Literature and history

Hello and welcome to literature and history. Episode 13, His Mind Teaming.

This is the second of our three programs on Homer's Odyssey, an ancient Greek poem likely

set down in its current form around 700 BC.

If you're just jumping in, I'd recommend first listening to the previous show in which I

introduce the characters and situation of the Odyssey and lay out the story of the first

eight books. In today's show, we're going to sail through the most famous part of the Odyssey.

Odysseus' perilous journeys in the two or three years after the Trojan War,

and his arrival after 20 years of wandering on his homeland of Ithaca.

Let's review what's happened in the story so far.

Last time we covered the first third of the Odyssey. In books one through eight, we first

learned that after the decade-long Trojan War, poor Odysseus wandered for an additional nine years.

When the Odyssey begins, Odysseus is being held captive on an island by a beautiful nymph called

Calypso, who tortures him by giving him all the food and wine he can eat and drink and making love to him every night.

Ever loyal to his homeland and wife Penelope and a little leery of being a jiggolo for a goddess to boot. Odysseus has only stayed with

Calypso for seven years because he's been forced to, and the first time we meet him he's crying

near the ocean and thinking of home. Fortunately for Odysseus

he is also friends with another female divine being, one considerably more powerful

than Calypso. Good old Athena, the daughter of Zeus, with gray eyes the color

of a still ocean, finely honed intelligence, and an act for wearing disguises and trafficking

in falsehoods, as Odysseus is back. In the opening of the

Odyssey Athena sets in motion a plan to get the lost hero home. And there is urgent

...