Conversations: Sing, Muse, of a Woman... Mythica, Penelope's Bones, w/ Emily Hauser

Once again Liv is joined by the wonderful Emily Hauser, this time for the episode that started it all, a conversation about Mythica (Penelope's Bones in the US and Canada), a look at the women of Homer and through them, women of the Bronze Age. Find Mythica or Penelope's Bones wherever you get books (ideally, not Amazon). 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 CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Liv Albert?

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

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• 1:52Liv Albert?

  Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and I am your host, Liv, here with another very exciting conversation episode. And yes, it's with a guest who I've had on fairly recently, because it turns out, it turns out there's just like so much to talk about when it comes to women in the ancient world. We just had to figure out where the hell to start looking. Today's episode is with returning guest, like I said, Emily Hauser. Emily and I spoke one time for the podcast and then just wanted to keep chatting about this stuff. We have so much fun. We have so much in common and we just, this is a great time. We recorded this episode a few months back now.

• 2:37Liv Albert?

  We've just been kind of bouncing all over the place, but it's coming out now because Emily's new book, Mythica, as it's called in the UK, or Penelope's Bones, as it's called in the US, is now out in the UK. I think it comes out in June in the US. Don't quote me on it, but it's like soon enough. And this book, I don't even know quite how to synopsize it in this like really succinct way, but essentially it is an examination of the women of the Homeric epics, specifically these women of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and looking at them through very real women of both the ancient world and the modern one.

• 3:20Liv Albert?

  Really, really interesting, but just really focusing on these stories of very real women and, and kind of tying them in with these Homeric epics. I'm so excited about this book. I imagine you are too, so we will just jump straight into this. Oh, it's almost like I could talk about women in Homer for like literally ever, ever, ever.

• 4:00Liv Albert?

  Conversations, Sing Muse of a Woman. Mythica, Penelope's Bones with Emily Hauser.

• 4:24Liv Albert?

  I mean, Mikael and I were both so excited for this, so specifically, I think you and I could talk about just women in the ancient world forever, and we will, I know, but specifically Mythica and/or Penelope's Bones, which is such a great title. I just want to hear everything. Firstly, though, like, why? How did you get into wanting to look at these women so specifically, like, and in this way?

• 4:46Speaker 04

  Oh, well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm equally excited to be here and, and just, yeah, chat about the book and everything, Women of Greek Myth. It's, it's always so much fun. So how did I know I wanted to, to look at these women? I mean, this has gone back such a long time, this interest and kind of quest for the women, not just behind Greek myth, but quite specifically behind the epics of Homer. And I think there are a couple of reasons for that. I think it really started, or maybe kicked off is maybe the better way of saying it, when I was in undergrad. And so I was at Cambridge,

• 5:28Speaker 04

  and I was choosing my undergraduate dissertation and what I was going to write about. And I just got really drawn to the way that I had always been told that the Iliad in particular, so I was really focusing on the Iliad, was this story that was just about men, and just about war, and just about blood and gore and glory, and that it was like this kind of flat poem. And it really troubled me, because that was never how I had felt about it. I had always been interested in the women, and the more I read it, the more the women came forward from the background. So I felt like I needed to do something to respond to that. And I guess everything I have done since then has basically been a series of

• 6:11Speaker 04

  responses to that in different ways. So, you know, first, my novels, where I, the first one in particular, For the Most Beautiful, was really kind of angling at that same question of, of how do we recover the women of the Iliad, and, and tells the story of Bruceus and Chrysaeus. And I guess now I'm doing it in nonfiction, and saying, how can we use the tools of history and archaeology and DNA to recover these women and put them back in the place where I think they need to be?

• 6:41Liv Albert?

  I, I mean, I love all of that, but so specifically, I know that, that idea of the Iliad so well. Mikael and I talk about this all the time. Just this idea that the Iliad, that people present the Iliad as being about the glory of war and little else. And it's like, what Iliad do you read when that is what you get? Because I don't see that in many ways, like it's not about the glory of war at all. But also on top of that, like specifically, I think in, in Homer, the women really do stand out in a way that they often don't in the rest of Greek myth. And I think they have been so ignored, even though they are so in there in a way.

• 7:18Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 7:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah, we should be talking about them all the time because they're such a rare example we have of these mythical women who like, were pretty awesome and generally have like pretty great stories. I mean, whether or not the, the, what happens in the stories to them is great is another question, but like they have, they have character in a way that is, feels so unique.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  Absolutely. No, that's, that's such a, a good way of putting it. And I think for me, that's exactly why women in Homer are so interesting because I often kind of try and articulate it as this kind of paradox around women, that on the one hand in Homer, women are incredibly powerful. In fact, they're actually central to the epics. If you think about the Iliad and the way that the Iliad is set up, right? It's telling a bit of the Trojan War. Well, the Trojan War happens because of Helen. Um, the Trojan, the, the, sorry, Helen gets taken away from Sparta by Paris because of the judgment of three goddesses. Helen then gets to Troy and the Iliad begins because of Bruceus and Chrysius, these two enslaved women,

• 8:23Speaker 04

  who then Achilles and Agamemnon fight about. It's like on every single layer of the narrative, you get the three goddesses, you get Helen, you get Bruceus and Chrysius. So they are the engines of the narrative. But the paradox is that the poem manages to.

• 8:40Speaker 04

  Encapsulate that power, use it for its own energy and then marginalize the women. And it gives us as interpreters so much power because we can say, look, these women are important and they really are. We're not making that up. Um, but we, it's our job to reclaim them from the place that they have been pushed into.

• 9:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, that's so, that's so well said. And as, as you were describing, you know, each of them in the Iliad, all I could think was, was the women who serve such similar purposes in the Odyssey, because like the Odyssey too is, you know, everyone's like, oh, it's about Odysseus's journey home, but like all the women are like the catalyst in, in that as well, in like every way, which I'd never quite thought about. Like I feel you could say the exact same thing you just described, but like in the Odyssey.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  You could. And, and exactly, I guess, like I often start with the Iliad because it is that kind of prototypical epic of masculinity. Um, and because obviously it's typically seen, whether that's right or not, as like the first of the two epics. So, you know, it, it is originary and it is, um, normative in a lot of ways in which the Odyssey, I think, isn't, and it can play with that. But then at exactly the same time, I actually think that the Odyssey in some ways does this even more. Um, and one of the reasons I, I really often do focus on the Odyssey for this is because of its opening line.

• 10:08Speaker 04

  Right. Because the Iliad asks the muse, and we haven't even mentioned the muse, but the muse also, she's the one who's beginning the poem. Right. She's the one who's singing the poem and inspiring the poet. But the Odyssey begins, muse, sing to me of a complicated man. That's Emily Wilson's amazing translation. Um, it's perfect. I, I mean, obviously that's not the exact, um, but complicated is her politropos. Um, but the first word in Greek is andra, man. And that is literally the word where we get androcentric from. Like this is the poem that defined androcentrism. Um, and I think it's so interesting that typically when we talk about the Odyssey.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  It tends to be talked about as actually, oh, but look, there were loads of women in there. So actually, like, it's all good. Women are represented. But like, dig down into it and actually, uh, the women are incredibly, um, stereotyped. They are representatives of all the kind of fantasies and fears that men have. And they are, I think it's, it's something that most people don't realize, but in fact, most of the women that are told of in, in Odysseus's travels, Calypso, Circe, Nausicaä, the sirens, they are told of in Odysseus's voice. So when we hear about them, we are not just hearing about like women characters. We're hearing about Odysseus's take on women characters in a poem by a man.

• 11:33Speaker 04

  Like, there are double layers of men's voices here and we need to excavate the women from them. Yeah.

• 11:38Liv Albert?

  And a man that we've been very explicitly told not to trust too.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 11:43Liv Albert?

  Like, Odysseus, you don't know what he's saying. You don't know, you know, what to believe and not to believe. And that's the interesting thing about the poem, but it absolutely affects these women so specifically.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that's such an interesting point that actually he tends, at least in kind of the relation of his travels, they tend to be taken at face value. This is what happened. That, you know, Odysseus was on his travels and he went to Circe, but it's like, well, actually all of that is being told by an incredibly unreliable narrator. So it makes us, it makes us question, um, the, yeah, the mechanisms through which women get transmitted to us. Which I think is really important, but the Odyssey maybe does that a little bit more subtly than the Iliad does. Yeah.

• 12:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah. I, it, man, this is all so interesting. I'm trying to piece apart like what, what to go to next. But I mean, yeah, to, to go with the Iliad, like, so you wanted to, you just broke, sorry, now I'm, don't even know how to phrase anything. I'm just too excited.

• 12:43Speaker 04

  I love it. I love it. Excitement for Homer is, is what we're here for.

• 12:47Liv Albert?

  I just love it all. And it's just, I'm getting reminded too, because when Michaela was here in person, which basically has never happened with us before, other than in Greece. But we were looking through both the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek, like just being nerds. And so I had it so fresh in my head that the first word was man, which I had never really connected before. So I was like, you know, I'm just, I'm ready to go with all of this. I love it.

• 13:09Speaker 04

  Amazing. You've done your prep work.

• 13:12Liv Albert?

  I mean, my life is the prep work, I think.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  Oh, for sure.

• 13:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Um, and so you went back to the muses, talk about the muses, like, and again, I'm phrasing this so poorly, but to just start at the beginning, I guess, with the muses, like, did you look at, I think your introduction is, is a new muse or something, right? So like, can you tell me about starting with the muses or what they, yeah?

• 13:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So basically, the introduction to Mythica or Penelope's Bones, as it's gonna be, um, stateside.

• 13:43Liv Albert?

  Such a good title.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, I, I am really psyched about it. And in a way, I'm just really glad that that one gets to get used as well, because then we get, we get both of them. Um, but it basically begins with what I call a new invocation to the muse, because the invocations, which is basically that kind of call on the muse for inspiration, and it's what the poet traditionally does in the ancient world in order to kind of ask for inspiration and for any kind of creative activity, any kind of craft, any art that the poet is, is gonna be doing, you call on the muses, who are the goddesses of song, the goddesses of, of poetry, dance, theater, all those kinds of things. And I kind of wanted to make us think

• 14:27Speaker 04

  about the fact that, um, these are women who are standing at the head of this tale, and yet they are having to tell the stories of men, by men. Um, they are literally kind of being channeled through the poet, and they are losing their voices entirely. And I kind of thought, like, how would the muse feel sitting up there on Mount Helicon, which is where the muses were? And yet another poet is saying, hey, muse, sing to me about a man, please. And she's like, oh, you know, really, again? And I just was like, what if we changed that invocation around? And instead, we said, muse, tell me about a woman.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  One word change, but such a powerful shift, because now the muse is not losing her voice and being channeled into a men's tradition, but she is an ally who is on our side in recovering the stories of women. And, and I feel like she would be very much behind that, I hope.

• 15:27Liv Albert?

  I, I would certainly assume so, yeah. No, that's the, how it. I remain, I think I have brain fog lately. I apologize. My mind is off.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  It's the new year. We're still recovering from the holidays.

• 15:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's it's been a messy time. But no, because when when you were mentioning the muse earlier, I just kept thinking back to our conversation that we had about, you know, the how women became poets. Because I it really stuck with me the way you the way you described it in that in that time that the that the muses really are working through the men, you know, which I conceptually I've always registered, but just the way that it's like their voices don't get to be heard and the women don't get to be the poets. They are just the the hidden inspiration, you know, it's like behind every great man is a great woman. And it's like, yeah, she should be in front, though. Like, yeah, why is she always behind? And so

• 16:24Speaker 04

  Do you know, do you want me to give you another example? Because there's another example that I find really interesting. Because in ancient Greece in particular, but it continues into Rome, but it starts in Greece. There's a real parallelism between poetry and prophecy. So Apollo is the god of both. And poets and prophets, they often kind of compare themselves to each other as like purveyors of truth. And they kind of have the inspiration of the knowledge of the gods. But what's super interesting from a gender perspective is that the oracle in Delphi in particular was female. And she was said to be possessed by a male god, Apollo. So we've got to kind of switch in gender here from like the female muse who is inspiring the male poet, but the male poet takes all the credit.

• 17:10Speaker 04

  But what happens when the when the gender roles are reversed? Well, when it's reversed, the female oracle is inspired. She's possessed by the god. Interesting that she's possessed, right? It definitely has kind of connotations of kind of like the possession of her body. And then she utters this kind of frenzied oracle. By the way, she does it in hexameter, which is the the meter that the Homeric bards would have used. So there's an awesome kind of parallel there. But then that gets interpreted by men who are called in the Greek prophetes. That's where we get prophet from, but that means someone who is speaking on behalf of someone else.

• 17:53Speaker 04

  So they literally get overwritten. Their kind of what we're told is kind of gobbledygook gets turned into serious man talk. And that gets conveyed to the public. And I think that's so interesting because for the male poet, that's not necessary. He takes the inspiration of the muse, he runs with it, he takes the credit. The female oracle does the hexameter, does the verse making, but then it gets kind of appropriated by men and turned into their speech. I just think that that's such an interesting kind of case study for that.

• 18:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I it's I've never thought about it in that connection. I've I I've always wanted to focus way too often on or too much on just the idea that, yeah, Apollo is like on the one side, the the oracle just sits in the middle and she doesn't actually get any control or power over the situation. She could say the most brilliantly prophetical thing, but those priests could be like, no, and then just, you know, completely, you know, change anything. And it's, yeah, that's always stuck with me that like the one, the few places where they give women some kind of power, they do not actually. Like, it looks like it on the surface when you break it down. No, no.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. And it's super interesting because there was actually a tradition that Homer actually stole his verses from one of the pithias, from one of the Delphic oracles. Because obviously both hexameter, but like, I love the idea that like, actually, Homer was just an entire plagiarism from a woman. I think that would be really cool.

• 19:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I mean, I have certain like, not, I mean, maybe plagiarism theories, but I have all these theories about like, there was some woman either in or around Euripides, you know, in in a similar way.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:39Liv Albert?

  Where it's just, uh, but I I mean. I don't, the, the problem is I just could be like scream about ancient women and now I'm trying to form them into thoughts. Or remain not coming. But it's so, when it comes to the Bronze Age, like how, you know, what were you doing to link these, you know, women of Homer with the real women? You mentioned DNA earlier too. So I want, I want to hear about all the ways you were looking at making them real.

• 20:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Well, that's the thing. Cause so far, we've just been talking about women of literature and women of myth, right?

• 20:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  And in fact, we've been talking about literature because it is the only way we can talk about myth. Because myth is just this thing that exists in the ether. It's stories that are told orally. And it's only in something like Homer's epics that they exist for us. That's the only way we can hear about them. And what I really wanted to do with Mythica, with Penelope's bones, was to completely switch up the way we talk about these women. And instead of using Homer as the access point, which is what it's always been, it's always been right, like, well, this is what we've got and it's the greatest epic and it's the beginning of Western literature. So this is what we, this is what we're gonna do, right?

• 20:56Speaker 04

  I was like, instead of doing that, what if we took what was actually happening to women, to their real lived experiences? And we use them to interpret Homer?

• 21:10Speaker 04

  So it's very much like what we've been saying about the muse. It's like, instead of the muse being the silent ventriloquist for the poet, what if we actually just listened to what she was saying? This is kind of the analogy, right? Like, so what can we do to dig into real women's actual experiences? And the thing that has been so amazing about writing and researching this book is that it has utterly changed the way I read the ancient texts, the way I read the ancient myths. It's like, because we're starting from actual women. We're not talking about stereotypes anymore. We're not talking about murderous wives or like sex crazed whores. We are just talking about like gritty.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  Women who are living in the real world, trying to get by and doing the things that women do. And that was just incredibly empowering for me.

• 22:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah, okay, I want to know everything about that. So the women, because I noticed that you've broken it down by women, you know, from the epics. And obviously it's called Penelope's Bones, which is, you know, I'm just going to try to say that title as much as possible. Um, so yeah, what like, what were you looking at? How were you breaking it down by these fictional women and connecting it to these real ones? Like, I mean, that might be way too big of a question.

• 22:29Speaker 04

  No, not at all, not at all. Um, because like, as much as I said, I wanted the history to be the starting point in a kind of very obvious way. Homer is also the starting point because like, that is kind of what is collecting these different women together. Um, and so basically I kind of split it up into 16 chapters that take pretty much all of the important women of the Homeric epic. So we've got Helen of Troy, Bruceus, Cassandra, Penelope, you know, all of the, all of these women, Calypso, Cersei, the ones we talked about. But I was thinking about how can we use them to talk about a particular facet or a particular experience or a particular role

• 23:13Speaker 04

  that women would have played in Bronze Age history. And so there's this recognizability of the names. So that's kind of like the hook. We've got the story, we've got the myth, we know, we think we know what they're about. And then instead we're like, well, actually I'm going to tell you about how Calypso was a weaver. And that is not what we tend to think about Calypso as. We tend to think about Calypso as the obstacle that stopped Odysseus from getting home, because that's what he tells us. Um, it's also like, incidentally, what he tells Penelope, which, you know, it's quite self-serving. Yeah, exactly. Oh dear, I just had to spend seven years having sex with a beautiful nymph on her island.

• 23:54Liv Albert?

  I had no control over it.

• 23:56Speaker 04

  She just kept me prisoner, um, and, and wanted, and wanted me to be her husband. It was so difficult and she wanted to make me a god and I said, no. And then, oh, and I was just sitting on the shore crying my eyes out for my wife. And yeah, so anyway, I, I was like, okay, let, let's put that Calypso on the side and let's talk about. The the kind of, as I say, gritty, the raw mechanics of what it would be to be a weaver. Because the first time we see Calypso in the Odyssey, we see her weaving. And she's walking backwards and forwards in front of her loom. She's singing, which is always a bad sign in Homeric epic.

• 24:38Speaker 04

  If a woman is weaving and singing, you know that she's trouble because she kind of has a little bit of agency and she's making her own plots, right? And that's that's tricky.

• 24:45Liv Albert?

  Amazing.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  But for me, I was just like, well, actually, like, let's pay attention to that weaving. Let's talk about what it was like for a woman to weave. What things did she have to do? How much time did it take her? How much time in her day did she spend doing this? And once you kind of go through it and you realize that actually this was taking up a colossal amount of women's lives. It was taking up probably about eight to 10 hours of their day. And you think about the fact that, and and no one has noticed this, which I thought was crazy. Odysseus needs to get off her island. What does he need? He needs a boat and the boat has to have a sail. Well, who made that sail? Definitely wasn't Odysseus because he was busy having sex.

• 25:30Speaker 04

  But it was it was Calypso. It was the woman who was doing the weaving. And it's just, I think it's this kind of reorientation that it reinscribes women's work. It reinscribes women's narratives. It changes the way we read men's narratives as well. It's it's just that kind of twisting of everything on an axis that for me just it like opened up the world anew.

• 25:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, and weaving is such a brilliant. I I've always wanted to know more about ancient women weaving because it is like the thing we know they did. You know, and so often that's a rare thing. We don't, we don't often know what they got to do in their daily lives, but we know about weaving. And that's so interesting. I didn't even realize that's how Calypso starts off because of course, that's not the thing that.

• 26:19Speaker 04

  It's not the thing you focus on. Exactly, because all of the, all of the Greek is focused on this vocabulary of restraint and holding back and keeping and imprisonment. And right, the energy of the beginning of the Odyssey is 100% like Athena coming to Zeus and saying like, you have to let Odysseus go. You have to make Calypso let him go. So we're thinking about her as this, as this jailer. And actually, like, if you kind of pay attention to what she's literally, what she's doing, it's very, it's telling a very different story. And yeah, I love that. I love that about weaving because it's also the case that I think weaving, you know, I mean, we can just dig into this because I guess, I guess we just kind of

• 27:01Speaker 04

  um went into this as a, as an example, but um weaving is such a good way into thinking about the ways that women have been systematically ignored. Um particularly in archaeology, because for so many years, male archaeologists were not interested in women's work. And so the kinds of tools that women would have been using were either kind of chucked out or they were just kind of put on the side and not kind of looked at compared to like the kind of shiny bronze weaponry that men are using. Um of course, there's the other thing, which is that weaving very rarely leaves any traces because

• 27:40Speaker 04

  textile degrades and looms are made of wood and distaffs and spindles are made of wood. So it's very convenient that it is invisible. Um and what I think is really amazing about what's happening now with modern archaeology and and modern science is that we can use tool, tools and techniques to recover weaving in a way that just wasn't possible before. Okay, first of all, we're, we're looking for it now, but also we can do things like we can find the kinds of dyes that women were using on it because we can find residues that are left on ancient pots from dye workshops. So we know what they were using. We can find um

• 28:21Speaker 04

  these tiny little remnants that are basically the only thing that we have that's left of that process, which is um a little whirl, a little spindle whirl that that goes on the bottom of the spindle and we can, we start finding those, we start counting them, we start talking about them. But also archaeologists can actually reconstruct them and can make spindles and looms along the pattern of what they were in the ancient world. They can do the spinning and weaving themselves and they can work out how long everything took. So how long exactly did it take to make a sail like Odysseus is? Well, the answer is it would have taken one woman four years.

• 28:56Liv Albert?

  Okay, so really technically speaking, so he was there for seven years.

• 29:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:02Liv Albert?

  And the way, the way you phrased it earlier just made this scream out in my mind of just, you know, okay, because he does just one day, he's like, I want to leave. And then Athena's like, he must be allowed to leave. But presumably, if it was that easy, he could have done it at any point over those seven years.

• 29:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I guess the narrative he tells is that he doesn't have a ship to get away. And it is Calypso who gives him the tools. So she gives him like an ad and an auger, which he needs to kind of bore holes in the wood. And, and she gives him the materials he needs to make a ship, a ship. So, yeah, that's his narrative.

• 29:40Liv Albert?

  Right. Well, and just to connect it to the sail, if it's taking four years, well, then like, she could have been working on it that whole time. And he's been telling the story as if he's been imprisoned with no way out. And it's like, meanwhile, she's sitting in the other room being like, I'm working on it, dude, like, you could help.

• 29:59Speaker 04

  Absolutely. So this is.

• 30:01Liv Albert?

  Work, so he would never.

• 30:02Speaker 04

  Exactly. And he, and he doesn't mention, he just mentions, you know, Calypso came, and she gave me the sail, and she gave me some clothes. And it's like, she 100%, she made them. And that's exactly it. So I was like, instead of us talking about a man being imprisoned on a woman's island, this is actually a story of a woman who is being imprisoned by the demands of a man's labor.

• 30:22Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 30:23Speaker 04

  It's completely the other way around. And it's exactly what you're saying. She's like, I'm working on it. I'm working on it. But like, four years for one woman. And this is, by the way, Calypso, right? She's in the middle of the ocean. She's not kind of connected to trade. She's not getting kind of deliveries of wool. She's not got a massive stock of sheep like you see at the kind of real historical palaces. So this is, for me, this is a viable way of reading this passage completely differently. And it is the history of women's weaving that kind of suggests that. And, and discoveries that are being made now.

• 30:53Liv Albert?

  That's so interesting.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:55Liv Albert?

  You you also reminded me of I'm I I think this was would have been in our the conversation we had with Dr. Kim Kim Shelton back

• 31:03Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:04Liv Albert?

  in my when we were covering the Bronze Age last year and about Mycenae because I think she also phrased it that the whip the results of the women's work was invisible like you were saying, you know, because these things it's just the nature of of the the things they used and how they just quite literally broke down over time and and therefore don't exist. And I think but I think she phrased it in a similar way that that also stood out to me in this that I've never quite considered it that way that, you know, it's just that it their work was invisible because the stuff that they did didn't last, but not because it wasn't, you know, equally important to everything that the men were doing. They needed all of that stuff. It just doesn't survive for us today. And then on top of that, you know, it's men interpreting most of the other stuff. And so we get this

• 31:46Liv Albert?

  complete loss or this idea that women did nothing or that they didn't leave a mark or that, you know, and meanwhile, of course, the the other thing I think this occurred to me in that conversation as well is like, well, the the mark is also the the children, but they don't get they're not left over as women's work or they're not seen as women's work, right? They're the, you know, the sons of their fathers. And

• 32:08Speaker 04

  Well, actually, there is such a good example of this because Kim is like absolutely right. But there is one point at which women's weaving becomes visible in the Bronze Age, and that is in the Linear B tablets. And so these are tablets that were kind of baked hard during the fires that kind of raged across Greece around 1200 B.C. and kind of led to the destruction of the Bronze Age. But and and when they were discovered, everyone was really excited. They were like, Oh, my God, another epic poem, you know, it's gonna it's gonna kind of break our our literary boundaries and we're gonna get something new. What it actually ended up being was these bureaucratic lists, as your listeners from the Bronze Age series will know, of like, you know, how many ox we oxen we have

• 32:51Speaker 04

  and, you know, how many bricks are we using to build this and like really boring stuff. And it was basically stuff that was like the equivalent of a pile of paper waiting to go into the office shredder and it just accidentally got preserved. But what's amazing about that is that it preserves the people who weren't meant to be preserved, and that's the women, and that's the enslaved. And that is that is, to me, so beautiful about it, because actually, like, we spent so much time talking about Homer, but like, Homer got preserved for a reason, like male, we talked about this. Intentional. Exactly. We talked about this when we talked about how how women became poets, that like you can see, if you look at Homer and you look at Sappho,

• 33:31Speaker 04

  Sappho wrote nine books of poetry and we have like, I I don't even know how many lines, only, well, we only have one complete fragment. Yeah. You know, uh, one complete poem and then the rest of it is just fragments. Um, so tiny fragments. So, you know, the, the male tradition exists for a reason. And what's amazing about accidental preservations like this is that they give us a window into, into this, into this world. And in one of the palaces in particular in Pelos, um, which is like, uh, the Peloponnese of, of Greece, um, and which amazingly in Homer is associated with the king Nester. So we get this kind of amazing confluence between myth and, and reality coming in. And it's one of the reasons why history can be such a great way into the Homeric epics.

• 34:15Speaker 04

  But we get real lists of real women who, um, are likely enslaved and they are described on the tablets very kind of perfunctorily, just sort of like, um, forty women, um, from Halicarnassos, um, and they are good at spinning, uh, seven children, uh, four boys, three girls. And they've been given this many figs and this many, this amount of wheat to eat. So they're being given rations and it's a record of their rations. Wow. It's, it's, and it, but what's amazing is that it sounds really dry and really boring, but, but I kind of try and unravel for you in the book, how, actually how exciting this is because it tells us what these women were doing, how they were being co-opted into this palace industry

• 35:00Speaker 04

  of, of textile making. But it also demonstrates that the women are doing childcare because it is only the women who are listed with their children. And, and this is another aspect of weaving that, that we haven't touched on yet, but like, why is it women who are doing spinning and weaving? Well, it's because it's something you can do at home. It's something that is not dangerous to children and it is easily interrupted. Now, I have a three-year-old and a four-year-old and I know about being interrupted. So you know, you have to have something that you can put down, you can, you can get up, you can come back, you could do food preparation at the same time. So this is part of that invisible labor that we also don't talk about. This, this kind of double uncounted labor that women are doing.

• 35:43Speaker 04

  And, and these tablets kind of give us that amazing insight into weaving and childcare at the same time.

• 35:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, I remember that was the other enormous thing I learned in that the, the episode I did with Kim was, was just what is in the Linear B too, because we do have so many more records of like goddesses and they're, they, they like really almost take precedence over the men, but of course we don't have stories from that time. So what would they look like? And yeah, wow, it's just, I absolutely love, love all of that. And now I'm really interested in how you went about Helen.

• 36:33Liv Albert?

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• 37:14Liv Albert?

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• 39:38Liv Albert?

  Really interested in how you went about Helen's. Like, so what angle does Helen have?

• 39:43Speaker 04

  Yes. Oh, my gosh. Well, Helen, because, you know, as I said, I'm thinking about each woman as a role. And for

• 39:51Liv Albert?

  That's why I want to know them all now.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. Well, just just look at the table of contents because they're all there.

• 39:58Liv Albert?

  Well, that's the thing, and it was just their names. And so now I'm like, well, we're gonna

• 40:01Speaker 04

  I know. So, so basically, for some of them, I wanted to really overturn expectations. So like Calypso as the weaver, that is not how you associate her. And I wanted that to be something that was interesting. For Helen, on the other hand, I felt that I wanted to actually do the most obvious thing, the thing that everyone talks about. And then I wanted to kind of detonate it. And that was her face. And I, because Helen's face is, is the topic of, you know, so much literature, so much art, so much male desire, fantasy,

• 40:40Speaker 04

  imagining. And I was like, what can we do to trace the longings of men that have generated this face? And then what can we do to move all of that to one side? And actually say, what would a woman at this time have actually have looked like? Like, let's actually talk about, again, real women. Let's not just talk about fantasies, but let's find them. Let's find them. And so what I basically do is I talk about particularly Heinrich Schliemann, who is a crazy, bonkers character of history, dynamited Troy because he wanted to get down to the lair

• 41:23Speaker 04

  that he thought was actual Troy, but it wasn't. And in so doing, he actually destroyed pretty much all of Homer's Troy. So thanks for that, Heinrich. But in the process, he also discovered, too low down, because he had, you know, blasted through the whole thing, he discovered a treasure trove of jewelry. Amongst which were like kind of this collection of diadems and earrings and stuff. And he immediately was like, this is the jewels of Helen. He dressed his wife up in it and he took a photo of her. And it basically went kind of like the 19th century equivalent of viral. Like everyone saw this photo of Schliemann's wife. Um, dressed up as Helen. It's, it's like so bizarre, but to me, it's such a great example of how

• 42:08Speaker 04

  these are the kinds of stories we need to peel back, right? The, the layers and layers of imagining and fantasy that are there. So how do we resist this? Well, for me, it's um particularly about using counter narratives, counter archaeological techniques and kind of new advances that we are doing in science and DNA to kind of resist these fantasies. So one of the things that I really love, I found this um amazing skeleton from the Bronze Age that was buried in Mycenae. Um, and Mycenae, of course, you know, legendary home of King Agamemnon, also the site of a Bronze Age palace. Um, so again, one of these really great history and myth confluences.

• 42:53Speaker 04

  And there was a woman buried uh in what we call sho- uh grave circle B. Um, and she is buried next to a man. And it had always been assumed that a woman is buried next to a man. Oh, of course, she's his wife, right? Because why would she belong there other than because she is his wife?

• 43:11Liv Albert?

  Yes, women are only defined by the men around them.

• 43:14Speaker 04

  Yes, tha- thank you. Thanks, Liv, for clarifying. Exactly, exactly.

• 43:18Liv Albert?

  We are not real people otherwise.

• 43:20Speaker 04

  Oh, I mean, yeah, exactly.

• 43:22Liv Albert?

  There is a six month old male kitten in my house, the only man around, and I guess that I'm just his, which is probably true.

• 43:30Speaker 04

  I mean, he definitely believes that. I'm sorry, like to burst your bubble, but.

• 43:33Liv Albert?

  He's a Greek man too. I mean, I'm not saying anything about that, but.

• 43:37Speaker 04

  Oh my god, that's amazing. Um, but anyway, they basically, um, a group of scientists did DNA research, um, DNA analysis of these two seventeenth, sixteenth century BCE skeletons. And they discovered that they were in fact brother and sister. And that is really interesting because it demonstrates that actually she is there not because she is married into a family, but because she is there in her own right, because she was born into what was obviously a wealthy family, judging from all of the kind of gold and paraphernalia around them. But this is where the counter narratives from archaeology come in because when they were excavated, initially, there was this beautiful gold, uh, sorry, not gold, actually, electrum face mask that was discovered near those bodies.

• 44:22Speaker 04

  And it was instantly assigned to the man. But if you look at where it was placed, it actually seems like it was a lot more likely to be the woman's. And so this gives us that first glimpse of like, okay, well, this is a face mask, right? So this is, it's, it's quite a crude representation, but it is a representation of a face. So could we be looking at a real face of a real woman from the age of heroes that Homer was later imagining? But what's great is that actually, science can take you one step further because you can do what, what facial reconstruction is, what forensic archaeologists now do, which is to build up, basically take the skeleton, model it, build up layers of clay on the face and you can actually see what that person would have looked like.

• 45:08Speaker 04

  So they did that. It looks amazing. You are looking back at, at this real life woman from, uh, Mycenae, just like Clytemnestra, right? Clytemnestra was at Mycenae. So it's a real kind of connection. But I was like, well, for Mythica, for Penelope's bones, let's go one step further. Let's use AI and let's try and actually turn this face into a kind of real living face. And that for me was like, this is how far we can push back against Schliemann's narrative and against Homer's narrative that Helen is, is a face. We can just say, well, actually, look, here is a real woman. Here is what she would have looked like. She was thirty four when she died. We know how tall she was.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  We, we know a lot about her from her DNA and let's kind of put her back in the front instead of this mythologized. Fantasized erotic woman. Let's take a woman who is like a real woman of royal micini and give her a face instead.

• 46:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, I love that. It just makes me think of that, that Helen painting. I don't know what, if it's, it's not from antiquity. Um, but that one where she's like, like a ridiculously pale redhead.

• 46:21Speaker 04

  Yes. I think you're thinking of either, um, Gabriel Rossetti or Evelyn Morgan.

• 46:27Liv Albert?

  I think it's Rossetti. Yeah, yeah. It's, and I just think like, oh, every time I, anytime, I mean, I do want to imagine these women from back then, but then I just think of these like, just ridiculously white Western interpretations of them and I'm so afraid. But the idea of like seeing somebody physically from there, whose body was there is just so beautiful.

• 46:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, and grounded. It's like really grounded. Exactly. Cause I think with Helen, one of the problems I always had with her is that she feels like the opposite of grounded because everything about her is fantasy and image and dream. And of course, you know, Euripides' stand, so you'll, you know, know all about the Adolon and the, the, you know, the ghost Helen. But like that image of Helen as a ghost who didn't actually go to Troy and she was, she was just a phantom. I think that encapsulates her depiction in myth so well. And so this is why I was like, it has to be archaeology. It has to be like history, real bones, you know, right? Penelope's bones, real women that is gonna resist that.

• 47:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. I, I'm slightly distracted by the Schliemann reference you made because I think we,

• 47:42Liv Albert?

  do you also know about his wife? Like, cause.

• 47:44Speaker 04

  Well, I know how he chose her. Like, is that what you're talking about?

• 47:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I feel like the listeners need to know.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  We do. It's, we do. I mean, you know, it's whichever one of us gets cursed with telling this ridiculously bad story.

• 47:55Liv Albert?

  I, I only know about it from reading. I'm trying to look around and find it. I forget what it's called exactly. But there's this old novel by Irving Stone and he, I think it's called like, it, it's something about, it's called The Greek Treasure.

• 48:09Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 48:10Liv Albert?

  And I know that he, he like fictionalized it, but worked off the reality. So that's all I know. But yeah, that he went to a Greek island. I forget which one.

• 48:17Speaker 04

  Oh, I don't know about the Greek island. I just know that he went to his tutor.

• 48:22Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:23Speaker 04

  So he had a Greek tutor and he asked his Greek tutor, by the way, by this point, he's already divorced. So he's looking for a second, he's looking for a second wife. And he asks for a woman in the Homeric spirit. And she has to be able to speak Greek. And he gets shown three pictures, which by the way, I kind of think of as like a perverted judgment of Paris. I don't know.

• 48:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 48:50Speaker 04

  But like he chooses Sophia, who becomes Sophia Schliemann. And yeah, they get married and they basically kind of act out this like weird Homeric fantasy. Because they, their children get, do you know the names of their children?

• 49:04Liv Albert?

  Oh, I did.

• 49:05Speaker 04

  Do you wanna guess?

• 49:06Liv Albert?

  Oh, I mean, Agamemnon.

• 49:08Speaker 04

  Agamemnon, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Andromache.

• 49:12Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 49:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:14Liv Albert?

  All right.

• 49:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so, you know, it's just, it's.

• 49:16Liv Albert?

  It's a choice with Andromache.

• 49:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, you gotta know it's not gonna end well, right? I mean, Agamemnon too. Maybe they were like fishing around, like, let's find someone who had a happy ending. No, no, no happy endings in Greek myth. Okay.

• 49:30Liv Albert?

  I think the wife was also though, like sixteen and the whole.

• 49:33Speaker 04

  She was really young.

• 49:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah, the Greek island, I think, is coming in and maybe I'm misremembering something too, or I don't know the whole thing. But that the tutor, I think, just was like, oh, well, this is like my little cousin who's been living on this Greek island who's like sixteen. Do you want her? Like, it was very like that.

• 49:49Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh.

• 49:50Liv Albert?

  Utterly horrifying.

• 49:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then, you know, then you get him like dressing her up, but you also get. Yeah, you also get this weirdness that he is clearly using her as kind of an accessory in this kind of role play cosplay that he is doing of Homer, because he, when he tells people the story of how he discovered the jewels, he says that Sophia was there and he says that she actually helped him to get things out of the trench. And he makes it this kind of romantic husband and wife discovery. We know that she wasn't even there. She wasn't even in Turkey at the time. She was back in Athens. So like, this is, this is also like this kind of weird warping of the truth that he does.

• 50:34Speaker 04

  And Sophia is very much part of that. So she's very much an analogy, I think, for Helen, right? Like, we've got the Judgment of Paris, we've got the kind of choosing of the wife, we've got the wife who then goes to Troy, but isn't it Troy? There are a lot of similarities.

• 50:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, it's so dark.

• 50:51Speaker 04

  Hmm, I know. It is, it is dark. It is dark. But I think that what's so weird about it is, and I, I just taught this to my students last, um, last term. And telling this story, it's like, there's this equal part megalomania about it. But also kind of, you have to acknowledge that if Schliemann hadn't done all of this crazy, we wouldn't have the historical site of Troy. So, well, maybe we would have, actually. Maybe we would, because we should also mention, which, you know, is coming way too late in this. But like, actually, someone else found it first. And Schliemann took all the credit. And so Frank Calvert is the guy who had actually identified the site.

• 51:34Speaker 04

  His brother owned the land and basically Schliemann just did a really dirty job and just, just kind of took all the credit.

• 51:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah, and blew it to shreds.

• 51:41Speaker 04

  And blew it to shreds in the meantime. Yeah.

• 51:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah, the man loved dynamite.

• 51:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, so maybe let's not give him too much credit.

• 51:47Liv Albert?

  Oh, gosh, no, that's the thing. The, the moral of the story is, he was garbage. We have some stuff because he did some things with his garbage behavior.

• 51:55Speaker 04

  Or maybe in spite of his garbage behavior.

• 52:00Liv Albert?

  It's, Michaela and I, we, we saw, when she was here, um, we went to the Royal Ontario Museum, which is Canada's sort of best example of some things from antiquity. And they have a replica of the Mask of Agamemnon. Michaela just looks at it and she's like, that's full of shit, or whatever you said. It was just great. But it was very like, yeah, I'm making you say it.

• 52:20Speaker 06

  Oh, so I, because there's like the theories that the Mask of Agamemnon is a fake, right?

• 52:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 52:27Speaker 06

  Um, and my personal one is that it looks way too much like Schliemann. And I think Schliemann just made it himself and was like, look, it's Agamemnon, but it looks weirdly like me. Ha, ha, ha.

• 52:39Speaker 04

  I love that. I've got some papier-mâché, I've got some gold foil, and I've got my face. I'm ready.

• 52:46Liv Albert?

  The thing is, it's one of those theories that like, especially after we've just discussed how Schliemann handled all of this. It's like, no, I mean, that that doesn't sound out of the realm of possibility at all.

• 52:57Speaker 04

  It tracks. It tracks. Yeah. No, I like this theory. I like it very much.

• 53:03Liv Albert?

  Anyway, yeah, it's not about Schliemann. Thank fuck. But it's it's so interesting to think about those aspects because obviously he's like now so tied to those sites. I am curious, I would love to hear your take on all of the women, but obviously I won't make you go through them all. That's what the book is for. But are there, I mean, maybe Clytemnestra? How did you go about Clytemnestra's story? And then if we need to talk about Penelope, at least.

• 53:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. So Clytemnestra doesn't come in because although obviously she is mentioned on the sidelines in the Odyssey, I decided she feels more like a tragic character.

• 53:44Liv Albert?

  And that's so true. She's not really in the Odyssey as soon as I say that. I'm like, she's in the story, but she's not. Yeah.

• 53:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, she's she's, I mean, she's she's recounted. So like Agamemnon is is talking about her and you get like comparisons, but like, I felt that like I wanted to keep to the the genre, right? And and because Clytemnestra is so huge in in tragedy, it was like, let's let's put her as a tragic villain and we'll deal with that. We'll deal with that.

• 54:09Liv Albert?

  Well, that's why her name came to me. And then as soon as you say it, I realized, no, her the poor reference to her is literally that, like, you're lucky Penelope is great. Look at my wife. She killed me, which, you know,

• 54:19Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 54:20Liv Albert?

  You deserve to dig a mammon.

• 54:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

• 54:23Liv Albert?

  Well, then the woman that she's compared to, who is, of course, I mean, the most fascinating character in the Odyssey, Penelope. Obviously, you couldn't go for weaving. So now I'd love to hear.

• 54:34Speaker 04

  Right. Exactly. So weaving was already taken with Calypso. And obviously, like, that is what Penelope is synonymous with, with the weaving trick and and the weaving and unweaving. So for Penelope, I have always been fascinated, and I've actually written some research on this, about how Penelope is or isn't the end game of the Odyssey. Because in so many ways, and this kind of goes right back to what we said at the start about this, this Homeric paradox around women. We start with women, we start with the Muse and with Helen and with Bruceus and Chrysaeus, and we end with Penelope. Like, how do you know that you're home? It's Penelope.

• 55:16Speaker 04

  Uh, Penelope is in many ways synonymous for Odysseus with Ithaca. And as much as we were kind of poking fun at him and saying, you know, when he is with Calypso and he's, he's saying he's longing to go home, he says he's longing to go back to Ithaca and to Penelope. And for him, those two things are very much tied up to each other. Um, I, I'm not necessarily saying that this is kind of like, as it has often been interpreted, a kind of like, straight up romance. I don't think it's that. But Penelope is locked in to what it means to be king of Ithaca. And that's where he wants to get back to. And so when we're thinking about this kind of upending of narratives and we're saying, look, we're not going to talk about the Odyssey as Odysseus' story anymore.

• 56:01Speaker 04

  But we're going to say that actually, we're going to notice the fact that it is Penelope's recognition of Odysseus that is the final jigsaw puzzle that, that is needed, not just for Odysseus to return home, but also for the poem to get towards its closure. To me, that was really interesting. And so that kind of opened the way to start thinking about the search for Ithaca. Because, you know, we've been talking a lot about Troy. Um, and before the end of the 19th century, before Schliemann and Calvert came upon the historical site of Troy, it was kind of widely accepted and thought that this was just a myth, just a legend, didn't have a basis in historical reality.

• 56:44Speaker 04

  And, and actually, a lot of the kind of Oxford and Cambridge dones at the time that Schliemann was excavating were actually quite frustrated with what he was doing because it was almost kind of tearing down Homer from this grand poetic pedestal. Oh. Right? So that's really interesting. But, but with Ithaca, we've got quite a different situation. And it's just this really awesome detective story, basically. Um, so. The issue with Ithaca is that in some ways it's kind of hiding in plain sight. And and I see a lot of analogies to Penelope here because Penelope is also someone who is there but not there. She's often like got her veil on, she's often kind of upstairs in her rooms, she's she's in the palace, but she's not of it, sort of.

• 57:28Speaker 04

  Um, because there is a modern island called Ithaki. Um, it's in the Ionian Sea, it's to the west of Greece. Um, there's a couple of islands around there, we've got uh Icchithi, we've got uh Ithaki, we've got uh Zakinthos and we've got um Cephalonia.

• 57:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah, right off the coast.

• 57:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 57:46Liv Albert?

  Really wanna go.

• 57:47Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh, okay, so side note here, I went to Cephalonia in twenty fourteen and it is stunning.

• 57:54Liv Albert?

  Are you going to tell me about the the Odyssey theme park that's on?

• 57:59Speaker 04

  Not the not the Odyssey theme park, but I've heard of this.

• 58:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah, my friend Kosi went last year and it was very frustrating because we had would just been in Athens together and then she flew off to Cephalonia to meet her boyfriend. And then she sent, starts sending me these videos and I said, I showed Michaela to you because they're, it's unhinged, have you seen it?

• 58:16Speaker 04

  I've seen, I've seen her photos on Instagram.

• 58:18Liv Albert?

  Oh, great, yeah, yeah, yeah. As long as it's all through Kosi, anyway, it's incredible. Um, but yeah, I I wanna go to Cephalonia very bad, so I'm glad to hear that that's.

• 58:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I would say maybe like, don't go for the theme park.

• 58:29Liv Albert?

  No, no. I just need to experience it.

• 58:34Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly, but no, it is such, it's such an amazing, amazing island. But I was basically kind of on that trail, on the trail of Odysseus's Ithaca. Because the issue that Homerists have had for for centuries um is that Homer describes four islands. Um, and we only have three. Um, and he gives the islands the names of Ithaca, Same, Dulikion and Zakinthos. So we've got Zakinthos, we've got Ithaca, but Dulikion and Same, like what what are we gonna do with those?

• 59:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 59:08Speaker 04

  So all kinds of different people have come up with all kinds of different propositions. Um, William Gladstone, the the Victorian Prime Minister of Britain, got involved at one point and decided he was gonna get in on the game. Because like, apparently that's just what you do.

• 59:22Liv Albert?

  Well, the British own the rights to ancient Greece, don't you know that?

• 59:26Speaker 04

  Another self-evident fact, Liv.

• 59:28Liv Albert?

  I think they've made it very clear.

• 59:32Speaker 04

  Oh my god, this is a total tangent, but it reminds me of this amazing Eddie Izzard sketch, where he's like, talking about British imperialism and he's like, I've got a flag. Do you all have a flag? And I just like imagine that that's exactly what Gladstone was like, I've got a flag for Ithaca.

• 59:49Speaker 04

  Anyway, digression. But basically, in the early 2000s, this British businessman called Robert Bittelstone came up with this idea that actually Homer was right and that the three islands we have were actually initially split up into four. And that the western peninsula of Cephalonia, which is nowadays called Peliki, was actually potentially initially cut off from Cephalonia by the sea. That there was a channel through there. And this is is super interesting because again, it's just like, okay, actually, we are able now to, what Bittelstone did was he teamed up with a famous geologist

• 1:00:33Speaker 04

  who kind of looked at the valley that he was proposing and showed that actually there was in fact, a massive landslide, that all of that that material that was in the valley had landslept down into the valley. They can take boreholes down into the ground and they found marine microfossils in there. So like, you know, they've proven that it was under the sea at some point. A different team of scientists have actually dated some tsunamis that were around there and they've given five different dates. And I think two or three of them are post-homeric. So, you know, we've got a lot of good evidence and Cephalonia is like, if anywhere is going to be a candidate for this, it's going to be Cephalonia because it stands basically at the edge of a massive seismic fault.

• 1:01:18Speaker 04

  And, you know, it's had loads of huge earthquakes. And in fact, this is kind of what I was going to say earlier when I visited in 2014, an earthquake had just happened. And I actually felt an aftershock of the earthquake while I was there. And, um, you know, so it was really, it really felt like the island was kind of like, yes, this is, this is a reality, you know? I was walking past beaches and you could see bits of the land that had slipped down from the latest earthquake. You could see massive boulders like the size of cars. So, so this is, this is not beyond the realm of possibility. And what I also love about this, though, is not just that it's an awesome detective story, but also that, like, actually, we don't know yet. This is still happening.

• 1:02:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:02Speaker 04

  Like, there is still a team there that is doing all of this work. They haven't even started looking for doing excavations because they are very sensibly waiting until this sea channel can be like a hundred percent confirmed, that the date is right. But this is Homeric excavations, Homeric discoveries that are happening right now, like.

• 1:02:21Liv Albert?

  I didn't know about any of that. I'm so excited.

• 1:02:23Speaker 04

  Oh, my goodness. So, yeah, I, that's why I was like, don't go for the theme park, go for this stuff.

• 1:02:28Liv Albert?

  Well, no, and I wanted to go to Cephalonia because it's beautiful and because it's close to Ithaca. So, but now, oh my god, now I really need to go.

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, um, you know, potentially, potentially it is Ithaca. And, and what's so exciting about what Bittlestone's theory enables is that Homer gives several different clues about Ithaca. So it's not just the four islands. He also says that it lies low. Um, the word in Greek is thamala, which comes from the word thon, which means earth. So it's, it's lying low to ground level, basically. And he says it's furthest to the dusk, uh, which basically means it's furthest to the west.

• 1:03:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:06Speaker 04

  Of the islands. And the issue is that modern Ithaca is actually furthest to the east. But the peninsula of Cephalonia is the furthest to the west. So if that had been an island, that is the furthest one out. So, yeah, it's just, it's just mega cool. And it just, it shows that, like, this search, like the search for Penelope, the search for Ithaca, these searches are still ongoing. And it's, it's like, it's modern discoveries. It's the kind of work that that team is doing and that this book is doing. It's uncovering things now. This isn't an old story. This is a story for now.

• 1:03:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I love that so much.

• 1:03:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's so cool.

• 1:03:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I mean, it was already on my like, big list of just places I need to see in Greece. But now it's on my like, okay, no, now because of the Odyssey, which I do love far too much.

• 1:03:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Oh, there's never, there's never too much. I'm wearing Iliad earrings.

• 1:03:59Liv Albert?

  I have noticed them. I love it. Plato's fire.

• 1:04:02Speaker 04

  Plato's fire, absolutely. Shout out. But like, there is no, there is no such thing as too much. I mean, my husband gave these to me for Christmas. And when I say gave them to me, I bought them and told him that he was giving them to me as my Christmas present.

• 1:04:14Liv Albert?

  That's accurate. That's the correct way to do it.

• 1:04:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is what proper like Homeric appreciation amounts to.

• 1:04:21Liv Albert?

  Well, see, I say it's too much because, because I've now, I didn't used to think I love the Odyssey too much, but I do now because of the Christopher Nolan movie announcement.

• 1:04:32Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, yeah, this is big news.

• 1:04:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and I, I feel like I'm the only one so far, or one of the few who think that it is utterly terrible news. Because the idea of Matt Damon playing Odysseus makes me want to gouge my eyes out with Odysseus's own sword. And that's all I'm saying. But I just, now I think I like the Odyssey too much because he's ruining it for me. And if I didn't love it so much, he wouldn't have this control over me.

• 1:05:02Speaker 04

  So you know that before you gouge out your eyes, you do have the option of just not watching it?

• 1:05:06Liv Albert?

  Yes, I do. But the problem is, I've spent the last eight years, um, calling my, calling Odysseus my main man on a hobby podcast that millions of people have listened to. And so I do still have to spend the next year and a half with everyone reminding me over and over again that Matt Damon's playing Odysseus. If, if it wasn't my life, I could at least ignore it.

• 1:05:28Liv Albert?

  Okay, so I'm being intentionally dramatic, but also.

• 1:05:30Speaker 04

  Fair dues.

• 1:05:31Liv Albert?

  I just think, I just think there was so much potential.

• 1:05:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll see, we'll, we'll see, we'll see how it goes. We can keep our fingers crossed, right? And, and also, by the way, let's just say it's not all about Odysseus. So maybe we could just ignore Odysseus and that would be also good.

• 1:05:49Liv Albert?

  The rest of the casting makes much sense either. It's fine.

• 1:05:51Speaker 04

  Well, no, that, this is where I was also going, but like, you know.

• 1:05:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Speaker 04

  What I'm saying is we don't have to love Odysseus.

• 1:05:59Liv Albert?

  No, no. And he's my problematic babe. It's fine. I love him because I love the Odyssey, not because I think he's a great guy.

• 1:06:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. And actually, complex heroes and complex heroines, that's what we're here for, right? Like, I mean, we don't, we don't want a kind of straight up goody goody, like, no one's gonna keep coming back for thousands of years for that.

• 1:06:17Liv Albert?

  No, no, exactly, exactly. Just sing of a complicated man.

• 1:06:21Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Complications is what we like, but also not.

• 1:06:25Liv Albert?

  Really, I want to know the women.

• 1:06:26Speaker 04

  The women.

• 1:06:27Liv Albert?

  Please, please, please. Yeah. So, speaking of, um, what, I would love to know about any of the others that you can share without us, you know, going into the night, um, which is already is nighttime for you, but what are your favorite beyond any of the ladies we've spoken about already?

• 1:06:45Speaker 04

  Um, gosh, a favorite. Oh.

• 1:06:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah, a favorite is such a hard word.

• 1:06:49Speaker 04

  It's such a hard word. Yeah.

• 1:06:50Liv Albert?

  Um, or one that has, you want to talk about or all of them?

• 1:06:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, all of them. I mean, like, that's the thing. It's like, you said stay up all night, but like, I mean, I would do that. Like, that's, that's, that's no challenge. Like.

• 1:07:01Liv Albert?

  Even as I said it, I'm like, I know the three of us would be fine.

• 1:07:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. So let's start on chapter two and then, you know, at midnight, we'll move to chapter three, but no. I mean, I guess the, the one that really personally resonates, and I, I don't know if for other readers, this is going to resonate as much, but I, as I mentioned, I have young children and I wrote this kind of shortly after giving birth. And I, for one of the chapters on Thetis, Achilles' mother.

• 1:07:36Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 1:07:37Speaker 04

  I focus on motherhood. And wow. I mean, for me, this is the most powerful chapter. It's actually interesting because, um, you know, I've had, I've had a couple of people read it and, and people have also said, um, this is the one that really kind of kicks at them. And I think.

• 1:07:57Speaker 04

  The reason, I mean, there are two reasons. One reason is is Homer and and what Thetis does in Homer. And we could talk about that, but I think we should first talk about the real women because like that's where this whole book and this whole project kind of takes its lead. Like, like, let's not start just with Homer's narratives, but with real women. And what I discovered through looking at, again, all of these kind of amazing um work that have has been done on um the archaeology of women and uh DNA studies is that the outcomes for women and infants in the late Bronze Age world was just utterly terrifying.

• 1:08:39Speaker 04

  I I like, I actually can't use another word than that. It is, it is, um, I still kind of get goosebumps when I, when I read this chapter or when I think about it. Um, basically, you can look at some of the statistics. I mean, the, the, the kind of basic thing of it is that you get all over the late Bronze Age world in Greece and and outside Greece as well. You get what are called intramural burials. And that comes from the Latin phrase intra moros, which means within the walls. So normally you would have uh bodies buried in cemeteries outside the city. That that's kind of typical burial practice. But but you see these intramural burials, particularly for children.

• 1:09:22Speaker 04

  And what happens is that the parents are burying their children literally under the floors of their homes because they don't wanna say goodbye. And um it is this extraordinary um testimony to the fact that I think it is so easy to think or to say that in the past, because women lost a lot of children, it didn't hurt as much. And I think that this is just ridiculous. And it it shows that this was.

• 1:09:52Speaker 04

  I I kind of call it in the book like like almost a literal scar because you know, these are, these are little pockmarks across the Greek landscape of infant burials. And we cannot ignore the grief that they that they represent. So you get like, like burials, like cemeteries where you get like, I can't remember the exact statistics, but it's like, I think forty percent of the burials are children under the age of one or something like that, in in one of, in one of them. So what you can do is you can basically look at both the children and at the skeletons

• 1:10:31Speaker 04

  of the mothers and you can see how the mothers are really struggling, their bodies are really struggling. So the the average age that they are giving birth is nineteen, which is under the optimal childbearing age of twenty to twenty five. You can see that they are malnourished and what's really interesting is this goes back to the Lydia B tablets. You get evidence in the Lydia B tablets that women are getting less food than men and they're not getting access to meat in the way that men are. Fuck off, sorry, that's my only, like I. Totally live, but wait for it, wait for it, because it's just, it's just, wait for how this happens, because what happens is if you're malnourished in youth, then

• 1:11:14Speaker 04

  your birth canal doesn't develop appropriately. So your pelvis basically flattens and there's something called pelvic ratio index, which measures how open your birth canal is. And at this cemetery, where I said, like, so many of the infants had died young, the mothers had a pelvic ratio index that was massively lowered compared to nowadays. So what's happening is you are malnourished, you're getting pregnant young, you are probably having, dealing with disease. We can see that in teeth, right? We can see evidence of disease. You're struggling through your pregnancy, you're then trying to give birth through

• 1:11:56Speaker 04

  a birth canal that because you've been malnourished, isn't ready for it. And then if the baby does survive, you are likely, or most likely, the baby's not going to survive, you are likely then, because you're not breastfeeding, to get pregnant again. Because you don't have the contraceptive protection of breastfeeding. And you will just go through this cycle of malnourishment, bad pregnancy, bad birth, potential infant death, and it goes and it goes and it goes and it goes. And this is what that cemetery of all of those infants is showing. That that it's not, it's not normal to have that many. And and you know, this is, this is incredibly tough stuff.

• 1:12:39Speaker 04

  But I think it must have been at the top of women's minds. And we know it was at the top of women's minds because because there are sanctuaries where they are trying to appease and make offerings to goddesses of birth. There is the cave of the birth goddess Elathwea, who was the goddess of birth pains. Yeah. Her cave is actually physically in Crete. I've been to it. It's amazing. You can visit it. And what's awesome about this is that it was actually so famous, it is mentioned in the Odyssey. Because when Odysseus makes up one of his lies.

• 1:13:13Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:13Speaker 04

  Many, many lies. He's always from Crete. Yeah, he's always from Crete. But he mentions this cave in Crete. Um, and this birth goddess, you know, there are offerings that have been given to her. So women are clearly desperate. And you know, like, having told you that, like, why wouldn't they be? But then, this is kind of the injection that this gives me, because then, let's use that. Let's take the fact that women are losing so many of their children, that that infant mortality is the reality of many mothers' lives. Well, look at Thetis. What does Thetis do? She wants her son not to die, right? And she is an immortal goddess.

• 1:13:52Speaker 04

  She shouldn't be having a mortal son. And we can talk about that, right? Like, she shouldn't have had an immortal son. It's because she got raped.

• 1:14:00Liv Albert?

  And it's because, and she got raped because Zeus didn't want to risk somebody being more powerful than him.

• 1:14:07Speaker 04

  More powerful than him. Exactly right. So it's male anxiety that leads to female rape. That leads to her knowing that she has given birth to a boy who's gonna die. And that wasn't, that wasn't in the cards for her. And I think to me, that like, it utterly changes the narrative of the Iliad. Because then, it's not actually about Achilles' anger at all. Because when Achilles is angry, who does he call out to first? It's Thetis. And she comes up and she says constantly, like, why did I give birth to you? Why are you going to be so short of life? You know, your, your end is coming soon. She even makes up this amazing word for herself, which is, is what's called a hapax legomenon, which is a word that classicists use because they like to confuse other people,

• 1:14:53Speaker 04

  which uh means once spoken. And, and it means something that is only ever used once in the whole of Greek literature. This is the only time this word appears. So it's almost like Thetis invents this word and she calls herself dus aristokai. So it is the worst and the best childbirther.

• 1:15:12Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 1:15:13Speaker 04

  And I'm like, oh, like, does that not resonate with exactly what it is to be a mother? That, that both that, that kind of that utter joy, like it is the best thing in her life, but it is also the thing that is giving her this pain. And if you reread the Iliad, then actually all of this is about Thetis. Because Achilles says, I need to have my glory. I need the Greeks to suffer. And it's Thetis who goes to Zeus and it's her who is the one who tells Zeus what to do. In fact, later on in the epic, someone, I think it's Athena, um, is kind of talking about the fact that Zeus is actually doing all of this because of Thetis. And she calls it the plans of Thetis. So this isn't even Zeus's plan anymore. This is Thetis's plan.

• 1:15:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:54Speaker 04

  And it's Thetis at the end of the Iliad, who when, when, uh, not Odysseus, when Achilles goes back, um, and he's finally, you know, he has killed Hector, his death is gonna happen. And it's her who comes and says, you are gonna die soon. She's already wearing black, she's already mourning him.

• 1:16:09Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:16:09Speaker 04

  And she says, you're gonna die soon. It's, it's happening. And like, to me, that's like, okay, this isn't the glory of a warrior. This is the devastating grief of a mother. It's a completely different story.

• 1:16:25Liv Albert?

  Oh, Thetis is all, every time I hear more about her, I want to learn more about her. And there is so much, I think, that has been kind of ignored until very recently. I know there's been a recent book. But it, yeah, she, she's another, it's such, I mean, as you've been saying this whole time, like, there really are these women, you know, in, in these works that means so much more than I think we've been led to believe for a long time. But Thetis seems to be the one that stands out in the Iliad so much because it really, you feel her feelings and you really understand kind of everything that's going on with her. And I love that,

• 1:17:07Liv Albert?

  you know, when, when she does, and hopefully I'm not misremembering something. It's been a minute since I read the Iliad, but when she does go, you know, and, beg for Zeus's help for Achilles, she, we get that reminder that the reason she's allowed to do this is also because she like saved him from a coup. Which is, you know, the whole level, other level of, of fascinating, just an extra layer.

• 1:17:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:30Liv Albert?

  And that being the only reference we have really to it. It's like, there's just so much going on with her.

• 1:17:36Speaker 04

  Absolutely. No, completely. And it's, it's a coup by the, the giants and the hundred handers, right? So like, it is, it is throwing us back to these original kind of cosmogonic battles that Zeus had to win in order to be the supreme patriarch of Olympus. And it's Thetis, not only who rescued him from that, but who by not having his or Poseidon's son, which as you mentioned, there was that prophecy that, that the son would overthrow him. She's also keeping the cosmogonic patriarchal order. So it's really interesting that it is then her using that kind of leverage to say, well, you do something then for my son.

• 1:18:19Speaker 04

  Right? Um, I just, I feel like it's, it's, it's to me, exactly what a mother would do, right? Like she has, she has suffered and suffered. She's incredibly powerful, but what is she gonna use that credit for? She's gonna use it because her son is hurting and she wants to make that go away. And I just, to me, that's, that is so powerful. And then, then kind of not that in with the tales of these, these real mothers from the late Bronze Age. And you're like, yeah, this is the story we should be telling.

• 1:18:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48Speaker 04

  I mean, I don't know if that's too bleak, because like, obviously, it is very bleak. It is very bleak, but like, we need, we need that. It's, and that's like, it takes me right back to the beginning, like gritty and raw and real, but like, but powerful too. And to me, like, as just as powerful a story as the story of basically a warrior who's gone off in a sulk. Let's be real.

• 1:19:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And I would argue it's a bit more interesting.

• 1:19:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:19:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, and, you know, looking at your list, or I was looking at the, not your list, the table of contents again. Um, and I, I have to now ask about the, the name who follows Fettis, which is Penthesilea.

• 1:19:31Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 1:19:32Liv Albert?

  And I want to know how you worked with that, because she's not really in the Iliad. But she's amazing, and I want to hear everything. And also, the real women behind that, because, because Penthesilea is an Amazon. Please tell me, Amy.

• 1:19:46Speaker 04

  Oh, my goodness. With pleasure, Liz, with pleasure. So, um, Penthesilea is, is awesome. So you're absolutely right that she is not, um, technically in the, the Iliad, um, or in, in the Homeric epics. Um, so the Amazons are mentioned, um, so they are mentioned briefly as like the fact that they once fought with or against Priam. We're not entirely sure. Um, and they are described with an adjective, which in Greek is anti anerai. And you might hear in that anerai, that's the same word as andra, which in its nominative is aner, man. So they are against men, but they're also equivalent to men, right? And I love this about language. I mean, I could kind of go on and on about this, but like, it is so cool that you've got a word

• 1:20:30Speaker 04

  that can mean both women who fight against men, but also women who are the equivalent to as good as men, right? That's really cool. Um, but the reason why Penthesilea is there is because, um, you know, we've been talking about the Iliad and the Odyssey as kind of fixed texts. We've been talking about Homer as if he is a single poet, but.

• 1:20:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah, usually I don't do that. So thank you for getting into it.

• 1:20:54Speaker 04

  What a slip. I mean, we've only been talking for like, what, two hours and we've got to it?

• 1:20:59Liv Albert?

  I certainly hope my listeners are used to it by now. I remind them all the damn time that Homer probably wasn't one guy.

• 1:21:04Speaker 04

  Excellent, excellent, excellent. But yeah, so you know, there is obviously this tradition, which has kind of come out of a lot of research around the kind of oral origins of the of the poems and the fact that they were passed down over the centuries, that they kind of gradually evolved into what we now have as a fixed text. But that text is not as stable as it looks. And actually, it really pays to resist that stability. So it's it's difficult because like, it's quite a difficult thing to do to have a text. You know, we pick up a book, we got a start, we got an end, you know, we know what we're dealing with. But actually, there are loads of different lines that scholars in the Hellenistic

• 1:21:48Speaker 04

  period decided didn't belong. And so they just took them out, whole chunks, whole passages. Someone has decided when you're reading a translation of the Iliad or the Odyssey, someone has decided this is the right text. You know, on what grounds, on what basis? So what's so interesting about this is that the end of the Iliad is always given as, and then they buried horse taming Hector. That is, that is the last line. But there is one manuscript of the Iliad that actually gives another line.

• 1:22:24Liv Albert?

  I'm so excited.

• 1:22:25Speaker 04

  I know, I know. And it says, and then came the daughter of Ares, Penthesilea.

• 1:22:33Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 1:22:34Speaker 04

  And what happens, the idea is that in the ancient world, the Iliad and the Odyssey were not the only epics that were out there. There was this whole cycle of epics around the Trojan War, which we now call the Epic Cycle. But I kind of describe them as like a box set, basically, of kind of poems. So basically, like, your kind of Marvel Universe, you've got Thor, and you've got Captain America, and like, you know, you've got your different kind of installments, and this is exactly the same. And what happens after the Iliad, which is the story of Achilles and Hector, is that we get a new set of heroes coming in. And those heroes are the heroes of a different epic called the Ithiopis. And the

• 1:23:19Speaker 04

  heroes are Penthesilea and Amazon. And Mem, excuse me, and Memnon, um, an Ethiopian. And so Penthesilea is riding in, literally Hector is being burned on his pyre, um, the smoke is going up to heaven. And in comes an Amazon and she is basically his replacement. She is going to kind of take the place of the Prince of Troy, the leader of the Trojans. Um, and to me, that was so interesting. It was like, we, again, it's this whole narrative, the Iliad is only about men, only men fight. But that's not true. In this medieval manuscript, um, it actually says that there was an Amazon who came in and actually she was the one who rescued the Trojans from the point that they were at, at the end of the Iliad.

• 1:24:01Speaker 04

  Um, so it's, it's just so interesting and, and that becomes a whole starting point for thinking about who the Amazons were. Because, you know, in the history of Greece, and I'm sure you have talked about this, a shed load, the Amazons are kind of this uh, antithesis to everything that is Greek and male and organised and civilised and they are barbarian and wild and female. Amazing. Amazing, basically, exactly, exactly. Um, and actually like to talk about a bit of etymology, I don't know if you know this and stop me if you do. But do you know the etymology of Amazon, like why they came to be called Amazons? I don't think so, and I work here. Okay, so this is awesome. So this is a classic kind of male Greek misappropriation. So

• 1:24:44Speaker 04

  we've got evidence from the Naht sagas, which are basically sagas from the Caucasus, um, which are, um, kind of oral traditional tales. And that area around the Black Sea is where, uh, the, the Greeks always said that the Amazons came from. And we've got evidence from these sagas that there was a queen in these traditional tales called Amazan. Oh my god. It sounds like the Greeks heard that word. And they thought, well, that sounds a little bit like in Greek, ah, mazdon. And mazdon in Greek means breast and ah.

• 1:25:21Speaker 04

  You can see, you can see where I'm getting. Yeah. And ah means without. Ah. So then they were like, well, these are clearly the women who cut off one breast in order to, to, to fire an arrow. Which by the way, like, you can absolutely do with two breasts. I, I have done archery and I have managed it with, with two breasts on. Like, literally, even if it was an issue, you can tape them down. Like, it's not like they had to cut them off, it's unhinged. Exactly. But it's so interesting, right, that they were like, okay, let's take this. This sounds like something that we are familiar with.

• 1:25:56Speaker 04

  And they generated this whole myth around these kind of, um, wild, um, horse riding, uh, fighting women who also cut off one breast. What's super interesting, though, is that for a long time, they were talked about in this kind of mythologizing axis, right? That it was like, men civilized Greek on the left and then, well, probably they'd be on the right because that's where the good things go. And then on the left, we would get the Amazons, the kind of wild uncivilized women. And they were only sort of considered as like a sort of philosophical schema.

• 1:26:33Speaker 04

  Um, but, and this is again, one of these amazing resistances of archaeology around the Black Sea, which I mentioned is where the Greeks thought that the historical, where they said that the Amazons were. Um, they had been finding these warrior burials for, for years and they're, they're called kurgans. And, you know, warriors buried off with their horses, with their, with their armor, with their weapons, fine. We know how to deal with this, we're archaeologists, Caesar and men.

• 1:27:02Speaker 04

  Always. Always. If it's buried with a sword, it's a man, all right? It's physically impossible for that to be any other way. Exactly. Um, oh my gosh, well, okay, I'm going to come back to this because I, I have another good one about this, but I'll finish with the Amazons first. So they recently did DNA analysis on these and it turns out that up to thirty four percent of these warrior burials are women.

• 1:27:25Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 1:27:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I know. Shocking, shocking.

• 1:27:31Liv Albert?

  It's almost like they're half the population.

• 1:27:34Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. But also, what is so cool about it is it's it's one of these moments where we can say, okay, myth has distorted, myth has stereotyped and it's created misogyny. But it has also preserved some element of historicity. What we now need to do is say, well, actually, like, how can we read this woman without the kind of layers of misogyny and stereotyping that the Amazons have built up? How can we actually look at these as warrior women who are actually fighting alongside men? So it's not just women, they're not like, not having sex, they're not like casting out their children, all of these things.

• 1:28:11Liv Albert?

  They had to make them, they had to make them unappealing women. They had to make them so different from Greek women, because otherwise, Greek women would be like.

• 1:28:19Speaker 04

  They would all have left.

• 1:28:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah, like, why can't we do things that we want to do? Like, yeah, they had to make them this, like, terrible othering.

• 1:28:27Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:28:27Liv Albert?

  Killing all the men, or like, the lesbian, the Lemni and women, like, they're very smelly, or like, there's something, you know?

• 1:28:36Speaker 04

  Exactly right, exactly.

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• 1:30:29Speaker 04

  But that's, again, it's what history can do. Because when we're looking at that real archaeology, we like, we put the real women in. And what's so cool is that typically it would be easy to argue, and it has been argued, I'm afraid, that like, a man buried with a sword, okay, he's a warrior, it's his weapon. A woman buried with a sword, well, don't worry, it's just ceremonial.

• 1:30:49Liv Albert?

  Naturally.

• 1:30:50Speaker 04

  Right, naturally. But why would she need a ceremonial sword? And but what's cool is with some of these burials, many of them actually, you can find evidence that these were women who died in combat. Because they've got like arrowheads buried in their skull.

• 1:31:03Liv Albert?

  Right, so there's just no way for them to...

• 1:31:04Speaker 04

  You can't, you can't get around that. It's like, maybe they just tripped and fell into the arrow.

• 1:31:12Liv Albert?

  Dino. It was all, they were all pulling a dino, like...

• 1:31:16Speaker 04

  It was dino, it was dino. Isn't that, isn't that amazing? So, but then there's just one other, which is the one I wanted to say about the sword, because this is such a good one. So, again, back in Mycenae now, and this is actually the woman that we were talking about earlier, who I used as kind of the AI facial reconstruction for like a woman who might have been a prototype of Helen. Well, she was also buried with a kind of kit of weapons. And again, as often happens, they were initially assigned in the burial to the man. But when the archaeologist, who was in charge of the excavation, realized that actually they belonged to the woman, the skeleton was sexed and, you know, it was a woman, so,

• 1:31:56Speaker 04

  okay, they, these belong to the woman, he changed his excavation report and he changed the word for sword to macheridion, which in Greek is basically like a penknife.

• 1:32:11Speaker 04

  So it gets reinscribed as what is appropriate for a woman to have. And it's like this tiny little diminutive dagger as opposed to the sword that she actually had.

• 1:32:23Liv Albert?

  I hate that I'm not surprised at all, you know?

• 1:32:27Speaker 04

  I know. This job, this job jokes you.

• 1:32:28Liv Albert?

  Sounds like what happened. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:32:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:32:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's like, you know, every time they, the, the running joke now online, thankfully, it's been made into a joke, but like every time they find, you know, two men in a burial together, they're like, oh, they're great pals, roommates even, or like two women or whatever. You're just like,

• 1:32:46Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:32:47Liv Albert?

  You could just go ahead and accept that, like, maybe things aren't what you want them to be.

• 1:32:52Speaker 04

  Exactly. Exactly.

• 1:32:54Liv Albert?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:32:56Speaker 04

  But that's why, that's why this kind of work is so, is so necessary because, you know, you think, you think that these are facts. You think that the things that you're looking at are kind of handed down from the past, served up on a plate and that's how it is. But actually, when you start looking into it, you kind of open Pandora's jar. And it's like, actually, everything is different from how you thought it was. And that to me was one of the things that was amazing. It's like, you know, everything, it overturns the Homeric epics. You read them completely differently. You're overturning assumptions about archaeology. You're, you're just, you're basically tilting the lens and you're looking at it from a completely different point of view. And that's, I don't know, it, it changes history for me.

• 1:33:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah. And it just, I mean, I feel like that about so many things when it comes to women, particularly in the ancient world that I've learned over the years, because I think that every, I mean, fairly often now, I will read something new and think like, oh, that changes how I see all of this. Like i- in writing my Medusa book, I got to this point where I was like, oh, like Medusa and also actually most of the monsters in Greek myth really seem to just represent like male fear of women who could say no to them or didn't want to fuck them. Like, Ultimately, that's what every monster seems to be is like.

• 1:34:13Speaker 04

  And it's so funny because I don't know if you have this, but I have a sort of resistance in that I'm like, it has to be more complicated than that.

• 1:34:20Liv Albert?

  Yes, because like they cannot be so simple as men just not being able to have sex with a woman they want to.

• 1:34:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, and then making her into a monster, but it's like, no, yeah.

• 1:34:29Liv Albert?

  No, I think that's what it is. Yeah. Yeah. And I did with Medusa too. It's so much darker because then they like utilize her head as like as a shield. And it's like, you know, they, it's just, yeah, it's, it makes it so much more interesting. It's horrifying. And also I love learning about it and will never stop. So, you know, I'm not complaining, but.

• 1:34:49Speaker 04

  But that's the great thing is that it's because you're taking this new lens, you're able to do the kind of magic of taking stories that have had a cultural currency for millennia that means something to so many people. And then you can invest them with a completely new meaning. And that's, that is to me, kind of magical. It's like you're, it's almost a kind of alchemy.

• 1:35:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and I love that I get to tell people all of this stuff and really like change my mind and learn and grow even on the show. And yeah, I, I, the way you were speaking earlier about translations and, and you know, the, the finality of what we think of as the Iliad as compared to the fact that there are, you know, so many different things that could be reconsidered at a moment's notice. But, you know, people often, if they're just coming to, to the, to the epics or Greek myth, or just picking up whatever translation they find or whatever one is, you know, publicized lately. And often people who don't live in this world, like, don't really understand

• 1:35:53Liv Albert?

  just how much a translation can change a text. And I understand that, but like, really, I mean, I think it's so important to remind people and, and really teach that, like, that you could have completely different texts of the same thing, just depending on who's translating it. And, you know, it, it's, yeah, I think it makes it so much more interesting, but also it's just so much more valuable in terms of just understanding the ancient world. I.

• 1:36:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. But I mean, this is, this is why we do what we do. And this is why, like, you know, it's still relevant to be learning these languages because these are not static texts. It's not like we get one translation and we're like, well, that's the translation. Like, we're done now. And they, they are always open to new understandings and new reinterpretations. I'll, I'll just give you one example, which I just really love. Um, because I've been thinking about it for, for Mythica, and I, I talk about it in the book, which is, um, at the beginning of the Odyssey, right? Where Athena comes down from Olympus and she comes to Ithaca and she changes into the guise

• 1:36:58Speaker 04

  of Mentes. Um, and so she moves from being a female goddess to being a man. What does Greek do with that? Because Greek is grammatically gendered. And like, anyone who's listened to our discussion in How Women Became Poets knows that I'm obsessed with grammatical gender. But it's, it's so interesting because when you have a grammatically gendered language, it is having to grapple with concepts around gender and it is having to make those salient in language. So is, is Athena then going to be grammatically female? Or is she going to be grammatically male? Has she changed? And what's really interesting is that Homer, at the point where she has just

• 1:37:38Speaker 04

  changed into a man, Homer has Telemachus coming up to greet her at the front gates of the palace. And he, and we, we are told in the narrator's voice, he addressed min. That's the, the Greek word. And that is a, is a gender neutral pronoun in ancient Greek. So the, the gendered pronoun. Oh, they were always gender neutral pronouns? I know. What a concept. It's cool, isn't it? Right? Yeah. Um, so, yeah. But like, the gendered one would have been auton, um, and, or ton. And that would have, that would have fit. So, but he, he says min, he says them. So it's, it's like he's signaling that there has been a gender change here. Yeah.

• 1:38:21Speaker 04

  And, and I just find that fascinating. And it's like, some translators will, will bring that in, some, some won't. Um, it is that, but that is a choice of translation, um, as to whether you use a gender neutral pronoun there. And that, and it makes a huge difference. Like, some of the older translations, you know, they'll have Telemachus kind of addressing him with like sir or something like that, which is like overly masculinizing Athena in a way that like also isn't there. So it's just like, it makes a huge difference in terms of how we think about, you know, translation, you might not notice, but it is telling you about gender. And it's one of the reasons why Emily Wilson's translations were so important because um, gender is not incidental to the texts. And Emily was was paying attention to that for kind of the first time.

• 1:39:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, I I think about that with, I mean, so many things, but um, I I had a conversation, um, oh god, I'm terrible apparently with names now, but um, I I had a conversation with someone uh, it back earlier last year um, about the the characters in in Ovid's Metamorphoses, it can be read as transgender. And I was really fascinated specifically to to talk about the the translation and the, or rather the, you know, the how the Latin handles it, which is of course, another very gendered language and and the ways that even Ovid played with what it meant to transform genders, you know? And I just think, yeah, it's it's so interesting,

• 1:39:47Liv Albert?

  particularly particularly when you're where you're looking at, I mean Athena of all things, because Athena is like, A- Athena is such a man's goddess.

• 1:39:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:39:57Liv Albert?

  And then even she has to transform into a man in order to speak to a human. And I think that's so interesting, like.

• 1:40:04Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And to have some form of power and entry into the palace.

• 1:40:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah, even though she's Athena, like the most on the man's side goddess.

• 1:40:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:40:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:13Speaker 04

  No, it's it's super, super interesting. And.

• 1:40:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah, you called her shapeshifter in the in the table of contents. I was curious. I'm glad you you very much explained that there.

• 1:40:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, so that that whole chapter is actually about gender fluidity.

• 1:40:25Liv Albert?

  Yes. Oh, my god, amazing.

• 1:40:27Speaker 04

  So it's it's about like how someone like Athena can give us a way into looking at gender fluidity beyond the binary in the Late Bronze Age and just how ridiculously much evidence there is for it. Like, as you're saying, like, oh, shock, shocking, but like. There is so much evidence.

• 1:40:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And even in the ancient world, they understood that there was an in-between that like, humanity possesses the ability to be more than just, you know, two sexes, whatever. Like, it's so, yeah. Oh, it's so interesting.

• 1:40:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it's so great. And it's, it's, again, it's so fun because you can, you can do that. So one of the things, again, because I'm kind of taking that archaeological lens, one of the things you can do is to look at the ways. Because obviously, when we're looking at a burial, and we've kind of touched on this already, like, archaeologists are making very binary calls on it. And in some sense, those are sexing from DNA. Um, and in others, it's associations of gendered objects, right? So this, this person is buried with a mirror and therefore they're a woman. This person is buried with a sword and therefore they're a man, right?

• 1:41:34Liv Albert?

  So like a pen knife.

• 1:41:35Speaker 04

  Oh, no, sorry. It's a pen knife. So it's a woman. Yeah, let's, let's move that back. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:40Speaker 04

  No, exactly. So.

• 1:41:40Liv Albert?

  The blade is the same length either way. Don't get into details, but.

• 1:41:45Speaker 04

  Size matters. Um, but like, it's, um, it's, it's a really great way of saying that actually that binary that is used operationally might be something that we want to actually challenge. And actually, why don't we look at the artifacts that are being used and think about how those are articulating and performing gender in fluid ways as opposed to just like, this is a sword, therefore this is a man, right? Like, actually, what is this? What is this saying? What is this doing?

• 1:42:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:16Speaker 04

  And, and I think that could be super interesting when, you know, combined with someone like Athena, who is, who is doing exactly the same thing, right? When she turns into a man, she takes a spear because that's what men do.

• 1:42:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:26Speaker 04

  You know?

• 1:42:28Liv Albert?

  Which is literally all she's known for. Like, yeah, it's, yeah, no, I, well, it, it is so interesting to, to think about the, the object as, as something that is being used by a human, you know, that, that isn't itself gendered objects. Have no gender. And so why are we to assume someone's gender based on? Yeah, what what they had and rather instead of what what purpose it served or what they did with that thing, you know?

• 1:42:57Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. And what kind of associations it carried and how that can be played with? Because it's just because there is an association doesn't mean it also can't be pushed back against.

• 1:43:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:09Speaker 04

  That could also be really fun and interesting. Yeah.

• 1:43:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just so funny to me hearing certain things of how, I mean, I want to say how things used to be done. But I know that in a lot of cases, they're still being done this way. But just the way we make these assumptions that if you just step back and ask a question, they fall apart completely. Like, why would we a hundred percent assume that if there's a sword, it's a man? Like, give me one piece of logical reasoning that means that that is a hundred percent certain. Like, nothing exists. There is no, there is no explanation to that. So like, did no one ever just step back and be like, why, though?

• 1:43:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43:53Liv Albert?

  Women can physically carry a sword. Women can physically wield a sword. Gender does not define what you physically can do with your hands, like.

• 1:44:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. But I think it's because archaeology has a vested interest in operating uncertainties. It is trying to construct a narrative of a reality that happened. And on the other hand, we've got myth that is operates in uncertainty and flexibility. And I think for me, that was one of the things that was so exciting about bringing them together. Because you almost get a kind of electric shock when the two meet each other. And when you make these two, this uncertain thing and this certain thing meet each other. And you're like, well, actually, we're going to force you to ask the difficult questions, like you're saying,

• 1:44:47Speaker 04

  in a way that actually this might be uncomfortable, it might be uncertain, but actually it's going to get at something really deep. Um, I, and I, I think that can be, that can be powerful. Yeah.

• 1:44:57Liv Albert?

  And isn't it more interesting if it's uncertain, but more accurate?

• 1:45:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:01Liv Albert?

  You know, like, I, I think that's more interesting. I think it's more interesting to consider like a person wielding something if it is not necessary to gender them, which in most cases it's not. You know, and like, a human is a human going to do this human thing, like, huh, it's, yeah.

• 1:45:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, it's just, it's just challenging assumptions, isn't it? And I think that's what it is about being um, someone who is curious about what it is to be a human on the planet. And that, that basically is what you are. If you like history, you're, you're learning what it is to be, to be a human and be part of this kind of crazy adventure, because that's just what it is. It's just a series of crazy adventures that other people have had.

• 1:45:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And I wanna learn about this forever.

• 1:45:42Speaker 04

  And I wanna learn about it, exactly. But like, i- if you're, if you're interested in that, then actually the question is more interesting than the answer. Actually saying, wait a second, this challenges what we always thought we knew. That's exciting. It doesn't bruise your ego. It makes you go, yes, fantastic. Like, tell me more, tell me more. Like, the, the example that I, I talk about in the Athena chapter is this burial of this male warrior from like, the fifteenth century BCE, um, near Pelos in Greece. And he was buried, and I'll use he, because he's sexed male, but I think that he's doing something really interesting with gender performance.

• 1:46:24Speaker 04

  Um, in his burial, but, but he's buried with a lo- alongside other things, a lot of other things, combs. And the, um, when this kind of hit the press, because it was discovered in twenty fourteen, so relatively recently. And when it hit the press, um, the kind of journalistic response to this was like, he was like, very into his looks. One of the journalists said he was a dandy.

• 1:46:49Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God. In twenty fourteen, we're using the word dandy.

• 1:46:53Speaker 04

  I know, I know. I mean, I feel like that should be struck from the dictionary. Um, but like, but the assumptions that are being made even now about like, a man not being able to own a comb without being called a dandy, like. To me, it's just like, we're not just talking about ancient gender assumptions. We're talking, if, if anything, we're talking more about modern gender assumptions.

• 1:47:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that is damaging to modern male.

• 1:47:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:47:18Liv Albert?

  Like, structure. I mean, that, things like that are why masculinity has become so toxic in so many ways.

• 1:47:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:47:24Liv Albert?

  Is because this idea that if there's a comb, you're a dandy, you care too much about your looks. Instead of you just care for your human body.

• 1:47:33Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. And it's like, this is basically the flip side of the penknife, right? This is the man who can't have a comb. So like, it's, we're also, and I think that's just important to say. That's why I said, being a human on a planet, we're, we're talking about humanity. We're like, we're, we're not just talking about women, we're talking about everything. Because this brings men into its fear and, and people of all genders. This is about how we express who we are. And like, yeah, challenging those assumptions that people like tend to make, sadly.

• 1:48:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, and it is, it is, it affects everyone today. Yeah, I mean, if we're going, if, if, if men as a concept are going to become less, uh, toxic. And I'm, I mean, I'm generalizing, but just of the notion of the what, the level, the type of masculinity that is toxic, which is such an issue, like, all of that is stemming from the things they have been told they're not allowed to do because of masculinity. And it's damaging to them i- i- in equal parts, or, or certainly like a hell of a lot. And it's just, it's so fascinating to me that we don't, that we're not in a place to further break those things down. I mean, we're getting, getting a little closer, but it's, yeah, it's just so weird and interesting and bizarre and.

• 1:48:46Speaker 04

  But it happens at the same time because they, I know, I know. But it, it happens at the same time because they reflect on each other. So like, my hope is that actually it's going to be this kind of work that will allow us to start doing that for masculinity as well as femininity.

• 1:49:02Liv Albert?

  And I do think that, I think that they, the younger generations are already doing a better job, you know? I mean, I, uh, femininity too, because, I mean, as somebody who was a teenager in the early 2000s, like, it was a dark time for everyone, you know? We're getting marginally better, I think, in some ways, but it's, yeah, it's interesting.

• 1:49:22Liv Albert?

  Can we finish with Cersei?

• 1:49:24Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:49:24Liv Albert?

  Can't not talk about the witch.

• 1:49:27Speaker 04

  Yes, let's talk about Cersei. I'm so glad you talked about Cersei because you mentioned Kim Shelton earlier. And she is actually a character in this chapter.

• 1:49:37Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God, I love this.

• 1:49:38Speaker 04

  Um.

• 1:49:38Liv Albert?

  She gave us a tour of Mycenae, can I just say?

• 1:49:41Speaker 04

  You're so lucky.

• 1:49:42Liv Albert?

  My group tour, the first ever podcast listener group tour. And just because Kim just offered on our call and I was like, are you serious?

• 1:49:51Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:49:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah, so we, I mean, I should say the museum, but it was pretty cool. Anyway, she's lovely.

• 1:49:57Speaker 04

  Amazing. Yeah, no, she's so great. And I talked to her like right at the very beginning of this book. Um, because, you know, she's, for those who don't know, she's currently directing excavations at Petzsa's House. Um, Mycenae, which is a kind of domestic pottery workshop kind of situation. An amazing, amazing site. But the reason I have her in this chapter, and I basically, this is something I kind of, I guess I haven't mentioned yet. But I start every chapter with a discovery. And one of the main agendas I have is to try and put women archaeologists there. Um, alongside the men, because, you know, obviously I said, you know, Troy, okay, I start with Schliemann.

• 1:50:40Speaker 04

  Um, well, unfortunately, like for hundreds of years, um, well, I mean, archaeology is a discipline, isn't that old? But like, it, it just has been the province of men. And yet there are so many amazing women who have done things that just really don't go recognized. So we're not just kind of uncovering the women of myth and the women of Homer, but we're also uncovering like contemporary women, scientists and archaeologists and stuff. So I was like, well, you know, let's, let's focus on, on Kim's work because she has done some really interesting stuff with, um. And, and you know, this sounds really random, but bear with me.

• 1:51:14Liv Albert?

  Nothing is random to me.

• 1:51:16Speaker 04

  No, okay.

• 1:51:17Liv Albert?

  Pigs, great.

• 1:51:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:18Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 1:51:18Speaker 04

  So, did you ever think that you were gonna be getting into pig fodder on your podcast? Well.

• 1:51:23Liv Albert?

  I mean, we're talking about Cersei.

• 1:51:26Speaker 04

  I know, exactly. Brace yourself, exactly. Well, this was the thing, because I was like, again, we always talk about Cersei as the witch, we, meaning the Western tradition men. Um, but like, you know, it's like, she's the prototypical witch, she's the enchantress, she, again, kind of keeps her deceased hostage for a year of sex and like, you know, uh, is evil.

• 1:51:48Liv Albert?

  I don't know about hostage with that one.

• 1:51:50Speaker 04

  Well.

• 1:51:50Liv Albert?

  He's pretty keen to be there.

• 1:51:52Speaker 04

  He's pretty keen, he's pretty keen. But again, in his version, it's like, oh, she kept me and she wanted to be my wife. Again.

• 1:51:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I just, I had to say no to her.

• 1:52:00Speaker 04

  I know. Exactly, exactly. So, yes, no, absolutely right. He, he trots off pretty willingly. Um, but like, she doesn't fare well in that tradition. And actually, if you kind of burrow into it, and you actually ask the question that tends not to be asked, which is, why does she turn men into pigs? Um, it actually gives you a really.

• 1:52:25Liv Albert?

  I almost said something really rude. I'm gonna keep. I'm just saying, because they are.

• 1:52:31Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, that's, that's one, no, but that's one, that's one answer, and it's an answer that the ancient philosophers gave. Um, that it was like allegorical and that it was like representative of men's gluttony and this kind of thing, right? Like, um, but I kind of wanted to be like, well, let's actually not make it about the men. Let's make it about her. Let's make it like a choice that she is making. And, and, and then ask it from that, from that perspective. So what's super interesting about what Kim has done is that she has found, along with her team, um, a well in this house that she's excavating in Moisini, and it is full of animal bones. So it was basically sealed off around thirteen twenty BCE, and, um, it's kind of a great depository of, of, uh, bones. And they've analyzed them.

• 1:53:15Speaker 04

  And loads and loads of the bones belonged to pigs. And what's interesting about it is that you can basically tell that these pigs were being reared in the house and that they were being kind of fed. You could even tell what they were eating. This is really cool for the work that Kim is doing because you can look at the kind of, this is called isotope ratio analysis. I had to like get all over this kind of sciency stuff for the book. But it's basically you look at the variations in an isotope of a particular element. And this is a particular isotope of nitrogen, which tells you whether they were eating legumes, which have a particular kind of value of this nitrogen or not. And if

• 1:53:56Speaker 04

  they're eating legumes, then they're eating a managed diet. So someone is trying to fatten them up. Whereas if they're not, then they're just kind of grazing on household waste. You know, the kind of typical idea of the pig kind of grubbing around in the courtyard. And what's really interesting from what Kim has found is that if you look at like the temple in Mycenae, the pigs there are being fed up. They're being fattened for sacrifice, managed diet. And what's happening in the town in the house is that they are just kind of grubbing around the house and they are being eaten. Now, what I really love about this is that one of the known pig fatteners was barley. And you get kind of various ancient experts

• 1:54:39Speaker 04

  telling you what to feed your pig, including Aristotle, which I love, that Aristotle like also gives pig food advice. But barley was one of them. And in the drink that Cersei makes for the men before they turn into pigs, she puts in barley. And I basically was like, well, what if we just kind of provocatively ask, is she actually just fattening these pigs up so that she can eat? Yeah. She's, she's a woman, she's living by herself, she's practical, she's got pigsty already. She just basically needs to turn them into her, her stock of pigs in order to be able to kind of be an economic woman who's looking after her household. And I

• 1:55:24Speaker 04

  just was like, that is, that is such a kind of practical way of thinking about Cersei that really pushes back against this kind of mystique of her as a witch. Of course, there are loads of other things that, that we can do with it. And, and I talk in the book about. All of these kinds of other resonances that pigs have. So they're really interesting in like ritual contexts. You get them often around women. You'll be familiar probably with the Thesmophoria. Um, but I don't know if you know about the pig ritual in the Thesmophoria?

• 1:55:54Liv Albert?

  I'm sure I read about it back when I last looked at the Thesmophoria, but please remind me.

• 1:56:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, no worries.

• 1:56:01Liv Albert?

  Well, and they, okay, sorry. This is me having a, I believe, a pig reference that is more related to Eleusis. But they, they would, I know this through the most bizarre way, but they would sacrifice pigs at Eleusis and clean them in the waters nearby. And I know this because a guy got eaten by a shark while cleaning a pig for sacrifice.

• 1:56:27Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:56:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:29Speaker 04

  That's really random.

• 1:56:30Liv Albert?

  That's just, yeah, I.

• 1:56:33Speaker 04

  I love that your, I love that your brain stores this knowledge. That's.

• 1:56:37Liv Albert?

  Yes, it's called, I assume autism, but it.

• 1:56:43Liv Albert?

  Uh, yeah, no, so I.

• 1:56:45Speaker 04

  But bonus shark facts.

• 1:56:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and the shark facts have come from the age of like three, so they're long lasting.

• 1:56:52Speaker 04

  Oh, that's so awesome.

• 1:56:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah. So anyway, but I guess really that's not at Thesmophoria.

• 1:56:57Speaker 04

  Eleusis, of course, is also associated with Demeter and Persephone, which is that Thesmophoria was this sort of women only um, festival for um, Demeter and Persephone a- around kind of women's fertility. And the kind of key part of that festival, as far as we can tell, was that they sacrificed piglets and that they put them down in a pit. And the idea was that they were basically representing Persephone, who of course was taken down into the underworld when she was raped by Hades. And while the, the story goes that when she fell in, a swineherd and his pigs fell in as well. And so these pigs basically become like substitute humans.

• 1:57:41Speaker 04

  And when they come out of the earth, it's like Persephone's rebirth and then they kind of endow the women with fertility. Now, what's super interesting for someone like Cersei is that, of course, her pigs quite literally are substitute humans, right? Because they are men who have been turned into pigs. So it's it's drawing on this association between women and sex and death, which, all of which are concepts that kind of oscillate around Cersei. She's the one who gives Odysseus the instructions to go to the underworld. Um, so, so everything about that centers on pigs. In a way that actually like pigs are the key to it, rather than just like they are the terror.

• 1:58:25Speaker 04

  They're actually the source, they're where you need to start with.

• 1:58:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I'm sorry if you just said this. Is, did he sacrifice a pig it to get to the underworld? Is that the blood or no?

• 1:58:34Speaker 04

  Doesn't, but he, um, but he sacrificed, I think it's a ram, um, forgive me if I'm wrong, but like he, but what he does is a, um, a sacrifice to the spirits of the underworld and and Cersei dictates this to him, how he needs to do it. And he needs to kind of cut its neck with the blood flowing down, so it's going down to the spirits. And what's really interesting is that we have comparative evidence from the Hittite Empire, which is this Bronze Age Empire to the east in in Anatolia, modern day Turkey. And there we have um, Hittite wise women who are basically kind of like the equivalent of witches, who are doing pig spells.

• 1:59:11Speaker 04

  And one of the pig spells is exactly one of these, like to the, to the spirits of the underworld, the pig pointing down, the blood going down. Very similar to the Thesmophoria with the pigs down in the pit, right? So there is, there is all of this connection that is kind of swirling around between women's power and pigs and death and access to the underworld that, Cersei is just like drawing on.

• 1:59:33Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 1:59:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:59:35Liv Albert?

  Oh, I love all of that.

• 1:59:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's, it's so cool, right? And it's just, again, it's just like it over overturned that story that Odysseus tells, that she's this kind of desperate. Well, first of all, that she's an evil witch who turns men into pigs, but then that she's this kind of desperate woman who just kind of tells Odysseus how amazing he is. Oh, you must be Odysseus. I recognize you because you're so amazing. Fall on my knees and beg you to have sex with me, right? Like, and it's, it rescues her from that narrative. And it's, it's, and it's done through pig food. Like, how cool is that?

• 2:00:07Liv Albert?

  I love that so much. I mean, this is the type of thing that's my favorite part about conversations is is the linking of, I mean, basically what you did in this book, which I tend to like pull out of people, but the linking of myth with with archaeology. Because I think, I mean, I like to, I want to learn it all and I love, I like that my show is originally based in myth. Because it it gives me a good excuse to just pull myth into every conversation. But every time, like, I have guests who are like, oh, it's, I have this topic, it's not quite myth. And I'm like, I'm not specific to myth anymore. I just want to hear everything. I'll probably make it about myth, but like, that's on me. You tell me everything.

• 2:00:47Liv Albert?

  Because I think, I mean, a huge part of what I think gets lost in people trying to access myth today from an outside point of view is is how much it was tied to real people. Because we come at it thinking of modern day storytelling and writing and books and this, they, you know, but back then, these myths served such a different purpose that we just will never fully conceptualize in the West today. Because we we have lost all of that, all of the things that make myth tied to humanity. And and like a very, very separate thing from a book of fiction today.

• 2:01:28Speaker 04

  What's really interesting is that when we say something is a myth now, we mean it's not true.

• 2:01:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:34Speaker 04

  And for them, it was the opposite.

• 2:01:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:36Speaker 04

  A myth was something that was true. It was something that told you something about who you were and who you belong to and how the universe came to be, all these kinds of things. But also, it was something that was was rooted in humans' capacity to kind of understand the world. So I don't know, you, I'm sure you know this, but the word myth comes from muthos, which means word or language. And it is very fundamentally, like, when you have a conversation, when you tell a story, you are doing myth, because it is how we try and understand the world. And there's just one amazing moment, which, you know, we talked about Penelope, but like, in The Odyssey,

• 2:02:17Speaker 04

  to me, this is paradigmatic, and I actually start with this in Mythica, because obviously Mythica is is it's called Mythica, it's got myth in the title. It's doing that as well. But at the very beginning of The Odyssey, The bard is singing downstairs in the palace in Ithaca. And he's singing the story of the returns of the Greeks from Troy. Now, obviously, this is the Odyssey. This is also the story of the return of a Greek from Troy. So this is a kind of Homer within the narrative. Um, and Penelope hears the song and kind of understandably, she doesn't like hearing it. She, she's kind of been waiting for Odysseus. This is not the topic that she wants to, to have in her home. And she comes downstairs and she tries to ask the bard to stop.

• 2:03:00Speaker 04

  And Telemachus, in this kind of horrendous moment of kind of insolent teenager-y, stands up and says, like, words are for men. And he uses the word muthos.

• 2:03:12Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 2:03:12Speaker 04

  Right? Muthos is for me alone, because I am the master in this house. And then he sends her upstairs to go and do her weaving, right? That circles back to, to women's weaving.

• 2:03:20Liv Albert?

  I really hate Telemachus.

• 2:03:21Speaker 04

  Yucky. Yeah, it's, it's not, it's not a good moment. Um, and Mary Beard actually has called it like the first instance of a man telling a woman to shut up in Western literature, which I think is, I think is an opposite assessment of the scene. But what I think is so interesting is that he's not just saying words are for men. He's saying myths are for men.

• 2:03:41Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:03:41Speaker 04

  The, the construction of meaning in words and in stories is what we do. And remember that this is the epic that has started with the word for man.

• 2:03:52Liv Albert?

  Man, yeah.

• 2:03:53Speaker 04

  Exactly. So this is a reminder in the very first book that women do not have a stake in myth. And I guess, I guess maybe this is like a really good place to end, but, but with Mythica, I'm trying to say women do have a stake in myth. That's, that's kind of it. That's the basic thing.

• 2:04:10Liv Albert?

  Well, I would like to say that, you know, that is also what I'm saying in my show. So it seems really.

• 2:04:15Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh, exactly. A marriage made in heaven.

• 2:04:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I'm, I'm obsessed with all of that. I didn't know about that line and now I'm going to think about it forever. But it's, I mean, yeah, it's, it, I think that that it is so hard to, to conceptualize myth today. Cause even when you said, you know, to them it was true. Like even that, I often get asked, you know, like, did the people believe all of these stories were true? And like, I don't think that's true. I think that they, it's like, you say truth, and I know what you mean, but in this realm, it's just like this, this notion of truth. Like, they didn't mean that everything happened literally, but they, the stories described that what they could understand as truth. And it's so hard to explain because it is, it's just so separate from our lived realities now.

• 2:05:02Speaker 04

  Exactly. I, I think, yeah. As I was saying it, I was also like, that's not right. It's, it's a source of meaning.

• 2:05:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:09Speaker 04

  A source of validation.

• 2:05:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:12Speaker 04

  And, and you know, we say something is valid and we mean it's true, but it doesn't have to be true, right?

• 2:05:17Liv Albert?

  But we don't mean literally.

• 2:05:18Speaker 04

  We don't mean literally true. It helps you to know where you are and who you are and who you belong to.

• 2:05:26Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. Yeah. It is just a way of understanding everything.

• 2:05:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:05:30Liv Albert?

  Everything. Yeah.

• 2:05:32Speaker 04

  I guess it goes back a little bit to what we were saying about archaeology and the way it tries to construct reality. And ultimately, what we are all doing all the time is we are putting walls up around ourselves to try and create a reality that tries to make whatever this is understandable. And myth is basically the original way of doing that.

• 2:05:56Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. I just love it so much. I always want to end these episodes with just like that expression. And then I feel like it just gets old, but it doesn't get old.

• 2:06:06Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 2:06:07Liv Albert?

  Because it's just, it's so good.

• 2:06:08Speaker 04

  This is why we're all here.

• 2:06:10Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 2:06:10Speaker 04

  Because we, because we love myth. I mean, like, you know, you asked me right at the beginning, like, where does this start? And I was like, oh, you know, with my undergraduate dissertation at Cambridge, like, where does it really start? It starts when I was 11 years old and my geeky Latin teacher gave me Greek lessons on the side and we did Perseus and Medusa and I was coloring in the figure of Perseus and Medusa. And I was like, Greek myth is awesome. That's where it starts, you know, I mean, this is where it starts for everybody. They they read Percy Jackson, they get in a get a book of Compendium of Greek Myths. Um, you know, they get gifted your Greek Myth Cocktails book, which like, it sounds like an essential on everyone's table. But like, it's just something happens and you just fall in love with these stories and you

• 2:06:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:56Speaker 04

  You don't fall, you don't fall out of love with them because as as we said, they they give you meaning. And every time you come back to them, they they tell you something new. So like, I I don't think you should apologize for being in love with myth.

• 2:07:07Liv Albert?

  Well, I'm eight years in, it's not going away. No, it's it's funny. I I love hearing the way so many people in the UK were able to first come to myth. Cause I I'm very jealous, uh, because

• 2:07:18Speaker 04

  Super lucky, honestly, super lucky. And I I credit

• 2:07:21Liv Albert?

  The fact you had Latin class?

• 2:07:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:07:23Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 2:07:24Speaker 04

  I know.

• 2:07:25Liv Albert?

  Like

• 2:07:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, things are, things are changing here.

• 2:07:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, I know. I do hear about that a lot too. So it's not to say it's still like this, but I mean, I think I also came, my my obsession developed, oh, I think when I was 12 as well. Only there was no Latin class, but I did have an incredible teacher who had us watch, he, you know, this would would have been the year 2000. God. And so he he wheeled in, you know, a TV and a VHS player and he put in what he had recorded on TV. So we, I think he probably had like, cut out the commercials on the VHS, you know, the olden days. And it was the the Odyssey mini series.

• 2:08:04Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 2:08:05Liv Albert?

  That came out in the nineties and I I mean, I I'm sure that's in large part why the Odyssey remains my favorite piece of myth and literature from that world. Because that's what I was given. That's my version of coloring and

• 2:08:19Speaker 04

  I mean I mean, yeah, I I will be honest that like, basically Athena for me is still Isabella Rossellini. Like, that hasn't got, that hasn't gone away.

• 2:08:30Liv Albert?

  I need to re-watch that because it really was my like, opening, but I've not gone back to it. But that's why it's ruined Matt Damon as Odysseus for you because like you've got your Odysseus. Sean Bean was great. Sean Bean is what ruined it. Yeah, yeah, that's true. The, the, the fact that we never got a Sean Bean. I know, absolutely. Odyssey, that's why I hate Matt Damon. He was, perfect, Michaela, you can say something.

• 2:08:51Speaker 06

  Thank you. I was gonna say, I can share my, my story of my.

• 2:08:55Liv Albert?

  Please, please, yes.

• 2:08:57Speaker 06

  It's a fun one, so.

• 2:08:58Liv Albert?

  Okay, yes.

• 2:08:58Speaker 06

  For anyone who don't, doesn't know, I am a, I am a First Nations woman in this country. But that means, um, in B C at least, we have it so that, uh, every Indigenous student gets, we all get a counselor, who is also Indigenous at school, and they bring us on like little field trips and stuff and like, so we can still be a part of culture. Um, and so I got to go to lots of ceremony when I was younger, and so I've been able to like, and me and my sisters, we all did. So we would like sit at our elders' feet and they would tell us the stories and stuff. So I always say like, I had a bit of a orality in my life growing up and I'm really lucky I got to experience that culture. And then my oldest sister, whose name funnily enough is Danae. I know, I know.

• 2:09:41Speaker 06

  She, uh, she discovered Egyptian myth and Greek myth one day and she got so excited about it. And she brought me and my other sister to her room and we sat on the floor and she stood on her bed and she was telling us these stories of, you know, like I very vividly, um, have the memory of her telling about Danae's own passage and the birth of Perseus and his stories. And in the way that our elders told us stories. So it was like this wild experience of getting to experience myth that way.

• 2:10:10Speaker 04

  But also, Michaela, I love that it was coming through your sister, like, you know, because, you know, we talked about this live in the last episode, but like oral tales told by women.

• 2:10:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:10:20Speaker 04

  You know, that's, that's really, that's really powerful.

• 2:10:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, she just seen my mom's face when, when we told her who Danae was in myth. She wasn't happy.

• 2:10:30Liv Albert?

  She didn't know. She had no idea.

• 2:10:34Speaker 06

  We were like, Mom, there was a golden shower. And she went, go away.

• 2:10:39Speaker 06

  No, I can't explain this to you children right now.

• 2:10:45Liv Albert?

  Meanwhile, myths like that are why I started the podcast between, between her and, and pacify where you're just like, I'm sorry, what were they telling stories of back then? I need to talk about it as if it is absurd, as absurd as it objectively is.

• 2:11:01Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh, that is such a good, that is such a good story.

• 2:11:05Liv Albert?

  I love that you've told that on the show, Michaela, because I've heard it a few times and I think this is the first time it's on mic.

• 2:11:10Speaker 06

  I'm pretty sure I like emailed it to you too. That was like my introduction to you being like, hi, hire me. Here's my story.

• 2:11:18Liv Albert?

  The email is why she got the job. So.

• 2:11:21Speaker 06

  I never want to see that email again.

• 2:11:25Liv Albert?

  Uh, well, I mean, I, women talking about myth is really all I want to do with the rest of my life. So I'm thrilled that the three of us.

• 2:11:35Speaker 04

  Well, you obviously do an amazing job at it. So keep, keep going, keep going.

• 2:11:41Liv Albert?

  Well, thank you so much for doing this. I.

• 2:11:44Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh, it was so much fun.

• 2:11:46Liv Albert?

  Yes. And, and we knew it would be, but oh man, it's still just what a joy. I'm so thrilled about this book. I cannot wait to read it.

• 2:11:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I'm honestly, yeah, I'm just so excited. I'm so glad I got to like, share it with you guys because I feel like it's been, it's been here. It's been something I've been so excited to share. And now I finally get to like, talk about it. And especially with like, you know, someone as excited as you, it's, it's lovely.

• 2:12:12Liv Albert?

  It's very exciting. Well, I, I'm, I'm so thrilled to have you. I'm still so glad that you, I, I'm sure I told this on our last episode, but you had DM'd me when Michaela and I were on that group tour. It might've been the day we went to Mycine to see Kim Shelton, honestly. And I just remember leaning over in the bus and showing her, just being like, hey, like, I think we'll get Emily Howser on the show. She was like, what? I was like, oh yeah. She's asking me like, as if I might, oh, maybe I would take her as a guest. And I'm like, please come on my show. Oh my God.

• 2:12:43Speaker 04

  Oh, I love it. I love it.

• 2:12:45Liv Albert?

  Such a joy. Well, um.

• 2:12:47Speaker 04

  This was so much fun.

• 2:12:49Liv Albert?

  So, so much fun.

• 2:12:50Speaker 04

  But I do like my cheeks, my cheeks are actually hurting from smiling.

• 2:12:54Liv Albert?

  I'm thinking the same thing.

• 2:12:56Liv Albert?

  Well, do you want to tell my listeners where they can read more from you or follow the Instagram that I know you're working hard at and has been lovely?

• 2:13:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I'm on Instagram at Emily Howser Author and you can also just check out my website, which is EmilyHowser.com. And otherwise, yeah, I've got an author page on Amazon, on Goodreads, that kind of thing. So do follow me wherever you follow your authors and stay in touch. And it would be just, yeah, lovely to kind of share this adventure with you guys.

• 2:13:26Liv Albert?

  So excited.

• 2:13:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, my gosh. It's, it's, oh, it's just so lovely. Honestly, my, my husband was saying before I came on, he was like, are you excited? I was like, honestly, I haven't been so excited about anything since I finished writing the book. Like, I just want to talk about it now. I just want to talk. So you've indulged, you've indulged me for two and a half hours.

• 2:13:43Liv Albert?

  Oh, I mean, yeah, you really had to twist our arms. It wasn't that Michaela was like bending over backwards to make sure she could be on this call of all the calls.

• 2:13:52Speaker 04

  Oh, I love that.

• 2:14:10Liv Albert?

  Oh, nerds. Thank you so much for listening. As always, it's so, it's so fun to talk to Emily. We're actually, when this comes out, we'll have met in person, which is so exciting because the book has just launched and I'm going to be in the UK for it. So it was just a coincidence, a really, really fun one. And I'm just, I'm excited for, for you to hear about this book, but just generally this episode. I'm so thrilled that I get the chance to meet and speak with all of these people who do all of this incredible research. Honestly, it keeps me going. And for all that things are really tough right now, to put it like lighter than humanly possible, I think it's just so important that we keep.

• 2:14:55Liv Albert?

  Interacting with history in this way with this acknowledgement of where we've come from and how we got here, particularly when it comes to women and other marginalized peoples and genders and, and learn from it, really take it in and acknowledge how we got here. Because I think that is the best way of getting out of, of this patriarchal capitalist scheme that's slowly taking us down. And so the more I can do that, the better. I'm thinking of, of everyone who's not a straight white man, particularly in North America right now,

• 2:15:33Liv Albert?

  but obviously bigger. Canada, we have an election coming up soon. If you just, God, if you're listening to, I've said this before, if you're listening to me and you're planning to vote conservative, what are you doing here? I, we need to talk. Like, I honestly think if you're listening to me, then you must have like kind of good intentions and like, maybe we can figure out why you would ever want to do that. Pierre Poliev is terrifying. He's terrifying. He's recently talking about women's biological clocks. And I'll tell you right now, I don't have one, but if I did, I'd slam it over his head. Um, this is, this is our time. This is our moment. This is our, this is our, this is, this is

• 2:16:13Liv Albert?

  us stepping up to the plate. This is us coming within inches, millimeters, god damn it, millimeters of, of what is happening in the States right now. This is our time to, to say that we are not looking to join them in fascism and that we are not looking to join them as being, how, how do you phrase a, a colonizing country that then wants to be colonized by another colonizing country? This is our time to say no to all of that. And I need you all to step up now. Let's talk about Miss Baby. It's written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela

• 2:16:58Liv Albert?

  Panguish is the Hermes to my Olympians. I was so, so thrilled to have her on this episode. I'm trying to get Michaela to do this more. So we need you all to comment and tell me how much you love hearing from Michaela because she has such incredibly insightful things to say. And I want her in on this with me more and more. So tell her, convince her that, that you

• 2:17:19Liv Albert?

  Select music by Luke Chaos. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network. God damn it, this is mine. Check out more podcasts on our network. Learn more about what we are trying to do well beyond podcasts and just generally bringing you socially conscious, intersectional in whatever ways we can. But I recognize that sounds really bad coming from a white lady right now. I'm, I promise I'm on it. And just this acknowledgement, acknowledgement of how we got here and how it affects everyone. And anyway, learn more at collectivemem.com. I could ramble on forever, but I will stop. I am Liv and I love this shit.

• 2:18:15Speaker 08

  At Lowe's, this Veterans Day and every day, military members, veterans and their spouses get automatic MyLowe's Rewards Silver Status Benefits. Plus 10% off eligible purchases with no annual limit. It's one way we honor and give back to those who have served and still do. Learn more and verify now at Lowe's.com/military. 10% discount can't be combined with another offer. Exclusions, terms and conditions apply. Loyalty programs subject to terms and conditions. Details at Lowe's.com/terms. Subject to change.

• 2:18:44Speaker 05

  The Quarter Pounder with Cheese is made with 100% fresh beef, cooked when you order it. Add hot crispy fries and an ice cold Coke and hopefully a lot of napkins. All for $8.

• 2:18:58Speaker 09

  Some days, getting the work done isn't the problem. Staying locked in is. AlphaBrain is on its Daily Neutropic Formula for Cognitive Support, designed to support memory, focus, attention, and mental clarity. Its formula with science-driven ingredients include theanine and huperzine A to support focus and memory, and it's caffeine-free. So when you're deep in the work, AlphaBrain helps support enhanced productivity and tune out distractions. Get focused on what matters. Shop AlphaBrain now at ONNIT.com.

• 2:20:14Speaker 10

  Enemy of My Dreams by Jenny Williamson is a historical romance novel set in the time of the late Roman Empire, where Alaric, a brutal Gothic warlord, and Julia, a Roman princess with a love of good wine, team up to take down Rome.

• 2:20:32Speaker 11

  The much awaited sequel, Game of Thieves, comes out December 8. In this sequel, Julia and Alaric must overcome centuries of conflict to work together, or the turbulent riptides of rebellion and the demons of their past will tear them apart.

• 2:20:45Speaker 10

  And now, for a limited time, when you preorder Game of Thieves through Burning Pages Bookstore, you'll get a signed book plate and a free art print of one of Jenny's favorite spicy scenes from across the series.

• 2:20:59Speaker 11

  Get this amazing artwork only from Burning Pages at burningpagesnc.com/game-of-thieves. Don't wait. Order your copy from Burning Pages today at burningpagesnc.com/game-of-thieves.