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- [00:01]
Mike Suiter
What can we learn from history's most powerful people? Join me Mike suiter, author of NextGen CEO, in History Extra's new podcast series, History's Greatest Leaders. To find out, listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:18]
Eva Jovic
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- [01:30]
Advertising Narrator
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- [01:31]
Eva Jovic
Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more@accenture.com Spotify this episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was. The bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for from a browse to a bike ride this summer. Find more on Facebook.
- [02:11]
Mike Suiter
I'm Arch Manning.
- [02:12]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I'm Madison Skinner.
- [02:13]
Eva Jovic
I'm Eva Jovic.
- [02:14]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I'm Decoria Moore.
- [02:15]
Advertising Narrator
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- [02:16]
Eva Jovic
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- [02:24]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Think you have what it takes?
- [02:32]
Mike Suiter
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. We're continuing our Sunday series on the Odyssey today, And in this second episode, Dr. Daisy Dunn tells Kev Lotchen about what Odysseus Expedition tells us about ancient Greece. Around 2800 years ago, a poet, or perhaps many poets set down a story that had been traveling by word of mouth for centuries. It told of a king trying to get home from a war. It should have taken him weeks, instead it took 10 years. The king was Odysseus and the poem the Odyssey. You might know some of his stories of the one eyed Cyclops, the sweet song of the sirens or the witch that turned his crew into pigs. But beneath the gods and the monsters and the wine dark sea, the are there historical truths to be found? I'm Kev Lotchen and I'm joined by Dr. Daisy Dunn, award winning classicist author and all round expert on the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Her books include the Ladybird expert book on Homer and the Missing A new history of the ancient world through the women who shaped It. In this episode we're joining Odysseus on his grand adventures to find out what they say about Americ Greece. Desi, welcome back.
- [03:44]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Thank you.
- [03:46]
Mike Suiter
As a prelude to what we're going to talk about today, the Odyssey is a story of a man going home. What is the circumstances that Odysseus needs to be going home in the first place?
- [03:56]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Well, Odysseus has been fighting in the Trojan War. This Trojan War went into its 10th year. He then embarks on 10 years of travels all the way back home again. And he is the last of the soldiers who fought at Troy to reach his home. And this is really important for the narrative of the poem because we immediately see what chaos has ensued in his absence in Ithaca. He's the king of Ithaca. His wife is there. She is being besieged by over a hundred suitors who are eager for her to marry one of them. And his son Telemachus hardly knows his father. He has begun to question his paternity even and he cannot control the situation on Ithaca, this sort of deluge of men who've taken over their palace. So it is really pertinent that Odysseus reaches his home and there's a lot of tension as to whether he's going to be able to do so.
- [04:54]
Mike Suiter
And we start that journey in Medius re. We don't actually meet odysseus until book five of the 24 books. So what's happening right at the start of the story?
- [05:04]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
At the beginning we're introduced to the fact that this is a poem about Odysseus and that he's had a very difficult plight. But we're beginning with the gods. The gods are having a Council about the situation and the future of Odysseus in particular. He has a goddess, Athena, who is really championing him and hoping that he will be able to get home. But the beginning of the poem is really very much set on Ithaca and revolves around Telemachus. So we often refer to those first opening books of the Odyssey as the Telemachus. So it's almost the miniature Odyssey of Telemachus himself. And Telemachus is visited by Athena. She comes to him in disguise as a mortal, and she gives him instructions. She says, you know, you need to try and deal with these suitors. It can't continue like this. And she says that your father is alive and you need to go off and search for information about him. And she sends him to the palaces of two of the men who had fought with Odysseus and at Troy. So she sends him off to Sparta to see Menelaus and to Pylos, to the palace of Nestor. So the beginning of the poem isn't really concerned with Odysseus so much as what he's left behind.
- [06:18]
Mike Suiter
And we should talk about the goddess Athena and also Zeus and Poseidon as well. So there's three major Greek deities who kind of interact and shape the story of the Odyssey. I wonder if you just introduce them for us.
- [06:30]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yeah. So this is kind of the important trinity of the Odyssey, these three gods. So Athena is the key one. She is the mentor of Odysseus. She has been by his side, she champions him, she adores him. And I think she recognizes something of herself in him because she is very much a goddess who's concerned with cleverness and craftiness. And Odysseus very much manifests both of those qualities. She is the daughter of Zeus. She was actually born out of Zeus's head, as you do. I mean, the gods themselves are quite dysfunctional as families. Zeus decided to swallow her mother because he'd been told of a prophecy that if her mother gave birth to a son, that son would usurp him and become king of the gods. And Zeus is king of the gods, so to stop that from happening, swallowed her mother and then gave birth to Athena out of his head. So Poseidon is the third in this sort of group. He is the brother of. Of Zeus. And when the powers of the gods were divided up, Zeus took the skies and the heavens, Poseidon took the sea, and Hades took the underworld. So nominally, they're all equal, but really Zeus is the most powerful of these three. But in Odysseus's story, really, it's Poseidon who is the chief threat.
- [07:52]
Mike Suiter
We're going to find out why Poseidon is so angsty in a little bit. Athena is a really interesting one, though, because there's an irony there, isn't it, that Athena is the reason that the Greeks took so long to get home from the war in the first place. Didn't she send the storms that kind of like stop them going home?
- [08:08]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I mean, the end of the Trojan War is horrible in every respect. There's a lot of looting, there's a sacking the city, there are the people being taken off into slavery. And part of this chaos after the war sees the lesser Ajax. There are two men called Ajax in the Greek army. The lesser Ajax, he actually. He rapes Cassandra, who is a daughter of King Priam of Troy, in a temple that is dedicated to Athena. And rather than punish him, she actually takes her wrath out on all of the Greeks. And there is a sea storm that's kind of created. There are storms all over the place. And the whole sort of departure of the Greeks is delayed as a result of her wrath.
- [08:57]
Mike Suiter
So that story is horrible. Is that another moment of Homeric Greece bleeding through into the Odyssey? Because we talked a bit about how some kind of hallmarks of Homer's own time come through. Wouldn't they have had a temple to Athena then? I thought that was a very much a later Greek thing, these temples to the gods.
- [09:13]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
This is really interesting, isn't it? Because we find several references to either temples or sanctuaries to the gods, and these were very much creations of the 8th century BC, so they more or less postdated the story, the setting of. Of the late Bronze Age. We said earlier in the previous episode that there are certain situations in the Odyssey, There are certain moments where we find traces of Homer's world spilling out into this point, and I think this is one of them. There's a real difficulty in trying to negotiate this situation between gods and men when temples haven't officially been founded yet in that theme.
- [09:50]
Mike Suiter
The gods of the Odyssey act in myriad ways, but they do interact with the story. Like they interfere. They can be petitioned. Is there a sense that Homer is imprinting that kind of approach to gods from his own time into the book as well?
- [10:06]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yes, definitely. And I think what we find really interestingly is that after the Odyssey and the Iliad come into being, you actually have a load of cults to the gods and to the characters in the poem. So people like Achilles, Odysseus, these cults actually are established in Greece and There's a real combination of traits and I think that people in the real Greek world are beginning to associate with, for example, Aphrodite. These are coming directly out of the poem. So some of the earliest writing that we have is from about 715 BC, and it's on a cup and it's all describing characters like Nestor, Aphrodite, from Homer's poems. So the fiction of the poem and the characterization of the people is directly spilling out into real religion and real belief in. And the ways that real people are thinking about the gods are very much informed by the kind of roles that Homer gave them in the poems.
- [11:10]
Mike Suiter
That's really interesting. And then, so we've got these gods. The gods are making Odysseus life a challenge, but they've got Telemachus and they've gone, don't worry, your dad's alive. So Telemachus has done his mini journey. He's beset by the suitors, but he's going to find out word of his father. The gods are milling around. We kind of get to book five and this is where we see Odysseus Talk us through this moment. What is Odysseus doing at this time?
- [11:33]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
So poor Odysseus is sitting on a beach and he is crying. He's really, really sad. He's been doing this day in and day out. Even though he's on a beautiful island, he's there with Calypso. Calypso is a nymph, so she is sort of semi divine. She's not human and she's very, very beautiful. And she lives in a cave. And this is described by Homer as being absolutely sort of fragrant with all these herbs and trees all planted around it and vineyards and grapes and all these wonderful things.
- [12:04]
Mike Suiter
So we shouldn't think of it as a cave. We should think of it like Hobbit hole. Levels of luxury.
- [12:07]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Exactly. It's beautiful. It's wonderful. So even when Hermes, the God, the messenger God, comes to tell her that the gods are ordering her to release Odysseus, he's even struck. He's like. He takes a moment to take it all in. And so look at these cypress trees and all these wonderful things which are there. So as a setting, it's almost like a paradise island that he's on. It's quite called Ogygia. But he's really unhappy. So Calypso clearly loves him. She wants to be with him forever. And they've been together for years, about seven years. And she's hopeful that they will be married and they will be a couple and they will live happily ever after. But his heart has never been in it. And I think she knows that. She watches him there on the shoreline, just longing for his home.
- [12:53]
Mike Suiter
He dropped in there. He's been there for seven years and decided the Odyssey is a ten year journey home. But Odysseus spends a large amount of time staying still.
- [13:00]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
He does. And I mean, this is a big question. Did he really have to stay that long? If he was that miserable, could he not have escaped by that point? And I think it can be really easy to be quite hard on him and say, you know, he's really been having his cake and eating it, you know, all these years with this very beautiful goddess. He could have been with his wife. I think there's a practical challenge in getting away because when the gods actually tell Calypso to release him, she says, well, I haven't really got ships to send him forth, you know, there doesn't seem to be a practical method for getting him there. So eventually she actually points him to some trees, gives him some tools, gives him some bread and wine, and says, build your own raft. And then he will get away. And his initial reaction was like, a raft, you know, I'm not going to be able to get it all the way home on a homemade raft. So he is on this raft escaping from Calypso. It's a difficult journey. He is windswept, he is crusted with salt. He is quite severely hurt by being buffeted by the waves. He's barely hanging on to the raft. He gets some divine assistance in order to survive this. And he eventually washes up on a shore and he is in a new place, which is the island of Scheria, which is home to the people who are known as the Phaeacians.
- [14:20]
Mike Suiter
This is where we suddenly hear about all his crazy adventures that he's had up to this point. Daisy, you said to me in our previous episode that it would take three days to recite the Odyssey. I wonder how quickly you can recap what happens to Odysseus.
- [14:36]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Can you give me a minute to try? Is it a test? So, okay, what happens? He leaves Troy, he sails off to Ismarus, he raids Ismarus, and then he, with his men, travels down and encounters the lotus eaters whose fruit makes. Makes them forget their homecoming. He then travels on and he breaks into the cave of the cyclops, blinds the cyclops, then he escapes. There he encounters a God and he receives a bag of winds. That bag of wind Wind, multiple winds. Multiple winds. Supposedly to help him on his voyage for his men. Open the winds. Disaster strikes. He battles the giant Laestrygonians. He encounters Circe, who turns some of his men into pigs. He travels down to the underworld. He returns to Circe. He sails past the Sirens and between Scylla and Charybdis. He then encounters the island of the sun, where his men eat some very holy cattle. And he then lands with Calypso. Finally, and I think from Calypso we've already got that he's, what are we, you know, on Skyria?
- [15:49]
Mike Suiter
So he's been ping ponging all over the place. It's really important to point out here that he did have a crew at one point. He starts off with a crew.
- [15:58]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
He starts off with a crew and he starts off with this band of men. And the group gets steadily smaller and smaller and smaller, which is very problematic because in some of these cases it's their fault. So Ismary is his first stop. A lot of them are disobedient. They disobey his orders to leave. They want to stay behind, they want to enjoy all the feasting and the meat and the wine and plunder more. I mean, they're plundering quite badly at this first stop. So they are disobedient to his orders. But from a military perspective, you'd say, well, these men are not respecting their leader. So this is a failure on Odysseus's part.
- [16:31]
Mike Suiter
One of the most common, at least my understanding epithets, I think I'm using that word right. For Odysseus is much enduring and certainly he endures a lot as you've kind of set out on this journey. We won't go for more, but I wonder if we can stop in a few of his places and linger a bit longer. And the one I'd hope to start with is the Cyclops Polyphemus. Because this, for me, if I was going to pick one story from the Odyssey, this is my favourite one as it encapsulates so much about who he is and some of the themes and it has a bit of everything in it.
- [17:01]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
For me it does. And I think it's the iconic story from Homer's Odyssey. I think when you're growing up as a child and you encounter myths the first time, the Cyclops is one of those first stories that you come across and it really stays with you. And in the poem itself, it's told with such verve. It's so fascinating. You have Odysseus and his men I think there were 12 men initially arriving at the caves of the Cyclops. And they are intrigued. They're thinking we're in another land. They've already been to a few stops already. And they wander in and they are hungry and they notice that in this vast cave there are these amazing cheeses all ready made. There are pails of milk, there are goats and sheep wandering in and out. And they make themselves perfectly at home. They go in and they light a fire and they sit around and they eat the cheese. And they don't know who lives in this cave. And yet they have done this. And this isn't proper in Greek society. You're not supposed to do that. So this is like kind of the first era of Odysseus. What then happens is the owner of the cave, Polyphemus, the one eyed giant cyclops, comes home and he's rightly furious. Who are these people?
- [18:18]
Mike Suiter
I mean, you just walked in, opened the fridge and just like, right, I'm helping myself to your snacks.
- [18:21]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Exactly. And if there's one thing that Cyclops cares about, it's his phlox and his cheese. And this is all gone. So he's upset. He sees these men and he rightly so. He decides he's gonna have words with them. But unfortunately he has more than words with them. He pulls a boulder across the entrance to the cave. And this boulder is so huge that it could not be lifted by men or even many, many sort of wagons and crates. It's absolutely enormous. So they're trapped inside and he sees these men and he decides to gobble some of them up. He eats the men. And I mean, the description that Homer gives is absolutely gross. I mean, don't listen to this while you're eating. It's horrible. He slaps the men, it says, like he's killing puppies against the floor. Their brains fall out, there's blood. But then he eats every bit of them. So all the bones, everything. And Odysseus is watching this and he's thinking, oh my goodness, like, what are we gonna do?
- [19:19]
Mike Suiter
And he was like, I shouldn't have asked for that gift. Cause he does that as well, doesn't he? He goes in and says, I want a present. Can I have a present?
- [19:25]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yeah. And then the Cyclops says, okay, your present will be that I will eat you last. So Odysseus needs to come up with a plan at this point because what can he do? They're trapped inside. The next morning, what happens is the Cyclops lets out his flocks to pasture. So daylight is coming in, they realize it's a new day. And Odysseus comes up with a plan and he decides to give the cyclops a present in turn. He gives him some of his wine that he's brought with him. And the cyclops is used to drinking milk, he doesn't know wine, so, so he starts to drink this wine. He gets completely sozzled. And that's exactly where Odysseus wants him. Odysseus then gets a sharp stake and he's sharpened it in the fire and he and his men plant it in his eye, his single eye, and he blinds the cyclops. And the cyclops is then reaching around in the dark and you know, trying to reach for these men. He's still hungry. He eats some more of these men. Eventually he has to open the boulder and let his flocks out. And this is where Odysseus plan comes in useful. He decides to put his men underneath the sheep and he climbs under a ram and he's holding onto the underside of the stomach. And so when the cyclops is reaching around, he can only feel the tops of his animals. And he has no idea that there are men clinging on like little ticks somehow to the underside, these massive ticks underneath. He doesn't realize that there's nothing suspicious about it. But the really clever thing is the cyclops has asked Odysseus his name and Odysseus has had great forethought and he said that my name is Nobody or Utis in Greek. So when eventually the cyclops calls out and the men have all escaped and they've gone back to their boat and the cyclops calls to his friends saying, you know, help, help, I'm being attacked. And the men, the other cyclops are saying, who's attacking you, who's attacking you? And he says, nobody is attacking me, nobody's attacking me. And they're like, well, okay then fine. So they don't come to his aid because he's been fooled.
- [21:31]
Mike Suiter
And the play on words in the Greek as well, right? It's not a translation, it's there, it's
- [21:35]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
there in the Greek, yeah, with UTIs and nobody. So it's really, really, really clever. And you just think, how did Odysseus think about this in that crucial moment?
- [21:44]
Mike Suiter
It's a very character building moment. But then he gets away and he does something blindingly stupid.
- [21:49]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
He does, he does. And this shows that he's not the great perfect hero that we might suspect him to be. He decides to call back at the cyclops and to taunt him with what he's done. And he finally reveals his true identity. He says that he is Odysseus. He's Odysseus son of Laertes, king of Ithaca, and he has done this and he is horrible to the cyclops and the cyclops by this point he is absolutely furious. And then he reveals to Odysseus in turn that, well, actually, guess who my dad is.
- [22:21]
Mike Suiter
Yeah, and spoiler alert, it is.
- [22:24]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
It is Poseidon.
- [22:26]
Mike Suiter
So Odysseus has doxxed himself to the God of the sea when he's on a naval journey home.
- [22:30]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Exactly. Big error
- [22:36]
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- [26:02]
Mike Suiter
how should we think about Polyphemus and the Cyclopes more broadly from this episode? Because I get a sense there's like in other parts of Greek myth, the Cyclopes, I'll say builders, they're not mindless savages, as maybe is portrayed a bit here, so.
- [26:17]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Exactly. I think that the Cyclopes are actually quite clever in some representations. I mean, certainly you see elements of that in Polyphemus, the way he's organized his animals and his cheeses. He's actually in many versions represented as a singer. You know, he's almost a poet in his own respect. In the Odyssey, he and his fellow Cyclops or Cyclopes, they are shown to be completely uncivilized. They're represented as monsters, as being very almost the antithesis of the Greek heroes who've come to meet them. And I think that's partly intentional. I mean, some people read that as being almost an allegory of how the Greeks viewed barbarians or strangers or foreign peoples more broadly. I think maybe that's going slightly too far. But I think what's really interesting is the fact that they describe them as being so uncivilized as to hold no assemblies and have no laws. And that's slightly ridiculous concept to think of these great cyclopedes with their single eyes going and sitting around having an assembly and having laws. I mean, that's not their civilization, it's not their culture. But certainly for people who were enjoying these poems when they were first performed in the 8th and 7th century BC, they'd have said, okay, well, we've got, with a society, with the laws, we've got our assemblies now, we've got the Greek polis. The Greek city state was coming into being. And at the center of the Greek city state you have laws, you have assemblies, you have these meetings which are, you know, these are proto democratic. They're not democracies like you get in the 5th century BC onwards, but they are a sense of men, because it is just men building their communities and having a sense of law and order. And the Cyclops are very much shown to be incapable of having that degree of organisation.
- [28:07]
Mike Suiter
This would be a really good place to bring in your myth of the week, because every episode we've asked you to pick a myth from the wider Greek literature that touches on what we've been talking about in the episode. And as I'm led to believe, this one features our friend Polyphemus.
- [28:22]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
It does, yeah. So I thought I wanted to tell a myth about Polyphemus that shows him in quite a different light to the one we see him in, in the Odyssey. And there is a myth which is told by a poet called Theocritus and then retold by Ovid and referred to by many, many other writers. And it describes his love for a nymph called Galatea. Polyphemus fell absolutely head over heels for this beautiful young girl and he began to write songs for her and to sing these songs to her. And in Ovid's version, certainly they're quite funny. They're sort of praising himself. You know how he is just as beautiful as the sun because the sun has only one eye. The sun is all one eye. So he has one very beautiful eye and he is very well groomed. And, you know, he's a good catch and he's seeing this. But Galatea is not mo moved by this whatsoever. Even when he decides to compare her skin to the loveliest thing he knows, which is cheese. Remember, he has his herds, he creates his cheeses. There's nothing in his world that's more beautiful than cheese.
- [29:30]
Mike Suiter
This is what I've been doing wrong all these years.
- [29:32]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I think this is the thing. If there are more men writing poems praising women for the lovely cheese quality of their skin, then there might be more love in the world.
- [29:39]
Mike Suiter
What is the best cheese quality of his skin? What allegory should I be drawing?
- [29:43]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Oh, I don't know, it's very difficult. You don't want a mouldy cheese, do you?
- [29:46]
Mike Suiter
Well, no, nothing colour to it.
- [29:48]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
He wants something lovely and pure.
- [29:50]
Mike Suiter
It's gonna go off in the heat. You don't want that.
- [29:52]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
No, you want something perfect. And I think this is clearly what he has in mind. But she, for some reason shocker, is not moved by this. She only has eyes for one man. And this is a young, probably teenage boy called Akis. And they are involved in a secret relationship or the beginning of a relationship, and Polyphemus actually spots them together and he is absolutely heartbroken by this. He is furious. So he lops off a bit of a mountain and throws it down and it threatens to crush Accus and he nearly dies. But at that point, in one of these versions, at least, Galatea says a prayer to her father, who is a river God, and he empowers Accus to be transformed into a river of his own kind. And he manages to survive this onslaught by the love rival and he becomes this blue skinned, blue haired creature who Galatea continues to adore.
- [30:56]
Mike Suiter
That's a very common thread in Greek myth, that when someone seems to meet a sticky end, they actually, there's no perishing involved, they just become something else quite attuned to nature.
- [31:06]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yes, I think this happens a lot, particularly, I mean, this whole theme of metamorphosis. This happens within the Odyssey. We see a man called Proteus who changes shape. He's an old man of the sea and he can transform. You get a lot of women in myth, particularly when they're being pursued by the gods and they don't want to be the lover of this God or raped by these gods, they are transformed into something else. So it becomes a form of escape. You get a lot of these stories of people being transformed. I mean, Ovid's Metamorphoses of the early first century AD is the great book as a kind of great repository of all these stories of shape shifting and transformation.
- [31:45]
Mike Suiter
So leaving Polyphemus behind, Odysseus goes on. Next person, I wonder if we could linger on a little bit is Circe the witch.
- [31:52]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Witch, sorceress, seductress, were many things. Yeah.
- [31:56]
Mike Suiter
But it's really interesting that the word that is in translation. I got this right Is Polypharmakos.
- [32:01]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yes.
- [32:02]
Mike Suiter
Which isn't. Which.
- [32:03]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
No, no, no. It means of the many herbs. That's how I would translate. Poly is many of the many herbs. I mean, she is witchy. She's very much described as that because of what she does with these. Because, I mean, you could say that a doctor was Polypharmacus. He has all the herbs to cure people. But it's what you do with them.
- [32:21]
Mike Suiter
Yes.
- [32:22]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Doctors don't go around turning people into pigs unless they're really bad doctors. So Circe gets this reputation partly, I think it's because she is a woman. I mean, I think this is a large aspect of it. There's a huge history in myth of associating women with being witches, with being sorceresses, of, you know, being up to no good. And the great sort of model for her in some ways is Medea. And Medea belongs to an age before Circe, but she's really only kind of written about in literature in any detail later. So she came from sort of further east from the area of kind of modern Georgia. And she provides Jason with herbs to protect him from these fire breathing balls who are protecting the Golden Fleece, which is his quest to go and rescue this Golden Fleece.
- [33:11]
Mike Suiter
Why can it not be a big ball? Why does it have fire?
- [33:12]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Fire. I know, I know. So he needs some kind of armor and the herbs are supposed to do this. Helen, likewise Helen of Troy. She is presented by Homer as putting herbs in people's drinks to make them forget the pain of the war. She's doing this and it's supposedly for their own good. Cersei, I don't think we can say that she's turning men into pigs for their own good. So it's very much the use to which you are putting these that determines whether you're a doctor or whether you're a sorceress or whether you're a witch. And it's being a woman that makes you very much fall into that category.
- [33:43]
Mike Suiter
We'll come back to that, but very quickly. Could you recap for us the story of. So Odysseus has turned up. And how did his men become pigs?
- [33:49]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yeah. So they encounter Circe. They've arrived on an island of Aeaea. Odysseus isn't one of the first people to approach her. He sends some of his men ahead and they are the ones who are unfortunately tricked and turned into animals.
- [34:04]
Mike Suiter
They come a bit poor sign. Yeah.
- [34:05]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Become a bit porcine. Message goes back to Odysseus. He needs to do Something he obviously doesn't want him to fall into the same trap. So he actually obtains a substance, an antidote to her herbs, from Hermes, the messenger God. He's given something called Moly. And Moly. What is Moly? This is another of those questions that has kind of obsessed scholars because there are various clues in the poem as to what moley is. It's said to be hard to dig up. It's said to have. I think it's. Is it black roots or believe its
- [34:39]
Mike Suiter
root is black and its flower is white as milk?
- [34:42]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Exactly. So what is that? People try to identify this, and even in the ancient world, people were really curious as to what this Moly could be. Get me some of that, please. There's a writer, a Greek writer, called Theophrastus, and he says it must be some kind of allium. So that, I think, isn't that like an onion? Allium to me means onion as well. I mean, we think of alliums in the garden, those great kind of purple ball flowers, onions, onion families. Yeah. So they thought it must be that. And it's, I think, partly to do with the nature of the roots being round. They thought that that must be Annie. But clearly it wasn't that. More recently, people have argued that it is actually the humble snowdrop, the kind of snowdrops you see coming out of the grass in sort of January, February kind of time. White flowers, apparently, black roots. I don't know. I've never looked at the roots of a snowdrop. But the crucial thing is it contains an antidote to poison called galanthamine. And galanthamine is supposedly supposed to help you. Again, I don't know the pharmaceutical uses of galanthamine.
- [35:40]
Mike Suiter
You haven't felt me to dig it up and just try something.
- [35:41]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I've never given it a go. Maybe I should. No, don't try this at home. But supposedly this is a model and could really be what Moly was.
- [35:51]
Mike Suiter
So Odysseus goes up and Hermes, who then turns up and says, no, have this Holy moly. I don't think that's the etymology of that, but I really wanted it. So have a hoey melee and that'll stop you turning into a pig. So Odysseus goes in, hams it up, as far as I understand it, and Circe tries the piggery spell on and it just doesn't work.
- [36:13]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
It doesn't work. It doesn't work. And then. Can we guess what happens next?
- [36:18]
Mike Suiter
Odysseus? I'm sure he goes, philandering, I'm pretty sure that's what he does.
- [36:22]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
They end up as lovers.
- [36:24]
Mike Suiter
Am I right in thinking the translation of the at that part is Odysseus? He's not really coerced into it. He's saying if you promise not to turn me into a pig then I will consent. Essentially.
- [36:35]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
That's more or less the negotiation. Yeah. And he just kind of fell oops into her bed.
- [36:41]
Mike Suiter
I mean, maybe she had skin like cheese. I don't know.
- [36:43]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Maybe, maybe. But I mean it seemed to be useful as he sees it for his quest and certainly for the storyline. It's useful because she is the person who's able to direct him to go down to the underworld. And this is an important aspect of the poem as well.
- [36:57]
Mike Suiter
So yeah, she's a really interesting kind of figure. We talked about that kind of witchiness about it end up in the London. And it struck me that she is very much in the imprint of later medieval medicine women. She is doing things with herbs that are naturally available. And I always find it really interesting when you kind of get the telling of going up and you know, her house is like a cottage in a glade of familiars. She has a wand. It's all very kind of tropey almost.
- [37:24]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
It is. You can see where we get so many of our kind of attributes of the witch from. I have no doubt that some of the origins of, you know, our witches and Hans Christiansen derived originally from the Greek.
- [37:36]
Mike Suiter
Another one I'd like to come onto are the sirens.
- [37:39]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Mm, I like the sirens. They are honey voiced, they sound wonderful. And Homer tells us a lot more about what they sound like than what they actually look like. Which is really interesting because there's a great later tradition of describing what they look like. Homer doesn't really give us much of a clue, but he describes the setting. He says that they are in front of a great meadow and this meadow is full of the bones of men who have died after hearing their song. It's one of those really enticing things. It's become folklore to go and hear the song of the sirens, but it's very dangerous thing and if you hear that song you will never make it home again. And Odysseus knows this, thank goodness. And he says, but I really, really wanted to hear it. So he gets his men to put wax in his ears and to tie him to the masts so he can't be lured away by these sirens. So they are manifestly female, but they are not in the kind of circe mould. I mean they're not seen to be potential love interests for Odysseus or anything like that. We know from sort of looking at Greek art that they're represented very early on as being bird women.
- [38:49]
Mike Suiter
Well, this is so interesting because you mentioned that line about they have this meadow and sirens in pop culture. Like if you, if you. I would put money if we went out and vox pop on the street now what's a siren? The people know a siren would go something aquatic mermaid esque. And that's very much not what they are in Greek times.
- [39:05]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
No, because I mean initially they have this meadow setting. So they're not particularly associated with being under the water certainly. But this association with having wings, of being kind of bird like almost seagull like I think of them as kind of singing over the sea. That seems to arrive really early on. So we have Greek vase paintings which are I think sort of at least 5th century BC showing them sort of with wings. But at the same time they are then shown with Odysseus tied to his mast. He's got a boat so he must be near water. So there's a meadow and there's water. But their association with the sea seems to develop slightly later.
- [39:42]
Mike Suiter
It's kind of a confusing geography. Like how's a meadow that close to the water? That really reminded me of another of Odysseus adventures where he's dealing with Scyllad and Charybdis because at some point he ends up hanging onto a fig tree over a whirlpool which didn't like geographically didn't make a lot of sense to me, but gets past the sirens and I think Scylla and Charybdis, they're next.
- [40:04]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
So he's facing two monsters which are of quite a unusual shape, shall we say. So Scylla and Charybdis. Charybdis is a whirlpool. So if he sails too close to this whirlpool his ship will get sucked under and there's no way he will get home. But Scylla is also a terrifying multi headed monster on this side on the rocks. So you can't get too close to that either. And for the Greeks, the idea of being between or sailing between Scylla and Charybdis is just like us, between a rock and a hard place. And if we look geographically, I mean people have tried to say that this is probably the Straits of Messina near Sicily. It's very, very difficult. The currents are very, very strong. So that's why you get the idea potentially of a whirlpool and then the straits. You're having to sail between these straits. You have this idea of these rocks being very, very dangerous. Your ship could be completely scuppered by landing on any of these rocks, under the water or hitting them, and in the storms as well, which really blow up around this area. And I think this is quite convincing. I feel like of all the episodes, it seems quite probable to me that the myth of Scylla and Charybdis derived from looking at the geography of this area and the experience of real sailors, how difficult it was to sail between these two very, very treacherous areas.
- [41:22]
Mike Suiter
We can't linger for too long here, but if you're fascinated by the likes of sirens Scylla and Circe. Sarah Clegg joined us on the podcast to discuss how ancient myths have portrayed women as monstrous beings. You can find a link to that in the episode description below. Among my beyond the podcast picks, Daisy, After Odysseus escapes from Charybdis, he ends up on this island that I'm not going to try and pronounce, where you have Helios, cattle of the sun. And this is a moment which I really wanted to mention to you because Odysseus does something. He does, I think, three times in a poem, which I'm really surprised at. He falls asleep at inopportune moments. Is he narcoleptic? I don't know what's going on with him, but this is another kind of moment where he loses control of his crew.
- [42:05]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
He does. I mean, he has been told specifically that his men and he must not eat these cattle or kill these cattle because they are sacred to the gods on this particular island. So what does he do? He falls asleep and his men just carry on and do precisely that. And that is a disaster because it is seen to be sacrilegious in every respect.
- [42:28]
Mike Suiter
And then, I mean, his men have beef, Helios has beef in a very different way. Why is there so much meat eating going on? Because you'd feel like at some point they'd be eating fish because, you know, they're at sea or sea standard.
- [42:42]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
By sea. Yeah.
- [42:43]
Mike Suiter
Yeah. And it seems like. I'm sure there's an episode where they do eat fish, but really grudgingly, yes.
- [42:49]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I mean, this is part of trying to create this idea of a heroic age. So in the heroic age, men eat meat, they are stronger, they are seen to be more powerful, and more importantly, they're seen to be closer to the gods. And what do the gods Eat the gods eat meat that's been sacrificed by men sent up. They inhale the smoke from these great barbecues that they have. And these are almost. A lot of these men are descended from the gods. You know, some of them in the Trojan War are semi divine in some ways. You know, they have divine blood flowing through them. And. And to Homer's kind of audience, they would have seemed superhuman. And there has to be some explanation as to how they're able to achieve these great quests. And that explanation is basically that they are feasting on a lot of meat and they are seen to be bigger. And certainly when people look back at the skeletons, I'm sure we'll come to this later, but of people who were living in the late Bronze Age, some of them in this society, they were bigger.
- [43:49]
Mike Suiter
They're literally bigger.
- [43:50]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Literally bigger, literally taller. Probably Bornea as well. So it's, it's the idea of creating the idea of them of being heroic and strong and mighty and closer to the gods.
- [44:00]
Mike Suiter
So Odysseus has. He's escaped from the island with a cattle of the sun. He's been to Calypso. He's finally found his way to the court of the Phaeacians. Where does the rest of his journey take him?
- [44:12]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Well, the Phaeacians are the people who agree to take him home. Finally, finally, finally. They are great sailors, they have a great crew, they are strong. There's enough of them to organize. They agree to do that, and they've heard his stories that he's told of all these amazing feats and defeated the cyclops and everything else. He's been telling all those stories to them. So they're impressed by him, they're happy to help him. So they agree to charter a boat, put Odysseus on it, and they take him all the way home. And unfortunately for helping him, they get punished by having their ship turned to stone by Poseidon, because Poseidon is still.
- [44:49]
Mike Suiter
He's very mad at. He's just still.
- [44:51]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
He's still in a rage. Yeah. So poor Phaeacians, you know, it's really, really unfair. Odysseus wakes up in Ithaca and Athena comes to him and says, you are home in Ithaca. Because it's presumed that he wouldn't necessarily recognize it after 20 years away. And she gives him a plan. She actually withers his skin, she makes him look old, she puts him in rags, she gives him a stick, she makes him look like a beggar so that he can then approach in disguise. The people of his home and he then has to group together with whoever is there to try and build a case and build up a defense really, or maybe more of an attack force actually against the suitors who have taken occupation of his home.
- [45:31]
Mike Suiter
And he finally does kind of oust them and win back Penelope. And you know, it kind of ends with his journey home complete, his status quo household restored. It's worth pointing out that bit we just talked about. The journey from. From the court of Phaeacians to him gaining his home is about half of the Odyssey.
- [45:51]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
It is.
- [45:52]
Mike Suiter
And it's a very. We've got a very short description and there are some events in there. But we were speaking earlier off camera about how even as scholars we can truncate that story. And I just wonder if we could expand on that a little bit.
- [46:05]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yes. So it's one of those things where people genuinely prefer the first half of the Odyssey to the second half of the Odyssey, even though there's a lot to do. And there are some exciting episodes where he has to defeat. He has a bow contest, you know, there's a lot of bloodshed. There are these great reunions. First with his dog Argo, who still remembers him, really sad. And then the dog dies. But they've had a reunion 20 years.
- [46:27]
Mike Suiter
It's a good life for a dog.
- [46:28]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
It's a good dog. Yeah. Good life for a dog. Very much so. With Telemachus, with his nurse, there are all these great sort of recognition moments and steady kind of identification of who he is, but all of that seems to be secondary. And people, people don't really like the fact that after he reunites with Penelope at last and they go to bed together, there's basically two more books. And people don't like those two more books. And there's a lot of speculation, some think that they were later editions or aspects of them were later editions. The fact that there isn't this neat ending after this happens, we actually see the suitors descend to the underworld and there is a great uprising of the suitors families who come up into arms and they're of another war and Athena has to step in to stop this war from breaking out between the people of Ithaca and the families of the suitors. So it's a bit messy.
- [47:21]
Mike Suiter
Which of the episodes do you prefer in the story? Like if you were going to have a rhapsode recite part of it for you.
- [47:29]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I love the reunion with Penelope. I love the Cyclops story. Like you, it is one of my favorites. I actually really like the Telemachy as well at the beginning. I find those sort of adventures of Telemachus quite interesting.
- [47:42]
Mike Suiter
How so?
- [47:43]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Because I think he's just so much a man in need of guidance. And him going off and reuniting with characters that I know and love from the Iliad, you know, visiting their courts and seeing how life has become for Helen of Troy after the Trojan War for the people of Pylos, what it's like, you know, what's the aftermath of the Trojan War actually like those early books is where you see this kind of return to normality and what Odysseus has been missing all this time. And that's why I find it interesting.
- [48:11]
Mike Suiter
That's great because we're going to talk a lot more about those courts and some of the more domestic moments of the Odyssey in future episodes. But for now, Odysseus is home. That sounds like a really good place to end this particular episode. Daisy, thank you so much.
- [48:25]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Thank you.
- [48:27]
Mike Suiter
And if you want more content like this, you can find all our video and podcast series ad free in the History Extra app.
- [48:40]
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