BONUS RE-AIR Conversations: The Missing Women of Euripides, Fragments w/ Dr Melissa Funke

Liv speaks with Dr Melissa Funke about gender and the women in Euripides' fragmentary works. Find more from Melissa at the Peopling the Past https://peoplingthepast.com/ project. 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. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here: mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liv Albert?

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

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• 1:53Liv Albert?

  Hi, hello, welcome. This is Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and I am your host, Liv. And today, today I'm here with another conversation episode in our ongoing series on Euripides, every correct person's favorite playwright.

• 2:15Liv Albert?

  And fortunately, you know, if I was going to talk about Euripides for an entire month's worth of episodes, I was also going to speak with all of the Euripides obsessed, I mean, maybe I'm projecting, but Euripides obsessed scholars that I could find. And fortunately, a couple of them are returning guests, people that you have heard before. And I am very excited to say that today's episode is one of those. I spoke with Dr. Melissa Funky, who is just a joyfully lovely person. She and I have met a couple of times at different events. And it's just, oh, my gosh, Melissa is so much fun. You might remember her from

• 2:53Liv Albert?

  our episode last year on Phreni, the, oh, my, the incredible Heterai from ancient Athens, who basically made an entire epic career for herself, including like ridiculously long lasting fame, you know, like 2,500 years of long lasting fame. And Melissa wrote a book about Phreni back then, and so came on the show. But today, today, I actually have a conversation with Melissa that has been in the works forever. Like, I think probably since she and I met in person, which was like a good year and a half ago now. Because some point, Melissa mentioned how she studies or did her dissertation or something.

• 3:37Liv Albert?

  I'm sure she's going to say it in the episode, and I should have reminded myself before recording this intro, but here we are. Melissa extensively studied the Euripides fragments that survive. Now, I'm not talking about those new ones that were in the news recently, but we are working on a conversation regarding those as well. But no, these are the Euripides fragments that have been known for quite some time now. When it comes to Euripides, we have not only more plays than any of the other tragedians, but also more fragments, lots of fragments, and some I knew about. There are some incredible fragments of more

• 4:16Liv Albert?

  plays that he did, featuring and starring these incredible female characters, but also, oh, my, there was just- There was so much. Melissa and I talked about so many of those fragments, what we do and don't know about those missing pieces and the stories that were attached to them. We had so much fun. Just, it's so much more about Euripides. And these are the types of things that are really hard for me to cover as narrative episodes because they are so missing and piecemeal and fragmentary. And so to have Melissa come on and tell us all about them is just such a joy.

• 5:08Liv Albert?

  Conversations: The Missing Women of Euripides. Fragments with Dr. Melissa Funky.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  So why don't we just start from like kind of an overview of like the fragments where they are, how they're preserved, how many there are, that kind of thing. Okay.

• 5:38Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  And I will fully admit that I have a bunch of crib notes right here just to help myself remember all of these details. Okay, so Euripides, we have 18 plays, right?

• 5:50Liv Albert?

  Lucky.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  That we attribute to him. There's also the risus. We're not going to talk about the risus because it's very obviously not Euripidean. It's from the 4th century and that's, that's kind of the scholarly consensus at the moment. But those are the plays we have, right? So some of those survive because they are what we call the select plays. So those are the ones that were chosen in Alexandria and Byzantium, or not Byzantium, Constantinople, but by Byzantine scholars, just to be a little bit confusing, as the kind of canonical plays, right? So when we talk about canon formation, Euripides is the best example because his canon kind of condensed, it contracted, and then it expanded again because there was a discovery of a manuscript, right?

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Of what we call the alphabetical plays, which are a remarkable collection of plays that, that has sort of opened up what we think of now in 2024 as the Euripidean canon. So we'll kind of start there. So Euripides is already one of those authors in the ancient world who has gone through that process of intentional selection, but then felicity, right? Where you're like, boom, okay, now we have all these extra plays. How exciting is this? And what we deal with and what we think of as the canon now is affected by pure luck, right?

• 7:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  And so this is what I love about the ancient canon is that a good chunk of it is selection. And we always have to think about the process of selection when we think about these texts. But a good chunk of it is also, hey, we stumbled upon this, not stumbled upon it. We found it by luck, or we found it because we were doing an archaeological dig and someone pointed us to a place where we would find a bunch of papyri. But this combo, right, of again, intention and felicity is what brings us his plays. So we have those plays. But we know the pseuda, which is this Byzantine encyclopedia, tells us that he wrote about 90, right?

• 7:42Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  And so all of our ancient playwrights, you know, Aeschylus, Sophocles, they wrote tons of plays that we just don't have, or we just have titles, this and that. Now, for Euripides, though, the great thing is that we have over a thousand fragments of his plays.

• 7:59Liv Albert?

  Is it that many?

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Yes, it's amazing. And we have the most of him, too.

• 8:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, way more than Sophocles and Aeschylus. And I'm sorry, I know that you love Euripides the most. So I'm going to apologize to everyone listening who loves Aeschylus and Sophocles. But I also love Euripides the most.

• 8:17Liv Albert?

  This is Euripides's series. We don't need to apologize to those guys now.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Okay, well, just give him his flowers. That's right. Or more appropriately, his crowns, we should be giving him. Yes. So, so we know he wrote like all of these plays and we're missing a bunch of them. But because of this kind of further process of intention and felicity, we have all of these fragments. So a lot of them are preserved, what they're what we call book fragments. So they're preserved by people like Plutarch or Athenaeus, our wonderful source of fragments for everything. A fellow named Stebius, who in the 5th century CE was writing and compiling a list of advice for his son.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Giant five volume, I think it's five, five or six volumes, right? It takes up like, you know, two feet on a shelf almost. Um, of quotations to give his son advice about sort of how to be a man.

• 9:12Liv Albert?

  Well, thank you to that guy. That must, that must have helped us so much in terms of otherwise lost works.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Massively, massively. Can you imagine though? I mean, it's, it's the premise that therefore his son, but can you imagine your, your dad being like, here are six volumes of quotations about how you should live your life and metaphysics.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  You know, uh, the problems with marriage, right? Like it's, it's really is like a soup to nuts collection.

• 9:42Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Anyways, good old, good old Tobias, good old John of Stobie, uh, collected all of these. And so we have a bunch of those book fragments. The problem with those that they are completely out of context. He doesn't describe what's happening in the play. He doesn't talk about it.

• 9:57Liv Albert?

  Does he give the title?

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Uh, we, we do have the title in the manuscripts to be as, yeah. So that's helpful as well. But with like Plutarch and Athanas, they tend to talk a little bit more about the context within the play. So that's, that's helpful as well. So we have all of those kind of, again, the quotations and those come from sources like Plato. They come actually from Aristophanes quotes, a bunch of these plays. And then we have papyrus fragments. And those are the ones that come from that, that dig, the Grenfell and Hunt, the famous dig, where they found a bunch of menander, a bunch of sappho. And big chunks of Euripidean plays that we didn't have before. So again, it's just, it's pure luck, right? What we get on that front.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  But then there's also the intentional quotation and selection of portions of plays that was happening in antiquity as well. Yeah.

• 10:51Liv Albert?

  I mean, I just love hearing about all of that. I, I feel like, I don't think there's much for us to say at this point on it, but this feels like the right place to mention the new fragments.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 11:02Liv Albert?

  Right? Like, I don't know how much you know, or I don't know how much there is beyond that article, which, of course, I have read obsessively, but it feels like the right time to like, bring up that it still happens now, that we can still find new things.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're not done. We're not done with finding these things. And as long as we have papyri that are still coming to light, that are still being published and edited, we're going to keep finding fragments, which is really exciting.

• 11:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  For me, because I'm a scholar of fragmentary literature, like, I'm always prepared for every argument I've ever made to be completely destroyed, right? By like, one, one unlucky find. In my case, I guess it would be. But yeah, so there's two, apparently up to 80 lines, I think, all together. Fragments of Euripides. One is from a play, Poliitis, which is one of the much more obscure fragmentary plays. I think the one that's most exciting for, especially knowing your interest in women in Euripides, and also for me and my interest in women in Euripides, is from I know. And I know is, is an amazing, it's a, it's a story that Euripides returned to several times, to the character of I know, and the story is connected to her. So she is, she's both a

• 12:11Speaker 02

  mother and a stepmother. So she's, it's, her stories are complicated. She gets married to this fellow Athamas, and she, he's been married before. He has two children by Nephilim, who is like a nymph. And they are Phrixus and Heli. So you might remember Phrixus and Heli from the story of the golden ram, right? So I know tries to kind of get rid of them when she's the stepmother. Then she has her own kids. She goes off, basically goes missing, and Athamas thinks she's gone, and he remarries, and he has two more children. So, sorry, I know also has children. This, you can tell, as I'm telling this story, there's so many threads to it.

• 12:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Anyway, so he has children with, with Nephilim, children with I know, children with this third woman, right? So.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  Ino comes back and she plots against the children of the new woman in favor of her own children. And that's what this fragment seems to be part of that play.

• 13:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  And so Ino is, she's really amazing because she gets to be kind of a wicked stepmother. She gets to be the loving mother, right? But also the deadly mother, which is another Euripidean character that comes up again and again. So she's kind of like, to me, she's almost like a Medea, right?

• 13:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  She's got that level of complexity of characterization of sort of the compellingness of her, of the way she acts and the choices she makes. So this new fragment, I'm really excited to find out what it really contains.

• 13:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Apparently, there's a conference happening at the University of Colorado in Boulder that will happen, I think, this fall, and they're going to introduce the content there. And so one of the main scholars of Euripidean fragments is at Colorado. His name is John Gabeir, and I apologize if I'm not pronouncing his name currently. But so, so I really look forward to seeing what that content is and how it might change our understanding of Ino as a character and how she might have been characterized in that play by Euripides.

• 14:23Liv Albert?

  Well, I'm extra fascinated by that, too, just because of the lack of Ino in other sources. You know, like, we know who her parents are because she's a daughter of Cadmus and Hermoneo, which is why I will remember her always. And we know, you know, that she had siblings and that her family had some issues.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Oh, those girls were trouble.

• 14:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah. You know, there's just, there's been some problems with the sisterhood there. But it's just so interesting because she is kind of the one who is otherwise missing from a lot of stories, right? She is not Agave, who tears her son's head off, and she is not Semelie, who's the mother of Dionysus. She's kind of the other one. And so, yeah, I'd love to know more about what he wrote about her. Oh, God. But I do have to say, the other fragment, for all that, obviously, I am most concerned with how Euripides handles women. The other fragment, which seems to suggest that a child died by drowning in a vat of honey, and his parents are trying to make him come back from the underworld. Is that kind of, did I get that right? I remember when I read it.

• 15:28Liv Albert?

  Because that sounds magnificently weird. So Euripidianly weird.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  So, okay, so this is the thing about the fragments is that I don't think we give enough credit to Euripides for just how weird he is.

• 15:39Liv Albert?

  I mean, I try to, and I'm always, yeah, I'm always surprised still.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  He's, he's just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, I think is how I would explain him as a playwright. No, I think that you'll often hear in conversations around tragedy in particular, oh, well, that can't happen in tragedy. And often that conversation is really shaped by the extant plays. So let's remember that we have VII, VII, 18, right? Like that's, those are our tragedies that exist. And when we're, we're shaping conversation by that, with those limits, we are really misunderstanding, I think, how experimental and funny and odd tragedy could be, and how unsettling it could be. I mean, I think we've kind of, we can embrace the unsettling part.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  But when we look at some of those plays, you're talking about Polydus, which takes place on Crete.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  He's got a lot more plays that are connected to Crete, right? He has a play, it's called Cretans, where Pasiphae, right? The mother of the Minotaur comes out and gives a speech, and you can imagine in a tragedy, this is like an aria, right? It's like a solo, and your actor is like, you know, doing their, sort of their best job in, in performing this, in which Pasiphae defends herself for having slept with the bull, and become impregnated by the bull. And she's blaming Minos, right? She's saying, listen, you're the one who messed up. You're the one who's being punished by the gods. And she goes through this really elaborate rhetorical defense.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  And the rhetoric she uses is the same kind of rhetoric you often see in speeches and courtrooms in Athens. So she says, for example, like, well, It's not like I fell in love with him because he was so good looking. I wasn't, you know, wasn't like he had these beautiful eyes and the color in his cheeks or whatever. But she, it's a really elaborate, fairly lengthy speech that we have preserved from that play.

• 17:35Liv Albert?

  I did not know about this.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that also kind of is leaning into the weirdness. Yes, it is strange for a woman to fall in love with a bull and then sleep with it and then give birth to a half man, half bull. That's weird. And Euripides is basically saying that he's having pacify. I say, this is not normal.

• 17:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  It's very strange, but also in a way that is, I would say, kind of empathetic or really like thoughtful in his characterization of pacifying too.

• 18:03Liv Albert?

  Unsurprising because that's why he is so interesting because I, I mean, that's fascinating. I feel like I have so many names of women characters that he's written that get to do things like that. And just adding her, like, I didn't know that that we had all of that. And I'm sure it's actually probably in the thing that you took the time to send to me once and I haven't read it yet.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  Don't even worry about that.

• 18:28Liv Albert?

  Well, now I'm like, at least I've got it though. I realize in a PDF somewhere, so looking, because that's, I mean, yeah, well, that's more interesting than the, the honey, but the new fragment. So do we think that's from the same play or the, oh, no, you said the Cretans is the one with.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, Cretans is a separate play.

• 18:48Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  But we do, I think when we look at the patterns across the fragments, you can see Euripides doing, returning to themes, returning to places, returning to mythical or mythological cycles.

• 18:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Where he is, you know, he's, he's going, I've got a bit more to explore here or there's a new angle to take and there's more for me to think of. So like I said, he does it with Ino, right? And her stories. He does it with Medea too. Right? And I think that's where you and I have talked about before.

• 19:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  Because Medea is just probably the most compelling character that was put on stage in ancient Greece, at least according to yours truly.

• 19:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah, and me. I will agree with you there.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:29Liv Albert?

  Well, and he does it with Iphigenia too, in a really interesting way, right?

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:34Liv Albert?

  Re- revisiting that story and kind of being like, I'm not done.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, and and we're gonna actually get, again, weird. We're gonna, we're gonna really explore this really strange what-if scenario with her. And so he does, um, it's not quite as many of the what-ifs. Like, he's still working within, I think, fairly established mythological tradition. But with Medea, for example, um, he has her as the wicked stepmother, um, in the play Aegeus. So of course Aegeus is the king of Athens, uh, the father of Theseus. So Theseus has been sort of identified and claimed by Aegeus at this point. And she goes and she basically has Aegeus give him a poison cup. She's trying to kill Theseus. So Medea gets to be the evil stepmother too, right?

• 20:18Speaker 02

  And so you can kind of see this, like, her, um, stepping into this really villainous space, right? That, um, the play Medea is maybe not, she's not as villainous in that play. Uh, but you see her step into it in Aegeus.

• 20:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I also just, I have to say that you are one of my favorite people for saying that she's not as villainous in that play. Because I agree with you, but when people talk about it, you know.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  I mean, the outcome is villainous.

• 20:47Liv Albert?

  But yeah, but you're right, though. She isn't. I just think a lot of the time, people just come at what the outcome is versus the actual character in the play. Because I agree, yeah, she is compelling and you're, you have empathy for her in the play. And so, yeah, having her turn. But of course, then on Theseus, which is my own, you know, dislike for the man. But I, I do love that we know that he wrote her doing that as well.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, there's also, uh, there's the play, um, Pelias, The Daughters of Pelias, right? And that's P E L I A S, I should say, right? So this is the story, it's earlier, sort of in The Adventures of Jason and Medea, you'll find it in the Argonautica. Um, where, where she convinces the, the, pardon me, the daughters of Pelias to tear him apart and boil the parts, right? In the hopes, of course, that he'll regenerate like the ram she had just shown using magic. And of course, she gives them fake herbs, so they're not really magical and they've actually just killed their father. Um, so you, again, you see like- These little, these hints of Medea, the villain, hints of what Medea is capable of.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  And so to me, in the context of those two plays, then you go back to the play Medea, you can really understand that characterization and the richness of what Euripides is doing in the play that exists, when you think about the possibilities that these other two fragmentary plays present to us.

• 22:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Now, when, when you mentioned that story of Medea and the daughters of Pelias, the, I mean, what, what comes to me obviously is Ovid, because I think he, his is probably the only version we have of that in detail that survives. Do, and my favorite thing about when Ovid tells that whole story is that there is a whole scene. I mean, granted, it's, you know, it's used really compellingly for his metamorphosis, so you never know what he was inventing. But there's this scene that's so heavily full of like explicit magic, and I am so obsessed with it. When she's like flying around in a dragon chariot, she's picking up ingredients everywhere. And so it makes me wonder, you know, if we have kind of this connection there, like how much of that did Ovid

• 22:54Liv Albert?

  pull or was inspired by Euripides is, and what we don't have, like, do we know anything about the magic level?

• 23:02Speaker 02

  So it's, it's hard for us to be specific about those kind of details, right?

• 23:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah, fair.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  But Ovid absolutely loves Euripides. I mean, he loves tragedy, but he loves Euripides. And so when you look at-

• 23:14Liv Albert?

  They're both weird dudes.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, he's like, I, he also loves the weirdness and he loves to dig into these kind of more obscure stories, right? He, he wants to show all the sort of randomness. And so when you look at like, for example, his poems, the heroides, which are these series of letters written by the heroines of myth, right? And you actually have characters who appear in the fragmentary plays of Euripides and nowhere else. So it's very clear that he is inspired by the fragmentary plays of Euripides. Yeah, so not, I wish there was more magic for you.

• 23:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  I can't promise you that. There's probably some amazing messenger speeches.

• 23:53Liv Albert?

  I was hoping there was some fragment about, you know, some kind of potion or something, you know?

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:59Liv Albert?

  But you said the heroïdes reference, that was perfect, because now I'm curious, what do we have? Or if anything, I don't even know of Hypsipoly, because I know Euripides wrote a Hypsipoly.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Yes. Okay, so Hypsipoly is our most, it's our most fulsome fragmentary play by Euripides, if that makes sense. We have hundreds of lines from it, largely from a papyrus discovery. So we have a lovely, long papyrus with tons into like hundreds of lines of Hypsipoly. Hypsipoly is another one of those Euripidean plots where you're like, just how do I keep track of this plot? And so you can see, actually, when you look towards like new comedy and those really labyrinthine plots, you can see them kind of coming out of Euripides' plays too. And so the story of Hypsipoly, I'm going to see if I can tell this, so just be patient as I go very slowly through it.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  So Hypsipoly lives on the island of Lemnos, okay, and she's the daughter of the king Thoas. When Jason and the Argonauts get to the island of Lemnos, there are no men there because the women have killed them all. Now, Liv, you probably know this better. Have they killed them all because they had bad breath? They were struck with bad breath?

• 25:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah, there's like something where like they thought the women were smelly.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 25:16Liv Albert?

  And so they killed the men.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  That's right. So there's, I think Aphrodite is involved in this as she must give a curse. Okay.

• 25:36Liv Albert?

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• 29:06Speaker 02

  So that's like the background, right? Jason and the Argonauts show up and all the women are like, well, hello, boys. So Hypesipoli has twins with Jason. But then Jason, of course, as heroes tend to do, takes off. And he takes the twin boys with with him. So off they go. Okay, Hypesipoli meanwhile, right? Has to sneak off the island and she has to get her father off the island too, if I'm remembering correctly. Anyway, so Hypesipoli ends up near Nemea, where she is enslaved and she is the nurse to the young baby of Feltes. So who is the the child of the king and queen there.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Okay, so while she's there, and this is where the action of the play, um, Hypesipoly begins. Um, and her sons have gone off and they're grown. So she is the nurse of this baby. There's some scenes in the play where she's like singing him songs. But she's sad because she can't sing the songs of her homeland, right? It's it's a really, um, uh, sort of insightful moment with an enslaved person. Who can't sing her own songs to this child, but she's sort of motherly to this child, right? As as its nurse. Anyways, so of course, the Seven Against Thieves and all of those armies come through Nemea. At this point too. So we've got like a whole bunch of sort of the multiverse of myth.

• 30:27Liv Albert?

  Crossovers, yeah.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  That's right. Um, and she takes the baby, Hypesipoly takes the baby and Amphiarus, who is a seer, uh, with the Seven Against Thieves, and he takes, or she takes him to a spring. With the baby. While they're there, a snake bites the baby and kills it. So one, this is a side note, not to Euripides' play, but uh, one of the stories that's told for the origins of the Nemean Games is that they're the funeral games for this baby of Feltes.

• 30:58Liv Albert?

  Oh, okay.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  So there's a little funny statue of a weird baby at at Nemea. And that's the baby of Feltes. It's just not a, it's not a cute statue.

• 31:07Liv Albert?

  Well, I mean, they did not do a lot of cute babies.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  They weren't good at it.

• 31:11Liv Albert?

  There's a lot of, babies are tiny humans in really distortedly bizarre ways, so.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 31:17Liv Albert?

  They're always fun.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  He looks like a little Oompa Loompa, in my opinion. Anyways, so, okay. So let's go back to Euripides' play. So the baby has been killed. She's being held responsible for this. In the meantime, there's a recognition of her sons and her. So there's a recognition that she is their mother, that she is not just your typical enslaved person, and this is what saves her from being put to death in the aftermath of the child being killed. So they're reunited, and this is a really common, the recognition plot. It's common in tragedy, but it's really, really, really common in Euripides' plays. And then that's what we see feeding into to Menander's plays and new comedy. All of that recognition, it seems to me, is coming from Euripides' plays largely.

• 31:58Liv Albert?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's this really complex. Play with this, this, you know, very labyrinthine plot. But you have, because we've got these long passages on Papyrus. We have lots of like the, the beautiful songs that she sings preserved. And so we have a lot better sense of Hypesipoly as a character. So one of the things that, you know, when I was just going back through my dissertation on this topic. One of the things that really struck me is that in the plays of Euripides, one of the themes that he explores from a million different angles. Is what happens to women? When they, when they get pregnant in not ideal cir- like circumstances. If that makes sense.

• 32:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  So.

• 32:42Liv Albert?

  Well, we covered Ion very recently on the show. So I feel like that's, that's a great example of that exact thing. Yeah.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. So there's all these plays where he's, he goes to what's called the girl's tragedy. Where a young woman gets sexually assaulted by a god or a hero, gets pregnant, gets in trouble from her father typically. But then I was looking back and I was, I was thinking of these different stories like Hypesipoly, right? Where she's been impregnated by a hero, but she's not married to him. This isn't like an ideal scenario. There's also, what else is there? There is Skirians. When Achilles, Achilles is on the island of Skiros. And he is hidden amongst the girls. He's dressed as a girl and he impregnates the daughter of the king. And then what happens to her and then Achilles? Exactly. There's also Alcmenae, right?

• 33:32Speaker 02

  The mother of Heracles who's impregnated by Zeus. So it's not just that it's all these sort of young girls, the Parthenoid being assaulted, right? It's all kinds of women and it's, it's what happens to women when they are put in a situation or are in a situation that is not the ideal sort of social pregnancy within marriage. And he comes back to this so many times and from so many different angles to think about what can happen to these women.

• 33:59Liv Albert?

  He just really was interested in women being real people. I will just never get over it.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:05Liv Albert?

  It's fascinating. I just feel like he, to me, is this specifically after I read the Ione, because I hadn't read it before, and I don't know how, nobody told me what it was about before, but here we are.

• 34:16Liv Albert?

  Because like now that I read that, I just, like Euripides was even, is even better in my books, but so specifically because all of this stuff that I feel like I've based, like the reason I started my show, just being that like we learn about all of these myths about women getting assaulted, as if it's just like, this is a thing the gods do, everything's great. And I just feel like we had, at least Euripides is proof, that there were people back then being like, hey, guys, this is kind of dark. We can examine it, you know? And I just, it's so like reassuring to know that somebody looked at the stories and thought, you know, it's not great. Like, why don't I kind of tell these stories and sort of, you know,

• 34:58Liv Albert?

  get, pull apart that idea that this is just like a fine thing because the gods are there.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think in all of those plays, Ione is the extant example of this, right? And I call, like, I'm, in my work, I've called them the rape and recognition plots. Because what happens is, again, someone's sexually assaulted, they give birth, and then there has to be a recognition at some point that saves the, the mother of these children. And then the children go on to become heroes. So usually you have the Deus Ex Machina, you have the god that comes in at the end of the play and says, actually, don't worry. Like, you don't need to kill your daughter, or you don't need to do this, because these are the children of Poseidon, or someone.

• 35:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  I want to make a point that it is not typically the god who impregnated the young woman, who does the, he doesn't show up and clean up the mess at the end, right?

• 35:47Liv Albert?

  Never. That's crazy.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, typically, it's like Hermes or someone else who comes in and does that. One play, fragmentary play, that I think you'll be very interested in, and it's one of my favorites, is Alge. And it follows that pattern. So Alge is a priestess of Athena, and the one who impregnates her is Heracles when he assaults her.

• 36:08Liv Albert?

  Huh.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  He assaults her in a sanctuary of Athena. And so, of course, Athena's mad about that. And so Alge is sort of fleeing, right? She's, she's going to get in trouble for doing this. But the interesting thing is that within the context of this play, it seems, and we only have a couple of short fragments from this portion of it, that Heracles comes back. And he says to her, actually, I was drunk when it happened. I admit I did you wrong.

• 36:37Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  So he says homo lageo se sadikena, that I did you, you know, I admit I did you wrong.

• 36:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  Um, and it's kind of remarkable to have that coming out of the mouth of the man.

• 36:48Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  Who, who was the, the one who assaulted her.

• 36:52Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's not an apology. I want to be really clear because there's not like,

• 36:57Liv Albert?

  No, no.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  People don't say sorry in ancient Greece in the way that we did. You give an apologia, which is like, you know, the reasoning behind your action.

• 37:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  But still, that adikane, that word that means like to do wrong, to do an injustice, is really remarkable that he acknowledges it.

• 37:15Liv Albert?

  Well, it's the acknowledgement, right? That that's what makes the big difference. You know, it doesn't, I feel like if it was an apology, it would be less realistic. Like, I like that it's just this acknowledgement. It reminds me of like, just when I did pick up the ion and like, right there at the beginning, Hermes is like, Apollo raped, uh, of course, I'm gonna forget.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Creusa.

• 37:35Liv Albert?

  Creusa, yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:37Liv Albert?

  Like, it's, it's so explicit, it's so like, direct, and it's, I just feel so interesting the ways he was really open about criticizing the, the way the gods or heroes like Heracles, behave and just, and not even like necessarily criticizing it. It's just, I guess, again, like, I'll say the same thing over and over again, but it's just that he was interested in what the women would experience from a realistic, as much as he could do, perspective. And I think that that is just so unique.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, if you look at Ion too, Creusa, when she's talking about it, she says, I called up for my mom. Like she, she, she talks about the actual experience of being raped. And she talks about the, yeah, the sort of distress that she felt. And that's the thing that to me, like, when you look at the law around uh, sexual assault in the ancient world, uh, especially in Athens, right? Where these plays and classical Athens, where these plays are being produced. The concern, especially for a young woman who's been sexually assaulted, is that she's no longer eligible for marriage. And then you've really affected the household that she comes from. Because then they can't, she's not able to be used in the way, right? That young women are used to join households through marriage, et cetera, et cetera.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Um, and that's really the concern. So it's not that they didn't understand that there wasn't like, pain and trauma for the young woman.

• 38:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  But that just wasn't encoded in their legislation. But Euripides,

• 39:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  when he does, when he has characters talk like this, he's acknowledging, yes, there's also the pain and trauma. I think Ovid's really good at that, too. And I think Ovid gets that probably from Euripides.

• 39:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  Uh, Menander, in a couple of his plays, mentions similar things.

• 39:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  And I think, again, that's, to me, that's coming through Euripides. And in fact, Auge, that play that I just mentioned, one of our fragments is actually quoted in a play by Menander called The Epitaphontes, which features a similar story of the young woman getting assaulted, getting pregnant, um, having, you know, troubles because of this. So you can see that Menander's like, yes, I'm pointing to the plays from Euripides that I am taking these ideas from.

• 39:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  But yes, absolutely. I just, I really, this is one of the things I always think about Euripides. Now, I have a question for you on this note, because I've been asked this before and, uh, well, I know how I answer it now, but my, my answer changes. Can we call Euripides a feminist? Because he does these things.

• 39:58Liv Albert?

  I think so. I, I mean, like, obviously, there's, there's so much you can say around using the term feminist, whether we want to say proto feminist or whatever. But like, I think yes, because to me, well, it's interesting, because Michaela and I have been talking about this a lot, um, when it comes to this series, because there's, there's so much like hilarious Euripidean slander out there, primarily from Aristophanes and people who believed Aristophanes. And this idea that like, that he hated women, right? This idea that he was like, bad to women. And then the examples being women like this, who are just like, complex and interesting and like, realistic human beings. And so to me, especially, I think, because he got criticized for it in that way.

• 40:39Liv Albert?

  And because he chose to write these women who are not just problematic for the sake of being problematic, but problematic in a like distinctly human way. Like, to me, in his work, the women really are, I mean, equal in a very specific way, but equal to the men in terms of their stories, their realism, the way he treats them, like, just the ways he's interested. Like, to me, there is an equality there that I don't think I've found elsewhere.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I often think about, say, Aeschylus or Sophocles too, and how they, I love tragedy, full stop, right? And I think, you know, a character like Clytemnestra is also really compelling, but I don't think she is as sympathetic as Medea even, right?

• 41:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, exactly.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  You know, that's something I think about. Um, the way I think about this now is what, because often when I'm watching a movie or watching TV shows, I'm like, I can tell sometimes, I'm like, I don't think the creators of this particularly like women.

• 41:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  Right? So the example I'm gonna give, sorry to some of the fandom, is Game of Thrones.

• 41:46Liv Albert?

  Oh, 1000 and 10%.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  People are like, look at all the female, strong female characters in it. And like, you can have a strong female character, it doesn't mean you like women.

• 41:51Liv Albert?

  No.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  And it doesn't mean you're not getting a weird kind of pleasure out of having them suffer or whatever. I don't think Euripides ever gets pleasure about, from the scenarios in which his female characters find themselves, right? And that's a really important thing for me in terms of just my own enjoyment of these texts.

• 42:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:09Liv Albert?

  No, I agree entirely. And to your point about Clytemnestra, because yes, like, Aeschylus and Sophocles, like, they both also write really interesting women, really compelling women, like, absolutely enjoy their female characters as well. The difference to me is likability, almost. Like, Euripides was less concerned with making them likeable, or making them kind of fit into the box, the women's box. You know, like, I think that that the others wrote realistic women, but I think they wrote realistic women to men, like what men think realistic women are.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, like Clytemnestra is the horror that men imagine women to be doing, you know, behind closed doors. What do women really think of me? They would all murder me in the bathtub with an with an axe, right?

• 42:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  But, yeah, but Euripides, yeah, his women have a bit more space, a bit more, again, there's just a lot more nuance in them.

• 43:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  Um, going back to kind of the the young women who've been assaulted theme here.

• 43:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  There's a play that I, it's it's the one play, if I could have one play, back hole again. It's this one, it's called Melanipe Wise, Melanipe Sophie. And it's the story of this young woman, again, she's been assaulted by Poseidon, gets pregnant, exposes her twins in a in a cattle barn, right? And then what happens is, of course, like the shepherd finds them, comes to the king and says, oh, you know, we found these babies. And she defends the babies and the woman who gave birth to them as though they're not her own babies to her father. So this speech was famous in antiquity. Melanipe is mentioned in Aristophanes,

• 43:52Speaker 02

  so right within Euripides' own generation, is also mentioned, I want to see in Aristotle as an example of a bad woman.

• 43:58Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  Or a less than ideal woman. I believe it's in Poetics, too, where where her name pops up. But imagine Melanipe as this sort of young unmarried woman, a Parthenos, who has just given birth to twins. And she's defending them, she's doing this like really rhetorical exercise of talking about a scenario that she is actually part of, but other people don't recognize that. And she's saying, like, you know, is it the fault of this young woman if someone comes along and assaults her? Well, obviously not. And and, you know, we shouldn't blame these young women. It's this really remarkable, again, it's this really remarkable speech to put in the mouth of this young woman, right? And again, when we think about the context of Athenian tragedy being performed, written by men, performed by men for an audience that's large.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Usually male, you know, um, imagine having those words come out of that performer's mouth in that to that crowd.

• 44:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  A really remarkable thing. It shows to me that, um, at least Euripides is really aware of the tension that underlies the way women are treated in classical Athens. And that he is leaning hard into that tension and trying to digest it, trying to navigate it, trying to think about it. Um, in ways that perhaps his peers were not yet.

• 45:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and I was just gonna say the Ion is so similar in that way.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:20Liv Albert?

  You you imagine the people watching those scenes and the very explicit ways in which Apollo is blamed for like a physical trauma is just so interesting to me. But yeah, that I mean, that's, that's how I see him. It's just like, he was, he was interested in them.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:37Liv Albert?

  And that's kind of what makes him different in my head to, to Aeschylus and Sophocles. I think they, I think I said yesterday about this, like that. Aeschylus and Sophocles to me write Penelope's. And I guess I, I mean that now in the case of like not the Clytemnestra's, those are sort of what. I mean, I guess he write, they, they write either Clytemnestra's or Penelope's. If I just want to use those two, right? Like even just the, the comparison in, in Odyssey, like even, you know, in Agamemnon's deadly or, you know, underworld comparison, like they write those two, that they're sort of the only versions of women. They're either perfect or they're horrible. And they can still be, they're still interesting. But to me, it's like Euripides is looking at all of the layers of humanity

• 46:21Liv Albert?

  in women versus sort of more of a kind of masculine caricature or like a, a man's caricature.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And I actually think that's, that's kind of interesting to think about too, because, you know, whenever you are in, in the ancient world, because they are so binary about how they think about gender, at least how they've idealized gender, not necessarily how it's actually practiced on the ground, but. They they think about it in this really binary way. And so whenever you kind of are talking about women in the interworld, you're you're talking about men at the same time, right? There's like two sides of a coin. So I often think of that, too. One of the things that I really appreciated, again, from the fragmentary plays, is what Euripides is doing to think about masculinity and how it operates, too. So this is actually a perfect, I'm gonna kind of segue into the play Antiope.

• 47:09Liv Albert?

  Please.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  Which is a story about a woman who has been impregnated by Zeus in the form of a satyr. And again, her sons are grown, right? And there has to be a recognition so that they can save her from basically, you know, another kind of evil stepmother character. But this is, this is a play in which the two sons have a debate between themselves about what it means to be a man.

• 47:35Liv Albert?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so this appears in Plato's Gorgias. So like, he's, he's interested in this too, a little bit. Because, of course, in that dialogue, they're thinking about rhetoric and the role of rhetoric in the polis. So in this play, you have the, the young man, Zephus, no, pardon me, Zephus, who is, he's like the kind of masculine, let's get into action, let's go build stuff, let's be in the polis, let's do this. And then his brother Amphion, who is like a musician, right, who plays the liar. And the two of them have a debate about how to be a man. And the interesting part is that Amphion, like the musician, is like, you don't always have to be in action. You don't have to go to war, you don't have to be building things. You can use your brain, you can use your mind.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  And this is a really interesting kind of idea. Again, if you think about the context of classical Athens, right? You're using your, your rhetorical prowess, you're using your mind in the court system, in the assembly. So there's these, you know, these kind of competing visions of masculinity. But the great thing about Euripides is that he never, no one ever wins his, his agons, his, his debates, right?

• 48:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  Is that he always kind of creates space for the, the gray to come in. And in this play, yeah, you have this really wonderful,

• 48:54Speaker 02

  again, these competing images, but that ultimately are kind of found not to be in competition with one another, these different ways to be a man. Which I find really, that's very fascinating. The other thing, though, that those fragments from that play kind of hint at is that the brothers, before they've kind of officially kind of reconciled with their mother, they accuse her of maybe not having been assaulted, of using the assault by Zeus as an excuse for, you know, she got pregnant by a man and that was it, right? And so you also see again, like, some of the complexities of that vulnerability of the woman in that situation that Euripides is trying to work through too. So again, he's always, he's always working through complexities. He never just let, you know, gives you a solution.

• 49:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, no, that's not interesting.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  No, not at all.

• 49:42Liv Albert?

  I imagine, well, I hope, and actually don't even know the answer to this because I don't even know if there is fragments. Phaedra, the lost Phaedra.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 49:51Liv Albert?

  What do we know? What do we don't know?

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Okay, so we have, we have Hippolytus, right? And so the Hippolytus that we have is actually called Hippolytus Garland-Bearer, right? So that's the second version of this play. He wrote an earlier version called Hippolytus Veiled, because Hippolytus is veiling, he's shamed by what's happened, right? He's being modest. And so in that play, the characters of Hippolytus and Phaedra are both, I think, more extreme. At least that's what the fragments insinuate. So Hippolytus is even more sort of incel-y.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  He's not, no, incel isn't the right way to describe, actually, Hippolytus. Let me, let me rephrase that. Hippolytus is even more sort of shunning of women completely, right?

• 50:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  He's very extreme in the way that he's shunning women, even in the extant play, but even more so in the earlier version. And Phaedra is the one who comes directly on to him in that version, as far as we can tell. So in the extant version, of course, it's the nurse who kind of goes, that's it, I'm gonna go tell him that you're in love with him and I'm gonna push this along, right? Which then results in the incorrect accusation of rape. Now, in the original version, the first version, at least, it seems to be Phaedra who directly comes on to him. And he rejects her. And then what seems to happen again in that first version is that she actually creates a scene and tries to create evidence that she's been assaulted, like she's fractured herself,

• 51:26Speaker 02

  right, to make it seem that he really had assaulted her. So she, you know, she's much more active in that one, much less torn by her actions, it seems, and also much more deceptive.

• 51:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, you know, when, when characters like in, in Aristophanes complain about, you know, Phaedra as one of the reasons why they don't think Euripides likes women, I think that's the Phaedra that they're talking about.

• 51:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's very interesting. And I, I, I feel like I've heard things about this, but I don't know how much it's speculation or not, but do we know why he wrote another one? Like, wasn't, there was like a backlash to the original, is that right?

• 52:05Speaker 02

  The reception to Phaedra in particular was not positive. It was too much. It's funny to me, and this is, I think, one of the kind of pieces of evidence I'd like to have more of, is more audience response, right? So it's funny to me when you hear things like, oh, well, we didn't preserve this play, right? This play didn't make it into the canon because its topic was too shocking. Well, what the heck is Medea doing in there? Right? Like, what, what are the lines that people are drawing when they're forming the canon? And yes, those lines are often very random, and they seem to be irrational or illogical to us. But so I'm, I'm interested in, in what was so negative about that Phaedra, right, that they didn't want anything to do with, that he sort of felt compelled to

• 52:48Speaker 02

  rewrite it in a more nuanced fashion, or in a way that was more sympathetic to Phaedra, right? Where she's sort of lovesick and she's driven to this, and then the nurse is the tipping point in that second version. Why, why would he be compelled to change it in that way?

• 53:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 53:01Speaker 02

  And the other thing we know from the fragmentary place is that plot type, it's called Potiphar's Wife, and that's when a married woman falls for a younger woman, and then there's a false accusation, or younger man, pardon me, I just made it much more interesting.

• 53:14Liv Albert?

  It would be.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  So, yeah, a married woman falls for a much younger man. And there's a false accusation of rape when he rejects her. So he, he came back to that storyline a few times in the play Phoenix. Um, but, but really importantly in the play Stenoboa, uh, which is the story of Bellerophon.

• 53:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 53:34Speaker 02

  Right? Who has, he comes to, um, he's been in Corinth and he can't, I can't remember where he goes. But he goes to be, uh, absolved of murder, basically. And Stenoboa falls in love with him. And again, from the fragments of this play, it seems like she's doing everything she can to seduce him. Uh, one of the fragments is about how Eros teaches you, right? Desire teaches you to be deceptive. It's the best, most effective teacher of all of these tricks and wiles. So clearly she's, she's trying to seduce him. He rejects her. She accuses him. He gets banished, right? And this is why he has to go kill the chimera he sent off.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  Um, anyways, so within the context of this play, one of the things he does is he comes back and says, I'm going to take you. We're going to fly away together on Pegasus. And of course he takes her up on Pegasus and drops her off the horse as revenge.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that seems to happen within the context of this play, right? You can imagine that messenger speech.

• 54:34Liv Albert?

  I was just going to, yeah. Wow.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:39Liv Albert?

  See, and because the, things like that are lost, those are the reasons why poor Bellerophon is never the one riding Pegasus in any modern adaptation of anything.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. Because he does, he rides Pegasus.

• 54:52Liv Albert?

  He's the only one, god damn it.

• 54:55Speaker 02

  But in a play by Euripides.

• 54:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  He rides, Bellerophon rides Pegasus, right? On the machina, on the crane.

• 55:04Liv Albert?

  Okay, that was beginning my question. Oh, my god.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  So this is what Aristophanes is making fun of when he has people riding around on dung beetles to get up to Olympus. Right?

• 55:13Liv Albert?

  Aristophanes just, he, he did not get the brilliance, sorry. Like he just, he really just, do you think so? It just seems like he was such a dick about it.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  You know, I think like it's, it was really noted in antiquity already by the fourth century by playwrights that, that Aristophanes and Euripides were like so entangled in their playwriting. Um, and oh, there's a verb that a playwright named Kurtinas, um, it's like to Euripida Aristophanize, basically is the verb that he makes up. But like it's, it's that the way that those two playwrights are entangled so, so that, you know, Aristophanes becomes one of our major sources for fragments of Euripides. And he's parodying him so much, you know, like, and that's before he adds usi. There's the multi plays of Euripides that get parodied as they're trying to escape. They, they keep trying to do these scenarios from Euripides escape plays.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  Um, so Andromeda, we would, we would not have Andromeda, basically, if it wasn't for Aristophanes.

• 56:12Liv Albert?

  Right. Yeah, all right.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:15Liv Albert?

  I mean, I understand his value in the, I just feel like he was, I don't know that he, I don't know that he respected Euripides based on his way he makes fun of it. Like, I'm glad we have it because, yeah, we have all these fragments and I think we have all these insights. But to me, like, and maybe it's also just the way that people have interpreted Aristophanes, because I know I've come across the argument in many places that Euripides hates women, all because somebody like believed like a joke in Aristophanes. So I'm kind of like, you know, whether or not he believed it, he's definitely contributed to the idea that Euripides hated women, which I just, I take offense to, I guess.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think, well, I think he's making fun of that reputation. I think he's making fun of people who are, who are kind of taking that simplistic interpretation. Part of it, though, like that idea that, you know, does Aristophanes respect Euripides? I think he does.

• 57:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  Because he keeps coming back to him, he might, he might not have said that in conversation.

• 57:07Liv Albert?

  Right, yeah.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  But you know, when someone's kind of obsessed with someone in a negative way, you're like, again, there's like a pleasure, there's a, it's not, you actually don't hate that person. There's some like enemies to lovers vibe between those two, I think, yeah.

• 57:23Liv Albert?

  I could actually, yeah, I could see all that.

• 57:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:25Liv Albert?

  I like that, that world.

• 57:28Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm writing fanfic apparently today here.

• 57:30Liv Albert?

  I mean.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  Your listeners can just, you know, run with it, please.

• 57:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I mean, we love to theorize on Euripides because we have to a lot because there's not a ton.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

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• 59:35Liv Albert?

  So, like, is it that you studied specifically, like, the women in the fragmentary plays?

• 59:40Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, that's what I wrote my dissertation on, was gender. But of course, the women are so important to tragedy as a whole, right? Like, even in the ancient world, people are like, wait a second, most of these choruses are made of women. Most of these characters, or a lot of these characters are women. So even, again, even in the ancient world, people are acknowledging this. We were talking about- How people think that Euripides was, you know, some kind of a misogynist.

• 1:00:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  In the ancient world. So when you have things like the sort of letters of Aristophanes, the li- the life of Aristophanes, and these are from later antiquity. And they are pretty much fictionalized accounts of his life. One of the ways that he's said to have been killed is by a bunch of women tearing him apart. Right? And of course, that just goes back to back guy, right?

• 1:00:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  They're taking these ideas straight out of his own, his own work. But because women were so angry at him. You know, because of how he was depicting them. So that they tore him to death, basically.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  But yeah, like already in the ancient world, people are going, hmm, there's something about Euripides and women.

• 1:00:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And I think to me, I'm so interested in it, but I think that where that comes in, it feels like it's that really quintessential thing where the men are just threatened by Euripides's interest or like concern with women. Like it just feels like they're like, he could be dangerous, you know?

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  Well, and I, I mean, there has to be an element and, and I'm completely speculating, but I'm just imagining if I am like a nice, secure, elite Athenian male in, you know, four fifteen or whatever. And these women are showing up on stage and they're expressing these concerns or we're taking an empathetic approach to their experiences. I'm gonna listen to that and go, okay, that destabilizes my identity. It destabilizes my place in society. And I'm a little threatened by it, right? That I'm not sure what to do with it. And if you think about it, Euripides of the three major Athenian playwrights was not winning tons of awards in his own lifetime. He did win a few, but not compared to the other two, right?

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  His success comes after his death. If that's really when he becomes a big deal. And it's because he's no longer, I think, quite as threatening anymore.

• 1:01:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah. No, that's the thing. I just think that's, it's so interesting to just imagine that issue around all of it. Because, I mean, especially I thought of it when ages ago now that I was covering the Helen. Because like that too, it's such a threat. This Idea that he is rewriting a woman like Helen, you know, this woman that is famous for being hated. And he's like, oh, hey, I've written this Helen where she didn't do anything for you to hate her for. Like, what do you think of that?

• 1:02:25Speaker 02

  And there's a happy ending.

• 1:02:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, he loved a happy ending.

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  Andromeda, right?

• 1:02:35Liv Albert?

  It's a Gnae among the Torians.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:38Liv Albert?

  Ion technically, yeah.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I would, I would put the asterisk on Ion. So, and that's kind of how I feel about these plays where like the, the god comes in at the end, the deus ex machina comes in and says, don't worry, the children, you know, that your life was threatened by, uh, they're going to become heroes. You'll be okay, right? You'll be the mother of heroes. And it's always to me like a, kind of like a, oh, feeling for the woman.

• 1:03:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  It hasn't really rectified what's happened to her. It's kind of like Heracles coming and saying, oh, you know, I'm, you know, I did this. I acknowledge I did a bad thing.

• 1:03:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:14Liv Albert?

  I do not say sorry for it, but.

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:03:17Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:03:19Liv Albert?

  So are there any others that you haven't gotten to in terms of fragmentary women? Because I want to know all of them.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  I've got, I've got to look at, oh, okay, sorry. Another one of my faves.

• 1:03:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  Is the play Alexander, which is of course the story of Paris, right?

• 1:03:34Liv Albert?

  Of course, yeah.

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  And it seems to have been in a trilogy of plays about the Trojan War. Right? Of different stages throughout the Trojan War, which I find really fascinating. So it's, it's the same trilogy as Trojan Women.

• 1:03:48Liv Albert?

  Can I make a prediction?

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  Go ahead.

• 1:03:50Liv Albert?

  Did Euripides write of Enone? And is that where Ovid might have gotten something from the Herodites?

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  Okay, so Enone does not pop up in this play.

• 1:03:58Liv Albert?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  So I don't, I haven't seen any evidence of that, but that's a really good point, right? Because Ovid, Ovid knew this stuff, right?

• 1:04:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  Just talk to Ovid and ask him questions about Euripides.

• 1:04:11Liv Albert?

  And also maybe, what was going on with the Ars Amatoria? Like, where, where do you actually stand?

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  Okay, that's awesome. The Ovid sidebars here, because to me, Ovid and Euripides are, again, they're so melded.

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  Although I feel like that might have been a parody.

• 1:04:32Liv Albert?

  I know, exactly. That's the thing. That's why I want to ask him because I'm like, dude, I think it there's everything else seem you seem really interesting. So.

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Um, okay. So let's go back to Alexander. Um, okay. Yeah. So it's the story of Paris. So the kind of the, the information that happens before the play starts is of course that Hecuba was pregnant with Paris and had a dream that she gave birth to a firebrand that was going to burn down the city. So they expose the child, right? And of course, I think, I don't know, anyone in ancient myth who's exposing children. I'm like, the track record of exposed children coming back and causing a problem is a hundred percent.

• 1:05:08Liv Albert?

  Truly.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  Banning a thousand for destruction. So.

• 1:05:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Good luck.

• 1:05:13Speaker 02

  Don't do it. It's not a great idea. Um, so what happens is they're, they're doing a games, right? Um, in Troy and Paris is an adult now, right? And he's just a, a shepherd supposedly, but he comes back and he's doing very well at these games. And the other sons of premium and Hecuba are getting pretty ticked off and jealous about this. Now the fragments suggest that they're coming to Hecuba and saying, kill him. He's making my life hard. And she is biting. She's going for this. So when we think of Hecuba from Hecuba and Trojan Women, we think of her as this vengeful mother. Right? And this, this mother whose love for her children is so, um, so huge that it drives her to these great acts of vengeance.

• 1:05:55Speaker 02

  But the amazing thing that we see in this is the hints of that Hecuba to come. Right? It's like the Hecuba prequel, basically, but that Hecuba already has this within her. She's not just this like bereaved saintly. Well, she's never a saint, but this bereaved mother, right? That she can be violent and vengeful for her children. That's just already in the roots of her character. And that's one of the things I really love about this play. And again, the thing I love about the fragments is seeing these, these iconic women like Medea, like Hecuba and seeing. Sort of the roots of how Euripides is thinking about them and thinking of how they get to the point at which they are these like very famous iconic characters.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  And again, just thinking through different potential scenarios for them. So yes, that's that I think is is probably one of my other faves.

• 1:06:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  Amongst the the fragmentary plays. But again, it's just it's because we think of Hecuba in a certain way.

• 1:06:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  We have other ways to think of her. That that were presented right in the ancient world that were part probably part of the way that people thought of of someone like Hecuba. But that we have lost because they they didn't make it into the canon.

• 1:07:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Liv Albert?

  Oh, I mean, he's just so interesting. I. And so, you know, beyond women, you were looking at gender. Was there anything else kind of at play in these fragments or just yeah, anything beyond women as well?

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, OK, so there's some interesting men, as I mentioned earlier, although this this kind of ties back to women. There's Achilles in Skirians when he's on the island of Skeros and he's dressed like a young woman. Right? And that play unfolds where he can never really like he can never get rid of his his heroic identity. Right? So even though he's dressed as a woman and no one seems to have noticed that he's among the girls. Uh, he manages to impregnate one, right? And of course, this play seems to be.

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  Also shows up and has to take him off to war. There's no potential for Achilles not to be this hero. So there's obviously through that there's an an examination of masculinity. Right? And who gets to to sort of shift between um gender identities and who can't? And someone like Achilles just really can't. That's written in stone for him.

• 1:08:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:10Speaker 02

  One of the more fascinating plays to me. Um, where you have men and you have sexuality coming into play. Is the play Chrysippus.

• 1:08:21Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:08:23Liv Albert?

  I know that name.

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  Oh, OK. What do you know about Chrysippus?

• 1:08:27Liv Albert?

  I, well, I think I have an idea of what's to come. I didn't know that Euripides wrote a play.

• 1:08:32Speaker 02

  Yes, so Chrysippus is the son of Pelops, right? Pelops and Hippotemia, you know, the house of Atrius, all that.

• 1:08:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  So he is the illegitimate son of Pelops. Laius, so everyone knows Laius is the father of Oedipus, speaking of people who expose babies unsuccessfully. Anyways, so Laius, and this is before all the events of Oedipus unfold. But Laius comes, and there's different versions of the story, and the fragments we have of this play don't really seem to indicate which is which. But he's either taking Chrysippus off to participate in a games, but he's around Chrysippus. So he's a young man, but he's older than Chrysippus.

• 1:09:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  And he sexually assaults Chrysippus.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  So that's interesting because we have very few mentions of same-sex desire in tragedy, right? We have Myrmidons by Iscalus, which is, again, Achilles and Patroclus, and it's very fragmentary. There's a mention of a thigh, right? Like, it's very fragmentary. But same-sex desire does not find its way onto the tragic stage as much as one might expect, given how much same-sex desire is talked about in the context of classical Athens, right? This, to me, is one of the mysteries of tragedy, is why it doesn't get as much airtime. And so in some senses, I find tragedy to be a little, even though you're having all these women doing all kinds of wild things, in some senses, it's kind of conservative, right?

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  When it comes to desire and sexuality, desire is so often in tragedy a scary destructive thing. Very, very rarely is it anything that brings you anything good, right? It's like the thing that makes Phaedra act in the way she does. Anyways, so in this play, right, you you see, first of all, same-sex desire, but it's also, again, really destructive. It has, so it seems to lead to the curse. So apparently, Peleus puts a curse on Lias and his house.

• 1:10:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  That I think is what leads to the whole Oedipus situation, I think, in some some versions of that myth. But one of the interesting, what we call a testimonium, so little comments about the content of the play, but not the quotations from the play itself, says that this, in Euripides' play, this is his way of offering an origin for same-sex desire between men, too.

• 1:11:06Liv Albert?

  Huh.

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  Now, whether that's the case, like, whether that's, you know, perhaps in some, you know, the final speech of the play or something. But to me, that's that's a really interesting potential there, that also same-sex desire there is starting in assault, too. So, again, it's one of those little nuggets of sexuality that are so rare in tragedy, but also there's something about masculinity and what it means to be a man, right, folded into that. And as we know, pederasty is so folded into identity in classical Athens, at least among a certain elite group. So we, again, we see Euripides kind of taking those those challenging topics on.

• 1:11:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  And trying to to at least begin to explore this one.

• 1:11:52Liv Albert?

  Do we get the sense of whether it was meant to kind of mirror a pederastic relationship in terms of the ages?

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  Well, we certainly know that within the context of this play, Lias is the older one, and Chrysippus is the the sort of the youth, right?

• 1:12:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  So that, I think that is is absolutely meant to, in some sense,

• 1:12:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  reflect pederasty.

• 1:12:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:12Liv Albert?

  I'm only thinking of of just whether, you know, because I'm gonna forget who I spoke to about this, but it's kind of brought up that in most of the stories, particularly with God, so different, but, you know, when there are same-sex relationships where neither is kind of like the obviously, you know, older one, it kind of tends to end in tragedy, Apollo's relationships, things like that. So I was just kind of interested in that, since this is definitely not, you know, not meant to be a romantic story.

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and that's the thing, like, at least with, say, the stories of Apollo that we find, like, he's, he seems to be sort of in love, or at least desiring.

• 1:12:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah, he, yeah.

• 1:12:53Speaker 02

  And again, we don't have enough of this play left to know kind of what, what causes that act. But at least to me, the comment that that's Euripides offering an etiology for same-sex desire, like, suggests that there's an element of desire, at least from, from Elias to Chrysippus, right? Chrysippus is the victim of assault, but, um, yeah, so, so there's something there, something. Again, this is the thing about working with fragments. You're like, oh, there's something there. I can't figure out what it is, but I can speculate what it might have been.

• 1:13:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah. And I, as soon as you said the name, I just remembered, basically, having read that anecdote, just simply that there is, you know, a version of the story where Elias assaulted him, and it spawned the origin of the curse, or the Sphinx itself. And, and I just kind of was immediately like, where did I read that then? Because it, I would have remembered if it was Euripides.

• 1:13:43Speaker 02

  Maybe in Ilian.

• 1:13:45Liv Albert?

  Uh, that's the thing. I was on Theoey. I pulled that up just while you were talking, because it's, I think it might have been, yeah, Pseudopoldorus says it really, really briefly. So there's at least that. Oh, yeah, there is Ilian. Yeah, here too.

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that's one of the things is, when we're trying to, like, put the plots of these plays back together, or at least trying to speculate on what they looked like. So for some of them, we have a whole papyrus collection that's known as the Tales of Euripides, and their hypotheses. So clearly, in the ancient world, you know, people, as they were collecting, and especially like through the Hellenistic period, then we get into the Imperial period, where people just wanted to, like, know all of these plays, but maybe didn't want to read them all. Right? You might have a collection of little synopses of each play, right? Or you would have the mythographers, people like Apollodorus, people like Heginus, who are writing down just the stories. So we go back to Apollodorus and to Heginus all the time

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  to put back these stories together. Heginus will say the odd time, this is from Euripides, which is helpful, but sometimes he says that, and you're like, actually, this doesn't seem to be from Euripides.

• 1:14:52Liv Albert?

  I've always found that. Work to be less helpful than even pseudopolaris.

• 1:14:56Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah. Well, it's such it's such a weird work, right? It could just be like schoolwork, right? It's such a strange little collection.

• 1:15:03Liv Albert?

  Well, I think, I mean, that's the most fun is just wondering where these things also like, what, where do they actually fit in the ancient world when it's like all we have? And I think I often wonder how much, you know, weight we give to something that's compared to the weight it was given back then.

• 1:15:17Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. And so that's the thing for me that I've really, the more I've been working on fragments, the more I appreciate the intellectual process that got us what we have, right? And then the more it makes me question how that process unfolded. And again, that that combination of intention and felicity that comes together. Where you're like, yeah, maybe we do have like a schoolboy's collection of synopses of myth, right? And maybe he made a bunch of mistakes and maybe my argument is resting on one of those errors, right? So I mean, that's the one thing, if you ever read my work on fragments, there's a lot of, well, this seems to be the case. It's likely the case. I really hedge my bets. Because I don't want to get too far out on a pretty fragile limb.

• 1:16:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  But the thing about fragments that I think is salutary, that's really important for all of us who work on the ancient world and think about the ancient world. To always consider is that there's always a process, even if you have full works, right? They come to you through a process. They didn't like, you know, it's not like someone was just like, here's the original copy of Oedipus by Sophocles. And they handed it to someone who handed it to someone who handed it to someone. It was rewritten, right? You know, bits of corruption come in with the rewriting. It was chosen to be preserved intentionally for a lot of different reasons that we don't fully understand still. You know, there's that, there's the process for everything we have from the ancient world. It's just that with fragments, it's so obvious to us.

• 1:16:45Speaker 02

  You know, that the it's laid bare, but I think it's really important for all of us to kind of to think about the ancient world itself as fragmentary. Yeah, we have as a fragment. Yeah.

• 1:16:55Liv Albert?

  If I have become anything on this show, it is emphasizing that to the point of annoyance.

• 1:17:03Liv Albert?

  Very poorly phrased, but I just like, I love, I love when I have guests say it because it, it, it's like, it reminds listeners that I'm not repeating myself unnecessarily.

• 1:17:12Speaker 02

  Okay, well, I would just like to say, yes, live no stuff.

• 1:17:17Speaker 02

  And you should always believe her.

• 1:17:20Liv Albert?

  Thank you.

• 1:17:21Speaker 02

  She knows what she's talking about. Not that you needed me to say that, but.

• 1:17:25Liv Albert?

  I mean, but especially with that, because I swear I say it all the time. I did a Q and A series recently and so often my answer is like, okay, well, like I was saying, and then I just go on and on about fragments and what survives and what doesn't and why that could be and what we don't know. And yeah, because it's just so interesting. Like,

• 1:17:43Speaker 02

  It really is.

• 1:17:43Liv Albert?

  I am obsessed with that. Yeah. And then the finding of new fragments and being like, oh, here's, here's some more like, and that could be happening all the time, especially with, you know, whatever they're doing in Pompeii. I haven't been fully following, but I, I mean.

• 1:17:57Speaker 02

  And the fragments of Euripides and even like the bits where we would, we don't consider them necessarily fragments because they're parts of a whole play that we have preserved elsewhere. Right?

• 1:18:05Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  But some of those are some of the most exciting bits and pieces that we have from antiquity. Right? So there's the fragment of, of Orestes, the chorus with the, the musical annotations that people have reconstructed. So, you know, these little bits and pieces often have the richest, they're the richest sources of information on aspects of performance or aspects as a reception of a play that we just wouldn't understand if we were just looking at the play.

• 1:18:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:30Speaker 02

  If you just look at that script all by itself, you're missing out on so much.

• 1:18:35Liv Albert?

  Oh, we recorded a whole episode on music, ancient, ancient tragedy yesterday with Sean Gerd. So.

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  Oh, excellent. Oh, that's gonna be so good. Okay. I look forward to hearing that one.

• 1:18:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:47Speaker 02

  I'm gonna have to use that for my classes because I love talking about music and I love playing the reconstructed Orestes chorus.

• 1:18:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:54Speaker 02

  For my students, um, because they just, the, the sound of the elos and the sound of the singers blows their mind. It's so different to what they've expected.

• 1:19:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I have a couple of different pieces of audio to slot into that episode that I haven't listened to yet, but, but Sean was like playing some notes on the guitar and explaining it to us. And it was just like the most interesting thing ever. So.

• 1:19:14Speaker 02

  That is so cool. That is so cool. Okay. I have, I do have to, there's one fragment I do have to talk about because it brings together music and fragments.

• 1:19:22Liv Albert?

  Great.

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  And like creativity, right?

• 1:19:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:24Speaker 02

  So this is a chorus. From the play Phithon. So Phithon, of course, is the son of Helios, who asks to use the chariot and doesn't drive responsibly and crashes it, right? Like any child giving the keys, yeah.

• 1:19:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:40Speaker 02

  It's a little warning to those of us who have children who will be driving one day.

• 1:19:44Liv Albert?

  Just don't give them the keys to the sun, very specifically.

• 1:19:46Speaker 02

  Yes, don't give them the keys to the sun or the Hyundai, whatever.

• 1:19:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, either one.

• 1:19:53Speaker 02

  But there's this really beautiful choral passage that's been preserved from, it's called the dawn chorus. And so one of my sort of favorite things in life is like when you get up early and you see like, you know, the people like opening up the coffee shop and the world is waking up. And so this chorus is kind of like the ancient Greek version of that, right? Like the shepherds are heading out to the, you know, to the pastures, et cetera. And it's this really beautiful moment before the tragedy comes, right? And this is, again, this is like, one of the great skills of Euripides, I think, is sort of giving you that foreboding, right? You know a tragedy is coming, you are watching a play by Euripides, or you're reading a play by Euripides, but you've got this beautiful dawn chorus that happens beforehand.

• 1:20:36Speaker 02

  So that chorus was, or music to go with it was composed by a fellow named Alex Silverman, right? Who is, as far as I'm concerned, a genius. He's very good with like ancient meter, with understanding how it operates, with transposing it into something that can communicate that to modern audiences. So he composed the music for it. And a group of students from the University of British Columbia actually went to Greece. So with Toff Marshall and Hallie Marshall, actually Hallie Marshall is the one who organizes this whole project. And recorded for Barefaced Greek, right? And Helen Eastman also works with Barefaced Greek. And he said, they recorded a film, a short film, you can find it on YouTube under Barefaced Greek, it's the dawn chorus.

• 1:21:20Liv Albert?

  I feel like I have it open because Top sent it to me a while ago and I

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  Oh, it's so good. It's so good.

• 1:21:25Liv Albert?

  So it's good because it's on Naxos, right?

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  Yes, they filmed it on Naxos.

• 1:21:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  So I have to, I have to admit, I was on that trip with them, with those students, but I didn't go to Naxos because I had to come back to Canada for a conference and I have kicked myself ever since.

• 1:21:39Liv Albert?

  Best island.

• 1:21:41Speaker 02

  But you will notice the students who are performing the chorus in many of the scenes are wearing orange jewelry, which is all of my jewelry that I brought for them to borrow,

• 1:21:53Speaker 02

  which should speak to the absolute volume of jewelry I own. Anyway.

• 1:21:57Liv Albert?

  Well, your Instagram handle also helps with that.

• 1:22:00Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, that's true.

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  Anyways, so they filmed this and so I got to hear them rehearsing and singing it and like singing it at various ancient sites, like singing it in the theater at Epidaurus.

• 1:22:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:13Speaker 02

  And it's this like beautiful youthful, you know, chorus of university students, right? So the way it's performed and the way that it just brings this fragment back to life, gives it life. Fragments are hard to bring back to life. They're harder to bring back to life than whole plays. There's no question. And the combination of the way the music has been composed and the performers and the setting is just to me really magical. But it really also just has really embraced the essence of what is happening in the context of that play too.

• 1:22:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:45Speaker 02

  So it's all, it's gonna have a special place in my heart forever.

• 1:22:48Liv Albert?

  Well, I'm gonna link it in the episode's description, that video.

• 1:22:51Speaker 02

  Oh, please do. Please do. Yeah. It's really wonderful. And it just shows like the collaboration of Alex Silverman, of Helen Eastman, of Hallie, of these really talented creative people who understand how to make the ancient world sing again.

• 1:23:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah, just come back to life. Oh, I love that so much. Well, I mean, I feel like that's a, that's a perfect place to end it and with something for the listeners to go watch after.

• 1:23:18Speaker 02

  Exactly. And they'll all be singing the song. It's still stuck in my head.

• 1:23:21Liv Albert?

  Oh, I love that. Oh, God. I just, I mean, even just hearing notes played yesterday, or I don't even know if it was notes. There was a lot of musical technicality that I am not familiar with, but just like even hearing the sounds, I can see Michaela laughing, just hearing the sounds that are supposed to go along with it. Meanwhile, she was on the call, but not on the call, typing away to me about how her classical piano training was coming in handy.

• 1:23:46Speaker 02

  That's the thing. I just, I don't know enough about music to really.

• 1:23:49Liv Albert?

  Same.

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  Grasp it in the way that people who have like classical training are like, oh yes, that's that mode or whatever. And I'm like, it's a semi tone. And I'm like, oh, okay. But that's, that's to me is the beauty of this, the fellow Alex Silverman. He can take that kind of knowledge, but he ta- he uses it in a way that communicates what the ancient music was trying to do.

• 1:24:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  To us in the modern world, using sort of a more modern vernacular. It's incredible.

• 1:24:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, I'm excited for that. I just, yeah. And I'm, I want to find all the music I can for the series because it's just, I mean, it's so exciting. Um, well, this has been so much fun. Thank you for talking Euripides with me slash just letting me kind of fangirl about him.

• 1:24:29Speaker 02

  Any day, any day was the fangirls of Euripides meeting today.

• 1:24:35Liv Albert?

  Well, is there anything you want to share with my listeners about where to learn more, read more? Um, I know you just, I didn't even remember, mention it, but, uh, I will have in the introduction anyway, but you also spoke with me about Freeny and have that book available. But anything else you want to share?

• 1:24:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, this, this project is not a book yet. It was my dissertation for my PhD way back in the day, as I mentioned, you know, quite a while ago, my child is the almost the exact same age as my dissertation. And she is getting big. But it is, it is something that I am going to put into book form in the next couple of years. I, it's, as you can tell, it's something that's too interesting to, I think, to leave undone. Lots of people have been working on Fragments more and more and more these days, which I'm, I'm really excited to see. Uh, and so if you want to read more, my suggestion to your readers is go get the Loeb edition. There's a, uh, from I think 2008, a lovely

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  version of Euripides Fragments. Um, and it's edited by Collard and Crop. Um, but it's a really good accessible way to dig into the Fragments. They do a pretty good job of putting together what's useful, uh, and helping, you know, someone who's new to the Fragments to kind of navigate them, which is always the challenge. Fragments, when you look at a page of Fragments, they have all these little annotations and markings that can be a little bit overwhelming. So head to the Loeb is what I would say. Um, and, and read up. And it's Euripides. So, you know, it's, it's going to be full of absolute gems.

• 1:26:03Liv Albert?

  Truly. He was just a weird guy in the most joyful way.

• 1:26:24Liv Albert?

  Oh nerds, thank you all so much for listening. As always, I'm really just, I'm so excited for this series. It's just been so much fun. And we of course have so much more still to go on Tuesday. I'm going to be talking about Euripides and the gods. In whatever forms I can share, I want to look at the, the way that Euripides handles gods as characters, ways that he might sort of push the boundaries, mix things up compared to the other tragedians. I mean, he did some weird stuff when it comes to the gods. I mean, including the fact that I'll never, that I'll never get over. The way he wrote Apollo as like a piece of shit. I'm just fascinated. So that's coming Tuesday.

• 1:27:09Liv Albert?

  And then of course, just so much more. We're going to talk about Euripides for as long as possible, quite honestly. Let's talk about Myths Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Penguish is the producer. This is the same Michaela, I will note. She has just changed her name to a matriarchal badassery name that is better for her. And also, it sounds amazing. The podcast is part of the iHeart Podcast Network. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. I am Liv and I love the person in the future who invents the time machine that doesn't disrupt the time-space continuum.

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