STORY  1:14:49 listening time Odysseus – “the polytropus man” – sets sail for home.  Adventures at Ismarus and in the Land of the Lotus Eaters follow.  A detailed flashback takes us to Ithaka, to explore Penelope’s three duties in her husband’s absence:  stewardship, sexual fidelity, and raising an heir.  The episode concludes with Odysseus and...

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STORY  1:03:45 listening time This episode includes all of the adventures – the horror, the comedy, and the strategy – inside the cyclops Polyphemus’ cave.  The episode concludes with Odysseus being cursed, followed by a short primer on how to curse one’s enemies, Bronze Age style. COMMENTARY:  UNDERSTANDING XENIA  21:49 listening time The Odyssey’s most...

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STORY  46:05 listening time The Great Wanderings continue, and disaster follows disaster.  First Odysseus squanders opportunity for easy homecoming via King Aeolus’ magical bag of wind.  And then Odysseus loses most of his ships and crew, in the Lastrygonian harbor of death. COMMENTARY:  THE ODYSSEY AS LITERATURE’S DEFINING QUEST STORY  27:13 listening time I offer...

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STORY  55:57 listening time Odysseus’ crew arrive on Circe’s island, where they are transformed into pigs (most likely for behaving like pigs).  After rescuing his crew, Odysseus decides to postpone his homecoming a full year, unwilling to resist the pleasures of the Circe’s “gorgeous bed”. COMMENTARY:  MARITAL FIDELITY IN THE BRONZE AGE   21:45 listening time...

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STORY  53:00 listening time Odysseus visits the underworld and has some interesting conversations with the dead.  His mom warns him about the deteriorating situation in Ithaka; Agamemnon warns him about the fidelity of wives (an Odyssey “recurring theme); and Achilles shares his post-life existential crisis: “was all of my earthly kleos really worth anything?”. COMMENTARY: ...

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STORY  58:55 listening time Odysseus listens to the Sirens.  I pause to provide a historical review of how Sirens evolved over time, following Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus then chooses between Charybdis and Scylla, and I pause to relate a seriously twisted “Scylla back-story”.  And finally, we witness the incredibly disturbing deaths of all of Odysseus’ remaining...

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STORY  53:58 listening time The episode opens in year seven of Odysseus’ long, largely undocumented sojourn on Calypso’s island.  Odysseus is longing for home, apparently unmoved by the promise of immortality with a goddess.  Up on Mount Olympus: Athena pleads Odysseus’ case, Zeus relents, and Hermes is sent to Calypso’s island with orders that “Odysseus...

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STORY  54:12 listening time At the same time as Hermes takes flight to Calypso’ island, in order to rescue Odysseus, Athena takes flight to Ithaka, in order to “rescue” 20-year old Telemachus: from his remarkable immaturity. This episode picks up the story in the twentieth year of Odysseus’ absence, and details the “Ithacan constitutional crisis”...

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STORY  49:47 listening time Athena sends Telemachus off on his first ever “road trip” – to Pylos and to Sparta – in the hopes that it might help the milquetoast young man to “grow a pair”.  Telemachus meets some familiar characters from Iliad:  windy old king Nestor, blustery Menelaus, and the “enigmatic-as-ever” Helen of Troy...

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STORY  1:04:45 listening time At the same time as Athena is in Ithaka – “mentoring” Telemachus – Odysseus washes ashore the land of the Phaeacians:  badly beat up, half-starved, and totally naked.  And his only hope of receiving the xenia that he needs, is to somehow find a way to supplicate a feisty young teenage...

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