00:00:00.000we're sort of going to do a, an introduction today and we can talk about book one.
00:00:07.100Uh, book one isn't terribly eventful. Uh, you meet Telemachus and, uh, Athena comes down
00:00:17.820in the guise of Mentis and, uh, they sort of lay out the basic story, the, uh, terrible
00:00:26.700murder in sparta of agamemnon agamemnon uh by clyde mestre and then his uh uh his revenge by uh
00:00:38.360that's depicted in the orestia tragic cycle is also narrated there's some interesting things
00:00:44.600so i thought we would just talk a little bit about that listen to it and um and then we'd
00:00:49.820talk about nolan but we could talk about nolan first and then go into the interview and if
00:00:56.680it goes long it goes long or if we don't even get to book one that would be okay by me yeah that's
00:01:03.420what i was thinking maybe kind of a light class and we talk about the film and kind of ramp into
00:01:07.800it because i'm sure it won't necessarily be a light class we'll have plenty to discuss all right
00:01:13.260let's just jump into this so um this is a great line actually from the homeric hymns to
00:01:26.380apollo uh this is from the first section of this homeric hymns oh lost persons you had a question
00:01:34.660well just in case you didn't already have this plan maybe for us noobs like historically you
00:01:40.360could do the setting maybe like just spend a couple minutes on the historical setting that
00:01:44.220the book was written in that'd be interesting okay thanks yes i was written in the time of
00:01:52.760jesus christ who was an american uh he uh came to us in kansas actually he he was a space alien
00:02:03.800who landed among a farm and uh he uh defended the city of metropolis against lex luther
00:02:12.040i thought it was inspired yeah eighth century bc is is when it was that's what they when they
00:02:18.520they believe it was written and it's considered one of the oldest alongside the iliad and hesed's
00:02:26.400work as well um yeah so those are considered the oldest yes which is itself very interesting
00:02:33.460because it's referring to this vast and intricate cosmology and uh pantheon of gods that presumably
00:02:42.620were already known for some period of time to the poets, right? For exactly how long is unclear,
00:02:49.840but we, as early as 1300 BC, we have inscriptions of theonyms and the names. What's interesting is
00:03:00.540that the names are not necessarily the names you would expect. If memory serves, I don't think
00:03:05.280Apollo appears among those inscriptions, which is interesting to us, of course. And most salient
00:03:09.980among those inscriptions is the theonym for poseidon um and they also think that dionyses
00:03:16.580now there is some with some of these names there's some uncertainty whether or not it's actually the
00:03:21.000name um but the ones that they feel most confident about or poseidon and then they think dionyses is
00:03:28.420also there but then there's a long period of time obviously from around 1300 bc to the 8th century
00:03:36.340So what happens in the interim? There's the Dark Age. There's the Bronze Age collapse, and then there's the Dark Age that follows it. And emerging out of the Dark Age is Homer, right?
00:03:50.000exactly and also just a couple of things so obviously this is a fiction uh it is a poem
00:04:00.680it is much like shakespeare placing hamlet in denmark in the middle ages there's no doubt some
00:04:10.640bits of truth to the to it or uh historicity there's a historical setting uh but to to take
00:04:19.660it as as fact i i think would be to miss the point entirely so this if it is narrating something
00:04:27.940it might very well be narrating the sack of troy and anatolia modern-day turkey uh at the end of
00:04:36.640the bronze age perhaps during the bronze age collapse um the uh they were writing in linear
00:04:43.280B which is an extremely complicated script uh that was only available to specialists it I don't know
00:04:51.800it might be like coding and C++ or whatever those things are uh it was it was that difficult and
00:05:00.160that sort of elitist in the sense of just so few people were able to uh engage with it um after the
00:05:07.800bronze age collapse you do have a collapse in hygiene literacy infrastructure civilization
00:05:14.180etc etc and we might even you know underestimate how complicated and advanced say old kingdom
00:05:23.940egypt really was uh but regardless there was this time there was this creation of a what we call
00:05:32.560ancient greek which is using a phoenician alphabet so it's usually using the semitic alphabet
00:05:39.600alpha beta etc um of this these mysterious seafaring people and sort of putting that on to
00:05:48.880uh the the spoken language of uh of ancient greek and and so you know for for homer the troja war
00:05:58.080is sort of a distant memory for Plato and others in, you know, the height of what we think of as
00:06:05.320the height of Greek civilization. It's Homer himself is a bit of a distant memory. And it
00:06:12.660really took another thousand years, more or less. It was in the 15th century that Homer's Odyssey
00:06:23.200started to be published in a form that we would recognize today in a codex form. Dante,
00:06:32.120even though he depicts Homer, but he certainly never read Homer. But later on, we would have
00:06:38.340the kind of codex printing, what we would understand as a book, and the bringing of
00:06:45.780Homer into the Western canon. It's been, I guess, a sort of relatively short period of time,
00:06:54.220remarkably. But I did want to just read this really quickly. This is from the Homeric Hems,
00:07:01.720which are different than Homer, of course. They're sort of written in his style and his vein,
00:07:08.720but they might have actually been written over a long period in the millennium before the common era or before Christ.
00:07:22.520I ask you to call me to mind in time to come whenever some man on this earth, a stranger whose suffering never ends, come here and ask.
00:07:32.660maidens which of the singers a man want to come here is to you the sweetest and in whom do you
00:07:40.220most delight do tell me in unison that i am he a blind man dwelling on the rocky island
00:07:47.520of chaos whose songs shall be the best in times to come and i will carry your renown as far as i
00:07:56.120roam over the lands of men and their cities of fair locations indeed they will not doubt this
00:08:02.580because it is true and i shall not cease uh to him far shooting apollyon lord of the civil bow
00:08:10.840silver bow and child of lovely haired leto um this is sometimes often taken as a hat tip
00:08:22.160a reference to homer himself the blindness this has been a tradition for a very long time
00:08:30.500Um, the reality is we don't know if Homer was blind. We don't know if Homer existed at all, uh, in the form of a writer like Milton or Shakespeare, uh, et cetera.
00:08:46.560And there's actually been a lot of interesting commentary of, you know, there's been a kind of documentary hypothesis, I guess you could say, with the Iliad and the Odyssey.