Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey: Class 1

tardiness so I think we should start I don't think our gentleman from Greece but since he's all given us something to drink and you can't drink it and tell us you turn the mic over to farmer Bridget thank you okay first of all it's so nice to be with so many friends colleagues former teachers former students in this environment of learning it's just such a privilege and I thank you all for coming tonight especially thank you to Sandra for the wonderful work she does with a scheme' forum and I have something special for you tonight I thought we would start with this this is mystique and I don't see any faces of recognition and I'm so pleased because that means I can tell you what this is there is an island off the coast of Turkey and its name is chioce will understand why chioce is so important to us momentarily but there's a tree that grows only on that island and a resin from that tree is used to make this liqueur it's called mystique when I found out about this I was in Greece for three weeks and I just came back when I found out about this I got the last two bottles in Manhattan I bought them both and I brought them to you and the reason this is important is that chioce is the island where Homer was born so I would like to offer a toast to the great epic poet Homer with a drink from his island mystique to the great poet hear hear by the way we still have another bottle of this because we didn't give you very much to start but we have plenty more if you're really thirsty this is a picture of the sunset at Delphi two weeks ago when I was there and I thought we would start with this just a nice environment for us let me give you a little background as to why I'm here in the first place because it's a little bit unlikely and perhaps that will put into context some of what you're going to see as an undergraduate in college I was a history major and loved this stuff but then obviously when you and to undertake a job of medical school and all you have to put this aside but later in my life maybe 20 years ago saundra logo I don't know when the Shinhwa forum was founded but we started talking a group of us and saying let's get back into the the great works of art and the first that we tackled was Dante with Rebecca Beale that was so successful immediately we discovered the wonderful faculty that exists here and some are already here dr. Stephen Whitaker is a mentor of mine and so is Morrie Meyers and both of them have taught at the Chimel forum and I happen to take Stephens course on the Odyssey it was compelling by the way he taught himself ancient Greek and he reads ancient Greek and he can tell you things about Homer that no one else can so that was such a wonderful experience that I decided that when I retired I would really take this on I needed a task a job to to take on and so I made a commitment to homer and those of you who know a little bit about Homer my wife will be so glad when these glasses are over I have to tell you that those of you who've read Homer will realize the significance of this as it was to me I had a house in Pennsylvania no longer do with a nice driveway and a red-tail Hawk lives in that beautiful woods all most of the day I and Alan you know the hawk we've talked about it he lives in your property too lots of stories about Al's of Hawk and mine I would see the hawk flying with one of Al's rabbits and I'd say I know where he went anyway so the red-tailed hawk as I was driving down the driveway I just made the commitment to really take Homer seriously the red-tailed hawk flew right over my car and off to the right now those of you that have read The Iliad in the Odyssey know that Homer uses Raptors in very important ways as omens and when they fly off to the right good things are going to happen and I was shocked by that because I had known this Hawk for 20 years or one member of the family anyway it never did that before but it did that week and another little omen that occurred to me when I was in the island of Kefalonia two weeks ago and I'll show you some of the pictures where we were looking for Odysseus his original home I was there the last night in this empty hotel and I felt for the first time an earthquake the whole hotel shook and Poseidon was saying goodbye to me so I have such an affection for a homer he's sending me omens with birds and shakes from Poseidon and so that's the context in which I bring these stories to you this is going to be a class probably not like anything you have done in the past and let me sketch it out for you and I hope that will meet your needs and by the way if it doesn't or if it does I'd love to know about it there are six sessions in the first one we're going to talk about Homer and why he's important and this lets me run very far afield we'll go into some very unusual places and about some fascinating people but we won't talk about the Iliad or the Odyssey we're going to talk about Homer tonight but for the two classes after this we will get into the Iliad and because I wanted to do this differently so it's not boring what we're going to do with the Iliad is use the language the beautiful language that Homer uses now this is in translation of course we're using fagles translation please if you have other translations you'll need fagles to get the right lining the lines lined up but we'll use the Iliad for the language and the way Homer tells story it's stunning and because the story is linear it starts here and it ends there it's not a complex story it's about a war that has a beginning in the middle and an end so we kind of know where it's going and so we won't worry too much about the story we'll worry about the language and talk about Homer from that point of view but for the fourth and fifth presentations we'll be talking about the Odyssey and we will not be talking about the specific language we'll be talking about story so we won't be reading the exact lines that we'll read in the next two weeks for the Iliad but we'll be recounting the stories and inviting all of us that no one of these stories if you'd like to take one on you can present it briefly and we'll go through the story part of this because it's so circular so circuitous and so fascinating as a difference a major difference compared with the Iliad that the two together the Iliad and the Odyssey I think offer us a context for continuity for so many important things and the last talk will be related to my interest in Ewing in psychology which began in this community through father Georg Simmel and Jean Manik and I've now I'm on the board of the Young Foundation in New York and I teach and study there and it became so apparent to me when I was invited to use Homer as a model for a masculine individuation from a psychological standpoint and to see how much Homer really understood about the human psyche so the last talk number six will be that so we're going to have a different have different ways of talking about this and I hope have a lot of fun if you've not read a single word that's okay if you know the stories by heart that's great so don't worry about if you have or have not read this will go through the stories as we can so that they will make sense to you as we discuss them but I don't want you to feel uncomfortable that you may not have done as much as you have intended this is a beautiful sculpture called the this is Homer down here and it's the ADEA fication of Homer he's sitting here with his two children the Iliad and the Odyssey and this was displayed here in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art but it's from the British Museum where it resides now but I thought that Homer was seen as almost to God by the ancients and this kind of beautiful sculpture was prepared for him in honor of him and this is the way the ancients thought about him and I thought it would be appropriate the apotheosis of Homer is what this is called and it's very appropriate Finlay who's a wonderful historian has this sentence and I believe it the history of America begins in Western Europe the history of Western Europe begins in Greece the history of Greece begins with Homer that's why Homer is so important to us if you look at our history and how we see ourselves go all the way back to Herodotus and Thucydides up to the present Homer is foundational for how the Greeks thought about themselves and their history now that doesn't mean there weren't many other fascinating wonderful writers at that time but we'll discuss why Homer captured the West and other stories like Gilgamesh for example or the shipwrecked sailor in hieroglyphics did not homer caught us through the history of Greece and because the and I agree with Finlay the history of Greece begins with Homer that's where we're going to start it's our it's foundational for us in the West part of the interest that so many people have had is to say well I really wonder was there a Battle of Troy where did a Grameen not really did was Mycenae really a talent those are factual historical questions of relevance and they're a wonderful rubric upon which to hang a story but the story can be embellished it can be expanded it can become not necessarily true in a historical sense but utterly true and the psychological or spiritual or human sense and that's where mythology comes so I'd like to read this with you because so much of what we'll be talking about is not only history but myth myths are among the subtlest and most direct languages of experience there are exact moments of signal truth or crisis in the human condition the mythographers the poet is the historian of the unconscious this gives to the great myths they're haunting universality why does a story like The Odyssey or the Iliad capture us so for twenty-seven hundred years we haven't been able to let it go there is something fundamental in that story that is profoundly truthful for ourselves and we're going to find out a little bit about what that is I think it is through the artist that we learn about our soul the biologist the physician will tell us about our biology but what about the noncorporeal aspects of us what about the psychological the spiritual parts of us and how do we think about that part of ourselves and the artist is the one in my opinion and you can disagree or we can discuss this who has the best way of doing that now this hierarchy here is mine but I think it makes some sense if you think about artistic manifestations of human behavior I think the first one probably had to be spoken language I don't know what they said I don't know in what language it may have been a little bit more than a grunt but it was a communication that had some symbolic meaning we don't know what that was next ritual arrangement why do they assemble those things like that we'll show pictures of this in a minute I'll show you examples of each of these decoration well we can come to a cave wall and put some really beautiful stuff on it and we can look at that beautiful stuff but not really know what the artist was thinking we can say wow that's great this one I think what was the artist thinking see what I'm saying when we get to painting and music the same is true it's beautiful we may like it we may be able to reproduce it but what did it mean to the man or woman who made it and we don't know that architecture I'll show you a beautiful temple it's 12,000 years old it's magnificent but what does it mean what was it for we can only conjecture but written language that's where the artist gets a hold of us it's through written language that the artist can tell us exactly what she or he is thinking what is the poetry that is being presented what's the story so it's through language that can be communicated and that's written language the emphasis here is written and we'll talk about that where did that come from why is that important for our to understanding of Homer so at the beginning at the end of this list I have language language spoken language written that's where so much of the importance of the artistic understanding of human soul I believe comes from has anybody ever seen this this is so cool this is called the Makah Pan's gat pebble it sits in a tiny little enclave of the British Museum and the people who put it there think it may be the most valuable resource that the British Museum has ever had the Makah pan SCAD pebble was discovered in South Africa it's called a menu port and we'll explain why in a minute but it's obvious what that looks like is a human face but there's something important here that stone was never worked upon by an artist it was just picked up and it was found remote from where that kind of stone was discovered in fact it was found in a grave would you like to see a picture of the person whose grave this was discovered Australopithecus Africans three million years ago I have no idea why he or she picked that Mac of pants Kent pebble up but it was buried with him and if we assume that he recognized the face in that stone what is it what artistic representation did that mean for that individual and what does that mean for us for me it tells us how archaic our appreciation of the artistic is and how far back we have to go to understand that aspect of ourselves and if we've been doing this kind of thing for three million years let's take a look at some other examples this is a cave in southern France and all of these stones here have been arranged but they've been arranged by Neanderthal 175 thousand years ago so we've gone from three million years ago to 175 thousand years ago it's lovely I have no idea what they were doing with that in the same way that I have no idea of why mr. Mackall pants got picked up his pebble and had it buried with him it's come a little closer these are shells discovered in Morocco they're 80,000 years old they're tiny holes in each one of these and they're strung together as beads now I don't know who wore them or why they would be lovely we see people wearing things just like that today and how they person who were these perceived this artistic expression I have no idea we can only guess this is from the cave of Chauvet it's one of the caves that I have not been in because you can't get in it I'll show you some that I have been in this was most recently discovered about of 20 years 15 years ago are you have you all ever seen the beautiful documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams it's the documentary of how this was discovered a couple of speed linkers were coming down the side of a cliff stopped for my drink and felt a breeze coming out of the cliff moved a small rock aside realized there was a hole enlarged the hole and left themselves in they had a lamp on their head and they were smart enough to realize as soon as they saw paintings on the wall they said we're out of here Jacques what who was a person Leslie and I have met is the head of French archaeological preservation in the ancient caves was called immediately in Paris and he said close it up don't tell anybody where you are I'll be there tonight and so when they found this place the show of a cave was explored in a perfect way by the archaeologists and anthropologists that were appropriate to that and not exploited by somebody who had just discovered it and this was found there this is a stalactite hanging down from the roof but you can see there's the head of a bull and the genitals of a woman this is the original chimera this is the original Minotaur who painted it what they were thinking why that was important I have no idea but language like this art like this is all over the caves throughout Europe all the way to the Ural Mountains we see these beautiful manifestations of the human soul but we do not know what the artist was thinking this is from Lascaux which we did see it's the only painting in Alaska where there's a human figure and when you're going to Lascaux and you're you're surrounded by these magnificent paintings on the walls and the ceilings it's the chartres of of Paleolithic caves the only picture you have of a man is that look how primitive that is compared to some of the magnificent paintings of Oryx and bison and men and animals that we don't see anymore you can wooly mammoths woolly rhinoceros is Irish elk animals like that that are painted on these cave walls and look what you have you have a Shaymin that's what we call them don't know if it was with a bird mask and erection and a bird staff painted next to an animal an orc that's wounded with its bowels and trails coming out that's how powerful painting I would love to talk to the person that painted and said what was going on what were you hoping to do or to represent we can only guess this magnificent structure comes from 12th rare 12th rare is a neat cave because it's in the Pyrenees and owned by a family named the big Glen count and Countess big Wow we had lunch with him they escaped the French Revolution they were so far away the French never got down there to decapitate them so the big amount of family kept their farm happened to be in the Pyrenees and it just so happened the count big glass great-grandfather discovered a cave on his property and started to excavate it he was very smart this is back in the beginning of the 20th century he decided that he would only excavate for six weeks a year because the advances in the technology and understanding of how to explore Paleolithic case was advancing so quickly he didn't want to do too much too fast and save some for the really great explorations that could be done later and it's still being done today but this is a unique figure in his cave and it's called the sorcerer the saucier and after if you look at this you realize it has the antlers of a deer or an elk the eyes of an owl ears of a wolf body of a lion the only anatomy of a human are the genitals of a man and the saucier sits in the wall looking out at you as you come into that part of the cave it is stunning I would love to talk to the guy that was painting that say what were you thinking what was it let's leave painting and talk about sound how does sound reflect our understanding of the human soul and how long has it been going on this is a bone flute discovered in a cave in Germany it's made from a vulture thigh bone it's 40 thousand years old and when you pick it up and play it you can't play this one but another one like it it's a perfect pentatonic scale it's black notes of a piano somehow in our brains we know this we have a sense of the of the frequency of various notes and how they relate to one another and these people were making a bone fluid out of vulture thigh bone that could play a perfect pentatonic scale I don't know what the music sounded like but I would love to hear it and I don't know what it meant this may be the oldest temple is gobekli tepe it's in the middle of modern-day Turkey it's being excavated now it's only been recently discovered 12,000 years old this is just the beginning of the agricultural revolution we were just beginning to plant wheat to raise crops and and to domesticate animals but this huge structure with beautiful bow relief sculptures of birds and and reptiles and snakes sits there I have no idea what they were doing or what their religion was or why they built it but it was certainly important an awful lot of resources went into this this is a picture of Stonehenge when I showed it to my grandchildren one of them said oh did you and Nana used to live there I said well but we aren't pretty old but no that's not that's not where we live but the reason I put that up is here Stonehenge 5,000 years old we really don't know we know some things the wonderful astronomical calculations we can find the summer solstice and the vernal equinox we can do all kinds of neat things with that building but we really don't know because those people haven't left us a record that we can understand all they've done is left us their beautiful architecture so you can see with all the examples that I've given us of an artistic manifestation of our soul we really don't know we conjecture but that changes when we can write and so this is going to be a turning point in this part of our conversation this morning this beautiful papyrus fragment is the oldest existing piece of Homer it comes from the 3rd century BC and it's in ancient Greek and it's the oldest fragment that we have so let's talk about Homer who was he he was a poet from chioce we've already toasted that chioce is an island off the west coast of Turkey only seven miles you can see the Turkish mainland from Chios and it's just a little bit distant from lesbos where Sappho came from so the two great lyric and the lyric poets and the epic poets came from two islands very close to the Turkish coast everybody thought he was terrific and everybody wanted him so we don't really know for sure that he came from Chios we believe he did but Athens for example really wanted him and they made a big effort to conscript him and to have celebrations and we'll talk about Pais Estrada's who was one of the tyrants that ran Athens he began a pen Athenaeum which is a big celebration in the sixth century and he conscripted homer he said Homer's Athenian and we're going to do everything in Athens but I think he was from Chios but seven cities wanted he came from a long line of bards if Homer lived in the end of the eighth century BCE that's between 750 and 700 BCE he was talking about his epics talked about stories that had occurred 400 years before that his two stories the Iliad The Odyssey we've said are attributed to him have been told we assume since the beginning of that period and that means that somebody had been telling these stories for 3 400 years I think it's very likely to be true because by the time we get to Homer they are so well done they are so well constructed and the genius of Homer at being able to do this was so extraordinary that they come to fruition in him but there's a 400 year history before him of these stories these poems being read he comes is he blind I don't I don't know I I doubt it it's said that he was a blind poet because Donna Doukas who's one of the figures in the Odyssey was blind and it was a it was a it was a bard a poet but there's no evidence that he was and he describes things with such clarity that I suspect he probably was not blind but I don't think it's important and he was a rap satis he was singing these let's talk about how he presented his stories the two epic poems the Iliad is sixteen thousand lines long it's the longest and it's problem and it is the oldest as best we can tell it was written about thirty years before the Odyssey so it came first whether it was simply the compilation of many stories and Homer was the best at doing this and he simply brought them all together and and then that synthesis became his and he then subsequently presented us with the Odyssey I don't really know but I think there's a difference in time the Iliad is older and the Odyssey is younger let me say now why that may be important one of the things that struck me was how the two stories go together and how different they are and if you agree with me that the Iliad talks about the first half of life the development of one's abilities and the Odyssey is about the second half of life the meaning of having developed those abilities those are two very different points of view and I think that Homer knew that did that the Iliad is the older the Odyssey is the newer and I think they do provide us a balance of if we're thinking from psychological terms the first half of the second half of life what's more about that later the Odyssey is twelve thousand lines long now just think of the challenge that Homer would have he comes into town that's how he earned his living everybody come into the wherever they were the the theater and they were expecting somebody to tell him a story that's 16,000 lines long it's going to be sung he's going to play on a lyre and they already know the story there's no secret everybody knew the stories so how was he going to keep people spellbound and it wasn't what he said it was how he sent it and how he presents these stories is so uncanny you'll see that as we start to go through them the genius of Homer is to keep you on the edge of this edge of your seat even though you know the outcome there are many different characters in the especially in the Odyssey if I mentioned somebody or a character that you're unfamiliar with say hey give me more about that because I don't want to confuse anybody and we if we bounce back and forth a little bit I'll apologize but as many of you know in the Odyssey there's a there's a creature called Polyphemus he's a cyclops well if you're gonna sound like a cyclops you have to sound pretty scary and I assume Homer did but when you have to sound like a 15 year old girl who discovers odysseus naked on the beach you have to sound like a 15 year old girl discovering a big man whose neck on the beach and that's a different way of talking so Homer has the challenge not only of presenting stories that people already knew that are 16,000 lines long singing them but also presenting them in character and I think he did you can see why I have such respect for his incredible talent there was something else this is poetry these are just stories that he's spinning he's doing this in dactylic hexameter ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba and then a spondee ba ba it just so happens that ancient Greek is perfectly suited to dactylic hexameter in the way that I Amba contaminobo modern English minor English poets write in iambic pentameter when we met Emily Wilson last week for those of you that came her translation of the Odyssey is an iambic pentameter that's what she chose but it's in dactylic hexameter so Homer is not only doing all this he's doing it as a poem now one third of its repeated there'll be epithets their stories their metaphors that come back again you've heard of course the beautiful phrase when dawn with a rose red fingers Sean once more world of daksha loss a us in Greek that comes up many different times but it makes it easier for Homer to get the story right and if he needs a particular meter at that particular part of his story then he can pull whatever model he wants to fit the poetry it's brilliant there 41 different epithets to achilles depending on what he wants to say about Kelly's and where the story is multiforms one of the most interesting books that I read was an analysis of the Odyssey and how Homer used repetition with similar characters and two stories that would remind him of what was to be said about each one and you don't really see this and when you read it but as you go through the analysis I was so impressed with these subtle techniques that were obviously present and available to him that he could cycle through back again with a different character a different slate is a different story but this would help him remember what was going on huh when he's dealing with such a complex topic the recurrent episodes phrases and epithets we've said that and meaningful names let's start with Odysseus Odysseus means pain suffering and his grandfather's maternal grandfather named him that his mother is auntie clientís he is his mother's antique laia who means against Fame we'll talk about why she might have felt like that or bid like that but the point is that the Homer is using the names of the people in his stories to tell you a lot about them it's not just this is their name this tells you something about them and the last thing to mention is these are improvised they're not memorized you cannot memorize twelve or sixteen thousand lines every time you told us it was different but he had these techniques for how to come together in a story and how to put these things together that he could improvise the Iliad and the Odyssey in that tillich hexameter singing it with a lyre and keeping you spellbound for two weeks yeah but I have the same reaction every time I think about that how did he do that wouldn't you have loved to have been there I can't tell you exactly how it sounded but Jeffrey Dubin who was a very good friend of mine introduced to me by Leslie in New York has written a most definitive book on Sappho and he sent me this he said Homer if you want to know what Homer sounded like this is as close as I can get so let me see if I can play this for you [Music] I think you're all probably very happy that I'm not speaking to you in that way but did you hear how it goes up and down at the end you have to sing it because ancient Greek is sung a lot a lot way a lot of ways like modern Chinese if that if the note goes up at the end is a different word if it goes down so you can't just say it you have to sing it and you have and he company himself on a lyre and that's perhaps as much as it sounded like so why is Homer important did I get the right thing yeah in my opinion and I welcome comments by the way raise your hand if you have a comment or a question or an interruption they would be welcome it's a great story it's the first work of the Western Canon we'll talk about that a little bit let me mention it just now maybe more later there are other stories that are older Gilgamesh is older shipwrecked sailor and hieroglyphics is older but they didn't have the staying power they didn't have the capacity to spread throughout the entire Mediterranean we'll talk about why in a minute so Homer even though he's not the oldest he's clearly the best and he's the first work of our Western Canon and for the first time through the artistic vehicle of an epic poem we have a clear vision of the human soul that's why we went through all those different artistic manifestations of the human soul and all of those are conjectural this is not Homer is telling us who we are he's telling us a story that we fully understand and that's what his genius is and why he's so important and an expression of the human soul but I mentioned we still have him and he was spread very quickly there's the invention of the alphabet for the first time I'd like to show you least some of my thinking on this and how the two go together the invention of the alphabet and the appearance of Homer in ancient Greece but as you can imagine this was a event in human history because for the first time we could write what we say and we could say what we read you couldn't do that with anything else how did this happen I went back there's a wonderful book published recently on Paleolithic cave painting signs these are not the paintings of the Bulls and the Oryx and the woolly rhinoceros these are the signs that you can find in the caves all the way from Altamira which is north and spain all the way to the Ural Mountains just take a look at this you can get a sense of simple diagrams you can see yourself doing anything like this and then take a look at ancient Greek this is the eighth century BCE so we have plenty forms and tech deforms and all kinds of things adorning the cave walls for 40,000 years we don't know what they mean we have no idea although we find the same symbol in different caves over thousands of miles we don't know what it means but here's archaic Greek I am NOT a linguist but you can see the similarity at least invite to my eyes between the two but what was it that happened we'll get there in a moment this is hieroglyphics as you can imagine hieroglyphics is not an alphabet by the time hieroglyphics stopped being used which is early in the first millennium there were six thousand symbols that had to be known nobody could do that no student could do that very specialized people were capable of doing that it was not an easy language to write and it wasn't until Chompy you don't found it the wrong there was out of stone in 1799 that we were able to decipher it so at least we know what the hieroglyphics means and we can find interesting stories in hieroglyphics and I've mentioned the shipwrecked sailor but hieroglyphics and the next language will show you which is cuneiform were primarily for political and economic purposes I Nebuchadnezzar killed you Xerxes or you owe me 14 barrels of wheat there was nothing literary or poetic about those languages that much no I will be criticized when I make an exclusive because there are some but most the time the languages we use for political and economic purposes yes I would agree yeah in fact the Bible and Homer are basically the foundations of Western culture and it's interesting that Hebrew and ancient Greek are children of the Phoenician alphabet Hebrew and ancient Greek came from the Phoenician alphabet we'll talk about that a little bit because there's some neat things that were done by one fascinating person that helped us a lot this is cuneiform cuneiform was invented in Sumer the Sumerian culture and southern Mesopotamia 4000 BC so it and it was used to write many different languages as it marched up the Fertile Crescent it wound up in the middle of Turkey we'll talk about this you know a little bit later in the talk so it was available for many different languages but again it was not a literary language it was for political and economic purposes primarily so who invented the Greek alphabet how did this all happen how do we write what we say and say what we read as I mentioned earlier the hypothesis is that one really smart person did the linguists who have looked at all of this and looked at linear B which is a proto Greek which preceded Greek as we are talking about it have looked at this and said this probably was done by one really smart guy living on the island of euboea Euboea is a long island off the east coast of Greece and that's where the oldest archaic ancient Greek is discovered and it's also found in ubian colonies in Italy so the first Greek was probably thought of by some guy who said you know if you can take the Phoenician alphabet which is all consonants and you add enough vowels then you could have I will call it an alphabet and you can say what you read and you can write what you say that had never been done before we don't know who it was as I've said I assume it's one person because the people who have written the books on on writing that I've read have felt that way probably off the coast probably on the island of Euboea probably the eighth century BCE and take a look at this simultaneously with and I put the because of Homer in there nobody can tell me that I'm wrong so in my fantasy this guy is sitting on the island of Euboea and he just heard Homer he said him that is so good I kind of write that down but wait a minute there's no way to do that and so I think it's possible that the genius of Homer in its presentations in the eighth century BCE stimulated some wonderful person we can't thank them enough or her enough to figure out how to write it down but then it happened so Homer and Greek come together simultaneously and when that happens it's the oldest form of writing we've talked about the European settlements in Italy and here's an interesting fact that language as it emerged immediately was not used for political or economic purposes it was used for the next 200 years primarily for literary purposes that's not exclusively true but that's one of the things that distinguishes it from cuneiform and hieroglyphics in my opinion so as soon as Greek was invented it spread all over the Mediterranean by the sixth century there were examples of it everywhere and I thought that one of the things that I would like to do as we swing into the last part of today is I picked some fascinating time sequences from then until now and to show you how Homer was picked up and used and how Homer influenced these different different times and different people six century BCE copies of Homer are all over the Mediterranean so the language works and it's not just prescribed a lot of people you can learn Greek an average person can learn Greek it doesn't have to be a specialized task Pais Estrada's was one of the tyrants his family retirements of 6th century Athens and he wanted to conscript a homer and say homers Athenian and he started the Panathenaic and where Homer was recited at least in the first one and 576 BC I think and Pais Estrada said you know there's a problem so many people are taking Homer and think they can make them better they add a little here that take off a little there they say oh this word shouldn't be there and we're starting to see all kinds of modifications of Homer and that's bad so paisa Stratos the tyrant of Athens said we're going to have a standard version of Homer it's called the PI sister T and R ascension and at that point standard versions of Homer were assembled and were probably what we have more or less today the 4th century BCE you cannot go from then until now and not trip over Alexander the Great in some way this amazing guy he was born in 356 BC his father philip ii had unified greece when he was 20 his father was about to embark on a big campaign against the persians and he wanted to demonstrate how powerful he was his daughter was being married to an alexander and so everybody from around the realm was invited and in the in the ceremony in the Coliseum they decided to have a special event and philip ii made a critical mistake he said I will look so powerful that I don't need to be accompanied as I walk in my family will come in front of me and my family will come behind me but I will stand there and we are going to call this the celebration to the twelve gods and me I'm the thirteenth God you see where I'm going in this here's a look it's a little inflation going out here well he made a huge mistake because as he was walking in a man named Paz Aeneas with a long knife put it right between his ribs and killed him in front of everyone Paz Aeneas was immediately killed all the people that were threatened by Alexander were killed Alexander the son Philip a second winds up as the king Macedonia whether he played a role in his father's murder it's conjectural I think you probably did there were many other people that died very quickly after that all related to him they were all murdered or killed some way but Alexander takes over and one of the first things he wants to do is chase Darius who's come around there and Alexander who's already earned a great reputation as being a wonderful commander he's leading his troops around he's chasing Darius and he captures Darius his family but he doesn't capture Darius and in the tent where Darius is family is a gold box and Alexander the Great says that gold box that's going to be just perfect for me to keep my copy of the Iliad he traveled with the Iliad and he put the Iliad in the gold box and took it with him and when he got to Troy Troy probably still there Alexander got out and took the weapons that Achilles had left there four to five hundred years ago if you believe this true and he left his own there he said I'll take it kill these weapons Alexander is important to us because in his genius he decided not to chase Darius all the way back to Babylon he went around and he founded the city in an Egypt called Alexandria and he founded it because of a dream he had and he was dreaming about the island of Pharos which comes up in the Odyssey and he said that dream was important I need to found a city by that Island and so he did and while he was doing that he took his own architects with him he said I want the Great Library to be right here Alexander died before they built the city of Alexandria and before they built the library but in 300 BC when ptolemy ii i think was running egypt at the time in the city was built the library was there the library was the centerpiece of all learning in the mediterranean and the beautiful words over the door as she walked in the library this is the healing place of the soul that was those are the words over the library at Alexandria 123 Sophocles plays Euclid everybody was working there it was an amazing place and although it was destroyed all the elements that remain from that library half of them are homer half of them are homer when you think of all the great playwrights all the great authors from the ancient world if half of what was at the library at Alexandria were homer you get a sense of how important he was and Alexander the Great knew that this is a fun story to tell in the 10th century in Constantinople an unknown scribe sitting there and his boss said I need another copy of the Iliad so copy of the Iliad is done by an unknown person and resides in the library in Constantinople it's ultimately called the Venice si and we'll come to explain why that's true but it's a lovely part of the story of how Homer gets to us today as we go forward Boccaccio was the first professor of Greek in Italy and in 1453 Constantinople Falls this is important because at the very end the only Greek speaking part of the world was in Constantinople that was the last Hellenistic part where a Greek was continued continually spoken and the Sultan I think his name was amendment first who was attacking Constantinople and destroyed it in 1453 ended the Greek speaking Hellenistic world at the time but before that happened Vasily Espace Arian was a cardinal in their church and he was invited to try to find some reconciliation between the church in the east and the West he was unsuccessful but he was a very good politician and he himself was Greek and in his travels between Constantinople and Italy and his love for Greece he realized that the Greek story was coming to an end that the Ottomans were going to take over ultimately in Constantinople and he wanted to create some place where he could have a repository of Greek treasures that could be used to start a new Greece and so he started two important books from Constantinople he did it from 1420 all the way up until just before his death he brought in this magnificent trove of works including this 10th century Venice a he really didn't know what he had he just wanted everything he could get with Greek when he died he gave everything to the city of Venice for their library and they built a library if any of you have ever been in st. Mark's Square you know the beautiful pillar with the Lion of st. Mark's there you're looking at at the canal the building right on your right with the pillars that's the Mariana that's where the library is and that's where the Venice assay is located now the Venice to say is a big deal and I'll show you a picture actually I'll show it to you right now you will come back to the rest of this this is what it looks like 360 pages of vellum done in a codex format and here's a story here in Greek but what's all this all that is called the Scalia and the Scalia are works from the ancient world from Alexandria the 3rd 2nd and 1st century BCE Aristarchus is not a tiss our Stefani's the great librarians of that library would write what they thought was their commentary about homer these were really smart people they loved Homer and they were very thoughtful about their critique and discussion of this this kind of work was available to the scribes sitting in Constantinople in the 10th century and he was smart enough not only to make a copy of the Iliad but to inscribe or all the original commentary as Scalia in the margin and so we have this beautiful book in that library with scholarship that goes back to the 3rd century BCE of what Homer was trying to say that's been protected for us through this unique document by the time we get to the 15th century obviously with the printing of the Bible homers printed and we have a standard version pretty much since then in 1870 those of you may have heard about Heinrich Schliemann he's the guy that decided he would discover Troy he was a complete amateur but a passionate one and he'd made a million dollars selling stuff to the warring armies in Crimea he made his escape and went to California and sold gold to the Rothschild family I mean you get the idea of what kind of person he was and along the way he ditched his first wife had a quickie divorce in Iowa and married a 16 year old girl from Greece but he was really wealthy and he was determined to find Troy and he actually did I find him a fascinating character and I've always thought he was a thug but when you talk to the people in Greece they don't see that he seemed that way they said without him we wouldn't have discovered any of this stuff so they see Sleeman differently but I put him in here simply because he was the one that discovered troy the story is a fascinating one I won't tell it to you tonight but it's easily discovered and he was some help found it and he found some magnificent treasure in Troy and then he said well we find Troy let's find where Agamemnon came from that was Mycenae nobody knew I'll show you some pictures of Mycenae a little bit later but he discovered my CD too and he discovered the mask of Agamemnon we'll see that so he comes up with discoveries that tend to incarnate the factuality of these stories that they were not just myths that there was eight that there was an event that occurred now a lot of what's been built around that is mythical but there was some fact to it and that's what's so interesting about Sleeman in the 1890s a whole trove of cuneiform documents was discovered in the middle of Turkey and the interesting part here is that they talk about the Trojan War from the other side that had never been done the only were the only resource we had to talk about the Trojan War was Homer until this and now you can read these cuneiform documents that talk about the aji yahwah's which would relieve the Achaeans that's same name for the Troy it for the Trojans or for the Greeks excuse me and they talk about Alexandros who was the King and Troy well the alternative name for Paris the Prince of Troy was Alexander so is pretty clear that there was another recording of those conflicts from the other side and that I think is fascinating but nobody thought you could recite a poem of twelve or sixteen thousand lines that really no it had to have been written down you couldn't have memorized it you couldn't have synthesized it until Millman Perry premature death from Harvard found some people in Yugoslavia that were illiterate but could do the same thing and he was able through his scholarship to show that in the modern world people could tell stories sixteen twenty thousand lines long without being able to read or write so that Homer really did do what we think he did and the last part of what I would like to show you today before we adjourn is a trip that I just came back from where I was invited to go to the archeological dig in Kefalonia where a fascinating group of people think they've discovered odysseus his home now as improbable as that is let me show you why i'm captured by this possibility robert brittle stone was a brilliant guy and he was he knew that he knew he knew the odyssey and the honesty and Homer says Odysseus comes from the farthest west portion of Greece and everyone had been looking at the island now called Ithaca which is not the farthest west portion of Greece it's a little island a little bit to the east and so everybody thinks that the modern island of Ithaca must have been his place well it probably wasn't just a modern island of Ithaca has only been called that for about three or four hundred years and there's some very good evidence that a tiny little Peninsula attached to the westernmost island called Kefalonia that became a peninsula instead of an island because of an earthquake probably was where Homer probably where Odysseus came from and so Robert brittle stone began to work and John cross Shaw was my host who encouraged me to come over there and I spent some remarkable time with him and let me share just a couple of these stories with you this is a piece of the island of Kefalonia you can see how beautiful this must be with these beautiful bays and this is the island this is called the police peninsula and brittle stone and Crawshaw hypothesis is that there was once a channel of water here Strabo the first century geographer agrees that there was so that at one time this was an island that it became a peninsula to the bigger portion of Catalonia here because of an earthquake and landslides which dumped all this into this area here so much of the work that's been done now is to be been to prove that but let me show you some of the beautiful sites that we found on Kefalonia and why I think I was standing at know dis es as pig farm first of all this is it would have been in Greek in the Greek diaspora which included Sicily Italy all around the Levant probably even into the Black Sea so there were there were Greek colonies all over that portion Marseille and perhaps even out farther than that so all the Greeks were everywhere it was amazing where they were colonizing and where there was a Greek colony there would be a copy of Homer yeah yeah thank you this was an olive tree that I thought was so beautiful and olive trees are very important in the story of the Odyssey so we'll come back to that but I thought you might enjoy this this is John cross Sean ocean and now let him speak for himself and a couple of the places that we've seen with apologies this is done with my iPhone and it was really windy we almost got blown off the summit of this rock we were standing so if it distorts the sound a little bit I'll translate it for you but let's hear what he has to say acne Bay I don't know if you could hear that but at the end of the odyssey Telemachus has to come home to Ithaca and Odysseus has to come home well this is where they think Telemachus landed and I was talking with John I said well John what about this little stream here and he said if you read Homer there's a stream in that Bay where Telemachus lands and you could see the stream just flowing gently underneath these rocks [Music] we're Odysseus landed homer clearly described it there's a long sandy beach so when the fee asians rollin up quickly they scoot all the way up on the sandy beach that's a sandy beach the last one we looked at was a rocky beach but that was perfect for where you would land if you were Odysseus coming back to your home well no dision comes back home he has all this loot and he has to hide it and he hides it in the cave of the nymphs the Cave of the nymphs who are weaving on stone looms which is to life dices long time we have been discovered by the men doing this roadwork now when I play this I remember Odysseus and Telemachus are coming together and they know it's very dangerous to go back to the palace because they're in trouble so they're gonna go to a dear friend of theirs who happens to be their pig farmer take a look at noticia says pig farm so those are very old Mycenaean walls I called cyclopean walls they're from 12th century BCE and it's his hypothesis that that was the pig farm I mentioned this to Emily Wilson who spoke with us last week and she said well you have to go look for some some fossilized pig dung when you go when you go back here I thought okay that's my neck that's my next trip I think you can see how beautiful this landscape is and I don't know if you're impressed but I was there was nobody there these sites are not protected the government barely knows about this they give a little bit of money to help with this but we walked all over the place asked the local farmer who said oh yeah you want a Mycenaean tomb there's one over here let me show you [Music] now there's some undiscovered or unexcavated Mycenaean tombs here which which John knows about and was able to show me but he's keeping it under wraps because there's a lot of competition in this work but the other thing that was so amazing to me was what the locals know they know all kinds of stuff that we are shocked to find you remember when they discovered la Sol meadows and and the Vikings had been on Newfoundland for people who are running the farms up there said oh yeah we should have showed you they'll Rock sit over there where they all came thousands ago so the locals know a lot of stuff so why is Homer important he's the foundation of Western history and culture he came along with the invention of the alphabet which is amazing accomplishment human accomplishment his stories give us the first clear artistic manifestation of the human psyche and soul it's an art unsurpassed artistic accomplishment and he's still relevant Emily Wilson gave us a new translation and I want to go back and dig some more thank you so we have a couple of minutes if you'd like to ask questions if you don't I I can tell you a little bit about how next week goes can I please next week we're going to start with the Iliad and we're going to talk about the specifics the the lines I would like some of us please to agree to read some of the lines you don't have to do anything more than read them but it's better that you then I my my voice throughout the day throughout the evening would be not so good so anybody that would like to do some reading raise your hand and I'll give you the lines here they're in the handout you can look them up in your copies of fagles translation but I'd be glad to pass these out we can do that quickly anybody great Janice you got book one that's great stuff in there Oh book two who's lucky old Mary three thank you book four will prep oh you're perfect for book 4 if there was a born book for Thank You book 7 anybody thank you there's not a lot here book book 9 there's nobody 10 or 15 lines 11 and 12 okay so I can't remember who picked these so when you come next week please remember that you're doing them which one you're doing anybody over here okay there's only a few hell yeah how about one line one line this is a that's Kurt you'll love that there's one line I've got one left okay this is me Jerry I'm no Jerry you're better I love your voice Jerry and there's more so before we adjourn are there any questions please yeah the saucier gobekli tepe it's a fascinating idea and you can't argue one of the things that I found so interesting in my recent trip was looking at the Eleusinian mysteries which were basically a feminine of a matriarchy that preceded the patriarchy that we've lived under now since since homer and what it was like for that the also the Oracle of Delphi and how that was different from the Eleusinian mysteries and then escalade peon healing sites the Greeks had so many fascinating ways of looking at all of this that it wouldn't surprise me if the need for agriculture came from that need for building these but the assumption is that the people that invented the agriculture were the women they were the ones standing behind and if you look at the Eleusinian mysteries three goddesses that are important to that they knew that you could take the seeds from the grain and plant them in the ground you get green next year that was a very powerful observation and the guys didn't know that but the women did and so the aggregate oh they're the guys are out hunting they didn't know and so the women have a very important role to play and probably that was one of the fundamental underpinnings for the matriarchy that existed in the Minoan culture that preceded the Mycenaean and one of the fascinating questions for us today is why did that change occur because we're in in the me2 conversation that we're having now are having this kind of conversation that they were having 3,500 years ago yes I think there was a whole group called the home era dying I think that's the point you're making there was a sort of a clan of people who are capable of doing that Homer was the best of the bards and they were probably doing his work and their own work but none of them are known the way Homer isn't I don't know them Gerry thank you well next week we'll dig into the Iliad the first 12 12 books and I it'll be a lot different from tonight and I hope as much one thank you we have another bottle we have another bottle okay

Channel: The University of Scranton

Views: 49,302

Keywords: Homer, Iliad, Odyssey, Schemel Forum, Schemel Forum Course, The University of Scranton, Scranton

Id: DVobvfJk4xA

Length: 72min 56sec (4376 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 03 2019