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So, meanwhile. While Odysseus is making his connections
with Eumaeus Telemachus is off in the farm [inaudible].
And Athena says, well gosh, it's time to get going, Telemachus.
Time to move to the next stage. She appears to him in a dream.
This appearance is a kind of standard feature of how epic poetry works.
Homer understands that dreams come in the form of usually the person is fast asleep
in the middle of the night a god or goddess will take a particular form hover
over the person's head, and say, hey you, why are you asleep?
You should be nervous. You got all this stuff to worry about.
And then tells the person that they should wake up, because of all the stuff they had
to worry about, close quote. Then the person who has the dream.
Starts to wake up and says, oh my gosh. Why am I sleeping?
I need to start worrying about stuff, and that's the end.
Dreams appear as a hovering presence over the top of a person's head giving them
some kind of news that's supposed to shake their world and rock their world.
This is a turning point for Telemachus. Now Athena, he's back, in her good graces,
and it's time to get off to the next stage.
The movement is quick, away from Menelaus' palace back through Pylos, and over to
Ithaca. On the way tough he picks up this person,
Theoclymenus. This is a person who has an interesting
story, He is because of a blood guilt on the lamb.
He is running away from his hometown and is trying to find a place to go and he
wants passage to Ithaca. So Telemachus says sure, okay, I'll take
you on. And some of you out there are saying, wait
a minute isn't this guy a murderer? How can you just take on this guy and
bring him to your own place? Well, in the Homeric times the idea of
having a blood guilt because you killed someone and therefore, being in exile
didn't necessarily mean that you were some kind of crazed murderer and there's no way
that we'd talk to you. Oftentimes, what it was, the way it was
processed through Homer's aristocratic environment was, well, this person got
into a bad argument with some other aristocratic person and they came to a
kind of duel type situation and the one aristocrat had to kill the other
aristrocrat. But that's tough luck for both of them.
Surely the dead one and also for the other guy who is now banished from his city.
So there's a way in which the, the person escaping the blood guilt is someone that
is a sympathetic, a slightly sympathetic character who needs some extra help.
Theoclymenus is this particular one so Telemachus takes him on.
His name is interesting. Theoclymenus.
Harkings back to two Greek words meaning someone who listens to, or someone who
hears and then Theo, a God. Theoclymenus has a special close
relationship with the gods. He is capable of reading signs.
He's a stranger who is brought into the mix.
You know, you know, Odysseus' home city of Ithaca, who's an exceptional sign reader.
This is going to be something that becomes an important theme for us as these books
unfold. We're going to watch signs galore as they
unfold in these, coming books. Yes, lots of them are going to be signs
from the gods. But they're also going to be special human
to human kinds of communications and secret codes that especially Odysseus and
Penelope engage in. The idea of a stranger from the outside
world in Theoclymenus is also mirrored in Odysseus.
He too is a stranger from the outside world.
And remember what we already know about strangers, as we heard in our
demonstrations of Xenia. We hear this in Nausicaa's mouth Hey
careful strangers might come from Zeus. There's a sense of slight spookiness,
interest, interest about a stranger, a little bit of mystical quality.
They could have a kind of divine inflection to them.
Well that's surely, Odysseus is constantly being mistaken for a god, isn't he?
And Theoclymenus has this special kind of god connection..
Now, we're going back to Eumaeus. The hut there as Odysseus and he are
making a connection. Eumaeus then gets a chance to tell his
tale. It's a connection that he gets to make
with Odysseus. Odysseus gets to listen and be a
sympathetic audience to Eumaeus. A nice way for him to make a further bond
with this, with this man. And he learns more things about the lay of
the land around Odysseus' spot. All of this intelligence Odysseus is
gathering in, in a, in a very subtle way. Now as the back and forth carries forward
Odysseus is learning the things he needs to know, getting prepared the sign readers
are coming in. Telemachus is on his way back, we're on
our way to what's gonna happen, crucial moment that's going to happen in the book.
Six, Sixteen Odysseus is going to start a series of reading mediums that's going to
bring him back to those inner chambers inside his house.