Special Episode – Storylife with Professor Joel P. Christensen

We are thrilled to sit down in conversation with Professor Joel P. Christensen to discuss some of the ideas explored in his forthcoming book Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things (Yale University Press).

Special Episode – Storylife with Professor Joel P. Christensen

Joel Christensen is Professor of Classical Studies at Brandeis University. He received his BA and MA from Brandeis in Classics and English and holds a PhD in Classics from New York University. His publications include A Beginner’s Guide to Homer (2013), A Commentary on the Homeric Battle of Frogs and Mice with Erik Robinson (2018), Homer’s Thebes: Epic Rivalries and the Appropriation of Mythical Pasts with Elton T. E. Barker (2019),  and The Many-Minded Man: the Odyssey, Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic (2020). 

Professor Christensen is also famous online for his engaging work on ancient Greece and Rome through his website sententiaeantiquae.com

In this episode we delve into some of the ideas that Christensen explores in his forthcoming book Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things (Yale University Press). With chapters exploring Homer in tandem with the COVID-19 pandemic and people’s response to it, particularly in the context of the United States.

Things to listen out for

• The power of epic poetry to have therapeutic benefits
• Biological analogies for the considering the life of narratives
• Approaching our understanding of the world and the affairs of people with generosity
• The Homeric Question(s)
• The dangers of the God-Author model when considering written texts
• On the significant differences between oral approaches to authority and written approaches to authority
• The arboreal metaphor for thinking of the Iliad and the Odyssey as objects
• Epic poetry and DNA (and some of the poetic meter!)
• The challenges of language whether its epic poetry or just going to language class
• The problem with Greek heroes and the protective nature of epic poetry
• The opportunity for ‘rehumanisation’ that comes from engaging with stories
• A call for an education revolution!

The cover for Storylife

It’s All Greek to Me!

Keen on the Ancient Greek recited by Professor Christensen in this episode?

He recites the opening line of the Iliad:

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος

which can be found online at Perseus.

And he also cites the first line of the Odyssey:

ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ

which can also be found online at Perseus.

Books (and film) mentioned

• Barbara Graziosi 2002. Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic (Cambridge University Press )
• Ruth Finnegan 1979. Oral Poetry: Its nature, significance and social context (Cambridge University Press)
• Walter J. Ong 2012. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Routledge)
• Rebecca Huntley 2020. How to Talk About Climate Change in a Way That Makes a Difference (Allen & Unwin)
• Cook, E. (1998). ‘Heroism, Suffering, and Change’ in D. Boedeker (Ed.), The Iliad, the Odyssey and the Real World: Proceedings from a Seminar Sponsored by the Society for the Preservation of the Greek Heritage and Held at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., on March 6-7, 1998 (pp. 47-63). Washington D.C.: Society for the Preservation of the Greek Heritage.
• Film: 2040 by Damon Gameau, released in 2019

Music Credits

Our music is composed by the amazing Bettina Joy de Guzman.

Automated Transcript

Lightly edited for the Latin and our wonderful Australian accents!

Dr G 0:15
Welcome to The Partial Historians.

We explore all the details of ancient Rome.

Everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battled wage and when citizens turn against each other. I’m Dr Rad.

And I’m Dr G. We consider Rome as the Romans saw it, by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.

Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Welcome everybody to a very special episode of The Partial Historians. I am one of your hosts, Dr G.

And I am Dr Rad.

And we are super thrilled today to be welcoming a special guest, Professor JoelChristiensen. Now, Joel Christiensen is professor of Classical Studies at Brandeis University. He received his BA and MA from Brandeis in classics and English, and holds a PhD in classics from New York University, and has many exciting publications in his back catalog, including ‘A Beginner’s guide to Homer’, ‘A Commentary on the Homeric Battle of Frogs and Mice’ with Eric Robinson, ‘Homer’s Thebes’ with Elton T. E. Barker and ‘The Many-Minded Man:The Odyssey, Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic’. Also, Professor Christensen is famous online for his engaging work on ancient Greece and Rome through his website, which I’m about to mispronounce, sententiaeantiquae.com

Yup, you stuff that up completely.

I did. Somebody correct me, please. Somebody correct me.

Sententiae, I think.

See, there you go. It’s easy. Just don’t rely on me for pronouncing things. So you could say, from this back catalog that we are incredibly starstruck and also completely out of our death, because we are Roman historians. And you will have noticed that Professor Christensen is really a Greek specialist in all of these sorts of areas that he’s focused on in his work. And we are going to be really junior learners in this process of this interview, which we’re excited about as we talk about Professor Christensen’s forthcoming book, ‘Storylife: On Epic Narrative and Living Things’, which is coming out in 2025 through Yale University Press. So thank you, Joel, so much for joining us.

Professor Joel Christensen 2:57
Hey, thank you for inviting me. I was so psyched when you guys sent that email, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Dr G 3:03
Fantastic. Woo hoo. I’m glad that the excitement is mutual, because we’re definitely starstruck. So this is, this is thrilling stuff. So to start off with, thinking about story life, in the preface, you say that this is an exploration of how we think about stories if we externalize them. And I’m wondering if you can take us a little bit about what led you to this idea to consider stories as external agents.

Speaker 1 3:31
Yeah, so I mean, what’s probably connected and animated my work, in fact, my interest in scholarship, since I was, I don’t know, middle school is thinking about how stories function in the world, why we respond to them so much, why we care about them and really like how we depend on them and what they do. And so, you know, for many years, in teaching myth, I, you know, grasp about for different metaphors and how to think about getting people to understand why makes vary, why stories are embedded in different contexts, and what similarities and differences from one context to another means. And at the same time, while I was doing this, I have been, as you note in the introduction, sort of habitually online, watching everything that’s happened in Twitter and Facebook since it started, I’m, you know, I feel like I’m not that old, but I’m old enough to remember a world before Google and before Facebook. In fact, both debuted while I was in graduate school, and you really got a sense of watching them unfold, of how much faster narratives were moving and changing, and how they could really make people act in different ways. And so part of it is, for me, I’ve always felt sort of on the outside of what we might see as American centrism and what we do in the world. To go back again to around the time Google debuted, I was in New York City for 911. I was there for the peace protest. And you know, I lost friends and, like, ruined family relationships. Because from the beginning, I didn’t understand why a terrorist attack in the US meant we should be going on an endless war and terror and, you know, invading Afghanistan, Iraq, all of those things. And so constantly, you know, I was interested in rhetoric, in politics. And then, you know, post the 2008 election and Obama, I got really interested in the way that stories shape our notion by identity and belonging to larger groups. And so that’s a very long answer for your for your question, but I’m getting, you know, I’m getting to the point, I got to the point where I, you know, everyone’s talking about intention and responsibility, like, who’s creating stories, who’s responsible for it? But one of the things that I think is really clear from watching the way narratives, you know, metastasize online and change, is I don’t think there are agents, right? We can point to specific moments where someone floats in there, gets accepted, but it’s so much more complicated than and so for me, what? But, you know, Trump’s victory in 2016 like bored me. I was like, How does this happen? How do people think like we can actually do? And then what really made me start to think of narratives as being independent of us was our collective response of us, especially to COVID, just the very notion that people were rejecting vaccination, not believing that we could understand the way the disease is working, rejecting masking and public health things, you know, it made me think, well, what if, just for sake of argument, we imagine that stories have nothing to do with our attention, right, but that they have a reason for existing on their own, and they operate by their own logic. And what if, in this logic is the very logic that animates the rest of creation, which is the need to perpetuate itself, not for good, not for evil, just for basic survival. And so that, for me, was sort of the starting proposition, what would it mean to just think about stories as independent from us, and that, in a way, can help sort of soften the blow of us understanding that something that we create and participate in willingly actually causes us harm. And so for me, this is also connected. It’s not just about COVID, of course. It’s also about climate change, it’s about so many of the narratives that we participate in that actually cause harm to us, individually and collectively. And so I think the ideas have been brewing and simmering for a very long time, but the real catalyst was just spending 18 months sitting at home watching us make bad decision after bad decision, and wondering if there’s a different way of thinking about things.

Dr G 7:45
Yeah, I think that’s really amazing. I think that puts things in a really great context as well, to set up, like the questions that we’re going to start to delve into further as we get into this interview as well, but this sense in which stories sort of sit both outside of the realm of the self, but are also constantly interacting with us as we move through space and time. And I think your analogy of, well, it’s not even an analogy, it’s just a fact of history, the way that the explosiveness of the internet over time, and so I don’t think that we’re that old, either, but we also pre date some of that stuff.

Speaker 1 8:24
Well, I mean, look for full disclosure, my age. I’m 46 right? And, you know, the first time I ever sent an email was when I was a freshman in college, yeah. And, you know, I never used the internet till I applied for college. And so I think this means, to a certain extent, that my consciousness and cognitive capacity formed before that and have a different relationship to information, but we can see that change. It’s like my parents talk about what life was like before cable TV. Like I really understand that, but I can clock the way it works. And just one thing to add to that, you know, that can another connection that that really primed all this thought is the work I did for my Odyssey book, which was really engaged in cognitive psychology and neurobiology and sort of collective notions of thinking and minds to sort of lay the basis for epic being a therapeutic experience. And I think one of our big challenges, and this again, lead back to the book, is as human beings, we are both culturally set up to think of ourselves as individuals and separate from things, and we’re biologically encouraged to consider the world in that way, but our language and our engagement with ideas, with others, is actually a collective experience. And so I think one of the reasons why I find these analogies not just useful, but absolutely necessary, is it’s so hard for us to defamiliarize ourselves, with our with the experiences that we have. Have like, we don’t think well in the aggregate, and it’s really hard to think outside of our individual subjectivity and imagine ourselves as part of a larger narrative ecosystem that shapes our identities, instead of sort of, you know, like free agents in the world making all of our own choices.

Dr G 10:15
Yeah, obviously, as of time of recording, to totally date this podcast, which I know we’re not supposed to do. But hey, watch me do it yet again. We are obviously all reeling with the news of Trump’s re election as of a few weeks ago, and definitely, as somebody who is constantly struggling with the lack of serious action on climate change, on the on the behalf of both institutions and individuals, I totally get what you’re saying in terms of, it just constantly boggles my mind that this kind of stuff is happening in the world. And I do think it has a lot to do with with narratives and the way that people interact with them. Yeah, that’s drive that, you know, helping to drive sort of action on these sorts of issues.

Speaker 1 10:55
No, I look it’s mind boggling. And you know, the the stance I always had, you know, when we elected, when we re elected, George Bush in 2004 you know, my first stance was, everybody’s stupid, right? But, but then I had to step back and say, look like, while it might be attractive to dismiss more than 50% of the country, like, we can’t assume that everyone’s just insane, right? Like, there has to be some other way to think about it, you know. And part of is about to reading people with empathy, trying to under, like, trying to understand the world in a generous way, which is really, really hard. And so that’s where it’s like, sort of, you know, to think of us as not individuals making rational decisions may seem to, you know, deprive us of agency, in a way, but it also is a fundamentally important framing for understanding human action, and I think that’s one of our real challenges in public policy and education. Is really seeing that problem there, that we are part of these larger tides in the world. And no matter how much smarter more informed we think we are like, we still have to look at the larger picture.

Dr G 12:11
So perhaps to segue from modern American politics to ancient Greece, such a jump time traveling a little bit obviously, even the average person on the street is probably aware that one of the standout figures in ancient Greek thought and storytelling is Homer. And one of the big questions that usually concerns scholars of Homer is important enough to receive capitalized letters, which is the Homeric question. Can you briefly explain to us what the Homeric question is all about?

Speaker 1 12:45
So, so that modifier, briefly, there is, is a dangerous request, but I’ll see. I’ll see what I could do. So the Homeric question, it’s not really one question, it’s multiple questions, and it has the following elements, one first one are the alien the Odyssey by the same person in scare quotes? Two, whether or not they’re by the same person, or if they are, are the alien Odyssey as we have them unitary? Are each of them whole in the way they’re meant to be, instead of sort of Malcolm text that were put together by later, by later editors? Three if these texts are unitary, or if they not, or if they’re not, what is the relationship between the texts we have and the oral tradition that we’re very certain predated the textualizations of the epic right? So, how did they move from an oral tradition of performance into a textual tradition of reading. And I think an additional question there is, how does that change the way we think about the epics, even if they came from an oral tradition, but they’re also in text? How do we analyze them? And then I think I’d add to that, how and when did it happen? And, you know it, did it happen in a single time or over time? And what’s the dirty relationship between the oral tradition and the text? So complicating features of this is that we have no certain evidence about a person called Homer. There are biographical traditions that are clearly false. They’re from all over the place. The best book on this is by Barbara Graziosi. It’s called ‘Inventing Homer’, and it really goes through the ancient evidence for the creation of Homer as a as a sort of poetic figure. You guys may like this next anecdote. I’ll try to make it simple. But my daughter came home. She is in She’s a freshman in high school, so first year in high school, she’s 14, and to hassle me, she took out her textbook, and she showed me in her history textbook, line, Homer was a blind poet who wrote The Iliad of the Odyssey, and she knew I was going to die from that. And she’s like, Well, why isn’t this right? I’m like, it. To and I tried to explain to her about composition and performance and how important it was over time. And then she said, Well, Encyclopedia Britannica says this is right. And she took out a phone and started fact checking me. And then she went to karate class and kept texting me. She texted, you know, what is Homer, according to you, and then she followed up people in my class say who was a real guy. And I just like, you’re trying to murder me, my daughter. And so I think the biographical tradition is clearly false. And in addition, there are significant features that are different between sort of oral derived literature and literary culture. And to add to all that, and make it more complicated, as a literate culture, where prejudice towards a sort of God author model for the creation of things. And I think if you read really carefully in the development of ancient Greek literature, you can see culture changing. I think Aristotle doesn’t understand oral culture. He doesn’t see the tradition as being indebted to variety and multiplicity and performance. He sees it as a written thing, because he’s a writer, and I think our number one challenge in conceptualizing a non written, fixed textual tradition for Homer is our own cultural framework that privileges authorship over genius over almost all else, and dis privileges collective contributions and creations.

Dr G 16:35
Well, you convinced me I’m going to go out and smash my bust of Homer immediately after recording this episode. Oh no, take that genius.

Professor Joel Christensen 16:45
Somebody might find it useful.

Dr G 16:49
Just fragments. Just leave fragments behind.

That should be appropriate, like that’s a good metaphor for what’s gonna happen here with the test, I shook that Aristotle was wrong about something. I mean, my god.

Speaker 1 17:02
I may be, I may be veering into iconoclastic territory by saying that, but I think, look, we have good evidence in studies in sort of oral culture, that the shift in mindset is less than a generation like even one person’s lifetime, as they move from an oral performance culture. Once they move to relying on reading and fixing things on a page, their sort of neurological relationship to creation changes. So there’s some good stuff, but like about that, but it’s something again, it’s so hard for us to think outside of it’s like thinking in another language completely, or like breathing different kind of air.

Dr G 17:41
Well, this is very much like what you were saying, though, because we are of the same generation as you, not to disclose our age too much, but yeah, as you said, like the creation of the internet in our youth, let’s say did definitely lead to some changes. And I am a teacher of teenagers, and so I definitely see the different way that they think about information and communication and all of that kind of stuff, in terms of how they interact with social media and AI and all of those sorts of tools which they’ve grown up with.

Speaker 1 18:14
Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s just a small sample of how much it changes. And just imagine the difference if you’re embedded in a cultural group that’s not relying on reading or writing at all, right, and that’s used to attributing authority externally. And so that, to go to your earlier question about sort of externalizing stories, one of the most important things, I think, differences in early Greek literature is the externalizing of agency for an authority, for narrative to the muse. We now think of that as a poetic device that’s a way like it’s taught like this is just something you do, but I think it was taken very seriously prior to Plato, and even you know among in his time, like this is a way of saying this comes from somewhere else without actually being sure about where it comes to them.

Dr G 19:02
I think this has good parallels to draw upon in connection with oral culture that still exists within indigenous traditions. So definitely in Australia, there is a sort of a reclamation of a lot of indigenous oral tradition, and the way that storytelling is embedded in a really layered way, and it’s about relationships between people. But it’s also the case that it’s very explicitly made clear that if you are being told a story by an elder, you’re only being told the first version of that story. There’s going to be deeper layers as you get further embedded into the culture and you demonstrate your responsibility and your obligations and things like that. So there’s a sense in which the complexity of something like a Homeric text in its oral form is really beyond our capacity to be able to comprehend, because we’ve only got this written version that remains. That oral tradition has not continued, because it would have evolved and changed through the retelling every single time.

Speaker 1 20:01
Yeah. And, I mean, I think this is one of the things that we miss the most in our tradition, about Homer as well, in that we’re taught to read ancient literature as if it’s modern literature, as if we just sit there reading it literally. And there’s been this sort of, this movement for about 300 years in reading ancient literature that discounts allegory and, you know, symbolism and indirect meaning. You know, as early we have evidence of 600 BCE Pythagorean traditions of, you know, of reading Homer’s allegory, of seeing everything in the Odyssey about being the reincarnation of souls. It’s not actually about the story of Odysseus. Instead, it’s a secret included message. And so I think you know that goes exactly with what you were saying about so traditional literature and community and layers of interpretation and passing down the authority of the past, it’s just something we’re so separate from, because we’re raised with sort of the belief in scriptural traditions where the word is on the page and we interpret it, and we have this idea of universal, timeless meaning, which seems to be inflexible in a way.

Dr G 21:09
So challenging, but also now I’m feeling a little bit riled up. The English teacher side of me is like, but no, it’s always about the interpretation every valid and different.

Professor Joel Christensen 21:19
But my guess is you would be a better English teacher, because there are different models, right? There’s the model where there’s one interpretation and the authority gives it to you, and then there’s the other one, where there are where it’s the ambiguity and multiplicity of interpretations that makes literature special. And so I think there’s a real tension there in the Western tradition of approaching literature, right? It goes back to who has the authority to interpret? Is it supply side poetics, where it’s all about whatever the author meant, or is it about something more, much more complicated, about that dance between tradition and the individual and audiences and sort of narratives?

Yeah, for sure, there’s so much to think about with this sort of thing. So yeah, I feel like I’m just like, I’m just letting my brain absorb it and and take it in um. But taking this idea a little bit further with the Homeric tradition, and starting to think about the external elements of it as well. You discuss the idea of thinking about Homer’s writing home, is writing get out my flesh rabbits through both an oral metaphor and an arboreal metaphor. So a metaphor related to trees. And I don’t know if you’re open to it, but I’m wondering if you’d be willing to recreate this experience of the arboreal metaphor for us.Okay, sure. So in the introduction, the first thing I talk about is, instead of thinking about the Iliad of the Odyssey as a complex symphony played in different rooms by musicians who can’t hear each other, the next one I think, I ask people to think about is the object of the elite. The Odyssey is something fixed like a tree in the landscape. So I have a section where I say, you know, I’ll quote myself, and I’ll go through it right. If you can get someone to read the next few paragraphs aloud, close your eyes and listen. And here we go. Take a minute and imagine a tree in a manicured park, a private garden. Make it a really lovely tree, one you would notice and remember, if you lingered on a bit, one that has been well situated in its environment. Think about the trees in perfect symmetry, the way it occupies its space. Has it grown? It’s in odd angles to meet the sun’s changing rays over the seasons or in response to persistent winds. How deeply is it rooted? Now think about this. Someone planted the tree, others tended to it and trimmed it. More people spent generations selecting this domesticated tree from its ancestral stock. Think about the uncountable hands that made this tree possible. The saplings transplanted, the varieties combined over time. What were their lives like? What stories did they tell? What were trees to them, think about the tree’s beauty, its esthetics. What makes us set this tree apart from others? What is essential about it? Our appreciation is based on other trees we might not remember, as well as an entire grammar of human beings in the environment, like any native language, you learned its basic syntax without trying. You have a sense of the way trees should be. You probably judge a tree differently from a shrub for historical esthetic reasons. You have expectations of what trees should do, how they should look and how they relate to the world around them. For the most part, you’re not cognizant of these assumptions, but you almost certainly have different notions about a shrub or a bush. Now, if you’ve been listening, open your eyes, but keep the tree in your mind. If someone asks Who is responsible for the tree, what do you say? Is that the person who designed the park? Is it the gardener is the first person who imagined a tree in the garden, any single answer ignores those countless hands, minds and environments that contribute to the treeness of the tree. I can keep going, and there’s more, but enough of it.

Dr G 25:07
No I think that’s good, that that starts to open up the pathways they’re thinking about the complexities of anything. So I think one of the challenges that students often come with is when they’re sold an idea that, like, Homer, is a guy, you know, he’s a blind poet. He did these things is that it gives it that singular point of generation. It’s like this is emerged from a singular moment of genius from one person. And perhaps it was a response to their world. But it somehow all comes down to them, and anything that we can take away from that text, we also then have to acknowledge the genius of the creator, and by stepping back and trying to place the poetry and the ideas that come with that poetry in the broader landscape. And I think this is part of the power of this metaphor, is that it allows us to see the whole context, or a window into that whole context. And it’s like we’re always looking at so much more than just some phrasing, just a moment of singular genius. I mean, Western culture does have this sort of propensity for the for the white male genius aspect, model of creation, but it’s so much more than that, and so I think that it shows a real potential for how we can start to think about literature completely differently. So thank you,

Speaker 1 26:33
Yeah, and well, and I think what I found useful or attractive about is that there are two angles, and it really gets into what I’ll just call, perhaps unfairly ecological thinking, right? Like we all, anybody who’s taking basic science understands how a tree is part of an ecosystem, what we lose track of, though, is that most of our ecosystems are human shaped. At this point, there are few that don’t have some sort of influence from us, that have kept a different equilibrium that wouldn’t be natural, whatever that means, because we’re still natural in a way, right? Or, you know, have had some other influence on what we’re seeing. So there’s that ecosystem that’s really critical, because every every piece of the tree is shaped by, you know, inheritance that it has from its own tree genes, right? And then the experience of the world, how the world has shaped it the secondary ecosystem that comes from our judgment, right, and our judgment is similarly constituted in an ecosystem of ideas, of our own history, of other people’s influence of esthetic judgments, of our interaction of our senses in the world that shape those esthetic judgments, but also shaped by them. I mean, all those things are really complicated, and then we live in a specific slice of time and have a real hard ability seeing duration of time and how things change. And so we pick a point, and we see things in one way or another, and we it’s very hard for us to think about these overlapping ecologies of sort of the nature and ecologies of thought.

Dr G 28:06
Indeed, yes, and I really, I liked, I liked that tree metaphor. That was actually the part that really jumped out at me when I was reading the introduction. Now I have to ask you a question about my most feared subject, which is ancient languages.

Professor Joel Christensen 28:25
I’ll try not to be too scary.

Dr G 28:28
Well, I am someone who struggles with language in any form, modern, ancient doesn’t matter. Latin, Greek, either way, I don’t understand it, so Homeric Greek is a big challenge. But even to people who are better at languages than I am. This is a big challenge. So in the first chapter, you explore parallels between Homeric language and DNA. What are some of the key features of Homeric meter and language, and how do you think DNA helps us to better appreciate the ethics?

Speaker 1 28:58
All right, so the first thing I’m going to say that’s probably going to upset you more, or maybe it won’t, is that I actually think that all language is going to be governed by the principles that I’ll talk about, but that it’s easier for us to think about Homeric language in this way, because we think of it in some way as artificial, even though that’s completely false. So I’ll talk about Homeric Greek a little bit, but, you know, interrupt me at any point, because I don’t want to send people screaming after they listen to this bit, right? So look, we know that all languages are governed by rules, right? And the rules are essentially arbitrary. They exist within a system of contrast, and we have learned them at a young age, right? And so there’s no sort of universal syntax or grammar or universal semantics or meaning. Those two axes are always engaging in the way that things unfold in time, right? So any languages, as I see it, has building blocks that are akin to. DNA. And the building blocks are the morphologies, the actual sounds, the grammar, how these morphologies fit together to unveil meaning right in an ordered way, following rules we know. And then there’s the semantic sphere, which is, well, what do these words mean in contact with each other? And so the very basic idea that I have is that, you know, DNA that’s not activated in an environment, that’s not living, is just a string of proteins, but when you put it in an environment in contact with other things, then various traits are triggered. They are, you know, they are activated and they reveal themselves to the world. So a big, you know, big thing people talk about in genetics for a while is epigenetics, right? The way that certain features of DNA or of a creature will be activated by its environment, right? And so, you know, a hand or foot doesn’t make any sense unless it’s articulated with the rest of the body. It doesn’t make sense in space to have four limbs, right? It’s really based on engagement with the environment. So in a very simplistic way, language functions the same way. Now Homeric Greek, I think, lends itself to this analysis a little better because of the way it developed, it has a limit on it that other languages don’t, and that limit is meter, right? So one of the things that people used to think about Homeric language is that it was composed the way Virgil composed the Aeneid or Shakespeare composed some of his poetry, which is that you had to, like, take your language and put it into meter, right? But that’s not actually what happened with ancient with a Homeric Greek. Homeric Greek developed over time with the metrical shapes as part of its repertoire. So just as our language is bounded by tense forms, whether it’s ed on the end for past tense or your ablouding with grew and grow. Ancient Greek had rhythmic features that drew from different dialects. And so that’s another reason why I find the DNA for attractive is because we can look at strands of DNA and see how one organism is actually comprised of many different historical organisms like DNA put together to make a entity that functions in a particular environment with particular constraints. So Homeric language has drawn from several different dialects with different forms for any given word that make it possible to fill the six foot line, and now I’m going to make it really concrete for me. All right, so the first line of the Iliad is μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος. First line of the Odyssey: ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ. The basic rule there is that the final two feet end in a shave and a haircut, right bump ba-da bump, bump, right, a dactyl and a spondee. Everything before that can be two longs, like may, like, sorry, long and two shorts, μῆνιν ἄει, it can be two longs. And the main rule is that ending. Now, if you follow the history of Greek poetry over time, as you move towards writing, the rules become much more rigid. If you you know, if you were turned off by Greek poetry or by prosody, it’s probably because someone made you learn a bunch of laws or rules. But the fact is, it’s much simpler. If you think of it as music, if you imagine, you know, four bars, four bars of four, four time, and your options are like a quarter notes and eighth notes, and I can mix them together, right? If you’re listening to music that’s in four, four time. You’re not sitting there thinking that’s a quarter note, that’s an eighth note, right? You’re listening to it, and you tolerate creativity. People shove a bunch of syllables and like one line or they go, the meaning goes over one line or another. Like, music has that variety that we don’t often attribute to prose. Now, to go back to Homeric week, part of what’s really amazing about it is that it’s not just single words put together. Most of the time, we’re looking at phrases that can be repeated. And so the line I mentioned, μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος, really has three parts to it, and you can split most Homeric lines into two or three parts, and most lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey, 16,000 of the Iliad or so, 12, 13,000 of the Odyssey. Majority of them don’t roll over into the next line. Each line is a single unit of meaning, which is first thing that floored me when I read Homeric Greek when I was I must have been 21 the first time I read it in Greek, because it was so different from, again, Milton or Shakespeare or Virgil, where you could definitely see the joins where we’re trying to fit our ideas in this. And so this means that somebody who was trained to perform Homeric Greek could speak, or at least converse the way I am right now, in meter, right? It wouldn’t be the same cadence or flow, because the esthetics would be different. But the whole system was conducive to composing in performance. And so the actual performance of Homeric poetry, Hesiodic poetry, anything in the same language, was a combination between sort of plans that happened ahead of time and the actual performance itself, which could change. And a lot of this comes from work that people don’t know about it, Millman Perry, Albert Lord, studying living epic and what used to be Yugoslavia, they really found that there were traditions where things like this were still happening, where it was absolutely possible for someone to compose in the spot a very complicated narrative. And so to go back to the Homeric question, before I wrap up on the language, all of this is connected to whether or not people thought it was possible to develop a super long narrative without writing as a planning and it comes down to that sort of last moment of whether or not we credit the amazingness of the Odyssey to this really fluid multicultural tradition, or we credit it to a final composer who inherited this tradition and put it all down. But back to the language itself. It is so hard to explain, to convince someone of how the Homeric language works if they don’t actually learn Greek. So if you’re not fully persuaded, you know, maybe come, learn Greek with me or learn it on your own. But I mean, it is. It’s qualitatively and quantitatively different from any language I’ve studied. And you can really feel it when you get into it if you move from a literate author, even a Greek one, like Apollonius Rhodes from several centuries later. And it’s even more severe if you jump to say Virgil, Lucan or Ovid.

Dr G 37:22
I know. Look, I think we should convince them by forcing them to sit through nine hours of, you know, Irish bard performance, or, you know,

Speaker 1 37:31
Right, right? And there are, I mean, that’s the thing. I mean, there are so many different traditions around the world that support it. But the challenging thing is that they’re not all the same, right? Just that. So I think one of the mistakes early studies in oral poetry made is making the assertion that they were monolithic in nature, culturally and esthetic, right? But we know that written forms of poetry, say a Shakespearean sonnet or a haiku, follow, follow very different cultural rules and adhere to very different expectations. So why would oral poetry be any different, right? So if you look at, you know, Sub-Saharan African epic traditions, Arabic epic traditions, Yugoslavian, Indian you know the oral traditions of the of the Maori, or, you know, indigenous people in Australia, there are very different rules, right? But they do show some commonalities and difference from literary cultures. I think there, you know, if people looking for reading recommendations or classic texts on this is Ruth Finnegan’s, Oral Poetry’ really shows the variety of things available in oral poetic traditions. And then Walter Ong’s ‘Orality and Literacy’ really focuses on difference in esthetics between oral cultures and literary cultures, and they read really well together.

Dr G 38:51
I think this is amazing, because this is opening up some pathways that I’ve definitely thought about before within literary English teaching, but and have understood sort of tacitly, because people who do study Homeric literature, if we and the flesh rabbits again, I think definitely wax lyrical in ways that other people who study other types of of poetry do not, and I’ve never really been able to put my finger on why, because I’ve always been a Roman person, and I’m like mad Latin, you know, it’s a bit like a mathematical part.

Speaker 1 39:36
I became a classics major because I loved Catullus.

Dr G 39:40
Ah, well, that’s a good place to start.

Professor Joel Christensen 39:43
Yeah, I read Catullus and Horace, I think, when I was 16 in high school, and I hated Horace, I’ll be honest there, but Catullus, like I did. I was floored, right? I was like, This is amazing. I want to understand more about it. And I took Greek just because you had to, yeah, you know. And, you know, I’d stumbled through. It, I was okay at it. I don’t think anybody would say I was an exceptional Greek student, but I remember from the first moment reading the Iliad in the original that I was like, this is different, yeah. And at that time, I said, I want to spend a little time figuring out how and a little time turned into a senior thesis. A senior thesis turned into a dissertation. And now I’m over 25 years into it, and I’m still figuring out how Homer’s different.

Dr G 40:26
That’s amazing.

Too late to turn back now.

Yeah, yeah, you gotta keep going

Professor Joel Christensen 40:33
Yeah, it is

Dr G 40:35
Focus now, focus now, You’ve got to be getting close

Professor Joel Christensen 40:40
I may have another 25 years.

Dr G 40:44
And I also think that’s one of the values, and the part of the great richness of studying the ancient world is actually it offers so much potential for rethinking and recalibrating your thoughts.

Professor Joel Christensen 40:55
It does, well I think, you know, yeah, in the spirit of the work I do, though, is sort of focusing on the opportunities rather than what’s been closed off. When I was in graduate school, I told my advisor, David Cider, who won’t listen to this, but if he did, he won’t mind me sharing that I wanted to do homework. And he said, why the bibliography is so long? He’s like, you can’t say anything new. And I’ve always been someone who does what people tell me not to do. I just got that problem. But I think, you know, I think there’s the challenge of it, but there’s also, you know, the depth of what people have said already is impressive, and you can learn from it. And that, you know, it was never boring conversation.

Dr G 41:38
Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. And I think what you said about language, though, is so true. Because I think one of the reasons why I actually struggle so much with other languages is that I struggle to see the different ways that people put together their sentence structures. I can learn the meaning of words and grammar and that sort of thing, but then put me in front of a passage which I have no idea what it’s about. And I’m like, Oh my God. It’s like they’re speaking like Yoda, and it makes no sense at all.

Speaker 1 42:07
But actually I think, I mean, I’ve been teaching languages since I was in college in Latin and Greek, and I actually think that some people just have are cognitively blocked and to move from word order dominant languages to inflected languages, just, I think there’s a percentage of the population where it’s just a huge challenge, right? It’s like being colorblind. And I don’t I don’t know of any studies that prove this, but I can tell you that I’ve had so many students who are smart people, but when it comes down to it, they will never understand an indirect statement in Latin and Greek. It just doesn’t come naturally, and it hurts. And I can’t explain that in any other way, except the brains are just not set up.

Dr G 42:48
No, look, I’m really glad that we have this on recording. So everyone out there, including my old Latin teachers, Professor Joel Christensen, has just said that I am a smart person, but cognitively blocked and it is impossible for me to understand.

Speaker 1 43:01
I didn’t say impossible. I just said harder. Like my wife. I met my wife when I was an undergraduate, but like in our like in our third week, and when I met her, she was studying Spanish, French, Arabic and Latin, like she was involved in those four classes. I said, What are you doing? She’s like, I don’t know. I like languages, but I remember her coming up and like, it was Latin indirect statements, and no matter how many times we went through it, she just couldn’t get it. Now she can speak any language better than I can. She’s a pediatric dentist. Now she’s gone to Ivy League schools. I haven’t, right, but there’s just that one thing, like, her brain’s just like, No, I hate it. I will not accept it.

Dr G 43:43
Under no circumstances

Dr Rad 43:43
Exactly what I think about Latin.

Dr G 43:48
Oh, look, I don’t want to speak too much about my facility with or with, not with languages. No, I keep trying. I was okay at Latin when I was able to study it four hours a day. That was, that was the time I got good at it.

Yeah and look, I think, as well, in Australia, in the in the era that we grew up, English was taught in a very strange way in that it wasn’t explicit. And then on top of that, back in, back in Australia in the 1980s your engagement with other languages in public schooling systems was generally fairly limited. So I think it’s also to do with, yeah, potentially, the culture you grow up in, and how it encourages you to perhaps engage with other languages.

Speaker 1 44:32
No doubt, yeah, like, I mean, I spent, you know, the few two years ago, we were in Denmark, and I think we, you know, told we’re in Scandinavia maybe a week and a half. And, you know, I had a graduate student study. I had to pass French exams, German exams. I don’t know any of it well, but just being in an environment where everybody’s speaking different languages all the time changes the way your brain works, right, like when you’re in and. Monoglot culture, like the US, for many of us, because we are really, really segregated, or or Australia, like, your brain’s just not primed for it. And it’s like, if you spend your life doing very little physical activity, and then suddenly you have to do a 5k like, it’s going to be the worst pain you’ve ever felt, right, but if you spend all your time really active, like, it’s not that bad. And so I just think it’s about training and and, you know, like, you can do everything you want in primary school and public school, but if you’re not embarrassed in languages and exposed to them, like more than 45 minutes, three days a week, like you’re not going to learn anything, like you’re always going to be blocked.

Dr G 45:40
Yeah. Well, okay, okay, okay, focusing in, focusing in, because

enough about my trauma.

I’m not disinterested in your trauma, Dr Rad.

No no, I have spoken about it many times.

I’m trying to learn Italian. My husband’s Italian, and that that is my new quest in life, and I’ve tried to learn so many times, and this is the first time where I feel like I’m actually getting it, because I’m no longer a beginner student, but I’m no yet, nowhere near yet, competent. But I have moments where I’m like, Oh, I think, I think I have it and and so, like, those little breakthroughs are really important, but it’s, it’s a struggle, but to to bring everything to a bit of a close, because we’re coming up on on our hour together, so we’re surrounded by stories. I think this is this has become really clear through what we’ve talked about and thinking about that context of politics, and the way that with the advent of the Internet, in particularly the the way that narratives shift and change so quickly. So there’s the stories that we’re told however we receive them. There’s the ones that we read so we go out and and we we either read them or we receive them. And then there’s the stories that we actually tell. So there’s the orality. So we might hear stories, we might read them. We might be telling stories as well. There’s this whole nexus. Stories create a capacity, I think, to glimpse lives and experiences that we will never have, the capacity to confront for ourselves. So there’s so much opportunity when it comes to stories, and particularly when we’re thinking about the Homeric tradition as well, and the things that extend out of that, the capacity to come in contact with generations of people so far removed from our own experience as well. If there’s one last thing that you’d like to leave us with in terms of thinking about stories, what sort of idea or question Would you like to leave us to contemplate?

Speaker 1 47:36
Oh, well, um, one idea I’m going to go over time.

Dr G 47:43
Also, you don’t need to limit yourself. If there’s more than one, that’s okay.

Speaker 1 47:46
No, no. I mean, so I think the main so, the thing you just said about story, giving us the capacity to experience 1000 lives is one of the most important things to acknowledge about narrative, right? And so I think that one of the ways that people often talk about language and narrative is to think of it as a technology, right? If we imagine that narrative and stories are akin to our ability to use fire or, you know, to cook food and to things like that, then we can see it as something we that we use that facilitates culture, etc. But I think another way to think about it, and this is the one I’ll go back to, is the notion that stories actually do keep on living on their own. And so the reason I really focus on the biological narrative in the book is to give us the understanding that stories combine and recombine with other features in the world, and they act on their own, so in a different environment, let’s say a heroic narrative is is successful and useful for getting people to stand up and defend their communities. On the other hand, that very same narrative can cause people to have expectations of their communities that are unfair and damaging, right? And so, you know, maybe I’ll answer your question by getting concrete and going to the Iliad and then jumping outside of the Iliad, if I can, right? So, too often people see the Iliad as a simple narrative where it’s about Achilles as a hero, and they’re not wrong, he’s a hero, but in the sense that Erwin Cook describes heroes in an article about Herakles and Odysseus, which is that heroes cause suffering and they suffer. So the biggest thing to understand about the Iliad and the Odyssey is that both of our primary heroes are mentioned for being serial killers, like from the beginning, Achilles is said to send myriad Achaeans to their doom, not Trojans, Achaeans. And from the beginning, we hear about Odysseus, that he tried really, really hard to save his men, but he failed. And then we’re asked. To consider how human beings make their own fate harder or worse than it has to be because of their own recklessness. And if you read the Odyssey carefully, it’s constantly pointing its finger, finger at Odysseus, right? So the ill in the Odyssey are not praise narratives. That’s the biggest reason people or biggest way people misunderstand them instead their narratives about mismatched expectations and about how dangerous elevating individuals above the collective can be, right? And that’s where I’ll go back to Achilles and try to say something positive, right? Because what I think the Iliad is offering is the very same thing that the Pfizer vaccine I just got last week is offering me vis-a-vis COVID, and that’s project protection. Because if you read the Iliad carefully, it lets you know that a heroic narrative is damaging. It lets you know that because Achilles expected to be honored by his community for being so awesome, and then wasn’t, and through a fit, his best friend or lover died. Patroclus dies because of Achilles, and that’s the hardest thing for the Iliad to convey, because people want to point fingers elsewhere. They want to talk about his rage, about how he is dishonored. No Achilles made a choice, and it was the wrong one, but the Iliad doesn’t end with that. Instead, if you carefully read the Iliad, and I’m not going to sound like a conspiracy theorist here, I hope it has Achilles many moments, this moment, moment in Book 19, where he laments for Patroclus and the other people watch him lament and feel pity, and they lament for themselves as well. This is Book 19, but if you read the language closely, it’s echoed at that magnificent moment in Book 24 when Priam comes to Achilles and he says to Achilles, remember your father and you know, and then they weep together, like they see in each other the suffering and the loss that they feel in themselves and the languages they pity each other, and they felt something about it. I think the notion the lesson of the Iliad is something that modern science has confirmed, and that’s the stories can actually make you feel the very same things, cognitively and neurobiology, biologically, that real life can make you feel they can change you. And it’s an avenue to be re humanized, right? And so what the Iliad offers, I think, and the Odyssey, too, if you listen to it carefully, is the understanding that narratives can send you in completely the wrong direction. They can make you instrumentalize other people. They can make you misunderstand people. They help you dehumanize other people in order to slaughter them and and continue with war. But narrative also has that potential when you understand somebody else’s story to make them real to you, and for you to see yourself in them and to maybe change. And so that’s a powerful moment. And the one person who acts like in The Iliad is actually zoops. He sees Achilles and he pities, and he changes the way he does things, because he has that feeling. And I think that the Iliad is that we as audience members are supposed to go through that process. And so like when I close the book, I talk about different stories. I talk about Kleomedes, this, you know, boxer who kills a bunch of young kids because he’s upset that he lost. And I talk about heroic narratives and the damage they do. But I don’t end by saying we’re screwed. Let’s just give up, right? Instead, like we actually need to get away from, you know, the very simplistic and superficial approaches to narrative that we have. We need to understand that it’s going to keep doing whatever it wants to do, but we can actually live alongside it, right? Like we can educate people. The thing I always tell students and my colleagues now increasingly, is that we’re born, we’re not giving a manual to the human mind and body, right? One doesn’t exist. And to be frank, if we were given a manual, I wouldn’t read it, because I never read the manuals anyway, right? But I think a fundamental function of education has to be especially in universities, where we say we’re preparing people to be citizens of the world, right? A fundamental part of education has to be understanding how narrative binds us and breaks us, how it allows us to work together as a group, but it also constrains our view of the future and what we think is possible, and how understanding narrative is actually prior to political activity, because political activity is presupposed on us, actually understanding each other. And so I think, like, you know, again, a long answer to your question. It wasn’t a simple question, to be fair, but I think at the end, the one thing to take away is that you. Oh, wait, I’m going to get negative. Now almost all of our educational systems are moving in the wrong direction, right? I mean, we don’t acknowledge that science is a narrative, right? That a whole notion of like causality is narrative. That what we need to train people from a young age to understand is, you know, differences between propaganda and narrative, identity and belonging, all of these things that make our life together possible. We take it for granted, to our own detriment, and then people who are good at manipulating it intentionally or not, I don’t think, for example, major politician, politician just elected the US President, again, actually thinking about what he’s doing instead, he’s leaning into a system that favors a certain type of madness. And so we need to have anti madness out there. We need to inoculate people against the disruptions of narrative and actually give them a control, a choice in their lives, both individually and together. And I know to say, Oh, this is all what’s going on the Iliad sounds a little crazy, right? But again, I think that the Iliad and the Odyssey emerge during periods of increasing political complexity, in a period when Greek city states were moving from little households and fiefdoms into larger entities that were experimenting with oligarchy and tyranny, aristocracy and democracy, and that the questions of language and how we lived together under the weight of the past were central to what they were doing together, and it’s no different for us today.

Dr G 56:36
Oh, this is a powerful conclusion. Thank you so much. I think there is ways in which the dismissal of the power of narrative across education broadly has been to its detriment. I definitely agree with you on this, because so much of the role of humanity subjects, not just classics, is to try and give students the potential critical tools to be able to see narratives for what they are, and to pull out the pieces of information that that don’t marry up quite well, to like expectation, To see the things that are potentially endangering society.

Speaker 1 57:23
And what you just said, I mean, you know, but the way we’ve been forced to sell the humanities right, is with these two insidious words, critical thinking, right? And we say it because, oh, this will make you a better stock broker. This will make you a better surgeon. Critical thinking will make you a better I don’t know baker, whatever it is, but what we need to double down on is that one of the original meetings of the liberal arts was the, you know, the studies worthy of a free person, but another one or the skills and studies that make you a free person. And I think no again, to put my conspiracy hat back on, I think there’s an intentional reason why corporations, governments don’t want to lean into that aspect of it, because, as you said, they’re the very skills the humanities social sciences, are the very skills that force us to question the basis of our social structures, of our inequalities, of our histories. And you know, there’s a there’s a reason why people might be disinclined to encourage that.

Dr G 58:28
Oh no, let’s not create a disruptive citizenry that is expecting more, that’s unproductive for us all. But don’t get me started on productivity before I get angry.

Speaker 1 58:41
I mean, at times I find myself like, sort of even railing against the academic humanities, because we are, you know, you teach English, you know how much of it is lik