Conversations: They Weren't Always F***able, the History of Sirens & Harpies w/ Dr Ryan Denson
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I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast. I'm Maria Tremarcki. And I'm Holly Frey. Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime. Each season, we explore a new theme from poisoners to art thieves. We uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching. And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story.

Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby. And I am your host, Liv, here with another conversation episode. And it is a returning guest who I hope you all know and love. This week, I spoke with Ryan Denson.

who has given us past episodes on ancient sharks. I mean, it was ostensibly about all sea monsters, but I made it about ancient sharks.

Ryan is always here to talk monsters, typically sea monsters, but in the case of today, we are talking slightly beyond the sea, depending on how you look at it. Ryan is here to speak about sirens and harpies, which frankly, I did not think we would have an hour and a half worth of conversation about those two because they don't appear in a lot of texts, but I should have known that Ryan knows everything because he is literally the monster guy.

Pretty sure his Twitter is still SeaMonsterGuy. I think it should be expanded beyond the sea. But really, we're just, I do love, I do love a monster. And in this case, we have female monsters and the ways in which that has been fucked up and probably was always fucked up.

Ryan is always here to talk patriarchal nonsense with me too. We had so much fun with this conversation and I'm just, you know, I'll always take monsters. And I love that I have certain guests where they'll pitch an idea and I'm like, yeah, of course, come on on. I know that you're going to tell me hilarious and joyfully fascinating things. And this is yet another example of that. So sit back.

and enjoy listening to how sirens went from half bird ladies to sexy mermaids who want to sex everybody. There's so much more than that, but let's be honest. That's what sirens became. Conversations. They weren't always fuckable. The dark and fascinating history of sirens and harpies with Dr. Ryan Denson.

So harpies and sirens this time, and specifically them like in a later period, right? I'm so interested. Not so much for this work. I usually do stuff in late antiquity, but these, for these handbook chapters that, I mean, I assume that's what you and Debbie have talked about. You know, it really kind of goes at a holistic type of assessment with the sirens and harpies. So, I mean, yet with the sirens in particular, we of course start with the Odyssey scene and,

there. Although actually we can get into a bit of the later history of the sirens that I couldn't quite cover in that handbook chapter because the handbook itself is mostly devoted to classical monsters. But the sirens are interesting for the way they essentially evolve because the word siren in so many languages, I mean, it's in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and I just learned it's in Polish too. It also means mermaid, which is interesting.

interesting indication of how they evolve over time. If you just Google siren, you see images of mermaids and this is actually where I first started looking into the topic because you know I did my PhD on sea monsters and sea people as the audience knows and at the very beginning it wasn't quite sure I mean where do you draw the line with what creatures you include in which you don't. So we

So we have these sirens that are sometimes mermaid-like figures, but that really only starts to occur at the early Middle Ages. So it was...

I've managed to narrow it down. I mean, as far as the thesis goes that I could include or exclude those rather. But I've sort of kept the idea alive and this handbook opportunity came along. So I was able to develop this that way, but didn't quite get to the mermaid aspect of it. Cause that is a bit of a later thing. Yeah. Well, I remember the last time I had you on, we talked about, yeah, like, you know, more people more specifically, cause I think the first time was more devoted to the monsters themselves and

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

Yeah, I mean, this is a great place to start because this is the I mean, obviously the most famous location that everyone, especially listening to this podcast will know the sirens from. Well, I even like just literally for before I even we got on this call, I was doing something for an episode that came out today and I was looking at the pottery where Odysseus is strapped to the mast. And I'm like, oh, yeah, you know that one. And I literally like I actually picked something else.

I was like, oh, that one's so common. And then immediately I was like, oh, no, I'm having a conversation with the sirens in like half an hour. That's perfect. Yeah, exactly. I think I know the exact one you're talking about is the one where it's like he's tied and there's one swooping down. Yeah, that's very interesting and something we can get into get onto in a second, because one of the things it's good to start with the Odyssey scene because we can talk about, I mean, what is in the Odyssey scene and what isn't.

I mean, we have, they are bird-like in the ancient world, especially that we see in ancient visual representations. But the Odyssey itself never includes any mention or description of what they look like. And this is very interesting, I think, in terms of how we consider the Odyssey scene. So, well, I guess to start with, I mean, we're first

basically introduced to the sirens by Cersei when she's basically giving Odysseus his directions back home and all of that and warning him of the different things that he will encounter. And she has, I have here the bit of

that I translated from it because it sums them up quite nicely, I think. So this is quote, first you will come to the sirens who bewitch all humans that come upon them. If someone unknowingly draws near and hears the voice of the sirens,

he will never see his wife and young children rejoicing at his home-coming but the clear song of the sirens will bewitch him they sit in a meadow and the many corpses of men rot around them the skin decaying on the bones

So, and that's how Circe describes them to Odysseus, and she never mentions anything, they're half bird or anything like that. They're always given with reference to their song. And especially with that end bit there, there's an interesting tension between the beauty of the song, it's described in...

Lots of ancient sources as being, I think Homer uses the phrase like lily-like and there's Apollonius uses something like, you know, extremely beautiful. It's a very pleasant song, but the sirens themselves, of course, we're not told what they look like, but they sit in this meadow of rotting corpses. So you already get a sense of the

tension between the beauty and the danger there yeah can i pick your brain about the greek because i noted in your translation there there was like very little unless i missed it gendering of of the siren so i'm really interested in just how gendered they are in the ancient greek not very gendered is yes this is a good um thing to talk about too i think um

Way back in the day, you know, when Twitter was an actual, you know, functional thing. I mean, people might have remembered Emily Wilson's thread about this, of the way that we translate sirens that, and this will be when we talk about the actual encounter. But when you get to the bit where Odysseus and his men are sailing up on the sirens island, a lot of translators will mention, you know, what the sirens say, and then the words flow from their lips.

Um, that's one way the sirens are sort of gendered in a lot of ways that, I mean, yes, I know lips is not strictly gendered, but I'm talking, um, in terms of the ancient Greek there, Emily Wilson makes the point that the ancient Greek word really means like your whole mouth. It's a very, um,

you know, generic type of word. Words flow from your mouth. But when you make it something like lips, you're kind of, in a way, sexualizing it a little bit. You're gendering it more, especially when you look at these 19th and 20th century type of translations that have other sorts of

typically male translators that have ways of sexualizing different characters like that. So that's something that she points out as a way that that's done. And she does things a bit different in her translation, of course, too. But no, I mean, in the actual ancient text, there's not a whole lot of gendered elements to it.

And that's a great thing to bring up.

And as much as we can look at what actually existed there and then, you know, what it has become with, like you said, like the sheer volume of male translators who have just gone on to make it weird, you know, like make it this sexual thing when it was really just about the singing of a song. And it made me think of it too, because I recently spoke with Emily Hauser, who has done some work on how

how women the book is called how women became poets and it's just about how like there was no feminine word that could possibly describe them you know and they like there literally wasn't the words to describe women and but but they was like even you know Sappho

Her music like came through the muses, not, you know, her not directly from her or whatever it was, you know, but basically this way that like, you know, the women don't come up with the song. They just sing the words of a man is kind of the basis. And so it's interesting to me that the like kind of siren notion of because they're singing. But, you know, how feminine is it? And is it their song? And anyway, now I'm just thinking about all these possibilities. But that's so interesting to know that it's not explicitly gendered.

Yeah. And I mean, one of the ways that I mean, it becomes a sort of gendered element seems to have a lot to do with where those sirens go in becoming mermaids, essentially, because, well, I mean, we can get on to one of the ways that I would contrast the differences is when we get to the actual Odyssey scene where they are swim or not swimming, but rowing up to the island, of course. And

Again, we don't really have any line in the Odyssey where, oh, they rode up to the island and there were the sirens. It's only described that what the sirens are saying, they begin to sing and Odysseus and his men overhear that. Of course, this is the famous thing where Odysseus is tied to the mast so that he can overhear this and all of that.

But again, we're not actually given any visual elements. So depending on how you want to imagine the scene, I think we're correct in probably assuming that Odysseus and his men are probably not seeing the sirens at all. They're probably hidden behind a rock or something like that. So that makes the sirens even more, you know, heavily aural creatures. They're defined by that song because you can't even see them. We don't have a description of,

Yeah.

And the way that I would contrast this too, I mean, if you've seen, I think it's like the fourth Pirate of the Caribbean's movie with the mermaids, the scene there is the exact opposite because it's essentially modern mermaid folklore where they come and they swim up to the boat and they can visually see the mermaid now. And obviously the difference is she has a fishtail and all of this. And

And the interesting thing there is that, you know, the actress that's played, it's a very conventionally beautiful mermaid. And the guy on the boat is basically entranced by her beauty. He's drawn in by that visual element. She begins to sing a bit later on, but it's really that, you know, allure of physical beauty. And he leans over the boat and tries to kiss her at one point.

But it's something we don't have in the Odyssey. At no point in the Odyssey is it said that Odysseus desires to kiss the sirens or have sex with them or anything like that. There's other sorts of things like that with sexual desire with Calypso and with Circe. But it's just not present with the sirens because that's not part of their nature in the ancient world, at least as the Odyssey goes. Yeah. Now all I can think about is...

I don't have examples, but I am fairly certain that somewhere along the line over the last few hundred years, a man would have translated some of the words as seductive in some way. And I feel like that's kind of how we end up getting to this weirdly sexualized aspect where...

you know the word seductive even if it was like a you know legitimate translation does not necessarily inherently mean sexualization but then you know immediately like as soon as we attribute it and then give this like feminine aspect then like slowly but surely it becomes that these women are like yeah like luring men to their death for like sexual reasons or with a sexual element that like definitely does not exist in the ancient sources yeah

And you see it in some modern paintings. I think it's one of the first things that comes up actually in Google images. I think it's like a 19th century painting where it's basically the sirens. They're fully anthropomorphic, but they're purely nude women and they're kind of like crawling up on the boat. And that has that's.

None of that is in the Odyssey, of course. And so it's obviously a visual medium. So they want to visually represent the sirens in some way or another. But they're making very particular gender choices with how they represent the women there. Yeah. I'm imagining this painting of the fall of Icarus. It's probably like a similar time period. And he's like surrounded by what I presume are meant to be sirens as well. And again, they're like this like really overly sexualized group.

Those are meant to be like, they're just like generally look like mermaid-esque, but that's no, it's, it's interesting though. And certainly that time period too. And art is where so much of that is coming in as well. Like locking in that sexualized nature. Yeah. And by contrast, I mean, we've already mentioned the famous, you know, Greek vase that shows the, you know, the bird siren is diving swooping down on Odysseus. There's nothing sexy about that. No, no.

Because again, that's not part of their nature. And it's like 90% bird. Like in that, it's literally a woman's head and then an entirely otherwise bird body. So it's like, I mean, if you're sexualizing that, like that's a lot more about the first and doing the sexualizing. Yeah. I mean, you posted, you made the good point on Instagram, I think a few weeks ago with a picture of one of them, the sirens, they weren't always fuckable. Oh, thank you.

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

one of, well, the one image I was able to use in this handbook chapter. And I think, yes, it's a Wikimedia image, so it's public domain. So I can send this to you if you want to attach it as well. But it's a third century AD mosaic from Tunisia that basically depicts Odysseus and his men rowing up to the island. And the sirens there are depicted as essentially, I mean,

The top half, the torso, is completely human, but they have essentially bird legs, so the scrawny bird legs, and they have wings behind them.

And it's an image that at first glance, you might assume that that, oh, that just looks like an ordinary woman until you notice the bird legs and the wings, of course. So that sort of depiction is at least a bit more woman-like, but it's not, it doesn't have any type of like sexualization to it. It's not,

for that purpose. It's nothing like the modern representations. I think even like, I mean, maybe I'm wrong in saying this, but it seems to me that the ancient Greeks didn't tend to sexualize any of their monsters, regardless of their gender. And that was very much a later thing. I'm thinking of Medusa. And in no way in the ancient Greek sources or pottery or artwork at all is she ever overtly sexualized. That

That is definitely all coming in later at this, like more modern Western idea of like, well, if she's female in any way, we got to make her sexy.

Yeah, exactly. Female monsters aren't sexy because, I mean, we've talked on previous podcasts about Scylla and Charybdis. There's dangers there, but it's obviously not a sexual allure or anything like that. Or if it is, it's more of like a fear of sexuality. Yes. Because I had like a more recent conversation with my friend Kossi about Charybdis and

And we like, she's the one who first pointed out to me that charybdis is just a giant gaping hole. Like, so it's like this, it's deaf. And same with Medusa. I think like if there is any sexual aspect, it is like this fear of what I presume to be female sexual agency that they had. And so it's not so much like they want, it's, it's more like this is a terror of a woman because she doesn't want to have sex with me. Yeah.

Exactly. It's the sort of like untamable, you know. Yeah. Unbreakable. Exactly. You can't, I mean, you can't assert the patriarchy over something like Scylla or Charybdis or anything like that. Yeah, exactly. It's just not going to work. Yeah. And yeah, that's a good way to read some of those references because, I mean, we do have the bits in the Odyssey that...

I think it's, you know, it's something gets sucked into crib. It's not even Poseidon could pull them out. Yeah. So they're, they're just untameable creatures. But yes, I mean, it is a thing that it does assert itself. I mean, a bit later on with the sirens that we already have a few references in the ancient world to basically comparisons of mortal women or historical figures to sirens in a negative light.

There is one that I always think of in the third century AD. So, I mean, far after the Odyssey and kind of sort of getting into late antiquity. But this is by Aelian and he's talking about the wife of Pericles, Aspasia, and he makes the comment that, and so it's not someone that he, Pericles and his wife were long.

dead by this point. It's commenting on a famous historical figure and he makes the point that, oh, her voice was so sweet one would have thought that they were talking to a siren. And it's, I suppose you could call this like a backhanded comment of it's on one hand saying she had a nice sweet voice and

But maybe the implications of that might be negative because there are negative ideas about that specific historical figure because she was supposedly a prostitute and things like that. Yeah, there's a lot of that. That's exactly what I was thinking too, like that way of...

Yeah, you're, you know, you're complimenting her, but you're also making this point of reminding everyone that, you know, you know, according to the gossip of the day, like Pericles married a Hatera, which like good for her. Asphasia was awesome. So whatever. Exactly. So, I mean, this is not to say that the ancient Greeks, they didn't think of the sirens as sexualized. This is a sort of later thing that's coming after the myth.

Because you see this thing with other female monsters, just like what we were talking about. I mean, sometimes they'll compare female historical figures to Scylla or Charybdis just as a way of disparaging them, of saying that they are monstrous. You can't really read it the other way around and say that they have more of a feminine aspect in terms of the monsters themselves. Yeah. No, it's always an insult because it's

Yeah, I wrote a big piece about Medusa for a book recently and I just now can't get over the idea of her as this representation of like male fear of like a

of just a woman generally who doesn't need them. And that's what makes me think of any time. If we're comparing these women, real women to skillet and cryptis or anyone like, yeah, it is, it is definitely not saying anything about the monster. It's saying something about the women and essentially like their independence, the way they don't fit into the patriarchy. Like you were saying, like you can't, can't bring those ones in. And so then they become this like terrifying creature. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly like that. And so, you know, we can point to scattered references like that. And when I dug up a lot of stuff on the sirens for this handbook chapter, yeah, you find a fair amount of that in non-mythological sources.

just passing comments and stuff like that as a way to characterize them. And one way, especially with the sirens, they get sexualized and also mermaid eyes. Well, this is kind of independent of that, but in late antiquity, especially a lot of Christian sources start picking up on the sirens as an allegory for lust, essentially. So,

Yes. And this is another thing that it's specifically a very characteristic thing of late antiquity, because a lot of people will say that, you know, past the fourth century AD, Constantine, you know, comes to power. This is the Christian Roman Empire. But it's still very, very much a pagan world. And the Odyssey is still well known. It's still being performed in all of that.

So they didn't throw out all of the old literature and stuff like that. It's still beloved and out there. What a lot of Christian preachers did, and we have references, I think, from Ambrose and others.

Clement of Alexandria and various others, John Chrysostom, they use that as a way to describe essentially the things that they considered were bad. And if your audience knows the story of the Odyssey, it's a convenient metaphor to use like that. And you can kind of already see like what we're just talking about with Aspasia, the

ways to do that in their culture kind of already set for them to take advantage of. Oh, the Christians must have had a wild time. Yes. And I think it, in a way it becomes even more enhanced because there is too, I mean, in Christian mythology, of course, there's the myth of Eve that, you know,

is often brought forth as a figure of temptation because it's made the case that Satan, as the serpent, basically tempted her to eat the apple. And it's through Eve eating the apple that she got Adam to eat the apple as well. So there's a lot of very misogynistic comments in ancient patristic works that basically say that, you know,

women caused the downfall of man essentially through that temptation and Eve is again time and time again brought forth as a figure of corruption and all of that so that you know and of course

goes from there and women in general being seen as a sort of site of lust and the comparison to the sirens it just grows and grows and that's where you get it in a lot of the modern mermaid folklore too like what i was talking about in that pirates of the caribbean scene yeah that they become sexualized right around the time they start becoming mermaid eyes yeah so what like i

I'm, you know, thinking of jumping very late to my knowledge being, you know, Hans Christian Andersen type mermaid, which is sort of to be interesting in itself because it still maintains that like terrifying nature. But like, yeah. When, when did they start making this transition into being what we think of as mermaids? You know, those dreams you just don't want to wake up from, but you got to roll out of bed to make them happen because you don't want to save your dreams for your sleep.

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Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast. I'm Maria Tremarcki. And I'm Holly Frey. Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime. Each season, we explore a new theme, everything from poisoners and pirates to art thieves and snake oil products and those who made and sold them. We uncover the stories and secrets of some of history's most compelling criminal figures, including a man who built a submarine as a getaway vehicle. Yep, that's right.

That's a fact. We also look at what kinds of societal forces were at play at the time of the crime, from legal injustices to the ethics of body snatching, to see what, if anything, might look different through today's perspective. And be sure to tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in custom-made cocktails and mocktails inspired by the stories. ♪

There's one for every story we tell. Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The earliest textual sources. So, I mean, we can say, I mean, as we've already done, that there are representations of essentially what we would call mermaids in ancient Greek art.

There is, however, no word in ancient Greek or Latin for mermaid. So we're aware that they knew of the concept. Some art historians will sometimes use the term female triton or tritonis, but those are not Greek or Latin words. Those are purely modern inventions. So as far as we're aware, they knew of mermaids in terms of visual representations, but had no name for them. And so the first time...

sirens get equated essentially to um fishtailed women is in this text called the liver monstrorum which literally means the book of monsters uh very fun book too i think you could find an online translation of it but it's an early medieval work it's usually dated to about the end of the 7th century or the beginning of the 8th century a.d um and it

There's a lot of interesting scholarship. It has some connection to the Beowulf poem as well, because Hrothgar is mentioned in that poem at some point. And there's other things that seem to have influenced that. So it's in a sort of early Anglo-Saxon context behind it. And what the book is, is basically just a rapid fire listing of different monsters. It is the Book of Monsters.

And we find a description there of the sirens. They're not described as bird-like, but they are described essentially as half woman, half fish, your classical mermaid. And so that's the earliest textual source that we know of that basically equates sirens and mermaids. Now, the interesting thing to wonder is, well, why is that? Why the shift?

And this is where we're just in the realm of pure speculation. We don't really know why the author of that text, was that person the first one to do this or was he getting that from somewhere else that maybe started a couple centuries before that? We just don't really know. But I mean, pure speculation would be, I think that maybe...

at this point in the earth, the late seventh century or so, the siren iconography is probably falling out of vogue. It's, you don't have any of these Roman statues of sirens or mosaics. So that image is maybe dying down a little. Um, at the same time, you see tons of medieval manuscripts and things with essentially the mermaid image. Um,

And so it may be gravitated towards using siren as a term to describe those mermaid figures. At some point, some sort of leap must have occurred with it. And we're not really sure how or why that occurred, but it just spreads from there. And it's, you can see it in most European languages. Like I said, going from Portuguese all the way to Polish, siren means both mermaid and siren. Yeah.

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

Which is interesting because that's certainly not a pleasant sound either. No, but I feel like that's more of the connection to like, it might sound pleasant, but it's, you know, it means something more. I don't know. That's fun. Yeah. And this is where too, in a lot of,

Again, that Pirates of the Caribbean does have it. That scene does have it a bit where she sings and stuff. So the director of that movie is obviously aware of it. But a lot of mermaid folklore doesn't have them singing. So they kind of lose that. Well, I think Little Mermaid does, which would be my main... I don't know if it does in the original Hans Christian Andersen, but obviously in the Disney. Yeah. I don't recall it having that. Yeah, I know they're terrifying in that. They're not...

Yeah, I only remember having like a copy of it as a kid and being like this. This chick is scary. I kind of like it. Yeah, that's the other thing of like, you know, even though I mean they're alluring but they represent that sort of danger underneath the surface so it's it's in a way a false thing.

because they are monstrous creatures just now you get that trope of that monstrous sexuality of luring them in with physical beauty and all of that sort of thing yeah they're just the sirens in Greek mythology they're not really pictured much outside of the Odyssey are they in terms of like textual sources

Am I misremembering? In terms of descriptions you mean? No, just even them appearing in many texts. I would think it's mostly the Odyssey and anything that was then those sort of mirrored, mirroring stories of sea travel.

Yes, it's mostly just in the Odyssey. So things that mention Odysseus' journey as well. So that is kind of like their central myth. We have very little else about the Sirens. There is some later traditions that... The Odyssey doesn't do this a whole lot that...

You know, the poet there is not really interested in how or why did these sirens, these creatures come to inhabit this island and what are they doing there? It's just there for the purpose of being there. Same thing with Scylla and Corybus. The Odyssey poet doesn't bother to explain it. They're just there. They're cool. But when you get to the Hellenistic period, some of those authors were more interested in coming up with explanations for where did these things come from?

And so we have it in a few sources. I think it's alluded to in Lycophron, in Roman sources, Hygienius tells it that according to them, the sirens, they were originally the handmaidens of Persephone. And as it's, I think Hygienius gives the best version of it that when, I don't know, the handmaidens basically failed to stop her from being abducted, Demeter just turns them into the sirens as their punishment.

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

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

that's never in the Odyssey but you know that's like a weird additional demonization it's like when they there's a story that I think only comes in surviving in Ovid to explain Scylla and it's like again it's like this thing where it's like a woman did something that a man thought was bad and so she was punished you know like

Ooh. Yeah. So in that, yeah. So if they started out as the handmaidens of Persephone and transformed into that, just, and obviously it's not their fault that Persephone got abducted in the first place. What are they going to do about that? I would think that that is Zeus and Hades' fault. Exactly. We never blame them in. But again, that's, that's just one of those later things. There is another, um,

And so, I mean, yeah, the Odyssey is pretty much the go-to myth and sort of the things surrounding that like that. There is one random one that we don't get any good details about. And I think it's only in Pausanias. But he recalls that there was once a musical contest between the muses and the sirens because they're both, you know, musical figures. And the sirens lost that contest. And so Pausanias says that they were plucked.

like birds um that's all we have on that I think it's it's not maybe not a real myth but more of a joke because that's that's amazing to me at least yeah well and that's just so it's so pausanias like I his work is so fun for that because it's like

Well, I also think his work is such a good reminder of what a myth actually was in the ancient world and how it differs from like what we would imagine a myth to be now, because it's like everything was all kind of meant to just be an explanation, like mythology and otherwise. And so Pausanias gets to be this great example of like,

a guy who went around and talks about real things and talks about mythological things. And they're kind of interchangeable because they were interchangeable in the ancient world of like what the belief system was. But that's very, that's very funny to have it be that context. I was just scrolling through because I was curious if they appeared in Pali Fatis who did a lot of like rationalizing, but they don't. So I just enjoy those rationalizations. Are there any,

rationalizations of the sirens that you know of? That's a good question. Um,

not that i know of no i think i would have looked into it but no nothing's coming to mind um that's a good question yeah i've been meaning to read more of palifatis and debbie felton brought it up in our episode and i read some of it for medusa so now i'm like all right now i realize i want to read all of what he wrote to rationalize nonsense yeah there i mean he has a

Yeah. Oh, that's a good... I don't think so, which is an interesting thing in and of itself. Yeah. Yeah.

Never bothered with that. Yeah. Which is why. And it is, I mean, they, you know, they really do only appear in the one story, but visually they were kind of all over the place. So it's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Cause they're yeah. Very frequent. And that mosaic that I mentioned in Tunisia, one of the things that's also not in the Odyssey is that in terms of visual representations, they're often given musical instruments just to represent their, their,

song nature in a visual media um which is something the one of the only ways that you can distinguish sirens from harpies um in terms of like how are they holding music i would i need to know more about how they could possibly have musical instruments i am obsessed there is um at least in that um it only occurs where they have essentially a woman's torso right because i don't know yes i don't know if you can google real quick it's not going to work on mine just um

Sirens Tunisia mosaic would probably bring it up. Actually, I can do it on my phone.

Because it is a Wikimedia image that should come up fairly. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, I love it. Their little legs. Yes. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, no, I see. Yeah, so one's holding a lyre. One has a little aloes set. And the other one's kind of wrapped up like a burrito, which is how I was before this call. I was picking up the photo of Achilles as a burrito. So it came to mind.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's great. I'm absolutely going to post that for this episode because it's also beautiful. Yeah. And again, you can see on the one on the right side where her thigh is exposed, you can see the detail where it looks like feathers there as well. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, I love these ladies. Yeah. And again, contrast that with the modern art that's not sexualized sort of image at all. Yeah, I don't think they're meant to look... The legs are... They have giant bird legs. It's like if an ostrich... Like bottom half... Top half woman, bottom half ostrich. Exactly. And...

yeah arms for musical instruments well and it remains to the that like that they're on land here you know like it's it's so interesting how they transition to being like an underwater creature because yeah yeah in terms of like you know the odyssey and and visual art like they are i mean not least because they have wings but like even just you know they're

Yeah.

So once you've sailed past these, you know, island of the sirens, you're safe, you're good. They're not going to fly after you. We see in visual representations that they can fly, but they are essentially a stationary threat in the poem itself, as is most things, it seems.

It's funnier to think about it that way because it just reminds you over and over again that Odysseus did not have to get him and his men into as much trouble as he did. None of this came upon them except maybe Scylla and Charybdis.

But like, otherwise, it's like, no, no, he sought out all of these things that caused the death of most of his men or all in the end. Exactly. And he's he's playing with fire to hear with the whole thing of like, you know, strapping himself to the boat. And there's actually another bit here. So he straps himself to the mast while the men, of course, have the beeswax in their ears so that they can't hear it.

But it said there that obviously as he hears the sirens and part of the allure of the sirens too, is that they're promising to give Odysseus knowledge about why the Trojan war occurred. So it's, yes, the song itself is beautiful, but it's also a bit of allure of knowledge. And this is what seems to get Odysseus. Um, because as the text says that, you know, uh,

It says, quote, yet my heart desired to listen. I twitched my eyebrows, a sign ordering my companions to unbind me. But they rode through rushing forward. He's such a loser. Exactly. And this is one of those things that's like.

It's somewhat of a meme that, you know, Odysseus and men, they never do anything right. They let the damn bag of winds out. They ate the cattle. They will go on to do that at this point in the narrative. So Odysseus' men get a lot of shit for, you know, screwing things up. But here, thank God they obeyed the original orders because if they'd listened to Odysseus here and unbound him, well, that's it. That's game over, you know. So they did the right thing.

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

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

I just released the episode that came out today at the time of our recording is Michaela and I

uh talking about who is worse achilles or odysseus and odysseus won by a long shot but it's just funny that this we're chatting about this now because i feel like all in my head i just have like all the varied mistakes and nonsense that he did so sirens are just one you know small piece of a big puzzle of odysseus being kind of an asshole who i love anyway because that i love the odyssey too much to care but exactly

So with the harpies, like, I mean, I feel like we could talk about the sirens forever too, but the harpies are interesting because they're both similar to the sirens and also really different. And yeah,

Similarly, I think also really only appear in the Argonautica. Do they go beyond? Yeah, I would love to hear more.

But siren, or sorry, harpies have exactly the opposite. They're characterized by repulsiveness, and they're a more mobile threat. They seem to fly in the myth of Phineas and in other sources as well. But yeah, I mean, the Argonautica, yes, that is the main source of them, which is a bit later too. We get some scattered references to them in previous texts. It's in

In the Iliad, I think it's, this is classic Greek mythology, it's said at one point that Achilles' horses are the offspring of a harpy and the west wind. Wow. So, you know, a personification of a wind and a harpy, what do you get? A horse. Naturally. A talking horse, too. Well, yeah. Classic Greek mythology. Yeah.

And that's the first reference we get in literature to a harpy. But of course, that's just a fleeting thing that tells nothing other than that it mated with the West Wind, however that works. Well, in the West Wind, like Zephyrus, he's usually depicted with wings too. So it's funny to be like, these two winged creatures got together and oh, out came a horse. Yeah.

And it's sometimes thought that maybe the harpies, they were originally wind spirits themselves. Maybe that's what the poet of the Iliad means, that they're two wind spirits. And maybe the harpies took a more bird-like direction and it seems different now. That's interesting. Because we also get a bit in the Odyssey, Odysseus himself never runs into the harpies, but there's a brief line from Telemachus, something to the effect of,

oh, my poor father, he's probably been swept away by the harpies. So they exist. And that's a potential threat out there, but it never happens. It's just a way for the poet to allude to other things out there. Yeah. Yeah.

And the harpies, they are characterized by this trait of essentially not this vocal element, but of snatching things up. So this is another bird-like element. I always think of when I think of the harpies, I think of seagulls. Mm-hmm.

because I lived in Exeter for four years. And anyone that's lived in a seaside town or anywhere with their seagulls... I just moved out of downtown Victoria where I could see the water from my apartment. So it was literally just seagulls outside all of the time. Yep. And so you probably know how much they love to snatch people's food. Oh, do they ever. Yeah.

I saw, I don't know how true this is, but I saw someone did a study apparently a few months ago that they actually prefer to steal food that people are eating because it connotates to their brain that when they see something else eating it, it connotates edible thing. So that's why it happens so much. I'm not a, you know, scientist in that regard. So I don't know how true that is, but yeah.

It makes sense because, yes, being in Exeter for four years and those are fat seagulls too because they're well fed. But you see a different bird element coming in here. Whereas the sirens, they get the musical element from birds. This gets, you know, the flying, the swooping, the stealing people's food. And this is, of course, where you get the myth of Phineas, which is not as well known as Odysseus. But, you know, Greek mythology people.

I've not. We probably don't. Isn't it in the Argonautica or is it not? Mm-hmm. Okay. It is. It's in Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica. It's in Valerius Flaccus' one, which I have here. I did the translation. I've been meaning to read that one, but I haven't. It's...

We don't have the full thing, but it's interesting nonetheless. And at least for Valerius Phlocus' description of it, he gives a more vivid description of what's going on here. So I can read that. But yeah, maybe just to give the myth of Phineas in brief for the audience. Phineas was basically a Thracian king who he was given the gift of prophecy for, or by Apollo rather. And what he started doing with it is,

prophesying. He started telling people the sacred intentions of the gods, the things that, you know, behind the scenes that they don't want mortals knowing about. And so in punishment for that, Zeus blinds him and he basically sets up this punishment where he will be eternally harassed by the harpies who come and either steal or befoul his food, you know,

shit all over it essentially as again seagulls are wont to do as well living for four years in exeter i'm well aware of that and so we have in valerius flaccus's argonautica and a description from phineas himself about it and so to read this quote the harpies always watch over my food alas i can never deceive them immediately they come down like the black cloud of a swirling whirlwind

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

That's such, yeah, just like see birds. I love that. And I mean, we presume that it's either that the birds, the harpies are stealing just enough of his food that he can, he still has enough to eat and live. Yeah.

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

It's almost like Apollo and Zeus are garbage, garbage characters. Yes, exactly. And yet, I mean, and

Zeus blinds him as well, just as an added extra... Beases of shit, those guys. Extra insult. And so, yeah, that is the main myth with the harpies, really. Etymologically, the term harpy is probably related to the Greek word for snatching. So we do think that that's...

You know, their central characteristic, how that would work if they evolved from winds, we don't really know. But that is the more repulsive side of the avians. You know, you're drawn towards the sirens. You would, especially if you're Phineas, you would love to get away from these, but they're flying. They're a more mobile threat like that. And he just can't.

ever get away from them yeah well as someone who spent a lot of time on cycladic islands i can tell like the wind is snatching too so that's interesting that like the connection like the winds on those islands like take your stuff and it's gone like so it's it would be interesting if they were also evolving from from wind and then the bird yeah the wind like

You know, because birds also, I mean, birds are so connected with the wind, not least because they're in the sky, but even like I can imagine birds,

I again on I've spent I'm lucky enough to spend a lot of time on Naxos and I'm obsessed with it but there there's been a number of times when I've just watched birds ride the wind where they don't look like they're going anywhere but they look like they're having a great time and so that's all I could think of too like this that connection between that that nature of the wind it would be it's interesting to consider yeah that that could be interesting because that could explain you know sort of telemarkets is

There's still wind spirits, but maybe it was felt that you need something more corporeal for the myth of Phineas. And so they changed that way. Yeah, there needs to be like a visual nature. And so, yeah, they kind of become birds because also it's like, well, what else in that world can...

can be, you know, can work with the wind in any kind of way. It's all about the seabirds and the winds, especially on those islands because the wind gets wild. I mean, Mykonos is a bigger example, but thank God I've not spent much time on there. But like you go to Mykonos, I've been for like an hour just because Delos is right there and you have to. But like it is the windiest, most difficult place to navigate. Just like everything

Anywhere in that realm is so, so windy. So now all I can think about is, yeah, the way those are kind of the same thing. You know, both can snatch things up or cause you trouble or, you know, even like, I mean, let alone in a ship, but the winds can be powerful. Yeah. I'm thrilled to know that wind connection, that's all.

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Well, I mean, the other thing, I mean, so it occurs around the myth of Phineas is the main thing that they're centered around. There's the other interesting thing, which I wondered if you talked about this with Debbie, because it's really her idea of Virgil's heartbeats. Did you talk about that? We did not. We really talked about serial killers more than anything. So you are still the monster guy on this show. Yes. I love that you mentioned the serial killers.

Yeah, that was the primary purpose. Absolutely fascinating. Oh, it was great. But I mean, so another prominent in kind of a weird location that the harpies show up is in book three of the Aeneid. And book three of the Aeneid is for the audience. I mean, that's where the Trojans are basically sailing around looking for a new home. So it's kind of a skiff, you know, a

parody in the way of the Odyssey. And they come up to one island and decide that, oh, okay, we're going to make this our new home. Essentially, this is going to be the renewal of the Trojans from here. And basically what happens is they start setting up their feast tables and some heartbeats come out of nowhere and start attacking them. And one of them speaks prophetically and basically tells Aeneas that, no, no, it's fated that you're going to go to Italy and all of that.

That's a very weird thing because nowhere else in the ancient sources are harpies given this sort of prophetic ability. Phineas is the one that has that, but we don't hear harpies doing this. And so one way to interpret this, there's an element of the Aeneid that's especially popular in recent scholarship, which is, I mean, the Aeneid is

work of epic. It's very serious, but there's also humorous elements throughout the text. And this is a big thing in scholarship. I think I saw a CFP for this a few months ago, actually, on exactly this. And I had a student when I was at Trent actually write a very good essay on something like this, that when they're in the underworld, Aeneas gets on Chiron's boat, and it's this leaky boat that's

in disrepair it might be a humorous element but this thing with the harpies might be another sort of thing that you've got this bird like thing speaking about the future so this might be a joke about Roman augury essentially yeah

in a kind of a third way. And it's, can you believe we trust the birds for everything? Exactly. And it's, yes, it stands out as kind of a ham fisted plot device in a way that how are we supposed to get Aeneas to Italy? Now I know the bird will tell him.

Essentially, because that's just nowhere else. Nowhere else do they have that sort of thing. So he could be, you know, and it's not to say that Virgil was an anti-ogre person or that he hated the gods or anything like that. You can and probably should poke fun at your own people's customs and things like that. And so that's what that has sometimes been read as there, this talking prophetic bird.

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

Oh, wow. And this gets back onto possible depictions of, you know, monstrous females in the ancient world. But the description that Virgil gives there is that the harpies show up and they have, where is my translation? They have blood and, you know, gore all on their claws and their lower torsos. And you might think, well, that's, you know, tearing apart animals or something like that.

And the text adds here that, quote, they had a most foul discharge from their stomachs.

And what Debbie's article there basically looks at is that a lot of the Latin terms that are used in this poem might connotate not just blood, but specifically menstrual blood. So is that an element of kind of what we were talking about here as well? I mean, the fear of female sexuality, of female bodies, things like that.

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

Yeah, a nonsensical is a good word for it because it's like, I mean, again, like what we were talking about. I mean, it's the same thing of we don't know. I was talking about, I mean, in terms of iconographic sources, you know, the compositions of how much woman and how much bird these things can be vary. But I think it's always the lower half that is bird like.

And I mean, birds don't menstruate. How does this really work? If you want to imagine, I mean, accurate anatomy of these sorts of things. But Virgil seems to be, I mean...

And this is, again, this might be another sort of joking thing of maybe an absurdist thing that Virgil is wanting to point out with these hybrid types of monsters as well. But it's one of these things. And Debbie's article on that, again, it's very, very good. It is, yeah, just called, I mean, Were Virgil's Harpies Menstruating? And it points to something that's very subtle like this because it doesn't really come across in translation because the specific Latin words used here are

You know, it's not overtly saying that they were menstruating, but it has connotations of that. And there's certain bits, too, that it's said here as well. I mean, the harpies come down and not just snatch up their food, but pollute it. Menstrual blood is often equated with pollution in the ancient world.

I always think of Pliny the Elder's statement. What is it? He thinks that menstrual blood essentially causes swords to rust instantly. That's, yes, that's in Pliny the Elder. A lot of crazy stuff.

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

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

wildest nonsense yeah it's yes if all if only there was some way to test this swords rusting ah no we'll never know i just have to assume i'm right have you ever heard i mean random thing but have you ever heard what was it aristotle's thing um that he says that women naturally have fewer teeth than men he has that

In his works. And it's like, well, if this is approvable, it would be fair. Yes, truly. He had a wife. Open a mouth and count. Like, what? But, you know, he's just, you know, just write it down. It's true because I say it is. I had not heard of that. Thank you. It's great. It's a meme somewhere. Yeah. Yeah.

But I mean, in Aristotle too, Fiona Mitchell in her fairly recent book on monsters, I mean, she points out a lot of the ways Aristotle considers monstrosity and talks about how he conceptualizes women too as a sort of like imperfect man. They're kind of sort of monstrous and deformed in his mind as well and in a lot of ancient thought. Yeah.

So maybe some of that is feeding into Virgil's depiction here that, you know, if you consider in Greco-Roman cultures women as being slightly monstrous or something, is that even more monstrous in a sense of a figure like this?

Yeah. Oh, I love this. They're just adding to all of my newest theories on. Yeah. Just, I, I just can never get over the, the ancient men and the nonsense they spewed. And this, this is what I always bring up and people say, I mean, Aristotle was the first scientist. He actually went out and observed the natural world. He couldn't even count the, you know, the teeth in his wife's mouth. He didn't go very far for observations on anything.

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

Yeah, but this is what you get in ancient Rome. They were just terrified of women. And that's it. Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting thing too with it that, I mean, this pollution in the Argonautica, I think it's implied that the pollution is excrement. It's the birds shitting on things. But if it's pollution from menstrual blood to a Roman audience, does that read as even worse in a sense? Yeah, yeah.

You know, maybe so. Yeah, no, I could, that, that sounds like so on point. I love it. I'm trying to jot down notes of everything. Every new episode I want to do based on this conversation. The Aristotle teeth. Aristotle teeth. I'm just writing down. I can, I can dig up that reference, whatever that is for you. I would love that. Cause I, I feel like I want to go back to it myself. Yeah.

Yes, I was just thinking, like, what if I could just read, like, just find...

old translations of a bunch of the wildest shit that ancient men said about women, and I just want to, like, read them straight out. Oh, God, I, that brings up a thought, too, of I wonder how that feeds into the reception history of Aristotle. Did, like, people in, like, the early modern period read that from Aristotle? Like, you know, male authors read that from Aristotle and assume that's true, like, because the great Aristotle said it?

But I think that is so true, I think, of so many things when it comes to women because they just were not –

actually interested in learning they were interested in like continuing their earlier their like assumption that women are lesser and so it was like well these guys have already done the work for us like we're not going to go ahead and like count teeth in a woman's mouth because that would be crazy like aristotle already did clearly like

And you can, you can feel, you can see a lot of it in Aristotle's work too, where he's, he's, it feels like he's trying his damnedest to find some way to disparage women by, you know, saying they're deformed. But at the same time, you have to recognize that, I mean, they're the other half of the human species and things like that. It's, you know, the things that they, they have are natural, but he doesn't, he wants to go against the grain and,

Find a way to make it unnatural. I mean, yeah, I think it all, like, it really ties so much into they saw the power inherent in, like, the uterus and the, you know, the female body in that sense. Like, they saw...

the power that it had to create life and how they couldn't control, you know, who the dad was or whatever. Like it was like this, this thing they couldn't control. And so they just spent so many hundreds of years making women into this controllable creature because it was the only way that they could like maintain any kind of power. And now it's like, I can see it in everything and from the ancient Greek world and it's,

fascinatingly terrible but I've not read Aristotle and now I have to thank you I usually just avoid I mean I avoid the philosophers because I just am not particularly interested mostly because of the way that certain men have like taken hold of them and made them obnoxious um

Right? Like, so, you know, I recently overheard a man refer to Marcus Aurelius as Marcus, like as if they were old friends. And I just was like, oh, right. You're a man I would not like to meet in a dark alley. Thank you for making that clear. Oh, God. Yes, it's especially bad with that.

genre like the tech bro stereotype that just loves stoicism and stuff like that and it just just yeah yeah exactly aristotle yeah i mean he's he's very different from what people will say about him because he's

The other thing, because I'm writing an article on seals in the ancient world now, so this comes to mind. I love all your ocean stuff. This is so great. Yes. I'll have to mention the sea monsters book is being submitted soon too, by the way. Yay! Let me know when it's out. You'll have to come back maybe and talk more sea monsters. I'm always down. But he has this bit on seals where he considers seals as deformed creatures and essentially monstrous too. Yeah.

And in the ancient world, this has a lot of other references too, where because they're deformed or monstrous, they're considered badly sometimes. And I love watching videos of seals on Instagram. Seals are fucking adorable. Exactly. How you could consider that monstrous is, you know, he does it because they're half on land and half on sea and things like that. They're essentially, he calls them unfinished animals pretty much.

but just you know appreciate seals for what they are they're the puppies of the sea that's like one of the few things I'm gonna miss from Victoria is just generally the ocean life because like you could just wander down and like walk out there we have this breakwater and the seals are always around there and they're just playing around used to be able to go feed them at this one spot

And then one of them dragged a kid in, in a different town. So, you know, but they're just so cute. And I love seals in the ancient world. I want to hear more about that, but I won't ask now. No, that's, that's such a joy to learn. Just because I don't want to keep you for too much longer. And I want to make sure we talk about the, the harpies and the sirens too. So like, I mean, is there, is,

Through that transition, or even just them still in the ancient Greek and Roman sources, is there anything that really stood out to you about...

the way they've been maybe, you know, depicted in so many different ways or their transformation. Like, I would just love to hear if there's anything more you're kind of really obsessed with. I mean, in turn, one of the things that stood out to me is how uneven it is too, that the sirens are so prominent in ancient culture, but the harpies are less so. Like we talked about the myth of Phineas, but the myth of Phineas obviously isn't as prominent as the Odyssey because, you know, the Odyssey. And so they're in a way seen as,

they come across as lesser. And this actually conveys over to modern scholarship too, because one of the things that we did for these handbook entries is that there's further reading sections at the end.

And on the sirens, I was able to find that and say in that section, well, there's this book and that book and there's an open access edited volume. There's tons of articles. There's lots of stuff on the sirens. But on the heartbeats, as far as I'm aware, unless it's been published recently, there's no book on the heartbeats whatsoever. And you have only scattered articles like Debbie's article in a couple

of other things. So if anyone out there is looking for something to do a PhD thesis on, I mean, the harpies are right there. You've got no competition. I did since...

Well, this is, again, with the prominence of the sirens themselves that I've heard since this chapter came out from two different Ph.D. students at Oxford doing stuff on the sirens. So it's still a big topic. But again, I mean, the harpies are so neglected and they're seen as, I mean, less interesting versions of.

of the sirens a lot of times. I talked a little bit about, I mean, the sirens, they always have musical instruments. And that's one way that you can say this or that depiction of a half woman, half bird is a siren, but harpies don't have that whatsoever. So

But sometimes people still assume that those are sirens just because, and we don't really know. Yeah. I was just going to ask, like, you know, how often were harpies depicted and how often can we tell because of exactly what you're just saying? The only way definitively you could tell is if they're represented with Phineas. Right. Then you know it's the myth, but otherwise we have all sorts of things like there's a, I think,

I think it's like a lamp or something in the shape of a siren or a harpy. And because it's just isolated, we don't really know what it was intended and which one it was intended to be there. Well, and that's the same with like even the, the statue I posted that you mentioned on from Instagram when I said sirens aren't always fuckable. And like that statue is referred to, you know, in, in the museum as a, as a siren, but it's,

why you know it really is just this half bird half woman and there are a lot of those you know as like individual statues that at least on pottery you usually get a bit of a storyline and so you know like you said like if they're with Phineas you can tell or it's really obvious if they're with Odysseus like

But yeah, in a statuary, it's just sort of one extra piece and how reasonably, you know, could you assume it's a siren? And is that assumption just based in like, well, sirens have become more popular. So we just make that assumption. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, the harpies do continue on into medieval sources as well. But I don't

I haven't looked at too much into the medieval sources of it, but I suppose harpies get their own distinctiveness in the medieval sources once the sirens become mermaids in a way. So they do. And then it's obvious. Once you get into the medieval period, you'd have to say those are, are,

if you see bird-like figures in a manuscript or something like that. So I suppose they get their own time, as it were. No, but that's true. Because even today, I think people would assume that a harpy is the half-bird, half-woman, whereas they're like a siren. Even if they don't necessarily equate a siren with a mermaid, because I think in English, that word mermaid is so ubiquitous. But even still, a siren would...

I don't think most people who weren't, you know, this deep in would assume that a siren is a half bird. Like I think that that, that has definitely been lost over time. Yeah. That's really interesting. And you, I don't, I'm going to mention a thing that I've only been, I've been recently told about this, this new TV show that is they're trying to get Indiegogo funding. So it's a, an indie project. And all I know about it so far is it's called hangry harpies.

But just if you're interested in knowing about that at all, you can Google it. Yeah, they emailed me about just to share it. And I haven't had a chance to look too deep yet or anything. But I think they just recently launched the Indiegogo. So that's pretty cute. And it's a new bit of Harpy's reception. Yeah.

Yes, which is an interesting thing, too, that it's specifically hangry harpies. Yeah. I just remembered the bit there from the Argonautica where it says they're also hungry, too. Yes, for the monsters have a hunger as I do. So it's like Zeus has basically cursed them with hunger. Yeah. They're suffering. I'll look into that for sure. Yeah.

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

I mean, I, on the sirens and harpies, I don't have too much. I mean, there is too, if you want to throw in another bird, I am doing a couple of different things on the Phoenix in Greek myth. Okay. So yes, the Phoenix is interesting to me because I feel like it is not very heavily utilized in Greek myth. And I've always assumed it's more of an Eastern. So what, yeah. What's, what's going on with the Phoenix? Yeah.

It is basically, I mean, it's, you're right to say that it's not heavily used because there's just scattered reports of it. It's in Herodotus first that he recalls essentially, I mean, the classical myth of the Phoenix, but

He recalls it essentially as a bird that carries the father of its or the corpse of its father to Heliopolis after it has died. So it's a weird you don't get the resurrection motif yet. Yeah, it's only in later sources, essentially. Heliopolis would get that. Yeah, yeah. Heliopolis, would that be in the east?

It's in Egypt. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. Well, I guess south. But yeah, but interesting. Yeah, more of that connection to outside of Greece, though. But yes. To me, the phoenix is not like a Greek phoenix.

Yeah. It's in Herodotus book two. So it's something that he might've picked up with the Egyptian stuff, which is his, because it's his Egyptian book. So it's something that comes external and doesn't really work its way into a lot of Greek mythology. So that's the sort of one-off thing. So if people are aware of that, it,

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

it makes for a nice symbol for Christ essentially. And it can be read other ways, essentially as a pagan symbol and things like that. So that's another bird-like thing that I'm looking at, but it's, you know, it has a kind of weird history where that one comes to prominence a bit later on, but it is found in Ovid and other sources as a kind of

one-off weird thing that they like yeah do you know anything about it beyond like greek and roman like where where the creature because i and i you know the name the word phoenix is obviously really greek and it's probably it's coming from phoenicia i would imagine or is like at least etymologically connected to the greek name for you know the general lebanon area

That's me just trying to drop in that Lebanon deserves to remain Lebanon. So I just had to say that. Good addition. Yeah, I mean, it's...

Thought that yes, probably it comes from elsewhere because the word phoenix in Greek, literally the word, it can mean Phoenician as well. It can also mean palm tree or the color purple. It has a lot of interesting meanings. Well, the color purple would be coming from the Phoenician of it though too, right? Because Tyrian purple. Yep.

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

yeah there so uh well and they're they're also by the time herodotus was around like the canonites phoenicians the whole levant and egypt were so interconnected that would make sense if you know even if it's not necessarily originating in egypt but he's learning about it when he's generally in that area also his egyptian book is just so wacky that's great yes exactly a hippopotamus

A hippopotamus is a terror of the... I just... I'm a fan of the hippopotamus. Yeah. And so, I mean, because Herodotus himself, he's writing in Greek and he's, you know, become so prominent in his own right, essentially gets imported and...

And the Phoenix too. I mean, it is a recurring thing. Of course, it resurrects itself sometimes every 500 years or sometimes every thousand years, depending on the source. But we have, interestingly with this one, Tacitus and others give specific dates for when the last one occurred. Oh, wow. According to Tacitus, it was during the reign of Claudius and things like that. So it becomes this,

sort of thing that it's perceived as something that's still ongoing. It's not just a one-off myth. And actually Claudius is said to have obtained the corpse, the remains of the old phoenix for the ludiciculares, the games given in honor of Rome's anniversary for that year and displayed it. Wow. Wonder what he had. He just had some poor dead bird. Exactly.

yeah but you know that's really interesting yeah what about the sphinx she she's not i guess she's not really bird no she has wings dude have you touched the sphinx at all no i haven't there's someone else in the handbook chapter um that's done an article on the fitness sphinx though so that would be i have no clue about that one i looked at that handbook because obviously i would want it and then it's 170 pounds i think and i was like

I'm going to just talk to the people who wrote for it. There you go. There's a whole list of new podcast guests there. But I mean, there is to, yes, the prices is, is a bit wild, but I mean, if you and Debbie haven't already recommended it, I mean, you, you,

universities can get an institutional subscription to those handbooks. That's true. We can get it from Michaela. So yes, to those of you, because I do recommend it. I want to read it. And you've just reminded me that my producer can probably get us access. And this, by the way, I mean, it makes for those of you that are teaching at Trent and I mean, I think everywhere else that has a classics department, there's sort of like mythology 101 courses. And this is something that I would love to have for teaching one of those because I

You can direct students to not just the individual chapters on the monsters themselves, but theoretical approaches. There's a chapter on psychoanalytic approaches, feminist approaches.

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

the ancient world like i just so much mythology so little time uh exactly exactly and on that note i will start to wrap up and let you go but i would love to have your back for more monsters and also probably i mean seals because if you're studying seals like the the issue is ryan that you connect with my two loves in this world which is ocean life and greek mythology yeah

It's so fun. Well, sorry. Well, I was going to say too, because we talked so much about sharks on the first one. I know. And this is open access too for people. And I've published an article essentially on the canine elements of ancient sea monsters now for CQ. And it talks a lot about the shark element of it because sea dogs in the ancient world.

I think as we talked about probably, they're basically overlapping between notions of sharks and sea monsters and stuff like that. So we have that out there now too, if people are interested in that and the book itself, it will be essentially, it's going to be called a zoo biography of the ancient sea monster. And it'll be published by Bloomsbury University.

I hope at the end of 2025 or early 2026, we shall see. That's great. That's not too long. Well, for the publisher. Yes, exactly. Well, that's, that's the hope. At least you never know. Yeah. I'm submitting it.

very beginning of January. So we shall see. That's great. Well, congrats on that too. Yeah. Well, I'll be excited to hear more and I will definitely go looking for that shark piece. Cause yes, I mean, I have loved sharks since I was a very young child and I, they live in my brain forever. Have you seen glad eight or two? How furious are you that they put a great whites in there? Sorry, spoilers. It's in the trailer. There's great whites in the Coliseum, Ryan. I haven't seen that.

Oh, I have, I've heard of the great white shark thing in the Coliseum. I haven't seen the movie though, but that is, that's fair. That's really, are they talk about, I mean, I don't care about spoilers too much. Are they, do they play a role? Does someone get eaten by a shark? Yeah. They, cause they do like one of, they, they kind of go along with that idea of the having like the naval battles in the Coliseum. So it's like full of water, but then there are great whites in the water. Like,

like while they're like two ships fighting as a gladiator fight. But like, I mean, having sharks in the Coliseum generally is wild enough, but the idea they're very explicitly great whites. And I just, I looked over to my friend who was unlucky enough to be there with me. And I just, we don't even have great whites in captivity. Now we have never been able to keep a great white alive in captivity. And they're proposing that they're in the goddamn Coliseum.

Hmm. This reminds me too. I have, I have a seal story from the ancient world that I can end off on. And it's crazy one too about, you know, what I was just saying that seals and Aristotle and other ancient sorts, they're monsterized. So we have this text. It's a Christian hagiography called the Acts of Paul and Thecla. Um,

And Thecla is, I mean, the gist of the story is that she's a Christian during the time of the persecutions and it's found out. So she's basically sentenced to death in the arena. She's brought forth in a gladiatorial arena to be gnawed apart by lions and stuff like that. The classic trope.

But in the literal text, it says that, and then there was a giant pool of seals just conspicuously there in the arena. No comment why or how. Why is there just a pool of seals in the arena is the big question. But she sees this and says to herself that, okay, well, this is why I'm going to be torn apart by the lion. So this is my last chance to be baptized before my death.

So she runs and she's about to dive in the pool. And as the text says, one of the audience members basically commented that, oh no, she's going to be torn apart by those ravenous seals, those monstrous creatures. And again, just such a weird image because I don't think of seals as ravenous in any way whatsoever. But in this text, they're ravenous monsters. They're about to devour her as soon as she jumps into this pool.

But she jumps into the pool, and what happens? There's a gigantic flash of light. Lightning has struck because God has intervened, and he has killed the seals before they can devour her. And so the text literally says that the seals, the corpses, float to the surface, and everything is fine. But, you know, this is...

The seals are apparently big, bad monsters that require God's intervention to slay here. And this is actually something that features, it'll be in an article I'm writing on seals, but also the end of the sea monsters book, because what's going on there is it's probably the author. It says the literal word for seals in ancient Greek focus, but it's probably the author himself.

Is basically influenced by the image of the Ketos. The sea monster. So if you think seals are monsters. Because of that sort of thing. Going back to Aristotle and others. Monsterizing seals. This is where you're at. I am completely obsessed with that. And I was already going to ask you. What the ancient Greek word for seal was. Did you say phokas? Phokas yeah. Yeah okay. With an K-A-S. Not in English obviously. Or K-A-S.

P-H-O-K-A-S. P-H-O-K-A-S. Yeah. Okay. Great. I'm going to do some searching in that. Thank you. That is, wow. What a joy. That's a perfect place to end it. Exactly. Is there anything else you want to share with my listeners about where to read more or anything? I mean, I still have, I mean, Twitter, but the better way, I mean, because that's gone downhill.

obviously. So I'm not going to mention that anymore. I mean, the best way to find me, I think I've given you a link to my CV on academia.edu, which I update fairly regularly. And that's where all the links to my works and other podcast appearances and stuff are. So you can find it that way or just Google my name. And I think that comes up first. So

That's the easiest way to find me and contact information too. I, you know, my email's there as well. Always happen to hear, happy to hear questions from people too. Love that. Now I'll link to everything. I'll find whatever we linked to in the past episodes. And also I'm going to find that shark article. Oh, ancient sharks. I mean, sharks just generally, that's such a thrill. And apparently I can just lump in seals just as dangerous as sharks. Yeah. Yeah.

The ancient world's an interesting place. Women have fewer teeth and seals are monstrous. Apparently. Yeah. Seals are bloodthirsty. Ladies are lacking in chompers. We're doing great. Thank you so much for doing this, Ryan. It was very fun. It's been great. Thank you. Thank you.

Ah, nerds, as always, thank you so much for listening. I love that I'm back to recording these conversation episodes. I will say I just finished recording one and it was so much fun and I just feel so awkward, though. I feel like I cannot have a conversation with somebody and sound like I know what I'm doing, even though it is my job. And I just thought I'd say that out loud because...

I imagine you all don't think of it when it comes to that because it is literally what I do all of the time. But I swear 90% of the time I still feel like an awkward weirdo recording conversations. But I fucking love it all the same. So stay tuned because we have so many more to come. I'm back to recording them all the damn time. And I am so pumped. Let's Talk About Myths, baby is written, produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Pangawish is the Hermes to my Olympians.

the producer. Listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Sign up to a new ad-free feed over on Patreon where you can get access to ad-free episodes and so much more. I have done a full rebrand and it is a real thrill. It's still a little in progress and

But we're basically there and I'm very excited to present you all with this new option. Not least because it's really pretty and we have the Oracle Edition, which is like a new version of the new logo created by the amazing The Angel Incarnate. And, you know, it's just going to be, it's going to be great. I am Liv and I love this shit.

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