Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Why Helen Of Troy Is The Real Star Of 'The Odyssey' About this episode Beautiful women are always causing trouble in history, and perhaps none more so than Helen of Troy.
She's the daughter of Zeus and a human mother, after all.
With the new film Odyssey hitting the big screen, find out all about the formidable Helen of Troy who was supposedly the most beautiful woman in the world and caused the Trojan War.
Joining Kate today is Ruby Blondell, Professor of Classics at University of Washington and author of two books on Helen of Troy.
This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.
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2:12 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely Betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back once again to Betwixt the Sheets. That's me doing jazz hands, but you can't see it because we're still on audio. Welcome back. It's fab to have you here. But because we care about you and your precious, precious feelings, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, book about adults, other adults, about dirty things and an adulty way of occurring a major love subject and you should be an adult too. And that's just to keep your feelings safe. We call that the fair do's warning because if you keep listening and you happen to get upset, well then, tough tits, because that one was on you. Fair do's, we did tell you. Right, let's crack on.
2:52 Kate Lister? Good morning, Betwixters. I do appreciate you coming all this way. About 3,000 years in the past, to be precise. It's actually a quiet morning in ancient Greece, down by the harbour in Sparta, but something momentous is happening. Queen Helen is standing on the deck of a boat, watching back towards the shore as she sails off with the Trojan prince, Paris. And that is not her husband. Huh. That's gonna piss a few people off. And if there's one group of people you don't wanna piss off, it's the Spartans. I think we can all agree on that one. Married queens just aren't supposed to bugger off with their sneaky link. Not now, not never. But did she go willingly? Or was there something more sinister going on in this story?
3:37 Kate Lister? Either way, it won't be long before whole kingdoms are at war, heroes will become legends, and luckily for us, it'll all be depicted on the big screen in a film called The Odyssey in the year of our Lord, 2026. So what better time to find out more about Helen's story?
4:17 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Yes, you may have already heard that a huge, huge blockbuster is about to arrive on our shores. It's Christopher Nolan's take on the ancient Greek epic story of the Odyssey, which features the story of Helen of Troy as part of it. Well, I mean, it's quite a big part of it. But what was the story of Helen of Troy? What else do the Greek myths say about her? Anything at all, other than that she started wars? What is her legend all about? It can't just be that she's a pretty face, can it? Well, joining me today is Professor Ruby Blondell, Professor of Classics at the University of Washington and author of two books on Helen of Troy.
5:02 Kate Lister? So if anybody can help us answer some of these questions, it's got to be her, right? Yeah, I thought so too. Right, fake horses and togas at the ready, let's do this.
5:17 Kate Lister? Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Professor Ruby Blondell. How are you doing?
5:25 Speaker 04 I am doing great, thank you.
5:26 Kate Lister? Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. You know, we had to get you on to do this one on Helen of Troy, because you are the author of Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation and Helen of Troy in Hollywood. So, given the fact that the Odyssey is about to come out and given the fact that there was a whole brouhaha on social media about the fact Lepita Nyongo is playing Helen of Troy, will you just like, stand back, everybody? I have got this one. This is my bag.
5:58 Speaker 04 Well, I have to say that all my friends were saying that, more or less.
6:02 Kate Lister? So how did you come to be a professor of classics? Would you remember when you first start, when you were first introduced to this material?
6:11 Speaker 04 Well, yes, but I had a very old fashioned, traditional English education, so.
6:15 Kate Lister? Oh, I see.
6:17 Speaker 04 It's like, I remember as a very young child, reading the stories from Greek mythology and loving, I mean, I loved the, all the myths for all the cultures. But as you know, classics, classical myth, Greek myth is the one that gets privileged in traditional educational contexts.
6:33 Kate Lister? That's true. That's, but it's stuck with you. It's like, this, this is good stuff, this is.
6:39 Speaker 04 Yeah. And then I was introduced to the languages and I turned out to, you know, be good at the languages and.
6:44 Kate Lister? Oh, are you?
6:45 Speaker 04 And I, I don't know, things have changed probably in Britain since my day, but back then you had to pretty much make your choice when you were 16, whether you wanted to, you know, do sciences or whatever you want to do. And so I started really young doing Greek and, and Latin.
6:59 Kate Lister? You did. I, I went to a state school. We didn't do Greek or, or Latin. We just.
7:05 Speaker 04 Some of them used to in those days. My best friend in college.
7:08 Kate Lister? Some of them used to.
7:09 Speaker 04 Went to a grammar school. Yeah.
7:11 Kate Lister? Yeah.
7:11 Speaker 04 And why I went to private schools and, you know, I was pretty much on the traditional track that way. But then after I graduated, I didn't know what I wanted to do really, but I knew I wanted to do something that would be fun. And I knew I was good at going to school and.
7:25 Kate Lister? Ruby, I love that you, that for studying ancient Greek for you was fun, that that's what you wanted to do for fun.
7:33 Speaker 04 Well, fun was going to California.
7:35 Kate Lister? Of course it was.
7:36 Speaker 04 That was the fun part. So everybody was like, well, why wouldn't you go to Cambridge or stay at Oxford, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, that wasn't really my motivation to go to the most elite academic institutions, although Berkeley was one, which is where I did my PhD. But I wanted to travel and, you know, do something a little different.
7:55 Kate Lister? That sounds fantastic. And obviously during the course of your studies and your travels around California, you know, a thing or two about Helen of Troy. So can we introduce, just in case there's anyone listening to this going, who? Helen, who? Can you tell us who Helen of Troy is?
8:14 Speaker 04 Well, I first started getting interested in Helen of Troy because, you know, Achilles is the greatest warrior of the Greeks. Most people probably know that. And Helen is the most beautiful woman in the world, ever.
8:28 Speaker 04 And I always thought that they kind of made a good couple because he, I mean, they should be a couple, right?
8:33 Kate Lister? You're right.
8:35 Speaker 04 He's the manliest man and she's the womanliest woman. And anyway, she's the most beautiful woman in the world. And as you know, not just from Greek culture, but from pretty much every culture the world has ever known, beautiful women are trouble.
8:47 Kate Lister? Yes.
8:48 Speaker 04 And so in Greek mythology, she's the daughter of Zeus, who's the king of the gods. And that means she has like a divine superpower, which is her beauty.
8:59 Speaker 04 But she has a human mother, so she's like among humans. She is human, but kind of special, very special. And has this awe inspiring superpower of her beauty, which makes everybody want to fall in love with her.
9:11 Kate Lister? Yeah.
9:12 Speaker 04 So naturally this is going to lead to trouble. And because she's the most beautiful woman in the world, it leads to the greatest war of all time, commonly known as the Trojan War.
9:21 Kate Lister? Yeah.
9:23 Speaker 04 So she elopes. Well, she's already married. She's married to Menelaus, who's kind of a loser. And my Menelaus is, is Michael Douglas. I think he would be the, anyway.
9:34 Kate Lister? He's, he's who you'd pick to play Menelaus?
9:36 Speaker 04 Yes, yes.
9:37 Kate Lister? Oh, I like that. Because you can't stand him.
9:42 Speaker 04 He's so, it's something, anyway, he's just kind of got loser. I, I don't know why he's a big star because to me he's got loser written all over him, but.
9:49 Kate Lister? I feel we need another episode to unpack this one, Ruby, but continue.
9:53 Speaker 04 So she's married to him at Sparta. And then this nice young man comes to visit and his name is Paris. And he's from Troy, Troy on the other side of the Aegean in now, now what's Turkey. And he is, he is not the hottest man in the world, but he's pretty good. The hottest man in the world.
10:15 Kate Lister? Right?
10:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, he's a looker.
10:17 Kate Lister? Yeah, he'd catch your eye if he smiled at you, you'd, yeah.
10:20 Speaker 04 Exactly. However, not a lot of people know this, but the most handsome guy at Troy is Achilles.
10:25 Kate Lister? Well, see, that makes, so why didn't he and Helen? No, I'm on a side quest already. I need to rein it back in, but maybe we can talk about why Helen and Achilles never got together? Because that sounds like they should have done.
10:37 Speaker 04 In mythological terms, yes, and I'm happy to have sidetracked. There is a very remote ancient version of the story in which they do get together in the afterlife.
10:48 Kate Lister? Oh, oh, oh, that sounds good, but then also, oh, okay, so they kind of get it together, but they're dead.
10:54 Speaker 04 Well, except they're living on because they're heroic semi-mortal figures.
10:58 Kate Lister? Because he's half a god as well, isn't he, Achilles?
11:00 Speaker 04 Yes, yes, that's one of the reasons they're well matched.
11:03 Kate Lister? Yeah, they've got a lot in common.
11:05 Speaker 04 But the bottom line reason why they can't get together is because then we wouldn't have a story, because she would never have walked out on Achilles.
11:11 Kate Lister? That would be, it would have been, it'd been a crap story, that one, it would just been, yeah, they got together, they lived, they made beautiful children and lived happily ever after, done.
11:19 Speaker 04 Absolutely, yeah. So she's got to be married to someone who's kind of a loser.
11:24 Kate Lister? Yeah, okay, okay.
11:25 Speaker 04 And then Paris comes along and seduces her and off they go to Troy and because Helen's so beautiful, the Greek chiefs have all sworn an oath, a really dumb oath, which is that if anybody takes Helen away, they'll all come and fight for her.
11:40 Kate Lister? They swore that oath?
11:42 Speaker 04 Yes.
11:43 Kate Lister? That's, oh, that's a weird oath to ask people to take. If anyone comes and steals my wife, you'll come with me to get her back. Like, if your mates came to you and had that as a deal, you'd have a few follow-up questions.
11:57 Speaker 04 Yes, well, you see, it's, everything comes back to the fact that she is the most beautiful woman in the world, period, ever, and they all want to marry her.
12:04 Kate Lister? Oh, because of course someone would try and steal her, of course somebody would, right, it's not like some, it's not like I'm getting married and like, there's no reason why anyone would want to steal me, it's of course someone would want to steal Helen, right, this makes more sense, okay.
12:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think you look very stealable, by the way.
12:19 Kate Lister? Oh, thank you very much, there are literally tens of people would want to steal me, but thank you. Okay, but that, it's a known risk with Helen, someone's gonna want to steal her.
12:29 Speaker 04 It's a known risk, and plus, they all want to marry her, so the way they kind of settle the deal is like, there are many versions of the story, but in one, there's a lottery.
12:37 Kate Lister? Oh.
12:37 Speaker 04 And Menelaus is chosen at random.
12:40 Kate Lister? That's a weird one.
12:41 Speaker 04 And and part of the deal of the lottery is that they all agree that whoever wins, they will all get together and defend him if his wife takes off.
12:50 Kate Lister? That's that's okay. All right. Okay, fine, fine. Right.
12:53 Speaker 04 I know. It's it's mythology, remember?
12:55 Kate Lister? It is, isn't it? Like, I keep trying to like, apply more sense to it, but it's a story. It's a story. We're moving on.
13:02 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:02 Kate Lister? Paris has stolen or seduced Helen?
13:06 Speaker 04 That is the million dollar question.
13:08 Kate Lister? Ah.
13:08 Speaker 04 Ah. There are many, many, many versions of the story. And in all the Greek versions, except one, but it's complicated. She is seduced, but she goes willingly.
13:20 Kate Lister? Right.
13:21 Speaker 04 She wants to go.
13:22 Kate Lister? Okay.
13:23 Speaker 04 And that's really crucial, the question of intentionality. A lot of the modern versions, they they all want to, for some reason, ancient and modern authors, they all want to defend Helen. They say, oh, well, she wasn't so bad. It wasn't her fault. And the modern ones tend to do it by saying, oh, she was stuck in a loveless marriage. You know, it's really not her fault. She had to get away. But in ancient ones, that's no excuse.
13:46 Kate Lister? No, I'm not sure how much of an excuse I would make that one either. Because if you're married to Menelaus and you know he has a temper, you know that. And you know that if you get stolen, there's going to be a big war. I think maybe maybe just keep it in your pants, Helen. That's what I think.
14:03 Speaker 04 Well, um, the Greeks took a very strong view about this kind of female behavior.
14:08 Kate Lister? And of course they did.
14:09 Speaker 04 You know, it's a very patriarchal culture and they think of women as being sex maniacs, basically, and
14:16 Kate Lister? Yes.
14:16 Speaker 04 incapable of self-control. So therefore it's easy to seduce them.
14:20 Kate Lister? Yes, yeah.
14:21 Speaker 04 And so Helen's behavior is kind of typical woman behavior.
14:26 Speaker 04 But she's also the most beautiful woman in the world. And we don't want to think bad things about her because we all secretly want her.
14:34 Kate Lister? Yeah, yeah.
14:35 Speaker 04 You know, if you think about the other bad women in Greek mythology, like Clytemnestra, who is my favorite, who kills her husband, and Medea, who kills her children. You don't see like fifteen authors all trying to say, well, it wasn't really her fault. You know.
14:48 Kate Lister? No, I mean, that's pretty privilege on an epic scale, isn't it? That one of just she she can do no wrong because she's the most beautiful woman in the world. Questionable choices, though, I think personally.
14:59 Speaker 04 But then you can turn it around and say, yeah, it's pretty privileged, but it's also power.
15:03 Kate Lister? It's power.
15:04 Speaker 04 The way I first thought about Helen was as a figure of power, she has this superpower. And that's what, you know, in a patriarchal situation, women and other oppressed people use whatever tools they have at their
15:14 Kate Lister? Absolutely.
15:15 Speaker 04 availability. And because men have this unfortunate weakness that they often want to have sex with women, I feel like you can't really blame women for taking advantage of that.
15:24 Kate Lister? Yeah, what's a girl to do, quite frankly? So she she's seduced, makes a bad choice, but she's pretty, so we don't want to blame her. She goes to Troy with Paris. And then obviously she writes a note to Men Allow Us going, sorry, not going to work out. And he goes, well, never mind then, it's all fine.
15:44 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's what happens.
15:47 Speaker 04 But that brings up another issue that I'm interested in, which is like, it's the men's fault. They didn't have to follow her. They didn't have to go.
15:54 Kate Lister? No, no, no, they didn't. They didn't. He could have just gone, well, stuff you, you trollop. I'll go and find another. I'll find the second most beautiful woman in the world.
16:01 Speaker 04 Exactly. So the Greek sources, they do, a lot of them do blame Helen. I mean, she is an icon of the bad woman. But they blame Paris more. He's he's the one who took the initiative and seduced her, and therefore he's the bad man.
16:15 Kate Lister? Is he much of a warrior, Paris?
16:17 Speaker 04 Well, he's usually presented as kind of a whip.
16:20 Kate Lister? Yeah.
16:20 Speaker 04 However, he is still an ancient epic hero. He's one of them.
16:26 Speaker 04 And so he looks glorious in his armor. He runs into battle looking amazing. And he does fight, you know, he's not a complete wimp. I think often the modern retellings seem to, they, they oversimplify all the characters.
16:39 Kate Lister? Hmm.
16:40 Speaker 04 That's just a tendency, you know, pop culture. And I don't think he's a complete wimp because otherwise, I mean, he wouldn't even be there among the heroic figures.
16:48 Kate Lister? No.
16:49 Speaker 04 But by compared to like Achilles or Hector or any of the real big ones, yeah, he's a wimp.
16:55 Kate Lister? Is, is he favored by Aphrodite? I'm just trying to remember.
16:58 Speaker 04 Yes, he is. He's favored by Aphrodite, and she's the goddess of sexual passion.
17:02 Kate Lister? Yeah.
17:03 Speaker 04 And she protects him. And this is a good example of how ambiguous it is because it's great to be favored by a god. All of the big ones have gods on their side. That's, you know, but Aphrodite, she's the goddess of sex. She, she whisks him away out of the battle when he's about to get killed so that he doesn't get killed. So it's kind of a dodgy form of protection when that girly girl goddess is your protector. Cause she's like the divine equivalent of Helen. She's the most beautiful, sexy goddess.
17:34 Kate Lister? And there is a, quite a long tradition in classical literature, going right back certainly to the ancient Greeks of beautiful women distracting heroic men from their manly quest and their manly duties. Whether it's Calypso distracting, keeping people on their island and stopping them from going on the heroic quest. Or, or like a little bit later, Dido keeping Aeneas from his heroic quest. And that kind of idea that if you spend too much time with women, you're going to become overly feminized yourself.
18:04 Speaker 04 Yes.
18:05 Kate Lister? And he's hanging out with Aphrodite. So maybe he's a bit of a metrosexual, Paris.
18:10 Speaker 04 That's putting it kindly. Yeah. Yes. And contrary to our stereotype, in the Greek stereotype is that men who are too attracted to women are more girly.
18:20 Kate Lister? Yes, I remember that now. Yes. Go explain that one in the Greek logic. How do they join those dots up? But if you, if you're too attracted to women, then you're effectively a big girl yourself.
18:31 Speaker 04 Yeah. Well, there's a really fundamental principle in Greek thinking, both in philosophy and also in ordinary, everyday life, which is that like is attracted to like. Things are attracted to things that are like themselves. So if you're attracted to women, that means you're girly.
18:44 Kate Lister? You're girly. Yeah.
18:46 Speaker 04 That's the bottom line. That's the basic principle.
18:48 Kate Lister? And if you spend too much time in the company of women, you're going to become soft and luxuriant and use bubble bath and moisturizer and just generally. And you can actually see echoes of that in this kind of hyper masculine men's rights podcasting manosphere at the moment, can't you? Is that it's all bros, bros, bros, and we don't spend time with girls because they're.
19:09 Speaker 04 Because they're icky.
19:10 Kate Lister? I'm overly, yeah, I'm overly simplifying.
19:12 Speaker 04 Oh, no, you can't oversimplify.
19:15 Kate Lister? So Paris is a metrosexual, but Helen seems to really, really like him. And he's favored by Aphrodite and they have a war. And I think the thing that people forget about the Trojan War is it's 10 years. It's not just like people show up in boats and have a bit of a skirmish and then it's all over. 10 years.
19:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. Now, what you just described, a bit of a skirmish and all of that, that might be what happened historically. But this is legend. This is, you know, legend takes an event from the past and makes it into something much greater, grander, more glorious. So, so it takes longer. The warriors are greater. They keep talking about how the poet who is composing this many hundreds of years later than they imagined time, they often say, basically, men back then were greater. We're just.
20:04 Kate Lister? They always say that, don't they? Every, no matter how far back you go, there's always this, look, once upon a time when things were better, when men were more manly, like the, there'll be things scratched on cave walls about how it was better in the olden days.
20:17 Speaker 04 Exactly. So it belongs to a heroic era, which is in fact mythological, you know, it's not.
20:23 Kate Lister? Yeah.
20:24 Speaker 04 Even if there are some historical origins. And to be honest, I don't really care if it's historical personally.
20:29 Kate Lister? Can I, well, this seems like a good place to ask the question, though. Is, is there any truth to the fact that there was a Trojan War? Where is Troy? Is there any historical evidence to any of this?
20:41 Speaker 04 Well, there is a place. Troy is a place.
20:45 Kate Lister? Okay.
20:45 Speaker 04 And it was discovered by someone who was a true believer, like, yeah, we can use Homer to find history. And as you can imagine, there's been a ton of archaeology done there.
20:54 Kate Lister? Wow, it's a real place.
20:56 Speaker 04 It's a real place.
20:57 Kate Lister? When did they find it? And it was found by a Troy fan. That must have been a moment. That must have been like when we discovered Richard III in a car park and it was a Richard III fan who did it.
21:07 Speaker 04 Yes, kind of like that. Yes, only this guy is like a professional, professional archaeologist. And so they've been digging around and people have been nagging about it. And they found like some spectacular jewelry, which have become, has become known as Helen's jewelry.
21:22 Kate Lister? Oh, wow.
21:23 Speaker 04 But that's all kind of made up.
21:25 Kate Lister? Yeah, okay.
21:26 Speaker 04 But the, my point is that it's more like you said just now, we don't know what really happened. There may have been some people who kind of had similar names or no doubt somebody stole somebody's wife because that happens all the time in myth and history.
21:39 Kate Lister? Yeah.
21:39 Speaker 04 And then they, no doubt, they fought about it. Who knows for how long? But over the course of hundreds of years, this was built up by the epic storytelling tradition into something much greater and grander.
21:52 Kate Lister? Yeah.
21:53 Speaker 04 And that's what we have.
21:54 Kate Lister? A ten year war is like, because Troy is a city, like, could you even besiege a city for 10 years? I know it's legend. I know it's a story, but just.
22:05 Speaker 04 Okay. Yeah. So I think the historical thing is a bit of a distraction. I mean, that's partly just because I'm not, I won't even say this, I'm not that interested in history, but.
22:14 Kate Lister? Oh, my God. Right. Cover your ears, dear listeners. No, that's fine. So it's, it's a real place, but probably not the place where there was a 10 year war because the daughter of a god and a demi goddess was stolen by a metrosexual who was loved by the goddess of love. Probably not that.
22:31 Speaker 04 It's kind of a shame, isn't it? But probably not.
22:33 Kate Lister? It is a shame. So I don't know if people really know how the story of Helen even ends. They might know about the war. They might know about the Trojans. They'll probably know about the Trojan horse. They'll know the big names Achilles, Hector, Achilles lover Patroclus, who's edited out of the movies. But how does it finish? How does the war end? What happens to Helen at the end of the story?
22:58 Speaker 04 Good question. Well, first off, there's a really interesting story regarding Helen and the Trojan War, which actually comes from the Odyssey. No doubt it will not be in this movie, but the story is that the Trojan horse was already inside the walls of Troy and they, you know how the men are supposed to like leap out in the middle of the night, right?
23:15 Kate Lister? Yep.
23:16 Speaker 04 And surprise the city.
23:17 Kate Lister? Yep.
23:18 Speaker 04 And so they're still in there and they're napping or whatever and waiting to jump out and Helen appears and walks around the horse and she makes seductive voices of all the men's wives back home and they all want to jump out of the horse.
23:35 Kate Lister? Awesome neat trick.
23:36 Speaker 04 Isn't it? She has this like magical superpower of seductiveness and among the Greeks, it's not just about how you look, it's also about your voice and how you present yourself. So there's a lot that associates the voice, singing, speaking with seduction.
23:52 Kate Lister? Wow.
23:53 Speaker 04 And because she's got this, these magical powers of seduction, she impersonates the spouses of the men and they all want to get, jump out and reveal themselves, which would ruin the whole plan.
24:04 Kate Lister? She's like a siren.
24:06 Speaker 04 Yes, exactly. Same idea. And the only one who resists is a disuse and a disuse shuts the others up.
24:14 Kate Lister? Wow, that, that really is superpowers. If that, that's like she's some kind of just seduction goddess who just knows exactly what to say.
24:24 Speaker 04 Exactly.
24:24 Kate Lister? Right. Oh, that casts her in rather a different, she's not just a pretty face.
24:28 Speaker 04 Oh, no. There's another story which I would connect with that, which is also in the Odyssey in the same scene, really. The scene I just described is a story told by somebody at a dinner party. And at the party, everybody is weeping and lamenting because the Trojan War was so terrible and they have lost a disuse, nobody knows where he is. And the hosts are Helen and Menelaus. It's at their place back in Sparta. So you asked about the ending. Well, the most common ending is she goes back to Sparta with him. So everybody's crying.
25:01 Speaker 04 And she just, she gets a magic potion and sticks it in the drink, which takes away their cares. So, so it's sort of like she put, I don't know, heroin in the wine.
25:09 Kate Lister? My god, she's drugging people as well.
25:13 Speaker 04 Yes.
25:13 Kate Lister? Wow, okay Helen, some questionable ethics going on here.
25:19 Speaker 04 So the drug is another example of her superpowers, you know, it's an emblem of her beauty that she can manipulate men however she wants and take away their negative feelings.
25:27 Kate Lister? Is that how she ends up back with Menelaus? Because I'd imagine like you would need some couples therapy for that, possibly Dr. Dr. Una would need to be involved. There would be like, like the idea that after 10 years of bloodshed and Odysseus has gone missing and Achilles is dead and Hector's dead and Paris is dead, like they're all dead. And then Helen's just gonna go back to Sparta with Menelaus and be like, yeah, sorry, sorry about that. We'll just pick up where we left. Anyone want, anyone fancy dinner? Anyone want something to eat? Like, is, the only way that that makes sense again is if she has this power that she's so beautiful that everybody just kind of goes, yeah, yeah, oh Helen, you're such a sort.
26:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, and actually how she ends up going back home is another good story. What happens at the fall of Troy is, you know, that everything's being sacked and burned and destroyed. And Menelaus sees her and he's really, really angry, you know, obviously. And he lifts up his sword to kill her. He's gonna take revenge. And she just kind of looks at him.
26:32 Kate Lister? Oh, wow Helen, oh my god. She is trouble.
26:37 Speaker 04 He literally drops his sword. You see this in pictures, there are vase paintings.
26:43 Kate Lister? Yeah.
26:43 Speaker 04 He literally drops his sword when he sees her and says to the guys, yeah, I'll punish her later. We'll take her home and punish her there.
26:53 Kate Lister? Oh, wow.
26:59 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Helen and Ruby after this short break.
27:12 Speaker 05 In a world where swords were sharp.
27:14 Speaker 06 And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians.
27:20 Speaker 05 Me, Matt Lewis.
27:21 Speaker 06 And me, Dr Eleanor Yanaga. Dive headfirst into the mud, blood and very strange customs of the Middle Ages.
27:29 Speaker 05 So for plagues, crusades and Viking raids and plenty of other things that don't rhyme. Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.
27:53 Kate Lister? What a mad, mad story. So another question then is, who wrote this? So like, I know that there's Homer, but was he the first? Did it exist in a tradition before him? Do we have any of that kind of evidence?
28:08 Speaker 04 Well, I was talking about how it probably, for all I know, started by like a cattle raid or some little, small thing, you know, involving a woman. And over hundreds and hundreds of years, that was built up into an epic, supposedly glorious narrative. Right? So the mechanism for that is oral poetics where it's all done orally. There's no writing. So for hundreds of years, the poets are passing the song. It's like a chanted song down from one to the other over the years and taking turns and embellishing it and expanding it and refining it. And there's lots and lots of controversy as to whether there was like one big person who kind of put it all together at the end, who we would call Homer.
28:52 Speaker 04 Or how it quite got to be that way, we don't really know. But the bottom line is it's not the product of a single author. It's the product of a long tradition.
29:00 Kate Lister? Yeah, like a kind of retellings, redrafts, like the King Arthur legend, I suppose. It's just it keeps getting retold and then eventually somebody with a big name writes it down.
29:09 Speaker 04 Exactly, exactly. And then even if Homer didn't exist, they had to invent him, you know, to be.
29:13 Kate Lister? Just about to ask you that, did he exist? Because we were interviewing Professor Helen King and she dropped a bombshell, which was that Hippocrates didn't write the stuff that we attribute to him, probably. It's like, it's like a brand name that just goes out of different people taking the name Hippocrates and writing stuff. Is Homer like that? Did he exist or is he a brand?
29:34 Speaker 04 Um, he became a brand for sure.
29:36 Kate Lister? Became a brand.
29:37 Speaker 04 We don't know if he existed in the sense that there could have been one poet who was extra specially important in putting it all together.
29:44 Kate Lister? Yeah.
29:45 Speaker 04 Um, just at the point where it got written down and stabilized. But we really don't know, and he is kind of a legendary figure. The Greeks didn't have the kind of views that we do about what counts as faking.
29:57 Kate Lister? No, no, they didn't. Plagiarism was very fast and loose.
30:01 Speaker 04 Yes, so you might stick your name Hippocrates on. Another example is Plato, the philosopher. We have a whole bunch of letters that were supposedly written by Plato, and a lot of them probably weren't. But it doesn't mean that people were trying to fake themselves out and pretend to be Plato.
30:16 Kate Lister? Yeah, yeah.
30:16 Speaker 04 It's more like branding, as you say. That's a good way to put it.
30:20 Kate Lister? Yeah, yeah, okay. All right, so Homer writes this stuff down. And how important would you say is Helen of Troy? Because like in the actual epic narratives of Troy, and then of course, the Odyssey that follows it, is she's not a major character in it, but it all circles around her.
30:42 Speaker 04 Yes, it all circles around her. She's the most prominent character and the female character in the Iliad by quite a lot.
30:49 Kate Lister? Yeah.
30:50 Speaker 04 She's also shows up in so many works of Greek literature.
30:56 Kate Lister? Does she?
30:56 Speaker 04 All different kinds, tragedy, oratory, she's mentioned in philosophy, all over the place, which is why I was able to, I mean, I wrote a book about Helen of Troy in Greek myth, and it doesn't even deal with all the texts.
31:08 Kate Lister? Wow.
31:09 Speaker 04 So she's kind of a pervasive presence. And she's got this bottom line superhero power. She's the most beautiful woman. And that.
31:16 Kate Lister? Hot.
31:16 Speaker 04 You know, that, yeah, and that sticks. But from every other point of view, especially ethically, they treat her in so many different ways. Like, was it her fault? Was it not her fault?
31:26 Kate Lister? Yeah.
31:27 Speaker 04 Was she seduced? Or did she seduce him? Or, you know, they love to cast judgment, but they also love to defend her in really weird ways, like saying, oh, it's not her fault because Aphrodite made her do it.
31:40 Kate Lister? I'm gonna try that one the next time I get pulled over for a speeding ticket. It wasn't me, it was Aphrodite. See how that sticks.
31:47 Speaker 04 Exactly, and Greeks wouldn't go for that either. So, but I always take it back to the supreme beauty. It's like, why do you want to defend her so badly? Because, you know.
31:57 Kate Lister? Because she's beautiful and because we don't. It's, it's interesting, I'm just drawing some parallels in like the past couple of weeks as we're recording, it's been, it was, it would have been Marilyn Monroe's 100th birthday and I think she's got to be one of the most beautiful women that, that's ever walked the earth and she certainly has that cult following around her and Helen was supposed to be even more beautiful than that, but people feel very attracted to the character of Marilyn and they never want to hear anything bad about her and they want to defend her no matter what she's done and it's that kind of thing again, isn't it, is because somebody looks a certain way and is beautiful, we want, we are attracted to that, endlessly attracted to that.
32:38 Speaker 04 Yes, and then that, that attraction and that desire makes them who they are because in a literal sense, nobody's the most beautiful woman in the world, but to be Helen, it is very much like Marilyn, she's a good parallel because she's iconic, she becomes to symbolize a certain kind of beauty and seductiveness and attraction for a particular time or place, namely 1950s US, so she takes on like a greater significance than any actual single mortal woman would ever have and Helen's a lot like that, I have a whole bit in my second book where I talk about her being a movie star, she's like a movie star, she's like Marilyn.
33:12 Kate Lister? Oh, that makes perfect sense and like she's popping up all over Greek culture and that same kind of iconic word, like she's a byword for beauty and sexuality and.
33:22 Speaker 04 Yes.
33:23 Kate Lister? She must have presented quite a conundrum to the Greeks because on one hand, they, they have an idea that, that the women just really can't help themselves, they're not very bright and that they can't control their passions and they're really horny, so of course she's going to run off, she's an idiot, but also she is like the thing that they fear because that level of attraction to someone makes you quite weak, like, this isn't even dealing with myth and legend, like we all know what it's like when you really, really, really fancy someone and you feel yourself being a complete twit, like you're acting like an idiot and you're doing stuff that it's, that you look back on, you're like, oh, it's so embarrassing that like I bombarded them with text messages, that's a weakness and that is something to be quite feared, I think.
34:05 Speaker 04 Absolutely, and that's exactly right. Helen stands for what it is about women that's terrifying to men.
34:11 Kate Lister? Yeah.
34:12 Speaker 04 And part of what's terrifying is that they want them and they need them. And you can go really basic and say they need them to reproduce.
34:18 Kate Lister? Yes.
34:19 Speaker 04 But you can't just ditch them.
34:21 Kate Lister? Let's talk about Helen in film then, because this is, that's a tough role to fill. Because the one thing everyone knows about Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. Like, so how, and it doesn't really matter what woman you get to play her is, like you said, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Like, there's gonna be somebody that doesn't think that's the most beautiful woman. So how do you even, who first played the most beautiful woman in the world on film? Who first played Helen?
34:48 Speaker 04 Well, I don't know, because it goes back really early, like this German epic silent movies.
34:53 Kate Lister? Of course, yeah.
34:54 Speaker 04 And I don't, I can't remember the name of the person who played Helen. But again, in my second Helen book, I have a whole bunch of stuff about casting. How do you cast? How do you choose? Who's to play the most beautiful woman in the world? Because we all pay lip service to the fact that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But secretly, deep down, people have opinions.
35:13 Kate Lister? Yes, they do.
35:14 Speaker 04 You know, I think A is more beautiful than B and, you know. So there's this constant tension in how you choose to cast her. And my argument is that she should be a great movie star, because a great movie star would bring that charisma, which is part of what Helen is.
35:28 Kate Lister? She's got the riz, as the kids would say.
35:30 Speaker 04 She's got the riz, yeah. I started thinking about Helen in the movies when I saw the movie Troy. Do you remember the movie Troy?
35:37 Kate Lister? Oh, I remember it very well. I quite like Brad Pitt's legs. I do remember that. I do know what's weird about that. When that film came out, I remember that got panned by critics and stuff. And now that there is a new version of it coming out, there's this weird narrative that's emerged about, oh, look how good this film was. It wasn't that good.
35:56 Speaker 04 No, it was, it was interesting. And I loved Brad Pitt's Achilles. I loved for the same reason I gave just now. He has the charisma. He's got the movie star glamour. And they film him that way, and that that's appropriate to a hero.
36:09 Kate Lister? Yep.
36:09 Speaker 04 So I liked that.
36:11 Kate Lister? I thought Orlando Bloom was a good Paris, like, very good looking, slightly feminine looking, not quite as heroic as his older brother. Thought he was quite good.
36:20 Speaker 04 Yes, I mean, I don't get it with Orlando Bloom. I don't like him at all, but I think he appeals to, like, the young, the very young.
36:27 Kate Lister? Okay, right, okay.
36:29 Speaker 04 But Helen was Diane Kruger.
36:31 Kate Lister? Yeah.
36:32 Speaker 04 And that made me so mad. That's when I started researching Helen.
36:35 Kate Lister? Tell me why you were mad, Ruby. Why did that make you mad?
36:39 Speaker 04 Because she's kind of, and she's written this way. It's not the actress's fault. But she's written as passive and weepy and mopey.
36:48 Kate Lister? Yes.
36:49 Speaker 04 And that's not sexy.
36:52 Kate Lister? That's a very good point. She isn't, she isn't very sexy in that film. She just sort of walks around just pouting a lot.
37:00 Speaker 04 Exactly. And looking mopey and they make up this whole thing about how she is, she, she's in this unwanted marriage. It was an arranged marriage, blah, blah, blah.
37:09 Kate Lister? Blah, blah, blah.
37:09 Speaker 04 Which actually in Greek sources isn't true. In some Greek sources, she chooses Metalas herself. Just makes a bad choice.
37:15 Kate Lister? Right.
37:16 Speaker 04 So they just made her into this kind of pathetic dish rag. And as I mentioned earlier, I always have thought of Helen through the lens of power, of female power.
37:23 Kate Lister? You're right. She wasn't very powerful. You're absolutely right. She was a bit wet behind the ears, to be completely honest.
37:29 Speaker 04 Very completely, yeah. So I didn't like that. So I started writing about how this did not fit into my idea of what Helen was like in the ancient world. And I think when I first wrote about it, I was a bit naive about how much of that is down to the actress and the casting, but most of it is down to the script and the director.
37:45 Kate Lister? Yes, yes. I do remember hearing some criticism of the film at the time, which said that the, the dialogue was quite stilted for everybody.
37:53 Speaker 04 A lot of fun was made of the accents, too. They were trying to homogenize the accents.
37:59 Kate Lister? And they completely removed Achilles's lover Patroclus and turned him into his cousin?
38:05 Speaker 04 Yes, this is a good example of how myth is really, really fluid.
38:09 Kate Lister? Okay.
38:10 Speaker 04 At that time, I researched it just to see, you know? And there is a very, very obscure mythological variant where he is his cousin.
38:18 Kate Lister? Oh, my God. Right. Okay, I stand corrected. I've been carrying this grudge for 20 years.
38:24 Speaker 04 No, you can you can carry it. I mean, it's not that it's it's not whether it's right or wrong. It's the choices that they make.
38:29 Kate Lister? Yes.
38:30 Speaker 04 Mythology is so fluid. And the Greeks made stuff up. Lots of their versions, they
38:35 Kate Lister? Good point, yeah.
38:35 Speaker 04 They vary. They vary. For you, writing a new play, you can make the character different.
38:39 Kate Lister? Absolutely.
38:40 Speaker 04 It's not that it's a mistake of what people like to think of as authenticity. It's not about that. It's about what choices do you make with the materials that are available to you?
38:49 Kate Lister? I would just have liked to have seen them be a little bit braver, I think. I would like to see
38:53 Speaker 04 You're not the only one.
38:54 Kate Lister? Yeah. I was just like, come on, guys, if we're gonna do it, if we've got Brad Pitt in a skirt, let's just, let's go the full hog here. Let's not hold back. Which I guess brings me to the topic of the new film that is about to come out. And the absolute hoo-ha that was created by the very idea of Helen, who's not real anyway, and was half a god and born of an egg, or whatever the hell it was, was is being played by a black woman.
39:21 Speaker 04 Yes, and we can thank especially Elon Musk, that well-known expert in Greek mythology and movies.
39:29 Kate Lister? Wasn't it amazing just how many classic professors popped up on social media when that was announced? Like, my God, I had no idea. There were so many experts out there. They're not experts, they're idiots. As an actual professor of this stuff, what is your take on Lepita Nyong'o playing Helen?
39:47 Speaker 04 I think it's super interesting. When I was writing about Helen in film and television, they were all basically blonde and blue-eyed or maybe green eyes and very, you know, stereotypical. Except, this is interesting, except for two that were in TV shows, not movies. Uh, TV shows can, back in the day, not, I mean, everything's changed now, but I'm talking about an episode of Star Trek and an episode of Xena Warrior Princess, both of which have Helen as a character, and they both used mixed-race actors.
40:18 Kate Lister? Okay.
40:19 Speaker 04 With dark hair. Television is a much cheaper medium. The stakes are lower. You can take more risks. And, you know, the Hollywood machine tends to encourage conformity.
40:30 Kate Lister? Hmm.
40:31 Speaker 04 So I thought, I, back when I was writing this stuff, I was really interested in that. The racial makeup of these two actors being different from the others. Diane Kruger, by the way, is German. And my theory of that is the director of Troy is German, and that's his ideal beauty.
40:47 Kate Lister? Interesting.
40:48 Speaker 04 Very tautonic, blonde, Germanic looking, because she is German. Anyway, these two, the one in Star Trek. People often ask me, like, who's your favorite Helen? I have a couple, and one of them is the one in Star Trek. Her name is Franz Wen, and she's half French and half Vietnamese. And I love that she's an evil Helen.
41:08 Kate Lister? An evil Helen now then.
41:11 Speaker 04 I like the evil Helens, and she also has a superpower. If a man touches her tears, he has to fall in love with her magically.
41:21 Kate Lister? That's helpful.
41:23 Speaker 04 Yeah.
41:23 Kate Lister? That's a good power.
41:25 Speaker 04 That's a, and that's kind of how I think of Helen. And she also has amazing clothes. And we haven't talked about this, but when you get on the topic of how do you represent female beauty?
41:35 Kate Lister? Yeah.
41:36 Speaker 04 A lot of it is the clothes.
41:37 Kate Lister? Of course.
41:38 Speaker 04 I don't think it really matters what you look like. It's how you, you know, dress to kill.
41:42 Kate Lister? Yeah.
41:43 Speaker 04 And, and this, she actually has the most costumes of any Star Trek female character.
41:48 Kate Lister? I'm gonna look her up. Actually, my producers just sent me a picture of her. Oh, hello. Oh, she looks.
41:55 Speaker 04 Of Troyus?
41:56 Kate Lister? Woo. Can, she, that is a hot, hot lady. I love the silver bikini wear. Oh, no, okay, I'm gonna watch that later. Okay, she's a.
42:07 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
42:07 Kate Lister? She's a badass.
42:13 Speaker 04 I'll be back with Helen and Ruby after this short break.
42:25 Speaker 05 In a world where swords were sharp.
42:28 Speaker 06 And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians.
42:33 Speaker 05 Me, Matt Lewis.
42:35 Speaker 06 And me, Dr Eleanor Yanaga. Dive headfirst into the mud, blood and very strange customs of the Middle Ages.
42:42 Speaker 05 So for plagues, crusades and Viking raids and plenty of other things that don't rhyme. Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.
43:06 Kate Lister? What's in the actual sources about what Helen looks like? Is there anything at all? Does it say she's wearing a silver bikini on a boat or spaceship?
43:13 Speaker 04 Nothing, rightly. I mean, she does become a goddess in the end when she does not. She doesn't die, she becomes a goddess. The Greek sources present her. I mean, I like to say the most beautiful woman is the one with the best accessories.
43:26 Kate Lister? I love that.
43:28 Speaker 04 There are, and there's lots of Greek illustrations of beautiful mythological women. And they tend to kind of look the same because there are certain tokens that you identify. And one is lots of jewellery.
43:37 Kate Lister? Right, okay. So in Greek art, that's how we are depicting a beautiful woman is with the jewellery.
43:42 Speaker 04 Jewellery, the clothes.
43:43 Kate Lister? Okay.
43:44 Speaker 04 It's kind of like in a cartoon, you know? If we look at cartoons, you don't expect a literal representation, but there are certain things like big boobs that tell you.
43:50 Kate Lister? Yes.
43:51 Speaker 04 This person's supposed to be hot, you know?
43:53 Kate Lister? Yep.
43:53 Speaker 04 So, and she has golden hair maybe, but it's a colour word that's used for gods and for heroes. It's kind of like lighter coloured hair. And yeah, so again, that's kind of symbolic. It's like most Greeks were dark haired.
44:09 Kate Lister? Yeah, but if you're a god, you've got this golden, bronzy type of a look going on. But Achilles is described like that too, is he? Or am I just thinking of Brad Pitt?
44:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, so that's kind of part of the, part of the tradition. But since there's no real person called Helen.
44:25 Kate Lister? No.
44:25 Speaker 04 You know, when I was working on it, people would write to me with questions like, how tall was she really?
44:31 Kate Lister? Did you answer honestly? Did you just write back and just go about five foot four, according to our research?
44:36 Speaker 04 Well, I'm always in the business of trying to separate out mythology from people's desire for everything to be a fact.
44:42 Kate Lister? Yes.
44:43 Speaker 04 I mean, it's a lot more interesting if it's not a fact.
44:46 Kate Lister? I think so.
44:46 Speaker 04 You can make her any size you want.
44:48 Kate Lister? Because it's not a fact is we have limitless scope to play with it. And I personally am very much looking forward to seeing what Lepita Nyong'o does with the character of Helen. Because if there's one thing, that actress has got its presence. Like she can command. She's got the riz, right? She can command a screen and all eyes are on her. So I, I think that she's gonna really bring it. And I'd like to see Helen be confident. I'd like to see her be aware of her power. I would like to see her have a bit more agency. And now you've mentioned it, I might like to see a bit of, a bit of bad Helen, a little bit.
45:26 Speaker 04 Yeah.
45:27 Kate Lister? What about you?
45:27 Speaker 04 She should be badass.
45:28 Kate Lister? What are you hoping for in this? I assume you're gonna go and see it, the film?
45:32 Speaker 04 Tickets for the opening night in Seventy Millimeter.
45:36 Kate Lister? What, what are you hoping for from Helen?
45:39 Speaker 04 You basically just described it.
45:41 Kate Lister? Yeah, a bit of attitude.
45:43 Speaker 04 Attitude, good costumes, really important.
45:46 Kate Lister? Yeah, good accessories. We know that now.
45:48 Speaker 04 Exactly. The kind of costuming and accessories and makeup that make you say, she's a badass bitch. That's what I want. The other thing that's interesting about her is she's also playing Clytemnestra.
45:59 Kate Lister? I didn't know that.
46:01 Speaker 04 Allegedly, yeah. And Clytemnestra is her sister.
46:04 Kate Lister? Right.
46:05 Speaker 04 Her half-sister.
46:06 Kate Lister? Lepita Nyong'o is playing both parts?
46:08 Speaker 04 Yep.
46:09 Kate Lister? Okay, this is interesting. Why do you think they've done that?
46:13 Speaker 04 I don't know. I think it's a really interesting choice.
46:17 Speaker 04 It reminds me of, there's an old, old Odyssey movie in which Penelope and Cersei, I think it is, or Calypso, Cersei are played by the same person. The idea being that, you know, what is it that's drawing him?
46:32 Speaker 04 And it kind of, it gives you an interplay between the two characters. It tells you that Penelope has semi-divine specialness that's just expressed through the casting. So there's a number of possibilities. It depends how they do it. But in Greek literature, especially in Ascle's in the Orystea, the Helen and Clytemnestra are represented as this pair, like this duo of bad women.
46:54 Kate Lister? Interesting.
46:55 Speaker 04 Two ways to be a bad woman. One is to be too quote unquote masculine, like Madame Nester, she picks up her axe and lobs her husband off. The other way is to be too feminine, like Helen, too much of a girl, too seducible. So they're kind of two sides of the coin of bad woman-ness, which the Greeks are so obsessed with.
47:14 Kate Lister? I wonder if that's what they're gonna do then.
47:16 Speaker 04 Well, that would be super interesting to make that suggestion that there's, you know, there's this continuum of all the different ways of being a bad woman. And, and because they're sisters, they, and one is half divine and the other isn't, they convey different facets of that, of the ways of being a bad woman.
47:34 Kate Lister? So as a final question then, why do you think the legacy of Helen endures the way it has? Because I wouldn't have thought, I mean, obviously everyone knows about her and she's kind of iconic, but I mean, the fuss that was kicked up about the idea of her not being played by a white Germanic woman, it's just like, she obviously still is in cultural currency and means different things to different people. Why do you think the legacy of Helen endures the way it does?
47:59 Speaker 04 That's a tough one, but I think it's because she just speaks to something so fundamental and basic. On the one hand, the desire that people have for beauty and the most beautiful woman, and, you know, which is, which is a placeholder for their desire for sex, their desire for babies, the, you know, all that stuff. And what goes along with that, which is fear, the fear of the power of female beauty.
48:24 Kate Lister? Yeah.
48:25 Speaker 04 And one way that I'm gonna say men, all the people online, I don't know, probably some of them are women, but they kind of wanna control that by saying, he's like, I know what it should be like, I know what authenticity is.
48:36 Kate Lister? That's a good point.
48:38 Speaker 04 And these are people who don't know anything about it, really, but it's a way of kind of asserting their control over the narrative to, to start talking about what she should be like. Again, when I was researching my second book, I read a lot of user comments and responses. And I saw how people, they developed their own idea of authenticity and then they would judge the film by that, even if it was nothing to do with the ancient story. It's like, they think it should be this way. And so they will judge it and say it's good or bad, depending on that. So it's a form of self-defense.
49:06 Kate Lister? I love that. It's a form of control. I hadn't even thought about that. Oh, Ruby, you have been wonderful to talk to. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
49:17 Speaker 04 Well, honestly, probably the best place is my Wikipedia page.
49:20 Kate Lister? Yeah, go and go and read Ruby's Wikipedia page. Are you on social media at all?
49:24 Speaker 04 I used to be on Facebook, but not, I'm still there. I'm on Facebook, but I don't use it very much anymore since it went kind of crappy.
49:30 Kate Lister? Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. In that case, read Ruby's books and go to her Wikipedia page. I very much hope that you enjoy the film. I hope that it is, I hope it rocks your world and is everything that you're hoping for.
49:42 Speaker 04 Thank you. Fingers crossed.
49:44 Kate Lister? Fingers crossed. Thank you so much for coming along. You've been fantastic.
49:49 Speaker 04 Thanks for inviting me.
49:52 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Ruby for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we have got episodes on sex work in Soviet Russia and the truth about Pablo Picasso, all coming your way. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer is Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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