Teaching Company does The Odyssey

UPDATE:Ophelia Benson offers some interesting thoughts at CLIOPATRIA

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Some time ago, Michael Blowhard recommended the Teaching Company Lectures. Good advice; I took it and ordered Professor Vandiver's talks on the Odyssey of Homer. I listened to them in the past few days on a long holiday drive. They were excellent. Superb. Gave me an entirely new perspective (not that I had much before) on Odysseus and his world. I had listened to the Robert Fagles audio version of The Odyssey several years ago and while I enjoyed it quite a bit, I realize now that I didn't really hear very much. Vandiver really does bring the book alive; that Homer was quite a teller of tales.

But one thing that struck me was Vandiver's depiction of ancient Greece as a place where there was no law, where justice was private vengeance, where there was no state to claim a monopoly on the use of force to punish. A true libertarian world, I thought. I remember hearing --- this was 30 or more years ago so it's possible I heard him incorrectly --- the son of a famous economist explain how we would all be better off if we had no public police i.e. the police should all be privately-hired, so they would be more accountable etc etc.

I wonder if he had been reading Homer.