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- [00:00]
Commercial Narrator
Howdy, shoppers. Fire up that propane grill and settle in for a new season of Hulu's hit animated series King of the Hill. Hank and Peggy are staying active in retirement.
- [00:08]
Venmo Advertiser
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- [00:09]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
You will not have to lift a finger.
- [00:11]
Commercial Narrator
Bobby and Connie hard launch their relationship.
- [00:14]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Now that we're dating, it's important your
- [00:15]
Kev Lotchen
parents know I'm a man.
- [00:18]
Commercial Narrator
And the alley guys are. Well, they're still the alley guys.
- [00:20]
Kev Lotchen
Yep.
- [00:21]
Commercial Narrator
Watch the new season of the Hulu original series, King of the Hill, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney. For bundled subscribers, terms apply. This has been a paid advertisement.
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Dr. Daisy Dunn
Foreign.
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History Extra Podcast Host
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. From the role of women to slavery and the role of the hero, the Odyssey has much to tell us about the ancient world. In this third episode of our Sunday series on the epic and its afterlife, Dr. Daisy Dunn guides Kevlochen through some of its key themes.
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Kev Lotchen
Around 2,800 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, 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. This time we're delving into the archaeology of Bronze Age Greece, looking for clues that might tell us what, if anything, in the Odyssey is based on facts. Welcome back, Daisy.
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Dr. Daisy Dunn
Hello again.
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Kev Lotchen
So to recap, Odysseus journey very quickly. He's left Troy, he's been to the land of Circones, he's met the lotus eaters, he's been with the Cyclops, Aeolus twice, Circe, the underworld, Circe again, Sirens, Scylla, Charybdis and onwards, finally ending up at Ithaca via the land of the Phaeacians. And he's been bouncing around all these places. Is it at all possible to map any of this onto what we know of the Aegean?
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Dr. Daisy Dunn
People have certainly tried. There have been some really, really valiant efforts to try and work out exactly where Each of these adventures took place on the modern map, and I would say some of them are fairly sort of reasonable attempts. So, I mean, we know where he's beginning. So he's beginning at Troy. We know where Troy is. It's near the Hellespont on this kind of west coast of what's now Turkey. He seems to then travel upwards and then down through the Aegean and then through the Mediterranean. And he's certainly going around the areas of Sicily. He seems to go up to sort of Malta, back down again and towards Greece and Ithaca. I mean, that's a slightly fraught question. Where is Ithaca? We have a modern island of that name. It doesn't really meet the description that we have in the poem. So some people say. I think the most convincing one's Paliki, which is a peninsula of Cephallonia, which we think was almost certainly an individual island a long time ago.
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Kev Lotchen
Not a million miles away from Ithaca.
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Dr. Daisy Dunn
Exactly. In the right neck of the wood. In the right neck of the wood, definitely. So he seems to travel almost in a figure of eight across these various seas. And there are descriptions of other places along the way. We get quite a global picture and
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Kev Lotchen
we touched on some of those in our previous episode. But maybe the Cyclops Polyphemus was on Sicily, how maybe Sila and Charybdis may have been in the Straits of Messina as well, around the bottom of Italy. The one that surprised me was perhaps the lotus eaters off the coast of Tunisia.
- [03:56]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yes. Yeah, it seems sort of Djerba, I think, is the place that's been identified. Quite possibly that is the case. So, yeah, I think it is possible to certainly identify some of these places. But the. I mean, it's imaginary landscape has really been kind of put on of a lot of these places.
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Kev Lotchen
The world itself, how expansive is it? I know within the Odyssey it begins mentioning that Poseidon's off in Ethiopia. Like how far is the known world at that time?
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Dr. Daisy Dunn
So it's quite far. So we've got North Africa, we've got Egypt, got Ethiopia as well, as you say, we have Crete, most of what's now Turkey, certainly sort of central portions, as well as the west coast, the Aegean Islands, the Greek mainland, the Peloponnese, off into Italy to the islands of Italy as well in the Tyrrhenian Sea. I mentioned Malta a minute ago. That seems to be where Calypso was, at least Gozo. So that kind of area. So it's quite broad. And I mean, that in itself is a reflection of Homer's Time as well, because people were traveling a lot more for leisure in his time. There were people going off to the Olympic Games. The Olympic Games were new in the 8th century BC. There were people going off for religious festivals, traveling across seas the first time going to see the oracle at Delphi. So there are reasons for people to be passing a much broader range of locations than they had previously.
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Kev Lotchen
This is perhaps a mistake on my part, but I hadn't really considered the kind of travel for leisure aspect of the Greek world at that time.
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Dr. Daisy Dunn
I think it's a big part of it and I think that's probably one of the reasons why the Odyssey was so appealing to the people immediately, because it was chiming with their own experience of them sort of beginning to be excited and not seeing necessarily the sea and voyages as being completely just dangerous and off putting, but actually be an appealing thing.
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Kev Lotchen
Let's start where Odysseus starts, which is in Troy. And Troy, as far as I understand it, unlike some of the places we're talking about, we know both it is real and also we've kind of fixed on where it is.
- [06:04]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
That's true, yes. So it's identified with a site at a place that's called Hizralik in the west of Turkey. Heinrich Steven is the great sort of excavator, the first excavator of the site of Troy. He was tipped off as to its location. He was an incredibly rich man. He'd made his money through trade in sort of indigo, in, I want to say coffee, maybe it was tea, this sort of thing. He's a. He's a great sort of businessman of the time. And he was an amateur archaeologist.
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Kev Lotchen
So not trained in any way.
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Dr. Daisy Dunn
No, no. So he very much went over to where he was told Troy might be with his copy of Homer, Iliad, Odyssey and you know, his kind of digging equipment, little team of people and he just began to dig down. And to modern archaeologists he's not really a hero, even though he's the great excavator of the site. He made so many fundamental errors and caused so much destruction in the process of excavating Troy that actually he made the situation a lot muddier and murkier than it might have been. And what I mean by that is that Troy itself is a really ancient site. So you have distinct layers of archaeology of different periods in time. And archaeologists have broken these up into roughly nine main layers and there are sub layers, you know, nine abcd, whatever within each. And Heinrich Schliemann's sort of rationale he thought, well, the Trojan War was surely the oldest thing to have happened at Troy. So therefore, to get to any evidence of Troy, I need to dig to the bottom or dig as deep as possible. So that's pretty much what he did. But if you're an archaeologist and you just keep going down, down, down, you're going to disrupt all those neatly kind of sedimented levels and you have a risk of one spilling into the other and you really disturb what's actually there. And this is a big problem with his excavation. So he went down, he kept digging and he went to Troy 2, so quite near the bottom, and he found some amazing things there. We have a lot of what he discovered. We have plates, we have. We have treasure jewellery. I mean, there's a really famous picture. He has a very young wife and he dressed her up in some of this gold jewelry that he found in this layer. And he had this habit of connecting whatever he found to Homer's poetry. So this was the treasure of Helen, Helen of Troy's jewelry. And his wife got to wear it. And it's a very nice idea, but it's very, very fanciful and not particularly accurate, as it turned out.
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Kev Lotchen
And to clarify that there's no indication that this has anything to do with Helen, he's just kind of gone and been like, this is a nice necklace. Maybe it belonged to Helen of Troy, I'm gonna call it that.
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Dr. Daisy Dunn
The fact is, and it was found out pretty soon afterwards, that a lot of what he found was about 1,000 years older than it should have been if it had belonged to Homer's Troy.
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Kev Lotchen
So he dug too deep.
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Dr. Daisy Dunn
He went to him.
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Kev Lotchen
He dug too deep.
- [09:07]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yeah, that was his big error. So in the process had disturbed these really important layers. Because modern archaeologists who are trying to find evidence of the Trojan War in the same kind of way, but with a bit more of a kind of scientific background, they identify the layers of Troy which are pertinent and relevant to the story of Homer in the layers 6 and 7. So not two 6 and 7 are corresponding to that kind of period. I think level seven, the relevant level, was destroyed in about 1300 BC. And level two is it's about a thousand years older. So looking back to 2100 BC or
- [09:47]
Kev Lotchen
something like that, and level seven is then where we. If we assume that as Troy and if we assume the Trojan War, that's the one which would have been destroyed at that time.
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Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yeah. And there are various layers of. Within these layers, there's evidence of many cases of destruction. So you Have Troy VI and Troy VII are the grandest cities. And there's really good evidence there of monumental walls of very, very thick sort of limestone blocks forming these walls of fortresses, of lookout towers. The kind of things that we find in Homer's poem where he's describing what Troy looked like. These are really sort of borne out by the evidence. But there are also signs that there were fires, there might have been earthquakes that destroyed these layers. And one of the really interesting things that happens is you find between six and seven, you find one of is rebuilt after what might have been an earthquake. And there's an extra effort in that period to create more and more accommodation. It becomes more crowded. So what began as quite spaced out. You're getting all these kind of much smaller house. They seem to be houses built very, very close to each other. And they have these great big earthen pots sunk into the floor. And that seems to be. To archaeologists, they say, well, look, this looks like the evidence of people trying to kind of batten down the hatch. In a time where there's a threat of war, where people are stockpiling, literally, they're putting their produce underground. They are trying to gather what, grain, wine, whatever they needed to survive. And they are living in a city which has very strong defenses because there's some kind of threat going on. And then people who really want to find a Trojan War then say, well, look what else we found here. We found arrowheads, we found slingshot bullets, we found swords, we found a bit of sort of armor. And they're quite paltry remains. You know, it's very difficult. You can't look at those and say, oh, look, this is the material of a great big Greek army. I mean, there's not enough. It's not there. It's not enough there. But there's something. It's very difficult to say exactly what happened, but certainly there was a destruction of a city, a rebuilding of a city, a destruction of a city, a rebuilding of a city.
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Kev Lotchen
So plausibly could have been a war, categorically no one knows. Is that where we've come down to?
- [12:12]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
I think so, yeah.
- [12:13]
Kev Lotchen
I'm really glad we've introduced Heinrich Schliemann, because he's gonna come back into the story in a moment. We could talk about Troy as a whole, as a podcast in itself. We can't do that here. But dear listeners and viewers, if you want to know more about Troi history, Arctic show has you covered. There's a episode in my beyond the Podcast Picks, which, with Professor Paul Cartridge Talking all about that ancient city and its war with the Greeks. You can find that in my beyond the Podcast links below. Daisy Away from Troy, there's a whole other host of places that Odysseus Antillemachus visits. All these other courts. What surprised me is a lot of these are based on real places and a real culture. I wonder if you could introduce that for us.
- [12:58]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
It seems that we have kings who look after certain areas, not just the immediate city or town in which they are based. So Odysseus is described as the king of Ithaca. Ithaca is the island. So he presumably was the only one. But then we have references to, for example, Agamemnon and Menelaus. I mean, Agamemnon is described as being a king over a much broader area in the Peloponnese. He's the king of Mycenae, but he also seems to have power over places such as Corinth. So there seem to have been kind of almost confederations of places which were managed by kings. And with Agamemnon, this is where we get sort of one of our clues as to the inspiration that Homer was drawing upon. Because in the poem, Homer describes him as Anax, and that's a word which means. It's often translated as lord. Quite difficult to translate because it seems to be the Greek equivalent, or it certainly is the Greek equivalent of wanax. And this is a word that comes from the Late Bronze Age. It belongs to something called the Mycenaean Age in particular. And the Mycenaean Age is really the age that is inspiring Homer. And the Mycenaeans had kings who were known as Wanax. One singular wanakes, I guess, would be the plural. I'm not floating in Mycenaean, but wanax is the word that we get. And there was a deputy to the Wanax, and they essentially they lorded over a palace culture, each one within this Mycenaean culture. There were various huge palatial residences dotted around many the Peloponnese. So Mycenae, hence the name, Mycenaeans. That was one of them. There were places such as Pylos, Tiryns, Iolkos, Glaar. These are places which aren't necessarily familiar to us today. You'd need a map, really, to identify most of them. But they were clearly incredibly advanced, very much ahead of their time. And they seem to have had palaces which are almost like cities in themselves. So there were thrones in some of these. So you can imagine a Wanax almost sitting there holding court. They had sort of Central halves with fires. They had columns and then multiple rooms stemming off these central courtyards. And some of these rooms would have been used for crafts, for trade almost. So you have sort of evidence of people doing weaving in some of these rooms. So they seem to have been almost miniature cities in themselves. And the idea is that you have a wanax, you have a leader who is almost the controller of these great little networks.
- [15:43]
Kev Lotchen
So in the Odyssey, where we see Telemachus journeying to these grand courts of Menelaus and Nestor at Pylos, and we have Odysseus going to King Alcinous in Scheria, are we able to map these onto the Mycenaean palaces as we understand them?
- [16:02]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yes, yeah, we are. I would say so, because I think when Homer is trying to create a picture of the grandeur of all of these places, he's actually looking at the archaeological remains of these very palaces, these Mycenaean palace complexes, because the people in his time, so think 400 years in the future, they're looking back at the remains of these palaces, which had largely been destroyed by then. But there are blocks, there are walls, there are aspects of them, and they're overall just as we are when we go and visit ancient Rome. And you see sort of, you know, some of the columns and bits and pieces still there. You are still thinking, goodness, how did they do that in that historical age? And because of the grandeur of these Mycenaean palaces, this helps to fuel the idea of the poem, because you're thinking, you're trying to create this idea of this great heroic age. The people who built these palaces must have been heroes, because there's so much more august and grand than anything in Homer's own time. So it makes sense. That's why they're doing it. And that you have Telemachus visiting one of the palaces, which we still have evidence of, which is incredible. He visits the palace of King Nestor. Nestor, elderly man in the Iliad, and he goes there and he is overawed by the grandeur of it. And we know that this palace that actually stood historically in this place, it was 6,000 meters squared.
- [17:24]
Kev Lotchen
Gosh, it's enormous.
- [17:25]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Really, really big. It was incredibly accomplished, yet was divided into, I think, three main sections for living. And it had courtyards, it had a great sort of colonnade. It had running water from an aqueduct, really early kind of aqueduct. And it was just absolutely extraordinary. And there's a great scene in the Odyssey where Telemachus takes a bath while he's there. So Nestor actually appoints Polycastor, one of his daughters, to actually go and bathe Telemachus. And Telemachus has this bath and he clearly really enjoys it. Cause he comes out and Homer says that he came out looking like the gods. So you think, wow, that must have been quite some bath. And I think this is a bit of an in joke on Homer's part because there was actually a very special bathtub which miraculously has survived. It's real bath? Yeah, real bath. And it's incredible. It's sort of. It's short. It's not like a long tub. It's a short kind of lozenge shaped tub. Not freestanding, it's kind of built in. You couldn't move it. And it was terracotta and it had. The interior was painted with concentric circles. And they would have been brightly painted. It's very much faded now. And found nearby were all of these kind of big jars and containers which would have been used to pour the person while they're in the bath.
- [18:43]
Kev Lotchen
Oh, wow.
- [18:44]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
So different sized ones for carrying the water and sort of tipping it in and filling the bath.
- [18:48]
Kev Lotchen
And that's a massive operation for one bath.
- [18:51]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
It is, it is. And it's just. I mean, it is absolutely incredible just to have that bath. And I just think, why did Homer mention this bath? Is because people in his time were obviously visiting the remains of this palace and looking at the bath.
- [19:04]
Kev Lotchen
So that comes into what we're talking about, about the travel element again. It's like, they know this place.
- [19:09]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yeah, they know this place. It's informed that the Odyssey's fiction, but it's inform. Informed by fact. It's informed by these archaeological remains which are trying to sort of. They're painting their own picture for the people who are living in Homer's time as to how amazing and august society was in the late Bronze Age.
- [19:28]
Kev Lotchen
And I wonder if we can see some of this in Mycenae itself, because there's some great archeological remains there. And one of the remains I came across was the lion gate. And it's enormous, right?
- [19:38]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
It is. It's incredible. I mean, the lion gate. I always call it the lioness gate because I actually think it's lionesses rather than lions. Up the top, there's two of them crowning the top, on top of this great big lintel. And the wall is monumental. And in ancient times, people couldn't work out how did they get these lions up there, how did they raise this lintel? And a lot of the myths that sort of turn up at this time is that the Cyclops were involved in building places like Troy and Mycenae and actually lifting these things.
- [20:10]
Kev Lotchen
That's so interesting that the culture seems so otherworldly that you've got a mythological kind of creation for it.
- [20:19]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
It really does. And I think this just shows you a lot about how much has changed, I think, between the time that the Odyssey is set and the time that it's actually being listened to by people in Greece. There's this sense, I think, very much, that they don't talk explicitly about having been through a dark age, but they're really aware of their inferiority to the time that came before them. They really, truly imagined that the people who were living in this earlier time that Home is describing were, you know, on first name terms with the gods and the goddesses, that they were so important and superior to the people who came after them, that there was a real closeness between gods and divinity. And the men were heroes and they were bigger and they were stronger. And how else would they build these monumental buildings?
- [21:04]
Kev Lotchen
Can we talk very quickly about the Mycenaeans themselves and how that culture worked? Because Mycenae is a city, but also they've given a name to their entire culture that's spread across the Aegean.
- [21:17]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yeah, it's the Peloponnese area. Broadly, it's really, really trailblazing as a culture. And we define the Mycenaeans today as early Greeks. They seem to have taken over from the Minoans who inhabited Crete before then. And the Minoans were the original occupants. They had their own really amazing palace culture. If you visited Knossos, and we're thinking about the world of Arthur Evans and the great excavations that he undertook there and the kind of recreations that he made there. If you visited, you'll see these very, very colourful paintings all over the place. So the Mycenaeans were partly inspired by the Minoans, but they also took over from the Minoans. They seem to have almost forced the Minoans out. Their society descended, the Mycenaeans took over. So they were the kind of original Greeks.
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Kev Lotchen
So what a different culture?
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Dr. Daisy Dunn
They were a different culture, but they were very much inspired by Minoan culture. So they took aspects of it and it wasn't clean cut. It wasn't like all the Minoans stopped and then the Mycenaeans began. There was an overlap between the two, but the Mycenaeans were the ones who proved the most successful and were particularly strong in trade.
- [22:27]
Kev Lotchen
Do you have any sense of how life in one of these palaces worked.
- [22:31]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
We do a little bit from some of the tablets which have been preserved.
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Kev Lotchen
These would be tablets in linear B.
- [22:38]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Linear B. So Minoans, they had linear A, and they used to write on these clay tablets. And linear A was a syllabic script. Linear B is quite similar. This was inherited or rather invented by the Mycenaeans, and there is some overlap between the two. And linear B was again a syllabic script. It was used for making lists, it was used for accounting, it wasn't used for writing out literature. They're just lots and lots of little symbols which you can sometimes actually decipher without knowing any of it. Today, some of them look just like bundles of wheat or things like that. It's sort of measures of certain materials of oil, cows, things like this and the Mycenaean language. Linear B is very difficult to decipher, but it has been deciphered, whereas linear A has not been fully deciphered yet.
- [23:31]
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- [23:32]
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- [24:01]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
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Dr. Daisy Dunn
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Dr. Daisy Dunn
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Dr. Daisy Dunn
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- [24:32]
Kev Lotchen
It's super interesting talking about the size of these palaces, because I'm really struck in the Odyssey about how you have the suitors in Ithaca, and Ithaca presumably is a palace in this context, that there's 100 plus suitors and they're there for maybe three years and they're eating Odysseus out of a house and Home. They haven't finished yet. The stores in this place must be massive.
- [24:53]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
They must be. I have an example from Pylos. So, great palace there. One of the storerooms there. Just one out of many, many, many storerooms. One storeroom contained nearly 3,000 cups.
- [25:06]
Kev Lotchen
Cups.
- [25:07]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Cups for drinking wine.
- [25:09]
Kev Lotchen
Not cups of anything, just literally cups.
- [25:10]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Just cups.
- [25:11]
Kev Lotchen
So that's given an indication of how many guests you might have in one place.
- [25:15]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yeah, exactly. That gives you an idea of just something of the scale on which banqueting, on which sort of hosting could have been taking place at that point. My impression from the poem is that Ithaca is much less grand than Pylos, than Sparta as well, where Menelaus is. I think it's very, very. It's comparatively rustic. It's falling apart because of these suitors. And I think. I mean, there's a real worry that they are depleting Ithaca of its resources. And I think they would have been completely dependent on the agriculture there. They are feasting on a lot of meat. So they must be depending on constant breeding of sheep, wine. Where are they getting that? I mean, Ithaca is an island. It must have been importing things from the mainland. It's not completely cut off. So I think it's of kind. There is a good storage of things for the suitors to use and abuse. But there is one of the worries that runs through the poem is that there's this great depletion and that this can't carry on forever. So my reading of it very much is that they are running out of time there, that they are pushing it almost beyond the brink, and that Ithaca, the kingdom, needs to be saved now by Odysseus. Just as much as Odysseus needs to get home because he wants to see his wife.
- [26:44]
Kev Lotchen
It's interesting that you have that kind of comparison between, like, a faded palace and these kind of grand spectacles, because ultimately the palaces do vanish, like they all kind of collapse.
- [26:53]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
They do. There's a sudden, and this is this dramatic end because they've been flourishing. And then suddenly we have examples of these. These palaces are all abandoned. Mycenae, I think, is the last to burn down. Pylos is abandoned. Everything. They all just completely left. And it's a bit of a mystery. You then get the fall of the Mycenaeans, and to this day, we're not exactly sure what happened. What happened to this great palatial society. Why did it come to a sudden end? Why were all these palaces just left
- [27:24]
Kev Lotchen
and the end was sudden Then it
- [27:26]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
seems to Be quite sudden. I mean, in the case, we know at Paidos that people had been having this great big feast beforehand, because Archelaus has gone in and found evidence of there being a great barbecue, a great feast, dead animals. They haven't found any human remains there. So it doesn't seem like there massive fire at the end, which caused everyone to go, but fires were widespread at these palaces as well. So we don't exactly know what caused this society to collapse. And there have been theories down the ages, all kinds of things we have. So theories of sea peoples. This is one theory that there's actually references to sea peoples on various documents, particularly from Egypt. Essentially the idea of kind of piratical raiders traveling around and causing chaos when they reach land. So some people hold those responsible. There was the idea of a Doric invasion, and the Dorics were a certain geographical group of people coming probably from the north. So they thought maybe these people were coming in from possibly Epirus in Greece, probably from the Balkans as well, and that there was some kind of battle. We haven't really got any evidence of that at all of this invasion. So that theory has been thrown up in the air as well. Certainly at the time of the Mycenaean collapse, there seems to be huge upheaval across this part of the world. So the Hittites, who are a very powerful people based in what's now Turkey, their cultures, they seem to be abandoning their cultural centers to some extent as well. There seems to be a lot of climatic change. People have looked at this from a sort of archaeological point of view as well, and think there might have been long periods of drought which might have caused people to move away from certain areas because of famine. There are so many different theories, but certainly the population seems to be getting smaller. And then what happens is we seem to find the Mycenaeans turning up in a completely different area. Because people have looked at the archaeology, for example, in Eurbeya and Lefkandi, which you can probably identify on a map, but which there are these great sort of buildings of houses and sort of certain aspects of the culture there, which seems to be Mycenaean. So it looks like people were traveling, there was suddenly mass migration, and there's a huge period of migration at the end of the late Bronze Age. So a real sense of upheaval. And perhaps the idea of this Trojan War feeds into this. I mean, perhaps we have this period where there are maybe not one war, but a series of wars across different nations. We have people very much on the move. A real sense that there is sort of life in flux and that it can't carry on in the way that it had. Certainly in these areas where there'd been great wealth with the Mycenaean palaces. And so everything is left behind. And then you have the beginning of this so called dark age where the population certainly has shrunk and it's shifted away from these cultural centers.
- [30:28]
Kev Lotchen
And that's very interesting. You mentioned Troy again there. So are we able to draw maybe not a line, but is there a correlation in time between when Troy perhaps vanishes and when the Mycenaean culture starts to collapse?
- [30:42]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
It's the same time. So I think, and I think quite a few people. I'm one of those people who reads the poem, the story of the Trojan War, certainly almost as an allegory for what's happening at that point. It's almost trying to describe this decline, this sudden change in the world where there was this great heroic age and it came to an end.
- [31:05]
Kev Lotchen
It's like a swan song almost.
- [31:06]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yeah, It's a last, final celebration of the strength of these people. And in this particular story, they come to an end through warfare that obviously wipes out a huge section of the population and through the gods as well. So it's one way of trying to explain, I think, what was a very, very turbulent period.
- [31:25]
Kev Lotchen
We don't have, I guess, a huge amount from this period. We've got some archaeological names, but one thing that I know we do have are graves. Is there anything we have found within Mycenaean era graves that would corroborate some of the details we see in the Odyssey?
- [31:41]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yes, for sure. So the Mycenaean graves are absolutely fascinating. They were excavated again by our old friend Heinrich Schliemann.
- [31:50]
Kev Lotchen
Love him.
- [31:50]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
And what did he do?
- [31:52]
Kev Lotchen
Did he go too deep and too hard?
- [31:54]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
He did. He did the same. This is very much a habit. And he connected what he found very readily with stories in the Odyssey and the Iliad.
- [32:03]
Kev Lotchen
The way you describe it, I get the impression that he's basically picked up his copy of the Odyssey and he's here and being like, this looks right. I'm going to. I'm gonna name it after this thing I found in this book. And almost treating the Odyssey or the Iliad like her guidebook.
- [32:15]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Exactly it. Exactly it. So he would find. I mean, he found the great. The mask of Agamemnon, this great famous mask that in itself is several hundred years older than Agamemnon would have been. If you take the Time scale of the poem, all kinds of things he's finding and he's giving them the names of these people. But the fact is, these grave circles and these tholos, these beehive type tombs, these very grand tombs that he was excavating, they do contain stuff that seems to belong to these Mycenaean era heroes, these warriors. And it is astonishing because we have the bones of a lot of these people as well. And they show that these people living in this era were several inches taller than people living in later Greece. They were buried, in many cases with armor. And the armor often correlates to the armor that Homer describes in his poems. So, for example, Homer describes people as carrying large rectangular shields, or figure of eight shields. He has them have scabbards, they have spears, they have helmets, a variety of helmets. But Odysseus has one that's identified as having boar tusks to it. And in some of these graves there's loads of traces of boar tusks. So we have boar tusk clearly would have been, I'm pretty certain, from helmets in these graves. And of sword, there are daggers, there's wonderful jewelry, and it just seems to match up quite well with the picture that Homer gives us.
- [33:52]
Kev Lotchen
We do have to talk about something else related to helmets. I mean, one reason we are talking about the Odyssey now is there's going to be a film about it, a Christopher Nolan film retelling the poem. It's not out yet. It will be by the time this episode airs. But one of the most famous early reactions, that is the typical inverted commas, typical Greek helmets, the brush one. I wonder if you tell us a bit about this style of helmet, like, I mean, in this trailer, what we've seen so far, it's a bit of a bargain bin Batman kind of look. How are these helmets? Are these typical? Are they accurate?
- [34:26]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
There are certainly a variety of helmets and I think for certain, Homer describes some of them as having horsehair plume helmets. So Hector, notably, he wears one of those in the Iliad. And there's this great scene where his child, his son Dianax, looks at it and he's scared of this nodding sort of horsehair plume on top. So that is perfectly credible. Likewise having these four task helmets, as we've said, sort of lining almost lined up around the helmet. I've seen the Batman one in the trailer that you've described. That doesn't ring true to me particularly. I mean, we don't know of all the colour used on these things and I know certainly the Shields in Homer seem to have been brightly painted, so perhaps there was a real variety of colour with the helmets, but certainly the one that I've seen, I immediately looked at it. I thought, well, that doesn't look right to me. Even though I couldn't say for certain that that didn't exist, because we haven't seen everything, obviously. None of us have. That was there.
- [35:27]
Kev Lotchen
I wonder. You've just made a point about colour, which I'd be really interested to follow up on, in that we know a lot of the Roman world. You have these kind of plain statues that actually once really brightly colored. Does that mirror onto the Greek world as well?
- [35:38]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
It does, yeah.
- [35:39]
Kev Lotchen
Okay.
- [35:39]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yeah. They love bright color. Absolutely. So I think that was certainly there in the war as well. You know, I think their armor was a great part of their sort of forming an identity, particularly when they're going into battle. And one thing that Homer really draws out in the poem is how organized the Greeks are compared to how disorganized the Trojans are. And it's partly because he is trying to say that the Trojans and their army are drawn from all quarters. They're coming from a quite diverse group of places and they're coming together and they have sort of different tongues, different languages. It's a bit of a ragtag. Whereas the Greeks are coming in a very, very unified way, even though they're drawn from all quarters of the Greek world. You know, Mycenaeus, one of the places that actually sends the most ships, because it seems to be one of the most august places. Pylos, again, second, most ships come from Pylos, a reflection there of the real grandeur of those places. So even though this army comes from all quarters, it seemed to have a kind of identity to it. And I imagine that the colors and the uniforms and the appearance of these people, even where it differed from soldier to soldier, there was still some kind of unifying style to it that created that kind of unified picture.
- [36:54]
Kev Lotchen
Maybe it's colourful horse plumes.
- [36:55]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
It might have been colourful horse plumes.
- [36:56]
Kev Lotchen
I mean, I'd go for that. A nice bright green horse plume would be amazing. Daisy, before we wrap up, there's just time to return to our regular segment, which we're having every episode. So each time I've asked you to pick a Greek myth that somehow ties into the themes we've been talking about. This time I understand it's treasure related in a fashion.
- [37:16]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yes. So we've been talking a lot about Heinrich Schneimann finding gold and being very Excited by it. So the mask of Agamemnon, the treasure of Helen. So I thought I would share with you a myth from the ancient world, ancient Greece, about gold, particularly the story of Midas.
- [37:35]
Kev Lotchen
Aha.
- [37:36]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
So Midas was a famous mythical king, and he ruled in Phrygia, which is in central Turkey. And he was given the opportunity to choose whatever he wanted by one of the gods. And he said, you know, his one wish was that everything he would come into contact with would turn into gold. He thought this was marvellous. And this wish was granted. And he was thrilled. And he started testing it out. He was touching everything that he was passing. He, you know, trees, he was touching the soil. Everything was turning to gold. And then he returned home, and he entered through the door. Door turned to gold. Felt fantastic. It's even more grand, my palace, than it was before. And then he sat down to dinner, and there was a wonderful banquet laid out for him. And he was so excited to tuck into this delicious feast. But he picked up his first portion of food, put it to his mouth, and he nearly broke his tooth because that too turned to gold. And suddenly this became a source of misery to him. And he realized what a fool he had been and how greedy he had been to make this his wish. So he repented of it, and he wished his wish away. And eventually that was granted. And he was told that instead he could carry on. And he was relieved for a while. But then he made a second error. He was called in to judge a musical contest. And he judged Pan, who was a woodland God, to be better than Apollo, who was really the God of music himself. And for making that ill judgment, he was punished, and he was given the ears of an ass.
- [39:20]
Kev Lotchen
Amazing. I mean, the first part of that, far too literal with your wishes. You've got to be careful of that sort of thing.
- [39:28]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
That's what they say. Be careful what you wish for.
- [39:30]
Kev Lotchen
Is that actually from this?
- [39:31]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
It's not from that, but we're going to the parable. Okay, fine.
- [39:34]
Kev Lotchen
Holy moly. And this. We're making up some new etymologies as we go along. It's such a fascinating thing. What happens if he touches the earth
- [39:43]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
that turns to gold? Like gold clod, but it's clods of earth.
- [39:47]
Kev Lotchen
He doesn't. Can't go the ocean. That'd be a.
- [39:50]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
The whole thing. No, but he does try when he comes in. And this is in some versions, so there's a Roman version, and he's described as trying to wash his hands. And that's obviously quite Difficult because the water solidifies.
- [40:02]
Kev Lotchen
Yeah. I mean, this is just all kinds of horrifying. I don't know where to go from it. It's terrifying. Is there any sense that any of these kind of myths were used as kind of, you know, we'd have, like, moral fables in the West. It only sounds like any myth like that would be kind of used. So kind of be careful what you wish for.
- [40:23]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
Certainly. Yeah. I'm sure that that was part of their purpose. They were stories for entertainment. They were very much par. Parables and mole tales. I mean, Aesop's Fables, we know those. For Aesop was Greek. He's coming from the Greek world. He was originally a slave. He's coming From, I think, 6th century BC, Greek island of Samos. All of his ideas are very much coming out of that. And we talk about those Aesop's Fables today, and we embrace them as moral tales. They were exactly that then.
- [40:50]
Kev Lotchen
Brilliant. Thank you for that, Daisy. And so the world in which the Odyssey is set has come to an end, but it's not the end of our story. In the next episode, we'll be looking at some of the poem's major themes of home, homecoming and guest friendship, and also the legacy that the poem has left on the modern world. Until next time, Daisy. Thank you so much.
- [41:09]
Dr. Daisy Dunn
See you then.
- [41:11]
Kev Lotchen
You want more content like this, you can find all of our podcast series ad free in the History Extra app. There'll be links to that down below.