You're Dead to Me - The Iliad and Odyssey (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: October 23, 2026

Greg Jenner is joined in ancient Greece by historian Dr Emily Hauser and comedian and actor Kiell Smith-Bynoe to learn about the epic poems the Iliad and Odyssey. Traditionally attributed to the poet Homer, these works tell parts of a legend that has fascinated us for centuries: the story of the Trojan War.Featuring a cast of unforgettable characters – Achilles, Odysseus, Paris, Helen, Hector and Agamemnon – the war between ancient Greece and Troy has inspired writers, artists and filmmakers for over a millennium. But the Iliad and Odyssey only recount episodes of this much bigger story. The Iliad, focusing on the hero Achilles, takes place in the closing stretches of the war. And the Odyssey tells the tale of Odysseus’s perilous voyage home after the Greeks have triumphedIn this episode, we trace the origins of the poems in the 8th century BCE, looking at whether Homer really wrote them and how these originally oral tales came to be written down, before exploring the fantastical tales they tell. Along the way, we also look at whether or not the Trojan war really happened, how the ancient Greeks defined heroism, and examine the role of gods and monsters in the poems and the lives of their heroes.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: Auréliane Perrin Written by: Dr Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Dr Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Dr Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Gill Huggett Senior Producer: Dr Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: Philip Sellars

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wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Yon Demy, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name's Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we're sharpening our swords, stashing our spears and sailing the wine-dark sea. Back to ancient Greece to learn all about the epic poems

known as the Iliad and Odyssey. And to help us on this valiant voyage, we are joined by two heroic companions in History Corner. She's senior lecturer in classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter, an expert on women in antiquity, Homer and the modern reception of classical texts. You might have read her incredible new book, Mythica, a new history of Homer's world through the women written out of it. It's Dr Emily Hauser. Welcome, Emily. Thank you for having me. Pleasure to have you him. And in Comedy Corner, he's a multi-talented actor, comedian and broadcaster.

You'll recognise him from hosting TVs The Great British Sewing Bee or starring in the award-winning sitcoms, ghosts, Stathlet's Flats and Man Like Mobin or maybe you've delighted in watching him succeed and fail on Taskmaster. Maybe you've seen his live tour show, cool story, bro.

But you'll definitely remember him from our episode on the Viking Explorer Leif Eriksen. It's the very cool Kyle Smith Bino, welcome back. Thank you very much for having me again. I didn't think I was allowed back. Oh, of course you're allowed back. Sure. Turns out you can do anything.

You can say anything and get invited back. All right. You were great last time. You had a lot of fun. We rummaged in the Viking Age. We did exploration a thousand years ago. Yeah, that's right.

Today we are taking you even further back. What do you know about ancient Greece? The Iliad, the Odyssey. Any bells? I'm going to say Medusa. Is that anywhere near? A little bit. A little bit off.

We'll get you back on track. Thank you. So, what do you know? So this is the Sawadier Know. This is why I have a go at guessing what you. our lovely listener, what you might know about today's subject. The ancient Greek geeks among you will certainly have read The Iliad and Odyssey, maybe as retold by the Marvelous Stephen Fry,

or perhaps in wonderful translation by Emily Wilson, that's my favourite translation. And even if you haven't read the classic classics, the story of the Trojan War is still everywhere in our pop culture. There are films, of course. There's 2004's Troy starring Hanson Brad Pitt, and of course now the Christopher Nolan film, The Odyssey. Plus, of course, you've got the Percy Jackson series.

There's Madeleine Miller's Song of Achilles, Margaret Atwood's feminist retelling of the Penelopeiad, I think, which is the pronunciation, am I right? Penelopead, yeah. Good, I think you. And there's even an anime series inspired by The Odyssey. So the plots are familiar to us, even when we don't realise it. But when were these stories first written and by whom? And is written the right verb? And what do they reveal about Greek culture?

And how many people are you allowed to slaughter and still be considered a hero? Let's find out. Dr. Emily, for those who've never heard the words, the Iliad or Odyssey, simply put, what are they? Right, well, what we're looking at are epic poems that are coming from ancient Greece, and they're part of a cycle of poems, which we know as the epic cycle, that are basically telling the story of the legend of the Trojan War. So this is a legend that is kind of springing up around a city called Troy in modern sort of northwest Turkey, a massive war happening there, about 10-year war, a siege, basically, that the Greeks enact.

And this initiates a huge cycle of poems. Now, of those, we've got two that remain. That's the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad telling a story of a couple of short weeks in the final year of the war and the Odyssey telling the story of one man's voyage back home. Do you know how long these poems are? Do you know how long, for example, the Iliad is?

I'm guessing, I mean, how do we even measure length? Let's go in lines, in lines. Lines. How many lines? 600. That's a fairly long poem. Emily, it's a bit longer than that, isn't it? It's just a bit longer, I'm afraid. The Iliad is about 15,000.

That's too many. That's too many. There's a reason. There's a reason you haven't read it. Yeah. And The Odyssey is about 12,100 lines. Oh, that's better. Yeah, yeah.

Nice slim, simple novel. What is epic poetry? I think you can think about the way that we use epic nowadays. When we say something's epic, we mean it's kind of massive, it's huge, it's bigger than life. And that's what an epic poem is. So we talked about how long they are, you know, thousands of lines. So epic is kind of defined by its length. It's also telling about big themes.

So it's telling about, heroes and gods and monsters and sort of voyages that are sort of bigger than anything that you've experienced before. And then the last thing, which is something that I think we wouldn't normally kind of put under epic in modern terms, is the metre. Now that's hexameter. And that's basically the rhythm that you're using in the poem, which basically breaks the line into six feet. Right. Hexameter is the meter of epic. Are we happy saying Homer wrote the Odyssey? Within there, there are sort of several questions.

A, Homer, real guy. B, wrote? Is that the right verb? First of all, wrote, probably the wrong one. Be free star. So, well, basically, yes. So this is where they started. So these poems started in an oral song culture where people would be, or you'd have bards

who would be really specialising in this kind of topic, and they would be reciting what we call composing and performance. So they would be up there on the stage, and they would be putting these building blocks together. Now, eventually over the centuries, those stories get handed down and at some point they start becoming kind of performed and they become fixed

a little bit more for performance because at that point they're being recited. We then get a moment where in about the mid-sixth century BCE we've got a tyrant in Athens called Pysistratus who's really interested in kind of scripting and fixing these texts and at that point that's where they really start to become like fixed written texts. So it's like a gradual process of them being written down and fixed into what we now know is the Iliad and Odyssey.

maybe 200 years between the composition and the actual writing? I'd say even more. Oh, really? So the roots of the oral epic go back to the 14th century BCE or earlier. And the writing is probably around the 8th to the 6th century BCE that that happened. So we've got hundreds of years of tradition and then hundreds of years of writing. That's amazing. Yeah.

Okay. Did Homer exist? Question mark? The ancient Greeks definitely believe that Homer existed. I don't know if we want to take their word for it because they also believe that the gods and goddess existed and that Zeus swallowed his wife, so, you know, maybe we're not going to take them too literally. With Homer, they thought that there was this kind of one poet who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. For us today, I think we're thinking more of this as a tradition of multiple

different itinerant bards who were really experts in their area. Instead of saying sort of the poet or he, I like to think of it as a collective tradition and say, they, the poets. You know, this is a communal tradition. Kail, do you know what the ancient Greek word for a poet was? Yes, imagine. Amazing if you just break out some classical Greek now. For a person sort of on the road, stops in, tells a story, gets a free meal. You get a free meal for telling a story?

Yeah. Yeah, are you not getting paid for your shows? Hang on a minute. I really hope you've got a meal for him now, Greg, after this. The sandwiches outside, if you want it. Is what they get dependent on how good the story is? I think that might be fair. It is absolutely true.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So you've got an incentive to make sure that your songs are really sharp. Yeah. I'll have a go at that. The Greek word, I mean, Rhapsodi. Yeah, so we've got several different words, but rhapsode is the word that is happening about the time where we've got these people who are performing

kind of scripts of the versions of the text. Rhapsodos in ancient Greek, and that means song stitcher. So the Iliadi Odyssey, as we know them, are recited first, composed perhaps collectively, but they also tell of events that happened way before ancient Greece as we know it. That's right.

The Bronze Age, the world of Macy and of the great heroes. The events of the Trojan, war probably took place if they kind of really happened around the late 13th, early 12th century BCE. So we're looking about 1200 BC, late Bronze Age, as you mentioned. And there have been attempts to kind of prove that this was true and real. My favourite example of this is the discovery of the real city of Troy. There is a real city. That is amazing. The guy who found it, Heinrich Schliemann, was absolutely obsessed with Homer, made up this kind of story later in life that he'd wanted to do this since he was a child, absolutely wasn't true. But anyway, he got it.

to Troy and he was in such a hurry to get to the area that he thought was the layer of Homer's Troy, that instead of waiting and digging down through the layers as you would if you were an archaeologist, he just used dynamite. Yeah, sometimes it's quicker though, isn't it? Sometimes you just got to get to it. Do you know what? That would be fine if he'd got the right layer, but he miscalculated by a thousand years. And so he blew through all of the layer that he wanted and ended up about a thousand years

too far in the past. When was this? So this is the late 19th century. So, you know, we're at the right at the beginning of archaeology. This guy's really not an archaeologist. He's a German businessman. He's a German businessman with a plan. He's been using it in his meetings.

Well, it works in the meetings. So we must work here. So Troy is a real city. It's not called Troy because we call it the Iliad. So it's called Ilion, Iliam, Iliar. Whatever endings you like. Well, actually, yeah, Homer gives it a couple of different names. We've got Troia, which is where we get our Troy from. But we've also got

Ilios and Ileon. And that's where we got the Iliad from. What's really interesting about, though, is that we have documents from around that time that talk about a city in that area called Wilusa. And we think that that word Ilios would initially have been pronounced Wilios. Oh. And so probably that Wilusa is actually our Troy. So it should be the Wiliad? It should be the Wiliad. Yeah, it doesn't have quite the same room. That sounds rude. Sorry. The reason that's interesting to me is because my middle name is Troy. Really? Wow. But I would hate if my middle name was Williard.

I'd be really annoyed if it was. We didn't even know you're in them. I mean, that's perfect booking for us. Yeah? We've got an actual Trojan here. Yeah. My dad wanted to call me Troy Smith. And my mom was like, don't be stupid.

So is Troy our only evidence for an actual real Trojan war? You know, the city of Troy, Ilion, Ilios, Wilios, whatever we're calling it. Do we have any other historical or archaeological evidence that this Bronze Age war did occur? Well, I mentioned the sources that tell us about this town, this city called Willusa. So those are coming from sources that are from the Hittite civilization. I don't know if you've heard of them, but there are this amazing late Bronze Age civilization in Anatolia. And they have extensive archival records. And they talk about multiple different wars that happen around this city.

In fact, in one of them, you've got a power who's getting a... involved that are called the Akiyahuans in the record. And now we think that it may be that those are the same as the people who Homer called Akeans, that's his word for the Greeks. So is it possible that the Akeans or in Greek Achaoy are the same as the Aheawans? I think it's probable at least. Seems plausible, isn't it? I'm going to say yes.

You're going to say, yeah, fantastic. It's official. Yeah, it's got the stamp. Let's turn to the poems themselves. We'll start with the Iliad, which effectively is Troy Story. that's what we should call it. Kyle, so what do you know about Achilles? Have you ever heard of Achilles?

Have you seen the Brad Pitt movie? I think I have seen the movie. And what I remember is Jim Howick talking about it on set of ghosts and saying that everyone in that film is wearing their own boxes. That's niche knowledge. Because when you think about it, when you watch these films and you get lost, and you're like, oh my gosh, it's amazing. Like the amount of people and this must have been so...

fun so epic to what to film and you think like they're all all in their own pants. I'm never going to watch it the same way again. Whose pants do you want them to be in? Well, no, they're like, they're not in like costume perhaps. They've got their own, they've probably got their own like the pants they came in with. They're just wearing their tidy whiteies. Yeah. So think about that.

That's my answer to that. Yeah. Achilles makes me think of the heel. Yeah. We have to address the heel. We do. The Achilles heel, the most famous thing about him. It's not in the Iliad.

It's not in the Odyssey. What? No. That's not in those 15,000 lights. How come the heel comes later? Who adds the heel? Yeah, well, it's a much later tradition, actually, the heel. So the story of the heel is that his mother, Thetis, who's a goddess,

is desperate to make him immortal. And so she takes him to the river sticks and she dips him in the sticks. But because she's holding him by the heel, The heel doesn't kind of get dipped in this immortal water. And that's why he's invulnerable there. In the Iliad, that's absolutely not the case. It's made quite clear that he can bleed and, like, you know, die like any other man. The Iliad is only telling sort of a small portion of his story

that's really organised around one particular, like, episode of his rage. It doesn't tell the story of how he gets killed. The plot of the Iliad is not easy to summarise. Is there a simple way of summarising it, Emily? Is there a sort of too long, didn't read one minute, Yeah, absolutely. So with the Trojan War, we start with the judgment of Paris, which is a moment where three goddesses are squabbling over an golden apple that's been inscribed with the words for the most beautiful. They all want it. They decide that a mortal has to judge between them. And so they go down to Paris, the Prince of Troy. He decides Aphrodite's the winner, not least because she bribes him with Helen, who conveniently already married to Menelaus, king of Sparta. Paris goes and takes Helen. brings her back to Troy. Menelaus, her husband, is outraged.

Sure. Yeah, as kind of as you would be. Goes to his brother, Agamemnon, who is the king of all of the Greeks, and they band together all of the Greeks. They head off to Troy on this massive expedition. Ten years of fighting around Troy. Ultimately, then Odysseus, kind of the trickster,

has the idea of the Trojan horse. The Trojan horse gets dragged into Troy. The Greeks jump out, they burn the city down, and then they go home. But that's not in the Iliad either. The truth, I mean, the horse isn't in the... Eliad. I mean, all the best bits that we know aren't even in the story. They're missing some stuff in there.

Yeah. Make it longer, that's what I've always said. Okay, where does the Trojan horse come from? That's in the Odyssey, right? Well, it's mentioned in the Odyssey, but the story of the Trojan horse actually comes in one of these lost epics. The Judgment of Paris, like the seizure of Helen, the Trojan horse, the sacking of Troy. Those are all in other epics that we've lost. The Iliad is sometimes subtitled as the wrath or the rage of Achilles.

Right. What's he so angry about, Kyle? Well, they didn't have Wi-Fi then. so probably that right you just can't get a connection yeah because I can get a connection yesterday and I was in I was in Tottenacourt Road

right so imagine I was angry but I mean in 2000 years people will be singing of that Roth that Roth will be sung the Kaeli ad yeah don't mind it

I don't mind that at all but you didn't set fire to a city no I left my dynamite at home I'm going to say it's not the Wi-Fi Emily. Why is Achilles so angry and wrathful and pouty? Well, it's anger that is the subject of the Iliad. So the very first word of the epic is anger or wrath. So sing to me goddess of the wrath of Achilles is how it starts. And he is angry because Agamemnon, the king of the Greeks, we're in the 10th year of the war. They've been fighting a lot and during that process.

10th year of the war? Yeah. Pack it in lads. They're all exhausted. So 10 years have gone, have gone by, they are exhausted. And they, in that process, have taken a lot of cities that they've raised to the ground. They've taken a lot of women captive as slaves. And one of those women has to get returned. Her father has come and has a bit of an issue with his daughter being enslaved. And so he comes, asks for her back. Agamemnon has to give her up.

And so he, in response, seizes one of Achilles enslaved women. Her name is Briseus. And Achilles gets really peeved by this. He withdraws from the war. And when he does that, he bends. ex-use, the king of the gods, to make sure that as many of the Greeks die as possible, so that they all know how great he is and that they really miss him. After that, his, what we're going to call him, companion lover, friend, Patricklus,

the epic's not really clear about their relationship, but it's clear that they very, very much care about each other. They're more than roommates, are they. They are absolutely a deep, deep relationship between them. And he goes out into the battle because he gets really upset by seeing all of his companions dying. So Achilles lets Patrickluss go to war, of course, Patricklus tragically gets killed by Hector.

Wearing his armour, right? Patriclus wears Achilles' armour. Yeah, he's dressed up as Achilles. I mean, you know, this sense of them being kind of two halves of the same person, really, really strong. He dies in Achilles' armour. That gets taken by Hector, the Prince of Troy, who kills Patriclus. And in that, Achilles' revenge just absolutely gets stoked.

So does he thinks that he's killed Achilles? Yeah, he does, initially. Trichita? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then they take their helmet off and they're like, oh, no, it's not Brad Pitt. Yeah. Okay.

And so we now get the rage of Achilles. which is where he's like vengeance mission, he's going to kill Hector. Yeah, and he doesn't stop there. Hector begged him for a burial, and instead, what does he do? He ties him to the back of his chariot, and he rolls him in the dirt and drags him around the tomb of Patroclus. This guy's fuming, man. Yeah, he's pretty angry. He's really angry, isn't he?

And the poem finishes not with the kind of conquest of Troy. It finishes with a funeral. It's incredible. Well, we've been focusing on this rage that does consume the epic. But we get to the end. And in fact, the gods have been very careful. to preserve Hector's corpse. So actually he's been kind of kept

for his relatives, for his family. And we get to the end of the poem and we get to a moment where, in fact, Achilles suddenly has this nighttime scene with Priam, the King of Troy, who comes, steals out of the city, comes to Achilles' tent, and he has this incredible scene

where he kneels on the ground and he kisses that hands of Achilles, the man who killed his son. And he says, you know, I am doing this because I would like to have my son's body back to bury. And they engage in this amazing kind of scene of kindness, of friendship, they share bread together,

and at that point, then Priam goes home with his son's body. And that's the end of the poem? That is the end of the poem. Troy doesn't get conquered. The war doesn't end? No, no. So hang on, it took them 15,000 lines to get to that. Yeah, what we've done in about 10 minutes.

I reckon I could have done that a little bit quicker. Achilles is a hero, right? In the ancient Greek world, he's a hero. Just to sort of sum up what he's done, Kayaocts a woman, he salts when he loses her, He lets his fellow Greeks die. In fact, he asks his fellow Greeks to die. He gets his boyfriend accidentally killed,

then seeks murderous vengeance, and desecrates the corpse. It's not the classic hero story we're familiar with in our Hollywood movies. Yeah, it's pretty extreme. Yeah, he's not John McLean, is it? It's not diehard. No. But, I mean, Batman was a bit naughty.

He's just being up people for the fun of it. It's sort of interesting, the word hero. It doesn't feel appropriate by our morals. So what is a Greek hero? Is it different? Well, what's interesting is that the word is the same. So the ancient Greek word that Homer uses for hero is heroes. It's where we get hero from.

But it means something completely different. So there's a definition of the hero that I really like, which is basically it is someone who is striving for immortality and will do anything to get that. And ultimately, ironically, proves that they can't do it and dies trying. Oh, wow. Wow.

Live fast or die trying. Yeah. And that's exactly. what they're doing. And they're really, they're living so fast that they actually end up bringing ruin to everyone around them. So an ancient Greek hero, if you're looking at the Iliad and the Odyssey, is actually someone who can actually destroy his community in a lot of ways. But they're doing that because that is what they need to be remembered into the future. What they want above all is glory. The word is claios in Greek and it means people talking about you. So the more extreme

things you do, the more people are going to talk about you. Yeah. That is the story for the Iliad. It's story of Achilles, his rage, and I suppose his brief moment of humanity at the end. Yeah. End of story. Yeah. And then we're on to the sequel poem, The Odyssey. The Odyssey is the story of one man's voyage home. In Greek, that's Nostos, and it's his return from Troy.

He's spent 10 years at Troy and he's got another 10 years to get back. On his way home, he encounters all kinds of obstacles, including a cyclops, a nymph, the Calypso, a witch who turns his men into pigs, Circe. When he gets back home, he ends up spending a lot of time trying to be recognised by his son and his wife. He wins his wife back. He slaughters all of the men in his house, and he is king of Ithaca once more.

Odysseus is meant to be the hero. And in some ways he's a very different hero to Achilles because he's brain's not brawn. Yeah. And he's meant to be kind of more loyal. He's trying to get home to his wife. It's nostalgia. It's Nostos, right? The pain of home.

Yeah. But in some ways, he's equally violent. Yeah. He gets all his men killed. He cheats on his wife and then accuses others of being unfaithful. He's quite hypocritical. Yeah. Well, and then we also end with this, not only this kind of mass slaughter,

but then all of the families of the suitors come in and enraged that he's just come home and kills everyone. 108 families like, have you seen my son? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, sorry. Exactly. Awkward. And by the way, I'm Odysseus and I'm welcome home. Sure.

Yeah. So, you know, we have this really kind of problematic ending. But yeah, so he is in many ways like Achilles. I said, you know, a hero. we could see a hero as a destroyer of communities. And yeah, he's lost all of his companions that he took to Troy. He's now come back and he's killed everybody. On the other hand, compared to someone like Achilles,

he is, as you said, much more kind of shrewd, much more cunning, much more clever. And that's what he's known for. He has loads of epithets, which are basically adjectives through the epic that describe him as like really cunning. Polymetus is one of them, really cunning, really clever. Of course he's got Penelope, who is equally clever, equally cunning. And she kind of matches him in his wits. So there is a different dynamic going on there.

Yeah, because she spent this whole time weaving to slow down the suitors from marrying her, and then every night she unwaved everything that she weaved that day. So for 20 years they've been sitting there going, are you done weaving yet? And she's like, no, I'm sorry, it's just taking really long. I'll do it. Give it to me, I'll do it. I don't even know how to weave, but often as she.

She's pretty smart. And Pellemic also is very clever. Yeah. The kind of parallels between Achilles and Odysseus. I mean, they meet these two former friends. They meet again. They meet in the underworld. And Achilles says,

I made the wrong choice. Yeah, it's an amazing moment of kind of flashback and interacting with the Iliad. So we talked about Achilles and Iliad who is sort of, you know, he ends up all out for this choice of he's going to burn out and just, you know, kill everyone around him because he wants people to remember him.

Well, in the Odyssey, Odysseus gets to talk to the spirits of the underworld and Achilles comes up and Odysseus says, oh look, you know, you're king of all of the shades, you know, well done you. And Achilles says, I would rather be the lowest labourer on the planet than the king of all of the dead. He regrets it.

Well said. But it's an amazing thing of like, okay, well, if Odysseus gets that message from Achilles, then he has sort of more knowledge than someone like Achilles did because he knows actually what is the right choices to get back home. So it then becomes even more urgent that he does need to get back home and try and have that long life version. This guy's going everywhere.

Yeah. Well, it's been quite the ride. How many stars would you give the Iliad an Odyssey now? Oh, I loved it. Yeah? I'm into it. Cool. Can I give it a four and a half?

I'll take it. I think Homer would be pleased with that. I think so. interested about the Achilles heel thing. I didn't know that. That was about getting dipped in by his heel. And it's probably more of a Roman later thing. Well, it's definitely, the first time it comes up is a lot, lot later than

in Homer. So yeah. The nuance window! Time now for the nuance window. This is where Kyle and I sit and snack on figs and olives and try not to turn into pigs, while Dr. Emily whips out a liar and sings to us, oh wonderful muse, something that we need to know about the Iliad and the Odyssey.

So my stopwatch is ready. Here it is. You have two minutes. Take it away. Dr. Emily. Why do we tell stories? What does the story have to do to survive nearly 3,000 years? I can't speak to 3,000 years of experience, but each time I come back to the Iliad and Odyssey in my lifetime, they mean different things to me, and each time it is a journey. As a teenager, the Odyssey to me was about Odysseus' son,

trying to become himself between a mother he doesn't understand and a father he doesn't know. At university burning the candle at both ends, the Iliad was about Achilles. burning out in a blaze of glory. And more recently, as a young mother, I have come to see that same epic through the eyes of his mother Thetis,

the grief of losing a child too soon, the determination to do what she can for him because he matters more than anything. Literature gives you what you are looking for. And literature like the Iliad and Odyssey that have been read across many hundreds of lifetimes contain the lives and the thoughts, the hopes and the dreams,

the paths taken by all the people before you who have read them. But this is not the only story the poems hold. These are stories that were born in change, that from their oral origins were told again and again in different ways, according to who was speaking and who was listening. And in this, there is another Iliad and Odyssey, I see, a story of reconciliation, of community, a tale of warning against losing touch with the earth and the people around us. As I see it, the Iliad ends with a scene of human hope and heart that shows even the most resolute and destructive warrior Achilles, in the dark,

in his hut on the beach, with his hands kissed by the father of the man he killed, and they cry together for the families they have lost, they break bread together, and Achilles offers to Priam kindness, handing back Hector's body for the humanity of burial. So let us cry together. Let us go on that journey and hang in the balance at the end and see that these poems that have lasted several thousand years remind us that it's not easy, but you can. We can move past war and destruction, we can care for those around us,

We can see through the eyes of others and in so doing we can read these poems as a journey towards humanity towards heart, towards hope. Beautiful, thank you so much. Makes me feel like I should have that at the end of my show. Everyone comes out and, yeah, yeah, that's exactly how I feel. I'm available.

Oh, okay. Want to come to Swindon? Well, thank you so much, Kyle. Thank you so much, Emily. Listener, if you want more from Kyle. Obviously, check out our Laith Erickson episode. It's, you know, more wanderings, more voyages.

Yeah. And for more epic historical poetry, we've got episodes on King Arthur and, of course, the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, which is also very funny and surprising. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe to Your Dead to Me

on BBC Sounds to hear the show 28 days earlier than anywhere else. I just like to say a huge thank you. To our guests in History Corner, we had the incredible Dr. Emily Hauser from the University of Exeter. Thank you, Emily. Thank you so much.

It's been so much fun. It's been a pleasure. And in Comedy Corner, we had the brilliant, Kyle Smith Bino. Thank you, Kyle. Thank you. And you, lovely listener,

Join me next time as we ask the historical muses to sing us another song about the past, but for now I'm off home. Hopefully it won't take 10 years, but you know what? British trains, it may be will. Bye! Greetings, malevolent munchkins, fiendish friends and devilish do-gooders. Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius! I'm Russell Kane and I'm delighted to be steering the ship that unceremoniously wrenches historic figures from their perfect pedestals so that we can decide whether they're evil, genius, or a heavy concoction of the two. It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

Yes, it's evil. Yes, it's genius. Get on board now and listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. In 1872, the Mari Celeste was found adrift in the Atlantic. Every person on board was gone, and none of them were ever seen again. Every Monday on Hidden History, Dr. Harini Bhatt takes an unexplained event from history, just like that one, reads the evidence like a case file, and tells you what she thinks happened. No hedging. Start with the Mary Celeste episode for a look at one of history's most enduring maritime enigmas. Follow Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bhatt, wherever you get your podcasts.