Homer's Odyssey Explained - Imagine No Religion

Before continuing with reading the whole text of Homer’s Odyssey, this video looks at a major difference between the ancient world and ours - what was understood by the concept of “religion”. I argue that we risk misunderstanding The Odyssey if we superimpose our modern concepts onto the completely alien ones of the ancient Greeks (and later Romans). We have a tendency today to understand history in the terms of the present day and if we don’t like what we find, “cancel culture” removes from our consideration all the things that offend us. By contrast - in this video, I introduce the idea that rather than trying to understand The Odyssey in today’s terms, the best way to approach the epic is as a portrayal of a society that is almost completely alien to ours but which, nevertheless, contains some of the seeds of what our present day culture grew to become. Read in this way, The Odyssey helps us to learn to enjoy and appreciate the past as a foreign country, rather than a badly reimagined version of today, or a tourist who wants to travel to exotic locations but only stays in Western style hotels. #theodyssey #homer #greekliterature #greekculture #greekhistory #books #literaryanalysis