Thaao Penghlis is a legendary actor who appeared on "Days Of Our Lives", "General Hospital", "Mission Impossible", and more. Yet he is also an intellectually curious person, and put together a mini-series on the archaeology of Homer's Greece.

Listen to Thaao Penghlis's "Lost Treasures" on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thaao-penghliss-the-lost-treasures/id1705933001

If you found this video useful, support us on Patreon and get patron-only content: https://www.patreon.com/automachination

Learn about and contribute to our first film, "From There To There: Bruce Ario, the Minneapolis Poet": https://www.gofundme.com/f/new-film-the-minneapolis-poet-bruce-ario

Subscribe to the ArtiFact podcast on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3xw2M4D

Read more from the automachination universe: https://automachination.com

Read Alex Sheremet’s (archived) essays: https://alexsheremet.com

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/automachination

Timestamps:

1:24 – introducing Thaao Penghlis’s “Lost Treasures” podcast; Thaao’s boyish desire to be an archaeologist; cultures which “don’t steal”; the spoken word & pre-literate cultures; human memory & the Trojan War; Heinrich Schliemann

8:28 – how time levels what is least important; the longevity of Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey; why Thaao Penghlis was drawn to Homer & Homeric archaeology; Thaao: a country without a culture dies; when Thaao found ancient treasure in a tomb; Homer as the beating heart of Greek culture; the Greek respect for what’s ancient

15:48 – Alex: Homer was probably a writer, not illiterate; Thaao: Homer delivered a point of view; the nature of theater & theatrics; Ithaca as metaphor; the relevance of Homer’s blindness; Thaao’s on Barack Obama’s oratory; superficial distractions; why Thaao Penghlis stopped doing Days of Our Lives

23:38 – Alex: Greek mythology has been simplified for a pop audience; why Aphrodite is not the goddess of love; the Iliad does not give one much backstory; Helen was stolen by Paris as well as by her former husband, Menelaus; the amorality of ancient Greece; Hector’s wife, Andromache, describes ancient ethics; the child-like depiction of Achilles; the startling lack of heroes & heroics in Homer’s Iliad

32:27 – Homer’s indirect storytelling; Thaao: the Greeks did not go to war over a woman, but the development of steel; America’s War in Iraq vs. the Trojan War; intellect in Odysseus; why women as property might still explain war in an anarchic system

38:27 – Achilles and the death of his male lover, Patroclus; Athens vs. Mycenaean Greece; Heinrich Schliemann & the Mycenaean tombs

42:30 – Thaao Penghlis: when I touched Schliemann’s documents and palace, it finally felt real; Homer’s Greece and the Italian Renaissance

47:55 – was Heinrich Schliemann merely an impressive conman; Schliemann’s romantic entanglements; Schliemann as Pygmalion; Thaao: every rich businessperson (and politician) deals with fraud; Schliemann’s Orientalism in neglecting Turkish history in favor of “Greek” relics; Germans stole Greek relics, then Russians stole them back

56:00 – how Russia and Iran take war booty; why transitioning away from Putin won’t help Russia; Alex’s thoughts on Thaao’s podcast; taking the difficult path in the arts and art education; Hollywood’s bastardization of Greek mythos; Thaao on superficiality in the showbiz world; “Lawrence of Arabia” is “too slow” for the young; how Woody Allen taught Alex about avoiding relationship mistakes

Tags: #tv #literature #greece #poetry #ancient #epic