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.

Let us continue the game another day.

So that, as everybody will know, was Zeus, the king of the gods.

He is staring down from Mount Olympus at the Greek hero Jason.

And Jason's 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.

And he's gone there in his ship, the Argo, with the Argonauts.

He has captured the fleece of a golden ram from Aetes, the king of Colchis.

He has won the heart of Aetes' daughter, who is called Medea.

who is a bit of a witch, literally, but very beautiful.

And she has helped Jason to win the Golden Fleece.

And it's Medea, of whom Zeus says, the girl is pretty.

Poor from Zeus.

And these are the very last lines of the film Jason the Argonauts, which came out in 1963.

And it starred Todd Armstrong as Jason, very wooden.

And Pussy Galore herself, Honor Blackman, as Hera.

the uh 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 it's brilliant.

So 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.

Wow.

Just to talk about Hera on a Blackman.

And 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 kind of figurehead on the Argo with great long lashes, which she flutters at Jason.

Oh, lovely.

Yeah.

Every so often.

so incredible special effects and when zeus says let us continue the game another day he he says that looking at her because they've basically been playing chess with the lives of the argonauts uh moving it around the chessboard on uh on mount olympus it's obvious from that that the script writers were hoping that they would get a sequel but the problem is that um moviegoers agreed with you and thought it was rubbish yeah so that the film completely bombed and so they never got the chance to do jason the argonauts part two yeah but dominic it is now widely recognized as a classic.

I think that's very strong, Tom.

Widely recognized as a classic.

And the person who thinks it's brilliant is friend of the show, Tom Hanks, who in 1992 compared it to Casablanca and Citizen Kane 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.

There.

No.

I don't think so, because he was doing it just before the Oscars, part of an a special uh a lifetime achievement award that was being given to um ray harryhausen oh yeah who was the most you know the most famous special effects guru in the whole of hollywood history so if you've ever seen a film where monsters move in a slightly staccato matter the the likelihood is that ray harryhausen was behind that and his work on jason and the argonauts is widely seen now as the absolute acme of pre-CGI special effects.

And And it's amazing for a film that was made in 1963.

So, 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 Argo 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 Trouton.

He's the second doctor from Doctor Who.

Very underrated doctor, actually.

He is.

Yeah.

Yes.

So I thought you'd enjoy it.

I mean, it's got Honor Blackman.

It's got Patrick Trouton.

It's got amazing things.

It's ticking all my boxes.

Yeah.

It's just a bad film.

Yeah.

I'll tell you who else it's got.

Nigel Green, who was the sergeant in Zulu.

Oh, yes.

Who played Heracles?

Yes.

And most amusingly 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 the titanic yeah played captain smith well he's and to be honest yeah you know if you've got to sail a ship from greece to to colchis captain smith is the last person you know

more a 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 bestow him wood.

Yeah, right.

Clashing 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's stolen the Golden Fleece.

He sews the teeth of a monster that Jason has slain.

And these skeletons fight with Jason and two of his friends, kills two of the friends, and Jason jumps into the sea.

i mean if you haven't seen it it's on youtube it's it's it's absolutely brilliant that idea of sewing the dragon's teeth may sound familiar because um

people may remember that cadmus the prince of tyre who went searching for europa who um dressed up as a menad um in the backey you know the founder of thebes he had also sewn a monster's teeth from which armed warriors had sprouted and 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 kind of killed each other.

But it's clearly the same basic idea.

And so people may be wondering, well, 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 kind of 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 rhodes and this is the the big source isn't it for the stories of the golden pleas now one interesting thing about this which might have occurred to people listening is 250 bc is very late so we are now well into the hellenistic era aren't we so 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.

So Talos, the giant bronze man, you know, who picks up the ship, the Harpies, the Clashing Rocks, the Spartoi, the sewn men, they're all in the Argonautica.

So in Apollonius' poem, it's not Aegis who sows the dragon's teeth, it's Jason.

And Jason is, as he does it, is drawing a plow that is being pulled by fire-breathing bulls.

Right.

And the reason for this is that it's been set as a challenge by Aegis, who doesn't want to give him the golden fleece.

And so basically, Aetes has said, if you draw this plow with the fire-breathing bulls and you sow the dragon's teeth and you live to tell the tale, then I will give you the golden fleece.

And Jason gets away with it because Medea, who is the daughter of Aetes, priestess of Hecate, the kind of 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 makes it's fire resistant so he he can cope with the fire breathing bulls it has a kind of incredible cocaine style effect on his self-confidence because jason in the 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 he he manages to um to 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's trick by throwing a stone into the middle of the sown men.

So 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's invention.

He explains it by saying that Athena, after Cadmus had killed the dragon, took its teeth and divided them up.

So half

Cadmus and half got given to Aetes.

So a bit of kind of retrospective continuity there.

Yes.

Yes.

And you can see that there is something, I think, quite Hollywood about this.

Apollonius basically, I mean, you could imagine him writing for 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.

And it works.

I mean, it is a kind of thrilling story to read.

But it's not just a thrilling story, is it?

Because Apollonius, so Apollonius is a great poet, but he's also a scholar who knows loads about Greek myths.

So actually, the comparison might be with a figure like J.R.R.

Tolgi, who's taking established myths and weaving them into, you know, throwing loads of elements in and creating a quest narrative that turns out to be a massive blockbuster.

No?

I think he is more, I'm surprised you didn't bring it up.

I think he's more like a script writer 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.

You know, with Star Wars, you have a kind of pre-existing universe where there are certain characters and certain plot lines, but you can kind of 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 kind of 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, you know, have grown up with and they know and love and reworking them and throwing new things 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, you know,

the kind of 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 Homer's.

We see Achilles, who's going to be the hero of the Iliad, as a little baby in the Argonautica.

Oh, my God, Anakin Skywalker.

Darth Veda as a little boy.

It's that kind of thing.

This is 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've 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 Rhone and end up in the western Mediterranean.

Yeah, don't go along the Rhone.

That's bumpy.

By tradition is where Odysseus sailed.

And so this gives Apollonius the chance to have the Argonauts meet all kinds of characters and monsters that Odysseus will go on to meet.

They pass the sirens, for instance, and Odysseus 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 lyre and he outsings the sirens.

And also you meet Circe, who in the Odyssey turns Odysseus's men into pigs

and then Odysseus kind of hangs out with him and she turns out to be Medea's aunt so it's like a bit like Dalveda turning out to be Luke's father

impressed with my incredible amazing knowledge of Cersei's knowledge yeah incredible and so I think part of the fun of

Reading the Arconautica, if you know anything about Greek myths, seeing the familiar elements, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's like, oh, there's Jabber the Hut and the Ewoks are back and his c3po making his inevitable appearance you know that's basically what it is but having said that for that reason i think just as people are kind of 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 that followed him throughout his career.

Traditionally,

it is said that,

and

your hackles always arise when i it is said that yeah so it didn't yeah but let's let's say for now that this is genuinely happened he had as his critic the most admired and celebrated poet of the age he was a guy called callimachus right and apollonius is writing you know an epic it's full of uh monsters and so on calimachus is writing very delicate recondite poems So if Apollonius is a script writer for a Star Wars prequel, Callimachus is more like T.S.

Eliot or Emily Dickinson.

Or if he's working in cinema, he's making little art house films, 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 mad.

You know, 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 kind of bombastic.

It'll be kind of meretricious trash.

Callimachus's nickname for Apollonius seems to have been the ibis.

And this is a bird that could be seen everywhere in Egypt, very common.

And it had always fascinated Greek writers for reasons that Peter Greene, in his tremendous book on the Hellenistic period, from Alexander to Actium.

Do you remember that?

I chose that as one of my

favourite history books from Alexander to Actium.

It's like 6,000 pages long.

Peter Greene lived to the age of 200, didn't he?

Yeah.

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 kind of filth or carrion it was also popularly believed to offset its diet by giving itself water enemas and colonic irrigation per anum with its own beak

besides copulating orally nesting in date palms to avoid cats and having a gut over 40 yards long.

And he then goes on to quote the geographer Strabo, who was writing in

the reign of Augustus, omnivorous and unclean, the ibis is only with difficulty kept away from things that are clean themselves and alien to all defilement.

So, in other words,

if we're to trust the tradition that Callimachus hated Apollonius, By comparing Apollonius to an ibis, he's essentially attacking the Argonautica not just as a kind of, you know, a mess of scavenged bits of trash, but for poisoning the ancient pure springs of myth.

And again, I think that is very like a kind of highbrow

critic of a Hollywood blockbuster.

It's a Guardian filmwriter saying there are too many Marvel films and people should be watching more Emil Bergman.

That's what it is.

That's essentially what he's saying.

And I think, you know, on one level,

you can see where Callimachus is coming from because the story of the Argonauts, I mean, it does draw on the foundational springs of Greek myth.

Homer doesn't mention Medea, but he does specify that Circe was sister to Aetes.

So in fact, it wasn't Apollonius' invention that Medea was Circe's niece.

And equally, he doesn't mention the Golden Fleece, but he does mention Jason and specifically the Clashing Rocks.

So in the Odyssey, when Circe is warning Odysseus about the Clashing Rocks and says, you know, avoid them at all cost,

Circe tells him that the Argo is the only ship that had ever passed through them.

So to quote the Odyssey, the swells would have hurled her too against those gigantic rocks had Hera not sent her on through since Jason was dear to her.

So Pussygalore stepping in to save Jason.

The rest of Apollonius' epic is culled from kind of various poets.

So Hesiod is there.

There's another poet from Thebes called Pindar, who wrote in the 5th century BC.

And in Athens, Euripides, friend of the show, author of the Bacchae, who we talked about in the previous episode.

So Pindar, we know from him that the story had begun with this absolutely kind of classic fairy tale, which revolves around a wicked stepmother who's out to get the two children of the king of Thessaly, who are called Phrixus and Heli.

And the brother and sister, Phrixus and Heli, they escape on a flying ram with a golden fleece.

And the ram takes off from Thessaly, flies over the Aegean, flies over the Hellespont.

And there there's a disaster because Heli hasn't got her seatbelt on and slips off and drowns in the stretch of water below.

Yeah, hence the name.

Hence the name, the Hellespont.

But Phrixus gets, he crosses the Black Sea safely, lands in Colchis and is given shelter by Aetes.

And when the flying golden ram dies, the fleece brings prosperity to Aetes' kingdom.

And so so he hangs it on a tree in a sacred grove where it is looked after by a dragon and the the the the the dragon the great serpent wraps its coils around the tree so this is all very familiar from the ladybird book of the jason the argonauts that i read when i was about five and also i see that the the rest of the the details where jason goes to get the fleece they're also in the ladybird book and they're from pindar too absolutely classic kind of greek myth isn't it his father what's this going aeson the king of yeah Iolkos.

He's been kicked out by his uncle, Peleus, when Jason was a baby.

And Jason, obviously, it's always the way he's been raised by a kind of wise old sage who is called Chiron and happens to be a centaur.

Happens to be a centaur, yeah.

But like, what's his name?

The

little gnome thing with the stupid voice.

Oh, come on.

Are you talking about Yoda?

Yoda.

Yoda.

So, yeah, so, so, Chiron is the Yoda.

Ignorant of Star Wars, are you, Tom Hond?

Am I?

No, that doesn't work, does it?

No, you know, Luke doesn't speak in the same Yoda's voice to Yoda.

Come on.

No, true.

Okay, all right.

So, meanwhile, back in Iolkos, Peleus, there's obviously a prophecy.

I mean, there's always a prophecy.

And he's been warned to beware a man with one sandal.

And Jason, he's been instructed by

Chiron, past his A-levels.

And so 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.

So Jason gives her a piggyback.

At the far side, the old woman transforms into Hera.

And this is why Hera from this point on is Jason's great patron.

But 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.

Yeah.

Sandal has come off.

Yes.

So he turns up and Peleus 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 and people may be wondering well that's you know why would jason do that and peleus comes up with three unanswerable reasons the first the first of these is that the ghost of phrixus demands it say the little boy Yeah, don't argue with him.

The second is an oracle has urged 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 iolchis 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 the voyage so i remember um 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 sort of um expedition to georgia on the other side of the black sea and he was trying to sort of uncover the roots of the golden fleece myth and he was sort of arguing you know 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 kind of historical reality, which is, what would you call it, the Greek age of exploration?

Yeah, a sense of colonization.

Yeah, going out.

I mean, Greeks obviously 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.

Right.

I mean, into the sixth century.

And it's about a process of discovery.

And they are venturing out into seas where you could well believe that you've come across clashing rocks or

monsters or sirens or whatever.

Well,

whether you're going westwards or eastwards.

So it's a bit like the, you know, the stories told by Vikings sailing off into the Atlantic or that, you know, down the great rivers through Russia.

But the problem, and this is, I think, why Callimachus has a point,

is that by 250 bc i mean everybody knows what the mediterranean and the black sea are like and no one could conceivably believe that there are monsters there and so that i think is why apollonius sends the argonauts into kind of middle middle europa oh the rhone and whatnot yeah because that they're generally people don't know what's going on there right so more opportunity for for for monsters so the one character who everybody remembers from chasing the golden fleece the the the hypnotic figure of medea the beautiful sorceress who helps jason but then obviously things go very very badly wrong for them as a couple and where does that where does she come from does she come from pindar as well yes so pindar provides apollonius with the outline of her story um and in pindar's account medea is a very heroic figure so as in the film actually um and her aid is crucial to jason's success he wouldn't have been able to win the golden fleece without her aphrodite um pindar says

you know casts a spell of love over her And in Apollonius' version, it's ridiculous.

Aphrodite gets Eros, her son, to shoot an arrow.

And Eros is like the kind of most annoying, it's like scrappy do.

He's like a kind of infuriating, child-friendly character introduced.

Oh, it's just terrible.

That Jarjar Binks.

Yes, he's the Jarjar Binks of Greek epic poetry.

And Medea.

is is you know it's 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, you know, harness the bulls and pep up his confidence.

And also, Medea 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 Jason then kills it.

And on the long voyage back, she provides the Argonauts with magic and prophecy.

That basically is the outline that Pindar gives Apollonius, and Apollonius kind of sticks to it.

There is another much more famous literary portrayal of Medea 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 Medea, she is portrayed in a very dark light.

And she is guilty of assorted crimes.

So in the back story,

as the Argonauts escape, she's taken her brother with her.

in one account.

As Aietes' 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 Aetis has to stop to pick up the bits.

Or in another account, the brother is leading the pursuit and Medea kills him.

When they get back to Thessaly, Peleas predictably does not hand over the throne.

So Medea eliminates him and she does it in a kind of brilliantly complicated way.

She gets Peleus' 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 that Medea is really into, is chopping up bodies.

And she chucks all the portions of the ram into the cauldron.

And there's kind of shimmering and a flash.

And then a minute later, the ram pops out and it's now a baby lamb.

kind of had all its youth restored to it.

And she says, if you do this to your father, then I'll be able to do the same.

And so Peleus's daughters get their father, slit his throat, chop him into bits, chuck him into the cauldron, and nothing happens.

And that's the end of Peleus.

So Jason then can become king of Iolcus and Thessaly.

And you'd think that he'd be very grateful to Medea.

But by this point, Jason is thinking, you know, she's a bit of a nightmare.

She's just, you know, endlessly chopping people up.

And fatefully, in Euripides' version, he dumps Medea

for a princess.

called Glauke, who's the princess of Corinth.

And so Medea doesn't take this lying down and she sends Glauke a poisoned dress and crown.

And Glauke puts it on and vanishes in a puff of smoke.

And Medea 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, son.

So harsh.

So harsh.

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

Continue.

Basically, Euripides' influence is so strong.

He's become such a kind of classic by this point that this is now the canonical understanding of Medea.

But it doesn't really suit Apollonius's purposes.

I mean, it's too bloodstained, too murderous.

And so essentially, he kind of slightly whitewashes that out.

I mean, that is so Hollywood.

You know, oh, we want to take that.

It's like the, yeah, it's like the Adam West Batman.

You know, all the right stuff i'm just going to say it first before the 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 sophocles aeschylus the great tragedians they have become classics and they have put later poets in their shadow and apollonius you know he has this anxiety of influence he's always conscious of it and that is really calimachus's point is that you can't write something fresh about medea

because we have these you know the euripides 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 kind of parallel, I think, in which the way that poets in, say, you know, 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.

And the independence of Athens and of all the other Greek city-states has effectively been snuffed out and dominated.

I mean, you know,

you know by whom.

Yeah, no one loves this more than I do.

I love to see the Athenians get a kicking from Macedon.

So Philip of Macedon 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 is history, he'd gone off on his, I think what we described as a gap year that got out of control.

Conquering the Persian Empire, going off to Afghanistan, dressing up in his foreign clothing.

Exactly, 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 sort of settled, fragmented into these pitiful little successor states.

But actually, those successor states are pretty powerful and rich empires, the Sanukid Empire, the Ptolemaic 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, you know, classic restus history club question, Alexandria.

It's Alexandria rather than Athens that is the real metropolis in this period, isn't it?

The sort of the city of culture, of science.

It's a mega city.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Obviously, it's founded by Alexander, named after him with Alexander's customary modesty.

And the thing about Alexandria, as opposed to Athens or Thebes with their kind of 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 kind of marshes and seabirds and peace.

So no temples.

And the central North Africa.

Yeah, no temples, no festivals, and crucially, no myths.

And so 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?

And I think that that's what the argument between Callimachus and Apollonius is all about.

Neither of them come from Greece, old Greece.

Callimachus had moved there from Cyrene, which is a city in what's now Libya.

And Apollonius himself, despite his name, Apollonius of Rhodes, seems actually to have been born in Alexandria.

And he was called of Rhodes because he liked visiting there.

Can Alexandria be a place?

What role does myth have in such a city?

And I think that Callimachus' 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 kind of vulgar and meretricious.

And I suppose it's slightly, again, like, you know, highbrow British attitudes towards American films.

Right, 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 mere

bit of a pastiche.

And I mean,

that's the classic criticism of Hellenistic culture.

But just to reiterate, I mean, that is the criticism that Callimachus is making, who is probably the greatest.

He's anticipating it.

Yeah.

Callimachus is looking back

to Athens and to Homer as the true golden golden age of Greek literature.

And you know, we do the same by and large.

Yeah, that's that tends to be the assumption.

You do.

I actually love the Hellenistic era.

I love the Hellenistic era too, but I can recognize that there is a point to Callimachus's

criticism that it is slightly Erzatz.

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

There is an Erzatz 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 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.

And he thinks that Callimachus is the idiot.

So like you.

And he wrote this one-line poem, which is kind of structured like an entry in an encyclopedia.

And he sums up Callimachus as trash, a cheap joke, a blockhead.

I love Apollonius.

I think he sounds brilliant.

It's exactly what I would do.

And I think that his defense of the Argonautica wouldn't just have been that it's, you know, a thrilling page turner.

What's wrong with a thrilling page turner?

You know, 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, you know, 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 claim to be gods, and of teeming mega-cities

that had not existed when

you know Sophocles, let alone Homer, was writing their masterpieces.

All right, well, let's take a break, Tom.

And 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.

And 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.

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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 sort of very fancy folio society edition of the Iliad that he puts under his pillow.

And he clearly is a very God-fearing or gods-fearing man because when he crosses the Hellespont, 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 Hephaestion 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 Zeus.

Yeah.

He goes to the Oracle of Siwa.

Yeah.

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 kind of stone burial heaps that are covered with ivy.

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 Arian, 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' 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 to turn back in 326.

Yet again, he built an altar to the gods.

I mean, Alexander,

he loves doing two things, basically founding cities called Alexandria and building altars.

And then he goes back to Babylon, and three years later, he's dead in Babylon, probably a malaria, possibly a poison.

We can't be sure.

Or is he, Tom?

Is he dead?

So Alexander is obviously angling to be worshipped as a god.

And this is a conceit that is treated with absolute contempt by, say, the Athenians.

I mean, 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 295, you have this Macedonian strongman called Demetrius the Besieger, which I always thought was a brilliant soup.

Yeah.

Polyoctes, isn't it?

Yeah, 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.

And he appears there as though he is, you know, a hero or maybe even a god, kind of Deus ex machina, appearing there.

And four years later, he comes back to Athens and is overtly greeted as though he were Dionysus, as though, you know, he has appeared, as though it's the anthesteria.

And he's accompanied into Athens by dancers carrying giant phalluses.

And the Athenians hail him with this kind of poem.

The other gods are far distant or have no ears or do not exist or ignore us, but you we can see before us.

You were not made of stone or wood.

No, you are real.

And they hail Demetrius as sota, as savior, and they allow him to live with his mistress in a back room of the Parthenon up on the Acropolis, the great temple to Athena on the Acropolis.

And Demetrius very modestly begins to refer to Athena as his sister.

And

that's just not his own ego, right?

Because this is becoming a trend across the Hellenistic world.

And I'm wondering, a lot of this must come from Egypt, from the Ptolemies, who are being worshipped as gods.

And actually, Ptolemy I calls himself Sota, doesn't he, the Saviour?

So this is becoming a trend for kings, would you say, across the Hellenistic era to identify themselves as the gods?

And I think you're right that it's part of a kind of cultural soup, but I think it's also reflecting a sense that the Olympians are not there for people in their kind of 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 kind of growing public skepticism among intellectuals about the Olympians' full stop.

So there is one book in particular that becomes an absolute bestseller in exactly this period.

And you can see why when I tell you what it seems is.

It's written by a philosopher called Euhemerus, and he comes up with a kind of very novel explanation for the ancient myths.

He's a kind of Graham Hancock Hancock of the ancient world.

And he wrote that this book is called The Sacred Register.

And in it, Euhemerus claims that he'd been sent on a diplomatic mission by one of the Macedonians to an island in the Indian Ocean.

And there he had found an inscription written in hieroglyphics.

And this is the Sacred Register.

So it's very Graham Hancock.

And the Sacred Register reveals a bombshell truth, which is that Zeus hadn't been a god at all.

He'd been a mortal king of Crete, who after his death had come to be worshipped as a god.

god and that this was true of all the other Olympians as well.

They would all been mortals and they'd been raised up to the heavens.

And 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 kind of recherche habit that had been under Plato.

It's becoming kind of becoming part of the mainstream.

So actually to go back to the last episode where we were talking about philosophers establishing themselves in opposition to poets and storytellers.

Initially they were out there in their little, you know, 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 kind of person who's hanging around at the museum in Alexandria, you are sceptical about the stories of the Olympians and you say, come on, this stuff is obviously rubbish.

There aren't people with the heads of this and turning themselves into eagles and sleeping with women.

That's obviously rubbish.

Yes, I think it is.

And again, I mean, it's a, you know, 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 kind of thing.

Yep, yep, yep, yep.

And

a bit like with the rejection of institutional Christianity today by intellectuals,

the rejection of the stories told of the Olympian gods by intellectuals in the Hellenistic world is often cast as a kind of 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 you know, 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.

So

I would say that what is happening in the Hellenistic world is that kind of

notions of the supernatural that had been appropriate to a world of small city-states

is now being adapted to a kind of 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.

And in due course, this will make him a great hero of rethinkers and skeptics in the Enlightenment.

But Epicurus is absolutely not an atheist, and he, you know, still less less a kind of rationalist.

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.

And his interest in the natural world, so all this kind of stuff about atoms and things,

you know, it's not because he's some kind of proto-scientist.

That is absolutely not what Epicurus is about.

To this day, there are rationalists who say, oh, Epicurus, he's brilliant.

You know, he's a kind of proto-scientist.

He's the opposite.

The only reason Epicurus has for researching the nature of things is to appreciate the pointlessness of believing in myths.

And this is because, in turn, it will lead to the state of tranquility, ataraxia in Greek, that Epicurus 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 Epicurus.

But it's not like he's saying, go out and become a, you know, invent nuclear physics or something like that.

He's basically, I mean, basically,

he's less Richard Dawkins.

He's much more the Maharishi.

Right.

He's somebody who says,

sort of, ignore all the silly rituals and stuff of the stuffy squares.

He's like the kind of person who drops out to become a Buddhist in the 1960s.

Is that basically what it is?

Yeah.

Well, you know, Buddhism is a kind of noble ancient tradition.

There's a strong element of the charlatan about Epicurus.

Oh, so he's like somebody talking about New Age crystals, that kind of thing.

He's a profounder philosopher than that.

I mean, there are Epicurans to this day who will not like that categorisation.

You know, so all the papyri scrolls in Herculaneum that are starting to be deciphered now are by Epicureans, which is slightly frustrating.

But Epicurus himself, I mean, there are definite qualities of, you know, the guru.

So he sets up effectively a commune in Athens, which is funded by his wealthy admirers.

Epicurus is not remotely in favor of allowing his followers to think for themselves.

So his dictum is always, act always as though Epicurus is watching.

So he's a kind of 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.

You know, this is an age where people are looking for a savior.

And when he dies, I mean, considering that Epicurus had absolutely rejected the notion of interventionist gods, I mean, Epicurus is, you know,

he's remembered very much like an interventionist god.

So he, he, while he was alive, he'd referred to his body as being something holy.

He demanded the first fruits from his followers.

So that's, you know, the first, the first fruits of the harvest, which is conventionally what you pay to the Olympian gods.

And then after his death, they hold commemorative feasts.

So he's kind of, you know, it's, it's looking back to the Olympian gods.

It's looking forward to the kind of the way that Christians will commemorate Christ.

Epicurus is not an embodiment of of enlightened rationalism, I think it's fair to say.

And, you know, there's that famous comment Chesterton makes that,

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, you know, they don't believe in nothing.

They become capable of believing in anything, basically.

So to go back to Jason the Argonaut, so what that's reflecting, therefore, is an age where there's a genuine kind of a massive flux of ideas, where the old institutions, the old sort of rituals and assumptions have lost some of their power over people and people are picking and choosing much more as they would

in like 1970s America or something.

They're questing.

Yes.

Exactly.

They're searching for meaning.

Yes, exactly.

So kind of hanging out in a garden and dropping out

is one option.

There's another option which is hinted at quite strongly in Euhemerus's book because Euhemerus, I mean, he's not an atheist either.

He thinks that the Olympians

were originally mortals, but he does think that there are gods, but he thinks that the gods are planets.

And this is another thing that is obviously influenced by Egyptian, Babylonian traditions.

You know, the Greek kings of Egypt and of

the Seleucids, they have access to this kind of very, very ancient astronomical, astrological inheritance.

And so this is a way in which the Olympians actually kind of make a return for Greek intellectuals is that the planets come to be identified with the Greek gods.

So 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, aka 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, Zeus, or as we call it, Jupiter.

But the thing is that 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, you know, 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.

And 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 there?

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 kind of astrology 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 Tyche, so Greek for fate, for fortune.

and that there is therefore, you know, 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.

So an Athenian poet put it in kind of very devastating terms.

It's not logos which guides the affairs of mortals, but Tyche.

So 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.

So,

you know, I think astrology is very bleak.

It tells you what's going to happen.

There's nothing you can do to affect it.

And if you think that Tyche is the goddess that controls everything, then, you know, a philosopher sums it up.

Well, her influence on our lives is as beyond computation as the manifestations of her power are unpredictable.

And 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 we overemphasize the 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 kind of 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, you know, it becomes like the equivalent equivalent of the trooping of the colour or Bastille Bay.

I mean, that's kind of 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 Argonautica, 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 Callimachus, is a very, very great scholar.

And they are both employed in the greatest of all the kind of research institutes that the Hellenistic period throws up.

And we've done an episode on it, namely the Library of Alexandria.

So Callimachus is the guy, as well as writing recondite poetry, he's drawn up the catalogue of the library, you know, absolutely massive product.

And Apollonius is an academic specialist on Homer.

So when he's writing, you know, an epic on the Homeric model, he knows what he's talking about.

He's an absolute, you know, he's been involved drawing up the kind of 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 librarian of Alexandria and he pips Callimachus 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 kind of thing that would have prompted, you know, they would have absolutely hated each other.

And so you can see that the Argonautica, even though it's a rollicking good read and tremendous entertainment, it is also something else.

It is a study, a logos of myths.

So it is a mythologia.

Right.

And so what is happening in Alexandria with people like Apollonius 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?

Do you think?

It's the study of myths.

Right.

It's the telling of myths with an awareness of their backstory and that you are doing it in a kind of a literary or scholarly manner.

So, you know, a children's book is a collection, you know, is a work of mythology or telling mythology.

The writer doesn't believe any of it, is drawing kind of various elements and putting them together to tell a good story.

But at its highest level, it results in extraordinary works of literature.

And 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 Aeneid is a work of mythology.

Right.

Virgil doesn't think it's real.

Virgil is, there's a slight, maybe

a tiny bit of an antiquarian element to it almost.

There is an antiquarian element.

I mean, whether he 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.

And you have Ovid as well, who writes this great collection of stories of transformations, metamorphoses for 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, Alexian, Jason the Argonauts, children's, you know, 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 stories.

They began as poems.

And that that's why they endure in a way that the stories of the Babylonians or the Egyptians or even the Egyptians, you know, 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.

And I think that's why they appeal to children and they appeal to, you know, famous intellectuals like Nietzsche and Freud.

And they've served as an inspiration to great writers and artists in a way that no other mythology has done.

And 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 molten heart of belief.

The Norse epics are written long after

the belief in the gods.

And so so they're kind of they have all kinds of contaminations yeah that explains their potency there is a drawback though which is that because it's mediated for us by by mythology by people who are studying it in a kind of 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, you know, we have kind of 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 Sophocles 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.

And that's the huge...

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 re-enter 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 favourite myth was always the Odyssey.

Really?

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

Yeah, okay, fair enough.

And I would love to do an episode at some point on The Odyssey.

We did one with Daniel Mandelson, but that's only for the club members and club members can get it at the restishistory.com.

Very cool.

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 Restus History subscribers will be able to hear first.

That's a very, very good plan.

Yeah, 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.

Kind of drawing up rules and creatures of whim,

but also of power.

Dominic, before we go, you asked me my favourite Greek myth.

That's yours.

Theseus.

Because that was was my gateway.

That was the first one I read.

Theseus and

going out of the labyrinth, fighting the minotaur and all that.

I loved all that.

The black sails.

We can do one on Crete as well.

Crete.

Well, Crete surely is a series waiting to happen.

It is.

Right.

It is.

Basically, the episode has turned into a scheduling meeting, which is like that.

We're back, aren't we, with an episode on someone who's very into the classics,

namely Enoch Powell.

Wow.

That's a

good segue.

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

And 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.

And then after that, we have the return of the Admiral himself, Nelson.

Can't wait.

Cannot wait.

Right.

And that bumshell, 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.