Hey, you know, while Odysseus is on his way home from the Trojan War, I figured we could just take a quick peek over to the rest of Greece and see how the rest of his buddies from the Iliad are doing on their way home.

Oh my goodness.

Oh, this is not going well. Yeah, so last time when we talked about Telemachus and his coming of age and the moment when Athena inspires him to go out searching for news of his father Odysseus and he's on his way home his long tenured journey home from the Trojan War. I read to you a passage in which Telemachus says,

I think with quite a bit of bombast and self-importance for such a young man, he says,

other men too lost their day of homecoming at Troy, and he's perfectly

right about that. Many people straight up died in the Trojan War, but it's also the case as he's about to discover when he journeys out into the world

that lots of other people had a really hard homecoming journey as well. Odysseus is the latest and last he's taken the longest,

but we learn as Telemicus ventures out that the aftermath of the Trojan War has been really rough for everybody and this is the place

maybe most of all where Homer furnishes the material for all of Greek literature subsequently.

I don't know how many times now I've quoted this Escalis saying when Escalis says that

all my tragedies are just slices from the great banquet of Homer,

but you're really going to see this week how that's true.

And what's so cool about that is it means you're not just reading Homer when you're reading Homer or any truly great work of Western literature.

I'm teaching a college course on Greek now and one of the things I say to my students is,

you know when you walk into an art museum

and you get to the Renaissance paintings

and you're in some giant room where everything kind of looks the same

and you know it's supposed to be great,

it's supposed to be high culture, but basically it's just a bunch of naked people running around

doing a bunch of stuff. Once you read Homer and once you read the Bible and Dante and Milton and as you get into this storehouse of the great Western tradition

suddenly those paintings don't all look the same to you because the world of culture starts to come into focus and you can tell these different myths that are all lifted from these sources, these deep well springs of tradition.

So you're not just reading one poem, you're actually getting inducted into a kind of society,

...