 I'm very excited for today's guest. This is Dr. Jackie Murray who's joining us. This episode is about many things, but it's very much ultimately about lore. How lore, both in antiquity and today, is used in shape by the dominant group to prop up our context structures and subjugate the dominated or other, the subaltern as you put it in your research. It's a very complex and important topic as the classical world has often been misappropriated in the interest of bad actors in the far right. People with a casual interest in the classics or in mythology don't realize on the surface, but it's there. That's why I feel like the research of you and the work of the writers of the Faro's blog have very important scholarship to share with the public. So this is kind of a simple question, maybe or maybe not. Was the ancient Mediterranean world a whitewashed dull array of marble? Well, I think the ancient Mediterranean world was not unlike how it is today, where there are multitude of hues of people wandering around. And so there's no place, really, where that would be the case, where everyone is just one skin tone. Even in Africa, people are not all the same skin tone. So yeah, people have always been moving around. There have always been wars. There have always been the transportation of people from all far flung parts of the world. So it's really impossible to accept the view that, oh, the ancient Mediterranean was somehow only peopled by what we consider today white-skinned folks. I think that's just ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense. The Mediterranean world, just like you said, it's a vast array of people throughout this cosmopolitan world, but also just in terms of the statuary and terms of the art, the architecture, it was a very vibrant, exciting, full of color. You have those great articles that I put in the show notes about classical sculpture by Sarah Bond, who took on these notions that early classics took on and it's like, oh, the ancient world was this type of way. When really these statues were full of color, and I think a good way of putting it was Jeffrey Kreipel. When he came on, he said the ancient world was kind of like a comic book. Everything was full of color and vibrant. And also Tim Whitmarsh, you know, in his great article on Black Achilles, he mentioned that the vocabulary of Greek is three times the size of Latin, right? So certain things in terms of color cannot just denote color, but they can denote things as different as gender. This word can mean like the color of the sand on the shore versus swift-footed, or something that means tanned can also mean vibrant and angry. I didn't know if you had any further thoughts on that. Okay, so one of the things that doesn't get discussed in the whole polychromy debate, actually that Curtis Dodder, who is the main editor of the Tharros website at a conference last weekend, pointed out that in a lot of the reconstructions that are adding color to the statues, they're adding color that doesn't really challenge the whitewash worldview. Now they just have pink skin, right? So there's really a challenge there, not that that needs to be a much of a big deal. The issue here is the influence, I think, that the origins of Greek Statue has in Egyptian art, right? And not just Egyptian art that's ruled by maybe questionable whether they're black or not Egyptians, because that's a whole thing, right? However, the actual Egyptians that the Greeks would actually, in their, the high point of Greek civilization, the late sixth, early fifth century moving into the Persian era, or say the Egyptians that are sort of depicted in the Odyssey that Odysseus interacts with, right? Or maybe the king of Ethiopia that shows up in the Little Iliad and other epic cycle poems. That these would have been the Nubian dynasties that ruled Egypt, okay? So that's already a thing, okay? And here are some pictures of the statuary that goes with the Egyptian pharaohs that correspond basically to the time period when Greek's statuary was becoming a thing. So this Kouros here is in the Met. It's one of the earliest statues, full statues we have of a male. And you'd have to be blind to be able to deny the influence here of high quality Egyptian statuary. So this is the thing that gets denied when we imagine that, oh, the Greeks, their statuary was just the best and it just came out of nowhere. Like it didn't come out of nowhere. Like it came out of the influences of all the cultures around them that they looked at and thought were amazing, right? It just so happens that the cultures that in Egypt that they would have interacted with was actually the, what we consider the quote, unquote, black Egyptian. And then of course, over time, as different Egyptian groups, different dynasties of Egyptian rulers kick in than the Greeks interact with them. But again, to go to the idea that the Mediterranean was this more multicolored world, this is something to bear in mind, right? That, yeah, sure, everybody can freak out that the statues were colored, but a lot of times the Greeks didn't really worry too much about how they were representing themselves vis-a-vis when they're borrowing other cultures' statuary. So here they're looking at the statuary that is designed to depict pharaohs, right? And in this particular case, the pharaohs that they would actually meet or the ruling elite that they would have actually encountered would have been dark-skinned, African, Nubian people. So to them, skin color doesn't really matter, right? It's a matter of stature. It's a matter of, do you have royal blood or not? Are you claiming to have royal blood? All of this stuff. Your skin color didn't really matter in terms of, because it was not an accurate or even important indicator of your status or anything. So that's really important to get. So even though the statues that we have, that people are saying, okay, are colored, because it could tell from the actual testing of the actual marble, you could see that there were colors on there, that this fetishization of whiteness that came on in the Renaissance and later, which was part of a whole ideology about whiteness, this was not as something that existed in antiquity. And even the sort of shapes and forms that the Greeks took on didn't originate with necessarily their own statuary, right? But originated in a culture, particularly a culture that they would recognize as different than theirs, and also was ruled by a black pharaohs, right? So that's something that bear in mind. I really love that you shared that because me and my studies, I thought that like, oh, wow, it's full of color, but you pointed out the influence of Egyptian statuary on Greek, and it didn't even come to mind to me. Thank you for sharing that. As you pointed out, while the Greeks and Romans didn't map race in our modern sense of 19th century notions of phenotype and all the baggage that comes with the white supremacy that it took on, it wasn't immune to creating the other or outsider. Greece and Rome, like the way they mapped sexuality, like the way they mapped attitudes towards women and other ethnicities is very complicated. And so today's show is not just about lore, it's also about maps. So discussing maps, how do we define race in a trans-historical sense? You mentioned that it doesn't map similarly to present day notions. There's a lot of resistance to the idea nowadays that we can transport the concept of race back into antiquity because there's a lot of scholarship or discourse about the invention of race happening in relation to the transatlantic slave trade. However, the problem is that a distinction isn't being made between the narrative that's produced to justify this particular form of race and what race actually is, right? Certainly a distinctive form of race emerges in relation to the onset of the slave trade. It actually starts before that, like in the 1200s, 1300s, where the issue is Christianity claims slavery's not good, right? So you got a problem of, Christianity has a problem with enslaving other Christians and Islam has another problem of enslaving other Muslims, right? So you have these two religions that are in conflict, remember, because this is the time period where you're having all the Crusades and both religions have this idea that Christians wanna say Christians and Muslims wanna say for Muslims. So we need to have a justification for why we can enslave other people because we still need to make money, right? So societies from the antiquity on to the medieval period have always had slaves, enslaved trading and slave traders. And obviously we don't need to have a society with slaves, but that was the idea that, well, somehow it's impossible for slave holding people, people who are benefiting from slavery to imagine a world where slavery doesn't exist. I'm sure slaves could imagine it, right? Because they wanted out. So they could imagine a world without, but the folks who are benefiting from slavery or whose lifestyle is completely dependent, even if they're not that conscious of it, they can't imagine a world without slavery. So they have to come up with a justification for how we can have slaves in a world where now the critique of slavery is becoming very strong, especially among the elites who are Christian and they feel that there's a problem. So some elites start worrying about, well, wait a minute, am I gonna get into heaven if I have slaves, right? And so you start to get coming up with stories about who are the natural slaves. Aristotle has this theory about natural slaves. Let's see if we can figure out who they are. And indeed you do get scholars or philosophers in the 1300s, et cetera, start to theorize who could possibly be the natural slaves. And there's a great article coming out by Hendrick Lawrence of Princeton targeting Albertus Magnus as the guy that actually brings together Aristotle's natural slavery and the idea of what we call sub-Saharan African, that is Africans that live in the tropic of cancer, tropic campricorn zone, they target them. So Albertus Magnus actually writes a treatise explaining why these are the people that are the natural slaves. And the interesting thing it has to do with skin color because above the equatorial zone that he's looking at, people are somewhat fairer skins in my color and lighter, and then you have people who are very dark, but then if you go further south, you also get people who are lighter skin. And so they notice this, the all the various travelers or whatever, they notice that, oh, in this particular zone, it's all very environmental based theory. In this zone, you're getting people who are lighter, you get here, you're always under super dark because that's where the sun's belt hits most directly, right? And then below that, again, people turn lighter. So this becomes a sort of handbook taken up later by folks like Columbus, et cetera for who they can enslave and it's okay, right? It's also at this time too, you're getting a lot of monstrosity discourses about where the monsters are in the real world and a lot of them happen to be right around there. So there's a tendency then to justify the enslaving of other human beings with whatever narrative you want. So here it's a developing of a sort of pseudo-scientific, proto-scientific narrative starts to emerge to justify maintaining slavery. And now we can narrow it down to people who we've decided are monsters and these are the black folks. You could say a similar narrative, if you step outside of slavery and we look at anti-Semitism, a similar thing is happening, right? Deciding that, well, these guys don't accept Jesus, right? There's something about them genetically or biologically start coming up with a way of justifying their unwillingness to accept Jesus and going even right to the text of the Bible to say, St. John where he quotes Jesus saying that Jews are the children of Satan or something like that, right? So then that becomes the way in which you justify pogroms against Jews, et cetera, because they're the demon seed or something like that, right? So you get these narratives that are emerging out of the medieval period, one stream of racist narratives demonizing, monstrophying Jews making people think that they really are monsters, right? They may look like normal people, but they're really monsters. And then as it keeps going forward, oh, we realize we can't just enslave everybody like we used to. And now we have to have a specific group of people we can enslave. And so we monstrify that group. So that's the emergence of our modern understanding of race. So it's sort of the seeds and then it keeps getting piled up over time and how we understand it. But this process didn't just happen. It didn't just start in the medieval period. It's always the way in which people justify trying to establish a permanent underclass that you can exploit and treat in a way that it supports a hierarchy, right? This is always the case. And you don't even have to time travel. You can just go to the other side of the world. You can go to Africa and see within Africa where groups are fighting with each other where under phenotypical terms, they would be identical, right? But they don't see the other group that they're fighting against as humans. So this is already within the modern context. You can see that race is not something that has a particular shape or form, right? That it adapts itself to whatever the historical circumstances are, whatever we need to justify keeping our particular regime in play, then we will change the narrative accordingly. So if we go back in time now to the ancient world where most of the cultures there have slaves, they need justification because even if you don't have Christianity or enlightenment or whatever it is among the elites saying that slavery or atrocities are not okay. You do have the resistance of the people who are being enslaved and being exploited, right? They're not just gonna sit there and take it. Most people don't. So there are different ways of explaining. Well, why is it that, and I usually focus on, say, shepherds are an easy obvious group for me. So I've been working on that. Why is it that shepherds have to stay in a particular lifestyle in the Roman Empire especially when you've created mass enslavement of populations like the Carthaginians, Sicilians, et cetera, you conquered their territory, you enslaved the population and given that the territory is best for shepherding or whatever, then you do that. But you have to justify it. So you come up with other kinds of justifications. And in antiquity, one of the modes of justification that actually appealed to the vast majority of people were this monster stories, right? Like, most people couldn't like aerosol over their head, right? Like any kind of airs, waters and places, justifications that are pseudoscientific at the time over everybody's head. But tell them about the Cyclops or tell them about Scylla and Charybdis or whatever, they can understand that, right? And it goes subliminally through the language, through metaphors and through comparisons that are constantly being made, you get the idea that this group of people are deep inside their monsters. And so whatever happens to them that seems atrocious is okay because monster slaying, most of the narratives that we love to listen to, Hercules slaying, the hydra and whatever, all of that stuff is very entertaining, but it also goes into our psyche and makes us okay with monster slaying. Because if you're a kid and you had a dream of a monster and you want somebody to kill it, it's okay. So they use something that's very psychically satisfying. The idea of what it was terrifying to you is monster-fied. So seeing that scary monster being killed in an atrocious way, it's okay. So that's a lot of what goes on in the making of race. One of the things that I think is a better way to approach race is to instead of worrying about what the categories are going to be, like is it going to be people with black skin, curly hair or green eyes, whatever, like those kinds of categories are actually a diversion from the reality. What's putting people into racial categories is the violence that they're experiencing, right? It's the atrocities that are being committed against them and then people being okay with the atrocities being committed against them. And so both sides eventually racialize each other, right? The folks who are being oppressed eventually start to see their oppressors as monsters and vice versa. Those who are doing the oppressing see the ones they're oppressing as monsters and they of course don't see themselves as oppressors. And so, yeah, you get this constant cycle of war, war especially where, you know, war is ultimately I think the creator of race where you need to have a reason why it's okay to go in and like right now we have a whole situation, right? In Israel with the like why is it okay for Hamas to go in and just like wipe out or abduct people or do all this stuff, right? Because they've already got it in their heads that Jews, especially Israeli Jews are monsters, right? And vice versa, the Israelis also have that view of Palestinian Hamas. They see all Palestinians as Hamas and they also have the same thing. So you have this sort of outrageous war that involves dehumanization of people on both sides because they've been inculcated in viewing each other as not human and then they acted out and it's the acting out that's more important because that's what really produces the racialized group, right? And the constant demonstration of we are superior to this group is how race is maintained. So it's this process where it may be under the surface we don't really think about, Tutsis don't think about Hutus in a certain way under normal circumstances, but through politicians or whatever we trigger that ancient hatred that they've got that's been coming at them through storytelling and whatever, then immediately the actions start to reflect that, right? Like we start to treat their women and children as if they're nothing, this kind of stuff happens. But this is going on all the time. This is not something just about black people being enslaved, right? That's not the only form of race there is and am I getting trouble for this? But the point is that if you don't realize that, right? Then all kinds of racist atrocities are going on around you and you don't even acknowledge it. And the folks who are victims of it can't form solidarity because they can't see that what's happening to you over here like if you're Asian American and you're being attacked on the street and you can't see that what's happening to you is pretty much the same thing that's happening to the Jewish family that's in the synagogue that's getting blown up and the black family whose dad was just dragged by the police, if you can't see all of that as the process of race when are you gonna have any solidarity to fight it, right? And that's the point of race, right? Racism is to keep everybody from actually forming any kind of solidarity against it, right? So that's kind of what I would say. So in terms of trans-historicalness, what I'm looking for when I look for race and antiquity I'm looking for moments where I can see the oppression of a group of people by another group of people. It's usually in war, it's easy to find but also it's tapping into a larger way of seeing the world that we can recognize in say the stories that they're telling in the myths and epic, et cetera, the religion, whatever. That it's not just an impersonal thing where I hate you and I don't care. But my hatred of you is tapping into a larger system that when other people like me see me raping your women and whatever, they think it's okay. And in antiquity, of course, there's a lot of that. Most of the stuff we have is from that perspective from the justifying of the oppressor because a lot of the literature we read is actually the oppressor's literature. Racism is not just a matter of phenotype. It's a matter of oppressive structures that become invisible ultimately to everybody around them including the oppressors at some point in time. Just to my own personal experience as a person of mixed race, as half Hispanic and half white, like, but all my family's Hispanic and people would treat me certain ways depending on who they thought I could pass as. It's important to recognize these things that we're living in societies and people back then are living in the same kind of situation where these oppressive structures, like, think about it, the Augustine reforms that he's doing at this time are invisible to probably 90% of the normal population. And unless you're an elite and you understand what he's trying to do in terms of creating that power vacuum and giving it more to himself every year, you're just trying to survive. These things are invisible. And I think it's important, you mentioned, of course, war, the threat of violence, things like that. Monstrification of the other. I think nowhere do we find these in antiquity in terms of the epics and the stories, in terms of creating that kind of authoritative text to other somebody else is in something like the Iliad or the Odyssey. You just look at the catalog of ships in book two of the Iliad, right? Everybody who is somebody gets a genealogy, but if you're nobody, then Homer doesn't waste any kind of time on you. How do they treat somebody who is, say, of a different ethnic group, but they're also kind of the same status of a hero? Are they taking their armor? Like they do in the Iliad? No, they're leaving it there. They're giving them a burial and the due props that they need when laying somebody to rest. And you were mentioning monsterification. You have this wonderful article on racecraft in the Odyssey. Of course, that's found in books nine and 14 and 15 that you deal with. So let's deal with the monsterification. Of course, polyphemus, the Cyclops and Odysseus. How does Odysseus treat polyphemus and how do they interact and what does that tell us about the dominated versus the dominator culture? Here's another really entertaining story that we love. It's a gripping tale. What's interesting about it is you have to remember who is it being told to and by, right? And so it's being told the Fiatians who we've already been told that they already have a hostile relationship with the cycle. They have history with the Cyclopes, right? The Cyclopes drove them out of their homeland before we entered the story with them, right? So they have a backstory with the Cyclopes, but they don't like them. So however Odysseus wants to describe the Cyclops, right? They're just gonna buy it, right? Like even though they know maybe that there is no such thing as a Cyclops with one eye and all that kind of stuff, right? But they like the story because they like the idea that these guys who harassed my ancestors, yeah, they were monsters. So already we were, we set up to accept the story because of course they admit there are real monsters. So yeah, so he tells the story from his perspective. And what's interesting is the, the whole Greek world around heroes, right? Is the idea of Xenia, of I treat you with so much respect that when I come to your house, I'm gonna get absolute trust where we're gonna feed you, bathe you, give you food, let us that you have the run of the house basically. And after that, we ask you who you are. Like we don't ask for your passport when you come out the door. We ask you, you know, in a very sort of subtle way, that the fiatians are the extreme of this. They can wait forever before they ever say, okay, okay, okay, fine, we need to know who you are. Right? But the normal pattern is you show up, you look a certain way, like you look like you're one of them and they let you in, they treat you properly. And then they ask you, so who are you blah blah blah? And then you give your heroic lineage and everything is all good. So we see Odysseus and his men just barge into the Cyclops' lair. They've already decided that this guy, whoever it is in this, whoever runs this operation here with the sheep stalls or whatever, this guy's not one of us because he's a shepherd, right? And it doesn't matter how big he is, he's a shepherd and we can just waltz into his house and start eating his cheese and whatnot. And then Odysseus starts testing him in terms of does he have manners as a hero, right? Well, of course he doesn't because he's not. He's a Cyclops. And so the Cyclops then shows his manners, like eating everybody, right? Which is of course what you expect if you're a hero and you look down on the people who are enslaved to you, who keep your animals, you expect that if you go into their house, you could just take whatever you want because you are their master. And so if they act uppity, right? Then you have to punish them. And so he punt, like, it's sort of set up in, you know, like our life threatening situation. So we're obviously sympathetic to Odysseus, which is I think really important about the story is that we have to feel sympathetic to Odysseus because that's what the story wants us to feel, right? So we feel sympathetic, you know, we feel the danger that he's in, this gigantic monster, the big boulder, all this stuff. And so when he pokes the Cyclops eye out, we're okay with that, right? But blinding in antiquity was hubris. Like it was a way of humiliating another human being. It was a dehumanizing act. And so he's allowed to do this dehumanizing act and we're okay with it. So that's how what I call the racecraft works. Where the story lulls us into this extreme sympathy with Odysseus and we're okay to see a human being being blinded, okay? And because he's a monster, he's gigantic, it's, you know, he's scary, he ate some of his men, all this stuff, right? And so then later, when we get to Ithaca and we meet actual people like Sheppard's and Herders who are disobedient to Odysseus, when Odysseus punishes those disobedient Herders by torturing them and lopping off their arms and making them hold it like, when he does that, right? Again, we are okay with it, okay? The story makes us okay with that, mainly because we know that inside of that disobedient Sheppard is that Cyclops, right? So they have this inner Cyclopian metaphysical-ness to them. And so we're okay with it. And then one of the things that Odysseus does is that he promotes Eumaeus and another Herder out of their slave status. Why though? Eumaeus tells us that, well, when he was abducted into slavery, he originally was a prince, right? So he kind of already has the, he's not a hero, but he's close enough that, okay, when we promote you, you're gonna behave well, right? Like, yeah, and even when we see Eumaeus interacting with the suitors, et cetera, he's clearly like, he's a prodigious enslaved person, right? So he benefits from that when the whole story comes to its conclusion and the suitors are wiped out and a new class of elites are raised up, which is Eumaeus and the other guy. Who don't notice that? That what's happening is, Odysseus has wiped out the elite class, the suitors are all the sons of his own guys, who of course lost on the way back. And now their sons are wiped out, right? So he's wiped out a whole bunch of heroes and now he's now replacing that group with his raised up shepherds or slaves. Now, this is a Roman reading, this will be terrifying. What do you mean, you're like making your shepherds, this is kind of like what you do when you're like a bad general who enlists gladiators and shepherds into your army to tear down your other political opponent, right? So there's a way of reading the Odyssey where there's a really weird revolutionary idea because he comes in pretending to be in the same class as Eumaeus and the other shepherds, but he isn't, he wipes out his enemies who are in the same class as him and then he raises up these enslaved people to be the new elite class, but only the enslaved people who are actually wherewithal to be okay with the slave system because another thing about Eumaeus is that he ends up having a slave, right? Like he has a slave already before he's raised up. So he's bought into the system, like I'm okay with slavery, even though I'm a slave, I can have a slave, that kind of thing. So it's really interesting how the Odyssey sort of does this setup where you have heroes can do certain things to non-heroes that they can't do to heroes, right? When I read the Odyssey, I don't sympathize with Odysseus. I actually see him as kind of a psychopath because I know he's a hero in the seventh century BCE sense of the term, but he does a lot of psychotic things with the family members around him and his slaves. We tend to really romanticize Odysseus, but yeah, just the way that other shepherd slave who's like, oh, Odysseus is never coming back. Odysseus wants to turn around and break his nose. And he's like, I'd be fully in my right to do that. People like to romanticize when he comes back with his nurse, Heraclia, but what he really does there is he grabs her by the throat and he says, if you tell anybody, I will kill you. And then he does this weird mind game with Penelope where he's like, there's a bed that only I can move. And he's constantly testing people's loyalty. It's not enough just getting back to the Cyclops for a second that he blinds them. He has to humiliate him and say, remember who did this? I did this, Odysseus. And he gives his genealogy. And I don't really sympathize with these people, but I understand that people at that time were supposed to. I think you're absolutely right. Your first read through, especially if you're a kid, which is often when kids experience this text, right? The monster fighting and all that gets into it. But then if you take a critical stance or if you start to notice in a second, I don't like that he did that. Then you start to see the text in a completely different way, which is why it's so rich. So I'm not promoting the canceling of the Odyssey in any way, shape, and form. As you know, I'm teaching it right now. And I think it's a great text for trying to understand human nature. And so no canceling of the Odyssey not happening on my watch. But what is that? If you take a critical stance or you look at some of the other characters who are sort of like, try to understand the text from the perspective of somebody who's in the background. Then you start to see certain things that Homer incorporates in there that may be critical of Odysseus' behavior, critical of the system. It's possible to show that, hey, there's something wrong with the way this guy behaves. Another example like what you're talking about where he's still a beggar and he watches the suitors grab his women. Now, of course, the suitors are going to rape his women. Like his enslaved women. They're going to be raped, right? Because these guys are, not to be toyed with, there's 112 of them. Did you know? I think there's not many of them. I think it's not like there's seven, right? And so the women don't have a choice. But he's watching that and then he gets angry and he imagines that he remembers the Cyclops dashing his men on the ground like puppies and eating them. He's watching that and he associates it with when the Cyclops eats his men, right? And then he has no problem to turn around later and hang these women for what has been done to them, right? So then that reveals to you a certain aspect of this culture when it comes to sexual assault and how women are treated in that culture, right? If some other male who doesn't have authority over their bodies, you know, exploits them as what happens with the suitors, then they're just garbage. They're just like puppies that get smashed, right? And even puppies getting smashed, that's kind of harsh. I like puppies. So like, you know, so there's this definite sense where the kind of mindset that we're allowed to see if we move away from his pity, I don't know, has too much pity for his own men. My students and I are wondering like, where does he come in to actually care that his guys are getting into trouble? Like his last minute is when he's, you know, at the beginning of the poem, it says, though he tried to save them, well, when did he try? Like, I think, oh, when he told them, hey, don't eat the cattle in the sun at that moment, that's when he tried and he didn't fell asleep. But that's the extent of his trying, right? And so maybe he lets a bunch of them get eaten by Silla, right? So that's a lot of trying. So yeah, I wonder about that. So it's interesting that you also feel that, I don't know if I trust this guy. I don't like, I don't like, I'm not sympathetic, not at all, not going to be. Well, that's a great point. And this kind of goes back to our very first discussion when I contacted you. You were like, well, I don't know, can you kind of have a conference and tell me about your show? And our first talk was about how everybody romanticizes the Iliad, right? But when we read the Iliad, the first book is about Agamemnon and Echelaus arguing over who gets to give, who's sex slave back. You know, he's like, well, if I give my sex slave away, you got to give me one of yours. It's really unsympathetic, but the genius of Homer, that he can have these traditional unsure materials. But he also like, he says, he puts in these little things like when the two soldiers are on the battlefield and they exchange armor, he shows these incredible moments of hospitality, of existential being human, like between Priam and Echelaus when he's begging for his son's body back. But like I said, the problem is ultimately these heroes are not heroes at all. They're basically guys who can human traffic, who can murder, who can go and pillage and plunder and we're supposed to be okay with that. And that's kind of the thing that I like about the Greek novels as well, you were mentioning the little subversive things. In Greek novels, there's a lot of emphasis on slavery and the dominated classes being sold into that slavery into the pirates. And more often than not, I really find that in something like Lucopy and Clydefon. And Lucopy and Clydefon, Clydefon's supposed to be the main character, right? But Clydefon's kind of a bumbling idiot. He doesn't really do anything. Everybody else, his slave is doing all the stuff, getting him out of trouble. So I like that subversive reading and I think something with Eumaeus as well. When he gives that story, oh, I grew up with the king's daughter and we were raised the same until we both came of age. But he gives this a beautiful little aside where he's like came of age where we had desire. He can't say that he desires his playmate because he's of a different social status. And that's part of it, right? That he knows by now that he's a grown man now, that if he expressed any kind of desire for Odysseus' sister, he could be lynched. This is the point, right? Like he cannot have any kind of desire for someone, anyone, until it's allowed by his master, right? And Odysseus at the end gives them a wife and whatever, right? Eumaeus says that when Odysseus comes back or if he ever comes back, he would give me a wife and whatever, right? And so Odysseus does, he gives these two a better status. He said that they could be treated equally with Telemachus, but not exactly. So they're basically, Telemachus is gonna be king and they're gonna be his noble guards or whatever, right? But they couldn't get married before that. And all those enslaved women who are of their status, they can access them. They can't make relationships with them that are sanctioned by anybody because those women effectively belong to Odysseus. And that's part of what's going on with the suitors, why they are raping his women. It's actually their act of aggression against Odysseus, even though he's not there, right? They can't do it to Penelope because there's consequences, but they can do it to these women because nobody in the heroic universe who could punish them would see a problem with it. So similarly, yeah, when you talk about the Iliad, yeah, the Iliad's really, really interesting. I definitely don't think it should be read by kids. If you want to, you know, ban something from K-12, the Iliad is definitely a text that needs to be banned from K-12 because it's too sophisticated when it deals with sexual violence and the normalization of sexual violence. Indeed, the conversation that they're having back when the Taliban or the Boko Harp, one of these terrorist groups that were abducting women about a couple of years ago, in this case, we're abducting Zayedi women. So they did these videos that were boasting about what they did. And there's one, it's a woman who had been rescued from this situation that we're showing the video. And the video might as well be the beginning of the Iliad where the guys were fighting over which women should be their sex slaves. You can get more on point than that where you have like these guys claiming, no, she's mine. And I prefer her to this and all this stuff, which is like, this is warlord behavior, right? And so that's how we have to recognize what's the context of the whole thing. That this is warlords and all the atrocities that go with war are on the table. And the first lines tells you that, right? That Achilles Wrath is going to have the corpses of his own men, the Greeks, right? Cause it's not like just everybody, it's the not Trojans. It's Greek bodies will be left out on the battlefield for the dogs and the birds to eat. This is his anger is gonna do that, right? And so that's the context where it's like, what kind of anger is it where the people you're supposedly fighting with, their corpses are dehumanized to the point where dogs and birds are scavenging them. But that is the nature of this war that they're talking about. It's a dehumanizing aspect of it. If we're in that context, of course, the fighting over sex slaves is just part and parcel of that, right? So this is why I really don't recommend kids to treat him ill yet. I don't care how watered down it is because you water it down and then they don't really understand when you actually read the real text, right? The Odyssey, I don't have a problem with there isn't too much going on there that kids can't overcome. But I do think for high school kids and under, the Iliad is really not something you should have your kids reading because you have to water down so much that it's not even the Iliad anymore. And if you water it down, you lose the actual sort of despair, I think that Homer has about war. There is a despair about war and what war can do to a noble person, right? And so the point I think of the Iliad is how Achilles gets corrupted by this anger that I think is of racial anger. The best image of him in his noble status is given to you by Andromache, right? Where she says, well, when he conquered Mycet, he didn't strip my father of his armor. He gave him a burial that was appropriate to another hero, right? Granted, he sacked the city and he did murder my brothers who were shepherds so he didn't really care about that. But the point is though, when it came to her dad, who was of the same status as him, he did treat him with dignity. And it took ransom for my mom, right? Like they ransom unlike Agamemnon who wouldn't take the ransom at the beginning, right? So he had the appropriate or at least acceptable behaviors for noble heroes before this. And this is the moment she's telling this to Hector presumably to give him the idea that, okay, well, so you can negotiate with it. I think she's suddenly hinting, negotiate with him so that he will ransom us, her son. But of course, when we get on the battlefield with Achilles, Achilles is so into this mayness, which I think is a manifestation of racial hatred, right? He literally says, I don't see you as a human being like I am, right? He says to him, what contracts do lions and prey have, right? We're predator and prey here. We're not in the same family. Yeah, you're not a human to me. So it's that dehumanization that happens to him as he dehumanizes Hector that I think Homer is despairing about, right? And then he needs to learn that you can't treat human beings even in battle. You can't treat human beings in a way that denies their humanity, right? And so that's when you have the father of Hector, Priam, come to him because God forced him to realize this. They have this awesome moment where he recognizes, to a certain extent, that, okay, fine. He does have to allow Hector to be buried. He has to recognize the humanity of Hector. This is not a monster slaying. This is a human being that you are dealing with. What's interesting about the Iliad is that as Achilles stays out of battle, the other heroes start becoming more and more dehumanizing to other warriors, or at least they try to, right? They try to destroy their corpses and all this kind of stuff, but they never actually do accept when it's a corrosion, it's very interesting. And only a couple of them. So Paedon, when Patroclus kills him, where he's treated, is dehumanizing. And then there's the guys in the water that Achilles kills. He dehumanizes them. But in general, Homer's hesitant to actually allow the hero's bodies not to get their appropriate burial. So even if our Paedon gets his burial, blah, blah, blah. So when Achilles does this to Hector, that's the limit. It's beyond what it is. But it's as if everybody's sort of acting out his wrath for him before he gets into battle, right? And doing it to the Trojans. And then finally, he comes back into the battle and then he starts just doing that. But to Trojans, interestingly enough. And the gods are now ticked off. And there's just so much we'll allow. Exus allows quite a bit to happen to Sar Paedon, right? But he's not gonna allow Sar Paedon to be there unburied. That's not gonna happen, right? Similarly here with Hector, it's like, okay, that's enough. You're not going to allow that. But I think is really interesting is his mother, who's no doubt given him this chip on the shoulder as far as I could turn. She says to Apollo, you're being unfair effectively. Because Apollo said he needs to give that body back now and it's asked to stop. And she's like, oh, you were at our wedding and you're making me do that. It's like, what is she talking about? Like he's saying, he needs to stop dehumanizing Hector. And she's saying, he needs to keep doing it. It's not fair. So she's actually on board with this action of his, right? But she has to let it go. That tells you that there's some kind of agreement. But she's, of course, the goddess of agreement. She's always talking about how I'm the most dishonored of goddesses and that sort of thing. So she transferred that agreement onto him. And so he's agreed that somehow his dignity has been painted in some way. First with Agamemnon and then as he keeps going with just spirals out of control, but there's an agreement there that he is not being treated as he should be. And Agamemnon sparks it by insisting that, well, I'm the top dog here and I get the top girl and that's how it goes. That's just the rules. Like what are you talking about? Something I noticed you emphasize in your work a lot is that it's important for us to try and find anti-racist voices in antiquity. I think the Iliad is definitely one for sure. If it's read properly, I do think that, as I said, Homer makes you despair of a way in which war can corrupt the souls of the warriors. That's one text that I think you can say is, to a certain extent, I found that the Argonautica can be certainly in the second half of it where the narrator starts to behave a little bit more like Homer in giving the defeated sort of honor where he starts off online with the same program of like monsters killing all of all. But then as the story goes, the Argonauts don't change. They still behave in the same old same old. But the narrator starts to notice that maybe some of this monster slaying stuff isn't that great. So when Hercules kills the serpent with the apples of his parodies there, he has the nymphs of the his parodies tell that story and they tell it from a very hostile perspective. Like that's how that story is told. So it's not told by the narrator, but he puts it in the mouth of the his parodies who calling him a con, like a horrible man that came by and he did that. So interesting. And then when the Argonauts kill their final herder that they kill, they treat him like crap as usual. But the narrator then tells you, oh, he's a son of Apollo and gives him this whole genealogy just like Homer does for the guys who are dying there. So there's a sense in which the narrator at least starts to at least worry about some of this monster slaying territorial conquest. Cause it's interesting that it's all happening in North Africa and that's where the Ptolemaic Empire exists where he's writing from, right? So he writes the same story about North Africa being this empty wasteland and it's vast and whatever typical colonial discourse about land you're going to conquer. But he does have these idea, these beings that appear out of nowhere, right? Like there are these invisible beings there. So that's interesting. So there are these people that are there but they're made to be invisible. You get the sense that there are other beings there but the Argonauts don't see them, they don't interact with them. So he's aware that there is this wasteland idea that goes with colonialism. But at the same time, it's not a friendly space for the folks that are coming in. They're coming in and conquering like Hercules, not okay. The locals don't buy it, right? They're not on board. And so it's interesting that it's in this African space that has just been officially taken into the Ptolemaic Empire. It's in that space where you're getting the critique. It's not a great critique, but it's a critique-ish of what goes on with Imperial conquest. These claims that, oh, the local divinity gave you the right to be here, this kind of stuff. That's presented there. But at the same time, you do have the sense that, well, not everybody there is gonna be happy that you come there. So you've got the nymphs who are just not having it with Hercules. And that, I think, is kind of interesting. But I do think that you can make even a text that's not particularly anti-racist. But I do think taking a critical perspective on it or trying to imagine, what would Euryklia's perspective be on this? Or what would Melantheus' perspective be on this whole operation? Taking a position of the story from not centering Odysseus and Penelope, but centering one of the other characters who are sort of like victims of the narrative, right? Or in the background of the narrative. So this is kind of what I'm getting my students to do that they're next. They have to do a critical reading and then they're gonna do a counter-reading. They take a position of somebody who isn't gonna be happy with what Odysseus do. And then see, not change any of the events that happen, right? But just imagine if you were Melantheus and Odysseus this beggar, because as far as you know, he is just a beggar and he's now hanging out with Eumaeus who you already see as Mr. Causing Problem for you because he's not sucking up to the suitors the way you are, because you're just trying to survive, right? How does the story go for you? Should you help the suitors, right? Like, I mean, there's 108 of them and there's just this one beggar guy who there's no reason for you to believe he's Odysseus. So there's ways of thinking about it where it's like, okay, that's interesting. And certainly the novels are another source of possibility. But yeah, I just say go out there and read more stuff. And I think critically when you're reading them, don't just like reject it because it's being used by white supremacists for whatever, but well, that's their use of it. Like you don't have to use it that way. Text don't harm you by themselves. Like it's how you take it in. And that's when they, that's how they harm you but by themselves they don't do any damage, I don't think. But that's just, some people might not like that. It's important definitely to read these texts both critically just within their own context and also realize that we can, just through our process of reception and as a reader, we can interpret in new and vibrant ways that subvert these dominating structures in charge. They're all ripe for creating stories that can subvert. Dr. Murray, thank you so much again. So I wouldn't say the Odyssey is anti-racist. I think the Odyssey is problematic in many ways. I can't, sorry. She's been waiting to do that the whole time.