Do Go On - 567 - Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey (with Greg Jenner)

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

This week we are joined by public historian Greg Jenner to hear the epic tale of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey! This is a comedy/history podcast, the report begins at approximately 18:16 (though as always, we go off on tangents throughout the report).Come see us in Canada in September 2026: https://dogoonpod.com/live-shows/ For all our important links: https://linktr.ee/dogoonpod Check out our other podcasts:Book Cheat: https://play.acast.com/s/book-cheatPrime Mates: https://play.acast.com/s/prime-mates/Listen Now: https://play.acast.com/s/listen-now/Who Knew It with Matt Stewart: https://play.acast.com/s/who-knew-it-with-matt-stewart/Jess Writes A Rom-Com: https://shows.acast.com/jess-writes-a-rom-comOur awesome theme song by Evan Munro-Smith and logo by Peader ThomasDo Go On acknowledges the traditional owners of the land we record on, the Wurundjeri people, in the Kulin nation. We pay our respects to elders, past and present. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Listen up, nerds, because we have some updates for you. Particularly if you live in Canada. Nerds. And in Toronto, if you're a Torontoian nerd, we've added an extra show in Toronto. Our first show live at the Royal Theatre on September 20 is nearly sold out. So adding an extra show straight afterwards. And guess what? It's the annual Christmas special.

Woo! Yes! So that's very, very exciting. We're also doing shows, of course, in Vancouver. That's almost sold out as well. Calgary are still a lot of tickets there left. And Montreal, quite a few tickets too. The Calgary, do you think there's tickets available because we're saying their name wrong?

And they're like, oh, I wish she was coming to Calgary. Never even heard of Calgary. And you can get tickets to all those shows, including the new one, dogo onpod.com. Canada, we'll see you in September. Hello and welcome to another episode of Do Go On. My name is Dave Warnocky and, as always, I'm here with Matt Stewart. Hello, Dave. So good to be here.

I'm going to jump ahead and say, Jess isn't here, but she's fine. She's fine. As far as we know, we haven't heard from her in a while. But we, you know, we'll get our fingers crossed. And that's the main thing. But there is someone sitting in her seat. That's right. We are looking for a replacement and we've been casting the net far and wide.

And this week we've gone all the way to the UK from the Your Dead to Me podcast. Hello to Greg Jenner. Hello. Oh, my God, that voice. Tell you what. Watch out, Jess. That's a beautiful voice. That's true.

Yeah. I mean, if anything, it's too good and it makes me sound extra dopey. And I don't need a lot of help with that. But you know, Greg, we've only just met, but just having spoken to you for the last couple of minutes, I'm like, I know this voice. And I just looked up my audio book library. I've bought two of your books. By mistake.

No. No. I love listening to history going asleep at night, so I've fallen asleep to you many times. Oh, we've slept together. Well, that's lovely. It's nice to meet you at last. Very, very cozy. Yeah, you were never there when I woke up.

Always making a fast get-away. Yeah, you know, classic, that's how I like to play it. English cad, you know. Lattabout town. Leaves you want any more. Exactly, I swoop in, charm you. And the next night you hit play and go, what's he talking about? He was speaking for eight hours whilst I slept last time.

Yeah, whispering sweet nothings into my ears. That was so good to meet you. And you too. Thank you so much for having me on the show. And you've got, I mean, you're like a, I don't think I know if I've heard this term before. What do you call yourself a, is it a public historian? Yeah, I'm a public historian, which means technically I think I'm owned by the public. So I'm not, you know, you can't buy shares in me.

Yeah, it's a slightly odd job title. It's the long, I mean, the boring story is that I didn't really feel confident calling myself a historian because I didn't have a PhD. I wanted to do a PhD, couldn't afford it. And so I ended up in the TV industry making history TV programs and then sort of ended up, you know, not doing that anymore and doing writing books and things. And people were like, what are you? And I was like, I'm kind of a historian, but I don't feel like I get all the credentials. So like, what else is there? Interesting.

Public historian is the best that I can sort of come up with because it's really nice because it means that you have a kind of mandate. My job is to make sure that history belongs to everyone. And that means doing it for kids, doing it for grownups, doing it in a way that's funny and approachable and global history. And making sure that everyone feels like they get represented and that the stories are not just British white men invading and conquering, which is very much how much of the UK curriculum used to be. It's better these days. I think we've followed a similar path in Australia. When I was a kid, it was definitely more of that. I believe kids these days get a bit more variety.

Yeah, it's good, isn't it? I mean, the history of the world is vast, and there have been about 108 billion people, we think. So, you know, when the story of history is basically nine men in hats, planting flags and going, that's mine now, that's quite a limited story. I think it's much more interesting to convey the human condition across the globe and in all the different ways.

And I'm primarily a social and cultural historian. I'm more interested in history of daily life and ideas and the history of stuff. I mean, I wrote a book on the history of celebrity culture, and I'm really interested in the history of underpants and toilets and, you know, socks and boring stuff. So I'm not particularly interested in war and high politics or economics. I like ordinary stuff. Oh, that's so good. Yeah.

And your new series, um, there is. Was there an episode on socks or underpants or something? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I host a show called You're Dead to Me on the BBC, which you can listen to in Australia, of course. And yeah, we're a history and comedy show. So I'm the host every week. We sit down a brilliant historian with a PhD and a great comedian.

And, yeah, we just did an episode on the history of underpants, which was really good fun. Really, really enjoyable. We had Vic McAulis, the improviser, and Professor Serendidna Darned who's a fashion historian. And yeah, we talked about the history of underpants, wide fronts, boxer shorts, bras, corsets, tunics. I got to try on a 19th century corset,

which was surprisingly comfortable. So, yeah. You know? That's okay. Yeah, if they're comfortable, I reckon I could use it for my posture a little bit. They're really good for posture. That's what they were for, right?

And suddenly you sit up better. So, yeah, I was converted. Yeah. And you're wearing one now. I don't know if the listeners probably can't tell. Yeah, great posture. You can't tell. I'm wearing one now. I'm also wearing a 19th century underpants. And, yeah, no, it's, you know, that's it. I'm fully in the past now.

You're a method historian as well as. Exactly. Oh, it's so great. I wonder if, I mean, I don't think we could quite get to your level, but what's a rung below public historian, Dave, because I feel like that's what we are. What could we, semi-public? Yeah, okay. We could, yeah, maybe, yeah, amateur public historians. Yeah, okay, I like that. Semi-pro. That's nice.

Semi-pro. That's great. Semi-pro. Yeah, you play at the weekends, but you've got a job nine to five. Yeah, that's good. We dabble in Australia. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

You represent Australia at the Olympics, but you aren't allowed to earn a wage. Yeah, I guess. I like that. Okay, this is good. And today, I mean, or maybe before we jump into the story, I'm curious a bit. You've written a lot of books, obviously. The two that I've got. And I got Ask a Historian

and a million years in a day. Okay. But you've got lots. You're a busy man, fair to say. Yeah, yeah, I've just started working on my ninth book, which will take about three and a half years to write. And, yeah, I write, so I've written three adult books, and then I pivoted to writing for kids.

So I've got four kids books out at the moment. I've got my fifth one coming out next year. and now I'm going back to writing for adults. So, yeah, I write books. I used to work on the TV kids show Horrible Histories for 11 years. I was the historian on that, and I wrote some of the jokes and a couple of songs, but mostly I was the nerd. And then I'll see...

Did I read correctly you described yourself when working on that show as a patent? A fierce patent, maybe even. A ferociously boring man. Yeah. Because my job was the sort of... The amazing thing about horrible histories was that we were a commoner. We were a sketch comedy show with amazing cast and brilliant writers and producers and absolutely every department was elite. But I had this kind of terrifying mandate to veto whatever I wanted. I could just slap my veto card on the table and go, no, we're not doing it because I say so. And that was incredible. And my amazing series producer Caroline Norris was fantastic at that. I was 25 years old when I got that job. And she said to me, you know, you can basically tell us what we can and cannot do. And she'll aren't. with me and try and convince me that we can do it.

And if I was convinced, then we'd do it. And if I was like, no, no, you can't do that. It's not factually accurate. She'd say, oh, that's annoying. All right. And I've never had that level of power again, really. You know, that was at 25, it was that incredible, amazing dream job. So, yeah.

I feel like maybe, Matt, we need something like that on this show. Great. Would you be able to accompany us on future episodes and just buzz in air and say, actually, that's not quite right. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, mate. I think that would be really handy to have, actually. That would stop a few tweets and emails, honestly.

That would really help us out. Oh, do you get a little bit of feedback, do you? I remember we used to get more of it. Dave normally catches himself eventually. I remember one time he had a breakdown by misattributing something of Fibonacci. Oh, yeah. And, yeah. I was thinking of Archimedes in the bath.

Yeah. Yeah, Fibonacci might have had it off. But I realized on here. Yeah, and you're like breakdown. It was full on to watch. But apparently funny to listen to. That's all the feedback. So, yeah, that's when I knew I'd never make it as a pro public historian.

Yes, that's true. You'll never go to the pros. It's okay. We all have a breakdown eventually. So you're dead to me. It's interesting the, I mean, it makes sense as crossover, but at the time recording, the most recent episodes about Anne Bonney and Mary Reid, which I did a story on do go on, an episode on do go on maybe a couple of months ago.

And in it, you were talking about doing an episode on Prohibition. And I'm like, oh, I did an episode on Prohibition. And there was one other one as well. I'm like, oh, the three you mentioned, I'm like, oh, I did a report on that. And then I'm like, yeah, history is, it's not as vast as you think, is it? You think of it as everything that's happened up until now. You pick anything. But it's also everything that's happened up until now that someone wrote about or whatever.

But you've been going for 11 years, you said. I mean, I think so you're just scraping the barrel now, right? You're just desperately seeking. What else? What else is there? Yeah, that's true. On the main feed, we would have done, yeah, we're pushing up towards 600 episodes and then we've done bonus episodes as well.

So it would be, I imagine it would be like 750 episodes, topics we would have covered probably over the years. That's amazing. What are you going to do for your 1,000th? Oh, we're going to be holding something back, don't we? What's the big one? Yeah. Well, what's it going to be? I mean, we still haven't, I did an overarching episode about World War I,

so maybe we could do the big sequel. Yeah. You know? Wow. I reckon we could get through that in an hour or two. Yeah, and maybe by then we'll have another sequel to talk about as well. That's true. Great.

Yeah, it can be current. It doesn't have to be history. You can just be a current affairs podcast. It's what's happening now. About Mr. Trump's latest war. Great. We're getting this out while we can. Well, you're putting me to shame.

We've only done about 180 episodes of Your Dead to Me in seven years. We go a bit slower. You go a bit slower, but also probably research a bit harder. Yeah, we have an extremely nerdy team. So my producers, Emma and Emmy, both have PhDs and our research team are all PhD students. Wow. So they're all brilliant. So on every series of You're Dead to Me, there's about 19 people with PhDs contributing to that.

series of 11 episodes. Wait, hang on. So you've got the experts. Public historian. You just need a D. Public historian, dude. You know what I mean? You just got your PhD.

Oh, lovely. Yeah, mine's unfortunately. I've got an honorary of PhD, which is nice and everything, but it's not real. But, you know, you can't use it in an airport. Is there an honorary doctor on board? Yes, exactly. Yeah. That happened to be last week, actually.

I was on a flight to Canada and the Tanoi came and I said, is there a doctor on board? Someone was feeling poorly. And I was like, no. There's absolutely no way that I am useful in this moment. I can tell you about the history of medicine. What kind of other pants are they wearing? Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. Depends out of death.

The emergency corset. Now, I read about your PhD, Greg, on your Wikipedia page. And it's not often we have someone on the show who has their own page. And this is the first time I get to. fact-check wiki in real time. Because, you know, we hear so many stories about people can write anything on there. I wanted to ask you, it says that you are a massive fan of the band Thrice. Is that correct?

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So I've never seen my Wikipedia page because I hate the notion that there is one. It sort of terrifies me. Okay. Just showing you now, the picture they've picked is such an odd one. It's doesn't show your face. Yeah, you're a book signing.

It's sort of the back of your head or the side of your head. Perfect. That is exactly what I want. Ideally, I'd be in perfect silhouette. There'd be no real, there's someone else is standing in for me. It doesn't look like you, to be honest. It's not a side profile. It's sort of above and side.

It's a lot of hair. Yeah, it's mainly hair. That's great. That's what I'm looking for, actually. That's basically what people know me for is the man with the hair. I've never seen my Wikipedia page, but I do love Thrice. They're a brilliant band. I'm a big fan of Thrice, too.

why I bring it up. So I just wanted to see if that was true. And I'm, I'm happy that it is. Okay. What's your go-to album? What's the, what's the album that you recommend to newbies? I mean, a couple of years ago, they toured Australia and they did the artist in the ambulance anniversary tour. Yeah, I saw that tour. Yeah, it was awesome. And that's probably, that's the one that got me into them and still probably my favorite. Yeah, it's an incredible album. So I guess that's, if that's what you recommend, oh, it's so good. I guess I'll listen to that. And since then, they've done a lot of experimentation with different styles. And it's all good, I've got to tell you.

Okay. Yeah. They're one of those bands who keep growing in good new directions. There's a lot of bands who try stuff and you're like, no, stop doing that. Stop trying. Don't like this. But they've kind of grown in a kind of bluesy, folksy direction, which is kind of interesting, but it's still really works.

It's still really heavy, but it's very, it's really good. But the artist in the ambulance album is sort of a masterpiece of post-hardcore. It's absolutely brilliant. It's so good. Matt, you would really like it too, knowing what you like. Okay, sick. I'm going to check it out. Check it out.

All right, Greg. Now, I believe you've got a story to tell us today from history from one of the 108 billion lives so far. Is that true to say? I've got a slightly bigger than one life story to delete. That's all right. I want to tell you about Homer, the Odyssey and the Iliad, which it's kind of three stories in one, but it's kind of one story too. So I'm cheating a little bit.

But we did an episode of this recently on You're Dead to Me. And I really enjoyed it. It was a hugely rewarding episode where I had a lot of fun. And so when the opportunity came to come and talk to you guys, I was like, oh, yeah, actually, you know what? I'd like to, having learned a lot about it myself from our expert, Dr. Emily Hauser, I'm now going to just steal all her notes and regurgitate than that you. She's much cleverer than me and much more knowledgeable.

So listen to my episode as well. Go listen to Your Dead to me to get a proper expert. but I'm now going to tell you what she told me and what our brilliant researchers told me as well. I like it. It's like a game of historical telephone. Exactly that. Exactly.

I'm going to regurgitate it like a mother bird into my little baby's mouth. So you are my little darling tweetlings in the next. I'm hungry. So yeah, yeah. So it's quite a complicated one. So how long have you got? I'll try and match your runtime.

Hey, we've been known to go pretty long. Yeah, yeah. There's no one booked in the studio after us, so really? Okay. This could be a game of chicken. Who's going to blink first? Okay, yeah, great. Let me start off then by giving you the very, very basic overlap. I mean, the obvious thing is the movie is outright. Everyone, I'm sure, many of your listeners have gone on scene

Christopher Nolan's new mega masterpiece, The Odyssey. It is an extraordinary cinematic achievement. It's quite different to the original poem. So a lot of people who've gone to see it have gone and enjoyed it as a movie, but they haven't necessarily loved it as an adaptation of a poem they might love. So historians, some historians are a bit like, oh, it's not what I was expecting. But I mean, I loved it. I thought it was brilliant, but it is very different.

So I'm going to sort of talk you through what the actual real poem does and the story and what we know about it. And then your listeners can then maybe see the movie and go, oh, yeah, okay, I can see the differences or not. Have you seen the movie, basically? I haven't seen it. I don't really know anything about it. But I do love the idea that I can go see it tomorrow and be disappointed. Don't be disappointed.

I mean, it's one of those movies where your sort of jewellery is on the floor for a lot of it because just the stuff they've achieved technically, it's amazing. It's an incredible cinematic visual feast. Go see it on the biggest screen you can. Don't watch it on a plane. That's one of the reasons, Greg, that I haven't seen it yet. We've got an IMAX here in Melbourne, and I've been very keen to see it there, but it is booked out for the next five months. Oh, wow.

Every day, like seven or eight sessions. We should book in for seven months' time. I mean, that's, it's not even on saying. So I reckon they're probably going to sell the year, yeah. So it's quite interesting. But I'd love to see it on the biggest screen possible, too, but yeah, haven't seen it yet. Otherwise, we're just go to a normal size screening and just, you know, sit a couple of rows closer than normal. The front row.

Yeah. Do a manual zoom, you know what I mean. Or maybe wear like really, really magnifying glasses. Oh, there, yeah. Just so that you, you know, it just feels bigger than it is. I'll borrow Anna's glasses. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Okay, so you haven't seen the movie.

That's quite helpful in some ways because this will all be new to you. But for your listeners who have seen the movie, I will sort of point out a couple of moments where it sort of changes. I'll try not to spoil stuff for you. That's going to be slightly tricky. No, spoil it. We won't be able to see it for so long if we won't for IMA. You'll forget.

Okay, all right, good. All right, here we go then. Right. So the Iliad, The Odyssey and Homer, as a sort of subject is big, it's messy, it's sprawling. So I kind of want to split it up into three. And the way I'm going to do this for you is I'm going to start by telling you about Homer, the guy, and the tradition of the poetry. And I will sort of give you a bit of introduction to that. And then we'll crack on with the story of the Iliad, which is the first poem, the Siege of Troy.

and then we'll do the Odyssey, which is the sequel poem, which is King Odysseus trying to get home from Troy, nightmare commute. And so I'll start with the kind of the Homer stuff. And this is where it's a little bit nerdy, a little bit technical, so I'll try not to bore you too much. But what you need to know is the Trojan War is supposedly a war was fought about 3,200 years ago, give or take, in Western Turkey. and the stories are incredibly important to the ancient Greeks.

This is a foundational myth for them. This is kind of their, in some ways, the origin story. In other ways, it's not their origin story because their origin story was about the gods creating the universe. But this is like their absolute most favorite story. And the guy who tells it, according to the ancient Greeks, is a guy called Homer. And Homer is the blind poet.

He can't see, and so his other senses are more attuned. And he is an incredible storyteller. And he's what's called a rhapsode. And a rhapsode means a, well, literally it means a story stitcher, which is kind of cute. So he's a story stitcher. He's, his name Homer, possibly in ancient Greek, means joiner, the joiner of things, someone who joins things together. So Homer is, according to the ancient Greeks. Sorry.

Yeah. My main role in the show is budding in when people have already started the next sentence. And he's really good at it. Go for it. I just, I'd never heard that term before. The only place I've heard it is the Queen's song. Boreemian Rhapsody. Is that, that's all connected, I'm assuming, to that?

I never even have to consider what Bohemian Rhapsody means. Yeah, I mean, that's the amazing thing. If you think of Bohemian Rhapsody, it's effectively three songs bolted together, right? It's the kind of piano ballad. It is a kind of a rock chorus. It's the kind of slow lament at the end. It's a rhapsody because it's a combination of storytelling. And so a rhapsode was a wandering poet,

and they would travel from court to court. Ancient Greece is not ancient Greece. The Greeks do not call themselves Greeks. It's a term we give to them. They called themselves later on the Hellenis, which is why we use the word Hellenic to talk about their world. So they weren't Greeks.

They didn't call themselves Greeks. And they didn't all belong to one big civilization. The ancient Greeks were fiercely independent. They were about a thousand different cities. It's called Apolis. So Athens was a city. Sparta was a city. Mycini was a city.

And they all had their own thing. They were all kind of independent of each other. And they spent most of the time fighting each other. And so we lumped them together as the ancient Greeks, as if they were this big old bunch of people who, you know, were all the same, but they saw each other as rivals, but they occasionally came together when they had to fight the Persians, who were the kind of big, baddie enemy that they would fight a couple of times in the fifth and fourth centuries. And so Homer is the great genius. He's the

brilliant storyteller that the ancient Greeks rhapsodize about. He's a rhapsode. He is the best. And you get this generation of poets who come after him called the Homeridae, which means the sons of Homer. and they all claim to be related to him. They were all like, oh, yeah, yeah, he was my granddad, he was my great-granddad, he was my uncle's best-mate. You know, they all of them sort of claim the clout of having some sort of family connection to him. It's in my blood. Yeah, exactly that, you know, in the same way that, you know, I think a lot of people will often say, I mean, I often meet a lot of Americans who are like, oh, yeah, I'm royalty. I did my family tree and I'm royalty, and it's like, sure, but like, we all are if you go back far enough.

So the Hamiridae are these sort of traveling wandering bards. They go to a court, they tell a story, and in return they get a free meal. That's how it works. And so Homer is the kind of great original storyteller, according to the Greeks. The issue is scholars in the past 50 years or so have started to go, oh, we're not sure he's real. So, which is a bit of an interesting debate. I won't go into it because it's very technical.

but there are at least two, if not three camps you can land in. You can either land in. He was definitely real. He invented all the poems. Leave him alone. So he's the original lone genius. Leave her alone. Yeah.

It's like that kind of defend Brittany thing in the late 90s. Leave her alone. So he's either the original genius and creator of the Iliad and Odyssey. Or he's definitely involved, but other people contributed. or he's basically a made-up collective noun for a bunch of different poets all wandering around, telling different stories that gradually coalesced until one day someone went,

ah, we should give this a name, let's call it Homeric poetry. So three different theories, any of them could be true. Most likely is probably the second or third. The idea of him being the sole creator seems unlikely, given the evidence we have now, linguistically, but it's possible he was a guy, but we're not sure. Oh, that's a bummer.

Maybe. Or maybe it's not. But it's interesting, like, it feels like if you give historians enough time, they'll eventually want to debunk everything. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We love to ruin stuff for you. You see the glee.

There are people who'd say that about Shakespeare, right? A similar kind of thing. Either didn't exist at all was a collection of people who used him as a front or Yeah, and that was a lot more recent. Yes, I mean, we have way more evidence for Shakespeare than we do for Homer. Shakespeare almost certainly was real. I would stake my mortgage on it. But he definitely collaborated with a couple of other writers.

We've got scenes in Macbeth. We've got scenes in, I'm trying to think, it might be 12th night. I can't remember. There's definitely scenes where other writers have definitely done some punch-ups and come in and gone. Oh, you need a witch scene. So Shakespeare was real. We know quite a lot about him. We know a lot more about him than we do about a lot of people in the 16th century.

So people often be like, oh, we know nothing about him, the mystery of the man. It's like, we have way more documentation for Shakespeare than we do for most other famous people in that time. But Homer, yeah, to the ancient Greeks, absolutely real. He was the dude. He was the creator. He was the kind of, he was the Christopher Nolan of the ancient world. the greatest storyteller, everyone knew his name, and everyone was desperate to be related to him, hence the Homeridae, hence the wandering sons of Homer who were like, yeah, he's my dad.

Do we have that now for Chris Van Olin? Yeah, oh yeah. He is my great-great-grandfather, if anyone's wondering. Yeah, Chris Van Noland definitely rooted my mum, for sure. Similar. Similar idea. That's how we get the Nolan sisters, right? No? Okay.

So Homer is a debate that academic historians love to have. We've been having it for half a century. It's an interesting fun debate, but foundationally, to the Greeks, he was real. And that's where I'm going, I'll kind of leave that debate for you, because we need to sort of crack on a bit more. So the obvious question also is, when does this get written down? So these two incredible epic stories, they are enormously long. So the Iliad is I think in about 15,700 lines of poetry.

So it would take you about eight hours to perform it probably. You know, if you listen to the audiobook, which is very good. There's one narrated by Claire Dane's does the Odyssey. It's excellent. It's about eight, nine hours. So that's a huge amount of poetry. This is an oral society. So they don't write stuff down.

So they have an alphabet, they develop an alphabet, but at this point, poetry is done from memory. So I don't know how long your shows are. Chaps, and when you're doing your stand-up shows, I'm guessing they're an hour. Maybe you do 75 minutes. Yeah. Yeah, no. How long does it take? Yeah.

An hour, and then there's a, you know, it would change a little bit each night and, you know, you have a little bit of interaction with the crowd and, yeah. Well, okay, so you've just explained how these stories evolve. That's exactly what happens. Every night, you get up, you tell the story, but the room doesn't go for a bit and you're like, oh, it's not working, I'll just move on. Or the room really loves it. And then you suddenly, they love this bit and you start riffing and you're building on it and you put a hat on a hat on a hat and you're going and going and going. And he only had one eye. Yeah, more of that.

Tell us about the one eye guy. Yeah, right. Well, we literally have a one-eyed guy in the Odyssey, right? We have Cyclops. We have polyphemous. So you both know, as standard comedians, you know. know what it is when you tell a shaggy dog story in a pub and you know, and with every retelling it gets longer and it gets funnier and it gets a little bit more outrageous. That's what's happening here.

So we have this sort of interesting linguistic shift where it's an oral story for centuries. We don't know how long. If the war allegedly happened about 1,200 BCE, so about 3,200 years ago, we don't have the first writing of it until probably about 600 BCE. The ones that we know are definitely written down are in the era of Pisistratus, who was a tyrant in Athens. But he was quite a nice tyrant. He was quite a good tyrant. He was a cultural tyrant.

He was one of those tyrants who actually quite liked culture and art and sculpture, and he introduced these playwriting competitions that were really important. And he was like, hey, let's perform the Iliari. add an Odyssey because those are great and everyone loves them. But we need a script. We need to have a script so can someone jot that down please? And so that's in like 522 BC. So that's about 2,000 and a half thousand years ago. This tyrant, he's not a king, but he's basically a king of Athens goes jot that down. Let's get that down on paper. This is good stuff. And that is how we then get the beginnings of the set text. Right. So I can see how it's confusing as to

how real Homer is and how much he wrote of it. Because So the idea is that, like, how long, 600 years after he might have written it if he was real, it was the first time someone probably wrote it down. Possibly. So the amount that it would have evolved, if that is true, you know. Oh, man, that's fascinating. Well, I like the idea that it was written by thousands of people over a long period of time, kind of. Yeah, it's nice to think of it as a collaborative work of share.

art in the same way that Wikipedia is, right? You know, you referenced my Wikipedia page that I'm not going to look up because I don't want to know what's on there. But Wikipedia is an incredible thing. I love Wikipedia and it is one of the kind of great human collaborations. It's an enormous edifice of human knowledge that is kept in place by volunteers who dedicate their life to updating esoteric knowledge and pages about wrestlers and philosophers and whatever else needs to be updated. And it's amazing. And I like thinking of ancient Greek stories as belonging to everyone, and that maybe each individual poet contributed something,

and that we can maybe track those little contributions back, and you can, yeah, you can find, you know, as with great sitcoms, you know, obviously in the UK, we have a tradition of having six episodes per series and only two series, and then the show ends. You're not having any more than 12 episodes, how dare you? Whereas in the US, right, they put out 300 episodes of this beloved show, and it's a writing room.

It's a room of people and they're all throwing in jokes. And sometimes people can't remember who wrote what joke. And we had that with horrible histories. Sometimes people be like, who wrote that joke? I can't remember who. And sometimes it's a rift. Sometimes it's in the room. Sometimes everyone claims they wrote it.

So I think the nice thing about the Homeric epics is that while we can see possibly the lone genius of Homer, I think there's actually something beautiful in the notion of this being a shared cultural. monolith. This is a story that everyone has sort of contributed to over the centuries. And what we have at the end of it is a kind of conglomerate of multiple inputs. It's interesting to now we've got the most modern adaptation with the Christopher Nolan movie and some people, you know, if you read the discourse online, if that's true at all, you know, scholars, experts are critical of it not being exactly what they imagined or whatever. But now if it is something that thousands of people have told a story and now he's telling his version,

is another, I guess, in a new medium. Like, it's, yeah, funny that those people would be so, I guess, critical. It's kind of feeding that it's just continuing the tradition of it. I agree. I think that's exactly it. I think, I mean, in a little bit, I'm going to hopefully try and blow your mind a little bit by telling you quite a lot of stuff that isn't in the original poems that you would imagine is. And people might be shocked by that, because if they haven't read them,

they'd probably assume that the Trojan horse is in. the poems and it isn't. Okay, mind-blown right here. Yeah, and, you know, it's an iconic in the movie, it's a brilliant scene and you're like, oh, that's great. It's not really in the poems, right? So there's an awful lot

that Nolan has changed for obvious reasons because a movie can't be eight and a half hours long, but he's changed things in really interesting ways. And in some ways, he's continuing to the tradition of telling his own story, which is kind of what the Homeric epics are about. But in other ways, he has really radically changed them

which is why some people are quite like, oh, that's not the story or the character that I know. So I tend to think of it as Christopher Nolan's version of an Odyssey rather than The Odyssey, if that makes sense. You know, it's his take on it in the same way that 10 Things I Hate About You is a take on Shakespeare. It's a brilliant movie. Heath Ledger's great, but it's not Shakespeare, but it is Shakespeare. So, yeah, confusing things about the Iliad, right? this is my little subtitle. I don't know if I needed a little jingle. Confusing things about the Iliad.

If you could just stick some music in there, lads, that'll be great. I do. I do. Maybe a ding, sort of a triangle, sort of ding. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, maybe some sort of, I don't know, accordion music. That would be great. Oh, yeah, really good.

Right, so Troy, the Siege of Troy. In Greek, it's not called Troy. It's called Ileon. So it should be called Ileon, but that is why the story is called the Iliad. So the Iliad is basically Troy story. But instead of, you know, Woody and Buzz, we have Achilles and Hector and we have Priam and we have Paris and Helen and Menelaus and Agamemnon and all these sort of great warriors and famous names. So, I mean, this is how little I knew about it. I do know most of those names.

Are they, I mean, are they famous from this story alone? Or are they also from other historical texts? As in, do you think they were real? Now you're asking. Yeah, I mean, this is the million dollar question, right? Because this is an incredibly difficult thing to unspool. like, is there any historicity to this story? Do we have any kind of archaeological or historical

or linguistic roots to these stories? And yeah, there are tiny shards of possibility. And I'll kind of go into those a little bit later, I guess. But in terms of the names, this poem is where we get those names. These are great heroes of the ancient world, and it's the Iliad and the Odyssey that really sing their names. and then you get lots of other poems that join on with this.

And what's interesting about it actually is that we have, I did a sort of off-the-cuff joke in the Ordetemy episode that in hindsight I kind of quite like as an idea, and I wish I'd built on it a bit more actually. But, I mean, I don't know if you guys have seen the Marvel universe, if you're fans of Marvel movies or whether you sort of take them, I think a lot of people kind of these days are slightly exhausted by them. Yeah, I think I'm on that.

Dave's maybe never really seen it, but I think I've seen all of them, but I definitely used to go see them at the cinemas, and now I'm more likely to see them when they hit streaming. Yeah, exactly that. So the example I would give is that the Iliad and the Odyssey are basically Avengers, Assemble, and like maybe Captain America Civil War,

like two of the greats, and what we're missing is all the other movies. So if you were a comic book fan, but you didn't know anything about Marvel and you would drop into the universe, what would you be able to make sense of by just having those two movies? Well, you'd make sense of the great heroes

in the Avengers movies, right? You'd go, oh, Iron Man, cool, Hulk, great, lovely. Black Widow, oh, there's a guy over there, he's really good at archery. How is he not dead yet? His superpower is quite good at archery. He should be dead by now. He's fighting aliens on spaceship,

but he's fine somehow. And you'd be able to piece together a much bigger world and you'd understand a sort of singular principle to them. They're superheroes, they're superpowered. They work as a team, but they used to be individuals. You'd be like, oh yeah, that makes sense. But you would be missing Ant Man and the Wasp and all the other thought too and all the other movies in that massive universe. And of course, Marvel keep referencing each, you know, they keep interlacing.

It's called metanarrative. They keep sort of sticking other stories into their stories so that you're forever being, kind of guided onto the next one, and they'll do the kind of cut scene after the credits that sort of introduces the next movie that you have to then go watch after that. The ancient Greeks invented that. It's called interlacing. It's an ancient Greek technique. Marvel borrowed it from the ancient Greeks.

And what we struggle with a little bit is that we don't have those other stories. So the Iliad and the Odyssey are the two best stories. The ancient Greeks tell us that. They were like, these are the absolute bangers. These two are the, you know, that's the, that's the, That is, they're the pinnacle of the Marvel universe. But we know of six missing poems that are, we have tiny shards of people talking about them. And that's how we know that they existed.

And from those, we can slightly deduce that there was a much bigger Homeric cycle, it's called, like the epic cycle. And they are called the Kipria, which is what introduces the beginnings of the war. like why does the Trojan War happen? Because it's not really referenced in the Iliad, weirdly. When we start the Iliad, you start in year nine of the war. So it just starts with like, year nine. The war has been going for nine years. And no one is, you know, everyone is dead, but, you know, it's nothing has happened.

So you sort of start in media res. You start in the middle of the story, you know, which is a classic storytelling technique now, right? And I guess like the second. If like a World War II movie or something survived 2,000 years and that was the only one, they don't always talk about how it started because they just assume that everyone who's watching it knows the backstory. Absolutely. Absolutely.

When you watch Flags of Our Father or Band of Brothers, or I'm trying to think of the Tom Hanks movie he did on a ship, Greyhound, I think it was, whatever. Like, yeah, you start in the middle of the story. And the middle of the story is a soldier gets paratrooped into enemy occupied territory and he's suddenly like being shot at and he's like, oh my God, that's where you start your story because it's exciting and it's good, you know, you're immediately into the drama. But yeah, we all know why World War II has happened because, because Hitler is a shithead. And like, you're like, oh, okay, great. But we don't, they don't have to tell you that.

They don't, you know, scene one doesn't have to start with someone saying, so Adolf Hitler invaded the Sudetenland. It doesn't, it's not needed. Adolfo said like I got rejected from art school. Yeah, well, okay, where do you want to start, right? Adolf Hitler's childhood was actually quite disappointing. A three-hour Star Wars-style scroll before every World War II movie. Previously on World War II. So these Greek poems that we know are missing, the first is called DeKypria,

and it tells of the story of how Paris of Troy abducted slash wooed, you know, Helen. And she's not Helen of Troy, she's not Helen of Troy, she's Helen of Spartan. She's married to the King of Sparta. And basically, Paris is promised her. She's the most beautiful woman in the world. He's promised her because he is the judge in a beauty contest between three goddesses. And one of the goddesses says to him, hey, look, if you let me win, I will get you the hottest woman in the world. And he's like, awesome.

Great. And so he's like, I choose that goddess. She's well fit. And the goddess is like, thank you. Great. Here's your hottest bride. Oh, bad luck. She's already married.

And so Paris gets Helen of Troy. We do not know from the Iliad or the Odyssey whether Helen is in on it, whether she's up for it, whether she's like doing a runner from her husband or whether she's been abducted. Like it's really hard to tell. In the poem, there are, in both poems, there are subtle clues as to whether she's regretful. She feels shame. She feels anger. She feels confusion. You can read her in numerous different ways.

She's quite a complicated character. The poems don't really show her in a great light, so there is a fair amount of judgment in there, but how she ends up as Helen of Troy isn't in the Iliad, really. I mean, it's sort of alluded to, but it's not like a foundational scene, right? It's not a set-up. So we have this missing poem, the Kipria.

We have a second missing poem called the Ethiopis, which tells of the funeral at the end of the Iliad. And that is also important because that is the poem that tells us how Achilles dies. So if I say to you guys, Achilles, what's famous about him? It's a heel. Talking about the heel. Right. Yeah.

Tell me about his heel. It's his only weak spot. The man, what's the idea that he was dipped in something and the god was holding him by the heel? So that was the only bit that wasn't protected or something? Excellent knowledge. Yes. So the story is his mother. She's a goddess.

She's called Thetis. She dips him in the river sticks, which is a magical river, the kind of the kind of afterlifey sort of godly realm. And she dunks him by the ankle as a sort of baby. So she sort of dips him in, but she's still clutching the ankle, and she forgets to make that bit wet. And so he is 98% immortal, but he has this annoying, tiny vulnerability on his heel.

That story is not in the Iliad. And it's not in the Odyssey. Achilles in the Iliad is mortal. He can die. He can get hurt. In fact, he does get hurt in the Iliad. Someone chucks a spear at him and it hits him on the elbow. And he goes, ow, and he bleeds.

Ow, my Achilles' elbow. Yeah, exactly, yeah. So the Achilles heel, we only have from a much later Roman poem by a guy called Statius. But we know that there's an allusion to it. missing in this poem called the Ethiopis. And so the Greeks possibly knew that he died by an arrow in the heel, but it's not in the heel in the Ethiopis. In the Ethiopis, it's an arrow, it's loads of arrows. Actually, Achilles is just killed by loads of arrows, just shoots him tons of arrows and then he's dead now. So there's an interesting question mark as to whether

the ancient Greeks knew about the heel. There is a famous artwork with Achilles dead on the ground, and his body is sort of peppered with arrows and there is one in his heel and you're like, oh, is that the one that did him in? We don't know. But the Romans take up the story centuries later and they start adding bits in and they're the ones who give us the things we know of now.

So the Trojan horse is in Virgil's anead. So Virgil is probably the most famous Roman poet. These are some good bits. Yeah. You know, props to the Romans. They did some good words. Yeah. So this is in some ways fan fiction. We can think about the ancient world as a storytelling culture where people are like,

I love that story, but actually it's missing a bit. And so poets go back and they retcon stuff. They sort of go back in and go, right, hang on. How did this happen? Why is this war happening? How did that guy die? Because at the end of the Iliad, this famous poem, Achilles not dead. The poem ends with him being like, bye.

Yeah, funeral time. Okay. He said that game show wave, you know. Thanks for coming. Thanks for coming. I had a great time, Dave. Thanks for letting me come. Interesting.

So my question before about were any of these people real from history is starting to feel a little stupider. The more I'm remembering there's like gods and goddesses and stuff. But I guess it could still be real and they've, you know, juzed it up in the retelling, inserted some immortality and whatever, based on vaguely real people? Absolutely, and we have the same with King Arthur, right? My master's thesis was on movies about King Arthur, and when you get down to the absolute core of it, could there have been some random guy called Arthur?

Yeah, maybe. Maybe, but did he have a magic sword? No, no, he didn't have a magic sword, but maybe he was a real guy. So all these sort of stories get built upon one man that may possibly have existed. did. But yeah, of course, the goddesses, the gods, they are, they're really important to the story. So the Greeks who weren't Greeks, of course, they, you know, they didn't call themselves Greeks, but we called them Greeks. And they're not called Greeks in the poems either. That's the other thing to say in the poems. They're primarily known by three different names, actually.

They are the Achaeans, sometimes the Danians, and sometimes the Argyves. So, and it's basically an alliance. It's basically a kind of a like a it's almost like they've put together like the kind of the ally forces in World War II. It's like you grab all these different random countries and go come on, we're all going to fight Hitler.

So it's the same sort of thing. It's basically what happens is Helen of Troy is kidnapped slash wood, taken back to Troy, and her husband very annoyed as he is, Menelaus, is like, oy, that's my wife that is. And he turns to his brother, Agamemnon,

this sort of very sort of scary, big sort of warrior type. And an Agamemnon's like, right, come on, lads. We're going to go get her back. And it's, you know, he puts together an alliance of all these random different Greek sort of peoples. They all contribute soldiers. They all contribute ships and food. And off they go.

Cut two, nine years later, they have achieved nothing. And there may come a point where you're like, hmm, is this wife worth it? But they, you know, they've invested this much. It's that classic thing. the kind of the psychology of sunk cost fallacy. When you've besieged something for nine years, you can't really go home because, you know, you've already invested, you know, most of your way,

if you're going to live to like 55, 60, that's a lot of your life you've dedicated to this pointless endeavour. Oh, yeah. I mean, is she as hot as I remember, you know? Nine years, you know? Yeah, but it's probably only going to be another couple of years. Yeah, yeah. We've come to this far.

We'd hate to turn back and find out. I was only going to take nine and a half years. Yeah. I mean, at least round it up to ten, lads. Come on. I least give it a good solid ten. Okay. It has been, that is my biggest takeaway.

Because I've always like, I've never, I never saw, what, 300 and Sparta and all that sort of stuff. And I knew of the Trojans and the Trojan horse. But I never even stopped to think about it at all about who these people were. But they're all what we think of as ancient Greece. Ancient Greek. So Troy is an ancient Western Turkey. Right. So the city of Troy was discovered in the late 19th century by a slightly bonkers

German businessman turned archaeologist. Really? He was an amateur archaeologist, so he was a bit like you guys. He was an enthusiast. The slight difference is that he used dynamite to excavate the size. Whereas we used dynamite jokes. On the weekend. I'm not like it.

Exactly. Yes, you use explosive comedy. He used literal explosives. So he found the city. He was working with another guy out there. He found this big city in Western Turkey called Hisalik. And he was a massive fan of classical Greek and Roman history. He was obsessed with it.

He was a German businessman, made a lot of money in business, and then decided to sort of dedicate his fortune and his life to proving these stories were real. So much like your question about, were these people real? He was like, yeah, yeah, they must have been real. And a lot of people at the time were like, no, I mean, these are stories. You're not going to find a city. And he kind of did.

And then he blew it up. And so what's funny, what's interesting is that he, because he used dynamite, he kind of, he went down too deep in his archaeology. He blew his way through the foundations of what actually turned out to probably be the real historical try of the story, if there is one. And he ended up in the way back in the bronze. age. He ended up at the beginning the bronze age about thousand years too early. And he found some amazing, glorious treasure.

This thing called, he named it the kind of the treasure of Priam, who's the king of Troy. And he found a sort of headdress. He was like, aha, Queen Helen's headdress. You know, he started naming stuff. He got his wife to model it. And she was, I think she was Greek, actually. So she looked quite good in the photo.

She looked like a kind of Greek beauty. And so the world's press for like, oh, amazing. They found Troy. And you know, lo and behold, later archaeologists went back and went, all right, well, he's blown up some of the archaeology, but there is some left, thankfully. And they've then, they've then sort of gone through it and systematically and scientifically try to go, all right, how does this city work? And what they've found is that actually there are multiple layers of Troy, at least nine. So the city was a ancient

Bronze Age city, had gone through various iterations. And it was destroyed multiple times. And there are two possible layers that may have been the Troy from our story. Maybe layer seven, maybe layer six. And those are destroyed around 1,300 BC or maybe 1180 BC. And it may be fire, it may be earthquakes, it may be war, hard to tell, but there is some visible destruction in the archaeology. You can see that flames have scorched the brickwork and something bad has really happened here. So, yeah, maybe there was a Trojan war. Maybe this city was real. be these people who lived there. They were, it's interesting, we do have tiny, sorry, I'm banging my table, we do have tiny hints

of archaeological evidence and linguistic evidence. So the Hittites, who were an ancient civilization who lived in Turkey, they had records written in their specific language, and they talked about Wilusa, the Wilusa, who were, these people who came along and attacked the city. And the Wilusa sort of doesn't sort of help. hugely, but then actually if you go Ilios, Wilios, you start to go, oh yeah, maybe, maybe there's a little bit there.

So maybe it should be the Wiliad rather than the Iliad. But the Wilusa, the Lusa, they may have been... Yeah, exactly, yeah. Okay, without ambition to be the cringy historian, it's like, hey kids, actually, poetry's cool. These are raps, right? We have to, you know, rap sodi is rapping. These poets do these stories in meter.

So they're not rhyming. They don't have rhyming couplets. It's not Fresh Prince of Bel Air level, you know. This is the story all about, a guy called Achilles. It's not that good. Because that obviously, Fresh Prince of Bel Air is our cultural high point. That's how we measure quality, right? You know, Carlton doing the Tom Jones dance.

The Carlton dance, yeah. The Carlton dance, yeah. So they did, these poets, Poems are in a rhythm, and it's called dactylic hexameter, which is a pretty sexy, lovely little phrase. And you might be more familiar with iambic pentameter, if you've ever had to study Shakespeare at school. And iambic pentameter is kind of what we use in the English-speaking world. Like it feels quite natural to us because of Shakespeare's influence and other influence. We kind of accidentally use iambic pentameter a lot in our daily life.

da-dum-da-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-m, you know, we kind of got that rhythm. The Greeks, they go for six feet in the kind of the metre. So they, rather than five, they go for six. So these poems do have a rhythm to them. They've got a kind of, there's a tempo to them, which is why in the Chris Nolan movie, he's got a rapper as the bard telling the story at the beginning, right? Wait, there's someone rapping at the start of the movie.

There's someone rapping at the beginning, yeah. And his story is a pissed off by this? Yeah. So there is a tiny possibility that the Willusa of Troy fought what the Hittites called the Hayaoah, and the Ayur may have, might have been the Achaeans. There's a tiny shred of linguistic possibility there. So to go back to your point, did this happen, was this real? Maybe, a little bit?

Like, you can find, there's tiny little shards and glimmers of maybes in there. And it's a fun game to sort of take these tiny shards and try and, try and, put them back together, but you're probably not rebuilding the original vase. You're probably, there's an amazing Monty Python sketch that I loved when I was a kid, which is archaeologists trying to reassemble a kind of, they're trying to reassemble the kind of broken bits of an ancient fossil, and they end up building a kind of massive monstrosity, like a huge, and just like, it's not, I don't think that's right.

And sometimes that's what historians can do. If we don't have all the evidence, we can reassemble the story, in a completely different direction. Much as the 19th century, you know, 19th century early paleontologists, when they first discovered dinosaur bones, they got them completely wrong. They're so amazing. Yeah.

They're adorable. They're so funny. Yeah. I mean, if any of your listeners have ever been to, live in London or have ever traveled to London, Crystal Palace Park in Southeast London has some of these amazing 19th century dinosaur reconstructions, and they're so funny. and they're just really wrong.

Yeah, limbs are in the wrong spots and horns. Things that they think are horns are actually trunks or arms or... Yeah, exactly. I think I saw something recently that they were... I don't know how much nonsense it is, but there might have been these miniature elephants around one of these islands and where their trunk hole in their skull was, maybe that's what led to the belief there might have been cyclops.

These cyclops giants with one eye. That's it. Yeah, this is an established theory. I think Tom Holland's, not Tom Holland in the movie, Tom Holland, the historian and podcaster. I think he's made that case in the past. Yeah, there is this possibility that in the ancient world people found massive dinosaur bones and went, oh, dragons. Oh, monsters. You know, that's a possibility, isn't it?

If you dig up a huge, huge bone or a huge massive skull and you don't know what it is, your natural instinct is to say this is some sort of ancient, terrifying mega beast. But rather than going, ah, well, of course, 65 million years ago, there was a pre-existing species of land mammal. You go, oh, no, no, it's the monster from the story we all love. So you can see how people perhaps have taken archaeological or forensic fossil evidence and then used it to back up storytelling cultures. That's perfectly sensible.

And we probably did the same, right? You know, I think plenty of people do. I mean, so many people now are convinced that ancient Egyptian and Mayan and Incan ruins are proof of aliens. And it's like, no, no, we've got really, really good evidence that Egyptians built the pyramids. We have a diary written by one of the guys who built the Great Pyramid. And they're like, no, it's definitely aliens. No, it's not. It's not aliens.

Greg, they've got to you, have they? Yes. Sorry. Yes. Apologies. Big archaeology. It's a big cover-up. Oh, no.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm actually a CIA plant, and I'm here to subvert your listeners. But that's the thing, right? Archaeology so often can disprove these stories that we can tell ourselves, because actually the stories are fun and they're attractive and they make sense. To the ancient Greeks, these stories are foundational. They're real, they're true.

Yes, they are aware that there's maybe a bit of narrative romance to it. But they see them as foundationally, they happened, they're real. And yes, there are tiny little linguistic elements where we do have, in an ancient script called Linear B, there is someone called Akru, which may be a link to Achilles. There's someone called Ecto, who may be Hector. Hector is the Prince of Troy who fights Achilles in the big punch up at the end. Hector is Eric Banner in one of the old movies, isn't he? That's, yeah, in Troy. So there's the Brad Pitt, Eric Banner movie.

And obviously, Eric Banner played Hector and Brad Pitt played Achilles. I don't know if you've seen that movie I don't know if you like that movie I remember when it came out it got an enormous kicking people were like this is rubbish and then when the Christopher Nolan trailer came out and everyone was like

oh this is awful nothing like the masterpiece Troy you're like hang on a second what a great microcosm of how nostalgia just cooks people's minds it's so funny it's so so so funny I've only seen bits of it and probably that scene where Hector

sort of comes in to defend maybe is that Orlando Bloom or something? Yeah, who plays Paris, yeah. But it's crazy the amount of, like, star actors in that one scene alone. You got the succession head guy, what's his name? Brian Cox. Brian Cox is there. And there's all sort, like, it's a star-studded little battle scene.

And I guess the whole movie is probably. Yeah, I mean, it's... Do you recognize that's worth watching, or is it annoying for someone who knows more about the story? I think it, I, you know, I enjoy movies as movies, so I can always take my historian's hat off. But when I saw Troy the first time around, I didn't love it as a movie. And I think if I rewatched it now, I probably still wouldn't love it as a movie. But maybe there's things to it I'd enjoy more in hindsight. Maybe just going, oh, look, because the guy from succession, maybe I'd just do a lot more of that.

But I think, yeah, when I first saw it, I was like, yeah, it's fine. You know, it just, it didn't, it didn't feel to me as great as Gladiator, which is an incredibly good, you know, it's a really good movie, gladiator. That really, really works. And the Alexander, the great movie was weird and strange, but when you watch the director's cut, it's much better. So maybe there's a Troy director's cut, which is a bit more watchable.

I don't know, it might be worth checking out. So we've done kind of the archaeology. We've done there was Troy, the city. real, is this story real? I guess I should tell you the actual story stories, if you've got time, if you're okay with that. Yes, please. Okay, right.

So we've got two poems here. As I said, we've got the Iliad, the Odyssey. The Iliad is the first poem. There are, as I said, the six missing poems, this cycle of missing poems. So we've done the Kipria, we've done the Ethiopis. The third one is called the Ilias Micra, which means the little Iliad, the mini-Iliad, which is kind of cute. That is the one that maybe mentions the Trojan horse, but we don't have it.

The fourth poem is called the Iliopersius, which means the sack of Troy, the destruction of Troy. And that's one, again, which tells probably a bit more about the destruction of the city. Don't have it. We have missing a poem called the Nostoi, which means the returners, those who came back, which is the story of how the great heroes of the Trojan War got home, apart from Odysseus, because Odysseus gets his own story. and then we also have the telegony and the telegony is a really odd one

again we don't have it but we know that it's the story of how Odysseus is murdered by his own son who doesn't know that he's killed his own dad and that happens way later in the story. So you've got kind of six stories missing but I'll do the two stories we do have because they're

incredible masterpieces. They are two of the oldest stories in Western literature they're not as old as the well there's a couple of older ones from you know, kind of Babylonian tradition and so on. So, you know, there are other stories. Bawolf or Bow Wolf or something.

Bayer Wolf, yeah, Beowulf is old English. So Beowulf is much, much later. So that's early medieval time. So Beowulf, you're looking at more like, I don't know exactly when, maybe six-seventh, maybe six-seventh centuries and all that. And that's sort of set in the kind of northern German, in the kind of northern Germanic kingdom. And it's a story of Beowulf, this great hero,

fighting a monster, a dragon, grendel and grendel. And it's a very classic old English poem. So that's much later than where we are. We are, you know, the story as we know it is set around 1,200 BCE or 1180 BCE during what's known as the great Bronze Age collapse, which is alluded to in Chris Nolan's movie in a really slightly odd, interesting way. and I'm not going to spoil it for you because I don't want to give that away because that's kind of like a kind of crux point

to his, well, kind of his conclusion of the movie. So all I'll say is that in that period, in the kind of late, 1170s, 80s in the Bronze Age, we get this fascinating collapse in civilizations across the Mediterranean world and they all simultaneously fall apart within the space of 20, 30 years.

And the only one that survives is ancient Egypt, just about, but these other hugely powerful Bronze Age, super powerful, super rich, big trading networks, big armies, big navies, beautiful capitals, they all completely just implode. And why that is long been debated, and there's all sorts of different theories, there's some really good books on it, but typically the baddies in the story are called the Sea Peoples, and they are sort of supposed to be these kind of terrifying invaders who sweep through and just destroy all these armies.

What's more likely is that actually it's a combination of like massive earthquake cycles, global, maybe global warming or environmental catastrophe, tsunamis, and then maybe the sea peoples might be invaders. They may also be refugees. There may be people fleeing from these crises and these destructions showing up and causing problems with logistics in terms of feeding them and whatever. Or maybe they're attacking because they're fleeing from danger, but wherever they end up, they get attacked.

And so they then attack, you know, we just don't know. we have this sort of massive question mark. But there is this 20, 30, 40 year period where everything just goes wrong. And Troy seems to be maybe part of that. And so our story is set just kind of in this world. And the Iliad is the story of the siege of Troy. And it starts with this very famous line, Sing to me, O Muse, of the Rage of Achilles.

That is the opening line, which is quite a cool, opening line. Yeah, that's got to say that's badass. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's not quite as good as Fresh Prince of Bel Air, but it's, you know, it's up there. If Jazzy Jeff put a bead under that. Yeah, exactly. That's a hit.

Exactly. What you need is do, do do do, do, do, do, do, you know, a little bit of that. So sing to me muse of the rage of Achilles. Muse, of course, the muses of the other kind of, kind of daughters of Zeus who inspire the poets. They've all got their own area of research. you know, there's the muse of history called Cleo, and there's the muse of poetry, the muse of music, and so on. So, sing to me muse of the rage

of Achilles, the wrath of Achilles. So the poem is about this warrior Achilles who is really angry, like really, really, really rageful. And what makes him angry is interesting. He is, to put it lightly, an absolute dickhead.

This is a man who is not in any way heroic, but to the Greeks, he is a hero. because their definition of hero is totally different to our definition of hero. Our definition of a hero is someone who runs into a fire to save a baby, someone who signs up to serve in a war despite knowing that they might get shot on the head, someone who does something incredibly brave, someone who donates a kidney. Like, you know, our hero is someone brave, courageous, altruistic, unselfish,

doesn't think of themselves, you know, runs into danger to protect others. Achilles is the exact opposite. It's a nightmare colleague. He is the worst possible guy on your team. He's not even the guy on your team who doesn't do any work and sort of phones it in and gets the A-plus at the end, you know, when you've all done the kind of, you know, the shared term paper or whatever. He's not even that guy. He's the saboteur on your team who is trying to bring you down. He is the worst.

And this is what they called heroic back then. Yeah. Yeah, he is a hero. Yeah, that's what we get the word from, Hiros. And so the story begins with, Sinctiomimus of the Rage of Achilles, and it begins with Year 9 of the War. This war is not going well.

Agamemnon, the great mighty king, has united all of the Greeks, the Argyves, the Archaeans, the Danians. He's brought them together. They are besieging the huge walls of Troy, and they cannot get in, and it's just taking forever. But they're going around and they're raiding other villages and towns,

and they're grabbing captives, they're grabbing prisoners, they're enslaving people. And of course, horribly enough, they're enslaving young women, which, of course, as we know, is probably for horrible, disgusting gross reasons, right? So Agamemnon takes a young enslaved girl as his own personal, you know, horrible servant to do terrible things with. And what happens is that this causes a plague, a curse to be put upon his men. basically someone manages to get a sort of a request up to the gods.

Oi, my daughter's been taken. This king's doing a horrible thing to her. I would like you to exact revenge, please. And so a plague sort of sweeps through the kind of tents of the Greek troops, and they start falling down dead. And Agamemnon was like, oh, no, this is bad. How do I solve this? And it turns out that he needs to give her back.

And he's like, oh, fine. So he gives her back. but because this guy is a dick Agamemnon, he's like, well, I, you know, I deserve an enslaved servant. I need another beautiful young woman to do horrific things too. So, Achilles, you give me your one. You got one, Briseya, she's called. You got one. I'll have yours.

And Achilles is like, no, she's mine. I stole her fair and square. You know, this sort of horrific two men arguing about who gets to keep the enslaved person. And Achilles has to sort of give her up. and he's so angry about it he pouts he salks in his tent and he's like fine well I'm not going to fight any little war anymore

and he's like a little he's like a kid taking the football home and you know you guys don't get to play anymore because it's my ball and that's heroic you know in that sense of the word it gets worse because he then calls to his mother

the godesthetist and he says mom he Agamemnon stole my enslaved servant and so he calls to her and he says, I want him, I want it to go all wrong for him. I want all his troops to die. I want all my fellow Greeks to die without me to prove how good I am at fighting, because he's the best fighter. He's the, he is the Brad Pitt of the ancient world. He's incredible at fighting. He's the number one warrior. You've got to have him on your team. And when he sulks and goes off

and refuse to play, not only does he refuse to play, he then calls on his goddess mum to curse the Greeks that they all start dying on the back of the field to prove. Yeah. It's very cringe behavior. It's very Cristiano Ronaldo behavior. It's deeply, deeply egotistical and I'm the only one who matters here. And if I can't play, then you should all die. So he is...

But if it was the Brad Pitt of his day, it's what a great bit of casting. That's true. Apparently, Brad Pitt hated doing that movie. And that is why he looked so sulky in it. Apparently he's not acting. Apparently he really did not want to do it. And the studio sort of forced him contractually. And so he spends the entire movie just like,

oh, why am I here? And that's exactly good. That's perfect method acting. Like the historians for once are like, he nailed it. He absolutely nailed it. His greatest performance ever. Because he's phoning his age and saying, how do I get out of this?

I'm the best actor. I want them to see when I don't act very well. The movie will fall apart. I want Eric Bennett to die when I'm not in the scene. Yeah. Mom. I don't know if that's true. I don't want to libel Brad Pitt,

although he's having obviously a pretty tricky time in the old PR game at the moment. Yeah, I think well, if he wants to sue our podcast, not Greg. Okay. We can take it, Brad. Yeah. Okay, great. We're, because we'll represent ourselves.

Thank you for defending my honour. You are my Hector, and I am your Paris. So Achilles calls down a curse, and all the Greeks start dying, right? So the poem begins with two curses. Firstly, the Greeks are dying a plague. Then suddenly they're dying because one of their own has been like, these guys should die because I'm more important than them.

So it's not a brilliant start to the poem, okay? And then it gets worse because the Trojans are like, brilliant, the Greeks are just dying. Everything we do is growing great. Every shot we shoot from our hour hits them straight, you know, square between the eyeballs. We're having perfect luck here. Let's counterattack. So the Trojans, you know, go and start slaughtering the Greeks.

And Achilles is like, okay, this is, I'll admit, this is bad. This is not great. We have come all this way and spent nine years and we are now getting absolutely clobbered. I'm still not going to fight, but I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I will let my best friend slash lover, Patrickluss, because, you know, Achilles is pretty gay. The poem makes it clear that this is the man he loves most in the world. and he's like, Patrickluss can wear my special armour. The special armour that my mum got for me,

it's kind of magic armour, it's been made by a god, it's really good stuff. He can wear it and he can go into battle and pretend to be me and that maybe will inspire the troops and we'll turn around this, we'll turn around this very unfortunate bit of bad luck that I have no idea where it's come from. It's like, what's you, you did it, you're the bad luck. It's literally the least I could do. Yeah, no shit, mate. You let me wear your clothes for a bit.

So Patrick Liss is like, okay, I'll be you. And storms off into the battle and Summaa starts fighting very bravely. He's a good warrior. He's having some good luck. But he comes up against Hector, Prince of Troy. And Hector is Eric Banner really, really good at fighting. And lo and behold, Hector kills. Patricklis is slaughtered, is killed.

And Hector's like, I killed Achilles. Woo! Sure done. And then obviously, Helmicum. comes off and he's like, oh, that's not Achilles. Very Shakespearean sort of stuff. Mistaken identical tears. Oh, it's a huge trope.

It's a massive trope in Arthurian literature, actually. There's a lot of King Arthur stories where brothers accidentally kill each other, wearing the wrong armour and stuff. It's like a weird bit of slapstick comedy in medieval storytelling. We're like, oh, no, not Barry. Like their chins are just not. They're all interchangeable chins. The mask covering, that's the forehead that I'm.

I really recognize. That was coming. Alice, I don't know. So Patrickliss is dead. The armour is, you know, mangled and captured by the Trojans. So Achilles is like, oh, my best friend slash lover is dead. I am angry. I am properly rageful.

And this is what we get the rough. Because it's like, and in some ways, I guess you could almost blame me. But I won't be doing that. Yeah. I feel partially responsible. responsible. No, I shouldn't, but I do. Yeah.

I'm very narrowing. Yeah, I'm a people person. And, you know, I just, I feel like I should get out there and just do my bit. This guy's a nightmare. He's an absolute nightmare. I don't know why I assumed that he was like a hero and more of the way we understand. No, the heroic construct that we use is quite a modern idea. You see it more in the Middle Ages in medieval literature and in Renaissance poetry.

You start to get the notion of the brave soldier choosing to die on the battlefield rather than run away. So you start to get a famous poem called The Battle of Maldon, which comes a bit after the Beowulf story you mentioned. But there's this sort of notion of like, I'm going to stand and I'm going to fight and I'm going to die here. And the men around that king are like, yeah, yeah, we're doing the same. We're going to stand and we're going to fight and we're going to die here, which is obviously the famous Battle of the Thermopylae, the 300 Spartans who decide,

yeah, this is our day to die, and we're cool with that. So you get this notion of courage that becomes kind of important, and later on in the 18th and 19th centuries, you start to get the modern notion of the hero as being someone brave who goes out to defend others. The kind of courage that is encouraged by people back in the war room.

Yeah. You know what to be really good. Were you guys out there? You should fight to the death. we're all in it together get that message out to him now and we're amazing there's that amazing Peter Cook

sketch from Beyond the Fringe from the 1960s which is exactly that which is what we need Jenkins is a meaningless sacrifice so I need you to go and die over there really sir yes absolutely so yeah so the notion of dying bravely in battle is an ancient idea

and what Achilles wants most of all, and this linked back to a book I wrote on the history of celebrity culture, what he really, really wants is something called Cleos, and Cleos means glory. Achilles is desperate for glory. That's why I mentioned the Cristiana Ronaldo thing. He's a Cleos Chaser. He's so obsessed with his own historical record.

He's so obsessed with the notion of being famous after he's dead. He wants to be eternal. He wants to be in the pantheon of the greats. He might build a ballroom or a statues and those sort of things. that kind of thing is. Chuckie's there on someone else's ballroom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whoever could we mean?

Yeah. Yes, he desires eternal glory, Claeos. And so he's desperate for it. And weirdly, his mum kind of offers him two paths. Achilles has offered, Thetis comes to him and says, look, there are two routes here.

You can live a long, kind of boring life, back home, not doing anything particularly interesting with your life. But you know, you'll live long and, you know, happy enough and you'll be out in the fields and you enjoy the sunshine and nice glass of wine. That's option A. Option B, you go to Troy and you'll probably die young, but you will be glorious. I'll take option A, mate. Oh, sorry. No, no, but like, all of us would be like, option A sounds good, thanks. I mean, I, yeah,

long, happy life drinking the wine and sort of, you know, stroking the dog. Yeah, great. I don't really care if people remember me when I'm dead. Right. But in the ancient Greek world, there is no greater glory than eternal memory. Like the idea here that your name will be sung by the poets evermore. That is absolutely the good stuff. That is what you want. That's what you crave.

That is what Achilles wants most of all. So when his mum offers him the choice, he's like, yeah, yeah, no problems here. I'm off to Troy. I'm off for the glory. And the irony, of course, is that when he gets there, he does this incredibly dickish move of not being glories, of not being noble, of not being brave, of sulking in his tent because his enslaved servant has been stolen from him and instead cursing his own colleagues and friends and fellow soldiers to death

to be killed by the Trojans. But then of course, we're still talking about him. He gets his wish. He gets his wish. Well, funnily enough, there's another ancient Greek called Hero Stratus, who I wrote about in my book on Celebrity. There's a thing called Hero Stratus Syndrome, which is something that modern psychologists and psychiatrists talk about,

which is the desire for, like, serial killers and mass shooters to get their name on the news, to be famous for their kind of awful atrocity crime. And, yeah, yeah. And it's called Hirostratus syndrome because it's named after this guy called Hirastratus, who lived about, I'm trying to think when he's born. It's something like 340 BC, something like that.

and he had no skills, no talents. He wasn't rich. He wasn't famous. I think he was born enslaved. He was lowly status. And he was like, I really want to be famous. I have no talents. I have no skills.

What do I do? Oh, I'll just do something awful. I'll just do something really infamous. So people have to talk about me. So he burns down the Temple of Ephesus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. And his punishment, when they get hold of him, they grab him, they torture him.

They're going to kill him. But the punishment is, we're going to we're going to strip your name from the history books we're going to make sure no one never knows who you are because that's what you crave

and we're going to take that from you the problem is his name is Hiro Stratus we know all about him he's got a Wikipedia page and so this this guy gets his wish because people can't help

but talk about these awful people we can't help but gossip about awful people That's all right, but if he died thinking that that was the case, then I think it all, everyone's a winner. You know, apart from the building that got bent down. Which Dave did a report years ago about the ancient 7-1. Did you talk about that? I spoke about the time, and I probably looked at his Wikipedia page.

And was his photo just the side of his head with some hair? Was that just him? It was, and he's a big fan of thrice, so I liked him. Oh, cool. Great. You know what he'd do now if a guy from lowly status just wants to be, leave his mark? He would have started a podcast, almost definitely. That's it.

We are the new Herostratus. That's it. We're just, you know, how do I get famous? I could burn something down or I could just put out several hundred hours of mediocre chat. So, so back to the Eliad, back to the story, right? So Achilles hears that his best friend slash lover, Patrickluss is dead. and he suddenly is overtaken by rage, by a lust for vengeance. He is unbelievably incandescently angry.

And he calls to his mum, Thetis, and says, Mum, I need some new armour. Get me some new armour. I'm going to go and kill the bastard who killed my lovely man. And Mum pops off to the magical Mount Olympus maybe. I can't remember. But she gets, it feces, the blacksmith god, to make some new shiny armour, brings it back down.

Achilles pops it on. And he goes off on the war part. and he slaughters everyone in sight. He is a killing machine. He is unstoppable. And eventually he gets, you know, he sort of carves his way through the Trojan soldiers, gets finally to Hector. And Hector legs it.

Hector runs for his life. He just, he's like, I'm not fighting this guy. He's so angry. Which, again, not tremendously heroic, but I respect it, because that is sensible. That is the first sensible thing anyone has done in this story. So he runs away And the gods are like

Oh well this is embarrassing We can't have this We can't have just one guy Legging it and another guy chasing him Because that's not It's not I don't know I guess we quite like police chases

Don't we? We like the kind of The helicopter shot as the Bronco Yeah exactly that We love the high speed chase And for a bit the Greeks are like This is fun

But eventually the gods are like okay this has to stop So is the idea that the gods are what Like the humans down there Are just their entertainment almost Yeah more than their entertainment The gods medal And this is what's so foundational

To the ancient Greek world They believe the gods intervene in daily life They believe the gods will come down In disguise as humans As animals So they They have this really sort of profound fear That they have to be

Kind of always on their guard of like they could be chatting to a god at any moment, right? They could be, you know, you wander into a wood and maybe you'll meet Zeus. He'll just be disguised as a goose or whatever. Zeus, the goose. I don't know. What a fun thing to be out to know, though. You could, if you were confident enough, the things you could, the ways you could manipulate

people, I really shouldn't be telling you, you know, you're at the shopkeeper. They're like, that'll be 20 bucks. Like, oh, I shouldn't be telling you this. but yeah I'm kind of Zeus Yeah Like when they hand the machine over at a restaurant And they say

You can tip me You don't need you can piss No it's fine But I am a gods Yeah Or am I shouldn't say that You didn't hear that from me Yeah 40%

Yeah exactly Yeah I'm not saying anything But I do live on Mount Olympies And just would be Would be great if you could maybe Just tip me 20% Instead of 10 That's so that's fascinating

So yeah So they Like I mean like probably humans have done forever. If there is a sickness, they go, oh, we're being cursed by a certain god for that thing that Greg did. Sorry, it's very under the bus, Greg. Yeah, no, it was me.

It was me. Yeah, exactly. A plague, gods. A flood, it's the gods. You know, any kind of abnormal, disastrous, problematic issue is the god. But also, if you're fleeing around in your ship and you're lost at sea and suddenly the wind picks up and you get carried to the shore. the shore, that's the gods rescuing you.

That is Poseidon, God of the Sea, going like, come all right, okay, all right, you've had enough drama. Get yourself home. So the gods see, sorry, the apology, I'm tripping myself up now. The Greeks see the gods in the natural world, and they understand the gods to be active agents of chaos, active, you know, and there are some gods who are innately chaotic, and there are some gods who are protected gods. There are some gods who are deeply selfish and just want to be worshipped, and, you know,

Zeus is a tricky one. Poseidon is famously vengeful. Aphrodite is the goddess of love, so she's kind of quite chill. Athena is very protective. So there are good gods you can turn to in times of crisis, and there are bad gods that you don't want to get on the wrong side of them. And so Achilles is rageful. He is chasing Hector around the city, you know, around the walls of Troy. And it's sort of, initially it's quite funny.

Benny Hill music. Yeah, Benny Hill music, but eventually the gods are like, okay, this is embarrassing. now. This is not what we paid for. This needs to stop. So one of the gods sort of whispers in Hector's ear and convinces him, look, maybe if you stood and thought, you'd have a chance against this guy. You're a good soldier. He's tired. He's been a lot of running. You know, he's immortal. He's mortal like you. You know, he's not a god. He's not one of us. He's, you could have him. You could take him. And so Hector was like, oh yeah, maybe I could take him. So Hector turns around and Achilles immediately stabs him in the neck.

So he's dead. So Hector is, so Hector is dead. And Achilles grabs his body, ties him to his chariot and drags him around the walls of Troy, drags the corpse around the walls of Troy, sort of flaunting the dead body and taunting the king, you know, Priam, who's just lost his son. Hector is the prince of Troy, his dad is Priam, His brother is Paris, who obviously started the war by accident by abducting Helen. And Hector is dragged around the walls of Troy multiple times by this sort of rageful Achilles who just cannot get the bloodlust out of him. He is so angry. He cannot help it.

He can't, you know, he's in a kind of tunnel vision rage. And eventually he kind of is talked down. And Priam, the king of Troy. comes out to him and says, just give me my boy back. Just give me back my son so I can bury him, you know, as a warrior. Jeez, yeah. As you would want, you know, you're a warrior too. You would want the same.

Just give him back to me, please. And as it so happens, Achilles sort of eventually sort of relents. And you get this really weird scene at the end of the poem. It's not weird. It's kind of beautiful in some ways, but you get this scene at the end of the poem where Achilles finally does something actually humane and good. and he gives back the corpse and they saw the grieving father

and the grieving warrior sort of have a moment together where they both recognize each other's pain and they both go, we've just lost someone we love and that sucks and I guess we should share in that moment for a bit

and so there is a funeral but you get this kind of tiny glimpse of Achilles the mortal the human, the man who loves and feels pain Even though he was directly responsible for both deaths. Even though the entire poem, you know, 15,700 lines, I think it is. You know, so many characters, there's hundreds of characters in the Eliad. There may even be 1,000, but there's so many people are dead by this point.

The war has been going on for nine and a half years. And the poem finishes there with the funeral of Hector. The walls of Troy are not breached. The Greeks have not won. Achilles is not dead. Like none of the stuff you think. happens in the Troy story, happens in this poem. It is really interesting in that regard.

And so then we get onto the sequel poem, The Odyssey, and I know we've been chatting for ages, so I'll try and do this a bit quicker, but there is an absolute, just a ton of weird stuff in the Odyssey. It's much more complicated than the Elyad in some ways. And so I'll try and race through it a bit more quickly for you guys, but, you know, the movie is three hours long, which is massively pared down. It's a huge, epic story, and what's interesting about it is that it's very very, very, very Christopher Nolan because it collapses time and it has flashback sequences and it has multiple

simultaneous. Well, they're not simultaneous. They sort of are, it's got multiple story strands that are interlaced so that you're following like two or three stories simultaneously, but there's this notion of time being elastic. And that's very Chris Nolan, right? He does that in most of his films. He's done that, you know, he's done that since forever, like since memento and, you know, obviously like Dunkirk, we had the kind of three-act structure, but you got time very differently with the fighter pilot on the boat and on the beaches with the troops. So the Odyssey is the perfect film for him,

because the poem itself starts quite unusually. And it begins with the opening lines. And this is the Emily Wilson translation, which is very good if you're looking for a translation. But it starts with the opening line, Tell me about a complicated man, muse. Tell me how he wandered and was lost when he was wrecked, the holy town of Troy and where he went and who he met and the pain he suffered in the storms of

the sea and how he worked to save his life and bring back his men and he failed to keep him safe the poor falls and they you know and so the poem starts with a summary it literally begins like okay here are all the things that happen in the poem that's helpful is that any of that from the missing poems no no I mean that's the thing right it's it's it's interesting because what it does in some ways is it goes you know this story already, don't you? Like the opening lines are like, you know this story. We all know this story. It's a classic.

But I'm going to tell it to you anyway. So, weirdly, you know, we're quite used to a introductory scene in a movie or a TV show that maybe does a prequel or a previously on or, as you say, the rolling credits in Star Wars. But this literally just goes, hey, this is the story. We all know and love about the guy who tries to get home and everyone dies. And you're like, oh, well, that's a spoiler. But okay, so it starts there. It's also interesting that, you know, just talking about how old the story is and who actually wrote it and whatever.

I mean, I'm not even, I hadn't even been thinking about how it's translated even from there. So it's like, it continues on, you know, how it's still evolving as a story. Because even a very direct translation is going to have to change some things. Oh, enormously. There have been multiple translations, some very famous ones, some ones that are a bit, you know, a bit rubbish. Emily Wilson's the first ever woman to translate it. And what's interesting is that she went back to the original Greek very forensically. She's a professor of ancient Greek.

She's an extraordinary, very, very brilliant scholar. And she was like, she realized an awful lot of the previous translations had really got some stuff quite wrong or had made big extrapolations or had said things that you're like, the Greek doesn't say that. you've made a choice there as a translator that you've really kind of loaded those terms. So it's really interesting. Her is much more stripped back. She uses Iambic pentameter. So she uses the Shakespeare sort of verse beat rather than the ancient Greek one of the six feet.

And so it's quite an interesting listen. The audiobook's good because you hear it as it's meant to be heard in some ways. There's a poem as an oral thing. But it's also designed to be more – sorry, I'm banging my microphone. It's designed to be more accessible to us now. So there are some really good translations out there that are a bit older. I really like hers because it's stripped back and quite plain, and you get a sense of the, I don't know,

it's a bit more emotive, a bit less sort of glitzy glam and a bit more about the kind of feeling, I guess. So The Odyssey is a really, really famous story that is about a man trying to get home. and so both the Iliad and the Odyssey are 24 books long. So poems in the ancient world, they have books, 24 books. Each book is however many lines. This story is a little shorter.

I think it's about 12,000 lines. So it's a bit shorter than the Iliad. And the story is that the Trojan War has ended. The Greeks have won. They have, you know, they've conquered Troy, hooray. Everyone heads back home. but Odysseus is missing. Odysseus, this great, smart, super genius, brilliant thinker, this strategist, he hasn't shown up, he hasn't come home, he's not got back to Ithaca, where is he?

We don't know, but it's been years. Is he dead? Is he lost? Is he returning? We don't know. So the story does not begin with Odysseus. It doesn't begin with our main character. Our protagonist is not in the poem for the first four books, which is really unusual.

It's really interesting. Instead, it starts with his queen. It starts with his palace, his court on Ithaca, where his queen, who has been waiting for him, whatever, she is now being besieged. In the same way the Greeks have besieged Troy, she's being besieged by about 108 guys, I think it is, like 108 dudes who want to marry her, and they will not leave. They are just there in her palace, and they're like, morning, hi, still here, still here, still. Fancy, yeah. Having a white. Have it a bit.

Yeah. Here you may. Yeah. And they are, I mean, I say besieged. Basically, they are, they've kind of taken over the palace. And these are the kind of strongest men on the island. They are warriors and some of them are rich. And they are all there queuing up to see who she will marry.

Like, come on, pick one. There's one of us, surely. Look, 108 guys, consider it like, you know, Tinder or hinge. Just, you know, keep swiping and you'll find someone, you fancy, right? A hectic version of the Bachelorette. Yeah, exactly. Yes. One woman. She's got to choose 100 and 8 guys. So these men are besieging her and she is holding them off as long as she can because she believes her husband's still alive. She doesn't want to marry them.

And she's got a son by Odysseus. Before Odysseus left, they had a baby together and the son is called Telemachus. And that's Tom Holland in the movie. That's Little Spider-Man. And Telemachus is kind of a teenager now. He's almost a man. He's kind of ready to step into his own thing. And which means that, look, if Odysseus isn't coming back, maybe Telemachus can be king, right? But all of the suitors are like, well, we want to be king. So there's now a threat. You know, for a long time he's been a boy, no real problems there. But he's now old enough to almost be a man. He could probably, in the next year or so, he could take the throne.

He could do, you know, and so a couple of the suitors are like, I guess we should kill this kid, you know, get him out of the way. So there's no option that she just. stays as a solo queen without a king? This is a great question. This is an excellent question. I mean, in the movie, there's a scene Anne Hathaway has, which is excellent that does exactly that, which is like, I've been on the throne for all this time. Like, why can't I have it? It's a great scene.

In the poem, it's slightly less overt, but we get this sense of Penelope being very smart, very savvy. Edius is the great genius of the ancient Greek world. He's super smart. He's the guy who comes up at the Trojan horse. He's the thinker. But we get a sense that his wife is equally. smart. And their son, Telemachus, has inherited the

smarts too. So we've got a kind of clever family here. So she is holding these guys off by various ruses. The most famous one, she's like, I will marry one of you when I finish weaving this beautiful shroud. And every day she weaves and every night she unweaves it.

And the next day the men come back and they're like, finished weaving. She's like, nope. No, no. As you can see, I have not finished weaving. They're like, wow, it really takes a long time to weave. Who knew? They're not the smartest these guys. So she is holding them off as long as she can. But her son, Telemachus, is now of the age where he could step up, which means that one of the suitors, a guy called Antinous, is plotting to murder him. You know, you've got to get rid of this kid because he's the rightful

there. And if we can get rid of the kid, then one of us can woo the queen, step in, become the new king. You know what really turns on a woman, killing her son. Oh, yeah. That's, if you are, I mean, It hasn't worked for me yet, but I reckon next time. You do that, she'll start weaving like this, no, tomorrow. Yeah, I mean, what a strategy. Yes, it's a very, it's a strong gambit, isn't it, to say, you know that boy you love, I killed him. What are you doing for a day?

Do you want to marry me? Yeah, exactly, yeah. So that is the first, like four books of the poem are like that. It's like the intrigue. It's the, it's the, jeopardy, it's the queen lamenting, it's the suitors showing up, going, hey, you know, we've come to eat your food, we've come to drink your wine, we've come to basically, we want to marry you, you know, choose one of us. And so there is this invasion of men in her court. It is

dangerous her court. There is a kind of loyal kind of like shepherd, swineherd who's been left behind by Odysseus, who's kind of going blind, but he's like loyal to her forever. There's a couple of servants who are loyal. So there's a couple of people there who are like, Odysseus is going to come back. So she's got a couple of allies, but primarily Telemachus growing up, he's going to get murdered if he's not careful. But we get to book

four, I think it is, maybe it's book five, I can't remember, but basically we've had four books of poetry and then we go, oh, Odysseus is alive. Cut two. Odysseus, our hero, here he is and he is bravely not doing much, actually. He's been stuck on an island

for seven years having sex with a random nymph called Calypso. So he is, you know, we get to him and he is, he has been. His wife is just stoically at home. Yes. Knocking back a hundred and eight fellas. And he's just rooting around on an island. Yes.

Jesus Christ, this guy. He's basically on, he's on Hot Nymph Island. They're on two different reality shows, aren't they? Yeah, yeah, it is. It's the MTV show. It's like, meanwhile, on Hot Nymph Island, Will, yeah, Will Calypso. Yeah, she has. She shagged him again.

So Calypso is a nymph. So she's not quite a goddess. Nymphs are kind of beautiful immortal creatures who kind of live in the forests. They live sometimes near the sea. They're kind of magical. They're not quite gods, but they have the kind of godly powers of eternal life, internal beauty. And Calypso is hot. And she's like, hey, this is great.

You just live on the island. In fact, I've got magic. I can make you immortal. We just stay here. and we'll just eat good food, we'll just have good wine, we'll have great sex, and why would you want to leave? And Odysseus is like, yes, I think I'm married. I mean, it's great, it's great, it's lovely, but I think I should get home. But he can't because he's kind of shipwrecked, you know, he was washed up on the island.

Is she kind of, I keep him prisoner? Or is he? She's kind of, no, it's a bit of that. It's a bit of like, she's keeping him prisoner. He's not trying that home. hard to escape. Yeah. I feel like the castaway movie would be very different of Tom Hanks had landed on an island.

Then I was just like this old lady. Wilson and Nymph. Yeah. He doesn't need Wilson. Seven years of just shagging this with his beach ball. Yeah. No. And what's nice in the movie is it's Charlie Seron.

And I think we can all agree that, you know, if Charlie Stadron was saying, stay, have some sex, have some wine. I think we could all be like, well, it's a tempting offer. I mean, I don't know. Do I even know if my wife is still alive back home? I can't know for sure. Imagine if I get there and she's moved on to someone else. He's tired and self and not.

She's probably remarried. She's probably got her own nymph. Gets home and she's married a nip as well. Oh, great. He has to go back to the other. It was fun when I did it. When you've done it, very disrespectful. Well, this is the thing.

Odysseus is a bit of a cad. He cheats on his wife multiple times in the story, whereas Penelope is the eternal, loyal wife. She is doing all she can. She's not kissed anyone out. She's not shangging anyone. She's not marrying anyone. She's doing all she can to honour the memory of her husband.

This has been written by a man. This is Homer, you know, a very misogynisticist guy. Women must be chastened, and they must always stay true and wait. But it's all right if the fellas have a little play around, isn't it? That's not bad if the fellas are a little go. Yeah, written by several thousand people, all men. Yeah, every single one of them that dudes being like, of course he's getting his end away. Of course he is.

So he's stuck on the island. He can't build a ship. He needs a crew. How do you escape off this island? Sure, he's sort of, to a certain extent, he's enjoying himself. The Nolan movie does something very different with it. And I'm not going to spoil it for you, but it's very different. And so what happens is the gods are like, okay, we feel like seven years is enough.

And this guy needs to get home. So the gods intervene. And they threaten Calypso and say, Calypso, come on, hand him over, give him back. You can't keep shagging this guy. He's married. And so she's like, oh, right. You know, they kind of threaten her. They're like, if you don't do it, we will punish you.

So she gets a message from Hermes, the messenger god. And he's like, go on, hand him back. And she's like, oh, fine, all right. And so Odysseus is like, finally, I can make my escape. And he sort of cobbles together a kind of ship of sorts, you know, set sail. And as soon as he sets sail, Poseidon, God of the Sea, is like, Odysseus, that dickhead, oh, he's going to drown. I'm going to get him. That bastard killed, that bastard blinded my son.

So his son is the Cyclops, who you mentioned earlier. So the Cyclops is the one-eyed giant who lives in a cave, lives on an island of Cyclopsis, actually. And this particular cyclops is called Polyphemus. And earlier in the story, but we haven't heard it yet, earlier in the story, Odysseus had blinded him. And he'd done so in order to escape from the Cyclops' cave because the Cyclops is quite dangerous.

and, you know, it's scary and killing his men. But the story goes, the amazing story, that Nolan does not do in the film, and I was very upsetly he doesn't do it. In the poem, not in the movie, Odysseus shows his ego and shows his cunning simultaneously because he blinds the Cyclops, you know, pokes out his eye.

He's only got the one, so, you know, that's awkward. He's stumbling around in the dark, can't see, and he screams, Who has done this to me? Who has done this? What man has done? this to me and Odysseus shouts, nobody, my name is nobody. And Polyphemus goes, that's a weird name, but okay.

Dad, dad, nobody has done this to me. Get nobody, get nobody, get him, get nobody. And dad is like, what? Who's nobody? That's not a name. So, clever Odysseus has got away with it. He's, you know, smart guy. He is escaped, a perfect escape plan.

and he gets on his ship with his men and he sails away and as he's sailing away he's like oh and by the way my real name is Odysseus you've been punk's he was so close it's so close and so his ego his his kind of this this clias this loss for glory gets in the way and just like Achilles he can't help but trip over his own ego he shouts out my real name is Odysseus and what does Polyphemus do he shouts out to his dad he goes dad update on the situation I've learned his name. His name is Odysseus. And the dad, of course, is the god of the sea. And if you're on a boat, the one guy you don't want to anger is the god of the sea, right? Who's the mum? You know what I mean?

Like if Poseidon's the dad, the sun is a giant cyclops, what's the other bit of the gene pool there to create that? I think there's various versions of the story. The Greeks had various different versions. I don't know exactly which version it is in the Iliad. So I won't, in the Odyssey, I won't tell you, because I'll get it wrong. wrong. But yes, exactly that. The gods are forever having, they're forever having sex with mortals often in very

unethical, weird ways. They'll come down to them as disguised as a bird or an animal or whatever. Well, I think that's on the human. They're rooting a bird. It's a great excuse, though, is a no, I thought it was a god. It was a god. Caught red-handed.

Yeah. In the barn, yeah. The classic It's the classic sheep shagger, excuse, no, no, wasn't shaking a sheep. It's actually Zeus. It would have been weird to say no. Yeah.

So, I will race through the story a bit because we've been talking for ages and your listeners are probably, they've probably given up hours ago. Well, Greg, I'll tell you this. Our listeners don't mind a long one. Yeah. If you've got time, then don't worry. Yeah, yep.

Yeah, I've got another thing in half an hour, so I'll wrap it up before then. Yeah, you can go really fast if you want to, other way. No, I won't go cruelly fast. There's the classic thing of, you know, like someone's being polite, maybe an English person, famously very polite, and they're saying, you know, I won't keep you.

And then the people, when they're just politely saying, oh, I need to go. And the people that they're being polite to just don't take the hint and say, no, no, no, no, no. And maybe they're Australians, maybe a couple of Australian guys. They say, stay, stay. Mate, we got all the time of the world. Stay on the island for another seven years. No worries.

Stay, have sex, it's great. I love talking to you guys. I'm having a lovely, lovely time. I would very happily stay for longer, but I do have another thing I meant to do. Hey, look, I might mean all of that is to say, you take as long or as little time as you like. Okay, all right.

Let's go through it a little bit more pacey, but, you know, I'll let you have some juicy bits of the story. So, long story short, Adysius has sailed off from, Hot Nymph Island, he's left Calypso behind. He immediately... Poseidon is like, that guy! Get him! And so massive, massive storms.

Did he know the Cyclops' dad was Beside as well? I don't... I can't remember. You really hope not because that's stupid otherwise. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You know that's how you're getting around. He's the one guy who wanted to decide. Yeah, Jesus.

So he washes up... Yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, you know, it's an absolute rookie error, isn't it? So he washes up on the island called Skaria, home of the Faesians, where there is a beautiful princess who finds him. She's called Nasekia. She's a gorgeous princess. She's doing a laundry.

She finds this bearded, battered, bruised, wet man on the beach. He's basically naked. And she's like, oh, hi. What are you doing? And he's like, help. And she's like, okay. And she takes him back to her court and meet her mom and dad. She's nice, you see.

And the mum and dad are called King Alcinous and, Queen Arete and they're great they're really lovely and they're like come in weird bearded man who's battered and bruised come have you know

and they give them a bath and they give them new clothes and they sort of give him food and he takes to the banquet table and they're like who are you and he's like okay funny story

I'm actually King Odysseus and they're like no way cool tell us a story Odysseus because everyone's been talking about you you've been missing for seven years stuff must have happened right He's like, yeah, oh, stuff really happened.

And so this is where the poem is a really weird thing. This is where it gets into metanarrative. And so we then get the story of what happened to Odysseus from Odysseus himself. He's telling other characters in the story, and that's how we learn about it. So what's super interesting about the ancient Greeks is they would embed stories within stories. And so in the Odyssey, we have this story within a story. And he's sitting there at the dinner table in the banqueting hall guy. right so funny story I was having sex with this nymph right and then and then the god of the sea

he shipwrecked me and I crash landed here and they're like sure but how did you end up on hot nymph island and he's like oh right yeah okay yeah yeah I've got that story too let me tell you the you know I'll take you back to the beginning and he starts to tell them the story of how he ended up shipwrecked in the first place on hot nymph island and he tells of multiple sort of chaotic derailments like disasters trying to get home. And in that, he includes, he went to the land of the lotus eaters where they ate the lotus flower and the lotus flower makes you forget. So he and his men forgot who they were for a bit.

So that was nice. So basically, drugs. They did drugs. And that was good. In the Chris Nolan movie, he conflates that with Calypso, the hot-knit-violence. So he squishes those together. Then they stumbled on the lair of polyphemus, the Cyclops, who was sort of, you know,

a fairly benign guy, but then accidentally sort of turned on them and then started to eat them. So that's when he did the nobody joke, and that's when Poseidon then cursed him. But then he got, he had a weird visit to King Aeolus, on the island of Aeolus, I think it is,

which is known as Wind Island, where presumably they eat a lot of beans, because this is the windy island where King Ayolis, and Ayolis is the ancient Greek word for wind, gives him a magic bag of wind to basically, like, scoop out the wind and throw it into his sails so that his magic wind will push him home. So that's nice. So he's got, like, some magic wind.

This is awesome. But it's great, isn't it? It feels like Gulliver's travels or, you know, an Eden Blarton book where he's at the, every place he goes a different world, you know. Like, yeah, absolutely. fireway tree or something. Yeah, it is. It's very iny-blighten. It's really charming. The difference is that his men on the ship think that there's gold in his sack. He keeps reaching to the sack and they're like, has he got treasure in there or something? And so they try and

open the sack themselves to sort of see, you know, has he got some treasure? And all the magic wind escapes and turns into a storm and drives them off course. And they end up instead on a terrifying island called Lastragonia, which is full of massive giant cannibals. Oh. These huge, huge guys. No, not good. Send me back to Nymph Island. I don't remember that medic faraway tree either.

That was a pretty nasty one. But, yeah, it's so funny that his men thought he was just going, oh, look at this gold. I'm going to grab, I just want to put my hand and touch the gold again. Yep, yeah. That's a group of guys who don't understand gold. You know, I don't think it's just a kind. All wind. All wind.

Because he's been chucking the wind up at the sails, so surely they're like, it's... They can't be money. They keep throwing that gold up into the... Gold air. So they end up on Cannibal Island. And at this point, they've got several ships, and he's got quite a large fleet of men. But they are, they are, most of them are killed because the giants chuck boulders at the ships and crush the ships. In the Nolan movie, he does it very different.

You may have seen the poster with like the giants wearing armor sort of, you know, towering over. Yeah. Okay. So he's turned the Lastragonians into these sort of massive warriors, which is not really what they're doing the poem. And the poem, they're more kind of like, like cliff people who chuck stones at you. So it's a bit different. So they just about escape from that island. He's got like one ship left and like 30 dudes.

Like most of his men are now dead, but he's got some guys with him. And they end up then kind of fleeing. and ending up on witch island now they end up on the island of Circe and she's a witch so she's got magic powers and she um bad witch bad witch she turns well bad witch turned sex witch because he has shags her too um so he he he he he so she turns all his men into pigs um apart from odysseus and odysseus is like hey could you not i need those those are my men and she's like oh all right Right. So she turns them back into humans. When she does so, they are younger and more beautiful than before. So that's the future of skin care. Great. So what we need is a kind of skin cream called Circe that just makes you look younger. But briefly turns you into a pig. First pick, Mark.

Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah, it's a shame they didn't go to witch pig island before Cannibal Island, because the cannibals. We don't need pigs. baking yuck I mean yeah maybe you're right maybe the order is all wrong so

they stay on the island for a year obviously Odysseus shags her too the Nolan movie does something incredible with this scene it is probably the best scene in the film and I won't say anything more about it but like when you see the movie

you'll probably agree with me it's truly astonishing what they do with it and also like emotionally it's just a brilliant scene in every way but like they make it seem very fleeting, whereas he stays for a year. They shag, they have a kid.

That kid later on is going to kill Odysseus, but that's in one of the missing poems. But moving on, they leave hot witch island, or weird witch island, I guess, because now they're going to go to the underworld. They go to the underworld, they go to Hades, basically to hell, to try and consult the prophet called Tariasius

to speak to the prophet to find out how to get home. While he's there, he bumps into dead Achilles. Remember Achilles from the first Iliad? Our dickhead guy who wanted eternal glory And then ended up, you know Well, turns out Achilles is dead Now remember he does not die in the Iliad So the Odyssey

Slightly spoils it You're like, oh he is dead, okay How did he die? Well, we're not quite sure But he's died at Troy He got his glory that his mum had offered him Remember his mum had said You can have glory or you can have boring life

He is now basically king of the undead And he hates it And he says to Adesias Chose the wrong option chose the wrong door, should have chosen boring life as the peasant farmer, that would have been good, this is rubbish. I hate it here. King of everything,

but I hate it. I would trade it in in a heartbeat. So that's really fascinating. That is one of the most extraordinary scenes in ancient literature, in any poem in ancient literature, because that is the most famous hero of the ancient world saying, ah, it's not all it's cracked up to be, I regret my fame.

That's awesome. So it's fascinating. It's really awesome. And again, I talked about that in my book on the history of celebrity because it's such an interesting scene. What's the book called? It's called Dead Famous. So you can get it on your audiobook if you want.

You want to sleep. I can sleep with you again tonight. Like Odysseus and Circe. So that's about the history of celebrity and fame. But like, so he meets some undead people there. And he meets some of his soldiers who've died. And they're like, you, Belend, you got us killed. And he's like, I'm so sorry.

I promise. I regret everything. I promise I will get your. I will get your. your souls back into the kind of, you know, I'll get them back in a good place. So I promise, if I get home to Ithaca, says Odysseus, I will sort out your souls. We'll do a, we'll do a special, you know, ritual and we'll sort you out. They're like, all right, you better keep your promise.

Then he gets back on his ship and Circe has warned him, by the way, on your voyage home, you are going to be stuck in a massive dilemma. You're going to face two terrifying monsters simultaneously, and you're going to have to choose one of them to go past. So it's a bit like end of level boss. You have to go for one of them. You can either choose terrifying whirlpool called Charybdis, and it will suck you and all your men down to the deep and you'll all drown. Or you can choose Silla, a giant six-headed dogwoman monster,

who's kind of like a giant cliff face. She's got six dog heads, but she's also a woman. It's kind of weird. If you sail past her, she will only kill six of your men. She'll eat six of your men, but you will live. so I need you to do that. I need you to go that way, but do not tell your men

because they won't want to know that. So Odysseus is like, okay, so he sails his ship and he sees the terrifying whirlpool and he's like, nope, I'm going to choose giant terrifying dog lady monster and sails past that and true enough,

she sort of swoops down and eats six of his men, but they do make it through. And then they face the temptation of the sirens. Have you ever heard of the sirens? Yes, that's from this. Okay.

Right. So this is where we get silence from. Sirens are famously these gorgeous sort of mermaid-type women who sing to sailors with this gorgeous song and the sailors cannot help but be lured in and are desperate to go and hear the song and want to know what it is. In the story, the sirens are these kind of monstrous creatures who want to drown the sailors. That's what they love doing. They love drowning a sailor and they lure them in by singing the song. again Chris Nolan does a pretty good scene here it's quite interesting what he does with it

so Odysseus lashes himself to the ship's mast so he cannot be tempted and his men block up their ears so he's like I want to hear the song but I don't want to die so I'm going to so I want you to basically gafferate me to the mast so I cannot escape but I really want to hear the tune is it what is it is it is it Bohemian Rhapsody? Is it you know is it is it hip-hop? Is it like a really lovely ballad

I want to hear the song. It's a theme from the fresh Prince. Yeah, exactly. Now here's the story. All about how. Yeah. I've got to join in. I'm going to join in. So they get past the sirens. They end up washing up on Helias. Helias is the magical island that belongs to the sun god, Helios. And this is a bad one because they wash up on the island and they are starving to death. There's no food. And the problem is there is food there. There are magic sacred cows. And these magic sacred cows belong to Helios, God of the sun. And he's like, if you eat my cows, I will curse you and you'll die. And people are like, but we are starving.

We're really starving. We're very, very starving. And those cows do look delicious. I'm going to eat the cows. And they eat the cows. And Odysse is like, no, not the cows. He told us, don't do that. And so, lo and behold, they eat the cows.

Helios is like, you, Belens, those are my magic sacred cows. and I told you. And so Helios has a word with Zeus, obviously King of the Gods. The lads get back on the ship, they take to the sea, and Zeus sends down a lightning bolt, and everyone dies apart from Odysseus, who hadn't eaten the cow meat. So Odysseus is once again back on his life raft. You know, he's on a sort of flotsam and jetsam. He's clinging to the wood.

And where does he wash up? Hot nymph Island. That's how we got to Calypso Island. I thought he was back there for saying. This is all that. Although you're kidding. I'm sure I've seen this island before. What a roller coaster.

What a roller coaster. This is how he ends up on hot nymph island with Calypso, how he spends seven years. And, of course, he's been telling this story to King Alcinibis and Queen Areti on the lovely island, the hospitality island. And so what we've just heard that it is. is in the Nolan movie is basically him telling a story of how he got onto that island in the first place and how he ended up back on this nice island with hospitality. So the story, the Odyssey, is this weird story with a story when there's story. And when we get to that point, they're like, cool, thanks for the great story. Lovely to meet you, yes, yes. Here's a ship.

And he's like, thanks very much. Bye. And he sails home to Ithaca. He has not a bad luck, but geez, he has some good luck too, doesn't he? Yes, he does. He does. He's a hot nymph island. And can I just put a little doubt on his stories like, man, is this all just a cover up for your time and hot nymphile? No, no, no, no. But yeah, all the guys got turning to pigs and had a bag of wind. And it's like, mate, you sound like you're absolutely making it as up as you go along. No, no, no, no, no.

There was a woman with six dogheads. I swear to God. You get home to your wife and she's like, where have you been? He's like, so, you're not going to believe me. Yeah, we've got a bit of an unreliable narrator here. What's going on? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So he sails home.

You know, the reason he's still alive is he's got one goddess on his side, and that's Athena. Athena is his great goddess. She kind of is his wing man, wing goddess, wing lady. She's always looking out for him. She's always stepping in. She's always, like, defending him when Zeus wants to kill him. She knows, she's this sort of loyal friend who's always in his corner. and she gets him home,

she sort of sets him up with a bit of a return to Ithaca, and she says to him, look, just be really careful when you get back because stuff is not going well. Meanwhile, by the way, and I haven't told you this, meanwhile, by the way, Athena has also been visiting Odysseus's son, the teenager, the kid, Telemachus, and she's been saying to him,

right, we've got to get you off this island, Ithaca, because someone's going to murder you, you're at risk, and your dad is alive. He's been shaking a lot of nymphs. Must admit, but he's alive. He's alive. He's out there now. Yeah. So you need to go on your own little, kind of like telemesee, kind of like a little odyssey but for yourself. And so he gets in a ship and he heads off to Pylos and he goes to

meet Menelaus Asparta who fought with Odysseus back in the Trojan War. So the teenage boy is also having a little coming of age story desperately trying to go meet his dad who he's never met before. He's like, have you ever, do you know my dad? I don't know what he's like, But everyone tells me he's really great. And so Odysseus gets home to discover that his son is actually already been looking for him. And they do have a lovely kind of meet cute. They're like, oh, mom, dad. You know, it's that kind of nice thing.

Not mom, actually, not quite that point. Athena sort of is sort of helping out. Eumaeus, the blind swineherd who'd been loyal forevermore, is still there. There's been a guy called mentor who's been looking after Telemachus. And that's where we get the word mentor from. Wow. So like a mentor program comes from this guy called mentor, who's literally just the guy guarding, defending Telemachus from everyone who tries to murder him.

And Telemachus's middle name is mentee. Yeah, exactly. His middle name is intern. So Odysseus disguises himself as a tramp because he's really scared about what happens if he wanders back into the court. Like, will everyone just stab him immediately? So he's like, all right, I'm going to go in undercover. So I'm going to be disguised. a tramp.

Charlie Chaplin saw. A little mustache and hat. You know, bearded and broken and all, you know, and he walks into the court and he asks for hospitality, which is what is very vital in the ancient Greek world. You need hospitality because, as Chris Nolan keeps saying in the movie, anyone could be Zeus. He calls it Zeus's law. The Greeks called it Zenya.

There's a Zenya with an X, X-E-N-I-A. Zenya is the hospitality you owe to another man. And weirdly, Zena was hereditary. So there's a scene in the Iliad where two men, two warriors are fighting each other, and they both go, hang on a minute, what's your dad's name? And the other one's like, we're questioned, but okay, here's my dad's name. He's like, I know your dad. In fact, I know your granddad. They had dinner together one time, so we shouldn't fight.

And so they stopped fighting each other because their grandparents had been mates and had had a dinner once. And that's hospitality. That's how important is the Greeks. So Odysseus is like... have very socialized, heavily socializing parents and grandparents, wouldn't you? Yeah, it's cool, isn't it? And that has saved me a lot of fights. It'd be amazing in a pub, wouldn't you?

If someone's about to like break a glass and stabby with it and you're like, hang on a second, just check. Remember a casserole. Did you go to Heathcliff Primary School in 1996? There was a pot-off. Me too, you know. So, Odysseus, he knows. there's danger. He's got his son there. The son sort of recognises now and like, Daddy,

and they are going to sort of have a bit of a plan. Meanwhile, super clever Penelope. She has been holding off forever and ever and ever, but she finally agrees. By the way, 20 years have passed by this point. Odysseus went to the war in Troy. It was a 10 year war and it's taken them 10 years to get back to Ithaca. So 20 years are passed. So Anne Hathaway still looks fine, still gorgeous, but 20 years have passed. And she finally goes, all right, I will marry. one of the 108 random dudes in my palace, but we're going to do a talent contest.

It is going to be a game show. It is the Bachelorette. You have to string my husband's bow, which Odysseus was famous for stringing this really mighty, powerful bow, and he could do this trick shot. He could shoot an arrow through 12 axes, 12 bronze axes

and the little kind of triangle shape. One of those movie pre-movie? The production company. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's what that's from. That's exactly it. There you go. That's what that's from.

So Odysseus is the only person you can do. Obviously, so all the suitors give it a go. They're all rubbish, obviously. No one can string the bow. Odysseus, the tramp, steps forward and goes, I'll have a crack. Takes the bow, strings it, shoots the arrow through. Penelope is like, my husband! I love you!

And Edisis is like, hello! Good to see your wife. Love you. One moment. Let me just go murder these 108 guys. So he takes his bow. shoots Alcinamus in the neck. He kills him immediately.

In the movie, in the movie, it's the other way. In the movie, they take their time because obviously you want a good fight sequence. But, like, kills him. Telemachus and Dad, you know, Odysseus, the two of them are kind of a double act. They slaughter absolutely everyone. Like, it's a killing spree. A hundred and eight men are slaughtered. Some of the maids are killed and hanged brutally.

It's absolutely horrific. And this is his whole community, right? These are like the strongest guards from his own kingdom. Literally it. This is a, this is, you've absolutely got it. This is so funny.

He's shown up and he has killed the entire aristocracy on the island. And then he's like, great. I'm home. Hi, Penelope. How are you? Sorry about the delay. And she's like,

where have you been? And he's like, I'm going to tell you some of the story. Not all of the story. So he tells a part of the story. And he says to her, weird thing. I know you just want to like,

you know, crack on with the marriage. everything and let's get back to the marriage bed and have a lovely, in fact, she says to him, how will I know it's really you? And he says, oh, because our marriage bed is made of, what is it? What is it? He's a, oh, it's an olive tree. It's made from an olive tree. It's made from an olive tree. No one else would know that. So, like, she knows it's him. And he says, weird thing, I've got to do a couple of things before we can crack on with the marriage. I've got to go and do this weird thing where I need to escort the souls of my dead men to hell. And she's like, weird.

okay and he's like yeah and by the way they shriek like bats and she's like again weird um so so he's like just got to go and do that i also need to just pop in on my dad laities and she's like oh okay i guess it's been 20 years so he does that he pops in on his dad he escorts the the souls to hell he kind of lays them to rest he kind of keeps his oath he pops in on his dad laity's kind of old and blind and you know doddery there's this amazing scene when edithes first comes back and the only person who instantly recognizes him is not a person. It's his faithful dog who has been waiting, has been waiting for nearly 20 years to see his master again. And the dog, old, lame, looks up at him, wince his, sort of gently wuffs and goes, Daddy, and then dies.

And you're like, oh, oh, my. Heartbreaking. That's from the text. That's, yeah, that's in the poem. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and again, Nolan does it in the film very nicely. Heartbreaking. So Laetiz, the dad is like, who are you, who are you? And he's like, I'm your son. And Leitees is finally convinced that it's his son. And then a really funny thing happens. Everyone shows up angry going like,

um, did you just kill all our 108 children? And Odysseys is like, yes. No, I did do that. I'm really sorry, but they were trying to shag my wife. So in my defense, you did the same, right? and they're like, no. You've killed everyone. Killed all our sons.

There's blood everywhere. The carpets are ruined. He's like, yeah, my bad, my bad. And hilariously, the poem ends with Athena, the defender goddess, who's protecting him all this whole time. She swoops down and she just does a memory wipe and just goes, okay, everyone forget that happened. And she does the kind of men in black, you know, the kind of magic pen that makes people forget.

She just goes, back to Will Smith. And she makes them all forget and it's happy ever after. And that's the end of the poem. Wow. It's a really weird. And what's funny, is scholars really debate, is that last book? Is that Homer? Because it's such a weird book.

It's got such a downbeat strange ending. Do you remember the Lord of the Rings movies, the third one, that just kept going? Yeah. And they keep having these like, you know, the hobbits get home and everyone's like, yeah, we did it. And then there's like an hour left. You're like, what? That's in the original Odyssey.

There's a weird book at the end, and scholars have long debated. Was this tacked on by some random poet later on? Because it doesn't feel like a kind of culmination. It doesn't feel in the same tone. It feels odd. It feels weird. There's these kind of shrieking bat souls who are like, take me to hell. So, like, people have often said, like, who added this bit in?

And that's then led to the conversations about who's writing the Odyssey, was it Homer, or was it, you know, his name maybe means the story stitcher. Maybe it was loads and loads and loads of guys who stitched these stories together and it's actually just loads of contributions. Anyway, that is The Odyssey. Oh, my God. Incredible work. Beautifully told.

That is so good. And I've not told you... On the edge of my seat. I've not told you about 98% of it. It's a bonkers, brilliant, amazing, huge story. The Iliad is good. The Odyssey is. is way better, I think.

And ideally you read both, but I think the Odyssey works on its own. So if you just want to dip him. I mean, who did you say did the great translation? Oh, yeah. So Emily Wilson has done a lovely modern translation, which feels really approachable and accessible. Some people don't like it

because it loses some of the kind of drama, some of the glitz. There's a very famous one by, I think, Robert Fargey's, I think, who did a really good one that's really good. It's got a real flair to it. It's a real like pizzazz translation. And Emily Wilson's is a bit more stripped back

and a bit more honest and a bit more, like she, as you said, she's gone back and corrected some of the kind of mistranslations. She's gone back in and she's pared it down and she's made it more of a kind of human story. But it's very, very good, and it's the number one better in the world at the moment because everyone's reading it because of the movie.

So that is, that's basically Homer, the Iliad the Odyssey in a in a nutshell I've probably got stuff wrong you know I've probably misremembered things but there's Chris Nolan version and now there's the Greg Genover version I love that his version's definitely better

and a great companion piece would be the new new episode is it out yet your episode yes it is yeah it was the first episode of series 12 so you can watch that on YouTube and you can listen we're now fully visualised you can watch on YouTube we had Kyle Smith Bino as our comedian and we had Dr. Emily Hauser as our historian and yeah that's on

YouTube or audio and yeah we've got obviously 180 episodes in the back catalogue and if you like funny history shows of course you do because you're listening to one right now listener then you'll enjoy your dead to me because we share an awful lot of DNA I think you know we love it we love a big story and we love I'm more nerdy than you guys I'm more interested in the kind of the facts but obviously I like to laugh too so yeah so yes yeah I've listened to a bunch you your series over the years. I really love it too. So people, you've got to check out you're dead to me. And Matt will be listening to you tonight as he falls asleep. You've got lots of books available. That's all right. Yes. Yeah, kids' books too. If you've got kids

aged eight plus, I do kids books too and I narrate those and those. And those are really fun because, you know, we've got music and sound effects and stuff. So that's a hoot. So, yeah. Well, sorry. I think there's like a half second delay, which means that I keep thinking there's a spot and there isn't. Go again. It's fine. It's all. Good. No, no, it's fine. I'm done. I've done all my chatting. We really appreciate you coming on and telling us that tale. We get over to the UK every couple of years probably for a tour. We'll have to link up when we're over.

Oh, nice. Yeah, that'll be fun. Yeah, that'll be real fun. And maybe we can do another episode, another time, a different subject on something else. Welcome back any time, yeah. I mean, very interested about these underpants. I can tell you all about the pants. Yeah, that's a fun. That's one of our best ever episodes, actually. I had so much fun on that episode. So, yeah, give that listening as well.

My first time over in the UK, I got in some social awkwardness, not understanding that pants, here pants is the overpants and there they're the underpants. Yeah. It's a classic, it's a classic error, isn't it? I said, I was dating an English woman, and we went, we're having. having dinner at a friend's place outside and it was getting a bit cold. I said, I'm, I'm glad I put pants on tonight. And they're all like, what? Special occasion. I mean, looking back, a weird thing to say anyway, but.

In hindsight, yeah. I mean, yes. I think the lovely thing about, obviously speaking to you guys, is that we agree on 97% of our language, but every now and then, you'll say something and I'm like, what? And every now and then I'll say something and you're, and that's the joy of it. We just get those tiny little mistranslations, and that often leads to, hopefully, hilarity and not war. But, you know, sometimes these things lead to punch-ups. So, yeah. But my parents had dinner with your parents, so I think we're all good. We're all good.

Thanks so much for joining us, Greg. It was an absolute pleasure. I'm so sorry. I think I've talked to you for two hours, 21 minutes, which is ludicrous. I'm so sorry. That's great. It's nowhere the longest episode we've ever done. I did an episode about my favorite Australian football club that went for nearly five hours.

Wow. Well, you could be a Homeric poet there. I was going to say, we were talking about epic poetry and this is an epic episode. But you could be one of the sons of Homer, the Homeridae. So there you go. An honour. Honestly, it's not that daunting. It sounds massive.

It sounds scary. It feels intimidating. It really isn't. It's a little odd. It's a little weird. The Emily Wilson translation is really good because she gives you a one-hour introduction before she starts the story.

So you get all of that kind of nerdy stuff about who wrote it, what's it about, what are the themes. So you get like a really nice deep dive into the world a bit and then she goes, okay, let's do the story. But it's not terrifying. Honestly, there are way harder books from the ancient world and I'd give it a go if you fancy it. I mean, the movie's great.

The movie will give you the gist of it, but the movie is cutting a lot out. It's a masterpiece for a reason, but I do think it's surprisingly accessible, but also quite funny in places. There are times where you're just like, Odysseus, you're such a dick. What are you doing?

Get home to your wife. And he's just like, well, I'm just over here now. I'm on Wind Island. You're like, no ability to sort of multitask and just get, you know, fulfill his tasks. Well, as we say goodbye to Greg. Our new friend. Our new friend.

And your best friend. He doesn't know that, but... We say hello to the Patreon section. Everyone's favorite section of the show. Our old best friend. Our old best friend, that's right. And we also get to Excel relax a bit. Homer is the name of a Simpsons character as well.

Oh my God. I was thinking it the whole time. I just, I know listeners were going, when are these losers going to make some bad jokes about the Simpsons? We're cool. Yeah, okay. Okay. We could, we wouldn't, we never would.

I never say that. But we were thinking it, just like you, home. Homer, the name of the Cincinnati. That is really good. So the way this part of the show works, and we are just for a peek behind the curtain's sake, we are recording this late at night like we used to do. I was going to say, it feels like the good old day.

It does. When I had a day job and I said, no, you must suffer too. We must start recording at 9pm. For this, because obviously the UK time difference, we've got Greg's morning. our evening and now it is 11 p.m. And we're still rocking. Man, I say rolling. You know?

So, yeah, the way this part of the show works is we thank some of our great Patreon supporters. If you want to be one of these Patreon supporters, then why wouldn't you want to be? Yeah. Tell me that. Science says more than words ever could. You can go to Patreon.com slash too go on pod. There's a bunch of different stuff you can get there, including first access to live

tickets, discounts, including our upcoming Canadian trip. there's five shows plus me and Al and maybe David Warnocky I think might have been teased in last week's episode are going to be doing some stand-up shows as well tickets to all of that is on the do-go-on pod.com website but if you're on the Patreon you'll also get a discount code you know if you want up to you and yeah other things such as access to the Facebook group the friendly corner of the internet get to go on fun outings. Like we did a do-go on Day to the Footy, where we got the best seats,

Penny, a Patreon and AFL employee. Hopefully I can't remember if I'm allowed to say that or not. Forget it. I mean, use that Men in Black style memory eraser. I'll just beeped the word AFL,

so it's a beep employee. Yes. But anyway, I got a real cool seats. I'd never realize there was a 2A level at the MCG. That was a. That was a. And we were front row of level 2A.

Yeah, it was a section I've never been to. Wow. Very fancy. That's amazing. I had a great knot. We ended up hitting the town afterwards. You know, Sarah was there. Another Dave.

Everyone was either Dave or their partner's name was Dave. Yep. In my case, my comedy partner. Yeah, you said, you know, my comedy partner's name was Dave. They were like, we know. Dave's like my comedy partner. This is the first other. Dave I've ever, man.

Acting like it's a really unique man. Whoa. What did this is? Hi, my mother, that's also the name of my friend Dave's dad. We went on a mini pub crawl and but ended up at Splain playing the longest game of pool ever. There was six of us. Because he couldn't get it in and was three on three.

And it honestly went for an hour. Was anyone else lining up for the table? No one was lighting up. Two dollar coin there waiting. I got three, two dollar coins thinking we'd play a few games. By one. By the end of the end of the table. if they weren't going on, like, oh, I'm happy to never play that again.

It was, it was incredibly embarrassing. Although, uh, the silly odd missile man, I think he was, he was, he, he potted a ball with his first shot and thought, and potted the black of the end. I'm like, you were just being polite in the middle, weren't you? Oh, come over a missed the air again. Anyhow, uh, this part of the show is about thanking, uh, all of our great patrons. Um, and the first thing we do is for people on the Sydney-Schenberg level, above section of the show we call the fact quote or question section which actually has a jingle

go something like this i'll do it myself uh with dave harmonizing you're going high although always go high fat quote or question ding always remembers the ding we always remember the sing and my god i miss jess perkins so much we need those those dulcet turns she'll be back soon as far as we are aware Now, just one this week. She's going to keep it brief so we can get out of here by midnight. And it comes from someone called Gary Jeff. Rump to UK.

Oh, my goodness. And... This is where Greg's from, our new best friend. Oh, my God. Greg's probably listening. Hey, Greg. Hey, Greg. Yeah, so, you know, like I said in the last few text messages, what's up?

Where are you? Where are you? Let's hang. Greg. I'm reading a book thinking of you. Yeah, Greg, ellipsies. Yeah, like my last four or five messages are the same. Greg, question mark, question my.

Eric, copy your page, Greg. Gary J. I was giving himself the title of Just a Bloke on holiday. I wonder where he is. With a question. Can write a fact, quote of question or really, whatever you like, Bragg or suggestion. He's going question writing, good day, mates.

Is that you doing Gary doing? That's me doing Gary doing me. God, that's good. Good day, might. I'm just here waiting, wanting to ask you some trip advice. I'm going on a trip abroad with a friend who may or may not be an international man of mystery. Who could that be? Jason Statham.

Austin Powell? I get those two girls confused. I think you might be talking about Saraj. I get those three confused. And we're travelling to Canada in September. What? Gattie, Jay. I really hope it's not late.

September because we've got some bad news. The Saints are out of finals contention. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, that's a relief. Could you advise us on anything that might be going on in the area of Montreal and Toronto? Tartar for now. TTFN. Let me have a look.

I'm just on things to do in Canada.com. And I'm zeroing on Montreal and Toronto. There's only two things on. Very sleepy towns. Yeah, very sleepy. Saturday, September 19. You could see Dugel won live of the Oscar Peterson Concordia University. We're at a concert, I'll give it with that.

And actually, there's four things on because later that night, you can see Matt Stewart and Elsie Trambley Boucher do stand-up comedy at Theatre Son Catherine. Is that the blaze it one or is that a different one? No, but if you're in Toronto, you can absolutely blaze it. There's two shows at the Royal Theatre on Sunday, September 20. That's how they say to Theatre. Theatre.

That's the Dugo One podcast. live in Toronto. And later that night, you can blaze it at the boardroom comedy club where Matt Stewart and Alison at Trambley virtual will do some stand-up comedy at a place where we think you can like smoke a bong or something in there. And I'm going to pretend that I'm really cool at it. Ooh, that's sweet.

Yeah, but when we land in Melbourne, you have to say to immigration, I did not inhale. I did not inhale. I know what's legal. and I did not inhale, Your Honor. It's a judge at the gate in Australia. Although I think is it getting a bit more legal here? Well, so that's all in flux.

Anyway, so that's what's going on in Canada, Gary Jay, if that helps at all, if those dates line up for you. A couple of ideas. Yeah, something to do. Maybe, yeah, come hang. Yeah, we might be there. I need Gaddy, Jay. Thank you so much.

Very exciting that you're coming from the UK. I love that. fun. Of course we expect Sarage to be there. Yeah. He travels for everything. Yeah. We assume he's got technology that's not yet available to the rest of the public,

yeah, i.e. A teleport machine. Or living on a plane. Wherever it goes. Welcome to plane. Thank you so much, Gaddy Jay from a UK. Next thing we like to do is shout out to some of our other great new Patreon supporters. Justin only comes up with a game, but she's on here, so maybe I will.

What about we give each of them like a week? year island. Like... Oh, yeah, there was so many weird islands. Oddessus, Odysseus, Odysseus. Odessius. Odessius. Odessius.

Like Odessius went to. Yeah. Land of wind. Land of cannibals, pig boys, but then become hot pig boys. Hot pig boys. I think I like that one the best. Yeah. I'd love to know what it was like to live as a pig.

Hot, yeah. And then come back hot. And then be rewarded by being younger and hotter. Tick, yes, please. Yes, please. I see no downs. side. So are you up for that?

Do you reckon you could come up with nine? Okay, weird islands that you might go to do. Magical islands. Yeah, okay. And feel free to tag out at any time we can switch roles. Yeah, you might have to give me the mercy tap on the shoulder when you seem to losing my mind. No, I'm going to, I'm backing you into the end.

You have to tap out. I'm not tapping in. All right, first up from Address Unknown can only assume from deep within the fortress of the moles. Thank you so much for your support. Amy Stahl. Weird Island where everyone's a garbo and everyone spends all their time emptying bins. Okay.

Bin Boy Island. It's another reality show. The winner doesn't have to take out the trash. Bin Boy wants a wife. That's good. There's got to be some sort of tagline. It's time to take out the trash. Amy Stahl.

Great name. And good luck on Bin Boy Island. Next up, thank you so much to or from Victoria Point here in Queensland. in Australia, Peter Shepard. Everyone on that island's set of hands has crab claws. Oh. And they've got a really itchy bit on their back that they can't quite get to. I once had some, let's say, flowers.

Yep. And I thought, I felt like I had crab hands. Anyway, it's crab hand island. Crabhand Island. Crabboy. I couldn't think of this particular kind of flower. I was they ate on. Oh, it's crocus.

Crocus. Was it crocus? I thought it was lotus. I was lotus. You're right. Because I've never heard of crocus. Oh. Is that a flower?

Look, I'm not saying because I haven't heard of it. That's not a flower. Oh, thank God it is a flower. Crocus. It looks chelopee. What did you say? It's beautiful. It's a beautiful flower.

The crocus. Ugly name for a beautiful flower. People also ask, can you grow croakers in Australia? Yes, you can grow croakers in Australia. There you. Good luck. Croak you, croak me. Croak week.

croak us. From... We are losing our minds here. From Glen Elg North in South Australia, which is in Australia. Thank you so much for your support, Stephen Dell. Stephen Dell, everyone on this island is a chocolate that leaves in a box, like a large chocolate box. Oh, okay.

So you get a sign, when you arrive, you get a sign, what kind of chocolate you are? Yeah. Oh, this guy's pretty nutty. You're a bit around. You're a Maltese. Yeah. You get divvied up. Yeah.

And then put in a box. Then put it in a box. But you're like a human still? Yeah. But there's a shape exactly now. Like there's a shape. Oh, it's like a plastic. It's almost like a coffin.

Yeah. You're hard to escape. But maybe it feels nice. Yeah. Feels like you've got your spot. So finally you're at peace. Honestly, Stephen Dell, I don't think you're going to find yourself lay way there for seven years.

I reckon you're going to, I reckon you might keep it moving. The nymph would want to be pretty hot. The chocolate nymph. Obviously, all these islands also have a nymph. From Chicago, well, the windy city, not the windy island in Illinois. Thank you so much for your support, Carly J. Carly J. What is it?

May it may be difficult for you, but this is an islander once you arrive, you can't leave until you grow a beard that touches the ground. So easy for some looking at you. difficult for me. I might be there a few centuries. That's the other thing, but you will live as long, like you're immortal, but you can't leave until your beard hits the ground. Oh, great. And when your beard hits the ground. You're free to go, free to shave. But you also instantly die? Does age catch up with you? Or is that, have you, you, you're aging as a pause? I reckon, no, you go back to the age you when you landed on the island. So you pick up your life. Yeah. Everything's on pause, and there's not much,

it's a very boring island, too. So you sit around and literally watch hair grow. I like that. I'll be up for having a break. Yeah, if it was, I'd love to be just about a pause time. There used to be a show. I can't remember as a kid, but the girl, the main character, would touch her two pointer fingers together,

index fingers, and that would freeze time. Ah. Can't tell you any more than that. I just remember one time she was abusing her power and whoever gave her the power took it away from her, and she was up in front of class, been told to like solve an equation and she's just going touching her fingers together

and then she's like everything all right and she's like yeah oh just nervous twiddling my because she'd been abusing it and not studying properly or whatever and she's addicted to it now I guess so yeah have I made that up let us know let us know I've just realized that we're also on video for our patrons that's another one of the um what do you call it perks perks uh obviously we're isn't just perks, but you still get video perks. But I, yeah, I think a few of my symbols of trying to look like a cool stoner, the hand gestures in, they weren't lining up. They're undercut you a bit.

Yeah. But if you're not watching, then they're really cool. From Newcastle upon Tyne, Brownowl country in Great Britain. Thank you so much. Riddles. Riddles. Riddle me this. Land of dinosaurs that only get bigger.

Start up very small, it get bigger and bigger and bigger. At each day or each moment? Maybe each day a little bit bigger. Yeah. You wouldn't notice it, but if you go inside for wintertime, you come back. Whoa. Whoa. They've had a gross bit.

Oh, well, they're feeding you. Oh, I remember when you were this. Yeah, that's true. How school? Riddles, that sounds like it. That's an interesting place. Here, what do we got? Deep within the Fortress of the Moles.

If you are a mole person and you want to get your Christmas card or whatever, just make sure you go into the Patreon, fill in your details. DM me on there if you're not sure how to. Anyway, from Deep Within the Fortress of the Moles, address unknown. Thank you so much to Liam McInerney. Liam McInerney is on an island. There's a really, really, really tall tree, like several kilometers tall. So, let's just say it's tall than at Everest.

Triple the size of Manehvers. That's sick. So like, what's that? 20K tall, 25K tall. And at the top is a monster that you have to beat. But their thing is that they keep pushing you off. You fall back down. You don't die, but you have to keep going back up.

Okay. And there's a god on that island who says, this is my sacred magic tree. Don't cut it down. If you do, you'll be cursed. Yeah. You've got to go up and beat the monster. You've got to keep going.

Sorry. Sorry. And then, but you might chop it down. It just means you'll get cursed. You get cursed. So Odysseus has men that they're sore and that thing too. Those freaks love a curse. From Salisbury or Salisbury, Salisbury, probably maybe in Great Britain.

Thank you so much, Ella Dunkley. Elad Dunkley. Geez, what am I thinking about this one? Maybe. You give me your hand? No, no, no, no. I just sort of, I thought you were looking like you were. you were needing to tap out.

Oh, you were tapping. You've got an idea. No, no, I'm not tapping in. I thought you were showing me a hand like you should do something with the hands. Yeah, what about this? Do something with that. I'm cupping my hands. Okay.

Turn that into something. Okay, it's like the beard one. Yeah. Where you can't leave until you've drunk to 20,000 leagues of water, which is actually just in 20,000 liters of water. Leaguers. Yeah, liters of water, but you can only use your hands to drink. Right.

It takes a long, long. time. Okay. And also the water tastes a bit bad. Oh, it's a bit salty. Yeah. The desalination is also a, it's a set of hands. But you get to.

But the guy's sweaty. But when you get, he's getting his real, he's salty. So he's getting rid of the sea salt. Yeah. But leaving sweat salt. Yeah. So it's really, you know, maybe slightly better. Yeah.

But anyway, it's not a great island. It's another island that you'd like to leave. But unfortunately, you're going to have to drink a lot of that hand water. Drink you a lot of that hand water. Drink you a lot. Drink it away out of this one. Ella, Ella Dunkley. Dunk does feel like someone who could...

Splash around. Nominated for Terminism. From Edinburgh. What a beautiful city it is in Great Britain. Scotland, I think, to be precise. Okay, and who is there? Jack, based on email, I think so-name might be a colour son-in-g. It's grey, I think.

I don't know it was. Okay, what about this one? This feels like one to me. Yes. It's called the island of things. 13 kings. Okay. Okay.

You go on an island. There's 13 men that are all claimed to be king. They're all decked out regularly. You can ask them a series of yes or no questions. You can ask as many as you like, but you obviously can't. But you have to determine. You can't ask that.

It's a meat loaf conundrum. You have to determine which one of them is king. And you have your guess. And if you're right, you get to leave. And if you're wrong, you have to stay on the island. And you become a 14th king.

Yeah. That's good. That's good. That's good. That's really good. That's really good. That's the first one that I'm like, good luck Homer topping that. Yeah, that's Homer-esque.

Maybe we are Homer's kids. See, that was a moment when he said you are like Homer's son. I'm like, but I didn't. Well done. Wouldn't do that in front of Greg. Maybe if he comes back, then he can see that sort of me. That really, I mean, I did show him a little bit of my tediousness, obviously. I thought any new listeners, they need to hear the real show.

They need to hear it. And finally, address unknown. Again, Fortress of the Moles. Thank you so much to Regan White. Buddy, hell, not the colour. Regan White. Or as annoying kids at primary school would say, what's not a colour, it's a shame?

Yeah. All right. Good on, yeah. I was probably one of those annoying kids. Anyway, what's Reagan? Where's Reagan? What about a tap out for the last? one. Have you got anything for Reagan? Why?

Tap out, okay. It's a tap island. Tap island. Okay, this is good. Okay, so, and the taps are out. The taps are out. The taps are out. You've landed on Plummer Island. Mario and Luigi.

Oh, my goodness. Have gone to save the princess. And the pipes are in disarray. The taps are out. Yeah. You need to fix the, water supply and you can't leave the island until you do. But the nymph is really hot.

Really hot. Yeah. And there's mushrooms. They're like, what? They're making hallucinate? Are you sure? You sure you don't have one more? I like a Tap Island.

Thanks so much to Regan, Jack, Ella, Liam, Riddles, Carly, Stephen, Peter and Amy. It is Peter, not Petter, right? Yes, of course. As soon as I said it out loud, it is Peter. Sorry. P-E-T-A. I hadn't seen the name.

I thought it was P-E-T-E-R. Yes. It is Pettor. Pettor. Hey, the rock. They built the church. No, there is. I will say.

Petrified Rock. Is that anything? There is. I remember, it's spelled different. A rally driver. Oh. My dad was a big fan of it was Peta Solberg. Right.

And then in Hunger Games. games, there's a character called Pet, uh, it's, it's Peter, but it sounds like they've got a Boston accent. Peter. Peter. Peter. But maybe he's got an aching it or something, I forget. I've just seen this. I've never known this before, but Pettersolberg's nickname is Mr. Hollywood. For, for his flamboyant, high energy personality, vibrant showmanship, and openness with fans and media. I do. I love. That's so funny. I love when a, you know, like a kind of, generally dull subgenre of work or whatever

car drivers, they're normally quite dull people. To like in that world, Mr. Hollywood, what, that's a low bar. Mr. Hollywood. He's like, yeah, this guy, I tell you what, they show him me a photo. He looks like Mr. Accounting. Yeah, that's right, because he's now in his 50s.

But that's good on your pedestal, like Mr. Hollywood. All right. Mr. Hollywood, I love that. Okay, so, well, what does that mean? We were up to the Triptage Club, Dave. Can you explain that? This is our Theatre of the Mind style clubhouse slash Hall of Fame

for people who have been on the shout-at level or above for three consecutive years. They've never jumped off. And we won't jump off them. No. Because we were going to welcome them in to the clubhouse, put their name up on the wall in gold lights. Once you can never leave while you want to because we've got everything you need. We've got arcade machines. We've got every single translation of the old.

Odyssey and the Iliad you could ever even want every language. We've got a beautiful library. Before the Great Library of Alexandria burnt down or never existed or whatever, depending on how that story went down, we offlineed it all. Yeah. So we've got all of it there. We've got all of everything. Those six or, was it six, seven?

Oh yeah, the missing books. The missing books. We've got them. We've got a copy of each. Yeah. But you can't leave the library with them. I'm not afraid you've got to read them in the library. Yeah.

Just there was an incident. Okay. And we just can't risk that again. Yeah. Okay. So we've got, oh, the other thing is Dave, basically what it's all about is I'm on the door. I'm reading out a few names, the new inductees.

Everyone is already in there, which we're pushing up to 1,200 people. My goodness. They're in there chanting along, hyping up the new attendees. Dave's on stage. He's the MC. He's sort of hyping you up with a bit of weak wordplay or whatever, based on your name or where you're from. And Dave also books a band for the after party.

Jess has normally behind the bar. She's fine. Certainly don't look into it. But she's asked me actually to announce the drink, which she came up with. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're just the face. And it's the lily pad Iliad. And it's like a it's vodka.

It's all vodka with a mint leaf floating on top and a Fredo frog. So it was like a few different types of vodka mixed together. No, no, no,

just straight. Oh, just one vodka. And then a mint lily pad lolly floating on top and a Fredo Frogs were just like looking kind of dead in there. Chocolate Fredo Frog.

If Fredo Frogs aren't an international thing. Good on you. And Dave, you've booked a band? You're never going to believe if I've booked this week. We actually spoke about him

a couple of times in the episode, Will Smith is here. My God. Yeah. Performing the Will he added. He will be performing the Willi Add in full? Just make sure you don't get his wife's name in your mouth. Okay.

He doesn't react well. You'll joke on that. Luckily, I can't think of what it is. Yeah. So it's hard to say. I wouldn't say it. Yeah. It's not for Oldemort.

What is that? It's getting late. So I'm going to read out some names. If you hear your name, Joel gone in. Dave's going to be hopping up on the dance floor and then hang around for some Will Smith. He's going to be doing that song that he did a couple of years ago where he's sort of like walking with a woman on each arm. You see that really awkward video and he had a new song last year?

I like girls. You mean you're like, I hope that day I. That can't be real. Anyway, so I thought it was really good. Willie, really, really good. Okay. Okay, okay, we are getting close to the end here. I hope Greg's not listening.

Please, Greg, if you are, please turn off. I don't want you to see us like this. Great, please, don't say it like this. You've seen this at our best. No, no, no, don't see us at our worst. We were so good before. Oh my God, we were funny as. No, it was, it's been a great episode.

It's been a great episode. I honestly think it's been a great episode. And Dave, we're going to go see that movie? I think we probably, let's just say it at a normal big cinema. Yeah, I can't wait six months or whatever. But Greg's right. Right, it's tempting to, I'm sure it'll be on the plane when we go to Canada. You can't let me do it.

No. Because that's... We've got to watch it before then. Yeah, that's a slap to everyone who made the movie. Yeah. And which, speaking, Will Smith again. It's his favourite way of communicating, I believe. That and sick rhymes.

Girls, girls. I like pretty girls. Am I remembering that right? Yeah, it's pretty bad. Oh, hang on. Your impression was pretty much. We are not on the same. same page on this one.

All right, so what do we got? We got a few inductees, Dave. Are you ready to hype some people up? Yes, please. All right. First up from citrus heights. That sounds like it could be, yeah. Oh, my God.

In California, sounds like a mystical island in itself. Please, welcome into the club, Tanya Ciratina. The lemonade is never tasted so good in Citrus Heights with Tanya. Tanya Ciratina. Fantastic. Next up from Banning. Also in California. Yay. Welcome to the club.

Tori, possibly Crawford. Tori, tell us your story. Let's... Allegory, Montessori. Here are some words that rhyme with Corey. That's a Lisa Simpson episode. Her dad is home. From Leicester in Great Britain.

Oh my God. It's Amy Latimer. Lester, they certainly ain't a pester. Yeah. Never forgets you. Will, is that you? Amy and a bunch of other patrons, we had a fun night out in Lester after I did a who knew it and stand-up show there, maybe the bad boy show, and it snowed outside the pub as we left.

Oh, that's awesome. It was magical. Amy, I hope I'm remembering that right. Amy's like, I've never seen snow and I have no idea who you are. from Concord in New Hampshire in the United States Welcome into the club Stephanie Magnolia Vizano Concord We got a great big Concord

Go on the speed of sound Is that then? Breaking a Sanbury? Faster. Yeah, spelled differently but that's okay. From address unknown, assuming deep within the fortress of the moles Oh, yeah. Welcome.

Into the club, Elise, Treywick. What I reckon? Sometimes with the w. Could be true wick? Trueick. Sometimes the W gets lost in a wick, doesn't it? Yeah. Could it just be Trek?

Trek. I doubt it, actually. I'm not a trekkie, but I am a true wiki. Yes. Is that something? Yeah. Never sticky when you're with Elise. That's what you're kind of joke.

True wiki. The fake rhyme. Yeah, yeah. Kind of like a, yeah, Will Smith kind of thing. That's, in a way. What a compliment. you. From Australind in Western Australia.

What an interesting name. Thank you so much and welcome into the club. Sarah Hurst. Sarah, no one fairer. Hey, you're so far from the worst. You're the best. Oh, that's pretty. What about mirror mirror on the world?

Show me the best Sarah of them all. Oh, it's Sarah from Australind. Yes. Sarah Hurst, more like Sarah the first. choice Sarah today and if Jess was here she would be

biting my head off and maybe sometimes you're like okay you need those you need those forces in your life I'm like an animal on an island

without a predator I'm getting too confident human rights you're like oh who's this fucker and finally welcome into Der Clure

from Hastings on Hudson in New York City. Oh, the miracle on. Welcome into Lisa Vance. Lisa, advance into the club and take your rightful spot. Lisa's dad on the Simpsons name is Homer. Welcome into the club. Lisa, Sarah, Lee, Stephanie, Amy, Torrey and Tanya. And the last thing we need to do, Dave, can you believe it? Triple Trip-Tipage Club, we have an inductee. Whoa, this is, can I explain it if you don't mind. I'd love it if you did. People who have amazingly been on the shoutout level or above for nine

straight years. They've never dropped off. 108 months in a row, they've been supporting us. And for that, we say, thank you. It's incredible. Absolutely blown away. So stoked to get your name in my mouth. Now, the way that we are... Sorry about that. Sorry about that. The way we normally do this, really hope it's not Will Smith's wife. That'd be really unlucky timing. Doing some real fresh gear, aren't we? You about Will Smith. Oh my God. King John. You'll

I think he was ill. Fresh. Fresh. Fresh. Fresh. French. We've got to do another episode of 1130. It's fun to flashback to what it used to be like.

The recently deceased president. Oh, not so fresh prince. What? It all makes sense. I don't know. It's insane. Turn off, Greg. I mean, it's not even really that late.

I don't know. I wouldn't be in bed. I'd be sitting there. It's not like it's 4 a.m. I don't know. I'll be sitting. I'll be awake. What is what's going on? Wait, so we go one person to bring in.

Yes, this is their time to show. Well, what we do is Matt reads out their name. I give them a salute, give them a little affirmation, little compliment, something to live by. Just not, we give them a kiss, but I'll give him a kiss. Can you give him a kiss? Obviously, they can watch the video of this big moment. And then, Matt, we also give them a classic episode of Do Go On, of which they are now the official custodian.

That's right. And when I get around to it, and I should do it soon before there's way too many to do, I'm going to put that in the show notes. Official Custodian of the episode. Yeah, that'll be fantastic. All right. So we got one this week, and I'm so excited to announce that. from, uh, ooh, Stony Stanton in maybe Lester as well, LAC in Great Britain. Welcome into the triple triptage club, Nick Thompson.

Nick Thompson, may your life be more epic than a Homer story. Salute. Uh, Nick, when I stamp on your feet. Remember now, your name is Nick. Thompson. Now, Nick Thompson. I had to pull up the curtains, the mustache to reveal his lips. And you are the official custodian of episode 36 H.H. Holmes.

Yeah. Or depending on how you said, HH Holmes. Yeah. I accept both. Triple H. That's fun prox. Who I assume at the time we talked about inspiring a wrestler. Oh, yeah.

I don't know. Probably did. Almost guarantee we did do that. Thanks Nick We love you Enjoy your time You get to go through the golden door Have your patron patron patron

What am I saying Patronage Patriot page portrait painted Oh portrait sorry yes yes Your patronage pointed Portrait painted We've got Leonardo DiCaprio on there It's not sure if he's on retainer

Or he's kidnapped him I'm not really certain No but he's still there He's still there Or he's just having a great time And he seems to be happily working away So he will do your portrait. You're in the golden room with only 35 others.

So enjoy yourselves. Yeah, there's a bag of wind in there, all sorts of stuff. Don't open it all at once. Dave, do we need to tell anyone, want anything? A couple of quick plugs, I guess. Bad Boy, my new special is, remains out on the Humdinger Channel. That's right. Hasn't been taken down yet.

Really appreciate all the kind words. People have been saying watching it, sharing it, etc. We're going to be in Canada coming up. And then back in Melbourne and around the world on the World Wide Web on stream, we're doing the cheerful, earful podcast festival in October. Yeah, a few questions, people saying, do I have to watch it live? No, you don't. If you are in the room, you have to.

Yeah. If you're in the room, you can only perform at once. But if you get a ticket to watch it online, it's up for a few days afterwards to watch at your leisure. Yes, and you can get the weekend passing. Two do go-ons, Who knew it, and a book sheet. And then there's a separate primates. just for the really, yeah, I don't know, I wasn't sure if I was going to say sexy or sick, but maybe both. Both. If you're so inclined, you can go to do go onpod.com for any of this stuff as well as to suggest a topic, browse our merch, you know, hear about anything.

Will block voting still be open? Maybe it'll be closing soon if it hasn't. Yeah, check it out. Check local providers. Yes. Check local guides. Thanks so much again to Greg Jenner. You've got to check out, You're Dead to Me. It's a great show, and there's lots of you haven't heard before to check out there.

But until next time, we'll say thank you so much for listening and goodbye. Ladies. Game show wave. Oh my God. Giday, mate. It's Matt here in the year 2026, letting you know that Block toba is coming and the voting is now open.

You can go to Bitley slash Block 2020. Block is in all caps or you'll find the link on our social media on our link tree, that sort of thing. But voting is now open for Block 2026. You can vote for your 12 favorite topics in a short list of 230 something. Oh my God, I'm excited. Also, my brand new stand-up comedy special Bad Boy is out now on the Humdinger YouTube channel. You can check it out for free.

And I would love it if you did. Bit of fun. People are already saying really nice things. Watch, comment, feed that algorithm. I would be so appreciative. And I love you. Never forget that.