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I'm Mary Beard.
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And I'm Charlotte Higgins.
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Welcome to Exploring the Odyssey.
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This is a book club where we really drill down into some of the most exciting bits of Homer's epic poem. Whether it's your first time or whether
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you're taking another stab at it, we'll
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be here to share our debates, our questions and our insights. It's just one of the most remarkable things in the poem.
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This is a story that captures the
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imagination and you kind of go, ugh.
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There's quite a lot of the consumption of human flesh in this part. The Odyssey.
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This is a super good bit, absolutely knockout.
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We'll give you some background information that you might need to get the most out of the poem.
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It's going to be serious reading, but
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with a lot of jokes, a lot of fun, and quite a few laughs along the way.
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So put the kettle on or pour
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yourself a large glass of wine and
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read along with us.
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To join, go to exploringtheodyssey.com watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts. It's August. Well, it will be when this goes out. We hope that a lot of you, at least if you're in the northern hemisphere, might be thinking about turning on your out of office message and taking a bit of a break.
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And whether you're going to be on the beach or by the pool or just taking a few days at home at this time of year, our thoughts, well, at least mine, often turn to
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what to read on holiday and at instant classics. Obviously we're thinking about what classical things to take on holiday and we mean what actual ancient texts might be fun to immerse yourself in over the summer.
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And there's one absolutely obvious answer, Mary, here. I think the Odyssey, because nearly everyone who listens to instant classics at least will go and see the film and a good many other people too. So you should absolutely read the Odyssey in whatever translation you can lay your hands on. Emily Wilson, Daniel Mendelssohn, there are millions of others. But you already know that the Odyssey is a great read. We're going to suggest some other really fun and engrossing books that we think might be rewarding to sink into over the summer. And this episode, really, Mary, is going to be about pleasure in reading, isn't it? And fun rather than terribly academic close reading.
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We've each chosen three books. Two of them are ancient Greek or Roman books in translation, and the third is a more modern book, perhaps not so obvious that we also think might make an enjoyable beach read.
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And we're chucking in a Couple of children's recommendations, too, because we believe in starting them young as future Instant Classics listeners.
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This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping the world today. And I'm Mary Beard.
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And I'm Charlotte Higgins. Each week we dive into the myths, the dramas and the characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us. Now, this episode, classical Beach Reads.
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So, okay, Charlotte, I'm going to put the focus on you first, right? What's the first slim paperback you're going to be taking to the beach with a classical theme?
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Well, actually, Mary, my first paperback is not at all slim. If you're the sort of person who wants to read, as I have done, decides that this is the year to read War and Peace on holiday or, you know, another massive tome, I have suggested that if you want to get your teeth really into something, you know, if this is your couple of weeks where you're really, really going to read and do little else, perfect Holiday. And you've never read Herodotus, the histories, this could be your year. Because Herodotus is brilliant, isn't he, Mary?
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I think he's brilliant, but he is, despite what I said about slim paperbacks, and you admitted he's quite a hefty paperback. And it is. I mean, this is the first surviving work of history from the Western tradition, and it's telling the story of the Greek conflicts with the Persians ending up in the famous Greek versus Persian wars. And if someone kind of summarized it like that to you, you might think, oh, God, I'm not sure that I want a load of battle narratives on holiday, but it is hugely more engaging and entertaining than that, isn't it?
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It so is. So, yeah, like Mary says, ostensibly, this book is about the rise of Persia to power and then the Greeks fighting off Persia in the Persian wars. And it's quite early in the sort of our list of sort of canonical Greek literature is the first prose work of history that survives. You know, Herodotus was born in around 485 in Halicarnassus, which is on the now the Turkish coast. But what makes it hugely enjoyable, actually, is almost like the texture of the book is so chatty, it's so gossipy, it's so full of good stories. Some of the stories are kind of folkloric, I would say, in their nature. So you get, you know, the story of how King Cyrus, the great Persian leader, became King Cyrus, and it's a story that feels a bit like, you know, the story of Romulus and Remus or the story of Moses. You know, he's a little foundling boy who was sent away and then brought back to the court. And then, you know, it's that kind, it has that kind of texture at times. You know, how do you explain how someone becomes so uber powerful that you have to have some kind of almost semi mythical story to explain it? And part of the, part of the fun of Herodotus is that he's, he's sort of trying to, he's at the start of trying to kind of unless unravel the difference between mythology and actual, you know, eyewitness, well documented history. And you can feel that tension. And that's sort of starting to happen as a historical discipline. But of course, the mythic folkloric books are all immensely fun. It also has this incredible anthropological aspect to it. Traveler's tales. There's a huge, there's a huge sense of, you know, he traveled, he talked to people. He obviously did do a lot of firsthand research, didn't he, Mary? And it contains stories and accounts of people from all over the Greek world. And that, to me is one of the most attractive parts of it.
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I mean, I think that's right. And I've noticed how even, you know, in the academic world, approaches to Herodotus have changed over my lifetime. I mean, when I was a student, we studied Herodotus because we wanted to know about the Persian wars, right? It was about the history of the Persian wars. And all the sort of chatty bits, the ethnographic bits we kind of left out because Herodotus was not very reliable there. About 30 years ago, maybe a bit longer, whole approach to Herodotus changed so that people started to say, look, it's those weird bits. It's the tales that are really interesting, not just the accounts of conflict. And so people started kind of saying, no, he's not just the first historian, he's the first anthropologist. And there is a really, really
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big
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swell of opinion now which says, look, this guy is so important because what he's trying to do is work out what the difference is between cultures. What is it to be Greek, what is it to not be Greek, what is a civilization and so forth, you know. And so, you know, the whole of the second book basically is taken up with him thinking that Egypt, which he's describing, is very weird. And it's a kind of, they do things very differently in Egypt. And the question then becomes, so what does it mean to be Greek and why do people do things in different ways? You know, I Think, as I hope I'm not remembering wrong here, I think that one of the things in Egypt that is very weird is that the women, not just the men, the women pass urine standing up.
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That's only what it is. It's the women, the women pe standing up, but the men pee sitting down in Egypt. So it's like the things that we take for granted are sort of reversed in Egypt. And what's so interesting about it really is that he doesn't condemn it. Also, the Egyptians are really stupid. I mean, let's face it, it probably didn't happen that way, but he thought it happened that way. And he did talk, you know, there is some reliable information about Egypt in the book because he did talk to Egyptian priests and he had information and he perhaps got a bit muddled. But he, it's culturally relativist, I would say. He's not entirely invested all the time in saying the Greeks are better. I mean, he sometimes thinks foreigners are weird. And, but, but it's not, it's not sort of jingoistic. It's a book that's. It's full of curiosity. And I mean, I mean, and also curiosity in both senses because there are sort of brilliant, you know, the further he gets from, from where he. His sort of zone of true intelligence is, the further out he gets, the weirder it becomes. So there are things like, I don't know, there are sheep whose tails are so big, I think this is in Arabia, that they have to have little carts to draw them along behind them.
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With my school teacher, when we were first reading Herodotus told me that story as an example of how you could never take Herodotus seriously. It does turn out that there are places in the world, actually Herodotus is sometimes right, where sheep do have little trailers to carry their tails.
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Do they? I never knew that. And then there are sort of moments where he says, well, I don't really believe that the beyond where the Scythians live, the Scythians of southern Ukraine, southern Russia, Black Sea, beyond where the Scythians live. I don't believe there are Griffins. But nevertheless, the idea has been planted that some people think there are Griffins. I mean, it's full of really great stories and these stories are great from the get go. So you're only a couple of pages in where you get this wonderful story, which is, if you've read the English Patient or seen the film, the Michael Ondarchi novel, important to that film is this story of King Kandaulis. Of Lydia and his wife and his senior lieutenant, Gyges. And the story is about how Gyges becomes king of Lydia. And the story is that Candaules loves his wife so much that he convinces Gyges that he should look at her naked while she's getting ready for bed. Gyges doesn't want to do it, but he reluctantly agrees to do it. And so he looks through a chink in the door and sees this extraordinarily beautiful woman undressing for bed. And then the next day, the wife says to Gyges, she says, well, now I know that you saw me. Now, either you must be killed or you're going to have to kill my husband, because this is not a situation that I can live with. And Gyges, with great misgivings, does kill Candaulis, the husband, and becomes king of Lydia. It's a wonderful story. It's a wonderful story. And it's right at the beginning of Herodotus. So there's no messing around. You start this book and you're already into a series of fabulous stories. And then all of it is. There is an overarching. There is an overarching story. And the overarching story is the rise of Persia. So all these kind of tall tales and the anthropological stuff about Egypt is all feeding into this wider story of why did the Persians become so powerful. So it is sophisticated as well as sort of fun and silly at times.
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Yeah. And I think one probably has to be careful not to believe too much what's no doubt on the back of the paperback about this great civilizational clash between Persia and Greece. And to think of it as a most amazing and fantastic insight into how this particular Greek guy In the 5th century BCE saw the world and its differences. That's what gets it for me.
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Yeah, I would 100% agree with that. And translations are available. I used to have the Robin. Well, I still do have the Robin Waterfall, which is very good, I think. In Oxford World Classics, Tom Holland has translated Herodotus, I think, for Penguin Classics. So there are loads of good translations. Mary, what are you going to kick us off with?
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I am going to go a bit more off piste. Right. And here I'm holding up a slim volume. This is a slim paperback, and it's headed Lucian Selected Dialogues. Now, I think if you saw that on the shelf of your local bookshop, you might not be hugely tempted to.
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You might swerve.
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You might think, Selected Dialogues. Right now, that is such an understatement of what Lucian is Lucian is a guy who's writing in Greek 2nd century CE. He comes from, you know, what is now Turkey. What he does. And this is why I think it's good for a beach read because he writes short things and we've got called here Dialogues, but what they are is they're short satires, they're squibs. I mean, if you, if you saw a book entitled Selected Squibs, right, you'd be rather more intrigued than Selected Dialogues. And he is this really subversive, funny character who over volumes and volumes and volumes and the selections that you get just scratch the surface, is kind of taking aim at some of the basic assumptions about Greek and Roman culture, attacking religion, having fun with all the kind of. Well, he sort of sees a sanctimonious self righteousness that there is around the ancient world. And he does that, you know, in a series of quite short so called dialogues. They call dialogues because some of them are conversations between two people, but they're not only that, which, you know, though, I'm afraid I've got to say this because we've talked about this a bit before in, in the podcast. They do actually make you laugh out loud. There's nothing much. There's a lot of wit in ancient writing, but there's not much laugh out loud stuff. And Lucian, really is that. Now I don't.
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Do you have to be a classics professor for it to be that funny? That would be my question.
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I will give you an example. I bet you didn't read this at university when you studied.
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Absolutely right. And in fact, I am looking forward to getting this because I believe you're. You're brandishing a new translation and I did not study. Lucien, I'm no expert in this. It's not a new translation. I could have read it all along. Is that what you're saying?
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Yeah, you could have read it all along. I mean, there is a very, very good new translation in hardback in eight volumes about to come out.
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Okay, that's not for the beat.
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We'll put it on the show notes. But it's not for the beat. This is an Oxford World Classics, quite old translation now actually. But let me give you, I'll just give you one example and I'll give you a taste of the other things. The most famous satire of Lucian is what's called the True History or the True Stories. And it's, you know, it's 40, 50 pages perhaps, no more. And what it is is a series of flagrantly untrue stories. Right? And the joke is he's calling it the true stories, but they're untrue. He says, look, I've got it in for all those people, you know, who travel around the, like Herodotus actually, who's telling you, telling you things about what the world's like. And it's a load of whoppers. It's just not true. Now why my story is true, he says, is that I'm telling you that they're untrue. I'm admitting that they're untrue. So therefore, haha, they're true. Okay. And so he takes you all over the place. I mean, in, in this true story, first of all, he first of all goes to the moon where he meets moon men and the moon.
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I love a bit of ancient sci fi. Basically, it's what it is, right?
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I mean, science fiction. Yeah. And the moon men are having a war with the sun men. And he actually gets, for a moment, he's taken prisoner of war by the, by the sun people, but he's actually gone to the moon. He's seen the strange characters, you know, who are all slightly weird and not like humans who live on the moon, that absolutely. The origin of moon man is quite funny. But I mean, this is to come back, as we sort of will find ourselves doing, I suspect, come back to the Odyssey. He has it in for Homer too, because Homer's stories can't be true, can they? I mean, he says, look at that, you know, Sila and Charybdis, you know, pull the other one right. But he then, in his fictional lying way, he visits the underworld, he visits the island of the Blessed, just like Odysseus had in one of his most dangerous travels. But with Lucian there's always a twist. And so he meets Odysseus when he goes down to the underworld in a sort of parody of Odysseus, his own trip to the underworld. And at a certain point, Penelope's there as well. Odysseus manages to kind of escape from Penelope and to go up to Lucian and hand Lucian a little note which he asks him to take to the nymph Calypso, the one who had apparently imprisoned Odysseus for seven years. And to say, could you take this, you know, please take this to Calypso? Lucian of course, reads the letter because why wouldn't you? And Odysseus is saying, I'm terribly sorry you offered me the possibility of staying with you and having immortality. I should have taken the option because instead look what's happened Right, so you, so it is, you know, it's all wonderfully funny like that. There are soft kind of slightly spoof dialogues between courtesans complaining about their clients. There's a completely marvelous denunciation. True or not, we can't quite work out of someone who set up his own very profit making, fortune telling culture. Right. And he's, he's making a packet of money out of pretending to have found a new religion.
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It sounds huge fun. And I've never read them all the, you know, I've never sort of sat down with Lucien and, and read a selection so that I, you know, I'm here for that. I'm totally here for that. That's a great recommendation, Mary.
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It's great. It's in Oxford. World Classics and you know, he's hugely influential in a way we've forgotten actually, you know, the whole tradition of modern sat Swift and people like that. They are looking back to Lucian. He's a kind of great, great forgotten writer of the ancient world.
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B
And it's interesting, like you say about Homer sort of popping up and you know, Lucian's kind of talking to the Odyssey. In fact, actually also Herodotus does that when you, when again, just in the very opening section of Herodotus, when he's saying, I'm going to explain the rise of, to power of the Persians, he starts with saying, well, some people say that it all started with the abduction of Helen to Troy. And then he questions whether that can be really the case. And. But you know, you get this great sense of you cannot escape, you cannot escape Homer. And actually that is kind of true of my next recommendation, Mary too.
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We go to Latin now.
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We've gone, we've gone to the world of Rome. We've gone to the world of Rome and I have chosen. And it's much, much more of a. I would say it's more of a sorbet on the beach than, than a big banquet like Herodotus. This is more a dip in and dip out. It's, it's by the first century CE poet. Well, he sort of spans the end of the first century BCE and the beginning of the first century CE poet Ovid, who was, yeah, he's around at the same time as Augustus. He's actually ends up being exiled to a remote place on the Black Sea because of some, well, we don't know, for some peccadillo, only described by himself as Carmen et error. A song and a mistake. So he messed up. He messed up poetically and perhaps sexually.
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The assumption is he might have been a bit too close to some of the ladies in Augustus's household. Whether that's true or not, we don't know.
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Anyway, he produced a lot of really extraordinary poetry, like Metamorphosis, which might have been a candidate for Beech street had I not already suggested one other enormous tome, but much less well known than Metamorphosis, but to my mind, enormous good fun. And very interesting is this series, this series of poems collected together as Heroides and Heroides, which sounds really, really obscure as a title. Just, it means. It's kind of Greek. It means female heroines. It means heroines, Heroines. Female heroes, Heroines. And what it is, right, 2,000 years before, there was a massive trend for writing novels from the point of view of classical heroines, like all the wonderful novels that we love, like Madeline Miller's Circe, which you should take on holiday if you haven't read already, or Pat Barker's novels set during the Trojan War, or Natalie Haynes's brilliant novels. Ovid had kind of done that in a sense already in that he. The Heroides are, as it were, made up letters from heroines of Greek myth telling the story from their own point of view.
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Usually the ones who've had a really rotten time. And here we've got, you know, here we got their side of the story.
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Yeah, and they're funny and elusive. I mean, I suppose one of the sort of slight downsides of the beach read aspect is that he quite often mentions quite obscure mythology, but to be honest, any translation has a few notes on that, or you can do what I do, which is sort of gently skip over it if it's too much effort to look it up. But the first one, for example, of this series of letters, and these are like. They include Deianeira to Hercules. Deianira was Hercules wife. Bad things happened to her in the end. Medea's letters to Jason. There's a kind of correspondence between Helen of Troy and Paris. When Paris is thinking about seducing, abducting or whatever, he writes a letter to her saying, you're going to have such a great time in Troy, Troy is much nicer than Sparta and you'll become very rich with all the lovely, beautiful, gorgeous objects we have to attempt to. And Troy. And Helen gives a very circumspect reply to this. But the first one is particularly fantastic, really, because it's, it's, it's. And again, we're in the world of the Odyssey here very firmly. It's a letter from Penelope to Ulysses, which is the Romanized name for Odysseus. And it's rather remarkable actually, the letter from Penelope to Ulysses. She's. It's at the point of the story where he hasn't come back. He's off somewhere. He's been away for a really long time. We're quite deep into the chronology of the Iliad and the Odyssey. So the idea is that he's been away for quite a long time, since the sack of Troy. So he's been. So the sack of Troy took 10 years and then he's been away for another bunch of years. So he's been away for like 15, 17 years. And she's kind of, where the hell are you? And it's a kind of. The tone is really fascinating. It's a kind of mix up of sad and angry. She's furious. But she's also. She's had a really terrible time. And it describes it really beautifully. You know, I've been stuck here with this useless son and useless old dad. You know, between us there's very little we can do about these awful ravening suitors. And then there are these sorts of gorgeous bits where she's describing how long it is since the end of Troy. And she says, you know, Troy is now, there are now, there are now creepers, there are now plants growing over the ruins of Troy. You know, the blood soaked fields have been nabbing, tilled because they've been, they've been, they've been fertilized with the blood of the war. And you know, you get this sense of time, so much time having passed since the end of the war. And she's really angry. And it's a really nice counterpoint to the, I suppose that kind of cliche of Penelope as being this sort of terribly patient, utterly, utterly, utterly kind of uncomplaining figure. No, she's having a massive, massive old complain here.
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A
What's kind of interesting about this whole book actually is it's very hard when you're reading it quite to make your mind up whose side Ovid the poet is on. You know, is he as. And I, I like to think this actually. Is he actually saying, look, let's give these women a voice here. Let's, let's hear it from the girls, you know, not just from these heroic guys. There are other people who read this and think that actually, what's he slightly satirizing? The women, you know, they, you know, they don't kind of know their place and they're all a bit unattractive in a way because they are complaining and they're going on and on. And as the whole issue with Ovid is often, is he the world's worst misogynist or is he standing up for the women? And the Heroides is one place where you can't quite make your mind up. But for me, he's actually really the first in a tradition that is standing up for the women in a way that we've now come to know and love from the 20th, 21st century.
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Yeah, I think I would agree with that, that it sort of hovers on the brink. And you know, of course one desperately wants it to be feminist. And it's maybe not quite, or you can't quite tell, but actually, you know, these are really beautifully done. They are kind of psychologically, I think psychologically pretty authentic in a sense. You know, they are as the awful word is relatable. And in terms of just a sort of brilliant poetic idea, as Mary says, like so early in world literature, to pull out sometimes tiny details from, as it were, like the, like the dominant source on this story, which is all, I mean, you know, the story of Jason and Medea, you know, the dominant source is I guess, this big poem called the Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes and to sort of pull out and also Euripides's play Medea. And he, I mean, not that you need to like have an intimacy with these original sources to enjoy the book, but there are times when he sort of pulls out small details and elaborates them and pulls back and it's just a. You know, it's really fun and it's really interesting. You can read a couple either side of having an ice cream by the pool.
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A
But it's one of those things that must have been completely mind boggling when it, when it was first circulated, you know, the, the idea within this hugely masculine tradition, the idea of this subversive poet. And whatever Ovid was, he was certainly a subversive poet. He comes in and he's saying, I'm going to, I'm going to flip it and I'm going to tell you the story from her point of view. And the idea of the letters is just great too because, you know, just like, you know, I was saying a bit ago about Odysseus hands Lucian a letter to take to Calypso. We're in this kind of world in which what you say in a letter which is taken by somebody else to the person that you want to read it, that's hugely important in antiquity. And so the collection of women's letters. That's great.
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B
And it is very funny at times that the only one that's not. I think I'm right in saying the only letter that's not purely mythological is a letter from the poet Sappho to Fyon, the man whom she supposedly married. And it's got this sort of hilarious rejection of her lesbian lovers in favor of. In favor of this man. It's. It is sort of. It's gloriously fun, it's very knowing and it's gloriously, it's gloriously funny. So I, I. Yes, Heroides sorbet on the beach. That's what I'd call that. What's next for you?
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A
Well, another hors d', oeuvre which is also kind of knowing. And again it's, Again, I've gone a bit off piste. Here's an Oxford World Classics, a translation of it. We'll be putting the stuff in the show notes so you can look up the different versions. It's a popular. It's a novel. It's an ancient novel by Longus, a man about whom we know nothing, except he probably lived around 200 CE. He's writing in Greek, but like Lucian, he's writing in Greek under the Roman Empire. Though in Longus's case he is imagining a story of Daphnis and Chloe to rather idyllic rustics, which he's setting back in the 5th century BC. He's looking back to this, you know, the idyllic world of unspoiled Greece. And the story starts off in slightly bizarre way. He, he first of all, and you have to get through this a couple of pages in which what Longus does is describes a painting that he's seen and he says, I'm good. This what my. What my book is, and it's only 80 pages. I'm going to tell you the story that was in this painting. So it's kind of going through a painting into this.
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B
Oh, I love that.
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A
Into this fantasy world.
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B
There's a posh Greek word for this, isn't there? Where you take an artwork and you describe it and then you bring it alive. And that goes all the way back to. In the Iliad, there's a description of Achilles's shield and it's. It's a wonderful. To me, it's a fabulous literary device. I love it.
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A
He gets over it quite quickly. The painting is the first two pages and then the rest of the novel is kind of a conceit about the painting. This is what was going on in the Painting.
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Right.
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A
And the story is that you've got Daphnis, young herdsman, age 15, and Chloe, similar female, aged 13. And their backstory is that they'd both been abandoned as babies by their parents, who, for whatever reason, didn't want to bring them up. So kind of exposed them is the euphemism here. And they had been found after, in a Romulus and Remus like way, being suckled one by a goat and the other by a ewe. Right. They were found by local rustics and brought up as their own kids. The story really gets off the ground, though. They've known each other for quite a long time. But, you know, at this moment, with these young people, 13 and 15, they start to fall in love with each other. They get into all kinds of scrapes and they have to take baths with no clothes on and things like that. But the. The kind of. The point of the poem, and it's just truly wonderful, is that these are kids who don't know anything about love. So they keep feeling the symptoms and being desperately in love, but they don't know what it is. They don't know why they're feeling all so hot and jittery. They keep saying, I'm feeling terribly hot, you know, and they also have no idea what you might do about it. Right. That if you're in love like this, what next? Right now, you don't have to worry that this gets extremely salacious because it's very kind of tastefully done. But as the story goes on, they do eventually, and there's all sorts of scrapes that are great fun and they get captured. Well, fun not for them, captured by pirates or there's some attempted rapes, etc. Etc. But the couple, Daphnis and Chloe, are still there. And they learn about kissing first, but they don't get any further than that. But then Daphnis gets taught by an older woman what it would be, you know, to take it to the next stage. And so he makes love to this woman, Lycanian, but as she leaves, she says, but careful what you do with Chloe. Cause it'll hurt her. It'll be really painful.
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B
So he's sort of inducted by an older woman.
- [36:10]
A
But it's all very, you know, you know, don't worry, don't worry, viewers and listeners. It's terribly chastely done, okay? But he decides he can't do that to Chloe. I mean, because he doesn't want to hurt her. Now, I don't want to give a spoiler here, but I'm sure you can. You know what's going to happen in the end, right? A they manage to make love. So it all comes good. They discover who their birth parents were who show up and they turn out to be rather rich, of course. But they decide all the same that they will spend their blissful married life still in the countryside looking after their flocks. And in happy marriage, right now, they can do it. So there is a totally happy ending, but it's the sort of classical literature that you don't believe exists. You know, somebody said there's a story about a couple of kids, really Romeo and Juliets, who are in love, but don't know what that means. And the story is about showing them what it means and in the end, letting there be. Not like Romeo and Juliet, letting there be a happy ever after.
- [37:27]
B
Well, that is, I have to say, happy ending. Happy ending is as rare as hen's teeth in ancient literature. So on those grounds alone, it just definitely deserves a recommendation. This is not something that ends with Mum killing her kids or everybody being killed or somebody committing some terrible mistake that they. Or a show putting out their eyes or hanging themselves. This is. This is a. This is a nice ancient story with a happy ending.
- [37:55]
A
Yes. And it is some very kind of delicate sex and it is hugely funny. You know, the joke is that how would you know what you were experiencing when you experience love if no one had ever told you?
- [38:10]
B
Yeah. Which is also, like philosophically quite an interesting thought experiment, like how do you know how things work if you're completely cut off from human society or. I've never read it. So again, that's one for me. If I hadn't already taken my holiday and had any holiday left, I would be taking it on holiday.
- [38:28]
A
But, you know, happily. It's short, guys. It's short. It's less than 80 pages.
- [38:35]
B
Let's turn to our novels or more modern, like out of the Ancient World books. Mary. Quite quickly, I. I am recommending a novel, a modern novel, contemporary novel, written in, I'm going to say, 2017. Published in 2017. And it is. Oh, I'm holding it up. It's. But actually, this is not how it was published. This. I was lucky enough to have a proof copy. This is, I think, early copy. Oh, you've got real. You've got the real cover, which is much better. American version, I think, of Colm Toybean's novel House of Names. There have been a huge number of really interesting novels set in the mythical past that have come out in the last 10 years or so we mentioned, you know, Madeline Miller and Song of Achilles and Circe and so on. I have a great soft spot for this novel by Colin Torvin. I mean, he's perhaps better known for his amazing novels, Nora Webster and Brooklyn, these contemporary novels, well, 20th century novels set in New York and in Ireland. He's better known, I think, for these American and Irish novels than he is for a novel that steps into the ancient world. And this novel is. It's set in the world of Agamemnon. So again, this is something that riffs, quite riffs on the whole story of the Iliad and the Odyssey. You know, we will have met. If you're watching the Odyssey film or reading it, there are characters that we have met. There's Achilles. We don't meet in the Odyssey, to be fair, but there's Agamemnon, there's Chinestra. And the story really covers. It covers much of the ground that's in Aeschylus play or series of plays trilogy. The Oresteia, which is about the homecoming of Agamemnon, how Agamemnon is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra, and then what happens next, which is that their son Orestes eventually kills Clytemnestra. So it's a sort of series of interlocking revenges. And we also get in Column's book, Colm Tubeen's book, you know, the answer to the question, why does Kleita Nestra kill Agamemnon? Which is because Agamemnon had killed their daughter as a sacrifice to secure a wind to send the fleet to the Trojan War, the Greek fleet to the Trojan War. So, you know, it's a kind of terrifyingly ugly story of a series of revenges and murders within a family. And he also draws on Euripides for some of that material. But I think the thing about it that makes it so compelling to read, having just given quite a confusing account of what it's about, is that he treats the material he sort of with incredible rigor. He sort of draws back from all this source material that is about very heavily determined by fate and the gods and just reimagines it as if it was people who don't really know what's going on. A family where, you know, like a lot of his novels, in a lot of his novels, there's a lot of silence and people don't know really what's happening. People don't really talk about the. No one knows the whole picture. And it's almost like, he's taken that sort of technique that he uses in his Wexford novels and his courtier novels, I should say, and applies it to this series of mythical stories. And I think it's incredibly beautifully done.
- [42:23]
A
It's very spare, but it also kind of takes you behind the scenes and gives you wonderful little Tobin additions, really clever additions to the story. You know, when we've been talking about the. The Odyssey film, we've been talking about how far, you know, the test of the adaptation is not whether it adapts the story, but whether the adaption, the adaptation adds to the story. And in Tobine's case, it really, really does. I mean, it's ages since I read it, but I recall just before they are going to kill Iphigenia, Clytemnestra and Agamemnon's daughter, the sacrifice, in order to, you know, appease the gods, to go off to Troy, there's this scene where, in order to kind of distract him, Agamemnon kind of plays with Orestes, Iphigenia's brother, and with. With his toys. And you've got this. You suddenly open up the domestic world of how, you know, what is it really like when you're going to take someone's sister away and kill her.
- [43:41]
B
I think that's exactly it. So he puts everything through an entirely humanizing lens. You know, what would it mean to know that your daughter's about to be murdered? How would you really react? And that first part of the book is really told from Clytemnestra's point of view to the point that you end up knowing exactly why she wants to kill her husband, exactly why she want. And that's the sort of, you know, it's not unlike Ovid in a certain way, in that. In that he flips the story and we see it from her point of view, which is not, of course, what the dominant story. The dominant story, I suppose, as Aeschylus tells us, although it's all in there, if you want to uncover what he's got is on his side. And I think was very influenced by. Is the wonderful play Iphigenia at Aulis, which is by Euripides, which does. Which sort of lays out, you know, what happened in those moments when Agamemnon was deciding whether to kill his daughter or not. So he has layers and layers of really interesting ancient models. But there's something. And he strips the gods out. I think I mentioned this in one of our Odyssey episodes, that that's a sort of something he has in common with Nolan is that this is. The gods are referred to, but it's effectively a godless world. And he talks about this. He's talked about this. I interviewed him once about this book. And he talked about how, you know, the novel as a form is not really very good with religion or gods. You don't want God. You don't want God or the gods in your novel. It's a form that's just very human. And so he doesn't really have the gods. It's all about human instinct, human motivation, human reaction.
- [45:34]
A
I think, for me, it really re injected the fear and the terror and the familial awfulness into a story that we often kind of tell as Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia and then went to Troy. And then when he returned, Clytemnestra murdered him. Right. We kind of get it all over as if, you know, without batting an eyelid. And what Toybean does is bat an eyelid about that story and really takes you into it.
- [46:05]
B
And Orestes, by the way, is one of literature's absolute lost boys. He's so unlike the Orestes that were constantly being shown from time to time are sort of shown as a distant glimmer. In the Odyssey. He was the model of what a son should be like. This is a. This is a lost and terrified. And I kind of traumatized Orestes. But anyway, Mary, what's your more contemporary. I mean, I don't think it's totally contemporary or.
- [46:36]
A
I'm holding it up now. Right. I guess you can see it, I think. I have to confess, I think I'm pushing my luck on this one. Right. So I'm hesitant about how far it makes real beach reading. But it's a book that, if you've been looking at the reactions to Nolan's Odyssey, and particularly the reactions to
- [47:05]
B
the
- [47:05]
A
apparent smaller part played by women in the Odyssey than what you get in Homer. You'll find that people often say, oh, look, it's always been recognized that there are powerful women in the Odyssey. Where are these gone? Exactly. So powerful and so long recognized that Samuel Butler wrote a whole book saying that the Odyssey was written by a woman right now. And. And then the reviewer, me included, then passes on without kind of developing that. Now. I thought it'd be interesting to go back to this book because it's. Samuel Butler is a 19th century satirist. He wrote Erewhon, the Way of All Flesh. But he's also trained as a classicist. And like all good people like everybody. Yeah, right.
- [48:01]
B
Like everybody was.
- [48:04]
A
Every posh elite boy.
- [48:07]
B
Every posh elite boy was. Let's qualify that.
- [48:10]
A
Yes, he. So he gets the idea that the Odyssey is so female dominated that it must have been written first of all by a woman. And he's very keen at this point when he says by a woman, he's also saying by a single person. Butler was living at the moment when people thought the Odyssey was a kind of work of a committee. And Butler is saying, read the Odyssey. It's clearly a single hand and it's a woman. And I'll tell you that she lived in Sicily at the town, the modern town of Trapani, right. And I can match up all the. The descriptions of the places in the Odyssey to Sicilian locations. That's why I think if anybody's going on their holiday to Sicily, Absolutely brilliant book to take particularly to Trapani, which
- [49:09]
B
is such a lovely town.
- [49:10]
A
It is highly recommend. Why I think it's worth reading is, again, this is a bit longer than my other choices, but actually about 100 pages of it are taken up with a precis of what happens in the Odyssey. A rather down to earth precis. Oh, yes, it's quite funny, but skippable
- [49:36]
B
if you don't need it.
- [49:37]
A
It's skippable but quite funny if you do. And Butler also translated the whole Odyssey, which is the version that James Joyce used actually, when he was. When Ulysses was being developed by Joyce. The satirist is never very far away, so he kind of has things to say like, look, we know it's by a woman, don't we? Because first of all, she's always going on, my authoress, about the kind of washing up. She was having people clear up the tables, right? She's, you know, no man would
- [50:14]
B
be
- [50:15]
A
bothered with the housekeeping in the way that this authoress is. And besides, she's hopeless at male things. So at one point she has a ship which has got a rudder at both ends. Now, that's because she didn't actually know which end of a ship a rudder went. You know, so she's a very.
- [50:35]
B
Girl.
- [50:35]
A
She's a girl and she's very bad on men's things and really super good on women's things. And he's just kind of wonderfully down to earth about this possibility. And he addresses his critics by saying, look, people are going to say it's extremely improbable that any woman in any age could write a masterpiece like the Odyssey. He says, well, that's true, but it's also very Improbable that any man could, you know, so there's this kind of. This glimpse of somebody who is, well, not exactly a proto feminist, but reading the Odyssey with. An almost semi feminist lens. And he creates this image, the authoress, who he actually thinks was. Portrayed herself as the Princess Nausicaa.
- [51:41]
B
Yeah, right, right.
- [51:42]
A
But he thinks she's not just any woman, she's quite young. She's young and headstrong. That's why she's. That's why she's writing this poem. She's young and headstrong, but at a certain point he thinks that she hasn't quite understood what she's heard about the relationship between Penelope and Odysseus. And she's always trying sort of to make excuses for the fact that they're not that keen to get back together after all. I mean, he has Odysseus on Calypso's island and he says, well, look, he stays there for seven years. I mean, come on, didn't. Didn't Calypso have a tool cupboard where he could go and get, you know, get an axe and make a boat for himself? You know, this is really, this is no good excuse. And he's also kind of very doubtful about the way the authoress seems to be making excuses for Penelope, too, who she wants to be this faithful wife, but nevertheless has to admit that there are funny things going on. And one of the funny things going on is that, as we saw, we've seen in Odyssey Book Club, there are allegations in the poem that Penelope is sending little notes to some of the suitors. Right. As if she's. Now, this is what Butler has to say about that. Sending pretty little messages to her admirers was not exactly the way to get rid of them. Did she ever try snubbing them? Nothing of that kind is placed on record. Did she ever say, well, Antinous, whoever else I may marry, you may make your mind easy, that will not be you. Then there was boring them. Did she ever try that? Did she ever read them any of her grandfather's letters? Did she sing them her own songs? So there is this marvellous kind of coming together of quite acute readings of the Odyssey with a sort of late Victorian satiric lens.
- [53:53]
B
I love it. I have to say. It's a great. I mean, whether you'd want to read it on the beach, I don't know.
- [53:58]
A
I would.
- [53:59]
B
I would read it on the beach. It's, it's, it's such fun. It's very funny and very silly, but actually really Acute. Like, I think when you've read it, you then read the Odyssey a bit differently. It's actually quite acute. And I quite like the idea, you know, I mean, I know there are a million reasons why it's silly to imagine that there was A, one author of the Odyssey and B, that that person might have been a woman. But it's just a really enjoyable and quite insightful thought experiment. And I like the way he. I like the way he thinks of her, almost like she might have been a sort of proto Jane Austen, but actually, the Odyssey is kind of novelistic. It does. It is full of extraordinary female characters. It is a bit ropey on how to build a boat. Who cares? You know, he sees a lot in the Odyssey and he delivers it. As you say, you can't. A bit like some of the other books we've discussed right now, you can't quite tell the extent to which he's being serious about it or not.
- [54:59]
A
It's a bit like Ovid in the Heroides, isn't it? You can't. Is he just sending up the whole academic enterprise on the Odyssey by this kind of ridiculous idea, which even, you know, feminist me thinks is ridiculous about it being written by a woman? Or is he serious? Now, I always used to think that there was more than a touch of satire here, that it was a joke about what people had to say about the Odyssey. I then came across a little account by a Cambridge classicist, female Cambridge classicist, Jane Harrison, who had had dinner with Butler in. In athens in the 1890s when he was writing this book, and she complained how awful it was because the only thing that he would drone on about was his stupid theory that the Odyssey was written by a woman. Now, at that point I thought, oh, it looks like he was serious about this. But serious or not, satirical or not, I mean, what for me is so interesting is that people are still referring to it. It's one of those books which is completely mad, almost certainly hopelessly wrong, and yet never goes away. You know, people always think it's not
- [56:22]
B
boring, and it's not boring. It's a lot of fun. Mary, very quickly, in one minute, we're shortchanging the kids, but we don't have any time left, basically. But just to throw out, if you had a junior recommendation, what would it be?
- [56:37]
A
Oh, I think, you know, for the under 14s, under 13s, there's Caroline Lawrence's series of Roman mysteries set around mostly around Pompeii, where our young Romans solve some dastardly crimes. And they're great fun. So they're about Rome, but they're also about mystery. So I would go there. What about you?
- [57:04]
B
Well, I would recommend eight, nine, I think. I'm not absolutely the most solid person on reading age, but the Percy Jackson books, if your youngsters haven't already read them, are huge fun. Set in 21st century America, but the sort of conceit is that the God and their offspring are still among us and they might be some perfectly ordinary seeming young, slightly adhdish young schoolboy. And they're sort of. They are, they are delicious. I think they're delicious. And you'll find that your very young child has a kind of weird knowledge of Greek mythology. I remember the first time I came across a kid who'd read them. It was, I think the kids, kids, the, the kids of a friend of mine and they're like eight or nine and they'll be talking about Tartarus. I was like, why are these children talking about Tartarus? Have they, you know, they kind of, you know, why are they so classically informed at such a young age? Because they've been reading Percy Jackson.
- [58:06]
A
So happy reading, everybody. And do let us know whether you enjoyed them.
- [58:14]
B
Absolutely. If you're going on holiday, have a wonderful one. 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 nstantclassicspod. Bye.