You guys, I got to admit, I'm pretty sad to be leaving Odysseus behind. I know this makes me a big softy,

and I did really like going through the Iliad with you guys, and Achilles is an incredible hero. No question.

But I feel like we've really gotten to know Odysseus. It's such an intimate character study, such a close, carefully drawn

portrait of him and we become so invested in his journey that now it feels a little

bit like bidding farewell to a friend, which is why I am pleased to report

that it basically turns out all of Western literature is just a sequel to the Odyssey.

So there's this famous quote by Alfred North Whitehead that all of Western philosophy basically just amounts to footnotes on Plato and Aristotle.

And you could almost say that the same thing is true about Greek literature and a large portion of

Western literature when it comes to Homer. I've said this before, but the poems we've been talking

about for the better part of this season on Young Heretics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, these were the closest thing that the ancient Greeks had to Holy Scripture.

Now, it's not that close because they really didn't have anything like our Bible in terms of the central canonical place that the Bible

has in our culture. But if they had something like that in classical Athens, this was it.

The philosophers quoted it and used it as examples. School children learned it and memorized passages

from it. People talked about this stuff. It was everywhere in the culture, and it became an incredibly fertile source for all sorts of other literature.

And we've had occasion to talk about the other poems that deal with the same mythological content as I've been introducing you to the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Because in order to understand

these poems, you kind of have to immerse yourself in the cinematic universe that they were a part of.

They weren't just sprung out of the ground magically from nothing. They didn't just come fully

formed. They entered into a pre-existing artistic community where people knew these stories. They were folk tales.

They were shared myths and legends that people had been telling. And so we've been immersing

ourselves in that world so that we can see what Homer is on about when he's crafting these

incredibly beautiful works of literature. But it doesn't end there. There's more good stuff to be

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