Greek mythology

But I think there's room there for exploration.

If anyone out there is looking to cash in on the post-Odyssey enthusiasm for Greek mythology, yeah, dig into it.

There's a lot of stuff like this that hasn't received as much attention.

I can imagine a really good Robert Eggers take on the Theseus tale or, you know, the kind of dusty, nasty old world look at Theseus going out to fight all the blood spillers.

It's a really cool book.

And it goes into a lot more than just what we're talking about here today.

So if your pyramid of interest includes both Greek mythology and true crime, definitely pick up that book.

Totally.

And fire has always been this, not always, it plays enormous roles in religion and mythology.

I mean, Prometheus in Greek mythology is the person who introduced fire, which in Greek mythology played a very similar role to Eve eating the apple and gifting man with knowledge in the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition.

And of course, it was a two-edged sword.

You got wisdom and you got death and pain.

Incredible advice.

So as we slowly draw to the end, I guess that final existential question is, Josh, what would you most like to be remembered for?

Well, let me slightly dodge that question by using one of the Greek phrases that I close a lot of my conversations with, and it's an old Greek proverb.

A society grows great when old people plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.

Have you ever wondered what the world of Greek mythology would feel like? When absolutely nothing was going wrong.

No monsters attacking.

No heroes accidentally offending a god.

No Zeus creating another problem that will take approximately three generations to fix.

Just nothing.

Hey guys! Welcome back to Tales of Olympus, the podcast where we dive into the wildest, most dramatic, and sometimes just downright unbelievable stories from Greek mythology.

I'm your host, Aera Laikao.

And today, we're doing something a little bit different.

The Romans were a lot less sentimental about these things, weren't they? They were much more practical with their gods.

Well, they begin as being so, but then they get drunk on the mythology, just like the Greeks, that it's Greek mythology.

But in the next generation down from Sulla, the Roman leaders, we're talking people like Julius Caesar and Pompey especially, take on this Near Eastern model of goddess for Venus and this direct relationship with her that Eastern monarchs had with war and love goddesses and just make it Roman.

The Romans think it's fine.

He'll share what he's learning, explore profound ideas across time and cultures, and share the one thing he always hopes to remember from each immortal book.

All right, let's talk about some Greek mythology.

I have just started reading this book right here, Jason and the Argonauts by Apollonius of Rhodes.

And this is my book for my November short great books reading group.

And I've also found that there's almost a limit on what people will share online in reading groups.

There's almost this fear that it's being recorded or something like that.

when you're in person it's just some of those barriers are are broken and i highly recommend it anyway i do that once a month short great books reading group and this is our book for this month and i started reading it recently i've read it before but uh i i want to read it again and it deals with greek mythology there's there's a lot in this time frame for uh for this work jason and the argonauts is actually well before the mythological time frame of the iliad and the odyssey And so the question that comes up when I'm reading this and the thing that I think about is, if I had to do it all over again, how would I approach Greek mythology? How would I try to get into that world? Perhaps the best way that we can think about it in our modern times is the Marvel universe.

And so you can go to the movie theater and see any sort of movie that is based upon that world.

It loses its potency.

And like, and this is, again, this is the creation myth, like spun in that way of like, okay, but like, what if, I mean, and Greek myth does this, right? Like, you know, um, Who was it that liberated, you know, because Kronos swallowed all of his children.

Right.

And then and then one of them was freed and then freed the other children, which were the other gods.

And yeah.

Yeah.

And I guess like, I wonder this is, this is going to sound like judgmental, but I'm like, is it like a failure of imagination, I guess? Because like, yeah, I think Craig has a pretty decent point that like, you know, Greek myth may not be as like explicit as begotten is, but like, it's quite gross.

I mean, biblical creation myth is pretty gnarly.

Yeah.

Just to see if he had any information about people like me, gods, Greeks showing up, being around.

And he said about a month ago, a snake-like woman walked into the cave with a bow, and I'm pretty sure it was mine.

What, like Medusa? Medusa? That's what I'm thinking.