Maybe you love the cold weather, and you want nothing more than to don your hat and scarf, and go walking in the crisp air. If that is the case, read on for some podcasts that can keep you company on your wintry wanderings.
Maybe you’re like me, and you’re planning to spend the winter hibernating next to a radiator, wearing a a fluffy onesie and a massive dressing gown, while covered in multiple blankets. If that is the case, read on for some podcasts that will keep your brain warm during these cold months.
Or maybe –– most unlikely of all –– you’re here to read about how I incorporated podcasts into my ‘Literature Review’. You may remember from Mythic Methodologies & Legendary Literature Reviews Pt. 2 that I wrote about Beyoncé in my lit review and you may be starting to truly believe that I do not know what a lit review is meant to be.
You’d be correct.
But, in lieu of admitting that I have no idea what I’m doing, I’ll say:
It’s a primary contention of my lit review that texts written for general audiences by classicists (such as Natalie Haynes’ Pandora’s Jar and Helen Morales’ Antigone Rising) contribute to breaking down the ivory tower of Classics by making it more accessible, and this is also the case with podcasts.
So here are some podcasts that I’ve found useful for my research, and that you might find fun!
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics.
Available on BBC SOUNDS & SPOTIFY & APPLE PODCASTS
Natalie Haynes was awarded the Classical Association Prize in 2015 in acknowledgement of her work bringing Classics to a wider audience for this BBC Radio 4 series. On this show, she acts in equal parts as a stand-up comic, lecturer, and interviewer as she explores and explains various figures from the Classical world, ranging from playwrights and philosophers to mythical characters.
Honestly, who wouldn’t want to here a very clever comedian cracking wise about historical figures such as Sappho and Aristotle, as well as mythical figures such as Jocasta and Medusa.
Personally, I am IN LOVE with the episode where she tells us the entire plot of Homer’s Iliad in 28 minutes.
In my lit review, I talk about the Pandora episode of Natalie Haynes Stands Up…, where she expounds that ‘in the version of Pandora that we all know, she is always the only one responsible, for letting all these nasties out into the world. We never blame anyone else. […] We just blame the beautiful woman’ (19:15-30). Though it has not always been so clear-cut. In Theognis’ Elegies, there are good things in the jar, and in Aesop’s fables, the jar is opened by a greedy man, ‘but all these versions slip away’ (20:30) in favour of blaming a beautiful woman.
The reception of Pandora’s myth, for Haynes, ‘is all a matter of mistranslation’ because the Dutch scholar Erasmus mistranslated the Greek word pithos, jar, into the Latin word pixis, box, which is important because ‘the box makes Pandora more malevolent’; Greek jars are terracotta and top-heavy, easily breakable, and therefore an unsafe place to store ‘all the nasty things in the world’ (23:30-25:00). Moreover, in artistic renderings of Pandora, ‘it takes almost no time after Erasmus has mistranslated this word, from jar to box, for Pandora to be shown in art with a box, and really quickly it becomes a strongbox,’. This inevitably makes Pandora’s act purposeful and malicious.
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| Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Pandora (1871) |
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| Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Pandora (1879) |
As Edith Hall notes in her conversation with Haynes, Pandora’s main function until the 19th Century was to appear naked, ‘especially in the quasi-pornographic paintings of the pre-Raphaelites’, highlighting her hyper-sexualised portrayal in art. That is, until ‘the late 20th Century ‘when a few brave feminist scholars start to say: hey actually this is interesting’, particularly to anthropologically compare Pandora and her receptacle to Eve and her apple.
Hesiod calls Pandora kalos kakon, which is an oxymoron.
‘Kalos means fine, or beautiful, or good, and kakon means the opposite: shoddy, ugly, bad’. Although, if both words can be either something visual or something moral, it is noteworthy that ‘the positive quality is always turned into something visual and the negative quality is always translated as something moral’ (25:45-26:40).
If, in the Ancient Greek, Pandora is a beautiful-ugly and a good-bad, translator’s choices to make the first word aesthetic and second word moral (in the Oxford World’s Classics, Pandora is rendered a ‘pretty bane’), speaks to a long-held misogynistic idea that ‘we always expect a beautiful woman to be bad’, therefore making Pandora ‘the original femme fatale’ (26:40).
It is Haynes’ contention that Pandora is not bad, ‘she is both good and bad, beautiful and ugly, she is an agent of change’ (27:00), and she is a victim of misogynistic translations and artistic renderings.
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics is so witty, well-researched, and it covers a lot of figures that I haven’t seen talked about elsewhere, including Aspasia, Petronius, and Aggripina… don’t know who they are? Listen now!
Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby!
Available on SPOTIFY & APPLE PODCASTS & ACAST
Long-time readers of The Shelbiad will remember 2019’s Let’s Talk About “Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby!” post, where I shared the story of how this podcast helped me to overcome the overwhelming imposter syndrome that I had at the start of the PhD:
When I started this PhD, I was pretty apprehensive about the mythology aspect of my project. All of my academic research has been on contemporary feminist literature; both my Undergraduate and Master's dissertations had chapters on mythology, and those were the parts I enjoyed the most, which led me to this PhD in contemporary feminist adaptations of myth. But, aside from an intro to Classical Mythology module in my first year of Undergrad, I had absolutely no formal training in Classics. I knew a fair bit about myths from my personal interests, but I had no idea how to be a mythologist or, as I kept putting it, 'I don't even know what I don't know about myths.' And, as with most things, the more you learn, the less you realise you know.
Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby! made me feel like I actually belonged in Classics, and for that I will be forever grateful.
So, I was really lucky to be able to include this podcast in my literature review. If lit reviews are about what the reader needs to know to position my research in the field, they need to know about the feminist analyses and conversations hosted by Liv Albert in Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby!
Myers favours women’s translations on her curriculums ‘both for their aesthetic value and, unapologetically, for the identities of their translators,’ as well as to open up discussions about the gendered act of translation and to demystify the labour of the translator (Myers 2019). Similarly, Liv reports that she tries ‘if I can, to get my hands on translations by women’ (Albert 19 January 2021: 10:50).
Albert deals predominantly with ancient sources in translation, providing innovative analyses of the myths, and she also produces episodes dedicated to contemporary retellings, such as Madeline Miller’s Circe; in the cases of Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne and Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships, Albert engages in critical conversations with the authors themselves!
In the podcast, ‘Myths of the ancient world are examined through a modern intersectional feminist lens, focusing where possible on amplifying the voices of women, trans, and non-binary people’ (Mythsbaby.com). In her conversation with Natalie Haynes, Albert states that her goal with the podcast is to try ‘to take back the women of mythology’, reclaiming them from ‘the men who wrote things down’ who chose to focus instead on the men in myth. For Albert, ‘it is important to examine how [women] could be interpreted if you are constantly aware of [the patriarchy in mythic tradition]’ (Albert 19 January 2021: 17:15-50).
If that sounds familiar… my research also seeks to examine Greek myth through an intersectional feminist lens, specifically concentrating on adaptations of myth in contemporary women’s writing! Moreover, Albert’s stated goal of reclaiming mythic women from their patriarchal portrayals in ancient texts and their subsequent reception clearly comes under the purview of my work.
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| Garbatti's Medusa statue, who holds the head of Perseus & looks exhausted (2008) |
Liv is a hilarious, swear-y feminist who is not afraid to hold both mythical “heroes” and misogynistic trends in the classical tradition to account for their patriarchal bullshit! What more could you wish for?
So, that brings us to the end of the podcasts that I talk about in my lit review, but here are a couple of other relevant ones that I would love to recommend in this end-of-year podcast roundup:
Ancient History Fangirl
Available on ANCIENT HISTORY FANGIRL & SPOTIFY & APPLE PODCASTS
Hosted by the incredible Jenny and Gen, this podcast is an absolute must! They’re fun and clever, creative in their retellings, incisive and empathetic in their analyses.
Their podcast looks at some of the most interesting aspects of the ancient world, including sex workers and sex magic in Ancient Greece & Rome; evidence for a transgender Aphrodite; the courtesans that ruled Classical Athens; Cleopatra; Fulvia; Boudica… to name but a few recent ones!
How is every single episode so incredibly fascinating?? I have no idea. It’s clearly some type of esoteric witchcraft, but let’s just pop some headphones in and enjoy the boons of it.
You’re Dead To Me
Available on BBC SOUNDS & APPLE PODCASTS & SPOTIFY
Okay, strictly speaking, this one is a bit of a departure from myth and ancient world podcasts, but I couldn’t help but include it.
Public historian (and chief nerd of Horrible Histories) Greg Jenner invites an expert historian and a well-known comedian on for every episode, and they talk about people / events / phenomena from history: stuff you might think you know very well, stuff you’ve heard of but don’t really know much about, and stuff you’ve never heard of but definitely should have!
As Greg Jenner says, this is a history podcast for people who don’t like history, or who forgot to learn any in school.
My favourite part is the NUANCE WINDOW, where the historian is given 2 minutes to talk uninterrupted about any aspect of their specialty that they want to share with the world. I like to imagine what I would talk about in my nuance window… probably something about Helen or Briseis or Antigone or Phaedra… I get carried away.
My very geeky, overachieving brain gets so amped up for the ‘So What Do You Know Now?’ section at the end, where Greg Jenner tests the comedian on what they’ve learned during the podcast. I play along, trying to get all the answers right.
On some episodes, like the Mary Shelley one, the Lord Byron one, and the Witch Craze one, I got quite a lot of the answers right; I was surprised by all the stuff I didn’t know about Boudica, Joan of Arc, and Genghis Khan.
There’s something for everyone on there, and if you’re still searching for stuff on the ancient world, You’re Dead to Me has episodes on the Egyptian Pyramids, the Ancient Olympics, and the Spartans!
So, why did I do a podcast round-up for December 2021? No, it wasn’t because I had run out of festive-themed posts after Christmas Myths and Dionysian December. It’s partly because I thought that recommending something that is free and accessible would be a welcome change to all the rampant capitalism at this time of year, and partly because we’re still living in a socially distanced world. It’s nice to feel like someone is talking to you about what they’re passionate about, to feel connected to other people with similar interests to yourself, and to have something to escape into when everything feels so overwhelming.
Happy holidays everybody, I hope you all have a restful and restorative time!
If you are able, please do support me by donating to my Ko-Fi
Thank you all for reading this, and for your continued support and readership during 2021.
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