Dan Snow's History Hit - Greek Myths: The Furies

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

The gods and goddesses of Ancient Greece have been written about for thousands of years. From their home atop Mount Olympus, they reigned over the land, sea and sky. The course of human history was shaped by the whims and wishes of these deities, and the Furies were no exception.On today's episode, Dan is joined by classicist and author Natalie Haynes, who tells us all about the goddesses of vengeance.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Greek mythology was such a huge part of my upbringing. I knew my Apollo from my Aphrodite. I could recount the voyages of Odysseus and Jason. I could tell you about the labours of Heracles. And the funny thing is, while so much has changed in the things that we tell children, the way that we educate them and introduce them to the cultures of the world. Greek myths have endured. They are endlessly fascinating. My kids are obsessed with Greek myths. My daughter, age 12, has a sweet little owl necklace, which other people admire, but we know is our little secret between ourselves, which I probably shouldn't be telling everyone on this podcast, which of course the owl is the symbol of Athena. And so she loves to wear the symbol of the goddess Athena, that wise,

all-knowing woman who's dared the fate of so many heroes. And I like our little secret. The gods and goddesses of Olympus have been written about for thousands of years, and they still are being written about in best-selling books, like the ones by Natalie Haynes, who really, the description does her no favours, because she's a polymath of the highest order. She is a comedian. She's very, very funny. Actually very funny in real life. She's a classicist. She's an author.

She's a fabulous human being. She's been on the podcast before. Many of her novels are inspired by the stories of the Greek world. And her most recent book is Divine Might, Goddesses in Greek Myth. And I want to talk to her about myth, goddesses, and why we're still fascinated in them. And I thought we'd pick out one particular subset of goddesses from her book, and that's the Furies. Who were the Furies? What was their role in the Greek world? And why does Natalie think the Furies aren't such a bad idea today? Maybe we should still

have Furies. Maybe we do. It's Natalie Haynes, everyone. We're talking about the Furies and the Greek pantheon. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff.

And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Natalie, it's so good to have you back on the show. It's lovely to be back. I missed you. Oh my goodness, since I last talked to you, you've become such a star on stage and screen and bestsellers and things. So congratulations.

Thanks. Very cool. Thank you. You and I obviously love Greek mythology. Yes, we do. Why is it, as it turns out, luckily for you, the great world public... Those are people who do.

Exactly. And obviously, and you have been a big part for you, the great world public... Those are people who do. Exactly. And you have been a big part of that, but transmitting it to new generation things. But why that? Why are these stories so enduring? Well, my theory, for what it's worth, is that it's because Greek mythology has human beings at its centre. So even when it focuses on gods like Hesiod's Theogony or whatever, they have a lot of very human characteristics. So essentially the currency of Greek myth is the human life,

right? People are transformed or changed into, well, of its metamorphoses, virtually every variant of animal and plant available. Gods behave and misbehave with relation to each other and to human beings. But essentially, it operates on a really kind of manageable, comprehensible scale. So the idea of some gigantic creature doing some gigantic thing at a level we can't possibly comprehend, as you might find in myth cycles like Norse mythology, for example, it's not really such a thing there. They go, oh, well, once upon a time we had the big chasm, chaos, and then there were the heavens and then there was it. And then we start getting people who have characters that we can kind of get hold of. And that I think is why

it's so compelling. And the weird thing to me about Greek mythology is it feels like people have kept adding to it. There's no canonical Greek mythology. There's no original version of any myth because ancient Greece is 2000 years long. So from the beginning of what we would call ancient Greece to the sort of later time of Greece during the Roman empire is as far from beginning to end as we are from Julius Caesar. And those stories are bubbling up across the Greek world, which is massive across all that time. So when people ask me, yeah, but what's the real version? What's the original? It's like, but there's no such thing. You know, there's always moments where there are counter myths coming across because often local societies want to adopt a particular hero or

heroine. You know, the version of the story where Helen goes to Egypt rather than to Troy is as old, at least as Homer. You've just made my brain hurt. I mean, it's because we spend a lot of time thinking about the Trojan War because of the Iliad, but we spend very little time thinking about Euripides' play Helen, which literally begins with Helen saying, hello, I'm on the bank of the Nile. Very inconvenient, actually. It's really clear that she's in Egypt. Usually I spend my time sad that we don't have more classical texts. Now on this occasion, I'm actually sad that that one has survived.

No, you're not. It's so good. It's so good. I love the Helen. I always thought it was what classicists describe as a problem play. Yeah, it is a problem. And then Frank McGuinness translated it for, I think, The Globe about 10 or 15 years ago. And it's that thing where you realise that in the hands of a master dramatist, as Frank McGuinness clearly is, you just go, oh, the problem was mine. It wasn't the place.

The women, it feels like a very fertile place to find stories and characters if you're interested in telling stories about women from the point of view where women have agency, obviously sometimes where they are victims, but do women play a more prominent part

in Greek mythology, I guess? They do. They really do. And again, this is something that we've tended to sometimes not notice or sometimes disregard. So we have, I always make this point, but still, we have eight surviving tragedies about the Trojan War by Euripides. Seven of them have women as the title characters. Only one, the Orestes, has a man as the title character. So Euripides obviously knew that if he wanted to find the drama in a war, it wasn't necessarily on the battlefield. That's covered really well with epic, but it was elsewhere in the build-up to the war,

in the aftermath of the war. And that's why we have, I can do this, hold on, the Andromache, the Electra, the Helen, the Hecabe, the Iphigenia and Alice, the Iphigenia among the Tarians, and the Troades, Trojan women, seventh place. All about women. Two about Iphigenia, even if she doesn't live to see much of the rest of the story.

Well, here's the thing. At the end of Iphigenia and Aulis, spoiler, it turns out she isn't sacrificed. She's substituted with a deer. And so she survives in order to become a priestess who sacrifices people in Iphigenia among the Taureans. So, you know, sometimes tragic victim, other times makes a quick getaway, wields a big axe. You're welcome.

I tell you, that family, the sons of Peleus. I mean, it's a difficult time for us all. Yeah, difficult. Talk to me about the Furies. Who are the Furies? The Furies are three really quite ancient goddesses. So they are perhaps the children of Uranus. I'm sure you know this already, and I always feel bad saying this to men, so sorry. But when Uranus is castrated,

some of his semen falls into the sea and becomes Aphrodite, and some of his blood falls, and that becomes the Furies in our earlier sources. Sorry, men, it's over now. But later sources like Aeschylus have them as the daughters of night, Nox, night, and they are revenge goddesses. So originally they start out as just sort of fairly nameless revenge creatures, and then gradually they develop personalities and impetus of their own. So there's usually three of them. They pursue relentlessly. If you commit a crime, particularly against a family member, a sort of unforgivable crime, as we might think of it, then they will pursue you until you can no longer cope, let's say. So their most celebrated victim

is Orestes, who they pursue because he has murdered his mother, Clytemnestra. But they're interesting divine characters then, aren't they? Because they're an embodiment of things that we feel like we are hunted by. Yeah, we really are. So they're both independent entities and also it's very easy to read them as a psychological embodiment. And a lot of Greek myth works like this, which I think is another reason it's so compelling. So for us, for example, desire is an internal thing. If I were to walk into a crowded room and see a very beautiful person and fall for them, we would assume that was on me, you know, that I'd walked into the room desperate to fall for them. We might, if we're a bit passive aggressive, assume

it was on them. You're so beautiful, I couldn't help but fall for you. But what we wouldn't do, probably, is assume it was a third party, Aphrodite, maybe Eros. Walking alongside you, floating behind you. Yeah, just imposing desire on you, whether you want it or not. For the Greeks, that's a really plausible way of describing because they don't have a language of psychology yet that allows you to describe what happens when you know it would be better for you if you went home to your loyal partner, but you instead decided to smooch a stranger. They don't have words for that. So Aphrodite afflicts you and there you go, you've got it covered. So if you think that love could be an externally applied force, then revenge suddenly seems a bit more,

or vengeance or a desire for justice suddenly seems a bit more real in that sense. We do have, I think, as a society and as individuals, a sense that things should be fair. You know, it's a really early plea from a child. It's not fair. And so when a terrible thing is done by somebody, I think we do tend to think there should be a consequence for that, that they should pay a price. The fear is price is always, I think, pretty well the extreme end of what we would consider to be reasonable. So, arrestees, as they pursue him, they are intending to drive him to suicide. I was about to say, they torment you to the point of wanting to end it all,

to throw yourself off a cliff. This is in the third play of the Orestes, Aresculus' Orestes, where the goddess Athene, who is about to hear this charge against Orestes, the Furies have pursued him all over the Greek world. You listen to Dan Snow's history. We're hearing all about the Furies. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends,

murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Let's remind everybody, why are they pursuing Orestes? Because he killed his mother.

Because he killed Clytemnestra. Yeah, we can link this back. This is good. We can link it to Iphigenia as well. So Agamemnon. Yes. Leader of the Greeks. Yes. Breaker of horses.nestra, yeah. We can link this back. This is good. We can link it to Iphigenia as well. So Agamemnon. Yes. Leader of the Greeks. Yes.

Breaker of horses. So anyway, whatever. So he leads the fleet off to Troy. Yes. They're becalmed at Aulis before the fleet can leave. And his priest, a man named Calchas, tells him that they must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia if they're to get a fair winter sail to Troy. So he duly does that.

Although, as we've said in the Euripides version, at the last minute, a deer is swapped in for Iphigenia by the goddess herself, which always makes me wonder just how corrupt Calchas was. Because if he was so right that this was the sacrifice that had to be made, how come a miracle essentially has to occur in order to save her life? I'm always curious about it. But in the main, well, whatever the main version. But the main take out is he kills his daughter and when he comes back from Troy, she kills him. She kills him.

Yes. So Orestes has this terrible decision to make. Yeah, avenge his father and kill his mother or allow his father's ghost to go unsatisfied and let his mother thrive having committed her crime. And the choice he makes along with his sister Electra is to kill their mother. But that, of course, means they are guilty of a her crime. And the choice he makes, along with his sister Electra, is to kill their mother. But that, of course, means they are guilty of a blood crime.

And are pursued by the Furies. And are pursued by the Furies. And Orestes is pursued all the way to Athens. And Athene will stand as his sort of juror, it appears, or perhaps judge. And then she decides, in the Aeschylus version, to step back slightly and essentially become more like a judge. So she asks leading questions, an interrogating judge, but she allows

the jury to be made up of ordinary men of Athens. So Orestes is essentially judged by his peers. And the Furies are the prosecution, basically. It's a courtroom drama, this third play in the trilogy. And they say, you know, we want to demand satisfaction for Clytemnestra because, you know, he killed his mother and that's unacceptable. And this is a really elemental law in, I was going to say ancient societies, but generally, I think we all pretty well go with don't kill your parents. As a parent, I am definitely propagating that. Really in favour, yeah, really in favour of this law.

It's not culturally specific. And that's another point about the Furos, is that they perhaps represent a time of sort of laws that we would consider to be simply true. We will always think that murder is wrong, I think, probably, and murdering parents is sort of doubly wrong. There are more culturally specific things where we might say, you know, these things have changed over time. Murder a slave? No problem. I mean, there's a really

interesting case in Plato's Euthyphro, which really illustrates how cultures change, because Euthyphro is prosecuting his father for having murdered a slave, and his family are appalled that he would prosecute his father. Yeah, exactly. To us, I think Euthyphro looks incredibly reasonable. He thinks all human life is the same. But to Socrates and to Euthyphro's family, he looks like a terrible, disloyal son. So a perfect example of how our values have changed over time. So theories-wise, it's a little bit like our use of King Arthur. Novelists can just bring him in to serve a particular purpose. Do the Furies appear elsewhere? Obviously, so famous in the Arrested story.

Yeah, they do appear elsewhere. And sometimes the crimes they have to pursue somebody for don't seem that bad to us. So, the story that we get in the Iliad, when Phoenix, or Phoenix if you prefer, comes to talk to Achilles, and he explains that the reason he's childless is because his father, whose name is Amintor, had been having an affair. I mean, this implies consent, which isn't necessarily present.

With a younger woman, the word in Greek is palarchis, which we usually translate to mean concubine. But again, that implies consent, which, you know, is not necessarily present. And Phoenix's mother pleads with him on bended knee. The whole thing is so desperate for analysis by Freud to have sex with his father's new sexual partner because she feels dishonored by this. And she thinks if this nameless woman has sex with her son, he'll no longer fancy her husband. It's like paging Dr. Freud. her son he'll no longer fancy her husband it's like um paging dr freud but uh yeah and the furies don't in that instance drive phoenix who's cursed by his father his father calls down the furies upon him but it's not for death it's for childlessness and that's why phoenix remains

childless in this story particularly so you can request the furies step up to a step up but b to what you like them to drive it doesn't it seems to have to be quite an elemental thing it's usually death but certainly in the case of phoenix it isn't telemachus says at the beginning of the odyssey when he's asked why he doesn't just chuck his mother out when he's sick of the suitors being in his home and he says because she'd be able to call down the furies on me. Right. So Telemachus, there's Fury opportunities there, aren't there? Well, there's a sort of Fury aversion is what happens there because the Furies exist, at least as far as Telemachus is concerned. He is prevented from committing a crime against his mother. I mean, at the very least, it would be antisocial behavior to render her homeless because

he doesn't like the young man who would like to marry her. So the fact that the Furies are in his worldview stops him from stepping out of line. So sometimes they might seem to behave really terrifyingly, as with Orestes, but here they're sort of maintaining social order. I have to admit, I kind of like the Furies. I think there's something to be said for a sense of sort of society-bound value that means that shame stops us from doing terrible. I feel like we've lived through a time when public servants have felt really capable of saying something wholly untrue or wholly contradictory of a previous sentiment. And then when asked, you know, to justify the change have said, I never said that, you know, to justify the change, have said, I never said that.

You know, that wasn't me. And I would quite like a sense that, you know, as a society, we say that's actually unacceptable. You should be ashamed of yourself. But they also feel very relatable in that we all tell each other the reason that murderers

and people that commit appalling crimes but go unpunished in this life, we kind of believe that they are haunted to the end of their days. You'd have to hope, wouldn't you? We believe that, don't we? Because we kind of have to believe that. Yes, because the alternative is awful, that they just thrive and don't care. Killing a lovely old lady who lives next door and stealing all her money,

but getting away with it. Well, actually, you're not going to enjoy that money because you're going to be absolutely haunted by the horror of what you've done. I mean, that is surely as well why Hamlet is such an extraordinary playwright and why Macbeth is such an extraordinary play. This sense that if you do something terrible or if you've witnessed something unavenged, you can't rest easy. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth both struggle with guilt. Hamlet knows that if he doesn't avenge his father, just like Orestes, that his father's ghost is going to trouble him. He has to act eventually. And Banquo's ghost is a Fury.

Yeah, of course. Just telling the best. I think so. I'm here to make your life absolutely miserable. You might wear that crown on your head, but I'm here to make your life miserable. Yeah, I think so. I mean, there's a gender switch, obviously, but I don't think that particularly troubles me in this instance. The Furies are really interesting in terms of being female because Apollo really despises them, at least in Easterland. He's a bit of a misogynist, isn't he? He's such a misogynist.

But one of the things he hates them for is being like horrible ancient children, he calls them. Oh, because they go all the way back to the beginning. Because they go all the way back. They're old gods. They're old gods. They're old gods. Yeah, but there's something kind of childlike about them, perhaps because their moral outlook is so simplistic. You know, as adults, we would say, well, sometimes it's a bit more complicated than that.

You know, it doesn't take very much for us to think. There might be times when we don't think it's the worst thing you could do to kill a parent. You know, if you had an abusive parent, if you were trying to protect your younger sibling from that abusive parent, we might think, yeah, okay, well, it's still morally wrong to commit murder, but maybe I would consider that manslaughter or maybe I would consider that a variant of self-defense. I would want some nuance. I wouldn't want to just say anybody who kills any parent is definitely evil. But they were here at the earth's beginning. But the Furo's are much more simplistic. They're like, no, that's definitely wrong.

They came out of a primeval soup. So they are a little bit unsophisticated in that respect, right? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. But maybe that's why I find them appealing. I quite like moral simplicity. You know, I'm always here with my kind of, oh yes, but what if philosophy type arguments. And every now and then you think,

oh no, it's quite good actually to have people who just see things in this totally, yeah, you yeah you did the wrong thing no I'm not stopping kind of way. And did they have different roles and which one do you like the best? I'm not sure I have a favourite one in terms of you know who does which because they all pretty well do the same thing but my favourite representations of them are always vase paintings there is something glorious about Furies on vase paintings because we have our literary sources are all about them being terrifying. They're disgusting, according to Pythia, the priestess of Apollo in the Eumenides, for example. They've got horrible

matted hair. Their eyes are disgusting and sort of dripping. And it's like, all right, well, we've all had hay fever. Don't be mean. But when you see them on vase paintings, they look weirdly young and oddly, incredibly cool. They wear these sort of lace up boots that have a slightly kind of Doc Martin vibe. And they wear sort of tunic skirts. So down to sort of knee length or maybe a bit below. They have snakes, not like Gorgons have snakes growing out of their heads, but sort of around them, coiling up an arm or, you know, going through their hair. And they always look exhausted because they're always in pursuit. So when they're not in pursuit, when they're resting either in the underworld

or because their quarry is now caught, they're always like leaning on each other, exhausted. One's got her head in the other one's lap. They just look so sisterly. I find them adorable. And like Athena with her outfit, you always know the Furies, do you? The Furies are always presented like that. I mean, pretty well, yeah. The Pythias says at the beginning of the Eumenides, she says, oh, they look a bit like Gorgons, but actually they don't look like Gorgons. She corrects herself. She says they look a bit like the creatures that steal food from Phineas,

harpies, in other words. And then she says, oh no, they don't look like that. So she's trying to find things to compare them to, but she struggles. So I think they're just themselves. Brilliant. Thank you very much for talking us all about them. It was my absolute pleasure. And tell us what the book's called. The book is called Divine Might, Goddesses in Greek Myth. you