Conversations: Revisiting the Cultural Memory of the Bronze Age

00:00:41
Speaker 1: Hello, this is let's talk about miss Baby, and I am your host live and it never gets more comfortable singing that, like I just in any case, I am here once again with a little episode that is taking bits of other episodes and putting them into one so that I can take just a little rest, just a little time, time to myself, time to oh my God, try to fix my mental health. And today, because it's Friday, so of course, we are looking at past conversation episodes. Once again, Mikaela has put together something really fun for you guys. We are looking at episodes that feature myths and mythology, these characters that have their origins in the cultural memory of the Bronze Age that was left behind and which was then picked up by much later generations and turned into these fascinating myths. So today we have selections, first from my episode with Cora Beth Frasier, who came on the show to talk about both the Minotaur of Crete but also autism. We had an absolutely fascinating conversation about this, and it was a few years ago now, so I hope you'll all be just revisiting this with fresh ears and really taken a lot of the really fascinating stuff that Korra shared it. It was such a joy an episode and I'm glad to reshare just even a small part of it. Just again, as with.

00:02:14
Speaker 2: The last episode on Tuesday, there is a Spotify playlist linked in the episode's description where you can find the full length episodes of these if you want to listen to the entire thing. And we also have a selection from my episode with Alexia Burrows Carol Mbido, who came on to talk about the notion of Kalon Kakhon, this beautiful, ugly, beautiful evil and how it aligns with the always wonderful Helen of Sparta. That was an absolutely amazing conversation and it spawned episodes. Me just like diving as deep as I could into the character of Helen, because I mean, unsurprisingly, she's utterly fascinating. So my conversation with Alexia is such a joy I'm thrilled to share again just a part of it. And finally we thought who better to return to than one of the guests from the Bronze Age Collapse episodes, So we're sharing a little bit of my conversation from a few years ago with Joel Christensen, who came on to talk a little bit more about Homer and the Homeric tradition, So there's just a little bit deeper dive or just a more specific conversation. We were looking at the concept of Homer and you know, the idea of Homer as an individual versus the idea of Homer as this kind of compilation of all of these varied oral storytellers from over so many centuries. This was an amazing conversation and it's the reason why Joel came back for the Bronze Age episodes, and we'll be returning soon for an episode looking at heroes who stay tuned for that conversations, revisiting the cultural memory of the Bronze Age, the Minotaur and the Labyrinth, the woman who started a decade long war, and the idea of Homer.

00:04:23
Speaker 3: When you read the sources that mention the minut all, it's very much there's very little description. You know, it's like like half man, half bull, or you know there's bull bits, or you know, it's very vague. But then you see the visual sources and they kind of have their own tradition, and you know, the mine at all tends to be very recognizable. In terms of well, essentially which bits a man and which bits a bull? And you know, there's sort of a tradition there that you can trace across and a pattern which is much more precise and consistent then you get in the written sources. Mm hm.

00:05:06
Speaker 2: So I'm so curious about that, you know, obviously, my I don't haven't looked at a lot of visual of Minotaur at all, if if any, I'm now thinking what I've seen. And meanwhile, I'm always so interested in the theseus of it, you know, the like, okay, you know, how much of his story are we getting from Athens and how much of it is Athenian propaganda? And so I've always been extra interested in in that cret inside of it, and like yeah, I mean it makes create look really bad, and I just have to think, like, you know, how much of this is Athens trying to make theseus into a hero that he obviously was not. So I'm so interested to hear what the variations are on the Minotaur.

00:05:47
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, And you know, I'm happy to do that. And I'm also happy to do some thesis bashing because that's all good too, please.

00:05:54
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm always down for Thesus bashing, But I would love to know if you know anything about that the Athenian of it, Like I keep meaning to look into whether there is you know, scholarship or it were people talking about how how much of it is based in Athenian propaganda and how much of it is like you know, I mean, I don't know if any of it's from crete, So I would love to hear anything about that.

00:06:17
Speaker 3: No, I mean, it's it's actually one of those areas that I'm still researching. I'm still trying to track down more visual sources because the feel that I get from a lot of the visual sources is that the Greek ones, there is very much a sense of Theseus as the hero with the monster. You know, he's often dragging the minutaur along behind him, or you know, it's it's very much, you know, the conquest of Theseus over the monster, and you know, but then you look at Etruscan sources and then you get a different version. I mean, it's like there's a famous vase painting of baby mineutor baby minus baby Oh my God, sitting on his mother's knee and he is so cute.

00:07:10
Speaker 4: I can't even tell you so so yeah, you know, you've got baby mine at all, and this is like completely different to you know.

00:07:22
Speaker 3: Evil horrible monster that must be killed because it eats people. A little cute mine at all, sitting on its mother's knee. It's just adorable. So yeah, I mean I need to look into it more, in particular looking at the relationship between the Greek stuff and the Etruscan stuff. But yeah, I haven't got there yet.

00:07:44
Speaker 2: No fair enough, But I'm so thrilled to hear him in the Baby Muntra. Now I'm like, okay, I'm gonna find a picture of that to post with this episode.

00:07:52
Speaker 3: You have to. It's the best.

00:07:54
Speaker 2: But that's so interesting that there are Etruscan visual representations because I mean I wouldn't have pegged that given how far the Etruscans would have been from Crete, you know, yeah, necessarily from Greece, but from Crete. That's really interesting.

00:08:06
Speaker 3: You know, I think the whole role of theseus in Athens and in Athenian law has has very much kind of shifted the focus. You know, we must see theseus as the grand hero, but then you look elsewhere and you get a different sense, and I think it's it's really kind of it's really interesting and really, you know, a useful wedge to open up an area of Theseus bashing.

00:08:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, the man deserves it. Yeah. The funniest thing I just find about him is that, you know, I think I think minotauricide because in that sourcing, at least you get some sort of the idea that it. You know, it was monstrous, you know, it was eating people whatever. But everything else about Theseus is objectively bad, you know, Like you hear these descriptions and you're like, I know, this is meant to make him sound heroic, but where is the heroism? Exactly right?

00:09:13
Speaker 3: Yeah, And you know that that's actually one of the things that I think is really interesting about the Labyrinth and the Minotaur and all of that, because at that point in the myth, in all, you know, in most of the versions, you have a very simple story of you know, Theseus is the hero. He volunteers, he goes to save his people, he kills the monster, and he emerges victorious and it's all wonderful. And then he goes off and does a whole load of awful things. You know, he dumps Sarah Anne, he causes the death of his father, you know, it's it's like, that's the pinnacle of decent theseus. He kills the monster and then it's all downhill from there, like really really.

00:10:03
Speaker 2: Fast, and it is the only good thing, well, I would say, you know, quote unquote good thing that he does. And again it's based on what we're supposed to believe about the minotaur, but yeah, I mean, you know, because I you know, always stand by his being a full on serial killer on the way to Athens, like and then even the Cretan bull, which is of course the Minotaur's father, or the but then it's the Marathonian Bowl even that he does for show. You know, he doesn't just like to feed this ball for the goodness of his heart. And I just think it's so fascinating because the minuta really is the only like quote unquote good thing he did. But was it good at all?

00:10:46
Speaker 3: Exactly? And that's what makes it really interesting, because you know, it's the more you know about theseus, the more you start thinking, oh, poor mine at all, Yeah, poor little baby mine at all. You know, it's it's trapped inside the labyrinth and it can't get out, and you know it's and then you start realizing the whole family connections. You know, the minotaur is the son of the queen. He's the brother of ari Anney Arianne, who gives the thread to theseus so that theseus can go and kill her brother. It's not nice, and you know it it gets really interesting and I think really that that's kind of my way into the whole thing, is just this sort of instinctive reaction against theseus and you know, championing the evil scary monster.

00:11:46
Speaker 2: I think that's I mean, that's right. I also, I mean the conception of the you know, so called scary monster is one of my favorite stories. And the reason I say I started this podcast because I read it one day and I was just like, why does no one tell the story comedically? Like so much of Greek mytho, It's like it's never or I mean not never now obviously, but you know, years ago it was not presented often as comedic. Yeah, and it is objectively funny in so many places where you're like, how were How is somebody telling the story of how Pacify conceived the Minotaur without comedy?

00:12:23
Speaker 3: You know? My My problem with that is, you know, I always I always wonder how that conversation went, you know, between pacified and Daedalus who is having to build you think, how how did how did you broach that subject?

00:12:45
Speaker 2: Yep, no, I've theorized on that a lot, in a really in fun ways, because you know, he had to at this point where where to believe he was a prisoner, you know. And and but yeah, it's like, okay, so I have these urges, they're not really my own, like a god gave them to me. You know, that's its own problem. But I really need you to create this thing for me, Like, I just need to make this happen. And I know you can do it and go for it. And then, of course, though you have to imagine as much as that conversation was deeply awkward, Dadlus like took the recommendation and he went for it hard. Hello, And I mean, you know, I've.

00:13:27
Speaker 3: Been a designer of chess sets, you know, I know how detailed you have to be to do the blueprints from a model or something. And yeah, I know, just I have trouble with the process. Just yeah, yeah, it's a difficult one. But I actually, you know, Dadalus is one of those characters that I just I really do find fascinating because he pops up all over the place doing various things. You know, it's like anybody needs a genius craftsman. Here you go, here's Dadalus. It's like, you know, every time you need a profit, you can just pull in tyresearch. You know, they just pop up randomly in various different stories, and it's time. It's like recurring characters in a TV show. So you know, it's I think Daedalus is fascinating because he gets roped into so much stuff. You know, there's that, there's the Labyrinth, there's there's his own story of the wings, but you know it has all sorts of complications that you read OVID and you've got the story of Perdix and you know how Daedalus was really maybe a bit of a creep actually, and well that's not really surprising since you know most people are in Greek myth, but you know you've got and then you come up with with weird and random little references in very strange places, Like there's a bit in Plato's Mino where Socrates is tak looking to this this slightly dim country boy called Mino, and he's winding him up a little bit, and he's talking about the difference between knowledge and true opinion, and he's trying to get Mino to well, he's doing his usual thing and being really annoying and and and he says, the difference between knowledge and true opinion is it's like Daedalus's statues. You don't have any of those up in Thessaly, do you, Mino. And Mino's like, oh what, And you say, oh, yeah, we have these statues and they were made by Daedalus. And you know, if you don't change them down, they just walk off. And so, you know, true opinion is like that. You know, if you don't if you don't pin it down with facts, it just it just wanders off. It's just like you know, these walking statues that we have here in Athens. You know, Dadalus is like this, this weird kind of moveable punchline and of random jokes that just pops up in the middle of philosophical text is very strange.

00:16:15
Speaker 2: It's just that I've not read a lot of Plato. Thankfully, I would say I'm fine with it. Yeah, but it just makes me think of like a story like that. And and then also you know, connecting it to the way people believe Atlantis based on Plato's nonsense is I'm just like he clearly wasn't serious and everything he wrote, like why why do you believe that one?

00:16:42
Speaker 3: That one is endlessly fascinating?

00:16:44
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm never over it. It's like my one of my bigger things these days. It's like, how did this become what it has become? But how did so? How did you get deeper into the Oh? I wasn't even doing this on purpose, but I'm going to do it again as.

00:16:57
Speaker 3: If I was.

00:16:58
Speaker 2: How did how did you get deeper into the labyrinth?

00:17:01
Speaker 5: That was?

00:17:02
Speaker 6: Thank you.

00:17:04
Speaker 3: Do my best, brilliant Yeah, well, okay, it's complicated.

00:17:10
Speaker 2: You up for a complicated story, please?

00:17:12
Speaker 6: Yeah?

00:17:12
Speaker 3: It goes on a bit.

00:17:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the labyrinth does.

00:17:19
Speaker 5: Yeah.

00:17:19
Speaker 3: Well that's the thing. And you know it is confusing and complex and you can get lost in it, which is pretty much you know what I do when I start talking. So this we too, This could go anywhere. So I was doing all this stuff teaching myth to I teach, I teach adults. I teach distance learners who come to education maybe late. So I teach frankly, people who are just really really enthusiastic.

00:17:50
Speaker 2: Ah, that's yeah, that's lovely.

00:17:52
Speaker 3: It's amazing. My students are just the best. They're they're fabulous and I learned so much from them, and they're great fun because they want to do stuff and they want to know stuff, and you know, it's it's great. So I was doing that, and then I was going through stuff at at home because my little boy was diagnosed with autism and I was looking at his behavior and I was kind of thinking, yeah, I know, he's diagnosed with autism, but he seems kind of normal to me. And then, you know, eventually I kind of I twigged that maybe that meant that I was autistic as well. So it took me a while. It took me a while to work that one out, but I got there in the end. And so I went through the diagnostic process and got diagnosed, and they pretty much said, well, yes, did you not notice. So, you know, after I picked myself up after that one and thought, yeah, I'm really not as smart as I thought I was. I got into that and I started reading lots about it because that's what I do, and you know, finding out all sorts of things, and honestly, social media is just the best for finding out stuff, you know, it's it's far better than all the books and training courses and everything out there because people just tell it like it.

00:19:14
Speaker 2: Is and their own experiences exactly. Yeah, it's it's mind boggling just to I recently discovered that obviously I have ADHD and just had never realized it, and like you just by reading everyone's constant talking about it, and I'm like, oh, yeah, that's why I have so much trouble doing like anything without a hard and fast deadline exactly.

00:19:39
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:19:40
Speaker 2: So you know, social media's amazing.

00:19:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then through all of that, and you know, it was a learning process and you know, so it's doing that and going through that and learning things about that. And I was teaching them myth and doing that, and then then I stumbled across this group called a claim and there are a group of scholars who around the world who are doing things to do with autism and classical myth and yeah, it's really interesting stuff. And it was like, you know, it's like they're in front of me like a neon sign, going notice me, notice me. So I kind of said to them, you know, can I join? And I think there would probably have been begging if they hadn't said yes, but they did, so you know, I joined them and started following what they were doing, and you know, they do lots of really interesting stuff. There's different projects going on in different countries and Susan DC at Roehampton in the UK, she's doing a thing where she works with kids using an image of the choice of Heracles and she gives the kids this image and she explains it and she gets them to talk through the different choices and imagine themselves in different positions, and you know, it's a way of thinking through things which is kind of separate from the world and it sort of takes the edge off it, you know, the fear that comes with real world situations if you struggle with those. It's a way of making it remote but still working through the problems. So that was really interesting. And then there's this other project based in Israel where they do essentially the same sort of thing, but using lots of different stories of heroes, so Perseus and Heracles and Theseus and you know, the minut Or and all of that, and it's working through ideas around fear and choices and you know, dealing with situations where you're lost or you don't know what to do or it's a lot to do with processing emotions, which for a lot of autistic kids is a real rollercoaster of you know, how do you learn to deal with these things? And so they're using to do that, and I thought, wow, this is just this is just amazing stuff. And at the same time, I was reading novels because I was doing that thing where you think, you know, I've got to read something that's not classics to get my head in a healthier space, because you know, I'm starting to see things when I go to sleep and it's not good.

00:22:34
Speaker 2: Counds like my life.

00:22:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so you know, I don't know, no read something different. I'm gonna I'm gonna sit down. I can read novels. I'm just you know, healthier headspace. So I was reading this novel called Pyreneesy by Susannah Clark, and it's nothing to do with classics. It's like a fantasy sort of novel. And the main character, Pyreneesy, he is in a world which is kind of is very surreal. It's like loads and loads of intersecting hallways with statues in them, and sometimes they flood, and he's on his own and he's got a notebook, and he writes things in his notebook, and he goes on wonders, and he makes charts and he does like tied charts, and he figures out the migration of the birds, and he writes about all the statues that he comes across, and you know, he's kind of having a whale of a time. But he's on his own. He doesn't know where he comes from. There's a mysterious man who keeps popping up and he doesn't know where he comes from either, but he sort of isn't really bothered, and he's just kind of, you know, he's in this really strange situation, but it's all good because he's making friends with the statues and sometimes he has a chat with the birds, and it's just such a nice novel. And I'm reading this and I'm thinking, you know, if I ended up in a world like that, I would probably do the same thing. I'd probably have a notebook, I'd be wandering around, I'd be talking to the birds, I'd be making friends with them, I'd be doing all that. And you know, so I'm reading that and I'm thinking, yeah, but there's something really weird about this. There's something that I'm missing. I'm just there's a connection there that's driving me mad, and I just don't know what it is. And then I read an interview where Susana Clark said that one of her inspirations was well C. S. Lewis, and also a story by the Argentinian writer Barhes and the story by Borjas is called the House of a Sterion, and I thought, there's something familiar about that, there's something, there's something niggling at me there. So I got the book. I got the book in translation, because you know, my language is limited, and it's only like a three page story, and it's about this character called a Stereon who is in this house and the house's loads of intersecting hallways, and he doesn't go out of his house because people look at him funny, and he's scared of them because they have really strange flat faces, and he doesn't really like to be looked at, and so he likes to stay in his house, and he likes the way the hallways all connect, and he's very proud of the fact that his house doesn't have any furniture in it. And so it's like clues being dropped all the way through the story about what's actually going on, and you know, sometimes people come to visit him, and you know, he runs to meet them and then they end up on the ground, and you know, it's all very you know, it's just three pages, but it's like a process of figuring out what it is that's happening. And then of course, you know there are other clues like he's the son of a queen and he's all alone and he's expecting his redeemer to come along someday and save him. And then at the very end there's just a comment and it says, you know, theseus said to Ariadne, the Minotur didn't even put up a fight. Oh my god, I know, yeah, yeah, I I may have cried a bit.

00:26:22
Speaker 2: Now, like chills just now and oh you've told me so.

00:26:25
Speaker 3: Oh it's terrible, but you know, it's but the description of him running through his his labyrinth and he's so happy, and he's jumping out from around corners, and he's he's playing games with himself and he's imagining the other astereon and he's imagining a little chat with him and saying, I will show you this pool and I will show you what is around this corner and sometimes I will get it wrong and we will laugh together and it's just.

00:26:56
Speaker 6: And so.

00:26:58
Speaker 3: I read that after I read Pirineesy, and I thought, you know, this is what's bothering me about the identification with autistic people and heroes. It's very empowering, and it's it's great to suggest that you know, there's there's this this position that they can be in, which is a position of strength where you know they can influence things and change things. But I thought, you know, for myself, as an autistic person, I'm so drawn to the monster. I'm drawn to the minotaur in this in this labyrinth, who is pottering around all by himself and having a great time doing it, and you know, is kind of looked at in a strange way by the rest of the world. And I thought, you know, once you get into that, there's a lot of other connections that you can draw out. And I think it comes back to this whole thing that I was talking about with the baby minotaur in the the Etruscan pottery. You know, this sense that the myth in its ancient forms is kind of flippable. You know, you've got the mine at all, big, scary, nasty, monster, Theseus great hero, but then you've got the flip side of you know, the monster is actually really a child of a family. The family lock him up, they betray him, they cause his death, they keep him confined, so he has to kill people to survive. It's you know, there's there's a whole other way of looking at it that exists in the ancient sources, and once you start doing that, I think that's where it gets really interesting because there's so many other elements to to draw out of it. Sorry, I'm just rambling.

00:28:51
Speaker 2: This is my favorite thing about the Conversation episodes is when I can get people to just ramble on. And that's so it's truly like it's when I just sit here with my big smile and like, oh I love all of this no, and I'm just sort of taking it all in. And I think that's become one of my favorite things to do, is to look at things from the other side. Granted not all things, like I'm you know, I'm not going to take a story of Theseus and try to like make it seem good, but that's not really the other side of anything. But I just keep you know, as you talk about this more and more and seeing that other the flipping of it is I hear Medusa's story in my head, and right, it's exactly the same, where it's like we have been sort of conditioned to see this version of the story where it is a heroic act to kill the monster because of all of these obvious things that not even all of these obvious things, because of the obvious fact that monsters must be killed, and no other real obvious anything. And so if you just, yeah, you take it on its head, and it's like, well, what if it's just an odd creature? What if it's just like not one hundred percent quote unquote normal, and that's all that makes it a monster? And I mean, granted, you know its top half bowl is a little bit monstrous, but not only kind of like yeah, and same with you know, snakes for hair and people to stone. Sure, a little bit monstrous. Does that mean they deserve to be killed?

00:30:13
Speaker 6: No?

00:30:13
Speaker 2: What proof do we have that they deserve to be killed? I don't know.

00:30:17
Speaker 3: And yeah, you know, I think that there's lots of things about that that I find really interesting. You know, this this notion of perceiving something as a monster because it is maybe a hybrid or a creature that's being put in a particular position. It's like names. I mean, I'm talking about Borjes's house of Asterion, and it did take me a while. I mean, I'm supposed to know myth, but it took me a while to place the name Astereon. And you know, that's the name that's given in some of the ancient sources.

00:30:55
Speaker 2: B quote it means like stary eyed or something.

00:30:57
Speaker 3: Erectly Apollodorus who mentions that the Minotor's name is Asterion, and it's a lovely name. I mean, it's something to do with the star. You know. Some people say, you know, starry, or some people translate as ruler of the stars or something, whatever the case. It's just a nice name.

00:31:18
Speaker 2: It's unrelated to his so called monstrosity. It's unrelated to anything except yeah, the stars. It is a beautiful name, and I think it's sometimes a stereonystereos like it's regardless, Yeah, it's it's starry. It's just it's just a nice name.

00:31:33
Speaker 3: It's just so nice. And then you have the fact that Asterion is called the Minotaur, which is the bull of Minos. You know, King Minos traps him in the labyrinth which is custom built to you know, have this monster at its center, and he makes him the minotaur.

00:31:53
Speaker 2: Well, he also makes the mistakes that lead to pacifate, like unwillingly conceiving it, like it's all Minus's faulty, is the bad guy in all of it.

00:32:05
Speaker 3: It's horrible.

00:32:35
Speaker 6: I think it's something that people will they'll read he Siod and they'll come across Kalan ka Khan or beautiful evil as it's usually translated. Obviously, Natalie Haynes has shown an entirely different light on it, which is so cool. But it's something that people are reading he Siod and they'll just be like, okay, cool, Like okay, she's beautiful and evil. That's great because a lot of people going into Heasiod at least now already know the myth of Pandora, like she has the box pithoy.

00:33:03
Speaker 7: Of course.

00:33:05
Speaker 2: Not all box. I definitely miss jar.

00:33:09
Speaker 7: It's a nice jar.

00:33:10
Speaker 6: It's a lovely Greek jar, and they'll go, oh, yeah, she's going to release all the evils. That's that's great, and leave the other one in the jar, usually depicted as a butterfly, you know, m that's what modern things kind of draw it as, which I find interestingly weird.

00:33:25
Speaker 2: But it is a butterfly, all right, it's cute, but I don't really get it. But you know, no, I yeah, I agree, it's pretty, I'm sure, but I don't really see the reference.

00:33:36
Speaker 6: Point absolutely, So I think people just go across it and they go Okay, cool, and just move on and forget entirely about it. But I saw it and I thought, oh, that's a really interesting concept. So I decided to go into it a bit, and I discovered like a whole plethora of scholarship and just interesting takes on it. Obviously most of them focus on Pandora. But then I saw it in another book, Ruby Blondell's book on hell or it was Bethany Hughes's book on Helen. Someone had said that Helena Troy was also a klonkakon, and I went, okay, I've read about that before. I went that's a really interesting take. And I love Helen of Troy. I am a Helen of Troy enthusiast. I love her. I think she's brilliant. People disagree.

00:34:31
Speaker 2: I think she's fascinating. I definitely want to I think she do more study on her.

00:34:34
Speaker 7: Absolutely absolutely, because she's so cool.

00:34:37
Speaker 6: Yeah, And I was just like, this is an angle because it's very briefly mentioned. I would argue like, there's no I haven't seen like a dedicated paper on it before.

00:34:48
Speaker 7: So I was like, I want to do that. I'm going to do that.

00:34:52
Speaker 6: And I read into it and I saw like lots of arguments for why and you have to define what kalon kakon is.

00:35:00
Speaker 7: Especially.

00:35:00
Speaker 6: I obviously took the root of beautiful evil because I think that one seemed the most enticing to me. And at the time I had and actually read Pandora's Juria read that about a halfway through and I was like, oh, no, another angle. Yeah, So I looked into it and I was just a standard at the gap almost that had been left. So I just endeavored to look into it even more. But I found that you can apply it to a good few things. You've got Pandora, obviously, who was the blueprint really, and then you've got Helen, who was the natural follow up for Pandora really because very beautiful and yet caused so much strife and harm and evil as it was. But then you've got women like Medea, and also you've got Circe to an extent or turkey, depending on your pronunciation. I found that you could apply it to metals also, mainly necklaces, and specifically the metal of gold, because that's seen as Aphrodite's metal, which I found really interesting. I'm not sure where that exactly originated from, but one of the ones I found really interested was in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, and it describes.

00:36:24
Speaker 7: Her she was being dressed by the Oh yes, Hora.

00:36:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's all right, it's the seasons. They're like they're dressing her so that she can go meet up with Anchises because Zeus and a good stuff.

00:36:41
Speaker 6: Of course, thanks Zeus. So the Susan's addressing her and she's just dripping with gold. She's got gold in her head, she's got gold ear rings, and she's got gold.

00:36:54
Speaker 7: The sentence that.

00:36:55
Speaker 6: Really jumped out to me was that they'd put it right on her breasts, so they've gon't.

00:37:02
Speaker 3: They're like painting her almost, yeah.

00:37:06
Speaker 6: Like that, so they're like on her immortal head. They put a finely wrought diadem, a beautiful gold one, and in her pierced ear lobes flowers of aricale I'm assuming that means orchids and precious gold about her tender throat and white breasts. They decked her in a golden necklaces, and I just love that she is dripping in gold. They've gone right, I'm going to put it right on her chest and on her tender neck, and it just it's very seductive, and I think that was absolutely the intention. Obviously, she's going for a meetup, metup with the mortal, Yes, with immortal How shameful of course for a woman, of course, not for the men. No, no, not for zeus. And that is all just it's such beautiful imagery. But also it's very erotic, and this is kind of repeated. Also, there's another story concerning Aphrodite in gold. So necklaces are apparently frequent tokens of erotic treachery, which I didn't know before embarking on this. I read it and I was like, oh, that sounds great, and I had a look into it. I was like, oh, yeah, that's actually a really good point. So Aphrodite had given to Helen this necklace, which was very gorgeous. Of course, it was a gift from the goddess of love to the most beautiful woman in the world.

00:38:38
Speaker 7: So after Helen went to Troy, she didn't take it with her.

00:38:41
Speaker 6: Menilaeus decided to dedicate it to a temple, and it ended up in the hands of this beautiful but lustful young woman who echoed Helen's behavior. So she ended up falling in love with a man, a young man. They were both unmarried, and they ran away together. And there's a bit of discourse on whether that was like because of the necklace or because of her generally, and she was attracted to the net because of this. Yeah, but I found it so interesting that gold especially was used in that story, and it's very cool.

00:39:17
Speaker 2: Okay, Now I have to ask, okay, because you're sort of blowing my whole mind on a lot of well it's like on this topic, but specifically as it relates to So I'm so curious if any of this has come up in relation to the necklace of Harmonia, you know.

00:39:36
Speaker 6: How much it Okay, it would have.

00:39:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, because that's like somewhat cursed necklace depending on what you read and from when or whatever. But it's and she's the daughter of Aphrodite and it's given to her from Hephaistus, and oh, my gosh, I've got so many questions. Now, fascinating.

00:39:55
Speaker 7: That's a whole little research project.

00:39:58
Speaker 2: I mean, I mean, there's a certain novel that's been in the works for like ten years about kad Was at Harmonia and that necklace. So now you just helped me out a little bit.

00:40:06
Speaker 7: I saw you writing it down. She's found.

00:40:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's so interesting.

00:40:16
Speaker 6: Necklaces and gold especially is a massive thing I think for Kalon Kakhan, and people might be wondering why so you've got the obvious Kalon side, the beautiful side going oh, yes, they're very beautiful, very seductive, very nice. But obviously in a lot of these stories with the Hemeric hymnta aphrodite, obviously she doesn't want Anchises to know that she is the immortal goddess Aphrodite. There is an element of deception in that, and she's like disguising herself as this young maiden and it's all like a big secret. So there's deception baked right into that, which is much what Pandora is like m And you know the same with Helen's necklace, like no one knows it has these powers almost lurking inlyeth. If you will not necessarily that there are powers within the necklace, but that they're kind of echoing Helen's behavior or Aphrodite's lustful powers are being kind of channeled through this. So Pandora herself when she's being created, obviously she's molded out of clay or earth, depending on which translation you get, and then she's dressed by goddesses and graces and everything beautiful, beautiful like that molded by Hephaistus and then dressed by Athena in some of them, so Pandora is kind of enhanced. Athena gifts her in Works in Days a girdle and ornaments, and the graces give her golden jewelry once again that gold is coming back up. And then she the seasons addressing her in spring flowers and kind of doing with perfume. I haven't looked into perfume, but it is enough. Look at I just didn't have the room unfortunately.

00:42:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm like, oh my gosh.

00:42:15
Speaker 6: Everything into links as well, so it's absolutely fascinating.

00:42:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love this.

00:42:21
Speaker 6: Topic from theogony, which is the one where the Kalon Kakon is actually referenced. It's not referenced in Works in Days I'm really sure, but he seems to have omitted that phrase.

00:42:35
Speaker 2: And just to remind my listeners, I think too, like maybe I'll I'm admit like my lengthy Pandora episode in this as well, because I recently covered Pandora and she's so interesting because he see it covers her in both Theogony and Works in Days in like fairly different ways.

00:42:49
Speaker 6: So it's interesting WED because I was looking at it and I was like, these are different people.

00:42:56
Speaker 2: So yeah, to note that she it's only in the Theogony, I think is interesting because also he's shittier to women in Works and Days than the Theogony for sure. That's why I say shittier.

00:43:08
Speaker 6: One of my lectures in my first year said said something rather profound about Heid. She went, he sioed as bright and intelligent as he was to be able to write and publish and everything like that, was quite a simple man, and he would be absolutely astounded that his works were being studied thousands of years in the future, but he would be absolutely horrified that there were women in the class. And it really made me laugh and I was like, you know what, you are absolutely right, absolutely that guy. So in theogeny Pandora is adorned in silvery clothing rather than gold. She has a highly wrought veil, it doesn't give her an indication as to color flower garlands once again, and a golden headband. The golden headpand is what I really like to focus on, because it's not all of these gorgeous engravings. So Hefeaistus made it once again, but it's the scripture of this diadem. It's highly wrought, it's endowed with terrible monsters, but also these beautiful creatures, and gracefulness is breathed right in, which I believe is the quote. And they're all also endowed with speech, which I found really interesting because I'm not sure how you endow a headband with speech, but if you can make clay into a woman, you.

00:44:35
Speaker 7: Know I'm not.

00:44:39
Speaker 6: And I really took that as a reflection of Pandora herself. So that this is this headband is something that's been molded and wrought by Hephaistus, and it's it's been created by him, such as Pandora has been. And then the breath and the speech and everything has and her gracefulness has been breathed in, and it's all been gifts from the gods, so Pandora's name actually trums relates to all gifts in according to some people. I don't study ancient Greek language, so I can't check that myself, but this is what I've read, and this is what I say. I really enjoyed the duplicity in the Diadem and Pandora herself because I just I just found it so interesting that they kind of did the same things. So you've got this terrible monster that's kind of smooth though with the gracefulness much like Pandora, which really echoes he'sialed sentiment as Pandora being a kal on Cacon.

00:45:48
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and what I find so interesting about it, and this is, you know, I'm my main sort of reference point for calon kakon was having read it in Pandora's jar, So I'll preface with that, but I find it so interesting the idea that it can mean ugly as well, because you know what Natalie Haynes then sort of clarified with that is that there two equally descriptive words about more visual descriptive versus you know, like Pandora being beautiful ugly is so different from her being beautiful evil you know, evil is like she thinks about it. She does this on purpose. She you know, releases those evils on purpose. And of course, you know, I think he Seed would probably want to translate it as beautiful, beautiful evil, right, I.

00:46:37
Speaker 7: Think he would mind.

00:46:38
Speaker 2: I don't think so. But at the same time, if you actually, like are looking at her story, like, she doesn't have any agency in it. She doesn't like think like all the modern interpretations of Pandora suggest that or like, you know, I should say pop culture, you know, like not academic, but you know, the modern understanding of her is like, oh, yeah, she was this curious woman, like she was the eve. She sought to look in and free the evils, like she did it because of her own feminine curiosity, right, Whereas if you read the sourcing like no, like it doesn't.

00:47:12
Speaker 6: Yes, Hermes was the one who instilled this, uh. I think they call it a bitch's.

00:47:20
Speaker 7: Mind, a name like that was a man.

00:47:27
Speaker 6: Like while instill curiosity, curiosity isn't inherently a bad thing, it was now Hermes that instilled what they would consider to be the negative trait.

00:47:40
Speaker 2: The trickster God did those you know, like, yeah, it's so interesting and really yeah, Like she doesn't choose to open it. She doesn't say like I'm going to function up or I'm going to ignore instructions all these things. She just opens it or in some cases it just it opens. Like whether or not she even does it, she's just there and it was a gift to her. So she gets the blame and this really fascinating way of Yeah, I think looking at it is as beautiful ugly as like it's just amazing. You're like, oh, yeah, right, it's just like it's imagery placed upon her versus something that she does. But I mean, even just like looking at it as beautiful evil is still just equally fascinating, especially when you look at he sid because he really like he lets it all really hang out when it comes to the two stories of Pandora. But like how he sees with I think that's Hesiod for you.

00:48:27
Speaker 6: Oh my god, there's a there's another bit of it that I always find really interesting. So she's described as a precipitous trap.

00:48:39
Speaker 7: As well. She is.

00:48:40
Speaker 6: This is what her destiny is. She is there to recavoc because Prometheus stole the fire and Zeus wasn't too pleased about it because Zeo's doesn't get his own way, ad shit happens. He's that could spoil Toddler.

00:48:56
Speaker 2: I don't know, we don't know how I feel about you.

00:49:00
Speaker 6: So like her whole thing was she was meant to be a curse. That's what she's described as. The first curse is Pandora, and the second curse, in he Stiard, is the avoidance of marriage and children. So men who don't marry these horrific women that Zeus and the gods have created have inflicted their own curse upon themselves by not doing that. So your cursed either way because of women, according to according to he Steard, but we have to remember whose actions led to this. It's Prometheus, Like we can't blame it all on Pandora.

00:49:38
Speaker 7: She was just molded. It wasn't her fault.

00:49:41
Speaker 2: And it's also just like the idea of Zeus being a vindictive asshole, right, like you know, yes, as much as it is because of what Prometheus did. Like if Zeus wasn't such a shit who needed to have his way all the time, wouldn't have caud any trouble either.

00:49:56
Speaker 6: Absolutely, But I just I love that she is the blueprint for women also, so she's the one that everything is based upon. It's not necessarily based upon the gods. Is the midge of the gods. So we know that she is absolutely bloody gorgeous because by definition, apart from the furies, of course, all goddesses are gorgeous as far as it goes, So we know she's gorgeous. But on the inside, it's this rotten interior. And this this idea carries on and on and on and on, and this idea of molding your wife, of course, also continues in Ischomicus' is not Ischomicuss, but he is the man speaking in Economicus. I believe it's by Xenophon. He talks about how Ischomicus molds his way. He's him having a conversation with Socrates, of course, and Socrates is talking to Iscomicus, and he's talk and Ischomiskus is telling him how he molded his very very young wife, like he wanted her to know as little as possible, which creeps me out. In imagine, I can't even just how much I hate it, but like he's like, I wanted her to know as little as possible. And then one day she came, she came, she came to me when I come home from I guess I think he was working in the fields.

00:51:21
Speaker 7: One day I.

00:51:21
Speaker 6: Came home and she was wearing she'd rouged her cheeks, and she'd whitened her face, and she'd she'd altered her height by wearing shoes with blocks in them. And he was like, what is this deception? Do you think that as husband and wife we should deceive each other? This is terrible, terrible, awful. I prefer you as plain as possible, essentially, is what he's saying. He's like, no, I don't like you to make up other men or find you hot, Like I don't like that.

00:51:51
Speaker 2: No, the way you can see that mentality in some modern mm hmm, yeah, so many feelings, there.

00:52:02
Speaker 6: So many feelings, but like this idea that this exterior of beauty because obviously this this young wife was trying to beautify herself. And she says, oh, but you know I did this for you, and he's like, I don't care. In more words, of course, he's trying to be very charming about it, because intro Greek men like to big themselves up, I think, especially in a socratic conversation, it's got to be pretty of course, so she's like, oh, I did this for you, and he's like, I don't want you to, because the more beautiful you are, the more attention you're attractive, and the more havoc will be brought, which is exactly kind of what happens with Pandora. She's beautiful and attracts a lot of attention from Epimetheus, bless him, the god of afterthought. I feel very bad for that man. He's the only innocent one. I'm decided.

00:53:02
Speaker 2: I can see that. Yeah, I mean he really had no control over it, Like he is literally the god of afterthought.

00:53:11
Speaker 6: So you get that with Pandora, where like she's beautiful but concealing something, much like this wife is considered to be Biostomachus. But then you have Helen, who is so beautiful she causes at the time in quotation marks of course, the biggest war that the world had ever seen. Like it puts out this idea that being pretty or beautiful or considered like above average is a lot of trouble. So in ancient Greece, in more kind of a classical period, when the citizenship law by Pericles came about, a lot of women were meant to stay inside, away from men because if they went outside it would cause trouble because they're beautiful. And you see this in Lysias one where this wife goes to a funeral and this man sees her. Thisfe is young, she's married, she's had a baby with her husband, and Lucias makes that very very clear that they've already had the baby because of the citizenship. How the citizenship law works, because otherwise the child would be considered illegitimate and would not be able to inherit property once the father died. And it's like she went to a funeral, she was in mourning, and yet still a man was attracted to her and caused trouble. So it reinforces that women should be locked away kind of message, which is just so one wrong, like it's wrong for one.

00:54:43
Speaker 2: Very classically Athenian.

00:54:45
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's very Athenian. But it's so interesting in how all of this just interlinks.

00:54:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's fascinating, I mean yeah, because you know, they cause so much trouble if they're just out and about being good looking, how dare they right?

00:55:01
Speaker 1: The nerve?

00:55:03
Speaker 8: The nerve?

00:55:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's I mean, so I because I've sort of now developed this love of this idea of the Beautiful Evil, Beautiful Ugly. I named a cocktail in my new Cocktails book, and I'll reveal it now in this episode. Oh so Blessed and Knowledge, and I did something weird with it, you know, So I'm like, the more I listen, I'm kind of like, I kind of I'm curious about what I did and how it'll be. I mean, it's a cocktail, it doesn't matter. But so I chose to go with Beautiful Ugly for Medusa, Oh yes, because I thought it was just an interesting way of addressing you know, obviously, I am me and this is my world. So if I'm going to have a Medusa cocktail, like, it's going to address the fact that, like she is deeply misunderstood and pop culture representation is completely wrong and all these different things. So I use Beautiful Ugly to kind of go with that and suggest that you know, she, like her monstrosity is questionable. I would argue, it's very like I think it's pretty unclear. Like we have, you know, we have a lot of gorgon imagery that often it's not named Medusa until unless when it just looks like a gorgon. And I find that so fascinating. She's the only mortal one. You know, there's so many things, but I decided that it sort of suited her when it comes to taking her story back from Perseus of like, she is a beautiful ugly she is kind of she's just sort of all things, but none of them required her to be killed by Perseus. That was, you know, purely exactly. It was one hundred percent just because like Polydectes wanted Perseus killed and he was going to do it by having him, you know, die trying to kill Medusa. But like it's just I, you know, I will take it upon myself to constantly push back against the idea that she was deserving of death in any way. And I just, yeah, I don't know. I suppose using beautiful Evil was an interesting way to do that. But then because of the layout of my book, I think I'm pretty sure the very next cocktail, it's like a section later, but is Pandora's jar. So then I go even deeper into the beautiful evil, beautiful ugly. So it's very fun. So yeah, there's a lot of I mean, honestly, for a book of cocktails, this is like the most academic shit, like.

00:57:32
Speaker 7: I'm going to teach people.

00:57:34
Speaker 2: And like, oh yeah, the level of nerd that is in this, Like you know, two paragraphs for each cocktail.

00:57:41
Speaker 6: You know what it's like a reward system. Read something academic, get drunk.

00:57:46
Speaker 2: Absolutely, And I just bought the ingredients to make the beautiful, ugly the Medusa cocktails. I'm gonna have to make one soon. And the the garnish for it is a rose with the thorns on.

00:58:01
Speaker 6: I love that.

00:58:02
Speaker 2: No, I don't know how you can do it with a cocktail.

00:58:05
Speaker 7: I don't know how you're going to drink.

00:58:08
Speaker 2: Rape it just to drape it on the glass. I think it seems a little complicated to me, but interesting and beautiful ugly.

00:58:17
Speaker 7: I guess I love that. I love that with my whole heart.

00:58:22
Speaker 2: Helen. So I'd love to know more about, yes, Helen hell generally and how Helen fits in with all of this, Not that you haven't said a lot already, but I just want to talk about Helen.

00:58:30
Speaker 6: Helen is my one true enough.

00:58:35
Speaker 2: As she should be.

00:58:36
Speaker 6: There's that key line about her that appears absolutely everywhere, the face that launched a thousand ships, And.

00:58:45
Speaker 7: I mean it didn't.

00:58:46
Speaker 6: There was not a thousand ships if there were any ships actually, but I like the line.

00:58:52
Speaker 2: It's it's a good line if.

00:58:55
Speaker 6: It's glorifying her beauty to such an extent, which I've kind of assumed has probably come from her Olympian paternity rather than her mortal because her siblings. I can't remember which way around it is one of the twins, one of the twin boys is from the Olympian.

00:59:16
Speaker 2: I think it's castor yeah, I feel like it always yeah, I always question it too. It's one of them.

00:59:25
Speaker 6: But not The other two are not described in such a way that Helen is. Helen is this vision of perfection. She is described in some cases as like a surroga Aphrodite, which I can't be sure that Aphrodite would have enjoyed considering everything with Psyche.

00:59:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, she doesn't really allow that, but she.

00:59:48
Speaker 6: Seems to give Helen a lot of gifts, So I think she's fine to be fair. I think she's like, yeah, if I just pair you with my favorite guy, Paris, it'll be fine.

01:00:00
Speaker 2: He almost wonder though, whether that was part of it, right, like whether.

01:00:04
Speaker 7: So much?

01:00:05
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, or like the subtle inclusion is that, like you know, the little hidden pieces that AFRODDI knows it'll start a war because and then she's that's kind of her way of, you know, making Helen not so perfect, because if Helen started a war, then her beauty doesn't mean as much.

01:00:21
Speaker 6: There has to be some flaws, you know, can't have it all nice and roses.

01:00:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, sometimes you'll just start the biggest war the Mediterranean have ever seen.

01:00:30
Speaker 6: Party time. So it's probably from her Olympian paternity, but we can assume that it has actually been enhanced by Aphrodite, as in.

01:00:42
Speaker 7: Book three.

01:00:43
Speaker 6: I believe when she's calling Helen to come back inside and meet her love of Paris, she threatens to take away her gifts in her favor So and we do see that gods and goddess is beautifying or changing their appearance of the Favorites. So I believe we see it in Apollonis and Argon Outica with Jason, where here is like, let's make him look spectacular, shooting all these superpowers into him. So Paulo the day.

01:01:15
Speaker 2: Well, and Athena does it too, Odysseus too right, you know, in lots of different ways disguising him. But then also when she finally yeah, and then she makes him look like as good as he's ever looked before. Like, you know, he's a handsome hunk of a man. He goes from you know, hidden Odysseus and an old man to like the hardest Odysseus you've ever seen.

01:01:36
Speaker 6: Absolutely so, I think you see that beautification via the God's interference, if you will.

01:01:43
Speaker 7: And it's not just from.

01:01:44
Speaker 6: Her Olympian paternity. But this beauty is really really hard to capture, I believe, Cicero notes Zeuxis. I'm not sure if I'm saying his name right. He's a he's a painter, and he was commissioned to paint Helen of Troy. This was many many years after she would have passed, not necessarily suggesting that she was ever alive, but right, you know, it was many years after the eliab.

01:02:12
Speaker 7: Was written, at least.

01:02:13
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:02:13
Speaker 6: So he auditions all of the women in the city to find Helen's likeness, but none, unfortunately, possess the beauty of Helen.

01:02:24
Speaker 2: No one can.

01:02:25
Speaker 6: Yeah, So instead he picks five girls who are the most beautiful or five women, It's a bit unclear on the exact translation. He selects the five most beautiful women and uses their best features. So He's like, I'll take your face and then your arms, and then your chest, and then your bottom and then your legs, and he goes that is how I will create Helen and her composite. But it's really interesting because her beauty. Despite that we know that she is the most beautiful woman in the world, we don't know what she looks like.

01:03:01
Speaker 2: No, we don't know what made her that beautiful. It's just like an inherent, like indescribable thing.

01:03:07
Speaker 6: They always just scriper as like the most beautiful, or stunningly like the immortal goddess, or frightening like frighteningly like the immortal Goddess I believe is the quote from Iliad three. But they never actually say why. They don't say her hair is as radiant as the sun or anything. They don't say anything like that, which is you get a lot of epithets with other women. We occasionally get like white armed or you know, stuff like that, but that's very very basic.

01:03:35
Speaker 2: It's very traditionally just like that's how they describe women.

01:03:37
Speaker 6: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's not really diverging from anything. But in this way, you also see Helen as quite similar to Pandora because she is almost molded, and from the from the painting, we don't know what she looks like, much like Pandora. We don't actually know what she looks like. We just told that she is molded in the form of the immortal goddesses, much like Helen's, which she's frighteningly like the immortal goddess referring to Aphrodite, so we can assume that they're fairly similar looking. Actually they're both Neither are described, their actual features are not described, and they are almost composite in this painting. So Helen is comprised of five different women, and Pandora is molded to resemble these goddesses. They are very similar in this way. So you get the kalon part, the beautiful part of Kalan Ka Khan, and you see it kind of coming to life. But then the interior, the lustfulness of Helen, or the curiosity or bitch's mind or knavish nature of Pandora comes through and gives you this evil that is so toxic and poisonous to the people around them that it destroys it absolutely engulfs everything, like Pandora releases all of these evils into the world, and then Helen brings on the biggest war that the world old has seen, or at least the Mediterranean.

01:05:13
Speaker 2: Is the world well exactly.

01:05:16
Speaker 6: So it's it's almost natural that they would both be considered Colomka con.

01:05:31
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's a huge There are so many different options on what Toma is or who and where the ethics come from that you can literally spend decades working on it. And one of the things that's really hard to convey is those of us who have strong convictions have often come to those after so much work that it's almost impossible sometimes to give all the information so someone can make a choice, right, And there are a couple things obscuring our ability to talk about it. So I want to get to sort of the obstacles for us to actually get to the truth before I talk.

01:06:28
Speaker 8: About my opinions.

01:06:30
Speaker 5: One is the genesis of the poems, and the textual transmission is so complicated and tortured that it's impossible to say anything certain about their origins, right, And I think that what happens is that people on either side tend to obscure the evidence.

01:06:48
Speaker 8: So, so first thing is obstacles, right.

01:06:50
Speaker 5: Obstacle one is the process of textual transmission and origins is so confused and tortured that it's really hard to sort of drill back to an original of any time. Obstacle number two is the impulse to drill back to an original. The very idea that there's an orr text or origin is so based in non archaic ideas that it really not quite perverts, but I'll say perverts twists the way we talk about the question, right, and option three sort of going along with this.

01:07:31
Speaker 8: Are cultural aesthetics.

01:07:34
Speaker 5: We find it almost impossible to conceive of what it's like to be part of a non literate culture, and we have this it's false dichotomy, right, If you're not literate, then you're primitive. If you're not writing things down and your oral then things can't be complex and sophisticated.

01:07:53
Speaker 8: So those three basic barriers.

01:07:56
Speaker 5: Make it really hard to even talk about the nature of Homeric poetry as we have it. All Right, So I'm gonna pause there. Do you want to talk about one of those things? Or can I keep rolling?

01:08:07
Speaker 2: I mean to add because that's so interesting and it's something that comes up for me a lot where people will ask me like, well, you know, I heard this version of myth you told this version, like what's the original or just the very idea of original myth?

01:08:20
Speaker 7: Right?

01:08:21
Speaker 2: People want to use that term. They want to understand, you know, I tell all these different variations all you know, I've covered one version three years ago and I'll redo it again and it's completely different. And that's just because I found more sourcing and I use primary sources now in a way that when I first started, I didn't know what I was doing and I just kind of figured out what I figured out. And so I'm constantly like navigating that with my listeners of no, you don't need to figure it out, there's no timeline, you don't need to figure out like why something conflicts with another thing in the myth, because they weren't thinking about that. It wasn't a concern. It was, yeah, this oral tradition. So I mean, I'm fascinated by all of that, and I think, yeah, it's something that I'm very familiar with.

01:09:00
Speaker 7: Basically, so we had.

01:09:02
Speaker 5: These cultural problems that make it hard for us to understand or make us deny the possibility that these texts that we have come out of a place where there is no author and that they don't need individuals to create their complexity. So when we deal with the complex so I'll go back to the textual transmission issue. But our basic cultural prejudice and belief is that to have something of structure and complexity, you have to have a designer behind it who intended for it to be the.

01:09:36
Speaker 8: Case, right, And that.

01:09:40
Speaker 5: Is based in a cultural perspective that's deeply informed by Christian views but also deeply informed by individualist ideas that are kind of post Homeric that arise with literacy. Not to say that the Homeric ethics don't show an individualist ideal, but what we project a lot of values on searching for the author. All right, So what I'll do, I'll just like talk briefly about or hormonalaic theory and then go back to your question about so the Illa and the Odyssey being.

01:10:13
Speaker 8: Very different, because they're all right, so.

01:10:16
Speaker 5: Oral formulaic theory, you know. Really it was anticipated by Hellenistic authors. It was anticipated further by Friedrich Augustus Wolf, who was a Homeric scholar in Germany. He published something called the Prolegomia at Homerom in seventeen ninety five, and it really came to its head after Milman Perry and Albert Lord did their field studies in the Balkans from Yugoslavia in between the two World Wars, right, and it emerges out of the place where the question used to be unitarians versus analysts, where people who said the Homeric epics are whole and they come from one author, and analysts said no, they were put together by editors and from a bunch of traditional narratives.

01:11:04
Speaker 8: What happened with Perry and Lloyd's.

01:11:07
Speaker 5: Theory is that they found they show pretty clearly one as Perry showed, Homeric language developed alongside meter, and it's formulaic in the sense that you can see.

01:11:20
Speaker 8: How it's actually built together.

01:11:21
Speaker 7: Right.

01:11:21
Speaker 5: It is an amalgam dialect that makes it possible to compose in performance. So you don't actually need you don't have with Homer, which you have with Virgil, which is someone sitting down like trying to make the meter work. So when someone sang the first line of the Iliad me so the first line of the Odyssey, and musa polutrop on hasmol apola, they didn't think.

01:11:45
Speaker 8: Of it as individual words. Right.

01:11:47
Speaker 5: These are themes, and these are ideas in which the language that you're contemplating them is ed to the meter, right. So language does amazing things. And part of what Milman, Perry and linguists at the time didn't have access to is modern linguistics, which shows that like, you can put almost any restriction on a language you want and it will find some way to function. Like language is in a way very much like viral life.

01:12:13
Speaker 8: I've been thinking this a lot with.

01:12:14
Speaker 5: COVID, right, which is that it adapts to its environment and its needs and it finds a way to work. So you can have languages that have no morphological tens right, instead you mark tents in time with lexical items with a word before now after you have languages in which nouns have tents, right, which is hard for us to think of speaking into European languages language, but you can put any restriction you want in a language and make it work. So the first leap that's hard for people to understand is that most people in Archaic Greece could compose hexameter to one extent or another right as part of being trained into a system. And we know this because the language of Homer isn't just epic right, Oracles use the same language. Elijack poetry use the same languae, which modified early philosophers composed and sang in hexameter, and so this was the language of authority in the ancient world. And so the thing that's hard for us to understand is that you can actually stand and recite poetry or sing it without sitting down with a pen and paper and figuring it all out. So that's one thing. And in any system poetry or art comes between in the tension between sort of the language you inherit from people and what that particular song or piece of work does.

01:13:46
Speaker 8: With that language.

01:13:47
Speaker 7: Right.

01:13:48
Speaker 8: So the second thing that was.

01:13:49
Speaker 5: Hard for people to really conceive is that long poems could be performed repeatedly over time.

01:13:55
Speaker 8: Right.

01:13:55
Speaker 5: So one thing that we find then from Lord's theory, from Lord's work and the singer of Tales is that you have these systems, these bards, these singers in Yugoslavia who sing extremely long songs based on themes that they compose in the moment. And so this is great, and what people often do is they stop at that moment and they don't follow up. In the entire field of oral poetics and anthropology and other fields that's still developing. And so one of the real dangers of this type of work is assuming that analogy equals truth. Right, when we find an analogy, it shows something's possible, it doesn't show it's probable. Another good example and one that always gets to me, is in Rajasthan. There in India, there's a traditional epic of Dave Narayan, who is a cattle wrestler, and the song is sung at a or performed at a yearly festival that lasts seven days, and the singers sing from dusk till dawn basically every day from memory, right, or they're composing. What they have actually as an aid for composition is a singer has an assistant the tapestry that has images of the tale that's illuminated as they're performing. And in the seventies and eighties, different performances of this were recorded, and it's longer than the Ilien in the Odyssey, and the difference between the performances is under five percent, right, wow, under five percent for seven days of singing compared to the Ilia in the Odyssey, which probably take around twenty four hours or less.

01:15:37
Speaker 8: Right.

01:15:38
Speaker 5: So, the one big challenge is our belief that it's possible to compose long things with intricate structure in performance, and that you don't have to be one person doing it right. And so that leads into sort of the secondary problem. If it is possible that we have this long traditional poem that can be sung in performance, does the genius come from the individual singing it or the tradition? And this is where I think most modern Homer is split. Is that decision. Do you think what's most important is the last singer or the entire tradition that came before. I think that people choose the last singer because of cultural prejudice, because it's hard for us to understand that communal creation can actually create extremely complex and rewarding works of art. We just don't want to see it that way. We're so prejudiced against collective creation and collectivity and so much towards individualism that we can't almost see outside of ourselves, right, And so I think these cultural prejudices make us accept the possibility of long form composition and performance as a type of art, but downgrade the probability of That's where the Ilia and the Odyssey came from.

01:17:05
Speaker 8: And that's where we can think.

01:17:07
Speaker 7: For me, the.

01:17:10
Speaker 5: Is trying to reconstruct the audience experience of it, and how important it is that these poems respond to audiences over time. One of the things you noted is how different the ilia in the Odyssey is, and the people in the past have said, based on their best knowledge, well, clearly this means that they come from different people, right, because they're assuming that differences from difference in.

01:17:32
Speaker 8: Human beings, not from theme.

01:17:34
Speaker 5: One of the things that Albert Lord and other oralists show really convincingly is that theme creates diction and structure. All right, the theme of the Odyssey is very different from the theme of the Iliad. But the one place where their language gets really close is in book twenty two when Odysseus is killing everybody, okay, And there are other ways, like there are books of the Iliad in which you have really strange language. The language of book ten is very different from the rest of the poem. The language of book twenty one, when Achilles is fighting the river is also really different from the rest of the poem. And you want to add something else. In the funeral games for patrol clists, very different language. And as you can imagine, over time people have said, well, these books don't belong because they're not the same. And to me, and you know, anybody listening to this who's on the other side of the equation to will object. But to me, this is very lazy thinking. It's like going outside looking at a tree, not liking its shape and saying that's not a tree, that's something different, that branch needs to go.

01:18:41
Speaker 8: Right. For me, it is the job of a literary interpreter to.

01:18:45
Speaker 5: Go to ridiculous extents to try to understand a piece of art in its own terms, rather than insisting that they should be able to change it, right, that there's something wrong with it. And so then this goes back again to the problem of transmission.

01:19:02
Speaker 8: Right.

01:19:03
Speaker 5: So if we accept the possibility that in the Odyssey come out of in oral context, and if we accept that part of their difference is connected to theme and audiences, right, The Iliot's a poem of war, teaches you how to die.

01:19:15
Speaker 8: The Odesty is a poem of life. It teaches you how what's surviving is for.

01:19:20
Speaker 5: Right, If we have these two different things, why don't we have anything else? If there was an oral tradition, right, why don't we have more variants?

01:19:28
Speaker 7: Right?

01:19:29
Speaker 5: And then finally, how do we go from having an oral tradition to having a textual and these The fact is you can't actually answer these questions. You can say what's likely, but you can't actually Without a time machine, which would cause its whole own problems, you can't actually solve them. We do know that the text we have was probably written down in Athens, and it was probably influenced by Athenian power and money around the time of the Persian Wars, but then nobody read it. Okay, here's the thing that people just don't understand. When you write down an oral tradition, people like don't read the transcript.

01:20:10
Speaker 7: Right.

01:20:10
Speaker 5: So Mina Scottagensen has a book called Writing Homer. She says some things that they are a little out there, but one thing she asserts is that what probably happened is that in the first time they were written down, if they're written down in monumental form, they were deposited in a temple for safe keeping or somewhere else and nobody touched them. All right, because you wouldn't suddenly change the way you enjoy art, right, if you're really into listening to music and someone is like, look, we have to preserve Taylor Swift for all time, we're going to write down everything. You're not going to start reading the lyrics instead of listening, because that's not what you do with the genre, right, So when genres transform, in order for them to be enjoyed, their use needs to transform. And so we see this happening in the text that show up in the fourth century. So in Plato and Aristotle and others, we see evidence of people turning.

01:21:07
Speaker 8: To written texts.

01:21:08
Speaker 5: And it's really during the hell in this period and libraries like those at Alexandria antia Pella, where you divorce the epics from their performance context and people suddenly start reading them and editing them and worrying.

01:21:24
Speaker 8: About the right version.

01:21:26
Speaker 5: So you know, when we go back to that moment of dictation, this is where dictation theory comes in. We have another moment where people are worried about where does the authority come from. So one of the ways that people who really want to believe in a single authorship theory adapt to these facts is they focus on the moment of dictation and say, well, that singer or the singers who are involved in dictation and the editor were the ones who made this fanciful thing that we made or that we have. Right, And I'll go back to another tree metaphor for understanding this one. Right, If you go outside and look at a tree that's particularly well suited to its environment, you might say, well, who's responsible for this?

01:22:13
Speaker 8: Right?

01:22:13
Speaker 5: And someone may say, well, the gardener put it there. I'm like, well, maybe the person planted it, But what about those who cared for it? What about the people who trimmed it afterwards? And what about the generation of human beings who manipulated the genome of trees to get this specific type of ornamental tree?

01:22:31
Speaker 8: And then on.

01:22:32
Speaker 5: Top of that, what about the esthetics of treiness?

01:22:35
Speaker 8: Right?

01:22:36
Speaker 5: How you and I have been judged or judged, have been trained.

01:22:40
Speaker 8: To judge the.

01:22:42
Speaker 5: Natural environment based on aesthetics that we've inherited. Right, we expect trees to look a certain way, and it's rarely how they would have looked in the wild or you know, one hundred centuries ago. For me, like oral poetry is like this, right, we selected for certain types. We find structure in it because we're looking for structure, and because it comes out of a process that enables and incentivizes poets to structure things in a ring structure, but we don't see the hundreds, if not millions of voices that were involved in its creation. So at the end, what we have is, you know, people who want to privilege the final composer in some way, and then people like me who want to say that composer could have been almost anybody. It may have been multiple people, and it was a process of audience of performers over time. So that's my very long answer to your question. But for me it cuts to the heart of what of how we think literature and art exists in the world. And I like to apply the same sort of thought process to other things. So if we're talking about a painting someone made, you might say, well, that's a picassam, and I might say, well, that's fine, he's really cool in everything, But what about the art of painting, Like, where did it come from? What about the conversations he was having, what about the history of art that brought him to that.

01:24:04
Speaker 8: Moment to create that thing? Right?

01:24:06
Speaker 5: And a painting is in a way, not to slight art historians, but a single painting in a way is nowhere near the complexity of sixteen thousand lines of the Iliad and the audis and twelve thousand lines of the Odyssey, and the tremendous histories that they bring with them. And so I think for us as audience members or modern readers, it is a lack of imagination that keeps us from seeing the poems as what I think they really are, which is SUI Genner's right. Unlike anything else that we know from the tradition of films.

01:24:41
Speaker 2: M that's all just so fascinating. I mean, I've sort of I've certainly, you know, I've always existed in the at least in the belief system generally that it was certainly all based in oral tradition. And I'm not you know, I don't think I've ever notably believed that Homer specifically was a person. Though funny enough, I realize he's sitting directly behind me, where in my camera Homer, the version of Homer that they sell in Athens at the time, is sitting behind me. But it is so interesting to to I mean, for one, that blew my mind to hear that it would have been composed in that way in Athens, were written down or whatever it was there. That's fascinating because I would have never I mean.

01:25:23
Speaker 8: No, it's so.

01:25:24
Speaker 5: I mean, we have shaky evidence that other cities made their made copies as well, and there's also apocryphal stuff to show important Homer is of city founders introducing.

01:25:36
Speaker 8: Homer into their cities.

01:25:38
Speaker 5: So like Krgus allegedly introduced Homer to the Spartans, right, and sold On allegedly was involved in Athens. Later we say it's the the sisteritids. But it really comes down to the materiality of the writing of the poems. I think in the modern world we completely underestimate how expensive of a task it would have been to record these poems in the fifth century BC. This wasn't just like, oh, I'll get some want to write down a book, right, This was like, I want to do something nobody's ever done before, because I'm a bawler, right, Like I'm going to show off and we're going to own it because that is a talisman of our power and authority. And you couldn't go to bookshops and Athens and buy the Iliad.

01:26:25
Speaker 8: This is done.

01:26:25
Speaker 5: I mean, it's so many scrolls, it's ridiculous. So I think again it's a lack of imagination. But also we've been incentivized to think that way, right. We construct the past not in its own image, but in our own, and we raise up what we've done in the meantime by doing that. And so I think a lot of what we need to do is to defamiliarize.

01:26:47
Speaker 8: Ourselves with it and to really look around.

01:26:50
Speaker 5: Homer for evidence of where the epics came from.

01:26:53
Speaker 2: M I've always found it so interesting, and I mean that certainly sounds like Athens, you know, the showing off kind of thing. But I've always found it so interesting that Athens is basically I mean, it's there, you know, I think in the Catalog of Ships, somebody's from Athens. But other than that, Athens is like exactly. Athens is like not in the Iliad, which has always been so interesting to me. And I know it's time frame, but just because they wrote it down there, I'm still surprised.

01:27:19
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, but I think that's actually part of the the the trick of Homer, right. The epics really endeavor to make their main characters nobody from nowhere, right, to appeal to the maximum number of polities, right, And that's why I really see the are these epics coming at the end of the performative tradition at a period when you have when you have a consciousness of all these other Greek places and a real attempt to appeal to them all without identifying with.

01:27:51
Speaker 8: One of the strong ones. Right.

01:27:53
Speaker 5: I mean, notice Thebes is not there. It barely even exists in the catalog. Corinth doesn't matter. Right, Sparta is kind of there in the Odyssey, but it's a weird sort of six Sparta, Like it's just like a house.

01:28:07
Speaker 8: Right.

01:28:07
Speaker 5: But the main aracters of each epic are from borderlands.

01:28:11
Speaker 6: Right.

01:28:12
Speaker 5: Thea is not a place, right, it just barely exists. And Odysseus' is Ithaca. It has so many problems with it that to this day people are like, oh it's in Greenland, or oh it's actually Ireland, or oh like crazy things. Right. The factually is the fact is fictional places are fictional places.

01:28:30
Speaker 8: Right.

01:28:30
Speaker 5: And what was important I think for the epics and why they were really selected from among all the other competing tales, is that they tell something that never actually happened, which is a story of a great coalition of Greeks uniting against an Eastern enemy. I think there's no accident that this became a popular narrative tradition around the time that the Greeks were engaging with the Persians more and more.

01:28:58
Speaker 8: Right, It's just like, you know, it.

01:29:00
Speaker 5: Became a convenient way of thinking about the world that really responded to the experiences and interest.

01:29:07
Speaker 3: On the audience.

01:29:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's really interesting. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, they were certainly or was more timely to be thinking about an enemy from the east. But at the same time, it's always interesting to me too that Troy is i mean pretty objectively like almost the good guy, not you know, like that you really you feel for Hector in a way that you don't really feel you certainly don't feel for like Agamemnon. And that's always interesting.

01:29:34
Speaker 5: Well, I think that's that's why it doesn't completely coalesce around that idea of the Greece versus the other. Instead, you know, I think probably what happens the Trojan more narrative was always there in such a way, but it became selective and selected and more prominent.

01:29:49
Speaker 8: And you see this in.

01:29:49
Speaker 5: A way, I think as you get farther ahead in the development of myths, as coalition narratives become really attractive right from the Caledonian Borhunt to Jason le Argo, to the Seven against Thebes. It's this whole experimental idea of what happens like if we knit together larger groups of people, Right, what happens when we send our big man against their big man and then they have to work together?

01:30:17
Speaker 3: Right?

01:30:17
Speaker 8: It's like, you know, you spend ten years trying to get to.

01:30:19
Speaker 5: The Avengers movie, right, you know, give everybody their origin narrative, and then suddenly the individuals aren't as important as they were. And so I think we have to put the Ilien in the Odyssey.

01:30:31
Speaker 8: In that context.

01:30:32
Speaker 5: And then you know, people like to put someone like Barry Powell or others will put the Ili in the Odyssey at the beginning of the Greek literary tradition, and I want to ask always, well, what if we do the opposite, what if we put it near the end? How does that change the way we think about it? Because we know that it wasn't written down really early and that it was still changing.

01:30:57
Speaker 8: And so that's really been sort of.

01:30:58
Speaker 5: The way I've approached it for a while, and I'm pretty convinced. I mean, my basic feeling is that the Illi and the Odyssey were written down partly for power, but also because society was changing and Athens tragedy became more popular. Lyric poetry rose in a way. I mean, it's important before and then you had the exporting of culture as part of empire power, and so I think you have to look sort of for cultural motivators for taking a traditional art form and encoding it in a new way.

01:31:45
Speaker 2: Thank you all so much for listening. As always again, I will be back soon with new episodes, specifically on Euripides. Because who better to bring me out of this absolute mental mess that I am in than my favorite man in the world. Let's talk a bit. This baby is written and produced by me Live Albert MICHAELA. Smith is the Hermes to my Olympians. She is the assistant producer who put together all of these clips to save me from myself because she's a joy. Laura Smith is a production assistant an audio engineer who's been doing incredible work on the conversation episodes ever since she joined, and also the website. Ugh, it's gonna be fun. It's gonna be more useful, That's what it's gonna be. The podcast is part of the iHeart podcast Network. Listen on Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. I am live and I do love this shit.