In Not Built in a Day: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire, historian and author Dr. Emma Southon offers a first-of-its-kind exploration of the enslaved people who built and sustained the storied empire. In this interview, we discussed slavery’s central role in ancient Rome and why these stories have so often been left out of history.

The emperors and senators are very much the outliers of what Roman life was like. What if all we had left from 21st-century Britain were Queen Elizabeth and Kate Middleton, and we tried to say that was what life was like? Or if all we had was Jeff Bezos, and we said that was what life was like in 21st-century America?

Slavery in the Roman Empire

Slavery was integral to the Roman Empire, and enslaved people made up a shockingly large percentage of the population. Unlike more modern race-based slavery, people in ancient Rome were typically enslaved during wars and military conquests. Under Roman law, enslaved people were treated as property rather than citizens with rights. Many were prisoners captured as Rome expanded across Europe and the Mediterranean. Others were born into slavery, as children inherited the status of their enslaved mothers.

The scale of Roman slavery is huge. The empire cannot exist without it. It is so profoundly embedded in every part of the empire and the culture of being Roman that I wanted to show just how vast it is.

Not Built in a Day Hits U.S. Shelves on June 30

With expertise, empathy, and the occasional dash of dark humor, Dr. Southon’s work—including books like A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire and her podcast History Is Sexy—champions the untold stories of marginalized Romans. Her latest book sheds light on the experiences of enslaved people, reconstructing their lives through material evidence often overlooked in traditional tellings of Roman history.

Published by Simon & Schuster in the U.S., Not Built in a Day: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire is available from June 30, 2026. The book is also available in the U.K. as Servus: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire.

Do you believe in magic? People across the ancient world certainly did, from Egypt and Mesopotamia to Greece and Rome.

We sat down with Dr. Jeffrey Spier—curator of Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World at the Toledo Museum of Art—to explore the fascinating crossroads of magic and the mundane.

There’s this universality about magic. We all have this desire—whether through magical texts and practices, or medicine and science—to make sense of or exert influence over the unseen.

Everyday Magic in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia

In Egypt and Mesopotamia, magic was embedded in daily life. Priests performed rituals, created amulets, and inscribed protective texts. And these practices were no secret—rather, they were carried out publicly in accordance with established religious traditions.

Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World illustrates how Egyptians and Mesopotamians sought to influence unseen forces. Among the artifacts on view are ancient spells and rituals recorded on papyri and inscribed on objects.

Magic and Suspicion in the Classical World

The Greeks and Romans viewed magic with a bit more suspicion. Mythical sorceresses like Circe and Medea embodied both the fear and fascination surrounding magic, reflecting a broader cultural anxiety about the perceived foreign origins of magical power.

Yet, behind closed doors, Greeks and Romans regularly turned to spells, charms, and even curse tablets for practical needs, from physical healing to romantic escapades. In the ancient metropolis of Alexandria, diverse traditions converged into a shared magical culture at the height of the Roman Empire.

How the Cursed! Exhibition Brings Ancient Magic Together

Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World opened at the Toledo Museum of Art on March 21 and runs through July 3, 2026. The exhibition gathers dozens of ancient artifacts to reveal how magical practices evolved across cultures.

Few artists are as closely associated with a single color as Vincent van Gogh is with yellow. The van Gogh Museum’s exhibition of Yellow. Beyond van Gogh’s Colour is the first to explore this connection in depth. It also shows how yellow has shaped the wider world of art, culture, and sensory experience.

We went behind the scenes with Edwin Becker, Head of Exhibitions at the van Gogh Museum and co-curator of Yellow. Beyond van Gogh’s Colour. He explained the enduring impact of van Gogh’s Sunflowers and looked back on the unique challenge of transforming a single color into a multi-faceted, multi-sensory exhibition.

Yellow. Beyond van Gogh’s Colour is a thematic, multi-sensory exhibition—an adventurous tour through the many meanings of the color yellow.

van Gogh’s Sunflowers and the Many Meanings of Yellow

In 1888, Vincent van Gogh settled in the south of France, where he was captivated by the bright sunlight and saturated colors of the landscape. From Arles, he wrote an effusive letter to his brother Theo: “Sunshine, a light which, for want of a better word, I can only call yellow—pale sulfur yellow, pale lemon, gold. How beautiful yellow is!”

The color yellow became so closely tied to van Gogh that friends decorated his coffin with yellow flowers at his funeral in 1890.

With Sunflowers, you have this feeling of a very cheerful, sunny color—this bright yellow in all its different tones. On the other hand, there is also a kind of melancholy in the flowers themselves, already fading away in the vase. And, at the same time, you realize how daring it must have been for someone to paint this in 1889.

Naturally, Yellow. Beyond van Gogh’s Colour centers around Sunflowers. But rather than focusing only on Vincent van Gogh and his life, the exhibition paints an incredibly wide-reaching picture of the color yellow.

Works by van Gogh’s contemporaries are shown alongside objects ranging from perfumes to party dresses. Together, these reveal how the same color can take on different meanings over time and in different contexts. The exhibition also features immersive installations by Olafur Eliasson, where yellow is experienced through light, space, and perception.

Yellow. Beyond van Gogh’s Colour was on view at the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam from February 13 to May 17, 2026. A corresponding publication, Yellow, is available via the van Gogh Museum shop.

According to legend, the Library of Alexandria was a great repository of knowledge constructed in the capital of Hellenistic Egypt. It is reported that over the course of 300 years, it accumulated almost half a million papyrus scrolls and contained much of the knowledge of the ancient world. Unfortunately, a significant section of the library was burned in 48 BCE during Julius Caesar’s civil wars, and it suffered further devastating destruction in the 3rd century CE. It was assumed that the library lost its importance, but new excavations of the site suggest that between the 5th and 7th centuries CE, the site of the Library may have become a major learning complex, called an Akadēmeia, which was a kind of prototype Late Antique university.

Note: In April 2025, at the American Center for Research in Egypt (ACRE) Conference, Richard Marranca sat down with Kholoud Mohamed Shawky to discuss the Akadēmeia of Alexandria in Late Antiquity; this article is the fruit of their conversation. Richard attended the conference on an award from the Kogan Fund of the Religion Department at Montclair University.

Kholoud worked as an archaeologist for Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquity and participated in the study of the last lecture hall at the Alexandria site. She is pursuing a PhD in Alexandria University and wrote her master’s thesis on “The Architecture of Educational Buildings in Egypt at the late Roman period, in the light of the recent discoveries at Kom el-Dikka, in Alexandria”

The Library of Alexandria: A Hellenistic Knowledge Repository

After Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, he established the most famous of his eponymous cities on the northern coast of Egypt, Alexandria. Established in 332 BCE and then constructed under the Ptolemaic dynasty, the Egyptian city was designed following the Hippodamian grid plan of Greek cities, creating the ancient nation’s first Hellenistic city. The city plan consisted of two main roads intersecting at right angles, with side streets running parallel to form a chessboard-like pattern. According to the Greek geographer Strabo, who visited in 25 BCE when Egypt was under Roman rule, one of the most important complexes in the city was the Museion, the temple dedicated to the goddesses of science and arts. The Library of Alexandria was attached to the temple, alongside a hall for scholarly meetings, a dining room, and public gardens.

This description evokes the Greek gymnasia, institutions of physical exercise that existed in Athens from the 6th century BCE onwards. It also brings to mind the schools of the Athenian philosophers, including the Κυνόσαργες (Cynosarges, associated with the Cynic Antisthenes), the Ἀκαδημία (Academy of Plato), and the Λύκειον (Lyceum of Aristotle), where philosophers developed their ideas and taught the youth in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE.

Excavating the Library of Alexandria

In 2005, an Egyptian-Polish mission, working at the Kom El-Dikka archaeological site, which encompasses the site of the ancient library, announced the discovery of 22 lecture halls in the center of Late Antique Alexandria, which flourished around the 6th century CE. These halls were designed as elongated exedrae, which are arcades with benched seats. They had three or five graded benches running along three sides, centered on some small steps that led to a main teaching chair, and a podium on the floor that confronts both the benches and the professor’s chair. Three of these lecture halls also had a cistern. Ten of the halls had anterooms with no traces of benches, while the anterooms of the three largest halls, measuring 17 meters long, had benches.

All the lecture halls were located within a significant urban complex that was built around big imperial baths flanked by monumental colonnades. In addition to the exedrae, numerous public buildings were built around it, including spacious bathing chambers that could accommodate hundreds of users every day, bathing pools, gymnasia for sports, and public latrines. A complex system of furnaces was used for heating water, which was drawn from the nearby cisterns. All the buildings are oriented north-south, except for two double halls with an external apse towards the east.

An Antique University

It is worth noting that scholars and researchers excavating the site have referred to these unique halls as the “Akadēmeia.” They describe it as the prototype of a new kind of educational organization characterized by regular attendance and study of science (e.g., arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) in permanent buildings, with specialized professors, and a complete scientific curriculum.

In Late Antiquity, as part of the Byzantine Roman Empire between the 5th and 7th centuries CE, Alexandria rose to prominence as an intellectual center of higher education, attracting both students from the aristocracy and distinguished teachers. Many biographies of famous thinkers indicate that they spent time or resided in Alexandria. To name but a few, there was Proclus, one of the most famous pagan philosophers in Athens in the 5th century CE; the Arab physician and pagan philosopher Gessios of Petra; the Patriarch Severus of Antioch; the Neoplatonic philosopher Damascius; the mathematician Theon and his daughter Hypatia; and the physician Agapios. This concentration of great minds in Alexandria has earned it the nickname the “Oxford of Late Antiquity.” It now seems that more than just being a gathering of minds, Byzantine Alexandria also had the physical infrastructure to support this time of learning.

When the Christian rhetorician Procopius (c. 465-526 BCE) was heading the school of Gaza, he described Alexandria as ὴ οίκνή τὥν λόγων μήτηρ (the house of the mother of words), suggesting its important role in education and culture in the 5th and 6th centuries CE. Sadly, the Akadēmeia was largely destroyed with the Persian conqquered Egypt in the early 7th century CE.

When you picture samurai, you probably picture a warrior with a kabuto helmet and a katana. But the real story of the samurai is actually a lot more complicated than what you’ve seen on TV or even in most books.

We tackled this topic in an interview with Dr. Rosina Buckland, Curator of the Japanese Collections at the British Museum, and Professor Oleg Benesch, Professor of Modern History at the University of York.

The diversity of the samurai is often flattened in popular culture, but it’s six centuries of incredibly varied roles and social functions.

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Oleg Benesch

Buckland and Benesch recently co-authored Samurai, an illustrated catalogue accompanying the British Museum exhibition of the same name. As experts in Japanese culture and history, they offer their takes on pop culture phenomena, common misconceptions, material culture, and more during our conversation, which you can watch in full below.

Beyond the Sword: Understanding Japan’s Warrior Class

For centuries, the samurai were elite warriors serving powerful lords and Japan’s military government. But beyond the armor and the battles, the samurai were deeply involved in social, political, and cultural life in Japan. During the peaceful Edo Period, for example, many samurai functioned as major patrons of the arts.

The samurai class was technically abolished in the late 19th century. Still, they live on as a global icon of Japanese culture, from ukiyo-e prints to video games.

People think ‘samurai’ refers to a male warrior in armor holding a sword, but they had many roles across the centuries. Men, women, and children were all part of the samurai class.

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Rosina Buckland

Exploring a Warrior Tradition Through Material Culture

Samurai is on view at the British Museum from February 3 to May 4, 2026. The accompanying exhibition catalogue, co-published by the British Museum Press and University of Washington Press, is available for purchase here.

Both the exhibition and its catalogue are unique because they use real objects to tell the real story of the samurai from their beginnings as a medieval warrior class in Japan to their enduring legacy in global contemporary culture.

Since its inception, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid has stood as a bastion of modern and contemporary art, housing some of the world’s most famous artworks, including Picasso’s Guernica. Under the leadership of its new director, Manuel Segade (since 2023), the museum is undergoing a profound metamorphosis.

TheCollector recently visited Reina Sofía and got a first-hand opportunity to view its recently renovated fourth floor and interview Manuel Segade on a wide range of issues, from the museum’s decision to spotlight multiple “forgotten” artists to his favorite artwork.

What’s Changing? Reina Sofía’s Five-Year Transformation

Since 2023, the museum has been changing. The change is “repurposing” the very architecture of Reina Sofía’s Sabatini and Nouvel buildings to better serve the art and the public. Segade outlines the timeline and the goal:

“This new presentation is the start of a three year transformation of the uses of the spaces in the museum’s headquarters. We’re changing one floor of the collection a year until 2028, because we are repurposing the spaces of our different buildings, leaving the upper floors of the old hospital—Sabatini building—for the collection and the ground floors and the spaces of our new Nouvel building for the temporary exhibitions’ program. This new presentation covers the last 50 years and gets through the end of the dictatorship of Franco to the present, as to say, the civic construction of the democratic arena in Spain.”

The “Forgotten” Artists Who Deserve the Spotlight

The museum’s fourth floor, which recently reopened to the public, recounts the art history of Spain over the past 50 years by way of 403 works by 224 artists. The new exhibition, titled Contemporary Art: 1975-Present, takes visitors back to the 1970s, the turbulent period when Spain transitioned from Franco’s 36-year dictatorship to democracy. The collection seeks to underscore the contribution of Spanish contemporary art to this process from 1975 to the present.

Of the total 403 works on show, 258 works (64%) are unexhibited. This means that new perspectives that had not been on view in past presentations of the museum’s permanent collection are now reaching audiences.

We asked Segade if this new presentation features any “forgotten” artists who particularly deserve the spotlight right now.

“So many… I think it is important to vindicate the early pioneers of conceptual art, like Paz Muro, whose irreverent actions were key to define our aesthetics in the 70s, or Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, whose continuous redefinition of what art is still provokes debate on our scene.”

Among these, there are also multiple women artists who were previously overlooked and are now receiving renewed attention. According to Segade:

“Also, there are a lot of women artists overseen in the past that should be valued for their contributions, like Paloma Navares and her new media feminist critiques or Salomé Cuesta questioning traditional optics and traditional perspective.”

Representing Women Artists

Another key feature of this new organization, as we previously mentioned, is the representation of women artists.

Of the total of 173 artists, 69 are women; a large number, but one that needs to increase in the future. Segade acknowledges the progress made, while remaining candid about the work that remains:

“We’ve introduced almost 35% of women artists, the biggest ever in the museum, but that clearly needs to increase: in 26,000 pieces in our collections, only the 15% are made by women artists.”

The role of women in this “new” Reina Sofía is more than a token gesture. It is a fundamental restructuring of the narrative:

“We really think that women were fundamental to produce the system of representation that we call contemporary art. The Second Wave of feminism is key in the formation of performance art and the struggles of the 70s happened in women artists’ bodies.”

Challenging Traditional Museum Narratives

Another change is the “hanging” itself. Eschewing a single, linear timeline, the museum now offers three distinct perspectives on the post-1975 era, forcing the viewer to engage with the art through different lenses.

The first thing a visitor sees upon entering the fourth floor is Juan Genovés’ Documento No… 1975, which sets the tone by addressing censorship and the relevance of basic rights. From there, the visitor moves to an introductory space featuring the following three chapters:

1. The Structures of Affect of the Spanish Transition: highlighting the emotional frailty of Spanish society during the period of democratic transition.
2. Material Counterculture: this chapter showcases the multiple subjectivities that remained underground during the period of Franco’s dictatorship.
3. Attempts at and Limits of an Institutional Regime for Art in Democracy: this chapter is concerned with the institutionalization of Spanish culture and art.

These three chapters mirror and serve as introductions to the three exhibition routes that the floor offers to visitors. “We don’t propose one but three different readings of the same period,” says Selgade. According to the museum’s director, the three tales presented in the exhibition are:

1. A History of Affect in Contemporary Art: an affective history of contemporary art.
2. The Powers of Fiction: Sculpture, New Materialisms, and Relational Aesthetics: a display of material culture—not only sculpture, but also what contemporary artists did to objects—and our relation with them.
3. A New Framework: The Institution, the Market, and the Art that Transcends Both: a tale of the institutional frame constructed to hold contemporary art in the last decades. Like that, the floor restarts back again in the 70s three different times.

The third route is particularly interesting for those interested in museums and heritage as it tells the story of the genealogy of the Museo Reina Sofía and the Spanish art system as well as how museums, as democratic institutions, offered a space and much-needed visibility to new forms of expression and social presence throughout the 20th and into the 21st century.

The Ever-Relevant Anti-War Message of Picasso’s Guernica

While the museum is currently highlighting its renovated and newly opened fourth floor, crowds still gather in front of its most famous artwork: Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.

“People still feels like getting it out of the street everytime a war starts anywhere on the world,” says Selgade. Picasso painted this grand, in scale and aspiration, work in 1937 in response to the bombing of the town of Guernica by 1937 the German aircraft of the Condor Legion, which Hitler had sent to aid Franco’s forces against the Republicans. The tragedy and pain that unfolded in Guernica was captured by Picasso in his work, and, for this reason, as Selgade notes:

“Guernica continues to be the most important declaration of ‘end to wars’ ever done.”

A Personal Perspective

As for his favorite object, Manuel Selgade tells us:

“Nowadays I love the terraces, where I can cross a penetrable sculpture of Venezuelan master Jesús Soto feeling the echoes of traffic from the street…”

As for the Museo Reina Sofía, it continues its journey toward 2028, undergoing a unique and exciting transformation. We are looking forward to seeing the changes unfold!

In the 5th century BC, Pericles was a central figure of Athens’ Golden Age. He guided the development of democracy and shaped the ancient city’s art and culture in ways that still resonate today.

We sat down with Dr. Paul Cartledge, one of the world’s foremost scholars of ancient Greece, to get to know the real Pericles behind the public persona—and to discuss his new book, Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric.

“What I try to do with this biography is a bit of a balancing act. On the one hand, Pericles was rational and reasonable – not a crowd-pleaser or a rabble-rouser. But in order to persuade the masses to vote for him, he had to be eloquent and persuasive, and therefore he needed to use rhetorical tricks. So he was both a statesman and a demagogue.”

Who Was Pericles, and Why Does He Still Matter?

As the cultural and intellectual center of the Greek world, Athens was home to figures such as Socrates, Sophocles, and Phidias during its golden age—an era known as the Age of Pericles.

Pericles was Athens’ most famed political figure, strengthening democracy, expanding its naval empire, and overseeing monumental projects like the Acropolis of Athens. He shaped policy, culture, and power in ways few individuals ever have within a democratic system.

Pericles still matters because the world he helped build endures. The democratic ideals refined in his time, the art and architecture he sponsored, and the cultural legacy of Athens still shape how we think about politics, citizenship, and civilization.

Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric

Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric is a “nuanced portrait” of Athens’s most famous leader. It paints a fascinating, threefold picture of him as a brilliant politician, visionary patron of the arts, and a man with an idiosyncratic personal life.

Dr. Paul Cartledge is Emeritus A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. He holds the Gold Cross of the Order of Honor of Ancient Greece and is an Honorary Citizen of Sparta. His latest book, Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric, is now available for pre-order via the University of Chicago Press.

The Bronze Age Collapse was a period of political and societal collapse across much of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East around the 12th century BCE. It saw the disappearance of major cultures such as the Mycenaeans, Hittites, and Ugarit. Ancient Egypt was also affected by the collapse, but with less devastating and therefore often overlooked results. Richard Marranca sat down with Dr Kara Cooney to talk about Egypt during the Bronze Age Collapse, including when it happened in Egypt and the evidence for its devastating effects. In particular, they dive into how the period of scarcity following the collapse led to organized grave robbing, not by poor workers but by the country’s new leadership, who reused and repurposed royal grave goods to reinforce their claim to power.

Dr Kara Cooney is a Professor of Egyptian art and architecture at UCLA, specializing in funerary practices and coffin studies. She produced a comparative archaeology TV series for the Discovery Channel called Out of Egypt in 2009, which is now available on Netflix. She is currently researching coffin reuse between the 19th and 21st dynasties, and the socioeconomic and political turmoil that characterized the period. Her recent publications include “When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt” (2018) and “Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches” (2024).

The Bronze Age Collapse in Egypt

RM: Can you tell us a bit about the Bronze Age Collapse and what it looked like in ancient Egypt?

KC: I think a lot of people were recently introduced to the subject by Eric Cline’s book, “1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed.” This is often imagined as a horrific moment in history, but it was a long-term development that took centuries to come to fruition. The more I work with the material from ancient Egypt, whether it’s coffin reuse or Sea People invasions or even the Amarna Period, I see the Bronze Age collapse as having planted its seeds way before it became visible.

The seeds were probably planted and germinating at the end of the 18th dynasty (c. 1550-1292 BCE). The Sea Peoples show up in the Amarna Letters as mercenary-type peoples. The letters also mention the lesser-known Apiru. In the letters, all of these Middle Eastern or Near Eastern rulers are saying that they have been taken over by the Apiru or that they have toppled another kingdom. So it all started during the 18th dynasty, and then increased during the Ramesside 19th dynasty (c. 1292-1191 BCE), and ended in civil war during the 20th dynasty (c. 1189-1077 BCE). This was followed by the breakdown of government systems and institutions, such as the temples and the kingship.

This is the Bronze Age collapse from the Egyptian perspective, but it would swallow up the entire Mediterranean with conflict and drama, arguably starting around 1300 BCE and then continuing on until even 1000 BCE, a longer timespan than I think most historians would grant it.

RM: What about Ramesses and the Bible? Is there anything in the Bronze Age Collapse that speaks to those connections?

KC: In the late 20th century, it became very unfashionable to look at the Bible as a historical source. Academics have turned away from identifying historical events in the Bible, except in 2 Kings, where Taharqa can be identified as a real person, and the Assyrians did have battles in Egypt. However, despite its historical references, the Bible has a mythical edge, as seen in the parting of the Red Sea and the swallowing of an army, which leads people to turn away from it as a real historical source, especially “scientific” historians who don’t want to be associated with evangelical truth-seekers.

This is also coupled with the trend to bring the supernatural into Egyptian history, with suggestions that the pyramids were built by aliens and drawing connections with the lost city of Atlantis. This has culminated in academics pushing back against examining the Book of Exodus through a historical lens.

I don’t understand why it’s so shocking and horrible to see the Book of Exodus as part of the larger story of the Bronze Age Collapse, because it’s all right there. You have the diminishment of the strongest power in the ancient world, Egypt. The pharaoh is doing things that don’t seem clever. Something’s happening. Exodus reflects people watching these events unfold and trying to understand them. They’re like, “Oh, my God, the richest superpower has fallen, has been laid low. How could this happen?”

There are kernels of information about the Bronze Age Collapse within the story. It mentions the Ramesside city of Pithom and Per-Ramesses, major centers of power during the 19th and 20th dynasties. Which king is it that features in the story? I think it’s the wrong question to ask. Pharaoh is Pharaoh. It could be Seti I. It could be Ramesses II. It could be Merneptah. It could be Ramesses III. It’s all of them. And it’s all of them dealing with the crisis of the Bronze Age Collapse.

The Amarna Letters and International Politics

RM: Can you delve into some of the other things revealed by the Amarna Letters?

KC: The Amarna Letters reveal how vassal kings could send their sons to the Egyptian court to grow up, become Egyptianized, and then bring Egyptian ideas back to their own kingdoms. But it gets to a point where the West Asian vassals are: “I’m done with this. I’m done with listening to what the king has to say. I’m done with being part of this scheme.” And you see decentralization and disconnection happening among this international courtier class.

When you read the Amarna Letters, you see that everyone is sleeping with everyone else. There are diplomatic marriages between Babylon and Egypt, as well as between Mitanni and Egypt. There are numerous princes and princesses being born, all of whom are connected and related. And I actually think Nefertiti is a foreign princess brought to Egypt for a diplomatic marriage; I’ll argue this in my forthcoming book. However, these strong international connections are beginning to deteriorate.

The Bible’s explanation for this is that it is God’s will, and this reflects the ancient mindset. It is a way to understand massive events, such as: “Why did Ugarit fall? Why did Mycenae fall? Why did all of the cities along the coast of West Asia become replaced by new elites? Why did Egypt have its own kingship replaced?” People often say that when the Sea Peoples invaded, Egypt was the only one that didn’t fall. But Egypt’s ruling class fell. The 21st dynasty (c. 1070-945 BCE) kings of Tanis were called Libyans, and they were Sea Peoples.

Collapse and Grave Robbing

RM: What about the Tomb Robbery Papyri? Do they provide evidence for the collapse? 

KC: The Tomb Robbery Papyri is not one papyrus but dozens that relate to tomb robbing trials during the 20th and 21st dynasties. They’re so interesting because they describe a bunch of rich, entitled elite officials who are systematically plundering the Valley of the Kings and vying for power in a new political system. Looking at it from this perspective changes everything about the Tomb Robbery Papyri.

Previously, Egyptologists had looked at those texts and thought, “Oh, my goodness, the necropolis security is broken down. These hordes of poor people are going into the Valley of the Kings and just stealing whatever they want.” But the Tomb Robbery Papyri reveal officials working against each other for their own benefit.

People are sent to Thebes to investigate, and all people who end up being investigated are associated with the High Priesthood of Amun. They could be a guardian, a craftsman, or something else, but they seem to have the priesthood of Amun as their patron. They seem to be offered up as scapegoats, and they are interrogated and tortured, and names are named.

It’s shortly after these documents were written down, in the reign of Ramesses IX, that we have actual hard evidence for the tombs of Ramesses II, Amenhotep III, and Thutmose III being systematically moved.

RM: So are the contents of the tombs being sold or moved to keep everything safe?

KC: When Howard Carter found Tutankhamun in 1922, it took him ten years to clear that tomb. Of course, he was an archaeologist working with care and precision, aiming to preserve the objects. In the ancient world, they were less interested in that. They wanted the gold. To have gotten to the bodies of Thutmose III or Ramesses II, the robbers had to remove them from their nesting shrines, sarcophagi, coffins, and masks. They’ve gotten in there and disassembled everything. And when those bodies were moved, they were stripped of all of their wealth and rewrapped. Egyptologists used to think, “Oh, that means that the hordes of Egyptians took them and then they were piously rewrapped by the High Priesthood of Amun.” But now we see that it was the High Priesthood of Amun that was precisely the institution responsible for taking the gold and treasures.

RM: So, the elite had a huge role in robbing the royal tombs. Is there much supporting evidence?

KC: Absolutely. The royal tombs at Tanis, belonging to the 21st dynasty, were found intact, a rarity. These foreign claimants to power needed to bury themselves with pomp and circumstance, so they took previous burial goods and used them for their own burials. There is a sarcophagus reused in Tanis that was recarved for Psusennes I, one of the first kings of the 21st dynasty, and it first belonged to Merneptah from the 19th dynasty. It was one of his four nesting sarcophagi, massive stone objects that are as big as your living room, placed inside one another like a Russian doll. That, to me, smacks of extraordinarily defensive burial tactics by the 19th dynasty kings. In contrast, we don’t have any Ramesside coffins preserved. I think this is because they were made of solid, like the inner coffin of Tutankhamun.

But if, like Merneptah, you have four nesting sarcophagi, what was in there that you needed to protect and move into that tomb? And how do you get the lid off? Incredibly, the grave robbers did get it out whole. Most of the other sarcophagi were broken apart to access what was inside. It seems that only this one was moved to Tanis and reused.

At this time, diplomatic relations exist between the foreign pharaohs in Tanis and the High Priesthood of Amun in Thebes, with everyone intermarrying. The Theban noblewoman Nodjmet bore Pinedjem I, a ruler of southern Egypt, as the high priest of Amun in Thebes, and she was also the mother of one of the kings of Tanis. They are in a time of scarcity, with no new stone and gold coming out of the mines, so they are working together to reuse earlier material. “You need a sarcophagus? Here’s a sarcophagus.”

No one has done this work yet. I can’t wait for the technology to examine the gold and silver objects from the royal burials at Tanis, published by Pierre Montet. The gold is thinner. The gold has a weird hammered quality. The gold lacks the skill of application evident in the tomb of Tutankhamun, our only fairly intact New Kingdom tomb. I know that gold is recommodified gold from the Valley of the Kings. Can I prove it? Not with the technology that’s available now. Hopefully, in the future, we will be able to pinpoint the exact sources of the gold and how many times it was reused.

Examining the burials of the high priests of Amun, including men such as Pinedjem I, Pinedjem II, and Masaharta, as well as the women and children buried with them, reveals that all are interred in reused coffins. This suggests they had no access to wood. The sycamore and acacia stands that must have been growing in the Delta were either repurposed for military needs or burned, or both. So, there is no new wood coming into Egypt. The trade from Lebanon in cedar wood and fir has been shut down. We can see that very clearly in the Story of Wenamun. So even these very wealthy, connected men are burying themselves in pieces of their rich ancestors’ coffins.

Karahantepe is one of the world’s oldest Neolithic sites, dating back as far as 9,200 years. Recently, Karahantepe yielded a very interesting discovery: a decorated stone vessel nested inside a larger one, with three tiny animal figurines (fox, vulture, boar). The figurines were arranged deliberately on a plate in a manner that suggests a carefully staged act with narrative intent. This makes this the earliest story told in three dimensions. TheCollector spoke with Prof. Necmi Karul* to learn about this new discovery and discuss what life would have looked like at the Neolithic site of Karahantepe a few thousand years ago.

*Necmi Karul is the Head of the Department of Prehistoric Archaeology at Istanbul University and Director of the ongoing excavations at Taş Tepeler (which includes sites such as Karahantepe and Göbeklitepe).

“The earliest three-dimensional storytelling.”

Karahantepe is a Prehistoric settlement in the Taş Tepeler area in Türkiye, the same area where Göbeklitepe was also discovered. The settlement is made up of four communal buildings constructed side-by-side, surrounded by domestic dwellings. One such circular communal building, dating from 9,200-8,800 years ago, included benches and two large ovens for preparing food at certain times. Small standing stones partitioned the space where one bench lay. Within this context, in a bench fill of red sterile soil, the excavation team made a unique discovery. Underneath the bench fill, they found stone plates and vessels with geometric and animal decoration (gazelle, fox, wild sheep) alongside human/animal figurines and animal bones. Inside a large vessel, the team discovered a smaller vessel, containing three stone rings and three animal figurines, each about 4 cm tall. The animals’ heads fitted into the stone circles. The small vessel was placed on a plate and nested inside a larger vessel.

But what makes these specific animal figurines so unique? Besides, there are several animal reliefs in Karahantepe, carved on T-shaped pillars (see note below) and benches, as well as many examples of prehistoric cave paintings featuring animals. Necmi Karul explains:

“All these [the cave paintings and pillars and benches] are two-dimensional. For the first time, we have a case of three-dimensional storytelling. They inserted the figurines into the circles and placed them inside one vessel that was then placed on one of the plates and inside a larger vessel. This means that their arrangement was organized. It was not an accident.

They also chose specific animals: fox, vulture, and boar, which are also the animals you commonly see on the pillars. This makes the findings different than everything else we have found until today. Therefore, I can call this the earliest three-dimensional story telling. And in this context, we have also some vulture, leopard, and fox bones with their pelt together. Perhaps there are other bones too. Our zooarchaeologist continues to work on the bones.”

Note: The T-shaped pillars at Karahantepe and Göbeklitepe are named after their unique “T” shape. According to Prof. Karul, these served functional purposes as columns that supported roofs. However, they also bear anthropomorphic features, indicating that they symbolically represented the human body. Also, their surfaces served as narrative surfaces: “blackboards” filled with reliefs of animals, humans, and geometric motifs that residents could see while seated inside.

Lost Mythologies That Kept a Society Together

But if this is a story told in three dimensions, then what is the story about? In Karahantepe as well as in Göbeklitepe, animals and humans are depicted on carved stones and pillars. Prof. Karul believes that these images depict a mythology that is now lost but was understood by the people who built the Taş Tepeler sites.

“We are sure that animals have different meanings for different societies. These animals depicted in Karahantepe certainly held meanings to the people that created them. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make any sense to depict them on the pillars. Some pillars present scenes composed of animals and geometric motives. Some even have human figures. For example, a pillar from Göbeklitepe has a headless man on the pillar with two cranes and other geometric motives. This might be a reference to mythological stories that the societies that built these places wanted to remember. If these were indeed mythological stories, the people going inside the building, would know them. This means that there would be storytellers interpreting the stories and keeping them alive as well as the artists who curved the figures on the pillars.

 

In the beginning of sedentary life, the people start to live together in large populations. Before, they used to live in groups of 20-25 people that were hunter-gatherers and nomads. But as they settled down and hundreds of hundreds people began living together they erected monumental buildings that could bring the people together. And these stories, told in the pillars and the figurines, helped keep the societies together.“

Hunter-Gatherers Who Settled Down?

In the earliest Taş Tepeler phases, there is no evidence for domesticated plants or animals: people are still hunter-gatherers but sedentary. This goes against the traditional view that holds that agriculture ended nomadic life. Now, archaeologists know that the so-called Agricultural or Neolithic Revolution is a term that should be used with caution. Settlements like Karahantepe demonstrate that groups of hunter-gatherers abandoned nomadic life to come together in sedentary societies. As Prof. Karul puts it, “they were still hunter-gatherers, but they preferred the sedentary life.”

But how could a large sedentary population be sustained without agriculture? The answer lies in the hundreds of hunting traps that have been discovered around Karahantepe. “This means, most probably, that they had strategies and techniques for controlling herds of animals using these traps,” says Prof. Karul. This way, they did not have to move around to secure their food.

By settling down, the hunter-gatherers of Karahantepe developed a new relationship with their environment.

“Some animals were good for domestication, some not. After 1,500 years, we observe some cultivation and domestication elements in these same settlements. Therefore, we can say that when they settled down, they were still hunter-gatherers. However at the end of the early Neolithic, they have become real villagers; they have domesticated crops and animals.”

The Challenges of Excavating a Neolithic Site

“The works will continue here for at least 50, maybe 100 years. I have less time,” says Prof. Karul as he talks about the excavations in the southern province of Türkiye’s Şanlıurfa area. There is also significant interest from institutions outside Türkiye. In total, 36 academic institutions from all over the world have been involved, to varying degrees, in the research conducted at Taş Tepeler.

“We came together because of a certain question, because of the will to understand the early sedentary life, early domestication and agriculture. Today everyone continues the sedentary tradition that began with the Neolithic. That’s why it’s such an important Era to study.”

There are roughly 220 people (archaeologists, specialists, students, and workers) working at around 10 sites in Taş Tepeler. This makes it one of the largest archaeological undertakings of its kind. The practicalities are far from ideal, though. With summer temperatures exceeding 50°C (122°F), the team has to be on site as early as 4 am.

Taş Tepeler is more than the sum of the archaeological excavations that are taking place at its sites. According to Prof. Karul, it is a multidimensional project based on the following four pillars:

1. Archaeology: Surveying and excavating across the region.
2. Environment: Using paleo-geography and modern ecology to understand landscapes then and now.
3. Heritage management: Göbeklitepe saw close to a million visitors. The volume of visitors is significant and careful planning is required as the other sites will open to the public in phases.
4. Ethnography: Documenting local villages, tools, and foodways that can not only inform prehistoric interpretation but also provide an opportunity to record living traditions.

With the star-studded new Odyssey feature film by Christopher Nolan in the works, everyone is talking about Homer and his epic tales about the Trojan War and Odysseus’ long journey home following its conclusion. With this in mind, Richard Marranca spoke to Dr Paul Cartledge, Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge, about the context of the epic poems, the technology described in the works, and the messages the Odyssey had for its original ancient Greek audiences.

Paul Cartledge is Emeritus A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge and a Global Distinguished Professor at NYU. He was chief historical consultant for the BBC series The Greeks and the Channel 4 series The Spartans — and has been a guest on BBC’s In Our Time and many other programs. Professor Cartledge is also a holder of the Gold Cross of the Order of Honor of Ancient Greece and an Honorary Citizen of Sparta. He has published major books on Ancient Greece, Sparta, Alexander the Great, Democracy, and more.

Context: Composition of the Iliad & the Odyssey

RM: Whoever Homer was, a blind bard, an editor, or no one, the works attributed to him were recorded in the 700s BCE, but also nostalgically harked back to a romanticized past of great kingdoms and heroes for the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Does that sound about right?

PC: Nostalgia was certainly a part of it. However, the epic tradition predated the 700s, when the two monumental epic poems were created and later written down, to the 1200s, when the events celebrated and commemorated in Homer’s verses may have happened. So, the past that the poets, or just “Homer” in shorthand, were looking back to over those five centuries was in a constant state of flux, and the messages conveyed to their audiences and later readerships differed accordingly.

The scenario of the Iliad, a massive invasion of Asia by a vast Greek army, was utterly unhistorical for all the original Homeric audiences. That would only eventually happen in the 330s BCE under Alexander the Great. But the scenario of the Odyssey, involving Greeks travelling around the eastern Mediterranean, was not altogether unfamiliar in the 700s.

The powerful kingdoms and heroes? Yes, there were very powerful kingdoms, far more powerful indeed than the Homeric poets living in their ruined shadow seem to have been able to comprehend. There were also heroes, but they belonged in a mythological world of legend rather than real Greece in the 1200s or the 700s.

RM: I just listened to your Hay Festival discussion with author Adam Nicolson. You mentioned that the Iliad focuses on one thing, and the Odyssey another. Can you explain that?

PC: The Iliad takes its name from one of the two names the ancient Greeks gave to what we call Troy: Ilion, also known as Ilium in Latin. Yet the Iliad does not end with the fall and destruction of Troy, but with the death and burial of Troy’s chief champion. That was Hector, the oldest son of King Priam, killed by the “man-slaying hands” of the greatest Greek hero, Achilles.

Why? Because whoever made this selection from the many poetic tales of a war of Greeks against Troy chose to focus on the “rage” of Achilles, rage being the first word of the Iliad, and not on the war as a whole. A war that was not about Achilles, but Menaleus, the king of Sparta, who was robbed of his wife, Helen, by the younger Trojan prince Paris. The Iliad really should have been called the Achilliad!

The Odyssey, on the other hand, does what it says on the tin. It is all about the trials and tribulations, especially the travels and travails, of King Odysseus of Ithaca. He was one of the many Greek kings who answered the call of Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, to help him recover his sister-in-law, Helen. That took the Greeks ten years of siege, though the Iliad focuses only on a few weeks in the tenth year. Odysseus’s nostos, or return, to Ithaca curiously took him exactly the same length of time.

Naval Technology

RM: “A thousand ships,” they have brought the Greeks to Troy. Ten years later, Odysseus and the others, if they survived Poseidon’s wrath and various monsters, headed home. Were these ships advanced in technology? Who rowed them? Did the Greeks navigate with instruments or maps? If I may add, how did they tell time? 

PC: Let’s be precise. It was allegedly 1,207 ships, not around 1,000. No positively identified Greek ship, warship or merchant, dating to the period around 1200 BCE, when the Iliad and Odyssey are set, is known to have survived. A shipwreck dating to around 1300 BCE was excavated off Ulu Burun, Turkey. It was a merchantman carrying copper, tin, glass ingots, pottery jars containing resin, gold and silver jewellery, metal weapons and tools, and assorted food items. It was sail-driven, reducing the number of crew, and headed, possibly, from the Levant to an Aegean Greek port.

Odysseus’s ships, all but one of which were lost en route back to Ithaca, were described as oared warships crewed by about 20 sailors each. Instruments are not known to have existed, so steering was done by dead reckoning and by the stars. Ships were usually made of cedar using the “shell-first” method, with planks assembled edge-to-edge and sealed with resin.

Motivations for War

RM: If there was a Trojan War, would the Greeks have wanted horses, slaves, land, fame, and the usual things of conquest? Or was it really because of Helen and Paris? 

PC: If, and that is a big if, the Trojan War really happened, there could have been something to the case of Helen. There is documentary evidence from non-Greek areas in the eastern Mediterranean, such as Egypt and the Levant, during the Late Bronze Age that royal women were key players in international diplomacy. But a pan-Hellenic expedition to get her back that lasted ten years, when the real Troy, Hisarlik, was well within range of normal Greek communications and commercial exchange? I don’t think so!

Thoroughly excavated, Hisarlik was densely populated and well fortified, and therefore a suitable target. However, there is no archaeological evidence of a siege, specifically by the Greeks, at the relevant time, at excavation levels VIh or VIIa. The Greek myth of Troy does not envision occupation following conquest, just recovery and plunder. One-off punitive raids for horses, slaves, and fame are plausible, but not the overblown Trojan War scenario.

Modes of Warfare

RM: In the Iliad and Odyssey, were weapons bronze or iron? Chariots? Did they fight in singular combat, small bands, or large armies? Was this era before the brilliant phalanx formation? 

PC: The Iliad is the poem of war. There is fighting in the Odyssey, but not regular battlefield warfare. In the Iliad, weapons are almost entirely of bronze, appropriate for the Bronze Age. But iron is known to the poets and mentioned as used for other types of objects, such as a key part of a chariot. Iron as a metaphor, for example, “iron-hearted,” is quite common. Chariots are in regular use in the Iliad, but not as fighting vehicles so much as taxis to take the heroes to and from the front line.

The storyline dictated that the action focus on individual Greek heroes fighting duels with their Trojan counterparts. However, there are several descriptions of massed, phalanx-like fighting, which probably owe more to the real world of the 700s than to 1200 BCE.

Cleanliness & Medicine

RM: Homer depicts the heroism and horror of war. Can you discuss medical treatment then? And how did people wash?

PC: It is one of the Iliad’s enduring appeals that the poem combines the tragedy of mortality with the glory of the death of a worthy opponent. In the real world of the Late Bronze Age, we have documentary evidence for the use of plants that could have served as medicinal drugs, but we can’t identify the “bitter root” with analgesic and styptic properties that Patroclus, Achilles’s bosom buddy, crumbled over a comrade’s gaping wound. Medicine of that era was mainly a combination of tried-and-tested, hand-me-down wisdom and religious invocation, especially of Asclepius, a son of Apollo. There appears to have been no qualified medical professionals, such as doctors or surgeons.

Bathing in heated water in individual bathtubs was an elite privilege, as the epics and archaeology agree. But cleanliness was a universal preoccupation. Ubiquitous olive oil was widely used for soap, applied by no less ubiquitous sea sponges.

Greek Astronomy

RM: Did the Homeric Greeks have astronomy? Did they represent the mythos stage rather than the logos stage?

A. The word “astronomy” is originally from ancient Greek, meaning the study or observation of the stars. Hesiod, an early Greek poet contemporary with the creation of the monumental Homeric epics around 700 BCE, produced a farmer’s almanac in verse, drawing heavily on heavenly observations. Constellations such as Orion and the Great Bear, as well as the Pleiades, a star cluster within the constellation Taurus, and Sirius, the Dog Star, all get a mention.

But Greek astronomy, in the sense of a disciplined application of geometry to cosmic problems, borrowing from earlier recorded observations by Babylonians and Egyptians, came later. Sometimes the progress of Greek intellectual thought towards the “scientific” rationalism of Classical times is described as a progress from mythos (myth) to logos (reason). But ancient Greek myth could be rational on its own terms, and it was never entirely confined to the rubbish bin of history.

Odysseus’ Return to Ithaca

RM: If I may, let’s return to Ithaca, where Odysseus was king. What was going on there with Odysseus’ family? 

RM: There was the royal family, there were aristocratic families, and then there were all the rest, the families of ordinary, poor, non-elite Ithacans. They are represented in the epic by Odysseus’s servant swineherd Eumaeus and his old nurse Eurycleia, both enslaved and, untypically, born into aristocratic families. Odysseus’s parents both play important roles at different points in the epic. His father, Laertes, appears right at the end, when he is rather mysteriously still alive, having given up the role of king to his son at least two decades before. His mother Anticleia appears when Odysseus sorrowfully visits her shade in the underworld.

But it’s wife Penelope, a Spartan girl by origin, and their only son, Telemachus, who are far more key. Telemachus indeed bookends the whole tale. At the start, he comes of age and wants to know where on earth his dad is. At the end, he crucially helps his father recover his throne and wife. Wise Penelope, as smart and as “full of many wiles” as Odysseus, finally tests her husband to check that he really is who he says he is. His demonstration with a special bow was not enough for her.

The suitors are young men of aristocratic families, claiming descent from some god or hero and distinguished not by their appalling manners but by their wealth in holdings of land and animals.

Q. What level of administration and technology existed in Odysseus’s Ithaca? Did the capital have defensive walls? 

Ask me that question of Agamemnon’s Mycenae, and I could answer without hesitation that the real-world Late Bronze Age Mycenae was the seat of a king who ruled a complex economy with the aid of a skilled literate scribal bureaucracy and lived in a palace on a hilltop surrounded by massive walling. But what of Odysseus’s Ithaca? There is even legitimate doubt as to whether the island so named is to be identified as the real island underlying the Homeric story.

Accepting that it is, nothing remotely comparable to the real Mycenae has yet been found on the island, and not for want of trying or of claims to have identified a suitable “palace” site, minus the defensive walling that any actual palace of that period would undoubtedly have possessed. The bureaucratic records of Mycenae and other contemporary kingdoms, such as Thebes, Knossos on Crete, and Sparta, were inscribed on clay tablets in a syllabic, not alphabetic, script known to scholars as Linear B. The words, eked out by pictograms, are the earliest known form of Greek. The Ithacans of the 1200s BCE were presumably also Greek-speakers, but as of now, that cannot be proven.

Bronze Age Diet

RM: Did they farm and fish? Was their diet sort of a Blue Zone or Mediterranean Diet? The Suitors are described as eating their way through the stores of food and meat at the palace. On average, was it a low-meat diet in contrast to the way the Suitors gorged? 

PC: Certainly, they did both farm and fish, more the former. Their diet would have been the classic “Mediterranean” diet, high in cereals like barley and wheat, with plenty of wine and olive products, and low in meat. The heroes of the Iliad, however, gorged themselves more on meat, partly to boost their growth, physical development, and overall health, in part to demonstrate that they were aristocrats, a cut above the hoi polloi with their vegetarian diet.

RM: Are the Suitors and Cyclopes similar in being breakers of hospitality? 

PC: Spot-on! The plots of both the Iliad and the Odyssey depend on breaches of hospitality. Menelaus suffers the abduction of his wife by his foreign palace-guest Paris. Odysseus suffers the near-destruction of his palace stores and the near-loss of his wife to the suitors, who lay siege to both. But, and it’s a big but, the suitors are human, all too human, whereas Polyphemus the Cyclops was the wholly divine son of Poseidon and a sea-nymph mother.

The lessons to be drawn from their stories were therefore very different. The poem insists that Polyphemus is utterly barbarous. Eating people is always wrong. Eating strangers or guests without even cooking them first, as he did, is even worse. Greek-style hospitality toward strangers was utterly alien to that barbarous monster.

Women of the Odyssey

Q. During his return on the wine-dark sea, Odysseus has affairs with Calypso and Circe. Can’t he just stay with them and be ageless, never dying? Must he return home? 

PC: Calypso, my favorite Homeric character of all, and Circe were both divine in a theological sense. Calypso was also divine in our colloquial sense, whereas Circe was a nefarious witch-like character. But their relationships with Odysseus were as starkly different as night and day. Odysseus stayed with Calypso for seven years, more than two-thirds of the ten years it took him to get back to Ithaca. Allegedly, he was dying to return home when Zeus’s messenger Hermes ordered him to move on from Calypso, but I have my doubts. That he had to get back to Ithaca, however, there is no doubt. The plot demanded it, or there would have been no nostos of any kind. It’s crucial that Odysseus, unlike Calypso, was a mortal human being. One part of the Odyssey’s message was to teach what it was to be human in a good way.

Q. Is Penelope like Odysseus in wisdom and heroism? 

PC: It’s a remarkable feature of the Odyssey, unlike the Iliad, that it features a female character of equivalent heft to that of the poem’s eponymous hero. In the real ancient Greek world, Penelope was indeed worshiped as a heroine. People sacrificed oil and wine to her as a dead mortal, to gain her support in the trials of everyday life.

In the Odyssey, she, like Odysseus, who was also worshiped posthumously, is wholly human but behaves in an almost superhuman way and, moreover, without the divine assistance that bailed out her husband more than once. Their marriage was, in the usual elite way, an arranged one, but the pair seems to have possessed an uncanny similarity in their craftiness and wiliness. Penelope showed hers by telling the suitors she would choose one of them to marry just as soon as she’d finished weaving her elderly father-in-law’s funeral shroud. Every night she undid what she’d done during the day.

That her yarn was wearing thin, however, when at last, after ten years, someone arrived in her palace claiming to be Odysseus, disguised as a beggar. The audience knows it is Odysseus, as do a few other key members of Odysseus’s family and household. But Penelope, Homer’s Penelope, will not allow herself to be convinced, or reunited with him sexually, until Odysseus passes the “bed test.”

Odysseus’ Bow

RM: Not to give away too much of the plot, but what kind of bow was Odysseus able to string? 

PC: Odysseus alone could string the bow with which he proved, to almost everyone’s satisfaction except Penelope, that he was indeed the king of Ithaca, despite his beggar disguise. The bow as described was of the composite type, formed of wood strengthened with sinew, dried animal tendon, and bellied with compressible plates of animal bone and horn. A type of bow that originated not in the settled communities of Greece but amongst the nomads of central Asia.

RM: In your Hay Festival talk, you mentioned that the Odyssey is more than “one damn thing after another.” The adventure is a great one, but it is even more than that. What did you mean?

PC: By that phrase, I meant that, over and above the narrative excitement and entertainment generated by the tales and horrors of Odysseus’s return, the poem has a very big ethno-political lesson to teach. There was no single ancient state of Greece in 700 BCE. Actually, there was no unified Greek state until 1832 CE, but that is another story. Instead, there were Greeks, who called themselves “Hellenes,” it was the Romans who called them all “Graeci,” living widely scattered around the Mediterranean and Black Seas. They had nothing much in common except that they were all ethnically and culturally Hellenes. They believed in a common ultimate ancestry, perceived commonality of language, with dialectal differences, and identified shared social customs, especially religious. What the Odyssey taught along its long and winding way was Greekness, how to be Greek, and how being Greek differed from, and was superior to, being not-Greek.

Homer’s Legacy

Q. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are the most important early books of Greece. Alexander carried the Iliad and people read Homer in Alexandria. Are they among the most important books of all time?

PC: They are immortal, eternal, and for all time because the supposed events and personages never actually existed outside the poets’ fertile imaginations. That’s my view, anyhow. But they were originally not “books” as we understand them. They were papyrus rolls, many of them, in the cases of the Iliad and Odyssey. Most ancient Greeks did not read Homer. They heard the poetry and memorized what they heard. Papyrus reed was an expensive import from Egypt, and it took an age to write out the Iliad’s 1500 and the Odyssey’s 1200 lines of hexameter verses. And it then required a practiced eye and the patience of Job to read them as texts.

Alexander’s Iliad text, comprising several scrolls, was said to have been prepared for him by his former boyhood tutor, Aristotle, the smartest guy in the whole Greek world of that time. But I’d bet my bottom dollar that the writing was actually done by one or more skilled enslaved persons to the master’s dictation. What was good enough for Alexander proved good enough for the entire Western literary and cultural tradition. Although Homer is now almost always read in vernacular translations, not the original, archaic, artificial, epic, dialect of Greek.

RM: A while back, you mentioned that you weren’t favorable to the movie Troy (2004) and hadn’t seen The Return (2024). What are you hoping for with the upcoming Chris Nolan Odyssey? It stars Matt Damon, Charlize Theron, Tom Holland, Robert Pattison, Anne Hathaway and others. Quite a cast.

PC: What a cast indeed! And what a director! But will Nolan go for magical-realism? It would be very appropriate for at least some parts of the Odyssey! Or will he embrace realist-realism in the manner of Petersen’s Troy (2004), in which there were no gods or goddesses, apart from a paddling Thetis played by Julia Christie? Or will it be something in between, recalling, say, Jason and the Argonauts (1963), an old-style adventure story with stunning special effects for the day, 1963? I hope the latter. The original epic poem is the classic picaresque tale, tricked out with monsters, magic, and sex. Nolan can’t go wrong, can he?