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- [00:01]
Columbia Brand Voice
You can't reason with the sun. Trust us, we've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Colombia's Omnishade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer@columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on aloe lotion. You're welcome, Columbia. Engineered for whatever.
- [00:31]
Mary Beard
Hello, lovely listeners. If you're not yet part of our Instant Classics book club, well, now is the perfect time to join because we are making our way through one of the most exciting works of literature ever. That's Homer's Odyssey.
- [00:50]
Charlotte Higgins
We would love you to join our book club, which we absolutely adore. So please do join now to give you all the access to our previous episodes and loads of other perks like being able to join our online community and getting early booking access to our live events.
- [01:14]
Mary Beard
We all know the story. The Trojan War has been going on for 10 years. The Greeks, who are wanting to capture the city of Troy, are beginning to despair that brute force is going to do it. So what they do is they resort to a clever ruse. Truths. They build a big, hollow wooden horse and they put some of their best fighters in it. The Trojans spot the wooden horse and they pull the horse into their city. They proceed in jubilation to have a party like it's 1999 BCE. After the big party are kind of collapsed and sleeping it off, out of the horse jump these crack Greek troops and they butcher the town to pieces. That is perhaps the earliest known undercover operation in world history. While the Greeks certainly did, you know, value heroism in terms of valor and strength and fighting ability, they also liked cleverness and a good ruse.
- [02:29]
Charlotte Higgins
So in this episode, we're looking at espionage and spycraft and code breaking in and around ancient Greece. And this episode is actually inspired by one of our listeners, Juana Gibson from North Carolina. Thank you, Juana. We'll be looking at some of the ingenious ways in which the Greeks developed encoding messages and communicating secretly. And they go all the way from concealing messages in women's earrings or tattooing the head of an enslaved messenger and sending him off with a message underneath his hair. And we'll be asking, you know, is this Le Carre in Greek tunics or is it a little bit too easy to see a direct line between modern intelligence services and ancient spying and crypto photography? But we'll also be asking, what can These stories tell us about the nature of power in the ancient world. And actually, you know, what can they illuminate about the way we think about spying in the modern world?
- [03:39]
Mary Beard
This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping the world today. I'm Mary Beard.
- [03:48]
Charlotte Higgins
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. Tinker Taylor, Soldier, Spartan.
- [04:03]
Mary Beard
A good joke, Charlotte. A good joke.
- [04:06]
Charlotte Higgins
I love that title. It turns out that if you put your spying goggles on, the history of ancient Greece is actually full of great buying stories and great cryptography stories and going undercover stories. And we have got a good one. We've got a goodie that we're going to start off with, Mary, haven't we? And this comes from the world between Persia and ancient Greece at the sort of turn of the 6th, 5th century.
- [04:49]
Mary Beard
At the time we're talking about sort of the very end of the 6th century, there were. The coastline of Turkey was in a sense, a disputed. A kind of disputed area between the two power bases of the Greek world and the Persian world. And there was one particular rich city at the time which Miletus. And it had been founded by Greeks on that Mediterranean coast of Turkey, but it had fallen into the power base of the Persian Empire, like a lot of the cities along that coast. And people are busy positioning themselves. And the ruler of Miletus, a guy called Histiais, was actually rather highly rated by the Persian king, Darius, and he fought for Darius in one of the Persian Empire's other kind of battles. And he'd fought with such distinction that Darius had said, look, you, ruler of Miletus, you've got to come back to my capital of Susa with me because I want you to be advising me. So we've got disputed territory. One bloke, Histiaeus, who becomes a favourite, although from a Greek city, becomes a favourite of the Persian ruler and ends up literally thousands of kilometers away. I mean, we're not. These are not nearby. I mean, we're talking about Persia as if it was a kind of small place, it's very big. And so his diocese hoikd out of his own city, Miletus, that thousands of kilometers to Susa.
- [06:50]
Charlotte Higgins
And back in Miletus, Histiais nephew is put in charge of the city, Aristagoras, and that's fine. But as time goes on, each of those people, Histiais and Aristagoras, for different reasons, they become restive. Basically, Histiais becomes very unhappy sitting around in Susa advising Darius. Aristagoras, for various reasons, becomes very nervous about his position. He's worried that the Persians are actually going to replace him. So both of them start to have a number of reasons, good reasons, why rebelling from their imperial overlords in Persia seems like a very good idea. But they're having these thoughts separately.
- [07:36]
Mary Beard
I'm 2000km apart and the trouble was
- [07:41]
Anita Anand
how
- [07:43]
Mary Beard
could they communicate with each other? Partly it was difficult just because of the distance, but also the Persians were really well known for being experts in kind of surveillance systems. The Greek historian Xenophon wrote actually about the king's eyes and ears. The eyes and ears of the Persian king, meaning the network of informers that Darius and the other Persian rulers had kind of used to keep an eye on what was actually going on on the fringes of their world. And they were, this was surveillance in control. So what were they to do? Histias has an idea, right?
- [08:34]
Charlotte Higgins
Histias has an idea. Luckily, Histias is super smart, at least so we learn from another Greek historian, the 5th century BCE writer Herodotus. Histiais hits upon the idea of using some absolutely cutting edge to technology writing. And he thought of a way of writing a message to his nephew Aristagor Aristagoras, thousands of kilometers away back in Miletus, that is going to be incredibly well hidden. So what he does is he shaves the head of an enslaved person. He tattoos or has a message tattooed onto the head of the enslaved person. He waits until the man's hair had grown again. This is not an especially fast process, obviously this is fairly slow. Then he sends the man off this long journey through the Middle east, the near east, to Miletus, to Aristagoras, his nephew. And the very, very tradecrafty bit of this that the Russians and the British of the 1960s of the Cold War would approve of. The man with the message tattooed on his head, of course, had no idea himself what it said. All he knew was that when he was to get to Miletus, what would he say? Mary?
- [10:06]
Mary Beard
He was going to tell, say to Aristagoras, shave my head. That's all he had to say. And this is what Aristagoras does. He shaves the man's head. And the message is, now is the time to rebel. And that turned out to be the beginning of a war that went on four years between those cities on the coast of Turkey and the Persian power base, central power base. And it was the precursor to the great big Persian wars that were going to follow between Greeks and Persians over the next decades. I mean, what I am curious about in this story, I have to say, Charlotte, I don't know about you, is what happens to this poor slave, right? He's first of all had his head shaped. He's had the tattooed message put on his head. He's then had to hide out somewhere, presumably kept, you know, locked away so no one could see his head until his hair had grown. Then he gets to Miletus, then he has the head shaved. And what happens to him next in the story? I mean, I think it's a. We just don't know. And it's one of those many kind of insights into the kind of invisibility of these, of the enslaved in Greek culture. Because the absolute key person in this story is the guy with the tattooed head. But he just totally.
- [11:44]
Charlotte Higgins
If we were making the film now, if we were making the spy movie of Histiais and Aristagoras, I'm sorry, but they would not be the lead characters. The lead characters would be the enslaved man played by Tom Hiddleston, no doubt, you know, making his way on this very perilous journey with his secret message, which is a really consequential message that is going to start a war which leads to another big war. This is a historically significant moment. Sadly, he just fades out of the story and we will never know.
- [12:18]
Mary Beard
It is a great story though, and it's captured the imagination of all kinds of people who work on spies and spying. The main source is the first surviving Greek historian is Herodotus in the sort of mid to late theory, 5th century BC, often called the father of history because he kind of, he gets in there first with something which defines itself as telling a story about the past. And Herodotus main theme, and this is how he's usually thought of, is how did the war between the Persians and. And the Greeks, how did it originate? And so he's the first person that we have evidence of, kind of wondering about historical causation. And he then tells the story first of the prequel to the Great Persian War and then to the big conflict of the early 5th century between Greece and Persia. I think it is interesting to kind of put one's spying spectacles on as kind of you hinted, because actually there is quite. I mean, there's quite a lot of stuff in Erodotus which ends up turning on cryptography or undercover operations in this great war. It's not just set piece battles and the story of Histias and the Head. I mean, it's a very good one, but it's only, I mean, it's only one of many. And they occur all through Herodotus. I mean, there's a great one from the beginning of his history where we find some more, you know, disgruntled plotters who they don't use an enslaved man. What they use is a hare, the body of a dead hare. And they insert a message into the hare, which is another, you know, H A R e the animal. Right. Another way of kind of finding the means of getting a message through to someone.
- [14:40]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah. These are all early forms of cryptography of what in the trade is known as steganography, hidden writing, the equivalent of invisible ink. And now, of course, it's not invisible ink. In the 20th century was invisible ink. Now it's pixels with information hidden in a computer file that might unleash a kind of cyber attack or pass on information. So these are the earliest forms of these spying techniques.
- [15:08]
Mary Beard
I guess this is one bit of Greek history where we actually find women have a more prominent role than you than they usually do.
- [15:18]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah, I think everybody's favourite, certainly, I would say your favorite and my favorite story in this particular book by Herodotus that relates to spying and cryptography is this. So again, it's set in this time just immediately before the big Persian war where the Persians launch a full scale enormous invasion. They're going to try and take over the whole of Greece. And again, it's this sort of slight sense of disputed loyalties. And Greeks are also on the Persian side. So the context is that there was a Spartan ruler called Demaratus who had been kicked out of Sparta and he ended up in exile at the Persian court. And he's favoured by the ruler by who at this point is not Darius, but Xerxes. And he becomes a kind of strategic advisor to Xerxes. And eventually he actually, when Xerxes is undertaking the attempted invasion of Greece, he ends up being Xerxes advisor on the ground. But in a way, Demaratus is almost a double agent, I would say, because before this full scale invasion happens, he decides to warn his countrymen, the Spartans, who he's been exiled by, and he does so again. He has this problem about how to get a secret message through all these thousands and thousands of miles and across the sea as well, how to get a message safely there. So what he does is sends what appears to be a set of blank wax tablets back to Sparta. Now, if you listen to our episode about Roman London, you'll know broadly what we're talking about, which is wooden tablets about the size of your iPad or smaller, covered over with wax, and you would use a metal stylus for writing in the wax. So if you were receiving a set of wax tablets, you'd normally expect the wax to have incisions in them and to have something written on them. But in this case, when they get them in Sparta, when they arrive, they're completely blank. They've got a message, apparently they've got something from Demaratus, but doesn't say anything on it, or they've got something from somewhere, it doesn't say anything. So everyone's incredibly puzzled by this. And, you know, you can imagine them standing around in Sparta going, what? What do we do with this?
- [18:01]
Mary Beard
They needed the canny woman because a woman called Gorgo, who is the wife of a leading Spartan and wife of Leonidas, she has the bright idea she kind of is cannier than all the blokes who'd be completely flummoxed. And she says, look, scrape the wax off the tablet. Because she has rightly cottoned on to the fact that the message hadn't been written in the wax, it had been written underneath the wax and then covered with the wax. So the blokes do what Gorgo says. They take. They scrape the wax off and there is Demaratus's message written on the wood underneath the wax. So in the end, it's the woman that saves the day. She has the bright idea and it's really important.
- [19:00]
Charlotte Higgins
It's so important. It is. It's one of the most consequential and important messages in Greek history that the Greeks got some warning of this huge invasion.
- [19:12]
Mary Beard
Yeah. The potions are going to invade. It was the. It was the key bit of information hidden under the wax discovered by the lady Gorgo.
- [19:23]
Charlotte Higgins
And in fact, Mary, there was a really important book written about cryptography in the 1960s by a guy called David Kahn called the Code breakers, and it's a complete history of code breaking. And in fact, it was so complete that the US government tried to suppress it. But in that book, he calls Gorgo the first known female cryptanalyst. And to my mind, she, you know, she has this. She's. She's like a sort of ancient Greek version of the ladies at Bletchley park trying to crack Enigma.
- [19:55]
Mary Beard
Yeah, you know, she's smart overall, actually, Gorgo's got form when it comes to foreign policy, really, because there's a great incident before when. When she's the kind of canny Child in this case. And the guy has come to try to get the Spartans in involved in one of these pre Persian war conflicts with the Persians. And basically the ambassador coming to Sparta is trying to bribe the Spartans and keeps offering them more money to get involved. And basically Gorgo, who sees what's going on as a brilliant pre teenager says to dad, that man's trying to bribe your dad. He's seen through to the bottom line of what's going on in these big international relations.
- [20:45]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah, so she's famously canny woman. We love her.
- [20:49]
Mary Beard
Yeah, we do love her. And she's in a way it's perhaps kind of reflects some sense of the Spartan women have rather more power in the world, are rather more involved in decision making or at least are able to communicate on the fringes of decision making than what you would find in Athens.
- [21:12]
Charlotte Higgins
And spying is as old as, as classical literature, in fact. I mean as we spoke about at the very beginning, the Trojan Horse of course is the sort of the original spying story. But Homer's Iliad also has an extraordinary moment of military intelligence gathering that goes very badly wrong. There's a Trojan character called Dolon who is sent out volunteers to go and spy on the Greek ships as they lie, you know, as the siege is taking place of Troy. And so he goes off in the dead of night to try and spy on the, you know, the Greek camp and the Greek ships he's intercepted by two famous Greek characters. Odysseus, who we know, we know from Odyssey book club is a very clever man, Odysseus and his pal Diomedes. And all the tables get turned and Diomedes and Odysseus capture Dolon. They interrogate him. There's a good cop, bad cop situation where Odysseus, needless to say, is good cop and says, don't worry, your life is safe. Just tell us how things are going on the Trojan side. And once Dolon has told them as much as he knows, Diomedes kills him. So that's a real.
- [22:36]
Mary Beard
Yeah, but it goes all through and it comes out of myth into all sorts of what might seem like strange byways of classical literature. I mean I think one of the best is very, very little read, I have to say. It is the work of a man called Aeneas taciticus from the 4th century BC, or that's what we call him. Aeneas Tacticus. Aeneas the tactician. And he's got a whole book, I mean he wrote many books on military strategy, most of which don't survive but the one that survives pretty much complete is about different forms of siege warfare and the skills you need for it. And there's a whole section of that precisely about how to get a message across in warfare. And there are some truly extraordinary stories which pick up the themes that we've seen in Herodotus. I mean, I think my particular kind of slightly gory favorite is one of the ways you can get a message across is to write it on leaves and then sew the leaves into an open wound and sew the wound up. I mean, really, really, it's not very hygienic.
- [24:03]
Charlotte Higgins
I worry about the person. It sounds like a highway to sepsis to me.
- [24:08]
Mary Beard
Yeah, highway to sepsis. I mean, you mentioned, I think you mentioned one about earrings, which is also quite good. I mean.
- [24:17]
Charlotte Higgins
Yes.
- [24:18]
Mary Beard
How does that work?
- [24:19]
Charlotte Higgins
The idea is that you'd write a very tiny, tiny message and then wrap presumably the papyrus, make it terribly, terribly small, whatever material you'd written on, terribly small, wrap it in little thin bits of lead which is very soft, and then use those as women's earrings and get the messages through that way. And of course, you know, using women as couriers and carriers of messages and material is a very well worn spying technique. You know, women seem less suspicious and something as innocent seeming as earrings, again, there may be health consequences from having that much lead around your ears, but. Okay, but it's a good one. I mean, there are all sorts of. There are early kind of sort of ciphers mentioned by Aeneas Taciticus as well, aren't there? He suggests you could send a message through by sending some perfectly ordinary written information, but then marking certain letters dotted around whatever the perfectly innocent, boring memo or letter. And then, you know, if you put those marks and letters together, then a secret message is revealed. It's a kind of cipher.
- [25:40]
Mary Beard
The question for me about all this though, and I think this is a good moment to take a break and come back. The question for me is, is there more to this, all these stories than just the kind of daring do of an early espionage community? Is it telling us more about Greek culture than just being good spy stories? So we'll come back to that in a minute. Okay, Charlotte, then that's the question. Is this just Le Carre in Teenix, right? Are we dealing with something more than the same old, same old spy story?
- [26:32]
Charlotte Higgins
It's a very interesting question. I think it seems very hard to argue indeed that their spies are that much like how we would understand spies and espionage, the world of espionage in the modern world. I mean, the idea that there was anything like an organized secret service that I think has to go out of the window. I do think that obviously, all these, Whether it's fictional stories in Homer or stories about. Or information and advice about siege warfare in Aeneas Tacticus, or these stories in Herodotus about the relations between the Greeks and the Persians, all of these things, I think, are just showing us how, in how absolutely important knowledge control is, and that, you know, a fundamental piece of knowledge can help you break a siege. You know, this is. This is controlling. Controlling knowledge is as important, was as important then as it is now in a kind of military or foreign affairs situation. But I think there's something else that's interesting, which is if one reads Herodotus, and by the way, we'll come back to Herodotus in future episodes because he is wonderful and his history is fantastically readable and it's just heaven. It's great fun and, you know, it's obviously an extremely significant text in all kinds of ways. But I suppose when I was reading bits of Herodotus for this episode with my spying spectacles on, I started to think about what is Herodotus trying to tell us with these stories? Why does he focus on these sort of moments of extraordinary ingenuity and messages getting through in these extremely unlikely circumstances? And the overall story of Herodotus is how a somewhat shambolic and not very unified collection of Greek cities managed to fend off a vast invasion by a hugely important superpower. And how? The question is, how did they do this? How? And I think part of Herodotus answer, not just in these stories, but throughout his book, is the Greeks managed to do it, at least partly because they're clever. This is Herodotus agenda, I think, is the cleverness, the intelligence of the Greeks. And I think these spying stories are moments where that cleverness, that subterfuge, the smartness, the shrewdness is highlighted. And I do think even looking at the modern world and the way we are, let's face it, one of the reasons I thought of doing the episode, thanks to Juana, is that spying is something that fascinates us now. You know, we are. We are gripped by spies in. In fact and in fiction, spying is becoming more and more important in our own kind of geopolitical situation. Vladimir Putin loves spying as a former intelligence officer, and I think it is. It's partly about the delicious feeling of knowing secrets that can undermine your enemy, but it's also something to do with. Well, actually, Putin said This Mary, there's a famous quote by Vladimir Putin about how spies can do as much, a single person can do as much as an entire army. There's a sense in which, you know, the individual, the individual by their own kind of cunning, can really change the course of history.
- [30:22]
Mary Beard
One direction I went was to think of Odysseus and we've mentioned Odysseus in this episode and we're talking a lot about him in the book club. But he is the classic spy because he is the clever one, Odysseus. I mean, Odysseus might be a good warrior, he is, he's not, you know, he's no slouch. But what, what Odysseus offers the Greeks is clever ruses. And you know, in a sense he is the model really for the idea of intelligence being what is, what's, what's going to win you the wars. I thought slightly more mundanely or kind of more frivolously, I thought of, you know, Asterix, the Gaul versus the Romans is another absolute case of this in there for them. They got the magic potion, of course, the Gauls, but there are the Romans, you know, absolute blunderbuss of military might. But the clever, canny Gauls with their magic potion manage to stand up to, you know, the biggest power the world has ever seen. And it's the same kind of axis of storytelling, I think.
- [31:40]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah, and I love that point about Odysseus, the idea that in some way Odysseus, Homer's Odysseus, stands at the head of a kind of long and persistent tradition of spies. I mean, he really is a sort of patron saint in a way of modern spycraft, the way he moves through the world. Also as a lone ranger in the Odyssey, you know, very much on his own in various disguises, helped by Athena often. But for me it's to the sort of appeal is this sort of sense of how do you, how do you get ahead of a monolithic, hugely powerful enemy? It's by infiltration, it's by secrets, it's by disguise and it's by, it's by being clever, it's by being clever.
- [32:30]
Mary Beard
That's what gives the stories in Hirada to something and other writers, their drive. Because it's not just the clever wheeze of putting the message in the earring, it is about how power works and it's about how the apparent underdog can win by being really smart. And I think that's a huge thing. I mean, in all sorts of ways the Greeks Ought to have lost the Persian war, the war with the Persians. But they're clever and they win by being clever. And perhaps even bigger point, though, that strikes me about this and about the preoccupation with these written messages. Now. There are all kinds of other versions of undercover operations in the Greek world, and the Trojan Horses, the patron saint of. Of undercover operations. But there is something here that I feel just underneath the surface is there's something about the power and the edginess of writing. I mean, we think of. We take writing for granted, we take messages so much for granted that we don't, you know, we don't bat an eyelid if we want to communicate with someone. Or at least, you know, up until the real modern digital world, you would, you know, you write a letter, right? That's how you do it. There's nothing odd about that. It's worth reflecting how innovative written messages writing was. I mean, you've got. Leaving aside the. The prehistoric scripts of Greece, well, basically, Greek writing starts in the late 8th century BCE so by the, you know, we're dealing with a relatively new phenomenon. I mean, it's a couple of centuries old. And I think what you see in these stories is still a degree of uncertainty about what writing is, how you interpret it, who controls it, how it can be transmitted. Writing is very much something that is still a bit taking your breath away. The idea of communicating with someone when you cannot be face to face with them and all the kind of potential that that opens up is both exciting but also slightly scary.
- [35:24]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah, there's a hint of the uncanny about it almost.
- [35:27]
Mary Beard
Yes.
- [35:30]
Charlotte Higgins
Writing is as new and strange and, you know, what do we do with it? And I do think that's very powerful what you just said, Mary, about being able to communicate with somebody but not face to face. I think if you, if you really sort of sit with that thought and imagine how extraordinary and strange to go from a situation where you more, you know, if you wanted to say something to somebody, you had to set either, you know, through an intermediary, but you could communicate directly with someone through this amazing new technology of writing. You could, you know, it's.
- [36:08]
Mary Beard
It's big.
- [36:08]
Charlotte Higgins
It's a big thing.
- [36:09]
Mary Beard
And I think that that gives another spin on the, you know, the story of the. The tattoo on the enslaved person's head. Because to us, I think we, we think of that just as a kind of slightly weird ingenuity. And I'm sure to many Greeks it would seem the same. But I think it's also saying, look, how just where are the limits of right? Is the tattoo not just ingenuity, but it's parading just how far writing can go and how weird, how weird it can be in not just an ingenious sense, but in a sense of what is it? What is the medium for writing? What and who can you write on? And that's a real. That is a real question in the Greek world. It's not just a little fantasy about a clever idea. It's about what is the proper use of writing? What is its. You know, what is its proper material? And I think that if we kind of try very hard not to normalize it and just take it for granted and then just think that there's some kind of slightly cranky uses of it. But can we put ourselves back into a period in which writing is itself unexpected, itself not very easy to kind of. To tame, you know, is writing itself something we have to puzzle about? You know, that it is. It is a puzzle. And I mean. And you see that. I mean, perhaps there is, you know, the one best example of that does actually come from the text of Homer. Now, the text of Homer was not composed in writing. Its origin is essentially an oral tradition, though it becomes committed to writing pretty soon down the line, probably, but it's composed orally. But you see, basically in the Iliad, for example, it's not a written culture. The leaders of the Greeks are not sending little notes to each other. It's essentially an oral culture. But there is that wonderful story in the Iliad. In book six, we'll put this in the show Notes, where writing, for once plays a part in the plot of the Iliad. And it's absolutely fascinating that it comes with a kind of real danger warning on it. I mean, we have this guy who's called Bellerophon. Through a complicated set of maneuvers and fallings out, he has been expelled from his home city. And he's going to be exterminated. Or that's the idea, he's going to be exterminated. But they can't quite bring themselves to do it. So they send Bellerophon off with a tablet, with a folded tablet in which is communicated the message to the person that he's going to give this tablet to, that Bellerophon should be killed. So Bellerophon is sent off carrying his own death sentence in writing, in the tablet. And Homer describes this, the text of Homer says that what Bellerophon was carrying in this tablet was many deadly signs. And of course, they're literally deadly signs. Although Bellerophon does in the end it manage clever ruses to escape this. But there I think you see this kind of first Homeric mention of writing and it is sinister and dangerous and puzzling and hard to interpret. And it's actually intended to kill.
- [40:41]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah. And I think the story rests on the idea that Bellerophon and anyone he encounters is guaranteed not to be able to read the message. So that writing can only be interpreted by a very scarce few people. You know, Homer is not describing this message casually as something called writing. You know, even the way it's described by Homer, like Mary just said, it's sort of dissociative and exotic and strange. It's not called writing, it's called many deadly signs. The idea that writing itself has to be described in this circumlocutory way, it's not normal, it doesn't have its own place in the world yet it is sinister, it is strange, it is something that only certain people can read. Yeah, I mean, I think it's really helpful and exciting actually to pause on that sort of idea of writing being itself a form of secret communication. I mean, who needs cryptography when writing itself is already doing that job?
- [41:55]
Mary Beard
And I think what it shows is that certainly in this early period of Greek history, the classical world, and looking back to Homer, what we would, you know, rightly, partly rightly think of in terms of espionage or undercover operations, it's partly that. But I think as often with these things, looking harder at spying opens up even bigger cultural questions about knowledge and power and comprehensibility and communication, which, you know, really goes beyond our stereotype of the spy.
- [42:41]
Charlotte Higgins
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 medianstantclassicspod pod.
- [42:58]
Mary Beard
Bye bye.
- [43:06]
Anita Anand
To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.
- [43:12]
William Duranpole
To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler.
- [43:18]
Anita Anand
Mah has one of the most recognizable faces in the world. Yet he started the life in a muddy provincial village.
- [43:25]
William Duranpole
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.
- [43:35]
Anita Anand
The Goal Hanger World History Show. I'm Anita Anand.
- [43:38]
William Duranpole
And I'm William Duranpole.
- [43:40]
Anita Anand
In this six part series we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitter to explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong.
- [43:50]
William Duranpole
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 burnt, children denounced their parents, and a nation worshipped a mango as a sacred relic.
- [44:11]
Anita Anand
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