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

29:38And there's a kind of parallel, I think, in which the way that poets in say 250 BC are in the shadow of a vanished greatness, literary greatness. Politically, Athens is slightly similar because Athens now in 250 BC stands in the shadows of empires that are vastly greater than the empire that the Athenians had run in the 5th century. And the independence of Athens and of all the other Greek city-states has effectively been snuffed out. And Dominic, I mean, 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.

30:20He 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 said, oh, it fragmented into these pitiful little successor states. But actually, those successor states are pretty powerful and rich empires, the Sunukid Empire, the Ptolemaic Empire.

31:01And 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? Classic Rest is 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 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 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.

31:40There was only kind of marshes and seabirds. The St. Petersburg of 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 to actually to have been born in Alexandria.

32:16And he was called off 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 megacity 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 meretricious and a 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 poet he's anticipating it yeah Callimachus is looking back to Athens and to Homer as the true golden age of Greek literature.

33:33And we do the same, by and large. That tends to be the assumption. You do. I actually love the Hellenistic era. I prefer classical Greece. I love the Hellenistic era too, but I can recognise that there is a point to Callimachus' criticism that it is slightly ersatz. It's because you don't like multiculturalism like I do, Tom. No, Dominic. There is an ersatz quality to trying to write an epic about a corner of the world that everyone knows is there and saying that it's full of monsters. But to stick up for Apollonius, Apollonius obviously thinks that it's an entirely legitimate what he's doing because otherwise he wouldn't write his epic.

34:07Of 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. 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 yeah 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 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 look or talk about alexander and his influence on uh what we've come to call greek mythology and let's look at what happens to this corpus of Greek stories and the way that Greeks understand the supernatural in the wake of Alexander's conquests.

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36:09Welcome 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 God's-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.

36:51And 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 travelled 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 2nd 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?

37:36No so he's never defeated but he's defeated by his own men in India on the river Hyphasis. They force him to turn back in 326. Yet again, he built an altar to the gods. I mean, Alexander, he loves doing two things, basically founding cities called Alexandria, building altars. And then he goes back to Babylon. And three years later, he's dead in Babylon, probably 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.

38:14But 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 Basigia, which I always thought was a brilliant subricade. Polyogates, 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 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 he has appeared, as though it's the Anthesteria.

39:01And 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 we can see before us, you are 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.

39:43And 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 Soter, doesn't he, the saviour? He does, yes. 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.

40:18The 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 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 kind of graham 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.

40:58So 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. And that this was true of all the other Olympians as well. They were all being 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 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.

41:45Initially, 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 Museon in Alexandria, you are skeptical about the stories of the Olympians. And you say, come on, this stuff is obviously rubbish. Yeah. There aren't people with the heads of this and turning themselves into eagles and sleeping with women.

42:16That's obviously rubbish. Yes, I think it is. And again, I mean, it's like, 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. 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.

42:58But this itself is a myth because just as intellectuals today who think that they have rejected, the superstitions of the past, actually are merely propagating new forms of that superstition. So you can see in the Hellenistic world, the rejection of what philosophers come to cast as superstition breeds its own superstitions. And 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 megacities. Right. The classic example of what this meant in practice, a guy called Epicurus, who is the son of Athenian settlers on Samos.

43:48He'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 re-thinkers and skeptics in the Enlightenment. But Epicurus is absolutely not an atheist and he's still 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, it's not because he's some kind of proto-scientist.

44:31That is absolutely not what Epicurus is about. To this day, there are rationalists who say, oh, Epicurus, he's brilliant. 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 you know 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 he's less richard dawkins he's much more the maharishi right he's somebody who says um sort of uh ignore all the silly rituals and stuff of the stuffy squares what we need 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.

45:42So he's like somebody talking about New Age crystals, that kind of thing. He's a profounder philosopher than that. I mean, there are Epicureans to this day who will not like that categorization. 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 the guru. So he sets up effectively a commune in Athens, which is funded by his wealthy admirers. Epicurus is not remotely in favour of allowing his followers to think for themselves. So his dictum is always, act always as though Epicurus is watching.

46:21So 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, saviour. So he really is like a cult leader. This is an age where people are looking for a saviour. And when he dies, considering that Epicurus had absolutely rejected the notion of interventionist gods, I mean, Epicurus, he's remembered very much like an interventionist god. So while he was alive, he'd referred to his body as being something holy. He demanded the first fruits from his followers. So that's the first fruits of the harvest, which is conventionally what you pay to the Olympian gods.

46:57And then after his death, they hold commemorative feasts. So it's looking back to the Olympian gods. It's looking forward to the way that Christians will commemorate Christ. epicurus is not an embodiment of enlightened rationalism i think it's fair to say and you know there's that famous comment chesterton makes that that you 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 institution, the old sort of rituals and assumptions have lost some of their power over people.

47:46And people are picking and choosing much more as they will do in like 1970s America or something. They're questing. Yes, exactly. They're searching for meaning. Yes, exactly. So kind of hanging out in the garden and dropping out is one option. There's another option which is hinted at quite strongly in Eurhemurus's book because 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.

48:33and so this is a way in which the olympians actually kind of make a return for greek intellectuals is that um 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 called 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're if you 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 taiki so greek for for fate for fortune um 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 um so an athenian poet put it in kind of very devastating terms it's not logos which guides the affairs of mortals but taiki 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 now 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 um that taiki is the goddess that controls everything then you You know, a philosopher sums it up well.

50:51Her 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 overemphasize the importance of that minority of people who really, really care about these things and talk about them a lot. But most people, of course, don't. They're interested in the price of bread or whatever. So Jason and 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.

51:33The old rituals that had sustained the independent Greek city-states carry on even though they're no longer independent. And for some, it becomes like the equivalent of the Trooping of the Colour or Bastille Day. 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.

52:11He'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. 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 an epic on the Homeric model, he knows what he's talking about.

52:44He's been involved drawing up the canonical text of Homer, which is something that scholars in Alexandria are really keen on doing it. He does it so well that he ends up becoming the chief 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.

53:19It is a study, a logos of myths. So it is a mythologia. 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. 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 a children's book is a work of mythology or telling mythology. The writer doesn't believe any of it, is drawing various elements and putting them together to tell a good story.

54:05But 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 thinks it's real or not, it's a complicated question.

54:44But 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, or writers and artists through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance into the modern period, is the great storehouse of Greek myth. It's the storehouse that Shakespeare draws on, Titian, Jason and the Argonauts, 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.

55:32So 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's why they endure in a way that the stories of the Babylonians or even the Egyptians, they seem unsatisfying to us in a way that the Greek myths aren't because they were ritualistic rather than literary. The Greek myths were always literary. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And I think that's why they appeal to children and they appeal to, you know, famous intellectuals like Nietzsche and Freud.

56:11And 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 they have all kinds of contaminations. That explains their potency. There is a drawback, though, which is that because it's mediated for us by mythology, by people who are studying it in a 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 and christian you know we have 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 the age of of sophocles and Euripides and still more of Homer.

57:24But 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.

58:06But actually, an even better way would be for me to ask you your favorite myth. Top myth. My favorite myth was always the Odyssey. Really? Yeah. I always loved the Odyssey because it was my gateway drug. Yeah, okay, fair enough. 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 club members, and club members can get it at therestishistory.com. Very good. But those who don't, maybe we could do one for the general listener. I think we should absolutely do one for the general listener to give people an insight into the ruthless way in which we conduct our affairs.

58:39I think we should do that when Christopher Nolan's film about The Odyssey comes out. Yeah, let's do that. I think we should do a series that Rest Is History subscribers will be able to hear first. That's a very, 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 ask me my favourite Greek myth. That's yours.

59:10Theseus. Because that was my gateway. That was the first one I read. Theseus and going at 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 shorty is a series waiting to happen. It is. Right. It is. Basically, the episode has turned into a scheduling meeting, which is lovely. We're back, aren't we, with an episode on someone who's very into the classics, namely Enoch Powell. 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.

59:47who goes on to become Nelson's great paramour. And then after that, we have the return of the Admiral himself, Nelson. I can't wait. Cannot wait. Right, and that bombshell, 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. Thank you.