As if we needed anymore indication from book one that it was time for Telemachus
to, to grow up a little. It actually comes out of Athena's mouth in
her disguise. She's standing next to him on page 87 and
says you must not cling to your boyhood any longer, it's time you were a man.
So, Telemachus realizes it's time to change, somethings got to give.
It spurs him into his action of failed attempt to rile the suitors in his of
beginning of Book two. And then, he gets ready to haul off on
this tour with mentor as his guide, Athena.
And when he does head out on this tour, he's going to learn things.
Travels a way for him to gain knowledge. And in his tour round these great capitals
in books three and four, what Telemachus is really going to do is take a journey
into a past. And this past is already something that
has a kind of grandeur to it. He'll look at Pylos and this wonderful
wealthy citadel of, of, of that we see with Nestor.
And then, we're going to move on to Sparta and see Menelaus and Helen of Troy
herself. We're going to see grand figures that are
already a mythic proportion according to how Telemachus marshal his engagement with
them. I thought in making this turn to this
grand past such as we're going to see in three and four, I might just toss up here
a slide of a famous probably our most famous ancient citadel from this time, the
citadel of Mycenae, Agamemnon's palace This is so-called lion gate and it has an
air of majesty to it. And, thinking back to the time when this
was built back in the first early, you know, early, early, early times first
millennium BCE and even before these citadels emerged up out of the out of the,
the plain around us and at a time, when there were simple agrarian folk in most
parts of the world. There would be these grand citadels.
And in the memory of time as the citadels age and as history builds up around them,
and events take place that involve these places, eventually people start to think,
my gosh, how in the world did they build those things, anyway, all those centuries
ago? And when they did that, they started down
a path of imaging that their ancestors were greater than they were.
They even called these stones, Cyclopean stones because they felt there was no way
a human being could have moved them and they are kind of things that only a
Cyclops could move. So, there was a, a, a kind of, of mythic
orientation toward their deep past that the Greeks already had during Homer's
time. The, the impulse here to look at your
ancestors as being much greater than you were leads us to our first universal law
in the course. I'm going to give you a few universal laws
in the course guarantee to be universal money back guarantee.
And how much money do we pay for a course there anyway?
Anyway, universal laws are money back guarantee.
Universal law number one, nostalgia is the most powerful force in the universe.
When people are looking back to their past they always imagine that it must have been
better. Seems to be something that is exhibited
across time and surely the Greeks are susceptible to this form of nostalgia as
well. So, Telemachus has his cue, it's time to
go and off he goes. He's going to visit two amazing places.
Athena's going to bring him along. He's going to see Nestor's coastal city.
And when he does, he's going to move from the his edge of his island of Ithaca and
have a trip down by boat to Pylos. Now remember, when he arrives by boat in
Pylos, what does he see there on the shore?
There are nine divisions of 500 people each.
So, already, we've got 4,500 people on a beach, that's probably going to arrest
your attention. And now in case, we haven't gotten your
attention, each of those groups of 500, each of those nine groups of 500 is
slaughtering nine bulls. So, we've got 81 bulls being slaughtered
simultaneously on a beach. If that doesn't grab your attention, then
you probably need some smelling salts. What Telemachus sees there absolutely is
just extraordinary to him. The grandeur of this scene something
amazing. And the display of wealth, the conspicuous
display of wealth. 81 bulls during Telemachus' time is, a, a
fortune to last, you know the equivalent of a fortune that could last a huge chunk
of a lifetime. And yet, here they are just being expended
in this one event on the shores as he goes.
So, we know we're entering into a world of grandeur.
And now, keeping in mind that this is a world of grandeur, we're always going to
be remembering, although it's going to take Telemachus a little while to remember
himself, that this should be the kind of grandeur that exists in his household.
And instead, these vagabonds are running riot across it.
From Pylos and then, we go over land, over to Sparta.
And at that point, we're going to meet Menelaus, Agamemnon's very brother, and
Helen of Troy, that face that launched a thousand ships.
We're going to have a private audience with her through Telemachus' eyes, we're
going to see Helen. Now, through this trip through this
traveling that Telemachus is going to do, it's a way for him to gain knowledge.
And at the same time, he's mirroring in a smaller, more controlled way, the kind of
adventure that his father is on. For each of them the experiential
knowledge that's gained through traveling is something that's profound, that's
powerful, that's life-shaping that gives them tools, and that allows them to
advance in their own lives. Travel is a deeply powerful tool according
to the scale of values. So as he gets ready to make his journey,
makes his connection gears up his boat, gets his provisions, makes his way to
Pylos, sees this grandeur, he sits down and has his audience with Nestor.
When he gets to Sparta, he'll sit down and have his audience with Menelaus and with,
with Helen. Now, at each turn, the, the elders sit
back and listen to Telemachus' version of events, and the first thing they do, when
they hear what is happening, is to react the way, presumably, we're being taught a
person should react, they don't just feel sorry for Telemachus, they don't pat him
on the head and give him some Kleenex, they're angry.
They're angry. The constant exhibition of Telemachus's
elders after he tells them this story is to feel anger.
We see this multiple times as the story is being told.
Athena has already shown it page 85, as [unknown] mentor, she is outraged and she
talks about how shameful this exhibition is.
On page 134, we hear from Menelaus, we also hear from Nestor, that this is
shameful what's happening. Anger comes up when they hear this.
The tour is partly an education for Telemahus to be schooled in how his
emotions ought to be working. His emotions need some calibration.
They need some changing. Oftentimes, I think we think that emotions
are just kind of natural responses to things and that just by nature you are
going to feel things like embarrassment, or anger, or joy or what, whatever it is.
But the stance that Homer is taking here in the Odyssey is a little bit different.
It seems that Telemachus actually needs some schooling in this.
There's an acculturation that he needs to do to know that it is right now to feel
anger. That is the kind of emotional response he
should be having. Each person that he talks to expresses
that. Then also, at each turn, we hear a
particular name that's brought up. When we're talking to Nestor on page 113,
the name Orestes comes up. Athena disguised as mentor on page 115
talks about Orestes. Menaleus, page 141.
After hearing the story of what's happening in Telemachus household, talks
about Orestes, and in fact, casting our mind back for a second, back to book one
Zeus in his introductory remarks right at the very beginning, talks about Orestes
right on page 78 in the translation. At each point a person who mentions
Orestes is an older authority figure. They're reacting to this expression of
powerlessness. In Zeus' case, it's the idea that people
just toss up their hands and it just feels like everything is just faded and it's the
gods fault. Instead, take action like that Orestes
did. The mentor Nestor and Menelaus each after
they hear the story that Telemachus tells and of his own pathetic powerlessness in
the situation say, oh, have you heard the one about Orestes?
Now, what are they referring to? What is this situation involving Orestes?
Well, it just so happens that the, one of the famous stories of homecoming is
something that's already percolating in the background of Homer's Odyssey.
When Agamemnon famously makes his way home, he gets home pretty quickly.
It's not a struggle for him to get a ship back to his to his citadel.
But when he does, he sees his wife. Hello and I'm, I'm back home.
He doesn't realize that his wife has taken up a liaison with a lover and that the two
of them go ahead and murder Agamemnon shortly after he arrives.
Now, this is an awful thing, Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's wife, and her lover killed the
head of household, Agamemnon, her husband. Now, it just so happens that within the
Greek ethical code, if someone kills your father as a son or a daughter, it is now
your duty to kill your father's killer. Well now, what happens in Agamemnon's
family? Agamemnon's own son and daughter are
responsible now for taking revenge against this killer, which means for them, killing
their own mother. This is a nasty business.
This is ugly, and this is awful. In Homer's version of it, the part that's
really emphasized is the lover part, Aegisthus.
It's, he's talked about as the one most responsible for the death of Agamemnon.
So, Orestes goes ahead and takes care of business and kills Aegisthus.
But it's a messy story. It's already messy in Homer's time.
And if you get even messier when we concentrate on it in our out weeks of the
class, we're going to turn to, after we turn to classical Athenian tragedy we're
going to see the story of Agamemnon told through Aeschylus' eyes.
My goodness, that's going to make my hairs grow.
But when Homer focuses on it, what he means to point is, Orestes in a situation
that was very ugly and very nasty, he had the gumption to do what needed to be done.
Even in a situation where that was nasty, nasty business, Orestes, did, what needed
to be done. Orestes and the story of run, cycling
around Agamemnon show up multiple times in Homer's Odyssey.
And in relation to Telemachus, they always show up as this kind of coda tom that's
placed on the end of Telemachus feeling sorry for himself in the code that comes
from a more, from an older more experienced person saying, you know what,
even in the nasty business that Orestes had to take care of, his house was all
messed up and Orestes came in and took care of business.
So when Telemachus is being schooled on how he should be reacting to the world,
he's being introduced generally to the grand and aristocratic world that is his
birthright, that he ought to be enforcing to be his own on the island of Ithaca,
he's being introduced to an emotional response.
He's being enculturated to the right emotional response.
Anger is what the person is supposed to feel when something as nasty as what is
happening in your house is happening. Not pity , not sorry for yourself.
Not powerlessness. He's also being schooled in historical
lessons. By saying, look, if you're in this
situation, you think you've got it bad, well, don't overlook what happened in a
similar, you know, in a, in a situation that was surely as bad as yours, and
probably much worse. Also, Orestes took care of business in his
own situation. And you, as the son of a father whose
being displaced by people that are eating you out of house and home, it's going to
be incumbent upon you, their hinting, hinting, hinting to take action yourself.
Go ahead and be the Orestes of your own story and take action.
Now, in book four, there's a wonderful scene that I just wanted to spend a little
bit of time with, we get to after we've had a chance to meet Nestor and his
amazing display of wealth we get a chance to see what's happening, in the, the house
of house of Menelaus. We also get to see that beautiful woman
Helen of Troy herself. She comes in and has an entrance into the
story. We get to hear from her and hear her own
story. When she does jump into the story there
are some interesting things for us to recognize.
First of all, her beauty. Her bewitching guile.
It's extraordinary. It's, it's obviously overwhelming.
She is indeed the face that launched a thousand ships.
When we get to see her she brings in a nice bowl for us to drink from that is
going to soothe our, our pains or else an, an alcoholic beverage.
But she also adds to it something extra, something special.
These are special drugs that she got on her sojourn in Egypt when she and Menelaus
were blown off course. And these drugs, she can now mix into
wine, that mix into this wonderful potion, where no one could feel any pain for
having had it. The narcotic effect of the wine is another
thing that seems to be hovering around the aura that is Helen.
So, in the case of Helen, we have beauty, we have magical power, we have
intoxication. A little bit of danger, as well, because
she can bring you out of this world. All of these things together showing up in
the figure of Helen, this is a cluster of ideas that we're going to see visited
regularly in Homeric epic. Of women who have power.
Who have very clear erotic dimension to their power.
Who also are mixed up in the idea of, of, of magic.
Who have extraordinary beauty. And who when they arrive in a room, turn
lots of heads. There's a tremendous power that Homer sees
in, in this cluster of ideas, and we're going to see it represented in multiple
places as our story moves forward. Not least, when we turn to away from our
story of Telemachus in the first four books of the Odyssey and move on to meet
our hero, the man himself the, the, the man the muses are singing of, Odysseus.
He'll appear in our next lecture.