00:09:27.140And then the necessary has to happen, which means Helen, as I say, the most beautiful woman in the world, had to be taken from her husband and given to Paris as a prize.
00:09:39.820And the tale is a bit ambiguous in different tellings, but Menelaus was away and Paris came over there, helped by Aphrodite and seduced and abducted Helen.
00:09:53.120Why does that matter? Because her face is the face that launched a thousand ships.
00:09:59.780The whole of the Trojan War, the whole subject of the Iliad, is about the Greeks not just trying to save their honor,
00:10:07.560but trying to restore to her rightful place in Sparta the woman who was wrongly taken by a Trojan.
00:10:13.900And so that whole sequence comes about from this troubled goddess Eris not being able to be at the party and the FOMO going loco.
00:10:23.120so to cast Helen is tricky you need someone who credibly could be taken as one of the most
00:10:32.260beautiful women of all time and none of us would want to make that call clearly it's a difficult
00:10:37.600one to do but more troublingly Helen was born from an egg because her father was Zeus but in
00:10:46.200the form of a swan and the swan and leader leda is the mother of helen zeus as swan got with leader
00:10:56.820leader popped out an egg and out of the egg helen was born so where are you going to find someone
00:11:02.320to cast with semi-divine semi-swan uh pedigree it's not going to be an easy one anyhow it's clear
00:11:10.220from the trailers and what we know that the actress Lupita Nyong'o has been cast as Helen
00:11:16.280and indeed as Helen's twin sister, Clytemnestra. We can come back to why she's interesting.
00:11:23.260Lupita Nyong'o is of Kenyan extraction, sub-Saharan, and therefore clearly different from the majority
00:11:32.260of the rest of the castings in the film. Most people in the film are white, they're mostly
00:11:37.740American, but Helen in and among them is a pointedly different looking figure. Now, we could
00:11:45.760say that's not that interesting. There is no realistic cast to call upon. And if the decision
00:11:54.720is made that we'll have a black actor as Helen, so be it. And, you know, I've got a lot of sympathy0.89
00:12:00.380with that view. It's not that interesting. On the other hand, it has been taken by many people
00:12:20.980with the broadly white casting of the remainder.
00:12:24.780Now, to be clear, we do not know precisely
00:12:27.900what the heroes of the Odyssey looked like.
00:12:31.920Nevertheless, for the Greeks who invented the tales, told them orally and then wrote them down once the alphabet arrived, they were their ancestors.
00:12:41.920So broadly speaking, the poem is about people of a Mediterranean ethnicity.
00:12:47.920The poem of Homer does not describe Helen in really any detail at all.
00:12:55.920all we have the word kalepokamos which means pretty hair nice hair well that doesn't help us
00:13:02.640but the one that's got a lot of attention is one of her epithets one of her standard adjectives
00:13:08.020is lukolenos which means having white arms now if you're in a largely white society that's not
00:13:16.080how you describe someone i wouldn't say oh do you know francis you know the guy with the white arms
00:13:21.280It's not a natural way to describe someone.
00:13:24.000So what that adjective probably means in effect, even though it's literally white-armed,
00:13:29.660means a woman who kept her skin white and pale because she was of an aristocratic status
00:13:35.660where she wasn't out working, wasn't getting tanned under the sun,
00:13:39.320and therefore her arms were a sign of her high status.
00:13:43.020That then takes us to the unsurprising fact that she was conceived of as someone,
00:13:47.620broadly speaking white in a mediterranean context so in that sense it is a very striking casting
00:13:54.560to go for she's a great actress as far as i can tell but it's made a lot of noise a very quick
00:14:02.580question on that um in in the roman empire there would have been plenty of people from africa in
00:14:10.180as part of it would that be fair it depends what you mean if you mean people from the continent we
00:14:14.860call Africa. Certainly the North African coast was part of the Roman Empire. The Berber kind of
00:14:22.080people are a much closer relation because the Phoenicians coming from modern Lebanon founded
00:14:29.640colonies on what we now call North Africa and as such were broadly Mediterranean. Sub-Saharan as
00:14:36.840you say these people were known of, tribes were known of and are occasionally described but they
00:14:43.280were cut off from both Roman rule and indeed general Roman society. So black people do appear
00:14:49.960in Roman accounts, but there's an element of novelty and difference to them. There isn't
00:14:56.200conventional racism against non-white people in the Roman world. It's more pointing out aesthetic
00:15:05.500differences rather than any kind of supremacy of whiteness. It's not a term used in the Roman
00:15:13.340or indeed in the Greek world. They didn't talk about whites and non-whites. What the Greeks
00:15:16.900talked about is us and the barbaroi, the blabbing non-Greeks. And you could be as white as could1.00
00:15:23.560be. It wouldn't matter. You're not Greek and therefore you're not good. And so the Greek1.00
00:15:28.540civilization preceding the Romans, I imagine there was even less contact with sub-Saharan
00:15:33.140Africa at this point. Is that fair? Yeah, it would be. It would be the sort of thing that would
00:15:36.580happen with far-ranging tradesmen or people journeying on some sort of mission or military
00:15:42.760campaign. There would not be, I think I can say perfectly clearly, there would not be in the
00:15:48.800Greek-speaking world regular interaction with sub-Saharan Africans at any point in the ancient
00:15:55.300Greek world. And therefore, it would be quite inconceivable for the Queen of Sparta to be
00:15:59.260a black woman i think yeah well it let's say for the sake of argument there was a queen of sparta
00:16:05.660in the early 12th century bc that woman is definitely not black yes and if she were black
00:16:11.420they might have mentioned it it would have been a more helpful adjective than a lucolinos to say um
00:16:17.420she was black now it so happens that when where when homer's odyssey begins poseidon the god of
00:16:23.820the sea, brother of Zeus, has headed deep into Africa to hang out with the Ethiopians, whose0.82
00:16:31.900ethnicity is quite hard to describe, but they were definitely dark skinned, black skinned.
00:16:36.460And so there's an element of mixing real human geography with a sort of fantastic land where the
00:16:42.620sun sets among the land of the Ethiopians. So it's not an unknown world, but it's not one that's
00:16:51.100part of Greek society now. So let's focus on the story of the Odyssey, which is actually one of
00:16:58.260my favourites. It doesn't matter how many times I hear it, I still think it's the greatest story
00:17:02.900ever told. So let's start. I know the book, or the book, the poem starts in the middle of the
00:17:09.180journey, but let's start at the beginning of Odysseus' journey chronologically. Where was he?
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00:17:47.480he was in Troy so we will know plenty about and we'll talk about the two great Homeric poems
00:17:57.020the Iliad and the Odyssey the Iliad comes first both in that its action is earlier it's about the
00:18:05.540war not what happened after the war but probably as a composition it's the older the more more
00:18:10.760complicated poem in several ways. The Iliad famously does not tell the most famous events
00:18:17.840of the Trojan War. It doesn't talk about the Trojan horse and the fall of Troy. It doesn't
00:18:23.400talk about the death of Achilles shot in his Achilles heel. Instead, it focuses specifically
00:18:29.260on a character flaw in Achilles, which both makes him a hero and leads to tragic consequences.
00:18:38.100That's his mareness, his wrath, his anger, which leads him to step away from the battlefield for a long time and thereby cause the death of many, many comrades, because without Achilles, they were in trouble.
00:18:51.800So that's set in the 10th year of this 10 year war out in Troy, which in our terms is in northwest Turkey across the Aegean.
00:19:00.580And then the Odyssey does not begin straight after the Iliad. In fact, it's in the seventh year of the 10-year wanderings of Odysseus that the action begins.
00:19:16.260So where is he and how have we got here? He doesn't appear until book five. Books one to four are really important for some of the things we'll talk about.
00:19:25.600they're about the baby who has become a boy and now has become a man but has no memory or
00:19:34.020recollection of his father Odysseus because he was a babe in arms when duty called and Odysseus
00:19:41.360had to leave his family. Odysseus didn't want to do that and he actually pretended to be mad
00:19:45.760insane so that he would somehow avoid the call of war and he was going around doing mad things
00:19:53.380like putting salt on his crops when the the team came to call on him and they tested him tested
00:19:59.540his madness by putting the baby in front of a plow and just when it was about to be torn apart
00:20:06.260by the the plowshare suddenly Odysseus snaps back into life and says okay it was just a stunt I'll
00:20:11.780go so that boy called Telemachus whose Greek name means the guy far from battle has become a man
00:20:20.020without a father figure in the house and in those four early books he's trying to become a man
00:20:26.500without a clear model and he goes on a bit of a tour meet some meet some old warriors and tries
00:20:31.860to get a sense of how he can assert authority over all of these suitors who were eating him
00:20:36.500out of house and home as for Odysseus in that seventh year of his wanderings he's trapped by
00:20:44.500a sex-mad goddess. It's a tough gig. He's trapped on the island of Ogygia. My heart bleeds for him.
00:20:51.140Heart bleeds for him. But he is wracked with one of the great pains of all, nostalgia.
00:20:58.260He has algos, pain, for his nostos. Nostos is the most important word in the Odyssey.
00:21:04.900It is the journey home, the return back to where you belong, both in terms of place
00:21:11.460but also in terms of people. That is the one thing motivating Odysseus in his struggles.
00:21:17.060But this goddess, Calypso, whose name means the Concealer, has managed to successfully hide
00:21:23.620Odysseus on his own on this island and every day sleeps with him. Every morning he heads down to
00:21:29.940the beach and just cries all day. That's what we're told about the man. It looks as though
00:21:35.860the hero Odysseus, this clever figure who invented the Trojan horse and therefore
00:21:39.860took down Troy, is going to die in complete unknowable anonymity. His name means nothing,
00:21:49.860no one's visiting him, no one knows where he is, and he stands for nothing.
00:21:55.200But Athena, the goddess up in the clouds, has a very soft spot for Odysseus. She regards him
00:22:03.280as a mortal version of her, someone who's really got the clever and the cunning to get out of
00:22:09.240difficult situations so Athena begs that a message be sent from the gods by Hermes to say
00:22:17.780Calypso enough is enough you've had your seven years with the man let him go and he is allowed
00:22:22.940to go and in his wanderings thereafter we learn about what happened before and what happened
00:22:29.820after he got there and he's been through some pretty wild adventures so let's talk about these
00:22:36.660adventures of course uh the one that everybody knows the most famous one is the son of poseidon
00:22:43.620the cyclops exactly the cyclops are a race and one of them called polyphemus is at the heart of this
00:22:52.500story in in in book nine the cyclopes are odd not because they're massive giants not because
00:22:58.700they've only got one big eye in the middle of their head nor indeed because they eat humans
00:23:03.800and in that sense sort of cannibalistic.
00:23:06.980They're odd because they stand as a rejection
00:23:09.840of everything the Greeks thinks makes a civilization.0.96
00:23:13.940When I was last on, we talked about some of the terms
00:23:16.060that would allow you to define something as a civilization or not.
00:23:21.340Well, the Cyclopes on their island are set up as a sort of anti-civilization.
00:23:25.860They don't meet one another and talk about politics.
00:24:44.860on arriving in Polyphemus' cave, first thing he does is says, okay, what can I nick? And there's
00:24:50.640loads of wheels of cheese, and the crew are quite into their cheese by this point. And they steal
00:24:56.400before they encounter the host. So there's a breakdown on both sides of what it means to be
00:25:02.820a proper Greek. Anyway, you will know the tale. Our viewers will know the tale too. But to put a0.60
00:25:10.340story short, with the boulder rolled in front of the cave, they can't kill Polyphemus. The boulder
00:25:19.780is so large that all of the men could not move it. They can only get out if Polyphemus himself
00:25:27.940somehow removes it. But Polyphemus has said he's going to eat them all, and that's that.
00:25:33.380So Odysseus uses his cunning and blinds that single eye of Polyphemus as he sleeps.
00:25:41.220He's been made drunk by this powerful wine and he's blinded by a huge stake.
00:25:48.660Then Odysseus and his crew get to the sheep which are at the back of the cave
00:25:54.340and they hang from the bottom of the sheep and as he counts them out and puts them out to pasture
00:25:59.780wondering what on earth's happened in his blinded state the men are able to be free now that should
00:26:05.260be the end of the story a clever trick to get out of pretty hot water there's one thing you've
00:26:10.340missed no man of course yes exactly that and and there's there's two levels to that thank you
00:26:15.420francis so even though as i said the cycle peas are sort of pretty individualistic they don't
00:26:21.340gather together in the way the greeks think we should if there's a major problem they might
00:26:26.760shout alarm and they might come and help each other. Well, one of the things you are meant to
00:26:31.580do as a good host and as a good guest is to give your name, to give your identity. That's the most
00:26:37.040important thing about you. And for whatever reason, doubtless cunning, Odysseus does not give that
00:26:43.260name. He gives a name that sounds similar, namely Udeis, not Odysseus, but Udeis. But that means
00:26:51.140nobody no man so what happens when polyphemus learns of this and then is attacked is he cries
00:26:59.080aloud no one is harming me no one is trying to kill me and the rest of the cyclopes think okay
00:27:07.420thanks for sharing we'll be on our way then the flip side to that is that in a sense
00:27:15.360Odysseus in that moment was acting like a nobody by not following the code of hospitality and
00:27:23.300standing up as the man he's meant to be he was actually losing the real identity of the hero
00:27:29.080but hubris in Greek tragedy will always take you down that arrogance that makes you feel you a
00:27:36.840little better than even the gods perhaps does become the downfall of Odysseus and kills a great
00:27:44.600great number of his men. Why? Because once they've got off the island, they're sailing away.
00:27:51.800Odysseus calls back to the enraged Polyphemus on land. Now I'll tell you, it's Odysseus who did
00:27:58.760this. Odysseus, son of Laertes from Ithaca, I'm the guy, and sort of raises two fingers at him.
00:28:05.320Well, as you said, Polyphemus is the son of Poseidon, and Poseidon controls the sea.
00:28:14.020So Polyphemus now has the one thing he needed to make a curse, the actual name of Odysseus.
00:28:20.120And the curse is sent up to the god of the sea, or down to him, wherever he is at the time.
00:28:25.780And he promises that he will cause untold troubles and death on the sea for Odysseus and his crew.
00:28:33.460And for the rest of the narrative, Poseidon kills Odysseus' men because Odysseus couldn't keep his mouth shut and wanted to take the credit.
00:28:42.880And that's a fascinating thing about Odysseus, is that his greatest strength is his greatest weakness.
00:28:51.120And that's it's and the way that you see it's a very modern hero, isn't he, in many ways, because he's not like Achilles.
00:28:58.160He doesn't have this incredible strength and power or like Heracles, who was a demigod.
00:29:03.460This was somebody who's very much in the realm of the mortal.0.94
00:29:07.500That's right. And in the Greek's mind, he's more Greek in the sense that not all of us are set out to be heroic warriors whose martial valour will simply win the day by force.
00:29:19.700Instead for the Greeks, it's about words, about how you use your brain to solve a situation.
00:29:27.000And that, as you rightly say, is the great virtue of Odysseus.
00:29:30.920He is Polomertes, a guy with all of the ideas.0.59
00:29:34.940He's Polomercanos, the guy with all of the tricks.
00:29:38.220He's Polothropos, a guy who can turn things in all sorts of different ways.
00:29:42.500He's Polophron, he's got loads of mental cleverness working within him.
00:29:48.500But fundamentally, that is how the Greeks wanted to engage with the world around them.
00:29:54.520That is their challenge, as we mentioned when we talked about philosophy,
00:29:58.620to impose order and sense on a world that seems chaotic.
00:30:04.400So in a real sense, the Odyssey moves on from the Iliad.
00:30:07.520The Iliad is about the tragedies of the battlefield
00:30:10.200and when human force causes damage to those around you
00:37:34.120Although some of his men become lost to this life, he sees that there's a dark addiction at work here and his crew need to be re-motivated by returning to what ultimately orientates you in life, namely family and homeland.
00:37:50.780so they keep going onwards they fall in with a witch called Circe who turns many of the men
00:37:59.420into pigs and is attempting the same trick with Odysseus but he manages to dodge it
00:38:05.480and he's able to escape from that island after a year but all the time Odysseus's crew are dying
00:38:16.160in different ways. We mentioned that six are lost on the island of the Cyclopes.
00:38:22.600But because of that cursing of Poseidon, again and again, they fall into various lethal and
00:38:30.280bizarre deaths. Circe takes up one year of their time, but things meaningfully change
00:38:37.840for Odysseus when they reach the land of the sun god Helios. Helios as the sun sees everything
00:38:51.000and on his island he's got his favorite cattle. He loves those cows okay and there's a very simple
00:38:58.180rule just don't mess with the cows. The winds are against Odysseus and his crew at this time
00:39:04.660and they spend a month on the island and after a month some of the crew crack they need beef
00:39:10.620so they kill some of his cattle and Helios is so outraged by this that he calls on Poseidon to
00:39:19.520turn up the pain for Odysseus and his crew and every single man dies except Odysseus
00:39:27.920they die in a shipwreck and Odysseus is on his own floating around as a single figure
00:39:33.240and he washes up on the island of Calypso who because there isn't a crew to reorientate and
00:39:41.700motivate Odysseus he's a lost man on that island he is a nobody again that takes us to the point
00:39:48.080where the narrative begins year seven Athena says come on let's get him off there and he builds a
00:39:53.880raft and heads to another land and this is the this is the really interesting episode less
00:40:01.040fantastic, but it's the really important one. He lands on an island where a people called the
00:40:06.700Phaeacians live, and they are perfect. They have a king and a queen who run a very Greek-like,
00:40:15.660idyllic, utopian landscape. Everything is peaceful. They have the most beautiful daughter,
00:40:22.380Nausicaa, who's ready for marriage, and she just wants to marry someone with kingly bearing. Well,
00:40:28.260here's Odysseus turning up, who, despite his long-suffering wanderings, is a king, and he
00:40:34.760would be a perfectly suitable husband. Everyone on the island is willing this to happen. It would be
00:40:41.260perfect. Odysseus rejects it. He says, even though you are more beautiful than anyone I could
00:40:51.420encounter, including my own wife, he said the same to Calypso, by the way, he wanted to marry him,
00:40:55.900I am destined to be returned and restored to my homeland there is no other option for me
00:41:04.260so again it's it's it's got a real moral weight to it this idea that even if circumstances be
00:41:13.080they wealth or be they you know a particular change in your circumstances seem to on paper
00:41:19.720give you everything you need. It's not worth the weight of anything if you cut your ties
00:41:28.380to the people and the places that give you your real identity, not just in the Greek world,
00:41:33.780but in our world. And where does he go from there? From there? Well, so he tells his tales to the
00:41:42.860Phaeacians, who are probably the Phoenicians in disguise, a very interesting people, who introduced
00:41:47.940the alphabet to the Greeks, among other things. He tells his tales of how he's got to that point,
00:41:53.380but fundamentally they accept his refusal of marriage and they, the best seamen in the world,
00:42:00.820take him back to Ithaca. And that's where the second half of the poem begins. He gets home,
00:42:06.500but the last thing he can do is head home and say, hey guys, I'm Odysseus, I'm back.
00:42:11.620Why? Because there are 108 men whose whole identity is predicated on being the new Odysseus.
00:42:20.740The real Odysseus is dead. No one's seen him for 20 years. No one's heard tell of him. He must be
00:42:25.380gone. All of these men didn't go to Troy. They're either the sons of warriors who went to Troy,
00:42:35.140and therefore they've grown up without credible male role models. Or perhaps worse, they're people
00:42:41.860who managed to dodge the draft and didn't head to Troy at all. They're true cowards.1.00
00:42:47.700And so the nature of these men, and they're portrayed in a really no-nonsense fashion,0.99
00:42:52.740is that these are anti-men. These aren't real men. They're entitled, arrogant folk who believe
00:43:00.420that they've got status and purpose in the world when they've done nothing. They've done nothing0.79
00:43:04.580to earn it and they've never seen true men in action but all of them are queued up in the hope
00:43:10.260that they will somehow win the hand of Penelope and be gifted wealth and comfort Odysseus is a
00:43:18.500decent warrior but as someone who's been away for 20 years he's not single-handedly going to take
00:43:23.380down 108 men so what he does over the last half of this this poem the last 12 books it's in 24 books
00:43:30.820in the form we have it is strategize as to how he can slowly bring on side
00:43:37.940old faithful friends who've never let him down this includes his dog argos and argos is in a
00:43:45.460terrible way he's mangy sleeping on big pile of dung on his last legs but he recognizes the true
00:43:54.820Odysseus, and is so overcome with joy, with dog joy, he dies. He dies in the moment.
00:44:02.260That's so Greek. He dies in the moment. Exactly. That's his beautiful death.1.00
00:44:10.420But it's strategically helpful, but the last thing Odysseus would want in disguise is a dog
00:44:15.220trotting after him who senses that something's up. So he turns to the lowest people in the
00:44:22.100social hierarchy. He turns to the swine herd, the pig herd, Eumaeus, the cow herd, Philoetius,
00:44:28.500and eventually he brings his son in. And with the help of Athena, the four of them ultimately
00:44:36.580slaughter everyone. Now Odysseus was told by Tiresias, the great prophet, when he went down
00:44:42.500to the underworld, not only that this needs to be done, but that it will happen. You've got to get
00:44:46.980home you need to kill them all he kills 12 women which is a more controversial part of it he kills1.00
00:44:52.76012 women who've been sleeping with the suitors has them all hanged then he says that's not enough1.00
00:44:58.880all the families of the suitors are gonna you know create a longer civil war so he goes and0.99
00:45:04.520kills all of them and then athena says okay stop that's it let's now have peace and that is the end
00:45:11.340of the poem can we just want because we missed out uh one of my favorite scenes which was with
00:45:17.100the bow of course so the person i've said almost nothing about but is the other half of the poem
00:45:25.420who needs to be remembered when reading almost any line is penelope penelope the wife of odysseus
00:45:34.140the queen of Ithaca. She has no idea what has happened to Odysseus. She knows the Trojan War
00:45:41.380is over. She knows that that took 10 years. But where's the husband? Literally everyone else
00:45:47.360is either dead or they've got back. Any figure you can name in the Iliad, one of those things
00:45:53.540has happened. They're at home and they're happy or they're not because they're dead.
00:45:57.160different sailors different tradesmen pass through the palace and they tell her tales they lie to her
00:46:04.900in order to get gifts from her they make up stories about Odysseus and she's basically given
00:46:10.060up hope but not entirely she still has pistis she has faith that Odysseus lives and so she's been0.96
00:46:18.600trying to hold off these 108 bastards for uh for best part of a decade by various tricks0.97
00:46:25.580her main trick was said okay I will marry one of you when I finish this burial shroud I'm weaving1.00
00:46:32.720women in the Greek world if they were elite women the main thing they did domestically was weaving0.98
00:46:39.400and once that's finished promise I'll marry one of you so she spends her day weaving but every night
00:46:45.420she unpicks it and removes that progress and delays indefinitely but the suitors now know this
00:46:52.220they've learned the trick and they're getting very heavy-handed that marriage has to happen.
00:46:57.840So Penelope, and it's very ambiguous what she's up to, says, okay, yeah, it's over. I need to
00:47:04.240marry one of you. So let's set up a contest. We're going to have 12 axe heads in a row and1.00
00:47:12.260there's a hole on the axe heads. It's debated about quite what the hole looks like. And anyone
00:47:16.780who can string my former husband's bow and shoot an arrow through all 12 axe heads, they win me.
00:47:25.100They will be king and rightful ruler of Ithaca. Telemachus will have to leave because he'll be0.90
00:47:30.780a nobody. He won't be inheriting the kingdom and everyone else will have to get back to their1.00
00:47:35.960lives. So it looks as though the one thing Odysseus needs, restoration to his family,
00:47:41.320is about to be lost well very cunningly of course this being Odysseus he is able as a beggar he's
00:47:50.480dressed as a beggar so as not to arouse suspicion he's able to persuade the suitors who don't think
00:47:55.660much of him that he could at least have a go none of them have been able to string the bow they
00:47:59.920weren't strong enough only one guy was able to do it and that was Telemachus but he stopped by
00:48:06.680odysseus from doing it and everyone else gives up for the day i say we'll try again tomorrow lads
00:48:12.720too too strong a bow odysseus has a go instantly strings it we're told he strings it with the
00:48:19.500same ease that someone can pluck the lyre that's homer the poet plucking the lyre as he tells us
00:48:24.900that and having strung the bow shoots it through the axes and then just starts slaughtering everyone
00:48:31.460so he's armed and dangerous and ready to go and the threat disappears by virtue of complete
00:48:39.160dispatch of all 108 suitors and let's i love the story and you told it beautifully and every time
00:48:48.060i hear the story i get utterly enraptured and when i used to teach it to my kids didn't matter
00:48:52.900where the kids were from they love the story as well it's a very happy ending yeah exactly
00:48:57.600It's revenge and that appeals to me. Now, let's focus on Homer because he seems to me to be quite
00:49:06.700similar to Shakespeare. He created this amazing work of literature, but nobody knows if he wrote
00:49:13.060it or if he existed or who Homer was. Was he a collection of people? Is this oral storytelling
00:49:20.600that was then written down? What do we actually know about this person? Let's talk about underwear.
00:59:10.120not just experience, but actually genuine hardship. And I think about those two Greek
00:59:15.920words all the time. That is how you grow and change and do good things in the world. Genuine
00:59:23.220suffering. Now, you shouldn't will suffering upon yourself or upon anyone else, but you will not
00:59:29.080learn without hardship. So one of Odysseus' epithets is polytlas, the man who suffered so
00:59:36.220much. That's what fundamentally makes a new kind of hero out of Odysseus rather than the sort of
00:59:42.820straightforward swashbuckling heroics of the battlefield. So these two foundational poems of
00:59:49.200the whole Western literary tradition, the Iliad and the Odyssey, begin with a model of heroism
00:59:55.880which is already difficult, complex, unfair and messy. It does not begin with a golden age when
01:00:05.060just being a hero was a jolly good lark and everyone clapped at the end of the day. It's grim.
01:00:12.800But life requires that quieter heroism of sacrifice and suffering for whatever one takes to be the
01:00:20.800higher good. Well, the more we talk to you, with you rather, and listen to you primarily actually
01:00:25.940about the Greek mythology and that period of time, I almost feel like the reason that these ideas as
01:00:32.960Francis talks about have stayed with us and have stayed relevant. The Greeks were just a lot more
01:00:38.600honest about human nature than we are. Is that a fair comment? Yeah, and I think it's multi-layered.
01:00:44.300They were much more instinctively aware of the failings of the human condition.
01:00:51.600All of their literature is motivated by finding these flaws that are in each of us,
01:00:57.320dramatising them, hopefully in a way which makes us people who aren't heroes, who aren't the stuff
01:01:02.440of myth, actually interrogate our own lives better. What did Socrates most famously say?
01:01:08.680Not that the only thing I know is that I know nothing. More importantly, he said the unexamined
01:01:14.660life is not worth living. It's unlivable. And what that means is if you will not interrogate
01:01:21.080the nature of your character and the flaws within it, you're not living. You are not actually being
01:01:27.400human. You're not a human being if you can't address, as difficult as it may be, the awkward
01:01:35.400and difficult parts of your own human soul. And the Greeks understand that, and it motivates
01:01:43.240almost everything they do artistically. Other cultures do the same, but it won't surprise you
01:01:50.260for me to share my opinion with you which is that despite this constant narcissism of talking about
01:01:58.280the self in our modern age we're actually acutely uninterested in interrogating our own personal and
01:02:06.440societal problems you know your podcast exists in order to have the conversations which we deem
01:02:12.360difficult to have well they weren't difficult for the greeks it was something that needed talking
01:02:17.520about so let's talk about it let's use logos to make progress now there are lots of barriers to
01:02:23.940having the kind of conversations and the sort of reflection that needs to happen in order for us
01:02:28.680to thrive as humans do you think part of it is also is that the greeks fundamentally understood
01:02:35.060the tragedy of life because if you look at their plays i mean they were fatalistic they were the
01:02:41.380their outlook was fatalistic really like you know this is life your life was predetermined there was
01:02:47.100nothing that you could do about it therefore it was tragic if you look at Oedipus Rex for example
01:02:52.220killed his father married his mother and there was nothing that he could do correct so in terms
01:02:57.280of myth and those inherited tales tragedies baked in and there's no escape however from the fifth
01:03:04.900century onwards from the dawn of ethics with with Socrates and Plato and then to the emergence of
01:03:10.520different rival philosophical schools, the academy, Aristotle and the Peripatetics, the Epicureans,
01:03:17.420the Stoics, all of these groups actually come up with different ways of responding to the challenge
01:03:22.360of being human. And they have very, very different views about whether things are fatalistic and
01:03:27.980predetermined or whether life is what you make of it. So although I agree with you when it comes to
01:03:33.840myths and the great tales actually the greeks as a people evolve evolve intellectually into
01:03:40.800realizing that actually actually you have much more agency over your life than uh the great
01:03:46.320tales might might suggest i i guess the question that i really wanted to ask deep down is what can
01:03:54.160we actually learn from the greeks because when you classics is getting studied less and less
01:04:00.560which i consider to be a tragedy actually what can we actually learn what have we forgotten
01:04:06.240and what should we remember and what should we incorporate in our current society a big question
01:04:12.600can be our last question in the style that we always ask what's the one thing we're not talking
01:04:17.260about i see is that i think not only is everything in greek culture but everything is in homer what
01:04:27.880my answer to your question would look like is the totality of the human condition so it's not
01:04:35.780a set of insights or things we might put in a little list which we can keep in our pocket and
01:04:40.560check when we need it it is a monumental modeling of the strengths and weaknesses of humans being
01:04:50.280together in the world now the greek world is amazing because it's still connected in a linear
01:04:56.300unbroken way to modernity. Modern Greek really is the language of Homer after
01:05:02.4803,000 years of people speaking together and there's a continuity in Greek
01:05:06.620culture which is I would say unique over the last 3,000 years in the world. So
01:05:13.460although it seems so distant and so other to engage with literature in the
01:05:18.200first millennium BC, it's actually looking deep into the genuine inheritance
01:05:24.560of the Greek people. So I think Greece is kept out far too much of our modern conversation.
01:05:31.720Greeks should be a more central player when it comes to thinking about what to do in the world.
01:05:37.080And I may add that we talked about casting in the Odyssey to begin with. Well, who wrote an0.90
01:05:43.520open letter to Hollywood saying, why are none of us in the film? The Greeks. The Greeks don't
01:05:52.000appear at all in the casting list of nolan's odyssey which for all its historic realism
01:05:58.640to their mind shows an acute lack of interest in greek culture and greek actors so i think
01:06:05.360that's almost a proof in a way of my sense that the greeks are not centralized enough
01:06:11.600in some of our cultural conversations because everything is there in their culture
01:06:16.960david before we head on over to substack where you answer questions from our supporters
01:06:21.120tell everybody again where they can find your work and of course more about Ralston as well
01:06:25.200thank you it would be a joy too the two things I'm most invested in in life are Ralston College
01:06:32.400r-a-l-s-t-o-n you'll find the link below the video which is a new college that is trying to
01:06:39.360teach the humanities properly beginning with ancient greek and teaching in greek in greece
01:06:46.560on an island not far from where homer may have been born and we chart the arc of the western
01:06:53.920tradition all the way through to modernity the greeks the romans medieval thought the influence
01:07:01.920of christianity the renaissance and the rediscovery of the classical the early modern and beyond
01:07:08.960it's fully funded uh for many people we've just finished our fifth uh our fifth admissions round
01:07:15.120so I'll be heading to Greece shortly with our fifth cohort but keep an eye out in September
01:07:21.440for our next admissions round and we welcome applications from all over the world as it
01:07:27.760stands you've got to be based in America to some degree but that will change very soon
01:07:32.640and you just need to have a BA in any subject and we will train you up to be an MA student in
01:07:39.520the humanities so that's Walston College please check it out if these things interest you
01:07:43.680And the other is a classics website I run with a small team of fellow colleagues and fighters who are motivated by the belief that the classics are there for everyone.
01:07:56.520They are meaningfully universal and no one has the right or the arrogance to stop your access to them or the license to change the past so that it looks more convenient to us in the present.