Conversations: Picking Apart Truth from Satire in Lucian's On the Syrian Goddess w/ Dr Gillian Glass

Liv speaks with returning guest Dr Gillian Glass, and this one is for the hell of it (ie., not at all Gillian's specialty). Learn more about Gillian's work here https://www.au.dk/en/[email protected], and the ANINAN project here https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/projects/an-intersectional-analysis-of-ancient-jewish-travel-narratives-er-2/. If you're curious about Lucian's On the Syrian Goddess you can find the full text here https://topostext.org/work/340. AVAILABLE NOW! The Odyssey: a Modern Retelling. https://geni.us/TheOdysseyBook Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby. Enter ourpodcast guest https://www.mythsbaby.com/contact form if you'd like to be on the show as a conversation guest! CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. I try to provide direct warnings when there is reference to anything with overtly traumatic themes but be aware that Greek mythology regularly features assault, death, and many other potentially triggering events. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Liv Albert?

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

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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 admittedly, we recorded this one a few months back now. I'm not, I don't remember if there's anything that's obviously, you know, months out, but we recorded this a while ago. And it's, I mean, I don't need to explain all of this to you, but it's just now coming out because there are so many things going on. But I spoke with returning guest Gillian Glass. You will remember Jillian from such episodes as Can You Smell the God in the Air? I think that's what it's called. We talked about like, oh, Epiphany, that's what it's called in Greek myths. So like

• 2:49Liv Albert?

  the appearances of the gods. And Jillian has also returned for another fascinating topic, the direct subject of which is not coming to my brain in this moment, but this is her third appearance. And this one, Jillian returned to talk about Lucian. And that's why I am so concerned with just talking about this appearance and have forgotten the other one. Because we talked this time about Lucian, you all remember Lucian. He is the like, second century CE satirist. I've talked about him in relation to his most iconic work, which is called The True History, and that

• 3:29Liv Albert?

  is the satirical epic about he as the like narrator of the epic, like traveling to the moon where there are like these bug creatures who are having a war with the bug creatures on the sun. And then he goes and he has, there's a war inside a whale. It's, it's wacky. We love Lucian. And I had never read anything beyond that. But Jillian had mentioned that she is fascinated by Lucian's On the Syrian Goddess, which is a work about, if you can believe it, a Syrian goddess, specifically Adar Goddess, I believe. And but we, we talk about what exactly

• 4:10Liv Albert?

  is going on in that work. And then Lucian broadly, and quite frankly, it also just expanded into a conversation about so many things in the ancient world, because that's what happens when you get two like-minded people behind a microphone. We had so much fun. I love having Jillian on the show. And you can bet she'll be back soon. But in the meantime, this was a delightfully unhinged conversation about a, an ancient writer who was equally delightfully unhinged. And so this is me rambling in the morning, trying to just record this introduction. The episode speaks for itself. You're gonna love it.

• 5:03Liv Albert?

  Conversations, picking apart truth from satire in Lucian's On the Syrian Goddess with Dr. Gillian Glass.

• 5:28Liv Albert?

  To the listener, I'm gonna, we're just gonna reveal all. To the listener, we just spent like a good half an hour talking about all of our plans and schemes for future work that everybody would be so jealous to hear of, but you don't get to know about. And instead, we're jumping right into this very casual conversation. I am here with returning guest Gillian Glass. And oh my God, we're, we're here to talk about Lucian. And Lucian has only been on the show, well, I mean, he's been on the show a handful of times, but only in regards to A True History, which is the most delightfully nonsensical work of joy. But he also wrote, so to the listeners, Lucian is satirist, I'm talking satirists too much. Yeah. That's a good kind of, of satirism etymology. Yeah,

• 6:13Liv Albert?

  he's a satirist from, what was he like, second century CE? Yeah, good guess me. But also wrote some wild stuff. And specifically, this piece that we're going to talk about today on the Syrian Goddess. And I'm prefacing this because Jillian, neither Jillian or I are Lucian experts. I forgot that I'd given myself homework and I forgot to read the whole thing. And Jillian's mostly caught up on it because we just want to have this conversation about it. So that's all to say, we're not expert experts on Lucian. We just wanted to talk about him because he's wacky. And this, this piece is particularly interesting. Not least because what I read about it, it seems like, you know, it was debated whether it was him. And they were like, well, can we take it seriously as like

• 6:58Liv Albert?

  this description of this Syrian goddess? And then it's confirmed probably that it was him, but also we can take it seriously. So I'm fascinated. That was a very long-winded introduction. But Jillian, I think you suggested this particular one. And can I ask why, other than just as somebody who's only read True History? Like, if not, though, if you're like, I just like this one, that's also fine. I've been interested in it, but I'm, I don't know why, other than I just know it's about Adar Goddess, or like, that is the Syrian goddess by name. And I have heard of her as a mermaid goddess, but I know nothing else. So I was just like, this sounds cool.

• 7:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. Hey, Liv. Hello, listeners. It's great to be back.

• 7:39Liv Albert?

  I always do this where I'm just like ramble it. And then I'm like, here, talk for the first time. Answer my question.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, fair. And you know, it's one of the privileges of being a return visitor, a return guest, if.

• 7:50Liv Albert?

  Means I just leap into.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 7:53Liv Albert?

  Straight into the ADHD mode.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  Love it. I'm here for that. I seem to remember that in our last meandering conversation around travel and intercultural contact in, in ancient Greek language literature with sort of tangential adventures into Latin and Hebrew and some other cool stuff.

• 8:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  Lucian came up, maybe because somebody mentioned the true stories. But I think we also mentioned, or I mentioned this because it is such a boundary bending, line blurring, porosity revealing, mind.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  I don't even know what to call it. Like it's uh, it's both a very coherent narrative. And then when you start to pay attention to the details, you just kind of realize that everything you were holding on to has slipped through your fingers. Like the water in the story all over the place between rivers and lakes and fish ponds and all these sorts of things.

• 8:57Liv Albert?

  This is exactly the description I wanted. That's beautiful. You might as well be an expert. I'm not saying you are, but based on that.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  I'm definitely not, but thank you. And I just, I just love every and all opportunity to talk about Lucian. I first encountered him in a

• 9:12Speaker 03

  first year masters seminar, which was taught by a Latin writer expert named Pascal Fleury at the Université Laval. But the course was open to basically anybody.

• 9:23Liv Albert?

  Is that the one in Quebec or no?

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Yes, the one in Quebec City.

• 9:25Liv Albert?

  Okay, good. I was like, is there another Laval? Should I make sure?

• 9:29Speaker 03

  So it took, it took some of my family members a very long time to remember that I was a student at the Université Laval. But I did not live in Laval, which is near and or in Montreal.

• 9:40Liv Albert?

  I was gonna say, yes, Laval is a suburb of Montreal, but then you said Quebec City. So we're just, it's Laval all over the place.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  Yes, it's named for the same, I can't remember if he was a bishop or an archbishop, named for the same guy.

• 9:52Liv Albert?

  My family is from Laval originally. I believe when I was born, we lived there, so appropriate.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Okay, well, there you go. So, uh, yeah, so Madame Fleury was teaching this course and it was open to all graduate students across the humanities and it was on representations of the author in their own works. And so these ideas of identity and self-identity and uh, performance and the, the creation of persona. And I got really stuck, not really knowing what to do. And she said, you should read Lucian of Samosata's True Histories. I think this, and then I, I wanna say it was an article by Briant that she handed me. I wish I could remember the name of the article she handed me because someone had written on

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Lucian's use of Homer as his own memorial persona in the text. And so I had a lot of fun exploring how Lucian becomes both Homer, but also Odysseus in this story. He uses both. And it's all this performance of education and pideia and culture. And it's challenging the boundaries between culture by basically saying, well, well, if pideia, education and being pepidumenos, erudite, intellectual, educated, is what it takes to be Greek, then I, this Anatolian man, this Syrian, I'm the Greekest of the Greeks. Right? And so that was my first introduction to Lucian and it was love at first satire, I guess.

• 11:23Liv Albert?

  Yes, because that, I mean, True History is so delightful. Like to the listeners, you need to go back and listen because this is the piece. I've read it. I've also had a, a, just a very silly bonus discussion with my friends in Ancient History Fangirl because I made them read it because it is so wild. And my favorite part, just, and it goes so well with how you described how he's writing in that piece is like towards the end when, you know, on his like odyssey and journey as Homer, they're through passing the underworld or passing through the underworld, but passing Tartarus. And I swear, it's been a while since I read it, but it's like he turns and looks over and he's like, oh, there's Herodotus

• 12:03Liv Albert?

  in the worst pits of hell because of his like so-called history. And I just always found that.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  Herodotus takes such a beating in Lucian. Also in, on How to Write History, he calls out Herodotus. And in a couple of other places and, and actually that's a really great segue into on uh, the Syrian goddess. Because of the Herodotian connection. So um, maybe so that listeners can sort of enjoy what we're gonna talk about. We can, and or I can give a short sort of context statement.

• 12:40Liv Albert?

  Please, if you don't mind.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  As you, Liv, have already said, there is debate within scholarship as to whether or not this is what we might call really Lucian or pseudo Lucian or like attributed to Lucian later. And one big name of someone who does not think it was written by Lucian, for example, is Tim Whitmarsh, interestingly. Not interestingly because Tim is known for, you know, disagreeing with consensus, but just because.

• 13:10Liv Albert?

  Only because we were talking about him before we hit record.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. Well, and so, so, so Tim Whitmarsh has worked very broadly with the ancient novels and across Second Temple, not Second Temple, that's what I do. He does Second Sophistic, blurring all the lines already, exactly.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  And he's done a lot of work on, on identity construction and how do we construct identity in these literary ways and through these sources. And so he is very well-versed in, in these texts and he's an excellent philologist. And his translation of and commentary on Luciphan Clydaphon is just incredible and I recommend it to anybody and everybody.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  But the consensus still is that Lucian wrote this and the, there are a variety of

• 13:56Speaker 03

  of arguments that I will put aside. I'll say right now for readers too, that the sort of, the go-to publication on the Syrian goddess is by Jane Lightfoot. It came out in two thousand and three and it's just called Lucian on the Syrian Goddess. And it's a, a new critical Greek text with a translation and some very, very serious and profound commentary essay, uh, argumentative chapters as well. I, for full disclosure, read a peer review of it on Brynmar. I did not get a copy in my hot little hands before today. So it's on my to-read list and I'm very much looking forward to it.

• 14:35Liv Albert?

  And now it's on mine as well.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, and literally everything else I was reading, everybody was saying, things along the lines of like, and of course, with, uh, uh, sorry, Lightfoot, two thousand and three is the, you know, the standard. And I'm going, I want, I wanna have that. Okay, so this, this, uh, this text is very much written in the style of the Greek ethnographer who is traveling somewhere and encountering a new culture and specifically a new cult and a deity and everything that comes around them. And is very, very recognizable to us as that kind of classic Greek, Hellenic and Hellenocentric ethnographic historical exploration of the world.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Now, if it really is by Lucian, that does mean it is second century CE. And a part of what gets called the Second Sophistic, that is itself a very old term, but then it gets sort of brought up again and reused in the, I wanna say the nineteenth century, might be the tw- mid, early twentieth century. Anyway, like it, anyway, it, it, the, and the idea of the Second Sophistic, there's a whole bunch of ideas. But the sort of, the, the two really big ones is that we now have a more secured and affixed Roman empire. By the second century CE, Rome is basically at its biggest geographic expansion, covering the whole Oikumene.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  But Greek language, Greek culture, Greek history, Greek literature has still got this massive cultural cachet. And so to be writing in Greek under Rome has a whole particular status and symbolism and meaning. The Second Sophistic is also marked by what is called adicization or adicizing. And so these authors are by and large issuing the contemporary post-classical Greek of their lifetime. So the coinae that is going to go with Alexander the Great around the world and is going to get used in administration and is gonna get used all over the various Ptolemaic, uh, solucid, antigone, uh, lajid kingdoms and, and throughout all, and really become the legua franca.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  The Second Sophistic authors are not going to do that. They are going to try and return and they are gonna succeed to returning to the classical Greek language of the fifth and the fourth centuries.

• 16:56Liv Albert?

  I did not know this.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  And it's adicizing because it's Attic Greek. It's what, yes, it is what Plato is writing. It is what Thucydides is writing. It is, and it is, it is, I have, uh, who, I have heard it compared to, like if you and I stopped speaking the way we are speaking in favor of like Shakespearean style of English.

• 17:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's what I assumed it would mean when you said adicizing, but I was like, but that late, surely it has to mean something else and I'm mishearing it. So that's so interesting.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  No, and it's going to be very important for uh, anyone who wants to get into the, the Greek text of the Syrian goddess. Because Lucian elsewhere, and he's a master stylist. Like this is one of the things that people have loved about him since the Renaissance. Uh, because he, his, his Greek is phenomenal Greek. And it is extremely Attic. But on the Syrian goddess is Ionian.

• 17:49Liv Albert?

  Wow. So he could also write in Ionian. And Ionian is, wait, okay, I'm mixing it up with Aeolic. Aeolic is weirder. Ionian, do you know an easy way to define how weird comparatively?

• 18:02Speaker 03

  So I, I'm always miserable at these sorts of like, more morphological and of like Pheno, what do they call them? Anyway, these were very linguistic, but uh, very importantly, Ionia is where Herodotus is from.

• 18:17Liv Albert?

  Oh, so he's doing this on, oh, right. So, right, of course. So he's writing from this like eastern, eastern Greek.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  This is Anatolia Greek. This is the.

• 18:27Liv Albert?

  Not, obviously, that would be a horror. They would, they would take offense to that word. I apologize. But the region of modern Turkey.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  The region of modern Turkey, where from, what is it? Like the eleventh century? We start to have these Greek colonies that pop up along this coast and Herodotus is from one of these colonies. And Lucian of Samosata, Samosat is also in what is today, modern Turkey, even though it's not coastal, it's, it's more inland.

• 18:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  And so, like. If this is a Lucian text, he is now using the language of Herodotus and the ethnographic style that Herodotus very much pioneers. And in a bunch of places, actually in one space, the place at the beginning, like Lucian starts, or the narrator, I should say, maybe, starts by saying, you know, he's heard all of these different tales and he's going to tell them to us. And he basically reserves the right to tell us which one he thinks is the most correct.

• 19:22Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  Well, that's very Herodotus, right?

• 19:24Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  Herodotus does exactly this. He goes and collects a bunch of stories and he tells you about his own experiences and then he decides for you which one he thinks is more likely or not. But lest we think that this is an about face from how Herodotus is treated elsewhere in Lucian, Herodotus is known as the father of lies.

• 19:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  And so if the narrator is affecting a Herodotian persona, is he telling you the truth or is he lying to you? And again, we come back to the idea of the true stories where he's, you know, you know, I solemnly swear I will lie to you about everything that comes up next, right?

• 20:04Liv Albert?

  It's so Odysseus too, like now, it's so Odysseus. And of course, you, you, yeah, you already pointed out that true history or true story is very also presented as it's an odyssey that he goes on. But even that is so interesting because that is so, now I'm like, did Herodotus take some inspo from Odysseus? Because I, I mean, obviously I've been really deep in the Odyssey for my kid's book, but the thing that I just, I hold on to and every time I'm trying to describe like why I think mine is superior to most of the other kids' books is that I'm presenting Odysseus as exactly what he was, which is that he's like, hey, I'm Odysseus, I'm fa- I'm famous for my lies, here's what happened. And I think it's so important that we present that because that's exactly how he starts

• 20:46Liv Albert?

  his story and why are we not usually saying it like that? But anyway, I'll just say like-

• 20:51Speaker 03

  There was a certain man from Crete.

• 20:52Liv Albert?

  Yes, exactly. Dude can lie about Crete till he's blue in the face, but we're supposed to trust this wacky story with monsters and mayhem?

• 21:00Speaker 03

  The fancy narratological term is autodiegetic.

• 21:04Liv Albert?

  Ooh.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  And something that scholars have been commenting on for a very long time is that all of the most unbelievable parts of the Odyssey are a part of the autodiegetic narration.

• 21:16Liv Albert?

  Yep. And so why do we always present it to kids? Like, he left Troy and then he did all these absolutely unbelievable things and then he landed at home. Like, no, it's so much more interesting to be like, no, we found him at the end and he says he did all of these totally unbelievable things, we just kind of have to believe him, I guess.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  As he's like crossing his fingers behind his back. I promise I met a siren, I promise. Okay, but now we're totally off topic. So coming back to Lucian.

• 21:42Liv Albert?

  Thank you.

• 21:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course. This is also the way my brain works.

• 21:45Liv Albert?

  ADHD.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. So Lucian, who is probably born sometime in the 120s and dies sometime after 180s, so like, we're talking like the, the core of the, the second century CE.

• 22:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  Who grows up in Anatolia under Rome, like basically Lucian is going to be one of the first generations that has this very fixed Roman imperial world around him. But just for context for everybody who's listening, right? We're talking about what is today, modern Turkey, roughly speaking. Well, depending on just how far back we want to go, which like, maybe we don't want to go all the way back, but, right? Like when we want to think in terms of just how much history is happening in this part of the world, we have the Hittite Empire, which starts as a bunch of city-states, which we can go with like the 17th century maybe, and that's going to, you know, chug along,

• 22:47Speaker 03

  chug along until-

• 22:48Liv Albert?

  Pseudo-Troy, you know, or is Troy, quote unquote Troy, quote unquote, and all happening there.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. So you've got the Hittite Empire and then that's going to fall apart at, at some point and we're going to see the rise of the Akmenids and then we're going to have the Babylonians and the Neo-Babylonians and the Assyrians. I probably put those in the wrong order or I'm misremembering who's who.

• 23:11Liv Albert?

  You found, I think that sounded vaguely right. The Akmenids being, yeah, the Persians when they're war, war, waging war with Greece, right? Yeah.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:23Liv Albert?

  And then-

• 23:24Speaker 03

  You and I have laughed before at how not much of a historian I really, really, really am.

• 23:29Liv Albert?

  No, and also I, if you're talking anytime, I mean, one, outside of the explicitly Greek world and then I'm less useful, but also anytime past the classical period and I'm like, whoops. But what's great for our listeners is that Michaela has been doing a big series on both Herodotus and the Hellenistic period. So I think they are probably slightly more aware than even you and I at this moment, thanks to Michaela.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  Well, and so I have now gone to the internet to pull some things up. So we've got the Assyrian Empire and the Hittite Empire that are at various points going to be concurrent with each other. We're going to get the Babylonians that come up after the various Assyrians and the Neo-Assyrians. And because what is today, modern day Turkey and modern day Syria don't map onto what are the ancient imperial and, you know, various monarchical boundaries.

• 24:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  The part of the world-

• 24:18Liv Albert?

  Ever-changing boundaries too.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  Exactly. The part of the world that Lucian is describing, depending on exactly where you're looking, like, because the Assyrians don't come all the way up into Turkey, but they're, you know, partially up and through Syria and, and through Lebanon and Israel, Palestine. And then of course, the Egyptians at different points are going to come up and try to take that territory and they're going to hold it and they're, then they're going to lose it. And so basically, the, the point, dear listeners, is that by the time Lucian is writing, we have had Hittite Empire, Assyrian Empire, Babylonian Empire, multiple Egyptian empires. We've had Alexander's conquest, then we've had the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, who are going to duke it out over the strip of land between them.

• 25:00Liv Albert?

  I was going to ask which even, yeah, which Hellenistic, so it was both of them fighting over it even, like-

• 25:04Speaker 03

  The Ptolemies are going to get all the way up there from memory.

• 25:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah, okay.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  But because the Seleucids are fighting the Ptolemies, that region is going to be affected by what's going on. And these are of course, just the big military, political heavy hitters of history. These are not the various nomadic, semi-nomadic, or sedentary tribes and communities that were living in these regions. These areas have always been ethno-religiously incredibly diverse. There has been movement, both sort of documented and undocumented throughout this region at various points, and it was always deeply interconnected. Oh, and I forgot the Phoenicians, the Canaanites were running around here too.

• 25:46Liv Albert?

  Oh my god, yeah, of course.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  How could we forget the Phoenicians?

• 25:48Liv Albert?

  Meanwhile, there's, the word Phoenician is used like 8,000 times in this text.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  Right, exactly.

• 25:54Liv Albert?

  Yep. So it's also the Phoenicians.

• 25:56Speaker 03

  Right. So also the Phoenicians. So this is by the second century CE, under Rome, an incredibly ancient part of the world. It is aware of its antiquity, of course. And it is aware that there have been these various moments of intercultural contact with varying levels of peace and/or conflict and coercion and/or cooperation that all have sort of been overlapping, overlapping.

• 26:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  Into all of this is born Lucian of Samosat, and this is the point, dear listeners, where we disappoint you and say that we don't know anything about Lucian of Samosat. Not, not definitively, not-

• 26:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  Not very strongly.

• 26:35Liv Albert?

  Because he was a satirist too, right? So we're like, is a lot of it also like, were you serious or were you not, I imagine?

• 26:42Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely, right? So there's, there are these little tidbits that he sort of autobiographically throws out to us that make us really want to see the author, the real author behind this, right? And so if I may momentarily divide two figures from each other, we have who we might call the author and/or historian, who was the real historical Lucian, who was born, grew up, was educated, wrote some stuff, had some opinions, probably got into some verbal and maybe even physical alterations, because he's got some fun opinions that probably offended some people.

• 27:19Liv Albert?

  I would imagine.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  He probably got more than his share of shiners, um, you know, in my, you know, head, headcanon. And then he dies. And so that was a real person. And then we have the narrators, plural, and literary persona, who tell the various stories of the texts that he wrote for us. And when we're being very- reductive sounds very negative, I'm trying not to be judgmental, but one interpretation of the author-narrator relationship is that they are one and the same. They're identical, they're the same person, and you can know the author from the narrator. Another interpretation is that they are completely, yeah, yeah, is that they're completely

• 28:05Speaker 03

  different.

• 28:06Liv Albert?

  Reductive, I think is the right word.

• 28:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the other is that they're completely different, right? And that the narrator is, is whether or not the narrator has a name, the narrator is a completely different character and they are as constructed as any other character in the story.

• 28:21Liv Albert?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Now, that becomes very clear to us in something, if I can take a, you know, quick comparison, like Achilles-Tatius, who wrote Lutepe and Clytaphon. Well, if Achilles-Tatius is the name of the author who wrote the story, well, Clytaphon is the character who narrates the whole story for us.

• 28:35Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  So here we have that first person, the fancy word, autodiegetic narration of the story. And we know that Achilles-Tatius is not Clytaphon, Clytaphon is not Achilles-Tatius, and we're okay with that. Things get more complicated if we want to compare with something like Herodotus or Thucydides, because how much of the authorial persona-

• 29:02Speaker 03

  Is the narrator?

• 29:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  How much of the narrator is the author, the narratorial persona? And I've just even mixed up the words and confused myself. Because we want to see in Thucydides' narratorial, authorial persona, Thucydides himself. And maybe he's there, but only so much, right? And and it it becomes, it becomes, I think, as someone who works on anonymous texts or pseudonymous texts. I think it becomes easier, within giant air quotes, to create these parallels or these one-to-one relationships between the author and the narrator for authors for whom we have only a few works. That are mostly kind of the same. And so even if we take something like Flavius Josephus,

• 29:50Speaker 03

  who, yes, he wrote uh the Jewish wars and Jewish antiquities and against Appian, and he has a whole autobiography. But these are all recognizably within a certain historical rhetorical style, genre. And they're kind of doing the same thing, but differently. And they're all attributed to one guy. And so we have this feeling like, okay, yes, he is. The narrator is the author, the author is the narrator, sort of thing. But even in modern studies, this has been

• 30:26Speaker 03

  reevaluated, and I think it gets called the rhetorical turn, or maybe the linguistic turn. But it across ancient historiography, classics and religious studies, scholars have been pushing back on this and saying, well, no, actually. The author is a figure who is creating, sorry, the author is a person who is creating a narrator, who is a figure, who is a character who serves a purpose. And so then to come back to Lucian, where we have so many genres. And he is so eclectic, and he's playing with so many genres, and he's incorporating so many genres. And he's telling stories from so many different perspectives, like we have these various uh mythic characters who are telling their,

• 31:05Speaker 03

  you know, woes in the first person, or we get these philosophers who speak in the first person. So he is an incredibly talented, very creative author. So first of all, we have all these narrators who we don't know really, like there are, so we all, we have all these narrators who we know are not him.

• 31:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah, which is so specifically like, yeah, he's writing people's conversations with each other. So, yeah, you, there's. And then on top of that, the true history, which is meant to sound herodotian a little, and then things like this. Yeah, on the Syrian goddess. So it's, yeah, the, but like the varying genres, I just, I wanted to emphasize because that does really stand out, particularly in ancient worlds, where people tended to kind of pick one.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  It does. Well, and then we get these moments in, uh, so like, uh, he's got one piece called The Dream, where he tells the story about how his family were sculptors, and he was supposed to be a sculptor. But he was always, you know, more gifted at intellectual exercises, and he accidentally destroys a piece of marble. And he gets like whacked upside the head by an uncle, maybe. Anyway, someone is basically very upset. Because understandably, he has wrecked a very expensive piece of marble. And this is how he turns away from these sort of material, worldly

• 32:21Speaker 03

  uh professions to the intellectual professions. But there are other authors who predate Lucian, who have very similar stories, if not identical stories. And I think the sculpture one, I'm blanking on who it is, but I think the sculpture one actually is an intertextual reference, or like an allusion to somebody specifically. And so even when we think Lucian might be telling us something about himself, he could also be making a textual connection with a reference. And we see other people do this too. Um, my master supervisor, Anne France Morin, also at the University of La Val, has worked a lot on Galen. And Galen very consciously models himself on Socrates in a couple of places. And I think the one example she gave was when Galen talks about how awful a mother he had, and how doting and gentle a father he had.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  We also have Socrates talking about that somewhere too.

• 33:08Liv Albert?

  That's the type of man I want, writing about medicine, for sure, for sure.

• 33:12Speaker 03

  My mother was a horrible shrew, and my daddy loved me very much.

• 33:16Liv Albert?

  Let me tell you about male and female reproduction.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Um, so I think that's the example Anne France gave. Um, and I would not for the life of me be able to tell you what texts I was in. But so when Lucian is telling us, you know, air quote, historic things about himself, or factual things about himself. Uh, we don't, we, we just, we can't know.

• 33:36Liv Albert?

  Well, he also said that he went to the moon and participated in like a war between the moon and the sun and these various like bug.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  You don't believe he spent time in the belly of a whale?

• 33:46Liv Albert?

  I would really love to, but the, it, you know, it's not so much the belly of the whale that throws me off. But it's the fact that there was able to be warring factions within the belly of the whale. You know, that one, I think.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  Your nose is growing, Lucian, your nose is growing.

• 34:00Liv Albert?

  I can admit that you could have lived inside a whale, but not that you could have had a battle inside a whale. That's too far.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  All right, listeners, Liv has determined where we crossed the line in the sand into absurdity. We're done now. Good night. See you next time. Um, why was I bringing all of this? Oh, right. I was bringing up all of this because there are lots of debates, if we come back to Lucian, who is writing in Greek within Roman Anatolia. There are lots of debates about, well, what is his identity? Because while this historically, and I would refer readers to uh Tim Whitmarsh's chapter on believing in Lucian, the religious polemics in the Cambridge Companion to Lucian, uh, for, you know, more of this.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  But uh, from the nineteenth century, people are very curious to define Lucian's ethnicity. Unfortunately, in very nasty terms at that point, and he is associated with um antisemitic tropes of of the period. Yeah, he be, he basically gets called a Jew covertly, and this is used to denigrate and demean him and position him outside of of valid critiques of authority, which is itself indebted to um. Lucian was very interested, or sorry, interesting to Enlightenment period authors. Either because they were anti-religion, and they saw him as scorning religion, or because they saw him as a threat to religiosity because of his irreverence. And again.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  No, he doesn't. But so this is, this is the covertness of it. No, it's, uh, he, the, the fact that he is from Samasada gets him branded Assyrian. And all of the same tropes that are propping up in the period's racial sciences about Semites show up in that discussion.

• 35:52Liv Albert?

  Right, because technically, the, the, the languages in the region are often Semite, but uh, oh, anyway. It's fascinating, but like, wow, the ways that people can bend over backwards to be, I mean, antisemitic, xenophobic in various ways. It's really, and also, can I just, from a perspective of today, that, that hurts on the Palestinian front. It's like you were, they, the people.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  It just hurts everybody.

• 36:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's like, because everyone, everyone was being wronged, like both, yeah, Judaism and the people, the other both Jews and non-Jews in the region were being wronged by everybody, and it's.

• 36:27Speaker 03

  Everybody is wronging everybody. Well, yeah, and then, and then, and again, Whitmarsh makes this point too. Even when we take the, the, whether you want to call it native, local indigenous identity and hold it up. And we laud it as, as is right to do. It's still can be reductive about what identity looks like, be it antiquity or modernity. Uh, it would march is specifically talking about the studies of Lucian here. And so he, he just makes the point that inadvertently, we just reproduce but flip the positive negative valence when we say that he was Syrian.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  And or that he was Greek, because as the litany of empires should hint at to us all. It's a bit more complicated than that.

• 37:16Liv Albert?

  I mean, I would say on a, the simplest level, he was Greek Syrian. Can't we, like, obviously both, right?

• 37:22Speaker 03

  And we just don't know, right?

• 37:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah, but like writing in Greek and from Syria, so at least, it's like.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  Right. Well, and there are people who have tried to argue that his first language was Syriac, which is an Aramaic uh the development within the Aramaic language, so is, is a Semitic language itself. But like, we just, we just don't know, is really what the point of all of this is to say. Which is one of the reasons Lucian is such an interesting figure, because he's con, he's commenting on imperial centers. Whether it's Athens or any of the other big, he's got things that are set in Delos, which was the heart of the Delian League and other things, right? So he's com- commenting on imperial centers, but is himself not really from an imperial center.

• 38:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah, he's very much like the outskirts of the empire or the edges. Yeah.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  Exactly. And that's a whole part of what's going on with a lot of the second sophistic literature. A lot of it comes from outside of the what do we call it, like the, the, the Hales heartland? Like, it doesn't come from the Peloponnese or the Attic region. It comes from these other places.

• 38:37Liv Albert?

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• 39:22Liv Albert?

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• 40:07Liv Albert?

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

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• 42:09Speaker 03

  Which, if we then come back to how the On the Syrian Goddess opens, we've got this claim to Herodotus because he's got this Ionian language and he's got this ethnographic genre and he frames it. And then he tells us, oh, right. And he tells us that this is his autopsy. And so we have this very like, I went, I saw, I tell you, kind of very Herodotus. I collected the information. I saw some stuff. I was told by priests. And then right after we think we fully and totally understand what's going on, this is a Greek ethnographic framework and perspective. He says, and I'm Assyrian.

• 42:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  And you're like, wait, hang on.

• 42:48Speaker 03

  What? Because you're using all of the Greek insider language, but now you've just told us that you are, to borrow one of Herodotus's favorite words, a barbarian.

• 42:59Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 43:00Speaker 03

  And I read a very cool chapter by Nathaniel Andrade. The whole book is called Syrian Identity in the Greco-Roman world, but this is chapter 10. Syria writes back Lucian's On the Syrian Goddess, where, and this is such a cool thing because there are other examples of it elsewhere. He, Andrade, points out that by calling himself an Assyrian, the narrator of this story does this really cool time warp because under Rome, this is Syria.

• 43:37Liv Albert?

  Oh, we've lost the ah.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  We have lost, we have lost the ah.

• 43:41Liv Albert?

  Oh, right. Because they renamed it Serial Pal.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  Quello Syria, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so this narrator is basically with this antiquizing word, putting us in a pre-Rome. Rome hasn't shown up yet.

• 44:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  And so he's, the narrator is inviting us to imagine that we are in some kind of,

• 44:10Speaker 03

  I don't know, Hellenistic world. We get the solusives to pop up incrementally. But then also this text is so very much a part of the discussions of religion and syncretism and cultural contact that is only possible under the Roman Empire. So it's this like fascinating time warp text.

• 44:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  With, and we've just got to the first paragraph, right? Like this is all we've talked about.

• 44:35Liv Albert?

  And which it works because that's also what I've read at this point. But because what really stood out to me too, is that the way even in the first paragraph, he is referencing, you know, the, the presentation is he's, he's talking about this temple to On the Syrian Goddess, right? But he's also naming all of the different cultures that are claiming this temple and this goddess, including Hera and, and others. But that's, that's so interesting in itself, just the way that it's, yeah, he's like pulling multiple regions and then also naming himself as that.

• 45:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Sorry. I was pulling back up to the text and then got lost in my own brain.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it's totally great. And

• 45:24Speaker 03

  in, in, in bringing in all of these different cultures, I mean, the, the chapter by Nathaniel Andrade, which before readers worry, or readers, listeners worry that they have to go and read the whole book. I, I found it very comprehensible as a chapter completely on its own. I don't know if other people would have the same experience, but I found it to be very easy to parachute in and then come out. The main point that Andrade makes really well and over and over and over again is that this entire

• 45:54Speaker 03

  ancient text

• 45:58Speaker 03

  sets you up to think that there are clear binaries. There is Greek and Syrian. There is insider and outsider and

• 46:13Speaker 03

  Greek and barbarian and all of these, you know, these, all these dichotomies, male and female, and all of, all of these ideas that we, we have, all these binaries. And then consistently and constantly undermines you over and over and over again, to the point where even the binary of the one who looks and the one who is looked at, the one who impartially observes and the one who subjectively participates, the one who is safely watching versus the one who is at risk and dangerously participating. All of these binaries just completely disappear over and over and over again. And the first paragraph sets us up to, to do this, right? Again, this is what it is, is what is

• 46:57Speaker 03

  like masterful storytelling. Lucian is setting us up to understand that you think your binaries apply here, but they, they don't apply here.

• 47:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 47:07Speaker 03

  Which raises really interesting questions about that middle space, that contact zone between cultures.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  At any given point in time, but especially in Rome or in, in second century Rome, which it is perhaps also worth saying for readers or listeners, that the second century CE is one of massive cultural transformation.

• 47:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 47:33Speaker 03

  Which isn't to say there aren't other cultural transformations. Of course there are. But this one, like this is the period where ISIS cult has been spreading out of Egypt and has been going all the way around. And of course, this is, Rome facilitated this.

• 47:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 47:47Speaker 03

  They, they brought their roads. They brought their armies and they, they didn't just conquer territories. They brought those territories back with them.

• 47:56Speaker 03

  Both coercively and violently through mass enslavement, but also you brought those people. So you brought their languages, you brought their stories, you brought their deities when you brought their bodies with you back to Rome, or when you moved them around different places.

• 48:11Liv Albert?

  And sorry, that out of curiosity too, because I think vaguely connective here, but there, they, there was a period too, where they were literally bringing gods over. Like this just makes me think of when they brought over Kabele from Anatolia and they made, you know, they wanted to bring this, this goddess cult over and they literally did it where they, where they made a whole, or at least presented a story where they brought, you know, a literal goddess, like votive figure and the priests all the way to Rome and made it a whole thing. So they were really keen to be like, kind of dragging that stuff over, yeah, literally and figuratively.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  Well, this goes back even to Virgil, right? Who's got this whole story of Aeneas bringing Anchises and.

• 48:57Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah, what's

• 48:58Speaker 03

  Uh, the, oh, yeah, I'm blanking on the poor child's name.

• 49:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  But all of, all of that iconography, yeah, all of the iconography where Anchises is carrying the, uh,

• 49:09Liv Albert?

  Aeneas is carrying Anchises and

• 49:11Speaker 03

  And then Anchises is carrying, yeah, the, the, the cultic objects from, yeah, I know.

• 49:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 49:17Speaker 03

  We might have had a classic license revoked.

• 49:19Liv Albert?

  True. Well, I'm not because I famously hate Rome.

• 49:23Speaker 03

  That is true. You're, you, you, you are not shy about that. Anyway, so like right from its, its, you know, Virgilian origin story, right? It's, it's, it's about bringing the gods and bringing the people into these, into these spaces. And the second century is the,

• 49:40Speaker 03

  it, it's, it's still very difficult to distinguish Christianity from Judaism in the second century in a lot of very meaningful ways. But the second century is going to be the period where those foundational texts for Christianity and Mishnaic, or sorry, I should say rabbinic Judaism are going to start being composed, compiled, they're, this is the sort of the dating for a lot of these texts. I mean, Paul and his letters are the first century CE, but the Gospels and the Apocryphal Gospels are often, some of them are pushed into the second century. Dating is complicated. It's, it's always a bit of a mess. And then the Mishnaic texts are often, I think they're sort of more third century is when they're actually going to get

• 50:25Speaker 03

  compo- composed, compiled in various ways, but that means that they are being talked about in various forms in the second century and, and also, so also the, the part of the world that Lucian comes from is going to be where we get Armenian and Syriac Christianities, which are some of the oldest Christianities. Because when you just think about the apostles who are walking from Jerusalem to anywhere else. Okay, you can go down to Egypt or you can go up. And if you want to walk up and around to get to Greece or Rome, you kind of have to go through what is today Lebanon, Syria, Turkey on route. And so this is, this is a high foot traffic zone is really the point that I'm making about where Lucian is living. And he is

• 51:10Speaker 03

  aware of a lot of what's going on. He is one of the first authors to mention even in passing Christians, which is one of the reasons why he was so interesting to other scholars of the Renaissance onward, because he mentioned these Christians. But, uh, yeah, so he's very, very aware of how culturally mixed the world he lives in is.

• 51:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  All thanks to Rome and their roads.

• 51:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and I, you know, I obviously talk so much about how culturally mixed that region was so specifically, usually I'm referring to more of the Hellenistic period just because of my own interests, but I, you know, it only gets more so. And it is so interesting to, when you get to see those people, when they fully recognize it. And I mean, yeah, the, the, the mythologizing of, of carrying those cultures over via Rome and everything is in itself so fascinating, just for the satisfaction that I think we both need. Aeneas's son is named Ascanius.

• 52:09Speaker 03

  Yes, it is. Thank you.

• 52:11Liv Albert?

  I knew it was another A. I knew they were all As and then I kept saying, I kept thinking of Absurtus. But Absurtus is Medea's son that, or, or brother that she, um, rips to pieces. Um, not the same one.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  Classic sibling dynamics from Greek mythology.

• 52:27Liv Albert?

  You know, um, but yeah, I mean, I've, I've also long been obsessed with like the Greek Aeneas and I, the ideas of like why Rome latched on to him and stuff, but, but it again, it's fascinating to see somebody who is in such in dialogue with that like multiplicity of cultures and is like so hyper aware and, and talking about it. But also I hadn't really registered, you know, what you said about the, well, the Assyrian part is really interesting and I'm so unfamiliar with when that separation comes that makes sense that's Rome. But he also is so, there, there's so much talk of Phoenician goddesses. It, it, to the point where like, I mean, I don't know enough about when

• 53:08Liv Albert?

  the Phoenician, you know, religion kind of fell off, but I know he's, he's naming Astarte as this, uh, related goddess, which is really interesting to me because when I'm coming at the, the more ancient Greek mythologies, like I come at Astarte as this potential precursor to Aphrodite, the way that, that she is a goddess contributed to, to really early forms of Aph- of Aphrodite. Like we're talking about like a good thousand years be- between like the height of Phoenician mythos and, you know, Phoenician culture, whatever that looked like to Lucian, like that's such an enormous period of time for him to be navigating and like being interested in dialoguing with.

• 53:52Speaker 03

  Well, and it raises interesting questions for us too about

• 53:58Speaker 03

  what is Lucian in dialogue with? Because the, the Zeus and Hera pair, who are the, the, the statues in the temple that he's going to eventually get around to describing. The way they are described, she is sitting on lions and he is sitting on bulls.

• 54:19Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  And there are scholars who have traced this iconography back to the Hittite god and goddess pair from the region. And so that's even before all of that.

• 54:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and the woman on, on lions is giving Kabele, which is, I mean, I don't know if she's fully Hittite. She's certainly coming from that at some point. But yeah, so it's

• 54:41Speaker 03

  And so then it raises questions of, you know, is, is Lucian aware? Cause he meant, so he says Astarte. So we know that he has some understanding of, or at least a preconceived notion of, of who that might've been or is. But is he aware of the Hittite antiquity behind any of this? And so it raises interesting methodological questions for how we use texts that are later to talk about earlier periods of, of history.

• 55:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 55:05Speaker 03

  Um, I have found a great quote from, um, Andrade, which maybe I think will give an idea for those listeners who are fans of herodotus and ethnography, but also how we might sort of blend or bend the boundaries on lines. A, a really great, uh, understanding of what he's doing. So it's going to be a bit of a block quote, but so as Liv has already said, so the narrator starts with this very classic. Here's what I'm going to tell you about the ethnographic historiographic framework and then tells us that he's a Assyrian who has been to this place, has seen these things, has participated in, in the cults. And then

• 55:49Speaker 03

  he then proceeds to talk about a whole bunch of other cultic sites in the world that he is aware of and why ultimately it's just to come back to the one, uh, in the, the Hierapolis, the holy city to the Hera of the Assyrians or the Assyrian Hera. And it's basically to say like, none of them is sacred, like this place is sacred. It's, which is, it's very funny. It's very much like, I'm going to show you my credentials and why, when I say this is the site, you will believe.

• 56:15Liv Albert?

  You have to believe.

• 56:16Speaker 03

  The site. I've seen the other great sites and they ain't got nothing. Um, but anyway, so then he's going to, you know, very herodotus, say that he saw a whole bunch of stuff. He's, and for the things that happened before his lifetime, he has spoken to priests and other people at the site and he has gained all of these, all of his knowledge. And he is then going to tell us about them and he

• 56:44Speaker 03

  does something very specific. So here I'm going to turn to Andron, um, sorry, I'm mispronouncing the name again, um, Andrade and quote, when he, Lucian, introduces the original temple's foundation, so this is the, the Hierapolis temple to the Syrian deity. The narrator implicitly posits that the accounts, logoi, for it are mainly those of the Greeks. He first notes that the logoi are sacred, heroic, evident, emphanes, or mythical, mythodes. And he then states that the rest are barbarian, alloy barbaroi, and some agree with the Greeks.

• 57:27Speaker 03

  These four categories cohere with the four narratives that he then tells. Those of Deucalion, evident, Semiramis, mythical, Ates, sacred, and Dionysus, barbarian, but agreeing with that of Greeks. The narrator thereby indicates that most myths for the temple's foundation are Greek accounts or barbarian ones related to them. But the narrator also significantly stresses at his text's beginning that he had received all such accounts from Assyrian priests, whom he had consulted regarding Hierapolis's remote past. They now therefore constitute Assyrian narratives or adaptations of Greek accounts.

• 58:11Speaker 03

  According to him, most claim that Deucalion founded the temple for Hera, but others at Semiramis, the Babylonian, established it for her mother, Derketo. A wise man posited that Attis built it for Rea. Assyrians therefore modeled Hera's statue on Lucian likenesses of Rea. A final perspective, as previously noted, was that Dionysus founded it for Hera. Remarkably, each account and its origins, despite the narrator's misleading labely, cannot, labeling, sorry, cannot be framed singularly as Greek, Assyrian, or barbarian. End quote. And that's even though

• 58:53Speaker 03

  So Andrade is is looking at the labels or the categories, the buckets for the stories that the narrator gives us. And then seems to slot the four versions into each of these buckets, but then undermines every single one of these buckets. And so first of all, this shows us that our buckets actually are just full of holes and aren't maybe the most useful things to be thinking about. But the other thing that Andrade is going to talk a lot about in the rest of the chapter is how this destabilizes what we might call the colonial imperial gaze. Because if we presume that we have a Greek ethnographic,

• 59:33Speaker 03

  also read male elite, objective, imperial empiricist view on the foreign barbaric feminine effeminate, whatever you want to put into that category, right? If if we presume that that is the dichotomy, well, now all of a sudden, we have to reevaluate that dichotomy because the Greek is shown to actually be Assyrian and the Assyrian is Greek and it gets very, very complicated and very tangled and very enmeshed. And actually is probably in some way an expression of what really was going on. And I'm not an archaeologist. A few of the things I was reading were alluding to the archaeological work that has been done. And there are suggestions that what the archaeological evidence shows for the region

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  is this level of complexity, because of course, when anybody shows up with a new story and they say, well, your great goddess kind of sounds like my great goddess and those people share their stories. Putting aside for the moment that this could either be cooperative and mutually beneficial sharing, or it could be coercive and violent, because those are different kinds of sharing. That the effect of that sharing doesn't stop after, oh, we shared a story, it ends, right? There might have been something useful to either party in that exchange of information. And so there are going to be adopting or adapting or amending of various aspects of what's going on. And so then all of a sudden, it's hard to tell where one ends and the next begins.

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  And it's very clear when you've got a whole spectrum, right? If you think about color spectrums or spectra and you've got like bright red on one side and bright yellow on the other side, it's very clear that the red is the red and the yellow is the yellow. But as you, your eye travels down that spectrum, at some point, it is orange, but it was red. And where does it become orange? And where does it stop being red is the very hard thing to, if you want to get granular, look at. And Lucian's whole text does exactly that. It's it challenges you to reevaluate whether red is red or maybe it's orange. Or is it actually yellow?

• 1:01:38Liv Albert?

  I mean, even just some of the names that you were mentioning there in terms of like the buckets, which then, you know, kind of fall apart, like Addis and Rhea being put together is really interesting to me because you are inherently mixing things, because like Addis as a name is is very, I don't know if it's coming from Hittite, it's certainly the region of Anatolia, because Addis is usually associated with Kibele. And sometimes Kibele is associated with the Greek Rhea. But like I'm, when I've had to, when I've been looking up these things, I'm always seeing Addis with more Kibele and timeframe wise, too, we know that Rome was really into Kibele.

• 1:02:20Liv Albert?

  So it's just interesting to me that he's saying Addis and Rhea, because then you are making this, you're making it Greer, but then but Addis is not Greer.

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then at some point, he does mention Adonis and Kibele does show up.

• 1:02:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  And like, it's just, it's all over.

• 1:02:36Liv Albert?

  Well, and Adonis, Adonis has major ties, which I learned in recent years, like looking up Adonis and Aphrodite, they're the, the story of Adonis and Aphrodite is like very linked to Astarte in in a way that I wasn't aware of, like their story kind of predates a lot of Greek mythos and connects more to Phoenicia, which is interesting in itself. So, and yeah, I don't know how even that connects to Lucian, but the way that he is working through like a thousand years of of this kind of mythography is interesting, just even on that, without the the actual history going on, too.

• 1:03:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:03:12Liv Albert?

  Like even just on the myth side, I'm like, wow.

• 1:03:14Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, for sure. And it's it's

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  it it is so important and yet so complex to position literally every single piece he writes, both within its literary reception history and its multi generic literary reception history. Because Lucian borrows as much from epic as he does from comedy, as he does from tragedy, as he does from history, as he does from philosophy. And he is so very educated and very erudite. But then, so if we want to call that vertical contextualizing, he also needs to be contextualized horizontally with what is going on politically, socially, economically, in his own lifetime. And across languages, across cultures.

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  There's more work being done now on the connection between Lucian and Latin authors than when I first encountered him ten, fifteen years ago. But still not as much. And scholars are more and more aware that that needs to be better understood because it's happening in his lifetime and there's a, there are discussions of whether or not there's a Latin second sophistic of some kind. And how do you put the Greek second sophistic into dialogue with the Latin second sophistic? And Lucian is also writing in,

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  he he's writing with themes or motifs or topics that are deeply imperially Roman. Um, these anxieties about the performance of identity and the performance of authority and the power of rhetoric and the ability to convince, persuade, but then also abuse through conviction and persuasion. Deeply Roman, very much of its period where the crucis on aurum is entirely based on, or not entirely based, but very connected to one's education and one's rhetorical skills and well, how you perform in the court and in front of the emperor and

• 1:05:15Speaker 03

  as a lawyer, like all of these various jobs are in the public, public sphere. There's just this performance all the time. You're performing your identity all the time, all the time.

• 1:05:24Speaker 03

  And then there are also these anxieties that come from the creation of this Imperium and the, we want their goods, we want to exploit their resources, but also we want to put up the walls around what is Romanes or Greecness or or right, all these identities. It's on a different topic, but if readers are interested in Latin elegy, Phoebe Baudic's book, or Baudich, sorry, I'm not remembering how to pronounce her name, um, on, oh, shoot, it's called something like post colonial readings of Roman elegy or something like that. Looks exactly at this, at how, how

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  in creating the other and the self, Roman Latin poets

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  reveal the anxieties, but also challenge and question whether the other is really other and the self is really self. And maybe we, the Roman self is more barbarian than that we would like to admit. And just in case it needs to be said for the reader or the listeners, when I say barbarian, I am using it in the Greek and Roman.

• 1:06:28Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:28Speaker 03

  You know, sense, I'm not trying to make any contemporary commentary.

• 1:06:32Liv Albert?

  I certainly hope my listeners at this point know that well, because I am obsessed with using that word to describe how the Greeks described it and also the etymology of barbarian. And I just came back from a visit, uh, where I regularly saw my Aunt Barbara. And I now think about that all the time and the name that, the fact that the name Barbara is also based on barbarian. It's just so delightful.

• 1:06:56Speaker 03

  That's fantastic. Yeah, it's something I I didn't even think about until I was teaching as a PhD student. And then I had a student very visibly become uncomfortable when I used that word. And I went, oh, timeout, we need to talk about what, you know, there, there is me, the historical Gillian. And then there is the, I don't know, we'll call it the professional persona that gets crafted. And then there's the professional persona that speaks in the voice of a Greer Roman author who is not, not me.

• 1:07:24Speaker 03

  It gets very complicated.

• 1:07:26Liv Albert?

  Truly, I mean, it's funny, the way we like our brains end up getting trained in ways that we don't necessarily intend. As a very, like, the dumbest example of this, I again was, I was just back at home in Victoria for the weekend. And somehow dinosaurs came up, it was because I was from my, with my like young nephew adjacent. And, uh, they are obsessed with dinosaurs. And I have discovered that I have trouble saying words that I know are based in Greek without, but even if they don't have a Greek accent, like I have trouble saying them in English without putting on a Greek accent. And I don't mean just.

• 1:08:06Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God, no, that was delightful. But I mean more something as silly as like, I can no longer do a silent P in a word. And so I was saying pterodactyl and then having to really catch myself and realizing that pterodactyl sounds very odd in English. But I have really gotten obsessed with the pte and I love, I don't do the silent P's. And I've gotten really like used to, I just like to say patolme. But then it got, it caught me and I'm like, oh, pterodactyl. And my sister looked at me like I was crazy. And I was like, I know, sorry, sorry, pterodactyl. I recognize I'm, I literally don't even speak Greek. So I don't know why I've, I can hit it so hard with these like. And then I'm just being the nerd in the room being like, did you guys know it means flying fingers?

• 1:08:51Liv Albert?

  Basically, winged fingers, either way, delightful.

• 1:08:55Speaker 03

  Everybody wants to know that, I assume.

• 1:08:57Liv Albert?

  Thank you, I think so. I also love to tell people that tyrannosaurus rex basically means king lizard king. I know that it means tyrant lizard king, but since tyrant originally just meant king, it does mean king lizard king.

• 1:09:10Liv Albert?

  And these are the fun things that I teach my listeners outside of actually intelligent things like this, the rest of this episode. But, okay, we were talking about so many dichotomies and binaries within this. And so the one I want to make sure that we talk about because this, we've already been contextualizing for an hour, which I love for us. But to bring it to like, the fun bits, I was really thrown in what little I did get to read ahead of this. But, and by thrown, I mean, not at all surprised, but surprised that it comes in so late. But all of the fallow, fallow, there, there are, of course, because we love goddesses, especially eastern goddesses, always seem to have a lot of dicks involved,

• 1:09:54Liv Albert?

  or and/or castration involved with priests, or eunuch priests, or what have, I mean, obviously, also can be seen as trans, depending on the context. Sometimes it's forced, and sometimes it's not. We don't want to do the forced ones. But, I mean, there was a whole thing with, with, I mean, dicks, primarily, I guess, just to make it lightest.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:20Liv Albert?

  The gender binary, I guess, is what I'm hinting at.

• 1:10:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is a, to say this is a fallow centric story would be underselling it. Yeah, listeners, if you do go read this, prepare yourself for self harm. And a lot of discussion of castration.

• 1:10:39Liv Albert?

  Okay, so maybe I, also, I didn't get to those points. I just got all the fallow. So maybe the, I know that sometimes eunuch priests can be seen as trans, but maybe not at all in this story. So I want to make that very.

• 1:10:51Speaker 03

  No, we really, we don't want that here.

• 1:10:53Liv Albert?

  I did not read the whole thing, listeners.

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, totally fair. And that's a whole other, that's a whole other methodological discussion that I am not equipped to have. I know it's a very delicate one, because while queer identities have always existed, and we can absolutely do queer readings of these texts from antiquity, and, and, well, but that's exactly the thing, right? We need to do them in a way that does not liberate some identities while further subordinating or marginalizing others. And unfortunately, a lot of the characters who could be, to avoid saying should, but could be interpreted within queer frameworks, are enslaved, or

• 1:11:37Speaker 03

  are the product of coercive and exploitative power dynamics. And we don't want any of that nastiness. And so, we're not going to do anything with, with, with that for this text.

• 1:11:48Liv Albert?

  Not in this case, yeah.

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• 1:14:21Speaker 03

  Right, because so, the, the story in short, for our, our listeners, is that the temple, as it currently exists, as the narrator has, has visited it, was the project of Queen Stratoniche, or Stratoniche, who is actually a, or was a salucid queen. So we do have some historical connection for her.

• 1:14:54Speaker 03

  And the whole story gets wrapped up in divine violence, because she, the queen, has a dream vision of Hera, who says, build a temple to me, and then threatens her, and basically says, if you do this, it'll be fine. If you don't do it, there will be consequences. The queen ignores this dream, falls very sick. Once she realizes that Hera is not messing around, she goes to her husband, who starts the commissioning for the temple. She then, she Stratoniche, gets better, and is able to travel to Hierapolis to oversee the project.

• 1:15:35Speaker 03

  Now, the king isn't able to go with his queen, and so he goes to one of her friends called Kombabus, a young man of handsome presence.

• 1:15:50Liv Albert?

  Uh oh.

• 1:15:50Speaker 03

  That was a quote. Right. Anybody being introduced as good looking, we're in for some concerns.

• 1:15:56Liv Albert?

  Not good.

• 1:15:57Speaker 03

  Exactly. And the king says that he knows Kombabus to be an honest man, and he loves him the most of all of his friends. And he basically is saying, I trust my wife with you, or I trust my wife to you. And you're gonna go and oversee this, this sacred project. And Kombabus, to his credit, straight up tries to refuse this. He is very worried about what's gonna happen. And the king basically says, nope, you're the man for the job. And Kombabus is able to negotiate a seven day delay to this travel, because they have to travel to Hier, Hier, Hierapolis. And the king agrees to the seven days. And the, the

• 1:16:42Speaker 03

  first thing that Kombabus is gonna do is he's gonna go and he's gonna reflect to himself about how worried he is that there is going to be a great and mighty disaster unless he removes entirely the cause of the evil. And he doesn't tell us what that disaster could be. He doesn't tell us what this evil is, except for that this is all kind of been foreshadowed by a previous story, which I'll come back to in a little bit. Anyway, good looking guy going off with a married woman. We all kind of know where this is going. So he then self castrates. And the Greek is, is kind of disgustingly interesting in that it, literally, he makes

• 1:17:27Speaker 03

  himself unwhole, incomplete.

• 1:17:30Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 1:17:31Speaker 03

  And he takes his genitalia.

• 1:17:33Liv Albert?

  And he, is he enslaved, this character?

• 1:17:34Speaker 03

  No, not to our knowledge.

• 1:17:36Liv Albert?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:17:37Speaker 03

  And if we're gonna go with, uh, kalos kagathos, as the idea that you're beautiful, and you're good, you're therefore free, the fact that he's a handsome young man suggests that he is not a slave, or an enslaved person. And so he takes the genitalia, he puts it in a box, which he then seals, and he takes it to the king, and he says, this is the greatest treasure of my household, and I want to, basically, he, they do, they do like a treasure swap, right? Like, you gave me your treasure, the wife, I'm gonna give you my treasure, my genitalia, and we will guard these for each other while we're apart.

• 1:18:15Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:16Speaker 03

  And so.

• 1:18:16Liv Albert?

  Wowza.

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is, this is such an interesting story, that if it hasn't already been done, I would love to put into dialogue with ideas of bodily pain, and identity performance, and suffering in the second century CE. Judith Perkins, this is like a 15, 20 year old reference by this point. She has, she has a book called The Suffering Self, which is all about how the performance of suffering and the mutilated body, the body marked by that suffering, is central to the identity of Christianity as it is, as it is growing. And she very clearly contrasts it with the Greek novels, where the characters are horribly

• 1:19:00Speaker 03

  abused, but remain the most perfectly beautiful beings ever. And so their bodies do not bear the marks of that suffering. And I think this would be a very interesting text, because, or to compare with, because even if we don't want a graphic description of what this young man has just done to himself.

• 1:19:23Speaker 03

  It remains that seven days later, he travels a long distance, which in this period, is he on horseback? Is he in a carriage or is he a litter? Is he walking?

• 1:19:33Liv Albert?

  And he's got a fresh wound?

• 1:19:34Speaker 03

  This would have been brutally painful.

• 1:19:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:39Speaker 03

  Ah!

• 1:19:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:40Speaker 03

  So, anyway, uh, so, and but very interestingly and very importantly, when handing over this sealed box to the king, um, Kombabu says to him that this item is dearer to him than gold and more precious to me than life. This is going to be very important because they're going to go off to Hierapolis and over this extended period together, Stratonike is going to fall passionately in love with Kombabu.

• 1:20:11Liv Albert?

  Oh!

• 1:20:12Speaker 03

  I know, we're shocked!

• 1:20:13Liv Albert?

  That one was unexpected, actually, yeah.

• 1:20:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally shocking. And she is going to make advances and there's uh, lots of interesting stuff that goes on in there because she does have some sense of shame or modesty. So she decides to get drunk because if you say something when drunk, it just, it could be attributed to sort of the drunkenness and not to you and so.

• 1:20:33Liv Albert?

  Let's all just not pretend that that's not still real.

• 1:20:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, and or not wildly problematic in a whole bunch of other ways.

• 1:20:40Liv Albert?

  God, yeah.

• 1:20:40Speaker 03

  Anyway, he is going to refuse her advances, she's going to get upset. And she's going to, anyway, it's all going to be unrequited and and they will eventually work it out because ultimately to prove to her that not only is he not interested, but he can't be interested, he will, uh, I can't find the exact um, words, but basically he reveals himself to her to say like, I, I, there's nothing I can do for you.

• 1:21:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:08Speaker 03

  Even if I wanted to and I don't, there's nothing I can do for you. And

• 1:21:14Speaker 03

  the king is going to be informed by informants that his wife is having an affair with the man who he had sent to watch over her and keep her basically chaste. And he's gonna come raring up to Hier- Hierapolis and he is going to seize Kombabu's and basically condemn him to death. And in this, the litany of charges, it is first that he was an adulterer, secondly, that he had broken the king's trust, and finally, that he had blasphemed the goddess by acting thus while engaged in her service.

• 1:21:46Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 1:21:47Speaker 03

  And so Kombabu's is of course going to say, well, I left that, that treasure with you, could we pull that out? To prove that I didn't do what I'm being accused of.

• 1:21:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:58Speaker 03

  And so now the treasure that is more precious than gold and more precious than life saves his life.

• 1:22:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  And the king is going to hand over the informants, uh, to be executed in his place because they were telling tales out of sacred school. And they're all going to air quote, live happily ever after. And then you, who likes these comparative mythic moments, uh, the narrator is going to bring in and compare this story with Phaedra, of course, and Hippolyte.

• 1:22:26Liv Albert?

  Wow, right, okay.

• 1:22:28Speaker 03

  And is going to say that he, the narrator, actually doesn't believe that, oh, because there are other versions of the story where Strat- Stratonike, when she is rejected, accuses him of, K- Kombabu's of molesting her in order to get him killed. And so the narrator says that he doesn't believe that Stratonike did this, and he doesn't actually believe that Phaedra did this either, because if you really love someone, you wouldn't do this.

• 1:22:52Liv Albert?

  I actually like that.

• 1:22:55Speaker 03

  It's not the worst, it's like a one-line refutations trying to ta- talk about Phaedra. Um, and, and this whole, so within the story of this cult, the, the Kombabu's and Stratonike's story is about, it, it's an ideology, it's the origin story for why the priests who work in this area, in this cult, are castrated, why they are called gali in the translation I was, I was reading, so eunuchs. And it's gonna set up a whole bunch of other stuff later.

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  But it does then sort of raise these questions about the giant falloi statues that are hanging around in this environment.

• 1:23:38Speaker 03

  The couple of things I was reading, and this is definitely Andrade's work, but maybe also a little bit Jason Koenig, talk about how

• 1:23:49Speaker 03

  while in the story, when we're reading the story or being told the story of Kombabu's and Stratonike, we, the reader, are quote unquote, safe. Because we're outside, this is a mythic narrative.

• 1:24:05Speaker 03

  And we get to have the elite Greek masculine, whole-bodied perspective that is impartial and distant. Because this is the mythic origin, right? It's in the past. Oh, but wait, we're gonna close this historical or temporal gap because this is not just that there was a eunuch at the founding of the temple, the priests are and continue to be eunuchs. And we're going to come later in the story, after we've described various cultic activities and the statues and the things that are going on in the temple, we're going to come to a description of the festival and

• 1:24:49Speaker 03

  we need to remember here that the narrator is both this Greek ethnographer, but also this Assyrian pilgrim who has worshipped and devote, participated in devotion at this, at this site. And the narrator in describing the annual rituals at this temple is going to talk about how there are people who come just to watch and there are people who come to participate. And he's going to describe the frenzy and the mania that is going to build and build so that the people who have come to participate will then take up the swords that have been put aside specifically for this act and then will self-castrate as a part of the ritual.

• 1:25:24Liv Albert?

  Ah, and there are people there just watching.

• 1:25:27Speaker 03

  Yes, and this is, this is like contemporary, right? So now we have completely collapsed this temporal distance. But in case you, the Greek, ethnocentric, androcentric, masculine reader, thought you were safe, the narrator now tells us that some people who come only to watch get so caught up in the frenzy that they participate.

• 1:25:49Liv Albert?

  Ooh.

• 1:25:52Speaker 03

  Ah, okay, so if you're just watching, are you in fact all of those things that you thought you were? Are you the outsider Greek impartial masculine

• 1:26:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:05Speaker 03

  body? Or are you the androgynized, castrated, effeminized Assyrian, air quote barbarian, who gives themselves over to mania instead of being rational and composed? And all of a sudden, all of those categories don't function in the same way. And this is also after we've been told that everybody who is a pilgrim or anyone who comes to Hierapolis at all has to shave their head and shave their eyebrows. So even if you don't participate in the self-mutilation, you can't leave Hierapolis without being marked by that context. And so your body is no longer marked as purely one thing or the other, which it wasn't to begin with anyway.

• 1:26:48Speaker 03

  But the bodies are now all entangled with their landscape and their activities and the ethnicities that have all been mixed into this area. And so the whole story collapses all of these binaries over and over and over again as it, in my reading, predominantly is challenging masculinity. And it's not questioning or challenging what femininity is in, in most ways, but it is very much, um, it is very much using femininity in various ways to talk about masculinity and the sort of the dichotomies that exist between male and female, masculine and feminine, and what body parts are connected to which identities? And how connected are they to identities? And, um, there's a bit in there too about

• 1:27:32Speaker 03

  the, the priests wear women's clothing, but then sometimes they wear men's clothing. And so there's also the very sartorial performativity of what do your, what do your clothes tell you? Uh, or tell somebody about you and who you are, which is also very Roman. The Greeks have it too, right? But like, the Roman imperial world is very concerned with who wears the toga.

• 1:27:54Liv Albert?

  And like, yeah, they were, they were, yeah, it's, it's so interesting to look at the differences between like, just the gender strictures between Greece and Rome because it's like, yeah, Greece was patriarchal as heck and women had it bad. But then Rome was like codifying things in a way that felt, it feels just like scarier.

• 1:28:14Speaker 03

  Right, we get like straight up laws about a bunch of stuff. And like who can wear things and not wear things and, oh, you wore purple, off with your head, kind of, that's, that's an exaggeration, please, those of you who are experts in Roman law, don't.

• 1:28:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, purple's, purple's too rich, everyone's allowed that one, but that's, yeah. But Tyrian purple, as I want to say again, I'm,

• 1:28:35Speaker 03

  That's exactly what it is.

• 1:28:36Liv Albert?

  Exactly, and I like to, I've just been reminding people right now because of poor tear getting blown off the face of the planet. And so I just have been trying to remind everyone of its overall historical importance.

• 1:28:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, fair.

• 1:28:47Liv Albert?

  Um, also, I've been, I want to do an episode on the history of Tyrian purple because I have always been obsessed with it. Squishing up little snails to make their richest color, just fascinating.

• 1:28:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is fascinating.

• 1:28:59Liv Albert?

  Speaking of Phoenicia, but, yeah, I, I, this is interesting because I don't know enough. And so, uh, and I don't know if you do, so don't, you know, but I, I just know that there are, especially in the Greek East, like a handful of different goddess cults, either, you know, you, you Hellenized from other r- regions or straight up, you know, Greek to begin with, but that have eunuch priests. Um, you know, it's more than just this and I wish I knew like the background of some of the other ones, but it's just generally fascinating to me. And I don't really think, like, it wasn't really a practice that I know of, of any goddess cults like on the Greek mainland.

• 1:29:41Liv Albert?

  And it might have become that way, but like originally speaking, there's little of that. And it's just generally interesting to me. I don't even know, you know, I don't know enough about it, but it's wild.

• 1:29:51Speaker 03

  I really don't know very much about it at all either. I will say that coming from

• 1:30:01Speaker 03

  Coming from biblical studies.

• 1:30:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:03Speaker 03

  I do spend most of my time with Second Temple Jewish literature, which

• 1:30:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:08Speaker 03

  includes for those readers or listeners who

• 1:30:13Speaker 03

  need a refresher or don't know.

• 1:30:16Speaker 03

  I definitely am in the camp who thinks that even the Hebrew versions of the biblical texts of the um, of the Torah, Tanakh are Hellenistic period documents. They they have earlier origins, but

• 1:30:28Liv Albert?

  Sure.

• 1:30:29Speaker 03

  they're they're sort of comp- compiling into something more.

• 1:30:34Speaker 03

  There there's there's no canon at at this point in period in ti- in time, but the compilation of the texts in various forms.

• 1:30:41Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:41Speaker 03

  is more of a Hellenistic project than than anything. But the Second Temple period definitely includes the Greek translation of Tanakh, which is get gets called subtuagint and other old Greek versions. It's also when the scrolls from the Dead Sea, Kumran, were composed or or copied and written. And the New Testament is also a um Second Temple Jewish text. So coming from that world.

• 1:31:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:11Speaker 03

  This sacred mutilation is fascinating because when we read the priestly codes from the Second Temple Jewish tradition and also the way it gets interacted with in a variety of of other texts. This is absolutely not allowed uh in in any way, shape or form.

• 1:31:33Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:31:33Speaker 03

  The the body of the priest figure is perfect and unblemished. And any kind of what we would call disability or uh it gets called like a blemish in in the ancient languages often, or it's translated as as blemish. Whether it is something you are born with or something that happens to you at some point in life. You're out. You are no longer able to fulfill this priestly role and it's uh the the forthcoming work of Barbara Tita on divine masculinity in the books of Samuel. She talks about how God is, uh this is me paraphrasing, it's not actually her words, but she basically talks about how God is obsessed with pretty boys. And he only wants the prettiest of boys.

• 1:32:12Liv Albert?

  So antiquity.

• 1:32:14Speaker 03

  Right? It's very Zeus and Ganymede.

• 1:32:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:32:17Speaker 03

  He goes and picks the prettiest, he wants the prettiest boy.

• 1:32:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:19Speaker 03

  And it's it is it is nasty and coercive and absolutely rape and rape culture and it's all in there. But in and part of all of that is this idea that if you have either voluntarily or by coercion been castrated specifically, but done anything, uh you know, you go your your finger got cut off by accident in a farming incident or whatever. You you can't serve in the temple in Jerusalem. And so

• 1:32:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:49Speaker 03

  this is such a different kind of story.

• 1:32:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:52Speaker 03

  That it's it it stands out to me in that way.

• 1:32:57Speaker 03

  But maybe I'll also qualify the comment on on on voluntary or coercive because

• 1:33:04Speaker 03

  to come back again to the concept of rape culture and and rape culture uh listeners is the idea that rape is in some contexts and cultures by various and different mechanisms conceived of as just quote unquote inevitable for some bodies and and inherent and is also profitable for other bodies. And it shows up differently in different times and different places. And that's me paraphrasing the quote from the Shiloh Project, which I thoroughly uh encourage folks to go and check out. And so when we come back to our our poor friend here, Kombabus.

• 1:33:45Speaker 03

  It is deeply problematic to say that this is voluntary self harm.

• 1:33:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:52Speaker 03

  Because what is his choice really? Because even if we think that he's probably some elite member of the court, because he is a friend of the king and I I would have to go and check, I don't know what's going on by Lucian's lifetime, but in Hellenistic literature, friend of the king, Philos to uh Basilaeu i- is like it's a status thing, like you you you don't have enslaved persons who are friends of the king. That is a you're the inner circle kind of statement. And it gets satirized in the Greek version of Esther, which is very, very fun. Um, but back to the topic, uh so this is this is a man, a young man, a good looking young man

• 1:34:35Speaker 03

  who is a friend of the king, which is telling us all sorts of things about how hi- his he's he's perfect of body. And he's associated with power. But he knows that if the queen wants something, well, this is where we have to think in terms of complex hierarchies. Or what uh Elizabeth Schussler Schussler Fiorenza calls kyrarchy, where someone is always a kyrrios, someone is always a lord. And this complicates the idea of these simple binaries of male and female and uh enslaver slash free or enslaved or foreigner, local, like right? It complicates all these binaries because it's very intersectional, right? We all hold these different identities and some in some instances, we have some power

• 1:35:19Speaker 03

  over some, but not over others. And that it's these complex systems of of subordination and and dominance. And so

• 1:35:29Speaker 03

  Kombabus knows that he is subordinate to the king. And he tries to refuse the task, but then he can't, so he negotiates a little bit. But he's also subordinate to the queen in some ways and many ways. And so it is deeply problematic to say that this is, you know, pragmatic, voluntary, any of those, like it might be pragmatic, but it is

• 1:35:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:53Speaker 03

  absolutely coercive in the way that systems of exploitation are coercive, because no one has told him to do this.

• 1:36:01Liv Albert?

  Well, and especially when you consider the end result, that that's the only reason that he's saved, right? So it's like, yeah, yeah, i- he doesn't really have an option. And also once you have heard the end, it's like, okay, well, what if he hadn't? He would have been fucked. So.

• 1:36:16Speaker 03

  Exactly. Well, and it raises really, and this is very much part of the literary cultural zeitgeist. It raises questions of human responsibility and agency. And there are all sorts of debates in the period across genres about

• 1:36:37Speaker 03

  sort of divine plans uh and pre- predestination, that's what I'm looking for, predestination. And we see it in various historiographic writings and in philosophical writings and in s- sacred narratives of of of many, many, many kinds. And here it's worth bringing this narrative or this part of the narrative into dialogue with an earlier vignette because something that I omitted accidentally from my summary of of the Kombabus and um Stratonic story is that we are told very, very explicitly that all of this is the doing of Hera.

• 1:37:18Liv Albert?

  Right? You were saying there was a story to come back to too. Yeah.

• 1:37:21Speaker 03

  Hera willingly caused this trouble. Quote, she knew full well that Kombabus was an upright man, but she wished to wreak her wrath on Stratonic for her unwillingness to undertake the building of the temple. And so to exact revenge on Stratonic, because even though the text doesn't talk about it and she gets drunk because she's got some modesty or and or it's actually shame in the in the Greek. And she doesn't really just want to like walk up to him and be like, yo, I think you're cute. Come come sleep with me. Um, it is still incredibly improper for a queen to be doing this. This is in beyond the pale of bad behavior. And so Hera is exacting revenge on Stratonic by humiliating, because also this is going to come out in the court, right?

• 1:38:05Speaker 03

  This comes out in the court, but this is what's been going on. So even though Lucian doesn't linger on it, Stratonic's reputation is ruined. And we can imagine what would have happened to her for having behaved this way, even though the king doesn't execute Kombabus. But this story all has parallels, especially in the question of

• 1:38:26Speaker 03

  of human responsibility and human agency in an earlier story, because before we get the Stratonic and Kombabus story.

• 1:38:34Speaker 03

  Right after we're told that Stratonic is the one who builds this temple. Our narrator launches into a story about the time that Stratonic's son-in-law, not son-in-law, stepson fell in love with her. And there there are actually historical documents about Stratonic having been married first to one salucid king and then later being married to his son by his first wife later. And so there there is actually historical

• 1:39:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:03Speaker 03

  stuff behind all of this.

• 1:39:04Liv Albert?

  That's it's really melding with the Patolmes there.

• 1:39:07Speaker 03

  Oh, I know.

• 1:39:10Speaker 03

  We don't have family trees, we've got family wreaths kind of dynamics. Yeah.

• 1:39:13Liv Albert?

  Absolutely.

• 1:39:15Speaker 03

  Excuse me. And so my interest in this particular vignette was piqued because we are told very clearly that this young man has fallen in love with her and he gets incredibly ill. And no one can cure this illness and they call a doctor and the doctor recognizes that there are no medical symptoms to diagnose because he's in love. And any of your listeners who are fans of the Greek novel know this top loss. This is what happens in Heliadorus's Ethiopica. It's what happens.

• 1:39:49Liv Albert?

  Greek novels. This is so embarrassing and even on my list forever, but I clearly have to.

• 1:39:54Speaker 03

  Well, I would be delighted to come back for more random conversations. I love the Greek novels. I'm just gonna come back a week after. Everyone's gonna be sick of me.

• 1:40:02Liv Albert?

  Absolutely not.

• 1:40:05Speaker 03

  It's also, so the the scene with the doctor is very much how um the Egyptian priest Calaziris diagnoses the heroine and the hero in in the Ethiopica. But even Galen has a text somewhere where he claims to be able to diagnose lovesickness. But and the thing that's important for the conversation of responsibility and accountability is that when the doctor realizes what's going on, because he also figures out that the young man is in love with his stepmother and not just with somebody, you know, who he could have access to.

• 1:40:40Speaker 03

  The doctor goes to the father, who is also the husband, and plays the trick, a trick where he actually claims that the boy is in love with the doctor, his own wife. To sort of set the king up to understand that this is maybe something like jealousy will not help the situation. And he says, the doctor says, his, the boy's malady depended not on his will, it was involuntary. And we are also told that it was um.

• 1:41:14Speaker 03

  Uh, he's possessed, the Greeks more like seized, grabbed by love and madness. He's crazy. And so this is very clearly setting up the young man's passions as not his fault. And to the young man's credit, he just goes and lies in beds and cries and has a fever. He doesn't act on his desire, which is very nice.

• 1:41:33Liv Albert?

  That's very impressive, yeah.

• 1:41:34Speaker 03

  It is, you know, some self restraint, appropriate, like that. But that also again raises interesting questions of power dynamics, because his stepmother is also the queen. So could he have done that? Had he wanted to approach her, probably not, but maybe, I don't know. Um, and then, uh, cause the king slash father should not get off scot free and absolutely deserves to be called out. When, uh, it is finally revealed that the, the situation, it has to do with his own wife and not with the doctor's wife. He makes some comment about how he, he, he'll, he'll give strata nique to the young man because it's better to lose a wife than a son. It's like, okay.

• 1:42:14Speaker 03

  Great. Love that instrumentalization of, of the female body and like, yeah, this is just so gross.

• 1:42:19Liv Albert?

  Doesn't matter what she wants. I'd just pick my son.

• 1:42:22Speaker 03

  No, exactly. Here's more rape culture, right? Where women are the object that is transferred between men as a part of homo social relationships, because who cares what she wants? And so we've, we've had this story, right? About love sickness and the question of madness and, and or self-control or accountability. And also the idea that love is a madness goes back to Socrates, but is also very divine coded that the gods send these things. It is very Greek myth. And so then we're not surprised when Hera shows up and is like, I'm gonna make you suffer.

• 1:42:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:57Speaker 03

  Here is your punishment.

• 1:42:58Liv Albert?

  Well, this feels to me too, like, I mean intentionally or otherwise, but he, this is calling back to so much early Greek mythos.

• 1:43:06Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:43:07Liv Albert?

  And even in the way where, like, one thing I've always been really intrigued by, it, it, it is most glaring to me in the Argonautica, um, with Medea and Jason, but there are so many cases, and I think you could argue all in a, if you really wanted to break it down, but where Greek myth really does imply that love as a concept is simultaneously divine and personal, like, I think that it's one of those things that it, from the, the myths themselves, you can kind of interpret that they believe that all love is formed by the gods and that doesn't really take away

• 1:43:49Liv Albert?

  a portion of the agency, but it also allows for like almost an excuse when things go wrong. Like it's, you know, it's like love is, is personal when it goes well and love is uh, divinely forced when it goes wrong. And that is, yeah, something that comes up in myth quite often and interesting that somebody so late and when referring to this foreign, not foreign Greek, not Greek temple, you know, is pulling on so much. That's just interesting.

• 1:44:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, the, I, the ancient ideas of emotion are so interesting and there's been lots of studies on what the Greek and Roman literary evidence suggests about what emotions were and how they functioned. And like, if I can make a complete

• 1:44:44Speaker 03

  binary that is maybe not always helpful, but you know, between the idea that emotions are entirely external and are visited upon you in some way. Versus the idea that emotions are entirely internal and are the product of the subjective self and our individual experiences, like the Greek and Roman literature really, uh, and, and the, the, the, the Hebrew, Jewish and Christian, uh, sorry, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Jewish and Christian literatures and Aramaic, go throw an Aramaic there too, also have these various different ideas, although we don't have medical treaties from, um, the, the early Jewish and Christian authors. So

• 1:45:28Speaker 03

  we don't know what they were theorizing about these kinds of things, but yeah, there's definitely, and then that raises all sorts of issues that if I could put it in, in sort of modern speak is your feelings are valid, what you do with them is not always acceptable. So we are responsible for how we act upon our feelings. And it seems like we get so many Greek and Roman myths that are very much case studies in, okay. Here's the feeling, what is appropriate behavior acted upon that feeling?

• 1:46:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that's so true. I've not really thought about it that way, but even like, even in with Medea, just to continue using that example, that's so great because I, and I use the Argonautica just because it's obviously the, the earliest and most like full, full, like complete version and that being, um, Apollonius is Argonautica, because I realize there are also later Roman ones that I don't know anything about. But, you know, eh, eh, there is, when Medea is, she is very much inflicted with this love of Jason, but then simultaneously she is very much the agent of the results, like when she kills her brother, um, you know, in order to save him, but at the same time, we are told originally that she would not love him if it weren't for Hera.

• 1:46:43Liv Albert?

  And, or no, I guess it would be Aphrodite because Hera is helping Jason in this case. But it's, yeah, it's, it's just a very, it's an interesting mode of understanding emotion, because I also, like, it, it both excuses things and expla- it, it just, I mean, I, it obviously it opens up a world more of understanding, particularly when it comes to things like rape culture, because it's like, who, you know, how did they comprehend, like, who was actually at fault for this stuff if they were conceptualizing it as the gods, but at the same time, I think that goes back to, um, particularly when we're dealing with like very early Greek mythos, we're dealing with a culture that is still conceptualizing everything.

• 1:47:24Liv Albert?

  And so, you know, we have gods for every concept under the sun with like Daimone's gods, right? You know, there, there's a god of sleep, like everything is controlled by the gods. So then how does one conceptualize agency if everything down to sleep and dreams and, and, you know, force, like everything is defined by a god. You know, uh, basically it's all unanswerable because of that, but it, it's interesting and infuriating, I suppose.

• 1:47:54Speaker 03

  Which I think summarizes these texts of why we keep going back to them, right? They are interesting and infuriating and they don't offer us easy answers and they don't offer us single answers, right? There's, for every single thing you and I have said about the, just this one text today, there are complimentary points, there are counterpoints, there are alternative interpretations, some of which would invalidate or challenge ours and others of which would build upon and expand and others of which would be completely beside what we're saying that have like no contact with and are therefore just mutually exclusive, but equally valid.

• 1:48:35Liv Albert?

  It's why I love having conversations about this stuff, because it really does just like, it really allows you to get into so many different thoughts and, and just like, just break through so many or like just, yeah, it, it basically just opens up so many more avenues when you're just even talking about it out loud with somebody and I'm obsessed with that.

• 1:48:54Speaker 03

  Have I in either of my two other guest appearances told you about the sacred Jewish reading practice, Chavruta?

• 1:49:03Liv Albert?

  I don't think so, but please do.

• 1:49:05Speaker 03

  Okay, so this is a very old, uh, practice and it comes from the root word, meaning friend, chaver. And Chavruta is like basically having a study buddy and it's, and it's how, and it's how the, um, it's a very traditional way of, of studying and like it goes back, I know at least to the middle ages, it might be older than that. And it's, it's rooted in the idea, or as it was explained to me, it was, it was, uh, by a rabbi many years ago, it is rooted in the idea, it's sort of twofold ideas. That on the one hand, it is dangerous to interpret on one's own.

• 1:49:47Speaker 03

  Now, that is if one wants to really go into the sacred idea, it's because through sacred narrative, we encounter the divine and any of your listeners will know that encountering the divine is always a dangerous thing. Regardless of the medium, you know, whether you actually encounter Zeus in bull form, walking down the street or, you know, whether you're in, an, an image of Aphrodite in her temple or like, right, it is, the, the gods are scary, the divine, the numinous is terrifying. And so meeting the sacred, even through the study of Torah is a risky thing and should not be done alone. But also.

• 1:50:30Speaker 03

  In connection to the the the danger of solo interpretation. When we do things on our own, we can inadvertently become hardened or radicalized or reductive in how we see things because we are doing it on our own. And we are social creatures. We don't really do anything on our own, but when when we do something by ourself and we interpret text on our own, we we become very rigid in what we're doing.

• 1:51:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, it goes back to biases, right? And like how we, every single human on this planet has their own individual biases. And so if you are reading and interpreting something by yourself, you are only existing within your your bias as compared to being able to, yeah, pull in others and therefore understand more.

• 1:51:19Speaker 03

  Right. So on the so that's the one hand, right? Doing thing, doing this interpretation on your own is dangerous for various reasons. And on the other hand, no one person can have truth, be that a lower T truth or a capital T truth. And

• 1:51:39Speaker 03

  it is the space in between. It is the dialogue, the conversation. Cause you don't have truth, I don't have truth. And we might never find truth, but it is in the between of our conversation and in talking about it together and in challenging each other. And having hard conversations and disputing and disagreeing and arguing. Even if we don't at the end agree, and this is one of my favorite things about the the Jewish tradition, Talmud preserves the whole argument, not just where they arrive, where the rabbis arrive, but they they preserve the debate and they preserve the other opinion and the dissenting voice over and over and over again, because the debate is sacred.

• 1:52:21Speaker 03

  And that is the other part of Revruta. It is the idea that it is between us. It is not me. It is not you. You don't have it. I don't have it. And neither of us even shows up with it. But we will together find it. And so there is something

• 1:52:35Speaker 03

  which is why I love that you have these conversation formats, because it is it is very much that we we all need the study buddy. And mytho are sacred narratives. And even if we want to make some version of

• 1:52:52Speaker 03

  secularized, saccharity. Right? If I don't love those words for many, many reasons, but if we wanted to create some idea that these these myths have been used, the idea of the classical and of the Hellenistic and Hellenism has been used for various reasons. Even in antiquity, it was already being being used, those calls with authority. And so these are the myths that we use to define who we are. And it's not a coincidence that when I guess what you and I would have been high school when Troy came out with Brad Pitt and um right? And and now we're waiting for the next Odyssey to come out and it, you know, people are losing

• 1:53:37Speaker 03

  their minds and having all these sorts of debates about the casting and all these sorts of things, right? And it's a it's that very like, these are the myths our cultures use to define themselves even today. And there's something beautiful, particularly about cinematography, where it is a collaborative project and no one person is making all of the decisions and it is this composite.

• 1:53:56Liv Albert?

  But they've made terrible ones by leeching out all of the color from the ancient Mediterranean.

• 1:54:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:54:03Liv Albert?

  I had to say it.

• 1:54:03Speaker 03

  I also wasn't a big fan of of Achilles and Troy, saying that the gods are envy of us, envious of us. And I I didn't enjoy the excising of the gods from Troy, because what's the point?

• 1:54:13Liv Albert?

  It feels like the same but opposite of what Christopher Nolan is doing by making the tagline of the Odyssey defy the gods, which is quite literally antithetical to like Homer and the Odyssey and like everything. And actually, he

• 1:54:26Speaker 03

  Defy the gods and spend ten years trying and failing to get home. See what happens. Odysseus is the greatest example of fuck around and find out.

• 1:54:33Liv Albert?

  Yes. Like defy the gods is the opposite of what the Odyssey is about. What do you mean?

• 1:54:41Speaker 03

  But but, you know, to come back to these things, say something about a certain perspective on culture and society and the nature of religion and the role of religion. And we don't have to like it. But these are the myths that we use to and in in the same way that we have these these feminist or womanist or female perspective retellings of these Greek myths. It's because and the queer retellings, it's because some of us didn't see ourselves in the stories and we desperately wanted to, right? And so

• 1:55:13Speaker 03

  this is the dialogue. This is the in between. This is the conversation vertically and horizontally across time and space between cultures and languages as we.

• 1:55:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah, myth says so much about how we are understanding the world as we live in it now. And I've said this into the microphone before, and I'm going to keep saying it because I really want everyone to just notice this because I don't have like a I don't have a thought on it yet in detail because the Odyssey hasn't come out, but boy, is it relevant to me?

• 1:55:44Liv Albert?

  They speaking of Troy and and also our ages and timelines and things because it is not irrelevant that the movie Troy came out in the first year of the American invasion of Iraq.

• 1:55:57Speaker 03

  No, it is not.

• 1:55:58Liv Albert?

  The Odyssey is coming out in the first year of hopefully the only year of the American Israeli invasion of Iran. Like wow, like I it's a coincidence. I recognize that to a degree because this movie has been in the works for a year and that was applicable of Troy as well. But like, wow, that says some so much about how we use ancient myth and how we use Greek myth very specifically, classical myth very specifically. It says so much about how we use it. That that these things are twenty one years apart. It is painful that or twenty two years. It's painful that it's not exactly on point for like how long it would have taken Odysseus to get home. I'm a little disappointed that this didn't come out two years ago, but then, hey, we

• 1:56:43Liv Albert?

  the Americans wouldn't have been invading Iran if it had. So, you know, and it's it wow, right? It's just, it's fascinating. And

• 1:56:52Speaker 03

  Well, and there's something, there's something interesting too. In this return to Troy

• 1:57:00Speaker 03

  in the early aughts, because and I'm unfortunately not remembering any of the authors, scholars I have read about this, but the idea that Odysseus is this great hero from antiquity is not entirely, but largely a modern and specifically a post World War One.

• 1:57:21Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 1:57:22Speaker 03

  Reevaluation. Because up to during and then even just little bits after the first world war, it was Achilles and in antiquity, for sure, Achilles is the great hero, right? And Odysseus is the liar. He's the glutton. He's the the you know, don't, there's, there's more negative things to say about Odysseus than good things to say about him in antiquity. And Achilles is the is the is the real hero. And after the first world war, where we had industrial warfare for the first time, people went, oh, right. And this is where we're going to get um oh, William Owens.

• 1:58:02Speaker 03

  An English soldier writes a poem, the the title and the final line of which is a quote from Horace. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. It is good and sweet. Or it is dulce decorum. Yeah, it is sweet and, you know, appropriate to die for one's country or patri. And Horace says it entirely earnestly. But in the World War One poem, that's the final line after a gruesome description of a mustard gas attack.

• 1:58:34Liv Albert?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:58:35Speaker 03

  So it is not dulce decorum est pro patria mori, right? And so the the the and I don't know anywhere near as much about this as I would like to, but the effect of World War One specifically, but both world wars on the conceptualization of heroism and whether we privilege Achilles, who gloriously dies young and chooses it, right? He knows, he knows that this is the choice he is making because of the prophecy.

• 1:59:02Speaker 03

  Do we glorify Achilles? Or do we prefer the world weary, middle aged man who wants to eat bread and drink wine and refuses immortality with the goddesses because he wants to go home?

• 1:59:18Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 1:59:19Speaker 03

  Even though he doesn't actually get to go home, he has to go and tell everybody, he has to walk with an oar until no one recognizes it. And then he can teach about Poseidon. But we're going to ignore that. And we're going to ignore the horrific violence at the end of the Odyssey that is, you know, perpetuated upon enslaved women's bodies. But there there's a massive cultural shift as a as the as the result of World War, World's War One and Two. And so there was

• 1:59:41Liv Albert?

  Know that connection. Of course, I can see it now and I want to know more. Oh, my god.

• 1:59:46Speaker 03

  And so there is then again, to come back to Troy, something gruesomely or sinisterly fascinating about oh, now we're back to Achilles.

• 1:59:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:54Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:59:57Speaker 03

  Okay, alright, what are we doing with this?

• 2:00:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, I'm deeply obsessed with that. Okay, I mean, we obviously clearly could keep talking forever. But also, it has already been a half an hour longer than we planned, because to the listeners, you're gonna get hints of this, but we were talking for like a half an hour about both of our upcoming work vaguely associated with rape culture before this, and then making callbacks that weren't necessarily the original on tape, but that's fine.

• 2:00:28Speaker 03

  Hashtag sorry, not sorry listeners.

• 2:00:29Liv Albert?

  You can read it eventually. I know you'll be excited by just that name of that concept alone. This has been

• 2:00:35Speaker 03

  Great.

• 2:00:36Liv Albert?

  utterly incredible. Thank you so much, and thank you for like, going with me on a bunch of odd little journeys far away from Lucian, because it's been really interesting.

• 2:00:49Speaker 03

  We had our own trips beyond the pillars of Hercules. It's good.

• 2:00:53Liv Albert?

  That's exactly right. Our own odysseys.

• 2:00:58Liv Albert?

  Oh my god. Okay, thank you so much. Is there anything you want to share with listeners about where they can read more from you? I know you've mentioned a couple of things, and I can link to anything in the description as well.

• 2:01:10Speaker 03

  Sure, much to my own embarrassment, I don't have a personal website, and I don't keep up with academia.edu. So if folks want...

• 2:01:20Speaker 03

  If folks want, yes, it comes with its own kind of anxiety of academic performativity and my failure to adhere to digital norms, but that's a different issue.

• 2:01:34Speaker 03

  If folks want to know what I've published recently, their best bet is to look me up just in Google, Gillian Glass, G L A S S, Gillian with a G, and for now, you can type in Ohus A A R H U S, because that has been my most recent employment. And where the publications are listed. That said, starting in August, I will be taking up a four-year position as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bergen in Norway.

• 2:02:09Speaker 03

  I have set as a personal goal to have my own project page for that, because I'm undertaking my own four-year research project, which will be very exciting.

• 2:02:22Speaker 03

  But that is yet to come. So for now, folks' best bet is just to smash my name into Google and see what happens.

• 2:02:29Liv Albert?

  Amazing.

• 2:02:30Speaker 03

  And they are more than welcome to shoot me an email if something I have written is behind a paywall, and they cannot access it. Happy to, happy to share that.

• 2:02:41Liv Albert?

  Most scholars are, just in case the listeners don't know.

• 2:02:46Speaker 03

  And today, we've been talking Lucian in and amongst a whole bunch of other things, but if folks are genuinely curious about any of the things we've talked about, they are more than welcome to say, hey, you mentioned this thing. Do you have a reference? Because as happens when we are interested in things, the ideas get smushed up in our brains, and I'm sure that every sentence actually had a footnote of 14 different books or something.

• 2:03:12Liv Albert?

  Story of this podcast, particularly conversations.

• 2:03:16Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 2:03:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, generally, folks, stay curious, stay compassionate, and...

• 2:03:23Liv Albert?

  That's a good, that's a good wrap-up line, that's for sure.

• 2:03:27Speaker 03

  Curiosity and compassion, it's really all we can do.

• 2:03:30Liv Albert?

  Oh my god, no, it's so true. Thank you so much.

• 2:03:32Speaker 03

  Thank you, Liv. Thank you, listeners.

• 2:03:50Liv Albert?

  As always, thank you all so much for listening. You can find more on Gillian's work, which is primarily not on Lucian at all, but is on women in Judaism. There's way more information and specifics, but that is what is coming to me now. Either way, it's fascinating, like, obviously, ancient Judaism and the Jewish texts and the women within that. We have talked off-mic about a ton of things, particularly, both of us are working on things related to rape culture. That part's, you know, less positive, but the collective female rage that we have when we talk together, that sure feels positive.

• 2:04:31Liv Albert?

  So you can find more on Gillian's incredible work on the links in the episode's description, and otherwise, stay tuned, because she'll be back. And if you haven't, make sure you listen to the other episodes that we have talked about. I believe the other one was, it was in some way related to women in ancient Jewish literature. I'm just forgetting the specifics, but I remember it being fascinating. This is what happens when I record this many conversations, is I just remember they were good, and that I loved them, and then also, unfortunately, my brain kind of veers off from there. But I absolutely love having Gillian on the show, and I'm always down to talk about Lucian, because his work is so utterly bizarre. And this one was so, this one was specifically extra fascinating, because, you know, he's talking about like, all of these

• 2:05:16Liv Albert?

  cultures that are both contemporary to him, and which came before, and which also have been like melded into this like, Roman period, post-Hellenistic, like conglomerate, I don't even know. I just absolutely love this stuff, if you can believe it.

• 2:05:33Liv Albert?

  Let's talk about Myths Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Pango wishes the Hermes to my Olympians, the incredible producer. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network, and, you know, we're working on stuff there. Hey, did you know I finally opened my online shop directly in time for the Americans to progress their trade war with my country and make it all completely unfeasible? But there are stickers. You can buy stickers, and I would love if you did, because I spent many hundreds of dollars on them two years ago, and only just now got the shop working because of all of the tariffs. And the only thing that you can buy without paying an arm and a leg in shipping and tariffs are stickers, because I can send them in letter mail.

• 2:06:17Liv Albert?

  So, do you want a sticker? Great, check me out. But I also do have those signed bookplates, so if you've bought a copy of my odyssey, and you would like to make it signed and personalized, you can get those. They are the cheapest. I could make them available while not actively losing money on sending them out to you guys, but you can make your book a signed copy in whatever way you choose via that shop, mythsbaby.com/m merchandise, or just go to mythsbaby.com, and, you know, click on the button that says shop. We're straight into the point here. More soon. Thank you all. I am Liv, and I love this shit.

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