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Hello, I'm Tom Lee and welcome back to the Odyssey. Odyssey. If you have been listening since the beginning, you'll know it's been quite a gap since the last episode until this one. It was a very busy school year for me, which has good news, but it absolutely kept me out of the studio and away from my research. So I'm back now. That summer has kicked in and my plan is to power through and finish the entire epic of the Odyssey before school starts again. If you are new to the podcast and if you have found it while I was on hiatus, I really want to thank you. It was very gratifying to see every week 50, 60, 80 people would download the episodes that were already in existence. And so it was great. But now I have a favor to ask you, because I'm absolutely amazed at the range of locations where people are listening. According to the app that hosts the podcast, which is Buzz Sprout, I have listeners in Auckland, I have listeners in Sutton Coldfield in Birmingham, Brisbane, Bixby, Oklahoma, Apollo, Pennsylvania, which I love that Tbilisi bus run H a raccoon Noko my school in Milan of NATO in Treviso. And I would love to know who you are. I would love to hear from you and I'm excited to share that there's a new feature on the Buzz Sprout platform that allows you to send me a text message completely anonymously. I know some people may not want to send a note because they don't want to give their personal information away, which I, of course, totally understand that. And I also understand it's a little cumbersome to type in my rather long website name. WW dot com Liz storyteller dot net and send a message through there which of course you can. But now if you go to the page for this podcast on whatever platform you're on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever it may be, you'll find a little link that says, Send me a text message and you can just click on that. And I've tried this out and I get a message from you, but I don't get any of your personal information other than anything you might want to share. So I would just love it if you could drop me a note and tell me where you listen. How you listen, why you listen. It gives me a much better sense of who I'm talking to as I sit here in this foam lined room in my very cool basement on a very hot day. So with that said, come back to our show. So I'm going to give you the scenario and you tell me the book or film to which it applies. There's a traveller in desperate straits, often in the middle of the night in a terrible thunderstorm who has some just desperate problem, and they arrive in the middle of nowhere at a magnificent home, a magnificent place. And it all sort of seems too good to be true as they're brought in to sit by the fire and drink a brandy and everything is going to be fine until we discover that wherever they have arrived, whoever is welcoming them is probably a mad killer. Or there's some desperate secret about this place that is not immediately revealed. But they're in worse trouble now than they were before. I'm sure you can think of at least a dozen films and maybe as many novels that take place with this scenario at the beginning. It's just a delicious sort of setup. And what's kind of fun is we know, we know what's going to happen. We know this is all going to go very wrong no matter how good it seems. The two scenarios that come to my mind when I think about that is a William Penn Dubois children's book from 1947 called The 21 Balloons, which was absolutely one of my favorite books when I was a kid. It's about a schoolteacher who retires and he wants to get away from everyone, wants to get away from children. And he gets into a large balloon in California and he's going to sail across the Pacific Ocean and he's just going to sit in his balloon and be at peace. But he is struck with a disaster when a seagull perches on the balloon and pierces it, and he lands in the middle of the ocean and he washes up on the shores of the island of Krakatoa. But Krakatoa is unbeknownst to anyone. Krakatoa is a paradise. There are splendid houses, and every amenity that anyone could want. The people are dressed in luxury and everything's perfect. They have diamond tie studs and they have diamond cufflinks and everything is made of precious jewels. And it turns out that Krakatoa hosts the largest diamond mine on Earth and that the people who are living there, I think they're British, sort of refugees. I can't remember the plot, but they live in this lap of luxury. However, once the professor arrives, they tell him, We're happy to have you with us. You can never leave a word of this great treasure can never make its way into the rest of the world. So he's sort of a prisoner in paradise. And the film that I immediately think of is The Old Dark House, which is a fantastic camp noir comedy thriller, horror movie directed by James Whale in 1932. And it is just the epitome of this. These travelers are in their car in the pouring rain and the cars breaking down. And yes, they're going to have to go to this old dark house where they are welcomed. I think it's Bela Lugosi who welcomes them and everything is splendid and perfect. But then they find out this is the most insane house there of mad killers behind every door and window in this entire house. And it's just fantastic. So I'm Tom Lee, and this is the Odyssey Odyssey, the podcast that tells the story of the Odyssey and all of the stories that surround the Odyssey that lead up to and away from this epic poem. And why am I talking about travelers in distress? Well, our hero, Odysseus, has washed ashore on the island of Sakarya, where the factions are living. They themselves are short of refugees and they've come to this island and set up this absolutely magical kingdom. And the word is not hyperbole. This kingdom is unworldly because the four aliens we're going to learn are relatives of the gods. In the last episode of the podcast, we heard about King Albinus and Queen Arati and how they were descended from Poseidon and from the Gigantes, the Giants who did battle with the Olympian gods. And we sort of interrupted the flow to talk about that battle of the Giants. But now we're back on the island, and the Princess Nausicaa has welcomed Odysseus. He's come out of the shrubbery completely naked and he's in complete distress. And Nausicaa has given him clothing, she's given him food, she's washed him, and she has asked him to come to her parents palace, But to wait until she arrives, she's going to travel with her friends, her servants, and he will follow on after she doesn't want to be seen walking through the streets of this island with a handsome stranger on her arm. People will gossip and Odysseus agrees to this. He is waiting in a little grove, sacred to Athena. While sick of the princess heads home. And Athena has appeared to Odysseus and told him everything that he needs to know. The king, the queen, their names, their lineage, where the palace is. And she sets him off on his way and as he walks. Through the island. He doesn't know it, but Athena has shrouded him with invisibility. This is another one of these real fairy tale motifs in this book of the Odyssey. There are lots of heroes in fairy tales around the world who have cloaks of invisibility or just an invisible mist that surrounds them. And this is how Odysseus walks through the town. And no one sees him, but he can observe the people and he can observe all the ships. This island we are going to learn revolves around its ships. They are descendants of Poseidon, the God of the sea and they are masters, sailors, more than master sailors. They're their ships are actually magical. Their ships have this ability to pilot themselves and to travel at immense speeds, great distances, and back again in a single day. And Odysseus is observing these ships as he walks through and finally he arrives at the palace of Albinus. And there's a magnificent passage in the poem. There's something sometimes called the Epic Gaze, or it crosses where the poet will go into incredible, intense detail. The script of detail about a scene, or sometimes even just a single object. Probably the most famous of these phrases is when Achilles gets his incredible shield given to him in the Iliad. It's made by Hephaestus, who we're going to hear a lot more about. But Festus has given this absolutely splendid shield, and Homer goes on and on and on, describing the details of the decoration of the Shield and what I think is so important as a storyteller. If we read one of these sort of epic games passages, it's all very well. We're reading Lush, descriptive prose, but it's important to remember that the original audience for these epics would have only been hearing it. They wouldn't have been looking at a printed page. They would have been sitting and listening to a rap. So to a Bard telling this description and I love this because I know from direct experience that when I do this with an audience, particularly with an audience of children, you managed to sort of get the listeners into a kind of trance and you transport them in their minds into this place. I often do this if we have to enter into a witch's castle or something, I'll really try to have the children see the space that the hero is entering in at one little boy. At the end of the story, he said to me, I forgot that that wasn't happening to me. And I think that that's what the original audience of The Odyssey would have experienced in this passage. As Odysseus stands and stares at this risk, splendid beyond anything, even this king with a palace of his own. This palace of Okinawa is beyond anything he could imagine. The walls are bronze and they're glowing. It's it's late in the day. The sun is setting and there's a kind of glowing light bouncing off of these bronze walls. And the cornice of the palace is made of this enameled blue with doors of gold and door posts of pure silver. The thresholds are bronze, the lintel is silver. Even the door handles are gold you're going to get about 800 years later, when Ovid describes the Palace of Helios, the God of the Sun, you're going to get this same image of this bronze and palace just glistening, gleaming with reflected light. There are gold and silver dogs, and these are sort of automatons that are made by have Festus. Here he is again. And I promise we're going to hear a lot more about the God, Hephaestus, the blacksmith, the craft or God. We'll hear more about him in the episode after the next one. But these dogs are as if alive and they are immortal, and there are seats fixed to the walls that are draped with magnificent fabrics. And all of this fabric has been made on the island, in the palace by the slave women of Elkin Lewis and Arity. And there are even golden youths who are holding up torches. More of these automatons that have Festus has made. And there are 50 slave women at work that Odysseus sees grinding corn and weaving and making yarn. All of these skills that make this magnificent home, all of these under the care of the goddess Athena, all of these sort of home related crafts. But the gaze continues beyond the palace itself to the orchards and the vineyards that surround this building. There are pears and pomegranates, apples and figs and olives. There's a beautiful line which even I can read in Greek, because it says pears upon pears, pomegranates upon pomegranates, apples upon apples. But the magnificent thing about this orchard is that the fruit is always available in every stage of its ripening. You don't have to have seasons here on the island of Sakarya. You have all seasons at once. Of course, the essential myth of Demeter and her 70 talks about how the seasons began, how winter began when Demeter dollar Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, her beautiful daughter, Persephone, or Cori, was abducted by Hades with the approval of Zeus and brought to be his bride in the underworld. And of course, Demeter was furious and demanded of Zeus that her daughter be returned to her. But as he was refused, he said he couldn't do this. This. This had been arranged. And Demeter protests by ending her work as the goddess of agriculture. And for the first time since the beginning of time, all of the fruit dies on the trees, the grapes, the apples, the corn, the pomegranates. They wither away and die. And it's classical Zeus that he doesn't really care about this. People are starving because of this, but he doesn't really care about those annoying humans until he realizes that they can no longer worship him. They can no longer make sacrifices to him. So he has to remedy this situation. And the famous contract is made whereby if Persephone he has eaten any food in the underworld, then she has to remain there forever. But if she has not eaten anything, then she will be set free. And Hades gets wind of this and tempts Persephone with fruit. Where have we seen this storyline before? But Haiti's attempt specifically with a pomegranate and she eats six seeds of the pomegranate. And just at that moment, Hermes arrives with the good news that she can leave Hades if she has not eaten. And of course, she's been tricked. And the judgment is put before Zeus, who decides that because this was rather poor sportsmanship on the part of Hades, that Persephone will be allowed to rejoin her mother for six months, or, as some people say, nine months every year and spend time on earth. But at the end of that time, she will have to return to the underworld to compensate for the pomegranate seeds that she ate. And when that happens, Demeter goes into her temple at you, loses a real place, a very important place. The Lucien mysteries took place here, and they were so mysterious. Nobody knows what they were. But that's where Demeter will go. And winter will begin. And one thing that often gets left out of that story is that Demeter has met a mortal boy named Tripp Thomas, and she gives him the secrets of farming, and she gives him the secrets of storing seed over the winter so that after all the plants die off, they can be reborn from seed. But none of that is happening here on Sakarya because the fruit is always in blossom and in fruit and ripening. The grapes are on the vine and they're ready to be pressed and they're still in flower wherever you look. A different period in the life of these fruits is flourishing in the garden as the west winds across is constantly blowing through the trees and through the vines to keep all of this fruit in just magnificent condition. And Odysseus, indeed, he sees unripe grapes growing and ripe, grapes turning purple and he sees people harvesting the grapes and he sees people pressing out the grapes. It's all happening all the time. Just a wonderful sense that this island is unconnected to time, time in some way. And there he stands. You know that the poem says, Long suffering. Odysseus gazed at the palace, and you just have this idea that this man who's been in a war and on a ship and in a cave for years and years and years, he's in this civilization. And again, he's seeing human craftsmanship and agriculture. But it's just it's resplendent, it's magnificent. It's actually magical. So once he's taken this long look at where he is, he pushes open the great doors of the palace on the advice of Athena, in the disguise of a little girl. And he marches right in to the room. And there's a naturally, because we're in the Odyssey, nobody can make an entrance when there isn't a feast going on. This has happened to Telemachus. Every time he arrives anywhere, there's a huge feast going on. And when Odysseus arrives here in the palace, there's a huge feast that's just ending. It's the end of a long night. And things are wrapping up because the company is making libations to Hermes. And this is I love this whole ritual that is such an important part of ancient Greek life, the pouring of libations. And what's kind of great about this is we have so many illustrations of this practice on Greek pots from sort of 504 hundred. We have many, many depictions of people and gods and goddesses pouring libations from one pot, one jug of wine into a sort of plate of. Fiala I forget what the word is, but into the sort of plate like ball that is held at an angle and one person would pour the wine into it and the other would receive it, and then it would be poured from the bowl either onto the earth or onto an altar. And this could have been wine. It could have been honey, it could have been milk. But most often you would pour libation of wine and then you would finish whatever was left over. You would finish yourself and you would make three at least three libations in the course of an evening. The first one would be to Zeus. The second one I can't remember. And the third one, the final libation would always be to Hermes, and that you could do as many other libations as you, the company, or you yourself personally wanted to make in the course of the evening, the party, the dinner. But the third one was always to Hermes. And that's how we know that the party is ending because everyone is just making libations to Hermes as Odysseus enters, still invisible, still wrapped in his mist of invisibility and he makes a beeline to the queen to a party. He throws himself on the ground. He wraps his arms around her knees, which is, as we've said before, this is the gesture of absolute supplication, the gesture that you are absolutely at this person's mercy. And it's almost unthinkable that you would refuse someone who has clasped your knees. And at this moment, the cloud, the mist of invisibility disperses. And you can imagine the company standing around at the end of this party. And this man appears on the ground on the floor of the banqueting hall with his arms around the queen's knees. And he immediately speaks and he begs for conveyance home, please send me home. I have suffered more than you could believe, more than I could tell you. And I beg you, and I pray to the gods that you and all your guests will live happy and fulfilling lives and be blessed if you will just send me home. And then Odysseus makes the great gesture of sitting in the ashes of the fireplace. He is completely mortifying himself, humbling himself in front of the king and queen to beg for mercy. What an entrance. It's magnificent. And you can just imagine the sort of stunned silence that would be in this banqueting hall. But the silence is broken in classic Greek epic style because we have a stranger in our midst. We have a guest in our home, and the first person to speak is actually one of the guests at the party, ickiness. And he says to the king, he says, to volcanoes, What are you doing? The stranger is in your house. He's sitting on the floor. Get him up. Give him a chair, give him food, Give him a table, Wash his hands, give him some wine. This is how we do you know this is. This is our culture. Don't leave him sitting there the ashes, but welcome him into your home. And of course, Akin was does no questions asked. I don't know who you are. I don't know where you're from. All I know is you're in my home and I'm going to give you food. I'm going to give you he gives him his sons. His favorite son sits in a silver chair there. Commodus sits to the right of canoeists and he makes him give up his chair to this stranger again, no questions asked. Just give this man food, give him anything that he needs. And Okinawa's absolutely assures him you will be taken home. We will send you home in one of our ships. Our ships travel faster than any others, anywhere you want to go. We can get you there in a day. You're going to fall asleep in the ship and you will wake up at home. Odysseus Problems have come to an end. Akin Lewis only makes one condition, which is that if the fates are against you, it's out of our control. We'll get you home safely. But if, as seems possible, with all the suffering that you've told us you've endured, if that continues, once you get home, if the fates are against you after we get you home, that's not our responsibility. But no harm will come to you while you're on our ship and while you're in our care. So it's just this magnificent response. I mean, Odysseus has come to this moment and a canoeist says, don't worry about it. We're going to get you home tomorrow. Tomorrow you're going to go home. Right now, all you have to do is eat and kid who is makes an interesting crack, he says, sort of Unless, of course, you are a God in disguise. You're you're not a god, are you? Which I love this because we know that at any point anybody could be a god or a goddess in disguise. So we've seen Athena already take on four or five different human disguises and rarely letting people know that they've been talking to a goddess. But Elkin was just wants to check and make sure you're not you're not with the police, are you? Yeah. You're not a God, are you? And he says, Of course, we would probably know if you were, because we are related to the gods. There are gods in our family tree. We are related descendants of Poseidon. Actually related to the Cyclops, the children of Poseidon. And this is just the first little dark tremor. Poseidon, of course, is Odysseus, a sworn enemy. The reason he's washed ashore here is because Poseidon has destroyed his raft. And this marvelous, friendly, wealthy, helpful king is a relative of Poseidon. But Odysseus says I am the most godlike creature you could hope to find at this moment. I'm absolutely destitute. I am as mortal as mortal can be. And the proof of that is how hungry I am. I am a slave to my belly, and he is given food and wine. And what one translator refers to as deities, which I'd sort of love to know what those were. But he eats. I mean, you can imagine this ravenous man seeing food and just eating as quickly as he can. And the servants are cleaning up. Everyone's going to get together again in the morning. Quinoa says, Well, we'll hear this man's story. We'll find out everything he needs, whatever we can do to help him. And we're going to send him on his way tomorrow. And the servants clear up. Everything is put away. The party is over. And for the first time, the queen speaks. And I don't know if this is supposed to be as funny as I always find it, but you just picture this long silence. We've been told how incredibly wise and just this queen is and that everything really relies on her. And she looks at Odysseus and she says, Where did you get those clothes? Which, of course, she made the clothes that Odysseus is wearing. She made them for her sons and her daughter, Nausicaa, that morning, inspired by Athena. She brought those clothes to the river to do the laundry, and that's where Odysseus got them. Nausicaa gave the clothing to Odysseus, but he's now standing in front of the queen. And it's just so funny that he's wearing the clothes that the queen made a right. He says, I thought you had come here from some great distance. I thought you were in distress. Where did you get my son's clothing? What are you doing wearing it? And it's just as a brilliant moment. And Odysseus in return, he does something that is tremendously unusual for Odysseus. He tells the truth. Odysseus, who is always tricking, lying, second guessing, just always being cagey, always holding back some truth. You have the sense at this point he has nothing left. He is completely ground down. He's completely exhausted. He doesn't have anything left in him except the truth. And he just pours out the story and it's kind of a recap is a sort of a tradition you often get in epic tellings where you have the sense that, like, if people had to go out and go to the bathroom or something at every now and again, the storyteller will recap the story. Here's here's our story. So far. And this is what Odysseus does. He tells everything that we, the audience, everything that we already know. He summarizes in sort of 50 lines about his shipwreck that brought him to Calypso after the war and how he was trapped by Calypso until she finally let him leave, and then how his raft was destroyed by Poseidon and how he washed ashore on Sakarya and met the king and Queen's daughter. Everything that we've heard is recapped and the King hears this and says, Well, you know, my daughter welcomed you, but she only made one mistake. My daughter did one thing wrong. She should have escorted you here to the palace herself. Why did she send you on your own to walk into this palace. And right away, Odysseus is sort of back to his old self, and he manages to twist the truth a little bit in order to save face for Nausicaa. Remember, she has told him that she doesn't want to be seen walking through the streets with a strange man. People will talk, people will gossip. And he agrees to this. But he tells the king, Oh, no, your daughter insisted on my coming with her. But I refused because of modesty. I didn't want to compromise such a lovely young woman by letting her be seen with me. So Odysseus is not totally beyond twisting the truth there. It's a lovely little moment. And then Elcano, as turns the tables again. He's heard Odysseus's brief recap of his story. He sees him standing there. We're told, again and again, even in his distress, how magnificently handsome Athena has made him look. And Elcano is in a moment that reminds me very much of something my own father would say, like, I'll tell you what, the hell with it. Why don't you stay here and marry my daughter? You seem like a nice guy. If she's single, just stay here and get married. Another sort of great moment. And Odysseus, of course, refuses, although it has been a has been a wonderful sort of tension flirtation between the two of them. He refuses, of course, because this whole the whole thing is about I want to get home. I want to see the smoke coming from my own chimney. I want to see my wife. I must get home. So he refuses the offer of Nausicaa as hand from her father. And very well. Then tomorrow you will go home. You're going to lie down in the boat. You're going to fall asleep. When you wake up, you'll be home. And every time I read it, I hear the Wizard of Oz saying in that balloon, My dear Dorothy, you and I will return to the land of E Pluribus unum. Everything is going to be just fine. And now Canada is throws out as proof of just how amazing these ships are. He makes an offhand remark that even if you went as far as you booya, you could go there and back in a single day. That's what happened when my people carried radar Mantis to you, Booya. And I can't resist. Another little discussion from the story of The Odyssey, just to talk a little bit about Radha mantis, who is part of this sort of nest of people in a complex genealogy that begins with Zeus and Europa. Great story. Yeah, very famous. You've probably seen if you don't know it, you probably seen pictures of Europa, who was the daughter of King Agena, and she lived in Phoenicia very, very far to the east of Greece and on the coast. And the king had a herd of cows. And one day a magnificent white bull appeared. And amongst this herd of cows and the Princess Europa, who was walking along the beach saw this splendid white bull. And it was so gentle, so sort of docile and so magnificent that she braided flowers together into a crown. And she put these on the bull's head. And then she made a necklace of flowers, and the bull sort of came to her and and bowed down his head so that she could decorate this bull with flowers and the bull was so tame that she even was able to climb on his back. Well, gentle listener never do that. This was zuse. Of course it was Zuse. Whenever Zuse fell in love with a human, he would disguise himself. He would transform himself often into an animal. We've talked about later and how she was seduced by zuse in the form of a swan. Well, Europa was seduced by Zuse in the form of a bull, and he ran as soon as she was on his back, he ran across the ocean, literally on top of the waves, and ran all the way to Crete, where he lay in love with Europa. And they had three children, three sons minus speed and and the Mantis and Zuse in his classic form, loved her and left her. And she actually did okay. She married King a mysterious and she became queen of Crete. But her three sons, all of whom were going to go on to have stories and adventures of their own. KING Minus speed. And who fought in the Trojan War, who lived three lifetimes as a son of Zeus, but ultimately died on the battlefield at Troy and was carried off by sleep and death. And that scene was on the magnificent crater at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that was sort of snuck out of Italy. The Italian government changed the law in the middle of the night so that they could sell this pot, this fabulous crater to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And it was there for many years until this was all discovered and it was going to be sent back to Italy and then to the lines were sort of out the door this this thing that had been in the hallway of the Metropolitan for years and years. Suddenly it was the thing that everybody in New York had to see before it went back to Italy. Anyway, that's what saw Pete, and the third time was rather momentous, but all three brothers battled with each other over the love of a boy. My Leto's, who was the son of Apollo, and these three brothers fought bitterly, especially because my sister's only loved saw Peden and the other two were bitter, bitter enemies of and because of this but ratted Mantis when he ultimately died, he was became a judge in the underworld. He's one of the people who judge the works, the lives and the deeds of the dead as they arrive. And this is celebrated by Virgil in the Aeneid, and he even turns up in Dante's Inferno rather months. So that's just that. That one little toss off that King Albinus gives to show the prowess of these boats. And then Queensryche orders a bed to be assembled, and it's brought out into the portico, into the porch, and it has this splendid purple coverlet. And this has to be the first time in 17 years that Odysseus has slept in a bed. It's just a magnificent ending to Book seven as Odysseus lies in his bed and the king and queen retire to their bed and night falls on Book seven. So there we are. The Odyssey. Odyssey is back in business. Thank you for listening. Send me a note. Tell me who you are and we'll see you next time. I'm Tom Lee. Thanks for listening.