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- [00:00]
Mary Beard
Once upon a time, back in the deep, deep past, Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, had a terrible headache. It was his own fault in a way, because he had swallowed whole his first wife, Matis. Don't ask exactly how, it's a kind of myth thing. Metis at the time was pregnant with their child.
- [00:26]
Charlotte Higgins
So eventually Zeus had to give birth. And that was what was causing the headache, because the only way the infant could get out was through his head. And that needed the help of the God Hephaestus, the God of crafts and metalworking, who took an axe to Zeus's skull and out popped the goddess Athena, fully formed and dressed in full, full military armor.
- [00:54]
Mary Beard
And she went on to become one of the most prominent gods of all Greek mythology. She was the goddess of wisdom, the helper of heroes. She was at Heracles side through his 12 labors. She had Perseus back when he went off to kill the gorgon Medusa. She was patron deity of the city of Athens. And not surprisingly, she was a bit of a daddy's girl. So this is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories that still shape the modern world. I'm Mary Beard.
- [01:31]
Charlotte Higgins
And I'm Charlotte Higgins. Each week we dive into the myths, dramas and characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us now.
- [01:40]
Mary Beard
And this time it's Athena, the private life of a Greek goddess. And it's a bit of a sprawling subject. Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney Plus. Let's go get ready for a new case. We're going to crack this case and prove we're the greatest partners of all time. New friends, you are Gary the Snake and your last name, Desnake. Dream in new habitats. Zootopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home. You're clearly working at Zootopia 2, now available on Disney. Rated PG.
- [02:31]
Charlotte Higgins
So we're going to take this in three bites, right? We're gonna. First of all, we're gonna talk a bit about all the stories, the wonderful stories about Athena, how she was depicted in Greek art, what her attributes were. In the second part, we're going to ask whether this amazing goddess really was a role model for women. And in the third part, finally, we're going to think about how she fits into this whole range of Greek gods and goddesses to try and make sense of her as part of this intriguing polytheistic pantheon.
- [03:03]
Mary Beard
We know she's popular because she's been the subject of several requests from people listening to the Podcast that we should do her. So here you are.
- [03:13]
Charlotte Higgins
It's a huge pleasure to be doing her. And I think, yeah, also she comes up a huge amount in our Odyssey book club, our subscriber book club, where we're reading Homer's Odyssey slowly together. And she is a key character in that. And so that's one reason why we're deciding to look at her in a bit more depth here. But I mean, certainly. I don't know about you, Mary, but for me she's just always been. From childhood when I first started reading all the stories about the Greek heroes and the Greek gods and the Greek myths, I always loved Athena. Right. She came up for me in. I had this really beautiful book that I sort of stole from one of my elder brothers, which was stories from Homer, from the Iliad and the Odyssey. And Athena was just sort of always there, dressed in this, you know, with a beautiful helmet and a spear and a shield and, you know, just doing stuff. Really actively involved in the story, helping out the heroes, digging in and just being kind of cool, you know, like a really cool goddess who. She wasn't sort of afraid of stuff. She wasn't sitting at home in Olympus knitting. She was kind of fun and she had all these shape shifting qualities. So in Homer's Odyssey, which is something we've talked about in the book club, she's always changing shape. She disguises herself as men, as women, as birds and animals. She's just sort of super cool. So I used to, as a kid, I absolutely loved Athena. And also for a nerdy girl, the fact that she was, we were taught right at school that she was the goddess of wisdom. And that was also like an incredibly cool thing for a nerdy girl to be excited about.
- [05:10]
Mary Beard
Yeah. It wasn't just the boys that could be wise.
- [05:13]
Charlotte Higgins
Exactly.
- [05:15]
Mary Beard
My first encounter, well, it wasn't my first encounter, but my kind of memorable early encounter with her was a bit less comfortable actually, because I remember I was a student and I was taking my mum to Greece, she'd never been to Greece. And we were in Athens and we went up to the Acropolis to see Athena's temple of the Parthenon. And my mum on the way up said to me, what I don't really understand is why if Athens was the kind of society, you tell me it was, in which, you know, women had no power, they were kind of kept restricted in some cases to the home. They had no political rights. If that was the case, I don't understand why their patron deity was a goddess. As Often with those absolutely straight on questions, they always kind of, they get to the bottom of all the things that you've not been asking yourself. And I remember struggling with my mum at that point saying it was really kind of very interesting and sort of admitting that I didn't have a good answer. And I suppose quite a lot of my subsequent career in classics has been thinking about what the right answer to my mum on that occasion. This was in the 1970s, what it would have been. And we are going to be touching on that in a bit, actually. You know, Athena the goddess of women or not. But before we get to that, we, we need to kind of fill out, fill out the kind of the picture of this goddess because she, she gets everywhere and then she's, you know, we think of her very specially associated with Athens and she is. But you find her all over the Greek world. She's called slightly different things. She's Athena the virgin, the Parthenos in Athens or also in Athens. She's Athena the goddess of victory. But under every Greek stone there's an Athena waiting to be discovered. And it's pretty much the same in the Roman world too where the kind of equivalent of Athena is the goddess Minerva. Now we're actually going to be leaving Minerva on one side in this episode. We may come back to her at some point. But you don't, you can't even make her purely Greek. She gets everywhere. She's called everything and she is wonderfully recognizable. Whenever you see her in a museum, there she is with her helmet. Like Charlotte was saying, she's got a helmet on and she's got her very odd breastplate. And you know, you know, where you are in a way with Athena, you definitely know her.
- [08:11]
Charlotte Higgins
When you see her, she's usually wearing this beautiful plumed helmet. And one of the things that is, you know, when you see her on a Greek vase or in a Greek carving, she has this, often has this thing which looks like a poncho on her which is called the aegis. So, you know, when we use that phrase under the aegis of, you know, whatever it might be, this is a reference to this really, really weird poncho thing that Athena wears. It's a tassel y garment thing. I mean, it's not even a garment, it looks like a garment and it's got the head of a gorgon, the Gorgon Medusa on it. The Gorgon Medusa is, you know, female monster who Athena helped the hero Perseus to kill. And she has this rather Appallingly kind of on her aegis. And she turns and Medusa turns people to stone with her glance. So the decapitated head of Medusa will turn you to stone. It's a sort of weird thing.
- [09:19]
Mary Beard
I mean, I think it's even weirder than that, isn't it? Because we look at this strange costume that Athena's got on the Aegis, which, I don't know, I think of it as a sort of kind of odd animal skin. And there is the head of the snaky locked Gorgon, which she has put right in the middle of this armor. And to us it's kind of like a lot of those things in Greek mythology. It's just a bit odd. If you say, how would it have appeared back in the fifth century bc, Say, well, what does Medusa do? Medusa is a figure who, if you look at her, turns you to stone. You can't survive looking at her, at this gorgon head. And that's what Athena is wearing in the middle of a sort of breastplate. And so she's actually this really dangerous character who you better be careful looking at. She's not just in a silly fancy dress in Greek terms.
- [10:21]
Charlotte Higgins
No, it's terrifying. And we say under the aegis of meaning under the protection of. But actually the aegis that she is wearing, you know, actually the Greeks didn't really know what it was fully and speculated about it and said it does this and it does that. But one thing that it does in Greek poetry is it produces fear. Like it's a terrifying thing and it's part of her in some way, it's part of her power.
- [10:45]
Mary Beard
I mean, I think it's interesting what you just said, Charlotte, about, you know, the Greeks speculated about this because as soon as you do kind of scratch the surface of Athena, you find there are loads of things about her that the Greeks themselves don't understand. And they are coming up with all kinds of sometimes completely barking mad solutions to what they might be. Well, how do you explain this basset of Athena and her wearing the aegis is one, her name is another. Because she's often called Pallas Athena as a sort of two names. And yet nobody quite knew who Pallas what the Pallas bit came from. Some of them said, oh, it was a childhood friend of Athena who she accidentally killed and took her name in memory of this friend of hers. A likely story, I would say.
- [11:46]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah. I mean, another theory is that Pallas was one of the giants that Athena killed in this big mythological battle that The Olympian gods, Athena and her siblings and parents fought against the giants and she supposedly killed one of the giants called Pallas and took his name. But again, you know, this is the Greeks sort of creating theories about stuff that is too ancient for them to fully grasp.
- [12:16]
Mary Beard
I mean, I think what you're saying is that when we're looking at Athena, what we're looking at is partly a whole series of puzzles that the Greeks had. We're delving into their puzzles as much as delving into the stories. But some things I think are a bit clearer. And we started with the story of Athena's birth, that Zeus had swallowed whole his first wife, Maetis, when she was already. When she was already pregnant with Athena. There's a very complicated succession story here which we won't go into. But the name of that first wife turns out to be absolutely crucial because what Matis means in Greek is cunning, cunning intelligence. So what Zeus has swallowed is cunning intelligence. And Athena's mum, if she had a mom, is also cunning intelligence. And that kind of plays out in quite a lot of the stories that we're going to see.
- [13:25]
Charlotte Higgins
There are great stories. And she does seem to embody cunning intelligence in all kinds of ways. Right. And one of the nice things about her, well, I always find very attractive about her in the curious way, is that she's absolutely there in terms of helping humans learn how to do technical stuff. So she. In early Greek poetry, she's there. We hear about her kind of helping humans learn how to build chariots. She is supposed to help Jason, as in Jason and the Argonauts, build the first ever ship, the Argo. And for women, she invents the loom and wool working stuff. So she. In 2025, she would be right up there in Silicon Valley, no doubt. But also where her kind of really fun stories come into play is this role she plays in actively helping heroes. And I think that's one of the reasons why she's so omnipresent in Greek stories and also quite hard to pin down in a way, because she just shows up in so many heroic stories, helping heroes do their heroic things, like helping Perseus. So one of Perseus's jobs was to kill the gorgon Medusa. And he does a bunch of other things too. And she's sort of always there, guiding him by his side with Odysseus.
- [14:49]
Mary Beard
She's really clever with Perseus, isn't she? Because one of the problems, as we said about the head of Medusa, who's Perseus is confronting her when she's still alive, not dead on Athena's aegis. But one of the problems is that you can't look at her. So clever, clever. Athena gives Perseus a mirror. I think it's a polished shield, so that he can see his victim without looking at her. Now, that's the kind of cleverness you expect from Athena.
- [15:23]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah, she's like tactical. She does tactical, clever stuff. But she's also there for Heracles a bunch of the time, isn't she, Mary?
- [15:33]
Mary Beard
Heracles has got his 12 labours he's got to do, and now who is helping him out? Partly with clever ideas, but partly with a bit of sort of support, practical support, but it's Athena. If you look at some of the sculpture that came from the temple of Zeus at Olympia where the Olympic Games took place, you'll find a whole row of sculpted images of Hercules and his Labours. Heracles in Greek and his Labours. My favourite one just sums up Athena, because Heracles, at a certain point, in order to fulfil one of his tasks, has had temporarily to take the whole world, the planet, had to balance it on his shoulders because he's Atlas, who usually does that, has gone off to help Hercules out, too. Right. Complicated. But the basic point is that the world, even if you're Heracles, is extremely heavy. So what this sculpture shows is Heracles struggling with keeping the world on his shoulders, but just next to him there is the goddess Athena, kind of taking just a little bit of the weight for him, helping him out so he can balance the world. And so you've got the combo of sort of decent practical support and the clever ideas.
- [17:08]
Charlotte Higgins
I mean, one aspect of her that is really sort of blazingly obvious and present all the time is how she is associated with the city of Athens, Right? And, you know, the Greeks thought, the Athenians thought that the reason their city was called Athens was because of Athena, and specifically because of an interesting competition held between Athena and Poseidon about who should become patron of this city. Right. And they offer their different gifts.
- [17:37]
Mary Beard
Poseidon is the God of the sea, right? And Athena is offering, as a sort of reward, if the Athenians back her, is offering to give them the olive tree, one of the great sources of Athenian pride and wealth. Poseidon is offering a saltwater spring.
- [18:01]
Charlotte Higgins
Pointless, useless. Unless you want to. Unless you want to establish a spa.
- [18:04]
Mary Beard
Well, yeah, but you might hint at some sort of control of the waters, but in this competition, it is Athena
- [18:13]
Charlotte Higgins
that wins and she's really associated with winning actually, isn't she? And there's a temple to Athenae in Athens. So every time you put on your Nike running shoes, in a way you are doing something with Athena, I would
- [18:30]
Mary Beard
say, because Nikkei Nike means victory. Athena, goddess of. And it is where the shoe name comes from.
- [18:38]
Charlotte Higgins
She is, she's a winner. She's a winner.
- [18:41]
Mary Beard
The stories are wonderful and we can see themes running through them of, you know, who she is, who she's supporting and how she's supporting them. We tend to feel we kind of want to get to the kernel, you know, what's the kernel of Athena? And that's always been quite hard. And it used to be modern students of ancient Greece looking at Athena, they thought that if you kind of went back to Athena's origins, you would somehow get to the kernel, right? You would, you would find what she was all about. And you know, it wasn't in principle a bad idea. Where did this all start? The trouble was that actually or almost no evidence for it. So there have been a huge range of explanations of what Athena's origins and central purpose is. In the end, they're not much more than fantasy. I mean, you know, one of my favorites is the idea that she started out as a kind of as an, a bird deity. She was actually an owl. That comes from the idea that he sometimes is shown next to an owl.
- [20:01]
Charlotte Higgins
So charming, right.
- [20:03]
Mary Beard
And you can find it on. There's loads and loads of souvenirs if you go to modern Athens on Athena's little owl. And she's also called, one of the descriptors of her the epithets is Glaucopis, which may mean, probably means owl eyed.
- [20:21]
Charlotte Higgins
Right.
- [20:21]
Mary Beard
So you have a whole range of scholars who are saying, aha, you know, go back to the very earliest of strata of Greek religion and mythology and there is Athena. Before she didn't have a human form, she was a bird goddess who eventually got a human form. Now my trouble is that all of this is kind of inference and guess upon guess from the tiniest, tiniest little bits of puzzles in the way Athena's presented or the way she's talked about. And I've always thought that the way that we should really think about Athena before we get into, you know, the prehistoric slime of when she was a bird goddess is to think what are the stories? Just a bit under the surface, what are the stories telling us about what Athena's USP is? After the break, we're going to come on to the really central one of Those. Which is really going back to my mum's question. What is the relationship between a friend, Athena, and women and women's power? Is Athena representing a kind of way of seeing in this very patriarchal Greek world, a way of seeing power vested in the principle of womanhood, not masculinity. That's what we're gonna be turning to very soon.
- [22:08]
Charlotte Higgins
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- [22:11]
Mary Beard
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- [22:18]
Charlotte Higgins
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- [22:20]
Mary Beard
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- [22:38]
Charlotte Higgins
So Athena, this female goddess with all these extraordinary powers, you know, seemingly invested with all this kind of cunning and wisdom, a goddess who is supposedly about winning stuff. She's about tactical and strategic intelligence. Is she actually Mary, Is she actually a female role model? Or is she in any way, you know, to what extent is she actually female? I suppose that would be a question for me. There is something very strange about this goddess. A really important thing about her is that she never has sex. She never has a child. Now, I'm not saying that you have to have sex or have a child to be female. I'm just talking in terms of, you know, the way the ancient world kind of thought about women and femininity. She isn't born of a woman. And I think that's a crucial thing. There's something, in other words, like. Other goddesses like Hera and Aphrodite are always, you know, they have sex, they have kids. There's something special about Athena. She's not the only goddess who doesn't have sexual relations, but it certainly seems very significant. It's very significant in her story that she doesn't do that.
- [24:03]
Mary Beard
I think we, you know, we have to come clean here, really, and say, sorry, if this is going to disappoint. I think it's absolutely fine. If we want. If we want to turn her into a feminist hero, well, that's up to us. But I think in the ancient world itself, Athena was actually, partly for the reasons you say, Charlotte, she was the big champion of the patriarchy. She was a figure who is technically female. But everything about her life story and what she does is sort of designed to say that in a perfect world, you could do without Women, you don't have to be born from a woman. You don't have to have. You don't need women to have babies. You could actually, if we were in the world of the gods, we might imagine that it could be no women at all.
- [25:14]
Charlotte Higgins
She just gets vaguely close to having a child, doesn't she? In one sense, and it's quite a weird story. But Hephaistos, this God of handicrafts and metalworking, tried to sexually assault her, tried to have sex, tried to rape her. Basically, they have a bit of a tussle, you know, she doesn't get raped, but he ejaculates. He ejaculates onto her thigh and she kind of wipes it away in disgust as semen. The semen falls onto the ground and out of the ground emerges the first ever Athenian king, Erichthonios. But in the form of a snake.
- [25:56]
Mary Beard
Yes. So if you say, did Athena have a child? Did she ever have sex? That is as close as you come. I think the other thing that is, again, we might overlook is the fact that she's so military because again, I think we think that that costume is just a bit weird. She's a female deity, but she's dressed in military costume. She's fighting. She's part of the principle of victory. Whereas in classical world, certainly in Athens, where she has her kind of biggest cult, the idea that a woman could be a soldier, that is an abomination. The only women who are soldiers in Greek mythology, apart from Athena, really, are the wild warrior women, the Amazons who live on the far margins of the Greek world and. And who attack the Greeks but are resolutely conquered because you cannot. These are women, in the case of the Amazons, who, you know, who do try to have a female fighting force. What they have to be is put down by the Greeks. You cannot have a female soldier. And yet here is Athena as a deity at the center of Athenian culture is representing that kind of paradoxical abomination. It's really. It's much stranger to look at her if you're looking with Athenian eyes than if you're looking with our eyes. When she does look a bit as if she's in kind of silly fancy dress.
- [27:41]
Charlotte Higgins
There's a clincher, isn't there? There is a clincher about Athena and the patriarchy, which is one particular story. So the story, right, is of this hero, Orestes. And we talked about Orestes, very touched on him very slightly. In our episode on Cassandra, Orestes was the son of Queen Clytemnestra in Argos, and Queen Clytemnestra had killed her husband Agamemnon. So Orestes, this son, is faced with his mum having killed his dad, and what does he do? He kills his mum. Orestes is put on trial for this and there is a jury. This is all written about. This is the story that's told in Aeschylus play Eumenides. So in the play Aeschylus, Eumenides, Orestes is on trial for the crime of killing his mother. And as the play goes on, this is, you know, it's kind of the first courtroom drama. The jury is evenly split because it
- [28:42]
Mary Beard
is a tricky one because, you know, Orestes did kill his mum, terrible crime at matricide, but his mum had killed his dad. So it's one of those cases where you can, you know, you see the arguments on both sides, which are put at some length in Aeschylus play. But predictably, perhaps the jury is 12 jurymen and they're evenly split between whether Orestes is guilty or innocent. Ish.
- [29:16]
Charlotte Higgins
And the chair of the jury or the person with the casting vote in this jury, in this trial is the goddess Athena, because there she is. This trial is taking place in Athens. Athena is the God associated with Athens. She just happens to be the person with the casting vote in this jury, trial by jury. And she, when she gives her vote, she says that she will cast her vote on the side of Orestes. That is for Orestes innocence in killing his mother. Because she says, no, mother gave birth to me. I will always vote and be on the side of the man with all my heart. She says, in any dispute, I will always be on the father's side. In this case, the father's. Orestes is avenging the killing of his father. And she pronounces Orestes innocent of the murder of his mother because. And it's her justification for doing this is entirely a patriarchal. I mean, it's entirely about upholding the patriarchal order. She says, I will always be on the side of the man.
- [30:37]
Mary Beard
And she explicitly says she refers to her own origins because she says, no mother gave birth to me. It's a speech full of kind of patriarchal resonance because I'm not going to punish the death of a woman who killed her husband, that is the death of Clytemnestra, her husband, who was the master of the house. So Orestes is going to win. And it is such an extraordinary, uncompromising speech in favor of the rights of men over women, that. That actually, some later scholars looked at this passage and thought it was so extreme that Aeschylus himself could not possibly have written it. It's so over the top in terms of favoring the patriarchy. But there's no reason to suppose this isn't what Aeschylus put in the mouth of the goddess Athena. And every time you are tempted to think that Athena might be offering some kind of way that the Athenian woman could see themselves reflected in, you know, just think of that. What she says is, I back the male in every way. I'm always on the man's side.
- [32:07]
Charlotte Higgins
It's chilling.
- [32:09]
Mary Beard
Women, this is a woman being a spokesperson for the patriarchy.
- [32:15]
Charlotte Higgins
It's one of the most. I mean, it's worth, you know, looking at and reading if you've got the time or the inclination, because it's so staggeringly the most patriarchal thing ever written. It's so clear. It's so clear that at least as far as Aeschylus was concerned, I think we have to remember that, you know, all the things that the Greeks thought and that we think about those gods are an accumulation of the way they were written, the way they were depicted in art, the way they were worshipped. So, you know, this is really part. This work by this playwright is really part of the way that Athena sort of is. It's not a certain kind of freak interpretation of Athena.
- [32:57]
Mary Beard
What it shows us, what it reminds us is that every which way you look at Athena, there's always a bit of an element of misogyny there, right? There's not an element of feminist free thinking. I don't think there's an element of asserting the control of men over women. Athena is the woman man. She's. You know, it's not even clear whether we should call Athena a female goddess, actually. She's a weird hybrid.
- [33:33]
Charlotte Higgins
And it only occurred to me this morning that in a way, the only. She doesn't really show up in any. She helps all these heroes, but she doesn't really offer help to female heroes. She does a little bit in the Odyssey to Penelope, but she never actually appears to Penelope. Penelope, Odysseus's wife. We'll get to that in the Odyssey book club. The one thing she does for women is invents the loom and wool working, which is a really important technology. But my God, if there was ever an activity designed to keep women working 12 hours a day in the home, wool working is definitely it. So thanks for that, Athena.
- [34:16]
Mary Beard
There are some bigger questions here, though. Aren't there?
- [34:18]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah, definitely. And I really want to ask you these questions, Mary. This is, I think this is, let's move on to kind of, to think about this, you know, what does this all add up to? I really want to ask you this, not least, Mary, because I know you did your PhD in ancient religion and you are, you know, you've thought about these subjects a huge, huge amount. But how does this fit into the world of the way the Greeks thought about their gods and goddesses? Yeah, what does, what. Who is Athena? At the end of the day, that's
- [34:49]
Mary Beard
a question I suppose I've worked on for 50 years and I'm not quite clear I've got the answer, but I've got a bit further than I used to have, you know, and I think that to some extent we've narrowed her down quite a lot actually in talking about her from the sort of vague stories, you know, cute anecdotes, strange birth, to seeing a logic in part to Athena. I'm not sure how even now I can answer the question of not specifically talking about Athena here, but any of the deities, what is a Greek or for that matter, a Roman God or goddess, what are they now? I think that we tend to think of them in a terribly oversimplifying way, actually. And we tend to think that the ancient religion is kind of a bit slightly primitive, just very slight, slightly simple. And that goes back for me and I expect for some other people that when I was at high school,
- [36:00]
Charlotte Higgins
one
- [36:00]
Mary Beard
of the things we did at one point was we learned a list of the 12 Olympian deities. And there was Zeus, the king of the gods, Hera, the queen of the gods, Athena, the goddess of wisdom. And they, they all came in sort of ready made packages and they were the gods of something where I now want to kind of push the question, though. I'm not sure that I've got an answer. I've got a few half answers. Is that what it's really important to do when we're thinking about this, this range of gods and goddesses is to think of them as a system in some way of polytheism. You know, there are lots of Greek gods and goddesses and that's not just because they couldn't make their minds up, which they wanted, or they always wanted to add another or whatever. There's something in the way they put that range of deities together that was helping them think about how the world worked, how it worked and how power worked. I wouldn't for a minute want to say that they didn't like us have great fun telling a story of Athena or worshipping this particular image of Athena or whatever. Yes, they did. But there is a sort of more nuanced way that, that we often miss of thinking about these gods, which is that you can only really understand them if you see them as part of a bigger way of explaining the world. And that is in their relationship, one to each other. Now, we, in what we've just been saying, we've hinted at some of that. We've hinted at some of the ways you might go beyond the idea of Athena as goddess of wisdom. I mean, if, for example, you compare and you put together Athena, our goddess next to Poseidon, who we would often call the God of the sea. Now, Athena is in part the goddess of the sea because astrologer said she's a. She was the person who kind of invented the first boat. So both Poseidon and Athena have kind of power over the sea, but they got power in really, really different ways. Poseidon is the sea as a kind of crashing waves, the sort of elemental force. Yes, that's right. That's the right word. The elemental force of the sea. Whereas Athena is the person who helps us tactically manage the sea. Now, what I think one would say is that if, as Greeks, we think the sea, we think Athena and we think Poseidon, and we think about the differences between them and the different ways they approach it and we think. And I think this is kind of the crucial point for me, we're seeing those. I think if we go back to antiquity, we're seeing those gods not as gods of something, we're seeing them as gods of how to do something. We're seeing them gods of different modes of power, which you only spot if you put them together and you see what the different things they offer are. And it's. I'm nowhere near the bottom of this, but I think there is a complexity that we. We just find convenient sometimes to overlook. There's a complexity in that system of the many gods and goddesses of polytheism. That is really important, actually.
- [39:57]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah. It's interesting what you say when you talk about Athena and Poseidon having this different sea aspect, maritime aspect. It made me think about Ares as well, who is the Greek God of war. We've already talked about the way that Athena's on the battlefield. She's dressed in battle dress, she's often helping heroes in war. But it seems like Ares has this. He's like the brute force and the kind of angry fury on the battlefield. And it's a bloodlust and it's the sort of thing that gets into your soul when you want to kill on the battlefield. And Athena is the sort of, she's standing back almost and she's inspiring heroes to be tactically intelligent and she has that aspect of militariness, would you say? Is that another.
- [40:49]
Mary Beard
No, that's another example, a really good example. And I think that what we're seeing here is something that is more sophisticated than we'd often like to imagine was embedded in Greek religion. The polytheistic system is helping you to think about how the world is, how it works and how we understand the power behind the world. And that's.
- [41:17]
Charlotte Higgins
Power is always such an interesting subject. I mean, I spent years and years and years of my life thinking about Athena as the goddess of wisdom, so to speak. And this is such an interesting and different and revealing way of thinking about the Greek gods as they fit together, I think.
- [41:36]
Mary Beard
But it's still, I'm afraid, Charlotte, the bottom line is that we can't look to Athena. For whatever reason, we can't look.
- [41:47]
Charlotte Higgins
She is not this hero that I thought she was when I was a child. No, that is a grave, grave disappointment. I feel like if she was around right now, she would be sitting at Mark Zuckerber Berg's shoulder suggesting developments in the metaverse. She's the God of artificial intelligence. I don't know. She's not. We love her, but she definitely doesn't love us, I think.
- [42:10]
Mary Beard
No, that's, I'm afraid, the sad conclusion to thinking about Athena. She doesn't love us.
- [42:17]
Charlotte Higgins
She's not a girl's girl. She loves her boys. As ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions and so if you have them, please do send them to us@instantclassicspodmail.com or on our social media at Instant Classicspod.
- [42:38]
Mary Beard
Bye Bye.
- [42:47]
Charlotte Higgins
To some, he is the revolutionary hero
- [42:50]
Mary Beard
who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.
- [42:54]
Charlotte Higgins
To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler. Mao Zedong has one of the most
- [43:02]
Mary Beard
recognizable faces in the world.
- [43:03]
Charlotte Higgins
Yet he started life in a muddy provincial village. A rebel son who hated his father, survived a 6,000 mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of titanic proportions. From Empire the Goal Hangar World History Show.
- [43:19]
Mary Beard
I'm Anita Anand.
- [43:20]
Charlotte Higgins
And I'm William Duranpool. In this six part series, we're joined
- [43:24]
Mary Beard
by world renowned expert Rana Mitter to
- [43:27]
Charlotte Higgins
explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong. We'll track his rise from a bookstore owner to a guerrilla commander, and we'll witness his ruthless elimination to secure total power. And we'll descend into the dark experiment of the Cultural Revolution, a time when ancient temples were but children denounced their parents, and a nation worshipped a mango as a sacred relic.
- [43:53]
Mary Beard
Subscribe to Empire wherever you get your podcasts to listen now.