The Ancients - Homer

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

The Iliad and the Odyssey are two of the world’s most famous poems. But who was their author, Homer, and how have his name and poems survived so long, preserved for almost 3 millennia?In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan is joined once again by author, classicist, and cultural critic, Daisy Dunn. Daisy helps us dissect the complex works, legacy and influence of Homer. From the Trojan War to Ionic and Aeolic Greeks, we find out more about the inspiration and impact that Homer holds.For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast we're talking about a figure whose legacy arguably rests among the most significant in the whole of human history. I know that's a big statement but with this figure it may well be true because this figure is Homer. Famed for the Iliad and the Odyssey, the story of the Trojan War,

characters such as Achilles, Agamemnon, Paris, Hector, Andromache and so many more. But what do we know about the figure of Homer? What do we know about his poetry? And is there any historical basis to these figures, to the whole story of the Trojan War? Well, to answer all of this and so much more, I was delighted to go and interview, roughly a week or so ago, the brilliant Daisy Dunn. Daisy, she's been on the podcast a couple of times before to talk about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, and also to talk about Rome's most erotic poet Catullus. She's a classicist, she's a wonderful speaker, and she also has done a lot of work around Homer. So without further ado, to talk all about Homer, here's Daisy.

Daisy, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Oh, hello, hello. Very happy to be back. I know, it's different this time, isn't it? We've done it twice before. It's always been Zoom, online, but now we can finally do it in person. This is brilliant. In person in London, what could be better on a beautiful, sunny day? It is absolutely beautiful indeed. And the topic we're talking about today, we've done Catullus, we've done Pliny, we've done Vesuvius but we're going much further back in ancient history this time. Homer, I mean this is a figure, this is a name, it's immortalised isn't it and his legacy is perhaps one of the most significant, one of the biggest of all figures

in all of history. I think it speaks for itself that Homer is a name that people are familiar with, even if they have no idea about Homer's poetry, who Homer was, what kind of date Homer was working. Homer's just one of those kind of catchphrases almost that people still mention in conversation, and they know that he's important and the work is important. And people talk about the Iliad and the Odyssey, if they're familiar with those titles being

almost like the set text the kind of foundation text of the ancient world and I think really they were that and they were important so it's right that Homer's name has been passed down continues to be discussed so widely. It seems to be discussed so widely indeed and I guess it leads us to the first really really big question not as simple as it sounds. Daisy, who was Homer? This is a million dollar question. Who was Homer? So in the ancient world, there was no doubt that there was a Homer. And Homer was the author of the Iliad and its sequel, The Odyssey. But no one could really say for sure who Homer was. Homer was not a standard name in Greek. So people tried to translate it, and it could be translated in lots of different ways. In particular, people thought that Homeros, the Greek version, could be a captive.

So people kind of imagined the idea of a poet sort of creating these lines in captivity, and this being a kind of a product of him being confined somewhere. Other people thought, no, homeros actually means blind. And this is a theory that really attracted a lot of interest historically, partly because in the Odyssey, there is a blind poet and his name is Demodocus and he performs at a court. He's a court poet and he's exceptionally talented. He has sort of assistants who pass him his lyre and he performs his poetry to the lyre and he is incredibly talented despite being blind

and it's a very ancient idea that you're blind but you can see everything and this is something that comes forward in your poetry. You're seeing the world in a different way and so people kind of thought, well maybe this is Homer making a kind of cameo appearance, you know, within the Odyssey, this is a celebration of who he was. At the same time, there's no evidence for that. The question of who Homer was, was problematic, because the name Homer was associated with the two epic poems from about as early as the sixth century BC, which is probably about a century and a half after

their kind of end point when the two poems were completed. So it's got an early association and around that time you find a group of poets calling themselves the Homeridae or the children of Homer and they're performing his poems on the island of Chios and partly because of that people thought okay so Chios must be the home of Homer. There are actually seven different places that claimed to be Homer's birthplace and another one entirely that claimed to be his place of death his final resting place.

So there are lots and lots of claims to sort of being places which thought they were associated with Homer in some respect. But none of them could be proven to be true. So the mystery of who Homer was is kind of something which has really fascinated the ancient world, but actually fascinated later writers and poets a lot more, actually. And that kind of question gets sort of opened up through the 18th century, the 19th century, question gets sort of opened up through the 18th century the 19th century and particularly the 20th century when new evidence comes to light or is discovered to throw even more doubt on the idea that Homer existed at all. There you go this great mystery of Homer as you said has gone down

for centuries I love this idea that perhaps one of the first cameos in history was by Homer if you say he was this blind poet. I mean, Daisy, it ever does seem to suggest, you mentioned Chios and these other places that seem to claim that they were where Homer came from. And the geographical location of these places, whereabouts are we talking? Does this seem to be east of the Aegean Sea? So not, let's say, the Greek mainland? That's completely true. So most of these places are all clustered around their kind of islands in the Aegean, or they're just off the west coast of what's now Turkey. So Asia Minor, as it was known in the ancient world. So some of these places are actually on that coastline,

and others are the islands just off it. So Chios is one of them. I think Athens did have a claim at some point, but it was a less likely one. the vast majority of them about six out of seven I'd say are sort of in that aspect of the part of the Aegean and there's good evidence that that was actually the home at least the birthplace of these poems because the clues are in the dialect and the dialect there are lots and lots of little bits of different dialects within these poems but there's the overarching sort of main dialect you find in the poems is the kind of dialect you find in that part of the Aegean or on the west coast of Turkey so there might be some truth in it well we'll definitely get back to that in a second I mean but also we've talked about the location we talked about Homer the mystery surrounding Homer what time period are we talking about when we mention the figure of Homer? So it's another complicated question. Oh, good.

I think when we talk about Homer, most people like to think of Homer sort of existing, shall we say, in the late 8th or the early 7th century BC. And that's the time where most people would say the poems reach something like a finished form. What we now know is that these poems have been developing for generations before that. So the mystery is whether Homer is at the end of that process. Is he the kind of the final poet or was he the originator of the tales which are contained within the poems sort of centuries earlier? I mean it's so interesting because could there have been all of these other figures as you

hinted at there who would have told and we'll get into the stories you know the Iliad the Odyssey story at their time but their names haven't survived and it's just the name of Homer that has survived and hence we always associate it with Homer but could there have been all these other renditions of these stories that just haven't therefore survived? Undoubtedly there would be many many many forms of the Iliad and the Odyssey because what was sort of discovered in the early 20th century is that lying behind these poems is a long what we call an oral tradition so what that essentially means is that these poems have been evolving and they've been composed within song by several bards, you know, successions of bards who've preserved them by singing them and passing them

down. So these poems would have been changing all the time with every single person who sung them. So what we kind of ended up with is probably quite different from the very beginning. It's almost like a game of Chinese whispers, but on a very, very grand scale, you know. These are poems which have had sort of contributions from lots and lots of different people. So that's why some people say, well, there's not really one Homer. All of these people who've been involved in that process of passing these poems down are essentially Homers, you know, plural. There are lots and lots of people there. But then, I mean, there still is the possibility, I would say, for a homer. If you think about someone who was either

at the beginning of that process, coming up the first person to actually tell these stories, or coming at the very end as a kind of a master editor who's collated all these different versions and like finally thought, okay, we're going to try and unify this story in some way and make it into something which is a bit more standardized so you could think of Homer in that way so people are really divided you know scholars aren't sort of unanimous in what they think about Homer in that process but I think what we're not divided

over anymore is the existence of this oral tradition by which the poems were composed and preserved in an age before writing. Well, you mentioned it right there. I was going to say, because are we talking therefore centuries before writing is invented in this part of the ancient world? So there's one historian who's actually suggested that writing came about in order to preserve the Homeric epics. And I mean, I wouldn't say that that theory has found huge support among classicists in general, but it is true that writing in Greece is kind of learnt or rediscovered

at around the same time that the Homeric poems reached their end point, arguably the first pieces of literature to be written down using this new alphabet that develops sort of around the 8th century BC in Greece and that's kind of been borrowed from the Phoenicians. It's come over, they've kind of adapted it slightly and sort of created their own writing. So it's been sort of a long process, Homer's had a long existence prior to that. So we're dealing with stories which are incredibly ancient and there are things we can actually see in the poems. There are certain things which are alluded to but never told in full. For example, the idea of the judgment of Paris. The fact that it's only alluded to in the poems means that that's probably older as

a story than the Homeric epics themselves. So we're looking really at a network of stories and poems and songs which would have been circulated in the ancient world before kind of finally coming down to us in the form that we know them. Therefore, talk to me a bit about the style of these Homeric poems. I've got words such as hexameter and epithets in my head. What do we know about the style of these poems? Well, they're written in hexameter, as you say. It's a very grand meter. That is the meter of epic. It's not a kind of light, frivolous sort of meter that you'd adopt for silly little pieces, you know, like you get in the Roman world, for example, in some Latin poetry that I love.

You get a kind of a lighter meter. This a profound meter it's quite heavy it means a hexameter essentially a line which has six sort of if you imagine like bars of music so sort of six bars and those bars have usually three beats within them sort of a long and two short so my teacher at school I remember she used to teach us hexameter with the phrase raspberry jam pot, like that. That's the kind of one sort of aspect of the line. So you don't have rhyming, essentially, within ancient Greek poetry. It's all in the rhythm of the piece. And this is what lent itself so perfectly to song. I mean, we think of reading the Iliad and the Odyssey today, but we shouldn't be doing that. We should be thinking of these as songs instead, things which have been performed, and the hexameter really aided that.

And epithets and these sort of formulae are sort of the building blocks of the epic. So we're talking about the phrases which are repeated, for example, within the Homeric works such as Fleet-Footed Achilles or The Wine-Dark Sea for example these are repeated throughout the poems and some people have said okay well Achilles has been described as sort of swift-footed fleet-footed at this point in the poem he's actually sitting down so it's irrelevant to him right there and so people said oh actually that's because these are kind of set pieces which helped the bards to fill the line, to fill the rhythm of the line. So they would just pick out these kind of pre-created phrases and drop them in in order to create the poems

and to stick to the rhythm, to sort of fill it so that each line was perfect. And again, there's various theories about this, but this is kind of partly what makes Homer so interesting and so special. There are so many mysteries about it. And it's kind of, I think, comforting to come across these repeated phrases and these whole passages which are repeated. You have whole kind of scenes where people are described as preparing for a meal. Someone brings in a bowl of water and everyone sort of washes their hands and then they put their hands to the food that's laid before them. There are scenes like that which are repeated again and again. and they give you a sense of the kind of traditions of the

ancient world. They're not just sort of related to song, they give you an idea of the rhythms of life as well which is being evoked in the poems. It is so interesting, I'm sorry I'm still thinking of the idea you know of A-levels in the future if they do the Iliad or the Odyssey rather than just reading it off a piece of paper they're singing it in song you know as it was in the future, if they do the Iliad or the Odyssey, rather than just reading it off a piece of paper, they're singing it in song, you know, as it was in the ancient times. Sounds completely horrific to my mind, I must admit. But if that was the original way, then it could be quite funny. Anyways, I digress. We move on now, because these works of Homer, now we've kind of mentioned them, but let's really delve into them. First of all, Daisy, what are these two works that are associated with Homer? So we have the Iliad, first of all, which tells the story of

the Trojan War, but not in its entirety. The Trojan War is said to be a 10-year conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans over Helen. And Helen is the wife of Menelaus of Sparta. She was supposedly born of Leda, a woman after she was raped by Zeus in the form of a swan. Always an interesting myth to tell. Always an interesting myth. Produced of two eggs as a result of that, four children, and Helen came out and she had a kind of slightly semi-divine side to her, partly because of that. And she was said to be very, very beautiful, partly because she has this element of divinity within her. And in the judgment of Paris, she was chosen to be

the prize that Aphrodite offered Paris if he was to give her the golden apple. And sex with the most beautiful woman in the world was the way to win Paris's heart. He's not the brightest spark. That certainly comes across in the poem. Also definitely comes across in the poem also definitely comes across in the film Troy if you've seen that in the character of Brad Pitt I think he hones that very very well and so I think Helen is sort of held in the tradition of this myth as being to blame for the Trojan War breaking out because then her husband and his brother Agamemnon create this big Greek army and invade Troy, intent on getting her back, getting her dowry back and punishing the Trojans for taking her.

And she really is taken. It's not sort of a choice that she's made to abscond with Paris as her lover. She actually hates Paris. And this comes across in the Iliad very, very clearly. I mean, he's a bit of an adult, particularly by comparison with his brother Hector, who's everything the great sort of hero should be. Paris is none of those things. So she's kind of really miserable and she's stuck. She's been there for 10 years with this war waging over her and she feels a great deal of guilt over that. King Priam of Troy, who's the father of Paris and Hector and many, many other children besides, is very kind to her and welcoming. And they sit down on the walls of Troy, looking at the battle going on below. And

the Iliad itself just hones in on a very short period in this 10th and final year of the war. And it doesn't conclude the whole story. It doesn't say this is the war in its entirety. It just captures a snapshot of that war. and you know what's going to happen. Troy is going to fall, but that sort of final moment isn't really captured until sort of later by later poets who tell their stories of Virgil, most famously of all, and the Aeneid tells the story of the Trojan horse and the fall of Troy proper. But you know what's going to happen. So it's a very small window, but it's

incredibly powerful poem for containing such a sort of very compact and intense moment within that 10 year battle. Absolutely. And just so we get our bearings of where this is now, where is Troy in the modern map, shall we say on the modern map? So Troy is sort of just off the west coast of Turkey. It's near the Hellespont and it's been identified with the site of Heshalik. And I'm sorry if my pronunciation isn't very good, but this was a site that's been excavated and most scholars would agree that this was the site of ancient Troy. And so let's delve therefore into the Iliad and this focus on this part of the Trojan War. Now, what's the whole plot of the Iliad?

There seems to be this fuse right at the centre of it, doesn't there, Daisy? So Agamemnon is the brother of Menelaus, the husband of Helen. He's also the general of the Greek army. He's the big guy who's in charge. And he takes the slave woman, Briseiseis who has been sharing Achilles' tent and Achilles is one of the great warriors, he's the great fighter among the Greeks and Achilles is furious about this, he sees this as a slight of his honour. Briseis is his, in Greek, his geras, his war prize.

And she as a woman has had no choice in this. She's been taken essentially to be his sex slave. That's what we would probably call her today. And Achilles is so offended by Agamemnon sort of lording himself over him in this way that he decides to quit from the fighting. And that in itself is tragic because it means that the Trojans are allowed to get the upper hand and you see a certain amount of this happening in the poem. Even though I think Homer strives to show a big difference between the two sides, the Greeks overall being more organised as an army,

being more stately, being more sort of professional, whereas the Trojans are shown to be sort of babbling in their foreign tongue and being a bit sort of promiscuous in the way that they're arranged on the battlefield. And it's partly because the gods are involved in this. So the tide of the battle begins to sort of turn and fit in the Trojans' favour. And so a kind of agreement needs to be made with Achilles and some of the kind of more persuasive soldiers are sent to try and persuade

him to rejoin the fighting and Odysseus is among those and they kind of bring him presents and promises and all kinds of things but it's ultimately the death of Achilles' other best friend, his comrade, his companion, some would say lover, Patroclus that persuades Achilles to kind of go up and fight. He's kind of filled with anger. He's filled with rage. And he must then kill and fight in a duel the man who has killed Patroclus, who is Hector. And that's essentially the arc of the story,

a very simplified version. It's a complex tale. I mean, absolutely. And it would take many, many podcasts to tell the tale of the Iliad in full, in its complete detail. But you mentioned a couple of other things there. I mean, first to tell the tale of the Iliad in full, in its complete detail. But you mentioned a couple of other things there.

I mean, first off, this role of the gods. So it's not just these hero figures that you mentioned and this storyline surrounding the feud. Do the gods also play a significant part? Do they interfere with the events that are occurring on the ground? It's often been said that the gods see the war almost like a chess game. they're looking down from Mount Olympus and they all have their favourites and they quarrel among themselves and they decide who they're going to support and who they want to be sort of see punished for their behaviour or their lack of kind of worship of the gods themselves. So there's a lot of interference from above. It's not a kind of level playing field by any means because the gods themselves. So there's a lot of interference from above. It's not a kind of level playing field by any means because the gods are so involved. You know, there are certain

people such as Athena and Apollo who certainly are very much there on the battlefield at certain times. And I mean, the other thing to say is that this is a bygone age. This is an age of heroes. So a lot of these soldiers are actually related to the gods they're descended from them and some of them sort of have you know this kind of divine ancestry which makes them stronger and more powerful than the average man so that's why you see certain soldiers such as Diomedes actually able to wound Aphrodite you know which is a rare thing he actually grazes her and that's not something you can imagine happening, but that kind of gives you an idea of how close the gods and men are at that point.

And that's something which suddenly later poets look back on as being partly why it was a heroic age, because of this closeness. But that closeness also involved quarrel and dispute. So that's sort of a major prevailing theme of the poem. It is so interesting. And you mentioned figures like Diomedes, and prevailing theme of the poem. It is so interesting. And you mentioned figures like Diomedes, and you also mentioned previously the jewel. And I know we're kind of skipping ahead here,

but if we go to the legacy of the Iliad and the story of all these jewels, Diomedes versus Aeneas, I think it's Diomedes versus Aeneas, that's one of the jewels, and Hector versus Achilles, as you mentioned. It's so remarkable to see how they inspire figures, real figures, much, much later, whether it's the 4th century, 3rd century. I'm thinking, obviously, I'm going to go to the Hellenistic period and the successors and how they're inspired. Alexander the Great, copy under his pillow, or however they say it. And then his

successor generals almost trying to emulate these heroes of the Trojan War told in these stories in how they duel each other. There are several accounts of them going out to duel the person that they hate the most, Eumenes, Neoptolemus or whoever. But it's so fascinating how you have the origins of those desires by those figures existing much, much later, centuries later, how it all originates from this Homeric tale intertwined with the involvement of gods and so much more. It's just remarkable, isn't it, Daisy, when you look at the legacy of just parts of a story like that and how they significantly influenced people, soldiers, commanders, living centuries later. Well, this is why Homer and the Iliad and Odyssey are not just a poet and his poems. You know,

they're so much bigger than that because they influence history in that way I mean you have these people harking back constantly and wanting to be on a par with them maybe Alexander the Great you'll know you know of course he kind of sort of modelled himself on these figures he has this kind of leonine hairstyle and everything else men who really wanted to be the equals of the men who are described by Homer. And this partly comes from the feeling that the times have declined since then. Now, something I'm really interested in is this myth of the ages, which is an idea we find in a near contemporary of Homer called Hesiod,

who describes there as being sort of five ages of man, starting with a golden age, going to a silver age, then a bronze age, then this heroic age, and then the Iron Age. And the Iron Age was the one that kind of persisted, and all these historians and everyone else kind of considered themselves as belonging to this Iron Age. But they're constantly harking back to the heroic age, saying, oh, we could try and be like this.

But what's interesting is you actually find within the Homer's poems themselves this similar kind of feeling that the fathers of these men were greater than the sons. Agamemnon's told at one point that he's no way as good as his own sort of ancestors before him were. Nestor is the old sort of king of Pylos, who is a very sage old figure in the Iliad. And he knows a lot of this older generation. And he's often saying that the men of today are in no way as strong and mighty as the ones who've come before them so there is this kind of constant golden age thinking going on which is integral to Homer but really is kind of writ large in later history when you find other warriors and other politicians trying to compare themselves and

match these great heroes of literature they're not even sort of real people, but they are real to them. And this is why Homer's so important. I say it, Homer, him, his poems, whatever you want to say, they infiltrate all aspects of society and ambitions and, you know, other people's goals. And people's sense of who they are come from Homer. It's sort of the lifeblood of the ancient world. History tells us that in 1455 the royal houses of Lancaster and York went to war,

beginning a 30-year dynastic struggle for the throne that would change the course of English history forever. It became known as the Wars of the Roses. At this time, the Wars of the Roses are well underway. There's so much uncertainty throughout the country and who's going to come through all of this. This month, we're dedicating a special series of episodes to finding out all the answers to your burning questions. People have just ashamed that both words were bad.

But when was this scribbled in? It's effectively an act of graffiti on a parliamentary roll. Who were the key players? What were the critical battles and switches of allegiance? Was it ever really a case of good and bad? Join me, Matt Lewis, on the Gone Medieval podcast from History Hit every Saturday for brand new episodes. you mentioned these figures real figures i mean it really begs the question could there have been any historical basis for these heroic figures that you have in Iliad, Agamemnon, Achilles, Priam, Nestor or whoever?

Could there have been a historical basis in which Homer based these characters? I guess this kind of leads on to the big question of was there a Trojan War? That's essentially what you're asking me. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely, yeah. Which, again, another very difficult question to answer. What I would say on that is that people are incredibly divided. There are historians who say there's no such thing as a Trojan War. This is complete fantasy.

It's been fabricated out of nothing. It's a selection of wonderful stories which have come down to us. Others have been really tempted to find some evidence for either real figures or see if their armour, for example, or the kind of world they belong to in the soil itself. And that was the driving ambition of Heinrich Schliemann, the guy who originally sort of excavated the site of Troy. He was tipped off to this likely site by a man called Frank Calvert. He went over, incredibly wealthy, self-made man, he sort of made his money selling sugar and tea and coffee and gold dust and all these sort of crazy things like that. And he wasn't a great sort of archaeologist by training or

anything, but he had the funds and that was what mattered. And he went down, he excavated this site at Hizlulik, he dug through the soil, kind of took the view that the Trojan War was a long time ago, so therefore it must be at the bottom, rather haphazardly just dug down uncovered some amazing gold jewellery and all kinds of things like that and then realised that it was centuries too old to have come from the period of Homer's Trojan War so a lot more had to be done and a lot more was done so particularly in the 1930s to excavate the site and what was found was the fact that there is some evidence within the strata of conflict. So in particular, the archaeology is incredibly complicated,

but roughly there are about 10 main layers of habitation within the site. And the ones that correspond to the Late Bronze Age in which the battles that Homer was describing would have been set are roughly within the layers of six and seven and there are lots of sort of six A, B, C, D that goes on and on and on but within those strata there's evidence of burning, there are a few arrowheads that have been found, there are some sort of slingshots with terracotta pellets and sort of an idea that certainly things have been rebuilt so one of the really interesting

things is a sort of monumental city that's built within the sixth layer and it has these incredible walls sort of very very thick walls surrounding this ancient citadel just as Homer described in the Iliad and this city was clearly incredibly grand incredibly well fortified but it was destroyed. And whether it was destroyed by natural causes, this area is kind of an area that sees a lot of earthquakes, for example, is unclear. But some people have been tempted to see this as being as a result of warfare. And partly sort of aiding that hypothesis is the fact that when it was rebuilt, even more fortification towers and things were added to the walls and a load of sort

of very very small makeshift kind of dwellings were erected within the streets where previously they had these lovely white streets quite elegant sort of looking these were very very kind of hasty makeshift almost sort of like two bedroom dwellings with living space and they all had these sunken amphorae in the floor for storing provisions clearly for storing food for storing wine which is unusual and that certainly looks like a place that is trying to sort of batten down the hatches and to make sure that they are going to be self-sufficient if their home comes under siege for example and it's the sort of thing you'd associate with wartime so there's some suggestion that this site was certainly the victim of either sort of natural disaster but quite possibly warfare as well and this is something which is kind of borne out by

other evidence in kind of Hittite tablets and other things at that time. You mentioned Hittites there I guess it also leads on to another big question, and I don't know how much we know about this, of who were the Trojans, you know, compared to if you said that Homer contrasts them to the Greeks in the Iliad. Like, were these Hittite people or were they an Ionic Greek people or Aeolic? I mean, do we know anything about who these Trojans were. So Troy in the late Bronze Age was a basal state of the Hittite empire and the Hittite empire was enormous. I mean it stretched all the way from the Aegean to a modern Iraq and they're incredibly powerful and they were certainly on sort of trading terms and speaking terms with the Trojans but less so with the Greeks. I mean they kind of seem to have almost been eyeing each other across the sea, the Greeks and the Hittites. And we still find interesting things. The Hittites knew Troy as a place called Wilusa, and they refer to it as such in their written tablets.

They're great sort of documentary makers. You know, they still had these tablets where they'd write things down, which is fortunate for us. And Wilusa is etymologically linked to what Homer calls Troy, which is Ilios or Ilion. There's a link between the two. And there is evidence in one of these tablets that Troy made a pact with the Hittites around sort of, I think it was 1280 BC. The king of Willusa actually sort of made an alliance with the Hittites and kind of an agreement that they would support each other in the event of an attack so they were kind of allies together and we know probably more about the Hittites than we do the Trojans per se but we

kind of have the idea of them being part of this sort of wider network and we know that from other tablets that conflicts were fought over Wilusa, but we don't specifically know of a Trojan war per se. And my feeling that there was a series of conflicts and a series of wars. I don't believe in one single Trojan war, but I believe that this was a time of great upheaval in this part of the world and that Troy was almost caught in the middle of it when the Hittites came into conflict with the Greeks and I believe that actually happened. Again it's very difficult to interpret from the evidence but there is sort of evidence of tensions arising between this

particular king called Ahiyawa who could have been a sort of Mycenaean lord sort of on the mainland and the Hittites. So very, very complicated history, but it is plausible that there was something like a Trojan War or a series of Trojan Wars, which, you know, some kind of memory of has been passed down. And maybe that's a romantic view, but it's the view that I take in light of the Hittite tablets and the sort of broader archaeology that I've looked into. There we go. There we go. Could well be. I mean, okay, so focusing in on that. It's so amazing, isn't it, when you can draw powers like the Hittites, like the Mycenaeans. And you mentioned Schliemann earlier, obviously did work at Mycenae too, didn't he? And to see how that could fit into the actual historical context of Troy. It's so remarkable. I mean, we've got to go back to

Homer. As I said, we'll be focusing in on Homer. And we've talked about the Iliad and the Trojan War. But the Iliad's not the only work attributed to Homer, is it? There's another one which is also kind of associated with the Trojan War. So the sort of sequel nominally of the Iliad is the Odyssey. And I always say to people, if you're going to start reading Homer even though the Odyssey is the sequel it's the one to read first in some ways it's an easier poem to relate to and get to grips to when you're reading Homer for the first time because it's a slightly more domestic tale it's more of an adventure story than the Iliad the Iliad is very much about the Trojan War

the Odyssey is about the aftermath of the Trojan War and that story is told almost purely through one of the veterans, Odysseus. He's wily, Odysseus, by one of his epithets in the poem. He's very clever, he's inventive. He's kind of a headman rather than a kind of brawny soldier on the battlefield. And he is on this long, long journey home. He's been away fighting for 10 years in the Iliad, but his journey's going to take him exactly the same kind of time to get home to his island of Ithaca. And he has a loyal wife waiting for him there, Penelope.

And she's been accosted by all these other men who want to marry her. In their absence, there are 300 of them who've taken over the palace where she used to live with Odysseus and their son is there as well and Telemachus and Penelope between them are really battling to fend off these really foul suitors for Penelope's hand there's a famous tale that arises in the Odyssey where she takes to her weaving by day and then she undoes it at night because she said that as soon as she's finished this funeral shroud that she's making for her father-in-law, Laertes,

that's when she'll take a new husband. But by unpicking the thread, she's been putting that day off for as long as humanly possible and you can't blame her when you read about these awful suitors just eating up all her food and sitting around feasting and getting drunk and making passes at the maids and everything else that's happening you know it's a difficult story for Penelope but it's also a difficult story for Odysseus who has to battle all kinds of things to get home from the Cyclops to Circe and these kind

of seductresses who try and slow him down on his great nostos is the Greek word which is the origin of our word for nostalgia. This means his homecoming. Because it's interesting with Homer's Odyssey, isn't it? I mean, and also, I guess, like the Iliad, you know, I'm presuming from what I remember, it doesn't start at Troy. It doesn't start with the Trojan horse or, you know, something like that, which is so commonly associated with the Trojan War, with Odysseus and so on. It starts much later, doesn't it? Is it following Scylla and Charybdis that Homer's Odyssey starts? It's not right at the beginning of Odysseus's great gap year home, is it? Great journey home. Well, exactly. I think sometimes

you can take to Homer and you're thinking, well, where's the cyclops? Where are all these beasts? Where are these fantastic stories I've been reading about? And then people think, okay, I've got to wait till book nine out of 24 to get to Odysseus retelling his own adventures of what he's endured so far. For the early part of the book, we're actually much more focused on the world that he's left behind, and his son in particular, Telemachus. And the first few books of the Odyssey are traditionally described as the Telemachy. It's Telemachus' own journey, it's his own quest to learn really who his father was. He doesn't really know his father, he was so young when Odysseus went off to war.

And he's grown up and he's a young man, he's full of rage, he hasn't really developed his own identity at that stage. So he goes off on a journey of his own to try and discover more about Odysseus's whereabouts but also more about Odysseus the man Odysseus the father who is this great man so he travels off to Sparta for example to see Menelaus who's back with Helen by this point so we're getting kind of a bit of a closure to that thread from the Iliad to find out more about Odysseus and he's traveling to Pylos as well the great kingdom of Nesta in the Iliad and he has his own questions and he's kind of helped along by Athena who is the most loyal goddess to Odysseus and we are kind of learning Telemachus about Telemachus as a man Telemachus is really it's a kind of a coming of age story, really, the Telemachy. He's growing up from a boy to a man, and he kind of becomes a lot more sophisticated, a lot more adult as the epic goes on. So it's so interesting. So as you mentioned

from there, so it's almost as if we're getting insight into the aftermath of the Trojan War through this Telemachy, through Telemachus and his interactions with these other figures who we knew from the Iliad. Exactly. And I think this is why people are sometimes sort of questioning about the Odyssey. It seems almost too perfect in the way it tries to wrap up what had been happening, these kind of threads which had been left dangling by the Iliad. And some people take objection to it from that perspective they obviously love the stories they like all the descriptions of the travels but they think okay we probably did want to know what would happen to Helen after the Trojan War but it seems almost too perfect what would happen to all these different people and that's why I think some people have said okay the Odyssey is definitely written by someone else other than Homer or by other people who are just

really desperate to complete the story and to create a sequel and you can kind of relate to that I think when you look at a perfectly good TV series or something and then suddenly there's a second series because it's been so popular and it just seems to be answering too many of the things just too directly which have been posed in the first series and you kind of think oh I wish that stuck with just the original not that we shouldn't have an od Odyssey, because I do love the Odyssey, but I think people have objections to it on that particular front. I mean, let's explore some ways perhaps where they might be similar in writing styles and all that. I mean, we talked about the gods earlier and how Homer portrays them in the Iliad.

Is it a similar sort of portrayal of the gods in the Odyssey? Are they always kind of watching on and interfering with events? They're certainly in the same way as in the Iliad. There are gods who are supporting and there are gods who are hindering. So one of the great gods who's hindering Odysseus in the Odyssey is Poseidon, the god of the sea. And this is partly because of the Cyclops episode. The Cyclops is the son of Poseidon. This particular Cyclops is a one-eyed monster. A Cyclops that Odysseus meets and blinds in his cave is Polyphemus. And he taunts him and he mocks him as he manages to get away from the cave by having blinded him, sort of grabs hold of

the belly of one of the rams he puts out to pasture. You know, the Cyclops is not a nice character, but he is very nice to his flocks. Soseus escapes then he mocks the poor blinded beast and Poseidon is outraged by this and he makes Odysseus's journey even more difficult by sea as a result of this and I think some people say well look Odysseus you had it coming this is a real example of hubris it's someone who thinks he's kind of greater than the gods in some ways so it's partly the gods are interfering kind of out of their own desire but partly in response to human behavior fair enough and this other key thing i'd love to ask about now is this whole idea of xenia xenia what is this idea of xenia what is homer trying to get across with this idea of xenia which seems to be so right at the centre of the Odyssey story.

Well, Xenia, roughly translated, means hospitality. But it's not a very hospitality, it's one of those phrases in English, we think of a hospitality industry. It's not a particularly good translation. Xenia in Homer is something much more important than that. So the Cyclops Polyphemus stands as, he typifies everything that Xenia is not he invites these men into his home which is his cave and he proceeds to eat them he doesn't sort of give them the hospitality which is expected so he is the arch villain the antithesis of what the ideal host

should be in the Odyssey there are other people who do things absolutely perfectly. So there's a princess, for example, who comes across Odysseus when he's washed up on her shore. Her name is Nausicaa, and she invites him into her home, her palace. And Odysseus is given food, he's given drink, he's allowed to wash. And only then, after he's feasted are questions asked of him and that's a kind of correct protocol it's the correct way of doing things and this is meant to be shown to strangers and I think certainly as I read these poems growing up I thought this is incredibly trusting of people it seems a bit silly to me that people would allow complete strangers into their home give them food and wine and then say well who are you what do you want like where are

you going but that is the way that things are done in the Homeric world and that is how Zenia works you're supposed to fulfill this for people who come into your home you're supposed to be welcoming to them you're supposed to sort of send them on their way only after sort of feeding them and giving them drink and giving them provisions giving them clothes in some cases and making sure that they get on in their journey as swiftly and comfortably as possible. So it's part of the sort of Homeric lifestyle. And I think it's just an incredibly interesting thing. It comes up again and again in the poem. It's one of those formulaic passages, which we see repeated again and again, because

it's part of the way of life. Is it one of those elements you see in cultures across the world, whether it's songlines in indigenous Australia, elsewhere in the ancient world where there are stories, but there's lots of meaning behind those stories and there's life lessons to learn, you know, to survive in an area of a world or how to get along with certain people in certain places. Do you think like this idea of Xenia and perhaps other ideas as well that were in Homer, his Iliad, his Odyssey, in other poems from this time, before the age of writing, do you think they had this larger meaning for those who were watching it, who were listening to it, with the songs and everything?

Lessons that they were supposed to take away from it, with how they were supposed to, shall we say, behave in their societies? I think people certainly took the idea of what was moral from these poems and what was the right way to comport oneself, the right way to treat other people. I think we can sometimes describe the Iliad and the Odyssey as being almost like the Bible of the ancient world. It wasn't something which was necessarily followed to the letter.

So much of it was obviously fictional, but the lessons that could be drawn from it were instructive for everyday life. And even in ways of sort of forming ambitions and really trying to teach people to aspire to something, to travel, it may be, to fight for their country. These were all myths and themes which could be extracted from the poems and to be treated sort of more realistically and to be held sort of quite close to people. And I think it's just incredibly important from that point of view that these poems were perpetuated because these are enduring lessons

which continue to be passed down. Okay. So I'm going to talk about all of that then. If we wrap up the Odyssey before really wrapping up with looking about, you know, the historical basis, reasons why for these poems, creating these two poems, these two epics.

How does the Odyssey end? The Odyssey ends with Odysseus returning to Ithaca and being reunited with his wife, Penelope, killing off all the suitors. There's lots of very, very violent episode with he's helped by Telemachus um he's helped by one of his herdsmen as well there's a great contest there with shooting sort of arrows and all kinds of things happen back on Ithaca and it's a kind of a very obviously sort of happy ending and there's some dispute as to where the Odyssey actually ended

is the final book 24 legitimate is it not legitimate because there's some dispute as to where the Odyssey actually ended. Is the final book, 24, legitimate? Is it not legitimate? Because there's sort of the idea of more adventures to come. And it's such an interesting story. As you said, it's very different to the Iliad story of Homer, you know, this adventure story and this homecoming story. I mean, do we know of any historical influences that might have inspired, influenced Homer or whoever initially created this story?

There are certainly influences coming over from the Near East. might have inspired, influenced Homer or whoever initially created this story? There are certainly influences coming over from the Near East. So the poem that probably was the great forerunner of the Iliad and the Odyssey is really the Epic of Gilgamesh, which simile tells of a hero and his quests and has a lot actually in common with the Odyssey in particular. And he's a sort of imperfect figure who has to overcome a lot of challenges both external and mentally sort of as well internal to himself and we think that probably Homer was familiar with this epic poem and there are certain there are lots of similarities between works so I think the Iliad and the Odyssey even though we know them in isolation today,

they're clearly part of a broader network of works which stretch across the world itself, really, you know, looking from the Near East, but also sort of within Greece, there's something we talk about, these poems of the kind of epic tradition. There are lots of other epic poems that we have traces of, things like the Ethiopis. So one of them, there's a whole band of different sort of epic fragments of tales of works that we no longer have, which were created mainly, I think, after the Iliad and the Odyssey. But these certainly weren't the only works. There were people trying to create sort of prequels and sequels and kind of side tales to these poems.

So there's a much broader network of epic poetry these are just the ones that survive isn't it they're the ones that survive yeah it's amazing i love that idea they're in ethiopias you know especially when you look at roman literature i guess greco-roman literature later like the ethiopica and heliodorus how once again that comes up it is stunning i guess what i've also loved about this is actually this link, whether it's the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Hittite Empire, you have this link between the Iliad, the Odyssey, Homer, and his inspiration, and the Near East. It really emphasises that connected nature of it, doesn't it? As we start to wrap up now, Daisy, I guess one of the other questions I've got to ask is, we've talked about the two big works, the Iliad and the Odyssey. But another big question is, why do you think he decides to write it? And it's not even writing.

Why do you think he or whoever before him, they decide, if Homer was even one person, they decide to compose this story, this epic tale, these epics? I think storytelling is as old as time itself. And I think that from thousands of years ago, people were entertaining each other by telling of gods and of people who were stronger than them. And of heroes, really, people that they could look up to and sort of make their lives richer in some way. And the narratives of both the Homeric poems are incredibly sophisticated they go off in so many different directions there are layers upon layers of different storytelling and I think different traditions embedded within them and we get a sense I think that a lot of these stories have been combined from different angles so you can imagine this kind of being like

the final stew pot if you like of ideas and stories that have been told by lots of different people over time. And it's just something I think people have done to make themselves happy, just like people dance, you know, all through time, people have told each other stories, and people have been interested in the possibilities of our connection with not just life, but with kind of what else is out there. And the idea of the gods and not just life but with kind of what else is out there and the idea of the gods and religion and I think religion obviously formed a natural part of society and formed part of the stories and that line between literature and religion was by no means sort of clear-cut you know they kind of fed into each other all too naturally so I think there

was a real really strong religious dimension to the creation of these stories in the first place. I mean absolutely and Daisy it's so fascinating isn't it when you look to the creation of these stories in the first place. Absolutely. And Daisy, it's so fascinating, isn't it, when you look at the legacy of Homer and the Iliad and the Odyssey, how it could have been one day there were people just listening to it or watching the poem, the performance with song and enjoying it and thinking how it therefore went from there to be continued, to be passed down generation to generation until writing and then it's passed down that through Greeks, through Romans, medieval, renaissance, 18th, 19th, 20th century. It's absolutely astonishing the legacy, how it starts all those many centuries BC and how it's continued, can we say, all the way down to the present day.

And that's testament to the greatness of these works, really. It's a recognition of the fact that these are special works of literature. And more than that, we've sort of spoken about these being part of ancient history itself. So the fact that they've informed so many of the decisions that have been made, so many of the fronts that people have put on through time. And it's just kind of understanding that these stories are great because they capture something of the human spirit itself. Daisy, this has been an absolutely great chat, as always.

Last but certainly not least, you have written a small little book, A Guide to Homer, What We Know, What We Don't Know. I have, which is sort of a Homer in a nutshell, which is called Homer, a Ladybird Expert book. Fantastic. Daisy, well, it's wonderful to see you in person and to do this in person. And it only goes to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. It's been great fun. Thank you. Well, there you go. There was Daisy explaining all about Homer, what we know about him, his works and his legacy. I hope you enjoyed the episode.

It was great fun to record that episode in person with Daisy. Now, last but certainly not least, if you'd like more Ancients content in the meantime, well, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter via a link in the description below. Every week I write a little bit of a blurb for that newsletter explaining what's been happening in ancient history hit world that week. for that newsletter explaining what's been happening in ancient history hit world that week. And lastly, if you'd also be kind enough to leave us a lovely rating on either Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts from, I would greatly appreciate it. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.