Conversations: Get In the Dragon Wagon, We’re Going Shopping, Women in Euripides w/ Dr. Alecto Hardwick

This week Liv speaks with Dr. Alecto Hardwick https://alectohardwick.com/ about women in Euripides! Okay well it started with all about Medea and then it quickly falls into Euripides' women because of course, we simply cannot help it. Pre-order Liv's Odyssey adaptation (!!!), The Odyssey: a Modern Retelling. https://geni.us/TheOdysseyBook 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:43Speaker 01

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• 1:44Speaker 00

  Hello everyone and welcome back to Let's Talk About Myths, baby. This episode Liv is speaking with Dr. Elekto Hardwick, who is all about women and other marginalized groups in antiquity. So AKA, you know, perfect for our show. This was a really fun conversation to listen to and to edit and just to hear all these wonderful thoughts bouncing around and also just to hear how Elekto approaches thinking about these topics. They have such a, like she has such a mindful way of

• 2:20Speaker 00

  Touching on these things and thinking about them. And anyways, it was just really delightful to listen to. And I'm sure you guys will all have an absolute delightful time with her as well. You can find her at her website, which she mentions in the credits, the end bit, and also which is linked in the episode description. And if you have any project ideas, as you will hear her mention at the end, I'm sure she would be absolutely happy to have you there with her. Thanks so much, guys. See you later.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  Conversations. Get in the dragon wagon. We're going shopping. Women in Euripides with Dr. Electo Hardwick.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  Um, but yeah, okay. I, I guess because we sort of changed this up at the last minute, I don't totally know where you want to go with Madea, but I would love to talk about anything that you want to talk about with Madea. So do you want to like, I mean, maybe tell me about a bit about yourself and your research, like a little bit. Don't feel like you have to go crazy, but like, how do we get into Madea?

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Sure. Um, so I.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  Also, no pressure.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  I've been drawn, I was drawn to women in tragedy, long before I even knew that I was transgender, which is.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  A sign, maybe?

• 3:56Speaker 02

  I was, I was the only supposedly man at the gender conference, long before I knew that was going on. But no, more generally, I am a Greek literature academic. I specialize especially in, I guess, where literature crosses over with psychology.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  Ooh.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  I'm interested in what ancient texts tell us about how people think, how people make decisions, whether it's audiences, or writers, or characters internally, how their brains work. I am.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, really interested in where Greek literature and psychology intertwine. And that kind of draws me on to identity.

• 4:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  As a trans female academic, thinking about marginalized identities and how they are constructed and imagined and how they themselves think is very much my jam. And Medea is constructed as marginal in so many ways. That's kind of why I keep returning to her and her story and her character.

• 5:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah, so then, okay, because Medea generally is an obsession of mine. I actually, it's funny that you wanted to chat about her because I have another person who is coming back on the show and she was like, can we talk about Medea and dragons? And I was like, hell, yeah. So we're gonna have like a little bit of a Medea spring, I think, which I think honestly, in the year 2026.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  I think that's what we all need.

• 5:34Liv Albert?

  Exactly. Just a little bit of righteous female rage. Um, but specifically when you're looking at Medea because you're looking at, I mean, her as a character through this like tragedy, you know, are you talking, this is the worst way of asking this question, but are you thinking specifically of like Euripides as Medea? Or are you looking kind of to the whole of her? You know, like, obviously because Euripides is beautiful, amazing, perfect, but also very limited in how it is able to cover Medea. But then there are so many other, you know, bits and pieces and, and obviously like on my show, we talk constantly about how those things, you know, talk to each other, but

• 6:18Liv Albert?

  then also how the different sourcing across centuries, you know, changes somebody specifically like Medea, but everybody too. So, yeah, I mean, that's like a very large question, but like, what do you, what are your thoughts, I guess?

• 6:31Speaker 02

  So I guess I want to start with sort of pre-Euripides Medea.

• 6:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  In some ways it's hard to because we don't have as much to go on. I think one of, there's a Pindar poem which tells Medea in, which is one of the more extended treatments of Medea that we have from before Euripides. I think what's striking about her is in.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  In pre-fifth century treatments, Medea is usually a goddess. Medea is usually some kind of divine figure. And I think constructing her as mortal and giving her all the vulnerability that comes with that is very much a Euripides innovation, or at least a thing he leans more heavily into than previous authors. I also, I guess the other place which we could return to later is Apollonius's Argonautica.

• 7:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  Because his Medea is, I think draws quite heavily on Euripides, but is so sensitive and so vulnerable, and we get to see so much of her tormented thoughts. I think she becomes a really rich character for exploring fragility and indecision and pain, even after Euripides.

• 8:04Liv Albert?

  No, I, I think about her so often in, in regards to all of that. I've never been good at reading Pindar and I don't, I can't tell you why. I really should, but in like-

• 8:14Speaker 02

  His Greek is quite hard.

• 8:15Liv Albert?

  That's the thing and it's always-

• 8:16Speaker 02

  There's also that.

• 8:17Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And well, no, and also I will say I, I don't, I don't know Greek. I just know how to poke around. Yeah, thank you. I, I do know how to poke around with the best of them, but I don't actually like know it. Um, but I, with Pindar, I think I've just never, because I'm so driven to the mythology itself. Pindar has always felt clunky to me because it's always revolving around these athletic competitions and everything, right? And there's always a different purpose, which like is fine, obviously, and has all of its validity. But then I'm forced to like kind of navigate pulling out the athletics and I just don't care about sports.

• 8:55Liv Albert?

  Um, but I've, so I, just to keep going on this sort of, because Medea, I think as an overall concept is the most interesting part because of like what you're saying, you know, with Apollonius and how we get this like sort of expanded version of Euripides. And then I'm thinking, and I'm going to go wild here. We're going to go into Rome. But I then, that leads me like right into Seneca's Medea, which is something I discovered only a few years ago and then lost my mind over the like- I mean, I thought Euripides' Medea was, you know, an incredibly intense

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:31Liv Albert?

  character and play. And then you watch Seneca and you're like, oh, okay, right. You see that sort of like, I mean, I think it's the nature of how tragedy had changed in that time. But I don't know, this is not leading to a question. I'm just kind of like, oh, my God.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  There's a real darkness, isn't there?

• 9:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  In Seneca's Medea and in Seneca's tragedies more generally.

• 9:52Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  I think he's, I mean, writing under Nero. He's ultimately deeply concerned with

• 10:04Speaker 02

  the sheer power that ruling families wield.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  In ways that Euripides, I think, doesn't delve into so much, but

• 10:18Speaker 02

  I'm comparing this especially with, if you've looked at Seneca's Thiestes.

• 10:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's the only other one I've read.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. And there's, there's that scene with the children being murdered in the grove, which I think is one of, one of the darkest scenes I've read in literature. And I think, yeah. Seneca's trying to engage with, I think, power itself. And imperial power especially, but power more broadly in ways that infiltrate the Medea story.

• 10:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And then just the innovations on the stage, right? Where like,

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:52Liv Albert?

  you have a stagecraft where you would show a kind of brutal murder on a stage versus, you know, in the Greek tragedy form where it's never, that's never going to happen. So it's just, it's an interesting thing to kind of watch how like Medea specifically, well, and Thiestes, I should say, because that's a favorite of mine. I'm obsessed with that family. But, you know, how a character like Medea can evolve with stagecraft and

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:17Liv Albert?

  and like, it felt like a very natural evolution for her to me, even though I'm no fan of Rome generally. But for Medea, it just felt so right to see her kind of in that much more like visceral and like violent position.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Although I think. You're right, although I think that with Greek tragedy, the way murders are mostly not shown on stage is a feature rather than a bug.

• 11:44Liv Albert?

  Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I like the difference, looking at the differences rather than, there's no comparison of what's better or worse.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  And it forces the audience to imagine it. And to me, the image the audience are gonna form in their mind's eye of what the killing of the children looks like is always going to be more horrifying than what they can stage.

• 12:10Liv Albert?

  Absolutely.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  And I think that's where Greek tragedy gets a lot of its horrifying power. It's by telling the audience, no, no, you're gonna visualize what this looks like, and that's what's going to frighten you.

• 12:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I agree completely. That's why I like, I like both, just for such different reasons, you know, but Euripides will always be like my beloved in a way that I cannot fully put into words, so.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  In that case, we can return to him for a little bit.

• 12:38Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God, please. I mean, I'm like obsessed with Euripides generally, particularly because of characters like Medea, but specifically to me, like, I think, I don't know, I think there's something going on with him as a person because the, the, the interest he had in the female psyche as compared to every single other man whose writings survived from the ancient world is my biggest obsession, like, and I also am obsessed with the way that the ancient Greeks then decided that that was misogyny because he like presented bad women and when, to me, all I'm like is, he saw women as humans equivalent to men.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Although I always wonder.

• 13:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  This isn't me disagreeing, this is my thinking.

• 13:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah, this is why I love the conversation aspect.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, when, when, for example, Aristophanes jokes about Euripides the misogynist.

• 13:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  In, in his Women at the Thesephora, where you have all the women plotting their vengeance against Euripides.

• 13:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  I always ask myself,

• 13:47Speaker 02

  did Aristophanes come up with this, or was this an ongoing joke already? Like, is the humor?

• 13:55Speaker 02

  Is the humor there that the audience would recognize jokes they're already making amongst themselves, or that we're introducing something totally new to them?

• 14:07Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  And I, I always wondered just how much of that trope is something Aristophanes created rather than drawing on and perpetuating?

• 14:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, I think that's a great question. And I, for me, what I think is interesting is the way that Aristophanes, like, insights, I say that in air quotes, because like, whether or not he, you know, invented this rumor or not, it has taken on a life where I have had, I have had people come into my comments and say, like, how do you love Euripides? The ancients thought he was a misogynist. And I'm like, I mean, do you understand misogyny? Have you read Euripides? Like, I don't know what you're talking about.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  The ancients thought a lot of things.

• 14:54Liv Albert?

  Exactly. The ancients thought women were barely people. And Euripides appears to have thought, hey, I think they're kind of interesting. And, you know, whether that says anything about his own kind of like gender or sexuality, I've always been so curious, or whether he's literally just like a guy who understood that women are people, you know? It's just an interesting, it's an interesting thing to imagine, I guess, between both Euripides and Aristophanes, like, these questions about, I don't know, I just like to imagine what they thought of women, I guess, because I, that's the only thing you can imagine.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  But it's interesting because he goes to all this length to make Medea a person. Sort of as, as we've said, he takes a myth where she's kind of a quasi goddess and makes her human, makes her a woman who's been abandoned. And then, right at the end, she suddenly feels like a goddess again. She's suddenly abruptly pulled away from the stage, placed in the Meccanair, what various postgrads used to call the dragon wagon.

• 16:08Liv Albert?

  Why have I never heard that before? That's delightful.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  It's very important.

• 16:12Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  She suddenly, we suddenly get that humanity.

• 16:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Tucked away again.

• 16:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  So she, he does make Medea a human for a time.

• 16:24Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. Well, and I think, I mean, I think the, the question of humanity versus the divine in the ancient world is also like such a big, such a big question and one that I think that we today have a hard time kind of reckoning with because there is, there is such a heavy amount of people who are seemingly human, but also either have divine parents or actually have like divine attributes too, like Medea, right? Like it's such an interesting idea because like, I mean, what did they really conceptualize as like a mortal? You know, Helen is such like a good kind of mirrored example of like, well, she's

• 17:07Liv Albert?

  human, but she's not, you know, Zeus is her father, but she's human.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  And humanity in the humanity is not in fact a binary.

• 17:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's, it's funny. I've been um, working on a, a children's book of the Odyssey that's going to come out in a few months.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Wonderful.

• 17:26Liv Albert?

  Yes, I'm very excited about it. It's been, it's been crazy. It's literally just finished last week, which is why I'm all over the place. Um, but one of the things I've been sort of struggling with is like, how to explain to children, like how we define a god and, and what type of god and all of these things, because like there are just, there is no hard fast rule on anything in Greek mythology, but we always want there to be. And especially when it comes to children's books, like you want there to be like finite answers.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Relatively a monster.

• 17:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  But which kind of leads me to think,

• 18:03Speaker 02

  how does Medea see her identity?

• 18:06Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  In your opinion, because that's the thing. She's.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  She's a woman, first of all. She's also crucially foreign. And one, one reason I love to explore Medea in general and Euripides' Medea is she really probes the ideas of otherness, of foreignness.

• 18:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  That we know were extremely live issues in late 5th century Athens.

• 18:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  With increasingly stringent laws about who could be a citizen.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  Being passed and remain

• 18:51Speaker 02

  immensely, immensely troubling issues. Medea explored quite explicitly, so in, in her famous speech to the chorus, she talks about the difficulty of being a woman.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  And then right after her famous line about, I would rather stand three times in battle than give birth once. She immediately goes, but your story and mine aren't the same. You're from Corinth. You have families here. I don't. So she forces us to confront womanhood, yes, but also foreignness.

• 19:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, to me, it, sorry, go ahead.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  No, please keep, please keep going.

• 19:35Liv Albert?

  Oh, I mean, I was just gonna immediately modernize it, which is maybe not the best, but to me, I ju- it just screams of like, you know, ad- admittedly myself being among them, but like the white women versus every other woman, right? Like, white women are at this like tier in the patriarchy.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:50Liv Albert?

  That, that, yeah, that other women are not on, right? It's, it's like, yeah, the Greek versus barbarian, women versus not, you know? And yeah, it's such, it's just, it's so powerful and so long, like, yeah, obviously still completely relevant today.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 20:05Liv Albert?

  In the most horrifying way.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  And the thing about tragedy is.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  There's a vision we get of Athens in tragedy as a place that loves welcoming and

• 20:20Speaker 02

  kind of, this is in some ways a toxic word to use, but welcoming and rehabilitating foreign harmful influences. We get that with Oedipus in Oedipus at Colonus, we get it with the Furies in Humanities. Athens sees itself as a place that can welcome in foreign influences, even harmful ones, and turn them into a source of strength.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  And part of the thing about Medea is, okay, she's in Corinth, but the play ends with her about to head on to Athens. She crafts herself as a foreign influence that can't be tamed, rehabilitated, turned into a nice little foundation stone of the city, in the way Athens loves to do.

• 21:15Liv Albert?

  Well, and it's, sorry.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  No, you go ahead.

• 21:18Liv Albert?

  No, no, yours was mid-thought, please do.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  And I always ask myself, is that,

• 21:26Speaker 02

  is Euripides showing, is that Euripides saying something about Medea? Or about Athens and how it sees itself and the people it welcomes? Or both?

• 21:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Go on.

• 21:39Liv Albert?

  No, well, and I just to like hit the nail on the head, God, what are phrases? I don't know why I try to use them. Yeah, because then the implication, of course, is that not only is she going to go to Athens, which is of course for Euripides, like the Greekest of the Greek.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:56Liv Albert?

  But also, the audience is meant to understand what she's going to do in Athens, which then is supposed to go full circle to their own city founding mythos, right? Where she's going to try to poison Theseus when he rolls up. And so, it's such an interesting, I mean, I think one of the most impactful things about Greek tragedy is when you know what the Greeks knew. Because that is meant to be the point of it, right? Like, you're not supposed to watch the play and wonder what's going to happen after. You're supposed to watch the play and know exactly what's going to happen after. And I love that I do because I have way too much of the stuff living in my head. But like to me, that's, I mean, it obviously doesn't take anything away from the plays being

• 22:40Liv Albert?

  performed today, but it adds so much when you do have the kind of understanding of the ancient audience of like what we are meant to know comes next.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  And it's usually what comes next is the foundation of a positive cult.

• 22:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  So Medea flying off to be a toxic influence in Athens rather than a positive beneficial one is in some ways a subversion of that. It's a subversion of the nice little cult ideology you get at the end of most tragedies.

• 23:13Liv Albert?

  Exactly. And it's in the same vein, an inversion of the deus ex machina, the god in the machine, the her flying off.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 23:23Liv Albert?

  In the dragon chariot, right, is in is already this subversion of like, that's not how plays are supposed to end. Like, that's not how the mecanae is supposed to be used. And yet he did this. And it, is it Medea that he wrote in exile too? No.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Um, I don't think so.

• 23:45Liv Albert?

  No, I think it's, I think it's another one that I'm just mixing up in my head of like another powerful woman.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  The other issue is that a lot of the early biographical traditions of Euripides are all kind of myths.

• 23:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Like the, the, the story that he died being torn apart by wild dogs in Matodon is probably just.

• 24:05Liv Albert?

  Don't think that's likely.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  It's probably reflects the back eye story.

• 24:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  And people love that so much that they sort of wrote him into the myth.

• 24:14Liv Albert?

  Well, yeah, because they were like, well, he went up north where that shit happened to Orpheus and where, and where the, we know that the back eye are gonna go wild in like.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  So yeah, reading, reading anything from biographical traditions of playwrights is just a mess and a joyful mess, but a mess nevertheless.

• 24:38Liv Albert?

  I, okay, hold on. I have to, I just have to be a crazy person and look up real quick which play I'm thinking of. Oh, maybe it's fucking Back Guy. I think it's, oh, it's, because Back Guy was produced posthumously, right?

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, okay.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Even that.

• 24:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Even that, you know, there, there has been debate over whether Euripides was actually in Macedon when he wrote it.

• 24:59Liv Albert?

  Oh, okay.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Even that's contested.

• 25:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I mean, it's all so interesting. Sorry, I could go on forever, but yeah.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  But yes, I was going to say, so Medea is othered in a number of ways, right?

• 25:14Liv Albert?

  Yes, barbarian.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  She's foreign, she's a woman.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Also, and so she emphasizes the chorus. Again, we don't know how she thinks of herself. We know, you know, there's always a chorus on stage. This isn't Shakespeare where we get Medea pouring her heart out in a soliloquy to the audience. She's ultimately self-producing to the chorus. She has something to gain here. She needs them in her corner.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  But I think what's in some ways scary about her is she's also terrifyingly Athenian.

• 25:58Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  And there's this one part just after she reveals her plan to kill her children. She says that what she's trying to do here is helping friends and harming enemies.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  I forget the exact line reference, but it's just when she's first revealing to the chorus, "I'm going to kill my children."

• 26:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Um, helping friends and harming enemies, that's how you have the most,

• 26:31Speaker 02

  the most heroic life.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Now, helping friends and harming enemies is

• 26:41Speaker 02

  a heroic epic virtue, but it's also an Athenian virtue. What she's saying is, this is the most Athenian way to act.

• 26:52Liv Albert?

  Well, yeah, especially when you're doing it in Corinth. This is interesting. I've never thought about it this way.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  She's looking at the audience and saying,

• 27:01Speaker 02

  By, you know, by Athenian ethics here, which valorizes being kind to my friends and causing the maximum possible pain to my enemies. If we follow that to its logical conclusion, killing my children becomes right. And I think that's meant to confront the audience. It's saying, what is Athenian-ness? Are we, by our own rules, does this become perversely not just right, but morally demanded?

• 27:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Okay, I've never thought it in that way. I've, I've always been so fascinated by the, that, the general speech when she is making this conclusion. She's gonna kill her kids. Because to me, it's always felt like, i- i- it's always felt like something where, from, you know, an, uh, objective morality, what she's going to do is terrible. But in her speech, to me, and it's been a couple of years since I've read Medea, so I won't pretend that I can like, but I've read it a number of times, enough. And, you know, to me, it's always felt like, sure, what she is proposing is horrific,

• 28:18Liv Albert?

  but she proposes it in such a way that you understand why she sees it as her only option.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:26Liv Albert?

  And so adding that layer of Athenian-ness on top of that, that's really interesting.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there's always this tension because, you know, back when she's persuading Crayon, when she's winning people over, is she,

• 28:43Speaker 02

  is she a witch who can enchant people? Or is she an expert retor, an expert orator? Who can win people over? Because command over oratory is one of the most Athenian things that can be in the fifth century. So we're, we're always, I think, treading the line between, yes, she's foreign, yes, she's a woman, yes, she's othered in every way, marginalized constantly, but...

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Provocatively, all she's doing is interpreting the rules which this new society have given her. And

• 29:33Speaker 02

  yeah, I think you're right that what she's she says, this is my only option. That it's even more scary. She says, this is my only option by your rules.

• 29:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, like what an added impact.

• 29:52Liv Albert?

  To yeah, now I will need to go back and read Madea.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  It's the bit the bit I'm referring to, by the way, is lines eight oh nine to eight ten.

• 30:02Liv Albert?

  Amazing. I'm gonna be picking this all up after. I've been meaning to get a Madea tattoo for a very long time and you're pushing me closer to deciding on something. So I'm gonna have to figure it out.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  I I and you know, I refuse to apologize.

• 30:14Liv Albert?

  And you shouldn't and you shouldn't. No, it's I don't I just. I don't know. Madea has always been so fascinating to me and I'm I'm not sure how to weave this question into where we were going, but I'm so interested in it anyway, but like. It's always been really interesting to me, you know, alongside all of all of this, you know, Athenianness that she's portraying and just the ways that you're like, I see why you see that this is what you have to do. And then I think on top of that, you know, we were talking earlier about. Her as a goddess and you know, when is she human? When is she a goddess? And I think there's like an extra level on top of that that makes it really interesting. To just sort of theorize about.

• 30:58Liv Albert?

  But like, what does it mean? To have this woman, a goddess who is also foreign. You know, like and and then what is I mean, there's so many questions about foreign gods, obviously, right? And like, you know, a lot of the time. A lot of the time we understand them as foreign gods because of a story like.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 31:18Liv Albert?

  Dionysus, right? He's a foreign god. He's a local god. All of these things, but and it's it's quite explicit.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:25Liv Albert?

  Whereas somebody like Helios, the son, you know, her grandfather. Where? You know, he's the Greek god of the sun. He is their god of the sun. But by nature of being the sun and rising in the east, that's where his family lives, and therefore his family are not Greek but foreigners.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:47Liv Albert?

  What is that, you know, what does that really imply to your culture and your understanding of, yeah, it's just interesting.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  I hadn't thought of that, but you're absolutely right. He's a

• 32:02Speaker 02

  a teasingly difficult to pin down choice.

• 32:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  At her origin.

• 32:07Liv Albert?

  Well, and he, she's like related to him, but also not like Aietes, obviously, like her father is going to be like, he is the one who, where she seemingly gets her foreignness from, but then it's like, okay, well, but his father is Helios, but Aietes is meant to be this like scary, violent barbarian. Well then, so how is his father your god of the sun? Like, it's just, it's, yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  There's also, you remember that part where in her big early speech to the chorus, Medea goes,

• 32:40Speaker 02

  "Our, our stories aren't the same. You guys have a family here. I am cityless, fatherless, familyless."

• 32:51Speaker 02

  And I think at that point, the audience is meant to ask, or could ask,

• 32:57Speaker 02

  "Why don't you have family here, Medea? What, what, what happened to them?"

• 33:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  "Did you, did you by any chance chop up your brother and leave him in the sea?"

• 33:07Liv Albert?

  And why? Why?

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Because again, so this is partly what I mean by her self-producing.

• 33:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  We, we are shown that she isn't telling the chorus the whole story. Because she uses the fact that she murdered some of her family as evidence of her isolation and vulnerability. And I think that's why it's ironic that suddenly, oh, look, gift from her grandfather. It's not the chariot.

• 33:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  It's not just

• 33:45Speaker 02

  a gift from the gods. It's a reminder that actually Medea's family ties do give her a lot of power still.

• 33:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  It's an ironic thing for her to rely on.

• 34:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  After.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  After denying that she has any family to protect her for most of the play.

• 34:24Liv Albert?

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• 35:06Liv Albert?

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• 35:49Liv Albert?

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

• 36:27Liv Albert?

  Well, and it's, I mean, just generally the, the, the questions that one can ask based on Greek myth alone. Like, I could ask these questions forever. But it's just, yeah, I mean, it's generally, that whole family's been interesting to me for a while. One, because it took me so long to realize that the reason they were from the east is just because that's where the sun rises.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I realized that approximately three minutes ago when you first mentioned it.

• 36:52Liv Albert?

  Oh, great, because somebody else did that to me on a podcast a couple of years ago, and I was like, what?

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Fully, yeah, I absolutely had not thought of Helios as a well chosen god who rises in the east. So, yeah.

• 37:04Liv Albert?

  No, great, great. Well, you know, somebody did that to me earlier, so we're together on this. Um, and it's just so interesting. It's like that added layer and like, but yeah, what does it mean to make like, to understand your god as being from this place, but then also is foreign? And of course, you know, that raises a bazillion other questions about how they would have understood other gods and, and the world itself. So, you know, they're unanswerable, but it's just, I think it just says so much about what I personally find to be so interesting and just like, mind boggling about Greek mythology is like, trying to just, just even conceptualize how people might have understood stuff like that, because to us now, it feels so impossible to have like,

• 37:50Liv Albert?

  a god that is inherently like, not one of you, but also your god. Like, obviously, it's the way, I mean, from an objective standpoint, like, Jesus is from Palestine and everybody says something different. So, you know, from an objective truth that is still relevant today, and also we have Mormonism. But, but from like an ancient world perspective, yeah, it's just so interesting to, to think about this, right? And like, okay, so they also fully conceptualize their gods as being, I mean, this is very true, obviously, but like, being deeply problematic and like,

• 38:29Liv Albert?

  not really aligning necessarily with the laws that humans, you know, are kind of expected to align with. It's just generally, I don't want to get, I guess, into a whole conversation about Greek gods, but, but Medea as this example of like, what is a goddess, what is a barbarian, what is a foreigner is just endlessly fascinating.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and. Again, you're right that, you know, where she ends almost feeling like a bodice. Before that, that passage where she's thinking about whether to, whether to go through with murdering her children or not, is where she comes across almost the most human in the entire play. And that's, yeah, from about line 1,020 onwards. That's, I think, the first time we really show her, see her doubting.

• 39:31Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  I almost, I almost think she kind of grieves in advance.

• 39:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  She's not allowed to lament after killing her children, but she does sort of weirdly lament before it.

• 39:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, she's like, has to process her grief ahead of time in order to actually do it, I think, like.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  It's, it's a passage I give my students to comment on all the time, just because it's so rich and so arresting. And it's honestly pretty rare in tragedy that we get a character really being made to doubt what they're about to do.

• 40:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like we get so much thought process in Medea too, in a way that is not really common elsewhere. We just get so much internalization and, yeah, this like kind of justification, but also like you're saying, like this grieving of what she's going to do before she even does it. Like, there's just, so, I mean, I guess this is where your interest with psychology is like, is heavily comes in. And so, I mean, I know nothing. I'm not a science gal, even that type. Um, but like where, yeah, thank you. Um, I just like the myths, please. And I like other people to come on and tell me about everything else.

• 40:58Liv Albert?

  But so like, I mean, what, I don't know how, I guess I'm just interested in how else you use psychology or like what else kind of comes into play when you're. I don't know, maybe I'm putting you on the spot with this question, but I'm just generally interested in how psychology intertwines, but probably we've already been talking about that inadvertently. Thoughts?

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Hmm. That's a big question.

• 41:20Liv Albert?

  I know.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  I mean, one axis we can use to explore it is just what the character says about their thoughts. We can take that at face value and we can try and map it on to

• 41:37Speaker 02

  map it on to how similar thought processes work in and have been studied. Because there's a, there's a lot of scholarship arguing that

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Medea's thought process kind of matches when actual child murderers have been interviewed.

• 41:57Liv Albert?

  Really?

• 41:58Speaker 02

  The justifications they come up with often echo Medea's. And what's interesting, I think, is that everything Medea comes up with

• 42:14Speaker 02

  is about community. It's about

• 42:20Speaker 02

  social rituals.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  It's about, you know, the marriages, um, care, baths. It's about everything, all the milestones she would have seen with her children. And it's also about how she's seen by people. It's about being mocked. It's about being having people laugh at her for not being able to punish her enemies.

• 42:50Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  And

• 42:57Speaker 02

  the other thing is that

• 43:02Speaker 02

  sorry, this is really

• 43:03Liv Albert?

  No, no.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Alexa rambles for 24 business hours.

• 43:08Liv Albert?

  Not at all.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  People often talk with Medea in terms of reason versus emotion. Her heart tells her to spare the children. Her head tells her, no, she's gone this far. She has to kill them.

• 43:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  I

• 43:27Speaker 02

  Firstly, I don't think that's true. She has actually got concrete arguments and heartfelt emotions on both sides. But also, reason isn't as significant a motivator as people think it is. Like, whatever you're doing, sure, you can logic something out or you can feel it. You're still imagining an outcome and then feeling a certain way about it. Emotions always plays a part. I don't think it's possible to choose a path to take purely through reason.

• 44:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  Because you are always evaluating how you feel about that outcome.

• 44:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Reason is still tied to internal emotions in every way. Yeah.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  And this works with Medea, and the rituals she compares, family life, social atmospheres, she's evaluating how she feels about all of them. And in that, can we find out anything about how women actually felt in classical Athens? Hmm, I'm less sure about that. Medea is not most women.

• 44:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  But we are sort of constructing social rituals, social milestones, traditions, and how these feel and are meant to feel.

• 45:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  And to me, that's valuable for just historians of emotion in general.

• 45:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I mean, oh, there's just so many interesting things about this. And I, I don't know now, I guess I'm, my ADHD brain is kind of circling back with everything you said to, you know, how you were explaining the...

• 45:29Liv Albert?

  When Medea's reasoning kind of fits with Athenian reasoning, you know, the hurting or helping your friends and harming your enemies.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:39Liv Albert?

  What I hadn't really thought before was just about how, I mean, like, I think, I think you're saying both and my head originally was thinking like, oh yeah, you know, her, her reasoning really fits the, the Athenian mentality. That's, that's what she's doing. She's helping friends and harming enemies. But from a literal perspective too, like because Euripides chooses to set this in Corinth, we have this like inherent, like, yeah, she's, she's literally helping the Athenians by taking out the Corinthians and like causing all of this uproar and then she's going to go to Athens. So it's just, I don't know, I guess I sort of took us away from the emotionality of it,

• 46:22Liv Albert?

  but it's just, that was sort of strumming around in my head because it's just, I mean, I guess what I'm kind of getting back to is I think maybe, time to remind the listeners of what that really means too, right? Because like the tragedies, you know, Greek tragedies generally take place outside of Athens typically to, in order to like tell a story that is going to make Athens look good and, and the other city kind of look bad in whatever way.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  I'm gonna probe at that a bit.

• 46:49Liv Albert?

  Please.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't disagree, but I'm gonna probe it.

• 46:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  Car- car- carry on though.

• 46:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, I mean, it's just, it's an interesting thing to relate, like, yeah, you know, this is making Corinth look bad, but written by Athenians. And of course, yeah, there's, there's definitely a complexity there, but it's just always been interesting to me, the way like, I don't know, I guess it's just an added level of question mark added to Medea's like entire persona to be like, oh, but you know, also by doing this terrible thing, she was inherently helping Athens. And so like, how does that add another layer on to how an ancient audience who would be primarily men too, which is also like an added level of interest? Like how they would see her, what, what that would even look like?

• 47:37Speaker 02

  There's so much there.

• 47:38Liv Albert?

  I know.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  There's so, so much there. I think.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  So people talk a lot about what it means when a tragedy is set in a certain city. And broadly.

• 47:55Speaker 02

  There seems to have been discomfort about showing bad things happening in Athens or to Athens.

• 48:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  Broadly, bad shit in tragedy is kept in other Greek cities a safe distance away. Thebes often.

• 48:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah, because they're the big enemy of Athens.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  There's a famous Froome Zeitlin article called Thebes as Anti-Athens, which basically explores what it means when tragedy is set in Thebes. But, and I think it usually tells some kind of story. It's about, it's often about Athens looking good, but it's often also about the audience imagining this happening in Athens.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  When something is set in Thebes, it's, it usually could happen here.

• 48:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  It's never usually, like, there are plays which strongly differentiate, you know, Athens is a democratic city and actually plays that off against, say, Theban oligarchy.

• 49:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  Um, Euripides' Supplicant fully has a debate on democracy, yea or nay. But it's rarely this couldn't happen here.

• 49:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  It's usually feels like a story that could happen to Athens just saves everyone the extra discomfort by not making it actually happen there.

• 49:38Liv Albert?

  Sounds like every Hollywood movie in America.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And Hollywood is the right reference to use for Greek tragedy. Like, if you think of, I don't know, let's pick a shit example, the Barbie movie.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  Most people who had any, who were even vaguely online, either saw the Barbie movie or knew it was happening. I think that's fair to say.

• 50:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Like, most people were aware of it, even if they didn't actually go see it, would have heard people talking about it. That's how much coverage Greek tragedy had.

• 50:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  It's a full, everyone would have either gone to see it or know somebody who had or hear it talked about.

• 50:27Liv Albert?

  It's like the equivalent of a blockbuster.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 50:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 50:30Speaker 02

  So, thinking about Euripides' Medea, the way people think about,

• 50:37Speaker 02

  the excellent Kugler film Sinners, which I saw a few days ago and is brilliant.

• 50:41Liv Albert?

  I've been meaning to watch it. Thank you for the, as soon as it was, broke all those Oscar nominations, I was like, well, I'm gonna watch it now. I mean, I was already going to.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  A deliciously good film.

• 50:52Liv Albert?

  The trailer looked so good, I've just been in such a dark place that I've been like, I can't watch it yet, but I've been, but now I'm going to, I'm going to, in any case, sorry.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  As you say, that level of cultural exposure is the terms we should be thinking of with Greek tragedy.

• 51:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, and it's, well, yeah, because I mean, it's like it was their primary source of entertainment as a culture. And, well, and I think that gets back to that, the really interesting aspect that we kind of miss as modern people interacting with these plays, which is that the people would have known everything around, like, surrounding the plays, you know? I mean, with Medea, I think this is probably the perfect time to mention, remind listeners that it is, according to the sources that we have, likely that Euripides invented or was the first one to use this element of Medea killing her children, whereas,

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 51:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah, and I think, and what is the, do you know offhand, there's the rumor about something about the Corinthians involved with this element? Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 51:57Speaker 02

  No, I don't.

• 51:58Liv Albert?

  There's like something where it was like, maybe originally he was gonna have the Corinthians do it and he had, I don't know, maybe I'm completely inventing it. I'm sure it's, I heard something one time ages ago, but it just generally, it, yeah, it's, it's an element where, you know, the, it's like,

• 52:16Liv Albert?

  Oh, I don't know. I guess it's like, I'm trying to think of an example of like some classic movie where if somebody made a remake and like completely changed like such a major element, right? I mean, it's, it's, it's doing that. It's, it's taking, it's like, I mean, I think another really interesting example of this is Euripides' Helen, which is inherently also another one of his amazing works of women, but also this story where it's like people would be watching this thing, thinking that they know what's going to happen. And that's the point of it.

• 52:49Speaker 02

  Another one I love playing with is Euripides Orestes.

• 52:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Where he has Orestes actually voted guilty rather than acquitted for killing his mother, and then have to try and basically fight his way out, fight and blackmail his way out of that. Um, yeah, we know Euripides likes playing around with and with established myths. And yeah, killing, Medea actually killing her children was an innovation.

• 53:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  When we have that line, um, where, whereabouts is it again? Uh, did, did, did, do, do, yeah, line seven ninety, where Medea goes, I will kill my children.

• 53:34Speaker 02

  Would have hit the first audience like an absolute hammer blow.

• 53:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  And then presumably other audiences, you know, it wouldn't have the same effect on later audiences.

• 53:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  All these plays were reperformed across the Greek world. But then it takes on a different cachet. People going, oh, are you gonna go down the theater, see Euripides Medea? Apparently it's the one where she kills her children.

• 54:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah, like, ooh, that's the Euripides version.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. It would become.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  Known as something transgressive, something new, something horrifying in a new way.

• 54:17Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 54:17Speaker 02

  For later audiences. So yeah, thinking, thinking about different expectations which audiences might have when it gets re-performed. And when it's more a cultural phenomenon rather than a new thing.

• 54:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 54:32Speaker 02

  Becomes really important here. Yeah.

• 54:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's just so, and I just, I mean, I could, I could theorize on all of this, literally forever, particularly when it comes to Euripides. Because I just, I just think his work is so goddamn fascinating.

• 54:47Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:48Liv Albert?

  Utterly obsessed. I'm a complete, yeah, I will probably never say a bad word about him. But it's just, I don't even know where this is going now because I'm just interested in, in Euripides and his, I mean, his. I just love him. I love him. Um, but it's, you know, I, I think his Medea, because of the killing the children, because of the, the dragon chariot at the end, like, there's just so many things about it that feel so subversive. And I guess I just want to know more, but I don't, I don't. You know, I mean, I think people like to debate whether or not Euripides really was subversive.

• 55:28Liv Albert?

  And I don't know, I thankfully, I don't live in the world of academia. And so I can just say like, I firmly believe Euripides was subversive. But it's just, to me, it's so interesting to, I guess, just look at the characters like this. To me specifically, when it comes to him. Medea is top of my list, but what I love about all of your, or so many of Euripides' work is just that the women felt real to me. Like the women in Euripides, to me, particularly like, I mean, as like.

• 56:02Liv Albert?

  An angry, childless feminist, like, child-free, I should say, very happily. But like, I, you know, I just find the women in his work to be so much more real and, and like impactful than the other playwrights, by and large, I should say. Like, they have a handful of good women, but like, I just, I don't know. I just think it's so interesting to think about that. And I guess I'm just interested in your, if you have thoughts on him as a person or theories in any way.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  And if we assume a majority male audience.

• 56:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 56:40Speaker 02

  I'm putting an asterisk by that. We'll, we'll return to it.

• 56:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 56:43Speaker 02

  Then why?

• 56:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Because I agree, his women feel and have long been flagged as feeling real.

• 56:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah, and unlikable to men.

• 56:52Speaker 02

  Now, go on.

• 56:53Liv Albert?

  Like, yeah, that's a bit real alongside with this unlikable to men. I think that's an important thing for, going back to your asterix, but all male audience, right? And like, but Euripides writes women that are like, really unlikable.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  And like, is he, so that, I guess the question I always ask is, is he genuinely trying to push against Athenian gender expectations, Athenian treatment of foreigners? Or is he reaffirming them?

• 57:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 57:24Speaker 02

  Is he?

• 57:28Speaker 02

  Is Medea's terrifying power meant to be

• 57:35Speaker 02

  liberating or threatening?

• 57:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 57:41Speaker 02

  And I, I mean, my sneaky answers to this, and this is where I think I differ from your approach, is I avoid thinking about authors at all.

• 57:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah, interesting.

• 57:53Speaker 02

  I think about audiences.

• 57:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 57:55Speaker 02

  I.

• 57:57Liv Albert?

  I think he's the only one I think about. So I think there's just something going on there, because like, great, yeah.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  That's fascinating, because that Euripides has managed to make himself into someone whose motivations we ask ourselves about.

• 58:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  Is.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  Immensely powerful.

• 58:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  I mean, sure. Aristophanes may have helped by making him such a recurring character, but Euripides, you know.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Sure, I can.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  Train as a literature scholar and be told about the death of the author just till the cows come home, but I still find myself asking about what Euripides wanted or aimed for or thought. And I think in some ways, that's what Euripides wanted to achieve. He.

• 58:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  Makes himself a character that we have to engage with.

• 58:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah, and I think for me, it's that like, I mean, even aside from these like specific women, where I think he wrote really interesting characters, you know, like Medea and Helen and Alcestis too is another like amazing one. But but then there's also to me, like, I mean, the Trojan Women, like, is such.

• 59:16Liv Albert?

  Like, that is such an interesting. Or just such a like, I don't know, like that one too, like, that's a huge question about what he meant, what was he doing? Was he pushing against Athenian tyranny and genocide? Or was he affirming it? And like, or somewhere in between, right? This, it almost feels more like an acknowledgement than anything else. Like even women, the women characters feel like an acknowledgement more than any kind of opinion, I guess. Like, I just more feel like he was like, this is how it is.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  And it's not just Athenian tyranny, but also.

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  I'm gonna provocatively say the tyranny of Homer.

• 1:00:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  These are, these are. Victims of the Iliad.

• 1:00:10Liv Albert?

  Well, yeah, but I'm more, I'm more connecting it also than to what the, what the Athenians did, right? And how he wrote Trojan Women immediately after.

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:00:17Liv Albert?

  But yes, also, yeah, also Homer.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, like he's saying, he's saying not just think about what, well.

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  Again.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  I don't know what he's saying or not saying.

• 1:00:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  But an audience member viewing this could think, huh, did we do this to the women of Melos?

• 1:00:41Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:42Speaker 02

  And also, yeah, these are the victims of a lit- a major literary text.

• 1:00:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah, like the biggest.

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  To us.

• 1:00:52Liv Albert?

  Exactly. The, like, the culture as a whole is at stake. Like, they, yeah, sorry.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree. It's a provocative thing for Euripides to explore.

• 1:01:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  Again, you can see me fighting the urge to take Euripides' bait and think about his desires.

• 1:01:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think that's what, that's what I love about him. And like, I, because I don't come at it from this, like, I have to have perfect evidence for everything, like, in the academic world, which I respect, but I don't want to be part of. But like, I'm like, okay, no, it's fine. I believe he was, you know, what I want him to be because that makes me feel better.

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  Honestly,

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  I don't want perfect evidence for, for things either.

• 1:01:39Liv Albert?

  No, exactly. Yeah.

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  Thinking about audiences gives us so many different ways to respond and think about things.

• 1:01:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  Another text, have you looked at Euripides' Ion much?

• 1:01:52Liv Albert?

  Stab me in the heart with the emotion. Yes, yes, I have.

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, because Croesus, that's what I return to with his treatment of women.

• 1:02:01Liv Albert?

  That slipped my mind in this whole conversation, the Ion. Thank you.

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  It's one that I often invite my students with content warnings to compare with Medea because with Ion,

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  we get it all patched up into a neat little, you know, just so story. And this is how we got all the Greek races at the end. But we are all so aware that it's built on, it's built on sexual assault. It's a story and an ending and a foundation of all of Greece that's built on Apollo raping Croesus. And we're, not just that, we are made to sit with her trauma for most of the play.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  We are made to see her suffer from it. We're made to see her also.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  Be so traumatized that she acts kind of badly, tries to poison Ion.

• 1:03:04Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  For a chunk of the play. It really. So, yeah, in Ion, Europa's really says, here's a nice foundation myth. Don't, don't you love this foundation myth? Bad news, it's built on sexual violence against a woman. And you, the audience, have to sit with that for the entire play. And then go home trying to make the ending feel right after that.

• 1:03:31Liv Albert?

  I'm so glad you brought up the Ion. I can't believe I hadn't thought of it. Oh, my God, because that one, I don't know how it's possible, but I went like five or six years of this podcast without realizing the plot of it. And so I just hadn't read it. And then I learned the plot and was like, what the fuck have I been doing? And so I covered it on the show and I like, I, I can't even fully put into words all of the. I feel like so much of my own feelings about the ancient Greek world were vindicated by that play. Like, I've had a lot of conversations over the years with authors, academics and, and anyone really about

• 1:04:16Liv Albert?

  the, the concept of like, I mean, assault and consent in the ancient world and also in myth, right? I mean, my entire podcast, years before I started talking to anyone who had any kind of real knowledge. Like, my podcast started out as me having like a however many years old classics degree that I wasn't using, but obsessed with. And I just was bored and, and lonely and, and started reading Greek myths again and was like, man, they're just rape. They're just rape. And 90% of the forms where the non-academic, everyday person is meant to ignore, like, take in Greek myths, most of those forms completely wash over the rape.

• 1:04:58Liv Albert?

  You know, they use words like seduction or wrapped away or all of these things. And

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  It's completely translated over as well as whitewashed often.

• 1:05:08Liv Albert?

  Exactly. And that's like, I mean, the translated, a literal translation is like the best case scenario for that. And then there are these books. There is a myth book by Robin Waterfield, and I'm ready to name, like fucking name and shame every time with this one because it's just called The Greek Myths, and it is one of the most common you'll find in bookstores. And in specifically, the sections on Medusa and Pandora, it has some of the most egregious inserted mythology or misogyny that has no bearing in ancient texts, or has like, the tiniest, like, I'm specifically thinking of,

• 1:05:47Liv Albert?

  and now I'm just gonna go on a rant, I apologize in advance, but in Medusa, there is a point where this book, this like supposedly like, these are the Greek myths, says that she was punished, like, obviously, like raped by Poseidon, the whole, actually, no, I don't even think he says rape. I think he like makes Poseidon seem like consent, but then on top of that is like, oh, she was punished because she said she was prettier than Athena. And meanwhile, it's like, there's one line at the very end of Apollodorus about Medea that's like, or some say that she said she was prettier than Athena. Like, it is not actually a canon note. It's not.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:29Liv Albert?

  You know, and it's, that's how people take it in.

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  This kind of stuff is everywhere. And that's part of why the Emily Wilson's writings about how translation choices filter, filter into, like, allow misogyny to filter into texts are immensely informative.

• 1:06:48Liv Albert?

  So, so important.

• 1:07:15Liv Albert?

  And to get back to the ion, because I went on my little circular ramble, but the ion for me

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  Kind of pointed.

• 1:07:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it sort of points that in some ways. Well, specifically, I'm thinking of like, there is, there's a conversation I had that I will literally never forget, and I won't name the person, but it was a very big author who is a scholar, but also an author of Greek myth and of novels, I should say. And we had this conversation where I was trying to bring up like an idea of consent, like in a certain story. And what she basically said to me was that, like, well, it doesn't really matter either way, because the ancient Greeks didn't really conceptualize consent. And I've never been able to stop thinking about that, because it like hurts my soul in a way that I have

• 1:08:06Liv Albert?

  trouble putting into words, because that mentality is so strong, like this idea that because they didn't have a word for consent, that they didn't conceptualize it. And I think it betrays the level of misogyny that is just so deep in our culture to think that, because it's like, and to me, the ion was the thing where I went, no, like, this is very clear evidence that regardless of the word consent, in whatever language, like, this is clear evidence that they can recognize the trauma of these situations, and not just the trauma of a sexual assault as a concept, but specifically one by a god, which is the thing that so many scholars come up like against all the time.

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  I agree. I also, for what it's worth, don't think we should privilege ancient Greek audiences over 21st century audiences. Like, to me, a pretty central aspect of my thought and my scholarship is

• 1:09:12Speaker 02

  Trying to figure out how a fifth century B C Athenian audience responded to Ion and trying to figure out how a twenty first century Anglophone audience responds to Ion are equally important endeavors. They are, you know, in in the same way as also thinking about how audiences else like in other places in ancient Greece or medieval audiences or, you know, every kind of audience has

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  valid and important and worthy of analysis responses to an ancient text. And for what it's worth, I agree. The idea that the fact that there's no word for consent doesn't mean the concept didn't exist and wasn't imagined.

• 1:10:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah, violence is still violence, like.

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  But even if it's, even if it does.

• 1:10:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  Even if it did mean that, we

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  the fact that modern day audiences read Ion as a play about sexual assault and its consequences is, doesn't have to have an asterisk next to it.

• 1:10:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:34Speaker 02

  That's automatically a worthy reading because it's one people have.

• 1:10:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah. No, and I, yeah, I agree completely. I mean, it's, I think it's, for me, it's this, I think the thing with

• 1:10:47Liv Albert?

  understanding, I guess, concretely, in whatever way, anything can be concrete in this realm, but like, understanding what an ancient audience felt, to me, is so,

• 1:10:59Liv Albert?

  I mean, and I'm just, I'm generally curious about, you know, how how your work fits in with that as well, because again, it's been a long time since I've studied everything formally. But like, I, you know, to me, I think what ends up getting kind of lost in in some of it is is the humanity of it all, right? Because when people say things like, oh, well, you know, that's not a rape in the myth because they didn't conceptualize consent.

• 1:11:25Liv Albert?

  Is like, to me, that that is negating the basic humanity of these people, right? Like, I don't care that they didn't have words to define it. They understood when someone's body was violated. Like, that's all it is. It's a human understanding. And so to me, it's just like, I get really mad when I hear stuff like that because I think it is so devaluing to the ancient world. Like, and also, you know, most of the evidence that survives is from men. And so then you also have the question of like, well, we don't know how the women felt. So how dare you say that because there is no word for consent, that the women did not understand this? Like, yeah.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, so I'm, I'm automatically wary of saying, well, of course, anyone felt like this. Just because I think that's always gonna be more culturally specific than we think it is. That said, I think you're right.

• 1:12:26Liv Albert?

  I mean, yeah, it's both, right? It's like, it's just, you have to acknowledge the humanity, along with also saying, nobody's a monolith. Yeah.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  Things can be both human responses and culturally mediated and culturally different. And

• 1:12:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  You're right that to say, you're right that to say they didn't have a word for consent is ultimately to privilege who provides those words.

• 1:12:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. And who wrote down the things that led us to believe.

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:56Speaker 02

  Who's writing those words?

• 1:12:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah. What survived in order to tell us what words they did or did not have?

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  I think one other thing about, thing about Ion, and which also makes it a fascinating thing to play to read alongside Medea, is it's also playing with dynamics of other foreignness and Athenian-ness. Because part of what makes, I, I, I'm afraid Croser does a white feminism TM.

• 1:13:30Liv Albert?

  She does.

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  Part of the problem is she's hostile to Ion because

• 1:13:38Speaker 02

  She thinks of him as Xuthas' son, her husband's, not hers, but also as not properly Athenian.

• 1:13:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:46Speaker 02

  And this whole trying to poison him with the Gorgon blood that her ancestors gave her. It's very.

• 1:13:55Liv Albert?

  Which I have also things to say about.

• 1:13:57Speaker 02

  It's very, it feels very much about protecting Athenian-ness, protecting her bloodline.

• 1:14:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  So Crosa is.

• 1:14:11Speaker 02

  I think.

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  Hmm. The good thing about podcasts is bits where I pause to think can be edited out.

• 1:14:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah, though sometimes I keep them in because it makes you sound smart when you really contemplatively like think. And then think a little bit.

• 1:14:28Speaker 02

  But also I think normalizing academic's pause to think is important.

• 1:14:33Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah, I do minimal editing.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't have all the answers at my fingertips, nor should I.

• 1:14:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  Um, I think the play wants to scrutinize.

• 1:14:47Speaker 02

  Wants the audience to scrutinize its gender dynamics. And how Crosa's body is violated and how her trauma is perpetuated from that. I think

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  in some ways it doesn't want us to think too hard about foreignness. And Athenian-ness and how that's constructed. And Xuthas is always kind of the adorably foolish for- foreign husband.

• 1:15:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah, he's a little bumbling.

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, in ways that I don't think the play actually wants to scrutinize much. So, yeah, Crosa is intensely marginalized in some ways. And has the privilege of being Athenian and having a bloodline which people, you know, like multiple people in the play are kind of A-OK with her trying to poison Ion.

• 1:15:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:46Speaker 02

  So it's fascinating to see her marginalized and traumatized and harmed in some ways. Immensely privileged in others.

• 1:15:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, I think like Madea, Creusa is this beautiful example of like how a lot of Euripidean women are just.

• 1:16:07Liv Albert?

  People, right? Like there, she is, she's a, she's not a perfect victim because there is no perfect victim.

• 1:16:13Speaker 02

  Quite.

• 1:16:13Liv Albert?

  She, you know, she, she is a victim. She is traumatized and also turns that into something potentially harmful, you know? And I think, yeah, it's another one of these examples of like, they're, they're just people in the most complex of ways. And that, like, that's what I'm obsessed with. And I mean, Creus is such a good example. And the, the Gorgon of it all. Okay.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:16:37Liv Albert?

  We have to talk a little bit because, so Medusa is like my entire personhood obsession. Like I, I know too much about Medea. And the Gorgon in Ion, so I, I wrote like a, a big thing about Medea for a book a while back. And I had, I went and researched like every reference to her before.

• 1:16:58Speaker 02

  Okay. So firstly, please send me that. I would love to read it.

• 1:17:01Liv Albert?

  One of the things I came up against, because I was looking up like every reference to not just Medusa, but the Gorgons. And I went through a kind of timeline of surviving references for her and the Gorgons generally. And the thing with the Ion that I, I can't quite get over is I think it, I mean, they're, God, I can't make this into a Medusa show, even though I want to, but like, the Gorgon in the Ion is simultaneously not Medusa, but I also think it has really deep ties to Medusa. Because in the Ion, the Gorgon

• 1:17:41Liv Albert?

  is not tied to the Gorgons of the Perseus myth. It's tied to the, to the war with the giants and how that Gorgon was born from that war. And then that Gorgon's blood is either, you know, poisonous or curative. And to me, that fits with a more, I guess, like, generalized idea of Medea that I have developed from all of my readings, which is that, like, I mean, number one, the gorgons are meant to be protective. They're apotropaic, obviously, but they also hold this power of like life and death.

• 1:18:23Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:18:24Liv Albert?

  And I don't know, I just think, I think it's so immensely fascinating that Euripides goes into these details about this gorgon's blood because it doesn't come up elsewhere, like at all. And yet, like, it, I don't even know, but I just, it feels to me like a gorgon is a protective, obviously, protective, you know, device, but specifically, I think that there are ties to women's protection in ways that we don't have surviving evidence for. Because, and you know, there's, there's a whole, you know, memes that go around where people say, like, oh, people put the gorgon on their doors and it said something for women, and that's not

• 1:19:08Liv Albert?

  true to evidence. But I think that there's something to be said for how the gorgons were used because they, yeah, I don't know. I, this is not forming anything, I guess, but it's just, I'll never get over. Please, please.

• 1:19:24Speaker 02

  So there's, hmm.

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  Thinking about the gorgon head on Athena's shield motif.

• 1:19:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:34Speaker 02

  Thinking also about the Furies and what happens to them at the end of Aeschylus' humanities. They sort of get incorporated as Athens as protective deities. There's a whole trope in tragedy and myth of Athens as a place that can claim monsters and use them to protect itself.

• 1:19:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I guess like Arechtheus and stuff too are a good example of that, with all these snake people.

• 1:20:02Speaker 02

  And I think that what we get an eye on is again. Gorgon blood transformed from something toxic and monstrous into something that can now be used to reinforce Athenian-ness. Much like, much like the Furies are in Iscalus. And the, the difference is that in Ion, the Gorgon's blood doesn't actually succeed in reinforcing Athenian-ness. It almost creates a tragic plot outcome, which then has to be grabbed and rescued and put back on

• 1:20:45Speaker 02

  track and we can all breathe a sigh of relief. It's one of the delightfully hard to analyze Europae's problem plays. So, yeah, in Ion, shit has to be fixed at short notice.

• 1:21:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  But I think that's kind of what Europae is playing into. The idea of monsters being made into pro-Athenian protective forces, except in a way that could go badly wrong and needs to be rescued.

• 1:21:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. And I think in this way that they also feel co-opted from somewhere else, maybe?

• 1:21:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:25Liv Albert?

  You know, like, because it, if, I had never made that explicitly Athenian connection because I'm too deep into the Gorgon as something that is so far beyond Athens, you know, that it bears no resemblance. But so it's so interesting to think of Athens also like taking hold of that. But of course they would because of the Gorgonion and Athena and yeah.

• 1:21:45Speaker 02

  And if you're thinking about bodily autonomy as well, like this is a step away from sexual consent. But the use of the Gorgon's physical body as a weapon. I mean, Medusa doesn't get to decide what her head is used for after her death.

• 1:22:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:05Speaker 02

  The Gorgon's blood, it's actually, it's in some ways a lot more.

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  Sure, I'm gonna use the word violating. It's a lot more violating in some ways than the way the Furies are kind of homed in Athens.

• 1:22:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  Because this isn't

• 1:22:24Speaker 02

  this isn't the, this isn't monsters being turned into defensive protective forces. This is them being turned into protective tools.

• 1:22:34Liv Albert?

  Well, but that's what the Gorgons are generally, and that's what has always fascinated me gen- like, because I mean, pre-Ovid, Medusa, there's no evidence that Medusa hurt a single person before Perseus took her head off of her body and used it as a weapon. And that's the thing I'll never get over too, like she is not a violent being. She is able to be turned into violence, but only through her own death.

• 1:22:59Speaker 02

  And it's interesting, therefore, that we've built this whole, I mean, all the have you ever seen any representation of Medea in, sorry, sorry, of Medusa in film or TV or art? That doesn't have a sculpture garden of victims around her.

• 1:23:17Liv Albert?

  No, no, exactly. She, because the men make this and they have to be scared of her.

• 1:23:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:22Liv Albert?

  Because a beautiful woman who has the potential to damage them is terrifying. I have a whole argument that like, the, the thing that scared men most about the Gorgons generally, and most female monsters is purely that they were females that the men couldn't have sex with.

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 1:23:41Liv Albert?

  Like, it, it all draw, like, goes kind of just down to that, like, basic form of, like, these are women who didn't want them. Because the Gorgons lived in the middle of nowhere, the far ends, edges of the earth. They didn't seek out anyone. Perseus had to bend over backwards to find them. Killed the one, not because she was harming anyone, but because somebody wanted her head.

• 1:24:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:03Liv Albert?

  You know, and so it's just, I don't know, again, I didn't mean to make this into a Gorgon episode, but it doesn't take much and I

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  How do we seamlessly grab this and return it to the world of Medea and the Jason's Greek tragedy?

• 1:24:19Liv Albert?

  Oh, I mean. I wish, well, we, we talk about how, how Aeschylus wrote a four Caides play that we don't have anymore. The daughters of Fortis, but that's fine. No, that's not a real answer. I just, yeah, I mean, I think that all of this, I mean, it all ultimately comes down to like the same big questions, which is just that, like, you know, what, I guess for me, the big question is just always like, what do we not know? Whose voices do we not have? Because I think that they would answer all of my questions personally, and I'm desperate for it. But that's not a very satisfying response.

• 1:25:05Liv Albert?

  Can I say, was the Ion one of the alphabet plays? I believe so, right?

• 1:25:10Speaker 02

  As in one of the ones that we think survived because it was in the large book? Yeah, we, yes, it's in, it's in that section of the alphabet, I think.

• 1:25:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah. So it's just interesting to me again, that this is one that the powers that be did not necessarily intend future readers to read.

• 1:25:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, although how like, thinking about how a work becomes canonical or doesn't.

• 1:25:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:37Speaker 02

  Is a fascinating question in itself. And my answer is usually,

• 1:25:46Speaker 02

  I mean, there's a lot of possibilities, right? It's, you know, this manuscript happens to not get eaten by worms. But the usual answer is, so do you know why the seven plays of Aeschylus, the seven of Sophocles, the seven of Euripides, apart from the alphabetical ones? Do you know why they survived?

• 1:26:09Liv Albert?

  Because they were studied in school, right? And therefore were copied, yeah.

• 1:26:12Speaker 02

  Byzantine Empire, school syllabuses. And that's, yeah, stuff getting picked for a school reading list has an immense influence over.

• 1:26:26Speaker 02

  What survives? And that's partly why debates over what should get set on good any curricula, what's allowed in libraries today are really affecting to me because you're not just choosing what children read, you're choosing what

• 1:26:40Liv Albert?

  What survives.

• 1:26:41Speaker 02

  Survives.

• 1:26:42Liv Albert?

  People don't see that unless they're like in it. Yeah.

• 1:26:45Speaker 02

  School reading lists don't reflect the canon, they forge it.

• 1:26:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:50Speaker 02

  And what decision goes into that? I mean,

• 1:26:57Speaker 02

  is it that they think Medea demonstrates some important moral qualities? Is it that they think it shows good Attic Greek that baby Byzantine administrators needs to learn? Impossible to say.

• 1:27:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:10Speaker 02

  But

• 1:27:11Liv Albert?

  Well, yeah, that's what's interesting to me, though, too, just because you're like the Ion isn't one of those, at the very least. And so what is it? And to me, the ones that aren't those are just generally interesting to me because it's like Helen Ion, Iphigenia, one of the Iphigenias, I think it's the Torians, probably. And it's just, it's just so interesting to, to, I don't know, I guess, I guess it's just, I'm particularly obsessed with the fact that we have these examples of things that were not studied in school. And what does that say to us, I guess? I am trying to wrap this up, I promise. I just keep having more thoughts.

• 1:27:46Speaker 02

  Oh, that's so allowed and indeed encouraged.

• 1:27:48Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:27:51Speaker 02

  I don't know, would I say not studied in school? Because again, they made it that far. They clearly kept being reperformed. I guess the alphabetical edition wasn't just book falls off a shelf, book falls off a shelf in Alexandria, and then is found under a rock in 1980.

• 1:28:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:11Speaker 02

  Like, it still reflects plays that were popular and kept being performed. I, I, to me, so Byzantine Empire education choices were primarily

• 1:28:27Speaker 02

  Does this reflect good, clear, Attic Greek style? And also, does this contain nice models of formal oratory? Speech-making, um, argument construction that our administrators can learn from? So that's, that Medeia kept being taught and made it into sort of the canonical Euripides VII reflects probably the fact that stylistically and linguistically, it was considered useful Attic Greek source material.

• 1:29:06Speaker 02

  I, it's not, I don't know if it's being any big aesthetic or thematic reason that Ion was excluded. But then again, I wasn't there.

• 1:29:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, even without like, I don't know, I think I'm also just like such a raging misandrist at this point, that I'm just like, I don't know, I just assume that like, the men would not be interested in being taught a play that primarily revolves around a woman's sexual trauma. And like, maybe that's me being too mean to the men, but they just keep showing themselves, so I don't.

• 1:29:54Speaker 02

  Oh, very possibly.

• 1:29:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:55Speaker 02

  I absolutely cannot rule that out.

• 1:29:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's just interesting to speculate, you know? It doesn't seem like something I'd have a man recommend.

• 1:30:04Speaker 02

  But again, and again, and again, this isn't me disagreeing.

• 1:30:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Speaker 02

  If that's a decision that was taken, that implies that they read Ion and saw that's what it was about.

• 1:30:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:21Speaker 02

  For them, for them to want to remove a theme from the syllabus, they have to see, they have to notice it and recognize that it's important and troubling.

• 1:30:34Speaker 02

  We're still, by making this argument, we are still, we are suggesting that it was legible as exploring sexual assault and its traumatic causes.

• 1:30:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah, which I just think it inherently is, but I guess there are maybe arguments to be made that like, it's not, I don't know, it's so interesting. But also like, I think what a great reminder and example about how like every single thing that we interpret as human beings from the beginning of time is biased.

• 1:31:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:08Liv Albert?

  Because like, I can't conceptualize somebody reading the Ion and not seeing that, but that's because I can't conceptualize that. And it's, you know, I mean, that it's going back to the translation issues and stuff, like everything is biased. And there's just this, there's this mentality, I think, that is only just now getting broken down, that like, history is like a finite thing, when really, it's like, no, no, like, a very specific subset of men up until like 100 years ago, were defining what history is. And that doesn't make it less valid, but it is imperative that we recognize that like, all history, all

• 1:31:48Liv Albert?

  literature, all art, like every single thing is interpreted and preserved and performed through a bias, whatever that may be.

• 1:31:59Speaker 02

  And how, and what, and where we go from there.

• 1:32:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:02Speaker 02

  How we recognize doing that.

• 1:32:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:05Speaker 02

  What that recognition and what reading through that entails is, to me, some of what's most exciting about ancient world studies.

• 1:32:17Liv Albert?

  I agree completely, even though informally, because I've built my entire life around just having these conversations and fuck if it isn't the most fun thing.

• 1:32:27Speaker 02

  There is no, there is no correct or incorrect way of doing classics, much as the academy might want you to think there is.

• 1:32:36Liv Albert?

  But this was so, so much fun and fucking insightful. And I'm glad that we kind of turned it into just generally Euripides, but also so excited to talk about Medea again because it's been a minute and like she deserves me talking about her like at least once every few months.

• 1:32:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, happy that Medea was the focus, but also happy we got to think of her through so many other lenses, including Euripides' other plays.

• 1:33:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:01Speaker 02

  Because I, she's anomalous in many ways, but I wouldn't want to divorce her from Crousa, from the Trojan women, from.

• 1:33:13Liv Albert?

  Ifegonai is another great in Tor- among the Torians. Like that story is wild, like.

• 1:33:19Speaker 02

  So many delicious contexts, so painfully little time.

• 1:33:23Liv Albert?

  Truly. But that does just lead us right into, I think you're gonna have to come back and talk about the Lycestrata.

• 1:33:28Speaker 02

  I would absolutely love to.

• 1:33:30Liv Albert?

  Wonderful, wonderful. Thank you so much for doing this. It's been so much fun. Is there anything you want to tell my listeners about places to follow you or read more or anything of the sort?

• 1:33:43Speaker 02

  So you can find out all the information you want to about me on my website. That's electo hardwick.com.

• 1:33:51Liv Albert?

  Beautiful. We'll link to it in the episode's description.

• 1:33:53Speaker 02

  Wonderful. And other than that, yeah, you can, you can find my book on there. You can find my articles on there. You can find my opinions on there. That's really, really all you need.

• 1:34:08Liv Albert?

  Beautiful.

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  And yeah, thank you so much, Liv. It's been an absolute joy. Would be so happy to come back sometime.

• 1:34:14Liv Albert?

  Beautiful. No, I, yeah, agree entirely. So much fun. And I truly could talk about, I mean, anything from the ancient world, but clearly we have similar taste in what specifically we like to talk about, which is the ladies. So.

• 1:34:28Speaker 02

  Also, one more thing I add, um, also to tell your listeners, I am always in the hunt for collaborators. I love working with creative artists in particular. I'm currently working with Rosemary Tickle, who's a composer, on choir settings of Sappho's fragments.

• 1:34:49Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 1:34:50Speaker 02

  Which.

• 1:34:51Liv Albert?

  Be still, my heart.

• 1:34:52Speaker 02

  In ways that explore how fragments work rather than trying to paper the gaps between them. If you are any kind of artist, composer, musician, filmmaker, and you want to collaborate on something ancient world related, please do get in touch. Again, my website's a good way to do that. I am always looking for just new ways to approach and engage with and reshape ancient texts we got.

• 1:35:23Liv Albert?

  Hell, yeah. Well, great. I love a call out. Please, people, if you, because that sounds amazing.

• 1:35:28Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:35:29Liv Albert?

  And I'm going to mention some more things off mic about that. But for now, I'm going to say thank you again so much. This has been a true delight.

• 1:35:38Speaker 02

  Thank you. Also, one more thing I wanted to mention is that I've been teaching Greek tragedy to undergrads for the last five or so years. And so many of the ideas I've been talking about in in this podcast have been refined and bounced off my students and chatted about with them. And they absolutely would not like, I don't think I've used anything uncredited for my students. I'm pretty sure I would have caught that. But these ideas absolutely would not be what they are without my students chatting about them with me, bouncing things back to me and helping me refine them. So just massive shout out to them.

• 1:36:23Liv Albert?

  Oh, I love that. That's, you're the first person, I think.

• 1:36:27Speaker 02

  Genuinely.

• 1:36:27Liv Albert?

  Has wanted to do, I think so. And I love it. That makes me really happy. So thank you to your students as well. I mean, I, I understand that value. Like, that's why the conversation episodes are some of my favorite. Because I can do all the research in the world, but like it bouncing stuff off people. It's like the, the, the Helios in the east thing, right? Like, I learned it because someone said it to me and it turned into a conversation. Then we're just going to keep sharing it around.

• 1:36:51Speaker 02

  Every conversation you have, just you've learned something different or even just a new way of looking at this material. Because like, like I said, every audience sees something different.

• 1:37:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:02Speaker 02

  And that's what I love uncovering.

• 1:37:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's the bias we were talking about, right? It's like everyone's brains have a different way of seeing these things and it's so valuable. So no, I'm really glad that you mentioned that.

• 1:37:11Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:37:25Speaker 00

  Let's Talk About Myths Baby is written and produced by the one and only Liv Albert, Michaela Panglish, the Hermes to all your Olympians, the producer, tired as usual. Select music by Luke Chaos. Thank you, Luke. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network, a collection of creators that all strive to bring you accurate and reliable information on the ancient world. These include the wonderful friends at Movies We Dig, The Partial Historian, Sweet Bitter, and so much more. Get ad-free episodes and others by subscription to the Oracle Edition on Patreon at patreon.com/MythsBaby or via the link in the episode's description. If you're coming on there, there's some new and exciting things coming down, happening in, hmm, May, May-ish. Are you a scholar,

• 1:38:07Speaker 00

  academic, or an expert in something from antiquity, from Greece to Rome to Egypt to anywhere in the Near East? We would love to have you on the show as a conversation guest. Go to mythsbaby.com/contact and fill out our podcast guest form. We want to hear from you. We really, really do. We love these conversations so much. So reach out. Talk to you all later. Bye.

• 1:39:17Speaker 04

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