Conversations: Even Women Had Names, Athenian Women (Without Husbands) w/ Katherine Backler

Liv speaks with expert Katherine Backler about all the lives and lore of the very REAL women of ancient Athens, from the the beautifully mundane to the righteously remembered. Katherine is the author of a new book on the lives of Athenian women, Athena's Sisters https://www.cambridge.org/ag/universitypress/subjects/classical-studies/ancient-history/athenas-sisters-reclaiming-women-classical-athens?format=HB&isbn=9781009672320. This is the (incredible!) pot mentioned that features all things women weaving https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/253348. Check out the next group trip through Thalassa Journeys https://www.mythsbaby.com/tours-events/ariadnes-escape. Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby. Enter ourpodcast guest https://www.mythsbaby.com/contact form if you'd like to be on the show as a conversation guest! CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. 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?

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

• 0:42Speaker 01

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• 1:34Speaker 02

  This December, the magic of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol returns to Virginia Repertory Theater in downtown Richmond. Experience the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge as he's visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, and rediscover the joy and true meaning of the holiday season. Performances run November 18th through December 27th. Tickets on sale now at virginianrep.org or by calling 804-282-2620.

• 2:31Liv Albert?

  Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and I am your host, Liv, here with another conversation episode. First and foremost, real quick, I am here with an updated group trip plan. So the one we released in the fall was too expensive, which I don't blame anyone. This is something where it has been kind of in the works for well over a year and everything just keeps getting more expensive. And also, like, in that time, you know, a lot of things have changed about like people's ability to go places. And I respect all of that. So absolutely, I mean, honestly, I get it. For those who still

• 3:15Liv Albert?

  can't afford this one, or don't want to spend that much, reasonable. We are again hoping to continue on with more. We're going to take a little bit of a pause in the other ones, just so this year can exist, because I have so many other book things going. But that is all very rambly to say that there is a new offering, again with Thalassa Journeys. So again, this will be like a very nice, it's pretty luxurious. It is, it is a way to see some Greek islands in style. We've cut down the itinerary a bit. So we no longer are going to Santorini, which honestly saves a bazillion dollars, because Santorini is like, so expensive. It's amazing, but so

• 3:58Liv Albert?

  expensive. So we have removed that, along with sadly, Delos. But we're still going to Crete, we're doing Knossos and Heraklion, which is the most incredible museum, because it's all, everything from Knossos, as well as some other parts of Crete, and then taking the fast ferry up to my beloved, beloved, beloved island of Maxis. This is the big thing about this trip. If you have been wanting to do islands, that's why this one is more expensive. Islands are always going to be more expensive. So again, we're going to have another mainland trip that will be less expensive coming in the future. But for now, if you are in a position and you want to see a couple of Greek islands with me,

• 4:37Liv Albert?

  Including my most beloved island, Dionysus's most beloved island, the place where he found Ariadne after Theseus abandoned her, which means like everything is named for Ariadne and Dionysus. It's amazing. And also it's where I snagged a cat off of a Greek mountainside with permission. Um, and so Naxos is really special to my heart and I, I would absolutely love for everyone to come. So again, deeply rambly apologies. I'm really good at this part. Um, I will be sending out a newsletter with this information, but for now you can go to my website. Um, and take a look at the events tab for more information, but the price has gone down. Uh, the dates have changed. We're now doing this in October, which also helped with the prices, uh, and the temperature.

• 5:21Liv Albert?

  We would be together for Halloween in the world of ancient Greece. Um, obviously the trip also does include Athens, so no forgetting that one. Take a look for details and again, little bit more affordable. I would really love if you all were able to come. Um, and join me on these Greek islands. And again, if you can't, you don't want to spend that much. You want to wait, um, for the more affordable mainland trip. That'll be back next year. And in the meantime, for those of you who want to come to this island, these two islands with me. I'm so excited. Let's go to Naxos together. Naxos has, okay, aside from it being so stunning and having like the most beautiful beaches.

• 6:03Liv Albert?

  In the islands, I swear. They also have like the best potatoes you'll ever have in your life. You think like, oh, I've had potatoes. You've had one potato, you've had all potatoes. You have not had all potatoes. You've not had Naxian potatoes, Naxian potatoes and Grier, literally life changing. Come for the potatoes alone. Oh my God, this episode. So I, I, well, I, this is another case where we recorded a few months ago. We were really lining them up. And then, oh my God, we're finally releasing this episode, but what that means is that I just re-listened to it after a couple of months. And that is honestly my favorite part because I was like, I've recorded so many of these that then they kind of flutter off away.

• 6:45Liv Albert?

  I just remember that, like how they went generally. And then I listened again and I'm like, oh my God, right. And I'm like learning all of this again. And thankfully it helps me retain this information just as much as it helps you all. And today's episode, oh my God, peak, absolute peak. We are learning about real women and in this way that I. I think is kind of new in terms of the people I've had on the show in just this really specific way in that like the goal is to look at women explicitly without men like women as singular human entities and obviously this is something that so many people who've

• 7:26Liv Albert?

  been on my show are focused with. I don't want to pretend that that's not true. But in this case, so the author slash scholar expert that we're speaking with today is Katherine Backler, who has written a new book called Athena's Sisters, which is generally about women outside of their husbands, not necessarily women that didn't have husbands, as you'll hear, but just women beyond their husbands, fathers, sons, women as people, just like the men.

• 8:00Liv Albert?

  But this, this episode is so good. And what really stood out to me is that Catherine gives them names. We'll get more into that. You'll, you'll hear it fully, but that, that really meant a lot to me and I'm, I'm so excited to share it with you all. And so

• 8:17Liv Albert?

  in this world that just seems to be increasingly scary when it comes to not being a straight white man, um, this is important now more than ever. And I just, I'm so thrilled that we can escape a little bit, um, into this world of, of ancient women who accomplished a lot without including men in their accomplishments and isn't that great for them. So I, I, no need for me to say anything more. Honestly, you are absolutely going to love this episode. I am not remotely worried.

• 9:09Liv Albert?

  Conversations. Even women had names. Athenian women without husbands with Katherine Backler.

• 9:32Liv Albert?

  I want to say, behind the scenes, Michaela and I got this request about your book, Athena's Sisters. I'm going to forget the subtitle, but I remember being so good. And I just couldn't wait because, I mean, again, like, this podcast is like 80 to 90% women in the ancient world and in Greek myth, because it's all I want to talk about. But when there's like a new, fresh, like, book, topic, anything, I'm losing my mind. So you're studying, like, not only real women in Athens, right? But like, can you maybe, maybe just a little introduction about how you started on this? I'm just so excited.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. Thank you. No, it's really exciting to be here. And it's lovely to be able to speak to someone who's also really excited about it. Yeah, so the book, the book came about partly because, well, interestingly, I did. So in my last year of my undergraduate course, we did this paper called Sexuality and Gender in the Greek and Roman World. And, you know, we were thinking about Athens and women in Athens. And there kind of seemed to be the sense that, well, women in Athens get married, and then their wives, and women are wives and whatever.

• 10:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah, they disappear forever and never do anything ever again.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, and there's this kind of, that's what's the most important thing about their lives, that they're married, that they're having children who'll grow up to be citizens. And I guess I was like, they can't all have been married, for a start. I was like, you know, just somehow statistically, there must have been some who weren't. And that kind of got me thinking. And I was like, oh, what if I went looking for single women?

• 11:05Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God. I'm so excited. Sorry.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  But then what I found was I was kind of, I was trying to track these women through their lives. So I went to the, I went to the orators, the speechwriters who are kind of writing legal cases for courts. And, because there are women in there, because lots of the cases are around property, so they're around families, what goes on in families. Or sometimes they are about kind of status. And because...

• 11:36Speaker 03

  Because in Athens, after halfway through the fifth century, you have to be the child of two Athenian parents to be an Athenian citizen, right? So

• 11:45Liv Albert?

  Despite the fact that women wouldn't count as citizens in terms of like all the rights, but they did count as citizens just in terms of creating more citizen babies.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  Right, it's kind of fascinating, this question, and it's become, it's become this really big question. And particularly, there's this amazing scholar called Yacina Block, who was like, you know, actually, women were citizens. Um, and, and she's not the first person to have kind of argued that, but she, she makes the kind of fullest case. And she's like, look, if you think about citizenship as being about belonging, if you think about it as being about kind of having a stake in your city and acting on behalf of your city, you know, women do all of that. And I, I mean, that's true, and I think that's really important. Um, but I still, yeah, I mean, basically, my view is the same as yours. I, it's sort of citizenship in inverted commas for me in a way.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  Um, because I think the Athenians themselves seem to think about citizenship as being about political participation, and that's something that's really important to them. And that's why towards the end of the fifth century, when there are efforts to limit political participation, they get all up in arms. Uh, and if citizenship weren't so closely about political participation, they, they kind of wouldn't care so much. Um, yeah, I, yeah. So anyway, so I was, I was looking for these single women. Um, and so I was following women through these, um,

• 13:11Speaker 03

  legal cases, and it was, it was interesting trying to kind of dig them up because, um, the other thing is that there's this very strong convention that men don't use women's names. It's understood as being really disrespectful to use a woman's name, so.

• 13:26Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  Right, so if I were to call, if I were a ma, if I were a woman, I'd call you Liv, and that would be fine. But if I were a man, I'd be like, oh, you know, I was having this podcast conversation with the daughter of whatever your dad's name is, or, right.

• 13:39Liv Albert?

  My dad's name is Daryl, and something about that is like the funniest.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  When I'm teaching this, I'm like, yeah, so you have to understand that I'd be like Catherine, daughter of Gary. And again, all these like names that are so like culturally specific. But yeah, um, and so, so you're kind of finding these women and, and there are kind of these efforts to kind of hide them in the speeches. Sometimes there's this one really interesting woman whose first husband is kind of involved in all these political intrigues and his second, her second husband's like, uh, executed. And so she's got these two marriages and she's a widow and she's moving around from house to house. But the speech kind of tucks it into a little subordinate clause. And it's like, you know, when she'd done this and this and this. And, and I was like, you know,

• 14:27Speaker 03

  there are these really rich lives going on here. You know, can I find out more about them? And in the end, the book, well, it stopped being about single women because I was following these women. And I was like, again, that category also isn't helpful. You know, women are single and then they're married and then they're single again. And the ones I found really interesting were women who don't know whether they're single or not. And there are this one, so there's this one case in a speech by Lysias, and it's this woman whose husband has gone away on like a naval expedition.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  And he dies and her dad, who is also her husband's brother, right? She's married to her uncle, which is the thing that they do, right? Yeah.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  He finds out that her husband's died, but he doesn't tell her. And for this whole year, he doesn't tell her, which is kind of interesting because he does this partly as a way of financially abusing her. It means he's got kind of control of the property. But I wonder whether it's, I mean, I, I would think of it as a kind of psychological abuse as well. There's kind of, yeah, this kind of an effort to control. But anyway, there's this whole year where she thinks she's a wife, but actually she's a widow. And they also found this. Tablet from a question that a woman asked, um, asked the oracle at Dodona and she says, um, is my husband dead and should I bury him as a dead person? And like, should I just, sorry, should I do the rights for him as if he were dead?

• 16:01Speaker 03

  And she just doesn't know whether he's dead or not. Um, and that must have been really common because, you know, communications are very poor. Um, there's not kind of identification of, of bodies and that kind of thing in a, in a kind of straightforward way.

• 16:14Liv Albert?

  Um, yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  So it just, yeah. So the book, sorry, the book started off.

• 16:18Liv Albert?

  This is amazing.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  It started off as being, it started off as a hunt for single women. And then I was like, actually, there's just a lot more going on here. But what did kind of stay from that initial, um, kind of question was this sense of, well,

• 16:36Speaker 03

  what, well, I, part of it is that how do women see themselves? Um, you know, are they like, oh, I'm so and so's wife? Or, you know, are there important relationships, something different? Um, and yeah, one of the fun things I found was women who make dedications, uh, on the Acropolis. Um, and they sometimes make dedications out of income that they've earned through their own work. Um, and they'll describe themselves and be like, oh, you know, Smikitha, the laundry woman dedicated this, you know, out of her earnings. Um, and they're really explicit about the fact that they're earning money. Um, and again,

• 17:16Speaker 03

  yeah. Sorry, I'm trying to get everything at once, but.

• 17:19Liv Albert?

  It's, it honestly, and I'm just sitting here like in such excitement for this, like, because I, I mean, what I, this is my favorite type of conversation, which is just that you're like answering all these questions that I have, but I don't have the academic wherewithal or interest in like actually finding them out myself. I just want other people to come tell me, which is honestly so perfect. And why this, well, and exactly why I've made this job, apparently exactly what I need, which is just that I get to have cool people come and tell me these things. And I get usually free books too, so I'm not complaining.

• 17:50Speaker 03

  Dream.

• 17:51Liv Albert?

  Right? Um, but like the thing I think about constantly, literally all of the time is.

• 17:58Liv Albert?

  Is these real women, but, but like, like you're asking, like, what did they think of themselves? I think about this in relation to the real women and I think about it in relation to mythology. And a lot, I think, one thing I've always been fascinated by is like how women saw the mythology.

• 18:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 18:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah, because so, so much of it is based in these very same ideas of like patriarchal control. Right? Like by way of these stories of gods impregnating every mortal woman they come across. Right? It's all about this narrative of like women being controlled in various ways. And obviously that's like a very dark reading and it's.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  I think, I think a lot of it is dark.

• 18:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's, it's true. It's like, yeah, and it's the myths, they seem kind of light, but then when you kind of break that down and you just realize like, I just think about these women growing up in that world where all of your culture stories are about how men control your body. How they decide that like, because you can procreate, you are like their property, but also like this thing that needs to be controlled and watched and you know, so much of these myths are based in this like very Athenian need to control paternity and these questions about like, yeah, could your baby have a different father? And is it Zeus or is it like some guy down the street?

• 19:22Liv Albert?

  And you know, it's, I, I've just always been fascinated with like how they saw anything in that world because of all of these external factors that we can see. And I just think they must have been like, obviously there would have been a whole swath of the different reactions to it. But like any kind of internality, I guess, about women is like all I ever want to hear. So it's, I mean, I'm thrilled. I love that you started this based on single women as a very happily forever single woman. Like I, that's a particular interest of mine in that world is like these women who maybe didn't have the in, like, I mean, I, interest is relative. Obviously they didn't necessarily have the choice, but like women that didn't become wives and mothers, like what the hell did they do?

• 20:06Liv Albert?

  And how cool is it to learn? But, but understanding that they made the, that they earned this money and they dedicated in this way, like that is such a. It seems so small, but it's so, it's so important and it's so interesting to learn that this kind of like lived reality that is not about being a wife and mother.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  Hmm. Yeah. And I, I mean, I think there's a surprising amount out there. That was one of the things that was most fun to discover. So one of the things that I argue in the book is that, so a lot of the sources that I was using were inscriptions. So particularly dedications and gravestones, basically. And I basically argue that if a woman is making a dedication,

• 20:54Speaker 03

  there are lots of indications that in some of those cases, it's out of her own resources. So for example, particularly these cases where they kind of basically specify that. So she's paying for it.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  And also the ways, the, the kinds of texts that they put on them, I think are sufficiently kind of varied, but also in some cases quite personal. And because the, the text is part of what the thing is doing. So for example, like if I, well, yeah, let's, if I just take an example. So my favorite example is this woman called Melina. So she's living in about the fourth century B.C., middle of the fourth century. And she makes this dedication and it's so helpful and I'm so grateful to her because she just makes all these points. And she says, right, with my, hang on, what is it? Yeah. With my hands and the skills of my labor,

• 21:47Speaker 03

  I raised my children. I'm, I'm doing it in the first person because I think of it in the first person. She uses the third person and that's quite normal for inscriptions. So they took it. So she says, yeah, with her hands and the skills of her work. Melina raised a generation of children. And, you know, having done this, she made this dedication to you and she makes dedication to a Ghana, which is this title of Athena, having to do with like work and, and Athena is like a worker, a kind of crafter.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  Uh, from the possessions for which she labored in honor of her favor. There we go, in honor of your favor, Athena. Anyway, there we go. Um, and, and, and so what, she does several things in that and she, um. So she says that she's made the dedication out of the possessions that she's earned by her manual labor, right? I mean, that, that's incredibly explicit.

• 22:33Liv Albert?

  It's so cool.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  And then she's really interesting because she's like, what I did with that, with those earnings, with my, with my work, was raise my children. That's really important to her. So her motherhood is really important to her.

• 22:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Um, but it was, she raised the children by doing the work, right?

• 22:52Liv Albert?

  Yes, that's interesting.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  The money, that's what enabled her to raise the children.

• 22:55Liv Albert?

  It's giving single mother in like a beautiful way.

• 22:58Speaker 03

  It's giving, I, I really think it's giving single mother because yeah, the fact that she raised the children by earning the money. Um, but the most amazing thing is this other phrase she uses. So she, she does it with the skills of her hands and whatever, and her toil. Um, but she also does it with righteous daring and she uses this word, Tolma, and it's like guts. And it's the, you hear it a lot in tragedy. And I guess I'm just thinking of what you were saying about what, what Athenian women are thinking when they kind of encounter the, these kind of cultural narratives. And it's almost like she kind of reclaims that word, you know, because it can be used very negatively. You know, Clytemnestra, she's full of Tolma, she murders her husbands. But like, what's this woman's daring? What's her kind of gutsiness?

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Well, it's, you know, being a single mom, you know, raising her kids with her earnings. And then she publishes it, right? She, she has it inscribed into this, we think it's like either an altar or a base for a statue. And she pops it up on the Acropolis, you know, she's not ashamed of it. She's really proud. Um, and again, that, that, I mean, I think that's maybe my favorite, actually it's not my favorite inscription in the whole book. Um, but, but again, this sense of, yeah, her, her kind of.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  Her own values? I mean, those are like value words, you know, righteous, you know, it it's not that she was just daring, but she was like daring in a good way. And she was like, you know, in good standing with the gods and with society and like that that matters to her.

• 24:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  And and I think if we do look at these inscriptions, at least it's potentially being by women. Um, and we know that women are composing poetry in the form of like singing laments. Um, which are in hexameters, which is the same meter that you get in lots of these dedications. So we know that women can compose poetry. Um, and you know, even if they are paying someone else, even if they're like, right, you know, if they go down to the sculptors workshop and they're like, okay, I want a statue. Uh, and then either they're, I don't know, paying a poet or like asking a friend to do it or, you know, whatever. They they've got to be saying, look, I want it to say X, Y, and Z.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  You know, someone who's just like, oh, you want a dedication to Athena? Great. I'll say, you know, uh, Melina dedicated this to Athena. No, no, no, no. She's been like, no, no, I want you to talk about my kids. I want you to talk about, you know, my daring. I mean, that that's it's the word Toma doesn't appear anywhere else on Athenian inscriptions for years and years, as in like centuries and centuries. So like, it's a really weird thing to put there. So I think that's so, I think that probably is hers, like her word.

• 25:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it, yeah. I I need to get into inscriptions, except again, this is something I just need other people to come tell me. I don't want to actually go into it myself. But like, I'm so happy to know that. And like even just, I, you know, as a very happily childless woman who also wants to hear all the childish stories from the ancient world, I'm very glad to hear of even this internality of like, she's so happy to have raised her children, that that that that does have like, it did feel like her, you know, I I try, I'm trying to use the word vocation a lot for like women. I've been looking at, you know, weaving and all these different things that they did that were not just like a job, but like formed, you know, how they saw themselves. And so it's.

• 26:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's so nice to see a woman who was like, no, I raised my kids. Like, I did this. This was my accomplishment. And like, this was my kind of vocation in that sort of way. It's beautiful.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  I, yeah, I think that's a really interesting way of thinking about it. It's like, yeah, it mattered to her. It was an achievement that mattered to her. It was something that was important to her. And it contributed to her sense of identity. And I think, yeah, and it's funny, vocation's not really a term that I've thought about for ancient Greek women somehow, but that, that, the way you describe it does make sense. You know, what, yeah, what, what, what do they do that is, is part of who they are?

• 26:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah. And like, it just, I feel like when it comes to women in the ancient world, it's the thing that we're lacking, like 99% of the time is, is what they felt like made them who they are, you know, and, and we have it for all the men, like either they're poets or they're orators or they're, you know, politicians, all of these different

• 27:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:13Liv Albert?

  things. We know what they were and like how they conceptualize themselves within like their connection to society in this way. Right? And we just don't have that for the majority of women. And, you know, we have like a handful of things that we know that they did do. But then also most of it tends to be biodegradable. And so like, doesn't survive, right? Like, and you know, I've, I've had conversations recently about like, um, you know, weaving as a profession and all, and, and sort of how, how that, you know, functioned as his vocation for women. But so often it is biodegradable. And I've talked about this in so many ways, but like, whether it's, you know, the, the weaving that they're doing, or even the children, like everything that women were doing for their lives,

• 27:58Liv Albert?

  didn't survive for archaeologists for the most part, right? Or, and then there's of course, like all of the, the bias in terms of, you know, how, how things were

• 28:05Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 28:05Liv Albert?

  understood in more recent years, but. It's just so interesting to be able to see someone who did sort of see this about themselves, who who who felt some kind of like life value in in their work and yeah, like it's made this dedication and and did it like there's no mention of a husband there at all, right? Like, that's so interesting.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, and and she must, I mean, there must have been one at some point, presumably, because she has children. Or, you know, there was at least some some kind of partner at some point, but she just doesn't mention him. And she's not the only one, like, there are other women who are like, oh, you know, uh, Micaela made this dedication, uh, on behalf of herself and her children, like, yeah, not not on your behalf. And so I didn't, I didn't know what, yeah, that's, that's, that's, I find that kind of interesting. But the, I mean, the biodegradable thing is is fascinating, isn't it? Because, I mean, I guess that's why I love the inscriptions so much. Because they they survive and they're physically there and they they give us this incredibly intimate access, I think, in some cases. I mean, obviously, some of them, you know, not all inscriptions are like that, but but some of them really do.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  Um, and and again, yeah, this this thing about how women see themselves. Um, and just coming back to the thing about, you know, do women necessarily see themselves as wives? I mean, again, it doesn't seem to be important in Melina's self sense of herself.

• 29:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 29:23Speaker 03

  The other woman I really love is a woman called Eusylla. Um, and so at the end of the fifth century, she sets up a tombstone for her friend, um, who's called Beota, so her female friend. Um, and it's got this gorgeous inscription and it says, um, for the sake of faithful and what is it? Yeah, faithful and kind of sweet or pleasant or lovely, um, friendship or love or affection. Um, your hetira, she calls herself her hetira, like her friend.

• 29:53Liv Albert?

  That word, yeah, companion, friend, yeah.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  Right, and that, and that's really.

• 29:57Liv Albert?

  But also what people love about that word.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  Right, and it's, it's, there is that ambivalence. And I think, you know, basically, you you know, when it's when it's used in a sexual context, it's it's functionally a euphemism. It it really means girlfriend or like lady friend or or whatever. I mean, all this sounds, that all sounds really gross. But, um, but but yeah, for her, it's it's her friend and like, um, and, you know, that, you know, they may well have been kind of. You know, aspects of of of kind of her erotic intimacy there, it's really hard to tell. I I mean, the word hetero, I think we want to be like, oh, it's a sex word, it's a sex word. But like, I think in this context, it's it's not, right? It's about their their relationship with each other. But the fact that she describes herself as this other woman's friend, it's like, oh, who are you?

• 30:44Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm my best friend's friend, that's that's who I am. Um, I just, I just think it's so beautiful.

• 30:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's so women, too. Like, I love those things. You know, like those, like, really, those examples of how humanity has not changed at all. You know, like, that's just such a like, a a girl thing to do in this way that like, like, not in a way that, you know, it just, it is a way that is pretty unique to women and just how we see friendships. You know, I'm like this, I won't get into it, but there's something to be said with it. This as compared to the male loneliness epidemic, you know, this, just this idea of like, women that see themselves as like firstly friends to their friends. And that's so nice, yeah. No, it, I mean, that's that's fascinating. I also, it it brings up, I regularly joke with my listeners that I have a theory that a a bunch of women in ancient Athens

• 31:33Liv Albert?

  were just having a lot of fun with each other because men just never conceptualized sex outside of penetration. So the women could have been like having a whole gay time and the men wouldn't have had any idea. Not to say all of them were, but I just think it's kind of a delightful thought that the dudes were like, oh, my wife's just been hanging out with her girlfriends for the past twenty four hours straight. You know, they can't do anything out of like untoward, so.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's it is really interesting because you, I mean, it it's such, as you say, it's like such a sex segregated society. So women, you know, spend almost all their time with women. Men don't really know what they're doing. And sometimes they're like, oh, yeah, it's fine, I don't care. And sometimes they're like, well, this is suspicious. Um, I always find it interesting. Right, yeah, right. And it's really, so at the beginning of this Aristophanes play where the women, they launch, right? The, it's like you say, they launch a communist takeover of the government, right? And and at the beginning, they're all like, oh, weird, my wife's gone, like, where could she possibly be? Um, and one of them is like, oh, maybe her friends invited her over for brunch. Um, and and they, and and that's like, oh, yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe that's it.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Um, and and so there's, you know, on the one hand, that tell, I mean, to me as a historian, I I love that. Because on the one hand, it it tells us that. Women do that. They go to each other's houses for brunch and um. I think that tends to be the sense that like women sit at home on their own all the time. No, no, no, no, no. They go to each other's houses. You know, they they don't like, you know, they kind of sneak around because you know, they don't want to be seen as like a woman who's like walking in the street and everyone's gonna say nasty things about them. Um but they definitely go, they're they're at each other's houses all the time. And it's both like not suspicious. Oh, don't worry. She's probably just gone to her friend's house. And it is suspicious because obviously in the play, it is actually a government take over.

• 33:27Liv Albert?

  Aristophanes is always suspicious of women though.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  Right, right. Um but he does give us all these glimpses of like what what's going on in women's lives. There's this other like tiny throwaway line in Lycestrata where this woman's like, oh, you know, I organized this like party the other day and I like invited all the women from the neighborhood around. Um. I'm my favorite kind of discovery of the book, maybe. I've said that several times. One of my many favorite discoveries.

• 33:53Liv Albert?

  I say that about every like conversation. I'm like, well, but this is one of my favorites. It's just you have a new favorite every moment and that's.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  Right. It's great. It's great. It's what makes my job so much fun.

• 34:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 34:03Speaker 03

  Um it's this um a later comedy by Menander and Menander's plays are like totally different to Aristophanes and they're pretty weird, but I really fell in love with this play. It's it's called like The Same Young Woman and you know, lots of things that are nasty and horrible happen in the play, like as in lots of Menander plays. Uh this young man rapes this young girl and you know, the the inverted commas happy ending is that they get married. Um and that is right. I know it's it's it's horrible and.

• 34:33Liv Albert?

  I've never read any Menander, but you're not making him see another feeling.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  I mean, all of the plays are like this. Rape in first scene, marriage to rapist in last scene. But what's kind of amazing is that by the by we get this picture of it's set in these two neighboring houses. And there's uh one of the families, it's a mom, a dad and their kind of teenage daughter. And the other family, it's a man and his like. Live-in girlfriend, if, depends what you wanna call her, um, and his adoptive son. And anyway, the women are friends. And the first speech of the play, the son is like, oh, yeah. So like, the woman next door was really nice. And he basically uses this word that's like kind. She was just really nice

• 35:21Speaker 03

  to my father's girlfriends. Um, and they made friends and then they spent a lot of time at each other's houses. And we get this portrayal of like what a female friendship looks like. You make friends, you hang out at each other's houses. And what's really fun is that one of these women is a poorer Athenian woman. And the other one is, uh, she's a Samian woman, so she's Greek or well, or is she, right?

• 35:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  So she's probably a sex trafficking survivor, basically. Um, she's, um, and she's either come from Samos or more likely she's come from somewhere else and kind of been sold through Samos. They just call her the Samian. And she's got a name, it's Crusus, which is like, goldy, blondy, I don't know.

• 36:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I was gonna say that, cause yeah, Crusa is like such a common name too, which also.

• 36:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:05Liv Albert?

  Um, yeah.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  And, and she, anyway, so they're, they're friends. So we've got this friendship between a poorer citizen woman and an immigrant and they're mates, they hang out. Um, and then Crusus, the, the Samian woman, hosts this party at her house for a religious festival. And they all go around and they hang out in the house. Um, and they take over the house. Um, they start off on the roof, which is why you do this particular festival, but they like spread out through the house. Um, and the teenage boy, who's clearly a bit of a loser and has nothing better to do, is like awkwardly in the house. And he's like, oh, this is really kind of weird. Like, the women have like staged a takeover of my house.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  And he's like, he's like, whoops, I kind of became, I was like a weird kind of spectator. And so like, he's the outsider on this, this woman's event. Um, and I don't know, I just got quite interested in the ways that women. You know, we can be like, oh, the important kind of divisions in Athenian society are, are you a citizen or are you not? Are you married or are you not? And yet, and yet, it's in a comedy. We don't know how realistic it is. But we've got this friendship between a citizen woman, citizen status woman, an immigrant, one of them, the Athenian woman's married, then there's her unmarried daughter, and like, they're all friends together. And like, their friendship really comes

• 37:26Speaker 03

  through. So the Samian woman, Chrysostata, she helps breastfeed the teenage daughter's baby. So they like, share the breastfeeding. Again, fascinating. Would love to know how common that was. And then when the, when Chrysostata's partner gets really angry with her and starts threatening her, she, the woman next door takes her in. And all of this, and again, this is so Athenian. And this is like, so what I feel like my job is doing. Neither of these three women, who, again, in some ways, their relationship is really richly portrayed, two of them are non-speaking and don't

• 38:06Speaker 03

  even appear on stage until the end. Right? And all, the thing about her taking in her friends is, all we get is the man turning back into his house and being like, oh, stop nagging me. Don't worry, I'll bring her in. So again, we're supposed to understand that she spent the last kind of few hours saying to her husband, come on, this is my friend. We've got to look after her. We've got to take her in. Yeah. Yeah. But I got, yeah, I got interested in like, what, yeah, what, so, again, we have these ideas about what divisions matter in Athenian society. But I think if you look at it from the perspective of women, sometimes the definitions are different, right? What matters to Euthylla is not who her dad is or who her husband is. It's that she's Beotia's

• 38:51Speaker 03

  friend. That's what matters to her. And what matters in this fictional setting is, oh, well, she's my next door neighbor. She's been kind to me. We hang out together. It doesn't matter whether she's Athenian or not. And like, don't get me wrong, in some cases, it really does matter. And it matters to women as well. And they're like, oh, I'm a citizen. You're not, you can't treat me like that.

• 39:07Liv Albert?

  Women can be xenophobic, too.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  Right, right, for sure. But then there are these kind of cases where where something, yeah, where something different is happening. And and and religious festivals seem to be a case where that happens. Because, again, women kind of stage a sort of takeover, right? So you've got in this festival in the Menander play, they take over the house.

• 39:34Liv Albert?

  I have to ask, sorry, that festival that starts on the roof, is that, because there's one that's like associated with Adonis, too.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  That's the one, that's the one.

• 39:40Liv Albert?

  It is, okay, yes, I'm so proud of myself.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  No, it's the Adonia festival.

• 39:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah, they make like little gardens or something, right? And there's like a ladder.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes.

• 39:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah, okay.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  And and they have the kind of slightly creepy thing is that they have like dolls, which I imagine is like life sized dolls of Adonis, and they're like mourning over them.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  And they're like grieving them. And there's this one scholar, Chrysanthemum Papadopoulou, and she has been like, well, you know, lots of women, and this brings me back to the woman that I was talking about right, right at the beginning, early on, where she doesn't know whether her husband's dead or not. Lots of women don't have a body to bury, right?

• 40:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 40:22Speaker 03

  So when eventually her husband did turn out to be dead, and her her dad admitted that, she couldn't bury him because he was, you know, buried over over on, well, in what's now Turkey. And and and so this scholar's argument is that, you know, this is a way for women to kind of cope with their grief. They they can kind of handle these bodies and be like, look, I never got to hold my son's body or my husband's body or whatever. There's this really creepy passage. I I love it. It's amazing, but it is so unsettling in the Agamemnon. And it's this big choral song. And it's like, oh, you know, we sent

• 41:02Speaker 03

  our sons off to war. And then Ares, who's like this kind of merchant, you know, he took the sons, and he like sent them back as ashes. And the adjective is like basically neatly packed. Like, like, you know, they're all tucked into little funerary urns. And like, that that's emotionally really hard.

• 41:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  If, you know, it's. Women, it's a really important thing for women to be able to do is to like, look after the body of a dead person.

• 41:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  And I just think it's a fascinating idea that the Adonia is about, I mean, it, yeah, it's, well, it's about all sorts of things. But one of them is, is maybe about coping with, with, yeah, with death, basically, basically.

• 41:44Liv Albert?

  Well, mythologically, that makes complete sense, but that's, of course, that would be it. And, well, and, you know, it is the cultural practice around women grieving was so specific and like such a large part that, yeah, I would imagine it would be very difficult to not have any kind of body to grieve over or anything like that. Yeah.

• 42:03Speaker 03

  But it's also, I mean, that, that, as you say, that cultural practice is really important, like, one is weirdly, it's really important financially, because so in Athenian law, um, basically, if you are someone's heir, it's your job to bury them. So like, if my parent died and I was the heir, which I wouldn't be because I'm a woman or whatever, but anyway,

• 42:30Speaker 03

  you know, it's kind of the social contracts, you know, I inherit, but I bury them, blah, blah, blah. So it becomes really important who buries who. And we have a couple of these legal speeches where there seems to have been like a fight over who gets to bury the body.

• 42:44Speaker 03

  And so, again, women, again, it's a thing and, and it's, yeah, it's so, it's so prominent in like Greek tragedy, um, but also you get a sense of how politically potent it is in tragedy, right? So obviously, the obvious example is like Antigone, it's her burying her brother is kind of this, this political act. Because it, it implies that she's kind of endorsing him and his campaign for the kingship. And similarly, Electra, she like goes to her dad's grave and she's really bothered that no one else goes to the dad's grave. Because it's all about his kind of, again, his status and legitimacy as king. And, and so those are all happening like on the mythic plane. But then in these legal speeches, we're like, oh, wow, you know, there actually were these disputes.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  And, and like, it, it mattered financially, which woman is burying the body?

• 43:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah. That's so interesting. So when it comes to like these, the, the legal cases and the speeches that you're reading, like, I mean, I know there are a handful of that become, I would say like meme level famous. You know, I'm thinking of, um, free me. Yeah. And like, and then I, I'm going to forget all the details, but I've been, I had been reading about Miera.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:57Liv Albert?

  But I've forgotten, I remember just being like, this sounds interesting. I need to go back and read the whole thing. And then.

• 44:03Speaker 03

  It's long. It's actually a surprise. It's fascinating. It's totally fascinating.

• 44:08Liv Albert?

  Did you, like, were, were any of those kinds of, um, I guess what I'm just asking is like, do you have more examples of like really interesting women from those court cases? Cause I think that would be so unique because we're getting it like through the voices of the men who were like arguing the cases, but like they're all about women and so often become like kind of mythologized in their own right.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 44:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 44:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and some of the, the myth stuff

• 44:37Speaker 03

  comes out as well in the speeches. There's this one speech where, um,

• 44:44Speaker 03

  yeah, so this, this woman, it's, it's actually this unbelievably complicated situation. And again, the, the trouble is you also don't, it's, it's really hard because a lot of everyone is trying to cover something up.

• 44:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah, of course. Yeah. These are all lawyers.

• 45:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and, and you've got to,

• 45:06Speaker 03

  yeah, it's really hard to be like, look, what, what, what do I think really happened here? And, and if I never know that, what can I get out of this speech anyway? You know, in terms of like what, what might be expected and so on. Um, so there is this one speech where, um, Oh gosh, this man allegedly marries this woman and then like has sex with her mom and they have a child. And anyway, at some point, someone's like, oh, what would we call this kind of baby? You know, maybe we'd call him. And then they list all these like mythical names to be like, this is so complicated and weird, like a Greek tragedy. Um, so, so that I guess that's

• 45:48Speaker 03

  in their heads. Um, it's, oh, yeah, it is. I mean, that's a weird one and not a particularly helpful example. I guess.

• 45:53Liv Albert?

  No, but I, I love it anyway. So don't get me wrong. I'm just like, okay, that's bizarre. I also like ancient gossip. That's fine, too. That's how women helped each other.

• 46:15Liv Albert?

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• 49:46Speaker 03

  So my favourite thing for ancient gossip is Solicias I, which is, so basically what's happened is this guy has, he's murdered someone, this guy has murdered someone, and he's like, "Oh, actually, it was fine that I murdered him, because when I killed him, he was in bed with my wife, and there's a specific exemption in the law that says it's fine to kill someone if you catch them in bed with your wife." And that is true, there was that exemption.

• 50:14Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 50:15Speaker 03

  In practice, like, for obvious reason, that wasn't the norm. And he's, and he's all like, "Oh, I didn't really kill this guy. In fact, it was the law who killed him, and like, I was just an agent of the law." Anyway, so he's doing that thing. But in the meantime, we get this picture of their family, and, because he's, he's really invested in being like, "We were a really good, upstanding family. I kept really good care of my wife, you know, it's not my fault that she was having sex with someone else." But then he's also got to be like, he's got to make the jurors think that, the, the people judging the case, he's got to make them think that he was stupid enough that this affair was going on under

• 51:00Speaker 03

  his nose. Anyway, we get this amazing picture of this woman and her relationships. And again, how much of it is true, how much of it is not, we don't know. But for me, one of the most interesting things is that she's friends with the guy's mum. So the husband is all like, "Oh yeah, she was having an affair with this man." And one of the, you know, the turning point for me was when I realised that she and this guy's mum had gone to the Thesmaphoria Festival together.

• 51:25Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 51:26Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh. And he's so, he's like, can you believe it? Can you believe it? This was like, like, the worst thing that she did. And it's kind of interesting, because there's this sort of implication that, right at the beginning, he's like, "Oh, all the trouble started when my mum died on me."

• 51:43Liv Albert?

  It's always a woman's fault.

• 51:45Speaker 03

  Right, it's her fault. She died. And that, he's like, "Well, you know, the reason that her dying was a problem was that they, this couple, sorry, my wife and this guy, met at her funeral." Okay, fine. But in fact, maybe it's that, like, the mother-in-law's job is to, like, keep an eye on the woman. And again, it's that thing about...

• 52:06Speaker 03

  You know, men are are are not spending their time with women. So like they're keeping an eye on their wives is mostly like delegated to their other female relatives. Anyway, so mum dies and now my wife is like, who knows what she's up to. Um. And she seems to have like got herself this alternative mother-in-law. She's like picked herself a mother-in-law. She's like, yeah, you know. This, and again, who knows, who knows. But I just find it fascinating that that that's. Yeah, that that relationship is kind of important enough for him to mention. And he mentions it because he wants to be like, look, this wasn't just some casual affair.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  Like, she was kind of half in this guy's family, half in my family. Whose kids are they? We don't know. Um, but there is this sense that. Yeah, the the. That behind some of these relationships are relationships with women that we just don't see so prominently. Um, and again, there's, yeah, and and there are several cases like that. There's this one where. Uh, it's this unbelievably tedious property dispute where like someone's. There's a river on someone's land, or like, it's not even a river, it's like a stream on someone's land. And it like flowed onto someone else's land and like their grain got wet and like now they're suing each other.

• 53:25Speaker 03

  But what's really interesting is that these two men are suing each other, but their mums are friends with each other. Um, and there's this this line about like, oh, you know, well, their their husbands used to be friends and then their husbands died and. But they were living like near to each other, so they became friends and they used to, again, they used to visit each other. Again, this thing like, what does it mean to be a friend of someone? You hang out at each other's houses. Um, and and then there's this bit where the flood happens and. One of the women invites her friend around and is like, oh, you know, all my stuff's flooded. And she like goes around, she's like, oh, look at all this flooding. And again. Like, that is what would happen if my house flooded. I'd like call my friend up and be like, oh, all my stuff's wet. Can you come and help? Or even just, can I just moan to you?

• 54:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah, exactly. I just want to complain. I have like half a friendship is like, please, just be here for me while I bitch about my life.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, and then what's really sad about it is that then. One of the sons is like tries to use that as evidence against Hassan. And so it's anyway, you've got this thing where the mums are friends. And the the sons are like at each other's throats through the law courts. Um, but again, this glimpse of. You know, women who have these kind of, you know, full, rich, social lives.

• 54:38Liv Albert?

  Um. Yeah. Oh, I'm obsessed with all of this.

• 54:43Speaker 03

  I love them so much.

• 54:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 54:45Speaker 03

  They're like my women. Um, one of the things, sorry, go on, go on.

• 54:49Liv Albert?

  No, no, I'm just rambling because I'm, I'm really just excited. So please, one of the things.

• 54:53Speaker 03

  One of the things that I decided quite early on. So again, with all these women, particularly the ones in the legal cases, because they're being talked about by men. The men are not using their names, right? There are one or two cases where they do, but it's like absolutely exceptional.

• 55:07Liv Albert?

  Um, their wives and mothers.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  Right, yeah. My wife, my mom, so and so's sister. Um, there's this one thing where someone refers to this guy as like, oh yeah. He's the man who's now married to the daughter of my opponent. And it's all, anyway. Um, but I was like, I can't be doing with this. I can't write a whole book about these women. If every time I mention them, I have to be like, oh, so and so's mom or so and so's wife. Particularly, you know, when particularly these women I was looking at where, you know, they're someone's wife and then they're no one's wife. And then there's someone else's wife and it may not even be paramount to them that they're the wife.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  You know, another relationship might be more important. And again, thinking back to Yuthilla, she doesn't describe herself as anyone's wife. She describes herself as Beatrice's friend. And I was like, I can't be doing with this. So I was like, right, they all had names, right? They obviously all had names and they would have referred to themselves by their names. We know from um, Aristophanes comedies that when women are talking about themselves, they use their own names. Women use their friends' names. Um, and I was like, right then, they're having names. So I took this amazing book called The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names. And it's just a list of all the names that happened. And I was like, right, I'm just gonna pick names for them. And, you know.

• 56:27Speaker 03

  On the one hand, like, the chances that these aren't, yeah, the chances that these actually were the real names are obviously tiny. Like, I'm not saying this was her name. I'm just saying, you know, she had a name.

• 56:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah, and she deserves to have one.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  Right, right, and, and, and.

• 56:44Liv Albert?

  That makes me so happy, just to, that makes me so happy.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  But there's, I mean, there's something genuinely misleading about just referring to a woman by certain relationships, because it can't ever give you the whole picture.

• 56:58Speaker 03

  And, and I think it also shows up that what, it's, in some ways, it's kind of more true insofar as it reflects the truth that was lost. She had a name, she used the name. And in some ways, it's also conspicuously not true, right? It's almost certain that it wasn't the name. And I think that maybe says something to how we do some of this history, right? The stuff that, yeah, the stuff that is true, but we can't get at it, but we can kind of signal that we know it's there. And then there's some space for imagination, you know, not just making stuff up out of nowhere, you know? I didn't make, I wasn't like, oh, you know, this is Bella and this is Susie.

• 57:40Speaker 03

  You know, I picked, you know, I picked names that, you know, were fifth century names or fourth century names that were used in Athens and, you know, whatever. But anyway, now I'm like, oh, these are my women. And I, so my housemates would be, well, they would take issue with my saying this. But I, I really loved doing the indexes for the book.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  My housemates would be like, oh, my gosh, Catherine, you were going absolutely crazy when you were doing those indexes. And yeah, I was. But one of the things I did was I was like, you know what? I'm gonna have an index of all the women. Here are all my women. Here's like, you know, let's say, you know, Melina, who we were talking about earlier. So it says like, Melina, you know, single mom, raises her children by the work of her hands, makes the seducation, she's on page, whatever. And I've got like, I think about a hundred and twenty five women, like, and people are like, oh, we don't know anything about women. We can just talk about women in general or like, oh, you know, and I'm like, no, no, no, we know all these people.

• 58:37Speaker 03

  And sometimes we know their real names, particularly the dedications. One of the women that I'd love to know more about is this woman who she makes a dedication in the sanctuary of the god Pan. Um, which is in this like cave and like interesting things going on there. And she's like, oh, this dedication was made by the beautiful Mika. And she's like, I'm really pretty. I just like kind of fascinating. Like she gives herself an adjective.

• 59:02Liv Albert?

  Good for you, girl.

• 59:02Speaker 03

  It's so cute. It's so lovely.

• 59:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah. No, I mean, like what you said about, you know, people describing the way we we can study women. Like, I think that's so common to just, I mean, from my side of it, you know, I this show started with me just telling myths with a kind of feminist. Then and then turned into something much bigger. But it's always been about just like my fascination with with women in the ancient world and in mythology specifically, but also with like how with how they've been interpreted over the last few hundred years and like what that has given us because people love to say stupid shit like like you, you know, well, the women, they just, that's what they did back then. Uh, that's just the way it was. So we can't, you know,

• 59:49Liv Albert?

  place any kind of criticism or or question it or or like, you know, like you're saying, like they had names. It's not wrong that you gave them names. They deserve names. And just because history didn't preserve their names because the men didn't find it relevant does not mean that they don't deserve names. It made me think of, because I always come back to the mythology side personally. But um, I've been thinking so much about Hesiod's catalog of women. Because the, I mean, I I think the idea of a catalog of women is very fun. I think Hesiod is like, well, he was fucking crazy. But um.

• 1:00:28Liv Albert?

  Like even the fragments that we have of it, of this like quote unquote catalog of women is literally just about whose mother they are or whose wife they are.

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:00:38Liv Albert?

  Right? And it's like, oh, okay. So even in this thing that is like ostensibly about the women, it's still not about the women.

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  Right, right, right.

• 1:00:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And so it's so important to, to do like what you did to, to give them names, to, to pick out what little stories or information we do have about women. Because it is, yeah, it's, it's true that we don't have much, but it's not because they didn't make much.

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:01:04Liv Albert?

  It's not because women didn't do it. It's because of countless things, but the primary one being the patriarchal power structure and how they decided that it wasn't worth preserving. Either that was in ancient Greece or in the 2000 plus years since, right? Yeah, there's generations of men who just decided our stories weren't worth preservation, but that doesn't mean they weren't there.

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, yeah. And I, yeah, I think that, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah. And the names are an example of that, right? Cause if, yeah, if it had been the women writing these sources, you know, because women were using women's names, we'd have the names, you know?

• 1:01:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  It's not, you know, it's, yeah, the, the catalog thing is, so the, I mean, the Athenians love lists. They just love them. Um, and, and one of the things that is really fun, and again, you know, and cause I, sorry, in the same way that you always want to bring it back to the myths, I, I always want to bring it back to the epigraphi, to the inscriptions.

• 1:01:59Liv Albert?

  Please.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  Cause I'm like, it's, it's like physical stuff.

• 1:02:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:02Speaker 03

  But you get these, um, I mean, yeah, so these big like, this is gonna sound unbelievably boring, but like, hang on, hang on in there.

• 1:02:10Liv Albert?

  It's not going to.

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  These big financial records of everything that the treasurers of the temple at Eleusis were spending. Okay, fine, great. Um, like, oh, you know, in this month, we spend this. Um, so it's basically a list of contractors, like we paid so and so whatever for bricks, fine. But there are women who appear in it. Um, and so we're like, oh, you know, we paid this woman called Thetily, um, maybe she's Thessalian. Um, we paid her X amount of money to make these little, um, kind of, uh,

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  Kind of sturdy waterproof caps for the construction workers to wear. And then there's this other thing where it's like, oh yeah, there's this woman we bought roofing materials from. Her name's Artemis and there's a woman we bought like reds. Like this, it's this red kind of stone that's used as a dye. And again, you know, these are women, like if you went to the temple at Eleusis, well, where's the roof from? Oh, well, it's this woman who like imported the roofing material and like, oh, you know, all that lovely red decoration. Where's that from? Oh, well, there's this woman called Soteris who like, you know, imported this stuff. But what is fascinating is that there's a, yeah.

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  Some of the scholars have kind of gone head over heels to be like, this couldn't possibly have been a woman.

• 1:03:29Liv Albert?

  Sure.

• 1:03:30Speaker 03

  And to the extent that they're like, oh, this couldn't be a woman called Artemis. It must really have been a man called Artemidas. That's not a Greek name. Or it must really have been a man, not, not a woman called Soteris, very, very common name at this time. But a man called Soteridas, again, like that is in fact a name, but not until centuries later. And I'm like, what, what if it was a woman? What if, you know?

• 1:03:55Liv Albert?

  Even from my, like, I know very, very little ancient Greek. I've never studied it formally, but I have been entrenched in this world for long enough to know that like the idas like name ending doesn't even sound like time period appropriate. And so Soteris, Soteris is like, I'm starting to think of the words now, but that's, that's a while and scholars. I mean, and I say this like 50 years ago and beyond, because I think it's vaguely better now.

• 1:04:23Speaker 03

  It is. No, it is better. Yeah.

• 1:04:24Liv Albert?

  It is. Yeah. I just, it's not good enough, which is why I say vaguely. And like, it's only been getting better in the last 20 to 30 years and like, it's been over 2000. So it's just thinking, you know, we're a little late in the game, but just this idea, like the amount of bending over backwards that people have done to like erase women in even just the last century is like unhinged. Like I've had, I mean, even on the mythology side, like the number of things I've encountered. Like written by scholarly men who completely bastardize the surviving sources, which are already inherently not friendly to women. Like the surviving mythological sources are not nice to women.

• 1:05:06Liv Albert?

  And somehow these modern men find ways of making those texts, those stories like 100 times more misogynist. And I'm just like, how do you, how do you do it? Like, how do you manage that in this? Like, I read this, there's this one very, very popular book of, of just generally a Greek myth retelling of, of everything. And this, this author manages to make the story of Pandora even more misogynist than Hesiod's, which is like, got to be truly like, how do you manage it? That man thought that women were like the worst thing to happen to men and you still managed to make that story, like inventing new details to make it, you know, more demonizing

• 1:05:51Liv Albert?

  to women. And I just think it's, I mean, it's so simultaneously like infuriating and fascinating how threatened they are by women to us to like erase us out of everything. Like, oh, she couldn't have imported building materials. She would have exploded.

• 1:06:07Speaker 03

  Right. It's just this, yeah, it's, and, and, and then you get this kind of cycle where, you know, as soon as you said, well, women couldn't do X, they couldn't do Y, then when you find evidence for women doing X or Y, you're like, well, it couldn't have been a woman then. And it just becomes very circular and, and then women can only do the things you expect them to do. And I mean, it's sad, isn't it? Cause it, it's such a waste of effort.

• 1:06:30Liv Albert?

  Yes. It's a waste of everyone's time and effort. Why?

• 1:06:35Speaker 03

  And it's funny, what you were saying earlier, this, this kind of, I mean, I sometimes see it as a kind of pessimism where people are like, oh, it's just too bad that we don't know anything. And I'm like, oh, well, actually there, there is more out there than, than you think, you know, if you, if you go hunting for it. And, and I think, yeah, I, I hope that's where the effort. Kind of can go.

• 1:06:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, there's certainly a lot of us doing it. I know, thankfully, from experience of how many people come on my show. But I, I do have to tell, I have to share an anecdote now because of what you said, but like, you know, once it's decided that a woman can't do a thing, then when they find evidence of it, then they have to backtrack. So a while back now, I had on Emily Hauser, who's become a friend and she wrote the new Mythica.

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:07:23Liv Albert?

  Yes. It's, I haven't fully read it yet, but I've talked to Emily enough to know it's amazing. But one of the stories she tells a lot. It will stick with me forever, which is that like, there was a, I think it was like a Mycenaean grave or somewhere like Bronze Age-ish. A grave of, of a found, they originally like they, I think that they originally decided it was a warrior. Yes. Because there was like a long blade in the grave. So naturally it had to be a man. Right. And then later, however much time passes and the DNA or the skeleton is sexed as a woman. And so they decided that that wasn't a blade. It was like a penknife.

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  Oh, unreal.

• 1:08:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Where it's like, okay. So, so once you can't, once you can no longer say that this was definitely the grave of a man, then you simultaneously can't have it be a woman's grave with a weapon. Like those two things, they just don't work. So it's like, well, in order to change one, you have to change the other. It's just like this cognitive dissonance that I, it's so, it's, it's so hard to learn about because you're like, this is crazy. Like, what do you mean? It doesn't make any sense. And that's the thing that drives me so wild about patriarchy generally is like, it doesn't benefit any of us and it doesn't make any sense.

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, absolutely. And, and, and again, there's like the effort of explaining it in the counterintuitive way. And, you know, some ways it is important to read things. You know, to be open to unexpected possibilities, right?

• 1:08:56Liv Albert?

  Totally.

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  To read things in a different way, but, but I mean, when you have to work that hard and like when you were so sure that anyway, yeah.

• 1:09:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Like, of course, there are instances where things do get reevaluated in legitimate ways.

• 1:09:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's good. And that's what we do as historians, but

• 1:09:10Liv Albert?

  Absolutely.

• 1:09:10Speaker 03

  It's the working really hard to be like, well, it, it just couldn't be like this because of my ideas.

• 1:09:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:16Speaker 03

  About, and of course, you know, we're, we're all in danger of falling into that trap of, you know, trying to bring our own ideas and, and what we want to see and, and whatever. But it is, yeah, it's frustrating. I, yeah, one of my, one, one of my women, my women, uh, is this, she's a, she's described really interestingly as a midwife and doctor. And, and the word doctor is used, like just normal doctor, like not a like lady doctor or just, just a doctor, doctor.

• 1:09:41Liv Albert?

  What did they, that's amazing first, but now I have a question about the Greek. What did they, what did, did they have a word for doctor in that way? Cause I always feel like they, it was like either, anyway, sorry, now.

• 1:09:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, it's iatros, as in like

• 1:09:52Liv Albert?

  Oh, of course.

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  Um, pediatric medicine or like, um, yeah. Um, anyway, so she's a, a, uh, an iatros, um, as well as a, as well as a midwife. Um, so there's this lovely, um, gravestone for her, which again was set up by a woman, seems to have been a client of hers. Um, a woman called Antiphila, and she's like, oh, she, it's, it's, it's this really interesting kind of double meaning. She's like, oh, she didn't cause anyone any pain. And now that she's dead, everyone misses her. And again, the, the thing about pain is, it's both like, oh, she never made anyone upset, but it's also like, she was a good doctor, like she didn't hurt me.

• 1:10:31Speaker 03

  Um, and, um, and I think particularly, you know, if she was a midwife and doctor, maybe she's like a gynecologist, I think probably. Uh, and what's really fun is on the tombstone, it shows these two women holding hands, which is what you often get on tombstones. And then these four children of different ages. And usually you'd be like, oh, that's a mom and her kids. But in this context, these are probably the children that she's delivered and then looked after. So it's like, you know, a professional success story.

• 1:10:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  Um, and, and I think it's really moving that her, her female client is like, oh, you know, she, yeah, she didn't, didn't cause anyone pain and everyone misses her. And like, here are probably my children who she raised and their life thanks to her. And I think that's wonderful. But there's this other, um, monument. Which says, well, we now can see, if you look properly at the top, it's got Phanesstrati, this woman's name at the top. And then again, there's this poem about how she healed this woman, or well, Asclepius, the healing god, healed this woman through Phanesstrati. So yeah, this idea of, you know, the gods, the healing gods working through this doctor. But up until really, really recently, people were like, oh, it says Phanesstratos at the top.

• 1:11:43Speaker 03

  It was a man.

• 1:11:44Liv Albert?

  Sure.

• 1:11:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. So. Yeah.

• 1:11:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah. No, I'm obsessed with that. I have another friend, Kristy Vogler, has a lot of work on like, ancient medicine and women in ancient medicine, but she usually works, I know, over in like Sicily. So now I'm like, okay, well, I'm gonna have to tell her all of that because that's the coolest thing I've ever heard. Because I know like the history of it is more often than not, you know, women are witches and men are doctors. Right. And so, I mean, I loved, I love to hear that we at least have some examples where they're like, no, no, she did the doctoring too. We don't have to give her like a totally different misogynist title.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. She's just, yeah, she's a doctor. Yeah.

• 1:12:22Liv Albert?

  But also having the evidence of like, I don't know, that, that one moves me. Like that one, any of these stories of these real women just fills my heart with so much joy. But like, that kind of acknowledgement of like, value and, and like, the work and just like, contribution to society and culture in such a way. And like, yeah, getting that, that like, acknowledgement, that recognition is so cool.

• 1:12:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think, I mean, this woman must have been an amazing doctor, right? The two different families were like, right, I'm gonna spend a lot of money putting up a monument for this woman. And it's really, it's, it is really sweet because the, the second one, the one where they initially had the name wrong. Basically, what seems to have happened is that this girl's mom has got sick and the girl has prayed for her mom to get better. And then as she understands it, Asclepius has healed her through the action of this doctor. And, and they've put up a statue of this doctor, seemingly, this, this woman who's a doctor. So again, that they're very aware of, of how her. Skills and and her contribution, you know, healed this woman. And then her dad has like paid for the monument.

• 1:13:32Speaker 03

  So then again, the sense that like, you know, the mom is the sorry, the daughter's really worried about her mom. Uh, and then they've got this doctor coming in and she's kind of helped. And and again, the, I mean, I don't know if you've ever read any of the Hippocratic stuff about gynecology, but like unbelievably grim, right?

• 1:13:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I've had it been told to me again by aforementioned Christie Vogler, who went through some stuff that broke my brain on this show.

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:13:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:56Speaker 03

  And so again, just the fact that you'd be like, what do I remember about that doctor? She never caused me pain, you know? I just think that's really beautiful. Um.

• 1:14:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I I've got some suspicions about how being a woman could aid in such a thing, given the Hippocratic corpus on women's medicine.

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Liv Albert?

  She was probably like, I know your uterus is probably not in your shoulder today. But I will, I will treat you accordingly. And then everyone's like, oh, my God, I just had like safe and happy medical care. And yeah, we're literally, it's just a woman being like, I don't think your organ migrated that far. It's not logical. I yeah, it's that's, that's so, I'm obsessed with all of this. Is that like also like time period wise, were you going pretty, I'm just trying to get a guess a sense of like, what kind of time period you're looking for all of it, but specifically that one?

• 1:14:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. So she's middle of the fourth century B.C.

• 1:14:48Liv Albert?

  She is. Wow.

• 1:14:49Speaker 03

  So yeah.

• 1:14:49Liv Albert?

  Did you go far after classical period at all?

• 1:14:52Speaker 03

  No. So I, yeah. So basically I I was like, I'll do the fifth and fourth century.

• 1:14:58Liv Albert?

  Those are my favorite centuries too. So I'm glad to hear.

• 1:15:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I, yeah, I mean, basically, I think. I mean, I find the earlier stuff absolutely fascinating and I'd love to spend more time with that. Um, and yeah, I mean, I think Emily Howes's work is amazing. Um, and and again,

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, there's, there's just so much there, which is really wonderful. But I wanted to, I wanted to be somewhere like I had, you know, actually a lot of evidence that I could kind of pretty securely date.

• 1:15:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:30Speaker 03

  And but also to be somewhere where people are like, oh, there's just no evidence. It's just too bad.

• 1:15:34Liv Albert?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:15:35Speaker 03

  Like, once you get later.

• 1:15:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:37Speaker 03

  You get, you know, women become much more prominent in the historical record in many ways. Um, in Athens, I think they actually are very prominent, but people tend, and obviously not everyone, and it is getting a lot better, but people tend to assume there's nothing there. Um, or they talk a lot, and I think the tragedies are amazing. And I think the tragedies do tell us in, in interesting, kind of weird, indirect ways about women's lives and the kinds of expectations that there were of them. And, and, and obviously those, yeah, they shape cultural expectations and so on. Um, but it was really nice to be able to be like, yeah, but also I have these, these real women.

• 1:16:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:15Liv Albert?

  It makes such a difference. And I think, I mean, working within that time period in Athens too, I, I mean, every, everything you just said, but, and also from, from like my perspective as just vaguely on the outside of it, like, I want that more out of that time period in Athens than most other time periods, because I also think that that is the time period and that is the region that solidified like all of our modern ideas about like quote unquote ancient women, right?

• 1:16:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:16:44Liv Albert?

  That is what formed it in this way where like, we know that women were treated quite differently elsewhere, but most of our records are from Athens. And so everyone like made all of these determinations about women in Athens and then, and then use that to determine like women of all of ancient Greece. And, and it's, I feel like it's just caused so much of this modern idea of we don't have sources for ancient women or women didn't do things, right? Like Athens is, and that time period of Athens is like the kind of like heart of that issue. So it's, yeah, a perfect, I think, period to be able to, to find these, this evidence of real women.

• 1:17:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:16Liv Albert?

  More.

• 1:17:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I, I, well, I, I obviously, I hope you're right, but, but, but I think, yeah, no, I think, and again, there's this, um.

• 1:17:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, the I, yeah, the people, people take that as, as, you know, the classical. Um, but also that, you know, that becomes such an influential cultural touchstone. You know, both for our ideas about women, but also for our ideas about like society and democracy and whatever. And so to be able to write the women back in and to be like, okay, yeah, you know, there are all these kind of, you know, you've got a society where, you know, there's, there's, there's all this stuff going on and, you know, but, but women are also kind of involved in it. And that they're shaping what's going on, they're shaping how the social structure works. They're determining who's in and who's out in their own kind of different way.

• 1:18:11Speaker 03

  Um, and just like, again, yeah, you know, they're putting the roofs on the temples. Um, the, you were saying earlier about weaving and the way that, you know, unfortunately, most of it just, you know, biodegrades. Um, but I mean, you know, Athens massive fleet with which it dominated the Mediterranean for ages. I mean, who made the sails?

• 1:18:33Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:33Speaker 03

  Women, you know, in the Piraeus weaving, um.

• 1:18:37Liv Albert?

  Who made the clothes that every single person would have been wearing? I feel like that's a thing nobody ever talks about. We talk all about what they wore. Who made it?

• 1:18:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:45Liv Albert?

  Like, and why is it that, that that was so, like such a minor field for so long? Like, again, better now.

• 1:18:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:54Liv Albert?

  But like, on this whole time period up until the last few decades.

• 1:19:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:01Liv Albert?

  Where the world is so obsessed with ancient Greece and wanted to talk all about all of the things they did, all of these great things. And all these men with all of their flowing fabrics and all of this. And it's like, who made those?

• 1:19:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:14Liv Albert?

  Like, yeah, it's just, it's, it's such like, I don't know. Yeah. It, women generally and their contributions. And then how it's seen, it's like, again, so fascinating and so infuriating and so just like, yeah, I don't know, heart ripping.

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  And and there's again, there's so much more to be done because we do amazingly. We have these records of so at this sanctuary of Artemis in Attica, somewhere called Brauron.

• 1:19:39Liv Albert?

  I want to know all about it. I am somewhat familiar.

• 1:19:43Speaker 03

  Great, great, great. So so women dedicate clothes there. Um, and again, because the Athenians love lists and they love knowing exactly what's in the temple and exactly how much it's worth. They make these unimaginably detailed lists about all the clothes that are there. So they'll be like, oh, you know, there was this, you know, tunic that had like a stripy purple border. Or, oh, there was this thing and it was in like this kind of color that was a bit like a frog.

• 1:20:08Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  It's amazing. It's completely amazing. Um, and they're like, oh, there's this, you know, piece of fabric and it was really expensive. Or there's this piece of fabric and it's like really worn out. Um, and you get, you know, again, impressions about things like fashion. So like Persian sleeves come in for a while. Um, and, um, yeah, and and and again, this sense that, you know, for women, they'd have gone to these sanctuaries. A lot of this stuff was displayed. They had some, some of them, they're like, oh, yeah. And this dress is in a display case or, you know, this dress, we've put it on the statue. So women are going there and we also think that they're labeled with the names of the women who made and dedicated them. And they'd be like, oh, wow, look at that dress. That's really gorgeous. You know, look at that, look at that.

• 1:20:54Speaker 03

  Um, border, you know, it looks like a fortress. That's one of the actions they use, you know, border like a fortress. Um, and oh, so and so made that, oh, amazing. Oh, I must learn to do that. You know, and again, so, you know, we think a lot about like men's competition and like politicians trying to one up each other. And again, there's possibly this whole sphere where women are like, oh, yeah, well, that woman, she's she's the best at doing X, Y and Z. But have you seen her designs on X, Y and Z? Um, and also, I mean, some of the descriptions of the designs are amazing. There's one where this woman has woven this thing of, um, someone pouring a libation to Dionysus. Um, again, like, just, I mean, the skill to do that. I mean, just incredible.

• 1:21:39Liv Albert?

  Um, yeah.

• 1:21:41Speaker 03

  And and we get it all in all this detail.

• 1:21:44Liv Albert?

  That makes me so happy. I weaving has become my big obsession lately just because I think, I mean, it's it's this like very visceral thing you can like latch on to of this with very important contribution that women made, but also because all I want to know is like what what they were weaving. I so I'm thrilled to know about that. I always think about, you know, the Ovid's Arachne and and I want to know like what level of reality that could have been based in, you know, and stuff like that where it's like, what detail were we getting, you know? Oh, I just, yeah, that's so exciting. I've Brawn is a big, I would like everyone to talk to me about it at all times. I have another friend who's working on on the lot over there and eventually she'll come on the show.

• 1:22:25Speaker 03

  Amazing. Oh, yeah. No, I'm excited.

• 1:22:27Liv Albert?

  But yeah, it's, it sounds like a fascinating, the fabrics. Sorry, now I'm obsessed.

• 1:22:50Speaker 04

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• 1:22:56Speaker 05

  Love the crown molding.

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  Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.

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  Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet?

• 1:23:05Speaker 04

  No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.

• 1:23:08Speaker 05

  No FiOS? Yeah, no, thank you.

• 1:23:12Speaker 04

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• 1:24:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think, again, just as, you know, women spent, these things were unbelievably time consuming to me.

• 1:25:03Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 1:25:04Speaker 03

  And women would have spent so much of their lives doing it. And again, it would have been, I mean, you know, I don't want to romanticize it, it would have been like backbreaking and they'd have been like, you know, achy and their fingers would have gone funny. And but it was also sociable. There's this, there's this amazing pot, it's in New York. I went to see it for my 30th birthday because I love this pot so much.

• 1:25:31Liv Albert?

  Sounds like something I would do.

• 1:25:32Speaker 03

  It's, it's, it's amazing. And it shows all, it shows kind of various stages of textile production.

• 1:25:39Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah, is it the one?

• 1:25:40Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah, it's that one.

• 1:25:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm like putting my arms up on my podcast. Yeah, no, but yeah.

• 1:25:46Speaker 03

  The one where they're, yeah, so there's the one where they're, they're doing the, the weaving on the loom, but they're also like doing the spinning and they're also weighing out the wool so that you've got the right amount of each color and whatever.

• 1:25:57Liv Albert?

  I stared at that photo or photos of that pot a lot lately.

• 1:26:01Speaker 03

  So what I found really shocking, I went to New York and I was like, obviously this is the coolest pot in the whole of the gallery. I was expecting it to be like the centerpiece in the room and it wasn't. And also it's tiny. I'd imagined it as huge, but it's so small. Um, anyway, I love it. I'm obsessed with it. Um, but they're all working in pairs or threes, right? It's not something you do on your own. Um, and it's this very kind of sociable thing. And again, it's something that, and this is something that there's this, um, archaeologist Lynn Foxall, who's done loads of work on this, but it's something that you'd have learnt at home. And when you were very, very little, uh, you'd have started, your mum would give you like a sheep, piece of like, you know, sheep wool that had like little bits of shit in it. And you'd like pick out, pick out the sheep poo, um, and like make it all clean.

• 1:26:46Speaker 03

  And then when you get a bit older, you learn how to like comb the wool and make it straight. And when you get a bit older, you learn how to like spin it. And then ultimately you move on finally to weaving, you know, not least when you're big enough to operate the loom and, and strong enough, because it would have been, you know, hard. Um. But the thing I found unbelievably moving is they've found these, um, loom weights, which are the things that you hang on the bottom of the loom so that you get the tension right.

• 1:27:13Liv Albert?

  One of the only things that survives.

• 1:27:14Speaker 03

  The only things that survive, right?

• 1:27:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:16Speaker 03

  Um, and some women stamp them. Um, sometimes they've got like a little seal that's got a picture on it and they stamp them. Or they just get like their hair clip or their hairpin and they stamp them. And I like, this one's mine. Um, because, you know, again, it's this incredible kind of precision thing. And I've read, I've read scholars who are like, oh yeah, weaving is like, you know, this kind of undifferentiated, non-skilled thing. And I'm like, oh my god. Um, this, and, and, and

• 1:27:42Liv Albert?

  Absolutely.

• 1:27:43Speaker 03

  Again, you'd see why you'd, you'd get used to, it's like, if you're used to typing on a laptop and then your laptop breaks and you have to borrow someone else's and it feels really weird. And it would have been like that so much. It's really important that you've got your loom weights. But the thing that makes me want to cry is that they have found some loom weights with the same stamps at different sites. And the hypothesis is that like mothers would give their daughters matching loom weights and then the daughters go off to their new families. But they've got that thing that reminds them of their mum and how they learned to weave. With her or reminds them of their sisters. Um, yeah, it kills me every time. And and they found those in Athens as well.

• 1:28:25Speaker 03

  Some amazing women back in the nineteen fifty s kind of catalogued all these stamps. And again, they're really interesting. And the two that I find most interesting, I think. So there are some which we think are stamps of Penelope. And just coming back to what you said about, you know, what do women think about these myths? But again, is there something there where they're like, oh, yeah, I'm a bit like Penelope. And I think of the woman I spoke about earlier, I call her Diagneti. The one where her husband's away and she doesn't know whether he's dead or not. You know, again, like Penelope is, you know, if you know the story, which people would have known. You know, she's a kind of touchstone for you. She's a woman whose husband went away to war and you just don't know whether he's dead or not.

• 1:29:05Speaker 03

  And and so maybe, maybe, you know, maybe she resonated with them. Or maybe it's just the weaving, right? Maybe you're like, you know, I want this woman who's really famous for weaving. And I'll I'll have her stamp on my loom weights. Um, but you also get stamps of Athena. Quite often. And again, you kind of expect that in Athens. They love Athena. They're really proud of her.

• 1:29:24Liv Albert?

  But she's also goddess of weaving.

• 1:29:25Speaker 03

  But right, she's goddess of weaving. And I like to imagine that these women. A bit like the woman Melina I spoke about earlier, who was the single mom and she. You know, she'd made this dedication to Athena because she felt that Athena had like favoured her work. Again, you know, this is a religious society where you ask the gods to help you with something in that kind of. In whatever their kind of sphere of influence is. And yeah, I can imagine that women were like, oh, Athena, can you help me with my weaving? And there's that kind of stamping in, you know, that she's, yeah, she's kind of involved in the process. And again, it's all this stuff about. You know, it is very easy to be like, well, we just don't know what was inside women's heads. And like, obviously, in some ways, we don't. But like, we shouldn't give up.

• 1:30:10Speaker 03

  And like, we can make some good informed guesses.

• 1:30:16Speaker 03

  Right, they're still people. And, you know. You know, choosing to decorate your own loom weights, that that's a real expression of like personality, right? It's like, you know, putting stickers on your laptop, which people do and they they put stickers on to show, you know, often people have like political slogans or like, you know, things about what country they're from, like little flags or whatever. Have you, are you gonna show me your laptop?

• 1:30:40Liv Albert?

  I'm just gonna, no, just take a sip from my water bottle that has a orca eat the rich on it.

• 1:30:46Speaker 03

  Incredible.

• 1:30:47Liv Albert?

  Not a political statement, no.

• 1:30:48Speaker 03

  Right, so it's it's Canadian, it's political, so you've both got your like, yeah, that's, and again, Athena, arguably the same thing, you know, this is my homeland, you know, arguably it is a political statement, you know, I belong to Athena, you know, I belong to Athens, that's a statement of political allegiance, who knows? Um, but I think, yeah, and again, you you get this sense of personality and it can be so easy to talk about women in the ancient world as,

• 1:31:14Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, even when we're talking about, yeah, I think personality is something that I just find, I mean, is there any way we can get at that? And and that is, or or preference, you know, again, this article that I, that when I first was reading about these stamps, it was like, oh, well, why, you know, why do some women um stamp them in this way? And why do some of them stamp them in that way? And at one point, it was like, well, maybe, and and, you know, the article says this, you know, maybe they just liked this style and didn't like that style. You know, these are real people who had likes and dislikes, and sometimes we can see them. Um, and that's just so exciting, I think.

• 1:31:48Liv Albert?

  Well, um, to to bring it back to the Penelope, because I think that's such an interesting, the loom weight and the Penelope of it all is so interesting, because, I mean, and and a great example of of personality and and how these things can mean so many different things, because like, you know, as you said, it it could very easily be this kind of like ode to a famous weaver whose husband was away, you know, and and sort of her strength throughout that. And then simultaneously, my read on Penelope and her weaving is how much it was an act of rebellion and how much it was an act of self-preservation, you know, like separating the

• 1:32:28Liv Albert?

  Missing your husband of it all and emphasizing the this is the way she prevents herself or keeps herself safe from all these predatory men, right? Like, that's what she did to stay safe from them. So it's like, even a name as simple as Penelope on a loom weight could hold so many different meanings for an individual.

• 1:32:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. For different people and different people will have resonated with different aspects of her story.

• 1:32:53Liv Albert?

  Exactly. Like, two Penelopes could have such different ideas.

• 1:32:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I always think, I mean, yeah, I, I always think it's this kind of effort to try to stop time, right? Or to try to control the narrative, to try to be like, okay, you know, Homer, you're marching on with this tale and I'm, I'm trying to stop it, you know, and to live the same day again and again and again, you know, just to, to kind of store.

• 1:33:20Liv Albert?

  Groundhog Day, but

• 1:33:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:22Liv Albert?

  With weaving. That's a very specific age group reference that I realize not everyone gets anymore. It's a movie.

• 1:33:28Speaker 03

  I, I know it's, yeah, it's, I, I've, I've, I've never seen it. I just know what it means. And I, I, yeah.

• 1:33:34Liv Albert?

  You get the reference at least. I have recently, I, this came up with somebody once and they just like, fully didn't get it. It was just like, that's a random holiday. It's like, okay, no, no, sorry. It's a, there's a very specific, like, early 90s movie, late 80s? Jesus. Anyway, doesn't matter. But that is what, that's what you're implying. But it's like, yeah, like, living the same day, one after, that's just, I don't know.

• 1:33:56Speaker 03

  But in an attempt to like, stop

• 1:33:58Liv Albert?

  Stop time.

• 1:33:59Speaker 03

  As you say, to keep her, to keep her safe or to prevent her having to make a decision she doesn't want to make. I always see it as like a, a bit of a battle with the author. I see that as

• 1:34:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:10Speaker 03

  Helen and the Iliad as well. There's like, you know, he's telling his story about the war of the Greeks and Trojans. And she's like, and I'm telling my story. And you're telling it through this poem and I'm telling it through this text.

• 1:34:22Liv Albert?

  Oh, yes. I'm, I just, I'm really good thinking about and talk about this stuff, like, literally forever. See how we're already at an hour and 20?

• 1:34:31Liv Albert?

  It's not hard. No, it's, I just, yeah, it, it, like, I'm so thrilled that so many people are doing this work on real women because Like, I mean, it matters in so many objective ways, but also it just feels so good to be able to talk about these real women, you know, as these people outside of wives and mothers. And if they want to be seen as mothers and wives, that's great, too, but but without this assumption that that they're not so much people as they are just like characters.

• 1:35:05Speaker 03

  Right, yeah, yeah. And again, yeah, I mean, you know, lots of, as I say, you know, lots of them will have been wives, you know, not their whole adult lives.

• 1:35:14Speaker 03

  And, you know, lots of them will have been mothers, but but they were also other things as well. And and they didn't necessarily see themselves primarily in all contexts as mothers, you know, yeah, be, yeah, they, yeah, they were people.

• 1:35:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah, exactly. That's the thing, like so much of learning this stuff is like, just being like, okay, but it's it's just that they were people too. Like, I use this argument all the time because I I'm obsessed with Euripides's work specifically because he wrote women as people and, you know, and we're we're talking about Aristophanes before, and I think, you know, in the those more for Ariad's as I, it's so interesting how how Euripides is is, you know, turned into this villain and all the examples are like, oh, he wrote these like terrible women doing terrible things. And I just read that and I'm like, he wrote women as people, women as people in the same way that men are people and that they are good people and sometimes they are bad people, but they are people.

• 1:36:10Liv Albert?

  And it's it's just so interesting to me that even back then, the men saw that as like an insult to women. And I think I'm so curious how the women might have seen it, but I just think it's a good reminder that just like, oh, women have always just been people too. And it's weird. We have to keep saying this.

• 1:36:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, yeah, it's a fun one because it, you know, the premise of the play is based on the fact that women, well, they're like readers of tragedy, right? That that, well, you know, that that kind of audiences of tragedy, you know, even if they're not in the theater, they, you know, women as they're portrayed in in the Aristophanes play, you know, have takes on on on these tragedies and and have views about.

• 1:36:58Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, about what they think of the characters and what they're doing. And also about the ways that the portrayal shaped their own lives.

• 1:37:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:05Speaker 03

  It's a, it's a really fun play. I love it. Um, yeah.

• 1:37:09Liv Albert?

  I, I have a weird, I, I love that play, but I also

• 1:37:12Speaker 03

  Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:13Liv Albert?

  don't like Aristophanes.

• 1:37:15Speaker 03

  I, yeah, so I say that, I feel that about all of them, like, on the one hand, Aristophanes is like a horrendous misogynist. I also, I, I should put my cards on the table. I love Aristophanes. And that's

• 1:37:23Liv Albert?

  No, that's fair, you can.

• 1:37:25Speaker 03

  He's a, he is a genuinely amazing source for women. And also some of his plays in parts are actually quite funny.

• 1:37:31Liv Albert?

  They are. I just, okay, so I'm just curious, because I, I've read, I mean, I've, I've covered most, not, I haven't actually covered the, um, the other one you mentioned, the

• 1:37:44Speaker 03

  Oh, the Assemblywomen one?

• 1:37:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, and I was

• 1:37:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know, yeah.

• 1:37:47Liv Albert?

  Greek name versus the English, but I haven't actually covered that one, but you know, I've, I've covered Lyssistrata and, and Thesmophoriasisai and, and Frogs. Um, and, like, I think, I mean, I, it, yeah, subjectively, like, it, it is good, his work is like a good reference for ancient women, but do you, I just often wonder, like, how much, because it's also so obvious that, like, I mean, he's, he's writing comedy, so I just, I often feel like he's also, like, satirizing women

• 1:38:15Speaker 03

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:38:15Liv Albert?

  where I wonder how real it could have been.

• 1:38:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I mean, this is obviously a question I've done a lot of grappling with when I've been using him as a source. And I guess just thinking about the ones you mention, so in Frogs, you know, there's the bit where, um, they go to the pub in hell, um, and they're like, and then these two women who run the pub are like, oh, Dionysus came and like, he ate loads of food, drank loads of drink and didn't pay. I'm really annoyed. And then they're like, I'm gonna take him to court. And, and we get loads of stuff from this, because obviously it's a joke, right? You know, I mean, you know, they're in a pub in hell, like, there's, there's just no way that it's not

• 1:38:55Liv Albert?

  Taking a god to court.

• 1:38:56Speaker 03

  Right, exactly, exactly. But we do get, just, so the, the, again, it's these throwaway lines, the women both talk about, actually, this is, sorry, I've got to tell the story. I am not going to use the person's name. I, I gave a lecture on this, um, and, um, Ha, how do I tell the story? Okay, so the, the women, one of the things they do is they call their legal representatives. Uh, and the term they use for their legal representative makes clear that they're immigrants. Cause immigrants had to have a kind of sponsor, basically, who could, you know, manage legal matters and, and whatever.

• 1:39:37Speaker 03

  Um, and the word for this, it's a totally normal, neutral Athenian word. It just means someone who stands in front of someone, stands for someone. The word is prostatis, which on paper is written prostates, right?

• 1:39:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:52Speaker 03

  And I, I was giving this lecture and this student was like, oh, um, I'll read, you know, I was like, fantastic. Thank you.

• 1:39:59Liv Albert?

  Oh, no.

• 1:40:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. And she was like, and, and so she's reading and I was so grateful to the student and she's, if she's listening to this, which I'm sure she's not, she's a fantastic student and her work is brilliant. Um, and she handled this so professionally, but she was reading it and she was like, oh, let me go and call my prostates. And I was like, great, thank you so much for reading that. And, and we kept going and then, but obviously as I was like, oh, and the fact that the women call their prostatis. And I saw her face and she was like, oh no, oh no, what have I done? But we all dealt with it very professionally. It was fine. Anyway, sorry.

• 1:40:30Liv Albert?

  That's the fun of ancient Greek. No, I mean, that is the fun of ancient Greek.

• 1:40:35Speaker 03

  Um, but the fact that the, they, yeah, it's these two women and they both have different, um, sponsors. Um, which must mean that they're both immigrants and they're not related. Um, and so the implication is if you're wanting to make like a realistic pub, and obviously in some ways it's not realistic, Kunsen hell and Dino is as a guest. But, you know, it's perfectly reasonable that the Athenians could be like, yeah, two women run a pub. They're both immigrants. That's, that's, that's the thing that we, you know, when Aristophanes wants to be like, this is a pub. What he does is he's like, oh yeah, and the landladies are, well, I mean, landladies is the wrong word, but anyway, the, the staff. Um, are, are, are two immigrant women and

• 1:41:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:19Speaker 03

  Again, so yeah, like bits and pieces like that. Um.

• 1:41:22Liv Albert?

  I think I need to have more conversations like that because I love that. That's cause I can. See how you take that as like, then you get this evidence of reality. And I think that that's because for me, I'm always just reading it more as the play.

• 1:41:35Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:41:36Liv Albert?

  Right. And it's so often it's like, you're just kind of wild guy. I don't know. And I just tragedy has always been my thing. Anyway, like specifically Euripides and tragedy. So I'm like, I'm completely biased. It's fine. But so I, but I'd love hearing it in that way because that to me is like what I want to learn out of.

• 1:41:51Speaker 03

  Right. And but I mean, obviously, like, that's not, it, you know, it's a pretty weird way to go about reading. Like, oh, you know, what's the most interesting thing about the frogs? Oh, it's these two women who run the pub and like their particular legal things. Obviously, it's not. I think frogs is a fantastic play and it's interesting. And yeah, the Thesmo, the, so the other thing that I love about the Thesmaphorius is, so again, the scene where there's the man who's come to the, so he's, yeah, he's Euripides, like father in law or brother in law or whatever.

• 1:42:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:21Speaker 03

  And he's dressed up as a woman and they're like, right, okay, there's an intruder at the festival. We've got to find her or him. And then the kind of conversation that follows, again, it implies that all the women would know all the other women, or at least most of the women would know most of the other women. That in itself is interesting. The fact that the women are able to be like, who should be here and who shouldn't. And again, obviously, in reality, probably we didn't have poets in laws dressing up as women to find out what women are saying about his plays. But, you know, again, it does imply a picture where women are able to police who does and doesn't come to their festivals.

• 1:43:07Speaker 03

  And there's this amazing, it's my absolute, maybe it's my favorite line in the whole play. Someone, they're asking him, they're trying to, he's like, oh, yeah, I was at the festival last year. We did all the things that we usually do. And of course, he doesn't know what they do because it's a big secret. And one of the like ID questions they ask him, it's like, if, you know, when you call your bank, like, oh, what's your mother's maiden name? They're like, Who was your tent buddy last year? Who did you share a tent with? Which woman did you share a tent with? And again, like, it's the only time we ever see this word, I think. But again, this, there's this like moment where you're like, oh, yeah, it's a three day festival. Women camp out, they share tents.

• 1:43:49Speaker 03

  And that's an important relationship to them. It means something to be like, oh, Liv, you know, who is your tent buddy? Like, I don't know, the Glastonbury Festival or whatever. Like, it's about what kind of relationship you have. And, you know, do women choose their tent buddies? Do they? Are they, is it always like, oh, I always go with my mother in law? Or can they be like, oh, actually, I go with my sister. Cause you know, she's married to someone else now, but like, we always get to spend these three days together. But again, this idea that there's this particular kind of friendship that is born from sharing a tent together, which unbelievably intimate. I personally hate camping. But, you know,

• 1:44:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I was holding myself back from the joke.

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  Right, right. Sorry. Yeah.

• 1:44:30Liv Albert?

  No tents for me.

• 1:44:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I, yeah, I kind of think, yeah, there's something. So one of my great sadnesses is Aristophanes wrote a play called Women Choosing Tent Sites. And we've lost it. It's gone.

• 1:44:46Liv Albert?

  Well, that's, that's a delight.

• 1:44:48Speaker 03

  Can you imagine? I would have killed to see that. And I said, we've got like stacks and stacks of like philosophers that I'm not particularly interested in.

• 1:44:56Liv Albert?

  And so much Menander.

• 1:44:58Speaker 03

  Oh, I love Menander.

• 1:45:00Liv Albert?

  No, and there's nothing wrong with that. I just mean with the volume of Menander has, of Menander that we have as compared to the others, that's just the discipline.

• 1:45:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, it would have been nice to have women choosing tent sites.

• 1:45:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah, there's a handful of Euripides ones where we know the title enough for me to know, like, like the one, The Daughters of Phorkos. There's a play and I'm like, so either, I mean, ostensibly, it's probably about, heavily about Medusa and the Gorgons, but then also features the,

• 1:45:29Liv Albert?

  The gray eye.

• 1:45:30Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 1:45:31Liv Albert?

  Characters and they're like swans or something. And it's like all of these different weird things where you're like, I would like to read that.

• 1:45:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:37Liv Albert?

  Please.

• 1:45:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I think, yeah, I think someone's just got to be writing them somehow now. Um, yeah, I, there's this woman called Lindsay Kooh, who's this amazing scholar of, of specifically a fragmentary Greek tragedy. And she's done this big kind of list of, um, oh, it's a lot more than a list. It's a kind of analysis and discussion, but of all the fragmentary tragedies that probably feature or even are largely about sisters. And I am loads of them, absolutely loads.

• 1:46:03Liv Albert?

  Taking notes.

• 1:46:06Liv Albert?

  Her name's Lindsay.

• 1:46:07Speaker 03

  Kooh, K O O.

• 1:46:09Liv Albert?

  Okay, thank you.

• 1:46:11Speaker 03

  She's at Bristol. She's amazing.

• 1:46:12Liv Albert?

  Now I'm like, okay, I'm gonna make my connections. Um, that's fascinating. I, okay, I, I just want to learn about all of this. I do think we could probably continue to talk forever. But again, we have already had an hour and a half. Is there, do you have any weird, we like briefly touched on gossip? And I wanted to kind of talk about it more because I love the idea that gossip is just the thing that women invented to, um, protect themselves and like share stories and things. But I'm curious if you have any like fun anecdotes that I might get out of you before I let you go.

• 1:46:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a good one. Um, let me see, fun anecdotes, fun gossip. I guess the tricky thing is

• 1:46:54Speaker 03

  getting at women's gossip and women's conversations is really hard because I, all the things that I want to be like, oh, here's this scandalous story. Our stories that like men are men telling. Um, I guess one thing that I think is not quite gossip, but it's like fun is, you know,

• 1:47:13Speaker 03

  again, would you believe it? It's another description, but this one, it's a bit of a pot and seemingly this woman has like carved onto the pot. Melis, so there's probably a woman's name. Again, there's been lots of argument like, is it, isn't it? But like, the majority of evidence is like, it's a, it's probably a woman's name. Melis thinks Alcayus is hot. Um, so it's this like, yeah, this guy, he's really, he's really cute. And she's like scratched it in the way you might like graffiti on a desk at school.

• 1:47:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:39Speaker 03

  Which I think is, yeah, I, so I love that. So that to me has a kind of gossipy sense to it. Um. Yeah. What else? What is? Yeah.

• 1:47:50Liv Albert?

  Anything like that too is just so nice, right? Because that feels so real again. Like, yeah, it's like doodling someone's name in your notebook, right?

• 1:47:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. There's this interesting bit right at the beginning of Lycestrata where um Lycestrata, and again, the word she uses for her friends is like, it's like a specific word for neighbor to be like, she lives in my district of town. So again, the sense that like, women have these relationships that we don't otherwise really see the words for. Oh, she's my tent buddy. Oh, she's my like neighborhood friend.

• 1:48:19Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 1:48:20Speaker 03

  But anyway, this woman who seems to be a bit older than her um is like, oh, you know, why are you frowning? Oh, you shouldn't frown like that. You know, it doesn't suit you. It's a bit like, oh, you know, if you frown like that, you'll get wrinkles. And again, it's this kind of, there's this kind of affectionate playfulness about it. She calls her like babe or baby. Um, and and so this, yeah, this sense that, you know, women speak in this affectionate way. One of the things I read for this book was this article bizarrely, it was an article about Japanese soap operas and about the way that gender is kind of done in these soap operas.

• 1:48:59Speaker 03

  And basically, the argument was like, when men are writing women, they kind of pick up stereotypical features of women's speech, sometimes without really realizing it, and then kind of exaggerate it. And that's how they code for like, this is a woman speaking.

• 1:49:15Speaker 03

  But again, this sense that when women are talking to each other, it's this kind of affectionate, friendly, they're using pet names.

• 1:49:23Speaker 03

  You know, they they say nice things about each other's appearance. And again, that, again, it just feels, yeah, it feels very like real.

• 1:49:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Normal, like the same as now. That's what I love most is like the these, these realizations or recognitions that they were people just like us and only so many things change. And how cool is that?

• 1:49:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:49Liv Albert?

  No, it's, yeah, well, I mean, again, I could keep you um forever, but I am cognizant of the time. So, I mean, is there anything else that you you wanted to talk about at all that we haven't gotten to? Or, I don't know, I'm just, I'm not trying to keep you.

• 1:50:05Speaker 03

  I feel like we've covered a lot and and I feel like, yeah.

• 1:50:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:12Liv Albert?

  Certainly. I've been, this has been thrilling.

• 1:50:15Speaker 03

  I guess, I mean, obviously there is, there just is loads more and that's really exciting. Um, and yeah, and I guess I'd also say, I mean, there are obviously loads of, as you say, there are like loads of people who work on this and there's some really good work being done and that's, that's exciting. I just think it's a great time to be someone who's interested in women in the ancient world. Like, it's a great time. Um, and I, yeah, I think it's fantastic that there are, again, all these different approaches. You've got, you know, I know you had Andromache Coranica on really recently. I mean, she's incredible and her work was really important when I was thinking about, yeah, about kind of women's poetic composition and women's work and, and so on.

• 1:50:53Liv Albert?

  I thought of mentioning her at the top because I was immediately connecting those two conversations when we started. Yeah.

• 1:50:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and, and, and obviously Emily Hauser as well. Again, incredible work. And what's, what's fun about Emily is that she both does the kind of scholarly work and she does the fiction. Um, and you know, there's obviously loads of stuff happening in, in fiction as well.

• 1:51:12Liv Albert?

  Oh, gosh, yes.

• 1:51:13Speaker 03

  You know, in some ways, it's all part of the same conversation. In some ways, they're doing different things and I think that's good. I think they should be doing different things. Um, but I think, yeah, I think there can be a role for, yeah, learning from each other, you know, as, you know, our scholarship gets, you know, manages to give us increasingly rich pictures of women's lives. I hope that that'll kind of enhance the fiction, which will be great. And, and I hope that people read the fiction and then get interested in the scholarship. Um, but also I think as academics, I think it is that, yeah, there's something to be learned from this. Okay. Well, how can we think about this differently? Um, and, you know, and, and there's a role for historical imagination, you know, not, not making stuff up, but this kind of like, oh, you know, how might it have been?

• 1:51:59Speaker 03

  Um, and, and then you dig around with the evidence, you know, like, well, does this fit? Does it not? Um.

• 1:52:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and I think that that's been done for men in history the entire time. They just don't say it like that. They don't see it in that way. It's just like, happens naturally. And

• 1:52:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:16Liv Albert?

  And so I think, yeah, it's just like, it's a good reminder that we're not reinventing the wheel here.

• 1:52:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:52:22Liv Albert?

  There's, this is just literally like

• 1:52:23Speaker 03

  It's just history.

• 1:52:24Liv Albert?

  People with other perspectives, reading history and all of history is.

• 1:52:29Liv Albert?

  You know, viewed through the lens of the person studying it and it's all based in this bias. And we are just simply like fresh eyes and ears, looking at it and, and seeing new things. And like, it's so cool and interesting and I want to know everything about these real women. So I'm so thrilled about this conversation.

• 1:52:46Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for speaking to me. I've had so much fun and it's, yeah, it's just, yeah, it's been lovely to hear from you and to, yeah, thank you. I'm very, very grateful.

• 1:52:53Liv Albert?

  Oh my God, thank you. No, this was a whole, just an entire thrill. I, like I said at the top, I was not remotely worried. I'm very often anxious with new conversation guests I haven't talked to before. But as soon as I knew all it was, was talking about ancient women, I was like, oh no, we're just going to have a great time. I'm not even remotely worried. So, you know, this was so much fun. I'm, I, yeah, I had an incredible time. Um, is there anything you want? Actually, would you mind reminding the listeners of your whole book title? Because I forgot the subtitle.

• 1:53:23Speaker 03

  So I think, yeah, I think if you just remember Athena's sisters, that's fine. As far as I'm aware, there's not another book out like all that. So it's Athena's sisters, colon, because you've got to have a colon, colon reclaiming the women of classical Athens by Katherine Backler.

• 1:53:36Liv Albert?

  Hell yeah. It's just, oh, no, literally all, that's all I had to see. And I was like, okay, no, we're having this conversation. And then like read more. I was like, okay, definitely, definitely. So I'm just thrilled. Thank you so much for talking with me. Thank you for doing this work. It's so cool.

• 1:53:50Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:53:52Liv Albert?

  And I mean, thank you for giving them names. Like just on a totally personal note, like I just think that's actually really important. Even if they weren't the exact names, like it is so important that we don't continue this idea that women are only mothers and daughters and wives. So it's lovely. Um, yeah. Is there anywhere that you want people to follow you or read more or anything?

• 1:54:13Speaker 03

  Gosh, what a good question. Um, so sadly, yeah, I'm always, oh gosh, I should have a sub stack. I should make a sub stack. But sadly I don't. Um, yeah, what a good question. Um.

• 1:54:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, not a clue, not a clue. I should, sorry, I should have an answer to that.

• 1:54:29Liv Albert?

  No, that's fair.

• 1:54:30Speaker 03

  I, I, for my own sanity, I'm like not on Twitter. Um, yeah, if, if there comes to be, if there comes to be, maybe there should be a sub stack. Maybe this is the time to do a sub stack. Anyway, but I mean, yeah, if, yeah, if you, happily, I have a weird enough surname that if you Google it, you'll find me. Um, and I love hearing from people. Uh, I love hearing from people who are students and thinking about these things, or, you know, they're just, just interested. Um, and yeah, hopefully this is the beginning of, of other work to come as well. So, so yeah, I think, yeah, weirdly Google.

• 1:55:09Liv Albert?

  Perfect. Also, if and when you have more work in this realm, you come right on back. Anytime, I'm always so thrilled.

• 1:55:17Speaker 03

  Thank you so much. All right. Lovely to meet you. Thank you.

• 1:55:20Liv Albert?

  Thank you.

• 1:55:35Liv Albert?

  Oh, nerds. Thank you as always. Thank you again to Catherine for speaking with me because, oh, it was really so good. Uh, I'm so glad you all finally get to hear this one and I'm really hopeful for more and more conversations exactly like this, where we are just focusing on these voices that have been so long forgotten and ignored because of the patriarchy.

• 1:56:07Liv Albert?

  So enormous thank you to Catherine and, um, honestly for real, like, come back. Uh, let's talk about this baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Panguish is the Hermes to my Olympians. Selection music by Luke Chaos. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network, where we are trying to bring stuff like this, just history with an attempt to look at everyone else and care about everyone else. You can learn more at collectivemem.com or via my website mythsbaby.com. As always, please submit any questions, comments, thoughts,

• 1:56:46Liv Albert?

  and feels for the next Q and A episode. I would love to do more, but I need more from you, so send those in. There's a link in the episode's description or mythsbaby.com/questions. Thank you all. Um, you know, I just, I keep reading the news, so I don't, I don't know what else to say, but we have each other and we have history and furious, furious empathy for like, people. Um, and, and you know, that, that'll keep us going. So, thank you all. So, fucking much. I am Liv and I love this shit.

• 1:57:43Speaker 01

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  This December, the magic of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol returns to Virginia Repertory Theater in downtown Richmond. Experience the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge as he's visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, and rediscover the joy and true meaning of the holiday season. Performances run November 18th through December 27th. Tickets on sale now at virginia rep dot org or by calling 804-282-2620.

• 1:59:47Liv 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.

• 2:00:05Speaker 03

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

• 2:00:18Liv Albert?

  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.

• 2:00:32Speaker 03

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