimate history is disputed. But then we have stories that describe the moon in explicit detail, and we have poems that describe space travel and the technical aspects of space travel in explicit detail. The people in 2000 years are going to be like, well, if they couldn't go to the moon, how do they know these things? Or how do they have these vivid details in these stories that predate what we understand about space travel? And the only explanation is, oh, well, we did actually go to the moon prior to when this future civilization thought we did, which is kind of what we're speculating about now.

[B]

I think you hit the nail on the head. Like this idea of using the Odyssey to try and speculate on a pre Homeric voyage into the Atlantic Ocean and perhaps beyond is very much like somebody a thousand years from now using the Martian, the novel the Martian, to understand what the Apollo program or what the Mars Rover program might have found.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And obviously Andy Weir did his research

[A]

based off real science.

[B]

Yeah. And I'm not saying Homer did his research, but he certainly would have used, like, you know, he would have used the stories available. He's not The Homeric, the epic poets do not create from scratch.

[A]

Right. As we found with Troy. Right. For the longest time it was like, the city's obviously not real. This war was obviously not. It didn't happen. And as time has gone on, it seems to be the case that no, Troy was perhaps a real city and that there was some type of battle that happened in this actual place. And sure, the details and what catalyzes the battle is certainly mythologized, but the actual events of an actual battle very likely occurred.

[B]

Troy was almost certainly a real city. The Hittites and Greeks almost certainly vied for control over it. And there was a local ruler named in the Hittite archives, Alaksandu, which if it sounds like Alexander, it is. And so this one archive shows us that there was a Greek speaking ruler in an area claimed by the Hittites. So just from that we see the Hittites and Greeks are vying for control over this area. Right, right. And the name matches the name given by Homer.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And the name of the city matches the name given by Homer. Okay, so.

[A]

So if the Iliad has these threads of truth to it, why would the Odyssey not also have these threads of truth to it?

[B]

Exactly. And in fact, now that we know more about the so called sea peoples, a lot of the Odyssey has echoes of the sea people voyages. That's another thread. I don't know.

[A]

But like the Phoenicians, these were master sailors.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Why is there so much resistance from the mainstream historical community if there is such a thing as a part of speech that would resist these threads as being perhaps evidence of transatlantic travel prior to Leif Erikson?

[B]

I wouldn't say it's resistance so much as it is indifference. I'll tell you a quick story. When I was starting my podcast as a grad student, one of my first interviews was with Richard Martin, who's one of the great Homeric scholars of our time at Stanford. And as I was in his office, like unpacking my microphones and cables and everything, he says to me, you're not slick Eddie, are you? And I was like, no, who's that? He's like, oh, this guy's been emailing me asking me where Odysseus went. I just want to make sure that we're not going to talk about that. And I was like, no, no, I'm not here for that. Which just goes to show you that scholars just haven't really cared about Homeric geography for several decades now. It's not that they study it and Dismiss these theories. It's just not part of what Homeric scholarship has been focused on. Right. And I should say that from antiquity till today, you've had like three camps of people. You've had the people that say it's all made up. Like the 50 comments that say it's fiction. Idiot.

[A]

Fair.

[B]

That's an ancient perspective. Famously, Eratosthenes, the geographer, said, you will find the location of Odysseus voyage when you find the cobbler who sewed together the bag of winds for Odysseus.

[A]

Okay, funny.

[B]

Then you have the people who have tried to fit it in the Mediterranean. The people who have said, oh, these distances are too long. Let's shrink it down to scale and put it in the Mediterranean. And then you've had a smaller, probably the smallest group who have said, well, hold on, it says ocean here. It says long days. It describes these long journeys. Like, if we take the text to be saying what it claims to be saying, we're outside of the Mediterranean. So you've had all three perspectives going back forever.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I don't see this ending anytime soon. Okay, fair. What I do see potentially happening is right now, in the past hundred years, you have a lot of people who are not Homeric scholars who don't know ancient Greek, but who love to sail, or they are history buffs, or they're obsessed with navigation technology, and they've written these independent works on trying to find Odysseus itinerary. Right? Then you have the scholars who are like, this is stupid. And one thing I wanted to do in my video is to create like a. To bridge the gap here, okay? Because the. These independent researchers, they all succumb to a few fatal flaws that are instantly apparent to all the scholars. And I think if they could just stop making those two fundamental mistakes, they could come closer to what would be scholarly acceptable by the scholars. And those mistakes are they try to begin and end the journey at Troy and Ithaca. But the scholarship has shown that the travel narrative is a later addition to the story. Okay, so, you know, a lot of people say if he went into the ocean, you would expect him to describe Gibraltar. Well, not if Homer copy pasted an Atlantic journey into an otherwise Mediterranean journey, beginning and ending with these two magical episodes, the storm and the Phaeacian robot ship. Okay? So I would say if anybody wants to, like, if anybody's going to form a group trying to reconstruct some Bronze Age Atlantic voyages, forget about Troy and forget about Ithaca. And also do not try to create one long, itinerary because Homer or whoever other bard put this together might not have preserved the order of the original voyage.

[A]

Right. They're not looking at it as a literal chronology. They're using these different places from these different stories to paint a picture that's convenient for the narrative.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Right. Are you familiar with the book and Croesus? I'm going to need you to look this up so I can get the actual title. Pigs, Witches, War and something else. It's a famous 70s anthropology book that basically the book is arguing for this idea of. He calls it cultural materialism. Yes, this guy. Cows, Pigs, wars and Witches by Marvin Harris. It's a wonderful book. And it basically attempts to look at religious traditions and sort of like spiritual traditions and try to distill the cultural materialism behind them. So, for example, there's many Semitic cultures, whether it's Judaism or Islam, that say, hey, don't eat pigs. And the prevailing kind of thought was like, initially like, well, God Allah said, don't eat pigs. Hashem ordained this. And then the later sort of thought was like, oh, well, pigs carry disease, yada, yada, yada. But Marvin Harris argues, well, any animal can carry disease. Like, why would pigs be explicitly excluded, whereas goats, cows, anything else, sheep, et cetera, et, can be eaten. And one of the arguments that he poses in the book is at the time, if you look at the economic conditions of raising pigs in the Middle east with these specific types of pigs, they were extremely resource dense. They took a ton of energy and time and nutrients and resources to raise them and to actually domesticate them. And so it became sort of an economic tradition to say, hey, it's actually not worth it for us to do this. We're going to cut them out. Same thing with cows in India, that the Hindu tradition says we don't eat cows. It's sort of the mother goddess. It represents all these things about creation. Well, he argues in this book, again, this is not religious. So I apologize if anyone holds this as a religious doctrine. He says this would be actually because the economic conditions of having cows versus killing cows is actually more advantageous to the society. And that if you are raising cows and taking the milk and all that, you will actually create more nutrients and sustenance over time with these specific cows at this time than if you just killed them off. And so it's an interesting look where you take these religious threads and these religious stories that are rooted in a religious tradition and then actually distilling the truth behind it. And it feels kind of similar to what we're doing now where we're taking these stories, these mythologies about Greek antiquity and Odysseus, et cetera, and we're saying, well, what is the actual anthropological truth? Is there something underneath it that's in the subtext that we can actually ascertain that if it's true, completely rewrites our understanding of sea travel, trade, exploration of this ancient period.

[B]

Yeah, I think what it boils down to is you're trying to find a signal within the noise. And that's always a tricky endeavor, of

[A]

course, and certainly disputed and at no point will be settled soon. Is there anything else from the text or even from the episode that you did that we didn't cover that you think is just an interesting thread that maybe paints a picture of travel outside the Mediterranean?

[B]

Yeah, a few things. One is just the sheer number of ancient texts that mention lands beyond the ocean. So Christos, if you can pull out, I think it's one of the files that begins with a zero. Yeah. So here is a non exhaustive list of ancient texts that mention lands beyond the ocean.

[A]

We got everyone. Plato, Pseudo, Aristotle, Pythias, Plutarch, Ptolemy, Seneca, Pliny the Elder. I mean, yeah, there's all these references too.

[B]

Yeah. Now to be clear, these are not all independent accounts. They might have some common sources, there might be some overlap. But it's still striking just how many ancient texts speak of not only islands across the ocean to the west, but some even claim a great continent. And, you know, so Plato in the work Timaeus, which is famous for being the place where we get the Atlantis story he speaks of, he says that Atlantis was outside the pillars of Hercules, which means west of Gibraltar, and that behind Atlantis there were other islands, and then behind those islands there was a great continent. Now, people sometimes say, why would you even mention the Timaeus? It's obviously a fiction. Well, just as when Andy Weir writes the Martian, he's going to use all the good scientific data he can get his hands on. Even if Plato is making this up entirely, he's gonna use whatever geographical stories or traditions he can get his hands on because he wants to make a believable tale.

[A]

Right. If you were to say to me, you know, how in the Martian gravity is different on Mars, I wouldn't say to you, why would you invoke the Martian? That's B.S.

[B]

exactly.

[A]

You're illustrating a point by using a pop culture film or book that I would understand.

[B]

Exactly. So when Plato says that there was a great continent behind Atlantis, like there would Be no reason for him to make that up. You know, like he's already pushing people's credibility. I mean, he's already kind of, he's already going out on a limb and saying that there was Atlantis. Right. He's already appearing crazy to people. Why would he add more details that make him even more crazy?

[A]

Right.

[B]

It makes more sense that he is mentioning things that had some basis in existing traditions or stories.

[A]

So

[B]

besides Plato, there's a few others that also mention a great continent, Plutarch. So Plutarch's on the face which appears in the orb of the moon. That's a handful on the face which appears in the orb of the moon.

[A]

It's got a nice meter to it.

[B]

That's probably the most fascinating of all these texts because it purports to describe a Carthaginian embassy to the so called land of Kronos, which a recent team of Greek astronomers has interpreted to be basically the same North Atlantic route from Britain through the Faroe Islands and Iceland and then to Newfoundland. Okay. And Plutarch says that when the Carthaginian embassy gets to what has been interpreted as Newfoundland, there are Greeks there that have been living there since the time of Hercules or before the time of Hercules, which means centuries before the Trojan War. And they live around a bay which has the size of what we know of as the Sea of Azov in the Black Sea. Okay. Now the Gulf of St. Lawrence by Newfoundland. Oh, it has the same size

[A]

as

[B]

the Sea of Azov and it has the same latitude as the Caspian Sea. And both those things fit the Gulf of St. Lawrence by Newfoundland. Okay. I'm just saying you can keep going down this rabbit hole as far as you want, you know, as long as you want.

[A]

Now with the Troy example, how it's thought to be mythology and then it's now accepted as a real city. The biggest thing here is that we have the ruins of an ancient city.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Now the obvious question is why are there no remnants, tools, weapons, bones of ancient Carthaginians in Newfoundland?

[B]

So, great question. Let's consider the Vikings for a moment. Okay. We know for a fact that the Vikings reached Newfoundland. We found their settlements, okay? But besides that one settlement, they have left zero genetic trace of their existence in North America. There have been no genetic study has found any Viking genes among the native populations of North America. Okay. And if we hadn't found that one site, we still wouldn't believe that they had reached North America. Okay? So this just goes to show how little is left behind by Some of these expeditions. Okay, now do I believe that the Greeks or Carthaginians reached North America? I'm not sure. Okay. I think if they did, it definitely was not done more than a few times. Because if there were an established trade route, we would expect to find more evidence archaeologically. We would expect to find North American crops taken to Europe and European crops taken to North America. We don't find that. Right. So if it happened, it was like a one off thing or a two off thing, maybe like three or four times max. And if that's the case, you wouldn't really expect to find much archaeologically right now.

[A]

Is there something with like. I don't know, I'm trying to think, like, okay, dung or feces, like, oh, we found a seed from North Africa that only grows there that now is indigenous like in this place. And it's a petrified piece of something or like anything that would indicate that. Again, if we're going based off the mythology, like, hey, Greeks have been here for centuries before the Carthaginians landed. There's got to be something.

[B]

Look, there are many such things. I'm not the expert on them, but, you know, like, I just saw this YouTube video where this guy is claiming that Olmec Monument number seven, I believe shows a bearded man carrying a flag who seems to be a Carthaginian. Okay. Like, there are people that have gone love that I haven't gone through this nor probably will I, but there are. If there is any evidence, it's very scant and there are people who try to find it. I mean, okay, one thing to mention is there are hundreds and hundreds of inscriptions that have been found in North America that are purported to be Egyptian or Greek or Phoenician. Almost all of them have been shown to be forgeries. Therefore, if there are any real ones, it's going to be really hard to convince anybody that they're real because of how many forgeries have been debunked.

[A]

Right. You know, now this Viking settlement in Newfoundland.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

How robust is that settlement, are you aware?

[B]

Beyond my expertise.

[A]

Because I'm so curious if it's like, hey, we found like maybe a cave where they were posted up, or if they're like, oh no, this was a proper city with, you know, 2,000 people and we have all these, you know, pieces of evidence here because that would maybe, that maybe like shake my skepticism where I'm like, all right, if they found like one bone and they're like, this is evidence of the Vikings and it's like, well, you're just one bone.

[B]

I know it's more than one bone, and I know it's fewer than 2,000 people, but where in that large spectrum, I can't tell you.

[A]

Fair. Now, before we move on, is there anything else from this that you think are interesting little threads that would promote this theory?

[B]

Oh, you know, we could go through some maps. So let's first look at numbers. 1, 2, 3. 1, 2 and 3.

[A]

What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because I gotta tell you something. I had one of those days recently where I woke up super tired. I drank coffee and then I drank more coffee. I was tired. I trained badly because I had too much coffee. And then I couldn't sleep because I had too much coffee. And the frustrating part is I'm doing all the things. I'm lifting, I'm eating protein, I'm taking creatine, I'm trying to sleep, I'm occasionally fasting because someone on YouTube told me it was good. But sometimes I'm still walking around feeling like I'm only charged to like 60%. And that is what got me thinking so seriously about testosterone. Like, I think about testosterone a lot because it's the thing that makes me feel amazing. And that's why I've been taking Mars mentioned. Here's what I learned. Your body can be making testosterone, but a portion of it gets bound to a protein called shbg. It's literally like the testosterone's there, but you can't use it. It's in jail. Marsman is designed to help you free up that lock testosterone, so your body can better utilize what it's already producing. And what's great about Mars man is there's no needles, no synthetic hormones. Mars man uses eight natural, clinically dosed ingredients that help support healthy testosterone levels, energy, and stamina. You can buy all of these supplements independently. But what I love about Mars Men is they put it all into one very simple dose. For me, it's just a steady sense of drive. I feel more locked in during the day. I recover faster, I feel better and more motivated to train. And some men report more consistent energy, stronger physical performance, and improved recovery. 91% of users report higher energy levels. And there are thousands of reviews on the Marsman website from actual dudes sharing their experience. It's made in the USA, third party tested, and it's available at GNCs nationwide. And it comes with a 90 day money back guarantee. So you can try it and pay attention to how you feel and See whether Marsman fits your routine. And for a limited time, the listeners of this show, if you are a camper, you are going to get 50% off for life plus free shipping and three free gifts when you go to MengotoMars.com that is MengotoMars.com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out. And after you purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about them. Make sure you tell them that Mark and Christo is from the campsite sent you. Now let's get back to the show. Hey guys, we're going to take a break real quick because this episode is sponsored by Brunt Workwear. I got the Marin boot right here and what immediately stood out to me about this is the quality. They feel substantial. They are genuinely comfortable. And just being honest, they are a really good looking boot. I like them, I wear them. This is even the pair that I wear. The pair that I wear is at my house and they're absolutely dirty right now. But this gear is made for people working demanding jobs in like actual trades. But you don't have to work on a job site to recognize when something is built really well. And right now, Brunt is giving one lucky winner $50,000 in the Brunt Potty of Gold Sweepstakes. Yes, that is the actual name and yes, it is a lot of cash. If I won 50 grand, I would go towards probably upgrading the campsite. I would get some new cameras. I would send Christos back to Greece probably. And what's awesome is that entering is completely free. Just create a Brunt account or log in with your existing account to start earning entries. And you can earn additional entries by following Brunt on social media, signing up for their emails and their texts or or even picking up some new gear. So you can also earn extra entries for every dollar you spend through September 18, 2026. And here's what you do. You go to bruntworkwear.com camp, use the code camp and you will get 10 off and enter the Brunt Potty of Gold Sweepstakes for your chance to win $50,000. Oh, and here's another thing that I love about Brunt is that they actually let you wear your boots before you decide if you want to keep them. And if the boots aren't right for you, you can return them for a full refund. It's a 100% risk free trial. There is no reason not to do it. It was started by this guy, Eric Girard. He literally grew up blue collar and he kept Hearing the same complaints like, hey, all the major brands aren't making boots for actual work. And one more time, you're going to get $10 off at Brunt when you use the code camp at checkout. So head to bruntworkwear.com camp, use the code camp and enter the sweepstakes for a chance to win $50,000. No purchase is necessary. The sweepstakes end September 18, 2026, and official rules apply. Go check out Brunt now. Let's get back to the show.

[B]

So this is the typical map you'll find. And if you go to the next two files, you'll see similar ones.

[A]

And so this is the explanation for the journey just being in the Mediterranean.

[B]

So these are already in the classical period. So like 500 BC the Greeks were doing this game where they were like putting dots on the map and connecting them. And most of these modern maps are based on those ancient reconstructions. Okay. And again, all of these were done by Greeks who, you know, did not believe the distances in the text.

[A]

Right.

[B]

They say these, these 9 day and 17 day voyages are just poetic exaggeration. If we shrink it down to scale, this is what we get. Okay, now let's go to the map called Mertz. I think it's zero at the beginning. So this is the most famous modern Atlantic reconstruction. And I actually made it myself based on Mertz's book because I don't think anybody. She herself doesn't give the whole voyage, I think, because it's so ridiculous if you put it all on the map. So I did it myself because I couldn't find one. And so she commits the fatal flaw of beginning at Troy and ending in Ithaca.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And she also commits the fatal flaw of trying to make it all one voyage. And as you can see, that forces her to make two, not one, but two full circuits around the Atlantic to get everything in. So that's, you know, that's kind of ridiculous. And you know, people look at other books that she's written and she used to be what's called a hyper diffusionist. It refers to these old theories that humans had explored much more than is plausible.

[A]

Love that.

[B]

So, yeah, she probably was a little cuckoo. But within, she also did a lot of interesting research and I think she came up with the be of fundi idea.

[A]

I see it.

[B]

So there's a few nuggets within the craziest stuff.

[A]

Hell yeah. What about Scaria being in Alabama?

[B]

Yeah. So that to me is preposterous. I mean, she. So she puts the. She puts the land of the sun. With the sun cattle north of the Bay of Fundy, where I said that there's a caribou. Yeah, I don't think she mentions caribou.

[A]

That's.

[B]

But from there she has Odysseus drift to the Azores where Calypso is, which I think is that. That's implausible because he's just drifting. And drifting speeds is like one knot, you know, it's very slow. So I don't think nine days is enough to get you from Canada to the Azores if you're just drifting. And then when he see. When Odysseus sees the land of the Phaeacians, Poseidon comes back from vacation and is like, what, that dude again? And he sends his storms and Odysseus is tossed about for three days before he reaches land. And Mertz has that. She thinks a tornado hits him in the Azores and takes him to Florida.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

Which not only is it ridiculous, but it's clear in the text that he's tossed around for three days and then makes it to that land that he saw three days earlier. It's not a new land.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You know, also, if you landed in

[A]

the Panhandle, you would remember, you know, that would be in there for sure. They'd be like, dude, we saw a gas station. You would not believe There's a BUC EE's up here.

[B]

There'd be way more people on spring break.

[A]

Exactly. There'd be a whole bunch of stuff, for sure. Wow. Okay. This is so fun seeing all this stuff.

[B]

Also, she puts. So she puts the land of the dead in West Africa, or I say Hades. Right. Which is crazy because there's never any fog there, like, ever. Okay. So she puts what Homer calls the foggiest place anyone's ever seen in the desert.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

Makes no sense.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But again, that's because she starts at Troy, and you shouldn't do that.

[A]

Right. It is interesting that basically all these maps put the lotus eaters in Tunisia, like, near Carthage. Is there a reason why it's kind of like, accepted amongst everyone?

[B]

Yes, because. Okay, so remember how I said that the imported copy pasted earlier travel narrative that we're trying to reconstruct begins and ends with these two magical episodes, the storm and the Phaeacians, the robot ship. So if you don't see that, okay, so the storm happens. You see, like, just southwest of Troy, there's the tip of Greece. And I have the arrow. Yeah, right there. So that tip is called that. That's Cape Malia. Okay, that's where the storm hits him. And the storm takes his fleet for nine days over the sea. Now that's too big a journey for the Mediterranean. But anyway, it takes him southwest and that takes you to the lotus eaters. So that would suggest a Libyan location or Tunisian location. If you are trying to shrink it down to scale and put it in the Mediterranean. Okay, but if instead, and this, by the way, I left your question unanswered about the Caribbean. This is where we get to that. If instead the storm off Malaya acts as the beginning of the copy pasted narrative. So we're suddenly now in a new place. We don't know where, but we're somewhere. And we're taken by a storm for nine days, southeast. And we come to a land where you could just eat food that's growing around you and not have any care in the world. Well, that sounds a lot like the Carthaginian island paradise they discovered that was so lush and desirable that people wanted to all move there from Carthage. And Carthage was scared of their home being depopulated, so they forbade people from going there. Right, Like I'm not saying. I'm saying if you're trying to find something in the existing ancient literature that matches the lotus eaters, the two accounts of the Phoenician Carthaginian ship being tossed on the sea for many, many days and coming to an island paradise where there's a lot of delicious fruit. Sounds like a candidate.

[A]

Okay, yes.

[B]

So could Homer have heard this from some Phoenicians? Possible. It might not even be part of the same story as the northern adventures. Right. He could have heard the Phoenician story of the island paradise and put that in the early part of the story. And then he might have heard a separate account of a northern journey with solar confusion. And between them is another magical episode, the island of Aeolus. Okay, now everybody, everybody and their mom has put Aeolus near Italy. You see that?

[A]

Mm.

[B]

Can you put, can you bring up the file called Lipari? L I P A R I. Okay, so this is the. To the west of the southern tip of Italy, north of Sicily, are this group of islands called, still called now the Aeolian islands. It's a popular destination for sailors. And most people since antiquity have said that the island of Aeolus, Aeolia, the island of the winds, is Lipari. Now the problem is Odysseus sails I think for like nine days east of Lipari before he finds his seaside of land. And, and within a day, you would hit Italy. Okay, so that doesn't really work. And he also says that the island of Aeolus is a floating island. Now, what would. What would make you think an island is floating?

[A]

Something to do with the stars, Maybe some type of rotation. Maybe, like, I don't know now I'm guessing.

[B]

Well, like, okay, let's say if you're on an island, maybe if there's like,

[A]

waves or, like, if the island felt shaky, like if you're on Long Island.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And you can see New York. Are you ever gonna think you're on a floating island? No, because the reference point stays the same. Stays the same. Right. What if you're on an island where there is no other land you can see, and the things that you do see beyond your island, like the clouds and the currents seem to be moving around you. Wouldn't you think that you are relatively. You're moving, that you're like a massive ship that's sailing in this sea?

[A]

Right.

[B]

So I think hints like that point to the island of Aeolus being also an Atlantic island. Super remote, very remote, where there are currents and clouds that make it seem like it's moving. And there is no big land you can see that serves as a reference point. And so it seems like you're just floating on the limitless sea.

[A]

Would the Azores be a possibly.

[B]

Or Madeira is another candidate. So Madeira, unlike the Azores, doesn't have an archipelago, but even the Azores is possible because the Azores are so far from each other that you could be on the easternmost Azore island and not really see the other ones.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

So I think for the island of Aeolus, Madeira and the eastern Azores are both possible. And both of those would allow you to have a nine day voyage before you hit land. And then so the cool thing is this. So when Odysseus leaves the island of the Winds. And by the way, why is it the island of the Winds that implies that it's an island that experiences all different winds? North wind, south wind, east wind, west wind.

[A]

Plural winds.

[B]

Yeah. And both Madeira and the Azores, because they're both kind of within this North Atlantic gyre, like close ish to the center. Not that, not central, but kind of far enough towards the center to have all the different winds and currents play a role. So you could experience all the different winds on either of those islands. And therefore it might be a floating island and one that has all the different winds come into play once in a while. So then Odysseus sails east with a steady westerly Wind and westerly means it's blowing you from the west. Okay. And he sails, I think, nine days. We can check that chart again. So he sails from the island of Aeolus for nine days eastward. And then Homer says he sees Ithaca. They even see, like, the smoke from the chimneys of their homes. And just as they're about to get close, some of these idiots on board, they open the bag of the winds get blown away, and the winds reverse and they get blown back to the island of Aeolus. Okay, now, since you cannot sail for nine days towards. Where is it? Yeah. Since you cannot sail for nine days east and reach Ithaca, it's impossible. So let's just assume for the sake of argument, that Homer substituted some other location with Ithaca. Let's just say Gibraltar, or let's say Portugal, or let's say Ireland. Doesn't really matter. Okay. It's very plausible that if you leave either the Azores or Madeira and you have an eastern blowing, a westerly wind blowing towards the east, in both cases, you could make the journey to, let's say, Gibraltar in about nine days. And in both cases, you could be hit by the Canary Current and. And an eastern wind randomly that will just blow you right back where you came from.

[A]

And I could imagine, once again, a story of a sailor being like, dude, I was sailing. I left this island. We were just about to be there, and then out of nowhere, these winds pulled us all the way back to this other crazy place. I almost died.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then that story passes along. It becomes this myth.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Oh, that's so fun. That is fascinating. It's. It's. It is fun doing this. Like, it's fun because it suspends a lot of the strict sort of academic scrupulousness that goes along with being, you know, like a. A. A professor, so to speak. Right. And it opens up so much more room to say, well, what if? And so often I find when speaking with professors or people that adhere to a very strict sort of academic guideline, they're like, well, if there's no other evidence for it or there's no other record for it, then it couldn't be. But just to say, well, what if? And I think in the gray of the what if. If even one of these is true, if even one mention of Newfoundland or, you know, the Funk Islands or something is true. I mean, it just completely changes what we understand about this period. And to me, I'm like, why would you not want to even just experiment with the idea? Right? Do you have other academics and other People of your scholarly standing that reach out to you privately, and they're like, hey, I think you're onto something here, but I can't say it.

[B]

Well, my friends who are in academia, they enjoy this stuff. They tell me that. Right. And it's not like they're afraid to say it. It's just that it's just not what comes up in academia.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And again, it's like, I think it's more indifference than it is hostility.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

I mean, of course, there are people who are hostile to anything that doesn't fall into their specialty. And they're established. You know what? They've established scholarship. But I think usually it's just they're indifferent to it, but if they come across it, they find it. So, like, I told a few of my friends who are now professors about this episode, and I was expecting them to be like, oh, we've lost you. But they were like, oh, that's cool. You know? Right.

[A]

I can imagine historians and anthropologists to be the ones that are the more effusive, where they're like, hey, you're using mythology to try to suggest that what I know to be true is wrong, so get out of here.

[B]

And just to be extra clear, you should ask me, how much of this do I believe? Go ahead.

[A]

How much of what we've talked about today do you believe? 100%.

[B]

Well, nothing. 100%. I think it's very likely that either the Greeks or the Phoenicians or both wandered up the North Atlantic coast to Britain and Scandinavia. Reasonable, given that we know that that happened later. I don't see why it couldn't have happened in the Bronze Age, especially given that they were looking for the sources of amber and for tin.

[A]

Okay, so maybe 85% likelihood.

[B]

I'd bet. Like, I'd bet a thousand bucks.

[A]

Wow. Okay.

[B]

But I wouldn't bet anything on the other stuff. Okay, so Iceland, you know, even I think it's. Well, I'll say that I think the Scandinavian stuff is, to me, sounds very likely, because, again, it happened later in antiquity. And the idea that nobody tried to follow the coastline and see where it went seems contrary to human nature. We have so many stories of other civilizations. I mean, the Polynesians. Right. Polynesians that reached Easter island, which is a thousand miles away from anything, and

[A]

it's a tiny little dot in the middle of the ocean.

[B]

The entire Pacific. Right. Like when. When the Europeans were, like, Captain Cook and others were in the Pacific, they found all these islands inhabited. It's like shooting A bullseye from, you know, a mile away. Right. We have stories of African attempts to cross the ocean. Like there's the famous story of Mansa Musa's predecessor. We don't know his name, but the king, Mansa Musa of Mali, I think, told the story that his predecessor ordered the construction of like a flotilla and they just sailed west into the ocean and were never heard from again. Okay, so this is what humans do. You know, they. Mertz has a. Again, Mertz, who is cuckoo, but she has some good lines. She said if anybody told the ancient Greeks, don't go there because the edge of the world is there, somebody would have been like, oh, let me go see. Right.

[A]

If we have people leaving Mali to just sail west and see what's out there, putting their lives on the line. It's hard for me to believe that only one guy in all of human history ever did that.

[B]

Yeah. So I think traveling to the north of Europe is quite likely. Everything else is plausible. It's worth investigating further. I'm not committed to it.

[A]

Can we still use this money metaphor? You put in 1,000 bucks on Scandinavia, how much money are you going to put on Iceland?

[B]

I don't know, maybe 500.

[A]

How much money are you putting in Newfoundland?

[B]

One or 200.

[A]

How much money are you putting on Bermuda?

[B]

50.

[A]

That's fair. I think that's a very reasonable estimate. And then what about the panhandle of Florida?

[B]

Zero.

[A]

I think that's fair. I think that kind of tracks for me. I think that makes sense, right? It's not. Again, I am very fond of this idea that ancient civilizations are more clever, more advanced, and as curious, if not more curious than we are at this very day. And I think we don't always give them so much credit. And I think we like to be like, oh, yeah, they believe the Earth was flat. They think this. And it seems like as time goes on, a lot of those assumptions about antiquity are maybe not so true and that I do think they were in many ways as smart and as clever and perhaps even smarter than us now in terms of specific local knowledge and information. And so the idea of, I mean, even looking at non humans like Homo florensis, they were seafaring, they were going distances. I think Neanderthals had boats like all

[B]

of these, like proto human Australopithecus is Australia, right?

[A]

Yeah, exactly. It's like, it's crazy to me that these even non human sort of like proto human hominids are doing sea travel. And the idea that like the, you know, the brightest, most elite Homo sapiens couldn't have done it just because we don't have a documented record of it. Yeah, it seems a little bit. I don't know, it lacks a certain amount of curiosity to me. But I love this. This is so fun. And the detailing that you put into this, I just think it's so enjoyable and really refreshing for someone with your pedigree and your authority on the topic to be willing and open to explore these types of things. I just think is awesome and evidenced by your channel and specifically this video's successful. I think it resonates with a lot of people as well.

[B]

Well, thanks. And it's been really fun talking about it with you.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. Now, before we go, I think we have maybe 25 minutes. Can I ask you some questions about the Odyssey? The film?

[B]

Sure.

[A]

So you saw the Odyssey, the most recent film by Christopher Nolan? Yeah, he's outside. I don't want to speak out of turn here, but you gave me a rating out of 10.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Could you share that with me now?

[B]

6 or 7 out of 10?

[A]

Why?

[B]

Well, okay, first of all, being somebody who has read the Odyssey so many times, including in ancient Greek, I'm going to be more picky than most people.

[A]

I mean, you can even recite the opening lines in ancient Greek.

[B]

I can.

[A]

Would you mind spin a little Greek for us?

[B]

Do you have a drum?

[A]

Oh, no, but I can give you a little beat, though.

[B]

Can you do like a dum? Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. There we go. Andramoyen e pe music. Poladhagen pontoi pathen al gehon katathumon arnumenos hein Te psuhyn kainoston hetairon al udhos hetarus erus satohieme nosper auton garsveteraisin atasthaliasin olonto. There you go.

[A]

Amazing. I mean, that is so cool. And so that's how it would be told.

[B]

Yeah. And for how many with a liar?

[A]

How many hours would that go on for?

[B]

We can't know for sure, but based on, like, the length of an English audiobook that covers the whole thing is about 12 to 14 hours. So it's possible that that's the time frame.

[A]

Wow, that is fascinating. That recontextualizes so much of it. Right. Because we read it in, you know, a class in high school or college, and it's just words on a page. It's kind of like when you read Shakespeare. You get the gist, but you lose so much because this is not a book to be read. It is a play or a performance to be experienced. And I imagine that this is probably the same exact way.

[B]

Yeah. And in fact, we know for sure that the Homeric rhapsodes that performed this, they could mimic different voices. They could get into like, I can remember Non's voice and then Helen's voice and then, you know, whatever. Like, they could. They would really get into character with all the different figures.

[A]

And what would be the context that I would be listening to this if I'm an ancient Greek?

[B]

Well, in, in Athens there were like state sponsored festivals where you'd have a superstar on stage and maybe a thousand people watching. In the age of Homer, we don't know, but probably like, you know, probably the types of scenes depicted in the actual Odyssey where you have a feast put on by a king or local warlord in a great hall and a bard as entertaining, maybe like a hundred people who are feasting.

[A]

Would I be drinking?

[B]

Definitely.

[A]

I'd be hammered.

[B]

You would?

[A]

Nice. Would I be on drugs?

[B]

Possibly. In book four of the Odyssey, when Telemachus visits Menelaus. By the way, this is a great missed opportunity for Nolan because Helen, Homer's Helen is way more formidable than Nolan's Helen. Okay. Homer's Helen drugs the whole party, really. When she sees that Telemachus is the son of Odysseus and Menelaus is going to start like waxing nostalgic about Odysseus and the Trojan War, which she caused in this storyline, she's like, okay, this is gonna be bad for me. Let me drug everybody's wine. And she uses an Egyptian drug that is so potent that if you take it, even if your child is being torn to pieces in front of you, you will still not shed a tear. So there we have like this type of scene where a bard might be present. He's not in this case. But drugs were definitely known and described.

[A]

What do you think that could be? I mean, it sounds like ecstasy.

[B]

The main theory is opium.

[A]

Ah, so you're just on heroin.

[B]

I'm not an expert.

[A]

That's wild. I mean, I'm. I mean, again, I've never done heroin. Not yet. But my understanding is like, that's. It's how you. It's from the poppy, right?

[B]

It's not. Well, again, it's not mentioned that it's poppy. It's just mentioned that it's from Egypt. And there has been speculation that Egypt was importing opium from, you know, Central Asia or something. Again, through various indirect intermediaries now, what

[A]

other discrepancies from the film to your understanding of the original Greek are you bothered? You?

[B]

Okay, the first thing is like, why are they wearing helmets when they're rowing on the boat?

[A]

Hilarious.

[B]

Or wandering in a forest? First of all, the helmets are anachronistic. These are much later helmets. They constrict your vision very severely. They're only useful if you are marching in a column of dudes. And you're only going to go forward if you're walking in a forest where there might be like dangerous creatures around you. You don't want to wear this helmet. All right. I thought that the biggest problem was trying to force modern morality onto an ancient tale. Like, it's. To me, one of the main values of the Homeric epics is that they have such a different morality. And even if we find it shocking or, or we don't want to accept that morality, shouldn't we know how other human societies saw the world morally?

[A]

What's the clearest example?

[B]

Well, the clearest example is that Odysseus kills all the suitors. Right, right. Can we do spoilers here?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a 2000 year old story if you haven't heard of it now. I mean, too late.

[B]

Well, because in Nolan's version, he doesn't kill all the suitors, okay. He spares quite a few of them. In Homer, he only spares like two or three. That's another missed opportunity. Because you know how like in the final scene, Odysseus, Matt Damon, Odysseus prophecies that only songs will remember them, that no writing will survive. Right. Well, in the actual Odyssey, one of the few people that Homer, that Homer, that Odysseus spares is the bard. The guy who's singing. He is one of the suitors technically, but he's also the singer of epic tales to the suitors. So how cool is that that you spare the guy who you want to sing of your exploits.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You know, that's kind of totally missed.

[A]

Yeah. It's sort of poetic to be like, I'm gonna kill everyone except for you. Go tell this tale to the next person. And then when you're watching it live at a festival, you're like, oh, that's the guy that got spared. Like it feels it becomes meta in a way. Oh, that's cool. Now, my friend Alex pointed out that he thought it was weird that Helen has a twin.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Now, I know that in some retellings, and it's been disputed, that there is this twin theory with Helen, but he says if she's the most beautiful woman ever, that you're gonna send a thousand ships for if she has a twin sister, doesn't that kind of nerf that whole point?

[B]

Yeah. So again, in the original, they are sisters, but not twin sisters. I'm not sure why Nolan did that. Maybe just to not have to find another actor.

[A]

You know, it's a little cheaper.

[B]

But there's these weird cases of twins where one twin is divine and the other isn't. Okay, so like, have you heard of Castor and Pollux? Mm mm. Or. So Castor and Pollux and Helen and Clytemnestra are two cases where you have two twins, two pairs of twins. And in each case, for some reason, one twin gets the divine parentage and the other does not. Sorry, they're not twins, they're siblings. But one of them gets the divine parentage, one of them doesn't. I think it might be like. So you have this like, you know, beautiful woman and a God sleeps with her, but her husband also sleeps with her, and perhaps one of the children has the divine parentage.

[A]

It's like a Maury Povich.

[B]

Anyway, it's a common thing theme in. Or it's a well known theme in Greek mythology that you can have siblings where one of them is divine, one of them is not. So Helen is semi divine, which is why.

[A]

After.

[B]

Which is why she and Menelaus are never going to die in the strict sense. But they will be transported to the isles of. To Elysium, to the Elysian Field. Menelaus is prophesied too, that he will not die, but because he has a divine wife, they will be taken by the gods to the Elysian Field across the ocean. Another reference to a land across the ocean where they will live there forever, basically. Okay, so Clytemnestra is a lesson attractive, less divine sibling in the original.

[A]

Interesting. Now, my buddy Andrew pointed out, he said that he actually liked the casting because many people would say, like, I know there's a lot of uproar from specifically the Greeks, right, Christos. Where they would say, like, oh, why are they casting a black woman in the space of a, you know, an ancient Greek. This is completely anachronistic. They're erasing Greek culture. My friend Andrew says she's actually the most exotic person and that, like, her ethnicity or her skin tone actually creates a distinction where she looks unique to the people. As far as the, like, the racial dynamic, it feels like it was a little bit overblown. But I'm curious your perspective as a historian on this specific time.

[B]

Well, I think that there were. I think there were so many more important issues that Nolan got wrong.

[A]

Yeah. You're worried about the helmets? It's very niche.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, like the only person in the cast who either was Greek or spoke Greek was a person who played a non Greek.

[A]

Hilarious.

[B]

So the first stop after Troy is Ismaris. It's not mentioned by name in the movie, but the first stop they make where they plunder this coastal village and there's this survivor and he's this old man and he tells them they're like, we're Greeks from Ithaca. And he speaks modern Greek to them. The actor is a Greek. Okay. And in the movie he's speaking modern Greek and he's saying, if you go west, troubles await you. And then he has to be translated to these so called Greeks.

[A]

Hilarious.

[B]

It's just like, seriously?

[A]

Yeah, that is a good distinction. Right. Like, Matt Damon is equally not Greek as Lupita. Like they're both not Greek. And we're kind of putting like a modern racialized lens on a period where race wasn't really a thing. Right. Like it was just sort of nationality. Is that fair to say?

[B]

Well, I mean, I don't know how much race was a thing. I think, I think Greece was definitely not as multicultural as it appears to be in the film, you know, but there's a lot we don't know.

[A]

So they also weren't speaking English.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Now, another element that I mentioned before that is my favorite part of the book, at least when I read it in high school, I was like, oh, that's so clever. Is when he tells the Cyclops that he's nobody.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Do you have a theory as to why that was cut out? Did it bother you that that element was removed?

[B]

Well, I did see that Nolan was asked this, I think by Jon Stewart in an interview, and he says, we just couldn't work it in. It was impossible. So, I don't know, I mean, look, there's a lot of unfortunate choices. I think maybe I should tell you what I thought was done well, though.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, before we get to that, I just want to know if there's any other details. You were like, ah, this was a missed opportunity. This is the best part. Da, da, da. Things that people don't know. I mean, the land of the dead, where he holds his mother three times and she evaporates and moves through him and she dies of, you know, a broken heart waiting for him that's like the most beautiful part of the whole poem. And it's also omitted. So I'm like, ugh.

[B]

I mean, look, if you're gonna take what was a 14 hour performance and make it into a three hour film, you have to cut things that are gonna be really sad to cut.

[A]

Fair.

[B]

Okay. At the same time, I think Nolan could have done some really awesome things that he didn't do. You know, like, one is to actually show the ancient morality in all its shocking alien aspects. Right. But I will say that there were some really, really clever things that he did.

[A]

Tell me.

[B]

Like when Odysseus in the land of. In Cersei's isle, when he. When he goes hunting and he shoots the deer and then he goes to retrieve the body, and it's a human body that's not in Homer. It's a brilliant touch to give Odysseus a way of understanding what's happening on this island, that you have a witch turning humans into beasts. And then here's one that he did that I think Aristotle would have approved. Because Aristotle said that the power of tragedy, and Homer, he takes to be a kind of related form of art to tragedy. The power of tragedy is most vividly seen in moments of reversal and recognition. So when fortunes suddenly change, or when somebody recognizes somebody, those are the powerful moments. And he says the best tragedies combine them. So the moment of recognition is also the moment of reversal of fortune. And in this case, Nolan, it's not in the original, but Nolan made the moment where the dog Argos recognizes Odysseus to coincide with the moment where Telemachus recognizes Odysseus, which also then marks the reversal. Because now Telemachus knows that things are different. Right.

[A]

So I'm not going to get killed. Things are turning around.

[B]

Exactly. So that would have been. That would have the stamp of approval of Aristotle on it.

[A]

Wow, that's a great way to look at this, I think. So many people are trying to skewer the original and say, like, oh, they ruined it and destroyed it and Hollywood effed up the whole movie. Well, there are elements that are changed, and perhaps some of those criticisms are legitimate. But it is also possible that in certain elements, Nolan did better than Homer. And that is quite an achievement. Even if he does it once. I mean, I know this is probably breaking Christos heart. He's like, no, dude, Homer's the best. No one could ever be Homer. But that part right there, it's not something I even considered in that one single moment. It does Two things at once that even the rhapsodes of old didn't do.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Wow, that's a great point. And that is also maybe the most beautiful part. Argo seeing his owner and being like. And then dying immediately after, and Odysseus shedding one single tear and wiping it away. It's perfect. I mean, truly perfect.

[B]

It's gold.

[A]

Right. It's also a great name for a dog that I feel like not enough people are using. Right. Like, I always meet Fidos all the time. How many Lunas have I met in the last year? Give me an Argos. That's the best dog name I've ever heard. I think there's going to be a big. There's going to be a big explosion of Argos in the next two years. Watch. Now, anything else that you saw in the film that you thought could have been different was a deviation, but you didn't mind or was even better than the original.

[B]

Well, I like to think of the positive things because there's a lot of negatives. I don't want to, you know, do that. But one more thing that was cool is the sound that the bow makes when you pluck it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Now, that's totally unrealistic. Okay. A bow of that tension would have sounded like bing, you know, hilarious.

[A]

Yeah. You want. You want bass?

[B]

What. What you hear is like the. The thickest, biggest string of a harp with that whole resonating chamber available. Yeah, right.

[A]

Feels like a. Like a tool intro, you know, that's what you want.

[B]

That was obviously like, you know, the sound was overlaid with harp or something. But what I like there is that in the scene with the challenge of the bow. Right. Oh, another missed opportunity. The interview between Penelope and Odysseus. Right. The original is way better, man. She's so much smarter, and they kind of speak in codes. And he kind of signals to her that he's Odysseus without saying it outright. And then she kind of gets it. And then she says, so, what should I do? And then he says, well, I think you should announce the bow challenge, which is totally not in the movie. Right, right. And then she's, okay, sounds good. So, like, you can read. It's not like, you know, it's not uncontroversial, but you can read into that scene in Homer that he's giving her a signal. She's getting it. She's asking for advice. He gives it, and then she's like, okay. And it's like they've conspired together. That's totally missed in the movie. But then what is cool is so he starts stringing the bow. And all these suitors are angry and they're jeering and they're insulting him, and you feel like at any moment they might just charge him and beat him up, right? And the music is growing in tension and growing and growing and growing. And then at the moment of the climax of the musical crescendo, it goes bang. And then the music stops like, shit just got real.

[A]

And it's like, yeah, it's awesome. But now, also in the Homeric, it's not something I ever understood. And from my reading of the excerpts of the original, where it's like, okay, he's talking to Penelope. He's like, let's do this bow thing. She's like, all right, let's do it. And then even after he does that, she still is not sure. And she's like, move my bed out of the chamber. And then he's like, well, you can't move the bed.

[B]

I made that bed.

[A]

It's an active olive tree. And it's like this whole thing, it's like. It makes me think that she still didn't believe it even after this whole feat and threading the bow and shooting through the ax handles, all that. So in your interpretation from the original Homeric, at what point does she know Odysseus is really him?

[B]

Well, I think the purpose of her at least feigning disbelief and making him prove himself is because Homer wants her to be an equal to him in Cunningham. If she had just said, oh, you're home, honey.

[A]

Thank.

[B]

Oh, thank you so much.

[A]

No, prove it with the axe handles.

[B]

That would be.

[A]

But after you do that, then she gotta come down and be like, all right, it's you. I get it.

[B]

But Odysseus himself does this, right? Like when Odysseus goes like. Odysseus doesn't just check people's intentions. He double checks and triple checks and triple tests, right? Like after he kills the suitors and he goes to see his father. His father is, like, plowing the earth all muddy and dirty. And. And you'd think he would just say, dad, I'm home. But instead, he makes up yet another tale of who he is, which is a lie. And he says, oh, yeah, I saw Odysseus. He's dead. And his dad, like, collapses, almost dies of, like, a heart attack. It's like, oh, just kidding. It's me dead.

[A]

Right? Yeah. Just pump fakes on him for no reason.

[B]

And you might be like, Again, somebody with modern morality coming in just like, that's so cruel. It's like, but, but this is why Odysseus survived. Because he's that kind of person who tests even the people that he should trust. He's that suspicious and that crafty and that cunning, that of all the people that went on this long saga, only he made it home. Right?

[A]

Right.

[B]

And then Penelope, I think the poet Homer, other bards, they want her to be his match in cunning. And so she has to do the same thing. She has to test him and double test him and triple test him, right? And then finally they're united. And when they're united, they have homo frosune, they have like minded relationship, which Odysseus says is the greatest thing on earth.

[A]

So don't look at it as, you know, a great hero that's godlike and a damsel in distress. Look at it almost as like spy versus spy, where it's like they're both testing each other the entire time, all the way up until the very end. Now, in the disputed ending of the original Homer, there's a great civil war and all the families of the suitor start fighting and there's a whole thing. And then Athena comes down and Zeus is like, guys, stop. And wipes everybody's memory. I've heard it said that that's not really accepted. What say you on that rendition of memory?

[B]

What do you mean it's not accepted?

[A]

I've heard that a lot of scholars have said, no, no, no, it ends after the olive tree bed situation and then happily ever after. But that additional ending where there's a civil war and Zeus has to throw a thunderbolt, is that part accepted by Homer's.

[B]

There's always some scholars who think, well, maybe the original ending was here or maybe Homer should have ended it there. But I mean, the manuscripts agreed that it ends after the divine intervention. And I think, to me, I think the existing ending we have is the best ending because to me the Odyssey, in the same way that the Iliad is a faint altered memory of the coalition warfare that attended the Bronze Age collapse, the Odyssey to me is a faint memory of the chaotic migrations that also followed the Bronze Age collapse. And so when, like, there is a sense in the ending of this epic poem that Ithaca will never be the powerful state it was once before, right? Like Odysseus regains his throne, but at a huge cost to the community and he's not happy about killing them. Like there's this great line where after he kills all the suitors, except for, like, three. The nurse Heraclia, who recognized his scar, she comes into the hall, right? And she's about to, like. She opens her mouth to be like, woohoo. And Odysseus, like, grabs her throat and says, it is not right to rejoice over slain men. So he. The poem is at great pains to make it feel like he did this out of necessity, in order to establish order, to establish his rightful place, so forth. But it's not a good. It's not a happy ending. It's not a good thing for Ithaca. Ithaca will never be the same. Just like after the Bronze Age collapse, the Greek. A lot of the Greek areas, they went on, they survived in a sense, but they never achieved their former glory until the end of the Dark Ages, four centuries later. And so there's a sense in this poem, like, yeah, order was restored, but this is now a kind of fallen world.

[A]

Right. And the fact that the gods had to come down and wipe everyone's memory.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Is that necessary? Like, sometimes it feels a little deus ex machina to me.

[B]

It's a bit of a deus ex mark, you know?

[A]

Okay, fair. All right. We agree on that. All right, well, Dr. Jack, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for the time. Truly, I am always honored to be in the presence of someone that is a scholar that is willing to come down to my level and explain the details and answer all my frivolous questions. So, truly, it means the world, and I would love to do it again.

[B]

Thanks so much. I've been following your show for a while, so it's an honor to be here, and I hope to be back.

[A]

Let's do it. Hey, guys. If you love conspiracies and hypothetical history, well, I want to invite you to check out Signal 33, a companion pod to our podcast here at camp. It's made and edited by the same team that runs all of our shows, and I choose the topics every single week, so check it out, subscribe, and start the dialogue in the comment section.