Conversations: No Culture is a Vacuum, the Winding World of Ancient Jewish Travel Narratives w/ Dr Gillian Glass

Liv speaks with Dr Gillian Glass about the history of ancient Jewish travel narratives and the beautiful multiplicity of the ancient world. Learn more about Gillian's work here https://www.au.dk/en/[email protected], and the ANINAN project here https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/projects/an-intersectional-analysis-of-ancient-jewish-travel-narratives-er-2/. Note: the project is actually called An Intersectional Analysis of Ancient Jewish Travel Narratives rather than interdisciplinary as stated in the episode! 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. I try to provide direct warnings when there is reference to anything with overtly traumatic themes but be aware that Greek mythology regularly features assault, death, and many other potentially triggering events. 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?

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• 2:10Liv Albert?

  Hello. This is Let's Talk About Myths, baby. And I am your host, Liv, back with a new conversation episode. And I'm really excited about this one. It is with returning guest, Gillian Glass. Jillian was on the show like years ago now, which is so weird because I swear it was like, not years ago, um, to talk about epiphanies. And so we talked about them in mostly Greek mythology, but it was just this idea of an epiphany, which is like a god, just like showing up. And I just remember it was all about the smell. Um, because there was a smell. Anyway, delightful past episode, if you want to go re-listen. But this time, Jillian and I were chatting,

• 2:50Liv Albert?

  and she mentioned she's been working on a new project. And obviously, I was so down. Uh, and so her research this time is all about Jewish travel narratives in the ancient world. And, okay, I mean, you'll hear me say this like a handful of times in the episode, but like, I try to stay very far away from religious texts that are still in use today. Um, you know, because I don't, I don't like interacting with people who could be mad at me for treating their religious texts like the texts that they are, which is ancient texts like anything else. And

• 3:32Liv Albert?

  I don't, that doesn't discount the religion. It's just that is how ancient texts work. That's a fact. Um, and so I just try to kind of often stay away from that. But obviously, Jillian is coming at it from this like ancient history perspective. And so I was like, okay, we, I'm down, I'm down. And all to say, it's a really, really interesting episode. We talk about these Jewish travel narratives, which were coming out at a time when the ancient world was going through so many changes. And there's so many different regions. And so obviously, we're going to talk about the

• 4:10Liv Albert?

  The, the region in question, the Levant, and we talk about the Jewish history there,

• 4:18Liv Albert?

  which I just want to make like really on the nose smack dab obvious that like the Jewish history there does not negate the Palestinian history there and nor does it, you know, nor does the Palestinian history there take anything away from the Jewish history because this was a time when there were so many different ancient peoples living together. Borders did not exist. I mean, even now borders are made up. And this is just a time of, of travel, of movement, of ancient peoples. And it's really fucking interesting. We had an incredible time. I don't know why I keep swearing. Just a heads up, this was recorded a few months ago now.

• 4:59Liv Albert?

  I don't really think there's any point where that is obvious, but like, I like to explain. And just to put a horrifically fine point on it, because of the world that we are all experiencing now, and I say that, recording this on January 29th, 2026.

• 5:22Liv Albert?

  Oh, the, the supremacy obsession of Western civilization does not benefit anyone except the super, super, super rich, super privileged people. And this is the, the best time, I think, to be like, looking at the ancient world and history generally. And recently, in one of the introductions I recorded, you know, I really just vaguely touched on the, the horrors of the ICE attacks on, on US civilians and, and undocumented people, it's always, it's an

• 6:03Liv Albert?

  attack regardless of immigration status. But, you know, I did, I made a reference to the fact

• 6:13Liv Albert?

  Anne Frank was an illegal. Um, and I think that that is absolutely relevant and and valid. Um, but I've recently, you know, seen a lot of people talking about the American history of slave catchers and how that is a much more apt point and how the Nazis actually learned a lot from the system of enslavement and Jim Crow in the States. So I just want to put a really fine point on it, too, that that what we're watching now is is not them borrowing from the Nazis. It is, in fact, very, very tied to American history. And simultaneously, I think it's important, especially as we are watching the utter, utter horrors of what

• 6:58Liv Albert?

  the state of Israel is is planning to do with one of the oldest cities and regions on the planet.

• 7:12Liv Albert?

  You can look up almost any map of the Bronze Age and you're going to see the city of Gaza. And so as, as we all watch what Israel and the US, those horrible besties, um, what they intend to do, I, and the propaganda that comes with that. I think this is a really important time and episode for me to point out some news that may have gotten missed amongst all the other horrific news. So you can look this up. It's, um, it was reported on eight or nine days ago. The Trump administration asked Penn State University, I believe definitely a Penn.

• 7:52Liv Albert?

  I, there may be more than one. Um, they asked this university at least for a list of Jewish students.

• 8:03Liv Albert?

  They asked for a list of Jewish students. So I just want to point out the ways that

• 8:14Liv Albert?

  I mean, I am not Jewish, so I don't want to pretend that I have any authority on this matter, but I do have eyes and knowledge of history and the modern state of Israel is not about making Jewish people any safer because Netanyahu's best boys, the Americans, are willing to ask for lists of Jewish students. Um, I just thought, I don't even know how to wrap this up because I just, but I, I thought it was really important. I didn't want to put it at the end. I wanted you all to hear it upfront. And all of that said, here is a really fun episode where we look into the very, very, very ancient history of Jewish travel narratives across the ancient Mediterranean.

• 9:13Liv Albert?

  Conversations, no culture exists in a vacuum, the winding world of ancient Jewish travel narratives with Dr. Gillian Glass.

• 9:38Liv Albert?

  I am, I'm so excited to have this conversation with returning guest Gillian Glass. Um, and mostly because, okay, this is how I'm going to preface it because there's, I mean, there's so many things going on here. I really typically try to stay pretty far away from modern living religions because I am not amongst any and don't particularly care for a lot of the ways that the organized religions behave. And I say that as organizations, not the faith. Um, but the thing about obviously what you're looking at, um, which is Jewish travel narratives. Yes. Yeah. That, that, you know, we're melding so much ancient history with, with like what

• 10:21Liv Albert?

  is obviously still a modern religion and everything, but I'm just so fascinated by this, the ways that this intersects. And I don't know, this is my, one of my first forays into any kind of biblical anything. So this is me like trying to lay it all out, but I'm so curious and like, I don't know, when we last chatted, we talked about. Why have I lost, I've lost the word now, the epiphany, the epiphanies of gods and smelling the gods in the air. So I'm just, I mean, I know I'm, this is going to be fascinating, but like, how did you get into this? What are you looking at exactly? Like, tell me a little about these Jewish travel narratives.

• 10:58Speaker 05

  Hey Liv, it's great to be back.

• 11:01Liv Albert?

  Oh, thank you. I'm terrible at also saying hello first. Everyone's kind of forced to say it all in the answer.

• 11:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, hello to Liv and her lipsters.

• 11:12Liv Albert?

  That's the first use of that and I'm not mad at it. Lipsters.

• 11:15Speaker 05

  I love it when I get to be the first to make a bad joke. Yes. All right. Well, it's great to be back. Thanks for having me back on. Yeah. Ancient Jewish travel narratives. I, as so many people who are finishing up PhDs know, or have finished up PhDs know, when you come to that timeline, deadline, things start to get a little squirrely because you don't really know what comes next. And you're applying for a whole bunch of things. And what landed for me was a three-year postdoctoral research project on a project being led by Professor Adisa Uzameki at Ohus University in Denmark. And she had won a European Research Council ERC grant to study ancient Jewish travel narratives. And the project's title

• 11:59Speaker 05

  is actually an interdisciplinary analysis of ancient Jewish travel narratives, which is sort of smushed and shortened into Aninam is what we call it. So I've been living in Denmark since January 2023 and I've got two wonderful colleagues on the project, Ilko Klaas and Anat Shapiro. And all four of us are working on different ancient Jewish travel narratives and we're doing it from different methodologies and perspectives and sort of doing different kinds of things with ancient sources. And travel narrative and Jewish travel narrative, all of the terms get held very broadly and very loosely because as I'm sure you have encountered and your listeners have encountered, definitions matter.

• 12:46Speaker 05

  Because on some very simple level, it's about what you include and what you exclude from your study. And travel narrative is a category that was very, very heavily influenced by the 19th century literary and cultural and historical world, but very specifically by the grand tour experiences of elite European, particularly northern European young men who would then travel to Italy and Greece. And this is a part of, in the big picture, it's a part of how the 19th century and certain colonial European, northern European perspectives used parts of classical history to self-define. And so you can think of Lord Byron and his travels and or Keats and these kinds of characters, right?

• 13:31Speaker 05

  Going around the Mediterranean world and poetry like Ozymandias, right? And I saw a colossal foot in the desert kind of thing, right? And so that-

• 13:42Liv Albert?

  Very like, sorry, I just wanna, cause it's-

• 13:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:45Liv Albert?

  Is the, the word is not, my, my brain wants this to be orientalizing, which is not really because of the region, but it's just that way that it like-

• 13:52Speaker 05

  It's othering.

• 13:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah, othering, yeah. It's this, this kind of like, they're from this like really wealthy area that has already done so much colonizing and has basically decided it owns that enormous portion of the world culturally and physically and all of this. And then they're going around and learning all of these things from these like, these ancient and you know, different, less intelligent people somehow. I don't know, there's just so much implication in these things.

• 14:18Speaker 05

  And it's one of the, I don't pretend to be an expert in this sort of thing, but from memory, it's one of the critiques of not just Edward Said, but of how his work has been used in that when it's called orientalizing, that's air quotes, fine when we're referring to peoples and places and cultures that are from the giant air quotes, Orient.

• 14:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 14:40Speaker 05

  But what do we do about Egypt? And what do we do about Sub-Saharan Africa? And what do we do about the indigenous peoples of what we call Northern South America? And what do we do about the way Northern Europe has used Italy and Greece? Cause they're not east per se, they might be south, they might be west.

• 14:59Liv Albert?

  But what they did is so similar and.

• 15:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's the other, right? It's the othering and the exoticizing and the fetishizing and the the way in which that other is used in the creation and the imagining of the self, which is deeply problematic to say, to say the very least.

• 15:18Liv Albert?

  And to just, I mean, put even a finer point on it, that, that, the, the way these things in contributed to the um, oh, you just used a word and my brain is so gone. Um, but the way these things contributed to the, the myth of like Western civilization, I think, to like really put that term on it. Because it's the ways, yeah, that, that this kind of the grand tour people of the like very wealthy, very quite white, you know, imagination of mostly British empire and yeah, how they created this myth of Western civilization from these ancient people.

• 15:48Speaker 05

  Absolutely. And so to, you know, jump back off of that into how we define a travel narrative. Because of the origins of travel, writing and travel narratives as a genre and, you know, get to this whole conversation too, but literary genre doesn't come to be the primary mode for writing and interpreting literature until sort of eighteenth, nineteenth century. And so in this world of the grand tour, travel writing is something that is by for and about particular kinds of male bodies moving through certain kinds of spaces and for leisure. This is for fun, which also indicates a certain kind of social and economic cat, uh, capital, right?

• 16:31Speaker 05

  You have the money for travel. This is not our modern world where travel has been, let's not say democratized, that's way too broad, but it's been, it's been more accessible for more people. And so that's not that, that's not this world that, you know, that I, that this, this travel narrative is coming out of. And so it creates these ideas about what travel is, its purpose, its function and who is doing it. But that's not the only kind of travel, which is also why some people refer to these kinds of things as mobility narratives and not travel narratives. Because mobility and cap, encapsulate, encapsulates wider concepts of travel. So it doesn't have to be. Jumping into our classical texts. It doesn't have to be Odysseus coming all the way back from Troy and having his great wanderings,

• 17:14Speaker 05

  which depending on how you wanna map those are either to the pillars of Hercules or all the way to the air quote new world and back. Who knows? No. But that's right. And so the Odyssey and the Odyssey is very, very important in how travel narratives have been conceptualized. It's the idea of the man as the traveler, woman as the home and the stayer. And also travel as a choice. And one that is undertaken voluntarily and, you know, for touristy fun sightseeing sort of things. And it makes it very modern, very secular, very capitalistic, all of these things that it's just not in the ancient world. And so mobility includes the idea of male and female movers and stayers.

• 17:55Speaker 05

  It also includes voluntary as well as forced movements because the movement of slaves around the ancient world is a huge number. Like I think people have calculated that a third of Roman society was enslaved peoples. Jesus. Right? It's it's absolutely a slave society. Right? So we're studying Jewish travel narratives. And so these are.

• 18:19Speaker 05

  We, the the concept of travel narrative is defined very, very broadly. Oh, because another big part of how travel narratives are conceptualized often has to do with these big grand adventures. And these are from the myths we know, Theseus, Perseus, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, these are men who are doing these great big wanderings. Yeah. Quote unquote hero journeys. Very much. And even, I mean, Joseph Campbell was once asked about what the heroine's journey was. And he, uh, you know, to the great irony of all this, was at a women's college. I think he was at Bryn Mawr, but I can't remember. But he was a professor at a women's college and a woman asked him about this and he responded something like, well, women don't need a journey because they are the prize at the end and they are what bring men home. And that's a massive paraphrase.

• 19:05Liv Albert?

  I, I mean, I'm not, I, I'm, it won't be the first time I say that there's no point reading Joseph Campbell. Um, but I'll say it again. I mean, I'm sure there's a point, but like, I just don't think that we need to trust him as this like be all and end all of this quote unquote hero's journey. I also think he jammed a lot of things into one narrative that he wanted to fit and I'm just over him is all. But good to know he said that because it gives me another reason.

• 19:28Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, no, he's definitely, uh, sort of at the, uh, the apex of a certain mono myth, universalizing trend of, of certain kinds of literary studies that I think a lot of, a lot of us have tried to move beyond. But so in order to get around this, our sources and the way we have been reading them at Anan Anan, look at the anonymous and unnamed figures. We look at the short journeys because women's mobility around a city for the day while they are undertaking their household tasks are movement, they are travel. And considering that prior to the modern world, people typically didn't ever travel further than about thirty or thirty-five kilometers from where they grew up, traveling to the next village is a huge undertaking.

• 20:12Speaker 05

  So we've looked at a very, we've looked at travel narratives in sort of any possible sort of, did you go from one place to another? Fantastic. Did you go on that journey in your mind? Did you have an imagined travel? Great. That's fantastic. Um, we've also taken

• 20:31Speaker 05

  the, uh, concept of Jewish in a very.

• 20:35Liv Albert?

  Was gonna be my next question. Sure. I was like, yeah, how are you defining Jewish here? That's so interesting.

• 20:39Speaker 05

  So this is a really massive, massive question and there are people who have devoted gallons and liters of ink to this question because what is Jewish? Where, when and how do we define it?

• 20:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 20:54Speaker 05

  The first, the first recorded use of a word that looks like Judaism comes from a text that we call Second Maccabees. It's in this series of texts called First, Second, Third and Fourth Maccabees.

• 21:08Liv Albert?

  Straightforward.

• 21:09Speaker 05

  Well, it is, but it isn't. Um, Fourth Maccabees is thought to be a massive rewriting of a very small section of Second Maccabees.

• 21:17Liv Albert?

  Sure. I love the ancient world.

• 21:20Speaker 05

  Third Maccabees.

• 21:22Speaker 05

  Has almost nothing to do with the other stories whatsoever, because First and Second Maccabees tell the story of Judas Maccabeus and his brothers, the Maccabees, which is a Hebrew word for hammer, who lead what is called the Hasmonean revolt, and they're going to go up against the Seleucid Kingdom. In the middle of the Ptolemaic, and the Seleucid Kingdom's warring up and down and over the the belt that connects Africa, Asia, and Europe in the wake of Alexander the Great's death.

• 21:49Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 21:50Speaker 05

  And of course, these are colonial kingdoms, right? And so the Maccabees take this opportunity to say, you know, we're not really fans of being here under these colonial thumbs, and we're going to capitalize on this. We're also going to invite in our friend Rome to get some help, and we're going to overthrow what we see as a as a not great government.

• 22:09Liv Albert?

  That goes well.

• 22:11Speaker 05

  Well, you know, for a hot minute, we do actually have a Hasmonean kingdom, and this is where Herod the Great, and this is going to set up the the um the political world that Jesus Christ is born into. And so this is, it it does happen, and the Hasmoneans do manage to set up shop and become kings in the dynasty. And then under Pompey, that's going to change a little bit, and then at some point Rome is going to bring that whole region under its control, and then that's going to lead into a whole bunch of Jewish revolts. But I have now sidetracked myself to say that First Maccabees is thought to have been written in Hebrew. We only have a Greek version of it now. But it's Second Maccabees, which is a very different take on the whole story, because First Maccabees is a very,

• 22:54Speaker 05

  what we recognize is a very historical document. It talks about men and their human actions, and how human beings had conflict and resolved it with military encounters. Second Maccabees is this fantastic.

• 23:13Speaker 05

  Retelling of the whole story wherein we have this very teleological, so the end. What's that word? Yeah, I was gonna say teleological. It means that the end of an event explains the whole beginning and its development. And it's basically kind of like a circular argument, right? That because it ended this way, we can explain the whole thing because of how it ended. And so the teleology of Second Maccabees is basically that Judas Maccabeus was chosen by the God of his people and his ancestors. And this God is the sole author and arbiter of all history. And so if, for a time being, the Seleucids and the Ptolemies were able to take over this territory and

• 24:00Speaker 05

  rule it, it was because this God permitted it to be. And so you have to then have to question, why is this? And within the ancient Jewish texts that are called Deuteronomistic histories. So, yes, like the Book of Deuteronomy. The whole of Jewish history can be explained by a cycle of basically living in harmony, where you follow the rules given to you by your God. And then there's a rupture of this, which means that you have to be punished for breaking the rules. And then after you have repented, then there's going to be a return to this peaceful living. And so Second Maccabees is a rewriting of the events

• 24:40Speaker 05

  in this, his Hellenistic world to suit this Deuteronomistic framework for history. It is because the ancient Jews, ancient Israelites, are not living in harmony with the rules given to them by their God that the Hellenistic forces of, well, First Alexander and then the Ptolemies and the Seleucids are going to be able to come in, take over the territory. And then, once there's been sufficient punishment, Judas Maccabeus and his very, very, very small guerrilla forces are going to be able to overthrow the entire Seleucid army. Now, this is one perspective, and it is actually within a much broader.

• 25:21Speaker 05

  Context of Salucid and Ptolemaic political endeavors and economic endeavors that are raging all over the ancient world and not just in this one region. The Second Maccabees is my favorite of the Maccabees because as it has this teleological agenda, we get angels in suits of armor riding horseback showing up on the field of battle and basically like lightning bolts causing blindness and fainting. And again, we're back at Epiphanes, right? It's it's high. It's me, the Epiphany Person.

• 25:52Liv Albert?

  I mean, I like it.

• 25:53Speaker 05

  It's a lot of fun. And so I was telling you this whole story because the first recorded use of a word that looks like Judaism is in the Greek of Second Maccabees and it's Eudaismos and Eudaism. And there's a huge amount of debate in scholarship about how do we translate this word? Because this region of the world, and it's not just in the these texts, this is also how the Greeks talk about themselves, how the Romans talk about themselves.

• 26:22Speaker 05

  Names of people groups are often associated with their territory. And so Eudaism and Eudaismos are connected to Yuda or Yehuda or Judah, the the region, the territory, the kingdom called Judah. And in the even older, what are going to be canonical, become canonical biblical sources, that's because of the Southern Kingdom of Judah, which is connected to and is forever in conflict with the Northern Kingdom of Israel. So the Kingdom of Israel, the Kingdom of Judah, which is how we have terms in modern English today of Israelites and Judaites. Or Judeans. And it's got to do with whether or not people came from these particular regions. Now, through a long and circuitous linguistic development, we're going to go from

• 27:08Speaker 05

  Eudaismos to Jewish. And the debate that scholars have is about using these terms because of as you were sort of talking about in the introduction, the connection between modern groups and ancient groups. And. There are always connections between modern groups and ancient groups. And it's also different and difficult, maybe not difficult, but maybe complex to talk about ancient groups when there are living groups that still identify and have these people as ancestors.

• 27:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 27:46Speaker 05

  And whether that's understood as biological genetic ancestors or as imagined kinship. And I'm not here to tell people which they should understand or believe. Um, it gets complicated because, and this is the case whether we're talking about ancient Judaism, ancient Christianity, ancient Greeks, ancient Romans, ancient Egyptians. These are stories that have been, or peoples and and archaeological evidence that have been used in modernity in certain ways that are connected to the ancient sources. And how that is connected, how do we do this in a way that is academically rigorous, but also sensitive

• 28:27Speaker 05

  both to the ancient world and to the modern world, as you can imagine, this gets very complex and very messy. And in the English scholarship world, because there's a different conversation that goes on in any other language. And scholars do point this out, the the use of Judean, Jewish, Juda, Judaism, Israelite. These are very specifically English issues because different languages use different, have had different linguistic developments.

• 28:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 28:56Speaker 05

  Um, Jewish tends to be the broadest term.

• 29:03Speaker 05

  It encompasses texts and peoples who were in the region that was called Juda and Israel. And also those people who were a part of that ethnic group who were in Alexandria, Antioch, Rome, et cetera, et cetera. And it's just this biggest catch all term.

• 29:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah, and I think this is, you know, I also just want to kind of use this opportunity to to point out to people too that like there, I mean, it feels so obvious, but I think.

• 29:36Liv Albert?

  In today's world, it's really important to remind everyone that ancient regions were not finite, like they were defined by themselves and by the people around them, and there were no borders or modern city-states. And so there are a lot of names for regions that don't don't devalue other names, is I guess what I'm trying to say, because I do obviously just want to point out that, you know, a part of this region was and remained to a degree called Palestine in places before the Romans. I just want to point that out because it gets

• 30:18Liv Albert?

  commented to me on the regular. This is a region that has changed names a lot and ownership, but the people themselves, you know, that's a different question. And yeah, this is just ways of ensuring that my listeners don't think that I'm suddenly ignoring Palestine. I want us to understand the ancient history of the region broadly and just to know that like lots of there were lots of names for this place. And, you know, there was a time when the Romans came in and solidified things, but up to that point, we are talking about an ancient people that were moving around and things were changing. And so many different names exist because whether the Greeks were talking about them, or they were talking about themselves, or the Egyptians were talking about them.

• 31:01Liv Albert?

  Like this is not a, it's not cut and dry, and one does not devalue the other.

• 31:06Speaker 05

  Absolutely. And every text has its own perspective and uses language that is both connected to and different from the language that is being used by others. And so one text might focus on the region of Judah, another might focus on the region of Coelos Syria, one might say Palestine, one might be talking about Samaria and the Samaritans, or Idumea and the Idumeans. These are other peoples who were living in this region. And Flavius Josephus, for example, talks about Idumeans and Samaritans, not only him, but as an example. And so there are lots of people and there's lots of movement because that's the other thing.

• 31:45Liv Albert?

  And thousands of years, which we also love to forget, or like try to squish into one. I mean, centuries, certainly, but also thousands of years. And it just, things are not always cut and dry.

• 31:57Speaker 05

  Absolutely. And we have all kinds of textual.

• 32:02Speaker 05

  Uh, what do we call them textual complexities, maybe about? When and where we have our documents. And so it's it's easy to look at the texts that are going to be canonized in the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible as an example. We have some fragments of many books that were found at Qumran in the Dead Sea region. But prior to that discovery in the nineteen fifties and sixties, the oldest manuscript we had for the Hebrew Bible was the Leningrad Codex, which is a medieval document. And the same goes for Euripides. Plato, uh, most of the actual manuscripts we have for these items are medieval or later. And we are fairly confident saying that they probably date to a certain time and place, but.

• 32:49Speaker 05

  Unless you dig something out of the sands.

• 32:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 32:51Speaker 05

  You can't actually, and then that that we also shouldn't mistake having an object from a particular time. As being the original, right? It might be a twenty seventh version of something and the relationship of textual written materials with oral cultures is one. Again, not my wheelhouse, but is a very complex one. Is worth remembering. So these stories.

• 33:14Liv Albert?

  And and the connection between texts and archaeology, or rather the ways that we are, like in this case, we're talking about text sources. And like with anything, that doesn't mean that, you know, there's like, uh, there's also an entirely separate side of the archaeology and the material culture. And not to say that they don't talk to each other, but just to tell the audience, in this case, we're talking about text sources really specifically.

• 33:38Speaker 05

  Absolutely, for sure. We're talking to, I I'm not an archaeologist and we're talking about text sources. Um, and to speak to this complexity, one of the other key words in the project title is intersectional. We're doing an intersectional analysis of ancient Jewish travel narratives. And so we look at stories along of a variety of axes of power and disempowerment and.

• 34:02Speaker 05

  Enfranchisement and disenfranchisements, some of which are uh male and female, man, woman, or, you know, eunuch. Uh slave, enslaved, I should say, free person, manumitted person, disability, age, ethnicity, are you a quote unquote citizen, are you growing up where you were born and you were a part of a hegemonic culture? Are you a part of a minority in a diaspora community? All, what is, are you, is it first language, second language, multilingual? So we're looking, or trying to think more broadly about these texts and how they interact and what they mean in different contexts.

• 34:42Speaker 05

  And so, this is gonna sound like a very unsatisfying answer, but basically, an intersectional approach to ancient Jewish travel narratives looks at

• 34:53Speaker 05

  anything that involves mobility of various characters.

• 34:56Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 34:56Speaker 05

  Uh that we try to understand within these complex social networks. According to the various axes of identity that are always fluid and always constructed in relationship to the other. And the category of Jewish is a massive sort of open one that includes everything that gets canonized in the Old Testament slash Hebrew Bible slash Torah.

• 35:20Speaker 05

  We haven't published anything on it, but we have included in conferences and and collected uh publication volumes uh works on the New Testament, because the first Christians were in fact Jews who followed a guy named Jesus.

• 35:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 35:34Speaker 05

  Um and so the New Testament is very largely, actually, uh it, when studied in its historical context, is very largely a Jewish document.

• 35:41Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 35:41Speaker 05

  And then we also include, and this is where I work often, works that did not get transmitted within the rabbinic Jewish community, although we've invited experts in on rabbinic texts, talking about travel and rabbinic literature a little bit. But there are lots of Jewish sources from the Second Temple period, which roughly overlapped the Hellenistic and early Roman period, Second Temple. We're talking sort of sixth century BCE to first, second century CE uh period.

• 36:09Liv Albert?

  Very early, cuz that's like, that's like archaic.

• 36:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, it's the return of the uh Jews from Babylon after the first uh, the fall of the first temple.

• 36:24Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 36:24Speaker 05

  Which happens.

• 36:30Liv Albert?

  You don't have to know for sure either. I'm just so curious.

• 36:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:32Liv Albert?

  There's dates and timelines.

• 36:33Speaker 05

  I am so bad at dates. Yeah, so at some point, um. The.

• 36:41Speaker 05

  Policy within the Assyrian Empire is going to change. And then, of course, we're going to become the Babylonian Empire. And it's during the Babylonian period that the Jews are going to be allowed to return from Babylon back to. Jerusalem. And then we're going to have the second temple that gets built. And it's actually the second temple. Although depending on how you wanted to find it, the third one, because Herod the Great is a big, uh, Avergat and gives lots of money to have the second temple. Refurbished. So it could technically be considered a third temple. Anyway, it's that temple that the Romans destroy in seventy one. Seventy, seventy one C E.

• 37:15Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 37:17Speaker 05

  So.

• 37:19Speaker 05

  Why was I saying this? Right. So it's called the Second Temple Period because scholars of ancient Judaism wanted to come up with a. Giant category that was more connected to sort of an internal perspective and not Hellenistic, which is about. Alexander and his generals and not Roman, which is about the Roman Empire. And so Second Temple is a category that was.

• 37:43Speaker 05

  Uh, created for that purpose. And there are lots of texts from the Second Temple Period. That are very likely or very much part of that Jewish literary world. But were transmitted through what is going to become Christianity and not what becomes rabbinic Judaism.

• 38:02Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 38:03Speaker 05

  So. Texts like that are. Sometimes called apocrypha and pseudophrapha. That's a Protestant term because it means that they are. Sort of secondary in their canonical status.

• 38:16Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 38:17Speaker 05

  They're also sometimes called deuterocanonical, which literally means second canon, deuterocanon.

• 38:21Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 38:22Speaker 05

  Um, and so these texts have different status in Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities than they do in Protestant Christian communities. But they were preserved by Christians, even though they come from a earlier. Jewish, uh, perspective. And so this includes things like the Book of Tobit or Joseph and Asena and. Uh, who else goes in there? Josephus is also preserved or Philo, Philo and Josephus, um, important Jewish, uh, historian and philosopher.

• 38:50Speaker 05

  Uh, Josephus, the historian and philosopher, were not preserved by rabbis. They were preserved by Christians. And the same goes for different linguistic traditions of texts that were preserved by rabbinic Jewish authorities. So the Book of Esther, for example, was preserved in Hebrew in the Jewish tradition. And the Christians have preserved the Greek and Latin, as well as all of the other church languages, whether it's Syriac or Armenian or Church Silvanic or any of these other languages of the early Christian world.

• 39:20Speaker 05

  And so that's

• 39:24Speaker 05

  why it's important to have a very broad definition of Jewish for these projects. Because if we're too narrow with any of these terms, travel, narrative, Jewish, we exclude a lot of stuff. And if we're too broad, well, I, I love too broad, but.

• 39:58Liv Albert?

  This episode is brought to you by Quince. You know the drill. Quince makes elevated, everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton and premium stretch denim. I have been speaking into a microphone about Quince for a while now and I have no complaints. I have a bunch of their stuff. I've got a couple cute sweaters that, I mean, it's, it's nearing sweater season. So those will be back in the rotation anytime now. And I have this leather bag that I absolutely love. It's like this braided leather and I use it like basically every day. Because that's the thing, they have really great basics.

• 40:42Liv Albert?

  Like they have really great things that you can wear with so many other things. Just the options are endless. And as the weather gets colder, like all the sweaters in my closet, Quince has everything you need to round out your wardrobe from warm, responsibly sourced down jackets. And cozy cashmere scarves and gloves to beautiful 14 karat gold jewelry that adds the perfect finishing touch. And of course, everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. So you're paying for quality, not brand markup. And if we haven't learned anything in the last 10 years, isn't it just getting rid of the middlemen, you know, making things more affordable?

• 41:25Liv Albert?

  So find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was me. Let's talk about myths, baby. It's the best way to support the show.

• 41:50Speaker 06

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• 42:22Speaker 01

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• 42:28Speaker 02

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• 42:44Speaker 01

  Don't you want to see the rest? Okay, bye-bye.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  Get Verizon FiOS because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.

• 43:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's really, that's so interesting. I mean, also just like telling me all this like I, I mean, I have a vague timeline. Like I said, I try to stay away from like more modern religions because it opens up doors with listeners that I don't feel like opening, but I am so

• 43:24Speaker 05

  That's fair. Let's keep those doors closed. We'll close those doors.

• 43:26Liv Albert?

  Exactly. I'm just so keen on the ancient history of it all, though. And like, yeah, I mean, I've always been generally interested in Jewish ancient history because it precedes so much Christianity and like, I'm a baptized Catholic, but fuck all that noise. So I'm just very much like, I would like to know the stuff that came before. And I kind of jokingly don't even love anything post-Hellenistic or even in the Hellenistic period. So I'm like, this is just so interesting and

• 43:51Speaker 05

  Alexander shows up and Liv is out.

• 43:53Liv Albert?

  And then I'm out. Honestly, we're joking about this because actually Michaela's putting together a whole big series on the Hellenistic period. And I'm just gonna keep making jokes about how I don't care about it. And that's why she's doing it. But like I am, it's just, yeah, it's so interesting to me, like the ways these things overlap. And then I'm thinking about the timeline that you're giving to, and I'm thinking about Herodotus and how he was traveling around at that time, like this very early, it sounds like the very early simple second temple period. That's what I got it right. And yeah, it's, that's just really interesting to hear that those kind of moves were being made. And like, now I'm thinking about like, oh, at the time, the Greeks were calling at least the a strip of land on that coast, they were calling it Palestine, as well as, you know, the people that were there and surely

• 44:38Liv Albert?

  had different names, connected names. Like there, there are just so many names for these regions. Like, it's a good time to remember, to remind everyone that Greek is not a name that was, that existed back then either. Like, you know, in the same way that the Greeks weren't quote unquote, like, real back then, because they didn't have that word. Like, you know, it's just

• 44:54Speaker 05

  Right. They're more likely to say, I am an Athenian. I am from Syracuse.

• 44:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Like, the word Greek is Latin. You know, and it's, it, all of these different things to remember, because in our modern world, and particularly with people who are outside of this, like, the, the depth Of of the history that that people like you and I are in like it's so easy to just think in our modern ideas of like well that bit of land is called this period like that's not how it was there was you know i- i- it just this I mean in our emails we talked about this being about like the plurality of people in the ancient world and I just kind of want to bring that in because it feels like that's such the right word to describe like what we're talking about how there were so many different names group groups of people religions like this very many languages in these regions like it was just this very interconnected

• 45:44Liv Albert?

  time in the ancient Med and i- i- yeah there's it's there's it's it's I think devaluing to ancient history and the ancient people to try to pin it in the ways that a lot of modern you know arguments try to pin these things down as like yes or no right or wrong these people did or did not exist back then like that is so unhelpful to everyone because there really was no like definition of of so many things like even the way you're defining Jewish like this very broad definition right because there is no other way to define these things

• 46:15Speaker 05

  And it's worth saying here that no people group has ever been a monolith

• 46:20Speaker 05

  and i- i- it sounds a bit reductionist or even cliche to say that in some ways but it's true whether it's an ancient group or a modern group groups are not monolithic there might be archetypes stereotypes tropes topoi and again this is where definitions are both helpful and necessary but they also can get in our way right we do need to have some kind of working definition for anything otherwise we can't study it but if we hold that too rigidly we lose track of what we're trying to look at it so if I take as an easy example there has been a

• 46:59Speaker 05

  longstanding presumption in the study of some second temple literature or a lot of second temple literature I should say that sources believed to have been originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic would have come from

• 47:15Speaker 05

  Jerusalem was probably the big literary production site with the making of manuscripts. Because that's where the temple and its scribal activities were. But they could have been produced anywhere in what would have been the Kingdom of Judea, the Kingdom of Israel, Samaria, Idumea. Palestine, that whole region. If it was Hebrew Aramaic, it came from there. If it was written in Greek, it must have come from somewhere else. Probably from Alexandria, because we know, thanks to a bunch of sources, that there were uh substantial Jewish communities living in Egypt, Alexandria, and then in and around the Fayum. But

• 47:54Speaker 05

  that's a highly problematic way to view literary production and language. And how literature, language, and communities overlap with each other. Because, well, after Alexander the Great, and then the creation of these hellistic kingdoms, Greek becomes a very important administrative language. In addition to being a very important cultural language. And it is in these middle spaces between the colonizer and the colonized that you have lots of cultural production as identities are negotiated on both sides. And it's not tenable as an argument

• 48:35Speaker 05

  to then say, well, anything written in this language must come from a particular part of the world. It can't come from anywhere else. And it's particularly the work of Marika Don't, who's over at Cambridge, who has been really

• 48:49Speaker 05

  striving to help us undo this very binary

• 48:55Speaker 05

  idea of language production, or literature production, I should say, as associated with specific geographic regions. And one of the things that she, among others, point to is that the caches of documents that we find themselves don't really support this, because the scrolls found at the Dead Sea, sure, lots of Hebrew, lots of Aramaic, but we also have Greek scrolls, Greek items from that cache. Same with the Oxarinkas. Find in Egypt, we have texts in all kinds of languages from that one location. And so what are we gonna do? Are we gonna say that anything found in Oxyrhynchus that's not written in some kind of demotic or other ancient Egyptian language was written somewhere else and was transported to that part of the world? That doesn't make a lot of sense. You can produce texts there.

• 49:40Speaker 05

  And even before and outside of, you know, the violent colonial systems and imposed language. How do you think trade happens, right?

• 49:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 49:49Speaker 05

  Merchants are wandering around the ancient world, selling their wares, trading their goods and okay, sure, you and I are gonna be able to come to a certain kind of agreement with just pointing at our various goods and wares and trying to exchange them. But at some point, we're also gonna have to learn languages. And so there's lots of exchange that's happening and there's lots of movement that's happening. And so these are very dynamic, very mobile spaces. Some of it is voluntary and you have people going on pilgrimage, you have people traveling to visit family, you have courts and elites who are traveling on aristocratic and political agendas. But a lot of the mobility is also forced and coerced, whether it's women and children who are dragged along with husbands who don't really care about their opinion, or if it's the tens of thousands of enslaved people who were moved

• 50:35Speaker 05

  around the ancient Mediterranean at any given point.

• 50:38Liv Albert?

  And refugees, I imagine too, there was, I would imagine, especially with like how many wars end up happening in these regions. You're also talking about like forced migration in those senses. Like there's just so many reasons why people were moving around. This is the thing that I'm most obsessed with on the show right now is just like this reminder, like I think it's just so easy, particularly like in our current world where everything everything is so easily like weaponized too. Like I think it's so easy to pretend like these regions existed in a vacuum and it's so important to remember that they didn't, that there was this incredible multiplicity around the ancient Mediterranean. I mean, around the world, surely, but.

• 51:19Speaker 05

  I mean, for goodness sakes, Alexander wanted to go to India to talk to the, what he called the naked wise men, the gymnosophists. Because India was a source of incredible wisdom and sagacity, right?

• 51:31Speaker 05

  That's not a quick trip.

• 51:33Liv Albert?

  No.

• 51:34Speaker 05

  From Macedon to India.

• 51:35Liv Albert?

  No.

• 51:36Speaker 05

  You can't just hop on a plane.

• 51:37Liv Albert?

  As soon as he goes there, then suddenly elephants are appearing in all of these stories. And we, like, there's so much, right? And I just, I'm just very cognizant of like, making this the, what such an important thing for my listeners. Because, I mean, because it's important, because it is the truth and, and history. But also because there is this running mentality that we can or should use history to decide whether or not people deserve to live comfortable, free lives now. That's why I think it's so important, because history has, has been and is being constantly weaponized by almost explicitly the colonizer of various places to enforce life or death on people.

• 52:20Liv Albert?

  And that's, I just, yeah, I want to just remember that this, this history, this multiplicity has been here forever. And any attempts to, to convince us otherwise are problematic in one way or another and should be, you know, investigated for that. But yeah, sorry, just, I have my little soapbox every once in a while, but it's just so important and like, it's just so true and kind to the ancient people to remember that there, nothing was a monolith, that nothing was in a vacuum, that all of these things were true at once, that all of these place names and these languages were true at once.

• 52:51Speaker 05

  And stories have always been a site of exploration. And by that, I mean, they have been a site to explore identity, intercultural contact, conflict, cohabitation among neighboring communities. They've been, they've been places to be playful and creative. They've been places to promote certain perspectives on the world, right? And this has always been, not the only, but one of the, the uses and significances of storytelling to humans. And so, I mean, I know Plato calls us like, you know, homo politicus, or whatever he calls us, and that's the Latin. So it's what, what he said anyway.

• 53:31Speaker 05

  But like, in many ways, we're not so much humans, I mean, we are political creatures, but we are human storytellers. Like storytelling is very central to our existence as people. So these, these stories come from incredibly diverse, complex worlds, and they represent incredibly diverse, complex worlds, whether it's something that we are going to classify as a Jewish, Christian, Greek, or Roman source. And so it's been.

• 53:57Speaker 05

  One of my great delights, even in my PhD work, when we were talking about epiphanies all those years ago. Um, it's one of my great delights to see how ancient Jews alongside Greeks and Romans and then later Christians. They do similar things. It's not to say that they're telling the same story and it's not to say that they are necessarily. Receiving or interpreting or adapting Greek and Roman sources, but the same literary strategies. Appear over and over and over again, and sometimes, yes, in direct response to each other, of course, that does happen. But there is so much shared.

• 54:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 54:37Speaker 05

  Experience across these sources. Uh, and so as an example, I wrote a piece a while ago where I compared. The metaphysical travels, which is to say the.

• 54:49Speaker 05

  The not real, not physical travels of air from Plato's Myth of Air, which is at the end of Plato's Republic. That great big treatise on the soul that uses political metaphors to talk about.

• 55:01Liv Albert?

  We won't pretend I've read the whole thing.

• 55:04Speaker 05

  It's all good. Um, people think of the Republic as being this great political treatise that every now and again talks about the soul or. What we might call proto-psychology to theorize on political life. And no, no, it's absolutely a treatise on the soul and on proto-psychology that uses the city, the polis, as a metaphor. For an internal existence. Um, and so at the end, we have this allegory of of air, who is a soldier who dies. And he travels to the afterlife and he sees the eschatological reality of death and the choices people make. After they die and how they are reborn. He is charged by these uh afterworld judges, they're unnamed, they're just judges. He is charged with returning to the land of the living to tell everybody about his experience.

• 55:49Speaker 05

  Because Plato is trying to convince you that only philosophy will teach you how to make the right choice in the afterlife, so that when you are reborn, you will live a good life. There's an agenda here.

• 55:59Liv Albert?

  I'm sorry, this is this is my time for a silly joke that I heard years ago from Classical Studies memes for hellenistic teens.

• 56:07Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:08Liv Albert?

  Over that account. Yeah, who said that Plato invented philosoph- or no, Plato invented Socrates to sell more philosophy. And I I just really enjoy that. And I think it that's a good, I mean, not that Socrates was a ma- well, he was a main player in the Republic because he's a main player in everything Plato did.

• 56:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:26Liv Albert?

  But specifically, yeah, Plato was all about convincing you that philosophy is the only way.

• 56:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, of course, of course. And so it's it is well documented that Cicero, several hundred years later, is going to write something called The Republic. And he's not necessarily talking about proto-psychology, but Cicero is talking about Roman values and Roman politics and is reflecting on what it means to be a good Roman. Cicero is very invested in the idea of the ideal statesman. And we know.

• 56:53Liv Albert?

  I had to read Cicero in school and I I'll never forgive him for that.

• 56:58Speaker 05

  Fair enough. You you don't have to forgive Cicero, Liv. It's okay.

• 57:01Liv Albert?

  I don't like Rome and he's a major reason.

• 57:05Speaker 05

  I can understand that. He's a particular flavor. And so Cicero in his Republic has a dialogue between a bunch of characters. And one of the main characters is Scipio. And Scipio is going to tell a story of a dream he had when he was in North Africa at one point, right before the beginning of the Third Carthaginian War. And it's all about, interestingly enough, Scipio's travels up to the heavens and he sees this cosmos and the stars and the planets and the harmonies. Hmm. Well, Eir also saw the planets and the harmonies and the cosmos while he was traveling around the afterlife. And actually Cicero directly references Plato's Republic, so it's a very clear.

• 57:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah, in case it wasn't obvious enough.

• 57:48Speaker 05

  Yes, it wasn't obvious enough. Yeah. So Cicero tells us that he is referencing Plato.

• 57:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 57:52Speaker 05

  And there's been lots of work comparing these two, but one what I did is I brought in a text that is called The Book of the Watchers, which is the first thirty six chapters of a big composite work called First Enoch.

• 58:06Speaker 05

  First Enoch is a Hellenistic era Jewish source. That was preserved in its entirety only in Ge'ez, which is ancient Ethiopian. Uh, language and. A whole bunch of fragments were found at Kumran in the Dead Sea Scroll collection. Which was very exciting for scholars because it meant that they got to put to rest whether or not there were earlier Hebrew and Aramaic versions. It was a big debate. Uh, about all of this. There are also big chunks of these first thirty six chapters that are preserved in Greek through the Christian tradition.

• 58:38Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 58:38Speaker 05

  Now, this is one of the texts that is often called, uh, an early apocalypse because it has this whole vision of Enoch. Multiple visions of Enoch, I should say, about what happens to the good and the bad after. The end of all things and you have these visions of both damnation as well as. Uh, blessing in the afterlife and you have this very, uh, dramatic vision of the heavens where. God lives and the house of God, which has floors of ice and walls of fire and things like this. I'm probably misremembering a little bit, but it's a very dramatic story. And it has massive influence on what are going to become the New Testament texts in various explicit and implicit ways.

• 59:22Speaker 05

  It's also going to have big influences on things, not just the Book of Revelation, but on later Christian thought as well. So it's a very important source. For understanding the transition of certain kinds of Jewish thinking into what is going to, or second temple Jewish thinking into what's going to become Christian thinking. And scholars have for a very long time noticed that there were certain similarities between. Parts of the Book of the Watchers. And Plato's myth of air as well as Sisyphero's dream of Scipio and. There are scholars who were more or less willing to say, yeah, there's this similarity or there's that similarity, for example.

• 1:00:02Speaker 05

  In both Plato's myth of air as well as in the Book of the Watchers, eschatology, and so that comes from the Greek word eschaton, meaning the end. And so eschatology is basically thinking about or writing about or studying the end time. Or what happens after the end time. And it's often connected with ideas of the eternal soul and judgment and either blessing or damnation or, or these sorts of things.

• 1:00:28Speaker 05

  And so lots of people have pointed to for both Plato and who whomever it's probably collective was writing. First Enoch, eschatology and geography are connected to each other. The sites of either blessing or damnation are physical locations connected to earth. In Plato, the souls come up out of the earth that are covered in dirt if they have been going through damnation. How a disembodied soul can be grubby and schmutzig, covered in dirt, don't ask me, I don't know. But it works for Plato, so we'll just leave it, we'll leave it be.

• 1:01:05Speaker 05

  And in the same way that the people who are blessed in the afterlife have a physical location. And we could think about the illusion planes and in in other uh he- Hellenic mystery cults too, right? And these physical locations of of good living after one dies. And so there are these sort of similarities, but scholars really were hesitant to do much more comparative work. Because a lot of literature, comparative literature in ancient studies, really wants to look at direct connections. They wanna be able to say, for example, that Virgil is definitely interacting with the Homeric epic. So here's where he's similar, here's where he's different, and here's what those similarities or differences tell us about Virgil's epic, right?

• 1:01:46Speaker 05

  We wanna be able to clearly say there's connection between the the hypertext and hypotext. I'm not interested in that sort of thing. I'm more interested in how stories are used. And so I compared those three sources, the Book of the Watchers and uh the Dream of Scipio and the. The Myth of Air, to think more about why is it that certain kinds of travel stories are convincing? Or are they convincing? Is this convincing? And so, in short, my argument was that these three stories have an incredibly powerful rhetorical strategy. Which is based around similar literary tropes, which are predominantly.

• 1:02:31Speaker 05

  Uh pseudography, epiphany, always. And the ways in which travel itself and especially cosmic or intergalactic travel. Taps into really key understandings of authoritative narrative in the ancient world. So we'll build backwards through those authoritative narrative. If we read the historiographies, for example, autopsy, the ability to say, I saw this with my own eyes is really important.

• 1:03:00Liv Albert?

  The origin of autopsy, of course it is. I like seeing the word in my head. Sorry. That's amazing.

• 1:03:06Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so Herodotus talks about autopsy, right? We, I love a good Herodotus story. Herodotus is very careful to tell you. Where he's talking about things that he himself saw and witnessed. And when it's an Egyptian priest who has a buddy whose third uncle was drunk at the tavern with their friend and who, right? He tells you all that stuff.

• 1:03:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Speaker 05

  Love, love book two. It's my favorite.

• 1:03:28Liv Albert?

  Ooh, Michaela's been going through book one for uh the show right now, just so that I have some time off and it's a delight. So I'm excited. I'm hoping she's gonna go into book two as well. I only know, I mean, I've not read all of Herodotus, but I had someone on years ago um to talk about his, his Egypt bits. And I have a feeling that the description of the hippo would have been one of those things he didn't see himself. And I love that for him.

• 1:03:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's a fun one. And that's gonna have a real fun literary reception, not the hippo specifically, but there are going to be other sources that like the describing an animal to an audience that have never seen it, becomes this whole literary trope and in uh Herod, not Herodotus, um.

• 1:04:09Speaker 05

  Heliodorus's fourth century C E Greek novel, Caraclea Theogenes, we get this whole description. And it's very, very much presented as a, as a riddle, an enigma for the reader to try and uh describe or figure out. It's called, the animal's called the uh Camilleopard.

• 1:04:28Liv Albert?

  Well, I know what the modern Greek word is.

• 1:04:32Speaker 05

  And so that's an animal that has spotted hair slash fur like a leopard. And it's got a face like a horse and it's got long legs and right? Like it's this whole hilarious description. Anyone who's ever seen a giraffe? Does not recognize a giraffe from this description.

• 1:04:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah, if I didn't know that modern Greek for giraffe was Camellipodali, I would not. I would not have been able to guess that there, but I do love that Greek is for giraffe is spotted camel.

• 1:05:02Speaker 05

  It's yeah, it's exactly that.

• 1:05:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:05Speaker 05

  Anyway, of as per usual, I have digressed. And so being able to say to somebody, yeah, I saw this with my own eyes.

• 1:05:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:10Speaker 05

  Gives you some real credit, some real authority, um, as does the ability to travel automatically, right? The three men in these stories, Eir, Enoch, Scipio. Oh, wait, they're all men.

• 1:05:22Liv Albert?

  Oh, what a surprise.

• 1:05:23Speaker 05

  I know. And while it's never explicitly stated that they're able-bodied and cisgendered, those things are implied or presumed. Because Cicero is a military man who is going to be, not Cicero, I mean, yes, Cicero, but Scipio. I should say, and I should also add that this is Scipio Emilianus, not Scipio Africanus.

• 1:05:42Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:05:43Speaker 05

  The, um, he's going to get called Africanus later, but we're, we're not at the first taking of Carthage, that is.

• 1:05:51Liv Albert?

  Oh, but it is the same guy?

• 1:05:53Speaker 05

  No, so it gets really fun and confusing.

• 1:05:55Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:05:55Speaker 05

  Scipio Africanus is the one who takes Carthage in the first Carthaginian.

• 1:05:59Liv Albert?

  Got it.

• 1:06:00Speaker 05

  His adopted great grandson is Scipio Emilianus.

• 1:06:05Liv Albert?

  Got it.

• 1:06:05Speaker 05

  Who is going to get called Scipio Africanus.

• 1:06:08Liv Albert?

  Got it.

• 1:06:08Speaker 05

  After, well, he, he gets called it because he is adopted, related to Scipio Africanus. But he also is going to be involved in and credited with the taking of Carthage in the third Punic War.

• 1:06:21Liv Albert?

  Oh, the last one.

• 1:06:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:06:23Liv Albert?

  Hmm, Prestago de Linda Est. These are like the minimal Roman things I know.

• 1:06:28Speaker 05

  One must know that Carthaginum de Linda Est. It's also like it is imperative to know Aliyah Yacta Est, right? The dice are thrown or cast.

• 1:06:35Liv Albert?

  I didn't know that one, so I'll.

• 1:06:37Speaker 05

  Oh, that's, that's Julius Caesar, and I can't remember if it's before or after he crosses the, the Rubicon. But it's, it's somewhere in there. That's one of my, I like the Aliyah Yacta Est.

• 1:06:47Speaker 05

  Eh, where was I? Sorry, ADHD conversations. Seriously, uh, so lots of skippi for sure. And so as a military man of the Roman elite, Scipio has all of these social and economic capitals, right? Like he's got so much privilege and so much status. And his travel and his movement is connected to this. He is a part of the Roman army. That is why they are in North Africa to begin with. Um, Enoch in the Greek texts, cause this is a multilingual tradition, is referred to as a scribe and the scribe of righteousness. And the scribal tradition in ancient Israelite communities is,

• 1:07:30Speaker 05

  it's complex and it's hard for us to really, us, I don't. I read people who work on this, this is not my, again, not my bailiwick. But it's hard to reconstruct specifically what kind of status these people had. Scribes are definitely associated with power. They are associated with temples and courts and kings and priests. But whether they are themselves powerful figures in that way, they have a lot of power, writing things down, being the master of the words. You have a lot of power to change and alter and adapt, right? But whether they are princes and priests is not always very clear to us. But there is, by the time we are in this Hellenistic world,

• 1:08:14Speaker 05

  a certain kind of male elite masculine authority that comes with the title of scribe. And so to say that Enoch is a scribe means that he has a complete able body and. Yeah, is a dude. Is a dude and all these things, exactly, right? Yeah. And so all of these things also then become circular in why they are authoritative, right? It's cause he has all these status markers that he is a figure who we can trust to go on this trip and to say that he saw what he saw and then, right, and then. Coming to air, air is actually an almost entirely silent figure because Socrates does all the talking, as per usual, and air is a soldier who dies on a battlefield.

• 1:08:59Speaker 05

  Uh, he's of the race of Pamphilia, which is

• 1:09:05Speaker 05

  either actually a region in modern day Turkey.

• 1:09:09Speaker 05

  Or means panfulay, all tribes or any tribe. So air is either air every man. Or he is from a specific region and it's a little unclear, but he is a soldier who dies on a battlefield. So that is very clearly. A certain kind of masculinity that's happening right here. And so these travel tales are. By men, about men, and what they see as they go wandering around. So that's how. Their ability to say, I saw this with my own eyes, my autopsy, is an authoritative strategy and travel. The access to travel, the ability to return to travel from travel. Is a part of the way this is a very powerful rhetorical strategy. The second, so that was travel and travel is the third.

• 1:09:54Speaker 05

  The cosmic travel is the third rhetorical strategy in these sources. The. Second one was epiphany. And one of the interesting things about these stories is that. These characters all encounter the otherworldly and the totally wacky. But unlike in something like the Homeric Hemtendemeter or the Odyssey. Where the otherworldly breaches from the other world into the mortal plane. These are stories of three very human people who go into the otherworldly space and see the otherworldly in its natural environment.

• 1:10:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:26Speaker 05

  And it's a process of naturalization. Uh, very literally, it naturalizes the whole thing. Cause you expect to encounter the paranormal when you are in the. Para worldly space. And so that is a. I think a way to sort of say that the world as it is presented to air Enoch and Scipio. Is a natural world. It is normal. Well, what is normal in these other spaces? Well, for air, what is normal is that. After this whole eschatological adventure, philosophy is. The mechanism that gets you to have a good life or a bad life when you're reborn. For Enoch, what is normal is that. All of history and all of space and time are controlled by the.

• 1:11:10Speaker 05

  God who has summoned him up into this otherworldly space. And this is the arbiter of all things. For Scipio, well, Scipio sees a cosmic structure that very interestingly exactly replicates the Roman imperial structure.

• 1:11:27Liv Albert?

  What a surprise!

• 1:11:29Speaker 05

  It's really very surprising, isn't it?

• 1:11:31Liv Albert?

  The Romans wrote propaganda?

• 1:11:35Speaker 05

  I mean, anybody everywhere, anytime propaganda, I'm shocked, right? Exactly.

• 1:11:40Liv Albert?

  But of all the people?

• 1:11:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. So all of these stories are using the epiphanic experience to legitimize and talk about certain kinds of perspectives and certain kinds of worldviews, whether it's a more local, communal-focused worldview, or whether it's a more imperial, global, universalizing worldview. And where and how you encounter the divine is a part of how these stories use that. And then lastly, all of these stories are pseudepigraphic, which is this really great word, pseudosc and epigraphae, literally false writing.

• 1:12:16Liv Albert?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:12:18Speaker 05

  We could, in this instance, refer to it as a nom de plume, or a pen name, because we know Plato wrote the Republic, but he ascribes his words to Socrates, who in turn ascribes his words to Heere.

• 1:12:32Liv Albert?

  Plato is so confusing, sorry, I just... He did invent Socrates to sell more philosophy, I just, sorry.

• 1:12:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. And we could, we could debate ad nauseam whether or not it's an earnest or an ironic use of Socrates and Heere, that's a whole... The discussion of humor and irony is a real big thing.

• 1:12:52Liv Albert?

  Especially in Plato, like, sorry, I'm just thinking of Atlantis, where I'm like, okay, uh, yeah.

• 1:12:57Speaker 05

  Well, and Aristophanes talking about the...

• 1:12:59Liv Albert?

  Oh, god, yeah.

• 1:13:00Speaker 05

  Four-headed, no, two-headed, four-armed love beasts, like, that's a whole, anyway.

• 1:13:06Speaker 05

  Uh, right. And so the the whole book called First Enoch is called that because the first verse of the whole shebang, like one one, is right there saying that these are the words of Enoch. Okay.

• 1:13:24Speaker 05

  But when we take a text critical approach, we can see that this is actually a composite document within a composite document within a composite document, right?

• 1:13:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32Speaker 05

  Probably Enoch uh is not uh the author. And I should say for your listeners who don't know who Enoch is, my apologies. Jumped the gun on this one. Um. Enoch is an anti-Diluvian character, which is to say.

• 1:13:45Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:46Speaker 05

  Who comes in the book of Genesis before the great flood, which is the one that Noah and his ark and the wiping out of humanity. So he's anti-Diluvian, Enoch. And I can't remember how many greats he is, but he is a great, great, great, great, something grandfather of Noah. And we have these very enigmatic lines about Enoch in, I wanna say Genesis five, where we know that he lived three hundred and sixty-five years. And he walked with God. And at the end, he was no more because God took him. So Enoch isn't said to die. And he lives three hundred and sixty-five years. Well, that sounds like a solar year.

• 1:14:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24Speaker 05

  So. And this gets a little complicated based on the texts that have survived and what we can and can't argue. So there's a debate around whether or not the stories preserved in First Enoch predate Genesis. Or whether they. Which would mean that Genesis, when it talks about Enoch, is condensing stories about Enoch. Or whether First Enoch is after Genesis and is therefore expanding things preserved. I tend to think that Genesis is probably shortening because those are some pretty specific things. And all of ancient literature is very laconic in that it presumes an audience who knows everything that the author knows, because also these things are typically in memoir and it's more about helping you

• 1:15:08Speaker 05

  recall things that you have actually committed to memory. And so you don't need a text in the way that we.

• 1:15:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah, we didn't, they didn't consume. And word like we do now.

• 1:15:17Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:15:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I love that because that just, I mean, this is why I want to hear more of of this. I mean, I like, I love the way you're studying this because it's like it is Jewish text, but it's not about the religion, which I mean, or I'm sure there are parts where it is.

• 1:15:32Speaker 05

  It's all deeply theological, but in the same way that Plato and Cicero are also deeply theological, right?

• 1:15:37Liv Albert?

  I think that's what I mean, whereas in the way that it's like, it it's ancient, it feels like studying Greek myth. Along like in the same way, because that's how I want to learn this stuff. And that doesn't, to me, that's not devaluing modern faith. It's understanding where these things are coming from. Like, I'm interested in ancient religion purely in that way of it being about the ancient people and what they were learning. And I love hearing the source questions, right? Because it's the exact same as all these Greek myth source questions, like what came first? And who's working off of what? And what was like inserted later? You know, there's someone with the Odyssey with like, what did they jam in later to make Athens seem more important? Or all of these different things.

• 1:16:14Speaker 05

  Well, exactly. The East Face of Helicon, a a book, oh, who wrote that book? I can't remember. Oh, that's embarrassing. But that was one of the first big studies. Like, there was massive influence by Semitic and further eastern peoples on Greek thinking.

• 1:16:33Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:34Speaker 05

  Hellenic texts.

• 1:16:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:36Speaker 05

  And so the Odyssey and the Iliad do show contact with Persians.

• 1:16:42Liv Albert?

  Phoenicians heavily, like.

• 1:16:44Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly. And so the first Enoch texts do as well. Whether we're looking at the Hebrew and the Aramaic or the Greek, whatever we're looking at, we can see points of contact between early Jewish literature and Mesopotamian. Stories as well as points of contact with Greek sources. There is a very good argument that it definitely in its Greek version, but maybe even in its Hebrew and Aramaic. That the story in the Book of Watchers, which in addition to Enoch's adventures up to heaven and and back. Is also about the watchers, which is to say these fallen angels who see beautiful earthly women and come down to earth. Either just to ogle them or to have sex slash rape them, depending on.

• 1:17:27Liv Albert?

  Wow, so Zeus?

• 1:17:29Speaker 05

  Well, they are kind of Prometheusan because they also give women knowledge. And not just women, in lots of texts, they give it to men and women and women and their descendants. And so they give women knowledge or humanity knowledge that they weren't supposed to have. That sounds like Prometheus and fire for sure. And then afterwards. And in connection to something that is also preserved in Genesis, the offspring of these watchers and the earthly women are going to be these horrific monsters. These giants who devour everything before them until the earth cries out. That sounds like Rea, doesn't it? The earth cries out and then they are locked in this pit in the earth. Which is also kinda like the Titans, right?

• 1:18:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:14Speaker 05

  And so we have these points of contact.

• 1:18:15Liv Albert?

  The Gigantomachy, the Hecatonchires, like we're talking, yeah, all of these stories like.

• 1:18:20Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:18:21Liv Albert?

  I mean, you mentioned the flood earlier too, which is the obvious one, right? Like, I mean, I don't know who's influencing who there. Everyone has this flood myth, but the, the, the fact that everyone has this flood myth is, is always going to be one of those really fascinating things about ancient literature and contact and.

• 1:18:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, and both Enoch and Noah have similarities to, uh, oh, what's his name? In the Anuma Alish, Gilgamesh goes to see, um.

• 1:18:49Liv Albert?

  Like.

• 1:18:51Speaker 05

  There's an ancient man who survived the flood. And that's when Gilgamesh goes to see to learn about how to conquer death. Yeah, I, I've always blanked on his name. Anyway, yeah, because these, these peoples are all talking to each other and cultures all interact. And they borrow from each other, they lend to each other, they, right, these entanglements are very real.

• 1:19:10Liv Albert?

  Nobody popped out of a vacuum to invent Western civilization. God damn it. That's an appropriate word.

• 1:19:18Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly. Um, right, and so Enoch.

• 1:19:24Speaker 05

  It's a very powerful ancestor figure to whom to ascribe certain ideas and perspectives. Because he lives for three hundred and sixty five days. And when he is so old, he doesn't die, God takes him and he walks with God. Well.

• 1:19:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:42Speaker 05

  In in age. Right, exactly. We have the apotheosis story for sure.

• 1:19:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:46Speaker 05

  Well, and Jesus and Mary later are going to have apotheosis stories. So there's, there's lots going on and it gets used over and over and over again. And then our third text is Cicero and he puts all of his ideas in the mouth of Scipio, this hero of the Roman Republic. And Cicero is having a hard time with what's going on with Julius Caesar in his own lifetime. He has a whole bunch of feelings and he puts them into the time of Scipio, who is dealing with the Gracchi brothers and that era of political turmoil in the Roman Republic. And so all three of these stories use pseudography in some way to

• 1:20:22Speaker 05

  take ideas that are very historically and socially contingent. They are the ideas of either one author or one group at a particular time responding to a particular issue. And they put those issues into the mouths of others. And when I say that, it's not meant to sound nefarious. Uh, there's something about the fact that it's pseudo that makes it sound like it's wicked in some way. There's been lots of scholarship. This is a very, very wide reaching ancient trend. It's not new.

• 1:20:53Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 1:20:54Speaker 05

  And it's not unique to any one culture. Um.

• 1:20:58Liv Albert?

  It's it's just this way of understanding things in a narrative form because, I mean, uh, maybe not explicitly, but in large part because like we were saying earlier that like the, the transmission of stories and writing was completely different. And it's just so, it's just like a very different world. And so, yeah, in order to tell us to make a point like that, one of the best ways of doing it was by like, yeah, putting it in the mouths of others.

• 1:21:21Speaker 05

  Absolutely. Well, you know, to take a very, very modern example, my mom always told me, life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.

• 1:21:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:29Speaker 05

  We don't actually, from, from what I remember, we don't see his mother say that. He just tells us that his mother said that.

• 1:21:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:35Speaker 05

  And so sure, she may have said that.

• 1:21:39Liv Albert?

  No idea what that references from, sorry. That just took my, me a beat and I was like, oh god, a bunch of you are really young. Anyway.

• 1:21:45Speaker 05

  This can be the mystery of the episode. Oh, no, you ruined it. Oh, so they just go look it up, like go find it.

• 1:21:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah, figure it out. Yeah.

• 1:21:55Speaker 05

  Right, and so these, these three stories, and I do actually think, uh, that there is points of contact between the Book of the Watchers and these Greek and Roman sources, but that's gonna come much later.

• 1:22:09Speaker 05

  But all that is to say that these stories are all using the same strategies and this cosmic travel interconnected with Epiphany and Pseudopigraphy is how Jews and Greeks and Romans at various different points

• 1:22:24Speaker 05

  create stories that are inclined or attempting to persuade a reader or to recruit an audience to a particular perspective. And we don't need to be seeing direct textual influence between these sources to be able to say that these are convincing literary or narrative strategies across these ancient cultures. And so what does that tell us? It tells us that these cultures all value stories told by ancestors. They all value knowledge that comes from the divine or the otherworldly. They all value the first-person narration of a story of

• 1:23:03Speaker 05

  from an experience somebody had themselves and also implicitly the unmarked, unspoken is that they also all prioritize and value stories and information that there are gained from elite, able-bodied men. Uh, insert all the other privileged categories you want.

• 1:23:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:20Speaker 05

  Uh, and that's an incredibly persuasive way to tell the story, which then allows us as the modern reader to step out and say, oh, okay. That's how they are going about persuading their audiences. And they're not trying to persuade their audiences of the same thing, of course they're not. But it means that the same style of rhetoric is very, very useful across a very broad range of time and space because Plato was writing in classical Athens, so that's what we're doing, sixth century, fifth century? I'm so bad at dates. Thank you. So we've got fifth century Athens with first Enoch, we've got anywhere from sort of second and first century.

• 1:24:02Speaker 05

  BCE, because that's roughly when the Khmer scrolls are dated to, to the fourth century E. E. s Ethiopian manuscripts that were preserved into the Greek that was being used by the early church fathers. And then you've got Cicero in Latin, who was preserved by Mercobrious through the Middle Ages, uh, the late antique and the Middle Ages as this astronomical treatise. And so these are very powerful story devices that are all connected to these travel stories. And how do you use a travel story, even if it's one that's completely far fetched, in the sense of you don't have spaceships, they can't actually go up into the cosmos?

• 1:24:40Liv Albert?

  Tell that to Lucian.

• 1:24:42Speaker 05

  Don't get me started on Lucian, he'll never end.

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• 1:26:51Liv Albert?

  Oh my god, I also could talk about Lucian forever, but...

• 1:26:54Speaker 05

  I desperately wanted to fit him into this article on Eir, Enoch, and Scipio, but I decided not to in the end because he is so obviously being satirical, and that's not as obvious in the other texts, but also a key thing. In true stories, Lucian actually does bodily travel into these other worldly spaces. And something that struck me as being very important to these three eschatological stories is that they are disembodied travel. Eir is dead, and it is his suke, his soul, that travels. And Enoch and Scipio are both sleeping, and they have some kind of astral projection dream travel. And so these are also ways to keep readers both engaged at arm's length

• 1:27:36Speaker 05

  because a key aspect of travel is access to space. And that's not just like long-distance travel. If we think about any ancient temple, do you get to go into the courtyard? Do you get to go into the temple? Do you get to go up to the altar? Do you get to go to the holy inner sanctum of that temple? And based on your access to these spaces, that tells us something about the status you hold in accessing those spaces. And so the fact that all three of these men get access to these other worldly spaces tells us something about their status.

• 1:28:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:10Speaker 05

  But they're also disembodied, so it tells us something else about their status, which is that they don't really belong here.

• 1:28:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:17Speaker 05

  They can come here, but they don't get to stay here. And then it raises the interesting question of imitation. Are we, the reader, meant to understand that? When we die, or when we sleep, we could also have this experience?

• 1:28:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:30Speaker 05

  Or is it sort of implying that, don't even get your hopes up, sweetie, like, you're never gonna get here?

• 1:28:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:35Speaker 05

  The question of imitation is a complicated one, but.

• 1:28:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I can see how Lucian doesn't fit, unfortunately, like, but, man, he's a wacky delight.

• 1:28:45Speaker 05

  He really is.

• 1:28:46Liv Albert?

  I feel like we could keep talking about this utterly forever, but I also, before we started recording.

• 1:28:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:28:54Liv Albert?

  We got into, I had, this is why I had to actually start us, because we just got talking and I need to know everything but on the microphone. So, I mean, this is, I think, a bit of a leap from, I feel like you could probably tell me everything so much more, but I really, we need to, we need to wax about women.

• 1:29:14Speaker 05

  We do, we do, we did talk about the ladies.

• 1:29:16Liv Albert?

  The wives, as you said on the mic.

• 1:29:18Speaker 05

  The wives, question mark, quotation marks? The wives, yeah. So, what live, dear listeners, uh, dear Livsners is alluding to is, along with my colleagues, A. Lisa Uzameki and Ilko Klas, we co-wrote a piece on these three anonymous women who are connected to Flavius Josephus, the historian. And Flavius Josephus, first-century CE author, he is born and raised in, as he calls it, Judea. He is associated with various elite powers in that area, priests, kings, generals, et cetera.

• 1:29:57Speaker 05

  Uh, during the, um, revolt against Rome, he is going to be given command, which is not uncommon in the ancient world. If you're a part of the elite and you're male, you're going to be given military obligations. And it's not gonna go very well for him. He's going to be captured by Rome, he's going to be enslaved, and then he's going to. By Asperciod's root come to be in good with the Flavians, which is how he comes to be named Flavius Josephus. He takes this name in honor of his patrons. Uh, his Hebrew name was was Joseph before all of this. Uh, sort of Latinizing or Romanizing, whatever we wanna call it.

• 1:30:35Speaker 05

  And he is not going to be enslaved forever, but he has a similar historical and literary position to Calibius. In relation to Rome, so this enslaved, captured, not really free, but also not really a slave anymore. Non-Roman who's going to be writing history in the Roman court and in Greek. Now for Flavius Josephus.

• 1:31:01Liv Albert?

  Just a few things going on there.

• 1:31:03Speaker 05

  So many things going on. And so Josephus is already himself an interesting character for thinking about. Who gets to write and what stories are they writing and for whom? And Flavius Josephus, eh, his works are preserved for us in Greek. Um, and we've got a whole bunch from him, one of which is called the Jewish Wars. Which tells the whole story of the war that he lived through, its causes, its consequences, the interactions, who did what, to whom, where, why, when, how. And he's very influenced by Thucydides as well as, um, I wanna say Dionysius called Carnassus. Um, but I could be mixing my dates around. Anyway.

• 1:31:42Liv Albert?

  I don't know enough about him to question you.

• 1:31:44Speaker 05

  Fair, fair enough.

• 1:31:45Liv Albert?

  But Thucydides sounds right.

• 1:31:47Speaker 05

  Definitely predates Josephus, that one.

• 1:31:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:50Speaker 05

  I know for sure. Um, and also especially with the sort of like the the causes of the war, the Casus Belli. Uh, Thucydides is is all about the, like, I'll tell you why they said they went to war, and then I'm gonna tell you exactly why they went to war, actually. And Josephus does that. He's like, let me tell you why they said they went to war. And I'm gonna tell you why they actually went to war, right? There's lots of that sort of stuff going on in Josephus. And he's got some very interesting rhetorical approaches, both through how he constructs himself as an authority figure and how he talks about Rome. And it's not always very clear what his stance is about Rome as well as his own people. And all of this depends on whether we as scholars assume he has a Roman audience in mind or a Greek audience in mind or a Jewish audience in mind. Who is he talking to?

• 1:32:35Speaker 05

  It's a big question.

• 1:32:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:37Speaker 05

  So that's his first major work. He then writes a work called Jewish Antiquities, which he tells us he writes because his first work met with so much acclaim that people begged him to write this one.

• 1:32:50Liv Albert?

  I love when we get moments like that from ancient authors where they're just like, just as obnoxious as some modern ones. Like I just, that's a delight.

• 1:32:57Speaker 05

  I'm a really big deal, believe me. I know, I know. And it's so easy to.

• 1:33:01Liv Albert?

  Why I get to write another, okay?

• 1:33:03Speaker 05

  It's so easy to make fun of Josephus. I should probably stop, but it's just, it's so, so easy.

• 1:33:08Liv Albert?

  He is no. Men deserved to be made fun of.

• 1:33:11Speaker 05

  He is no better or worse than any other ancient male author. Let's, let's be honest.

• 1:33:17Speaker 05

  And so in Jewish antiquities, it's exactly what it says on the label. He is telling you the history of the Jews. And because he, like any of the ancients, has a different understanding of history than we do the moderns, he starts with, in the beginning, God created. And so he tells you the whole of what we now think of as the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible or, or Tanakh. Starting with all of these anti-Diluvian and then the flood and then all of these, call them historic or mythic, take a pick, characters like Abraham.

• 1:33:45Liv Albert?

  Mytho-historic even.

• 1:33:47Speaker 05

  Love that one. Mytho-historic. And then he comes down into, yeah, I love it. I, I also use that one actually. And he comes down into the books of Chronicles and Kings and then he comes into his own, he writes up to his own living day. Uh, really. And so he tells you the history of the Jews all throughout this period. He also has a work called Against Appian, which is a treatise about someone he doesn't like and he's arguing with him. We'll leave that one aside. He also has a work that is called The Life. Beos, which is, if not the oldest recorded autobiography, is one of the oldest. Recorded and transmitted autobiographies. Because of course, we don't want to presume that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

• 1:34:28Speaker 05

  Somebody else might have written an autobiography and we just don't have it, but Josephus is definitely one of the oldest and.

• 1:34:36Speaker 05

  With Ilco and Elisa, we wrote a piece on how and why intersectional approaches to travel narratives can be very elucidating using the autobiography of Josephus, because Josephus mentions three women who at some point are a part of his life. And highly problematically, these women are referred to as wives in a lot of scholarship. And all three of us took umbrage with this. And another thing we took umbrage with is that Josephus is often presented or characterized as this solo mover and shaker in the ancient world. And

• 1:35:20Liv Albert?

  Despite having three unnamed women at his side.

• 1:35:23Speaker 05

  Right, and also despite the fact that this is not a modern world with a credit card where you can travel on your own with ease. You don't travel alone in antiquity, you just don't. Both because it's logistically impractical, but also because it's highly dangerous. There are bandits and pirates and you can't go anywhere by yourself. So we looked at these three women who are all anonymous. Because we also must remember that it is a frequent thing in literature that the unimportant characters or the characters deemed unimportant by the authors are unnamed. And so we looked at these, and they are very frequently women and also enslaved. That's a fun Venn diagram. And so we looked at these three women in order to reconsider

• 1:36:06Speaker 05

  what movement looks like in this first century B.C. or sorry, C.E. And at the end of the day, unfortunately, what we did was focus again on Josephus. Because this is his story about himself and so the information is presented in a certain kind of way. But we did manage to reconsider as well what the reality of these women was very possibly like and why they were presented in the way they were presented. And so the first woman.

• 1:36:37Speaker 05

  She is not even really a woman and we should frankly just call her a girl. She is referred to in the Greek as a parthenos, which is usually translated in English as virgin. It's often more maiden. It's not virgin in the way we think of it as like never having had sex, but it's.

• 1:36:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I spout on about this a lot, a lot.

• 1:36:53Speaker 05

  Great, your readers are acquainted with the debate.

• 1:36:55Liv Albert?

  Just this idea of it's a woman, young enough to be unmarried and childless and the use of the English word virgin is often icky.

• 1:37:05Speaker 05

  It is, and in this case, it probably is. Uh, the case that this young woman, the word is being used of this young woman to denote never having had sexual congress with anybody. Well, I should say with a man because people don't care about lesbian sexual activity.

• 1:37:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah, only penetration matters.

• 1:37:22Speaker 05

  And it doesn't threaten patriarchy because you can't get pregnant. Um, so that's fine.

• 1:37:27Liv Albert?

  Another thing I talk about on the show constantly. Maybe the ladies were having a lot of fun together because it didn't count, according to the men.

• 1:37:34Speaker 05

  Exactly. It's, it's fine. Um. And Josephus. I'll say encounters this woman. Because both he and she are taken captive in war in and around the region or the city that is called Cesaria or Cesaria Maritima. And they get relocated somewhere else. Now, Josephus is a, an important enslaved, captured guest. And so, under the command of the spasion, the spasion commands him to go and pick out the parthenos of his choice.

• 1:38:09Speaker 05

  And Josephus tells us some very important things about her. They're very important within giant quotes here. That she's parthenos and that she is one of the captives of the local, you could translate this as either native or indigenous or local, regional communities.

• 1:38:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:24Speaker 05

  And we don't know anything else about her.

• 1:38:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Where is this Cesaria?

• 1:38:28Speaker 05

  Cesaria Maritima, it's now, uh, it's along the coast of the Mediterranean, near Akko in Israel, Palestine. Uh, it's, uh, right there.

• 1:38:36Liv Albert?

  Got it.

• 1:38:36Speaker 05

  Um. And this is.

• 1:38:38Liv Albert?

  Those are big questions.

• 1:38:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, it's totally fair. Uh. It, um.

• 1:38:45Speaker 05

  It is important to Josephus narrative that she be both of the ethnic community as well as Parthenos because Josephus has told us elsewhere that he is a part of the priestly social category and priests as a sacred category and not just for the ancient Jews, but for all the ancient peoples, right? To be a priest is a sacred special category and for this particular community to be a priest means that you can only be married to or have sex with a woman who is pure of some definition of pure. And there are writings in other places and Josephus explains to us that women who were captured in war, even if they are returned

• 1:39:29Speaker 05

  to their families are considered to be impure from a ritual perspective. Because and Josephus is really gross about it. He says that they've like collaborated or something like that with their captors and it's like, oh yeah, sure. We're calling rape collaboration now. Yeah.

• 1:39:44Liv Albert?

  Well, that's like the that's it's giving the slave women at the end of the Odyssey.

• 1:39:48Speaker 05

  It really is, right? Exactly. Whether you're coerced, yeah.

• 1:39:53Speaker 05

  Exactly. It's like you can die now or you can have sex with me. Like, oh, great. Um, that's a, that's a great option. Thank you. And so this Parthenos is regularly referred to in scholarship as a wife and she's not. She is a child. First of all, she's probably somewhere between twelve and seventeen or maybe eighteen and she is a trafficked rape victim. And to make it even grosser,

• 1:40:20Speaker 05

  Josephus is at the end of this story, you know, this telling us about who this woman is. Um, and so he's told her that she's, you know, ethnically local and Parthenos because of it, how important that is to his status. He gets to preserve his priestly status. But then at the end,

• 1:40:38Speaker 05

  she is sent away.

• 1:40:41Speaker 05

  And scholars have interpreted this whole, it gets like two sentences, Liv, it's not a lot. They've interpreted this to mean that he marries her, that she's his wife, and that she is at the end manumitted. Now, there are specific verbs in Greek for manumission, and that's not what is used here. It's like she's sent away. So she's very likely just taken and given to some other man as his new sex object, which is not.

• 1:41:04Liv Albert?

  And there's no evidence of any kind of legality, like marriage, right? It's just like he picks up a virgin and then sends her away.

• 1:41:11Speaker 05

  Well, and the verbs used, whether we're talking Septuagint Greek, or we're talking Homeric Greek, the verb for marry is always to take. And so it shows a.

• 1:41:23Liv Albert?

  God, it's so great.

• 1:41:25Speaker 05

  I think it shows a modern discomfort from modern translators.

• 1:41:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:29Speaker 05

  Because the same verb, whether it's la bone, or it's a different one, and I'm blanking on the one that Josephus uses, but it's also used in Homer. It's a verb that when the object, the verb object, the grammatical object, is something material, like gold, or food, or a trombone. The translators are very happy to say, oh, he took the trombone.

• 1:41:50Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:41:50Speaker 05

  But when the verbal grammatical object is a woman, or a female human being, all of a sudden, it's translated as marriage.

• 1:41:59Liv Albert?

  Sorry, I, I, this is an ongoing issue with ancient studies, just generally, and it makes me wanna scream. But it also reminds me, there is this verb that's used in Hesiod. Now, I don't know Greek, to be clear, but I am really good at poking around in dictionaries, and I know enough Greek to figure a lot out. And there is this verb that's used in Hesiod, and I've become obsessed with it because it's used to describe Medusa and Poseidon. And people have this really great habit of being like, oh, yeah, that was consensual sex, up until Ovid said it was assault. But the verb used by Hesiod, which is like the only, the earliest version of anything with Poseidon and Medusa.

• 1:42:41Liv Albert?

  Um, I think it's per lexo, per lexito, something like that, and it essentially, like, the other forms of it are pluck out a superfluous hair. And then, but then when it's used for, for like, what is obviously assault, like, the, the, the line is that Poseidon, like, and English translators always say lay with. The line is that Poseidon lay, the, but not even using his name, they call him the dark haired one. The dark haired one lay with Medusa in a field of flowers. And that's the verb, so it's either lay with or pluck out a superfluous hair. But yeah, please tell me how it was like a consensual love affair, like.

• 1:43:23Speaker 05

  That's such an interesting verb, picking fa- plucking flowers.

• 1:43:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's plucking, like, no, that's assault, sorry, here we are.

• 1:43:31Speaker 05

  Well, it's also very, very like the flower imagery is definitely so Persephone Cora wandering in the field when Hades assaults her.

• 1:43:37Liv Albert?

  I've actually been meaning to check, yeah, what verb is used there. I know the verb is also used with like Achilles and Berseus and stuff, so you're like, well, I'm not fucking con- being convinced that this is a love affair.

• 1:43:46Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:43:47Liv Albert?

  Anyway, sorry, that was my little Greek, but that's wild.

• 1:43:51Speaker 05

  Right, yeah, it is, for sure. Well, exactly, so one of the things that Elise Iko and I did was walk through, like, so there is a category in Roman law for two slaves that share tents and are sort of giant air quotes man and wife, because they don't have the same level of choice and freedom and divorce rights that free Roman men and women would have had. And Josephus didn't use any of that language for us, so we can use other historical evidence to sort of think about what this is. But let's also not shy away from the fact that this woman has no choice, and at the end, we're not told she's manumitted, we're just told that she is sent away. And we don't know what that means.

• 1:44:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:28Speaker 05

  Then we find out that he moves to Egypt and he's there with Vespasian and with the Roman army, and there he gets another woman. That's what we're told, another woman, like, okay, sure.

• 1:44:38Liv Albert?

  Now, is this, because off mic earlier, you said there was only use of the one word of giune, which is woman. Was it it, or, because you'll get there, but I'm just, I'm so interested in that point.

• 1:44:51Speaker 05

  And now I'm doubting myself and I'm misremembering, so it might be actually that the second and third women are actually referred to as yunay.

• 1:44:59Liv Albert?

  So, just for the listener, that means women.

• 1:45:01Speaker 05

  That does mean woman, yeah, it it means woman. And it's uh it's an adult woman and it it's synonymous with wife. And in the same way that um in like modern English ceremonies, people are uncomfortable with I now pronounce you man and wife at weddings. That's because man and wife, like wife in English used to just mean woman. So it it man to mean husband and wife or woman to mean married woman. All these languages, we've all been doing this for a bazillion years, right?

• 1:45:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:29Speaker 05

  And so, exactly. Uh but in and and it's because marriage in different ways for both men and women does signal that you are now fully adult. And you are living an adult life in your communal uh environment. And so, uh Josephus gets to Alexandria and he has this other woman. And we don't really know anything about her other than the fact that she has children. It's not even very clear from the language whether they are children by a previous marriage. Or whether they are children with Josephus. Josephus does name one of them and raises him, so.

• 1:46:02Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:46:03Speaker 05

  But we know the Romans adopted, so maybe he's going with that custom, we don't know. We also don't know what ethnicity, excuse me, this woman is. And all what we do know is later that Josephus sends her away because her habits are displeasing to him.

• 1:46:16Speaker 05

  And people have made a lot of hash out of this minimal amount of information. And they've made all kinds of arguments about how, oh, this this proves that she wasn't Jewish. Because these habits are displeasing and so they must be that she was like bringing idolatry into the house. Well, that's. Well, and it's a, it is a leap. And it fits a certain trope of Jewish, particularly Jewish prophetic literature or ancient prophetic literature. Wherein it is because of marriage to foreign women that Jewish men are misled into idolatry.

• 1:46:48Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:46:48Speaker 05

  So it fits a paradigm, but Josephus isn't necessarily alluding to that paradigm, he's just, like, they could have been fighting and said, like, who knows, right?

• 1:46:56Liv Albert?

  Well, I feel like there could, yeah, there could be so many different things that get described as that, yeah.

• 1:47:01Speaker 05

  Exactly, all we know is that she is sent away. Presumably he keeps the child that he named, but we don't really know. His third wife is the one we know the most about, she's from Crete. And she's from a Jewish family that is well respected and important in Crete. And she clearly has some kind of. Leverage, power, status, we don't know, because when she doesn't like the tutor they've hired for their children, she fires him and hires a new one.

• 1:47:25Liv Albert?

  Hell yeah.

• 1:47:26Speaker 05

  Right? She's involved in her children's upbringing and education. It's important.

• 1:47:30Liv Albert?

  And and the household, that's a household decision.

• 1:47:32Speaker 05

  That is a household decision, absolutely. And so, this was particularly Ilko's work, eh, did a, did a lot of looking into, well, wait. Why Crete? What the hell is going on with Crete? And there is evidence that there were Jews living on Crete. But what Ilko reconstructed, based on other evidence and other sources, were the sailing routes of the ancient world. And Josephus is a landowner in Judea after the war. And so he's partially in Rome, but he's partially in Judea. And you can't sail directly there.

• 1:48:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah, right along the way.

• 1:48:04Speaker 05

  Stopping point. And so, thinking about Josephus as mobile and as moving and as needing to move between Jewish communities, because where you stay when you're on travel adventures, well, that raises. And then in a very hypothetical, I should say, all of our readings are, you know, we think well argued. But of course, you could take this information and argue other ways. Eh, it creates the understanding of, right, this is why a Cretan woman would have been a marriage possibility. The other thing that we, we, we argued or pointed out in the piece was that, air quotes around interestingly, interestingly,

• 1:48:45Speaker 05

  these three women, in terms of social and economic status, align with where Josephus is himself.

• 1:48:54Speaker 05

  In his various points in the autobiography. So, cynic-docally, they act as some kind of stand-in for Josephus himself. The Parthenos is when Josephus himself is still a captive in a camp after or during the war, and this patient commands him to pick his, you know, sex toy of choice. And whether or not that's actually how it happened, and Josephus was told to choose, or whether that's Josephus sort of covering himself from criticism in some way. It still shows that, you know, a female body is used as some sort of hospitality gift exchange between two men. As a status marker, at a time when Josephus himself does not have very high.

• 1:49:38Speaker 05

  Status and doesn't have as much agency, then he gets to Alexandria and presumably as someone who's been chosen to travel with the Roman court. He has more agency and he has now chosen somebody else to be in his life. And then he sends her away because. And I can't remember the Greek, I can't remember if Josephus sends the Parthenos away, or if she is sent away in a more passive voice. But Josephus decides he chooses the second woman and then sends her away. And then the third woman is. A local Cretan elite and has the most status, and that's also when Josephus himself has the most status. And so Josephus travels as a part of.

• 1:50:20Speaker 05

  The Roman courts and the Roman imperial military environment and then also as. A landowner who needs to be in in between where he comes from and the Roman. Court system and how you move around and with whom you move around is a really important way of understanding that Josephus is not. Despite how he talks about himself and despite how any ancient author talks about himself, they are not traveling on their own. They are a part of these. Moving households and these larger moving systems. And that's before we even start talking about how many enslaved people they would have needed to be taken with them to. I don't know, change diapers, make dinner, pack laundry, whatever they're.

• 1:50:59Liv Albert?

  I mean, I think about this with the Odyssey, it's it's been coming up a lot because there's like this moment where they. Like sack a city and take all of these women hostage and then they are literally never mentioned again. You're like, oh, eventually all your ships sink, so I guess they die, but. You didn't think hard enough about them to tell us. And yeah, it's, you know, there's so often these. These, just the implication of like there would have been all of these other people around.

• 1:51:22Speaker 05

  For sure, and they often don't get mentioned until you get some description or a very short description of some great. Ambassadorial political delegation that shows up somewhere and then you get a reference to a retinue. You're only told what that means, right? So that was a very fun and very interesting piece to collaborate on the three of us sort of thinking about, well, how do we use the concept of travel narrative? To not just focus on this one person and how do we use? This one person's admittedly very meager information, he doesn't tell us much about these women. How do we use this information and then put it into context with?

• 1:52:01Speaker 05

  Other, whether they're archaeological or literary sources, and how do we put them into conversation with what classicists, whether they're? Hellenists or Romanists, or whatever they're doing and to sort of think about. Josephus as this mobile. Author who is between cultures and between spaces and is more often than not between and not in, right? You're in Rome, but you're between the Jewish and the Roman peoples and systems, or you're in Judea and you are in between. The Jewish and the Roman.

• 1:52:35Liv Albert?

  Different way.

• 1:52:39Speaker 05

  Property, are you in a rented apartment in Rome, are you, there's all of these different power dynamics that are always changing and always fluid. And we see it even in how Josephus talks about, you know, Vespasian ordered me to pick up Arthenos. Compared to, and then I met and married this Cretan woman, which implies I met, I married, I chose.

• 1:52:59Speaker 05

  Right, so there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a implied shifting of his own status. As someone who does or does not have a lot of control over his life and is either forced or coerced to do different things.

• 1:53:15Liv Albert?

  That's, yeah, that's so, it's so interesting, I mean. I, again, could talk about this forever, I will try to wrap us up just so that, you know, keep us from talking forever. But they're just like, I just, I'm perpetually obsessed with the ways that we can pick out like. Real lives from these larger things, right? Like that's what that feels like to me is is picking out these real women. From a story that they were never meant to be like included in in a in a large amount, but that doesn't mean we can't. Still find them, you know, and I love that we are trying to find these like real women.

• 1:53:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, to borrow from another traveling Jewish author, Paul, uh, for now we see through a glass darkly. We do only see these women darkly. It is a very vague image, but um, one that is worth. Trying to reconstruct in some way, shape or form because they're unnamed and.

• 1:54:17Speaker 05

  Easily overlooked, unfortunately, and that's also the way the narrative encourages to read. But Elizabeth Schusler Furenza, a very important scholar in feminist approaches to biblical literature. In her early works, talks about a hermeneutics of suspicion. And more or less what she invites is to read against the grain and to ask what is not being said.

• 1:54:43Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:54:43Speaker 05

  Who is not being mentioned and why? And so just to be a little suspicious about what our authors are telling us and without, without discrediting them, right? Like it's not, it's not to downplay the horror that Josephus would have experienced and seen.

• 1:54:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah, or the importance of him as a person.

• 1:55:00Speaker 05

  Of course, even though we like to make fun of him and it's so easy.

• 1:55:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah, the ancient author is invited, so.

• 1:55:06Speaker 05

  Well, they really do, but I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure there's someone out there. If, if there is anybody out there reading my work, I'm sure I invite it as well, so it's fine.

• 1:55:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:14Speaker 05

  We all just invite it.

• 1:55:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:15Speaker 05

  Just learn to laugh at ourselves. Um, but yeah, so just being a little suspicious about, you know, how and why things are presented to us the way they are and not to the point where we discredit and accuse, but to the, just to the point where we say, right, this is a partial. We are seeing through the glass darkly and we might see more if we look in a different way or if we turn, it's like one of those um optical illusions where if you turn upside down, you see the different image. It's like, what, what, what do I see when I turn it a different way?

• 1:55:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, well, and just for the longest time, because of the people in this field and, and so many, you know, issues around that. For the longest time, there was no one even remotely interested.

• 1:56:00Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:56:00Liv Albert?

  In looking for the people who were left out.

• 1:56:03Speaker 05

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 1:56:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah, anonymized or just barely mentioned these footnotes like for the longest time, I think we've all been kind of convinced that because they were left out, they were footnotes that they didn't matter or that their entire gender didn't matter because they were, you know, and it's like, there's so much going on there and there's so many like, there's so many bits and pieces to pick out of the sources that, that do exist, why, you know, how they came to be, all of these things that, that, yeah, like really beg us to ask about the other people because. I mean, yeah, I think more and more. I just want to emphasize that, you know, all people are uh equal in this world and we've been doing all the same goddamn things.

• 1:56:46Liv Albert?

  Oh, for centuries and centuries, like we're all the same humans from five thousand years ago to now and like, yeah.

• 1:56:52Speaker 05

  Well, and and and I would say that we're we're all doing the same things, but we're it's also it's why it's important to read these. Texts, look at these objects and to have a conversation about them with other people because I I don't think it's uh. By coincidence that in the nearly three years I've been working on this project.

• 1:57:13Speaker 05

  The publications and the conference papers that have challenged me the most, that have made me develop the most. And not just as a scholar, like this is a human person, uh have been the ones that I have co-written with my colleagues. Because those are the ones where you have to s- you are you're obliged to stop and think about why you think something. Because your colleague says, oh, here's my interpretation of this. And then you go, wait, hang on. I don't agree with you. Why don't I agree with you? And then you go back and forth and you go back and forth and it can be, it can be intense. It can be, it can be, we had some very. I wouldn't say tense, but we had some very uh lively and animated debates about our our interpretation and where we finally landed. But the ultimate.

• 1:57:59Speaker 05

  Piece that Elisa Iko and I pulled together. While any one of us could have written something about these three women who are mentioned by Josephus. None of us could have written the piece that we did together and we challenged each other immensely. And while it can be difficult, because sometimes you say something or they say something that you don't agree with. It is in that in-between space that we actually learn and grow and it is in the discomfort of not knowing. And finding out we were wrong, that we grow and develop and it's.

• 1:58:35Speaker 05

  It's been an absolutely incredible experience to have that. And so it's also one of the value, I think, of what you as a podcaster ho- offer.

• 1:58:43Liv Albert?

  I was just gonna say, it's my favorite part is this, these conversations because you really do pick out such completely different and new thoughts and ideas, just even if there's not an explicit disagreement, but this it's the, the conversing, it's that like shared experience of talking about these things that you, you develop ideas and expand them and, and learn new things. And oh my gosh, yeah.

• 1:59:06Speaker 05

  Yeah. And we develop and grow. I mean, the piece on air and Enoch and Scipio I wrote is, has been out for a while now. And I gave a talk on it last week, the week before. Time has no meaning. And um the talk I gave on it, okay, the audience member didn't say it quite like this, but they basically, the, the, the comment I made about the humor or the irony in Plato is entirely because someone said, yeah, okay, your argument kind of relies on the pseudography as being earnest. And are you sure Plato's being earnest? And I went, oh, I didn't think about that. And somebody else said, yeah, I think you're wrong about Cicero too. And I went, yeah, not about the pseudography thing, about something else about Cicero. And I went, oh, I'm so glad you told me because I wanted to, I wanted to something else with this. And I don't like it. Oh, sure. It's published. It's out. It's done. Goodbye.

• 1:59:52Speaker 05

  But like, it's only when people show up and say, I disagree with you. Oh, tell me more. Why do you disagree with me that you can develop and, and learn. So it's it's fun to show up and have those conversations, even though of course our egos always take a hit. Find out we're wrong about something. It's not easy, but it's, it is worth it. The discomfort is worth it.

• 2:00:11Liv Albert?

  And it gets easier over time, I will say, because like I've been doing these conversations for five years now and the growth that I have had is like unimaginable, like in the five, I mean, I've been doing this show for eight years, which is also

• 2:00:24Speaker 05

  Whoa, good for you.

• 2:00:25Liv Albert?

  Thank you. Yeah. Who the, I don't know how that happened. I blinked. I blinked. And the conversations have been since 2020 and, and yeah, like those alone have just expanded my abilities and my knowledge and all of these things. And I've also gotten like really, I've gotten better at being like, no, I was totally wrong about that. Let me like, expand that. I mean, there's so much stuff from our early episodes that I'm like, don't trust me back then. Listen to the new stuff. You can listen to me. That's fine. But like, learn from me when I then correct myself later because I do. And yeah, it's just.

• 2:00:54Speaker 05

  Right. Like our ancient texts, we are evolving and we are not static. These things are always fluid and the adventure continues. And we didn't even talk about how travel is actually a metaphor in most of these sources.

• 2:01:07Liv Albert?

  I feel like we could go on forever. I mean, maybe you'll have to come back.

• 2:01:10Speaker 05

  Maybe I'll have to come. We can talk about coming of age and travel as a metaphor.

• 2:01:14Liv Albert?

  And maybe Lucian a little like, I don't.

• 2:01:16Speaker 05

  Oh, my God.

• 2:01:16Liv Albert?

  Like, maybe this will be your chance because you, if you, I don't know if you try to avoid him in your studies much, but you can come on here and we can talk about his madness.

• 2:01:25Speaker 05

  I would love to come back and talk about Lucian. Okay, great. On the Syrian goddess is just.

• 2:01:31Liv Albert?

  Okay. So see, I've only read the true history and I've been actually, that's one that's.

• 2:01:35Speaker 05

  We should book club it. We should, we could, we should have a whole conversations book club.

• 2:01:39Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:01:39Speaker 05

  On the Syrian goddess.

• 2:01:41Liv Albert?

  I'm, that's thrilling because, yeah, okay, I'm taking notes, taking notes. Listeners, stay tuned.

• 2:01:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, thank you, Sowers.

• 2:01:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Thank you so much for doing this. This was so much fun. I'm, can't wait to talk about more Lucian. Um, but yeah, it's, it's been a joy. Um, and is there anything you want to share with my listeners? Reading more, where to find you, anything?

• 2:02:01Speaker 05

  Sure. Uh, if, uh, so if, if, if, uh, reader, all listeners want to go and read some fun stuff. Uh, well, the article I was talking about with Eric Enoch and Scipio is already out. It is called Authority From The Back Of Beyond. It is an open access source, which means that you don't have to pay. You can just type that in, uh, and you will find it. You can also look me up. G I L L I A N G L A S S, Gileam Glass, and you'll find either my website at the university or you'll find that article. The project, if you want to know more about it, if you type Aninan, A N I N A N Denmark into.

• 2:02:48Speaker 05

  Browser of your choice, you will find us, or if you type in my name, you'll also find the website as well. If you're looking for fun ancient travel stories. Well, I am definitely going to say that a person should read the Myth of Air, The Book of the Watchers, and The Dream of Scipio. Other really fun ones are the ancient Greek novels, which are all these wild romance stories of people traveling around the Mediterranean, getting separated from their beloved and having to find them again. Uh, or Lucian's True Stories is also a great one. Jewish travel narratives specifically, I am a huge fan of um.

• 2:03:26Speaker 05

  The story of the slave of Abraham and Rebecca from Genesis. So if you just type in Gen- Rebecca, Genesis, it'll, it'll come up. I also am a fan of how Josephus retells that story in Jewish antiquities, and so you can just type Jewish antiquities, Josephus, Rebecca, Abraham, it'll, it'll, there's, there's free versions on the internet for that one. And I would also really recommend the Book of Tobit, which is a crazy story where an angel disguises himself to guide a young boy through the wilderness, and a fish tries to eat him, and they use the fish guts to ward away a demon, who is terrorizing a woman who just wants to be happily married. But every time she tries to get married, the demon who's in love with her kills the husband on the wedding night.

• 2:04:12Speaker 05

  So, would definitely recommend the Book of Tobit.

• 2:04:16Liv Albert?

  We love ancient stories.

• 2:04:19Speaker 05

  Right?

• 2:04:20Liv Albert?

  They are wacky, and yeah.

• 2:04:22Speaker 05

  So good.

• 2:04:23Liv Albert?

  So good, so good. I love that. That's great, thank you.

• 2:04:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:04:27Liv Albert?

  Well, I'll try to link to some of the easier things in the episode's description too, so people can find it. And yeah, this is just so much fun. Thank you.

• 2:04:34Speaker 05

  Thank you so much, Liv. It's great to be back, um, to have been back, I guess, for, for more conversations and uh. We'll just have to do some Lucian next time.

• 2:04:42Liv Albert?

  Oh, shucks. Yep.

• 2:04:44Speaker 05

  Rats.

• 2:04:45Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah, that's gonna be so boring.

• 2:04:46Speaker 05

  I know.

• 2:05:04Liv Albert?

  Thank you all so much for listening. I know I went off at the beginning, so I won't keep you all now, but I'm really appreciative. I just think this is really important and I'm trying to make sure that we're all enjoying this historical content, just while also recognizing the ways that it ties in with some of the horrors that so many people are experiencing now. And I mean, when I learned that the Trump administration had asked for a list of Jewish students, I mean, I've never like, before I was obsessed with ancient history, I was really obsessed with World War II history and Holocaust history, probably from way too

• 2:05:43Liv Albert?

  young of an age. And I just, I see that. And then I see this horrific plan for Gaza. And I just wonder, I mean, I don't wonder at the power of propaganda, but God, is it heartbreaking?

• 2:06:03Liv Albert?

  Because privilege is all is a construct, just like whiteness is a construct, just like all race is a construct. And the second that the people in power don't have a use for you anymore, they're going to come for you, whether you are a Jewish person, a black person, a Latino person, an immigrant of any kind, a woman. It doesn't matter what privilege you think you have right now. They can take it away the second they want to. And we just should all be very aware of that. And all of that said, I said, I wouldn't go on another soapbox at the end. So I hope you enjoy this episode. An enormous thank you to Jillian for coming

• 2:06:46Liv Albert?

  on. And we just, it was a great time. And frankly, I had completely forgotten about the Lucian conversation because I am so burnt out. And now I'm really excited to send Jillian an email and figure out what we're gonna do for this Lucian thing because heck yeah, heck yeah. So much fun. Just an enormous thank you. Go check out Gillian's work on these Jewish travel narratives, because fucking fascinating. Last Talk of Midsummer is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Panguish is the Hermes to my Olympians, the incredible producer. Select music is by Luke Chaos. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network. My book has finally gone to print, so I think hopefully I'll be able to find myself back and

• 2:07:30Liv Albert?

  get right back to scripted episodes and more new conversations and all of this good stuff and the Memory Collective and everything. Fingers crossed. It's like really hard to like get over like really, really heavy duty depression burnout, anxiety burnout, when you're also somebody who has to pay attention to everything that's happening in the world at all of the time and everything is horrible. And I don't, how are people finding inspiration right now? And like positivity? Could you tell me? Could you share your tips? I am Liv and I love this shit.

• 2:08:24Speaker 04

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• 2:08:54Speaker 07

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• 2:10:07Liv Albert?

  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. 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. 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.

• 2:10:51Liv Albert?

  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.