 Our guest this morning is Dr. William Hansen. Dr. Hansen is professor emeritus of folklore and classical studies at Indiana State University Bloomington. He is the author of Ariadne's Thread and the editor and translator of many popular books on mythology, including the book of Greek and Roman fairy tales, legends and myths, classical mythology, a guide to the mythical world of the Greeks and Romans, and the topic of our discussion, the translation and commentary on Flagon of Trolley's book of marvels. So Dr. Hansen, welcome to the show. It's an honor. Thank you so much. So we're talking about Lagoon of Trolley's book of marvels. It's a very curious text. It stands in a long tradition in the popular literature of the Greek and Roman world, but in many ways it differs. So before we get to discussing what separates Lagoon from the rest of his contemporaries, can you give a brief rundown of what the genre of paradoxography was? Paradoxography is actually a modern worn or a Byzantine word. It's not a word that the ancients used, but that just means that they had a genre for which they did not have a name. Paradoxographers are people who write about marvelous things or amazing things and it was a genre that arose at a particular time and lasted so long and mostly has not survived, but the paradoxographers would write collections of marvelous things about amazing plants, amazing stones, amazing bodies of water, amazing ethnic groups, and they would give them each two or three sentences and then go on to the next item, just a modest kind of form with this kind of little hits, I guess, you know, some amazing stones, some amazing plant. So in Greek, those are called paradoxa that is surprising or unusual things. So a paradoxographer is a person who writes or collects paradoxes. You mentioned that although some of it doesn't survive, we do know from Byzantine compendiums, things like that of some of these progenitors of the work. So who are some of the makers of this kind of literature before Flagon came on the scene? We have some names and I translate a few samples in my books. So one of them says, Theopapa says that in Chalcidus in Thrace, there is a certain place having the peculiarity that any animal that enters it exits again unharmed except for dung beetles, which do not escape, but turn around in a circle and die on the spot. For this reason, the place is called dung beetle death. Another example, the bat is the only bird that has teeth, breasts, and milk. Aristotle says that seals and whales also have milk and he records something even more amazing than this, which is that on Lemnos, a Greek island, so much milk was milked from a he goat that cheese was made from it. And then a third example, it is reported that in the island of Leoke, a Greek island, no bird is able to fly over the temple of Achilles. You can see they're just arbitrary, they kind of come from anywhere. They're just little amazing things. Paradoxographers normally don't try to offer explanations for anything, they don't try to figure out causes, they just give you an amazing, believe it or not, sort of thing and move on to the next one. We have maybe four or five paradoxographers whose works have survived in part. They're mostly short 20 pages, five pages, and then we have illusions to other paradoxographers whose works haven't survived. It was not a highly respected genre and antiquity, even though some of the people who were paradoxographers were prominent poets or statesmen, but it didn't have a lot of respect then and it doesn't have a lot of respect now. Very few scholars in the present day have bothered to write on it, they just think of it as kind of trash science, I suppose. I think it shares that with the Greek novels in a sense. There wasn't a lot of respects given to the Greek novels until fairly recently in scholarship, but it's important to realize that these were extremely popular texts at the time. So who exactly was Flagon of Trailies? When did he live? What can we know about him? He lived in the second century of the common era in the 100s and the main thing about him, well, he was a Greek and has a Greek name and he comes from a Greek city, Tralis, which is, I guess, in modern-day Turkey, but in ancient times was in the area called Keria and he was a freedman of the emperor Hadrian. That kind of situation with Greek freedmen, often there were educated Greeks who had been enslaved for one reason or another, perhaps captured in war or whatever and then ended up being owned by wealthy Romans who used them as tutors for their children or for other purposes. Flagon was part of the imperial staff of the emperor Hadrian. So he's an educated guy, once a slave, now free, wrote a number of books, including the book on marvels, but he also wrote a book on long-lived persons which he copied lots of names out of the Roman census archives from a certain area and he just listed people who lived to be 100, then the people who lived to be 110 and all the way up to one of the symbols or cirruses who lived to be a thousand years old. He seemed to be fond of writing books that consisted basically of kind of lists. So you have a list of long-lived people and he wrote a book called the festivals of the Romans and the Olympians. He wrote a history of the Olympics as well. He made a list of all the Olympic victors up to his days. So that goes back to 776 BC. So you list who won the stadium race, who won the double stadium race, who won the chariot race, and then since the Olympics eventually developed a boys division as opposed to an adult men division, then who won the boys stadium race and who won the boys such and such. He just gives all those names that may sound more arbitrary than it really is because those names were sometimes used as a kind of dating system in antiquity since if you think about it, the ancients didn't go around saying I live in the year 35 BC because that's a non-existent system at that time and so they would often date things by who were the consuls in Rome, who were the two principal officials, or who were the archons in Athens, or who was the priestess of the temple of Hera at a particular time. Another way then was to say the such and such Olympiad appeared four-year units and they were usually remembered by who won the adult male stadium race because that was the original Olympic event and that was the big event. You were really a celebrity if you won that race. Anyway, he made a list of all those and then when he gives the names, he gives a little bit more than that to make it interesting. He added what were memorable events that happened in that particular Olympiad. He'll give you an Olympiad and then he'll say there was a war going on in such and such a place. A big earthquake happened in Syria, kind of a paragraph of information of notable events, something like the annals. It's fascinating when I was going through that list of long-lived persons. It was interesting to me because I wondered how they vetted for some of these people and their ages. Did they just arbitrarily say that I'm 102 years old or whatever? You mentioned in the commentary in the introduction to Book of Marvels that Flagon is similar in many ways to previous paradoxical literature, but he's also different in certain things he puts emphasis on. How is Flagon's Book of Marvels different from the other paradoxical literature of the time? If you look at the other paradoxographers, they tend to be tame. If people remember Ripley's Believe It or Not, I don't know if that dates me too much to remember that, but it is a popular feature, I guess mostly in the comic strips, and then sometimes in book form. Just little amazing things that were fun to hear about, but were not really sensational. They were just like, you know, a potato was found that looked like Winston Churchill's face or something like that. They said like, oh, that's cool. Here's some more examples. It's amazing that the sun tanzas were as fire does not do so at all, and that a diamond does not become hot when it is placed over fire. I don't know if that's true or not. And then a magnet attracts during the daytime whereas at night it attracts less or not at all, which is probably completely false, but who was going to check it? And then a different one, Eudoxus of Rhodes says that there is a people in Celtic territory who see not during the daytime but at night. So there's a little kind of ethnographic thing. Another example, they say that no wolves, bears, snakes, and animals of this sort are born on Crete, on account of the fact that Zeus was born on it. Again, like that's probably completely false, but again, who's going to check one more. Among the Crobozoae, some ethnic group, it is customary to mourn for a new mourn baby and congratulate a deceased person so that they behave just the opposite of everybody else. So that's what's typical in the paradoxographers. Little funny hits that you would say, oh, something like that. But where a flag on differs is that he focuses completely on human beings. He's not interested in amazing stones or amazing bodies of water or weird things that happen on such and such an island and no place else. He focuses only on human beings and on human beings he focuses only on really sensational things, really bizarre things, amazing multiple births and ghosts and discoveries of huge bones and discovery of live centaurs, things that will really catch your attention and just go beyond what the other paradoxographers typically wrote about. And you'd have to call it, I think, sensationalism. And I think one thing that's notable about flag on is that this is really the first surviving piece of literature that it just seems to be entirely given over to sensationalism in the Western literary history. So it's maybe a modest badge that flag on can bear and say, I'm the first guy to do this, but that seems to be the case. And sensationalism certainly has a major subsequent history in some book authors, but then in popular literature, like newspapers and the like, but flag on seems to be the first person who focuses on it entirely. And one can speculate why that would be another question. I think my immediate response to studying the book of Marvels was that it was not so much Ripley's, believe it or not, like you mentioned paradoxography as it was more national inquirer sensationalism. In the paradoxographers, I can see a lot of precursors even to that work and something like Herodotus, right? Herodotus does a lot of ethnography and very interesting animal stories and play stories, things like that. It just seems like paradoxography took that out of the historiographical area and put it squarely in the, you know, Ripley's, believe it or not. It's kind of like when I think of flag on and some of these stories, I immediately think of something like the Haunted House story that plenty of the younger tells and Lucian of Samosa tells. It's slightly different, right? In both accounts, but like the same essence and kernel is there. So it's very interesting at emphasis on the sensational, just for sensation's sake, you know? So where does Flagon draw his sources from? It gives the impression of being an honest guy. To me, I don't feel like he's feeling the need to improve the stories. I think he's found bizarre stories. He likes them for whatever reason and records them. I think he's honest about that. And he gives some of the sources. Some of the sources are other paradoxographers, just kind of tame people because he cites them, Antigonus and Apollonius. He's maybe going after their most extreme stories instead of, you know, the quieter stories. But other things, he's very fond of oracles. He quotes lots of oracles almost tediously because I think the oracles aren't so much to modern taste. For one thing, they are deliberately obscure. And so how much deliberately obscure stuff do you want to read? But Flagon loved it and he quotes these inextenso and must have written sources for those. He quotes a Sibylene oracle kind of surprisingly because so far as we know, the special Sibylene oracles that once belonged to the symbol of Kumai were private property of the Roman state and were not accessible to people generally and could only be consulted by order of the Senate. And that only happened during what the Senate regarded as state emergencies where you needed to have some supernatural guidance to consult. So we don't know why Flagon had such a document, but he quotes two Sibylene oracles and he's the unique source for this kind of thing. They're not real fun reading. They're kind of curious things. They're deliberately obscure. You have to learn some tricks to read them and kind of decode them. But somehow he got hold of that. Some of the things he's quoting are in letter form. He has a variety of sources. One odd thing about him, I think, is that he's not... I mean anybody who writes knows you have to have a sense of proportion and you have to have some thought of your audience. Flagon doesn't seem to have any sense of proportion. If he learns of something that takes two sentences to tell, like a woman gave birth to a bunch of snakes, then he just says that and he tells you when it happened by dating it by the Roman consuls or the like. But if he runs across something like the Sibylene oracle that's several pages long, then he just gives you that whole thing. That's great for us because it means we get to have this stuff with as little interference from him as possible. But it's strange as literature because one item is two or three lines long, the next one is two or three pages long. Certainly the most well-known story from the Book of Marvels is Philinion. Yeah, Philinion. The first story about the revenant of the young maiden who, after six months of being dead, she rises from her parents' womb and carries on this affair in their house with one of their boarders. Yeah, it's definitely his best story. You make the case that, yeah, it was definitely told in epistolary form at first, but it's very interesting how it's carried out in Flagon where the story is told in the third person, but then at the end, it becomes more of like an official document like you say, where the official is like, okay, I did this and I went to go check on them. Flagon, I think you're right. He really does revel in the Marvelous for Marvelous's sake. Like when he talks about something like the hippocentre, how it was embalmed. If you don't believe me, you could just go see this. You can go look at the Emperor's Storehouses. I think I'll walk to the Imperial Palace and go searching through the storehouses, my private museum. I don't know, but yeah, he invites you to do that. Well, now and then does he try to enhance his credibility by saying that, you know, I saw this person as a person who maybe claims to be 120 years old or whatever. I've seen this person. This person was brought to the Emperor or this item is in the Emperor's Storehouse. Yeah, he does that with one of the hermaphrodites, the sex changers. He says, I myself have seen this person. Yeah, Aitete. With that story, it's very interesting. He's like, in Syrian Laodicea, there is a woman named Aitete who underwent a change in form and name even while she was living with her husband. And this is a very interesting story that's told in quite a few variations in the Book of Marvelous as well. He says, having become a man, Aitete was renamed Aitetos. This happened when Macrinos was Archon at Athens, like you were saying the dating through Archon's proconsoles, things like that. And he says at the end, I myself have seen this person. Yeah. So they call that autopsy in Greek autopsy means you've seen it yourself. It doesn't have the medical meaning that we have. So we would say this is the case of autopsy, which is often characterizing Herodotus that Herodotus says, you know, I was in Egypt and I saw this amazing paradoxical thing. So as opposed to just hearsay. Yeah. Herodotus is definitely one of the fathers of this type of literature. You can see the interest in the wondrous, as you mentioned a bit earlier, I think, especially in Herodotus there in the fifth century B.C.s. There's an interest in the marvelous, but it wasn't until later that you have people who create a form of literature that selects only for marvelous things in kind of list form. But you could tie that together with literary trends in the fourth century B.C. where kind of list literature or collections come into being. That's a literary idea. It's not just an obvious thing to do, but collections are famous collections of fables, esopic fables, you know, come into being around the fourth century B.C. and joke books, you know, and then eventually paradoxographers. So just the idea of making a collection of a whole bunch of kind of short items of the same generic sort is a literary idea. The paradoxographers reflect that literary trend. And you do have a really great compilation. The book of Greek and Roman folk tales, legends and myths. It's a really interesting, amazing compilation of just all of these things you're talking about, this popular literature, these jokes, these paradoxographical stories, these miracle stories, the famous werewolf story of Satirica, right? Yeah. That we don't realize that the world of the Greeks and Romans wasn't just populated by these lofty stories of the gods. A lot of the stories take place just between human beings. You know, those are actually some of the more interesting ones I found. One interesting thing I don't think we mentioned is that you have two different kinds of ghosts in ancient Greek tradition. You have the kind of ghosts that perhaps most readily comes to our mind if we think of a ghost and that's the kind of ethereal ghost that's, you know, you could put your hand through a ghost body and you wouldn't feel anything and the ghost can go through walls or something like that. You have that kind of ghost, but then you have another kind of ghost, the embodied ghost or revenant who is in a way indistinguishable from a living person. That person is solid and talks and has strength and can push back. And that first story of Phlegon, the one of the ghost Phylenion, is of that sort. And that's really what makes it striking, I think, that a young man who's a guest, the beginning of the story is gone. So it's not only a great story, but it's made a little bit more mysterious by the fact that the first part of the story is missing. So you have to guess a little bit. But as the story opens, the maid servant in the house happens to go to the bedroom of the guest room in the house and the door's partly opened and she looks through there and she sees the guest who's a male and she sees also a female and she recognizes that the female looks exactly like the daughter of the household who died recently, just some months ago. And she's astonished and she rushes to the master and mistress of the house and yells for them to come and see this and they tell her that she's crazy. And so they don't come and check for a while. But when they confront their guest and tell him that the woman he's been sleeping with died some months ago, he's astonished. I mean, he's been having sex with this person. She's been coming to his bedroom every night. They've exchanged lovers' gifts. He can't tell the difference between a living person and a dead person. He can't believe that this woman he's been having an affair with is actually dead or he would like to have that confirmed and know what's going on and the story concerns that. In the same way, there are two different kinds of hermaphrodites in the hermaphroditic stories here that there's the one kind of hermaphrodite of the sort that we think of as hermaphrodites, somebody who has both male and female genitals, usually in a somewhat incomplete form, not fully male and not fully female but intersectionally body parts representing the sexual equipment of each gender. So that's what we think of as hermaphrodites and a couple of the hermaphrodites in flagonar of that sort. But most of them are, I don't know, you could call them successive hermaphrodite, somebody who starts off in one gender like female and then ends up being male. Always goes in that direction. You always end up in male, which in ancient thinking means that there's been an improvement because ancient thinking men are more valuable than women. So you have two kinds of hermaphrodites, a simultaneous hermaphrodite, both male and female, and then the ones that an apparent female or true female is converted to a male and you get the implications of that unexpected change. So flagon in general, his work doesn't really deal with the mythological aspect of the gods, things like that. But he does start off the sex changer hermaphrodite story arcs with Tiresias, which I found very interesting. He tells a very traditional mythological tale or I guess heroic era tale. And then he just goes on to discuss these cases of females becoming men and then later he discusses the stories of men giving birth, which again, is not unprecedented in Greek mythological traditions. I didn't know if you could touch upon that. The paradoxographers by and large avoid taking examples from mythology. You could ask why because mythology is of course full of examples of astonishing things. And I think it's because in a sense they're too easy. Everybody knows these stories. There are lots of marvels from mythology and they're just too easy. And more marvelous is not something that happened in the distant vague past, but something that happened yesterday. And more marvelous is something that happened in your town or in a neighboring town that is something that is said to have happened in distant India. So closer in time and closer in space seem to have more marvelous weight. And the paradoxographers were drawn to that kind of thing. They're more interested in the properties of a magnet, you know, a stone that has these odd properties than in maybe some mythological stone. They'll make some references to the flag on does have a few mythological things in there, but there are not many. The Thereseus one is a good example of a mythological reference that it's funny because Thereseus is a male who because of a bizarre thing, he sees two snakes copulating and strikes them and is converted into a female and then as a female for some number of years, in which case he lives as a female and as a woman has a sexual relations with a man. And then he sees the same snakes later on hits them again and becomes a male. So he fits the theme that flag on is playing with people who go in succession from being one gender to another and always end up being a man. In this case, it's man woman man. And then the story has a humorous element, which is the thing that most people remember about the story. And that is that Zeus and Hera, the kingdom queen of the gods are having one of their usual quarrels. And their quarrel is who gets more pleasure from sex. Do men get more pleasure from sex or do women get more pleasure from sex? And they're each claiming that the other does. And they have the bright idea of asking Thereseus because he's been both. He's been both a male and a female. He's had sex in both of those conditions. And so he'll know. And so they ask him and he gives the memorable answer that if sexual pleasure or divided into 10 parts, women get nine parts of that and men get one part of that. And Hera think kind of angry at Thereseus for telling the great secret of women that women actually get more pleasure from sex than men do blinded him as a punishment. And then Zeus gives a compensatory gesture, which is to make him into a seer. So even though he can't physically see, he can kind of mentally see things that other people can't see. It's an issue of the female becoming male, not just in these tales, but it's also in like the philosophy of Aristotle's very strange way of looking at how birth happens and who has the essence of the human in them. Jesus says I'll make her become male like in the Gospel of Thomas. It's very interesting because Lagann is again, he'll have these stories like Thereseus, but then he'll have a completely insane, revenant story like Polycritos. Polycritos is just like this dead body that comes back and you think he's going to be nice about the baby, right? And then like all of a sudden, he just like eats the baby's body. That is perhaps the most bizarre story in the whole collection. I don't think it's the best story. I think the first one is the best, but the second one, Polycritos is perhaps the most is the strangest. If you think about the ghost stories and the hermaphroditic stories, one thing they have in common is kind of a breakdown of categories. In the ghost stories, you think about life and death and if when you're alive, you're alive, but when you die, you stay dead. You don't get to come back and change again, but in ghost stories you do and you have beings that are not quite alive and not quite dead. So the notions of life and death become kind of fluid and that's really upsetting when that is found in a community. People don't know what to do with it and they're very uncomfortable and in an ancient context it means that the gods must be unhappy with something that we've done and so it's our job to discover what that is and make it a right perhaps by some sacrifice. The same thing is true with the hermaphroditic stories. There's kind of a breakdown in sexual categories that are gender categories. If you're a male, you're supposed to stay a male. If you're a female, you're supposed to stay a female. These things aren't fluid. You're not supposed to be able to flow one thing into another. So I think the stories that Flaggon begins his work with are these stories in which you have basic categories, life and death, male and female that become suddenly fluid in a community and how people attempt to deal with that. The stories create a situation in the reader or the listener where the everyday rules that are supposed to govern our daily existence are turned on their head. People have to figure out what's going on there, just in my opinion. I don't think a lot of the monstrous births needed to be snuffed out like that, but I understand that they took that as a sign that the gods were displeased. When you had the usual solution was to drown an anomalous child or to burn it, but to take it outside the city boundaries because that was always regarded as a very significant spatial matter. You wanted to be outside your city and not to be defined as some pollutant that's inside the city and then burning or drowning, getting rid of you by fire or by water seemed to be, I think, the most complete way of making something there not to be there anymore. I think the one that is most striking to me is the woman who gave birth to a child with the head of anubis. Oh, yeah. So I would assume that she gave birth to a child with the head of a jackal or something. Anubis would be a jackal. Yeah, it's hard to know. I mean, flag on doesn't a head, so he doesn't say, well, that kind of look like a jackal or something like this. A jackal. Another woman gives birth to a monkey and another birth, to a bunch of snakes. You could try to speculate if something lies behind the story. What was it? Was it that she gave birth to a child that looked like a monkey? Well, of course, that ruins the story, but who could say? For the most part, doesn't say that he witnessed these things. So he's passing on maybe a story that that's now been through several tellings and perhaps a little bit improved with each telling, but who could say? Yeah, it's very interesting. Flagon even does a little bit of the Benjamin Button abnormal development of human beings. He kind of covers all the bases. Definitely like my top five is the story that he tells about the hippocentre. And I found this very hilarious. He gives us all the plausibility he can, right? He's like, the hippocentre was captured alive by the king, but it did not take to the change in air. So it died. So he had it embalmed. There's no way to really verify this one way or another. It could just be like some misidentified creature embalmed, probably no. But the capture of the live centaur, this is also part of an ancient tradition. In this case, the embalming of this animal and then sending it eventually to the emperor. There are two themes there that maybe are worth remarking on. One is that there were lots of examples of preserved and embalmed creatures that were supposed to be the remains of this or that fabulous creature, either a satyr or a merman. That is a triton or a nared or a centaur. So these things that people knew from mythology and had a picture of from ancient art from statuary and painting. The artists help people to picture what these things are supposed to look like. And then you have the discovery or the creation of fake remains. In some cases, there was one, there was a phoenix, which is supposed to appear regularly in Egypt. There was the remains of a phoenix that was sent to the emperor and displayed in Rome, and everybody regarded it as a fake. So you could see that people knew that these things could be faked, but they also could also be well-intentioned interpretations of things or things that got redefined as they got passed around. There were lots of instances of the remains of fabulous creatures being on display in a kind of a museum spirit, and some of the more deliberate fakes and could be seen as that. The other thing is this kind of interesting pattern that if you have something really amazing, send it to the king. This was what people did. If you go back to Herodotus and you have a fisherman who catches an unusually fine fish, what does he think of doing? He gives it to the local ruler. It's something so fine, you should give it to the finest person around. You capture a samtar and you embalm the remains. What do you do with them? You send them to the emperor, and so the emperor has the makings of a cabinet of curiosity or proto-museum. And also that legend, obviously, of the person who made, was it the glass that couldn't be broken? Yeah, and the emperor had him killed, so it worked both ways. It's easy for us to today look at these stories and say that the people reading them are kind of gullible, but I don't think they're gullible. I think that just the matrix of their worldview, you understand the people of the heroic age were bigger in stature than human beings today, things like that. So it would make sense that you would have giant bones and you would identify them as such. You don't understand what a certain animal looks like that you've never seen before. You're, of course, going to say that's a near-end or something like that or a centaur. And that raises the question for me, ultimately, of you just as the folklorist just asked somebody who's been studying these ideas for such a long time, what kind of insight can we gain from things like paradoxical literature from the book of marvels? What insights does that give us into the popular reading taste of Greco-Roman antiquity? Well, I would say the reading taste question is maybe slightly more complex. I believe you had popular literature in antiquity, and I wrote a book anthology of ancient Greek popular literature, which I tried to give examples of what literature that has the feel of popular literature, even though there was not mass literacy in antiquity, and books were very expensive. Any book you had had to be copied by hand. There were no cheap books and books were not plentiful. And yet there's a kind of literature that seems aesthetically to be the kind of literature that we call popular. So I think that existed. And I think people, as folktales and legends myths show us, there's an abiding fascination with the wondrous and the marvelous and the unexpected. So I think you just have to kind of take that as a given about human beings. We like that kind of stuff. We don't demand that it has to be true. I compare a lot of the paradoxical items to anecdotes, because I think there's a lot that's similar between the things found in a collection of paradoxography and things say let's found in a collection of anecdotes. You have short little stories. They all offer you kind of a hit. The anecdote tells you some unusual thing that a person said or did. The paradoxical thing gives you the properties of a magnet or a hermaphrodite, some little hit like that, and then what you get to enjoy. But without the pressure of it being important of how true it is, you can take an anecdote about a current celebrity or about some famous person in the past and you just enjoy it for being a good story and it might be true. That's fine if it was all the better. But if it really wasn't, you might say, what's the kind of thing that he might have done or she might have done? It's the kind of thing I would believe is characteristic of that person. So I think there's that element, the kind of light Ripley's believe it or not sort of thing on marvels. Some marvelous thing is claimed it may be true or not, but it's fun to think that it was true. But the other thing that maybe it should be mentioned is that there was a serious interest in this kind of information by ancient intellectuals. For example, if you are a philosopher or medical doctor with a philosophical interest and you wanted to know how do the human body work and in particular, how does the soul work? Can your soul leave your body and can you still be alive or do you die in the meantime? How does that work? So you could have what for the time were serious scientific questions, people wanting to figure this out and then using believable stories about odd things as evidence. And so the story of Philindian can be used that way. People can come back and what's going on with the boundaries and categories of life and death. And we can see that some of the sources that we have for this were ancient medical doctors, they were using this as serious evidence. And we may think that legon stories were too bizarre to be true, especially like the proliferous the second story that you mentioned. But the fact is that flagon was taken seriously in later centuries. And when people read flagon, they took these as historical accounts and that these things really happened. And you see these stories being retold in Renaissance literature and taken quite seriously. So they weren't dismissed as just a good story or something like that. It's a great point to make, especially with the medical doctors, the philosophers, telling these kind of tales. Well, it's not exactly the same. A really good precursor to something like flagon and paradoxographical literature is something like plenty of the elder's natural history, where he's combining that type of stuff together. He's taking perhaps some of the more sensational as part of these lists that he's creating. It's kind of like Leucopy and Clytophan. Achilles Tejas includes paradoxography in his work. He includes one of the fables of Aesop within the text. And it kind of tells you something about the reader as well, right? It was Sulla, right? Who found the Seder and he had it brought to him. Yeah. Some soldiers found a Seder who just had to be sleeping in a grove or a minnow. And so they thought, wow, this is an actual Seder. And so you have to show it to your general, Sulla. And it made some kind of gurgly sounds that people couldn't interpret it, like a horse name or something. They didn't keep it. They let it go. Another thing that came up when you were speaking about what these texts tell us about the audience. When I was talking to Daniel Ogden, Dr. Ogden liked to say that these are kind of like campfire stories. These are like stories you tell around the table when you're at the symposium at dinner. Even though the book is some number of years old now, Flagon has never gone out of print. So it's still available if a person finds this topic fun enough. Yeah. I highly recommend it. The Book of Marvels itself is actually quite tiny compared to what you would think of at first. These tales are very brief. You actually translate all three of Flagon's existing works in there. You do the long-lived persons. You do the Olympiads. The most important reason to pick up this text is your commentary. Your commentary really adds a lot of insight. You really give a lot of historical literary context to the work. And that's what makes your translation and commentary on this so indispensable, I would say, if you're interested in antiquity. Bill, this has been such a fun interview. I love going down these tales of the bazaar with you. Thank you so much for sharing your time, your knowledge. We hope to talk to you soon. Nice to talk with you. Thanks so much.