The Iliad and Odyssey (Radio Edit)

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. This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  Sometimes we all need an extra helping hand, especially with a tricky business problem you've been putting off. Claude is the AI for just that. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. And Claude isn't just for quick questions. Hand it a whole task, like turning a folder of scattered notes into a report, and it does the work and hands back something finished that you can open and edit. Claude can now draft a doc or deck right in front of you, and Claude Design now lives right inside Claude. Describe the website or prototype you're picturing, attach your design system, and it comes back in your own design language, ready to edit right on the canvas. It works with your files and the tools you already use, like Gmail and Slack.

• 1:18Speaker 00

  And whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model, or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai/solve. That's claude.ai/solve. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.ai/solve.

• 1:48Greg 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.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:30Greg Jenner?

  Pleasure to have you in. And in comedy corner, he's a multi-talented actor, comedian and broadcaster. You'll recognize him from hosting TVs The Great British Sewing Bee, or starring in the award-winning sitcoms Ghosts, Statlet's Flats and Man Like Mobine. 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 Le Fericson. It's the very cool Kyle Smith-Bynoe, welcome back.

• 2:57Speaker 04

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

• 3:00Greg Jenner?

  Oh, of course you're allowed back.

• 3:01Speaker 04

  Sure. Turns out you can do anything. You can say anything and get invited back. All right.

• 3:06Greg 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.

• 3:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right.

• 3:12Greg Jenner?

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

• 3:18Speaker 04

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

• 3:24Speaker 03

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

• 3:28Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 3:30Greg Jenner?

  So, what do you know?

• 3:36Greg Jenner?

  So this is the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, 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 marvelous Stephen Fry, or perhaps in wonderful translation by Emily Wilson. That's my favorite 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 handsome Brad Pitt. And of course, now the Christopher Nolan film, The Odyssey. 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 Penelopeead, I think, which is the pronunciation. Am I right?

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, Penelopeead, yeah.

• 4:13Greg 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 realize 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. Dr Emily, for those who've never heard the words the Iliad or Odyssey, simply put, what are they?

• 4:37Speaker 03

  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. And this initiates a huge cycle of poems. 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.

• 5:19Greg Jenner?

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

• 5:23Speaker 04

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

• 5:25Greg Jenner?

  Let's go in lines, in lines, lines. How many lines?

• 5:28Speaker 04

  Six hundred.

• 5:29Greg Jenner?

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

• 5:32Speaker 03

  It's just a bit longer, I'm afraid. The Iliad is about fifteen thousand seven hundred lines. Yeah. There's a reason, there's a reason you haven't read it.

• 5:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  And the Odyssey is about twelve thousand one hundred lines.

• 5:44Greg Jenner?

  Oh, that's better. Yeah, yeah. Nice, slim, simple. Yeah. What is epic poetry?

• 5:48Speaker 03

  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.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  So epic is kind of defined by its length. It's also telling about big themes. So it's telling about heroes and gods and monsters 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, which basically breaks the line into six feet.

• 6:26Speaker 04

  Right.

• 6:27Speaker 03

  Hexameter is the meter of epic.

• 6:31Greg Jenner?

  Are we happy saying Homer wrote the Odyssey? Within there, there are sort of several questions. A, Homer, real guy. B, wrote? Is that the right verb?

• 6:39Speaker 03

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

• 6:42Speaker 04

  He freestyled.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  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 specializing in this kind of topic. And they would be reciting what we call composing and performance. So they would be up there on the stage 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.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  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.

• 7:35Greg Jenner?

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

• 7:39Speaker 03

  I'd say even more.

• 7:40Greg Jenner?

  Oh, really?

• 7:40Speaker 03

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

• 7:45Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  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.

• 7:54Greg Jenner?

  That's amazing. Okay. Did Homer exist? Question mark?

• 7:58Speaker 03

  The ancient Greeks definitely believe that Homer existed. I don't know if we want to take their word for it because they also believe 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. 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. 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.

• 8:31Greg Jenner?

  Kyle, do you know what the ancient Greek word for a poet was?

• 8:35Speaker 04

  Yes, imagine.

• 8:37Greg Jenner?

  It'd be amazing if you just break out some classical Greek now. For a person sort of on the road, stops in, tells a story, gets a free meal.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  You get free meal for telling a story?

• 8:45Greg Jenner?

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

• 8:48Speaker 04

  Hang on a minute.

• 8:49Speaker 03

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

• 8:51Greg Jenner?

  There's sandwiches outside.

• 8:52Speaker 04

  Is what they get dependent on how good the story is?

• 8:55Greg Jenner?

  I think that might be fair.

• 8:56Speaker 03

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

• 9:01Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. So the Greek, the Greek word, what, I mean, rhapsody, rhapsode?

• 9:05Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:18Greg Jenner?

  So the Iliad and Odyssey as we know them are recited first, composed perhaps collectively. But they also tell of events that happened way before ancient Greeks as we know it.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 9:29Greg Jenner?

  The Bronze Age, the world of Mycenae and of the great heroes.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  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 1200 BCE, late Bronze Age, as you mentioned. And there've been attempts to kind of prove that this was true and real. My favorite example of this is the discovery of the real city of Troy. 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 layer 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.

• 10:16Speaker 04

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

• 10:21Speaker 03

  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.

• 10:35Speaker 04

  When was this?

• 10:36Speaker 03

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

• 10:43Greg Jenner?

  He's a German businessman.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  He's a German businessman with a plan.

• 10:45Greg Jenner?

  He just fancied.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  He's been using it in his meetings. Well, it works in the meetings. So it must, it must work here.

• 10:51Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  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. And so probably that Willusa is actually our Troy.

• 11:28Greg Jenner?

  So it should be the Williad?

• 11:29Speaker 03

  It should be the Williad. Yeah, it doesn't have quite the same.

• 11:31Greg Jenner?

  That sounds rude. Sorry.

• 11:32Speaker 04

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

• 11:36Greg Jenner?

  Really?

• 11:37Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 11:38Speaker 04

  But I would hate if my middle name was Williad.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  I'd be really annoyed if it was.

• 11:45Greg Jenner?

  We didn't even know you were in there. I mean, that's perfect booking for us.

• 11:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:47Greg Jenner?

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

• 11:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. My dad wanted to call me Troy Smith. And my mom was like, don't be stupid.

• 11:54Greg 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?

• 12:07Speaker 03

  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 civilization. I don't know if you've heard of them, but there are this amazing late Bronze Age civilization 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.

• 12:50Greg Jenner?

  Seems plausible, doesn't it?

• 12:52Speaker 04

  I'm gonna say yes.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  You're gonna say, yeah, fantastic.

• 12:54Greg Jenner?

  It's official.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's got, it's got the stamp.

• 12:56Greg 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?

• 13:07Speaker 04

  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.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  That's niche knowledge.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  When, because when you think about it, when you would 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, to film. And you think like, they're all, they're all in their own pants.

• 13:40Speaker 03

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

• 13:42Greg Jenner?

  Whose pants do you want him to be in?

• 13:43Speaker 04

  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.

• 13:51Greg Jenner?

  They're just wearing their tighty whities.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:53Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 13:54Speaker 04

  So think about that. That's my answer to that. Yeah. Achilles makes me think of the heel.

• 14:03Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. We have to address the heel.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  We do.

• 14:05Greg Jenner?

  The Achilles heel, the most famous thing about him.

• 14:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:07Greg Jenner?

  It's not in the Iliad.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  It's not. No.

• 14:09Greg Jenner?

  It's not in the Odyssey.

• 14:09Speaker 04

  What? It's not in that, those 15,000 lines?

• 14:14Greg Jenner?

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

• 14:17Speaker 03

  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. 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 organized around one particular like episode of his rage. It doesn't tell the story of how he gets killed.

• 14:52Greg Jenner?

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

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So 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, and they band together

• 15:41Speaker 03

  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.

• 15:57Greg Jenner?

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

• 16:02Speaker 04

  They're missing some stuff in there.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  Make it longer. That's what I've always said.

• 16:07Greg Jenner?

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

• 16:09Speaker 03

  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.

• 16:22Greg Jenner?

  The Iliad is sometimes subtitled as the wrath or the rage of Achilles.

• 16:26Speaker 04

  Right.

• 16:26Greg Jenner?

  What's he so angry about, Kyle?

• 16:28Speaker 04

  Well, they didn't have wifi then.

• 16:31Speaker 04

  So probably that.

• 16:33Greg Jenner?

  You just can't get a connection.

• 16:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:35Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 16:35Speaker 04

  Because I can get a connection yesterday and I was in, I was in Tutankhamun Road.

• 16:39Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  So imagine, I was angry, but yeah.

• 16:44Speaker 03

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

• 16:48Greg Jenner?

  The Kailiad.

• 16:49Speaker 04

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

• 16:52Greg Jenner?

  But you didn't set fire to a city.

• 16:54Speaker 04

  No, I didn't have, I left my dynamite at home.

• 16:57Greg Jenner?

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

• 16:59Speaker 03

  It's not.

• 17:00Greg Jenner?

  Why is Achilles so angry and wrathful and pouty?

• 17:05Speaker 03

  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.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  10th year of the war?

• 17:25Speaker 03

  I know.

• 17:25Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 17:25Speaker 04

  Pack it in, lads.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  They're all exhausted. So 10 years have gone, 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. After that, his, what we're going to call

• 18:10Speaker 03

  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.

• 18:17Greg Jenner?

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

• 18:18Speaker 03

  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.

• 18:31Greg Jenner?

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

• 18:34Speaker 03

  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' armor. That gets taken by Hector, the prince of Troy, who kills Patroclus. And in that, Achilles' revenge just absolutely gets stoked.

• 18:48Speaker 04

  So does he think that he's killed Achilles?

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, he does. Initially.

• 18:52Speaker 04

  Trickster?

• 18:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:53Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. And then they take their helmet off and they're like, oh no, it's not Brad Pitt.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:57Greg 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.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. 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.

• 19:14Speaker 04

  This guy's fuming, man.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's, he's pretty angry.

• 19:16Greg Jenner?

  He's really angry, isn't he? And the poem finishes not with the kind of conquest of Troy, it finishes with a funeral.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  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, he's been kind of kept for his relatives, for his family. And we get to the, the end of the poem, and we get to a moment where in fact Achilles suddenly has this 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 that 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 her son's body.

• 20:05Greg Jenner?

  And that's the end of the poem?

• 20:06Speaker 03

  That is the end of the poem. They burn Hector's body.

• 20:08Greg Jenner?

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

• 20:10Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 20:11Speaker 04

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

• 20:14Speaker 03

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

• 20:16Speaker 04

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

• 20:19Greg 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.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's pretty extreme.

• 20:43Greg Jenner?

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

• 20:45Speaker 04

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

• 20:50Speaker 04

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

• 20:52Greg 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?

• 20:59Speaker 03

  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.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 21:23Greg Jenner?

  Wow. Live fast or die trying?

• 21:24Speaker 03

  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 klos in Greek, and it means people talking about you. So the more extreme things you do, the more people are going to talk about you.

• 21:54Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, 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, end of story.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:03Greg Jenner?

  And then we're on to the sequel poem, the Odyssey.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  The Odyssey is the story of one man's voyage home. In Greek, that's nostos, and it's his return from Troy. He's spent 10 years at Troy and he's got another 10 years to get back. On his way home, he encounters all kinds of obstacles, including a cyclops, a nymph, a calypso, a witch who turns his men into pigs, Circe. When he gets back home, he ends up spending a lot of time trying to be recognised by his son and his wife. He wins his wife back, he slaughters all of the men in his house, and he is king of Ithaca once more.

• 22:38Greg Jenner?

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

• 22:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:44Greg Jenner?

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

• 22:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:51Greg Jenner?

  But in some ways, he's equally violent.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:53Greg Jenner?

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

• 22:59Speaker 03

  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 kills everyone.

• 23:08Greg Jenner?

  108 families, like, have you seen my son?

• 23:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:12Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, sorry.

• 23:13Speaker 03

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

• 23:16Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  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. 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, polymathus 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.

• 23:55Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, 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's just, it's taken really long.

• 24:06Speaker 04

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

• 24:09Greg Jenner?

  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, they meet in the underworld, and Achilles says, I made the wrong choice.

• 24:24Speaker 03

  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.

• 24:55Greg Jenner?

  He regrets it.

• 24:55Speaker 04

  Well said.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  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.

• 25:11Speaker 04

  This guy's going everywhere.

• 25:12Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. Well, it's been quite the ride. How many stars would you give the Iliad and Odyssey now?

• 25:16Speaker 04

  Oh, I loved it.

• 25:17Greg Jenner?

  Yeah?

• 25:17Speaker 04

  I'm into it.

• 25:18Greg Jenner?

  Cool.

• 25:18Speaker 04

  Can I give it a four and a half?

• 25:19Greg Jenner?

  I'll take it.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  I think Homer would be pleased with that.

• 25:21Greg Jenner?

  I think so.

• 25:22Speaker 04

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

• 25:24Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 25:25Speaker 04

  That was about getting dipped in by his heel.

• 25:27Greg Jenner?

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

• 25:29Speaker 03

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

• 25:35Greg Jenner?

  The nuance window.

• 25:40Greg 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 muse, 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.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  Why do we tell stories? What does the 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, and literature like the Iliad and Odyssey

• 26:43Speaker 03

  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. 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, 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.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  And they cry together for the families they have lost, they break bread together, and Achilles offers to prime 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, and in so doing, we can read these poems as a journey towards humanity, towards heart, towards hope.

• 27:59Greg Jenner?

  Beautiful. Thank you so much.

• 28:01Speaker 04

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

• 28:05Speaker 04

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

• 28:08Speaker 03

  I'm available.

• 28:08Speaker 04

  Oh, great. Want to come to Swindon?

• 28:13Greg Jenner?

  Well, thank you so much, Cael.

• 28:14Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 28:15Greg Jenner?

  Thank you so much, Emily. Listener, if you want more from Cael, obviously check out our Late Ericsson episode, it's, you know, more wanderings, more voyages.

• 28:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:22Greg Jenner?

  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. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds to hear the show 28 days earlier than anywhere else. 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.

• 28:43Speaker 03

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

• 28:45Greg Jenner?

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

• 28:49Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 28:49Greg 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 may be will. Bye.

• 29:17Speaker 05

  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.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  Sometimes we all need an extra helping hand, especially with a tricky business problem you've been putting off. Claude is the AI for just that. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. And Claude isn't just for quick questions. Hand it a whole task, like turning a folder of scattered notes into a report, and it does the work and hands back something finished that you can open and edit. Claude can now draft a doc or deck right in front of you, and Claude Design now lives right inside Claude. Describe the website or prototype you're picturing, attach your design system, and it comes back in your own design language, ready to edit right on the canvas. It works with your files and the tools you already use, like Gmail and Slack.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  And whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model, or strategising your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai/solve. That's claude.ai/solve. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. claude.ai/solve.

• 31:07Speaker 06

  This week on The Interface, millions of kids have grown up on camera with their childhoods turned into content. There's a new law in California that gives influencers the right to be forgotten, and it could impact adults, too. And an attack on Russian data centers started a rumor that all the evil disinformation bots had been deleted from the internet. But the truth might actually be a lot scarier. For our take, join me, Jess Maddox. And me, Thomas Germain, for The Interface. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.