What The Odyssey Is Actually About

29:01Or down to him, wherever he is at the time. And he promises that he will cause untold troubles and death on the sea for Odysseus and his crew. And for the rest of the narrative, Poseidon kills Odysseus' men because Odysseus couldn't keep his mouth shut and wanted to take the credit.

29:20Konstantin Kisin:And that's a fascinating thing about Odysseus, is that his greatest strength is his greatest weakness. and that's it's so and the way that you see it's a very modern hero isn't he in many ways because he's not like Achilles he doesn't have this incredible strength and power or like Heracles who was a demigod this was somebody who's very much in the realm of the mortal that's right and in in the Greek's mind he's more Greek in the sense that not all of us are are set out to be heroic warriors whose martial valor will simply win the day by force Instead for the Greeks, it's about words, about how you use your brain to solve a situation.

30:04And that, as you rightly say, is the great virtue of Odysseus. He is Polymeritis, a guy with all of the ideas. He's Polymercanos, the guy with all of the tricks. He's Polythropos, a guy who can turn things in all sorts of different ways. He's Polyphron, he's got loads of mental cleverness working within him. But fundamentally, that is how the Greeks wanted to engage with the world around them. That is their challenge, as we mentioned when we talked about philosophy, to impose order and sense on a world that seems chaotic. So in a real sense, the Odyssey moves on from the Iliad. The Iliad is about the tragedies of the battlefield, and when human force causes damage to those around you in ways you can't predict.

30:54The Odyssey is about two things. It's about the power of the mind over the body and it's about the all-important draw of those two things that give life meaning, people and place. Odysseus realises, as Achilles realised only once he had died, the heroic code of the Iliad, the heroic Bronze Age code of what the good life and the good death look like, is hollow. There's this concept of the kalos thanatos, the beautiful death. Well, what's that? Well, for a start, it's death. So it's the end of your life. And secondly, it's dying on the battlefield in the middle of a killing spree. Why is that good?

31:40Because you will win kleos. And kleos literally means being talked about. People will hear of that moment. But you have to die to win that, which creates this catch-22 almost paradox, which is the best thing a man fighting a war to defend his family can do is to die in that war and not return to the family he was fighting for. One of the most moving scenes in Homer's Odyssey, which is such a powerful poem in all manner of ways, is when Odysseus confronts the ghost of Achilles in the underworld. And Achilles says, you've just been praising me about being a great fighter, saying I'm a great fighter now down in the underworld.

32:28Well, I'll tell you this. I would rather be the lowest level serf, serving as a slave on the poorest estate possible, than be the king of the whole of Hades. It means nothing to have lost your life. You need to live and thrive. And the reason that's so resonant for Achilles is his mother told him early on in the Iliad, he had a choice. very unusual that a Greek hero can have any say over their fate. It's all predetermined. He has a choice. There's a high road and a low road. He either will die young on the battlefield as the greatest warrior of all time, but he'll die. Or he can retreat from the battlefield, go home and live a long and happy life with the family he will build.

33:19Those are his options. and it looks as though he's going to take the latter option at a stage in the Iliad but only when his closest companion, possible lover Patroclus is killed on the battlefield is he brought back in to the life of the warrior and does indeed die the young death foretold of him. He now says to Odysseus it was a sham. I shouldn't have followed my own kleos, my own lust for glory. I should have headed home and done what really matters in life. And Odysseus is in the same place. The goddess, the sex goddess on the island for seven years is no good. He has been robbed of being a father.

34:01He's been robbed of the childhood of his son. And the best he can do is to try and salvage something with the little time that remains. And when they meet, one of the most beautiful and poignant similes in the whole of the poem is told. Telemachus finally realizes that the dad he couldn't remember is back after 20 years of toil. They embrace and they start wailing, but their wailing, their uncontrollable grief, is described as the wailing that ospreys or vultures make when as parents they see that their chicks have been stolen by humans before they could fly. So the reuniting of son and father is treated like a pair of parents who've lost the one thing they were meant to do in the world, namely have a childhood emerge from them.

34:55It's extremely poignant.

34:58Konstantin Kisin:You can spend three hours in a cinema watching Christopher Nolan's movie adaptation of The Odyssey, or you can spend that same three hours understanding the actual poem for free, guided by a Hillsdale College professor. Hillsdale College runs free online courses on the books that shape the Western tradition, taught by their own faculty using the same materials their students study on campus. Their newest course covers Homer's The Odyssey. Professor Benedict Whelan walks you through it. Courage, loyalty, leadership, temptation, family, and what it actually means to go home. It has held an audience for close to 3 ,000 years.

35:34Konstantin Kisin:This doesn't happen by accident. For me, the scene that changed how I read the whole thing is Calypso offering Odysseus immortality if he stays with her and he turns it down. He picks a mortal life, an aging wife, a home that might not even want him back anymore. That's the entire argument of the book in one scene. There are more than 40 of these courses and I couldn't recommend them more highly. Go to hillsdale.edu slash trigger to enroll. It's totally free. Read the classics. Study the West. That's hillsdale.edu slash trigger. That's very powerful. And David, just returning to the chronology, how does, do we know in the Odyssey how he ends up captured by Calypso, the sex goddess?

36:23We do.

36:24Konstantin Kisin:Take us from the Trojan War through to that moment. Of course. So Troy falls, the Trojans lose. One of the Trojans ends up heading over to Italy and founds the Roman race. So the Romans believed they were from the Trojans. But as for the Greeks, they've won. They get their booty, which is both material wealth and people, concubines. They head back home to the different parts of Greece or the Greek-speaking world. And that should be that. But for Odysseus and his crew of maybe 500, 600 men in the 12 ships he brought, things go wrong pretty early. They stop at a place where the Caconians live. They instantly raid the place, steal the women, steal the property, and they actually lose a battle.

37:16So the first thing they do is basically abuse another part of the ancient world. They're then cast onto a different island and there they meet huge giants who are cannibalistic. They're the Lystragonians and that's just a straightforward disaster and they flee. But the really interesting place they go to in these early wanderings is the place of the Lotus Eaters, the Lortophagoi. and this is a community which is found there's a certain flower you can eat and if you eat the flower you lose all longing for the things that gave your life meaning you you lose a longing for your true home for your family you just tap out and it's a land of addicts who've given up on what orientated their life and Odysseus sees this although some of his men become lost to this this life.

38:15He sees that there's a dark addiction at work here and his crew need to be re-motivated by returning to what ultimately orientates you in life, namely family and homeland. So they keep going onwards. They fall in with a witch called Circe who turns many of the men into pigs and is attempting the same trick with Odysseus but he manages to dodge it. and he's able to escape from that island after a year. But all the time, Odysseus's crew are dying in different ways. We mentioned that six are lost on the island of the Cyclopes. But because of that cursing of Poseidon, again and again, they fall into various lethal and bizarre deaths.

39:10Circe takes up one year of their time, But things meaningfully change for Odysseus when they reach the land of the sun god Helios. Helios as the sun sees everything. And on his island he's got his favourite cattle. He loves those cows. And there's a very simple rule. Just don't mess with the cows. The winds are against Odysseus and his crew at this time. and they spend a month on the island and after a month some of the crew crack. They need beef. So they kill some of his cattle and Helios is so outraged by this that he calls on Poseidon to turn up the pain for Odysseus and his crew and every single man dies except Odysseus.

40:06They die in a shipwreck and Odysseus is on his own floating around as a single figure and he washes up on the island of Calypso, who because there isn't a crew to reorientate and motivate Odysseus, he's a lost man on that island. He is a nobody again. That takes us to the point where the narrative begins. Year seven, Athena says, come on, let's get him off there. And he builds a raft and heads to another land. And this is the really interesting episode. It's less fantastic, but it's the really important one. He lands on an island where a people called the Phaeacians live, and they are perfect.

40:47They have a king and a queen who run a very Greek-like, idyllic, utopian landscape. Everything is peaceful. They have the most beautiful daughter, Nausicaa, who's ready for marriage, and she just wants to marry someone with kingly bearing. Well, here's Odysseus turning up, who despite his long-suffering wanderings, is a king and he would be a perfectly suitable husband. Everyone on the island is willing this to happen. It would be perfect. Odysseus rejects it. He says, even though you are more beautiful than anyone I could encounter, including my own wife. He said the same to Calypso, by the way, he wanted to marry him.

41:33I am destined to be returned and restored to my homeland there is no other option for me so again it's it's it's got a real moral weight to it this idea that even if circumstances be they wealth or be they you know a particular change in your circumstances seem to on paper give you everything you need. It's not worth the weight of anything if you cut your ties to the people and the places that give you your real identity, not just in the Greek world, but in our world. And where does he go from there? From there? Well, so he tells his tales to the Phaeacians, who are probably the Phoenicians in disguise, a very interesting people, who introduced the alphabet to the Greeks, among other things.

42:28He tells his tales of how he's got to that point. But fundamentally, they accept his refusal of marriage. And they, the best seamen in the world, take him back to Ithaca. And that's where the second half of the poem begins. He gets home, but the last thing he can do is head home and say, hey guys, I'm Odysseus, I'm back. Why? Why? Because there are 108 men whose whole identity is predicated on being the new Odysseus. The real Odysseus is dead. No one's seen him for 20 years. No one's heard tell of him. He must be gone. All of these men didn't go to Troy. They're either the sons of warriors who went to Troy and therefore they've grown up without credible male role models.

43:17or perhaps worse, they're people who managed to dodge the draft and didn't head to Troy at all. They're true cowards. And so the nature of these men, and they're portrayed in a really no-nonsense fashion, is that these are anti-men. These aren't real men. They're entitled, arrogant folk who believe that they've got status and purpose in the world when they've done nothing. They've done nothing to earn it and they've never seen true men in action. But all of them are queued up in the hope that they will somehow win the hand of Penelope and be gifted wealth and comfort. Odysseus is a decent warrior, but as someone who's been away for 20 years, he's not single-handedly going to take down 108 men.

44:03So what he does over the last half of this poem, the last 12 books, it's in 24 books in the form we have it, is strategize as to how he can slowly bring on side old faithful friends who've never let him down. This includes his dog, Argos, and Argos is in a terrible way. He's mangy, sleeping on big pile of dung on his last legs. But he recognizes the true Odysseus and is so overcome with joy, with dog joy, he dies. He dies in the moment. So good. So grief. He dies in the moment. He's so happy. Exactly. That's his beautiful death. But it's strategically helpful. But the last thing Odysseus would want in disguise is a dog trotting after him who senses that something's up.

44:56So he turns to the lowest people in the social hierarchy. He turns to the swine herd, the pig herd, Eumaeus, the cow herd, Philoetius, and eventually he brings his son in and with the help of Athena, the four of them ultimately slaughter everyone. Now Odysseus was told by Tiresias, the great prophet, when he went down to the underworld, not only that this needs to be done, but that it will happen. You've got to get home, you need to kill them all. He kills 12 women, which is a more controversial part of it. He kills 12 women who've been sleeping with the suitors, has them all hanged. Then he says, that's not enough.

45:36All the families of the suitors are going to, you know, create a longer civil war. So he goes and kills all of them. And then Athena says, okay, stop. That's it. Let's now have peace. And that is the end of the poem.

45:50Konstantin Kisin:Can we just, because we missed out one of my favourite scenes, which was with the bow. Of course. So the person I've said almost nothing about, but is the other half of the poem who needs to be remembered when reading almost any line is Penelope. Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, the queen of Ithaca. She has no idea what has happened to Odysseus. She knows the Trojan War is over. She knows that that took 10 years. but where's the husband? Literally everyone else is either dead or they've got back. Any figure you can name in the Iliad, one of those things has happened. They're at home and they're happy or they're not because they're dead.

46:36Different sailors, different tradesmen pass through the palace and they tell her tales. They lie to her in order to get gifts from her. They make up stories about Odysseus and she's basically given up hope but not entirely. She still has pistis. She has faith that Odysseus lives. And so she's been trying to hold off these 108 bastards for the best part of a decade by various tricks. Her main trick was, okay, I will marry one of you when I've finished this burial shroud I'm weaving. Women in the Greek world, if they were elite women, the main thing they did domestically was weaving. and once that's finished promise I'll marry one of you so she spends her day weaving but every night she unpicks it and removes that progress and delays indefinitely but the suitors now know this they've learned the trick and they're getting very heavy-handed that marriage has to happen so Penelope and it's very ambiguous what she's up to says okay yeah it's over I need to marry one of you.

47:43So let's set up a contest. We're going to have 12 axe heads in a row. And there's a hole on the axe heads. It's debated about quite what the hole looks like. And anyone who can string my former husband's bow and shoot an arrow through all 12 axe heads, they win me. They will be king and rightful ruler of Ithaca. Telemachus will have to leave, but he'll be a nobody. He won't be inheriting the kingdom and everyone else will have to get back to their lives. So it looks as though the one thing Odysseus needs, restoration to his family, is about to be lost. Well, very cunningly, of course, this being Odysseus, he is able, as a beggar, he's dressed as a beggar so as not to arouse suspicion, he's able to persuade the suitors who don't think much of him that he could at least have a go.

48:36None of them have been able to string the bow. They weren't strong enough. Only one guy was able to do it, and that was Telemachus. But he stopped by Odysseus from doing it, and everyone else gives up for the day, and says, we'll try again tomorrow, lads. Too strong a bow. Odysseus has a go. Instantly strings it. We're told he strings it with the same ease that someone can pluck the lyre. That's Homer, the poet, plucking the lyre, as he tells us that. And having strung the bow, shoots it through the axes, and then just starts slaughtering everyone. So he's armed and dangerous and ready to go. And the threat disappears by virtue of complete dispatch of all 108 suitors.

49:21Konstantin Kisin:And let's... I love the story and you told it beautifully. And every time I hear the story, I get utterly enraptured. And when I used to teach it to my kids, didn't matter where the kids were from, they loved the story as well. It's a very happy ending. Yeah, exactly. It's revenge and that appeals to me. Now, let's focus on Homer, because he seems to me to be quite similar to Shakespeare. He created this amazing work of literature, but nobody knows if he wrote it or if he existed or who Homer was. Was he a collection of people? Is this oral storytelling that was then written down? What do we actually know about this person?

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51:17Konstantin Kisin:Sheath.com. Brilliant question and so important. So the ancient Greeks knew about the same as us about this thing we call Homer, i.e. almost nothing. What existed was a very complex poetic tradition of song. In the evening, you'd get around the fire, have a few drinks, and some skilled musician would chant or sing a song in this very complicated metrical form, which would tell a tale of the great figures of the past, the heroes that we've learned about since we were yea high. That is an oral tradition. Why? Because the Greeks lost writing. They had the technology of writing in the second millennium BC, but the Bronze Age collapse caused them to lose that very skill.

52:11So there is a Greek Dark Ages in the 11th, 10th, 9th, 8th centuries. Nobody can write, so they'd forgotten how to. In the 8th century, the Phoenicians reintroduce an alphabet to the Greek world and the Greeks instantly take it up. That is when these oral poems, which were told over a few hours each evening, take a written form. The name Homer appears at that time. Who was he? He probably was a person. He probably was a very successful performer, man in demand on the circuit. But crucially, he will have inherited almost all the language, almost all the phraseology and certainly almost all of the tales that are tied to his name now.

52:56But maybe he had a way of framing and creating this really complex narrative pair of poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in a way that was so successful and so powerful that they made it into writing. Those were the ones to pause in time, to memorialize in a fixed form in writing. I believe Homer existed. I believe he was from the Ionian part of Greece, so probably the eastern side of the Aegean, the west coast of Turkey, on an island or on the mainland there. He probably lived in the 9th or 8th centuries BC. He was a single genius, but drawing on a tradition that was so old, We can't even say how old it was.

53:41It was at least 500 years old and could well be over 1 ,000 years old. Allegedly, he was blind, but there's a poet inside the Homeric ethics who's a bard and is blind, and that may be the reason for that. It may be an inference the wrong way round. Not blind Homer putting in a blind poet to refer to him, but someone assuming Homer was blind because the bard he describes was blind.

54:07Konstantin Kisin:Could it have also been in Greek mythology when people are blind, they have vision? Exactly. Yes, that is really well put. So two things to say there, Francis. The first is that there is an extremely intimate connection for the Greeks between vision and knowledge. The very word I know in Greek is oida, but that literally means I have seen. You find knowledge empirically through the senses. If you've experienced something, you know it in a meaningful way. It's not an intellectually abstract thing. You experience it and know. But there's also a version of seeing beyond. And you see beyond by getting rid of the distraction of your mortal vision.

54:48And it's the blind who have the ability to see beyond. So Tiresias, whom I've already mentioned, that great prophet who could see the future, he was blind. Ironically, Oedipus, the man who unwittingly kills his father and has children with his mother, blinds himself on discovery. Because he thought he knew it all. He thought he saw it all and could understand the situation. He knew nothing. And it's a sign of his transcendent knowledge that he blinds himself and takes away that distracting vision, which got in the way rather than liberated him. So you are right, it fits for Homer, who begins the poem by saying, Andra moi enne per Musa, Polotropon, etc.

55:35Sing to me muse, this deity, sing through me of this Polotropos aner, this man of many twists and turns. So bards were thought to have a divine connection. Divine song was meant to transmit through them. and you're right that a blindness suggested an ability to see beyond.

55:58Konstantin Kisin:And David, why is it that this still resonates? And the reason I ask that question is I've literally taught the Odyssey to kids all over London and it doesn't matter where the child comes from. It really doesn't. First generation immigrants, working class boys, kids from very affluent backgrounds. The moment you tell the story of the Odyssey, they're hooked. Yeah, I think it works on several levels. And like all great literature, it resonates with you differently at different stages in your life. No question the entry point that excites the young are the weird and wonderful monsters of The Wanderings of Odysseus.

56:36It's a fantastic series of episodes which have inspired literature ever since. But it resonates more deeply the older you get by it revealing that many things we're told in life are a sham and a distraction. There are many things trying to dull our senses and to keep us away from the things which deep down we know actually matter. And those are people and place. I fundamentally believe that you cannot orientate yourself in the world meaningfully without having an attitude to space and time. The space you're from, the people who inhabit it, but crucially, time, past and future. You need to have a relationship to the history that brought you here.

57:27And you need to have a stake in the future such that your actions matter beyond your own immediate benefit. And that is what the whole suffering of the Odyssey is about. And as you rightly say, that's a universal tale. And I think what's really interesting about Nolan taking on the Odyssey is that it's the kind of film Hollywood doesn't want to make. What I mean by that is the things I just described are against the grain of what not just Hollywood, but a huge amount of cultural activity has been doing. attempts to downplay that instinctive value we place on the family unit and on multi-generational responsibilities that natural yearning for a return of some kind to the place that is home for you and no other place can be home well those kind of orienting and structuring devices in life are not helpful to certain political causes.

58:27And we would not struggle between the three of us to think of films which in some way have tried it to complicate or problematize those natural yearnings. And we would struggle to think of films which really valorize and celebrate those things from the last 20 or 30 years. So I'm really pleased that Nolan has taken the Odyssey on. And my only great and sincere hope is that people in watching it will see the things that I've said are so important about it and be inspired to go beyond the film and to engage with the poem itself, which is uniquely powerful.

59:06Konstantin Kisin:Because one of the things that I love about Greek mythology is when it talks about heroism, it's something that we forget. You know, nowadays we all want to be celebrities. We all want to be heroes. But what we don't want is to sacrifice something. And the nature of the hero is you have to sacrifice something. You have to give something of yourself. You do. And in the Iliadic heroic code, that giving of something will be your own life. You will give your life to serve the heroism that is demanded of you. Your duty goes beyond you. But there's also this really important Greek idea of pathé mathos, learning through suffering.

59:48not just experience but actually genuine hardship and i think about those two greek words all the time that that is how you grow and change and do good things in the world genuine suffering now you shouldn't will suffering upon yourself or upon anyone else but you will not learn without hardship so one of odysseus epithets is polytlas the man who suffered so much that's what fundamentally makes a new kind of hero out of Odysseus rather than the sort of straightforward swashbuckling heroics of the battlefield. So these two foundational poems of the whole Western literary tradition, the Iliad and the Odyssey, begin with a model of heroism which is already difficult, complex, unfair and messy.

1:00:39It does not begin with a golden age when just being Being a hero was a jolly good lark and everyone clapped at the end of the day. It's grim. But life requires that quieter heroism of sacrifice and suffering for whatever one takes to be the higher good.

1:00:59Konstantin Kisin:Well, the more we talk to you, with you rather, and listen to you primarily actually about Greek mythology and that period of time, I almost feel like the reason that these ideas as Francis talks about, have stayed with us and have stayed relevant. The Greeks were just a lot more honest about human nature than we are. Is that a fair comment? Yeah, and I think it's multi-layered. They were much more instinctively aware of the failings of the human condition. All of their literature is motivated by finding these flaws that are in each of us, dramatizing them, hopefully in a way which makes us people who aren't heroes, who aren't the stuff of myth, actually interrogate our own lives better.

1:01:43What did Socrates most famously say? Not that the only thing I know is that I know nothing. More importantly, he said the unexamined life is not worth living. It's unlivable. And what that means is if you will not interrogate the nature of your character and the flaws within it, you're not living. You are not actually being human, you're not a human being if you can't address, as difficult as it may be, the awkward and difficult parts of your own human soul. And the Greeks understand that and it motivates almost everything they do artistically. Other cultures do the same, but it won't surprise you for me to share my opinion with you which is that despite this constant narcissism of talking about the self in our modern age we're actually acutely uninterested in interrogating our own personal and societal problems you know your podcast exists in order to have the conversations which we deem difficult to have well they weren't difficult for the greeks it was something that needed talking about.

1:02:55So let's talk about it. Let's use logos to make progress. Now, there are lots of barriers to having the kind of conversations and the sort of reflection that needs to happen in order for us to thrive as humans.

1:03:08Konstantin Kisin:Do you think part of it is also is that the Greeks fundamentally understood the tragedy of life? Because if you look at their plays, I mean, they were fatalistic. Their Their outlook was fatalistic, really. You know, this is life. Your life was predetermined. There was nothing that you could do about it. Therefore, it was tragic. If you look at Oedipus Rex, for example, killed his father, married his mother, and there was nothing that he could do. Correct. So in terms of myth and those inherited tales, tragedies baked in and there's no escape. However, from the fifth century onwards, from the dawn of ethics with Socrates and Plato, and then to the emergence of different rival philosophical schools, the Academy, Aristotle and the Peripatetics, the Epicureans, the Stoics, all of these groups actually come up with different ways of responding to the challenge of being human.

1:04:01And they have very, very different views about whether things are fatalistic and predetermined or whether life is what you make of it. So although I agree with you when it comes to the myths and the great tales, actually the Greeks as a people evolve evolve intellectually into realizing that actually actually you have much more agency over your life than uh the the great tales might might suggest

1:04:25Konstantin Kisin:I I guess the question that I really wanted to ask deep down is what can we actually learn from the Greeks because when you classics is getting studied less and less which I consider to be a tragedy actually what can we actually learn what have we forgotten and what should we remember and what should we incorporate in our current society a big question can be our last question in the style that we always ask what's the one thing we're not talking about i see is that i think not only is everything in greek culture but everything is in homer what my answer to your question would look like is the totality of the human condition so it's not a set of insights or things we might put in a little list which we can keep in our pocket and check when we need it it is a monumental modeling of the strengths and weaknesses of humans being together in the world now the greek world is amazing because it's still connected in a linear unbroken way to modernity Modern Greek really is the language of Homer after 3 ,000 years of people speaking together.

1:05:42And there's a continuity in Greek culture which is, I would say, unique over the last 3 ,000 years in the world. So although it seems so distant and so other to engage with literature in the first millennium BC, it's actually looking deep into the genuine inheritance of the Greek people. So I think Greece is kept out far too much of our modern conversation. Greeks should be a more central player when it comes to thinking about what to do in the world. And I may add that we talked about casting in The Odyssey to begin with. Well, who wrote an open letter to Hollywood saying, why are none of us in the film?

1:06:26The Greeks. The Greeks don't appear at all in the casting list of Nolan's Odyssey. which for all its historic realism, to their mind, shows an acute lack of interest in Greek culture and Greek actors. So I think that's almost a proof, in a way, of my sense that the Greeks are not centralised enough in some of our cultural conversations because everything is there in their culture.

1:06:54Konstantin Kisin:David, before we head on over to Substack where you answer questions from our supporters, tell everybody again where they can find your work and, of course, more about Ralston as well. Thank you. It would be a joy to. The two things I'm most invested in in life are Ralston College, R-A-L-S-T-O-N. You'll find the link below the video, which is a new college that is trying to teach the humanities properly, beginning with ancient Greek and teaching in Greek, in Greece, on an island not far from where Homer may have been born. and we chart the arc of the Western tradition all the way through to modernity.

1:07:35The Greeks, the Romans, medieval thought, the influence of Christianity, the Renaissance and the rediscovery of the classical, the early modern and beyond. It's fully funded for many people. We've just finished our fifth admissions round, so I'll be heading to Greece shortly with our fifth cohort. but keep an eye out in September for our next admissions round and we welcome applications from all over the world. As it stands you've got to be based in America to some degree but that will change very soon and you just need to have a BA in any subject and we will train you up to be an MA student in the humanities.

1:08:18So that's Walston College please check it out if these things interest you and the other is a classics website i run with a small team of fellow colleagues and fighters who are motivated by the belief that the classics are there for everyone they are meaningfully universal and no one has the right or the arrogance to stop your access to them or the uh the license to change the past so that it looks more convenient to us in the present We're against all of that. We give you open, clear, free access to the ancient world in all of its complicated and fascinating ways. Antigone Journal, type it in, head over there, and please enjoy the 500, 600 articles we've got there.

1:09:05And if you'd like to write for us, please just pitch and we can pay you. It's a good project and I'm very proud to have spent the last five years working on that.

1:09:13Konstantin Kisin:David, what a pleasure it's been to have you back. I'm sure we'll have plenty more of these conversations in the future. I hope we do anyway. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where David's going to answer your questions. An era I'm interested in is how Greek philosophy and Christianity were combined to be the foundation of Western society. Could you provide some examples of what Christianity took from the Greeks to turn it into what it is today?

1:09:48We'll be right back.