 That was an audio reconstruction of Book 8 line 267 and after by Georg Danek of the University of Vienna and Stefan Hagel at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. These two scholars have developed a technique of singing the Homeric epics which they say is appropriate for primarily oral tradition from which these poems emerge. Their reconstruction may not be exactly what the epic poems sounded like, but they can use the accentual structure and sentence intonation of ancient Greek to match that to the metrical structures to figure out how the words and notes best fit together in a way that made the poems sound like a song while serving the dual purposes for the bard, which was on the one hand to have something structured enough that it could be remembered, but on the other hand be open enough to allow improvisation as it's sung. That selection of a sample that they chose is appropriate because it's part of the song that would have been sung by a bard, but it's also a song about a bard singing another song. So it's one bard singing about another bard and it's a particularly relevant story that we'll come back to in a little bit. But first let's start off with the beginning in Book 1 of the Odyssey. We have the invitation or the invocation of the muse similar to what we saw in the Iliad. And instead of singing about the rage of Achilles, this time Homer is asking the muse to sing to me, oh muse of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. That term that is translated by the A.T. Murray translation I provided for you and maybe translated differently if you look at another text. But that term polytropon literally means many turns or shifts, someone who's versatile. And this, like most of the Greek words used to describe Odysseus, don't lend themselves very well to direct translation into English. But the concept that Murray's trying to get to is one that's kind of familiar to us, although there's not one specific English word. So his translation of polytropon as many devices is not very exact, but it does hint at this larger theme in Odysseus' character that is part of a more common epithet for him. Polytropon meaning many turns has sort of double meaning. Part of it is the number of turns he has to go through in this narrative, in his trying to get home, trying to make it home from Troy. He's knocked one way then the other. He can't go straight home back to Ithaca. He has to try one thing and then that doesn't work so he has to turn and then there's another obstacle and he has to keep turning. But the turns aren't only the turns in his path, they're also the turns that he's prepared to make, the ones that he chooses that he sort of thinks through. He thinks through several different options and then chooses one of those and if that one doesn't work then he has to adapt. So he has the turns in his path but he also has the turns in his head. Now this is different than heroes like Achilles or Ajax or Diomedes who simply run head on into whatever is in their way. In these cases heroism is determined strictly by strength, overpowering the obstacle. But Odysseus' heroism is his ability to adapt to the things that he can't directly overcome, not to give in so he doesn't sort of give up when he runs into an obstacle. But he's able to find a way around those forces that he would not be able to directly overpower. And this concept is one that's familiar to us. Of course we want to be careful if we import a personal context into this 2700 year old text. But we have this character type that is different than the usual sort of B movie action hero that sort of overcomes everybody by being able to out-shoot them and overpower them, being stronger than everybody else and tougher than everybody else. There is another type of character that is frequently referred to as the swashbuckler, especially in a sort of pirate context. And if you think of like Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, you see that he's somebody who is always outgunned and always sort of in this inescapable situation. And yet somehow he manages to think of a way out. Of course Indiana Jones is very much this type of character. He's not the strongest and he's not the one who can shoot his way out of every situation. But he does come up with some sort of plan at the last minute. Also the Sherlock Holmes, especially the Guy Ritchie version with Robert Downey Jr. is this type of hero. And the term most often used for this, especially to describe Odysseus, is matis. And this is just like polytropon. There's not one single English word that's a very good translation of this. But matis is something that's written about by these two classical scholars, Marcel de Tien and Jean-Pierre Vernaut. And they're both cunning intelligence in Greek culture and society. And that title, Cunning Intelligence, is their attempt to translate that. But they say that matis, this thing that Odysseus has, is a type of intelligence and a thought, a way of knowing. It implies a complex but very coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behavior, which combine flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills and experience acquired over the years. And these, all of these, this combined characteristic is applied to situations which are transient. They're shifting, disconcerting, ambiguous, situations which do not lend themselves to precise measurement or exact calculation or rigorous logic. In other words, there are things that you just can't plan for. And if you have matis, you'll be able to figure it out once you're in that situation. They say that when an individual who is endowed with matis, be he a god or a man, is confronted with multiple change in realities whose limitless polymorphic powers render it impossible to seize, he can only dominate that situation. That is to say, to enclose it within the limits of a single unchangeable form within his control. If he proves himself to be even more multiple, more mobile, more polyvalent than his adversary. Similarly, in order to reach his goal directly, to pursue his way without deviating from it across a world which is fluctuating and constantly oscillating from one side to another, he must himself adopt an oblique course and to make his intelligence sufficiently wily and supple to bend to every conceivable way and his gait so askew that he can be ready to go in any direction. And so this going in any direction is the mini-turns, the polytropon. But it's also more frequently Odysseus is described as Palu medis. And that Palu is where we get our word Pali, like multiple. So he has this skill, but he has multiple versions of the skill. And he can go one direction, but if that way is blocked, he can switch feet and go the other direction. Of course, we see this kind of thing in the adventures of Odysseus that is probably what you've read, if you've read the Odyssey before. And when he gets locked in the cave of the Cyclops, Polyphemus, he can't overpower Polyphemus and all his men together wouldn't be able to move the giant stone door that blocks the way. So they have to come up with this strategy of getting Polyphemus drunk, then stabbing his one eye out and then, of course, Polyphemus isn't just going to open the door for them then. So they have to cling to the bellies of the sheep that Polyphemus is allowing to go out in grays so that they can get out. All of this is an exercise in medis, sort of thinking your way around an impossible situation. We can imagine if Achilles or Ajax or Diomedes were in that cave, they probably wouldn't have made it out. They probably would have made a last stand and tried to fight Polyphemus and lost. Odysseus is regularly referred to as Polymatus, having multiple types of matus. And he above all, according to Dettian and Vernat, is the hero who is Polymatus as well as Polytropus. This was the first word of the Odyssey, having many turns. He's also Polymechanos, in other words, this is many devices. Literally Polymechanos would translate as many devices, which is what your translator used to translate Polytropon in the beginning. So they're different words, but they are kind of getting at the same multi-valent character. He's an expert in tricks of all kinds. Polymechanos in the sense that he's never at a loss, never without expedience. He has these Poroi, these Aporos is a way out or a way through. An Aporia is a place with no way through, no escape. And yet, even when he is an Aporia in this kind of trouble, he has some sort of Poros. He's able to find a way through the impossible. When taught by Athena and Hephaistus, the deities of matus, the artist also possesses a Technapantoi, an art of many facets, so a type of art that has many different elements to it. Knowledge of general application. The Polymatus is also known by the name of Poikilometus, or Iliometus. We've come across these terms before, although you came across them in translation. Especially these last two terms, Poikilometus and Iliometus. These were terms that Hesiod used to describe Prometheus, who's the middle part of his name. His name means forethinker, pro being ahead, and the mythos seems to be an old version or a cognate of the word matus. Hesiod describes Prometheus as poikilon, which means working in many colors, and it was usually used to describe embroidery. So you're interweaving. You're weaving together these different threads, these different colors. He also used the term Iliometus, which means full of various wiles. In that word, Iliometus, the Ilo means moving quickly, shifting quickly. So birds and insects that would dart back and forth in the air, they would be described as Ilo. As soon as they're going one way, all of a sudden you see them change course and go the other. Combine that with matus, the strategy. So quickly changing strategy, and the type of strategy that is woven together with other types of strategies, or can weave its way through the difficulties, the troubles that the hero with matus finds himself in. But remember that Hesiod condemned this. He said that this poikilon Iloometus of Prometheus was inferior to the power of Zeus, that this matus just wasn't enough. You might think it would be enough, but it was overwhelmed by Zeus. But because Hesiod seems to dislike this sort of irregularity. He doesn't want to acknowledge a world that is not well-ordered by a strong god who can force everything to fall into line. If Prometheus was able to get out of line through this Iloometus, then that's something Hesiod clearly doesn't want to engage with, doesn't want to admit is possible. And yet Homer very much respects this characteristic. And the same terms that Homer uses to praise Odysseus are the terms that Hesiod uses to condemn Prometheus. As Detsian and Vernant point out, Athena and Hephaistus are the deities of matus. Athena's mother was literally named matus. She was the one who Zeus loved, and because Zeus was afraid that matus would give birth to a child who would overthrow Zeus, Zeus turned her into a fly and swallowed her. And this is why, if you know much about Greek mythology, you probably remember the story, that Athena was born from Zeus' head. Hephaistus had to split Zeus' head open with an axe, and then Athena came out fully grown. This is because her mother, Matus, was turned into a fly while pregnant. Zeus swallowed her, and that's why Athena was inside the head of Zeus. So she came literally from the head of Zeus, but also her mother was the nymph whose name was Matus. And also Hephaistus is the god of Matus. And with this we return to that story from Book 8, that the blind-barred Demoticus sings before the Phaistians and Porodysius. In this song, Demoticus sings about Hephaistus, who was the husband of Aphrodite, and yet Aphrodite was having an affair with Ares, the god of war. Hephaistus suspected it, but there wasn't much he could do about it. Aphrodite and Ares kept it secret, but also Hephaistus couldn't just sort of catch them in the act and challenge Ares to a fight. He wouldn't be able to take him. Also, if he just told the other gods about this, they could easily deny it. He has to come up with some way to both catch them in the act and do it in such a way that Ares would not be able to physically attack him. And so he comes up with this net. He creates this mechanism over his own bed that he shares with Aphrodite that would trap them while he pretends to be gone in Aphrodite and Ares. They meet up with each other, they go to bed, and then the trap falls down on them. And then Hephaistus brings all the other guys to see them there trapped together. So through his intelligence, he's able to come up with a solution for a problem he wouldn't be able to solve, or to point out at least a problem he wouldn't be able to do if he fell back on the conventional means of either confrontation or accusation. And that's probably why this tale is in the Odyssey at this point. At this point when Odysseus is on the island of the Phaeacians, this story isn't maybe as relevant as we might expect it to be when compared with Demonicus' song about the Trojan War, specifically about the Trojan Horse. That's very ironic because Odysseus, whose idea of the Trojan Horse was, is right there. He's in disguise, they don't know who he is yet. So that story, you might say, oh well obviously that's relevant to this point in the narrative. But the incorporation of Matus, the reminding of the audience of the skill of Matus is just as much a reference to Odysseus at this point, even though it's a story about Hephaistus. But the Odyssey isn't just a story about Matus, this unique sort of swashbuckling, crafty intelligence that Odysseus has. Although this is definitely part of the thematic structure of the narrative. It is primarily one of the Nostoi, one of the stories about the returns of the Greek heroes. And remember that in some of the stories about the Trojan War that we've lost, there is one part of the epic cycle called the Nostoi, which is about the return of Agamemnon and Menelaus. Agamemnon goes home from the Trojan War directly, although once he gets there he's killed by his wife Clytemnestra. At the same time his brother Menelaus, who is reunited with his wife Helen, they end up down in Egypt and it takes him seven years to get home. And if you read Book 4 of the Odyssey you'll read Menelaus and Helen describing a little bit of that return voyage. But there was a whole series of stories about the returns of the Greeks, individual Achaean heroes coming home after the end of the war. And this is Odysseus's Nostos, this is his attempt to get home. And of course you probably remember all the adventures he goes through on his attempt to get home, having to escape the Cyclops Polyphemus, having to sail between Scylla, the sea monster, and Charybdis, the whirlpool, getting stuck on the island of the Lotus Eaters, or getting stuck on Circe's island. And eventually after he loses all his men in the ships, he ends up on the island of Calypso. It's there he gets stuck for seven years. And when we first see him in the beginning of Book 5, we see that he's spending his days sitting on the shore of Calypso's island wanting to return home. There's tears in his eyes when Hermes comes to tell Calypso that she has to let him go. The narrator describes this beautiful paradise where Odysseus has been living, and a goddess, this nymph, has offered to make him immortal if he will stay there with her. And it's clear that she has kept him there as her lover. And he tells her how beautiful she is and how that he can't really give a good reason why he wants to go, but he clearly does want to go. When he's not there satisfying her needs, he's sitting on the shore looking at the ocean, wishing that he could go home. This is an interesting parallel to the situation of Helen in the Iliad. Remember that Helen seems to have gone willingly with Paris, leaving her husband Menelaus. But by the time we see her in Book 3 of the Iliad, she clearly wants to go home. She clearly wants to be reunited with Menelaus. She wants Paris to lose this duel with Menelaus, and she tells Paris that directly. Aphrodite has to coerce her, has to threaten her to go to bed with Paris at this point. Helen has clearly been part of this adulterous relationship and been treated as a queen in this powerful city, but she is ready for this to end. This is not what she wants for herself. She's being held captive by a goddess. Similarly Odysseus is participating in this adulterous relationship with this goddess, and he has the option of staying there. He would be happy and be made immortal, but clearly he needs more than this. He wants to go home to Penelope. After all this time, this is the one thing he wants. He wants to complete his nostrils. He wants to come home. Now, speaking of Calypso, you may have noticed if you've read the later parts of the Odyssey, you will remember that Odysseus was also trapped in the Isle of Circe, a sea nymph who also wanted Odysseus to stay with him. And Circe turned his men into pigs, and he had to use magic in order to turn his men back into men, but then he still ends up staying with Circe for an entire year. In two cases, he's stuck on an island with a sea nymph who wants him to stay there as her lover, and he has to come up with some way to get out of there, and he needs the help of a god in order to do it. It's very likely that this is a doublet. It's very likely that these two stories once existed independently, and then later Homer, or whoever redacted all of these stories into the epic of the Odyssey, had to come up with a way to integrate the two. Had to decide, do I just go with the story about Circe, or do I tell the story about Calypso, or do I do both? And clearly Homer chose to do both, although the similarities between these two stories seem to indicate that you may have divided at some point, been different ways of telling the same story, now they become two different stories that are integrated into two parts of the same narrative. And besides the nostos, this situation that Odysseus is in with Calypso, he is her guest, and there is this bond between guest and host that was considered very sacred by the Greeks. It was protected by Zeus. If you were traveling, you would go to the home of someone who was about your economic status. So if you were royalty, you'd go to the palace. If you were a farmer or a herdsman or something, you would go to a farm. And you would ask people of your same social status to make you a guest. You would be a zenos. And just like Metis, this is a word that does not have a single English word that will allow us to translate it easily. A zenos is a stranger, but a zenos is also a guest, and a zenos is a friend, and a zenos is a host. So the guest and the host and the friend and the stranger, all of these things are one term, zenos. And that doesn't mean that there are different definitions for this one term. You are all of those things, or at least you're either a guest, but you're also a friend and a stranger at the same time, or you're a host and you're a friend and a stranger at the same time. And when you refer to another person as zenos, this is someone who is accepting hospitality or giving hospitality, but even if you don't know who they are, you are bonded by this sacred relationship protected by Zeus where a guest is not supposed to abuse or steal from or threaten a host, and a host should not steal from or threaten or abuse a guest. Frequently, there was an expectation that you would have a gift for your host as a guest, and a host would have a gift for his guest. And we see this relationship, different versions of it, throughout the Odyssey. So Calypso is not being a very good zenos as host when she will not let Odysseus leave. Similarly, Odysseus accuses Polyphemus later of being a bad zenos because obviously if you're killing and eating your guest, you are not following the laws of Zenea. But also back home, we have a very good example of bad guests. The suitors who are trying to court Penelope, that's maybe a little too easy a term, they're trying to coerce Penelope to marry one of them so that they can have a share in Odysseus' wealth. Potentially, there's the implication they want to kill off Telemachus. And we see this in Book 1. Book 1 introduces the concept of Zenea, the guest-host relationship, and points out how badly it's been abused. So these suitors are eating up Penelope and Odysseus' household, their food, drinking their wine, abusing their servants, and abusing them, making threats to them directly to Telemachus in some cases. So they are being bad Zenoi. They are not following that relationship. And this seems to be the justification for later toward the end of the Odyssey when Odysseus has to kill them all. It becomes clear that these are the worst of the worst kind of people because they abuse the guest-host relationship, which is a sacred bond. Now besides Book 1, I asked you to read books 5 through 8. And this is not the usual reading. If you've read the Odyssey before in high school, you probably read books 9 through 12. Books 9 through 12 have the story of Polyphemus and the story of Circe turning the men into swine and the story of sailing between Scylla and Charybdis. And these are what most people think of when they think of the Odyssey. These are the things that show up in the movies, movie versions, cartoon versions, video games, that sort of thing. And books 9 through 12 and all of these stories of adventures are important. They're familiar. But that doesn't mean that they're more important than the rest of the Odyssey. If you'll notice, I've divided the story chronology from the narrative order. On the top, if you imagine this line going from left to right, the blue line, the story chronology. This is the story, the things that happens, the events. The fall of Troy to Odysseus' returning home and killing all the suitors. At the bottom is the narrative order, if you imagine it going from left to right. And you read book 1, you read books 5 through 8. And then I didn't ask you to read books 9 through 12 or the rest of it. But the familiar elements, the books 9 through 12, notice are just a small part of this much larger narrative. They also describe events that happened in time before the first 8 books. So if you read all of the first 8 books, which you didn't have to, I just asked you to read books 1 and books 5 through 8. But if you read up to book 9, suddenly at book 9, the story goes back into, or the narrative goes back in time. And that is because Odysseus at that point begins to narrate his own adventures. So within the story or within the narrative, we have Odysseus narrating his story. And what he narrates is something that happened much earlier in time than anything. You may have learned in high school, this is later, do we call it in Latin, in medias reis. They're in the middle of things. So the narrative of the Odyssey starts in the middle of the action. It actually starts much closer to the end. So if you look at that story chronology at the top, you see that when we first meet Odysseus in book 5, this is at the end of his 7 years on Calypso's Island. So this is that fourth dot from the right. This is where we pick up. And all the stories about his adventures we're going to hear later, all this happened much earlier on. And also that story of his adventures only takes up these 4 books, books 9 through 12. And after that, books 13 through 24 are about Odysseus's return to Ithaca and his having to use his matis to go in disguise to find a way to take his kingdom back from these suitors who are destroying his kingdom and violating these sacred laws of Zinnia and threatening his wife and his son. So while the adventures of Odysseus that you probably read about before this class are important, they're not the only part of the Odyssey. They're not the part we want to focus on and forget everything else. And I asked you to read books 5 through 8 for a couple of reasons. One of those reasons is because those books are going to become, they're going to be very relevant to us when we move on to Virgil's Aeneid. You're going to see some very familiar elements. Things happening, Virgil describing Aeneis going through certain narrative steps, certain events happening that sound a lot like what you read in books 5 through 8. But also, books 5 through 8, especially books 7 and 8, introduce us to this blind bard, Demoticus, and start to focus not just on the events of the story of Odysseus's adventures and his journey home, his nostos, but also the role of the storyteller. The role of the narrator, not just the narrator of the Odyssey, but narrators within the Odyssey. First of all, the blind bard, Demoticus, telling us the story of Hephaistus, tricking Aphrodite in areas. But then he also tells the story of the Trojan War itself while Odysseus is listening, and that provokes Odysseus to then narrate his story, narrate his adventures, when he says, I am Odysseus whose klios, whose fame reaches the heavens, when he finally reveals who he is to the Phaeacians, and he tells the Phaeacians his story. And after he narrates that story of his own adventures, the Phaeacians are sort of, they are now more his allies than ever. They were good Zenos, they were good hosts before this, but now they are his accomplices, now that they know his story. At the end of book 12, they will take part in the continued adventures of Odysseus once they know what the previous adventures were. So in books 7 and 8, Homer, or using Homer in general sense, whoever this bard was that takes these story elements and puts them together into this narrative and orders them in this way, is putting a lot of attention on the importance of storytelling, of the continuation of a story in order to continue a hero's klios, but also the way people's understanding of their world comes through narrative and how narratives shape what they are willing to do, what they are able to do, and to influence others around them. One thing that does unite the first four books, which are frequently referred to as the Ptolemyche, the story of Ptolemychus, because Ptolemychus we need to know something about, we know Odysseus from the Iliad, so the audience of the Odyssey needs to know who Ptolemychus is and what's going on in Ithaca. This is being set up for when Odysseus finally does return. Those two stories, the story of Odysseus and the story of Ptolemychus will then reunite. But notice through all of this, the goddess Athena is playing a very important part. As one of the goddesses of Matus, so the daughter of the sea nymph named Matus, she is obviously someone who we could count on to empathize with Odysseus. Athena, though she's a goddess, she can't just make anything happen she wants, especially because as we learn later with the story of Polyphemus, the god Poseidon is angry at Odysseus, wants to punish him for blinding his son, Polyphemus. So if Poseidon wants Odysseus dead or at least wants him to spend more time suffering on the sea, Athena can't just directly overrule him. She has to come up with a way to rescue Odysseus and she has to do it at a time when she can get around the opposition of Poseidon. And that's exactly what happens. Poseidon is off in Ethiopia. Remember from the description of the epic cycle that the Ethiopians took part in the Trojan War after the Iliad. And they're very much a part of the periphery of the Greek world. The Greeks knew of Ethiopia as a great civilization to the south or to the east because to get there by land you would have to go east before going south. But Poseidon is off in Ethiopia accepting sacrifices there and Athena uses this opportunity to then try to persuade the rest of the gods to persuade Calypso to let him go. And so she gets the gods, especially Zeus, to agree to this and she goes down to prepare Telemachus to sort of take his place in manhood and in opposition to side with his father. She goes to sort of become his mentor. And this is where we get the word mentor. Athena takes the guise of a man named Mentes and one way to translate that is instead of Mentes, is mentor. So a mentor today we use the term to mean somebody who coaches you, who trains you, who guides you in something they know how to do or in life in general. And this is exactly what Athena is. She is the original mentor. So she's acting as mentor to Telemachus but also she is trying to help Odysseus get out of this inescapable situation and she has to use a bit of matis on her own. She has to wait till Poseidon is gone and then get Calypso to let Odysseus go. And so when Odysseus leaves the island of Calypso think about what he's been through. He left Troy with all of his ships full of treasure that he got from his victorious role in the Trojan War and he lost all of it. He lost all of his men, lost all of the ships, lost all of the treasure he'd gotten from the Trojan War. He ends up on the island of Calypso. Then when Calypso has to let him go she outfits him with or at least lets him build this raft and gives him these sort of splendid treasures to take with him but he's going to lose all of that as well. His raft is going to be smashed against the rocks once Poseidon realizes he's on the sea again. And so he consistently loses everything he possesses. He can't depend on any object to get him through. He has to give up even the sash that the sea nymph I know gives him when he's stuck in the water and he's going to drown. He's lost his raft. I know tells him jump off the raft that's not going to get you where you want to go. He has to think about this. He has to think of two potential outcomes and he tries to hold onto that raft as long as he can but eventually he has to give up even that. He has to give up everything. All he has with him are his wits or his matus. And I know gives him this sash that allows him to stay afloat for several more days until he washes up on the shore of the Phaeacians and even that he has to give back. So by the time he gets to the island of the Phaeacians he has literally nothing. He's completely naked. He's covered in sea rime and grime and mud. He's sleeping under these bushes and yet he still has the most important thing for our hero, for Odysseus, is his matus. And he's also of course got the patronage of the goddess Athena. And so Athena in book five has to sort of help him set the stage. This is a rather humorous besides sort of reminding us that Odysseus is able to get by on nothing but his matus and Athena's patronage and protection. We're confronted with that when he shows up sort of naked, lying in the bushes, when the princess of the Phaeacians, Nausicaea, because she's been sent a dream by Athena that she needs to take all the clothes and go down to the river and wash them. Athena is sending her directly to where Odysseus is. And we have a rather humorous scene where this older naked man is lying in the bushes and he needs help from this young woman. But of course what's he going to do? Just walk out and reveal himself. And he thinks for a minute maybe I should run up to her and grab her knees and beg for help. But of course that might not be taken very well. So he has to think, how do I handle the situation? Here's a young woman who could help me. I need help. I have nothing else. So he has to understand how he appears or would appear to her. He's not going to look like this king of Ithaca and hero of the Trojan War. He's just going to look like a naked creep in the bushes. So he has to approach Nausicaea in a way that will communicate that he is safe, that he is not a threat, a sexual threat or otherwise. And he does this by very carefully choosing the way he describes her. So he grabs these branches to cover himself and you may be thinking, well all the Greek art, the statues, the pictures of men on vases, vase paintings, this sort of thing, they're always naked. Why is this really a big deal that he's naked? Actually yes. The reasons for artistic nudity, what's frequently called heroic nudity are that in art the heroes are portrayed this way but that doesn't mean that they were just hung around naked all the time or fought naked on the battlefield at the time. Probably the best way to describe it in modern terms would be to compare it to comic book heroes. For some reason comic book heroes are always wearing these skin tight outfits so that you can see every single muscle, not everything, they're usually nicely ambiguous around their extremities. But we want to see the hero's muscles, the hero's sort of physical importance and stature and prowess visually represented. Same principle in Greek art but that means that Odysseus, having no clothes with him, is going to appear at best as some sort of crazy beggar and at worst a sexual threat. So he has to come up with a way to approach Nesika in a way that does not scare her away. So he has to keep in mind the way she thinks, the way she will see him and he has to say something that will cause her to see him one way instead of another. But he needs to get her to think of the way he is thinking of her as the way someone would see not only a goddess but specifically he compares her to the goddess Artemis. And the goddess Artemis choosing her, you might think well Athena's done so much for him, if he's going to praise Nesika as beauty shouldn't he compare her to Athena? Given what we know about the decision of Paris, Athena did not seem to be too happy when Paris awarded the apple of Eris that said to the ferris awarded that to Aphrodite and so you might think that Odysseus would say you're as beautiful as the goddess Athena. But he chooses Artemis for a very good reason and that is because Artemis was well known through other myths as someone who was not only a virgin goddess but protected her virginity violently. So even one time when a hunter saw the goddess Artemis bathing naked in the water he saw her by accident. She was so enraged by this that she turned him into a deer and his hounds, his own hunting dogs tore him apart not knowing who he was. That was how fiercely Artemis protects her chastity. So when he compares Nesika to Artemis he's specifically choosing a goddess who is known to be protective of chastity. In doing so he's showing that he is someone who respects the virtue of chastity and therefore not a sexual threat. So what he's doing is using theory of mind. He's keeping in mind not only what she may or may not think but specifically what she thinks about him and what she thinks about the way he thinks about her. So we've got three steps here. He's just thinking, his made us, his sort of craftiness but his thinking about her thinking about his thinking about her. Fortunately Athena has also taken a role in shaping Nesika's theory of mind, the way she thinks, the way she responds to Odysseus. We're told that Athena gives her the courage to be a good Zenos, to be a good hostess. So there's a stranger in her land and she wants to help him come back to the palace because that is what a good Zenos does. That is what a good host does. Whenever there's a stranger we want them to feel welcome. But she doesn't tell Odysseus to go straight back to the palace with her. She doesn't want to guide this naked grimy old man back to the palace herself. And it's not that she's being a bad hostess at this point. She is also pretty crafty as far as theory of mind goes. She knows what the other faicians would think if they saw her leading this man back to the palace. They're going to say, oh, I guess Nesika has her new husband because keep in mind she is now a marriageable age. She's looking forward to being married soon. She doesn't know who. She doesn't have a husband picked out. Her father has not chosen a husband for her. But she is very excited about the fact that now that she is of age, a husband will be chosen for her. And if she comes walking back to the palace of the faicians with Odysseus, people are going to assume number one that this must be her new husband. And number two, who is this guy? Clearly she has not chosen very wisely. So she doesn't want to get people talking. So she has to keep in mind how the faicians, especially faicians who might be her potential husbands that have not, whoever it will be, not being chosen yet, will not get the wrong idea. So Nesika tells Odysseus, come along a little bit later, go this direction. When you get there, she gives Odysseus something to wear and tells him how to get to the palace and says, don't go straight to my father. I'll send him us first. Go to my mother, Arite. And she will be the one who shows you hospitality. Ask her first. And so she does help him get back. She doesn't want to be the one to lead him directly back and have people talk. But she does tell him how to get there, how to get the hospitality, and Odysseus does, he, you know, unbeknownst to him, Athena puts this veil of mist around him so that the faicians don't see him as he goes toward the palace. And he's unseen even when he gets into the throne room until the very moment when he goes up to Arite, the queen, and asks for hospitality for Zinnia. And she, of course, helps him. He talks to Alcinois, the king. The king, of course, says, of course, we're going to show you Zinnia. We're going to show you hospitality. And they notice that they don't ask him who he is. They first just make sure that his needs are met, that he's given something to eat and a place to stay. Then Arite asks him who he is, and he doesn't tell her yet. And even though he doesn't tell her, they still, they not only show him this hospitality, they also want to put on this great performance for him. They want to have this athletic contest, this feast in his honor. And this feast involves athletic competitions. It involves this blind bard, Demonicus, singing as entertainment. And once he hears this blind bard, Demonicus, singing about the Trojan War, he starts to remember who he is. He starts to become Odysseus. So it's not just that he hasn't been, that he's been hiding his identity. He hasn't been acting his identity. He hasn't been Odysseus. Not only has he not named himself as Odysseus, he's still in this position where Odysseus, the hero of the Trojan War, has been, he has not been able to play that role in quite a long time. He is still this nameless Zenos, this stranger, this wanderer, who is dependent on help from other people right now, because he has nothing left of his life as the hero, or one of the heroes of the Trojan War. And yet once this blind bard, Demonicus, begins to sing of the Trojan War, then that identity starts to come back, starts to return to Odysseus. This bard, Demonicus, is a very interesting character for several reasons. We have three, Alcindus describes him as the greatest among bards, most beloved by the gods. Odysseus later describes him as the greatest of bards, and then the narrator also describes him. The narrator tells us that he was, quote, the good minstrel whom the muse loved above all other men, and he gave him both good and evil. Of his sight, she deprived him, but gave him the gift of sweet song. In other words, the muse of epic poetry gave him the ability to sing these epic poems, but took away his sight in the meantime. So he's blind, he has to be led out to the gaming area where Alcindus and Odysseus and the Phaetians are. And once he's there, at first he sings a story about Odysseus and Achilles, where there's this quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles. Now this is not something that's in the Iliad or apparently anywhere else in the epic cycle, but it's, this is the two people, or the only person that Achilles hasn't had a quarrel with, seems to be Odysseus, but here apparently Demodocus knows this story, and as he sings this story, Odysseus, who is still in disguise, who still or at least isn't known, he begins to weep, and he tries to hide it, but Alcindus, the king of the Phaetians, notices. And then after the games, Demodocus sings the story of Hephaestus and Aphrodite, and Odysseus asks him immediately after this to sing about the Trojan horse. And the story of the Trojan horse is the story of Odysseus at his best, showing his matis, the thing that made him every bit as important to the Achaeans as Achilles' skill in battle and Agamemnon's leadership. This is what essentially won the Trojan war, so Odysseus is asking Demodocus, without referring to himself, saying, tell me my story, the story of my chaos, of my glory. And he does, he sings the story, describes the construction of the horse and the bringing it to the gates and then the whole strategy. And at this point, this is Odysseus in disguise, nobody knows who he is, hearing his kleos, the story about him that will live after his death, the thing for which he will be remembered, the thing he should feel this sort of eternal pride. This kleos was the thing that motivated Achilles, it was the thing that motivated all the warriors and all the Achaeans, all the Trojans were motivated by kleos, this memory of you that will last after your death. And he's got it, he's now got proof that in this far away land that few humans have ever been to, this blind bard is able to sing this story about his stratagem that won the war. And yet look at what happens, he's not only weeping now as he was before, when he first heard Demodocus sing about his quarrel with Achilles, he wept and only Alcindus noticed it. But now, we're told that, quote, this song, the famous ventral saying, but the heart of Odysseus was melted and tears wet his cheeks beneath his eyelids and as a woman wails and flings herself about her dear husband, who has fallen in front of his city and his people, seeking to ward off from his city and his children the pitiless day. And she beholds him dying and gasping for breath, she clings to him in shrieks aloud while the foe behind her smite her back and shoulders with their spears and lead her away to captivity to bear the toil and woe. While most pitiful grief her cheeks are wasted, even so did Odysseus let fall pitiful tears from beneath his brows. In other words, Odysseus isn't just crying and he's not just crying like a woman who's been taken into captivity, but he's crying like a woman who is watching her husband die while her husband was trying to defend his city and his home and his family. So in other words, not only is Odysseus weeping as if he was one of his own victims, as if he was one of the Trojan women, but he's weeping as if he was one of the Trojan women at hearing the story of the fall of Troy, which he himself enabled. So this is a very ironic simile. This is a Homeric simile where Homer stops and explains this comparison at length and it's very ironic because it's almost as if he was one of his own captives. Something about this, the way that Demoticus sang the story, put him in the mind of the very people whose defeat enabled his own victory, his own kleos. So if his kleos comes at the defeat of the Trojans, now he weeps as if he was one of the Trojans. So it's this very cathartic moment, very unusual moment, but very conspicuous moment where the hero is sort of becoming himself again at the same time coming to terms with how he became who he was. And of course this is what leads Alcindus to finally say, you must have a name, who are you? We want to know why it is you cry at hearing the story of the fall of Troy. And Alcindus says, but come now, tell me this and declare it truly, whether thou hast wandered and to what countries of man thou hast come, tell me the people and of their well-built cities, both of those who are cruel, wild and unjust, and of those who love strangers, the Xenos, and fear the gods and their thoughts, and tell me why thou dost weep and wail in spirit as thou hearest the doom of the Argyve Denaeans and of Elios. This is the gods wrought and spun, the skiing of ruin for men. That there might be a song for those yet to be born. In other words, Alcindus is not only saying, please tell us who you are, but tell us how you fit into this story, because this story, all of these events, this tragedy at Troy, this victory at Troy, depending on which side you're on, this Trojan War, the gods caused this to happen for this reason, that there would be a song for those yet to be born, that there would be something for people like Demoticus and for Homer to sing about to the next generations. And it's at this that Odysseus, at the beginning of Book 9, finally says who he is. He says, I am Odysseus, son of Lertes, who am known among men for all manner of miles, and my fame, Cleos, this is the word he uses here, my Cleos reaches unto heaven. In other words, now that my fame has been validated, has been shown to me, I will say that I am this person that you were just singing about. And it's at this point in Book 9, and from Book 9 all the way through Book 12, all the adventures about what has happened to Odysseus, all the Polyphemus and the Isle of the Seercy and Isle of the Lotus Eaters and Skil and Charybdis, all of this is within Odysseus' own narrative of what he's been through since the Trojan War, since this is something presumably within the narrative that Demoticus would not have known of, could not have sung about. But now, all of this, Odysseus follows Demoticus' story with his own story, or Demoticus' narrating of the Trojan War with his own narrating of his adventures after the Trojan War. And it's at this moment that Odysseus becomes Odysseus again. He sort of reclaims at the beginning of the very first line of Book 9, he is described again as Odysseus Polymetis, Odysseus the man of many types of metis, the many strategies, the many solutions. So who is Demoticus? Demoticus seems to have a very important role even though it's a very small role. And not only does he have a very important role within the narrative of the Odyssey because he provokes Odysseus into revealing himself into telling who he is and to telling four books worth of adventures, but also in the historical context of the Odyssey and the centuries that followed the Odyssey, it's this character that seems to have led later Greeks to presume that Homer was a blind bard, that Demoticus was actually a self-portrait. And it's possible, although it's very speculative, but what we know about Homer, the legend of Homer being this blind poet that composed the Iliad and the Odyssey seems to be based on this portrayal of this bard. Now he's not the only bard described in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Book 1, Penelope and Telemachus had their own local bard, and this one is the one that is described as being the favorite of the Muse and the favorite of the other gods, who Odysseus and Alcinus both say is the best. Odysseus says that he sings of the Trojan War as if he was there. So this character sort of has fused with the historical character, if I can say that, of Homer. We don't have any other sort of contemporary historical evidence of a poet named Homer, and we don't have any autobiographical information within these texts the way we do with Hesiod. Hesiod describes himself directly. Homer doesn't unless Damodicus is a sort of self-portrait. So in the character of Damodicus, Homer turns the attention of his audience not only to himself as a storyteller, but he turns their attention to themselves, the audience themselves, as the recipients of the chaos of the heroes, whose stories he's telling. And notice that Odysseus is, in books 8 and 9, the first part of Book 9 that I read to you and, of course, 9 through 12 when he tells his own story, he acts three roles. He's one of the heroes in Damodicus' story. He's also the audience listening to Damodicus' story. And hearing his story awakens his identity, and it will set him back again on his path home, on his nostrils. But first, in Book 9, he will perform the third role, and that is the storyteller, because his own story, his chaos, the thing that he fought for on the battlefield of Troy, cannot survive without being retold. And there are two, maybe even three, necessary roles that must be performed in order for chaos, the glory of the heroes that they've won on the battlefield, to be won and to survive. First, there are the people who strive against each other to do the things which will be remembered, and whether they win or lose. In both the Iliad and the Odyssey, the characters fight not just for Time, that is, the treasures that are given out that signify their success on the battlefield. But they fight for glory, for chaos, by which they know that they will be remembered after they're gone, whether they win or die on the battlefield. But the fight is only half of chaos. It's just the first part. It's, you know, somebody has to tell the story and somebody has to hear the story and continue that story. Without somebody to tell the story and hopefully tell the story well, there is no lasting glory, no chaos amphithon. Remember this term from the Iliad. This is what Achilles and Diomedes and others are striving for. This very old concept that shows up in other Indo-European literature. It shows up in a nearly identical word in the Sanskrit Mahabharata, the epic of ancient Hindu. They're striving for lasting glory, not just the things they win on the battlefield. That's why they fight in the first place. And Alcindus articulates this point when he tells Odysseus, or asks Odysseus to tell his own story. And he says, Alcindus says, Tell me why you weep and wail in spirit when you hear the story of the doom of the Argyve Danaians and of Elios. In other words, you hear of the fall of Troy and the victory of the Greeks. Why does it make you cry? This, the gods wrought and spun the skying of ruin for men that there might be a song for those yet to be born. So all of this destruction, all of this death, the gods had a purpose for that and that is to create this story that will be passed on to future generations. So it's not just about the storyteller, but about the audience. We are the ones that are yet to be born. For whom Odysseus and his comrades, the Achaeans and the Trojans, earned Klayos, created a story that we could hear and examine and learn from. Klayos serves them with glory that will live on when they're dead. And their Klayos serves us, the audience, in all the ways that a narrative shapes our individual and cultural development. And of course, in Homer's time, the development of writing was just arriving in Greece or at least just becoming more widespread. It was being applied to things like recording narratives rather than just recording official documents of high-ranking members of society. And we don't know if Homer was able to write or if he had someone write his songs down or if generations passed between the composition of the Illyad and the Odyssey and the time it was finally written down. But the fact that it was written down lets us know that the continuation of the story and of these heroes Klayos was as important to those subsequent generations as it was to the individuals whose glory these texts were supposed to amplify. How many other stories have been lost because their tellers didn't have the technology of writing or the form of writing, whether it was papyrus or some other perishable medium did not survive the ravages of time. But it also reminds us that the motivations for the Trojan War, like so many other human actions, would not have been merely the achievement of immediate goals, like the return of Helen or the accumulation of wealth on the battlefield from the spoils of war. In these narratives, at least, the heroes fight in order to earn their place in the story and it doesn't matter so much in the end whether they win or lose. That's a point we're going to see in our next reading which is Virgil's Aeneid and yet one of the losers of the Trojan War becomes the hero of his own epic as well as the hero of a new European empire that of Caesar's Rome.