Dan Snow's History Hit - Greek Myths

Episode Date: September 26, 2020

Natalie Haynes joined me on the podcast to retell the stories of remarkable women at the heart of Greek myths, from Medusa, Penelope, and Pandora, to the Amazons.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History It. In this episode of History It, we're going right the way back to Greek myths, these foundational stories that we tell ourselves to this day, thousands of years after they were first dreamed up, thousands of years after they were first written down, which attempt to explain our own universe, our own nature, our own condition to ourselves. The Greek myths have endured as a corpus of extraordinary stories,

and they're brought brilliantly into focus by Natalie Haynes. She's been on the podcast before. She's as smart as she is funny and she's goddamn hysterical. She's written a mixture of history and historical fiction, always rooted in the ancient world, and she's now published a book about Greek myths, their genesis and how in the retelling they've they've evolved and transformed and in many ways departed from their original forms if you love classical history then you've got to go and check out history here we've got a classical history podcast on there we have got tv shows we've got it all going on you just go to

historyhit.tv use the code pod1 pod1 you get a month for free and your second month for just one pound, euro or dollar. So you can fill your boots. You can binge like Netflix, but better on history content. All that history content's on there. Hundreds of hours of documentaries, the whole works. So go and fill your boots. In the meantime, enjoy Natalie Haynes. Natalie, good to have you back on the podcast.'s lovely to be back thanks for having me the thing i've always found fascinating about miss is that they're not they're not all written

down anywhere are they the weird thing about the greek myths is that they seem to exist and no but nobody apart from very clever people like you can tell you where the platonic ideal form original form of that myth is there's no canonical text text, is there? There just isn't. And actually, in a way, it's a sign of a myth's success and of a mythological character's success that there isn't an Ur text, as it were. Because what it means, really, is that these stories were being told across Greece at the same time by multiple storytellers, which is how all these contradictory versions emerge. So we have a version of a story like, I don't know, the Jocasta Oedipus story, the story of the house of Thebes. And you go, oh, okay, I kind of know that. It's, you know,

kid is killed. Oh, not killed. Sorry. Just kidding. And then goes away and then comes back, kills his dad at a crossroads, marries his and you know and then what happens okay well that's basically it does he put his eyes out yeah that's it and that's kind of a sort of mashed version of the Sophocles version in Oedipus Tyrannus the 5th century version but he's drawing on a tradition then which is already hundreds of years old and some versions, I've been saying these words for about a thousand years, in some versions of their story, Oedipus and Jocasta, they marry illicitly, and their sin, as it's perceived, is discovered straight away. They don't have children. He goes on to have children with somebody else. In some versions of their story, she hangs herself when

they find out. In the Homeric version, which is the oldest we have from the Odyssey in book 11, she hangs herself and rushes down to Hades. She has a different name in that, by the way. She's called Epicast, not Jocasta. And so in some versions, she lives and he isn't banished. He's locked up in the palace by his sons. This is in Euripides' Phoenician Women. And she becomes this sort of super powerful political diplomat

trying to negotiate with warring parties. There is absolutely no, what's the word I want, right, proper version of any of these stories because they all develop across Greece at the same sort of time. And people are doing, sometimes we've got really close versions, like who kills Agamemnon? And the answer is for Aeschylus in his play Agamemnon, it's Clytemnestra.

But if you look at a vase painting, which we can date to within about 15 years of the play, one side or the other, but infuriatingly, not which. It's her lover, it's Aegisthus, who murders Agamemnon. Does it make a difference? Well, yeah, a bit, because one version is a woman who is acquiring political power. She's behaving in this incredibly deviant, societally deviant way of wanting power for herself, of killing her husband. One version, she's basically an axe-holding cheerleader encouraging her lover to kill her husband,

which is a much more kind of domestic version of that scene, much less transgressive, even though the murder is the same. And so you kind of, you look at these things and think, well, yeah, actually it is really worth delving into to hunt around in hesiod or in homer or to look at these you know unexpected fragments of pottery or sculpture and to try and say well you know not necessarily which is earliest and therefore which is right um but why do all these different versions come up and then why do we prefer one

version to another when does anyone ever now tell you the story of Helen of Sparta, to give her her starting out name, going to Egypt rather than to Troy? You pretty much never hear it, but the two traditions are equally old. And that's why we've talked about this before on pods. I mean, you, people like Madeleine Miller as well, wrote Circe. You feel that rewriting these myths for a different age, being inspired by what's gone before, but not sticking religiously to them, is very much in the tradition of the ancients as well. Absolutely. The ancients are all writing is rewriting, as far as they are concerned. If you're, you know, Aeschylus called his own plays slices from the banquet of Homer rather

magnificently, and Homer might not even have been one person. So we have no suggestion that there's like a right version in everyone. There are attempts to impose order. Peisistratus in the late 6th, early 5th century, I think, BCE in Athens, has his editors kind of codify a proper version of the Iliad and the Odyssey because they want a sort of proper version of Homer. But really, until that point, it's hard to think of any time when these stories have been sort of, someone has to set them down and say, it's like this. These stories developed during oral culture before writing existed. So of course, they're going to change in the retelling. The act of telling a story is the act of changing a story. And that's before

you get to the Romans, people like Ovid, who was such a magpie, desperate to find these Greek myths and retell them with a Roman spin, which changes them all over again. And then, of course, they become reinterpreted through later history. So what you find is somebody like Pandora, who for the Greeks is an incredibly interesting, nuanced character without any of the kind of dubious fall of man type subtext that we've applied to her. She gets sort of merged with Eve once the Old Testament is being commonly read and discussed. And so her role in Hesiod is to be a kind of chaos bringer, because mankind needs that and Zeus sort of decides that she's an agent of change. But I don't know about you, but I grew up reading her story as, you know, bad woman does

thing that makes everyone's life worse. It's like, well, that's not there in the Greek, I'm afraid. Bad woman, if only she'd done what she was told and been grateful for her pleasant domestic life, none of this shit would have happened. I mean, if they'd only sculpted her out of clay with a different mindset, it would all have been fine. In this latest brilliant book you've written, you're attempting to write the women back into these myths. Are you doing so in a way that is quite historiographical? Because of course, you are both a historian and a phenomenal writer of historical fiction as well. So this is more historical. who read A Thousand Ships or Children of Jocasta will like having a sort of compendium volume to go with it, I suppose. That's the plan, vaguely. These stories do need exploring because, you know, you just, most people aren't going to read the Theogony and the Works and Days and then compare

the versions of Pandora that Hesiod describes in each one of those things. And it is interesting. Most people don't know that Pandora doesn't have a box until Erasmus mistranslates her. She has a jar in the ancient world. And it is different. It just is, isn't it? A jar is something which is really easily knocked over or broken. A box requires real malice to open it. And so when we take the phrase Pandora's box, and then, you know, make that she's got to really deliberately do bad things. We will overlook, of course, the fact that the first time Hesiod tells her story, she doesn't have any kind of receptacle at all. We overlook the fact that in every single visual representation of her from the ancient world, she doesn't have any receptacle at all. She's always shown in the act of being created. We just let the fact that Erasmus translated her

in a slightly wonky way, the Greek word is pithos, he translates it to pyxis, jar to box, it just becomes her story. And yet, why should it be? It's only been her story for a few hundred years. And there was a whole story for 2000 years before that, that we sort of forgot. And often they've been distorted, you know, for really kind of understandable, almost blameless reasons. You know, there's a reason why Nathaniel Hawthorne or Roger Lancelin Green simplifies these stories for children. And I'm not particularly advocating that the story should be really complicated for children. And I'm not particularly advocating that the stories should be really complicated for children. It's just because those editions were produced and

written, put together in the mid-19th century, in the case of Hawthorne, mid-20th century, in the case of Green, they reflect the biases of their times. And so you kind of think, well, it probably is, isn't it? I mean, there's certainly scope, I think, for somebody to rewrite the puffin book of greek myths or whatever it should be us born book of greek myths for for children trying to to reflect the world we live in now and the way we read classics now rather than the way we read classics in the 1950s or 1850s but in the meantime i hope children who read that as children can now read this and go oh hang on a minute because they should what other women i women, I mean, obviously, Pandora is a hugely important figure in myth. I mean, what about some of these other figures? I mean, you've talked about Clytemnestra. Who else are you pleased with the things that you've been able to add or redress?

Well, Penelope, because obviously, she's always presented to us as this sort of ideal wife. And it's pretty much 100% by men who don't know her, who talk about her in those terms. So Penelope is the long suffering wife of Odysseus. He spends 10 years away doing the Trojan War, 10 years coming back, having a great adventure. We always see the Odyssey as a great adventure narrative. So I always think it's worth pointing out at this moment that of the 10 years he spends adventuring to get home, one year of them is spent shacked up with a woman named Circe, seven years of them are spent shacked up with a woman named Calypso. So in fact, it's just the two years of adventuring. And the other eight years are, let's say, bedroom adventuring, which is a bit less heroic. I mean, I'm sure he's tremendous

in the sack, don't get me wrong. And then Penelope is presented as this glorious sort of long suffering woman who maintains his home and doesn't remarry in spite of constant pressure to do so. And that's her part of the story in the Odyssey. But there are versions of her story where she in fact doesn't do that, where she has a fling with one of the suitors called Amphinimus, I think. There's a version where she has an affair with the god,

in fact, and produces the god Pan as a result. So I really enjoyed reclaiming her. Medusa was a story that I felt I should know more about. And in fact, she will now be my next novel, having written a chapter on her in Pandora's Jar. Because again, I had grown up watching the Ray Harryhausen Clash of the Titans. I thought that was basically all I needed to know about Medusa. Monster.

But she isn't a monster. She's a woman who is cursed after being raped as punishment for being raped. And so it's like, okay, I didn't know enough about this story and I should know more. So yeah, reclaiming her was, and obviously warrior women, I love to take on. So the Amazons were fun. With Medusa, where did you reclaim her from? There is an incredible history of Gorgonea. So a Gorgon is what Medusa is. There are three, Medusa, Steno and Uriale, almost always, not entirely always, but often in greek myth female deities are tripled so you get um three graces the three gray eye the gray sisters who share an eye and a tooth

which you may remember from assorted films of your childhood and three seasons i think because the greeks don't have four three hours that so you often get these this tripling of of goddesses and the gorgons are no different. And what we see across the Greek world, before Gorgons exist as full-bodied creatures, are Gorgonea. A Gorgoneon is the head of a Gorgon, and the Greeks used to put them on shields. Agamemnon has a Gorgon head on his shield in the Iliad, for example. Athene has one on her breastplate. You see them on the front of temples often. So they serve a role which is apotropaic. They're protective. We use them to avert evil spirits. And there's been a lot of debate about what kind of evil they're supposed to avert. tusks. And so is it noise that they're being associated with? Do they protect us from thunder and lightning? You've been to Greece, you know how real the weather feels there. Is it wild animals?

I think that seems more likely. The snakes for hair, the fact that when you make them circular with the snakes for hair, it actually also looks like a lion's mane. The tusks, boars can certainly kill a person. And so they protect us from wild animals, perhaps, or they make us feel a little safer. We create our fears, or observe our fears, and we make an object which makes us feel more secure, a talisman, if you like. And then, of course, the Greeks, born storytellers, must think, well, there's all these heads everywhere. And perhaps Humbaba is an inspiration as well, the headless nature anyway. So they may be purloining it from Mesopotamia, perhaps it's their own sort of folk creation

but the Greeks can't resist a story and so they see all these heads and they think well they must belong to bodies, what does a gorgon look like? And then of course what they end up with is a whole set of creatures, gorgons and yet there's so many decapitated heads around and then the story of Perseus

arrives to explain how you separate a gorgon from her head and it's like okay, so Perseus arrives to explain how you separate a Gorgon from her head. And it's like, okay, so Perseus is added to the Medusa story and not the other way around. She's not a monster for him to kill. He's a hero to decapitate her and separate body from head, which I think is already quite a strange way round for a story to be told. And her story is told really, really well in Ovid, for example, in the Metamorphoses, where we get stacks of detail. But there are a lot of earlier versions of her. She gets a name check in Hesiod, for example. So she dates back a really long way.

But her story has been distorted again through time. So Perseus needs a great deal of assistance, divine assistance to take on Medusa. He's helped by Athene and by Hermes. They take him to the nymphs who've got a special backpack. Kibesis is the Greek for backpack, in case you were wondering, which you can use to kind of carry Medusa's head. And he gets special winged sandals. He gets a special cap of invisibility. So he needs loads of furnishings before he can take her on but in the end he decapitates her when she's asleep and I kept thinking about those memes that were up when the 2016 American election was happening do you remember um and they they used the image of the Cellini or sometimes the Canova Perseus Triumphant is what that Canova sculpture is called, the one that there's a copy of in the Met in New York. And it's Perseus holding up Medusa's head.

And it's like, well, he's only triumphant if you think you're the guy. If you think you're the woman, it doesn't look very triumphant. Looks a bit decapitated to me, thanks for asking. And then, of course, there was that incredible moment when this meme just raced across the internet, when Christine Blasey Ford was giving her evidence to the Senate Judiciary Committee. And there was a gender swap of that image. Do you remember this? And it was a white marble, seemingly marble, I think it's a doctored image, personally,

Medusa. And she's holding up the head of Perseus. And some people put text on the image, which said, be thankful we just want equality and not payback. And it was such a shocking image. You're like, oh my God, she's decapitated a man. And you go, I've seen this image a thousand times and never felt that sense of shock. What does that say about the society I live in? That I don't find her decapitated body shocking. I find his shocking. That's not okay. And so it was that thing where you go, I'm not just trying to find this story in Greek myth, although I am. I'm not just trying to dig this story out of Latin poetry although I am I'm not just trying to dig this story out of much more modern art although I am I'm trying to dig it out of my own prejudices from just existing now it's like god I really

have to stop and think sometimes geez come on sort it out well that's wonderful thing about this podcast and being challenged and educated by wonderful people like you. Just let's finish up on warrior women because they are all the rage at the moment. Yes, they are. Not unrelated to what we just talked about.

Tell me about the Amazons. I love Amazons. And I wrote Penthesilea's story into a thousand ships because I had loved her for years. That vase, which of course they had at the British Museum Troy exhibition, the Exegcias vase, which everyone saw, I think, there, where Achilles and Penthesilea are in the final moments of their battle at Troy. It's so heartbreaking. Amazons always, always fight together. There's a fantastic moment in Pausanias,

who is your sort of spiritual guide, I would hope, when he's going around Greece and he sees a sculpture, I think, rather than a painting of an Amazonomachy, a battle between the Greeks and the Amazons. And I love him so much. This is why he's a genius. He doesn't just say, oh, there are lots of Amazons and lots of Greeks. He counts them. And he works out there are exactly 29 Greeks fighting 29 Amazons. And that's, you know, the detail that we come to him for. And I love the way that Amazons are, it's a fair fight. They're called Antianeri by Homer, equal to men. So they are, it's very, we're very much in this sort of area of Wonder Woman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where women can fight on equal terms with men. And that begins, as far as I can tell,

with Amazons. And one of the reasons I think Amazons needed reclaiming was actually another linguistic shift. And it drives me completely mad because Hercules, to give him his Greek name, goes to reclaim as one of his labours, the war belt of Hippolyta. And I grew up at least until I was probably 20, I would say, only ever hearing that story described as him going to collect the girdle of Hippolyta. And girdle is a heavily gendered word, for the most part in our time, meaning a woman's garment, a woman's belt. And even if you go back to something like Midsummer Night's Dream, where Puck is going to put a girdle around the earth, it's an ungendered, sort of plain belt. But the word in Greek for Hippolyta's war belt, xerster, is a war belt.

It's a war belt, exactly the same word as used for the war belts worn by men heroes in the Iliad. So she's got a proper fighter's belt. And that is what Hercules wants to take for, well, a woman he's trying to impress, as usual with Hercules. And it just really annoyed me when I was like, well, the Greek word for a woman's belt is xurner. That's like a nice, neat belt that ladies would wear. And all these translations of this story had basically, it seemed to me, robbed her of her martial prowess. She's got a war belt, goddammit. She's got a battle axe in it. The Amazons invented the battle axe, the double-headed battle axe.

Securus is the word in Latin. Pliny the Elder tells us that. So how can we stop talking about them in those terms? It just drives me mad. You know it does. So the impetus to go oh it's right here was was ever present in this book well thank you so much coming back on the podcast it was my pleasure it always is and um tell everyone the name of the book the name

of the book is pandora's jar women in the greek myth congratulations thank you natalie hi everyone it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying, and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it, and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts, and give us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps, and basically boosts up the chart,

which is good, and then more people listen, which is nice. So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't want to subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you don't want to buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favour. Thanks.