Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey: Class 4

okay so I think we're gonna go ahead and get started thanks everybody for coming on this is week four we're all on the shore underneath the walls of Troy waiting for a boat home so we begin the Odyssey tonight I thought that just a couple of comments one of the one of our class asked me to just reflect a moment for actually how were these stories told how did Homer actually do this and we brought this up in the first talk but it might be fun just to review this again Homer is a name that is assigned to this great poet the first of his epics the Iliad is sixteen thousand lines long and the Odyssey which we'll start tonight is twelve thousand you cannot memorize these but you can synthesize them so they're created new every time with a genius that he had for telling story but this was his living there were a group of bards called the home era die who went all over the place telling these stories and I'm assuming they got paid for it Homer came from Chios which is an island off the coast of Turkey and when you listen to the Iliad or the Odyssey it takes twelve fifteen eighteen hours so all of this is done over a period of time and Homer would come into the amphitheater or the theater people would be there men and women and he would sing these accompanying himself on a liar and the reason he sang them is that ancient Greek was almost a sung language when you went up or down at the end of an of a word that would make a different word so you almost had to sing these India Company to himself probably on a four-string lyre and he did this as poetry dactylic hexameter was the poetry that he used so this extraordinary performance of spontaneously creating a story that everybody knew in dactylic hexameter and singing it for days and enthralling an audience was an accomplishment that I think we can all appreciate how extraordinary it really was so that's a little bit of the background of how did these actually go and he went from town to town doing this today we're going to begin the odyssey and we've tried to do each one of these a little bit differently so we're not going to read any of the text tonight as we have with the Iliad and I wanted us to see how Homer wrote fagles translations and that's why we look at the text but tonight we get to be even more creative we tell the stories ourselves so many of you have volunteered to tell one of these stories and thank you for that you can tell it in your own words and I've decided to do it in such a way that we will go through it not as Homer told it because he began in the middle of things and did things in flashbacks but I wanted to do it from leaving troy to getting home to Ithaca because in each one of those stories sequentially we learned something very important not only about the story but about the psychology that we're going to uncover in our last class so I'd like to begin in that kind of kind of way but first let's go back a little bit this was a slide I showed in our first presentation and the reason for showing this is that there's been some remarkable new discoveries I don't know if you all saw this form Indonesia and Borneo this week and we were talking about it as such a remarkable a set of discoveries this is a cave painting from Lesko and we showed this at our first talk and we have no idea what the artist was thinking but here is a man in a bird mask with a bird staff with an erection and an eviscerated bull we have no idea what he was what the artist was thinking when he created this in debt this is a magical painting and we made the point that in talking about why Homer was important for the first time with Homer because we have a written alphabet and we can write the story and we can spread it that way for the first time in history we have through the artistic vehicle of an epic poem a clear of the human soul and expression of the human psychology and that's why this artistic concept of these two epochs is so important for us but let's take a look at what else has been recently discovered this is one of the new cave paintings just discovered in Borneo and it's even older than the cave paintings in Europe who knew I mean we assumed that as we evolved and left Africa and came into Europe that that was the location of the cave paintings but this painting which is so similar to the ones in Europe you can see the horns of the bull and the hands over here may be as old as fifty-two thousand years old in the limestone cave in Borneo and remember what we said that the locals know what's going on the anthropologists and the archaeologists took pictures of the paintings in for example ASCO and showed them to the natives in Borneo and I said ever seen any of these and I said oh yeah we've got caves over here with stuff like that and that's how they were discovered so this magical painting 52,000 years old look at these hands we've seen these all through the cave paintings in Europe this isn't Borneo this a long way away you have to assume that our ancestors that left Africa knew how to do this so that when they got to Europe or when they got to Borneo they were doing it and the other remarkable thing is that there are two ages of hand paintings here 20,000 years apart the old ochre red and the magenta colored our 20,000 years apart so if you think about the culture that these people had this goes back 52,000 years to 10,000 years ago when they stopped painting the caves you have a culture of 40,000 years how old is our modern culture when would you say that we began maybe with Homer Gerry's and the Renaissance I agree with that Tuesday that is a perfect answer for a james joyce scholar so i would say that the point is that our culture may only be 3500 years older for lucky this is 10 times more than 10 times older and then these lovely stick figures remember the first one i showed you from alaska a little bit similar here this isn't borneo so we're looking at the artistic manifestation of the human soul it's so ancient but we don't really know what the artist was going to tell us or what these pictures mean but with homer we do so let's start at the end of our last class when we ended the Iliad with these profoundly simple words Homer says and so they buried Hector breaker of horses and we said there were important considerations from The Iliad that I'd like to review before we go into the Odyssey first of all we used the word Klaas which is Fame the pursuit of fame you don't have to win the battle but you can become famous through the battle so even if you die it's through the combat through the fighting through the struggle that you become famous and that is what is to be highly desired throughout the Iliad we talked about masculine and feminine and how masculine the Iliad is we'll see how different the Odyssey is going to be and woman and ruin is characterized in the Iliad as woman's strong and Swift the other point I'd like to make and I've said it before but we'll say a lot more is that the Iliad from a psychological standpoint talks about the first half of life what are we going to become and I think the Odyssey in many ways talks about the second half of life why did we become that what is the meaning in the Iliad - we saw some remarkable phrases and stories that I just like to remind us of Souza's description of man there is nothing more agonized in man of all that breathe and crawl across the earth pretty grim but that's pretty much what Odysseus is facing and we will see that only Odysseus only Odysseus in both of these stories has a point of view that gets him through and he has a great phrase he says bring the trial on and we'll see where he does that many other people don't do that nobody else does that but he does we saw the shield of Achilles with the beautiful depiction of human life but then the comment that fagles has in his introduction that Homer threw the Achilles shield is talking to us about human nature which he characterizes as we are lovers and victims of the will to violence that is a profoundly relevant question both for this time and also for our own if we are hard-wired for this how do we manage that and you will have some suggestions for us and then the Magnificent encounter between Priam and Achilles two different generations and Priam says those remarkable words to Achilles I kissed the hands of the man who killed my son as he begs the body of his last dead son an amazing encounter and throughout the Iliad we keep seeing Odysseus come back he's not the major character Hector's more important probably kilise is more important Agamemnon and Menelaus get their play but Odysseus keeps coming through and I wanted to bring this to our attention because we know a lot about Odysseus by the time the Odyssey begins let's take a look at some of those episodes in which we encountered Odysseus that tell us about his character he's the one that was picked by the Greeks to return crises to her father after she was stolen he opposed Agamemnon's despair and the recommendation to leave eloquently he was said to be eloquent in fact Helen said he stands there silent but wait till you listen to him the words come thundering out of just and you'll forget about how he looks after you've heard him he said to be a leader in council in battle and selected as the emissary to Achilles to try to get him to fight and in fact he makes the offer to Achilles that he's been told to make but he edits the officer because he knows that Achilles will never subordinate himself Achilles to Agamemnon so dizziest leaves it out it's quite clever now Achilles doesn't accept it anyway but you get this capable you you see this capability in Odysseus as we go through the story he and Diomedes volunteer for a mission at night to sneak up and they do they capture Dolan they interrogate him find out all about the new troops and they and they killed Dolan and then go on and kill 12th rations in their sleep from the information they've gotten from Dolan so you see this stealthy courageous thoughtful person the emerging then Odysseus is surrounded by Trojans and wounded it has to be rescued by Ajax but he rallies the Greeks the second time when Agamemnon and despairs and then when Achilles finally says okay I'm going to fight Achilles says let's go fight just see you soon no we haven't had dinner yet eat first you'll never win a battle if you haven't had your food how thoughtful and then at the end the so ferocity that we talked about thinking this or that we we see Odysseus saying to himself now what it will be bad enough if I lose my nerve and run but worse if I'm caught why am I talking with myself only cowards depart in battle a real warrior stands his ground so here we know a great deal about Odysseus as we find him left in Troy and we're gonna try to find out what happened to him sing to me of the man mused the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy many cities of men he saw and knew their minds many pains he suffered heartsick on the open sea fighting to save us life and to bring his comrades home safely but he could not save them from disaster the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all the fools they devoured the cattle of a son and the Sun God blotted out the day of their return so launch out on his tail Muse daughter of Zeus start from where you will sing for our time too those are the first words of fagles beautiful translation for us it summarizes the whole story and entity says start from where you will he'll start in the middle in meteor race but then he says sing for our time too I'd like to make this point now and then again many times he sings for our time too he tells us things that are utterly valid for us as modern human beings and I think it's so interesting to see how Homer is able to do that and this is a picture that I was able to take in the Museum of Athens as I told you this sculpture was hidden away and being being repaired but I persevered and I finally got them to let me in there with a couple of guards and I took his picture and I thought that's exactly what Odysseus looks like battle-scarred this was pull off the bottom of the Mediterranean but he doesn't quit bring the trial on so that's our hero because it says so in the end on his on his stand where he was found and he's also got a scar on the leg where a boar damaged him that's a great question Jerry I didn't show you the whole statue just because I thought his face would do enough but but he's got enough barnacles on him to obscure who he was but it's his leg in the scar on his leg and I show this picture both because I think it's so beautiful remember he's the man of twists and turns look at this lovely twist and turn that's an olive tree on what I think is probably Odysseus is farm and we talked about that in our first talk but it also reminds me to remember to discuss olive wood and olive trees because Homer uses the olivewood four times as he tells his story and each time it's used differently it's part of the genius of this storyteller of how to use something as simple as olive tree or olive wood and embellishing the story and we'll try to remember that this summarizes what I think are the differences between the Iliad and the Odyssey the Iliad is the first written how do we know that some of the really archaic Greek that is used is the oldest it has a masculine orientation we've talked about playoffs it's a linear story it starts here and it goes there it goes back and forth the battle goes back and forth but it's all right there a troy there's no traveling around it's right there and I think it summarizes for us from a psychological standpoint the first half of life but we're moving in to the Odyssey it's written second and I think it's written about thirty years after the Iliad or these written down about thirty years after and I think comes from a more mature mind from the older man it emphasizes the feminine in some extraordinary ways and as we go through it each one of us tells our our the portion of the story that we're gonna tell I'd like us to think about it how could this have something to do with the feminine in terms of informing us not all the stories do but many of them do in ways that are surprising whereas the goal of the Iliad was Fame the goal of the Odyssey is to get home now it's literally to get home for Odysseus but for us from a psychological standpoint we could say it's to become whole whereas this is linear this story is circuitous back and forth and around and around there are three cycles if you look at the map to see where he's gone and how he's done it that he goes through so there's nothing linear about this and I think this talks to a great deal about the development human development in the second half of life the why the meaning of life here's some words just to bring us up to date before we get into the story a cat a basis is a descent into the underworld we had a wonderful lecture there that Sandra had organized by Jim cloth shir where he talked about this and so many of the epochs deal with the descendant of the underworld well the first of course is his homer he's not really the first because Gilgamesh also does this and it's a thousand years older but we don't have Gilgamesh as the foundation for Western culture like we do Homer and we've talked about why when you could enter the underworld you can call up some ghosts and question them about the future and that will happen in our story and that's the nykeya the gnosis the homecoming and the first four books of the Odyssey are called the Telemachus because they're named for Telemachus Odysseus's son so the story begins with not Odysseus but with Telemachus and here's the map so I'll take the story through and I'll take the first four books until amicus and Odysseus and then we'll get into the travels that that go on just to orient us here's Troy and here is Ithaca and so here is ethica right now where Telemachus is and he's at home he's about 20 years old he doesn't know his father's father left when he was a baby never couldn't couldn't recollect his father but he's got a serious problem there are a hundred and eight suitors that want to marry his mother so she has a big problem too but so does he and if one of them does then he's out of business because he's going to be replaced as the future king and yet he has no experience he's never been tried and tested he's not battle tested so here we have Telemachus at home worrying about his mother who's being courted by a hundred and eight people and his father is sitting on the island of Ogygia which is over here at Calypso's Island we'll find out how he got there but they're both stuck and here's where Athena comes in she inspires both of them to move and she gets to the limit because he said you got to go out and look for your dad and she inspires him she raises a crew for him and off he goes to look for his father this is a brilliant way that Homer offers us one of the two transformations that are going to occur if their major transformations in life one of them is from adolescence to adulthood and the other is through midlife they're both going on simultaneously here's Telemachus leaving home to earn his clay off if you will he's only 20 years old he's going to look for his dad and Odysseus is trying to get home his nostos to become a mature man and both of these are going on in parallel well Telemachus makes a good effort of it and he stops first at pilos where he meets nest or who was one of our heroes from the Iliad Nestor treats him beautifully remember we talked about the word Xenia and how you accept and bring everybody in you welcome the stranger and Nestor is impeccable in the way he welcomes Telemachus and then he goes Telemachus goes from Nestor's house where he asked where's my dad and does just says I don't know and he goes to Menelaus his home in Sparta to inquire about his father and there Menelaus says I will I last heard that he was on the island of Ogygia so there's that clue that Odysseus is still living once he's gone there Athena says you better get back home because things are deteriorating at home so that little cycle is now complete Telemachus goes from Ithaca to pilos to Sparta and then he comes back home but he's told be careful where you land your ship because they're looking for you and they may kill you and so Telemachus sneaks in the back way and will show a picture of that later and at the same time Odysseus is being is going to be moved from his his place where he stuck on Calypso's Island where we're going to start our story however is back at Troy if you realize that we've never said anything about the Trojan horse not even mentioned in the Iliad as famous as that is it only comes up in book four of the Odyssey where Menelaus in talking to Telemachus says Oh your dad had such a great idea we built this horse so they were hiding in there it's the first time we hear about the Trojan horse but let's start back here with a Trojan horse and assume that the war in Troy is now over and so the Greeks have to go home and the first place they go is is marrows with the so Kony's and I think Peter are you gonna tell us that story hold on remember you don't read you don't have to read any of this you can just tell it in your own words and we're gonna reflect a little bit on each one of these stories as they inform us [Laughter] so the land is this first-person singular this is his tone the story you land on this island and his Richard in plunder the women in this good run they did and he was smart enough to say okay no he was mature he was the leader I said enough is enough let's get out of here but they had translation does it have too much wine to swill worst a blunder more and that was sent me their downfall he had the locals fighters defending their homeland and they really beat them in battle pretty good yeah this was lucky to get his men back on the ships I found it interesting instead of telling you know we lost this many men a very graphic description of six rows from every ship we're missing of men right pulled out of the bay yeah it's a very rapid way of describing the loss six brothers from every ship yeah that's a perfect sir thank you and you emphasize the things that I was looking for as well said once they plundered the place and they had their what they had but does he said let's get out of here time to go but his men did not and they stayed and they wound up paying a huge price one way of that and this is a perfect little vignette why wouldn't plundering the psycho knees work just like plundering the Trojans we did it before it should continue to work but I'd like to look at each one of these stories as a metaphor if you will for human development psychology and the psychologists would say that this is a regressive restoration of the persona which means if what I used to do before works why don't I keep doing it but guess what it's not going to work you can't stay a young man all the time do we know people who never left college for example that's maybe our metaphor but you can't keep going back and doing the same thing and that's what we're seeing here with this things are different now that we have grown through young adulthood and things are going to have to change anyway they do make their getaway thank you Peter and the next place they go is that they sail south and they get blown off-course off the Cape of Malia there's a huge storm that blows them off course I happen to be on the Cape of Malia once and so I wanted to climb all the way up to the top of the rocks to see where Odysseus missed and it's interesting because if you don't make the turn right around here with a northwest wind all those ships could do was reach they couldn't tack and so he was blown all the way off course all the way down here and winds up at the island of the lotus-eaters and that'll be our next story wonderful Peter can we just pass the mic over here with the Drew and drew so tell us about the turns out to be mind-bending and a little bit cheating apparently very similar to the opium dens of China were to just lie around all day this proof seems to be a question astir exactly what it was apparently at that time in our district there were a number of plants that were known to affect the psyche of those so indulged in though and it could have been almost anything again but Decius went looking for them and found them in that condition and they didn't want to leave thank you so that's a nice summary here and you're right an awful lot of people have been looking for the Lotus ever since this story was was told and I agree with your with your assessment but here again here's another place where Odysseus says bring the trial on we're gonna get out of here but here's another way to look at this story we've left Troy we tried fighting in is morose and we got we got our butts kicked and so now we're on the Lotus land and a psychological way to look at this is and this is what Jean Houston says if what we did no longer works and we do not wish to go forward let's just forget how often does that happen with for example our warriors that come home from Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq but it's here that Odysseus as true has told us says no no we got to get out of here this is no place for us so we're going through this transition from the first half of life we've gone through the regressive restoration of a persona now that doesn't work to how we don't like what we did and we don't want to go forward so we'll just get stoned and we're not going to do that so we leave the island of the lotus-eaters and the next place we're going to go is the island of the Cyclops this is where they wind up this is a great story who's telling that for us Oh Janice is perfect yeah but we really need a biologist to tell us about a cyclops yes counsel each family lives in isolation from its neighbors they don't bother raising their own crops the gods give them everything they need so Odysseus and his men land on an island sort of off shore from where the cyclops live and it's a dark and foggy night and the next month the next morning when young dawn with her rose red fingers shown once more and he repeats that every time so that you know that the story is exactly four days long so they wake up and the island is covered with goats they go hunting and he tells us again twelve ships times nine goats except Odysseus's gets ten goats because he's the best and they feast on the goats and they drink heady wine that they took heuristically and so there was a thing it reminds me of the Bible there was a beginning and there was an ending so when youngdong with her rose-red fingers shown once more so here they are they've eaten their they're fine they should be going off and instead he says oh I want to go over to those Cyclops I want to see what they're like and they don't want him to do that but he takes a group of 12 men and he takes a skin a very special one very very strong blind that had given been given to him by someone whom he saved and they go into the cave of the Cyclops when he wasn't there and they explore the cave and it's full of pens of young lambs and kids and cheeses that the Cyclops is made from the milk and the men want to just take the cheeses and the and the lambs and the kids and get going but Odysseus says no he wants to stick around so they ate all the Cyclops Jesus and then when he returned with his flock he closes the door to his cave with a giant boulder so they can't get out and he milks intense his flock which I thought was interesting because although he's not they're supposed to not be civilized at all he is a good shepherd he's taken care of his animals then he lights a fire and he sees Odysseus and his men and they explained that they are the men of akia coming from Troy who've been blown off course and they say so you should be a good host and you should give us a gift a guest gift and the line is the sort that hosts give strangers that's the custom and he said and they say that strangers are sacred and that he then by the rules of civilization should be a good host and that it but on the other hand they also threaten him because if they don't treat if they don't if he doesn't treat them right Zeus is going to avenge them and he isn't intimidated because he can see that they're just little pipsqueaks and so instead he tries to find out where their ship is and Odysseus lies and tells him that it was destroyed by Poseidon so the Cyclops grabs to with men smash them fall asleep and Odysseus thinks that he'll attack him with his sword but he realizes then that if that happens then they can't move the boulder so they can't get out so when young dawn with her rose red fingers shown once more then the Cyclops gets up kills two more of the men leaves with his flock but but replaces the boulder behind him chilly again can't get out and so Odysseus comes up with a plan and he and his remaining men take a chop off a piece of the Giants wooden Club which is supposed to be as big as a mask and it's made of right spin out of olive wood and they sharpen it so then when the Cyclops returns at night in tents it's flat and then he bashes two more men together and eats them but this time Odysseus offers him a mole of this special wine and the Cyclops drinks it and then he drinks a second and then he drinks a third oh then he asked Odysseus what his name is and Odysseus answers nobody and then he asked this guest gift and the Cyclops says that his gift is going to be that he'll eat Odysseus last you're welcome after eats the rest of the men and then the Cyclops is a charming host vomits human and wine until he's blind drunk then Odysseus and his crew of four heat the sphere that they've made until it's red-hot and the embers and they thrust it into the Cyclops eye and the eye sizzles and it spurts boiling blood mmm and we learned that the Cyclops name is Polyphemus and he wakes up in a rage calls on his neighbors to come and help him and my child it was interesting that he thinks of his neighbors even for a group that's not supposed to be civilized he has neighbors and he calls upon them for help and they say well who's bothering you when he says nobody so his friends and again I I thought it's interesting that they're referred to as that then they say there's nothing we can do if it's nobody so it must be a plague from Zeus and you should call upon your father Poseidon to help so then we know that Poseidon is his father so Odysseus then plantus came to escape and during the night he lashes the Rams together into groups of three and he puts one of his men under the center RAM of each group and then because Odysseus's sets himself apart all the time there is the one largest Ram and he chooses that for themselves and so then when youngdong with her rose red once more the Cyclops moves the boulder so that the flocks can leave the cave and the men are hidden underneath the the Rams and they get out so the Cyclops can't detect them and he notices that the largest Ram is moving more slowly than the rest and he asks if it's because the ram has sympathy for his blinded eye and I thought that was interesting because it also showed that the Cyclops aren't completely without empathy that he he thinks that that Ram would feel empathy for him and he and the Cyclops says he'll have revenge on nobody so the men are all anxious to get away again and but while they're still in shouting distance on the boats odysseus taunts the cyclops saying that Zeus has avenged him for eating his guests and the Cyclops is so angry he rips the peak of a towering crags so you know this is big guy and he throws it at the ship just missing it but he causes a wave that's so large that it washes the boat closer sure and they panic so they start paddling like crazy and once they are a little bit further again Odysseus continues to taunt the Cyclops and his men are very unhappy about this and so then he brags and tells the Cyclops his name and he says I am Odysseus Raider of cities and the Cyclops then reveals that a prophet had told him years ago that he would be blinded by a man named Odysseus and he would assume that that would have been a great man but instead here's this dwarf this pipsqueak so he insults Odysseus and calls him a coward and now he says his guest gift is that he's going to call on his father Poseidon to prevent Odysseus from returning home and then this is just a little last bit because I think it's so important or if he's fated to see his people once again and reach his well-built house and his own native country let him come home late and come home a broken man all shipmates lost alone in a stranger's ship and let him find a world of pain at home so he is telling the whole story the great teller of tales that was wonderfully done thank you there are a couple of things that I would like to to add to this first of all he was so clever he said my name is no man or nobody but that's a that's almost a pun on his own name the word that Odysseus used was Otis and mate s means skillful person so that homers using this pun if you will to both fool Cyclops but also tell us what Odysseus is all about and he's smart enough to not say who he is and that's how he gets away because when they say who's hurting you will nobody and cyclopses family doesn't come to his aid but a dis he has blows it on the way out said it was me Odysseus here he goes back to the young man Odysseus the clay US pursuit of chaos Odysseus and it will cost him dearly if he is to get home Genesis is perfect that you did this because there is a fascinating bit of biology that goes with all of this would say well you know none of this can be can be real I mean this is just an imagination there is a fodder for sheep called corn Lily and corn lily has a teratogenic chemical in it called cyclop amine and if you sheep eat enough of this the cyclopia mean inhibits the gene that's responsible for the division of the forebrain into two parts it's called the sonic hedgehog gene so cyclop amine in this fodder will inhibit the sonic hedgehog gene which prevents the forebrain from dividing into two parts and the Lambs that are born are cycloptic they have a single eye now whether or not this had any part in the beginning of the story I don't know but I thought I would share that to you for for whatever enchantment it offers okay so he gets away and he's lost some more people and he gets away from the Cyclops and the next place he goes is to Aeolus so he gets blown over here and that's our that's our next story who's talking who's telling us about a oh great so this is a fairly short story but thank you for doing it ty [Music] the shipmates were traveling and they come across an island described as a floating island and they land and this is goes off to find Aeolus who is the king of the the island and he finds him in his palace with his wife and his children that is to say six sons and six daughters who are married and they enjoy a feast with wine for a great quite a while and then Aeolus asks Odysseus to explain what he's been up to and the story and he tells him the story of his tribulations and tribulations over the fall of Rome there when he finishes that he then would this just asks Aeolus for assistance in his trip going home you know Aeolus says yes he could help him and so he says I will give you a guest gift and a oilless is the Greek god of wind and so what he does is to take all of the winds but one and puts them in a sack which is made of an ox skin oxide and he ties it tightly and this just takes it and puts it on the ship among his things and the one wind which is not put in the bag is the west wind and they get aboard the ship and the west wind blows them toward their goal for nine days and they come they conspire and they see fires but at that point Odysseus is tired and he's gonna take a break takes a nap and while he is sleeping his crew start talking and they're very unhappy because Odysseus has been according to them every time they stopped at another spot he gets a guest gift and presumably these are things of great value gold and silver and he's not sharing them with his shipmates so they find the sack and they open the sack and out come all these winds and there's a tremendous storm and it blows the ship's back to the island and so Odysseus goes back to find the king insert explains what happened and he said could you help me again because we need help to get back to on our way home eniola says I'm sorry I have I've helped you once now you're on your own and so this just gets back in the ship and at that point his shipmates now have to do the rowing and they start rowing much time so what's happened here is that Odysseus hasn't gone quite far enough to be able to get home he hasn't gone through the hard work of the trip to Hades and the self-examination that that imparts and I forgot to ask when we were back with the Cyclops is there anything possibly feminine about the experience in the Cyclops cave because we're trying to see if there's any feminine influences on any of these stories as we go through well I'll throw out three things the Cyclops was a male but he lives in a cave which can be a metaphor for female genitalia he's blinded by a spike of olivewood and the interesting word that Homer uses which is extraordinary when he says my eye hurts the word that he uses is the same word for pain and childbirth so if there is a movement in the direction towards a feminine influence on Odysseus maybe it starts in the Cyclops cave I can't find anything in the story of Aeolus except that Odysseus hasn't done the hard enough work yet and he's blown off-course and he comes back and then as you properly point out the wind isn't blowing and he's rowing it is hard work now and so they do row and the next stop for them it's the least for onehans and I think do you have that out this is a short but interesting story [Music] okay when when Aeolus curses Odysseus and he says he he must be despised by the deathless gods because because he came back he then his men then row for six days and six nights non-stop and and just sort of as a my own personal footnote to this it seems at this point that this sense of unequivocally welcoming the guests is starting to break down culturally or at least for the story because they always you know welcomes him and gives him the gift and the the the crew doesn't adequately respect it and doesn't adequately respect ah dess use so so the second time they go back they get kicked out and that sets up what happens with the Lystra go nians because when they on the seventh day they reached the Lystra go nians and it's a harbor a very apparently a very good one with high walls protecting it he describes the the harbor as never a swell they're bigger small a milk-white calm spreads all over the place and his the other ships seeing the welcoming harbour go in a DES use Moore's his ship outside the harbor he does not go in you get the feeling he's a little suspicious of it but he doesn't really explain it and then basically he sends some of the crew in to find out who's there and what's going on because as they pull in there's there's nobody there they basically they see nothing so he sends three three in to figure out what's going on and they meet the daughter of the king the king is an FA DS and they meet his as they describe it his strapping daughter and I suspect harbors gonna do something with that in a minute but she sends them off through the to the to the to the fort to the palace and inside they they find anta Fatty's wife a woman huge as a mountain craig who filled them all with horror so so there does seem to be a change there as well but when when the King walks in the first thing he does is to grab one of the men that that she said sent in rip them apart and eat him tore him up for dinner is the phrase and the the other two escaped went back to the boats to warn the boats but at that point they were stuck they were they were in in the harbor surrounded by the harbor walls and the Lystra go nians attacked them all hundreds he says not like men but like Giants and they flung great rocks and sank the entire fleet that was in the harbor a DES use is outside the harbor so so he and the crew on his ship escaped it but everybody else is killed off in the harbor as as homework puts it they were speared like fish so it was and and part of the reason I suggest that this may be a falling a part of the the tradition of hospitality is there is no warning that this was going to be happening they were they were started by the daughter of the king they were invited to run up to the palace they go up to the palace and immediately the horror begins so basically that's the story thank you and the deaths use pulls out or pulls away and hightails it happy to escape their death and we do know thank you how that was perfect and we know the name of the King don't wait anything what's the name of the daughter and the Queen neither one of them has a name they're nameless these are nameless very dangerous feminine powers that eat people about as basic as it can get and when they get away from the last Virgo nians the next step is the island of Searcy and I think Steven that is your that's your that's your cue so entities and his monstrous white and his terrible Lester go nians kill and eat oh my men and destroy all my ships save one one single Pentecostal rose one single fifty orde ship and we head out across the dark sea as fast as we can and tell at the point of absolute exhaustion we spy an island ie the island of the Enchantress q:k we land we crawl up on the shore and we weep and we weep for three days at last I get up and climb a hill and see in the centre of the island smoke I come down on the way killing a stag I reach my men we light fires we eat and I tell them there is a habitation and they weep again with terror there are 46 of us left the only other leader is my annoying in-law you're a class who's a coward and a fool but by right he is my second so we divide the men 22 to each of us and draw lots to see which of us will go to the island centre he wins they leave when they approached the centre of the island they see a palace of dressed stone and within it they hear the singing of a loom and the singing of a goddess and circling the building are bears and lions and wolves and they are tamed and they greet the men and they lick their faces and the men call to the house and the singing stops and the great beauty kir k appears and welcomes them and says come in come in I'll give you a feast I'll give you drink and they go in and she seats them at table and she gives them lavish beakers of wine into which she has poured potion and when they drink it she taps them with her wand and they turned bristling into swine they could no longer recognize each other but their minds are whole within their suena SH skulls my cowardly cousin of course did not go in but hid and ran frantically back to the ship where he tells us weeping and shrieking to board it and run for our lives it was all I could do to get the story from him he told me and said we've got to go and I said no you stay here if you like but I'm going to get my men as I approached the hall the giant-slayer the god Hermes approaches me sent by Zeus at Athena's urging and he tells me of an herb only gods can pick called moly that has a black stem and a white flower and is an antidote to care Ches potion and he tells me when she tries to transform me I should pull my sword and threaten her and demand of her that she pledge not to do me any more mischief when I approach her house I see the pens are full of my men and the wild beasts are fawning and she is delighted to see me and invites me in and pours me a beverage and I drink it and she taps me with her wand and I pulled my sword and put it to her throat and she says you must be Odysseus I heard you were coming let's go to bed I say nothing until you pledged not to harm me not to do me any more ill she does we do then she offers me a feast and I say I shan't feast as long as my men are transformed free them all so she sends her servants out and they are all restored and they are all given a great feast and we send a runner back to the ship to tell Eleanor to return and he is still sniffling and crying and refusing and we stay with her for a year and after a year my men say um weren't we going somewhere oh yes so I say to the Enchantress we have to be on our way she says of course it is a perilous journey ahead of you so before you go on your way you have to go down to the home of dread Persephone the queen of the Dead and speak to tiresias the Theban seer because he will tell you what you have to do what route you have to take what perils you have to avoid if you're ever to get to see your native land when you get to the edge of hell you'll dig a pit as deep as your arm and fill it full of flour and wine and the blood of a lamb and the dead will crowd around you and Tiresias will crowd and only let him drink and only let him then speak to you of what is to come I go back to my men and say all right we're setting off but first we have to go to Hades and brave the realm of the Dead there is much moaning but eventually they begin the clamor of preparation and as we're marching down to the ship the last of us to awaken Alpen or the youngest and most foolish man in my company who has fallen drunkenly asleep on the top of the highest roof of kir Kay's house leaps still drunk to his feet startled and falls he breaks his neck and as we shove off to that far shore his soul speeds to the land of shadows beautiful thank you Steve a couple of things that I think are important in what Steven has said here is cure Kay and she is a goddess she's not a she's not a person and it requires Hermes the god of transformation remember we talked about him earlier he has to come in to negotiate this to be sure Odysseus gets through this okay and gives him the moly that neutralizes the the potion that she has and the way I think about this from a psychological standpoint because Searcy is a magical divine feminine force that is taking Odysseus and helping to transform him into a complete adult that's the psychological role that she plays here and that when Odysseus draws his sword that's not so much a phallic image or a threatening image as it is a sword of discrimination and she has the wand of transformation so with a masculine discrimination and the feminine transformation we see Odysseus survive this encounter but he's then told this feminine force cannot take him all the way to maturities she says you have to go down and talk to Tiresias nobody's happy about it but they do and I'm going to tell the story of tiresias just because I think it's so interesting and there are a couple things that I wanted to mention Steven described perfectly how the sacrifices are going so I won't reiterate that but the sacrifices are made and up come these ghosts and here comes first his mother antique laia remember we've said that names mean something ante client fame she had not wanted him to go to Troy she learned him to stay back and three times he tries to embrace her and Homer says that three times like a like a a waif just drifts through his arms and he cannot embrace her it's a remarkable scene that district many times in literature but finally tiresias comes up and drinks the blood and is allowed to talk to him two things are really important about tiresias this is not Homeric what I'm going to say to you now about what tiresias says comes from Hesiod which is about a contemporary of Homer and I couldn't this is not what Homer tells us about Tiresias but I believe that Homer believe this about Tiresias and use this as part of his story but Tiresias the blind seer of thebes is the only figure in literature that I know of that spent part of his time as a man and part of his time as a woman not a hermaphrodite man first woman and then back to man Hera was the one who transformed him and there's some interesting reasons that we will go into now because they're not important but here is tiresias the only figure not only in this story but in all of literature that I know that has was both a man and a woman he knew both sides and it was Tiresias that was going to tell or this is how to get home or how to get back to Ithaca or how he becomes psychologically integrated as a complete adult and that's why this role that tiresias plays is so important and then he says you will get home but when you get home there will be much suffering there's a there's something you must do to take care of the offense you've made to Poseidon you take your oar which is a weapon of war and you walk inland until it's no longer seen as a weapon of war it's seen as a winnowing fork and there you plant your or make your supplications to Poseidon and then tiresias says you will die a gentle death as an old man surrounded by your family so this seus has a prediction of how it's going to turn out and he has a he has a recipe for what he has to follow in order to do this I think one of what what Tiresias tells him to do is so remarkable and I wanted to reflect a little bit on it with you you can see immediately the swords into plowshares from weapon of war to win owing fork how are we moving from a time of war to a time of peace maybe agriculture there are even some suggestions that this is an echo a very ancient echo of the original home of the Dorian's which is off the Russian steppes and where they where they mastered the agricultural life and if this is in some way an archaic or reflective moment of that history of the Dorian's when they came down to to populate Greece but whatever it is it's it's what Odysseus has to do in order to get home and to make his supplication to Poseidon and it's this pivotal moment where he's finished with his work in the underworld and that has to come back up empowered with the script of what he has to do and directed by this this person who was both man and woman we're gonna run out of time in a little bit but these stories have been so good this might be a good place for us to pause I know many of many others have volunteered to tell part of their stories which we can do next week is that okay with everybody and if you can't be here next week I can fill things in but I think that rather I would like to leave us right here at this profoundly important moment where Odysseus now with the help of Hermes in getting into the underworld and the and the insights of tiresias man and woman is learning how he can actually get home so let's stop there for a moment just go around the room and see if there any questions you'd like to to address on these stories that have been so well told by by all of us before we adjourn any questions or thoughts I've tried to emphasize some of the feminine in these stories as you can see us moving in that direction we'll get more than that when we come back okay so what we're gonna do remember that next week we don't have a session next week is Thanksgiving I hope you all have a lovely Thanksgiving and there's no class next week on the 20th but when we come back the following week we will finish some of these stories that will bring us back to Ithaca and then see how Odysseus actually captures recaptures his home and there are some readings that I would like to have for us but I think that rather than pass those out because everybody has an assignment for where we're going to start next week and I'll hold on to these and do these later so thank you very much and have a nice Thanksgiving [Applause]

Channel: The University of Scranton

Views: 8,955

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

Id: VSHlRqf4AZk

Length: 70min 14sec (4214 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 03 2019