Conversations: They Weren't Always F***able, the History of Sirens & Harpies w/ Dr Ryan Denson

Liv speaks with returning guest, the Sea Monster Guy Ryan Denson, about the history and transformation of Sirens and Harpies. Find more from Ryan on Twitter/X https://x.com/seamonsterguy?lang=bn&mx=2. Submit to the quarterly Q&A at mythsbaby.com/questions http://mythsbaby.com/questions and get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing. 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?

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• 2:09Liv Albert?

  Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby! And I am your host, Liv, here with another conversation episode, and it is a returning guest who I hope you all know and love. This week, I spoke with Ryan Denson, who has given us past episodes on ancient sharks. I mean, it was ostensibly about all sea monsters, but I made it about ancient sharks. Ryan is always here to talk monsters, typically sea monsters, but in the case of today, we are talking slightly beyond the sea, depending on how you look at it.

• 2:50Liv Albert?

  Ryan is here to speak about sirens and harpies, which frankly, I did not think we would have an hour and a half worth of conversation about those two, because they don't appear in a lot of texts, but I should have known that Ryan knows everything, because he is literally the monster guy. Pretty sure his Twitter is still sea monster guy. I think it's, should be expanded, beyond the sea, but really, we're just, I do love, I do love a monster, and in this case, we have female monsters and the ways in which that has been fucked up, and probably was always fucked up. Ryan is always here, is always here to talk patriarchal nonsense with me, too. We had so much fun with this conversation, and I am just, you know, I'll always take

• 3:35Liv Albert?

  monsters, and I love that I have certain guests where they'll pitch an idea, and I'm like, yeah, of course, come on on. I know that you're gonna tell me hilarious and joyfully fascinating things, and this is yet another example of that. So, sit back and enjoy listening to how sirens went from half-bird ladies to sexy mermaids who wanna sex everybody. There's so much more than that, but let's, let's be honest. That's what sirens became.

• 4:20Liv Albert?

  Conversations, they weren't always fuckable. The dark and fascinating history of sirens and harpies with Dr. Ryan Denson.

• 4:44Liv Albert?

  So harpies and sirens this time, and specifically them like in a later period, right? I'm so interested.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Uh, not so much for this work. I usually do stuff in late antiquity, but these for these handbook chapters that I mean, I assume that's what you and Debbie have talked about. Um, you know, it really kind of goes at a holistic um type of assessment with the sirens and harpies. So I mean, yet with the sirens in particular, we of course start with the Odyssey scene uh there. Although actually we can get into a bit of the later history of the sirens that I couldn't quite cover in that handbook chapter because the handbook itself is mostly devoted to classical monsters. But the sirens are interesting for um the way they essentially evolve because the word siren in so many languages, I mean, it's in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and I just learned

• 5:36Speaker 03

  it's in Polish too. It also means mermaid, um which is an interesting indication of how they evolve over time. Um, if you just Google siren, you see images of mermaids. And this is actually where I first started looking into the topic because you know, I did my PhD on sea monsters and sea people, as the audience knows. Um, and at the very beginning, it wasn't quite sure, I mean, where do you draw the line with what creatures you include and which you don't? So we have these sirens that are sometimes mermaid-like figures, but that really only starts to occur at the early Middle Ages. So it was. I've managed to narrow it down. I mean, as far as the thesis goes, that I could include

• 6:20Speaker 03

  or exclude those rather. But I've sort of kept the idea alive and this handbook opportunity came along. So I was able to develop this that way, but didn't quite get to the mermaid aspect of it because that is a bit of a lighter thing.

• 6:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, I remember the last time I had you on, we talked about, yeah, like, you know, merpeople more specifically, because I think the first time was more devoted to the monsters themselves. And and it, yeah, it was, it's always interesting to me, the way that like, I mean, there, there are like these half fish male creatures in Greek mythology, but there really isn't any explicit half fish female, even though we have this notion of mermaids. And then, yeah, like you're saying, this tie to the sirens. Whereas, you know, like, maybe, do you want to start with just a little brief overview on them in the Odyssey? So like that oldest form, like I've talked with them sort of peripherally, but never in detail.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, this is a great place to start because this is the, I mean, obviously, the most famous location that everyone, especially listening to this podcast, will know the sirens from.

• 7:24Liv Albert?

  Well, I even like just literally for before I even, we got on this call, I was doing something for an episode that came out today and I was looking at the pottery where Odysseus is strapped to the mast. And I'm like, oh, yeah, you know, that one. And I literally, like, I actually picked something else. Because I was like, oh, that one's so common. And then immediately it was like, oh, no, I'm having a conversation with the sirens. I'm like, half an hour, that's perfect.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. I think I know the exact one you're talking about is the one where it's like he's tied and there's one swooping down. Yeah, that's very interesting and something we can get in, get on to in a second. Because one of the things, it's good to start with the Odyssey scene because we can talk about, I mean, what is in the Odyssey scene and what isn't. I mean, we have, they are birdlike in the ancient world, especially that we see in ancient visual representations. But the Odyssey itself never includes any mention or description of what they look like. And this is very interesting, I think, in terms of how we consider the Odyssey scene. So, well, I guess to start with, I mean, we're first basically introduced To the sirens by Circe.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  And when she's basically giving Odysseus his directions back home and all of that and warning him of the different things that he will encounter. And and she has, I have here the bit that I translated from it because it sums them up quite nicely, I think. And so this is quote, first you will come to the sirens who bewitch all humans that come upon them. If someone unknowingly draws near and hears the voice of the sirens, he will never see his wife and young children rejoicing at his homecoming. But the clear song of the sirens will bewitch him.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  They sit in a meadow and the many corpses of men rot around them, the skin decaying on the bones. So and the end quote, you know, that's how Circe describes them to Odysseus. And she never mentions anything, their half-bird or anything like that.

• 9:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  They're always given with reference to their song. And especially with that end bit there, there's an interesting tension between, you know, the beauty of the song it's described in. Lots of ancient sources as being, I think Homer uses the phrase like lily-like and there's Apollonius uses something like, you know, extremely beautiful. It's a very pleasant song, but the sirens themselves, of course, were not told what they look like, but they sit in this meadow of rotting corpses. So you already get a sense of the tension between the beauty and the danger there.

• 10:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Can I pick your brain about the Greek? Because I noted in your translation there, there was like very little, unless I missed it, gendering of of the sirens. So I'm really interested in just how gendered they are in the ancient Greek.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  Not very gendered is, yes, this is a good thing to talk about too. I think.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  Way back in the day, you know, when Twitter was an actual, you know, functional thing. I mean, people might have remembered Emily Wilson's thread about this of the way that we translate sirens that. And this will be when we talk about the actual encounter, but when you get to the bit where Odysseus and his men are sailing up on the sirens. Island, a lot of translators will mention, you know, what the sirens say, and then the words flow from their lips. And that's one way the sirens are sort of gendered in a lot of ways that, I mean, yes, I know lips is not strictly gendered. But I'm talking in terms of the ancient Greek there. Emily Wilson makes the point that the ancient Greek word really means, you know, like your whole mouth.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  It's a very, you know, generic type of word. Words flow from your mouth, but when you make it something like lips, you're kind of in a way sexualizing it a little bit. You're gendering it more, especially when you look at these 19th and 20th century type of translations that have other sorts of. Typically male translators that have ways of sexualizing different characters like that. So that's something that she points out is a way that that's done. And she does things a bit different in her translation, of course, too. But no, I mean, in the actual ancient text, there's not a whole lot of gendered elements to it. And that's a great thing to bring up.

• 11:52Liv Albert?

  All I know, of course, it's, yeah, naturally, that's the only thing I could think of. But that is so interesting, especially for how they transform. Like, I really like more and more these days to go back and, and as much as we can, look at what actually existed there. And then, you know, what it has become with, like you said, like the sheer volume of male translators who have just gone on to make it weird. You know, like, make it this sexual thing when it was really just about the singing of a song. And it made me think of it too, because I recently spoke with Emily Hauser, who has done some work on, on the. How women, the book is called How Women Became Poets.

• 12:37Liv Albert?

  And it's just about how like, there was no feminine word that could possibly describe them. You know, and they like, there literally wasn't the words to describe women and, but, but they was like even, you know, Sappho. Her mu- her, her music like came through the muses, not, you know, her, not directly from her or whatever it was, you know, but basically this way that like, you know, the, the women don't come up with the song, they just sing the words of a man is kind of the basis. And so it's interesting to me that the like kind of siren notion of, because they're singing, but you know, how feminine is it? And is it their song? And anyway, now I'm just thinking about all those possibilities, but that's so interesting to know that it's not explicitly gendered.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and I mean, one of the ways that, I mean, it becomes a sort of gendered element seems to have a lot to do with where those sirens go in becoming mermaids essentially. Because, um, well, I mean, we can get on to one of the ways that I would contrast the differences is when we get to the actual Odyssey scene where they are swim or not swimming, but rowing up to the island, of course. Um, we don't really, again, we don't really have any line in the Odyssey where, oh, they, you know, rode up to the island and there were the sirens. It's only described that what the sirens are saying, they begin to, you know, sing and Odysseus and his men overhear that. Of course, this is the

• 14:02Speaker 03

  famous thing where Odysseus is tied to the mass so that he can, you know, overhear this and all of that. But again, we're not actually given any visual elements. So depending on how you want to imagine the scene, I think we're correct in probably assuming that Odysseus and his men are probably not seeing the sirens at all. They're probably hidden behind a rock or something like that. So that makes the sirens even more, you know, heavily aural creatures. They're defined by that song because you can't even see them. We don't have a description. If they're not even seen, they are just purely their song, at least in the Odyssey scene. This will change, of course, when you get into ancient art and later descriptions and things like that. But the Odyssey just has no visual element whatsoever.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  And the way that I would contrast this too, I mean, if you've seen, I think it's like the fourth Pirate of the Caribbean's movie with the mermaids. And the scene there is the exact opposite because it's essentially modern mermaid folklore where they come and they swim up to the boat and they can visually see the mermaid now. And obviously, the difference is she has a fish tail and all of this. And the interesting thing there is that, you know, the actress that's played is a very conventionally beautiful mermaid and the guy on the boat is basically entranced by her beauty.

• 15:31Speaker 03

  He's drawn in by that visual element. She begins to sing a bit later on, but it's really that, you know, allure of physical beauty and he leans over the boat and tries to kiss her at one point. But it's something we don't have in the Odyssey. At no point in the Odyssey is it said that Odysseus desires to kiss the sirens or have sex with them or anything like that.

• 15:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  There's, you know, other sorts of things like that with sexual desire with Calypso and with Circe. But it's just not present with the sirens because that's not part of their nature in the ancient world, at least as the Odyssey goes.

• 16:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, I, now, all I can think about is what, I don't have examples, but I am fairly certain that, you know, somewhere along the line over the last few hundred years, a man would have translated, you know, some of the words as seductive in some way. And I feel like that's kind of how we end up getting to this like weirdly sexualized aspect where you know, the word seductive, even if it was like a, you know, legitimate translation, does not necessarily inherently mean sexualization. But then, you know, immediately, like as soon as we attribute it and then give this like feminine aspect, then like slowly but surely it becomes that these women are like,

• 16:48Liv Albert?

  yeah, like luring men to their death for like sexual reasons or with a sexual element that like definitely does not exist in the ancient sources.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  And you see it in some modern paintings. I think it's it's one of the first things that comes up actually in Google Images. I think it's like a 19th century painting where it's it's basically the sirens is they're fully anthropomorphic, but they're purely nude women and they're kind of like crawling up on the boat and that has that's none of that is in the Odyssey, of course. And so it's it's obviously a visual medium. So they want to visually represent the sirens in some way or another, but they're making very particular gender choices with how they represent the women there.

• 17:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I'm imagining this painting of the fall of Icarus. It's probably like a similar time period and I he's like surrounded by what I presume are meant to be sirens as well. And again, they're like this like really overly sexualized characters unless they're meant to be like they're just like generally look like mermaid-esque. But that's no, it's it's interesting. And certainly that time period too. And art is where so much of that is coming in as well, like locking in that sexualized nature.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. And by contrast, I mean, we've already mentioned the famous, you know, Greek vase that shows the, you know, the bird siren is diving swooping down on Odysseus. There's nothing sexy about that, of course. There because again, that's not part of their nature.

• 18:16Liv Albert?

  And it's like 90% bird like in those in that it's literally a woman's head and then an entirely otherwise bird body. So it's like, I mean, if you're sexualizing that like that's all you know, that that's a lot more about the the perks of doing the sexualizing.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, you I mean, you post it. You made the good point on Instagram, I think a few weeks ago with a picture of one of them of the sirens. They weren't always fuckable.

• 18:40Liv Albert?

  Thank you. I forgot I did that. It was all bird. Yeah.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  And so that's, yeah. And one of the other things we can talk about with visual representations is that's one way that they're visually represented. You have essentially an entire bird body and just a woman's head where the bird's head would be. And they had different sorts of compositions of how much is woman, how much is bird that we see in ancient art.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  The one image I was able to use in this handbook chapter, and I think, yes, it's a Wikimedia image, so it's public domain, so I can send this to you. Uh, if you want to attach it as well, but it's a third century A D mosaic from Tunisia. Um, that basically depicts Odysseus and um, his men rowing up to the island. And the sirens there are depicted as essentially, I mean. They, the top half, the torso is completely human, but they have essentially bird legs, so this, you know, scrawny bird legs, and they have wings behind them. And it's an image that at first glance, you might assume that that, oh, that just looks like an ordinary woman.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Um, until you notice the bird legs and the wings, of course. So that sort of depiction is at least a bit more woman-like. But it's not, it doesn't have any type of like sexualization to it. It's not um, intended for that purpose.

• 20:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  It's nothing like the modern representations.

• 20:09Liv Albert?

  Well, I, I think even like, I mean, I, uh, maybe I'm wrong in saying this, but it seems to me that the ancient Greeks didn't tend to sexualize any of their monsters, regardless of their gender. And that was like very much a later thing. Like I'm thinking of Medusa, and in no way in the ancient Greek sources or pottery or artwork at all, is she ever like overtly sexualized. Like, that is definitely all coming in later, this like more wa- modern, western idea of like, well, if she's female in any way, we gotta make her sexy.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Female monsters aren't sexy, because I mean, we've talked on, on previous podcasts about Scylla and Charybdis. There's dangers there. But it's obviously not a sexual allure or anything like that.

• 20:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah, or if it is, it's more of like a fear of sexuality.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:00Liv Albert?

  Because I've had like a more recent conversation with, with my friend Kasi about Charybdis. And we, like, she's one who first pointed out to me that Charybdis is just a giant gaping hole, like, it, so it's like this, it's def- and same with Medusa, I think, like, if there is any sexual aspect, it is like this. Fear of what I presume to be female sexual agency that they had, and so. It's not so much like they want, it's, it's more like, this is a terror of a woman because she doesn't want to have sex with me.

• 21:30Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's the sort of like untamable, un, un, you know.

• 21:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah, unbreakable.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. You, you can't, I mean, you can't assert the patriarchy over something like Silla or or Corybdis or anything like that.

• 21:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  It's not gonna work.

• 21:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  And yeah, that's a good way to read some of those references because I mean, we do have the bits in the Odyssey that, um, I think it's, you know, it's something gets sucked into crib. It's not even Poseidon could pull them out.

• 21:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  You know, so they're, they're just untamable creatures. Um, but yes, I mean, it is a thing that, it does assert itself. I mean, a bit later on with the sirens that we already have a few references in the ancient world to basically comparisons of mortal women or, you know, historical figures to sirens in a negative light. Um, there is one that I always think of in the third century A.D. So I mean, far after the Odyssey and kind of sort of getting into late antiquity. Um, but this is by Elian and he's talking about the wife of Pericles, Aspasia. And he makes the comment that, and so it's not someone that he, Pericles and his wife were long dead by this point.

• 22:42Speaker 03

  Um, it's commenting on a famous historical figure and he makes the point that, oh, her voice was so sweet. One would have thought that they were talking to a siren. Um, and it's, I suppose you could call this like a backhanded comment of it's, it's on one hand saying she had a nice, sweet voice. Um, but maybe the end of, if, you know, uh, what's, what's the word? The implications of that might be negative. Um, because there are negative ideas about that specific historical figure. Um, because she was supposedly a prostitute and things like that. So.

• 23:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of that. That's, that's exactly what I was thinking too. Like that way of, yeah, you're, you know, you're complimenting her, but you're also making this point of reminding everyone that, you know, you know, according to the, the gossip of the day, like Pericles married a Hetera. Which like, good for her. Espasia was awesome, so whatever.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  Exactly. And so, I mean, this is not to say that the ancient Greeks, they didn't think of the sirens as sexualized. This is a sort of later thing that's coming after the myth, because you see this thing with other female monsters, just like what we were talking about. I mean, sometimes they'll compare, you know, female historical figures to Scylla or Charybdis just as a way of disparaging them, of saying that they are monstrous. You can't really read it the other way around and say that, you know, they have more feminine aspect in terms of the monsters themselves.

• 24:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, it's always an insult because like, yeah, I wrote a, I wrote a big piece about Medusa for a book recently, and I just now can't, I can't get over the, the idea of her as this representation of like, male fear of, of like, of just a woman generally who doesn't need them. And that's what makes me think of anytime if we're comparing these women, real women, to Skilla and Charybdis or anyone like, yeah, it is, it is definitely not saying anything about the monster. It's saying something about the women and essentially like their independence, the way they don't fit into the patriarchy, like you're saying, like you can't, can't bring those ones in. And so then they become this like terrifying creature.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly like that. And so, you know, we can point to scattered references like that. And when I dug up a lot of stuff on the sirens for this handbook chapter, yeah, you find a fair amount of that in non-mythological sources, just passing comments and stuff like that as a way to characterize them. And one way, especially with the sirens, they get sexualized and also mermaidized. Well, this is kind of independent of that, but in late antiquity, especially a lot of Christian sources start picking up on the sirens as an allegory for lust, essentially.

• 25:32Liv Albert?

  They would.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  Yes, and this is another thing that it's specifically a very characteristic thing of late antiquity, because a lot of people will say that, you know, past the fourth century A.D., Constantine, you know, comes to power, this is the Christian Roman Empire. But it's still very, very much a pagan world, and the Odyssey is still well-known, it's still being performed and all of that. So they didn't throw out, you know, all of the old literature and stuff like that. It's still beloved and, you know, out there. What, you know, a lot of Christian preachers did, and we have references, I think, from like Ambrose and Clement of Alexandria and various others, John Chrysostom.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  They use that as a way to describe essentially the things that they considered were bad. And if your audience knows, you know, the story of the Odyssey, it's a convenient metaphor to use like that. And you can kind of already see the, like what we were just talking about with the spagea, the ways to do that in their culture kind of already set for them to take advantage of.

• 26:40Liv Albert?

  Mm-hmm. Oh, the Christians must have had a wild time.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  Yes, and I think it, in a way, it becomes even more enhanced because there is to, I mean, in Christian mythology, of course, there's the myth of Eve that is often brought forth as a figure of temptation because it's made the case that Satan as the serpent basically tempted her to eat the apple. And it's through Eve eating the apple that she got Adam to eat the apple as well. So it's, there's a lot of very misogynistic comments in ancient patristic works that basically say that, you know, women caused the downfall of man essentially through that temptation.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  And Eve is, again, time and time again, brought forth as a figure of corruption and all of that.

• 27:34Speaker 03

  So that, you know, and of, of course, you know, goes from there. And with women in general being seen as a sort of sight of lust and the comparison to the sirens, it just grows and grows. And that's where you get it in a lot of the modern mermaid folklore too. Like what I was talking about in that Pirates of the Caribbean scene.

• 27:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  They become sexualized right around the time they start becoming mermaid eyes.

• 28:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah. So what like, I'm, you know, thinking of jumping very late to my knowledge being, you know, Hans Christian Andersen type mermaid, which is sort of to be interesting in itself because it still maintains that like terrifying nature. Um, but like, yeah, when, when did they start making this transition into being what we think of as mermaids?

• 28:26Liv Albert?

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• 31:35Speaker 03

  The earliest textual sources. So I mean, and we can say, I mean, as we've already done, that there are representations of essentially what we would call mermaids in ancient Greek art. There is however, no word in ancient Greek or Latin for mermaid. So we're aware that they New of the concept, it's some art historians will sometimes use the term female Triton or Tritonus. But those are not Greek or Latin words. Those are purely modern inventions. So as far as we're aware, they knew of mermaids in terms of visual representations, but had no name for them.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  And and so the first time sirens get equated essentially to um fishtailed women is in this text called the Liber Monstrorum, which literally means the Book of Monsters. Uh, very fun book, too. I think you could find an online translation of it. But it's an early medieval work. It's usually dated to about the end of the seventh century or the beginning of the eighth century A D. Um, and it, there's a lot of interesting scholarship. It has some connection to the Beowulf poem as well, because Crothgar is mentioned in that poem at some point.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  And there's other things that seem to have influenced that. So it's in a sort of early Anglo Saxon um context behind it. And what the book is, is basically just a rapid fire listing of different monsters. It is the Book of Monsters. And we find a description there of the sirens. They're not described as birdlike, but they are described essentially as half woman, half fish, your classical mermaid. And so that's the earliest textual source that we know of that basically equates sirens and mermaids. Um, now, the interesting thing to wonder is, well, why is that? Why the shift? Um, and this is where we're just in the realm of pure speculation. We don't really know why the author of that text.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  Was that person the first one to do this, or was he getting that from somewhere else that maybe started a couple centuries? Before that, we just don't really know. But I mean, pure speculation would be, I think that maybe.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  At this point in the Earth, the late seventh century or so, the siren iconography is probably falling out of vogue. It's you don't have any of these Roman statues of sirens or mosaics. So that image is maybe dying down a little. And at the same time, you see tons of medieval manuscripts and things with essentially the mermaid image. And so it may be gravitated towards using siren as a term to describe those mermaid figures.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  At some point, some sort of leap must have occurred with it. And we're not really sure how or why that occurred, but it just spreads from there. And it's you can see it in most European languages. And like I said, going from Portuguese all the way to Polish, siren means both mermaid and siren.

• 34:42Liv Albert?

  That's so interesting. I also always, well, I mean, it's, I suppose it's not something I regularly think of. But as soon as you started saying that, I just also realized that, you know, even our word for siren, like a, you know, ambulance siren or whatever, like it's still coming from that, I would imagine.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, which is interesting because that's certainly not a pleasant sound.

• 35:03Liv Albert?

  No, but it, but I feel like that's more of the connection to like, it might sound pleasant, but it's, you know, it means something more. I don't know. That's fun.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. And this is where too, and a lot of, again, that Pirates of the Caribbean does have it. That scene does have it a bit where she sings and stuff. So the, the director of that movie is obviously aware of it, but a lot of mermaid folklore doesn't have them singing. So they kind of lose that.

• 35:28Liv Albert?

  Well, and little, I think Little Mermaid does, which would be my main. I don't know if it does in the original Hans Christian Andersen, but obviously in the Disney.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't recall it having that.

• 35:40Liv Albert?

  I know they're terrifying in that, like they're not.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:44Liv Albert?

  I, I only remember having like a copy of it as a kid and being like, this, this chick is scary. I kind of like it.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that's the other thing of like, you know, even though, I mean, they're alluring, but they, they represent that sort of danger underneath the surface. So it's, it's in a way a false. Um, allure, because they are monstrous creatures, just now you get that trope of that monstrous sexuality of luring them in with physical beauty and all of that sort of thing.

• 36:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah, they're, um, I just, the sirens in, in Greek mythology, they're not really pictured much outside of the Odyssey, are they? In terms of like textual sources? Am I misremembering?

• 36:27Speaker 03

  In terms of like descriptions, you mean?

• 36:30Liv Albert?

  No, just even them appearing in, in many texts. Like I would think it's mostly like the Odyssey and anything that was then like, you know, those sort of mirrored, mirroring stories of sea travel.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  Yes, it's mostly just in the Odyssey. So things that mention Odysseus's journey as well. So that is kind of like their central myth. We have very little else about the sirens. There is some later traditions that, the Odyssey doesn't do this a whole lot that, you know, the poet there is not really interested in how or, how or why did these sirens, these creatures come to inhabit this island? And what are they doing there? It's just there for the purpose of being there. Same thing with Scylla and Choripus. The Odyssey poet doesn't bother to explain.

• 37:15Liv Albert?

  They're just there. They're cool.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  But, yep, but when you get to the Hellenistic period, some of those authors were more interested in coming up with explanations for, where did these things come from? And so we have it in a few sources. I think it's alluded to in Lycophron. Um, in Roman sources, Hyginus tells it that, according to them, the sirens, they were originally the handmaidens of Persephone. Um, and as it's, I think Hyginus gives the best version of it that when, I don't know, the handmaidens basically failed to stop her from being abducted, Demeter just turns them into the sirens as their punishment.

• 37:55Speaker 03

  Um, and, you know, you can see things, that's kind of a, a half-assed explanation in a way, looking for a source of the sirens and you just, oh, well, they were the, you know, the handmaidens of Persephone. Why not? But that's a classic Hellenistic thing, really, of stringing to death their different myths like that.

• 38:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  And there's also one, it's in Hyginus too, that it was prophesied that the sirens would therefore, you know, continue doing their thing of um using their song to cause ruin to people um until they failed. And so they failed with Odysseus and as a result, they were forced to fling themselves from the rocks and kill themselves.

• 38:38Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  Again, that's never in the Odyssey, but you know.

• 38:44Liv Albert?

  That's like a weird additional demonization. It's like when they, there's a story that I think only comes in surviving in Ovid to explain Scylla and it's like, again, it's like this thing where it's like a woman did something that a man thought was bad and so she was punished, you know, like, ooh, yeah.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  So in that, yeah, so if they started out as the handmaidens of Persephone and transformed into that, just and obviously it's not their fault that, you know, Persephone got abducted in the first place. What are they gonna do about that?

• 39:15Liv Albert?

  I would think that that is Zeus and Hades's fault. We never blame the men.

• 39:21Speaker 03

  But again, that's, that's just one of those later things. There is another um, and so, I mean, yeah, the Odyssey is pretty much the go-to myth and sort of the things surrounding that like that. There is one random one that we don't get any good details about, and I think it's only in Pausanias. Um, but he recalls that there was once a musical contest between the muses and the sirens because they're both, you know, musical figures. And the sirens lost that contest and so Pausanias says that they were plucked like birds. Um, that's all we have on that. I think it's, it's not, maybe not a real myth, but more of a joke. Because that's, that's amazing to me.

• 40:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and that's just so, it's so Pausanias. Like I, his work is so fun for that because it's like, well, I also think his work is such a good reminder of what a myth actually was in the ancient world and how it differs from like what we would imagine a myth to be now, because it's like, everything was all kind of meant to just be an explanation, like mythology and otherwise. And so Pausanias gets to be this great example of like, a guy who went around and talks about real things and talks about mythological things and they're kind of interchangeable because they were interchangeable in the ancient world of like what the belief system was. But that's very, that's very funny to have it. Just be that contest. I was just scrolling through because I was curious if they appeared in

• 40:50Liv Albert?

  Pali Phatus, who did a lot of like rationalizing, but they don't. So I just enjoy those rationalizations. Are there any rationalizations of the sirens that you know of?

• 41:02Speaker 03

  That's a good question. Um, not that I know of. No, I think I would have looked into it, but no, nothing's coming to mind. Um, hmm, that's a good question.

• 41:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I've been meaning to read more of Pali Phatus and Debbie Felton brought it up in our episode and I read some of it for Medusa. So now I'm like, now I realize I want to read all of what he wrote to rationalize nonsense.

• 41:25Speaker 03

  There, I mean, he has a couple of good ones for the sea monster stuff.

• 41:29Liv Albert?

  Oh, I bet. Yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, that's a good, I don't think so, which is an interesting thing in and of itself that they never bothered with that.

• 41:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  Which is why.

• 41:42Liv Albert?

  And it is, I mean, they, you know, they really do only appear in the one story, but visually they were kind of all over the place. So it's interesting. Yeah.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, because they're, yeah, very frequent and that mosaic that I mentioned in Tunisia. And one of the things that's also not in the Odyssey is that in terms of visual representations, they're often given musical instruments just to represent their song nature in a visual media, um, which is something the, one of the only ways that you can distinguish sirens from harpies. Um, in terms of.

• 42:14Liv Albert?

  So like, how are they holding music? I would, I need to know more about how they could possibly have musical instruments. I am obsessed.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  There is, um, at least in that, um, it only occurs where they have essentially a woman's torso.

• 42:27Liv Albert?

  Right. Cause they have little hands.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  Yes. I don't know if you can Google real quick. It's not going to work on mine. Just, um, sirens Tunisia mosaic would probably bring it up. And actually I can do it on my phone. Uh, because it is a Wikimedia image that should come up fairly.

• 42:46Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, I love it. Their little legs.

• 42:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 42:50Liv Albert?

  Oh my gosh. Yeah. No, I see. Yeah. So one's holding a lyre. One has a little aloe set. And the other one's kind of wrapped up like a burrito, which is how I, I was before this call, I was picking up the photo of Achilles as a burrito. So it came to mind.

• 43:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, that's great. I'm absolutely gonna post that for this episode because it's also beautiful.

• 43:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. And again, you can see on the one on the right side, um, where the thigh, her thigh is exposed. You can see the detail where it looks like feathers there as well.

• 43:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh.

• 43:23Speaker 03

  Which is really nice, I think. Yeah. And again, contrast that with the modern art that it's not sexualized. Um, sort of image at all.

• 43:33Liv Albert?

  It's, yeah, I don't think they're meant to look. The legs are, they'll, they have giant bird legs. It's like if an ostrich, like bottom half, top half woman, bottom half ostrich.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  Exactly. Um.

• 43:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  Arms for musical instruments.

• 43:50Liv Albert?

  Well, and it, it remains to the, the like, that they're on land here, you know, like it, it's, it's so interesting how they transition to being like an underwater creature because.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah. In terms of like, you know, the Odyssey and, and visual art, like they are, I mean, not least because they have wings, but like even just, you know, they're. Yeah.

• 44:12Speaker 03

  And this, it's something I always thought interesting about the Odyssey is that, you know, they have all of this adventure. They're, they're traveling through the sea, but nothing really comes up and swims up to the boat or anything like that.

• 44:26Liv Albert?

  That's so true.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  You know, Charybdis is obviously in the sea, but all of the threats in the Odyssey are really stationary stuff. So once you've sailed past these, you know, island of sirens, you're safe, you're good. They're not gonna fly at you. We see in visual representations that they can fly, but they are essentially a stationary threat. Um, in the poem itself, as is most things, it seems.

• 44:48Liv Albert?

  It's, it's, it's funnier to think about it that way because it just reminds you over and over again that like Odysseus did not have to get him and his men into as much trouble as he did. Like.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:59Liv Albert?

  None of this came upon them, except maybe skill and Charybdis.

• 45:05Liv Albert?

  But like, otherwise, it's like, no, no, he sought out all of these things that caused the death of to most of his men are all in the end.

• 45:12Speaker 03

  Exactly. And he's, he's playing with fire too, here with the whole thing of like, you know, strapping himself to

• 45:19Liv Albert?

  Oh my god, yeah.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  Uh, the boat. And there's actually another bit here. So he straps himself to the mast while the men, of course, have the beeswax in their ears so that they can't hear it. But it said there that obviously as he hears the sirens, and part of the allure of the sirens too, is that they're promising to give Odysseus knowledge about why the Trojan War occurred. So it's, yes, the song itself is beautiful, but it's also a bit of allure of knowledge. And this is what seems to get Odysseus. And because as the text says that, you know,

• 45:54Speaker 03

  it says, quote, "Yet my heart desired to listen. I twitched my eyebrows, a sign ordering my companions to unbind me, but they rode through rushing forward." So, you know.

• 46:06Liv Albert?

  He's such a loser.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  Exactly. And this is one of those things that's like, it's somewhat of a meme that, you know, Odysseus' men, they never do anything right. They let the damn bag of winds out. They ate the cattle. They will go on to do that at this point in the narrative. So Odysseus' men get a lot of shit for, you know, screwing things up.

• 46:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  But here, thank God, they obeyed the original orders. Because if they'd listened to Odysseus here and unbound him, well, that's it. That's game over, you know? So they, they did the right thing.

• 46:39Liv Albert?

  Well, and even when they do get shit for that, like it tends, it still all comes down to him most of the time. You know, the winds, I guess there's like the one thing. But even still, I feel like he could have done a better job, like talking to them about, you know, it's so interesting, all the different things. It's like, no, it's all about your leadership guy. Like.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  This is also one that I, I think it throws a bit of light on. I mean, Odysseus is obviously, I mean, his trait is being polymechanist, being clever, being smart. But this is also another thing where you can't really worm your way out of this. And the fact that he so desperately wants to be unbound shows that. If he'd not been told about this whole thing by Cersei and just came across this unawares, that's it. You're done. So it's another threat that, I mean, his famous trait, it did nothing to help here.

• 47:30Liv Albert?

  I just released the episode that came out today at the time of our recording is Michaela and I talking about who is worse Achilles or Odysseus and Odysseus won by a long shot, but it's just funny that this we're chatting about this now because I feel like all in my head, I just have like all the varied mistakes and nonsense that he did. Sirens are just one, you know, small piece of a big puzzle of Odysseus being kind of an asshole who I love anyway, because I love the Odyssey too much to care, but.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 48:03Liv Albert?

  So with the harpies, like, I mean, I feel like we could talk about the sirens forever too, but the harpies are interesting because they're both similar to the sirens and also really different. And similarly, I think also really only appear in the Argonautica. Do they, do they go beyond? Yeah, I would love to hear.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I mean, one of the ways that I came up for this handbook chapter, I mean, yes, they're both, they're both bird monsters, of course, and but they are kind of opposites in a way. The sirens, they have this enchanting quality. They try to draw in their victims, but siren or sorry, harpies have exactly the opposite. They're characterized by repulsiveness and they're a more mobile threat. They seem to fly in the myth of Phineas and in other sources as well. But yeah, I mean, the Argonautica, yes, that is the main source of them, which is a bit later, too. We get some scattered references to them in previous texts. It's

• 48:58Speaker 03

  in, in the Iliad, I think it's, this is classic Greek mythology. It's said at one point that Achilles' horses are the offspring of a harpy and the west wind.

• 49:12Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  So, you know, a personification of a wind and a harpy, what do you get? A horse.

• 49:19Liv Albert?

  Naturally.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  Horse too.

• 49:21Liv Albert?

  Well, yeah.

• 49:21Speaker 03

  Classic Greek mythology.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  And that's the first reference we get in literature to a harpy. Um, but of course, that's just a fleeting thing that tells nothing other than that it mated with the west wind, however that works.

• 49:36Liv Albert?

  Um, well, and and the west wind like Zephyr, Zephyros, he's usually depicted with wings too. So it's funny to be like, these two winged creatures got together and up out came a horse.

• 49:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's sometimes thought that maybe the harpies, um, they were originally wind spirits themselves. Maybe that's what the poet of the Iliad means that they're two wind spirits. And maybe the harpies took a more birdlike direction and it seems different now.

• 50:03Liv Albert?

  That's interesting.

• 50:04Speaker 03

  Cause we also get a bit in the Odyssey, Odysseus himself never runs into the harpies. But there's a brief line from Telemachus, something to the effect of, oh, my poor father, he's probably been swept away by the harpies. So, you know, they exist. And that's a potential threat out there, but it never happens. It's just a way for the poet to allude for, allude to other things out there.

• 50:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  And the harpies, um, they are characterized by this trait of essentially, they're not this vocal element, but of snatching things up. So this is another birdlike element. I always think of when I think of the harpies, I think of seagulls. Um, because I lived in Exeter for four years. Um, and anyone that's lived in a seaside town or anywhere that there's seagulls.

• 50:52Liv Albert?

  I just moved out of downtown Victoria where I could see the water from my apartment. So it was literally just.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:58Liv Albert?

  Seagulls outside all of the time.

• 51:01Speaker 03

  Yep. And so you probably know how much they love to snatch people's food.

• 51:05Liv Albert?

  Oh, do they ever?

• 51:07Speaker 03

  I, I saw, I, I don't know how true this is, but I saw someone did a study, apparently a few months ago, that they actually prefer to steal food that people are eating because it connotates to their brain that when they see something else eating it, it connotates edible thing. Um, so that's why it happens so much. I'm not a, uh, you know, scientist in that regard. So I don't know how true that is, but. It makes sense, because yes, being an Exeter for four years, and those are fat seagulls too, because they're well fed. But you see a different bird element coming in here, whereas the sirens, they get the musical element from birds.

• 51:48Speaker 03

  This gets, you know, the flying, the swooping, and stealing people's food. And this is, of course, where you get the myth of Phineus, which is not, not as well-known as Odysseus. And, but, you know, Greek mythology people.

• 52:03Liv Albert?

  I've not. Isn't it in the Argonautica, or is it not?

• 52:08Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:08Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 52:09Speaker 03

  It is. It's in Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica. It's in Valerius Flacus's one, which I have here. I did the translation.

• 52:21Liv Albert?

  I've been meaning to read that one, but I haven't.

• 52:23Speaker 03

  Ah, it's, we don't have the full thing, but it's interesting nonetheless. And at least for Valerius Flacus's description of it, he gives a more vivid description of what's going on here, so I can read that. But, yeah, maybe just to give the myth of Phineus in brief for the audience. Phineus was basically a Thracian king who, he was given the gift of prophecy for, or by Apollo, rather. And what he started doing with it is prophesizing. He started telling people the sacred intentions of the gods, the things that's, you know, behind the scenes that they don't want mortals knowing about.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  And so, in punishment for that, Zeus blinds him, and he basically sets up this punishment where he will be eternally harassed by the harpies who come and either steal or befoul his food, shit all over it, essentially, as, again, seagulls are what to do as well, living for. Four years an exeter, I'm well aware of that. And so we have in Valerius Flacus's Argonautica, a description from Phineas himself about it. So to read this quote, "The harpies always watch over my food. Alas, I can never deceive them. Immediately they come down like the black cloud of a swirling whirlwind.

• 53:48Speaker 03

  By the sound of her wings, I already know Kalino from far away. They pillage and carry off my feast, spoil and overturn my cups. A stench rages and a wretched fight ensues, for the monsters have a hunger as I do. Nor would I be allowed to interrupt this fate by death. My cruel destitution is prolonged by such nourishment." End quote.

• 54:18Liv Albert?

  That's such, yeah, just like sea birds. And I love that.

• 54:22Speaker 03

  And I mean, we presume that it's, it's either that the birds, the harpies are stealing just enough of his food that he can, he still has enough to eat and

• 54:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 54:33Speaker 03

  live, which is even worse. So he's perpetually in a state of hunger because of this, because the harpies are, you know, destroying his food, stealing it in one way or the other. And this is the characteristic thing that they do in that myth. They just arrive and swoop in and do this just to harass this poor guy for prophesizing with the gift of prophecy that he was given by the gods.

• 54:58Liv Albert?

  It's almost like Apollo and Zeus are garbage, garbage characters.

• 55:05Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. And yet, I mean, and I mean, too, Zeus blinds him as well, just as an added extra.

• 55:13Liv Albert?

  Bees is a shit, those guys.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  Extra insult. And so, yeah, that is the main myth with the harpies, really. Etymologically, the term harpy is probably related to the Greek word for snatching. So we do think that that's. You know, their central characteristic, how that would work if they evolved from winds, we don't really know. But that is the more repulsive side of the aliens, you know, you're drawn towards the sirens, especially if you're Phineas, you would love to get away from these, but they're flying, they're a more mobile threat like that, and he just can't ever get away from them.

• 55:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, as someone who spent a lot of time on Cycladic Islands, I can tell, like, the wind is snatching too. So that's interesting, like the connection, like the winds on those islands, like, take your stuff and it's gone. Like, so it would be interesting if they were also evolving from, from wind and then the birds in the wind, like, you know, because birds also, I mean, birds are so connected with the wind, not least because they're in the sky, but even like, I can imagine, I, again, I've spent, I'm lucky enough to spend a lot of time on Naxos, and I'm obsessed with it, but there, there's been a number of times when I've just watched birds ride the wind, where they don't look like they're going anywhere, but they look like they're having a great time. And so that's all I could

• 56:39Liv Albert?

  think of, too, like, that connection between that, that nature of the wind, it would be, it's interesting to consider.

• 56:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, that, that could be interesting, because that could explain, you know, sort of Telemachus's reference, that there's still wind spirits, but maybe it was felt that you need something more corporeal for the myth of Phineas, and so they

• 57:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, they need, there needs to be like a visual nature. And so, yeah, they kind of become birds, because also it's like, well, what, what else in that world can, can be, you know, can work with the wind in any kind of way. It's all about the sea birds and the winds, especially on those islands, because the wind gets wild. I mean, Mykonos is a bigger example, but thank God I've not spent much time on there. But like, you go to Mykonos, I've been for like, an hour, just because Delos is right there and you have to, but like, it is the windiest, most difficult place to navigate, just like, anywhere in those, in that realm is so, so windy. So now all I can think about is, yeah, the way those, they're kind of the same thing, you know, both can snatch things up or cause

• 57:44Liv Albert?

  you trouble, or, you know, even like, I mean, let alone in a ship, but the winds can be powerful.

• 57:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:52Liv Albert?

  I'm thrilled to know that wind connection, that's all.

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• 59:45Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, the other thing, I mean, so it occurs around the myth of Phineas is the main thing that they're centered around. There's the other interesting thing, which I wondered if you talked about this with Debbie, because it's really her idea of Virgil's harpies. Did you talk about that?

• 1:00:02Liv Albert?

  We did not. We really talked about serial killers more than anything. So you are still the monster guy on this show.

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  Yes, I love that you mentioned the serial killers.

• 1:00:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that was the primary purpose.

• 1:00:13Speaker 03

  Absolutely fascinating.

• 1:00:14Liv Albert?

  Oh, it was great.

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  But I mean, so another prominent in kind of a weird location that the harpies show up is in book three of the Aeneid. And book three of the Aeneid is, for the audience, I mean, that's where the Trojans are basically sailing around, looking for a new home. So it's kind of a skiff, you know, a parody in a way of the Odyssey.

• 1:00:38Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  And they come up to one island and decide that, oh, okay, we're gonna make this our new home. Essentially, this is going to be the renewal of the Trojans from here. And basically, what happens is they start setting up their feast tables and some harpies come out of nowhere and start attacking them. And one of them speaks prophetically and basically tells Aeneas that, no, no, it's faded that you're gonna go to Italy and all of that. That's a very weird thing, because nowhere else in the ancient sources are harpies given this sort of prophetic ability. Phineas is the one that has that, but we don't hear of the harpies doing this. And so one way

• 1:01:20Speaker 03

  to interpret this, there's an element of the Aeneid that's especially popular in recent scholarship, which is, I mean, the Aeneid is a work of epic. It's very serious, but there's also humorous elements throughout the text. And this is a big thing in scholarship. I think I saw a CFP for this a few months ago, actually, on exactly this, that, and I had a student when I was at Trent actually write a very good essay on something like this, that when they're in the underworld, you know, Aeneas gets on Chiron's boat, and it's this leaky boat that's in disrepair. It might be a humorous element, but this thing with the harpies might be another sort of thing,

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  that you've got this bird-like thing speaking about the future. So this might be a joke about Roman augury, essentially.

• 1:02:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  Parodying that in a kind of absurd way. And it's

• 1:02:14Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Can you believe we trust the birds for everything?

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  Exactly. And it's, yes, it stands out as kind of a ham-fisted plot device in a way that, how are we supposed to get Aeneas to Italy now? I know, the bird will tell him.

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  Essentially, because that's just nowhere else. Nowhere else do they have that sort of thing.

• 1:02:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  And so he could be poking, you know, and it's not to say that Virgil was an anti augury person, or that he hated the gods or anything like that. You can and probably should poke fun at your own people's customs and things like that. And so that's what that has sometimes been read as there, this talking prophetic bird like here.

• 1:02:58Liv Albert?

  And Yeah.

• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  And there's another, the reason I asked if you and Debbie talked about this, there's another interesting bit of that scene that she has written an article on. The article is, I think it's literally just titled, Were Virgil's Harpies Menstruating?

• 1:03:15Liv Albert?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  And, and this gets back on to possible depictions of, you know, monstrous females in the ancient world. But the description that Virgil gives there is that the harpies show up and they have, where is my translation? They have blood and, you know, gore all on their claws and their lower torsos. And you might think, well, that's, you know, tearing apart animals or something like that. And the text adds here that, quote, "They had a most foul discharge from their stomachs." And what Debbie's article there basically looks at is that a lot of the Latin terms that are used in this poem might connotate

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  not just blood, but specifically menstrual blood. So is that an element of kind of what we were talking about here as well? I mean, the fear of female sexuality, of female bodies, things like that.

• 1:04:16Liv Albert?

  Fear of bodies that men don't want to have sex with. I think it's so specific. I almost wrote that into this piece I had on Medusa, and instead it's going to become an episode. But it just feels like that's so specifically what it is in this like, like I just can't get over it kind of way, because I feel like the, the men of the ancient world will never stop surprising me with their level of just like nonsensical misogyny.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And nonsensical is a good word for it, because it's like, I mean, Again, like what we were talking about, I mean, and it's the same thing of, we don't know, I was talking about, I mean, in terms of iconographic sources, you know, the compositions of how much woman and how much bird these things can be vary. Um, but I think it's always the lower half that is bird-like. And I mean, birds don't menstruate. How does this, this really work? If you want to imagine, I mean, accurate anatomy of these sorts of things.

• 1:05:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15Speaker 03

  But Virgil seems to be, I mean, and this is again, this might be another sort of joking thing of maybe an absurdist thing that Virgil is wanting to point out with these hybrid types of monsters as well, but it's um, one of these things. And Debbie's article on that, again, it's very, very good. It is, yeah, just called, I mean, Were Virgil's Harpies Menstruating?

• 1:05:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  And it points to something that's very subtle like this because it doesn't really come across in translation. Because the specific Latin words used here, you know, it's not overtly saying that they were menstruating, but it has connotations of that. And there's certain bits too, that it said um, here as well, I mean, the harpies come down and you know, not just snatch up their food, but polluted menstrual blood is often equated with pollution in the ancient world. I always think of Pliny the Elder's um, statement, what is it? He thinks that menstrual blood essentially causes swords to rust instantly.

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  Um, that's yes, that's in Pliny the Elder, um, along with a lot of crazy stuff. Um, so it-

• 1:06:25Liv Albert?

  They just couldn't fathom that women just existed as bodies. Like, it reminds me of, I, I had Helen King on a few months ago too, to talk about um, like the, the history of women's bodies and it's just,

• 1:06:38Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:38Liv Albert?

  They just absolutely came up with the wildest nonsense that they thought was going on in there, like wombs wandering all over the place, menstrual blood rest, like rusting immediately, like it's just, they were like, well, these are weirdly different forms than, than ours. And, and we can't possibly come up with like, you know, we can't like study them in any kind of, you know, realistic detail because why would we do that when we have men to study? Instead, we'll just assume the absolute wildest nonsense.

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's, yes, if only, if only there was some way to test this sword's rusting.

• 1:07:14Liv Albert?

  Ah, no, we'll never know. I just have to assume I'm right.

• 1:07:17Speaker 03

  Have you ever heard, I mean, random thing, but have you ever heard, what is it Aristotle's thing? Um, that he says that women naturally have fewer teeth than men?

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  He has that in his works. Um, and it's like, well, if this is approvable.

• 1:07:35Liv Albert?

  Yes, truly.

• 1:07:36Speaker 03

  He had a wife.

• 1:07:37Liv Albert?

  Open a mouth and count, like what?

• 1:07:40Speaker 03

  But, you know, he's just, you know, just write it down. It's true. Cause I say it is and.

• 1:07:47Liv Albert?

  I'd not heard of that. Thank you.

• 1:07:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's great. It's a meme somewhere. Um, yeah. And, but I mean, in Aristotle too, um, Fiona Mitchell, in her fairly recent book on monsters. I mean, she points out a lot of the ways Aristotle considers monstrosity and talks about how he conceptualizes women too, as a sort of like imperfect man. They're kind of sort of monstrous and deformed in his mind as well. And in a lot of ancient thought. Um, so maybe some of that is feeding into Virgil's depiction here. That's, you know, if you consider in Greco-Roman culture as women as being slightly monstrous

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  or something is that's even more monstrous in a sense of a figure like this.

• 1:08:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, I love this. They're just adding to all of my newest theories on.

• 1:08:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:41Liv Albert?

  Just, I, I just can never get over the, the ancient men and the nonsense they spew.

• 1:08:47Speaker 03

  And this, this is what I always bring up and people say, I mean, Aristotle was the first scientist. He actually went out and observed the natural world. He couldn't even count the, you know, the teeth in his wife's mouth, apparently. He didn't go very far for observations on anything.

• 1:09:04Liv Albert?

  It's such an easy thing to prove, as is the rust. Like, I'm sorry. The ladies are menstruating once a month. You're really that curious? Fucking figure it out. Don't just like assume hot nonsense. Like, why would that blood be any different from other blood?

• 1:09:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, but you know, this is what you get in ancient Rome.

• 1:09:25Liv Albert?

  They were just terrified of women.

• 1:09:28Speaker 03

  And that's it. Yeah. I mean, that's an interesting thing, too, with it, that, I mean, this pollution in in the Organica, I think it's implied that the pollution is excrement. It's the bird shitting on things. But if it's pollution from menstrual blood to a Roman audience, does that read as even worse?

• 1:09:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:48Speaker 03

  You know, maybe so.

• 1:09:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, I could. That that sounds like so on point. I love it. I'm I'm trying to jot down notes of everything I every new episode I want to do based on this conversation.

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  The Aristotle teeth.

• 1:10:01Liv Albert?

  Aristotle teeth I'm just writing down.

• 1:10:05Speaker 03

  I can I can dig up that reference, whatever that is for you.

• 1:10:09Liv Albert?

  I would love that.

• 1:10:11Speaker 03

  Because I I feel like I want to go back to.

• 1:10:14Liv Albert?

  Yes, I was just thinking, like, what if I could just read, oh, like, just find old translations of a bunch of the wildest shit that ancient men said about women? And I just want to like, read them straight out.

• 1:10:25Speaker 03

  God, I and that brings up the thought, too, of I wonder how that feeds into the reception history of Aristotle. Did like people in like the early modern period read that from Aristotle, like, you know, male authors read that from Aristotle and assume that's true, like, because the great Aristotle said it?

• 1:10:43Liv Albert?

  But I think that's that is so true. I think of so many things when it comes to women, because they just were not actually interested in learning. They were interested in like continuing their earlier, their like, assumption that women are lesser. And so it was like, well, these guys have already done the work for us. Like, we're not going to go ahead and like, count teeth in a woman's mouth, because that would be crazy. Like Aristotle already did, clearly.

• 1:11:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. And you can, you can feel, you can see a lot of it in Aristotle's work too, where he's, he's, it feels like he's trying his damnedest to find some way to disparage women, um, by, you know, saying they're deformed, but at the same time, you have to recognize that, I mean, they're the other half of the human species and things like that. It's, you know, the things that they, they have are natural, but he does, he wants to go against the grain and find a way to make it unnatural.

• 1:11:42Liv Albert?

  I mean, yeah, I think it all, like it, it really ties so, so much into, they saw the power inherent in like the uterus and the, you know, that the, the female body in that sense. Like they saw the, the power that it had to create life and how they couldn't control, you know, who the dad was or whatever. Like it was like this, this thing they couldn't control. And so they just spent so many hundreds of years making women into this controllable creature because it was the only way that they could like maintain any kind of power. And now it's like, I can see it in everything and from the ancient Greek world. And it's fascinatingly terrible, but I've not read Aristotle and now I have to, thank you. I usually

• 1:12:26Liv Albert?

  just avoid, I mean, I avoid the, the philosophers because I just am not particularly interested. Mostly because of the way that, uh, certain men have like taken hold of them and made them obnoxious. Um, right? Like, so, you know, I, I recently overheard a man refer to Marcus Aurelius as Marcus, like as if they were old friends. And I just was like, oh, right. You're a man I would not like to meet in a dark alley. Thank you for making that clear upfront.

• 1:12:51Speaker 03

  Oh God. Yes. It's especially bad with that genre, like the tech bro stereotype that just loves Stoicism and stuff like that. And it just, well, just.

• 1:13:03Liv Albert?

  Yep. Yep. Exactly.

• 1:13:05Speaker 03

  Aristotle, yeah, I mean, he's, he's very different from what people will say about, uh, him because he's. The other thing, uh, cause I'm writing an article on seals in the ancient world now.

• 1:13:15Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  Comes to mind, so.

• 1:13:17Liv Albert?

  I love all your ocean stuff. This is so great.

• 1:13:20Speaker 03

  Yes, I'll, I'll have to mention the, the sea monsters book is being submitted soon too.

• 1:13:25Liv Albert?

  Yay, yay, let me know when it's, uh, you'll have to come back maybe and talk more sea monsters. I'm always down.

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  And, but he has this bit on seals where he considers seals as deformed creatures and essentially monstrous too. And, and they're in the ancient world, this has a lot of other references too, where because they're deformed or monstrous, they're considered bad and ugly sometimes. And if you, I love watching videos of seals on Instagram.

• 1:13:51Liv Albert?

  Seals are fucking adorable.

• 1:13:53Speaker 03

  Exactly. How you could consider that monstrous is, you know, he does it because they're half on land and half on sea and things like that. They're essentially, he calls them unfinished animals, pretty much. But just, you know, appreciate seals for what they are.

• 1:14:09Liv Albert?

  They're the puppies of the sea. I, that's like, one of the few things I'm gonna miss from Victoria is just generally the ocean life. Cause like, you could just wander down and like walk out there. We have this breakwater and the seals are always around there. And they're just playing around. Used to be able to go feed them at this one spot. But then one of them dragged a kid in, um, in a different town. So, you know, I'm starting that. But they're just so cute. And I love, oh my God, the seals in the ancient world. I want to hear more about that, but I, I won't ask now. Um, no, that, that's, that's such a joy to learn. Um, just cause I don't want to keep you for too much longer and I want to make sure we talk about the, the harpies and the sirens too.

• 1:14:52Liv Albert?

  So like, I mean, is there, the in, through that transition or even just them, you know, in, still in the, the, you know, ancient Greek and Roman sources, like, is there anything that really stood out to you about the, the way they've been maybe, you know, depicted in so many different ways or their transformation? Like, I would just love to hear if there's anything more you're kind of really obsessed with.

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  I mean, in turn, one of the things that stood out to me is how uneven it is too, that, um, the sirens are so prominent. In ancient culture, but the harpies are less so you like we talked about the myth of Phineas. But the myth of Phineas obviously isn't as prominent as the Odyssey, because you know, the Odyssey. And so they're in a way seen as they come across as lesser. And this actually conveys over to modern scholarship too, because one of the things that we did for these handbook entries is that there's further reading sections at the end. And on the sirens, I was able to, you know, find that and say in that section, well, there's this book and that book. And there's an open access edited volume. There's tons of articles. There's lots of stuff on sirens.

• 1:15:59Speaker 03

  But on the harpies, as far as I'm aware, unless it's been published recently, there's no book on the harpies whatsoever. And you have only scattered articles like Debbie's article and a couple of other things. So if anyone out there is looking for something to do a PhD thesis on, I mean, the harpies are right there. You've got no competition. I did since, well, this is again with the prominence of the sirens themselves that I've heard. And since this chapter came out from two different PhD students at Oxford doing stuff on the sirens. So it's still a big topic, but again, I mean, the harpies are so neglected and they're seen as, I mean,

• 1:16:43Speaker 03

  less interesting versions of the sirens. A lot of times I talked a little bit about, I mean, the sirens, they also always have musical instruments. And that's one way that you can say this or that depiction of a half woman, half bird is a siren. But harpies don't have that whatsoever. So, but sometimes people still assume that those are sirens just because, and we don't really know.

• 1:17:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I was just gonna ask, like, you know, how, how, how often were harpies depicted? And how often can we tell because of exactly what you're just saying?

• 1:17:16Speaker 03

  The only way definitively you could tell is if they're represented with Phineas. Then you know it's the myth, but otherwise we have all sorts of things like there's a, I think it's like a lamp or something in the shape of a siren or harpy and because it's just isolated, we don't really know what it was intended and which one it was intended to be there.

• 1:17:37Liv Albert?

  Well, and that's the same with like even the the statue I posted that you mentioned on in from Instagram when I said sirens aren't always fuckable and like that statue is referred to, you know, in in the museum as a as a siren, but why? You know, it really is just this half bird, half woman, and there are a lot of those, you know, as like individual statues that at least on pottery, you usually get a bit of a storyline. And so, you know, like you said, like if they're with Phineas, you can tell, or it's really obvious if they're with Odysseus like. But yeah, i- in a statuary, it's just sort of one extra piece and how how reasonably, you know, could you could you assume it's a siren? And and is that assumption just based in like, well, sirens have become more popular, so we just make that assumption?

• 1:18:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And and I mean, the harpies, the harpies do continue on into medieval sources as well, but the well, I don't.

• 1:18:31Speaker 03

  I haven't looked at too much into the medieval sources of it, but I suppose harpies get their own distinctiveness in the medieval sources once the sirens become mermaids in a way. So

• 1:18:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  And they do.

• 1:18:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah, then it's obvious. Yeah.

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  Once you get into the medieval period, you'd have to say those are are harpies if you see bird like figures in a manuscript or something like that. So I suppose they they get their own time.

• 1:18:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:54Speaker 03

  As it were.

• 1:18:56Liv Albert?

  No, but that's true. Like, because even today, you know, I think people would assume that a harpy is the half bird, half woman, whereas they're like a siren. You know, e- even if they don't necessarily equate a siren with a mermaid, because I think in English, it's, you know, we we that word mermaid is so, you know, ubiquitous. But e- e- you know, even still, like a siren would would, I don't think most people who weren't, you know, this deep in would assume that a siren is a half bird. Like, I think that that that has definitely been lost over time.

• 1:19:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:26Liv Albert?

  That's really interesting. And you, I don't, I'm gonna mention a thing that I've only been, I've been recently told about um, this this new TV show that uh is they're trying to get um indie go go funding. So it's a an indie project. And all I know about it so far is it's called Hangry Harpies. But just if you're interested in knowing about that at all.

• 1:19:48Speaker 03

  That sounds.

• 1:19:49Liv Albert?

  Google it.

• 1:19:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah, they they emailed me about uh just and just to share it, and I haven't had a chance to to look too deep yet or anything, but there there, I think they just recently launched the indie go go. So that's pretty cute, and it's a new new bit of harpies reception.

• 1:20:05Speaker 03

  Yes, which is an interesting thing, too, that specifically hangry harpies.

• 1:20:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  I just remembered the bit there from the Argonautica where it says, they're also hungry, too. Yes, for the monsters have a hunger as I do. So it's like Zeus has basically cursed them with hunger.

• 1:20:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:23Speaker 03

  They're suffering. Oh, that's I'll look into that for sure.

• 1:20:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah. That's so fun. Um, well, I mean, uh, sorry, now my brain is turning around. I'm. I usually try to keep people, you know, less than an hour and a half. If you wanted to chat a bit more about anything, I'm so down to hear more. But I also don't know more my brain will ask you, so.

• 1:20:48Speaker 03

  Um, I mean, I on the sirens and harpies, I don't um, have too much. I mean, there is too, if you want to throw in another bird, um, I am doing a couple of different things on the phoenix in Greek myth.

• 1:21:02Liv Albert?

  Okay, so yes, the phoenix is interesting to me because I feel like it is not very heavily utilized in Greek myth. And I've always assumed it's more of an eastern. So what? Yeah. What's what's going on with the phoenix?

• 1:21:16Speaker 03

  Uh, it is basically, I mean, it's you're right to say that it's not heavily used because there's just scattered reports of it. It's in Herodotus first, um, that he recalls essentially, I mean, the classical myth of the phoenix. But he recalls it essentially as a um, bird that carries the father of its or the corpse of its father to Heliopolis after it has died. So it's a weird, you don't get the resurrection motif yet.

• 1:21:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:45Speaker 03

  It's only in later sources, essentially. And you begin to get that.

• 1:21:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Heliopolis, would that be in the east?

• 1:21:55Speaker 03

  It's in Egypt. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah, okay. Well, I guess so. But yeah, but interesting. Yeah, more of that connection to outside of Greece, though. You'd like it.

• 1:22:02Speaker 03

  But yes.

• 1:22:02Liv Albert?

  To me, the phoenix is not like a Greek. Creature.

• 1:22:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's in Herodotus' book too, so it's something that he might have picked up with the Egyptian stuff, which is his, because it's his Egyptian book. So it's something that comes external and doesn't really work its way into a lot of Greek mythology. So

• 1:22:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:22Speaker 03

  That's the sort of one-off thing. So if people are aware of that, and it, there's not too terribly much to say because it doesn't really interact with Zeus or any of the other Apollo or mythological characters. It's just kind of a one, one-off thing. I suppose it makes good for an ending here as well, that some of the stuff that I'm doing with it is looking at the later Christian appropriation of it. As essentially because of the resurrection motif.

• 1:22:49Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:22:50Speaker 03

  It makes for a nice symbol for Christ, essentially. And, and it can be read other ways, essentially as a pagan symbol and things like that. So that's another bird-like thing that I'm looking at, but it's,

• 1:23:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:04Speaker 03

  You know, it has a kind of weird history where that one comes to prominence a bit later on. But it is found in Ovid and other sources as a kind of one-off weird thing that they like.

• 1:23:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Do you know anything about it beyond like Greek and Roman? Like where, where the creature, because I, and I, you know, the name, the word phoenix is obviously really Greek and it's probably, it's coming from Phoenicia, I would imagine. Or is like at least etymologically connected to the Greek name for, you know, the general Lebanon area.

• 1:23:37Speaker 03

  It's, yes.

• 1:23:38Liv Albert?

  Trying to drop in that Lebanon deserves to remain Lebanon. So I just had to say.

• 1:23:42Speaker 03

  Good. Good, good addition. Um, yeah, I mean, it's thought that yes, probably it comes from elsewhere. Because the word phoenix in Greek, literally the word, it can mean Phoenician as well. And it can also mean palm tree or the color purple. It has a lot of interesting meanings.

• 1:24:02Liv Albert?

  Well, the color purple would be coming from the Phoenician of it though too, right? Because Tyrian purple. Yeah.

• 1:24:08Speaker 03

  And so it might be, um, something that became associated with that. And the people have looked at. Again, it's in Herodotus's Egyptian book. So it's widely thought that it's something that he came about when he's digging into all the Egyptian stuff.

• 1:24:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:23Speaker 03

  There, so.

• 1:24:25Liv Albert?

  Well, and they're they're also, by the time Herodotus was around, like, the Canaanites, Phoenicians, the whole Levant and Egypt were so interconnected. That would make sense if, you know, even if it's not necessarily originating in Egypt, but he's learning about it when he's generally in that area. Also, his Egyptian book is just so wacky. That's great.

• 1:24:45Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:24:46Liv Albert?

  A hippopotamus is a terror of the.

• 1:24:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:50Liv Albert?

  Hippopotamus.

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so, I mean, because Herodotus himself, he's writing in Greek and he's, you know, become so prominent in his own right, essentially gets imported. And the phoenix too. I mean, it is a recurring thing, of course. It resurrects itself sometimes every five hundred years or sometimes every thousand years, depending on the source. But we have, interestingly, with this one, Tacitus and others give specific dates for when the last one occurred.

• 1:25:18Liv Albert?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:25:19Speaker 03

  According to Tacitus, it was during the reign of Claudius and things like that. So it becomes this interesting sort of thing that it's it's perceived as something that's still ongoing. It's not just a one-off myth. And actually Claudius is said to have obtained the corpse, the remains of the old phoenix for the ludiciolaris, the games given in honor of Rome's anniversary for that year and displayed it.

• 1:25:50Liv Albert?

  Wonder what he had. Just like had some poor dead bird.

• 1:25:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, but, you know.

• 1:25:59Liv Albert?

  That's really interesting.

• 1:26:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah. What about the Sphinx? She she's not, I guess she's not really a bird. No, she has wings. Dude, have you touched the Sphinx at all?

• 1:26:07Speaker 03

  No, I haven't. There's someone else in the handbook chapter that's done an article on the Sphinx though, so that would be.

• 1:26:17Liv Albert?

  I looked at that handbook because obviously I would want it and then it's a hundred and seventy pounds, I think. And I was like, I'm gonna just talk to the people who wrote for it.

• 1:26:25Speaker 03

  There you go. There's a whole list of new podcast guests there.

• 1:26:31Speaker 03

  But there, I mean, there is to, yes, the prices is, is a bit wild, but I mean, if you and Debbie haven't already recommended it, I mean, you, universities can get an institutional subscription to those.

• 1:26:43Liv Albert?

  That's true. We can get it from Michaela. So yes, to those of you, because I do recommend it. I want to read it. And you've just reminded me that my producer can probably get us access.

• 1:26:53Speaker 03

  And this, by the way, I mean, it makes for those of you that are teaching at Trent and I mean, I think everywhere else has a classics department. There's sort of like mythology 101 courses. And this is something that I would love to have for teaching one of those because you can direct students to not just the individual chapters on the monsters themselves, but theoretical approaches. There's a chapter on psychoanalytic approaches, feminist approaches, cognitive approaches, things like that. It's a very good teaching resource, I think.

• 1:27:26Liv Albert?

  Well, and, and one of the things we did talk about with Debbie was a couple of the articles on polyphemus, which was really interesting. And now I want to read those and looking at him through a lens of disability studies and also colonialism and all of that. So, yeah, I, I definitely want to read more, especially now having chatted with you about it. Um, there's just, there's so much, uh, all the ancient world, like I just.

• 1:27:51Speaker 03

  So much mythology, so little time.

• 1:27:53Liv Albert?

  Uh, exactly, exactly. And on that note, I will start to wrap up and, and let you go, but I would love to have your back for more monsters and also probably, I mean, seals, because if you're studying seals, like the, the issue is Ryan, that you connect with my two loves in this world, which is ocean life and Greek mythology.

• 1:28:16Liv Albert?

  It's so fun. Well, sorry.

• 1:28:19Speaker 03

  Well, I was gonna say too, because we talked so much about sharks on the first one.

• 1:28:22Liv Albert?

  I know.

• 1:28:24Speaker 03

  I've now, and this is open access too for people. I mean, and, um, I've published an article essentially on the canine elements of ancient sea monsters now for CQ. Um, and it talks a lot about the shark element of it because sea dogs in the ancient world, I think, as we talked about probably. They're basically overlapping between notions of sharks and sea monsters and stuff like that. So we have that out there now too. If people are interested in that and the book itself. And it will be essentially, it's gonna be called a zoo biography of the ancient sea monster. And it'll be published by Bloomsbury, I hope at the end of twenty twenty five or early twenty twenty six.

• 1:29:06Liv Albert?

  That's great. That's not too long. Well, for the publishing world.

• 1:29:11Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. That well, that's, that's the hope at least. You never know with these sorts of things. I'm submitting it very beginning of January, so we shall see.

• 1:29:22Liv Albert?

  That's great. Well, congrats on that too. Yeah. Well, I'll be excited to hear more and I will definitely go looking for that shark piece. Um, cause yes, I mean, I have loved sharks since I was a very young child. Um, and I, they live in my brain forever. Have you seen Gladiator two? How furious are you that they put, uh, great whites in there? Sorry, spoilers. It's in the trailer. There's great whites in the Colosseum, Ryan.

• 1:29:45Speaker 03

  I haven't seen that. Uh, oh, I haven't. I've heard of the great white shark thing in the Colosseum. I haven't seen the movie though, but that is.

• 1:29:53Liv Albert?

  That's fair. That's really all we need to talk about.

• 1:29:55Speaker 03

  I, I mean, I don't care about spoilers too much. Are they, do they play a role? Does someone get eaten by a shark in the?

• 1:30:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah, they, cause they do like wanna, they, they kinda go along with that idea of the having like the naval battles in the Colosseum. So it's like full of water, but then there are great whites in the water, like while they're like two ships fighting as a gladiator fight. But like, I, I, I mean, having sharks in the Colosseum generally is wild enough, but the idea, they're very explicitly great whites. And I just, I looked over to my friend who was unlucky enough to be there with me and I just, we don't even have great whites in captivity now. We have never been able to keep a great white alive in captivity and they're proposing that they're in the goddamn Colosseum.

• 1:30:36Speaker 03

  Hmm, this reminds me too, I have, I have a seal story from the ancient world that I can end off on, and it's a crazy one too. Oh, I didn't say that. About, you know, what I was just saying, that seals and Aristotle and other ancient sources, they're monsterized. So we have this text, it's a Christian hagiography called The Acts of Paul and Thecla. And Thecla is, I mean, the gist of the story is that she's a Christian during the time of the persecutions, and it's found out, so she's basically sentenced to death in the arena. She's brought forth in a gladiatorial arena to be gnawed apart

• 1:31:16Speaker 03

  by lions and stuff like that, the classic trope. But in the literal text is, it says that, "And then there was a giant pool of seals, just conspicuously there in the arena." No comment. Why or how? Why is there just a pool of seals in the arena is the big question? But she sees this and says to herself that, "Okay, well, this is why I'm going to be torn apart by the lions. So this is my last chance to be baptized before my death." So she runs and she's about to dive in the pool. And as the text says, and one of the audience members basically commented that, "Oh no, she's going to be torn apart by

• 1:32:00Speaker 03

  those ravenous seals, those monstrous creatures." And again, just such a weird image, because I don't think of seals as ravenous in any way whatsoever. But in this text, they're ravenous monsters, they're about to devour her as soon as she jumps into this pool. But she jumps into the pool, and what happens? There's a gigantic flash of light. Lightning has struck because God has intervened, and he has killed the seals before they can devour her. And so the text literally says that the seals, the corpses float to the surface, and everything is fine.

• 1:32:38Speaker 03

  But, you know, this is, the seals are apparently big, bad monsters that require God's intervention to slay here. And, and this is actually something that features, it'll be in a, an article I'm writing on seals, but also the end of the sea monsters book. Because what's going on there is it's probably, the author, it says the literal word for seals in ancient Greek, phokas, but it's probably the author is basically influenced by the image of the keitos, the sea monster. So he thinks seals are monsters because of that sort of thing. And going back to Aristotle and others, monsterizing seals. This is where you're at.

• 1:33:23Liv Albert?

  I am completely obsessed with that. And I was already going to ask you what the ancient Greek word for seal was. Did you say phokas? Like?

• 1:33:30Speaker 03

  Phokas, yep.

• 1:33:31Liv Albert?

  It's like, yeah, okay. With an, like, with an K A S, not in English, obviously, or?

• 1:33:38Speaker 03

  P H O K A S.

• 1:33:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah, okay. Great. I'm gonna do some searching in that. Thank you. That is, wow, what a joy. What, that's a perfect place to end it. Is there anything else you want to share with my listeners about where to read more or anything?

• 1:33:52Speaker 03

  Um, I mean, I still have, I mean, Twitter, but the better way, I mean, because that's gone downhill, obviously. So I'm not going to mention that anymore. I mean, the best way to find me, I think I've given you a link to my CV on academia.edu, which I update fairly regularly. And that's where all the links to my works and other podcast appearances and stuff are. So you can find it that way, or just Google my name. And I think that comes up first. So that's the easiest way to find me. And contact information too, you know, my email's there as well. Always happen to hear, happy to hear questions from people, too.

• 1:34:30Liv Albert?

  Love that. Now, I'll link to everything. I'll find whatever we linked to in the past episodes. And also, I'm going to find that shark article. Oh, ancient sharks. I mean, sharks just generally, that's such a thrill. And apparently, I can just lump in seals just as dangerous as sharks.

• 1:34:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, the ancient world's an interesting place. Women have fewer teeth and seals are monstrous, apparently.

• 1:34:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah, seals are bloodthirsty, ladies are lacking in chompers. We're doing great. Thank you so much for doing this, Ryan. It was very fun, as always.

• 1:35:03Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:35:04Liv Albert?

  Thank you.

• 1:35:19Liv Albert?

  Ah, nerds, as always, thank you so much for listening. I love that I'm back to recording these conversation episodes. I will say I just finished recording one and it was so much fun and I just feel so awkward, though. I feel like I cannot have a conversation with somebody and, and sound like I know what I'm doing, even though it is my job. And I just thought I'd say that out loud because I imagine you all don't think of it when it comes to that, because it is literally what I do all of the time. But I swear 90% of the time, I still feel like an awkward weirdo recording conversations, but I fucking love it all the same. So stay tuned, because we have, we have so many more to come. I'm back to recording them all the damn time and I am so pumped. Let's talk about myths, baby.

• 1:36:03Liv Albert?

  Is written, produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Pangawish is the Hermes to my Olympians, the producer. Listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Sign up to a new ad-free feed over on Patreon where you can get access to ad-free episodes and so much more. I have done a full rebrand and it is a real thrill. It's still a little in, in progress, but we're basically there and I'm, I'm very excited to present you all with this new option. Not least because it's really pretty and we have the oracle edition, which is like a new version of the new logo created by the amazing,

• 1:36:47Liv Albert?

  the angel incarnate. And, you know, it's just gonna be, it's gonna be great. I am Liv and I love this shit.

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