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A
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C
Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Anand.
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A
And me, William Dremel. And we are back in the Bronze Age Mediterranean, and we are heading inevitably towards a spectacular collapse.
- [01:14]
C
So, as we discussed briefly with Stephen Fry in the last episode, the legendary Greek author Homer is one of the key voices who has taught us all about the Bronze Age collapse, writing epics like the odyssey, the Iliad, 500 years after the event. But how much truth from that era is passed down to Homer through oral myth, through the Greek Dark Ages, and how much does he actually, you know, pass down to us? So to dig deep into Homer and the many debates that are going on in circles of historians today, we have the best in the business, may I say, Simon Goldhill, I mean, a legendary author himself, professor in Greek literature and culture and at King's College, Cambridge. Thank you very much for being with us.
- [01:57]
A
And as we saw at the Jaipur Literature Festival, he is also a spectacularly dynamic lecturer.
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C
Simon, the reason we've got you on, apart from the fact that you are, I mean, hilarious and also very knowledgeable, is that there's this huge argument going on at the moment about Homer. Believe it or not, those of you who aren't sort of rooted in this kind of literature, it's heated. So, you know, this argument is about whether he was a historian, was he a preserver of memories of the real world, was he a chronicler, was he. I mean, it's. Can you rely on Homer? I mean, that's the question, Simon. Can we believe Homer?
- [02:32]
D
You can believe Homer, but not for the things you want to.
- [02:35]
A
Oh, so very neat sidestep.
- [02:41]
D
That's to say, of course, Homer has been absolutely crucial in establishing a set of values not only for the Greek world, but for literature going forward. In many ways. Just think of James Joyce as modernist, greater. He's going back to Homer to discover what he wants to say about the world. So there's absolutely clear that Homer has produced an extraordinary text that has all sorts of things in it for all sorts of people. Now, the reason why it's become interesting to historians is, first of all, that he clearly comes out of what we call an oral tradition. That is that we know that behind Homer there were loads of bards producing oral literature. And we know something about oral literature. We know it changes, we know it develops. We know each text is different. But what it means is that when you read Homer, you're always walking on the buried life of words. They go back deep into. Into Greek history. They go back even further than GRE Greek history, many people believe, right back to Indo European. You can see phrases in Homer that clearly look all the way back hundreds of years and yet are still there in the text. So in that sense, of course, he embodies a certain history, a history of language, a history of inherited ideas. But at the same time, even Homer, Even Homer knows that he's writing about a past that is lost. He's inventing a fictional world. He says, 10 men of today could not lift the rock that Hector lifted with ease. Right. So we know we're not as good as those old guys that he's writing about. So it's absolutely crucial that Homer himself is inventing a lost world which has all the fictional qualities of a lost world. It imagines things we couldn't possibly see. It imagines grandeur that we couldn't possibly know. It imagines horror we couldn't know. So is it a chronicle? No. Yes. It gives us the first picture we have of dairy farming in the Western world. A cheese factory in a Cyclops cave. It tells us a little beach about subsistence farming as an image. But is it a historical text that tells us anything about what was going on in Troy? Nah. No.
- [04:48]
C
Okay. All right.
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D
I'm not gonna go there. All right.
- [04:50]
C
Okay, you don't go there. But I wanted to. I mean, there were chroniclers, though. I mean, you know, Thucydides is one who. I always think of him as sort of like a tabloid journalist these days, you know, who's sort of picking up on the juicy bits of gossip.
- [05:03]
D
Oh, no, he's much better. That. No, no, that's more like your auditus.
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A
You know, you're trying out the wrong person. Anita Sheet.
- [05:12]
D
Thucydides is a hyper intellectual, extremely smart, clever guy.
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C
Little bit bitchy, though. Little bit bitchy.
- [05:20]
A
Simon, he's writing for the lrb.
- [05:22]
D
He's more Lib, I think, more Simon Sharma than I don't know. Anyway, but these must remember, that's the 5th century and the 4th century. These historians who are chronicling history is really invented as a subject by Herodotus or people around Herodotus in the fifth century, Homer's writing, if he's writing, if he's producing, probably in the 8th century, 300 years earlier, nobody knew the word history, let alone the subject history. All the stories you tell of the past are stories, and they could be true or not true, but the importance of them is the way they work on the listener. Do those stories have an effect? That's what we're looking for.
- [05:58]
A
Simon, one question, straight up. You've already said that this is the product of generations of bards, one after another, preserving memories from way, way, way back, you said, even as far as sort of Indo European arrival. But is there any reason to believe that there was actually a Homer? And we often see pictures of him when you go, I was in British Museum, and there was a nice, nice sort of statue of him there. Is there any reason to believe there actually was a bard who was so spectacularly good that he had the whole tradition gifted to him?
- [06:30]
D
It's a fascinating question. We've got this idea that there were loads of bards floating around, going from city to city. We have stories about them in producing their songs for dinner parties, moving on to the next place, maybe staying a while. And yet we have something that we have very, very rarely in the bardic tradition, an extraordinary pair of brilliant epics that are structured over 24 books. I mean, the books are later, but they're structured over a huge amount of verse, so that the beginning of book one is echoed at the end of book 24. We can see this. Aristotle already called the Odyssey a work of sophisticated structure. It has embedded stories, retrosp, forward. It's extraordinarily complicated piece of work in a sort that we don't associate with oral epic. And consequently, we have to explain how, from what we know about oral simplicity and repetition, how do we get these amazingly sophisticated texts? And one answer has always been, well, there was one absolutely brilliant bloke, or there were two absolutely brilliant blokes, one who wrote the Iliad and one wrote the Odyssey. Or if for some Victorians, there was one absolutely brilliant woman who wrote the texts. So it's all a projection. It goes all the way back to antiquity. We have somehow to explain brilliance, and it's very hard to imagine a sort of collective brilliance emerging. We all want one person to have done it.
- [07:53]
A
We last met In Jaipur and in the countryside outside Jaipur and towards Jodpur into the desert, there is still a living tradition of bardic literature which hasn't died. Rather like the sort of thing that anthropologists were studying in the Balkans in the 1920s and 1930s, 30s. And you get this tradition of passing it on from father to son that the children are trained before their fifth birthday. They have to learn it very, very young. And there are, there are epics. Papuaji epic can be recited, I think, for seven days without ceasing, with just short breaks for meals and a quick sleep and then they go on. Is that the sort of world we're talking about?
- [08:39]
D
Yes, probably. Although we don't know about seven day festivals. We do know that the whole of Homer was recited at the Great Panathenaea, a festival in Athens in the fifth century. And we had a series of bards and each one had to pick up where anyone stopped.
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A
Brilliant.
- [08:55]
D
And that would have lasted several hours at least. So we know that there were full scale performances. We also know that some people learnt it off by heart, not just bards, but also just intelligent people who said, I want to learn Homer off by heart, and did so. We also know that they were shorter performances, performances. We know that there were extracts that were performed which presume that you know the whole thing. But you could just drip, drop in and say, oh, let's have Taniptra. That's the bit when Odysseus has his feet washed by. And let's have that bit. And so they even had titles for those extracts. So we have a full range of cultural modeling. And by the 5th century, once you get Anita to your Thucydides, you've got a complete intellectual background, you've got scholarship going on, on Homer already. And amazingly, and this is something worth remembering, our first text we have of Aristophanes the comedian. It's only a fragment. His earliest play gives us a schoolroom where boys are learning their Homeric vocabulary.
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A
Really interesting.
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D
So in the 5th century it was already out of date. You couldn't just understand it. So it's not really a people's literature. It's already out of date in the 5th century and hard for people to get the Greek itself.
- [10:01]
C
It's a wonderful thought that, you know, Homer basically is this gorgeous tapestry of feelings, emotional responses, but also history. And I just, you know, when you talked about the milk churn in the Cyclops's cave, how can we sift out what is actually clearly an experience from the Bronze Age? And what is Homeric poetic tradition. You know, how do you pick up reality from what is artifice?
- [10:28]
D
Well, there is one old tradition that goes. You can find a nugget. Here's a bit of truth. We know from the Cyclops cave that cheese was made from sheep with the following pails. Because we've got the words for the pails and all the rest of it. Absolutely fine. You can do that if you want. The trouble is, of course, that the Cyclops is a monster with one eye in the middle of his forehead, who can pick up two people, one with each hand, and bash their heads on the floor like puppies and eat them up. Now, why isn't that part of the experience of the Bronze Age? In what sense is it or isn't it part of the experience in the sense that Odysseus, Achilles, all these characters from the epics meet goddesses and gods. Now, is that part of your experience in a world full of gods, or are we going to go, no, we're terribly rationalists in the 21st century. We know that doesn't happen. I think it's really hard to decide what people actually experienced in the Bronze Age, not only because the Bronze Age is a long time ago and the past is another country, but also because Homer already knows that his past is not his present. And so he's always inventing, fictionalizing, playing with these ideas, so it becomes extremely difficult. And yet, because he's a fantastic poet who creates a whole world, it's so tempting to go back into that world and say, that is the reality.
- [11:50]
A
You've already hinted that there are fragments in there which go way, way, way back. How. How do you identify the kind of, I suppose, the archaic fragments in Homer, the bits that are older than the other bits?
- [12:05]
D
Well, we generally believe that the Iron Age came after the Bronze Age and that iron was much better for bashing people's heads off than bronze. Right. So that is generally true. Yet we have in Homer both bronze and iron being used in that way. So the usual suggestion is that the bronze looks back to an earlier age and the iron is the modern age. Of course, that could be Homer's fantasy about. In those days, they used to use bronze, I don't know, but it's usually taken to be that there are layers of history being built on top of each other and that both bronze and iron were used at different periods. And they're both there in Homer. And you can see. So you can see that inheritance.
- [12:46]
A
You often see people talk about the boar's tusk helmet and various Details of the weaponry, such as these, the types of shield, the tower shields, which had pointed out, as earlier.
- [12:58]
D
I think that's right. I mean, I think you can't create a fiction out of nothing, and you can't listen to a fiction that has no relation to your world. So there must be connections of that sort that people buy into in that created world, as we know from science fiction, that tries to imagine a future. Right. The monsters always look like versions of humans, whatever. We're not very good at imagining monsters, actually. And in the same way, the equipment that's used is obviously a projection from today going forward in all sorts of ways. And when we go to the past, we can see the same thing. So if we went to Walter Scott in the 1800s and saw his version of chivalry, we know it's not what the medieval age was like. We know it wasn't like, but it's an incredibly powerful image that became extremely influential in the world as what it should be like. And so we've always got to play with that sensitivity to where does fiction come from? So, yes, the boar's head helmet could have existed. There may be an early one with a. With tusks on it. Why not? It's also extremely easy to imagine it as a fictional object. It's not too hard.
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C
You're doing my head in. You're doing my head in, Simon, because I don't know what to believe now.
- [14:07]
D
I'm trying to, Anita, I'm trying to.
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C
Okay, all right.
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D
You should bury yourself in the world of Homer and the world will become real for you.
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C
Well, I love the world of Homer, but now you've got me questioning everything. And it was a Cyclops. Lactose intolerant. Did he have cheese? I mean, was there even a Greek expedition against Troy? I mean, what do we know that was there a Greek expedition against Troy?
- [14:31]
D
Well, first of all, the word Greek doesn't even exist in this period, so. No, it isn't. It isn't a collective. It's a collective. What we're told in Homer is that because Helen was taken by Paris, the Greeks all got together, all the different nations, to mount an international expedition to destroy Troy, which was such a huge city that it took so many people and so many years to do. Did that happen? Who knows what happened? What it is, I'm afraid we've been to Troy, we've dug on Troy. Everybody thinks there's Troy. Whatever it was, it wasn't a huge city. Right. Those don't exist in that period, in that Place. The walls weren't the size described by Homer. The groups of people, I mean, the thousands of people who went there, how are they going to feed themselves? It's a little like when we look at the Bible. Everybody knows that the Bible is absolutely true, perfectly true, every word true. How did they get seal skins to make the COVID for the Torah in the desert? How did this. I mean, it doesn't stop the Bible having a truth. You don't have to be literal in the way you understand texts. You have to understand it's a world picture. It's an image being produced for a particular reason. So when we get the catalogue of ships in book two of the Iliad, which lists all the people who went to Troy, it gives you a real map of the Greek world. You can trace that map around the Mediterranean. It goes city to city in the right order around the Mediterranean. And it gives you some sense of the size of the city because of the number of troops it sent. So we're getting a map of a real world. But did that actually happen? I think you don't want to be too literalist, Anita. I think you just have to get into the world of fiction. So the brilliance of Homer is that he creates so convincing a world that you want to go into it, you want to experience, you want to believe it, and that's what great poetry will do.
- [16:24]
C
I get all of that, but I still. I need truth in my poetry. I do need a little mod come of something.
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E
You're very difficult.
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C
I'm sorry about this, but I just want to know, you know, okay, we're not going to call them Greeks. I'm not going to do that again, because they weren't. But, you know, Mycenaeans and Troy, I mean, do we know whether they had conflicts? I mean, what do we know about the conflicts?
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D
Right?
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C
Are we saying that there were lots of little conflicts that were stitched together and became a. A basis for the Trojan War? And what are we saying?
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D
We do know that based on economic trade, there were fights over control over roots, over immigration, over resources. And we know those sometimes were international, as we would say. It's not too far from Greece to Troy. It's just across the sea, the Greek East. These are places that speak Greek for a lot of period, too. So it's the same community and they're fighting. And we have no idea at the what level there was. We can see that Troy, where we think Troy was, was destroyed. We've done the archaeology on that. So you can see that there were Cities that were destroyed over time. And so we, we know that these were done by either natural disasters, but more likely, there are plenty of cases where we can see it was through war. So we know there are wars in this period. Were they of the scale of the Trojan War as predicted? Was the city ever big enough to need a horse full of people to go through a gate? No, I mean, it's. We know it's that big.
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A
It can't be that we have found Mycenaean pottery, is that right?
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D
There's no doubt there is trade. There's trade between these areas. We know that. We've always, for the last 200 years, we have tended to underestimate the long term, long scale trade from all the way from China to India to Greece and back. We can show it in Africa, we can show it all around. So we know this is going on. And there's no trade without fighting in this period. So yes, there's fighting, yes there's competition, and yes, you need stories to explain it. You need stories to build it up, to talk about it. So I'm sorry, Anita, I can't give you the truth because it doesn't exist.
- [18:28]
C
I mean, I'm not going to say I'm not disappointed. But on the upside, there may not be an Agamemnon for me to loathe and despise as much as I do. I mean, is that what you're saying? That these people may be confected as well?
- [18:40]
D
Well, how lovely it is that we have the so called death mask of Agamemnon as dug up by Schlima. And there are two things to say about that. There's no reason to associate it with Agamemnon at all as a character. Although it's a beautiful mask and it's.
- [18:53]
A
And it's a thousand years too early, isn't it, or something. It's the wrong period.
- [18:57]
D
That's exactly right. But what most archaeologists would do these days would be more interested in the seeds they found inside the mask, the gold mask itself, because it would tell us more about the culture.
- [19:08]
C
So you mentioned this was an oral tradition. And Willie was talking about, you know, the, the, the dramatization and the stories of Papu and how they are memorized. There's 15,000 lines in this work attributed to Homer. One person who may or may not have been one person called Homer. How does that poem transmit orally?
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D
Well, it's very difficult to imagine, isn't it? We know that there are structured scenes. We know that the easiest thing to do is to imagine the structure of the poem, and it has a very, very clear structure, so you know which scene comes next, so you're not worrying about the narrative. We also know that it's made up of what they call formulae, so you can recreate scenes in different ways. And what most people is that actually each performance would have been different, but at some point it becomes fixed. And that's what's so interesting, that by the 5th century we have our Homer. And where there's lots of trouble with manuscript traditions, there's very little trouble with the Homer manuscript edition. There are very few places we say, well, we don't know whether that's really there or not, because it got fixed very early.
- [20:10]
A
The Rajasthani poets get also very fixed. There are tiny variations within lines, but the. The basic line by line anthropologists have recorded them 20, 30 years apart, and there's almost no difference.
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D
And there are other examples elsewhere where the poems change to fit new societal norms. So if you've got a genealogy which justifies power and you find power has changed, you find that in 20 years the genealogies change, so you get different people's stories.
- [20:42]
C
So, I mean, this oral tradition, though, you know, we've talked about, talked before on this podcast about this extraordinary collapse of the Bronze Age, where literacy itself is devoured and destroyed and the population is in decline, and it's all pretty chaotic and dark in this time. How does this oral tradition then survive a collapse like that?
- [21:08]
D
Well, that's one of the great mysteries, isn't it? One can only assume that even through the collapses and horrors of a society in disarray, there is still some need for imaginary projection of a better world. And consequently, even in despair, you can produce great art and you can continue to respond to the world through it. And that's the only explanation we can give for what happened and why we get such a mishmash when we get two or 300 years later and we see what survived, why it doesn't quite fit together in the way that you would like it to do, to be historical truth. Right. And it's because it has that. So not only layers of history, but layers of fragmentation built into it from the beginning. It's part of its very nature just.
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A
To pursue that again. What do you mean by layers of fragmentation?
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D
We can see that there are different parts of stories that are put together in certain ways.
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A
Right.
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D
And that sometimes in the past, people have been rather naive about that and hunted for contradictions. But there are ways. You can see that there are bits of the story that are surprising. The way they're put together, you would say, oh, that doesn't quite make sense. Why is that the case? Why do we need that? And it seems to be that it's because they've put together different bits of stories in different ways. That said, it's a remarkable unity overall, which makes those disjunctions all the more evident in some ways. But it's fascinating that they've not been excised from the text and those. And they're left in there for us all to see. What makes Homer remarkable is the incredible unity of the narratives. Thus it's all the more surprising when you can see the disjunctions, when stories seem to have been forced together in some way or another. And critics have leapt on that as a sign of the oral composition. But it's also a sign of a sort of history of fragmentation, a history of how different people have had their go at this poem before it comes to where we are.
- [22:56]
A
We're gonna take a break now. When we're gonna come back, we're gonna ask Simon about how this poem actually reflects the reality of the Bronze Age collapse. Now, this is an advertisement from our old friends. Better help.
- [23:15]
E
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- [24:08]
A
Down.
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E
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- [24:23]
A
Welcome back. We were looking at the nature of the. The oral tradition before the break, but I'm interested, Simon. How much can we use this text, this extraordinary text that survived, that's written so much later? How far can we use it as a source for the Bronze Age Collapse.
- [24:41]
D
I think it's very hard to get an image of Bronze Age collapse per se. There's no writing in Homer. I mean, there are half a hint of some signs on one bit of paper that was sent, but otherwise there's no writing, which is a sign of the later period rather than the Mycenaeans who did have writing.
- [24:59]
A
Interesting. Yeah.
- [25:00]
D
There is no sign of genuine. In what you might call empire organization. What we have for Mycenaean culture is catalogs, lists of food, of tribute.
- [25:15]
A
This is in the linear B you're talking about.
- [25:16]
D
Yeah, in the linear B material. And none of that seems to have come through into Homer in an interesting way. So there are silences that I assume are a product partly of that collapse and partly of Homeric fantasy about the past when we don't have the modern technology, because it's in the old days. So, I mean, Homer was singing at a time when writing is coming into being again in the 8th century. So there are some people who think writing was invented to write down Homer, which I think is probably a bit romantic. But I do think the fact that Homer probably comes from the first days of the rediscovery of writing is a fascinating moment to think, well, why doesn't he write about writing? Why does he avoid telling us about technology? Well, it could be because of the Bronze Age, or it could be because he doesn't want to talk about modernity.
- [26:07]
A
Would you say that the poems are both haunted by the idea of collapse? This pervasive sense of an ending, of a world passing away? As you said, the people today aren't as wonderful as they once were. That whole sense of a world getting lost.
- [26:22]
D
Yeah, the sense of a lost world is everywhere in Homer. But fascinatingly, there's no real description of the destruction of Troy. So the one thing you would expect would be the destruction of Troy. But the Iliad ends with the burial of Patroclus and Achilles left on his own, awaiting his death. And by the time he gets the Odyssey, Troy has fallen a long time ago. And the only time we get a story about is when another bard sings a story in Phaeacia. So it's already become the subject of song. So we don't get anything like the full scale description that we get. For example, in the Aeneid, Book two of the Aeneid, the destruction of Troy, there very, very long version which comes out of Roman violence and Roman sense of how cities can be destroyed. So it's interesting, we don't get that. What we do get, of course is a fascinating indication in the Odyssey in particular, of the possibilities of migration, of colonialism, of discovering new lands and new places. And that too, is a crucial part of the Bronze Age development and Mediterranean, Iranian.
- [27:21]
A
Of boatloads of violent men turning up.
- [27:23]
D
Yeah, exactly.
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A
On far shores and often running amok.
- [27:27]
D
Yes, and we see stories of that that Odysseus tells of himself. The first thing he says when he's telling his own story in the land of Scheria to the Phaeacians and the Phaeacian king, he says, we arrived at this place and of course we sacked a town. And then he. Then that's the first thing he says as his story. And it's very interesting that we do get that sense that even the Cyclops says to him, you brigands, when they turn up, because that's. The Cyclops even expects there to be brigands around the place. So you're absolutely right. This idea that we get of a Mediterranean world in which boatloads of violent men turn up and do nasty things, but also where you can colonize and build new cities and a real sense of cultural difference. In the Odyssey, right from the beginning, opening lines, it says, a dis. You saw the towns of many men and learnt their mind. Right. Cultural difference is built into this homogenous world, and that's part of the Bronze Age dispersion of population.
- [28:23]
C
There is also, and I don't know, I mean, you've sort of touched on this before, so I'm thinking that I'm picking up the threads from you, that there is a nostalgia that, you know, before was better, that, you know, that this sort of period, even in this period of collapse and murder and intrigue, that actually, you know, the bad guys get it in the end. You know, there's some justice, there's some natural order. Order. Do you. Is that right?
- [28:48]
D
Oh, I don't know. I'm not going to go there. I don't think it's as sweet as all that, I'm afraid. I mean, you've got to remember that Achilles is a psychopath. He's the hero, but he's the person who always goes too far. And he goes on a murderous rampage after Patroclus is done, and he desecrates the corpse of Hector, he does human sacrifice on the two. He's not a good guy in that.
- [29:11]
C
Sense, but he doesn't live happily ever after. Does he, though, Simon? I mean, that's the thing, you know.
- [29:15]
D
That'S what's so wonderful about these poems is they are just the World is a better place. But we're left at the end of the Iliad, we're left with Achilles in despair. His friend has died. He's got what to look forward to, nothing but the loss of his own life.
- [29:32]
C
Yeah, I know. I take that point. But I suppose what I'm trying to say is that there are giants, not Cyclops style giants, but there are fine men. So there's a nostalgia for these sort of, you know, heroes that existed.
- [29:47]
D
You're absolutely right. That there is a sense that in the past there were these grand figures who can provide models of how we think about what could be good today. But like the Hebrew Bible, there is no hero who is unflawed. You know, it's very interesting. It's. It's modernity that wants its heroes. Simple, it's Hollywood, or some would say saints, Christian saints. We want them to be perfect, but they're not. A disuse is a nasty, tricky bastard who kills everybody he meets, loses his whole. I mean, he's not Captain Kirk.
- [30:18]
C
Oh, Penelope should have dumped him so early on, I swear.
- [30:23]
D
You don't think she did?
- [30:26]
C
I mean, Go on, seriously, there are some young women I'd love to have chats with. What are you doing? Move on, lady.
- [30:35]
A
One thing that's very interesting is that it isn't just, of course, the human characters who are very flawed. It isn't just Achilles, who's a difficult thing, and Odysseus a brigand. The gods themselves are incredibly flawed.
- [30:47]
D
They certainly are. And humans get to stab gods in the Iliad. I mean, Diomedes actually stabs Aphrodite, who runs off crying, and Athen teases the disuse in the Odyssey. And Zeus gets tricked by his own wife sexually. I mean, no, they are not paradigms in the sense of being perfect. They're paradigms of how. How power works and what it's like to imagine a world where consequences are so different. So in the middle of the Odyssey, we can tell a story of how the God Ares of war has sex, adulterous sex with Aphrodite and gets caught in bed by her husband, right? With a magic sort of cobweb, like unbreakable bond. And all the male gods turn up and just giggle. And Hermes says it'd be worse to be caught in bed with Aphrodite. Blimey, I'd do that. This in the middle of a poem which is going to punish potential adulterers with death. Yeah, the human world, completely different consequences to your actions. And so that's a very interesting idea about what's it like to imagine a world not just of better heroes, but a place where consequences aren't quite the same.
- [32:02]
C
So this is, to me, really interesting because he does paint the gods often as being a bit ridiculous. You know, sort of this whole fnaf and a standing around a bed and making filthy jokes. You know, this. This couple are caught having an adulterous affair and, you know, many, many other examples where they're. They're simply that they can be a bit ridiculous. Now, do we know whether that is actually quite seditious at the time that, you know, people used to worship at temples, they would, you know, sacrifice at temples. That there was a real, you know, in the spirituality of the time, there was utter veneration. And then you've got.
- [32:39]
A
Homer wouldn't try that in India today.
- [32:42]
C
Or the Catholic Church.
- [32:43]
D
No, absolutely. Yep.
- [32:45]
C
So is he seditious then or.
- [32:47]
D
No, it's very interesting. So let's go back to your favorite historians of the 5th century, and if we go to Herodotus, right, who knows a great deal about other cultures and gods and all the rest, he says explicitly, homer gave the Greeks their gods. Homer defines what the gods are for Greeks, so far from being seditious, he's fundamental, really. Yeah. Okay. So that's fantastic, isn't it? I mean, so what we have to relearn when we read Homer is how culturally biased our views of divinity are and how much monotheism as a concept in the west and religious piety in the east has overwhelmed the possibility of a much different sort of religious activity where, yes, you can joke about some gods, and yes, I mean, you don't joke about Zeus normally on stage, but you could joke about quite a lot of gods. And. And you can also go to temples when you go. Let me give you an example. When you're in the second century and you're Lucian, Syrian, Greek satirist, he describes in his work the Orotes going to a temple of Aphrodite, the Aphrodite of Kos. And they sit around and they tell dirty stories to each other. That's a way of worshiping Aphrodite and have a long discussion. Is it better to sleep with a boy or a girl? And they argue about that and they tell stories about. About it. And that's a perfectly good way of observing the religiosity and the piety of a temple of Aphrodite. And no, that's not what happens in the Catholic Church.
- [34:16]
A
Simon, how far is what Herodotus says, actually, because the gods who we get in Homer are there also in the Linear B tablets, aren't they? They're older gods and Linear B.
- [34:28]
C
We should remind people, I mean, those tablets are contemporary with the Bronze Age. That's why they're really important.
- [34:31]
D
Yes, that's right. That's why they're important. Yes, absolutely. They're Bronze Age tablets and they've been deciphered, largely unlike Linear A. And we can read what they're about, we get the names of gods and we know they're occults, but we have no real representations. Right. So even though Dionysus is there, we don't see him as the long haired, slightly effeminate drunkard figure or the bearded Dionysus of theater or whatever. So it's Homer who gives the stories that fill the imagination. And the important thing is that Homer becomes the furniture of the Greek mind. You can't explore the world, experience the world without Homer in the Greek world. So the. It's always layered with this past, this Bronze Age memory, as Anita puts it, this sort of haunting. But at the same time, those gods have a touch of. Well, I'd be very careful before you call them ridiculous, because people who do that in Greek tend to get zapped, Anita. So watch out.
- [35:27]
C
Smite me if they want. I'm right here. Smite me if you feel you're hard enough.
- [35:34]
D
Oh dear, that's brave talk. I would never.
- [35:39]
C
So shall we talk about sort of the archaeological record? Because what I would be fascinated to know is that has everything been dug up that can be dug up when, when it comes to Troy and you say, look, there was no, no big. I mean, if someone dug up an.
- [35:52]
D
Horse, a very large horse, A large.
- [35:54]
C
Horse, or, or, you know, is there anything that has been discovered in the recent past that, that has changed scholarship in your area?
- [36:03]
D
Well, in the last 150 years, for sure, the whole discovery of Troy and where they think Troy is has been absolutely fascinating. So throughout the 19th century, various sites were promised to be Troy. And they tried to do it from the text of Troy. And now we have a site that we think is Troy and we're happy with that. And it does show us quite a lot. But it's been very well done dug. So too has Mycenae. And you can tell that we know the size of Mycenae. We can see what it was like as a population. We know it was not capable of mounting an expedition of the size mentioned in Troy. That's just physically impossible. But at the same time you've got the extraordinary lion gate and the possibility of discovering other things like that that give you some sense of how the city presents itself. And the tombs are remarkable. And there are are new discoveries being made all the time, not always of Bronze Age, sometimes of later ages. But these archaeological discussions do regularly change what we know about Philip of Macedon, about Alexander, about that sort of period, been very recent discoveries on that area. And I think we're constantly learning more about the archaeology of trade and of migration and seeing how these cities interrelated with each other. And I think that's one of the things we are learning a lot about.
- [37:22]
A
So, Simon, we've got a new coming out with Ulysses at the center, with Matt Damon and all the rest of it, and a black Helen, we're told. What is the relevance of Homer today? Why should we continue reading it beyond the fact that it's just this wonderful story that generation after generation love to hear?
- [37:41]
D
Well, it is a wonderful story, but what's important about it is the way in which it's emotionally, socially, politically productive. So it's not just that we repeat it because it has the authority of the past right from the beginning. Homer gets rewritten because he becomes a resource for telling the important stories we want to tell. Greek tragedy is a constant rewriting of Homer. Virgil, that great classic of European nature, a rewriting of Homer all the way up to James Joyce and beyond. We want to retell the stories of Homer because they're not simple, because they're engaged. They create the world, which gives us our sense of values about power, about masculinity, about what it is to have a family, what it might mean to go home, what it is to be lost, what it is to return. All those categories are so important and don't stop being important because Homer has set the field for the discussion. That's why it never goes away.
- [38:40]
C
And just finally, I'm just between us, between friends, would you go and watch a movie, a retelling of Troy with a stress toy or a notebook? I mean, how do you cope with retellings? Or are you fine with it?
- [38:56]
D
I am not a gatekeeper, but perhaps I could end with a story that always amuses me, at least that I was asked to go and see the film Troy when it opened the first night, to review it for the Evening Standard. And I had to sign a waiver as I went in, promising not to reveal the plot in my review.
- [39:17]
C
Oh, that's gorgeous.
- [39:19]
D
Trifles shot.
- [39:22]
C
Oh, it's an absolute delight to have you? Thank you so much, Simon Goldhill, it's been an absolute delight. And William, what have we got coming next? Because this is such a lovely topic to be discussing.
- [39:32]
A
So we're moving back from text to archaeology. In the next three episodes we've got Eric Klein who's big bestseller on the Bronze Age collapse, 1187 how civilization came to an end. That is where we're going now. And we're gonna look in detail at how not just Troy and Mycenae but but Ugarit and half the rest of the city states on the on the Levantine coast went down and how Egypt didn't.
- [40:03]
C
And interestingly, if you cannot wait for the next episode, you just don't have to. All you need to do is join Our Club, empirepod uk.com empirepoduk.com and you'll get it right here, right now. I promise. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita on it.
- [40:19]
A
And goodbye from me, William Turnbull.
- [40:31]
F
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