RE-AIR: Conversations: A Most Sophoclean Prophecy, Women & Wordplay in Sophocles’ Trachiniae w/ Amy Pistone
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Oh, hi, hello. This is Let's Talk About Myths, baby. And I am your host, Liv, here with yet more on Sophocles' Trichiniae. Because how could I cover this incredible play without speaking to an expert who also loves it? This is Let's Talk About Myths, baby.

This actually started way back when I first had Amy on the podcast to talk all things Sophocles back in the summer. We briefly touched upon Trichiniae in that conversation, but I hadn't read it at the time. So as soon as I started reading it, I just knew I had to bring Amy back on the show.

It's really becoming a favorite play of mine. It's just so interesting and Dianera is so complex and sympathetic and just so different from the other important women of Greek tragedy. I love her. I love this play and I was so thrilled to talk to Amy about it. She provides some insights into the Greek of it all, how it would have been performed, and then she shares theories...

So many good theories and so much more, particularly when it comes to how Sophocles plays with prophecies from oracles. Ugh, it's so good.

Now, I did record this episode just as I was writing the script for the final episode of Trichiniae. So the second half of that episode, like after Heracles arrives, was written after our conversation. And I think some of our conversation affected the way I told that bit and in a good way. But now you can kind of see where that came from. But also it means I didn't fully know the ending of the play when we spoke. Like I did because I mean, I know the story of Heracles' death.

but not the way the play handles it. The Zeus of it all. Ugh.

We also go on a whole tangent about The Rock's Hercules movie, and I kept that in because I thought it was fun. And now it kind of holds me to finally watching that movie. Similarly, Amy mentions the Movies We Dig podcast, which is a full-blown coincidence because I recorded last week's episode and this week's at totally different times. But isn't it perfect? You can catch Amy's episode of Movies We Dig, which, if you don't remember, is last week's guest's podcast. And Amy's episode is all about the Mummy trilogy.

And yes, I was really mad that someone got to that before I did. I also kept in a big bit of Amy talking about building a course around gender in the ancient world because I mean, that's just so insightful and cool. And if courses like that existed when I was in university studying classics, I could have started this whole career probably a lot earlier. And so many of you are always asking about my experience studying classics and

So you're going to get a lot more relevant information out of hearing from a current university teacher of classics like Amy because I graduated 10 years ago. Anyway, that was a lot of behind the scenes info, but it felt interesting and pertinent. On to the episode. Sophocles, Dianera, Heracles, Aioli, Zeus. Ugh, Zeus.

conversations a most Sophoclean prophecy women and wordplay in Sophocles' Trichiniae with Amy Pistone dive right into the Trichiniae yay this is this is really fun I'm looking forward to it so exciting I finally read I'll admit most of it I'm working on the last episode right now so I'm like I

I'm just towards the end. And I was like, I could just speed read all of it. I know what happens. It's fine. So I'm like, but I, I took a play that I didn't know very well and turned it into like, okay, three episodes of me obsessing over it, which is what I do with every new play that I read. But this one. I'm so excited to get to talk about it because like, it's one of these plays that for the longest time, nobody like it was, it was always like, uh, like kind of the black sheep of the Sophocles family. And it's, it might be my favorite. I mean, like they're, they're,

Oedipus Rex is, you know, like classic Antigone. Like they're, they're, they deserve to be classics, but this is probably just like my personal favorite of, of his plays. So I'm, I am so excited to have an excuse to get to think out about it with somebody. I can see why it would be like, it's definitely turning into one of my favorite plays for sure. Just because I mean, and I don't really have like a structure for how we're going to do it. So just kind of, you know, talk about the play generally. A cat just jumped up in my lap. So that's,

He always has to make a sound when he does it, too. Oh, sweet baby. Yeah, so, I mean, I basically just want to, like, dive right into everything. But Dianera, I think, is the obvious reason why this play is just so good. Like, she's just so great. Yeah.

So can I give you like a fact that might make you even more like just obsessed with Deanna? So two facts. One is like an etymological fact that her name and different translations like sometimes explain this and sometimes don't. But her name...

more or less like etymologizes or translates out to um man killer um and so there's this this kind of idea that we see in a lot of tragedies about how like someone's name you know this like gnomon omen like somebody's name like has something to say about the kind of person they're going to be or the kind of person they are um and like you see this with helen that people like

kind of pun or like etymologize her name to being from a verb for to take to seize and then so sometimes like translators do all kinds of fun stuff to try and translate the pun which is famously hard to translate puns but they like you know of course like hell she was you know Helen she was held to ships held to the men held to the city and essentially in the Greek it talks it's like you know like

she's a taker, right? She's the person who sees the gold and this war took so much from us and we should have, there's kind of this weird way of like, we should have seen this coming because it's right in her name. It was right there. Which, so Deonera, like nobody really comments much on it in the play. They're not like, oh, we should have known. But the fact that there's this kind of built in like,

yeah she's not going to be able to avoid destroying in some way um the the man in her life um the her husband and so that that is just a side fun like etymological tidbit but then the part that i love is so for a lot of plays we can kind of deduce who like which roles the same actor would have played just in terms of exits and things and for this play we're like we're

pretty much the I don't know if there might be some debate but we for the most part are pretty convinced that the actor that plays Deonair is the same actor that plays Heracles I was just going to guess that when you said it because like she's on the stage like the whole time until she's not

Which is, like, it's so great because you get this, like, right, that this too, because it's really, it's like the story of her and then the story of him and they never, they're never there together. And the whole play is about their, like, their relationship and that they're never, they never talk to each other. They never, like, look at each other. They're never on stage together. But it also makes this, like, really, I think this sort of really powerful. And I saw a staged production a while back and they had the same actor play both of them. And, like, being able to see that is just amazing.

kind of really makes you think about like the relationship between them and like, are they, you know, are they versions of the same person in some sense? Are they like, are they, does that highlight how different they are? But it, it kind of forces you to think about that when you're like, oh, that's, that's the same body. That's the same, like, that's the same person that I just saw as, as Deonera. And like she left and then her husband comes in. Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah. The moment you said that, I was like, wait, oh, I bet it's gotta be Heracles. That's so cool. Yeah.

Because, yeah, I mean, I've just in the writing of the script for when this is going to air or when my story of it is going to air, I've just gotten to the part where Diana dies. And then I was like, basically, my brain just kept staring at the screen like, OK, I have to write more. But also I've kind of I've already written like 3000 words of this tragedy today. And maybe I'm going to take a moment. Yeah.

Well, and this is one of the like, okay, so quick, quick side note tangent. And, and I apologize if this is like stuff you've already talked about. And you're just like, oh, I always love it. So one of my constant things I come back to is that I Aristotle's poetics, which like totally shaped how much we read tragedy and all of the best tragedies like don't fit what he thinks they should be. And this is like a classic two part tragedy, which he's like, no plot should be single. Like it should be one plot. We don't want these dumb, like half this, half that.

kind of plots like that's that's poor writing and it's like this is such a good play and the fact that and you know you get a lot of these where it is it's exactly the thing that he's complaining about in in plot structure and like it's such a good play if you don't think that good plots can be written like this then I question your ability to know if like what a good play is because this is such a compelling story um but like this part where you know any of these plays where there's

There's a clear split in the middle. Hippolytus is one of these where, you know, Phaedra is there at the beginning and then she dies. And now it's a play about Hippolytus and it's a play about Theseus and things like that. And I mean, same deal with this play that it's this very... And in a lot of ways, I find those two-part structures to be great because...

it's sort of a play that's about two different things and your brain has to be like, how do those things react or interact with one another? Like, what am I supposed to do about the juxtaposition of these two different storylines? So like,

or loss or, you know, but it's always like something happened and then someone is reacting to it, which is kind of fundamentally what I think tragedy is about, is about how we react to terrible things happening. So, yeah, I can't miss a chance to complain about Aristotle being bad at reading tragedy. I mean, yeah, but

I mean, if he thinks this one's bad, then I don't think I've ever read. I feel like I had to have read some of Poetics in school, but that would have been at least 10 years ago. And it's all lost my left my brain. I make habit of not reading a lot of philosophers. If I'm being generous, I will say that Aristotle is and I don't I don't often feel generous towards Aristotle, but I will say that he is.

there's good reason to think that he's more talking about lost tragedies that like are a later time period. He's not talking about like our major tragedy and he's talking about people who are writing at his time. So like his contemporaries who are, and he's like, oh, like these plays suck. And like, we don't, we don't have these plays. So I mean, maybe they do. And maybe he's accurately pinpointing these problems with the plays of his time. But,

A lot of the examples he uses are major tragedies that we have. And so it doesn't let him entirely off the hook. But there are those who would say that it's more about... He's not writing primarily for us and thinking about these plays. He's primarily using this as a way to tell tragedians of his time, like, be better. Here are the things you're doing that are bad. But yeah, I still think he's... But this play...

why people have hated until very recently. Like it's just having this like moment of people realizing how great it is because for the longest time it didn't fit what people wanted. Like there was a whole tradition of like the Sophoclean hero and what people thought that meant and like what the Sophoclean hero exemplifies, which is, I could psychoanalyze so many of these scholars who are like writing about like the, you know, the heroic temper. We have all of these works where it's this very...

A hero who stands out against his civilization and his society. And he's like the lone man who gets it in all society. And like, you can just see people in like the middle of the 1800s. Like, like they think they are the Safa Queen hero and you can just see them putting themselves into the scholarship in ways that I find to be very, because like,

I think that it causes people to misread when you were reading for the Sophoclean hero. You have to force ambiguity and complexity and messiness of these plays to fit what you want this type of hero to be. And so I think, like, but, and this didn't fit that, right? Like, this didn't fit that model at all. Like, we have, you know, Deianira, and then she accidentally kills Heracles, and then, like, we have no resolution. It's just this bleak ending, and...

people didn't think it was appropriately Sophoclean. And there were some people who suggested like, maybe it's forged, like maybe it's not really Sophocles, maybe it's like inaccurately attributed to him. And it was a long time before it,

found a home in the more like, no, this is a legit Sophoclean tragedy. It's a really good one. And we haven't we haven't given it a fair shake. Yeah, it's so interesting because I think because I'm not in the academic side of it, I don't like I don't have a good frame of reference on even what that Sophoclean hero would be like. Is it all around Oedipus? Which I'm like, is he meant to be a hero? Yeah.

So if you think about Ajax and his story, that you have like, oh, he's too good for this world. It's kind of a lot of the vibe that people come at this with, that a man who comes into a reconcile, maybe a woman, I guess, Antigone, ugh. But it's very much like a man who society doesn't get him. He gets it. And society, he is coming into conflict with his society. Yeah.

And I guess, I mean, that's a way to read some of these plays, but it flattens and it takes so much out of it if you're trying to say that these heroes are all somewhat the same, like Philictides or Neoptolemus or whatever. Like, are they like Oedipus, who's like Antigone, who's like Ajax? Yeah.

That whole project and, like, that whole history of engaging with these plays, I think, does a disservice to the text, which are so much messier. Like, they're so much messier. And I think there was a period in scholarship, and it was, if we get into a whole, like, you know, a certain type of, like, elite man, white man, you know.

You know, largely British or other like European elites who have never been wrong about anything ever. But you like they are not.

necessarily looking, they don't want to see all of the messiness and the complexity of some of these texts. And part of that is, you know, like the rational greed. Like we don't want to think about the more irrational stuff and the more, like there is a thing that we look for in antiquity and we're reading for that. And it's

I think there has been, thankfully, I mean, over the last, you know, 50, 75, 100 years, like we've really done a much better job of seeing the richness of these texts. But yeah, this play, like for so long, people were not, they just didn't think it was good. And they're so wrong about that because it's so good. Yeah. And I can see kind of why. I mean, because Dianera is what makes it so good. But she's not like, she's not a heroine like...

many of the other more famous Greek tragedies. She is not Clytemnestra. She is not Medea. And that's what makes her so interesting, but also like makes her, I would say probably unique in a way that would might annoy people who are looking for a more traditional tragedy of like the woman is bad. Like the woman must be bad or she must be antiquity. There is no in between. Right. Like you have to be this kind of like masculine type of hero. Like you have, you know, that there's,

she just doesn't fit into any of those. And then our hero, like our, you know, like our Greek hero guy, like,

You know, we I mean, we don't even gesture at the idea that he becomes a god. Like you get to the end and, you know, in the back of our mind, there's all this like, yeah, I mean, he becomes a god, but we don't see any of that. He is screaming and pain and agony. And he's in like the register that men never go in and tragedy. Like he's in this like super like, oh, my God, this is very bad kind of meter and like register. He's up. He's up in the very emotional range.

And we get no resolution. Like we get nothing. There's no solace. There's no consolation. It's just like, wow, this. And then at the end, either the chorus or Hylus, his son, like just says like, and this is Zeus saying,

And we, and scene. Like that's, that's, you know, it doesn't explain, it's just like, wow, that's, they just kind of throw it in your face that this is Zeus, Heracles' dad. Like, and we keep getting reminded throughout that this is his dad who is letting all of this happen to him and is looking on, is not doing anything. And we never even get a mention of Zeus.

Oh, and he's definitely like, we're going to go put him on a pyre and he'll become a god now. Like, we don't talk about that. That would give us something to fall on as like, oh, it's okay then. Nope, he's just screaming and he's on fire. He is burning to death and I think we're done here. That is a bleak way to end a play. And like a play generally, but then also when you take into account like, yeah, it's Heracles. Like, he's the...

the hero, like the number one, the most universal, the most beloved, like,

Like he is the guy and he ends on fire and in pain. And that alone is so interesting. And I, you know, love it for all my love to hate heroes, because I think it's just so much more interesting than all of their, the other stories around them or, or it is so much more interesting than the idea that like, yes, Heracles dies, but up, he goes into Mount Olympus and he lives with a nice lady named Hebe. And we all just don't even have to think about it.

it you know like meanwhile I found myself I realized it after I'd already done a couple of episodes like leading up to this play where I was like I kept saying that Dianero was his last wife and I was like I think I'm just like gonna just forget apparently that like he does go up and marry a goddess like becomes this whole thing but it does feel so different and it's like that's such a way like a clean way of ending his story when it seems so much more interesting and complex and like

more indicative of the life he led to have him end on fire you know especially after this play because they don't make him look very good like it's very much i mean you know you can still see the way that the

Heracles of it all in there but it's so much like Dayanera is just trying to have a decent life even she's you know she's not even trying to have like a great life or like a great marriage she just wants to not be sad and anxious like all of the time and even when she finds out about Aioli she's just like

I mean, it'd be fine if he just like went off and was in love with women elsewhere. But like, just don't bring her into my house. And you're like, oh, my God, in the bed. Yeah. Yeah. It's such a like it's such a low bar that she has. And the fact that she's so specifically is like, I don't want to be. I mean, I feel like there's such a reference to like to the Clytemnestras of the world. Like, I don't want to be a Clytemnestra. Like, I don't.

you know, I mean, there's some specific lines where she's like referencing how she doesn't want to be that kind of woman. She wants to protect her marriage. Like she's not trying to kill her husband. And I think like the part of the tragedy of it is that

she's very specifically trying not to kill her husband and she still ends up killing her husband yeah and she just yeah i mean it's so explicit that all she wants is to just have him love her and not bring another woman into their house like not even just only love me it's like love me and also just don't bring another woman into my bed like absolute bare minimum and then and

Yeah, it's her naivety or it's just like the fact that she just fully doesn't know what she's doing. She just really thinks she's just trying to get something good and like just trying to help her situation. And she just has no idea.

that it's gonna kill him and then even when she does she realizes immediately and like immediately feels bad and it that's so interesting too where it's like there's no anger in her at all it's all just like longing to have a halfway decent life and love yeah and like i don't know how you can't find that to be such a compelling plot like that's

I don't know. The plots that I find the most gripping and like the most tragic are the ones where like everyone's making a decision that you understand every step of the way. Like, you know, there's no point where you're like, yeah, you shouldn't have done that. Like maybe people should have known better about some aspects of like, do I think the centaur blood is probably a good thing? But I think the plate is such a beautiful job of looking at the

how reasonable it is that she thinks all of the things that she thinks. She doesn't do anything wrong. She wants to protect her house and her marriage and her family, which is fundamentally the thing that women are allowed to act in the sphere of tragedy. The house is their place. And so she's trying to act in the place that she is allowed to act.

and protect her child and her husband, like her marriage. And that, that backfires on her. Like that's so, I mean, just such like a, a beautifully crafted, but really tragic plot. Yeah.

And she's so sympathetic from the very beginning too. So I think it just immediately introduces that idea of like, this is just a woman not only trying to get by, but yeah, do right by her family and her husband and her house. And she does everything right. You know, even the, with the centaur blood, the poisoned robe or whatever it ends up being like,

She made it. She made it by hand and with love. And okay, it happened to be poison. But like she didn't know that and she just made it. But even the way it opens with like her story, you know, of the river god and everything, but also just like

her sadness like the play just opens with her sadness in a way that I was not expecting and like really was powerful for me reading it for the first time which I love and hate to do for the podcast because I feel totally thrown in but also I think it makes for good episodes and then I get to read the play yeah and you're I mean you're reacting like authentically in the moment as opposed to yeah I feel like some plays that I've read and taught and talked about so much like I may react like I kind of

I know how I feel about the play. And, you know, this is, this is the part that I always want to talk about. And I feel like when you're, you're engaging with something for the first time, like you're, you're feeling the, like the rawness of the intensity of those emotions. And I don't know. I mean, in some ways, like that's,

if we were thinking about these as things that were originally performed, like you're getting like your first time watching a movie, like you are reacting how an audience would react. Like, you're like, oh, no, Tiana, no. Like that's, you know, the 20th time you read a play, you're like, yeah, this is like, you know, maybe I get some clever wordplay I didn't notice before because, oh, that's foreshadowing. I see. But you're not getting that

that actual authentic reaction so I don't know I think it's great you're reading it for the first time here it's very fun and it makes my life easier than having to read it and then write an episode reading it again so I just do it but one thing that really surprised me from like just the Greek mythology of it all is the way that Dianera is so sympathetic to Aioli like before and after she knows the truth of why she's there like she's just kind to her and she's just like

you look really sad. You look particularly sad. Who are you? Why are you so sad? And then even when she finds out, it's just like, you're really sad. Like that was just surprising to me just from Greek mythology as a whole, but also, I don't know. I suppose I'm just so used to going to Euripides for nice women who don't hate everyone. Yeah.

Well, and that's, you know, that she would be justified in being mad at, like, this, I mean, this is the thing that's causing the problem. Like, this is, you know, like, Aioli is the threat to her marriage. And the fact that she doesn't take that out on her, I think, and I mean, this is a somewhat anachronistic way to think about this, but I very much see, like, the impulse to, like, get mad at the other woman or, you know, as opposed to,

I mean, if you're mad at anyone, you're mad at Heracles. And you're not even mad at Heracles, even though you deserve to be mad at him. But that Aioli didn't choose this. Like, she had no say in any of this. Like, Heracles fell in love or lust or, you know, whatever. But, like, and he did all of this and took her. I mean, this is not – and I think there's something so –

I don't know, like aspirational or relatable in an aspirational way that she isn't, she isn't mad at Iole. And, you know, that this is, if anything, this is Heracles' fault. Yeah. That we're not meant to be like, ugh, Iole, this homewrecker, which is, it's fundamentally not fair. And I think in some ways, like Cassandra and Clytemnestra, we think about like, like,

Cassandra is perceived as a threat. Like Clytemnestra is not happy that this woman is coming home, even though she's enslaved. She has no choice about it. But in a lot of ways, I think Clytemnestra still thinks of her as a threat. And Dayanara in so many different ways is really explicit about like, she doesn't want to be Clytemnestra. And, you know, and not that there's, I mean, I love Clytemnestra, but that I think the fact that

That Day and Era is so intentional about, like, that's not what I'm doing. I am not trying to axe my husband when he gets home. I am trying to do something different. I want to save this marriage. I don't want to destroy him. Yeah. I'm just... I feel like I'm mostly just impressed with Sophocles for actually conveying that so incredibly well. Because...

I find it to be very, I mean, very believable that she fortunately does look and say, like, no, this was not Aioli's decision. She does not want to be here. But it's more rare that anyone would actually convey it in an ancient Greek work. I'm like, oh, yeah, well done. Yeah, like, it's a very, like...

Yeah. Like high fives off of these. Like that is a astonishingly enlightened view that you have, you know, and whether or not he's thinking about this in the same terms we are. Like there is something like really great about that. Yeah. I mean, he certainly had to have been thinking about it enough to get there. So I'm like, hey, you know. Well, yeah. Yeah. Good on him. Yeah. I don't hate her except, well, not even except, but I don't, I don't hate her really at any moment. There's a couple of lines where you're like, oh, they're really like,

tossing around i guess there's just some interesting lines about the enslaved people around and like the the translation says nurse i never know what to really describe that as a person but she you know has this great idea and and diana is like oh you had a really good idea even though you're enslaved how lucky you're you can be smart too and i was like oh

Okay. I don't think that needed to be said. Unnecessary. Didn't need that comment. Could have said nothing at all. That would have been just fine.

Have you ever brought your magic to Walt Disney World like, "Hey, we came to play"? Did you tip your tiara to a Creole princess or get goofy officially? Step up like a boss and save the day? Or see what life's like under the tree of life? Did you? If you could, would you? When we come through, it's true magic, 'cause we came to play. Bring the magic at Walt Disney World Resort.

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Oh, yeah. Oh, it was just, I don't even know. The whole thing is just so, so interesting. Greek tragedy is always so, it's just always so eye-opening to me. The way that they're able to tell these stories, but in such interesting ways. The way that we often don't have other versions to look at. Like, other versions of the myth. And so we have all these questions over, like, what...

Is purely from the myth backstory that Sophocles is working off of and like what did he invent? I think this is a good example of that. Like we have the idea of what happens, but even as I'm thinking about it, like we don't have a lot pre-Sophocles of what happens. We have a lot after. Yeah.

Yeah, like a lot of this is his or as far as we can tell, like a lot of this is his own interventions as opposed to, you know, some stories like they're out there. There's versions out there. But yeah, this is one that like we don't have. We don't have that many like particularly specific details like a lot of this is Sophocles own thing. Yeah.

Yeah, which is always one of the things I think about too as soon as I start a tragedy of like, what does the audience already know going in and then how does that affect the play and so I'm kind of curious in this case like

how much of of dianera like causing the death but then also heracles's death generally like i'm curious how much of that did exist before like or how much did end up surprising the audience i imagine there isn't a good answer for that but yeah i mean i think for a lot of it and to be fair i also i often tend to be on the side of like

we shouldn't assume people, you know, even though like some of the versions that we have out there about this and that, I tend to a lot of times be on the side of like, well,

You don't know. I mean, there's, there's versions out there and we don't know what we've lost and we don't know what the most common version was. So I tend to be a little bit more agnostic about some of those things. But I do think people, people are assuming the story ends with apotheosis. And so I think that is one of the places where the fact that that's so specifically not included, like it has to be an intentional choice because I think the story naturally ends with apotheosis. And I,

And that's not what we get here. Yeah. I mean, I thought it did. I thought it ended with Apotheosis because of course it's Heracles, like hands up a God. We all know that. Yeah. That's what happens. Yeah. It reminds me of the end of Iphigenia at Aulis, which to me does feel so like tacked on because we get this like weird deus ex machina that's like, look, she's fine and it's all good. And it's like, it, I'm sort of,

I prefer when plays don't have that, which is why I love things like Medea and Bacchae and now this, because it's so much more enjoyable and maybe it's just my personality or what, but like, I much prefer to just have this straight up horrific tragedy to end on. And this one, you sit with it. Like you just, you have to sit with it. And,

And it's ugly and it hurts. And that is a part of like, and you did it with everybody else. Like you did this with all your friends and you went through this thing that was like really sad. And then you're just going to kind of sit there and be like, oh, okay, that just happened. And, you know, then, I mean, you talk about it or you work through it or you whatever. But like, yeah, I really like when plays end.

you know, like Oedipus at Colonus is like, it's fine, but it's sort of a, you know, it's a kind of a happily ever after. Like he probably becomes a God or whatever. Like we don't know for sure, but like it's this very resolution to a story as opposed to like, no, it is bad. Like I just found out horrible things about who I am and I blinded myself and my wife slash mom is dead. And Oh God, what are we going to do now? And like,

And I'm not giving you anything that makes it better. We just, you know, and scene. Yeah. Yeah. That one's so much more preferable to me. And like, yeah, this one too. It's like, it's not only tragedy. It's not only sad. It's also horrifying in a way that not a ton of great tragedies have. Like they all have the sad. They do that pretty well. Obviously some better than others, but like,

The description of Heracles from the moment he puts on the clothing is like hardcore. It is so much to take in. And I haven't even gotten to like him being on stage yet in my reading of it. And I'm still like, holy shit. So I just can't even imagine, you know, the more of it, what, what is the rest to come, but also like,

watching that and hearing about not only not just anybody experiencing that kind of pain and like it's also just gross like it's gory it's nasty it's horrifying and not like to think of anyone experiencing that but then also Heracles like this guy that does everything that you think of as

the man who can do everything, who has, who's traveled the whole of the Greek world, like just the most universal of heroes. And it's like, this is his end.

Fully by accident. Like, so unintentional and horrifying. And it's such a, like, I kind of love when heroes get, like, spectacularly unheroic deaths. Like, Jason, like, doesn't, Medea doesn't kill him. Like, at least that would be, I feel like in some way that's a better ending for him than Jason.

she took everything from you and now you're just a dude who like you don't have Medea. So what, I mean, can't accomplish that much. And you're going to die when your boat falls on your head, like a piece of rotting wood from your boat is going to fall on your head. Like way to take any like heroic oomph out of that guy's story. And it's, I feel like you get kind of the same, like,

He's Heracles. And he's going to die from an accident, a misinterpretation. Like that is there in some way. Like it's just so chef's kiss of like, I love it. Like it's the least, it's such an unheroic death for someone. And one of, someone I went to grad school with, Catherine Liu, she wrote her dissertation on Heracles. And one of the things that she like saw in his story is about how he is

Like, the violence that he does to monsters and things, like, that external facing violence, like, it's this story of, like...

That is really destructive in domestic sphere, right? And like that, and that's something that ever since she told me, like I want to make sure she gets credit because it is like so informed the way I read a lot of different things about like Odysseus or something, right? With it, like the skills that keep you safe at war and that make you good at heroing out there are so out of place in at home. And the fact that like Heracles kills all these monsters and then,

is is brought down by like this constant like domestic strife that you know he kills his his first wife and children and his wife kills him and they that that's sort of the cost of this like type of hero that we built like goes and kills monsters to make the world safe like

you can't, you can't turn that off. Like there is, if, if you are like a violent monster slayer, like you can't come home and leave all your, your violence outside and that it's, it's inevitably going to have consequences like domestically. And I think, I think you see that so much in this play that someone who is out there having, and who in a lot of ways, like he's the pinnacle of masculinity, but also we get a lot of these stories where he's sort of

gender bending and cross-dressing and there's a kind of fluidity that we see in his character and like that his death comes in this kind of gender, you know, that he and Hira have always been at it and that, you know, relationship with his wife and that this, that it is around women that his death comes about. Like I feel like that is in some ways kind of poetically just as well that his story is so much this like masculine thing

killing monsters, doing hero stuff. And, and it feels like there's this oversight about, about women and about home and, and that that's what keeps getting him is these, these kind of

like interpersonal domestic family things are what keep bringing him down when he's like doing such amazing things in these other parts of his life yeah and just even the way you phrase that made me think too like it's almost it's a little bit full circle too you know he kills his wife and children in a mad rage and then when he marries another one she ends up

Killing him not in a mad rage, like truly just accidentally. Like we don't even have that same kind of explanation that he gets from his other family. And yeah, that's, I mean, it's so true. And I think this is what makes Greek mythology and Greek tragedy so much more complex than the most of the, certainly like the popular mythology.

like adaptations and reception of it. Like it's just so much more cut and dry in versions now. And granted, I have not seen the Hercules with the rock, which I really need to. Can you please watch it? And then we can talk about it, please. Can we be movie discussion buddies? Because it is my favorite. I love it so much. You definitely told me to watch it the last time we talked. So yes, absolutely. I will watch it and you can come on and we'll just talk about it.

excellent. I'm always telling people like, do you want to watch, like discuss a movie with me? I'm like, yeah, please let me like the movies we dig podcast. They're like, you know, here's all the movies we can talk about. I'm like, what about Rockies? I want to talk about Rockies. And like somebody already talked to me. Oh, that's, that's the one movie I have really strong opinions. I'm not like a film person. I don't have classy, like sophisticated opinions about movies. I'm like, Oh, big explosions, things go boom. Like that's, that's my like,

I love Fast and the Furious. That's my lane of movies. And I just really, I want to talk about the Rock Hercules movie because it is, let's do this again. After you've seen it, please. I could talk about that movie forever. Not just for like dumb explosion reasons, but like as what it's doing in the realm of like thinking about what mythology does, it

God, it's so good. I keep hearing good things. So I need to just sit down and do it. I think the problem was as soon as I decided that it was off streaming services here. So I'm just going to pay some money and I'll watch it. I'm fine with that. Okay. Then we can discuss it. Yeah.

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Well, completely aside from that movie, my thoughts on the connection or like the sort of the way that they... Movies about mythology just tend to do the opposite of this. Like they don't make...

They make heroism what we think of it now. Like these just these great men going off and killing monsters and saving the day and coming home and living happily ever after with these pretty ladies. But meanwhile, like that isn't realistic. Like the realism is that a guy like Heracles could not live a normal life. Like he just couldn't. And even I told you.

In the way I sort of, it was hard to decide how to tell the lead up to their story before the play because I wanted to get in the backstory, but also like so many different versions kind of have it told differently or they just don't give you a timeline because it's Greek mythology and no one likes a timeline. So I basically told the like story.

I only origin aside from like the version that are not in the play beforehand. But what really stuck out to me was like, I think it was mostly Apollodorus because I think he's kind of one of the only like full sources of it. And of course he's so brief and,

Somebody once called him the TLDR of mythology. And I think about that all the time. So true. But he describes it as like that Heracles, you know, went and he tried to win this or he did win this archery contest against I always father and her brothers. And that was supposed to mean that he got to marry her. And her father was like, no.

no you killed your last wife and children like you can't which like fair dad yes reasonable point exactly and that just felt so real of like yeah like

Heracles is not the guy you want marrying your daughter. Like even in ancient Greece where it was kind of like, well, how much did we care what the women ended up doing? Like, no, no, even that it's like, nah, he, we all know he killed his wife and children. And like, he's been atoning for it all these years. And like, that doesn't mean that he just suddenly gets to, you know, marry anyone he wants.

And it's just so interesting the way that like that is just so real and how you would think of a human in real life. Whereas, yeah, in all the versions of I mean, obviously, Disney's Hercules is like something else entirely. I love it desperately. It does not show much of like the sort of the real darkness involved as a cartoon. Yeah, it's doing something different. It's not trying to do the Greek version.

your thing yeah yeah but then like you know say clash of the titans which is also not good but like it is a better example of like what we think of of what heroes do but even still you know people get a happy ending but it's like honestly yeah i mean the ptsd alone like you deal with stuff like that you're kind of you know you're a changed human and and this is such a great example of of yeah heracles not not being able to do regular person things and then

dying from it, which is all where I started talking about this, but it's just so interesting. Like, it's just so real. I love Greek tragedy so much. I think about it every time I get into it. And then it's like, I forget for another few months when I'm out and then I'm like, man, it's all just so good. And like, it's just so great.

Yeah, it was so hard. I was assigning some plays to my students this semester and like trying to like pick just a few. I can't imagine. How can I not do this one? Because then like this class is supposed to talk about so many things that aren't just Greek tragedies. But, you know, if we look at this, then we got to look at this play because, you know, they pair so well together. Then we also got to look at this story over here and...

Oh, it's so hard. It's so hard to just pick like just like two plays that we're going to read. I can't imagine having to pick and like and decide which ones that people learn because there are just so many and there's so many. They're fascinating for so many different reasons. What did you pick? Yeah. So, well, this is a sex and gender in the ancient world. And so we looked at Medea and Agamemnon. But it's killing me that we didn't because, you know, there's so much like I'm trying to do.

like sexuality and and also thinking about gender and I we're going to be looking at Lysistrata and like is this a feminist rallying cry thing or like is that not really like is it weird that we keep talking about this is like the feminist dream play and um and so then it's killing me that we didn't do humanities because it's so you know we've had I mean Athena comes up so much and um you know people had questions about like how come she does stuff that isn't like

you know, women like don't really do war and how come she's the goddess of war? I'm like, I, okay, I have to like, I gotta come back to the humanities again because I gotta talk about how like Athena is this like mean girl and she doesn't, you know, she always says she's gonna side with the man because she doesn't have a mom and like, you know, so it's, I mean, thinking about goddesses, but you know, I wanted to read the Homeric and it's not like we haven't read a lot of mythology, but, yeah,

You know, we did some Homer and we did Homer and Kim and then we did Medea and Agamemnon. And, you know, then we're also trying to talk about like real life women and, you know, looking at historical sources and looking at some. And we talked about monsters and monsters that are coded female. And it's so it was so hard to settle on just like a handful of things. Yeah. You could you could talk. You could do a class about like.

sex and gender that's entirely just looking at tragedies as as long as you don't care about the parts of life that are not represented accurately in tragedies which is a lot of it but um yeah it's it was it was really hard yeah can i i don't mean to i don't mean to totally derail this but can i go on like a tiny little rabbit hole of a thing that i think is so cool about this play there's a chapter i wrote a whole chapter in my dissertation like this was my road into this play

And I like, I love it a lot. And I just want to like point out how cool this is because it plays into a lot of this other stuff, but it's like a very nitty gritty, like linguistic-y, like close reading of some of the text. And yeah,

So one of the, basically my dissertation was about how gods speak in like oracles and things and like how, because in Sophocles, like one of, you know, as much as you can't like the Sophocles and hero this and that, the thing that like is pretty is in fact like seven for seven across Sophocles is the divine tries to communicate and people screw it up terribly. Like people just swing and a miss and, or they think, you know, they think they understand it and they don't, or they understand it and they try and avert it and they can't.

But like miscommunications with the divine is like, that is a thing that Sophocles seems very concerned with. And so one of like, this was the first play I started working on because I tried to write about Euripides and my advisor was like, the questions you want to ask are not Euripides questions. Like, I think they're actually Sophocles questions. So she's like, you know, look at some of these. And so I was looking at this a lot from the perspective of like, why do these miscommunications happen so much? Like,

you know, with Oedipus, we have like kill your father and sleep with your mother and how that works out. And so one of the things that I think is really actually like a real driving force throughout this play is that we have this prophecy that either like, and we have like, there's a timeline, like a, like a countdown time of sorts. And like at this moment, and we get, we get this, like there's sort of five different versions of a prophecy about Heracles that he got from Zeus, which is weird to get it from Zeus and not Apollo in the first place. Yeah.

And it's kind of, I mean, it kind of highlights like what a dick move it is that like Zeus, like he goes, he gets it from Zeus at Dodona, which is one of the, I mean, it's, you know, usually it's Apollo and Apollo is like famously tricky and we can't tell what he means. And he's, you know, it's Heracles' dad that gave this like imprecise and confusing prophecy that sets all, I think this like really does kind of drive the plot along in a way that like

So at this moment, like, and Deionera says it, and we get it from the chorus, and she even mentions, like, she wrote it down. Like, we get this mention, like, you know, this was written down. And that at the present moment, either Heracles would die or he would have a rest from his labors. Right? And so you get this. And I think that a lot of her actions are sort of motivated by the fact that

as one reasonably would, you think like it's A or B. Okay, well, he's not dead. He's coming home. So he's going to have a rest from his toils. So he's going to be home finally. And like it matters that I protect my house because he's going to be here. Like if he's off doing whatever, not my problem, but he's done with his toils. And so I think like she very reasonably interprets this as saying that

Like it's either this or this, but not both. And it turns out as Heracles and like people, people mentioned this later, like, oh, the only rest from toils is death.

It wasn't an either or. It was actually like a... It was a both. And the fact that, like, this extremely plausible misinterpretation, like, it's the natural way to read it. That I think that makes her... That drives some of her actions because she's not worried about him dying. So maybe she would think harder about this weird centaur blood if she didn't think that he was safe. But he isn't dead. So she doesn't, like...

that it's the other option and this kind of thinking about like how how that either or works in a way that is kind of misleading right and it's kind of and you could say like are the gods is zeus just being mean like is he trying to set this up as a riddle of some sort um but you have exactly the same kind of like misinterpretation and i think we see a similar like i think sophocles is really interested in how language works as part of my like my dissertation was on this but

Because Oedipus, we get a similar, right? That he can't solve like the riddle-y type prophecy that he gets. And he's the guy that famously solves riddles. Like that's his thing. And that he can't solve the riddle. And so I think like Sophocles is really interested in how communication and miscommunication works. Like how language works. And this is a time like the Sophists are in Athens. Like we've got like...

How language works is a really, it's stressing a lot of people in Athens out that you can teach people to make bad arguments sound good. Like people can be deceptive with words and how does language, like how does communication even work? And, but it's with the story about Nessus and the cent, like the centaur,

You get like an exact little microcosm of the thing that is happening in the play as a whole that we think Heracles is safe because we think he's at rest to his toils, which isn't the same as death until we find out they are. And Nessus is like, this will make sure that he will never love any woman more than you.

Which again, like the natural way to interpret that is like, oh, he'll love me. He'll love me the most as opposed to like, no, he'll never love anyone but you because he's dead. He can't love anyone because he's dead. And like that's like there's the same kind of like

there are riddles that she doesn't realize are riddles. And the fact that like, I think that that is this like little kind of subtle trope that runs through here. But I think, you know, and you contrast that with Lycus, the messenger is, it's just straight up lying. Right. And like, that's a different, like he's lying for motivations. There's language that we misunderstand for very reasonable. Like no one thinks they and they're screwed up. Like it makes sense that you would be.

You know, you would think that this means that because that's the most obvious interpretation. And so I think it's this kind of really subtle thing about this play, but it's really cool in the way that I think Sophocles is really interested in how...

Like how people make meaning. When I say something, how do you decide how to interpret it? You know, are you going to interpret it maliciously? Are you going to interpret it at face value? Are you going to like think about it and be like, hmm, this feels like a riddle. Maybe I should figure out if I know what's going on here. And that the fact that people don't think harder about that they just take things at face value is kind of if we want to talk about there being some like tragic flaw, like, you know, that people always come back to this like, oh, the tragic flaw.

In Sophocles, people's mistake that they make most of the time is thinking that they understand something that they don't understand. I'm like, that's a gut. Like, that's so relatable. Like, I'm never going to have to worry about, you know, sleeping with my mom and killing my dad. But I'm like,

God, the fact that like the idea that I could walk myself into a terrible situation because I thought I, I thought I knew what was going on and I don't like, oh, and you know, and you see this in all of his plays in different ways that I think he's kind of obsessed with the way that, that language works at this time when everyone is thinking about how rhetoric and language and persuasion are operating. Like I think, so I just, that's one of the things that I love about this play is that you get these like little like riddles or like tricksy phrases.

phrasing that like the gods never technically lie, but they sure do make you, you know, make you like you, you misinterpret them a lot because you are, you are operating in the way that we all do without thinking about it. And I think his plays force you to think about that aspect while also doing all of these other, like pulling your heartstrings and like, oh, Deonera, and you don't hate Aioli. You could hate her, but you don't. And like, it does,

I think this play works on so many really interesting different levels. So I just... I can't talk about this play without talking about how this prophecy is such a cool thing that operates throughout this as it's going along. No, thank you for bringing it up. I did...

I mean, I feel like I didn't harp enough on the prophecy. Now I'm going to look at my script for it. But because the centaur thing, like the Nessus's line to me is so like obvious, but not obvious. Like it's obvious because we know. But yeah, if you're in Daenerys position, it's not obvious that like, yeah, you're the last person he's ever going to love because he's going to be dead.

The Oracle in Oedipus is one of my favorite things. And I, you know, kind of inadvertently introduced way too many listeners to the idea that like you literally can never trust the Oracle. And it's fairly because of like Oedipus. And I'm like,

So like, that's not totally true. I'm sorry. It's to the point where, and it's adorable and hilarious, but like, I will post a picture of Delphi and people will be like, what did you do? You went and you went to the Oracle and like every time. And I'm like, okay, like it's fine. Like the real Oracle, they kind of did trust. It's just like in Sophocles, I guess, primarily. Which is such a, well like, okay, so here's the thing that I'm like, and not everyone agrees with me on this, but that disclosure aside.

So I think, like, because they do trust the, and most questions that you actually gave to the actual Oracle at Delthi were, like, simple yes or no questions. And yet in Sophocles and Herodotus, who happened, like, we know that they were, you know, we have accounts that they're friends.

I think this is a thing that they're talking about. Like, I think, like, we see this as a literary trope that shows up in both of them, but not really before that. And I think this is, like, a Sophocles, Herodotus, at the time when everyone is starting to, like, kind of freak out about, like, because, like, oracles never lie to you, right? Like, they never lie, but they are misleading in a way that, like, technically true, but never what you would think it would mean.

And I think, like, I think that that is such a, like, a thing of that moment when, like, both these guys are hanging out in Athens and allegedly they're hanging out with each other. Like, I just...

I realize like this, I can't ever prove any of this, but I'd like to think that they're like hanging out, drinking wine, being like, dude, have you ever noticed like how words are so weird and like having this because it's, you see it all the time. Like in like Herodotus has these, you know, if you attack a great empire will fall. And then it comes back and he was like, but you said I would win. He's like, did I say you would win? I said an empire would fall. Did your empire not fall? And it's like, ah, darn it. You got me Delphi. Like,

And so I, yeah, that like, but again, like people react in the way that you absolutely would. Like someone tells you you're going to kill your dad and sleep with your mom. You get as far away from who you think are your mom and dad as possible. Like, yeah, you didn't have all the information you, you know, who you think mom is, is wrong. Like you have a fundamental mistake under there, but.

That's the most reasonable thing to do is get so far away from mom and dad that this could never happen. And so, and I get like, I think another thing we see in how these miscommunications happen, people are like the way that emotional investment, like that people hear what they want to hear or they, they don't think more about it because they are angry or sad or whatever, afraid. Right. And like,

Yes, technically, you know, as Delphi in Herodotus is like, you should have asked a follow-up question. And Kreese is like, oh, yeah.

No, you're totally right. And but like, I mean, imagine someone hearing the prophecy that that Oedipus gets and being like, OK, but who are my mom and dad? Like, no one would do that. No one would do that. You are going to like have your breath taken away and be like, no, that can't be true. No way. And then you're just going to book it like you're just going to get out of town.

And so I feel like it's this, like we get the ways that like on a language, like on a word level, you can misunderstand things, but also how the way that you feel about things fundamentally shapes the way that you, you receive things, right? Like someone tells you something and you're mad at them. So you're not going to believe them. Or, you know, like when Tiresias tries to tell people things and like Oedipus is mad at Tiresias because he thinks that Tiresias is a plot

is plotting. So of course he's going to be like, you know what? Screw you, buddy. Like, absolutely. No, no, you're wrong. And you're plotting and I hate you. And I don't have to listen to anything you say. And like outside the play, we're all like, oh, Tiresias is always right. But someone in that situation where, you know, you're doing all this stuff and you think people are plotting, like

you are in a very plausible state to not hear what someone is saying, even if they're trying to tell you the truth. And so I think, you know, if you want to talk about there being like a Sophoclean thing, it's not some weird idea of what the hero is. It's like, it's that people react in exactly the way you expect they would. And it destroys them. Like people doing exactly the normal thing to do in that situation. And it destroys you. Like,

Oh, yeah. And it's so much more tragic that way, right? Like, that's so much more of a human tragedy of just behaving in a human way. But also, I think in the case of Oedipus and this one, like...

It's that they all, I mean, they behave, they definitely react in the most common way, the most natural human reaction to these kinds of oracles. But then on top of that too, like in order for, for either of them, you know, either of the, the prophecies to be taken like accurately to have avoided this.

the person listening would have had to just go to the worst case scenario immediately. Like that, that would be the only way, you know, like sure. Dianera could have understood this Oracle from Dodona scenario,

like she could have understood it accurately but she would have had to have been like a nihilist like she would have had to just been like my life is shit so this must be shit this must be the absolute shittiest possible answer and the gods are being dicks like for no reason and like yeah in a way that if that's not the answer you look like an absolute like paranoid like you look you know you look like you're a conspiracy theorist about like no maybe the word that said this wasn't really that and like you look like you're connecting like

red yarn. Yeah. It's that meme. Exactly. It's like, yeah. But then like that's, you know, I mean, you only sound paranoid if you're wrong. Yeah. You know? And,

And yeah, so I feel like that there's like such this cool, like sub, like just under the surface about like all of all of this kind of stuff. And then at the end, like the person who gives the prophecy and the play, like lest we forget, the last lines are there is nothing here that isn't Zeus.

And, like, we cannot forget, like, Zeus set this in, like, why? Like, are the gods just monsters? Like, I mean, maybe. But, you know, what are we supposed to make of that? That at the end of all of, he's on fire. And, you know, everything is terrible. Like, the worst possible outcome of everything has happened here. Hylas is supposed to marry Eoli. That's super weird. Like, son, could you marry my would-have-been, like,

slave slash wife like and also I'm gonna go die or or not who knows really but probably gonna go die now and then Hylas like I like to read the manuscripts aren't sure if like it's a chorus or Hylas at the end who's saying the last lines but somebody ends with yep that's all Zeus like

It like forces you to just stare at like the bleak nihilism of this. Like what kind of Zeus would do this to his son? Like not even just to a random hero, to his son. Yeah. And his like most famous son, you know, like his most heroic hero. Yeah. Like,

Oh, yeah. That just reminds me too, because the first lines of the play really struck me also, which are just like Diana saying that, you know, they say you can never tell if your life has been good or bad until it ends in death. And like, that is also just so indicative of like the whole of the play, but also just the very end, like another, it's kind of another full circle moment of that.

Just to stray a tiny bit, you just reminded me of a question I had, which I realize I can ask you. The name of Hylos versus the name of Heracles' boyfriend, Hylos, what is the connection there in terms of the Greek? Is it...

That is – so I think the vowels are the same. Let me just double – let me double check with the spelling. Because in English they have an A versus an O, but I don't know about the Greek. I didn't look. Yeah. So let me just –

So I'm going to double check what the Greek for both of these is. Okay. So they are... So they're slightly different. So it's like Upsilon Lambda Lambda Omicron Sigma. So it's where we get for Heracles Sun is usually spelled. So there's like two L's in it. Yeah. As opposed to Upsilon Lambda Alpha Sigma. So they are different. But I mean...

by most of our reconstructions of what like they're they're not so different yeah um and so yeah i think the like i think i think people must have i don't i don't know offhand of any stories that say that like heracles named his son after hylus it just feels so likely feels so possible you know yeah i mean it seems like and especially given how much you know going back to like helen's name being in like people punning on like diana this and that like

Greeks in ways that constantly amaze me. I don't have to write a book, but if I did, I would want to write a book about the weird insistence on like wordplay at times that it feels so inappropriate for puns. I am just low-key obsessed with how, you know, you get this in the Bacchae about like pantheist and pantheist, like the word for grief and suffering and like

you know, man, you're sure suited to your name. I'm like, this is a weird time. Like, you're threatening him. And it just seems like a weird time to be like, Pentheus. Do you get it? Do you get what I did there? Pentheus? Because your name, like...

That's not very threatening. Like, you're just goofy. And, you know, like, you know, Day and Era or, like, Helen. But you get a lot of these places where, especially in tragedies, where things are always going terribly. And you get these kind of people, like, thinking about, like, ah, because the word. And so I don't know of anyone who, but it would be, like, that's very much the kind of thing that someone like obscure Alexandrian or, like,

some like Byzantine scholar would be out there being like well actually I've done some research on this and I'm pretty sure that those are connected but I don't know of any attestations of that but I will I will check and get back to you because it is a very good question and uh I mean yeah it's it's a little weird yeah a lot of a coincidence you know it is like that feels a stretch I do explain it in the episode because of course all of it all it is is like vocal so I'm like I'm

saying Hylos here. I'm saying Hylos, but also they're spelled very similarly because in the works I've had, like the English transliteration is exactly the same. It's like H-Y-L-A-S or H-Y-L-L-O-S. You're like, like that's, yeah. My instinct is that I would pronounce those exactly the same. Exactly. You know, there are, I mean, sure, like

Look at the accent and the vowel. But I mean, they're so similar that I have to... Yeah, now I know I'm going to go... I can add this to my list of weird wordplay that I find deeply out of place and strange the more you look at it. Yeah, it's just so interesting just because like... I mean, Hylas is definitely Heracles' most kind of famous...

boyfriend but also the one that like died a tragic death it wasn't his fault which is pretty rare for men with young boyfriends in greek mythology generally like well and anyone close to heracles yes dying from not his fault is also like strange oh my god just reminds me of the i mean in both in sophocles and in the myth surrounding it like the way that if it is dies is like

how are you like this Heracles? Like in Sophocles, it's like he kicked him off a cliff and in the rest of the myths, it's like he threw him against a wall. You're like, okay, well, both are great. You seem like a cool guy. You seem super well adjusted. Love this for you. But like, I feel like it is like, I feel like so much of it comes from that, like

you can't like that's the cost of of having you know of of being someone who can like do all of this violence and you know that like sometimes the violence comes out when it's not supposed to like it comes out at times when it's not appropriate and and I think that is like that is part of the cost of like if you are like if you are a weapon of a person like you

Sometimes that weapon, there's going to be people who get hurt that aren't supposed to be. He's not a monster. Heroes are supposed to kill monsters. And you fundamentally are misdirecting that. And that's one of the things I think is so cool about tragedy, especially, that you really see the cost of heroes, the cost of heroism that...

you know Ajax and his honor like he takes his own life and then we spend the second half of the play seeing what that did to his like wife and child like you you have to you see the cost of like oh

So these heroic heroes seem cool to you, huh? Well, like, let me show you what that actually looks like. When we start thinking about, like, what happens after the hero adventure ends and he has to, like, he goes home or he goes, you know, he's, like, what happens after the, like, happily ever after? He got the thing he was supposed to go and he did his hero thing. And, like, you know, I mean, it was with, like, Jason and the Argonauts stories, which, like,

And that the kinds of things that that were fine when you're out questing like, oh, you're you are seducing a woman to or like charming a woman into helping you out. Like, well, try that at home. Like you're going to you're going to try and charm like you're going to you're trying to marry a princess to to upgrade in life like that. That works when you're out there. That doesn't work.

When you're in here. And I think like you see so many different variations of, you know, you don't get to kill all the suitors. Like you're the king. You can't kill all the suitors. You absolute maniac. Like you can't do that. And it's not even like us as modern people saying that. It's like...

Inside the story, like we get to see the suitors and the underworld being like, that was weird. What happened? Why? Why did that happen? I'm like, the whole town is mad. Like Athena has to come and be like, guys, be cool, because it's so clearly out of line. Like no one's like, oh, no, that's fair. They deserve that. No one says that. Yeah. Inside the story itself, we get all of the people being like, no, you can't. You can't do that. Yeah.

And so, yeah, I think like tragedy especially does such a good job of like taking the stories that we sometimes, and if we look at closely at Homer, I mean, I think he problematizes a lot of this stuff as well, but these stories that we might uncritically think are like so cool and like, oh, what a hero. And then when we think about the implications of that and what it, like what the cost to family and self and whatever, like what all the costs of heroism is, like,

Maybe society needs Heracles. Like those monsters were eating people. Like maybe, maybe we do need a Heracles, but there is a real cost to it. Like we have, we should at least think about the trade off there. Like we should think about the trade off of like the trauma of young men going to war. Like we should think about the cost of, I don't know, you know, any of these number of different things that like when you, when you pit a person against society, like their family, their obligations to family and society, like,

it doesn't end well. Like there is a cost to, to any of these decisions that we make. And like, we need to look at like with, you know, with our open eyes, like we need to look dead at like all of the, the costs that are associated with these things that we think are important. And I think tragedy, again, like not just tragedy and I hate to be like a tragedy exceptionalist, but tragedy. And a lot of what I love about tragedy is that it, it shows you what,

what the maybe unintended consequences or the costs of these things are. And I think, and then it just leaves you to sit with it. Like it just ends like, yep, that sucks, doesn't it? Well, you and all of your fellow citizens, I guess, walk out of here and go talk about what you think we should do about this because the play is not going to give you any answers. The play is just going to tell you that like, man, this is a shitty situation, isn't it?

I think that is what makes tragedy so unique because it can do that so much like with so much more detail and first person of it all, you know, compared to Homer or the myths or whatever, right? Like it does have like a unique story.

viewpoint into all of this because you get it from the person's voice or you get to just see it happening or hear about it happening more like you know rarely do we get the violence anywhere on stage but you you hear about it from these voices and so and it yeah I mean I can see what you mean though about it being it is it is different from the way that they might make the same similar points in other works but tragedy does it in this like much more sort of powerful and visceral way but just because of the format and because of the way they can like

Add so much more detail to the story, too, because of it's just dialogue or people get their own monologues. You get to hear from the chorus and all these different reasons. Well, and I think the fact that you also like the fact that the action is offstage, that you are experiencing it the same way the characters are experiencing like horrible thing that happened, like a messenger is coming in and telling you about it. And.

like you as the audience are experiencing that tragedy the same way that their main characters are. And then you can't help it. Like you are in a similar position to them thinking about how am I reacting? How would I react in that situation? That it puts you in there as a part of this conversation, as opposed to me saying like, well, it's important to understand that, you know, like I'm not preaching at somebody, but I'm like, you are a part of that story. And then you have to like grapple with like,

But I think Heracles is important. Like we need it. We need Heracles. Like you can't have hydras roaming around the countryside. Like that's a problem. But also like this is really bad. And how do we like I don't know what the answer is. But and I think part of like that you you grapple with that more or less in silence like you're watching a play.

And then you, but you're doing this with all of the citizens. And I think there's something really important in terms of sort of civic discourse about we all went through this like really rock in a hard place kind of situation of like, well, we can't not have this, but we can't not have that. And they can't coexist. Like, oh, how do, like what would have been the right answer in this situation? And then you and all your citizens go out and talk about this together. And I think that that is an important part that sometimes get lost when we read them on paper that like,

All, you know, the vast majority of people in the city are experiencing these plays and people from other cities. And...

And that it is a place where people can grapple with some of these questions a little bit removed, right? A step or two, like it's not their own life. We're not saying like, what should we do about the Peloponnesian War? But we are thinking about what the cost to, you know, the cost of violence, like the cost of, you know, I mean, a ton of these plays were performed during the Peloponnesian War that we're thinking about, like, what is the cost of violence?

you know, military violence and what is that costing us at home and what is that costing us as a people and our empire and our whatever, like that it gives you this invitation and this kind of inroad to thinking about these important questions. And you're coming from a place of like, how do they viscerally react to seeing this, this situation that is kind of like,

important questions that I'm thinking about as a citizen. So I think there's something like really fundamentally important about that. It's like when you walk away from a movie or a play and you just have to discuss it with somebody. Yeah. The first thing like you walk out like, what do you think? Yeah. And you just have to sort of decompress or that's not the right word. But, you know, yeah, just just talk about it afterwards. Oh, it's so beautiful and fascinating. This was so wonderful. Yeah. Thank you so much.

And we will chat more in the future. I have like so many more things we could chat about. But thank you so much. My hottest takes about things can be found on Twitter. I'm at Aipa Stone on Twitter. And other than that, I mostly just teach in and thinking about tragedy these days. So if you're in the Pacific Northwest, we're doing a production of the media this spring. So for anyone that's in the Pacific Northwest,

come end of April, come, come visit. And I'll send you, I'll send you the info. So yeah, come on. Yeah. I have a guest room. You're welcome to come stay and we could, we could go hang out where I'm organizing a little symposium to go along with it. So it'll, it'll be, it'll be really cool. Yeah. I'm gonna have to talk to you about this more for sure. Excellent. Well, thank you so much. As always, this was a huge pleasure and I look forward to doing this again sometime. And you've seen the movie with the rock and Hercules.

Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to Amy for coming on the podcast. It was so much fun to chat, as you can tell in the episode you just listened to. I just want any excuse to talk about Greek tragedy and to hear from people who have studied it so, so much more than I have and who know the ancient Greek a little bit.

Ugh, just so cool. So huge thanks. You can follow Amy on Twitter, like she said, and I've put her handle in the episode's description. And especially if you're interested in studying classics in university or college, as you Americans say, I'd recommend following Amy and a lot of my guests really because, but Amy is really active in student outreach and just generally classics outreach. And so many of my guests are in the absolute best of ways, the most welcoming and inclusive of ways. So if you are a Twitter person,

It's really nice to interact in those spaces and you really get a sense of like how classics can be. And if you love tragedy as much as I do and are in university or high school in Canada or the US right now, stay tuned because Amy and I recorded a little announcement of something that is just super duper cool. Something that you can partake in that's coming soon.

Let's Talk About Myths TV is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Smith is the Hermes to my Olympians and also handles so many podcast related things from running the YouTube to creating promotional images and videos to editing and research. The podcast is hosted and monetized by ACAST. Thank you all as always. I fucking love my job. I am Liv and oh my gods, I love Greek tragedy so much.

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