All right, well, last week we met some of the women in Odysseus Life who helped to walk him back home,

and they gave him a beautiful, poignant, sad kind of send-off on his way to Ithaca.

But now, my friends, fellas and lads, this one's for the boys.

Okay, so I said last week gave a little preview of this.

We had the three, almost the three races.

That's not exactly who they are, but the three women who kind of bookend Odysseus journey back home

after all the shouting is over, after the tragic loss of his whole crew,

when he's really been stripped down to the barest possible bones.

He meets Calypso, spends seven years with her in a kind of holding pattern, a way station. She does care very deeply for him, but ultimately he's mourning,

desperate to get home. She has to let him go.

Then once he makes his way out, he finds his way to the

the Feations and to Alkinuos and Nusicaea, and that's where he begins to reintegrate into society.

Civilization, which he's been searching for this whole time, keeps coming up on new islands,

new places, trying to find a group of people that will

honor guest friendship and Zeus and really respect some of the basic principles of civilization.

Now he has the ideal of that in front of him with the feations. They're sort of utopian society

or civilization, but he has to let

that go to. They have to let him go. And finally, finally, he meets his real divine match in

Athena, who meets him on the shores of Ithaca and kind of smacks him into shape, whips him up into readiness.

She disguises him, as I said last time, turns him into an old beggar so that he can

perform one last grand trick, a kind of wily sort of subterfuge.

He's going to use now his abilities sort of for good

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