RadixJournal - September 18, 2026


Odyssey 5-8: Of Phaeacians and Phoenicians

We Are Charlie Kirk

Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

143.2

Word count

2,148

Sentence count

37

People

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Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 um well let's uh talk a little bit about what is going on in books five through eight
00:00:13.280 uh i would say this um i am taking care of my kids
00:00:18.720 next weekend so i think we might just just because i don't know i i might have time i i just uh
00:00:26.720 i sort of like to you know get prepared in the hours right before the um the session because
00:00:35.960 things are fresh in mind but um i was thinking maybe we should just do a movie and take a quick
00:00:42.720 break from homer next weekend and then return we we are going at a good clip now of uh four at a
00:00:53.060 time um i think this section has some interesting things though that are related to rem theory
00:00:59.400 and they're less sorted than talking about cultic pederasty that's good yeah a little
00:01:06.000 less grimy i suppose let me let me set things up just to make sure that we're all on the same page
00:01:11.640 so again today we're going to talk about five through eight these are very interesting because
00:01:16.780 this is the first time that we meet odysseus in book five we were dealing with telemachus and
00:01:26.860 the telemachy as it's known in books one through four and uh then right at the end of book eight
00:01:35.320 um when um odysseus is among the phaetians he is about to reveal himself to them so it's sort of
00:01:46.400 leaves on a bit of a cliffhanger we we meet odysseus uh with calypso uh on the island of
00:01:56.620 agigia which is this sort of magical island that few will ever venture towards but odysseus ends
00:02:05.200 up there shipwrecked and he spent seven years in effect as her sex slave and um they go to bed
00:02:13.940 although sort of I guess with love um he's not exactly a sex slave maybe is that word
00:02:20.800 maybe and for all the connotations that word entails but he is captive on that island
00:02:27.320 unquestionably and uh Calypso will ask you know why would you even want to go home who is this
00:02:34.040 Penelope uh I'm a goddess and uh Odysseus has to use some rhetoric in a way not to offend her you
00:02:42.720 know, I'm merely a man. I've got to go home. I have some duties there and so on. Calypso helps
00:02:47.620 Odysseus build a boat, and it is a ship. It's not quite the raft that we saw in Christopher Nolan's
00:02:55.380 version. But Poseidon, who was off with the Ethiopians, his subjects, he becomes very angry
00:03:03.980 that Odysseus is at it again. Even though Zeus is sort of determining the world's fates,
00:03:10.780 uh poseidon still wants to get his piece of this and um he shipwrecks he destroys the ship
00:03:21.060 and uh i i believe odysseus even rides on a beam and then has to swim and at some point has to
00:03:27.620 discard these wonderful clothes that calypso gave him uh and he ends up on the island of sharia
00:03:33.940 um and there we meet the uh theatians um who are this this people that um came to uh sharia from
00:03:48.940 somewhere else and they're a people that really understand the art of xenia they can entertain a
00:04:00.760 guest with the best of them. They aren't a warrior people. They're sort of ship-faring people and a
00:04:06.680 people who knows how to dance. There's some interesting descriptions in here. And Odysseus
00:04:13.040 meets Nausicaa, or Nausicaa, I believe is how we're, I think I'm getting better at pronunciations.
00:04:22.700 nausicaa who is um a princess and she's a teenager she it should be married at this point but
00:04:34.080 uh she can't find the right guy she's very picky but she's also a memorable beautiful and charming
00:04:41.820 girl and uh odysseus is again shipwrecked before her she is with her other maids um playing ball
00:04:50.860 on the seashore. Athena wants this beautiful girl to find Odysseus to help him on his way,
00:04:56.660 and so she talks to Nosika about how she needs to wash her clothes, and so she takes her maids
00:05:09.480 down by the seashore, and they're playing ball, and they see Odysseus. Odysseus is naked,
00:05:14.280 um sort of maybe at rock bottom of sorts and he um covers himself uh with branches a sort of fig
00:05:25.720 leaf if you were i think there are some evoke well i would say maybe even eden sort of might
00:05:32.040 perhaps evoke this scene uh perhaps then there they meet um alcanus who is the king this is in
00:05:41.740 book seven and um Odysseus doesn't go with the princess to the to the palace he go Athena covers
00:05:51.120 him in a mist and he kind of walks somewhere else I think there's a little bit of a hint when
00:05:55.540 Odysseus meets this young girl that she might want to marry him she actually even suggests
00:06:02.480 something like that and uh I think she is impressed by this weathered man but obviously
00:06:10.520 a man who is powerful and intelligent and cunning etc and i think also there's a little bit of a
00:06:18.820 sense that who is this person who's washed up on shore he might might he just want to rape you and
00:06:24.660 take you back on his ship or something like that i i think there's sort of both things going on in
00:06:29.920 this meeting um and then a book eight her name is thought to mean ship burner which might suggest
00:06:37.580 as a kind of obstacle in Odysseus's path, right?
00:06:41.800 Yeah, that is interesting.
00:06:43.060 Calypso's name is also interesting.
00:06:44.540 I guess we'll get to that.
00:06:45.440 I presume you wanted to.
00:06:46.880 I think the general thesis there
00:06:48.640 is that it does seem that there is a kind of
00:06:50.460 dying and rising aspect to Odysseus.
00:06:53.460 He's going into the afterworld and so forth,
00:06:55.980 and he's held captive by Calypso,
00:06:58.940 whose name essentially suggests mystery cult.
00:07:02.480 Yeah, I hide.
00:07:04.200 You can even see that, you know, apocalypse.
00:07:06.160 we think of the word apocalypse as um doomsday but that's not what it means it means uncovering
00:07:13.160 and you can see that in the word calypso covering um it's all yeah i would say that she reads very
00:07:21.440 similar to persephone yeah and and she keeps him captive for seven years which is meaningful as
00:07:28.480 well because that's the number of saturn but it's it may also be suggestive of months this is i'm
00:07:33.680 just spitball in here so it's almost like that's the winter right the months of the year that are
00:07:41.580 not fertile and that's when adonis is with persephone maybe that is too specific but i
00:07:48.740 would say that the general theme it seems is coming out of the underworld and it does seem
00:07:55.060 that there are these kind of allusions maybe to mystery cults going on where he's emerging out
00:08:00.600 of the underworld where he visits the underworld and so forth and then he's held captive by a woman
00:08:06.820 who i would say is very kind of persephone coded she's a phonic goddess yeah in theory that would
00:08:12.800 make penelope something closer to venus penelope's name sometimes is thought to mean duck and this
00:08:21.040 was one of the fertility symbols of venus alongside rabbits and doves and so forth
00:08:27.380 interesting let me quick we'll we'll start to delve into that a little bit more let me just
00:08:33.080 uh finish with the summary um then in book eight um it's very interesting it's it's sort of like
00:08:39.900 the olympic games after the death of patroclus in the iliad uh we meet uh queen arete and also
00:08:50.020 So Demidakis, who I think I even mentioned this, these few lines when we first started talking about this, but who seems to almost be a portrait of Homer himself. And there's a, I don't know, meta like level going on with the poem.
00:09:11.260 this presumably this is a poem meant to be performed um whatever we think about its
00:09:18.460 origins in the oral tradition i'm i'm more on the its origins were in the literary tradition
00:09:24.320 side of things but it certainly is something that could very well be performed and it would
00:09:30.560 have been performed by someone like demodocus who's also depicted as blind there's a tradition
00:09:34.800 of homer being blind there's some little places and even in the homeric hems where homer might be
00:09:40.600 some figure of homer might be described of sorts we obviously don't know who he is but
00:09:46.020 um the this is given a he's given a um uh a a commemorative celebratory uh description he's
00:09:58.340 given the choice slice of meat by odysseus uh they play games in their three songs um interestingly
00:10:06.380 the final one is um about the trojan war itself and the wooden horse that was given to troy that
00:10:15.100 the greeks stashed themselves in and this creates all this weeping and crying by odysseus um the
00:10:24.260 story right before that is also very interesting one it's mars and venus uh having an adulterous
00:10:31.360 affair and um asbestos is uh understandably uh po'd about this and he creates this net of chains
00:10:41.020 to uh weigh them it's like a trap that falls down when they go to his bed um while he's off at
00:10:47.840 limnos interesting i mean there's a lot of little tidbits here um uh and uh and and obviously the
00:10:55.380 gods are shocked uh poseidon says that you know if if war doesn't pay the the due basically to
00:11:03.700 asbestos the uh uh his um civil penalty for being cucked or whatever then i'll pay it and and so
00:11:12.180 they they get out of it but um there's also interesting thing in the songs where odysseus
00:11:18.820 asks Demodocus to sing of the Trojan War and he sings about the horse. A couple of interesting
00:11:25.920 tidbits here. First off, the Trojan horse wasn't narrated in the Iliad. And I mean,
00:11:33.400 I don't know if we'll ever know the answer, but it might even arrive from a little bit of a later
00:11:41.180 tradition than the Iliad itself. And then that's a tradition that's sort of retconned into the
00:11:47.380 Odyssey. I don't know that for sure, but all we do know is that the horse is not mentioned.
00:11:53.840 There's another thing that's not mentioned to the Iliad, and I believe it's not mentioned
00:11:57.800 anywhere else, where there is this great argument between Achilles and Odysseus. And here we see
00:12:05.300 again brains versus brawn. And Agamemnon is very pleased by this argument because he knows that
00:12:12.340 this means that we're going to be triumphant as it was foretold by an oracle uh but it's an
00:12:18.460 interesting story to tell and again it's not narrated in the iliad um if we do assume that
00:12:24.740 the odyssey came after the iliad maybe the iliad is sort of like take kind of retconning you could
00:12:29.580 say or kind of embedding other traditions into this bigger story uh it is certainly shocking
00:12:36.380 you know if you if you know nothing or next to nothing about the trojan war you know that there
00:12:42.680 is a horse and yet the horse doesn't appear at all it's not even mentioned in the iliad um and
00:12:48.160 it's only seen in a flashback uh at a story basically in the odyssey but uh anyway there's
00:12:55.120 also an interesting um simile going on where odysseus is heartbroken by the stories of the
00:13:04.240 Trojan War. It's the essence of bitter sweetness. He is proud about what he did. I think he is
00:13:15.440 shell-shocked to some degree. Christopher Nolan emphasized the war veteran quality of Odysseus,
00:13:25.260 maybe overemphasized it, but I don't think it's absent in Homer. He's also thinking of
00:13:32.940 uh the men he's lost he's hearing about his great triumph but then he feels out of sorts because
00:13:41.160 he's nobody at this point he's been trapped for seven years uh what who knows what's going on at
00:13:48.260 home who cares about this trojan war business when you've he's lost his own kingdom etc etc and
00:13:54.280 he's weeping and uh they say he's weeping like a woman who is fallen upon her dead husband after
00:14:01.960 the sack of her city and she's about herself to have spears at her back and to be dragged off as
00:14:08.560 a slave or war bride or or whatever might happen to you in those times and um it's it's very
00:14:17.040 interesting in the sense that it shows empathy for the trojans who they were the ones who faced
00:14:26.100 these types of ordeals they were the defeated ones they were the ones where after the men died
00:14:34.500 the women were uh became slaves in effect war brides captives or were just simply killed and
00:14:43.580 so sort of like odysseus feels the pain of of troy in an interesting way uh but anyway i think
00:14:51.960 that gives everyone a good idea of what's going on in these four books um does anyone want to jump