The cultural pressures of the Persian Wars likely influenced the Greeks to emphasize Trojan War narratives, which represented Greeks banding together against an external threat. This made the stories more popular and provided a reason to write them down.
The Homeric epics evolved from oral traditions with less fixity to greater fixity, eventually becoming textualized in the 6th century BCE. The process involved storytelling traditions that were sung in parts and eventually compiled into the texts we know today.
The Persian Wars made the Trojan War narrative more appealing to Greek audiences because it represented Greeks uniting against an external enemy, similar to how the movie 300 resonated during the Iraq War. This cultural context likely influenced the emphasis on these stories and their eventual writing down.
The Trojans are portrayed as more sympathetic because the Iliad is not just about Greeks versus Trojans; it’s about the human condition and the problems of heroes. The story emphasizes that the Trojans are part of the race of heroes, making them worthy opponents and not simply villains.
The Iliad reflects the political struggles of its time by depicting a society transitioning from monarchy to oligarchic and democratic models. The Achaeans represent an oligarchic aristocracy, while the Trojans’ monarchy is criticized for prioritizing family interests over the people, leading to their downfall.
The 'heroic age' represents a period in Greek mythology marked by the wars around Thebes and Troy, which Zeus used to end the race of heroes. This era is seen as a break from the past, with the Iliad and Odyssey serving as cultural memories of this transition.
Modern readers often misunderstand the Iliad as a celebration of war because they focus on the glory of heroes and battles. However, the Iliad actually critiques war, showing how violence and conflict harm both individuals and communities, and ultimately, the only good reason to fight is to protect loved ones.
The Iliad challenges monarchy by showing how the Trojans’ royal family prioritizes its interests over the people, leading to poor decisions and ultimate defeat. The story suggests that monarchies, unlike oligarchies or democracies, cannot make decisions for the good of the city.
The evolutionary model suggests that the Iliad evolved over time from oral storytelling traditions, moving from less fixity to greater fixity before being written down. This model emphasizes that the text we have today is the result of a long process of development and adaptation.
Some scholars argue that the Iliad was written down in the 9th or 8th century BCE because this is when alphabetic writing first appeared in Greece. They also believe this timing is closer to the supposed Trojan War, making the story more historically relevant.
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Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and I am your host, Liv, here with another fascinating conversation in my series of Bronze Age and its Collapse episodes.
Today I spoke with returning guest Dr. Joel Christensen who came on to talk about oral storytelling. Not just the stories themselves of Homer and the epic cycle but just the concept of this as a
practice what we do what we don't know about how oral storytelling came about how long it lasted how it was that these things were eventually written down into works like the Iliad and the Odyssey that we still have today and
All of the bits and pieces that go into this like utterly mind boggling topic that spans so many timeframes like we are going well beyond the Bronze Age here but we are looking at how the Bronze Age impacted the storytelling of those later periods and
what we do and do not know about them. Oh, it's absolutely fascinating. I can't even succinctly explain what we talked about. So I'm just going to let you listen. We had a great chat. Joel has been on the show before to talk about Homeric epic romance.
broadly and will be returning soon because as you'll hear at the end of this, oh, we got to talk Odysseus and some heroes. That's coming in the future. But for now, oh, this, I mean, this has to be one of my favorite episodes just because of my utter obsession with the transmission of these texts and I can't wait for you to hear it. So sit back and enjoy a little dive into the ancient world of oral storytelling.
Conversations from Homer with Love. The evolution of oral storytelling with Dr. Joel Christensen.
I've been looking at the Bronze Age for this series and trying to like tease out, you know, like what exactly is happening in something like Homer because it does, you know, they were kind of, I think a lot of the intention was to recall the Bronze Age that came before and kind of look at what little evidence survived for them and kind of develop stories based on that. But I've never really dug too
too deep into, you know, the sort of history. So yeah, I'd just love to hear more about, maybe give my listeners like a little rundown on oral storytelling as a tradition. And then we can kind of go from there and talk about all the weird and I don't know, wacky things they did when they finally wrote it down. Okay. Yeah. I mean, just wherever you want to go, you know, I'll follow you. Great.
But yeah, I mean, so the tradition of it, the before it got written down, like, you know, how much do we know about what was going on? And in terms of the, I mean, I don't know what kind of, I guess, record exists of what was happening before the thing that we have now that is Homer. Yeah, well, so here's the problem, right? We have almost no evidence. Yeah.
Yeah, that's what I was imagining when I asked. Anything, right? No, no, we have nothing. In fact, the only evidence, okay, let me backtrack a little bit. Like, we have some things, right? But it's not like we have, you know, catalog entries saying people were performing the Iliad at this time and place.
Anything we have that we've cobbled together is pretty much from internal evidence of the poems and then random evidence from other places. And so, you know, the scholarly sort of community on this topic are so all over the place that what I'd like to do is to give you like two, three different extremes, if you will.
All right. So for your interest, like there's one extreme, which is that, you know, there were oral storytelling traditions, but the Iliad came into its form in like the coast of Turkey.
as early as the ninth century BCE, and then made some winding passage to dictation in, say, the sixth century BCE, when somehow it was written down, and then we've more or less gotten that text. Right. So that's one model that posits
a fixity between the content the ancients had and the one that we have, and that locates it for linguistic and topic reasons, like in Turkey, right? Near Troy, right? Another model that's similar to this one that I think is as, let's say, suspect is
is the idea that Barry Powell and some others have, and that's that the alphabet was basically adopted in Greece in order to write down the Iliad and the Odyssey in like the ninth or eighth centuries BC. The problems with this is that there's no evidence for it. The reason we've made this argument is that's when we see like alphabetic writing in the area in the initial part. And that's also when people want Homer to be
Because it's closer to the so-called actual Trojan War. And there's a spoiler alert there, like it wasn't an actual Trojan War. A much more complicated model, and the one that clearly I'm leaning towards because I'm giving it last, is an evolutionary model.
Now, the clearest and probably most well-known version of this is Gregory Nagy's evolutionary model. He talks about it a lot. But I think people tend not to understand what's meant by it. And I think another reason why it's hard for people to buy is while Nagy is probably the most prominent philosopher,
scholar of Homer in the United States in the past 50 years, he doesn't always translate his work well for larger audiences. And we as Homerists haven't considered what I think is an important question, which is what are the material and cultural conditions that persuaded people to write down the Iliad and the Odyssey?
All right. So let me just, and I'm going on too long as usual, but let me just give you- No, no, this is exactly what I want to hear. I'm very excited. Yeah, let me give you the sketch of the evolutionary model. Great. All right. We know from internal evidence, some external evidence, that the Homeric epics were orally composed.
We have no idea how long the oral composition tradition went, but we do know that there's enough similarity between certain formula and metrical patterns in Sanskrit and Greek that we can probably trace back oral storytelling traditions thousands of years.
But that's just speculation. We know from early Greek writing, from linear B, that there are similar metrical shapes and that there probably was an oral storytelling, even heroic storytelling tradition that we might understand it during the Mycenaean period. But it doesn't mean that we have anything from there at all.
Right. We one of our challenges is that we don't have good evidence for oral storytelling traditions outside of Greece. So eventually I'll get to the evolutionary model. But one thing people like to talk about is like commonalities between Greek epic and ancient Near Eastern storytelling traditions like those that we get in the Hebrew Bible or in the Gilgamesh traditions.
But they seem to be coming from somewhat different places. And so that sort of leaves us in a gap of knowledge and evidence. What we really think about when we talk about the development is how we move from oral composition to a stage of the fixity that we now have.
in our text. And so the way I've been thinking about it, and so what I do notionally and when I teach about it now is I combine what I call like the Iliad as a diachronic object with Nagy's evolutionary progression. And the basic idea is that we have storytelling traditions that move from
less fixity to greater fixity, and then became textualized as we know it, following a process that is more or less open with different narrative traditions right up into the 6th century BCE. We know there were other epics that weren't written down. What we know from internal evidence is that the stories were probably sung in parts.
Right. And so I want to give a macro view and then go back to that detail, that parts thing, because it's important. So the basic argument is that there are many different versions of the story of Achilles, of the rage of Achilles, and that the Trojan War narrative is a setting, not a story itself. And so we know from like we have manuscript variants for the beginning of the Iliad, one that gives us a poem that was about the rage of Achilles and the rage of Apollo.
Right. Which is a different focus than what we get in the Iliad that we have where there is a raging Apollo. But he only rages for like like nine lines or something. Right. It's a short amount of time. It's a very different type of poem. So it's pretty clear to people that you have variations that are significant well into the classical period.
And that and we had two basic problems to think about. One is, how do we get from the model of storytelling we see inside Homeric Epic, which is like a dude playing a liar and singing a song at dinner to like 24 poems, 24 books. Yeah. Right. That in performance time lasts like 18 hours. Right.
Yeah. These are very different things. Yeah. This is weird. Right. Yeah. I'm increasingly convinced live that nobody in the ancient world read it beginning to end. Yeah. I think if you look at evidence in Plato, what they refer to, like most of the time they're referring to episodes. And I think what we really probably have going on in the Iliad more so than the Odyssey, but in both is think of them as like greatest hits albums.
That at some point got put together. Now, I want to caution that people, when I say something like that, they might think I'm a neo-analyst and I'm not. And I want to tell you what a neo-analyst is. Right. I needed that. Thank you. A neo-analyst is a neo-analysis is an approach to Homer that looks at its engagement with other people.
narrative traditions and imagines how the Iliad and the Odyssey were put together by drawing on motifs and patterns in those other poems.
The reason I'm not a neo-analyst is I don't think we have access to those poems, right? It's just speculation, right? And it assumes that there's someone there to pick and choose and put things together when I think that in the Odyssey that we have a more, for lack of a better word, organic production.
that were put together. And so I still haven't finished the explanation. But the reason I said greatest hits album is if you sit down and you look through the Iliad, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense there for the ninth year of a war.
war the catalog of ships the viewing of the viewing from the wall by helen the duel between paris and menelaus like why wait nine years to do that right a lot of this stuff just doesn't make sense the building of the achaean fortifications in book seven and then talking about them being destroyed in book 12 the iliad is anachronistic internally constantly
And so what I think we have here is evidence of someone bringing singers together at some point and saying, tell us the whole story.
Right. Which would have been odd in a tradition that was based on telling parts that are appropriate to specific contexts. Yeah. And we don't have the motivation to tell the whole story or the ability to do it until you have a certain scale. Right. And so when I think about where we got to that moment where you could create this, this dynamic poem that draws on the entire story, but tries to fit it into 12 days of action and,
I try to think about what's the cultural emphasis and what's the material possibility. You need money. You need time. But you also need a reason to write it down. And so my basic...
theory, which is completely unproved, I just have to say that, is that the cultural pressures that make us choose the Iliad over other tales have to do with the clash between Persia and Greece. And the way I think about it is this. We know from evidence of art, even the evidence of Greek tragedy, that the Trojan War story wasn't the only game in town.
Right. There's another big story tradition, and that's Thebes. And there are other story traditions that bring lots of heroes together to fight other bad guys. Jason and the Argonauts, the Caledonian boar hunt. I think of all of these narrative traditions as being engaged in what I call coalition narratives, where Greeks get to imagine themselves banding together with other Greeks against other forces.
But what happens in Asia Minor, starting in the middle of the 6th century, is that the Persians move in. They start to put pressure on the Ionian Greek city-states, the 12 major cities there. We hear about Athens sending them money from an early period. And what I think really happens from then on is that audiences,
poets, and their sponsors started to emphasize Trojan War narratives over other stories because they represented the Greeks banding together to go out to fight someone in the East.
much in the same way, and this is a huge leap, much in the same way that I think that the movie 300 was so popular in the 2000s because we were fighting wars in the Middle East and it engaged in those types of orientalizing motifs and othering people from the East. I think the Trojan War narrative as well appealed to audiences because they were conscious of
Greek versus the other in a way they hadn't been before because of the totality of the monolithic nature of the Persian empire as it developed in the Greek mind. And so I think that this tendency, this preference for the Trojan war narrative grew. And then once there was actual conflict, once the Persians invaded Greece, um, I think it became wildly popular and you really see it. Like if you follow later authors like the, uh,
rhetorician, philosopher, Isocrates. He lived to be 100. He spent his entire life saying, let's go fight the Persians again. He was influential on the House of Macedon. One of the reasons why Philip the Great and Alexander grew up thinking what real Greeks do is fight Persia is because of people like Isocrates.
And so Isocrates is like, you know, his floret is about like 380 BCE. Alexander invaded Persian 331. And I think if you look at Greek tragedy and Greek art, there's no good reason
to think that audiences in the fifth century were reading the same Iliad and Odyssey that we were. Yeah. Right. We get some snippets here and there by the time of Plato though, it seems that the epics that he was talking about and that Aristotle was talking about pretty close to ours. So we're looking at, I think, and this is sort of nauseous model as well. You know, stories that go back to a, Hmm,
legendary period. And then you focus on a couple themes. You have the wrath of Achilles, the homecoming of the heroes. And then these stories become selected and valued because of cultural moments, because of experience. And then they get told more. And then I think what we're really looking at is under the influence of Athenian empires,
where you have a context for performance, which is the festival to Dionysus, and the money to produce it and write down the text. You have the only real opportunity for creating the dictation, the transmission, and the copying of the text. And this accords in a couple ways with the only real evidence we have from antiquity.
We have stories about the so-called "Pasistratid Recension," which is when the tyrants, sons of Pasistratus, created the performance of Homer in Athens, which is about 530 to 510 BCE. And then we have good internal evidence of the poems that the final stage of the epic's formation went through sort of the Attic Ionic dialect that really Athens makes the most sense. But even then,
I don't think we were done. I think probably Plato had access to texts similar to ours. But it's really in the libraries of the Hellenistic period, not just Alexandria, but at Pella, at Antioch, in the Seleucid Empire, you have people attempting to create the authoritative Homer. And the reason they're trying to create the authoritative Homer is they're not in Greece anymore.
Yeah. They're projecting Greekness. They're trying to possess it in a way that's competitive and authoritative in the same way that when, when in the modern world, people immigrate to new places, sometimes it calcifies their identities. They try to produce them and perform them in ways that they wouldn't if they were just at home. Yeah. Right. And so I think, so that period, so that's how we get like, it's the libraries of Alexandria that
more or less bring together the texts we have, like 95%. And then it's a long period of editing and refining and scholarship that produces what we eventually get from Byzantine libraries. The finest manuscripts we have, the Venetus A and B, that you can find online if you search the Homer Multitext Project.
And so those manuscripts are from like the ninth and 10th century CE. Wow. Yeah. So if I, you know, if you go and tell someone, look, I got a complicated story about where text comes from. And it probably took about 2000 years. Most people are going to like,
just shake their head because they can't conceive of it. The best, the image I have, and you'll indulge me in a slight anecdote is of my toddler. So Layla's almost three years. I think the last time I was on the podcast with you, she might've been there with me, like making noise. She wasn't walking yet, right?
But this summer we took her on a Disney cruise, which in its way is like unfathomable and horrifying. We could do an entire episode about my feelings about Disney. Nobody wants that though.
Right. But we would be outside the boat, right? Giant boat. And we would say, Layla, look, there's the boat. And she'd say, yes, that is a boat. And then we'd go inside and we'd say, Layla, we're in a boat. And she'd say, no, this is not a boat. No, this is a hotel.
And we'd show her the window, be like, look, there's water outside. We're on a boat. She's like, no, this is not a boat. We are not on a boat. Because her little mind could not conceive of it. Because human beings don't think well in the big and the aggregates.
And so you have to learn so much about how oral composition works, about how we transcribe poems. And then you have to think materially as well. Like, what were people doing? Like, why would they write down an oral tradition? And then what happened after that? Because it's not like it was written once and everyone's like, all right, we're not going to perform poems anymore. Like, we're not going to sing these songs because we got it written down. Right?
Right. What probably happened, and this is an argument of a Danish Homerist, Minneskapt Jensen, is that once it was written down, people like put it away like a sacred object and then ignored it. Just because you wrote it down doesn't mean everybody knew you wrote it down. It was a World Wide Web to publish it on. Right.
So it probably went on living, which is why the editing of Homeric texts in the Alexandrian period was so important. So that's a very long story. So now I said I treat the Iliad as a diachronic object. And the reason I do is if you're asking how people are reading or engaging with the narrative, you have to ask what their assumptions were when they came to it. For us,
It's a translation. We sit down and we read it like a book because that's what we know. But I think that in antiquity, even someone like Cicero or Seneca in the Roman times probably just read some passages here and there and never would have sat down and gone beginning to end, scroll to scroll, because that's just not the habit of reading. And I think even further, if you go back to the performance culture,
there would have been no opportunities or rare opportunities to ever hear that whole Greatest Hits album. Instead, like you'd have a singer come, you'd have them perform a part. And then later on, you'd hear another one. And you spend your life hearing bits and pieces of the Iliad here and there in different forms. And then it maybe just may be you're one of the lucky people who could go to a full performance.
And then when you went, that's 18 hours. Pay attention for the whole thing. Yeah.
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I mean, I did it. I read, you know, through a translation like book by book. And I mean, yeah, each episode I think was like 30 minutes to 45 and then there's 24 of them. Like I was doing it weekly and that was a lot. Like, I mean, yeah, it's, it's so interesting. Like,
you know, I try, I try to emphasize this to people because I think one of the, the, the most common things coming to this kind of content when you are not, you know, heavy in to the research and you don't have all of the context, the context and the background of everything, like, you know, you, you think, I think we're all kind of led to believe until you know otherwise that like ancient Greece is this kind of like single thing, like, you know, everything kind of like, you just think of it as this place. Like, even if you pick up, you know, obviously the Iliads can be different, but like you pick up a book of myth, like,
unless you're picking up the original sources, like you're, you're getting it from somebody else who just like put together a version, but there's often no, like, I mean, even if there is an introduction that introduces some of this context, like half the time, nobody reads it. And you just end up thinking of this as like this thing, like Achilles did these things and, you know, Heracles did these things. And like, maybe like, you know, obviously that's a bad example because generationally they couldn't be friends, but like other heroes, you think like, Oh, they were pals, whatever, you know, like, but, but,
And I think it's so much more interesting to be able to go into it in this level of depth.
But I also think probably I annoy people with it sometimes, but I don't care. Like I would much rather think of it as like this tradition, longstanding, everything changed and nothing existed at once and there's no canon and yeah. Yeah. No, but that's the thing. So two things about it that I want to follow up with that I think is important is I think we often make the mistake of thinking that Homer's the authoritative beginning of tradition. But I always invite people to think about, well, what if it's the opposite?
What if Homer comes at the end of a tradition? And I think if you read the Iliad carefully, the internal support for that approach is pretty significant. Right. Another thing about it, you know, you were talking about reading it intensively. And the way I think about it, well, yeah, the way I think about it is that the Iliad and the Odyssey are very different poems, depending on the pace with which you engage with it.
When I was in graduate school, a faculty member named Seth Ben-Odedi said, you never truly read the Iliad unless you read it in Greek in under seven days. Yeah.
Okay, yeah. And you know, I mean, it's not easy. You have to set aside some time. You can do it. But it's a very different experience. And I think what people miss is that there is a cognitive and emotional difference between the way we read and the way you have enjoyed it in performance. The first thing is repetition.
and re-engagement. I think that performance of epic in the ancient world would have probably been cyclical. It would have been episodic. It would have been repeated. So it would be like, you know, watching Die Hard every Christmas, right? If that's your liturgical cycle. Every time it's a repetition, but it's different because you're different. You're engaging with it. The people around you are different, right?
Right. That's one. But again, it would also be like watching parts of Die Hard at different times of the year and piecing it together and thinking about those things. And then the pacing is different. When you sit down and read something, right, you can stop and linger. Right. You can take a break. You can move. But when you're listening.
Like you don't get to stop and think about things, right? You may not hear everything. You may make mistakes in what you're listening to. You're producing meaning at real, at a real time pace. That's very different.
experientially. And so I think the part of it is about thinking about that pacing, right? How the text will be different. I don't want to, I don't mean to like dismiss modern styles of reading, just that it's different. It's the difference between like walking along a path and then driving fast along it. You're noticing something different depending on the pace that you're taking through it. And then depending on, you know, your somatic response, right?
Feeling the ground, feeling the air without a vehicle is very different from clutching a wheel or hitting the clutch or something. And so I think it's important when we're interpreting and thinking about the style of storytelling in Homer to think about those differences in reception.
I mean, I think about this a lot when I have tried to, you know, really emphasize the difference between something like Homer and like the Aeneid or, or metamorphoses, just like the simplest nature of just like one was written to be written, like, and one was created out of this, you know, longstanding massive tradition that you just went into such detail about, like they were created in such different ways.
ways and with such different intentions but I think that now because of the way we interact with things like in our current time like it is really hard to find to like really recognize that if you're just picking it up yourself like because we just come at it like this is a book in my hands and I am meant to read it somebody wrote it for me you know yeah whereas like
you know, kind of everything from the Greek world, not everything, but a lot, most of it, like in terms of texts is coming from like a very different, you know, place. And even just mythology, like, you know, people are always asking me questions about like the missing pieces or how do you think this person would have felt about this or that? And I, I like to engage with, with the mythology, I think in, in,
you know, a closer way to what it would have been in the ancient world, which is that I'm like, you, you can't wonder what they would have thought. Cause that wasn't the point. Like there is no answer to your question because they weren't asking that question. So it's just not relevant. Like the reason they would have developed something is, you know, for such different purposes than, than the way we read something. Now they weren't necessarily thinking about character development and plot points and all these different things, right? Like that just wasn't the point. Um,
And I mean, sure, you could speculate on it now if you want. I personally am just like, nah, I don't want to speculate on it. Like, I want to look at what they gave us. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, my my shtick is always I want to think about how it it impacted people rather than sort of why why it's designed in such a way. You know, my the thing I always sort of snide thing I say is I'm not interested in supply side poetics.
I'm interested in like, you know, how did audiences respond? Why do stories work for them? Why would they respond to some more than others? Yeah. See, and I'm interested in why they cared about this detail of the myth versus, you know, something else like, yeah, like I don't, I don't care about what Heracles thought. Like I care about why Heracles did these things and like what that says about the tradition that gave him those things to do.
But like, yeah, it's much more interesting, I think, to think about the real people behind it versus, you know, the stories that they created. I don't know. The stories are obviously pretty good, too. It's my entire career. So I like them. You know, I'm a fan. Well, and speaking of the stories like, OK, going back to what you said about, you know, kind of being solidified with, you know, the interactions with the Persians and that kind of connection, like,
I'm interested in how that that works with the way the Trojans are are presented. I don't want to go too deep into that because I have so much else I want to talk about. But I am so fascinated always with the way that the Trojans are very sympathetic. Like, yeah, they're not really given to you like they should be an enemy. And so I almost wonder if that's kind of I mean, it's like just like a thought, but like.
if you know because they're recalling obviously i want to bring back to the bronze age like they're recalling this this cultural memory that they you know think maybe they have um of this war with troy um and and maybe it's more about like well in the old days you know the heroes behaved in these ways but now it's different so you know the way we would fight the persians would be different they're the enemy kind of thing versus like the trojans it's they seem so much more
like on equal ground, I guess, in terms of like who is or is not bad. It seems like between them, like I almost think if you have to pick a good guy, like the Trojans have more redeeming qualities. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, yeah. So I do want to distinguish between like my sort of theorist
that they selected for the Trojan War because it reflected their experiences and the contents of the Iliad. Because I think one of the problems with making, with thinking of the Trojans as Persians is what you just presented, right? But to be fair, I think although it's pretty clear or it's a more or less clear scholarly opinion that it's the Persian Wars that really represented
the Greeks to think of themselves as Greeks. What you really see is that, you know, the Greeks are pre-ethnostate, right? They didn't see themselves as a unity fully. And if you follow the tradition or the history of the Persian Wars, they're constantly backstabbing each other and taking money from Persia in order to beat other Greeks. So I think it's a far more complicated thing than we would have now, you know? I think it's a testament to the,
So multiculturalism in the Aegean that they do see the Trojans as potentially like them. But there's an interesting moment that speaks to your interest in book two. So usually people are defeated by the catalog of ships.
And they don't get all the way to the end and find, oh my goodness, there's a catalog of Trojans too. And the catalog of Trojans, like the one distinction that's made, one of the few places where we talk about foreignness or see foreignness in the Iliad is when we find out that they speak different languages. The Trojan and their allies are compared to like birds from different lands speaking different languages.
And this seems to be a broad, sort of linguistic diversity isn't well represented in Homer, but it does seem to be connected to Troy. There's a great moment. You've probably had an episode about this I missed, but in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, when Aphrodite appears to Anchises, the lie she tells him is that she had a Trojan nurse when she was young, and that's how she learned to speak his language. Hmm.
So there's a consciousness of linguistic difference. And a couple of people have written on this. A guy named Ross wrote an article called Barbarophanos, where he talks about Panhellenism and the Iliad. And then Hilary Mackey has a book called Talking Trojan, where they really look at Trojan difference. So the Iliad constructs difference for the Trojans, but it's limited because ultimately it's not about the Trojans or the Greeks. It's about
being a human being, right? And it's about the problems of heroes. And so I think one thing that helps us understand, if we could call it geopolitics of the Iliad and the Odyssey, is who are their main heroes, right? The main guy of the Iliad is Achilles. And he's from a nowhere place called Thea.
I think this is very intentional. I think this story became important because he's not attached to a Corinth, a Thebes, a Sparta or an Athens. He can become a vehicle for everyone to cheer for, boo for, boo against because he's not connected to them.
Similarly, Odysseus is from such a nowhere place that we still don't agree to this day that the place called Ithaca in Greece was Odysseus' Ithaca. And so I think it's the equivalent of picking a backwater place, right? Because you don't want your hero to be connected too much to the current power.
But, and then, you know, for another example too, I think the Greeks had different aesthetics about humanizing enemies than we do. Right. If the Trojans were barbarians in the sense of foreigners in the sense that the Romans depict some Easterners. Right.
they wouldn't be heroic opponents. They wouldn't be worthy of an epic song, right? So everybody at that age is part of the race of heroes, including the men abroad. And then even, you know, something that's a good comparison is that even when we get to something like Aeschylus' Persians,
The main character is Xerxes, ghost of his mother. And the Greeks explore their own suffering and loss by looking at the experience of
of the people they defeated. And so that's different. I mean, and just think about how different it is. The thought experiment I always have with students is, I think the closest thing we could do to tell the story of the Iliad in a modern context would be to set it in the war on terror, to have a coalition of the willing in Afghanistan made up of all the allies we cobbled together and to make our opponents the Taliban and to allow us to humanize
members of the Taliban in a way that we know from current events we're not capable of doing. Yeah. Right. But that would be the story. The story would be, you know, I don't know, an Australian, a British and U.S. contingents arguing with each other and falling out and then focusing, you know, on a family, you know, fighting these people in a battle they didn't choose. Because no matter how we feel about some, you know, about the Taliban, they didn't attack the United States. Mm hmm.
I wrote that into an episode on Tuesday. You have incredibly funny timing, like as a just random funny reference. This is in the air. Yeah, it's not irrelevant. It's not. People didn't start most of the wars that they're dying in. Yeah. Right. Right. And, you know, we don't actually know how many people died. And so I think like that, that part of what's magic about the Iliad
And that I think differentiates it from so much else is that willingness to humanize the enemy. Because the point is not about Troy falling. The point is not about the evils of the Trojan. The point is about the conflict and trouble that great men cause their own people. That's the point. And I think that's an interest in anxiety that's at home.
to the 6th century BCE as well, the 7th century BCE as well, when Greeks are negotiating conflicts among aristocrats. Yeah.
I okay this is a good push we really I would really like to do that episode on not just Odysseus now that we're talking because I think it needs to be more about Odysseus yes and like the heroes but like the way you're talking about this just reminds me how often and specifically recently when you know the new Iliad Emily Wilson Iliad came out that the way that that a lot of men view the Iliad as a story of like the glory of war is
When it is so distinctly not remotely about that. No, no. It's in fact about how war is dumb and violence is dumb. Literally. And the only good reason to fight is if someone's trying to kill your loved ones. Yeah. If you get any other message than that from the Iliad, then I don't know what you're reading or listening to.
listen to. I mean, it's the people, right? Like it's that it's the, the warmongering nature of certain people of just like war is always, you know, good and right. And like bad guys are bad. Like, but, but this is, I mean, again, I think part of the accomplishment of the Iliad that also makes it dangerous, um, is that it mirrors its audiences. Like it's just ambiguous enough
that you can read into it what you want. And I think that part of this is because of the process I talked about, about how it developed. And so I'll give you a hot button topic, right? That shouldn't be, is what's the relationship between Patroclus and Achilles, right? I mean-
Some people are very certain about it, right? But if you read the epic and look for the evidence, like, it's not clear, right? And I think the reason it's not clear is because
Really, it's very cagey. There were Greek city-states in which it was, to some extent, acceptable for two men to have a sexual relationship, to be partners. There are others where it's more sort of a pederastic, older man, younger man situation.
And there are others where you just, it's not common. Right. So if you want to be the best epic ever, right. You've got to be able to appeal to the largest audience possible. Right. And so if you go and look at the ancient evidence, Aeschylus, Plato, they were certain that Achilles and Patroclus were lovers.
And they have good evidence for it. But they were certain because they looked around at their world. That's what they saw. And Homer's just cagey enough that the epic made space for that reading. At the same time, it made space for them to go sleep in the same tent with women. So whatever's going on there is like, we don't understand it. But same thing with violence. I mean, the Iliad, in a way, it's the opposite of what we think. It's not...
performing an inception on us. Instead, it has enough space in the margins to accommodate our prejudices, our assumptions, our needs. And that's where it gets dangerous. Yeah. People are like, you know, a few years back and I don't know, one of the multiple online fits, many fits I threw of people, you know, the Christian classical education people were like, we need to read classical texts so you can be like Odysseus. Yeah.
I was like, I don't think you want to be like Odysseus. Yeah. Right. You know, I mean, he's kind of a shithead. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like, yeah. I mean, Achilles is another, like, it's like, you can want to be like Achilles, I guess. But like, has he given you reason to like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting. I mean, this, like the glory of these heroes, like it's,
If your glory is bound up in praying for your people to die and then being surprised when your lover or best friend is killed, maybe pick something else. Yeah, I'd say you probably. It is. No, but I think that's very much why when you get to Achilles in the Odyssey, even though it's Odysseus saying he can't trust him, Achilles says to Odysseus, don't bullshit me.
about glory Odysseus I would rather you know be a slave to a poor farmer um than to be prince of the dead like what does glory give you like it's not life like you're gone you don't get to experience it it's it's nonsense yeah and so I think that you know again people read what they want to ahead of time yeah um yeah and that's not that's not epic's fault
No, well, yeah, it reminds me of like the way people often just see the heroes broadly and like the way the word hero kind of has a very different, I think, context now than it would have back then. This idea that like a hero inherently is good and valiant and it's like the evidence tells us otherwise. Like you might want to believe that, but...
Well, that actually, that may just provide the perfect segue to actually talking about the project. Great. I was going to get there. No, no. So before I forget, though, because the word hero itself,
has a connection to different ages, right? So when you asked me to come on and talk about the Bronze Age, part of me was like frozen fear. Yeah, I added the context. Do I really know anything about the Bronze Age, right? No, no, because like the Iliad itself like has evidence inside for consciousness of several distinct different archaeological periods. Yes. But what it really also marks in connection with other poetry is a break with the past.
So the Iliad is very conscious of the audience's part that the heroic age ended. And so that word hero, when I teach about Homer and teach about heroes in my myth course, I emphasize that hero in the ancient world means a radically different thing for what it means now. One, it means someone in their full strength.
Right. It's etymologically associated with the word Hera, you know, with vitality and youth, which has its own weird things going on. Right. But the second and second thing that's important, and I usually try to get by this is a hero seems to imply a specific type of narrative arc. But the third thing that's important for the Bronze Age question is that the hero represents a period in time.
And the way we know this is not from Homer necessarily, but from Hesiod in the works and days. And so the works and days, I don't know if you talked in your podcast before about the myth of the metals, right? So the works and days talks about the creation of mankind and how many times it takes. And it's got this probably Near Eastern motif where we started with the age of gold men, then silver, then bronze, and then there's iron and we're part of iron, but
But in between bronze and iron, Hesiod sneaks the heroic age. And the heroic age, he says, were when men went to war against each other and they sailed the sea in ships and Zeus got annoyed with them and decided to wipe them all out. And this is what Hesiod says, in wars around the flocks of Cadmus.
and in the Trojan War for the sake of Helen. And so in the Hesiodic perspective, the whole idea of getting rid of the race of heroes is based around two wars that Zeus decided to foster. The Theban Wars, so starting with the wars between
between Oedipus' sons and then the one following that by the successors, and then everything around Troy. And so this is often paired with the fragment of a poem called the Kypria, which is in the so-called epic cycle. It's the beginning of the Trojan War narrative. And it starts out by saying there was a time when the masses of people going all over the earth got really annoying. And Zeus decided to fan the flames of the Trojan War to unburden
the land of it. And then adds, and Zeus's plan was being completed. So this line in Greek, it's diasteteleia tabule, is also the, I think it's ninth line of the Iliad, or maybe it's the seventh line of the Iliad. So the beginning of the Iliad for ancient audiences, it's specifically marked as being part
of an era ending process, right? So the whole rage of Achilles, according to the beginning of the Iliad, is part of Zeus's plan. And we don't know what Zeus's plan is in that context because it's both the plan of the Iliad and the plan to end the race of heroes through war. And so earlier you had talked about, you know, the cultural memory of destruction,
And if anything, the memory that develops for ancient audiences is of a cataclysm that, unlike the flood in the Bible, was a human cataclysm.
The gods are involved. Credit still goes to Zeus. But the whole era has ended because of the wars. And this is where we might want to think about the material reality. And so for people who've been to Greece, as you have, know, every Greek city-state has something like an acropolis, like a raised area that tends to have, as in Athens, a temple on it.
But it seems that in the Mycenaean period, most of these sites were the sites of palaces. Mm-hmm.
So something changed over time, right? And the people who heard the stories, told the stories, tended to associate the end of the race of heroes with a cultural turnover in the past that had to do with, you know, a series of abandonment of different sites, a transition from one political religious model to another, and all those ranges of things. So the cultural memory is not, it's not, they didn't know the Bronze Age collapse existed.
And I think some people we know are even skeptical about that title to begin with, right? I've been putting it in quotations every time. Well, you know, as with anything, when someone's absolute about something, I'm like, well, what if we say the opposite? What if there's continuity instead of discontinuity? But there's a consciousness of this loss, a transition that moved us to something lesser. And I think that's how, if we're thinking of Greeks imagining the past,
of this current age, the end of the race of heroes is marked with the Trojan War and the wars around Thebes. And you see this, you know, if you go to Herodotus or Thucydides, they acknowledge like that to be a moment. I mean, you know, Herodotus seems to take
the Trojan War more seriously than Thucydides, whereas Thucydides is like, well, people are always raiding other people, you know, so this sounds reasonable. But even they position that as a break, right? As a join somehow between a mythical past and their historical present. Mm-hmm.
Well, yeah, I mean, one of the things I've been, you know, looking at as I get deeper into this, the researching for the Bronze Age, quote unquote, collapse, is, yeah, I mean, this kind of, I mean, I've always kind of considered
wanted to call it more of a transition. The word collapse, though, sounds so nice and dramatic. So, you know, I'm utilizing it how I need to, while then also immediately being like, it's an overdramatic word for what happened. It's a transition. But I understand, I mean, you know, the change in writing, I mean, I don't like to say loss. Every time I read loss of like
ability to write every time you're you know looking at this transition and I mean of course it's ultimately a change in writing with obvious as far as we know maybe a few hundred years in between there were there's we don't know but to me it sounds more like yeah there's a there's a change in a writing structure um versus some kind of like loss of the ability to it's always framed as if they kind of get dumber you know like they lose the ability to to think in the same ways and
And that feels so unnecessarily limiting to the people of the time. But you can kind of see how...
How Homer as a concept, you know, or sort of as, you know, the oral tradition as a storytelling concept like comes out of that. Like you, you, you see a language written on things that you can't read. You see abandoned palaces that look richer than what you're living in now that are bigger and all of this. And, and then if you also are kind of have this, this idea of a, of a heroic age, like
It feels like it comes together so beautifully to create what then becomes, you know, the Iliad and the Odyssey. This, like, this memory of a time past. It's a convenient coalescence, really. Mm-hmm.
Right. And that's the thing I think, again, we often we often too much think that there's a plan that someone set out and did it this way when, you know, it just it turned out right. It was convenient. You know, there are other heroic narratives as well. But it seemed like a good let's call it explanatory framework.
Like what happened? Why do we have evidence for all these things? And now people have generally showed that knowledge in oral cultures lasts like three generations, right? And then changes and shifts and gets more fluid. But, you know, it's even unfair, I think, as you've indicated, to think of Greece as a pure oral culture, right? You know, literacy came and went. I'm skeptical about how far spread like knowledge of linear B1.
Right. I mean, we don't have good evidence, great evidence for it in inscriptional ways. Well, that's why I don't like the idea of it being a loss. Like they lost this ability because to me, like what we have of linear B suggests that it was very purposeful. Like it was used in very intentional and very specific ways. So once you no longer have the need for like palace records, right.
well then like obviously this language is going to die out but it's not because they like lost any fundamental thing about them they just no longer use this thing and then once it's gone from enough from the few people that might have known it like then it's gone you know and i think i think we vastly over emphasize um the simplicity of antiquity right this is it
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One of the things that I'm always amazed by is how little I know about the ancient world still after all those years. I was just visiting some colleagues at Vanderbilt University, and one of them there works on the archives of Darius the Great. In Chicago, we had like 20,000 tablets that were taken from the destruction of Persepolis.
And what's amazing about these tablets is they're in Aramaic, Elamite. There's one Greek one. There are a couple that shouldn't be there from like in Egyptian forms. And you're like, and this is like from the 520s BCE, right? And later, like this amazing resource that's only there. And I was asking the woman who works on it, Annalisa, I'm like, so why did we have that? Like, did they have it?
there? She's like, well, burned down, we don't really know. Maybe it was a disused storeroom for a while. Who knows why we still have these things? But it's like, if they had that in this one place,
Like how much variety and strangeness was there in the ancient world and interconnections that we don't know about? So that's why I think about this whole notion of discontinuity and continuity is based on evidence from locations that have had continual habitation of human beings for thousands of years. And what do we do? We reuse stuff. We break stuff. We're irreverent. We're dirty. We're messy.
So it's just, I'm very, I get worried when we get, when we're certain about these things and we're like, it's the dark ages. Like, well, it's dark to us. Yeah. It doesn't mean it was to them. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I, I, I've been just, yeah, noticing this, this use of the word loss a lot in ways where
Like I, you know, I'm very intentionally coming at this series, like with the same kind of mindset that I came to Atlantis and Sparta series in the past years, where I want to kind of like, you know, um,
I'm not going to find the right words, but basically like get, you know, get rid of this idea or, or teach a more accurate kind of concept of what, you know, happened at the end of the bronze age and, and everything. And cause in my head it was like, Oh, you know, the, the sort of, I've been calling them like the loud history bros, like the guys who read one book and then like talk really loud into a camera about a thing. Like I saw this video once and it,
and it has and will continue to stick with me forever. It's this guy talking about the Bronze Age and up to Homer. And he's like, and he's just this like loud white guy talking into an Instagram reel, you know, like there's just so much that's happening. And even just that little bit, and he talks loud and fast. And, and he's like, so and he starts talking about like the greatness of the Bronze Age and all the palaces and the richness and all the gold and
And then he's like, and then, you know, something happened and they all disappeared completely. They lost the ability to read and write and like understand a written word. And then from this dark ages of nothing, like Homer sprung up and invented the Greek language with the Iliad and the Odyssey. Exactly. Your face, you know, it's not for the podcasters, but yeah, I saw this guy's video and I was like,
oh my God, I feel like my head is exploding. Like I'm basically like, like for every palace, there had to be thousands of people laboring to support it. Right. And, and, you know, the best you can say about the bronze age collapse is that you had a system crash.
Yeah. Right. And that the elite networks that gave us the best evidence for the period ceased to function in the same way. Right. But what about the other millions of people on the planet who went on living and doing the same things?
It just, it doesn't, it makes zero sense. I mean, one of the things that I was thinking about, you know, I think actually our experiences of war and plague over the past few years maybe helps us reset a little bit. But babies are born during sieges, right? People get married and die and keep on living when others are at war. And the problem is we're so used to the primary narrative,
that we lose track of the fact that like, if all knowledge had been lost, if there had been a major, like, like a loss of everything, it would have taken maybe 10,000 more years to get back to where we were. They didn't lose the wheel. They didn't lose architect. Agriculture. I didn't forget animal husbandry. I mean, all of that's pretty bizarre. And we're talking about like a little corner of the world. Yeah.
There's one little place. There are already human beings in the Americas doing their thing. People in Egypt are doing their thing. I was going to say, Egypt's a great example for like, yeah, okay, I'm sorry. Like everything died out in Greece. They lost literally all human abilities, but Egypt's just continuing on being Egypt. But again, to go back to like my earlier shtick about people not thinking well in the aggregate. Yeah.
Right. Like think about the fragility of a cultural group that has a bunch of different little centers. Right. If you have a massive center with the collected wealth and like, you know, it's one thing you can absorb. So system changes in a different way, you know, but in Greece, I mean, the Mycenaean cities, when little,
like backwaters. They weren't that important. And I think our idea of the Greek miracle, so that fake idea of the Western progress of mankind makes us think it must have been really important. No, you think they're important because we had some famous archaeologists who went to look for them, made a big splash about them. But, you know, there's some piles of rocks. Yeah.
Well, well, but compared to like the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, like other people going on, like, like they're not, they're not it. Yeah. Backwater. You know, this last year we were in Denmark and Norway and they, you know, they have tons of museums there about the Vikings and stuff. Cause that's what they do. And I was going through and looking at the timescale and the evidence and the material that they had. And I'm like,
you know, like these guys were a bunch of backwater fools. And I say this as someone of Scandinavian descent, like you go in and you see like their history and you're like, and they went to Byzantium and brought back a sword. I'm like, yeah, because they didn't know how to make it the same way. Right. And that's, I think of like the Viking relationship to the Byzantium to me is,
like something like, and this is a difficult analogy, a Mycenaean relationship to Babylon or Memphis in Egypt or something like there's just a big difference in there. And so, you know, I mean, we make a big deal of this collapse for the same reason. Like we make a big deal of like lie made up stuff like Atlantis, which is like, we want this thing to be more important.
Well, exactly right. Yeah. Because we've got this cultural narrative that traces our heritage there. And we think that if like we come from nothing, right. Or if there's something big didn't happen, then somehow that cheapens us, which is, it's just weird. Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me. And I, I,
I gather you won't take offense, but apologies. But like, it reminds me of the American narrative of just like, you know, moving to the new world and breaking away from Britain and, you know, becoming this great big thing, leader of the free world when almost no country will refer to you as that. That's not the U S like, you know, it reminds me of that. It's worse. No, it's worse. So I know I'm not offended at all. So like, um, no, my, um, the,
I had this argument within my family. So my grandfather is still alive. He's 95. His father famously, according to him, came from Norway, walked across Canada, and then went south into Minnesota.
Right. And all the way. OK. Homesteaded. Right. And so my grandfather's whole narrative that aligns with sort of Trumpish American vision that our family came here and did everything on our own. Right. We really pull ourselves up. And I said to him and other family members, not so gently. I'm like, all right, the two major things that put our family into the middle class are getting free land and the GI Bill in World War Two.
And I'm like, did you do that yourself? And where did that come from? Right. And he's like, well, you know, we worked that land. I'm like, it was free because of an American government policy to displace the indigenous people. Right.
Right. It's not like that land had been unpopulated or unused for thousands of years. We didn't just discover it. We stole it. And then, you know, for something like the GI Bill, like people often forget that like my grandfather, who was Protestant, Scandinavian, got to barely fight at all and then go in and get a graduate degree thanks to the U.S. Army. Whereas if he had been black.
he wouldn't have gotten that degree. They didn't make that available to Black Americans in the same way. And so it's all about the narrative we tell. And this isn't always what we do with the past. We make a narrative that fits our desired identity now, rather than letting go of our desired identity now and looking at the actual evidence.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, obviously Canada has one too, so I won't pretend we don't like, I mean, I'm just generationally white Canadian. So I'm like, we don't have a family story, but if we did, you know, it either would be horrible or like wrong. Right. Well, I mean, that's the thing. I mean, and to take it back to Homer, because I think this is absolutely appropriate conversation to have. It's like, to what extent do you let the story you tell of the past decide who you are now?
And a lot of times what you see in Homer is that negotiation of identity. And one of the things I love about looking outside of Homer and other narrative traditions is how people are reading themselves into it, how people are negotiating their identities once Homer becomes this cultural authority. And to go back to like the Bronze Age thing, while the Homeric epic marks a break with the past,
The evidence in it shows no consciousness of what that past was like. The material evidence is like Bronze Age, Iron Age, just randomly grabbing stuff that doesn't belong together. In much the same way as, I don't know, if we watch a movie about King Arthur, there'll be types of weapons that a medievalist will say shouldn't be in the same place. But it's a fantasy of the past that in some way is communicating who we think we are now.
And so I think when like the most important thing to tell readers of the Iliad and the Odyssey who are interested in them as historical documents is their historical documents of what ancient audiences believed were components of the past. Right. Doesn't mean they were.
Right. Because none of them were archaeologists or historians. They're just like, yeah, well, people in the past wore boar tooth helmets and they had figure eight shields. Those weirdos or those heroes or however we want to view them. The boar tooth helmets are so good. They kill a lot of boars for those. I don't know. I saw them in Nafplio for the first time and was like, oh, my God, this is kind of horrifying and deeply weird.
Look, humans do weird stuff, right? And, you know, I mean, I think what we're missing is that at the time, how much easier it would have been to collect boar's teeth than it may have been to smelt the right metal and paper. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, it makes me think of the, you know, when you were talking earlier about how the Mycenaeans seem so impressive because these, you know, old school rich archaeologists went and found stuff and made a big deal out of it. And, you know, the Mask of Agamemnon is such a beautiful example of that. But it's also a great example of like.
I mean, this is me just like absolute base knowledge of anything, but like, it feels like it's a good example of them using minimal abilities with metal because it's gold. Like gold is so soft and squishy. Like they're not showing like a lot of skill with these beautiful, they would have been totally useless, but they look good. Yeah. I mean,
If you're wandering through a museum and you look at gold from ancient Greece and then you go to the Egyptian section, it should be humbling. Yeah. Right. But again, I'd point to that. I mean, you know, we have these grave items from a select number of monumental graves. But what percentage of that is a population?
If we're really thinking about the heroic period, there's this wild, I don't know if you saw some of us commenting about it online, but there's this recent review of Robin Lane Fox's book on Homer by the, by the Homerist Richard Janko that praises Robin for being like among the last of the aristocratic Homerists. The people really understand what aristocracies are like because they were raised in, in, in a,
England and the UK, and that because of that, he can really understand nobility in the Iliad. And one, like aristocratic sentiment in the UK doesn't map onto aristocratic sentiment in antiquity. And if you think you do, you're overlaying things that are different. The second thing, I mean, how many audience members who listen to the Iliad
who were nobles or aristocrats, right? I mean, for every person who got a gold mask in their death in Mycenaean Greece, there had to be tens of thousands or more who didn't, right? And so I'm wondering, like, why are we always worried about the one person who may have enjoyed some of the poem when for these narrative traditions to live,
They needed thousands of people to enjoy them. Yeah. I mean, they had to adapt to those. They had to appeal to everybody. But just like this focus on the elite reception of it and the elite culture is a part. And I'm going to make sense here. It's part of why we make that error of thinking the Bronze Age collapse may have been more than it was. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Yeah, it was a loss of elites. It was loss of what we can find, but not the people themselves. Yeah. I mean, if we had a system crash now because of technology, probably a bunch of billionaire assholes would survive because of their bunkers, right? Unless, of course, their security teams killed them off and kept their stuff, right? There'd be a mixture of that stuff. But throughout the world, imagine if we had system crash now, who would survive? Yeah.
Right. Subsistence farmers outside of the West. Right. Like people, people who are in the so-called third world countries we haven't let come into usher into the 21st century would have a much better chance of surviving than you or I would. Oh, yeah. Like I can't grow a fucking tomato. Yeah.
I have some beautiful indoor plants. I definitely can't eat them, but they are alive. But so that's the thing. I mean, like what culture would survive? Who would be the standard bearers of humanity and what would it look like? And just because someone's a subsistence farmer in whatever place we're going to point to doesn't mean they don't know about art. Yeah.
And just because they couldn't continue the tradition of, or didn't care to even if they could, the tradition of using Linear B doesn't mean the language just died out completely and it was some wild thing. They could have just had the...
A whole episode from the Iliad, like, memorized in their head, but oh, they didn't jot it down like a palace record, and so we get to pretend like all intelligence died out. Because that's what it always seems like, is this, like, a loss of human intelligence with this collapse. And it's...
It's gross and weird. It is. But again, I think the narrative privileges us, right? One, people like a good mystery. They sure do. Right. Another, like it, I don't know. I think part of it, part of the attraction of such narratives is that it breaks down time. It makes people,
Us seem more important. Right. And they makes the continuity of human culture seem more limited. But, you know, even in the few years I've been alive on this earth. Right. Every few years we're taking back the dawn of Homo sapiens like farther and farther, like the continuity of history. Oh, it doesn't just go to 3000 B.C. or 6000 or 20,000. We're going to keep going.
And so, you know, we have to do that work because we're so like monomaniacally focused on the present, you know, on ourselves. Monomaniacally is very good word. Thank you. Feels very accurate.
Well, I mean, honestly, that's, I feel like that's the perfect reconnection to the Bronze Age to wrap this up. So I won't take up too much more of your time. Thank you so much for doing this. This was so much fun and turned out exactly like I wanted. Oh, good, good. I'm glad I could read the script you sent me. Exactly. These are definitely scripted. I know they sound like it. Someday we still got to hit up Odysseus, but I think you're right. Thinking about the
about that social change in the switch, right? Something happened as the Greeks moved. So one discontinuity to think about before you kick me off is that the Iliad and the Odyssey posit monarchy, right?
but they were performed for audiences that largely lived in oligarchies and some democracies. Yeah. So how do these epics function as criticisms of a political model that the Greeks themselves no longer prize? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have like a couple more minutes? Yeah, I can talk a little longer. I don't want to keep people past what I schedule, but I also... Well, because I mean...
yes, that's, that's so interesting. Because yeah, that would have been really around that tyrant, like heavy tyrant period. Right. Like when they would have written it down. But they're not, they're not, they're not generally not hereditary monarchs. Right. I mean, what you see people who write about things like this from like, you know, Robert Drew's Basileus to a lot of the work by like Josiah Ober and Kurt Rafflaub about the,
generation or development of Greek democracy. It's just a chaotic period, right? But you do get two things that happen almost everywhere around Greece politically. Development of two different types of
of assemblies, right? So if you take Sparta, for example, you have the Gerousia, Council of Old Men, and then you have the Ecclesia, right, the Assembly of All Soldiers, and all of citizen men. And you basically have these two mechanisms, these two institutions, most places in Greece,
Most cities in Greece have evidence for a smaller council of oligarchic rule balanced against a larger participative assembly. And what's fascinating is that these two structures are...
um, reflected in the Iliad and the Odyssey, right? The Iliad is all about the assembly of the soldiers that they perform for in the first book. Um, and then constantly all the decisions are being made in the boule and the small council of the elders. And they're called, it's called, you know, the council of the Garantone of the old men, but Diomedes and Achilles aren't old men. Right. And so what most fear, um, uh,
theorists see in this is a development of two sort of competing ideas. One, sort of an oligarchic, aristarchic ideal in that small council. And two, a more participative assembly that reflects the larger need of ancient Greece to have citizen warriors of certain types. And so this is everywhere. But there's no evidence for a model like this in the Mycenaean period. Yeah.
And so this has got to be speaking to Greek audiences of the time. And I think it's part of the reason why the Iliad takes the shape it does. It's not about fighting Trojans. It's about Greeks fighting Greeks. I think it's a reflection of the social strife that you actually see in the 6th and 5th century BCE.
Yeah. Well, and it is fascinating to think of it as that what you mentioned, like right at the top, like, you know, connecting with with the Persians and this way of like pulling the Greeks together in ways that they hadn't been before, because I think.
Like it is both doing that and very much acknowledging the fact that like that doesn't come easy. Like they don't get along. Like there's always going to be strife within the Greeks. And if anything, I think you can see an implicit criticism, if not bending to explicit, of monarchy in the depiction of the politics of Troy. Hmm.
And so this is a very old hobby horse for me. I, in fact, wrote my dissertation about rhetoric and politics in the Iliad. But I think there are three different political stages. You have the Achaeans who are tending towards an oligarchic aristocracy. You have the gods who are straight up like sopranos, like monarchy, like this is a mafia. And then you have the Trojans who try to act like the gods.
But they can't because a monarchy in the Iliad's mind only works if you have a god king, someone whose power can never truly be challenged. And so I think you could make the argument that the Iliad is implicitly critical of human or mortal political arrangements that depend on that model because the interests of the family and Troy necessarily trump the interests of the people. And that's bad news. Yeah.
That's so interesting. And it really emphasizes, I think a very real disconnect between how, how that type of criticism is often made today versus back then, because like, yes, the way you're breaking it down now, like it, it is a criticism of a monarchy through Troy, but at the same time, like,
It doesn't just make them bad. It doesn't just make them like, you know, these the enemy. And I think that today, a lot of times like that type of criticism, like I'm thinking pop culture, you know, like. No, I mean, what it shows is that the Trojans make bad decisions. Yeah. Because of their institutions. Yeah. Because they're bad people. Yeah. Yeah.
It's just so much more interesting a criticism than what we get today. Well, it's also so much more true of human nature. Exactly. Like one of the things, and this is really super boring, but it's like in the past few years, like I've been very active in university governance. I've been chair. I'm a dean now. And when there are problems, I always ask, like, is this a structural problem or a personnel problem?
Now that is, this is a polarity. It's never just one or the other, but good people make bad structures function. But, and good structures cover up people who aren't working that hard. Right. But oftentimes, like no matter how hard you work, if you're in a bad structure, you're going to have bad outcomes.
And I think that's what's going on in the Iliad. If you look at the rare scenes, Hector talking to Polydamas, the Trojan Assembly of Book Seven, because they're willing to put the interests of the individuals of the royal family ahead of the people, they can never make a decision for the good of the city. They can only make a decision for the good of the family.
And one of the things that's a refrain throughout both the Iliad and the Odyssey is when leaders destroy their people through their own recklessness. Yeah. Well, and I think it's, you know, they're making these decisions for the good of the family. But then you also get to see how like not only are those decisions, obviously, they go very badly for the people, but they also go badly for the family. You know, like they do. Yeah.
Hector dies very badly. And so it's like, it's a good reminder that like, or, you know, I think it's, it's pointing out that even, you know, it doesn't even work for the elites, which is maybe a connection back to the bronze age. Like even when you're only concerned about this monarchic family of elites, it's, it doesn't save them either, you know? Yeah. Well, and I think it's partly contained within that metaphor that's used in Homer a lot, the shepherd of the host.
The whole idea that a leader as a shepherd has a lot to do with it. It's not a benign thing because we always have to remember that shepherds fleece their flocks and sometimes eat them. But their well-being is...
embedded in the well-being of the flock. Right? And the well-being of the people. And that's marked at the beginning of the Iliad when Agamemnon's failure is to not take care of his people, to make a decision about his own interests over the people. It's marked in Achilles asking for his own people to suffer because his honor was
was transgressed. And the people who are consistently shown as making better decisions, Nestor, Diomedes, sometimes Anesios, right? In the Iliad at least. At least in the Iliad, yeah. Yeah, yeah. They're shown thinking about the whole. Yeah. And the people.
And that, I mean, if people, you know, if the classical educators want to focus on that lesson from the Iliad, then I'll say, all right, go. That may be the good heroic lesson. Yeah. But not the rage and not the self, ruthless self-interest that we see. The glory of war. The glory of war. No, war is a bad idea because people die. Yeah. Yeah.
That's literally what it's saying and what also logic shows. I don't know. Glory and war. It's people who don't have time. People have too much free time. Like, you know, go back to farming. That's what Odysseus tried to do. It didn't work.
I mean, yeah, maybe they would have been better off leaving him at home. Could have made better decisions. Oh, could you imagine? That would have gone really well. Yeah. Or at least better, you know? I don't know. And they wouldn't have had Achilles because he convinced them. So, I mean, either way, but, you know, they wouldn't have had the same plot. That's why we're not allowed to rewrite it. Yeah, exactly.
Well, I mean, that feels like a perfect wrap up. Thank you so much. Again, I'm going to maybe I'll keep in both where I just kept you again, but this has been wonderful. Yeah, it's always fantastic to talk to you. I love the work you're doing. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Oh, nerds. Thank you, as always, so much for listening. I realized at the end of that episode, I didn't ask Joel to promote anything because I just got so caught up in asking so many more questions. So instead, I will point you out to his website, which is Sententiae Antiquae. It's Latin and I always have trouble pronouncing it, but I will link to it in the episode's description. And it, along with
his Twitter as well, which I will also link. But both are really, really wonderful things.
sources and just like insights into ancient languages. There's a lot of pieces in really modern and readable translations, a lot of works that you probably would have never heard of otherwise, little fragments here and there. I've used the site a lot in my own nerdy research and actually novel research, but it's a true joy. So if you're nerdy with that kind of stuff, I highly recommend it. Again, you can find links in the episode's description there.
And next week, we will be continuing on, finally reaching the point of collapse. So on Tuesday, we will talk about the collapse of the Bronze Age, what that really means, what might have really caused it, and everything in between, followed by two conversations about those aspects of the collapse.
Oh, you have so much more to look forward to. I have so much more to look forward to. We're going to have a great time. Let's talk about myths. Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Smith is the Hermes to my Olympians, the assistant producer. And honestly, I mean, just really the brain behind this entire Bronze Age series. I have...
worked very minimally on the scripts because she's written such good stuff and uh it's just i this wouldn't exist without michaela so huge thanks and laura smith is the always wonderful audio engineer and production assistant who has done incredible work on these conversation episodes see we're all working together we make such a nice little team the podcast is part of the iheart podcast network listen on spotify or apple or wherever you get your podcasts
If you want to help me continue bringing you this podcast, consider subscribing to the Patreon, where you have access to loads of past bonus episodes. And is that the end of my script that I'm not reading a script from? Yes, I think it is. Thank you all so much for being incredible nerds who just want to hear about this stuff with me. It is such a thrill. I am Liv, and I love this shit.
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