Hello and welcome to classical stuff you should know.

This is a podcast about the classical education world and all the stuff you should know about it.

This is definitely a rip-off of one of my favorite podcasts, Catholic stuff you should know.

And yeah, so we just stole their name.

And today, my name is Graham Dawson.

With me, we have AJ Hannberg.

And AJ, you have something that you seem excited about.

Yeah.

So the problem with Homer's literature is that it's pretty inaccessible to any of us today.

The average person.

Right, or the average adult.

I tried to read it after college, and I hated it because there's a wealth of mythological background that you really need to have before you can even jump into the book,

because the book really does start in the middle of the story. So if you don't have that,

none of it makes a lot of sense at all, and you really can't get what is good from the Iliad.

So I encourage you, anybody out there, please don't jump into the Iliad just willy-nilly

without listening to either this podcast or having someone to walk you through it, because you're just going to miss it. Now, does Homer back fill all this stuff later on in the book?

No.

Does this stuff come back and like, book 10, here's the background stuff you need to know?

He assumes that you know all of this, and he never fills it in. There's even stories between

the Iliad and the Odyssey that don't really get filled in because he assumes you know it.

And it's because it was cultural currency. It's the same thing as knowing that Abraham Lincoln was a

president, right? That's, and helped to abolish slavery. That's something that we know because it's

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