The Iliad and Odyssey: heroic epics from ancient Greece

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Is President Trump snubbing South Korea to reignite his friendly relationship with Kim Jong-un? I'm Asma Khalid, and I host the Global Story podcast from the BBC. The US and South Korea have been close allies since the 1950s. But this week, Trump announced that the US will substantially reduce joint military exercises with South Korea. He cited his very good relationship with North Korea's Kim Jong-un. For more, check out the Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to You're Dead to Me, 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 comedians. 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 in. And in Comedy Corner, he's a multi-talented actor, comedian, and broadcaster. You'll recognise him from hosting TV's The Great British Sewing Bee or starring in the award-winning sitcoms Ghostbusters. Ghostbusters, Stathlet's Flats, and Man Like Mobine. 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 Erikson. 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. 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. Thank you. 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. Right culture. Yeah, right culture. Right language. Great. Yeah, these are epic poems. So, what do you know? So, this is the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, or viewer, hello, 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 marvellous 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. No comment on the helmets. I'm not getting involved. Plus, of course, you've got the Percy Jackson series. There's Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles, Margaret Atwood's feminist retelling of the Penelopead, I think, which is the pronunciation. Am I right? Yeah, Penelopead. Good, thank 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. Let's find out. Right, Dr. Emily. For those who've never heard the words, the Iliad or Odyssey, which maybe incorporates Kael, I'm not sure. 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 because Paris, the Prince of Troy, abducted, or let's put it in quotation marks, abducted Helen of Sparta, already problematically married to Menelaus. The Greeks get a bit peeved by that, and they come and try and get her back. 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. 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, you know? I want to say, I'm getting the feeling of 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. 700 lines, yeah. I'd say that's too many. 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. Kyle, you are a storyteller, because Cool Story Bro, you get stories, you know, from the audience, right? Yeah. What makes a story epic? I mean, we've got to start with the beginning, middle, and end. Okay. That's a golden rule. Sure. And then, for me, personally, I want some jeopardy. Okay. Yeah. Maybe some danger. A revelation. I need some characters. I need detail. This is good. That's what I like. Okay. Yeah. What is epic poetry? It's not going to be our definition of epic, but I like it very much. And, in fact, that beginning, middle, and end, I don't know if you know that, but Aristotle, the theorist of narrative, was the one who said that's what all good narrative has to have. Right. So you're in the footsteps of Aristotle. But no, so for epic, 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. Yeah. So epic is kind of defined by its length, and later, ancient poets actually talk about Homer. And they say, like, Homer is like the sea, and we are just like little rivers that are running from it. So epic is really big. 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, 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. So basically, because these were oral poems initially, which is why I loved hearing you talk about your storytelling, these were done aloud, and so you'd have a rhythm that would kind of, like, bring everything together. And that's this hexametrical rhythm, which basically breaks the line into six feet. Right, so like iambic pentameter. That's exactly right, that's another metre. So iambic pentameter is quite natural to English, so that one will be "dum-da-dum-da-dum-da-dum-da-dum." It's something you hear a lot in Shakespeare. Hexameter is the metre of epic. You named the author Homer. People at home might be going, "Yes, I've heard of Homer." Have you heard of Homer? Yeah. Not the Simpsons character? Yeah, I don't know. I can't remember why. Okay. But I have heard of Homer's somethings. Maybe the Iliad and Odyssey? Yeah, maybe. Yeah, yeah. I think so. I'm happy saying Homer wrote the Odyssey, because 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, because. Did he freestyle? 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. A little bit like you described, kind of on the stage, in the festival, whatever it was, and they would be putting these sort of 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-6th century BCE, we've got a tyrant in Athens called Peisistratus, who's really interested in kind of scripting and fixing these texts. Yeah. And I think 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 as the Iliad and Odyssey today. So 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 centuries BCE that that happened. So we've got hundreds of years of tradition, and then hundreds of years of writing. That's amazing. Anyway, did Homer exist? The ancient Greeks definitely believed that Homer existed. I don't know if we want to take their word for it, because they also believed that the gods and goddesses existed and that Zeus swallowed his wife. So you know, maybe we're not going to take them too literally. But 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 there. their area. So when I like to think about it, I like to think about 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 so homer's meant to be blind right he's the blind poet homer and he's meant to be the the greeks believed he's the sole creator of these two poems yeah um wait so what's he writing about then it's not stuff he's seen well this is kind of the point because if you're blind then you're kind of attuned to the power of a story and also to the influence of the muses who were the goddesses of song who were inspiring the bard so this idea of kind of him being blind is very much him turning in and listening to the power of the word wow yeah i mean the opening line is sing to me oh muses right it's yes it starts by it's a song yeah well in both of the epics they start like that way so we've got sing to me muse in the iliad and then in the odyssey we've got tell me muse so both of them very oral spoken and that's gesturing to the fact that they were originally sung accompanied by a lyre and you've got this muse who is the goddess of song or one of nine goddesses of song and is imagined to kind of inhabit the bard and relay to him all of the knowledge that he doesn't have it's funny that it's sing initially and then they're like actually just tell me yeah maybe this person doesn't have a great voice let's downgrade him yeah 15 000 lines or something like and then we went over here yeah great um kyle do you know what the um ancient greek word for a poet was yes imagine um amazing if you just break out some classical greek now ancient greek word for a poet yeah for a traveling poet 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 the sandwiches outside is what they get depending on how good the story is i think that might be absolutely true yeah yeah yeah so you've got an incentive to make sure that your songs are really sharp yeah i'll be making stuff up though that's fine that's the point that's what they want good story just say the muses told you wow yeah so the greek the greek word what i mean rhapsody rhapsode yeah so well we 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 um rhapsodos in ancient greek and that means song stitcher which is really fun so what they're doing is they're basically sewing together different kind of parts of versions of the song so you've got sort of like maybe you know this part which is about the anger of achilles and you've got this little episode that's about like a spy mission and we're going to stitch those together and we're going to make those into a longer song oh nice so it's not bohemian rhapsody it's athenian rhapsody it's exactly fab okay i mean alexander the great had a copy of the iliad didn't he that was his favorite book he did so this was given to him by uh his tutor aristotle the guy who we were talking about earlier um you know uh and he yeah he kept the copy of the iliad under his pillow so sweet yeah very very inspired by homer that's cool that's cute isn't it so the iliad the odyssey as we know them are recited first composed perhaps collectively perhaps it's a sort of tradition of composition perhaps there is one great blind genius homer maybe not we don't know but they also tell of events that happened way before ancient greece as we know it this is the bronze age the world of mycenae and of the great heroes yeah that's right so what we're looking at here is we're not going to be thinking about kind of epic as history as kind of a straightforward document of what happened in the past but what they do do because of that is that they are kind of encoding memory in some ways so this process of song making is really the idea of kind of passing down a memory and one part of those memories that they're passing down is of this trojan war now the events of the trojan war probably took place if they kind of really happened around the late 13th early 12th century bce and 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 favorite 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 schlieman 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 um but anyway he got to troy and he was in such a hurry to get to the area that he thought was the lair 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 it's sometimes it's quicker though sometimes you just got to get to it do you know what that would be fine if he 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 i mean when was this so this is the late 19th century so you know we're at the right at the beginning of archaeology this this guy's really not an archaeologist he's a german businessman with a plan he just fancied he's been using it in his meetings like well it works in the meetings so it must we must work here i mean can you imagine that episode of time team just tony robinson just dynamiting things i found a roman oh it's on fire sorry um it's just amazing so troy is a real city it's not called troy because we call it the iliad so it's called yes ilion iliam ilia ilia whatever endings you like well actually yeah homer gives it a couple of different names we've got troya which is where we get our but we've also got ilios and ilion 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 willios oh and so probably that wilusa is actually our troy so it should be the williad yeah it doesn't have quite the same 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 william i'd be really annoyed if it was we didn't even know you in there i mean that's perfect booking for us yeah we've got we've got an actual trojan here yeah um my dad wanted to call me troy smith my mom was like don't be stupid um that's amazing just because she was like that's too boring yeah well you should shout out all the troy smiths yeah count yourself lucky and of course in the simpsons there is troy mcclure and homer so we've got troy and homer in the simpsons which is a nice little in jokes there are several layers of of troy which may have been the the classic hemoric one but earthquakes destroyed it fires destroyed it war and then a german came along and dynamited it so we're not quite sure which layers he left some bits behind so you know when we're looking at those layers there's enough we can do to work out that there was a city there that was destroyed around 1190 1180 but he did find treasure he did he did find proper golden lovely shiny treasure see he's got something he's onto something he's just gonna start blowing stuff up man i mean the line between an archaeologist is looking quite for the listeners and viewers please do not go around blowing up treasure it's just not archaeologists be very sad if you do that um yeah he got his wife to model the treasure it was called a king priam's treasure well he called it king priam's treasure so so he just found this treasure in this lair that he was convinced was homer's troy even though he was a thousand years too far in the past found this kind of beautiful cache of golden jewels and things smuggled it out of troy illegally took it off to athens dressed up his wife in it called it the jewels of helen of troy and basically sent it out to all of the newspapers in the world at this point facts really are just kind of you know peripheral to the overall project yeah and then what where does it go oh it's got a really interesting story so basically it goes on tour it's exhibited it goes on tour yeah it does i know it's exhibited in the uk i wonder if it got more um audience in fairham than i did well i don't know about that but then it comes back and it's in berlin and he puts it up in an exhibition where he says he wants it to be exhibited for all time this is his kind of attempt to memorialize his name and then after the war it ends up getting uh appropriated should we say by soviet troops and disappears off to russia we don't know where it is well we do because some russian journalists worked incredibly hard to find it and they found it only a couple of decades ago wow oh so where's it now so now it's now in a museum in russia so is troy our only evidence for an actual real trojan war you know the city of troy ilion ilios willios 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 the city called wilusa 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 and in fact in one of them you've got a power who's in the record and now we think that it may be that those are the same as the people who homer calls achaians that's his word for the greeks so is it possible that the achaians or in greek achaioi are the same as the achaians i think it's probable at least seems plausible yeah i'm gonna say yes it's official yeah it's got it's got the stamp but you know this idea of this this city that's been engaged in war multiple different times in the late bronze age that has had involvement from powers of kind of the ahioans somewhere in the aegean you know could that be the pattern for the greeks coming to a city like troy that's the idea and setting it on fire and setting it on fire yes classic when they leave 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 um kyle's 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 howard 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 in it you're like oh my gosh it's amazing like the amount of people and this must have been so fun to so epic to to film and you think like they're all they're 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 pants they've got their own they've probably got their own like the the pants they came in with they're just wearing their tighty whiteys yeah so think about that that's my answer to that yeah Achilles makes me think of the heel yeah and something to do with trainers okay is there something is there like an animation where there's like someone makes Achilles trainers oh interesting I don't know that one I feel like it's in Hercules the Disney version I was going to say you're thinking of the sandals I think that they make in Hercules the kind of I think I am thinking of that yeah so the heel we have to address the heel we do the Achilles heel the most famous thing about him yeah it's not in the Iliad it's not it's not in the Odyssey what? no it's not in those 15,000 lines 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 Styx and she dips him in the Styx 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 he's 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 and that's something that comes in a lot later and actually becomes really popular as a visual motif later in Christian art because of course the idea of baptism and baptism was in the water and the idea of Achilles being dipped in the water that's interesting 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 take? yeah absolutely so essentially with the Trojan War we start with the judgement of Paris which is a moment where three goddesses are squabbling over a 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 he goes yeah 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 have 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 Iliad I mean all the bits 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 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 so all we've got is the Iliad which really just tells the story of like Achilles small episode in the war doesn't tell how he got in it doesn't tell about his death and then we've got the Odyssey which tells the story of just one of the Greeks of many who were coming home after Troy it is quite Marvel Universe if there were only two films left and they in the Marvel Universe and you had to figure out what had happened by just watching Ant-Man yeah exactly so it's not that the Iliad and the Odyssey were the two most important poems it's just they're the only two we have well for the Greeks they thought that they were the best so that's why they were attributed to Homer they thought he was the best poet so you know that's why they preserved them as opposed to the others who were you know just by second second class poets according to the Greeks 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 yeah because I couldn't get a connection yesterday and I was in I was in Tottenham Court Road right so imagine I was angry but yeah I mean in 2000 years people will be singing of that wrath that wrath will be sung the Kaeliad yeah oh 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 but now I remembered I've just been reminded to take it with me everywhere I go yeah I'm gonna say it's not the Wi-Fi Emily it's not 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 pack it in lads they're all exhausted so 10 years have gone by they are exhausted and they in that process have taken a lot of cities that they've razed 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 Briseis Briseis and Achilles gets really peeved by this he withdraws from the war and when he does that he begs Zeus 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 wow not much of a team player is he Achilles ego big ego big ego yeah I mean he's giving sort of strong footballer energy it's very Cristiano Ronaldo it's very like me and only me so yeah so he's enslaved a woman and then the woman has been sort of liberated and he's angry and so he just sort of sulks in his tent and sort of goes you took my slave yeah you took my slave I'm not going to fight then well absolutely and you know she hasn't even been liberated because she's just been turned over to another Greek so you know it's absolutely but he does and he has kind of the biggest sulk in history ends up causing the death of many many different Greeks after that his what we're going to call him companion lover friend Patroclus 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 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 Patroclus go to war of course Patroclus tragically gets killed by Hector wearing his armour right Patroclus 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 Patroclus and in that Achilles' revenge just absolutely gets stoked so does he think that he's killed Achilles? yeah he does initially trick shot yeah and then they take their armour 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 that's exactly what happens he gets back into battle gear his mum gets him divine armour he gets all dressed up and he absolutely wipes out the battlefield he fights with the gods and eventually he ends up killing Hector the one who killed Patroclus and he's like 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? so eventually the gods have to say Achilles this is enough you know this is too much like an intervention isn't it? yeah exactly well his mum comes down she's as I mentioned a goddess so she comes down gives him the message and just says Achilles you've got to relax you've got to just eat and drink have some sex and you know just basically take a chill pill and stop doing this that's what mums are for you know yeah absolutely and the poem finishes not with the kind of conquest of Troy it finishes with a funeral it does yeah it ends with the funeral of Hector and it's actually a very beautiful scene because Achilles hands over the body that he has desecrated to the father what's left of it what's left of Hector to Priam the king of Troy and there is a funeral and there is this sort of very moving moment of grief with both men acknowledge each other's pain 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 you know he's been kind of kept for his relatives for his family that's nice of them no it's really good and we get to the end of the poem and we get to a moment where in fact Achilles suddenly has this kind of night time 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 the 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 so hang on it took them 15,000 lives to - We'll get to that. - Yeah, what we've done in about 10 minutes, that's us. 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, Kael, he abducts a woman, he sulks 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 McClane, is he? It's not Die Hard. No, but I mean, Batman was a bit naughty. He's just beating 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 heros. 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. So what they want, above all, is glory. The word is kleos 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. Okay. Despite his rage issues, Achilles, you know, does show compassion, as we say. And we get this funeral, this reconciliation, which is kind of amazing. Prep for a busy week with Whole Foods Market. Start your day with fully cooked breakfast sausages from Amy Liu, 365 brand frozen waffles with no bleached flours, and, of course, Whole Foods Market eggs, which are all cage-free or better. In the evening, bring home a build-your-own family meal that feeds four for just $35. Choose one entree and two sides. Shop smarter, not harder, at Whole Foods Market. The U.S. and South Korea have been close allies since the 1950s. But this week, Trump announced that he's going to be that the U.S. will substantially reduce joint military exercises with South Korea. That's the Iliad. That is the story of the Iliad. It's the 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. Mm. And this is named after another great hero of the Trojan War. So is this continuing where we left off? Well, it's not, because in the meantime, they've already had the sack of Troy. We've had the wooden horse being taken in. We've had Troy burning. We've had all of the captives parceled out. We've got everyone on the boats. We've had a bit of a problem with Athena, who gets very angry with the Greeks. And then they all start getting sent home. So with The Odyssey, we're just seeing that point where Odysseus is now on his way home. So I don't have to have read the first one. Do you know what? The Odyssey actually gives you a bit of a recap. It does. I think you'll be all right. It actually has flashback scenes, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. It feels so modern. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about The Odyssey. This is Odysseus. He is one of the kind of great warriors who's gone out in this Greek mission to reclaim Helen of Troy. He's renowned for his intelligence, and he's trying to get home to his wife, and it just takes forever. Yeah, 20 years in total. That's how long Penelope had to wait. Oh, my gosh. She must have been so bored. Well, she had a lot of weaving to keep her occupied. So much weaving. Which sounds really exciting. And unweaving, of course. Yes, and unweaving. Unweaving, too. But yeah, 10 years in the war, 10 years coming home. Wow. So she's had a long wait. 10 years coming home. Yeah. Well, and then we've also got his son, Telemachus, who was a baby when he left, and by the time he comes back, he's just about to become a man. So he's also been waiting for his father to come home for that amount of time. So that's Tom Holland in the movie. Yeah, exactly. So we get this story of one man's attempt to just get home after he's already been out to war for 10 years, and it starts. Where's he coming from? Western Turkey, so it's not that far. No, it's not that far. To where? Well, to the Ionian Islands, so that's around the other side of Greece. So he needs to go across the Aegean, kind of around the southern Peloponnese, and then up towards the Ionian Islands. So it's a trip. It's a trip, but it's not going to be more than a couple of weeks. Yeah, I was going to say, like a month at sea, maybe? You know, stop off, have a barbecue, but like it's. But he goes into kind of major fantasy land, and when we start the Odyssey, we basically start with him on the island of a nymph called Calypso, where he has been for 70 years. Seven years. And that's the kind of initiating. What are you doing over there?. point on the island, yeah. Maybe I'm not sure on the island. I think. I once went to Gatwick instead of Heathrow. And then when you realise, you're like, oh my gosh, that's so far away. So I understand maybe like four years. You've experienced your own Odyssey. Yeah. I love it. But the rest, come on. Emily, what do we mean by nymph? Well, the Greek word for nymph is nymphae, which means. both a sort of minor goddess. It could also actually mean a bride, which tells you the way that they're thinking about these, the sort of nubile young women who are potentially sort of lingering on islands around the Mediterranean and waiting to catch a man off guard and take him off his path. Right. Calypso is a sort of gorgeous eternal goddess, right? Yeah. She promises to make him immortal as well. And she fancies him. And she's like, look, we'll be lovers. I'm more beautiful than all the mortal women. So just stay here. We'll just have sex and eat fruit. Yeah. And he's like, maybe. But for seven years, he sort of like doesn't leave. Prevaricating. Situationship. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I get it. It's a seven-year-long situation. I've been there, I get it. Yeah. I've got to get home to my wife. Really? This time I will. This time I will. So he's stuck on hot nymph island. Let's talk about the rest of the plot of the Odyssey, which is incredibly complicated. So tell us some of the plots. I mean, we can't do all of it. No. Just some standout. Well, what we've got going on basically are kind of, three different levels at the same time. We've got Odysseus starting out on Calypso's island and he still needs to get home. So he's got the rest of his voyage to do. We've got the suitors in Ithaca who are basically 108 men. They really want to marry Penelope and they have basically sat themselves down in the palace at Ithaca and just don't want to leave and they are determined to make that happen. We've then also got the teenage son Telemachus who goes on his own mini-odyssey. And I kind of like this because he basically wants to be like his dad. So instead of Odysseus, doing an odyssey, he's Telemachus. So he does a Telemachy. And he goes on a like mini-daddy trip to try and find his father, goes to a couple of Greek palaces and then ultimately comes back. So we've got all of those sort of three things happening at the same time. Odysseus, of course, like when he is on his way back, we also get him stopping off at a place called the Island of the Phaeacians. And he gives the story of his adventures of all of the things that happened to him before he got to Calypso's island. So not only are we getting those things happening in forward progression, but we're also getting a flashback to what happened to him at Troy. And he has all sorts of issues. Do you know any of the kind of magical creatures that stop him? I've heard nymph already. Yeah. Hopping off the island, yeah. I'm guessing it's not one of those. What other stuff they got knocking about? Gargoyles? I mean, that's pretty close, actually. It's not bad. It's not bad. Yeah. Have you heard of sirens? Yes. Yeah, I have. What do you know of sirens? The ones that sing to the sailors. That's right. And then they get there and they eat their heads or whatever they do. No, they don't. They don't. They just enjoy wrecking them on the rocks. You sure they don't eat their heads? Yeah. I'm pretty sure that they don't. I mean, Homer describes them as being like bird women. So they've got sort of the heads of women, but then they've got the kind of wings and talons of birds. See, now, I've been to London Zoo at feeding time for the vultures and they are eating heads. Yeah. There it is. When I was in drama school, we had to do animal studies and I chose a vulture. And then they, this was disgusting. They threw rabbits into the vulturing, not live ones, dead ones. But you watch the vultures eat the rabbits and they stand on them and then just like rip their heads off and then get their beak inside the body. Nasty. It's nasty stuff. Now you're telling me that sirens have got bird bodies. It's making me more inclined to think that they're eating their heads. So it's going to be very difficult for you to change your mind. It's a hot take. It's a hot take. Fair enough. There's also a cyclops. Oh, yeah. Oh, one eye. One eye. Big old cyclops. Sure. Who's the son of Poseidon. Yeah, he is. Gone to the sea. Yeah, yeah. That's kind of a big problem for Odysseus. That's a real issue, right? Yeah, well, because one of the reasons this is a problem is. He's a nepo-cyclops. He is, exactly. Well, because he really wants his father to kind of get on his side when Odysseus basically is a really, really bad guest and not only eats the cyclops' food without asking him, but he also pierces him in the eye with a stake to blind him. Oh, come on. He's only got one. Yeah, I know. But then he does this great trick as well where, you know, he's Odysseus, so he's very clever. So he tells the cyclops that his name is Nobody. So the cyclops then calls out to his brothers and he says, guys, guys, Nobody's blinded me. Which, you know. Why are you telling that? Yeah, I know. That's not news. Thanks, back to my shepherding or whatever I was doing. Then Odysseus, he has this fatal kind of moment of what the Greeks would have called hubris, which is this kind of excessive pride. And he's managed to escape. He's got out by climbing underneath the sheep that the cyclops has. So he's clung under them and got out of the cave. They get onto their ship and then he turns back and he says, I want you to know that the person who did this to you was Odysseus now that's really bad because then the Cyclops knows exactly who to pray to his dad Poseidon and to ask him to curse him and that is the reason why Odysseus ends up taking so long to get home yeah of all the gods you don't want to curse you god of the sea when you're on a boat no I know mate yeah um he also encounters a witch called Circe and she turns his men into pigs inconvenient but delicious yeah what I will say though is that after she transforms them into pigs she transforms them back and when they transform back they are younger and better looking than they were before I don't want to eat bacon anymore yeah and vegetarian yeah wow is this the future of skincare well there you go exactly just you know a little bit of kind of pig and then back to yourself and then you're 10 years younger would you would you do pig for a bit how long okay it's not very long no okay no it's just enough for Odysseus to be a little bit of a pig and then back to yourself and then you're 10 years younger would you would you do pig for a bit how long okay it's not very long no okay no it's just enough enough for Odysseus to be a little bit of a pig and then back to yourself and then you're 10 years and her to have a chat and a drink yeah but your version of not very long based on how long this is I mean he does end up staying with her and sleeping with her for a year yeah so he's not very faithful really it's a man trying to get back to his wife no they've got a very different version of one night stand yes they have yeah there's also the the sun god Helios he gets in the way is that a guy that runs easy jet no different guy who's the god of the sun who has some really nice cows the best cows the best sacred cows sacred cows yeah and he really doesn't want those cows to be killed and of course what do Odysseus his men do they kill them and they eat them because they're really hungry they are really hungry in their defense they're really hungry and they don't eat pork anymore no and they don't want to eat the fish they don't want to eat fish right yeah they just they don't really like it they don't fancy it yeah they've been messing about yeah maybe right basically Helios gets really annoyed uh asks Zeus to kind of have a go and so Zeus strikes them with a lightning bolt and then Odysseus is the only one left yeah oh so he's this sort of great captain he's this great warrior he's this great hero but he gets all of his men killed yeah every single one of them yeah and he only survives because he's so smart and he's he's the guy who came up with the Trojan horse he's the kind of genius strategist right he does get home eventually and Penelope his wife I don't even forgot where I lived by then yeah he gets back just get a new house he gets back to Ithaca and Penelope doesn't recognize him yeah because he goes in disguise yeah well this is the question does she doesn't she recognize him so when he rocks up on Ithaca after 20 years um Athena the goddess uh who is his patron goddess because she is the goddess of cunning and wisdom and that's exactly who he is she meets him on the shore and she turns him into an old beggar to disguise him because obviously what he's got to do is he's got to make sure he's got all of his allies around him before he tries to get back into the house at Ithaca he's come after 20 years nobody knows who he is but yeah so he kind of comes up to the palace disguised as a beggar and they have these really great moments of conversation between Penelope and Odysseus the beggar where Penelope says things like oh beggar your hands look so simple and I don't know what to do with them I don't know what to do with them to my husband's hands um or you know yeah exactly whoops you know there are these moments where it's like near misses or maybe did she didn't she recognize him yeah he does effectively get rid of the 108 suitors yeah Penelope sort of she sort of sets a contest right with the bow so this is another one of these convenient things that happens is that Odysseus the beggar happens to be in the palace and on that day she decides that actually she's going to give up on Odysseus and she's going to set a contest for her hand in marriage to be fair to us you're waiting for a she did yeah it just is very convenient that it happened at the point that he's there um she sets up this contest and says whoever can string Odysseus's old bow and can shoot an arrow through the axes is going to be able to be her new husband right of course all of the suitors try they fail Odysseus steps up and is in this kind of amazing cinematic moment he takes the bow he strings it he kind of turns back into himself and then he kind of shoots it and the arrow and then slaughter follows him and then he's like oh my god I'm so sorry I'm so sorry I'm so sorry I'm so and he basically just kills all of them he kills 108 men yeah exactly he locks the doors make sure they have no weapons tired yeah I know relax man you just you haven't seen your wife for ages just go do some smooching yeah killing everyone these heroes are quite uptight but they stole his stuff they stole his stuff they've been on his land they've been stealing his stuff they've been trying to get over it kiss his wife let it go okay you know well he also does something worse which is well I don't know if it's worse but it's equally bad which is that basically he kind of I don't know this word oh basically he kind of brings him into the world of being a kind of uh what what a hero is essentially in that time he needs to teach him how to do that and in doing that he basically says you've got to take the 12 enslaved women in my house who I think you're going to write it down oh amazing I love that that's going to be your only note for today yeah start making the notes 50 minutes in great this is clearly the only clever thing I've said today I forgot there's a test at the end um so basically he makes him hang uh 12 of the enslaved women who Odysseus has decided were not faithful to him and so Telemachus has to kind of string them up in the courtyard only I might add after they have cleaned up the bodies of the suitors so he's incredibly grim yeah Odysseus is meant to be the hero and in some ways he's a very different hero to Achilles because his brain's not brawn yeah and he's he's meant to be kind of more loyal he's you know 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 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 are enraged that he's just come home and killed everyone 108 families like have you seen my son uh yeah um yeah sorry exactly awkward and by the way I'm Odysseus and I'm welcome home sure yeah um so you know we have this really kind of problematic ending but yeah so he is in many ways like Achilles I think he's 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 and 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 polymeters 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 and he's like oh my god I'm going to kill you I'm going to kill you so there is a different dynamic going on there she spent this whole time weaving to slow down the suitors for marrying her and then every night she unweaved everything that she weaved that day oh so for 20 years they've been sitting there going are you done weaving yet and she's like no I'm sorry it just it's taken really long I'll do it give it to me I'll do it I don't even know how to weave she's equally smart and Telemachus also is very clever and the kind of parallels between Achilles and Odysseus I mean they meet these two former friends they meet again you want to do something fun you want sort of like you want to do something fun you want to do something fun bowling maybe flight club you want an activity based thing okay so at the darts yeah something like that well I don't know how the darts feels to you but they meet in the underworld does that feel dartsy it doesn't feel as um interactive okay yeah no they they meet in the underworld and sure and Achilles says I made the wrong choice yeah it's an amazing moment of kind of an 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 laborer on the planet than the king of all of the dead he regrets it well said yeah 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 yeah we should talk about the women in these stories you know your wonderful book mythica is about women sort of written out of the story and we've mentioned some women Penelope of course the goddesses how does this story work in terms of gender politics well obviously we've talked a lot about how this is a story that is about the glory of men and that's really kind of what we're talking about what the economy of ancient epic is in fact another definition I could have given you earlier when we talked about what is epic is it is the stories of men it actually calls itself that in Greek that's clear and run that means the stories of the glories of men so women just really aren't part of that economy in fact what they are doing to that is that they are either helping men to do what they need to do so think of Penelope who helps Odysseus to basically get reinstated as the king of Egypt or the king of Persia to do and that's like Calypso and Circe who are basically holding up and again I'm putting that in quotation marks Odysseus on his way back home and so there's not that much space for them within the epics at the same time there are women who kind of maybe just try and get their voices heard Helen is a really great one we haven't talked about Helen no I mean in traditional storytelling she elopes with Paris like she runs away with him it's like oh let's get married and run away together but in this in the way you told it it made it sound like she didn't have a choice in Paris sort of grabbed her you know it's kind of like you know it's kind of like you know it's kind of her well she kind of tells different versions of the story which is really interesting so sometimes she talks about herself being unwilling and that she didn't want to go at other times she blames herself and she says you know I was the reason that the Trojan War happened and I feel awful about it in fact when Telemachus does his mini telemachy and he goes on his trip he goes to Sparta and he sees Helen and Menelaus like now we're after the Trojan War Helen's got back home to be with Menelaus her first husband again really awkwardly playing with sort of happy families telling stories to each other about the Trojan War darling do you remember that time in the war you know my face and everything oh yeah exactly it's really really funny actually gives them drugs to try and make them forget what happened which i kind of think you know if you're greece's biggest homewrecker that's that's what you're going to do you're going to drug your audience yeah you've got to try everything really yeah so it's interesting so helen maybe the agency there is is tricky but the women in this story are sometimes obstacles they're sometimes seducers they're sometimes goddesses but athena is the sort of one true friend of odysseus at least she is and in fact she's the one who really kind of motivates the plot of the odyssey in a lot of ways it's the beginning of the odyssey is her storming onto olympus and saying to zeus you need to get odysseus off the island of calypso so she's the one who kind of sets the narrative going and then at the very end when we've got the families the suitors back on ithaca who were kind of rising up and are really annoyed at what odysseus has done it's her who calms everyone down so she's really kind of the one who's like taking odysseus's narrative in check and making sure everything happens right so there we go we just did 27,000 words of poetry in about an hour so you can condense it yeah yeah this is a lot of stories you've written and you've kind of sort of edited highlights it's i mean these they're extraordinary stories and poems i mean is there anything that stood out to you anything that surprised you yeah a lot loads of it um mainly the dynamite um i think bring back dynamite you don't hear about dynamite anymore it's so vintage yeah yeah yeah there must there must still be uses for it i mean yeah maybe not on archaeological sites yes let's say no to dynamite maybe in mining but maybe less so you know in in science and archaeology but you know but as a storyteller yourself is there something is there anything in these stories that you sort of heard and went oh that's interesting i wouldn't have done that or you know i wouldn't have done most of it i will say that but it's a storyteller i mean in terms of the narrative you know the structure of it the flashbacks the kind of three stories spinning yeah well i mean it's a lot like what we do when we're improvising we do callbacks um and you have like flashbacks or you have like two years later someone might shout from the side of the stage um things like that but i can't believe how long this stuff took i can't believe how long this stuff took i can't believe how long this stuff took is that true are there years like our years we're talking about myth here right like is any of this true like i think you know one thing that people have talked about is for instance the trojan war being 10 years in some cultures the idea of kind of 10 years is something that you would use for endless so it's also just a kind of way of right demarcating like a really really big and long war that was important yeah but also 20 years away for odysseus and he gets back and actually he's still kind of a young man right because he left when he was like 21 too probably and you again get this kind of youthfulness so maybe he's got the athena glow up so because yes he didn't have his pig no he didn't have his pig transformation he gets his moment he must stink though after 10 years of trying to get home yeah i mean he had some baths on the way back he got bathed by various of his i bet he's wearing his own underpants definitely yeah at one point he wasn't at one point he washed up naked on the shore so yeah yeah he got new clothes all right well it's been quite the ride um so uh mark's out of how many how many stars would you give the iliad an odyssey now oh i loved it yeah i'm into it cool and i really want to see this film now good i wasn't bothered before brilliant and now you are can i give it a four and a half i'll take it i'd like yeah i'd like to do that i think homer would be pleased with that i think i'm really interested in about the achilles heel thing i didn't know that yeah 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 news uh something that we need to know about the iliad and the odyssey so my stopwatch is ready here it is uh you have two minutes take it away dr emily why do we tell stories what does the story have to do to survive nearly three thousand years i can't speak to three thousand 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's 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 we mentioned alexander the great who kept a copy of the iliad beneath his pillow and when he lived with achilles what he got from him was war global conquest and glory and a young death that burns the world with it it is a pattern in the pattern of destruction and a story that so many of us see around us today 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 it makes me feel like i should have that at the end of my show everyone comes out yeah yeah that's what that's exactly how i feel i'm available oh right i want to come to swindon um so what do you know now well it's time now for the so what do you know now so uh kyle we've done a lot of talking we've summarized 27 000 lines of poetry easy uh yeah do you feel confident you didn't make many notes no i didn't i sort of forgot that the book was there it kind of blended into the table a little bit you were prioritizing the oral poetry yes exactly taking it in yeah is it still in there we'll see yeah we'll see 10 questions for you okay here we go okay question one which blind poet has traditionally been credited as the author of the iliad and odyssey homer very good question two how were the iliad and odyssey first communicated song they were they were sung come on live question three what tool did schliemann use to excavate at troy dynamite yes i think he used shovels too but he did use dynamite which is not tremendously helpful question four what event supposedly caused the trojan war there's a certain woman involved his eyes are rolling around his face hopefully they won't fall out what event caused the trojan war who running off or or being or being perhaps taken oh because um what's his name had a slave and then thingy bob took the slave off that's a different one that's the start of the iliad i'm thinking here of helen and troy but that is good we're gonna give him half a point i'm giving you half a point half a point because you were remembering briseis weren't you so i'll give you half of that question five what does kleos mean in ancient greek it's what achilles really really wanted it's not in your notes story no it means glory he wanted glory and you can't you can give me half for rhyming story right fine i'm giving him half a good one okay fine okay question six why do achilles and agamemnon fall out in the iliad actually you've already said this one because he took his slave off him very good clear questions come on my sleeve question seven what is the name of odysseus's faithful wife who waits 20 years for him penelope very good question eight name one obstacle of many obstacles that odysseus faces on his 10-year commute home he had told cyclops who blinded him and then cyclops said dad very good that boy blinded me and then he did some stuff to the sea he did that's very good question nine what famous trick did odysseus design to get inside the walls of troy they hid in a horse they did the trojan horse yes uh question ten i think this is for eight and a half out of ten i've lost count to be honest yeah let's say nine uh okay let's say nine out of ten this for nine out of ten maybe what regret does achilles share with odysseus when he meets him in the underworld living too fast and dying too young that's right he wanted a boring life as a farmer i'm giving you nine out of ten yes sir that's pretty good excellent excellent i'm very pleased let's see if you can get a bonus point yeah what was the greek name for a wandering poet who got their free meals for a good story do you remember ah i think famous queen song rhapsodes very good i'm giving you 10 out of 11. yes sir nice one i'm really happy with that well thank you so much thank you so much emily uh listener and if you want um more from kyle obviously check out our leif erickson episode it's you know more wanderings more voyages in the viking world 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 i'd 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 to 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 ten years. But you know what? British trains, it maybe 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. on BBC Sounds. The U.S. But this week, Trump announced that the U.S. From. to more, check out The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. ♪