You're Dead to Me - Aristotle (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Greg Jenner is joined in ancient Greece by Professor Edith Hall and comedian Dan Schreiber to learn all about famous philosopher Aristotle and his world changing ideas.Born a doctor’s son in the coastal settlement of Stagira, Aristotle would go on to revolutionise intellectual life in the west, writing on everything from theatre and the arts to politics, moral philosophy and zoology. After studying under Plato at his academy, Aristotle became a teacher himself, tutoring none other than a young Alexander the Great in Macedon before returning to Athens to found his own school, the Lyceum. And yet this extraordinary life came to an end in exile, after he was banished from his beloved Athens. This episode charts Aristotle’s incredible rise and fall, exploring his intellectual career and philosophical ideas alongside his friendships and romances, and asking whether, despite his views on women and slavery, he deserves the title of the greatest Greek philosopher.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Madeleine Bracey Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: James Cook

BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are dusting off our philosophy textbooks and going back nearly 2,400 years to ancient Greece to learn all about one of history's greatest beardy chin-strokers, Aristotle. And to help us tell our virtue ethics from our empiricism, we have one top-notch teacher and one very eager pupil. In History Corner, she's Professor of Classics at Durham University and a Fellow of the British

Academy. You might have heard her on Radio 4's Natalie Haynes Stand Up for the Classics or Radio 4's Great Lives. Maybe you've read one of her many books including Aristotle's Way, How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life and her most recent book Facing Down the Furies. And you'll know her from our episode on Mr Triangle himself Pythagoras, it's Professor Edith Hall. Welcome back Edith. Hi, I'm absolutely thrilled to be here though I would dispute that Aristotle's actually dead to me because I dream about him almost every night.

Okay, we'll get into that later. And in Comedy Corner, he's a writer, comedian, presenter, producer and podcaster. He's a polymath. Maybe you've listened to his incredible podcasts, No Such Thing as a Fish, and his new show, We Can Be Weirdos. And you'll definitely remember him from our episode of Your Dead to Me, all the way back in series one on Young Napoleon. It's Dan Schreiber. Welcome back, Dan. Hey, thanks for having me. I have to say, Aristotle, from what you were saying just before we started recording, absolutely the time person I'd want to sit down and ask weird questions to. He sounds really interesting.

So last time out, Dan, we had you back in 18th century France and Corsica, and we were following the travails of a young man called Napoleone. How do you feel about ancient Greece? Is this a comfort area for you? No, I'm equally as ignorant in ancient Greece as I am at that time. So what do you know? This is the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And Aristotle is one of the most famous Western philosophers of all time.

He's one of the most famous names in all of history. Maybe you're picturing a beardy guy in a robe. Maybe he's lecturing a bottle blonde Alexander the Great because you've seen the movie Alexander where all the Macedonians were Irish for some strange reason. Perhaps you've encountered Aristotelian ethics through the wonderful sitcom The Good Place. But who was this philosopher who changed intellectual life in the West forever? How did he get to be so brainy and so important? And what do you do when a king orders you to tutor his frat boy son? Let's find out. Right, Professor Edith, let's start at the beginning. Where and when was Aristotle born?

What was his family situation like? Aristotle actually had a really boringly normal personal life. So he's a GP son. He's son of the GP in a little town called Stagera, which means the dripping place, because it's high up on a cliff where the waters drip down into the sea. And dad's called? Nicomachus. Nicomachus. Nicomachus.

Yeah. He's definitely real, right, Aristotle? Yeah. Because there's so many of these characters from this period where the stuff was written about them all these years after and you find out, oh, Pythagoras, was that a real guy? Aristotle's like, we know he's real. He is very, very real. He's extremely real.

Even though just lately, some of his works have been banned in China and some of the Chinese internet started saying he wasn't real. He's extremely real, even though just lately some of his works have been banned in China and some of the Chinese internet started saying he wasn't real. Take it from me, not the Chinese internet. His mother was called Festus and he seems to have been very fond of her. But very sadly, his parents died when he was about 13, both of them. We don't quite know why. Matthew Feeney Does he cross over with any other great notable character from history, if you were looking global? Kind of like Cervantes and Shakespeare were living in the same period, right? CLAIRE He's on a cusp between what we call classical

Athenian democratic Athens. So that's the Parthenon, it's Pericles, it's the Peloponnesian War and the Persian Wars. And then because he teaches Alexander the new, what we call the Hellenistic world, which is after the Macedonian takeover of the Persian Empire. What do you think he does with his time, you know, 13, 14? Was there any sports at the time? Oh, yeah. I'm sort of going off Monty Python sketches here. But yeah. You went to the gymnasium. You did all the things that you do in track and field at the

Olympics. He's got huge respect for athletics and health and training in all of his work. So I suspect that it was just he was very good at athletics, but even better at intellectual things. Yeah, he's absolutely excelling everywhere. And so his brother-in-law and his sister spot the talent and go, this kid needs proper training, right? Absolutely. Otherwise, he would undoubtedly have become the general practitioner in Staghorn because these things were hereditary. And in fact, his father came from generations and generations of doctors to the extent that he's supposed to be descended from Macaon,

who is a mythical doctor in the Iliad, who was the son of Asclepius, the actual god of medicine. Either his sister or his brother-in-law just got so fed up with this boy going on and on about, you know, saying, do I know I'm really here? Do we exist at supper? So they say, okay, we got money. What's the best university in the world? Oh, we know it's Plato's Academy in Athens. Sent him off at 17. So Aristotle rocks up to Plato's Academy. He's going to learn from this superstar philosopher and Plato had been taught by Socrates. That's wild. Was there a fourth after Aristotle?

Theophrastus. Yeah. Oh, he's not impressed. Not as big a name as the other three. Aristotle was his star pupil. He stayed on and became a teacher, you know, because he stayed there for 20 whole years since Plato died. I think he was perfectly happy there, but he gradually became more and more important.

And he studies a variety of things at the Academy, right? So it's not just philosophy, it's astronomy, natural science. Well, he studies lots of things that Plato really wouldn't have approved of. I mean, I think that's the really important thing. So Plato's Academy did not study natural science at all. Oh really? No, no, no. I think Aristotle's out there sort of picking up mushrooms and stones and sort of measuring plants and trees and doing all kinds of things which Plato wouldn't particularly

have approved. Because Plato's just hardcore theory. Well, it's the three great branches of philosophy as they were then, which are ethics, how should I live, epistemology, how do I know things, and ontology, what is existence. It's hardcore philosophy. He liked maths, yeah, or theoretical. But things like natural science, Socrates had played around with in his youth, but had given up. And there is no sign that Plato was interested in it at all. How interesting. So he writes about lyric poetry, he writes about drama, he writes about epic, which I

guess is the Iliad, the Odyssey. He writes about comedy but we don't have it, which is devastating to me because you and I both love comedy. We don't have his book on comedy. We've lost book two of the Poetics. How did we lose it? Where did it go? Most of the stuff we lost because Byzantine monks didn't like it. Didn't get the job. Oh, you think trashed. We've lost almost all of Sappho because various Christian bishops said we don't want any of

that lesbian pornography, that kind of thing. I suspect there was an awful lot that wasn't really appropriate to the Greek Orthodox Church in Aristotle on comedy. Yeah. So I don't know what was in it. I have read everything that Aristotle wrote in his surviving works about humour. I'm sad to say that he says that we've all got to be humorous, we've got to be a good person is going to be humorous, but he says that there are two extremes. There is a mean, which is just to be appropriately witty and that isn't very promising. Yes, Dan, appropriate wit.

Appropriate wit. What did he label himself as? I think he thought he was an appropriate wit. In 348, a big thing happens to him, the death of Plato, 348 BCE, his tutor, his sort of his great intellectual figurehead dies and again the idyllic life comes crashing down around him and you might assume that he gets the gig teaching at the academy takes over running the school. I wouldn't assume that. No, okay. Well, no, because clearly he's gone into the natural sciences. Yeah, Plato is going this guy's lost the plot. He'd be the equivalent of a scientist these days. You'd be like, what's happened to this guy? He was so that the brain's

going faulty. I assume because of the power of Plato as well that other people around him would be like, why is he talking, why is he looking at mushrooms? What's going on? You've clearly deduced what happened because he doesn't get the job that he's expecting. The rivals sort of step in and muscle him out and it's a guy called Spius Sippus. Yeah, which means enthusiast for horses. He was to my mind a rather boring mathematician and nobody's ever heard of him, but he was also related to Plato. Oh nepotism.

Partly nepotism, but I suspect it was much more envy that all the other people at the academy just couldn't stand the fact that this guy so outclassed them, that instead of saying, great, we make him in charge and we're in his slipstream and we can all benefit, it's bye bye Aristotle. So he doesn't get the gig and he instead he gets an invitation to go to a new place. He does. And this place is called Assos. Yeah.

Okay. And off he goes to Assos, which is where? It's absolutely stunning. It's on the western coast of Turkey but further down. The nearest island is Lesbos. So as you can see it's about sort of halfway down. And he's invited by a guy called Hermias. Yes. Who is a former slave who's now ended up as king. That's what they say, there's been some sort of coup, he may have committed murder,

he may have murdered the tyrant, he's become king or tyrant, which means somebody who's come into monarchical power but not through hereditary. And he invites Aristotle over apparently to help him write a constitution. Which sounds very progressive and modern, doesn't it? So he heads off to Assos. I spent most of my thirties on Assos too, but I was mostly trying to buy skinny jeans. That would be in an Aristotle joke. That's appropriate wit everyone.

I bet there was a Quidlin joke to back that. So Assos, he goes there and he finds love. He does. It's either Hermiaus's daughter or his adopted daughter or possibly his niece. But anyway, it's a posh woman in his court. Called Pythias? Called Pythias. He marries her and it seems to have been very happy.

They have a daughter together, also called Pythias, because Aristotle apparently, you know, he's run out of names. He's like, well, you know, I've met one. Well, it's possible, but it's also possible that she actually died in childbirth. Oh, really? In which case it would have been very natural to call the little girl. Oh, that's sad. But they moved to the Isle of Lesbos. They do.

Which is not Farfamassos. And we've got this single dad with his little girl. What do you think they get up to on Lesbos? What do you think Aristotle is going to do? I'm not going to take the bait, buddy. Nice try. Well, I don. Well, give me a bit more about Lesbos. What is the island like? Is it populated at this point? Very much so. There are three big cities. The biggest is Mitilini. And it's a place of great culture. It's deeply cultured, very ancient. It's had the poet Sappho. It's had another very famous poet called Alsaias. It's already in the Iliad it's had another very famous poet called Alcaeus, it's

already in the Iliad as the land of fair women. Also got the most extraordinary natural world. I mean, botanists today will say it's got outstanding amount of really interesting plants that don't exist anywhere else and it's got this massive lagoon, which is a lake which is mainly freshwater, but it actually blurs into saltwater and meets the sea. And it had such an amazing amount of interesting creatures living in it that Aristotle said, I know what I want to be now. I'm going to be a marine zoologist. Did he invent that? Yeah.

Yeah. Wow. The question of what did he do with his daughter? Sometimes scientists do look at their young as an experiment. That's why I was asking about the island. Was it to separate the daughter from the mainland so as to just bring her up believing in weird stuff? I don't think so. The fact is he got a very good friend, either already had or more likely made, but there was this young guy, he was 17 years younger than him, so about 20, called Theo Fraster. And he is a lesbian. He lives on lesbos. Stop it. I'm just mirroring what you're saying.

He is obsessed with plants. And I think they quite literally decided to invent zoology and botany together. He's not desperately trying to get his job back in that. No, if life gives you lemon. Yeah, study that lemon and write a book about it. Right, exactly. Invent lemon studies. Yeah.

But it does sound like it doesn't matter what his life circumstance would have been. The curious mind would have just explored any surroundings. I think that's exactly right. And so when he's there, he describes 500 species of animal. He's looking at plants as well. Yeah, but it was easier back then. There was so much, nothing had been described. When you invent something.

But he also invents environmental thinking. One of the things he sees or doesn't see in the lagoon, he says there used to be a thing called a red scallop. The fishermen have told me, he talked to all the people who really knew, the fishermen have told me, but overfishing has killed it. It is extinct. Yeah. Oh, wow. He actually says that. That's the first reference in world literature to human industrial farming or anything actually killing off a species. And extinction is an idea, isn't it? Really rediscovered until the 18th century.

So he's now actually quite big in green circles. Guys, controversial theory. I think he might have been a time traveler. This feels like someone who's like almost a glitch. Like too much information just poured out of one person. You think he's got a wristwatch, you think it is? I think if we are living in a simulation, he got the extra weapons. I knew you'd make it weird. I didn't think it would be this far in.

Well, I needed to hear the evidence first and clearly something's going on. Yeah he's on Lesbos, he's doing all this, he's having a great time, he's written stuff and then suddenly he gets a job offer. Oh dear. From a man called Philip of Macedon, he was in the king business and Philip says I've got a kid over here, bit of a brat, could you teach him? And the kid's name is? Alexander the Great. Not yet great. Not yet great. Alexander the... The brat. The brat. So he's the heir to the throne.

He's the son of Philip's fourth wife, Olympias, complicated court politics, murder, poison, intrigue. Absolutely. You never know you're going to survive through adulthood. And Aristotle gets the gig and he decides to go. Why? Well, he gets the gig and decides to go. That's how it's always put in his biography.

We don't know any more about it. I would say when you get a letter from Philip, the greatest murderer the Greek world has ever known of Macedon, you don't sit around saying, I don't think I feel like that because you might be dead the next day. So you think it's a threat. Also, it did mean money, money, money, money, money, money. And I think Aristotle already always had his eye on the long game, which was to found a university to completely outclass the academy. Because he does, Alexander is told you don't have to be a philosopher, but please do listen to the philosophers, which feels like a compromise. Like, okay, all right, you're not, you're not going to be a philosopher. I get it. But can you at

least listen to them? Well, he will definitely have taught him ethics, politics and rhetoric, a sort of curriculum on how to behave. So rhetoric is speech making. How to govern your country and how to speak in public. Yes, this has been the basis of it. But we simply don't know. And everything that Aristotle wrote after Alexander went east, Philip died, and Alexander went east, and Aristotle went straight back to Athens and founded the Lyceum. Everything he wrote after, he never really talks about Massa and he does talk about things like really evil, very rich people or what happens in Tyrant's

households, you know, that kind of thing. But he doesn't put names to it usually. It's aged 48 that we get Aristotle returning to Athens, you know, and he's lived life by this point. He has written a new constitution, he's fallen in love, he's become a new dad, he's been widowed, he's invented zoology, he's invented marine biology, he's tutored at Trostfond Brat and survived the most dangerous place in the world. And he's gone back home to Athens, you'd think to take up his job at the academy, but he doesn't, right? He ends up opening a rival school, which I don't know if that's petty. No, it's not petty.

No? Okay. He just wanted to run his own show. I completely get it. He didn't want to go back to all those old rivalries. But that school is called the Lyceum. And because Theophrastus was natural science and he did it with Theophrastus. So he brings Theophrastus with him. Utterly loyal to Theophrastus, yes.

They do it together. Is he received back into Athens as a kind of returning hero? Well, not as a returning hero, I don't think, but as a perfectly welcome resident alien. He never got citizenship. Never, really? No. But I think he got loads of money. I have to say this. I think he was very sensible that he will have been paid extremely well, being with Philip of Macedon's court. So he took that money and ran and stayed alive and ran.

And then puts the money into the school? Yes. He took that money and ran and stayed alive and ran. And then put the money into the schools. So the Lyceum is arguably the first teaching university. The academy is a philosophy class, but this has got a library, this feels like it's something different. It is something different. One of the things that he did was lectures to the public in the afternoons. They had public lectures.

I mean, he saw it as a public facingfacing institution. And he wrote lots of books which we very sadly haven't got, which put his complicated ideas in very simple form to circulate amongst the general public. He was highly committed to that. But he only stayed alive for about 13 years. But in that 13 years, my goodness what he did. Yeah. Where's his daughter at this point? She's with him and he's got a new girlfriend who he never seems to marry. She's called her Pyllis and she seems to be a slave or commoner in some way that he couldn't marry. Maybe she, I don't know. We don't know why he didn't marry her, but he treated her as

his wife. She was from Stagra. He very, very attached to her and he had his son, Nicomachus, named after in the Greek way, his father. Yeah. So he had his son, Nicomachus, named after, in the Greek way, his father. Yeah. So the father of the GP was Nicomachus. Yes. After whom the Nicomachean Ethics is named. You're holding up a book? I'm holding up the Nicomachean Ethics, which I just happened to have in my pocket. So this is one of it. So he writes 160 books, treatises. Yeah. And a lot of them, I think, in that time, or finished them in that time.

How big are these books? Like, we talking like word count per book? Oh god they vary between five thousand and hundred and twenty thousand. And he's writing books on physics and metaphysics or Nike McKean ethics, the politics on the soul. He writes about the soul. He writes about animals. He writes about storytelling. He writes about jurisprudence and law and justice and equity, like he's just every subject, logic, he's doing everything and the thing that I suppose he's most famous for in moral philosophy is what we call virtue ethics. How would you sum that up quickly on a comedy podcast? Okay, you're more likely to be happy if you try to be nice, A, and B, you don't have to

suppress your emotions and instincts, you've just got to get them in the right amount. That's it. Job done. Yeah, that's beautiful. It's so sensible. It's sensible, centrist politics. It's not what you want. And there are words that are used in philosophy. Eudaimonia. Yeah, that means...

Flourishing. Flourishing. It's more a verb than a noun. Oh, is it? Yeah, that means flourishing flourishing. It's more a verb than a noun It's be it's not happiness, but living your life in a way that will could use to happen as So be good be happy and you will be good. And if you be good, you'll be happy basically It's pretty good. It's very simple. Yeah, I think it's true as well. Not to he doesn't need my backing But there's no life after death. It's all about now. That's very important. Ah, so be here now. He's very zen, isn't he? He's very zen. It's now. It's now.

This is it. You won't get punished afterwards. You'll just be miserable now if you're nasty. Does he believe in the gods? Or does he? Sort of. But they're kind of these weird things that live far away on the planet. Yeah. No interest. The unmoved mover. He has no no interest or she has no interest whatsoever in human life. You are at your dashboard. You've got to sort it out. Humans have got to sort it

out. You can't look to the beyond for any moral answers. So, you know that classic question of if you could have a dinner party with any guests from history. So, Aristotle seems like he's the perfect guest to be there. Out of curiosity, if he was at my dinner party and he saw women at the table at my other, what would he be saying there? Well, I think he was a bit of a flirt actually. Interesting. He constantly cites the example of what to do if you really, really fancy your neighbor's

wife. Hang on a minute. You've said adultery was a bad thing. No, you don't. He's coveting his neighbor's wife. He says what to do. And then he gives you the example of Helen of Troy. He says, be like the old men in the Iliad who said when they saw her, God, she's beautiful, but sent her back because she's caused the war. Wow. Okay.

He says, do with your lady you're infatuated with or man you're infatuated with, do the Helen you say, yes, you're gorgeous. I'll bugger off. That's a shame because Helen's also at my dinner party. Sorry Helen, gotta go. I think we do. I mean, we've spent a lot of the episode saying what an extraordinary man and I'm not going to back away from that. But he has flaws. He's not a saint. There are things that he believed that we would find repellent. Absolutely. One of them was that he did not believe women were as intellectually capable as men. Right?

No. So he thinks women are not as smart. We do not have a deliberative capacity. We can't think things through. We're all in motion. Therefore, we cannot have full citizenship. He's also, he's ancient Greek, so he is a slave owner. He came out with the big justification of slavery that I'm afraid was wheeled out ever from the 15th century to the American Civil War. He was responsible for that. I think the slavery thing is the thing we really struggle with.

It's a very big one. But he does even, I mean, I'm not trying to defend him on this, but he does even say there is a really big problem because quite a lot of slaves do appear to be actually as good and big and clever as we are. His empirical good sense, he does actually admit that. And he also in his will had all his own slaves freed so they wouldn't be sold on. Okay. And is that- Most unusual. That's unusual. Okay. There still is a bit of a plot twist on Aristotle, but you know,

that is going to happen. We do have to kill Aristotle off. He sort of dies slightly in ignominy. He sort of chased out of Athens. Yes. Why? Okay. So that's to do with Macedonian high politics. This is after Alexander dies and there's lots of jockeying for power and influence and the Athenians don't want to be taken over by the Macedonians. Because he's got Macedonian connections, they accuse him of doing the same sort of things they did Socrates, which is subverting the youth, bringing in, you know, it's what he did to philosophers he didn't like. He said, I'm not

going to give you the satisfaction of doing a suicide thing like Socrates. I'm going to take the option of exile. And he goes off to the island of Euboea, which was not under Athenian jurisdiction, but where his mother came from, and he had a house, takes his girlfriend, her pilus, and apparently his children, and seems to write about his very detailed will and dies apparently of stomach cancer about a year later. Matthew 16 And Theophrastus stays behind in Athens and keeps his books. And that's how we have them, right? That's how we…

Catherine Well, there's a very long story behind that. But yes, he's got Theophrastus to leave everything to and that must have been a very great comfort. I mean, Theophrastus was, Nihcomicus is still very young. He's got a very adult son who's been his best friend for a very, very long time. Wonderful relationship. So he died soon after exile from Athens and his reputation immediately after is not that burnished with glory. It takes a little while for people to rediscover his brilliance, I think. Is that fair? Yeah, because other more new and shiny philosophical schools took over, especially Stoicism and

Epicureanism, which the peripatos, the academics at the Lyceum carried on and became one of the most dominant schools of antiquity, but not immediately after No. So there you go, Dan. Aristotle. Pretty good life? Yeah, he's all right. Yeah, no, what an incredible life. It feels silly again saying that because obviously it must be an incredible life, but I was surprised by how few details I knew about what he had actually achieved. But when we did the Pythagoras episode, you were able to sort of knock down quite a few

myths. Well Pythagoras himself left such so little. We have actually almost everything I've said, almost 80% of it is out of his own works. Right, so this is solid testimony. The Nuance Window! NUANCE WINDOW! All right time now for the nuance window. This is where Dan and I peripatetically promenade around the Lyceum for two minutes while Professor Edith tells us something that we need to know about Aristotle. My stopwatch is ready. You have two minutes Edith, take it away. The one thing that most people have heard about Aristotle was that Monty Python wrote

a philosopher's song in which they quoted him. Plato, they say, could stick it away half a crate of whiskey every day. Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle. Hobbes was fond of his dram. Rene Descartes was a drunken fart. I drink therefore I am. That may be the only thing you know about Aristotle that he was indeed a bugger for the bottle. What I want to tell you though is that Monty Python were being completely plagiaristic. The history of Aristotle bottle songs goes all the way back to 1652. I have done this research and there is a tavern song by one John Hilton that was sung in 1652. So actually at a really dodgy moment because, you know, Oliver Cromwell's running the place

and spoiling fun. But he says, come away, come away to the tavern, I say, Leave your prittle prattle, fill us a bottle, You're not so wise as Aris. Dottle. What you probably don't know either is that Cockney's slang for an arse, a back end, is an aris. And the reason for this is extremely complicated because originally bottle and glass is the passing for arse. That goes to just bottle is your arse. But because bottle rhymes with Aristotle, Aristotle ends up as arse and it

just ends up as aris. Intellectual history and then we end up with a bum joke. That's what should be in his poetics about comedy, right? Are you kind of like on board with the arist- because I think we're both team Aristotle over here. I'm massively team. I mean, outside of the stuff that is very questionable, I think in terms of if I'm looking at him purely as someone who was thinking differently, uniquely, what a brain, what an extraordinary footprint to have left on our planet, to have created marine biology, to

have been the name of an octopus in the original Adam's Family movie. What I would love to do now is just work out how much of modern day life is thanks to his brain, this one brain. Yeah, lovely stuff. Well, thank you so much, Dan. Thank you, Edith. And listener, for more applied philosophy, check out Edith's previous episode on Pythagoras, which was an absolute hoot. We also did an episode on medieval science. And if you want more Dan in your ears, you can scroll all the way down in the app. That's back to 2019, to the Young Napoleon episode with Dr Laura O'Brien.

It's a really fun one. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with your friends, subscribe to Your Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. But I'd just like to say a huge thank you again to our guests in history corner from University of Durham. We had the fantastic professor Edith Hall. Thank you, Edith. Thank you. And in comedy corner, we had the brilliant Dan Schreiber. Thank you, Dan. Thanks, Greg.

To you lovely listener, join me next time as we return to the classroom for another lesson from the past. But for now, I'm off to go and rewrite Aristotle's Lost Volume on Comedy. I think it's mostly to do with bums. Bye! Best medicine. Dissecting funny and fascinating medicine. I think pain management is the best medicine. Bibliotherapy. Therapy by books. Sleep. Well, spot the comedian.

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