1 00:00:04,086 --> 00:00:07,030 Our story of the Trojan War it's so powerful. 2 00:00:07,030 --> 00:00:12,309 It not only creates an impulse for poets to start talking about what happened 3 00:00:12,309 --> 00:00:15,379 before it. And we get all the prequels that we talked 4 00:00:15,379 --> 00:00:19,618 about in our previous lecture. There is also a lot of energy spent trying 5 00:00:19,618 --> 00:00:24,827 to figure out what happened after it and we have a lot of sequels to the events on 6 00:00:24,827 --> 00:00:29,020 the plains of Troy. There are whole sets of legends that get 7 00:00:29,020 --> 00:00:34,156 built up around the aftermath and each of them hearkens back to facts about the war, 8 00:00:34,156 --> 00:00:38,255 the things that really happened there. And the main over arching theme. 9 00:00:38,255 --> 00:00:41,406 Is that things were just awful there and nasty. 10 00:00:41,406 --> 00:00:45,028 The Greeks tell this story to themselves about an awful war. 11 00:00:45,028 --> 00:00:48,784 And in fact the Greeks don't come off looking so good in that war. 12 00:00:48,784 --> 00:00:53,721 Remember we talked about the, the, the parts that Homer focuses on in his Iliad. 13 00:00:53,721 --> 00:00:58,416 Talk about Greek on Greek struggles. They don't seem to work well as a team. 14 00:00:58,416 --> 00:01:02,386 They've got bad leadership. There's nasty motives that motivate 15 00:01:02,386 --> 00:01:07,604 Achilles and all the ugly things he does. Well the Greeks don't put a kind of glossy 16 00:01:07,604 --> 00:01:11,296 eyed view over any of the materials that happened in this past. 17 00:01:11,296 --> 00:01:15,094 And then also. Also what happened at the end of the war. 18 00:01:15,094 --> 00:01:20,860 The Greeks are, they remain, yeah they, they hold up in their mythology stories 19 00:01:20,860 --> 00:01:25,091 about themselves doing awful things. Famously awful things. 20 00:01:26,013 --> 00:01:32,037 There are a few moments in particular that stick out in Greek imagination about them 21 00:01:32,037 --> 00:01:38,090 going to far in their victory in the Greek war after they conquer Troy and, and get 22 00:01:38,090 --> 00:01:43,031 over the walls. They, there's awful things that happen but 23 00:01:43,031 --> 00:01:49,070 even before hand in order to get into that city of Troy they have to penetrate with 24 00:01:49,070 --> 00:01:55,041 spies in a raid in order to. Attract from the from the Temple of Athena 25 00:01:55,041 --> 00:02:01,083 a tiny little figure called the Palladium this is a statute that represents Athena 26 00:02:01,083 --> 00:02:05,026 and that is well loved by the goddess herself. 27 00:02:05,026 --> 00:02:10,691 Now when the Greeks sneak in and pull this little figurine out of Athena's temple, 28 00:02:10,691 --> 00:02:17,034 what they are doing is they're removing a magical element that had a protective aura 29 00:02:17,034 --> 00:02:21,083 over the city of Troy. According to what they knew they would be 30 00:02:21,083 --> 00:02:27,031 incapable of overturning the city of Troy as long as the Palladium resided in, in 31 00:02:27,052 --> 00:02:31,051 Athena's Temple. By removing it they now removed this extra 32 00:02:31,051 --> 00:02:36,059 special aura protection around the city and they can conquer it themselves. 33 00:02:36,059 --> 00:02:39,515 But in so doing they violate Athena. She's upset about that. 34 00:02:39,515 --> 00:02:44,405 She doesn't like it that her Palladium has been taken out of her statue, so out of 35 00:02:44,405 --> 00:02:48,229 her temple. So they have actually done a sacrilegious 36 00:02:48,229 --> 00:02:51,575 violation against Athena in order to conquer Troy. 37 00:02:51,575 --> 00:02:54,993 Furthermore. Nasty crimes galore, of, of different 38 00:02:54,993 --> 00:02:59,362 kinds of violence happen. The Greeks talk about themselves as 39 00:02:59,362 --> 00:03:02,701 murderers. They kill people in, in, horrible wartime 40 00:03:02,701 --> 00:03:05,662 rage. This is the kind of thing that happens in, 41 00:03:05,662 --> 00:03:10,524 in, in war poetry, so they, they probably could have said to themselves, well, you 42 00:03:10,524 --> 00:03:13,658 know, we went too far and that's what war is like. 43 00:03:13,658 --> 00:03:16,750 But the Greeks didn't say that to themselves. 44 00:03:16,750 --> 00:03:21,836 The versions of the stories that they preserve say we went too far even by our 45 00:03:21,836 --> 00:03:26,736 own standards, and that was awful. For example, they took the little Prince 46 00:03:26,736 --> 00:03:32,242 Astyanax a tiny little baby at the time in the city of Troy, and just hurled him from 47 00:03:32,242 --> 00:03:37,084 the walls, an innocent little infant. Hurled him from the walls and the, the 48 00:03:37,084 --> 00:03:41,067 body of the infant dies by being splattered on the ground. 49 00:03:41,067 --> 00:03:44,056 Hurled off of a distance of many tens of feet. 50 00:03:44,075 --> 00:03:49,096 That's not something the Greeks are proud of, and yet they keep telling it in their 51 00:03:49,096 --> 00:03:52,091 stories about an example of their own excesses. 52 00:03:53,010 --> 00:03:57,081 Similarly and maybe most famously, the Princess Cassandra is raped. 53 00:03:57,099 --> 00:04:05,094 And she's raped by warrior Ajax. And she's raped on the alter of the temple 54 00:04:05,094 --> 00:04:08,546 of Athena. The number of violations that happen here, 55 00:04:08,546 --> 00:04:13,591 the excesses that are built into this act are so extreme and so vile that the rape 56 00:04:13,591 --> 00:04:18,868 of Cassandra gets held up in this short list of crimes that the Greeks commit when 57 00:04:18,868 --> 00:04:22,480 they conquer Troy. And again, this is all preserved within 58 00:04:22,480 --> 00:04:27,581 the Greek tradition and they preserve it in such a way that shows that they're not 59 00:04:27,581 --> 00:04:32,670 just chalking it up to the excesses that heroes sometimes resort to when violent 60 00:04:32,670 --> 00:04:35,579 things are happening. It's, they just go too far. 61 00:04:35,579 --> 00:04:40,044 Now when they do go too far they set up a whole set of other stories. 62 00:04:40,044 --> 00:04:46,409 There are stories about the aftermath of the Greek war Greek, Greek war against the 63 00:04:46,409 --> 00:04:50,109 Trojans. That each of them hark back to this, this 64 00:04:50,109 --> 00:04:54,141 nasty episode, these nasty episodes that happened there. 65 00:04:54,141 --> 00:05:00,175 The, the amount of negative energy that's stirred up in Troy when the Greeks conquer 66 00:05:00,175 --> 00:05:04,626 it, is just to much to stay confined to that area, and it leaks out. 67 00:05:04,626 --> 00:05:07,811 And it follows the Greek hero's on their way home. 68 00:05:07,811 --> 00:05:13,767 The journey's home, in Greek it's called the, there called the Nostoi are the 69 00:05:13,767 --> 00:05:19,522 famous sequence of stories that talk about the heroes, the Greek heroes, making their 70 00:05:19,522 --> 00:05:23,667 way home. And in each case they're, they're working 71 00:05:23,667 --> 00:05:26,145 out. The nastiness that get, got built up for 72 00:05:26,145 --> 00:05:30,166 them over in Troy. Some cases, the journey home was a little 73 00:05:30,166 --> 00:05:35,597 bit easier than others Nestor gets in, famous Greek hero that we're going to meet 74 00:05:35,597 --> 00:05:39,844 in the Odyssey, gets himself home pretty quickly without too much trouble. 75 00:05:39,844 --> 00:05:44,488 Menelaus has a long sojourn, he's blown off course in Egypt, he meets the Old Man 76 00:05:44,488 --> 00:05:48,878 of the Sea and has adventures there, we'll learn about him and the Odyssey. 77 00:05:48,878 --> 00:05:53,397 Agamemnon famously gets himself home, that's not a problem, but when he gets 78 00:05:53,397 --> 00:05:56,250 home there's awfulness that's waiting for him. 79 00:05:56,250 --> 00:05:59,844 We're gonna learn about that. A lot, when we're reading the odyssey, 80 00:05:59,844 --> 00:06:03,446 Agamemnon's journey home. But the most important of all these 81 00:06:03,446 --> 00:06:07,917 Nostoi, is the one we're going to spend the first weeks of class reading, and 82 00:06:07,917 --> 00:06:12,657 that's Homer's Odyssey, which gives us the story of the journey home of a particular 83 00:06:12,657 --> 00:06:17,543 Greek hero the one that we're going to spend most of our time focusing on in the 84 00:06:17,543 --> 00:06:21,022 first few weeks of the class, that is this great man Odysseus. 85 00:06:21,022 --> 00:06:25,707 We'll spend some time reading his story when we turn to Homer's Odyssey, we'll 86 00:06:25,707 --> 00:06:30,902 look at the first few pages of that in our next video, but before we do we need to 87 00:06:30,902 --> 00:06:33,456 spend a little time talking about this man. 88 00:06:33,456 --> 00:06:38,800 We have already mentioned his name, Homer. We've talked about his dates around 750 89 00:06:38,800 --> 00:06:41,664 BC. And there's a portrait of him and you may 90 00:06:41,664 --> 00:06:45,216 even recognize this as a traditional representation of Homer. 91 00:06:45,216 --> 00:06:49,641 Unfortunately, what this is though, is just a traditional representation of 92 00:06:49,641 --> 00:06:52,745 Homer. We have no idea what Homer actually looked 93 00:06:52,745 --> 00:06:55,820 like. In fact, what we know of Homer survives 94 00:06:55,820 --> 00:07:00,409 from The Iliad and The Odyssey. There is a window on the world and a 95 00:07:00,409 --> 00:07:06,189 thought world that is made very rich and explicit through that those poems that 96 00:07:06,189 --> 00:07:11,308 give us an idea about what kind of thoughts the person behind the poems had. 97 00:07:11,308 --> 00:07:15,405 But we don't know anything that corroborates who this poet was. 98 00:07:15,405 --> 00:07:20,942 In fact in the scholarship from the previous century, there were many people 99 00:07:20,942 --> 00:07:26,500 that had a strong view that actually there were Homers that to talk about a single 100 00:07:26,500 --> 00:07:31,497 poet behind an, an epic poem like Odyssey or the Iliad was not a smart thing to do. 101 00:07:31,497 --> 00:07:36,853 Because likely what happened was that this was a corporate effort of a lot of people 102 00:07:36,853 --> 00:07:42,047 who were singing songs in public. These wandering bards would, we know, we 103 00:07:42,047 --> 00:07:47,045 actually know from Homer's tale, wandering bards went around and sang songs, for 104 00:07:47,045 --> 00:07:50,080 wealthy clients. And, when they did, they sung parts of the 105 00:07:50,080 --> 00:07:55,037 Trojan War legend and other things having to do with heroes like Odysseus, and 106 00:07:55,037 --> 00:07:59,030 Achilles and Agamemnon. So the idea was developed that there's a 107 00:07:59,030 --> 00:08:03,081 kind of corporate set of these, and whole chunks of these were kind of edited 108 00:08:03,081 --> 00:08:07,044 together to create the documents of the Odyssey and the Iliad. 109 00:08:07,044 --> 00:08:11,025 And there would be no sense talking about a single Homeric voice. 110 00:08:11,025 --> 00:08:16,342 Instead we talk about many Homeric voices. The idea in the scholarship has taken a 111 00:08:16,342 --> 00:08:19,452 backseat now. Mostly what's happened is that the 112 00:08:19,452 --> 00:08:25,066 coherence of the story itself has just been the strongest piece of evidence, for 113 00:08:25,066 --> 00:08:30,728 the scholarly field to think that likely what we have here is indeed the result of 114 00:08:30,728 --> 00:08:34,914 a single poetic hand. At least the Odyssey itself is, and The 115 00:08:34,914 --> 00:08:40,289 Iliad itself is, it could be that they were written by different poets, but it is 116 00:08:40,289 --> 00:08:46,197 likely that they were each written by a single poet and it may well be the case 117 00:08:46,197 --> 00:08:49,080 that those were the same. Those poets were the same. 118 00:08:49,080 --> 00:08:54,015 We don't know that for sure and the scholarship is tinkering around the edges 119 00:08:54,015 --> 00:08:57,038 of that question still. But it is no longer such an urgent 120 00:08:57,038 --> 00:09:02,023 question for us to try to find the half dozen or a dozen or, who knows, fifteen or 121 00:09:02,023 --> 00:09:05,024 twenty voices that might be behind the Homeric legend. 122 00:09:05,024 --> 00:09:09,053 And instead, it pretty much seems, at least to most of us who are studying the 123 00:09:09,053 --> 00:09:13,082 material these days, that there was a single editorial hand, at least or 124 00:09:13,082 --> 00:09:16,044 strongly poetically talented editorial hand. 125 00:09:16,044 --> 00:09:21,007 Let's go ahead and call that person a poet and we might as well go ahead and stick 126 00:09:21,007 --> 00:09:24,089 with the name Homer. It works pretty well to describe based on 127 00:09:24,089 --> 00:09:28,016 what the traditional association of that. A person. 128 00:09:28,016 --> 00:09:32,065 Yes, so, now we have this figure that's behind the poems such that we know them. 129 00:09:32,082 --> 00:09:37,037 The figure is writing in a script, and luckily, the script doesn't look anything 130 00:09:37,037 --> 00:09:41,085 like this, it probably would not have survived to us in, in the form that it 131 00:09:41,085 --> 00:09:45,024 did, had the Greeks only had a script that looked like this. 132 00:09:45,024 --> 00:09:50,007 This is an early example of Greek writing, that does not use an alphabetic script. 133 00:09:50,007 --> 00:09:54,055 It's pictographic, you'll see it seem on first glance to resemble Egyptian 134 00:09:54,055 --> 00:09:59,064 hieroglyphics or maybe even have some to resemblance to a cuneiform kind of text. 135 00:09:59,064 --> 00:10:04,092 You'll know that those are early writing systems developed in Egypt and the ancient 136 00:10:04,092 --> 00:10:08,007 Near East. Those were made to hold, keep records of 137 00:10:08,007 --> 00:10:13,028 kings and keep track of historical events, important events that were of consequence 138 00:10:13,028 --> 00:10:16,024 for wealthy and aristocratic classes of people. 139 00:10:16,024 --> 00:10:20,089 It also was used in Egypt and in the ancient Near East to record literary 140 00:10:20,089 --> 00:10:23,090 evidence. So we have epic poems and stories that 141 00:10:23,090 --> 00:10:29,078 survive from very early periods. In this pictographic scripts in Egypt and 142 00:10:29,078 --> 00:10:34,691 in and in ancient Greece. The early Greek version of a picto-graphic 143 00:10:34,691 --> 00:10:39,728 script, known as linear A and B as exhibited in this slide was never used to 144 00:10:39,728 --> 00:10:41,574 record any literary. Evidence. 145 00:10:41,574 --> 00:10:46,178 So we may well have had wandering bards going around in the early first millennium 146 00:10:46,178 --> 00:10:50,447 BCE or even before in the second mill, millennium BCE likely we did have 147 00:10:50,447 --> 00:10:54,913 wandering bards going around telling stories but none of them survive. 148 00:10:54,913 --> 00:10:57,491 Luckily the one that does survive is Homer. 149 00:10:57,491 --> 00:11:01,907 And Homer survives because of the technology that you see behind me. 150 00:11:01,907 --> 00:11:07,149 The alphabet arrives into Greece right about the time that Homer's epics are 151 00:11:07,149 --> 00:11:11,410 current in his society. Lucky for us that it made it in time. 152 00:11:11,410 --> 00:11:16,819 Invented as best we know by Phoenician's on the far side of the Mediterranean the 153 00:11:16,819 --> 00:11:20,578 far eastern edge. Make sure I got that right off the 154 00:11:20,578 --> 00:11:24,077 Mediterranean. And the alphabet was an incredibly useful, 155 00:11:24,093 --> 00:11:27,048 technology. It is written down in different 156 00:11:27,048 --> 00:11:29,096 characters. There are Hebrew characters, Greek 157 00:11:29,096 --> 00:11:33,039 characters, there's an Arabic script later, and Roman script. 158 00:11:33,056 --> 00:11:37,009 But whatever script is used, there's really only one alphabet. 159 00:11:37,026 --> 00:11:41,068 Some have more vowels than others. Some have different ways of treating 160 00:11:41,068 --> 00:11:45,027 certain kinds of consonants. But it's, it's a single technology. 161 00:11:45,027 --> 00:11:49,048 And it's so useful it spreads like wildfire, around the Mediterranean, and 162 00:11:49,048 --> 00:11:51,080 through the ancient near east. And it's. 163 00:11:51,080 --> 00:11:57,012 Thank goodness for this invention that Homer, is going to survive. 164 00:11:57,012 --> 00:12:02,086 The specific language that Homer spoke is a very interesting one. 165 00:12:03,009 --> 00:12:07,074 His diction is an epic. Diction which draws from lots of different 166 00:12:07,074 --> 00:12:12,011 dialects around the Greek world. It's not written in one particular 167 00:12:12,011 --> 00:12:14,098 dialect. It's actually written in a kind of 168 00:12:14,098 --> 00:12:19,078 hotchpotch of, of many different ones. It would be as though a contemporary 169 00:12:19,078 --> 00:12:24,065 American poet was capturing the accents of the North-East uh-huh, in, or my own 170 00:12:24,065 --> 00:12:29,014 beloved Philadelphia or Boston. Together with accents of the American 171 00:12:29,014 --> 00:12:32,616 South or accents of Chicago or the or the Westcoast. 172 00:12:32,616 --> 00:12:35,652 And had a kind of mish mash of them all together. 173 00:12:35,652 --> 00:12:41,442 The Homeric dialect and represents a kind of aggregation of a corporate Greek way of 174 00:12:41,442 --> 00:12:43,980 speaking. The lines in Homer are very 175 00:12:43,980 --> 00:12:48,169 straightforward. He writes in a dactylic hexameter that is 176 00:12:48,169 --> 00:12:53,740 a, a line made of six metrical feet, and each of those feet is made up of a dactyl, 177 00:12:53,740 --> 00:12:58,575 a long and two shorts, a dum dit, dit. So the basic element of Homeric epic 178 00:12:58,575 --> 00:13:01,511 poetry comes down to a long and two shorts. 179 00:13:01,511 --> 00:13:06,869 String six of these together with an n caps at the end, that's what the x means, 180 00:13:06,869 --> 00:13:11,688 that can be either long or short. String six of these together and you've 181 00:13:11,688 --> 00:13:13,019 got a. Homeric line. 182 00:13:13,019 --> 00:13:16,335 String 15,000 of them together, and you've got. 183 00:13:16,335 --> 00:13:20,476 The Iliad, 12,000 of them together, and you've got The Odyssey. 184 00:13:20,476 --> 00:13:25,529 Pretty extraordinary feat for him to be able to write, elegant, beautiful, metric 185 00:13:25,529 --> 00:13:29,389 poetry over the course of many tens of thousands of lines. 186 00:13:29,389 --> 00:13:32,495 It's also the case that any of these dactyls. 187 00:13:32,495 --> 00:13:36,031 A long and two shorts can be replaced by a spondee, two longs. 188 00:13:36,031 --> 00:13:40,211 On occasion, this metrical information will be useful for us to have. 189 00:13:40,211 --> 00:13:44,611 So I wanted to make sure that we had it. Next, we get to get started. 190 00:13:44,611 --> 00:13:49,235 We're gonna open The Odyssey and see what Homer has to tell us about this greatest 191 00:13:49,235 --> 00:13:52,531 of Greek heroes. This character Odysseus. 192 00:13:52,531 --> 00:13:59,588 We're gonna meet in him wonderful qualities of a person that is bringing all 193 00:13:59,588 --> 00:14:03,524 his human characters his human qualities to bare. 194 00:14:03,524 --> 00:14:09,149 Trying to solve all kinds of difficult situations and get himself out of trouble. 195 00:14:09,149 --> 00:14:13,073 And also lots of times getting himself into trouble. 196 00:14:13,073 --> 00:14:15,003 We'll turn to that next.