Empire: World History - 333. Bronze Age Apocalypse: The Fall of Troy with Stephen Fry (Ep 2)

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

Stephen Fry joins William and Anita to discuss how Greek Myths have shaped our understanding of the Bronze Age Collapse.  Was the Trojan Horse real? What can we learn about the end of ancient civilisations through The Odyssey and The Iliad? How much truth lies within the story of the Trojan War, and where is the real archaeological site of Troy today?  Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Editor: Bruno Di Castri Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. We seem to be in the middle of a Homeric revival. The Odyssey is about to hit our screens, and Stephen Fry's wonderful retelling of the story of the Iliad and the Odyssey is at the top of the bestseller list. We have him here with us. We are recording in Jaipu, and he's going to tell us how much of the story in the Iliad and the Odyssey

has a basis in reality. We know Troy and Mycini from Homer and the ripple of novels and TV series and movies which have come from his work. But what was the actual history? What was the archaeology behind those stories? What happened in the Bronze Age collapse that led to Troy and Mycenae?

Sini turning into empty ruins, just goat herds and olive trees. Today, we have none other than Stephen Fry, author of four spectacular books on the Greek myths and the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as all his other wonderful work in comedy and movies. And he'll be joining us to tell us what actually happened to inspire the works of Homer. Sing goddess of the rage of Achilles. We are back. We're doing our Empire Pod series on the Bronze Age collapse. I'm William Dalrymple. And I'm Anita Arna.

And we are absolutely thrilled. I'm going to tell you we've got a secret weapon on this podcast today. But you know, this is part of our Bronze Age series. And we've already talked about this collapse that occurs. And it is the strangest thing. It feels like literally overnight, people forget how to read and how to write. But one thing that they don't forget is their stories. And to talk about the most.

famous of those stories. Stephen Fry, our secret weapon, is here live from Troy, reporting. From the ramparts. Thank you so much for being with us. I can't tell you what an honor it is to be summoned to the imperial court of Empress Anita and Emperor William. And it is a fascinating period that we're exploring and it's a privilege to be talking about it. I'm not an archaeologist. I'm not a philologist. I'm not a scholar. I'm an enthusiastic amateur. So if I make errors of judgment or chronology, I hope I'll be. But then Homer makes the same mistakes perhaps, well, we'll see. It is one of my favourite subjects, the story of the Greeks and the Siege of Troy and Odysseus' return home, of course.

I say Greeks. Homer called them the Achaeans, the Danians, the Argyves. The word Greeks is a much later one, but it refers really to the Mycenaans, a warrior aristocracy essentially, obsessed with honor and reputation that would give them an eternal glory, a Cleos, as they call it. It's the Cleos that's in the name of so many Greeks, you know, Cleopatra and all the Socrates, you know, all the Cleese, Heracles, who's Hercules, you know, Herres' glory. He was actually named Heracles because she hated him because he was a love child of Zeus and she never liked Zeus's love child, her husband, her errant husband. And so as an attempt to placate her, Tariasius, because he was born in Thebes, suggested that he

changed his name, as a baby, this was, to Heracles, the glory of Heron. But it didn't help much. It didn't help at all. And then Athena even put her on Hera's breast when Hero was asleep, because it would bond them if he suckled her milk. But she woke and saw it and tossed him away, and her breast milk spread across the sky to form the milky way. I didn't know that story.

Because Galaxy, of course, is from the Greek for milk, galactic, as in lactic. So the chocolate makers are right. Anyway, this is completely separate. But, no. Keep going. Don't start. The cleese in names, apart from John Glees, or maybe he would claim it's the same, is that sense of glory. So a mortal can almost become immortal in memory by achieving this honor.

And interestingly, that honor is not just their fighting, but it also means they have to be buried and burned. And that's why it's so important for Hector's body, for example, to be collected by his family, because just to be left on the bare earth would deny you that glory. And they wore these extraordinary boasts tusk helmets. They were beautifully carved into plates like sort of thin dominoes that layered. And the tower shield that is described that Ajax had, the SACOS, which is almost a man's height, a huge thing with a great shoulder strap. And that Homer writes about accurately.

But in his day, which was 400 years later, these things had completely disappeared. So it's like us describing Henry the Eastgoat. something like that. Yes, that's right. So the great question in which we will explore is how Homer could have known about so much detail of the Bronze Age when his age, sometimes called the archaic Greek Age or the, of course, wider sense, the Iron Age as opposed to the Bronze Age. And by now they were using iron weapons. And so their memory, as it were, a race memory, obviously hundreds of years ago, is fascinating. It can only have been passed down by poetry and conversation and stories.

And the word from someone you love. You know, somebody you trust. And a certain amount of archaeology. I mean, you know, the palaces were there. The great palaces of Tyrins and Mycini and Thebes and so on. And Pylos were there. And they have frescoes, which we can see today, which show the Boers Tusk helmet and show some of the elements.

So they would have seen them. But they would have been mysterious ruins. Exactly. And the world they were living in was less grand. They were in huts at the bottom of the hill. Worthiest people who could build such palaces. Could move such stones. Exactly.

They must be heroes. Yeah. I mean, we had Joe Quinn, who I know you know, and have spoken with, in fact. And she painted this really sort of complicated, dissonant kind of thought in your head that you've got these interconnected, sophisticated, civilizations, which they interweave like lace.

And yet they are so fragile. Egypt, the Hittites, as well as the Greeks. So it's across the Mediterranean, all trading with each other, intermarrying, sharing gods occasionally. Yes. And then bang. It's remarkable, isn't it, that all this intercourse between these cultures and these cultures that were thriving all seem to collapse at the same time? And Homer is writing 400 years later, looking at the ruins, wondering what the hell went on in there. You have to imagine, for example, I think in the 14th century, Chaucer,

writing an epic poem about the collapse of Roman Britain. But without even the writing that there was in the dark ages of Northern Europe, he just using folk memory. It's an incredible idea, isn't it? Can you imagine him doing that? It's brilliant poet like Poma, but how could he have done that? The only way is if there had been an active sense of this folk memory alive. And as I say, you know, 400, 500 years, you know,

just think of our own history. So how much history is actually buried in this poetry? Well, I mean, as I say, there are the mentions of the technology of the time, the weaponry, which is clear. They didn't have any writing as such in the time of Agamon other than Linear B, which was a bureaucratic language. And it's noticeable that Homer never uses writing or anything of the kind. The alphabet was just beginning.

when Homer was around. So he may or may not, if you imagine there was a person called Homer, may or may not have been literate or known about the writing. But so there is not a single moment in all of Homer where anybody gives a message

that's written down. And so he's aware of that, I think. We had making this recording in Jaipur in Rajasthan and in the villages outside this town there are still oral poets who know

no epics by heart. There's two local ones that are entirely local to the area of Jobpur and Jaipur, which is this story of Papuji, who's a hero who rescues cattle. And Gogaji, who's a snake king who does, gets up to all sorts of amazing, amazing stories. And I've interviewed the homers who recite these and they are to send their father to son, father to son. They perform with their whites. Oh. And the children are fed. milk, which is a luxury in the villages of India, to improve their memory. And we'll go into the... So they're really sort of privileged and treated as kind of holy as it were.

But it is a living thing here. Yeah. I mean, I know tracks of Sanskrit, which pertain to some of the oldest scripts. I don't know what they mean exactly, but I know them from memory. You would talk them as a gun. Yeah, 100%. It's the one thing that you just said right now, I just want to unpack it. Yeah.

You said, if you assume that Homer really was one man, Now, can we just examine that for a second? Yes. What else are we to assume, if not one man called Homer? For many years, it was assumed that there was a man called Homer, and he was regarded possibly as Ionian, which we would now call Anatolian, so actually from the same landmass as Troy, not from the Greek mainland or the Peloponnese or one of the islands. Which was a Greek colony.

Yes, it was a Greek colony and was inhabited by Greeks. And not to be confused with the Ionian Sea, which is right the other side, it's all very confusing. as a lot of Greek things are. He was reckoned to be blind, and there were mentions of blind Homer and this sort of great man. And then an American called Millman Parry

did a sort of tour of what was then Yugoslavia, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia. And he found this living tradition of bards, I suppose we'd call them poets, like the ones you've mentioned here in India, who recited long poems from memory and also improvised and added new parts to them. And he recorded them and noticed that there were extraordinary similarities

to the way the poetry of Homer works. The epithets, the famous were the Wind Dark Sea and the rosy-fingered dawn. Yes, Rhododactyl. Yeah, exactly. And the names having it's always, you know, Agamemnon, Anaxandron, king of men, and Nestor, tamer of horses and swift-footed Achilles. So on all these little memory landmarks that the poet needs to sort of leap from one to another. And the genealogies, which is extremely important.

I had the privilege of traveling in the Golden Triangle, the sort of border of Myanmar and Thailand where the Aki people live. And we filmed there. I was doing a documentary about language. And there was a man there who learned the genealogies of all of his people and his clan. And so when a boy came of age, this man would recite to him his genealogy

and the boy had to learn it over weeks and weeks and weeks. And it was a list of names, Begats, essentially, because the Hebrew Bible does the same thing. And very possibly, Isaiah and the others also were oral to begin with and uttered their prophecies in exactly that way. and so, Biggato and so, little memory cues. And these Aki people, I mean, they go all the way back to their original Adam and Eve.

So they can take a day to recite their genealogies. So these are memory systems for a people to cohere their culture, to feel who they are, their identity, as well as their stories. And this existed in Yugoslavia, and as you say, it exists in India. In India, in this area, it's actually a healing thing. And the Bopas are brought in if someone is. is ill, or even if the cattle are ill, in the case for the Papagie epic. And so if you suddenly have a sort of flu, your cows go down with something and they're not

producing milk, you bring the Boporan and he'll sing for 72 hours or you can pay him to do the whole thing over five days. And at the end, the lamp is extinguished. And at that point, the healing takes place. It's meant to be the... We also have the baghatting here. I mean, if you've ever been to the gats... You certainly do have a fair amount of baguette with one billion people.

Yeah, a lot of baguiting went. But, you know, you have that... Not the gap that you chew. No, no. The guts, which is just near the Ganges. So they sort of built up platforms. Oh, yes, of course. I know what you mean.

And you will have... If somebody dies, I mean, it happened when my father died, you go to the pundit who has represented your clan for thousands of years. And you will sit before him. And he has before him this book of vellum with all of the names, Begat-who, Begat-who, Begat-who, and they are all men. And I think I'm one of the first women to insist on my name being written. It may not surprise you at all.

A little bit of a row on the gat. But yes, I mean, and they can recite quite far back, but not as far back as your academic. No. And it's interesting, isn't it, that even in the modern Western tradition, my father's family, which is the non-Jewish side of my family, they kept the family, the Fry family tree in the family Bible. Right. You opened it, and there it was. And that's quite common, I think.

A lot of families do that. There is this sense that your genealogy and is somehow connected to your identity and even to your religion. Yeah. But circling back to where we say, I love this, this is you're so fit into this. podcast. We love dogleg on this podcast. Rabbit hole. Rabbit hole jumping up. But you so shaking her head. What I should say, previously on this podcast, I was asking. So the evidence then, because of those linguistic patterns, because of the conventions, is it may not have been just one

blind man writing it down. Different rhapsodes, as they were, called Demodocus in the Odyssey is the Bard who starts to recite about the Trojan War when Odysseus is an anonymous guest in Toronto. interrupts him and says, whoa, wait, I was there, I know what I'm talking. And he starts then to take over. And you learn everything that happened to Odysseus in flashback from that moment. But the character of Demodocus, people have always said that's little self-portrait from Homer. Because, you know, there he is this bard who's revered and whose job is to remind people of who they are

and to be the keeper of the record of a people and their history. So these stories that had moved across time over the three or four, five centuries from the collapse of the Bronze Age had presumably been kept alive by a mixture of these bards. Ioi do they're called or rhapsodes. And nonetheless, when we get to Homer

and what Homer left us, there is something different. This moves from the kind of psychologically flat, repetitive poems, if you call them that of the Yugoslavian tradition. I can't speak for the Indian, obviously. And it becomes something quite different. The psychology, the ambiguity of character,

the point of view about war that comes through the Iliad. Homer is not, you know, he's not glorifying the Greek tradition and dissing the Trojan. It's very noticeable that anyone who reads the Iliad ends up feeling far more sorry for and in line with Priam and Hector than with the tantrums of the killies. Exactly.

And Agamemnon is a failed leader. He constantly makes mistakes. He's always wrong, in fact. And everyone sort of ignores him. He has that sort of miserable leader problem. I'm as strong as Ajax, but everyone thinks he's the hero. He's whining and awful, but we'll come to him in a minute. He's simply whining and awful.

Can we head with Agamemnon to the real Troy and located on the map? Where is it and what's the story of its rediscovery? As with another great American is about to arrive, as with Millman Parry, who was the one who gave us this new view of Homer as possibly a series of rhapsodes. There was another American called Heinrich Schliemann, a German name, but he made his fortune in America out of gold. It was a very rich man.

And he had an idea that was revolutionary. One thing we ought to remember about the West is that Homer was really worshipped once he arrived towards the beginning of the Renaissance, but that throughout the dark ages and the medieval period, it was absolutely essential to believe that myth was fantasy. It was not rooted in truth. The idea that it was true was a kind of heresy because the only truth was Christian truth.

And these were pagans with gods, multi-gods, you know, polytheistic religion. And therefore everything about it was a fantasy. And you could enjoy it and some of the intellectuals at the very end of the medieval period were beginning to. And obviously, you know, Chaucer had written about Troilus and Crusade and so on. And, you know, you had to have a very sort of delicate view of how you presented Greek mythology. But certainly the idea that it was founded in absolute truth was just nobody believed that. Nobody.

And suddenly this American says, I believe there really was a Troy and that there was a war there. And in 1870, he goes to the... The Dardanelles, Dardanos was a Turkish, sorry, was a Trojan founder king, and they called the mouth of the strait, these straits that lead to the Sea of Marmara that then goes to the Bosphorus, of course, and into the Black Sea. The same straits where Gallipoli is fought for the same reason. Where my father's father fought and for the rest of his days, you would always say, I always respected Johnny Turk.

My wife, Olivia's grandfather's. right testicle was shot off at Gallipoli. We've all got a little and still managed to produce something like 120 great-grandchildren and they all went and had a ball in Gallipoli, because that part... They had a gillipoli ball. They have a gilliply ball.

It's a little further in. It's a landmass at the north of the peninsula, but the actual mouth the Greeks called the Hellespont. Helle was a Greek who fell off a golden ram that was flying over there. And where he landed, where he landed, was called the Helles Pond, the Helles Sea. And the ram flew on to Colchis, which is now Georgia,

and its fleece was guarded by a golden prince. And of course Jason, then his Argonauts sailed through the Dardanelles, through the Bosphorus, to the Black Sea, to, or the Eucsine Sea, as they call it, to get the golden fleece. But anyway, that point has always been vitally important for trade, because it is the gateway to the East, cliché as it is, but from the Aegean, you have to get first through the Sea of Marmira, then to Constantinople, Istanbul, whatever you like to call it. The Trojans were taking a toll? They were like Singapore.

Exactly. Exactly. There's a very good analogy, Singapore. Yes. And it became a very rich city taking its tolls from every people traveling east or traveling west. And the gorgeous Troy became a sort of legend. And Schliemann said it's going to exist somewhere.

And he found this place called His Salik. and began to dig to dig in a way that still makes archaeologists shudder to this day. I mean, pickaxes.

I mean, they basically say he did more damage Detroit than the Greeks. I'm really interested sort of 1870 is the date that you're saying. If you have a world

that has to change its view, that fantasy is real, I mean, was the world shook to put it in Gen Z? It was a world that was already being shaken.

It had been shaken by another form of archaeology, if you like, geology. which had absolutely rocked the foundations of Victorian belief because the geology was starting to prove that the world was not just hundreds of thousands,

not just millions, but billions of years old, which was horrifying. I mean Ruskin called it those damned hammers. Tick, damn, bang, bang, bang. They weigh, you know, all these archaeologists. And it was seismic. And then, of course, Darwin had his go. So it was a period in which the faith and the foundations

of belief that had held for hundreds of years were really beginning to shake. And then there's this new kind of, as it were, geology, archaeology was to show that there was truth to the Greek stories. Well, and what happens afterwards, I mean, you can certainly see that in the patterns of the politicians that we get, everybody trips over themselves to be a classicist.

I mean, it becomes the thing that the ruling class will study. Gladstone wrote an enormous book just on the subject of colours in Homer. I did not know that. I don't know that isn't. Yeah, it's important linguistically actually because he, you know, there was no color blue described by Homer, which seems insane because you look out of the Aegean and the sky. They've got a lot.

Why is it wine dark? It's not wine dark. It's blue. Stephen, can we just, before we go to the break, just describe the Troy, which will be. No, there's an archaeological feature called a Tell, as in William Tell or any other, which is like a sort of layer cake, essentially, that builds up into a mound. And that's what he found at his sarlick. And there are a number of layers that are different instantiations of the city of Troy. That's to say different civilizations built cities there that we use the word Troy of, but there are at least nine.

And they are called in Roman numerals Troy 1, Troy 2, Troy 3. In fact, some of them are even 7A and 7B. And he thought Troy 2, I think, was the Troy. He found it. There was treasure there. So he dug down to the second sort of level of Troy. and he called it Priam's Treasure and everyone said my God it's Priam's treasure

Archaeologists now, no he was hundreds of years almost a thousand years out and it was much, much older and the Troy we think that was the one that must have inspired this series of legends which eventually get told by home and come to us through that

is 7A That's right 7A is the most likely candidate there are sort of water jars and various other things that are still there and evidence of burning and it's the right age. It's 1,200 years old, give or take, 30 or 12. We met with Joe last time this empire, which not many of us know much about the Hittites. Yes. And it was

on the kind of periphery of that world. It was. The Hittite empire sort of certainly encroached on that. If you read Homer, of course, everybody speaks Greek, the Trojans included. Now they can't have spoken Greek of that period. They would have spoken a sort of Hittite tongue called Lewish or Lewian or Luvian, it's sometimes called L-U-Bel. W-I-A-N and that was completely unrelated to Greek really. But Homer was, you know, like a film, Troy or I dare say Christopher Nolan's film. They'll all be speaking English in that, just so it's the similar thing. And we have in the Hittite archive references to a rebellion or something on this coast.

A little local trouble. What they call the city is, might even be related to Iliam, mightn't it? Is it, Will Lusia? Will Lusci, yeah, something like that. Okay. We're going to sort of take a break now. But join us after the break. We'll continue our Odyssey with Stephen Frye.

Welcome back. So we've talked about the places. We're going to talk about the people now. And we are going to get to the man who boils my blood, Agamemnon, in a little while. But we should, first fall, lay the landscape of this. The whole story of Helen of Troy, of Paris, of Agamemnon, of Fijinaa, all of those people. I mean, just give us a little Reader's Digest version of this story. Paris was a handsome young shepherd.

living on the slopes of Mount Ida outside the city of Troy, when suddenly Hermes comes to him in the shape of another shepherd and says, would you do me a favor and judge a competition? And he leads him to a clearing, and there are three beautiful women who are goddesses. They are Hera, the Queen of Heaven herself, Athena, the goddess of wisdom and Warcraft, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty.

And he says, we've got to decide who's the most beautiful, the backstory. if that is that there was an apple which each of the goddesses wanted and it was awarded it was the apple of discord awarded to the fairest and they couldn't decide who the fairest was and they decided that paris this shepherd should do it so he went to her hearer who said i will give you powers and principalities and everything you want wow and she's just like just like indian politics exactly and athenes says i will give you wisdom i will give you the understanding the hearts of men He thinks, wow, that's good.

Surely, oh, she's won. And then Aphrodite opens a little scallop shell and shows her a face. And it's the face of Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, the queen of Sparta. It says, give it to me and I will give you her. And he immediately says, you've won. The other two disappear in a puff of fury. Great, yeah. And sure enough, and it turns out the Paris is actually a prince of Troy.

and he'd been abandoned on the hillside because he was going to be the curse causing the downfall of Troy, which of course he does. So it's the typical wonderful prophecy. But he's welcomed back into his family as a prince when they discover who he is, not knowing what was going on.

He then goes off to Sparta where Menelaus, who's the brother of Agamemnon, the two Etraean brothers, from the house of Atreus, which is a cursed house. We might come to that later. It's quite interesting. And he basically,

steals Helen. Yes, because Aphrodite doesn't show the wedding ring in the shelf. No, that's right? Helen's a little bit married, just slightly married at the time, right? And he cants her off with a lot of Menelaus's treasure as well by boat to Troy. And Priam and Hecuba, who are king and queen of Troy, sort of welcome her and she stays. And obviously, Menelaus is outraged in Agamemnon, who is the sort of boss brother, the chief of men, the Annex. They plot revenge. They call, as it were, sound the hunting horn and call for all the kings, princes and chieftains of the Mycenaeanian world from Thebes to Ithaca and outcome Odysseus and, you know, all these Adonias and various other figures, Ajax, the two Ajaxes, and all the famous heroes. And they gather on this huge number of boats and they sail off to Orlis in Biosha, ready to get a fair wind to Troy. But the wind doesn't come, as it is. happens. Agamemnon has in his spare time killed a deer that happened to be sacred to Artemis, Huntress goddess. They irritate gods, left, right and center. And so she curses the whole

fleet by dropping the wind, so there's no wind. It gets very stale and very hot. And eventually Calcas, who's Agamemnon's prophet, says, well, you've killed the sacred deer and you must sacrifice your daughter, Ephigenia. This is where my problem starts. Yeah, it's not good. obviously and Agamemnon tricks his wife, Clasdemnester, by sending a message saying Achilles, the prince, the golden prince Achilles, the most handsome, gorgeous, brilliant warrior ever, the greatest mortal alive, wants to marry a Fijania, come over from Mycini, come over from Tyrians, on a boat and for the wedding. So she's terribly excited, Clytemnestra, you can imagine, and so is aphigenia. And they come over, and Agamemnon basically says, no, that wasn't true.

I'm actually I'm going to have to sacrifice for the order to get the wife and you know he sees himself as you know poor beleaguered leader having to make a difficult decision to kill his daughter

Achilles is furious because his name was dragged into it without his knowledge and this begins the needle between Achilles and Agamemnon that is to become the great casaspellai of the Iliad and anyway

so yeah she sacrificed and there are two stories one is she is just simply killed. Another is that she sort of disappears and then she appears later in Taurus. And there's the wonderful play by Euripides. And then operas. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Eugenia in Taurus, where she becomes a priestess. But are they real? Are they real people? Well, are they real people? Yes. And did this war take place? Yes. After he had excavated Troy, Schlingaman went to Mycini and in 1876 and he dug up a lot around the palaces and so on. And he, of course, did the same thing.

He found a golden funerary mask, quite staggering beauty, which he instantly named the mask of Agamemnon. Once again, he was hundreds of years out. It was far too early, but it's still called the mask of Agamemnon. And he certainly showed that the Mycenaan Empire was very similar to the kind of one that Homer describes. And we know things like the Megaron, the hall around which the palaces were based, very like a medieval castle hall.

And there's the Gate of Lions, which is a very famous image that is often reproduced to disqual, These two wonderful lions facing each other, but now sadly headless. Yes, no, headless indeed. So whether Agamon existed, there was the figure called in Linear B, a Wanax, but an Anax in Homer, because there are different kinds of king in the Greek world. There's the words we know, of course, the first word we know is Tyrannos, from which we get tyrant, which isn't necessarily the despot that we think of now, but it usually means a king not from

bloodlines, but from right of rule. And there's Basilioos, which is the most common word for king. from which the name Basil drives. But then there was Anax, which is like the overlord. And that's what Agamemnon was. He was the Anax Andron, the chief of men. That's how he's always described. And so he was the commander-in-chief.

Whether he lived, I mean, if he did live, and, you know, there would have been an emperor of that time. And there seems no reason for it not to be Agamemnon. The name, you know, Homer's not the only one to use it. There are other sources to the Trojan War than Homer, it must be remembered. And for example, I mean, obviously later ones like, you know, Virgil, because, you know, the Trojan horse is not in the Iliad, no. And so these other sources which give us stories all agree on the names.

So, you know, there is an absolute unanimity about the cast of characters, not just from Homer. But, but, but any evidence of the war, when you look at the archaeology, forget Homer for a minute, You actually look on the ground and you try it. In Mycini or in Troy? In Troy. Oh, in Troy, yes, there is. Sort of piles of arrowheads. Arrowheads and, yes, burning and indeed of Greek artifacts too.

There were certain signs that actual Ikeans were there. And they're Greek arrowheads. Yes, from the Perpennes. Exactly, yeah. So there is that, there's a real sense of it, a real sense of it happening. And Macyni, you know, becomes, in our imagination, the great empire, that followed the Minoan Empire, which I'm sure you... Have you covered that?

I'm sure you... We haven't. No, we will. It's like a school exam, isn't it? We haven't covered that yet. No, no, we really do get a de-minus. Because we should just talk about the language for a moment, because that's very important.

People may have heard of Linear B, which is this mysterious language that was discovered in Mycenaean and places where the Mycenaean Empire held in Pylos in places like that, which is further south on the Peloponnese. And no one could translate it, because they didn't know what language was in. And it never occurred to anyone.

It seems so simple to us that it was in Greek. Because no one thought that Greek in the Bronze Age was spoken, that it was a later language. So they thought maybe it was Dorian or it was some sort of new language that no one knew because they couldn't translate Linear A. The two languages were named by Arthur Evans, the great excavator of Connoisse in Crete, exactly. And Minoan means of Crete because Minos was the great king of Crete.

So Linear A is still untranslated, not decoded. A man called Michael Ventris. And I live very close to his blue plaque where he lived. And he was a self-taught genius, really. And he and John Chadwick between them. And there was an American called Alice Krebao, I think her name was, who was a scholar, whose work they based it. But it was the Rosetta Stone, essentially. He said, well, suppose this is Greek.

It wasn't Rosetta Stone in that were no other languages to compare it to, But as with the Rosetta Stone, you could say, suppose there were place names in there. Suppose in some of these documents we have in Linear B, there is a name like Tiryns, the city, or Thebes, the city. And he worked it out and he translated it. And we discovered that there was this language. And what's interesting is that it was a language not of Grand Warriors, not of magnificent heroes, not of poetry, not of kind of culture, intercourse, the language of Greece that we know and so respect from its classical age, this language of philosophy and poetry and insight and magic and science and all the glories

and rhetoric. But it was a boring language of tax records and bureaucracy. But then when you think about an empire, an empire, yes, is led by alpha males and brilliant plotters and great but the civil servants as well. But without the civil servants, without them, without the supply chains without the... It's hitchhacker's guide, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. You fire off your bureaucrats, you all die out. Exactly right.

And that's the sort of proof because that's all, they're the only ones who left a record. Right. So you've got two completely different sorts of sources. You've got the linear B, which is giving lists of sheep and olive oil delivered to the palace and the amount of grain in the granaries and this sort of stuff. Yeah. And it doesn't actually... It's equally true, but it's a completely different view of the same world.

It's in-land revenue versus poetry. I mean, it's a touch of that in Homer. In as much as one of the most famous parts of the early part of the Iliad is called the catalogue of the ships, in which he lists all the ships that the different islands and lands and provinces sent to Agamemnon and to his fleet. And it's quite bureaucratic in that sense, which is, you know. But also, you get that from Homer's, he loves a list. That's what I mean. That's what it is, the catalogue.

The whole thing is exactly the same thing. Also get in the linear B a reference, a key reference to watchers on the coast. Yes, that's right. Down on the south there, there's this sense that they are being invaded. And there's a call for more bronze, isn't there? They need more material to defend themselves. There is this echo, you're right, that they're under threat. So Joe taught last episode.

Joseph Quinn, yeah. about how there are signs just before the collapse, just before Troy and, or Troy 7A and my senior are, in one case, destroyed and the other case, abandoned, that there is re-fortification, there's anxiety in the air, that this is a world which is not, despite its sophistication,

despite all its defenses, despite its boreheaded helmets and its bronze swords and all this, these people are nervous. They know, they know, that their world is threatened somehow. Absolutely.

And I think any reading of Homer shows you that there is a melancholy sense of ending all through both the Iliad and the Odyssey. There's regret at the slaughter and the sense of its uselessness and perhaps the emptiness of male honour and all that it stood for this Cleos. And in the Odyssey, he gets home,

but he's lost all his men. He is naked and alone on his island. and he has to slaughter more to get to his wife, who is sort of doubtful of him. And he doesn't even stay on the island. And he goes off on this fruitless expedition to try and expiate Poseidon, who was still angry with him.

There is this sense, because Homer would, of course, known that this was, he was writing about a civilization that was on the brink of ending. And he brings that sense of failure there. And it's in all Greek culture, this sense that they stretch too far. and that everything comes to an end

and that the human enterprise is always doomed. I mean, you're sitting in a country of epic poetry as well. I mean, the Rama and the Mahabara, but they always have happily ever after. I mean, at the end, you know, you'll have the suffering. And they don't do this here. Bollywood is inherited a bit of that. Well, no, but there are two versions of that.

There's one where she jumps into the funeral pyre. There's another one where she goes, I'm not having anything to do with you, Ram, because you didn't stand by me, has his children. No, and takes his two children. Lowen Cush and won't let him see them. Into the forest. Yeah, into the forest where he discovers them years later.

Complicated. Another chat for another time. But can I talk about the horse again? Was there a horse? Was it filled with warriors? Was it the downfall of that empire? Was Matt Damon inside? It's a magnificent device.

I mean, one of the readings you can have of the whole myth cycle of Troy that Homer gives us is that warriors don't win wars. smarts win wars. There are two gods of war in Greece, and it's very important there are two gods of war. There's Aries, who is the bloody god of combat, of fighting, of martial violence. And there is Athena,

who is the goddess of warcraft and tactics and strategy and being smart. And her favorite human, her favorite mortal on the face of the earth, is Odysseus, the crafty king of Ithaca. Clever one. And he's the... the one who ends the war, not Ajax, not Agamemnon, not Achilles. They all fail. He wins with his brain.

And it's as if the Greeks or Homer are saying that, are saying that this civilization, the only figure that we should really reverence in the end is Odysseus. And I'm going to devote my next epic entirely to him because he shows that it is our minds that are going to conquer the world, not our brawn. And it is Athena, not Ari's the god of war, that who is going to do it. And so he uses smarts he basically invents that he gets everyone to build this enormous horse beautifully decorated horse with a trapdoor in its belly that could fit sort of 20 men or so and uh he then instructs agamemnon to move all the ships from the shoreline behind the sort of picket and the defensive where they've been for 10 years and and sail off around the round the headland uh and to

empty the the the plane of ilium in front of the the the gates and the walls of Troy, the topless towers of Ilium, as Marlowe called them, and just have this horse. And the Trojans wake up one morning and look out wearily over the walls. And for the first time in 10 years, there's no Greek encampment. There's nothing but this strange object standing on the plane. So they kind of creep out rather nervously and they look at it. And there's a little message somehow.

I don't know. She can't be written on it. It's a very good point. Because it's not in Homer, as I say. in home and never, never uses writing, but I think Virgil does suggest it's written. Basically saying this is a gift because you've won. You've won the war. We're going home. We can't. We can't see, do you? Have this horse. You know, it's, and, you know, there's a sense that it's sacred and that, you know. And so they all celebrate and move it in. Leoccoon,

who's one of their prophets and very excited by it. Cassandra, who is a daughter of Priam, a priestess, who has been given the gift of perfect prophecy by Apollo. But then he tries to have his way with her and she rejects him. And he's outraged and he can't take the gift back. He found her so beautiful he gave her this gift. And God's cannot take back a gift they've given. So he spits in her mouth. And that spit is a curse that although her prophecies are true, they will never be believed.

So she says, no, this is a trap. And they know no one hears. She said, no. No, no, no. And then in it comes and they close the gates And there's the horse in the city. Overnight, Hacquemnon is men creep back And then the trap door swings open

And out pops Odysseus and the other men And they unlock the gate and in come the Greeks And they slaughter. And they disgust the gods Because their vengeful violence, their rape, Their sacrilege is absolutely unparalleled. It's dark. It's really dark.

You know, he does not approve. And there is a great sense of sorrow and horror as the ashes and smoke rise. And the women are bundled off to be sex slaves. And the whole. Agamemnon takes off Cassandra, in fact. And Cassandra, as she goes, cries, you're taking me to my death and yours. And of course, he doesn't hear that. Believer.

Yeah. And it's a miserable sight. And very few of them, Nestor, the old Nestor king of Pylos, is about the only one who just gets home very quickly. and quite happily. Almost all, Domeneas has a terrible time, kills his own son and who's, you know. But the archaeology shows that Pilos too is, is burnt and destroyed. It's part of this wipe out of the Roselot. Exactly. Did that really happen? Did the horse exist? Well, I know there are theories now about it being a sort of metaphor, and maybe it was. Poseidon, the god of the sea, was also the god of horses

and the god of earthquakes. And one of the standby explanations for the end of any civilization, whether it's Mayan or Trojan, is that there was an earthquake. And climate change and earthquakes are the big outside human influences that can cause the end of civilizations, as we know. And certainly there's a belief there's evidence. There was a massive earthquake that ended the Mycenaan Empire, that ended, you know, it was one of the contributing factors

to the end of the Mycenaan Empire. and the various empires around the Mediterranean that fell. And Troy 6. And Troy 6, that's right, which is one of the candidates for the real Troy. I just, I mean, we're coming to the end of our time, but just one thing that occurs to me is that while you were talking about, you know, gods giving boons that they can't give back. I mean, you know, again, we're doing this in a country that has many gods, has gods of war, has gods of the sun, has gods of the moon and gods of the stars.

And also this idea of, you know, if you give a boon, you can't take it back. so you have to give a boon extra, which will undo the first boon and mess it all up. And I don't know what, you know, these stories are so compelling. Have you ever looked east, you know, more east, to the kind of mythology here and the marriage of the two? I felt unable to do so because I didn't grow up with them. And it would be merely the act of someone having to research. And my blood isn't in it, if you so do mean. And I would feel, obviously, it's much more of a job for someone like you.

Oh, you'd have so much fun doing it. I would love it. And I do enjoy. You know, I remember seeing the Mahabarata with, you know, the Peter Brook. And it was amazing. And absolutely spellbound by it. And like Greek myth, it has juice. It has character.

It has failure. Ambiguity, too. Ambiguity. They're not golden heroes. They're full of flaws. And I love that. Yeah. It's wondrous.

Stephen, today, why should people still read Homer? What is it that makes it living for us today? And why at this moment do we have movies coming out? It's so interesting, isn't it? Suddenly there seems to be a big Homer year. Yes. So many explanations aren't there as to why these things suddenly become popular again? You know, you could...

Good story for a start. Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, they are magnificent stories. The Iliad is fantastic in its detail. And the rise in violence and the cutting between Troy and the Greek encampment and the depictions of Hector. and his wife and child and and and are just so exquisite and perhaps one of the most beautiful scenes in all literature is after achilles has dragged hector's body around the walls of troy in the dust

of his chariot wheels to the disgust of his own greeks let alone to the misery of hector's parents hecuba and and priam he takes the body back to the camp and refuses to bury it and as i had mentioned that is that meant he would never get any glory hector and he was the most glorious hero of them all and priam the king this powerful king of this rich um magnificent city like a beggar leaves the city crosses the greek encampment goes to achilles tent grasps his knees and begs for the body of his son and achilles weeps and gives it to him and it's just an extraordinary scene tender humanity i'm sobbing remembering it it is so beautiful and there are moments like that and there's another one that always gets me, which is when Hector is about to go out to fight, and it's his death day, in fact.

And he puts on his plumed helmet, and his baby, Astyanax, his child, sees it and cries. And he and Dramache, his wife, sort of laugh at the baby and giggle and say, isn't it funny? He's afraid of the shadow of your plume. And there's something so human about that. It's those little touches. It goes in and out, out to the epic and into the human, like all the best stories. But as far as this weaving of empires that we in this point, it also shows how fragile these worlds are. And the archaeology backs that up. The fact that we have this magnificent city, this whole civilization in all its glory. And it's more fragile than everyone realizes. Absolutely. The speed with which they can disappear and the Greek obsession with arrogance, with hubris, with this idea that

you know that just being loud and brave and shouty is enough is the you know and agamemnon ends up being stabbed in the bath and and Achilles you know himself is just killed and ends up in in the underworld and as he says to Odysseus in the in the underworld when Odysseus goes to the underworld in the odyssey Achilles who is really the patron saint of athletes because he's he's about the glory of youth and speed. His mother, Thetus, was given the option when he was born. This boy will either live a life of such glory as no mortal has ever lived, but short, or he will live a long life in obscurity. And she wanted that for him, but Achilles wanted the glory, just like a sportsman. You can be a sportsman and you'll be famous until you're 30, and then you'll grow fat, and you'll have arthritis,

and you'll be a drunk. And even Manjaro would come to your... And they'll say, no, I still want to, I want the glory. I want to play for Majesty United. Well, not Majesty United. No one wants to play for them anymore. But you know what I mean? And then Achilles says to Odysseus, when Odysseus sees him, he says, you must be very happy down here because everyone worships you,

because you're Achilles and your fame is great, your Cleos is great. And he distinctly repudiates Cleos, Achilles, the Wu had the most cleos of anyone, the most glory. He says, no. I would rather be a dirt poor farmer living in total obscurity an ordinary life than the life I had. And that's really powerful and an astonishing thing. And Odysseus hears that, you know.

We're going deeper into Homer in our next episode. We've got Simon Goldhill, who I think you're a great fan of. Yes, hugely. He'll be so entertaining and so informative. He's coming on at the end of having just done, I think, an epic 20-part lecture series at Cambridge on Homer. So he's going to be diving deeper into the whole business of who Homer was or was there a Homer and the actual poetry and the epic.

But Stephen Fry, thank you so, so much. I'm an honour to have you on the show. I'm really enjoyed it. Thank you. It was an honour for me.