So there's one question from world literature that everybody's always asking and that is who is John Galt

but I will see you your John Galt and raise you one better. I'm still fixated on a much older mystery who is Odysseus.

All right our hero at last takes center stage. We've been on this journey, weeks and weeks now on this journey through the Homeric poems.

We started with the material before the Iliad and the judgment of Paris

that kicked off the Trojan War. Then we went through the Iliad and the story of Achilles' rage and the grand destruction that it wrought upon the Greeks and then the death of

Hector. Now we're deep into Odyssey territory. We talked last week about what was going on back home in Ithaca with Telemicus and Penelope

We talked about the news that reached Telemicus via Menelaeus one of Odysseus comrades from the Trojan War the news about Lemael

Emanelaeus, one of Odysseus comrades from the Trojan War, the news about Odysseus that he may still

be alive after all this time for all these years.

And remember that we're going through this story in chronological order of the narrative itself,

which is not the order that the poems go in.

I'm trying to tell you the story from start to finish because I think a lot of Homer's audience

would have had that template in their minds when they were listening to the poems or

later on reading them and in order to fully get everything we can out of these enormous epics which have so much in them.

The whole world almost is contained in these epics, but to get it all out you need to know kind of what's going on so

that's the trajectory we've been taking it's not the trajectory Homer takes which is a

more artful trajectory where different things come kind of out of order. The poet Horace, the later Roman poet Horace,

invented this famous phrase to talk about this technique.

He said that poets who really know what their subject matter is about

begin in Medias Rest, that is they drop us right into the middle of the action and

sometimes this is taken to mean that things which begin in medias rest start in the middle of a scene and now if somebody says well this novel begins in medias rest

they'll probably mean that the first chapter opens with a line of dialogue in the middle of a conversation or something like that.

...