Civility

22:13Melvyn Bragg:and we are travelling back to 8th century BCE to trace the origins of the Iliad and Odyssey, epic poems that became backbones of Western literature. Join me and my fantastic guests as we unpack the stories of ancient Greek culture, war and triumph and have a laugh while we do it. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.

22:38Melvyn Bragg:Can I go back a step or two? Did the civil war change things radically in this respect? You're nodding. Yes, I think massively so. So you've got, as Teresa has mentioned, you've got this way in which civil discourse has broken down, where you've got kind of obscene publications like Mercurius Fumagosis, which is kind of larded with insult and profanity, where you've got parliamentarian soldiers desecrating altars by placing their naked bums on them, on this kind of thing. So this has been occurring. But you also have a sense, you know, in 1660, the royalist Richard Alstree writes a book called The Gentleman's Calling.

23:11Melvyn Bragg:And he starts from the principle that this is all about reconstruction, that you've had such an utter collapse of gentility and of social hierarchy. And from 1660, the Restoration onwards, that hierarchy has to be rebuilt somehow. And a form of godly civility might be the way to do that. But he says, you know, the levelling principle, but also all of the crimes and sins of a puffed up gentry have demolished the hierarchy as was in England. And now it is the role of all good royalists to rebuild it from scratch. So to find a way of being civil, of being honest, but in a way that returns to a kind of dreamt-of status quo and a kind of a social hierarchy as it was beforehand.

23:51Melvyn Bragg:I thought you wanted to say something, yes. It's just, you know, Andrew Marvell, the famous restoration poet, his biggest insult or criticism that he could make at the bishops who were responsible for this profound incivility in terms of not making space for other denominations and not making listening to other voices was that they were rude. So rude is a severe criticism in the Restoration period. Just take these points up between you whenever you're listening.

24:19Guests:So to go to the question about civility and toleration, so the picture that we've been painting here is of those who are appealing to civility in general in the 17th century in England are those who are opposed to religious toleration, sort of broadly construed. The idea is that if we permit people to disagree publicly about religious questions, then inevitably we will descend not only into a war of words in which we hurl Lutheran-style insults and scatological images at each other using this great advancement in communications technology, the printing press, but from there it's but a hop, skip, and jump to the all-out destruction of civil war.

24:58Guests:That's the Hobbesian picture. And although few people would admit to agreeing with Hobbes on this, I think this is really almost a kind of consensus view. You cannot have a civil society that is also a tolerant society. But what happens in the 17th century is that people that we might expect to be the most sympathetic with Luther, these evangelical hot Puritan Protestants, a few of them begin to see that if they are going to be able to claim toleration for themselves, they're going to have to sort of reclaim civility too. And so one of the most interesting people in this regard is a hot Protestant called Roger Williams, who's sort of a very close contemporary of Hobbes, although a much more obscure figure.

25:39Guests:He is theorizing civility from the perspective of someone who is seen by almost everyone around him as paradigmatically uncivil. He's an evangelical Protestant who's constantly calling people sort of followers of the papal antichrist, accusing them of worshipping the devil, etc, etc. But he's doing so in the British colonies of North America on the colonial frontier.

26:02Melvyn Bragg:He's Rhode Island.

26:03Guests:Absolutely. So Roger Williams is known today, if he's known at all, as the founder of the colony of Rhode Island, which becomes the state of Rhode Island. And effectively what happens with Williams is he is so uncivil to his fellow Puritans in Massachusetts Bay that they end up banishing him in the dead of winter. And he survives only through the hospitality of the local Native American tribes, so the Narragansett and the Wampanoag. And so Williams finds himself in this sort of somewhat uncomfortable position of realizing that actually there is more civility among the unchristian pagan inhabitants of the New England wilderness than among his fellow Christians in Massachusetts Bay.

26:41Guests:And this leads Williams to pioneer an argument, which we'll later see again in John Locke, which is effectively to say society can tolerate not just varieties of Christianity, but it can tolerate even sort of non-Christian religions. For Williams, he thinks the most paganish Jewish or Mohammedan consciences, even Catholic anti-Christians, remember he's a kind of Lutheran, he sort of believes that Catholics follow the Antichrist, can live together if they but keep the bond of civility. And ultimately, when toleration triumphs by the end of the 17th century, it's with this idea that one can be civil without being a kind of good Christian.

27:19Melvyn Bragg:Can we move to Locke here?

27:20Guests:So that same argument, we see it in Locke's famous letter concerning toleration published in 1689. So Locke effectively says, look, it's not religious diversity that's the problem. It's not the fact that people disagree on these really fundamental questions and sort of argue and compete with each other in the domain of religion. It's that they do so in a way that violates this code of civil conduct. They do so in an uncivil way. So he says, if men will just keep the softness of civility in their disputes, then we can peacefully coexist together in religion. And so Locke, his toleration is not quite so extensive as Williams is, but he says, if we may speak frankly as becomes one man to another, neither pagan nor Mohammedan nor Jew should be restricted in his civil rights on matters just because of differences in religion.

28:14Melvyn Bragg:Yeah, but Nanarama said it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it. Exactly.

28:19Guests:It's the manner of disagreement, not the fact.

28:22Melvyn Bragg:And it's quite neat that at the same time as Locke is kind of theorising toleration and civility in that context, he's also, much like Erasmus, writing on children and education. So he writes in his Some Thoughts on Education, which is one of the most influential educational tracts of the modern era, huge in North America and elsewhere. where he is sceptical about maybe the fripperies of civil behaviour, but even Locke, at the same time as he's got that scepticism, urges parents to send their children to dancing masters because he says that that is the best way to learn the carriage of the body, that you simply need to be able to perform bodily civility in the exact same way that Erasmus was arguing over a century beforehand.

29:02Melvyn Bragg:Did civility become something that you had to pursue and join in order to be accepted in an acceptable society? Absolutely. So civility and the language of civility disperses throughout society across the early modern period. What dates are we talking about? So throughout the 16th and 17th century, but if you start to look at the records of church court disputes, so kind of parish level disputes, people having barneys in villages in the early 17th century, they are already using the language of civil and uncivil. My neighbour has behaved in a most uncivil way towards me. she is a most uncivil woman meaning that she's not honest that she's not chaste and there develops this market across the 17th century as Phil mentioned for manuals for books that will teach you how to be civil but they start to kind of penetrate all kinds or all aspects of society so you can learn to be a civil shopkeeper you can learn to be a civil housemate you can learn to be a civil servant who teaches you who's giving you this learning so there's a wide variety of people writing these manuals so for instance you'll get William Scott writes an essay of drapery which aims to teach merchants and shopkeepers this kind of behaviour.

30:11Melvyn Bragg:You'll get Hannah Woolley writing for serving maids and gentlewomen at the same time. So regular working authors are finding a way to teach civility across the board. If you're learning a new language, your Latin grammar will contain material on how to act civilly. And if you go on the grand tour or if you go and undertake educational travel, that too becomes an education in civility as well. Phil, is there much evidence of a reaction against civility at this point? There's plenty of positions you can take or forms of sociability you can adopt but you have Greek models like the hetereia and the komos which are very ritualised and quite abusive, masculine forms of drunkenness which get taken up in the early 17th century by English soldiers and groups privileged young men who are causing havoc in taverns and so on And often learning these ideas and these ritualised behaviours abroad on the continent and fighting the wars.

31:09Melvyn Bragg:You have ideas of making merry, where you would go to the alehouse and you would engage in banter, usually drunkenness again, or good fellowship. That's another kind of category of behaviour where you wouldn't necessarily conform to rules of civility. and then you have more philosophically probably engaged positions a bit later like libertinism which Alfred Bern is the poet I suppose Rochester is the central figure and they are more deliberately uncivil or anti-civil in a kind of ideological way.

31:42Guests:So picking up on that and making sort of explicit something that's been implicit in a lot of what we've been saying um civility is a code of civilized conduct or kind of virtue of civil conversation combines elements of equality and hierarchy in interesting ways. So we are meant to abide by this code of civility so as to have the kind of conversation that can take place between those who are free and equal, a conversation that is absent domination. But in doing so, we're also expected to conform ourselves to the hierarchical codes of behavior on the basis of our place within the kind of status quo.

32:17Guests:And so this is really clear in the case of considerations of gender. So that's sort of another example of the consummately uncivil person, or maybe let's say the paragon of incivility in this period, would be the female prophet who insisted not only on speaking on the basis of her direct line to God, but doing so in a way that was at odds with the feminine ideal of civility as being, exhibiting a kind of comely, infeminence, silence.

32:45Melvyn Bragg:I'd like to move forward now. Starting with you, John, how did this civility we've been talking about slip into ideas of civilisation? Yeah, so civility is, for people in the 16th and 17th century, something that you can bring people to, that you can reduce people to civility. And so from very early on, it becomes a tool and a language of domination. This idea of the barbarous against the civil. So we have in Ireland, for instance, with the English presence in Ireland, the Irish are characterised as barbarous and rude and needing to be brought to civility. So we get this with people like Edmund Spencer, it's very, very clear that the rude and wild Irish need to be tamed and brought to civility and to civilisation.

33:29Melvyn Bragg:And, you know, when we have massacres, for instance, of British settlers in Ireland, that's seen as being a collapse and a failure of the civility that, and the Protestant civility, the plantation was meant to bring in. At the same time or around the same time at the beginning of the 17th century with the growing English presence in North America, you see the same exporting of this language. So you see in kind of early communications around, for instance, the Virginia Company and the presence in the Chesapeake and around, you see the language of rudeness, of barbarity and of savagery being used to describe indigenous Americans.

34:04Guests:Just to agree with John, I mean, so the idea of civilization, the term civilization really comes in kind of the 18th and 19th centuries. But from the beginning, when I was talking earlier about the sort of Greek sense of political life as opposed to the life of a barbarian, there's the sense that the uncivil is rude, unruly, violent, dark, superstitious, all of these things. and all of these antonyms come in and inform the ideal of the civil person over and against those. And we can think of this as maybe the kind of the dark side of civility or civility talk. To appeal to civility is always to kind of raise the specter or the possibility of needing to suppress or exclude the uncivil other.

34:46Guests:I may have used, I think I used the phrase earlier, beyond the pale to describe the uncivil person as beyond the pale. It's a really suggestive phrase because it derives from the kind of Latin palace for stake or fence. So the person who's beyond the pale is the barbarian living beyond the fence. And of course, in the case of Catholic Ireland, it was the idea that the sort of savage Irish barbaric Catholic lived beyond the pale of sort of Anglicised, civilised Protestant Dublin.

35:13Melvyn Bragg:I mean I think one of the things we haven't talked about so much is the the idea of the civil conversation which is a kind of literary genre a learning tool of the skills but also a kind of formula for how you can engage with people who you have serious disagreements with and I mean one of the probably the grossest misapplications of civility just going on from what John was saying about Ireland and the early Americas was this the slavery complex and the fact that civility played into part of the justifications of why we could turn black people into chattel property and so on and treat them so inhuman.

35:48Melvyn Bragg:Can you just say a bit more about that? With civility as a justificatory point for that kind of nexus and the development of the slave economies in Barbados and in the Caribbean and then over in America as well. So going back to this idea of the civil conversation which Guazzo, one of Castiglione's Italian compatriots, introduces into the vernaculars in the 16th century, you find this guy called Thomas Treon, who's a sugar trader, so involved in and complicit in the slave trade at an early stage. Nevertheless, writing this in 1684, a civil conversation between an Ethiopian slave and a Christian, his master.

36:28Melvyn Bragg:And what you find is the enslaved person leading the discussion and following civil conversation norms is able to convince and show the Christian master that how inhumane and how uncivil and how brutal the treatment of the slaves has been and how they can reach a point of not abolition, but amelioration based on their conversation. So you have the perfect civil conversation being applied to the most imperfect, if you like, application of civility at quite an early date. And I think that's an important skill to relearn.

37:03Guests:I mean, this idea, Williams is such an interesting figure because he encapsulates all these different discourses of civility we've been talking about. So the civil as opposed to the barbarous or savage, the civil as opposed to the violent, and the civil as kind of the way of life of the urbane sort of merchant in London, because he's the son of a merchant tailor born in London. and who speaks...

37:25Melvyn Bragg:Friend of John Milton.

37:26Guests:Friend of John Milton speaks myriad different languages and it's precisely his facility with languages that allows him to master Narragansett language. So his first publication in 1643 is what's called The Key into the Language of America. And what it is, is it's a fascinating sort of handbook of American Indian language, culture and ways of life as a way of trying to open up what seems like savagery from the perspective of Protestants of old England to show that actually civility is there in the new world among the so-called savages.

37:59Melvyn Bragg:Can we say more about John Rawls? I think Theresa can.

38:06Guests:To skip way forward in time. I mean, so we've been talking in a loose way about this developing sense of a link between civility and toleration. We see it in Roger Williams. We see it in John Locke. And we see it in sort of even in 20th century liberal political philosophy. So John Rawls is the most famous philosopher of liberalism. He too sort of picks up on civility as being the key to coexistence between people who disagree deeply, especially disagree deeply in religion. In his book, Political Liberalism, he talks about what he calls the duty of civility, and he imagines it specifically as the willingness of the members of a secular liberal society to conduct their disagreements only on the basis of a shared commitment to secular liberal principles of justice and their willingness not to bring in their kind of partial religious commitments or authorities in the course of conducting their political debates.

39:05Guests:So again, civility as keeping the sort of the uncivil, in this case, the religious out.

39:12Melvyn Bragg:I mean another guy who another philosopher who is working in the same ballpark is Habermas and his idea of the kind of the bourgeois public sphere and so on which was criticized at the time for being elitist and gendered and so on. But in terms of the underlying principles, which are probably taken from ideas of civility going back to the ancients and then thinking about the crisis of our public discourse at the moment in the Western world, at least both in terms of our demagogic leaders and areas of discussion like social media and so on, you can see that you need some kind of recourse to civility to reform or improve the way which we talk to each other about so many different issues, I think.

39:55Guests:So there's a kind of paradox that comes up again and again of sort of civility being essential for the possibility of tolerance on the one hand, but also the way in which civility talk and especially accusing people of incivility becomes a tool of intolerance. We could coexist very well together in the midst of all our differences, so long as you sort of shut up.

40:16Melvyn Bragg:Can I just go across to you, Jordan? What aspects of civility would you jettison if you were asked to lighten the load in the balloon? Today, I think there are two. One is the use of appeals to civility as a means to silence people by saying, you are being uncivil, therefore I don't have to listen to you. But maybe more controversially, the historical sociologist Norbert Elias argued that the early modern period witnessed a civilising process and that people were urged to feel more shame about bodily functions and other things. There's a kind of rise of shame across this period. And maybe counterintuitively, I would like to argue that we should bring back shame in civil discourse.

40:55Melvyn Bragg:You should be ashamed to lie in public. You should be ashamed to slander opponents in filthy terms. And I think that, you know, we have witnessed a collapse of civil discourse at the moment in part because we have lost the ability, societally and politically, to force those in power to feel shame for shameful acts and shameful words. So, bring back shame. That's what I say. Do you think that? I think that's a really good point. And the basic principles of accommodation and self-knowledge as well, I think, are really significant. But shame is definitely the way to go. Can I keep asking you for a moment?

41:35Melvyn Bragg:Is there any way in which you think public civility is diminishing or it's in a steady place or where are we? Yeah, I think that, you know, we have, for all their problems, we have centuries of discourses about tolerance and learning, even when it's difficult to live together. I study immigrant communities in 16th century London. And I think we are witnessing a sustained chipping away of kind of hard won ideas about how you live with neighbours who are different to you, even if you don't like it. and I think that there's, for all that there are painful and violent legacies of civility and these ideas, I think there are also things that are worth keeping about how you live with difference and how you thrive in difference as well.

42:21Melvyn Bragg:Do you want to take that?

42:22Guests:Yeah, I mean, just to go back to the question of sort of what I jettison and what I keep with civility, I think that one of the aspects of civility that's worth reviving in the midst of this kind of contemporary crisis of civility, especially in sort of very polarised democracies like this one is recovering the kind of mereness of mere civility the sense of the kind of minimal nature civil behavior civil disagreement as meeting a low bar grudgingly and I think that that's what Roger Williams really saw in appealing to civility was that we've got to be able to live together peacefully even with those people that we regard as damned right and we've got to be able to maintain the sort of possibility of coexistence while also remaining convinced that our neighbours are going to hell.

43:11Guests:There's this wonderful example of this from Williams' own life, which is that he remained convinced throughout his life, even though he was impressed by the civility of the American Indians, that they were participating in devil worship. But nonetheless, upon one of his returns to London in 1651, he brought with him a petition on behalf of the Narragansett people for toleration so that they may not be forced from their religion. Again, Williams thought this religion was devil worship, but nevertheless, he thought it must be tolerated, that they could live together civilly with that which he could not approve.

43:46Melvyn Bragg:Last word from you, John. Well, actually, that makes me think a little bit of Montaigne, Michel de Montaigne, the French essayist, in his essay on cannibals, where he says that you've got these kind of 16th century discussions of supposed cannibalism in the Americas, but he looks at the French wars of religion on his doorstep and these kind of hecatons, these extraordinary massacres that are ongoing and poses the question of where barbarity really lies. And I think you see a way in which these discourses can be used to turn the mirror on European society. And that kind of critique, I think, is extraordinarily powerful.

44:20Melvyn Bragg:Well, thank all of you very much indeed. Thanks to Theresa Bajan, John Gallagher and Phil Whittington. In Our Time now takes its annual break and we'll be back on the 18th of September. Have a good summer and thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did you not say? Did you think you didn't have time to say that you would like to have said? I think I didn't talk as much about the social spaces that civility penetrates, but actually John picked up on some of those spaces when you mentioned the shopkeepers and gender relations and so on.

45:00Melvyn Bragg:So the parallel trajectories of the political, the religious and the social are really interesting. And John mentioned Hannah Woolley, who wrote, she was probably the most successful writer's full stop in the later 17th century. In one of her conduct books, it called The Gentle Woman's Companion from 1673, which was co-written with her publisher, Dorman Newman. and so it's not quite clear who's written which bits and she was quite cross that he'd written probably too much at the time. She defined civility as gentle plausibility and also a science of the right understanding of ourselves and how to dispose of our words and actions in the proper place and time.

45:43Melvyn Bragg:And I think the fact that that kind of sensibility and that sense of expectation of self-knowledge and self-awareness is penetrating, This is about how to talk to equals, but also how to subordinates, to talk to mistresses and mistresses to talk to subordinates and so on. But that went right down society. There was a little town I was brought up in, underneath the congregational church, that's where they had what they called the socials, which are the dancers. One trumpeter who'd been in the army, one guy who played the drums and made a living by painting posters. And we danced to that and learned how to dance to that.

46:19Melvyn Bragg:and the interesting thing reading about this and coming to this is that I went out from when I was a little boy from 89 you go to somebody and say may I have the pleasure of this dance and then you go and lead them back to the chair and I think that was common in what could be called working class communities it had gone to that extent is that idealistic or do you think there's something in that? No I mean I think there is a huge penetration of civility through the social order I mean the dangers going back to the issue of making people civil who don't want to be civil the reformation of manners is part of that process and that was often quite a persecutory alienating process because it is you know it's not straightforward to make people behave how you want them to behave even if it's possibly for a civil society's good and so on so there's there's always that tension between the social control and the power and and the empowerment and the improvement that people might get from it.

47:17Melvyn Bragg:I mean, the idea of civility is that it enables you to succeed in social situations as well, but at the same time, it's reproducing the inequalities that structure those situations, and that's a kind of massive paradox, I think.

47:30Guests:I think the problem is that when the aspirational element of civility and the exclusionary element of civility come together, you define civility in an ever more demanding way while also preserving this sense of the uncivil as intolerable.

47:44Melvyn Bragg:or you change what it's called and you develop politeness and you do it on spaces where you can be something that looks very like civil but some of the people who are starting to get a bit close aren't really allowed to enter or to participate in the same way

47:57Guests:that's right, I mean I wish I could have said a bit more about the kind of tolerant and civil society that Roger Williams himself founds in the new world the colony of Rhode Island so Rhode Island is interesting for a lot of reasons but basically the Williams's colony it's the most tolerant society that the world had ever seen absolutely in the 17th century it's the most tolerant society the world had ever seen and actually would see for a long time thereafter in Rhode Island there's no established church and on top of that there's a kind of what we would think of as equal protection so everybody enjoys the same and equal rights of free exercise free association and also free expression and so what happens in Rhode Island is you get this very kind of idiosyncratic picture of mere civility.

48:45Guests:To its critics, Rhode Island just seemed, they called it the, they called it Rogues Island and the latrine of New England, basically all of the religious riffraff and castaways, as well as American Indians were sort of living together in a way sort of where they would sort of disagree freely on the sort of most fundamental questions. But for Williams, this was kind of the key point. Civility had got to be understood in contrast with and sort of as different from spirituality or spiritual goodness. So to be merely civil was not the same as being a good person, a good man or indeed a good Christian.

49:19Phil?

49:19Melvyn Bragg:I think there's also a danger because of very powerful narratives like Elias' civilizing process and things like that, that we've approached civility as this blanket sort of ideology which everyone is always pressing down on people the whole time. but of course in in reality um people go to different social contexts and situations and they behave differently because you know i mentioned there's those different kinds of interactions that you can have that were valorized you know people could do what be civil and part of civil society in one part of their day and they could do something else in the other part of the you know hogarth's william hogarth's painting the um modern midnight conversation where you have all these very civil and respectable men absolutely out of it at 12 o 'clock at night in as soon as it's in john's coffee house or something like that you know juxtapose that with the the conversation pictures that he also painted some of which were the same people with their families or with civil people you know people have these different situations there's a a very good article about this kind of occasional politeness occasional civility occasional wit and so on it's not a constant, it's not like your mother watching you the whole time, 24 hours a day kind of thing, and monitoring your behaviour.

50:35Melvyn Bragg:People are different in different contexts. I think it would have been really interesting as well in that context to talk a bit more about travel, and particularly about the Grand Tour, because this is one of those places where the bounds of civility are tested, where people come into contact, in close contact, with people who are different religions to them, where you have to make snap decisions, like you're a Protestant on the streets of France, and the Blessed sacrament is being carried past you, do you take off your hat and kneel? Or do you attempt to kind of, you know, withstand it as a good Protestant?

51:02Melvyn Bragg:What's the right thing to do? And it's really interesting because if you look at the two kind of major foundational texts for the Grand Tour in England, so Jean Gaillard writes The Complete Gentleman, which is kind of all about how you should do this kind of travel. But he is coming off the back of an extraordinarily problematic and difficult period of travel with the young gentleman, Philip Percival, which got so bad that Gaillard gets dumped in the middle of France and has to travel home on his own. So it's kind but a long breakup letter in one way. But the other person who's really famous in this is Richard Lascelles.

51:30Melvyn Bragg:And Richard Lascelles is an extreme, he's the person who comes up with the phrase the grand tour. He's an extremely well-regarded guide to Italy and to Italian art and culture. But he's Catholic, he's a Catholic priest. And you have this idea that, you know, through travel and you have places like spa towns, like cities like Rome, where people have to work out every day and occasional civilities because you cannot constantly be at war with your tour guide or your tutor or your valet.

51:57Guests:Civility is rubbing along together, getting on with it.

52:00Melvyn Bragg:And then you're expected to bring it back to England. What you learned from that and turn it into a proper English civility with no flavour of fun. And also, if we understand civility as these skills, these social skills, then when Hannah Woolley is defining her science in the 1670s, it's precisely being able to understand context relative to other contexts and adjusting your behaviour accordingly. That's the key. it's not having a blanket set of rules like using a fork in a certain way it's being able to adjust to these situations as and when they arise and I guess that's the empowering aspects of civility as a sort of social ideology Well thank you all very much again Thank you Thank you Enjoyed that, did you?

52:42Melvyn Bragg:Yeah, it was really good Do you want tea or coffee? Yes please Black coffee please Melvin? A little coffee please Coffee, thank you very much

52:53Guests:I did have a Puritan quote just to amuse us all, but Thomas Watson in 1660. Civility doth but wash the outside, the inwards must be washed. A sow may be washed, yet a sow still. Civility is but strewing flowers on a dead corpse.

53:10Melvyn Bragg:Oof. Oh, dear. In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production.

53:19Guests:From BBC Radio 4. The Russians will be launching a satellite sometime in the next three weeks. I'm Kim Cattrall, back with a new series of Central Intelligence.

53:28Melvyn Bragg:This is a CIA covert op top secret. The drama podcast that tells the history of the CIA from the inside out. Starring Ed Harris, Johnny Flynn, and me, Kim Cattrall. Miss Page, such a pleasure to meet a real American.

53:44Guests:Listen to Central Intelligence Series 2 first on BBC Sounds.

53:52Melvyn Bragg:Before Achilles found glory and Odysseus eventually found his way home, someone had to compose the Iliad and Odyssey. But was their credited author, Homer, even real? Hi, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy show that takes history seriously, and we are travelling back to 8th century BCE to trace the origins of the Iliad and Odyssey, epic poems that became backbones of Western literature. Join me and my fantastic guests as we unpack the stories of ancient Greek culture, war and triumph, and have a laugh while we do it. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

54:29Melvyn Bragg:Bye.