18 A History of Epic w/ Gregory Nagy and Leonard Muellner (Homer, Iliad, Gilgamesh)

[music] Hi! Thanks for tuning in to Ancient Greece, Declassified. Episode 18 A History of Epic On this podcast we've talked about the Iliad and we've talked about the Odyssey Dedicating a full episode to each epic As you will have gathered by now, the Homeric epics have been hugely influential over the millennia And you can find Homeric echoes and influences in countless movies and popular books today But it's not just their status as influential classics that make the Iliad and Odyssey worth your time These epics open up a whole world of fascinating questions, not just about Ancient Greece, but about human history and society in general For example, there are elements within the epics that are very similar to other stories told by other cultures in completely different parts of the globe Separated from the Greeks by entire oceans So how do we explain that? Here's another interesting question As you'll recall from previous episodes The Homeric epics are thought to be products of a long oral tradition of storytelling of an illiterate society That were finally written down when that society became literate Well, if that's the case, and these stories that are told and retold from generation to generation Serve as a kind of collective memory of a society that has not written records Then how far back in time can such a collective memory reach? How you answer that question will profoundly affect how you understand prehistory Not just of the Greeks, but of any culture whose myths and legends you might be interested in Furthermore, if these epics grew and developed over time with hundreds of storytellers adding something here and changing something there over the years Then how are we to understand the evolution of the epics in their entirety? Is it just a random process of addition and modification by random people? Or are there patterns or societal forces at work which at a macro level Shape and combine these stories into the elaborate epics that we now have? Our guests today have spent many years pondering these and other questions relating to epic storytelling traditions We're joined this time by not one, but two of the world's pre-eminent scholars of archaic Greek epic Greg Naage is professor of classics at Harvard University and director of the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC Lenny Milner is professor emeritus at Brandeis University and director for publications and information technology at the Center for Hellenic Studies Greg Naage and Lenny Milner, welcome to Ancient Greece Declassified I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having us Lenny Milner, let me start with you The most famous pre-Greek epic is the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh which dates back to the second millennium BC Do we know of other storytelling traditions or epics before the time of Homer? In terms of actual attested epics we don't have any, but I think comparative research proves that they must have existed When you're talking about oral traditions what comparative evidence teaches us is that they may have come to us Say in the eighth or the seventh century BCE when we're talking about Homer But they don't just appear on the scene, they're the product of a long and evolving tradition And we can show with comparative evidence, for example if you look at comparative linguistics of terminology for poetry We have the same words attested, cognate words attested into other Indo-European languages in Sanskrit In the West and in other cultures that were part of the original Indo-European languages which broke up as a whole in the third millennium We have words about the making of poetry inherited in common by these languages and their cultures In other words you can show that the production of poetry and the kinds of composed expressions with a certain methodical value even are inherited in common by these cultures that go back to the third millennium BC Then you can assume that there's a song culture and an oral tradition behind them That's so interesting, so by looking at the vocabulary and the phrases in later documents We can see that there are common origins and then we can infer that there must have been common strains of oral traditions that influenced all of these Exactly So you think that there were oral traditions in Anatolia and in Greece and in the Middle East that were perhaps influencing each other over thousands of years? I think that's true, I think in the 1920s maybe the most important figure in the study of the historical evolution of the Indo-European languages of French scholar named Antoine Maillet He wrote a short period proving that the beaders of the Saffic poetry, that's the poetry of Saffa which is sixth century, are cognate with the beaders of the oldest poems in Sanskrit that is the hymns of the Rigveda in India The systems of Procedure are the same, the rhythmical patterns can be shown to be related, so the evidence is not only verbal but also in terms of the rhythms of the poetic tradition that go back to common ancestors and to the period of Indo-European community Wow, that's so interesting Greg Naaj to continue with Gilgamesh for a bit, if we look at Gilgamesh and the Odyssey, there are a lot of striking parallels For example, both stories begin with the council of the gods, in both the protagonist journeys to the edge of the known world and seeks to gain immortality but finally comes to accept their own mortality and comes home How do you explain the many similarities between these two epics produced by very different civilizations? A lot of the elements like traveling to another realm and seeing things that everyday people can't see are features of many traditional societies that don't even have institutions that we could in any way describe as epics So for example, in many Native American traditions, the vision quest is very important part of the traditions that hold people together And for me at least the journey of Gilgamesh to another realm and the journey of somebody like Odysseus to another realm in the Odyssey are parallels that are not all that close, even though to us moderns they seem very close indeed In general, traditional societies share a lot of characteristics that are alien to us moderns or how shall I describe ourselves? People who don't have traditions of myth and ritual were storytelling and things that we do that we consider our sacred go together We don't have that, that's why we find amazing similarities that are not that amazing if you look at traditional societies writ large Well, it's interesting that you wrote of the Native American example because there are, as you said, some interesting similarities in Native American folklore and the Mediterranean epics Yes And several people have tried to explain this like Carl Jung hypothesized about the collective unconscious of humanity And Joseph Campbell who influenced George Lucas' story of Star Wars also talked about the monomyth, like the same myth is universal for humanity Do you have a theory about why there can be such common elements across these distances? Well, it's interesting that when you do look at the myths and rituals of humans worldwide Yes, there are many similarities And I can understand how psychologists especially can find things to compare about what one person dreams overnight And what we can find in a variety of civilizations all over the world And there's something to that But instead of talking about monomiths, I still prefer to talk about what the anthropologist Claude Lévis-Stolz observes about human societies around the world And that is the one unifying thing that they all share in one way or another is diversity, different versions In one version, the world may end with a flood In another version, across the river, the world may end with a fire that destroys all material So to me, that kind of difference is what is so fundamentally human about myth and ritual Oh, Lennie Milner, did you have something to add to that? Yes, this is another point that Lévis Strauss makes about these motifs or stories that seem to be recurring all over the world And what he says is that they're like the sounds that the human voice can produce There's only a limited number of them, they keep on, they're more or less the same You have selections of them in different languages, but what you do with them changes from one society to the next So the similarity between the anthropist story among the borrero Indians and the one that you find in Greek civilization is zero In fact, because they have totally different social functions, they're in completely different contexts, the variations on them work in different ways important to think, and I think Greg Gnology has explained this most beautifully, that there are really three kinds of models that you want to talk about when you're looking at comparing myths or stories in different cultures. There are the stories from cultures that are genetically related, where they will inherit things in common. There are cultures where you can have interchange and borrowing, okay? But there's also the notion of a typological factor, that is there are kinds of stories. This is I think the monomith idea that you kind of recurring in cultures that are totally independent of one another. And trying to distinguish between these things is really important and can be very difficult to distinguish between borrowing and innovation between unrelated cultures and genetic inheritance. Interesting. Well, to follow up on this point of inheritance, the Homeric epics take place long before Homer's time in what we call the Mycenaean period. And some people have speculated that Homer is inheriting a very old oral tradition. Is there any hard evidence that there was a live epic tradition in Mycenaean times? I mean, the only documentation that we have from Mycenaean times is the Tablet's in linear B, which are to not discuss song culture. But there's no like paintings of singers, okay? So it's clear that their song going on is a figure with what looks like has been reconstructed as a liar. I think Greg can tell you more about it than I can. Well, there are many references in the material culture even of the second millennium before our era, that point to a song culture, a pattern of narratives that you and I would consider epic. And we can include here the wall paintings on the island of Santorini, where there are representations of battles, sea voyages, a wide variety of domestic scenes that are very similar to what we read in the Homeric, Iliad and the Odyssey. And I'm perfectly convinced that such evidence, by way of paintings, for example, is parallel to other traditions that involve not visual arts but verbal arts. So yes, yes, yes, the song traditions very much there already in the second millennium BCE. When it comes to very old things that are preserved in Homeric poetry, details that seem to go back as much as a millennium, somebody like me is convinced that the power of this medium is such that it can actually recover realities, physical realities of a past that maybe a thousand years older than the verbal arts that's producing these details. For example, when Hector leans over to kiss for the last time, the infant that he has with Andromache in the famous Goodbye Scene, where Hector says goodbye to Andromache and where the child is so scared by the horsehair helmet. A great archaeologist like the late Emily Vermeule can say, "Well, this is something that has been noticed by the medium that is a detail so old that that kind of helmet went out of production around 1500 and maybe 1600 before our era. And yet here this detail comes back to haunt us in a medium that's dated at the earliest eighth century, seventh century before our era." Wow, that's amazing that the oral epic tradition can preserve information over such a very vast time period. Now I'd like to get into how these stories evolved over time until they were written. And I know that you have your own theories about that. So as a segway, let me first ask you about your approach to the question, because you've written so much about ancient Greek epic and your ideas have been so influential that people often classify Homeric scholars today as Nageans and those who are not Nageans. So if I may put you on the spot for a second, what is the Nagean approach to how these ethics evolved? Well, it certainly shouldn't be named after me, but a form of thinking that was pioneered at Harvard University by Millman Perry and then continued by Albert Lord. And people like myself and Leonard Milner and many others and the generations that come after us are simply following in the footsteps of a method of looking at a medium like Homeric poetry, a method that stresses the traditional nature of the song culture that produced what you and I are calling epic today. This method involves comparing not just systems that are historically related, but also systems that we find all over the world that are commonly called oral traditions. And so for me to apply the empirical methods of researchers who studied oral traditions worldwide is hardly Nagean. It's simply an approach that is true to anthropology, linguistics, as well as to what Germans in the 19th century would call "philology," which was a very specialized understanding of philology. But is it fair to say that your approach emphasizes the role of ritual in shaping the ethics more than many other scholars approach? It's true that my approach does that, but it's not my approach. It's simply an anthropological approach. And I would say the one debate I have with many of my dear colleagues who are studying the ancient world is that they should look at the methodology of anthropology and linguistics more than they do. I'm not being holier than thou and saying that because I have to keep learning anthropological insights myself. But you understand that I don't consider that a kind of personalized theory or discovery procedure. No, absolutely. But I mean, well, Lenny Milner, let me turn to you for a second, because the idea of ritual affecting the evolution of stories is something that's hard for me to wrap my head around. I think it's hard for a lot of people today to grasp. So I mean, how can rituals change the way people tell stories? How does that work? Well, a lot of rituals are enactments of stories, just to give you something very straightforward. One of the things that's different about ancient cultures as against ours is that we tend to make these hard and fast distinctions between things like myth, ritual, social occasions, economics, politics and all that stuff. But in the ancient world, it's very, very hard to separate out those threads. An anthropological approach teaches us to try and understand the coherence between all of these things. So a religious festival at which poetry is performed, poetry looks to us like a secular event, but in antiquity, it's a totally coherent thing. Okay? So it's much to the norm in these cultures as it is alien to our way of understanding them. So would an example be that you have a festival to, I don't know, Apollo? And there's a bard there who tells part of the Iliad and he makes sure to include something about Apollo because it's a festival of Apollo. And so the pressure of the festival to elaborate on this particular God might create some slight change in the narrative. Is that, I'm just trying to figure out, is that how it might work? That's such a beautiful example because when there is a festival of Apollo, what the singer, let's call him singer, not bard, what the singer does is invoke Apollo, but by doing so, Apollo as a divinity is in charge of the whole event. So for us, it's just all paying lip service to some God who is probably irrelevant to what we really want to hear, but I've worked a lot on this when you invoke a God at a festival. The God is the occasion. He becomes, or she becomes the occasion. And for us, of course, ritual is automatically boring because we think of religion, which we think of in a very specialized way. But for them, the whole thing is ritual, including the parts that give us a great deal of pleasure, including the parts where we're worried about whether we're okay with the cosmos. All of that is part of the big picture. And one other thing, if you look at the rituals of mostly lower caste societies in India today, and these things have been studied a lot in recent publications, what you find is that the most interesting stories that you and I think of as epics originate from a center point where a small community is worshiping a hero, whether it's a he, hero, or a she, hero. And in the context of that worship and celebrating why that hero is worshiped, there is a central story that emanates from that place of worship. But then as the diameter of that emanation, that diffusion expands, in a sense, the core ritual element is less visible, but it's still there. So each ritual then, or each instance of a ritual, would only really have a profound effect on a particular episode in the epic. Yes. Yes. And then a sequence of thousands of rituals over hundreds of years would all put pressure on different pieces of the epic, and so the whole epic would morph over time. That's a beautiful formulation. What you've just done is explain the catalog of ships in Iliad Rhapsody II, where it's a recognition of everything that everybody is proud of, but it's all localized, and it travels from one place to another. And it's almost like a game of connecting the dots, where different things are more sacred to one community versus another community. But when all is said and done, the most important parts of every community's cosmic creation concept is represented. That's fascinating. Lenny Muleen, do you have something to add to that? I mean, I think there are different models for how cultures synthesize themselves. And I think the culture of ancient Greece is particularly diversified. So it doesn't unify itself by abstracting something that everyone has in common. It amalgamates all these things into a whole. So people's local cultures and traditions are incorporated in the broader whole. It's really interesting. So Greg, one last question about this dark age period when all these stories are evolving. Obviously, we have very little evidence of what's going on exactly at the time. But if we look at, say, 19th century Europe when these folklorists are traveling around and collecting stories, they found that women played a huge role in preserving and passing down these stories from generation to generation. Do you think that women may have played a vital role in the oral traditions of dark age Greece? It's a beautiful question. And could I say that in response to the worries of many students who say, "I don't like a killi's in the Iliad" and various other statements like that, or the Iliad is simply about men at war and I'm against war. So why should I read the Iliad? I like to say just to provoke people that to my mind, about 60% or 70% of the creativity that goes into the verbal art that culminates in our version of the Iliad comes from women, comes specifically from the kinds of songs that women sing on occasions like lamentation, but also occasions like love songs. Love songs not only at weddings and at female initiations, but in other occasions where even a lament can modulate into a love song and vice versa. Now having provoked you by talking about 60% or 70% of the Iliad being understandable in terms of women singing traditions, I'd like to pick a fight with you about the dark age. And at the height of the dark age, or why don't we say in the depths of the dark age, we have something like the geometric vase that is commonly known by archaeologists because it's such a spectacular sample, the dipolon vase. And it's located, it's displayed at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. It's to your left as you go in. And it's a vase, it's a utensil, but it defies utility because it's as tall as the ceiling here. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but it's big. Then you look at this thing, this is coming from the dark age, eight century before our era. And yet you look at the shapes of the human figures as represented there and you notice that the upper body is an upside down triangle or you notice that other patterns aren't lozenges, which is a triangle and then an upside down triangle under it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you come to the realization that these shapes are derived from the art pattern weaving done by women. And that the painting of the dipolon vase is a secondary art form practiced by men because men are the painters, but women are the weavers and the human forms. And in fact, all the forms that you see in this work of art are fundamentally derived from women's transmission of understanding, of human understanding, of verbal art and visual art. So you notice you caught me already saying verbal art. I'm convinced that verbal art is alive and well in the so-called dark age. It's just that it was an economically bad time, but I think in terms of the humanistic heritage, it's just as alive and well as the eras that come after and the eras that came before. Wow, that is so fascinating. All right, so Lenny, let's jump to the end point of these dark ages that were not so dark. In the 8th century BC, you get all these different epics that crystallize out of the oral traditions of the preceding centuries. Why did Homer's two epics in particular become so popular and overshadow all the other ones? Well, for an answer to your question, what I look to is the work of my colleague Douglas Frame, who I think has a produced this book called "Hip-Hot-On-Eastor" and can show you that the birthplace of these songs was in a group of cities, twelve cities, who combined their resources and met in a festival environment and all participated in the performance of the songs and that the songs have a function in this group of cities of representing a social political, economic, religious, and ritual coherence among the group. So this is in a very early phase of the evolution of the epic out of the dark ages. One of the things that the epic is doing and that's responsible for its generation, that is these songs have a way of combining cultural traditions from a large geographical area and bringing them together. So just in itself, this is an exercise in producing something that stretches across boundaries. So this is part of its ambition. Wow. So, can we maybe think of the Homeric epics as a kind of social technology that is enabling connections to form over larger areas? Yes, that's very well said. It can be also converted. Now I think you can see a different model, for example, happening in Athens in the fifth century where you have a kind of cultural imperialism where the Athenians are trying to take over the poetic traditions for the performance of epic and in tragedies and own these things, and enable themselves as a universal culture. In our print "Thusydides" channeling paracles actually says, "We don't need Homer as a publicist for Athenian glory." Because we own Homer. In other words, unlike the earlier way of saying it, which is that Homer is the educator of all the Greeks and why, because, as you said, Homer represents the synthesis of what most Greeks speaking people have in common. No, this is better now with the ambitions of Athens as a cultural empire. Let's call it that. They can say, "Well, Homer may be the educator of all Greeks, but we own Homer, so we're the educators of all Greeks." So are you saying that because the Athenians produced the authoritative addition of Homer, they basically used it as an imperialistic tool? Yes, we have to be careful when we say addition. And can I use the Greek word because you'll love this. The Greek word means simultaneously authoritative and common to everybody. Today, coiné is authoritative Athenian style, but it's also common, democratic. Everybody can enjoy it. Everybody can learn from it. It's standard in English. It's standard. It's like the King James. So this is interesting because I've actually received some emails from listeners who say, we always hear that the Tyrant Pysisteretus in the sixth century that he standardized the Homeric epics and that therefore the Athenians had the final say in what was included, what was excluded, but how do we know that because we don't have any sources from that time period? Well, but what I love is that you go to the Agra of Athens today and you go to a not very often visited place called the altar of the 12 gods, which was a monument set up by the Pysisteretus, Pysisteretus and his family, to honor the fact that the 12 major gods of the Iliad and the Odyssey are, shall we say, shaped by Athenian society. So you have this archaeological self-assertion of the Athenian version of how to look at the gods, why 12 gods? Well, look at the fact that in Homeric poetry in general, the idea is to accentuate what most Greeks have in common and to shade over the most different things that would divide Greeks rather than unify Greeks. It's a tendency, it's not a done deal, it's in progress, but it's Athens that managed to take it the farthest. So this is a little bit of a digression perhaps, but I think it's interesting to because we can see how even after the epics were largely formed, they could still be modified and used for political purposes. So my question is how did the Athenians impose their version on the rest of the Greek world? - Go ahead, Gregor. - Well, Gregor, just a very brief attempt at answering a very good question, which is that it's not that there's that much about Athens in the Iliad or the Odyssey. In fact, if you look at how many times Athens has mentioned, it's not a pretty impressive record, but that's what Pericles means as channeled by Thucydides when he says in his speech to the Athenians that we don't have to have Homer publicizing what we are and what we do. It's because we own Homer. So in a funny way, what really matters is that everybody has to accept that the Athenian version of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the fifth century before our era, that Athenian version is something that even Spartans have to deal with. So it doesn't matter where. They really have the corner on the song culture. - It kind of reminds me of how Europeans now watch Hollywood versions of their works of liturgy. - Yes, it's like Versailles, the Netflix version of Versailles, with American actors, not British actors. - Not even British actors anymore. - Or Americans speaking with a British accent, which is not even that. - Not even that, because of the imperialism of the British culture. - Which is still a little bit there, isn't it? That a British dialect is still more prestigious than an American one. - Well, it's hard to imagine Pericles speaking with an Illinois accent for some reason. But let's get back to the question of ritual, but flip it. So we've now seen how rituals and religion may have influence the development of these stories. But I'm wondering if the stories in turn can influence religion because there's this famous line in Herodotus that the Greeks didn't really have a clear view of who their gods were until Homer and Hesiod kind of standardized them. So Lenny, do you think that there's the other side of the influence as well? - Sure, I mean, what happens is that these things have prestige and they start to level out some of the idiosyncrasies and people lose their local traditions in favor of the ones that are more prestigious and widespread. So it's a natural process, I think. You can document another cultural and environments comparatively as well. - It's so interesting how dynamic this whole process is where you have blending of cultures and then the new product kind of irons over local differences to continue with Herodotus for a second. He also tells us that the Egyptians and the Phoenicians and the Persians all had their own stories and versions of what happened in the Trojan War. Unfortunately, none of those accounts survive. We only know what little Herodotus tells us about them. And of course, this historian, Herodotus, has a reputation for being a little too fanciful sometimes. So should we really believe him that all these different cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean had each preserved over hundreds of years memories of the violent upheavals at the end of the Bronze Age? And if we do believe him, how does that affect our interpretation of Homer's account? - I'll just mention one thing about these Phoenicians and Persians that Herodotus refers to. I've often thought that when he's talking about the Persian version and the Phoenician version, he's thinking primarily about Greeks, mostly Ionian speaking Greeks of Asia Minor. Who shall we say promoting the party line of the Persian Empire as opposed to, let's not call it party line, but the ideology of Athens, for example. - But there are some examples that I think you can't explain with that model. I mean, when the Persians way out there say that Perseus came over there and founded their dynasty, that seems to be unlikely to have been just Greeks saying that. - Well, see, I would argue that when you look at especially Lydia and the Lydia and Empire in Asia Minor, that the dynastic stories about who came first and who came second and how Heracles himself, not just Perseus, but Heracles is involved in the founding of a very important dynasty. When you see that, might take would be that it's the Lydia and Empire using the ideologies of the Greeks who live in Asia Minor to promote their own empire in terms of Greek, which is then something that Herodotus is very sensitive about, and he picks up on it, and he understands how Greek mythology in general can be manipulated by a whole variety of different empires. - Okay, but to boil down what you're saying into very simple terms, you don't believe that the Phoenicians and Egyptians and Persians had independent memories of the wars at the end of the Bronze Age, such as, say, Eric Klein describes in his book 1177. - Not quite that way. I'm a big fan of Eric Klein's work. I'm also a big fan of the work of Mary Bach-Varová, who has built a very compelling model about Hittite traditions and Luvian traditions about the destruction of Troy, and unquite persuaded by her arguments. All I'm saying is that when Herodotus is talking about all these mediations, what he has primarily in mind is not something that just grew out of a Phoenician tradition or a Persian tradition, but was somehow mediating what were the Greek traditions of Asia Minor. May I give one example, which just gives me a sense of wonder every time I think of it, which is that the speakers of Greek whom we now call Eolians, so Eolic Greek, in northwest Asia Minor. They had a tradition that Troy was not completely destroyed, but that a bastard son of Hector, I bet in their version it wasn't a bastard son called the Scamandrius, actually picked up the pieces and was a ruler of Troy. Now that is very antithetical to what Athenians would say in the 5th century. For them there shouldn't be any son that survives Hector. That Hector's line should be completely obliterated, and so their epic traditions where the child of Hector and Andromachy is not only a stew on ox, which is one name, but also Scamandrius, which is the name of the brother who would have been king. So the brother gets killed off, so there is no succession. All I'm saying is you see that kind of rivalry even among Greeks when it comes to the story of the destruction of Troy. Interesting. One last thing I'd like to ask you guys about concerning the formation and evolution of these stories is whether there can be cross-pollination between different epics. So there's a theory among some scholars that the part of the Odyssey that details Odysseus's travels by sea with all the monsters and everything, that that section was taken from a different earlier epic about the travels of the Argonauts and transplanted into the Odyssey. So does this kind of cross-pollination between completely different epics happen often? That's one model that people have, and it's not impossible. I think proving it is very difficult. What's probably a better model is that you have these kinds of stories in the song culture, and that they're not necessarily attached to Odysseus or Jason or anyone else. They get, they can be, there are different ways of telling them with different heroes, and in one version it's Odysseus and another it's Jason. Instead of saying one is borrowed from the other, they can both be deriving from a common source, which consists of all the varieties of stories that are in the imagination of all the participants in the song culture. May I offer one little story about the Cyclops. The most beautiful example of variation in Mediterranean stories is the fact that unlike the version we have in our Odyssey where the Cyclops and the Cyclopies don't know anything about seafaring. There's another version that has come down to us, and this was discovered by a professor called All Wine, a very young professor, that in this version Odysseus, after he blinds the Cyclops, is chased all over the Mediterranean by angry Cyclopies. So they turn out to be great sailors in this other version. Okay, where can I read this? Give you the reference, it's in and know by Eustatius, one of the great commentators on the Odyssey, ignored mostly by experts in the Odyssey, and then this young assistant professor just notices it. Well, look at this version. That's fascinating. So Lenny, your view of this kind of common database of stories that can be pulled by different storytellers into different epics on the spot is really fascinating. And if we travel forward in time, we find that the Romans start playing this game too. And they're much more removed from the time of the Trojan War than Homer was, of course, but they pick up the baton and they start writing their own epics about the Bronze Age. Why would they do that? Well, I think One of the things that we've left out and we haven't talked about is the concept of hero in these stories and the fact that we have the heroes in Epic, but there's also a very important part of Greek religious life, which is heroes at cult, but we do have evidence, I think from the last from the 20th century archaeologists have found evidence of a cult of Anias, okay, when we think of as the Trojan hero in Laceum going back to the 7th century BCE and Laceum is where Rome is the district in which Rome is, okay So I think thinking that this is an artificial process is probably wrong that that this is a very old tradition the stories of Anias the development that it underwent in the poetry of Virgil is certainly special and belongs to a moment in time and a cultural a complex cultural synthesis that has to do with the imperial ambitions of the Roman Emperor and all sorts of other an absorption of the of Not just a Homeric poetry but of the Alexandrian view of a Homeric poetry So there are a lot of different things coming together in Virgilian poetry But I think one thing that one shouldn't think of is that it's an artificial exercise of something I'm ported from without there is a real indigenous tradition that's being responded to and adopted and expanded by Virgilian poetry Wow, so if the Romans had a shrine to Anias so far back Could you say a bit more about how you know hero worship and having shrines to certain heroes is connected with epic storytelling Person to ask a sitting across from me But what Lenny already said about the hero cult of Anias Just fits right into a very general pattern that What we call epic stories about heroes are organically connected to the worship of heroes which was a historical fact in the Mediterranean and In the case of Anias everybody wanted to get a piece of Anias because in the myth Anias is the son of Aphrodite who is the goddess of regeneration not only sexuality but regeneration That means if your dynasty is founded by Anias it'll last forever and there are many Dynasties that claimed Anias the one that got away with it was Rome Well speaking of Rome if I could go back in time and save one of the many epics that were lost I Would probably save the early Roman epic called the Analas by Anias Because good taste unlike all other epics we still have the Analas didn't glorify a bunch of kings or Lords or heroes it glorified the Roman Republic This was written before Virgil's in the Ed when Rome still was Republic and I find it so fascinating that the Romans took this traditional genre and used it in this radically new way to promote a constitutional political system now judging from the very limited Fragments we still have of the Analas. How do you think it might have been similar or different to the more traditional Epics about heroes and kings? That is such a beautiful question that all I can do is agree with that I would I would give anything to have the Analas of Anias One thing I would say is that the ambitions of the poetry are not something that are that much of an innovation in other words There are political agenda and social agenda in Homeric poetry as well I mean all over the place and we have records about these things So the adaptation of the prestige literary or cultural medium to local and isolated moments in the tradition is something that had been going on for a long period of time So harnessing these things to your current agenda That's part and parcel I think probably of every epic tradition whatever we want to call them these stories about the ancestors That's so interesting and it shows how flexible and enduring this model is and you know in recent times J.R.R. Tolkien and G.R.R. Martin have written epic stories set in fictional worlds that harken back to the distant past so Why do authors continue to craft epic narratives and project them foreign to the past even today? And also why do people go crazy about it? popular Yes, I mean let me say something and then Greg also is a big fan of the aim of thrones and I'm not but I've read some of the talking books but I think that what happens is that this is something that Greek epic does and that these things do that is that you have a whole world created Okay, it's a self-contained universe in terms of language in terms of the personnel in terms of the whole way it works And what happens is that it's an immersive world for the people who engage in it and that just like people become gamers or people become interested in any other sort of socially spread artistic or intellectual activity. This is like a totally fulfilling world and it encompasses people's Imaginations in a way that's extraordinary. So I think that these stories when they succeed Okay, and they don't always succeed. Okay, they have that ability to make people enter into their their Imaginations in a kind of holistic way. Okay, that's so interesting takes over their individuality Beautiful. Yeah, well then a final question for you Greg. More on pop culture is our modern obsession with superhero movies in any sense similar to the ancient interest in heroic tales. I love superhero narratives especially now the Black Panther because I think the success of this particular experiment shows how It's human nature to aspire to this larger than life world. I think I'd want to stress however that Heroes are not 100% admirable They never were just because they're larger than life Doesn't mean that they can't do things that are unspeakably bad and one thing the older I get Just really sticks with me is how dysfunctional myth can be and that's why ritual again is so important in a traditional society Because ritual when you relive myth how should I say it purges those things that we hate about ourselves and while purging that way the medium can highlight things that we really want to be ourselves and so it's not the way we use hero Where I can say so and so is my hero that means they have to be 100% perfect. No, it's just the opposite the hero is forever in the process of recreation and has faults that are bigger than ours but has virtues 90% that are also bigger than ours. So We want our lives to be transformed by heroic models No, I think that's a key thing that the Greek heroes have especially that they embody huge virtues whether we're talking about Edipus or Achilles or Disaus they also have serious faults and it's a way of making them more accessible But also they're in a dynamic relationship to us and to their own world. Yes, and it's not like Mr. Goody two shoes Hero right is just boring immediately and no one believes in them Yeah, they're very inspiring but at the same time they're very disturbing Yes, and that's why I mean I think Game of Thrones taps into that it's yes, yeah Game of Thrones is closer to ancient myth in that it magnifies both the heroic and the disturbing us That's right and I'm very worried about Daenerys and what will happen to her Greg Nage and Lenny Milner thank you both for coming on the show. Thank you. Thank you If you'd like to learn more about ancient epics and heroes Our guest Greg Nage has an online course you can take from Harvard called the ancient Greek hero in 24 hours It may be the best online classics course available right now and here's the really cool part If you don't need to get college credit from it or a certificate that you've completed it If you just want the knowledge then the course is completely free It's really an incredible resource for all of us You can find the link for where you can sign up in the show notes and on the web page for this episode Which is greasepodcast.com/18 and one last thing I'd like to recommend another podcast that I've actually been meaning to tell you guys about because it's definitely worth checking out History in the making is a cool show produced by a fellow named Rob Sims who just might be the next Dan Carlin in the making His first season covers the period of classical Athens and goes really in depth into one of the most fascinating Military conflicts from antiquity the Peloponnesian War And I think it's the only podcast that covers it so check that out. That's history in the making links in the show notes. See you guys next time Thanks for listening to ancient Greece declassified Can you still sing obvious and sing something that's going glass Thousand years slips by so fast goes up into a dust steaming with you