Transcript of 605. Greek Myths: Jason & The Quest for the Golden Fleece (Part 4)

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For the moment, let them enjoy a calm sea, a fresh breeze, and each other.

The girl is pretty, and I was always sentimental. But for Jason, there are other adventures. I have not finished with Jason Jason. Let us continue the game another day. So that, as everybody will know, was Eus, the King of the gods. He is staring down from Mount Olympus at the Greek hero Jason. Jason has had an extraordinary time. He's sailed all the way from Greece to the distant land of Colchis, at the other side of the Black Sea, possibly in present day Georgia. He's gone there in his ship, the Argo, with the Argonauts. He has captured the fleece of a golden ram from Aetis, the king of Colchis. He has won the heart of Aetis' daughter, who is called Mediah, who is a bit of a witch, literally, but very beautiful. And she has helped Jason to win the golden fleece. And it's Mediah, of whom Zuse says, The girl is pretty. Poor from Zuse. And these are the very last lines of the film Jason the Argonaut, Rats, which came out in 1963, and it star Todd Armstrong as Jason, very wooden, and Pussy Galore herself, Honor Blackman, as Hero, the Queen of the Gods.

Now, Tom, you think this is a brilliant film, don't you? I love it. I think it's a bit rubbish, but you think it's brilliant.

Before we come on to the question of whether it's good or bad, there is a friend of the show who thinks it's not just good, but the best film ever made. Just to talk about Hira, on a Blackman. She plays a key role in the film because she actually has a bit of a crush on Jason, and so she's always looking out for him throughout her adventures. And in the film, she's a figurehead on the Argo with great long lashes, which she flatters Jason.

Oh, lovely.

Every so often. So incredible special effects. And Wenzu says, Let us continue the game another day. He says that looking at Hero because they've basically been playing chess with the lives of the Argonauts, moving it around the chess board on Mount Olympus. It's obvious from that that the scriptwriters were hoping that they would get a sequel. But the problem is that moviegoers agreed with you and thought it was rubbish. So the film completely bombed, and so they never got the chance to do Jason the Argonauts' Part Two. But, Dominic, it is now widely recognized as a classic.

I think that's very strong, Tom. Widely recognized as a classic.

The person who thinks it's brilliant is a friend of the show, Tom Hanks, who in compared it to Casablanca and Citizen Can, and then said, It's better than them. It is the greatest film ever made.

It hasn't struck you that Tom Hanks might have been being ironic?

I don't think so.

No? Okay.

I don't think so because he was doing it just before the Oscars, part of a lifetime achievement award that was being given to Ray Harryhausen. Oh, yeah. He was the most famous special effects guru in the whole of Hollywood history. If you've ever seen a where Monsters Move in a slightly staccato matter. The likelihood is that Ray Harryhausen was behind that. His work on Jason and the Argonauts is widely seen now as the absolute acme of pre-CGI special effects. It's amazing for a film that was made in 1963. Special effects highlights in Jason and the Argonauts, for those who haven't seen it, include Talos, who's a giant Bronze warrior who comes to life and picks up the and drops it into the sea. There are Harpies, who are two winged monsters who keep sweeping down and stealing food from a poor guy called Phineas, who has offended the gods. He's a blind seer. A lot of blind seers in Greek myth.

He's Patrick Troughton. He's the second doctor from Doctor Who. Very underrated doctor, actually. He is?

Yeah. Yes. I thought you'd enjoy. I mean, it's got Honor Blackman. It's got Patrick Troughton. It's got amazing things.

It's ticking all my boxes. Yeah. It's just a bad film.

I'll tell you who else it's Nigel Green, who was the sergeant in Zulu. Oh, yes. Who played Heracles. Yes. And most amazingly of all, Argus, who's the guy who builds the Argo and is the captain. He's played by the guy who, in A Night to Remember, the great film about Titanic, played Captain Smith. To be honest, if you've got to sail a ship from Greece to Colcys, Captain Smith is the last person you-No.

More slander of Captain Smith. Captain Smith completed many, many, many voyages before that unfortunate incident. He was a very reliable captain, and I just want to make it absolutely clear. Once again, I would happily sail with Captain Smith at any date you care to mention, except probably that night in 1912.

Would you trust Captain Smith to get the Argo through the Clashing Rocks?

Well, he clearly did. He did. So I'll be still in the wood.

Yeah, right. Cashing Rocks also appear in Jason and the Argonauts, and the most famous special effects in Jason and the Argonauts is skeletons that rise up out of the Earth after King Aetes, who's furious because Jason is still in the golden fleece. He sews the teeth of a monster that Jason has slown. And these skeletons fight with Jason and two of his friends, kills two of the friends, and Jason jumps into the sea. If you haven't seen it, it's on YouTube. It's absolutely brilliant. That idea of sewing the dragon's teeth may sound familiar because people may remember that Cadmus, the Prince of Tire, who went searching for Europa, who dressed up as a main ad in the back eye, the founder of Thebes, he had also sewn a monster's teeth from which armed warriors had sprouted. It's true that they weren't skeletons and that Cadmus, rather than fight them, had picked up a rock and thrown it into the middle of them, and they'd all killed each other. But it's clearly the same basic idea. And so people may be wondering, what's this story that was a Cadmus in Thebes? What's it doing in Jason and the Argonauts?

Isn't this just a classic example of Hollywood taking bits and pieces from different myths and stitching it all together and making a complete Frankenstein's monster out of the whole thing? But, Dominic.

Yeah, there's always a but.

There is a but. Jason and the Argonauts, the film, is actually a very, very faithful adaptation of an epic called the Argonautica, which was written sometime around 250 BC by a Greek poet called Apollonius of Rodes.

This is the big source, isn't it, for the stories of the Golden Police. Now, one interesting thing about this which might have occurred to people listening is 250 BC is very late. We are now well into the Hellenistic era, aren't we? The era following the death of Alexander the Great. We'll come back to that later in the show. But just take us through the Argonautica, because a lot of the elements from the film are in the poem, right?

Yeah. Talos, the giant Bronze Man who picks up the ship, the Harpies, the Clashing Rocks, the Spartoy, the Sewn Men, they're all in the Argonautica. So in Apollonius' poem, it's not Aetes who sews the dragon's teeth, it's Jason. Jason, as he does it, is drawing a plow that is being pulled by fire breathing bulls. The reason for this is that it's been set as a challenge by Aetes, who doesn't want to give him the golden fleece. Basically, Aetis has said, If you draw this plow with the fire breathing bulls and you sow the dragon's teeth and you lift it on the tail, then I will give you the golden fleece. Jason gets away with it because Madea, who is the daughter of Aetis, priestess of Hecate, the the the the goddess of magic and witchcraft and so on, has fallen in love with him. And she gives Jason a magic ointment, so a sports unguent, which he smears all over himself, and it's fire resistant, so he can cope with the fire breathing bulls. It has a incredible cacane style effect on his self-confidence. Because Jason in the epic is actually, he's a bit of a wuss, so he needs a bit of a top up.

He gets away with it. He manages to draw the plow, fire breathing bulls, they incinerate him and all of that. And she's also the one who advises him to pull Cadmus' trick by throwing a stone into the middle of the sown men. The story of Jason plowing the field with the fire breathing bulls, that's a very old one. The idea that the dragon's teeth then sprout up. This is Apollonius' invention. He explains it by saying that Athena, after Cadmus had killed the dragon, took its teeth and divided them up. So you half got Cadmus and half got given to Eates.

A bit of retrospective continuity there.

Yes. You can see that there is something, I think, quite Hollywood about this. Apolloni is basically, you could imagine him writing for a movie franchises or whatever. The Argonautica is basically the model for all the adventures of Greek heroes that you get in children's books. Tales of daring Do, Fights with Monsters, all of that. It's not as our previous episodes have been about. It's not about exploring the nature of the gods, plumbing the various dimensions of Dionysus or any of that. He's very, very concerned to write something that people will find page-turning and exciting and interesting. It works. I mean, it is a thrilling story to read.

But it's not just a thrilling story, is it? Because Apologius... So Apologius is a great poet, but he's also a scholar who knows loads about Greek myth. Actually, the comparison might be with a figure like J. R. R. Tolkien, who's taking established myths and weaving them into throwing loads of elements in and creating a quest narrative that turns out to be a massive blockbuster. No?

I think he's more, I'm surprised you didn't bring it up. I think he's more like a scriptwriter for a film in the Star Wars franchise.

I only did that because I know you hate Star Wars.

No, I'm happy to have Star Wars introduced because I think it's quite a good parallel.

Okay. Okay.

With Star Wars, you have a pre-existing universe where there are certain characters and certain plot lines, but you can mess around with it. You can introduce new characters. You can take elements from one film and put it into another. You can do that with superhero films as well, can't you? You can. He is much more like a script writer for a Marvel film than he is a Greek tragedian.

So he's basically taking elements from the comic books that people have grown up with and they know and love and reworking them and throwing new in and all of that stuff, right?

Well, so think of Star Wars. You had those famously terrible prequels, didn't you? I am the Princess of Naboo, and I have come to negotiate a tariff reduction. I mean, unbelievably boring. But it's a prequel to the famous, the iconic Star Wars. Apollonius is doing something very similar because basically he's writing a prequel to the most famous of all Greek epics, which are Homers. We see Achilles, who's going to be the hero of the Iliad as a little baby in the Argonautica.

Oh, my God. Anacin Skywalker.

Like Darfader as a little boy. It's that thing.

It's just the phantom menace of Greek mythology. That is the most damning thing you could possibly say about it.

It's much better than that. When the Argonauts, they got the Golden Fleece and they're sailing away from Colchis, and they take a mad route to get back to Greece along the Danube and the Rhône and end up in the Western Mediterranean. Yeah, don't go along the Rhône.

That's bonkers.

Which by tradition is where Adycius sailed. This gives Apollonius the chance to have the Argonauts meet all kinds of characters and monsters that Adycius will go on to meet. They pass the Sirens, for instance, and Adycius gets tied to the mast so he can hear the Sirens. But when the Argonauts go by, they've got Orpheus, who is the greatest musician who's ever lived, and he plays the Liar, and he outsings the Sirens. Also, you meet Cerci, who in the Odyssey turns Aditius' men into pigs, and then Aditius hangs out with him. She turns out to be Madea's aunt. It's a bit like Garth Vader turning out to be Luke's father. Are you impressed with my incredible- Yeah, amazing knowledge of these-ray of Star Wars knowledge.

Yeah, incredible.

I think part of the fun of reading the Arca Nautica, if you know anything about Greek myths- Seeing the familiar elements, right?

Yeah. It's like, Oh, there's Jabb of the Huts, and the Ewoks are back, and his C3PO making his inevitable appearance. That's basically what it is.

But having said that, for that reason, I think, just as people are a bit sniffy, perhaps, about Star Wars prequels, people were sniffy about the Argonautica as well. The charge that Apollonius was a scavenger and a plagiarist was one that followed him throughout his career. Traditionally, it is said that I knew your hackles always arise. It has said that. Yeah, so it didn't. But let's say for now that this has genuinely happened. He had, as his critic, the most admired and celebrated poet of the age, who was a guy called Kalimicus. Right. And Apollonius is writing an epic. It's full of monsters and so on. Kalimicus is writing very delicate recondite poems. So if Apollonius is a script writer for a Star Wars prequel, Kalimicus is more like TS. Elliott or Emily Dickinson.

Or if he's working in cinema, he's making little art house face 10 minutes long.

Yes. And the reason for this is very self-conscious because we are no longer living in an age of epic and that trying to be Homer is is mad. We can never do it. The circumstances that were germane in Homer's age have completely vanished. You cannot help. If you're going to try and write a Homeric epic, it will be pastiche. It will be bombastic. It will be merritricious trash. Kalimicus's nickname for Apollonius seems to have been the Ibis. This is a bird that could be seen everywhere in Egypt, very common. It always fascinated Greek writers for reasons that Peter Green in his tremendous book on the Hellenistic period, From Alexander to Actium.

Do you remember that? I chose that as one of my favorite history books, From Alexander to Actium. It's like 6,000 pages long. Peter Green lived to the age of 200, didn't he? He was still writing books like When Other People Have Been Long Dead. Brilliant historian.

And very, very entertainingly written. So he explains why the Ibis fascinated Greek writers. So this is Peter Green. The Ibis was a foul feeder of gluttonous and indiscriminate veracity. Scavenging any filth or carrion. It was also popularly believed to offset its diet by giving itself water enimers and calonic irrigation per annum with its own peak. Besides copulating orally, nesting in date palms to avoid cats and having a gut over 40 yards long. He then goes on to quote the geographer Strabo, who was writing in the Rain of Augustus, Omnivirus and unclean, the ibis is only with difficulty kept away from things that are clean themselves and alien to all defilement. In other words, if we're to trust the tradition that Callimicus hated Apollonius, by comparing Apollonius to an ibis, he's essentially attacking the Argonautica, not not just as a mess of scavenged bits of trash, but for poisoning the ancient pure springs of myth. Again, I think that is very like a high-brow critic of a Hollywood blockbuster.

It's a Guardian film writer saying, There are too many Marvel films, and people should be watching more Ingmar Bergman. Exactly.

That's essentially what he's saying. I think on one level, you can see where Clemence is coming from because the story of the Argonauts, it does draw on the foundational springs of Greek myth. Homer doesn't mention Mediah, but he does specify that Cerci was sister to Aetes. In fact, it wasn't Apollosia, Solunius, his invention, that Mediah was Cerci's niece. Equally, he doesn't mention the golden fleece, but he does mention Jason and specifically the clashing rocks. In the Odyssey, when Cerci is warning Adycius about the clashing rocks, and says, avoid them at all cost, Sursey tells him that the Argo is the only ship that had ever passed through them. To quote the Odyssey, The swells would have hurled her, too, against those gigantic rocks had Hira not sent her on through since Jason was dear to her. So Pussy Galore stepping in to save Jason. The rest of Apollonius's epic is culled from various poets. So Hesiot is there. There's another poet from Thebes called Pinda, who wrote in the fifth century BC, and in Athens, Euripides, a friend of the show, author of the Baki, who we talked about in the previous episode. So Pinda, we know from him that the story had begun with this absolutely classic fairy tale, which revolves around a wicked stepmother who's out to get the two children of the king of Thessaly, who were called Frixus and Hely.

The brother and sister, Frixus and Hely, they escape on a flying ram with a golden fleece. The ram takes off from Thessaly, flies over the Aegean, flies over the Hellespont. There there's a disaster because Hely hasn't got her seat belt on and slips off and drowns in the of water below.

Yeah, hence the name.

Hence the name, the Hellespont. But Frixus, he crosses the Black Sea safely, lands in Colchis, and is given shelter by Eetes. When the flying golden ram dies, the fleece brings prosperity to Eites' kingdom. And so he hangs it on a tree in a sacred grove where it is looked after by a dragon. The dragon, the great serpent, wraps its coils around the tree.

So this is all very familiar from the Lady Bird book of the Jason the Argonauts that I read when I was about five. And also I see that the rest of the details of where Jason goes to get the fleece, they're also in the Lady Bird book, and they're from Pindar, too. Absolutely classic Greek myth, isn't it? His father What's his name? Ason, the king of- Ason. Yeah, Iolkos. He's been kicked out by his uncle, Peleus, when Jason was a baby. Jason, obviously, it's always the way he's been raised by a wise old sage who is called Kyron and happens to be a centaur.

Happens to be a centaur. But what's his name? The little gnome thing with a stupid voice. Come on.

Are you talking about Yoda?

Yoda. Yeah. So So Khyron is the Yoda.

Ignorant of Star Wars are you, Tom Arndt.

Am I? No, that doesn't work, doesn't it?

No. Luke doesn't speak in the same Yoda's voice to Yoda. Come on.

No, true. Okay. All right. Meanwhile, back in Iolkos, Peleus, there's obviously a prophecy. I mean, there's always a prophecy. He's been worn to beware a man with one sandal. Jason, he's been instructed by Khyron past his A levels. Now it's time for him to set off to Iolkos. He's going along and there's an old woman, there's a swollen river. The old woman can't get across the river. Jason gives her a piggyback. At the far side, the old woman transforms into Hira. And this is why Hiera from this point on, is Jason's great patron. Bart Dominic, while he's been crossing the river, what do you think has happened to his footwear?

Oh, his sandal has come off, hasn't it? Very famous. Sandal has come off.

Sandal has come off. Yes. So He turns up and Peelius sees this new arrival and realizes, oh, my God, his trouble. So he comes up with a brilliant scheme, which is that he tells Jason, look, I will give you the throne, but first of all, I really think that you should go to Colchis and get the golden fleece. People may be wondering, why would Jason do that? And Peelius comes up with three unanswerable reasons. The first of these is that the ghost of Frixus demands it, so the little boy.

Yeah, don't argue with him.

The second is an Oracle has urgent it, so you can't argue with that. And the third is that just as the golden fleece has brought peace and prosperity to Colchis, so if it gets stolen, then that peace and prosperity will be brought to Iolkis. So unanswerable. Jason says, Yeah, fine, whatever. And Peleus swears a solemn vow that he will give Jason the throne if he comes back with the golden fleece. So to quote Pindar, So this was their agreement, and then they parted. And at once, Jason ordered heralds everywhere to proclaim that a great voyage was to be made.

And on the question of the voyage. So I remember Michael Wood did a TV series, and Michael Wood has been on our show, great TV historian, called In Search of Myths and Heroes. And he went on this great expedition to Georgia on the other side of the Black Sea. And he was trying to uncover the roots of the Golden Fleece myth. And he was arguing the roots lie in memories of Greek voyages out into the unknown, across the Black Sea, to a land that might maybe had gold or some kinds of riches or who knows. There is a sense, isn't there, among historians and scholars, that the story of Jason the Golden Fleece does reflect a historical reality, which is, what would you call it, the Greek age of expiration.

A sense of- Colonization.

Yeah, going out. I mean, Greeks, obviously, they go to the Crimea, don't they? They do go across the Black Sea to the far side. When is that time period? Because that must have been centuries distant by the time that people like, well, certainly by the time Apollonius is writing.

eighth, seventh centuries. I mean, into the sixth century. It's about a process of discovery. They are venturing out into seas where you could well believe that you've come across clashing rocks or- Yeah, of course. Monsters or sirens or whatever. So whether you're going westwards or eastwards. So it's a bit like the stories told by Vikings sailing off into the Atlantic or down the great rivers through Russia. But the problem, and this is, I think, why Kalimicus has a point, is that by 250 BC, I mean, everybody knows what the Mediterranean and the Black Sea are like. No one could conceivably believe that there are monsters there. And so that, I think, is why Apollonius sends the Argonauts into middle Europa.

The Rhône and whatnot.

Yeah, because generally people don't know what's going on there. So more opportunity for monster.

The one character who everybody remembers Jason the Golden Fleece, the hypnotic figure of Midneya, the beautiful Sorceress who helps Jason. But then obviously, things go very, very badly wrong for them as a couple. Where does she come from? Does she come from Pindar as well?

Yes. So Pindar provides Apollonius with the outline of her story. And in Pindar's account, Mediah is a very heroic figure, so as in the film, actually. And her aid is crucial to Jason's success. He wouldn't have been able to win the Golden Fleece without her. Aphrodite, Pindar says, cast a spell of love over her. In Apollonius' version, it's ridiculous. Aphrodite gets Eros, her son, to shoot an arrow. Eros is the most annoying… It's like scrappy doe. He's like a infuriating child friendly character. Just terrible. Like Jaja Binks. Yes, he's the Jaja Binks of Greek epic poetry. And Mediah has got this arrow of love embedded in her heart. It leads her to basically portray her father, give Jason the magic ointment that enables him to harness the bulls and pep up his confidence. And also, Mediah helps him to kill the dragon that's been guarding the golden feast. She has another ointment, puts it in the dragon's eyes, and the dragon falls asleep, and and then kills it. And on the long voyage back, she provides the Argonauts with magic and prophecy. That basically is the outline that Pinda gives Apollonius, and Apollonius sticks to it.

There is another much more famous literary portrayal of Madea that Apollonius had inherited and had to negotiate. And this comes from Euripides.

Yeah, we know that Euripides loves a really dark play.

And he loves a murderous woman. And in Euripides' play about Mediah, she is portrayed in a in a very dark light, and she is guilty of a sorted crime. So in the backstory, as the Argonauts escape, she's taken her brother with her in one account. As Iotis's fleet is closing in on the Argonauts, she chops her brother up into two pieces and throws it out into the sea.

Such a weird and unsettling detail.

So Eutis has to stop to pick up the bits. Or in another account, the brother is leading the pursuit and Mediah kills him. When they get back to Thessaly, Helias, predictably, does hand over the throne. So Mediah eliminates him, and she does it in a brilliantly complicated way. She gets Pelus's daughters, and she says, Look, I have incredible powers of sorcery. Your father is very, very elderly. I can make him much younger. Look, and she brews up a potion in a cauldron, and she gets an aged ram, and she slits the throat of the ram, and then she chops the ram up into little bits. This is obviously something Madea is really into, is chopping up bodies. And she chucks all the portions the ram into the cauldron, and there's shimmering in a flash. Then a minute later, the ram pops out, and it's now a baby lamb, had all its youth restored to it. She says, If you do this to your father, then I'll be able to do the same. So Peelias' daughters get their father, slit his throat, chop him into bits, chuck him into the cauldron, and nothing happens. That's the end of Peelias.

Jason then can become king of Iolkos and Thessaly. You'd think that he'd be very grateful to Mediah, but by this point, Jason is She's a bit of a nightmare. She's just endlessly chopping people up. Faithfully, in the Euripides version, he dumps Mediah for a princess called Glauca, who's the princess of Corainth. And so Madea doesn't take this lying down, and she sends Glauca a poison dress and crown, and Glauque puts it on and vanishes in a puff of smoke. And Madea then goes off, kills the two sons that she's had by Jason, thereby denying him any male heirs, and flies off in a chariot drawn by dragons, and goes to Athens.

She's a piece of work, isn't she? She's the Mary Lincoln of Greek mythology, Tom.

So It's so hard.

I hope the people on the Reddit enjoy that one. Continue.

Basically, Euripides' influence is so strong. He's become such a classic by this point that this is now the canonical understanding of Mediah, but it doesn't really suit Apollonia purposes. I mean, it's too blood stained, too murderous. Essentially, he slightly whitewashes that out.

I mean, that is so Hollywood. Oh, we want to take it- It's like the Adam West Batman.

All the dark night stuff.

I'm just going to say it first before the listeners do. There's a lot of ludicrous parallels being made in this episode.

I think it's not- But we lean into it.

We love it.

Euripides, Sofoclees, Aescalus, the Great Tragedians, they have become classics, and they have put later poets in their shadow. And Apollonius has this anxiety of influence. He's always conscious of it. And that is really Kalimicus's point, is that you can't write something fresh about Mediah Because we have these... The Euripides portrait means that you're always going to be operating in its shadow. And the only thing that Apollonius can do basically is to ignore that, set it aside. And there's a parallel, I think, in which the way that poets in, say, 250 BC, are in the shadow of a vanished greatness, literary greatness. Politically, Athens is slightly similar because Athens now in 250 BC stands in the shadows of empires that are vastly greater than the empire that the Athenians had run in the fifth century. The independence of Athens and of all the other Greek city states has effectively been snuffed out. Dominic, you know by whom.

Yeah, no one loves this more than I do. I love to see the Athenians get a kicking from Massaden. So Philippa Massodon started it, didn't he? In 338, he smashed the Athenians and the Thebans. And then four years later, Alexander the Great, one of the very top friends of the rest of his history, he'd gone off on his, I think what we described as a gap here that got out of control, conquering the Persian Empire, going off to Afghanistan.

Dressing up in his foreign clothing.

Exactly. Taking proskinesis, adopting Persian customs, goes off to Central Asia, goes off to India, and then he dies in 323, and his empire is carved up. And it's always said, oh, it fragmented into these pitival little success of states. But actually, those success of states are pretty powerful and rich empires, the Sanukid Empire, the Tolemaic Empire, and I guess the most glamorous, certainly for me, and it's the place when people say, Where would you go if you had a time machine? A classic Restes history club question. Alexandria. It's Alexandria rather than Athens that is the real metropolis in this period, isn't it? That's the city of culture, of science.

It's a mega city. Yeah. Obviously, it's founded by Alexander, named after him with Alexander's customary modesty. The thing about Alexandria, as opposed to Athens or Thebes with their ancient stories about their beginnings and their ancient relations with the gods and heroes, is that on the site of Alexandria, before Alexander arrived there, there had been nothing. There was only marshes and sea birds. The St.

Peter'sberg of North Africa.

No temples, no festivals, no festivals, and crucially, no myths. Then there's an obvious question, what do the ancient gods mean in a city where everyone is an immigrant? What relevance do these ancient Greek poems now have? I think that that's what the argument between Clemence and Apollonius is all about. Neither of them come from Greece, old Greece. Clemence had moved there from Cyrene, which is a city in what's now Libya. Apollonius himself, despite his name, Apollonius of It seems actually to have been born in Alexandria, and he was called off roads because he liked visiting there. Can Alexandria be a place? What role does myth have in such a city? I think that Clemence's charge against Apollonius, therefore, is very clear and not unjustified, which is that if you're going to write an ancient epic and you are doing so as a citizen of a parvenu mega city like Alexandria, then you can't help but be vulgar and merritricious. I suppose it's slightly, again, high-brow British attitudes towards American films.

Exactly. But it's also interestingly, it mirrors the criticism that historians for a long time have actually made of the Hellenistic era, haven't they? Historians and critics, really since the 19th century, have been holding up Greece, the classical age of Greece as the model, have then said, Oh, and what came next was vulgar and merritricious and a bit of a pastiche. That's the classic criticism of Hellenistic culture.

But just to reiterate, that is the criticism that Kalimicus is making, who is probably the greatest poet.

He's anticipating it.

Kalimicus is looking back to Athens and to Homer as the true golden age of Greek literature. We do the same, by and large. That tends to be the assumption. You do.

I actually love the Hellenistic era. I prefer it to Pascal Gris.

I love the Hellenistic era, too, but I can recognize that there is a point to Clemence's criticism, that it is slightly ersatz.

It's because you don't like multiculturalism like I do, Tom.

No, Dominic. There is an ersatz quality to trying to write an epic about a corner of the world that everyone knows is there and saying that it's full of monsters. But to stick up for Apollonius, Apollonius obviously thinks that it's an entirely legitimate what he's doing because otherwise, he wouldn't write his epic. Of course. He thinks that Kalimicus is the idiot, so like you. He wrote this one-line poem, which is structured like an entry in an encyclopedia. And he sums up Kalimicus as trash, a cheap joke, a blockhead.

I love Apollonia, so I think it sounds brilliant. That's exactly what I would do.

And I think that his defense of the Argonautica wouldn't just have been that it's a thrilling page turner. What's wrong with a thrilling page turner? They're great. But also, he would say he's doing something much more with it. And specifically, what he is doing, he would say, I think, is that he is adapting myth, this great inheritance of the stories of the gods and the heroes to the age of Alexander's successors, which is an age of global horizons, of kings who claimed to be gods, and of teeming mega cities that had not existed when Sofocleys, let alone Homer, was writing their masterpieces.

All right. Well, let's take a break, Tom. Then when we come back after the break, let's talk about Alexander and his influence on what we've come to call Greek mythology. Let's look at what happens to this corpus of Greek stories and the way the Greeks understand the supernatural in the wake of Alexander's Conquests. This episode is brought to you by Uber. Now, do you know that feeling when someone shows up for you when you need it most?

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Welcome back to The Rest is History. Now, we promised you Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great, of course, was famously devoted to the stories of Greek myth and legend. So there's a story, isn't there, that he travels with a copy of the Iliad, a very fancy folio society edition of the Iliad that he puts under his pillow. And he clearly is a very God-fearing or God-fearing man, because when he crosses the Helles Point, for example, he builds an altar to the 12 Olympians. And he is obsessed Particularly with Achilles. I mean, he thinks of himself and his friend, Haphaistian, as the modern day Achilles and Patroclus. And he takes all this incredibly seriously, doesn't he, Tom?

He does. He comes to think that he's literally the son of Seus.

Yeah, it goes to the Oracle of Siwa.

When he reaches what's now Afghanistan, he sees traces all around him of Dionysus, who was supposed to have traveled there many, many centuries before. So he sees stone burial heaps that are covered with ivy, and and ivy was sacred to Dionysus. And so Alexander assumes that these were boundary stones that have been set up by the God. Alexander's ambition is to go even further than Dionysus. So to quote Arrian, the Roman historian, writing in the second century AD, he confidently expected his troops would join him in this, done as it would be in imitation of Dionysus's achievements. But, Dominic, that doesn't happen, does it?

No. So he's never defeated, but he's defeated by his own men. In India, on the River Hyphasis, they force him to turn back in 326. Yet Then he built an altar to the gods. Alexander, he loves doing two things, basically founding a city is called Alexandria, building altars. And then he goes back to Babylon, and three years later, he's dead in Babylon, probably in malaria, possibly a poison. We can't be sure. Or is he, Tom? Is he dead?

Alexander is obviously angling to be worshiped as a god, and this is a conceit that is treated with absolute contempt by, say, the Athenians. They see this as an example of the insane megalomania. But the thing is, it doesn't actually take long for the Athenians to hail one of Alexander's successors in person as a God. So not long after Alexander's death, only a few decades in in '95, you have this a Mastodonian strong man called Demetrius the Besedia, which I always thought was a brilliant subrhege.

Polyurchides, isn't it? Yeah.

And he comes to Athens and occupies it, and he addresses the Athenians in the theater of Dionysus, where the tragedies have been staged. He appears there as though he is a hero or maybe even a God, deus ex machina, appearing there. Four years later, he comes back to Athens and is overtly greeted as though he were Dionysus, as though he has appeared, as though it's the Anthesteria. He's accompanied into Athens by dancers carrying giant phaluses. The Athenians hail him with this poem, The other gods are far distant or have no ears or do not exist or ignore us, but we can see before us, you are not made of stone or wood. No, you are real. They hail Demetrius as Sota, as savior, and they allow him to live with his mistress in a back room of the Parthena up on the acropolisus, the great temple to Athena on the acropolisus. Demetrius, very modestly, begins to refer to Athena as his sister.

That's just not his own ego, right? Because this is becoming a trend across the Hellenistic world. I'm I'm wondering, a lot of this must come from Egypt, from the Tolemies who are being worshiped as gods. Actually, Tolemies I calls themselves Sota, doesn't he? The savior. He does, yes. This is becoming a trend for kings, would you say, across the Hellenistic era to identify themselves as the gods?

I think you're right that it's part of a cultural soup, but I think it's also reflecting a sense that the Olympians are not there for people in their hour of need, that the old rituals and cults that had seemed to keep Athens in the favor of the gods are no longer functioning. The corollary of this, in turn, is a growing public skepticism among intellectuals about the Olympians' full stop. There is one book in particular that becomes an absolute best seller in exactly this period. You can see why when I tell you what it seem is. It's written by a philosopher called Euhemirus, and he comes up with a very novel explanation for the ancient myths. He's Graham Hancock of the ancient world. He wrote this book is called The Sacred Register. In it, Euhemirus claims that he'd been sent on a diplomatic mission by one of the Macedonians to an island in the Indian Ocean. There he had found an inscription written in hieroglyphics, and this is the sacred register. It's very Graham Hancock. The sacred register reveals a bombshell truth, which is that Zus hadn't been a God at all. He'd been a mortal king of Crete, who, after his death, had come to be worshiped as a God, and that this was true of all the other Olympians as well.

They were all been mortals, and they'd been raised up to the heavens. The popularity of this thesis suggests just how large a market there has come to be by the third century BC for works of philosophy, that it's no longer the recherche habit that had been under Plato. It's becoming part of the mainstream.

Actually, to go back to the last episode where we were talking about philosophers establishing themselves in opposition to and storytellers. Initially, they were out there in their little, their academy outside the city, but their ideas have clearly percolated more deeply over the centuries. And now, would it be an exaggeration to say that by and large, now in the Hellenistic era, If you are a self-respecting intellectual, in other words, if you're the person who's hanging around at the Museon in Alexandria, you are skeptical about the stories of the Olympians, and you say, Come on, this stuff is obviously rubbish. There aren't people with the heads this and turning themselves into eagles and sleeping with women. That's obviously rubbish.

Yes, I think it is. Again, all comparisons have their problems. But perhaps there's a slight element of the way in which most intellectuals would be embarrassed to say that they believe that God became a baby and was born from a virgin, that thing. A bit like with the rejection of institutional Christianity today by intellectuals, the the rejection of the stories told at the Olympian gods by intellectuals in the Hellenistic world is often cast as a triumph of reason over superstition and of self-examination over blind faith. But this itself is a myth because just as intellectuals today who think that they have rejected the superstitions of the past, actually are merely propagating new forms of that superstition. So you can see in the Hellenistic world, the rejection of what philosophers come to cast as superstition breeds its own superstitions.

Okay, interesting.

I would say that what is happening in the Hellenistic world is that notions of the supernatural that had been appropriate to a world of small city states is now being adapted to a vast globalized one with mega cities. The classic example of what this meant in practice, a guy called Epicurus, who is the son of Athenian settlers on Samos. He'd been a boy back when Alexander had crossed the Hellespont, and he ends up in Athens, where he teaches a vision of the universe that is very atomistic. He teaches that everything is made up of atoms. In due course, this will make him a great hero of re-thinkers and skeptics in the Enlight. But Epicurus is absolutely not an atheist, and he's still less a rationalist. He He did believe in gods. It's just that the gods he believed in were gods who didn't intervene in human affairs and did not control the destiny of the world. His interest in the natural world, so all this stuff about atoms and things, it's not because he's some proto-scientist. That is absolutely not what Epikurus is about. To this day, there are rationalists who say, Oh, Epikurus, he's brilliant.

He's a proto-scientist. He's the opposite. The only reason Epikurus has for researching the of things is to appreciate the pointlessness of believing in myths. This is because in turn, it will lead to the state of tranquility, ataraxia in Greek, that Epikurus sees as being the ultimate goal of existence. So effectively, what he's doing is saying, turn on, tune in, drop out. It's a completely radical rejection of the assumptions of classical Athens, and that's why there's a lot of hostility towards Epikurus. But it's not It's not like he's saying, go out and become a, invent nuclear physics or something like that. Basically, he's less Richard Dawkins. He's much more than Mahrishy.

Right. He's somebody who says, ignore all the silly rituals and stuff of the stuffy squares. He's the person who drops out to become a Buddhist in the 1960s. Is that basically what it is?

Yeah. Well, Buddhism is a noble ancient tradition. There's a strong element of the charlatan about Epicurus.

He's like somebody talking about New Age crystals, that thing.

He's a profounder philosopher than that. I mean, there are Epicurians to this day who will not like that categorization. So all the papyri scrolls in Herculeanium that are starting to be deciphered now are by Epicureans, which is slightly frustrating. But Epicureus himself, there are definite qualities of the guru. So he sets up effectively a commune in Athens, which is funded by his wealthy admirers. Epicureus is not remotely in favor of allowing his followers to think for themselves. So his dictum is always, act always as though Epicureus is watching. So he's a big brother. And his admirers, while he's alive, call him the leader. And then when he dies, they call him Sota, savior.

God, so he really is like a cult leader.

This is an age where people are looking for a savior. And when he dies, I mean, considering that Epikurus had absolutely rejected the notion of interventionist gods, I mean, Epicurus, he's remembered very much like an interventionist God. So while he was alive, he'd referred to his body as being something holy. He'd demanded the first fruits from his followers. So that's the first fruits for the harvest, which is conventionally what you pay to the Olympian gods. And then after his death, they hold commemorative feasts. So it's looking back to the Olympian gods. It's looking forward to the way that Christians will commemorate Christ. Epikurus is not an embodiment of enlightened rationalism. I think it's fair hard to say. And there's that famous comment Chesterton makes, and you can adapt it, that when the Greeks choose not to believe in the Olympians, it's not that they don't believe in nothing. They become capable of believing in anything Basically.

To go back to Jason, the Argonaut, so what that's reflecting, therefore, is an age where there's a genuine a massive flux of ideas, where the old institutions, the old rituals and assumptions have lost some of their power over people, and people are picking and choosing much more, as they will do in 1970s America or something.

They're questing. Yes, exactly. They're searching for meaning.

Yes, exactly.

Hanging out in the garden and dropping out is one option. There's another option which is hinted at quite strongly in Euhemius's book, because Euhemius, he's not an atheist either. He thinks that the Olympians were originally mortals, but he does think that there are gods, but he that the gods are planets. This is another thing that is obviously influenced by Egyptian, Babylonian traditions, the Greek kings of Egypt and of the Silukids. They have access to this very, very ancient astronomical, astrological inheritance. This is a way in which the Olympians actually make a return for Greek intellectuals, is that the planets come to be identified with the Greek gods. The Swiftest planet is the planet that comes to be called Hermes, the messenger of the gods, and the Romans call Mercury, and we still call it Mercury to this day. The brightest, most beautiful planet, Aphrodite, a. K. A. Venus. The bloodiest planet, the planet that's the color of blood is Ares, the God of War or Mars. And of course, the largest planet, that's the King of the gods, Jesús, or as we call it Jupiter. But the thing is that the The rule of these planetary Olympians is much, much more tyrannical than the rule of the traditional Olympian gods had been, because the planets can't be swayed by festivals or by sacrifices or anything like that.

They're completely indifferent. They're chill. The doom that's written in the stars, if you believe in astrology, is something that you can't escape.

There's always been an element of fatalism. There's always been an element of fatalism in the Greek understanding of the divine and whatnot, hasn't it? But it's become more pronounced now, would you say?

I think if you believe that your fate is locked into the stars, all you can do, the best you can do is to try and learn what it is by becoming a massive astrolog fan. But there is an even bleaker possibility, which also becomes very widespread in this period, that there is no order at all and that the greatest of all gods is Taike, so Greek for fate, for fortune, and that there is, therefore, Or there's no pattern there. There's no logos. There's no possibility of fathoming an order in the universe because there isn't one. An Athenian poet put it in very devastating terms. It's not logos, which guides the affairs of mortals, but Tikeh. You were saying this is an age where people are looking around for answers and solutions, and some of these answers and solutions are very bleak. Now, I think astrology is very bleak. It tells you what's going to happen. There's nothing you can do to affect it. If you think that the Taiki is the goddess that controls everything, then a philosopher sums it up well. Her influence on our lives is as beyond computation as the manifestations of her power are unpredictable.

Yet. So we've been talking about philosophers, but what do the people in the streets of Athens or Alexandria, the taverns in the marketplaces, what do they think? Because there's always a danger when we're talking about belief that we overemphasize the importance of that minority of people who really, really care about these things and talk about them a lot. But most people, of course, don't. They're interested in the price of bread or whatever. So Jason, the Argonauts would not have been so successful, presumably, unless there were loads of punters who loved this thing and who genuinely thought that it had meaning, presumably.

The old rituals that had sustained the independent Greek city states carry on even though they're no longer independent. And for some, it becomes like the equivalent of the Trooping of the Color or Bastille day. I mean, that's the limit of it. But I think for lots of people, they do continue to feel that the gods are imminent and that by practicing these rituals and these festivals, they are in communion with the gods. But I think also there are intellectuals who clearly miss the gods, who love them, and Apollonius would be representative of that. Apollonius, when he writes the Arga Nautica, is not doing it as a hick. He's not doing it as someone who doesn't understand exactly what he's doing because he, like Calimicus, is a very, very great scholar, and they are both employed in the greatest of all the research institutes that the Hellenistic period throws up. We've done an episode on it, namely the Library of Alexandria. Kalimicus is the guy, as well as writing recondite poetry, he's drawn up the catalog of the library, absolutely massive product. Apollonius is an academic specialist on Homer. So when he's writing an epic on the Homeric model, he knows what he's talking about.

He's been involved drawing up the canonical text of Homer, which is something that scholars in Alexandria are really keen on doing it. He does it so well that he ends up becoming the chief librarians of Alexandria, and he pips Callimicus to the job. And so that's why, although there is skepticism among some scholars about the idea of this literary rivalry between the two men, I think there was, because I think that's exactly the thing that would have... They would have absolutely hated each other. And so you can see that the Argonautica, even though it's a relic in good read and tremendous entertainment, it is also something else. It is a study, a logos of myths. So it is a mythologia. And so what is happening in Alexandria with people like Apologius, is that myth is becoming mythology.

So just distinguish for us what you mean by the difference in myth and mythology. So is the difference maybe that mythology is more self-conscious and nostalgic and backward-looking?

What do you think? It's the study of myths. It's the telling of myths with an awareness of their backstory and that you are doing it in a a literary or scholarly manner. So a children's book is a work of mythology or telling mythology. The writer doesn't believe any of it, is drawing various elements and putting them together to tell a good story. But at its highest level, it results in extraordinary works of literature. This is how the myths pass into the bloodstream of European culture. So the Romans are writing mythology. So Virgil, when he adapts Homer to tell this great epic drawing on stories of the Trojan War and the Odyssey that explains the beginning, the origins of Rome, the Aneod is a work of mythology.

Virgil doesn't think it's real. Virgil is. There's maybe a tiny bit of an antiquarian element to it, almost.

There is an antiquarian element. I mean, whether he thinks it's real or not, it's a complicated question. But it's not summing up myth for the Romans in the way that Homer defines myth for the Greeks. You have Ovid as well, who writes this great collection of stories of transformations, metamorphoses, or Writers and Artists: Through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Into the Modern Period, is the great storehouse of Greek myth. It's the storehouse that Shakespeare draws on, Titian, Jason the Orknaughts, children's, Percy Jackson, all of that. That's how the myths endure. Because if you have mythology, you have myth. The myth is embedded within the mythology.

But also, don't they endure because so many I know you hate using the word religion, but I'm just going to use it very loosely. So many ancient religions were defined through ritual, through tradition, through ritual, through practice. But what makes the Greek myths, for want of a better word, distinctive is their story stories. They began as poems, and that that's why they endure in a way that the stories of the Babylonians or even the Egyptians, they seem unsatisfying to us in a way that the Greek myths aren't because they were ritualistic rather than literary. The Greek myths were always literary.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I think that's why they appeal to children and they appeal to famous intellectuals like Nietzsche and Freud, and they've served as an inspiration great writers and artists in a way that no other mythology has done. They continue to this day, and that's why we can do a series on Greek myths.

Possibly the Norse myths because they also have come down to us purely as stories rather than as performance or ritual.

But I think that's slightly different because the Greek myths are coming from the mountain heart of belief. The Norse epics are written long after the belief in the gods. They have all kinds of contaminations. That explains their potency. There is a drawback, though, which is that because it's mediated for us by mythology, by people who are studying it in a slightly abstract way, and because over the course of the generations and the centuries, it's been perpetuated by people who do not believe any of it at all, and that's the inheritance that we get. It is difficult for us because our assumptions tend to be materialist and Christian. We have a cultural overlay. It is difficult for us to get back into the mindset of the Greeks themselves, to get back into the age of Sofocleys and Euripides and still more of Homer. But I think you cannot properly understand the Greeks without trying to imagine yourself in a world where the gods are the primary actors in the life of the various Greek cities and in the Cosmos more generally, because it's only then that we can properly see how the Greeks saw themselves. I increasingly think that about the classical period of Greece and the centuries before it, is that the challenge is to try and imagine yourself back into a world where you can escape the mythology and reenter a world of myth, to put it like that.

Very nice. Very nice way to sum it up, Tom. But actually, an even better way would be for me to ask you, your favorite myth, top myth?

My favorite myth was always The Odyssey.

Really?

Yeah, I always loved The Odyssey because it was my gateway drug.

Yeah, okay, fair enough.

I would love to do an episode at some point on The Odyssey. We did one on with Daniel Mandelso, but that's only for club members, and club members can get it. The rest is history. Don't Very good. But those who don't, maybe we could do one for the general listener.

I think we should absolutely do one for the general listener to give people an insight into the ruthless way in which we conduct our affairs. I think we should do that when Christopher Nolan's film at The Odyssey comes out.

Yeah, let's do that.

I think we should do a series that Rest is History subscribers will be able to hear first.

That's a very good plan.

Very good plan. Now you see the way. Now people get a little glimpse behind the curtain. They see the way in which we plan these things with no regard to commercial motives whatsoever.

We're like the Olympians, aren't we?

Yeah.

Drawing up rules and creatures of win, but also of power. Dominic, before we go, you ask me my favorite Greek myth. That's yours.

Thetius. Because that was my gateway. That was the first one I read, Thetius and going to the Labyrinth, Fighting the Minor tour and all that. I love all that.

The black sales. We can do one on Creet as well. Creet?

Well, Creet shortyism is serious waiting to happen. It is. Basically, the episode has turned into a scheduling meeting, which is lovely.

We're back, aren't we, with an episode on someone who's very into the classics, namely, Enoch Powell. That's a good segue.

That's a thrilling transition, isn't it?

Then after that, we've got a woman who is very into acting out the Greek myths, namely, Emma Hamilton, who goes on to become Nelson's great paramour. Then after that, we have the return of the admiral himself, Nelson.

Can't wait. Cannot wait. That bumshal, thank you so much, Tom. That was absolutely fascinating. Brilliant. A tour de force. We haven't had a tour de force for a while, but now we've had a really good one.

Brilliant. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Hey, it's Anthony Scaramucci, and I want to tell you about my podcast, Open Book, which just joined the Goalhanger Network, which we're all very proud of. In my latest episode, I interviewed Goalhanger's very own James Holland. We spoke about World War II and what World War II teaches us about today. Here's a clip. Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Well, I think he was a great man.

I think he was a man of vision.

He was a man of enormous geopolitical understanding, and he was a man who offered possibilities. When you're in a life and death struggle, you need people that can persuade you.

You need people that can bind you.

You need men of vision, of charisma. That's the problem with the moment is we haven't got those guys.

I mean, he's flawed, of course, all the great men are. But thank goodness for the developed world and the democratic world that he was political leader of Great Britain in throughout the whole of World War II. He literally, in so many different ways, man of the century, I think, because Roosevelt was a charmer. Roosevelt was a great strategist. He pulled the Americans through the Depression and helped him manage the war.

But without Churchill holding ground in May and June of 1940, it would have been a much darker, much worse world.

It would have been not a lot that the Americans could have done without Churchill's steadfastness and his inspiration to his fellow citizens.

If you want to hear the full episode, just search Open Book wherever you get your podcast.

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