The Most BRUTAL Disaster in The Odyssey?

[00:00:00]The next time they hit land, the fleet anchors inside a beautiful enclosed harbor with these high cliffs and calm water totally protected. All 12 ships sail in super easy except one. Inside the harbor, turns out the place belongs to Lestrigonians, the these giants who come down to the coast and spear his men like fish and they eat them. 11 of Odysseus's 12 ships are destroyed in a single sitting. Most of the men who survived the 10 years at Troy in that one harbor. It is the biggest catastrophe of the entire journey and it is the one that people don't really talk about. There's no clever trick, there's no cunning, there's there's no escape, just one ship that happens to be on the outside basically like shipwrecked while the rest of the fleet is butchered on the inside. Then, the last ship is carried onto the island of Circe where they meet a goddess or maybe a witch depending on the interpretation who drugs half the crew and turns them into pigs. But Odysseus, who's armored with this like magical herb from the goddess Hermes, forces her at sword point to turn them back. And then, the story does something very unexpected. They just stay there for an entire year just like hanging out, feasting, chilling.

[00:01:18]Finally, the crew has to pull their captain aside and remind him, "Hey, we got to go home. A bunch of dudes are trying to hook up with your wife, Penelope. We we got to we got to get this thing going."

[00:01:28]And then finally, they decide to leave.

[00:01:31]The goddess witch lady Circe tells them something crazy. They she says to them that their road home runs through the land of the dead.

[00:01:40]If you're Odysseus at this point, you got to be like, "Bro, I Why did you guys open the bag of wind?

[00:01:45]I saw it. I saw all these guys trying to get with my lady and now I'm back on this island with a bunch of y'all as pigs and then unpigged and now she says we got to go to the land of the dead."

[00:01:56]So, Odysseus is like, "Screw it." All right? He sails to the edge of the world, which is an actual place in the story. Maybe in real life, I don't know.

[00:02:04]Never been there. And this is allegedly where the dead go. So, he crosses the ocean to a shore where, the poem says, the sun don't shine. A land wrapped in permanent mist and clouds where it is always night time. And there's no monsters or giants or uh witches or cities, just fog and cold at the very border of the living world.

[00:02:27]And there, on that gray beach, he does exactly what Circe told him to do. He digs a trench with his sword, about like a like a forearm deep, and he pours in offerings, milk, honey, sweet wine, water, barley. And then he cuts the throat of two black sheep and lets the blood run down into the pit. Because there is a rule in the world of the dead that is very creepy. It's that ghosts are mindless. They're empty. They're these like fluttering shadows with no memory and no voice until they drink blood. Once they taste blood, they suddenly remember who they were, and they can think, and they can speak, and they they become anthropomorphized, and they become almost like humans again.

[00:03:08]So, the moment that blood hits the trench, the dead souls come swarming up out of the dark. Brides who died young, old men, soldiers still with their wounds, thousands of them crowding in from every direction, sounding like, according to the poem, unearthly shrieking.

[00:03:24]Odysseus stands over the trench with his sword drawn, holding back the entire dead population of all of history from one puddle that can make them feel human again.

[00:03:33]And there he meets the blind prophet, Tiresias, who gets a drink and gives him a warning. And remember this, about the cattle of the sun. That's the warning he gives Odysseus. He says, "Beware of the cattle of the sun." Now, it's a weird warning. We're going to come back to it in a second, but just remember that, okay? Now, Odysseus meets Achilles. You know Achilles, the greatest warrior who ever lived, the man that the entire Trojan War was built around. And Achilles is dead. And delivers one of the most devastating lines in all of ancient literature. He says he would rather be a poor farmhand alive, breathing, and toiling away in someone else's field than be a king over all the dead.

[00:04:17]So, the glory that the entire war ran on, Achilles says it's worthless. But then Odysseus sees a ghost that he was not expecting. It's his mother. His mother Anticlea is there. She was alive when he first set sail for Troy, and she tells him how she died, of grief, waiting for him to return.

[00:04:38]Three times he tries to embrace her.

[00:04:39]Three times she just pours through his arms like a like a shadow, like a ghost. And then come the Sirens. Now, you probably heard of these ruthless creatures, but they're not exactly the way they're depicted in a lot of movies. Let's look at how the story actually goes. As the ship approaches their island, the wind just dies. Like the sea goes flat. It's like perfectly glassy and silent. And the crew has to pull out oars and row towards the sound, which is its own kind of like horror. You can imagine being on like a perfectly still lake or like a perfectly still ocean. And you just you don't even hear any waves or anything, just the sound of your own oars hitting the water and pulling. Maybe like the creaking of the wood as you start to go go forward. And nobody gets ambushed by the Sirens. You hear them coming from miles away across this dead calm sea, and still you just continue to row anyway. Odysseus preps the ships exactly the way that Circe told him to. He takes this wheel of beeswax, and he slices it up, and he starts kneading it to become soft in the warmth of the sun. And then he plugs the ears of every single crewman.

[00:05:50]And then the crew ties him to the mast, arms and legs. And in the Odyssey, there are two Sirens, not like a chorus of them, just two. And Homer gives them no physical description whatsoever. He doesn't describe like mermaids or fish scales or wings, no combs or mirrors on wet rocks. It doesn't say that like they're baddies. The fish-tailed mermaid temptress that we all imagine when we hear the word Siren is just centuries of artistic drift that came later. Ancient Greek painters actually drew them as birds with the heads of women. So, the mermaid thing actually comes from much later depictions. In the original story, the bait isn't beauty. It isn't even love songs. It's not even really about the music. Listen to what they actually sing in the actual text of the Odyssey.

[00:06:40]This is what he actually hears as he's going past them, as he's, you know, tied to the mast of the ship. He hears this, "Come here, celebrated Odysseus, and we will tell you everything. We know all that happened at Troy. We know everything that happens on the whole fertile Earth."

[00:06:58]That is so different than the version that we hear in like the Hollywood tale, right? Like we hear like, "Oh, like they're beautiful. The song is so gorgeous. They're like they're drawn to the beauty." The Sirens are actually offering knowledge. They're offering total information. The war explained, death explained, that that experience he had with his mother on the island where he couldn't hug her, that unresolved like torment that he feels in his soul, all of it is explained. And that is the most all-consuming enticing thing that Odysseus truly wants in this whole poem.

[00:07:32]And it works on him like instantly.

[00:07:34]Odysseus starts thrashing against the ropes and jerking his head signaling for the crew to cut him loose. He's like, "Hey guys, this was this was all uh uh the beeswax thing, who cares? Just cut me loose, let me out of here." He's just pleading with them with his life to get him unhooked from the mast. And all of his men respond by rowing even harder. Well, two of them get up, walk over, and tie their captain down with even more rope. And the whole time the sirens are singing from a meadow heaped with rotting corpses. A flowering field, the poem says, "piled with the bones of men, the skin still shriveling on them." Thanks to his remaining faithful men who can't hear anything cuz they have, you know, beeswax in their ear, they kept on they kept on rowing and they make it past the sirens.

[00:08:21]And next they go through a strait with a monster on each side, the Scylla. Six heads on long serpent necks striking down from a cliff. And then, of course, the Charybdis, a whirlpool that swallows the entire sea three times a day.

[00:08:36]Now, the advice that he has from Circe to get past these guys was brutal. They have to hug the cliff beneath the Scylla. But, as a result, they're going to lose six men, but they won't lose the entire ship. And Odysseus follows the advice, but with an adjustment that a lot of the adaptations always leave out.

[00:08:57]He doesn't tell his crew.

[00:08:59]Yeah, in the actual story he doesn't tell the crew. He straps on his armor, watches the six heads of the Scylla monster come down, and later says that the sight of his men screaming his name as they were lifted away was the most painful thing that his eyes ever saw.

[00:09:14]But, he'd already decided that someone needed to pay the toll in order to get the rest of the men through. Then comes the Thrinacia, the island where the sun god pastures his sacred cattle. Remember this part? That one ghost, Tiresias, back at the edge of the world, he warns Odysseus about this exact moment. And he said that if he didn't heed the warning, it meant death.

[00:09:37]Odysseus wants to sail right past it, but the crew is exhausted and starving and just saw six of their homies get eaten, and so they're starting to, you know, chat about mutiny. Led by his second-in-command, this guy Eurylochus, demanded one night of rest on the shore.

[00:09:54]So, Odysseus gives in. And then a storm traps them there for a month. Now, of course, the food runs out, and while Odysseus is inland, asleep again at the fatal moment, the starving crew slaughters one of the Sun God's cattle.

[00:10:12]This was again the big warning from Tiresias, don't do that. The bad omens start immediately. They're pretty creepy, actually. The hides begin to crawl along the ground, and then like the meat starts to like moo like a cow on the spits, like while it's cooking over the fire. And finally, when the weather clears up and they set sail, the men meet their final destruction. Zeus splits the ship with a thunderbolt, and every last man except Odysseus drowns in the wreckage.

[00:10:44]Odysseus clings to a piece of the ship and gets swept back through the Charybdis, and he survives by hanging from a fig tree over the whirlpool that's eating the sea three times a day, and then he just drifts in the ocean for nine days, until he washes ashore on an island called Ogygia, alone.

[00:11:04]Think about it. He starts this whole journey with 12 ships, 600 men. Well, now 599 of them have died, all the ships are gone, and Odysseus is now alone. And the poem's opening lines have already told us about how to read this. The men died, it insists, by their own recklessness. The captain, it doesn't blame. But, remember who's talking here.

[00:11:27]Because now we get to the part that changes everything we've just heard. I mean, the Cyclops, the Sirens, the witch Circe, the ghosts, the whirlpool, the poem doesn't show you any of it directly. You see books 9 through 12, the entire famous section that everyone knows, like the whole reason you know the story even exists probably if you're like me, is a tale Odysseus tells about himself out loud after dinner to a court full of wealthy strangers that he desperately needs a ride from. There's no other witnesses. Every man who could confirm a single word of it is dead. And the one thing that the poem establishes about this man beyond any doubt whatsoever is that he lies.

[00:12:09]Like all the time. He loves lying.

[00:12:12]You may have just heard literature's very first unreliable narrator and it's one of the most important works of literature ever.

[00:12:19]So, next, let's look at what the poem actually says happened when he wasn't the one telling the story.

[00:12:26]10 years from the fall of Troy to the homecoming, that's the legend, right? The famous 10 years of wandering. Except, when you lay the poem's timeline end to end, the monsters aren't really that big of a part of it. I mean, the raid, the Cyclops, the winds, the harbor, the year with Circe, the dead, all that stuff, the cattle, it all fits into roughly the first 3 years.

[00:12:48]So, what about the other seven? Well, Odysseus actually spends those in one place. All those seven years on the island of Ogygia as a captive of the goddess named Calypso. Calypso wants him as a husband and she has no intentions of ever letting Odysseus leave and there's nothing that he can do about it.

[00:13:06]Like, he's a goddess and he's just a man with no ship or crew or anything. The poem tells us by the end, the nymph, meaning the goddess, no longer pleased him. At night, he sleeps beside her in a cave and every single day he walks down to the shore and stares at the empty sea and he cries. So, what finally breaks this, you know, prison that he's in?

[00:13:31]Well, the gods convene.

[00:13:33]While Poseidon is conveniently out of town, he's not really at this conference, and Athena, who's basically Odysseus's lawyer throughout this entire poem, raises his case, and Zeus agrees, and sends Hermes down to tell Calypso to let him go. Before Odysseus leaves though, Calypso makes Odysseus one final offer. She says to Odysseus, "If you stay, I will make you immortal." That is a massive offer. It literally she's saying, "I'll make you basically a god.

[00:14:03]I'll make you one of us." And Odysseus says that he knows Penelope, his wife, who's waiting for him on the shores of his hometown, can't compare with a goddess. But even so, that's not what he wants. He wants to go home. So, he builds a raft and sails for 17 days until Poseidon, on his way back from, you know, his travels or maybe like a vacation or something. He looks down and he spots Odysseus on his raft, and he detonates the sea one final time. The raft that Odysseus is floating on is smashed. A sea goddess lends him this magic veil to keep him afloat, and he swims for 2 days.

[00:14:41]He crawls ashore, naked, basically dead, on the land of the Phaeacians, a nation of master sailors. He's found by none other than the princess, Nausicaa, doing laundry at the river with her maids. The Phaeacians take him in and give him a feast. And remember that thing we were talking about before, that xenia? How How do you say it? Philoxenia?

[00:15:05]>> Philoxenia.

[00:15:06]>> Philoxenia. This is a place that finally understands hospitality. I would say Circe kind of gets it.

[00:15:14]>> Mhm.

[00:15:14]>> Like some of the other ones. But this this spot is like it shows the Greek version, all right? And they have a whole banquet. And at the banquet, the blind singer finally performs the song of Troy and the wooden horse and the mysterious guest weeps into his cloak.

[00:15:30]And so the king finally asks, "Who are you?" And Odysseus tells him who he is.

[00:15:34]He says, "I am Odysseus, the son of Laertes, known to the world for my cunning." And that's where he launches into the next four books of monster stories that we just walked through.

[00:15:45]It's that moment. Everything we know from the story is a flashback performed by Odysseus to the people that he's basically on the island with. Meanwhile, back on Ithaca, home has become an occupied territory. 108 suitors are camped in the palace. They're eating all the food, drinking the cellars dry, devouring the estate of a man that they're just completely, you know, confident is dead. And Penelope has been holding off this siege all alone. She announced that she would choose a new husband soon, just as soon as she finished weaving a burial shroud for old Laertes, her father-in-law, which was very proper of her and very dignified, so no one really objected. And she wove the shroud by day and then she would secretly unweave it by night. And she bought three full years with that trick until one of her own maids ratted her out. And then old Telemachus, Odysseus and Penelope's son, just got back from searching abroad for any news of his father and had to slip past an ambush just to make it home. You see, the suitors have moved on from freeloading to planning the murder of the heir and basically take over this entire island for their for themselves. And that is the state of things when a strange beggar no one recognizes walks into the palace courtyard. It's been 20 years since Odysseus actually left the island of Ithaca and set sail. The whole war a curse, a goddess's island, and Odysseus finally sets foot on Ithaca again. So, real quick, remember how the poem has 24 books? The entire second half of it takes place on Ithaca, and it's not really an adventure story, to be honest.

[00:17:32]It's an undercover operation with like surveillance and a disguise and a loyalty test. It's a man casing his own house so he can take it back from the inside. Essentially, if the first half of the Odyssey is the mythos, it's like the mythology around everything, the second half is like a revenge thriller Hollywood movie. It's like the tensest stretch of storytelling that survives from the ancient world, and this is basically how it goes.

[00:18:00]Athena disguises Odysseus as an old beggar with like shriveled skin and rags and like a walking stick, and his first stop is a hut in the hills, the home of his swineherd and slave, this guy Eumaeus. Now, Eumaeus is a man who owns nothing. He takes in this filthy, uh, you know, homeless stranger and feeds him his best pig and gives him his own cloak against the cold without the slightest clue even who this man is.

[00:18:30]Meanwhile, up at the palace, the richest young men in the kingdom are violating every single law of hospitality ever.

[00:18:38]The poorest man in the story is actually the best.

[00:18:42]Think about that. Like the poorest beggar, this guy takes in Odysseus and holds this sacred xenia principle to the highest degree, this this this honor, this hospitality. Then, at the palace gate, on a dung heap, lies a dog. This is Odysseus's dog, Argos.

[00:19:01]Odysseus trained him as a little puppy 20 years ago, and now he's this old, lumpy, tick-ridden throwaway.

[00:19:09]And he's the first living soul on Ithaca to recognize his master. Argos is too weak to stand up, so he lifts his head and he wags his little tail.

[00:19:18]>> [gasps] >> I mean, just what a beautiful, like, visual. I love dogs. That's so cute.

[00:19:23]Isn't it the best? Like, Odysseus comes back 20 years later and his dog is like, "That's my boy right there. I know that guy."

[00:19:29]But Odysseus, who obviously can't break his cover cuz he, you know, he might just get killed immediately, he wipes away a single tear and walks past him into the house.

[00:19:39]Now, the poem says that Argos dies right there on the spot. Having seen Odysseus again in the 20th year, Argos can finally pass away in peace.

[00:19:51]Shit's going to make me cry, dog. Isn't that beautiful?

[00:19:54]Also brutal. I mean, it is brutal, but it is beautiful. Now, inside, the beggar works the halls of his own palace.

[00:20:00]Odysseus in this disguise starts kind of going around and basically begging for scraps from men eating his own food at his table, drinking his wine. And he's quietly mapping like which servants are loyal and which ones are, you know, fine with Odysseus dying. And basically, he's looking for the ringleader of all these potential suitors that are trying to marry Penelope and kill his son and take his entire estate. And he finds him, this guy Antinous. And basically, caps off the evening by hurling a footstool at him. Later that night, the old nurse Eurycleia, the woman who nursed Odysseus as a little baby, is told to wash the stranger's feet. And her hands find a scar above his his knee, a boar tusk wound from a boyhood hunt. And she knows instantly who this is, and she turns towards Penelope to cry out. But Odysseus's hand closes around her throat and he tells the woman that if she makes a sound or tells anyone when the killing starts, he's not going to spare her.

[00:21:00]Yeah, that detail doesn't really survive the adaptations either cuz it shows Odysseus kind of as like like brutal, aggressive guy. But he says, "Hey, don't say a word."

[00:21:09]But, then there's Penelope.

[00:21:11]The queen sits down for a long fireside interview with this beggar, and he claims that he actually hosted Odysseus decades ago, and swears that the great man is alive, and that he's on his way home right now. And Penelope weeps.