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Christopher Nolan's screen adaptation gives a flattened, unimaginative Odysseus, a dull Calypso and a merely regal Penelope, and the movie would have been pretty much the same without the gods.

Neal Bierling's monograph follows Philistine history from the Judges through David, Solomon and Hezekiah to Nebuchadnezzar's invasion, while the exact relationship between Samson and Hercules gets testy.

With Margalit Fox

Margalit Fox's book on the decoding of Linear B, found on Crete by Arthur Evans in 1900 and solved by Michael Ventris in 1952, credits Alice Kober's overlooked work.

With Joe Goodkin

Joe Goodkin, a Classics major from the University of Wisconsin turned Chicago musician, performs his own sung interpretations of Homer's Odyssey and Iliad on the show.

Bierling's 1992 monograph links the Mycenaeans of Atreus and Agamemnon to the Philistines, with Egyptian steles, Apollo Smintheus and a startling similarity between Iliad I and I Samuel.

Heinrich Schliemann, the German tycoon who helped discover Troy and Mycenae, gets asked here whether he was a legitimate archaeologist, a mad genius or a grave robber.

Athena, disguised as Mentor, wants the punishment of the suitors and disloyal staff, raising hard questions about the deaths of Leodes and the executed maids.

Penelope wins her battle of wits over their bed as the suitors are sent to Hades, where Agamemnon jeers, while Odysseus tests his old father with one more false identity.

In the underworld Odysseus meets Epicaste, Antiope and Alcmene, then hears Agamemnon's grim homecoming tale, finds a silent Ajax Telamon, and sees Sisyphus, the original rock-n-roller, eternally doomed.

Odysseus survives Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens and his men's fatal hankering for a decent steak on the island of Helios, before Athena sends him to Eumaeus's hut on Ithaca.

Odysseus clocks the mouthy Irus in a bum fight, then Penelope overshares with the stranger, Eurykleia shrieks at a telling scar, and a geesey dream puts his wife in the driver's seat.

Telemachus finally reunites with Odysseus at the hut of the swineherd Eumaeus, complete with bird omens and Odysseus dodging stool legs while disguised as a beggar.

After the Cyclops, Odysseus receives the winds from Aeolus then decides on nap time without telling his crew, survives the cannibal Laestrygonians, and reaches Circe's island of Aeaea with help from Hermes.

Telemachus leaves Ithaca for the Peloponnese, visiting Nestor before reaching Sparta, where Menelaus and Helen give conflicting versions of the Trojan Horse story.

Boar's-tusk helmets, Nestor's cup, elaborate burials and a catalog of ships supply the archaeological and linguistic evidence weighed here for a historical core to the Trojan War.

Zeus sends Hermes to free Odysseus from Calypso after seven years, and Odysseus and Nausicaa have a go at jarts while Demodocus plucks the hottest hits of the Mycenaean Era.

Odysseus travels to the land of the dead, where the ghost of Elpenor appears fresh from Circe's island, Tiresias delivers his prophecy, and his mother Anticleia's shade cannot be embraced.

The Odyssey opens with Penelope and Telemachus besieged on Ithaca by greedy suitors, and the poem's first word, andra, might be a guidestone for its deeper themes.

The tour through Homer's Iliad ends with death on all sides as Patroclus and Hector die, with the guys weighing the aesthetics of greaves, shields and the so-called Superman paradox.

Wolfgang Petersen's 2004 film Troy gets revisited here, questioning its Homeric spirit and awarding Orlando the Tiresias prize for the most obnoxious performance in the cast.

Honor lost and honor defended frame Book 9 of Homer's Iliad, where Achilles spends the book glamping in his tent.

Part 1 of the journey through Homer's Iliad brings Achilles, Agamemnon, Briseis, Chryseis, Diomedes and a face that launched a thousand ships.

Following Prof. Richard Whitaker, the guys weigh three Odyssey translations by Anthony Verity, Emily Wilson and Peter Green, and ask whether Wilson's, the basis for Nolan's film, has sufficient gravitas.

This fun-size offering tackles the mysterious, quasi-historical Palladium, the talisman held in the Trojan citadel that protected the city until Odysseus and Diomedes stole it away; rumor says it went to Athens or Sparta, and then maybe Rome.

Hesiod's Theogony, close to a canonical creation myth from about 700 BC, explains where the gods and universe come from, with two Aphrodites and Kronos angling for a role.

Hesiod's Works and Days, from around 700 BC, asks whether he rivals Homer while covering the justice of Zeus, the myth of Pandora and the five ages of mankind.

The eighth-century BC Dipylon Vase has every inch of its surface covered, with a funeral scene dominating it, and the episode asks what drives a culture toward that fear of the empty space.

With Peter Green's help, the guys trace how Darius the Great is turned back at Marathon before his son Xerxes I seeks revenge with a horde of wicker-wearing Immortals.

In 480 BC the Persians learn Spartan discipline holds until the traitor Ephialtes shows Xerxes a mountain path, and Leonidas resigns himself to death.

In 415 BC, as Nicias opposes it, Alcibiades persuades Athens to invade Sicily, then faces accusations after the herms are mutilated and maybe even a drunken satire of sacred mysteries performed.

Lysias, a resident alien who prospered as a speechwriter, impeaches the tyrant Eratosthenes to get justice for his murdered brother Polemarchus after Sparta's regime followed the Peloponnesian War.

In 1977 Manolis Andronikos revealed the royal Macedonian tombs at Aigai, likely holding Philip II, a find framed here with David Grant's research and Demosthenes' Second Philippic.

The Library of Alexandria's fabled burning did not happen all at once, and the pagan-versus-Christian finger pointing over its loss does not help.

The tomb and body of Alexander simply vanished, and the search runs from Babylon to Memphis, Alexandria and even Venice, though some of the greatest Caesars once visited the tourist attraction.

Wycherley's study of the agora shows it as more than a marketplace, a hub for politics and athletics, while nearly every Greek polis had religious shrines, gymnasia and stadiums.

Sophocles' Trachiniae leaves it unclear whether Deianeira is an innocent wife or a calculating rival to Iole, closer to Euripides' Medea or Phaedra, with Heracles as villain or hero.

The episode wraps up Lucian's account of Alexander the False Prophet in Abonoteichus, where the shyster teams up with apprentice Cocconas to go a-bilking with fake eggs, rumors of Asclepius and puppet snakes.

Demeter gives the infant Demophoon nightly fire purgations for his mortality, is caught in the act, and decides to set up a cult at Eleusis, while Persphone must beware the pomegranate.

Milo of Croton won multiple Olympiads and supposedly deadlifted a stone of more than 1100lbs; Pausanias, Galen, Strabo and Cicero were fascinated by his prowess and his appetite.

Socrates' elenchus, the method of question and answer he uses to refute his interlocturos, gets tested against the tactics of the Sophists with help from scholar Gregory Vlastos.

Lord Elgin removed the Parthenon marbles from Athens to his Scottish mansion, and they still sit in the British Museum in London while Lord Byron somehow avoids the same blame.

Socrates describes an inner daimon that only seeks to drive him away from something, a voice the guys compare to the apostle Paul's conscience in Romans, within Plato's Apology.

With Ken Bratt

Ken Bratt explains why he chose Herodotus, the man of Halicarnassus, for his Princeton dissertation, weighing J.A.S. Evans' question of whether he is history's father or its liar.

Apollonius' Argonautica reaches King Lycus, who welcomes Jason and his crew warmly until crew members Idmon and Tiphys meet a quick demise, so mourning meets the approach to Colchis.

Apollonius has Jason's crew face the boxing king Amycus of the Bebrycians, whom Polydeuces defeats, and the sons of Boreas free the prophet Phineus from the stench-laden bird women.

In Theocritus' Idyll XI the Cyclops Polyphemus woos the sea nymph Galatea with song, composed by the Syracusan, Alexandrian poet before Polyphemus ever meets Odysseus.

At Epidauros, invalids sought healing from Asclepius in the abaton, near a theater, stadium and the tholos where his remains were said to be buried.

Apollonius of Rhodes takes a four-book voyage from Colchis back to Iolcus and asks whether Jason can reclaim the throne from uncle Pelias by himself or needs the sorceress Medea, granddaughter of the sun.

Consulting the oracle of Apollo at Delphi meant climbing Mount Parnassus, making purifications and offering sacrifices first, and an answer no more straight-forward than poor old Croesus got.

The episode credits the grid-pattern city, still visible in modern street plans, to Hippodamus of Miletus, who spread his design for the Greek city across Attica, Italy and Rhodes.

Ancient Greek parents frightened children with the blood-thirsty Mormo, the seductive Lamia and the dung-footed Empousa, and the guys also wander into Athens' most-haunted house, watching for dead relatives.

Apollonius' Book 1 carries the journey from Iolcus toward Colchis while Dave and Jeff puzzle over Jason's milquetoast administrative style and a Heracles stripped of his brawling, wine-binging swagger, first stop Lemnos.

The episode lays groundwork for Socrates' defence speech, asking how the reign of the 30 tyrants and his connections to great men like Pericles influenced it, and what the elenchus did for ethical teaching.

Aeschylus has Io, tormented by a gadfly, show pity for the chained Prometheus, testing Stephen White's thesis that the play reinforces ancient Greek gender roles.

Aristophanes' Clouds stages a debate between Superior Argument and Inferior Argument, asking whether might makes right, whether rhetoric is all there is to law, and whether Pheidippides can be trusted with logic.

Lucian of Samosata, a second-century satirist born in the further reaches of Asia Minor, wrote A True Story and took on the fraudulent shyster Alexander, with Erasmus and Thomas More somehow involved.

With Deborah Roberts

Deborah Roberts of Haverford College helps open Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, with the dialogue between smith god Hephaestus and the personifications Power and Violence, and how this telling differs from Hesiod.

Aristophanes' Frogs imagines Dionysus, god of tragedy, descending into Hades in 405 BC to bring the recently dead Euripides back, since there are now no good poets left.

Jason must recover the golden fleece and reclaim Iolcus's throne while Hercules abandons the voyage searching for his squire Hylas, a Hellenistic test of Apollonius against Callimachus.

Aristophanes' Clouds mixes the lofty and the scatological, and Socrates offers to teach how making Inferior Argument stronger dodges the Christmas credit card bills that recently came calling.

With Diane Arnson Svarlien

Translator Diane Arnson Svarlien discusses her new edition of Aristophanes, covering Lysistrata and the Ladies of Thesmophoria, and what it takes to translate his comic Greek verse.

Relying on David Konstan, the guys take up Ocean and the chorus of Oceanids in Prometheus Bound and compare it with Agamemnon, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Euripides' Hippolytus, through Deborah Roberts' translation.

This archaic hymn to Demeter, running four hundred ninety-five lines, may serve mystery-cult ritual, and gets compared here to the cults of Mithras and Dionysus.

Jason's crew must sail past the Smashing Symplegades to reach Colchis and recover the golden fleece, while the episode mixes stern-scraping action with musing on the perfect length for an epic simile.

The sophist Gorgias, 483 to 375 BC, working the Olympia and Delphi circuit and Athens, defends Helen of Troy so persuasively that his own final word undercuts the whole argument.

Euripides' Alcestis has Admetus continue his mope-a-thon until Heracles shows up between a funeral and a house party, and a strange, silent, veiled woman brings the twist ending.

Euripides' Alcestis, which even devotees of tragedy may not know, has Apollo and Thanatos trade rap-battle insults while hubby Admetus behaves insufferably; its poet is the man the Athenians loved to hate.