So we leave our abode with Circe and make
our way out into the wider world. She's given us instructions.
We're going to be careful to bury Elpenor, of course, because of what we learned in
the in the underworld. And we're also going to watch out for what
we see when we run into the sirens and the Scylla and Charybdis.
And we're going to be careful when we run in to the cattle of the sun.
All of these things are information that Odysseus has gathered.
It's making him a little bit better able to be prepared for, be ready to react to
the stuff that he runs in to. Sirens, of course, are a wonderful short
episode that gives us a start in this next sequence of stories in this very famous
phase representation from the British museum, thanks British museum for the use
of this. We've paid copyrights to all kinds of
people for this, and some were easier to get than others we're very glad to be able
to have this image in the and of course it's a wonderful image with Odysseus
there, you can see him strapped to his mast his men are busy rowing impervious to
the beautiful sounds that are coming at them from these figures that this artist
has chosen to represent as being in position on either side of the vessel, and
then one swooping down, right, with feathers galore, right next to Odysseus.
And you can see him having this amazing sense of being glued to his mast but still
some kind of craning that he's doing towards this beautiful sound.
So what do those sirens sing? Well, in fact, Homer tells us.
And why don't we take a quick minute and see what it is that is the siren song.
Here's what they say. Come closer, famous Odysseus, Archaea's
pride and glory. Moor your ship on our coast so you can
hear our song. Never has any sailor passed our shores in
his black craft until he has heard the honeyed voices pouring from our lips, and
once he hears to his hearts content, sails on a wiser man.
We know all the pains of the Greeks and Trojans, once endured on the spreading
plain of troy when the gods willed it so. All that comes to pass on the fertile
earth, we know it all. So, the sirens know everything.
Odysseus is now listening to this melodious song where presumably everything
is being sung to him. So, this man who's so thirsty for
knowledge who is always seeking out things that are strange, new restless in his
curiosity has now presumably achieved in hearing the siren's song knowledge of it
all. Wouldn't that be amazing?
No one else heard such a thing. We can't verify that Odysseus does indeed
know it all. But he did indeed figure out a way to hear
the siren's song. Next stop they have to make somehow thread
the needle between two awful things. The, the Scylla and Charybdis.
Here the Scylla is represented as Homer talks about a, a, a monstrous woman with
horrible mouths and this kind of snakelike underneath.
That these horrible mouths going, they can chomp on the men.
They're hungry for them. Now Odysseus in making his way through the
Scylla and the Charybdis, he has some advice that he relies on from Searcy, but
he also faces just kind of awful situation.
There is no way he's gonna get through here without losing some people.
If he goes too close to Charybdis, he is going to lose all his men, so he decides.
To do the opposite and get a little too close to the Scylla.
And when he gets too close to the Scylla, he knows he's going to lose some men.
This is leading us to universal law number four in the class, which is that, usually
making leadership decisions means choosing between two bad things.
Usually making leadership decisions means choosing between two bad things.
And when a person's put into a position of leadership, they have to make those calls.
Now you can, you can see that there's a logic to what Odysseus has decided to do,
but in being the decider here, he is the one who decides that some of his men are
going to die, and they get eaten by this creature right here.
Awful kind of thing he has to run into. So, this is now having known all things,
having made the tough call that is required for him to get his ship through
intact through these awful, too awful things, runs into his final adventure.
His cattle of the sun. He is told to steer clear of this they
want to make sure that they stay away from this awful potential problem but
Odysseus's men prevail and they land on the cattle of the sun, when the winds blow
in the wrong direction they're stuck and they are stuck without food.
Now we need to look a little bit about cattle and the role they played in ancient
Greece. The first thing we should talk about is
sacrifice. Cattle are what we do when we want to give
a gift to the gods. Cattle are the most luscious and most
appropriate kind of gift a person can give, and therefore they're the thing that
you and I as human beings can muster that is grand enough to be a gift to the gods.
Greeks sacrifice other things too, if they're less prominent, if they're less
wealthy it's perfectly fine to sacrifice a pig to the gods or a chicken or whatever
you have around. They don't usually sacrifice fish but they
do sacrifice these normal kind of eating animals after the god gets the sacrifice,
human beings usually partake of, of the killed animal and eat the flesh.
And that's understood as a kind of share a meal with the god.
The gods usually only want just the smoke, and a few other things we'll learn about
this when we read some pieces of Heisedon Prometheus story.
But mostly what they want is the smoke and then you and I eat the meat.
Well if you're a really wealthy person the most appropriate sacrifice you can give is
you're going to be able to afford the most appropriate sacrifice which is cattle, a
gods love cow meat and that's something that the Greeks, spent a lot of time
trying to figure out how to get more of. They were, in fact, in certain ways almost
obsessed with this little creature down here.
They were fascinated by cows, cattle, oxen and they, we, we find these
representations, of cattle in prominent places.
In the artistic record we see, for example these, these, beautiful golden cups that
were recovered at the site of Vaphio in southern Greece their representative of a
very old time. The cups probably date from around 1500
B.C.E. In other words, well into you know, well
into the past, far enough to be in the time that Homer is representing, and even
earlier than that. We see examples in artistic
representations from this time, examples on these Vaphio cups, and then also, on
the island of Crete, and in other archaeological finds from the Mycenaean
and Minoan period, known as a high heroic age, where bulls are this kind of central
subject matter for the most lavish beautiful artistic representations we can
find. This is true in Fresco's, in wall
paintings, and here in these amazing cups made of gold, so already a luxury item.
What's the appropriate decoration for a luxury item?
A similarly luxurious mode of food, here doing wonderful dances around impaling
poor human beings at the time they're doing it, but the, the interest in these
cattle as shown through these artistic representation was almost borders on a
kind of obsession. Now there's further discussion to be had
about the social and cultural role of meat.
We've talked a little about it's religious significance and a little about it's
artistic representations but also, in it's social and cultural dimension.
Meat especially cattle meat is extremely important.
Eating beef is an experience, for those who have had it of overwhelmingly rich
protein. There is just no question that what is
being ingested into a body that's eating meat is scratching some kind of itch.
Now, vegetarians and those that for whatever reason don't eat meat may poo,
poo this and yet there is enough anecdotal evidence out there of the kind of
rapturous effect that the ating of high-protein food in does to people for us
to recognize that having a strongly, super hyper protein-rich food source is
something that, that sometimes find at least sometimes find thrilling.
Beef is the most expensive form of this super rich protein to be found in
antiquity. Only the most aristocratic and most
wealthy people could have afforded it. It was the luxury food item.
Remember what happens when Telemachus goes to see Nestor and there's this
demonstration of wealth. How is that wealth demonstrated when we
first arrive on the shore? 81 bulls are being sacrificed.
That's an extraordinarily conspicuous consumption of meat.
Now, in addition to talking about just the meat itself and maybe the experience of,
of eating it we should also make reference to what it takes to raise cattle.
Most ancient temple sights where cattle are being slaughtered in a kind of regular
way. Also, needed to control huge lands around
them in order to raise the meat that they needed to sacrifice at the temple sight.
For example, you've, example the famous temple sight of Delphi required control of
thirteen square kilometers in order to provide enough grazing land for the cattle
that they needed to raise to slaughter at that temple sight.
So, just in order to have cattle a person needs to have control of land.
This is not true of every single food source.
Oh, but it is definitely true of cattle. So another impediment to just running into
this in, in a usual way, with any person that you might run into on the street is,
is the land required to do it. It is something that is specifically for
very wealthy people. Now when we do run into that this source
of extremely attractive protein on the Cattle, the Island of the Cattle of the
Sun, we might ask ourselves well my goodness these poor starving men.
Here are these glistening examples of the most luxurious kind of foods Greeks can
imagine and yet these men are prohibited from eating them.
Now why in the world would a god be so cruel to prohibit them from eating this?
Who in the world could prevent this kind of thing from happening?
Well, there's an important declaration that has been made.
Helios has declared that these cattle are scared to him.
When Helios declares these cattle are sacred to him, he immediately takes them
out of being a normal, authorized food source for human beings.
When he takes them out of being a normal, authorized food source for being human
beings. When Odysseus' men cross that line, what
they've done is much more than eat some cows.
What they've done is eat something that they've been told, by a religious
authority counts not as food. They have crossed very strong and nearly
indelible line in most all cultural formations between what counts as being
something authorized to eat and what is something that is not authorized to eat.
When they do that, they've committed a very grave crime indeed.
We're going talk about some of the details of what this crime is all about in
upcoming next segment.