RE-AIR: Conversations: Putting the Trans in Transformation, Iphis and Caeneus w/ Dr Joe Watson

This episode originally aired in June 2023. Liv speaks with Dr Joe Watson https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/classics/intranets/staff/watson/ about the trans characters of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Iphis and Caeneus, along with some necessary asides into Atalanta, Arachne, and Medusa. : WHO WANTS TO WATCH THE ODYSSEY WITH ME?! I'm teaming up with the new Odyssey movie to give away tickets to advance screenings on July 13 in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. Sign up HERE https://forms.gle/N5hcGdd5114ab4gSA before July 8 (details below). AVAILABLE NOW! The Odyssey: a Modern Retelling. https://geni.us/TheOdysseyBook Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby. Enter ourpodcast guest https://www.mythsbaby.com/contact form if you'd like to be on the show as a conversation guest! CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here: mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Liv Albert?

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

• 0:39Liv Albert?

  Hello, dear nerds. This is Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and I am your host, Liv, here with a gremlin cat from Greece who's just announced himself right in time for me to start this recording. And I am here today with a re-air of an episode, because frankly, there's a lot going on. If I'm totally honest, I'm gonna be on a major Canadian morning show. I guess I could like say what it is. I don't know, nerds, I'm gonna be on CTV's Your Morning on Monday, talking about my odyssey, which is wacky. There's a lot going on, there's some

• 1:21Liv Albert?

  anxiety, and I can't bring myself to just record my own voice for two hours. So here I am with a re-airing. And honestly, this year is quite, it's just, it's quite a year. And I, I really feel like I've missed out on my annual celebration of just how ancient and eternal

• 1:51Liv Albert?

  queerness is. And very specifically trans people.

• 1:56Liv Albert?

  And I missed that. And so I'm re-airing an episode today. Because this year of all years, my god, it's just, anyway. So here's your, here's your reminder. The trans people have been here with us forever. And absolutely certainly on this here podcast, we believe. I don't even know what to say anymore because it's so absurd. Anyway, we, we recognize the existence of trans people and we love them. Um, and, and here we are with some stories of, of trans characters from millennia ago. Because again, spoiler, they've been here forever. Um, but I did want to come in with this quick little announcement ahead of this re-airing.

• 2:41Liv Albert?

  To remind any of you in Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal. Um, that you can sign up for free passes to a pre-screening of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey on July thirteenth. Um, like I said, on Tuesday, sign up. There's a link in the episode's description as well as details. You have to sign up before July eighth or ninth. Um, it's again, will be written in the description. Uh, they're free tickets and for anyone signing up for the Toronto screening. Uh, I'll be there and how fun is that? So, um, we can, we can watch The Odyssey together for the first time.

• 3:24Liv Albert?

  And so just reminder about that, um, it's coming up. So if you want to be a part of that and you can get to Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal, sign up. Uh, I don't know the details on just how many tickets, but I have a feeling it's gonna be pretty easy to get your hands on these free tickets to this screening in those three cities. So get in there and.

• 3:49Liv Albert?

  Enjoy hopefully some time off of work. Um, we can choose to enjoy time off work without celebrating our colonial overlords in both Canada and the US. And so let's do that together. And maybe I'll just sit back and enjoy some of the videos coming out of America's 250th celebration because they are really indicative of just how far that country has fallen. Um, I mean, I guess a lot of the original founding nature of it.

• 4:32Liv Albert?

  Um, anyway, those things are entertaining. How cool would it be if, um, he died? You know, right? Like, that would be pretty cool. There's a bottle of champagne in my fridge, ready to celebrate the moment. It's the moment it comes true.

• 5:11Liv Albert?

  Hi, hello, welcome. This is Let's Talk About Myths, baby. And I am your host, Liv, here with a conversation episode. Oh, I'm so excited about this one. I, I just recently listened back to it to do this editing and I just, I love when listening back is like just as much fun as when I recorded it. And that is so the case for this one. So I spoke with Dr. Joe Watson, who I learned about from himself when he, uh, reached out to me last year. I, I was covering, uh, the stories of if Ianthi and of Canis slash Caeneus.

• 5:53Liv Albert?

  These are the two trans characters that are featured in Ovid's Metamorphoses. And he shared an article that he'd written about exactly this. It was so wonderful. And a conversation was like, it was too late in the month to have a conversation for last year. So we kind of put it on the books for this year and, and I'm so glad it worked out. We talked about Iphis as a trans character or how they can be read as, you know, a kind of lesbian story that, that kind of gets its means of being like a real love story in ancient Greece. You know, all of these different ways that we can read these characters and, and generally how we can understand them to, to be all these different forms of evidence of,

• 6:37Liv Albert?

  you know, gender diversity and, and sexual orientation diversity in the ancient world. So we talked about the, the real intricacies of, of what makes Iphis very different from Caeneus, even as they are both trans characters. Absolutely fascinating. There's a bunch of asides into other amazing characters from Ovid's Metamorphoses because that is what Joe specializes in. And so we talked a little bit about Adalanta and a little bit about Medusa and Arachne too. And just generally such a fun and informative and insightful conversation and just perfect for Pride Month. I am recording this introduction weeks in advance.

• 7:19Liv Albert?

  So I'm trying to put myself in when it'll actually be June, which it is not currently. But in any case, it's absolutely perfect for, for Pride Month for once more featuring stories of LGBTQIA characters in the ancient world, which I really love doing every year, even if it is getting more and more difficult to find ways of telling stories because I have exhausted all of them. But thankfully we have conversation episodes for that. And so this is just one of three new conversations that I've got coming this month. Now that I think about it, I don't know if this one's coming first because I'm just, it's just the first one I'm recording. We'll see. I'm going to stop trying to over explain something and just let you get to the episode.

• 8:16Liv Albert?

  Conversations, Putting the Trans in Transformations. Iphis and Canias with Dr. Joe Watson.

• 8:39Liv Albert?

  So, I mean, you'll have to forgive me because we originally talked about this like a full year ago.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 8:45Liv Albert?

  Um, but I'm, I'm just like, I guess I'm just, I'm fascinated by anything that you have to say in this realm, but like basically you've studied, you've studied the, the two notable trans characters in the metamorphoses, right? So it would be like Iphis of Iphis and Ianthe and then Cana or Canias.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:02Liv Albert?

  So yeah, what, what, in what way of, if you study these characters, like what, what have you, yeah, what work have you done on them?

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Sure. So I guess this like all originally came out of when I was doing my PhD and I was interested in how this like, there was this group of, we're going to complicate this term in a second, but let's start off with this group of female characters in the metamorphoses who all sort of behave in the same way. And you'll be familiar from your reading through them, it's the ones like the women who do these long speeches. So it's your Atlanta, this mirror, and they all kind of have the same sort of dynamics. I was interested in comparing those to each other. And then I had like Iphis in the middle of this. And I was like, but woman doesn't feel right to describe Iphis alongside all these other ones who were just unambiguously definitely women. And so that was, so basically it started off as, I need to fit in a footnote in this dissertation

• 9:53Speaker 01

  to explain why Iphis isn't a woman, but for the sake of argument, I'm going to talk about this group of people and Iphis is going to be in that group of people.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  And then from there, it kind of turned into, okay, so I'll write this, so I'll write this. Then eventually, we had a ten thousand word paper on our hands and I was about to send this off and publish this somewhere. And I kind of had a lot of, I guess, weird feelings about this as a non-trans person, but a queer person. I was like, so I was kind of going, should I publish this? Should I not publish this? Is this my story to tell? And then I thought, well, I know a lot about Obit. I may not myself be trans, but I know a huge amount about Obit. I love the Met. Maybe I can try and tell this story. So I guess that's where it came from originally. Um, and then it just came across, I guess the next step was I got really annoyed at reading other people's writing about IFIS.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Particularly, um, and so I started going through all these articles and you see the most weird outdated language from classicists in like two thousand and six.

• 10:54Liv Albert?

  Oh, God.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  We are not talking about like nineteen sixty here or anything.

• 10:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Um, just stuff that I'm like, that's not even a slur. That just doesn't make sense.

• 11:03Liv Albert?

  Oh, God.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  So like, I can't remember who it is now, but someone, actually, I also wouldn't name the chain on the show. Um, but there's, you know.

• 11:10Liv Albert?

  Sometimes they deserve it, but I understand.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Who talks about like people being bisexual and, and they don't mean like attracted to more than one gender. They just mean like with duplex sexual anatomy, so like in some way maybe intersex. And I'm just like, that's not even a helpful description. Like, no one reading that would know what you mean.

• 11:33Liv Albert?

  No, that literally means something else, like to everyone who reads the word.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  And let's be honest, who's going to be reading the words about IFIS and the anti? Like, there's going to be a fair number of bisexuals in that audience going, that's what?

• 11:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  So it was rage, basically, then propelled me on from there.

• 11:51Liv Albert?

  Fair.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I. In seeing all these weird things that other people had said, I realized there were so many things that seemed abundantly obvious, not just to me, but to so many people that I knew and that I could see on the internet. I was never like a Tumblr girlie myself, but I was very aware of Ifis and Kinaeus as being like characters in that kind of realm of the internet.

• 12:16Liv Albert?

  I bet they would be. Yeah, I was also never on Tumblr really, but I can see that so real.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  So I thought, this is not my hot take. This is very much something that's in the atmosphere. So I thought, if I just say some really obvious things, at least then someone said them and they're in a publication record somewhere as having been said. So someone else can go, the argument has been made, but Ifis is actually a trans character. I thought, great, if that could be done, that'd be wonderful. So I guess that's where it started.

• 12:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, I really, I, I really like that and identify with it because like I, I mean, I still remember like years and years ago on the show, originally reading that myth. And I know the first time I, I read through it and, and the first time I featured it on the show, I kind of, I, I definitely, I remember coming out at the end and being like, I think you can see this character in two different ways, depending on how you personally want to see them. Like, I think that Ifis can be read as a lesbian who was gifted some way of being with the person that they love in a society where they couldn't, you know, or as this trans character. And, and the trans character works so well too. I mean, purely because like there is not, it's not just one trans character in the Met.

• 13:30Liv Albert?

  And that is so, so interesting. And so, yeah, like, I like, I mean, one, just the fact that the Met has these characters is so important today and also just like generally interesting. So I'm glad to know that people are writing about it. Like, I don't, I don't have the same access to like the academic side. So I'm thrilled because you sent me your paper and that was so helpful. And I just remember like, oh, this is great. Cause like, I don't, I'm not in that world. I don't even know where to go. Like, I mean, I know where to go looking, but oh my God, trying to weed through J store as a person who's not in that realm anymore. Like, nah, sometimes I just get lost every time. Um, but yeah, so I was thrilled to have that, but it is so, it's such an interesting kind of concept to go through. I mean,

• 14:07Liv Albert?

  I can't, I can't get over the bisexual thing though. And also like 2006, like I wish that surprised me, but like I graduated high school in 2006. It was not that long ago, even though, okay, fine. It was, but like. Like, yeah, it's just, it it's so wild, the way that things have changed like so much and also like not at all, but you know, that's

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 14:26Liv Albert?

  Interesting, yeah.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  I I might in my, in another world that we fully don't need to go into, um, I do a lot of like late nineteenth century, early twentieth century stuff and describing someone who we would now call intersex as bisexuals just read to me like this came out eighteen ninety seven, this this is that that's what this feels like.

• 14:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  It's like, no, this was in the mid two two thousands.

• 14:48Liv Albert?

  Like, I mean, I I would expect, uh, just, I would horribly expect a lot of transphobia in that time because like, you know, I grew up with friends. Um, the show, to be clear, but like,

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:58Liv Albert?

  Hey, you know, it it's, but yeah, but to see that, that's just like nonsensical. Like, did, I know, I'm just like, I want to understand, like, did it, I mean, no, no, I don't, because I was gonna be like, well, because I guess if it's with like, boys and girls presumably, but like, there is actually no acknowledgement that they would like.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, I mean, it's just, I am the all the way, I'm like,

• 15:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  It's like, you know,

• 15:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  It's a

• 15:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  One person direction, but yeah. No, I I think I did look into it at the time, is this, it is a thing, it's just not a thing that normal people would say they want to be understood.

• 15:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah, because I mean, like, the the word, the origins of the word itself make it make sense, but like, the word itself does not mean that, so here we are, yeah.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  So, yeah, and then I think, I think one of the things, because I I didn't feel when I was writing this article, like I was reinventing the wheel, I felt a bit like I'm saying things that people have been saying for years, but I'm saying them in a recorded way.

• 15:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Um, and some of the things, I'm just like, this is so, there's so much interesting, obvious stuff, like, even if Ovid doesn't know what a trans person is, and sure, maybe Ovid doesn't.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  He goes out of his way to say, Iphis is a name you can give to anyone of any gender, you go, he doesn't have to do that, and yeah, sure, it works in the nice clever bit of the myth where you go, yeah, sure.

• 16:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  This is a character who's potentially going to change gender, but also it, he doesn't have to go out of his way to to like, allow that reading quite as well as he does, and he does allow that reading, because I I really liked what you said about. You can sort of read this as anything depending on who you are, what you want to come at it from. And a few, couple of years ago, before I ended up publishing this piece, I did this workshop at the university I was at at the time with undergraduate students, where we looked at the story and we looked at reception of the story in kind of modern literature and said like, but what, what is this? Like, what labels do we want to attach? And the number of different labels I got back from my audience saying, well, it was obviously, this is what I, this is obvious, this is what I, and go, well, none of you said the same thing.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  So it's clearly not that obvious. And that's a really nice thing about that story. I think, I think that's somewhere where my understanding like changed over time. I started off with this kind of rage, like, I need to make the political statement that Iphis is a trans man because no one else in the scholarship at least is making this political statement. And so it's really important. And then kind of going, yeah, it is. It's also quite important for lesbians as well, because it's not like there's a great number of lesbians out in classical literature for people to look at. And this is a nice, happy story. So I think that was, it took some time, I think, to maybe calm down from my rage to go, actually, those people could read this. And that's, that's good, actually.

• 17:40Liv Albert?

  Well, I, I mean, I think, yeah, both are valid too, though, right? Like, obviously, especially now, you know, trans representation is incredibly important, especially like laying out the history of how long these people have existed and the acknowledgement in stuff like the Met of like, hey, like, yeah, maybe Ovid didn't, you know, how to conceptualize the concept of a trans person, but like, at the same time, he very much did in his own very specific way. And I mean, there's, there's so much example, there's lots of examples beyond Ovid too, in the ancient world, which is just, it's so nice. And so, yeah, like, I also love to, to, yeah, make that very clear, you know, in my show. But at the same time, yeah, I mean, there really is not a lot of. Happy ending, like same-sex relationships at all, like let alone women.

• 18:25Liv Albert?

  There's almost no like, you know, acknowledgement of women loving other women. But even when there are men, they tend to die. So, you know, it's like, it's nice to have this as, as possibly both as like, yeah, th- this kind of thing where if you feel that is representative of you, like, great, it's either one, you know, like, and I, I think that's, yeah, a nice, a nice way of seeing it. There's like, there's lots of myths like that, but this is one that's particularly interesting. And so like, I read your paper back when I did the episode and then I admittedly didn't read it again.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Totally fair. I try not to either.

• 19:01Liv Albert?

  I mean, great, you know, I, I get that. I don't, I don't tend to listen back to anything that I do unless I absolutely have to.

• 19:08Liv Albert?

  But so like, what, what was it that you were, were kind of laying out in terms of this as like the, you know, the evidence aside from, well, I mean, I mean, feel free to reiterate all of it, actually.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  No, it's fair. So I guess the thing that struck me first about Ifis is I looked at the story and, you know, this is this lovely story where you get this person born who the author tells us, Ovid tells us, is born a woman, quote unquote, but then

• 19:37Speaker 01

  immediately told by her, well, her father says to her mother, you can't actually raise a daughter because there's no money. And so this child from day one is raised as a boy. And you don't really know much about how Ifis understands himself. Sort of do get a speech later on, but we get this, um, this child who's raised a boy. And then later in life falls in love with a young girl, doesn't really understand how that's going to work because there's no fun little sexual paradigm telling Ifis how to love a woman. And then in kind of through their mother's help, um, transforms, quote unquote, transforms, because exactly what that transformation is, is not entirely clear, but transforms into a man.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  I think one of the things that struck me when I was thinking about how am I going to make this argument was actually that transformation is weirdly understated because what you get is something like Ifis's step got longer. His face grew and got more vigor in it and he became stronger and it was, it's really like general stuff. It's not very explicit. And so,

• 20:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  You know, being a kind of myth nerd, I thought, well, I was gonna have a look. What do the other versions of this story say? Like, Ovid can't be the first. What other versions of this story saying? There's like a similar story that clearly Ovid is basing the Iphis and the Antony story on.

• 20:55Liv Albert?

  It's not really.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, from, I think, I'm gonna say Antoninus Liberatus, although I might be wrong.

• 21:01Liv Albert?

  I was gonna say, how did I miss this? But if it was, if it was Antoninus Liberatus, I could see why I would miss it. So.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  People would miss that. Have I got that right? Maybe. Whether I have, oh no, sorry, it's Nicanda. I'm so sorry. It's Nicanda.

• 21:13Liv Albert?

  No, another that I would, what? I don't even.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  So we don't have the text. We have like a summary of it later. So it's one of those ones.

• 21:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah, love. And by that, I mean, I hate them.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  I hate them so much. And I think it's Antoninus Liberatus who references it. So that's.

• 21:26Liv Albert?

  Oh, good. Right. Yeah. One of those.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, one of those.

• 21:28Liv Albert?

  Guy referencing another guy. Yeah.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Um, but it really explicitly says in Greek source that, um, it's there, the goddess Meto, I think, rather than the goddess Isis, which is Ovid. Grew genitalia on a girl, grew male genitalia on a girl. So it's like super explicit.

• 21:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  And then Ovid doesn't do anything like that. And that really interested me. Like, why does Ovid, who has absolutely no qualms whatsoever about making a story sexual if it doesn't have to be? Not do that here.

• 21:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I I also want to remind the listeners too, just how much, because that is so interesting, because not only that, um, but also like the whole point of including this character in this book is to have a transformation. And typically, the transformation is fairly detailed, because that's the entire purpose of the metamorphosis. So yeah, to have it be so inexplicit is really interesting.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Really odd. And it's, you know, without getting into the whole, like, what's going on in the literature sort of thing. There's something really weird going on in book nine of Ovid's Metamorphoses anyway, because all of the transformations are a bit odd there. You know, the story immediately before Iphis, the story of Biblis, who's a woman who's in love with her brother. And she writes him a love letter. It's so weird. She writes him these love letters. And then she doesn't really like transform. Like, at the end of the story, she turns into a fountain, but it's described in about four lines and you go, you didn't need a two hundred and fifty line story to tell me that she transformed into a fountain in four lines. So what are you doing with metamorphosis and transformation at this point?

• 23:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  And then we have a story that's all about change, but the change itself seems really understated.

• 23:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Which is odd, decidedly weird. So yeah, so I started from saying this is a transformation that's like understated.

• 23:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  And then I looked at the name, that's a common name. And I thought, well, is it? Like, if we actually look at how this name is used in historical records and the like, inscriptions and things like that, is it mostly used of men or mostly used of women?

• 23:30Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  And the answer is basically, it genuinely is like a common name, like it really is.

• 23:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Um, which is interesting, like, you know, I've picked a name that really was.

• 23:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And it's Greek too, right? Because it's so we think that he probably invented this name though, or we, we, you know, have evidence of it before.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we generally think genuine, oh, no, he invented the name, he invents attaching it to this myth. So there's.

• 23:51Liv Albert?

  Okay. No, yeah, that's what I think. Yeah.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:54Liv Albert?

  But I mean, he picked a very Greek name.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  It's a very Greek name and a name that is historically really associated with men. Cause there's a, an Ifis in the Alcanautica and Jason the Alcanauts.

• 24:04Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  So you've already got, if you're reading it and you don't know anything about the story, your association is that's a man's name, even though you probably know women call that

• 24:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  I guess like as a person called Joe, I relate.

• 24:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  There are women, but mostly it's a man's name.

• 24:19Liv Albert?

  As someone who was originally named Alex, I also agree.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, I hear that.

• 24:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I looked at that. And then I thought, cause I got, I got confused basically. So Latin and Greek, awful languages and they have cases. So they have multiple forms that words can appear in.

• 24:41Liv Albert?

  That's why I gave up on Latin very quickly.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Totally fair. Um, and I thought, well, I don't know, how does this name work with a Greek name that's being talked about in Latin, in Latin poem? Like what, where is it getting its endings from? Are they kind of, they look a bit Latin to me. I was looking at these look like Latin endings. It's a bit of Greek ending in there. So I started looking into the endings of the Greek name, how, how that works. And it turns out that in Greek, you have like a masculine Ifis that looks like Ifis sometimes, but then has different forms and a feminine Ifis that looks like Ifis and has other forms. So they only really look alike. In the, in the form where their eye fits, otherwise they look different.

• 25:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  But Ovid only has one form of the name, so he's kind of mixed together to some extent, probably. The masculine, the feminine, Greek ending. So you get this kind of already. You're associating it with a man, but it's got these blended endings and has some feminine endings in it too. So on a grammatical level, it really interested me. This was a like blended name that. We don't have great evidence for the name in Latin before Ovid. So we don't, it was really hard to make a case to how. How much blending of it's done and how much that's just what's happened over time to the name. But certainly. Ovid's done something to deliberately combine some forces here, which is really odd, I thought.

• 25:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I guess, cause i- i- in Latin, and this is me not ever having read Ovid in Latin, and again, having done first year Latin and then been like, no. Um, uh, like, because in the actual poem itself, wouldn't it? So it only appears as if it's, it doesn't ever have.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Sure. So yeah, so it does appear in other forms, but a lot of the time it's not. Always explicitly clear, which.

• 26:20Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Whether it's taken. So I think. The first time it comes up, um, this is at this point basing my memory. On, on like not reason, this might be wrong. I think it's if it ever tartar. So mutata's a feminine ending. So like with Iphis having been transformed, which. So like, that is feminine.

• 26:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  But then immediately afterwards, you get like, like it's her grandfather's name. So you go, well, then it's associated with a man, then you get it in a very masculine form. So it's like it's undercut immediately. We kind of have to do the feminine thing, cause this point in the story, Iphis is grammatically at least feminine.

• 26:54Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Um, but then it immediately gets undercut. So there's this consistent like tension with the way of presenting that name.

• 27:00Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  And from there I got really interested in like, okay, cause Latin's a gendered language. Everything is either masculine, feminine or mutant. What other words does Ovid use of Iphis? Like, cause every adjective would have to agree with the name and then it would be a feminine masculine. And at this, at the early point in the story. There are a couple of feminine adjectives, totally true. There's also a lot of like deliberately avoiding the gender. So some parts, some forms in Latin don't display gender, some do. And it's like Ovid prefers to use the forms that don't display gender at that early point in the story.

• 27:31Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Which I thought was really interesting.

• 27:33Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Um, and you even get lots of references to Iphis as. Like other things, just like metaphorically. So when Iphis is in the womb. Um, he's a a weight, and a weight is a mute agenda in Latin, a condus. So like, again, it's deliberately not feminizing. You get kind of lots of things like this where I'm like, if Ovid wanted to exploit this, this kind of person who loves to exploit poetic forms and stuff, he would go out in this way to make these feminine forms, and he doesn't.

• 28:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  It's it seems to be deliberately underplayed to me.

• 28:05Liv Albert?

  Do you know how this compares to Caeneus and Caeneus? Because I'm curious about that. Yeah, because like, I know, like, in the translations, that one, I I can't remember as well with with Ephes, but that one tends, Caeneus is pretty explicitly like Caeneus as Caeneus is a woman, and then Caeneus is a man. And it,

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it feels like that really explicit. Like, so, yeah, do you know?

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that is absolutely really explicit in the.

• 28:31Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  And there are, there are like, two really interesting things about that, actually. So one is about the order in which we meet the character, Cynais, like, what do we meet them in?

• 28:41Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Because what we get told in terms of storyline is, we're at Troy, having the Trojan War. It's really violent, it's really bloody, and there's this great soldier on the battlefield called Cynais, and he is killing people left and right. Um, uh, oh, no, sorry, I've got that confused. Um, we we have a battlefield and we've got, uh, Sickness, the soldier Sickness, he's killing people left and right.

• 29:03Liv Albert?

  Um, but yeah.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um.

• 29:06Liv Albert?

  One of the swans.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, one of the swan ones, one of those ones. Um, and then we cut to a, like, campsite story time, where Nestor is saying, actually, I once met a man who was just like Sickness, who also couldn't be destroyed, back in the, like, pre-mythic days before the Trojan War. And he was called Cynais, and no one could ever defeat him. He was so great, he was so powerful.

• 29:27Liv Albert?

  And he's a woman.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  And there's just like this story, who maybe was a woman.

• 29:32Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  So it's it's framed as like, meet the man, who's Cynais. Then there's this story of Canis, this rumor of Canis.

• 29:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  And we get that told, and we get this, you know, the story that, um, I'm sure your listeners are already familiar with, where this young Thessalian woman, Canis, is walking along the beach and is assaulted by Neptune, and it doesn't go great. Um, but the first response she has is to go. You've done a horrible thing to me. I want you to make it so that I am no longer a woman.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  And what does that mean? Like, what does it mean not to be a woman? Does it mean to be a man? Or does it mean not to suffer the things she just suffered?

• 30:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Like Neptune makes a decision and Neptune says, yeah, okay, what we're saying is that you want to be a man. And there's some evidence that maybe Kineus then enjoys that. So potentially that was what he was asking for. But the question itself, make well, the statement itself, making me not a woman is so ambiguous.

• 30:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  And again, people like scholars have gone in different directions on that. Is this just saying patriarchy is shit? Which it is.

• 30:40Liv Albert?

  Uh huh.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  So I don't want to be a woman under this system. Or is this saying I actively want to be a man?

• 30:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  To to me and my reading, the fact that the first thing that Kineus does after being transformed is go out and penetrate some the salient fields.

• 30:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  I'm like.

• 31:01Liv Albert?

  That's what I read too. I was like, uh, this is what tells me that I'm going to read this story as a nice thing that happened instead of a horror show. Because it is, yeah. I mean, one, that's a more enjoyable way of reading it. Neptune is bad enough without, you know, adding anymore. But then, yeah, that I forgot about that until you said it. I was like, oh, I can hear myself like reading that to the listeners because it was so, it was a lot. Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  It's so like, to me, that just feels like a deliberate explicit thing.

• 31:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  But the other really interesting things going with Kineus that I don't really talk about in the article, because I might have missed this five years ago when I wrote the article.

• 31:38Liv Albert?

  Well, you've got it now.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  But, you know, have the great opportunity when you're when I'm teaching students now to be like, this is why scholarship can be rubbish, because sometimes your humble lecturer can fully forget or not put something in an article, but at least you get to have it in the classroom now, five years later. Is that Ovid doesn't invent character Cynais, like Cynais has a literary history before he turns up in Ovid. Um, and most of that's pretty simple, right? So he turns up in Homer, he's one of the heroes, it's all good. Uh, he turns up in the Argonautica where he's one of the heroes there and he's, you know, he's a great soldier. And that's where we first get the first idea that maybe his skin is unbreakable, which in the Ovid really plays with it, his skin is unbreakable.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Um, but, well, he also turns up in Virgil, and that's the thing I think I completely forgot when I wrote this article. Is so briefly he turns up in Virgil. But when he turns up in Virgil, it's during the, like, book six of the Aeneid, where, um, Aeneas is going down into the underworld to find out about how great Rome is gonna be. Um, and he goes down, he's just about to go and see, um, Dido again after fucking her over in book four. And he sees this crowd of women from mythology. And so he goes down, he sees like Phaedra and Eryphyle and Pasiphae and all these kind of women from Greek mythology, particularly Greek tragedy.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Um, and he also sees Cynais, who was called Cynais there, so getting this like masculine name.

• 33:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Who I think Virgil says was once transformed into a man.

• 33:15Liv Albert?

  Huh.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  But has clearly, or maybe reverted back to being a woman once in the underworld.

• 33:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  And it's quite ambiguous, like exactly what's going on there, you know, once a man, now a woman is what seems to be the the force there in the underworld. So that's, whether Virgil invents that or not, we don't know. But there's already before Ovid, this little suggestion that maybe we can play with the gender in this mythology a little bit.

• 33:41Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:57Liv Albert?

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• 34:38Liv Albert?

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• 36:03Speaker 01

  And actually, Cynaeus has already turned up in the Metamorphoses at least once as well.

• 36:10Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  In, back in book eight. So this story makes you expect to read in book 12.

• 36:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Book eight, in the story of Atalanta and the Caledonian boar hunt.

• 36:21Liv Albert?

  Right, because he's another one of those, right?

• 36:24Speaker 01

  He's another one, exactly. He's another one of the ones.

• 36:26Liv Albert?

  In every hero story.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Which I think is all part of it. Like, if, again, if thinking about what your reader who's never read the Metamorphoses is reading, these is in Cynaeus, they go, I know that man. That, you know, that is a powerful, heroic superhero man from the Age of Heroes, from the Iliad, from all these other books. So I think Virgil's already saying, ooh, what if he was a woman? And then Ovid goes, what if I could exploit this even more and make this into the whole story? What if the whole story is not really about him being this heroic man, but it's actually about how he became that heroic man?

• 36:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Um, because in book eight, when he turns up.

• 37:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  He's there, and I'll give you the Latin because it's quite, it's quite, you could read it in a couple of ways.

• 37:11Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  We get, so it's a long category of all the heroes who are helping out Nelliega and Atalanta kill Caledonian boar. And we get Yam nonfeminae Cynaeus, so no longer a woman Cynaeus.

• 37:24Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  But Ovid's not mentioned before, so clearly Ovid's going, you remember in Virgil when he was a woman, but is now a man and then was a woman again. Well, now he's no longer a woman.

• 37:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  And now, four books later, I'm going to tell you the story of why he's no longer a woman. So it's.

• 37:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  He's playing around with that so much liberally.

• 37:43Liv Albert?

  Well, and I wonder if the Virgil is, is necessarily attempting to say that he was a woman again in the underworld? Or was, if he was just included because he was once.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 37:55Liv Albert?

  A woman.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:57Liv Albert?

  Because by saying Cynaeus and not, well, though I guess we can't necessarily know if, if the name Caeneus was, would have been known as the alternative, but yeah, that's interesting.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  He definitely says that, yeah, and it's, it's a little bit.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  Ambiguous, because it's literally, he goes as a companion also, who was once a man, once a young man, now a woman, Cynais.

• 38:21Liv Albert?

  Oh, okay.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Once again, turned back into his old form by fate. But what's the old form? It's the old form, a man or a woman, you know?

• 38:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Huh.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  It's so deliberately playing around with it. So Ovid just clearly goes, there's a myth I can exploit. And if I'm doing my poem all about transformation, here's a story where I can talk about transformation. And look, maybe I'm not just transforming the the gender of this character. I'm also transforming the literary tradition. Do you see what I did there? You know, this is something Ovid loves to do.

• 38:52Liv Albert?

  That, yeah, that's very obvious. That's so, that's so interesting. I had a thought happen and then my brain lost it. What? Oh, you're gonna lose it again, that's fine. Um, no, I just, that's really interesting. I'm fascinated by just like how Ovid plays with this stuff. And I mean, I just, I guess I'm just like trying to wrap my head around just like all of it, I guess. But it is, now the, seeing this comparison between Cynais and Iphis is really interesting. Oh, that was what I, you said something earlier that I, I forgot that the whole thing about Cynais is that, is that his skin, yeah, is,

• 39:37Liv Albert?

  what did you, you said unbreakable.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, unbreakable, because I think that's what the, from memory, I think that's what he's explicitly called in, um, Apollonius of Rhodes, of Nautica, so the kind of Hellenistic poem is unbreakable there, yeah.

• 39:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Because all I can think about that is the alternative word being impenetrable.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Yep. Absolutely.

• 40:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  And that's the other, I think that was the, you know, the thing that I realized in writing this article is that actually, There is this paradigm, this system of masculinity at Rome that we associate particularly with the end of the Republic, so like the 40s, 50s BCE, going through to the early Empire, so the kind of 20s, 30s BCE, going through to the early century, early decades, and C, which is exactly what Ovid's writing, which is that masculinity is all about being impenetrable in so many different ways, like masculine, impenetrable socially, because no one can come and mess with you, impenetrable physically, because you shouldn't be stabbed by weapons,

• 40:47Speaker 01

  but also impenetrable sexually, because actually, there's this whole thing that particularly comes out in the, in 90s scholarship, that being a man at Rome is about being a penetrator. That's a penetrator sexually, it's also a penetrator in like literary and philosophical ways, but, um, and that's kind of how you can define a man, as opposed to any of the other gender groups who are floating around Rome, like enslaved people and women and children, they're all the opposite to a man in that sense.

• 41:18Liv Albert?

  Oh antiquity.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  It's a joy, isn't it?

• 41:24Speaker 01

  You know, it's one of those fun things, my students always look at me like, what are you talking about? And I'm like, yeah, we're gonna have to use the word genders at this point, and we're gonna have to talk about like, women and children and enslaved people as a different gender to men, because if this is gender construction and being a man is being a penetrator, and they're not penetrator, then they're a different gender to men. And like, that's okay, actually.

• 41:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Not in a way they liked or signed up to.

• 41:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah, really. My, my biggest thing that I've just been saying into so many episodes lately, is that I'm just obsessed with the idea that Athenian women were off having sex with each other all the time, because men did not have any, like, they didn't conceptualize sex as anything other than penetration. So they were just like, no, the women are just hanging out, they're like Lumen together all the time, they, you know, they don't care.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Weaving.

• 42:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, absolutely. I love that. I love that so much.

• 42:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah, like just, yeah, this idea that's like, it's just like all about that. Because of course, like even, even in all of the, you know, male relationships in, in Athens, it was still all about who was penetrating home.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. Like, it all comes down to that. And you can see why that becomes such a fascination in the scholarship, because like, this is such a weird model. It's such a specific model, like, and it doesn't get broken that often. Like, sometimes it gets broken, but not that often. Um. So yeah, so if if Cynais is like already mythologically impenetrable.

• 42:46Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  And Ovid wants to stress that I'm making him into a man, and the way he gets to do that is by saying he's a man because he's impenetrable, unlike those two things go together. Um. And so when he go, when so after Nestor's telling the story in the in the battle scene, Nestor's telling the story about like.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Cynais is a soldier and it's the battle between the sentors and the lappids and Cynais is now a young lappid hero fighting the sentors. Um. He goes, well, I'm gonna make it really explicitly. That he is completely impenetrable and he can't be defeated by their swords, Reed, they also can't fuck him. Like he is totally indestructible because no, no one can enter him and he's going to go and enter everyone else in the battlefield. And suddenly you begin to look at the the descriptions of the battles that Cynais. Does when he's fighting these sentors and it's like. He stabbed them, he put a big thing in them, he made a wound on top of a wound on top of a wound and you go, oh no, this is. This is not subtle from Ovid like at all.

• 43:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  This is really explicit.

• 43:50Liv Albert?

  I mean, Ovid did love to Ovid.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Of course, like. Would he be the same poet if he wasn't like constantly having sex scenes that actually look like battle plan?

• 44:00Speaker 01

  No.

• 44:01Liv Albert?

  No, and I just, yeah, I the penetrating that the salient field was like just.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  It was like a a preface to penetrating the like sentors who were in those salient fields later on.

• 44:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, it's just like all of it. He just, he liked to penetrate. That's all we know about Cynais.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Can we say about our boy Cynais?

• 44:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Good for him.

• 44:21Liv Albert?

  But but this transformation. That does so explicitly make Cynais a penetrator, you know, when when he becomes a man. But is so subtle with Iphis is such an interesting like comparison. Yeah, so I mean, yeah, did like I imagine you talked about that, but like, did you come to any conclusions about like what, yeah, what this means or what it could mean?

• 44:47Speaker 01

  I guess like. I guess that this is one of those places where it's really nice to acknowledge that our modern world has given us a range of language that the ancients didn't necessarily have, and we can talk about like. Being at various spectrums on a various places on a spectrum of gender. That like, not every ma- man has to be. It has to be kind of, it's like, we can't all be kind of, some of us are gonna fall short of that. Um. But you can have these different things that are both definitely masculinities, that are both definitely ways of being a man. But doing that in slightly different ways. Neither of them deviating too much from what it means to be a man at Rome, because to be a man at Rome has very specific rules.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  As far as we can tell, they both meet those rules and the. Even though, Ovid is really explicit about Caeneus being a penetrator, he still leaves room for us to think about. Um, Iphis is a penetrator too, because the very last line of the Iphis story, which was the last line of book nine, because it ends with this story. Is a little um, votive offering that Iphis Ianthi give to the goddess Isis and they say, we thank you. Um, the boy Iphis. Potitor, his woman is the verb, and potitor is this verb which means like to possess.

• 46:06Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  But usually to possess, or at least in Ovid, very often to possess in a sexual way.

• 46:11Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  So he does end with this moment of penetration, even though it's kind of. Not explicit, there is the last moment of penetration. So they're both men. They can be men in different ways and that's okay.

• 46:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and that's, that's basically what I would also think just from this conversation, like. And I think that that again, is such a powerful, like. Acknowledgement in the ancient world even of this kind of spectrum of the different forms and you know, the ways that, yeah, for, for all. The way, for all that Iphis cares, he's a man. Like, he gets what he wants, he gets to marry Ianthi like happily ever after. So like, for all the ways that that matters to either of these people. They are men.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Because I guess, yeah, that's a really interesting thing with, with the Iphis story that I don't think I ever really thought about. So, you know. He's been raised as a man for probably the first thirteen years, it's like, it's always best if it's thirteen.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  What would it suddenly mean if he was uncovered and asked to live his life as a woman? Like, that would not be a natural state of affairs for him. But everyone who wants to push back and say, well, this is, because that, you know, Iphis has this speech. And that's the thing we can't ignore is that Iphis has this long speech. Which is why I started looking to him in the first place, if you remember going back to like these.

• 47:27Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Unquote, unquote, have these speeches. Where he says, I'm really uncomfortable with everything. Everything's making me unhappy. Like, what is this world? And he brings out all these mythological examples and says, well, like, pacifying was pretty rubbish. But at least she got her man. Like, what, what does it mean that I can't even do that? Like, I'm so unnatural that I can't even get treated like pacified. That's a really disturbing thing to say about yourself. Um, and people will point to this to say, well, this, again, this is patriarchy. This is a woman suffering under the patriarchy and she's not able to express her. Her unhappiness in a, in a kind of coherent way. So what she does is bring in these weird mythical examples in. And I can't, if someone wants to read it that way, it's totally fair.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  But to me, that just feels like someone who has no idea how to be a woman, what it would mean to be a woman.

• 48:17Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  If the next day, you know, Iphis speaks to Yanti and Yanti says, I don't want you, I want you to dress as a woman now. What would that, like, that wouldn't work either. Um, and so there's definitely a lot of kind of trauma and discomfort in Iphis's speech there. But I don't, that necessarily equates to like, I really want to be a woman either.

• 48:42Liv Albert?

  No, and it, it, like, it reminds me of the, there's a reading of the Medusa story of, of Ovid. Um, that goes around the internet all the time. This idea, because it's not in Ovid, you know, it's this, this idea that the sort of some kind of background of this is that. You know, A- Athena didn't transform Medusa to punish her, but to save her from future results.

• 49:09Liv Albert?

  And it that this, the argument you're talking about, about this, the issue being the patriarchy, like reads to me like that, which like on the surface feels feminist, it feels pro women. But as soon as you just like, scratch the surface just slightly, you realize that what that is, is not pro woman at all. It is not anti patriarchy. It is actually more like an agent of the patriarchy. It is more like the, the, the type of white women who have bought into the patriarchy so much that they can't see other genders and they can't see through the weeds, right? Like, so like, you know, because to, to suggest that the only way to, to gift Medusa with a

• 49:54Liv Albert?

  lack of assault is to make her hideous or whatever, you know, people want to read it is like terrifying to me or make her monstrous or whatever. Like it, it, it not only erases the fact that in every single other version of Medusa ever, she is born a Gorgon. It's just, and she's not necessarily ugly. She's just literally who she is. That's just who she was. And like it erases that. And then just like with Ifes, it erases the fact that it is very explicit that he is like, no, like, I mean, literally the story is that he and his mother know that he is biologically female. And nobody else knows. And he's lived his entire life with everyone, his father included, believing he is a man. Like, yeah, this is not, this is not somebody who's like, I feel like a

• 50:39Liv Albert?

  woman and I'm being forced not to be like, no, this is, it sounds more like gender dysphoria. Like it sounds more like somebody who is figuring themselves out. And it's like, no, no, like I would just like that my gender like affirmed, like I would like ISIS, you know, through transformation to affirm my gender. And yeah, like, I think that, yeah, to, to suggest that, like, that it's a patriarch, it's just like, I mean, I, I'm not one to say that something is not the fault of the patriarchy because everything is, let's be honest.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:08Liv Albert?

  But yeah, like it, it, to me, doesn't read like that. In this case, it, it reads like, yeah, like, like Ifes just wants their, them, the, them that they've known for their entire life to be affirmed via goddess interaction.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  And it's so tied up with loving empathy. Like that is the thing that happens at the end of the day, like. Everything out like what we don't see in Ives's story at all is like a love of masculine behaviour outside of sex. A love of, you know, we don't see any relationships where Ives praise like enjoys being referred to as a man or anything like that. We see he loves this woman, the way he wants to love this woman is as a man. Therefore, that's how the story works for him. And I think like it's totally reasonable to say that that's maybe not the most. Um, positive representation of trans identity in the universe.

• 52:06Liv Albert?

  Well, the ancient world isn't known for good. It's more just that they existed.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. And like, why should we expect Ovid to give us a good representation of trans identity?

• 52:15Liv Albert?

  Well, yeah.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Like, I totally don't. What I do think is important is that readers, whether they're trans or not, can look at Ovid and pull out this stuff. Um, even if Ovid didn't intend it, even if none of it is based in reality, and there is some really interesting suggestion to. We have some really obscure references to sex change operations in historical documents, right? And they don't have a clue what's going on biologically. Like, these descriptions make it very clear they don't understand how a sex change operation would work. But.

• 52:48Liv Albert?

  But they're still thinking about it.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  It's something that is at least perceived to be plausible within the world. And it doesn't matter whether it was or not, because so many things that we think about today. Were not plausible in the ancient world. We don't really read the text and think it didn't exist, like.

• 53:01Liv Albert?

  Well, that's the thing. Like, all of this is not to be seen as, yeah, like. Some great ancient trans story that makes everyone happy and everyone gets what they want. It's it's evidence. That even in the ancient world, there were people who were born in a body that did not feel like the right one to them and they like. It was acknowledged in some way in these ancient sources. Like, it's literally just evidence that the concept. Of somebody feeling that they are the wrong gender, like existed. I mean, there's also the, I don't know if you know much about this, and I have been. I will be doing more research, hopefully, but like I meant like just came up, but there's the like emperor.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:43Liv Albert?

  Who was like, I'm a woman. Yeah.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  I am so not a historian, to the point that sometimes my students like ask me about battle and I'm like, I don't know, I'm sorry.

• 53:53Liv Albert?

  I mean. I'm the same. I just covered the Bronze Age for a month and I'm like, that was all of my, that was all my assistant producer writing that and me going, this sounds smart, Michaela. Thank you.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  And as like, so this is going to be the most uninformed take ever about elegabulous because I fully don't know.

• 54:12Liv Albert?

  That's great. So am I. We'll like, we'll just talk about it.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. As I understand it, it's one of those things where we have some sources that don't love elegabulous, that are later than elegabulous and think what's a really good way we can insult elegabulous and that's to use feminizing language. But at the same time, you don't make that kind of story up about someone out of thin air. Because the story's presumably got to mean something to the person who's reading it. They've got to go, yeah, actually I recognize this story about this empress and I can kind of identify with them.

• 54:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  And also, why am I looking to the, I think it's the script or it's the story I have to say, it's the writers of the history of the later emperors. Why am I looking to them to give me a good trans narrative? Like, I fully don't need to. But if a person who reads that story goes, you know, enough of the pieces here are coming together that I can sort of make a puzzle out of them. Why shouldn't they? Like, I, I don't know enough about the story to know how much there is in, in the original text, but.

• 55:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah. No, I don't know. I just remember hearing that there's like a, I don't know if it's a quote or maybe somebody attributing a quote. Um, but basically saying that I want to be a woman or something like that. So like, yeah. I mean, yeah. And if anything, if anything, again, like exactly basically what you're saying is like, it, it, it's still proof, the concept of gender, at least like, you know, identity not matching biology.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:40Liv Albert?

  It was at least conceptualized, even if it was used as an insult, it is still proof that it was a concept.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And there are so many of these stories because the problem, almost the problem with this sometimes is that you need to spend so long. When you're talking about these stories in a public context, defending the possibility that they can be read through a queer or a trans lens. That you end up spending all your time doing that and not just saying, look at how many of them are. And you get like, you know, you've got these ones in Ovid, you've got stories in Lucian of this character, Nigilus, who is undoubtedly some kind of trans masculine. But the various groups of people at Rome who are not filling normative gender categories, even if they are maybe somewhere on a trans spectrum. So you've got the the Canidi, who are these kind of like,

• 56:27Speaker 01

  I mean, if you want to take the general definition of them, they're people who like to receive anal sex, but that's also complicated in various places, but they're not occupying like a typical masculine gender. Sometimes they're described with feminine pronouns, feminine adjectives in Latin.

• 56:41Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Um, you've got the the Tribidas, who maybe do or do not exist, but anyway, they're talked about in literature, who are a group of quote unquote, women who perform extremely masculine behaviours. And have been theorised more recently as being as being trans men to you've got, you know, the the Galley, who are this group of priests for the gods, the Sibeli, who ritually castrate themselves, which is not in and of itself gender transformation, but so many of the stories about them treat them also like they're undergoing gender transformation.

• 57:11Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  That all of this together, and I kind of wanted to just give you like a a throwing list of them, because when you take it all together, you go, the number, like, normativity is just that, it's it's a particular group of normal people in the world who are behaving in a normal way. But there are so many people who deviate from that. And deviation does not have to necessarily mean trans or queer, but it doesn't mean we can preclude or not use those labels either if they're appropriate and they do.

• 57:40Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Um, and I don't, yeah, I didn't necessarily want to make it sound like I'm saying that every single one of those groups is definitely trans.

• 57:47Liv Albert?

  No, no, yeah.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  But they're all definitely queer, because they're all saying fuck you to normativity and to to normal rules about gender and how you do gender.

• 57:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, they're all going beyond the standardized binary in some way. Yeah.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 58:02Liv Albert?

  I I knew of the priests, but I didn't know of the other two examples. That's really, yeah.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  So and they're not, because they're not mythological, right? They always turn up. So particularly.

• 58:12Liv Albert?

  I also don't care about Rome all that much unless people tell me about it. I like when people come on and tell me about Rome, but I I don't like to read about it. It's too much.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Very fair. The Cnidae are really fascinating. They turn up mostly in kind of various abuse poetry, so like Roman satire, Roman epigram, things where people are looking at how you go at each other, which doesn't help.

• 58:29Liv Albert?

  I like, I've never heard the term abuse poetry before. Sorry, I like, that really got me. That was really good.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Oh, have a, uh, Hippunax and Archilochus are an absolute hoot. I mean, there's some horrible stuff to solve in there too, so they're not totally a hoot, but there's some great stuff in there.

• 58:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Um, but no, so you see them like Marshall's a great example where he'll just talk about a group of people saying, you know, women these days don't even like real men. They like Cnidae and go, what the fuck's a Cnidae? Like, what does it mean to say they like Cnidae?

• 58:59Liv Albert?

  Is this like a connection to like the island? Is it an island or is it the town? Like, I'm just thinking of the Aphrodite of Cnidos, which is so famously like, yeah.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. So not like, yeah, but more so not Cnidos, but Cnidos with an actual I in there.

• 59:14Liv Albert?

  Oh, okay.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  Um, but yeah, and it probably means something like riva, like kinetic.

• 59:20Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  And it's probably to do with them like dancing with their buttocks and, you know, shaking them to like come and fuck me kind of vibes. Um, but yeah, so they turn up and and again, these are men. We talk, the texts talk about them as men, but some texts also say, give them like the crowd of of Cnidae who are like women and you go like to Apuleius, they turn up as a crowd of female Cnidae and you go, well, yeah, I guess they are deviating from a masculine.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Idea of gender there. So these groups, they're all over the place and to kind of rigidly say that Rome exists on a gender binary, when the Romans themselves fully understand that the man who penetrates is a particular kind of man and everyone else isn't necessarily like a real man. And I'm not using the word real men because that's what like Marshall does. He talks about the wary weary, the real men, as opposed to all of these quote unquote men who are getting fucked and therefore not real men, you know?

• 1:00:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah. It's so, I mean, oh, the ancient world, because like I'm just connecting this all to Greece, you know, which of course has like very similar and very different like, but again, it's it's got all the same deviations, all the same like beyond these binaries issues. I also just have to say, this made me think of this, but I recently wrote a big thing on Medusa. And so I did like, I did a dive into like almost any source, ancient source that I could find that ever mentioned her in any way. And there, I believe, yeah, no, it was Diodoro Ciculus, who wrote about how, because there was like a lot of, there's a lot of versions that want to like rationalize her and be like, this is where the story came from, right? And I think his is like the one where it's like, oh, the Gorgons

• 1:01:07Liv Albert?

  were actually like the Amazons, like another race of warrior women. And they actually fought the Amazons, but then, and they were like all amazing and they were so good at what they did and all this. And then Heracles came and killed them all because as the leader of men, he was not willing to let any woman lead any country. So he killed them. And then, and then, but explicitly, when when Diodoro like explains about them and like how powerful as warriors they were, he says, they're nothing like women of today. And I'm just like, okay, cool. So like, even when you want to acknowledge this like race of women who, you know, by

• 1:01:51Liv Albert?

  Roman standards, were going to be like men, like that's right, obviously, the kind of purpose behind it. He's like, there used to be women who were like men. They're nothing like the women of today. Cause the whole idea is like, well, the women of today are not men because real men, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, it was just, it was such like a, it was one of the, one of the few sources where I was like, I'm really torn on this. Half of it is really cool and half of it is utterly horrifying.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  But that's so, that's so indicative, I think, of how, um, of like what a Roman author does when they encounter a strong woman. And how they're gonna deal with it, which is.

• 1:02:26Liv Albert?

  They're like, it's old and nothing like now.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I think actually, like, if we look at the warrior women who turn up in Latin texts. Like, they are so obviously treated not as women in a sense. And I think such a great example, like even, let's stay with the Metamorphoses for a bit, is like Atalanta, when she turns up in the Metamorphoses. She is like explicitly a woman. There's none, you know, there's gender play, but it's not gender play in a way you're ever gonna go, there's a man.

• 1:02:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  But the text doesn't know what to do with her because she has to be sexy. Because, you know, woe betide a woman be anything other than sexy.

• 1:03:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  So Ovid goes out of his way to say, look, she's gorgeous, her hair's drooped over her back, her body's like ivory. You know, it's this really erotic description of her. But at the same time, she's like beating men all the time. And like, how does he reconcile this like? Sexualized woman and the fact that she is beating all the men.

• 1:03:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  Ovid doesn't give us the story that like Hyginus does where she chases them with swords and kills them. But, you know, he doesn't know what to do with that. He doesn't know how to gender her.

• 1:03:32Liv Albert?

  I'm gonna like just mix up what sources what, because I haven't looked at Atalanta in a while, but, um. Cause I, I, when I last looked at Atalanta, I was really interested in separating her into two different forms. Like the one who's super powerful and does all this incredible stuff. And then the other one who falls for a golden apple and then has to get married. Because to me, they were, because also there's very explicitly sources that suggest that she is from two very different places and has two very different backstories. So I was like, okay, I like the idea of two different Atlantas. Cause also it doesn't fucking make sense with her character in the other story to like make that. But does Ovid have the apples? Do you know?

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. So here's where I fully admit that that particular episode of your podcast inspired me to write an article about Atlanta.

• 1:04:13Liv Albert?

  Fuck off.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Because you were stressing so hard how these two different women. And Ovid has two different Atalanta stories. But kind of not different women, they kind of are and aren't different women.

• 1:04:26Liv Albert?

  Well, yeah, because Ovid wouldn't wanna be like, no, no.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, wouldn't want to be simple.

• 1:04:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  And that's what really interested me, because you you went through sources and you're so right, the other sources are so explicit about these being different women.

• 1:04:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  Um, and it's not just Ovid, he does, Ovid does this to a great degree than any other pro and poet. He sort of kind of blends them a little bit, and in some places it's explicitly confused. So there's, I think Ovid mentions Atalanta like about fifteen times across all his poetry. Um, and on one occasion, it's definitely unambiguously a blended figure, it's like a bit of the Scinean Atlantean, a bit of the Ocean Atlantean. But in the Met specifically, he does mix them together. So you get the story of the Caledonian boar hunting, okay? Which is all, you know, it's pretty standard Caledonian boar hunt, all that kind of stuff. It doesn't deviate too far from the mythology. But the language that's used of her there gets really explicitly picked up when he tells the story of Scinean Atlantean, of Arcadian Atlantean.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  That's what was all around, but the one whose fa- whose father is Scine is the one who does the apples and the foot race.

• 1:05:28Liv Albert?

  That's where the word, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that, because I feel like the Arcadian one is the one who was raised by bears, because.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  No, you're so right, yeah.

• 1:05:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah, because it's all about bears.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're so right. Um, so, yeah.

• 1:05:37Liv Albert?

  But yeah, but it's confusing because of where Caledon is, because, yeah, so I I'm with you.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Um, but, yeah, the book Ten Atlante is described like in very similar ways to the Book Eight Atlante, and there are some very deliberate, like, textual things Ovid does when he's describing the Book Eight one to say, keep your eyes peeled, she's gonna come back later, and then she does. So, so that was, that really kind of got me thinking, these are two different women who Ovid wants to blend into one woman, because they're both doing gender-defying things, and

• 1:06:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  it's so explicitly about gender. So you get, I think, I think it's in the Book Eight description where she's described as like having the face, a, a, a face that would seem girlish in a boy or boyish in a girl. And you go, okay, I, I know Atlante, we hung out, um, you know. And then in book ten, when the character comes back, the same description is applied to Hippomenes, her lover. That he has a face that's like boyish and a girl, girlish and a boy. And you go, so you're connecting these two stories, aren't you going in your way to make me connect them together?

• 1:06:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  So there definitely is weird gender stuff going on there.

• 1:06:48Liv Albert?

  Hmm, that's so interesting. I definitely did not. I was just like, yeah, the the Atalanta of it all. I feel very vindicated. Thank you so much for telling me that. But also, like, I'm trying to think back on my sources now, like, is it that, yeah, because they really do appear. It's Ovid who really is the only one who does like a full, comprehensive, anything.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:07:10Liv Albert?

  So it makes sense that he would be like, nah, they're the same.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  They turn up super briefly. I think one of them, the one with the footrace, turns up briefly in in Hesiod's catalog of women.

• 1:07:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  And I think the other one might turn up in somewhere else. But they both, they both have ancient histories.

• 1:07:30Liv Albert?

  Exactly. Yeah, she, they're both very, have very ancient origins and definitely like, you know, there's stuff in both the regions. And I know, yeah, there's, there's a lot of like fragments that suggest that she is very ancient as a character.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:43Liv Albert?

  But yeah, like there was, I wa, I, it would make sense if Ovid was the first one to make them into one. Or, or even if he's not doing it explicitly to lead modern people to be like, there's one Atalanta.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, at least to, to, to play them together in a really explicit way. Yeah.

• 1:08:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  I made a little table about like which different Atlanteans turn up in these stories. Which was really nerdy of me.

• 1:08:08Liv Albert?

  I love it.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  It is basically, yeah, Ovid who mixes them together and makes things a bit more confusing. And yeah, it's, it's this weird reference to his ibis where he can't decide which Atalanta it is clearly in that particular moment. He mixes them together there too.

• 1:08:26Liv Albert?

  Interesting.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  But they're pretty explicitly separated out before that, until you get to the story of, um, I think it's Apollonius Rhodes, not Apollonius Rhodes.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  Sudapulodorus, that's the one tells where he goes. I don't know, she was maybe three different people and maybe had four different boyfriends. I can't tell you anything more than that, I'm sorry. Um, so, you know, and that's he's probably post Ovid, so he's probably drawing at that point already on this tradition where they've been re-blended.

• 1:08:58Liv Albert?

  He is, yeah, I mean, he does a lot. He has a lot of like things that are almost certainly coming from Ovid.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah, huh.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  So yeah, she's she's fascinated. So thank you for putting me on to that because I fully went down that rabbit hole because of that episode.

• 1:09:15Liv Albert?

  This is thrilling. So you wrote an article about it?

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:18Liv Albert?

  Could you send it to me?

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  Absolutely, definitely.

• 1:09:20Liv Albert?

  I'm thrilled.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  It's very like literary because it's all about genre and stuff.

• 1:09:24Liv Albert?

  No, but I love that. I mean, this is, I'm just thrilled that my like, the thing I was like, I'm gonna make two different episodes because I'm mad. That that turned into something more legitimate.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  No, yeah, so, yeah, I'm happy to know it, but it was just really odd to me.

• 1:09:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. I think also Jennifer St. was inspired by my episode. Sorry, I just have to say like, apparently my Atalanta episodes have just done more than I thought. So I'm just. This is like, this is a feel good moment for me.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Very fruitful. They've gone on to create so many things. That's so brilliant.

• 1:10:00Liv Albert?

  Sorry, you were saying.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  No, I found what I was saying. Probably just that if Ovid sees an opportunity to mess with things and mess with time and mess with what you expect a story to be about, he fully will. Because, oh, while we're at Atlanta, just to sidetrack Ovid in Atlanta, for Ovid, she is the epitome of like sexual. Um, so in the Ars Amatoria, I think you've referenced the Ars Amatoria in the show, right?

• 1:10:24Liv Albert?

  I sure have.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  The end of book three, so the literal climax of the whole poem, the last mythological character who turns in the Ars Amatoria is Atalanta.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  Uh, where she's explicitly turning up because she's got great legs. So if you have sex with her in certain positions, you'll be able to look at her legs better. And she's in this catalog of like different positions you can have sex with different women in because they have different like physical features. Um, and I love the Ovid's like good bite in mythology in the Ars Amatoria is put Atalanta's legs over your shoulders. They look great. Fantastic. No notes. Ten out of ten.

• 1:11:02Liv Albert?

  The Ars is like so joyfully fucked up.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  So fucked up, so fucked up.

• 1:11:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah, uh, I mean, Ovid, like,

• 1:11:13Liv Albert?

  for all that I absolutely love the Met and the Rs for very different reasons, but like, really, I just think a lot about the ways in which our modern understanding of Greek mythology have been forever altered by that man just being, because and he didn't know, he was just like, I'm writing a thing. This is like a fun poem I'm writing. I'm gonna take a lot of inspiration from Greek myths. I'm gonna change some stuff because I want to. And then 2,000 years later, people are like, Medusa was a priestess of Athena and she was beautiful and she was transformed. And I'm like, it's a thing that he made up because it was funsies. Like, yeah, and it now with Atalanta too. I'm like, is every book you pick up now that's just called

• 1:11:58Liv Albert?

  Greek mythology. I mean, even mine probably says it, even though I hope I made a point, but that was years ago. So who's to say like, but you know, everyone's like, this is one Atalanta. She was incredibly heroic. She did amazing and wonderful things. She didn't want to marry a man, except there was this time that she got really distracted by a golden apple. And so she married a guy. Like,

• 1:12:17Liv Albert?

  it's just, yeah.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  But I love when you said that Ovid didn't know what he's doing. I think Ovid fully knew what he's doing. I think the Met is so intentionally.

• 1:12:25Liv Albert?

  Oh, I mean, like that he didn't, yeah, he didn't expect that 2,000 years later, people would be like, this is the Greek myth is what I think.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's fair. There's so much like knowingness. And like, sometimes, you know, I've been reading the Met for years and I wrote a whole PhD on them. Like, I, Met is my poem inside out. And still sometimes I'm reading it and I just go, what the fuck, you sly dog. Like, how did you slip that under my nose for the last nine years when you've been making this clever little reference here? I've never picked up on that before. That's genius. And it's, it's such a knowing poem about like, how can I change everything and make it Roman, but more importantly, make it mine? Because if it's Roman, I don't want it to be like Augustus's or any emperors or anything. It's mine. That's, I mean, I know

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  you've done the read throughs on your podcast, but the way the Met ends with that such an exclamation of like, For all of time, I will be read, wrote, like, foreign lips will read my words. You go, you had such a big idea of yourself of it, and you're right to, to be fair.

• 1:13:31Liv Albert?

  I mean, he's, yeah, like, it worked. Like, you know, he, we can't, we can't say he didn't succeed.

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  He did kind of, I can't, I can't critique that.

• 1:13:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I don't, I forget what I was reading. I think I was just reading some, I've just been like finding random, like, indie published novels lately that I can just like, buy for cheap and, and read and not remember anything after I've finished reading them, but enjoy it in the moment. And I definitely, like, this morning, read something where somebody just referenced Ovid in some book. I think it was like a fantasy book and somebody was like, I'm gonna read Ovid. Like, I just think, yeah, like, he, he really, I mean, the dude got around. Like, he's just been everywhere.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  And it's so, like, the history of Ovid, when you get into the Middle Ages and medieval period, like, so much of why we think of Greek mythology as being, Ovid did this, is because he becomes the source book for painters.

• 1:14:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  And you get those lovely, moralized versions of Ovid, you know, there's the French Ovid moralisé, and there's one in Latin called the Ovid moralisartis.

• 1:14:37Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  Which are just like, Ovid if you made in Christian, but then also, let's use this to inspire every Titian painting and every Joto painting for the next four hundred years. So that our imagery of like, what, like, if you Google any mythological character, you're gonna get some kind of Renaissance painting of them.

• 1:14:57Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  And our whole, like, way we think about it is so focused on how Ovid told those stories. Like, one of my favorite paintings is Titian's Diana and Actian. It's that wonderful one. Where Acti, Titian, Diana's chasing him and her bow's pulled and he is falling to the floor and is half turned into a stag, but not fully, so his head's stagnant, his arms are even still, it's gorgeous.

• 1:15:18Liv Albert?

  I'm Googling this. Yeah.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  Um, and it's so directly lifted from Ovid, like, down to the color of, like, which of the three dogs were biting Actian? They're the three dogs who run ahead in the race in Ovid. It's so taken from that story.

• 1:15:32Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  Um, and I think that's so much of it is that we don't, no one paints the Greek myth until, like, you get to the Prographe, like, you know.

• 1:15:42Liv Albert?

  Well, and and and then there's also the Latin of it all, right? Just how much more readable Latin was for so long? And how much more people were taking in Greek things via Latin? You know, so, yeah, I mean, it's unsurprising and also incredibly annoying. Like, I just this Medusa thing made it so clear to me because I'm just like, I'm so deeply over Ovid's version of her. And I'm just like, I just want the Greek. But like even there's this History Channel video that I saw in my research. And I mean, yeah, it's the History Channel. But it has like very, I mean, I assume that most of the talking heads on it are, you know, also fairly well known, but one of them I did know personally.

• 1:16:28Liv Albert?

  And it presents this entire story of Medusa and all of these experts and all of this stuff. And it says the Greek myth, Greek myth, Greek myth, over and over and over again, and then proceeds to tell Ovid's version of the story. And I just am like, like, I just, it's still like this thing that's, Ovid, he's just done so much.

• 1:17:15Liv Albert?

  Anyway, this is not about Medusa, even though my head can make.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  No, but let's make it about Medusa briefly.

• 1:17:20Liv Albert?

  Please.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  Because my, my whole, my obsession with Medusa at the moment, which regards to Ovid, is which Ovid version? Because Ovid tells two in the Metamorphoses, but one of them is three words long, so everyone misses it.

• 1:17:33Liv Albert?

  Ah, yeah.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  You get the whole book four story that's really detailed. Then in book six, in Arachne's tapestry.

• 1:17:40Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 1:17:40Speaker 01

  Arachne's stitching all of these women who've been assaulted by the gods.

• 1:17:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  And one of them, in genuinely like a line and a half of the Latin, so probably like a line of any English translation, is Medusa. But it's a different story.

• 1:17:53Liv Albert?

  What is it?

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  Because.

• 1:17:55Liv Albert?

  I already hit it in this book.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  He's got to be a story because she's already got snaky hair when Neptune assaults her.

• 1:18:03Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  Which doesn't make sense, yeah.

• 1:18:06Liv Albert?

  Uh, it's just the Greek version?

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  Just the Greek version. But also, um, we get absolutely no reference to the Temple of Athena stuff. That's, I mean, it's only half a line long, so you've got to expect that. But moreover, Neptune's a bird.

• 1:18:21Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Neptune is not a bird. You feel that in book four, when Percy's telling that story about Medusa getting assaulted, he would mention if Neptune was a bird.

• 1:18:29Liv Albert?

  For sure.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  He doesn't. And so in this like brief half line.

• 1:18:33Liv Albert?

  Also, why would Neptune be a bird in any case?

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  So, this is like something I delved into very deeply because Neptune is never a bird. This is the only time in all mythology Neptune's a bird. And the best bit about this is that this is explicitly like a story for how Pegasus came about. So Pegasus. But why would he be a bird?

• 1:18:54Liv Albert?

  Why would it be a bird? Yeah, why would it be a bird? Because she's gonna give birth to a fucking horse, horse.

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  Because he's, and Neptune's the god of horses. Like, it's such an obvious, he turns into horses in so many mythologies.

• 1:19:03Liv Albert?

  He assaults another goddess as a horse.

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  As a horse, another goddess who turns up next on that tapestry, by the way.

• 1:19:09Liv Albert?

  Fuck off.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, exactly, as a horse. But it's so obvious that he should be a horse when he gives birth to a horse, or rather calls someone else to give birth to a horse. But he's a bird, and I can only think that that's Ovid slash Arachne deliberately going, you think you know the story of Medusa from book four? This is a different story. Like, he's got them both.

• 1:19:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Also, it really is how many times I've said fuck off as that's not totally common and I apologize.

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  It's totally okay.

• 1:19:38Liv Albert?

  It does show just how impressed and excited I am. That's just how I react, I swear, when I can't think of anything else to say. I like slash when I feel like somebody could take it, but I like I that's really fucking interesting.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:55Liv Albert?

  There I did it again. Um, the bird is so weird because I want it like I like that I love though that she already has the snakey hair because like that's, that's the stance that I just think is kindest to her, to the Greek origins, to, to the story is just that like, I still think she was assaulted by Poseidon, like I think that that is very explicit in the Hesiod, even if nobody agrees with me. That's not true. Some people agree with me, but not the men on the internet. Um, but like it, it, it, she, it just makes so much sense. Like she was literally just born that way. Like it's so much kinder to be like, she wasn't ugly. She was just a monster. Monsters don't have to be ugly. They just have to be inhuman.

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:36Liv Albert?

  And like, yeah, she was terrifying, but she was terrifying because she could protect herself, not because she was going to come get you, you know, like, and, and like the Athena thing is just so unnecessary, like in Ovid, I mean, and, and just, I don't know. It's so interesting. And also one thing I've, I recently sort of just registered, um, is just that Ovid does not call her a priestess of Athena or of Minerva, even though like half the people who read, who, who like conceptualize Ovid's version are like, she was a priestess. And it's like, no, no, she was just in the temple.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  Like.

• 1:21:10Liv Albert?

  And like, people just went into temples. That was very normal.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  And there are some pretty good reasons why like a young, presumably virginal Greek woman might be in a temple to Athena. Like, yeah, that's a perfectly reasonable thing for her to be doing.

• 1:21:23Liv Albert?

  Incredibly normal. Yep.

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  No, it's, it's so interesting how like we think we know things about Ovid or even about Greek mythology and so often we just have sort of got a kind of maybe half created version that we've added things to.

• 1:21:37Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  Which I'm sure I've done all the time too, but it's so.

• 1:21:41Liv Albert?

  I mean, yeah, it's hard because you you you do end up taking it in from all of these sources, even if you are reading the ancient sources like. It's still like we're just existing in the 21st century where so much has become seemingly like canon, quote unquote, you know, in whatever way. And and it's it's easy sometimes to be like or to forget or just like overlook the fact that like, oh, wait, that's not actually from the ancient world at all.

• 1:22:03Speaker 01

  Hmm. I think for me, that's so much of what's happening on Arachne's tapestry. I think Arachne's tapestry is a whole other mess. In that like so much is going on there and there are so many ways to read it, a bit like what we're saying with um with like Ifis, there's so many ways to read it. But to me, it's so notable how every single, nearly every single story on there is either not the version we have elsewhere. Or really different to the version we have elsewhere. Um, or deliberately picks up on the less common way that story is told. But it seems to me that that's just a consistent catalogue of of Arachne saying not only what's going on with gender and the gods and the immortal women and what leads to vices.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  But also, let me show you all of these untold stories, all these like paths the Mesmophosies could have gone down and told you all these stories that. You know, we don't get a story of Asteria in the Mesmophosies, even though she turns into an island, that's so peaked Mesmophosies vibes, she turns into an island. We don't get that except for like this brief reference in Arachne's tapestry.

• 1:23:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  And even there, it's the wrong way around because she, I mean, it on Arachne's tapestry. Um, we have Jupiter turns into an eagle and assaults her. Every other version of that myth tells you that she turns into a quail and runs away from Jupiter.

• 1:23:18Liv Albert?

  And this is a hysteria, you're saying, right?

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:20Liv Albert?

  That's, yeah, that's really.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  We could go through like Arachne's actually line by line. Almost every story does this. Where it's not the version you expect, or it's slightly different to the version you expect, or it's just this like messing with it. And I think it's just this explosion of like. If the Mesmophosies had an extra 20 books, what could be like?

• 1:23:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and it's almost like this kind of acknowledgement that Ovid was like, I did the stories the way I wanted to in the Met, but here are the other versions.

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  And I know the other versions, like, and I can fully tell them if I wanted to. And that's so many of the stories, when you really get deep into them, have that. Like, a little acknowledgement of the other version of the story, just hiding behind it.

• 1:24:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:01Speaker 01

  Which is is beautiful. When I show this to students, you know, we sell this like. This like this man, how dare he?

• 1:24:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  Um.

• 1:24:09Liv Albert?

  I mean, oh, man. I I think I think that a lot, just generally.

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:13Liv Albert?

  Like, everything about him.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  Good and bad.

• 1:24:15Liv Albert?

  There's so many contradictions. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, very good and bad. Like, I'm very torn about how I feel about it.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:22Liv Albert?

  In an enjoyable way. Um, to to kind of like link it back up to Iphis because of.

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, sorry.

• 1:24:28Liv Albert?

  I could talk about everything forever.

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  I'm not very off topic there.

• 1:24:31Liv Albert?

  Oh, I love I love a good off topic, absolutely. And I've literally, like, I could, I could keep you for hours talking about arachne. Um, but I will not. Um, but maybe we'll talk about the future. Um, but the, I would love, I meant to ask this earlier. I would love to know if you have any thoughts on why it is that it's Isis who changes him?

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Sure. So. There's like. A more obvious and a less obvious answer, I think. I think. The more obvious answer is hidden in the description of the parade of Egyptian gods who turn up at the beginning of the myth.

• 1:25:10Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  So when, so right at the beginning of the myth, just after, um, Iphis's mother, Telefusa, has fallen pregnant and has realized. Ah, what if it's a girl? If it's a girl, I'm going to be screwed. She has this dream in which a load of different Egyptian gods and goddesses come to her.

• 1:25:27Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  And, um. It's it's all the usual suspects, you know, all the kind of, it's beautiful, there. And then you get Isis and you get Osiris. And Osiris and Isis are kind of partnered here, as they often are in mythology. Um, and Isis has very prominently these two gleaming horns that are superphallic and look like wits. And Osiris, very particularly, is described there, as often, as being the god who is always looking for his penis. Because of the story that, you know, his body gets chopped up and it's like, missing. But Ovi doesn't have to mention the fact that Osiris is looking for his penis and is missing his penis.

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  Or that Isis is this goddess with penis horns.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  And I do think that's like your mythical hint as a reader. This is gonna be a story about characters whose genitalia doesn't necessarily match up to the characters, their genders.

• 1:26:27Liv Albert?

  Interesting.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  But you know, we have the goddess that the, for all intents and purposes, female-bodied person, although she's mostly cow-bodied. Um, but you know, female cow-bodied person who is got extra appendages. And then this male-bodied god who's lacking his appendages.

• 1:26:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  So that, that to me seems like a really good reason as to why it's Isis.

• 1:26:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  Another, so the other one, I guess generally is that, cause it's, I think I mentioned earlier in the, if we have Antoninus Liberius correctly recording Nicander's version from Heteria Eumana. Um,

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  then it's, it's the goddess Leto, the toner there. So it's not, it's not Isis at all.

• 1:27:17Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  I think the other reason why it's Isis there has to do with what Isis is doing in the Metamorphoses more generally.

• 1:27:27Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  Which is that she's the character Io who turns up right at the beginning and Ovid wants to draw connection. You know, there's this tradition um that the Greeks like to bring about, that Herodotus, I think, is the first one to mention. That when Io has been turned into a cow, after being assaulted by Jupes, she was gonna wander all around the world. And eventually turns into the goddess Isis when she reaches Egypt.

• 1:27:50Liv Albert?

  Yep. It's their way of being like, we are a little bit older than the Egyptians, okay, guys?

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  We actually have this, this woman who did all of the colonialism, cause she wandered everywhere, made it all Greek.

• 1:28:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And then she, cause then she gave birth to babies who then went on to found the Peloponnese. And so here we are, like, yeah. Yeah.

• 1:28:11Speaker 01

  But he of it deliberately draws connections between Isis in book nine and Io in book two and um one. Um as if to kind of make you remember that that's a character who's already turned up. Now Io doesn't have that much weird stuff going on with gender, but she does have weird things going on with her body and a certain dysphoria about her body. It's beautiful scene in book two where Io looks into a river. We're into a lake, think puddle or something. And that's the first time that she realizes that she's been turned into a cow.

• 1:28:43Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  And you get that bit where she tries to speak and she can't speak. Um and and there's a do you remember Eidolon, the the kind of lovely online feminist classics journal that lasted for half five and five minutes?

• 1:28:57Liv Albert?

  It closed before I really got into the world of academia through this. It was too bad, but yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  There was a great article in there, but this is fully from memory. So if I've got this person's name wrong, I'm so sorry. I think my son called Sasha Barrish or Barrish. Um which was talking about comparing the Io and the Isis story.

• 1:29:15Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  As with the the Io story and the Ifis story.

• 1:29:18Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  And saying that like for their experiences, they didn't identify, and I I I'm so sorry, I cannot remember what flavour of trans Sasha Barrish was. But they were saying that they didn't identify with the Ifis story, the story of dysphoria, but the Io story, they absolutely do. This moment of looking in the mirror and seeing a body that's not the body you think should be there.

• 1:29:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  And that disconnect. Now, all of that to say, I do wonder if there is something really subtle about having Isis, the goddess who in her own life, her own period of experience, had a bodily disconnect. And the obit is explicitly told that she had a bodily disconnect. And she turns up here with her kind of penis like horns that aren't quite befitting of this female goddess. And all of that connects to the very scene that Ifis will have when he stands there and says, what is my body? I don't understand this. How do I make this work? How do I love this woman? That's maybe really tinfoil hatty. But it seems to me, if you're gonna choose a goddess to do that, she's a really good pick.

• 1:30:25Liv Albert?

  Well, and she is quite a unique pick. Like, I don't know if he, does he set it in Egypt? Or I think he just kind of is vague about where it's happening, right?

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  The story of Isis, especially in Crete.

• 1:30:35Liv Albert?

  Okay, yeah. So we've got that like kind of southern connection.

• 1:30:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:39Liv Albert?

  But, yeah, like, it's intentional. I mean, obviously, Isis also by the time of Ovid, like, just for the listeners, like, Isis was a fairly large goddess in the more classical world of Greco-Roman everything, but still, it's a very, like, still, you're choosing a, like, historically Egyptian god and aligning them with other, like, Egyptian gods that didn't become as popular and...

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  And Ovid goes, that was a way to make her, like, Egyptian, that story, by including all these other ones, and they've got instruments that are rattling, and he goes, that was a way to make this an Egyptian scene. If you want me to get even more tin for Hattie briefly.

• 1:31:11Liv Albert?

  Do you have time? I have time.

• 1:31:13Speaker 01

  I always have time for tin for hats.

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  The story of Biblist that's just happened

• 1:31:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  has involved, so the story of Biblist goes straight into the story of Isis. And they're connected into one of those Biblist ends by turning into a fountain. And Ovid says, "That's a really weird thing." Crete's famous for really weird things. For example, "Do you know about the story of Isis?" So they're deliberately connected to that very tenuous line of weird shit happens.

• 1:31:43Liv Albert?

  That's so funny, because, like, Crete is known for very weird things, but, like, not Isis.

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  Not Isis. No, she's not, uh, similarly with Crete, because Ovid mostly makes the story up.

• 1:31:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  And she, yeah, she's, she's Cretan, or he's Cretan, or they're Cretan in the, in the McCandless version, because that happens to Heistus. Heistus.

• 1:32:00Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  A Phystos. Mixing my Latin, my Greek, whether they're Phystos, so...

• 1:32:06Liv Albert?

  So fair. I can't imagine dealing with both. I only know the disc, so...

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That's what I, that's what I went to, was like, the disc, the disc.

• 1:32:13Liv Albert?

  The disc, yeah.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  So that's also on Crete. But Biblis has been on this long journey, this like ridiculously kind of incomprehensibly long journey after, so to recap the story again, she tries to sleep with her brother, he says no, she keeps trying to sleep with her brother, he runs away, she gets sad, she runs away. And there presumably, um, the story takes place in the west coast, if I've got my directions right, I'm really awkward, yeah, the west coast of Turkey, right?

• 1:32:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's what I was thinking too.

• 1:32:47Speaker 01

  Uh, like area, that kind of area. Um, and she ends up by the end of her story, like in the Levant. So she is on this massive big journey across what we now call Turkey and down into what we now call the Levant, I think ends up probably somewhere like that in Syria.

• 1:33:04Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  Um, which is obviously an incomprehensibly long journey for someone to run while crying the entire time.

• 1:33:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah, connected with Io though.

• 1:33:11Speaker 01

  But connected directly with the route that Io goes.

• 1:33:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:15Speaker 01

  That's my tinfoil hat connection.

• 1:33:17Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  Is the, it's the.

• 1:33:18Liv Albert?

  Well, clearly, I mean, I'm on the same page.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So, you know.

• 1:33:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  It's a one size fit all tinfoil hat. Um, but yeah, maybe there's this, I mean, it's the sort of thing that Ovid would do to trace that same route that Io goes, just before he brings Io back on stage and reminds you, look, I did Io in book two, I'm doing Io now as Isis in book nine, it's the same, maybe.

• 1:33:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it, it certainly seems at the very least that he was like, hey, this is a connection I could make, you know, like even if he's not making some big depth thing about it, like, he's like, hmm, yeah, you know, like, I mean, I, I wonder if there's something, this feels like it would be not necessarily kind to the story of this in I am the, but like, I wonder if there's some kind of connection in that look Biblis didn't get the man she loved.

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  No, I think that that is totally fair though.

• 1:34:07Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  Because book nine, like.

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  Does have these weird, like, bad love stories that don't quite go right. And that puts it on into book ten, right, which is the story of, between you get the Song of Orpheus, who does all these stories of loves that go wrong. And one of those sort of mirror it directly fits on the story of Biblis in book nine. So that connection is totally there.

• 1:34:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:29Speaker 01

  In between those two stories. Um, particularly with

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  Iphis being like the only happy one in the Met. And that's what, you know, every article actually say, it's the only happy one. You see anyone's explicitly happy at least.

• 1:34:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I mean, it's one of the only explicitly happy love stories in all of classical mythology.

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:48Liv Albert?

  Like, I, I put out a call, like, I just tweeted out, like, a call, it was around Valentine's Day, and I was like, can anyone think of a love story in Greek mythology that does have a happy ending? And a lot of people reference that, if it's an anthean, I was like, Roman, I don't got it.

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:04Liv Albert?

  I, so, I mean, they're really like, happiness is relative.

• 1:35:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think there is something weird going on with Biblis fails at love and Iphis succeeds at love because they're different love objects and how they go about them. The whole purpose of the Biblis story revolves around how communication is key. And how doing communication right is key, because Biblis first writes a letter to her brother.

• 1:35:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  And that obviously doesn't go too well, because if you get a letter that says, dear brother, I'd like to do the nasty nasty with you, you're kind of not really feeling up to it. Um. But afterwards, oh, there's this huge speech where she goes, oh, I clearly spoke to him wrong, like, my communication was bad. Maybe if I'd chosen a different day, or if I'd spoken to him face to face rather than sending a letter. And so that story all revolves around, yeah, incest is bad, but particularly communication is important.

• 1:36:02Liv Albert?

  Right. If you could have communicated your incest request a little bit better, things might have gone differently.

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  But then, Iphis doesn't communicate. Like, we never hear Aempe speak. We only get Iphis' side of the story. And there is this, you know, in many ways, it's kind of the other way around. It's not a story of incest, it's a story of gender confusion. It's not a story in which communication happens but fails, or communication doesn't happen and succeeds. It's not a story in which a woman, well, it is also, it's a vivid story also, this is a story in which a potentially quote unquote woman tries to exercise masculine desire in a different way. Bibbith tries to exercise masculine desire by being a woman, by chasing her brother. Iphis tries to exercise masculine desire by being a man and successfully wins her, his

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  lover. So there is this kind of paralleling of those two stories that Ovid sets up in the way he connects them on that little hinge of weird shit be happening in Crete.

• 1:36:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah. That's really, yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, in a place where the woman had sex with a bull, I mean, you know.

• 1:37:08Speaker 01

  And that's what Iphis says, right?

• 1:37:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  This is the land where a woman had sex with a bull. And I can't have sex with that.

• 1:37:15Liv Albert?

  She could find love. Why can't I?

• 1:37:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:37:20Liv Albert?

  Oh, and that's why I do, does it to like, pull it back to that, because I think we've talked a lot about it as a trans reading, which I think is equally important. But I do also still like the idea of it being a reading of two women who loved each other, but were not in a world where they were permitted to be together, and this was their way of being together. Because, yeah, like, that, that, I just remember that moment, that, like, kind of, I mean, you have to really suspend disbelief of like, okay, yeah, pass by, like, she was able to love her bull, and like, you know, why can't I? And so I think, yeah, it was, it was kind of, it obviously, like, again, like we were talking about with other things, like, nothing about any of this should be read as like, an ideal story of weirdness in the ancient world, because that just, it's not the way this works. But what it is, is

• 1:38:03Liv Albert?

  evidence for these, like, the acknowledgement of something beyond, yeah, the, the standard binary, and people who lived outside of it, and the ways in which they might have conceptualized that ability, you know?

• 1:38:15Speaker 01

  Have you ever read Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy?

• 1:38:19Liv Albert?

  No.

• 1:38:19Speaker 01

  Right, it's about a hundred pages long and it is, it's the only reception of the I've been told about this.

• 1:38:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  And the thing I love most about that, I really enjoyed it as well. The thing I love most about it is that it does not settle on the genders of those protagonists at all. So what we nominally have is a lesbian couple who meet at a time in one of theirs life and then they get together and they go and be co-warriors together, which is great. Um, but the, a second person in the lesbian couple, the one who I guess is, is Iphis in this story. Or maybe even like the story, it's not clear. Um, it's called Robin Goodfellow. So there's a lot of masculinization in that name. And then they go around, and it's been some years since I've read this, but they go around when they're doing their eco-terrorism, writing little notes.

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  That say, we are the messenger girls, we are the messenger boys, and they alternate between being the messenger girls and the messenger boys. So even in that retelling, just thousand and six, I think, there's deliberate like, I'm not going to settle on what their genders are because it doesn't actually matter. It's a story of queer love and queer reading. It doesn't matter where they fit on that spectrum.

• 1:39:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Huh. Oh, that's really interesting. Also, I love that it kind of links back, like I'm going to link it back to the two thousand and six of it all. And be like, oh, that's nice. There was like a good also form of.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  Actual bisexuality as well.

• 1:39:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Here we go. The most, the reasonable and well-accepted version of bisexuality. And then the absolutely bizarre, nonsensical way of using the word.

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:39:59Liv Albert?

  It does remind me of bi-weekly, how it's like, which one? Is it every two weeks, twice a week?

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  As someone who can't count and can't do time, that is like the bait of I exist, both of those exist.

• 1:40:10Liv Albert?

  Uh, yeah, no, same. As somebody who releases their episodes twice a week and has ADHD and just generally is like, I don't know. I don't even remember. I think that I know that at some point I had to set it up in Apple and I think, I think they put in brackets like, this is what we mean. And I was like, great. I don't remember if it's bi-weekly or semi-weekly, but here we are.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  We'll take it. Whatever it is, we're running with it.

• 1:40:36Liv Albert?

  Oh my gosh, this has been so much fun. Um, I love that we talked about so many more characters, just like so much of the Met. No, no, no, I like truly know I'm saying this with all honesty. Like, one of the things that I love about talking to people is when they, we get on these tangents, because like, I can talk about almost any mythological character, and I love to. So like, if we can connect to more, I mean, especially in the Met, because like, I'm slowly having more and more conversations about it. Thankfully, people keep being like, hey, I studied it, want to talk? And I was like, I do.

• 1:41:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:08Liv Albert?

  Um, but yeah, like, it's, it's such a fascinating text that I've read in so many different forms over so many years, but having these insights from people who study it and know the Latin and everything, uh, it's just, it's so, it's such a joy. So thank you so much.

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. It's been lovely to talk about it.

• 1:41:23Liv Albert?

  Oh, I'm, I'm, I'm thrilled we finally made this work. This was like a year in the making. I was literally like, I'm pretty sure, at least I was explicit. Often I'm just like, have to ghost people by accident because I have a bad brain. Um, but at the very least, I think this time I was like, no, no, we're gonna come back for next year's Pride. It's gonna be great.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  Pride Month is not cancelled.

• 1:41:43Liv Albert?

  No, I'm like hell bent on always having Pride content in June, despite having kind of exhausted the Met.

• 1:41:50Speaker 01

  What's out there, yeah.

• 1:41:52Liv Albert?

  There's minimal, and most of it involves somebody dying, a tragic death.

• 1:41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:57Liv Albert?

  Here we are, you know, but not, not if it's in Miami, so.

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  That one's lovely.

• 1:42:01Liv Albert?

  Uh, what a joy. Um, is there anything you want to share with my listeners about reading more from you or following anything? You don't have to, but here's your opportunity.

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  I'm on Twitter if you want to follow me. I sometimes tweet about mythology and Latin stuff, mostly tweet about like modern Greek poetry and geisha, but that's okay too.

• 1:42:20Liv Albert?

  I mean, a lot, I think my listeners would equally like that, so here we are.

• 1:42:23Speaker 01

  So I'm at Joe Watstein, J O E W A T S T E I N, Frankenstein on the end. Um, and if you really want to read any of my scholarship, it's less dry than me in person. It's more dry than me in person, um, but you can shoot for my email.

• 1:42:40Liv Albert?

  You're very not dry.

• 1:42:43Speaker 01

  You'll be able to do your mind.

• 1:42:45Liv Albert?

  Wonderful. I'll link to your Twitter and everything in the episode's description.

• 1:42:49Speaker 01

  Oh, but quick note, do make sure if you do that it's Joel Watson, because otherwise the kind of

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  alt-righty Paul Joseph Watson, who I share half my names with, unfortunately comes up. So like, put Joel Watson or Watson Classics, because otherwise you'll get some content that is not fun and is not Joe Watson approved.

• 1:43:06Liv Albert?

  I appreciate that warning. I didn't make the connection because it's just the Joe, and that's, yeah, I bet you live with that in a very awful way a lot of the time, yeah.

• 1:43:17Liv Albert?

  Well, on that light note, thank you so much again for doing this. This was really, really fun.

• 1:43:39Liv Albert?

  Ah, nerds. Thank you as always for listening. That episode was long, in the greatest way, so I will keep this outro short and sweet. Let's talk about Myths Baby was written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Smith is the Hermes to my Olympians, my assistant producer. Laura Smith is the audio engineer and production assistant. The podcast is part of the iHeart Podcast Network. Listen on Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. And actually, check out the Spotify playlist featuring all of the episodes I have done over, I imagine, seven full years of trying to feature queer and just generally queer stories from the ancient world. There's a Spotify playlist

• 1:44:22Liv Albert?

  linked in the episode's description for everything I've ever done, if you want to hear it all. Thank you all so much as always. What a joy. I love conversation episodes. I am Liv and I love this shit.

• 1:44:48Speaker 02

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