0:41

Hello, this is let's talk about

0:43

miss Baby, and I am your

0:46

host live and it never

0:48

gets more comfortable singing that, like I just

0:51

in any case, I

0:54

am here once again with a little

0:57

episode that is taking bits of other

0:59

episodes and putting them into one so

1:02

that I can take just

1:04

a little rest, just a

1:06

little time, time to myself,

1:09

time to oh my God, try to fix

1:11

my mental health. And

1:13

today, because it's Friday, so of

1:15

course, we are looking at past conversation

1:18

episodes. Once again, Mikaela has

1:20

put together something really fun for you guys.

1:23

We are looking at episodes

1:25

that feature myths

1:27

and mythology, these characters

1:29

that have their origins in the

1:31

cultural memory of the Bronze

1:34

Age that was left behind and

1:36

which was then picked up by much later

1:38

generations and turned into these fascinating

1:41

myths. So today we have selections,

1:44

first from my episode with Cora

1:46

Beth Frasier, who came on the

1:48

show to talk about both the

1:51

Minotaur of Crete but also

1:53

autism. We had an absolutely

1:56

fascinating conversation about this, and it was a few years

1:58

ago now, so I hope you'll all be

2:00

just revisiting this with fresh

2:03

ears and really taken a lot of the really

2:05

fascinating stuff that Korra shared it. It

2:07

was such a joy an episode and I'm glad to reshare

2:10

just even a small part of it. Just again,

2:13

as with.

2:14

The last episode on Tuesday, there is a

2:16

Spotify playlist linked in the episode's description

2:18

where you can find the full length episodes of these

2:20

if you want to listen to the entire thing. And

2:23

we also have a selection from

2:25

my episode with Alexia Burrows

2:28

Carol Mbido, who came

2:30

on to talk about the notion of Kalon

2:32

Kakhon, this beautiful, ugly,

2:34

beautiful evil and how it aligns

2:37

with the always wonderful Helen

2:39

of Sparta. That was an absolutely

2:41

amazing conversation and it spawned

2:44

episodes. Me just like diving

2:46

as deep as I could into the character

2:49

of Helen, because I mean, unsurprisingly,

2:51

she's utterly fascinating. So my conversation

2:53

with Alexia is such a joy

2:55

I'm thrilled to share again just a part

2:58

of it. And finally we

3:00

thought who better to return to

3:02

than one of the guests from the Bronze

3:04

Age Collapse episodes, So we're

3:07

sharing a little bit of my conversation from

3:09

a few years ago with Joel Christensen,

3:11

who came on to talk a little bit more

3:13

about Homer and the Homeric tradition,

3:16

So there's just a little bit deeper dive

3:18

or just a more specific conversation. We

3:20

were looking at the concept of Homer and

3:23

you know, the idea of Homer as

3:25

an individual versus the idea of

3:27

Homer as this kind of compilation

3:30

of all of these varied oral storytellers

3:33

from over so many centuries.

3:35

This was an amazing conversation and

3:37

it's the reason why Joel came back for

3:40

the Bronze Age episodes, and we'll be returning soon

3:42

for an episode looking at heroes

3:44

who stay tuned for that conversations,

4:00

revisiting the cultural memory of

4:02

the Bronze Age, the Minotaur

4:04

and the Labyrinth, the woman who started

4:07

a decade long war, and

4:09

the idea of Homer.

4:23

When you read the sources

4:26

that mention the minut all, it's

4:29

very much there's very little description.

4:32

You know, it's like like half man, half

4:34

bull, or you know there's bull

4:36

bits, or you know, it's very

4:38

vague. But then you see

4:40

the visual sources and they kind of have

4:42

their own tradition, and

4:45

you know, the mine at all tends to be very

4:47

recognizable. In terms

4:49

of well, essentially which bits

4:51

a man and which bits a bull? And you know, there's

4:54

sort of a tradition there that you can

4:56

trace across and a pattern

4:59

which is much more precise

5:01

and consistent then you get in the written

5:04

sources. Mm hm.

5:06

So I'm so curious about that, you

5:08

know, obviously, my I don't haven't looked

5:11

at a lot of visual of Minotaur at all, if

5:13

if any, I'm now

5:15

thinking what I've seen. And

5:17

meanwhile, I'm always so interested in the theseus

5:19

of it, you know, the like, okay,

5:22

you know, how much of his

5:25

story are we getting from Athens and how much

5:27

of it is Athenian propaganda? And

5:29

so I've always been extra interested in in

5:31

that cret inside of it, and like yeah,

5:33

I mean it makes create look really bad, and

5:35

I just have to think, like, you know, how

5:38

much of this is Athens trying to make theseus into

5:40

a hero that he obviously was not. So

5:43

I'm so interested to hear what the variations

5:45

are on the Minotaur.

5:47

Oh yeah, And you know, I'm happy to do that.

5:49

And I'm also happy to do some thesis

5:51

bashing because that's all good too,

5:54

please.

5:54

I mean, I'm always down for Thesus

5:57

bashing, But I would love to know if you

5:59

know anything about that the

6:01

Athenian of it, Like I keep

6:04

meaning to look into whether there is you know, scholarship

6:06

or it were people talking about how how much

6:08

of it is based in Athenian propaganda

6:11

and how much of it is like you know,

6:13

I mean, I don't know if any of it's from crete, So

6:15

I would love to hear anything about that.

6:17

No, I mean, it's it's

6:19

actually one of those areas that I'm still researching.

6:22

I'm still trying to track down more

6:25

visual sources because the

6:28

feel that I get from a lot of the visual

6:30

sources is that the

6:32

Greek ones, there is very much

6:34

a sense of Theseus as the hero

6:38

with the monster. You know, he's often dragging

6:40

the minutaur along behind him, or

6:43

you know, it's it's very much, you know,

6:45

the conquest of Theseus

6:48

over the monster, and you

6:50

know, but then you look

6:52

at Etruscan

6:54

sources and then you

6:56

get a different version. I mean, it's like

6:58

there's a famous vase

7:01

painting of baby mineutor baby

7:04

minus baby Oh my God, sitting

7:07

on his mother's knee and he is

7:09

so cute.

7:10

I can't even tell you so

7:14

so yeah, you know, you've got baby

7:16

mine at all, and this

7:18

is like completely different

7:21

to you know.

7:22

Evil horrible monster that must

7:24

be killed because it eats people. A

7:26

little cute mine at all, sitting on its

7:29

mother's knee. It's just adorable.

7:31

So yeah, I mean I need

7:34

to look into it more, in particular

7:36

looking at the relationship between

7:39

the Greek stuff and the Etruscan stuff.

7:41

But yeah, I haven't

7:43

got there yet.

7:44

No fair enough, But I'm so thrilled

7:47

to hear him in the Baby Muntra. Now I'm

7:49

like, okay, I'm gonna find a picture of that to post with

7:51

this episode.

7:52

You have to. It's the best.

7:54

But that's so interesting that there

7:56

are Etruscan visual representations

7:58

because I mean I wouldn't have pegged that given

8:00

how far the Etruscans would have been from

8:03

Crete, you know, yeah, necessarily from Greece, but

8:05

from Crete. That's really interesting.

8:06

You know, I think the whole role

8:08

of theseus in Athens

8:11

and in Athenian law has

8:13

has very much kind of shifted the

8:15

focus. You know, we must see theseus

8:18

as the grand hero, but then

8:20

you look elsewhere and you

8:22

get a different sense, and

8:26

I think it's it's really kind

8:28

of it's really interesting

8:30

and really, you know, a

8:33

useful wedge to

8:35

open up an area of Theseus

8:37

bashing.

8:38

Yeah, I mean, the man deserves

8:40

it. Yeah.

8:42

The funniest thing I just find

8:44

about him is that, you

8:47

know, I think I think minotauricide

8:49

because in

8:51

that sourcing, at least you get some sort

8:53

of the idea that it. You know, it was monstrous,

8:56

you know, it was eating people whatever. But

8:58

everything else about Theseus

9:01

is objectively bad,

9:04

you know, Like you hear these descriptions and

9:06

you're like, I know, this is meant to make

9:08

him sound heroic, but where

9:11

is the heroism? Exactly

9:13

right?

9:13

Yeah, And you know that that's actually

9:16

one of the things that I think is really interesting

9:18

about the Labyrinth and the Minotaur and all of

9:20

that, because at that point

9:23

in the myth, in all, you know, in most

9:25

of the versions, you have a

9:27

very simple story of

9:30

you know, Theseus is the hero. He

9:33

volunteers, he goes to save

9:35

his people, he kills the

9:37

monster, and he emerges

9:39

victorious and it's all wonderful.

9:42

And then he goes

9:44

off and does a whole load of awful things. You

9:47

know, he dumps Sarah Anne,

9:50

he causes the death of his father, you

9:52

know, it's it's like, that's

9:55

the pinnacle of decent

9:58

theseus. He kills the monster

10:00

and then it's all downhill from there, like

10:02

really really.

10:03

Fast, and it is the only

10:06

good thing, well, I would say, you know, quote

10:08

unquote good thing that he does. And again

10:10

it's based on what we're supposed to believe about

10:12

the minotaur, but yeah, I

10:14

mean, you know, because I

10:17

you know, always stand by his being

10:19

a full on serial killer on the way

10:21

to Athens, like and then even

10:24

the Cretan bull, which is of course

10:26

the Minotaur's father, or

10:29

the but then it's the Marathonian Bowl even that

10:32

he does for show. You

10:34

know, he doesn't just like to feed this

10:36

ball for the goodness of his heart. And

10:38

I just think it's so fascinating because the minuta

10:41

really is the only like quote unquote good thing he did.

10:43

But was it good at all?

10:46

Exactly? And that's what makes

10:48

it really interesting, because you

10:50

know, it's the

10:52

more you know about theseus, the

10:55

more you start thinking, oh,

10:57

poor mine at all, Yeah, poor

10:59

little baby mine at all. You know, it's

11:02

it's trapped inside the labyrinth

11:04

and it can't get out, and you

11:06

know it's and then you start realizing

11:09

the whole family connections.

11:13

You know, the minotaur is

11:15

the son of the queen. He's

11:18

the brother of ari

11:20

Anney Arianne, who gives the thread

11:22

to theseus so that theseus can go and kill

11:24

her brother. It's not nice,

11:28

and you know it

11:30

it gets really interesting and I think really

11:32

that that's kind of my way

11:34

into the whole thing, is just this

11:37

sort of instinctive reaction against

11:39

theseus and you know, championing

11:42

the evil scary

11:44

monster.

11:46

I think that's I mean, that's right. I

11:48

also, I mean the conception

11:51

of the you know, so called scary monster is

11:53

one of my favorite stories. And the

11:56

reason I say I started this podcast because I

11:58

read it one day and I was just

12:01

like, why does no one tell the story comedically?

12:03

Like so much of Greek mytho, It's like it's never or

12:06

I mean not never now obviously, but you

12:08

know, years ago it was not presented

12:10

often as comedic. Yeah, and it

12:13

is objectively funny in so

12:15

many places where you're like, how were How is

12:17

somebody telling the story of how Pacify conceived

12:19

the Minotaur without comedy?

12:23

You know? My

12:25

My problem with that is, you know, I

12:28

always I always wonder how

12:30

that conversation went, you

12:32

know, between pacified and Daedalus

12:36

who is having to build

12:41

you think, how how did how did

12:43

you broach that subject?

12:45

Yep, no, I've theorized on that a lot, in

12:48

a really in fun ways, because

12:50

you know, he had to at this point where

12:52

where to believe he was a prisoner, you

12:56

know. And and but

12:59

yeah, it's like, okay, so I have these urges,

13:02

they're not really my own, like a god gave them to

13:04

me. You know, that's its own problem.

13:06

But I really need you to create this

13:09

thing for me, Like, I just need to make this happen. And

13:11

I know you can do it and go

13:13

for it. And then, of course, though you have to

13:15

imagine as much as that conversation was deeply

13:17

awkward, Dadlus like took

13:21

the recommendation and he went

13:23

for it hard. Hello, And

13:25

I mean, you know, I've.

13:27

Been a designer of chess sets,

13:29

you know, I know how detailed you have

13:32

to be to do the blueprints from a

13:34

model or something. And

13:37

yeah, I know, just I

13:39

have trouble with the process.

13:42

Just yeah,

13:44

yeah, it's a difficult one.

13:48

But I actually, you know, Dadalus is one of

13:50

those characters that I just I really

13:52

do find fascinating because he

13:55

pops up all over the place doing

13:57

various things. You know, it's like

14:00

anybody needs a genius craftsman.

14:02

Here you go, here's Dadalus. It's like,

14:05

you know, every time you need a profit, you can

14:07

just pull in tyresearch. You

14:10

know, they just pop up randomly in

14:12

various different stories, and it's

14:15

time. It's

14:17

like recurring characters in a TV

14:19

show. So you know, it's I think

14:22

Daedalus is fascinating

14:25

because he gets roped

14:27

into so much stuff. You

14:29

know, there's that, there's the Labyrinth,

14:32

there's there's his own

14:34

story of the wings, but you

14:37

know it has all sorts of complications

14:39

that you read OVID and you've got the story

14:41

of Perdix and you know

14:43

how Daedalus was really

14:46

maybe a bit of a creep actually, and

14:49

well that's not really surprising since you know most

14:51

people are in Greek myth, but you

14:54

know you've got and then you come

14:57

up with with weird and random

14:59

little references in very strange

15:01

places, Like there's a bit in Plato's

15:04

Mino where Socrates

15:08

is tak looking to this this slightly

15:10

dim country boy called Mino,

15:13

and he's winding him up

15:15

a little bit, and he's talking about

15:17

the difference between knowledge and true

15:19

opinion, and he's trying to get

15:21

Mino to well, he's

15:24

doing his usual thing and being really annoying

15:26

and and and he says, the difference

15:28

between knowledge and

15:31

true opinion is it's

15:33

like Daedalus's statues. You

15:36

don't have any of those up in Thessaly,

15:38

do you, Mino. And Mino's like, oh

15:40

what, And you say, oh, yeah, we have these

15:43

statues and they were

15:45

made by Daedalus. And you know, if

15:47

you don't change them down, they just walk

15:49

off. And so, you know,

15:52

true opinion is like that. You know, if you don't

15:54

if you don't pin it down with facts, it just

15:56

it just wanders off. It's just like you

15:58

know, these walking statues that we

16:01

have here in Athens.

16:04

You know, Dadalus is like this, this weird

16:06

kind of moveable punchline and

16:08

of random jokes that just pops

16:11

up in the middle of philosophical

16:13

text is very strange.

16:15

It's just that I've not read a

16:17

lot of Plato. Thankfully, I would say I'm

16:19

fine with it. Yeah, but

16:22

it just makes me think of like a

16:25

story like that. And and

16:28

then also you know, connecting it to the

16:30

way people believe Atlantis based on Plato's

16:32

nonsense is I'm just like he clearly

16:34

wasn't serious and everything he wrote, like

16:36

why why do you believe that one?

16:42

That one is endlessly fascinating?

16:44

Yes, I'm never over it.

16:46

It's like my one of my bigger things these days.

16:48

It's like, how did this become what

16:51

it has become? But how did so?

16:53

How did you get deeper into the Oh? I

16:55

wasn't even doing this on purpose, but I'm going to do it again as.

16:57

If I was.

16:58

How did how did you get deeper into the labyrinth?

17:01

That was?

17:02

Thank you.

17:04

Do my best, brilliant Yeah,

17:07

well, okay, it's complicated.

17:10

You up for a complicated story, please?

17:12

Yeah?

17:12

It goes on a bit.

17:17

Yeah, yeah, the labyrinth does.

17:19

Yeah.

17:19

Well that's the thing. And you know it is

17:21

confusing and complex

17:24

and you can get lost in it, which is pretty

17:26

much you know what I do when I start talking. So

17:29

this we too, This could go anywhere.

17:33

So I was doing all this stuff teaching

17:35

myth to I teach,

17:38

I teach adults. I teach distance

17:40

learners who come to education

17:43

maybe late. So I

17:46

teach frankly, people who

17:48

are just really really enthusiastic.

17:50

Ah, that's yeah, that's lovely.

17:52

It's amazing. My students are

17:55

just the best. They're they're fabulous and

17:57

I learned so much from them, and they're

17:59

great fun because they want to do stuff

18:01

and they want to know stuff, and you know, it's

18:04

it's great. So I was doing

18:06

that, and then I was going

18:08

through stuff at at

18:10

home because my little boy was

18:12

diagnosed with autism and

18:16

I was looking at his behavior and I was kind

18:18

of thinking, yeah, I know, he's diagnosed

18:20

with autism, but he seems kind

18:22

of normal to me. And then,

18:24

you know, eventually I kind of I twigged

18:27

that maybe that meant that I was autistic

18:30

as well. So it

18:32

took me a while. It took me a while to work that one

18:34

out, but I got there in the end. And

18:37

so I went through the diagnostic

18:39

process and got diagnosed, and they pretty

18:41

much said, well, yes, did

18:44

you not notice. So, you

18:48

know, after I picked myself up after

18:50

that one and thought, yeah, I'm really not as

18:53

smart as I thought I was. I got into

18:55

that and I started reading lots about

18:57

it because that's what I do, and

19:00

you know, finding out all sorts of things, and honestly,

19:04

social media is just the best

19:06

for finding out stuff, you know, it's

19:08

it's far better than all the books

19:11

and training courses and everything out there because people

19:13

just tell it like it.

19:14

Is and their own experiences

19:16

exactly. Yeah, it's it's mind

19:19

boggling just to I

19:21

recently discovered that obviously I have ADHD

19:24

and just had never realized it, and like

19:26

you just by reading everyone's constant

19:29

talking about it, and I'm like, oh, yeah,

19:33

that's why I have so much trouble doing like anything

19:36

without a hard and fast deadline exactly.

19:39

Yeah.

19:40

So you know, social media's amazing.

19:42

Yeah, and then through all of that, and you know, it

19:44

was a learning process and you

19:46

know, so it's doing that and

19:49

going through that and learning things

19:51

about that. And I was teaching them myth

19:53

and doing that, and then then

19:55

I stumbled across this group

19:58

called a claim and there are

20:00

a group of scholars who around

20:03

the world who are doing

20:05

things to do with autism and classical

20:08

myth and yeah,

20:10

it's really interesting stuff. And it was

20:13

like, you know, it's like they're in front

20:15

of me like a neon sign, going

20:17

notice me, notice me. So I

20:21

kind of said to them, you know, can

20:23

I join? And I think there

20:26

would probably have been begging if

20:28

they hadn't said yes, but they

20:30

did, so you know, I joined them

20:32

and started following what they were doing,

20:34

and you know, they do lots

20:37

of really interesting stuff. There's different projects

20:39

going on in different countries and

20:42

Susan DC at Roehampton in the UK,

20:44

she's doing a thing where

20:46

she works with kids using an

20:49

image of the choice

20:51

of Heracles and she gives

20:53

the kids this image and she explains

20:55

it and she gets them to talk through

20:58

the different choices and imagine

21:00

themselves in different positions,

21:03

and you know, it's a way of

21:05

thinking through things which is kind of

21:07

separate from the world and

21:10

it sort of takes the edge

21:12

off it, you know, the fear

21:15

that comes with real world situations

21:17

if you struggle with those. It's

21:20

a way of making it remote but still

21:22

working through the problems. So

21:24

that was really interesting. And then there's

21:27

this other project based in Israel where

21:30

they do essentially the same sort

21:32

of thing, but using lots of different stories

21:34

of heroes, so Perseus

21:37

and Heracles and

21:39

Theseus and you know, the minut Or and

21:41

all of that, and it's working

21:44

through ideas

21:46

around fear and choices

21:49

and you know, dealing with situations

21:51

where you're lost or you don't know what

21:53

to do or it's

21:55

a lot to do with processing

21:58

emotions, which for a lot

22:00

of autistic kids is a real rollercoaster

22:03

of you know, how do you learn to deal

22:05

with these things? And so they're

22:08

using to do that, and

22:10

I thought, wow, this is just this

22:13

is just amazing stuff. And at

22:15

the same time, I was reading

22:18

novels because I was doing that

22:21

thing where you think, you know, I've got to

22:23

read something that's not classics to

22:25

get my head in a healthier space,

22:28

because you know, I'm starting to see

22:30

things when I go to sleep and it's not good.

22:34

Counds like my life.

22:35

Yeah, and so you know, I don't know, no read

22:37

something different. I'm gonna I'm gonna sit down. I can

22:39

read novels. I'm just you know, healthier headspace.

22:42

So I was reading this novel called Pyreneesy

22:46

by Susannah Clark, and

22:48

it's nothing to do with classics. It's like a fantasy

22:51

sort of novel. And

22:54

the main character, Pyreneesy, he

22:57

is in a world which

22:59

is kind of is very surreal.

23:01

It's like loads and loads of intersecting

23:04

hallways with statues in them, and

23:06

sometimes they flood, and he's on his own and

23:08

he's got a notebook, and he writes things

23:10

in his notebook, and he goes on wonders,

23:13

and he makes charts and he does like tied

23:15

charts, and he figures out the migration

23:17

of the birds, and he writes about

23:19

all the statues that he comes across,

23:22

and you know, he's kind

23:24

of having a whale of a time. But he's on his own.

23:26

He doesn't know where he comes from. There's

23:28

a mysterious man who keeps popping up and

23:31

he doesn't know where he comes from either, but

23:33

he sort of isn't really bothered, and

23:36

he's just kind of, you know, he's in this really

23:38

strange situation, but it's all good

23:41

because he's making friends with the statues and

23:43

sometimes he has a chat with the birds, and

23:46

it's just such a nice novel.

23:49

And I'm reading this and I'm thinking, you

23:51

know, if I ended up

23:53

in a world like that, I would probably

23:55

do the same thing. I'd probably have a

23:57

notebook, I'd be wandering around, I'd

24:00

be talking to the birds, I'd be making

24:02

friends with them, I'd be doing all that. And

24:05

you know, so I'm reading that and I'm thinking, yeah, but

24:07

there's something really weird about this. There's something

24:09

that I'm missing. I'm

24:12

just there's a connection there that's

24:14

driving me mad, and I just don't know what it is. And

24:16

then I read an interview where

24:19

Susana Clark said that one of her inspirations

24:22

was well C. S. Lewis, and

24:24

also a story by the Argentinian

24:27

writer Barhes and

24:29

the story by Borjas is called the

24:32

House of a Sterion, and

24:34

I thought, there's something familiar about that,

24:36

there's something, there's something

24:38

niggling at me there. So I got

24:41

the book. I got the book in translation, because

24:43

you know, my language

24:45

is limited, and it's only

24:48

like a three page story, and

24:50

it's about this character called

24:52

a Stereon who is in

24:54

this house and the house's

24:57

loads of intersecting hallways, and

25:01

he doesn't go out of his house because people

25:03

look at him funny, and he's scared

25:05

of them because they have really strange flat

25:08

faces, and he doesn't

25:10

really like to be looked at, and so

25:12

he likes to stay in his house, and

25:15

he likes the way the hallways all connect,

25:18

and he's very proud of the fact that his house

25:20

doesn't have any furniture in it. And

25:23

so it's like clues being dropped

25:25

all the way through the story about what's

25:27

actually going on, and you know,

25:30

sometimes people come to visit him, and

25:32

you know, he runs

25:34

to meet them and then they end up

25:37

on the ground, and you know, it's

25:40

all very you know, it's just three

25:42

pages, but it's like a process

25:44

of figuring out what it is that's happening.

25:47

And then of course,

25:50

you know there are other clues like

25:52

he's the son of a queen and

25:55

he's all alone and he's

25:59

expecting his redeemer to come

26:01

along someday and save him. And

26:05

then at the very end there's just

26:07

a comment and it says, you know, theseus

26:09

said to Ariadne, the Minotur

26:11

didn't even put up a fight. Oh

26:14

my god, I know, yeah,

26:19

yeah, I I may have

26:21

cried a bit.

26:22

Now, like chills just now and oh you've told

26:24

me so.

26:25

Oh it's terrible, but you know, it's but

26:28

the description of him running

26:30

through his his labyrinth and

26:33

he's so happy, and he's jumping

26:35

out from around corners, and he's

26:38

he's playing games with himself and he's

26:40

imagining the other astereon

26:43

and he's imagining a little chat with him

26:45

and saying, I will show you this pool

26:48

and I will show you what is around this corner

26:50

and sometimes I will get it wrong and we will laugh

26:53

together and it's just.

26:56

And so.

26:58

I read that after I read Pirineesy,

27:00

and I thought, you know,

27:03

this is what's bothering

27:05

me about the identification

27:08

with autistic people and heroes.

27:10

It's very empowering, and it's

27:13

it's great to suggest that

27:15

you know, there's there's this this position

27:17

that they can be in, which is a position of strength

27:19

where you know they can influence things and change

27:22

things. But I thought, you know, for myself,

27:24

as an autistic person, I'm so

27:27

drawn to the monster. I'm drawn

27:29

to the minotaur in this in this

27:31

labyrinth, who is pottering around

27:33

all by himself and having a

27:36

great time doing it, and you

27:38

know, is kind of looked at in

27:40

a strange way by the rest of the world.

27:43

And I thought, you know, once

27:46

you get into that, there's

27:48

a lot of other connections that you can

27:51

draw out. And I think

27:53

it comes back to this whole thing that

27:56

I was talking about with the baby

27:58

minotaur in the the Etruscan

28:00

pottery. You know, this sense that

28:03

the myth in its ancient

28:06

forms is kind of flippable. You

28:08

know, you've got the mine at all, big, scary,

28:10

nasty, monster, Theseus great hero, but

28:13

then you've got the flip side of

28:15

you know, the monster is actually

28:17

really a child

28:20

of a family. The family lock him

28:22

up, they betray him, they cause his

28:25

death, they keep him confined,

28:27

so he has to kill people to survive. It's

28:30

you know, there's there's a whole other way

28:33

of looking at it that exists

28:36

in the ancient sources, and

28:39

once you start doing that, I think

28:42

that's where it gets really interesting because there's so many

28:44

other elements to

28:46

to draw out of it. Sorry, I'm

28:48

just rambling.

28:51

This is my favorite thing about the Conversation episodes

28:53

is when I can get people to just ramble on. And

28:56

that's so it's truly

28:58

like it's when I just sit here with my big smile and

29:00

like, oh I love all of this no,

29:04

and I'm just sort of taking it all in. And

29:06

I think that's become one of my favorite

29:09

things to do, is to look at things from

29:11

the other side. Granted not all things, like I'm you

29:13

know, I'm not going to take a story of Theseus and try

29:15

to like make it seem good, but that's

29:17

not really the other side of anything. But I just

29:19

keep you know, as you talk about this more and more

29:21

and seeing that other the

29:23

flipping of it is I hear

29:26

Medusa's story in my head, and right, it's

29:28

exactly the same, where it's like we

29:31

have been sort of conditioned to

29:33

see this version of the story

29:35

where it is a heroic act to kill

29:38

the monster because

29:40

of all of these obvious things that not

29:42

even all of these obvious things, because of the obvious fact

29:44

that monsters must be killed, and no other real

29:47

obvious anything. And so if you just,

29:50

yeah, you take it on its head, and it's like, well, what if

29:53

it's just an odd creature?

29:55

What if it's just like not one hundred

29:57

percent quote unquote normal, and that's

29:59

all that makes it a monster? And I mean, granted,

30:02

you know its top half bowl is a little

30:04

bit monstrous, but not only kind of like

30:06

yeah, and same with you know, snakes for hair and

30:08

people to stone. Sure, a little

30:10

bit monstrous. Does that mean they deserve to be

30:12

killed?

30:13

No?

30:13

What proof do we have that they deserve to be killed?

30:16

I don't know.

30:17

And yeah, you know, I think that there's

30:19

lots of things about that that I

30:21

find really interesting. You

30:23

know, this this notion of

30:26

perceiving something as a

30:28

monster because it

30:30

is maybe a hybrid or

30:33

a creature that's being put in a particular

30:35

position. It's like names.

30:38

I mean, I'm talking about Borjes's

30:40

house of Asterion, and it did

30:43

take me a while. I mean, I'm supposed to know myth,

30:46

but it took me a while to place the

30:48

name Astereon. And you

30:50

know, that's the name that's given in some

30:52

of the ancient sources.

30:55

B quote it means like stary eyed

30:57

or something.

30:57

Erectly Apollodorus

31:00

who mentions that the Minotor's name

31:02

is Asterion, and it's a lovely

31:05

name. I mean, it's something to

31:07

do with the star. You know. Some

31:09

people say, you know, starry, or

31:12

some people translate as ruler of

31:14

the stars or something, whatever

31:16

the case. It's just a nice name.

31:18

It's unrelated to his so

31:21

called monstrosity. It's unrelated to anything

31:23

except yeah, the stars. It is a beautiful

31:25

name, and I think it's sometimes a stereonystereos

31:27

like it's regardless, Yeah,

31:30

it's it's starry. It's just it's

31:32

just a nice name.

31:33

It's just so nice. And then you have

31:35

the fact that Asterion is

31:38

called the Minotaur, which is the bull

31:40

of Minos. You know, King

31:42

Minos traps him in the

31:44

labyrinth which is custom built

31:47

to you know, have this monster at

31:49

its center, and he makes him the

31:51

minotaur.

31:53

Well, he also makes the mistakes

31:55

that lead to pacifate,

31:58

like unwillingly conceiving

32:01

it, like it's all Minus's faulty,

32:03

is the bad guy in all of it.

32:05

It's horrible.

32:35

I think it's something that people will they'll read

32:37

he Siod and they'll come across Kalan ka Khan

32:39

or beautiful evil as it's usually translated.

32:41

Obviously, Natalie Haynes has shown an

32:44

entirely different light on it, which is

32:46

so cool. But

32:49

it's something that people are reading he Siod and they'll

32:51

just be like, okay, cool, Like okay, she's

32:53

beautiful and evil. That's great because

32:56

a lot of people going into Heasiod at

32:58

least now already know the myth of Pandora,

33:00

like she has the box pithoy.

33:03

Of course.

33:05

Not all box. I definitely

33:07

miss jar.

33:09

It's a nice jar.

33:10

It's a lovely Greek jar, and

33:12

they'll go, oh, yeah, she's going to release all the evils.

33:14

That's that's great, and leave the other one

33:17

in the jar, usually depicted as a butterfly,

33:19

you know, m that's what modern

33:22

things kind of draw it as, which

33:24

I find interestingly weird.

33:25

But it is a butterfly, all

33:28

right, it's

33:30

cute, but I don't really get it. But you know, no, I

33:33

yeah, I agree, it's pretty, I'm sure, but I

33:35

don't really see the reference.

33:36

Point absolutely, So

33:38

I think people just go across it and they go Okay,

33:40

cool, and just move on and forget

33:43

entirely about it. But I saw it

33:45

and I thought, oh, that's a really interesting

33:47

concept. So I decided

33:49

to go into it a bit, and I

33:51

discovered like a whole plethora

33:54

of scholarship and just

33:57

interesting takes on it. Obviously

33:59

most of them focus on Pandora.

34:03

But then I saw it in

34:05

another book, Ruby Blondell's

34:07

book on hell or it was

34:09

Bethany Hughes's book on Helen.

34:12

Someone had said that

34:15

Helena Troy was also a klonkakon,

34:18

and I went, okay, I've read about that before.

34:20

I went that's a really interesting take. And

34:22

I love Helen of Troy. I am a Helen of Troy

34:25

enthusiast. I love her. I

34:27

think she's brilliant. People disagree.

34:31

I think she's fascinating. I definitely want to I

34:33

think she do more study on her.

34:34

Absolutely absolutely, because she's so cool.

34:37

Yeah, And I was just

34:39

like, this is an angle because

34:41

it's very briefly mentioned. I would

34:44

argue like, there's no I haven't

34:46

seen like a dedicated paper on it before.

34:48

So I was like, I want to do that. I'm going to do

34:51

that.

34:52

And I read into it and I

34:55

saw like lots of arguments for why

34:57

and you have to define what kalon kakon is.

35:00

Especially.

35:00

I obviously took the root of beautiful evil

35:03

because I think that one seemed the most

35:05

enticing to me. And

35:07

at the time I had and actually read Pandora's Juria

35:09

read that about a halfway

35:12

through and I was like, oh,

35:14

no, another angle. Yeah,

35:18

So I looked into it and

35:21

I was just a standard at the gap

35:24

almost that had been left.

35:27

So I just endeavored to look into it even more.

35:29

But I found that you can apply it to a

35:31

good few things. You've got Pandora,

35:34

obviously, who was the blueprint

35:36

really, and then you've got Helen, who was

35:38

the natural follow up for

35:41

Pandora really because very

35:43

beautiful and

35:45

yet caused so much strife and

35:47

harm and evil as it was.

35:51

But then you've got women like Medea,

35:56

and also you've got Circe to

35:58

an extent or turkey, depending

36:01

on your pronunciation. I found that you

36:03

could apply it to metals also, mainly

36:05

necklaces, and specifically the metal

36:07

of gold, because that's seen

36:09

as Aphrodite's metal, which

36:12

I found really interesting. I'm

36:14

not sure where that exactly originated

36:17

from, but one of the ones I found

36:19

really interested was in the Homeric Hymn

36:21

to Aphrodite, and it

36:24

describes.

36:24

Her she was being dressed by

36:27

the Oh yes, Hora.

36:30

Yeah, I think

36:32

it's all right, it's the seasons. They're like they're

36:34

dressing her so that she can go meet up with

36:36

Anchises because Zeus

36:39

and a good stuff.

36:41

Of course, thanks Zeus. So

36:45

the Susan's addressing her and she's

36:47

just dripping with gold. She's

36:49

got gold in her head, she's got gold ear

36:51

rings, and she's got gold.

36:54

The sentence that.

36:55

Really jumped out to me was

36:57

that they'd put it right

36:59

on her breasts, so they've

37:02

gon't.

37:02

They're like painting her almost, yeah.

37:06

Like that, so they're like on

37:08

her immortal head. They put a finely

37:10

wrought diadem, a beautiful gold

37:12

one, and in her pierced ear lobes

37:15

flowers of aricale I'm assuming

37:17

that means orchids and precious gold

37:19

about her tender throat and white breasts.

37:22

They decked her in a golden necklaces,

37:25

and I just love

37:27

that she is dripping in gold.

37:29

They've gone right, I'm going to put it right on

37:31

her chest and on her tender neck,

37:34

and it just it's very seductive,

37:37

and I think that was absolutely the intention.

37:39

Obviously, she's going for a meetup,

37:44

metup with the mortal, Yes,

37:47

with immortal How shameful of

37:49

course for a woman, of course, not for

37:51

the men. No, no, not for zeus.

37:55

And that is all just

37:58

it's such beautiful imagery. But also it's

38:01

very erotic, and

38:05

this is kind of repeated. Also, there's

38:08

another story concerning Aphrodite

38:10

in gold. So necklaces

38:13

are apparently frequent tokens

38:15

of erotic treachery, which

38:18

I didn't know before embarking on this.

38:20

I read it and I was like, oh, that sounds great, and

38:24

I had a look into it. I was like, oh, yeah, that's actually

38:26

a really good point. So Aphrodite

38:29

had given to Helen this

38:31

necklace, which was very gorgeous.

38:33

Of course, it was a gift from the goddess of

38:35

love to the most beautiful woman in the world.

38:38

So after Helen went to Troy, she didn't take it with her.

38:41

Menilaeus decided to dedicate it to a

38:43

temple, and it ended

38:45

up in the hands of this beautiful

38:48

but lustful young woman who echoed

38:51

Helen's behavior. So she

38:54

ended up falling in love with a man, a

38:56

young man. They were both unmarried, and

38:58

they ran away together. And

39:01

there's a bit of discourse on whether

39:03

that was like because of the necklace or

39:05

because of her generally, and she was attracted

39:07

to the net because of this. Yeah, but I

39:09

found it so interesting that

39:12

gold especially was used

39:14

in that story, and it's very

39:16

cool.

39:17

Okay, Now I have to ask, okay, because

39:20

you're sort of blowing my whole mind on a lot

39:22

of well it's like on this topic,

39:24

but specifically as it relates to So

39:28

I'm so curious if any

39:30

of this has come up in relation to the

39:33

necklace of Harmonia,

39:36

you know.

39:36

How much it Okay,

39:39

it would have.

39:40

Yeah, because that's like somewhat

39:43

cursed necklace depending on what you read

39:45

and from when or whatever. But it's and

39:48

she's the daughter of Aphrodite and it's given to

39:50

her from Hephaistus, and oh, my gosh, I've got

39:52

so many questions. Now, fascinating.

39:55

That's a whole little research project.

39:58

I mean, I mean, there's a

40:00

certain novel that's been in the works for like ten

40:02

years about kad Was at Harmonia and that necklace.

40:04

So now you just helped me out a little bit.

40:06

I saw you writing it down. She's

40:09

found.

40:14

Yeah, that's so interesting.

40:16

Necklaces and gold

40:18

especially is a massive thing

40:20

I think for Kalon Kakhan, and

40:22

people might be wondering why so you've got

40:24

the obvious Kalon side, the beautiful

40:26

side going oh, yes,

40:28

they're very beautiful, very seductive, very

40:30

nice. But obviously in

40:32

a lot of these stories with the Hemeric hymnta

40:35

aphrodite, obviously she

40:37

doesn't want Anchises to know that

40:39

she is the immortal goddess Aphrodite.

40:42

There is an element of deception in that,

40:46

and she's like disguising

40:49

herself as this young maiden and

40:52

it's all like a big secret. So

40:54

there's deception baked right into

40:57

that, which is much what Pandora

41:00

is like m And

41:02

you know the same with Helen's necklace, like

41:04

no one knows it has these powers

41:07

almost lurking inlyeth. If

41:09

you will not necessarily that there are powers

41:12

within the necklace, but that they're kind

41:15

of echoing Helen's behavior or Aphrodite's

41:17

lustful powers are being

41:20

kind of channeled through this. So

41:23

Pandora herself when she's being

41:26

created, obviously she's molded out of

41:28

clay or earth, depending

41:31

on which translation

41:33

you get, and then she's

41:36

dressed by goddesses and

41:38

graces and everything beautiful,

41:41

beautiful like that molded by Hephaistus

41:44

and then dressed by Athena in some

41:46

of them, so Pandora

41:48

is kind of enhanced. Athena

41:51

gifts her in Works in Days

41:53

a girdle and ornaments,

41:56

and the graces give her golden jewelry

41:58

once again that gold is coming back

42:00

up. And then she the seasons

42:02

addressing her in spring flowers and

42:05

kind of doing with perfume. I haven't looked into perfume,

42:07

but it is enough. Look at

42:10

I just didn't have the room unfortunately.

42:12

Yeah, I'm

42:15

like, oh my gosh.

42:15

Everything into links as well, so it's absolutely

42:18

fascinating.

42:19

Yeah, I love this.

42:21

Topic from theogony, which

42:23

is the one where the Kalon

42:25

Kakon is actually referenced. It's not

42:27

referenced in Works in Days

42:29

I'm really sure, but he seems to have

42:32

omitted that phrase.

42:35

And just to remind my listeners, I think too, like maybe

42:37

I'll I'm admit like my lengthy

42:40

Pandora episode in this as well, because I recently

42:42

covered Pandora and she's so interesting because

42:44

he see it covers her in both Theogony and

42:46

Works in Days in like fairly

42:48

different ways.

42:49

So it's interesting WED because I was

42:51

looking at it and I was like, these are different

42:53

people.

42:56

So yeah, to note that she it's only in the Theogony,

42:58

I think is interesting because also he's shittier to women

43:00

in Works and Days than the Theogony

43:04

for sure. That's why I say shittier.

43:08

One of my lectures in my first year said

43:11

said something rather profound about Heid. She

43:14

went, he sioed as

43:17

bright and intelligent as he was to be able

43:19

to write and publish and everything like that, was

43:22

quite a simple man, and he would be absolutely astounded

43:25

that his works were being studied

43:27

thousands of years in the future, but

43:30

he would be absolutely horrified that there

43:32

were women in the class. And

43:35

it really made me laugh and I was like, you

43:37

know what, you are absolutely right, absolutely

43:40

that guy. So in

43:43

theogeny Pandora is adorned

43:45

in silvery clothing rather than gold.

43:48

She has a highly wrought veil, it doesn't

43:50

give her an indication as to color

43:53

flower garlands once again, and a golden

43:55

headband. The golden headpand is what I really

43:57

like to focus on, because it's not all of these

44:00

gorgeous engravings. So Hefeaistus

44:02

made it once again, but

44:06

it's the scripture

44:08

of this diadem. It's

44:11

highly wrought, it's endowed

44:14

with terrible monsters,

44:17

but also these beautiful creatures,

44:20

and gracefulness is breathed

44:23

right in, which I believe is the quote.

44:25

And they're

44:28

all also endowed with speech, which I found

44:30

really interesting because I'm not sure how you endow a

44:32

headband with speech, but if you can make clay

44:34

into a woman, you.

44:35

Know I'm not.

44:39

And I really took that as a reflection

44:42

of Pandora herself. So that

44:45

this is this headband is something that's been

44:47

molded and wrought

44:50

by Hephaistus, and it's it's

44:52

been created by him, such

44:54

as Pandora has been. And

44:57

then the breath

44:59

and the speech and everything has and

45:01

her gracefulness has been breathed in,

45:03

and it's all been gifts from the gods, so

45:06

Pandora's name actually trums

45:08

relates to all gifts in

45:11

according to some people. I don't study

45:13

ancient Greek language, so I can't check

45:16

that myself, but this is what I've read,

45:19

and this is what I say. I

45:22

really enjoyed the duplicity in

45:26

the Diadem and Pandora herself

45:29

because I just I just found it so interesting

45:31

that they kind of did the same things. So

45:34

you've got this terrible monster that's

45:37

kind of smooth though with the gracefulness

45:40

much like Pandora, which really

45:42

echoes he'sialed sentiment as

45:45

Pandora being a kal on

45:47

Cacon.

45:48

Yeah. Well, and what I find so interesting

45:50

about it, and this is, you know, I'm

45:53

my main sort of reference point

45:55

for calon kakon was having read it in Pandora's

45:57

jar, So I'll preface with that, but I

46:00

find it so interesting the idea that it can mean

46:03

ugly as well, because

46:06

you know what Natalie Haynes then sort

46:09

of clarified with that is that there two

46:12

equally descriptive words

46:14

about more visual descriptive

46:17

versus you know, like

46:20

Pandora being beautiful ugly is

46:22

so different from her being beautiful evil

46:25

you know, evil is like she thinks

46:27

about it. She does this on purpose. She you

46:29

know, releases those evils

46:31

on purpose. And of course, you know, I think

46:33

he Seed would probably want to translate it as beautiful,

46:36

beautiful evil, right, I.

46:37

Think he would mind.

46:38

I don't think so. But at the same time, if you

46:40

actually, like are looking at her story, like, she

46:43

doesn't have any agency in it. She

46:45

doesn't like think like all

46:48

the modern interpretations of Pandora suggest

46:50

that or like, you know, I should say pop culture,

46:52

you know, like not academic, but you know, the

46:54

modern understanding of her is like, oh,

46:56

yeah, she was this curious woman, like she was

46:58

the eve. She sought to

47:01

look in and free the evils, like

47:03

she did it because of her own feminine

47:05

curiosity, right, Whereas if you read

47:07

the sourcing like no, like

47:10

it doesn't.

47:12

Yes, Hermes

47:14

was the one who instilled this,

47:17

uh. I think they call it a bitch's.

47:20

Mind, a name like

47:24

that was a man.

47:27

Like while instill

47:29

curiosity, curiosity

47:33

isn't inherently a bad thing, it was

47:35

now Hermes that instilled what

47:37

they would consider to be the negative trait.

47:40

The trickster God did those you

47:42

know, like, yeah, it's

47:44

so interesting and really yeah, Like she doesn't choose

47:47

to open it. She doesn't say like I'm going to function up

47:49

or I'm going to ignore instructions all

47:51

these things. She just opens it

47:53

or in some cases it just it

47:55

opens. Like whether or not she even does it, she's

47:58

just there and it was a gift to her. So she

48:00

gets the blame and this really fascinating way of

48:02

Yeah, I think looking at it is as beautiful

48:04

ugly as like it's just amazing. You're like, oh, yeah,

48:06

right, it's just like it's imagery

48:09

placed upon her versus something that she does.

48:12

But I mean, even just like looking at it as beautiful

48:14

evil is still just equally fascinating, especially

48:16

when you look at he sid because he really like he

48:19

lets it all really hang out when it comes

48:21

to the two stories of Pandora. But like

48:23

how he sees with I think that's Hesiod

48:26

for you.

48:27

Oh my god, there's a

48:29

there's another bit of it that I always

48:32

find really interesting. So she's

48:35

described as a precipitous trap.

48:39

As well. She is.

48:40

This is what her destiny is. She is

48:42

there to recavoc because

48:45

Prometheus stole the fire and

48:47

Zeus wasn't too pleased about it because Zeo's

48:49

doesn't get his own way, ad shit

48:52

happens. He's

48:54

that could spoil Toddler.

48:56

I don't know, we don't

48:58

know how I feel about you.

49:00

So like her whole thing was

49:02

she was meant to be a curse. That's

49:04

what she's described as. The first curse is

49:06

Pandora, and the second curse,

49:09

in he Stiard, is the

49:11

avoidance of marriage and children.

49:14

So men who don't marry

49:17

these horrific women that

49:20

Zeus and the gods have created

49:22

have inflicted their own curse upon themselves by

49:25

not doing that. So your cursed either

49:27

way because of women, according

49:30

to according to he Steard,

49:33

but we have to remember whose actions led to this.

49:35

It's Prometheus, Like we

49:37

can't blame it all on Pandora.

49:38

She was just molded. It wasn't her fault.

49:41

And it's also just like the idea of Zeus

49:43

being a vindictive asshole, right, like

49:45

you know, yes, as much as it is because

49:47

of what Prometheus did. Like if Zeus wasn't

49:50

such a shit who needed

49:52

to have his way all the time, wouldn't

49:54

have caud any trouble either.

49:56

Absolutely, But I

49:58

just I love that she is the blueprint

50:00

for women also, so

50:03

she's the one that everything is based upon.

50:06

It's not necessarily based upon the gods. Is

50:08

the midge of the gods. So we know that she is absolutely

50:10

bloody gorgeous because by

50:13

definition, apart from the furies, of

50:15

course, all goddesses are gorgeous

50:19

as far as it goes, So

50:22

we know she's gorgeous. But on

50:24

the inside, it's this rotten interior.

50:27

And this this idea carries

50:29

on and on and on and on, and

50:31

this idea of molding your wife, of course,

50:34

also continues in Ischomicus'

50:37

is not Ischomicuss,

50:39

but he is the man speaking in Economicus.

50:41

I believe it's by Xenophon. He

50:44

talks about how Ischomicus molds

50:46

his way. He's him having a conversation with Socrates,

50:49

of course, and Socrates is talking to

50:51

Iscomicus, and he's talk and Ischomiskus

50:53

is telling him how he molded his

50:56

very very young wife, like

50:59

he wanted her to know as little

51:01

as possible, which creeps

51:04

me out. In imagine,

51:07

I can't even just how much I hate it, but

51:10

like he's like, I wanted her to know as little as

51:12

possible. And then one day she came,

51:15

she came, she came to me when I come home

51:17

from I guess I think he was working in

51:19

the fields.

51:21

One day I.

51:21

Came home and she was wearing she'd

51:24

rouged her cheeks, and she'd whitened her

51:26

face, and she'd

51:29

she'd altered her height by wearing shoes

51:31

with blocks in them. And he was like,

51:34

what is this deception? Do

51:36

you think that as husband and wife

51:38

we should deceive each other? This

51:40

is terrible, terrible, awful.

51:43

I prefer you as plain as possible,

51:46

essentially, is what he's saying. He's like, no, I

51:48

don't like you to make up other men or find you hot,

51:50

Like I don't like that.

51:51

No, the

51:53

way you can see that mentality in

51:56

some modern mm hmm, yeah,

52:00

so many feelings, there.

52:02

So many feelings, but

52:05

like this idea that this exterior

52:07

of beauty because obviously

52:10

this this young wife was trying

52:12

to beautify herself. And she says, oh, but

52:14

you know I did this for you, and he's like, I don't

52:16

care. In

52:18

more words, of course, he's trying to be very charming

52:20

about it, because intro Greek

52:22

men like to big themselves

52:24

up, I think, especially in a socratic

52:27

conversation, it's

52:30

got to be pretty of course, so

52:35

she's like, oh, I did this for you, and he's

52:37

like, I don't want you to, because

52:39

the more beautiful you are, the more attention you're attractive,

52:41

and the more havoc will be brought, which

52:43

is exactly kind of what happens with Pandora.

52:47

She's beautiful and attracts a lot of attention from

52:49

Epimetheus, bless him,

52:52

the god of afterthought. I

52:55

feel very bad for that man. He's

52:59

the only innocent one. I'm decided.

53:02

I can see that. Yeah, I mean he really

53:04

had no control over it, Like he is literally

53:07

the god of afterthought.

53:11

So you get that with Pandora, where

53:13

like she's beautiful but concealing something, much

53:16

like this wife is considered to be Biostomachus.

53:18

But then you have Helen, who is

53:21

so beautiful she causes at

53:23

the time in quotation

53:26

marks of course, the biggest war

53:28

that the world had ever seen. Like

53:33

it puts out this idea that being

53:35

pretty or beautiful or considered

53:38

like above average is a lot

53:40

of trouble. So

53:43

in ancient Greece, in

53:45

more kind of a classical period, when the citizenship

53:48

law by Pericles came about, a

53:50

lot of women were meant to stay inside, away

53:52

from men because if they went outside

53:55

it would cause trouble because they're beautiful. And

53:57

you see this in Lysias

54:00

one where this

54:03

wife goes to a funeral

54:06

and this man sees her. Thisfe

54:08

is young, she's married, she's had a baby

54:11

with her husband, and Lucias

54:13

makes that very very clear that they've

54:15

already had the baby because of the citizenship.

54:18

How the citizenship law works, because otherwise

54:20

the child would be considered illegitimate and

54:22

would not be able to inherit property once

54:24

the father died. And it's

54:26

like she went to a funeral, she was in mourning, and

54:29

yet still a man was attracted to her

54:31

and caused trouble. So it reinforces

54:33

that women should be locked away kind

54:36

of message, which is just so one

54:39

wrong, like it's

54:42

wrong for one.

54:43

Very classically Athenian.

54:45

Yeah, it's very Athenian. But it's

54:47

so interesting in how all

54:49

of this just interlinks.

54:52

Yeah, that's fascinating, I mean yeah, because you know,

54:54

they cause so much trouble if they're just out

54:56

and about being good looking,

55:00

how dare they right?

55:01

The nerve?

55:03

The nerve?

55:05

Yeah, that's I mean, so I

55:09

because I've sort of now developed this love

55:11

of this idea of the Beautiful

55:13

Evil, Beautiful Ugly. I named

55:16

a cocktail in my new Cocktails book,

55:18

and I'll reveal it now in this episode.

55:21

Oh so Blessed and

55:25

Knowledge, and

55:27

I did something weird with it, you know, So I'm

55:29

like, the more I listen, I'm kind of like, I kind of I'm

55:31

curious about what I did and how it'll be.

55:34

I mean, it's a cocktail, it doesn't matter. But so

55:36

I chose to go with Beautiful Ugly

55:38

for Medusa, Oh

55:41

yes, because I thought it was just an

55:43

interesting way of addressing you

55:45

know, obviously, I am me and

55:48

this is my world. So if I'm going

55:50

to have a Medusa cocktail, like, it's going

55:52

to address the fact that, like she is deeply

55:54

misunderstood and pop culture representation

55:56

is completely wrong and all these different things. So

55:59

I use Beautiful Ugly to kind of go

56:01

with that and suggest that you

56:03

know, she, like her monstrosity is

56:06

questionable. I would argue, it's

56:08

very like I think it's

56:10

pretty unclear. Like we have, you know, we have a lot

56:13

of gorgon imagery that often

56:15

it's not named Medusa until unless

56:17

when it just looks like a gorgon. And I find

56:19

that so fascinating. She's the only mortal one.

56:22

You know, there's so many things, but

56:24

I decided that it sort of suited

56:26

her when it comes to taking

56:29

her story back from Perseus of like, she

56:32

is a beautiful ugly she is kind of she's

56:35

just sort of all things, but none of them

56:37

required her to be killed by Perseus.

56:39

That was, you know, purely exactly.

56:43

It was one hundred percent just because like Polydectes

56:46

wanted Perseus killed and he was going to do it

56:48

by having him, you know, die trying

56:50

to kill Medusa. But like it's

56:53

just I, you know, I will take it upon myself to constantly

56:56

push back against the idea that she was deserving

56:59

of death in any way. And I just, yeah,

57:02

I don't know. I suppose using beautiful Evil

57:04

was an interesting way to do that. But then because

57:06

of the layout of my book,

57:09

I think I'm pretty sure the very

57:11

next cocktail, it's like a section later,

57:15

but is Pandora's jar. So then I

57:17

go even deeper into the beautiful evil,

57:19

beautiful ugly. So

57:21

it's very fun. So yeah, there's a lot

57:24

of I mean, honestly,

57:26

for a book of cocktails, this is like the

57:28

most academic shit, like.

57:32

I'm going to teach people.

57:34

And like, oh yeah, the level

57:36

of nerd that is in this, Like

57:38

you know, two paragraphs for each cocktail.

57:41

You know what it's like a reward system. Read

57:43

something academic, get drunk.

57:46

Absolutely, And

57:49

I just bought the ingredients to make

57:51

the beautiful, ugly the Medusa cocktails.

57:53

I'm gonna have to make one soon. And the

57:56

the garnish for it is a

57:59

rose with the thorns on.

58:01

I love that.

58:02

No, I don't know how you can do it with a cocktail.

58:05

I don't know how you're going to drink.

58:08

Rape it just to drape it on the glass.

58:11

I think it seems a little complicated

58:13

to me, but interesting and

58:16

beautiful ugly.

58:17

I guess I love that. I love that with

58:19

my whole heart.

58:22

Helen. So I'd love to know more about, yes,

58:24

Helen hell generally and how Helen

58:27

fits in with all of this, Not that you haven't said a lot already,

58:29

but I just want to talk about Helen.

58:30

Helen is

58:32

my one true enough.

58:35

As she should be.

58:36

There's that key line about her that appears

58:39

absolutely everywhere, the face that launched

58:41

a thousand ships, And.

58:45

I mean it didn't.

58:46

There was not a thousand ships if there were

58:48

any ships actually, but I

58:51

like the line.

58:52

It's it's a good line

58:53

if.

58:55

It's glorifying her beauty

58:58

to such an extent, which I've

59:02

kind of assumed has

59:04

probably come from her Olympian paternity

59:07

rather than her mortal because

59:10

her siblings. I can't remember

59:12

which way around it is one of the twins, one

59:14

of the twin boys is from the Olympian.

59:16

I think it's castor yeah, I

59:18

feel like it always yeah, I always

59:21

question it too. It's

59:24

one of them.

59:25

But not The other two are

59:28

not described in such a way that

59:30

Helen is. Helen

59:32

is this vision of perfection.

59:35

She is described

59:38

in some cases as like a surroga Aphrodite,

59:40

which I can't be sure that Aphrodite would

59:42

have enjoyed considering everything with Psyche.

59:46

Yeah, she doesn't really allow that, but

59:48

she.

59:48

Seems to give Helen a lot of gifts, So

59:51

I think she's fine to be fair. I think

59:53

she's like, yeah, if I just pair you with

59:55

my favorite guy, Paris, it'll

59:58

be fine.

1:00:00

He almost wonder though, whether that was part of it, right,

1:00:02

like whether.

1:00:04

So much?

1:00:05

Well, yeah, or like the subtle inclusion is

1:00:07

that, like you know, the little

1:00:10

hidden pieces that AFRODDI knows it'll start

1:00:12

a war because and then she's that's

1:00:14

kind of her way of, you know, making

1:00:16

Helen not so perfect, because

1:00:18

if Helen started a war, then her beauty doesn't

1:00:20

mean as much.

1:00:21

There has to be some flaws, you know, can't

1:00:23

have it all nice and roses.

1:00:25

Yeah, sometimes you'll just start the biggest war

1:00:27

the Mediterranean have ever seen.

1:00:30

Party time. So

1:00:33

it's probably from her Olympian paternity,

1:00:35

but we can assume that it has actually

1:00:37

been enhanced by Aphrodite, as

1:00:40

in.

1:00:42

Book three.

1:00:43

I believe when she's calling

1:00:47

Helen to come back inside and meet

1:00:49

her love of Paris, she threatens

1:00:52

to take away her gifts in her favor

1:00:55

So and we do see that gods

1:00:57

and goddess is beautifying or changing their

1:00:59

appearance of the Favorites. So I believe

1:01:02

we see it in Apollonis and Argon Outica

1:01:04

with Jason, where here is like, let's

1:01:06

make him look spectacular, shooting

1:01:09

all these superpowers into him. So Paulo

1:01:14

the day.

1:01:15

Well, and Athena does it too, Odysseus too

1:01:17

right, you know, in lots of different ways disguising

1:01:20

him. But then also when she finally yeah,

1:01:23

and then she makes him look like as good as he's

1:01:25

ever looked before. Like, you know, he's

1:01:28

a handsome hunk of a man. He

1:01:30

goes from you know, hidden Odysseus and an old

1:01:33

man to like the hardest Odysseus you've ever

1:01:35

seen.

1:01:36

Absolutely so, I think you see

1:01:39

that beautification via

1:01:41

the God's interference, if

1:01:43

you will.

1:01:43

And it's not just from.

1:01:44

Her Olympian paternity. But

1:01:47

this beauty is really really hard

1:01:49

to capture, I believe, Cicero

1:01:51

notes Zeuxis. I'm

1:01:54

not sure if I'm saying his name right. He's

1:01:56

a he's a painter, and he was commissioned

1:01:58

to paint Helen of Troy. This was many

1:02:01

many years after she would have passed,

1:02:05

not necessarily suggesting that she was ever

1:02:07

alive, but right, you know, it

1:02:10

was many years after the eliab.

1:02:12

Was written, at least.

1:02:13

Yeah.

1:02:13

So he auditions all of the women in the

1:02:15

city to find Helen's likeness,

1:02:19

but none, unfortunately,

1:02:21

possess the beauty of Helen.

1:02:24

No one can.

1:02:25

Yeah, So instead he

1:02:27

picks five girls who

1:02:29

are the most beautiful or five women,

1:02:32

It's a bit unclear

1:02:35

on the exact translation. He selects

1:02:37

the five most beautiful women and uses

1:02:39

their best features. So He's like, I'll take your

1:02:41

face and then your arms, and

1:02:43

then your chest, and then your

1:02:46

bottom and then your legs, and he

1:02:48

goes that is how I will create

1:02:50

Helen and her composite. But it's

1:02:52

really interesting because her beauty. Despite

1:02:55

that we know that she is the most beautiful

1:02:58

woman in the world, we don't know

1:03:00

what she looks like.

1:03:01

No, we don't know what made her that beautiful. It's

1:03:03

just like an inherent, like indescribable

1:03:06

thing.

1:03:07

They always just scriper as like the most beautiful,

1:03:10

or stunningly like the immortal goddess,

1:03:12

or frightening like frighteningly like the immortal

1:03:15

Goddess I believe is the quote from Iliad three.

1:03:17

But they never actually say

1:03:20

why. They don't say her hair is

1:03:22

as radiant as the sun or anything. They don't say anything

1:03:24

like that, which is you get a lot

1:03:26

of epithets with other women. We

1:03:29

occasionally get like white armed or

1:03:32

you know, stuff like that, but that's very very basic.

1:03:35

It's very traditionally just like that's how they describe

1:03:37

women.

1:03:37

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's not really diverging

1:03:40

from anything. But in

1:03:42

this way, you also see Helen as quite

1:03:45

similar to Pandora because

1:03:48

she is almost molded,

1:03:50

and from the from

1:03:53

the painting, we

1:03:55

don't know what she looks like, much like Pandora.

1:03:57

We don't actually know what she looks like. We just told that she

1:03:59

is molded in the form of the immortal goddesses, much

1:04:02

like Helen's, which she's frighteningly

1:04:04

like the immortal goddess referring to

1:04:06

Aphrodite, so we can assume that they're

1:04:09

fairly similar looking. Actually they're

1:04:11

both Neither are described, their

1:04:13

actual features are not described, and

1:04:17

they are almost composite in this painting.

1:04:19

So Helen is comprised of

1:04:22

five different women, and Pandora

1:04:25

is molded to resemble

1:04:27

these goddesses. They are very

1:04:29

similar in this way. So you get the kalon

1:04:32

part, the beautiful part of Kalan Ka

1:04:34

Khan, and you see it kind

1:04:36

of coming to life. But then the interior,

1:04:39

the lustfulness of Helen, or

1:04:42

the curiosity or bitch's mind

1:04:44

or knavish nature of Pandora comes

1:04:47

through and gives you this evil that

1:04:51

is so toxic and poisonous

1:04:53

to the people around them that it destroys

1:04:58

it absolutely engulfs everything,

1:05:01

like Pandora releases all of these evils

1:05:03

into the world, and then Helen brings

1:05:05

on the biggest war

1:05:08

that the world old has seen, or at least

1:05:10

the Mediterranean.

1:05:13

Is the world well exactly.

1:05:16

So it's it's almost

1:05:20

natural that they would both be considered

1:05:22

Colomka con.

1:05:31

Yeah, there's

1:05:52

a huge There are so many different options

1:05:55

on what Toma

1:05:57

is or who and where the ethics come

1:05:59

from that you can literally

1:06:02

spend decades working on it. And

1:06:04

one of the things that's really hard to convey

1:06:07

is those of us who have strong convictions

1:06:09

have often come to those after

1:06:11

so much work that

1:06:14

it's almost impossible sometimes to

1:06:16

give all the information so someone can make a choice,

1:06:19

right, And there are a couple things

1:06:21

obscuring our ability to talk about

1:06:23

it. So I want to get to sort of the obstacles

1:06:26

for us to actually get to the truth before

1:06:28

I talk.

1:06:28

About my opinions.

1:06:30

One is the genesis

1:06:32

of the poems, and the textual transmission

1:06:35

is so complicated and tortured that

1:06:38

it's impossible to say anything certain

1:06:40

about their origins, right, And

1:06:42

I think that what happens is that people

1:06:44

on either side tend to obscure

1:06:47

the evidence.

1:06:48

So, so first thing is obstacles, right.

1:06:50

Obstacle one is the process

1:06:52

of textual transmission and origins is

1:06:55

so confused and tortured that

1:06:58

it's really hard to sort of drill back

1:07:00

to an original of any

1:07:02

time. Obstacle number two

1:07:05

is the impulse to drill back to an

1:07:07

original. The very idea

1:07:10

that there's an orr text or origin

1:07:13

is so based in non

1:07:16

archaic ideas that

1:07:20

it really not quite perverts,

1:07:22

but I'll say perverts twists

1:07:25

the way we talk about the question, right,

1:07:27

and option three sort of going along

1:07:29

with this.

1:07:31

Are cultural aesthetics.

1:07:34

We find it almost impossible to

1:07:36

conceive of what it's like

1:07:39

to be part of a non literate culture,

1:07:41

and we have this it's false dichotomy, right,

1:07:44

If you're not literate, then you're primitive.

1:07:46

If you're not writing things down and

1:07:49

your oral then things can't

1:07:51

be complex and sophisticated.

1:07:53

So those three basic

1:07:55

barriers.

1:07:56

Make it really hard to even talk about

1:07:59

the nature of Homeric poetry as we have it. All

1:08:01

Right, So I'm

1:08:03

gonna pause there. Do you want to talk about one

1:08:05

of those things? Or can I keep rolling?

1:08:07

I mean to add because that's

1:08:10

so interesting and it's something that comes up for me a lot

1:08:12

where people will ask me like, well,

1:08:15

you know, I heard this version of myth you told this version,

1:08:17

like what's the original or just the very

1:08:19

idea of original myth?

1:08:20

Right?

1:08:21

People want to use that term. They want to understand,

1:08:24

you know, I tell all these different variations

1:08:26

all you know, I've covered one version

1:08:28

three years ago and I'll redo it again and

1:08:30

it's completely different. And that's just because I found

1:08:32

more sourcing and I use primary

1:08:35

sources now in a way that when I first started,

1:08:37

I didn't know what I was doing and I just kind of

1:08:39

figured out what I figured out. And so I'm

1:08:41

constantly like navigating that with my listeners

1:08:44

of no, you don't need to figure it out, there's no

1:08:46

timeline, you don't need to figure out like why

1:08:48

something conflicts with another thing in the myth,

1:08:50

because they weren't thinking about that. It wasn't

1:08:52

a concern. It was, yeah, this oral tradition.

1:08:54

So I mean, I'm fascinated by all of

1:08:56

that, and I think, yeah, it's something

1:08:58

that I'm very familiar with.

1:09:00

Basically, so we had.

1:09:02

These cultural problems that

1:09:04

make it hard for us to understand or

1:09:08

make us deny the possibility that

1:09:11

these texts that we have

1:09:14

come out of a place where there is no

1:09:16

author and that they don't need

1:09:19

individuals to create their

1:09:21

complexity. So when we deal with the complex

1:09:23

so I'll go back to the textual transmission

1:09:26

issue. But our basic cultural

1:09:28

prejudice and belief is that to have something

1:09:30

of structure and complexity, you

1:09:32

have to have a designer behind it who

1:09:35

intended for it to be the.

1:09:36

Case, right, And

1:09:39

that.

1:09:40

Is based in a

1:09:42

cultural perspective that's deeply

1:09:45

informed by Christian views but

1:09:47

also deeply informed by individualist

1:09:50

ideas that are kind

1:09:53

of post Homeric that arise

1:09:56

with literacy. Not to say that the Homeric ethics

1:09:58

don't show an individualist ideal, but

1:10:00

what we project a lot of values

1:10:03

on searching for the author. All right, So

1:10:06

what I'll do, I'll just like talk briefly about

1:10:08

or hormonalaic theory and

1:10:10

then go back to your question about so the

1:10:12

Illa and the Odyssey being.

1:10:13

Very different, because they're all right, so.

1:10:16

Oral formulaic theory, you know. Really

1:10:19

it was anticipated by Hellenistic

1:10:21

authors. It was anticipated

1:10:24

further by Friedrich Augustus

1:10:27

Wolf, who was a Homeric

1:10:29

scholar in Germany. He published

1:10:31

something called the Prolegomia at Homerom

1:10:33

in seventeen ninety five, and

1:10:36

it really came to its head after

1:10:39

Milman Perry and Albert Lord did

1:10:41

their field studies in the Balkans

1:10:43

from Yugoslavia in

1:10:45

between the two World Wars,

1:10:48

right, and it emerges out of the place

1:10:50

where the question used to be unitarians

1:10:53

versus analysts, where people who said the

1:10:55

Homeric epics are whole and they come from

1:10:57

one author, and analysts said no,

1:10:59

they were put together by editors and

1:11:02

from a bunch of traditional narratives.

1:11:04

What happened with Perry

1:11:06

and Lloyd's.

1:11:07

Theory is that they found they show pretty

1:11:09

clearly one as Perry

1:11:12

showed, Homeric language developed

1:11:14

alongside meter, and

1:11:17

it's formulaic in the sense that you

1:11:19

can see.

1:11:20

How it's actually built together.

1:11:21

Right.

1:11:21

It is an amalgam dialect that

1:11:23

makes it possible to compose

1:11:26

in performance. So you don't

1:11:28

actually need you don't have with Homer, which

1:11:30

you have with Virgil, which is someone sitting down

1:11:32

like trying to make the meter work. So when someone

1:11:35

sang the first line of the Iliad me

1:11:39

so the first line of the Odyssey, and musa

1:11:42

polutrop on hasmol apola, they

1:11:45

didn't think.

1:11:45

Of it as individual words. Right.

1:11:47

These are themes, and these are ideas

1:11:50

in which the language that you're contemplating

1:11:52

them is ed to the meter,

1:11:55

right. So language does amazing things. And

1:11:57

part of what Milman, Perry and

1:12:00

linguists at the time didn't have access to is modern

1:12:02

linguistics, which shows that like, you

1:12:04

can put almost any restriction on a language

1:12:07

you want and it will find some way to

1:12:09

function. Like language is in a way

1:12:11

very much like viral life.

1:12:13

I've been thinking this a lot with.

1:12:14

COVID, right, which is that it adapts

1:12:17

to its environment and its needs and it

1:12:19

finds a way to work. So you can have

1:12:21

languages that have no morphological

1:12:23

tens right, instead you mark

1:12:26

tents in time with

1:12:28

lexical items with a word before now

1:12:31

after you have languages in

1:12:33

which nouns have tents,

1:12:36

right, which is hard for us to think of speaking

1:12:38

into European languages language, but you can

1:12:40

put any restriction you want in a language and make

1:12:42

it work. So the first leap that's

1:12:44

hard for people to understand is that

1:12:47

most people in Archaic Greece could

1:12:50

compose hexameter to

1:12:53

one extent or another right as

1:12:56

part of being trained into a system. And

1:12:58

we know this because the language of Homer

1:13:01

isn't just epic right, Oracles

1:13:04

use the same language. Elijack

1:13:07

poetry use the same languae, which modified

1:13:09

early philosophers composed and

1:13:12

sang in hexameter, and so

1:13:14

this was the language of authority in the

1:13:16

ancient world. And so the

1:13:20

thing that's hard for us to understand is that

1:13:22

you can actually stand

1:13:24

and recite poetry or sing it

1:13:27

without sitting down with a pen and

1:13:29

paper and figuring it all out. So

1:13:32

that's one thing. And in any system

1:13:35

poetry or art comes between

1:13:38

in the tension between sort of the

1:13:41

language you inherit from people and

1:13:43

what that particular song or piece of

1:13:45

work does.

1:13:46

With that language.

1:13:47

Right.

1:13:48

So the second thing that was.

1:13:49

Hard for people to really conceive is that

1:13:51

long poems could be performed

1:13:53

repeatedly over time.

1:13:55

Right.

1:13:55

So one thing that we find then from Lord's

1:13:57

theory, from Lord's work and the singer

1:14:00

of Tales is that you have these

1:14:02

systems, these bards, these singers in Yugoslavia

1:14:04

who sing extremely long songs based

1:14:07

on themes that they compose

1:14:09

in the moment. And so this is

1:14:11

great, and what people often do

1:14:14

is they stop at that moment

1:14:16

and they don't follow up. In the entire field

1:14:19

of oral poetics and anthropology

1:14:22

and other fields that's still developing.

1:14:24

And so one of the real dangers of

1:14:27

this type of work is assuming

1:14:29

that analogy equals truth. Right,

1:14:32

when we find an analogy,

1:14:34

it shows something's possible, it

1:14:36

doesn't show it's probable. Another

1:14:38

good example and one that always gets

1:14:41

to me, is in Rajasthan. There

1:14:43

in India, there's a traditional epic of

1:14:46

Dave Narayan, who is a cattle wrestler,

1:14:48

and the song is sung at a

1:14:51

or performed at a yearly festival

1:14:54

that lasts seven days, and

1:14:56

the singers sing from dusk

1:14:58

till dawn basically every day

1:15:01

from memory, right, or they're composing.

1:15:04

What they have actually as an aid for composition

1:15:07

is a singer has an assistant the tapestry

1:15:09

that has images of the tale that's

1:15:11

illuminated as they're performing.

1:15:14

And in the seventies and eighties, different

1:15:16

performances of this were recorded,

1:15:19

and it's longer than the Ilien in the Odyssey,

1:15:21

and the difference between

1:15:24

the performances is under five percent,

1:15:27

right, wow, under five percent

1:15:29

for seven days of singing compared

1:15:32

to the Ilia in the Odyssey, which probably

1:15:34

take around twenty four hours or less.

1:15:37

Right.

1:15:38

So, the one big challenge

1:15:40

is our belief that it's possible

1:15:43

to compose long things

1:15:46

with intricate structure in

1:15:49

performance, and that you don't have to be one person

1:15:51

doing it right. And so that

1:15:54

leads into sort of the secondary problem. If

1:15:56

it is possible that we have this long traditional

1:15:58

poem that can be sung in performance, does

1:16:01

the genius come from

1:16:04

the individual singing it or

1:16:07

the tradition? And this is where

1:16:09

I think most modern Homer is split.

1:16:12

Is that decision. Do you think

1:16:14

what's most important is the last

1:16:16

singer or the entire

1:16:18

tradition that came before. I

1:16:20

think that people choose the last singer

1:16:23

because of cultural prejudice, because it's

1:16:25

hard for us to understand that

1:16:28

communal creation can

1:16:31

actually create extremely

1:16:33

complex and rewarding works

1:16:35

of art. We just don't want to see it

1:16:38

that way. We're so prejudiced

1:16:40

against collective creation

1:16:42

and collectivity and so much towards

1:16:44

individualism that we

1:16:47

can't almost see outside of ourselves,

1:16:50

right, And so I think these cultural prejudices

1:16:53

make us accept the possibility

1:16:56

of long form

1:16:58

composition and performance as a type of art,

1:17:01

but downgrade the probability of

1:17:03

That's where the Ilia and the Odyssey came from.

1:17:05

And that's where we can think.

1:17:07

For me, the.

1:17:10

Is trying to reconstruct the audience

1:17:12

experience of it, and how important

1:17:14

it is that these poems respond to

1:17:16

audiences over time. One

1:17:18

of the things you noted is how different

1:17:20

the ilia in the Odyssey is, and the people

1:17:22

in the past have said, based on their

1:17:25

best knowledge, well, clearly this means that

1:17:27

they come from different people, right,

1:17:29

because they're assuming that differences from difference

1:17:31

in.

1:17:32

Human beings, not from theme.

1:17:34

One of the things that Albert Lord and other

1:17:36

oralists show really convincingly is

1:17:39

that theme creates diction and

1:17:41

structure. All right, the theme

1:17:43

of the Odyssey is very different from

1:17:45

the theme of the Iliad. But the one place

1:17:47

where their language gets really close

1:17:50

is in book twenty two when Odysseus

1:17:52

is killing everybody, okay,

1:17:54

And there are other ways, like there are books of the Iliad

1:17:57

in which you have really strange language.

1:17:59

The language of book ten is very different

1:18:01

from the rest of the poem. The language of book twenty

1:18:04

one, when Achilles is fighting the river

1:18:06

is also really different from the rest of

1:18:08

the poem. And you want to add something else. In the

1:18:11

funeral games for patrol

1:18:13

clists, very different language. And

1:18:15

as you can imagine, over time people

1:18:17

have said, well, these books don't belong

1:18:20

because they're not the same. And to me,

1:18:22

and you know, anybody listening to this who's on

1:18:24

the other side of the equation to

1:18:27

will object. But to me, this is very lazy

1:18:29

thinking. It's like going outside

1:18:32

looking at a tree, not liking

1:18:34

its shape and saying that's

1:18:36

not a tree, that's something different,

1:18:39

that branch needs to go.

1:18:41

Right. For me, it is the job

1:18:43

of a literary interpreter to.

1:18:45

Go to ridiculous extents to

1:18:48

try to understand a piece of art

1:18:50

in its own terms, rather

1:18:52

than insisting that they should

1:18:54

be able to change it, right, that there's

1:18:57

something wrong with it. And so then this goes

1:18:59

back again to

1:19:01

the problem of transmission.

1:19:02

Right.

1:19:03

So if we accept the possibility that in

1:19:05

the Odyssey come out of in oral context, and

1:19:07

if we accept that part of their

1:19:09

difference is connected to theme and audiences,

1:19:12

right, The Iliot's a poem of war, teaches you

1:19:14

how to die.

1:19:15

The Odesty is a poem of life. It teaches you

1:19:17

how what's surviving is for.

1:19:20

Right, If we have these two different things, why

1:19:22

don't we have anything else? If there was an oral

1:19:24

tradition, right, why don't we have

1:19:26

more variants?

1:19:28

Right?

1:19:29

And then finally, how

1:19:31

do we go from having an oral tradition to having

1:19:33

a textual and these The

1:19:36

fact is you can't actually answer these questions.

1:19:39

You can say what's likely, but you can't

1:19:41

actually Without a time machine, which

1:19:44

would cause its whole own problems, you

1:19:46

can't actually solve them. We do know

1:19:49

that the text we have was

1:19:51

probably written down in Athens,

1:19:53

and it was probably influenced by

1:19:56

Athenian power and money around

1:19:58

the time of the Persian Wars, but

1:20:00

then nobody read it. Okay,

1:20:03

here's the thing that people just don't understand.

1:20:05

When you write down an oral tradition, people

1:20:07

like don't read the transcript.

1:20:10

Right.

1:20:10

So Mina Scottagensen has a book called

1:20:13

Writing Homer. She says some things

1:20:15

that they are a little out there, but one thing she

1:20:18

asserts is that what probably happened is

1:20:21

that in the first time they were written down,

1:20:23

if they're written down in monumental form,

1:20:25

they were deposited in a temple for safe

1:20:28

keeping or somewhere else and nobody

1:20:30

touched them. All right,

1:20:32

because you wouldn't suddenly change

1:20:35

the way you enjoy art, right, if you're

1:20:37

really into listening to music and

1:20:39

someone is like, look, we have to preserve

1:20:41

Taylor Swift for all time, we're

1:20:43

going to write down everything. You're

1:20:45

not going to start reading the lyrics instead

1:20:48

of listening, because that's not what you do

1:20:50

with the genre, right, So when genres

1:20:52

transform, in order for them to be enjoyed,

1:20:56

their use needs to transform. And so

1:20:58

we see this happening in the

1:21:00

text that show up in the fourth century. So

1:21:02

in Plato and Aristotle and

1:21:04

others, we see evidence of people turning.

1:21:07

To written texts.

1:21:08

And it's really during the hell in this period and

1:21:10

libraries like those at Alexandria

1:21:13

antia Pella, where

1:21:16

you divorce the epics

1:21:18

from their performance context and

1:21:21

people suddenly start reading them and editing them

1:21:23

and worrying.

1:21:24

About the right version.

1:21:26

So you know, when we go back to that

1:21:28

moment of dictation, this is where dictation

1:21:31

theory comes in. We have

1:21:33

another moment where people are worried about

1:21:36

where does the authority come from. So one

1:21:38

of the ways that people who really want to believe

1:21:41

in a single authorship theory

1:21:43

adapt to these facts is

1:21:46

they focus on the moment of dictation

1:21:49

and say, well, that singer or

1:21:51

the singers who are involved in dictation

1:21:54

and the editor were the ones who

1:21:56

made this fanciful thing that we made

1:21:59

or that we have. Right, And

1:22:02

I'll go back to another tree metaphor for understanding

1:22:04

this one. Right, If you go outside

1:22:06

and look at a tree that's particularly well

1:22:08

suited to its environment, you might

1:22:11

say, well, who's responsible for this?

1:22:13

Right?

1:22:13

And someone may say, well, the gardener put it there.

1:22:15

I'm like, well, maybe the person planted it, But what

1:22:17

about those who cared for it? What about the people

1:22:19

who trimmed it afterwards? And what about

1:22:21

the generation of human beings who

1:22:26

manipulated the genome of trees to

1:22:28

get this specific type of ornamental

1:22:31

tree?

1:22:31

And then on.

1:22:32

Top of that, what about the esthetics

1:22:34

of treiness?

1:22:35

Right?

1:22:36

How you and I have been judged or judged,

1:22:38

have been trained.

1:22:40

To judge the.

1:22:42

Natural environment based on aesthetics

1:22:44

that we've inherited. Right, we

1:22:46

expect trees to look a certain way, and

1:22:48

it's rarely how they would have looked in the wild

1:22:52

or you know, one hundred

1:22:54

centuries ago. For me, like

1:22:56

oral poetry is like this, right, we selected

1:22:59

for certain types. We find structure

1:23:01

in it because we're looking for structure, and

1:23:03

because it comes out of a process that

1:23:06

enables and incentivizes poets

1:23:08

to structure things in a ring structure, but

1:23:11

we don't see the hundreds,

1:23:14

if not millions of voices that were involved

1:23:16

in its creation. So at the end,

1:23:18

what we have is, you know, people who want to privilege

1:23:20

the final composer in some way,

1:23:23

and then people like me who want to

1:23:25

say that composer could have been almost anybody.

1:23:28

It may have been multiple people, and

1:23:31

it was a process of audience

1:23:34

of performers over time. So

1:23:37

that's my very long answer to your question.

1:23:39

But for me it cuts to the heart of

1:23:42

what of how we think literature

1:23:44

and art exists in the world. And I like

1:23:46

to apply the same sort of thought process to other things.

1:23:48

So if we're talking about a painting someone

1:23:51

made, you might say, well, that's a picassam,

1:23:53

and I might say, well, that's fine, he's really

1:23:55

cool in everything, But what about

1:23:58

the art of painting, Like, where did it come from?

1:24:00

What about the conversations he was having, what about the

1:24:02

history of art that brought him to that.

1:24:04

Moment to create that thing? Right?

1:24:06

And a painting is in a way, not to slight

1:24:08

art historians, but a single painting

1:24:10

in a way is nowhere near the complexity

1:24:13

of sixteen thousand lines of the

1:24:16

Iliad and the audis and twelve thousand lines

1:24:18

of the Odyssey, and the tremendous

1:24:20

histories that they bring with them. And

1:24:22

so I think for us as audience

1:24:24

members or modern readers,

1:24:27

it is a lack of imagination

1:24:30

that keeps us from seeing the poems

1:24:32

as what I think they really are, which is

1:24:35

SUI Genner's right. Unlike anything

1:24:37

else that we know from

1:24:39

the tradition of films.

1:24:41

M that's all just so fascinating.

1:24:44

I mean, I've sort of I've certainly,

1:24:47

you know, I've always existed in the at least

1:24:49

in the belief system generally that it was certainly

1:24:51

all based in oral tradition. And I'm not you

1:24:54

know, I don't think I've ever notably

1:24:56

believed that Homer specifically

1:24:58

was a person. Though funny enough, I realize he's sitting

1:25:00

directly behind me, where in my camera

1:25:03

Homer, the version of Homer that they

1:25:05

sell in Athens at the time, is

1:25:08

sitting behind me. But it is

1:25:10

so interesting to to I

1:25:12

mean, for one, that blew my mind to hear

1:25:14

that it would have been composed

1:25:17

in that way in Athens, were

1:25:19

written down or whatever it was there. That's

1:25:21

fascinating because I would have never I mean.

1:25:23

No, it's so.

1:25:24

I mean, we have shaky evidence

1:25:27

that other cities made their

1:25:30

made copies as well, and there's also apocryphal

1:25:32

stuff to show important Homer is of city

1:25:35

founders introducing.

1:25:36

Homer into their cities.

1:25:38

So like Krgus allegedly

1:25:40

introduced Homer to

1:25:42

the Spartans, right, and sold On

1:25:45

allegedly was involved in Athens.

1:25:47

Later we say it's the the sisteritids. But

1:25:49

it really comes down to the

1:25:52

materiality of the writing of the

1:25:54

poems. I think in the modern world we

1:25:56

completely underestimate how

1:25:58

expensive of a

1:26:01

task it would have been to record

1:26:03

these poems in the fifth century BC.

1:26:06

This wasn't just like, oh, I'll get some

1:26:08

want to write down a book, right, This

1:26:10

was like, I want to do something nobody's ever done before,

1:26:13

because I'm a bawler, right, Like I'm going

1:26:15

to show off and we're going to own

1:26:17

it because that is a talisman

1:26:20

of our power and authority. And

1:26:22

you couldn't go to bookshops and Athens

1:26:24

and buy the Iliad.

1:26:25

This is done.

1:26:25

I mean, it's so many scrolls, it's ridiculous.

1:26:29

So I think again it's a lack of

1:26:31

imagination. But also we've been

1:26:33

incentivized to think that way, right. We

1:26:35

construct the past not in its own image,

1:26:37

but in our own, and

1:26:40

we raise up what we've done in the meantime

1:26:42

by doing that. And so I think

1:26:44

a lot of what we need to do is to defamiliarize.

1:26:47

Ourselves with it and to really

1:26:49

look around.

1:26:50

Homer for evidence of where

1:26:52

the epics came from.

1:26:53

M I've always found it so interesting,

1:26:56

and I mean that certainly sounds like Athens, you

1:26:58

know, the showing off kind

1:27:00

of thing. But I've always found it so interesting

1:27:02

that Athens is basically

1:27:05

I mean, it's there, you know, I think in the

1:27:07

Catalog of Ships, somebody's from Athens. But

1:27:09

other than that, Athens is like exactly.

1:27:11

Athens is like not in the Iliad,

1:27:14

which has always been so interesting to me. And I know it's

1:27:16

time frame, but just because they wrote it down there,

1:27:18

I'm still surprised.

1:27:19

Well, I mean, but I think that's actually part

1:27:22

of the the the trick of Homer, right.

1:27:24

The epics really endeavor

1:27:27

to make their main characters nobody

1:27:30

from nowhere, right, to appeal

1:27:32

to the maximum number of polities,

1:27:35

right, And that's why I really see the are these

1:27:37

epics coming at the end of

1:27:39

the performative tradition at a period

1:27:42

when you have when you have a consciousness of

1:27:44

all these other Greek places and

1:27:47

a real attempt to appeal to them all

1:27:49

without identifying with.

1:27:51

One of the strong ones. Right.

1:27:53

I mean, notice Thebes is

1:27:55

not there. It barely even exists in the catalog.

1:27:58

Corinth doesn't matter. Right, Sparta

1:28:00

is kind of there in the Odyssey, but

1:28:03

it's a weird sort of six Sparta, Like

1:28:05

it's just like a house.

1:28:07

Right.

1:28:07

But the main aracters of each epic are

1:28:10

from borderlands.

1:28:11

Right.

1:28:12

Thea is not a place, right, it

1:28:14

just barely exists. And Odysseus'

1:28:16

is Ithaca. It has so many problems with it that

1:28:18

to this day people are like, oh it's

1:28:21

in Greenland, or oh it's actually

1:28:23

Ireland, or oh like crazy things. Right.

1:28:26

The factually is the fact is fictional places

1:28:28

are fictional places.

1:28:30

Right.

1:28:30

And what was important I think for

1:28:33

the epics and why they were really selected

1:28:37

from among all the other competing tales,

1:28:39

is that they tell something that never

1:28:42

actually happened, which is a story of

1:28:44

a great coalition of Greeks uniting

1:28:47

against an Eastern enemy. I think there's

1:28:49

no accident that this became

1:28:51

a popular narrative tradition around

1:28:54

the time that the Greeks were engaging

1:28:56

with the Persians more and more.

1:28:58

Right, It's just like, you know, it.

1:29:00

Became a convenient way of thinking about

1:29:02

the world that really

1:29:04

responded to the experiences

1:29:07

and interest.

1:29:07

On the audience.

1:29:09

Yeah, that's really interesting. That makes a lot of sense.

1:29:11

I mean, they were certainly or

1:29:14

was more timely to be thinking about an

1:29:16

enemy from the east. But at the same

1:29:18

time, it's always interesting to me too that Troy

1:29:22

is i mean pretty objectively

1:29:25

like almost the good guy, not you know,

1:29:27

like that you really you feel for Hector in a way that

1:29:29

you don't really feel you certainly don't feel for like

1:29:32

Agamemnon. And that's always interesting.

1:29:34

Well, I think that's that's why it doesn't completely

1:29:37

coalesce around that idea of the Greece

1:29:39

versus the other. Instead, you know,

1:29:41

I think probably what happens the Trojan more narrative

1:29:43

was always there in such a way, but it became

1:29:46

selective and selected and more prominent.

1:29:49

And you see this in.

1:29:49

A way, I think as you get

1:29:52

farther ahead in the development of myths,

1:29:55

as coalition narratives become really

1:29:58

attractive right from the Caledonian

1:30:00

Borhunt to Jason le Argo, to

1:30:03

the Seven against Thebes. It's this whole

1:30:05

experimental idea of

1:30:07

what happens like if we knit together

1:30:10

larger groups of people, Right, what happens

1:30:12

when we send our big man against their

1:30:14

big man and then they have to work together?

1:30:17

Right?

1:30:17

It's like, you know, you spend ten years trying to get

1:30:19

to.

1:30:19

The Avengers movie, right, you know,

1:30:22

give everybody their origin narrative, and then

1:30:24

suddenly the individuals aren't

1:30:26

as important as they were. And

1:30:28

so I think we have to put the Ilien

1:30:30

in the Odyssey.

1:30:31

In that context.

1:30:32

And then you know, people like

1:30:34

to put someone like Barry

1:30:36

Powell or others will put the Ili in

1:30:38

the Odyssey at the beginning of the Greek literary

1:30:40

tradition, and I want

1:30:43

to ask always, well, what if we do the opposite,

1:30:46

what if we put it near the end? How

1:30:49

does that change the way we think about it? Because

1:30:52

we know that it wasn't written down really

1:30:54

early and that it was still changing.

1:30:57

And so that's really been sort of.

1:30:58

The way I've approached it for a while, and I'm

1:31:00

pretty convinced. I mean, my basic feeling

1:31:03

is that the Illi and the Odyssey were

1:31:05

written down partly for power,

1:31:08

but also because society was changing

1:31:10

and Athens tragedy became more popular.

1:31:13

Lyric poetry rose in a way.

1:31:15

I mean, it's important before and

1:31:17

then you had the exporting of culture as

1:31:20

part of empire power, and

1:31:22

so I think you have to look sort of for cultural

1:31:25

motivators for taking a

1:31:27

traditional art form and encoding

1:31:29

it in a new way.

1:31:45

Thank you all so much for listening. As

1:31:47

always again, I

1:31:50

will be back soon with new episodes,

1:31:53

specifically on Euripides. Because who

1:31:55

better to bring me out of this absolute

1:31:59

mental mess that I am in

1:32:01

than my favorite man in the world. Let's

1:32:04

talk a bit. This baby is written and produced by me Live

1:32:06

Albert MICHAELA. Smith is the Hermes to my Olympians.

1:32:09

She is the assistant producer who put together all of

1:32:11

these clips to save me from

1:32:13

myself because she's a joy. Laura Smith

1:32:15

is a production assistant an audio engineer who's been

1:32:18

doing incredible work on the conversation episodes

1:32:20

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1:32:23

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1:32:25

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1:32:27

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1:32:38

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