 So Dr. Walsh, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here. This is going to be kind of a fun little discussion about just our favorite classics. What they can tell us about the time, you know, why should we care? As many a writer in antiquity would say, it all starts with Homer. So let's talk about Homer for a bit. A thoughts on Homer, his importance to the text we're going to be talking about today. The reason he's so essential relates to exactly what you just said, which is in the ancient world, if we take the testimony of people say like Quintillion, who talks about ancient education and these kinds of intellectual activities like writing prose literature, for example, or even thinking about the echoes we can see ourselves between something like the Greek novel or even the Gospels and Homer, we can tell that this is really Homer's work is if I could make a modern day equivalent, it's a little bit like Shakespeare. A lot of people in the ancient world literate and even people we would consider perhaps not literate, we're aware of Homer, we're aware later of Virgil, we're aware of the foundational nature of these texts as epics that are a shared narrative for people. So an example might be to say to be or not to be, everybody knows what I'm quoting there or they've heard it or some kind of general ideas of like logic or, you know, ethics that people can cite from a text like this. Homer has that status. So if you were part of Pidea, ancient education, if you were learning to read and write, there was kind of no way to escape it. A lot of your homework would have just been things like rewriting lines from Homer to learn penmanship, we would call it, or it might be to have an exercise. One of my favorite ones, I remember when I was writing the book that I came across was your teacher would give you an assignment to take a character from Homer's myriad of characters and basically write a monologue for them on a particular subject that's missing from the text, right? So the idea of supplying a different kind of supplemental narrative to something that's already there in the story. So I think what you end up seeing is two things in later literature. One is when in doubt and you need to kind of fill in the blanks and a story, you're going to go back to Homer for a model of how to create dramatic structure or how to tell a particular kind of story, things like shipwrecks. Or I was actually rereading Dennis McDonald's work on this and he was pointing out turning people or, you know, objects into swine, right, like that's something that appears as well or walking on water. Those kinds of phenomena appear in Homer and make are sort of a go to if you are looking to supplement your narrative that you're writing in later decade centuries. And so I think you can't quite escape that. And then the other thing is if you're going to sort of demonstrate yourself as a writer in the ancient world to show that you belong, that you know your stuff, that you are an authorized writer for the kind of narrative you're trying to tell, you're going to want to make an homage to Homer or again later Virgil because it just you're placing yourself within that conversation quite literally like you're placing yourself and your status as a writer, you're within the trajectory of people recognizing like, oh, this person knows their stuff. I expect as a reader or an audience member to hear some kind of homage to this literature we all know. And so you're sort of an a bind, I think, if you're an ancient writer in this period, I think you have to do it. You have to do it maybe because you can't help yourself. This is how you learned or you have to make an homage to Homer because you know people will be looking for it. So that's how I think of his status. You're mentioning even people who are like modestly educated, like I think back to something like Trimalkeo's Feast. Trimalkeo, he's like kind of sputtering out like these weird, strange amalgams of the legends and the myths that are completely out of their canonical status. But like he's trying to show that he's like a culture dude. He's failing miserably. But that's what he's trying to do as a freed person. Like he's kind of got that chip on his shoulder. He's like, didn't you know that Helen was the sister of Polly Nicies or whatever? Like he just carbels everything up. The more time goes on, the more I just love Trimalkeo. I've always loved. So this is Petronius. We think wrote this story, like some scholars debate this, but the Satiracan. And I've talked about the Satiracan elsewhere, the Malaysian tales. And you know, we might want to get into that. But Trimalkeo appears in that text as well. It's a satire and meaning it's supposed to be funny. And the thing with Trimalkeo, it's a really, really, really long story. He's wealthy and he's trying to also show that he's cultured, but he's really not. So every single thing he does is either tacky or weird. But it's like some version of what a truly cultured person would do. So he has this big dinner party and every single move he makes is like the tacky version of what a truly like cultured, rich person would do. And that's not a value judgment. Like, you know, rich people can be jerks, right? Like that's not saying that, you know, being actually wealthy and cultured is better. But what the purpose of the story is trying to do is show like what it looks like for humorous purposes when someone is aspiring to this, but getting it wrong. Just even to the very beginning of the story when you walk into his house. So his dinner guests are noticing that he has murals on the wall, depicting himself sort of leaving from his survival status to an exalted status where he's been chosen by the goddess to like, you know, what march into Rome is this wealthy figure. It's almost like an apotheosis of himself, the kind that like an emperor would have. But then they ask, what other kind of paintings do you have in this house? And it's all Homer, right? Like he talks about how he has the odyssey, you know, painted on other walls of the house, which to me is an indication of exactly what we're talking about. Like Tremolchio as this sort of humorous figure of the very literal kinds of things you would expect from literal in a humorous sense. It's like two on the nose. Like he tries to do the thing that's expected to on the nose to literally. So of course, he has Homer painted on his wall. That is like probably for him, the ultimate symbol, right? Of his his culture status, his exalted. Yeah, absolutely. And it really raises the point about what Petronius I take it. Petronius did write the text just because there's too many knocks on Seneca, the younger in there, Luke and things like that, you know, in the later books to not be written in this period of time, at least, you know, even the concept, the concept is taken from Horace's book one satire, too. I think where they go to the ghost dinner party, but Tronius plays around with the narrative and Colpius is the main character, right? But he's just as big of a low life as all the other ones. But he's down and you really see Petronius kind of break that wall where he's laughing at and Colpius as well. Who's laughing at these other dudes who were laughing at them because they're like these like wandering vagabond scholars. It's very interesting. Like like and Colpius looks like a painting. He's like, what is this? They're oh, it's from Homer. It's from the Iliad or whatever. And he didn't as his cultured dude who knows about oratory, who knows about writing and stuff like that. He should have known that. But like Petronius is mocking and Colpius, whose name literally means like crotch, you know, like he's literally like a dick. You know, like he's he's not like a good dude. Yeah, Tremolchio is very interesting because you feel like you have to explain Tremolchio and his party. But everybody knows that story, right? It's the great Gatsby. Yeah. And my husband's an English professor. You might have probably read about this. We have this conversation constantly. You do realize this is just the great Gatsby. I'm like, yeah, I know, you know, like I probably need to if I read about it, start the next book off with that. That's a perfect, the perfect analogy. That's why I wanted to have this show, because people are like, oh, these stories are old. Why should we care? The unreliable narrator comes into play in Homer. It comes into play in the Greek novels. Like we didn't invent the unreliable. Two things that come to mind to me from what you're saying is sort of the main character or the character you're seeing the story from, who's actually flawed. We see that a lot in movies. I was watching Rushmore. I hadn't seen it in a while. But like that's those are not likeable characters, but you're like willing to go through the story, right? So I see that too in something like the Satirakon, you know? And so you're along for the ride because you just kind of can't believe these figures, but it's the cultural commentary that becomes essential. The other thing about the great Gatsby is I always get nervous because I don't want to be like a phenomenologist. In other words, like I don't want to mistake stuff that I know that's in more recent history for the ancient world. Like I don't want to apply a lens that I'm more familiar with. Like I always have wanted to write something that talks about the Gospel of Mark being like Hemingway. Because before Hemingway, you had like James Joyce and all these really complicated writers like Melville. And you know, like the idea was that it was supposed to be difficult. I've heard some people refer to this as a cult of difficulty. Like, you know, the more difficult a writing, the more it was exalted until like someone like Hemingway comes around and like short declarative sentences, just kind of like very, very dense, but still, you know, gets the story across in a compelling way. I've always wanted to write that, but then I'm afraid like, well, I don't want people to think that I have mistaken the transition from the 19th to the 20th century for, you know, the imperial period. But I still think those conversations, especially in this kind of space are helpful because it gives us a model for thinking through and we might decide it doesn't work, right? But I think that some of those kinds of analogies are really good to the great Gatsby appeals to me too, because what Tremalchio is doing when he has a dinner party and he's calling on people to help him remember some kind of quote from Homer or something like that, you know, when you have those kinds of contexts, it's this idea that the book, that language, that learning and intellectual life was a status marker in the period we're talking about in the imperial period, it gave you more status to be able to do those things or to perform those kinds of acts or practices, and you can even call it a sort of theater. But if you want to impress the people around you and show both your economic status, but also to gain respect, you're going to want to play those kinds of language games. And that was definitely the case too, in the period I'm talking about, like that kind of transition from 19th to 20th century, you know, like word games, language play, being aware of literature, difficult literature, all of that was super important. What Tremolchio shows us, though, in that context is how it can go awry, and that's where the humor comes from. It's not unlike the turn of the century and the first century, so to speak, the second Sophistic era. There's a huge emphasis on display. It literally is display. Any handbook you get on oratory from this period of time emphasizes as much your performance, emphasizes how you deliver the speech as much as it emphasizes the learning. So like Mark is really interesting to me, because I was reading Tim Wittmarsh's work on the second Sophistic, and he mentioned that at the same time that there was a lot of emphasis on the showy kind of word play in your writing and in your delivery, there was also a reaction against that. Don't be showy. Don't, you know, and kind of like, are you familiar with Onos, which is like kind of like the Greek redaction of the golden ass story? And you mentioned it a little bit ago, so I want to give you the platform. This comes from my conversation with Joel Rullahan, who has done a lot of work on Apple. Yeah, I talked to him. Yeah, he's awesome. Oh, he was my he was my undergrad graduate Greek teacher. He was fantastic. He and Nancy Evans are run that Classics Department and they're responsible for for me. Yeah, his translation is excellent. So I that's my favorite I used. So Onos is kind of written at the same time as the golden ass they take from a common Greek source, a Greek metamorphosis that was very popular in antiquity completely lost. We know of it from Phodos, right? Who's a ninth century Byzantine scholar and church person. He basically read all these texts together and he said, OK, Onos is kind of like a truncated version of the Greek story. And Appalachus is golden ass is like a huge expansion of it. So when I look at Onos, I kind of think of like the synoptic relationship like Matthew and Luke look and see something in Mark that's missing and they react to it in different ways. So the guy who does Onos does it in this way and just how Matthew and Luke does it their way and they expand or delete depending on their comments. And the thing I'd like to say about that too, though, is, you know, we we sometimes use this word like missing to say that Matthew and Luke read Mark and they decide X, Y and Z is missing. It might not even be missing. It might just be like they have a different kind of training. They're part of a different intellectual track or conversation or even not. But they they have a different take on it. And so this is something that I like to emphasize that we have to scrutinize our idea of history in some ways, because, you know, the the idea of using divination or inspiration is not necessarily alien to the concept of history in this period either. So it could be that these writers as writers want to supply different kinds of details to their story to get across an impression of historical matter or historical events or to give a different kind of impression of the story. And the thing that I think is really remarkable about let's just say the Synoptic Gospels because you got what we're talking about, although John does apply here too. But with the Synoptic Gospels, especially is kind of like what you're describing. You have multiple authors with the same story telling different versions. We see that in other cases in the ancient world, especially in imperial literature with things like biographies of famous figures, which is essentially what the Gospels are, too. And so this idea of being able to detect those different approaches from different authors is really actually kind of exciting. And that's why I like to always try to sort of bridge that gap between classics and religious studies because more I know Tim Whitmarsh works on this, too. You know, thinking more about and he's been working with Canada Moss as well, who's, you know, both of them are excellent on these subjects. You know, the idea of how do we understand this literature better in its context, both in terms of those kinds of conversations, training, book culture, but also thinking about actual technology, how these things were made, you know, like all of this is essential and tends to get to get missed. I think in religious studies sometimes when people are focusing more on using the Gospels as history today. Do you see what I mean? Like we don't do that with Homer, right? Like we we understand it more as a tool or something like, you know, your own notification to read it or try to understand discourses of the ancient world. But we don't use it as a foundational story of a history anymore. Right. But we still try to wield the Gospels in that way. And so I think it says as much about us today as it does about the ancient world. And that brings up a good point, the deficiencies in using the Gospels as your loan tool to extract history, so to speak, from these texts. It kind of makes me think of like I was reading Virgil's eclogs and I was reading Daphnis and Chloe not too long before that. And to me, it's kind of like trying to use Daphnis and Chloe or eclogs to try to find out the historical Malibias or the historical, you know, the Amaryllis or whatever. You know, it's like you're missing something if you don't take into consideration that he's using theocrates before that and he's using homoges to his time. I think it's very important to bring them both together. Have you ever read any of Glenn Bauersock's work? Yeah, he has a book called Fiction is History. OK, we have the same. I love fiction is history. Actually, a friend of mine gave me that book I wanted to mention because you mentioned Horace before and my colleague here at University of Miami, Miami and friend Jen Ferris-Hill writes on Horace and she's written some really excellent work on his satires. And so I recommend people look them up. But I went for a walk with her and her husband and her husband recommended. He actually gave me his copy of Bauersock based on some of the stuff I was talking about on our walk. And as soon as I read that book, I just it actually informed a lot of what I talked about in my first book. I cite him, of course, but he had even more influence than I let on, I think, in that book. But I really like how he frames those categories and helps us reimagine them. I think it's a very useful model, like you said, because I think it's more important and more useful to look at these writers as all in the same educational and cultural milieu, learning and taking things from each other than just in their own little insulated bubbles. I think no, a writer that we both love is more of an epitome of this than I think people realize is Lucian of Somosota. Lucian Greek is not his first language, but he writes great Greek. He's Syrian, Aramaic is his first language. Lucian is from like the Babylonian area. Lucian is from the place where all this Jesus stuff went down. For these stories would still be around. And he's the perfect fusion of like high culture, low culture. He's using them both. Let's start with Lucian, because Lucian is a great example. He's a selfist as well. He's not just a writer. He like goes around and performs, right? So we have to keep that in mind. So, you know, but Lucian is also familiar with all these like silly traditions, like in the East passing of Peregrinus, you know, Alexander, the false prophet, things like that. He talks about these guys. And when I think of Paul, when I think of Paul of Tarsus, yeah, I'm thinking Peregrinus is more of the type of guy that he would have been. Yeah, Gary wants that. The whole thing is like he's aware of Paul and making fun of him. But I think that that's a little too far out on the ledge. But I remember we can't prove it, but I had a similar idea. I was like, this has to be like inspired by somebody like Paul because he's like he's gotten people visiting him in prison. Things like it was about a year ago. I reread it and I was thinking to myself, like, this is this whole thing is just making fun of Paul. Like there was a world in which I could see that. But he is writing later. And, you know, there's certain lines of thought that martyrology is, you know, like it's maybe making fun of martyrology in general. So to say that it's just Paul is probably too specific, but I had the exact same instinct, you know, whether it's Paul himself, which would have made sense to me in some spaces, because, like you say, you know, Paul's letters are circulating. He maybe had an awareness of him. And certainly the passing of Peregrinus, I really recommend anybody to read it. It's a wild, a wild ride. And Lucian is an excellent writer. His true history or true stories is also excellent and has that whole like epic journey, kind of Homeric inspiration as well. But the passing of Peregrinus just in case anybody doesn't know is about this guy who I mean, I'm going to put it in my own words. Other people might put a different point of emphasis to it, but he basically wants to be famous, this dude. And so he sort of lily pads from one kind of philosophical group to another. So he'll try being, you know, a cynic for a while. He'll try being another. But he's also on the lamb from the law because he's he killed his father and he's done some other things I won't mention. But for a while, he sort of embeds himself with the Christians. And so it's one of the first texts we have outside of a Christian ambit where you have a writer who's not a Christian who actually doesn't seem to have a particular like no skin in the game on Christianity one way or the other, really, but talks about how Peregrinus goes into sort of like a I guess you would call it, you know, like underground Christian. He goes underground into a Christian group because they're so gullible that he knows that they'll protect him and pay his legal fees. And he is enough of a good con man that he actually rises in the ranks. He's got a couple of things that sound kind of funny in the text, like saying he's like the rebirth of Socrates and he's he could be a God, you know, within Christianity, I don't think that would have been the case. So he's got things a little bit wrong, it sounds like. But that's not the point. The point is that he's mocking the Christians and gives an idea of what the impression was of Christianity from outside of the Christian bubble at the time. Yeah, that's just a fabulous text. And then ultimately Peregrinus embeds himself in other groups, but goes to the Olympic Games and sets himself on fire in front of everybody. Everybody remembers this. Apparently it happens. Like there's independent attestation of this. So, you know, he goes out. I think a blaze of glory would be the the right phrase for this. Anyway, it's very interesting. You mentioned Lucian as one of the earliest mentions of Christianity. I think of another person that I put on the agenda, plenty of the younger. Plenty of the younger is also an important person for this period of time as an orator, as a, you know, a lawyer. You know, he's basically the Phoenix Wright ace attorney of his day knows plenty is kind of like we were talking about the great Gatsby earlier in relation to Tremacchio as Jay Gatsby. I think of another character in the great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan. Tom Buchanan is like the, you know, the super like old money, blue blood type guy. He looks down on these type of people. And that's the type of person plenty of the younger was. He was like, I think there was this like freed man. He really aided in his epistles that he kept calling just the slave, like his letters to his friends. Like he hated this. Plenty is another example of just like this educated person like Lucian, who is mixing this high and low culture because in between all these like really learned letters, both as an administrative person to the emperor and as a lawyer or to his friends, he's talking about like friendly dolphins and he's talking about haunted houses. So like that goes back to your book, like the milieu of the people who are writing these texts, right? They don't see a problem with like, oh, there was this dolphin who like took this boy. He just like took him for a swim out into the ocean or there was this haunted house and a philosopher went and like lived there and like laid the ghost like so we have this idea in our minds nowadays that these guys are like sitting around reading Homer all day or Virgil and that's all they're reading. And they're just like reading like heroic hexameter all day or whatever. But like they're interested in a lot of different stories and Plenty tells you explicitly. He hears these stories at the symposium. Yeah. You know, the dinner table. Yeah, actually that happens in Tramalchio too. You know, at one point in the dinner party, the narrator says like and so I talked to my neighbor like, tell me some stories. Like give me the news. Like what's going on out there? And then he tells me like about ghosts. You know, it's the same kind of thing. There was a trading in this kind of storytelling as well. And it has its place like any kind of fantastic storytelling. And we don't have to necessarily separate it as high culture or low culture. You know, Plenty also had something else going on with him that I always found interesting, which is his uncle Plenty the elder was so socially influential, but also heralded as this great intellectual in the ancient world, which, you know, is he a really good one? Like that's up for debate. But he at least like that that was kind of his ethos or that was kind of like how he presented himself. And so Plenty the younger had something to really live up to, you know, plus Plenty the elder dies and like the Pompeii explode. You know, like he's he's like this big heroic figure at this like intersection of culture in a lot of ways. And so he had a lot to live up to as well in terms of carrying that mantle of the family. And so it's interesting to see that as well, because on one hand he has to sort of continue to perform those high culture kinds of symbols of his status, his literacy, etc. But he also because that's so established for him, he can also talk about ghost stories and things like that and engage in some of those kinds of conversations as well. Plenty the elder, yeah, like you said, he's like paroled as like this great mind, but he's using a lot of paradoxography in his natural history right alongside stuff we would consider classical writing. And it shows that like, yeah, this was not separated in the minds of these elites and elites is defined as, you know, Whitmarsh does with the second sophistic as you do in your book. You're separated as an elite by your education. Doesn't really have to do with like social classes. I'm glad you brought that up because I think it's something that like on the surface can be confusing. But I talk about elite cultural status, which might sound like a little bit fuzzy, but I make sure to make that delineation in the book for exactly the reason that you're indicating here, which is and this is Canada Moss's work I mentioned before. You know, a lot of people were enslaved and educated because their function within the household was to be called upon to take dictation, you know, be a secretary for the elite man in the household who had the economic capital, but maybe not the education, you know, an enslaved person who was literate was more considered and extension really even and she's written about this of the body of the rich guy in the house, you know. So like, why does he have to bother going to school and get carpal tunnel from learning to write? He could just enslave somebody to do that for him. Yeah. And that reminds me like, like, you know, life of Esop like when they're bringing Esop to the they're bringing Esop to the the market and he's got like this guy who knows music and this guy who's like a teacher and they're going for a lot more than he is. Canada Moss has a book coming out called God's Ghostwriters where she talks about these kinds of workers. It's going to be fantastic. It's going to change how we talk about these things. And it's something by my talking about elite cultural producers. I didn't even think about it entirely when I was writing my own book, but gesturing towards it because I was thinking about someone like Epictetus. Just to be clear, Canada Moss has taken this like in a much better direction. And I honestly didn't have it within my purview at the time. But I was thinking about Epictetus, who was formerly enslaved that he is someone who had cultural capital. He's somebody because he had education when he's freed can become a philosopher, can become an instructor, can take on students and take on a more exalted status culturally because he had that education. And one thing Tremolchio shows us, too, is that there does seem to be this class of people in antiquity that didn't have that education, but for one reason or another basically become what we would call millionaires. They have all of this wealth, but they don't necessarily have the cultural capital or they rely on others to obtain it. Yeah, it has nothing really to do with money per se. We make that mistake, I think, today because we think about like the Silver Spoon Analogy, right? This is kind of back to the 19th, 20th century, too. Like people who were part of what we might even call like a native aristocracy in America. I'm thinking about people like the Roosevelt or the Kennedys, right? Like they're part of these established families. The Roosevelt's going back to, you know, like the founding, quote, unquote, of the country becoming these wealthy. I always think, too, of the work of like Edith Borton, right? Like there was this class in society in America, you know, like the Guggenheims or whatever. Like they they were wealthy. Education became a form of cultural capital. They start libraries, you know, like even Benjamin Franklin does this once he gets wealth and he came from a background. He never even went to school for like five minutes, you know? And then he had to go, he's an indentured servant to his brother, basically in a print shop, but he would steal books at night and read them. You know, like that's the mythology around him. But he becomes, you know, essentially a millionaire as well. And so you have these class of people who were usually wealthy. And they were the ones who went to like the Ivy League schools. And they were sort of this ruling class in America, you know, de facto. And that starts to kind of unravel in the 20th century. That is a model that here's a case where it doesn't quite work for the ancient world, because you do have so many people where literacy just wasn't necessary for a lot of folks. So it wasn't part of them having to choose a profession. Or again, they could enslave somebody to perform that function for them. So you see something going on in antiquity there again, where it's the cultural capital comes from your proximity in some ways to that intellectual culture and however you can display that. So it can have to necessarily be that you have it yourself, but that you have proximity to it or you can display it in other ways like Tremonchio tries to do. Let's get the plague on. You know, I think sometimes something like flagon or what we call paradoxography, so just to explain what that is, you know, genre is really a modern designation just to be clear. So when we talk about like, there's paradoxography, people didn't necessarily know they were writing paradoxography in ancient worlds. Right. You had you had paradoxography in Herodotus. We talk about Herodotus, for example, as a history, but he's engaging in the same kind of like story play that you see in collections of what we call paradoxography. So scholars use that designation. And sometimes you see terms like this in the ancient world. I'm not saying they didn't have a sense of like, you know, that they were writing a particular kind of literature. But you you have these collections of stories that were really just kind of people who study paradox, paradoxography don't like this, like Monica Amsler. If I say this, but I'm going to say it for the purposes of illustration, which is paradoxographies kind of like Ripley's believe it or not. Like, you don't want to reduce it to that, but just to kind of give a sense of what these collections sort of look like. They tend to be these stories that are so obviously fantastic in a way that they they stretch credulity. But if you look at someone like Herodotus, you start to realize he does the exact same thing at times in his storytelling as well. So what you would find in Flagon, for example, long lived persons, right? It's just literally a list of dudes. Well, there's a woman there, too. And you really take the census list and you just like list of them as it's. Yeah, like people who lived to be a hundred and one, a hundred and two, a hundred and three, a hundred and four, like he goes down the list kind of in chronological order. Like here are all the names of people I know who lived a hundred and ten, right? Like they this is and then he has another section. These sections are like kind of edited in later on for the trans like by translators. But like basically you get a sense, you know, people who lived to be a hundred and forty, like, you know, that didn't happen. But it's the kind of story that the paradoxographers would promote. Like I see one here, too. There's a Sybil who lived a thousand years, right? So we look at this and we say absolutely not, except when the Bible says it. We're like, don't you remember that guy who lived? That's a great point, too, because Patronius does that, too. Patronius has a fable of the unbreakable glass, right? He's doing the same thing. But people liked these stories and they didn't have to be so extreme. One thing I really like, too, is here's one about a giant tooth that you can see somewhere, right? And I think here about the work of Adrian Mayer. It's so brilliant. It's one of those things like you're ashamed. You don't think of it yourself. She wrote this book called The First Fossil Hunters quite a bit ago, because I think I read it. It might be about 20 years old now, but it's really good. Her premise is we know in the Mediterranean world, there are a lot of fossils from the dinosaurs. And so ancient people would have found these or seen bone outcroppings. Like, so what do they think these were? And she actually has an active Twitter account, too. And she posted this week something that was also in her book, which is if you look at the skull of, I want to say it was a woolly mammoth. There's an indentation in the center of the skull that looks like the Cyclops, right? Or you can imagine how certain mythological creatures may have been based on the kind of bones they were finding in the ancient Mediterranean. But those kinds of bones would have been taken to temple treasuries in the ancient world as sort of these prized phenomena, right? Like, I don't know how else to put it like their treasures. They're also sort of peculiar, you know, like oddities in a way. But if they're reimagined as part of a mythology, this goes back to Homer as well, right? Of like the sort of creatures like like a Cyclops would be. Here you can go. It's almost like a tourist trap. You can go see this giant tooth. You can go to this temple and see like Cyclops' skull. You can go and see like this giant bone that was probably Achilles heel, right? Like this kind of stuff also makes its way into the so-called historians like Herodotus, it makes its way into this other kind of storytelling. And I love how Adrian Mayer kind of gives a rational explanation for how these stories come about. But you can start to see that all of this is of a piece, right? And that's where the literature starts to reveal itself as we question how much these things are history, something that you raised a moment ago. But there's in all of these stories a way to reconstruct a certain understanding of how people interacted in the ancient world, how they were educated, the kind of stories they valued, you know, all of that it can be extracted from these texts to give us a more holistic idea of the ancient Mediterranean. Just going back to the the bones section that Blagon has, like he mentions a lot of the bones were considered the bones of the heroes from the elite in the Odyssey, because they had a concept that the heroic age people were bigger than they are now. So he's like, oh, yeah, these bones as you can see in a cave, you were talking about the the the tourist trap and the kind of the the cap and end of curiosities. One of my favorite stories in Flagon is the the centaur that they captured that died on the way to the way down. And he said, oh, this is in the Treasury. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's in the Imperial Treasury. It's been involved. So I think he actually says and apologies if I have this wrong. But I think he actually says, and if you don't believe me, you can go to the Treasury and you can look at it. Which he does that quite a lot. Yeah, which is funny, because I actually wrote something on this. I think that's coming out and I might have taken it out. But thinking about Luke, actually, in the way that Luke kind of tells it. But, you know, like, you can't check that. But it gives like that patina of authenticity to be like, you don't believe me? Like I talked to two people who, you know, say that they saw and you can go and look at the Temple Treasury yourself, right? Because he does that with the hermaphrodites, too. Yeah. And he's like, I've actually seen some of these people. And Herodotus does the same thing, too. Where he says he's talked to eyewitnesses who confirm things. But some of the things he says, like it's that balance, right? Where like, sometimes you're like, OK, that's plausible. Some of the things I don't like to repeat because they're like overtly racist about other places in the far flung reaches of the empire. So I won't repeat them. But some of the stuff he says is like, dude, you know, like absolutely not. But he's he's able to make these kinds of claims because they're far away and because they can't be confirmed, but also because it's entertainment in a way. And so I think we have to understand that. Because the other thing you see in Paradoxography, too, is sort of this authorizing strategy is telling time, according to who is in leadership at the time. Yeah. And and that's something I'm exactly. And I have a piece coming out on that in the next quest for the historical Jesus volume that's coming out with Chris Keith and James Crossley are the two editors. And that should be out next year because Luke does the same thing, you know, when Quirinius is governor of Syria, like X, Y and Z happened and the Paradoxographers do the exact same thing. And so sometimes you'll see scholars be like, oh, well, in Luke, he's taking human time and putting it into divine time. Right. Like that that doesn't help, right? In the sense that it doesn't reveal the literary strategy that's going on, because if you open up the Paradoxographers, you can see the exact same thing going on. So this is just a kind of storytelling people enjoy. And we don't have to say one kind is high class, one kind is low class. It's it's the kind of storytelling that it's just common now in this period of time. That actually reminds me in terms of how they're telling time. Like Lagoon is a very interesting case because Paradoxography deals a lot with like nature, things like that, natural wonder. I talked to Bill Hansen, who actually edited or. Yeah, he was he you were mentioning that some people don't like the analogy to a Ripley's, believe it or not. But Bill would actually say that Flagon is like. I think he would agree, but he would actually go further. And he actually would say that Flagon is almost like a national inquirer. You know, it's it's like back yet. So there used to be people would say like this is a newspaper rag like back in the day. But there was something called News of the World back when like you could get a newspaper at the end of the aisle at the supermarket. And I remember on Sundays, my mother would go food shopping and I would make her buy me News of the World. I actually have a Bat Boy Found in Cave t-shirt. Like I followed the whole Bat Boy. I don't know what happened to News of the World. I should look it up. But Bat Boy Found in Cave was like this ongoing story for News of the World. And they had like this puppet that looked like a Bat Boy. And like they would make up all these stories around. I loved that thing. Like this was like the Reagan years. It was better than reading about that. You know, like it was much more enjoyable, especially for my sense of humor. And there was even a play. I remember I went to it in Boston that somebody put on that was like the musical of Bat Boy. Like these stories take on a life of their own, but there is a space for them. And so I think that's important to remember. So I'm not as offended by the Ripley's analogy or the Bat Boy analogy. But I understand why, like, then it's easy to dismiss them, right? If you classify them that way. So I'm still working out how I want to talk about paradoxography to make sure that I give it the respect it deserves without reducing it to Bat Boy. The other thing I wanted to say is this idea of the the ancients being bigger that you get from paradoxography. That's in The Heroicus as well. The narrator of that story is hanging out in this space where there's a temple to one of the heroes. Yeah, this is the tomb to Protocellius. And he's talking to his gardener, right? He's just called the vine grower. And so this guy just hangs out around this temple slash tomb, you know, monument to Protocellius. And he claims that the God is appearing to him. He says, I used to live in the city and I was a well educated urbanite. But the God has told me to go into this rural space and basically become the caretaker for this dedicated space to him. And so in return, he appears to me and it actually gets a little erotic. Like he talks about how the God is like super sized, you know, like so all of these, you know, epic heroes are larger than we are. And that he embraces him and he smells really good. Like he has this whole like he's so handsome and he smells really good and that he spends the whole day like basically working out and the vine grower like watches and like run laps and like, you know, do hero stuff like he's he's an Avenger or maybe better than an Avenger. It's very funny because like it's not just Protocellius. It's also he tells the story of all the different heroes from the Iliad. They didn't really exalt Homer in education so much as like they kind of nitpicked at him. And that's what Herocas is like all different heroes are like correcting Homer. Oh, Homer wasn't there. I was there. I was actually there because, you know, I died in the war. I think my favorite story is the one at the end that they tell about Achalaius's ghost, a very classic story where Achalaius and Helen are on this island. And we have to keep in mind that these are revenants, too. These aren't like incorporeal ghosts like Jesseus Meath and Book 11 of the Odyssey. These are like revenants like the hero of Temasa type. These are like scary zombie type things. They tell the story of like Achalaius and Helen are chilling on this island. And this merchant goes to the island and Achalaius is like, I want you to bring me back a girl from Troy because she's the last descendant of Priam. He's like, well, yeah, just bring her. Leave her on the sand and then you just go away. Don't look back. Achalaius pairs the girl to pieces. Like it's terrifying. So they like live in this weird space where these are like, like you said, big, giant, beautiful, heroic people. But they're also like these insane creatures who like murder people. It's like in a whim, like the hero of Temasa. I was talking to Daniel Ogden about that one. He was another, you know, character from the Odyssey. I know we were both here to specifically talk about, if anything else, true story. Just with a true story, like Lucian kind of inventing this meta history, turning these genres on their head, things like that. It's like obviously a parody of not only Homer, but also Herodotus, right? Well, he says it right off the bat, I think. He says, you know, so many, it's only reminds me of Luke in some ways, honestly, where he says, here's one true thing I could tell you about the story I'm about to write. I'm a liar. But so many people like Homer get to write these kinds of epics in these stories. Here's my turn to engage in the same kind of activity. But I'm just preparing you don't believe anything I'm about to say. And then, you know, his his characters proceed to like go to the moon. The moon stuff is my favorite part of the of the whole thing where, you know, it's an epic tale, like this band of brothers, you know, like on the ship somehow, like they see all kinds of weird things, but then they manage to get swept up into the sky and they sail for a while and realize that they actually are on the moon, but it's considered actually the first sci-fi novel. Really, it's the first time you see a very Star Wars sort of thing where these guys end up on the moon. Turns out the moon is only inhabited by men. If they need babies, they plant their testicles into the moon and it grows like a baby tree. They have other ways of handling this, too. Like they grow them in their leg or something like that. That whole thing take taken from Aristotle. The whole physiology thing, like men are responsible for all of it, of course. So they live in this land where like they never even heard of a woman before. And the whole conceit of the thing is that the morning star is uninhabited. And there's basically a leader of the sun and a leader of the moon, if I'm remembering correctly, that are in a battle over it. But the thing is so great because he creates all these sci-fi characters where they they're like the radish slingers. So these are people who are on like lettuce winged birds, throwing radishes at each other and they're wearing like bean hats. It's all that kind of like the space aliens that are fighting each other over this territory, this morning star. I have a group with Dan McLellan and Canada Moss. We call it the Dascaloid where once a month, one of us gives just like a one hour talk, you know, more or less a lecture on some topic. And I did one on ancient sci-fi where I just used Chewbacca, you know, like the way that he describes, Lucien describes these ancient hairy creatures. It sounded just like Chewbacca. I'm not saying that, you know, Lucas at all borrowed from this explicitly. They probably had no idea about it, but you did have that kind of imagining these creatures in space and storytelling already. And so this is how you really see the true history doing something that's both evocative of stuff like Homer, like the epic, like the travelogue, like the kind of paradoxographical topics we've been talking about, but in a new key, you know, it's really innovative to put it in that context of space and like a space battle with aliens and that kind of stuff. Because it's not that far off of how you see someone like Herodotus describing far off lands. It's also within the philosophical context that Lucien's writing in, the way that philosophy imagines even like the nature of the cosmos or the afterlife. Yeah, the moon, yeah, the moon is like a reflection of life on earth in a way. It's like kind of a mirror reflection. Yes, great book. Love it. Her book is so great and she just goes through like, what is the moon? Like basically you had to have a position even in the second sophistic on the nature of the moon, like what is this thing? Because, you know, this is not she starts off the book by talking about like, there's no Apollo program. They have no idea what this thing is. The sun sets and there's like this cosmic pupil staring at them and they can see that there's topography to it and it's changing all the time. So, you know, if you look at ancient discourse on what is the moon? Is it a giant uterus? Is it a giant eyeball? Is it another land? Like, is this where souls go? Like, is that where the afterlife takes place? Like all of those conversations are longstanding. At the time that Lucien is writing, you had to have if you're a philosopher, if you're an intellectual of any kind who is promoting themselves in the ancient world, a religious expert. And Alexander, the false prophet, comes to mind here, too. He interacts with the moon. He says he's married the daughter of the moon, God, Selene. And that's how he gets some of his, you know, cultural capital as well. You have to have a position on the moon. What you think it is, there are some people in the ancient world who would say that they could capture the moon, the Thessalian, which is used to say this, too. They had a particular kind of practice that they could perform. That was like they had a bowl full of water and like using certain kinds of apertures they could make it look like, especially during an eclipse, like they had captured the moon. So they would use like lights and the ceiling and stuff like that. But being able to show that you have some position on the moon and understanding of it, you could even capture it. This was part of ancient discourse that gave people the cultural capital we were talking about. And I have a piece that's in queue to be published with Harvard Theological Review on what Paul thought the moon was. Because if you look at 1 Corinthians 15, if you look at 2 Corinthians, he talks about levels to the heavens and the moon and other planetary bodies quite a bit. And that's something that, again, part of a discourse of the 1st and 2nd century, I mean, it has a longer history than that. But all these writers are having similar kinds of conversations. And you can have innovations like Lucien putting guys on the moon, but the same kind of what we would call again, genre or illusions all pertain, which is whether it's Homer, whether it's kinds of timekeeping, whether it's engaging and a fantastic storytelling that people like to do on all levels of society. That's what you're seeing when you compare it to these texts. I think nowhere for me is the brilliance of what Lucien is doing in a true story apparent than when he's on the Isle of the Blessed. He has Homer next to Odysseus. And you see, when I talked to Karen about this, like we talked about how Odysseus is the one who's kind of starting these lying tales. When he's talking to the Pheasians, when he's talking to Eumaeus, when he comes back, he's he's kind of like spinning these yarns. So it's really interesting that Homer and Odysseus are on the Isle of the Blessed. And Odysseus, you see, is still trying to kind of rewrite the story in a way before Lucien leaves. Like he's like, can you give this letter to Calypso? Because he's like, don't tell Penelope. So it's really interesting. Even the characters in the text themselves are trying to write their own story and rewrite history. Yeah, you were mentioning that too with, you know, what you see in the heroics kind of rewriting Homer. And I think that's a really great takeaway because we tend to think about the classics and we think about canonicity, right? So when we're talking about ancient texts outside of Christianity, we'll talk about like Homer, Virgil, like we have reasons, right? Like this is as we talked about, like how people went to school, but we have reasons of imagining what the classics are. And then when you turn to early Christianity, we talk about canon because there is a biblical canon of texts that over hundreds of years become sort of the authorized history of the Christian movement, right? But what you have with the Synoptic Gospels as we talked about, what you have with all these other texts that we're talking about is a sort of writing and rewriting of those histories, that these are mobile, malleable stories that people engage with and change as a historian. I tend to have no problem, although I tried to keep it in line with like comparing a text that are like 300 years apart, you know? And like sometimes you have reasons for it, but like you collapse history a little bit just because of what survives, what you have on hand, how to explain the arc of a narrative or a trope or, you know, some kind of concept in the ancient world. We have a tendency as classicists and religious studies historians to do this, right? Now, imagine, you know, history goes on another 10,000 years. I hope it does. But you could look back and say, well, in the first 2000 years of the quote unquote common era, you have like the story of Homer, Virgil, et cetera, right? Like these epics. And then you have Pirates of the Caribbean, right? Which do you see what I mean? Like I'm saying something kind of silly, but you understand what I mean, right? Like these epic tales in the turn of the 20th century, you know, to the 21st century, you know, they reimagined Homer through Johnny temp, right? Like that is something people might do, right? And they would talk about different genre, like movie genre to literary genre. I'm being a little facetious here, but you see what I mean. But there's a constant telling and retelling of these kinds of stories because they work and they're familiar in some ways. And so people who enjoyed Lord of the Rings, enjoyed Pirates of the Caribbean, enjoyed Star Wars, maybe are not as aware of how common those like the buddy tale journey into uncharted territory and encounters with like strange creatures and engagement with established narrative and mythology. Like all of that is present in there. I mean, even with Tolkien and also C.S. Lewis, like there's Christianity there, right? Like there's homages there to Christian literature as well with Savior figures, etc. So we have to be, I think, flexible and how we understand these narratives and how they're shared and how they develop. Absolutely well said.