The Rest Is History - 13. Stephen Fry and Troy

Episode Date: January 7, 2021

Stephen Fry is our guest on The Rest is History as he tells Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook about his enduring fascination with the Greek myths. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello, welcome to The Rest Is History. It really is a grey old day here, the rain pouring relentlessly down, and what I wouldn't give for a little bit of the Aegean sunshine. Well, as it happens, Tom Holland always brings a little bit of Greece with him, don't you, Tom? Thank you so much, Tommy. That's a charming thing to say. And in fact, you have very kindly already allowed

me to do one episode on ancient greece we covered the trojan war um and because i'm a glutton for good things i would like to uh return to that um and today we are going to look perhaps more broadly not just the trojan war but at the whole field of greek mythology but it's going to be a different kind of podcast because um for the first time we have a guest. And I think that, you know, when we have our first guest on this podcast, it's got to be a special guest. Definitely. Well, Dominic, for our first guest, I've chosen a polymath, a comedian, an actor, a novelist, an all-round Renaissance man. And it's the definition of a Renaissance man, I think, that he should love ancient Greece and perhaps specifically its mythology. So the Renaissance man that I have invited on is Mr Stephen Fry, who is joining us from California,

has a new book out on the Trojan War. Stephen, thanks so much for joining us. It's a pleasure. And as a Renaissance man, in your honour, I'm even wearing tights. Which we can't see on the set, but I'm sure it looks absolutely gorgeous under the desk. So Stephen, we've already had one episode on the Trojan War war so it is a treat to get back to it um and you you've got um new book about it and it's the third in a sequence of books that you've written about greek myths how much were you looking forward to getting to the trojan war enormously i mean both as uh in a positive way and also the slight sense of dread, because I knew that at least the Trojan War and its aftermath, or after myth, ho-ho, would lead to an end of the story of Greek myth.

One can overdo how shaped Greek myth is and how much of a literary performance, rather than a folk performance it might be. But more than most mythic cycles, it seems to begin at the beginning with the birth of the gods and end with the coming home of characters like Odysseus, the nostos, as the Greeks call it, that wonderful sense of home, which can so easily symbolically seem like mankind coming home to itself and no longer needing gods to explain the oddities of

the world or to interfere and intervene in the way that gods used to do and used to do in almost all cultures and you know british folk had fairies and little people who used to dwell amongst us supposedly and and almost all myths have have this idea that there was a time when gods and men trod the earth together and uh the fact that it had to come to an end somehow that the trojan war um and particularly the coming home even the tragic coming home of agamemnon and um and uh and the slightly less happy coming home of uh helen and menelaus and the slightly less happy coming home of Helen and Menelaus, and the apparently happy coming home of Odysseus to the hearth, to their own families, to their own problems and squabbles, rather than just continuing to be puppets of the gods,

is a wonderful sense of closure anyway. But the Trojan War is the final explosion of gods and humanity broiling together under the sun in the dust and um that's something i've i've really looked forward to i tell you the thing i didn't look forward to because i don't think of myself as that sort of person was the butch mano a mano fighting that uh formed so much of the iliadad. And I thought I would get rather, but, you know, reading it again, it is extraordinary how beautiful, poetic, strong and perfect, really,

Homer's writing about these fights is. You would think they become repetitive and boring, even in the violence of, you know, blood and brains shooting out of the sockets of a helmet and some of the really quite cinematic and horrific images, you would think you'd tire of them. But actually there's something quite genuinely noble and remarkable about the fighting which I never thought I would find because I think of myself as a typical child of my age

for whom militarism and the warrior code is for saps and is for Spartans and we're all Athenians, you know. That sort of sense that it's a bit over, it's part of what we now call toxic masculinity. And yet characters like Ajax and Hector and Achilles and Diomedes, you know, the real warriors in the story, as opposed to the sharp operators like Odysseus and Nestor and so on. There is a quality to them that continues to speak to you across the thousands of years um that that is just remarkable and i was very pleased that my publishers when they read the manuscript they found that that the actual fighting in the sand in front of the walls of troy was for them really important part of it if i can um i know tom wants

to ask you lots of questions about myth in general but one thing that interests me so your first book in this cycle was about the gods and then you sort of did heroes. And this one you've moved a tiny bit more towards history because the Trojan War is an event that people argue about. So was that, did you write about it in exactly, were you conscious of adopting the same voice as it were that you had with the earlier books?

It's a really good point that, Dominic. And yes, it's part of what I was saying about coming to the end of the mythic nature of this whole story as it becomes to leak into historicity of some kind. I think it's fair to say that for most of the modern age, what we call the modern age, we didn't think of the Trojan War

as having any historical basis. And it wasn't really until Schliemann and the late 19th century and his excavations that this idea that it could really have happened, that there could have been a war in a historical place like that, became clearer and clearer. Though, of course, that's a whole other story. Schliemann was a showman and a fraud and all kinds of things. And as some archaeologists made the point that with his

dynamite and his readjusting of the sites, he finally destroyed Troy in a way that the Greek armies never could. But yes, it is interesting. And I had an image for it, which is rather cute, I suppose, and therefore not necessarily to be trusted. But it works as an analogy to some extent, that when you begin at the very beginning of the myths, you have these almost archetypal figures, these primordial deities who are what they represent. So Ouranos, whom we amusingly call Uranus, of course, is the sky. And to this day, the Greek word for sky is Ouranos.

So in that sense, you're talking about personifications of abstract or meteorological ideas and elements in the world and the cosmos that humans apprehend. And they give them a name and an agency. And that's a very basic God. And I remember thinking, this is a bit like the early days of computer gaming, when in the first generation of four-bit computing, it was very blocky. And there was no resolution, there were no curves. The colours were very basic, just the primary colours of light, you know, red, green, blue and yellow. And then 8-bit and 16-bit, you started to get anti-aliasing,

as they call it in the graphics world, and you got these polygons with more shapes and more resolution because there was more power and more computing. So by the time you got to the turn of the century, each new generation of computer graphics was becoming more resolved, richer, more complex, more real. And it's the same with the personalities of Greek myth. It starts with these, the sky, the earth, darkness, you know light these are the gods ether you know and so on and then the race of titans is born from that and they have a little more personality you can see chronos and the others and rhea they've got they've definitely got personality they're 8-bit or 16-bit even and but then their children zeus and here and poseidon and Demeter and so on, they really have character and personality and richness.

And then the next generations, including, of course, humankind that are made by Prometheus. And so you start to get this, as I say, a bit like computer gaming. You start to get a landscape of entities, of divine beings that have real ambiguity and complexity and contradiction. They are, as Ian Forster would say, rounded characters rather than flat characters. They have resolution, you know. They're 4K HDR. And they've got all the... And that becomes even truer as you move into the Trojan arena where you can see it is all about the flaws in humanity and in the gods that drive the story

rather than just plain clunky lust or ambition, but conflicting motives that give rise to questions that people still ask today. So, of course, I'm talking as if assuming that everybody knows the story of the Trojan War, but perhaps people will know enough at least to know that the proschema, as historians like to say, the casus belli, the cause of the whole thing, the bone of contention or the apple of discord, in fact, is all about Helen of Sparta, who is abducted. And there I've used the word and taken to Troy and becomes Helen of Troy. And of course, she is, as I say, the bone of contention.

But the question you're bound to ask when reading Homer, who back references, obviously, to that story of Paris coming to Sparta to take her, and we still don't know, reading the whole of the Iliad and reading the sources after, the Smyrnaeus, Quintus Smyrnaeus and others, you still don't know, does Helen come willingly? Is she hypnotised by Aphrodite, the dullest answer perhaps?

Or is it as you sense that she was glamorised by this very handsome Trojan prince, but that slowly his vanity, his surface qualities, his lack of bravery or self-knowledge or honor caused the love to die? eye. And that is much more interesting. And it's sketched in so lightly by Homer that you can't quite believe you've read that much into it. But that's part of Homer's genius, I think. Yeah, well, I was going to say on the topic of Helen, I mean, part of the fascination of all the figures of Greek myth is that when you write about them, say, in a book like yours, they are unitary characters, and they are the compound of all the mystery and all the many different things that have been written about them by different people. So Helen, of course, you know, she's not just the subject of Homer. Many different writers wrote about her and many

different writers attributed different motives to her. And I wonder when you are writing about the gods or the heroes or Helen, you are having to draw on multiple sources. How easy did you find it to blend those sources so that you had kind of a sense of unitry characters when you were writing about them? That's a really good question. And of course, it's impossible not somehow to take sides, if that's the right phrase. Most people of my generation and background who, you know, studied classics a bit at school, you know, up to A-level at least, and certainly not academically qualified to pronounce too much on it, but most of us tend naturally to side with the Greeks in the Trojan War, the Achaeans, whatever you want to call the side that's come to collect Helen, just because that's the civilization that we regard as the one that's

primary. But whenever you get involved with the story, you can't help feeling extreme admiration and respect for Priam and his family with the exception of Paris and Diphobus perhaps but generally speaking Hector and Andromache are so lovable and splendid and Odysseus is genuinely so twisted and cruel and Agamemnon is so pompous and absurd and lacks self-knowledge to such a great degree and you start to get furious with the Greeks and you realize that nonetheless you are telling the story from their point of view and I think the way I got inside the characters and tried to have my own well tried to let them speak for themselves but under my own, well, tried to let them speak for themselves, but under my own guidance, obviously, was by mostly having Odysseus as the point of consciousness for me, even if I don't tell the story entirely from his point of view. It is usually Odysseus watching Agamemnon or seeing

something dishonorable happen and being a little bit cynical about it. And, you know, that sort of allows one to have the ironic distance, because I think Odysseus has an ironic distance from a lot of this. And he never wanted to be there, and he very rarely reveals what he thinks um but but he he allows one to see the dark side and the good side of every character i i mean it's not a wholly literary or satisfactory way of doing it but of course you can't just fill it with footnotes i'm not a historian i can't say but for some people helen was the shrew of all ages. For others, she was a cult who was worshipped here, there, and so on.

Because almost every character takes on huge meaning to subsequent generations. So Diomedes had temples to him and so on. But you can't stop and do all of that. I think you have to allow the reader to be surprised by how upset they are, perhaps, at the fall of Troy. Because we've all wanted it you think come on we've got to we've got to win the Greeks have got somehow to win and when the Trojan Horse finally works it is one is disgusted I think by the violence by the horror by Neoptolemus Achilles son his particular horrific cruelty and violence.

And it's never held back by the writers. Obviously, Homer isn't there in terms of the story of the Iliad. It's finished long ago. It ends with the funeral of Hector. But he refers to what will happen and then other sources like Virgil and Quintus Menaeus give good descriptions of terrible violence and we feel responsible I think that's part of the in the same way I suppose that an intelligent and sensitive student reading about the massacre at Amritsar would feel somehow complicit just by being British. It's nonsense. We weren't there. It wasn't our decision.

We're not General Dyer. We're not, you know, we're not responsible for it. And yet it's a stain on something to do with our identity. We won't go too far into the horrors of identitarian politics just now. But you know what i mean that there is a it's part of the literary adventure of history is that you cannot but identify and in identifying when the side that you allow yourself to does something dreadful you feel that you've done that dreadful thing but stephen doesn't this raise an interesting question, which is that writing about this, I mean, this was a story that was told in a culture that was much more violent than our own, with a cult of honour that we barely understand. And it must be an interesting challenge to retell that story for basically, you know, there's always that argument, which I imagine we all find quite irritating about relevance, about the relevance of myths and history and whatnot. But it must be a challenge to write about this story for an audience that don't prize those

things, for whom violence is repellent. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think it's one of the real difficulties facing historians and retellers of any tale of the past. And I'm talking about the recent past, which you, Dominic, know very well, well for example have made your study is that subsequent generations find it very hard sometimes to understand what you might call the codes behind yeah so for example and i my generation of god sons and nephews and nieces it's sometimes if i watch a film like i don't know it could it could be Brief Encounter or The Way to the Stars, some Second World War movie, they genuinely say to me, did people talk like that? And I'll think, actually, is it that odd?

I say, well, maybe it is. So why don't they, why do they hide everything? They don't talk about what they're feeling at all. And I think, gosh, that is true. I mean, we sort of knew as a kind of joke about those stiff upper-lipped Englishmen, but come to think of it, Michael Redgrave and Kenneth Moore, Johnny Mills or whoever,

they speak off the subject all the time. And this is recent. You know, I knew Johnny Mills. He was actually a very close friend. And my parents' generation were exactly that generation. And I don't think of them as being a different sort of human. And yet the codes of conduct and of emotional language and even of what is loss, what is honour,

what it is to be a good human, there are a lot of very puritanical young people looking back at recent culture and judging it. And as you know, we now have to have apologies up in front of every film to explain that they reflect a different way of looking at the world so if you go back thousands of years to the bronze age where that you're not you haven't even got the advantage of a of writing to give you an insight all you have is the marvelous detail of for example a good example of what i guess you're referring to dominic would be the the the code of of what to do with the dead body

which is to us a kind of well we might know the story of antigony which all revolves around not you know not burying someone so and we know that it's important in the Middle East to cover a body very early. So you can sort of get the idea that... But we tend to use what I think anthropology has called the functional fallacy. That's to say, we say, oh, yes, you cover a body early because otherwise it corrupts. There must be a good scientific quick reason.

That's the reason behind kosher food. It spoils in the heat. Everything has to have a reason. Whereas's the reason behind kosher food it spoils in the heat you know everything has to have a reason whereas in the in the hermetic code the covering of a body with earth or the burning of it or the the the the expiation and the treatment of you know guest friendship and other codes like that um while you can try and put a reasoning behind it and give it a function, it's probably, without going too left-bank intellectual, it is probably better to treat it in a slightly more Levi-Strauss kind of way. It's a phenomenon of, it's an expression of behaviour

that is rewarded by examining it and thinking about it and not just instantly saying, oh, it's because. Because is actually less interesting than how, how they live this code. And as you say, the violence to us is unspeakable, partly because of the pain. We just think of the awful pain of these wounds suppurating and the screaming of men as they're hurt. And also because, you know, we don't... There's no sympathy.

It seems that all the sympathy is displaced into religious, you know, obsequies and, you know, funeral rites and ointments and unguents and so on. But that really you're looking as a Westerner with our culture and our post-romantic codes of sympathy and so on. We're looking for those tiny moments in Homer which we pick out. I choose Homer because it's the clearest source. So that would be what's he called, Antilochus, the son of Nestor, running along the sand to tell Achilles that the noise that has caused Achilles to look towards

the fighting is the fighting over the death of Patroclus. And then he has to squat in front of Achilles and hold both his hands. And as Homer says, not so much in friendship, but more to stop Achilles harming himself. And Achilles sobs and sobs. And you think there, there's a point of contact for me, a soft liberal, in the widest sense of the word, westerner with my values that come from keats and tennyson and dickens and you know the whole armory of hollywood and soft culture and

you know that we must be lovely to each other and that we when we do love each other we break down in tears and that our emotions you know have a a righteous, you know, order of expression. And so you see that finally happening in Homer, and it's like you gush with, oh, what a moment that is. Or the moment when, you know, Andromache and Hector are, you know, he's got his helmet on, and the flash of the helmet flashes in his baby, Astarnax's eyes, and Ayanax opens his eyes and starts to cry because because he's scared by the nodding plume of his father's helmet and hector laughs and takes the helmet off and they laugh at the boy for being frightened

and and underneath it all is uh andromache's thinking you're going to die today hector and he's saying i'm not going to die today it's all right not today and the you're going to die today, Hector. And he's saying, I'm not going to die today. It's all right, not today. And the child is going to die as well. And how that child dies is so horrific as well, yeah. So it's like these tiny moments. It's all you need. And it's a very important part of storytelling

is how small those moments need to be. I remember being taught this as a wonderful lesson by a friend of mine who was really my sort of rabbi for storytelling, as it were, because he spoke in a wonderfully rabbinical way. It was a man called William Goldman, Bill Goldman, who wrote Butch Cassidy, the screenplay, and The Marathon Man.

He did The Princess Bride, is that right? Princess Bride as well, yeah. Who we've already name-checked on this podcast. Never fight a land war in Asia. In Asia, it's a great one, isn't it? One of the ineluctable truths, exactly. But he was saying to me how, for example, Butch Cassidy in The Sundance Kid, he wrote as a comedy.

He said, you just need one or two tiny moments to remind the audience that what's behind this is death. And then they'll go along with the ride, they'll love the characters, but behind it all, there'll be a bell tolling. And in Butch Cassidy, it's a lot of comedy between Paul Newman and Robert Redford. But there's one moment when they get their pardon from the sheriff

and he just hands them the pardon and he looks Paul Newman in the eye and says, you're going to die bloody butch you do know that and and then there's a second of cloud goes across those blue eyes of paul newman and then he jokes again and and then katherine ross later on in the film says um says them uh when they say they're going to go to south america she says i'll cook for you i'll sew for you i'll i'll i'll do anything for you but one thing I won't do, I won't watch you die. And Bell said those are the only two moments in the film which are in any way a kind of downbeat moment,

and yet they hang over it. So for all the banter and the fun that the characters have, who are those guys? You know, all this wonderful comedy, there is that little plangent sense. and similarly in all the horror and martial conquest and genealogical genealogical name calling of families and dynasties and so on that homer gives you there are these little pinpricks of human interaction that just make the whole thing so real that you come back to it again and again. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.

I remember watching Robin Lane Fox, the very distinguished classicist reciting the heart-rending end of the Iliad when Priam, the father of Hector, comes to the Greek camp to beg for the return of the body of his son, who Achilles is desecrating the body, refusing to allow it to be burned. And Priam kneels before Achilles and kisses the hands of the man who slew his son and weeps. And as Robin Lane Fox was reciting this, he began to weep. And it was an incredibly powerful moment, the kind of sense of people being joined across the millennia in this shared experience of the trauma of it.

But I was thinking, I mean, Robin Lane Fox was from a generation who marinated in the classics, absolutely kind of raised in this kind of stuff. And you were talking about that, that there's a kind of generations that were absolutely habituated to the study of Greece and of Rome. And now, as he was saying, we live in an age where that is much less the case. And yet the success of your book suggests that still, this stuff has a cut through, but perhaps particularly to children. And it's, I mean, it's odd, isn't it, that this should be so violent. It's about death, it's about slaughter, it's about rape, it's about all the most horrendous things. And yet, it always

cuts through to children. And this is how children get introduced to antiquity more times than not, certainly how I was. And isn't that a paradox? It is. And I wonder about it a lot because most of the communications I get and requests for letters and thoughts about these books is from either children or their parents. And so I have considered why it is. And I wonder if it isn't something to do with where the stories are poised between reality and symbolism.

I mean, I'm sure you get this, both of you, and yet it's quite hard to explain why I think these stories are so different from fantasy. Because people will say, oh, yes, because I love the Game of Thrones or I love Tolkien or something. And I'll go, yes, well, very nice too. And they'll say, but that's similar, isn't it?

It's got dragons and monsters and people with superpowers. And I go, yes. And yet, while that's true, I don't think of Greek mythology as being like that, even though it reasonably is. And nobody likes people to be snobbish about fantasy franchises. And, you know, it doesn't help with the study of classics or the study of

history to be dismissive of passions that young people have in terms of storytelling so if they love their tolkien and their jk rowling and their game of thrones and their marvel cinematic universe then that's that's fine but i think the the god's thing thing is somehow children are aware of this sense of belonging in a special space where humans and these fictional gods, they don't really believe in, but they know they're on their side. The children know about them. They've collected their details. They feel they can belong in that world. And I think they love what academics call double determination, which sounds a very strange idea, but is one of the things that's particularly interesting in late Greek myth is when, say, Paris is aiming his arrow at Achilles, you can tell the story that he gets off a lucky shot

and it lands in the heel of Achilles. Or you can say that Apollo appeared and held the arrow for him, held the bow and guided the shot because that's what Apollo, god of archery, might do. And he's on the side of the Trojans. And it is actually written that he would be, in some respects, the author of Achilles' death. There's an earlier prophecy about that. Well, so you could say, as Homer does, that there is apollo and there is paris or you can be more like an author is saying oh the muse wasn't with me with me last night the author doesn't really think

there's a muse whispering in their ear but if the muse is with them they'll go oh the muse was absolutely in my ear and i wrote and i wrote and it was amazing. And wow. And then she went, you know, and it's, you know, cricketers will say the same about mother cricket or, you know, or form, you know, is a kind of God that settles on you. And every Greek archer in thousands of years after the Greek war would have said, come on, Apollo, guide my arrow, because that's just like Basil Forty saying, thank you, God. You know, it's just a thing we do. So you can read the whole of the Iliad and the whole of the Odyssey and decide that the gods are symbolic purely and that it doesn't really, when Athena tells Achilles to calm down

and not lose his temper publicly or him, you know, and just to leave the tent, is that simply the better angels of his nature? and not lose his temper publicly or him, you know, and just to leave the tent? Is that simply the better angels of his nature? Is it the wisdom in him saying, come on, Achilles, don't lose your temper? You know, the Athena in us is that character that is wise and temperate. Do you see what I mean?

So there is this, it's double determination. You can say it's the God and have it as a fantasy world of gods actually in the battle or you can have it as these they stand for these elements that they represent i wonder if it's kind of the difference between dinosaurs and dragons that both are kind of big and fierce but dinosaurs actually existed and in the in the imagination of of the ancients the gods existed um yes and and that kind of in a way makes them because i i'm at the moment i'm kind of doing a sequel to troy so i'm writing a history of of ancient greece in which the gods do continue to play because oh they did they did have roles you know yeah philippides running from from athens to

summon the spartans to come and join them at Marathon. And he's running back and the Spartans have said that they're going to come late. And he meets with Pan, the great god Pan. This is what Herodotus says. And Pan says, I will be there at Marathon. And then at Marathon, sure enough, the Persians experience panic. Pan is there. And so I'm kind of writing it and putting the gods back in.

And it's kind of like rewilding history, because suddenly all kinds of things make sense. So I've been kind of thinking about this, that I think part of the appeal of it almost is entering a world in which these gods are possible, and there's something about their glamour, their mystique, the kind of way in which they behave terribly makes me it's appealing to children.

I don't know. Yes. Something of that. I think you may be right, and I like your dinosaur dragons idea. I think there is this sense that I had, and I'm sure you had, as a child when reading Greek mythology, that somehow there was a... It goes back to something truthful or something pure and right,

whereas a single authored fantasy world, like Tolkien's or Narnia or any other, while it can be terrific fun, doesn't have that sort of authenticity, that sense of it belonging to something real. There's a weight, isn't there, Stephen? Yeah. I think it's kind of a weightiness that these... There's a sense of it belonging to something real there's a weight isn't there steven yeah it's kind of a weightiness that these there's a sense of rootedness i guess yes but actually i wanted to press you on this i'm glad i'm so glad you brought it up because in our house

i have a nine-year-old so you're a constant presence i mean you're you're in our ears all the time through harry potter through the hobbit the sherlock holmes audio books which you did and i'm wondering whether um i mean some of those things have a kind of mythic quality so sherlock holmes for example i mean he's become a kind of mythic character he's accumulated like a sort of old boat he's got all these kind of carbuncles on all these sort of you know he's he's more than purely the creation of arthur connor isn't? And do you think there are other modern equivalents that have become mythic in the same way as Homer's characters? I think Holmes is a pretty special example. I was thinking about this not long ago, about how many characters could you express in a game of Pictionary quite so quickly as Sherlock Holmes?

You'd have a looking glass and a deerstalker and a pipe, and instantly, wherever you were in the world, they could say, Sherlock Holmes. And, you know, you could do it, I suppose, with Charlie Chaplin as a film image character, and maybe with the circles for the ears of mickey mouse when you're moving towards the logo side of characters there but there is there is no question that sherlock holmes has extraordinary uh reach through cultures all over the world and um one can look for answers as to

where that might be i suppose the most obvious one is that we all want sherlock holmes in the same way i suppose we want to jeeves you know there is this idea of wouldn't it be wonderful to have a friend, a mentor, a wise teacher who saw things and knew things and could advise us and yet, you know, be a friend and not be an emperor or in some way a terrible boss, you know, but just someone there who could just solve everything for us. And it's interesting because there isn't that much of an archetype. I mean, you could argue that Jeeves and so on is an archetype, you know, the servant that's wiser than his master goes back through Valpone and Ben Johnson

and Goldoni and right back to Terence and Roscius and those Roman plays all full of stupid masters aren't they? Who are kind of equivalents of a Bertie Worcester. But to have a

Sherlock Holmes figure, I suppose the is odysseus in a way because one of the things you can say about the trojan war again without being too sort of prescriptive about it is that um it's mankind playing out what mankind is, you know, this first test of this greatest war that's ever been, these two civilisations clashing and more soldiers and more ships and more resources being put into this fight. And what's going to win it? There's Ajax and Diomedes and all these remarkable, Hector, these great fighters, Penthesileur and Memnon

and all these amazing warriors, but they don't win it. What wins it is deceit, cunning, trickery. Those are the human qualities. And it is, you know, I mean, Nietzsche wanted us to look at Dionysus and Apollo as the two principles that are behind the Greek spirit and so on in terms of, you know, harmony, golden order, reason, numbers, prophecy, all the beauties of the Apollonian way. And then underneath that, of course, the frenzy, the appetite, the addiction, the instinct and impulse of the Dionysian way of being. But also there is in between Hermes and his descendant Odysseus, where sheer trickery, lying, deceit, storytelling, which is, of course, another aspect of Hermes,

one of his responsibilities. He's the god of storytellers as well as of liars. And storytellers are liars, of course. So maybe behind that glory, of storytellers as well as of liars and real storytellers are liars of course so maybe but behind that glory is an impish truth about humanity the um uh the Icelandic uh and Norse uh uh saga makers we're kind of familiar with but I was reading ages ago, and I can't remember who, so I may have got it very wrong. But I was reading that, as it were, on the hillside at the end of the battle, there would be two bonfires, and around one would be a group of people listening to the saga maker,

who would tell how Hengist had destroyed 40 people with, you know, his sword and killed another 20 just by strangling them, and how heroic he was. Then around the other bonfire would be the glee man who would tell how Hergis did actually not manage to strap his sword and had fallen over, but he had fallen over on top of two of the enemy and squashed them. And he would tell a satirical comic version of the battle. And in a strange sort of way, the Trojan War is like that. There is this noble roster of extraordinary heroes and their incredible courage and their skill with swords and spears and bows and arrows and chariots and all the rest of it.

But then there is this deceitful wicked um figure this delightful cunning Odysseus who strokes his chin and thinks up ways of using deceit to win the war and that is what wins it followed by appalling violence of course but but that's it's as if because I think one of the things about Greek myth is that Greeks must have and I I know it's wrong to say must have, they must have noticed that they now had the writing that the Phoenicians had given them, the Cadmian alphabet, as they called it. So that was fine. But they'd built up a civilisation

that was actually better than the one across the sea, the Egyptian one that existed for thousands of years and barely changed in that time. It takes an egyptologist to say oh that particular pylon is 3 000 years old that one is 5 000 years old but that's 2 000 year difference you know i mean if you go back 2 000 years from from now you're in the year 10 20 or 40 years before before the battle of hastings and it's a very different world. Whereas the Egyptians stayed the same, and the Greeks appeared to be the first civilisation

that believed in progress, that wanted to learn new things and change and add and adapt and adopt and evolve in terms of their civilisation, their policy, their polities, their city-states, the way they were run. And of course one can romanticize and idealize the Greeks far too much. We know that they also had slaves and they were brutal to their own people when they needed to be and so on, or felt they needed to be. But they were unusual and they looked at humanity, it seems seems in a different way to previous civilizations

of course we can only go from either an archaeological record and look at objects or from a historical record when writing arrives again uh after the collapse of the bronze age and the you know arrival of the phoen alphabet, you can start to see that the Greeks were interested in what humans were. And they wrote plays and philosophy evolved that examined human motive and in ways that we don't have any evidence that other people did. And they may have done, of course, but they didn't leave it on cuneiform tablets and they didn't leave it in any other record for us to see clearly that they had anything like the greeks fascination with the ambiguity complexity contrariness of human motive and behavior and that

people weren't just as i say the early version they weren't just four-bit blocky non-resolved but that people were complicated and they had warring gods inside them and athens itself and greece and you know was a confusing thing and there were different ways you could choose to live. And you could live by your wits or you could live by martial prowess. And the Greeks never resolved it. The Romans decided martial prowess would be it. And they re-aligned Greek mythology in ways to emphasize that. I mean, you know far more about this than me, Tom. I'd love to hear you talk about the religion of Rome,

which is much easier to talk about than the religion of Greece, although there was a religious caste in the time of Athens. Of course, they put Socrates to death. But in Rome, the way they changed Ares to Mars, for example, or the way they changed Aphrodite to Venus, the gods became symbols of a Roman attitude, didn't they more? Well, I think the Roman gods are more analog. Yes, yes. To pursue your metaphor. And I think that you're talking about Odysseus

as being kind of cunning and clever and smart and mobile and contradictory. And then you moved on to talking about Athens in very similar terms. And of course, the god who joins them both is Athena, who, for my money, is the greatest deity of all time because she's so complicated. You know, she is the god of the battle line, but she's also the god of the loom and of the arts of civilization. And I think it speaks wonderfully of Odysseus that Athena chooses him to be her favourite. And I think it speaks wonderfully of the Athenians, that she chooses

them to be her people, the people that she looks out for. And I remember as a child that realising that was what served as the gateway drug of moving from mythology to history, of thinking that the Athenians were the kind of Odysseus of the ancient world. Of course, there is one mythic sort of origin story of Athens that suggests that actually the Athenians chose Athena rather than she choosing them, that Athena and Poseidon went to the people of the city and asked them which god they wanted to be their patron.

And Poseidon offered them spring water and all that, and good tides and things like that, and said he wouldn't send any earthquakes. And Athena, in this particular version, offered them the olive. I'd go for the olive. Yeah, and they decided with the olive, they could build ships out of olive wood. They could use the oil in all kinds of ways

and the fruit of the olive to eat. And so they decided that that was a more valuable thing than anything Poseidon could promise them. Let me ask you a very humdrum question. It's about the tone of voice that you adopt. So you're saying that you get a lot of correspondence from children. And I'm wondering whether that um when you started did you think of the so you started with the mythos and the heroes did you think of these you didn't think of them as children's books right no I didn't but I did remember that it was as a child that I fell in love with them and that

I read Robert Graves who who wrote two versions of his collection, one for adults and a children's version as well. And I soon went to the adult one because I loved the detail of footnotes and all these extraordinary little side stories he told. So I was sort of writing for an intelligent young adult, early teen kind of to as much as anything. And what I had in mind, because it struck me as so important when I was first thinking about this was the, the sense of the hearth, the, the, the sitting around a fire that, you know, like a lot of people I'd read Noah, who Val Harari and, and had been thinking about early mankind and the development

of early tools and then of fire and so on and of language 50,000 years ago. And I was thinking, well, okay, 50,000 years ago, language and fire have allowed human beings a great deal more safety of an evening and a great deal more leisure time the calories come cheaper now and uh you know animals are slowly being uh harnessed to to work and so on and so children are sitting around the fire at the end of the day and saying as they hear the wind rustling in the trees what is that wind what is that noise who drives it where does it come from because human beings whenever there's an agency a force a movement a motive which is the same as a movement etymologically isn't it a motion where as soon as there is motion you have to ask yourself what causes it and that is the essence of what newton

asked what causes this motion i can't get behind it i can understand wind to some extent not hugely but there was a sense that wind had a physical explanation wasn't a god but everything else that moves even what is it that pushes fruit out of twigs and blossom and leaves, and then what causes them to drop? And the children ask this, and the adults say, oh, well, if you don't know the answer, then you give it an agency, and that's what we call a god. You say there is this force that pushes the fruit out. And then a story develops around the mother, the barley mother, Demeter, the great goddess of food and fruit and so on,

and how she does all this. And then why does she stop? Why doesn't it, why does it stop in the autumn? Ah, well, and then the story of, you know, so you get a kind of kipling just so story etiological stories is the technical name for them i think and um these are all stories you can just tell to to bind you as a family a group a clan a clan, a tribe, a community generally, abound by these stories they tell. And then as they trade with groups over in another valley

or even across a bay, and those groups will have a slightly different story about their god. So you mix them and you get a syncretic, as they call it, sort of mixture of different religions happening and different, you can't quite remember where that one came from. But all this is while you have language, but you haven't yet got writing. But then what happened is that roughly the same time, two great Greeks, Hesiod stroke Hesiod, I never, don't ask me about vowels and Greek pronunciation.

Americans and Britain say different things. You may say Hesiod, you may say Hesiod. Anyway, he and Homer, around the same time, started to give a shape that has stayed with these stories ever since. And so they've become, in that sense, literary. Hesiod wrote down the birth of the gods, theogony, and gave very clear stories of who was the father and the mother and where they all came from. And one assumes he was working on what had been stories told orally, but he was self-consciously writing them down and giving them a shape.

And there was an authority to the way he he did it which meant subsequent generations would say well look up in your hessian so by the time you get to plato and those sort of people they're referring to him and they're referring to homer who's given these stories an authentic shape so they've there's an official version i suppose in the same way there became an official version. I suppose, in the same way, there became an official version for the Arthur legends. There have been these different... Then Mallory and others put them into... And then you say, well, no, this is the version, the Lady in the Lake version with the sword coming out.

Or with Robin Hood, you say, this is the version here. And they become official. But there's always that sense that they started with Robin Hood, you say, this is the version here, you know. And they become official. But there's always that sense that they started with just families telling stories to keep their children amused and to tell them how the leopard got its spots, as it were. Yes. So, Stephen, when you think about that, this kind of chain of transmission going thousands and thousands of years,

and then you think about all the links in that chain from Homer, Virgil, through the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance, into the modern age. I mean do you have a consciousness of that? Do you have the anxiety of influence or do you not think of that weight of influence at all? It's funny Tom, it happens in both directions. On the one hand, I feel completely free because I think these are folk stories. They are in the Jungian sense, part of the collective unconsciousness of a whole people from long ago. They don't have any copyright marks on them. Their public domain, if ever ever anything was but on the other hand yes

these are stories that have been burnished and gilded and perfected by every every great poet and and writer before me and and i am in that sense utterly unworthy but the best you can feel is that i can't spoil them i can't at least i hope not i mean that would be that would just be awful i mean the because you go back you look at um some of the big names a couple of big americans in particular who had dominated uh american childhoods for over a hundred years would be thomas bullfinch and nathaniel hawthorne who who both Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote his Tanglewood Tales for children in which he told some of the um the great stories of Greek myth um particularly the sort of Ovid stories of transformations um and and Bullfinch told his

very burglarized but but excellently exciting stories of greek myth and they stayed for children and of course they use language like you know swain you know someone's a swain well that's we don't have swains anymore we don't know what a swain is but i was so i i was thinking well i'm sure my language will date because it will. You can't stop it from dating. But I won't, I try not to accelerate its dating by doing what you occasionally see in these illustrated versions of modern Greek myth for children in which, you know, Phaeton was this dude who lived in, you know, Phrygia or something. And you think, well, I'm not going to call them dudes. I'm not, you know, they just, it's not me. And you think, well, I'm not going to call them dudes. I'm not, you know, they're just, it's not me. And that's beneath you, Stephen.

Well, I mean, I can understand why people would want, you know, to make these characters appear more vivid and alive. And they might think that using, you know, South Side Street slang is a good way of doing it. It's just not the way I could do it personally. I think another thing is there is a huge proportion of children who are not what we think children are. In other words, who don't spend their lives with their heads buried

in Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok and so on, who actually think it's a bit lame and who love the idea of discovering old musty things in libraries. I'm sure that if I were 15 now, I would be like that. I would want to go off grid. I would have fun with my friends saying, let's use real telephones. Okay, let's meet next week. You know, exactly. And all that sort week. You know, exactly. And all that, I'd sort of, you know, go off the grid because it would be fun. Or even produce a magazine using a Gestetner duplicator

rather than, you know, just scanning things. Just because it would be a, you know, in its own way, pretentious, of course, but one would be part of that gang that liked looking back. And I was, when I was a schoolboy, I wore stiff collars and was a complete prick as far as, you know, doing all these, you know, looking old-fashioned. But Stephen, you love your technology.

I know, that's the weird thing. Famous for loving your technology. Yeah. I'm aware that we've kept you for far too long, but I just wanted to say how i mean in a way how moving it is to be talking that you were talking about these very ancient tales and about how people gather and discuss them and here we are you're in california we're in england and yet still we're talking about these stories and and to thank you for

for having come on and and talk to us about it it. It's kind of an amazing synergy of ancient and modern. It's such a pleasure, Tom. And I have to say, which I haven't managed to do, what an admirer I am of both your work. I love what you do. And I've listened to them as audiobooks, actually, Dominic, Seasons in the Sun and White Heat. They actually work really well.

And, of course, I'm exactly the age when I was growing up through these periods of the 60s and 70s in particular that you bring to life so brilliantly. And so between you, you bookend Western history rather fabulously. Stephen, we should be paying you for this. You provide us with the perfect end for this podcast. Stephen, we can't thank you enough for having come on and wishing you all the very best with the book.

Thanks so much. A real pleasure. Thank you. So that was Stephen Fry. Tom, I could see your face during that conversation. You were loving that, weren't you? That was right up your alley. It really was.

And particularly because, as I said, in the course of the interview, I'm doing this kind of sequel to the Trojan War, where the gods are real. So hearing Stephen's views on that and how it relates to Greek history and more generally to the kind of, the way that we understand the past,

Greek past particularly, I thought it was fantastic, really interesting. Let me ask you a quick question, just coming off the back of a chat with Stephen. So his books have been colossal sellers. Do you think there'll ever be a point in history, I mean, in the foreseeable future when people will lose interest in this stuff, when it will just become sort of obscure antiquarianism and these myths will no longer play such a role i mean already they play a smaller role than they did in say the victorian period don't they i thought that that question was hanging over the whole everything we talked about pretty much because it we had the

context of a society and education system that was completely geared to studying these myths and now we no longer do and yet the success of steven's books shows that you don't need people to be completely grounded in the classics yeah for children to get obsessed by it because the stories are so strong they're so strong that people respond to them instinctively and you know just looking at the way that it's been reinterpreted and reinterpreted and reinterpreted that doesn't happen because there's you you know, there are school teachers or cultural conservatives saying, you've got to enjoy this. It happens because there is something about them that instinctively encourages people to retell them, reinterpret them, and draw kind of an understanding of the world from it that I think, I think, you know, it will endure forever.

Actually, one of my favourite reinterpretations of the trojan war is um a science fiction novel by a guy called dan simmons i don't know if you've come across it you read a book called ilium uh and it's set in the shadow of mount olympus mount olympus of course is the largest mountain on mars and um nano enhanced superhumans are restaging the trojan war and they are kind of in the role of the gods intervening. And in a way, it's kind of the best fictional recreation of the power of the gods relative to humans that I've come across. And I think that, you know, I can absolutely imagine in 3000 AD that people will still be reading the Trojan War

and maybe doing it on Mars, who knows? Great. Well, that's a good note on which to end. So that's our chat with Stephen Fry and we'll be returning to more normal service next time. Goodbye. Goodbye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.