The science behind the myth: Homer's "Odyssey" - Matt Kaplan

Homer was a brilliant blind bard. He continues to teach us what it means to be human. What home means for man. For Odysseus, home was Ithaka, the ideal kingdom. Although pagan, Homer had more faith in a higher power, God, than modern man does today. Plato warned parents not to let their children read Homer too young because of how Homer depicted the gods. Every high school should teach The Iliad and the Odyssey, but they don't. Why? We live in the age of Lotus Eaters...we've forgotten what home is...

Do you know the story of Prometheus? The Olympian gods punished him by tying him on Caucasus and a hawk was eating his liver. His liver was recovering but the hawk was coming and eating it again to keep Prometheus weak. Don't you find odd that ancient Greeks knew that liver have the ability to recover?

Wow awesome tidbit 👌

That's why I love myths and legends so much - there is always a grain of truth in it, and finding out what is real, and what has been added as fiction, is the fun part. So many myths turn out to have distorted origin in the real world. Take the flood from the bible - it really happened, maybe not the whole world or with any deity involvment, but there were big and huge parts of the world being flooded by nature. Mesopotamia, where the first modern civilisation was born with written text and agriculture, but also the region, in which many parts of the bible probably take place, had freak floods and many people must have died from the sudden rush of waters.

Not sure about the arch or anything like that, but you can see, that a particularly huge flood after a long period of rain could have risen many meters and flooded a lot of land..

Or giants causeway - sure the story with the two giants may be a little off, but there seems to have been an actual bridge as there isn't just the giants causeway in ireland, but also the "other side" of it in scotland. People must have seen both sides of the very, very unique landscape and figured that they somehow were connected. So no one had an understanding of what actually happened, so they made it up.

What abt the ret of the journey.

Neat

I love how TED has no understanding of epistemology whatsoever and is basically just "ScientismTM". Like this guy just said "THHere MIigHt Be mo rE Truth tO thEse MytHs THAT wE Can DIsCoveR" as though these ancient texts don't convey more truth than a scientific paper ever could.

i heard that circe turned the men to pigs, but just animals is fine too

Great lesson woven into this story. Ironic that ecstasy is tag named " molly" as well. LOL

Beautiful

Dr. Andreas Plaitakis is my godfather!!! So cool 🤩

Who here read Circe from Madeline Miller

ordersauoccsyndbtdt

Great Explanation

i mean im not surprised. people even used to thought that the mental illness was possessed by demon

Woah, SnowDrops have medicinal properties that can combat Alzheimer's.. that's brilliant 😃💮

Excuse me but how is the Odyssey "Western" literature?

This doesn’t explain how he became a Man of Constant Sorrow

According to the myth moly was born from the blood of the Titans

Yes those herbs were known to Greeks but Oddyseas voyage to Ithaca is a deeper meaning of our deeper self/soul back home... I have yet to find such analysis in English but in Greek the symbolisms taught in some schools and from some teachers who have a deeper.understaning of what was Odyssey about .

As a classics major this is wrong for so many reasons

I don’t believe Jimson weed would be the plant as it is native to the Americas. However, it’s cousin Atropa Belladonna, or Deadly Nightshade, is native to Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa. Additionally, it contains some of the same compounds.

Veritas

Famous piece of western literature.

Just because the herb is real, doesn't mean the events occurred.
Also, Odysseus shows his dirk to Circe, and that's what makes Circe attracted to him.
"Not much direct evidence," means it didn't happen.

Need more episodes and examples on the science behind myths, please!

This story gives an entirely new meaning to "popping molly".

Weed

That is quite interesting, but I'm not sure that the contemporaneous existence of plants with some sort of psychotropic effects, in any way gives authenticity to any of Odysseus' adventures! It just means Homer et al, knew about recreational drugs.

"Holy Moly!" Yes, that's where the saying comes from!

wait we haven’t been taking these myths seriously this entire time???

Ilyon-Ilion-Or him
Ilyad -Ilijad -Or misery
Ilya-Ilija -or me
Odyssey -Odi-se-ja -Go awey or I'm leaving

This no no attitude to drugs is a very modern thing because in our ancient past people were far more tolerant of using any kind of drug to achive a state of consciousness.
Homer did not write the Odyssey but instead he rewrote it in his own way.
Read the book called Homer in the Baltic written by the italian physician Felice Vinci he gives another explination of why we should read the Odyssey wuth a diferent perspective peace.

This seems so cool after you have read circe by madeline miller

Bruh, Why you're trying so hard

Please ! Please ! Please make more videos like this, on other epic poems or myths.

Kurukshetra war was fought between Pandavas and Kauravas but they made this into some kind of mythical fantasy..
People always loved to add spices to things to make it look more fascinating and, hey it actually sell

Spoiler alert. If ur reading or planning to reading circe just please know that u will be spoiled

Everyone knows he was just writing an allegory for the movie “Oh brother where are thou?”

No. What a stretch! You missed the point. The Odyssey is not the Illiad. The places in the Illiad can be found. Snowdrop is not moley. The story is about the hardness of Odysseus's character. When you interpret a spiritual symbol as a fact, you destroy it's ability to transform you life.

This is why i like stories

The sound mixing of the Narrator compared to the intro is really bad

Molly huh... we still have that.

Jimson weed? Scp foundation wants to know your location

Jimson weed

Wow

With time, stories become myths, myths become legends.
Most myths have a base in reality, but the older the story, the more "mythical" the telling becomes and the original events are harder to identify.

We can still easily see that today in a nutshell with the "broken phone" exercise.