Tell me the tale of a man, Mews, who had so many roundabout ways, to wander, driven off course after sacking Troy's hallowed cape.

Many of the peoples whose cities he saw, and whose ways of thinking he learned.

Many of the toils he suffered at tea, anguish in his heart as he struggled to safeguard his life,

and the homecoming of his companions.

But he did not save his companions even so,

though he longed to, for the heedlessness destroyed them.

There's and nobody else's.

Fools that they were.

Like children who devoured the sun god Hyperion's cattle.

And so he took from them the day of their homecoming.

Goddess, start where you will.

Daughter of Zeus, share the tale with us too.

So that was the opening of Homer's great epic, the Odyssey,

brilliantly translated by a friend of the show, Daniel Mendelssohn.

And there was only one person who was capable of reading that for us,

and we're very grateful to the tremendous classical actor,

Russell Crow, for reading those words.

And the reason that Russell agreed to do that for us is because the Odyssey is one of the great

foundational moments, the foundational products in all Western culture and civilization. It ranks alongside Homer's other great poem,

the Iliad composed in the 8th or the 7th century BC, and of course the Bible as an absolute

building block of the culture that we now are so familiar with Tom. So the Odyssey has given us so many other stories, hasn't it?

You've said that it's kind of foundational work of Western culture,

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