The Iliad and Odyssey: heroic epics from ancient Greece

Greg Jenner is joined in ancient Greece by historian Dr Emily Hauser and comedian and actor Kiell Smith-Bynoe to learn about the epic poems the Iliad and Odyssey. Traditionally attributed to the poet Homer, these works tell parts of a legend that has fascinated us for centuries: the story of the Trojan War. Featuring a cast of unforgettable characters – Achilles, Odysseus, Paris, Helen, Hector and Agamemnon – the war between ancient Greece and Troy has inspired writers, artists and filmmakers for over a millennium. But the Iliad and Odyssey only recount episodes of this much bigger story. The Iliad, focusing on the hero Achilles, takes place in the closing stretches of the war. And the Odyssey tells the tale of Odysseus’s perilous voyage home after the Greeks have triumphed. In this episode, we trace the origins of the poems in the 8th century BCE, looking at whether Homer really wrote them and how these originally oral tales came to be written down, before exploring the fantastical tales they tell. Along the way, we also look at whether or not the Trojan war really happened, how the ancient Greeks defined heroism, and examine the role of gods and monsters in the poems and the lives of their heroes. If you’re a fan of fantastical myths and legends, heroes behaving badly, and ancient Greek culture, you’ll love our episode on the Iliad and Odyssey. If you want more from Kiell Smith-Bynoe, listen to our episode on Viking explorer Leif Erikson. And for more historical epics, check out our episodes on the Legends of King Arthur, and the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh. You’re Dead To Me is the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Every episode, Greg Jenner brings together the best names in history and comedy to learn and laugh about the past. Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Auréliane Perrin Written by: Dr Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Dr Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Dr Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Gill Huggett Senior Producer: Dr Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: Philip Sellars

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

• 0:00Greg Jenner?

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• 1:39Greg Jenner?

  Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name's Greg Jenner, I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster, and today we're sharpening our swords, stashing our spears and sailing the wine dark sea. Back to ancient Greeks to learn all about the epic poems known as the Iliad and Odyssey. And to help us on this valiant voyage, we are joined by two heroic companions. In history corner, she's senior lecturer in classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter, an expert on women in antiquity, Homer and the modern reception of classical texts. You might have read her incredible new book, Mythica, A New History of Homer's World Through the Women Written Out of It. It's Dr Emily Howser, welcome Emily.

• 2:21Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:22Greg Jenner?

  Pleasure to have you in. And in comedy corner, he's a multi-talented actor, comedian and broadcaster. You'll recognise him from hosting TVs The Great British Sewing Bee, or starring in the award-winning sitcoms Ghosts, Stathlet's Flats and Man Like Mo Bean. Or maybe you've delighted in watching him succeed and fail on Taskmaster. Maybe you've seen his live tour show, Cool Story Bro. But you'll definitely remember him from our episode on the Viking explorer Leif Erikson. It's the very cool Kyle Smith-Bynoe, welcome back.

• 2:48Speaker 05

  Thank you very much for having me again. I didn't think I was allowed back.

• 2:51Greg Jenner?

  Oh, of course you're allowed back.

• 2:53Speaker 05

  Turns out you can do anything. You can say anything and get invited back, alright.

• 2:57Greg Jenner?

  You were great last time, you had a lot of fun. We rummaged in the Viking age, we did exploration a thousand years ago.

• 3:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right.

• 3:03Greg Jenner?

  Today, we are taking you even further back. What do you know about ancient Greeks? The Iliad, the Odyssey, any bells?

• 3:09Speaker 05

  I'm gonna say Medusa. Is that, is that anyone here?

• 3:15Speaker 04

  A little bit, a little bit off. We'll get you back on track.

• 3:19Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 3:20Greg Jenner?

  Right culture.

• 3:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, right culture.

• 3:22Greg Jenner?

  Right language.

• 3:23Speaker 05

  Great.

• 3:24Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, these are epic poems.

• 3:28Greg Jenner?

  So, what do you know?

• 3:33Greg Jenner?

  So this is the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener or viewer, hello, what you might know about today's subject. The ancient Greek geeks among you will certainly have read the Iliad and Odyssey, maybe as retold by the marvellous Stephen Fry, or perhaps in wonderful translation by Emily Wilson, that's my favourite translation. And even if you haven't read the classic classics, the story of the Trojan War is still everywhere in our pop culture. There are films, of course, there's 2004's Troy, starring Hanson Brad Pitt, and of course now the Christopher Nolan film, The Odyssey. No comment on the helmets, I'm not getting involved. Plus, of course, you've got the Percy Jackson series, there's Madeleine Miller's Song of Achilles, Margaret Atwood's feminist retelling of the Penelopeiad, I think, which is the pronunciation, am I right?

• 4:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, Penelopeiad, yeah.

• 4:15Greg Jenner?

  Good, thank you. And there's even an anime series inspired by The Odyssey. So the plots are familiar to us, even when we don't realise it. But when were these stories first written? And by whom? And is written the right verb? And what do they reveal about Greek culture? And how many people are you allowed to slaughter and still be considered a hero? Let's find out. Right, Dr Emily, for those who've never heard the words the Iliad or Odyssey, which maybe incorporates Kyle, I'm not sure, simply put, what are they?

• 4:42Speaker 04

  Right, well, what we're looking at are epic poems that are coming from ancient Greeks, and they're part of a cycle of poems, which we know as the epic cycle, that are basically telling the story of the legend of the Trojan War. So this is a legend that is kind of springing up around a city called Troy in modern, sort of, northwest Turkey. A massive war happening there, about ten-year war, a siege, basically, that the Greeks enact because Paris, the prince of Troy, abducted, or let's put it in quotation marks, abducted Helen of Sparta, already problematically married to Menelaus. The Greeks get a bit peeved by that, and they come and try and get her back. And this initiates a huge cycle of poems.

• 5:26Speaker 04

  Now, of those, we've got two that remain, that's the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad's telling a story of a couple of short weeks in the final year of the war, and the Odyssey telling the story of one man's voyage back home.

• 5:39Greg Jenner?

  Do you know how long these poems are? Do you know how long, for example, the Iliad is?

• 5:43Speaker 05

  I'm guessing, I mean, how do we even measure length?

• 5:45Greg Jenner?

  Let's go in lines, in lines. Lines, how many lines, you know?

• 5:48Speaker 05

  I want to say, I'm getting the feeling of 600.

• 5:53Greg Jenner?

  That's a fairly long poem. Emily, it's a bit longer than that, isn't it?

• 5:57Speaker 04

  It's just a bit longer, I'm afraid. The Iliad is about 15,700 lines, yeah.

• 6:02Speaker 05

  I say that's too many.

• 6:03Speaker 04

  There's a reason you haven't read it.

• 6:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  And the Odyssey is about 12,100 lines.

• 6:08Greg Jenner?

  Oh, that's better. Yeah, yeah, nice, slim, simple novel, yeah. Kyle, you are a storyteller, because Cool Story Bro, you get stories, you know, from the audience, right?

• 6:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:17Greg Jenner?

  What makes a story epic?

• 6:18Speaker 05

  I mean, we've got to start with the beginning, middle and end. That's the main, that's a golden rule.

• 6:22Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 6:23Speaker 05

  And then, for me personally, I want some jeopardy.

• 6:27Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 6:28Speaker 05

  Yeah. Maybe some danger, a revelation, I need some characters, I need detail.

• 6:34Greg Jenner?

  This is good.

• 6:36Speaker 05

  That's what I like.

• 6:37Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 6:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:39Greg Jenner?

  And what is epic poetry?

• 6:40Speaker 04

  It's not going to be our definition of epic, but I like it very much. And in fact, that beginning, middle and end, I don't know if you know that, but Aristotle, the theorist of narrative, was the one who said that's what all good narrative has to have. So you're in the footsteps of Aristotle. But no, so for epic, it's, I think you can think about the way that we use epic nowadays. When we say something's epic, we mean it's kind of massive, it's huge, it's bigger than life, and that's what an epic poem is. So we talked about how long they are, you know, thousands of lines. So epic is kind of defined by its length, and later ancient poets actually talk about Homer. And they say, like, Homer is like the sea, and we are just like little rivers that are running from it. So epic is really big. It's also telling about big themes, so it's telling about heroes and gods and monsters

• 7:24Speaker 04

  and sort of voyages that are sort of bigger than anything that you've experienced before. And then the last thing, which is something that I think we wouldn't normally kind of put under epic in modern terms, is the meter. Now, that's hexameter, and that's basically the rhythm that you're using in the poem. So basically, because these were oral poems initially, which is why I loved hearing you talk about your storytelling, these were done aloud, and so you'd have a rhythm that would kind of, like, bring everything together. And that's this hexammetrical rhythm, which basically breaks the line into six feet.

• 7:54Speaker 05

  Right, so like iambic pentameter?

• 7:58Speaker 04

  That's exactly right, that's another meter. So iambic pentameter is quite natural to English, so that will be dum da dum da dum da dum da dum, something you hear a lot in Shakespeare. Hexameter is the meter of epic.

• 8:11Greg Jenner?

  You named the author Homer.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 8:14Greg Jenner?

  People at home might be going, yes, I've heard of Homer. Have you heard of Homer?

• 8:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:18Greg Jenner?

  Not the Simpsons character?

• 8:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't know, I can't remember why.

• 8:21Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 8:22Speaker 05

  But I have heard of Homer's somethings.

• 8:26Speaker 04

  Maybe the Iliad and Odyssey?

• 8:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, maybe.

• 8:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:29Speaker 05

  I think so.

• 8:30Greg Jenner?

  Are we happy saying Homer wrote the Odyssey? Because, I mean, within there, there are sort of several questions. A, Homer, real guy. B, wrote, is that the right verb?

• 8:39Speaker 04

  First of all, wrote, probably the wrong one, because...

• 8:42Speaker 05

  He freestyled.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  So, well, basically, yes. So this is where they started. So these poems started in an oral song culture, where people would be, or you'd have bards who would be really specialising in this kind of topic, and they would be reciting what we call composing and performance. So they would be up there, a little bit like you described, kind of on the stage, in the festival, whatever it was, and they would be putting these sort of building blocks together. Now, eventually, over the centuries, those stories get handed down, and at some point they start becoming kind of performed, and they become fixed a little bit more for performance, because at that point they're being recited. We then get a moment where, in about the mid-sixth century BCE, we've got a tyrant in Athens called Pisistratus, who's really interested in kind of scripting and fixing these texts.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  And at that point, that's where they really start to become like fixed written texts. So it's like a gradual process of them being written down and fixed into what we now know as the Iliad and Odyssey today.

• 9:39Greg Jenner?

  So maybe 200 years between the composition and the actual writing?

• 9:43Speaker 04

  I'd say even more.

• 9:44Greg Jenner?

  Oh, really?

• 9:45Speaker 04

  So the roots of the oral epic go back to the 14th century BCE or earlier.

• 9:49Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 9:50Speaker 04

  And the writing is probably around the eighth to the sixth centuries BCE that that happened. So we've got hundreds of years of tradition, and then hundreds of years of writing.

• 9:58Greg Jenner?

  That's amazing.

• 9:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:00Greg Jenner?

  Okay. Did Homer exist? Question mark?

• 10:03Speaker 04

  The ancient Greeks definitely believed that Homer existed. I don't know if we want to take their word for it, because they also believed that the gods and goddesses existed and that Zeus swallowed his wife, so, you know, maybe we're not going to take them too literally. But with Homer, they thought that there was this kind of one poet who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. For us today, I think we're thinking more of this as a tradition of multiple different itinerant bards who were really experts in their area. So when I like to think about it, I like to think about, instead of saying sort of the poet or he, I like to think of it as a collective tradition and say, they, the poets, you know, this is a communal tradition.

• 10:40Greg Jenner?

  So Homer's meant to be blind, right? He's meant to be the blind poet, Homer, and he's meant to be the, the Greeks believed he's the sole creator of these two poems.

• 10:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 05

  Wait, so what's he writing about then? It's not stuff he's seen?

• 10:53Speaker 04

  Well, this is kind of the point, because if you're blind, then you're kind of attuned to the power of a story and also to the influence of the muses, who were the goddesses of song, who were inspiring the bard. So this idea of kind of him being blind is very much him turning in and listening to the power of the word.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 11:10Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, and I mean, the opening line is "Sing to me, oh muses", right?

• 11:13Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 11:14Greg Jenner?

  It starts by, it's a song.

• 11:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, in both of the epics, they start like that way. So we've got "Sing to me, muse" in the Iliad, and then in the Odyssey, we've got "Tell me, muse". So both of them, very oral, spoken, and that's gesturing to the fact that they were originally sung accompanied by a lyre. And you've got this muse who is the goddess of song, or one of nine goddesses of song, and is imagined to kind of inhabit the bard and relay to him all of the knowledge that he doesn't have.

• 11:38Greg Jenner?

  It's funny that it's "sing" initially, and then they're like, "Actually, just tell me".

• 11:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:43Greg Jenner?

  Maybe this person doesn't have a great voice.

• 11:45Speaker 04

  Let's downgrade him.

• 11:46Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, 15,000 lines of something like, "I'm bad, we went over here". Yeah, great. Kyle, do you know what the ancient Greek word for a poet was?

• 11:55Speaker 05

  Yes, imagine.

• 11:56Greg Jenner?

  It'd be amazing if you just break out some classical Greek now.

• 11:59Speaker 05

  Ancient Greek word for a poet?

• 12:01Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, for a travelling poet, for a person sort of on the road, stops in, tells a story, gets a free meal.

• 12:06Speaker 05

  You get free meal for telling a story?

• 12:08Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. Yeah, you're not getting paid for your shows.

• 12:11Speaker 05

  Hang on a minute.

• 12:12Speaker 04

  I really hope you've got a meal for him now, Greg, after this.

• 12:15Greg Jenner?

  There's sandwiches outside if you want them.

• 12:16Speaker 05

  It's what they get, depending on how good the story is.

• 12:18Greg Jenner?

  I think that might be fair.

• 12:19Speaker 04

  It is absolutely true, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've got an incentive to make sure that your songs are really sharp.

• 12:24Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 12:25Speaker 05

  I'll be making stuff up, though.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  That's fine. That's the point.

• 12:28Greg Jenner?

  That's what they want, they want a good story.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  You just say the muses told you.

• 12:30Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 12:31Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, so the Greek, the Greek word, what, I mean, rhapsody, rhapsode?

• 12:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, well, we've got several different words, but rhapsode is the word that is happening at about the time where we've got these people who are performing kind of scripts of the versions of the text. Rhapsodos in ancient Greek, and that means song-stitcher, which is really fun. So what they're doing is they're basically sewing together different kind of parts of versions of the song. So you've got sort of like, maybe, you know, this part, which is about the anger of Achilles, and then you've got this little episode that's about like a spy mission, and we're going to stitch those together, and we're going to make those into a longer song.

• 13:04Greg Jenner?

  Oh, nice. So it's not Bohemian Rhapsody, it's Athenian Rhapsody.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 13:08Greg Jenner?

  Fab, okay. I mean, Alexander the Great had a copy of the Iliad, didn't he? That was his favourite book.

• 13:13Speaker 04

  He did. So this was given to him by his tutor Aristotle, the guy who we were talking about earlier, you know, and he, yeah, he kept the copy of the Iliad under his pillow, so.

• 13:22Greg Jenner?

  Oh, sweet.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, very, very inspired by Homer.

• 13:24Greg Jenner?

  That's cool. That is cute, isn't it? So the Iliad and Odyssey, as we know them, are recited first, composed, perhaps collectively, perhaps it's a sort of tradition of composition, perhaps there is one great blind genius, Homer, maybe not, we don't know, but they also tell of events that happened way before ancient Greece as we know it.

• 13:42Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 13:43Greg Jenner?

  This is the Bronze Age, the world of Messine and of the great heroes.

• 13:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. So what we're looking at here is, we're not going to be thinking about kind of epic as history, as kind of a straightforward document of what happened in the past, but what they do do, because of that process of handing down over generations, is that they are kind of encoding memory in some ways. So this process of song-making is really the idea of kind of passing down a memory. And one part of those memories that they're passing down is of this Trojan War. Now, the events of the Trojan War probably took place, if they kind of really happened, around the late 13th, early 12th century BCE. So we're looking about 1,200 B.C., late Bronze Age, as you mentioned. And there've been attempts to kind of prove that this was true and real. My favourite example of this is the discovery of the real city of Troy.

• 14:33Speaker 04

  There is a real city, that is amazing. The guy who found it, Heinrich Schliemann, was absolutely obsessed with Homer, made up this kind of story later in life that he'd wanted to do this since he was a child, absolutely wasn't true. But anyway, he got to Troy, and he was in such a hurry to get to the area that he thought was the lair of Homer's Troy, that instead of waiting and digging down through the layers, as you would if you were an archaeologist, he just used dynamite.

• 14:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, sometimes it's quicker, though, isn't it? Sometimes you've just got to get to it.

• 15:03Speaker 04

  Do you know what? That would be fine if he got the right lair, but he miscalculated by a thousand years. And so he blew through all of the lair that he wanted and ended up about a thousand years too far in the past.

• 15:16Speaker 05

  When was this?

• 15:18Speaker 04

  So this is in the late 19th century. So, you know, we're at the right, the beginning of archaeology. This, this guy's really not an archaeologist.

• 15:24Greg Jenner?

  He's a German businessman.

• 15:25Speaker 04

  He's a German businessman with a plan.

• 15:27Greg Jenner?

  He just fancied.

• 15:28Speaker 05

  He's been using it in his means, and like, "Well, it works in the means". So it must, it must work here.

• 15:33Greg Jenner?

  I mean, can you imagine that episode of Time Team, just Tony Robinson just dynamiting, "I found a Roman war, it's on fire, sorry". It's just amazing. So Troy is a real city. It's not called Troy because we call it the Iliad, so it's called Ileon, Iliad, Ilya, Ilya?

• 15:50Speaker 04

  Whatever endings you like. Well, actually, yeah, Homer gives it a couple of different names. We've got Troya, which is where we get our Troy from. But we've also got Iliad and Ileon, and that's where we got the Iliad from. What's really interesting about, though, is that we have documents from around that time that talk about a city in that area called Willusa, and we think that that word "Iliad" would initially have been pronounced "Willios".

• 16:13Greg Jenner?

  Oh.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  And so probably that Willusa is actually our Troy.

• 16:17Greg Jenner?

  So it should be the Williad?

• 16:18Speaker 04

  It should be the Williad, yeah. It doesn't have quite the same rhythm.

• 16:21Greg Jenner?

  That sounds rude, sorry.

• 16:22Speaker 05

  The reason that's interesting to me is because my middle name is Troy.

• 16:25Greg Jenner?

  Really?

• 16:26Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 16:27Speaker 05

  But I would hate if my middle name was Williad. I'd be really annoyed if it was.

• 16:33Greg Jenner?

  We didn't even know your middle name. I mean, that's perfect booking for us.

• 16:37Speaker 05

  Yeah?

• 16:38Greg Jenner?

  We've got, we've got an actual Trojan here.

• 16:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. My dad wanted to call me Troy Smith, and my mum was like, "Don't be stupid".

• 16:43Speaker 04

  That's amazing.

• 16:46Speaker 05

  Just because she was like, "That's too boring".

• 16:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, you should.

• 16:49Speaker 05

  Shout out to Troy Smith.

• 16:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, just count yourself lucky it wasn't Willios.

• 16:51Greg Jenner?

  And of course, in The Simpsons, there is Troy McClure and Homer, so we've got Troy and Homer in The Simpsons, which is a nice little joke. There are several layers of Troy, which may have been the, the classic Hymoric one, but earthquakes destroyed it, fires destroyed it, war, and then a German came along and dynamited it, so we're not quite sure which layers.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  He left some bits behind, so, you know, when we're looking at those layers, there's enough we can do to work out that there was a city there that was destroyed around 1190, 1180 B.C.

• 17:17Greg Jenner?

  But he did find treasure.

• 17:18Speaker 04

  He did.

• 17:19Greg Jenner?

  He did find proper golden, lovely, shiny treasure.

• 17:20Speaker 05

  See, he's got something, he's on to something. He's just got to start blowing stuff up, man.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  I mean, the line between pirate and archaeologist is looking quite fragile here.

• 17:28Greg Jenner?

  For the listeners and viewers, please do not go around blowing up treasure, it's just not, archaeologists would be very sad if you do that. Yeah, he got his wife to model the treasure. It was called King Priam's treasure?

• 17:39Speaker 04

  Well, he called it King Priam's treasure. So, so he just found this treasure in this lair that he was convinced was Homer's Troy, even though he was a thousand years too far in the past, found this kind of beautiful cache of golden jewels and things, smuggled it out of Troy, illegally took it off to Athens, dressed up his wife in it, called it "The Jewels of Helen of Troy", and basically sent it out to all of the newspapers in the world. At this point, facts really are just kind of, you know, peripheral to the overall project.

• 18:06Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 18:07Speaker 05

  And then what? Where does it go?

• 18:09Speaker 04

  Oh, it's got a really interesting story. So basically, it goes on tour, it's exhibited.

• 18:13Speaker 05

  It goes on tour?

• 18:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, it does, I know. It's exhibited in the UK.

• 18:16Speaker 05

  I wonder if it got more audience in Faram than I did.

• 18:19Speaker 04

  Well, I don't know about that. But then it comes back, and it's in Berlin, and he puts it up in an exhibition where he says he wants it to be exhibited for all time. This is his kind of attempt to memorialise his name. And then after the war, it ends up getting appropriated, shall we say, by Soviet troops and disappears off to Russia.

• 18:36Greg Jenner?

  We don't know where it is.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  Well, we do, because some Russian journalists worked incredibly hard to find it, and they found it only a couple of decades ago.

• 18:43Greg Jenner?

  Wow.

• 18:44Speaker 05

  Oh, so where's it now? In a museum?

• 18:46Speaker 04

  So now it's now in a museum in Russia.

• 18:47Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 18:48Greg Jenner?

  So is Troy our only evidence for an actual real Trojan War? You know, the city of Troy, Ileon, Iliad, Willios, whatever we're calling it. Do we have any other historical or archaeological evidence that this Bronze Age war did occur?

• 19:00Speaker 04

  Well, I mentioned the sources that tell us about this town, this city called Willusa. So those are coming from sources that are from the Hittite civilisation. I don't know if you've heard of them, but there are this amazing late Bronze Age civilisation in Anatolia, and they have extensive archival records, and they talk about multiple different wars that happen around this city. In fact, in one of them, you've got a power who's getting involved that are called the Achaeans in the record, and now we think that it may be that those are the same as the people who Homer calls Achaeans, that's his word for the Greeks. So is it possible that the Achaeans, or in Greek Achaei, are the same as the Achaeans? I think it's probable, at least.

• 19:43Greg Jenner?

  Seems plausible, doesn't it?

• 19:44Speaker 05

  I'm going to say yes.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  You're going to say, yeah, fantastic.

• 19:47Greg Jenner?

  It's official.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's got, it's got the stamp. But, you know, this idea of this, this city that's been engaged in war multiple different times in the late Bronze Age, that has had involvement from powers of kind of the Achaeans somewhere in the Aegean, you know, could that be the pattern for the Greeks coming to a city like Troy? That's the idea.

• 20:06Greg Jenner?

  And setting it on fire.

• 20:07Speaker 04

  And setting it on fire.

• 20:08Greg Jenner?

  Yes, classic.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  When they leave.

• 20:10Greg Jenner?

  Let's turn to the poems themselves. We'll start with the Iliad, which effectively is Troy story, that's what we should call it. Kyle, so what do you know about Achilles? Have you ever heard of Achilles? Have you seen the Brad Pitt movie?

• 20:19Speaker 05

  I think I have seen the movie, and what I remember is Jim Howitt talking about it on set of Ghosts, and saying that everyone in that film is wearing their own boxes.

• 20:31Speaker 04

  That's niche knowledge.

• 20:34Speaker 05

  Because when you think about it, when you watch these films and you get lost, and you're like, "Oh my gosh, it's amazing, like, the amount of people, and this must have been so fun to, so epic to film", and you think like, they're all, they're all in their own pants.

• 20:52Speaker 04

  I'm never gonna watch it the same way again.

• 20:54Greg Jenner?

  I mean, whose pants do you want him to be in?

• 20:56Speaker 05

  Well, they're like, they're not in like costume pants. They've got their own, they've probably got their own, like the pants they came in with.

• 21:03Greg Jenner?

  They're just wearing their tighty whities.

• 21:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:05Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 21:07Speaker 05

  So, think about that. That's my answer to that.

• 21:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, Achilles makes me think of the heel.

• 21:15Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Speaker 05

  And something to do with trainers.

• 21:19Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 21:20Speaker 05

  Is there something, is there like an animation where there's like, someone makes Achilles trainers?

• 21:26Greg Jenner?

  Oh, interesting. I don't know that one.

• 21:28Speaker 05

  I feel like it's in Hercules, the Disney version.

• 21:30Speaker 04

  I was gonna say, you're thinking of the sandals, I think, that they make in Hercules, the kind of...

• 21:33Speaker 05

  I think I am thinking of that, yeah.

• 21:34Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, yeah. So the heel, we have to address the heel.

• 21:38Speaker 04

  We do.

• 21:39Greg Jenner?

  The Achilles heel, the most famous thing about him.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:41Greg Jenner?

  It's not in the Iliad.

• 21:42Speaker 04

  It's not, no.

• 21:42Greg Jenner?

  It's not in the Odyssey.

• 21:43Speaker 05

  What?

• 21:43Speaker 04

  No.

• 21:44Speaker 05

  It's not in those 15,000 lines?

• 21:47Greg Jenner?

  How come the heel comes later? Who adds the heel?

• 21:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, it's a much later tradition, actually, the heel. So the story of the heel is that his mother, Thetis, who's a goddess, is desperate to make him immortal. And so she takes him to the river Styx and she dips him in the Styx. But because she's holding him by the heel, the heel doesn't kind of get dipped in this immortal water. And that's why he's invulnerable there. In the Iliad, that's absolutely not the case. He's, it's made quite clear that he can bleed and like, you know, die like any other man. The Iliad is only telling sort of a small portion of his story that's really organised around one particular, like, episode of his rage. It doesn't tell the story of how he gets killed. And that's something that comes in a lot later and actually becomes really popular as a visual motif later in Christian art.

• 22:33Speaker 04

  Because of course, the idea of baptism and baptism is in the water.

• 22:36Greg Jenner?

  Oh, right, yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 04

  And the idea of Achilles being dipped in the water.

• 22:38Greg Jenner?

  That's interesting. The plot of the Iliad is, it's not easy to summarise. Is there a simple way of summarising it, Emily? Is there a sort of too long didn't read, one minute take?

• 22:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. So essentially with the Trojan War, we start with the Judgment of Paris, which is a moment where three goddesses are squabbling over a golden apple that's been inscribed with the words, "For the most beautiful", they all want it. They decide that a mortal has to judge between them. And so they go down to Paris, the prince of Troy. He decides Aphrodite's the winner, not least because she bribes him with Helen, who conveniently already married to Menelaus, king of Sparta. Paris goes and takes Helen, brings her back to Troy. Menelaus, her husband, is outraged. He goes, yeah, as kind of as you would be. Goes to his brother Agamemnon, who is the king of all of the Greeks.

• 23:28Speaker 04

  And they band together, all of the Greeks, they head off to Troy on this massive expedition. 10 years of fighting around Troy. Ultimately then, Odysseus, kind of the trickster, has the idea of the Trojan Horse. The Trojan Horse gets dragged into Troy. The Greeks jump out, they burn the city down, and then they go home.

• 23:45Greg Jenner?

  But that's not in the Iliad either. The Trojan, I mean, the horse isn't in the Iliad. I mean, all the bits, best bits that we know aren't even in the story.

• 23:51Speaker 05

  They're missing some stuff in there.

• 23:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:53Speaker 05

  Make it longer, that's what I've always said.

• 23:55Greg Jenner?

  Okay, where does the Trojan Horse come from? That's in the Odyssey, right?

• 23:58Speaker 04

  Well, it's mentioned in the Odyssey, but the story of the Trojan Horse actually comes in one of these lost epics. The Judgment of Paris, like the seizure of Helen, the Trojan Horse, the Sacking of Troy. Those are all in other epics that we've lost. So all we've got is the Iliad, which really just tells the story of like Achilles' small episode in the war. Doesn't tell how he got in, it doesn't tell about his death. And then we've got the Odyssey, which tells the story of just one of the Greeks, of many who were coming home after Troy.

• 24:27Greg Jenner?

  It is quite Marvel Universe if there were only two films left in the Marvel Universe and you had to figure out what had happened by just watching Ant-Man.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 24:36Greg Jenner?

  So it's not that the Iliad and the Odyssey were the two most important poems? It's just they're the only two we have?

• 24:40Speaker 04

  Well, for the Greeks, they thought that they were the best. So that's why they were attributed to Homer, they thought he was the best poet. So, you know, that's why they preserved them, as opposed to the others who were, you know, just by second, second-class poets, according to Greeks.

• 24:53Greg Jenner?

  The Iliad is sometimes subtitled as "The Wroth or the Rage of Achilles".

• 24:57Speaker 05

  Right.

• 24:58Greg Jenner?

  What's he so angry about, Kyle?

• 24:59Speaker 05

  Well, they didn't have wifi then. So probably that.

• 25:05Greg Jenner?

  Right, you just can't get a connection.

• 25:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:06Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 25:07Speaker 05

  Because I couldn't get a connection yesterday and I was in, I was in Tutankhamun Road.

• 25:10Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 25:11Speaker 05

  So imagine, I was angry, but...

• 25:15Speaker 04

  I mean, in 2000 years, people will be singing of that wrath, that wrath will be sung.

• 25:19Greg Jenner?

  The Chaeliad, yeah.

• 25:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, don't mind it. I don't mind that at all.

• 25:24Greg Jenner?

  But you didn't set fire to a city?

• 25:25Speaker 05

  No, I left my dynamite at home. But now I remember, I've just been reminded to take it with me everywhere I go.

• 25:32Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, okay, yeah. I'm gonna say it's not the wifi, Emily.

• 25:36Speaker 04

  It's not.

• 25:36Greg Jenner?

  Why is Achilles so angry and wrathful and pouty?

• 25:41Speaker 04

  Hmm, well, it's anger that is the subject of the Iliad. So the very first word of the epic is anger or wrath. So sing to me, goddess of the wrath of Achilles, is how it starts. And he is angry because Agamemnon, the king of the Greeks, we're in the 10th year of the war. They've been fighting a lot and during that process...

• 26:00Speaker 05

  10th year of the war?

• 26:01Speaker 04

  I know.

• 26:01Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 26:01Speaker 05

  Pack it in, lads.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  They're all exhausted. So 10 years have gone by, they are exhausted. And they, in that process, have taken a lot of cities that they've raised to the ground. They've taken a lot of women captive as slaves. And one of those women has to get returned. Her father has come and has a bit of an issue with his daughter being enslaved. And so he comes, asks for her back. Agamemnon has to give her up. And so he, in response, seizes one of Achilles' enslaved women. Her name is Briseus. And Achilles gets really peeved by this. He withdraws from the war. And when he does that, he begs Zeus, the king of the gods, to make sure that as many of the Greeks die as possible, so that they all know how great he is and that they really miss him.

• 26:44Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 26:45Greg Jenner?

  Not much of a team player, is he, Achilles?

• 26:47Speaker 05

  Big ego.

• 26:47Greg Jenner?

  Big ego.

• 26:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:49Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, I mean, he's giving sort of strong footballer energy. It's very Cristiano Ronaldo. It's very like, me and only me. So yeah, so he's enslaved a woman and then the woman has been sort of liberated and he's angry. And so he just sort of sulks in his tent and sort of goes...

• 27:02Speaker 05

  You took my slaves.

• 27:03Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, you took my slaves and I'm not gonna fight then.

• 27:06Speaker 04

  Well, absolutely. And, you know, she hasn't even been liberated because she's just been turned over to another Greek. So, you know, it's absolutely, but he does, and he has kind of the biggest sulk in history, ends up causing the death of many, many different Greeks. After that, his, what we're gonna call him, companion, lover, friend, Patroclus. The epic's not really clear about their relationship, but it's clear that they very, very much care about each other.

• 27:28Greg Jenner?

  They're more than roommates, aren't they?

• 27:28Speaker 04

  They are absolutely, a deep, deep relationship between them. And he goes out into the battle because he gets really upset by seeing all of his companions dying. So Achilles lets Patroclus go to war. Of course, Patroclus tragically gets killed by Hector.

• 27:42Greg Jenner?

  Wearing his armour, right? Patroclus wears Achilles' armour.

• 27:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's dressed up as Achilles. I mean, you know, this sense of them being kind of two halves of the same person, really, really strong. He dies in Achilles' armour. That gets taken by Hector, the prince of Troy, who kills Patroclus. And in that, Achilles' revenge just absolutely gets stoked.

• 28:00Speaker 05

  So does he think that he's killed Achilles?

• 28:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, he does, initially.

• 28:03Speaker 05

  Trickster?

• 28:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:04Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, and then they take their armour off and they're like, oh no, it's not Brad Pitt!

• 28:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:09Greg Jenner?

  Okay, and so we now get the Rage of Achilles, which is where he's like, vengeance mission, he's going to kill Hector.

• 28:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's exactly what happens. He gets back into battle gear, his mum gets him divine armour, he gets all dressed up. And he absolutely wipes out the battlefield, he fights with the gods. And eventually he ends up killing Hector, the one who killed Patroclus. And he doesn't stop there. Hector begged him for a burial. And instead, what does he do? He ties him to the back of his chariot and he rolls him in the dirt and drags him around the tomb of Patroclus.

• 28:41Speaker 05

  This guy's fuming, man.

• 28:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's pretty angry.

• 28:43Greg Jenner?

  He's really angry, isn't he?

• 28:45Speaker 04

  So eventually the gods have to say, Achilles, this is enough. You know, this is too much.

• 28:49Greg Jenner?

  Like an intervention, isn't it?

• 28:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Well, his mum comes down. She's, as I mentioned, a goddess, so she comes down, gives him the message and just says, you know, Achilles, you've got to relax, you've got to just eat and drink, have some sex. And, you know, just basically take a chill pill and stop doing this.

• 29:04Greg Jenner?

  That's what mums are for, you know, you know.

• 29:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 29:09Greg Jenner?

  And the poem finishes not with the kind of conquest of Troy, it finishes with a funeral.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  It does, yeah, it ends with the funeral of Hector, yeah.

• 29:16Greg Jenner?

  And it's actually a very beautiful scene because Achilles hands over the body that he has desecrated to, you know, to the father...

• 29:23Speaker 05

  What's left of it.

• 29:24Greg Jenner?

  What's left of Hector, to Priam, the king of Troy. And there is a funeral. And there is this sort of very moving moment of grief where both men acknowledge each other's pain?

• 29:33Speaker 04

  It's incredible. Well, we've been focusing on this rage that does consume the epic. But we get to the end, and in fact, the gods have been very careful to preserve Hector's corpse. So actually, you know, he's been kind of kept for his relatives, for his family.

• 29:46Speaker 05

  That's nice of them.

• 29:46Speaker 04

  It's, no, it's really good. And we get to the end of the poem and we get to a moment where in fact Achilles suddenly has this kind of nighttime scene with Priam, the king of Troy, who comes, steals out of the city, comes to Achilles' tent. And he has this incredible scene where he kneels on the ground and he kisses the hands of Achilles, the man who killed his son. And he says, you know, "I am doing this because I would like to have my son's body back to bury". And they engage in this amazing kind of scene of kindness, of friendship. They share bread together. And at that point then, Priam goes home with his son's body.

• 30:20Greg Jenner?

  And that's the end of the poem?

• 30:21Speaker 04

  That is the end of the poem.

• 30:22Greg Jenner?

  Troy doesn't get conquered, the war doesn't end?

• 30:25Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 30:26Speaker 05

  So hang on, it took them 15,000 lines to get to that?

• 30:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, what we've done in about 10 minutes, that stuff.

• 30:32Speaker 05

  I reckon I could have done that a little bit quicker.

• 30:34Greg Jenner?

  Achilles is a hero, right? In the ancient Greek world, he's a hero. Just to sort of sum up what he's done, Kyle. He abducts a woman, he sulks when he loses her, he lets his fellow Greeks die. In fact, he asks his fellow Greeks to die. He gets his boyfriend accidentally killed, then seeks murderous vengeance and desecrates the corpse. It's not the classic hero story we're familiar with in our Hollywood movies.

• 30:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's pretty extreme.

• 30:59Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, he's not John McClane, is he? It's not Die Hard.

• 31:01Speaker 05

  No, but I mean, Batman was a bit naughty.

• 31:06Speaker 05

  He's just beating up people for the fun of it.

• 31:08Greg Jenner?

  It's sort of interesting, the word hero, doesn't feel appropriate by our morals. So what is a Greek hero? Is it different?

• 31:15Speaker 04

  Well, what's interesting is that the word is the same. So the ancient Greek word that Homer uses for hero is heros. It's where we get hero from. But it means something completely different. So there's a definition of the hero that I really like, which is basically, it is someone who is striving for immortality and will do anything to get that. And ultimately, ironically, proves that they can't do it and dies trying.

• 31:39Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 31:39Greg Jenner?

  Wow, live fast or die trying.

• 31:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, and that's exactly what they're doing. And they're, they're really, they're living so fast that they actually end up bringing ruin to everyone around them. So an ancient Greek hero, if you're looking at the Iliad and the Odyssey, is actually someone who can actually destroy his community in a lot of ways. But they're doing that because that is what they need to be remembered into the future. What they want above all is glory. The word is kleos in Greek, and it means people talking about you. So the more extreme things you do, the more people are gonna talk about you.

• 32:10Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, okay. Despite his rage issues, Achilles, you know, does show compassion, as we say. And we get this funeral, this reconciliation, which is kind of amazing.

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• 34:40Greg Jenner?

  That's the Iliad. That is the story of the Iliad. It's the story of Achilles, his rage, and I suppose his brief moment of humanity at the end.

• 34:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:48Greg Jenner?

  End of story.

• 34:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:49Greg Jenner?

  And then we're on to the sequel poem, The Odyssey. And this is named after another great hero of the Trojan War.

• 34:56Speaker 05

  So is this continuing where we left off?

• 34:58Speaker 04

  Well, it's not, because in the meantime, they've already had the sack of Troy. We've had the wooden horse being taken in. We've had Troy burning. We've had all of the captives parceled out. We've got everyone on the boats. We've had a bit of a problem with Athena, who gets very angry with the Greeks, and then they all start getting sent home. So with The Odyssey, we're just seeing that point where Odysseus is now on his way home.

• 35:18Speaker 05

  So I don't have to have read the first one?

• 35:21Speaker 04

  Do you know what? The Odyssey actually gives you a bit of a recap. I think you'll be all right.

• 35:25Greg Jenner?

  It actually has flashback scenes, doesn't it? It feels so modern.

• 35:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:28Greg Jenner?

  Okay, so let's talk about The Odyssey. This is Odysseus. He is one of the kind of great warriors who's gone out in this Greek mission to reclaim Helen of Troy. He's renowned for his intelligence, and he's trying to get home to his wife, and it just takes forever.

• 35:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, 20 years in total. That's how long Penelope had to wait.

• 35:47Speaker 05

  She must have been so bored.

• 35:50Speaker 04

  She had a lot of weaving to keep her occupied.

• 35:53Greg Jenner?

  So much weaving.

• 35:53Speaker 04

  Which sounds really exciting.

• 35:54Greg Jenner?

  And unweaving, of course.

• 35:56Speaker 04

  Yes, and unweaving, exactly. But yeah, 10 years in the war, 10 years coming home. So she's had a long wait.

• 36:01Speaker 05

  10 years coming home.

• 36:02Speaker 04

  Well, and then we've also got his son, Telemachus, who was a baby when he left, and by the time he comes back, is just about to become a man. So he's also been waiting for his father to come home for that amount of time.

• 36:11Greg Jenner?

  So that's Tom Holland in the movie.

• 36:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 36:13Greg Jenner?

  So we get this story of one man's attempt to just get home after he's already been out to war for 10 years, and it starts...

• 36:20Speaker 05

  Where's he coming from?

• 36:21Greg Jenner?

  Western Turkey, so it's not that far.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  No, it's not that far.

• 36:25Speaker 05

  To where?

• 36:26Speaker 04

  Well, to the Ionian Islands, so that's around the other side of Greece. So he needs to go like across the Aegean, kind of around the southern Peloponnese, and then up towards the Ionian Islands.

• 36:34Speaker 05

  He's gone the wrong way.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  It's a trip, but it's not gonna be more than a couple of weeks.

• 36:37Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, like a month at sea, maybe, you know? Stop off, have a barbecue, but like it's...

• 36:42Speaker 04

  But he goes into kind of major fantasy land, and when we start The Odyssey, we basically start with him on the island of a nymph called Calypso, where he has been for seven years. And that's the kind of initiating...

• 36:55Speaker 05

  What were you doing over there?

• 36:56Speaker 04

  Point on the island, yeah.

• 36:58Speaker 05

  I'm not sure on the island. I think, I once went to Galway instead of Heathrow.

• 37:04Speaker 05

  And then when you realize, you're like, oh my gosh, that's so far away. So I understand maybe like four years.

• 37:12Greg Jenner?

  You've experienced your own Odyssey.

• 37:13Speaker 05

  Yeah. But the rest, come on.

• 37:16Greg Jenner?

  Emily, what do we mean by nymph?

• 37:18Speaker 04

  Well, the Greek word for nymph is nymphe, which means both a sort of minor goddess. It could also actually mean a bride, which tells you the way that they're thinking about these, a sort of nubile, young women who are potentially sort of lingering on islands around the Mediterranean and waiting to catch a man off guard and take him off his path.

• 37:38Greg Jenner?

  Right. Calypso is a sort of gorgeous eternal goddess, right?

• 37:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, she promises to make him immortal as well.

• 37:44Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, and she fancies him, and she's like, look, we'll be lovers. I'm more beautiful than all the mortal women, so just stay here and we'll just have sex and eat fruit. And he's like, meh, maybe. For seven years, he sort of like doesn't leave.

• 37:59Speaker 04

  Prevaricating.

• 37:59Speaker 05

  Situationship.

• 38:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 38:02Speaker 05

  I get it.

• 38:03Speaker 04

  A seven-year-long situation.

• 38:04Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, he's like, I've gotta get home to my wife, you know?

• 38:06Speaker 04

  Really? This time I will.

• 38:07Greg Jenner?

  This time I will. So he's stuck on hot nymph island. Let's talk about the rest of the plot of The Odyssey, which is incredibly complicated. So tell us some of the plots. I mean, we can't do all of it, but just some stand-up.

• 38:19Speaker 04

  Well, what we've got going on basically are kind of three different levels at the same time. We've got Odysseus starting out on Calypso's island, and he still needs to get home. So he's got the rest of his voyage to do. We've got the suitors in Ithaca, who are basically 108 men. They really want to marry Penelope, and they have basically sat themselves down in the palace at Ithaca and just don't want to leave, and they are determined to make that happen. We've then also got the teenage son, Telemachus, who goes on his own mini Odyssey. And I kind of like this, because he basically wants to be like his dad. So instead of Odysseus doing an Odyssey, he's Telemachus, so he does a Telemachy. And he goes on a like mini daddy trip to try and find his father, goes to a couple of Greek palaces, and then ultimately comes back. So we've got all of those sort of three things happening at the same time.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  Odysseus, of course, like when he is on his way back, we also get him stopping off at a place called the island of the Phaeacians, and he gives the story of his adventures, of all of the things that happened to him before he got to Calypso's island. So not only are we getting those things happening in forward progression, but we're also getting a flashback to what happened to him at Troy.

• 39:24Greg Jenner?

  And he has all sorts of issues. Do you know any of the kind of magical creatures that stop him?

• 39:29Speaker 05

  I've heard nymph already.

• 39:31Greg Jenner?

  Yep.

• 39:31Speaker 05

  So...

• 39:32Greg Jenner?

  Hot nymph island, yeah.

• 39:33Speaker 05

  I'm guessing it's not one of those. What other stuff they got knocking about? Gargoyles?

• 39:38Speaker 04

  I mean, that's pretty close, actually.

• 39:39Greg Jenner?

  It's not bad.

• 39:39Speaker 04

  It's not bad.

• 39:40Greg Jenner?

  Yeah?

• 39:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:41Greg Jenner?

  Have you heard of sirens?

• 39:42Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 39:43Greg Jenner?

  Yeah?

• 39:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, I have.

• 39:44Greg Jenner?

  What do you know of sirens?

• 39:44Speaker 05

  The ones that sing to the sailors.

• 39:47Greg Jenner?

  That's right.

• 39:47Speaker 05

  And then they get there and they eat their heads or whatever they do, what they do when they get out.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  No, they don't, they don't. They just enjoy racking them on the rocks.

• 39:55Speaker 05

  You sure they don't eat their heads?

• 39:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm pretty sure that they don't. They, I mean, Homer describes them as being like bird women, so they've got sort of the heads of women, but then they've got the kind of wings and talons of birds.

• 40:06Speaker 05

  I'm, see now, I've been to London Zoo at feeding time for the vultures, and they are eating heads.

• 40:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:15Speaker 05

  They got fed, when I, when I was in drama school, we had to do like animal studies. And I chose a vulture, and then they, this was disgusting, they threw rabbits into the vulture, not live ones, dead ones, but you watched the vultures eat the rabbits, and they stand on them and then just like rip their heads off and then get their beak inside the body. Nasty. It's nasty stuff. Now, you're telling me that sirens have got bird bodies, it's making me more inclined to think that they're eating the heads.

• 40:44Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 40:45Speaker 05

  So it's gonna be very difficult for you to change your mind.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  It's a hot take, it's a hot take.

• 40:47Greg Jenner?

  Fair enough. There's also, there's also a cyclops.

• 40:51Speaker 05

  Oh, one eye.

• 40:52Greg Jenner?

  One eye, big old cyclops.

• 40:53Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 40:54Greg Jenner?

  Who's the son of Poseidon, god of the sea.

• 40:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. That's kind of a big problem for Odysseus.

• 40:59Greg Jenner?

  That's a real issue, right?

• 40:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, because one of the reasons this is a problem is...

• 41:01Greg Jenner?

  He's a nepo cyclops.

• 41:03Speaker 04

  He is, exactly. Well, because he really wants his father to kind of get on his side, when Odysseus basically is a really, really bad guest, and not only eats the cyclops' food without asking him, but he also pierces him in the eye with a stake to blind him.

• 41:16Speaker 05

  Oh, come on, he's only got one.

• 41:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know. But then he does this great trick as well, where, you know, he's Odysseus, so he's very clever. So he tells the cyclops that his name is nobody. So the cyclops then calls out to his brothers, and he says, guys, guys, nobody's blinded me, which, you know...

• 41:31Speaker 05

  Why are you turning up?

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know, they're like, right, thanks, back to my shepherding or whatever I was doing. Then Odysseus, he has this fatal kind of moment of what the Greeks would have called hubris, which is this kind of excessive pride. And he's managed to escape. He's got out by climbing underneath the sheep that the cyclops has, so he's clung under them and got out of the cave. They get onto their ship, and then he turns back and he says, I want you to know that the person who did this to you was Odysseus. Now, that's really bad, because then the cyclops knows exactly who to pray to his dad, Poseidon, and to ask him to curse him, and that is the reason why Odysseus ends up taking so long to get home.

• 42:05Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, of all the gods you don't want to curse, you, god of the sea, when you're on a boat.

• 42:09Speaker 04

  No, I know.

• 42:09Greg Jenner?

  Come on, mate. He also encounters a witch called Circe, and she turns his men into pigs.

• 42:16Speaker 05

  Hmm, inconvenient.

• 42:19Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, but delicious.

• 42:20Speaker 04

  Do you know what I will say, though, is that after she transforms them into pigs, she transforms them back, and when they transform back, they are younger and better looking than they were before.

• 42:30Speaker 05

  And they don't want to eat bacon anymore.

• 42:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, and vegetarian, yeah.

• 42:33Greg Jenner?

  Wow, is this the future of skincare?

• 42:35Speaker 04

  Well, there you go, exactly. Just, you know, a little bit of kind of pig and then back to yourself, and then you're 10 years younger.

• 42:40Greg Jenner?

  Would you do pig for a bit?

• 42:42Speaker 05

  How long?

• 42:43Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 42:43Speaker 04

  It's not very long.

• 42:44Greg Jenner?

  No, okay.

• 42:44Speaker 04

  No, it's just enough for Odysseus and her to have a chat and a drink.

• 42:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, but your version of not very long, based on how long this is.

• 42:51Speaker 04

  I mean, he does end up staying with her and sleeping with her for a year, so...

• 42:54Greg Jenner?

  He's not very faithful, really. You've got a man trying to get back to his wife.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  No.

• 42:57Speaker 05

  They've got a very different version of One Night Stand.

• 42:59Greg Jenner?

  Yes, they have. There's also the sun god Helios, he gets in the way.

• 43:03Speaker 05

  Is that a guy that runs E D J?

• 43:07Speaker 04

  No.

• 43:08Speaker 05

  Who's that?

• 43:08Speaker 04

  A different guy who is the god of the sun who has some really nice cows.

• 43:13Greg Jenner?

  The best cows.

• 43:14Speaker 04

  The best cows. Sacred cows. And he really doesn't want those cows to be killed. And of course, what do Odysseus's men do? They kill them and they eat them.

• 43:21Greg Jenner?

  Because they're really hungry.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  They are really hungry.

• 43:23Greg Jenner?

  In their defence, they're really hungry.

• 43:24Speaker 05

  And you don't eat pork anymore.

• 43:26Greg Jenner?

  No, and they don't want to eat the fish. They don't want to eat fish, right?

• 43:28Speaker 05

  Why don't you eat the fish?

• 43:29Greg Jenner?

  They just, they don't really like it. They don't fancy it.

• 43:30Speaker 05

  Because Poseidon's been messing about with them.

• 43:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, maybe.

• 43:32Speaker 05

  Right.

• 43:33Speaker 04

  Basically, Helios gets really annoyed, asks Zeus to kind of have a go. And so Zeus strikes them with a lightning bolt. And then Odysseus is the only one left.

• 43:42Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 43:43Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 43:43Greg Jenner?

  So he's this sort of great captain. He's this great warrior. He's this great hero, but he gets all of his men killed.

• 43:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:48Greg Jenner?

  Every single one of them.

• 43:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:50Greg Jenner?

  And he only survives because he's so smart and he's the guy who came up with the Trojan horse. He's the kind of genius strategist, right? He does get home eventually. And Penelope, his wife.

• 43:58Speaker 05

  I'd have even forgotten where I lived by then.

• 44:00Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 44:01Speaker 05

  Well, I might just get anywhere else.

• 44:02Greg Jenner?

  He gets back to Ithaca and Penelope doesn't recognise him.

• 44:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:05Greg Jenner?

  Because he goes in disguise.

• 44:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, this is the question, does she, doesn't she recognise him? So when he rocks up on Ithaca after 20 years, Athena, the goddess, who is basically his patron goddess, because she is the goddess of cunning and wisdom, and that's exactly who he is. She meets him on the shore and she turns him into an old beggar to disguise him. Because obviously what he's got to do is he's got to make sure he's got all of his allies around him before he tries to get back into the house at Ithaca. He's come after 20 years, nobody knows who he is. But yeah, so he kind of comes up to the palace disguised as a beggar. And they have these really great moments of conversation between Penelope and Odysseus the beggar, where Penelope says things like, oh, beggar, your hands look so similar to my husband's hands. Or, you know.

• 44:49Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 44:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 44:50Speaker 05

  Whoops.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  You know, there are these moments where it's like, near misses, or maybe did she, didn't she recognise him?

• 44:55Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 44:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:56Greg Jenner?

  He does effectively get rid of the 108 suitors.

• 44:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:59Greg Jenner?

  Penelope sort of, she sort of sets a contest, right, with the bow.

• 45:02Speaker 04

  So this is another one of these convenient things that happens is that Odysseus the beggar happens to be in the palace. And on that day, she decides that actually she's going to give up on Odysseus and she's going to set a contest for her hand in marriage.

• 45:14Speaker 05

  To be fair to her, she waited for ages.

• 45:16Speaker 04

  She did, yeah. It just is very convenient that it happened at the point that he's there. She sets up this contest and says whoever can string Odysseus's old bow and can shoot an arrow through the axes is going to be able to be her new husband.

• 45:30Speaker 05

  Right.

• 45:31Speaker 04

  Of course, all of the suitors try, they fail. Odysseus steps up in this, in this kind of amazing cinematic moment. He takes the bow, he strings it, he kind of turns back into himself. And then he kind of shoots the arrow. And then slaughter follows and he basically just kills all of the men.

• 45:48Greg Jenner?

  He kills 108 men.

• 45:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. He locks the doors, makes sure they have no weapons.

• 45:52Speaker 05

  Isn't he tired?

• 45:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know.

• 45:53Speaker 05

  Relax, man. You just, you haven't seen your wife for ages. Just go do some smooching.

• 45:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:59Speaker 05

  Killing everyone.

• 45:59Speaker 04

  These heroes are quite uptight, aren't they?

• 46:01Greg Jenner?

  But they stole his stuff. They stole his stuff. They've been on his land, they've been stealing his stuff, they've been trying to.

• 46:05Speaker 05

  Get over it.

• 46:05Greg Jenner?

  Trying to kiss his wife.

• 46:06Speaker 05

  Let it go.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  Okay, you know. Well, he also does something worse, which is, well, I don't know if it's worse, but it's equally bad, which is that basically he kind of inculcates his teenage son Telemachus into this kind of slaughter.

• 46:16Speaker 05

  I don't know this word.

• 46:17Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 46:17Speaker 05

  Inculcate.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  Basically, he kind of brings him into the world of being a kind of, what a hero is essentially in that time. And he's to teach him how to do that. And in doing that, he basically says, you've got to take the 12 enslaved women in my house, who I think weren't.

• 46:32Speaker 05

  I just remembered all the book here.

• 46:33Speaker 04

  You're going to write it down. Oh, amazing. I love that. That's going to be your only note for today.

• 46:38Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. Start making notes 50 minutes in, great.

• 46:41Speaker 04

  This is clearly the only clever thing I've said today.

• 46:43Speaker 05

  I forgot there's a test at the end.

• 46:47Speaker 04

  So basically, he makes him hang 12 of the enslaved women who Odysseus has decided were not faithful to him. And so Telemachus has to kind of string them up in the courtyard, only, I might add, after they have cleaned up the bodies of the suitors. So it's incredibly grim.

• 47:01Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. Odysseus is meant to be the hero. And in some ways, he's a very different hero to Achilles, because his brain's not born.

• 47:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:07Greg Jenner?

  And he's, he's meant to be kind of more loyal. He's, you know, he's trying to get home to his wife. It's nostalgia, it's nostos, right? The pain of home.

• 47:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:14Greg Jenner?

  But in some ways, he's equally violent.

• 47:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:16Greg Jenner?

  He gets all his men killed. He cheats on his wife and then accuses others of being unfaithful. He's quite hypocritical.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, and then we also end with this, not only this kind of mass slaughter, but then all of the families of the suitors come in and are enraged that he's just come home and killed everyone.

• 47:31Greg Jenner?

  One hundred and eight families, like, have you seen my son?

• 47:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:34Greg Jenner?

  Uh, yeah, um, yeah, sorry.

• 47:36Speaker 04

  Exactly, awkward. And by the way, I'm Odysseus and I'm welcome home.

• 47:39Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, you know, we have this really kind of problematic ending. But yeah, so he is in many ways like Achilles. I said, you know, hero, we could see a hero as a destroyer of communities. And yeah, he's lost all of his companions that he took to Troy. He's now come back and he's killed everybody. And on the other hand, compared to someone like Achilles, he is, as you said, much more kind of shrewd, much more cunning, much more clever. And that's what he's known for. He has loads of epithets, which are basically adjectives through the epic that describe him as like really cunning, Polymetes is one of them, really cunning, really clever. Of course, he's got Penelope, who is equally clever, equally cunning. And she kind of matches him in his wits. So there is a different dynamic going on there.

• 48:18Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, because she spent this whole time weaving to slow down the suitors from marrying her. And then every night she unweaved everything that she weaved that day. So for 20 years, they've been sitting there going, are you done weaving yet? And she's like, no, I'm sorry, it just, it's taken really long.

• 48:30Speaker 05

  Well, I'll do it. Give it to me, I'll do it. I don't even know how to weave.

• 48:32Greg Jenner?

  So she's equally smart. And Telemachus also is very clever and the kind of parallels between Achilles and Odysseus. I mean, they meet, these two former friends, they meet again.

• 48:42Speaker 05

  You want to do something fun. You want sort of like bowling, maybe flight club. You want an activity based thing.

• 48:49Greg Jenner?

  Okay, so at the darts.

• 48:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, something like that.

• 48:53Greg Jenner?

  Well, I don't know how the darts feels to you, but they meet in the underworld. Does that feel dartsy?

• 48:57Speaker 05

  Hmm. It doesn't feel as, um, interactive.

• 49:03Greg Jenner?

  Okay. Yeah. Now, they, they meet in the underworld and.

• 49:06Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 49:06Greg Jenner?

  And Achilles says, I made the wrong choice.

• 49:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's an amazing moment of kind of flashback and interacting with the Iliad. So we talked about Achilles and the Iliad, who is sort of, you know, he ends up all out for this choice of he's going to burn out and just, you know, kill everyone around him because he wants people to remember him. Well, in the Odyssey, Odysseus gets to talk to the spirits of the underworld and Achilles comes up. And Odysseus says, oh, look, you know, you're king of all of the shades, you know, well done you. And Achilles says, I would rather be the lowest labourer on the planet than the king of all of the dead.

• 49:40Greg Jenner?

  He regrets it.

• 49:41Speaker 05

  Well said.

• 49:41Speaker 04

  But it's an amazing thing of like, okay, well, if Odysseus gets that message from Achilles, then he has sort of more knowledge than someone like Achilles did, because he knows actually what is the right choice is to get back home. So it then becomes even more urgent that he does need to get back home and try and have that long life version.

• 49:56Speaker 05

  This guy's going everywhere.

• 49:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:59Greg Jenner?

  We should talk about the women in these stories. You know, your wonderful book Mythica is about the women sort of written out of the story. And we've mentioned someone, Penelope, of course, the goddesses. How does this story work in terms of gender politics?

• 50:10Speaker 04

  Well, obviously, we've talked a lot about how this is a story that is about the glory of men. And that's really kind of what the economy of ancient epic is. In fact, another definition I could have given you earlier when we talked about what is epic is it is the stories of men. It actually calls itself that. In Greek, that's klea andron. That means the stories of the glories of men. So, um, women just really aren't part of that economy. In fact, what they are doing to that is that they are either helping men to do what they need to do. So think of Penelope, who helps Odysseus to basically get reinstated as the king of Ithaca, or they are obstacles to what the men need to do. And that's like Calypso and Circe, who are basically holding up, and again, I'm putting that in quotation marks, Odysseus on his way back home. So there's not that much space for them within the epics.

• 50:55Speaker 04

  At the same time, there are women who kind of maybe just try and get their voices heard. Helen is a really great one.

• 51:01Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, we haven't talked about Helen.

• 51:02Speaker 04

  No.

• 51:03Greg Jenner?

  I mean, in traditional storytelling, she elopes with Paris. Like she runs away with him. It's like, woo, let's get married and run away together. But in the, in the way you told it, it made it sound like she didn't have a choice and Paris sort of grabbed her.

• 51:15Speaker 04

  Well, she kind of tells different versions of the story, which is really interesting. So sometimes she talks about herself being unwilling and that she didn't want to go. At other times, she blames herself and she says, you know, I was the reason that the Trojan War happened and I feel awful about it. In fact, when Telemachus does his mini Telemachy and he goes on his trip, he goes to Sparta and he sees Helen and Menelaus. Like now we're after the Trojan War. Helen's got back home to be with Menelaus, her first husband again. Really awkwardly playing sort of happy families, telling stories to each other about the Trojan War.

• 51:48Greg Jenner?

  Darling, do you remember that time?

• 51:49Speaker 04

  Do you remember that?

• 51:50Greg Jenner?

  Do you remember that time when the war, you know, my face and everything? Oh, mother.

• 51:52Speaker 04

  Exactly. It's really, really funny. But she actually gives them drugs to try and make them forget what happened, which I kind of think, you know, if you're Greece's biggest homewrecker, that's, that's what you're going to do. You're going to drug your audience on you.

• 52:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, you've got to try everything really. Yeah.

• 52:05Greg Jenner?

  So it's interesting. So Helen, maybe the agency there is tricky. But the, the women in this story are sometimes obstacles, they're sometimes seducers, they're sometimes goddesses. But Athena is the sort of one true friend of Odysseus, at least.

• 52:17Speaker 04

  She is. And in fact, she's the one who really kind of motivates the plot of the Odyssey in a lot of ways. It's the beginning of the Odyssey is her storming onto Olympus and saying to Zeus, you need to get Odysseus off the island of Calypso. So she's the one who kind of sets the narrative going. And then at the very end, when we've got the families, the suitors back on Ithaca, who are kind of rising up and are really annoyed at what Odysseus has done, it's her who calms everyone down. So she's really kind of the one who's like taking Odysseus's narrative in check and making sure everything happens right.

• 52:45Greg Jenner?

  So there we go. We just did 27,000 words of poetry in about an hour.

• 52:51Speaker 05

  So you can condense it, see?

• 52:53Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, this sort of edited highlights. It's, I mean, they're extraordinary stories and poems. I mean, is there anything that stood out to you? Anything that surprised you?

• 53:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, a lot. Loads of it. Um, mainly the dynamite.

• 53:06Speaker 05

  I think bring back dynamite. You don't hear about dynamite anymore.

• 53:09Greg Jenner?

  No.

• 53:10Speaker 05

  It's so vintage.

• 53:11Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:13Speaker 05

  There must, there must still be uses for it.

• 53:15Speaker 04

  I mean, yeah, maybe not on archaeological sites.

• 53:17Greg Jenner?

  Yes.

• 53:17Speaker 04

  Let's say no to dynamite on archaeological sites.

• 53:20Greg Jenner?

  Maybe in mining, but maybe less so in, in science and archaeology. But, you know, but as a storyteller yourself, is there something, is there anything in these stories that you sort of heard and went, oh, that's interesting, I wouldn't have done that? Or, you know.

• 53:31Speaker 05

  I wouldn't have done most of it. I will say that.

• 53:34Greg Jenner?

  But as a storyteller, I mean, in terms of the narrative, you know, the, the structure of it, the flashbacks, the kind of three stories spinning simultaneously.

• 53:39Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, it's a lot like what we do when we're improvising. We do callbacks and you have like flashbacks or you have like, two years later, someone might shout from the side of the stage.

• 53:49Greg Jenner?

  Nice.

• 53:50Speaker 05

  Things like that. But I can't believe how long this stuff took. Is that true? Are there years like our years?

• 53:56Speaker 04

  We're talking about myth here, right? Like, is any of this true? Like, I think, you know, one thing that people have talked about is, for instance, the Trojan War being 10 years. In some cultures, the idea of kind of 10 years is something that you would use for endless. So it's also just a kind of way of.

• 54:10Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 54:11Speaker 04

  Demarcating like a really, really big and long war.

• 54:14Greg Jenner?

  Just a huge, huge war.

• 54:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:15Greg Jenner?

  But also 20 years away for Odysseus and he gets back. And actually, he's still kind of a young man, right? Because he left when he was like 21 too, probably?

• 54:22Speaker 04

  And you again get this kind of youthfulness. So maybe he's got the Athena glow up.

• 54:26Greg Jenner?

  Oh.

• 54:27Speaker 04

  So.

• 54:28Greg Jenner?

  Because yes, he didn't have his pig.

• 54:29Speaker 04

  No, he didn't have his pig transformation. He gets his moment.

• 54:32Speaker 05

  He must sting, though. After 10 years of trying to get home.

• 54:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, he had some baths on the way back. He got bathed by various of his hosts.

• 54:40Greg Jenner?

  I bet he's wearing his own underpants.

• 54:42Speaker 05

  Definitely.

• 54:42Speaker 04

  Well, at one point he wasn't. At one point, he washed up naked on the shore.

• 54:45Greg Jenner?

  That's true.

• 54:46Speaker 04

  So, yeah. Yeah, he got new clothes.

• 54:48Greg Jenner?

  All right, well, it's been quite the ride. So Mark's out of, how many stars would you give The Iliad and Odyssey now?

• 54:54Speaker 05

  Oh, I loved it.

• 54:55Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 54:55Speaker 05

  I'm into it.

• 54:56Greg Jenner?

  Cool.

• 54:56Speaker 05

  And I really want to see this film now.

• 54:57Greg Jenner?

  Good.

• 54:58Speaker 05

  I wasn't bothered before.

• 54:59Speaker 04

  Brilliant.

• 54:59Greg Jenner?

  And now you are.

• 55:00Speaker 05

  Can I give it a four and a half?

• 55:01Greg Jenner?

  I'll take it.

• 55:02Speaker 05

  I'd like, yeah, I'd like to do that.

• 55:04Speaker 04

  I think Homer would be pleased with that.

• 55:05Greg Jenner?

  I think so.

• 55:05Speaker 05

  I'm really interested about the Achilles heel thing. I didn't know that.

• 55:08Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 55:08Speaker 05

  It was about getting dipped in by his heel.

• 55:11Greg Jenner?

  And it's probably more of a Roman later thing.

• 55:13Speaker 04

  Well, it's definitely, the first time it comes up is a lot, lot later than in Homer. So, yeah.

• 55:24Greg Jenner?

  Time now for the nuance window. This is where Cael and I sit and snack on figs and olives and try not to turn into pigs, while Dr Emily whips out a lyre and sings to us, oh, wonderful news, something that we need to know about The Iliad and The Odyssey. So my stopwatch is ready. Here it is. You have two minutes. Take it away, Dr Emily.

• 55:43Speaker 04

  Why do we tell stories? What does a story have to do to survive nearly 3,000 years? I can't speak to 3,000 years of experience, but each time I come back to The Iliad and Odyssey in my lifetime, they mean different things to me, and each time it is a journey. As a teenager, The Odyssey to me was about Odysseus's son trying to become himself between a mother he doesn't understand and a father he doesn't know. At university, burning the candle at both ends, The Iliad was about Achilles burning out in a blaze of glory. And more recently, as a young mother, I have come to see that same epic through the eyes of his mother, Thetis, the grief of losing a child too soon, the determination to do what she can for him because he matters more than anything. Literature gives you what you are looking for.

• 56:27Speaker 04

  And literature like The Iliad and Odyssey, that have been read across many hundreds of lifetimes, contain the lives and the thoughts, the hopes and the dreams, the paths taken by all the people before you who have read them. We mentioned Alexander the Great, who kept a copy of The Iliad beneath his pillow. And when he lived with Achilles, what he got from him was war, global conquest and glory, and a young death that burns the world with it. It is a pattern of destruction and a story that so many of us see around us today. But this is not the only story the poems hold. These are stories that were born in change, that from their oral origins were told again and again in different ways, according to who was speaking and who was listening. And in this, there is another Iliad and Odyssey I see,

• 57:11Speaker 04

  a story of reconciliation, of community, a tale of warning against losing touch with the earth and the people around us. As I see it, The Iliad ends with a scene of human hope and heart that shows even the most resolute and destructive warrior Achilles in the dark, in his hut on the beach, with his hands kissed by the father of the man he killed. And they cry together for the families they have lost. They break bread together. And Achilles offers to Priam kindness, handing back Hector's body for the humanity of burial. So let us cry together. Let us go on that journey and hang in the balance at the end and see that these poems that have lasted several thousand years remind us that it's not easy, but you can. We can move past war and destruction. We can care for those around us. We can see through the eyes of others.

• 57:56Speaker 04

  And in so doing, we can read these poems as a journey towards humanity, towards heart, towards hope.

• 58:02Greg Jenner?

  Beautiful, thank you so much.

• 58:03Speaker 05

  It makes me feel like I should have that at the end of my show.

• 58:07Speaker 05

  Everyone comes out going, yeah, yeah, that's exactly how I feel.

• 58:10Speaker 04

  I'm available.

• 58:11Speaker 05

  Oh, great. Want to come to Swindon?

• 58:17Greg Jenner?

  So what do you know now?

• 58:22Greg Jenner?

  Well, it's time now for the So What Do You Know Now? So, Cael, we've done a lot of talking. We've summarized 27,000 lines of poetry.

• 58:29Speaker 05

  Easy.

• 58:31Greg Jenner?

  Do you feel confident? You didn't make many notes.

• 58:33Speaker 05

  No, I didn't. I sort of forgot that the book was there. It kind of blended into the table a little bit.

• 58:38Greg Jenner?

  Well, you were prioritizing the oral poetry.

• 58:40Speaker 05

  Yes, exactly. I was taking it in.

• 58:42Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 58:43Speaker 05

  Is it still in there?

• 58:44Greg Jenner?

  We'll see.

• 58:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:45Greg Jenner?

  We'll see. 10 questions for you. Okay, here we go.

• 58:47Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 58:48Greg Jenner?

  Question one. Which blind poet has traditionally been credited as the author of The Iliad and Odyssey?

• 58:54Speaker 05

  Homer.

• 58:54Greg Jenner?

  Very good. Question two. How were The Iliad and Odyssey first communicated?

• 59:00Speaker 05

  Song.

• 59:00Greg Jenner?

  They were, they were sung.

• 59:01Speaker 05

  Come on.

• 59:02Greg Jenner?

  Sung live. Question three. What tool did Schliemann use to excavate Troy?

• 59:06Speaker 05

  Dynamite.

• 59:08Greg Jenner?

  I think he used shovels too, but he did use dynamite, which is not tremendously helpful. Question four. What event supposedly caused the Trojan War? There's a certain woman involved. His eyes are rolling around his face. Hopefully, they won't fall out.

• 59:22Speaker 05

  What event caused the Trojan War?

• 59:25Greg Jenner?

  Who running off or being, or being perhaps taken?

• 59:28Speaker 05

  Oh, because, um, what's his name had a slave? And then Biggie Bob took the slave off.

• 59:35Greg Jenner?

  That's a different one. That's the start of The Iliad. I'm thinking here of Helen and Troy. But that is good knowledge.

• 59:39Speaker 04

  I think we've got to give him half a point for that.

• 59:40Greg Jenner?

  I'm giving you half a point, half a point. Because you were remembering Brusius, weren't you? So I'll give you half for that. Question five. What does klos mean in ancient Greek? It's what Achilles really, really wanted. It's not in your notes.

• 59:53Speaker 05

  Story.

• 59:54Greg Jenner?

  No, it means glory. He wanted glory and fame.

• 59:57Speaker 05

  You can give me half for rhyming.

• 1:00:00Greg Jenner?

  Story rhymes. Fine, I'm giving him half a point.

• 1:00:02Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:00:03Greg Jenner?

  Okay, fine, okay. Question six. Why do Achilles and Agamemnon fall out in The Iliad? Actually, you've already said this one.

• 1:00:10Speaker 05

  Because he took his slave off him.

• 1:00:12Greg Jenner?

  Very good, clear question six.

• 1:00:13Speaker 05

  It's like, come on, don't get my sleeve.

• 1:00:15Greg Jenner?

  Question seven. What is the name of Odysseus's faithful wife who waits 20 years for him?

• 1:00:20Speaker 05

  Penelope.

• 1:00:20Greg Jenner?

  Very good. Question eight. Name one obstacle of many obstacles that Odysseus faces on his 10-year commute home.

• 1:00:27Speaker 05

  He had told Cyclops who blinded him, and then Cyclops said, Dad.

• 1:00:33Greg Jenner?

  Very good.

• 1:00:34Speaker 05

  That boy blinded me. And then he did some stuff to the sea.

• 1:00:38Greg Jenner?

  He did, that's very good. Question nine. What famous trick did Odysseus design to get inside the walls of Troy?

• 1:00:43Speaker 05

  They hid in a horse.

• 1:00:45Greg Jenner?

  They did, the Trojan horse?

• 1:00:46Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:00:47Greg Jenner?

  Question 10. I think this is for eight and a half out of 10. I've lost count, to be honest.

• 1:00:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, let's say nine.

• 1:00:52Greg Jenner?

  Okay, let's say nine out of 10. This for nine out of 10, maybe. What regret does Achilles share with Odysseus when he meets him in the underworld?

• 1:01:01Speaker 05

  Living too fast and dying too young.

• 1:01:03Greg Jenner?

  That's right. He wanted a boring life as a farmer. I'm giving you nine out of 10.

• 1:01:06Speaker 05

  Yes, sir.

• 1:01:07Greg Jenner?

  I think that's pretty good.

• 1:01:08Speaker 04

  I think that's excellent. I'm very pleased.

• 1:01:10Greg Jenner?

  Let's see if you can get a bonus point.

• 1:01:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Greg Jenner?

  What was the Greek name for a wandering poet who got their free meals for a good story? Do you remember? Think famous queen song.

• 1:01:20Speaker 05

  Rhapsodes.

• 1:01:20Greg Jenner?

  Very good. I'm giving you 10 out of 11.

• 1:01:23Speaker 05

  Yes, sir.

• 1:01:25Greg Jenner?

  Nice one, Cael.

• 1:01:25Speaker 05

  I'm really happy with that, actually.

• 1:01:26Greg Jenner?

  Well, thank you so much, Cael.

• 1:01:28Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:01:28Greg Jenner?

  Thank you so much, Emily.

• 1:01:29Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:01:29Greg Jenner?

  Listener, if you want more from Cael, obviously, check out our Late Erickson episode. It's, you know, more wanderings, more voyages

• 1:01:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:01:36Greg Jenner?

  in the Viking world. And for more epic historical poetry, we've got episodes on King Arthur and of course, the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, which is also very funny and surprising. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in history corner. We had the incredible Dr Emily Howser from the University of Exeter. Thank you, Emily.

• 1:01:52Speaker 04

  Thank you so much. It's been so much fun.

• 1:01:54Greg Jenner?

  It's been a pleasure. And in comedy corner, we had the brilliant Cael Smith-Bynoe. Thank you, Cael.

• 1:01:58Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:01:58Greg Jenner?

  And to you, lovely listener. Join me next time as we ask the historical muses to sing us another song about the past. But for now, I'm off home. Hopefully, it won't take 10 years. But you know what? British trains, it maybe will. Bye.

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

  Greetings, malevolent munchkins, fiendish friends and devilish do-gooders. Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron, evil genius. I'm Russell Kane, and I'm delighted to be steering the ship that unceremoniously wrenches historic figures from their perfect pedestals so that we can decide whether they're evil, genius, or a heavy concoction of the two. It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Yes, it's evil. Yes, it's genius. Get on board now and listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.

• 1:03:00Greg Jenner?

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