Pod Insights Let's Talk About Myths, Baby! | Greek Mythology & the Ancient Mediterranean Muse, Sing the Songs of Persephone's Women... Dead Women of the Odyssey About this episode Examining the women of the Underworld in Homer's Odyssey (and contextualizing last Friday's episode a little further...) This coming Friday: part two of the EPIC takeover that fully delves into its musical depths. Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby
CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing.
Sources: Selections read from the Odyssey, translated by AT Murray https://www.theoi.com/Text/HomerOdyssey11.html.
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.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Liv Albert? Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So, check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/groups.
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2:39 Liv Albert? Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby! And I am your host, Liv, here with... Well, a little something in between. So, on Friday, I released the first half of an episode that I have done alongside Kristy Vogler, who's doing a kind of takeover of sorts for the show. The intention of it was for Kristy to be... Kristy, who also is one of the hosts of Movies We Dig, part of the New Memory Collective. And so through Movies We Dig, Kristy talks entirely about reception of the ancient world, you know, in pop culture and media.
3:19 Liv Albert? And so the idea behind this takeover is that Kristy, someone who takes in all of that pop culture and media and is really well-versed in talking about it, sits down with a couple of other experts and breaks down this piece of pop culture that I have not had the opportunity to do. So, of course, we started off with a bang with Epic the Musical. And then the... This is all just... We're going back around. The idea was, okay, great, I don't want to be, you know, out of it entirely. I'm looking for ways... Part of the takeover nature of this was not just that we can look at pop culture stuff
4:02 Liv Albert? that I don't feel like I am right for, but also because I am entirely coincidentally quite busy working on the beginnings of my children's retelling of The Odyssey that's going to be published next year. Oh, my God, I'm dying of excitement. But that alongside building this memory collective and an adult novel that I am hell bent on getting picked up as well, I'm looking for ways of expanding episodes of the podcast that are a little bit less work for me. And so I was really excited that Christie wanted to do this. I knew she would do it right. Christie loves Epic. She was going to come at it as a classicist and archaeologist and also somebody who liked it. But we wanted
4:46 Liv Albert? me included too, which is why weeks ago, we put out a post on the podcast Instagram asking you all to pick, if you could, just pick one song for me to listen to from Epic, what would it be? You all had a lot of feelings and it was really great. The song that won out was the song, "No Longer You." It takes place in the underworld saga and I was really excited to listen to it. I liked it fine. My big issue, my big issue is nothing to do with Epic. My big issue is that because of my attention span and honestly, the amount of mythological
5:27 Liv Albert? content in so many forms that I take in and research and try to build my own version of all day, every day for the last eight years, what that means is that I have a lot of trouble listening to the type of music where I have to pay attention because frankly, I don't have the attention span. I know that there is what must be an absolutely beautiful visual version that I could watch. It's just not something that I feel equipped to take all of it in, let alone then talk to you all about it. And because of that, I had simply avoided it for a while and talked a lot, like I do about, say Percy Jackson.
6:11 Liv Albert? I talk very openly about how I may not be in a place to ingest all of the pop culture about Greek mythology that's coming out these days, but I love it. I am thrilled that this type of content is bringing more people to Greek mythology, that's bringing more people to my show to learn the ins and And out and the context and the background. I think it's great. I am so incredibly supportive of every type of pop culture reception of Greek mythology. That doesn't mean I'm always the right person to talk about it necessarily. And so what I thought was that Christie and I had found this, this kind of workaround, a way for me to ingest some of it. While then she will bring in a group and really talk about it in depth. What I didn't consider
6:57 Liv Albert? is that I would end up talking so much that it turned into an episode in itself. And then I had to split it off from the episode that's coming out with Christie and the guests, all of whom love Epic and are going to talk about it in the realm of Epic, the concept, Homer broadly, musicals. We have some incredible guests lined up, both of which have been on my show in the past. So you can look forward to Friday's conversation episode hosted by Christie as this kind of takeover and featuring Joel Christensen, you all love him. One of you even commented about him or referencing him in the first half of this episode. So Joel Christensen and Joe Goodkin, who's also been on my show a handful of years ago, because Joe is also a modern bard.
7:42 Liv Albert? Joe has also written these enormous adaptations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and he's been performing them for like, I think, listening to their conversation 25 years, which is incredible. And so we have this really incredible episode coming out, breaking down all of that stuff. What I did that was apparently silly was break it up into two episodes because the first half was just me. And it turns out that if you tell me that like 20 women have been cut out of an epic that is one of the only pieces of literature from the ancient world that features so many stories of women where it's actually about the women. Well, I'm sorry, I'm going to be bothered by that. And again, it's no fault of anyone's. And as I said,
8:26 Liv Albert? in that episode that aired on Friday, not a single one of my critiques were directly aimed at the creator. My critique is of how we as a culture have
8:39 Liv Albert? Taken the Odyssey and kind of made it about something else. I think this is a larger cultural issue that then leads to a creator who doesn't see the inherent value in those stories in the underworld. And in that case, I'm not even making it about women. I think it's just about seeing the value in those aspects of the story. And it's also a complete preference. Like, it is not necessary, but it took me off guard. It bums me out. And again, literally nothing to do with the creator, which I know for a fact, I said a handful of times. Not least because the absolute number one thing I don't want to do, and I have said that into this microphone,
9:19 Liv Albert? like, a lot of times by now, the number one thing I never want to do is talk about a piece of reception pop culture and ruin it for anyone. I don't want to ever inadvertently say something that would make a creator feel bad about their work. I don't want to take something that listeners already enjoy and take away from that enjoyment at all. That is something I think about all the time, and perhaps too much. And it's the nature of the beast. I understand. But this episode is coming to today because I feel
9:58 Liv Albert? really bad that people have taken that first half of the episode and understood it as anything other than me being personally bummed out by a choice. And, and, and maybe this is me being oversensitive, or just, you know, being forced to focus on a handful of trolls. But I definitely know there are listeners of my own who feel like I took something away from epic by doing that. And it was absolutely not my intention. But at the same time, I don't think I could have ever learned something like that and not reacted that way. And, and again, it's about there being wider context, absolutely.
10:41 Liv Albert? And that's why we have this epic additional episode for you all, where these experts are going to come in and talk about what they like about Epic and really go into those details. And, and yeah, a trick of the editing, it was unfortunate. But I do want to talk about why, why that bothers me. And again, emphasize how it has nothing to do with this individual creator and everything to do with how our culture has asked us to think about the Odyssey.
11:30 Liv Albert? I want to talk about the women in the underworld. I am setting aside the choices of Jorge, the creator of Epic. I am setting that aside in a nice little box, not to be confused with a jar. We're setting that aside. We're going to return to it, but I want to say that this is not about that. This is about the wider cultural understanding of the Odyssey that meant it was really easy to cut those characters out and think that you're not cutting out anything important, because I think that's what happened. I think that it's really easy to look at this scene from the underworld and think like, oh, it's just kind of like this extraneous additional storyline that doesn't really
12:15 Liv Albert? send the plot in any further direction. You know, I, I understand the desire to feel like those plot points are extraneous. And my issue is, is about the cultural background of what led us to that point. Because let's be perfectly honest, the wider issue here is the cultural.
12:37 Liv Albert? Creation of the Odyssey, the 3,000 years, give or take, since the story was being originally developed up until now. Because within those 3,000 years, we, as a culture, have determined a lot of things about the Odyssey that are more about the cultures that came after it up until now, than they are about the story that was being told in that earliest form of the epic. And again, this is the wider issue. The wider issue is how we see the epic.
13:15 Liv Albert? Because any number of retellings, blogs, descriptions on Wikipedia or wherever, will give you a lot of information about the Odyssey that isn't necessarily wrong, but does leave out all of the things that I think make it more interesting. And again, what I think makes the Odyssey so interesting is everything outside of Odysseus and how all of those things are interacting with Odysseus. What that says about him as a man, what that says about him as what we conceptualize as a quote-unquote hero,
13:56 Liv Albert? what that says about him as a husband, as a father. I think it's way more interesting to look at Odysseus as, like I said, this fucked up dude who did fucked up stuff. And a part of that, though indirectly, is coming in the underworld. And that's because this moment in the underworld, where we not only get the stories of a great number of women, which I will get into, but also stories of the heroes, a lot of the men who died with Odysseus at Troy, we get a lot of these insights. We get a lot of Agamemnon complaining about his bitch of a wife, Clytemnestra,
14:37 Liv Albert? who just went ahead and killed him the second he got home, and we love Clytemnestra for that. But that is a large part of what is going on in that scene because... Clytemnestra is behaving as this foil to Penelope. Clytemnestra's already dead. She's killed Agamemnon. We don't see her despite what the casting for Christopher Nolan's Odyssey might suggest to you. We don't see Clytemnestra at all. She is just talked about as this horrible woman, this horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible woman who betrayed her husband and she killed him and she slept with his cousin, who was his arch enemy, and all of these things. And we in this poem are being asked to think of Clytemnestra as the opposite of Penelope,
15:19 Liv Albert? as the woman who did all the wrong things when her husband went away to war and when he came back from it, whereas Penelope is doing all the right things. And I think where the women in the underworld are fitting in between those two dynamics is what's most interesting. So we're going to talk about what the women of the underworld were getting up to.
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18:56 Liv Albert? I want to read this section to you because it best details who we're talking about. I'm going to read it in pieces. I'm gonna let my tone imply whether or not it is a quote, because I want to break down each individual woman in a little bit more detail so that you understand as we go. But in the meantime, we're just gonna start reading a little bit of this section of the Odyssey, which is in Book 11. Odysseus is in the underworld. He's been given all of these instructions. He's spoken to the prophet Tyresius, who tells him a whole prophecy. Then he speaks with his mother. He also sees Elpenor, the guy who died falling off of
19:37 Liv Albert? the house. And once he's finished speaking with his mother, this is what happens next. Thus we two talked with one another, and the women came, for August Persephone sent them forth, even all those that had been the wives and the daughters of the chieftains. These flocked in throngs about the dark blood, and I considered how I might question each. And this seemed to my mind the best counsel. I drew my sword from beside my stout thigh, and would not suffer them to drink of the dark blood at all at one time. So they drew near, one after the other, and each declared her birth, and I questioned them all. Then
20:21 Liv Albert? verily the first that I saw was high-born Tyro, who said that she was the daughter of noble Salmonius, and declared herself to be the wife of Cretheus, son of Aeolus. She became enamored of the river, divine Anipius, who is far the fairest of rivers that send forth their streams upon the earth. And she was wont to resort to the fair waters of Anipius. But the enforcer and shaker of the earth took his form and lay with her at the mouths of the eddying river. And the dark waves stood about them like a mountain, vaulted over, and hid the god and the mortal woman. And he loosed her maiden girdle and
21:02 Liv Albert? shed sleep upon her. But when the god had ended his work of love, he clasped her hand and spoke, and addressed her. Be glad, woman, in our love, and as the year goes on its course, you shall bear glorious children, for not weak are the embraces of a god.
21:21 Liv Albert? These do you tend and rear, but now go to your house and hold your peace and tell no man, but know that I am Poseidon, the shaker of the earth. So saying, he plunged beneath the surging sea, but she conceived and bore Peleus and Nellius, who both became strong servants of great Zeus. And Peleus dwelt in spacious Aeolcus and was rich in flocks, and the other dwelt in sandy Pelos. But her other children, she, the queenly among women, bore Tchritius, even Aisen and Pheres and Imothion, who fought from chariots. So that's the first woman, Tiro.
22:04 Liv Albert? We know that she's the daughter of Salmonius, he's a famous king. She falls in love with a river, it seems, but it's not the river that she then gets to sleep with. Poseidon turns himself into this river, god, deceives her, hides her, rapes her. It's very clear. He takes her virginity is even how clearly that is laid out here. And then he's like, nah, you don't get to be upset about that. I'm a god, don't tell anyone, but raise my children. And one of those children is Peleus, not to be confused with Achilles' father, Peleus,
22:48 Liv Albert? they're spelled differently, but it's hard to pronounce them differently. This is Peleus, the father of Jason. Jason and the Argonauts. And so we, we get this idea that this woman who comes up to him first just tells him a story of a god violently assaulting her and then essentially telling her to keep quiet, raise these children. And the end idea we're supposed to get is these children are famous.
23:22 Liv Albert? So, that's the first one. Here's the next. "And after her I saw Antiope, daughter of Asopus, who boasted that she had slept even in the arms of Zeus. And she bore two sons, Amphion and Zethus, who first established the seat of seven gated Thebes and fenced it in with walls, for they could not dwell in spacious Thebes unfenced, how mighty soever they were."
23:52 Liv Albert? Alright, that one was Antiope, not the Amazon Antiope. Uh, this is a different one. Um, it might not sound quite as dramatic because it's Zeus, whereas with Poseidon, we typically know that it is inherently violent because the sea is violent and Poseidon essentially is the sea. But when it comes to the children Amphion and Zethus who go on to be quite famous for those walls of Thebes, there's a lot of other sources that have details about how Antiope, because she became pregnant without a husband, essentially was forced into exile or punished or these varying levels of trauma. Alright, next one.
24:37 Liv Albert? "And after her I saw Alcmene, wife of Amphitrión, who lay in the arms of great Zeus, and bore Heracles, staunch in fight, the lion-hearted. And Magara, I saw, daughter of Creon, high of heart, whom the son of Amphitrión, ever stubborn and might, had to wife."
24:57 Liv Albert? Again, not quite so bad. This is Zeus, so it's less explicit, mother of Heracles. Uh, but we still get the mention of Magara in there, who Heracles, of course, killed along with all of their children. And even still, the story behind Alcmene, uh, becoming the mother of Heracles, there are absolutely versions which suggest that Zeus performed some kind of trickery in order to sleep with her. And it's only because she was married to Amphitrión and he was able to raise a son as Heracles that we don't have more dramatic, um, effects of, of that happening. Next up is a bang.
25:41 Liv Albert? And I saw the mother of Oedipotes, fair Epicaste, who wrought a monstrous deed in ignorance of mind, in that she wedded her own son, and he, when he had slain his own father, wedded her, and straightway the gods made these things known among men. Howbeit he abode as lord of the Cadmians, in lovely Thebes, suffering woe through the baneful councils of the gods. But she went down to the house of Hades, the strong warder. She made a fast noose on high from a lofty beam, overpowered by her sorrow. But for him she left behind woes full many, even all that the avengers of the mother bring to pass.
26:24 Liv Albert? That's another name for Jocasta, if you didn't get. This is Oedipus and Jocasta. This is the earliest form that we have of their story. We actually don't have almost anything else until Sophocles' version of the myth in the play, Oedipus, Oedipus Tirannus. But still, we are very clearly getting here a woman who, while not explicitly originally, you know, had some kind of trauma due to the gods, she does have some trauma pretty clearly here. And we get such visceral details of her killing herself because of what happened.
27:06 Liv Albert? Next. And I saw beauteous Chlorus, whom once Nellius wedded because of her beauty, when he had brought countless gifts of wooing. Youngest daughter was she of Amphion, son of Iasus, who once ruled mightily in Orchamanos of the Miniae. And she was queen of Pelos and border her husband glorious children, Nestor and Chromius, and lordly Pericleminus. And beside these she bore norm-
27:35 Liv Albert? And beside these she bore noble pero, a wonder to men. Her all that dwelt about sought in marriage, but Nellius would give her to no man, save to him who should drive from Philarchi the kin of mighty Iphicles, sleek and broad of brow, and hard they were to drive. These, the blameless seer, alone undertook to drive off, but a grievous fate of the gods ensnared him. Even hard bonds and the herdsman of the field, howbeit when at length the months and the days were being brought to fulfillment, as the year rolled round and the seasons came on, then verily mighty Iphicles released him, when he had told all the oracles, and the will of Zeus was fulfilled.
28:22 Liv Albert? Now, in this case, we don't have a tragedy for Chlorus, and good for her, but instead what we have is a woman who is being lauded for the children she created. And while I don't love any woman being determined, or any of her worth being decided based on her ability to have children, or who those children ended up, in the ancient world, this is a incredibly important thing that they've laid out for her, because she's the mother of Nestor. And as we know, because this is the Odyssey, Odysseus is tight with Nestor. We love Nestor, he's known to be the wisest, sort of the best of the Achaeans in terms of just counsel,
29:05 Liv Albert? and he brings this kind of calming presence. Of course, it's Telemachus who goes to speak with Nestor at the beginning of the Odyssey to hear about Odysseus and his travels. So, this connection to Nestor and his family is incredibly important. It is a lot of honor being given to Chlorus by having her story recounted in the Odyssey.
29:29 Liv Albert? Next. And I saw Leda, the wife of Tyndareus, who bore to Tyndareus two sons stout of heart, Castor, the tamer of horses, and the boxer, Polydeukes. These two the earth, the giver of life, covers, albeit alive, and even in the world below, they have honor from Zeus. One day they live in turn, and one day they are dead, and they have honor like unto that of the gods. This is Castor and Polydeukes, they are incredibly important. Of course, Leda and Tyndareus are famous also for being the parents of Helen and Clytemnestra.
30:10 Liv Albert? There is a lot of varying sources in terms of, you know, who are the children of Zeus, of those four kids, and also some lack of clarity in these earliest sources about how related Helen and Clytemnestra are. So it's not totally surprising they're not mentioned, but it is key that Leda is named here as the mother of Castor and Polydeukes because they are considered to be two really important heroes who did really important and important, I'm saying important so many times, really important things in Sparta that were done by these guys. So again, we are having a lot of honor being given to Leda, being given to the woman by having her story told to Odysseus in the underworld.
30:56 Liv Albert? And after her I saw Ephimeria, wife of Eleus, who declared that she had lain with Poseidon. She bore two sons, but short of life were they, godlike Otis and far-famed Ephialtes, men whom the earth, the giver of grain, reared as the tallest and far the comliest after the famous Orion. For at nine years they were nine cubits in breadth and in height nine fathoms. Yes, and they threatened to raise the din of furious war against the immortals in Olympus. They were fain to pile ossa on Olympus and Pelion with its waving forests on ossa that so heaven might be scaled.
31:38 Liv Albert? And this they would have accomplished if they had reached the measure of manhood, but the son of Zeus, whom fair-haired Leda bore, slew them both before the down blossomed beneath their temples and covered their chins with a full-grown beard.
31:55 Liv Albert? Again, here, we are getting the story of two really important characters of Greek mythology told through the lens of their mother. Their mother! We have ideas of the father, certainly, we know who she's married to, but this is about the mother.
32:14 Liv Albert? "And Phaedra and Procris I saw, and fair Ariadne, the daughter of Minos of baneful mind, whom once Theseus was fain to bear from Crete to the hill of sacred Athens; but he had no joy of her, for ere that Artemis slew her in sea Gert Dia because of the witness of Dionysus."
32:36 Liv Albert? Well, those ones are straight out Phaedra, Procris, and Ariadne. They all, in this version, have pretty terrible fates. I mean, it's harder to say when it comes to Phaedra, because a lot of what we know about her terrible fate is pretty heavily based in a play, but broadly, we still understand that she had some kind of terrible fate, I would imagine, even in these oldest of sources. And Procris is, if I recall, killed by her husband through some kind of accidental trauma, tragedy. And Ariadne, who, in this version, which of course, remember, there are countless versions of what does or does not happen to Ariadne after Theseus, but in this case,
33:19 Liv Albert? it's the version where she is killed on Dia, which is another name for Naxos, after he takes her there, and it's because of the gods, but also because of Theseus.
33:34 Liv Albert? "And Myrrha and Clymeni I saw, and hateful Eryphily, who took precious gold as the price of the life of her own lord; but I cannot tell or name all the wives and daughters of heroes that I saw ere that immortal night would wane. No, it is now time for sleep, either when I have gone to the swift ship and the crew or here; my sending shall rest with the gods and with you."
34:03 Liv Albert? So Odysseus is telling this story to the Phaeacians. It's towards the end of his journey, not the end of the Odyssey. There's a lot going on. But I just really wanted to look at these stories of women because while they present all of these varied stories of mythological women who go through different experiences, be they good or bad, and have children, be they famous or famous for being good or famous for being bad, but in all cases, they are famous.
34:41 Liv Albert? And the fact that when Odysseus is in the underworld in the Odyssey, he speaks to a handful of men, yes, he does speak to heroes later. But before these women, he speaks to his mother, his dead crewmate Elpanor, and he speaks to Tyresius. Now technically, he's supposed to speak to Tyresius first, so it's kind of like we see these people back and forth. And the blood mentioned at the beginning is because if you don't remember, there's a whole thing about him having to sacrifice an animal, I'm going to forget what type exactly, but essentially these shades from the underworld have to drink the blood in order to speak to somebody who's living.
35:25 Liv Albert? And so there's a lot going on there. But to me, it's just really, really, really interesting that before we get to the heroes, before we get to the names that we and the listeners back in the ancient world would have known in even more detail because they fought with Odysseus in Troy, before we get to Agamemnon, to Achilles, to anyone like that, we have these stories of women. We have these stories of women who, at least when it comes to this mythological time period, did what was considered to be the greatest things they could do, and that is have important children.
36:07 Liv Albert? We don't love it, but when we take it in context, it is important to recognize that the story being told about these women is their importance. It comes before the men, it comes before the heroes, and we know from right at the beginning that Persephone sends them. So this queen of the underworld, this goddess of spring and also the dead.
36:31 Liv Albert? Sends these women to talk to Odysseus. And given we're at this point in Odysseus's story where he's kind of like halfway home and not in a literal sense because I don't think it's possible to really define it as a literal sense, but you know, he's, he's already been with Circe at this point. He's already done, he's already been with polyphemus with the cyclops. He's already had the majority of the adventures that he's going to have, or at least half of them. And when he gets to the underworld, which is in itself a real feat, um, you know, that it's a really big deal to go to the underworld to be able to speak with the dead.
37:13 Liv Albert? And we get these really, really detailed stories from the dead sent by a goddess. And it's, it's all of these goddesses. And though the phrasing of, of him telling the story to the Phaeacians isn't necessarily so explicit, not least because I have to read this old translation to you, but these women are telling their own stories to Odysseus. And that is something that to me really stands out in, in the breadth of the surviving Greek mythology. I, I, I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm saying this, I'm, I'm recording this kind of out of nowhere. I, I wasn't really sure what kind of timing I was going to do for the next episode.
37:56 Liv Albert? I both did and didn't want to give you guys this break because I'm, I'm, I'm feeling stressed about having damaged epic to anyone in your eyes because that's absolutely not my intention, but my intention really is to just talk about what it means to cut out that many women and that many women who get to tell their own story. And it's absolutely a preference and it's absolutely not necessary to the story. I don't think that excluding them fundamentally changes the Odyssey, but I think it fundamentally changes the opportunity, I guess, the opportunity to see the Odyssey for something slightly closer to what it was in the ancient world.
38:36 Liv Albert? And, and, and this is entirely personal. I mean, again, this is, this is entirely my, my personal feelings, which is what the last episode was too. But I think I'm at this point where people want something of me and I, it's a very weird thing to, to talk into the microphone in this way and to have people want to hear what I have to say because I'm really, really cautious of, of not ever putting down someone's work. That is literally never my intention and I make a really, really conscious effort to adhere to the statement, like, I mean, about people doing work now who I respect. Obviously, if I don't respect
39:16 Liv Albert? you or you're a problematic person, I'm all no holds barred. But when it comes to people who are creating in this way, where it's like you're, I think they're doing great work. I think that Epic has contributed so much to the popular discourse. I have absolutely no complaints with it as a concept at all. And again, my issue is with the broader cultural idea and it's just simply, and this is what I said last time, and I'm gonna say it again. My complaint is simply that it bums me out. Do I fundamentally think it should change or that anything was done explicitly wrong? Absolutely not. It bums me personally out.
39:58 Liv Albert? It bums me out because I want to hear a song of those women telling their story. I want to hear an acknowledgement that there were that many women who got to physically tell their own story, not only to Odysseus, not only to the Phaeacians through the voice of Odysseus, but to the ancient Greek people. It, it fills me with an enormous sense of joy and pride in the ancient world to read that section of the Odyssey because we get their stories straight from their mouths, in whatever way we can get anything straight from the mouth of a mythological person, but we do, we do.
40:41 Liv Albert? And so again, this, this episode, I just wanted to talk about those women. I wanted to talk about them because I was bummed out, not because, again, I think that there's anything fundamentally wrong. I wanted to talk about them because I was bummed out and therefore I would like to give them the voice that I simply wish they'd had in Epic. And that doesn't mean, I think, anything badly about the musical. It doesn't mean that I have any negative associations with the musical. It just means that I wanted to hear their story and it bummed me out that I didn't get to.
41:21 Liv Albert? And I think that the exclusion of them is a symptom of a much, much bigger cultural problem with how we think of the Odyssey.
41:31 Liv Albert? It's a much bigger issue. It's not about an individual piece of reception that does or does not do that one thing.
41:40 Liv Albert? I, I just wanted to hear their stories and, and I want to talk about why I think we should.
41:50 Liv Albert? Because we don't have many mythological women from the ancient world and we have even less that get any kind of agency over their own stories. And I just want to hear them. I want to hear them.
42:08 Liv Albert? Because they're the closest thing we have to real women of the ancient world.
42:28 Liv Albert? Oh nerds, thank, thank you very much for listening to this attempt to explain myself further and contextualize and clarify because it really, I mean, I didn't want to sound too defensive because I don't, I don't even really feel like I'm necessarily defensive. It's just that I, I felt very misunderstood, I guess, not least because, again, I was getting comments where it was really clear that the people wanted me to say one thing about Epic and when I didn't.
43:05 Liv Albert? They kind of just took that notion and ran with it. But I'm really, like I said, I'm really, really conscious of not, of not putting down another person's creative work. And because people read that or, or decided that I'd said that despite me very explicitly saying I was not doing that, I, I, I just felt the need to explain myself and in explaining myself, I wanted to look at those women because they don't have a song about them. So I'll just tell you about them instead. So, thank you for listening. On Friday, you're going to have a really, really brilliant, insightful conversation
43:51 Liv Albert? about Epic the Musical from people who love it, who've listened to all of it, which again, it's not that I don't love it, it's that I don't have it in me to listen. It's just not for me and that's fine. And we need, we need that to be fine. So instead on Friday, you're going to get a great conversation with a handful of people who really love it and know what they're talking about, who love Homer and Epic as a concept and who sing these stories today. You're getting the absolute perfect people to talk about this. It's just that I edited it poorly and it should have all been one episode, but here we are.
44:33 Liv Albert? So stay tuned on Friday, you're going to have that exact conversation that I think you wanted from last Friday. And in the meantime, those are the women in the underworld, the women whose stories I want to hear. Let's talk about Myth Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. I'm doing my best. I, I'm doing my best.
44:58 Liv Albert? It's a wild fucking time.
45:03 Liv Albert? Michaela Pangu is the Hermes to my Olympians, my incredible producer. Kristy Vogler did an absolute fuck ton of work on last week's episode and on this coming Friday's episode, and we absolutely love her for it. Truly, I am so excited. And I'll tell you right now that Kristy and Michaela are talking chaos. I was there for part of it, too, because I've seen one episode and I'm gonna watch more, especially now. But again, I need to be able to make it like a thing I enjoy and not like a thing that I then feel like I have to talk about for work. So Michaela and Kristy are really diving deep into chaos because that is like a whole other
45:45 Liv Albert? piece of wild, incredible reception, just like Epic, but in a very different way. And we love that for the world of Greek mythology. We really fucking do. Select music by Luke Chaos. I just want to clarify, because I kept saying edited when it comes to the choice to split the episode into two. That's not an edit. I don't know. I made the choice to split it into two. Kristy did all the work. I just don't want to take away from that. Kristy did all the editing for last Friday's episode and next Friday's episode because she's a great friend who wants to give me content and also talk about interesting things that she's better at than I am. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network. We're working on putting together
46:29 Liv Albert? more stuff. Things are slow going because we're just, just a couple of people living through, you know, I don't even want to say. This episode is gonna come out post-Canadian election and...
46:52 Liv Albert? That silence is too long. I don't know what else to say. Thank you all so much. Thank you to the people who commented on last week's episode and understood what I was trying to do and appreciated it and just generally know what I care about. And I really appreciated those, those good comments. They really helped me not be like, oh, my God, what have I done? I don't want to ruin this thing for people. That's like the opposite of what I want to do. So I appreciate those comments very, very much. I am Liv and I love this shit. I, I love The Odyssey. I love reception of The Odyssey. I love Odysseus despite him being utterly, utterly, utterly terrible.
47:36 Liv Albert? Because we can love things and critique them. It's just how humans interact with art.
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Previous Odysseus, Man or Monster? The EPIC (!!) Takeover w/ Christie Vogler Next Conversations: Old Tales, New Media, The EPIC (!!) Takeover w/ Christie Vogler, Joe Goodkin, and Joel Christensen (Part 2) Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated