How to Write an Epic Poem

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Glossary:

Agathos/Agathoi(pl)   'Good' 'noble' 'excellent'

Aidos   Shame

Aiskos   An act of shame and dishonour

Akleos   To die without glory/kleos

Apotheosis   The process of becoming a god

Aristeia   A hero's moment of peak bravery and martial excellence on a battlefield

Aristos   'Best' 'finest' 'noblest'

Epithet   A descriptive word or phrase added to (or instead of) a name to highlight a key attribute

Katabasis   A journey to the Underworld

Keres   Female spirits who personified violent, cruel or fated death.

Kleos/ Kleos Aphthiton   Renown, glory or fame. Aphthiton means 'everlasting'

Kudos   Distinction earned through heroic deeds

Metre   A rhythmic, measured pattern of stressed and unstressed syallables in a line of verse

Miasma   A spiritual pollution caused by impious or taboo actions

Nekyia   A necromantic ritual to summon and converse with the dead

Patronym   A component of a name derived from the name of a father or grandfather

Philia   Friendship, brotherly love, or partnership

Polytropos   'much-turned',  complicated

Rhapsode   Professional performer who recited poetry

Transcript:

 Laura Jenkinson Brown is back and she's going to be talking to us a little bit more about epic poetry.  Can you just remind us, Laura, why you are such an expert guest on this topic?  

Oh, well, thank you very much.  Well, I've been teaching in a secondary school context rather than an academic context,  the ancient world, specifically ancient Greece and Rome, for the last 20 years this year.  And for a lot of that time, I have taught the Odyssey and the Iliad  and focused on the world of the hero within those Homeric epics.  And I've also taught about the other great hero that we'll talk about in a minute that is such an important figure to both ancient Greece and ancient Rome.  So in my comics work, which most of you know me from,  I teach and I draw very simplified versions of these things  because they are aimed at students in school.  So it's kind of the basics really, which is what very much I was also taught when I was at school.  But of course, over time, you realize that what you're taught at school is the basics.  And then you can add to that over time.  So what I want to do today is sort of give the basics and a bit more then of the extra detail  because some of these sometimes are a bit harder to fathom  or they're slightly more complex than the basic version.  And I want to give that to you without you having to do all the extensive reading,  especially as sometimes it is really best to have read this in the ancient Greek,  which I don't have, sadly, I never got to be taught that.  I have somewhat failed to learn that on my own,  save for sort of tidbits and etymologies and formations and derivations.  So I kind of have a basic working knowledge of ancient Greek terminology and its context,  if not actually the ability to read in ancient Greek one day, one day maybe.  But in the end, all of these words and all of these terms that we're going to talk about,  they essentially pertain to people and their attitudes to life and their attitudes to each other  and their attitudes to the situation that they find themselves in.  And even though those might be really, really different to the way that we live  and the scenarios that we experience, essentially these are quite universal at heart.  So we might be able to identify with them, if not necessarily agree with them and follow them.  

So if the Greeks had heroes, and I know that from Disney if nothing else,  where does that concept come from and is there a prototype for the Greek hero?  Who's the original? 

So essentially we get our idea of these ancient heroes from two main places  when we're talking about, say, an overview of them, what makes an ancient hero.  And those two main places really are Heracles or Hercules to start off with,  because he's the example to all.  I hope I don't offend anyone if I say that you can think of Heracles and then Hercules  as being like an ancient Greek and then Roman Jesus-like figure,  because he's the son of God, the God Zeus, Deus, and Jupiter, Jovpater, the father, the God.  And he's born of this great God, but he is human.  So he is in a human scenario.  And he does great things within that human scenario that are greater than most people.  So he is like a superhero, but he's also flawed.  He's very human and he's also very polluted because of a lot of the actions that he takes  that are not necessarily admirable.  And that's also something that's quite key to an ancient hero that we'll talk about later on.  So he's good in the ways that he says he never starts an argument, he always ends them.  But that's like if you say something mean to Heracles who are like,  what did you say? I fight you, you're dead now.  Sometimes he also does do really bad things like burning down an entire city  and its inhabitants in order to take a woman when he's even already married.  But he does atone for a lot of these and that's the identifiable bit.  So he very famously kills his entire family.  So that lovely bit, the end of Disney's Hercules, where he goes off with Megara into the sunsets.  She is dead now, all their children are dead.  

And this is Juno's fault or Hera's fault.  So Greek is Hera, Roman is Juno.  And he, of course, as many ancient heroes do, he goes and gets an oracle from Delphi  to find out what he should do in order to atone for this, we would call it, sin.  They would describe this as miasma, this religious pollution.  He's done absolutely the wrong thing. He's killed his own family.  And he is told by the oracle he is given,  which is either from Apollo or possibly from Hera who is interfering in his story,  that he must go and sell himself into slavery or be the slave of Eurystheus,  his cousin whom Hera has already given Heracles his birthright to  by making him be born king instead of Heracles.  And Eurystheus then gives him these 10 and then another two,  making up 12 impossible tasks that will clear his miasma.  And these are those  Labours that he is really, really famous for doing.  And they are superhuman endeavors.  So these superhuman endeavors that he does and he doesn't die during them.  So he's finally allowed to not do any more.  And then he dies horribly in a way that is just absolutely awful.  He is literally burning alive by putting on this.  Depending on which version of the story you read,  it's either the semen of the centaur nurses on this shirt that have called.  All centaurs apparently wear shirts as you totally see those in images of them.  Or it's blood stained and it's also stained with the hydro poison  that Heracles killed him with. He's dipped his arrows in hydro poison.  He's killed the centaur with this win.  The centaur is trying to run off with his new bride Deineira.  And he puts on this shirt, long story.  His wife asks him to do it because she thinks he's having an affair.  And Nessus has told her that this will be a love potion to revive a waning love.  And he starts to burn alive because of the venom of the hydra  that he's killed as one of his  Labours.  And he dies horribly. He puts himself on his own pyre.  He has to get this guy Philoctetes to light it for him.  He gives him his bow.  But finally the gods take pity on him and at the moment his human body dies.  His soul is taken up to Olympus and he is given an apotheosis.  He is made into a god. He is accepted as a god.  He has this weird symbolic second birth by hiding under Hera's skirt  and then comes out from her skirt like he's being born again.  She finally stops being mad at him and he becomes this god.  

And so the Romans really treat him as this god.  So like if the Romans stubbed their toe instead of going, oh Jesus,  they'll go, oh Heracles, he'll be the first point of call for them.  He's the guy they swear by.  So Heracles and Hercules becomes this amazing role model to the ancient Greeks and Romans,  especially to the Romans who then deify their most precious people,  their most precious leaders.  Julius Caesar becomes deified and then after him the best emperors get deified in Hercules-like style.  So Heracles or Hercules, as we'll see, fits into the sort of criteria  for being an ancient hero that we'll look at in a minute.  And then the other place where we get these criteria,  what is an ancient hero, is essentially from Homeric literature.  

So Homer is part of the epic cycle, which appears to have been known in antiquity,  even though it's not really known now and we only have tiny fragments of it.  And we have the Odyssey and the Iliad.  Iliad is meant to come first, at least chronologically, and then we have the Odyssey.  But there's lots of other stories in between that fill in the blanks.  And all of these stories make up the story of the Trojan War.  In the Trojan War we get loads and loads of examples of these great heroes,  specifically Achilles, who we'll use as kind of a good basis for talking about this.  And the reason why Homer is a great point to start with this is because  he is essentially Pan-Hellenic, all ancient Greek city-states.  A city-state is a polis, the plural is poleis.  They had him in common.  They were all very individual, all had their own belief systems.  They'll have essentially the same gods, but the ways in which they worship them,  or specific gods that they particularly worshipped, might be different.  They'll have their own currency.  Some of them were very different from each other.  If you look at Athens and compare that to Sparta, for example,  that's often a great comparison that is made in my line of work,  where we're teaching the basics to students.  

But Herodotus, essentially the father of history,  an ancient Greek historian around the 5th century BCE,  he says that Hesiod, a mythographer, and Homer, an epic rhapsode,  are the foundation to all civilization.  Not exactly like a holy book that must be worshipped,  but a set of examples of people and things that set out how the world is,  why it is like that, and a series of examples, these great men,  these heroes that now everyone has in common and everyone would know about.  And everyone would also potentially worship,  because there was hero worship as well as god worship in the ancient world.  A lot of these heroes have shrines set up to them.  And in fact, very recently, one of the buildings on the island of Ithaca  that is Bronze Age and is often referred to as the School of Homer  and is potentially a site where Odysseus' palace might have been,  there have been finds found there that suggest that in fact this was an Odysseion,  a place where Odysseus was worshipped as a hero.  So this is why we can look back at both of these as great examples.  

So let's imagine I'm Homer and these stories are being told all around me.  Where on earth do I start in order to turn all of these stories into an epic poem?  And how do I make it one that my audience is going to really respond to?  

So if we're talking about heroes in epic poetry,  in particular if you're going to build an epic poem, for example, that has them in it,  you've got these stories and the stories of Hercules  being performed by rhapsodes or rhapsodoi, professional reciters.  And then those who are in the audience, they are visualising this,  they are imagining it as it's being told to them.  So they have their amazing imaginations to try and visualise this.  They visualise this Theominoi.  And this is why so much of the stories are told very, very visually.  So we'll look at some of the ways in which that's done a bit later on.  And you start your poem, especially if you can imagine you're outdoors, you're the poet.  Perhaps you've got an audience in front of you.  As audiences do, they're all mumbling and muttering to each other,  chatting about what they're going to have for tea, waiting for the story.  Or perhaps you're telling this story or singing this story with your lyre accompaniment,  perhaps in front of an audience who are eating,  and you want to get their attention, you start with the invocation to the muse.  You call upon one of the muses, specifically Calliope, the goddess of epic poetry,  to fill you with inspiration so that you can tell this story.  It's also a way of sort of saying, curtain up, guys.  I'm started now. You should listen.  Plus I've evoked a god, so that would be respectful to listen right now.  

Another thing that you do as you say this is you often start with a word  that is going to be an encapsulation of the particular hero  that you're going to talk about.  So using the Iliad as an example for that,  the very first word is menis, which means superhuman anger.  So we're about to find out that Achilles, whom the Iliad is about,  has the superhuman anger.  That is his main characteristic.  For the Odyssey, it's pretty much just he is a man and he is a polytropos man.  He is a complicated man.  So that's a very different story that's being told,  but they will still fit into this overview of what is a hero.  

So I am a poet. I'm building my epic.  It's going to have my heroes in it.  I've invoked the muse.  How am I going to help myself? Because these are long poems, right?  How many hours do we think each poem would take to recite?  

Oh, this is really interesting.  It's not clear whether the whole poem would have been recited  or whether these are in fact amalgamations of all the individual stories  that made up this particular story.  So there's a theory that they might have been recited  with sections done each day, for example, out of festivals.  Say over a week, you could probably get through several books or chapters.  We might call them chapters today.  They tend to be called books because when they were written down,  they were on scrolls, which we would think of as now as books.  And you could get through several of those a day within a comfortable sitting, perhaps.  You don't want to be sitting there all day long.  About a decade at least ago, there was this fantastic project  where the entire Iliad was recited.  I think it started at about 7 a.m.  and it was done by the Almeida Theatre in conjunction with the British Museum.  They had all these fantastic actors come and recite different chunks of the Iliad.  So it started off, they were reciting in the British Museum  and the whole thing was livestreamed.  I spent an amazing day on my sofa, live tweeting the whole thing  and explained to people, no, you won't hear about the whole story.  And they kept going after the BM was shut.  They then moved to the Almeida Theatre and I think it finished at about 10 p.m.  So it went all the way through the day with very brief pauses  for different reciters to stand up and speak.  

But it gives us an idea, it would not be possible for one person  to stand up and recite this all day, I think.  And reciting it all from memory would be probably incredibly difficult,  especially if you haven't had a break in between each book,  which is why it makes sense that it might be performed over a week, for example.  But then the examples we have of rhapsodes telling these stories in epic itself.  So in the Odyssey we have an example of the character Demodocus,  who is a bard who is in the Court of the Phaeacians.  And he might even be like self-insert characterisation of Homer,  who was meant to be blind, and Demodocus is blind, right?  And Demodocus only tells certain parts of the story.  So for example, much to Odysseus, who was sitting there at this point  unidentified to his guests, Demodocus starts singing about him  and when he had this argument with Achilles.  And that shows us there is a section of the story being told over dinner.  So it might be that parts of it were told over dinner,  might be that parts of it were told over a day,  over several days at a festival.  It's unlikely they were all told in one go.  

That said, there are still ways in which the poet has clearly  used things like formulae in order to make this easier to remember.  For a start it's a poem, and poetry is always easier to remember  because it fits into meter.  So as I would say to my students at this point,  who are generally a bit younger, but they've done a bit of Shakespeare,  I'll say, right, you know about meter from Shakespeare.  Shakespeare writes in English, or at least Shakespeare in English  which is a bit older than ours, he writes in iambic pentameter.  And we'll talk about what an iamb is, so it's a metrical foot.  It goes short, long, iamb, and there are pentameters.  There are five of those in a line, iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb.  That fits for that particular version of our language.  For ancient Greek and the ancient Greek that Homer was composing in,  we use dactylic hexameter.  So I would then ask my students to look at their finger,  and they'll see that their finger, their dactyl,  is composed of long, short, short bits.  And so that's what a dactyl is, long, short, short.  And it's hexameter, and they know what a hex is,  and they can link that to their maths, which is fun.  So, dactylic hexameter, there are six dactyls.  Long, short, short, long, short, short, long, short, short, long, short, short.  

Really quite musical.  

It is, actually. Sorry, I'm not sure if I did five or six there,  but I should have counted on my fingers.  So in order to then remember those lines,  you know that they fit into that line of poetry.  And then you've got clever ways of fitting  all the things you want to into that line of poetry.  Like, for example, they might, instead of a name,  use an epithet instead of a name.  So an epithet is an adjectival phrase  that still explains the character,  but maybe in a few more syllables  that fits better into your line.  

So examples of epithets might be things like,  these are all in translation, of course,  white-armed, which tends to be for, like,  female goddesses pertaining to their status,  their paler, because women, human women  who are high status stay indoors, and so they're paler.  So goddesses who are, like, superhuman versions of that,  they must be, like, white, so they're white-armed.  Great-hearted means brave.  Resourceful, we get that one for Odysseus.  Swift-running is one that is used for Achilles.  Or sometimes these epithets are patronyms.  They are describing the father or the grandfather  or the ancestor of the person.  So it's like calling someone by their surname,  we might do, or by their family name.  So the son of Atreus, for example,  is a way of describing Menelaus or Agamemnon,  and that also helps you remember how they are linked  in mythology to all these other grand stories.  So all of those help the poet fit all of their details  and their story into these lines of meter  that make them easier to remember.  

There's also formulae within those formulaic phrases  like, so they ate and drank to their heart's content,  which tells you that a feast is finished.  Or, for example, in the Odyssey,  when a new day turns up, rosy-fingered dawn arrived.  And that is sort of a verbal signpost  for you to imagine the new day is starting.  So that's quite a useful thing to fall back on as well.  

So I've got meter to help me remember.  I've got epithets to help me remember who everyone is,  which is very useful.  The cast list is considerable.  What else can I use to try and make sure  that I remember what's going on,  particularly because I'm guessing that I'm going to have  to repeat quite a lot as I go through,  and I don't want it to be the same every single time.  Is there anything that I can make to explain something  to compare, contrast, describe?  

One of the things you mentioned earlier is that  the audience are sort of these visualizers.  They've got to imagine everything  that's happening in front of them,  and they will not necessarily have experienced  the things that are happening in the Iliad,  certainly not the stuff that's happening in the Odyssey,  you would hope not everyone's experienced that.  Cyclops or so forth, or had to stab one in the eye.  So similes are used,  and whereas we might use a simile,  it was like this,  and that just helps us visualize a little better.  They've got epic similes.  Sometimes these are called Homeric similes  because they seem to be so prevalent in Homer.  Any simile is made up of specific parts.  So you have the topic or tenor,  which is the thing that you are trying  to describe in different ways.  So for example, the men who are fighting,  they are being described,  they are the topic or tenor,  as standing tall,  that is the event of the subject in a simile,  like, that's the comparator,  and then we have the vehicle,  the thing we're comparing them to,  like golden corn.  So immediately then,  we can visualize them as standing up tall,  corn grows tall.  

We then also have other imagery,  aside from that visual imagery,  we've got the link to the fact  that corn is golden and their armor is bronze  and shining in the sunshine.  So that will maybe help us visualize them all  looking very beautiful.  But then the simile will go on,  and it will talk about how the corn  is being cut down by the farmer  at its point where it is risen to its highest.  It's the right moment for it to be cut down  in swathes as they cross the field.  And that gives us other imagery.  It gives us sound imagery.  The farmers cutting down the corn in swathes,  their scythes perhaps make the sound  that the spears and the swords  of these soldiers are using.  And then we've also got this idea,  which is quite sad,  that these soldiers are at their prime,  like the corn,  and they're being cut down  because this is their fate,  this is their moment of death  that has been foretold.  Because this is what's going to happen to corn,  and this is what's going to happen to the men  because they've gone to war.  So with these similes,  you get this immediate idea,  and then you have further detail  that allows you to understand  what's happening in the story  a little bit better,  and also allows you to really identify  with those moments  and have emotions attached to those moments.  

Something that might be a bit more visual  might be a simile from the Odyssey  where Hermes is flying off  to find out where Odysseus is,  and he knows where he is on Calypso's island,  and he is described as being like a seabird.  So there the topic is Hermes,  the event is being described,  he is flying,  the comparator is, again, he is like,  and the vehicle is that seabird  skimming over the waves.  So we can really visualise how Hermes,  because he has wings on his sandals,  he can fly fast like a seabird.  But that seabird is also flying over the waves  because it's looking for food,  like he is looking for Odysseus.  That is his main focal point,  and that is his reason for being there,  just like the seabird is flying overhead.  

So by putting in these different similes,  that can really add a lot of fantastic graphics, really,  to an audience's imagination.  And it will generally allow them to visualise something  that they can't necessarily have experienced  with something that they will have experienced,  or is likely to have been something they've experienced.  So many of these similes are fascinating to us  as modern audiences because they describe everyday life.  There's loads and loads of farming similes.  So two heroes going up against each other  might be described as being like two bulls  going head-to-head.  There's a great simile about Hercules  in Ovid's Metamorphoses,  where he talks about the later adventures of Hercules,  where he's fighting Achelous,  who is a river god,  and they're fighting over Deineira,  who will get to marry her.  They are described as being like two bulls  going up against each other  while the herd looks on in fear.  And they are both the bulls.  They are clearly very well-matched  because they're both the same,  which is interesting because Hercules is a hero,  but he's still a mortal,  and Achelous has made it very clear  in his fighting words beforehand that he's a god.  And the other suitors who came for Deineira' hands  have gone, I'm not fighting them.  So they've stood back.  So they are the rest of the herd.  They are the lesser cows, as it were.  And you could also then get the sound  of them grappling each other.  And then it's also a bit foreshadowing  because then Achelous does actually turn into a bull  in cheating, trying to win.  And that doesn't go so well for him.  

So in other words, then,  before cinematic CGI,  similes help the imagination of the audience  by bringing images that they're familiar with  to help them imagine images  that perhaps they will never see,  i.e. someone turning into a bull,  a god flying past their heads.  It's easier to imagine because you've got these similes  prompting you to build the image yourself.  

That's right.  

Perfect.  

And going back to this idea of heroes,  most of the similes are about them  and their decisions and what they are doing.  And so it allows us to understand  their characters and their lives  and their experiences in that moment.  

OK, so I'm the poet.  I know how I'm going to write it.  I've got my meter.  I've got my similes.  I've got my epithets.  Now I'm going to build my hero.  So is there a kind of standard formula for a hero?  Are they all the same in their core?  

To an extent, yes.  They're all heroes.  I mean, that is in fact an ancient Greek word.  So that is the word we get for hero  is the ancient Greek word for it.  And these are specifically people  who are above the rest.  They are aristos.  They are better than everyone else.  Is that where we get aristocracy?  It is indeed.  So the rule by the better people  who are self-identified as better, to be honest,  because there's this idea that if you are richer,  it is generally because you are better  and because you were born better and higher up.  So there's not a lot of, say, social climbing  in ancient Greece.  It sort of improves a bit in Rome later.  But at this point, often,  the reason why they are aristos  is because they are noble or agathoi, right?  Because if you're born noble,  you don't have to do the grunt work.  And you will get better food.  And you are probably going to be,  if we use the example of what we think of as nepo babies today,  you're probably going to be prettier and taller and everything  because of the gene pool that has been actively selected,  your mother will have been the most beautiful woman  available at that moment in time.  And your father is the product, as well,  of these similar kind of unions.  And you will also be skilled in warfare  or whatever it is that you're skilled in  because not every hero is a war hero,  but we are specifically using examples like that  at the moment.  You will be skilled at that  because that's all you get to do is train.  You will have had the best education  and your education will have had all of these things  to make a top young man.  You'll be trained in fighting,  also playing your lyre,  also chariot racing, all of these different things.  There's a lovely bit in the story of Heracles  where it describes all the things that he is trained in,  and generally heroes get to be trained,  and sometimes they're even trained by Chiron,  the centaur, for some part.  He's the nice centaur who isn't born  from the weird, rapey ones from Ixion's backstory.  So they're all the bad centaurs, right,  like Nessus, the one that we killed earlier.  So generally, if you think of a hero,  recently the series Gladiators came back on British TV,  which is the best TV show ever,  and probably I think the closest we'll get  to actual Gladiator combat, really.  

It's not far off, I have to say.  

It's not far off.  It's all about the personalities,  which I think is something that people often forget, right,  that that would have been a big draw  for the people watching gladiator bouts.  But yeah, so modern Gladiators,  they've all got a thing,  they've all got a particular skill  that they're named after.  Some of them are even named slightly incorrectly  after Greek gods.  But if you look at them  and then you look at the contestants  and you see how these Gladiators,  they're a foot taller,  they're incredibly beautiful,  they have the biggest muscles you've ever seen.  That's who we're talking about here, right?  That's Hercules.  If you've seen Giant from this season of Gladiators,  that's maybe what Hercules looked like,  but without the frosted tips.  And so he's had all the best breaks in life,  he's had the best food,  he's had the training,  and he's got the gene pool.  So this is probably why they would have been bigger and better.  

But then they are also held to this higher account  because of this status that they have.  And they are expected to be skilled in combat  because they have had this upbringing.  And so these talents that they have  are also something that they need to exemplify.  And that's then when we come down to this idea  of almost what I was taught as  and what I continue kind of teaching as,  because this is quite an accessible idea,  like the heroic code, right?  The unwritten rules which are then composed  and actually written down then later on in Homer,  the standards by which they live.  And there are certain rules that you follow,  and they all kind of boil down  to this one particular set of rules.  

So the things that you do as an ancient Greek hero,  like Heracles, like all the ones in the Odyssey,  well, you're meant to.  They don't necessarily do this in the Odyssey and the Iliad.  You specifically look out for your friends and your kinsmen.  So these are your people that you have the highest filia for,  your love of kin, your closest kin.  But you must do harm to your enemies.  And if they're your enemy,  it will have been made clear that that is the case.  And you must always be the best, Aristotle.  You must show that you are the best  of all these people by your actions  and distinguish yourself above others.  And part of that is standing fast firmly  if you are in a battle scenario,  no running away, no turning your back to the enemy.  You must show your bravery with your face,  but you must also be not just a doer of deeds,  but actually a speaker of words.  You need to be able to lead.  You are being looked up to as the leader,  the chieftain, sometimes the king,  and there are different terms for these too.  

So you definitely have to be able to do this,  lead an army, lead an assembly at the same time.  And what it boils down to is kleos.  Kleos seems to be something we can describe as glory  in simplified terms, or honor, honorable things.  Where you get that from is what people hear about you.  It is what is heard.  It is your repute.  You want your kleos to live on forever in epics, right?  So all the heroes that we hear about in the epics  and Heracles, for example,  in all the different stories written about him,  they have achieved that kleos  because the kleos is the epic  that they're being sung about in.  How you get to that kleos is kudos, right?  The things that you do that give you good reputation.  And if you don't do those things,  you are a kleos, you are without kudos.  And so things that you might do to gain kudos,  going back to that hero and being Aristos,  you might have kinship with a god.  So you might have an actual god as your father,  your mother, or at least somewhere  in your recent ancestry.  You will be very beautiful, as we've already established,  handsome, tall.  You will be very rich.  You might also increase that wealth on the battlefield  by taking spoils and slaves.  The people you enslave adds to this  because they add to your entourage  and they add to, sad to say,  they are your property.  And then, of course, on the battlefield,  you show this prowess and you speak well  in the assembly, as we've also said.  You also follow the rules.  You act with aidos.  And this is, I tend to teach it  as being almost like two things you can gain.  You can gain kudos, you can gain aidos.  

A visualization I give to this as my students  is like a jar of pennies.  They can both fill up, but which one will fill up more?  You want your kudos jar to fill up more.  You want to do more things that are good reputation.  If you act without aidos,  which in a way is a sense of shame,  or rather a fear of incurring shame,  you will gain a bad reputation.  You will have eiskos.  And that's your jar full of bad pennies, right?  So you will become a naïdes.  It's talked about in terms of someone  who does things that are wrong to do.  I think that's generally the,  that's the long form of aidos is bad  and aidos is shame.  So you are meant to do things that are right,  and thus you act with aidos.  You understand the right thing to do,  and you fear the shame of doing the wrong thing.  

So if we were to give examples of that,  heroes that we are known about for doing generally the right thing overall,  Achilles, Odysseus, they are in these particular Homeric texts,  which are not texts, these are these poems.  Paris is also there, or Alexandros,  he's also there in the Iliad,  he's described by his brother as weird.  You don't have the right foundations for your actions.  You are someone who acts without that sense of shame.  You don't understand that you are bringing shame upon everyone.  You have stolen someone's wife.  You refuse to fight properly on the battlefield.  You didn't even turn up to battle in armour.  You were just wearing someone's leopard skin.  You had to borrow some other armour.  And then you left the battle when you were about to lose.  You were spirited off by Aphrodite,  but you're here, you haven't gone back to it, right?  So you're acting in a shameful way.  And so we remember Paris overall now.  We do remember him,  but it's not really for the right reasons.  We would say he's infamous rather than famous.  So you could say someone who has a lot of kudos  gets famous for good reasons,  kleos, and then someone who is infamous,  we would say now,  have acted without their sense of shame.  They have had aidos, say,  or they are incurring this shameful action,  and we remember them, our klees, without kudos.  

So when I'm building my hero,  he's not like a modern superhero.  He's just, you know, 100% good.  There's room for manoeuvre  into being a bit of a bad guy,  as long as most of the time he's doing the right thing.  And the other thing,  it doesn't sound like the Greeks were particularly  interested in underdogs, does it?  

No, it's quite interesting.  I used to teach tragedy,  and we would discuss the differences  between ancient tragedy and modern tragedy.  So we'd look at all the characters in ancient tragedies,  and they're always nobility.  There is never a regular person  until you get to say,  I think Arthur Miller is writing tragedies,  Death of a Salesman,  literally a real-life guy  who is experiencing life like everyone else.  And I think, really,  that's because, for a start,  a lot of these are escapism.  And when we want to hear escapism,  we want to hear about these amazing people  who we can only imagine being like  and maybe they are our own models we can live up to.  They're not regular people.  And we want to be like them.  We want to be rich.  We want to be famous.  We want to do amazing deeds.  And that's just not accessible  in your everyday, regular life.  And that's kind of the same today.  We still have all these superheroes.  But we probably hold our heroes now  to an even higher standard than before.  We want our heroes to be above humanity  now that we discuss morality.  We want them to be moral.  Otherwise, they become a super villain.  And we have very cut-and-tried good and evil.  Ancient Greek heroes, definitely,  are not necessarily people we would like.  They are not necessarily admirable.  And that's really key.  So in doing all of these great acts,  you might actually do stuff  that is what we would term as wrong.  And in fact, the ancient Greeks would suggest is wrong,  like Heracles killing his family.  And then his great  Labours are amazing.  But they are done while he is  in a self-imposed state of slavery.  He's put himself down to the lowest possible role.  And they might benefit the local populace, right?  Because a lot of the things that he gets rid of  are these terrible creatures  who are decimating populace  or who are just ruining crops,  which is still a massive deal.  But benefiting the local populace is a secondary act.  Whereas today, superheroes, super man goes,  spider man goes to fight evil,  to help people, to save people.  Ancient heroes aren't doing that.  

If you look at Theseus, he's not doing that.  He is very, very self-interested.  He's not in the examples that we've got here,  but he is still one of the heroes of mythology.  So really, hero is, as we said,  one of the better people,  as in he is bigger, stronger, better,  has the better starts in life,  but they're not necessarily nice people.  Odysseus is definitely not a nice guy.  He's pretty cutthroat.  He will do what he needs to do to benefit him  and sometimes to benefit his crew,  but mostly him,  because he wants to get back to his family.  He's still a great guy with his family,  it could be argued,  but he's very cutthroat in wanting to get back to them.  So we've got much more complicated characters  in ancient Greek heroes.  

Roman heroes, if we look at Aeneas, perhaps,  because he is also a hero of an epic,  and the epic that he is here of is Aeneid,  which is written rather than composed in Latin  by Virgil in the first century B.C.C.  He is good.  He's a good guy.  And in fact, he transforms from being  like an ancient Greek epic hero in Book Two,  where he's describing what happened at the fall of Troy,  which is mentioned in the epic cycle,  but not in one of the epics that we have.  So it's not in the Aeneid.  It's mentioned briefly in the Odyssey by Menelaus,  what's happened.  So Virgil goes,  I'm going to put some more detail into this,  and he talks about fall of Troy and the wooden horse.  And Aeneas' immediate response to Troy falling  is to go out and die honorably,  because that is part of Kleos.  

Dying in an honorable way,  fighting is something that is expected  when we look at Achilles in a bit.  He is certainly someone who values this idea.  So he goes out and he wants to die gloriously,  and he goes out to fight.  And he has to be stopped by his Olympian mother, Venus,  or Aphrodite, but this is a Roman poem,  so we'll go with Venus.  And she makes the scales fall from his eyes, as it were.  And he can truly see that actually the gods are the ones  toppling Troy on behalf of the Greeks.  That time is done.  That time is over.  And he must now transition into being the savior of his people.  And so that is what a Roman epic hero now becomes,  which in fact is very dull.  And my class have often said,  when Game of Thrones was on,  like, oh my God, he's such John Snow,  he never does anything wrong,  he's just so good all the time.  

Oh my God, Aeneas is John Snow.  Right?  

Yeah, absolutely.  

Selfless to a fault.  And one of the essays that then we write,  on a day level when we're discussing Aeneid,  is Aeneas is not the main character of the Aeneid, Rome.  Specifically, the new golden age of Rome  that is being set up by Augustus  is the main character of the Aeneid.  And in fact, there was even a series,  an animated series,  Ulysses 31.  Like all the best 80s comics were,  80s animations were,  this fantastic, interesting mix of cultures  making these about a completely different culture.  Ulysses 31 is meant to be about Odysseus,  but like in space.  But he's not.  It's definitely Aeneas,  because he never does anything wrong  and he's really nice.  So Aeneas becomes this very different type of hero  and even though he treads in the footsteps,  literally, of Odysseus in his story,  he like gets to the Cyclops Island  after Odysseus has been there and so forth.  And then he like does a thing where he,  Odysseus kills one stag,  Aeneas has to outdo him seven stags.  I think I mentioned that before.  It's never explained how,  but like he's just better than these heroes.  All of his stories come down to,  I have to do the right thing for my people.  

When he falls in love with Dido  and they act like man and wife  and he starts taking over as king of Carthage,  where she has set up this new city,  he is then told Mercury is sent down  to get him to go on his way  in the same way that Hermes is sent down  to allow Odysseus to go on his way.  Odysseus is going to get home  and Aeneas has to step away from this new home  he's built and make a new home,  which is just for these Trojans.  It's going to be Rome in the end.  And so he's got to do that for the sake of his people,  not for the sake of himself.  So it's a very different kind of modern hero  compared to the ancient Greek heroes,  the Roman heroes,  it's probably more modern viewpoint.  

Definitely far fewer shades of grey with Aeneas.  I liked what Ava McMaster said  in her episode on the Aeneid,  where she said he was kind of throughout the poem  trying on costumes of previous Greek heroes  to try and work out what a Roman one was.  And his idea of a Roman hero is very, very different  from the Greek heroes that you've been describing so far.  

That's right.  Another thing that often heroes do or have done  is have a link with the underworld before they are dead.  So Odysseus visits the underworld,  doesn't go in,  has a nekyia on the banks of the underworld,  but doesn't actually go into it.  Achilles is famously dipped into the sticks, apparently,  by his goddess mother.  So that protects him,  and that's why he can only be hurt in his heel.  We'll come back to him in a minute.  Other heroes, not from these specific myths.  Orpheus is a very different hero as well.  His talent is not fighting, but it is singing.  He goes into the underworld famously  to try and get back his wife who has died.  Theseus also goes to the underworld,  but for really stupid reasons.  

Because he's Theseus..  

He goes with his friend.  

Yeah, exactly, right?  

He's already kidnapped Helen of Troy.  Well, sorry.  She will be Helen of Troy.  She's Helen of her mum's house,  essentially, at this point still,  because she's a child,  and he kidnaps her in order to have her in his wife's stable  for when she's old enough to marry.  And then he goes off with Perithous.  They go, right, who will get for you as a wife?  We'll go to the underworld and get Persephone.  So he goes to the underworld.  

And then Aeneas, he gets the best underworld journey.  So he's tied in with this idea of heroes being able to go  into the underworld.  But also then they have a katabasis.  They go down into the underworld,  or at least stand near it, like Odysseus does.  But they then have an anabasis.  They come back out.  Hercules also does this one.  He has to retrieve as his last labor,  Cerberus, the three-headed dog of the underworld.  He gets to come back out too.  Thus Aeneas, who we start to see now as like  a checklist of all the best bits of heroes,  he gets to go to the underworld too,  see his dad,  see all those who were being punished  for doing the wrong thing,  including some future Romans who are now history  to those reading his epic,  and then see a whole load of future Romans  who were about to be born into their new Roman identity,  including Julius Caesar and Augustus and so forth.  So he gets to go to the underworld and see it,  but it's in order again to make Rome  the center of the story  and Augustus the center of the story.  But yeah, so another tick box that heroes can have  is being trained by a centaur,  meeting famous people, going to the underworld.  

Okay, so I'm definitely having to put that in my story.  My hypothetical hero will go to the underworld at some point.  When we think about modern movies,  they often have formulas.  So we might have the training montage or the makeover.  What can I have as a kind of set piece in my epic  that's going to show everyone this hero doing his thing,  being amazing, becoming glorious?  

In epic specifically, we would have an aristeia,  which is I suppose quite specific to the Iliad really,  but that is where so many of these heroes  are fighting on the battlefield,  and this is what this is.  So this is another formula as well,  which makes it easier for the poet to remember.  It also, I suppose you could say,  as we've used modern filmmaking terms  to compare things to like CGI,  this is to start off with the montage, right?  The training montage or the getting ready to fight montage.  So the formula goes like this.  The hero has divine inspiration.  So now whichever god put the idea into whichever hero  to go on their spree of battle.  So that's their divine inspiration.  The idea has been implanted in the head.  

Then we get this arming sequence, the montage, right?  Where they put on their armor in the same order  every single time.  What differs here that the poet can show off with  is what details of the armor is given  depending on the greatness of the warrior  and how cool their armor is.  And you can imagine at the divine inspiration,  the audience are already getting excited  because they know what's about to come.  And then the arming sequence allows them to visualize  this hero putting on each piece of armor.  First, the greaves, which are like shin pads.  They cover the bit below your shield.  Then the corselet or cuirass.  So you've got some kind of covering on your torso.  And sometimes these are then described in detail.  Then you hang your sword from its baldric.  It's a belt.  Now, you are a sword owner  because you are a noble hero.  Lesser heroes don't have swords, which is really interesting.  

In Mycenaean burials, we see these beautiful swords  being buried in these very lavish burials.  Regular people in the Iliad, the foot soldiers,  they just have spears, more long-range weapons  that can also be used in a sort of a pokey context.  But hand-to-hand duels are going to be happening  between heroes like those bulls we talked about earlier.  So you hang on your sword.  

Then you pick up your shield,  your great massive shield.  Lots of description words to say.  It's really, really big.  Because you have to carry it, I suppose.  Yeah, I mean, hiding behind a shield doesn't sound very heroic,  but the fact that you are carrying the shield,  this is like a physical prowess.  Then you put on your helmet,  which in examples of artwork from early Bronze Age  right through to classical periods,  where we get a lot of these images in classical armour,  have huge plumes on them,  which you can imagine is quite a cool thing  because it makes you look taller  and it wobbles about and distracts your enemy.  

And then you pick up your spear,  or sometimes two spears,  and then you're ready to go.  So that arming sequence,  arm montage as it were, completed.  The hero then expresses their enthusiasm for battle,  and then they advance onto the battlefield.  So then we get the action.  There's a killing spree.  There are many deaths.  Often these are very poetic deaths.  So sometimes because these deaths mean much more to us  if we know who's being killed,  the people being killed will be named first.  Have a quick backstory.  They were really worshipped back home as being a great hero,  and then we're told,  doesn't matter now, they are killed.  And sometimes these deaths are also really gory.  So there's a bit where someone's eyes fall out  because their head is cracked inside their helmet.  I mean, eyes can't really fall out,  but like they're described as falling off,  there's a brilliant bit.  

Agamemnon loves cutting people's bits off.  I think it's him who cuts off a hand.  He just does.  He just loves this.  And I think it's when he cuts off a hand,  the hand keeps moving.  Like he's trying to grab this bit.  It's really cool though when you're teaching this to kids,  well, young adults, but also kids.  It's kind of exciting,  but your reaction just then is exactly what the audience would do.  They love to hear it,  but they have these mixed emotions.  We are sad because the person has died.  We are enthralled because of this gory stuff  that hopefully we will never have to experience  the watching of happen or it happened to us.  And then we get, again, a formulaic phrase,  like their teeth bit the dust.  Another one bites the dust.  And their soul went down to the underworld  or their soul went down to Hades.  So we kind of miniature follow them.  It's almost like rites are being said  in this poem for the dead.  So they're being honored.  Their memory is being honored by being in the poem.  So they have got Kleos.  They're being killed,  but they're being killed by someone who's really impressive.  

Again, to go back to that example in Metamorphoses  where Achelous is actually telling Theseus  about how he lost his horn  when he had to fight Hercules.  He says, I don't like talking about times when I've lost,  but like I lost to Hercules,  so I don't mind that much.  He's pretty amazing.  If I was going to lose to anyone,  at least it was him, right?  So here it's the same thing.  These are lesser heroes.  They are dying to a greater hero  as part of that greater hero's story.  So they're a footnote in the story,  but at least they're getting named  and at least they're getting honored.  Now, the hero then is wounded.  Will they survive?  So there's this great moment in an aristeia  where you think, oh no,  it can't all be good, right?  Because as we've established with Aeneas,  being just good is boring.  There's got to be a moment  of something happening.  Like with Diomedes, he's a great hero,  he has an aristeia.  He gets hit in the foot  with an arrow, but guess who?  It's Paris!  

Nobody's favorite Paris.  

So Alexandros/Paris,  he goes up,  haha, I hit you!  Kind of wish I'd hit you in the stomach though,  because that's where I was aiming,  but I still hit you.  I mean, I am paraphrasing wildly here,  of course.  

I know, but it's just so Paris, isn't it?  I'm a bit crap, but I'm going to boast about myself anyway. 

 Yeah,  because that's what I do.  I mean, who brings  a bow and arrow to  a spear fight, right?  

An idiot. 

 And Diomedes is like,  just imagine looking at his foot  and going, yeah, you hit me in the foot!  And he's really annoyed, because  ending his Aristeia, so then there is tension,  but he still has an ultimate triathlon,  then he limps off the battlefield.  So that's the end point, right? They end on a high,  but they go off and be healed  to fight another day.  And in the Iliad, there is a hero who is a  healer, Machaeon,  and he heals those who have  been hurt on battle. But he does also  go into battle, so he's also  seen as a hero because he fights.  So there's different ways to be a hero,  but in the Iliad, it does seem to come down to  fighting, which is why we're laughing at Paris  because he's not really very good at it.  

So that is, I suppose, the main thing  that would really  mark out a great hero  in this particular hero  who has an Aristeia.  The most famous Aristeia  in the Iliad is actually  probably Patroclus's  or Patroclus's Aristeia,  which is then followed by  finally Achilles's  Aristeia. And it's his Aristeia that we've been  waiting for the entire story.  

So I am my own hypothetical  poet. I'm writing my  own epic.  Who could I base my main character  on? Who is, like, the ultimate hero  in Homer?  I can look at his story,  how he's written, and think, yes, that's going to be  my inspiration for writing my own  hero. 

I'm literally  rubbing my hands together with glee at this  question. Obviously, I would say  I would personally say Odysseus,  but  only because  I find him the most interesting.  But if we look  at which two poems have survived  intact from that entire  epic cycle that is  otherwise lost,  it has to be really either Odysseus  or it has to be Achilles. I mean, you could go with  Heracles, but he doesn't have a [surviving] epic.  So we're talking about that. So let's focus on those  two. I think Odysseus is interesting because he  does an awful lot of things that are questionable.  His adventure goes outside  this framework of the warfare.  So if we're going to stick with  the majority of these heroes  from this, I think we'll go with Achilles, because  he is within this warfare, and his story  really concerns that.  

But I think one of the reasons why both of  these have survived so well,  these poems are specifically about these two  heroes, which makes them easier  to sort of focus in on as  stories. And then these two heroes  are so very different,  and yet very similar,  they're really identifiable.  They are both men who suffer.  They suffer in really different  ways. Achilles  suffers.  He wants, and it is  basically his entire  focus in life,  he wants glory,  and he wants imperishable  glory. Glory that does not end,  which would be kleos aphthiton. I think I'm pronouncing that right.  So this is imperishable glory.  

You can have glory, and it will be real glory,  and people will talk about it, but you want glory that lasts forever.  And we know he's achieved that, because we're talking about  him right now. And the glory is,  the kleos is the story that we are  hearing about him.  So even within the Iliad,  like we had with Demodocus in Odyssey,  we have in the Iliad as well, heroes  being sung about by  not necessarily rhapsodes, but by  actual characters. So for example,  the character Phoenix  is telling a story to  Achilles to try and make him want to fight,  because this is the plot of the Iliad.  Achilles has  been slighted.  His honor, his kleos, is in  danger. Not because of him  doing something  aidos, with, you know,  not fearing shame, but because of  Agamemnon not fearing  shame. 

Agamemnon has acted  without aidos, so he has gained  this bad reputation. Because right  at the start of the Iliad, we are  told that he has taken as one of  his slaves, Chryseis.  She is the daughter of Chryseis,  a greater naming,  and he is a priest  of Apollo. He,  as you do, comes to ransom  his daughter back,  and as you don't, Agamemnon has  laughed in his face and kicked him out.  That has slighted not just him, but has  slighted Apollo as well.  And so Apollo,  you don't want to get on the wrong side of,  he sends a plague.  And so because of Agamemnon's  folly here, who he does, he blames  folly, or Arte, the goddess  of folly, making stupid decisions,  he says later. It wasn't me, really. It was  me, but it wasn't me, really. It was her. She blinded  me to the right thing to do. But at this point,  he's still doing the wrong thing. All these people are dying.  

First of all, all the animals die, so they can't even sacrifice  or eat. And then the men start to die.  And they call an assembly. He is  told by Calchas, or Kaltas,  who is their seer,  who looks at the entrails and who also  looks at the peasants of birds.  So he's an orga. He's a seer.  That the reason why this is  happening is because  don't make me say it, Calchas, is because  there's someone here who won't  like what I have to say. Everyone looks  at Agamemnon. It's Agamemnon's  fault. Agamemnon is like, I knew  you'd say that. I hate it when you say this. You always  say bad things about me. I don't  want to give up my girl. Fine,  if I have to give up my girl, I'm going to take another girl.  I'll take Achilles.  I'll take your girl. Achilles is  like, I'm sorry, what?  You can't do that. Achilles is  the one who has found all these  women by killing all their families  and taking them as slaves, and they've been handed out. He's the  one doing all the work. Agamemnon,  Achilles says, he has just sat in his  throne and done nothing, but he's the greater  king, and so he must be respected.  

Now, for no reason  at all, really, other than  Achilles has agreed that  you kind of need to do it. So fine,  I'll take your girl. I'm going to send some men to take  her. And Achilles is so incensed  by this, he almost kills  Agamemnon there and then, but we are told  Athene pulls him back by  his hair. Athene, goddess of wisdom, makes  him do the right thing. So he  acts in the right way, even though  Agamemnon has acted in the wrong way.  And because Agamemnon has disrespected him,  treated him like a regular  guy, not treated him  with the respect he deserves, and thus  put into perspective the reason why he's there  at the war at all, he refuses  to fight, and he sits out.  So, an awful lot  of the Iliad is him not fighting.  And when they realize  that this is a bad thing,  because now the Achaeans, the Greeks,  are losing, and Hector's  doing a great job of almost pushing them back to their  ships, Agamemnon goes, yeah,  it is my fault, I'm really sorry,  but it wasn't my fault really, and now I  should probably give him some more stuff  that will give him clothes. And he lists a load  of stuff he's going to give to Achilles.  

This is the embassy to Achilles.  He's going to give him a huge number  of physical gifts right there and then. And then  when they win the war and when he goes home,  he's going to allow him to marry his  daughter, so he'll become his  heir, essentially. He's going to give him  some cities to also  be king of, and thus they will worship him as a  hero, all of this stuff. And he  chooses three people to go and talk  to Achilles to try and  win him round. 

He picks  Odysseus, because Odysseus is good at  talking, and he thinks he  can talk him round. Phoenix,  who I mentioned a moment ago, he's  like a father figure on the  battlefield to Achilles,  so hopefully Achilles will respect  his decision. And then he's going to  send Ajax, and Ajax  is kind of the epitome of what  a good warrior should be.  Normally, we would say, Darmades,  he's the second best warrior, but he gets really  cross about stuff. So we'll pick Ajax,  who, to all extents and purposes,  bit of a meathead, doesn't really get  why Achilles is so cross. You should just  fight, that is what is right. 

So they  go and they have  this embassy to Achilles, and when they get to  Achilles' hut, he is sitting there  with Patrocles  next to him, and he is singing  about the feats of  men. He is literally  doing what Homer is  doing by  singing this song about him.  He's singing the songs of men, because that is  what is important to him.  And Patrocles is sitting there next to him,  waiting for him to finish, which I love  that line. It sounds so grumpy, but it's  not. And Achilles immediately  jumps up and gives hospitality  to his men. And we didn't talk  about hospitality, because it's not the  major focus of the Iliad, but it  is a focus. It's one of these things that  you do, because it gives you  kudos to do it correctly, and it  is aidos to do it  incorrectly. You must give things to your  guests and treat them in the right way. And there's a  formula for that too. 

So he immediately  gives food to his guests, sits them down,  and waits for them to be finished before  they talk business.  And immediately, there's this lovely moment  where Phoenix and  Ajax are nodding to each other, which one of us should go  first? And Odysseus goes, I'm going to go first,  because I'm going to get to the gist of it.  Agamemnon says, sorry, he wants you back, he's going  to give you all this stuff.  Now that should be enough for Achilles,  all the stuff. It is  a righting of a wrong by taking  the woman from him.  I didn't mention her name, sorry, Briseis.  By taking her from him,  he has physically removed,  Agamemnon has physically removed a  piece of Achilles's  booty,  for other words, war spoils,  and he's done it in front of everyone,  which has reduced his reputation.  

By saying  in front of this assembly all of the things  that he will now give back  to Achilles to right this wrong, including  that girl, and he promises  he hasn't slept with her, he makes a big deal  of that, that should right that wrong,  that should atone for this, that should fix  the situation, because it is  physically giving back that  kudos.  The reason why Achilles  is such an amazing hero, and why he has  an entire poem, not Darmidae's,  not Ajax, is because  of what he says next. He gives this  amazing speech where he says, Odysseus,  don't talk bland nonsense  to me, alright? I know what you're about.  He's the only one who can really see through  Odysseus's chatter.  Because I know  what is important. Because I  have been given two fates,  Keres.  Now this is something that's really, again,  kind of key to a lot of heroes,  they have a grand fate.  No one knows their fate generally  in real life. A lot of these heroes do  because they've gone to get  an oracle from Delphi.  

But here, like Odysseus has  a fate, his fate is to get home.  Unfortunately he also has a bad  fortune, he will not get home straight  away. Achilles  has two fates depending on  what he does, and he's been told this by  his goddess mother, so she's got the skinny on this.  He can choose,  he can either  stay home and live,  and no one will remember him.  Or he can go  to Troy and fight,  but he's going to die there.  But the upshot of that is he will have  eternal chaos. Now we know  which one he has picked.  At this moment in time, he's clearly  not sure which one he should pick,  because Agamemnon has just  put this in fabulous monochrome  for him.  Go home or fight or die.  And he says this is my life  we are fighting for  and what I do with that life.  So please don't tell me I can  just fix the situation by accepting  his gifts. Because he  made this into a nonsense.  He turned this on its head by what he did.  He has no respect for the system.  He has acted with Eidos.  And essentially he says, do you know what?  I'm going now. I'm going to go home tomorrow.  Phoenix, you can come with me.  

Phoenix, as  his way of trying to convince Achilles  to stay, he has told a story  of an ancient hero.  He has sung a tale that's the song of  Meleager.  And that story is about doing the right  thing by your kinsmen.  But it's not enough for Achilles.  And so he doesn't really see the real  story that's being told there.  Without him everyone will die.  And there's also,  we realize, a bit of foreshadowing there.  Because what he does next is  he kicks them all out, says he's going to go home  and crucially doesn't go  home. He's still not ready to make that choice.  He could go. He said he's going to.  But he doesn't.  Kleos is the be-all and the end-all  and he's starting to realize that.  

But he doesn't realize it entirely  until the crucial main point, the death  of Patrocles.  Now he is a really interesting character  because he is being presented not exactly  as a hero. They have this lovely domestic  arrangement. Patrocles  cooks, he looks after the guests.  He's older than Achilles  but he's kind of looking after him.  They are absolute  soulmates.  That's been interpreted in lots of different ways  but the way that Achilles reacts later  when Patrocles dies  suggests that they are absolutely  entwined.  

But we never really hear about him  being a hero until what happens.  He's seemingly soft-hearted  compared to Achilles.  He sees all the fighting and dying on a battlefield  and Nestor sees this and Nestor says  why don't you go to Achilles and ask if you can  fight in his stead?  Just enough so that we at least  get some relief from the Trojans  trying to attack us.  We're going to get forced back to our ships  and then we'll either have to go or we'll be stuck here forever  and we'll all die. So Patrocles does this.  He comes home and because it comes from him  when he says to Achilles  your heart must be made of stone  I think that's who you're  you can't be born of anything other than that  practically questions one of the things  that makes him a hero, his paternity.  Achilles kind of agrees.  He says alright fine, you can wear my armor  stand there in my armor  make it look like it's me  if I go that will look like  I'm giving in to Agamemnon  so you go and we'll tell everyone it was you afterwards  but don't go  any further. Don't do any fighting  because that will make me  less valuable if you're any good at it.  But also he's really worried about him fighting  because he's not as good as him.  

Patrocles does this, he goes on to the battlefield  he stands there in his armor  but then he has an  aristeia. This for him  the pull of the Kleos as well  is too great and so he  experiences it too and he does  die for his  comrades and in fact the way he dies  is that he's so good at fighting  he's actually god. If you line up how many  people are killed in each aristeia  he's got the biggest kill count of the entire Iliad  only because I suppose Achilles  isn't really fighting for most of it  but even when Achilles does fight he doesn't have  such a high kill count  and that makes us think that he's going to do  incredibly well. He even kills a son of Zeus! He kills Sarpedon.  

Finally he's like practically running up  the walls of Troy  and he has to be brought down because we are told  in the poem if he had got into  Troy that would have like practically  changed fate so he can't be allowed to do that.  The gods can't control  fate but they can  make people's fortune go a certain way and  Patrocles is destined to die. He is  knocked back by Apollo  he is stabbed by a guy  who's like literally on his first day of battle  and then he is taken down by  Hector and the language  to describe it almost makes him sound like he's  being sacrificed  almost like on the altar of  Achilles' anger  and his  kleos himself. And it's  his death and then the loss of that armor  so Achilles can't even go into battle  that makes Achilles realise he's  made the wrong decision. 

He is almost  like a tragic hero at this point except that  this predates what we think of as tragedy  in that he realises he's made the wrong  choice and he absolutely falls apart  he grieves like a woman  would grieve tearing his hair pouring  dust over himself. He's on suicide  watch. They are worried that he will  end his own life because  of this. And then the  next day he's sulky. I want to go into battle. I want to go into  battle now. I want to go and kill. They're like no you have  to eat something. You haven't eaten yet. Eat  something. They're looking after him.  I go Memnon and him make peace because we can't  go into battle until I've made peace but I still want to go and kill  him. I have to go and kill Hector. And finally  he does. 

He has realised  that that is what he wants but he's made  lost this absolutely  best person in his life to get  this. So he earns  that kleos back himself  but it is still tainted.  He realises he did the wrong thing but  Agamemnon did the wrong thing first.  And so Thetis  has to get Ephesus to make new armour for  him. And on that armour  on the shield in particular  is a set of scenes  one scene of a city  at peace  and another scene of a city under  siege. And Achilles looks upon it  marvelling at the artwork  not really knowing what it means  and we can kind of see he's made  his choice. He could be in the city  at peace right now but instead  this is what he is going to  use to go into battle to gain that kleos  and now we know he will die  for it. 

Looking after  those whom he honours the  most having lost the one he honoured the absolute  most of all. So he has his  aristeia. It ends with a  duel with Hector. He earns that kleos  back. He's still really angry.  He earns further.  He acts shamefully by putting  the body of Hector to mal  treatment dragging it naked around  Troy three times.  But in the end he gives that  body up. So that is the end of  the Iliad where he gives the body up and his  anger is finally reduced. We don't  see him actually die but  that die is cast to  use that as a metaphor  for it. We know he's going to.  His mother has even  like started mourning him  while he's still alive.  When he's dying for Patrocles  she comes and cries for her son  because now she knows  he's not going to make the decision she  wants him to make of not dying.  He is there.  

So I guess I think that's why he survived  in his story. His story  survived because it's really complex  because it's really identifiable.  He's not perfect. He makes mistakes.  He loses out.  Again this is later why very similar tragic  heroes will be so amazingly well  preserved in our memory and so well preserved  by further playwrights  and poets. So we remember  him in the same way epic poems  remembered and recorded those feats of  heroes. 

So when  I think about the modern  idea of hero which  tends to mean most of the  time one of two things.  The guy with the biggest machine gun  in a World War Two movie.  Or someone  in Marvel Cinematic Universe  generally, it seems to be.  And I don't think  anyone in MCU sounds  as complicated  as morally grey  as anyone in Greek epic.  We seem to have  flattened the  idea of hero  in modern cinema  let's say compared to  Greek epic. It sounds  like there's a lot more nuance.  

I think we almost think of hero in terms  of protagonist now.  The main character. And people  will say who's the hero of the story? Meaning  protagonist. Which is a term from  theatre, Greek theatre. The  actor who plays the main character whereas the  other two actors, the deuteragist  and the tritragist will play multiple characters.  But that's it. It's the focus  rather than maybe their deeds. 

And then  superhero has come to mean  what we think about the heroes  of ancient Greek and Roman kind of culture.  Like the later Roman. They are like  you say flattened into being  good. And they fight  evil. Instead of  they fight morally ambiguous things.  Or they are the ones who are morally ambiguous  and doing it for the ability to  be remembered forever. And both  are remembered. Maybe not forever.  I mean good grief. I've lost track of how many Superman  films there have been. He's probably  I'm going to get such hatred for this.  Superman is boring.  

Superman is so boring.  

Oh he is. I used to find  Spider-Man really boring too until the most  recent films which have brought  in a bit more of that characteristic because they've made him a lot  younger and he's able to make mistakes.  I think heroes should be allowed to make  mistakes. I'd say instead of  MCU we go DC. I think Batman  is possibly closer  to  the ancient Greek heroes because  maybe we can use that tick list  right. He is  not the son of a god but he's the son of a wealthy  man and woman. 

Yeah definitely  aristocracy. 

He has  suffered. He loses his parents  at an early age. In a horrible  way. That would be awful for anyone.  He still has  the better upbringing. The resources.  And he uses those resources  to fight crime.  But he does it as a vigilante.  And he uses violence.  Certainly in the earlier incarnations  of him.  So he is morally ambiguous.  He is also often made to  look like the bad guy.  And they use him as one  of the villains compared to say  the police who are meant to be the good guys.  So he is thrown into this morally ambiguous like  he's got a secret.  Who he really is in real life is different.  So that's where I suppose he is  somewhat different in that he  inhabits two spheres rather than  this one sphere that the ancient Greek  heroes do probably by  necessity really. So he's got that additional  thing. 

Like Achilles is definitely not going to go  secretly by another name and do nice things  because what's the point? No one's going to  remember that. Whereas with Batman  with his real name. As Bruce Wayne he's  still, he's the other side. He's the philanthropist  with lots of money. He's still slightly morally  ambiguous certainly in maybe the  later films. So  I think we still have an aspect  of those heroes. But  all of these heroes,  all of these myths, whenever  they're retold, whenever myths are retold,  again like every retelling,  it's a mirror to the society in  which it's being told. Superman is a  hero for that period of time because he is  morally good and he does  save us from evil. And  he becomes popular again and  again at times when that kind  of security is needed.  When perhaps  things are more gray  arid, then we can  have superheroes  who have that  morally gray area.  These days we  seem to be actually living  in the MCU or DC.  Billionaires are actually  trying to kill the world. Like that  W7 perhaps  and MCU and DC. That's actually  happening now, which is fascinating.  Who is our  hero now? Who is being  made of? Dare I say it, MCU films  have kind of fallen by the wayside a little bit.  

Now we've got  The Boys. So what we've  got now, which is perhaps  a really interesting viewpoint on  heroes, is The Boys by Garth Ennis,  which came out in graphic novel  form years ago,  but is now being reinvented.  And the topic's kind of tweaked  to be very actually  anti-superhero. Anti  these vigilante wannabes  with great powers who actually are irresponsible  with them. And then the actual  the main villain is  the biggest superhero of them all.  Like he's practically Mr  America, Homelander.  And he's the worst of all of them.  That's actually  very much a sign of our times  now. And that the heroes  who are fighting against him,  they are the ones that we put our  trust in, not the superheroes  who are in the pockets of the billionaires  who are trying to run the world.  

I suppose before that, another  really interesting was The Watchmen,  which I think is very much  I can't remember which came first, but I think that very much inspired  The Boys. The Watchmen is a series  of superheroes who are again  kind of flawed and not even really  particularly good. And then  we've got films like  Harley Quinn and  The Suicide Squad  and Suicide Squad,  which is one is a better version of the first, so they didn't even change the name.  And they are again  they're anti heroes.  They are heroes who have come out of prison  because they're only heroes by  being super. But  then they get the chance to redeem themselves and do something  for the good of the world. So again  the modern view of this, what  a hero is, but almost like  a cross between an ancient Greek hero who's  got these massive powers and what do they do with them?  They do stuff for themselves to give them  now they're being forced into a scenario  where they have to actually do something for the good of everyone else  and maybe die  in that term. So maybe The Suicide Squad is the most  accurate  representation of an  ancient Greek hero.  

Well who knew we were going to end there?  

No, I certainly didn't.  

So  in summary then,  my hypothetical  Greek hero that I've designed for my  hypothetical epic  poem, he's morally grey  as long as he's following most  of the rules and keeping  his good reputation  intact most of the  time. He's not necessarily a nice  guy. He's not  out saving damsels in distress  or kittens stuck up trees.  He's doing things for his own glory.  So he's not that kind of  idea of a hero, but he's also  the best,  the best of the best. He's got to be  pretty fantastic at what he does  and gorgeous and strong  and wonderful,  preferably with some god in his  ancestry. 

Indeed.  He's got to like, he's  given all this stuff on a plate.  He's got to make good on it. He's got to  do something with it. 

So  it sounds like a Greek hero  is someone that you can have a lot of fun with  because they're not one thing.  They're not perfect.  

And that's identifiable  because who is perfect? What human,  what mortal is perfect?  And that's the best way to have  a role model who has  maybe suffered but come back  from it. Who has done  bad things but has atoned for them and is now  doing better things.  That's someone that you  want to remember. And that's  I think universal. That's ancient and that's  modern.

 There you go.  Well, thank you so much  for coming on once again  returning guest to explain how  to build an epic and how to build a hero.  That was really, really interesting.  Thank you so much for having me back.  And just for all listeners out there,  where can we hear you in a little  bit more detail? 

Well, aside  from my comics work, which you can find at  greekmythcomics.com where I put all my work  free of charge to use, use for learning,  use for lessons. I've also written  a book about being a  hero, You Are Odysseus, which  essentially allows you to read the  Odyssey but making Odysseus' decisions  for him and then possibly going  off on a completely different tangent.  And I've also turned this into  an audiobook podcast  so you can listen to me  reading the book, the main Odyssey  storyline, whilst being  Odysseus in a nice  atmospheric soundscape.  And that is currently out now wherever  you listen to your podcasts.  

And  lucky you listeners, series two of  You Are Odysseus has just dropped.  It is an insanely good  audiobook and well worth  your time.