And I wonder if there's a sense that this is almost a warning sign or a smoke signal for the dangers of leaving home, that you might forget home or you might be so changed that it no longer is home to you.

Yeah, so I mean, I think the lotus eaters is interesting for various reasons.

So this theme of kind of forgetting home permeates the whole poem right so the first sort of time we encounter it really is is kind of in those first four books on Ithaca when you know Telemachus is is sort of bewailing the fact that his father has been forgotten that kind of thing but then also when he goes to um Sparta and Menelaus is telling stories of the Trojan War and everyone's crying including Telemachus you know because he's hearing about his father who's never met and you know Menelaus is remembering his fallen comrades and Helen says oh dear this is all getting a bit intense isn't it and she puts this pharmakon so this sort of potion almost into their wine and it's said in you know by the narrator that this potion is so powerful that it could make you sort of happy even if you'd seen your entire family slaughtered in front of you right so it's not a particularly it's a pretty ominous drug this pharmacon but she puts it into the wine and their tears dry up and then they start you know sort of cheering up and telling sort of bantering around with different stories and it I think it sets the scene for this very ominous it's how how sort of pleasant it is in the moment to forget your grief but how ultimately, potentially dangerous it is, right? So, you know, the idea that you could be happy even if your family was slaughtered in front of you because you've simply forgotten who they are, you've forgotten to be sad, is not a particularly positive way to think about, you know, that feeling of forgetting your grief.

So I think the Lotus Eaters is kind of tapping into that as well.

And I think it's also, you know, kind of making, again, this sort of meta-poetic point, right, about the fact that Yes, Odysseus' men are forgetting their home and they're staying with the Lotus Eaters, so they're forgetting.

But the result of that is that they're also being forgotten.

Because if you don't go home, your fame, your kleos, never gets back to the people who would hear it and tell it.

What do you think, Francis, is the impact of that sense of loss in the poem?