Begin anywhere. Start… wherever you want. One of the first things that the poet who sings the Odyssey does is to give up control of the poem. He knows that he's not really making the decisions - he's not really making the creative choices. The whole process, the whole poem is in the hands of the Muses. And he gives it up to them. He says “I'm not going to even decide where to begin this poem. You decide.” The Greek word is ἁμόθεν  (“hamoten”)  and in all of Homer's work, that word only occurs one time, right at the beginning of the Odyssey  - Begin wherever you want. And I love this idea that there is no fixed, definite beginning to the story of the Odyssey. When we think about stories and storytelling, we always think about the beginning, the middle and the end. This is something we're always teaching children about. Begin at the beginning and build up to a climax and then resolve the story. But mythology really doesn't work that way. Myths are stories inside of stories and stories surrounding stories. The end of one myth is almost always the beginning of another man. And this idea of this interconnectedness of stories within stories was really driven home to me in a visual way. When I first saw the artwork of an Argentinian artist called Tomas Saraceno in 2008, he created an installation called “Galaxies forming along filaments like droplets along the strands of a spider's web.” Saraceno studies the movements and the constructions of arachnids, and builds these enormous gallery sized constructions that are webs of webs, webs inside of webs, and when you visit them you can actually crawl around inside them. You can crawl up and you can lie down and. You can go around corners and you can sort of see where you were before, but there really is no beginning to these structures and there's no center. It's a web of webs, an interconnected Galaxy, just as he says. And to me, that's a perfect metaphor for the way myths work. I'm pretty sure that when people were hearing the story of the Odyssey some 2700 years ago, if a a story was referenced, if another myth was referenced, it was something that people would have understood. People would have recognized that - they didn't need to sort of check the footnotes and that's the experience that I hope to share a little bit of in the course of this podcast - not just retelling the story of the Odyssey, but telling the stories that surround the story and connect to the story where one ends, another will begin. So hello, I'm Tom Lee, and this is “The Odyssey Odyssey.” a journey through the story of the Odyssey and all of the stories that surround and connect to it. And since this is the very first episode, it seems appropriate to give this over to the Muses. The daughters of Zeus and Memory. Zeus is the father of hundreds of characters in Greek mythology, but what I love about the Muses is that they are the daughters of the goddess Mnemosene, the goddess of memory. Just think about that. The ancient Greeks gave memory its own goddess. And she's actually one of the very first goddesses. Of course long before Zeus and Poseidon and Hera came along, they had  older brothers and sisters. The first group of gods, the Titans, the children of Earth and Sky. And there were twelve of them, and we kind of take this for granted when we think about mythology - 12 gods but - dividing the universe up and you had 12 categories, how would you do it when we. If you come from a monotheistic viewpoint it's really pretty straightforward. You have a God and that God or that goddess is responsible for everything. They do everything  - but as soon as you have more than one God, even if you just had two gods. You have to decide who does what, which God is responsible for which elements of creation, for which elements of nature. So how would you divide everything that exists into 12. Would you give one goddess the realm of memory. I think that says so much about the ancient Greeks, especially when we remember that this poem and much of the great poetry that comes to us from ancient Greece was originally committed only to memory. There's a a raging debate among scholars - and this might be a very good time for me to make my blanket disclaimer for the whole of this podcast series that I am very definitely not an expert. I don't have a PhD and  I'm not a classics scholar. I am a storyteller and I have been for several decades -  and I tell stories in schools and theaters, but I also get to do a lot of work in museums and I get to work with experts and I get to find out a little bit about the process of research. But to be very clear, I don't have a PhD. I stole a joke. Years ago I heard  a tour guide giving a walking tour in New York City, and he told the group he said, well, I do have a PhD, but I'm homeschooled and I instantly stole that joke. (If you're out there listening, thank you.) And I like to think that if the Academy had a a playground and the playground had a sandbox, that would be about where you would find me. So I'm going to try very hard throughout this podcast, not to say anything that sounds definitive, but I do invite you to enjoy exploring and learning with me. I should also mention that. I don't speak ancient Greek, but I do study it. I I play around with Ancient Greek, I have a very patient tutor who indulges me. He keeps trying to get me to. Volume one, page one, chapter one of my Greek grammar and I keep coming to him with passages of of Hesiod and Plato and Homer, and and asking what this means and how this idea might be expressed. So I I enjoy playing around with Greek, but let's get back to the importance Of memory in ancient Greece. One of the big questions that actual experts debate and have done for well over 100 years is the Homeric question. Back in the 18th century and earlier, Homer was thought of as the greatest writer who ever lived - greater than Shakespeare, greater than anybody. That he had written these epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and his use of language and metaphor and character was better than anyone, and he had written this all down, and it had come down to us from ancient Greece. And. Increasingly, people started to challenge this idea that Homer had in fact written anything at all. In fact, a lot of people questioned if Homer had ever even existed. The idea of Homer is is very much alive. There's a a famous bust  - there's a beautiful copy in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts  -  It's a Roman copy of a Greek bust - and it is declared to be Homer, but it's it's an imagined portrait. The person who sculpted the bust had no idea what Homer looked like because the bust was made hundreds of years after Homer lived, if he ever lived at all. But he's clearly blind. There was a very strong idea that that Homer was not only a great poet, but that he was also blind. In fact, this kind of gave him - One of the poets, one of the rhapsodes the storytellers in the story of the Odyssey is himself blind, and this was sort of associated with Homer. So that's all a little bit romanticized, but it raises the question, well, how did he write? If he was blind. The poem may well be older than writing itself. It may have been created, possibly by one person, possibly by many different people, but it may have been created over hundreds of years in a culture where nothing was ever written down. If you wanted to pass on the story, if you wanted to pass on a poem in its entirety, you would memorize the poem, and this we're talking about 12,109 lines of poetry, but you would memorize the entire thing, and you would recite it. And after you died, you had you had passed this knowledge - not any kind of text - but you had passed the knowledge of the poem the exact poem on to the next generation of storytellers of rhapsodes. And it lasted that way until writing miraculously came along in ancient Greece. And the version that we have today is the version that was written down when writing began around 2700 years ago.

So you would want a goddess for memory.  Because all of learning was held in memory. There's a great story in a dialogue of Plato, the Phaedrus, where the speakers, imagining the Egyptian God Thoth, who creates the alphabet and gives the alphabet and the ability to write to humankind - and the idea is that the alphabet actually gives us permission to forget - the alphabet is not a tool to increase our learning, but it's permission to forget things once we can write things down. Learning and knowledge does not have to be part of us. It does not have to come from within us. So I just love this idea that that the story had to be completely internalized, and that in order to do that, you needed the help of a goddess, the goddess Mnemosene, the goddess of memory. Her – what is he? Her nephew? I guess Zeus's Nemas and his nephew. And long before he was married to his sister, Hera, he slept with Mnemosene 9 nights in succession and after time had passed. Mnemosene gave birth to nine daughters and these were the joyful daughters of art, all of literature, language, poetry, dance, music fell to the Muses and their primary job was to live on Mount Helicon which overlooked the home of the gods, Mount Parnassus. You could sort of - you can see Mount Parnassus from the distance when you're standing on Mount Helicon and it has beautiful woods and streams that flow through it. The Muses dance around this and praise their father they praise Zeus. But every now and again they leave the mountain. They shroud themselves in darkness, and they come among people. And if they come to you and you are a poet or an aspiring poet, if the Muses come and inspire you, it's your lucky day. One of the prayers. To the Muses says that kings are made by Zeus, and that's all very well, but poets are made by the Muses, one of the most important writers - in addition to Homer - and this is - we know this is an actual person who actually lived around the same time as Homer, Hesiod, and he tells that he was a shepherd, and he lived not far from Mount Helicon and he was tending his sheep, and the Muses came to him and said we're going to make you able to tell lies that seem like truth and truth that sings out and he became a poet because of the Muses. So who were they? What were their names? I was so hoping you were going. To ask that. Cleo Uterque, Talea, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Volumnia, Urania, Calliope, and many of their names tell a little bit about the area of the arts that they inspire. Cleo is dedicated to the art of history, to historic poetry. Uterpe is for lyric poetry and her name has the the root word of of delight and joy like her sister Terpsichore, who delights in in dancing. The coral odes  this sense of this joyous celebration of art. And there's not too many of ancient depictions of the Muses. A lot of times you'll go to a museum and they'll say possibly this is a sculpture of a muse or, or possibly the figure on this ancient pot is  a muse. Or maybe it's just an unknown, udentified goddess or there's often a question mark, but there are some amazing depictions of the Muses from a little bit later. There's a sarcophagus in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that actually comes from Rome. It comes from about 300 to 100 AD. So it's almost 1000 years after the Odyssey was created, but it shows the Muses in a contest with the sirens and I'm going to put this on the Instagram page for this show, the Odyssey Odyssey. But it's, it's just, it's really exciting. You can see who's. A little bit like Saints. The Muses often have symbols. Uterpe has a double flute because she's responsible for lyric poetry. Urania is responsible for the heavens and astronomy, so she often has a sphere or things like that. So we know these are the muses and they're battling. They're they're actually kind of wrestling with the sirens and the sirens. Are these harpy like figures, beautiful women's bodies but sort of hideous bird legs, bird claws. For the. feet and they sing to the Muses, sing about Zeus. But of course the sirens and we're going to encounter them later in the story of the Odyssey, they sing in order to lure men and women to their death, usually men, because it's sailors. But they're evil and they're absolutely evil. They use their singing. They're evil. So here's this battle between the Muses and the sirens. And guess what? The the Muses are winning. The Muses are taking the sirens down. And Athena and Zeus and Hera are are looking on. It's a it's a fabulous sculpture, but you really see much more of the Muses in the Enlightenment - in the 18th century. If you had a stately home in the 18th century, you might even have a a room that was dedicated to the Muses. The very idea of a museum comes from this idea of the Muses. It's not an ancient Greek word. It's a word that comes from the 17th century, the very beginning of the Enlightenment, that you would have a a seat of the Muses,  a place where the muses could dominate where rich white men could celebrate their dedication to the arts in their seats of the muses. Unless of course, you're from Hartford, CT, where we proudly lay claim to the oldest public museum in America, which isn't a museum at all. It's an. Atheneum the seat of Athena, the goddess of  wisdom. There's a beautiful set of paintings, enormous paintings of the Muses by an artist called Shalman. Yeah, in the Cleveland Museum of Art. And I love this because I think there's only five of them there because the guy who was going to pay for them, he went bankrupt and they never finished painting all the Muses. But they wound up in a house in Switzerland. And they stayed there for quite a while until they were discovered in a very dilapidated condition, and the Cleveland Museum beautifully restored them. And they're on display there. But absolutely my favorite depiction of the Muses comes from something called cigarette cards from the William Kimball Tobacco Company in 1889. This was an American Tobacco company. And they used to put little pieces of cardboard in the cigarette packages to keep the cigarettes from getting crushed. And then someone had the brilliant idea of putting pictures on these little cards. And this is one of the ways that the trading card was born. And they would, they would do these whole sets. They had a set of goddesses of the Greeks and Romans and. These beautiful sort of Gibson girl Goddesses - and they have each of the 9 muses with their appropriate artistic tool. So now that the Muses have been properly evoked and I hope, appeased. Where do we begin? Where do we begin to tell the story of Odysseus? The story begins with a couple of big spoilers. We learned that of all the men who went to the Trojan War with Odysseus not one is coming back alive. Odysseus is alone, every single one of the men that came with him has died. And we're going to see this happen in the course of the story one by one, sometimes in large groups, sometimes singly, they're going to die. They're going to be devoured, they're going to be killed, they're going to be cursed. And if Odysseus is going to make it home, he's coming back alone.

Right.

And we also know that the God Poseidon is furious at Odysseus, and we know why in what is arguably the most famous episode in the entire epic. Odysseus blinds the son of Poseidon, the cyclops and this is, you know, the story that everyone knows from from the Odyssey. If I go to a a middle school class or even younger, that's the story that's as far as a lot of kids are concerned - that's what the Odyssey is about. It's actually a fairly short episode, and it's mentioned. Right at the beginning, Poseidon is the enemy of Odyssey. And where is he? Is he on a raft in the middle of the ocean? Is he searching for a way home? No, Odysseus, whom we don't see for the first five books of the poem - I think about Jaws. I think about how supposedly Steven Spielberg put in his  contract. That you wouldn't see the shark until the first hour of the movie had gone by. I don't know exactly, and I don't even know if this is true, but I've always loved the story that it was in his contract that you would not see the shark until well into the movie. And here we are, two and a half thousand years before “Jaws,” and we're not going to see Odysseus, we're going to see the gods worrying about Odysseus. We're going to see his son. Searching for his father. But we're not going to see Odysseus, but we know where he is. He's on an island. Captive by a beautiful nymph. The daughter of Atlas, another one of the Titans, Atlas, who holds up the Earth, is the brother of Mnemosyne. So you see the the threads of the web are beginning to spin themselves and his absolutely ravishingly beautiful sensuous world. Calypso lives in a splendid cave on an island that is planted with celery and violets. One of my favorite images in the whole poem. This idea of a field of celery and violets. I really want to put a garden bed in that that has that as a sort of an homage to Calypso. He's a prisoner on this side. He has no boat. He cannot get away. He sleeps with calypso every night - against his will he tells us, - and she even offers to marry him. She offers to give him immortality, but no, the only thing he wants is to go home. How can you say that without thinking of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, all I kept telling them was I want to go home  - and the gods are very much aware of Odysseus. And they're aware that the war has ended and that. everyone that has to get home is home - everyone that hadn't died in the war has finally arrived home? Some sooner, some later. Some have come home more successfully than others. Agamemnon is on Zeus's mind because he came home from the war. Only to be murdered the minute he walked in the door. Honey, I'm home, honey, I'm dead. The story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and Egysthus This is a fabulous rabbit hole that we will dive into. This is one of the many stories that surround the story of the Odyssey. Agamemnon casts a really long shadow. We hear about him again and again. He's sort of the antithesis. Of Odysseus - Odysseus struggles and struggles to get home to the wife, to the family, who who loves him, who miss him, who want him back -  and Agamemnon sails home swiftly without any problems. He sails home from the Trojan War and he walks in the door. His wife doesn't even let his feet touch the ground. She puts down a purple cloth and she gives him a bath and she - Or maybe her lover - Or maybe both of them -  kill Agamemnon within minutes of his entering the house, and we will dedicate a future episode of “The Odyssey Odyssey” to the long, complicated cursed family of Agamemnon, the House of Atreus. So it's a standstill. Nothing is moving, nothing is happening. Everyone is stuck. Until one day. And that, as a storyteller, that is probably my favorite phrase to use in a story -  because it means that things are going to begin. Something is going to change, and what changes in the Odyssey is that Poseidon goes on vacation. Or maybe call it a business trip. Poseidon goes to see The Ethiopians. The furthest point on the globe. He goes to the people farthest away because he loves The Ethiopians and they worship him. They sacrifice 100. Rocks and 100 lambs hecatomb is of of sacrifice and and Poseidon is celebrated and he has this marvelous time smelling the smoke of the sacrificial fires and being worshipped by The Ethiopians. But while he's away, the gods and the goddesses begin to discuss. What are we going to do? And on that note, I think I'll say - To be continued -  Thank you for listening to episode one of “The Odyssey Odyssey.” You can check out the Instagram page at the Odyssey Odyssey and there's links to that on the web page for this website. Www.theodysseyodyssey.com. And I'd love to hear from you if you have questions or comments or better ideas or you want to correct my Greek. Anything.  I'd love to hear from you. As a storyteller I'm used to telling stories to hundreds of people live and in person. Looking at their faces and their facial expressions, while I'm telling you. Worry of during the pandemic, a lot of performers learned to perform for tiny little lenses and cameras on their phones and computers, and now I'm sitting in a dark, padded room. And talking to a microphone. But I hope you're listening and I hope you're interested. And if you have questions, please do get in touch. I'd love to hear from you just before I go, I want to give a quick shout. Out to the great folks at Studio 20 South at the West Hartford Public Library. This is an amazing creator space of makers. Base where you can go in and work all kinds of equipment, including a podcast, recording booth and software. And when I was just starting from nothing, they were incredibly helpful and pointed me on the right path. So if you're in Connecticut, you have a library card. Be sure to check them out. Until next time. I'm Tom Lee. Thank you.