Good morning and welcome to LLT121 Classical Mythology, in which we are, today, taking up the careers of a number of lesser heroes, heroes who, for whatever reason, could not rise up to the level of Heracles or his washed out counter part from Athens, Theseus. The first hero we’re going to take up today is Jason. The local hero of a city named Iolcus. It’s interesting. Nobody in this room is currently named Jason, but we all know somebody who is. The kid who lives across the street from me is named Jason. It’s a name that somebody actually has. What I don’t understand, for the life of me, is why it’s so popular. The Jason story starts out in the city of Iolcus where a King Cretheus—don’t worry, he’s not going to be on the test—he gets married to this woman named Nephele. Nephele in ancient Greek means cloud. This young woman’s name is Cloud, more about which in a second. They have two kids, Phrixus and Helle, a boy named Phrixus and a girl named Helle. Well, Nephele has the two kids. She decides to go back to her previous career, which was being a cloud. Yes, that is right. She goes back to being a cloud. Cretheus gets married to Princess Ino of Thebes. By now, you should know what the one primary distinguishing characteristic in Greek mythology is about the fine city of Thebes. The gods hate it. Nothing good ever happens at Thebes.
Well, here’s what happens. Ino says there is a plague coming to Thebes, to Iolcus. Since they don’t have any nutrition bureau or farm bureau to help them out, they send off for the Delphic Oracle. Ino tampers with the Delphic Oracle. She fixes it so the Delphic Oracle says, “You have to kill Phrixus and Helle.” So the poor king decides, “All right. I am going to kill Phrixus and Helle,” when, much to everybody’s surprise, this golden ram comes swooping down out of the sky. He picks up Phrixus and Helle and carries them away off to the east. Of course—here’s the Rorschach map of ancient Greece—they don’t make it all the way out there. What happens is that Helle loses grip of the ram, falls into the ocean and dies right around the city of Byzantium. Forever after, the strait was called the Hellespont. Cute, people falling into the ocean all week. However, Phrixus makes it all the way out to the end of the world. This land, actually it’s in the Black Sea, called Colchis. There in Colchis, the ram sets Phrixus down. King Aeetes, king of Colchis, sacrifices the ram to Apollo—good career move—and hangs the fleece of the ram up on a tree in honor of Apollo. Aeetes is the son of no less a person than Helios, the sun god so he can get away with killing golden rams and stuff like that. Aeetes and his wife, Mrs. A, have a lovely daughter named Medea. We’ll meet her later.
I pause for a question. Meanwhile, back in the city of Iolcus there is a question about the inheritance of the throne. Who should become the king? Should it be the older brother, Aeson, who is, after all, the legitimate king. He is the son of the king and the king’s wife. Or should it be Pelias, who is the son of the king’s wife and Poseidon. Poseidon is a very lusty, zesty god, Mike. He gets around. He’s also a very popular second choice if you want to give yourself divine parentage. If you are not going to shoot for Zeus, Poseidon will do. In the best of all possible worlds, Aeson gets to be king. But in order to make this myth work better, Pelias becomes the king of Iolcus, forcing Aeson and his little baby boy, Jason to go into exile. We pause here. Jason learns how to be a hero while living in exile. He studies with the centaur, Chiron, the nice centaur. He learns to hunt and do math and stuff like that. It is really nice. Then one day, Jason’s about seventeen or eighteen, perhaps. He decides that he really wants to be king of Iolcus. He knows just how he's going to go about it, too. He is going to come into the city of Iolcus, be admitted to the palace, and ask his Uncle Pelias, the king, if he can be king now, because it’s really fair that he be the king. Scott, do you have a question about that? Does that sound like a sane way to operate? No, it’s idiotic, as a matter of fact, but he’s not very mature. This is what he claims to do. Yes, you have to remember that children growing up today have a lot more pressures on them today than they did when they were growing up in ancient Greece. So he was probably as naive as the day is long.
At any rate, Jason is walking to the city of Iolcus. By a stream he sees a little old lady. She’s fallen down and she can’t get up. Jason being the nice pleasant, well-bred, well-raised young man that he is, kindly helps the little old lady up. Isn’t that great? In the process he steps in some mud, which sucks the sandal off of his right food or left foot. Have any of you ever done that? Stick your foot in mud and have it pull your shoe off. If not try it sometime. I am not making this up. Tiny did young Jason realize but the old woman was Hera, queen of the gods. I know that our primary familiarity with Hera comes with her taking very nasty revenge on mortal women who, through no fault of their own, have engaged in a relationship of some sort with Zeus. Hera can’t get even with Zeus, so she makes these poor women miserable. We think to ourselves, “That Hera. What a jerk. That Hera. What a cold, conniving you know what.” It’s true. You could have no worse enemy than hear. But, as Jason is going to find out, you can have no better friend than Hera, also. By his kind and unselfish act of helping the little old lady who couldn’t get up, Jason has got Hera on his side. Meanwhile, back at Iolcus, King Pelias receives an oracle. This one is unambiguous. Beware of the man with one sandal. Notice how artfully I worked it into the narrative there. So you can guess what happens.
Young, nice, polite Jason shows up. He knocks on the door of the palace of Iolcus, asks to be taken into King Pelias. “Uncle King Pelias could I be the king now?” King Pelias looks down at Jason’s feet and sees that one of his sandals is missing. Ding! Pelias thinks about it for a second and says, “Sure. You can be the king, on one condition. I want you to go out to the end of the world and bring me back the golden fleece.” Jason is young. He’s alone in the world. Nobody knows him. The odds? Oh, let’s see. What exactly is the other side of the world? Let's say that I ask Elizabeth to go to Irkutsk in the Soviet Union and steal me some plutonium, please Elizabeth. You know you have no way of getting to Russia. You don’t speak Russian and these are just some of the problems, right? What do you estimate your chances of that are Elizabeth? Slim to none. Or the other way of looking at it is, of course, she’s going to go get the plutonium and come back with it because this is a legend about how great and heroic she is. The art of the story lies in getting from point A to point B. He says, “Yeah, sure, Uncle King Pelias. I’ll do it.” Hera serves as his recruiting agent for this new quest. She goes around and recruits all sorts of heroes, a whole boatload.
This fellow by the name of Argus makes a magic boat. It is a really great boat with lots of oars. It has sails and everything. They call it the Argo. Here we have the legend of Jason and the Argonauts. Or, one time I rented the fine movie and the clerk, who is not, perhaps, one of the great minds of the 20th century, called it Jason and the Octagons. The store has since closed. You may be familiar with a genre of movie in which there is no discernable plot, no really great stars or maybe a B movie star perhaps like the immortal Dolph Lundgrin. Dolph Lundgrin came to fame as this burly Swedish guy who was married, for a brief time, to Sylvester Stallone’s ex-wife. So you can understand Dolph’s credentials. The problem is that you guys have got about a million dollars to finance this big, huge blockbuster movie a starring vehicle for the immortal Dolph. How many of you have never heard of Dolph Lundgrin before? Have you led a reasonably happy life, Kristen, despite never having heard of him? What do you do? You load the movie up with all sorts of heroes who are B movie heroes, who are perhaps not as familiar to the crowd, who will work cheap and be happy to work cheap. Do you follow the analogy I’m drawing here, Carrie? Who is a B movie hero that might be willing to work cheap along with Dolph Lundgrin in Jason and the Argonauts? Regina. Kato Kaelin will be happy to work cheap. Lyle Alzado, Lou Ferrigno. Jackie Chan his agent said he would call you back, but you’re still waiting.
It gives rise to a movie type which we’ve all seen before, too, the buddy movie. The Dirty Dozen. The Magnificent Seven. What other buddy movies—ensemble movies—have you ever seen? The Brady Bunch doesn’t count. There is a really serious tough guy and then there’s a wild and crazy joker kind of guy. It’s like any war movie you’ve ever seen. Hulk Hogan, Mr. T would be willing to work cheap. You have to have a guy who’s good at music. Then you find out that Dolph Lundgrin, the star of your movie, the star of your buddy movie, the star of your low budget, low quality movie, has talked Arnold Schwartzeneggar into appearing. How long does Arnold appear in this movie? For about 30 seconds. Then what do you do with Arnold Schwartzeneggar? Kill him. Why do you kill him? Because he’ll cost too much. Moreover, he’s going to show up Dolph Lundgrin. This is a Dolph Lundgrin movie, darn it. So you keep them in there as long as you can afford them, which is probably about 30 seconds. You keep Arnold in there. He says, “Make my day. I’m going to pump you up.” Then he dies horribly. But, for better or worse, you can now say Dolph Lundgrin, big letters, Dolph Lundgrin, Arnold Schwartzeneggar, Jason and the Argonauts. If, while you’re watching the movie, you know, Regina is sitting there with her tongue hanging down to the floor... You like Arnie? Sure, he’ll do. You say, “Hey, wait a minute. That’s it?” But you’ve already paid your $6.75 to see the movie, which is all I care about. To heck with art.
Hera rounds up for Jason a crew of all sorts of heroic-type people. Orpheus plays music. The winged brothers Calais and Zetes, sons of the north wind. They have wings on their back. They are really cool guys. They’re recruited for the war effort. Castor and Pollex, the divine sons of Zeus and a swan. No Zeus was the swan. The woman was not a swan. I always wondered about that. They show up. Also the fathers of various Trojan War heroes, like Pelias who is a B movie hero who went on to be the father of Achilles. So on and so forth. And, in a cameo, appearance Heracles. How long mike do you say we keep Heracles in this myth? Thirty seconds before he starts showing up Jason, right?
I’m going to tell you about four stops. First of all there is the... and then there’s that. Then there’s the Phineus Island and Symplegades. Okay, very dynamic. Oh heck, I can wing this. The island of Lemnos is inhabited by women, just women. All of the men have been driven away. They are women living without men. They are lonely. Our heroic heroes come stepping off the gangplank. They make the women happy. I’m being facetious. This is part of the heroic ethos if you will, love them, leave them, get out. Jason and his Argonauts mingle in love with the various women on the island of Lemnos. That is basically thrown in there to handle point number six on the Herometer, love interest. The next stop is the island of Cios. At this point, Hercules is rowing in such a burly fashion—he is, after all, Hercules—that he snaps an oar. They have to pull ashore on the island of Cios in order to find Hercules a new oar. While Hercules is looking for a sufficiently studly tree to provide him with an oar, he sends his close personal associate, Hylas, a young lad who is a good friend of Hercules. Yes, Hercules has an occasional boyfriend from time to time. That is all right. The Greeks were very tolerant of bisexuality.
Here’s what happens. Hylas is a really nice looking young lad. He goes to fetch some water and while he’s dipping in there to fetch the water, he is kidnapped by water nymphs. What a horrible thing to have happen. Hercules is distraught. He’s sad, really seriously bummed. He doesn’t have an oar, if you’ll recall so he asks to be left alone on the island of Mysia to look for his close, young, associate Hylas. Thirty seconds, Mike, that’s it. That is the end of Hercules in this legend. Stop number three is Phineus Island, the island inhabited by this blind king by the name of Phineus, who is a prophet. King Phineus has a problem. This is what King Phineus would look like today. He has harpies. What are harpies? As I read somewhere, they look like women, only worse. That is not exactly right. They have the heads of women. Actually, this is kind of a cute harpy. They have wings like a bird. What is their MO, their modus operandi? Do you know? They swoop down on your picnic table and they eat as much as they can. What they do not eat they befoul poopily. They dung on it. They fecatize it. I like that. This has been going on for years. Well, Jason sends the winged brothers, Calais and Zetes, to chase the harpies away, and they do. Phineus is so pleased that he prophesized, “Yeah, you’re going to get there. Beware of the clashing rocks.” That is stop number four. The clashing rocks are two rocks that go crash. Jason sails straight through them. I mean, because, really, if it’s going to be any kind of heroic legend at all, you’ve got to have a difficult entry into the magic never, never land where you go meet interesting people and kill them. You don’t, for example, just stride in through the door and say, “Hi, I’m home.”
They make it through the clashing rocks and they make it to the city of Colchis where King Aeetes reins. Regina, your question. Of course it does. Have you ever watched a sitcom, a brand new, innovative sitcom on television? Three minutes into the thing you say, “I’ve seen this before. I know these characters.” No they are not the Stymphalian birds. Although we could probably use the Stymphalian birds, because this is a pretty low-rent movie. You make a good point, Regina, that the plots, the monsters and that sort of thing are pretty much recycled from one to another. Except for when you’ve got a B movie hero like Jason, it’s his big deal, okay? If you are looking, for example, at the career of a U.S. Senator or a state governor or something like that, who has worked his or her way up through elected political offices, being elected alderman or dogcatcher looks like it’s pretty small potatoes. But if you’ve only wanted to be an alderman or the dogcatcher and you get elected, it’s a pretty big deal. Okay, fine. Jared. He had harpies.
Okay, when Jason and his manly men walk off the SS Argo to get the golden fleece, Jason, being the polite young man that he is, introduces himself to King Aeetes and says, “King Aeetes, your kingliness, could I please have the golden fleece?” Aeetes says, “Sure.” There’s something in Jason’s personality—he’s such a polite young man—that brings this out in other people. “All you have to do is, one, yoke these two brass-footed, fire-breathing bulls. There they are off in the distance, pawing the ground and snorting fire. Then I would like you to sew this here field with dragon’s teeth. Here have some dragon’s teeth. Thirdly, I would like you to kill all the men who are going to pop up out of the ground once you have sewn the dragon’s teeth. Then, when you’ve done all that, Jason, yes, you can have the golden fleece with my best wishes.” His chances are still not very good. Until—and, again, Regina, you can yodel if you heard this plot development before—the king’s young daughter, young woman daughter, Medea, sees studly young Jason walking down the gangplank and says, “Woo-hoo. I gotta help this guy.” Where have we heard this before, Carrie? Theseus, right? Ariadne takes a liking to him. If we’re to believe Ovid in his Metamorphosis, Medea even makes a little speech to herself and says, “Oh, yes, I know the best thing to do, and I approved it, but my heart says take the worst course.” So she does. She loves the big galoot. It so happens that she’s a witch. She’s smart. That’s right. Back in ancient Greece any woman who is smart was automatically a witch. The name, Medea, could be interpreted to mean thinking person (female). She is nobody to mess around with.
Here’s what happens. She rubs this magic goo on him, which makes him impervious to fire. She tells him some magic chants to put dragons to sleep and stuff like that. I don’t mean to bother about the details, but with Medea’s help Jason yolks the bulls, Jason sews the field with dragon’s teeth, and then, when the little guys with swords and shields come out, Jason takes this huge rock and throws it amongst them. They all get mad and accuse each other of having thrown the rock. They kill each other. Not bad. Jason says, “King Aeetes, could I please have that fleece now.” He points to the fleece. It’s hanging on a tree. It’s got a dragon guarding it. Yeah, go get it. But forearmed with his magic ointment from Medea he goes and says, “Okay.” He takes it down and he and his men all get back onto the Argo. Medea is going, “What about me?” “Okay. You, too, Medea. hop aboard.” Although Regina will probably tell you, because she’s written this one, that he’s going to wind up demonstrating towards Medea the same lack of commitment that Theseus displayed towards Ariadne, because that’s the way heroic males behave. Sad but true. This is the amount of devotion that Medea shows to him. The SS Argo is pulling away from the city of Colchis and Aeetes is kind of mad, because he really didn’t mean to let Jason have the golden fleece. So they are chasing. We have a boat chase scene. Medea gets this great idea for throwing them off track. She happens to have on board her little brother Apsyrtus. What she does is she kills him and chops him up into little bits and tosses bits and pieces of him off this way and that way. So, while the Argo is making straight for Colchis, the other boat has to sail around and pick up the pieces of the late Apsyrtus to put together, hopefully, enough of him to bury. This is what Medea is willing to do for her husband.
We go on. They return to the city of Iolcus, where Jason comes up, knocks on the door of the royal palace, asks for King Pelias and says, “Here it is, Uncle King Pelias. Now can I be the king?” “No.” Jason has no idea what to do next. He’s not tremendously bright. It’s like me. I’m not tremendously bright, either, but I’m married to somebody who is. Medea has a plan. She is, after all, a sorceress. What she does is she puts this boiling cauldron of water in front of King Pelias and his daughters, heats it up, puts in a special mix of twelve special herbs and spices, tosses it in there and then puts this horny old ram and tosses it into the cauldron. She leaves them in there for about three minutes and out comes a little lamb. Baa, baa, baa. Whoa, that’s cool. “You pop in the old thing and it comes out fresh, new and young.” “That is right King Pelias. Would you like to hop in, King Pelias?” King Pelias hops in and what does he get? He gets boiled. He is dead. Jason and Medea incur miasma. They wouldn’t leave home without it. They go to the award winning city of Corinth to be purified. King Creon purifies Jason of his miasma, but, for better or worse, they don’t, for whatever, reason ever go back to Iolcus. Jason and Medea wind up living in Corinth. They have a couple of kids whose names may as well be Jason junior and Jason the third. They are a couple of boys.
One day King Creon summons Jason to the palace. Jason, you know Mrs. Creon and I have been trying for years to have a son to be king. We can only have our daughter Creusa. It is sad. We can’t let a girl be king. At this point let me mention that Creusa looks suspiciously like, oh, I don’t know. Who would you say? Wynona Ryder? Cindy Crawford? Cameron Diaz. I don’t know whom. You don’t care. Okay, so she looks like Wynona Ryder. What I would like you to do, Jason, is marry her. Then you can be the king. There is a problem. Jason is already married, but maybe he’s not a fanatic about it. Besides, Medea is not as young as she used to be. You know. She’s probably follows him or nags him because he doesn’t like to watch Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman on Saturday night or something. Jason gets a clue. He thinks, “Yeah, this sounds like a good idea. I get to marry Wynona Ryder and I get to be the king.” Only one problem, Mark. Yeah. His wife might not be so happy. This is the plot of Euripides’s award winning play, the Medea. It begins with this scene, this notion, that Jason has just found out that he can marry the princess of Corinth, but he has to figure out a way of making it sound right to Medea. He comes up to Medea and says, “Well, I got a little proposition for you. Medea, you’ve been a really good wife for me. You know our kids are really great. What I would like to do is divorce you and marry the princess so our two boys can be princes and I can be king. You’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that our boys are going to be kings.” This does not sound like a really winning proposition, does it? Remember that Medea means thinking person (female) in ancient Greek. That is why we get all the more frightened when Medea says, “Okay.” Medea goes into her hope chest and says, “Would you please give this garment, this little robe to wear, to your new wife. I saved it in my hope chest all these years. I brought it from my homeland that I’m never going to see again that I gave up and murdered my little brother for you.” You know that a guy has got to be pretty dumb if he’s been married maybe 20 years and he can’t fall for a guilt trip, right? No, this guy is an idiot. Here’s what he does. He takes the garment and he is walking away from Medea. “Geez, I didn’t think it was going to be that easy.” He sidles off, right? The next thing we know, we go back, we don’t see the wedding. We see Medea kind of standing out on her front porch. The door is shut and the kids are nowhere to be seen. A messenger comes roaring in from the wedding. “Oh, boy. Jason is mad. Jason is coming.” The princess put on the robe that Medea had sent along. She immediately started to burn. The king of Corinth Creon saw his daughter burning so he tried to throw himself on her to try and stamp out the flames. He’s gone, too. How ghoulish you all are. Jason is coming and he’s mad. Jason comes roaring up on his chariot. “Medea. You killed Creon. You messed up my wedding. You messed up our plans. I’m taking the boys and I’m getting out of here. Where are the boys?” Medea says, “The boys are in the house. You can go in and get them.” Jason goes into the house, screams, and comes running out screaming because Medea has killed them. Jason just kind of goes berserk because, you know, killing him would have been too easy and too quick. He wouldn’t suffer enough if she killed him. She has killed the two children, which means he’s never going to reproduce, because think about it for a second. The two kids he already has are dead, and what female in her right mind is going to want anything to do with Jason after this? To those of you who say, “Yeah, that’s really horrible to kill your kids.” I agree. I’m very grateful that my parents never killed me, even once. Remember Medea is the granddaughter of the sun god, so he sends a chariot down to pick her up—she’s got connections—cart her off to Athens. Isn’t that neat? Where she becomes the wife of King Aegeus and the stepmother of guess whom? Theseus. Remember we can hardly have a myth without Theseus.
Jason’s end comes in a very subtly satisfying way. Jason spends the rest of his days just hanging around by his dry docked ship the SS Argo and reminiscing about the way things used to be. As many old duffers do. If you ever talk to somebody who is really old like me. I do. It’s terrible. I have freshman honors students and I tell them about what it was like when I was in high school. They can’t identify with it. They just sit there listening to me thinking, “Boy is he old.” Jason just sits around in the Argo and talks about and thinks about all of his great expeditions and stuff like that. One day a rotting timber falls off and conks him on the head and he dies. That is his encounter with death. He dies. That is the end of Jason.
You still have a few minutes so I propose to take this opportunity to launch you rapidly into the career of Perseus. Perseus, who’s name I will now write on the board, is not mentioned in your study guide. That is because the idiot who typed up the study guide didn’t put him in there. The idiot who typed the study guide was me. So I apologize. For what it’s worth, he’s a very satisfactory hero. He has his own movie, perhaps the most successful of all the hero movies, is the epic Clash of the Titans, which I have watched so many times I can’t even bare to think about it now. It begins… that’s right. It’s not on here because I didn’t type it on here. It begins with this old king named Acrisius. Acrisius and his wife Mrs. Acrisius have one child a daughter named Danaë. That umlaut, those two dots over the E do not mean that she is a heavy metal band. They mean that it is pronounced Danaë not Danaë. Although Acrisius would look good as a heavy metal band. Danaë, a very lovely young lady, is destined to bear a son who will kill his grandfather. This kind of complicates Acrisius plans to marry his daughter off. Instead of marrying his daughter off, he hides her in a forest, in a hollow chamber with a good, solid roof and windows, etc. so no guy can marry her, or have his way with her, thereby begetting a child who is going to grow up and kill him. Are you following that?
Well, of course Danaë is so beautiful that the cosmic swinger himself, father of gods and men, takes a liking to her. Being Zeus, descends to her in the form of a shower of gold. Please put it that way, a shower of gold. He breaks through the window as a shower of gold and, pretty soon, Danaë is pregnant. No, with a cute little baby, Mark. Look at the little guy. He looks kind of ugly. This is taking place with state tax dollars so I don’t want to offend anybody’s feelings. It’s a cute little baby who’s going to grow up and kill you, Ray. What do you do with him? You are the wrong person to ask. I know. You take Danaë and you little baby, Perseus, and put the in a box, a beautiful, big, huge, wooden box. You nail it shut and throw it into the ocean. That way, you can be sure you really kill them because no one could survive that, right? But you weren’t there when they died, so you didn’t actually kill them. Look, this is a common trick in Greek mythology. Like when Jocasta and Laius produced Oedipus, the kid who was going to grow up to kill his dad and marry his mom. If they were going to kill him, if they had decided to kill them, they should have just killed him right then and there. Killed them good and dead. Handing him off to the shepherd to go and expose on the mountain isn’t going to do them any good.
As you can guess, mother and son are tossed into the box and Zeus takes care of the box. The box washes up on the shore of an uncharted desert isle. It’s not really uncharted. It’s the island of Seraphos where a fisherman by the name of Dictys, which means fishnet in ancient Greek. The fisherman finds the box and opens it up. “My god. There’s a woman in here with a little baby. I’m going to bring it to my brother, King Polydectes.” King Polydectes goes, “Whoa, a gorgeous looking young woman and a little baby. She seems kind of attached to the baby, so I won’t kill him. But I am interested in Danaë.” For years, King Polydectes has Danaë, the lovely young woman, and Perseus, the little baby, on his island. She won’t marry him. She doesn’t want anything to do with him. She really has had a pretty rough life as it is. She wants to be left alone.
Young Perseus grows up on this island, too. He has no father figure. When he asks mom who is my dad? What does mom tell him, Heather? Zeus, right? “Great, yeah, I have a whole bunch of friends whose parents are Zeus. You expect me to go tell people that my dad is Zeus.” Of course, we know his dad is Zeus. One day when Perseus is about 15 or 16 Polydectes finally hits on a scheme to get Perseus out of town so that he can marry or do something with Danaë. He decides to have a party for all the young men on the island. The price of admission is a horse. A horse is very expensive to this day. A horse, to an ancient Greek kid, is the equivalent of a BMW, a brand new Beamer, and not those entry level Beamers, either. It’s a four door leather interior Beamer. That is the price of admission to this dance. Perseus was one of the kids, maybe you were one of these kids growing up, too, who didn’t go to the dance. He never went to the dances. They stood around outside the door and smoked cigarettes and drank Mad Dog and snickered at the people who went. “A horse, the price of admission is a horse. I could just as well go back and bring the head of Medusa.” The door opens up.
King Polydectes pokes his head out. “I heard that Perseus. I challenge you. Why don’t you go back and bring back the head of Medusa?” Perseus goes gulp. Okay. What do we estimate Perseus’s chance of bringing back the head of that horrible monster with the snaky hair whose head turns people to stone. What are his chances of coming back in one piece, Mitch? Okay, so you’re going to look at it from that way. Of course he’s going to do it. He has done if every semester since I started teaching this class, as a matter of fact. Never is, Mark. I’ve tried. By the same token he’s about 15 years old. He is supposed to go to Baghdad and, armed with his bare hands, beat the tar out of Sadam Hussein and bring back his mustache. Well, you get the picture. Stay tuned for our next exciting episode of the adventures of Perseus. You’ve been a good class. I’ll catch you later.
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