Never mind the education aspect of the historical rundown, the ancient gossip analysis is so delicious and juicy and they way they talk is so open I feel like I am part of the conversation and its just fabulous!
The dialogue, chit chat, humour just make this such an enjoyable series. And, real and informed history. I think you guys have squared the circle (sounds like a possible episode?) thank you.
The host/guest relationship and responsibility in Greek myths is such a wonderful thread. Heroes stop fighting one another after learning that their fathers had entertained the other's. It's the other reason Paris is doomed, for breaking this bond as Menelaus' guest.
yall are reading my mind.. when yall were doing the french revolution, i was reading charles dickens, tolstoy, schama, dumas, hugo...... now as SOOOON as i pick up a few translations of the ILIAD, yall wanna move on to Helen of Troy. lol, you gotta be freaking kidding me. this is great.
I'm Greek I've studied Homer in highschool in the prototype and later read Odyssey and Iliad!One gets really obsessed by the stories! Helen is the bright one from Hel that comes Helios the sun and so Hellas name means Hel(sun)las(two L's)Las means stone or rock!By the way Eleni is one of the most usual names in Greece and elsewhere!
There is a new theory. One that comes out of PLASMA SCIENCE...it proposes myth & art came out of prehistoric skies, when HELIOS or SOL was actually on a closer orbit to Earth! The PLANET SATURN. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-t7EAlTcZFwY.htmlsi=TGWqiRtfl7Zx2WHg
Wow, this was an incredible university level lecture that I listened to in pretty much one sitting and was enthralled about 95% of the time. I am becoming a real ancient Greek and Roman nerd thank you for that illuminating discussion of Helen of Troy. By the way in high school Mounted, “the Trojan women.“ And it was a dark and tragic play but very interesting to hear now about who Helen of Troy was.
On the last point you guys discussed, I think in a way Clytemnestra as a figure does serve as a warning to women at the time to not disrupt the order of things. But she's also a warning to men not to mistreat their wives or kill their children as women with no agency have nothing to lose if the worst has happened to them. She's a warning of the madness of women who are pushed to edge I think.
So the murder of her husband is down to madness rather than revenge for him murdering her daughter because he thinks it'll change the weather? I think the madness comes from the men in this story!
@joannecheckley1280 Yes, and maybe she had no other option. She was having sex in the palace of Argos with a son of the family of her husband's ancestral enemy: one Aegisthos; and her husband, Agamemnon, could have killed her if he'd found out, or found a sneaky method of so doing (poison or getting someone else to do it, for example).
Just found this channel and loved this video. I've heard of Tom before but didn't realise it was him until half way through! Great to listen to, very knowledgable.
I consider myself a amateur historian.im from the first state Delaware.im into alot of different historical subjects.most is European history.i started watching these getleman about the french revolution.i always say America doesn't have history compared to europe.this subject of custard i really didn't know much more then he was a civil war hero and was flamboyantly dressed.after watching this whole thing.i learned so much.espescailly about the sue and custard of course.thank u very much.u guys are awesome
Achilles of heel fame ! From Greek hero to a sports injury I find your discussions of history oh so interesting and entertaining at the same time. Thanks and hopefully you can keep it up 👍
Guys. This is a brilliant recap of these mythologies. I think a diagram would be helpful. Can you imagine a world without myths? We use stories for identities (contrived of course) and entertainment. We needed heroes in WW2, and so McArthur was allowed to become a big hero despite repeated cock-ups and biased actions to serve his own giant ego.
This was amazing. Takes me back to my classical mythology days at university. I loved the background to the Iliad and Odyssey. But I think the Oresteia was just as important. Clytemnestra got a raw deal, she lost a daughter to sacrifice, her husband was an a-hole and she took matters into her own hands. Good for her. I can’t remember, did women go to the theatre back then? I can see the first play as a little something for the ladies.
This is long before the rivalry between Athens and Sparta existed. Both were backwaters at the time when the Minoans were fading and the king of Mycenea was high king of greece.
You guys remind me of the bbc's in our time podcast. Sure wish they'd bring that back to RU-vid, but since they've removed it from RU-vid, you two will do just fine ;). Thanks for your charts. Although, I don't always agree with your opinions, I do so love hearing them.
Thesis: Helen , Klytemnaestra, Penelope, and Arete, at least, are avatars of the mother goddess. Marriage to one of them confers legitimacy to a kingship. That’s why Aegisthus was treated as a king and why the suitors wanted Penelope.
You two are starting to trend toward Dan Carlin length podcasts and that's definitely not a bad thing. Thanks for the knowledge and keep it coming - big fan of your work.
Hitler had great disdain for archeology in Germany. When Goring (I think) showed him artifacts found by excavation, he fumed that all they proved was that Germans were living in caves while the Greeks were in decline! It seems he thought the Greeks shamed his master race theory. (If I remember correctly, Speer relays this in his autobiography. )
Yes this is true. He wrote that the Italians must be laughing at Himmler for getting excited about the mudhuts of Germania. It didn’t really do much to change is world view as their way out of that was that both the Greeks and Germans looked more like Germans back then than they do now. I.e. their race was diluted. There’s probably some truth to that as many Roman emperors had blond hair and the paintings in Macedon of the locals from 500 BC sure don’t look much like modern Greeks.
This was so interesting. I was fascinated by the ancient Greece, the gods and goddesses, and the Trojan War when I was a child. I remember making a Trojan Horse out of popsicle sticks for a school project. And I constantly played an old PC game from the 90s that was about ancient Greece and the Trojan War (the characters were all animals, I think).
I'd forgotten about Dan Simmons books, thanks for the reminder! I liked them years ago and likely still have the books somewhere. Enjoy this presentation style, and this is fascinating, but I'll stick with Terry Pratchett's version of Helen of Troy. It's a lot simpler.
There was a time in ancient Greece where people from across Asia Minor came to Greece in ships to steal property and women, in this time the myth of the beautiful Helen is mentioned. Then the Greeks went to steal from Asia Minor and this story was constantly repeated.
Next topic suggestion: Joan D'Arc, Frederick Barbarosa, El Cid, Saladin, Genghis Khan, William the Conqueror, Cedric the Saxon. Please please please 🙏 🤲 🙏 🤲 🙏 🤲
1:25:01 well, arguably the building of Cyclopean Walls is a perfect answer to earthquakes. Almost nothing of the buildings inside might be left but the bloody things are still there 4000 to 3000 years and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of earthquakes (most of them minor ones) later, and still these Cyclopian Walls are standing.
I think it’s the pin that holds the wheel onto the axle that was meant to be replaced with wax not the axles. It’s so that it would melt as it heated up and the wheel would come off. Probably a trick that was actually used at the games at some point
The Thyestes story was taken up by Roman philosopher and dramatist Seneca (using Euripides) and indeed this influenced Elizabethan dramatists like Shakespeare specifically in "Titus Andronicus."
Thanks for the show although more of the things are known to me at least It's very entertaining thanks again!My grandmother and my sister are called Heleni Ελένη!!!
this is good i love listening to re-examinations of these old stories i hope its ok to mention i made a 5 minute graphic reinterpretation / representation of this mythology to some music i wrote on this (my) channel last month, cheers
At the time if the Trojan war it was not the Oersians who were the overlords of Troy, but the Hittites. We even have a hittite uniform text in which they talk of Walusa and how it os under siege and they will not b be able to send aid right away. This text doesn't specifically mention who is besieging Walussa(troy), but the timing and the location can only be that it is the myceneans who are attacking troy at the time of the bronze age collapse.
Less strictly Hittite and more in the Hittite sphere of influence, among the Luwian speaking kingdoms that were independent vassals to the greater power to the east
The Achaeans probably raided Troy for the same reason Jason and the Argonauts headed for the Black Sea - lots of native gold (and purple dye) passed down the Hellespont. But Helen makes a more elegant casus belli than mere greed…
:1:18:12.. I saw that mask... At the Pushkin museum in Moscow in September of last year. I made a picture of it... It is supposed to be in Athens... But it is in Moscow as of last year and is probably is still there. As we speak. *Wink* oh and Priams treasure was there too. By the way.. I'm Remi.. studied Greek and Roman studies at the university Laval of Quebec.. your podcast is .. awesome. 😂😂
I had to teach a course on Greek mythology in the English Department of a university in a Muslim country and the students assumed that I, like all westerners, really believed this stuff and that i was trying to convert them!
I thought that Muslims regardless of how they feel about West they somehow respect Greek history and culture. Let's not forget how many greek texts were copied and preserved during the islamic golden age.
Speaking from my Highland Scottish heritage, women had a very powerful place in clans, sometimes even to the point of having equal inheritance rights to men, simply because the men were fighting each other so often in feuds, other people's wars or just livestock raiding. One of Robert Bruce's earliest major supporters was a woman called Christina MacRuari, who was powerful in the Western Isles. Maybe the same was happening in Bronze Age Greece, which then became symbolic of a chaotic era when Greece became more politically stable. This is perhaps mirrored in the Theseus myth, where he is continuously imposing a male dominated pantheon on older matriarchal religions and cultures, from Eleusis to Crete to the Amazons in the Black Sea. if that mythological period actually reflects history, passed down through the generations by word of mouth until Homer et al finally wrote them down, then you could say that the heroic period, including Troy, was when the culture turned, which is perhaps it is so clearly remembered in the ancient Greek psyche. And incidentally, that period would have been not much more than three generations, because they all knew each other. Castor and Pollux were Helen's brothers and they were on the Argo with Jason and Herakles and Orpheus and Philoctetes. Theseus was only a generation older, and he had seen Knossos before Thera blew.. You might say that the heart of the canon of Greek mythology might have been a historical period of fifty or sixty years when the young Achaean civilisation exploded out of Greece into the surrounding world.
Even back then the lads understood the risks it takes to be married to a beautiful woman. My wife is Tharcian and comes from the banks of Danube. I noticed there is a difference in culture how a relationship between a man and woman is valued and they seem to have all sorts of mystery and folklore surrounding relationships .
Remember that the apple was dropped by Eris, the goddess of discord! There is massive discord throughout the the Illiad on both camps at every level. Be very careful with whom you invite or not to parties!
Perhaps the name Helen means 'silvery/moon/shining' and may relate to the metal Tin from the black sea supply route. Tin was a strategic metal in the bronze age.
Helen of Troy is not real ? Next you'll be saying there is no Father Christmas, Beowolf, King Arthur or Robin Hood !!! Another excellent episode and well done as ever :)
It is likely that the eagle that killed the great playwright Aeschylus by dropping a turtle on his bald head was a Bearded vulture (Lamergeier) which commonly drop their prey on rocks to soften them up.
Stories from the conflicts between Troy and the micenians appeared earlier, also from the Hatti side. Only one greek version survived, the one that Homer wrote down.
Speaking of shaping drinking glasses after famous chests, & to tie it back to a previous episode, isn't the myth that Marie Antoinette's breast was the mold for the champagne glass?
About the physical appearance of Helen - she’s described identically as Achilles and this is how the Thracians with their multiple tribes were described looking. Let’s not forget that the times that Homer was singing about the main original population of the lands mentioned in his Iliad were the Pelasgians (Pelops as their forefather) and other tribes who were all related, that includes the Thracian kingdoms, Trojans and the Hittites. Maybe we could look at the story of the kidnapping of Helen as simply taking her back to where she belongs, uh? Don’t forget that at that point of history, Greeks do not really exist, the war is between the Achaean kingdom and the Trojans and the Trojan’s allies who are in fact the related kingdoms of the Thracian confederation. Achilles himself is from a Thracian background.
I had always understood that Helen in reality loved and was happy with menolaus until Aphirdites spell put a false love for paris in her heart. She even begins to see how he is not a man as Greeks understand it when she sees him fight menolaus.
And Helen loving Paris was still a later addition. All that really happens in the earliest version is Aphrodite awarded Helen to Paris for choosing Aphrodite in the test. Helen’s consent or desire is never mentioned. She was kidnapped
Read the Odyssey as well for context. Helen is a member of a class of queens who were tree godesses. Helen, Clytemnaestra, Arete, Penelope, Circe, and Calypso have a lot in common.
Well, Tom. Talking about the "power of myth," today? Have you ever considered how much of what you believe is a myth? Especially about anything related to modern China. Why don't you, once again, talk about how modern China has "parallels" with the warlord regimes of the 4th to 2nd Centuries BC? I love it when you relate your mythological beliefs as some kind of insightful, historical, factual observation.
I always thought it interesting that if Helen was 12, then so were her brothers. Were they already heroes and Argonauts (is being stuck in Hades the reason Theseus doesn't join? We know Herakles rescues him on his Labor to collect Cerberus, so that fits). Also, if Clytemnestra is her twin, then wouldn't she be as beautiful as Helen, although not god-gifted?
I think a fatal mistake of this podcast is to present all the myths together without distinction. They are not one narrative but a vast number of different myths told by different authors in different centuries, all presenting a different political perspective. The story of Theseus, as you observed, does not weave well into the story of Trojan war so those are probably different myths created in different cities/nations.
@davegold oh absolutely! He was definitely Athens' favorite 'son', and therefore he became tied to myths he might never have been a part of. Actually, amoung the Argonauts, there are, at times, numerous additions whose names and stories are tied to city/states of the period, just to 'establish' their place in the great epic!
"The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales" by Felice Vinci throws the whole tradition into question by positing the idea that the Iliad represents a migration of myth from its Scandanavian origins. Vinci proves through the book's description of climate and geography that the Iliad could not have taken place in the Mediterranean. Instead, it matches more closely to the Baltic during the period known as the Holocene Climactic Optimum (i.e. a global warming period that ended around 3000 B.C. or about 1800 years earlier than most estimates of the Trojan War) when temperatures in Scandanavia were higher but were soon coming to an end which then leads to mass migration out of Scandanavia and, into central Europe and, eventually down into Greece where the story then takes root but fails to match Mediterranean climate and geography. Ancient features of Ithaca match the small island of Lyo off the south coast of Denmark while the Mediterranean Ithaca has no resemblance at all. Ancient Troy correlates to Troja off the coast of Finland. In addition, the grave of Kong (king) Urlauses in southern Denmark correlates to Ulysses while the Danaans of Greece are the Danes of Denmark.
Sappho is one woman. Her opinion that Helen should have stayed home and been a good mother/daughter/wife does not reflect female opinion. Plenty of women, who in the all male world of the poet would have been in favour of Helen running off and ditching a homemaker's responsibilities would have not had a voice. You would not base conclusions on one male voice, why are women seen as monolithic so that one is the voice of all?
Also, in the few scrapes of Sappho we have she mentions various mythical characters, which is common in literature on either side of the Early Medieval era of Xian repression. Moreover, whatever Sappho says about Helen does not change the male gaze core of the myth.
@carolynredinger439 Yes! male gaze core. Soft porn for ancient Greeks. I still reel with disgust that one female voice is seen as speaking for all Greek women. I'm sure they were as diverse as 21st-century women, despite the compulsory domesticity.
Ranke-Graves says in these times the kingship came through the females : so Menelaos was king as Helen’s husband. Of course he wanted her back In an analogy, Klytæmnestra had the right to kill Agamemnon after he sacrificed HER daughter, the future queen of Mycene the whole background is the coming of Dorian tribes ( male domination ) to the matriarchal Pelasgian Greeks If you read all the Greek myths with this in the back of your mind, you find a lot of ‘overcome’ matriarchy
More matrilineality. Matriarchy as an inverse of patriarchy (where men are socially and politically disenfranchised as an entire group and rendered as property or having little rights, and this is typically reinforced through violence against them, in the way women experience under patriarchy) has never existed. Matrilineal and matrifocal societies have existed and some still exist to this day. But they’re more egalitarian than the other way around
There were various accounts of the cause of the death of Paris. One attributes it to Apollo, another to a stab in the back with a knife and the arrow is the latest version.
I think Helen was a real mortal woman, she just was the excuse reason of a husband offended who must repair his reputation by taking her back. The Greeks want Troys wealth and destroyed entirely, so they make up rumours of this Helen to justify their greed. Helen may have been very pretty but I think she had sensual aura that may have been overwhelming to men. A Woman like this can have an attitude that with this ability I will use men’s lust to 54:04 survive a man dominated world. You guard your heart and never give it to a feckless male who will only see you as property, useful only until your beauty and fertile womb time is gone, than thrown away. A smart Woman in my books. You have no right to refuse a man your body but your Heart is a different matter. So use your body to your best advantage and men are offended by this. A wife in Greece is still just sex slave for the lust and advancement of men so Blame a Woman for Men’s lust for expansion and wealth. Make up a fantasy reason instead of being honest. Who said men had no imagination. 😮
I like your vibe and the podcast... Just wanted to add some details... In order to explain better some stories you must have a backround... First noone raped anyone, you describe it as a norm in ancient times(maybe if you look at east it was but not in Greece and Greeks).. it was a common practise in the era the abduction, and most of the times woman wanted to get abducted to free herself from her family or a marriage she didnt want(like Helens with Menelaos for example) or she fall in love with another guy... Women in ancient Greece were free... They were not as slaves or just to reproduce... We can see that in general population not only in the upper classes... In most Greek city states women were free to go whenever they want, exercise, get education etc... We have even Matriarch societys with the most know as Sparta... Also we know about the Goddesses, the muses and others... So women had their place in society.... And than its eras... It was the Cyclops era, the Gods era, the heros era, etc.... you cant talk about Hommer from 1000BC and than again in 400BC that Socrates teached and make comments on 2 different eras.... Also the Hommers era known as Heroes era we have another Greek Civilization(Mycanean), with different norms and situations .. Other than that you present different aspects and help spread knowledge... Thank you...
