Welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show, the culturalist. With Victor Davis Hanson, the Martin and Ili Anderson senior fellow in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution.

And the Wayne and Marcia Busk Distinguished Fellow in history at Hillsdale College. I am the co-host, Sammy Wink.

The culturalist is a new podcast on the relevance of history to modern culture. We often hear it said that the past repeats itself. Here we look at those patterns in history.

We, some of you have read Thucydides history of the Peloponnesian War and he says in that it's a blueprint for all time. And with the idea that the idea that that there are certain constants in human nature and human society.

Today in this episode, Victor talks about lessons from ancient Greek civilization found in the Odyssey and in Greek tragedy. Now first let's turn then to Victor the Odyssey and Homer who was entertaining young Greeks and teaching them about their mythology.

But the ideas of the Odyssey run deeper than myth and an entertaining tale of a journey, Homer. And we would like to discuss those other things, those long term things with you.

Okay, well thank you, Sammy. So what is Homer, Homer is just a name. There's no first name. There's no last name. There's just Homer or Homeros in Greek.

And we associate him with two monumental poems. Monumental means are long and in they're written or composed or early in a deck, chili, examiner meter long short short, long short short, six time.

Okay, so we have the Iliad are about the last year of the war, multi week incident, the wrath of Achilles and then we have one other poem, the Odyssey and how one of the heroes of the many heroes, how they struggle to get back home. In this case Odysseus, how he came

back to Ithaca after 10 years fighting at Troy and another 10 years wandering the Aegean and the Mediterranean and counting various monsters. Now, it doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of other Homeric poems or dozens of them by Homer and his associates.

Oral Bards and the so-called dark ages between 1200 and 700 BC that composed tales of monumental heroes, monumental places, monumental events before their time and they passed that down to a guild of illiterates, they're writing, as we know it, the Phoenician and then the Greek alphabet did not yet exist when they composed at least until maybe Homer's last poem or two.

I like to do a little bit different take and one of them is, are they historical, are they accurate, was there an Ithaca, was there a Mycini, was there a Troy and the first thing to remember is that there was a monumental civilization in Greece, we call it the Myciniens and the last stage was the most impressive.

About 1600 to 1200, 1250 BC and the name comes from the greatest citadel of Mycini and it was near Eastern or Egyptian or non Greek at least we thought in its organization was monumental, it was on a hill or a rise in the lowlands, word king or a Wannox and onox and his world court distributed power,

money, authority to people surrounded them and they brought their wares, their agricultural produce mostly, but also metals up into the world storehouses so it was not communist, but it was very highly hierarchical ranked society.

And it fell apart crash burned we don't know why we don't know whether it was too intensively controlled by the aparat at Mycini or Tyrann's or Thebes or law and they were knocked out suddenly and decapitated or we don't know whether see people's or the Dorians or somebody from the North came and knocked them out but they were destroyed and when they were destroyed, they lost, they being Greeks lost about 90% of the time.

So in the de Treetis that followed for five centuries, just imagine the United States being nuked if you will, very complex society being nuked and we have all these movies about survival on the beach or water world or all of these post aparat the book of Eli something like that in the dark age and there were probably Mycini and lords by the name of Ajax or killings or Odysseus and

over the centuries as this impoverished society recovered slowly, they started telling stories about this last generation or last few generations of the Mycini and they exaggerated them and they became almost divine and they stumbled into Mycini and tombs, Mycini and walls and they said who built these who built these incredible things we couldn't get near doing them now and so they call them the Cyclops or the got the sons of Heracles or Heracles.

So in that process of exaggeration we came up with we had the Sac of Troy and the exhibition to Troy and I don't know that was probably a Mycini and rate of some sort into Anatolia from Greece and then we had the wanderings of one Mycini and Lord and that became exaggerated into fairy land so to speak over four or five centuries and then the last the last generation of this guild at his home or

he was fortunate that he coincided with the rise of the new city state in the word civilization rebounded but on very different premises, it was no longer Mycini and it was no longer dark age the Greek language was still spoken but a new alphabet allowed it to be literary and the city state of those and Greek religion was codified and we started to have epic poems and lyric poem he see it works and days he's the organe, precinctly it's a great story.

And that last version of that oral saga was canonized or institutionalized or codified but it was probably written down and that's where we have it.

So our question what is in the Odyssey the answer is it's like a sandwich and onion one layer a very small layer goes back five centuries to the Mycini and world and there's things in there certain words of places that no longer existed 500 years when Homer composed and yet they're in the Odyssey and the

Soviet there's a board think about a tooth of a bore helmet that nobody'd ever seen in Greece in 700 and yet it's mentioned in the Iliad so obviously the poem was handed down father to son or guild partner to guild partner and they included material objects included place names included words included dialects that nobody knew what they meant they just knew that was essential to the archaic flavor of the story.

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