1 00:00:07,775 --> 00:00:11,085 A close encounter with a man-eating giant, 2 00:00:11,085 --> 00:00:14,834 a sorceress who turns men into pigs, 3 00:00:14,834 --> 00:00:18,345 a long-lost king taking back his throne. 4 00:00:18,345 --> 00:00:21,956 On their own, any of these make great stories, 5 00:00:21,956 --> 00:00:25,545 but each is just one episode in the "Odyssey," 6 00:00:25,545 --> 00:00:32,895 a 12,000-line poem spanning years of Ancient Greek history, myth, and legend. 7 00:00:32,895 --> 00:00:36,046 How do we make sense of such a massive text 8 00:00:36,046 --> 00:00:39,995 that comes from and tells of a world so far away? 9 00:00:39,995 --> 00:00:44,095 The fact that we can read the "Odyssey" at all is pretty incredible, 10 00:00:44,095 --> 00:00:49,435 as it was composed before the Greek alphabet appeared in the 8th century BCE. 11 00:00:49,435 --> 00:00:52,156 It was made for listeners rather than readers, 12 00:00:52,156 --> 00:00:56,277 and was performed by oral poets called rhapsodes. 13 00:00:56,277 --> 00:01:00,476 Tradition identifies its author as a blind man named Homer. 14 00:01:00,476 --> 00:01:05,017 But no one definitively knows whether he was real or legendary. 15 00:01:05,017 --> 00:01:08,866 The earliest mentions of him occur centuries after his era. 16 00:01:08,866 --> 00:01:12,456 And the poems attributed to him seem to have been changed 17 00:01:12,456 --> 00:01:15,771 and rearranged many times by multiple authors 18 00:01:15,771 --> 00:01:19,207 before finally being written down in their current form. 19 00:01:19,207 --> 00:01:22,556 In fact, the word rhapsode means stitching together, 20 00:01:22,556 --> 00:01:27,616 as these poets combined existing stories, jokes, myths, and songs 21 00:01:27,616 --> 00:01:30,295 into a single narrative. 22 00:01:30,295 --> 00:01:33,207 To recite these massive epics live, 23 00:01:33,207 --> 00:01:35,697 rhapsodes employed a steady meter, 24 00:01:35,697 --> 00:01:37,558 along with mnemonic devices, 25 00:01:37,558 --> 00:01:42,198 like repetition of memorized passages or set pieces. 26 00:01:42,198 --> 00:01:46,057 These included descriptions of scenery and lists of characters, 27 00:01:46,057 --> 00:01:49,705 and helped the rhapsode keep their place in the narrative, 28 00:01:49,705 --> 00:01:54,157 just as the chorus or bridge of a song helps us to remember the next verses. 29 00:01:54,157 --> 00:01:56,868 Because most of the tales were familiar to the audience, 30 00:01:56,868 --> 00:02:00,548 it was common to hear the sections of the poem out of order. 31 00:02:00,548 --> 00:02:02,858 At some point, the order became set in stone 32 00:02:02,858 --> 00:02:07,288 and the story was locked into place as the one we read today. 33 00:02:07,288 --> 00:02:11,508 But since the world has changed a bit in the last several thousand years, 34 00:02:11,508 --> 00:02:15,048 it helps to have some background before jumping in. 35 00:02:15,048 --> 00:02:20,179 The "Odyssey" itself is a sequel to Homer's other famous epic, the "Iliad," 36 00:02:20,179 --> 00:02:22,821 which tells the story of the Trojan War. 37 00:02:22,821 --> 00:02:27,158 If there's one major theme uniting both poems, it's this: 38 00:02:27,158 --> 00:02:32,349 do not, under any circumstances, incur the wrath of the gods. 39 00:02:32,349 --> 00:02:36,908 The Greek Pantheon is a dangerous mix of divine power and human insecurity, 40 00:02:36,908 --> 00:02:40,838 prone to jealousy and grudges of epic proportions. 41 00:02:40,838 --> 00:02:45,569 And many of the problems faced by humans in the poems are caused by their hubris, 42 00:02:45,569 --> 00:02:50,499 or excessive pride in believing themselves superior to the gods. 43 00:02:50,499 --> 00:02:52,797 The desire to please the gods was so great 44 00:02:52,797 --> 00:02:55,850 that the Ancient Greeks traditionally welcomed all strangers 45 00:02:55,850 --> 00:02:58,068 into their homes with generosity 46 00:02:58,068 --> 00:03:01,969 for fear that the strangers might be gods in disguise. 47 00:03:01,969 --> 00:03:05,200 This ancient code of hospitality was called xenia. 48 00:03:05,200 --> 00:03:10,320 It involved hosts providing their guests with safety, food, and comfort, 49 00:03:10,320 --> 00:03:14,910 and the guests returning the favor with courtesy and gifts if they had them. 50 00:03:14,910 --> 00:03:17,551 Xenia has a significant role in the "Odyssey," 51 00:03:17,551 --> 00:03:21,681 where Odysseus in his wanderings is the perpetual guest, 52 00:03:21,681 --> 00:03:27,330 while in his absence, his clever wife Penelope plays non-stop host. 53 00:03:27,330 --> 00:03:30,800 The "Odyssey" recounts all of Odysseus's years of travel, 54 00:03:30,800 --> 00:03:36,030 but the narrative begins in medias res in the middle of things. 55 00:03:36,030 --> 00:03:40,922 Ten years after the Trojan War, we find our hero trapped on an island, 56 00:03:40,922 --> 00:03:46,341 still far from his native Ithaca and the family he hasn't seen for 20 years. 57 00:03:46,341 --> 00:03:51,511 Because he's angered the sea god Poseidon by blinding his son, a cyclops, 58 00:03:51,511 --> 00:03:56,271 Odysseus's passage home has been fraught with mishap after mishap. 59 00:03:56,271 --> 00:03:59,420 With trouble brewing at home and gods discussing his fate, 60 00:03:59,420 --> 00:04:04,468 Odysseus begins the account of those missing years to his hosts. 61 00:04:04,468 --> 00:04:07,031 One of the most fascinating things about the "Odyssey" 62 00:04:07,031 --> 00:04:10,551 is the gap between how little we know about its time period 63 00:04:10,551 --> 00:04:14,671 and the wealth of detail the text itself contains. 64 00:04:14,671 --> 00:04:17,422 Historians, linguists, and archeologists 65 00:04:17,422 --> 00:04:20,433 have spent centuries searching for the ruins of Troy 66 00:04:20,433 --> 00:04:24,172 and identifying which islands Odysseus visited. 67 00:04:24,172 --> 00:04:28,921 Just like its hero, the 24-book epic has made its own long journey 68 00:04:28,921 --> 00:04:31,511 through centuries of myth and history 69 00:04:31,511 --> 00:04:34,482 to tell us its incredible story today.