Gods in Epic Poetry

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Episode Transcript:

 Now, just this very week as I was getting this episode ready to publish, I was scrolling through social media and an interview popped up on my Reels. It was Daniel Radcliffe, who I love, and he was talking about the Iliad and about how he never wants to read it. He's read one of the modern adaptations, he said he'd read the Odyssey at school, but that realistically, the Iliad was never going to be a book that he was going to ever finish. And you know, I get it, the Iliad is a big book, it's dense, it's weighty,

 and if you're coming to it for the first time, it can be pretty intimidating. And I thought to myself, maybe Daniel would read it if it didn't feel like work. These poems, even if you're reading a translation, they're thousands of years old, they're about people that are very different from us, doing things that are very different from what we would do. But all you really need is someone to walk you through the context of the poems, explain how they work, explain some of the themes. And wouldn't you know it, today's episode does just that. I've asked one of our special guest experts to walk us through the role of gods in epic poetry, because they were main characters too. So Daniel, if you're listening, crack open that copy of the Iliad, you're going to be fine. OK, we have a stonker of an episode this week with our next special guest expert. Would you like to introduce yourself please?

 Hello, I am Laura Jenkinson-Brown, better known as Greek Myth Comics, and I'm a secondary school teacher from the UK down in the South Coast. I've been making Greek Myth Comics for the last 11 years, little infographic-y type explanations with stick figures of areas of the ancient world and especially literature and epic. And I've also recently written a book which is called You Are Odysseus,

 and it's an interactive fiction version of the Odyssey where you get to try and make the same decisions as Odysseus. But if you don't, you go on a completely different adventure. 

We're going to be talking about epic as a genre, but specifically, and I'm excited about this, the role of gods in epic. And I say this because before I read any Homer properly, I saw the movie Troy with Brad Pitt in it. And then when I went to read it properly, after realising that it wasn't quite as imposing as it seemed at first lance, that actually that film had missed out a lot. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. The gods in epic poetry. Is it fair to say, do you think, that the gods play a pretty vital role in the narrative of poems like The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid?

 Well, immediately, what is an epic poem? So it's got heroes and it's got gods in it. And sometimes also monsters, although we might argue that the people are the monsters, but that's another conversation.

 And really, if you don't have the gods in an epic poem, is it really an epic poem? Because it all comes down to really what the gods are. And this is a really interesting starting point when we teach classical civilisation for GCSE. So I've been teaching classics for 20 years, and for most of that time I taught The Odyssey and I taught The Iliad and The Aeneid. And some days I got to teach all three, which was just amazing. And so when we start off with the gods and we learn about what they are and who they are

 and what they represent, we realise that the gods are essentially external representations

 of what interests mortals and what's important to mortals.

 And one of the reasons why perhaps the Greek and then the Roman gods are so popular is because they generally represent one main thing that's really identifiable. And these things are still identifiable.

 So a god of love, all sex, and a god of war. I mean, immediately you can start to see that these are

 the things that are the most important themes in these people's lives, the people who were worshipping these gods at the time.

 And then, of course, an overarching sky god who's in charge of everybody and who's male, which reflects their patriarchal society. So having the gods in epic is one way. It elevates the whole thing because mortals are just people and they live and they die. And sometimes they do amazing things in between. And that seems to be what epics are about, those amazing things. But those amazing things can only be allowed to happen with the gods on hand. So they're in the background because everyone seemed to just accept that that's what was there behind them running their lives.

 And then when you have the gods directly appear as characters, you have a different sort of reason why they're there. And that they're not just representation of mortals' interests, but now, if they're associated with a specific character, they're the external representation of that character's talent.

 So few examples in the Iliad, Paris is very much doted on by Aphrodite because he's beautiful and sexy,

 and she's the goddess of that. And in the Odyssey, Athena is very much Odysseus' patron,

 almost his best friend, in a way, or at least in one-sided best friendship. And she is representing his wisdom, his cunning, his cleverness, and his war tactics within all of that because that's the male sphere of action.

 So if you take those out of epic, you have still got a cool story, but you are just reliant on the people in the story being exciting enough to do that. And then you've got the other problem in that you've got two types of divine presence in these stories, where one, you have, say, divine inspiration, and it can be like a little tiny thing, like it was as if a god guided us in, we were able to park our boat up so well,

 or if to say it was as if the gods had heard us and driven out these stags in front of us so we could make a meal of them. And that sort of does like a tick in a way, like we say, oh my goodness, or how lucky, or something like that. But then there's divine intervention, where the gods actually intervene. And you could probably split that into two roles, one where they seem to take the body of another human character, and so it could be argued that really it was just that human character maybe, and they didn't actually intervene.

 And that's easy to perhaps show on screen when you don't include the gods in your film. But then there's the divine intervention, which actually affects the plot. And as you mentioned with Troy earlier,

 one of the reasons why that film goes so far off the story is because they took out the gods, and thus they took out the divine intervention that changes the direction of the story. And they just went with, what would people do? And with people, it's a much shorter war.

 Yeah, absolutely. So for people reading or watching adaptations of the Trojan War, the Odyssey now, we've grown up in a modern world. We've usually grown up in or around religions

 that have a single god who's benevolent and omnipotent and he loves us and he wants the best for us,

 who cares deeply about mankind. Is that how Greek and Roman gods are depicted in ancient epic, or is it slightly different?

 It is different. I was just going to say, no, it's absolutely not. The gods have their favorites and often it's because another god owes them a favor to do with that favorite, so they're not actually doing something for the person, they're doing it for the other god. So for example, when divine armor is made by Hephaestus, he's doing it as a favor to the female goddess that has asked him whether it's Aphrodite, his wife in some of the poems, or whether it's Achilles' mother, Thetis, because she did him a favor earlier. And then the real basis for it, you have ancient prayer, which is another thing that we also teach on the GCSE. And we use examples from epic for both looking at the formula that a prayer is, because all of these things have a specific way of putting together the act of sacrifice and the act of prayer, so that you get all the bits involved. And even if you get all of that right, the gods might just decide not to listen to you, because it's not in their interest. They might have a completely different interest.

 So in the Iliad, when the queen of Troy is taking her women folk and praying to Athene to help them,

 we get the dramatic irony of hearing the poet tell us, but the goddess did not listen. And we know that Athene is on the other side. She's got a vested interest in supporting the Greeks, because Paris didn't pick her in the pretty goddesses competition. So the gods are very much picking and choosing

 their favorites if they feel represented by them, like those examples from before. Whether or not the god listens to you, it doesn't matter whether or not you have done everything right. So Hector, Prince of Troy, perfect man, does everything right, always worries about everyone, is probably the nicest character in the whole Iliad.

 Yes, I would agree!!

 And the gods are even saying, oh, it's a bit sad that Hector's got to die. He's always given us really good prayers. Oh, well, could you do something about that? Oh, no, you can't? Oh, okay. Because, yeah, well, you have this vested interest in this other thing happening. Troy must fall. And so we're just going to get to that in the end.

 And Hector is collateral damage... So would a Greek always find it a good thing if they attract the specific attentions of a god?

 Oh, well, that's very open, isn't it? For what reason have they attracted the attentions of the gods?

 Probably not. I mean, the first example that jumps to mind, Athene might be really chummy with Odysseus when she feels like it, certainly. But he attracts the attention of Poseidon

 because he blinds the Cyclops at Polyphemus. And Polyphemus' dad is Poseidon. And Polyphemus asks Poseidon in a prayer, but in a negative prayer, which we would think of as a curse, to either kill Odysseus or, if he can't, because Odysseus is actually fated to get home, then to mess up his life. And then that's exactly what happens because Poseidon chooses to act upon this. So you can attract the gods' attention in the right way and in the wrong way. And I guess, I suppose, if you attract their attention in the wrong way, they've got to do something about it, because otherwise it reflects badly on them, doesn't it?

 They can reward you if you do good stuff, or they can not reward you. And that makes them even more powerful because you don't know what direction they will go in. But if you have upset them,

 then they will absolutely come down on you like the proverbial ton of bricks. I think it's in the start of the Odyssey where there's an assembly of gods, and Poseidon isn't there. So Athena finally feels like she can talk to Zeus about getting Odysseus back in the world of the living. He's being stuck on Calypso's island. And they bring up these examples of other humans who have transgressed, I think there's Orestes, and what happened to him. So that's sort of an example of actually in the end

 they argue that yes, it is time for Odysseus to come out. He's served his purpose. Poseidon really can't be angry with him anymore, and it's right that he should go back.

So she does argue that he has these merits for the gods. So I suppose the answer is it is a good thing and a bad thing. It just depends on what you've done, really. And in hindsight, you could have done anything because something might happen, and you might attribute that to the gods doing it, and you will find a reason for why it happened, and you either did a good thing or a bad thing.

 Right, so it's not always a good idea to attract too much attention either way, perhaps.

 No.

 Just in case, because even if you attract the positive attention of one god, you're likely to annoy whoever they're not friends with at the moment.

 No, this is true, this is true. Although, can I think of an example? Yeah, so I suppose we can go slightly

 off Homer and edge towards Virgil and how Juno really hates Aeneas because he's Trojan. That's literally it. And it doesn't matter that everyone else seems to like Aeneas, and he does have this purpose.

 Jupiter, rather than Zeus, because it's Roman, is saying, well, he does have this purpose. He is going to go and found Rome the greatest of all cities that will ever be. And Juno has to finally give up, because her hatred of him, for this very spurious reason that she didn't get picked by another Trojan as the prettiest one, she has to give that up, because even she has to concede that she can't keep destroying him, because he's not destined to die, so there's only so far that she can go with it. But even then, she argues that fine, I destroyed Troy, fine, you can destroy one of my cities in the future. I really like Dido's city, Carthage. You can have that one. And then she agrees that, I will definitely stop attacking him, but only if you allow the language to still be called Latin, because I really like Turnus, who he's about to destroy as well, and he's part of the Latins.

So there is this bartering going on between the gods to do with their favorites and who they would like to continue on and who they've picked as their champion, I suppose. You get the same thing with Heracles, and Hera really hates him because he's yet another product of an affair by her husband,

 and she really ruins his life constantly. But even he, at the end, gets his apotheosis and is allowed

 to be turned into a god, because he has done so well and has upheld the gods' names all this time.

 I suppose the other way of attracting attention is by being incredibly hubristic, where you have shown off far too much pride and arrogance and perhaps even said that you were better than the god in some way, no matter how factual. There's so many myths about that, but to bring that back to Homer,

 the entire plot of the Odyssey is about transgression against Xenia, the hospitality, which is the law of Zeus.

You must look after your guests, and as a guest you must act in the right way. And most of that story

 even comes from the original sort of transgression, where Paris steals another man's wife and that starts the Trojan War, although you could also trace the beginnings of the Trojan back to Zeus just had to have someone yet again. But all of the baddies, say in the Odyssey, are people who have done the wrong thing when it comes to that particular law. Polyphemus, rather than give guest friendship,

 has eaten his guests, and he gets blinded, even though he says, I do not care for the gods. That's hubristic in itself.

 And on the other end of it, when he's back in the mortal realm, the suitors have turned up, and then they won't leave, and they're eating all the food, and they are making demands, and living it up, at none of them has expense, and okay so far, but then they plot to kill their host's son, and that's against everything. And Odysseus is told by Tiresias, by Athene, you are going to kill them for that, because that is Zeus's law, that they have transgressed, they have been hubristic in that.

 Right. And that makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

 It does. There's got to be a purpose for all of the death. It can't just be, and then there was a bloodbath,

 and the end, and it's not, and well it is if you believe that the book 24 is not original, which seems to sort out the fact that everyone's on their arms and is really upset about this. Book 24 being written elsewhere, that's an entire different episode, maybe we can get into that one day.

 For the gods, again coming back to the idea of gods that we might have now, that they're all wonderful people, not people, but they're flawless, they are perfect. Is that true of gods in epic, or do we see some really deep character flaws that they are not even trying to hide? The gods are definitely not perfect,

 and that's really interesting, and I think that's another reason why they are so very beloved still,

 and why people still write books about them and make them characters and stories, because they are like humans times a million, and they have all the superhero things, they can fly, and they can move fast, and they can change into different people, and they can do what they want, and they live forever,

 and there are no consequences to their lives, which means they can be incredibly petty, just like real humans, and they don't have any consequences for it. So it's very much a kind of do as I say,

 but definitely don't do as I do, because that would be hubristic.

 I'm going to give you some really bad examples here. I'm Zeus. I'm going to sleep with everyone,

 but you can't do that, because women are property, and that would be transgression,

 but I'm a god, so it's okay, and lots of these other examples. The gods themselves are imperfect.

 Aphrodite sleeps with a man who is not her husband. Zeus sleeps with women and men who are not his wife. The gods themselves are generally seen as very, very beautiful, but even one of them,

 Hephaestus or Vulcan, is often described really unfairly, I think, as ugly, and he's often given this sort of almost comedy appearance, which we would think of as absolutely hateful now,

 because he has in a lot of depictions of him a disability, but even that is a show of the gods' power.

 He is thrown off Olympus, and he falls all day and all night, and he finally lands, and it doesn't kill him, and he only has this one small disability, I suppose, by contrast to what could have happened,

 and he is still really beloved among them for being the best at making beautiful things, and he is still seen as this absolute paragon of the crafts and the art of humankind, and every beautiful thing is attributed to Hephaestus or Vulcan. It is as if he helped me make this thing, which again is stopping you being a bit hubristic by saying, I made it, and he had no help in the matter.

 So the gods are definitely not perfect, and I think that's important. A really perfect god is very difficult to have faith in, I think, and especially when bad things happen. When bad things happen in the ancient world, oh, we probably did something wrong, and now we have to re-examine why we've angered a god. It's the whole plot of the story of Oedipus. There's a plague on his city, to stray away from Homer a bit there, but there's a plague on his city, and he's got to find out why there's a plague

 because clearly they've done something wrong in the past, and then he discovers that he's the one

 who's done something wrong, very sadly, by killing his father and marrying his mother completely unwittingly. But the whole idea then is that the city is cursed because it is polluted. It has not been kept sacred by acting in the right way. He's done things that only gods would do, like commit incest.

For example, Zeus and Hera are brother and sister, but they're immortals, so there is no consequence to that. But for mortals, there absolutely is. So it's really interesting, I think, this relationship between gods and mortals and how gods are essentially this superversion of a mortal, kind of like a bit like a modern superhero, but they're flawed-like people, so they're identifiable, and that makes them much more easy to believe in and much more easy to understand when things go wrong.

 I would absolutely agree with that, definitely. Particularly when, for instance, we see modern tragedies

 and you have 'thoughts and prayers,' I always kind of think, well, is the prayer not a little bit too late?

 Or did the god not listen? Yeah, it's not helping us. If I were a god on Mount Olympus, I can imagine...

 All careful there, Alex!

 Oh, I know. I'm going to get some kind of curse come down on me... if I were a god on Mount Olympus and I had no consequences to any of my actions and I could do pretty much whatever I wanted. I struggle to think about why I would be so heavily emotionally invested in what a bunch of mortals are doing down at the bottom of the mountain. So when we think about the Trojan War,

 why are the gods bothered about anything that's happening? Why do they keep intervening?

 Why do they keep picking favourites?

 There's loads of answers to this and they're all really fun because humans are always trying to justify why we exist, what are we for, and then we have to just, why do the gods exist? And one of the things I do when I get asked questions like this in class is I invoke Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, which most of them still know what that is. Although it's still going into the past of our sort of cultural identity.

 And there's a bit where Tinkerbell is sick and you have to clap and say you believe in fairies and Tinkerbell will come back to life. So I guess that's a bit like the gods. One of the reasons why the gods care about mortals seems to be that they worship them and they seem to feed off that in a way.

 If we look at the story of Demeter and Persephone, when she's trying to get her daughter back and then she finds out that her daughter has been given in marriage to Hades without her being involved at all and she's really angry about it, she can't harm the gods, so she harms the people. She stops them being able to grow food and then they can't worship the gods anymore because they're all dying.

 And the gods get upset about this and so that's her leverage. And then you might ask the question

 but didn't the gods exist before mortals? And then didn't the gods invent mortals or was that Prometheus or was that Prometheus and Zeus? And perhaps the argument there is that yes,

 the gods won and then what do they find themselves in charge of? An earth with some animals on it

 and all the titans imprisoned so they've got to replace them with something perhaps. In the earliest myths, there seems to be a world where the gods and the humans kind of co-exist a lot more closely

 while all of these ages of heroes seem to come in.

 So the gods are talking directly to kings like, you know, Minos of Crete, he asks for a favour,

 send me something beautiful so I can sacrifice it to you and then Poseidon sends him the beautiful white bull from the sea and then he doesn't sacrifice it and the whole minotaur story happens.

 Whoever it was who built Troy the first, is it Ilus? That would make sense, Illium. I can't remember now. He has Poseidon helping him build the walls of Troy and then he doesn't pay him. So we have this really close connection between gods and mortals and it's like the gods are testing them every so often

 and then sometimes the gods get tested by mortals and then they're the ones who are being punished

 for all eternity like Sisyphus who just keeps transguessing against the gods just to see what will happen. He pokes the bear, literally. He ends up pushing a boulder up a hill for eternity.

 Most people don't get punished for eternity but he does and it seems like the gods can't really

 seem to exist without mortals and mortals can't exist without gods possibly or is that a bit like, you know, George Orwell?

 If there is hope that lies in the proles are we just waiting to rise up and rebel against the gods in number? One, and I forget where I read this and I could never find the reference again refers to a story about how Zeus wanted to cut down the number of humans and so that was one of the reasons for the Trojan War because it would kill so many and then the world could sort of start again and that sort of fits in a little bit with the idea of Bronze Age collapse then and things that have started and restarted or so forth but it is a bit of a mystery and I'd love to know where I've read that or where I've heard that. It's so difficult to find sources these days when so much of social media is pumping them back at you without the source attached to it and then you can't remember where you read it. Was it in dance or was it in one of my other hundred books? So yeah, it's a really interesting question that but I think in the films, the really earlier sort of 1950s films that they make of this and the gods are in their beautiful big palace and everything is white because they hadn't really understood about polychromy

 and they've got this big fishbowl in the middle and it's like a magic pond and they can see the humans

 or it's like a little battleground and they're moving them around. Olympus looks so boring.

 This is the only thing they have to wire their time which is just like humans. We have to be having a war or playing a game or something at least now we have books and TV in order to pass the time.

 So we could describe potentially the whole Trojan War as the gods playing their version of Dungeons and Dragons to keep themselves amused...

 There's this idea that the gods are messing with us and you can kind of see why then the idea of a more

 say modern, dare I say modern god, it's probably not really the right thing to say, a god who loves everyone equally and looks after everybody and is therefore the best god because he's got all of our interests at heart. You can see why that might actually be quite for some people an attractive concept.

 So one of the things that I'm interested about in Greek religion is the idea of the fates controlling everything to do with mortal lives right from their birth until their death. So if every mortal has everything about their life predetermined, when the gods are intervening and interrupting and meddling, is this all pointless? Can they actually help their favourites and hurt the ones that they don't like when everything's fated already or are they also slaves to the fates?

 I like this idea of them as being slaves to the fates because it's never really explored who the fates are

 and they don't really appear in a lot of actual mythology, they're just sort of recognised as being there I think. But the idea of them is wonderful because you have these three women and their spinning wool essentially which would have been a massively identifiable thing in the ancient world and you are the wool. So one chooses the wool or starts to spin it, another one measures it out and then the third one cuts it. So yes, this idea that your life is already decided and when it's going to get cut is decided.

 But what I like to think of is the difference between fate and fortune because in Epic the gods always talk about the fates of mortals. So in the Iliad, Achilles who talks about his own fate and Thetis his mother, his goddess, mother who talks about his fate where he has two potential fates and it depends on what he does in his life that will give him this fate to end up with. He will either not go to war and live a long life and have loads of grandkids and be entirely forgotten which is the fate that his father, the warmonger Peleus or warmonger is probably a mean word, the general, the fighter Peleus that's what he wants for his son to be greater than him and that was the thing, whoever slept with Thetis would have a son greater than himself. And the other fate is that he will go to the Trojan War

 and he will go and fight and he will die there but then his name will last forever and that's the one Peleus wants for his son Thetis would like the other one for her son and that's why she tries to hide him away from all that and hides him as a girl on Skyros for example.

 And the gods know that these fates maybe are slightly malleable and that's maybe your fortune but then your end point is generally fixed but Achilles at least has a choice of end points depending on what he does and I think the later philosopher Heraclitus said something similar a man's fate is his character or rather maybe it's the other way around a man's character is his fate, the choices that you make end up giving you a particular fate. But then what's overlooked there is the idea of fortune, what happens to you on the way. So I like to think of fate as being your final destination and fortune is the journey and if you mess up on your journey the gods can, well if you mess up in a way that upsets the gods they can make your journey long and arduous. So for example Odysseus, when he is being cursed by Polyphemus Polyphemus puts this proviso in, I want him dead but if you can't do that because he's fated to get home then please let him get home late in a wretched state needing help and alone, finding trouble at home - I had to put it in a rhyme so I could remember it! - and those are all the things that then come to pass he loses all his men, he's literally got not even really the clothes on his back

 when he washes up on the island of Phaeacians and there is trouble at home and he comes home with nothing.

So all of those things seem to be his fortune like he's destined to get home but when is not destined

 and because, I mean he nearly gets home Aeolus gives him the bag of winds so that the winds do not interfere with his journey and he just has Zephyrus to blow him home and he pilots the ship for nine days and nights and they can see Ithaca they can see the fires burning on the shore and he falls asleep then because he's home and he's been awake for nine days again, impossible but still he's a hero right

 he's amazing and then his men open the bag because he didn't tell them what was in the bag

 and even though it's made a big deal of in the Odyssey I always share out everything

 everyone gets their fair share the men assume that he's hiding something from them and that they're not going to get their fair share and they open the bag and there's a horrible storm and they get blown right back to Aeolus and then after Aeolus refuses to help them because he must be so hated by the gods for this to have happened - Aeolus says I can't touch you because Aeolus's entire role is dependent on the gods he's a mortal too it seems or at least he's a mortal who's been elevated to the status of almost divine and given the winds to look after and married all his children to each other which is definitely a divine thing not a mortal thing even Aeolus cannot touch Odysseus because he must be so hated for this to happen and this is after what's happened with the Cyclops so you know, whose fault is it were they destined to open the bag because now the Cyclops has got Poseidon to make his dreams come true.

And then the next stop after that is the Lystraconians and they all get eaten except for Odysseus' deception he's already losing his men so this idea that he is fated to get home but what happens on the way is fair game and that seems to be I suppose if we argue we could look at an awful lot of the lives of heroes and we'd find that same pattern but then the interesting thing is it is only the lives of heroes who get a prophecy perhaps and not everyone does get a prophecy they might just have the gods intervene in their lives so not everyone knows what their fate is going to be and the gods really aren't that bothered about most people so we only hear about the heroes if the gods want to intervene in their lives when Patroclus is having his Aristeia his red-eyed meltdown on the battlefield and killing loads of people and he kills Sarpedon, a son of Zeus and Zeus is really upset about it but Sarpedon is fated to die

 at the hands of Patroclus so he can't do anything about it. Instead he just makes it he makes it rain blood which is amazing what an omen to show his displeasure and I was always really mystified because

 I used the same copy every year of the Iliad and one year when I was reading that page

 literally there was a bloodstain and I don't know where it came from! So that was really cool,

 but yeah they really are bound by this and no one really seems to understand why Zeus can hold up his golden scales on the battlefield to see who will win a particular battle with it so yes, Troy is destined to fall, but during that time Troy gets absolutely routed and the Greeks get absolutely routed so they say oh maybe Troy won't fall, but we know it's destined to fall. So even though they're winning right now

 they won't win in the future. 

In the Iliad quite early on there's a truce where Paris says I will fight your best warrior and we'll end the war right now and Menelaus the husband of Paris' new - well I say new they've been married 9 years by this point - wife Helen, says I'll fight you and Paris is like oh yeah but not you and then he has to be coerced to fight but then in a shocking act of divine intervention when Paris is about to lose the battle, Aphrodite literally picks him up and flies him away in a puff of smoke and he's gone and that isn't ignored, everyone on the battlefield is rushing back going wait where is he and the Trojans say

 we don't have him and the truce seems to be on the point of breaking but they've sworn special oaths about it and then Athene comes down as another member of the Trojan side and tells Pandarus,

 apparently a very stupid man with a bow and arrow, 'you could kill Menelaus right now

 and end the war', and he shoots him and then thus the truce is ended. So we do have this divine intervention that affects the plot.

 I think it's really interesting that Zeus doesn't intervene with Sarpedon. The blood is cool and they should have had that in the movie!

 It's very metal

 It is incredibly metal! That would have been an amazing scene, but it does seem to be interesting

 that just because they're gods doesn't mean they're going to all act in the same way; they're not all going to just sit back and watch. It's a personal choice - it's not something that they can or cannot do

 as a whole because of who they are, which means that I suppose, even if you have a divine parent and even if you have the favour of one of them, it might not do you any good...

 But then again it might! I like the kind of dramatic tension that that causes. It doesn't matter who your father is! Your father can be Zeus, it doesn't matter. I mean, if all the gods had children who were just immortal or even semi-immortal that would be really dull - except if you have them battle each other. And I suppose that's really what the Iliad is; a load of the greatest heroes are somehow descendants of the gods. Half the population seems to be a descendant of Hercules by this point anyway

 (or Heracles rather) but yeah this personal choice is really interesting and I find it fascinating that of all the gods in the Iliad who are present, (because they're not all present), it's Aphrodite the one who seems to be the one who's most like a main character and who actually intervenes on more than one occasion. It is very much because her favourites Paris and her son Aeneas, her mortal son, are being attacked and she can't bear it. So she actually tries to intervene to save their lives knowing perhaps that they are not fated to die there, so it's okay for her to do this. 

When Zeus ponders saving Sarpedon, Hera says something along the lines of 'do it then, but we immortals will not support you because we know it's wrong.' It's like they think about doing it but they are bound by these really special rules. Aphrodite doesn't care, she gets well in there.

 Athene is so annoyed about this, she gives Diomedes the power to see the gods in their true form and Diomedes stabs Aphrodite in the hand which is, like, he actually wounds a god! But then there's even a point where Zeus says 'look, stop intervening everybody! We need to let this play out!' and then Hera seduces him, so that then he will fall asleep as men apparently do, and they can all get back down on the battlefield.

But I prefer it when the gods don't get directly involved because it's almost like breaking that fourth wall, and then when you do make that choice in classical reception to not include the gods you are

 left with a whole bag of holes really, and a story that's disjointed and doesn't really make sense.

 I mean let's face it the Trojan War as a ten year siege doesn't really make sense anyway and I don't think there's any evidence for a siege that long at the place that is identified as Troy (whereas there are

 several sieges that clearly are) but I think where a god is used, like I said before, to be the external representation of the talent immortals at that point even in death... When Patroclus is finally taken down on the battlefield it takes three men to do so and one of those men is Apollo, so he's not really a man,  he strikes him and makes all his armor fall off.

 Not every kill in the entire Trojan War is listed in the Iliad and Achilles kills hardly anyone comparatively, the biggest Aristea belongs to Patroclus. He kills the most people because it's the most documented one and it's very much pride comes before a fall. He's practically trying to run

 up the walls of Troy and he has to be taken down (including by a god) to stop him really just emphasizing how powerful and he really has been and that seems to be a much more effective and identifiable way of using the gods in the story. Whereas having Aphrodite come down and take Paris

 off the battlefield - that's just funny - because then it cuts to her taking him into Troy and going to see Helen, and then having an argument with Helen where Helen is feisty because she's had enough

 and she's like saying 'if you love him so much you sleep with him' (which is amazing) and Aphrodite

 essentially threatens her with violence - 'remember I can end you! Go and sleep with that man that we both adore!' So Helen's like 'fine' and she goes and sleeps with him and then it cuts back to the battlefield we're like 'wait where is he? Where's he gone? He was here a minute ago!' And then they have this argument and then later on Hector goes back into Troy essentially to find out where his brother's gone and we have this wonderful scene where he goes and he finds his brother polishing his helmet... (euphemism possibly!?) and sitting in his bedroom. He hasn't even thought to come back

 to the battle and Helen's just weaving, and Helen looks at Hector and there's 'oh you and me, you and me Hector! Why are the gods so so mean to us? We above all are hated by the gods!' and Hector then says 'come back to the battlefield, you know what are you doing, you good for nothing man with the wrong priorities!' and Paris is all 'I suppose you're right but just don't hate me because I'm beautiful! I will come back!' and then he runs back to the battle... and the simile is like a stallion going to where the mares are, right? It's all about sex with him, it's so gross.

Then comparatively poor old Hector sees his wife who is the right kind of woman for him, who knows what he's doing and wants him to come back in he says 'I would feel shame before the men and women of Troy if I were to just stay indoors and I have to go out and do this thing', knowing that he will die.

 You get this moment elevated by the presence of Aphrodite and it becomes almost comical but also really really dark, and I think what that then does is highlight the moment of utter tragedy.

 The flaw of Hector is that he's too good, and that's the last time he sees his wife and child.

It's devastating to read, it really is! I think I cried the first time I read it because I love Hector, a huge

 Hector fan.

 Going back to Aphrodite, not only does she sound like she's potentially she's not really even that scared of emasculating Paris by scooping him up and taking him away... but also she sounds like

 the mother-in-law from hell, doesn't she!? I think there's almost a little bit of a parallel isn't there

 between gods and mortals with Peleus and Thetis. Peleus wants Achilles to be a warrior and die as

 a warrior (Thetis doesn't)... Zeus is willing to sit back and watch Sarpedon die because it's on a battlefield it's an honourable death, but Aphrodite again the woman doesn't want that so there's a kind of maternal aspect isn't there?

 Exactly. They're identifiable. Aphrodite might be the goddess of sex but she's also a mother, especially then I suppose in the Roman text where she becomes the great mother figure for Rome rather than in the Greek text where she's not like that to put it mildly! But yeah that is this identifiable female figure. She's outside her sphere of action and yet she's also within it. She shouldn't be on the battlefield but she's protecting her son. The gods can do that! When we then see Hector's wife Andromache, she's out of her sphere - she should have been weaving in the house like Helen was ironically actually doing, she's always perceived as this terrible slut  but actually she's behaving in absolutely the right way

 and Andromache is outside her sphere of action and she's taken her child to stand on the walls and look down and she's actually giving her husband war advice! She is going to lose her husband. It's not because of that, but she is going to lose her husband and so, again, the gods being these external representations of things that are important to mortals. That's absolutely it; mothers and protection of children, fathers still wanting to protect their children but also by doing so by protecting their reputation because that's the male sphere of action, the warfare... the tactics...

 I mean we can see that in Athene being such a sort of a duality of a goddess in that she is a goddess

 of wisdom but for men and women that's entirely different things - for men that is war tactics. That's why she wears her helmet pushed back on her head - she's giving advice on war, she's not in it. And then for women she's weaving, and men make the statues so she's always in that male form but also I imagine carving a loom would be really hard... but she's then representing those aspects of men pretty much all the way through the myths. If we look at the Odyssey, for Odysseus and Penelope she's kind of represented in both of those in that for Odysseus it's the wiliness. For Penelope she is the weaver. She uses that to her advantage, she weaves stories and she literally weaves the shroud and we're always told

 that Penelope is a great match for Odysseus and so we kind of see perhaps Athene in both of those things. Or, rather, we might do through this lens because again she's so identifiable as these particular traits not that we have such different spheres of action for men and women now, (mostly!) - but I think that's the most important thing about them [the gods] is that they do represent us. One might even say they might even have been created by humans to begin with!

 I can hear the thunderbolts! If there's a sudden storm over your house in the next two minutes we will know why!

 So we've talked about several goddesses and we've talked about the gods being really central to the narrative of these epic poems and of course there are a lot of epic poems that aren't anything to do

 about the Trojan War, and there are a lot of epic poems that we don't even have anymore, they've been lost forever which is really sad...

 RIP the Epic Cycle

 But when we think about the Trojan War, for anyone who doesn't know the Iliad is a short part of it -

 there was a whole epic cycle of other poems that covered other parts of that war. The Odyssey is the aftermath, the Aeneid is the aftermath... so all of these let's say the main trilogy of epics that most people are familiar with, they are all to do with this one war in one way or another and that war

 starts because of something that mortals aren't really involved with. When we talk about again

 Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom, Orlando Bloom runs off with someone's wife and that's the reason that this war starts, but when we look at the ancient texts that's not really the start of the story. So for anyone who doesn't know can you just run us through what we have already described quite accurately

 as the Pretty Goddess Contest?

 So I'm just holding up my golden apple that sits on my desk. I've got one on all my desks: my school desk and my home desk as well, because it is this amazing symbol. The apple gets co-opted as a symbol

 of all sorts of things later as well, and this golden apple... well golden apples seem to literally grow on trees for the gods, they like humans have got their orchards and their cattle herds because that's how you count wealth in the ancient world, how wealthy you are through the property and your livestock

 and so forth, but they're special like they live forever and they're golden and stuff like that. And when

 when we talk about the story we even have to go further back into why there was this competition in the first place. So it is a really wonderful story. Of course it starts with Zeus having an affair with someone or wanting to and we are told that the goddess Thetis, a sea goddess, a shapeshifter

 catches his eye but she comes with is it a curse? is it a prophecy? attached to her, her child

 will be greater than its father. There is a long history of gods being overthrown by their father, Zeus does most of that overthrowing, but his father was overthrown, his father and so forth

 and he's the one who's finally done the final overthrowing -  and he doesn't want to be overthrown by anyone so in order to invalidate it he will make this goddess be tethered to a mortal and that way the child can only be better than its mortal father and not a threat to the gods.

 So Peleus is the king, a very warmongering king apparently, a great leader and a great fighter, he

 captures Thetis. There is a literal battle in which she keeps changing into different shapes and defeating him. He sneaks up on her while she's asleep and ties her arms and legs together so that if she was to try and shape shift she would tear herself apart, thus he bests her and wins her, it's not

 particularly romantic, but they get married and then we have this wedding which to all intents and purposes sounds like later fairy tales, like a certain set of fairies who give gifts for example. So at this wedding the gods are of course invited, and they all give gifts. I think Hades gives them a beautiful urn in which to be buried and so forth and they get other beautiful gifts. And then they did not invite

 Maleficent, I mean Eris(!) they did not invite Eris the goddess of strife to the wedding, because how would want that, right? We don't want that at your wedding, right? But she takes it badly, so of course she causes a problem in a self-fulfilling prophecy, don't invite the goddess of strife, do invite the goddess of strife -  she's going to cause a problem either way.

 And so she takes this golden apple - this token really it's not particularly valuable, the gods don't seem to value literal gold, it's just something that mortals do, but all of their versions of stuff is cool and more interesting than mortal versions anyway, they don't even eat normal food. They eat special god food and special god drinks; ambrosia and nectar. And [Eris] inscribes on it 'to the fairest' and throws it into the wedding, and these days you'd think oh that's clearly for the bride. No, the bride, is

 in the hierarchy of goddesses, very low down indeed, she is a water nymph essentially and so the three

 goddesses that argue about it are Hera, the wife of Zeus and the queen and thus she must be the most beautiful because he picked her as the queen, and Aphrodite literally the goddess of sex and beauty

 clearly has to be her and Athene, who you kind of feel like wouldn't really have been interested

 in a competition like that, but then again I suppose there's a goddess of war tactics, she's a goddess

 of competition so she kind of has to be involved as well and so they fight over it. And they ask Zeus which one of us should have it and he is sensible enough to not want to get involved in this conversation because he's going to upset someone and so he decides (I think it's him deciding) that

 the contest will be decided by someone who can really appreciate beauty: a beautiful mortal, because mortals peak and die and thus we understand what beauty is because it is fleeting, whereas when everyone is utterly gorgeous on Olympus it means nothing anymore. So the most beautiful mortal is

 Paris, who is this shepherd in the environs of Troy and he's been raised by shepherds and he's married to a nymph who, (I forget her name -  how fitting because she's hardly ever written a story,)... Hermes turns up, messenger of the gods, he says 'right Paris you're about to judge a competition be warned, three goddesses are going to turn up and you have to pick one who's the most beautiful, okay bye!'

 And then the goddesses turn up and in some versions of the way this story is retold he's really nervous, he's like 'oh I couldn't possibly choose between you' and other versions, he's like 'oh I can't possibly choose between you, get your kit off' and so either that or it's the goddesses arguing - well Aphrodite

 has got her belt of beauty, this interesting MacGuffin that occasionally comes out. She's got this belt, which essentially is her girdle, which kind of means her bra, so she's like she's got this bra that makes people fall in love with her because she's so beautiful. I don't think she needs that but I think it's in the Iliad where Hera borrows it to seduce like she just borrows her this really great dress essentially

 to seduce her husband, every girl's done that! So that's why they have to all take their clothes off so they can be judged equally and of course he still can't judge them equally, it's just too hard, so they all

 bribe him, which seems to be something that the gods seem to think is okay and all of these prizes

 that they offer link to what they are god of.

 So Athene offers him ability to win battles. He's a shepherd. Hera offers him all the cities in the world, once he's won the battles, like he'd be king of all these things. Okay, again, shepherd... and Aphrodite offers him sex on a plate, literally, with the most beautiful woman who's ever lived (she's married to someone else!) but it doesn't matter because he's married to someone else too, and he goes with that

 choice, then it is revealed, so she can't just like magically give him Helen, she puts into place how he will find this: he discovers that he is in fact the abandoned son of the king and queen of Troy, Hecuba

 when she was pregnant with him, the queen of Troy, dreamt that she was giving birth to a torch. Not a torch for light, but a torch for burning down cities. So when she gave birth to the baby they decided that they would kill it but they can't, he's too beautiful, so they abandon him outside the city walls

 they expose him, which seems to have been common enough practice - that it's in a lot of myths - and he is, as often happens, he doesn't die of exposure as is expected, that's the loophole, you haven't killed

 your child, it died of natural causes, it's fine, instead he's picked up by a shepherd. It's either always a shepherd or a messenger, and he's raised as his own, so he doesn't know that he's the prince of Troy. Aphrodite reveals this to him, his name is actually Alexandros because Paris means baggage because he was found in a bag, I love that, so, and maybe it's like, he is baggage when he turns up because he is

 indeed fated to cause this war, so he goes back into the bosom of his family just so happens that he is sent on a diplomatic mission to Sparta where Helen, the most beautiful woman who has ever lived, lives because she is from Sparta, she's originally Helen of Sparta and her husband Menelaus is now king of Sparta (because it seems that you marry into that bloodline and become king) and he then absconds with Helen. Whether Helen goes willingly, we don't know.

 Some poetry, there's a lovely Sappho piece that says that she is made stupid by love, love makes her insane and leaves behind her wonderful parents and her child, Hermione and go off and by the time we meet her in the Iliad she is massively regretting that decision and considers herself a victim of the gods

 so then that kind of brings us to her having been stolen. And then the reason why all the rest of the Greeks who are in individual city-states go to war with her is that when Helen was being married off

 her father was worried that all the Greeks would fight these Greek kings over her and so Odysseus helped him make this oath between them that whoever she picked, all the other suitors would not go to war with him but would go to war for her if she was ever kidnapped and taken away and thus that then happens and the war begins.

So absolutely, we're seeing that without fate without the gods, none of this story would have happened, they would have all stayed at home, just having fun listening to some music, drinking some wine...

 In hindsight we see all of this because of course you've got to wonder how many of these things are put together to make the story far more exciting and interesting than it was. I mean there's so much information about the sort of when this supposed war is meant to have happened was it towards the end of the Bronze Age and this whole argument about how Bronze Age collapse happened and was it in fact a war over resources were people being displaced. Is it that? Is Helen a figurehead for this?

 But it doesn't, it almost doesn't matter really because it's so mythologised, the reality that the Trojan War can't possibly be the same as the myth in any way except there was a place called Troy and there was a war there and we don't know when that happened or why it happened really. We know that there were wars, it was clearly a very rich place and places that are rich build great big walls because they need them. Even Mycenae has this great big wall and it was apparently nowhere near as rich as Troy in the stories, although it was the greatest of all the Greek city-states at the time and so they clearly must have a need to protect against invaders and that's what they did.

When we think about epic poetry, I know certainly that there will be listeners out there who have perhaps been interested in the stories and know a little bit about the stories already, everyone knows about the Trojan Horse for instance, not that that's in the Iliad,  and they might look at these

 books on shelves in the bookshop and they're massive usually big old fancy hardbacks and they might think to themselves this looks intimidating. I don't want to read this, I'll just watch Brad Pitt, it will be easier, I'll understand it because this isn't for me.

 Or listen to epic the musical! That's another one

 I firmly believe that people should give it a go, and if they do, what do you think they should be bearing in mind about the gods as characters as they're reading? Just keeping in the back of their mind to make everything make sense?

 Well I suppose what we need to remember when we are reading these is that they weren't

 composed originally to be read and also they were composed for people who knew all of these characters so I suppose a little bit of a little bit of preparation to not feel lost, knowing what the gods represent I think is really key because that unlocks so much of the story but a lot of that is also inherent in the story in their epithets for example I think something that would be really useful is a little guide to the way that these texts are written now that they have been put down because they were originally to be recited. And so they have lots of little I suppose tricks, clever things that both enhance the narrative but also help a poet recite them and help the audience remember what they're listening to

 and who the characters are. So perhaps having a little go to list of techniques that are used. So similes for example, the Homeric simile is a much longer version of a little classic simile. It was like this

 because it helps an audience imagine the scenario. And things like epithets which we don't really

 use anymore, epithets are little descriptive clusters of words that go before or after the name or

 sometimes even replace a name  in order to give you a little bit of background about that character.

 Fleet-footed Achilles for example, he's really fast when he runs. Deep-breasted women of Troy.

 Zeus the thunderer. Just reminds you who the gods are for example as well and other things like

 formula. You could literally build a raft based on the formula given for how Odysseus builds a raft over five days in the Odyssey, it's so detailed.

 But you can imagine the poet kind of goes autopilot: there's a formula and prayers are also a formula and sacrifices are also a formula and when the warriors put on their armour is a brilliant formula because it tells you that there's going to be a fight scene coming it's the equivalent in film now of the montage where they build up and put on their clothing so they put on this bit of armour and this bit of armour and there's a formula to that too and then they're normally inspired by a god at the end of it and then they go on the rampage and then even the rampage has a formula to it too. So you start to see these patterns throughout and then there's even a formula right at the start 'oh muse, help me tell this tale' which reminds us that these were orally told stories and this is a good way of getting the audience to start listening it's like the curtain up at the beginning of a play, but it's also a good way to get them to shut up and a nice little making sure that you're not being hubristic by saying I'm really great and I can remember this entire word story on my own so these sorts of things I think are important because

 they're kind of alien to us as readers of modern fiction and that's often where especially if you get kind of an old-fashioned translation with already old-fashioned words in it. I think translations need to be updated so that people can understand them, it shouldn't be a battle to just get through solid meaning.

If you've got an old-fashioned one it can be really difficult because they get really flowery about including all of these techniques whereas if you had a more modern one they're much more open and clear and it makes you realise how well the story is crafted and that can only be to its benefit you don't need to study them and pick them out in order to enjoy it having an understanding of why they're there so that they don't trip you up and you don't feel like you're an idiot for not knowing about them

 which some people might feel or they might feel alienated by so many of them being in the text or the text feeling not very modern I think those are the main things to understand and they're minimal as well, you can read them as a page, just be aware of these things.

 Do you have, and I know that you're not going to recommend Brad Pitt... do you have...

 I thought he was really good actually

 I'm more of an Eric Banna girl

 Well that's because you love Hector! I quite liked I liked the performance of Brad Pitt as Achilles

 I mean they took away his great speech, I think he did a really good job with the limited script that was on hand but some of those lines are... I mean the sack of wine. I think it's actually dog face -

 that always gets a laugh but the things he says... some of the more philosophical things he says

 are rather good, and about his fate for example. And you're an Eric Banna girl because he is also an excellent Hector, he's got a much more sympathetic face!

 I agree, I just love Hector, I can't help it!

 you're meant to love Hector, because then you have to be sad that he dies. Everyone dies, everyone is sad, devastated, I can't stress enough how emotional it is to read it once you've got invested in all of it. I had to read it every year for 11 years and every year I would tear up. I still watch Pompeii The Last Day

 every year with my first year and every year that makes me tear up at the end even though I know they all die.

 Do you have, for those people who want to graduate now from a movie and get into the text itself,

 do you have a particular translation perhaps or an audio book if it's meant to be heard... maybe you have a particular version that you are happy to point people towards?

 I will say that I really enjoyed the recent Emily Wilson translations of both The Iliad and The Odyssey

 although I haven't listened to the audio books because there are some books I can't listen to an audio book of because I have to read them, but I hear that they're very very good. Those audio books and voiced by incredibly talented female voice actors which is I think a really interesting way to retell

 which was probably told by male rhapsodes, because we don't even know if Homer existed or whether he's a model for these sorts of characters.

 There is another one out, it seems to be quite the thing to translate The Iliad and The Odyssey at the moment. I haven't read there's a very recent one by I think Daniel Mendelson has done The Odyssey

 and I have not read it yet... I have a rather large collection of Odysseys and they all vary in tone and are interesting. I do think one of my favourite translations is a 1950s translation of The Odyssey by W.D. Rouse, and it's really jolly good fun. It's just a really fun translation and he does like it's a little bit

 classist as well because he gives the slaves like a dialect words to use instead it's a little bit Dickensian in that way but it is really fun and he even translates the names of the Phaeacians (the people

 that Odysseus washes up on the shore of who are amazing sailors and he translates their names -

 like one that's called Poop Deck which is just delightfully funny, and really it did not need to be translated and that's a really fun translation and it's also really thin and small and you can still get copies of it so it's kind of fun. You're still reading something kind of old by our standards.

 But what's great about the Wilson one is just going back to the parody of the language and ditching like hundreds of years of male gays one of the things that's really interesting argument in that translation is the way that the slave women are dealt with at the end and they're not called all the rude names in her translation that they are in all the previous translations done by men. Instead the words that are actually there like women are used so that's really interesting so it kind of comes with a great commentary and she has also written and made videos about her word choices so that's fascinating too

 I think the best thing to do is make a collection of them and become completely nerdy about it.

 Because it deserves it. There's also other films that perhaps are maybe slightly more accurate in terms of the way they cling to the text but then every film I've ever seen changes something which I don't know I think that's wildly... to say that I can write a better story... I think a lot of it is down to

 what they had the budget for. I mean there's the great Armando Sante as Odysseus, a series from like the 90s which doesn't even have the sirens in it! It has the cyclops and then maybe there's a little bit of Aeolus but he's weird, and then there's Circe, and then there's Calypso, and then that's kind of it!

 The real life bits as in when he's back in Ithaca, those are pretty good, those sections and you do tend

 to find an awful lot of these films of the Odyssey in particular focus on the supernatural stuff

 instead of the really amazing stuff that happens when he gets home to Ithaca which is just delightful

 and incredible and hardly anyone who only has a passing knowledge knows about. I have yet to find a film that does that and the other bit perfectly - there's another recent film, I don't know if you've seen The Return?

 I haven't yet, I need to!

 I got invited to see that at the British Museum by my lovely friend Caroline Lawrence who's an amazing writer and she was very upset by the film because it has very little to do with the Odyssey at all, there's just some similar characters in it and I was really annoyed because I was teaching that bit

 of the Odyssey that's in the GCSE the bit where he comes home and has selected books from that section and I really wanted a good film version of that. And it wasn't, it's something else really

 and but it was interesting to hear the director defend his choices to everyone else in the room who was also very angry about it, and Ralph Fiennes was also there and he was he's very good in it and I could definitely see him as Odysseus but it was an interesting take on it. Going back to your actual question

 to graduate from the film you've got to read some version of the original that's really the only thing

 to do and finding the least scary one is definitely key -  the most recent translation that isn't a bit of

 AI slop that someone's posted up or isn't just actually not people can get very confused about these if they're buying off sites like Amazon because because it's out of copyright these older translations anyone can take them and stick them in a free book or a paid for book with a pretty cover. So beware of cheap versions! Ask around and find something that has has at least got a real a live translator so you know it's been done recently and they're generally done really well, but with a different view in mind

 to how you know every translation has a purpose through that translation - what are they trying to do that's new? - just like every film of an ancient text every bit of classical reception is trying to do omething new with it, that doesn't make them any less relevant but you have to accept that they will stray away from the original material. Even the creator of epic the musical which is also an utter delight and really really fun, even he says this is not the Odyssey please don't use this in your school tests

 because you will fail! And it does, it does go away from the Odyssey in a lot of ways because that's

 what is possible through a musical - you can't put the entire Odyssey into a musical, it'll be like a million days long. And the same with Iliad, but I do think that taking the gods out of those films if you are going to make a film version of them is dicey because the whole point of these epics is that the gods are there and they're present. If you want to make a human drama about it out of it then fine, but

 you're going to find it really difficult and you're going to be telling an entirely different story and you have to own up to that I think.

 That's I think a really good point, it does seem when you're watching that kind of thing that there is something missing and then you realise what it is! So to finish, I can't let you go without asking you what you think about (and we don't know a lot yet) what you think about Christopher Nolan's upcoming Odyssey, because we've been getting drips and drabs of cast lists I know there's Tom Holland and Zendaya and Odysseus is Matt Damon... I think Anne Hathaway is Penelope...

 II mean I had my own cast list in my head everyone does I suppose. yeah I don't know, I'm

 I have been drawn on this topic many times and it's really difficult to see what the film is actually going to be like because, and something I realised is Christopher Nolan is keeping most of the details incredibly close to his chest, I have read interviews with him I have read exclusive interviews with him in Empire magazine and literally the only thing that has been teased about it is the bit that isn't in the Odyssey or the Iliad which is the Trojan Horse but that is what people think of when they think of

 the Trojan War and they think of the Odyssey so he's been clever and canny in that respect, he wants this film to be a success. He's famous for doing war films he was in fact originally going to be the director of Troy which I didn't know until recently in the Empire article I read and so he has been thinking about this image, and it is a really important image I think the horse and it is disappointing when that image is not discussed because it is most people's immediate frame of reference so I can totally understand why it's got to be in there. If you were doing a totally accurate adaptation of the

 Odyssey it would not be in there but neither would Odysseus for like the first third of the film

 so people would be alienated immediately, and I guess you just can't do that when you have a budget of

 256 million dollars to make back. So that is what he is starting with but it does sound like at least.

 I think there was a leaked trailer again I didn't get to see it so I haven't seen anything except the photos that have been very carefully allowed out and I think it does seem to come in when Telemachus is visiting Menelaus to hear about his dad, so that's something that is in the original that most people, most film makers, kind of miss out. They don't often put that in but that is in the Armand de Santé one, a bit at least anyway, and it's clearly going to be in this one so that's interesting and good and we know he's playing Menelaus so he is literally someone who is going to be in it. But like I said it's not in the Odyssey but it also gives context to who Odysseus is because the whole idea of the Trojan horse

 that's his greatest thing so it's amazing it's not really in the Odyssey and I think it is briefly mentioned

 by Menelaus so that's interesting but that is the only thing that there are pictures of. There are pictures of some of the characters, there are pictures of the characters wearing shockingly bad costumes

 but frankly not as bad as the costumes in The Return, so I'm going to have to get over that and you see

 Penelope's in there, she's in terrible costume frankly in my opinion however the background is very much Minoan Mycenaean, the palace is clearly inspired by Knossos, those are still reconstructions but the throne is the same shape and it has birds on it which links to Athena appearing as those birds

 so those are interesting details and there's a picture of Telemachus wearing again shockingly bad costume but holding what is very clearly a Minoan kylex which is interesting again.

And the main image that is shared of Matt Damon in his shockingly bad costume which isn't even

 I mean it's not Bronze Age, fine it's a myth, when is it set, but if the background's Bronze Age then why aren't the costumes, it's weird! And apparently there was this ghosting of this incredibly talented

 and actually Greek armour maker Demetrios Katsanikis I think his name is and his work is

 amazing and he recreates this armour from Mycenaean pottery, it's beautiful and

 the dendro-panoply and stuff that's actually from that time period and it looks much cooler

 than what they've given them which is dull and brown and a bit silvery and trousers which is like Germanic and barbaric, and so it's really interesting so far. And then there's other some pictures

 Athena is being played by Zendaya who is frankly known for wearing amazing clothes as well as being a brilliant actress and they've put her in a white tunic, I'm so sad for her, and also

 Matt Damon's hair is short and that upsets me, it just really upsets me. He grew a beard, it's a very short beard and we do get a description of Odysseus and he's short and not very impressive to look at

 he's an average guy but he has dark hair and he's a bit mysterious looking and I just don't get that from Matt Damon. But the other things that have been mentioned, the sirens are mentioned

 the Cyclops is mentioned apparently they filmed that in the Cyclops cave on I think Crete

 or the one that is said to be the Cyclops cave and there is an animatronic that's very exciting, to me. If you include good versions of the supernatural stuff then you have to be including gods as well

 we have one god, definitely has an actor who is named that they are definitely playing that god

 which is interesting because that god mostly cosplays as men in the Odyssey Athena always turns up as either the mentor and very rarely as herself there's that one moment where Odysseus finally gets back to Ithaca and Athena turns up, she pretends to be a shepherd and then she reveals herself to be

 Athena and they sit under a tree and have a chat. I want that to be in the film! 

I want that to be in the film.! So, reasons to be cautiously optimistic, then, even though we've seen some clunkers already.

 What upsets me is how people who like Nolan are telling everyone else who like the Odyssey that they're not allowed to be upset that the costume is crap because it's just a film, right, but they'll be the ones saying it's a historical event. Please, let's stop with that now. So I am cautiously optimistic

 that he will have done a really good job, I do like his films. I really liked Tenet, even though the

 sound was terrible but they fixed that now with these new IMAX cameras that can record sound

 as well, and that's the whole thing -  it's all in IMAX and it's really exciting apparently. I just want to watch a great film, I don't really care how close I can get to the man's face in the film, I want to see the Odyssey but the fact that he hasn't shown any of that makes me think that maybe it's really good and also in Technicolor, maybe all the grey bits are just reality, and then it'd be like The Wizard of Oz, right, where they go into Oz and it goes into Technicolor, wouldn't that be cool? And oh, there was one other thing, they are literally rowing, the actors were literally rowing a Viking ship, it is a Viking ship that they've borrowed and I suppose you could probably argue that Bronze Age warships

 are quite visually similar to a Viking ship, I don't know if they are weak on the front though, which is a bit that literally allows them to man, I don't know if it's more pronounced in a Bronze Age ship

 but yeah, it's called the Drakon. You can hire it, it's great, but it is very much a Viking ship and I remember reading a little article that someone had written when they were filming in Ireland, because they filmed all over the world for this, they filmed on the black beaches of Iceland for the underworld, which is cool because they literally go into the underworld of course in the Odyssey, they're outside it in the Grove of Persephone, but I've been to that beach and I could definitely visualise that. But in Ireland, someone wrote this article and they were saying, and yes and they have costumes and

 a boat for whatever time period the film is set in... we don't know, we can't really tell just from this as well because they do, they just look like Vikings. But then so did Ajax in the film of Troy look like

 a Viking, he did a bit didn't he with his big battle axe but at least he was the big guy

 like he is meant to be. 

 I have to say thank you so much for coming on and talking about the gods and epic

 because I do think that they are so important to understanding the genre and also how the story

 is supposed to go.

 Exactly, I mean you can't just kill Menelaus in the middle of the Iliad and expect the story to keep going because you didn't have a goddess to stop the truce and save him by knocking the arrow out of the way!