Conversations: Sing, Muse, of a Woman... Mythica, Penelope's Bones, w/ Emily Hauser
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ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. ACAST.com. Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby. And I am your host, Liv, here with another very exciting conversation episode. And yes, it's with a guest who I've had on fairly recently. Because it turns out, it turns out there's just like so much to talk about when it comes to women in the ancient world.

We just had to figure out where the hell to start looking. Today's episode is with returning guests. Like I said, Emily Hauser. Emily and I spoke one time for the podcast and then just wanted to keep chatting about this stuff. We have so much fun. We have so much in common. And we just, this is a great time. We recorded this episode a few months back now. We've just been kind of bouncing all over the place. But it's coming out now because Emily's new book,

Mythica, as it's called in the UK, or Penelope's Bones, as it's called in the US, is now out in the UK. I think it comes out in June in the US. Don't quote me on it, but it's like soon enough. And this book...

I don't even know quite how to synopsize it in this like really succinct way, but essentially it is an examination of the women of the Homeric epic, specifically these women of the Iliad and the Odyssey and looking at them.

through very real women of both the ancient world and the modern one. Really, really interesting, but just really focusing on these stories of very real women and kind of tying them in with these Homeric epics. I'm so excited about this book. I imagine you are too. So we will just jump straight into this. Oh, it's almost like I could talk about women in Homer for like literally ever, ever.

conversations sing muse of a woman mythica penelope's bones with emily hauser

I mean, Michaela and I were both so excited for this. So specifically, I think you and I could talk about just women in the ancient world forever. And we will, I know. But specifically Mythica and or Penelope's Bones, which is such a great title. I just want to hear everything. Firstly, though, like why? How did you get into wanting to look at these women so specifically like in this way?

Oh, well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm equally excited to be here and just, yeah, chat about the book and everything, Women of Greek Myth. It's always so much fun. So how did I know I wanted to look at these women? I mean, this has gone back such a long time, this interest and kind of quest for the women and

not just behind Greek myth, but quite specifically behind the epics of Homer. And I think there are a couple of reasons for that. I think it really started or maybe kicked off is maybe the better way of saying it when I was in undergrad. And so I was at Cambridge and I was choosing my undergraduate dissertation and what I was going to write about. And I

I just got really drawn to the way that I had always been told that the Iliad in particular, so I was really focusing on the Iliad, was this story that was just about men and just about war and just about blood and gore and glory and that it was like this kind of flat poem.

And it really troubled me because that was never how I had felt about it. I had always been interested in the women. And the more I read it, the more the women came forward from the background. So I felt like I needed to do something to respond to that. And I guess everything I have done since then has basically been a series of responses to that in different ways. So, you know, first my novels, where I, the first one in particular for The Most Beautiful was really kind of

angling at that same question of how do we recover the women of the Iliad and tells the story of Briseis and Criseis. And I guess now I'm doing it in nonfiction and saying, how can we use the tools of history and archaeology and DNA to recover these women and put them back in the place where I think they need to be?

I mean, I love all of that. But so specifically, I know that idea of the Iliad so well. Michaela and I talk about this all the time. Just this idea that the Iliad, that people present the Iliad as being about the glory of war and little else. And it's like, what Iliad do you read when that is what you get? Because I don't see that in many ways. Like, it's not about the glory of war at all. But also on top of that, like,

specifically, I think in Homer, the women really do stand out in a way that they often don't in the rest of Greek myth. And I think they have been so ignored, even though they are so in there in a way. Absolutely. Yeah, we should be talking about them all the time because they're such a rare example that we have of these mythical women who like were pretty awesome and generally have like pretty great stories. I mean, whether or not the...

what happens in the stories to them is great is another question but like they have they have character in a way that is feels so unique absolutely no that's that's such a good way of putting it and I think for me that's exactly why women in Homer are so interesting because I often kind of try and articulate it as this kind of paradox around women that on the one hand in Homer women are

incredibly powerful. In fact, they're actually central to the epics. If you think about the Iliad and the way that the Iliad is set up, right, it's telling a bit of the Trojan War. Well, the Trojan War happens because of Helen. The Trojan, the, sorry, Helen gets taken away from Sparta by Paris because of the judgment of three goddesses.

Helen then gets to Troy and the Iliad begins because of Briseis and Chryseis, these two enslaved women who then Achilles and Agamemnon fight about. It's like on every single layer of the narrative, you get the three goddesses, you get Helen, you get Briseis and Chryseis. So they are the engines of the narrative. But the paradox is that the poem manages to encapsulate that power

use it for its own energy and then marginalize the women. And it gives us as interpreters so much power because we can say, look, these women are important and they really are. We're not making that up. But we, it's our job to reclaim them from the place that they have been pushed into. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, that's so well said. And as you were describing, you know, each of them in the Iliad, all I could think was the women who serve such similar purposes in the Odyssey. Because the Odyssey 2 is, you know, everyone's like, oh, it's about Odysseus's journey home. But like,

all the women are like the catalysts in in that as well in like every way which I'd never quite thought about absolutely like you could say the exact same thing you just described but like in the Odyssey you could and and exactly I guess like I often start with the Iliad because it is that kind of prototypical epic of masculinity um and because obviously it's typically seen in

whether that's right or not as like the first of the two epics. So, you know, it is originary and it is normative in a lot of ways in which the Odyssey I think isn't, and it can play with that. But then at exactly the same time, I actually think that the Odyssey in some ways does this even more. And one of the reasons I really often do focus on the Odyssey for this is because of its opening line, right? Because the Iliad,

asks the muse, and we haven't even mentioned the muse, but the muse also, she's the one who's beginning the poem, right? She's the one who's singing the poem and inspiring the poet. But the Odyssey begins, muse, sing to me of a complicated man. That's Emily Wilson's amazing translation. It's perfect. I mean, obviously that's not the exact, but complicated is her polytropos. But the first word in Greek is

Andra, man. And that is literally the word where we get androcentric from. Like this is the poem that defined androcentrism. And I think it's so interesting that typically when we talk about the Odyssey,

it tends to be talked about as actually, oh, but look, there were loads of women in there. So actually like, it's all good. Women are represented, but like dig down into it. And actually the women are incredibly stereotyped. They are representatives of all the kind of fantasies and fears that men have. And they are, I think it's something that most people don't realize, but in fact, most of the women that are told off in Odysseus's travels, Calypso, Circe, Nausicaa, the sirens,

they are told of in Odysseus's voice. So when we hear about them, we are not just hearing about like, we're

women characters, we're hearing about Odysseus' take on women characters in a poem by a man. Like, there are double layers of men's voices here, and we need to excavate the women from them. Yeah. And a man that we've been very explicitly told not to trust, too. For sure. Like, Odysseus, you don't know what he's saying. You don't know, you know, what to believe and not to believe. And that's the interesting thing about the poem, but it absolutely affects these women so specifically. Yeah, and that's such an interesting point that actually...

he tends, at least in kind of the relation of his travels, they tend to be taken at face value. This is what happened. Odysseus was on his travels and he went to Circe, but it's like, well, actually all of that is being told by an incredibly unreliable narrator. So it makes us question the mechanisms through which women get transmitted to us, which I think is really important. But the Odyssey maybe does that a little bit more

than the Iliad does. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is all so interesting. I'm trying to piece apart like what, what to go to next, but I mean, yeah, to, to go with the Iliad, like, so you wanted to, you just broke, sorry, now I'm don't even know how to phrase anything. I'm just too excited. I love it. I love it. Excitement for Homer is, is what we're here for. Yeah,

at all and it's just I'm getting reminded too because when Michaela was here in person uh which basically has never happened with us before other than in Greece uh but we were looking through both the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek like just being nerds and so I had it so fresh in my head that the first word was man which I had never really connected before so I was like you know I'm just I'm ready to go with all of this I love it amazing you've done your prep work what

I mean, my life is the prep work, I think. Oh, for sure. Yeah. And so you went back to the muses. Talk about the muses. Like, and again, I'm phrasing this so poorly, but to just start at the beginning, I guess, with the muses, like, did you look at

I think your introduction is a new muse or something, right? So like, can you tell me about starting with the muses or what they, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So basically the introduction to Mythica or Penelope's Bones as it's going to be stateside. Such a good title. Yeah, I am really psyched about it. And in a way, I'm just really glad that that one

gets to get used as well because then we get both of them. But it basically begins with what I call a new invocation to the muse.

because the invocations, which is basically that kind of call on the muse for inspiration, and it's what the poet traditionally does in the ancient world in order to kind of ask for inspiration. And for any kind of creative activity, any kind of craft, any art that the poet is going to be doing, you call on the muses who are the goddesses of song, the goddesses of poetry, dance, theatre, all those kinds of things. And I kind of wanted to...

make us think about the fact that these are women who are standing at the head of this tale, and yet they are having to tell the stories of men, by men. They are literally kind of being channeled through the poet, and they are losing their voices entirely. And I kind of thought like,

how would the muse feel sitting up there on Mount Helicon, which is where the muses were. And yet another poet is saying, hey, muse, sing to me about a man, please. And she's like, oh, you know, really again. And I just was like, what if we change that invocation around? And instead we said, muse, tell me about a woman.

One word change, but such a powerful shift because now the muse is not losing her voice and being channeled into a men's tradition, but she is an ally who is on our side in recovering the stories of women. And I feel like she would be very much behind that, I hope.

I would certainly assume so. Yeah. No, that's how it remained. I think I have brain fog lately. I apologize. My mind is off. It's the new year. We're still recovering from the holidays. Yeah. It's been a messy time. But no, because when you were mentioning the muse earlier, I just kept thinking back to our conversation that we had about, you know, the how women became poets. Because it really stuck with me the way you described

the way you described it in that, in that time that the, that the muses really are working through the men, you know, which I conceptually I've always registered, but just the way that it's like their voices don't get to be heard. And the women don't get to be the poets. They are just the, the hidden inspiration, you know, it's like behind every great man is a great woman. And it's like, yeah, she should be in front though. Like,

Why is she always behind? And so do you know, do you want me to give you another example? Because there's another example that I find really interesting because in ancient Greece in particular, but it continues into Rome, but it starts in Greece. There's a real parallelism between poetry and prophecy.

So Apollo is the god of both. And poets and prophets, they often kind of compare themselves to each other as like purveyors of truth. And they kind of have the inspiration of the knowledge of the gods. But what's super interesting from a gender perspective is that

the Oracle in Delphi in particular was female and she was said to be possessed by a male God, Apollo. So we've got to kind of switch in gender here from like the female muse who is inspiring the male poet, but the male poet takes all the credit. But what happens when the gender roles are reversed? Well, when it's reversed,

The female Oracle is inspired. She's possessed by the God. Interesting that she's possessed, right? It definitely has kind of connotations of kind of like the possession of her body. And then she utters this kind of frenzied,

By the way, she does it in hexameter, which is the meter that the Homeric bards would have used. So there's an awesome kind of parallel there. But then that gets interpreted by men who are called in the Greek prophetes. That's where we get prophet from. But that means someone who is speaking on behalf of someone else. Okay.

Wow. So they literally get overwritten. Their kind of what we're told is kind of gobbledygook gets turned into serious man talk and that gets conveyed to the public. And I think that's so interesting because for the male poet, that's not necessary. He takes the inspiration of the muse. He runs with it. He takes the credit. The female oracle does the hexameter, does the verse making, but then it gets kind of

appropriated by men and turned into their speech. I just think that that's such an interesting kind of case study for that. Yeah. I've never thought about it in that connection. I've always wanted to focus way too often on or too much on just the idea that yeah, Apollo...

is like on the one side, the Oracle just sits in the middle and she doesn't actually get any control or power over the situation. She could say the most brilliantly prophetical thing, but those priests could be like, no, and then just, you know, completely, you know, change anything. And it's, yeah, that's always stuck with me that like the one, the few places where they give women some kind of power, they do not actually, like it looks like it on the surface when you break it down.

No. Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. And it's super interesting because there was actually a tradition that Homer actually stole his verses from one of the Pythias, from one of the Delphic oracles. Oh my gosh. Because obviously both hexameter. Yes. But like, I love the idea that like actually Homer was just an entire plagiarism from a woman. I think that would be really cool. Yeah. I mean, I have certain, like not,

I mean, maybe plagiarism theories, but I have all these theories about like there was some woman either in or around Euripides, you know, in a similar way. Yeah. But I mean, I don't know. The problem is I just could be like scream about ancient women. And now I'm trying to form them into thoughts.

Or remain not coming. But so when it comes to the Bronze Age, like how, you know, what were you doing to link these, you know, women of Homer with the real women? You mentioned DNA earlier too. So I want to hear about all the ways you were looking at making them real. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Well, that's the thing, because so far, we've just been talking about women of literature and women of myth, right? And in fact, we've been talking about literature because it is the only way we can talk about myth, because myth is just this thing that exists in the ether, it's stories that are told orally, and it's only in something like Homer's epics that they exist for us. That's the only way we can hear about them.

And what I really wanted to do with Mythica, with Penelope's Bones, was to completely switch up the way we talk about these women. And instead of using Homer as the access point, which is what it's always been, it's always been like, well, this is what we've got and it's the greatest epic and it's the beginning of Western literature. So this is what we're gonna do, right? I was like, instead of doing that,

what if we took what was actually happening to women, to their real lived experiences, and we use them to interpret Homer?

So it's very much like what we've been saying about the muse. It's like, instead of the muse being the silent ventriloquist for the poet, what if we actually just listened to what she was saying? This is kind of the analogy, right? Like, so what can we do to dig into real women's actual experiences? And,

the thing that has been so amazing about writing and researching this book is that it has utterly changed the way I read the ancient texts, the way I read the ancient myths. It's like, because we're starting from actual women. We're not talking about stereotypes anymore. We're not talking about murderous wives or like sex crazed whores. You know, we are just talking about like gritty women.

women who are living in the real world, trying to get by and doing the things that women do. And that was just incredibly empowering for me. Yeah. Okay. I want to know everything about that. So the women, because I noticed that you've broken it down by women, you know, from the epics. And obviously it's called Penelope's Bones, which is, you know, I'm just going to try to say that title as much as possible. So Penelope,

Yeah, what were you looking at? How were you breaking it down by these fictional women and connecting it to these real ones? Like, I mean, that might be way too big of a question. No, not at all. Not at all. Because, like, as much as I said, I wanted the history to be the starting point in...

a kind of very obvious way, Homer is also the starting point because like that is kind of what is collecting these different women together. And so basically I kind of split it up into 16 chapters that take pretty much all of the important women of the Homeric epic. So we've got Helen of Troy, Briseis, Cassandra, Penelope, you know, all of these women, Calypso, Circe, the ones we talked about.

But I was thinking about how can we use them to talk about a particular facet or a particular experience or a particular role that women would have played in Bronze Age history. And so there's this recognizability of the names. So that's kind of like the hook. We've got the story. We've got the myth. We know, we think we know what they're about. And then instead we're like, well, actually, I'm going to tell you about how

Calypso was a weaver. And that is not what we tend to think about Calypso as. We tend to think about Calypso as the obstacle that stopped Odysseus from getting home because that's what he tells us. It's also like, incidentally, what he tells Penelope, which, you know, it's quite self-serving. Yeah, exactly. Oh dear, I just had to spend seven years having sex with a beautiful nymph on her island. Oh,

control over it she just kept me prisoner um and and one and wanted me to be her husband it was so difficult and then she wanted to make me a god and I said no and then oh and I was just sitting on the shore crying my eyes out for my wife and yeah so anyway I I was like okay let's put that calypso on the side and let's talk about the the kind of as I say gritty the raw mechanics of

what it would be to be a weaver. Because the first time we see Calypso in the Odyssey, we see her weaving and she's walking backwards and forwards in front of her loom. She's singing, which is always a bad sign in Homeric epic. If a woman is weaving and singing, you know that she's trouble because she kind of has a little bit of agency and she's making her own plots, right? And that's tricky. Amazing.

But for me, I was just like, well, actually, like, let's pay attention to that weaving. Let's talk about what it was like for a woman to weave. What things did she have to do? How much time did it take her? How much time in her day did she spend doing this? And once you kind of go through it and you realize that actually this was taking up a colossal amount of women's lives.

It was taking up probably about eight to 10 hours of their day. And you think about the fact that, and no one has noticed this, which I thought was crazy. Odysseus needs to get off her island. What does he need? He needs a boat and the boat has to have a sail. Well, who made that sail? Definitely wasn't Odysseus because he was busy having sex. Yeah.

But it was Calypso. It was the woman who was doing the weaving. And it's just, I think it's this kind of reorientation that it re-inscribes women's work. It re-inscribes women's narratives. It changes the way we read men's narratives as well. It's just that kind of twisting of everything on an axis that for me, just it like opened up the world anew. Yeah. Well, and weaving is such a

I always wanted to know more about ancient women weaving because it is like the thing we know they did. Mm-hmm.

you know and so often that's a rare thing we don't we don't often know what they got to do in their daily lives but we know about weaving and that's so interesting I didn't even realize that's how Calypso's starts off because of course that's not the thing that is not the thing you focus on exactly because all of the all of the Greek is focused on this vocabulary of restraint and

holding back and keeping and imprisonment and right the energy of the beginning of the Odyssey is 100% like Athena coming to Zeus and saying like you have to let Odysseus go you have to make Calypso let him go so we're thinking about her as this as this jailer

And actually, like if you kind of pay attention to what she's literally what she's doing, it's very, it's, it's telling a very different story. And yeah, I love that. I love that about weaving because it's also the case that I think weaving, you know, I mean, we can just dig into this cause I guess, I guess we just kind of went into this as a, as an example, but weaving is such a good way into thinking about the ways that women have been systematically ignored and

particularly in archaeology, because for so many years, male archaeologists were not interested in women's work. And so the kinds of tools that women would have been using were either kind of chucked out or they were just kind of put on the side and not kind of looked at compared to like the kind of shiny bronze weaponry that men are using. Of course, there's the other thing, which is that

Weaving very rarely leaves any traces because textile degrades and looms are made of wood and distuffs and spindles are made of wood. So it's very convenient that it is invisible. And what I think is really amazing about what's happening now with modern archaeology and modern science is that we can use tools and techniques

to recover weaving in a way that just wasn't possible before. Okay, first of all, we're looking for it now, but also we can do things like we can find the kinds of dyes that women were using on it because we can find residues that are left on ancient pots from dye workshops. So we know what they were using. We can find these...

these tiny little remnants that are basically the only thing that we have that's left of that process, which is a little whirl, a little spindle whirl that goes on the bottom of the spindle. And we can, we start finding those, we start counting them, we start talking about them, but also archaeologists can actually reconstruct them and can make spindles and looms along the pattern of what they were in the ancient world. They can do the spinning and weaving themselves and they can work out how long everything took. So how,

How long exactly did it take to make a sail like Odysseus's? Well, the answer is it would have taken one woman four years. Okay. So really technically speaking, so he was there for seven years. Yeah. And the way, the way you phrased it earlier just made this scream out in my mind of just, you know, okay. Cause he does just one day he's like, I want to leave. And then Athena's like, you must be allowed to leave. And,

But presumably, if it was that easy, he could have done it at any point over those seven years. Yeah, I mean, I guess the narrative he tells is that he doesn't have a ship to get away. And it is Calypso who gives him the tools. So she gives him like an adze and an auger, which he needs to kind of bore holes in the wood. And she gives him the materials he needs to make a ship. So yeah.

Yeah, that's his narrative. Right. Well, and just to connect it to the sale, if it's taking four years, well, then like she could have been working on it that whole time. And he's been telling the story as if he's been imprisoned with no way out. And it's like, meanwhile, she's sitting in the other room being like, I'm working on it, dude. Like you could help. Absolutely. So this is work. So he would never. Yeah.

Exactly. And he and he doesn't mention he just mentioned, you know, Calypso came and she gave me the sale and she gave me some clothes. And it's like she 100 percent she made them. And that's exactly it. So I was like, instead of us talking about a man being imprisoned on a woman's island, this is actually a story of a woman who is being imprisoned by the demands of a man's labor.

Yes. It's completely the other way around. And it's exactly what you're saying. She's like, I'm working on it. I'm working on it. But like four years for one woman. And this is, by the way, Calypso, right? She's in the middle of the ocean. She's not kind of connected to trade. She's not getting kind of deliveries of wool. She's not got a massive stock of sheep like you see at the kind of real historical palaces. So that's,

this is for me, this is a viable way of reading this passage completely differently. And it is the history of women's weaving that kind of suggests that and, and discoveries that are being made now. That's so interesting. Yeah. You, you also reminded me of, I'm, I think this was, would have been in our, the conversation we had with Dr. Kim, Kim Shelton back in my, when we were covering the bronze age last year and about my Cini, because I,

I think she also phrased it that the results of the women's work was invisible. Like you were saying, you know, because these things, it's just the nature of the things they used and how they just quite literally broke down over time and therefore don't exist. And I think, but I think she phrased it in a similar way that also stood out to me in this, I'm

I've never quite considered it that way that, you know, it's just that their work was invisible because the stuff that they did didn't last, but not because it wasn't, you know, equally important to everything that the men were doing. They needed all of that stuff. It just doesn't survive for us today. And then,

On top of that, you know, it's men interpreting most of the other stuff. And so we get this complete loss or this idea that women did nothing or that they didn't leave a mark or that, you know, and meanwhile, of course, the other thing I think this occurred to me in that conversation as well is like.

well, the mark is also the children, but they don't get, they're not left over as women's work or they're not seen as women's work, right? They're the, you know, the sons of their fathers. Well, actually, there is such a good example of this because Kim is like absolutely right, but there is one point

at which women's weaving becomes visible in the Bronze Age. And that is in the Linear B tablets. So these are tablets that were kind of baked hard during the fires that kind of raged across Greece around 1200 BCE and kind of led to the destruction of the Bronze Age.

And when they were discovered, everyone was really excited. They were like, oh my God, another epic poem. It's going to kind of break our literary boundaries and we're going to get something new. What it actually ended up being was these bureaucratic lists, as your listeners from the Bronze Age series will know, of how many oxen we have and how many bricks are we using to build this and really boring stuff. It was basically stuff that was like the equivalent of a pile of paper waiting to go into the office shredder.

and it just accidentally got preserved. But what's amazing about that is that it preserves the people who weren't meant to be preserved. And that's the women and that's the enslaved. And that is, that is to me so beautiful about it because actually like we spend so much time talking about Homer, but like,

Homer got preserved for a reason. Like male, we talked about this. It was intentional. Exactly. We talked about this when we talked about how women became poets that like, you can see, if you look at Homer and you look at Sappho, Sappho wrote nine books of poetry and we have like,

I don't even know how many lines. Well, we only have one complete fragment. Yeah. You know, one complete poem. And then the rest of it is just fragments. Tiny fragments. So, you know, the male tradition exists for a reason. And what's amazing about accidental preservations like this

is that they give us a window into this world. And in one of the palaces in particular in Pylos, which is like the Peloponnese of Greece, and which amazingly in Homer is associated with the King Nestor,

So we get this kind of amazing confluence between myth and reality coming in. And it's one of the reasons why history can be such a great way into the Homeric epics. But we get real lists of real women who are likely enslaved and they are described on the tablets very kind of perfunctorily, just sort of like,

40 women from Halicarnassos and they are good at spinning, seven children, four boys, three girls, and they've been given this many figs and this amount of wheat to eat. So they're being given rations and it's a record of their rations.

Wow. But what's amazing is that it sounds really dry and really boring, but I kind of try and unravel for you in the book how actually how exciting this is, because it tells us what these women were doing, how they were being co-opted into this palace industry of textile making. But it also demonstrates that the women are doing childcare.

because it is only the women who are listed with their children. And this is another aspect of weaving that we haven't touched on yet. But like, why is it women who are doing spinning and weaving? Well, it's because it's something you can do at home. It's something that is not dangerous to children and it is easily interrupted. Now I have a three-year-old and a four-year-old and I

And I know about being interrupted. So, you know, you have to have something that you can put down. You can get up. You can come back. You could do food preparation at the same time. So this is part of that invisible labor that we also don't talk about. This kind of double uncounted labor that women are doing. And these tablets kind of give us that amazing insight into weaving and childcare at the same time. Yeah, absolutely.

Oh, I remember that was the other enormous thing I learned in that the episode I did with Kim was was just what is in the linear B2 because we do have so many more records of like goddesses and they're like really almost take precedence over the men. But of course, we don't have stories from that time. So what would they look like? And

Yeah. Wow. It's just, I absolutely love, love all of that. And now I'm really interested in how you went about Helen. Hey, when was the last time waiting in line made your day better? Exactly. At TeliRx, we're done with all that. Visit TeliRx.com where you can choose from over 250 prescription medications. Let our licensed providers review your order and we'll deliver it right to your door even as soon as the next day. No waiting, no waiting.

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really interested in how you went about Helen's like so what angle does Helen have yes oh my gosh well Helen because you know as I said I'm thinking about each woman as a role and for that's why I want to know them all now yeah exactly exactly exactly well just just look at the table of contents because they're all

Well, that's the thing. And it was just their names. And so now I'm like, well, I know. So basically, for some of them, I wanted to really overturn expectations. So like Calypso as the weaver, that is not how you associate her. And I wanted that to be something that was interesting.

For Helen, on the other hand, I felt that I wanted to actually do the most obvious thing, the thing that everyone talks about. And then I wanted to kind of detonate it. And that was her face. And I, because Helen's face is, is the topic of, you know, so much literature, so much art, so much male desire, fantasy, imagining. And I was like,

What can we do to trace the longings of men that have generated this face? And then what can we do to move all of that to one side and actually say, what would a woman at this time have actually have looked like? Like, let's actually talk about, again, real women today.

Let's not just talk about fantasies, but let's find them. Let's find them. And so what I basically do is I talk about particularly Heinrich Schliemann, who is a crazy, bonkers character of history, dynamited Troy because he wanted to get down to the lair that he thought was actual Trinidad.

actual Troy but it wasn't and in so doing he actually destroyed pretty much all of Homer's Troy so thanks for that Heinrich but in the process he also discovered too low down because he had you know blasted through the whole thing he discovered a treasure trove of jewellery and

amongst which were like kind of this collection of diadems and earrings and stuff. And he immediately was like, this is the jewels of Helen. He dressed his wife up in it and he took a photo of her and it basically went kind of like the 19th century equivalent of viral. Like everyone saw this photo of Schliemann's wife dressed up as Helen. It's like so bizarre, but to me it's such a great example of how

These are the kinds of stories we need to peel back, right? The layers and layers of imagining and fantasy that are there. So how do we resist this? Well, for me, it's particularly about using...

counter narratives, counter archaeological techniques and kind of new advances that we are doing in science and DNA to kind of resist these fantasies. So one of the things that I really love, I found this amazing skeleton from the Bronze Age that was buried in Mycenae.

And Mycenae, of course, you know, legendary home of King Agamemnon, also the site of a Bronze Age palace. So again, one of these really great history and myth confluences. And there was a woman buried in what we call Grave Circle B, and she is buried next to a man.

and it had always been assumed that a woman is buried next to a man oh of course she's his wife right because why would she belong there other than because she is his wife yes women are only defined by the men around them yes thank you thanks Liv for clarifying exactly exactly we are not real people otherwise I mean yeah exactly obviously there is a six-month-old male kitten in my house the only man around and I guess that I'm just his which is probably true

I mean, he definitely believes that. I'm sorry to burst your bubble. He's a Greek man too. I mean, I'm not saying anything about that, but... Oh my God, that's amazing.

But anyway, they basically, a group of scientists did DNA research, DNA analysis of these two 17th, 16th century BCE skeletons. And they discovered that they were in fact brother and sister. And that is really interesting because it demonstrates that actually she is there not because she is married into a family, but because she is there in her own right, because she was born into what was obviously a wealthy family, judging from all of the kind of gold and paraphernalia around them.

But this is where the counter narratives from archaeology come in, because when they were excavated, initially, there was this beautiful gold, sorry, not gold, actually, electrum face mask that was discovered near those bodies. And it was instantly assigned to the man.

But if you look at where it was placed, it actually seems like it was a lot more likely to be the woman's. And so this gives us that first glimpse of like, okay, well, this is a face mask, right? So this is quite a crude representation, but it is a representation of a face. So could we be looking at a real face of a real woman from the age of heroes that Homer was later imagining? But what's great is that actually science can take you one step

further because you can do what facial reconstruction is, what forensic archaeologists now do, which is to build up, basically take the skeleton, model it, build up layers of clay on the face, and you can actually see what that person would have looked like. So they did that. It looks amazing. You are looking back at this real life woman from Mycenae, just like Clytemnestra, right? Clytemnestra was at Mycenae. So it's a real kind of connection.

but I was like well for Mythica for Penelope's Bones let's go one step further let's use AI and let's try and actually turn this face into a kind of real living face and that for me was like this is how far

we can push back against Schliemann's narrative and against Homer's narrative that Helen is a face. We can just say, well, actually, look, here is a real woman. Here is what she would have looked like. She was 34 when she died. We know how tall she was. We know a lot about her from her DNA. And let's kind of put her back in the front instead of this mythologized woman

fantasized erotic woman let's take a woman who is like a real woman of royal mycenae and give her a face instead yeah oh i love that it just makes me think of that that helen painting i don't know what it means it's not from antiquity um but that one where she's like

like a ridiculously pale redhead. Yes. I think you're thinking of either Gabriel Rossetti or Evelyn Morgan. I think it's Rossetti. Yeah. And I just think like, oh, every time I...

I mean, I do want to imagine these women from back then, but then I just think of these like just ridiculously white Western interpretations of them. And I'm so afraid. But the idea of like seeing somebody physically from there whose body was there is just.

so beautiful and like this real reminder. - Yeah, and grounded. It's like really grounded, exactly. 'Cause I think with Helen, one of the problems I always had with her is that she feels like the opposite of grounded because everything about her is fantasy and image and dream. And of course, you're a Euripides stan, so you'll know all about the Eidolon and the ghost Helen, but like that image of Helen as a ghost who didn't actually go to Troy and she was just a phantom,

I think that encapsulates her depiction in myth so well. And so this is why I was like, it has to be archaeology. It has to be like history, real bones, you know, right? Penelope's bones, real women that is going to resist that. Yeah. Yeah. I, I'm slightly distracted by the Schliemann reference you made because I think we...

Do you also know about his wife? Well, I know how he chose her. Is that what you're talking about? Yeah. I feel like the listeners need to know. We do. We do. I mean, you know, it's whichever one of us gets cursed with telling this ridiculously bad story. I only know about it from reading. I'm trying to look around and find it. I forget what it's called exactly, but there's this old novel by Irving Stone. And he, I think it's called like, it's something about, it's called the Greek treasure.

Okay. And I know that he, he like fictionalized it, but worked off the reality. So that's all I know. But yeah, that he went to a Greek Island. I forget which one. Oh, I don't know about the Greek Island. I just know that he went to his tutor. Oh yeah. So he had a Greek, Greek tutor and he asked his Greek tutor. They were this, by the way, who by this point he's already divorced. So he's looking for a second, he's looking for a second wife and he asks for a woman in the Homeric spirit. Okay.

And she has to be able to speak Greek. And he gets shown three pictures, which by the way, I kind of think of as like a perverted judgment of Paris. I don't know. Yeah. Right. But he chooses Sophia who becomes Sophia Schliemann. And yeah, they get married and they basically kind of act out this like weird Homeric fantasy because they, their children get, do you know the names of their children?

Oh, I did. Do you want to guess? Oh, I mean, Agamemnon. Agamemnon. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Andromache. Oh, yeah. All right. Yeah. And so, you know, it's just a choice with Andromache. Yeah. I mean, you've got to know it's not going to end well, right? I mean, Agamemnon too. Maybe they were like fishing around. Like, let's find someone who had a happy ending. No, no, no happy endings in Greek myth.

okay i think the wife was also though like 16 and the whole yeah the greek island i think is coming in and maybe i'm misremembering something too or and i don't know the whole thing but that the tutor i think just was like oh well this is like my little cousin who's been living on this greek island who's like 16 you want her like it was very like that oh my gosh utterly horrifying

Yeah. And then, you know, then you get him like dressing her up. Yes, exactly. Yeah. You also get this weirdness that he is clearly using her as kind of an accessory in this kind of role play, cosplay that he is doing of Homer. Because he when he tells people the story of how he discovered the jewels, he says that Sophia was there.

And he says that she actually helped him to get things out of the trench. And he makes it this kind of romantic husband and wife discovery.

we know that she wasn't even there. She wasn't even in Turkey at the time she was back in Athens. So like, this is, this is also like this kind of weird warping of the truth that he does. Um, and Sophia is very much part of that. So she's very much an analogy, I think for Helen, right? Like we've got the judgment of Paris. We've got the kind of choosing of the wife. We've got the wife who then goes to Troy, but isn't it Troy? There are a lot of similarities. Yeah. Oh, it's so dark. Hmm.

I know it is, it is dark. It is dark. But I think that what's so weird about it is, and I just taught this to my students last, last term and telling this story, it's like, there's this equal part megalomania about it, but also kind of, you have to acknowledge that if Schliemann hadn't done all of this crazy, we wouldn't have the historical site of Troy. Yeah.

So, well, maybe we would have actually, maybe we would because we should also mention, which, you know, is coming way too late in this, but like actually someone else found it first and Schliemann took all the credit. And so Frank Calvert is the guy who had actually identified the site. His brother owned the land and basically Schliemann just did a really dirty job and just, just kind of took all the credit. Yeah. And blew it to shreds. And blew it to shreds in the meantime. Yeah. Yeah. The man loved dynamite.

Yeah. So maybe let's not give him too much credit. Oh gosh, no, that's the thing. The moral of the story is he was garbage. We have some stuff because he did some things with his garbage behavior. Or maybe in spite of his garbage behavior. Yeah.

It's Michaela and I, we saw when she was here, we went to the Royal Ontario Museum, which is Canada's sort of best example of some things from antiquity. And they have a replica of the Mask of Agamemnon. Michaela just looks at it and she's like, that's full of shit or whatever you said. It was just great. But it was very like, yeah, I'm making you say it. Oh, so I, because there's like the theories that the Mask of Agamemnon is a fake.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And my personal one is that it looks way too much like Schliemann. And I think Schliemann just made it himself and was like, look, it's Agamemnon, but it looks weirdly like me. I love that. I've got some papier-mâché, I've got some gold foil and I've got my face. I'm ready.

one of those theories that like especially after we've just discussed how Schliemann handled all of this it's like no I mean that doesn't sound out of the realm of possibility at all it tracks yeah no I like this theory I like it very much

Anyway, yeah, it's not about Schleman, thank fuck. But it's so interesting to think about those aspects because obviously he's like now so tied to those sites. I'm curious, I would love to hear your take on all of the women, but obviously I won't make you go through them all. That's what the book is for. But are there, I mean, maybe Clytemnestra, how did you go about

Clytemnestra story and then if we need to talk about Penelope at least. Yeah, absolutely. So Clytemnestra doesn't come in because although obviously she is mentioned on the sidelines in the Odyssey, I decided she feels more like a tragic character.

And that's so true. She's not really in the Odyssey as soon as I say that. I'm like, she's in the story, but she's not. Yeah. Yeah. She's, I mean, she's recounted. So like Agamemnon is talking about her and you get like comparisons, but like I...

felt that like I wanted to keep to the the genre right and and because Clytemnestra is so huge in in tragedy it was like let's let's put her as a tragic villain and we'll deal with that yeah deal with that well that's why her name came to me and then as soon as you say it I realized no her the poor reference to her is literally that like you're lucky Penelope is great look at my wife she killed me which you know exactly you deserve to dag a memnon yeah

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, then the woman that she's compared to, who is, of course, I mean, the most fascinating character in the Odyssey, Penelope. Obviously, you couldn't go for weaving. So now I'd love to hear Penelope. Right, exactly. So weaving was already taken with Calypso. And obviously, like, that is what Penelope is synonymous with, with the weaving trick and the weaving and unweaving. So for Penelope, I have always been fascinated. And I've actually written

some research on this about how Penelope is or isn't the end game of the Odyssey, because in so many ways, and this kind of goes right back to what we said at the start about this, this Homeric paradox around women. We start with women. We start with the muse and with Helen and with Briseis and Chryseis, and we end with Penelope. Like,

How do you know that your home? It's Penelope. Penelope is in many ways synonymous for Odysseus with Ithaca. And as much as we were kind of poking fun at him and saying, you know, when he is with Calypso and he's, he's saying he's longing to go home, he says he's longing to go back to Ithaca and to Penelope. And for him, those two things are very much tied up to each other. And so,

I'm not necessarily saying that this is kind of like, as it has often been interpreted, a kind of like straight up romance. I don't think it's that. But Penelope is locked in to what it means to be king of Ithaca.

And that's where he wants to get back to. And so when we're thinking about this kind of upending of narratives and we're saying, look, we're not going to talk about the Odyssey as Odysseus' story anymore, but we're going to say that actually we're going to notice the fact that it is Penelope's recognition of Odysseus that is the final...

jigsaw puzzle that is needed, not just for Odysseus to return home, but also for the poem to get towards its closure. To me, that was really interesting. And so that kind of opened the way to start thinking about the search for Ithaca.

Because, you know, we've been talking a lot about Troy. And before the end of the 19th century, before Schliemann and Calvert came upon the historical site of Troy, it was kind of widely accepted and thought that this was just a myth, just a legend, didn't have a basis in historical reality. And actually, a lot of the kind of Oxford and Cambridge dons at the time that Schliemann was excavating were actually quite

frustrated with what he was doing because it was almost kind of tearing down Homer from this grand poetic pedestal. Right. So that's really interesting. But, but with Ithaca, we've got quite a different situation and it's just this really awesome detective story basically. So Homer,

The issue with Ithaca is that in some ways it's kind of hiding in plain sight. And I see a lot of analogies to Penelope here because Penelope is also someone who is there, but not there. She's often like got her veil on. She's often kind of upstairs in her rooms. She's in the palace, but she's not of it sort of.

because there is a modern island called Ithaca. It's in the Ionian Sea. It's to the west of Greece. There's a couple of islands around there. We've got Ithaca, we've got Zakynthos, and we've got Cephalonia.

and right off the coast yeah exactly I really want to go oh my gosh okay so side note here I went to Cappellonia in 2014 and it is stunning are you going to tell me about the the Odyssey theme park that's on not the Odyssey theme park but I've heard of this yeah my friend Kossi went last year and it was

very frustrating because we had just been in Athens together and then she flew off to Keflonia to meet her boyfriend and then she starts sending me these videos and I showed Michaela to you because they're it's unhinged have you seen it? I've seen her photos on Instagram oh great as long as it's all through Kasi anyway it's incredible but yeah I want to go to Keflonia very bad so I'm glad to hear that that's true I mean I would say maybe like don't go for the theme park yeah no no I just need to experience it

Exactly, exactly. But no, it is such, it's such an amazing, amazing island. But I was basically kind of on that trail, on the trail of Odysseus' Ithaca, because the issue that Homerists have had for centuries is that Homer describes four islands and we only have three. And he gives the islands the names of Ithaca, Samae, Dulicium and Zakynthos. So we've got Zakynthos.

We've got Ithaca, but Dulicium and Sarmie, what are we going to do with those? So all kinds of different people have come up with all kinds of different propositions. William Gladstone, the Victorian Prime Minister of Britain, got involved at one point and decided he was going to get in on the game because apparently that's just what you do. Well, the British own the rights to ancient Greece. Don't you know that? Another self-evident fact, Liv. I think they've made it very clear. Yeah.

Oh my god, this is a total tangent, but it reminds me of this amazing Eddie Izzard sketch where he's like, talking about British imperialism and he's like, I've got a flag. Do you all have a flag? And I just like imagine that that's exactly what Gladstone was like, I've got a flag for Ithaca. Um,

Anyway, digression. But basically, in the early 2000s, this British businessman called Robert Bittlestone came up with this idea that actually Homer was right and that the three islands we have were actually initially split up into four.

and that the western peninsula of Cephalonia which is nowadays called Peliki was actually potentially initially cut off from Cephalonia by the sea that there was a channel through there and this is super interesting because again it's just like okay actually we are

able now to what bittlestone did was he teamed up with um a famous geologist um who kind of looked at the the valley that he was proposing and showed that actually there was in fact a massive landslide that all of that that material that was in the valley had landslip down into the valley they can take boreholes down into the ground and they found marine microfossils in there

So like, you know, they've proven that it was under the sea at some point. A different team of scientists have actually dated some tsunamis that were around there and they've given five different dates. And I think two or three of them are post-humeric. So, you know, we've got a lot of good evidence. And Kefalonia is like, if anywhere is going to be a candidate for this, it's going to be Kefalonia because it stands basically at the edge of a massive seismic fault.

And, you know, it's had loads of huge earthquakes. And in fact, this is kind of what I was going to say earlier when I visited in 2014, an earthquake had just happened.

And I actually felt an aftershock of the earthquake while I was there. And, you know, so it was really, it really felt like the island was kind of like, yes, this is, this is a reality. You know, I was walking past beaches and you could see bits of the land that had slipped down from the latest earthquake. You could see massive boulders, like the size of cars. So, so this is, this is not beyond the realm of possibility. And,

What I also love about this though is not just that it's an awesome detective story, but also that like, actually we don't know yet. This is still happening. Yeah. Like there is still a team there that is doing all of this work. They haven't even started looking for doing excavations because they are very sensibly waiting until this sea channel can be like a hundred percent confirmed that the date is right. But,

This is Homeric excavations, Homeric discoveries that are happening right now. I didn't know about any of that. I'm so excited. Oh my goodness. So yeah, that's why I was like, don't go for the theses.

go for this stuff. Well, no, and I wanted to go to Kefalonia because it's beautiful. Well, that too. And because it's close to Ithaca. So, but now, oh my God, now I really need to go. Yeah. So, you know, potentially, potentially it is Ithaca. And what's so exciting about what Bittlestone's theory enables is that Homer gives several different clues about Ithaca. So it's not just the four islands. He also says that it lies low

The word in Greek is which comes from the word, which means earth. So it's, it's lying low to ground level basically. And he says it's furthest to the dusk, which basically means it's furthest to the West of the islands. And the issue is that modern Ithaca is actually furthest to the East, but the peninsula of Cephalonia is the furthest to the West. So if that had been an island, that is the furthest one out. So,

So yeah, it's just, it's just mega cool. And it just, it shows that like this search, like the search for Penelope, the search for Ithaca, these searches are still ongoing and it's, it's like, it's modern discoveries. It's the kind of work that that team is doing and that this book is doing. It's uncovering things now. This isn't an old story. This is a story for now. Yeah. I love that so much. Yeah. It's so cool.

Yeah, I mean, it was already on my like big list of just places I need to see in Greece. But now it's on my like, okay, no, now because of the Odyssey, which I do love far too much. Yeah, exactly. Oh, there's never, there's never too much. I'm wearing Iliad earrings. I have noticed them. I love it. Plato's fire. Plato's fire. Absolutely. Shout out. But like, there is no, there is no such thing as too much. I mean, my husband gave these to me for Christmas. And when I say gave them to me, I bought them and told him that he was giving them to me as my Christmas presents.

That's accurate. That's the correct way to do it. Yeah. This is what proper, like, Homeric appreciation amounts to. Well, see, I say it's too much because... I didn't used to think I loved The Odyssey too much, but I do now because of the Christopher Nolan movie announcement. Oh, absolutely. I mean, yeah, this is big news. Yeah. Well, and I...

I feel like I'm the only one so far, or one of the few, who think that it is utterly terrible news. Because the idea of Matt Damon playing Odysseus makes me want to gouge my eyes out with Odysseus' own sword. And that's all I'll say.

I just now I think I like the Odyssey too much because he's ruining it for me. And if I didn't love it so much, he wouldn't have this control over me. So you know that before you gouge out your eyes, you do have the option of just not watching it. Yes, I do. But the problem is I've spent the last eight years calling Odysseus my main man on a podcast that millions of people have listened to. And so I do still have to spend the next year and a half with everyone reminding me over and over again that Matt Damon's playing Odysseus.

If it wasn't my life, I could at least ignore it. I'm being intentionally dramatic, but also... Fair dues. I just think there was so much potential. Yeah, no. We'll see how it goes. We can keep our fingers crossed, right? And also, by the way, let's just say it's not all about Odysseus.

So maybe we could just ignore Odysseus and that would be also good. The rest of the casting makes much sense either. Well, no, this is where I was also going, but like, you know. What I'm saying is we don't have to love Odysseus. No, no. And he's my problematic fave. It's fine. I love him because I love the Odyssey, not because I think he's a great guy.

Yeah. And actually, complex heroes and complex heroines, that's what we're here for, right? Well, exactly. We don't want a kind of straight up goody-goody, like no one's going to keep coming back for thousands of years for that. No, no, exactly. Exactly. Just sing of a complicated man. Absolutely. Complications is what we like, but also not. But also the women. Yeah, please, please, please, please.

Yeah. So speaking of, what I would love to know about any of the others that you can share without us, you know, going into the night. Oh my gosh. Which is already night time for you. But what are your favorite beyond any of the ladies we've spoken about already? Gosh, a favorite. Yeah. A favorite is such a hard word. It's such a hard word. Yeah. Or one that has it you want to talk about or all of them.

Yeah, all of them. I mean, like, that's the thing is like you said stay up all night, but like, I mean, I would do that. Like, that's, that's, that's no challenge. Even as I said it, I'm like, I know the three of us would be fine. Yeah. So let's start on chapter two. And then, you know, midnight, we'll move to chapter three, but no. Okay.

The one that really personally resonates, and I don't know if for other readers this is going to resonate as much, but I, as I mentioned, I have young children and I wrote this kind of shortly after giving birth. And I, for one of the chapters on Thetis, Achilles' mother, I focus on motherhood.

And wow. I mean, for me, this is the most powerful chapter. It's actually interesting because I've had a couple of people read it and people have also said this is the one that really kind of kicks at them. And I think...

The reason, I mean, there were two reasons. One reason is, is Homer and what Thetis does in Homer. And we could talk about that. But I think we should first talk about the real women because like, that's where this whole book and this whole project kind of takes its lead. Like, let's not start just with Homer's narratives, but with real women.

And what I discovered through looking at, again, all of these kind of amazing work that has been done on the archaeology of women and DNA studies is that the

outcomes for women and infants in the late Bronze Age world was just utterly terrifying. I actually can't use another word than that. I still kind of get goosebumps when I read this chapter or when I think about it. Basically, you can look at some of the statistics. I mean, the kind of basic thing of it is that you get all over the late Bronze Age world

In Greece and outside Greece as well, you get what are called intramural burials. And that comes from the Latin phrase intramuros, which means within the walls. So normally you would have bodies buried in cemeteries outside the city. That's kind of typical burial practice. But you see these intramural burials, particularly for children.

And what happens is that the parents are burying their children literally under the floors of their homes because they don't want to say goodbye. And it is this extraordinary testimony to the fact that I think it is so easy to think or to say that in the past, because women lost a lot of children, it didn't hurt as much. And I think that this is just ridiculous. And it shows that this was...

I kind of call it in the book, like, like almost a literal scar because, you know, these are, these are little pockmarks across the Greek landscape of infant burials. And we cannot ignore the grief that they, that they represent. So you get like,

like burials, like cemeteries where you get like, I can't remember the exact statistics, but it's like, I think 40% of the burials are children under the age of one or something like that in, in one of, in one of them. So what you can do is you can basically look at both the children and at the skeletons of the mothers, and you can see how,

the mothers are really struggling. Their bodies are really struggling. So the, the average age that they are giving birth is 19, which is under the optimal childbearing age of 20 to 25. You can see that they are malnourished. And what's really interesting is this goes back to the Lydia B tablets. They,

You get evidence in the Linear B tablets that women are getting less food than men and they're not getting access to meat in the way that men are. Fuck off. Sorry. That's my only, like I totally live, but wait for it. Wait for it. Because it's just, it's just wait for how this happens. Because what happens is if you're malnourished in youth, then your birth canal doesn't develop appropriately.

So your pelvis basically flattens. And there's something called pelvic ratio index, which measures how open your birth canal is. And at this cemetery where I said, like so many of the infants had died young, the mothers had a pelvic ratio index that was massively lowered compared to nowadays. So what's happening is you are malnourished. You're getting pregnant young.

you are probably dealing with disease. We can see that in teeth, right? We can see evidence of disease. You're struggling through your pregnancy. You're then trying to give birth through a birth canal that because you've been malnourished isn't ready for it. And then if the baby does survive, you are likely or most likely the baby's not going to survive. You are likely then because you're not breastfeeding to get pregnant again, right?

because you don't have the contraceptive protection of breastfeeding and you will just go through this cycle of malnourishment, bad pregnancy, bad birth, potential infant death and it goes and it goes and it goes and it goes and this is what that cemetery of all of those infants is showing that it's not normal to have that many. And this is incredibly tough stuff

But I think it must have been at the top of women's minds. And we know it was at the top of women's minds because, because there are sanctuaries where they are trying to appease and make offerings to goddesses of birth. There is the cave of the birth goddess, Aela Thwia, who was the goddess of birth pains. Her cave is actually physically in Crete. I've been to it. It's

Amazing. You can visit it. And what's awesome about this is that it was actually so famous. It is mentioned in the Odyssey because when Odysseus makes up one of his lies, many, many lies, he's always from Crete. Yeah, he's always from Crete. But he mentions this cave in Crete.

And this birth goddess, you know, there are offerings that have been given to her. So women are clearly desperate. And, you know, like having told you that, like, why wouldn't they be? But then this is kind of the injection that this gives me, because then let's use that. Let's take the fact that women are losing so many of their children, that infant mortality is the reality of many mothers lives.

Well, look at Thetis. What does Thetis do? She wants her son not to die, right? And she is an immortal goddess. She shouldn't be having a mortal son. And we can talk about that, right? Like she shouldn't have had an immortal son. It's because she got raped.

And she got raped because Zeus didn't want to risk somebody being more powerful than him. More powerful than him. Exactly right. So it's male anxiety that leads to female rape that leads to her knowing that she has given birth to a boy who's going to die. And that wasn't in the cards for her. And I think to me that like it...

utterly changes the narrative of the Iliad because then it's not actually about Achilles' anger at all because when Achilles is angry who does he call out to first it's Thetis and she comes up and she says constantly like

Why did I give birth to you? Why are you going to be so short of life? You know, your end is coming soon. She even makes up this amazing word for herself, which is what's called a hapax legomenon, which is a word that classicists use because they like to confuse other people, which means once spoken. And it means something that is only ever used once in the whole of Greek literature. This is the only time this word appears.

So it's almost like Thetis invents this word and she calls herself Dus Aristotokea. So it is the worst and the best child birther. Oh. Anna.

oh, like, does that not resonate with exactly what it is to be a mother? That both that kind of that utter joy, like it is the best thing in her life, but it is also the thing that is giving her this pain. And if you reread the Iliad, then actually all of this is about Thetis because Achilles says, I need to have my glory. I need the Greeks to suffer. And it's Thetis who goes to Zeus and it's her who was the one who tells Zeus what to do. In fact, later on in the epic,

someone, I think it's Athena, is kind of talking about the fact that Zeus is actually doing all of this because of Thetis. And she calls it the plans of Thetis.

So this isn't even Zeus's plan anymore. This is Thetis's plan. And it's Thetis at the end of the Iliad who, when Achilles goes back and he's finally, you know, he has killed Hector, his death is going to happen. And it's her who comes and says, you are going to die soon. She's already wearing black. She's already mourning him. And she says, you're going to die soon.

It's happening. And like, to me, that's like, okay, this isn't the glory of a warrior. This is the devastating grief of a mother. It's a completely different story. Thedas is all... Every time I hear more about her, I want to learn more about her. And there is...

So much I think that has been kind of ignored until very recently. I know there's been a recent book. But yeah, she's another, it's such, I mean, as you've been saying this whole time, like there really are these women in these works that

um, mean so much more than I think we've been led to believe for a long time. But Theta seems to be the one that stands out in the Iliad so much because it really, you feel her feelings and you really understand kind of everything that's going on with her. And I love that, you know, when, when she does, and hopefully I'm not misremembering something, it's been a minute since I've read the Iliad, but when she does go, you know, and, and

beg for Zeus's help for Achilles she we get that reminder that the reason she's allowed to do this is also because she like saved him from a coup which is you know the whole level other level of fascinating just an extra layer yeah and that being the only reference we have really to it it's like there's just so much going on with her absolutely no completely and it's it's a coup by the

the giants and the hundred handers, right? So like it is throwing us back to these original kind of cosmogonic battles that Zeus had to win in order to be the supreme patriarch of Olympus. And it's Thetis, not only who rescued him from that, but who by not having his or Poseidon's son, which as you mentioned, there was that prophecy that the son would overthrow him. She's also keeping the cosmogonic patriarchal order, right?

So it's really interesting that it is then her using that kind of leverage to say, well, you do something then for my son. I just I feel like it's it's it's to me exactly what a mother would do. Right. She has she has suffered and suffered. She's incredibly powerful. But what is she going to use that credit for? She's going to use it because her son is hurting.

and she wants to make that go away and I just to me that's that is so powerful and then then kind of knock that in with the tales of these these real mothers from the late bronze age and you're like yeah this is the story we should be telling yeah yeah I mean I don't know if that's too bleak because like obviously it is very bleak it is very bleak but like we need we need that it's and that's like it takes me right back to the beginning like gritty and raw and real but like

But powerful too. And to me, like just as powerful a story as the story of basically a warrior who's gone off in a sulk. Let's be real. Yeah. I would argue it's a bit more interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, and, you know, looking at your list or I was looking at the, not your list, the table of contents again. And I, I,

I have to now ask about the name who follows Therese, which is Pampasilea. Oh, yes. And I want to know how you worked with that because she's not really in the Iliad, but she's amazing. And I want to hear everything and also the real women behind that because...

Because Penthesilea is an Amazon. Please tell me, Amrys. Oh my goodness. With pleasure, Liv. With pleasure. So Penthesilea is awesome. So you're absolutely right that she is not technically in the Iliad or in the Homeric epics. So the Amazons are mentioned everywhere.

So they are mentioned briefly as like the fact that they once fought with or against Priam. We're not entirely sure. And they are described with an adjective, which in Greek is anti-aneirai. And you might hear in there, aneirai, that's the same word as andra, which in its nominative is ane, man. So they are against men.

but they also equivalent to men. Right. I love this about language. I mean, I could kind of go on and on about this, but like, it is so cool that you've got a word that can mean both women who fight against men, but also women who are the equivalent to as good as men. Right. That's really cool. Um, but the reason why Penthesilea is there is because, um,

You know, we've been talking about the Iliad and the Odyssey as kind of fixed texts. We've been talking about Homer as if he is a single poet, but... Yeah, usually I don't do that. So thank you for getting me to do it. Oh, yeah, what a slip. I mean, we've only been talking for like, what, two hours and we've got to it? Yeah.

I certainly hope my listeners are used to it by now. I remind them all the damn time that Homer probably wasn't one guy. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. But yeah, so, you know, there is obviously this tradition, um, which has kind of come out of, of a lot of research around the kind of oral origins of the, of the poems and the fact that they were passed down over the centuries that they kind of gradually evolved into what we now have as a fixed text.

But that text is not as stable as it looks. And actually, it really pays to resist that stability. So it's difficult because like, it's quite a difficult thing to do to have a text, you know, we pick up a book, we got to start, we got an end, you know, we know what we're dealing with. But actually, there

There are loads of different lines that scholars in the Hellenistic period decided didn't belong. And so they just took them out, whole chunks, whole passages. Someone has decided when you're reading a translation of the Iliad or the Odyssey, someone has decided this is the right text.

you know, on what grounds, on what basis. So what's so interesting about this is that the end of the Iliad is always given as, and then they buried horse taming Hector. Yeah.

That is the last line. But there is one manuscript of the Iliad that actually gives another line. I'm so excited. I know. I know. And it says, and then came the daughter of Ares, Penthesilea. And what happens, the idea is that in the ancient world,

the Iliad and the Odyssey were not the only epics that were out there. There was this whole cycle of epics around the Trojan War, which we now call the epic cycle. But I kind of described them as like a box set, basically, of kind of poems. So basically, like your kind of Marvel Universe, you've got Thor and you've got Captain America and like, you know, you've got your different kind of installments. And this is exactly the same. And what happens after the Iliad is

which is the story of Achilles and Hector, is that we get a new set of heroes coming in. And those heroes are the heroes of a different epic called the Ethiopis. And the heroes are Penthesilea and Amazon and, excuse me, and Memnon, an Ethiopian. And so Penthesilea is riding in. Literally Hector is being burned on his pyre. The smoke is going up to heaven.

And in comes an Amazon and she is basically his replacement. She is going to kind of take the place of the Prince of Troy, the leader of the Trojans. And to me, that was so interesting. It was like, we, again, it's this whole narrative. The Iliad is only about men, only men fight, but that's not true in this medieval manuscript.

it actually says that there was an Amazon who came in and actually she was the one who rescued the Trojans from the point that they were at at the end of the Iliad. So it's just so interesting. And that becomes the whole starting point for thinking about who the Amazons were. Because, you know, in the history of Greece, and I'm sure you have talked about this, a shed load, the Amazons are kind of this...

antithesis to everything that is Greek and male and organized and civilized and they are barbarian and wild and female. Amazing. Amazing, basically. Exactly. Exactly. And actually like to talk about a bit of etymology. I don't know if you know this and stop me if you do, but do you know the etymology of Amazon? Like why they came to be called Amazons? I don't think so. And I want to. Okay. So this is awesome. So this is a classic kind of male Greek misappropriation. So it's,

We've got evidence from the Nart Sagas, which are basically sagas from the Caucasus, which are kind of oral traditional tales. And that area around the Black Sea is where the Greeks always said that the Amazons came from. And we've got evidence from these sagas that there was a queen in these traditional tales called Amazan.

Oh my God. And it sounds like the Greeks heard that word and they thought, well, that sounds a little bit like in Greek, a masdon. And masdon in Greek means breast. And a, you can see, you can see where I'm getting. Yeah. And a means without. Ah, yeah.

So then they were like, well, these are clearly the women who cut off one breast in order to fire an arrow, which by the way, like you can absolutely do with two breasts. I have done archery and I have managed it with two breasts on. Like even if it was an issue, you can tape them down. Like it's not like

them off it's unhinged exactly but it's so interesting right that they were like okay let's take this this sounds like something that we are familiar with and they generated this whole myth around these kind of um wild um horse riding fighting women who also cut off one breast and

What's super interesting, though, is that for a long time, they were talked about in this kind of mythologizing axis, right? That it was like men civilized Greek on the left, and then, well, probably they'd be on the right, because that's where the good things go. And then on the left, we would get the Amazons, the kind of wild uncivilized women.

And they were only sort of considered as like a sort of philosophical schema. But, and this is again, one of these amazing resistances of archaeology around the Black Sea, which I mentioned is where the Greeks thought that the historical, where they said that the Amazons were, they had been finding these warrior burials for years. And they're called Kurgans and they're,

you know, warriors buried off with their horses, with their armor, with their weapons, fine. We know how to deal with this. We're archaeologists. These are men."

Always. Always. If it's buried with a sword, it's a man, right? It's obviously physically impossible for that to be any other way. Exactly. Oh my gosh. Well, okay. I'm going to come back to this because I have another good one about this, but I'll finish with the Amazons first. So they recently did DNA analysis on these and it turns out that up to 34% of these warrior burials are women.

- Yeah, yeah, exactly. - It's not. - Yeah, I know, shocking, shocking. - It's almost like they're half the population. - Exactly, exactly. But also what is so cool about it is it's one of these moments where we can say, okay, myth has distorted, myth has stereotyped and it's created misogyny, but it has also preserved some element of historicity.

What we now need to do is say, well, actually, like, how can we be this woman without the kind of layers of misogyny and stereotyping that the Amazons have built up? How can we actually look at these as warrior women who are actually fighting alongside men? So it's not just women. They're not like...

not having sex. They're not like casting out their children. Well, that's the thing. They had to make them, they had to make them unappealing women. They had to make them so different from Greek women because otherwise Greek women would be like, they would all have left. Why can't we do things that we want to do? Like, yeah, they had to make them this like terrible other ring. Exactly.

killing all the men or like the lesbian or the lemnian women like they're very smelly or like there's something you know exactly right exactly

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offering a $25 per month unlimited plan that's guaranteed to never go up in price. They have blazing fast 5G and plans for all the latest devices. Visit your nearest Boost Mobile store and find us online at boostmobile.com. But that's, again, it's what history can do because when we're looking at that real archaeology, we put the real women in it. And what's so cool is that typically women

It would be easy to argue, and it has been argued, I'm afraid, that like a man buried with a sword, okay, he's a warrior, it's his weapon. A woman buried with a sword, well, don't worry, it's just ceremonial.

Naturally. Right, naturally. But why would she need a ceremonial sword? But what's cool is with some of these burials, many of them actually, you can find evidence that these were women who died in combat because they've got like arrowheads buried in their skull. So there's just no way for them to... You can't get around that. It's like maybe they just tripped and fell into the arrow. Dino. They were all

pulling a dino like dino isn't that isn't that amazing so but then there's just one other which is the one i wanted to say about the sword because this is such a good one so again back in my sceney now um and this is actually the woman that we were talking about earlier who i used as kind of the ai facial reconstruction for like a woman who might have been a prototype of helen

Well, she was also buried with a kind of kit of weapons. And again, as often happens, they were initially assigned in the burial to the man.

But when the archaeologist who was in charge of the excavation realized that actually they belonged to the woman, the skeleton was sexed and, you know, it was a woman. So, OK, these belong to the woman. He changed his excavation report and he changed the word for sword to macharidion, which in Greek is basically like a penknife. Yeah.

So it gets re-inscribed as what is appropriate for a woman to have. And it's like this tiny little diminutive dagger as opposed to the sword that she actually had.

I hate that I'm not surprised at all. You know? I know. This job, this job jades you. Yeah, it sounds like what happened. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. It's like, you know, every time they, the running joke now online, thankfully it's been made into a joke, but like every time they find, you know, two men in a burial together, they're like, oh, they're a great,

Pals, roommates even, or like two women or whatever. You're just like, you could just go ahead and accept that maybe things aren't what you want them to be. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Oh, wow. But that's why this kind of work is so necessary because, you know, you think that these are facts. You think that the things that you're looking at are kind of handed down from the past, right?

served up on a plate and that's how it is. But actually when you start looking into it, you kind of open Pandora's jar and it's like, actually everything is different from how you thought it was. And that to me was one of the things that was amazing. It's like, you know, everything, it overturns the Homeric epics. You read them completely differently. You're overturning assumptions about archeology. You're, you're just, you're basically tilting the lens and you're looking at it from a completely different point of view. And that's,

I don't know. It changes history for me. Yeah. Yeah. And it just, I mean, I feel like that about so many things when it comes to women, particularly in the ancient world that I've learned over the years, because I think that every, I mean, fairly often now I will read something new and think like, oh, that changes how I see all of this. Like in writing my Medusa book, I got to this point where I was like, oh, like Medusa. And also actually most of the monsters in Greek myth really,

really seem to just represent like male fear of women who could say no to them or didn't want to fuck them. Like,

ultimately that's what every monster seems to be is like and it's so funny because I don't know if you have this but I have a sort of resistance in that I'm like it has to be more complicated than yes because like they cannot be so simple as men just not being able to have sex with a woman they want to yeah yeah and then making her into a monster but it's like yeah yeah no I think that's what it is yeah yeah yeah and I did with Medusa too it's so much darker because then they like utilize her head as like as a shield and it's like yeah

you know, it's just, yeah, it's, it makes it so much more interesting. It's horrifying. And also I love learning about it and we'll never stop. So, you know, I'm not complaining, but, but that's the great thing is that it's,

because you're taking this new lens, you're able to do the kind of magic of taking stories that have had a cultural currency for millennia that means something to so many people. And then you can invest them with a completely new meaning. And that's that is to me kind of magical. It's like you're it's almost a kind of alchemy. Yeah, yeah. Well, and I love that I get to

tell people all of this stuff. Yeah. Like change my mind and learn and grow even on the show. And yeah, the way you were speaking earlier about translations and, you know, the finality of what we think of as the Iliad as compared to the fact that there are, you know, so many different things that could be

reconsidered at a moment's notice. But, you know, people often if they're just coming to to the to the epics or Greek myth are just picking up whatever translation they find or whatever one is, you know, publicized lately. And often people who don't live in this world, like don't really understand just how much a translation can change a text. And I understand that. But like, really, I mean, I think it's so important to remind people and really teach that like

you could have completely different texts of the same thing just depending on who's translating it and you know it it's yeah I think it makes it so much more interesting but also it's just so much more valuable in terms of just understanding the ancient world I

I mean, this is why we do what we do. And this is why it's still relevant to be learning these languages because these are not static texts. It's not like we get one translation and we're like, well, that's the translation. We're done now. They are always open to new ideas.

understandings and new reinterpretations. I'll just give you one example, which I just really love because I've been thinking about it for Mythica and I talk about it in the book, which is at the beginning of the Odyssey, right? Where Athena comes down from Olympus and she comes to Ithaca and she changes into the guise of Mentes. And so she moves from being a female goddess to being a man.

What does Greek do with that? Because Greek is grammatically gendered. And like anyone who's listened to our discussion in How Women Became Poets knows that I'm obsessed with grammatical gender. But it's so interesting because when you have a grammatically gendered language, it is having to grapple with concepts around gender and it is having to make those salient in language. So,

is Athena then going to be grammatically female or is she going to be grammatically male? Has she changed? And what's really interesting is that Homer at the point where she has just changed into a man, Homer has Telemachus coming up to greet her at the front gates of the palace. And he, and we are told in the narrator's voice, he addressed min. That's the Greek word. And that is a gender neutral pronoun that,

in ancient Greek. So the gendered pronoun, I know, I know. It's cool, isn't it? Right. Yeah. So yeah, but like the gendered one would have been out on and, and that would have, that would have fit. So, but he says men, he says them. So it's, it's like he's signaling that,

that there has been a gender change here. And I just find that fascinating. And it's like, some translators will bring that in, some won't. But that is a choice of translation as to whether you use a gender neutral pronoun there. And it makes a huge difference. Like some of the older translations, you know, they'll have

Telemachus kind of addressing him with like, sir, or something like that, which is like overly masculinizing Athena in a way that like also isn't there. So it's just like, it makes a huge difference in terms of how we think about translation. You might not notice, but it is telling you about gender. And it's one of the reasons why Emily Wilson's translations were so important because gender is not incidental to the texts. And Emily was, was paying attention to that for the first time.

Yeah. Well, I think about that with, I mean, so many things, but I had a conversation. Oh God, I'm terrible apparently with names now, but I had a conversation with someone back earlier last year about the characters in Ovid's Metamorphoses that can be read as transgender. And I was really fascinated specifically to

to talk about the the translation and the or rather the you know the how the latin handles it which is of course another very gendered language and and the ways that even ovid played with what it meant to transform genders you know and i just think yeah it's it's so interesting particularly particularly when you're where you're looking at i mean athena of all things because athena is like

Athena is such a man's goddess. Yeah, absolutely. And then even she has to transform into a man in order to speak to a human. And I think that's so interesting. Absolutely. And to have some form of power and entry into the palace. Yeah. Even though she's Athena, like the most on the man side goddess. Yeah. Yeah. It's super, super interesting. And,

Yeah. You called her shapeshifter in the table of content. So I was curious. So I'm glad you very much explained that there. Such a shapeshifter. That whole chapter is actually about gender fluidity. Yes. Oh my God. Amazing. So it's about like how someone like Athena can give us a way into looking at gender fluidity beyond the binary in the late Bronze Age and just how ridiculously much evidence there is for it. Like as you're saying, like, oh, shock, shocking. Yeah. Like...

There is so much evidence. Yeah. And even in the ancient world, they understood that there was an in-between, that humanity possesses the ability to be more than just two sexes or whatever. It's so... Yeah. Oh, it's so interesting. Yeah. No, it's so great. And again, it's so fun because you can do that. So one of the things, again, because I'm kind of taking that archaeological lens, one of the things you can do is to look at the ways...

Because obviously when we're looking at a burial, and we've kind of touched on this already, like archaeologists are making very binary calls on it. And in some sense, those are sexing from DNA.

And in others, it's associations of gendered objects, right? So this person is buried with a mirror and therefore they're a woman. This person is buried with a sword and therefore they're a man, right? So like we've got- But a penknife. Oh, no, sorry. It's a penknife. So it's a woman. Yeah, let's move that back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, exactly. The blade is the same length either way. Don't get into details, but- Size matters. Yeah.

But like, it's a really great way of saying that actually that binary that is used operationally might be something that we want to actually challenge. And actually, why don't we look at the artifacts that are being used and think about how those are articulating and performing gender in fluid ways, as opposed to just like, this is a sword, therefore this is a man, right? Like, actually, what is this saying? What is this doing?

Yeah. And I think that could be super interesting when you combined with someone like Athena, who was who was doing exactly the same thing. Right. When she turns into a man, she takes a spear because that's what men do. Yeah. You know, yeah.

Which is literally all she's known for. Like, yeah, it's, yeah, no, I, well, it is so interesting to think about the object as something that is being used by a human, you know, that isn't itself gendered. Objects have no gender. And so why are we to assume someone's gender based on, yeah, what they had and rather instead of what,

what purpose it served or what they did with that thing, you know? Exactly. Exactly. And what kind of associations it carried, um,

and how that can be played with because it's just because there is an association doesn't mean it also can't be pushed back against and that could also be really fun and interesting yeah yeah I mean it's just so funny to me hearing certain things of how I mean I want to say how things used to be done but I know that in a lot of cases they're still being done this way but just the way we make these assumptions that if you just step back and

ask a question, they fall apart completely. Like why would we a hundred percent assume that if there's a sword, it's a man, like give me one piece of logical reasoning that it's,

means that that is 100 certain like nothing exists there is no there is no explanation to that so like did no one ever just step back and be like why though yeah women can physically carry a sword women can physically wield a sword gender does not define what you physically can do with your hands like yeah exactly but i think it's because um

Archaeology has a vested interest in operating in certainties. It is trying to construct a narrative of a reality that happened. And on the other hand, we've got myth that is, operates in uncertainty and flexibility. And I think for me, that was one of the things that was so exciting about bringing them together because you almost get a kind of electric shock when

When the two meet each other and when you make these two, this uncertain thing and this certain thing meet each other and you're like, well, actually, we're going to force you to ask the difficult questions, like you're saying, in a way that actually this might be uncomfortable, it might be uncertain, but actually it's going to get at something really deep.

Yeah. And I think that can be that can be powerful. Yeah. And isn't it more interesting if it's uncertain, but more accurate? Yeah. You know, like, I think that's more interesting. I think it's more interesting to consider like a person wielding something if it is not necessary to gender them, which in most cases, it's not, you know, and like a human is a human going to do this human thing like

Yeah, exactly. Well, it's just challenging assumptions, isn't it? And I think that's what it is about being someone who is curious about what it is to be a human on the planet. And that basically is what you are. If you like history, you're learning what it is to be a human and be part of this kind of crazy adventure because that's just what it is. It's just a series of crazy adventures that other people have had.

Yeah. I don't want to learn about this forever. I don't want to learn about it. Exactly. But like, if you're, if you're interested in that, then actually the question is more interesting than the answer actually saying, wait a second, this challenges what we always thought we knew. That's exciting. It doesn't bruise your ego. It makes you go, yes, fantastic. Like, tell me more, tell me more. Like the, the, the example that I talk about in the Athena chapter is this burial of this male warrior from, um,

like the 15th century BCE, um, near Pilos in Greece. And he was buried. I'll use he cause he's sexed male, but I think that he's doing something really interesting with gender performance, um, um, in his burial, but, but he's buried with a lot alongside other things, a lot of other things, combs, um,

And the, um, when this kind of hit the press, cause it was discovered in 2014. So relatively recently. And when it hit the press, um,

kind of journalistic response to this was like he was like very into his looks. One of the journalists said he was a dandy. Oh my God. In 2014 we're using the word dandy. I know. I know. I mean I feel like that should be struck from the dictionary. But like but the assumptions that are being made even now about

Like a man not being able to own a comb without being called a dandy. Like to me, it's just like, we're not just talking about ancient gender assumptions. We're talking, if anything, we're talking more about modern gender assumptions. That is damaging to modern male society.

like structure. I mean that things like that are why masculinity has become so toxic in so many ways is because this idea that if there's a comb, you're a dandy, you care too much about your looks instead of you just care for your human body. Like,

Exactly, exactly. And it's like, this is basically the flip side of the penknife, right? This is the man who can't have a comb. So like, we're also, and I think that's just important to say, that's why I said being a human on a planet, we're talking about humanity. We're like, we're not just talking about women, we're talking about everything.

everything because this brings men into its fear and people of all genders. This is about how we express who we are and like, yeah. Challenging those assumptions that people like tend to make. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it is, it is,

It affects everyone today. Yeah. I mean, if we're going... If men as a concept are going to become less toxic... And I'm generalizing, but just of the notion of what... The type of masculinity that is toxic, which is such an issue. All of that is stemming from the things they have been told they're not allowed to do because of masculinity. And it's damaging to them in equal parts or certainly a hell of a lot. And it's just...

It's so fascinating to me that we don't, that we're not at a place to further break those things down. I mean, we're getting, getting a little closer, but it's, yeah, it's just so weird and interesting and bizarre. But it happens at the same time because they, I know, I know, but it happens at the same time because they reflect on each other. So like my hope is that actually it's going to be this kind of work that

that will allow us to start doing that for masculinity as well as femininity. And I do think that, I think that they, the younger generations are already doing a better job, you know, I mean, femininity too, because I mean, as somebody who was a teenager in the early two thousands, like it was a dark time for everyone, you know, we're getting marginally better, I think in some ways, but it's, yeah, it's interesting. Interesting.

Can we finish with Cersei? Because I can't not talk about the witch. Yes, let's talk about Cersei. I'm so glad you talked about Cersei because you mentioned Kim Shelton earlier and she is actually a character in this chapter. Oh my God, I love this. She gave us a tour of Mycenae, can I just say? Oh, you're so lucky. My group tour, the first ever podcast listener group tour. And just because Kim just offered on our call and I was like, are you serious?

Seriously? Yeah. So we, I mean, I should say the museum, but it was pretty cool. Anyway, she's lovely. Amazing. Yeah, no, she's so great. And I talked to her like right at the very beginning of this book. Because, you know, she's, for those who don't know, she's currently directing excavations at Petsa's house in Mycenae, which is a kind of domestic community.

pottery workshop kind of situation an amazing amazing site but the reason I have her in this chapter and I basically this is something I kind of I guess I haven't mentioned yet but I start every chapter with a discovery and one of the main agendas I have is to try and put women archaeologists

alongside the men because you know obviously I said you know Troy okay I start with Schliemann well unfortunately like for

hundreds of years. Well, I mean, archaeology as a discipline isn't that old, but like it just has been the province of men. And yet there are so many amazing women who have done things that just really don't go recognized. So we're not just kind of uncovering the women of myth and the women of Homer, but we're also uncovering like contemporary women, scientists and archaeologists and stuff. So I was like, well, you know, let's, let's focus on, on Kim's work because she has done some really interesting stuff with, um,

And, you know, this sounds really random, but bear with me. Pigs. Nothing is random to me. No. Okay. Pigs. Yes. So did you ever think that you were going to be getting into pig fodder on your podcast? Well... I mean, we're talking about Circe. I know. Exactly. Brace yourself. Exactly. Well, this is the thing, because I was like...

Again, we always talk about Cersei as the witch. We, meaning the Western tradition, men. But like, you know, it's like she's the prototypical witch. She's the enchantress. She, again, kind of keeps Odysseus hostage for a year of sex and like, you know, is evil. I don't know about hostage with that one.

one. He's pretty keen to be there. He's pretty keen. He's pretty keen. But again, in his version, it's like, oh, she kept me and she wanted to be my wife again. Yeah. I just, I had to say no to her. Exactly. Exactly. So yes, no, absolutely right. He trots off pretty willingly. But like she doesn't fare well in that tradition. And

if you kind of burrow into it and you actually ask the question that tends not to be asked, which is why does she turn men into pigs? It actually gives you a really... You almost said something really rude. I'm going to keep... I'm just saying because they are. Sorry.

Well, I mean, that's, that's one. No, but that's one, that's one answer. And it's an answer that the ancient philosophers gave, um, that it was like allegorical and that it was like representative of men's gluttony and this kind of thing. Right. Like, um,

But I kind of wanted to be like, well, let's actually not make it about the men. Let's make it about her. Let's make it like a choice that she is making and then ask it from that perspective. So what's super interesting about what Kim has done is that she has found, along with her team, a well in this house that she's excavating in Mycenae. And it is full of animal bones.

So it was basically sealed off around 1320 BCE. And it's kind of a great depository of bones. And they've analyzed them. And loads and loads of the bones belonged to pigs.

And what's interesting about it is that you can basically tell that these pigs were being reared in the house and that they were being kind of fed. You could even tell what they were eating. This is really cool for the work that Kim is doing because you can look at the kind of this is called isotope ratio analysis. I had to like get all over this kind of science stuff for the book.

But it's basically you look at the variations in an isotope of a particular element. And this is a particular isotope of nitrogen, which tells you whether they were eating legumes, which have a particular kind of value of this nitrogen or not. And if they're eating legumes, then they're eating a managed diet. So someone is trying to fatten them up.

Whereas if they're not, then they're just kind of grazing on household waste. You know, the kind of typical idea of the pig kind of grubbing around in the courtyard. And what's really interesting from what Kim has found is that if you look at like the temple in Mycenae, the pigs there are being fed up. They're being fattened for sacrifice, managed diet. And what's happening in

the town in the house is that they are just kind of grubbing around the house and they are being eaten. Now, what I really love about this is that one of the known pig fatteners was Barley.

um and you get kind of various ancient experts telling you what to feed your pig including aristotle which i love that aristotle like also gives pig food advice yeah um but barley was one of them and in the drink that sassy makes for the men before they turn into pigs she puts in barley and i basically was like well what if we just kind of

ask is she actually just fattening these pigs up so that she can eat yeah she's she's a woman she's living by herself she's practical she's got pig styes already she just basically needs to turn them into her her stock of pigs in order to be able to kind of be a an economic woman who's looking after her household and i just was like that is that is such a kind of practical

practical way of thinking about Cersei that really pushes back against this kind of mystique of her as a witch. Of course, there are loads of other things that we can do with it. And I talk in the book about

all of these kinds of other resonances that pigs have so they're really interesting in like ritual contexts you get them often around women you'll be familiar probably with the Thesmophoria but I don't know if you know about the pig ritual in the Thesmophoria I'm sure I read about it back when I last looked at the Thesmophoria but yeah please remind me yeah yeah no worries well and they're

okay sorry this is me having a I believe a pig reference that is more related to a lucis but they would I know this through the most bizarre way but they would sacrifice pigs at a lucis and clean them in the waters nearby and I know this because a guy got eaten by a shark while cleaning a pig for sacrifice oh my gosh yeah

That's really random. So anyway, that's just, yeah, I, I wouldn't put shirts in any possible context. I love that your brain stores this knowledge. That's, yeah. Yes, it's called, I assume, autism, but it does, yeah, no, so I,

But bonus, shark facts. Yeah. Well, and the shark facts have come from the age of like three. So they're long lasting. Oh, that's so awesome. Yeah. So anyway, but I guess really that's not at Thesmophoria. Well, Eleusis, of course, is also associated with Demeter and Persephone, which is that Thesmophoria was this sort of women only festival for Demeter and Persephone around kind of women's fertility. And the kind of key element

part of that festival, as far as we can tell, was that they sacrificed piglets and that they put them down in a pit.

And the idea was that they were basically representing Persephone, who of course was taken down into the underworld when she was raped by Hades. And while the story goes that when she fell in a swine herd and his pigs fell in as well. And so these pigs basically become like substitute humans. And,

And when they come out of the earth, it's like Persephone's rebirth. And then they kind of endow the women with fertility. Now, what's super interesting for someone like Circe is that, of course, her pigs quite literally are substitute humans, right? Because they are men who have been turned into pigs.

So it's drawing on this association between women and sex and death, all of which are concepts that kind of oscillate around Circe. She's the one who gives Odysseus the instructions to go to the underworld. So everything about that centres on pigs in a way that actually like pigs are the key to it rather than just like they are the terror. They're actually the source of

They're where you need to start with. Yeah. I'm sorry if you just said this. Does he sacrifice a pig to get to the underworld? Is that the blood or no? He doesn't, but he, but he sacrifices, I think it's a ram. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but like he, but what he does is a, a sacrifice to the spirits of the underworld and, and Cersei,

dictates this to him how he needs to do it. And he needs to kind of cut its neck with the blood flowing down. So it's going down to the spirits. And what's really interesting is that we have comparative evidence from the Hittite empire, which is this bronze age empire to the East in Anatolia, modern day Turkey,

And there we have Hittite wise women who are basically kind of like the equivalent of witches who are doing pig spells. And one of the pig spells is exactly one of these, like to the spirits of the underworld, the pig fiends.

pointing down the blood going down very similar to the Thesmophoria with the pigs down in the pit right so there is there is all of this connection that is kind of swirling around between women's power and pigs and death and access to the underworld that Cersei is just like drawing on yes yeah oh I love all of that yeah yeah

It's so cool, right? And it's just, again, it's just like, it overturns that story that Odysseus tells that she's this kind of desperate, well, first of all, that she's an evil witch who turns men into pigs, but then that she's this kind of desperate woman who just kind of tells Odysseus how amazing he is. Oh, you must be Odysseus. I recognize you because you're so amazing. Fall on my knees and beg you to have sex with me, right? Like, and it rescues her from that narrative. And it's done through pig food. Like, how cool is that?

I love that so much. I mean, this is the type of thing that's my favorite part about conversations is the linking of... I mean, basically what you did in this book, which I tend to pull out of people, but the linking of myth with archaeology. Because I think...

I like to, I want to learn it all. And I love, I like that my show is originally based in myth because it gives me a good excuse to just pull myth into every conversation. But every time, like I have guests who are like, oh, it's, I have this topic. It's not quite myth. And I'm like, I'm not specific to myth anymore. I just want to hear everything. I'll probably make it about myth, but like, that's on me. You tell me everything because I think

I mean, a huge part of what I think gets lost in people trying to access myth today from an outside point of view is how much it was tied to real people. Because we come at it thinking of modern day storytelling and writing and books. But back then, these myths served...

such a different purpose that we just will never fully conceptualize in the West today because we have lost all of that, all of the things that make myth tied to humanity and like a very, very separate thing from a book of fiction today. What's really interesting is that when we say something is a myth now, we mean it's not true. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It was the opposite. Yeah, a myth was something that was true. It was something that told you something about who you were, and who you belong to, and how the universe came to be all these kinds of things. But also, it was something that was was rooted in humans capacity to kind of understand the world. So I don't know, I'm sure you know this, but the word myth comes from mythos,

which means word or language. And it is very fundamentally like when you have a conversation, when you tell a story, you are doing myth because it is how we try and understand the world. And there's just one amazing moment, which, you know, we talked about Penelope, but like,

in the Odyssey to me this is paradigmatic and I actually start with this in Mythica because obviously Mythica is it's called Mythica it's got myth in the title it's doing that as well but at the very beginning of the Odyssey um

the bard is singing downstairs in the palace in Ithaca and he's singing the story of the returns of the Greeks from Troy. Now, obviously this is the Odyssey. This is also the story of the return of a Greek from Troy. So this is a kind of Homer within the narrative. And Penelope hears the song and kind of understandably she doesn't,

like hearing it she she's kind of been waiting for Odysseus this is not the topic that she wants to to have in her home and she comes downstairs and she tries to ask the bard to stop and Telemachus in this kind of horrendous moment of kind of insolent teenager-y stand up and says like words are for men and he uses the word muthos

Oh, right. Muthos is for me alone because I am the master in this house. And then he sends her upstairs to go and do her weaving, right? That circles back to, to women's weaving. I really hate. Yeah. Yucky. Yeah. It's, it's not, it's not a good moment. Um,

And Mary Beard actually has called it like the first instance of a man telling a woman to shut up in Western literature, which I think is, I think it's an opposite assessment of the scene. But what I think is so interesting is that he's not just saying words are for men. He's saying myths are for men. The construction of meaning in words is,

And in stories is what we do. And remember that this is the epic that has started with the word for man. Man. Yeah, exactly. So this is a reminder in the very first book that women do not have a stake in myth. And I guess maybe this is like a really good place to end. But with Mythica, I'm trying to say women do have a stake in myth. That's kind of it. That's the basic thing.

Well, I would like to say that, you know, that is also what I'm saying in my show. So it seems pretty perfect. Oh my gosh. Exactly. A marriage made in heaven. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm obsessed with all of that. I didn't know about that line and now I'm going to think about it forever. But it's, I mean, yeah, it's, I think that it is so hard to conceptualize myth today. Because even when you said, you know, to them it was true. Yeah.

Like even that I often get asked, you know, like, did the people believe all of these stories were true? And like, I don't think that's true. I think that they, it's like you say truth and I know what you mean, but in this realm, it's just like this, this notion of truth. Like they didn't mean that everything happened literally, but they, the stories described that what they could understand as truth. And it's so hard to explain because it is,

It's just so separate from our lived realities now. Exactly. I think, yeah, as I was saying it, I was also like, that's not right. It's a source of meaning. Yeah, yeah. A source of validation. Yeah. And, you know, we say something is valid and we mean it's true, but it doesn't have to be true. But we don't mean literally true. We don't mean literally true. It helps you to know that.

where you are and who you are and who you belong to. Yeah. It's just a way of understanding everything. Yeah. Everything. Yeah. I guess it goes back a little bit to what we were saying about archaeology and the way it tries to construct reality. And ultimately what we are all doing all the time is we are putting walls up around ourselves to try and create a reality that tries to make whatever this is understandable. Yeah.

And myth is basically the original way of doing that. I just love it so much. I always want to end these episodes with just like that expression. And then I,

I feel like it just gets old, but it doesn't get old. This is just, it's so good. This is why we're all here. Yes. Because we, because we love myth. I mean, like, you know, you asked me right at the beginning, like, where does this start? And I was like, oh, you know, with my undergraduate dissertation at Cambridge, like, where does it really start? It starts when I was 11 years old.

and my geeky Latin teacher gave me Greek lessons on the side and we did "Perseus and Medusa" and I was coloring in the figure of "Perseus and Medusa" and I was like, Greek myth is awesome.

That's where it starts. You know, I mean, this is where it starts for everybody. They read Percy Jackson. They get in, I get a book of compendium of Greek myths. You know, they get gifted your Greek myth cocktails book, which like sounds like an essential on everyone's table, but like, it's just something happens and you just fall in love with these stories and you, you don't fall, you don't fall out of love with them because as we said, they give you meaning. And every time you come back to them, they tell you something new.

So like, I don't think you should apologize for being in love with me. Well, I'm eight years in, it's not going away. No, it's, it's funny. I love hearing the way so many people in the UK were able to first come to Myth because I'm very jealous because, you know. Super lucky. Honestly, super lucky. And I credit pretty much it. Yeah. Yeah.

I know. Like, yeah. I mean, things are changing here. Yeah, I know. I know. I do hear about that a lot too. So it's not to say it's still like this, but I mean, I think I also came, my obsession developed, I think when I was 12 as well, only there was no Latin class, but I did have an incredible teacher who had us watch. He, you know, this would have been the year 2000. God. And so he wheeled in, you know, a TV and a VHS player and he put,

put in what he had recorded on TV. So we, I think he probably had like cut out the commercials on the VHS, you know, the olden days. And it was the, the Odyssey miniseries. Oh yes. That came out in the nineties. And I, I mean, I I'm sure that's in large part why the Odyssey remains my favorite piece of myth and literature from that world, because it's,

That's what I was given. That's my version of coloring in Perseus and Medusa. I mean, yeah. I will be honest that like basically Athena for me is still Isabella Rossellini. Like that hasn't gone away. Yeah.

I need to re-watch that because it really was my like opening, but I've not gone back to it. But that's why it's ruined Matt Damon as Odysseus for you because like you've got your Odysseus. Sean Bean was great. Sean Bean was, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. The fact that we never got a Sean Bean. I know. Absolutely. That's why I hate Matt Damon. Yeah.

Perfect. Michaela, you can say something. Thank you. I was going to say, I can share my story of my influence. Please, please. Yes. It's a fun one. Okay, yes. For anyone who doesn't know, I am a First Nations woman in this country. But that means in BC, at least, we have it so that every Indigenous student gets, we all get a counselor who is also Indigenous at school and they bring us on like little field trips and stuff and like, so we can still be a part of culture.

And so I got to go to lots of ceremony when I was younger. And so I've been able to like, me and my sisters, we all did. So we would like sit at our elders feet and they would tell us the stories and stuff. So I always say like, I had a bit of a orality in my life growing up and I'm really lucky I got to experience that culture. And then my oldest sister, whose name funnily enough is Danae. Yeah.

I know. I know. She discovered Egyptian myth and Greek myth one day and she got so excited about it. And she brought me and my other sister to her room and we sat on the floor and she stood on her bed and she was telling us these stories of, you know, like I very vividly have the memory of her telling about

Denae's own passage and the birth of Perseus and his stories and in the way that our elders told us stories so it was like this wild experience of getting to experience myth that way but also Michaela I love that it was coming through your sister like you know because you know we talked about this Liv in the last episode but like oral tales told by women

You know, that's really powerful. You should have seen my mom's face when we told her who Danae was in Myth. She wasn't happy. She didn't know. She had no idea. We were like, Mom, there was a golden shower. And she went, go away. No, I can't explain this to you children right now.

Meanwhile, myths like that are why I started the podcast between her and Pacify, where you're just like, I'm sorry, what were they telling stories of back then? I need to talk about it as if it is absurd, as absurd as it objectively is. Oh my gosh, that is such a good story.

I love that you've told that on the show, Michaela, because I've heard it a few times and I think this is the first time it's on live. I'm pretty sure I emailed it to you, too. That was my introduction to you being like, hi, hire me. Here's my story. The email is why she got the job. It worked. I never want to see that email again.

Well, I mean, women talking about myth is really all I want to do with the rest of my life. So I'm thrilled. Well, you obviously do an amazing job at it. So keep going. Keep going.

Well, thank you so much for doing this. Oh my gosh. It was so much fun. Yes. And we knew it would be, but oh man, it's still just what a joy. I'm so thrilled about this book. I cannot wait to read it. Yeah. I mean, I'm honestly, yeah.

I'm just so excited. I'm so glad I got to like share it with you guys because I feel like it's been, it's been here. It's been something I've been so excited to share. And now I finally get to like talk about it. And especially with like, you know, someone as excited as you, it's, it's lovely.

It's very exciting. Well, I'm so thrilled to have you. I'm still so glad that you, I'm sure I told this on our last episode, but you had DM'd me when Michaela and I were on that group tour. It might've been the day we went to Mycenae to see Kim Shelton, honestly. And I just remember leaning over in the bus and showing her and just being like, hey, like, I think we'll get Emily Hauser on the show. She was like, what? I was like, oh yeah, she's asking me like as if I might, oh, maybe I would take her as a guest. And I'm like,

come on my show oh my god oh I love it I love it such a joy well um so much fun oh so so much fun I do like my cheeks my cheeks actually hurting from smiling I'm thinking the same thing

Well, do you want to tell my listeners where they can read more from you or follow the Instagram that I know you're working hard at and has been lovely? Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I'm on Instagram at emilyhauserauthor. And you can also just check out my website, which is emilyhauser.com. And otherwise, yeah, I've got an author page on Amazon, on Goodreads, that kind of thing. So do follow me wherever you follow your authors and stay in touch. And it would be just, yeah, lovely to kind of share this adventure with you guys.

So excited. Yeah. Oh my gosh. It's, it's, oh, it's just so lovely. Honestly, my, my husband was saying before I came on, he was like, are you excited? I was like, honestly, I like haven't been so excited about anything since I finished writing the book. Like, I just want to talk about it now. I just want to talk. So you've indulged, you've indulged me for two and a half hours. Oh, I mean, yeah, you really had to twist our arms. It wasn't that Michaela was like bending over backwards to make sure she could be on this call of all the calls. Oh, I love that.

oh nerds thank you so much for listening as always it's so it's so fun to talk to Emily we're actually when this comes out we'll have met in person which is so exciting because the book has just launched and I'm going to be in the UK for it so it was just a coincidence a really really fun one and I'm just I'm

I'm excited for you to hear about this book, but just generally this episode. I'm so thrilled that I get the chance to meet and speak with all of these people who do all of this incredible research. Honestly, it keeps me going. And for all that things are really tough right now, to put it like lighter than humanly possible, I think it's just so important that we keep

interacting with history in this way, with this acknowledgement of where we've come from and how we got here, particularly when it comes to women and other marginalized peoples and genders, and learn from it, really take it in and acknowledge how we got here, because I think that is the best way of

getting out of this patriarchal capitalist scheme that's solely taking us down. And so the more I can do that, the better. I'm thinking of everyone who's not a straight white man, particularly in North America right now, but obviously bigger. Canada, we have an election coming up soon. If you just...

God, if you're listening to me and you're planning to vote conservative, what are you doing here? We need to talk. I honestly think if you're listening to me, then you must have kind of good intentions. And maybe we can figure out why you would ever want to do that. Pierre Polyev is terrifying. He's terrifying. He's recently talking about women's biological clocks. And I'll tell you right now, I don't have one. But if I did, I'd slam it over his head. This is our time. This is our moment. This is our...

This is our... This is... This is us stepping up to the plate. This is us coming within inches. Millimeters. Goddammit. Millimeters of what is happening in the States right now. This is our time to say that we are not looking to join them in fascism and that we are not looking to join them as being...

How do you phrase a colonizing country that then wants to be colonized by another colonizing country? This is our time to say no to all of that. And I need you all to step up now.

Let's talk about Miss Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Panguish is the Hermes to my Olympians. I was so, so thrilled to have her on this episode. I'm trying to get Michaela to do this more. So we need you all to comment and tell me how much you love hearing from Michaela because she has such incredibly insightful things to say. And I want her in on this with me more and more. So convince her that you love her.

Select Music by Luke Chaos. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network. God damn it, this is mine. Check out more podcasts on our network. Learn more about what we are trying to do well beyond podcasts and just generally bringing you socially conscious,

intersectional in whatever ways we can but I recognize that sounds really bad coming from a white lady right now I'm I promise I'm on it and just this acknowledgement acknowledgement of how we got here and how it affects everyone and anyway learn more at collectivemem.com I could ramble on forever but I will stop I am Liv and I love this shit