Conversations: How Women Became Poets, Gender History in Greek Literature w/ Emily Hauser

Liv speaks with author Emily Hauser about her book How Women Became Poets. They look at women in Greek myth, literature, etymology, and, very specifically, the long and arduous history of women 'poets' in Greek literature. Plus, a sneak peak at Emily's next work: Mythica/Penelope's Bones. Find more from Emily here https://www.emilyhauser.com/. CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here: mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liv Albert?

  Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So, check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/groups.

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• 1:40Liv Albert?

  Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and I am your host, Liv, here with another amazing conversation episode. Today's episode is with Emily Hauser, who is sort of everything in the classical world. You may know her name from a number of novels from a few years back, before the big craze, I would say, but also she has some recent and upcoming nonfiction work and...

• 2:12Liv Albert?

  Wow. This book that we're talking about today slash just this conversation in general blew my mind wide open. You can look forward to many more conversations with Emily because we had such an incredible time and oh my god, this episode. And honestly, I couldn't think of a better title for the episode than the book itself. So just, oh, enjoy.

• 2:52Liv Albert?

  Conversations: How Women Became Poets: Gender History in Greek Literature with Emily Hauser.

• 3:15Liv Albert?

  So you set a couple of things off, Mike, that will lead me directly into how I'm so thrilled to have you here, which is talking about writing academically versus, we didn't actually talk about it, but I'm going to bring it up, the fiction writing. Because I did not know that you were an academic. I only had your fiction books on my shelf. And then so when Michaela like told me about this, this book, How Women Became Poets, I, Michaela suggested this and I was like, oh, great. She was like, can we get it for the show? And I was like, yeah, we're both getting copies. No problem. And I had one sent to her. But I saw the name and I was like, oh, I literally only had considered fiction. I was so thrilled to like know this. And then I Googled you and then very shortly

• 3:59Liv Albert?

  after you messaged me. So it became this absolutely perfect thing. But it must be so interesting to have a fiction career in addition. Like, there's not a lot of names for that. I mean, Natalie Haines is one, but I think she writes less of that, like deeper academic stuff like you do. So, I mean, yeah, where was that transition kind of coming from? And I know that your fiction is also fairly older. So I don't know, I've had it for a while. I'm not gonna lie, I have a lot of fiction books that I haven't gotten to read, but I have.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh.

• 4:30Liv Albert?

  But like, yeah, so like, how did that come about? Kind of before we dive into like all of the questions I have about the actual content of your.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, my gosh. No, that's, I mean, it's such a good question. And I feel like it's, it's something we were kind of edging towards a little bit off mic anyway. So basically, the way it happened was I was doing my, so this is the fiction kind of side of things. So I was doing my PhD in classics at Yale and I was having the kind of typical PhD crisis of confidence, crisis of calling, like whatever you're gonna call it. And I just kind of was like, I feel like I, I want to prove to myself that classics can be accessible, that it can be exciting, that it can reach young people. And all of the things.

• 5:15Liv Albert?

  So relatable.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I know. Honestly, like, I mean.

• 5:19Liv Albert?

  I've never thought of that before, huh?

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Same thing, different media. Oh, my God. I'm totally preaching to the converted. But yeah. Um, and I was just like, if I'm going to make a career out of classics, which I already knew I wanted to do. I need to make that a career that works for me. And just kind of doing the straight up academic, you know, I'm writing an article that maybe like three other people in the world are gonna read. And it's like, you know, gonna change our perception of like one word in one ancient text. I was just like, I feel like although I, I really admire that kind of scholarship. I want to think bigger and I want to think in all kinds of different ways. I want to think about all of the different methods that you can use to approach classics.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  And kind of, um, break down those boundaries a little bit. And I think I was quite free to do that because I was a grad student. So I was, you know, I was only in my first year. I wasn't at the point where I was thinking about job market or anything like that. So, um, I wrote the novels during the PhD, um, but I definitely had.

• 6:22Liv Albert?

  You have three, don't you?

• 6:23Speaker 02

  I do. Yes. So I did.

• 6:25Liv Albert?

  That is unhinged in terms of impressive.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I was basically doing it at the same time as during my dissertation. So I was like writing like the dissertation in the morning and the novels in the afternoon.

• 6:37Liv Albert?

  I mean, I have been doing that for years in terms of like the podcast and a novel, and it remains unfinished. So I am so impressed.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I don't know. I just feel like I really kind of had this burning desire to get it out into the world. I was really excited about, um. It kind of, it started with the first novel, For the Most Beautiful, because I had read Margaret Atwood's Penelope ad, and I was like, why has nobody done this for the Iliad? Why has nobody told the stories of the women of of Troy that we hear in Homer's first epic? And obviously saying that now, it sounds kind of really obvious because, um, you know, like. Now it's been done, but. Yeah, then, exactly. We had Pat Barker, we had Natalie Haines. So, like, you know. Um, but at the time, I was like, I really feel like this is, this is a story that really needs to be told. And I really wanted to do that in a way that would would open up what I felt was a very inaccessible text, the Iliad, to to a wider audience.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  So I feel like I I did that. And I did that kind of, um, I quite, I separated my myself quite, um, carefully. So. I basically wrote my dissertation and then kind of almost in secret, I was doing the novels. So I didn't tell my dissertation advisor that I was doing this because I was worried about the kind of. You know, maybe judgment I was going to get from the field. Um, and amazingly, wonderfully, everyone was like so supportive when eventually I did say, well, you know, actually, I kind of, I've got this deal, these these books are coming out. And it was really wonderful. But I think for me, because I had kind of separated these two parts, like the scholar and the writer. It was very important to me that I still demonstrated my academic chops.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Um, and this is like a little bit what we were talking about off mic because I think particularly in classics, it. It's just, it's quite, well, quite, it's a very conservative field. It is a field that, you know, has its roots in philology. And it, there is a kind of certain expectation of this performance of philological knowledge in order to kind of get acceptance. And I think that I wanted to be like, look, I can do both. I can do the kind of mainstream trade novel that is going to kind of like, you know, be. Fun and light and accessible, but then I can also do the kind of deep philology.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Um, but at the same time, as I say, like, I didn't want it to just be like, you know, here is like one word in one text. I wanted it to be something that was kind of synthetic and was like. Assessing and reassessing the whole field. So I went for this kind of like crazy ambitious idea of doing like all of Greek literature. And I mean, initially, you know, you will not believe this, but actually initially it was going to be all of Greek and Latin literature.

• 9:22Liv Albert?

  Oh, my god.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  So it was like initially even crazier. But like, I feel like for me, that was very important. And this was also particularly part of my development as a scholar. I was getting to the end of my PhD. I was then starting this project when I was at the Society of Fellows at Harvard. And I was, you know, on the job market. And so I was definitely thinking about how I was presenting myself as a classicist. And so that kind of philological work felt really important to me. Let alone, I mean, I'm just kind of giving you, I guess, the the framework of where it was in my life as a kind of principle, as opposed to kind of the topic, which obviously I'm also really passionate about.

• 10:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, well, I'm really interested in all of that, honestly, because I, I mean, I love that having that balance. And I think, I mean, personally, like, I years ago bought, like, every myth retelling I could find. This was before there were as many as there are now.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, you would be rank up pretty, pretty soon.

• 10:20Liv Albert?

  Exactly. A little while ago. And particularly, well, I mean, I would say exclusively when they featured women. And so I was like, saw yours, and I was like, oh, my god, absolutely. And then quickly fell into this podcast where it became slightly, unfortunately, felt like work to read mythological novels. But not least, because my, my, the thing I have with some of them, and I'm not going to be specific, because I don't even have any specific examples, but I would read them. And I would find myself far too consumed with questions of like, oh, I wonder why they made this choice? Or, oh, was this kind of like, this sort of quote unquote inaccuracy, I don't, you know, but in whatever way that's true for mythology, like, was that intentional? Or like, I would just overthink everything

• 11:04Liv Albert?

  because my knowledge of the sources is like, obnoxious. And so, but like, but now that I know.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  It's a good word.

• 11:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  We embrace the obnoxiousness.

• 11:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah, like, I'm proud of it. But, but now knowing. That that you're coming at it from your background. It makes me go like, okay, well, those are priority books for me to read because

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:23Liv Albert?

  While the other ones, not to say that any is better or worse, but like some are, I think, better for people with a deep knowledge of mythology pre-existing. And some are better for people who want like a fun fiction and that that's perfect. But for me, like, I do find if people don't have the depth of the field that necessarily I do, like, I get annoyed because I'm over, I'm questioning every single thing that they do. And I'm like, that's not fun for me or the author. So like,

• 11:50Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh. No, and sometimes, no, but you're so bright. And sometimes you have to actually rein yourself back in and be like, remember that this is not attempting to be a kind of historical artifact. It is fiction, you know? And I feel like I kind of need to need to bang myself over the head with that. And and that's, you know, me and I've I've already kind of gone through that process of writing the novels and had to kind of confront that myself. So like, I I hundred percent get what where you're coming from. I mean, for me, what was really important for the novels was having an author's note that really made clear what kind of historical accuracy you could expect and what choices I had made, the points where I had changed

• 12:30Speaker 02

  or altered the myth or the narrative, so that people would kind of go away being like, okay, I can, I can at least kind of understand what's happening here. Because I think the thing that I I really dislike is when you're being presented with something. And I guess we're kind of lucky in that, like, when we read one of these mystery tellings, we we know the parameters. We know the choices that have been made and the alterations that have been made. And we can maybe get frustrated with them or we can question them, but we feel secure in understanding

• 12:57Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  that framework. And I think the thing that I find really frustrating is if I'm reading a historical novel in a different time period that I'm not as comfortable with. When then I'm like, well, actually, I don't know what kind of choices you were making. And I I really, as a, as a scholar, As someone who's passionate about history, like I need, I need to know that.

• 13:17Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, that's my thing with myth is that like, I love the changes. That's fine. But in my head, they need to be like, changes made with specific intent based in the myths. So then when I'm reading something and it's clear that like, they just changed it because they felt like it, like that's fine for you, but it's going to drive me crazy kind of thing, you know? But anyway, this is not about fiction. I could turn it into anything. Um, but I mean, honestly, the title of this book alone was, made me go like, ha, I'm obsessed. Um, but I will, maybe we'll start with the question that Michaela gave me. Because she's missing out. Um, and I'm going to read it directly, uh, just for the reasoning why I'm pulling out my phone. Okay.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  You're not, you're not checking your messages.

• 13:57Liv Albert?

  This is a direct quote. Uh, okay. Uh, ask her about the Homeric hymn to Hermes and how it made me a little sad. My nickname is Hermes. LOL LOL. Uh, that was not a full question, but basically I don't know what reveal you gave about the Homeric hymn to Hermes that would make Michaela, Michaela feel this way. And I love that hymn so much. So I'm

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 14:20Liv Albert?

  fascinated.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Oh God, well, I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to destroy it for you.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Why is her nickname Hermes? By the way, can I ask?

• 14:28Liv Albert?

  Oh, because she is, uh, generally my like everything person and

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Okay. So it's not because she's like stealing things from you?

• 14:35Liv Albert?

  No, no, not the trickster part. Uh, it's more sort of the, it originally started kind of as like a messenger part. And then it became like Hermes is kind of the god of everything and

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 14:46Liv Albert?

  Michaela does everything with me.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Okay. Okay. Okay. So the, the good side of Hermes.

• 14:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Okay, great. Well, yeah. So, um, well, yeah. Spoiler alert, I, you know, I'm going to destroy the American to Hermes for you. Um, but basically, um, the, so I guess if I give a kind of bit of a context of what the book is about, just so that kind of

• 15:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah, sorry, please. That's probably

• 15:07Speaker 02

  No, no, no, that's fine. But just so that you get the context that this is happening in, because otherwise it might seem a bit weird. Um, so basically the kind of beginning, the starting point of this was, I suddenly realized that Sappho, who I'm obsessed with, adore her poetry.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Didn't have a word to talk about who she was as a poet.

• 15:31Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  And I just felt that we spend so much time talking about Homer the bard or Hesiod the bard or Euripides the poet. And I just was like, what would Sappho be?

• 15:45Liv Albert?

  You mean because it's so gendered?

• 15:47Speaker 02

  It's gendered. There is no female. There is no, there is no feminine. Yeah. So if she called herself a poet.

• 15:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  She would be calling herself a man poet.

• 15:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  Like, there were things that you could do, right? So what you could do is you could take the masculine term and you could add a feminine um definite article on the front. Um, which in Greek is permissible. That's something you could do. But she doesn't do it. And this is the thing that is interesting to me. So the first point is she doesn't have a word. And in fact, that word doesn't occur until like the fourth century, the word for a female poet.

• 16:23Liv Albert?

  How am I not surprised? I wish I could be, but.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  But like, how mad is that? Because if you just think about how, how like, Sappho is actually such a, an interesting example because she is basically the best chance that a woman would have had to get some kind of form of recognition in that, you know, you get all of these accolades. These like, oh, Sappho is the tenth muse and, you know, here's the list of the lyric poets and Sappho is there. But she herself never gets called a poet.

• 16:50Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  And I was just like.

• 16:51Liv Albert?

  And she wasn't alone, just for the context of the listeners too. Like, there were lots of, we have a record of a lot of other women who were writing poetry.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And, and excellent poetry and poetry for which they were lauded, right? Just to give some examples, like there's Irina who writes an epic poem. Um, which is, you know, again, kind of quite gendered in the ancient world as being kind of masculine and about war and, and about heroes and men. And, and Irina writes this amazing poem that is uh an outpouring of grief for her childhood friend who has died. And, and it's, it's called the distaff. Uh, distaff is something you use when you're weaving. So it's like, it's just centered around the feminine. But again, it was recognized as being a real masterpiece in antiquity. Um, you've got Gnosis who writes uh really famous epigrams, like a whole, a whole load of, of women.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  But yeah, they don't get poet terms um until the, the, the word for a female poet doesn't come in until the fourth century. So I was like, okay, so, so basically.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  We have a poet, Sappho, who is really excellent and the men acknowledge she's excellent, but they never give her this term, which suggested to me that there was some kind of ring fencing going on. There was some sense of access to this term. And that's kind of suggested, not only by the way it's used, but also by the structure of the language, because Greek is a grammatically gendered language. So you've got a masculine term, you can't use it for a woman. So I basically just then was like, well, what if we tried to tell the story of Greek literature, instead of assuming that it was inevitable that poets were going to end

• 18:31Speaker 02

  up being like 99% men, we actually realized that this was a kind of strategy of creating the masculinity of the poet as if it was inevitable.

• 18:47Liv Albert?

  Wow. Also, I'm just having this moment of like, how has it taken me this long to have you on my show? Because this is like, literally all I want to talk about all of the time.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh. I love this. I mean, you know, we've got like a few hours till I go to bed.

• 19:01Liv Albert?

  We'll be back.

• 19:03Liv Albert?

  No, it's, yeah. I mean, this is like my entire, like, the crux of this podcast is just me like, trying to understand the ancient lives of women, but like also being faced with the endless amount of pre-existing like scholarship that suggests that like women just basically didn't matter back then.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, or didn't matter or didn't exist.

• 19:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah, basically. Or like, what real people?

• 19:30Speaker 02

  What real people, exactly. Didn't have identities or experiences. And I think for me, it was this absence of a word suddenly made me realize that actually, like, you know, we talk a lot about how kind of language shapes our reality. And there's kind of a real understanding of how important words are. And that understanding was there in antiquity. Plato like bangs on about it all the time. But like, if that word isn't there, that articulates.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  A real absence of the woman poet, and I don't think it's an accidental absence. In fact, it can't be an accidental absence because Sappho is there. Right? So I just was like, okay, I feel like I need to retell Greek literature as this story of making this look like it was always going to happen.

• 20:23Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God. Why haven't I read this book yet? I'm glad I haven't.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Um, so, so basically what we do is we start with the assumption that actually, in the beginning, it would have been perfectly possible for there to be a feminine version of the word for poet. So, once you're in the Archaic period, um, so this is kind of right at the beginnings of Greek literature. And we're looking at Homeric epic, we're looking at Hesiod, who's um, another epic poet and traditionally thought to be a little bit later than Homer. And so we're, we're right.

• 20:55Liv Albert?

  Misogynist.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh, absolutely. Like, I will, yeah, we'll, we'll get there, I'm sure.

• 21:00Liv Albert?

  I'm sure.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  So with Homer, the word that they're using for a poet is Ioudos, which means singer man. And I translate it quite specifically as singer man because you need to understand in English that this is gendered male.

• 21:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  And it's sort of the equivalent of like fireman. Um, that we used to have in English and right, we've got singer man. Um, and it is perfectly possible, grammatically speaking in Greek, to have that as a feminine. Uh, you can still have that kind of masculine looking ending, grammatically speaking, those can be feminines if you put the feminine definite article in front of it. What's super interesting is that in Hesiod, right, the misogynist poet we were talking about, um, he has actually a fable in his works and days where he talks about the nightingale. Right? It's this, this like great fable for, for gender where you're just like, oh, my gosh.

• 21:54Liv Albert?

  And days is like, I mean, that is, I, I've read it aloud to the listeners, so just, and I've not talked about it. I've just read it aloud because, like, I don't, what is even the point?

• 22:04Speaker 02

  You were just like, I don't even have words to start on this.

• 22:07Liv Albert?

  That's absurd.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  So, so he has this, well, the listeners might remember then, he has this parable about the hawk and the nightingale. And the hawk snatches the nightingale and the nightingale doesn't say anything and he, the hawk says to it, um, like, uh, you're a nightingale, even though, um, like, I'm, I'm going to kind of like take you, I'm the stronger one, even though you are a singer. And he uses the word aidos. Um, and this is like showing basically like it is possible to have this referring to a night, to a feminine, the nightingale in Greek is feminine, the nightingale is super interesting because the word for nightingale in Greek basically means songstress. It's a feminine because they believed that only the female sang.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  So it's basically as close as you're going to get for a term for a female poet, the word nightingale.

• 23:03Liv Albert?

  Do you know offhand what the word is?

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Yes, it's aedon.

• 23:06Liv Albert?

  Okay, thank you.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  So you can hear the similarity probably, aidos and aedon, they're both coming from, they're both cognate, um, related to the root of, uh, the verb aedor, which means to sing. So aidos is a singer man, aedon is a songstress. Um, and it's, and it's so interesting because in the, in the grammar of the Greek, and now we get like real nitty gritty, but he says, um, even though you're, um, a singer, aion, aion, and aion looks masculine, but here it's got to be feminine because it's agreeing with aion, which is feminine. So what he's basically doing, and, and what's fascinating about this is that the nightingale, even though he says she's a singer, even though the nightingale is renowned for her beautiful song, she is feminine in the, in the Greek world.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  What he does, this hawk in this parable, is he completely silences her. He says, you're not able to speak even though you're a singer. And he uses the masculine word that she is not able to do.

• 24:05Liv Albert?

  That's the most Tesea thing I have ever heard.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:08Liv Albert?

  Also, just like, peak Ancient Greece.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Right, right. It's just like, and, and this is, this is kind of exactly that. It's this, it's the, like, it's this process of kind of creating it and curating it. And like, there, the, the word echoes here are so strong that it seems like it's not possible for it not to be, particularly because, and, and maybe this context will be helpful to the listeners, the word Iodos, which he's using for this nightingale, this female nightingale who's being silenced by the male hawk. And this word Iodos is used again and again throughout Homer and Hesiod for the bard, um, the one who is telling the heroic epic songs of men.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  And in fact, Hesiod actually uses that word of himself in the Theogony when he's getting like inspired by the muses and he's chosen because he's so special. And, um, the, the nightingale is like, it's basically kind of like demonstrating that it's not possible for her to have this word.

• 25:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  So this basically leads us to the Homeric hymn.

• 25:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah, but okay, actually, before we get there, I have another question because now I can't stop talking about Sappho.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:24Liv Albert?

  And the thing I'm now kind of stuck on is this calling her of the tenth muse, which, you know, I know that I, I feel like I've read that there's some sort of debate about whether he was serious or making fun of her. I mean, I assume that he was serious. She was well respected. But to me, that phrasing now, and I, I don't, I tragically never learned Ancient Greek because I'm a, it's just a disaster, but I do know like enough to pick, pick things apart, but like.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, exactly. That's, that's all you need. You just need the love. You need the love.

• 25:51Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God. No. And, and the like, knowledge of the Perseus website, thankfully.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. Perseus.

• 25:58Liv Albert?

  I, I've learned a lot from just like, yeah, getting curious and being like, all right, we'll put this into Perseus. I'm going to figure out what the Greek word is.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  That is cool.

• 26:05Liv Albert?

  But, you know, so that's all to say, you know, I don't quite know the context around calling her the tenth muse. But now hearing you explain all of that, it feels to me like not so much like a, um, appreciation of her or, or like it is, but it is also tinged with this thing of calling her a muse, which is the women who inspire men.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  And a silent.

• 26:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, this is how I read it. And I think like this is the kind of constant debate around the muse. And so uh there's, there's, I mean, there's, there's loads of scholarship on this, but about whether the muse is positive or negative. And you know, you can see it as positive because you can say, well, look, like you've got a female goddess who's in charge of song. And, you know, at the very beginning of the earliest epics, we've got the muse being called on and she's the one who has all of the power. But at the end of the day, does she actually end up speaking? And well, she speaks in Hesiod. Um, and so Hesiod has that moment where they tell him how special he is. Um, but like, I'm, I kind of resist the idea that that is the muses speaking.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Because again, that is the fiction of the male poet imposing himself on literature and saying, well, this is what women sound like. But it's like, well, you, you're the poet who's meant to be inspired by the muses and you're giving the muses a voice. Like, how is that meant to be empowering to the muses? And so my reading of the tenth muse is absolutely that. I think it's this kind of classic thing of it's intended as a compliment and it's really not.

• 27:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Um, I had a really interesting um experience at a conference um last year, yeah, last year. Where I presented a paper where I basically went through systematically. All of the places where Sappho is talked about in ancient literature to kind of demonstrate. All of the moments where she could have been called a poet and she wasn't. Um, and there's one moment in Plato where she's called um Cala, beautiful. And Alcaeus at the same, I'm pretty sure it's Alcaeus or maybe it's Anacreon, but I'm pretty sure it's Alcaeus, is called Sophos, wise. And I said, well, I feel like this seems a little bit pointed in that.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  The male poet is being given the attributes that we associate with poetry, knowledge, expertise. And then the female poet is getting what we associate with objectifying the female body. Um, okay, we might argue that it is a quality of her poetry as being beautiful, but actually it's the beautiful Sappho. So I, I think we have to argue quite hard to do that. Anyway, this male scholar in the audience raised his hand and he was like, well, I think I would take it as a compliment if somebody called me beautiful.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  And I was just like, okay, but maybe that's the problem in that like.

• 28:56Liv Albert?

  Men think it's only a compliment.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Men think it's a compliment. And this is the, this, so this for me is the tenth muse syndrome. Let's call it the tenth, tenth muse syndrome in that like, I, I genuinely think that the male poets, they're trying, what they're trying to do is they're trying to find a way to talk about Sappho because she's so unusual. And the only example they have of a woman associated with poetry is a silent muse. And so that's what they call her. You know, and, and so it's meant to be, it's meant to be a good thing, but actually like by the point that this is happening, like the association between women and poetry has become so much one of kind of silent passive personifications inspirers

• 29:37Speaker 02

  as opposed to active poets speaking wise, that the kind of conglomeration of terms that gets attached to them is muse, not poet.

• 29:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's like the truth behind the phrase, like behind every great man is a great woman or whatever, you know? It's like the truth behind that is that like the women are supposed to be behind and silent.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Or, or even if they're not silent, they're not operating in the same frame. I think this is maybe a little bit kind of what I'm trying to get at with the book is that like, I don't understand why, and I kind of still don't understand, I feel like that question is still open to me. I still don't understand why a woman like Sappho wasn't just accorded the same terms as men. And I think what I find particularly interesting, and that's kind of what I, what I get to towards the end is I start investigating the terms that women use for themselves. And what's super interesting is that women never use feminine forms of the normative masculine terms. So they will never call themselves a poetess or a songstress.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  They try and find kind of different ways around it. And in my, in my mind, in my reading, it's because by that point, the words have become so associated with the canon and the kind of the male poet, that it is impossible to disassociate them. Or they just, they just don't want to be a female version of a male poet.

• 30:58Liv Albert?

  Or they probably know too that they wouldn't be accepted as one. And so like, why try instead of?

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Why try? Exactly.

• 31:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah, like, like adjusting it so you know that you wouldn't be like beat down.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:10Liv Albert?

  As a result. Yeah.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  Exactly. Exactly. And no one has ever given you that time before. So

• 31:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  You kind of, at that point, believe that there isn't a space for you in that time. So you try and find another one.

• 31:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, it's like, I mean, feminism broadly is a really slow process because you have to break down all of the idea that you physically don't have this ability.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:30Liv Albert?

  And so like, it's, you know, now we've reached a point where fortunately, many of us are beyond that. And it is just a matter of like, breaking down the barriers that are left behind on it. But like, we, for the most part, the idea that we're like physically incapable of something is like rarer. I won't, I won't say it's gone. It's deeply not gone.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  No.

• 31:50Liv Albert?

  But like, it's more rare than it was a hundred years ago. But like, it's such a slow movement that these women are just beginning it. They're looking at it and being like, well, I'm doing this thing, but like, I don't have the cognitive like ability to believe that I'm doing it at the same level as them because nobody has given us that.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Exactly. Or even the language. And obviously, there's a ton of research about how kind of cognitive ability and language kind of are shaping each other. So like, I think that because the language is structuring their world, they have grown up in a world structured culturally and linguistically around the fact that they do not belong in this sphere. And yet they're kind of trying to use words that try and articulate it. And I'm reminded of some like, some great scholarship I've been reading recently. I've been basically kind of like my, one of my passions, and this kind of goes right back to the conversation we were having at the beginning, is about how criti- critical kind of thinking and creative thinking can go together. So how actually it is totally

• 32:49Speaker 02

  normal and fine for someone to write a novel and also be a scholar, which I feel like, you know, was was such a journey for me to kind of realize that. But like, I'm, I'm really, I'm really interested in that. And so I've been reading a lot about kind of how women in particular rewrite Greek myths. And I think that there is something.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  Powerful about the fact that you have been put outside it because then you're not, you're not willing to kind of take on the old terms. You're, you're, you're, you're wanting to kind of break it down. And there was this really great article I was reading by Alicia Ostrica, and she was talking about how women have always had to speak in code. And because the kind of the dominant force, the dominant system has always been against them. So if they wanted to kind of make some kind of intervention, they needed to like say, say one thing on the surface and say another thing underneath. And that's something that I really found when looking at the ancient literature was that it was all a kind of form of, of code.

• 33:43Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. Wow.

• 33:50Liv Albert?

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• 34:33Liv Albert?

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• 35:16Liv Albert?

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• 37:02Liv Albert?

  I want to know everything, but before we dive into the rest of everything, and also we'll get to the home, Eric, Kim, her, Mikayla, who I'm sure is listening. Well, not yet, but eventually. So, okay, I have this, this like kind of a pet obsession that I've developed this year about the Theogony. And I don't know how much it would fall into what you've done here, but I'm so interested about your thoughts because, I mean, like we both clearly have the same opinion on Hesiod, that's fine. To me, I was recently, like I've read the Theogony, I don't even know how many times, but I was looking back at it. Under like the kind of framework of I was doing this for for Women's History Month and looking at like, just, I mean, the sort of evidence for women and it was coming on the,

• 37:45Liv Albert?

  or right before I was doing a whole series on the Bronze Age too, right? And and so the thing that I'll never, you know, stop thinking about is how the Bronze Age, what we know of from like the material culture and everything seems to suggest that like they worshipped women pretty broadly, particularly before, you know, even prehistorically and all of that, like talking Socratic and then the Minoan people, right? Like women everywhere, they worshiped a goddess, no question. And then we get to the Theogony and to me, the Theogony reads as kind of this like unintentional, obviously, but this kind of cultural memory of the slow decline of a mother goddess figure in like a prehistoric culturally Greece at least, or the broad area.

• 38:30Liv Albert?

  And like this kind of slow decline of her because you get Gaia at the beginning who's like all powerful and then she's immediately covered over by a man. And then she gets finds a way to have power through that, you know, with the Hecatonchires and all of these, these children she gives birth to that then the man hates and then the man makes it worse, right? And then we have like the next generation, right? And so, you know, Rhea is similarly lessened, brought down by Cronos. And then, you know, it just keeps going, right? Until we get to the Olympians and by the time we get to the Olympians, the women are like sufficiently brought to heel. Hera is only going to punish the women for the actions of her husband. Athena is like queen agent of the patriarchy.

• 39:13Liv Albert?

  Like you get to this thing with the Olympians where they are the women who know their place, right? But like to me, the even just the the story of how they got there feels like this kind of somehow they're picking up on what came before, you know, like when women did hold the ultimate divine power in the cultures. But like, obviously, they've lost that. The Greek language is only coming about at this point when the Olympians are brought to heel, but like.

• 39:43Liv Albert?

  It just feels like it has to be some kind of memory of that kind of prehistoric Bronze Age where goddesses mattered more.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, well, I mean, gosh, there's so much I could say about this. I guess like the first thing I would say is I am so glad you're talking about the Bronze Age because like I've literally just like been writing about it and like have this book coming out in April next year called Mythica, or in the States, it's going to be called Penelope's Bones.

• 40:14Liv Albert?

  That's a great title, but also it seems like so American to want to change it to that.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  I know, I know, honestly, but you know what? I'm actually really tickled because Penelope's Bones was like my initial title. And so like, I'm, I'm like, I, I love that Penelope's Bones is getting an airing somewhere.

• 40:29Liv Albert?

  It's a great title.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  It's, it's a lot of fun. Yeah. But basically I'm looking at kind of basically exactly what you're saying, like the real evidence for the women of the Bronze Age and what that kind of tells us about the kind of myths that later arose.

• 40:43Liv Albert?

  I kind of didn't even clue in for how much this would be utterly up.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  A hundred percent on topic.

• 40:49Liv Albert?

  That's why we were so obsessed when you messaged me because I was like, this is literally what I've been talking about for like, at least the last year.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh, I love it. Well, I, yeah, I can't wait to talk more about that one. But basically, I guess on that front, what I'll say is that when you're looking at history, there's always a really difficult but interesting layer of what is actually there, and I'm putting that in kind of quotation marks, and what people interpret. And I think the, that this theory of, and I don't even necessarily want to say theory in a kind of snarky way, but like, like the, the idea of a, a mother goddess is something that was, was put forward in, so it was, it was basically put forward by, with response

• 41:37Speaker 02

  to the Minoans, as I'm sure you know, by Arthur Evans or Arthur Evans, but he was responding to kind of an earlier vein of scholarship, going back to the Golden Bough and, and Jane Ellen Harrison and like sort of, you know, late 19th century, early 20th century scholarship. But there was this. It was kind of tying in with like early feminism. But it's to my eye, it's early feminism a little bit gone wrong in that it's exactly that same attempt to distance and personify the feminine, which is what we see happening with the muse. So and and I think, you know, I think there are ways to make it embodied and powerful and interesting.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  But I think what's interesting about this kind of this theory of that early mother goddess is that to me, it still has quite a kind of, um. I mean, it's really odd to say this, but like the idea of a kind of matriarchal separate society is quite a patriarchal one. Because I think that like, actually, if you look at the kind of what to me anyway, what the remains are showing us is that male bodies are being kind of venerated and explored and so are female bodies. And actually, so are bodies that kind of challenge those stereotypes. And I talk about that a lot in my book as well.

• 42:56Liv Albert?

  So excited.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I guess I guess just the reason I may be slightly resisting that is that I think that Hesiod's version of it is a version that, hey, the patriarchy has won, the the matriarchy has been overthrown. But that's a very patriarchal message. I think that actually a much more feminist reading is more nuanced and more sort of like look like women were there and they were engaged and embodied and interesting. But it's not necessarily like matriarchy versus patriarchy. Does that make sense?

• 43:28Liv Albert?

  Yes, and I think you're just articulating basically everything else that goes like kind of behind my theory because I'm not, I don't suggest that like it is a positive representation of anything. It's more that it's like this kind of echo of before. And yeah, when I say matriarchy, I really mean more of like the egalitarian because yeah, like matriarchy does not have to exist in opposition to patriarchy. I just think that at that earlier time, like if that's what was happening and based on like what certainly like very little evidence I've seen is that like it just feels like it was just sort of a Broadly more egalitarian, particularly in the Minoan culture, right? Like, we're talking, they don't, we don't necessarily even know that they did like a king situation or a queen even, right?

• 44:13Liv Albert?

  Like, just real egalitarian, like, it feels more like, like a true ultimate, like, egalitarian socialism, basically, kind of thing, where it's like, really just about kind of living within, like, I don't even know how to phrase it, because we, we exist in this structure that is so thousands of years into the patriarchal norm that

• 44:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:36Liv Albert?

  it becomes like impossible for us to pull apart from it, right? Like, I've said this to somebody recently, where like, people like to say, like, when they're upset about politics, like, well, you know, or I should say, women like to say when we're upset about politics, like, oh, you know, things would be better if women ran the world. And like, where I see things now is that, like, if we suddenly, if Canada elected a female prime minister, if Kamala Harris wins, like, I mean, also, like, I, I don't want to suggest that I'm like, a fan of any American politician at all, um, but, like, that wouldn't change anything, because we are too far into the patriarchy, to just like, let a woman fix something. But I think that if we had stayed in this, like, prehistoric, this more like, let's say,

• 45:17Liv Albert?

  egalitarian instead of matriarchal, like, then I think things would be completely different. But we have 3,000 years in between, and it's gone too far.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  Well, exactly. And, and how do you, and in a sense, that's kind of what we need to do, is we need to do the archaeology of that process. And that's, I guess, a little bit what, um, how women became poets is doing. It's also what, what Mythica and Penelope's Bones is doing in, in like, a different way, but it's like, how do we look at actually kind of what happened and try and prize apart how that process worked? Um, I guess, you know, like, I, I absolutely agree with what you're saying, and like, it makes me think of my reaction to the Barbie movie.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  Not to like, you know, suddenly bring Barbie in, but yeah, I'm gonna do it. Um, because to me, like, the fundamental flaw was that the end was basically like, women are gonna do exactly the same thing as men do, and they were in the same place, they were in the same location, they were in Same structure. And it was just like, I feel like you've completely missed the point of what kind of a a different, a different solution, a radically different solution would look like. But the other thing I would also say is, and I guess this is like where I'm really kind of showing the fact that I'm like a literature person or like sources person, text person. Because with the Mycenaeans, so like that's the kind of late Bronze Age civilization that's like just after the Minoans.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  And on mainland Greece, we have their writing and we are able to read it. And thanks, by the way, to the fact that Ventris cracked it because of a woman. Let's just say that, like Alice Coba did most of the work. Sorry.

• 46:56Liv Albert?

  No, not sorry.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  You know, not sorry, but not sorry.

• 46:59Liv Albert?

  Please tell me every single thing like that at any time.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, excellent. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, that's like a key rant in.

• 47:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 47:07Speaker 02

  In Mythica and Pytholopy's Bones is just like, oh my gosh, why like, and and not only that, but actually like, and I find this super fascinating. She was the one who actually cracked the fact that Greek, uh, sorry, that Linear B, which is the script. Um, that um, the Mycenaean Greek is written in. Um, she was the one who cracked the fact that it had gender. Isn't that cool? Right? Then it was a woman who cracks it had gender. And then it was that discovery that it had gender. That made Ventris realise suddenly, oh my gosh, this is Greek.

• 47:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  So I just, I, for me, as as a linguist, as someone who's interested in gender, as someone who's interested in the way gender structures the world. That to me is like on so many levels, that's so interesting, right? Um, but but anyway, that was, that was a digression. I was just gonna say that, like. If we didn't have the Linear B texts translated for us. And we only had the wall paintings and the artifacts and the burials of the Mycenaeans. Would we read them in the same way? And I would argue not. I think that the the tablets completely change the way that we see the kind of hierarchy working, particularly the way that we see enslaved women

• 48:18Speaker 02

  being manipulated. And so I feel like personally, I'm kind of like holding judgment a little bit on the Minowans until Linear A.

• 48:26Liv Albert?

  So fair.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:29Liv Albert?

  And So fair.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  Right? Because I just feel like iconography, it's so tempting. But what iconography does is it tells you a kind of spun story, but that story might be one that is a hoped for, a wished for, a fantasized, created, like, it's not necessarily telling you what's really happening.

• 48:49Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Not not not necessarily our texts, but the the good thing about the Linear B texts, like what I just find hilarious is that, like, obviously, everyone was just like, oh, my god, it could be like more epics, it could be more poetry. And then it's like

• 49:02Liv Albert?

  Palace records.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  Boring ass records, exactly.

• 49:06Liv Albert?

  We have this much olive oil. Screw you.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  Suck that. But yeah, I which I just I just find so funny. But like, I also think that it's such a kind of um good reminder that, like, as much as kind of I love studying literary texts. You know, this is actually kind of where you find the core of some of the hidden people, like some of the some of the hidden things that like texts just deemed too boring to talk about. Or, yeah, anyway, I just I could go on about that for ages. Like, that's that's Bronze Age, but we could talk about that next time.

• 49:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah, we'll be back. No, oh, my god, I know. I'm trying to like not just go to every single topic possible because I do think we could talk for hours. Um, well, maybe we make it three episodes of you of the time sometime.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, you you know what? Yeah.

• 49:50Liv Albert?

  I'll have you as a repeat guest anytime you want to come back. Oh, my god.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  So sweet. I would love to.

• 49:54Liv Albert?

  I really just, oh, my god, there's so many questions. Okay, we're gonna leave the Bronze Age aside despite the fact that I want to know everything. Um. But like, I just want to hear more about the women. I mean, I do want to get to the Homeric hymn, but like, I just I want to know everything about this. Like, how are you are picking this apart? Like? Hi, sorry, I can't even, I can't even form questions. I really just want to know all about ancient women at all times. It's my like entire life's purpose.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  Amazing. I love that. I am very much there for that. So like, that is, that is, that is enough of a question for you.

• 50:27Liv Albert?

  So yeah, like what, I mean, what else? Okay, maybe we go to the Hermaticum to Hermes, but I really want to know generally, like, what are the things that like blew your mind in researching this or like literally anything?

• 50:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Okay. Well, let's do the Hermaticum to Hermes, because I feel like it's good to kind of get the male author texts out the way, and then we can start talking about what the women said. Um, so because basically for me, I was like, what I wanted to do was talk about what the women were calling themselves and, and how Sappho, but also other female poets were dealing with the fact that they didn't have this vocabulary, how they were kind of articulating that sense of identity in a world that kind of had, literally had no space for them. But I realized quite quickly that in order to do that, I needed to set up like all of the stuff that had happened, all of the structuring and the ring fencing that had gone on in order to make them feel excluded from those terms.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  So, um, one of the examples, and I think that this basically demonstrates how, well, I was gonna say, I don't want to say vicious, but I'm gonna say vicious, how vicious and violent this kind of exclusion of women from poetry was, is in the Hermaticum to Hermes, you have, um, a, a sort of, um, description of Hermes, uh, invention of the lyre. And he invents the lyre, um, from, um, a tortoise. And actually, like, I've got a copy of the book here, so I can, um, read you the passage. So he has just been born and he has hopped out of the cave where he's born, because that's what happens to gods.

• 51:58Speaker 02

  Um, and as he kind of like came out of the entrance of the cave, um, and now I'm, I'm reading, um, a translation of the text. And he found there a tortoise and so got an endless source of pleasure, because it was Hermes who first made the tortoise a bard. She came across him at the gates of the courtyard grazing on the lush grass in front of the house, waddling as she walked. The luck bringing son of Zeus saw her and laughed, and said, "Here's a good omen for me already, and not one I'll disregard. Hello, lovely looker, dance beating feast companion, a welcome sight. Where did you get this beautiful plaything, this speckled shell you wear? A tortoise who lives in the mountains? But I'll pick you up and take you into the house. You'll be a help to me, and I won't slight

• 52:43Speaker 02

  you. You'll benefit me, first of all. It's better to be at home, for there's danger outside. You'll be a safeguard against harmful spells while you live, and if you die, then you'll sing beautifully."

• 52:56Speaker 02

  So, um, this, it sounds lighthearted and jokey, and that's how all of the male commentators have taken it. But I think, particularly in the Greek, but I think it actually came across in the English as well. Um, yeah. And I obviously kind of also did that on purpose. It's my, it's my translation. So, but you can hear things that are threats coming in, right?

• 53:21Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  Especially that-

• 53:22Liv Albert?

  Well, especially when you know the result.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  When you know the result, exactly.

• 53:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Do you want to tell the listeners now that like, or is that gonna come in later?

• 53:28Speaker 02

  Well, like, literally, literally, it goes on. And this is like, this is where, so the passage, the passage goes on.

• 53:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 53:35Speaker 02

  This is what he said, "And lifting her in both hands, he went back into the house, carrying his lovely plaything. Then he probed into her, and with a chisel of grey iron, gouged out the life stuff of the mountain dwelling tortoise. As when a quick thought pierces the heart of a man who is visited by constant worries, or when bright glances flash from the eyes, so glorious Hermes made his work as quick as his word. He cut reed stalks to measure and fix them in, fastening their ends across the back through the shell of the tortoise. Over it, he cleverly, he cleverly stretched oxhide and attached two arms and fitted a bridge across both, and stretched the gut strings of seven female sheep." So, um, I think

• 54:12Liv Albert?

  It's all women.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  It's all women, right?

• 54:15Liv Albert?

  Didn't know that. Wow.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  Yep, the female sheep, exactly. So like, this is clearly a very gendered process. Um, but also like, I think like, as I said, like those threats that are coming in at the beginning where he quotes, he says, it's better to be at home for there's danger outside.

• 54:31Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 54:32Speaker 02

  Like, literally, he's just come out of the cave. It's like, he is picking her up, he's taking her in, and then he probes into her with a chisel, and scoops all of the life out of her. Like, I think it's not, I mean, what I was astonished by was that I, I seem to be the first person who has suggested that that is a rape metaphor, but it seems to be inescapable that it is a rape metaphor.

• 54:56Liv Albert?

  I, I keep, the reason I've turned around in my seat is I know I have a different translation, but I'm moving and so my books are in a different spot. And I just wanted to pull up, like, I have a Diane Rayer translation. So I was like, okay, another woman. Um, cause I, I love that hymn, which is why also partially why, you know, Michaela was mentioning it, but like, I love it because it's silly. The tortoise part has never been my favorite because I was raised to not even ever see the movie Bambi, let alone anything else. But like,

• 55:23Speaker 02

  I love that that was like a principle of your upbringing, you know, be kind, don't watch Bambi.

• 55:27Liv Albert?

  Honestly, I, my mother is hilarious. Just because I was a kid in the nineties, all of the movies were about animals and she was always like, no, because the animal could get hurt. You can't watch it.

• 55:36Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 55:36Liv Albert?

  She still to this day says if I saw Dumbo, it was at somebody else's house.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 55:40Liv Albert?

  Anyway, longstanding. Um, but, you know, it, I have always just thought like, okay, it's a little silly because it's a baby and then, you know, it's the stealing of the cattle that's extra funny and kind of tricking everybody. But, I mean, I, yeah, I've never heard so gendered and the probing. So I was just so curious what like other translations I've read because.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  For sure, for sure. Well, exactly. And and you know, like, obviously, I'm I'm kind of bringing that out. But I also believe that it's there. I see it there in the Greek. Um, so basically with the with the book and and I that was something I really wanted to do was that I I feel like it's so easy for this kind of work to be very distancing if someone doesn't know the Greek. So everything is in translation, everything is transliterated. But if you wanna see the Greek, it's in the footnote. So you can kind of get into get into it. But like, um, there's other stuff that makes it kind of quite clear that this is is kind of um sexualized. He calls her a lovely looker. He calls her a dance beating feast companion, and that word, the feast companion, is hetira.

• 56:46Liv Albert?

  Um, which. Of course it is.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 56:49Liv Albert?

  Of course it is.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  You and your listeners all know that is the kind of prostitute um at the symposium. Um, and so like, he.

• 56:58Liv Albert?

  The bringing inside to stay safe, though, too, that screams of like Athenian women being like kept inside of a home.

• 57:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. But then also, he's like, it there's there's such a kind of um violence to it because he's saying it there's danger outside and they are meeting outside. So he's literally saying, I am the one who is dangerous to you. But he's pretending to protect her. Right? It's it's that kind of really toxic. Um, like, he's saying, come inside, come inside, you'll be safe here. And then he rapes slash disembowels her. Um, and for me, like, the the kind of the thing, so so the rape metaphor is kind of the overarching. Shall we say the gender structure of it? But then the the poetic structure of it, um, or the meta poetic structure

• 57:46Speaker 02

  is that, I'm sure you heard, it starts off by saying, it was Hermes who first made the tortoise a bard. Um, and uses the word Ioidon. Um, so you start off with the tortoise being the one who's the singer. It sounds like the tortoise is the one who has kind of the the equivalent power of song to the male poet. But by the time you get to the end, um Hermes finishes his thing and then he breaks out into song. And in his song, he tells the story of his own glorious episode, his glory. And that's what leads you into the rest of the hymn, right? So it's Hermes telling his own song. So what he's done is he's taken the poetic ability of the living tortoise.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  And he's turned it into a dead liar that he can use. To sing, an empty shell, exactly, that he can use for his own voice to tell his own glorious deeds.

• 58:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 58:41Speaker 02

  Right?

• 58:41Liv Albert?

  That's wild.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 58:44Speaker 02

  So just for me, it was just like, look, you can, you can actually see in the progression of the passage. You can see the way in which the poet is acknowledging. Women have access to poetic power. The tortoise is or has the potential to be a bard. But the way that that poetic power gets harnessed is it's taken by men, it's silenced like the nightingale in Hesiod. Uh, there's, there's rape and physical violence like the tortoise and it is harnessed into the man's song. And it's not a coincidence that all of this sort of metaphorical stuff is happening within a song that is being sung by a man.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  So that the male poet is enacting all of those things on the female as he is describing it happening in his poem.

• 59:35Liv Albert?

  Well, also like it, it just screams like he made the tortoise into a muse.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, right.

• 59:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah, he made her a sort of background player.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, kind of worse because she's, she's an instrument that he is constantly fingering.

• 59:49Liv Albert?

  But I feel like that's what the muses are too, right? Like sing muse of, it's like this demand. And like, I mean, yeah, the, the fingering that I cut off, but in the other words, like just very good. But like, yeah, I mean, you're, that's, it's considerably more literal.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05Liv Albert?

  Um, but yeah, like it just, it generally screams muse to me too.

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  It does, it does, but I I see it perhaps slightly differently in that the poet who invokes the muse isn't actually believing that the muse is the one who is singing. There is no fiction that the muse is the one who is singing the Iliad. What the fiction is, or the Odyssey, what the fiction is, although he does say, of course, he does say, sing muse, but it's clearly the poet's voice. Um, what what kind of implication is that he wouldn't know as much? He wouldn't have as much stamina, right? That's the kind of passage in in book two of the Iliad where he says, like, I wouldn't be able to do this if I had ten tongues or whatever like. So so she's kind of um giving him strength, she's inspiring him, but she's not the one who's singing.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  And again, it's that fiction that she is singing.

• 1:00:58Liv Albert?

  She's that behind driving force though, right? Yeah. That like hidden drive and driving force, just like the lyre.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:05Liv Albert?

  Like, yeah, sing muse, but it's like this, sing it into me.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  Sing it into me, so I can do it. Exactly. It's exactly right. And it's that same force of appropriation that is happening with the lyre, where it's like, I need an instrument of song. Women are powerful and they have this powerful connection to song. And and I have all kinds of like theories about about why they they think that, but like, they have this powerful connection and therefore I need to harness that in some way. And we can create the mechanism of the muse, we can create the mechanism of the lyre. But like, what's super interesting to me is that all of the trappings of song, the inspiration, the instrument, the song itself, they're all feminine in Greek.

• 1:01:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  The only thing that is masculine is the poet.

• 1:01:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Wow. Wow.

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. No, it's, yeah. It makes you see, it makes you see Greek literature totally differently, right?

• 1:01:57Liv Albert?

  Completely. Well, it's funny because like, it doesn't, it doesn't to me because I feel like what you're doing is articulating and like giving me real and complete evidence for all of the stuff, the like, just hidden thoughts that have been not hidden, I I make them a career, but like the thoughts that have been in my head, which is just that like, there has to be so much more going on here. Like, because everything we have is just, yeah, like this idea that the women were basically not there, they're not real people, like, in the month of September, I'm doing episodes all on Euripides and and this has come up a lot because I consider his work to be at least the the closest we have to like. A person who wanted to give us women that are real people.

• 1:02:40Liv Albert?

  Like to me, he writes the most realistic people in or women in that he makes them like flawed and fucked up, just like the men. Whereas Sophocles and Aeschylus give you really interesting and powerful women, but they don't give you fucked up women. Because they're not interested in like making women look like men. Whereas I think that Euripides was like, I think that he, I don't want to give him too much credit, but I think that in terms of like comparatively.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:05Liv Albert?

  He's the closest to thinking that women were like some level.

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  I might push back on that slightly.

• 1:03:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  That Sophocles and and Aeschylus are interested in making women like men, but they're making them look like ideal men.

• 1:03:18Liv Albert?

  Right, okay.

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  Not flawed men.

• 1:03:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  Yes. Because I do think that like, if you think of particularly like Antigone, obviously springs to mind, but if you think of Antigone, she's like. She's not feeling like a woman on two counts, one because she's ideal and one because she feels like a man.

• 1:03:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  And and like, you know, there there there is that distancing effect that they do, whereas Euripides is like notoriously. Bringing things down to kind of reality in all of his characters.

• 1:03:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I I think I said this in a in a conversation, actually, but it's coming back to me, so I'm going to say it again, because I think it's smart. It's that Aeschylus and Sophocles, they write Penelope's.

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Liv Albert?

  Whereas I think that like Euripides writes Medea's, you know, like the quote unquote, perfect woman, this idea that Penelope should be perfect, not a real Penelope, I should say.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Liv Albert?

  But the like, the concept, the male Penelope, you know?

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  What do you, what do you do with Aeschylus's Clytemnestra then?

• 1:04:10Liv Albert?

  You're so right. Not Penelope.

• 1:04:14Liv Albert?

  No, and I I mean, it's, I shouldn't say anything's across the board, but it's still like. Does Aeschylus, I always forget this, does he let Clytemnestra actually be the killer? He doesn't, does he? He gives it to Aesch, to Agis this?

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  Um, I think they both do it together. She does the net and he does the sword.

• 1:04:29Liv Albert?

  Right, but yeah, she doesn't.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  On that, but.

• 1:04:31Liv Albert?

  She does not penetrate, though.

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  I I don't think so, but they don't put me on that.

• 1:04:35Liv Albert?

  No, no, fair, but I'm I'm pretty sure you're right, because that's always been in my memory, too, that she doesn't get all the credit in Aeschylus. So it seems to me that still there's, there's, it's, there's always some kind of like, they're just never quite as.

• 1:04:49Liv Albert?

  I don't know, maybe just interesting. I'm also completely biased towards Euripides.

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  I mean, basically, what I'm just getting from this is that you're a Euripides fan girl, right?

• 1:04:57Liv Albert?

  I love him. He gives me so many women that are weird, but.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  The book has a whole chapter on Euripides.

• 1:05:02Liv Albert?

  Oh, I, yeah, I was expecting that. What are your thoughts on him? Are you gonna ruin my life when it comes to Euripides?

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  Uh, no, no, no, no, I would never do that, would never do that. But, um, no, I think what's interesting about, and I think what was so cool about, about looking at Greek literature this way for me, was that I think, I think your articulation of it was, was absolutely right, was that it gave a slant to things that I had already felt intuitively, but hadn't been able to back up. And I kind of think of it almost like archaeology, like sort of like excavating the texts. And I felt that with Euripides, you get this kind of double bind in that you get these fascinating female characters,

• 1:05:45Speaker 02

  this sense of a desire to actually kind of open up female experience and to put women, real women, on the stage. Um, but at the same time, you run up against the kind of inevitable problem of the society he's living in, the culture that he is performing for, and the fact that he is a man, and he is a poet in a certain tradition, right? So, and in a sense, I feel like that's, that's, that it, that's difficult, it's, it makes it, but that, I find that a productive tension. And I think that that productive tension, um, it comes out in the way that he uses the words for poet.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  Because fascinatingly, he, um, and it's kind of well-known that, like, basically what happens to words for poet is that in the Archaic period where they're still kind of transitioning from the oral, they use the word singer man, Ioidos. But then, once you move into the fifth century and you start getting, um, much more focused on textuality, they start calling themselves poetes, um, maker, maker man. Um, and that's obviously where we get poet from. Um, but the tragedians still keep Ioidos singer. Um, because they are performing on stage, they're singing, so they're kind of seeing themselves as within that oral tradition. And Euripides.

• 1:07:08Speaker 02

  Far and away above Sophocles and Aeschylus, uses Iidos in the feminine in really interesting exploratory ways. Um, that like you basically don't see anywhere else, like, like the examples. Yeah, no, exactly. I'm, I'm, I'm validating you.

• 1:07:25Liv Albert?

  Goodness.

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  But.

• 1:07:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  But. Then we get to Medea, and I think it's like so interesting that you gave the example of Medea because like, like Medea obviously like is kind of amazing. But then at the same time, what you get, once you get to the end of Medea, is you get a woman who is both extraordinary, boundary pushing, kind of like fucked up to extremes. Um, but then also she gets pushed into the role of the monstrous other that women have always occupied in male literature. And, and, and like I said, that's a double bind. There's no way out of that.

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  And that to me is my reading of the exit on the chariot. It's like, there's nothing I can do. Like by doing this, I've turned her into exactly the same kind of stereotype that you guys have always seen. And I think he's reflecting on that. So there's this super famous ode, um, where the chorus reflects on the history of the male domination of literature. And I know you know this, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna read it.

• 1:08:31Liv Albert?

  No, it's been a while. So uh, now I'm like, hey, maybe I need to read my day again. It's been years. So please.

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  Well, if you read anything, read, read this choral ode because they say, "The muses of the old male poets," and the word they use there is Iidos, the old male poets, "will stop telling tales where I, the woman, was unfaithful. Apollo, lord leader of song, never gave us the chance to sing to the liar, note the liar."

• 1:08:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  "If he had, I'd have sung back a song to rival his story. There's a lot of history and lots to say about us as much as the men." So I mean, like, that is just like kind of feminist manifesto one O one, right? Like, it's it's amazing and loads of people are kind of like, you know, and this comes, um, I I'm pretty sure it's just after um, Madea's kind of like pronunciation of like, I'd rather uh fight on the battle line than than give birth, you know, that kind of famous reversal of of uh roles. But I think what's really interesting to me about this is that they sing this at the point where they think that Madea's not gonna do anything.

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  And then she goes and she kind of does the thing that basically turns her into the kind of stereotype that Cora's is saying. The men always make us into you, right? Um, and there's this word here, I'd have sung back a song to rival his story, I'd have sung it back, and that's Antaheese, I would have echoed it back. And I kind of like see this as a bit of a kind of like the powerlessness of Echo, that story of Echo, who who is this nymph who gets turned into kind of just a voice. And all that happens is this echo chamber where, you know, you can try and kind of liberate women from the stereotype, but it just ends up kind of dragging them back in.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  And I feel that's kind of where Euripides ends up, and I think he's conscious about it. I think he's, I think he's interestingly conscious about it, but I I think that it's there.

• 1:10:27Liv Albert?

  Well, I think that's so interesting too, because to me, that feel, and again, I am incredibly biased and I do recognize that. I love him, but I love him because of stuff like this, because to me, you saying that makes me think like he knew what was going on, he knew that like he wasn't gonna be the single man who could change it, like that wasn't gonna happen. But like, I think that what he could do is this, is like, say it out loud. And it reminds me of like the Ion, because the Ion's the one that like, I read it for the first time earlier this year, which I don't know how it took me that long, but like, and also because I didn't know what it was about, I don't know how nobody told me in the interim, but like, that to me, it's such a similar thing where like, we have this entire play

• 1:11:10Liv Albert?

  that acknowledges that divine assault is still assault, that women experience trauma, that they can get beyond the trauma, like, it's to, I couldn't believe that the content of that play when it comes to Creusa's character and the express acknowledgement that Apollo is a predator.

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:27Liv Albert?

  Um, like. But then at the same time, you know, it at the end, but like she doesn't get any kind of like real acknowledgement that like that what he did was wrong, like we know, but like, it's not like Apollo comes in and is like, sorry, you know, it, it kind of is just like, well, it all gets acknowledged, just like in Madea, that all of this is very bad. This is not good. This is traumatic. Women are people, all of this stuff. And then at the end, though, you know, she gets like a quote unquote happy ending, but it's not a happily, right? Like, it's not like an actual fix of anything or, or even like, like, you know, as fixed as it could have been like, so it just feels like that where it's a lot more of recognizing these issues.

• 1:12:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:09Liv Albert?

  Being like, this is a problem, or this is not even a problem. I don't want to say that he necessarily like

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  No, it's a thing.

• 1:12:16Liv Albert?

  Wanted to change his thing. Yeah.

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Liv Albert?

  He's just acknowledging it as a thing. This is a thing that exists.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:21Liv Albert?

  And also like, that's it, you know?

• 1:12:23Speaker 02

  No, exactly. And, and, and he's willing to kind of play with it and explore it and engage in the tension. And then when the tension pushes back, he's sort of like, okay, look, there's tension here.

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• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  Um, no, absolutely. And that's exactly what I see in the way that like, whenever any other poet, male poet that I came across in this period kind of prior is trying to articulate women as poets. They don't do it in that same way. They do it in the kind of what we might call the ring fencing way. Whereas Euripides is very open to the possibility that it might happen. But he's also kind of aware of the contingencies on it.

• 1:14:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah, he's realistic.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:34Liv Albert?

  But to me, because the thing I say about him that I do think still stands even after all of this is like, the thing that makes him interesting to me is that he just thought women were people. Is the, the bar is in the ground. I think he acknowledged that women were also complex human beings.

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:48Liv Albert?

  With a like, just general similar like biology to men or whatever, you know, like the bare minimum. But there, it's so rare that it, it becomes this enormously important thing in the ancient world.

• 1:15:02Speaker 02

  But also like that it's translated into misogyny, which I find so interesting.

• 1:15:05Liv Albert?

  Oh my God, yes. Aristophanes just thinking that because he wrote women who did bad things, that he hated women. Like it, to me, those two things happening are, are this like real strong acknowledgement that like, people, the men, I should say, men were capable of like, understanding these things were happening and that they were like real. But also like, not there enough to like, recognize what's actually going on. Like, yeah, the, the, this idea that he's a misogynist because he wrote Medea. And it's like, no. But even when you mentioned the day of sorry, I just want to come back to Clytemnestra because it occurred to me after like, Clytemnestra in, in Aeschylus is, is a very interesting character, but she is not Medea in how sympathetic

• 1:15:48Liv Albert?

  Medea becomes, even as she does something horrible. Like Clytemnestra is awesome. But I don't, I don't, and again, it's been a very long time since I read Aeschylus even more than Medea, but like. To me, it feels like she's still, she's this really like, I love her. But she doesn't get necessarily this kind of like turn of like, oh, we really feel. Maybe she does. I don't know. Maybe I'm like talking out of my ass.

• 1:16:09Speaker 02

  No, I think you're right.

• 1:16:10Liv Albert?

  It's been a while.

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  No, I think you're right. I think you're right. Um, there is, there is that kind of sense of like, maybe

• 1:16:19Speaker 02

  distance from Clytemnestra. Yeah.

• 1:16:22Liv Albert?

  He wrote like a Homeric Clytemnestra, maybe, you know, where, where she's interesting and powerful, but kind of still a villain.

• 1:16:29Speaker 02

  Hmm. And yet, at the same time, like, I feel like, I mean, I could talk about her as well because there's like something else I've been working on, which is

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  just a kind of short paper, but like, I feel like it's so interesting. Like at the moment where she has just murdered Agamemnon in Ischylus, she stands up and she says, I did it. I was the one who killed my husband. And she says, like, she like claims responsibility for the murder, like 10 different times.

• 1:16:57Liv Albert?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 1:16:58Speaker 02

  It's, it's apparently like one of the most kind of clustered moments in Greek literature where someone claims responsibility for, for murdering someone. And she says, like, I did it with, with this right hand. And she says it, that the right hand is the architect of justice. And I feel like, so this again, kind of go, gets kind of deep into the weeds of etymology. But in Greek, there's another word which they often use in the fifth century for poet, which isn't a poet, as a maker, but it's a tekton, a carpenter, a creator, and a craftsman. And she is using this word craftsman of her right hand, having just killed her husband.

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  So to me, like, there's clearly some kind of like, you know, hey, hey, I'm making my own poetry here.

• 1:17:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I like that. Okay. I mean, it's so interesting. I'm glad that I brought up Euripides because, I mean, I would like to know clearly anything about him at all times, but. I mean, I just want to know about all of these. Oh, actually, no, I had a thought about the muses earlier because especially after you broke down the Homeric hymn to Hermes. I'm just now like thinking about everything.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:07Liv Albert?

  And it it makes me wonder about Apollo and what kind of evidence you have about him silencing. Because to me, he's like one of the very obvious silencers that he just does it with rape all the time.

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:18Liv Albert?

  I would love to know what you found out about.

• 1:18:20Speaker 02

  Well, the obvious example is Cassandra.

• 1:18:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  Um, and because uh that's a kind of particularly toxic form of silencing. And I feel like what's interesting is we keep coming back to this kind of. I feel like it's almost like the gift that's also a curse, right? Being a muse is sort of endowed as a positive thing, but actually it's a silencing. And that's exactly what happens to Cassandra. It's it's sort of like, oh, well, you get to tell the truth, but no one will believe you. Um, and kind of woven into this into this kind of sexual violence. Um, I'm trying to think of like moments like in in this book. I'm not sure that he particularly comes up around words for poet.

• 1:19:03Speaker 02

  Um, I think that's probably also particularly because for whatever reason, I think probably it's because of this kind of tendency towards personification and abstraction of women. The male poets tend to use the muses as their bouncing off point, right?

• 1:19:19Liv Albert?

  Because they couldn't use Apollo.

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:20Liv Albert?

  He is too powerful for that.

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. So I feel like kind of my instinct is that in this kind of story of the generation of the poet. Apollo would be more of a threat. And I don't think it's like a coincidence that it's like Hermes who makes the liar, but Hermes is kind of at a distance, you know, like I just, yeah.

• 1:19:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, that's really interesting. I, yeah, I can see all of that. The muses too, though, like, I mean, I know we we have so little in terms of textual sources for the muses beyond exactly what we're talking about. I'm just like this kind of like hidden silent force, but but on them specifically. Did you pull out anything more about like, I mean, any of the etymologies or literally anything, but now they're even more interesting to me.

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, totally. Um, so. You know, this brings us back to Euripides or like pseudo Euripides because um there is a play which I don't know if you're familiar with the Rhesus.

• 1:20:14Liv Albert?

  I'm familiar with it in that that all I know is that it probably wasn't written by Euripides.

• 1:20:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, yeah, it probably wasn't written by Euripides, but was attributed to Euripides in antiquity. But in that play, the muse is actually a character. And and she is the mother of one of the characters. I can't necessarily remember who. I don't remember if it's actually Rhesus himself. But there is um a kind of formulation in there and I can't exactly remember the Greek of it, but it's like the the muse is connected to actually the kind of poetry formation. It's kind of like hymn singing muses or something like that, I think. And that's kind of like actually relatively unusual. And like I said, like the muses talk in the theogony.

• 1:20:56Speaker 02

  And but like, I think that's that's complicated. But actually, this idea of having kind of a muse on stage as a character or like as a kind of like, I feel like that's really interesting. Um but at the same time, I guess the fact that it's like probably not Euripides and it it's sort of like it would make sense that this would be slightly later when they're kind of starting to. I don't know, the muse doesn't become this kind of like distant kind of honorific figure of epic, but becomes kind of like a little bit more epigrammatic, a little bit more kind of like fun to play with, that kind of thing.

• 1:21:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, it's also when we have the like clear nine of them too, right? Because in Hesia, there's probably.

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  You're so right. That's that's when they kind of get, yeah, codified.

• 1:21:36Liv Albert?

  So there's just a lot more like happening with them. Yeah, that that that makes sense. That's, I mean. It's also interesting, Sappho broadly, like, do you have any thoughts on on her, the content of what she wrote? Because it's always interested me that like the stuff she wrote was so much more sort of like real life. And and, you know, she didn't write epic, obviously, but like, I don't know, her her obviously will only really a fragments other than the one.

• 1:22:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:04Liv Albert?

  Sorry, that was my cat's automatic food dish going off. Oh, yeah. So what like anything?

• 1:22:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, just speaking of the muses, she has a fragment, I think it's fifty five, but don't quote me on that. Um where she's basically kind of like um. Competing with another woman and she's saying that like she doesn't have the gifts of the Piriyan muses. Which kind of subtext Sappho does have. So I think it's super interesting that she there is kind of saying that like a poet's gift is the gift of the muses. But to and and that, you know, on the surface of it, that sounds completely like also what like an epic poet would say. And this gets now to kind of what I was talking about, women speaking in code in that and

• 1:22:51Speaker 02

  obviously, this is kind of my own interpretative slant, but I think that like when she says that as a woman, as a woman who clearly kind of has a goddess centered worship in the first kind of programmatic oh that opens everything up, where she's talking to Aphrodite, then having the muse there and talking about the gift of the muses, it makes it completely different. Now, this kind of brings me maybe kind of this works super well because this muse conversation and this like what women call themselves conversation will come together now because we do get, I said that there isn't a feminine term for poet until the fourth century and that's true in the like the actual feminine of poetes, the poet.

• 1:23:32Speaker 02

  But Herodotus, the historian, who, you know, father of history, I'm doing air quotes again, by the way.

• 1:23:39Liv Albert?

  Your your tone helps.

• 1:23:40Speaker 02

  You can hear my, you can hear my air quotes voice. Um, so and he, in his histories, he talks about Sappho. And he calls her uh Muso Poets, a music maker.

• 1:23:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  And that word Muso Poets, you can probably hear it, there's muse or music. The word music comes from muse, it just means musey things. So muse, music, maker, Poets. Poets is cognate with poetes, the maker, the poet. So there's a lot of stuff going in there, but what's super interesting is that Sappho in one of the fragments of her poetry, fragment one fifty. She is said, according to the person who preserved this fragment for us, that she's talking to her daughter. And she is saying to her daughter, it is not appropriate for there to be lamentation in the house of those who serve the muses. And the word she uses is musopolos.

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  So musopolos means an attendant of the muses. Musopolos, Herodotus's term, means music maker. Now, what's so interesting is what has happened is Sappho's term, attendant of the muses. It's got this sense of kind of uh privileged access to the gods. Feminine community, it's her and her daughter, they're in their home, she's talking to her daughter, she's talking about collective grief. She's talking about service to the female goddesses, the muses. Her word musopolos changed one letter, the L to the I, and you get musopolos. But what's happened by doing that change is by having that as a music, uh as a, sorry, as a maker rather than an attendant.

• 1:25:21Speaker 02

  You can make music, but you can't make muses.

• 1:25:25Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:25Speaker 02

  So he has basically taken the kind of suggestive subtle force of what Sappho's doing, where she's she's attending on music, but she's also attending on the muses. And he's basically said, no, no, like you are just a music maker. Um and and that is deliberately, to me, that is a clear intertext with Sappho's fragment. Um, you know, it's it's just one uh consonant change, uh oh, yeah, one uh change of a consonant to a vowel. Um and yet it completely shifts the meaning. And to me, that like, that is that kind of process of, and what's super interesting is that's the other way around, right? That's a woman's vocabulary, where a woman has come up with a really interesting resonant term for her own poetic making.

• 1:26:10Speaker 02

  Her female community, her mother daughter relationship, her relationship to these feminine goddesses. And he has taken it and he has circumscribed it and said, like, no, you're a musopolos. And to me, that's like doubly interesting because he doesn't call her a poet as a poet. He calls other men poets in histories, but he doesn't call Sappho that. So this is like, to me, that's like a a pointed jab, right?

• 1:26:32Liv Albert?

  It sounds like the Plato, the tenth muse thing, right? It's like acknowledging that she exists.

• 1:26:38Speaker 02

  And that she had a time, that he's read her poetry.

• 1:26:42Liv Albert?

  Uh huh.

• 1:26:43Speaker 02

  But then changing it.

• 1:26:44Liv Albert?

  Oh, I can't say that, though. That's not right. Like, yeah, wow.

• 1:26:50Speaker 02

  So cool, right? But like, you know, once you start doing this, once you get into that granular detail of like the words, you start seeing these kinds of conversations that are being had across these different texts and this kind of formation of an identity that makes it seem like the gender identity of the poet has to be masculine. And you see it again and again. There is no alternative. Yeah.

• 1:27:16Liv Albert?

  Wow. Okay. Is there any that you, anything that you haven't talked about yet that you've found to be just like so almost hilariously egregious? You know, that type, that level of misogyny where you're like, it, this is funny. It's so bad.

• 1:27:30Speaker 02

  Oh, right. I mean, those ones. I mean, like, I feel like I don't talk about that in, in this book. I talk about it in the prologue to, to Mythica or Penelope's Bones, because I'm just basically like setting up the levels of misogyny. But actually, no, that's not true, because I do talk about that here. Um, and that, that's kind of like my starting point. So I'll talk about this one.

• 1:27:49Liv Albert?

  Cause like, there's always something.

• 1:27:50Speaker 02

  Well, there's always, there is always one. It's like, it's like, how do I pick which one is basically what I just did.

• 1:27:57Liv Albert?

  Oh, I know the feeling.

• 1:27:59Speaker 02

  Um, so like, obviously, the kind of obvious ones are like Simonides, um, the kind of like, oh, here's the donkey woman who's like so lazy that she like rolls in her own muck. And here's the pig woman. Like, you know, those, that one is just like the horrific one that like, I, I feel like I kind of open every like ancient women course with, because I'm just like, guys, this is what we're dealing with. Um, so I, like, I talk about that in Mythica and Penelope's Bones, because I'm just like, you need to understand the levels of misogyny that we're trying to excavate. Um, but the one that I find really interesting, and I feel like has been super rich for me, um, to kind of interpret, and I feel like maybe this will be also interesting from a kind of contemporary point of view, is, um, the opening of the Odyssey where.

• 1:28:43Speaker 02

  In the first book of the Odyssey, Telemachus, Odysseus' son, is kind of at home trying to kind of fill his dad's shoes in Ithaca, and the bard is singing, and the bard is singing a song of the return of the Greeks from Troy. And obviously that for Penelope, who's kind of waiting upstairs, doing what she does, which is hanging out in her bedroom, that obviously strikes a kind of sore note. So she comes down and she asks the bard if he can change his song. And Telemachus gets up and he makes this whole speech that is like, no, like, go back upstairs, go back and start weaving again, like, you know, song is for men and I'm the master in this household. And for me, that's like, it's

• 1:29:25Speaker 02

  not only an instance of kind of horrific misogyny, but I think as someone who's really interested in the poems and the kind of meta poetic elements, the fact that he says, he says words are for men, but the word he uses in Greek is mythos. And that means myth.

• 1:29:48Liv Albert?

  Well, I've made him incredibly angry.

• 1:29:54Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I know. Telemachus would be like, uh, woman, where is your distaff and your spindle?

• 1:30:00Liv Albert?

  Do you want to know the best part that I, you've just given to me, is that my very first episode of the Odyssey, which was from probably 2019, maybe 2018?

• 1:30:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:11Liv Albert?

  Is just called Telemachus is a whiny little bitch.

• 1:30:17Speaker 02

  I love that. And I mean, there could not be a better name for a podcast with an episode that is titled that. Yeah.

• 1:30:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I mean, that's, that's just it. So you're welcome.

• 1:30:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. I mean, you know, that's, that's the bit that doesn't get into the translations, but.

• 1:30:32Liv Albert?

  He is being a whiny little bitch.

• 1:30:34Speaker 02

  He's so whiny. I mean, like, to be honest, like, it's kind of like worse than that. Cause then like, obviously later on, you get this horrific episode in, in the kind of closing act of the Odyssey where he actually hangs the enslaved women, basically because he feels like he's been kind of emasculated because they were. Being raped by the suitors, like, yeah, just horrific.

• 1:30:56Liv Albert?

  He is not. One of my least favorite.

• 1:30:58Speaker 02

  He's not a role model.

• 1:30:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah, now I'm even angry that I use the word bitch. Like, that's, I mean, I. I wanna call him a man, that I might have to go take it. I think it's just bee in the title.

• 1:31:07Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, okay, okay. So, yeah, well, yeah. Um, I was gonna say we could imagine it like, you know, in Simoni- Simonides, because he has the bee woman, but the bee woman's actually the only good one. So like, uh, yeah. We'll, we'll, we'll retract that.

• 1:31:21Liv Albert?

  I mean, yeah, but like, it's really just the, it's also just a reminder that this kind of came out of nowhere, but I know it's true. That the Greeks also called female dogs like the same as women, or like that they had the same kind of like, like, that's wild to me.

• 1:31:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, Helen calls herself that in the Iliad and in the Odyssey.

• 1:31:39Liv Albert?

  That was, I was just also gonna bring up Helen, because my question now is from the Odyssey, like, I mean, this may or may not tie into your book exactly, but I've always been so fascinated with the, the like. Dichotomy of, of Penelope and Helen in the Odyssey, because, or really just even the Helen of the Odyssey versus the Helen of the Iliad, like. Like Queen Witch coming back to Sparta, like, is there anything kind of interesting in the, the, the word wording there, or just anything on that?

• 1:32:03Speaker 02

  Um, yes, there is. Um, so what's super interesting about, um, Helen, well, I guess there are, there are loads of interesting things. There are always interesting things to say about Homer. Read my book that's coming out.

• 1:32:16Speaker 02

  Because basically the, the Mythica Penelope's bones is, is about women and Homer particularly.

• 1:32:21Liv Albert?

  Oh, Jesus, okay.

• 1:32:22Speaker 02

  Like, that, that's the focus. The focus is like, so that's why this, this passage, this silencing of Penelope is so pragmatic for me, because it's like. You have this moment where a woman tries to affect poetry. She tries to not only affect poetry, but she tries to affect myth. She tries to tell her own, not even tell her own story, but ask someone to tell a different story, and she doesn't get to. So I feel like talking about the women of Homer is just so important, because it's like, it is the starting point. It's where all of these kind of preconceptions start. But anyway. Um, I talk a lot about, about Helen in, in Mythica and Penelope's bones, but basically I think there are, there are a couple of really interesting things.

• 1:33:00Speaker 02

  One interesting thing is that, um, they, there is this moment where in, in, this is in the Odyssey. Where she talks about, um, she's kind of discussing what happened in the Trojan War, and she's saying that they made war. On account of me, um, the one who is a bitch.

• 1:33:22Speaker 02

  And she uses this word for a female dog. And Emily Wilson, who obviously amazing translations, like really, really brilliant. And she has this fantastic um chapter, which I always teach with, where she talks about um how she decided to go about translating this. Because you can't disassociate the fact that the poet is calling her a bitch from the fact that Helen is calling herself a bitch, right? And so it's like, it's not fair to assume necessarily, and I'm probably doing a terrible job of paraphrasing Emily's amazing um words. But it's not fair to assume that Helen is being derogatory about herself.

• 1:34:04Speaker 02

  And rather, one might assume that that pose of calling Helen a bitch is one that the men are imposing on her. And it's one that she is articulating back to them. So Emily has a brilliant translation where she says, they made my face the cause that hounded them.

• 1:34:23Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 1:34:24Speaker 02

  So good, so good. And obviously you get hound in there, so you get dogs. Um you get this kind of idea that like actually Helen is sort of a pawn in a man's game. And that actually this kind of derogation that she has to suffer. And that she in some sense kind of internalizes um in the way that she speaks. Um is something that has been kind of set up by men. So that's the first interesting thing. The other thing that is that I really love is that in the Odyssey, um she and Menelaus have this like extremely awkward exchange of like, let's tell our memories from Troy, which is just like, oh, well, darling, you were the one who was on the battlefield.

• 1:35:04Speaker 02

  And I was the one who was inside Troy with my kind of lover slash rapist, not entirely sure. But um anyway, it's like super, super awkward. And um they each tell stories. And he tells this really awkward story about how it was when he was inside the Trojan horse. And she was going around the Trojan horse and she was imitating all of the the voices of all of their wives and. And then she tells a story about how Odysseus snuck into Troy and she gave him a bath, which is just like definitely kind of like got undertones. And he says at the end, after she's finished, he says, well done, wife, you spoke really well. And the word he uses or the phrase he uses is katamoran. You you spoke.

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

  Um accordingly, I guess maybe is a kind of nice translation of that. But what's really interesting is that that ability to kind of speak to measure is something that is prized in Homeric epic as a function and a feature of the epic poet.

• 1:36:05Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:36:05Speaker 02

  So it's this super awkward exchange. You're not sure if he's being sarcastic or not, but at the same time, he's kind of just said, you are basically talking like an epic poet. You've basically just told the story, a mini story of the Trojan War. And you've, you've done basically what Homer is doing. So I kind of love that, like, we start with Penelope getting told to basically shut up. Like myth is not for you. You don't get to tell your own story. But by the time we get to Helen and Helen, right? She's always the one who's like breaking the rules, breaking the boundaries. But by the time we get there, we get this acknowledgement, at least acknowledgement. And I think, you know, there is definitely some sarcasm in there.

• 1:36:46Speaker 02

  But like, we get an acknowledgement of the fact that she is capable of speaking like an epic poet. And I think that's really cool.

• 1:36:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I don't want to get too much into Mythica, but like, do you look at, and you can just say yes or no, because we'll get into it when you do. But like, do you look at like the, what may be coming in from the Archaic period versus like what might be more of like a remnant of like the earlier versions, you know, like just in terms of like, you know, when it was written down versus the hundreds of years before.

• 1:37:12Speaker 02

  Okay, no, super, super good question. So basically what I do, and, and I think this is, yeah, we, we don't need to get too into it. But basically what I do is, because I think that the question around Homer and history and like, was he Archaic? You know, was he like Iron Age? How far back in the Iron Age? How much of the bondage? Was he a he? Exactly.

• 1:37:30Liv Albert?

  Was he a person?

• 1:37:31Speaker 02

  Was he even one people? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Exactly. I'm, I'm literally, I'm just about to teach a class on women and Homer. And I've been like, trying to kind of like synthesize the Homeric question for them. And I'm sorry, I'm right in the weeds of this right now. But basically.

• 1:37:43Liv Albert?

  I've got an episode if you care. If you want to give any Themen anything to.

• 1:37:48Speaker 02

  But basically, kind of where I landed on this was, I feel like the problem with that, especially when you're talking about women, is that that always starts with Homer. It always is like, when was Homer? What did Homer say? Who was he? Like, when was he composing? But if you're looking for women and you're interested in the history of women and how that weaves together with how women are represented in the epics, then you've got to start differently. You can't start from Homer. So what I decided to do was to take the fact that the epics are clearly making it clear that they are imagining a kind of heroic age that is kind of pitched back into the late Bronze Age.

• 1:38:34Speaker 02

  Take that kind of seriously, use that as a lead and then say, right, we're not going to start with Homer. We're going to start in the late Bronze Age. We're going to look at what women were actually doing, what they were actually experiencing, what archaeology can do for us, what the latest DNA studies can do, what we can do with facial reconstruction. Find out what women were doing and then see if that makes us read the poems differently.

• 1:38:56Liv Albert?

  Oh, I'm so excited.

• 1:38:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So it's just like, I feel like the starting point has to be different because we just like, it shouldn't. Although I like, I love Homer and Homer is, is, is really fantastic on so many levels. But if you use Homer as the starting point, you are already engaging in that kind of process that I guess we've been talking about this whole time. That process of the formation of the male poet as inevitable, that process of the formation of the male hero as inevitable. Whereas if you say, well, look, no, I'm looking at historical women, historical women's experiences. And then does that make us understand the themes of women as mothers in the Iliad? Women as weavers in the Odyssey? How does that make, how does that change how we see literature?

• 1:39:41Speaker 02

  I feel like that's, that's such a different spin.

• 1:39:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I mean, that's what I wanted. And also after this conversation, that's also what I expected. But like, cause yeah, I mean, that's what's so interesting to me. Cause I feel like when you're, I mean, when you're starting at Homer, you're kind of already starting at the end, right? Because the version that we have is kind of already at the end.

• 1:39:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:40:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And you know, it's like, I'm not making claims about the kind of layers or whatever that make up the poetry. Because in a sense, that's not the end goal. The end goal is to. Start with kind of the historical experience of being a woman and then use that to read these fantastic works of literature and myth in different ways.

• 1:40:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Okay, at this point, the name Penelope's Bones is absolutely better. I'm so glad it's called that in this state.

• 1:40:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I honestly am so, so thrilled because basically like I start off with this like real life Mycenaean woman who they've like done DNA sequencing on and they like know what her eye color is, what her hair color is, and she's not that far away from like ancient Ithaca. So I'm like, oh my gosh, like, you know, this is sort of like bringing back to life someone who is sort of like Penelope, or at least like the sort of the forebearer of Penelope. And that that makes us, that makes us take them seriously. I think that's what it is. It's about, about giving them space and realizing that, okay, Penelope didn't exist, but like real, real Bronze Age women. You know, like there's this infuriating quote and sorry, like I'm just continuously ranting. Basically, this has been like two hours of me ranting.

• 1:41:08Liv Albert?

  This is the greatest thing ever.

• 1:41:10Speaker 02

  But like, um, basically kind of what Mythica and Penelope's Bones is doing is it's arguing against, um, I don't know if you're familiar with Moses Finley's World of Odysseus.

• 1:41:19Liv Albert?

  No.

• 1:41:20Speaker 02

  So it was like this, this kind of very important text in like the, the mid 20th century. And he basically like argues that, um, you, I mean, he's like doing all of this kind of Homer and history thing. And he's like, Homer is definitely Iron Age and I can prove it for this and this and this reason. And, you know, it's infuriating in a lot of ways. I think the logic is also kind of off. But one thing he says is there is a quote right at the beginning and it says, there is no feminine in the age of heroes.

• 1:41:48Liv Albert?

  Oh, oh my god, what?

• 1:41:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:49Liv Albert?

  Like literally what?

• 1:41:51Speaker 02

  Right. And I feel like for me, that was the kind of like, no, like, like there were women.

• 1:41:58Liv Albert?

  That's my answer to that.

• 1:41:59Speaker 02

  Right? Like exactly. Fifty percent of the population were there. Okay. In the age of heroes as Homer imagined it, maybe not. But like, that's, that's, that's.

• 1:42:08Liv Albert?

  But like, there still is.

• 1:42:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:11Liv Albert?

  Even Homer, like I always find Homer interesting because the women are like comparatively pretty great compared to a lot of like later texts.

• 1:42:18Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I think Homer, like, and this is what I was going to say earlier, but I didn't want to kind of go into like a Homer love fest because you know, Euripides.

• 1:42:24Liv Albert?

  You can do that next time, but I'm ready for it. I'm not, I'm not far from that.

• 1:42:29Speaker 02

  But like, yeah, your Euripides is my Homer. And I feel like I just, I love the complexity of Homer. I love the way that I feel like spaces are opened within the epics to. There's the dominant ideology and then there's like these glimpses of the fact that it could be different. And that goes on all kinds of different levels. It goes on gender levels. It goes on kind of mortal, immortal levels. But like, I feel like it's, it's so stunning for me, the way that that happens. But like, I feel like the fact that he says that, that Finley says that is, is such a, for me, that was a big driver to be like, no, like, the women are there in the history and they're there in such fascinating ways. The women are there in the poems and they're there in such fascinating ways.

• 1:43:12Speaker 02

  And what happens when we throw those two together and we basically kind of say to Telemachus, no, Penelope's not gonna shut up. She's gonna tell her story and we're gonna kind of find, yeah, find her bones.

• 1:43:25Liv Albert?

  I'm so obsessed with all of this. I, i- it's just, yeah, I mean, my, the reason I started the show was basically to look at like, the way myths treat women and be like, this doesn't have to be the only way we see women in, in the ancient world and in Greek mythology. And it's just, everything you're just saying reminded me of like, so many bad reviews I've gotten over the years are just from, I'm assuming men. I feel comfortable in saying they're all men. Um, or women who are so deep in the patriarchy that, you know, there's a lot of those. Um, but like, th- this complaint that because I talk about, um, like, let's say all the divine assaults,

• 1:44:09Liv Albert?

  like all the divine rape, because I talk about divine rape as if it was a bad thing, um, that I am somehow like, i- i- like changing history. Like the number of people that would come to me and be like, oh, cause I would say like, you know, say the rape, the rape of Persephone, like one of those ones where the word rape is like famously in the story, right? And so, and then, or really any of them, but those are the best example because people have come to me and been like, "No, you're reading into it way too much. The word rape just meant to kidnap." And I just want to look them in the eye and say, "Why do you think that is?" "It's not because they were only taking them away."

• 1:44:52Liv Albert?

  "It's because kidnapping involved inevitable rape." Like, that's not, but there's this entire mentality that like, "Because," and it, I mean, most of it comes from like translating this stuff from the last 200 years, this, this idea that like, "Because somebody translated it as not a bad thing, that like it was fine." Or, you know, like, I get a lot of people, I talk about Medusa and Hesiod a lot, and I argue, and I stand by it forever, "That in Hesiod, it also involves the same divine assault that is involved."

• 1:45:25Speaker 02

  I think so too, yeah.

• 1:45:26Liv Albert?

  Thank you.

• 1:45:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:28Liv Albert?

  You're the first time, you're the first person, because I see this a lot, you're the first person who's ever been like, "Yes."

• 1:45:32Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 1:45:33Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah, like, but, or just like, they don't want to like definitively say that, but I think it's so clearly definitively there.

• 1:45:38Speaker 02

  It's so clearly there, because all of the, the setting is there, right? It's like, you know, they, they've created the setting for the drama, so like, you know, what, what's gonna happen next? It's exactly like what you're saying. It's like, there's, there's this sequence of events that happens.

• 1:45:51Liv Albert?

  Truly. Yeah, no, like, I mean, yeah, I, I have that one translation of it, like, basically memorized, because I talk about it so often. But like, yeah, Field of Flowers, they call him the dark-haired one, they're literally setting up, like, it is basically equivalent to Persephone in Hades.

• 1:46:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:05Liv Albert?

  It's the same. And, but because Hesiod doesn't say it was non-consensual, the number of times I get pushback, and I'm like, "That's because Hesiod doesn't conceptualize consent. It's not because it wasn't a thing."

• 1:46:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:17Liv Albert?

  You know, and, but like, that is what people, like, have such issue with, is that like, "They so often are like, "Well, no, it wasn't a, it wasn't like a traumatic, it was just like the thing that happened." And I'm like, "Just because it was the thing that happened, doesn't actually mean it wasn't traumatic." Like, why are, what are these bright mentalities that like have to connect these things?

• 1:46:37Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 1:46:38Liv Albert?

  And so, yeah, I'm just, oh my god, I'm...

• 1:46:39Speaker 02

  No, look, no, I think, I think you're exactly right, but I think the other thing that I would say is like... I think what's so interesting with that, that kind of statement that you were saying, that like somehow you're kind of misinterpreting or de-purifying the myth or, or you know, like, like, it's like that I find extraordinary because I think you could do that with something, they, they might have even a point to a degree. I, I disagree with it because as a, a literary person, as someone who, who loves looking at literature and analysing literature, I feel like literature should always be open to debate, that, that's what, that's what it is. But they could have grounds with Cassiod for saying

• 1:47:25Speaker 02

  this is a kind of historically contextualised text, you know, it, it might have particular things and you could sort of have a, a frank and interesting back and forth that looks at the kind of philology of it, as you kind of said, with what kind of tropes are being called on. But I think with myth, what I find so bizarre is that myths very essence is the fact that it is completely open for interpretation. Um, and what's so interesting, and I've been really kind of trying to get at this, we're thinking about kind of why myth is so rich for women. I think it's because myth has this really interesting ability to

• 1:48:05Speaker 02

  inform canonical ways of thinking and, and to inform majority ways. It's what Telemachus is doing when he's saying Muthos is for me. But at the same time, myth because of its plurality, because of the fact that myth can always take a different angle, it can always be told from a slightly different way. It's also subversive. Um, and it makes it a really great way into challenging the norms because you are using the tool that the norms use, but you are using its force against itself.

• 1:48:44Liv Albert?

  You're making me really proud about what I do for a living and I just appreciate it a lot.

• 1:48:47Speaker 02

  I'm just giving you a little bit of applause right there.

• 1:48:49Liv Albert?

  Thank you. I mean, I just feel like, well, I gave it to myself really by saying that I think that's what I do. Like with mythology.

• 1:48:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:55Liv Albert?

  And I love it. But yeah, like it's, I mean, yeah, the, the things that people have said to me over the years about like what I should and should not be doing with myth is so funny to me. And like, I think there are some valid critic or critiques of that.

• 1:49:08Speaker 02

  Well, is it possible that they're all like Telemachus?

• 1:49:11Liv Albert?

  Honestly, yeah. The people who come to me about this are all Telemachus because if they had like a, like if somebody comes to me with like a valid, or I mean, I don't want to say that like I can define validity, but like I am capable of seeing where I have done wrong. But like the stuff that I've gotten over the years are just these like hilariously misogynistic takes. Or, and they're just like so clueless, right? Like they just have no idea what myth actually functions as. Or I recently polled a list of like all of my reviews, so they're really fresh in my head. And normally I don't think about them that much. But I had another guy once who was like, um, you know, what are, what are you talking about? Myths aren't real history. They reflect the cultures of the time. And I'm like, yeah.

• 1:49:56Speaker 02

  And?

• 1:49:56Liv Albert?

  That, yeah, that's literally what I'm talking about. Like, yeah, that, that, that doesn't actually, but he was like so mad about how the way I do it. Because I'm not doing it with the way he says, but it's like, it's because men are really threatened by the way I look at men in myth being not perfect.

• 1:50:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. Interesting. But I think it's also, I think what's interesting, and I, I see this a lot with my students, is that it is really difficult to disassociate myth from history. Because as this reviewer, commenter pointed out, myth doesn't really exist, or it exists, but it doesn't appear outside of history and culture. So the way it manifests is actually in these kinds of things, but it isn't actually itself historical. So it's, it's like, it's really difficult to kind of prise apart those, those layers and you have to be, you have to be careful. Doing it, but that's like, that's where it gets interesting. That's, that's why, that's

• 1:50:56Speaker 02

  why we're both chatting for like two hours about Greek myths.

• 1:50:59Liv Albert?

  And, and like, that's the, yeah, the fun is picking apart everything. And yeah, I'm just, I'm moderately obsessed. I, this has been a joy. We're gonna wrap this first one. I, but oh my God, I'm so glad we did this. You're gonna come back.

• 1:51:13Speaker 02

  Me too. Honestly, Liv, thank you so much for having me. It's like, honestly, it's just, I feel like, yeah, we could go on into the night. It's, yeah, you know, if there wasn't a time difference, maybe we would spend all day. But yeah, no, it's.

• 1:51:23Liv Albert?

  I mean, glad to just have you back. So.

• 1:51:26Speaker 02

  That would be so great. Yeah. No, thank you so much. And thank you so much also for like, just, yeah, taking such an interest in, in what I do as well and like asking such great questions.

• 1:51:36Liv Albert?

  Oh, I would thank you for giving me all of this. Now I'm, I mean, I'm gonna become obsessed with this. You're gonna just join in on all of my various levels of like ancient women obsessions. So.

• 1:51:45Speaker 02

  Well, if you want, we've got, um, proofs coming sort of hopefully soonish of, of Mythica, Penelope's Bone. So I can send that to you. And like, honestly, like, I, I feel like sometimes I, I mean, I'm like, quite a kind of like excitable person anyway, but I just get so excited about this book. Like, I just, I don't know, I feel like it's sort of a just, it's a little bit like, kind of what you were saying about, about suddenly kind of seeing things differently. It just feels like it's encapsulated something for me about what I'm trying to do, why the past is so interesting. And just like, ah, it's just, just cool. I just love the Bronze Age as well.

• 1:52:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I mean, I, yeah, I'm so excited for this next book. So yes, oh my God, please, we would love proofs. I say we because Michaela can have, she gets first dibs because this is really her love of everything. Oh my God. Um, that is, yeah, I'm so excited. I'm so excited to have you back. I mean.

• 1:52:37Speaker 02

  Thank you. I'd love to. I can't wait.

• 1:52:41Liv Albert?

  Um, is there anything you want to tell my listeners in terms of, I mean, I assume, well, they can buy, um, How Women Became Poets. Everywhere.

• 1:52:48Speaker 02

  Yes, it's.

• 1:52:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's available in in UK, US, like most good bookstores. And and yeah, I guess the kind of the one thing I would say, I guess, just because, you know, I've we've got excited about talking about Mythica and Penelope's Bones. But like, I would really urge people, if they like the sound of it, to go ahead and preorder it. And it's available on all good book bookshop sites. And it's on on Amazon, it's available across the US, UK. It's also in some random territories, like Hungary and Portugal, apparently, as of recently. So, but like, if you could preorder it, it would like mean just so much to me. Because, yeah, I just can't wait for it to be out in the world and to share it with everyone.

• 1:53:29Liv Albert?

  And to the others, to the listeners, preorders, just in general, like, I used to work in publishing, just to explain before I go on this slight rant.

• 1:53:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:53:38Liv Albert?

  Um, preorders are incredibly important because they count as first day sales. So if you preorder a book, it's better than even buying it on day one or the day after. Like, you've made a real difference. So, yeah.

• 1:53:49Speaker 02

  It's so, it's so true.

• 1:53:50Liv Albert?

  Across the board.

• 1:53:51Speaker 02

  It's so true, which is why, like, authors are always saying it. But it's like, you know, it's as an author, it's kind of difficult to say. But, yeah, it obviously makes a massive difference because

• 1:53:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:58Speaker 02

  it, the reason you want it to get the day one sales is because that's the thing that counts for the bestseller lists, which obviously makes.

• 1:54:03Liv Albert?

  And that's just how you get, yeah, you get known more and more.

• 1:54:06Speaker 02

  You get known.

• 1:54:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:07Speaker 02

  And and and the book reaches more people. And that's just, that's just ultimately what I want is I want people reading and caring about rewriting ancient history through women and ancient myths through women. And doing it from like, I think it's like, it's been done so well through fiction. But I think that there's like a real need for it to be done through nonfiction, to look at the real women.

• 1:54:26Liv Albert?

  I agree so, so, so much.

• 1:54:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:29Liv Albert?

  Absolutely. Yeah. Well, you're hitting the right audience with my show. You just kind of defined what we're all obsessed with.

• 1:54:35Speaker 02

  I mean, I was kind of like, you know, the book called Mythica and yours is like, has myths in the title. It's kind of like, yeah.

• 1:54:42Liv Albert?

  Oh, it's.

• 1:54:43Speaker 02

  It's a done deal.

• 1:54:44Liv Albert?

  Absolutely perfect.

• 1:55:02Liv Albert?

  Oh, thank you all so much for listening. I haven't read that book yet, but based on that conversation, oh gods, do I want to. Highly recommend. And again, you can look forward to Emily returning on the show because, oh, we had a time. Let's Talk About Myths, Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Pangawish is the Hermes to my Olympians, the producer. Select music by Luke Chaos. The podcast is part of the iHeart Podcast Network. Listen on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sign up for our new newsletter, Iris's Rainbow,

• 1:55:41Liv Albert?

  because I have to give everything a cute name. mythsbaby.com/newsletter. I am Liv, and I love this shit.

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