Dan Snow's History Hit - Women of the Trojan War

Episode Date: June 17, 2020

I was thrilled to be joined by Natalie Haynes. Natalie is the is the author of 'A Thousand Ships', a retelling of the Trojan War from an all-female perspective. In this podcast we discussed the classical accounts which have contributed to our modern understanding of that legendary war and its terrible aftermath. This was produced from one of our Zoom discussions, where History Hit TV subscribers joined the chat and were able to ask Natalie their burning questions. 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.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Last week on our live podcast Zoom webinar I've got to find a snappier title for those. Anyway, our live podcast record that subscribers to History Hit TV are welcome to join and ask questions We had the very brilliant Natalie Hayne. She was talking to us all about the Trojan War. She has written the most beautiful book about the Trojan War from the female point of view using the Iliad, of course, the Odyssey, but also slightly later classical authors and their interpretation of the war. And she's just retold that story beautifully. So we had a chat about the Trojan War, all things classical world.

It's been great to finally get her on the podcast. She's one of my favourite classicists. It was fantastic, as you'll hear. If you're a History Hit TV subscriber, you can join our next webinar by looking in your inbox. You'll find a link with joining instructions. It'd be great to have you on there. As I always say, it's lovely because I can steal your best questions and make it sound like I thought of them. We've got David Carpenter coming up, talking about Henry III and a whole bunch of other great historians lined up as well.

If you want to subscribe to History Hit, it's like Netflix for history. You've got hundreds of documentaries on there, all the podcasts podcasts all the back episodes of the podcast hundreds of them and access to the webinars and stuff you just get a history hit dot tv use the code pod one pod one you get 30 days free a month just one pound euro dollar after that so it's pretty sweet deal if you don't mind me saying pretty sweet deal we've got everything from classical history go way back we go to we go to mesolithic we got stone age history on their archaeology all the way up to the present day really discussing statues and whether it's right to pull them off their plinths and why they exist in the first place so that's what's going on on history hit tv great to have you on board in the meantime everyone here is the excellent natalie

haynes natalie thank you so much coming on the podcast thanks for having me it's so nice to see you and hear you and talk to you it's really nice it's long overdue we need to have another one of our nice historian dinners again soon and do another panel at short valley yeah it'll be fun yes we do so speaking of ancient history most recent book is about the trojan war from the point of the women there have, your extraordinary scholarly book, there have also been some really remarkable books, fictionalised accounts recently, that seem to have kind of grabbed a bit of zeitgeisty. Everyone's talking about these books and yours. And why suddenly are we retelling the story, do you think, of this foundational moment in kind of Western literary

culture through women, do you think? Yeah, because people in kind of Western literary culture through women, do you think? Yeah, because people haven't done it for a really long time, is the short answer. It has ever been done before. It was done by Euripides, most successfully, in the 5th century BCE. He wrote eight, I think, surviving tragedies to us, tragedies which survived back the Trojan War. One of them, Orestes, is focused on a man, Orestes. The other seven have women as title characters. So don't make me do it. I can. Hang on. Andromache, Helen, Hecubae, Phigenia and Aulis, Phigenia among the Taurians, Trojan women, and the Helen. So Euripides knew that the drama of the Trojan War was not on the battlefield. That's where you write your epic if you're Homer. But the drama of it, if you want a different literary form,

is off the battlefield. It's the build-up to the war. It's the aftermath of the war. It's brutally, I guess, the equivalent of the scenes that go around the action sequences in a movie. It's like those kind of emotional sequences are what you want for a drama. Otherwise, things don't change.

People don't get to make choices in the same way. And then Ovid did this incredible job with the Heroides, a set of letters from the abandoned women of Greek myth, reworked in Latin, to the men who'd abandoned them. The first of them is Penelope writing to Ulysses, Odysseus, as he is in Greek. And there are quite a few of them are involved in the Trojan War or Greeks one way or another from the Trojan War.

So Helen writes one, Laodamere writes one. So women had been the focus point of some writing about the Trojan War, but just not for a really, really long time. And I think we'd kind of got sidelined into thinking that the only way you could tell the story of the war was sort of the Iliad. But the Iliad is not even two months in a 10 year war. It's a tiny snapshot really of the war. It doesn't look at the buildup to the war, the causes of the war, all things that we would consider as historians now

to be crucial to understanding a war. It just comes in in the final year of the war and goes, da-da, 10 days of plague, right, now some fighting. And then, you know, 10 days of funeral games, the end. And you're like, well, where's the Trojan horse? It's not in the Ili like well where's the trojan horse it's not in the iliad where's the achilles heel bit not in the iliad and so the most famous bits of these stories have kind of come to us from elsewhere and i think there's been a really disappointing but unsurprising tendency to think that women's stories in fiction particularly should be domestic you know that women told domestic stories and men got to tell adventures.

And that was basically how publishing worked for a really long time. And then over more recent years, I think publishers have been a bit more willing and readers have been really very willing, I think. Perhaps it's a post-Harry Potter thing because, you know, it's a huge epic written by a woman. Even if it's snootily described as children's fiction,

it is still an epic story full of gods and monsters, basically. And I guess other epic stories, they've tended to be in fantasy or sci-fi when women have written them. And so kind of reappraising these historical or mythological, quasi-historical stories and saying, well, what happens if we turn this story around? What happens if the Trojan War, you know, is only experienced by the women? What happens if the men are minor characters in these women's existence it just seemed to me like a really obvious thing to do I wanted to write an epic and this is the one I want to write an epic you know I know I still feel slightly embarrassed saying that I'm like oh no normally I write tragedies

but you go no okay I'm gonna write damn it here's an epic here it is that's an awesome achievement I think of you as a historian. So what about your arts? What about writing that epic? Where were you when you set out? Where were you when you finished? On fiction, on archaeology? I mean, where did you want this story to be placed

on this kind of scale of what we think we, well, things we don't know anything anyway, do we? I mean, it's all myth. I mean, for the Greeks, the Trojan War is history rather than myth. For 5th century BCE Greeks, so when Euripides is writing his plays, when Sophocles, Aeschylus are writing their plays, the Trojan War is just history from a bit longer ago. And so they're not concerned by the presence of gods. That doesn't make it ahistorical to them. I mean, proper historians, modern historians like you, weep at what ancient historian people like me and Michael Scott consider to be evidence. I know that because there's so little,

we have so little to go on that's archaeological. So that does make it a little bit of a challenge. We don't even really know if Troy was at Hisilic, which is where Schliemann, the German archaeologist, sort of amateur archaeologist, cited it. That's where I made it in my book because I'm such a nerd of a novelist. I would love to be able to just invent a world but actually I need a physical landscape to put Troy in. I had to choose a real place to be each of these locations and then look at pictures of them and work out you know what they would have looked like, what animals were there, what plants were there because I can't just imagine it beautifully without that assistance. But I used loads of archaeological and other historical material, partly, obviously, the texts

that survived to us from the ancient world, lots of them in Greek, lots of them in Latin, some of them just fragments, which is a fat lot of help. But, you know, things like there's a beautiful statue of Protesilaeus, or it's usually called Protesilaeus, who is the first Greek to die. His name just means the first one, the first of his men, the first of the people. And Protesilaeus, who is the first Greek to die. His name just means the first one, the first of his men, the first of the people. And Protesilaeus is the first of the gang to die at Troy. And there's a letter from Ovid's Herodotus collection from his wife, Laodamere, to him. But there's this incredible statue that's usually described as him in the British Museum. And his feet are poised.

He's about to jump off the boat onto the shore. And it's so big. His feet are, you know how gorgeous Greek statue feet are poised. He's about to jump off the boat onto the shore. And it's so, his feet are, you know how gorgeous Greek statue feet are anyway. They're always, you know, incredibly beautiful toes because it's a sort of sign of your godlikeness if your toes are all a beautiful equal length. And it's just a gorgeous statue. And so when I wrote my version of Laodamere,

she has this vision of him jumping off the prow of the ship that's at the front. I know I should know this, having written a book called a thousand ships. The vision that she has of him, the dream that she has where she becomes very anxious and worried that he won't come home, that's the statue from the British Museum, which I just nicked and put it in my novel and passed it off as my own imagining, I'm afraid. We got history hit subscribers on this Zoom webinar. Andy Sisk has brilliantly asked the question that I was about to ask, so I sort of nicked it off him really. And he and I both kind

of wondering, therefore, do you treat Euripides and Ovid as a historian might treat Thucydides and Herodotus? So are you remaining true to their narrative or where it suited you? Have you kind of changed it? There is no true version of these myths. And it's something that kind of feels really obvious, but actually it kind of requires unpacking a little bit, which is we're used to saying, oh, well, you have to kind of look at the bias of Thucydides. He's inventing the speeches that he attributes to, you know, Pericles or whoever we assume,

because, you know, he's writing sometimes at the same time the same time but you know Livy or somebody like that is writing sometimes hundreds of years after his events have happened so there's a lot of invention going on in ancient historians anyway so you always have to have that kind of bias alert and also the creativity alert but I guess the thing is that these stories were being created orally around a huge space across Greece at the same time which is why you get so many contradictory narratives about the same person so we have multiple stories of what happens to for example Helen which date back to the same sort of time so she is the most obvious woman in the narrative to discuss I suppose but there are some versions of her story where she goes to troy and sometimes she goes willingly and sometimes she

goes unwillingly sometimes she's kidnapped from sparta by paris sometimes they elope together but sometimes and this dates back to the 8th century it's at least as old as homer's version of her story she goes to egypt for 10 years and spends 10 years blamelessly in egypt in the palace of proteus, the one who can change shape but doesn't like to have sex with her. So she has completely, you know, remained true to Menelaus for the whole 10 years. But the gods send an Aedilon, an image of her to Troy, made of air. It looks exactly like her. The war is fought in the exact same way. And at the end of it, the Greeks reclaim her and she disappears into the air she's made of. So this alternate narrative of Helen, which is the backstory to Euripides' play Helen,

exists at the same time as the version where she goes to Troy and destroys this entire city, or she's single-handedly responsible. In the Iliad, she's really guilty about what she's done. In the Odyssey, we follow her home to Sparta after the war is over, and we see that she is drugging Menelaus every night with a drug which stops him from crying about the war. I mean, she basically gives him Rohypnol every night for the rest of their marriage, and she doesn't even tell him she's doing it. She just slides it into the wine and serves it up. Just incredible. And these stories sound so strange. There's a fragment of a Sophocles play, which you've only been able to read in English in the last couple of years from Matthew Wright's brilliant set of lost plays of Greek tragedy there are two fragments which survive one where

she's considering drinking bull's blood i.e committing suicide by poison and another where she is scratching her face with writing implements so So she's self-harming, which seems like a really modern narrative device, but it's 2,500 years old. And she's using the exact tools that male writers have used to make her the most famous woman across the entire ancient world, probably. When I read it, it was probably that thing,

like in a film, I would have dropped the book in astonishment and surprise. So these stories are always contradictory right from their earliest iteration. You know Euripides writes three versions of Helen that we have that survive and they're all completely different. She's really brainy or she's really funny or she is as Professor Edith also memorably described her a dumb blonde in one version. So there is no true right accurate version of who Helen was there are only contradictory stories so I kind of went through a little bit as a historian I'm picking all these different varied stories but also a little bit you know I got to choose kind of which one had the most narrative push for me

and sometimes the story just doesn't exist very much at all when I wanted to tell the stories of the goddesses that was a lot more of a challenge. There's sometimes almost nothing about the goddess Gaia, who I wanted a really short, it's like less than a page, chapter on. There's very little about the goddess Eris, Strife, who throws the apple on which is inscribed the Greek ter kaliste, for the most beautiful, among the goddesses. And this is the beauty contest that provokes what we call the judgment of Paris. We know hardly anything about anything about her so I just made it up but I figured that's what ancient historians were doing too so that's okay no I think that's right that's why I was kind of wondering is did you where

possible were you influenced by the ancients depictions of these people even though they obviously wildly contradictory it's all myth-making but you treated them almost as primary source material i really wanted to come from a position of knowledge rather than ignorance which is high risk strategy with me because obviously ignorance is by far the easier one and takes less work but there were contradictory narratives about somebody it's like i'm just gonna have to decide which one of these i love the most and there were times when there was a narrative that i thought i would be able to use that Helen's story about her drugging Menelaus for the and in the end it threw the whole book off balance so I did all the homework and then I took the chapter out it goes that way sometimes

so having established what sources you used and stuff what was it about this most recognisable and familiar of stories what comes out most in your retelling? How did you want to retell it? I was it taking the violence, the battlefield out of it or just putting people like Helen into the centre of the action? Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies

teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week yeah it's still a really violent book i should say not being on the battlefield doesn't stop people being on the receiving end of an awful lot of violence because obviously as we know from contemporary war and indeed every war the people on the battlefield are only a fraction of the story of the victims of war and you know people trafficking and sexual slavery and things like that have been true of every war as far as I

always think of this when people talk about war crimes and I think I wonder when the war is where war crimes weren't committed because even mythical wars tend to be incredibly disproportionately cruel to the people who have no role in them and no power to stop them they they're just in the wrong place at the wrong time. So I suppose I thought the story would stand no matter kind of which aspect of it you looked at, because it's such an extraordinary and complicated tale. And I thought, you know, the way that I read the Iliad, I suppose, is basically, it's just a catalogue of men dying, of, you know, these horrific, brutal deaths, one after horrific, brutal deaths, one after another, after another, after another, after another.

But the emotional hits often don't happen on the battlefield. There's a reason why the poem is called The Iliad, the story of Ilios, Troy, and not The Achilleid, the story of Achilles. It's not just about this Greek... Even though that first line famously, Men in Aeidae thea pele adio Achilleos, sing goddess of the wrath of Achilles. It's not just about the wrath of Achilles. Otherwise it would be named after him.

The Aeneid is named after Aeneas. The Odyssey is named after Odysseus. It would have been an option. It's named for the city. And I think all those scenes which happen in Troy itself, in book three, in book six, in book 24, very emotionally, feel like the emotional core of that poem it's like well what happens when we see a whole city when we see men and women talking not just the

battlefield outside Troy but the actual city which is at stake it's an incredible part of the poem that it begins in book one with this incredibly individualistic, angry, masculine discussion, let's say, euphemistically, in the Greek camp, where men are arguing about their individual honour, where Agamemnon is told he has to give back his war bride, a girl called Chryseis, and he therefore demands that Achilles hands over his war bride, a woman named Bryseis, and then, you know, Achilles withdraws from the fighting, and so on, so It's all about men basically going, respect me and stamping their feet like toddlers and then walking away.

And then by the time we come to book 24, where we see a whole society, Troy, come together to bury their great hero, Hector. Spoiler, spoiler. We get this idea of a whole society, what a society looks like when women aren't missed out and deprived of any kind of status at all, which the Greek camp is for sure, because all their wives and daughters and so on, apart from

the ones they've sacrificed, are waiting back for them in Greece. And I think it's really, really hard to read the Iliad or hear the Iliad originally, I suppose, without thinking you'd rather be in Troy. The Greek camp looks really unappealing, even if you like fighting a lot, you'd rather be a Trojan, even though you know that Troy's days are numbered. Because being part of this whole society just seems more complete than being part of this highly individualistic. You know, Achilles prays in book one of the Iliad when he's been insulted, as he perceives it, by the other Greeks. He prays to his mother Thetis, the sea nymph, to intercede with Zeus and have Zeus aid the Trojan cause. So a minute ago they were his comrades in arms and now he's praying for them to die.

There's no loyalty there at all. Whereas the Trojans are fighting to defend their brothers, to defend their loved ones, their families, their home. It feels like a much more emotional war on the Trojan side. And I kind of always thought this story has been slightly undertold from the Trojan perspective, you know, Euripides play the Trojan women notwithstanding. So I really wanted to do that. And then when I thought about what happens with all these Greek stories when they get home, you know, what happens when Agamemnon gets home, of course, is that Clytemnestra is waiting for him with what we might describe as a large axe. She's presented throughout Greek myth and again by Roman retellers of her story, like Ovid, as the sort of archetypal bad wife.

But there's an incredible moment in Agamemnon, the Aeschylus play, first of the Oresteia, where she challenges the chorus of old men of where she lives and says, you know, why do you think it's more important that Agamemnon has been killed than that his daughter Iphigenia had been killed, which is the sort of backstory to this play. She kills her husband because he had killed their daughter. And she properly calls them out and says, you know, why is her life worth less than his? And reading these plays as a teenager when I was doing Greek A-level, I remember thinking, there isn't an answer to that, is there? Teenage girls are valuable and important. And so I thought, yeah, OK, well, that's... And I guess it had been kind of filtering through my brain

for quite a while before I kind of found the confidence, I suppose, skill, maybe, to write it. But those questions were being posed by men 2,500 years ago. It's like, well, why is a man's life worth more than a teenage girl's life? And you go, I don't have an answer to that that anyone's gonna have heard before i'm gonna do this the i've a giant story is very difficult in our family because whenever we're about to go sailing on a little dinghy my daughter says i hope you're not going to kill me for a fair wind and it's just a super awkward snow family moment i love your daughter and that is just the case

let me tell you she is a woman after your own heart my daughter she's a classicist. Come on another one. As you point out the structure of the Iliad is actually super weird very very short and it's about this kind of giant argument and then of course the wooden horse. How did you decide I mean you've got such a gigantic canvas how did you decide on the thread that you were going to run through it? I told my publishers right at the beginning, I had to write them a page because I was in the process of selling them two books. I had written The Children of Jocasta, which was my retelling of the Oedipus story. And they said, can you write us a page on what the next book would be? And I said, yeah, yeah. And I walked home and I wrote a page which basically

said, and I'm paraphrasing only very slightly, it's going to be the story of the Trojan War, but only told from the perspectives of the women. And it's going to be the Trojans and the Greeks and the goddesses who sort of caused the war. And it's going to start with the Trojan horse bit because that's the bit everybody knows. And I feel like that will give people a kind of fingerhold on it. And then I'm going to do the causation timeline backwards and the consequences timeline forwards. And it's going to change POV every chapter. OK. They went, yes, all right. backwards, and the consequences timeline forwards, and it's going to change POV every chapter. Okay? They went, yes, all right. And I really thought they would wig out and actually, it

was fine. But I felt really confident that I should start with the horse, because I still think the fall of the city is the bit that we all kind of feel like we most know, even though we know it from Virgil, not from Homer or from anyone else, really. It's in book two of the Aeneid that we probably know it best, or I guess retold versions of that probably for us in, you know, children's books and things when we have them puffing book of Greek myth and things like that as kids. But I love Virgil. And I have to say this before I continue this sentence. And I think book four of the Aeneid, another story, Dido, that I was certain would be in this book, and it just didn't fit. And I couldn't make it sentence. And I think book four of the Aeneid, another story, Dido, that I was certain would be in this book and it just didn't fit

and I couldn't make it work and I had to abandon it, even though I love it. But I know Virgil can write incredible women because Dido, but in book two of the Aeneid, which was my GCSE set text, Aeneas is trying to leave the city,

which is on fire. He's got his son and his old dad and he's trying to get out of the city before it's too late and he's killed. And he's with his wife, Creusa. And then she just sort of gets lost somewhere in the melee and he doesn't notice. And then he does notice and goes back and looks for her. And she appears to him as a ghost having clearly died and then very swiftly been spiritually reformed.

And she basically reappears to go, don't worry about me. Go off and find someone nice. Have a lovely time. And even at 16, I was like, oh, come on, there has to be more to her story than that. That is unacceptable. You know, at the time, of course, the 90s, we were used to seeing that in films, you know, that basically wives or girlfriends just existed to be in a film and say to a man, have an adventure, be careful. And then, yeah, yeah that was all occasionally they'd get beheaded in the final reel and that was it it's like women aren't your adjuncts they're actual human people and so I was determined that the book would begin with Kweusa because I always felt she'd been short-changed and I have done so for well for a really long time well over 25 years when I started

working on this book I'm like no this story gets told. Was it a struggle to give women agency? I mean did you want to give women agency in this book or did you want to provoke sympathy because they are like some of these other books you mentioned at the start you get a sense of powerlessness and the drama comes from powerlessness the drama comes from being forced to watch these idiotic fools in this kind of heroic Bronze Age testosterone-fueled society, like, hammer out your fate drunk in combat. And you're just going, well, let's see how this goes. How did you approach these women and their power? I think you still have agency even, or at least you still feel like you have agency even when you have very little actual power and I guess there are two examples that I would probably turn to here

one is Hecuba sometimes she's called Hecuba which is a Roman version of her name and her story was once one of the best known Greek tragedies in fact I think it was the best known Greek tragedy in England at the time of Shakespeare that's why Ham Hamlet says, what's he to Hecuba? Everyone knew that reference. And she is the most devastated victim of the war. You know, she loses virtually every son. Her daughters are enslaved as war brides. Her husband, Priam, the king of Troy, is slaughtered while he's clinging to a statue of a god in a temple, which is hugely sacrilegious as well as everything else. So she loses her home, she's enslaved, she loses her son, she loses her daughters, they have countless of both and then she discovers, and you can read this in Euripides play Hecuba, that the youngest son, his name is Polydorus, means many

gifts, much gifted, she has sent him away before the end of the war secretly to be looked after by the king of Thrace, a man named Polymestor. And Polymestor has killed him for the money and dumped his body in the sea. Obviously not money, because money doesn't exist yet, but gold. Dumped the body in the sea, and the body washes up on the shore outside Troy, where the women still are as their city burns. And she commits one of the most vicious revenges in all of Greek tragedy and that is saying something which is that she persuades the Greeks to take her to Thrace where Polymestor and his

two smallish sons live and she and the women of the chorus which is incredibly unusual in Greek tragedy for the women to do anything at all normally choruses just comment on events they don't participate in them so that gives you an idea of how transgressive this is already. They kill Polymestor's two small sons, and then they blind him so that the last thing he will ever have seen is his children dying in an act of revenge for having killed her son. Now, that is an extraordinary revenge, but it gives us an idea that this woman doesn't have any agency.

She's literally enslaved. But she has persuasion, and she uses it to persuade the Greeks to let her take this revenge. They obviously know that Polymestor was a traitor because he was helping out the Trojans, even if he then killed the boy for the gold. And so she needs their permission and their help. But it doesn't stop her from conducting, as I say, one of the most extravagantly unpleasant revenges. And I think it's a really important point that we often forget is that people who are victims of horrific violence, which Hecuba assuredly is, can also be perpetrators of horrific violence. And it seemed to me really unusual that you got that story with the woman at its centre. We tend to think of the phrase women and children in a war or a disaster gives us this idea that men are off perpetrating things and women are sort of passive victims of things and actually it's a lot more complicated than that even though she is certainly the victim of terrible violence she is also not just a victim

she is something more and something more dangerous and so yeah sometimes the story didn't quite exist the way that I kind of felt like it could be told. And the story of Andromache that is in A Thousand Ships is one of those examples. But I won't talk about it because I'll cry. That would be bad. So let's not. Put you out of your discomfort by just asking a final question. Here you are, thousands of years later, writing this epic inspired by the Odyssey and the Iliad and all these other retellings of this story. Why do they maintain their power to this day? I think they have an archetypal quality. I think Greek myth generally has an archetypal quality,

which means it's just really hard for us to not see ourselves in it, even though our situations are very different. I think it's really interesting that probably the most famous character in all of Greek myth, I would guess, must be Oedipus because of the Oedipus complex and everything. And most of us don't relate to the idea of killing our fathers and marrying our mothers, I assume. I don't know who your audience is, but I'm assuming that most of us don't have first-hand experience of that. And yet, there he is, somehow in our subconscious. It somehow does reflect a sense that we have of our children perhaps growing up

to think that they need to overthrow us in order to become full people. Freud obviously is hit and miss as far as I'm concerned on all kinds of things. Women, for example. But I think there is something really elemental in that myth. The idea that our children might want the best for themselves and that we might want the best for them and those two things might not be the same is something that's really integral to that story. So that a story which keeps being told and retold of people, I mean, the Oresteia is an incredible example of violence wrought at every stage between generations of the

same family, you know, father killing his daughter, a wife killing her husband, a son killing his mother, that kind of tension, it never quits, does it? And so there's a reason why these stories keep being reworked and retold in contemporary versions. I made a programme a few years ago for Radio 4 called Oedipus Enders about Greek myth and soap opera. And I interviewed loads of soap writers, and they were quite open. I saw their ideas boards. They were quite open about using Greek tragedy as part of their inspiration because of the way you can have that intrafamilial conflict

where generations are set against each other or brothers at war, you know, the story of the seven against Thebes was easily transferred to, you know, EastEnders with the Mitchell brothers. People didn't think twice about it. The writers didn't think twice about it the writers didn't think twice about it there are lots of classicists or secret classicists working these kind of things I think Greek myth has these very elemental qualities which there are other myth cycles which don't you know maybe we don't feel the same thing

about a giant tree about Yggdrasil or something maybe we should maybe if we thought more about how we connect to a giant tree we'd be nicer to the planet and that would be good but Greek myth is quite human centric I suppose so tearing out your eye so that Odin could know all I agree I've never thought about that that's a really good comparison in fact Natalie thank you so much it's been such overdue having you on this podcast and tell everyone what the book's called oh it's called a thousand ships it's a beauty and you're going to come back on the podcast you've got a super interesting book coming out this autumn or fall as well so see you then i hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you you go, a bit of a favour to ask.

I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there,

and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresomeome but if you could do it i'd be very very grateful thank you