Is the Odyssey myth or memory?

0:00Welcome to the History Extra podcast. From the role of women, to slavery, and the role of the hero, the Odyssey has much to tell us about the ancient world. In this third episode of our Sunday series on the epic and its afterlife, Dr Daisy Dunn guides Kev Lodchen through some of its key themes. Yes, around 2800 years ago, a poet, or perhaps many poets, set down a story that had been

0:31travelling by word of mouth for centuries. It told of a king trying to get home from a war. It should have taken him weeks. Instead, it took ten years. The king was Odysseus, and the poem, the Odyssey. You might know some of the stories of the one-eyed cyclops, the sweet song of the sirens, or the witch that turned his crew into pigs. But beneath the gods and the monsters and the wine-dark sea, are there historical truths to be found? I'm Kev Lodchen, and I'm joined by Dr Daisy Dunn, award-winning classicist, author, and all-round

1:04expert on the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Her books include the Lady Bird Expert book on Homer and The Missing Thread, a new history of the ancient world through the women who shaped it. This time, we're delving into the archaeology of Bronze Age Greece, looking for clues that might tell us what, if anything, in the Odyssey is based on facts. Welcome back, Daisy. Hello again. So, to recap Odysseus' journey very quickly, he's left Troy, he's been to the land of Sikonius, he's met the Lotus he is, he's been with the Cyclops, Aeolus twice, Circe, the underworld,

1:40Circe again, Sirens, Scylla, Charybdis, and onwards, finally ending up at Ithaca via the land of the Phaeacians. He's been bouncing around all these places. Is it at all possible to map any of this onto what we know of the Aegean? People have certainly tried. There have been some really, really valiant efforts to try and work out exactly where each of these adventures took place on the modern map. And I would say some of them are fairly sort of reasonable attempts. So, I mean, we know where he's

2:13beginning. So, he's beginning at Troy. We know where Troy is. It's near the Hellespont on this kind of west coast of what's now Turkey. He seems to then travel upwards and then down through the Aegean and then through the Mediterranean. And he's certainly going around sort of the areas of Sicily. He seems to go up to Malta, back down again and towards Greece. And Ithaca, I mean, that's a slightly fraught question. Where is Ithaca? We have a modern island of that name. It doesn't really meet the description that we have in the poem. So, some people say,

2:47I think the most convincing one's Palachy, which is a peninsula of Cephalonia, which we think was almost certainly an individual island a long time ago. Not a million miles away from Ithaca. Exactly. In the right neck of the wood. In the right neck of the wood, definitely. So, he seems to travel almost in a figure of eight across these various seas. And there are descriptions of other places along the way. We get quite a global picture. And we touched on some of those in our previous episode, but maybe the Cyclops Polyphemus was on Sicily, how maybe Cylian Carybdis may have been in the Straits of Messina, as well around the

3:21bottom of Italy. The one that surprised me was perhaps the Lotus Eaters off the coast of Tunisia. Yes. Yeah. It seems sort of Jerba, I think, is the place that's been identified. Quite possibly, that is the case. So, yeah, I think it is possible to certainly identify some of these places. But the, I mean, its imaginary landscape has really been kind of put on top of a lot of these places. The world itself, how expansive is it? I know within the Odyssey, it begins mentioning that Poseidon's off in Ethiopia. Like, how far is the known world at that time?

3:53So, it's quite far. So, we've got North Africa, we've got Egypt, we've got Ethiopia as well, as you say. We have Crete, most of what's now Turkey, certainly central portions as well as the west coast. The Aegean Islands, the Greek mainland, the Peloponnese, off into Italy, to the islands off Italy as well, in the Tyrrhenian Sea. I mentioned Malta a minute ago. That seems to be where Calypso was, or at least Gozo. So, that kind of area. So, it's quite broad. And, I mean,

4:24that in itself is a reflection of Homer's time as well, because people were travelling a lot more for leisure in his time. There were people going off to the Olympic Games. The Olympic Games were new in the 8th century BC. There were people going off for religious festivals, travelling across seas the first time. Going to see the Oracle at Delphi as well. So, there are reasons for people to be passing a much broader range of locations than they had previously. This is perhaps a mistake on my part, but I hadn't really considered the kind of travel for leisure aspect of the Greek world at that time.

4:58I think it's a big part of it. And I think that's probably one of the reasons why the Odyssey was so appealing to the people immediately, because it was chiming with their own experience of them sort of beginning to be excited and not seeing necessarily the sea and sort of voyages as being completely, you know, just dangerous and off-putting, but actually be an appealing thing. Let's start where Odysseus starts, which is in Troy. And Troy, as far as I understand it, unlike some of the places we're talking about, we know both it is real and also we've kind of

5:32fixed on where it is. That's true. Yes. So, it's identified with the site at a place that's called Hisrelik in the west of Turkey. Heinrich Schlieben is the great sort of excavator, the first excavator of the site of Troy. He was tipped off as to its location. He was an incredibly rich man. He'd made his money through trade, in sort of indigo, in, I wouldn't say coffee, tea, maybe it was tea, this sort of thing. He's a great sort of businessman of the time and he was an amateur archaeologist. So, not trained in any way?

6:04No. No. So, he very much went over to where he was told Troy might be with his copy of Homer, Iliad, Odyssey, and, you know, his kind of digging equipment, little team of people. And he just began to dig down. And to modern archaeologists, he's not really a hero. Even though he's, you know, the great excavator of the site, he made so many fundamental errors and caused so much destruction in the process of excavating Troy that actually he made the situation a lot muddier and murkier than

6:40it might have been. And what I mean by that is that Troy itself is a really ancient site. So, you have distinct layers of archaeology of different periods in time. And archaeologists have broken these up into roughly nine main layers. And there are sub-layers, you know, nine A, B, C, D, whatever, within each. And Heinrich Schliemann's sort of rationale, he thought, well, the Trojan War was surely the oldest thing to have happened at Troy. So, therefore, to get to any evidence of Troy, I need to dig to the bottom or dig as deep as possible. So, that's pretty much what

7:14he did. But if you're an archaeologist and you just keep going down, down, down, you're going to disrupt all those neatly kind of sedimented levels. And you have a risk of one spilling into the other. And you really disturb what's actually there. And this is a big problem with his excavation. So, he went down, he kept digging, and he went to Troy 2. So, quite near the bottom. He found some amazing things there. We have a lot of what he discovered. We have plates, we have crockery, we have treasure, jewellery. I mean, there's a really famous

7:48picture. He has a very young wife, and he dressed her up in some of this gold jewellery that he found in this layer. And he had this habit of connecting whatever he found to Homer's poetry. So, this was the treasure of Helen. It's Helen of Troy's jewellery, and his wife got to wear it. And it's a very nice idea, but it's very, very fanciful and not particularly accurate, as it turned out. And to clarify that, there's no indication that this has anything to do with Helen. He's just kind of gone and been like, this is a nice necklace.

8:20Maybe it belonged to Helen of Troy. I'm going to call it that. The fact is, and it was found out pretty soon afterwards, that a lot of what he found was about a thousand years older than it should have been if it had belonged to Homer's Troy. So, he dug too deep. He dug too deep. Yeah. That was his big error. So, in the process, he disturbed these really important layers because modern archaeologists, who are trying to find evidence of the Trojan War in the same kind of way, but with a bit more of a kind of scientific background, they identify the layers of Troy which are pertinent and relevant

8:57to the story of Homer in the layers six and seven. So, not two. Six and seven are corresponding to that kind of period. I think level seven, the relevant level, was destroyed in about 1300 BC. I mean, level two is? It's about a thousand years older. So, you're looking back to sort of 2100 BC or something like that. And level seven is then where we, if we assume that as Troy and if we assume the Trojan War, that's the one which would have been destroyed at that time. Yeah. So, and there are various layers, within these layers, there's evidence of many cases

9:32of destruction. So, you have Troy six and Troy seven are the grandest cities. And there's really good evidence there of monumental walls, of very, very thicks of limestone blocks forming these walls, of fortresses, of lookout towers, the kind of things that we find in Homer's poem where he's describing what Troy looked like. These are really sort of borne out by the evidence. But there are also signs that there were fires, there might have been earthquakes that destroyed these layers. And one of the really interesting things that happens is

10:06you find between six and seven, you find one of these cities is rebuilt after what might have been an earthquake. And there's an extra effort in that period to create more and more accommodation. It becomes more crowded. So, what began is quite spaced out. You're getting all these kind of much smaller houses, they seem to be houses built very, very close to each other. And they have these great big earthen pots sunk into the floor. And that seems to be to archaeologists, they say, well, look, this looks like the evidence of people trying

10:39to kind of batten down the hatches in a time where there's a threat of war, where people are stockpiling, literally, they're putting their produce underground. They are trying to gather what grain, wine, whatever they needed to survive. And they are living in a city which has very strong defences because there's some kind of threat going on. And then people who really want to find a Trojan war then say, well, look, look what else we found here. We found arrowheads, we found slingshot bullets, we found swords, we found a bit of sort of armour.

11:12And they're quite paltry remains. You know, it's very difficult. You can't look at those and say, oh, look, this is the material of a great big Greek army. I mean, there's not enough. It's not there. There's not enough there. But there's something. It's very difficult to say exactly what happened. But certainly there was a destruction of a city, a rebuilding of a city, a destruction of a city, a rebuilding of a city. So, plausibly, could have been a war. Categorically, no one knows. Is that what it's come down to? I think so.

11:42Yeah. I'm really glad we've introduced Heinrich Schliemann because he's going to come back into the story in a moment. We could talk about Troy as a whole, as a podcast in itself. We can't do that here. But dear listeners and viewers, if you want to know more about Troy, History Action has you covered. There's an episode in my Beyond the Podcast picks with Professor Paul Cartridge talking all about that ancient city and its war with the Greeks. You can find that in my Beyond the Podcast links below. Daisy, away from Troy, there's a whole other host of places that Odysseus and Telemachus

12:18visits, all these other courts. What surprised me is a lot of these are based on real places and a real culture. I wonder if you could introduce that for us. It seems that we have kings who look after certain areas, not just the immediate city or town in which they are based. So, Odysseus is described as the king of Ithaca. Ithaca is the island. So, he presumably was the only one. But then we have references to, for example, Agamemnon and Menelaus. I mean, Agamemnon is described as being a king over a much broader

12:53area in the Peloponnese. He's the king of Mycenae, but he also seems to have power over places such as Corinth. So, there seem to have been kind of almost confederations of places which were managed by kings. And with Agamemnon, this is where we get sort of one of our clues as to the inspiration that Homer was drawing upon because in the poem, Homer describes him as Anax. And that's a word which means, it's often translated as Lord. Quite difficult to translate because it seems to be the Greek equivalent, or it certainly is

13:24the Greek equivalent, of Wanax. And this is a word that comes from the late Bronze Age. It belongs to something called the Mycenaean Age in particular. And the Mycenaean Age is really the age that is inspiring Homer. And the Mycenaeans had kings who were known as Wanax. One singular, Wanax, I guess would be the plural. I'm not fluent in Mycenaean. But Wanax is the word that we get. And there was a deputy to the Wanax. And they essentially, they lauded over a palace

13:59culture, each one. Within this Mycenaean culture, there were various huge palatial residences dotted around, mainly the Peloponnese. So Mycenae, hence the name Mycenaeans, that was one of them. There were places such as Pylos, Tyrens, Jokos, Galar. These are places which aren't necessarily familiar to us today. You'd need a map, really, to identify most of them. But they were clearly

14:29incredibly advanced, very much ahead of their time. And they seem to have had palaces which were almost like cities in themselves. So there were thrones in some of these. So you can imagine a Wanax almost sitting there holding court. They had central hearths with fires, they had columns, and then multiple rooms stemming off these central courtyards. And some of these rooms would have been used for crafts, for trade almost. So you have evidence of people doing weaving in some of

15:00these rooms. So they seem to have been almost military cities in themselves. And the idea is that you have a Wanax, you have a leader, who is almost the controller of these great little networks. So in the Odyssey, where we see Telemachus journeying to these grand courts of Menelaus and Nestor at Pylos, and we have Odysseus going to King Alcinus in Iscaria. Are we able to map these onto the Mycenaean palaces as we understand them?

15:31Yes. Yeah, we are. I would say so. Because I think when Homer is trying to create a picture of the grandeur of all of these places, he's actually looking at the archaeological remains of these very palaces, these Mycenaean palace complexes. Because the people in his times, I think 400 years in the future, they're looking back at the remains of these palaces, which had largely been destroyed by then. But there are blocks, there are walls, there are aspects of them. And they're overall, just as we are, when we go and visit ancient Rome, and you see some of the columns and bits and pieces still there. You are still thinking,

16:07goodness, how did they do that in that historical age? And because of the grandeur of these Mycenaean palaces, this helps to fuel the idea of the poem, because you're thinking, you're trying to create this idea of this great heroic age. The people who built these palaces must have been heroes, because they're so much more august and grand than anything in Homer's own time. So it makes sense. That's why they're doing it. And that you have Telemachus visiting one of the palaces, which we still have evidence of, which is incredible. He visits the palace

16:38of King Nesta, Nesta, elderly man in the Iliad. And he goes there and he is overawed by the grandeur of it. And we know that this palace that actually stood historically in this place, it was 6,000 meters squared. Gosh, it's enormous. Really, really big. It was incredibly accomplished. It was divided into, I think, three main sections for living. And it had courtyards, it had a great sort of colonnade, it had running water from an aqueduct, really early kind of aqueduct. And it was just absolutely extraordinary. And there's

17:15a great scene in the Odyssey, where Telemachus takes a bath while he's there. So Nesta actually appoints Polycaster, one of his daughters, to actually go and bathe Telemachus. And Telemachus has this bath, and he clearly really enjoys it, because he comes out and Homer says that he came out looking like the gods. So you think, wow, that must have been quite some bath. And I think this is a bit of an in-joke on Homer's part, because there was actually a very special bathtub, which miraculously has survived. It's real, the bath.

17:45It's real bath. Yeah, real bath. And it's incredible. It's sort of, it's short, but it's not like a long tub. It's a short kind of lozenge-shaped tub, not freestanding. It's kind of built in, you couldn't move it. And it was terracotta. And it had the interior was painted with concentric circles, and they would have been brightly painted. It's very much faded now. And found nearby were all of these kind of big jars and containers, which would have been used to pour over the person while they're in the bath. So different sized ones for carrying

18:15the water and sort of tipping it in and filling the bath. That's a massive operation for one bath. It is. It is. And it's just, I mean, it is absolutely incredible just to have that bath. And I just think, why did Homer mention this bath? It's because people in his time were obviously visiting the remains of this palace and looking at the bath. So that comes into what we're talking about, about the travel element. Again, it's like they know this place. Yeah, they know this place. It's informed that the Odyssey is fiction, but it's informed by fact. It's informed by these archaeological remains, which are trying to sort of, they're

18:48painting their own picture for the people who are living in Homer's time, as to how amazing and august society was in the late Bronze Age. And I wonder if we can see some of this in Mycenae itself, because there's some great archaeological remains there. And one of the ones I came across was the Lion Gate. And it's enormous, right? It is. It's incredible. I mean, the Lion Gate, I always call it the Lioness Gate, because I actually think it's Lionesses rather than the lions up the top. There's sort of two of them crowning the top on top of this great big lintel. And the wall is monumental. And in

19:23ancient times, people couldn't work out how did they get these lions up there? How did they raise this lintel? And a lot of the myths that sort of turn up at this time is that the Cyclops were involved in building places like Troy and Mycenae and actually lifting these things. That's so interesting that the culture seems so otherworldly that you've got a mythological kind of creation for it. It really does. And I think this just shows you a lot about how much has changed, I think, between the time that the Odyssey is set and the time that it's actually being listened

19:58to by people in Greece. There's a sense, I think, very much that they don't talk explicitly about having been through a dark age, but they're really aware of their inferiority to the time that came before them. They really truly imagine that the people who were living in this earlier time that Homer's describing were, you know, on first name terms with the gods and the goddesses, that they were so important and superior to the people who came after them, that there was a real closeness between gods and divinity and that the men were heroes and they were bigger and they were stronger. And how else would they build

20:32these monumental buildings? Can we talk very quickly about the Mycenaeans themselves and how that culture worked? Because Mycenae is a city, but also they've given a name to their entire culture that's spread across the Aegean. Yeah, it's the Peloponnese area broadly. It's really, really trailblazing as a culture. And we define the Mycenaeans today as early Greeks. They seem to have taken over from the Minoans who inhabited Crete before then. And the Minoans were the original occupants. They

21:06had their own really amazing palace culture. If you visited Knossos, I'm thinking about the world of Arthur Evans and the great excavations that he undertook there and the kind of recreations that he made there. If you've visited, you'll see these very, very colourful paintings all over the place. So the Mycenaeans were partly inspired by the Minoans, but they also took over from the Minoans. They seem to have almost forced the Minoans out. Their society descended, the Mycenaeans took over. So they were the kind of original Greeks.

21:37So were they a different culture? They were a different culture, but they were very much inspired by Minoan cultures. They took aspects of it. And it wasn't clean cut. It wasn't like all the Minoans stopped and then the Mycenaeans began. There was an overlap between the two. But the Mycenaeans were the ones who proved the most successful and were particularly strong in trade. Do you have any sense of how life in one of these palaces worked? We do a little bit from some of the tablets which have been preserved. These will be tablets in Linear B?

22:07Linear B. So Minoans, they had Linear A and they used to write on these clay tablets. And Linear A was a syllabic script. Linear B is quite similar. This was inherited or rather invented by the Mycenaeans. And there is some overlap between the two. And Linear B was again a syllabic script. It was used for making lists. It was used for accounting. It wasn't used for writing out literature. There are just lots and lots of little symbols which you can sometimes

22:38actually decipher without knowing any of it today. Some of them look just like bundles of wheat or things like that. It's sort of measures of certain materials of oil, cows, things like this. And the Mycenaean language, Linear B, is very difficult to decipher, but it has been deciphered. Whereas Linear A has not been fully deciphered yet. It's super interesting talking about the size of these palaces because I'm really struck in the Odyssey about how you have the suitors in Ithaca. And Ithaca presumably is a palace

23:11in this context. There's 100 plus suitors and they're there for maybe three years and they're eating Odysseus out of the house and home. They haven't finished yet. No. Like the stores in this place must be massive. They must be. I have an example from Pylos. So Great Palace there. One of the storerooms there, just one out of many, many, many storerooms. One storeroom contained nearly 3,000 cups. Cups? Cups for drinking wine. Not cups of anything, just literally cups. Just cups. So that's given an indication of how many guests you might have in one place.

23:44Yeah, exactly. That gives you an idea of just something of the scale on which banqueting or which sort of hosting could have been taking place at that point. My impression from the poem is that Ithaca is much less grand than Pylos, than Sparta as well, where Menelaus is. I think it's very, very, it's comparatively rustic. It's falling apart because of these suitors. Yes. And I think, I mean, there's a real worry that they are depleting Ithaca of its resources.

24:19And I think they would have been completely dependent on the agriculture there. They are feasting on a lot of meat. So they must be depending on constant breeding of sheep. Wine, where are they getting that? I mean, Ithaca is an island. It must have been importing things from the mainland. It's not completely cut off. So I think it's credible. There is a good storage of things for the suitors to use and abuse. But there is one of the worries that runs through the poem is that there's this

24:52great depletion and that this can't carry on forever. So my reading of it very much is that they are running out of time there, that they are pushing it almost beyond the brink and that Ithaca, the kingdom, needs to be saved now by Odysseus just as much as Odysseus needs to get home because he wants to see his wife. It's interesting that you have that kind of comparison between like a faded palace and these kind of grand spectacles because ultimately the palaces do vanish. They all kind of collapse.

25:22They do. There's a sudden and this is this dramatic end because they've been flourishing and then suddenly we have examples of these. These palaces are all abandoned. Mycenae I think is the last to burn down. Pylos is abandoned. Everything, they all just completely left and it's a bit of a mystery. Then you get the fall of the Mycenaeans and to this day we're not exactly sure what happened. What happened to this great palatial society? Why did it come to a sudden end? Why were these palaces just left?

25:54And the end was sudden then? It seems to be quite sudden. I mean in the case we know at Pylos that people had been having this great big feast beforehand because archaeologists have gone in and found evidence of there being a great barbecue, a great feast, dead animals. They haven't found any human remains there so it doesn't seem like there was a great massive fire at the end which caused everyone to go. But fires were widespread at these palaces as well. So we don't exactly know what caused this society to collapse. And there have been theories down the ages, all kinds of things. We have theories of

26:28sea peoples. This is one theory that there's actually references to sea peoples on various documents particularly from Egypt. Essentially the idea of kind of piratical raiders travelling around and causing chaos when they reach land. So some people hold those responsible. There was the idea of a Doric invasion. And the Dorics were a certain geographical group of people coming probably from the north. So they thought maybe these people were coming in from possibly

26:59Epirus in Greece, probably from the Balkans as well. And that there was some kind of battle. We haven't really got any evidence of that at all, of this invasion. So that theory has been thrown up in the air as well. But certainly at the time of the Mycenaean collapse there seems to be huge upheaval across this part of the world. So the Hittites, who were a very powerful people based in what's now Turkey, their cultures, they seem to be abandoning their cultural centres to some extent as well. There seems to be a lot of climatic change. People have looked at this from

27:33a sort of archaeological point of view as well and think there might have been long periods of drought which might have caused people to move away from certain areas because of famine. There are so many different theories but certainly the population seems to be getting smaller. And then what happens is we seem to find the Mycenaeans turning up in a completely different area. Because people have looked at the archaeology, for example, in Yerbea and Lefkandi, which you can probably identify on a map, for which there are these great sort of buildings of houses and sort of certain aspects of the

28:07culture there, which seems to be Mycenaean. So it looks like people were travelling. There was suddenly mass migration. And there's a huge period of migration at the end of the late Bronze Age. So a real sense of upheaval. And perhaps the idea of this Trojan War feeds into this. I mean, perhaps we have this period where there are maybe not one war, but a series of wars across different nations. We have people very much on the move. A real sense that there is

28:37sort of life in flux and that it can't carry on in the way that it had. Certainly in these areas where there'd been great wealth with the Mycenaean palaces. And so everything is left behind. And then you have the beginning of this so-called dark age where the population certainly has shrunk and it's shifted away from these cultural centres. And that's really interesting. You mentioned Troy again there. So are we able to draw, maybe not a line, but is there a correlation in time between when Troy perhaps vanishes and when

29:09the Mycenaean culture starts to collapse? It's the same time. So I think, and I think quite a few people, I'm one of those people who reads the poem. The story of the Trojan War certainly almost is an allegory for what's happening at that point. It's almost trying to describe this decline, this sudden change in the world where there was this great heroic age and it came to an end. It's like a swan song almost. Yeah. It's the last final celebration of the strength of these people. And in this particular

29:42story, they come to an end through warfare. That obviously wipes out a huge section of the population and through the gods as well. So it's one way of trying to explain, I think, what was a very, very turbulent period. We don't have, I guess, a huge amount from this period. We've got some archaeological remains, but one thing I know we do have are graves. Is there anything we have found within Mycenaean era graves that would corroborate some of the details we see in the Odyssey? Yes, for sure. So the Mycenaean graves are absolutely fascinating. They were excavated

30:16again by our old friend, Heinrich Schleeman. Love him. And what did he do? Did he go too deep and too hard? He did. He did the same. This is very much a habit and he connected what he found very readily with stories in the Odyssey and the Iliad. The way you describe it, I get the impression that he's basically picked up his copy of the Odyssey and he's here and being like, this looks right. Yeah. I'm going to name it after this thing I found in this book. And almost treating the Odyssey or the Iliad like her guidebook. It's exactly it. Exactly it. So he would find, I mean, he found the great, the mask of Agamemnon,

30:51this great famous mask. That in itself is several hundred years older than Agamemnon would have been. If you take the timescale of the poem. All kinds of things he's finding and he's giving them the names of these people. But the fact is these grave circles and these tholos, these beehive type tombs, these very grand tombs that he was excavating, they do contain stuff that seems to belong to these Mycenaean era heroes, these warriors. And it is astonishing because we have the bones of a lot of these people as well. And they show that these people

31:25living in this era were several inches taller than people living in later Greece. They were buried in many cases with armor. And the armor often correlates to the armor that Homer describes in his poems. So for example, Homer describes people as carrying large rectangular shields or figure of eight shields. And he has them have scabbards, they have spears, they have helmets, a variety of helmets. Odysseus has one that's identified as having boar tusks to it. And in

32:00some of these graves, there's loads of traces of boar tusks. So we have boar tusks, clearly would have been, I'm pretty certain, from helmets in these graves. There's swords, there are daggers, there's wonderful jewelry. And it just seems to match up quite well with the picture that Homer gives us. We do have to talk about something else related to helmets. I mean, one reason we are talking about the Odyssey now is there's going to be a film about it, a Christopher Nolan film,

32:31Retail on the Purim. It's not out yet, it will be by the time this episode airs. But one of the most famous early reactions to that is the typical, inverted commas, typical Greek helmets, the brush one. I wonder if you tell us a bit about the style of helmet. Like, I mean, in this trailer, what we've seen so far, it's a bit of a bargain bin Batman kind of a look. How are these helmets? Are these typical? Are they accurate? There is certainly a variety of helmets. And I think for certain, Homer describes some of them as having horsehair plume helmets. So Hector, notably, he wears one of those in the Iliad.

33:07And there's this great scene where his child, his son, Astyanax, looks at it and he's scared of this nodding sort of horsehair plume on top. So that is perfectly credible. Likewise, having these four-task helmets, as we've said, sort of lining, almost lined up around the helmet. I've seen the Batman one in the trailer that you've described. That doesn't ring true to me. Particularly, I mean, we don't know of all the colour used on these things. And I know certainly the shields in Homer seem to have been brightly painted. So perhaps there was a real variety of

33:43colour with the helmets. But certainly the one that I've seen, I immediately looked at it and thought, well, that doesn't look right to me, even though I couldn't say for certain that that didn't exist. Because we haven't seen everything, obviously, none of us have, that was there. I wonder, you've just made a point about colour, which I'd be really interested to follow up on, in that we know a lot of the Roman world, you have these kind of plain statues that actually wants really brightly coloured. Does that mirror onto the Greek world as well? It does. Yeah. Yeah. They love bright colour. Absolutely. So I think that was certainly there in the war as well. You know, I think their armour was a great part of their sort of forming an

34:18identity, particularly when they're going into battle. And one thing that Homer really draws out in the poem is how organised the Greeks are compared to how disorganised the Trojans are. And it's partly because he is trying to say what the Trojans and their army are drawn from all quarters. They're coming from a quite diverse group of places. And they're coming together and they have sort of different tongues, different languages. It's a bit of a ragtag. Whereas the Greeks are coming in a very, very unified way, even though they're drawn from all

34:49quarters of the Greek world. You know, Mycenae is one of the places that actually sends the most ships because it seems to be one of the most august places. Pylos, again, second most ships come from Pylos, a reflection there of the real grandeur of those places. So even though this army comes from all quarters, it seemed to have a kind of identity to it. And I imagine that the colours and the uniforms and the appearance of these people, even where it differed from soldier to soldier, there was still some kind of unifying style to it that created that kind of unified picture.

35:23Maybe it's colourful horse plumes. It might have been colourful horse plumes. I mean, I'd go for that. A nice bright green horse plume would be amazing. Desi, before we wrap up, there's just time to return to our regular segment, which we're having every episode. So each time I've asked you to pick a Greek myth that somehow ties into the themes we've been talking about. This time, I understand it's treasure related in a fashion. Yes. So we've been talking a lot about Heinrich Lehmann finding gold and being very excited by it. So the mask of Agamemnon, the treasure of Helen. So I thought I would share with you a myth

35:57from the ancient world, ancient Greece, about gold, particularly the story of Midas. Aha. So Midas was a famous mythical king and he ruled in Phrygia, which is in central Turkey. And he was given the opportunity to choose whatever he wanted by one of the gods. And he said, his one wish was that everything he would come into contact with would turn into gold. He thought this was marvellous. And this wish was granted and he was thrilled and he started testing it out. He

36:35was touching everything that he was passing. Trees, he was touching the soil, everything was turning to gold. And then he returned home and he entered through the door. The door turned to gold. It felt fantastic. It's even more grand in my palace than it was before. And then he sat down to dinner and there was a wonderful banquet laid out for him. And he was so excited to tuck into this delicious feast. But he picked up his first portion of food, put it to his mouth and he nearly broke his tooth because that too turned to gold. And suddenly this became a source of misery to him. And he realised

37:11what a fool he had been and how greedy he had been to make this his wish. So he repented of it and he wished his wish away. And eventually that was granted. And he was told that instead he could carry on. And he was relieved for a while. But then he made a second error. He was called in to judge a musical contest. And he judged Pan, who was a woodland god, to be better than Apollo, who was

37:42really the god of music himself. And for making that ill judgment, he was punished and he was given the ears of an ass. Amazing. I mean, the first part of that is far too literal with your wishes. You've got to be careful of that sort of thing. That's why they say be careful what you wish for. Is that actually from this? It's not from that. But I mean, this is a parable. Okay, fine. Holy moly. And this, we're making up some new etymologies as we go along. It's such a fascinating thing. What happens if he touches the earth?

38:12That's hand to gold, like gold, clods, but it's clods of earth. He doesn't, can't gold the ocean, that'd be a... The whole thing. No, but he does try when he comes in, and this is in some versions, so there's a Roman version. And he's described as trying to wash his hands. And that's obviously quite difficult because the water... Everything, everything. ...solidifies. Yeah. I mean, this is just all kinds of horrifying. I don't know. I don't know where to go from it. It's terrifying. Is there any sense that any of these kind of myths were used as kind

38:43of, you know, we'd have a like moral fables in the West? Is there any sense that any myth like that would be kind of used? So kind of be careful what you wish for. Certainly. Yeah. I'm sure that that is part of their purpose. They were stories for entertainment. They were very much parables and moral tales. I mean, Aesop's fables, we know those for. Aesop was Greek. He's coming from the Greek world. He was originally a slave. He's coming from, I think, 6th century BC, Greek island of Samos. All of his ideas are very much coming out of that. And we talk about those Aesop's fables today, and we embrace them as moral tales.

39:18They were exactly that then. Brilliant. Thank you for that, Daisy. And so the world in which the odyssey is set has come to an end, but it's not the end of our story. In the next episode, we'll be looking at some of the poem's major themes of homecoming and guest friendship, and also the legacy that the poem has left on the modern world. Until next time, Daisy, thank you so much. See you then. If you want more content like this, you can find all of our podcast series ad-free in the History Extra app. There'll be linked to that down below.

39:49See you then.