In Our Time - The Greek Myths

Episode Date: March 13, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Greek myths from Achilles to Zeus. Are you a touch narcissistic? Do you have the body of an Adonis? Are you willing to undertake Herculean tasks or Promethean ventures? Perhaps you have an Oedipus complex? If you answer to any or perhaps all of these you owe something to the Greek myths, a collection of weird and wonderful stories that, like Penelope’s shroud or the needlework of Arachne, were constantly woven and unpicked across centuries of Greek and Roman civilisation. The myths have a cast of thousands including mighty Zeus, Jason and the Argonauts, wily Odysseus, beautiful Aphrodite and Cerberus, the three-headed dog. They are funny, shocking, quirky and epic and have retained their power and their wisdom from the ancient world to the modern. With Nick Lowe, Senior Lecturer in Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London; Richard Buxton, Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the University of Bristol; Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Cambridge University

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, are you a touch narcissistic? Do you have the body of an Adonis? Are you willing to undertake Herculean tasks or Promethean ventures?

Perhaps you have an Oedipus complex. If you answer to any or perhaps all of these, you owe something to the Greek myths, a collection of powerful, resonant and wonderful stories that like Penelope's shroud or the needlework of Arachna were constantly woven and unpicked across the centuries of Greek and Roman civilization from before Homer to Ovid and after. The myths have a cast of thousands, including Mighty Zeus,

Jason and the Argonauts, Wily Odysseus, beautiful Aphrodite, and Cerberus, the three-headed dog. They're funny, shocking, quirky and epic, and have carried over their power and their wisdom from the ancient world to the modern. With me to discuss the Greek myths from the Argonauts, are Nicolaoe, reader in classical literature at Royal Holloway University of London.

Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, and Richard Buxton, Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the University of Bristol. Nick Lowe, can you briskly tell us what you understand by a myth and give us a particular example to illustrate it? Well, the Greek myths are perhaps a rather special kind of myth,

but in general terms, a useful way of thinking about myth is that it's a story which is never fixed in a definitive version, which is by definition retellable. For the Greeks, this meant specifically the stories of their heroic age, of the world up until the death of the generation that Sack Troy and the age of the gods before that. So the GERERA St. Troe, we're talking 1,400 to 1,400 to 1,400 BC

and the generation before that disappears, really? Well, yes, one of the things the Greeks weren't entirely, clear in their own minds about, but which we can now see with great clarity, is that their heroic age was actually a real historical period because back in the second millennium, there had been this flourishing Mycenaean civilization with its great palace centres at places like Mycenae and Pylos and Tyrins,

which were just rubble or villages at the time of Homer and later Greeks. And around about 1,200, that all falls. apart and it's still very mysterious why, but the Greeks were aware that once there had been a great age where these palace centres were settled and where their ancestors had occupied Crete, Sactroy, and somehow it had all come to an end. So they were aware that this was their past. This is a golden age. Can you just pull out one of the gods from the golden age, from 12, or around him?

about that and then we'll have to fast forward 500 years. Well, rather than take a god, let me tell you a story which actually resonates very strongly with the end of the age itself, because it is in a sense the very last Greek myth. The Odyssey had a strange sequel in the... in a minor Greek epic called the Telegany. The sorcerer of Circe has a son called Teleganus

who, on growing to adulthood, learns that he is in fact the son of the famous Adisius. And so he goes off to Ithaca to find his father. And when he gets there, he's treated as an invader, he gets into a battle with the locals. And he kills the leader of the local resistance, in a rather Steve Irwin touch,

in a spear tipped with a sting-raised dart. And, of course, the leader of the local resistance is Odysseus himself, his own father. And this fulfills a sort of, strange prophecy in the Odyssey about Odysseus being destined to die a death from the sea, which was very mysterious in antiquity. And then having realised that he's killed his own dad, he's distraught, he takes not only the body, but his surviving family, off to his mum, Cersie, who makes everyone but Odysseus, who's dead, immortal, and Teleganus marries his stepmother, well, he marries

disuse's widow, Penelope, and his half-brother Telemachus, Adisius' son in the Odyssey, marries Circe. And what's so extraordinary about this story is not just that it's completely bonkers. Not necessarily, but go on. Well, it certainly wasn't seen as bonkers in antiquity. The Tragedian Sophocles was extremely attracted to this strange combination of patricide and incest, and the story, of course, of

a son who unwittingly kills his father and then marry as his god's widow, becomes his Edipus. Yeah, that filtered through to the tragedies which we'll come to later. The first written myths, though, we have, as I understand it, with Homer the Iliad in the Odyssey and with Hesiod, we'll come here in a minute.

Can you, again, we have to be brief here, I'm sorry, because we're just setting up a beginning here. We tend to think of them as something beginning in Western literature, but as I understand it, there were at the end of something. They were at the end of a bardic tradition. These had been sung by poets, often illiterate poets, through what we can call the 500 Dark Ages after the, let's say, the fall of the Floreen of Mycena, until we come to Homer. Is that right? Yes, the Greeks

were emerging from a Dark Age so dark that they never really knew it had happened. But the one thing we do know that had been going on right through the Dark Age from 1200 was this extremely sophisticated, professional Bardic tradition. And when around about 800 the Greeks reinvent writing, they never rediscovered their old writing system, but they adapted

their own alphabet, inventing vowels as they went from Phoenician alphabet. So they wrote this, and we're talking about Homer collecting a lot of Bardic poems, not there being worn Homer. We're not talking to a man sitting down and writing stuff, we're talking about so many collecting all the stuff.

Well, this is dangerous territory, Certainly the Iliad and the Odyssey are the first texts from that Bardic tradition to be written down. And they come right at the tail end of that tradition. And although other epics were written down subsequently, the Iliad and the Odyssey were, in a sense, the last great creative gasp. I'm going to Richard Buxton now. Around the time of him there was a poet Hesiod. It was a very different poet.

His theogyny gave us the genealogy of the Greek gods. And he was always been thought of us much more prosaic. But yet again, I want to establish this. so listeners know the idea is, as far as I've read, from what you three of Britain, the idea is bringing together of a lot of oral traditions and putting them in these forms, which then became the definitive place

where you looked for the Greek myths and so on. Is that right? Absolutely. Hesid is sometimes even dated earlier than Homer, but a rule of thumb would be late 8th century, early 7th century, for both the Homeric constitution of those poems and for Hesid. But Hesiod is a different kettle of fish. He was a peasant farmer who came from a very small village in Beosha, northwest of Attica.

And he's best known for writing, composing, two works, which have come down to his complete. One's called the Theogony, and the other's called the Works and Days. Now, the Theogony is an attempt to set out exactly how the gods had got to be where they are in Hesiod's day, and what process of violence and trickery and all the rest of it led to that present state of Greece. religion. It's very difficult to summarize what's going on theogony in a brief space, but you can take one primordial pair as a place to start from, that would be Gaia and Uranos. Now, Gaia, the earth goddess Uranos, the sky. And what happened was that Uranos, like many Greek gods, was resentful of the possibility he would be supplanted.

And so whenever Gaia gave birth to children, Uranos replaced them within Gaia and didn't allow them to grow up. Gaia couldn't stand this, and she conspired with one of the sons, it was called Kronos, that Kronos should emerge from an ambush, bearing a sickle made of adamant, which is, as it were, kryptonite, the most powerful substance you can possibly imagine,

and castrate his father, which he did, through the genitals into the sea, and from the genitals from their foam, there grew Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love. Kronos, therefore, had made it to supreme deity of the cosmos. And he, with his co-evils, the titans, ruled in place of Uranos. But like father-like son, Kronos too, was resent for the possibility that he would be supplanted. And so whenever his consort, Rhea, produced any children, Kronos swallowed them.

The way of circumventing that was that Reh. his consort, when the last child was born, gave Kronos to swallow a stone and hid Zeus away, because Zeus was the last child. Zeus grew up in secret, and in due course, supplanted Kronos, obliged Kronos to vomit up, first of all the stone, which was on show in historical times in Delphi, and then all of the brothers and sisters of Zeus. And that was the stage when the universe of gods as we know it. What's constituted. The last part of the theogony shows Hecid setting

out the privileges of Zeus, his brothers and his children, and that's how the world is divided up. So it's very much an establishing of parameters of the religious world of the time of Hesed. And he brought in other things the idea of Pandora's box, which is very important. Yeah, well

that actually comes it's not a box, but we're going on to that in a tick. Well, they'd love to be a little tick. It's a big jar. It was only a box after 1508 because Erasmus said it was a box.

I'm with Erasmus. Well, in that case, you're against all the great tradition and their successes until 1508. I was being completely out of order there. Yeah, okay, okay, okay. Anyway, Pandora and a big jar. Now that comes into, this is a

fascinating story. It comes into the works and days, the other poem by Houston. Pandora was a trick for mortals. She was a kind of counterbalance to the fire which Prometheus had stolen from the gods and give to mortals. As you said, we must have something which is going to bring the mortals down from the state which they are arrogantly in. And he ordered Hefeistus to make a woman.

And all of the gods gave a little bit of their own qualities to that woman. Hence the name is Pandora, All Gift. All gifts. Can I move over to Mary now? Can you take that story of Mary and Mary Bearden, take us on from there? Yeah, I think it's a story that isn't quite as weird or even entirely misogynist as Richard's been kind of hinting. The Pandora story is, in a way, a bit like Eve in Judeo-Christian mythology.

She's given us this gift to mortals, but it's a snare and delusion. She has this jar or box. And one of the things that she's supposed to do is keep it all shut. But in various versions, either she or people persuade her to open the box or open the jar. And that's when Pandora appears to be a dead bane to me. mortal life because all the good things waft away or all the bad things escape. It depends which version you have and go through mortal life. And all she's got left in this box for poor old mortals to keep is hope. But everything else has gone. What I think is interesting about

this and in the way it fits into Hiziod is what they, why Hiziod is doing really here is a bit of a nerd. He's a bit of a kind of a kind of, 8th century academic, honestly, and he's trying to get all this straight. He's trying to say, okay, so what happens when, where does it all start? How does, who was the first woman? When did mankind become mortal? Et cetera, et cetera. And he offers you all kinds of ways of getting a grip on these mad stories, some of them less mad than others. And one of his most famous ways of doing this is another story which has got

a history right up to the present day, which is the ages of man. And it's a kind of, he has a sort of cycle of deterioration saga for human which we have never abandoned. No, he's absolutely right. He got it right, absolutely. A golden age from above the silver. He has different ages.

The golden age we live in is rubbish. Yeah, the golden age is great because everybody parties all the time and they don't have arthritic knees. They live forever. They live. They live sort of forever. Then you have the silver age where they're kids for 100 years, but then they quickly demise after that. Then they have the Bronze Age where real thugs.

Then you have the Age of Heroes, and that's the Trojan War, and they're pretty dreadful. And then you've got Our Age help. Our Age is the Iron Age. And we are living in... It is really dug in that. It's extraordinary, isn't it? But the Iron Age has a secret to it,

because it's two stages of the Iron Age. It's pretty rotten for us, but, Melvin, it's going to get worse. And as the irony goes, it's going to get really horrible scenes. And you can see, first of all, I think what's interesting about this is a kind of attempt to sort of get a grip. Get a grip people, five phases. But also, and this is why it's so interesting, is it leaves all sorts of funny threads unthreaded. So you say, well, when did this happen?

Was this before or after Pandora? And you can't ever quite tie the chronology down. and it looks terribly gloomy because you think, oh, it's all getting worse. But at the beginning, when he's talking about the Iron Age, he says, oh, I wish I'd been born earlier, like in the Golden Age, or maybe after. And so you think, ah, so maybe things are going to get better again after the Iron Age. And so what it's giving you is a structure which you can then debate the minutiae of, which appear to be much more complicated and interesting,

or keep you going for millennia. Yes, that's a point you make in there. Can we just talk about Herodotus, writing in the 5th century moving forward? We've got Homer and Hesiod, Daly, and the Odyssey. We've got men and women who are still with us in our literature and talk and lot. We've got Hesiod's views which have been hinted at. Herodotus said that Homer and Hesiod had given the Greeks their sense of the gods. Now, what did he mean by that, Nicola?

Well, what he meant by that particular claim seems to have been that the way in which the Greeks pictured their gods visually and as personalities was largely fleshed out, partly with the help of art, but in very large part by the poems of Homer and Hesiod. One of the things we have to realise about Greek religion, of course, is it was not a religion of the book, and our modern notion of what a religion is is centered on notions of belief and doctrine. of a kind that are completely irrelevant, really, to ancient Greek religion, which is very much a religion of practice. And so in the absence of sacred texts, the great early works of their poetry became the reference text. So what they did is what others could have their sense of belief in what ought to be done, what was the heroic alternative in life?

Yes, absolutely. They didn't just describe what the gods were like. They also served as a kind of moral and philosophical reference point in the absence of anything else that had that same kind of a cultural dissemblance. Still around this area, and I'll come to you in a moment, Richard Buxon, one example of how this is playing into Greek sense of mystery are the Elysinian mysteries. Can you tell us how they came about and what relevance they have? Yeah, I think it's a good example. The version of the myth of Demeter and Persephone, which is played out in the ritual of the Elysinian mysteries, of the way in which myths are grounded in the practice of everyday life in Greece. Can I say a word about the myth and then bring in the mysteries? The myth recorded how Demeter and Persephone, mother and daughter, became separated. Out of the earth there arose when Persephone was picking flowers, the god of death, Hades.

He abducted her, took her down into the underworld to be his bride. And the fertility on the earth was withdrawn. As a result of that, Zeus said, we've got to put a stop to this. he sent a message down to Hades to say that Possephone must be released. She was released back to a mother, but Hades had persuaded her to eat a pomegranate seed. So there was a kind of link between them. So when Pesephani returned to the upper world, it could only be for a part of the year. And the rest of the year, she would then spend down with Hades.

Now, that myth has got all kinds of different resonances. It resonates in terms of mother-daughter relationships. It resonates in terms of the pattern of vegetation in the world. It resonates in relation to Greek marriage customs. Yeah, she's down in Hades for four months, which is always a seeding period. Obviously, but there's a twist to that. Let's come up on the point that you made about the Ellicinian Mysteries. This was one of the most sacred rituals in the whole of 6th, 5th century Greece.

It was celebrated at Elusis, which is about 20 kilometres from Athens, in honour of Demeter and Persephone, we don't exactly know what took place in this ritual because a lot of the information we've got is from hostile Christian critics who wanted to belittle what was going on in the mysteries. But it's clear that the mysteries were in honour of Demeter and Persephone and that part of the initiation ceremony involved a passage symbolically from darkness to light

and that the story of Demeter and Persephone, return of Persephone to the upper world may even have been recited during the course of that ritual, but at the very least, it informed what was experienced by the participants in the mysteries. So it's a perfect example of the symbiosis between a story which informed the experience of people, practice and religion, and the practice of religion which fed back into that story and gave it more than simply, oh, it's only a myth. Marybitt, can ask you a very big question, but why, why for you did people tell this stories? As Niccolo told us at the beginning of the programme, they filtered through, one version is,

they filtered through, it seems to be reasonably accepted, for the Mycenaean age for 500 years, they were by, what, from I read, Bardic persons who may well have been completely literate and so and so forth, so by the time they got to Homer and Hesiod, they'd been honed in different ways and extended and developed, and made very complicated. And they held on and they still held on. Maybe because of that. But did they have a function? If so, what was it?

You can, this is a few thousand years of scholarship is now going to be distilled into a minute. No less. You have to assume, as a starting point, that the fact that these things go on being told and recounted and sung and written about must mean they're doing a really

important job. This is not some kind of, you know, mad conservatism on the part of the Greeks who go on telling these stories long after there of any use to them. And I think myth is a terribly economical form of thinking about the world. And in some ways, I think it helps. If instead of seeing it as a thing, you know, where is this thing called myths out there, if we think of it instead as a set of ways of thinking about how the world is. So if you think of it as a process, you know, as a verb, you know, to myth, rather than looking for myths out there, I think you get the function of it much better.

And the underlying function, it has all sorts of, you know, byways which go down the roots of pleasure and all the rest. But the underlying function is to help us think about what human existence is like and why it's so jolly, difficult and hard and why we do what we do. And one of the things that comes out of Hesiod, for example, is a complicated, strange tale about the origin of sacrifice. Sacrifice is the absolutely crucial central ritual

of all Greek religion everywhere. They worship different gods in all sorts of ways, but the one thing everybody does is sacrifice animals. to the divine. And what Hesiod is offering you is a story of why that happened, how we come to do that, and also how we should begin to think about it. And what myths do, I think, is they don't, why they say, jolly, good at this, is instead of closing it off and saying, you know, therefore, you know, X plus Y equals Z, you know, now you know, what they do is they push you and point you in different directions and they say, think when you're thinking about sacrifice about why gods are different

from men and why are animals different from gods and why are they different from men. Try thinking about it this way and they're terribly sort of, their questions, interrogations and prompts to saying, what is life like? What is it? They go from small questions like, depending on how you see it. Do men or women have a better time in sex? You know, that's a question we need to think. about and Greek mythology will prompt you to think, how might you know that? How would you know? And here we've got, Tyresias comes along. He's a person who's been both a man and a woman. He can tell you whether men or women have a better time. But also think about sacrifice. Why, when you sacrifice, do the gods get the rotten bits of the meat and the humans get the nice bits? Aha. Well, think about it this way. So it's a myth is a framework for thinking about how we are.

Well, that was a brilliant distillation. It was terrific. I'm going to ask you to do more distillations as the years ago on there. Richard. Can I echo everything Mary has said and maybe use a phrase to encapsulate it, which is myths as a thought experiment. And you get this very particularly in tragedy. The case of Arrestes, for example.

Can I just get, I want you to talk on about this, but if I can give a little headline, in the fifth century, as it were, the great tragedian, Sophocles, Erupides, and Esclos, took the myths and you. worked them into their plays as we know it is and so the underside of the myths that came

into the tragedies that's just a little prompt and I interrupted you so please No no it's a very good way of putting it and that phrase the underside of the myths is an important one another important one to take it into tragedy if you think of some of the great tragic heroes such as the great heroes

I should say not the great tragic heroes the heroes of adventure like Jason Heracles Thesius fighting monsters performing great exploits in the wide world. What you get in tragic retellings of the stories about those heroes is precisely the underside, the family disasters that went along with those great heroic figures. Theseus is not portrayed in tragedy as someone who slays the Minotaur

and any number of other mighty deeds. He is remembered for his portrayal in Hippolytus by Euripides, in which he mistakenly curses his son, Hippolytus, who he believes has tried to rape Theseus' wife, and as a result, Hippolytus dies a tragic death. This is typical of what you get in tragedy, the underside of heroism. Now, just to come back to that point I made earlier on

about thought experiments, take the example of Arrestes in Eusculis Orostaya trilogy. He's faced with a dilemma. The dilemma originates because his mother, Clytemnestra, has killed his Arrestes' father, Agamemnon, when Agamemnon returned victorious from the Trojan War, and she killed him in the Bath ignominiously, partly because before the Trojan War began, Iphigenia, Clytemnestra and Agamemnon's daughter, had been sacrificed by Agamemnon, killed, in order that the expedition should continue. And also, Agamemnon had brought

back a concubine, Cassandra, from Troy with him. So Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon. The dilemma of Arrestes in tragedy is this, which is better, which is worse, shall I leave my father's honour unavenged, or shall I kill my mother? We could bring in another phrase, in addition to a thought experiment,

and that will be testing to destruction. This is what myths do, in tragedy in particular. They test moral, and political categories, push them to the limit and see what happens when that's done.

Nicola, is there an explanation why the tragedians took their source material they could have taken all sorts of source material, presumably. Do you have an explanation of why they went

to this body of information? Well, for one thing, it was a vast, ready-made hoard of material. By the time East Scullus makes his debut the first of the great tragedians in about the four 90s,

there is already this so-called epic cycle of 13 poems, which if you read them end to end, told the whole story of the world from the creation right down to the end of the heroic age and this kind of folk memory of the fall of the Mycinian palaces. But Aristotle, who was still able to read this stuff a century and a half later, was absolutely damning in his verdict. Apart from the Iliad and the Odyssey,

they were all junk. The stories were great, but the tellings were just unreadable. And so what the tragedians can do is in this new, invented medium of theatre, they can retell these old stories in much more vivid, powerful, brought-to-life ways. And what's more, they can do it again and again and again, because one of the things about tragedy is that it's a ferocious hot house. The number of new plays required every single year

is something like a dozen just to fill the festival quotas. So these stories get told again and again. And they can do it competitively. I think that's a crucial thing because you don't get one single version of the Greek myth. You compete. You say my version of the past is the one which is going to win the prize

at the dramatic festival. I think that's terribly important because I think it's quite easy to get the impression from the outside looking at this body of material. You know, to ask the question, why no, didn't they think of their own plots? You know, isn't this a bit lazy

going back to this mythic cycle of stuff. And I think you have to turn that view completely on its head. And you say the point is that people know one version of the story. The point is to make them see that story subtly differently, to make it answer a slightly different set of questions. So it's not kind of intellectual, creative laziness. It's really making, it's squeezing the myths to make them work for all they've got. When you say the point is that people, i.e. the audience, the one point of the story,

you're bringing up the notion that a lot of these stories had local differences. We think of one story of this, but actually it was different for you now and so and so forth. Yeah, we've terribly kind of, we've had an awful orthodox attitude to Greek myths, which comes from compendia that we read in school about, you know, the Greek myths, and here is the story of Hercules and the story of Arestis, or whatever. And we come away with the impression that there's a kind of orthodox quasi-biblical narrative here, which is the version. What gives myth-telling its real push is that in any one place there are different versions told, so that there is a real intellectual buzz about thinking

about how do we do this. I mean, if you go, for example, to the story, a famous story of Medea, the wife of Jason, who famously in Euripides' play, slaughters her children in order to punish her errant husband. It is certainly the case that there are many versions of the story of Medea where she looks after the children just like any good mum should. So even in those big kind of apparently cataclysmic tragic events, myths offer you different endings. But they also, not only within one place, but also across the Greek world,

offer you local myths, local variants. You'd go to the little town of Lockery in South Italy and you would find a completely different version of what Persephone got up to and she went down to the underworld from what you might do in Athens. Do you want to take up the Medea for a moment? Yeah, just briefly on Badiah.

Just again to echo what Mary is saying, there's a nice contrast you can make between Pinder and Euripides. Pinder is a praise poet, writing in the early 5th century BC about athletic victories. He composed for choirs of young men to sing in celebration of the victory of an athlete at the Olympic Games, for example, and other Olympic Games and other similar games. And one of the odes that we have composed by Pinder describes how Jason is a wonderfully heroic character.

and Medea is a tiny little figure at the side of that with almost no importance. She's entirely subsidiary to Jason. The point of this context is to praise the athletic victor and you praise that victor by saying he's like Jason. Jason was a kind of mythical paradigm. And so the way in which that myth, the Medea myth, is cooked in that context

is to have Jason greatly overshadowing Medea. Now the underside of that is Euripidivisian, tragedy, where Medea takes centre stage, Jason is peripheral, and Medea manipulates a series of men and eventually escapes unscathed at the end on the chariot of

her grandfather the son. Can I take up a point with you, Nick, that Nicola, that Mary Beard made. If I can emphasise just to get a move on, really, that they became inflexible. There was one story, just where there'd been many, many stories around them.

But was this set in motion by the scholarly mythographers in the 5th century BC. Once they got hold of it, there it was, the illiterate bards were still roving the countryside, I'm sure, for centuries afterwards, but they weren't the action. The action was in the text. There are two parallel strands

in the 5th century. First of all, there is the beginnings of this work of systematisation and collection in prose. It's no longer the creative poets. It's starting to be the early Greek scholars who are trying to assemble a coherent corpus of the stories

that have come down from various different local traditions as a man called Therisides who writes 10 books in the 5th century, which were hugely influential on the later project. But tragedy also itself is a bit of a turning point, because although one of the things that drives tragedy is the sheer plasticity of myth, the fact that these stories don't exist in a single form,

some of the tragedies become so famous, something like Euripides-Madilla, becomes so famous in later generations that it exercises a huge gravitational force on the shape of the variations thereafter. And it becomes very, very difficult thereafter to have a story in which Medea doesn't, in fact, murder her children, even though that particular detail was very likely Euripides' own invention.

And then in the Hellenistic period, the process of, in the 3rd century BC, under the early toonomies at the Library of Alexandria especially, there's a really concerted scholarly enterprise to try and bring not just the whole myth, but the whole, and the diversity of local traditions, but the whole Greek literary heritage together in catalogs and coherent overall views. And that's when retellings of myth in handbook form really start to take off.

Mary Beard, can I ask you to put this in a context? Was it, were they the herbal-whelming intellectual appetite and interest of the Greek literate and engaged community? or did certain intellectuals think that these were rather on the side? What was really happening was science and philosophy and so on. Well, there does start to be what I think you'd say is a productive and quite mythic tension, really, between guys who want to say, oh, look, that's all mythos, that's myth, that's stuff that isn't true. And I am going to go down the road of looking at history and the truth and facts,

and that myth is something we need to share. shed. Instead of, I want to get rid of the mythic bits of my history and I want the history straight. This is the kind of tales you learn on your granny's knee. This is for kids. It's not for clever intellectual academics like us. I think there's two things about that which are important, though. First of all, they never manage it. Nobody sheds mythos in Greece or Rome. Nobody in the 21st century sheds the mythic and always you have a tension between a desire to say, I don't want that, but it always comes creeping back. You can read, you know, Herodic and Thucydides and Thucydides, the beginning of history are actually mythic texts as well as they are narrow,

scientistical history. But also, I think, the other bit that myth is always doing to you, and it's one of the questions it asks, it's always kind of playing with you, mythic thinking, and saying, oh, you go to believe me? Do you really think? that orpheus charmed the animals? How can you be so gullible? And myth always has the last laugh because myth is always itself asking you that question. How far are you going to go along with this stupid story?

Richard. Richard Buckson. Yeah, just a quick comment in relation to the intellectualisation of myth. We seem to be suggesting that there was an increase in process of standardisation, handbooks and all the rest of it. That certainly did go on at Alexandria. But we've got to remember that Alexandria was only one part of the Hellenized world. We think of that, the Hellenistic world usually thought of us, from the death of Alexander to the conquest of Egypt by the Romans,

roughly 300 years from 330 BC, that sort of thing. And in that period, the Hellenistic world covered the whole of mainland Greece. It covered the islands. It covered Asia Minor. It covered Egypt. And you cannot reduce what was happening to myth. simply to an intellectualisation. In those 300 years, myths still continued to be told

by grandmothers and nurses and mothers to their children. There still continued to be dramatic competitions put on throughout the whole of the Hellenistic world. Myths were used by ambassadors who wanted to argue for the historic relationship of one community to another. So myth orally told, continued as a side-by-side feature

in relation to that intellectualisation. I would like to move on, I'm sorry. Can I actually move it on? No, I'd like to move it on. Because I want to get to Ovid. I was going to go to Ovid. Let's get on with it. Because a lot of people receive Greek myths now through Ovid,

who I don't think it was a Roman poet in the first century in the reign of Augustus, Shakespeare, flows into Shakespeare, he flows into Ted Hughes, and so on. He wrote the metamorphosis. Now, can you tell us what he did there and why it was so effective? Yes, it's worth saying, just to link this to what Richard was just saying, that there is one very important sense in which third century Alexander is a bit of... I want to come to Obit, please, Nick.

Yes, but it is a bit of a pinch point because Ovid is essentially being an Alexandrian poet and mythographer all at once. Ovis metamorphosis is an attempt to... write a continuous narrative epic, which will do the hesiodic thing and beyond. It will start with the creation and it will go all the way down through the heroic age, telling stories in order, they shift into one another, they're all linked by this theme of transformation, which will eventually culminate in his own time in the age of Augustus. And it will be a continuous story that gives you a history of the world from its beginnings until the present day. And it's very ironic that a lot of what we, and particularly the Latin European West, thinks of as the

Greek myths, are actually stories that emerge for the first time literature in Ovid. And a lot of my daughter's collections of Greek myths are, in fact, Latin myths, which don't survive in any earlier Greek text at all. But it is a very Ovidian kind of history of the world, in that it's, in many respects, anti-epic in its values, it's very interested in the romantic, psychological, ironic kinds of story rather than heroic military subjects. Fine, Mary, can you take it along? I'm going to Richard.

You're all chafing at the bit to get to Ovid. Yes, at last, the Romans. It's terribly easy to think of Ovid as an awful desk job, so here we've got finally everything oral has gone out. We have a clever, witty intellectual sitting down and writing 15 books, and it's systematizing where Hesiod failed. and with a sense of humour. And if somehow now we're not in myth,

we're in somebody writing about myth, not inside. And I think that's a completely wrong way to see Ovid. Because the one thing that Ovid does for you, if you're in Rome, is it really shows you that your concerns, your politics and your social life and all your Roman concerns are absolutely linked to the problems that these myths raise. Because what happens, what is the last transformation

that Ovid offers you in book 15 of the metamorphosis. It is the transformation of the murdered Julius Caesar killed in the pursuit of Libertas, liberty, into a god. And actually Ovid is hitting the nail on the head and he's saying, you might think that narcissus turning into a flower was some silly little story that we poets tell. But bodily transformation and moving of categories is something that our politics is deeply engaged with

and it's absolutely central to our culture. Case rests. Richard Buxton. There's a crucial point to make about the difference between what Ovid is doing in relation to particularly themes of metamorphosis and what his Greek predecessors has done. We've got one or two fragmentary remains of Greek metamorphosis stories. They end, still today, there is a custom according to which.

So you'll have a tale of someone miraculously transformed into a stone or into a rock or into a plant or into an animal. And that will be linked by those Greek tellers of metamorphosis stories to something actually being done in the practice of Greek religion in a particular place. Ovid generalises those stories. He de-hellenises them in many ways. He sends all kinds of psychological and moral action over the precipice, but it's done not in a way which is linked into Greek ritual.

but in a more exportable way. And that's why those stories have had such a long history. He also exposes what they're in a sense really about, because ultimately Ovid faces directly the case of belief. So he has the narrator of his metamorphosis, believes every silly word. His characters within these stories, looking at these funny transformations going on,

start to say to each other, can you believe this? You know, his narcissist is really becoming a flower? and so ultimately myth is seen to challenge itself from within. I enjoyed that in office. I'm sorry to have heard you along, but there's so much to say.

Thank you very much to Mary Beard, Niccolo and Richard Buxton. And next week we will be talking about Sora and Keikagard, known as the father of existentialism. Thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud,

where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit bbc.co.com.uk forward slash radio four.