I have bitten the bullet and am about to launch a classical podcast (with Charlotte Higgins) about classics, ancient and modern. It will not just be about ancient history and literature, but also about the way we still use and debate the ancient world now. It’s called Instant Classics. We hope that Charlotte and I are a good combination: we both studied Classics at university (me a bit before her!). But she has moved “more modern”, while I have stuck in antiquity. Off-mic, it’s being produced by Jonty Claypole.
I now feel a bit embarrassed about my resistance to podcasts: rather like my earlier resistance to blogs (yes, really!). Until I was reluctantly persuaded to write a regular blog (by Peter Stothard, when he was Editor of this paper) I had been very sniffy. We called them “weblogs” back then, and I was of the view that mini-articles of 700 words or so were the very essence of dumbing down. I soon discovered that, thanks to the links, blogs were actually a way of getting more information across, not less. I still remember the feeling when I realized that I could do a post on (for example) the Res Gestae of the emperor Augustus and give readers the whole text of it, instead of concocting a limited summary. It opened up a new range of classical things for discussion.
I hope it’s going to be the same with the pod. We are going to do a weekly discussion on a variety of classical themes. Some of those will be the “great stories”, both historical and mythical (Cassandra, the prophetess who foretold the future with deadly accuracy but was destined never to be believed, is the subject of one of our first episodes). But we also plan to look at questions that often get sidestepped in public-facing classics. How many people could read and write in ancient Rome? How often did Romans really wear togas? And we’ll be taking a few deep-dives into individual authors and works of literature. Another of our early episodes is on Sappho.
But alongside this we are also hosting a regular “book club”, as it is called in podland. We’ll be working through, and talking about, the Odyssey, from start to finish – over several months, however long it takes us. Sometimes we’ll knock off a whole book in a single session, sometimes we’ll linger for half an hour on just ten lines, sometimes we’ll take a big question about the poem (like “when was it composed?”). We’ll mostly be reading in English translation, but we will stop on a Greek word or two every now and then.
We have one eye on the Christopher Nolan film coming out next year. But we also think it’s well worth doing anyway. Classicists are always recommending people to read the Odyssey as it makes a good starting point in ancient literature. And so it does. But it is still a challenge if you come to it completely cold. I mean just in the first couple of hundred lines, we glimpse Odysseus on Calypso’s island, read about a discussion of the gods on Mount Olympus, and end up in Odysseus’ palace in Ithaca which has been occupied by a load of thugs who are after Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, while she patiently waits for his return from Troy. The thugs are euphemistically known as “the suitors” – but is that word used anywhere else now, except in reference to the Odyssey? Besides there are quite a few puzzles to trap the non-specialist – sidelong references to events at Argos (Clytemnestra and Aegisthus getting rid of Agamemnon) and the goddess Athena appearing in mortal disguise. It isn’t entirely straightforward, if this is your first ever encounter with classical literature.
So, our message is, come read along with us.
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