Gifts Chosen for the Journey Home (Homer’s The Odyssey, Book 15 – Part 3)

I want to talk real quick.

I got this book from the library.

I was looking for something else and just happened to come across it.

It's called Classical Mythology A to Z, an Encyclopedia of Gods, Goddesses, Heroes and Heroines.

nymphs spirits monsters and places by annette gisecki and it's got illustrations by jim tierney it is a thick boy of a book um but why i ended up taking it from the library and by taking it i mean borrow it i did not steal it uh it is too big and heavy to ever try to steal from anywhere um is you know there are so many of these types of resources and books out there but one thing the illustrations in this are just beautiful and the other thing is you know in this day and age where you can get all of the information you need online which is where i do so much of my research for this just general google searches and reading through articles and uh directories of stuff what This book has made me realize is the importance of organizing.

Because I can go and just look at like, hey, give me some information on Menelaus and it will give me information on Menelaus.

But this I really enjoy and I've only begun to browse through it has, you know, what you would expect from a dictionary or an encyclopedia, these little entries about people, places, things, etc.

But It breaks it down.

in ways that are much easier to understand and organized.

And they have these really cool, I'm trying to find it.

I just had it open a second ago.

They have these really cool family trees that show the connection between everyone in a way that answers some questions for me, like relational stuff.

So the reason I bring it up now is we keep talking about the bloodline of Atreus, the seedlings of Zeus, et cetera.

And this book has a whole chapter called Heroes, Heroines, and Peoples.

And it starts with the house of Atreus, which shows a family tree going all the way back to Zeus.

Zeus having relations, if we want to call it, with a nymph and giving birth to Tantalus.

And then you just go straight down the line until you get to Atreus.

And Atreus and Eropi, I think is how you pronounce it, gives birth to Agamemnon, who we have covered extensively, and Menelaus.

So we can kind of see laid out here how all of this works.

And granted, we're talking about Menelaus here, but the whole kind of convoluted nature of the Agamemnon, Clemnestra, and just this episode really lays it out in a way that is easier to understand.

because Agamemnon and Clemnestra give birth to four children, including Orestes, who is the one who kills Aegisthus for the affair.

We also see the connection between Clemnestra and Aegisthus laid out in this family tree, which is very helpful.

Also connected to the house of Atreus, Atreus' brother, I think you pronounce it Pythias, or Pytheas has birth with question mark and has two offspring or has an offspring called Aetheria, who's the one that has relations with Poseidon to bring forth Theseus, who we have talked about on the show before.

So anyway, I really enjoy this book and I might in a future episode review look to see what it says about Odysseus let's take a look just at the index to see what we're working with in the future here Odysseus is on so many pages as we might expect cool alright so we got some stuff to look into here This is just a really, really cool book, and I think I want it for my own coffee table.

I'm glad I got it from the library so that I could browse it, and it looks like something that I would reference all of the time just for fun.