RE-AIR: Conversations: From Homer, With Love… The Evolution of Oral Storytelling w Dr Joe

Due to a cough that Liv just cannot seem to shake, part two of the Q&A episodes will be coming next week. Instead, today enjoy a favourite episode from earlier this year. This episode originally aired on April 19, 2024. Liv is joined by Joel Christensen to talk all things oral storytelling, the tradition, theories on its origins, and how the Iliad and the Odyssey intersect with their ancient origins. Read more from Joel on Sententiae Antiquae https://sententiaeantiquae.com/. Help keep LTAMB going by subscribing to Liv's Patreon for bonus content! http://www.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. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. 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.

• 0:35Speaker 01

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• 1:05Speaker 02

  Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to build Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 2:10Liv Albert?

  Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and I am your host, Liv, here with another fascinating conversation in my series of Bronze Age and its Collapse episodes.

• 2:27Liv Albert?

  Today, I spoke with returning guest Dr. Joel Christensen, who came on to talk about oral storytelling, not just the stories themselves of Homer and the epic cycle, but just the concept of this as a practice, what we do, what we don't know about how oral storytelling came about, how long it lasted, how it was that these things were eventually written down into works like the Iliad and the Odyssey that we still have today. All of the bits and pieces that go into this utterly mind-boggling topic that spans so many timeframes, like, we are going well beyond the Bronze Age here, but we are looking

• 3:10Liv Albert?

  at how the Bronze Age impacted the storytelling of those later periods and what we do and do not know about them. Oh, it's absolutely fascinating, I can't even succinctly explain what we talked about, so I'm just gonna let you listen. We had a great chat. Joel has been on the show before to talk about Homeric epic broadly, and we'll be returning soon because, as you'll hear at the end of this, oh, we gotta talk Odysseus and some heroes. That's coming in the future. But for now, oh, this, I mean, this has to be one of my favorite episodes just because of my utter obsession with the transmission of these texts, and I can't wait for you to hear it. So, sit back and enjoy a little dive into the ancient world of oral storytelling.

• 4:09Liv Albert?

  Conversations from Homer with Love. The Evolution of Oral Storytelling with Dr. Joel Christensen.

• 4:31Liv Albert?

  I've been looking at the Bronze Age for this series and, and trying to like tease out, you know, like what exactly is happening in something like Homer because it does, in, you know, they were kind of, I think a lot of the intention was to recall the Bronze Age that came before and kind of look at what little evidence survived for them and, and kind of develop stories based on that. But I've never really dug too deep into, you know, the, the sort of history. Um, so yeah, I'd just love to hear more about, maybe give my listeners like a little rundown on oral storytelling as a tradition and then we can kind of go from there and talk about all the weird and, I don't know, wacky things they did when they finally wrote it down.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Okay. Yeah. I mean, just wherever you want to go, you know, I'll, I'll follow you.

• 5:16Liv Albert?

  Great. But yeah, I mean, so the, the tradition of it, the before it got written down, like, you know, how much do we know about what was going on? And, and in terms of the, I mean, I don't know what kind of, I guess, record exists of what was happening before, um, the, the thing that we have now that is Homer.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, so here's the problem, right? Uh, we have almost no evidence.

• 5:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah. That's what I was imagining when I asked.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  Anything, right? No, no, we have nothing. In fact, the only evidence, okay, let me backtrack a little bit. Like, we have some things, right? Um, but it's not like we have a, you know, like catalog entries saying people were performing the Iliad, um, at this time and place. Um, anything we have that we've cobbled together, um, is, is pretty much from internal. Evidence of the palms and then random evidence from other places. And so, you know, the scholarly sort of uh community on this topic are so all over the place. Then what I'd like to do is to give you like two, three different extremes, if you will. All right. So for your interest, like there's one extreme.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  Which is that, you know, there were oral storytelling traditions, but the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Iliad came into its form. And like the coast of Turkey.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  As early as a ninth century BCE. And then made some winding passage to dictation in, say, the sixth century BCE. When somehow it was written down and then we've more or less gotten that text. Right. So that's one model that imposes a fixity. Between the content the ancients had and the one that we have. And that locates it for linguistic and topic reasons.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  Like in Turkey, right? Near Troy, right? Another model that's similar to this one that I think is as, let's say, suspect. Is the idea that Barry Powell and some others have, and that's that the alphabet was basically adopted in Greece. In order to write down the Iliad and the Odyssey. In like the ninth or eighth centuries BCE. Problems with this is like, there's no evidence for it. The reason we've made this argument is that's when we see like alphabetic writing in the area in the initial part. And that's also when people want Homer to be. Yeah. Because it's closer to the so-called actual Trojan War. And there's a spoiler alert there, like it wasn't an actual Trojan War.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  A much more complicated model, and the one that clearly I'm leaning towards because I'm giving it last. Is an evolutionary model. Now, the most, the the clearest and probably most well-known version of this is Gregory Nag's evolutionary model. He talks about it a lot. But I think people tend not to understand. What's meant by it. And I think another reason why it's hard for people to buy is while Naj is probably the most prominent scholar of Homer in the United States in the past 50 years. He doesn't always translate hi- hi- his work well for for larger audiences.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  And we has home as homers haven't considered what I can, what I think is an important question is, which is, what are the material and cultural conditions that persuaded people to write down the alien in the Odyssey? All right. So let me just, and I'm going on too long as usual, but let me just

• 8:55Liv Albert?

  No, no, this is exactly what I want to hear. I'm very excited.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, let me give you the sketch of the evolutionary model.

• 9:01Liv Albert?

  Great.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  All right. We know from internal evidence, some external evidence that the Homeric epics were orally composed. We have no idea how long the oral composition tradition went, but we do know that there's enough similarity between certain formula and metrical patterns in Sanskrit and Greek that we can probably trace back oral storytelling traditions thousands of years, right? But that's just speculation, right? We know from early Greek writing from Linear B that there are similar metrical shapes and that there may, there probably was an oral storytelling,

• 9:42Speaker 03

  even heroic storytelling tradition that we might understand it during the Mycenaean period. But that doesn't mean that we have anything from there at all, right? We, one of our challenges is that we don't have good evidence for oral storytelling traditions outside of Greece. So eventually I'll get to the evolutionary model, but one thing people like to talk about is like commonalities between Greek epic and ancient Near Eastern storytelling traditions, like those that we get in the Hebrew Bible or in the Gilgamesh traditions. But they seem to be coming from somewhat different places. And so that's sort of, it sort of leaves us in a gap of of knowledge and evidence are what we really think about when we talk about the development

• 10:27Speaker 03

  is how we move from, you know, oral

• 10:32Speaker 03

  Composition to a stage of the fixity that we now have in in our text. And so the way I've been thinking about it, and so what I do notionally, and when I teach you about it now is I combine what I call like the the Iliad as a diachronic object with Naj's evolutionary progression. And the basic idea i- is that we have storytelling traditions that move from less fixity to greater fixity and then became textualized as we know it. Following a process that is more or less open with different narrative traditions right up into the sixth century BCE, right? And you know, we know there were other epics that weren't written down.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  And you know, what we know from internal evidence is that the stories were probably sung in parts. Right? And so I want to give a macro view and then go back to that detail, that parts thing, because it's important. So the basic argument is that there are many different versions of the story of Achilles, of the rage of Achilles, and that the Trojan War narrative is a setting, not a story itself. And so we know from like, we have manuscript variants from the beginning of the Iliad. One that gives us a poem that was about the rage of Achilles and the rage of Apollo. Right? Which is a different focus than what we get in the Iliad that we have, where there is a raging Apollo. But he only rages for like, like nine lines or something, right?

• 12:01Speaker 03

  It's a short amount of time, right? It's a very different type of poem. So it's pretty clear to people that you had variations that are significant well into the classical period. And that, and we had two basic problems to think about. One is, how do we get from the model of storytelling we see inside Homeric epic? Which is like a dude playing a liar and singing a song at dinner.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  To like twenty four poems, twenty four books.

• 12:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  Right, that in performance time lasts like eighteen hours.

• 12:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  These are very different things. Yeah. This is weird, right?

• 12:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  I'm increasingly convinced, Liv, that um, nobody in the ancient world read it beginning to end.

• 12:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  I think like if you look at evidence in Plato, what they refer to, like, most of the time, they're referring to episodes. And I think what we really probably have going on in the Iliad, um, more so than the Odyssey, but in both, um, i- is think of them as like greatest hits albums.

• 13:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  That at some point got put together. Now, I want to caution that, you know, people, when I say something like that, they might think I'm a neoanalyst. And I'm not. And I want to tell you what a neoanalyst is.

• 13:18Liv Albert?

  Right. I I needed that. Thank you.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  A neoanalyst is a, a, yeah, a neoanalysis is an approach to Homer, um, that looks at its engagement with other, um, uh, narrative traditions. And imagines how the Iliad and the Odyssey were put together by drawing on motifs and patterns in those other poems. The reason I'm not a neoanalyst, um, is I don't think we have access to those poems, right? We did. It's just speculation, right? Um, and it it assumes, um, that there's someone there to pick and choose and put things together. Um, when I think that Iliad and the Odyssey, that we have a more, for lack of a better word, organic productions that were put together.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  And so, uh, I still haven't finished the explanation, uh, but the reason I said greatest hits album is if you sit down and you look through the Iliad. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense there for the ninth year of a war. The catalog of ships, the viewing of, the viewing from the wall by Helen, the duel between Paris and Manoleis. Like, why wait nine years to do that, right? A lot of this stuff just doesn't make sense. The building of the Akean fortifications in book seven. And then talking about them being destroyed in book twelve, the Iliad is anachronistic internally constantly.

• 14:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  And so what I think we have here is evidence, um, of someone bringing singers together at some point and saying, tell us the whole story.

• 14:50Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  Right, which would have been odd in a tradition that was based on telling parts that are appropriate to specific contexts.

• 14:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  And we don't have the motivation to tell the whole story, or the ability to do it until you have a certain scale.

• 15:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  And so, when I think about where we got to that moment where you could create this, this dynamic poem that draws on the entire story, but tries to fit it into 12 days of action. Um, I, I try to think about what's a cultural emphasis? And what's the material possibility? You need money, you need time, but you also need a reason to write it down.

• 15:29Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Right, um, and so my basic theory, um, which is completely unproved, I just have to say that, um, is that the cultural pressures that make us choose the Iliad over other tales have to do with the clash between Persia and Greece.

• 15:46Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  And the way I think about it is this, we know from evidence of art, even the evidence of Greek tragedy, that the Trojan War story wasn't the only game in town. Right, um, there's another big story tradition, and that's Thebes. And there are other story traditions, um, that bring lots of heroes together to fight other bad guys, Jason and the Argonauts, the Caledonian boar hunt. I think of all of these narrative traditions as being engaged in what I call coalition narratives, where Greeks get to imagine themselves banding together with other Greeks against other forces. But what happens in, um, Asia Minor, starting in the middle of the 6th century, is that the Persians move in. They start to put pressure on, um, the Ionian Greek city-states,

• 16:31Speaker 03

  the 12 major cities there. We hear from, we hear about Athens sending the money from an early period. And what I think really happens from then on is that audiences, poets, and their sponsors started to emphasize Trojan War narratives over other stories because they represented the Greeks banding together to go out to fight someone in the east.

• 16:54Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Much in the same way, and this is a huge leap, much in the same way that I think that, um, the movie. Three hundred was so popular in the two thousands because we were fighting wars in the Middle East.

• 17:05Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  And it engaged in those types of orientalizing motifs and, you know, othering. You know, people from the East. I think the Trojan War narrative as well appealed to audiences. Because they were conscious of Greek versus the other in a way they hadn't been before. Because of the totality of the monolithic nature of the Persian Empire as it developed in the Greek mind. And so I think that this tendency, this preference for the Trojan War narrative grew. And then, once there was actual conflict, once the Persians invaded Greece, I think it became wildly popular.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  And you really see it, like, if you follow later authors like the rhetorician philosopher Isocrates. He lived to like be a hundred. He spent his entire life saying, let's go fight the Persians again. He was influential on like the House of Macedon, one of the reasons why like Philip the Great and Alexander. You know, grew up thinking what Greeks, real Greeks do is fight Persia. Uh, it's because of people like Isocrates. And so Isocrates is like, you know, his florid is about like three eighty, you know, BCE. Alexander, you know, invaded Persian three thirty one. And I think, though, if you look at Greek tragedy and Greek art, there's no good reason

• 18:27Speaker 03

  to think that audiences in the fifth century were reading the same Iliad and Odyssey that we were.

• 18:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  Right? We get some snippets here and there. By the time of Plato, though.

• 18:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 18:38Speaker 03

  It seems that the epics that he was talking about and that Aristotle was talking about pretty close to ours. So we're looking at, I think, and this is sort of Naj's model as well. You know, stories that go back to a legendary period. And then you focus on a couple of themes. You have the wrath of Achilles, the homecoming of the heroes. And then these stories become selected and valued because of cultural moments, because of experiences. And then they get told more. And then I think what we're really looking at is under the influence of Athenian empire. Where you have a context for performance, which is the festival of Dionysus,

• 19:21Speaker 03

  and the money to produce it and write down the text. You have the only real opportunity for creating the dictation, the transmission, and the copying of the text. And this accords in a couple of ways with the only real evidence we have from antiquity. We have stories about the so-called Persestratid recension, which is when the tyrants' sons of Persestratus created the performance of Homer in Athens, which is about, you know, 530 to 510 BCE. And then we have good internal evidence of the poems that the final stage of the epics formation went through sort of the Attic Ionic dialect that really Athens makes the most sense.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  But even then, I don't think we were done. I think probably Plato had access to texts similar to ours. But it's really in the libraries of the Hellenistic period, not just Alexandria, but at Pella, at Antioch, in the Seleucian Empire. You have people attempting to create the authoritative Homer. And the reason they're trying to create the authoritative Homer is they're not in Greece anymore.

• 20:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  They're projecting Greekness. They're trying to possess it in a way that's competitive and authoritative in the same way that when in the modern world, people immigrate to new places, sometimes it calcifies their identities. They try to produce them and perform them in ways that they wouldn't if they were just at home.

• 20:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  Right. And so I think so that period. So that's how we get like, it's the libraries of Alexandria that more or less bring together the texts we have, like 95%. And then it's a long period of editing and refining and scholarship that produces what we eventually get from Byzantine libraries, the finest manuscripts we have, the Benetius A and B that you can find online if you search the Homer Multitext Project. And so those manuscripts are from like the 9th and 10th century CE.

• 21:27Liv Albert?

  Wow, yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  So if I, you know, if you go and tell someone, look, I got a complicated story about where a text comes from, and it probably took about 2,000 years. Most people are gonna like. Just shake their head because they can't conceive of it. The best, the image I have, and you'll indulge me in a slight anecdote, is of my toddler. So Leila's almost three years. I think the last time I was on the podcast with you, she might have been there with me, like making noise. She was, yeah. She wasn't walking yet, right? But this summer, we took her on a Disney cruise, which in its way is like unfathomable and horrifying. We could do an entire episode about my feelings about Disney. Nobody wants that, though, right?

• 22:10Speaker 03

  But we would be outside the boat, right? Giant boat. And we would say, Leila, look, there's the boat. And she'd say, yes, that is a boat. And then we'd go inside and we'd say, Leila, we're in a boat. And she'd say, no, this is not a boat. No. This is a hotel. Right? And we'd show her the window, be like, look, there's water outside on a boat. She's like, no, this is not a boat. We are not on a boat. Because her little mind could not conceive of it. Because human beings don't think well in the big and the aggregate. And so you have to learn so much about how oral composition works, about how we transcribe poems. And then you have to think materially as well. Like, what were people doing? Like, why would they write down an oral tradition?

• 22:55Speaker 03

  And then what happened after that? Because it's not like it was written once and everyone's like, all right, we're not going to perform poems anymore. Like, we're not going to sing these songs because we got it written down, right? What probably happened, and this is an argument of a Danish Homerist, Minneskotta Jensen, is that once it was written down, people like put it away, like a sacred object, and then ignored it. Like, just because you wrote it down doesn't mean everybody knew you wrote it down. Like, there was a world wide web to publish it on, right? So it probably went on living, which is why the editing of Homeric texts in the Alexandrian period was so important. So that's a very long story.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  So now I said I treat the Iliad as a diachronic object. And the reason I do is if you're asking how people are reading or engaging with a narrative, you have to ask what their assumptions were when they came to it, right? For us...

• 23:55Speaker 03

  It's a translation.

• 23:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  We sit down and we read it like a book because that's what we know. But I think that in antiquity, even someone like Cicero or Seneca in the Roman times, probably just read some passages here and there.

• 24:09Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  And never would have sat down and gone beginning to end scroll to scroll.

• 24:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 24:14Speaker 03

  Because that's just not the habit of reading. And I think even further, if you go back to the performance culture, there would have been no opportunities or rare opportunities to ever hear that whole greatest hits album.

• 24:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  Instead, like you'd have a singer come, you'd have them perform a part. And then later on, you'd hear another one and you spend your life hearing bits and pieces of the Iliad here and there in different forms. And then it maybe just may be you're one of the lucky people who could go to a full performance. And then when you went, that's 18 hours? Pay attention for the whole thing?

• 24:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 24:58Liv Albert?

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• 25:41Liv Albert?

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• 26:25Liv Albert?

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• 26:43Speaker 01

  Verizon FiOS celebrates the holiday hostess with the mostess. When the whole family's over, you've got Verizon FiOS whole home Wi-Fi. Fast, reliable, 100% fiber internet in every room. So your little nephews can blast video games on full volume. Your daughter can stream football under the dinner table. And grandpa can turn on the same movie for the third time. A full house with full Wi-Fi coverage. So everyone can do their own thing together. 100% fiber internet for 100% holiday hosts. Switch to Verizon FiOS today. All home Wi-Fi included with all FiOS gig plans. Availability varies.

• 27:13Speaker 02

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals. No kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 28:09Liv Albert?

  I mean, I did it. I read, you know, through a translation like book by book. And I mean, yeah, each episode I think was like 30 minutes to 45. And then there's 24 of them. Like, I was doing it weekly and that was a lot. Like, I mean, yeah, it's, it's so interesting. Like, you know, I try, I try to emphasize this to people because I think one of the, the, the most common things coming to this kind of content. When you are not, you know, heavy into the research and you don't have all of the contact, the context and the background of everything. Like, you know, you, you think, I think we're all kind of led to believe until you know, otherwise that like ancient Greece is this kind of like single thing, like, you know, everything kind of, like, you just think of it as this place.

• 28:50Liv Albert?

  Like, even if you pick up, you know, obviously the Iliad can be different, but like you pick up a book of myth, like, unless you're picking up the original sources, like you're, you're getting it from somebody else who just like put together a version. But there's often no, like, I mean, even if there is an introduction that introduces some of this context, like half the time, nobody reads it. And you just end up thinking of this as like this thing, like Achilles did these things and, you know, Heracles did these things. And like, maybe like, you know, obviously that's a bad example because generationally they couldn't be friends. But like other heroes, you think like, oh, they were pals, whatever, you know, like, but, and I think it's so much more interesting to be able to go into it. And this level of depth, that I also think probably I annoy people with it sometimes, but I don't care.

• 29:31Liv Albert?

  Like I, I would much rather think of it as like this tradition longstanding, everything changed and nothing existed at once. And there's no canon and yeah.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, but, but that's the thing. So, so two, two things about it that I want to follow up with that I think is important. Is I think we often make the mistake of thinking that Homer's the authoritative beginning of tradition. But I always invite people to think about, well, what if it's the opposite? What if Homer comes at the end of a tradition? And I think if you read the Iliad carefully, the, the internal support for that approach is pretty significant. Right? Another Thing about it, you know, you were talking about reading it intensively. And the way I think about it, well, yeah, the way I think about it is that the Iliad is and the Odyssey are very different poems. Depending on the pace with which you engage with it.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  When I was in graduate school, a faculty member named Seth Benardetti said, you never truly read the Iliad unless you've read it in Greek in under seven days.

• 30:29Liv Albert?

  Okay, yeah.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  And you know, I mean, it's not easy. You have to set aside some time. You can do it. But it's a very different experience. And I think what people miss is that there's a, there is a cognitive and emotional difference between the way we read. And the way you would have enjoyed it in performance. The first thing is repetition and re-engagement. I think that performance of Epic in the Ancient World would have probably been cyclical. It would have been episodic. It would have been repeated. So it would be like, you know, watching Die Hard every Christmas. If that's your, in your liturgical cycle, like every time it's a repetition, but it's different because you're different. You're engaging with it. The people around you are different, right?

• 31:15Speaker 03

  That's one. But again, it'd also be like watching parts of Die Hard at different parts, different times of the year. And piecing it together and thinking about those things. And, and then the pacing is different. When you sit down and read something, right, you can stop and linger.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  Right? You can take a break. You can move. But when you're listening. Like you don't get to stop and think about things, right? You may not hear everything. You may make mistakes in what you're listening to. You're producing meaning at real, at a real time pace. That's very different experientially. And so I think the part of it i- i- is about thinking about that pacing. Right? How the text will be different. I don't want to, I don't mean to like dismiss modern styles of reading, just that it's different. It's a difference between like walking along a path and then driving fast along it. You're noticing something different depending on the pace that you're taking through it. And then depending on, you know, your somatic response.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  Right? Feeling the ground, feeling the air without, without a vehicle is very different from like, you know, clutching a wheel or like hitting the clutch or something. And so I think, I think it's important when we're interpreting and thinking about the style of, of storytelling in Homer. To think about those, those differences in, in reception.

• 32:37Liv Albert?

  I mean, I think about this a lot when I've tried to, you know, really emphasize the difference between something like Homer and like the Aeneid or Metamorphoses, just like the simplest nature of just like one was written to be written, like, and one was created out of this, you know, longstanding massive tradition that you just went into such detail about. Like, they were created in such different ways and with such different intentions. But I think that now, because of the way we interact with things, like in our current time, like, it is really hard to find, to like, really recognize that if you're just picking it up yourself, like, because we just come at it, like, this is a book in my hands and I am meant to read it. Somebody wrote it for me, you know?

• 33:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:22Liv Albert?

  Whereas, like, you know, kind of everything from the Greek world, not everything, but a lot, most of it, like, in terms of texts, is coming from like, a very different, you know, place, and even just mythology, like, you know, people are always asking me questions about, like, the missing pieces, or how do you think this person would have felt about this or that? And I, I like to engage with, with the mythology, I think, in, in, you know, a closer way to what it would have been in the ancient world, which is that I'm like, you, you can't wonder what they would have thought, because that wasn't the point. Like, there is no answer to your question, because they weren't asking that question. So it's just not relevant. Like, the reason they would have developed something is, you know, for such different purposes than, than the way we read something now. They weren't

• 34:04Liv Albert?

  necessarily thinking about character development and plot points and all these different things, right? Like, that just wasn't the point. And I mean, sure, you could speculate on it now if you want. I personally, I'm just like, nah, I don't want to speculate on it. Like, I want to look at what they gave us.

• 34:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And, you know, my, my shtick is always, I want to think about how it, it impacted people, rather than sort of why, why it's designed in such a way, you know? Um, yeah, my, the thing I always, the, the sort of snide thing I say is, I'm not interested in supply-side poetics, right? I, I'm interested in, like, you know, how did audiences respond? Why do stories work for them? Why would they respond to some more than others?

• 34:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah. See, and I'm interested in why they cared about this detail of the myth versus, you know, something else. Like, yeah, like, I don't, I don't care about what Heracles thought. Like, I care about why Heracles did these things, and like, what that says about the tradition that gave him those things to do. But like, yeah, it's much more interesting, I think, to think about the real people behind it versus, you know, the stories that they created. I don't know, the stories are obviously pretty good, too. It's my entire career, so I shouldn't knock them, but yeah, you know.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  I like them. I'm a fan.

• 35:16Liv Albert?

  Well, and speaking of the stories, like, okay, going back to what you said about, you know, kind of being, it's solidified with, you know, the interactions with the Persians and that kind of connection. Like, I'm interested in how that that works with the way the Trojans are presented. But I don't want to get too deep into that because I have so much else I want to talk about. But I am so fascinated always with the way that the Trojans are very sympathetic. Like, they're not really given to you like they should be an enemy. And so I almost wonder if that's kind of, I mean, this like, just like a thought, but like, if, you know, because they're recalling, obviously, I want to bring it back to the Bronze Age, like, they're recalling this, this cultural memory that they, you know,

• 35:58Liv Albert?

  think maybe they have of this war with Troy. And and maybe it's more about like, well, in the old days, you know, the heroes behaved in these ways, but now it's different. So, you know, the way we would fight the Persians would be different. They're the enemy, kind of thing. Versus like, the Trojans, it's, they seem so much more, like, on equal ground, I guess, in terms of like, who is or is not bad. It seems like between them, like, I almost think if you have to pick a good guy, like, the Trojans have more redeeming qualities.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. So I, I mean, I, yeah, so I do want to distinguish between like, my sort of theory that they selected for the Trojan War, because it reflected their experiences and the contents of the Iliad. Because I think one of the problems with making, with thinking of the Trojans as Persians is what you just presented, right? But to be fair, I think although it's pretty clear, or it's a more or less clear scholarly opinion, that it's the Persian Wars that really triggered the Greeks to think of themselves as Greeks. What what you really see is that, you know, the Greeks are pre-ethno-state, right? They didn't see themselves as a unity.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  Fully. And if you follow the tradition or the history of the Persian Wars, they're constantly backstabbing each other and taking money from Persia in order to beat other Greeks. So I think it's a far more complicated thing than we would have now, you know. I think it's a testament to multiculturalism in the Aegean. That they do see the the Trojans as potentially like them. But there's an interesting moment that speaks to your interest in in book two. So usually people are defeated by the catalog of ships. And they don't get all the way to the end and find, oh, my goodness, there's a catalog of Trojans, too.

• 37:53Speaker 03

  Right. And the catalog of Trojans, like the one distinction that's made, one of the few places where we talk about foreignness or see foreignness. In the Iliad is when we find out that they speak different languages. The Trojan and their allies are compared to like birds from different lands, speaking different languages. Right. And and, you know, this seems to be a broad, the sort of linguistic diversity isn't well represented in Homer. But it does seem to be connected to Troy. There's a great moment, you've probably had an episode about this I mix I missed, but in the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite. When Aphrodite appears to Anchises, the lie she tells him is that she had a Trojan nurse when she was young.

• 38:37Speaker 03

  And that's how she learned to speak his language. So there's a consciousness of linguistic difference. And a couple of people have written on this, a guy named Ross wrote a book, sorry, an article called Barbaro Phanos, where he talks about Pan-Hellenism and the Iliad. And then Hillary Mackey has a book called Talking Trojan, where they really look at Trojan difference. So the Iliad constructs difference for the Trojan, but it's limited. Because ultimately, it's not about the Trojans or the Greeks. It's about. Being a human being, right? And it's about the problems of heroes. Yeah. And so I think one thing that helps us understand, so that if we could call it geopolitics of the Iliad and the Odyssey, is who are their main heroes, right?

• 39:22Speaker 03

  The main guy of the Iliad is Achilles. And he's from a nowhere place called Thea, right? I think this is very intentional. I think this story became important because he's not attached to a Corinth, a Thebes, a Sparta, or an Athens. He can become a vehicle for everyone to cheer for, boo for, boo against, because he's not connected to them. Similarly, Odysseus is from such a nowhere place that we still don't agree to this day that the place called Ithaca in Greece was Odysseus's Ithaca. Yeah. And, and so I think that it's, it's the equivalent of, of picking, you know, a backwater place, right?

• 40:02Speaker 03

  Because you don't want your hero to be connected too much to, to their current power.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  But, and then, you know, for another example too, I think the Greeks had different aesthetics about humanizing enemies than we do, right? If the Trojans were barbarians in the sense, or foreigners in the sense that the Romans depict some Easterners, they wouldn't be heroic opponents. They wouldn't be worthy of an epic song, right? So everybody at that age is part of the race of heroes, including the men abroad. And then even, you know, something that's a good comparison is that even when we get to something like Aeschylus's Persians, right? The main character is Xerxes, and it's ghost of his mother.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  And, you know, the Greeks explore their own suffering and loss.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  By looking at the experience of the people they defeated.

• 41:03Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  Right. And so that's different. I mean, and to think about how different it is, the thought experiment I always have with students is, I think the closest thing we could do to tell the story of the Iliad in a modern context would be to set it in the war on terror. To have a coalition of the willing in Afghanistan, made up of all the allies we cobbled together, and to make our opponents the Taliban. Um, and to allow us to humanize members of the Taliban.

• 41:30Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  Um, in a way that we know from current events, we're not capable of doing.

• 41:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 41:36Speaker 03

  Right. Um, but that would be the story. The story would be, you know, I don't know, Australian, British, and US contingents arguing with each other and falling out. And then focusing, you know, on a family, you know, fighting these people in a battle they didn't choose.

• 41:51Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  Right. Cause no matter how we feel about some, you know, about the Taliban, they didn't attack the United States.

• 41:57Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  Right. Um.

• 41:59Liv Albert?

  I wrote that into an episode on Tuesday. You have incredibly funny timing, like as a just random funny reference.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  This is in the air.

• 42:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's not irrelevant.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  It's not.

• 42:10Liv Albert?

  People didn't start all most of the wars that they're dying in. Yeah.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  Right, right. And, you know, we don't actually know how many people died in that one.

• 42:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  Um, and so I think like that, that, that part of what's magic about the Iliad, um, and that I think differentiates it from so much else is that willingness, um, to humanize the enemy.

• 42:33Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  Um, because the point is not about Troy falling. The point is not about the evils of the Trojan. The point is, um, about the conflict and trouble that great men cause their own people. That's the point. And I think that's an interest and anxiety that's at home to the sixth century BCE as well, the seventh century BC as well. When Greeks are negotiating conflicts among aristocrats.

• 43:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I, okay, this is a good push. We really, I would really like to do that episode on not just Odysseus now that we're talking, because I think it needs to be more about Odysseus, yes, and like the heroes, but like, the way you're talking about this just reminds me how often, and specifically recently when, you know, the new Iliad, Emily Wilson Iliad came out, that the way that, that a lot of men view the Iliad as a story of like, the glory of war, when it is so distinctly not remotely about that?

• 43:34Speaker 03

  No, it's in fact about how war is dumb, and violence is dumb, and the only good reason to fight is if someone's trying to kill your loved ones. Like, if you get any other message than that from the Iliad, then I don't know what you're reading or listening to.

• 43:49Liv Albert?

  I mean, it's the people, right? Like, it's that, it's the war mongering nature of, of certain people of just like, war is always, you know, good and right, and like, bad guys are bad, like.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  But, but this is, I mean, again, I think part of the accomplishment of the Iliad that also makes it dangerous, is that it mirrors its audiences. Like, it's just ambiguous enough that you can read into it what you want. And I think that part of this is because of the process I talked about, about how it developed. And so I'll give you a hot button topic, right, that shouldn't be, is what's the relationship between Patroclus and Achilles? Right? I mean, some people are very certain about it, right? And but if you read the epic and look for the evidence, like, it's not clear, right? And I think the reason it's

• 44:41Speaker 03

  not clear is because the Iliad's very cagey, right? There were Greek city-states in which it was, to some extent, acceptable for two men to have a sexual relationship, to be partners. There are others where the, it's more sort of a pederastic, older man, younger man situation. And there are others where you just, it's not common, right? So if you want to be the best epic ever, right, you've got to be able to appeal to the largest audience possible, right? And so if you go and look at the ancient evidence, Aeschylus, Plato, they were certain.

• 45:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 45:17Speaker 03

  That Achilles and Patroclus were lovers, right? And they show have good evidence for it. But they were certain because they looked around at their world. That's what they saw. And Homer's just cagey enough um that the that the epic made space for that reading. At the same time, it made space for them to go sleep in the same tent with women. Right? So whatever's going on there is like, we don't understand it.

• 45:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  And same thing with violence. I mean, the the the Iliad, it it in a way, it it's the opposite of what we think. Like, it's not performing an inception on us. Instead, it has enough space in the margins um to accommodate um our our prejudices, our assumptions, our needs. Um, and that's where it gets dangerous.

• 46:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  People are like, you know, a few years back, and I don't know, one of the multiple online fits, mini-fits I threw of people, you know, the the Christian classical education people are like, we need to read classical texts so you can be like Odysseus. I was like, I don't think you want to be like Odysseus. Yeah, right? You know, I mean, yeah, he's a he's kind of a shithead.

• 46:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like, yeah, the I mean, Achilles is another like, he it's like you can want to be like Achilles, I guess, but like, has he given you reason to like? Yeah, it's yeah, it yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, this like, the glory of these heroes, like, it it it.

• 46:40Speaker 03

  If your glory is bound up in praying for your people to die and then being surprised when your lover or best friend is killed. Um, I don't know, maybe pick something else.

• 46:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's a you problem.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  It is. No, but I think that's very much why when you get to Achilles in the Odyssey, even though it's Odysseus saying he didn't can't trusting him, can't trust him. And Achilles says to Odysseus, don't bullshit me about glory, Odysseus. I would rather, you know, be a slave to a poor farmer um than to be prince of the dead. Like, what does glory give you?

• 47:17Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  Like, it's not life.

• 47:20Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:20Speaker 03

  Like, you're gone. You don't get to experience it. It's nonsense.

• 47:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 47:25Speaker 03

  And so I think that, again, people read what they want to ahead of time.

• 47:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  And that's not, that's not epic's fault.

• 47:34Liv Albert?

  No, well, yeah, it reminds me of like the, the way people often just see the heroes broadly and like the way the word hero kind of has a very different, I think, context now than it would have back then. This idea that like a hero inherently is, is good and valiant. And it's like, the evidence tells us otherwise. Like you might want to believe that, but.

• 47:53Speaker 03

  Well, that actually, that, that may just provide the perfect segue to actually talking about the Bronze.

• 47:58Liv Albert?

  Great. I was gonna get there.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  No, no. So, so before I forget though, because the word hero itself has a connection to different ages. Right? So when you asked me to come on and talk about the Bronze Age, part of me was like, like frozen fear.

• 48:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I added the context.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  Do I really know anything about the Bronze Age? Right? Um, no, no, because like the Iliad itself like has evidence inside for consciousness of several distinct different archaeological periods.

• 48:28Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  But what it really also marks in connection with other poetry is a break with the past. Right? So the Iliad is very conscious for the audience's part that the heroic age ended. And so that word hero, when I teach about Homer and I teach about heroes in my myth course, I emphasize that hero in the ancient world means a radically different thing for what it means now. Right? One, it means someone in their full strength. Right? It's etymologically associated with the word Hera. Yeah, you know, with vitality and youth, which has its own weird things going on, right? But the second, and you know, the second thing that's important, and I usually try to get by this is

• 49:12Speaker 03

  a hero seems to imply a specific type of narrative arc. But the third thing that's important for the Bronze Age question is that the hero represents a period in time. And the way we know this is from, not from Homer necessarily, but from Hesiod in the works and days. And so the works and days, and I don't know if you've talked in your podcast before about the myth of the metals. Right. So the works and days talks about the creation of mankind and how many times it takes. And it's got this probably Near Eastern motif where we started with the gold, age of gold men, then silver, then bronze, and then there's iron, and we're part of iron. But in between bronze and iron, Hesiod sneaks the heroic age.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  Right. And the heroic age, he says, were when men went to war against each other and they way and they sailed the sea in ships. And Zeus got annoyed with them and decided to wipe them all out. And, and this is what Hesiod says, in wars around the flocks of Cadmus. And in war, and in the Trojan War for the sake of Helen. And so in the Hesiodic perspective, like the whole idea of the getting rid of the race of heroes is based around two wars that Zeus decided to foster. The Theban wars, so starting with, you know, the wars between Oedipus's sons.

• 50:40Speaker 03

  And then the one following that by the successors, and then everything around Troy. And so this is often paired with the fragment of a poem called the Cypria, which is in the so-called epic cycle, it's the beginning of the Trojan War narrative. And it starts out by saying, there was a time when the masses of people going all over the earth got really annoying. And Zeus decided to fan the flames of the Trojan War to unburden the land of it. And then adds, and Zeus's plan was being completed. So this line in Greek, it's dios de telea tabule, is also the, I think it's ninth line of the Iliad. Or maybe it's the seventh line of the Iliad.

• 51:24Speaker 03

  So at the beginning of the Iliad, for ancient audiences, it's specifically marked as being part.

• 51:32Speaker 03

  Of an era ending process, right? So the whole rage of Achilles, according to the beginning of the Iliad, is part of Zeus's plan. And we don't know what Zeus's plan is in that context, because it's both the plan of the Iliad and the plan to end the race of heroes through war. And so the earlier you talked about, you know, the cultural memory of destruction, right? And if anything, you know, the, the, the memory that develops for ancient audiences is of a cataclysm that unlike the flood in the Bible, was a human cataclysm.

• 52:15Speaker 03

  The gods are involved, credit still goes to Zeus, but the whole era has ended because of the, of the wars. And, and you know, and this is where you might, we might want to think about, you know, the material reality, right? And so for people who've been to Greece, as you have know, every Greek city-state has the, you know, something like an necropolis, like a raised area that tends to have, as in Athens, a temple on it, right? But it seems that in the Mycenaean period, most of these sites were the sites of palaces. So something changed over time, right?

• 52:55Speaker 03

  And the people who heard the stories, told the stories tended to associate the end of the race of heroes with a cultural turnover in the past that had to do with, you know, a series of abandonment of different sites, a transition from one political religious model to another, and all those ranges of things. So the cultural memory is not, it's not, they didn't know the Bronze Age collapse. And I think some people we know are, are even skeptical about that, that title to begin with, right?

• 53:26Liv Albert?

  I've been putting it in quotations every time.

• 53:28Speaker 03

  Right? Well, you know, as with anything, when someone's absolute about something, I'm like, well, what if we say the opposite? What if there's continuity instead of discontinuity, you know? But there's a consciousness of this loss, a transition that moved us to something lesser. And I think that's how if we're thinking of Greeks imagining the past and of of this current age, the end of the race of heroes is marked with the Trojan War and the wars around thieves. And you see this, you know, if you go to Herodotus or Thucydides, they acknowledge like that to be a moment. I mean, you know, Herodotus seems to take the Trojan

• 54:12Speaker 03

  War more seriously than Thucydides, whereas Thucydides is like, well, people are always raiding other people, you know, so this sounds reasonable. But even they position that as a break, right, as a join somehow between a mythical past and their historical present.

• 54:33Liv Albert?

  Well, yeah, I mean, one of the things I've been, you know, looking at as I get deeper into this, the researching for for the Bronze Age, quote unquote, collapse, is yeah, I mean, the this kind of, I mean, I've always kind of wanted to call it more of a transition. I the the word collapse, though, sounds so nice and dramatic. So, you know, I'm utilizing it how I need to, while then also immediately being like, that's it's an over dramatic word for what happened. It's a transition. And but I understand, I mean, you know, the the change in writing, the I mean, I don't like to say loss of every time I read loss of like, ability to write every time you're, you know, looking at this transition. And I mean, of course, it is ultimately a change in writing with obvious, as far as we know,

• 55:16Liv Albert?

  maybe a few hundred years in between there where there's we don't know. But to me, it sounds more like, yeah, there's a there's a change in a writing structure versus some kind of like loss of the ability to it's always framed as if they kind of get dumber, you know, like they lose the ability to to think in the same ways. And and that feels so like unnecessarily limiting to to the people of the time and and but you can kind of see how How Homer as a concept, you know, or just sort of as the, you know, the oral tradition as a storytelling concept like comes out of that, like you, you, you see a language written on things that you can't read. You see abandoned palaces that look richer than what you're living in now that are bigger and all of this. And, and then if you also

• 56:01Liv Albert?

  are kind of have this, this idea of a, of a heroic age, like it, it feels like it comes together so beautifully to, to create what then becomes, you know, the Iliad and the Odyssey, this like, this memory of a time past, but.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  It's conven- it's a convenient coalescence, really, right? And that's the thing, I think, again, um, we often, we often too much think that there's a plan that someone set out and did it this way, when, you know, it just, it turned out, right? It was convenient. You know, there are other heroic narratives as well. Um, but it seemed like a good, let's call it a explanatory framework, like what happened, why do we have evidence for all these things? And now people have generally showed, um, that knowledge in oral cultures lasts like three generations, right? And then changes and shifts and gets more fluid. Um, but you know, it, it's even unfair, I think, as you've indicated, to think of Greece

• 56:57Speaker 03

  as a pure oral culture, right? Um, you know, literacy came and went. Um, I'm skeptical about how far, how far spread like lit knowledge of Linear B was, right? I mean, we don't have good evidence, great evidence for it, um, in inscripional ways.

• 57:14Liv Albert?

  Well, and that's why I don't like the idea of it being a loss. Like they lost this ability because to me, like what we have of Linear B suggests that it was very purposeful, like it was used in very intentional and very specific ways. So once you no longer have the need for like palace records, well then like obviously this language is going to die out, but it's not because they like lost any fundamental thing about them. They just no longer use this thing. And then once it's gone from enough, from the few people that might've known it, like then it's gone, you know?

• 57:46Speaker 03

  And I think, I think we vastly over emphasize, um, the simplicity of antiquity, right?

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• 59:27Speaker 03

  One of the things, you know, one of the things that I'm always amazed by is how little I know about the ancient world still after all those years. I was just visiting some colleagues at Vanderbilt University. And one of them there works on the archives of Darius the Great. We had, or in Chicago, we had like 20,000 tablets that were taken from the destruction of Persepolis. And what's amazing about these tablets is they're in Aramaic, Elamite. There's one Greek one. There are a couple that shouldn't be there from like in Egyptian forms.

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  You're like, and this is like from the 520s BCE.

• 1:00:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:12Speaker 03

  And later, like this amazing resource that's only there. And I was asking the woman who works on it, Annalisa, I'm like, so why did we have that? Like, did they have it there? She's like, well, burned down. We don't really know. Maybe it was a disused storeroom for a while. Like, who knows why we still have these things?

• 1:00:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  But it's like, you know, if they had that in this one place, like, how much variety and strangeness was there in the ancient world and interconnections that we don't know about?

• 1:00:41Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  You know, so that's why I think about that. There's a whole notion of discontinuity and continuity is based on evidence from locations that have had continual habitation of human beings for thousands of years.

• 1:00:54Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  Right? And what do we do? We reuse stuff. We break stuff. We're irreverent. We're dirty. We're messy. Uh, so it's just, I, I, I'm very, I, I get worried when we get, when we're certain about these things. And we're like, it's the Dark Ages. Like, well, it's dark to us.

• 1:01:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  Doesn't mean it was to them.

• 1:01:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:01:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I, I, I've been just, yeah, noticing this, this use of the word loss a lot in ways where like I, you know, I'm very intentionally coming at this series, like with the same kind of mindset that I came to Atlantis and Sparta series in the past years, where I want to kind of like, you know, um, I'm not going to find the right words, but basically like get, you know, get rid of this idea or, or teach the, a more accurate kind of concept of what, you know, happened at the end of the Bronze Age and, and everything. And because in my head, it was like, oh, you know, the, the sort of, I've been calling them like the loud history bros, like the guys who read one book and then like talk really loud into a camera about a thing like

• 1:01:56Liv Albert?

  that I saw this video once and it, and it has and will continue to stick with me forever. It's this guy talking about the Bronze Age and up to Homer. And he's like, and he's just this like loud white guy talking into an Instagram reel, you know, like, there's just so much that's happening and even just that little bit. Um, and he talks loud and fast and, and he's like, so, and he starts talking about like the, the greatness of the Bronze Age and all the palaces and the richness and all the gold and. And then he's like, and then, you know, something happened and they all disappeared completely. They lost the ability to read and write and like, understand a written word. And then from this dark ages of nothing, like Homer sprung up and invented the Greek

• 1:02:41Liv Albert?

  language with the Iliad and the Odyssey. Exactly. Your face, you know, it's not for the podcasters. But yeah, I saw this guy's video and I was like, oh my God, I feel like my head is exploding. Like.

• 1:02:54Speaker 03

  I'm basically like, like, for every palace, there had to be thousands of people laboring to support it. Right? And, and you know, the, the best you can say about the Bronze Age collapse is that you had a system crash.

• 1:03:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:14Speaker 03

  Right? And that the elite networks that gave us the best evidence for the period ceased to function in the same way. Right? But what about the other millions of people on the planet?

• 1:03:26Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 1:03:27Speaker 03

  Who went on living and doing the same things? Like, it just, it doesn't, it, it makes zero sense. I mean, one of the things that I was thinking about, you know, I, I think actually our experiences of war and plague over the past few years, maybe helps us reset a little bit. But babies are born during sieges, right? People get married and die and keep on living when others are at war. And the problem is we're so used to the primary narrative that we lose track of the fact that like, if all knowledge had been lost, if there had been a major like, like a loss of everything, it would have

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  taken maybe 10,000 more years to get back to where we were. Like, they didn't lose the wheel, they didn't lose architect agriculture, they didn't forget animal husbandry. I mean, all of that's pretty bizarre. And we're talking about like, a little corner of the world.

• 1:04:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:04:29Liv Albert?

  This is one little place.

• 1:04:31Speaker 03

  There are already human beings in the Americas doing their thing.

• 1:04:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:35Speaker 03

  There are people in Egypt are doing their thing.

• 1:04:37Liv Albert?

  I was gonna say Egypt's a great example for like, yeah, okay, I'm sorry, like, everything died out in Greece. They lost literally all human abilities, but Egypt's just continuing on being Egypt like.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  But a- a- and again, to go back to like my earlier shtick about people not thinking well in the aggregate. Right? Like, think about the fragility of a cultural group that has a bunch of different little centers.

• 1:05:03Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  Right? If you have a massive center with the collected wealth and like, you know, it's one thing, you can absorb. So system changes in a different way, you know, but in Greece, I mean, the Mycenaean cities wouldn't little like backwaters.

• 1:05:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  They they weren't that important, right? And I think, you know, our idea of the Greek miracle of sort of that fake idea of the Western progress of mankind makes us.

• 1:05:32Liv Albert?

  Founders of Western civilization.

• 1:05:34Speaker 03

  It must have been really important. No, you think they're important because we had some famous archaeologists who went to look for them. Right? Made a big splash about them. Um, but you know, like, there's some like piles of rocks.

• 1:05:49Liv Albert?

  Well, but compared to like the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, like other people going on like, like they're not, they're not it. Yeah.

• 1:05:56Speaker 03

  It's a backwater. I think, you know, this last year we were in Denmark and Norway. And, you know, they have tons of museums there about the Vikings and stuff because that's what they do. And I was going through and looking at the time scale and the evidence and the material that they they had. And I'm like, you know, like, these guys were a bunch of backwater fools. And I say this as someone of Scandinavian descent, like you go in and you see like their history and you're like, and they went to Byzantium and brought back a sword. I'm like, yeah, because they didn't know how to make it the same way, right? And that's, I think of like the Viking relationship to the Byzantium to me is. Like something like, and this is a difficult analogy.

• 1:06:38Speaker 03

  Isenean relationship to Babylon or Memphis in Egypt or something like there's just a big difference in there. And so, you know, I mean, we make a big deal of this collapse for the same reason like we make a big deal of like lie, of made up stuff like Atlantis, um, which is like, we want this thing to be more important.

• 1:06:59Liv Albert?

  Well, exactly right.

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  Right. Because we've got this cultural narrative that traces our heritage there. And we think that if like we come from nothing, all right, or if there's something big didn't happen, um, then somehow that cheapens us, which is, it's just weird.

• 1:07:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:16Liv Albert?

  It reminds me, and I, I gather you won't take offense, but apologies, but like, it reminds me of the American narrative of just like, you know, moving to the new world and breaking away from Britain and, you know, becoming this great big thing, leader of the free world when almost no country will refer to you as that, that's not the US. Like, you know, it reminds me of that.

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  It's worse. No, it's worse. So I know I'm not offended at all. So like, um, no, my, um, they, I had this argument within my family. Um, so my grandfather is still alive. He's 95. His, his father famously, according to him, um, came from, uh, Norway, walked across Canada, and then went south into, uh, Minnesota, right? And

• 1:08:01Liv Albert?

  Oh, all the way there. Okay.

• 1:08:03Speaker 03

  Homesteaded, right? And so my grandfather's whole narrative that aligns with sort of Trumpish American vision, that our family came here and did everything on our own, right? We really pull ourselves up. And I said to him and other family members, not so gently, I'm like, all right, the two major things that put our family into the middle class are getting free land and the GI Bill in World War Two. And I'm like, did you do that yourself? And where did that come from? Right? And he's like, well, you know, we worked that land. I'm like, it was free because of American government policy to displace the indigenous people. Right? It's not like that land had been unpopulated or unused for thousands of years.

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  We didn't just discover it, we stole it. And then, you know, for something like the GI Bill, like, people often forget that, like, my grandfather, who was Protestant Scandinavian, got to barely fight at all and then go in and get a graduate degree, thanks to the US Army. Whereas if he had been black, he wouldn't have gotten that degree. Like, they didn't make that available to black Americans in the same way. Right? And so this is, it's all about the narrative we tell. And this is always what we do with the past, right? We make a narrative that fits our desired identity now, rather than like getting, letting go of our desired identity now and looking at the actual evidence.

• 1:09:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, obviously, Canada has one too, so I won't pretend we don't. Like, I mean, I'm just generationally white Canadian. So I'm like, we don't have a family story, but if we did, you know, it either would be horrible or like, wrong, right?

• 1:09:47Speaker 03

  Well, and that's the thing, I mean, and to take it back to Homer, because I think this is absolutely appropriate conversation to have. It's like, to what extent do you let the story you tell of the past decide who you are now? And a lot of times what you see in Homer is that negotiation of identity. And one of the things I love about looking outside of Homer and other narrative traditions is how people are reading themselves into it, how people are negotiating their identities once Homer becomes this cultural authority. You know? And to go back to like, the Bronze Age thing. While, while the Homeric epic marks a break with the past, right? The evidence in it shows no consciousness of what that past was like.

• 1:10:28Speaker 03

  Like, the material evidence is like Bronze Age, Iron Age, just like randomly grabbing stuff that doesn't belong together, right? In much the same way as like, I don't know, we watch a movie about King Arthur, right? Like there'll be types of weapons that a medievalist will say shouldn't be in the same place. Right. But it's a fantasy of the past that in some way is communicating like who we think we are now. And so I think when like the most important thing to tell readers of the Iliad and the Odyssey, who are interested in them as historical documents, is there historical documents of what ancient audiences believed were components of the past, right? Doesn't mean they were, right?

• 1:11:11Speaker 03

  Because none of them were archaeologists or historians. They're just like, yeah, well, people in the past wore boar tooth helmets and they had figure eight shields, those weirdos or those heroes or however we want to view them.

• 1:11:22Liv Albert?

  The boar tooth helmets are so good.

• 1:11:26Speaker 03

  They'd kill a lot of boars for those. I don't know.

• 1:11:28Liv Albert?

  That's what I thought. I saw them in Napoli for the first time and was like, oh, my God, this is kind of horrifying and deeply weird.

• 1:11:36Speaker 03

  I look, humans do weird stuff, right? And you know, I mean, I think what we're missing is that at the time, how much easier it would have been to collect boar's teeth than it may have been to smelt the right metal and shape it.

• 1:11:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, it makes me think of the, you know, when you were talking earlier about how the Mycenae seem so impressive because these, you know, old school rich archaeologists went and found stuff and made a big deal out of it. And, you know, the Mask of Agamemnon is such a like beautiful example of that. But it's also a great example of like the, I mean, this is me just like absolute base knowledge of anything. But like, it feels like it's a good example of them using minimal abilities with metal because it's gold. Like gold is so soft and squishy, like they're not showing like a lot of skill with these beautiful. They would have been totally useless, but they look good.

• 1:12:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, if you're wandering through a museum and you look at gold from ancient Greece and then you go to the Egyptian section, it should be humbling.

• 1:12:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:47Speaker 03

  Right. But again, I'd point to that. I mean, you know, we have these grave items from a select number, right, of monumental graves. But what percentage of that is the population? Right? If we're really thinking about the Harar period, there's this wild, I don't know if you saw some of us commenting about it online, but there's this recent review of Robin Lane Fox's book on Homer by the, by the Homerist Richard Janko that praises Robin for being like among the last of the aristocratic Homerists, that people really understand what aristocracies are like because they were raised in, in, in, in England, in the UK.

• 1:13:29Speaker 03

  And that because of that, he can really understand nobility in the Iliad. And one, like aristocratic sentiment in the UK doesn't map onto aristocratic sentiment in antiquity. And if you think you do, you're overlaying things that are different, right? The second thing, I mean, how many audience members who listened to the Iliad were nobles or aristocrats, right? I mean, for every person who got a gold mask in their death in, in Mycenaean Greece.

• 1:14:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:05Speaker 03

  There had to be tens of thousands or more who didn't.

• 1:14:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:11Speaker 03

  Right? And so, so I'm wondering, like, why are we always worried about the one person who may have enjoyed some of the poem? When for these narrative traditions to live, they needed thousands of people to enjoy them.

• 1:14:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:26Speaker 03

  I mean, they had to adapt to those. They had to appeal to everybody. But just like this focus on the elite reception of it and the elite culture is a part, and then I'm going to make sense here, it's part of why we make that error of thinking the Bronze Age collapse may have been more than it was.

• 1:14:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:45Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:14:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it was a loss of elites. It was the loss of, yeah, what we can find, but not the people themselves.

• 1:14:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, if we had a system crash now because of technology, probably a bunch of like billionaire assholes would survive because of their bunkers. Right? Um, unless of course their security teams killed them off and kept their stuff, right? There'd be a mixture of that stuff. But throughout the world, imagine if we had system crash now, who would survive?

• 1:15:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:12Speaker 03

  Right? Subsistence farmers outside of the West, right? Like people, people who are in the so-called third world countries, we haven't let come into usher, usher into the 21st century would have a much better chance of surviving. Than you or I would.

• 1:15:29Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:29Speaker 03

  Like, I can't grow a fucking tomato.

• 1:15:33Liv Albert?

  I have some beautiful indoor plants. I definitely can't eat them, but they are alive.

• 1:15:37Speaker 03

  But so that's the thing. I mean, like, what culture would survive? Who would be the standard bearers of humanity? And what would it look like? And just because someone's a subsistence farmer in whatever place we're going to point to, doesn't mean they don't know about art.

• 1:15:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:53Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:15:54Liv Albert?

  Well, and, and just because they couldn't continue the tradition of, or didn't care to, even if they could, the tradition of using linear B doesn't mean the language just like, died out completely. And, you know, it was some like wild thing, like they could have just had the, a whole episode from the, the Iliad, like memorized in their head. But oh, they didn't jot it down like a palace record. And so we get to pretend like all intelligence died out. Because that's what it always seems like is this, like a loss of human intelligence with this collapse. And it's, it's gross and weird.

• 1:16:28Speaker 03

  It is, but again, I think the narrative privileges us, right? One, people like a good mystery.

• 1:16:34Liv Albert?

  They sure do.

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  Right? Um, another, like it, it, it, I don't know.

• 1:16:41Speaker 03

  I think part of it, part of the attraction of such narratives is that it breaks down time. It makes us seem more important.

• 1:16:49Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:49Speaker 03

  Right? And it makes the continuity of human culture seem more limited. But, you know, even in the few years I've been alive on this earth, right? Um, every few years, we're, we're taking back the dawn of Homo sapiens, like farther and farther, like the continuity of history. Oh, it doesn't just go to 3,000 B.C. or 6,000 or like 20,000, we're going to keep going. You know? Um, and so, you know, we have to do that work because we're, we're so like monomaniacally focused on, on the present. You know, on ourselves.

• 1:17:23Liv Albert?

  Monomaniacally is very good word. Thank you.

• 1:17:27Liv Albert?

  Feels very accurate.

• 1:17:31Liv Albert?

  Well, I mean, honestly, that's, I feel like that's the perfect reconnection to the Bronze Age. Um, to wrap this up, since I won't take up too much more of your time. Thank you so much for doing this. This was so much fun and turned out exactly like I wanted.

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  Oh, good, good. I'm glad I could read the script you sent me.

• 1:17:48Liv Albert?

  Exactly. These are definitely scripted. I know they sound like it.

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  Some, someday, uh, we still gotta hit up Odysseus, but I think you're right, thinking about, um, the, about that social change in the switch, right? Something happened as the Greeks moved. So one discontinuity to think about before you kick me off. Is that the Iliad and the Odyssey posit monarchy. But they were right, performed for audiences that largely lived in oligarchies, um, and some democracies.

• 1:18:17Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  So how do these epics function as criticisms of a, um, political model that the Greeks themselves, uh, no longer prize?

• 1:18:27Liv Albert?

  Right? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, do you, do you have like a couple more minutes? Or do you?

• 1:18:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can talk a little longer.

• 1:18:35Liv Albert?

  I, I never want to keep people past what I schedule, but I also, well, cause I mean, yes, that's, that's so interesting. Um, because yeah, it, that would have been really around that tyrant, like heavy tyrant period, right? Like when they would have written it down.

• 1:18:49Speaker 03

  But they're not, they're not. Um, they're not generally not hereditary monarchs, right?

• 1:18:54Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:18:54Speaker 03

  What you see, people who write about things like this from like, you know, Robert Druze, Basilaus, to a lot of the work by like, uh, Josiah Ober and Kurt Rafflau about the uh, generation or development of Greek democracy. It's just a chaotic period, right? But you do get two things that happen almost everywhere around Greece politically. Development of two different types of um assemblies, right? So if you take Sparta, for example, you have um the Garusia with Council of Old Men. And then you have the Ecclesia, right? The Assembly of All Soldiers um and of all Citizen Men. And you basically have these two mechanisms, um these two institutions.

• 1:19:36Speaker 03

  Most places in Greece, most cities in Greece have evidence for a smaller council of oligarchic rule balanced against a larger participative um assembly. And what's fascinating is that these two structures are um reflected in the Iliad and the Odyssey, right? The Iliad is all about the assembly of the soldiers that they perform for in the first uh book. Um, and then constantly all the decisions are being made in the Boule, in the small council of the elders. And and they're called, it's called, you know, the the Council of the Garantone of the Old Men. But Diomedes and Achilles aren't old men, right?

• 1:20:15Speaker 03

  And so what most theor- um theorists see in this um is a development of two sort of competing ideas. One, sort of an oligarchic aristarchic ideal in that small council. And two, a more um participative assembly that reflects um the the the larger need of ancient Greece um to have citizen warriors

• 1:20:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:40Speaker 03

  of certain types. And so eh this is everywhere, but there's no evidence for a model like this in the Mycenaean period.

• 1:20:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  Right? And so this has got to be speaking to Greek audiences of the time. And I think from the, and I think it's part of the reason why the Iliad takes the shape it does. Right? It's not about fighting Trojans. It's about Greeks fighting Greeks. I think it's a reflection of the social strife that you actually see in the sixth and fifth century B.C.

• 1:21:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and it is fascinating to think of it as that, what you mentioned, like right at the top. Like, you know, connecting with, with the Persians and this way of like pulling the Greeks together in ways that they hadn't been before, because I think like it is both doing that and very much acknowledging the fact that like, that doesn't come easy. Like, they don't get along. Like, there's always going to be strife within the Greeks.

• 1:21:30Speaker 03

  And if anything, I think you can see an implicit criticism, if not bending to explicit, of monarchy in the depiction of the politics of Troy. Right? And so like, this is a very old hobby horse for me. I in fact wrote my dissertation about rhetoric and politics in the Iliad. But I think there are three different political stages. You have the, the Achaeans who are tending towards an oligarchic aristocracy. You have the gods who are straight up like sopranos like monarchy, like this is a mafia. And then you have the Trojans who try to act like the gods, but they can't. Because a monarchy in the Iliad's mind only works if you have a god king.

• 1:22:14Speaker 03

  Someone whose power can never truly be challenged. And so I think you could make the argument that the Iliad is implicitly critical of human or mortal political arrangements that depend on that model. Because the interests of the family in Troy necessarily trump the interests of the people. And that's bad news.

• 1:22:36Liv Albert?

  I think that's so interesting, and it really emphasizes, I think, a very real disconnect between how

• 1:22:45Liv Albert?

  How that type of criticism is often made today versus back then? Because like, yes, the way you're breaking it down now, like it is a criticism of a monarchy through Troy. But at the same time, like, it doesn't just make them bad. It doesn't just make them like, you know, the enemy. And I think that today, a lot of times like that type of criticism, like I'm thinking pop culture, you know?

• 1:23:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, I mean, what it shows is that the Trojans make bad decisions.

• 1:23:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:16Speaker 03

  Because of their institutions.

• 1:23:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:18Speaker 03

  Not because they're bad people.

• 1:23:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah. It's just so much more interesting a criticism than what we get today.

• 1:23:24Speaker 03

  Well, it's also so much more true of human nature.

• 1:23:26Liv Albert?

  Exactly.

• 1:23:27Speaker 03

  Like, one of the things, and this is really super boring, but it's like, in the past few years, like I've been very active in university governance. I've been chair, I'm a dean now. And when there are problems, I always ask, like, is this a structural problem or a personnel problem? Now, that is, this is a polarity. It's never just one or the other, but good people make bad structures function.

• 1:23:52Speaker 03

  But, and good structures cover up, people aren't working that hard, right? But oftentimes, like, no matter how hard you work, if you're in a bad structure, you're going to have bad outcomes.

• 1:24:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:05Speaker 03

  And I think that's what's going on in the Iliad. If you look at the rare scenes, Hector talking to Politimus, the key, sorry, the Trojan Assembly of Book Seven. Because they're willing to put the interests of the individuals of the royal family ahead of the people. They can never make a decision for the good of the city. They can only make a decision for the good of the family. One of the things that's a refrain throughout both the Iliad and the Odyssey is when leaders destroy their people through their own recklessness.

• 1:24:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and I think it's, you know, they're making these decisions for the good of the family. But then you also get to see how, like, not only are those decisions, obviously, they go very badly for the people, but they also go badly for the family, you know?

• 1:24:49Speaker 03

  They do.

• 1:24:50Liv Albert?

  Hector dies very badly. And so it's like, it's a good reminder that like, Or, you know, I think it's pointing out that even, you know, it doesn't even work for the elites, which is maybe a connection back to the Bronze Age. Like even when you're only concerned about this monarchical family of elites, it doesn't save them either, you know?

• 1:25:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, and I think it's partly contained within that metaphor that's used in Homer a lot, the shepherd of the host, right? The whole idea that a leader as a shepherd has a lot to do with it, right? It's not a benign thing because we always have to remember that shepherds fleece their flocks and sometimes eat them, right? But, but their well-being is, is completely embedded in the well-being of the flock, right? And the well-being of the people. And that's marked at the beginning of the Iliad, when Agamemnon's failure is to not take care of his people, to make a decision about his own interests over the people.

• 1:25:47Speaker 03

  It's marked in Achilles asking for his own people to suffer because his honor was, was transgressed. And the people who are consistently shown as making better decisions, Nestor, Diomedes, sometimes Odysseus, right? In the Iliad.

• 1:26:04Liv Albert?

  At least in the Iliad, yeah.

• 1:26:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. They're shown thinking about the whole.

• 1:26:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:11Speaker 03

  And the people.

• 1:26:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:13Speaker 03

  And that, I mean, if people, you know, if the classical educators want to focus on that lesson from the Iliad, then I'll say, all right, go. That, that may be the good heroic lesson.

• 1:26:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:25Speaker 03

  But, but not the rage and not the self ruthless self-interest that we see.

• 1:26:29Liv Albert?

  The glory of war.

• 1:26:30Speaker 03

  The glory of war. No, war's a bad idea because people die.

• 1:26:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah. That's literally what it's saying and what also logic shows.

• 1:26:39Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't, I don't know glory and war. It's people who don't have time. I'm sorry, people have too much free time, like.

• 1:26:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:47Speaker 03

  You know, go back to farming.

• 1:26:51Liv Albert?

  That's what Odysseus tried to do. It didn't work.

• 1:26:54Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, maybe they would have been better off leaving him at home. Could have made better decisions.

• 1:26:59Liv Albert?

  Oh, could you imagine? That would have gone really well. Yeah. Or at least better, you know?

• 1:27:04Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:27:04Liv Albert?

  And they wouldn't have had Achilles because he convinced, so, I mean, either way, but, you know, wouldn't have had the same plot.

• 1:27:13Speaker 03

  That's why we're not allowed to rewrite it.

• 1:27:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, that feels like a perfect wrap up. Thank you so much again. I'm gonna, maybe I'll keep in both where I just kept you again, but this has been wonderful.

• 1:27:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's always fantastic to talk to you. I love the work you're doing.

• 1:27:28Liv Albert?

  Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

• 1:27:46Liv Albert?

  Nerds, thank you as always so much for listening. I realized at the end of that episode, I didn't ask Joel to promote anything because I just got so caught up in asking so many more questions. So instead, I will point you out to his website, which is Sententi i Antiqui. It's Latin and I always have trouble pronouncing it, but I will link to it in the episode's description. And it, along with his Twitter as well, which I will also link. But both are really, really wonderful sources and just like insights into ancient languages. There's a lot of pieces in really modern and readable translations, a lot of works that you probably would have never heard of otherwise, little fragments here and there.

• 1:28:29Liv Albert?

  I've used the site a lot in my own nerdy research and actually novel research, but it's a true joy. So if you're nerdy with that kind of stuff, I highly recommend it. Again, you can find links in the episode's description there. And next week, we will be continuing on finally reaching the point of collapse. So on Tuesday, we will talk about the collapse of the Bronze Age, what that really means, what might have really caused it and everything in between, followed by two conversations about those aspects of the collapse. Oh, you have so much more to look forward to. I have so much more to look forward to. We're going to have a great time. Let's talk about Myths, Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert.

• 1:29:14Liv Albert?

  Michaela Smith is the Hermes to my Olympians, the assistant producer. And honestly, I mean, just really the brain behind this entire Bronze Age series. Uh, I have worked very minimally on the scripts because she's written such good stuff. And, ugh, it's just, I, this wouldn't exist without Michaela, so huge thanks. And Laura Smith is the always wonderful audio engineer and production assistant, who has done incredible work on these conversation episodes. See, we're all working together. We make such a nice little team. The podcast is part of the iHeart Podcast Network. Listen on Spotify, or Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to help me continue bringing you this podcast, consider subscribing to the Patreon, where you have access to loads of past bonus episodes.

• 1:29:57Liv Albert?

  And is that the end of my script that I'm not reading a script from? Yes, I think it is. Thank you all so much for being incredible nerds who just want to hear about this stuff with me. It is such a thrill. I am Liv, and I love this shit.

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