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- [00:01]
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- [01:21]
Meta Glasses User
Introducing Meta Glasses. You have questions.
- [01:24]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
They've got answers. Hey Meta, what's the capital of Peru? Lima.
- [01:29]
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How do you say where's the restroom in Spanish?
- [01:33]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
Dondes Talvano.
- [01:35]
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Hey Meta, Is a hot dog a sandwich?
- [01:38]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
Technically, no. Spiritually, yes.
- [01:41]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
Hey Meta, what should I do with my life?
- [01:43]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
That's one of life's biggest questions. What do you think?
- [01:47]
Meta Glasses User
Ask anything with the new Meta glasses.
- [01:50]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
Hey, I just Venmo'd you for rent.
- [01:52]
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- [01:58]
Progressive Insurance Narrator
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- [02:07]
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- [02:09]
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- [02:10]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
Get the Venmo debit card Venmo Stash
- [02:13]
Venmo Advertiser
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- [02:26]
History Extra Podcast Intro Narrator
Welcome to the History Extra podcast. You've probably caught some of the recent hype about new film the Odyssey, and in the latest of our Sunday series, Kev Lotchen will be speaking to classicist and author Dr. Daisy Dunn about this ancient Greek epic. In today's episode, they're exploring what the Odyssey is and what we know of its author.
- [02:48]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
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 Kevlotchen 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 first episode we're gonna tackle the biggest of questions. What makes D Odyssey special? Who exactly was Homer? And why is there skepticism that Homer existed at all? Daisy, thank you so much for joining us.
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Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
Thanks for having me.
- [03:55]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
Before we get into the thorny thicket of authorship of the poem, could you give us a real top line summary? What is the Odyssey about?
- [04:01]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
The Odyssey is a very thrilling adventure story about a hero called Odysseus and his quest to make it home from the Trojan War to his island home on Ithaca and be reunited with his wife Penelope, his son Telemachus. And the story really involves him battling a number of things along the way. So monsters, gods, sea, storms, even himself to a certain degree. And the Odyssey is a poem. It's an epic poem and it is the sequel to the Iliad. And the Iliad told the story of the Trojan War. And it's long, it's divided into 24 books by books who basically mean chapters. And as I said, it's written or composed in verse.
- [04:47]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
And we call it an epic poem. That is partly. It's a long poem, it's 24 books, 12,000 lines. But also epic poem means something in particular.
- [04:56]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
In this instance, it does so epic, as you say, partly to do with its length, its size, also its subject. So it has to involve war, battles, a quest. Often gods, demigods are involved. Some kind of quest is a big meaty subject that epic poetry tackles. And it's also defined by the fact that it is composed in a certain metre, called it dactylic. Hexameter.
- [05:24]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
We're going to come back to gods and monsters. They're going to come up many times as we talk about the Odyssey, but onto dactylic hexameter. That's something our listeners and viewers, they might have heard or might be familiar with, like the term. And the Odyssey and Iliad are composed in this particular way. Maybe not so much what it actually is. What does it mean? How does it sound?
- [05:43]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
So the easiest way to think about it is that this poetry was originally sung. So it helps to think of the Odyssey as one big song. And if you think about it as a song, you can then imagine it almost written out as if it's a music score. If you picture a music score, you have lots of bars. So with a hexameter. Hexameter. Hex means six in Greek, So it means there are six bars. So each line could be divided into six bars. And these bars have a very particular metrical scheme, a number of kind of syllables within each. And nearly always the last two bars end the same way. So these last two bars are usually long, short, short, long, long. So my teacher at school said, think of the rhyme. Raspberry jam pot. Raspberry jam pot. So that's how. A bit slower. Most of the endings of these lines sort of culminate. So it's very stately, that rhythm. It's very serious. It's quite a sort of heavy, august type of meter, having things it didn't rhyme. You know, it's not a rhyming poem like we have rhyming poems. This is in place of rhyme. So it creates this kind of sense of grandeur. And that's what we understand by epic metre.
- [06:55]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
I love that little. Kind of like you can almost tap it out on your knee. I've been thinking of it in terms of linguistic Lego blocks.
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Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yes, yes.
- [07:02]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
The way all these pieces fit together. What I noticed when I was looking at the poem is the way you have these repeating phrases over and over again. And I wonder, that speaks to that sing song nature you were talking of.
- [07:16]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
Absolutely. You have these elements which are giveaways that this was a song. So you have epithets and formulae, or we officially call these things. So epithets are things like Swift Footed Achilles, Rosy Fingered Dawn, Odysseus of the Many Ways. These are kind of repeated phrases which are easily attached to names or people. And then you have these great passages, these formulae which are repeated throughout. So you find these things which are. They're often describing things like when people come together to dine together. So people sit down and they put their hands at the food that's laid before them. And there's a whole process. And part of this, when I think about it, I used to think these bits really reinforce how traditional certain aspects of the behavior in the Greek world was. So coming together to dine seems to be a very, very almost traditional formulaic process, and that's echoed within the song. But when you had these original singers perform, it was very helpful to have these set passages, almost like a chorus in a song. They could just revert to these certain bits at the appropriate moment and they could fill the metre when they needed to with these set phrases. So it was kind of helpful building blocks for them and, you know, a way that listeners could really get to know the poem. They'd memorize certain bits themselves, even while listening.
- [08:33]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
Yeah. I noticed so many incidents in the translations, like when morning happens, mourning can't just happen. And you kind of alluded to this, but in the Robert Fagos translation, it's when young dawn with her red rose fingers shone once more. And it's almost like a bridge. And there was another one where Odysseus. He cries, he weeps. He's a very emotional man. But it's exactly the same phrasing. It comes again and again. And you can just see the kind of like, oh, I need to. This event needs to happen. And here it is.
- [09:01]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
I love that as well, because it is part of the story. It's not just a functional thing, having these repeated. It's part of the whole character of the permanence, how you get to know their world and how you get to know the people within it.
- [09:11]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
Daisy, before we dive in, could you give us a bit of an overview about when the Odyssey is set versus when it is written?
- [09:18]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
This is really interesting. I often describe the Odyssey as being almost like a historical novel.
- [09:23]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
I've read you saying that.
- [09:24]
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- [09:24]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yeah. I think it's the easiest way to think about it because I think we can get so lost in the idea. This is a really ancient work, so you assume that everything it's describing is contemporary, but that's not the case at all. The end point of the Odyssey is around the 8th century BC, where you start to get a decent version of it. But the events it's describing belong to the late Bronze Age. And this is about 400 years earlier than the poem when it's being sort of composed and sort of finished off. That's a long time. And it's partly, I think, a sort of tribute to that age, because the Bronze Age in the Greek memory was this time of heroes and splendor and wealth. It then fell. So you get the end of the Bronze Age. The Trojan War is right on the cusp of the end of the Bronze Age. And what followed that was the Dark Age. And it's become deeply unfashionable for historians to talk about Dark Ages full stop. But in truth, the population shrunk quite drastically. Art became far less ambitious than it was. There seems to have been really a kind of a bit of a hiatus culturally. Certainly writing was no longer taking place before that. In the Bronze Age, they'd had a type of writing on tablets. This stops happening, and it's at the end of that process. So around the 8th century BC that the Odyssey and the Iliad come into being, and they are then written down and basically Greece is kind of waking up again, and it's the beginning of the Archaic era. So we have a real disjunction between the period in which the poem was composed and the period in which it is set. This is looking back in time at this really, really glorious. Just before it fell and times became a lot darker.
- [11:17]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
And I'm really taken by that comparison you made about it being like historical fiction. You said the period is like 400 years. So if we map that onto today, that is me writing about what the 1600s were kind of like early modern.
- [11:29]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
It's so far removed. And this is why the Odyssey is so fascinating, because you have certain traces in it which are legitimately from that period. Because some of these stories have been passed down. They've covered that distance. They are stories which are myths which have been told then, and they've come down only naturally. There are words which have come down naturally. But then there's also this concerted effort in the 8th century BC to make this sound a lot older than it is. So you have this sort of, you know, almost stage setting, you know, putting in the props of the. Of the time. People looking at the archaeology, thinking, okay, that's what it was like then, and describing it. But then you have little giveaway signs where you have elements of the 8th century BC accidentally being left in. So it's almost like when you watch, I remember, I think it was on Downton Abbey. Everything looked perfect in this one shot, but someone had left their water bottle on the fireplace and that was still in the shot, and that gave it away. This is what I mean. So in the 8th century BC, there are certain things which happen, such as a temple start to be built for the first time. There's a lot more travel. There are elements suddenly which are imposed upon this period. So you can tell that it isn't authentically, wholly a creation of the late Bronze Age.
- [12:41]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
We're gonna talk a, like the archaeology and a kind of historicity odyssey. But just as a teaser for now, what is your most egregious water bottle?
- [12:51]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
Oh, in the Odyssey. Well, I think there's a moment in particular where the Cyclops and his friends, Cyclopes, we might call them, the plural. They are described as not having any assemblies for lawmaking. There are no assemblies for lawmaking that we know of in the period in which the poem was set. This is very much a product of the 8th century BC.
- [13:13]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
It's imprinting Homer's time onto the poem. Amazing. I think it's also really interesting that when we think of ancient Greece, a lot of, like, popularly, we're thinking of a very specific point in time, which is probably more classical Greece. Right. It's like Athenian democracy and Pericles and the oracle at Delphi. This is all very much earlier than that.
- [13:33]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
This is a long. This is centuries earlier. Yeah. We think of the birth of democracy. You talk a lot about 5th century BC Greece. Cause that's where you get Pericles. It's where you get all the great plays. You get Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus. They are you know, so sort of four hundreds for the late Bronze Age. The period that's been described here, we're talking about sort of 1200, 1100 BC. So centuries, centuries earlier, when many people introduced theodicy.
- [13:59]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
It is a book by Homer. Neither of those things are strictly kind of a bit of simplification on the thing. So it was not a book, it was sung. How did that work in the ancient Greek world? Like, would I expect to be able to go out and hear it performed?
- [14:15]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
It's a difficult question because it's slightly shady as to how this actually worked in the ancient world. The strongest clues actually occur within the poem itself. So we encounter within the story a number of bards who are performing songs and stories, even about the Trojan War itself, within the poem. And they are people who've come to court. So we have to imagine there are various palaces, various kind of quite grand societies within this poem. And they have a bard who's there performing often to the accompaniment of a lyre. And as often after dinner, there's been a great banquet. People are gathered round, they're listening to stories about the war or about the Gods, lots and lots of stories being told by these people. So we had the idea that in the real world people were doing exactly that. There were these bards who were performing the poems. But this is, as you said, this is a long work, you know, 12,000 lines. That's quite a lot. There's been estimates probably would have taken about three days to perform that. Oh, wow. And you know, that's allowing for a bit of feasting, a bit of socialising in between, but that's quite long. So I think it's very, very likely there would have been performances of certain books, of certain passages within the poem for certain events. People wouldn't have necessarily gone and, you know, stayed for the three days to hear the entirety because they would have come to know this story really, really well and people would have favourite episodes within it. You know, just like in TV today, people might have a favorite episode they want to rewatch. There are certain kind of standout episodes within the Odyssey which people would have loved to go and hear performed. It's a social thing to do, you know, it's not like listening to a podcast. It's very much a crowd thing, a sociable thing, part of society and as I said, sort of accompanied by music as well. And there, at some of these performances there would have been one bar taking over from another and you know, there's a kind of almost like companies of these bars, I think.
- [16:09]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
So like if we were doing a performance of it, like you do a section, I'd do a section, someone else
- [16:13]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
would come in so that no one got tired. And you know, probably people specialize in certain aspects of it and they're really good at doing this. So I think, you know, it's a very, very community based type of exercise.
- [16:25]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
Do you have a favorite kind of epithet, the way these kind of are built. Do you have that bit that comes back to you and go, oh, that's so like magical the way it flows.
- [16:34]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
I mean, I really like all the dining bits in the Odyssey because I'm always interested in food anyway. I love food and I find it really interesting how people sit down and the kind of formality, even if they're eating something really simple like bread and wine. You know, the fact that there's a process, there's a ceremony to actually dishing this up and bringing a table over to someone and the kind of practicalities of it, I find that really interesting.
- [16:57]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
And then we've got this poem that is sung. How do we get to a point where we have a version of it? That's written down.
- [17:05]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
It's a long process. It's a really, really long process. So very likely there were multiple versions of the Odyssey floating around, being composed by different people, being composed during the performance itself initially. And the poem basically started life in a period where there wasn't writing in Greece. And it was at the end of that process, at the end of what we call the Greek Dark Age, that the Greeks rediscovered the art of writing around the 8th century BC and wrote down what they could of the Odyssey. And even after that point, there were performances of the Odyssey taking place and there were many, many different forms of it, depending on who was singing, the tradition that they had heard, you know, what they'd grown up listening to. So there was no standardized form of the Odyssey even after it was written down for the first time. So it's only really from about the 6th century BC that people started to actually standardise and thinking we want a kind of fixed version of the Odyssey in order to perform it. So it's very, very fluid process, very, very slow and very creative. It's very difficult to actually get a sense of this today because we are so reliant on writing things down. But people in that time had an a.m. they could recall things and really put things to heart. So it might kind of defy belief thinking, this is a long work. How did anyone memorize all of this? But it did happen and there were kind of gradually evolving versions.
- [18:43]
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- [20:08]
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- [20:38]
Meta Glasses User
One crunchy bite of a Hershey's cookies and cream bar and I'm taken right back to college. Move in. Day I was a little overwhelmed by the newness of it all. Boxes were everywhere. I needed a break from unpacking.
- [20:49]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
But just as I was able to
- [20:50]
Meta Glasses User
take a breath and open my Hershey's cookies and cream bar, my new roommate, Rachel walked in. I offered her a piece, but she said no. Then after a beat, she said, actually, those are my favorite ones. We left, the ice was broken, and
- [21:04]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
we've been friends ever since. Hershey's. It's your happy place.
- [21:09]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
So it sounds much more like for much of its early history, the Odyssey was a collection of almost individual episodes that then get kind of attached together into one whole.
- [21:21]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yes. I mean, I think that's fair. I think that's fair because, I mean, I think for sure there are stories within the Odyssey which are older than the Odyssey themselves. Likewise with the Iliad, there are certain myths which predate these two epics. Even though these two epics are the earliest pieces of literature we have, we know for a fact that stories in there are older. So they've been passed down for generations. They've filtered through into these poems. There are certain episodes which are developing in these poems at different paces, and then suddenly they come to be standardized. So it's gradual and there are certain elements which are a lot older than actually meet the eye.
- [21:57]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
And somewhere within this, we get to the second part, where it is a book by Homer. Where does this person come into this story?
- [22:07]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
Homer is a real enigma, and he was an enigma even in ancient times. So people in the ancient world believed that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed by Homer. And they believed that Homer was one man. There was little doubt about that.
- [22:21]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
And a real man.
- [22:21]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
A real man. But no one could say for sure who he was. It was a bit of a mystery that he was someone who was in the distant mists of time. They weren't quite sure where he'd come from, who he was, who his family was. His name wasn't a standard name. Homer or Homoros in Greek wasn't one of those surnames that people came across. So there were efforts to translate the name to try and find clues as to who he was. And one of the translations is blind. And the idea arose that he must have been a blind poet and is always working back from the fact. People said, well, these poems weren't written down initially. Of course they weren't because he was blind, so he couldn't write. But those people didn't realize they didn't know their own history to the extent that there wasn't actually writing before the 8th century BC in Greece. So therefore it wasn't a possibility. Their explanation was he couldn't write it down because he was blind. Sculptures were made of Homer. They'd never seen this man. There's a bust. There's a bust, a great one in the British Museum many centuries later. I think that's sort of. There's a Roman copy of a Greek original which is about the second century bc. But these are based on the imagination. They showed him as blind. And part of the appeal of this is that one of the performing poets in the Odyssey, Demodocus, is blind and he is there and he's singing songs and he's a wonderful celebrated poet. So people almost saw him as, you know, that's Homer making a cameo in his own work. But there's no certainty about that because Homer's could also mean captive. So some people said, oh well, he must have been a captive and he composed these great works while in captivity. But none of those things could be proven. And there are seven different places in the Greek world that claimed that Homer came from their hometown.
- [24:07]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
Would we know any of them today?
- [24:08]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yeah, so I mean, Athens is one of them. Argos Chios, Greek island, Smyrna on the west coast of what's now Turkey. So lots of competing places. Eos claimed to be his death place or his place of death. They actually minted coins claiming to show Homer, big shaggy beard, quite a sort of good looking man. Those coins are silver, but they're unfortunately about the 4th century BC so they're far too late to be accurate in any degree. But what's interesting about most these places is they're clustered around the Aegean Sea and the west coast of Turkey. And when we look at linguistic clues within the poems, we find that most of the language is what we call Ionic in flavor, and that refers to the area. So it refers to these islands in the Aegean and the west coast of Turkey. So it seems almost certain that Homer, whoever he was, came from, or at least the poems originated in the Aegean or on the west coast of Turkey. So Homer remains a myth. We don't know whether he was a real person. We don't know whether he was just a figure who was invented in order to put a name for this. Really kind of quite difficult to capture description of poetry being performed by lots and lots and lots of people. But today it's perfectly acceptable to talk about Homer as if he's one man, just because it's artistic convention. It's easier to say this is written by or composed by Homer.
- [25:33]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
But to the Greeks, they had no question about it. They thought this person definitely did exist. He definitely composed his poems like he was a legend in their own time, by the sounds of it.
- [25:44]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
He was. I think you find, like, there are a few kind of questions as to, like, you know, is this really one person? Even by the sort of second century ad, there are people. There's a scholar, for example, a writer called Lucien, who's throwing a little bit of shadow on the prospect of there being one hero. Yeah. And because of that, I think that hints at the fact that some people were slightly uneasy with the idea that there was one author. Why don't we know anything about him? But it's only really, truly by the kind of 18th, 17th, 18th century that people are really starting to question whether Homer was actually a person or whether these poems can actually be attributed to anyone at all.
- [26:23]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
It's actually quite late. So we've gone from the 6th century BC all the way through to the 18th, 19th century. And I guess that's the Homeric question. And then we get that capital Q, which means, you know, it's a big debate.
- [26:34]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
It's one of those things. You see a Homeric question and you come across this as a student. I did. And you think, oh, no, what is that? It's not as sort of daunting a task as it looks. I mean, basically the Homeric question is, who was Homer? Who composed the Ethics? When did that happen? And what was the process?
- [26:52]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
That's basically what we've just talked about,
- [26:54]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
basically what we talked about. And it's this whole idea that maybe, because we know for sure now that these poems began life orally. They were sung before they were written down, something we call the oral tradition. That how can you then attribute them to anybody? Because they've been floating around, there've been people who've been performing them and adding to them they've been composing while they've been performing them. You have contributions from lots and lots of different performing poets through all this time. So how can you say there's any Homer at all? But people eventually divided into two camps over the Homeric question. So we're going back to particularly German scholarship in the kind of 17th, 18th century, and they're really getting to the nitty gritty. They're looking at all the linguistics. They're getting very, very excited and very worked up about lots of tiny little clues.
- [27:41]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
Oh, I love a library study. Hit me.
- [27:42]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
I love it. And they are very excited about this. And it becomes quite heated. You get these very, very strong debates between people, two camps, broadly, the Unitarians who believe that there was a Homer, or at least that the poems could be attributed to one single mind. And then you get the analysts who kind of see this more as these finished works as a patchwork of pre existing versions which have been sewn together. And they're very much more for this kind of multi authorship. And it's very, very difficult because this has never been resolved. There are people, there are scholars who are still divided over the two. When I was a student, it was very much like, I'd have been total out of fashion to say there was one Homer and he composed this. This whole idea of there being an oral tradition was really cemented by a couple of scholars in the early 20th century, a couple of American scholars. So Milman Parry and his assistant Albert Lord, they really tried to prove the fact that these had oral tradition, that there was a sort of great oral history behind these poems.
- [28:45]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
Something I didn't expect when I was researching. This is. This is going to take us to the former Yugoslavia.
- [28:50]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
It is, yes. So they were traveling around and they realized in former Yugoslavia that people were performing songs, poems which they'd memorized and they'd been passed down through generations and generations. And they'd been able to do this without writing them down. And looking at the way that they were doing this, that they were using these kind of formula and epithets in their own way in order to build up songs which could be memorized and passed down. They were able to set down a theory about how this happened. And this became incredibly influential through the 20th century. People thought, well, that's it, you know, this is how these poems have evolved. The whole idea of Homer became quite unfashionable. You know, no one would have looked at that bust of Homer and said, you know, this is the man we must praise for giving us these wonderful works of literature that all became out of fashion more recently. Things have begun to turn back the other way because there's a great school of people who are saying still, well, look, these are such unified works. I mean, they're so coherent the way that certain episodes are foreshadowed. How would one singer foreshadow what another singer was gonna sing later in the song? You know, how is this great communication happening between all these different singers? It seems so well put together, so well tightly structured, that surely this is the product of a single mind. And Robin Lane Fox recently wrote a book and he's favored very much this idea of there being a Homer. You know, these works being a great brainchild of one person. And I think the closest way I can sort of try and bring these two groups together is almost by looking at the poems as having this long, fluid gestation. But perhaps the overall story, the arc, if you like, of each of the epic poems was originated by one person. Perhaps someone latched onto these pre existing myths, began to almost flesh out a narrative, and came up with the original concept for the Odyssey and the Iliad. And then maybe there was someone at the other end of that process. So when these poems were starting to be written down, they're having to compile all this kind of stew pot of different ideas and songs and elements together and try to unify it into something that really held its own as a very, very coherent work as literature. So maybe there was like an original Homer and there was Homer an editor. And it's interesting to me that Homer Ross, another translation of the name, is a fitter together.
- [31:20]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
Okay.
- [31:21]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
And I think, well, that's quite a good clue. I mean, surely we have another Homer at the other end of this process who's almost distilling everything that's been passed down to this great oral culture and then thinking, okay, now we have something like a final odyssey, even though many more poems will be sung.
- [31:37]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
So we're saying we have. We have two Homers, one who is the imaginator, if you like. Is that a word? I don't know, I've just used it.
- [31:43]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
Let's go with it.
- [31:44]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
And one at the other end who is essentially the editor whose kind of sticks together, has put the foreword on front and go, here you go. This is the collected Odyssey.
- [31:52]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
This is how I see it not everyone will agree with me because as I say, it is still very, very much argued over as a topic. But I think that's part of the power of these poems is this whole mystique. They are so ancient, they are so brilliant, people get really het up about how they could become these great works that they are. And I think in a way, not being able to solve that question definitively is actually a good thing.
- [32:16]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
Real or not, Homer is a name indelibly linked of ancient Greece. So it's no surprise he ranks among History Extra's most influential figures in the ancient Greek world. But who stands alongside him? And are they even real? You can find out in my beyond the podcast Picnic. The link for that is in the episode description below. Daisy, we talked a lot about Homer as potentially being the author, but as I understand it, there perhaps are one or two other names floating around. The one I know you know about is Fantasia, and I wanted to ask about this person.
- [32:49]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
I find this fascinating. So there was a theory, and it has ancient origins, that Homer didn't compose these poems at all. In fact, he plagiarized them from a woman called Fantasia, who was the true Homer, if you like. The story goes that a woman called Fantasia composed certainly the Odyssey, and she left the manuscript of it in a temple in Egypt. And Homer came along and said, oh, this is quite good. Can I borrow it? And he did so, and then he used it to compose the great epic poem and she was forgotten from the whole process. And this idea gained traction. So all the way through the kind of Victorian period through to Robert Graves. Think of I, Claudius. They genuinely believed that the Odyssey might have been composed by a woman because it seemed more domestic in nature than the Iliad, the Iliad's concern with battle and with war. The Odyssey I wouldn't really describe as a domestic poem, but it's certainly a quest for domesticity. He's trying to get home to his wife and his son. And certainly there's an author called Samuel Butler who bought into this theory as well. And he was saying, well, there were so many mistakes in the Odyssey that a man just wouldn't make. So maybe this theory that a woman wrote it is true. Because, for example, he says there's a description in the Odyssey of a ship as having a rudder on each end. And he said, a man just wouldn't make that mistake.
- [34:18]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
I hoped that story was going to be better. Not like it was, oh, it's a mistake.
- [34:23]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
Therefore, well, it gets better at the end because. So they were kind of they felt confident in this partly because there was. The earliest origin that I know of, Fantasia is a second century or third century bc, Alexandrian scholars, I think, Great Library of Alexandria, where all the great scholars congregate. And there's a man called Ptolemy the Quail who describes Fantasia. But the thing about Ptolemy the Quail is that he was a trickster and he wrote loads of nonsense and tried to back it up with false citations. So he seems to have made up Fantasia as a joke. So it's this great literary hoax that she's been carried through all the way through history. But she almost had the last laugh because, I mean, it's staring them in the face. Fantasia in Greek means a fantasy. So almost like all these men have been hoodwinked by her to an extent. So I quite like that. I think she almost gets the last laugh.
- [35:13]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
So, Daisy, a lot of these manuscripts ended up in the library at Alexandria.
- [35:16]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
They did, they did. And that's where it was, a great depository for all the great works. People were able to sort of divide the books up. They didn't give them numbers. Initially, it was letters of the Greek Alphabet. But before that point, there had been some effort to try and reconcile these different versions. And there was a great event that took place in Athens, the great Panathena. And we believe that the poems were being performed that in some kind of standardised form because of the ruler at that time trying to ensure there was a sort of a known accepted version. And we're told at that point that the Rhapsodes were instructed to take over one from the other. So we were talking earlier about people not getting too tired and performing this. So certainly at this point people were learning bits and then carrying it on. Someone else would step in and kind of carry on where his previous singer left off.
- [36:09]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
And the Rhapsodes are the singers?
- [36:11]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
Yeah, exactly. And they are singing, they're performing these epic poems. And then we get through to Great Library of Alexandria, and so we have this sort of fairly standardized version by then that's being created so people know what the Odyssey looks like.
- [36:25]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
Cause I wonder if this time at a festival, when they're trying to get standardized, is this other author who I've heard about is, I think, gonna get his name wrong, but Peisastras.
- [36:32]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
Do you mean Peisistratus?
- [36:34]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
Probably I do.
- [36:35]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
So I think so. He. So he's a tyrant ruler of Athens, and he seems to have been the man who actually instructed to be performed as part of this festival. So I think this is Important because it shows that in his eyes at least, these are already crowning works of kind of Greek history. The fact that they are being endowed with this great importance at this early date shows just how important Homer is seen to be.
- [37:00]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
Daisy, before we wrap up this episode, there's just time to talk about a regular segment we're gonna have. Every week, in every installment, I've asked you to bring us a myth of the week that somehow relates to what we've been talking about in each episode. What do you have to kick us off?
- [37:14]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
I'm gonna give you the Trojan horse.
- [37:17]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
Aha.
- [37:17]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
And I've chosen this one because a lot of people read the Iliad and expect to find the Trojan horse there. But that myth isn't told in the Iliad, and it's only told really very briefly in the Odyssey. So most classical readers had to wait until Virgil, Virgil's Aeneid, great epic poem in Latin to actually get a good proper telling of this myth. And it's curious because this my. Is really about Odysseus. They are at the end of the war. People are tired. The soldiers are absolutely exhausted. They've been, you know, in their 10th year of war, trying to battle down the Trojans. And the Greeks have to come up with something. And Odysseus is very clever, and he says, let's build a wooden horse and present it to the Trojans as a present. So they do exactly that. They build this enormous wooden horse, and Greek soldiers hide inside it. They bring lots of ropes in there. They hide and they are silent. And this horse is wheeled up to the walls of the citadel of Troy. And the Trojans are supposed to think, wow, this is a peace offering. This is a present. The Greeks have pretended to sail away, and there are Trojans among them who are suspicious of their. Famously, in Virgil's version, you get a priest called Laocon.
- [38:42]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
I love him.
- [38:43]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
I absolutely love him, too.
- [38:46]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
I studied Latin, and then that's how I got introduced to Aeneid. Is this episode of Virgil where he comes running in saying, no, and the snakes come, and it's amazing.
- [38:55]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
He's brilliant. He's the one who says those in immortal words. I fear the Greeks even when they're bearing gifts.
- [39:00]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
Yeah. And this is where we get this phrase from. Even today.
- [39:01]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
It's his. Exactly. They should have listened to him, but they didn't. Instead, they listened to a man called Sinon who said, we've got to bring in the horse. Let's bring in the horse. He's actually colluding with the Greeks, he's a bad man. And stupidly, the Trojans decide to pull the rope and bring this huge horse into the citadel. And as they do so, the horse shudders on the threshold. And in Greek thought, that is a bad omen if there's any kind of fall or shudder over a threshold that's meant to all get ill. So they should have known then, but they didn't. The horse is led in nightfall and the men begin to break out of the wooden horse. So they can then sack the city of Troy. And Odysseus plan has worked.
- [39:50]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
Is there something special about the horse to the Trojans? Like, why is it a horse?
- [39:54]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
There is. The Trojans were actually known to be great breeders of horses and trainers of horses. I mean, archaeological evidence suggests that they were very, very strong at breeding great horses very, very early on. And I think the Greeks knew this and they appealed to their instinct. They knew that they absolutely loved the horse. And historically, a lot of people said, well, isn't this ridiculous? They've been at war for 10 years. If there's a Trojan War, how on earth would a horse then solve the issue? This seems very, very far fetched, but people even in antiquity try to reason with that. And there's a geographer called Pausanias and he said, well, actually it wasn't a physical horse, it was actually a siege engine. And this is the description. So people found ways of trying to bring together the myth with something more historically plausible.
- [40:45]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
Isn't that worse if it's a siege engine? Because it's not a gift, it's literally a weapon of war and be like, oh, yeah, let's take that inside, that'll be fine.
- [40:53]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
I guess from his point of view, they thought, oh, maybe they didn't do that, maybe it was just a siege engine and it was kind of like used as a battering ram as part of it. And so something's been lost in the true telling.
- [41:03]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
What I love about this story is it gives us a glimpse of Odysseus because it's very much a story centred around him and his coming.
- [41:11]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
It is, it is. This is what he's known for. He is a man who is very much dependent on his brain rather than his brawn. In the Trojan War, we think about Achilles as being the great warrior who's known for being the greatest fighter. Hector's a great diplomat, Odysseus is the clever one and he's quite tricky. He's a trickster, he's into deception, so he's clever. But he's also clever in a way that's quite sort of manipulative. So this is almost a double edged sword. You know, this isn't a wholly positive quality for Odysseus. It can serve him well, but we might not always admire it.
- [41:48]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
We're going to talk a lot more about Odysseus, what he gets up to, and also the way he gets up to it in future episodes. But for now, that seems like a really nice place to end this one. We've got a final, if you like, version of the Odyssey. We may or may not have an author, but next time we can get straight into the journey. So Daisy, thank you so much.
- [42:10]
Meta Glasses Assistant / Venmo User / Hershey's Narrator / Dr. Daisy Dunn
Thank you.
- [42:12]
Kev Lotchen (Podcast Host)
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